Episode 731: Fatal Beauty (1987)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh geez bote, it's showtime.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
People say good money to see this movie.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
When they go out to a theater.

Speaker 4 (00:12):
They want cold sodas from a pot, popcorn, and no
monsters in the protection booth.

Speaker 5 (00:17):
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Cut it off, la. Lots of ways a girl can

(00:48):
get into trouble.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Gimme kiss? What gimmy kiss?

Speaker 3 (00:52):
And the surest way is to be a lady.

Speaker 6 (00:55):
Captain, you have the right to remain side, but no lady.

Speaker 7 (01:03):
And have to take the ris like to ask a
couple of questions.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
That's a taint it.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
This is whoopy?

Speaker 8 (01:12):
What kept you stopped to pick up a sailor?

Speaker 4 (01:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (01:15):
I almost had one too, but your mother beat me
to him.

Speaker 7 (01:19):
You're no way of party talked hard meat it.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
She's got the moves, she's got the mouth. This place
a real mess. You know where we can find a
good maid.

Speaker 8 (01:30):
You know, people like you are the reason abortion is legal.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
She's got the badge.

Speaker 5 (01:35):
We talk the free, nice smooth honnie.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
But she's got to have his help.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Let me follow you around for a little while.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
To stop a killer.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
What I'm sure they want, fatal beauty, What.

Speaker 8 (01:55):
The hell are you doing?

Speaker 9 (01:56):
Here.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
I've missed you too, but he go. Everything got a
whip here. Perfume shot.

Speaker 6 (02:08):
Yes, honey, I know I shot you one word and
I'm going to clear your signs.

Speaker 5 (02:18):
My cats, so you gotta shoot him.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
Well we go, Sam Elliott, I can't let you go
anywhere that make anna Fatal Beauty. You're probably undercover, your
lousy teste.

Speaker 8 (02:44):
Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
joined me once again. It's mister Rob say Mary.

Speaker 5 (02:49):
Everywhere I go people are dying to meet me.

Speaker 8 (02:51):
Also dragging me for this month long extravaganza is mister
Kevin Layne.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
And don't call me bitch, Hi, Mike.

Speaker 8 (03:00):
We continue Whoop Brewery what they look in nineteen eighty
seven's Fatal Beauty, Directed by Tom Holland and written by
Hillary Henken and Dean Reiser and based on a story
by Bill Spenno. The film stars Whoopy Goldberg, of course,
as Rita Rizzoli. Of course. She's a smart, talking, street
wise police detective who runs across the designer drug Fatal Beauty,

(03:21):
and she has to take it off the streets to
avoid unnecessary deaths. We will be spoiling this film as
we go along. So if you haven't seen Fatal Beauty
and don't want anything ruined, please turn off the podcast
and come on back after you've seen it. We will
still be here.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Rob.

Speaker 8 (03:35):
When was the first time you saw Fatal Beauty and
what did you think?

Speaker 5 (03:38):
Well, the first time seeing it all the way through,
I think was for this episode. I think these Whoopy
Goldberg comedies were often in rotation on TV in the
nineties and that so I think I may have caught
snippets of this one or Burglar or Jump a Jack.
Flash is hard to remember, but to actually sit down
and really watch it in her was this episode. I

(04:02):
thought it was really good. It reminded me of its era,
given that it was made eighty seven. As I was
watching it, I got a lot of feeling that this
is a female version of Beverly Hills Cop. Maybe that
just has to do with certain sort of casting scenario.
Obviously she's a comedian and Eddie Murphy as well, but

(04:24):
just it's a good, little least procedural. And this was
in that era when Sam Elliott was quite handsome and
I remember as a.

Speaker 8 (04:36):
But it's okay, those those insurance commercials I'm seeing he's
looking a little long in the tooth, but yeah, oh
my god, what a cool drink of water this guy is.

Speaker 5 (04:46):
Yeah, and I remember it was around this time that
I don't even think my mother had a photo of
me on her desk, but she had a photo of
Sam Elliott on her desk at around this time. So
this just brought back my flashbacks to my mother and
her loyalty to Sam Elliott. And I'm sure that if

(05:07):
she hasn't seen this, I'll be buying her a copy
on DVD.

Speaker 8 (05:09):
Most urgently, was Sam Elliott a rival for your mother's affections?

Speaker 5 (05:14):
I don't really want to get into that here because
I'm afraid that my insurance won't cover those kind of.

Speaker 8 (05:20):
Discussions here mind, Yeah, it might be good to save
that for your therapist. And Kevin, when was the first
time you saw Fatal Beauty and what did you think?

Speaker 1 (05:27):
I saw this for the first time about a year
ago or maybe two years ago, and the thing that
jumped out at me on that first watch was it
was a lot more straight and a lot more violent
than I expected. It was a proper action adventure film,
and it wasn't as comedic as I was expecting. From
a Whoopi Goldburg film, and I had the last three

(05:50):
of these films all scrambled together. They were all quite
similar to me, and there were a lot of overlap
with scenes with her taking on these different personas and
Stufe it could be her character from Bergner, it could
be her character from Jump with Jack Flash. But that
was my main takeaway was that this was a really
violent cop movie and not at all what I expected,

(06:11):
and I enjoyed it then and on this rewatch I
enjoyed it even more.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (06:17):
Again, I don't know when I saw this one. Rob
was saying, it was ever present, and like you, Kevin,
I definitely scrambled up these things. But yeah, Fatal Beauty
just stands apart for me like this is. And it's
unfair because we've talked about two other movies before this,
which were good. I really enjoyed both of those, but

(06:37):
Fatal Beauty for me is like up on that pedestal.
I really like this movie, and yeah, it is so
freaking violent. I forget about how violent some of these
movies were. It just works.

Speaker 5 (06:50):
It works.

Speaker 10 (06:50):
Yeah, it's so good, and it's so strange because Bill Spanno,
as I said, wrote the original version of it, and
we'll hear from him later and hear what that was like.
It was called extreme Measures, and he really describes the
character as being like a dirty Harriet type of character.
But Hillary Henken, it feels like she is the one
once she got assigned this that she took it across

(07:13):
the finish line, because there's a draft out there from
Milius which is even more violent and is pretty shocking
when it comes to some of the violence in there.

Speaker 5 (07:23):
Millis Millius, I know it's crazy, right, I thought he
you turn into a kids movie.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
It's not as good of a script.

Speaker 8 (07:30):
Though, no it's not.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
They made the better vversion.

Speaker 8 (07:34):
They definitely did, And but his version is weird because
it says based on a screenplay by Hillary Hankin, and
I'm like, oh, okay, not this is my draft. And
there's even like a little note down there about who
gets credit and these kind of things. And then the
next draft I read it's pretty much the shooting script,
and that's Hanken. That's a riser who he used, not

(07:56):
the one that worked with her on Roadhouse. I'm trying
to remember what else he wore. But then also I
am pretty sure that Tom Holland, the director, not the
actor who Rob and I were talking about how negative
aged he must have been at this point, a young
spider man. No, the director, Tom Holland. It seems like
his mark is on there as well, because it feels

(08:17):
like it's what ninety nine percent of what we see
on screen. It's very close.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Although where it differs, I think there are important differences
between the script and the film that I'm hoping to
talk about. But yeah, this is one of these films
where almost every problem is solved with a gun. It's
just shoot a door to open it, shoot a chart
tire to stop someonech chasing you, shoot anyone that's walking
away from if they turned their back and you shoot them.
And I love it.

Speaker 5 (08:45):
It's funny that you said dirty Harriet and then Milius
got involved, because of course he had some hand in that,
and as Kevin, you were saying, this is just part
of that era. That whole thing started in the seventies.
Obviously Dirty Harry picture. But it seemed like as we
got into the eighties and got into this sort of yeah,

(09:06):
just violence solves everything, it just became light entertainment.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Or putting on a persona acting out a fictional character
version of yourself. You tend to do not a lot
as well, walk in somewhere and just pretend to be
somebody else and black out your way through. It's a
staple of the genre.

Speaker 8 (09:26):
Oh, which is perfect for Whipopy Goldberg because that's what
we've been talking about for these last two weeks, was
just the way that she puts on these different personas
and can do it at the drop of a hat.
It's very similar to the whole asking Axel something and
he turns around and suddenly is a completely different persona,
like walking into the club where Victor Maitland is and
suddenly he adopts that kind of fay homosexual persona that

(09:49):
he's doing. And this movie starts with Whoopi Goldberg. This
is so unusual for a female cop to play a prostitute.
That never happens in the movie. So she is completely
dulled up. And the way that she's fragmented during these
opening credits where you see the shoes and then you
get the ass, and then you get the glasses and

(10:09):
then finally you get Whoopy And here she is putting
on a complete character of this prostitute. But yet she's
really torn because she's a prostitute, but she's really a cop.
So when she sees violence happening in this bar where
she's supposed to be making this drug deal, she has
to step in and that really blows her cover. And
it took me a long probably until the last time

(10:31):
I watched this the other night to realize that one
of the guys that sees her on the street makes
her as a cop. When she says it freeze police,
I know that that's when fred Asparagus realizes the gang member.
I was like, oh, I didn't realize that this kid
was here. And also at the end of the movie,
I don't know what the hell was going on, but yeah,

(10:52):
and then I just real quick, I have to call
out fred Asteragus as dig Ado. I guess his name is.
I just talked about him last month when we were
talking about the Three Amigos, and he plays the bartender
at the little sleepy town and he looks completely different.
It's amazing the transformation of him from the skeezy bartender.

Speaker 5 (11:17):
Excuse us, we're not Mexicans, we're from out of town.
We were wondering if you could tell us where the
best hotel in town.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Is there's no hotel in this town.

Speaker 8 (11:27):
Great, no hotel.

Speaker 5 (11:30):
I could kill somebody.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
We have heard of you, No kidding, I have a
message for you.

Speaker 8 (11:42):
Germans says to wait here to this massive gay drug
dealer with the wonderful like. I don't know what kind
of hairstyle that is, but it's great in the little
pinky ring and everything. I mean, hats off to him
and every single character, every actor in here, even the
guy that is doing the violence against the woman at

(12:02):
the beginning, that's familiar face as well. That's the guy
who was Michael Ironside's man at arms in total recall.
I absolutely love that dude.

Speaker 5 (12:12):
One of the things that I really like about her
character and here, and this becomes prominent a little bit
more later, is that, like you said, part of what
blows her cover is she sees this violence against someone
one of the street people, and you learn her connection
to those people in a way that they're her best informants,
they're her best people. She has a humanity for them

(12:35):
that I think might have been underwritten in if it
was maybe a male character. I don't know. This is
maybe some way in which there's some sort of community
that's built with her character in that way, and I
really like that. At the same time, I had a
note here about in that opening because of some of
the stereotypical pieces, and I was talking about the queer

(12:56):
code character and things like that. As I wrote here,
I go, is mega, I'm like anti Mexican talk heard
the cheech as the bartender. So there are some kind
of cringey racist jokes in here that but you have
to remember it's nineteen eighty seven.

Speaker 6 (13:13):
I want to cut that blanchet please, and don't speak
those fans because I don't understand what the fuck you're saying.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Do you want a glass?

Speaker 8 (13:19):
So?

Speaker 5 (13:19):
What do you want a glass?

Speaker 11 (13:21):
Do?

Speaker 4 (13:21):
I want to know? Wrap it in the tap of
dumb motherfucker?

Speaker 5 (13:24):
Yes, I want to go what is this Sto't be
doing this shit to me, honey, because I know you people.
You people come up here under the bushes and shit
and then you want people like me, hard working people.

Speaker 8 (13:33):
Like me, to get down or you to get to
you and got no teeth brushed.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
There's two things I noticed from the opening. One is
that it appeared to me that she's wearing like the
Dorothy Ruby red slippers and she's walking on the streets
because they're like the same look, they're bejeweled, and that's
a choice. You could pick anything, but you chose those.
And the other thing is that her introduction to the script
is the same scene, but in the film when she

(14:00):
walks into the bar, she starts monologue again, she starts
putting on a persona and that's all ad libbed based
on the differences between the script and the film, and
that immediately just puts me at ease. It's, Oh, she's
having fun, she's here, And I just say it is
a bit of a safe the cap moment where she
sees somebody in danger or indeed, and she blows a

(14:20):
cover to protect them. But yeah, I was instantly on board.
I was like, I like this. I like the vibe,
I like the look of it, I like the tone,
and I like the character that she's putting on.

Speaker 8 (14:29):
This done and she doesn't do a ton of character work,
but she does it at times. She'll get back in
that outfit later on in the film, which was surprising
me because I thought it was a one and done
type of thing, But she actually dons those glasses, that wig,
all that stuff later on, and I like that at
her desk in the police headquarters, that she's got all

(14:51):
of these cyrofom heads there with wigs on it. So
you're like, oh, she's the undercover person. She likes to
do this kind of stuff, and it's just fitting for
her and for the whoopee persona that we've seen built
over these last few films.

Speaker 5 (15:04):
In the shootout opening here and Kevin used it as
his opening line on the show is she really has
a problem with the B word, But here I wrote,
she doesn't have a problem with the N word. No,
that really kind of threw me. I was like, Wow, okay,
which then, and this is before obviously we'll get a
bit into the backstory. But I was thinking about this

(15:27):
and when I realized that she has this Italian last name,
I thought, okay, this is Gean Carlos Fasito. Maybe kind
of scenario. Or then I sorted to think to myself,
I'm like, maybe Dennis Hopper was right in True Romance.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
So I, okay, I'll see what you're doing here.

Speaker 5 (15:47):
No, wow, wow, anyway, that's a deep cut for the kid.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
Problematic, but I'm not.

Speaker 5 (15:52):
Going to I'm not going to say the word. But anyway, wow.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
I wasn't quoting the film though, I was just that
was just something I wanted to say up front.

Speaker 8 (16:01):
Yeah, we've had incidents in the past.

Speaker 5 (16:04):
Yeah, yeah, I know you too.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
I did love her little what would you call it?
What's that move? That that Texas switch type move that
she does where they're in the alley and he's looking
for she's basically just disappeared behind him to some sort
of magic of the movies and has a nice move asshole.
I was like, Oh, I'm into this film. It's good crack.
It's working for me. It's the smoothest of the three

(16:28):
so far.

Speaker 8 (16:29):
Yeah, and the script is the one that makes the
most sense to me, even though it had gone through
a bunch of writers. And you can see in that
Millius draft, and I don't know the draft before that,
but you can see echoes of what this film becomes
in that Millius draft where oh, this is the scene
where the drug deal happens. This is a scene where

(16:49):
this happens, and but you get it in a much
different way. Like with Millius, he sets it up so
that she's more of a hot shot and she ends
up buying the bad drugs. I believe now please correct
me if I'm wrong, but I want to say she
ends up getting the bad drugs and then is going
to take them to headquarters, and this land mover or

(17:12):
dump truck or one of these type of industrial machines
crashes into her car and they steal the drugs. They
end up kidnapping her, tying her up arms of kimbo.
The first time I read it, I thought they actually
raped her, but it's just the Brad Dwarf character, yeah,
who comes over with like I was going to rape
you or whatever, and I was like, oh shit, this

(17:34):
is like a rape prevenge film, but it's not quite that.
But it is her fucking up and allowing these drugs
to go on the street. That does not happen in
the final movie, which I'm glad for because she's already
got a lot of emotional baggage in this and I
appreciate it that she is such a well rounded character
in this film. Even though this is a cartoon shoot

(17:55):
them up ultraviolet movie from the late seven sorry late eighties,
when this was de rigueur. I'm sure this kind of
got lost in the shovel of all of the action
films that were happening at this time.

Speaker 5 (18:08):
I love how that reveal of her background is later.
I'm glad that they didn't put it in the first act,
and that was the driver of everything. I like that
it sits in the background and you're like, Okay, why
is this? Why does this person have no life? Because
at one point it's there's the cliche scene with the
captain where it's like the Starsky and Hutch scene where

(18:29):
they get pulled in in the procedural and it's like, God,
damn it, what.

Speaker 9 (18:33):
Are you doing to me?

Speaker 3 (18:34):
Huh no money, no dope, no, don cadillo.

