Oliver Stone's "The Doors" with Bret Berg of Museum of Home Video

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Major Label Debut this Year is the podcast
about major label debuts and increasingly other things such as
today a movie That's right, it's your MLD Movie Club,
watching Oliver Stone's seminole Portrait of Slash Exercise in Excess
starring Val Kilmer embodying the legendary Jim Morrison, and we

(00:34):
ended up doing something a little different from just like
watching the movie and John Paul and I talking about it,
which was what I was assuming we would do. And
then John Paul had a way more interesting idea, which
was to link up with friend of the show, Brett Berg.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Name occupation for.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Jim Thanks doctors quote, you can feel it in the
air planet. He's screaming for change, Morrison. We've got to
make the myths the train right now. Brett is described
by the great John Paul, who has always has a
way with words. As a Los Angeles based film, music

(01:22):
and video creative director and curator with a finger on
the pulse of the weird, the compelling, and the esoteric.
Brett wears many hats, including working at the American Genre
Film Archive and also running the Museum of Home Video,
which in their own words, is ninety minutes of found
footage for stoners, seekers, archivists, and drinkers. In other words,

(01:46):
Brett is our kind of guy. Here at Major Label
Debut and as part of the Museum of Home Video,
he does something he calls faster Piece Theater, wherein he
takes a movie and chops it down. We thought it
would be cool to get Brett to do just such
a cut of Oliver Stone's nineteen ninety one masterpiece question Mark,
The Doors, and he very kindly did it, and it's

(02:11):
gonna premiere on Tuesday night. If you're listening to this
episode pretty soon after it comes out. The streaming premiere
of Faster Piece Theater, Brett Berg's cut down edit of
Oliver Stone's The Doors is taking place Tuesday, September two,
in collaboration with Major Label Debut. We're presenting it. The
Doors is a long movie, and it's a long movie

(02:32):
that feels like a long movie, and that sort of
seems to be by design. This is a movie that
it's about a lot. It's self consciously much like the
music of the Doors. It's serious and it conducts itself
as an important epic depiction of something elemental about America,
which is you know, that's your Oliver Stone playbook right there.

(02:53):
Whether or not it succeeds, and in what senses it succeeds,
is something that Brett and I get into. It's something
that everyone has their own opinions about. But it definitely
is long. So for Brett to try and cut it
down to a lean I think he got into about
it exactly an hour to cut it down that much,
and what is left after that is a very interesting

(03:13):
exercise and a very interesting act of film criticism and
creativity and like post facto collaboration. That's just the kind
of like makes you stroke your chin intersection that I
personally love. Lizard King. I couldn't do anything.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Christ the mars it. I have to like go make
a record, sure why.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
I was really thrilled to watch Brett's edit of The Doors.
I think it's it's really fun. I think you guys
will enjoy watching it if you tune in. That was
just a beginning because then talking to Brett about making
the edit and about the movie the Doors and the
music of the Doors, and just like art and culture
and commerce and all that in general was incredibly rewarding
him and I I really got along we're really simpatico.

(04:02):
I think we have a lot of the same ideas
about this stuff, but Brett is way better at articulating
it and understanding it than I am. This is a
man who has truly immersed himself in it for his
whole career, and you can tell from not just the
depth of his knowledge, but the depth of his wisdom.
If that's not glazing it a little too much anyway,
all stop handing out superlatives and just throw without further

(04:25):
ado to my conversation with Brett Berg about his faster
piece theater edit of Oliver Stones, The Doors, and lots
more besides here it comes right about now, Brett, thank
you so much for not just watching The Doors the movie,

(04:49):
but immersing yourself in the doors of the movie in
order to create this fever dream edit that you made
of it. And I think we were both, in our
own ways coerced by major label debut producer and good
guy John Paul Bullock into watching this movie. Possibly is
some sort of twisted game of his own. He seems

(05:10):
to derive a sick pleasure from watching people watch Jim
Morrison do his thing. What did you make of the
Doors movie? As you got inside it to break it down.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Well, something that struck me immediately upon this rewatch was
that it's the most expensive rock biopic ever made.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
And the scope of this movie is huge.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
There's that one scene where it's like two thors of
the way through and there's a huge concert and there
are a few at least a few thousand extras like
Ben her Cleopatras style throughout this stadium, and there's like
trash fires and people running around like it's a treasure
island in Pinocchio. And I'm like, damn, they don't make

(05:59):
movies like this anymore, for sure. So I was really
struck by the they don't make movies like this anymore
niss of this movie upon the rewatch. Also, this was
like peak Oliver Stone. You know, he made JFK directly
after this, He won Oscars directly before this, and this

(06:19):
was definitely the height of his career and he decided
to do this, and we are all the better or
worse for it.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
It was simultaneously the height of Oliver stone mania and
Oliver Stone's mania.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Absolutely, I'm not a fan of Natural Born Killers.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
I never was.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
People love the soundtrack more than the movie. I know,
and you know that was kind of the beginning of
the end for him. So this is while he's still
riding high, almost as high as the Peyote trip that
they're taking in the movie. And this is the beginning
of a lot of his experimental techniques writ large. Previous

(07:01):
movies of his had little burbles of it, like Talk
Radio with Eric Bogosi and is very stylized. Born on
the fourth of July, very stylized. But this is like
the first time when he's like rocking out with his
cock out, basically just like Jim Morrison in the movie.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
It's such different subject matter for him to engage with.
I mean, obviously he does the same sort of like
it's really about America, Oliver Stone epicsweeping this with the
subject matter, but it's really interesting to see him engage
with pop culture and art and that end of things
rather than politics and war. And you know, as much

(07:40):
as those things, maybe he's ahead of his time because
those are all starting to collide in bizarre ways now
more literally. But what do you think it is about
engaging with the doors in Jim Morrison's story that compelled
Oliver Stone. What does it seem like to you.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Well, it's an ultimate boom tail for sure. Yes, And
Jim Morrison kind of comes off like the ultimate pampered
boomer rock star, and you know everyone puts up with
his eccentricity slash mania slash mental illness slash undiagnosed something
or other, and you know everyone's so naive, and it

(08:23):
feels like maybe Oliver Stone shares that naiveness. Even though
he's commanding this enormous film production and he's won Oscars,
he does come off as somewhat naive in both this
and JFK and even in Natural Born Killers too. Yeah,
I don't know. This is like all place, right place,
right time. You know, this was the era in which

(08:45):
you could make one hundred million dollar budgeted rock biopic.
So it just the boomerness oozes off the screen. And
I say that, you know, loving most of what the
boomers made cultural product wise from the era, I don't
hate boomers. I'm just noticing that that's what this is.
But did you pick up on that? Are you like

(09:08):
sensitive to the boomer stuff?

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Well, it's I think the fact that I'm a little
more removed from it, and also I've lived my whole
life in Canada, where we're very like completely influenced by
the pop culture of the United States, obviously, and my
whole life has been like one hundred percent Americanized. And
yet maybe because the it was more diffuse in the

(09:30):
sixties and seventies, but it feels like some of that
like core boomer life blood, the thing that really informs
the American boomers, you know, full fulsome boomerness is somehow
diffused here in a way that makes it feel at
arm's length. And my experience of The Doors kind of

(09:51):
right from the jump was, geez, these guys are a lot.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
You know.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
I saw this movie for the first time literally at
John Paul's apartment. I was in LA with my old
band making a record, so already I was in that
like in a completely skewed mindset where I was totally
up my own asks. You'd spend twelve hours a day
making like stroking your chin and making artistic decisions in
the studio, and then we went to John Paul's and

(10:17):
watched the whole Oscars. So then we've been hanging out
for like five hours drinking, and our drummer's parents were
there too, they'd come to visit. So who are literally boomers,
I think, and then John Paul was like, Okay, I
know we all just watched a five hour broadcast, but
do you guys want to watch The Doors by Oliver
Stone now that it's ten thirty in the night. So
that was the first time I'd seen it, and it

(10:40):
was like, really cathartic for me because the movie treats
Jim Morrison's like lizard king shamanistic artiste personality so sincerely
that I couldn't help but find it periodic. And then
that kind of skewered my own self seriousness, which was
really threatening to become problem for me in that moment