Speaker 11 (18:39):
I have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Speaker 5 (18:41):
I don't need explanations, I need results. Do you know
what Captain McKay is going to do to me?

Speaker 9 (18:46):
And all over some two bid hooker?

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Not a two bit hooker, Not a two bit hooker.

Speaker 4 (18:52):
Charlie far As a friend of mine.

Speaker 6 (18:53):
She has to be the best ear I have on
the streets, and she gave me them a to have
a bus last month.

Speaker 5 (18:58):
I don't care that says, I mean, you have no life,
You have nothing besides this job. All you do is
your job. So the question is why are you driven
to do the jobs? So that plants the question in
our head as the audience, going, Okay, why is this
person so maniacal on their job. Is it just I
don't know, bride and self satisfaction or is there something
else going on here?

Speaker 8 (19:17):
Well, it just through luck that she ends up being
assigned to the murder of Digadillo or gets called to
that scene, and that ends up kicking off the whole mystery.
But she had that connection to him before goes back
figures out that he's dead, and then once we get
tied into drugs, then it becomes a real Now it's

(19:38):
personal thing for her, especially when she sees the van
and it has Kroll's name on it and she's, Okay,
this respectable businessman is completely dirty and I'm going to
basically take him down. It becomes a real vengeance type
of story for her, And I like to your point
that we don't know why she's that driven until towards
the end, and then that scene. That scene just can

(20:02):
got you. She is such a great actress and just
shows it in that one particular scene. Especially.

Speaker 5 (20:09):
Yeah, it's one of those pieces that kind of sneaks
up on you on an eighties movie that you're not expecting.
And I talked about this before on the First Blood
episode where I'm like, I didn't expect to start crying
when Stallone starts giving that monologue at the end of
First Rambo film. It's the same thing with this, where
you're like, Wow, that's deep. I wasn't expecting that for

(20:31):
kind of an actioner, and.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
It's not in the script. That was one of the
big key changes between the draft that I read, the
shooting script draft, and the film itself. Should we tell
people what it is? It basically is that she's lost
a child through her own neglect of allowing. She's taken
the job Homebrew and her young toddler, I believe, got

(20:56):
into the drugs, took them odd and died. So she's
basically lost her child. And in the script there's a
couple of things, a couple of changes. There's three major
changes that they make that I think one of them
is good, which is that change that they make with
their personalize her reason for wanting to take down this

(21:17):
whole empire. But the other two I think are solely
missed and I'll talk about them later. But in the script,
she talks about her sister and it's something that happened
to her sister that made her want to be a cop,
which is confiding all this into Marshak, the Sam Elliott character.
But in the film, it seems they must have written
that on the day, or they must have rehearsed or something,

(21:38):
because that's not there at all in the draft. There's
nothing about her having lost a kid. And the thing
that I noticed is that she feels a little skitzo
in the film because of that, because she's so glib,
she's so enjoying her job, bantering with all the guys.
She seems to be a carefree character. And then that
reveal where she's no, she's somebody who's having a deep

(22:02):
wound that she's masquerading, and that this is very personal
for it's a big change. And I noticed as well
that in the Cisco A Needbit review that I saw
that's the scene that Ciskel highlights as the saving grace
of the whole film. That it really reminds people that,
regardless of what you think of these films, what po
go Bog is a great actress.

Speaker 8 (22:22):
You said, she takes the job home with her, that
is she a cop at that point, because it sounds
like she got mixed up in drugs when she was younger,
and she had the kid when she was fourteen.

Speaker 5 (22:32):
You're right, Actually, yeah, My memory of it is that
she had a rough youth, she was an addict, she
had this kid, the kid dies, and that kind of
appears to have set her straight and to go, Okay,
I got to get my shit together, because you know
this is serious, this isn't It's not just me anymore.

Speaker 8 (22:54):
I can see where you're coming from, Kevin, because it
goes from her being a drug addict to her becoming
a police detective. And you're curious about how that transition happened.
So it would have made just as much sense had
she brought the evidence home or something.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
What I tend to do is I tend to read
the shooting script while I'm watching the film for the
second time, so I'm like going straight through it. And
it started to deviate quite drastically at that period where
the marsh that character. He had a whole other scene
where he was going back to Kroll and he was
laying the plan and he knew quite clearly that he
was setting her up and he was trapping her, and

(23:30):
it was playing against these scenes where he was falling
for her, and I do love the relationship that they have.
It's nice to see her falling for somebody. And they've
got some great pattern as well that isn't in the script.
These these funny little back and forth where he's inelegantly
flirting with her and she's trying to bat them away.
I loved all that stuff, which again feels like it
was ad libbed on the day, But those changes, I

(23:51):
was like, what's going on here? This is a huge
change to the character that they seem to have made
while in production.

Speaker 8 (23:57):
And as far as I remember, there is no Mike
Mark Shack in that Millius draft. It feels like he's
very much a later invention.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
I couldn't track any of the characters from the Millius
drafted this because it seems like they only kept to
read a name. So some of the set pieces with
similar reports. Who are all these guys?

Speaker 5 (24:15):
Granted I only watched this once, but I had moments
at times, and I think it becomes more It evens
out as the film goes, But in the beginning, I'm
trying to figure out beyond kind of the meet cute
and they start to develop. There's part of me That's
what I'm not understanding. If this is your job and

(24:37):
you're trying to be a serious person doing your job,
this guy is dirty. I don't understand why you're getting involved.
There's almost a feeling that maybe in my first viewing,
i'd say early on, there's this little thing where it's
and it could just be a little scene, it could
be a line. I don't know that could have sured

(24:57):
that up just a little bit. For me, it just
felt like, I don't understand why you would allow yourself
to drop the professionalism here with this person that obviously
you're I don't know. I don't know what your take
on that was. Later it's fine, Like when you get
towards the third act and all that, I'm like, I
can buy it there, But in the early go I'm like,

(25:18):
I'm not getting it.

Speaker 8 (25:20):
I like that she basically humiliates him the first time
that they meet, Like the way that he comes out
from behind the gate. She's going to go see Kroll
played by Harris Eulin in here and she's up at
the gate. It's very actual trying to see Victor Maitland
type of thing. To your point, Rob and he walks
out and he starts flirting with her big time, especially

(25:41):
when he finds out that her last name is Rosoli.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
That's Italian, isn't it. M I always had a weakness
for Italian ladies school. There was this one that rose
I'm off Fatano got those eyes. She had one problem
shut out those big beautiful brown as or as a
get or anything she wanted. Maybe all pretty Italian ladies

(26:07):
feel that way.

Speaker 9 (26:09):
Figure, is here a point to this start point?

Speaker 3 (26:14):
Is this is private property.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
If you want to come call in and show me
a piece of paper that says warn on it otherwise,
or even dare chain.

Speaker 8 (26:23):
And for all this we had to go through Rosa Malfatana's.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Trying to be friendly.

Speaker 3 (26:27):
Officer.

Speaker 8 (26:29):
Oh, he's just flirting big time, and I'm like melting
there looking at nineteen eighty seven Sam Elliot just oh gosh,
whatever man and that more black scent and everything, and
she ends up Okay, we'll see you later, and it
takes herself out of there. But then she ends up
breaking into Kroll's place anyway, and he gets pissed off

(26:53):
at Marshack and it's just like, yeah, the thing of
follow her and make sure nothing happens to her is
weird flecks to have there, but it just you have
to go with it for the movie to work. I think.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
I think that's what he tells her. What he's really
doing is he's making sure that she's not getting too close. True,
so he's informing them. But the dialogue that they have
that I wanted to mention because I was like jotting
down all these lines and I'm like, I'm loving this.
This is the stuff that I would be aiming to
work myself. He apologizes to her a moment later on
in the film in the car and he's I'm sorry
for being such an asshole, and she's like, it's all right,

(27:27):
I'll get used to it. I just love that kind
of like back and forth for it's just an acknowledging. Yeah,
I still think you're an asshole, but I'm sure I'll
get used to it.

Speaker 5 (27:36):
In the back and forth and the banter are there.
This is where I was like, you're not gonna mention
the mismatch, Like you were saying, I have a thing
for Italian ladies.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
Wasn't meant to be share.

Speaker 8 (27:47):
It was meant to be share. Yeah, she was as
reader Resoli. And so it's funny because Kevin. We've gone
through gender swaps, racial swaps, ages, all of these different things.
This is the first time we're talking about a movie
that was written for a female character but written for

(28:07):
an Italian female character. So we're so close. We are
so close to actually having a movie written for Whoopy Goldberg,
but we're still far away from that. And apparently at
one point it was supposed to be Sharer and then
they changed it to Whoopy Goldberg, and then the Marshak
character was supposed to be Billy d Williams, and so
it was like, okay, good, no misagenation. We can't have

(28:28):
that because people think, oh, of course, interracial kisses have
been fine since Kirk and Aura all that time back. Yeah,
Beverly Hills cop perfect example. We're taking this romance. Write
the fuck out of here. It's amazing that there is
romance in this at all, that there is a kiss
at the end, and there was supposed to be apparently

(28:48):
a sex scene at one point. It's note, we can't
have that. They were going to give this movie an
X rating if there's going to be a sex scene
between Sam Elliott and Whoopee Goldberg. How do you like that?
Nineteen eighty.

Speaker 5 (29:01):
I read some coverage on this before I watched it,
and I can pick up on where that scene was.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
Now.

Speaker 5 (29:08):
It's my understanding that they actually shot it and then.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
After the big hot to hot moment where she tells him,
she basically reveals who what's driving her.

Speaker 5 (29:18):
It came there, and it's my understanding that it was
in the preview version and the audience didn't like.

Speaker 8 (29:25):
It, so they cut it didn't test well.

Speaker 5 (29:28):
I'm actually amazed by this, and I don't want to
get too deep into this, but culturally, I think that
maybe white Americans could accept Sam Elliott and a black woman,
but if it was a black man and a white woman,
I think that really would have been problem. I think

(29:48):
it's still a problem.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Didn't they have the issue with Hitch where Rosario Dawson
was cast opposite Will Smith. They could go with a
Latin X person on a black guy, but it couldn't
be a white woman opposite Will Smith in not film anyway,
So it was still going on like into the early
two thousands.

Speaker 5 (30:08):
That's wowd It makes me a little sad to see that.
It's not that I needed it per se, but now
that I know that it was cut for that reason.
It's just damn really.

Speaker 8 (30:19):
The relationship between Rita and Mike that really drives the
second half of the film. When she confronts him and says,
you work for this guy who sells all of these drugs.
She knows that Kroll is bad. How can you justify that?
And ask him flat out, how can you live with yourself?

(30:39):
And sometimes I let it slide? And that becomes the
big thing, and she just picks up on that let
it slide thing and just hammers him with it. And
when you see that scene of her talking about her backstory,
it's basically like, how can you let this slide? Marshack?
Look at what drugs have done to this woman who

(31:01):
you are falling in love with, who we are about
to have sex with in one version of it, how
can you let this happen? And I love that. It's
just she hits him a few times and she's really
angry and mean about it, and I'm glad because he
deserves that. He's the dynamic character in the second half
of the film, changing his ways from working for a

(31:23):
drug dealer to helping out Risoli and taking a bullet
for literally taking a bullet for her.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
The other thing where the film is strengthened by rewatching
it and knowing what's motivating her truth is the scene
that she has with Zach's murdor, where she's confronting another
murderer who doesn't care what happens to her son, who's
washed her hands with him, And when you realize that
she's someone who doesn't have that anymore, she's not a
motor anymore, it makes more sense why they would get

(31:52):
into an actual fistfight altercation where in the film it's
played kind of fun and it's it's almost like a
class thing. But when you realize that she's coming from
a place of I cannot understand you. Why would you
be that way? You want son, you're more concerned about
playing tennis? The rage is justifoied Oh.

Speaker 8 (32:10):
And Jennifer Warren as this mother character, as what's her name,
Cecily Jaeger, She's in here for two scenes and it's
just amazing. She is so good. Well, of course I
mostly know her from Night Moves and Slapshot, and there's
a lot of slap Shot crossover between Fatal Beauty and Slapshot,
but yes, she is amazing, just in those two scenes

(32:33):
and to go from that hoity toity if what you
can do with him? And I have to get back
to tennis, and I have to how dare you come
into my house? And especially when Rizzoli touches her, and
you just get the feeling that there is a massive
racist thing going on. Not only is it how dare
this cop touch me? How do this other woman touch me?

(32:55):
But how dare this black person touch me? Is how
that moment feels to me, and that she has to
overcome all of that in order to see what's right.
And it takes her own son, the James Lgrow character
off screen committing suicide or attempting suicide. Sorry that it
takes that to wake her the fuck up and finally

(33:17):
allow that the last little bit of connection from the
drugs to this what's his name? Denny Mifflin. I kept
thinking of dunder Mifflin to Denny and then to Kroll.
She's that lynchpin for it. But it takes so much
to get that information out of her.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
She thinks she's to help the first time that she
sees her, oh.

Speaker 8 (33:39):
Man, yeah, my skin crawled at that moment. And yeah,
there's a lot of racial stuff that goes on in
this movie. And yeah, though to your point, Rob, it's
pretty funny that the N word doesn't get her nearly
as upset as bitch. But then towards the end of
the movie, brad Dorf's just calling her bitch all over

(33:59):
the place. What's your last line going to be? The
last line needs to be don't call me bitch. But no,
you said Smith and Wesson asshole, And I'm like, that's
the wrong line to me.

Speaker 5 (34:11):
It was just the logic of it, where it's if
you're going to change the character, if you're obviously going
to make them, it's going to be a black woman's whoopy.
Those things now need to be in there, either a
subtext or text so that way, like if someone does
say the N words, he has to react to that,
if you have to react to the fact that someone's

(34:32):
calling you out. I actually think it would be a
good thing for it to be more prominent because you
have these double like you were talking about, there's double
or triple layers there in which this character has to
move within the world and how they do their job
and how they live their life. And I think that's
more accurate of how someone would be a navigating world.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
She did it in burglar I remember where the police
detective guy calls were picking and then she goes into
a sarcastic portrayal of a slave. The brad Dorf character,
he pretty much takes over in terms of the villains
in the story and he becomes the main bad guy
that she's got to take down, which surprised me when
I was watching the film, because I thought it's not

(35:15):
usual that you have the henchman be the big bad boss.
But that was another change from the script. And I
don't know if you guys noticed that as well, but
I found that quite notable. Where it feels like that
was probably change because of test screenings as well, where
it felt like it's much more impactful to end on that,
even though it's a weaker line, but that sort of
kiss off line of Smith and Weston asshole than what

(35:37):
was in the script. But I loved that scene in
the script.

Speaker 5 (35:41):
Yeah, anytime brad Dorffe shows up, I'm there. I love
him in here, I think as a bad guy. Sure
it's a little over the top, but it's fun a little.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
It got him chucky.

Speaker 5 (35:57):
I was thinking that right before this was what Blue Velvet. Probably, Yeah, I.

Speaker 8 (36:02):
Think you're right eighty six that would have been.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (36:05):
Him and that crazy hair that he's got. I just
I love it. And he's got the he's got two
henchmen at the beginning, and there's a whole thing in
the script I want to say where it's oh, we
know this guy isn't going to make it. Basically, they
end up killing the third guy, so it's just him
and this other dude and the other dude who can

(36:26):
chew on glass and.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
A bond villain, oh.

Speaker 8 (36:30):
Yeah, in order to impress that real preppy asshole, plus
a very young Mark Pellegrino with that wild blonde hair
and they call him Frankenstein and he just, oh my god,
he looks like a freaking teenager in this movie. I've
always followed Pellegrino and just always love when he shows

(36:51):
up and stuff. Speaking of David Lynch, that was he
was in mahalland Drive the last time I really remember
seeing him. But he's great as Thug number two in
The Big You know, he plays dumb really well. So
it's really nice that he's in here as this henchman
character and that they get the other guy taller than him.

(37:12):
Pellegrina already looks tall, and then the other dude, the
glass chewer guy, is even taller than him, and I'd
like that. It's Dorf just basically, oh, he's the muscle.
I'm the one in control. It's almost like a master
blaster situation. I'm surprised he doesn't right on top of
this guy's shoulders and just like, oh yeah, kill that guy,
open that door, twist this person's neck off, like those

(37:33):
kind of things, because Dorf is just fricking wild. And yeah,
to your point, mark the change in the script of
because Dorof does not kill the Harris Ulen character. He
ends up. Ulen or Kroll just shows up out of
nowhere in this movie. It's just like, oh yeah, I
happen to be here too. It's oh okay. And then

(37:54):
Brad Dorpe kills him. Because there's a whole extra scene
at the end of the script where.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
You which is a great scene.

Speaker 8 (38:01):
Yeah, oh yeah, it's a great scene.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
At the very end of the film where the freeze frame.
It's quite an awkward ending the freeze frame on her
saying you're going to be all right. The movie continued
where she walked back into the crowd and the cal character,
the guy who was always fiddled with his tie. He's like,
where are you going? She goes up to Kroll's office
and she basically gets him through a back and forth.

(38:25):
She gets him to take the drugs, the laced drugs,
and he dies through his own supply. But there was
another thing that I want to mention as well, which
was shocking to me. That the drugs are laced with fentanyl.
And I didn't know that fentanyl was such a big
thing until the last four or five years. And it's
going back to the eighties where it's whoa. This is

(38:47):
as timely as ever thanks to that one edition. But
that's the big dangerous element that adding to the drugs
is cut fifty to fifty with fentanyl and some PCP.

Speaker 8 (38:58):
Which feels really bizarre because fifty percent fentanyl. True confession time,
I have yet to do fentanyl. I probably have. It's great,
Oh is it okay?

Speaker 1 (39:10):
I had a decoration and they give it to you,
and it's all I've never felt more warm, cozy, like chill.
And they only gave it to me twice. They wouldn't
give me any more than that. It's a painkiller, like
would they administered in the hospital, and I loved it
and it was like, no, no, that's enough. Now I
totally get white people would be trying to sneak some

(39:32):
of that stuff. It's lovely, but don't do drugs.

Speaker 8 (39:35):
No, don't do drug But they always show like this
much can kill a person, and it's like a grain.
Oh two grains and you're dead. So I'm like, they're
cutting this with fifty percent. And now they don't say
fentanyl in the Wikipedia. They just say it's fifty percent
purity and cut with fin cyclodine, which is basically PCP.
So I'm like, okay, well that makes sense when a

(39:56):
PCP plus cocaine. I'm like, all right, that that's a
great designer drug. And you see the one the black
guy walking out of the apartment building and they're just bubba, Yeah,
they're just shooting all of shooting them so much. And
then even actually I take it back because I thought
Dwarff had taken it and that's why he was indestructible
at the end, but then he's kevlar bitch.

Speaker 5 (40:19):
That scene that you brought up about the guy that
they just unload on and all of that. I remember
those stories from when we were young when we were kids,
that there was this fear that there were these street
drugs and originally it was crack or it was PCP
or whatever that would turn these people into like superhuman strength,

(40:41):
and therefore you had to be really rough with them.
And one thing I also noticed about the cops in
here is that the cops actually look like cops. We
haven't gotten into the swat team era of cops in America.
Like I was looking at footage of the white riots
in San Francisco. Harvey Milk was killed just for fun,

(41:02):
just happened to be part of a documentary. I think
I was watching Lifetime to Harvey Milk, and I was like,
look at those cops. They look like regular cops, just
blue shirts. Sure like they're gonna wear like a motorcycle
helmet to deal with the rioting. But they don't look
like they just got off the plane from Iraq or Afghanistan.
And I was just like, wow, I'm like, now cops

(41:25):
in America look like super soldiers. They don't look like
normal people.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
I don't know if it's true, but don't they say
that New York has the sixth largest standing army in
the world.

Speaker 5 (41:35):
It's probably true.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
Mike, you were gonna say something where you had a
personal experience with Fenton and like cut you off.

Speaker 8 (41:40):
Oh no, I haven't. I just was talking about the
grains and just how oh we always talking about how
like this much and they'll show like a close up
electron microscope almost of them. This much can kill you.

Speaker 5 (41:51):
And I remember there was a fear story kind of
like wild in the Streets where they were worried of Oh,
terrorists are gonna dump and it's only gonna take a pound.
Only takes a pound of fentanyl and they can put
it in the local water supply and it'll fucking kill
thousands of people. So yeah, actually you know what you
were saying.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Yeah, but it.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
Makes this film very timely, just that it's.

Speaker 8 (42:13):
This bad batch that's going around anything that's stamped incorrectly
thanks to that one Asian kid who O deed like
on the own supply. And it's just what a great
scene to have him laughing through the whole thing while
this We talked about the violence before, but like Dwarf
and his boys coming in with machine guns and just

(42:35):
shooting every fucking thing. They talk about how they unloaded
a clip and a Digadio's face and stuff. And I
think that's even in the script, is them shooting this
guy in the fucking face, but just massive violence. Meanwhile,
this kid is laughing his head off through the entire scene.
I thought that was a great touch that it almost felt

(42:57):
almost like a Tony Scott kind of thing. Had there
been feathers flying or something, I guess that would have
been more of a Tony Scott thing.

Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yeah, you need those chefs of light.

Speaker 8 (43:07):
But yeah, talking about the cops, John p. Ryan as
the lieutenant who's always great and always such a good yeller.
You get Charles Hallahan, who most people know for having
his chest split open and a fucking thing coming out
of it from the thing. Mc gainey in here as
one of the cops. Ruben Blades in here and I'm
trying to remember who plays Shahida Steve aka Hoshi. So

(43:30):
you get this great mix of all these people and
Ruben Blades and I had to look it up. I
wanted to make sure he's fine. He says, Blades is
his last name, not necessarily blot As. He'll accept Blatas,
but Blades. I love when he gives that little thing
where he tells someone to freeze and if they run
and he goes man they never stop. And then later

(43:52):
on in the movie he says freeze and these two
kids stop and he gets that little quick smile on
his face.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
Oh fuck it.

Speaker 8 (43:59):
Actually, that's like such a great moment in this movie
for me, those.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Are the moments which punctuated and just keep it bubbling along.
There's another moment which I noticed as well, wasn't in
the script, and it's an ad lib where they turn
up at the house at read his house, and the
cat is on the roof and he goes to her,
Your cat's on the roof, so what are you gonna do?
Shoot him because she's got a gun in her hand.
Nice little additions to the dialogue, but it have been

(44:24):
so functional and expository I enjoy it. But yeah, I
like that a moment at the end he got his
little arc as well. Someone took him seriously for once.

Speaker 8 (44:32):
Or the lady who's talking Chinese and I think it's
Hallahan says. What she's saying is I don't know, I'm Japanese.

Speaker 5 (44:38):
Talking about the cops in the way cop process is
done in the film. There's a lot of things like
I talked about the being hauled before the captain scene,
which we've seen in ten thousand police procedurals before.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
They're off the case mcgarnagal.

Speaker 5 (44:53):
But I wrote here and you can pick out who
he is. But I wrote, like Richard Gear lookalike guy
talking to her. This is where she's under cover. They
go to that like restaurant Jimmy Silver, and there's this
whole thing where she hangs them up in the freezer
and tortures him, to which I wrote here. Of course,
if you torture people, they'll give you the information you want.

(45:14):
That always works to see reservoir dugs.

Speaker 8 (45:17):
This is America.

Speaker 5 (45:18):
This is where you can play with gender. There's this
whole thing where she starts grabbing at his genitals and
all of that stuff. And then there's a later scene
with reminded me of the RoboCop rights. You have the
right to remain silently like blast bottiker through the window
and all that stuff, where she's beating up the one

(45:39):
guy and she's reading him his rights at the same time.
So there's scenes like this where yeah, we're gonna do
the dirty hairy thing.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
We're gonna Sennamentoza is one of the most respected citizens
in the statement, Bang and you ran his little off
a cliff, broke the necks of three of his bodyguards
and drove a bus to his front door.

Speaker 9 (45:57):
A Cup and Nile have proof that he's head of
an international door. You don't want to hear it, McBain.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
The shootout in the boy House with all those scribs
and explosions and shit going off, that was an excellent
action sequence. Or I felt proper Jeopardy and I thought
Sam Maniot was gonna get killed at that point. He's
here to get fridged. But yeah, the action is a
lot more narrowly than I expected, like blood packs going

(46:24):
off all over the place and people getting blasted in
all types of like weaponry getting unloaded. It doesn't pull
its punches. I can see why it almost got an
X rating.

Speaker 8 (46:34):
No, and I love when they're going down the hallway.
They're almost back to back at one point and I'm
just like, oh, this is very Butcher and sun Dance
and to see.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
I would love to have had a sequel with the
tour of them.

Speaker 8 (46:44):
Oh yeah, gosh, yeah. The chemistry that they have is
fantastic and it's just on paper. It doesn't seem like
it's going to make sense when you go, WHOOPI Goldberg
and Sam Elliott are going to be lovers, partners kicking
ass and taking names. And I'm just like, yeah, okay,
that doesn't sound like it's gonna work. But then you
see it on screen, You're like, oh, fuck, yeah, this

(47:05):
seems like the most natural thing in the world. And yeah,
them trading clips back and forth, very clever stuff.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
I was surprised that he felt that he was miscastle.
I'm not he really is a mistake to do the film. Yeah,
he felt that he wasn't right for the part, that
he didn't do a good job and that was a
mistake in his career. And I was like, no, this
is no. It looks like you're having fun and you
have a great report together. So I don't know what
he was feeling in a moment to feel like that
was a mistake from but I thought he was good

(47:33):
in there.

Speaker 8 (47:34):
The next script that Hanken wrote or co wrote that
comes up is Roadhouse, which to me is one of
Sam Elliott's best characters ever. And he does eat shit,
doesn't it. The sense gets killed in that film.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
All I remember from that film is I used to
fuck guys like you in prison.

Speaker 5 (47:52):
Talking about the room to rooms shootout and then she
gets wounded because the ceiling falls in on her. Happens
twice and then ends up in the hospital. Now this
is part of me that and I understand it's we
need it for the script. Stop with trying to handle
the film logic is that there's a newspaper story, and

(48:12):
that's how Durris's character finds out she's in the hospital
and goes after unlike she was undercovered. There wouldn't be
a story in paper wounded.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
Oh, he didn't think it has.

Speaker 5 (48:23):
From there, it's really where you start to build the
tenderness with the Mic character, where it's like he visitors
in the hospital, he gets through the dress. She was
looking at things like that, can't accept it. It's a bribe,
so that she's still trying to keep this professional distance
while at the same time getting pulled in.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
They really played it open the script as well as
shooting draft with the dress where he gets sort of
actually put it on and she doesn't want to wear
it because he'll see her scars, and he convinces her,
and it felt a little bit more like a pretty
woman type back and forth where I could imagine this
playing where it's more romantic writer or like the weapon
would rende Russo and Gibs and showed each other our scars.

Speaker 11 (49:05):
You want to drink, drink your leg and drink to
your leg.

Speaker 6 (49:08):
Okay, so we drink her legs.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
I thought it was a better change in the film
because the relationship is based on empathy rather than sensuality,
which is what the script was going for. That was
one of the changes where I was like, I'm glad
you made those changes because it would felt like too
much of a tonal change.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (49:28):
I love the scene where she sees the dress the
first time and you would think, again, it's here's a
five thousand dollars dress. But I love that when she
because this is all done, no dialogue, it's just her
mouthing words and signaling, and she's signaling to a shop
girl inside who's like fixing up the window display. And

(49:51):
I love when she's five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars
for that dress and the woman gives her a little
sympathetic I know, it's crazy, right, And I was so
afraid that the one was going to be like if
you can't afford it, get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Kind of thing.

Speaker 8 (50:04):
But I love that she's just like, I know this
is nuts, so but yeah, when he comes to her
with the dress, and I'm glad that they he didn't
have the put on the dress for resolely type of thing,
because that would have felt very controlling, and that doesn't
seem like the way that Marshak is And it doesn't
feel like she would take orders or suggestions from fucking anybody.
She is so in control. I love how cool she

(50:26):
plays it when Zach the James LaGrow character acosts her
at the deli, and that scene is they're in the
Millia's version and it's so different. There's there isn't a deli.
But I love the whole thing of her interacting with
the guy behind the deli kuind of Max I think
his name is, and just there back and forth and

(50:47):
you can tell she's been there a thousand times. And
how cool she plays it with pickpocketing the grow taking
his knife, and I want to say, when she shows
a little bag of drugs, I'm like, oh, I think
she just had that and just did a real quick
press the digitation. I don't think that was inside of
La Girl's pocket at all, and she just was like,
oh look what I found. I'm like, yeah, she's in

(51:07):
complete control of the situation. She's laughing at this kid
who thinks he's such a badass, even though he's coming
at her with a knife, just bursts out laughing. I'm like,
this is She's a cool cucumber.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
She's also being maternal. She's seeing a teenager who is
probably reminds her a little bit of the people that
she probably would have ruan around with. And she's not
gonna book him. She's not going to bring him, bring
him in, and she's not gonna handcuff him. She's gonna
humiliate him and just tell him fuck off, don't bother me.
And I like that. I like that her humanity and
the humanity between her and sam Eliot comes through in

(51:42):
those scenes. They don't play it for the little hanging fruit.
They go for a little bit more of a Groun
did softer approach. That really balances out the more grubby
and gnarly aspects of the shoot outes and the violence.

Speaker 8 (51:55):
It makes you feel for Lagroux too, and especially that
scene later on where he tells that story about how
he went out for swim. He had drugs with him,
and he'said, oh, let's do these drugs. But at first
I'm going to go off for a swim. He comes
back in all of his friends are dead, and you
get to see all of these dead teenagers there, and

(52:16):
I'm like, wow, I was tempted to laugh when I
first they had that hard cut to the teenagers, just
because it is a funny situation for me seeing all
of these dead teenagers all in like their party and everything.
But he sells it. When Lagro starts to tell that story,
he really sells it and makes me care for this
kid who could have just been a complete punk, Like

(52:39):
you don't want you don't give a shit about this
guy because he's just a little privileged white boy. But no,
I actually cared about him and I care for him
when they said that he tried to commit suicide, because
can you imagine the survivor's guilt that this kid's going
to have for the rest of his fucking life.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
I'm just on a how prescient the film is that
those see things that are still going on with people
taking dodgy cork and just dropping dead is part of
a plotline for a mid eighties movie. It feels eerie
in some respects, but maybe it was always going on
and maybe it's only just caught fire in the last

(53:16):
few years.

Speaker 5 (53:17):
But yeah, sadly, it's much worse now than I think
it was then. If you were to go back and
look at the OD statistics for the late eighties, by comparison,
I think, what is it in the last ten years,
It's been about roughly the amount of Americans dying in Vietnam,
about fifty thousand or more a year dying from od's
in the US. So it's and it has been that

(53:40):
way for the past ten years.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
Still, I enjoyed my fentanel.

Speaker 5 (53:45):
You did it in the way it was supposed to
be done, under supervision and for a particular reason, not
because you got a hot dose on the street. Sadly.

Speaker 8 (53:55):
Yeah, speaking of cops, I forgot that. Larry Hankin also
plays a cop in here, very muller ish to his
role from Running Scared, where he just shows up for
a few minutes, comes in, talks about the bad batch
of Fatal Beauty, and then he goes on his way,
like how he showed up and worked on their undercover
police car, made that crazy taxi for Billy Crystal and

(54:18):
Gregory Hines and then goes on his way with that.
We talked about how she plays characters and how she
doesn't play a ton of characters in here, but the
other one I forgot. You mentioned the Richard Gear drug dealer.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
And she's want to be actress.

Speaker 8 (54:34):
Oh yeah, actress, what did you know? Of course, it's
almost that same wig where she was the entertainment from
Jump to Jack Flash.