(11:01):
in time. So in a weird way, it kind of
gave me the freedom to escape from my own inner
Jim Morrison. But the boomerness of it all, I think
that that got kind of obscured by the fact that
it's like when you watch Spinal Tap as a musician,
you just have to take it seriously and so you
kind of miss some of the other points. It was
a similar experience for me.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, I haven't seen the new Spinal Tap yet, have you.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
No, I haven't. I am extremely skeptical that it's possible
to make a funny spinal tap movie in twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
Well, it's true because Rock is kind of dissipate. I'm
not gonna say dead, but dissipated. Yeah, so to make
a Rock parody movie in twenty twenty five is a
little odd, I will say. But yeah, you know, it's
another boomer thing. These people are heroes of mine. I
think I'm gonna eventually see this movie. Upon this rewatch
of The Doors, I was also really really struck by

(11:51):
that no one seemed to be concerned with Jim Morrison's
well being at any point in time. But then again,
no no one seemed interested in anyone's well their own
well being and anything, you know, and his piccadillos and
strangeness was just explained away by when he was a child,

(12:12):
he saw a Native American out the car window, and
that's why he's like this. The movie fails to really
investigate his character, which is hilarious because it's a one
hundred million dollar movie about this character.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
It's true, and it's the way that it spends the
money on recreating these big concert sent pieces, like you said,
in the recording sessions and the you know, the wild
parties and everything else. For all of that, it's it
all seems very superficial. And I found and everyone has
a version of this where they if you watch one
hundred million dollar Hollywood movie about your job, it's going

(12:47):
to be a little more difficult for you to buy it.
And I thought it was interesting you were describing earlier that,
you know, the thousands of extras, the amazing concert set piece.
Watching it, all I could think is that it looks
small and fake and set bound. And you know, that's
probably more on my having looked out at a thousand
crowds in my time, but it just like they spent

(13:08):
all that money on that. And then meanwhile, Jim Morrison
is just kind of like a freaking leather pants.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
I did like Val Kilmer's performance. I think that he
studied a lot, and he's got the stage moves down,
he's got the drunken stumbling over on stage part down.
So the movie does work on a movie level. It's
just so silly. And I don't know, are you a

(13:33):
rock biopic person? Did you go see the Queen Movie
when it came out? For example?

Speaker 1 (13:38):
No, I didn't. I find them all to sort of
have the same effect on me as the Doors did
the first time I watched it. I just can't take
it seriously, and it does. It never seems to engage
with anything I'm interested in about the bands, although I
think the fact of them is endlessly fascinating, and the
way that they, especially the contemporary like Neutered, had geographical
rock biopicks or such objects of fascination to me as

(14:02):
products of our diseased culture. But I don't find them
to be particularly exciting as movies. What about You.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
I'll sometimes see them. I sort of enjoyed Bohemian Rhapsody.
I really enjoyed Rocketman, the Elton John one, because that
is more explicitly a fantasy. But I have not seen
walk Hard, which everyone seems to love.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Oh I just saw it for the first time, and
it was hard to get out of my mind watching
this movie. Obviously, everyone has heard the notion that since
Walkhard was made, it is difficult to sell a straightforward
sincere rock biopick or so people seem to always speculate
online every time they make one, and then it goes
on to make millions of dollars and win oscars. So

(14:44):
maybe it's actually the genre was not as killed by
walkhard as it seemed. And yet I do think that
it's impossible for me to watch a nineteen ninety one
Doors biopick through the same eyes as someone in nineteen
ninety one. Just I just have all of that accumulated
meta awareness around the silliness of it and around the

(15:04):
cliche of it all. And you know, the Doors are
a thirty more years older as a band now than
they were when that movie came out forty years and
that alone is a wild accumulation of cultural context between
you know, a moment and another moment.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah, at this point, it's like Jim Morrison is like
Lincoln or any other like figure from American antiquity. Yeah, yeah,
So who's to say what he was really like at
this point? So I guess we could take the Doors
a complete face value, and maybe he was a maybe
he was a genius.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
Who knows, Yeah, because maybe the whole base you know,
they didn't have the Internet, they didn't have Wikipedia, the
baseline was different for genius was another time.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah. So are you like a fan of Oliver Stone
in general? I guess I am. I guess I grew
up watching his movies unlocking them.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
I frequently across any director, across any Jean All movies.
I have a shocking number of blind spots and movies
I've missed. So I'll just preface any conversation about movies
by saying I've seen like three Oliver Stone movies. That
being said, JFK is one of my favorite movies. It's
one of my most rewatched movies. I find it. Everything
that I find falls really flat for me about the

(16:18):
doors sings in JFK. The ridiculousness of it, all, the absurdity,
the wild self seriousness of it, all, the total like
bullshit myth making where he plays so fast and loose
with the facts. I remember seeing JFK in high school
and saying like, oh, so they do know who did it?
It's all right there, Donald Sutherland explained it, and finding

(16:38):
out later that half of the things in the movie
are just he made them up. But then the other
half are totally true, and sometimes the true ones are
weirder than the fake ones. But the whole thing is
just this wild improvisational millage of fact and fiction, which, yeah,
in JFK. To me, it's like the voice of God.
It's truer than the truth. And then yet in the Doors.

(16:59):
I find it just kind of phony. Boloney, what's your
Oliver Stone high point?

Speaker 2 (17:05):
I have not seen Platoon. Everyone seems to think that
that's the best one, but.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
It's a fucking bummer.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
I mean, I better experience with his run from being
a successful screenwriter in the seventies all the way up
to JFK is a pretty good run. And there's a
lot of entertaining movies in there, like movies he wrote
such as Scarface or Midnight Express, I don't know, they're
they're pretty fun. And then Salvador Talk Radio, JFK, the Doors,

(17:38):
they're all pretty fun. I have also not seen Born
on the Fourth of July. I just you know, war movies,
I get it. I understand the horrors of war without
needing a movie to drink to like put it right
in my face. So I haven't seen those. But I
don't know. He got accolades. He was the king of
the world at that moment, and he it wasn't like

(17:59):
he took a big swing with the Doors. He took
a big swing every movie, Yes, for several movies in
a row.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
So you have to appreciate that, as I guess as
a lover of movies that take big swings. But there's
I don't know, this movie three stars on letterbox. Three stars,
that's what I would give it because it's it's it's
two phony balogney. Yet it's just imminently watchable, I think.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
So let's talk a little more about the Faster Piece Theater,
cut of the Doors, the new update for a new era.
I guess in general, when you're going in to make
these edits, do you have like a theory of the
movie that you're trying to essentialize it to. Are you
just are you going with your gut cutting out parts
you find boring? Is it improvisational? Is it planned? What's

(18:46):
how do you start one of these projects?

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Well that I guess we'll start with Faster Piece Theater
is my name for taking a movie and whittling it
down to not it's essentials, but just the things that
I find intriguing or funny about it. And I usually
have no plan. What I'll do is sometimes I'll glance
at the movie first watch maybe two minutes, and go, okay,

(19:09):
this is what the pace of the movie is. I
think I can approximate the running time of the cut
down before I actually start, and then I'll throw it
in the Adobe premiere, hit space bar and start watching
it for the first time while I'm about to cut
it up. So it's very improvisational, and I take the
Brian Eno e Ching approach and whatever will be, whatever

(19:34):
shall be, will be, or whatever nonsense philosophical phrase you
want to attach it to. But it's just is it funny,
is it boring? It's kind of a binary. So the
second it gets boring, I make an edit point. The
second it starts to get good again, I make another
at a point and collapse it and just keep doing
that until I get the finished form. Sometimes that's eight minutes.

(19:59):
Sometimes it's an hour. With the Doors, because I thought
there's just so much spectacle here that I didn't want
to make it fifteen minutes. I wanted to make it
a little meteor. However, there's still a ton of very redundant, boring,
stupid parts of the Doors. So here you have this
two plus hours movie that's now one hour. And also

(20:20):
I'm not the only person to cut up the Doors,
because Oliver Stone did a different cut of this movie
a few years ago, which was basically taking out one
scene towards the end which does not make any difference
because it's at the end of the movie. You're already
two hours in. It's the scene where Val Kilmer is
on the roof of like the Chateau Marmont and Meg

(20:41):
Ryan is like, come back out here, what are you doing?