Speaker 5 (54:43):
Like I said, when I saw him, I'm just like,
I don't know who this guy is, but he looks
like a Richard Gear lookalike, which would have worked in
this period.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
She comes in love on screen as well, when she's
caught loose like that, where you can tell it's not scripted.
It's just convinced this guy that you are want to
be actors. And I always love her when she does that,
So I can see why it keeps coming up in
the films where she keeps adopting these other personas, but
I always enjoy it. She's such a charismatic character. The

(55:12):
thing that I noticed as well from reading a book
that I think maybe is worth mentioning, is that she
was dealing with substance abuse herself at this time, and
that's why she was so skinny. She was doing coke
and she knew that if she gave up the coke,
she was going to gain weight, and she thought at
some stage the trade off was, Okay, if I gained
twenty pounds, it's worth it, rather than my daughter finding

(55:33):
out that her mother was an addict find out that
her daughter was an addict. But when you see how
I think she is in this film, how spry she is,
and she's playing this character where she's talking about having
lost her child to coke and it's not in the script,
I'm wondering how much that was weighing on her that
she felt the need to put it through this character's

(55:55):
point of view before she processed it herself. But she
talks about in the book where she's very forecoming. It's
a brilliant book, actually her book, bits and pieces, but
she talks about how she was always the second choice
in all these films, that it was never anyone wanted
her that she would come in, and she was constantly
trying to convince people that she was good enough, and
she just felt that she could never get the same

(56:18):
respect that others would get as a lead, like they
didn't have the right makeup people, they didn't have the
right hair people, and did come in and they spray
her hair with water and she'd be like, oh my god,
you do not know what you're doing. And meanwhile she
was like doing lines and lines of coke in order
to stay thin. It adds to the performance.

Speaker 5 (56:36):
I think in this period. All I can think of
is in the mid and late eighties is how she
was so connected to Robin Williams and understanding his own
substance use and if they were paling around. It doesn't
surprise me in the least that she was up to
her elbows and cocaine when that guy was no the same.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
She said they all were. She said that bell Air
of Beverly Hills, you go into a party, people would
hand to your choice of coeludes, and there was just
rails of coke on every table, and it felt so
normalized that she didn't see it as dangerous because everybody
was doing it and they were all successful and they
were all protected, and so she thought, oh, I'm going
to fit in. And then she made the choice to

(57:16):
cut with all those friends and move in different spaces
and make that departure from that life soole that she
was living. But yeah, it's interesting. It's a very good book.
I enjoyed her.

Speaker 5 (57:27):
We were talking about with the racial politics then, not
to say things are absolutely better some I don't know,
almost forty years later on from this film, it was
much harder in that era. There was not a lot
of black leading actors in that period. The only like

(57:48):
constant blackface on TV in America at least was and
now we know how he turned out. Sadly is was
Bill Cosby because I I don't know what he got
a bad case of pudding pups. I just remember being
I don't know, six seven years old and talking to
a neighbor kid. And I grew up in a working class,

(58:09):
working poor neighborhood, but it was still like I didn't
realize that the time is rather segregated. And I remember
talking to as kids do you're six, seven, eight years old,
and it's what is it? Do you watch? It's oh,
we like the show and that, and I would talk about, oh,
we watched Cosby show. And I remember the kid just said,
as playing as day, like you were telling the time

(58:31):
or the weather. It's Oh, we don't watch that show
because there's blanks on it.

Speaker 8 (58:35):
Oh wow.

Speaker 5 (58:37):
And I remember going to my dad and talking about that.
He's like, yeah, we don't use that word in this house,
like we don't act like that here. And I am
and my dad explaining to me, like I said, I
was only like six or seven years.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Old and learned behavior.

Speaker 5 (58:54):
But the way I think about it is that kid
is probably more mainstream of what most people thought at
the time where I was growing up, as opposed to
my parents. So for someone to try to have an
acting career, to try and be to get lead roles
in this period, who is black, it had to be

(59:17):
such a struggle. Today, Yeah, you got Will Smith and
things like that, and things are much more normalized in
that way along racial lines.

Speaker 8 (59:27):
Ish ish because you still get all of this stuff
where it's, oh, how dare you recast Johnny Storm to
be a black guy? It's like how you Oh, it's
so woke you have to have this DEI thing and
bring all these black characters in it. Have you looked
at America? Do you see the racial makeup of our country?
And also there is a thing about representation where it's

(59:49):
just like, yeah, to your point. If I was a
little black girl at this point, like in the early
to mid eighties, I got nothing, like I'm not gonna
i have no other than maybe one person or two
people on Sesame Street. I had nobody who I'm looking at. Like,
until The Cosby Show came along, it was really tough

(01:00:10):
to see black people on television other than the very
menior roles or the one of a group of people
like Ron Harrison, Barney Miller. Yeah, there wasn't that, and
that's a black man. I'm trying to think of the
last time i saw black woman on Barney Miller. It's
very rare.

Speaker 5 (01:00:29):
Or if they were the lead roles were poor people,
so you had like in the ghetto with like Good
Times or the Jeffersons. Yeah, but they also it was
like evolved out of that or Sanford's Son, So you
had this thing with it's like poor people, non professionals.
It wasn't until The Cosby Show came along that you

(01:00:50):
had black professionals where it was like, no, black people
can be doctors and lawyers, and because that's what the
two of them were, and they can be everything in
that way. And so I always posited that for US
gen xers that it was the Cosby Show that changed
the culture a bit, that allowed something like Obama to

(01:01:13):
be elected president because people could visualize and go, oh,
black guy could be president too. Even my grandfather, who
was in his eighties and was casually racist, said yeah,
I got to vote for the colored fella instead of
voting for John McCain. So it showed this evolution. I
don't think people understood how representation changed the way in

(01:01:34):
which people engaged in media. That became a cultural crossover.
And like he we was saying, if you can't see it,
then you can't be it. And there was part of that.
And even for me growing up working poor, where it
was like, I want to be a writer. I want
to have a creative life. And wasn't that my parents
and had books in the house. They did, but I
may as well have told him I wanted to be
a fucking astronaut. Because they didn't know anyone who was

(01:01:56):
a writer, and they didn't know anyone who was an astronaut,
so they had no vision for how you could live
a creative life. They were like, just don't work in
the factory. Just go do something else. It's interesting to
see the dynamics through that lens. I don't think that
if a younger person was watching this movie today that
they would even maybe pick up on those kind of things.

Speaker 8 (01:02:15):
Yeah, I think you're right, And I don't think they
would realize just what a rarety a black female action
star was, and that all of those dark.

Speaker 1 (01:02:25):
Skins female actress as well, because even today, the majority
of the black actresses who are leading ladies, they're lighter skinned.
It's notable. See. The thing that I find fascinating is
that the race issue is it's very specific to America.
While everywhere has got its racial issues, America still seems

(01:02:46):
to be grappling with it in a way that the
rest of us just don't understand why it's such an
issue for you guys. And maybe it just has to
do with your history and it has to do with
segregation and all that stuff. But we grew up just
loving black culture and loving the black exports we're watching
like Fresh Prince of bel Air and not batting an
eyelid about it, or kidd and Play or whatever music was.

(01:03:09):
It always just felt normalized. And that was in a
country which was predominantly white Catholic. It's an interesting difference.

Speaker 5 (01:03:18):
For me growing up. I grew up around a lot
of kids who were like Pino and do the right thing.
And there's that scene where Spike's character pulls them aside
and says, you keep saying this word all the time.
You keep talking about how awful black people are. But
your favorite sports heroes and your favorite musicians and your
favorite you're so in our culture, but you don't respect us.

(01:03:38):
And I grew up around so many kids like that
who had no respect for black people and on the whole,
but they would just eat their culture with a spoon
daily anyway. So yes, welcome to three white guys talking
about racism a racial politics.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
You're white. I had my camera off.

Speaker 5 (01:03:57):
Sadly, I don't like to equate myself to that of
my cultural ethnic background, much like you, a bit of
the Irish and the Celts who were not considered white
for a long time.

Speaker 8 (01:04:10):
PARTI O'Malley table morning tea. You know, it just doesn't
look like any party I've ever seen before.

Speaker 9 (01:04:19):
Man, you never heard no black Irish Irish?

Speaker 8 (01:04:21):
That's right?

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
Who do you think of it? In the mac Rea?
Look it's on huh so Rocky, that's.

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
Ow We're trying to not use that too much anymore
because now we legitimately have a lot of amazing black
Irish people, so it doesn't really dilutes it and confuses it.
But yeah, we consider ourselves as Irish people to be
very liberal, very progressive. We're all about equality and all that.
But we don't claim the Irish Americans.

Speaker 9 (01:04:50):
What.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
No, this has got to get so many downvotes, people
are going to seek seek me out. I'm not going
to find our podcast and are just going to review bombus.

Speaker 5 (01:05:03):
Uh, well, we're all getting duxed. We're all getting duxed.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
I love Trump Piece, I love the Went Home Alone too,
I love The Apprentice.

Speaker 5 (01:05:12):
Yeah, wrapping it up here, the ending and such, is
there anything that we're missing?

Speaker 8 (01:05:18):
I also wonder where that car is going at the
very end we talked about the freeze frame, but the
credits take place over a car and I'm guessing it's
her Resolute and Mike in the car. I think it's
her piece of shit car that's going, and then we're
following that for a while as the end credits are going.
Then we pull out and it carries on its way.

(01:05:42):
I don't know if it is her piece of shit
car though, because it's not her what Axle drives a
crappy blue Chevy Nova, but she's got hers where you
can hear the yeah, just whineing like crazy.

Speaker 5 (01:05:54):
It's a beat up old sixties Mustang.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
Of the fact as well that it's a shabby car,
that it's not gleaming, it does set her apart from Axel,
where she's not flash. She's actually just a working cop.
But it's a dirty pink and I like it. It
gives a character, and it's a great poster as well,
like the artwork for the film is great for reclining
in the car with the gun and the Hollywood sign

(01:06:18):
behind her. It's cool. But I do think they should
have stuck to the ending in the script. That the
ending in the script was just it tied up a
lot of loose ends, and I liked it rather than
that freeze frame, where I guess they just thought, look,
cut your losses, now we don't get out.

Speaker 5 (01:06:33):
They're like it worked for truefo four hundred blows. Get
them that freeze frame, let him think about it, and
then send them off into the night.

Speaker 8 (01:06:43):
I mean, it was such a cop, such a TV trope,
but especially like for Cop shows where you get that
last freeze. Of course, we all remember how they would
parody that in Police Squad the Zaz Show where they
would freeze but the criminal didn't know that they were
supposed to freeze.

Speaker 5 (01:07:01):
Don't they freeze at the end of Beverly Hills Cop
Because if I remember, isn't it like this? Yeah?

Speaker 8 (01:07:07):
Oh yeah, okay, yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
Can't remember what Van Dam is a double impact, is
it or no? It's the Van Dam one where he
gives the thumbs up at the end.

Speaker 8 (01:07:19):
Years ago, I saw a super cut of all the
ends of Chips and every single freeze frame. It would
be like the last joke and then the freeze. Oh
my god, it was wonderful. Sot yes, and then they
would freeze and credits. It's like if somebody did that
for the opening of CSI Miami, that would be great too.

(01:07:41):
And I'm sure they have.

Speaker 1 (01:07:43):
One with David Cruso taking off his glasses constantly detective.

Speaker 8 (01:07:47):
The victim has seamen in her ears. I guess she
got to hear her killer coming.

Speaker 5 (01:07:56):
I don't know. That just reminds me of and I
think you still do this on Facebook where you have
the through the legs posters, just the cliche use of image.

Speaker 8 (01:08:04):
Yeah, we're going to take a break and play a
pair of interviews. First up, you'll hear from the original
author of Fatal Beauty, Bill Speno, and we'll follow that
up with an interview with director Tom Holland. And we'll
be back with both of those right after these brief messages.

Speaker 5 (01:08:23):
I don't know how he does it. I mean, the
guy does books, he writes reviews, he's on the show
every week with me. I'm talking about my Humble podcast partner,
Mike White from the Projection Booth. Hey, it's Rob Saint Mary.
I just wanted to let you know Cinema Detours. Mike's
new book is out. It collects a bunch of reviews
that he's done over the past decade or so for
various places here and there, and you basically want to

(01:08:44):
pick it up. And I'll tell you why, because some
of those older reviews the movies that you have seen,
it's kind of like chatting with an old friend. And
then the movies that you haven't seen yet. Well, Mike
will add about another one hundred to one hundred and
fifty movies that you're going to have to see before
you die, you can give him a wedgie or something.
Next time you see them, thank them for that one.
It's Cinema Detours. You can get it over at our website,

(01:09:04):
projection dashbooth dot com. You can get it at Amazon
dot com, and you can get it in either payper
form if you're old school, or you can get it
for your kindle, your e reader. So there's no reason
to detour. Cinema Detours from Mike White. And of course
you can always learn more about what we do about
the books and everything else at projection dashbooth dot com.

Speaker 8 (01:09:29):
Before we even talk about your career in screenwriting, I'm
so curious. Can you tell me a little bit more
about you and how you got into entertainment overall.

Speaker 7 (01:09:37):
You know, I did a lot of theater when I
was in college, and what got me into this charter
was that my friend and I had a singing group
that had a number one hip record Walk right in
and we toured around the world and I like the performing.
And then we were doing a tour to introduce the

(01:09:57):
Mustang to the world College Tour and this is nineteen
sixty four, obviously, and we traveled by bus for only
out of time we ever traveled by bus. We traveled
by plane or drove by car, and I needed some time.
I hated just sitting in the bus hour on end.

(01:10:17):
So I started writing a play and don't ask me why,
I just did. And I found I liked writing. So
I wrote some plays, had a couple things done off
off Broadway. And then a friend of mine an ancent
in California, I knew who was originally started in the theater.
He says, why don't you write a screenplay? So I

(01:10:37):
checked out what screenplays were and wrote one. Find out
found out I really liked it, and so I went
from there. And then my wife and I went to
California to seek fame and fortune and spent about a
year there, couldn't get anything to happen, went back to
our home in Cape Cod and then my wife got

(01:10:59):
a television series, so he went back to California. And oh, meanwhile,
also I worked. I worked as an assistant on a
movie for American International, and I was just a kind
of general go for a shot in New Mexico. And
at that time I got to know a lot of
people on the film, and so I still didn't know

(01:11:22):
I wanted to break into the screenwriting business, but I
had no idea how to do it. But then one
day I was going to go play tennis at a
public art but there was too long a wait, so
I said, I'm just going to go over and talk
to my friend Norman at AIP and we sat down
and we were talking, and he said, Bill, listen, you
know they were known for low budget pictures, and you know,

(01:11:45):
under people like Roger Corman, they started you know, you know,
the story Scorsese and Nicholson and a lot of other
He said, Bill. You know, he knew I was a writer,
and he said, have you gotten the ideas? And so
out of the top of my head, I said sure,
and I gave him a one liner, which was Hatfields

(01:12:05):
and the McCoy's as a rival stock car racing families,
and he said, I can sell that. So that was
my first job, was out of the blue. They offered
me minimum and I took it and I had a
lot of fun writing it, and looking back, it was not,
I don't think a very good script. There wasn't enough
action and enough wasn't exploitative enough. But the reason it

(01:12:30):
didn't get made, as a matter of fact, when I
had the script and Jim Nicholson, he and Sam Arkoff
owned the company and Lee had a disagreement about whether
to do this picture or not, and Jim Nicholson was
the champion of my script. But I remember meeting in
their office and saying, listen, I've got a good friend

(01:12:51):
who was looking for his first directing job, and I
know he's going to be big in this town, and
you ought to consider him. His name is Steven Spielberg,
and he had one credit, which was a two TV movies,
one called Duel, which was they got great ratings, and
Stephen and my wife Joan and I were good friends,

(01:13:12):
and he said, oh, yeah, no, I'd like to do that.
So I told him the basic story and we went
out to Riverside and watched the races, and I had
a whole bunch of it. Used to Super eight films,
They used to put them in a little little boxes
like this, and so I run along about four of

(01:13:34):
these Super eight boxes and gave them to Steven and
he shot the race and I wish I had those.
I wish I talked with him to say, you know,
I wish I'd saved those. He said, probably they really
would have been bad, he said, because we didn't have
a very good angle on the race. But anyway, needless
to say, because of a dispute with Nicholson, the movie

(01:13:54):
never got made, but it got me publicity, got me
an agent, and then I went on from there and
again I had a script that I'd written about. It's
called Siege originally, and I sold it to CBS with
the help of a good friend who was an agent.

(01:14:16):
An interesting story and it's not a complaining one, because
it all turned out great for me. Was that they
offered me. The studio offered me less than minimum for
the script, and then they finally agreed to it. And
then the producer on the script and there was that

(01:14:38):
go project at this point said well we can't afford
to do. And this was the guy who was very,
very wealthy, one of the heirs of the Max Sycture fortune.
He said, well then, Gus, you know I was being
paid fifteen thousand dollars. He said, unless you take ten
thousand dollars, we can't do the show. I knew it
was much more important to get a credit, and he said,

(01:14:59):
but don't worry, he said, you know, when the profits
the movie come in, you'll get your extra five thousand,
so I knew it was born. I got a credit.
The movie came on the air, not only had great ratings,
but I got specifically mentioned as the writer. And after
that my career took off. You know, I wrote a

(01:15:19):
lot of television movies, and I wrote a bunch of
spec scripts and then without going through the years, because
this was nineteen seventy three, I think, and literally just
after the my movie aired and everybody was looking for
me to be a writer, and I had an agent

(01:15:39):
call me up the right six months writer strike happened,
so couldn't do anything, and I thought, well, you know,
this is a business. It's ups and downs. So you know,
my wife and I had just agreed to buy a
house on Mulholland, so we spent the six months. She
taught her acting class and I worked on renovating the house,

(01:16:03):
and the strike was over. It seemed to just take forever,
and you know, like what happens in a strike, a
lot of my other fellow writer friends couldn't write, so
we would do things like go bowling or talk about
the business. But once the strike was over, I got
all kinds of offers to write TV shows, TV long form,

(01:16:26):
and so you know, I did that for a few
years and had a lot of fun doing it. I
got to be known as a writer because I also
turned down a lot of things because ethical reasons, Like
they wanted me to write the script about Charles Manson
and I read his self aggrandizing biography and realized, there's

(01:16:48):
no way making a movie about this isn't going to
make him important in some way because he's the protagonist.
So I said, no, forget it, I'm not going to
do it. Movie never got made. But anyway, I was
in the screenwriting loop and I was the go to
writer for long form, and I turned a lot of

(01:17:10):
things down, either because I didn't feel I could do
a good job, but it was nice to be in
a position. And it was also nice to be where
I would, you know, sit at my desk writing and
the checks would come in the mail because this is
way before a direct deposit, and I stick them in
the drawer. I didn't even have time to put them
in the bank. You know, it was fun and I

(01:17:32):
really enjoyed the writing. But after a while I realized
that writing for television, either if you were writing a
prestige show, it wasn't really what I wanted to do.
I wanted to write screenplays. So that's kind of the
height of my being offered things. I said to my agents, Listen,
I always want to write scripts and then spec scripts,

(01:17:53):
and they said, okay, we'll support you, which meant a
big cut in commission for them, but they supported me.
I guess. The second or third script I wrote was
optioned by twentieth Century Fox, but again that they signed
me a producer, and it got caught in the mill
that the East Coast wanted to do it, the West

(01:18:15):
Coast didn't, and so it didn't get made. But I'm
you know, it was still a good script. And so
that's pretty much what I kept doing. And then two
years later, Steven Spielberg we were good friends. We hung
out together, and we saw him through the staggering success
of Jaws and also him going into and into fame,

(01:18:39):
and he used to have a we had a boat
in the marina which we spent weekends on and Steven
would come down and we'd hang out, and I remember
him telling us that they wanted him to do the
sequel to Jaws, and he knew instinctively it was the
wrong thing.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
To do.

Speaker 7 (01:18:57):
And then he said to me one day because I'd
showed him a couple of my spec scripts, and he said, Bill,
he said, you said, you're really a classy writer, he said,
but you're not going to get to be known. He said,
you should just figure out what's the most commercial script
you can think of and write it just to get noticed,

(01:19:20):
which was great advice. So I thought and thought about
what's the most commercial thing I can write. I was
a big fan of the Clint Eastwood movies, the Dirty
Harry movies, so I thought, huh, dirty Harriet, and I'll
write I accept on making I'll make her a woman,
a liberal, and I said it in the Houston Police Force.

(01:19:43):
And I went in and tried to sell it to
Fox and a couple of others and they were interested.
You know, I pitched it, so I said, well, okay,
So I wrote the script and then I knew I
needed a better agent for selling a script. So this
is way before the big spec script craze happened. And
I found an Asian named Melinda Jason, who was really

(01:20:06):
just what you want. I mean, she was classic, you know, pushy,
over the top, but I knew she could sell the script.
So she did the classic thing, which has sent the
script out on a Friday and saying, you know, you've
got a chance here. We want to see bids on
Monday morning. And I was back and we were back

(01:20:29):
in our place in Vail, Colorado, which is where I
was mostly living, and I remember sitting there and Melinda
called me up and said, well, Bill, we got some bites.
And the one who came up with the most money,
which was really life changing money at that point, was
twentieth Century Fox, and they said, we'll give you a

(01:20:51):
certain amount of money, you know, several hundred thousand dollars
for an option on the script, but if we buy
it outright, will give you more money. I said, I
wrote this script to sell it, and so I sold
it outright, and that was really thrilling moment because it
bruty did change our life. And I forever thanked Spielberg

(01:21:15):
for saying you ought to do that, Bill. And of course,
then the story because that script, which my title was
Extreme Measures, we eventually became Fatal Beauty after the long
But if we you know, talking about the whole process
of Fatal Beauty, my main thing is is that script

(01:21:38):
accomplished exactly what I did wanted. It raised my profile
enormously and I got offers to, you know, to write
all kinds of movies do rewrites, were lots of money,
but that wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't
want to write Beverly Hills Cop too. And when the

(01:21:58):
business was changing, and when writers like Shane Black and
Steve Desosa came in, I knew they could write this
stuff much better than I could. That wasn't my metier
writing you know, an action action comedy script. And of
course when Lethal Weapon came out and Beverly Hills Cop,

(01:22:21):
you know, action comedy scripts with a lot of real
action but also comedy, especially the kind of ironic approach
of Shane Black's. I said, well, I'm glad I turned
it down because those guys are better than I would be.
It's not my thing, and I'm they're writing I really admire.

(01:22:41):
But it got me to where I got a lot
of rewrite jobs and writing jobs. But the experience of
working on Fatal Beauty, as I said, I don't know
what information you want, but my overwhelming feeling about it,
no matter the fact that script that was made into
Fatal Beauty was nothing like my original script. I remember

(01:23:05):
sitting in the screening room with my wife at Fox,
and they were they expecting this, you know, because it
was supposed to start somebody like Christine Lottie, not somebody
like Whoopi Goldberg, who I would admire a lot as
an actor and as a person, but totally wrong casting.

(01:23:27):
But they said, you know, they shot the movie and
they said, well, by contract, we have to write high
are you to write the sequel? And we know this
is going to be a big movie. So I watched
the movie Fatal Beauty in a screening room at Fox,
and I turned to Joe and said, I don't know.
They think it's going to be a hit. I think
this is a terrible movie. And but I don't pretend

(01:23:49):
to know. There are movies that were hits that I
didn't understand, and movies that bomb that I thought were wonderful.
It's like all of us. So but I said, sure,
I'll write the sequel. And then of course the movie
came out and the movie to John Goldwin was the
producer working for Fox, and she said, well, the movie

(01:24:09):
didn't open, and it didn't, I mean, it had a
terrible opening, and he said, well, you know, we're just
going to pay you off because there's not going to
be any sequel. And I said, Marie, I'm so surprised.

Speaker 9 (01:24:23):
So that was that.

Speaker 7 (01:24:25):
And originally when they hired, they hired the writers they
wanted to. Wanted me to work with some more seasoned
writer writing this genre. I'm doing a rewrite for the movie.
And I said, who did you have in mind? And
they said John Mealyus and I said, no, I don't
like him, but more importantly, I don't like his writing,

(01:24:46):
and I know and working with him would be a
nightmare because I knew a lot of people who'd worked
with him. And they said, well, okay, and you know,
they hired some other writers to do it. But when
I saw the movie, I realized one, you know, a
completely different plot, essentially different characters. And the movie bombed.

(01:25:08):
And I regretted the fact that my name was going
to be all over it. But the fact was it,
really I did accomplish what I wanted. One they had
They paid me a really good sum because before the
movie opened they had to buy contract or great a
price for the for the sequel, and so between the
original price and the sequel and the reruns. I you know,

(01:25:34):
I shared credit with with other people, but of course
I did, because they really wrote the script that shows
up on the screen, you know. I know years later
people would say to me, oh, I really liked that
line in Fatal Beauty and I saw your name was
on it, and I said, no, that goes to the
rewrite rye. That wasn't one of my lines. It was frustrating,

(01:25:56):
but it's also not an unusual tale for a professional screenwriter,
and it reaccomplished exactly what I wanted, so I have
mostly I would have loved if the original script had
been shot. And as matter of fact, a couple of
people hired me, some readly at the same studio that
eventually made it. They said, Bill, and they'd hired me

(01:26:18):
to do a rewrite on a movie or something, and
theson Bill, I read the original script one of the
extreme measures, and he said, why didn't I make it?
That's a great script, And I said, I agree, but
I'm not an executive. I don't know why. But the
fact is, my original script got me a lot of
other work, so to me, it accomplished exactly what I wanted.

(01:26:43):
And even though the work that I was mostly offered.
At that point, writing scripts or rewriting was not stuff
I wanted to do. I know I'd done a good job,
and because the script sold and a lot of people
read the script, and a lot of fellow writers looked
at it and said they couldn't understand they paid you

(01:27:04):
all this money for that, And I said, well, but
I analyzed what the business was. They needed humor, it
needed to be frank and just skirting the edge of
what was possible at the time. But also especially the
women executives loved it because Harriet, I believed, which was

(01:27:26):
her name, was a very strong, independent woman. I didn't
take shit from anybody and was excellent at her job.
But as I said, it's exactly the opposite of Clint
Eastwoods dirty Harry, and I like that character. I you know,
it was just an old fashioned Western kind of thing,

(01:27:47):
you know. So that that was pretty much the story
of it. I don't know how much detail I can
give you, because once I didn't agree with to work
with Melius, they hired They hired actually a couple of
good writers to work on the script, but they wanted
to go a completely different direction, and having subsequently and

(01:28:11):
previously been hired to rewrite other people's scripts. I was
aware sometimes the scripts were really terrible scripts but a
writer had a good idea, But other times they were
the prescribed scripts I was rewriting were really pretty good.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:28:27):
The thing is the if a producer has a heavy
hand in the project and is pushing it forward, he
wants to see his ideas, and so that's just the
nature of professional script writing. But the whole experience is
great for me because they got my name out. And
also I became known as a really good writer and

(01:28:49):
a very fast writer. So if somebody needed a rewrite,
and I wasn't getting the kind of payment that some
of my friends got. A few years later, after the
big Spece script craziness, where the money? I mean, my
friend Tom Shulman got a package for his agency CAA
where he got a million dollars for a script that

(01:29:12):
it was a package for CIA. The movie didn't go anywhere,
wound up being called This was Sean Connery, and I
can't remember who the woman wind up starring in it,
but of course I can't remember the name of it.

Speaker 8 (01:29:26):
I believe that's medicine man.

Speaker 7 (01:29:28):
Anyway, there was the whole vogue, and I'm sure you
know the history the preedy, big money respects scripts. And
also when people like Shane Black and Steve Desoza and
came along, and then there was the whole Diehard craze.
At one point they asked me to write to work
on a Diehard and I said, no, that's I don't

(01:29:52):
want to do that. I did that, and I said, also,
there are guys and women who can do it much
better than I can, because that's not my I was
known for character driven stories and good characters and good dialogue,
and that's not really needed or even though I feel
that Shane Black and Desusa and some others I've done

(01:30:15):
a really good job and write terrific dialogue, and it's
then it's been proven by you know, things they've written
later on. But it was it was a great time
for me. But I also I didn't like having my
scripts just not done the way I wanted them. So

(01:30:36):
I had some lucky breaks. But you know, I had
people who wanted to buy scripts, but I said, but
I said, well, I don't want to hear to turn
this into this, and they said, well, that's pretty much
what we want to do. Just independently based on a
spicscript I'd written that never got done. But Dustin Hoffman
hired me to write a script, and I worked with

(01:30:57):
the Richard Gear on a script, and I ultimately those
movies didn't get made. But also then when you work
with a big star, there's a lot of other things
going on, you know there. And when I got to
know Robert Redford pretty well, you know there, some of
them are incredibly talented, like Dusty Hoffman or Richard Gear.

(01:31:21):
I really like Richard Gear as a terrific person. But
things that happened, you know, he and also he said,
you know, my profile isn't high enough. I just can't
get this movie going on my own. It was before
just before Officer and a Gentleman and between Officer and
Gentleman and Pretty Woman. So once Pretty Woman came out,

(01:31:43):
you know, he was he was back on the a
list that I have absolutely no complaints, And I don't
want to be in a process of gossiping negatively about
anybody who works on a script. Has so many factors
come into play, so many people have different agendas. You know,

(01:32:03):
sure I would have liked it if my script that
turned out to be Fatal Beauty was the original script.
I'm convinced it would have been a very successful movie
and maybe even a franchise. But you never know. I mean,
the movie business is very strange business, and the kind

(01:32:24):
of magic you know. I mean, I know guys like
Alan Ball who come into town with a script and
the you know, Steven Spielberg's ambulance buys it, shoots it
American Beauty almost like he wrote it, and he goes
on to have a terrific career. That's not usually what happens.

(01:32:47):
And you know, I got to know people like he said.
I was at a writing meeting at Columbia and the
secretary says, you know, my copy machine maker just sold
a script for two million dollars. And I said, really,
And I knew what the script was. It was under
siege by one it was you know, it was it

(01:33:08):
was die Hard on the boat, of course, but he'd
come up with a clever And I said, no, you
don't understand. This guy is a screenwriter who's working as
a copy machine repairer. He's been working for years trying
to get things going. But to them, what they saw
was it was like when I went to the secretary

(01:33:29):
to pick up the check for selling Extreme Measures, which
became Fatal Beauty, and the secretary looked at him, says,
you got How long did it take you to write this?
I said three and a half weeks and they said,
you got that many thousand dollars a day. I said, no,
I've been doing this now for fifteen years. You know,

(01:33:49):
that's the nature of this business. And I know a
lot of writers, really good writers, who never catch a break.
It was like when when we had the number one
hit record in the world. People said, Wow, you guys
are lucky, they said, and you already know what to do.
You really understand the business. I said, no, lucky is

(01:34:09):
what we were. We were in the right place at
the right time, with the right song. It's a fairly
simple song. You could dance to it, you could sing it,
and it was an incredibly lucky break. That's why there's
a sign over my wife and I's bedroom door that's
says gratitude, because I feel incredibly fortunate, especially because I

(01:34:31):
wasn't willing to take every job that came along, and
I feel fortunate I had the luxury I didn't because
I vowed when we came to California. I was not
going to get involved in a lifestyle that I had
to work to support. So we never got a huge,
fancy house. We never wound up, although we did go

(01:34:54):
to Chasen's a lot just because we liked it. Well,
we never wound up, you know, spend lots of money
and things. We didn't give huge, large parties. And I'm
so glad because maybe because I had a degree in economics,
I realized that this may go on for a while,
it may not. Both with the with the hit record

(01:35:17):
and both of the screenwriting success and I've both were
incredibly lucky breaks at the right place at the right time,
And I'm forever grateful for that. And that's why I
only have good things to say about the whole experience,
which turned out to be fatal beauty, because you know,
I would grouse to my wife sometimes though I wish

(01:35:37):
they'd made the original movie, and anytime somebody unearthed the
original script, they would say things like, well, why wasn't
this made? And of course, you know, you have to
really be deep into the screenwriting game to understand what
can happen to scripts. And you don't have to talk
to too many writers. Most of them successful ones. It's

(01:35:59):
like still Owne said once that anybody who's trying to
make it in this business is covered with scar tissue,
because when I used to teach, I would say, you know,
if you're not getting a lot of no's in this business,
you're not working hard enough, because it's not with rare exceptions.

Speaker 9 (01:36:17):
I mean.