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Come back in?

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Like they cut that one scene for reasons. I don't
even know. That's the final cut the Doors. If you
see that on Blu ray or something, that's fascinating. Yeah,
Oliver Stone is a tinkerer. He's kind of like George Lucas,
famously his movie Alexander, the historical biopic about the Alexander
the Great. There are four different officially Blu ray released

(21:08):
versions of this movie because he could not stop fucking
with it. And I don't know, I feel like, if
he's willing to fuck with his own movies, then I
should be allowed license to fuck with his movies.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
I absolutely agree. And I found, well, one of the
things I found so interesting and enjoyable watching your cut
and then watching the I guess, not the final cut,
but the original release cut of The Doors. Yeah, it's
much much shorter. I found it to be. It like
really tells the same story and conveys the same because

(21:39):
the movie is both really episodic and really feverish, and
there's sort of these recurring visions that happen, and it
borders on you know, the magical realism isn't the right word,
but whatever, the phantasma oracle is leaking in around the edges,
you know, as is appropriate for a biography of the
Lizard King himself. And I really found that your cut

(22:03):
really almost added to that effect. And you know, the
sort of wild montage of it all, you know, as
the choice that he made to depict this band's or
and this really this guy's roller coaster stumbling down a
hill experience of his life and his art. Yeah, it

(22:23):
was kind of like, I don't need the other two
hours of this movie to get the whole gist of it,
I think. I mean, maybe that's a dumb guy thing
to say, but I found it to be. It really
did essentialize what I think is interesting about the movie
in the first place. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Well, when I do one of these edits, I'm not
looking to keep any narrative cohesion, so I will make
a wild leap from one scene to maybe seven minutes later,
omitting stuff and you don't know what these stuff. I
omit it is because you're just watching the edit, But
it kind of doesn't matter, because again, it's all about
what I find funny or interesting. And I will say

(23:01):
that I again I left in a lot more of
the movie than I usually do when I make one
of these things, which is a testament to the filmmaking
and the style and the epicness of this thing. But
also you don't need the scenes with him arguing with
Meg Ryan in domestic conflict because they're both dumbbells. We

(23:23):
get that from the beginning. And they're alcohol soaked and
taking too many drugs and you get that. So I
just wanted to focus on the moments that I don't
know it might resonate with an audience that's already drunk
or stoned or on the level.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Yes, all the characters well, And the narrative beats of
the rock biopic, and like the rock and roll narrative
in general, are so culturally ingrained by this point that
cutting over eight minutes in the movie just still implies
the same narrative progression, because it's clear when it's like
when the guy says, oh, we should go into the studio,

(23:57):
and then you hear the song playing that now you know.
Now the newspapers are spinning saying The Doors number one
in whatever countries across the world. And it's cool to
I mean, to be able to lean into those narrative beats.
I don't know, it's obviously not your primary focus, but
it does provide you with a nice little scaffolding that's
just sort of there in everyone's brain.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
I also think that maybe people should watch The Doors
because it gives you an insight into what the record
business used to be, which is so nostalgic, right. It
depicts an era where bands routinely would put out two
albums a year every year and tour. I don't know
how they did that. I guess they had fewer distractions.
They didn't have any Nintendo back then, so yeah, but

(24:40):
like that's fascinating to see. And when you're making records
that fast, you don't have a lot of time to
you don't know, why have time for introspection, So you
just kind of commit to tape whatever you got, you know,
whatever you're working on. And it just so happened to
be that they were working in a really fertile period.
They're all in the early twenties when they're doing this
shit and no one's telling them no. I think it's

(25:02):
a big factor because this is an era in which
the record companies, much like the movie studios around the
time of Easy Writer, they did not know how to
speak to the counterculture of the current youth culture. So
they're just like, you know what, do whatever, and we'll
just market whatever you got. And sometimes the Doors music
reflects that. Yeah, so you and I grew up in

(25:24):
the nineties and odds and that's a much different time
for the record business. How does your experience mirror or
not mirror what the Doors go through in this movie,
Like they just they're playing a show with the whiskey,
and then the guy from Electors like, Hey, I'm a
guy from Electra. Does that mirror what you happen to you? Well?

Speaker 1 (25:43):
I find it so fascinating to even reflect on, because
before I got into the business, my expectations were completely
created by media like the Doors, and so there are
things that I feel like I experienced in a similar
way that I'm not even sure actually unfolded that way.
They just sort of fit into the narrative beats that
I was expecting when I was twenty one, and so

(26:05):
I took them at that. You know, at that level,
there was certainly less money flying around in my orbit.
There was less I don't want to say there there
was less like libertine freedom. There was less indulgence and
more emphasis. It was much more of a business. There
was much more emphasis on efficiency and on customer service.

(26:28):
We didn't talk about it in such bloodsoak terms, but
in retrospect the way that we would talk about our
creative decisions. Very quickly once we got into the music
business just became what will be popular, And that's not new. Obviously,
the music business was born out of selling records to people.
But the rock and roll dream of just making your

(26:49):
artistic statement and be you being the conduit for connection
and the suits just being the people who give you
the money to facilitate that was already far in the
rear view and were sort of pretending like, oh, you know,
maybe the strokes and the vines and you know, this
new era of guitar toting leather jacket wearers are bringing

(27:10):
that attitude back. But I don't think that that could
come back, and it certainly never did. And so that
was sort of the commercialness of it all was much
more close at hand, but also it was like less
harrowing and feverish. You know, I never witnessed anyone get
locked in an on fire closet even one time, and

(27:31):
I don't really regret that per se. What about you,
you played, I'm sure you still play music, and you've
been a longtime bassist primarily right.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, I only know how to play bass guitar. My
hands are too clumsy for guitar guitar, and my body
is uncoordinated for drums.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
So a bassis way gravitated born bassist.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, and I don't play music so much anymore, primarily
because my band is museum of home video. My band
is this other media. I am in a band sort of,
but it's in another medium.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, And.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
Especially during the lockdown era, I didn't take the base
out of the case once. I was so engrossed in
growing my live stream channel that I didn't think to
noodle around, not even once, because the lure of Adobe
Premiere was so strong. And I've always been a found
footage enthusiast and I've been a big fan of other

(28:35):
people who do it, and I treat them like bands groups,
like everything is terrible Found Footage festival, TV carnage, and
then you know, like people like the Bob Dylan of
Found Footage, who is Bruce Conner and other people like
Craig Baldwin. I don't know. I love these things. I
love music and film equally, so I apply a music

(29:00):
a cality to things like this edit of the Doors.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
So, as a musician, and especially as a younger musician,
what was your relationship like with the music of the Doors.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
I grew up liking it in junior high and high school.
So I had a record player in my room since
I was a little child, and I don't know if
that was unusual. I'm born in seventy nine, so throughout
the eighties I would constantly spin all the Disney LPs
that my parents bought from me when we were at Disneyland.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
And when I was in.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Fifth or sixth grade, I discovered, oh, my god, my
mother has a hidden record collection in a closet. So
there was one stack of LPs that was in a
closet with boxes kind of positioned around it as if
to say, don't notice that this is here. I don't
know if that's what my mother actually was thinking, but
it was a pile behind a pile, behind a pile,

(29:57):
and The Doors Self Titled was one of the records
of my mother was listening to in high school. So
I'm like, I guess I'm going to try this out,
and it kind of blew my mind. It was one
of the first records that actually unlocked a door to
you know, ironically, door of perception to a whole new
realm of stuff. Now, whether that realm of stuff was
just sixties rock, you know, whatever, but she had a

(30:20):
whole lot of things like Kenny Loggins and oh, who's
the poet Rod Mecewan. She had a lot of Rod
meck Cuwan records, But it was The Door Self Titled,
which I played a thousand times in junior high that
I just really got into. And in fact, when I
got my first CD player, the Door Self Titled and

(30:41):
The Doors Movie ost those were two of the first
CDs ever bought. And then as high school went on,
I graduated from that to punk and metal and prog
rock and sort of left the Doors behind to a
certain degree. But I do look the music, it's groovy,

(31:01):
it's fun, it's original. I mean, sixty years later, it
does still have a snap to it. So that's something,
but again undiagnosed. You know, maybe if he had been
on coyludes instead of booze, like his life would have
been a little different. Yeah, Like, maybe it's good. Maybe

(31:23):
it's good that he checked out before cocaine was the thing.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
We'll never know And that's that's the promise of Oliver
Stone in its way too. He followed that killer down
the hall. Yeah, I got I learned about the Doors
because my school bus driver somehow got wind that I
was like into music, and she showed up one day
and she was like, I you should read this book.
And it was like a paperback biography of Jim Morrison.

(31:49):
I don't remember what it was called, and I have
no idea if it was a you know, a legitimate
scholarly one or like a trashy cash in one or what.
But I read it and I found the story because
it was still I was young enough that it was
sort of one of my first exposures to that style
of rock and narrative, that the self destructive genius narrative.

(32:11):
And I found it really compelling, and I sought out
a little bit of Doors music and I just it
just bounced off me. I just was like, this is
too silly. I couldn't even then take it seriously. And
the lyrics, there was so much emphasis on his you know,
his poetry and his way with words, and I found
the lyrics to be you know, kind of after all

(32:32):
the build up. I was like that this is what
everyone was talking about, I don't know guys, And well
he was stoned and drunk, so yeah, yeah, And I
was twelve and a nerd, so it was maybe not
the right meeting of my brain wasn't ready for it.
But I could never recover from that. But it did
strike me watching the movie how the music is a
little you know, left of center. It's a little jazzy,

(32:54):
and it's a little groovy, and it goes to some
places that must have been really rash and exciting to
hear musically at the time, even though the emphasis is
always on the front man, as it so often is. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Also, Kurt Vile is an influence which I'm sure was
unfamiliar to a lot of boomer children when they were
growing up. And it is jazzy and it is funky
and taking a lot of influences both literary and musically,
and fusing them together and they had hit after hit
after hit, I mean huge band. Yeah, something undeniable. But

(33:29):
when presented in the thirty five millimeter anamorphic scope epic
film format, maybe the music's not that epic, Like, maybe
it doesn't deserve that style treatment. Maybe this movie would
have been better as a mumblecore indie rather than some
like one hundred million dollar thing.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, a lot of shots of Kevin Dillon, like playing
the drums and looking mad at Jim Morrison. That's my
main takeaway from the music of the movie is who's
going to well? Val Kilmer stumbles around.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Being a serious stack. What did you think about all
the actors playing it? Seems like they mostly got it down,
as opposed to other films where it's like, clearly the
person has never held a guitar before. But what's your
expert take on, like, were they actually nailing the physicality
of being a band? And are there movies where you

(34:25):
think the filmmakers do get it right where the band
feels like a band.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
I thought that they did a great job both. I
thought the actors did well and also the filmmaking didn't
emphasize it. You know, there's another version of the movie
where there's a lot of close up shots of the
hand on the organ flying around playing the iconic shit,
but mostly that's framed out, and you see Kyle McLachlin,
you know, smoking a cigarette and looking cool, and I

(34:50):
think that's generally the right choice, and I thought the
guys did a good job embodying it. I thought it
was a very interesting group of actors. Lachlan always a
welcome presence, Kevin Dylon always, Johnny drama, and then the
guy from JFK who's the fake Oswald who says sorry,
I thought I was shooting at that. Son of a bitch.

(35:11):
Kennedy is also there, which I was really happy to
see him.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Is that Frank Whaley from Yeah Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, he
plays Robbi Krieger, Right, yep.

Speaker 1 (35:22):
You know, I think it's kind of cool to have
a group of guys that aren't a listers like Val
Kilmer rounding it out, but aren't all great actors and interesting,
you know, strong presences in their own ways, which as
the characters are kind of being overshadowed by Jim Morrison,
the actors are sort of existing there, you know, behind
Val Kilmer who's going so hard and the rest of

(35:43):
them are keeping it pretty shell like the rhythm or
not the rhythm the I'm trying to not use music
words for film. It's the chemistry between the four guys
felt reasonably lived in and band like. It's really hard
to depict the genesis of a song on screen, and
so all these movies always resort to the same egregious

(36:04):
scene that this movie typifies, where you know, one guy says, hey,
I got something new, and then he sort of strums
a tentative, shitty version of Light My Fire, and then
all of a sudden, the band launches into the master
recording of light My Fire, and then one of the
guys says, wait a minute, Wait a minute, it just
needs one more iconic thing that everyone recognizes. I have
an idea, and then they do that thing. I understand

(36:25):
why it's depicted that way. Always it's usually a pretty
good scene, but also it's really hard for me to
fully emotionally invest in you.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Know, sometimes songs do come together in an instant, and
sometimes they take five years yep. And movies are definitely
not good at conveying either. The movie that I think
most nails being the reality of being in a band
day to day is Frank from twenty fourteen. I don't
know if you saw that one.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Oh, is that the one where Michael Fassbender's were in
a big head? Yes, I tried to watch. I remember
when it came out. I tried to watch it and
whatever streaming service it was on crashed and I couldn't
watch it, and then I never watched it again, So
now I missed my chance.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
The depictions of the interplay between the musicians to me,
felt the most like an actual touring DIY band, right,
and the way that when they're playing the song on
a stage, they are physically moving and eye contact and
getting into the music and then going back to the
eye contact. I don't know. There was something about it

(37:26):
but on but often movies do not get it right
at all. And now it's actually it's a really interesting
why more musicians don't turn to filmmaking to make music movies.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, I thought it's a totally different thing and it's
not depicting the same mechanical processes. But I rewatched eight
Mile recently and that's another movie that felt like it
just felt really real in terms of starting to create something,
starting to embody, you know, for me, it was starting
to be part of a band, which is like a

(37:57):
thing you learn how to do together and as a group,
or sort together and separately. And he was sort of
you know, he's doing that as one guy, but that
one really rang true to me as like and the
way it fits into your life and kind of defines
your life, but also you still have to go to
work around it. And you know, probably because life was
a little different in California in the seventies than in
Michigan in the nineties. You don't see these guys going

(38:20):
to their jobs, you know, I guess you see Jim
Morrison quit film school. Do you know if the student
film that's depicted in this movie had any resemblance to
something that real Jim Morrison made.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
I don't know. That's a very good question. I don't know,
But I do know that there are bootlegs that circulate
of a movie that Jim Morrison did make called Highway
spelled Hwy. And I don't know if that was from
his student time or during like a fuck around period
in between making records or something. Yeah, it is also

(38:50):
sad to think that maybe Jim Morrison could have been
a filmmaker of note. Yeah, but who knows, you know, well.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
That's it. I mean, it's like these it's very it's
great man theory of history. And you know, when it
comes to rock biopics, you do tend to go in
that direction. But he, you know, he does seem like
he just was exceptionally charismatic, present individual who was bound
to bend the fabric of his reality in one way

(39:19):
or another. Yeah, and that seems to be who Oliver
Stone wants to make movies about, and maybe who he
perceives himself as being.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
That's a great segue because he does he see himself
as the film Jim Morrison. Is he the Jim Morrison
of Hollywood?