Speaker 7 (01:36:18):
And you know, the actor Lee Majors was on a
series with my wife Joan, And this was a guy,
a football player in Tennessee, came to town. Now his
second cousin was Rock Hudson, but Rock Hudson didn't have
anything to do with him. He just said, you know,
why don't you come to town. And he got a
job first working for the parts the LA Parks Department,

(01:36:43):
and then he started hanging out with a bunch of
stump men who playing touch football. And then one day
a friend of Rock Hudson said to him, listen, they're
looking for a guy who looks like you to fill
out the cast of a new tub television seria of
Barbara Stanley called Big Valley. So he went up and
read for it. No acting experience at all, never acted

(01:37:07):
in high school, but he was a good looking guy. Engaging,
and he got the part, and he was never out
of work for the next twenty plus years. You know,
had three or four series. You know, you know how
unusual a story that is compared to all these talented actors.
The same thing I think of all the incredibly talented

(01:37:30):
musicians and songwriters who never make it. You know, they
can run rings around me in terms of music, certainly
in terms of guitar playing, but they weren't in the
right place at the right time. So that's why. And
the whole Fatal Beauty experience provided exactly what I wanted

(01:37:51):
to which it gave us my wife and I financial
freedom and to do the things that I want, did
not have to do things I didn't want.

Speaker 8 (01:38:00):
I mean, this might be a little bit unfair since
you were writing Extreme Measures back in almost forty years ago,
but can you tell me a little bit more about
the story itself, and even if you have to tell
it in terms of differences between what we eventually saw,
but I'd love to know what that original script was like.

Speaker 7 (01:38:18):
The original script was as I said it was. The
character was named Harriet Casey, and she was in the
police department. And I knew how these scripts went. So
the opening shot of the original script was, you see, Harriet.

(01:38:39):
There's an attractive policewoman and she's standing with a bunch
of obvious police recruits in a you know, kind of
pretty much standard building and she's lecturing them on how
to deal with the perpetrators. And we don't know who
she is, we just see her. And she says to

(01:39:02):
one of the recruits, you know, the hall, tall, handsome guy.
So first she says, listen, you know, hold the gun
on me and threaten me. And so the guy holds
the gun and she said, act real mean, like you're
going to shoot me. She just talks to him a
little bit, and suddenly she know, she closes the distance

(01:39:25):
and grabs the gun with her finger on the trigger,
him firing it. But he manages to pull a trigger,
but the gun is pointing at the ceiling. When the
cameras up to the ceiling, it shows a whole bunch
of holes in the ceiling. Obviously she's done this many times.
And now, of course it's well known you don't get
too close, but in those days, something that if every

(01:39:49):
policeman knows, but it wasn't something that was in the
film language at the time, and so you know, Harry,
we follow Harriet. She goes from there and somebody calls
her on her pager. This is before cell phones working,
and said, listen, Harriet, we got a situation. And she said, okay,
I'll be right there. So she said. He said somebody

(01:40:12):
is holding people hostage in an elevator. She said, okay,
I'll be there, so she comes. He walks in, that says,
a tall high rise building in a shopping mall. And
she walks into the building, looks around and somebody says, oh,
here comes Derry. Harriet. Get out the body bags. And

(01:40:33):
that's another fellow policeman. And they don't know what to do,
and she says, okay, give me a minute. She walks
into the sundry store and says to the guy, I
want a really large, ugly purse and a real silly
floppy hat. So she puts it on, walks back and says,
so where's the where's the elevator? And they said he's

(01:40:54):
holding people there. So she goes to the elevator, presses
the button, and the elevator down and there's this guy
holding the people with a gun on them, and she
gets in pretending to be this so fluttery, really confused woman.
She says, oh, I'm so sorry, and I'll wait for
another elevator, and the gunman says, no, you get on, lady.

(01:41:17):
So she gets on with her purse and her silly
floppy hat, and the elevator rises up, and it's one
of those things with the glass elevator. It's open and
you can see the whole of the shopping mall, kind
of like the Century City mall. And as the elevator's rising,
the guy gets more and more frightened and more and
more menacing. And we'd seen Harriet put the gun in

(01:41:41):
the purse, her gun in the purse, this horrible floppy purse,
and the guy more and more menacing, and he looks
like he's going to go for somebody. So she shoots
through the purse and blows the guy right out the window,
which wouldn't happen, but and he fallsid to the floor,
and so she turns around, gets rid of the hat

(01:42:02):
and then leaves. You know, later she had met a
guy in the sundry store who really came on to her,
and you know, she really liked the looks of the guy.
Without going through too much detail. She winds up in
a hotel in a hotel room with him a little

(01:42:22):
later in the day, and of course he hasn't seen
the news or anything, and you know, they're about they're
in bed in in the hotel room, about to get
it on when the on the television comes Harriet. They're saying, well,
you know, he really saved the day, and she says

(01:42:42):
they bleep it out. She says, I just trying to
keep the ship ship rising below chin level. And she
just goes, oh my god. And of course the guy
she's about to get into bed with, you know, nothing's
going to happen. So she picks up her clothes and
leaves and the guy I sort of stares open mouth.

(01:43:02):
But that's how they introduce into the character. And the
next day it turns out she's kind of has a
you know, a dirty Harry approach to She doesn't like
to work with inexperienced partners and she likes to go
along alone. But the Houston police chief said, listen, Harry,

(01:43:25):
I we didn't need you to take care of this guy.
He's kind of a special hire, so I want you
to partner with him. And so she says, okay, so
she meets the guy and is a young black guy, nervous,
and so they're walking, you know, to the shape up
and she says, listen, let's get this straight right away.

(01:43:47):
You don't call me gash hunt pussy, he said, And
I won't call you nigger, dinger, darkie. All right, and
he goes all right, But that sets the tone. In
other words, she very frank, I'm not concerned about what
we now call political correctness. But she gets the job done.
And so the story of the movie is about very

(01:44:11):
clever murder that's going on serial because it turns out
it's two twins and what's called a foaliadeu or working together,
and they're inseparable, and so, you know, she and her
partner track it down, and there's a whole lot of

(01:44:31):
things that go on. But what's so the script is
the combination of the action and the humor. They're sent
out of town to check on a lead, and she
goes to this small town in Texas where there's the
typical you know Virgil Timbs Virgil, I forget that, I
mean not a Virgil's the Rod Steiger character and Chable

(01:44:55):
Knight and anyway, you know, Harriet comes in and he
doesn't want to give much and he said, listen, he said,
you know, around these parts of the country, we feel
about women in our police force like we feel like
shit in our apple pie. And Harriet says, well, I
won't ask if you're any recipes and leaves. But the
people who are reading that spec script, they like that

(01:45:18):
kind of language because it was pushing the boundaries of
what you could do. And they like the character because
she has a great sense of humor. But also the
position se'es in is realistic. You know, she has a
lot of admirers, but a lot of envious policemen on
the on the force, but because she gets the job done,

(01:45:40):
and you know, there's a lot of excitement, a lot
of them. There's a big shootout at the end and
very dramatic and where Harriet gets the part and her
partner get the the purpse car. They're in are in
a classic location. They're in a big warehouse and she

(01:46:02):
manages to hook the purpse car on a on a
huge chain and it winds up being hoisted above the
air with the with the purp playing. You know, it
was a very visual I knew what it was. I
didn't pretend that it was some kind of amazing piece

(01:46:22):
of writing. It was meant to be an action comedy
with a female protagonist. And you know, a lot of
the actresses of the day heard about it and wanted
to play it. But once they they put John Mealyus
on his rewriting, and then another writer, and then and
then they started changing the script and they changed it

(01:46:45):
into a very ordinary drug story. And of course then
none of the actresses who wanted to play the original
character wanted to play it, but Whoopy Goldbert was looking
to do something different. And I remember this was before
I saw what they'd done with the script. I remember
seeing on the Tonight Show talking about how much fun

(01:47:05):
she was having playing a cop and you know, using
a big gun. And they had some pretty good They
had Reuben Blades, and they had Sam Elliott. They had
a pretty good supporting cast. I thought the movie was
was nonsense. It still could have been nonsense in to
beg a big hit. You know, nobody knows anything to

(01:47:26):
code Bill Goldman, which is really true. But Tamir, it
was just a miracle that I accomplished what I wanted
to do, and I learned very quickly the movie did
good for me. I didn't want no point in trashing
writers who were hired to work on it, no point in,
you know, when people would see the movie and see

(01:47:46):
my name and say, oh, you know, I enjoyed that
was fun, I would say thank you. I wouldn't say, oh,
you should have seen my script, you know, because that
then they deflates the people who are complimenting you, because actually,
if it's a civilian, a regular person, they're really excited, Oh,
your name's on a movie. And Opie Goldberg was in it.

(01:48:07):
And of course, once the movie came out on TV
and you know, ran, of course nobody remembered that it
was a flop, except, of course, twentieth Century Fox. But
over the years, I'm sure they've made their money back
because it plays an awful lot, and you know, they

(01:48:27):
sold it with a basket of movies, and I still get,
you know, an occasional twenty thirty forty dollars residual. But
I realized it's you know, that was nineteen eighty four
or five. It was made, you know, forty years later.
You know, I just dealt with the fact that it
did what I wanted and that I would never show

(01:48:48):
it to anybody as an example of my work. Oh,
you ought to see this movie. I mean, a lot
of my contemporaries, their scripts were made into really good movies.
It'd be proud to show it. Some of my television
movies turned out pretty good, some not so much. But
I said, I basically feel about my career very fortunate.

(01:49:10):
And there's a lot of very talented writers who never
really wound up getting a break, And especially now and
now when everybody has two businesses, theres and show business
and everybody, you know, there's endless you know. I had
a lot of students I sometimes taught at festivals or
or movies that I taught for seven years the University

(01:49:31):
of North Carolina, teaching screenwriting and playwriting. And you know,
the kids have in most cases delightfully unrealistic views of,
you know, how they're going to make it in Hollywood.
And a couple of times I got some of my
students' intern jobs. But then they found out how much

(01:49:52):
work it is if you start at the bottom. And
they thought they were going to go out there and
they'd have a script and you know, people would fall
all over them, and they said, well, I'm you know,
I'm being a gopher for. And I said, who are
you being a gopher for? And I said, well, I'm
working for Scott Free And I said, these guys are
a major production company. Just look around and get to

(01:50:13):
know people. There's lots of opportunities. They didn't want to
do that. I was really surprised, and I was aware
of it when I was trying to sell anything my
first couple of years, you know, went on endless interviews
to try and sell, you know, show for them originally
and shows like Benicheck or The Original Mission Impossible. And

(01:50:37):
I did write a couple of things for television, but
I really didn't like it because the formula was so rigid,
there was limited what you could do. And the TV movies,
some of them which came out really well, I just
got tired of the restrictions in the in the act
format because in those days, this is way before you

(01:50:58):
could write a series or a movie for you know,
HBO or Apple or any of the others. I would
be fun to written in those times. And also I
dispect scripts that I had that everybody said were absolutely
great never get made. But there are a lot of writers,

(01:51:18):
some of them extraordinarily successful could never get their pet
script made. But again I just had no complaints, And
I don't really have a lot of gossip because I
wasn't around the production of Fatal Beauty, and I just
know from you know, people at Fox who hired me

(01:51:40):
to do other projects were around the project and saw
it going what they thought was in the wrong direction.

Speaker 8 (01:51:48):
But who knows.

Speaker 7 (01:51:48):
I mean, there's you know, if especially you're a student
of the film industry, many movies people thought were going
to be absolute bombs weren't. We're surprise hit, never mind
real oddball things like the Blair Witch Project or things
that just came over the transom, and nobody can figure

(01:52:09):
out why was that his success? And then why do
movies like Porky's or you know, American Pie, why do
they become huge hits and other either outrageous comedies. I
remember I was they wanted to hire me if somebody
had written a script that eventually became something about Mary

(01:52:32):
and they said, you know this is this is not
a good script.

Speaker 3 (01:52:35):
What can you do with it?

Speaker 7 (01:52:36):
So I read it and said there were a lot
of things I came up with, and they didn't like
any of them. They would have made a good movie.
But then I saw the Fairly Brothers movie. I thought,
good thing they didn't harre me because the Fairly Brothers
got that kind of outrageous, ridiculous in maywey Case's childish approach.

(01:53:00):
I never would have thought of that, and never would
have wouldn't have been a giant hit, you know, and
especially some of these site gags. But they were the
right people. And that's the coda line from one of
the Dirty Harry movies. The man's got to know his limitations.
And I knew what my strengths were and what my

(01:53:20):
weaknesses were, because what I never wanted to do was
take a thing just for the money, knowing I couldn't
really do a good job with it. You know, the
things that I took, either rewrites or originals that they bought,
I knew by my standards I could do a good job.
Sometimes they came out well, sometimes they didn't like I

(01:53:44):
was hired to do a major rewrite on a ge
movie Theater, which was a prestigious CBS to our movie,
and the woman who read the original script way missed
the mark and they were right about it. So I
did a you know, major rewrite on it. And interestingly enough,

(01:54:08):
the movie won a Peabody Award. I didn't get any
credit at all. When the arbitration or the thing came through,
I didn't bother putting in. I said, well, you know,
it wasn't my idea. And I don't know how much
I did or I don't know what the criteria was.
But what happened was when the my name didn't show

(01:54:28):
up on the script, and a woman named Judith somebody
or other, you know, she got the credit, she got
all the residuals and and but the New York Times
was really i'd have to say, outraged, because they ferreted
out the real story of what I did with the script.

(01:54:49):
I think they talked to the producer and they wrote
an article which was unheard of, saying Bill Swano, you know,
should have had credit on this. And then when it
won an award, the producers of the movie insisted that
I get on an award also because I'd done they

(01:55:10):
thought i'd done, which I thought was an incredibly decent
thing and really surprised me because but I never you know,
I remember sometimes writers called me up if I worked
on their script or they worked on mine, and they'd
say listen, I need to get mostly close to the
credit for this, because I did an awful lot of work,

(01:55:33):
and I said, it's not my decision to make. If
he wanted, I'll just let it go to arbitration. Sometimes
I lost, sometimes I didn't, but I I didn't know.
You know, there were writers I knew who would handle
the arbitrations, but I did. This wasn't something I wanted
to do, and I didn't want to get knowledgeable enough

(01:55:55):
to do it, so I would just let it go,
and sometimes it went my way, like it certainly went
my way in the ge theater was called Miles to Go,
starting Marty Balsen and interestingly enough, McKenzie Phillips, a John
Phillips's daughter. You know, I knew John Phillips really well
because he and Scott mackenzie, both of them went on

(01:56:17):
for considerable fame, had a folk trio and used to
hang around us in the village trying to figure out
how we played what we played, so I knew him.
And of course when I knew him, John Phillips was
this absolutely straight laced guy wearing a suit and singing
preppy songs. So when I saw him and the mom

(01:56:39):
was in the Poppas, which I thought was great. I
loved their music. I thought they were a fabulous group,
but unfortunately they were you know, at the dysfunctional hell
hole in terms of lifestyle. But it was kind of
you know, like I the way the paths crossing the business.
This is off the topic, but you know, I was

(01:57:01):
in graduate school studying economics, and I used to go
to a little cafe in the place they called Dinky
Town in Minneapolis, which is where a university students hung out.
Then there was this kid wearing a red beanie, singing
and playing songs, and he and I would trade sets,
and he was a surly young kid. He didn't particularly

(01:57:23):
like me. I was doing a lot of American blues
and blassic and he was doing traditional songs but also
some songs he'd written. And of course that guy was
Bobby Zimmerman, soon to be known as Bob Dylan. So
when we both showed up in the village a few
years later trying to be singers, and he was suddenly

(01:57:45):
Bob Dylan, not from Hibbing, Minnesota, but from calub New Mexico.
And you know, having claimed gone to visit Woody Guthrie
and I was pretty contemptuous, and I really didn't like
his first year songs. But then all of a sudden,
he wrote a couple of songs and I went, wait
a minute. I mean, I like this guy, but he's

(01:58:06):
a fucking genius. This guy really is great. So I've
been in a huge appreciation of his music, not of him.
And he tried to pretend he didn't know me when
we first showed up in New York. Right, I was
gonna bust his chops because I knew who he was,
but I never said anything.

Speaker 8 (01:58:25):
You know, I was, and then he was. I mean,
he went on to be you know, well.