Speaker 1 (39:34):
I was reading online about this movie and I can't
remember who it was, but someone who was connected, like
close to the doors, I don't know if it was
one of the band members or one of their family members, said,
that's not Jim Morrison in that movie. That's Oliver Stone
played by Val Kilmer. So someone thought, so got to.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
Love Oliver's hitchcock like cameo as the film school teacher
who's like get out.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
Of here, running a very chill class. I must say,
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
On a base level, I appreciate this movie because this,
like it depicts a time that's pre cell phone.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
Living in the moment.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yes, the movie is the ultimate living in the moment
movie for sure. And maybe maybe that's why we tend
to think of boomers as as the self centered generation,
because they were just living in the moment constantly, regardless
of the consequences. So is this a eulogy for boomerism

(40:29):
while boomers were still in control? I don't know. These
are the things I think about when I'm stoned at
eleven am talking about an Oliver Stone movie.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
Well, by the time you've made your edit, how many
times do you feel like you've watched the Doors movie through?
Is it really just a matter if you shoot through
it once and then you double check to make sure
you didn't miss any cuts? Or does this take days
of sort of watching and carving and carving and watching.
The vast majority of them are first drafts. They are
I gotta get this done because I have a shit

(41:00):
every week to do, and I trust my instincts enough
to not needle with things once I've locked the vibe
of what it's going to be.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
But you're right, I do it once. It's kind of
like automatic writing almost, and then I do go back
and make sure the audio transitions work, and it's not.
There's no pops in between, like at a point and
I look to see, can I take a few more
minutes out? Is this thing actually extraneous? When I thought
it was necessary to make people laugh and keep people entertained,

(41:32):
because the pace of my show overall is very fast.
If you were to put a BPM on it, I
would say, like one point fifty, it's like you're locked in.
I make it so that people are afraid to go
to the bathroom because they'll miss something. So again, this
was an interesting edit because I gave it more languid
screen time than I would normally, but also because I thought,

(41:54):
since we're going to be talking about it and you're
going to be using it for your show, I might
as well make it a little bit more substantial and
my typical slash and burn twelve minute prankster version. I mean,
I do feel like a prankster regardless of length, but
at least this is like me not mocking Oliver Stones
too much.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah, and I mean the doors music just kind of
begs to be languid, you know, there bpms are. I
think seldom getting up to one point fifty, and it
would have been hard probably to chop too fast, or
you're gonna get all these scenes and they use so
much of the music. Obviously you're gonna get scenes three.
It's kind of here like uh, and then they're onto
the next one. It would get too choppy. Like I said,

(42:37):
I really think it tells the whole story. It really
communicates the essence of the movie so effectively, and I
just think it's wonderful.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
I wanted to ask what your first such at it was,
and how you first sort of hatched the idea, and
how you first approached the first premiere session that you
went into.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
Okay, I guess I should tell my whole background of.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Or just tell your whole story from wherever it begins.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Born and raised in LA grew up in movie culture,
love movies to death from infancy, got my first video
star job right out of high school, and then eventually
a few years later, I became one of the managers
at Cinophile Video, which is miraculously still there in West LA.
It's an enormous store. It's kind of like in Toronto.

(43:25):
They used to have Suspect video. It's kind of like that,
and video editing technology in the late nineties was just
starting to become something that the average person could tackle
based upon the hardware that was affordable in previous eras,
video editing software was like tens of thousands of dollars.

(43:45):
You needed your own dedicated room to operate it, and
now it's on a desktop in your living room. So
I was surrounded by a forty thousand titles in this
specialty video store. And in the late nineties, I made
my first found footage edit, which I just called logo,

(44:05):
which was me compiling all the vhs Fly by Night
company opening logos that everyone loves. The Vestron one is
the most well loved. But I took one hundred and
fifty of those and I just kind of laid them
end to end in a rhythm that I thought was
kind of funny.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
And.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
That was kind that was off. I was off to
the races and then just kind of professionally dealing with
arcavism as I do in my day jobs. I don't know.
I love Negative Land, I love Craig Baldwin, I love
seeing stuff on MTV that was recycled media spat out

(44:45):
to a nineties culture. It was all just sitting in
my head. And so when I got to Sina Family,
which is a now defunct movie theater here in Los Angeles.
It's a single screen repertory art house, or was, and
we just made our own trailers. So I just kept
swimming in the pool of found footage and recontextualizing media.

(45:07):
We would make our own full ninety minute live shows
out of found footage, just because no one was telling
us no. And then in more recent times, I've started
a live stream channel called Museum of Home Video, which
is the flagship show. Is me every Tuesday night doing
a few hours of presenting edits like this, just showing

(45:30):
stuff in its entirety that I think is fun, old
game shows, talk shows, commercials. I'll take a movie and
I'll cut it down to twelve minutes in some irreverent fashion,
and it's all presented kind of like I'm an MTV
VJ and I come on air every thirty minutes and go,
you just saw that. Now you're going to see this.
Because I also have a background of being a college

(45:51):
radio DJ here in Los Angeles on KXLU, so I
just took all of these things, hosting movie shows, creating
found footage edit's you needing to present like a DJ
or something. It kind of squashed it altogether and that
became Museum of Home Video. So I'm kind of swimming

(46:12):
in found footage NonStop, and it's my medium at this point.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
What first attracted you to this, like cultural detritus? You know,
do you remember what first crossed your field of vision
that compelled you and hooked you into this world, because
it's not something that everyone naturally ever even comes across.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Correct. I was babysat by television because I had a
single mom who was doing her best, yeah, and she
happened to PLoP me down in front of cable television.
I was lucky enough to have cable TV in the home,
and I don't know, just doing the five hundred channels thing.
And also at the peak of MTV, the peak of

(46:53):
Comedy Central, seeing Joe Bob Briggs on the movie channel
on cable, It's all just swimming in my head. Mist
three k kids in the hall, you know, It's just
I've just I just lived that world for so long Esthetically, Oh,
being into LP collecting right out of high school in

(47:15):
the late nineties at a moment when no one gave
a shit about vinyl so I could grow a two
thousand record collection in college. I don't know. I was
just constantly thinking about archival stuff. Vintage stuff just kind
of happened.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
It's my temptation always to take a real philosophical what
does this tell us about us? Angle on these things?
Do you have a such a philosophical eye on it?
Or are you again just hitting it more like you said,
going through the edit just like what makes me laugh,
what bores me? Keep jettison?

Speaker 2 (47:49):
You know, well, most of it is interesting to me
because it tells me where we've been, and it points
to how we got here, and it kind of points
to where we're going if it's prophetic enough. So I
just think that we can explain our current society and
it's quirks. The signposts were already there, and none more

(48:17):
apparent than in the commercials.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
I think yep.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
I had a very very wise art history teacher in
my senior year of high school, and we not only
read a very fantastic book called The Shock of the
New which is written by an Australian art critic named
Robert Hughes, who actually hosted a TV version of it. Well, Hey,
in his Australian blah blah blah, he just kind of

(48:42):
narrates this whole ten part amazing series about art. Everyone
should go check that out. But he also one day
came into the class. This is still in the VHS era,
this is late in later nineties. He puts a tape
in the He doesn't even say hi to the class.
He puts a tape in the TV and he he
says to the class, Okay, today we're gonna watch commercials

(49:03):
with the sound off, because that will tell you what
they're actually selling to you. That'll give you a hint
to the subliminal things they're trying to communicate. And I
don't know, it was thirty years ago. I still think
about that because it was so instructive to understand media
literacy and how reading archival material can explain where we're at.

(49:27):
So that's what continually fascinates me. And as a kid,
I wanted to watch all of TV and try to
get through a lot of it. So now I do
kind of get to watch all of TV and movies
and share what I've learned with the audience, meaning I
cut it up for funny purposes.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
I mean, the commercials thing is the perfect way to
talk about it. Ay, the commercial thing is really interesting
in Canada because typically the way it works here is
all the channels, even the American channels that carry American shit,
they replace the commercials with the Canadian commercials, and so
it's quite rare. But every once in a while just
seems to randomly happen. You'll be watching a football game

(50:06):
or an episode of TV or whatever, and you'll realize,
oh shit, we're getting American commercials. These are different and
increasingly the way that I think I noticed that is
less that I see that the products are American and
more that I feel like a horror starting to grow
in my body because all the commercials suddenly are for
like a flashlight that can also be used as a

(50:26):
blunt weapon in case of home invasion by an MS
thirteen gang member, And it's the juxtaposition between them sometimes
in the same commercial break is just like really jarring
and rattling. But also, as you say, we both grew
up on TV. Watching TV was like a fun for me.
It was a fun treat. I had the opposite thing

(50:47):
where my parents, their way of trying hard was to
stop me from watching television. They subscribe to that notion.
But the upshot kind of becomes the same thing. Either
you're exposed to it so much you have to watch
it all the time, or it's kept away from you
so you have to watch it all the time. And
the commercials are part of the TV. They're what you
couldn't look at your phone, you couldn't get your computer out.
You watch the commercials too, And so our whole media

(51:08):
brains were in some ways created as much by the
commercials we were watching as by the quote unquote art
or at least entertainment we were watching. And that seems
to me something that's really spoken to by what you're doing,
where you're sort of mashing these things together in some ways,
and you know, Oliver Stones, The Doors is broken down
into parts alongside these you know, old commercials, and they're

(51:33):
using the same language to speak to us. They're using
the same visual cues and narrative understandings and assumptions, and
like they're speaking to us across the same cultural fabric
and forcing the mind to confront that. I think is
really a worthwhile endeavor not to preach.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
The commercials that I tend to pick to show because
I don't just grab any commercials. I will sift through
all the commercials to get the just like I'm sifting
through the movie, and the ones that I tend to
choose are usually the most cinematic, where some kind of
cinematic technique, whether it's editing or cinematography or just a

(52:14):
fucked up jingle that kind of takes you out of
the reality of it and kind of makes you think,
what is going on here? Why did they Why did
they make it like this? Why does this exist? I
love that question Why does this exist? In movies is
kind of like it used to be so bad It's good.
That was a very gen x thing in the aughts
and teens that that in movie terms, moved to what

(52:36):
the fuck?

Speaker 1 (52:37):
What the fuck?

Speaker 2 (52:38):
You know, movies like Burdemic or Miami Connection, those were
four grounded as cult movies because of what the fuck?
We have evolved beyond so bad It's good. Now it's
evolved beyond that, and I think the true question to
ask is not what the fuck? But why does this exist?
And that curiosity breeds empathy, which I think is also

(52:58):
a hallmark museum of home video where yes, we're poking
fun mercilessly at some stuff, but we're also trying to
make you understand context and again how that informs where
we're at and where we're going. So that's the philosophy
of it.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
On that note, before we started recording, John Paul and
I were talking about we're also in a book club
together because we don't talk enough just doing the podcast,
and it's a sci fi book club, and everyone in
the book club is buzzing about this new ice Cube
or of the World's movie. I haven't seen it yet,
but apparently it's a disaster. But though even the way
people are talking about it is like they must have known,
it must be on purpose, and it does seem like

(53:36):
there is this new phenomenon of self aware would be
so bad, it's good what the fuck called movies? But
they are doing it in a knowing way. They all
went to screenings of the Room and then wanted to
make their own the room. And then the question is
is it possible to make the room on purpose or
is that anyway? What do you make of where we're

(53:57):
at in that cycle of things.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
I have seen the ice cy War of the Worlds,
and it is singular. I think that's why it's becoming viral.
It's not just so bad, it's good. It has a
huge movie star in it, yeah one, and it was
a COVID lockdown production too, so we're It's kind of

(54:20):
like how The Deer Hunter came out in seventy eight
and it was about Vietnam, which it had ended about
five years earlier.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
So I think that's where we're at with COVID movies
right now.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
And War of the Worlds is not only tremendously just stupid,
but it allows us to laugh at us at that time.
Perhaps it's a little bit of an escape valve for
the COVID tensions because none of us have really dealt
with it. There's something about screen because it's also a
screen life movie where the entirety of the film takes
place on the screen of a computer. And there's more

(54:54):
of those. Unfriended was one recently. It was kind of
a minor hit. So there's a lo a lot of
ingredients in the soup. As to why it's so fucking
tasty is like a so bad it's a good movie.
But then also you cannot force a new version of
the Room into being. It has to happen organically, and
we can't forget that everyone's brain is broken, like the

(55:17):
last ten years have, whether it's the politics, or it's
the advances in technology or what the technology does to us,
all of us are just fucked, and so sometimes bad
ideas from fucked imaginations just leak through and become these
ultimate talked about viral cult movies.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
That's very well put, and I think it's I sometimes
catch myself in my mind and this is such a
bad impulse tending to want to like gatekeep that kind
of I'm not sure if ironic low culture is quite
the way to put it, which is such an ironic itself,
an ironic thing to feel like, Oh you're not you

(55:59):
don't even dan what a true bad movie is. And
I like your more egalitarian take on it.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
Well, I grew up in that culture, I mean, gen X.
I think our biggest failing is the gatekeepery thing, just culturally.
I think it reads poorly today and is unempathetic and
very very straight white guy I might say, Yeah, So
I'm glad that that vibe has dissipated. And also a

(56:26):
lot of stuff, especially in the sin of family time,
we were doing cutting edge repertory film shows in twentyd
and eight to twenty fifteen sixteen somewhere in there. That's
what the length of the place. And we did some
edgeloord things. I'm not proud of one hundred percent of

(56:46):
the material we put up. I think I evolved my
style and we did do a lot of good things.
But I think now I have a different approach where
I am thinking about the audience more these days. Back then,
it was like, Haha, look at this funny video joke
I made. Now I think it's more about what am
I giving the audience, What kind of a good time

(57:07):
or a bummer am I giving them? So I'm just
thinking about things a little differently.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
What excites you about current happenings in movies, television, popular culture?
Writ large. I sense that you have a more optimistic
outlook than I do, and I would love to hear
anything you might want to share about it.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
My day job is in the film exhibition and distribution,
primarily of repertory movies of old movies like The Doors Right. So,
I've seen an enormous explosion upward in the number of
film restorations being put out under the world. The number
of places, especially here in Los Angeles showing movies in Toronto,

(57:49):
you have the Paradise on Bloor and you have the review.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
The review is just like a five minute walk from
where I'm sitting right now. I go there all the time,
and I wish I went there more often.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
They have sold out crowds often because there's this there's
like a lot of movies to show, a lot of
places to show them at. The gamification and the fomo
effects of letterboxed on movie watching, which cannot be understated,
and not just gen Z, but people in general who
previously did not go to the movies, old movies, they're

(58:22):
understanding that it's a choice that they can make when
they go out. Like going to see an old movie
is now in the conversation with a bar, a restaurant,
live music, live DJ, the park, the museum, and it's
just part of the deck of cars, of choices, and

(58:44):
a lot of people just want to feel good, and
so it's good to see a movie with a crowd,
and especially a movie that's old, you never heard of,
and there's just a there's a rise of that, and
there's a diminishing of first run because especially last year,
Hollywood released fewer movie movies physics because of the strikes,
and that had an effective while all the movie theaters

(59:06):
need movies to show to stay open. So repertory became
more of a thing more recently, and that is getting
me really optimistic. It's growing my business. So I find
that I have real world data on this is happening,
and I think it'll just spill over into other mediums eventually.

(59:26):
I've seen a lot more bookstores open, which makes me happy.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
That is great, and it's interesting to the way, yeah,
the way that the older media is kind of getting
more on an even playing field with the newer media.
Now it's with the music industry now. It used to
be if you were if a song was going to
change your life, if a song was going to blow
up and change your life, it would happen when the

(59:50):
song was new, and if it didn't happen. Even in
my career, we had plenty of songs that had all
these hopes and dreams on them and then got stuck
in the vault after it didn't hit the first year.
And now the band's over, and yet at any second
on TikTok, any one of our songs or any song
that anyone has ever recorded in the history of recorded
music could become the biggest song on TikTok, and like

(01:00:13):
something from twenty years ago, it can just right back
up to the surface. And that seems like a really
big change in the way popular culture is consumed.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Yes, I have heard about this. I'm not on TikTok's
funny you think I would be, but I just I
don't have any time for that because I have to
make a show every week, and I have a day
job on top of that. So a friend of mine
who is in a current touring band who opens for
like big acts and stuff, he's told me he blew
my fucking mind because he told me that part of

(01:00:43):
being in the music business right now, if you're a
legacy actor or a new act, is you have to
be ready at any time to win the fame lottery
of TikTok. Because a band from the nineties, who did
he describe Guster.