Speaker 7 (01:58:32):
I guess when you win the prizes. He's won. You know,
I still don't know that. I disagree over his winning
the Nobel Prize.

Speaker 8 (01:58:43):
So how about you? Are you still teaching, are you retired,
or what are you up to these days?

Speaker 7 (01:58:48):
I'm pretty much retired. I found, you know, I had
a lot of scripts, play scripts and movie scripts, but
I just what I'm interested. I'm just I just don't
have an interest anymore of writing them. I still love movies,
and occasionally I do some teaching on zoom or from consulting,

(01:59:09):
just pro bono for friends. But also I'm aware that
the business has changed incredibly amount and the things that
I like to teach about the fundamentals of storytelling and
the fundamental bricks of constructing a good story are still valid,

(01:59:30):
and they're valid for a lot of other things. I
remember when I was teaching in North Carolina, I had
the students who came to my class, but they wanted
to be lawyers. But they're learning how to organize a story,
which if you're going to be a trial lawyer. And
I thought, well, that's the terrific idea. And you know,
I also taught playwriting and I had some really talented

(01:59:53):
people who I'm really pleased with because a lot of
the teachers who are teaching these talented people wanted to
mold them into what they thought what a good writer
should be. And I would just say, you know, this
is your and they want to do projects that their
other teachers would say, that's wild.

Speaker 3 (02:00:11):
Nobody likes that.

Speaker 7 (02:00:12):
And one of them was Becker Brunsteadter, who went to
New York, had a few small plays down in a
couple published, but then she was part of the writing
staff of This Is Us and has now gone on
to a well deserved really good career as a writer.
I'm very, very talented, but she had her own unique

(02:00:33):
approach to things, and I encouraged her, you know, no,
go with that weird godball approach. You've got the things,
because that's you know, somebody who's not trying to imitate
but is trying to be themselves is really rare. And
her teachers had told her. I encouraged her to write
a play which was very scattered and a lot of

(02:00:54):
different stories, and they said, well, don't write that play,
you know, And it turns out, out of thousands of entries,
it won the college wide play contest and she got
a full production. And you know, she was just she
was just different.

Speaker 1 (02:01:11):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:01:11):
She was a big woman, a lesbian but not out
as one, but everybody knew, and a real oddball tattoos
and but just incredibly smart. People used to say, well,
you know you taught Becker right, and did you help her?
I said no, I just let her go the way
she wanted to go, which is which I think is

(02:01:32):
in a way it's helped. But I wouldn't claim somebody
with that kind of talent. I feel hopefully they'll.

Speaker 3 (02:01:39):
Find their way anyway.

Speaker 7 (02:01:41):
But I really enjoyed the teaching, and I have a
lot of you know, I taught for seven years and
then I did a lot of festivals and teaching and
both my wife and I and my wife is Joan.
Joan Darling is a world renowned teacher. And we still do,
you know, some zoom classes our case occasionally go to
a festival or a place, you know, and I don't

(02:02:05):
do as much because either of us want to travel.
Like we used to go to film festivals and it
was fun. They treat you well and you don't have
to work too hard and you get to see a
lot of interesting movies. But now ever since the pandemic,
traveling is really onerous. That's pretty much my story. Do

(02:02:25):
you have any other questions or did I answer what you.

Speaker 8 (02:02:29):
I think you gave me everything that I was hoping for.
So thank you so much for.

Speaker 7 (02:02:33):
This my pleasure and nice to meet you and talk
with you.

Speaker 8 (02:03:06):
Tell me a little bit more as far as like
where were you in your career when this project crapped up?
And where was the project? Because like you said, share
was cast in it. I know it went through many writers,
Like where was that when you got to it?

Speaker 9 (02:03:19):
I got to it after Dean Reichter had done the
most recent draft and one good thing is out of it.
I became very I became very good friends with Dean Rocher,
who was a wonderful man, a terrific writer.

Speaker 4 (02:03:33):
You know.

Speaker 9 (02:03:34):
I mean he did the polishes on Dirty Harry, you know,
I mean it just was everything and he had just
done it was a very coherent script. But it was
a coherence script for you know, you know, for share,
you know. And it was not funny, that was the thing.
It wasn't funny. Then I started to work with with

(02:03:56):
with woofe of Sam. I think I think I got
three four five days of rehearsals. It wasn't funny. It
wasn't like, you know, it wasn't Eddie Murphy and you know,
and Beverly Hills cop her personality came through, but it
wasn't formed yet. I mean not as the movie personality
wasn't formed yet. That if she played the script, that

(02:04:20):
would have been a rich for so that she so
she made the script come to her, if that makes sense.
If it came in. There were there were moments when
it was then when it was funny, but it also
you know, got it got edgy too, you know, there's
a little bit of race baiting in there. I had

(02:04:40):
a terrific experience with her forty five years forty years ago,
forty years ago on Fatal Beauty. It's just that it's
just the whoopee has become such a public personality. I
don't want to say the wrong thing. But then she
was she was an actress. She was coming off Color
Purple and the and the series two or three Burglar

(02:05:02):
what have two or three comedies that she'd done, you
know what I mean. I thought she was extremely talented.
I think she was miscast in Fatal Beauty. I made
the mistake of being convinced by Laddie Ellen ladd Junior
to use her to replace Believe it or not, Share

(02:05:24):
Fatal Beauty had started out to be of the genre
that they then called guns and garter belts, and it
was meant to have a serious to have share player,
a serious badass, you know, along with being very sexy,
and then you know, and then having some kind of
a relationship with Sam Elliott and Shaer bailed a lot

(02:05:48):
smarter than me. The arguably and Cher went and did moonlighting.
So I started to back out and I had a
house to deal with. MGM. Lottie just really twisted my
arm and kept insisting that she would make it funny

(02:06:08):
Whoopy and you know, and I kept saying, but it's
not a funny script. It's it's a shoot him up
with a female lead and a little bit of sex
throw And then I mean, but there's no there's no
funny lines in here. The conception is not funny. Anyway,

(02:06:29):
Lottie said she'd do it, and I don't know why,
but I agreed. I thought I Whoopy was a terrific talent.
And you know, there there were there were a few
bumps along the way. Once she bailed because she she
went to a prize fight in Vegas during the night
shoot and left me hanging. She wasn't a professional yet

(02:06:51):
in the sense of, you know, being a trained actor.
She was a personality, and she wasn't funny on her
on her own. She wasn't funny in the sense that
she was verbally going to come up with her own
funny lines. You know, I think that if I'd had
other actors with her, maybe I could have tried for

(02:07:13):
some improvisation.

Speaker 3 (02:07:14):
But it was hard.

Speaker 9 (02:07:15):
What she was great at was mimicking people, especially you
know people you knew, politicians and stars. I mean, it was,
it was, it was she could grab a piece of
it and you didn't catch a little bit of them.
So she was terrific with that. But you know, we
never got into politics. I never thought about politics, you know.

(02:07:35):
And then you know, in some ways she's smarter than
all of us because she took you know, she jumped
off She was brilliant a ghost, and she jumped off
of that into into being a public personality and a
talk show and it has become something totally different and
Fatal Beauty because it doesn't fit the political stream of

(02:08:01):
the how do you say the temper of the day.
Back then, they didn't they didn't want to hard a
hardcore black killer cop female. They wanted you know, they
wanted the color purple. But anyway, so it got, it got.
It got bad reviews, and it didn't do well. But

(02:08:22):
it played like crazy when we when we previewed it,
it blew out, it blew out the numbers on all
black audiences, and it did very well with white audiences. Male.
Because who she is, I think in Fatal Beauty doesn't
it was what the atmosphere of the time throughout the country.

(02:08:43):
Political media, major media. They didn't want to see Whoopee
the way she was in Fatal Beauty. They wanted to
see her in a way which I guess promoted a
racial healing. I don't know, so it it sort of
became forgotten Fatal Beauty, and I happened to think it's

(02:09:03):
an extremely well made movie, and I think she did
a terrific job, and Sam did a great job, and
you know, I have only good things to say about people.
Except the schedule was deadly because oh it went for
day to night and there was damn there was damn
little day. So I mean it was you know, It's
just it was, you know, a week after week of

(02:09:24):
long nighters. God damn near killed me. I ended up
walking away from him with walking pneumonia. The film basically
has disappear from my over where I was. I was
very hot off of Fright Night, so you know, and
you know, and I was already established as a writer
in Hollywood, and I went from that into a little

(02:09:48):
film called Child's Play. I was firing on all four cylinders,
but I needed I needed the material there, you know,
and I got it because I wrote Child's Play.

Speaker 8 (02:09:59):
Was this your first time working with Brad Dwarf?

Speaker 9 (02:10:02):
Yes, that's why I hired Brad as Charles Lee Ray
and why I've created a legacy with Brad, who make
more want than all the rest of us doing voiceovers
as Chucky. Yeah right? God who knew? Now Brad's an
Academy Award would he have?

Speaker 3 (02:10:18):
Actor?

Speaker 9 (02:10:19):
And I saw that in uh in Fatal Beauty, And
I had him in my mind when I wrote Charles
Lee Ray, which is who's only in the opening scene, Brad,
But it also informed what I did with the character
of Chucky because I knew I had Brad Brad's voice,
but that l came off of Fatal Beauty. So there's

(02:10:40):
an argument for you. If I hadn't, if I hadn't
done Fatal Beauty, I wouldn't have worked with Brad Durffe,
And I wouldn't. I wouldn't have I wouldn't have used
him in Child's Play. So there you go.

Speaker 8 (02:10:52):
Did I ever tell you the story about going to
Las Vegas and going to Planet Hollywood and staying there
and we got put each room has a theme to it,
and we got put into the Chucky room.

Speaker 5 (02:11:06):
Uh, huh.

Speaker 8 (02:11:06):
Tell me they have a table with a good guy
doll inside of it. They've got the outfit, like the
overalls and stuff in a hanging on the wall like
behind glass. They're huge pictures. There was a huge picture
of Brad Dworf above the tub. And I'll tell you,

(02:11:27):
my wife does not like horror films. She was so
tempted to go down and just complain and get us
mood too.

Speaker 5 (02:11:33):
And I.

Speaker 3 (02:11:36):
That's so funny.

Speaker 9 (02:11:37):
Well, I mean, it's amazing. The Chucky has to be
one of the most successful merchandising campaigns of all time.
And that's a tip of that. The David Kirshner or
was the producer. He made the film because he saw
that potential. And of course I was totally didn't understand
that at all. I was doing a throw I was.

(02:12:00):
I was doing the prototypical killer doll film. I don't
know if I've ever been a killer doll film before,
before Child's Play. I mean I knew. I took it
off the one of the episodes that Dan Curtis did
for Trilogy of Terror, which the TV movie in nineteen
sixty eight.

Speaker 8 (02:12:19):
Yeah, the Zuni fetished all that little bit that knife.

Speaker 9 (02:12:22):
Yeah, but it was the way he shot it. He
shot that on a skateboard, put a sixty milk camera
on it to shoot the dolls point of view, and
that's what made it work. And I had seen a
lot of things came together. I had seen The Shining
and Kubrick's use of setikam in that, and they invented

(02:12:43):
what they call a low boy off the steady cam
which got you down on the floor. And I'll think
that I hadn't seen it before until until Shining, which
I got nineteen seventy nine. But so I wrote that
script and designed all of that with the doll because
of what I'd seen with Dan Curtis and the Prey
and the zuomidaland then what I saw on the Shining,

(02:13:06):
And if I got it worked visually, it worked, you know.
I mean that Dolphon turned into something terrifying. That's what
I was doing. David Kirschner was looking for ways to
merchandise everything Chuck ate, and you know, I mean in
the combination of a movie the scared living hell out
of you with a merchandising campaign that reached into every

(02:13:29):
imaginable place you know, age And I mean, so Chuck
is going to bury us all. Chuck is gonna be
going long after we're both gone. You know. It's just
so just amazing. And no I did not see it.
I did beyond what I did, beyond the first movie
to stand alone, you know.

Speaker 8 (02:13:51):
Going back to the fatal beauty in the cast, I mean,
the cast is just amazing to have, like you know,
John p. Ryan or Harris Eulen or Jennifer Warren. I mean,
these are all just people that knock it out of
the park every single time.

Speaker 9 (02:14:05):
Terrific cast. I think it's an excellent movie in Dean
Reisner thought it was thought it was terrific, you know,
and you know, and he surely did all the touch up.
And the gal I don't know, the gal who rode
over the original draft that it didn't Hillary Henkin, I think, yes,
oh yeah, I don't know. But Dean I got to know.

Speaker 8 (02:14:26):
Yeah, I've read one of her and Dean Reisner's drafts,
and then one that Millius was taking a swag at
as well.

Speaker 9 (02:14:34):
Well. Millius was on it before I was, and I
took over his office there it was MGM then now
Sony and in his office police piece supply wood screwed
to the to the back of the door, and it
was marked up with all these with all these knife marks.

(02:14:54):
And what he'd done is he said it is that
I was told. He said it his death and take
it a knife, throw her right head of the door.
Ain't bety been able to get it? So this so
it's sinking in the back of the door to the
plywood thinging for the put up. So I don't think
he was thinking about a romantic comedy when he was
doing Fatal Beauty, but he was on it before I was. Yeah,

(02:15:17):
And then they toned it down. They toned it down
for me, but then they took Whoopy and put her
into that, and I don't I don't think I was
as sophisticated then as I like to think I am now.
Maybe if it had Norman Tanamar or comedy director. But
I don't see how it. I never saw any way
to turn that. There was there was no funny bone

(02:15:40):
at its core was with Fatal Beauty. And so what
you have is yet you should you should have a
bit of Millius's vision, and you know, and the polishing
by Dean rised her and then the personality the Whoopy
paid put into it. But she played it, you know
she did, and I thought she sold the violence pretty well.

(02:16:00):
And I hope more people discover the film. But of
all my films, it's it's it's probably the along with
the TEMP, is the least mentioned. So there you go.
The ending got screwed up. I don't want to get
into it. But that was Bob who was that? That
was Stanley Jaffey. They'd had he'd had success changing the

(02:16:22):
ending on Fatal Attraction, was it? And then so we
went crazy changing changed the end, not not the films,
but the ending, and then changed the ending on John
millis Is World War two film Navy, I think. And
then then that I got I got hit on the TEMP.
And then he also went after Sliver, so he got

(02:16:44):
four or five films in a row. The endings got
mauled by by Stanley Jeffy. I don't know if anything
were successful beyond Fatal Attraction, but I don't know in
terms of changing the ending adding that much more. But
what he did is he softened it in uh in
the TEMP. Well, thank you so much, this is great
talking with you, we too, thank you very much.

Speaker 8 (02:17:17):
All Right, we are back and we were talking about
Fatal Beauty and it is next week, which will play
the preview in a little bit. Next week is going
to be interesting because we've talked about these films three
in a row with Jump and Jack, Flash, Burglar and
Fatal Beauty, and these for me have always been and
you were talking to earlier, Kevin Hike mash all of

(02:17:39):
these things up in your head. There's a real flow
to these films. But after this we get the Telephone,
which is I want to say, based on a play,
and it feels completely different. This is the last time
we really get Whoop as a action hero for I
think forever. You could make an argument that her character

(02:18:01):
from Sister Act is a little bit of an action hero.
There's a little bit of crossover with some of the
stuff as far as her with her early character and
then her nun character.

Speaker 3 (02:18:12):
But this is it.

Speaker 8 (02:18:13):
This was quite a little run for her with these
three films, and I wish that she had stuck with
being an action hero. I think she does a great
job of it.

Speaker 1 (02:18:23):
Although she runs very funny. Whenever I see a running
she waggles.

Speaker 8 (02:18:28):
I never noticed that before. Who runs funnier? Her Tom Cruise, Oh,
Tom Cruise is a boss.

Speaker 1 (02:18:34):
He runs like a cheetah. Keep running, Tom Cruise. I
just watched him yesterday in a few Good Men because
we're doing courtroom dramas. I like stunned that he went
through the eighties, which was an incredible run for him,
winning an Oscar. He is a fucking phenomenal actor, like
way better than his persona would have you believe, or

(02:18:56):
his recent a decade a plus of outpush. But yeah,
he was a great actor in the eighties, like back
to back, like such charismatic, brilliant performances. But WHOOPI ones like,
it's funny.