Speaker 1 (01:00:59):
Custer, He's had him on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
Yes, he said that, like Guster suddenly like plays stadiums
now because of a TikTok fame lottery that they won.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
Is that true something like that, Yeah, And it might
have even been. They're really good on TikTok. We follow
we have a major label debut TikTok. I only go
into it to add captions to our videos because they
have got a good captioning algorithm in there, And we
follow gusters. Whenever I open the app, I see their
latest video and the numbers are always great and the
content is always premium, and I just love to see
it for them. And it's a perfect example. There's a

(01:01:30):
Canadian band who want Yeah. One of their like fifteen
year old songs blow up on TikTok, and Canadian bands
historically always struggle being nearly as big in America as
they are in Canada. And this was a band that
you know, could tour really big in Canada but had
never done huge shit in the States. And then their
next American tour was suddenly the biggest tour they'd ever done,

(01:01:51):
just on the strength of Yeah, this old song of
Theirs that for whatever reason clicked for in fifteen second intervals.
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
I have been reading this book that reads like a
Stephen King horror novel called Mood Machine by Liz Pelly.
I don't know if you've read this already.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
Not yet, but it's on the list John Paul Book
is a strong advocate for that book as well.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
Yeah, it's terrifying, not good, It really is. It really
is like Clive Barker time in the music industry, where
like the corporate cenobites are out and it's a weird,
fucked up time. And Spotify has been using ghost artists
for a decade. It's not just the Velvet Sundown, it's
they've been doing it the whole time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
Yeah, practically, it's just shattering the I mean, it seems
like we're just in the industry and the tradition are
holding on, like the thing that is embodied in the
Doors movie, like the dream of the big rock and
roll music industry when it was four guys could get
together and do acid and write a song that changes
the world and changes their lives and everyone makes bazillions

(01:02:51):
of dollars off it. All that shit. The bottom fell
out twenty years ago, if not longer, and they're just
clinging to it and clinging to it. But you know
that it's sooner or later it's all going to be gone.
It's just literally not sustainable. A real classic. The old
world is dying and the new world is struggling to
be born moment, and I'm really curious to see where,

(01:03:13):
you know, the music industry, which I know so intimately
in particular, winds up, but really all of it. I mean,
I guess this is just another way of saying I'm
curious to see what's ahead for all of us.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Yeah, my own bands that I was in in the
underground scene in LA and the aughts, we were never
big enough though where we would have been courted by
a major label, although one of my band they sure
thought we were going to be and that was a
fun tension within a stupid electro punk d like that.
But I definitely know what it's like to go on

(01:03:45):
tour and to do the daily grind of being a
musician on tour, and I think about it all the time.
And this movie doesn't do enough to really capture the
tour part. It shows him playing like the iconic shows
in certain cities, but the absolute grind of being a

(01:04:07):
musician where you do have to put out two albums
a year and tour and do promo and basically live
a three hundred and sixty five day year life as
a machine. Because it was it was a machine.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Yeah, and it is interesting, I mean, obviously there's handlers
and people that help you with it. But the movie highlights,
you know, Jim Morrison's spiraling out and running around stumbling crazy,
having epiphanies. But you do have to show up at
the studio to make two records a year, and you
do have to wake up in the morning to catch
the flight to the next city to do the tour.
And there is just a certain amount of professionalism baked

(01:04:42):
into even the rock star lifestyle of Jim Morrison. That's
not sexy, and I get why it's not in the movie,
but is you know, probably as much the reality of
his life experience as the drug fueled epiphanies in the Desert,
which I know that see is fictional, but it's metaphorical too.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Maybe he was an alcoholic because that was the only
way he could cope with having to put out your
records e or and touring it pro Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Well, the thing about touring that lends itself so well
to alcoholism, as you know, is that it's a lot
of weight and around. You get to the venue at
one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, and then you know,
you have your sound check, and then you've got like
six hours before you play the show, and you can't
really do that much because you have a show to
play that night and you're sort of at work. But

(01:05:27):
no one's stopping you from drinking six beers during that
time period, and it's so fun to do that. Sometimes
you just do it, and then sometimes you do too
much of it and don't stop when you should. So
why you got to stick to Kansa Cores light and
not bottles of Jack Daniels. It was always my philosophy.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
My technique at a certain point was to get a
full cup of soda water and just put a single
whiskey shot in it so that I could have something
to sip on that was mildly alcoholic the whole time
and not have to That was That's my coping mechanism
of being on the road.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
I think about it all the time. But it was
also very destructive, you know, physically on you I would
love to see more doors touring depicted, simply because I'm
curious about the mechanical realities of touring at that point,
Like what did they have a tour bus. It's the
same thing with the Beatles. I'm reading the Beatles Anthology
book again, and I'm the most fascinated by the parts

(01:06:22):
where they describe driving on the motorways in their van,
trying to imagine what was van touring in nineteen sixty
two Britain like having van toured in twenty twelve Britain.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
Yeah, in Britain it seems more miserable because of the
cold and the damp. I mean a movie, Am I
right that they cover this in Control, like the horrible
conditions of cramming all of them into one car.

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
I haven't seen that movie, but I hope that they do,
and if they do, it makes me much more inclined
to go check it out.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
Yeah, I've read a lot, but for some reason, I
decided to read as many books about Joy Division and
New Order as I could because I read Peter Hook's
book about the Hacienda and that was so fascinating, of like,
they must all have books, and so they did. So
I read the Bernard Sumner book, other Peter Hook books,
and then like contemporary eighties books about the bands as

(01:07:14):
they were happening, and yeah, it sounded miserable, like touring
in Britain was miserable, but at least everything was like
forty five minutes away from each other.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Yes, I mean as a Canadian, you know, there's like
generously ten major markets in this country that you can tour,
and doing that those ten markets is a very long
drawn out process with a lot of driving in it.
Or you can go to England for two weeks and
play like thirty towns and still have forty left over
that you haven't hit yet, even though they're all next
to each other. It's just such a different experience.

Speaker 2 (01:07:42):
Yeah, can I tell you my I mean, you usually
ask people what they eat when they're recording.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
If you have an answer prepared, you know, much like
on a cooking show where they bring a finished one
out from under the desk.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
I had, merely because we were talking about England. The
one time that my band did get to play in
Europe and went to the UK, we played in South
off Hampton, which is outside of London, and the two
others and our friend who we brought along as the driver,
they were all the vegetarians, so they tended to dictate
where we go find food, which is fine with me,

(01:08:13):
and we ended up at an Indian restaurant which had
no vegetarian options, which was bizarre. I'd never encountered that.
I guess it's just the neighborhood. But they ordered all
these dishes and they asked if they could just substitute
potatoes for the meat because we were told that the
restaurant only had potatoes. So we over ordered and there's
six different dishes on the table and they're all potatoes.

(01:08:36):
And as we were sitting there eating them, I noticed
to the corner of my eye, like it's a Pink
Panther movie, Like it's a Blake Edwards gag. There's a guy,
there's a delivery person who's just showed up with an enormous,
like fifty pounds sack of potatoes.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
That's touring. That's what it's like, Just a fifty pounds
sack of potatoes to replace the fifty pounds of potatoes
you are currently eating. Like, oh yeah, tomorrow, there's just
more are the same coming for me? What was the
name of your band? I don't think we've mentioned it yet.
I want to give the people a chance to seek
it out.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
Oh god, I don't want to give any of my
ex bandmate the Spotify pennies. But it's called an Anavanka
and we were around for about five years. In the
second half the oughts during the MySpace era. It was
a good time to be a band. Yes, it was
one of the last Yeah and our first record was
on an indie label called GSL, which I was a
huge fan of growing up and going to to DIY

(01:09:29):
shows and so I love as a fan of the
label so much. When I got into being in a band,
I thought, can we get our band on this label?
And it happens.

Speaker 1 (01:09:37):
It was amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
We had two albums I played bass. They're on streaming.
I have no idea who gets those royalties on it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
It's never quite It never amounts to enough to really
notice the problem with those yeah sad state of affairs.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
Are you thinking about pulling your shit from Spotify?

Speaker 1 (01:09:54):
I don't know, Like I think that the people who
are doing it are correct. Spotify is just I use it.
I pay for it. It pays me to a much
smaller degree. The first year that Spotify came out, they
gave like, if you were in a band, they gave
you a free premium account to Spotify as like a hello,
because you know, just like the major labels and all

(01:10:16):
these other companies, the frontmen are like real cool enthusiastic, sincere,
well meaning music lovers who get hired to, you know,
to go out there and be the ambassadors. And then
when it turns out that what's behind it all is
the two one thousand Facebook capitalism, everyone already signed up
for it, and now it's like, well, I don't know
how else to listen to music anymore. I can't afford,

(01:10:37):
largely because of Spotify. I can't afford to be going
and buying CDs or records like I used to.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Use CDs at a good record store. They're a fucking dollars.
So when I said late nineties, when I started collecting
LPs at age eighteen, all the vinyl was super cheap
and the CDs were the like, if you bought a
new CD, it was the equivalent of thirty American dollars today,
which is easy to think about. Yeah, and we all
did it all the time, all the time. Now, almost

(01:11:05):
thirty years later, the dynamic has flipped a one eighty
and now CDs are a dollar and the vinyl's expensive.
But it's not that CDs are back, it's that CDs
are everywhere and they're cheap, so have at it. A
lot of people still have the shit in the car,
and I just bought a five CD changer that came
with its own preamp speakers. I'm having a great.

Speaker 1 (01:11:25):
Time, although I can't say that I'm living the CD
lifestyle fully yet I really co sign anyway. And well
also just as a musician, when people, I mean when
people were buying CDs, musicians were buying houses and now
nobody's buying shit. M and I get my one dollar
Spotify or alty check. Jim Morrison would have hated to

(01:11:45):
see it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
Yeah, but if you didn't die in seventy one, is
good chance he would have died in seventy three or
five or something.

Speaker 1 (01:11:53):
It's a great point. It was not a healthy lifestyle.
One cannot live on one's own blood alone.

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
Yeah. One of the most verifying revelations in that Mood
Machine book about Spotify is that it treats the artists
like customers, where there's a portal and you can look
at your data and you are becoming a customer of theirs.

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
I remember when they introduced the portal looking at it,
and for a second, I remember being really dazzled and thinking, Wow,
this is really such radical transparency. To be able to
see exactly where people are listening into what songs, And
then I went in to look at it to make
you smart new plans for our business from it. And
what you learn is people are listening to your music

(01:12:36):
in all the major big cities where people have always
listened to music, and where you were already touring because
obviously you're going to go to LA and New York
and London and Toronto and Chicago, like, oh this was
maybe this wasn't worth giving up the entire economic stability
of our way of life for this fake information.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
Yeah, it really is the mask off thing, isn't it.
Where the CEO is framed is like a good guy
or your pal or whatever. And then they invest in
AI military drone yeah, new weapon shit, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
Yeah, I mean this is we're in the mask off
stage of our civilizational progress or lack thereof. And it
is well, as you say, it is at least a
very interesting time to experience media. I love to watch
NFL football. Speaking of institutions, they're not morally pure at

(01:13:30):
their heart. But just like it's such a full on
tenant like everything to ten entertainment product, just everything about
it is this like perfect machine of human entertainment. It
seems like you're really looking right into the core of
the thing every time you watch it. And maybe that's
just a high flute way for me to justify watching

(01:13:51):
the Packers play every week, but I do find it
to be a genuinely, like psychically moving experience every time
I watch a football game.

Speaker 2 (01:14:00):
So, you know, one thing that Museum of Pon Video
and the NFL have in common is that it's all
appointment viewing. Sports is the last frontier of people having
to show up at a certain time and date to
watch a thing, yep, And that has gone away for
everything else. So I think that the majority of my
live stream audiences likes the show but also really likes

(01:14:21):
that it's live and that it is ephemeral and appointment
viewing yep. And because we don't have too many of
those that they structure their week around the Tuesday, which
is nice to hear.

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
You know, Well, I'm honored that major label debut gets
to dip a toe in that water. This has been
a really fascinating I mean, you did all the work
of making the edit of the movie, but I really
felt proximate to something really cool and interesting and something
that gets at something elemental that I think this show
is always trying to find ways to get at and

(01:14:58):
it seems like what you're doing is is exactly at
the bullseye of that. And so it's just so cool
to see the cut and experience it that way, and
also what a lovely time chatting about it. If you
are listening to this episode, please mark on your calendar
to check out the Faster Piece theater edition of the Doors.

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):
Yeah, so it's a again. Museum of Home Video is
every Tuesday night starting at seven thirty pm Pacific. So
for you, Graham, it was the show itself would start
at ten thirty pm and the faster Piece thing will
be like thirty forty minutes into the show. And I
don't know, if you like things such as MTV Classic,

(01:15:41):
MTV and Comedy Central and Channel Changing as a vibe,
you will probably enjoy Museum of Home Video. So we
have a Patreon where you can rewatch any episode. I
have five years worth of weekly shows. There's a lot
to swim in there around with. I'm a big proponent
of switching off of the big corporate streamers and finding

(01:16:03):
your own path, So support Patreon creators more. I guess
that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (01:16:10):
I agree, and I will return to the subject of food,
the most important subject of all the potatoes, et cetera.
But specifically to ask you by way of concluding, well,
you were ripping out this doors faster piece theater edit,
what were you eating? Drinking, smoking, or craving?

Speaker 2 (01:16:31):
Definitely smoking weed? What kind of weed? I'm not really
too particular on because I think that the Indicas sativa
divide doesn't exist anymore because they've all been cross bread
enough times. It's just weed. Drink wise, I make myself
enormous like construction site, tin cup mugs of just herbal

(01:16:53):
tea or barley tea from the Japanese market, and food
I tend to batch cook from I work from home,
tend to batch cook for myself. So it was probably
a stir fry or a chicken soup or lentil. That
sounds like a very wholesome diet I try. I don't
keep desserting the house because I'll eat it and I'm

(01:17:15):
gonna I'm gonna be fifty before you know it, and like,
I have to start thinking about that stuff. So I've
cut out dessert. I don't keep bread in the house
because I will eat it. It's around mm hmmm uh
and uh yeah, Lentils, you'll be surprised what you can do.
I'll take that under advisement. Brett, Thank you so much,
not just for being so generous with your time talking

(01:17:37):
to me and listening to me talk about my theory
of how NFL football can tell us about the collective subconscious,
which I know everyone is really interested in, and we'll
definitely make the final cut, but thank you for cutting
down Oliver Stone's chaotic masterpiece The Doors into an even
more chaotic masterpiece of your own. I loved watching it,
I loved thinking about it, and I really.

Speaker 1 (01:17:58):
Love talking about it. And just thank you so much
and great work. That is my conversation with Brett Berg
from the Museum of Home Video in the American Genre
Film Archive and more about his edit of The Doors
movie and about the Doors movie and The Doors and

(01:18:18):
well you heard the conversation. You don't need me to
sum it up quite so quickly. That something they say
in radio is tell him what you're gonna tell him,
tell him, tell him what you told him. And I
think we really structure the podcast that way. You know,
there's the intro, and then there's the conversation, which is
the real thing, and then there's the outro, and it's
happening right now. And sometimes I don't know what to
say here since it's so redundant, and I end up

(01:18:39):
getting meta. Anyway, I had a really great time talking
to Brett. I had a really great time watching his
edit and learning about the way he sees the world
and sees the doors movie and the art commerce intersection
and the whole thing. It's not our usual conversation about
a major label debut. I don't know. We're feeling this
out as we go, right or sort of finding what

(01:19:01):
it is that interests us and what about art in general.
The show is really trying to understand or get to
the bottom of, or at least you know, it's a
tree that we're trying to bark up, and talking to
Brett was like another thing that felt like it clarified
it for me. I don't even know how to describe
it in words. I guess if I did, they we
would just do that. Every once in a while we

(01:19:21):
do an episode. There's one coming up with Nell's Klein,
which is another one. We recorded the interview a few
months ago. Just right away I knew that's the kind
of conversation I want to have on the show, and
this conversation with Brett was just such a conversation from
a whole different angle. So I can't thank him enough,
not just for coming on the show and having that
great talk, but also for spending the time to edit

(01:19:43):
the Doors movie down for us, and for hosting it.
Like I said in the intro, when I was telling
you what I was going to tell you, watch it
on September second. It's at the Museum of Home Video
dot com at seven thirty pm Pacific Standard time, which
is ten thirty pm Toronto Eastern Standard time. That's when

(01:20:04):
it's streaming at the aforementioned website, Museum of Home Video
dot com. Thank you so much for listening to major
label debut. The show is produced as always, but even
more so since this is a bonus episode, so even
more work for these guys by John Paul Bullock and
the great Josh Hook. Our music is by my friend
Greg Alsop. You can find us on all of the

(01:20:26):
various socials media. If you want to see my slack
jaw computer using face for yourself, you can log onto
YouTube and find major label debut. That's the end of
the show. That's the end of the spiel. Major Label Debut.
Will return with more tales from the intersection of art
and commerce on behalf of The Lizard King, So Long,

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Oliver Stone's "The Doors" with Bret Berg of Museum of Home Video

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