Speaker 5 (02:19:09):
When you talk about what Obviously there's this stand up era,
there's her TV work, the Star Trek stuff that she
did that endeared her to so many, and then you've
got things like the Color Purple and Ghosts, which are
her high the high level Academy stuff, the Sister Act movies,

(02:19:33):
people like those are good crowd pleasers. So she has
this range. That's the thing. I really like, I have
a lot more respect. When I sat down I thought
about it, I was like, here's someone who's been around.
I don't know how much it crossed over into Ireland
and the UK with her, but beyond the film piece,
but just been in the culture for like over forty
years when you think about it, and there always just

(02:19:57):
seem to be something on with her. And then still
she's got the view like the talk show panel stuff.
So I've got a lot of respect for her and
her opinions on things, and her willingness to be out
there and to take chances too. I think that's a
great thing.

Speaker 1 (02:20:16):
I also want to just sing the prices of her
book again, because I was very surprised at how touching
it was. She's a great storyteller as well. She has
this book that's about her mother and her brother when
she both lost them and how much it destabilized her
and that the people that knew her most intimately and
could confirm all of her recollections were gone, and her

(02:20:36):
trying to basically navigate life without them. And she talks
about growing up in the projects with a single mother,
and it's a really fantastic book. It's so touching. But
she's just a great storyteller as well. Do you forget
that she wrote all of her plays and her one
woman shows and stuff, So she's a great writer as well.

Speaker 8 (02:20:57):
I wish that she had an even better run. She's
great in some of the things that she did after this,
like Clara's hard or there's a couple of weird missteps
with Homer and Eddie. I know people love soap dish.
I actually want to go back and rewatch that.

Speaker 1 (02:21:16):
I loved Made in America. I thought that was funny.

Speaker 8 (02:21:19):
I have not seen that yet.

Speaker 1 (02:21:21):
I was a kid in that. I remember Jennifer Tilly
as well, and where she was a hyperactive like bimbo
and she can't whel naked across the bedroom in front
of Ted Danson where he couldn't keep up with her.

Speaker 8 (02:21:33):
That's a selling point right there.

Speaker 1 (02:21:35):
Okay, it's a funny film, and will Smith that as well.
It was good crack. But yet to your point, Rob,
she wasn't as well known for all of her ancillary stuff.
It was the movies, and only some of the movies,
like these last three didn't really cross over. They weren't
theatrically released over here. So there were like films that

(02:21:55):
you might catch if they were on TV or in
the video shop, but they didn't have any big public
the push behind them. There was nobody marketing them. They
just appeared one day and you eat a sort of
but you didn't.

Speaker 5 (02:22:06):
The only thing I can really think of when it
comes to this, and we brought it up already, is
that it does live within this continuum, and someone would
I'm sure there's a book some film researchers looked at
it of cup procedurals and certain cliche elements or blending
of elements that they just kept recycling these from the
early seventies through. You still have them today to a

(02:22:29):
certain extent. It seems like they've moved more onto TV
though as you get into the nineties. But there just
seemed to be a whole maybe like twenty years where
these kind of films you get several of them a year,
kind of standard fair. You know, usually every action star
had at least one of them. There was, you know,

(02:22:49):
like we talked about with her Eddie Murphy, it was
like it was a way to try and get comedians
up to the next echelon or something. I just find
them an interesting document of an era, you know, really
beyond they're just pure entertainment value, but meaning what do
they represent in terms of the time. And one of

(02:23:11):
the things that I wrote in my notes for this
movie was shoot Out at the Mall totally Eighties.

Speaker 8 (02:23:17):
Yeah, immediately I was thinking of Commando or gosh, even
Police Story three. There's so much broken glass in this,
or not Police Story three, Police Story the original, there's
so much broken glass in this film. I was like, Wow,
this is They're really going for it. They really are
going to blow the shit out of this mall. And yeah,

(02:23:37):
that is such an eighties thing.

Speaker 1 (02:23:39):
Blues borders with the cop cat chase, true to mail,
it was.

Speaker 5 (02:23:43):
The era of the malls, at least in America.

Speaker 8 (02:23:47):
Whenever I hear Rossoli, of course, I think of Rossoli
and Iles, the TV show that was from the twenty
tens where Andrew Harmon was Jane Rossoli. I was hoping
it might have been a sequel where Rita comes back,
but no, she's Jane Rizzoli. And then there's Sasha Alexander
is Mora Isles. And that's the the id and the

(02:24:08):
super ego type of thing, which I guess plays also
into the whole thing of the Kroll versus the Brad
Duraff character, where it's like Kroll is so super cool
and super calm and just very matter of fact with
Whoopee as Resoli, and then Dorf is just completely whacked
out through the whole thing that Milius draft. Again going

(02:24:31):
back to that, the three guys in that one they
wear what was it like, a Hitler mask, a wolf mask,
and a porky pig mask. Through the opening heist that happens,
and it's fucking crazy, blood, blood, wolf and step.

Speaker 1 (02:24:49):
It begins with her beating up a couple of nuns.

Speaker 8 (02:24:52):
Because she noticed their shoes and they're like, She's like, oh,
those are way too good a shoes for nuns to
be wearing.

Speaker 1 (02:24:59):
They're wearing Adie, which apparently were the shoes of drug dealers.
I could not imagine Share in this film though, even
though she's a great actress and I was imagining her
in the Ear of Suspect and things like that, but
it just it wouldn't work for me. It wouldn't have
the same bounce to.

Speaker 8 (02:25:15):
It Share was doing. Okay, I think she took Moonstruck instead,
So good for her. Yeah, I don't know if you
guys speaking of would be Goldberg vehicles, but the one
that she made in ninety five called Boys in the Side,
Did you guys ever see that?

Speaker 1 (02:25:31):
I have seen it. I thought that was cute. She
sings in that.

Speaker 8 (02:25:34):
Yeah, I really like that. I thought it was a
great movie. I haven't seen it since it's probably ninety six,
but I remember really liking that.

Speaker 1 (02:25:42):
And it's rare for a road trip movie that isn't
film and Louise. That's more of a chase movie, but
a road trip movie that has three female leads. It's
riding the line between something like Beaches and something like
the majority of other Yeah, but it's that kind of
thing where one of the characters ends up dying. And
but yes, sweet story. We watched a load of world
movies recently and that was one of the rare outliers

(02:26:04):
because I had women in it.

Speaker 8 (02:26:06):
I almost for this series. I almost said that we
should do the Associate from ninety six.

Speaker 3 (02:26:13):
How do you succeed in business?

Speaker 8 (02:26:15):
Try showing some cleavage.

Speaker 5 (02:26:17):
Joined the Boys Club?

Speaker 11 (02:26:18):
Men like doing business with men.

Speaker 5 (02:26:20):
By becoming a man.

Speaker 8 (02:26:21):
I need a new look, Old White and Man.

Speaker 5 (02:26:24):
On October nineteen, my name is Robert County, don't miss
a sleek.

Speaker 9 (02:26:28):
Review of The Boy.

Speaker 4 (02:26:29):
Critics are calling an outrageously funny comedy man as Whoopy
Goldberg makes a killing.

Speaker 1 (02:26:35):
In the market.

Speaker 3 (02:26:36):
I can't afford to have a term The Associated.

Speaker 5 (02:26:39):
Britty PG thir D special sneak review this Saturday.

Speaker 8 (02:26:43):
I really like that movie. I especially like the Diane
Waste character in there. But Whoopee is really good in
that and we keep talking about how she put on
these characters to go in drag and turn white in
that movie. Normall, Oh, it's a great one. But for
the reason why I didn't choose it was because it's

(02:27:06):
a remake. And it's actually like the fifth remake or
fifth adaptation of a story from I want to say,
like the nineteen thirties, written by I want to say,
an Italian author, and they made so many different versions.
It's basically somebody anybody who sets up a fake person.

(02:27:29):
It's very Captain Tuttle, right. It's like I set up
this fake person and they're the one who's really in charge,
and I'm just following orders. And but I'm the smart person,
and I'm just giving the fake person all the good ideas,
and the good ideas come from them, and they're somebody
of much higher status, or in Whoopee's case, it's an
old white guy. So she's, oh, mister so and so

(02:27:51):
is an available right now. But she's giving all of
this stuff and basically creating an empire with this fake person.
And of course at the end it's we have to
see this person that this is necessary that we do this.
And she's great. But like I said, Day and West,
throughout that movie you find out, oh, she's actually the
power behind the throne at this other company and she

(02:28:13):
comes over with and works with Whoope, and you're just like, oh,
she's These two women could take on the entire fucking world.

Speaker 3 (02:28:20):
And I really like that.

Speaker 5 (02:28:22):
I'm actually amazed that you didn't do this because, as
Kevin said, he loves Donald Trump, and I guess he's
in it.

Speaker 3 (02:28:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:28:29):
Oh, I mean, I just love his character. I just
think he's he speaks to me such a decent person
and he has such great ideas. I really think him
and Musk are going to save the world.

Speaker 9 (02:28:40):
Really, be careful.

Speaker 8 (02:28:41):
People are gonna think you're.

Speaker 5 (02:28:43):
You're gonna go.

Speaker 1 (02:28:44):
Slash my wrists. But what do you say that, Mike?
I was thinking of American fiction where Jeffrey Wright creates
this fictional lower class ghetto author in order to appeal
appeal to like these medical lost white readers.

Speaker 3 (02:29:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:29:01):
I have yet to find an English translation of that
original book, but I really want to and that I
have found a couple versions of this movie, the different
adaptations of it. But there was a seventies one I
want to say that.

Speaker 1 (02:29:17):
Was just a bit like A Star Is Born.

Speaker 8 (02:29:19):
Yeah, exactly, And I want to say that it was
your friend Rob. Jean Claud Carrier was one of the
authors of that seventies one.

Speaker 5 (02:29:27):
I pulled it up and it says here it was
Renee Gainville The Associate seventy nine French film. Yeah, Jean
Claud Carrier did the adaptation on that.

Speaker 8 (02:29:38):
But yeah, if you look at the author it goes
back even further, which is crazy. It's the Gennaro Prieto
book that goes back to the early part of the centuries. Yeah, twenties. Okay,
I thought it was thirties, but apparently I spoke with
somebody recently. Oh, I spoke with Nick Thiel, who wrote

(02:29:59):
the screenplay for the at the adaptation for the American stuff,
And apparently Donald Petrie, the director of the Associate, really
did not get along with Whoopee at all. So I'm like,
I probably won't be able to talk with him. But
THEO was very open and you'll hear that interview when
we talk about v I Warshowski much later in the

(02:30:21):
year in November. Is that noir is neo noir. We're
doing a lot of neo noirs this year.

Speaker 5 (02:30:28):
We don't make distinctions metals metal. You want to get
into black metal or doom or sludge or speed metal.
It's all metal.

Speaker 8 (02:30:36):
So it's not Cookie Monster singing. I really can't stand
that cookie monster voice. All right, We're going to take
another break and play a preview for next week's show
right after these brief messages.

Speaker 4 (02:30:54):
Coming from New Line Home Video Academy Award winner Whoopi
Goldberg stars home video exclusive for the entire family. I'm
back Theodore Rex from the People that Brought You Monkey
Trouble and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Movies. Whoopee is
Katie Coltrane, a futuristic, wise cracking cop who's a heartbeat

(02:31:15):
away from losing her job until she's forced to team
up with a new wave in law enforcement.

Speaker 5 (02:31:20):
It's a dinosaur, you too solve this case again.

Speaker 7 (02:31:23):
It's a dinosaur new partner, Coltrane.

Speaker 5 (02:31:25):
To solve a crazy crime, you gotta make them look
like a real cop.

Speaker 4 (02:31:32):
And together they're hitting the streets to have a good time,
You Cannot eat our only suspect, and save the world
from a colossal crime caper. My Powers from the creative
team of Honey, I Shrunk, The Kids Who Framed Roger Rabbit,
and Televisions Hit Showed Dinosaurs, he.

Speaker 6 (02:31:51):
Booking, Your Mind shut Down, and your glands have taken over.

Speaker 4 (02:31:55):
Whoopy's films deliver big time. These films alone have sold
over six million in video units.

Speaker 6 (02:32:01):
Oh Hey, God, is hey y'all doing?

Speaker 5 (02:32:04):
And you think You're gonna get somebody?

Speaker 4 (02:32:08):
Nando Marketing support includes a three sided standee with Rumble
in the Bronx and Bed of Roses, and a Dino
sized four pack with a Rumble in the Bronx sweatshirt
and twenty Theodore Rex key chains. The Theodore Rex trailer
will be seen on the Bed of Roses and Rumble
in the Bronx releases, generating over fifty million consumer impressions. Ah,

(02:32:30):
It's a thirty five million dollar star studded tail. You'll
never forgetting at the table.

Speaker 11 (02:32:37):
Just clacked the day out leaf with woo Can you
just slide your button?

Speaker 5 (02:32:42):
In?

Speaker 4 (02:32:42):
Nineteen ninety six is best family comedy.

Speaker 9 (02:32:47):
Theodore Rex love when he does that.

Speaker 8 (02:32:50):
That is right. We are wrapping up Wooperary next week
with a look at Theodore Rex. Until then, I want
to thank my co host Robin Kevin. So, Rob, what's
been going on with you, sir.

Speaker 5 (02:33:00):
I'm just enjoying my time up in the high desert
and getting out into nature doing some hikes. Hope to
do some traveling in the coming months. And I'm probably
within i don't know, a couple of thousand words, a
couple of more pages on first draft of a novel
I've been working on for the last couple of months.
So I'm pretty happy about that. So not much beyond that.

Speaker 8 (02:33:23):
Oh, not much. Just writing a book, that's all.

Speaker 5 (02:33:26):
Yeah, with no plans to ever release it. I'm just
writing for the sake of writing. I have no contract.
I'm just doing it for myself.

Speaker 8 (02:33:33):
Kevin, When you're not writing your pro Trump blog, what
else are you up to?

Speaker 1 (02:33:37):
Well, I'm in the middle of a script right now
and I'm stuck overout fifty pages into it. So I'm
looking forward to watching Theodore Rex. No, I'm still I'm
over with my co host Will on the Best Bits
podcast where we just talk about different topics each episode,
and we have the Crack and so you're welcome to
come and check us out over there. It's a very
different kind of podcast where we're much more about having

(02:33:59):
the crack and poking fun at the business that we
unfortunately working.

Speaker 8 (02:34:05):
So you're smoking crack over there, is that what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (02:34:08):
Yeah, we can't get our hands off Fentinel at the
moment because there's a shortage. Yeah, Crack is freely available
and thanks.

Speaker 8 (02:34:16):
Again guys for being on the show. Thanks everybody for listening.
If you want to hear more of me shooting off
my mouth, check out some of the other shows that
I work on. They are all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com.
Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to
join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth.
Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over
the world.

Speaker 9 (02:34:50):
You can't.

Speaker 5 (02:35:00):
I think he's sprainingen say spinning. You doesn't lay it one.

Speaker 6 (02:35:11):
Time you never got a seven for us a.

Speaker 1 (02:35:17):
Time where.

Speaker 5 (02:35:21):
You brought up in the world.

Speaker 8 (02:35:24):
But when the loose us up the sun.

Speaker 5 (02:35:29):
Spinning in the world, seen.

Speaker 6 (02:35:31):
Don'ts you know you can't stand the fall.

Speaker 1 (02:35:36):
I think he's spending move.

Speaker 6 (02:35:39):
Don't spread enough.

Speaker 11 (02:35:43):
So you wort twice to me, tell me fyce because
they got me a dance.

Speaker 6 (02:35:48):
The wall, the aim, no got no to fat baby.

(02:36:23):
It's my there to gun, next job at the time,
you say, and my mom.

Speaker 5 (02:36:29):
But maybe.

Speaker 6 (02:36:32):
I think explaining, yeah, say, displaying no smock give a sun.

Speaker 1 (02:36:43):
Maybe some friends shine, so.

Speaker 6 (02:36:54):
Snif say.

Speaker 11 (02:37:06):
Student snipe bon, students sign.

Speaker 6 (02:37:27):
And snipe sh

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Episode 731: Fatal Beauty (1987)

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