Year 19, Episode 22

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
And now Your Chill Pack Hollywood Hour with Dean Hagland
and Phil Lareness.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome to year nineteen, episode twenty two of Your Chillpack
Hollywood Hour for the first Monday of October twenty twenty five.
Coming at you once again from the Los Angeles neighborhood
of Los Phelis after a week driving all over and
around and in and out the SF Bay Area. I

(00:28):
am Phil Lareness and joining us via the magic of
podcasting and zoom all the way from the environs of Detroit.
It's the MotorCity adjacent madman, a master of the digital
How do you do TV's Dean Hagland, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
More and more, it's becoming digital. How do you don't
you know when I go around going I miss Skype.
That's got to be a sad day for an old man.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yes, So for people who uh maybe didn't hear, this
was a phrase Dean used to describe I think the
art of post production or just production in a modern
age when so much is digital and are the digital
how do you dose? And it's a phrase that we'll
get called back ad nauseum later in the show.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
And it makes me giggle every time when.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
We play some clips we recorded earlier last week and
maybe even prior to that. Dean, I want to start
with a question we discussed in depth, the Stephen Colbert cancelation.
When that happened, we blissfully stayed out of the Jimmy

(01:43):
Kimmel situation, let it blow over, kept our heads down.
And indeed, not only does it blow over, he's back
and more popular than ever. And the question I actually
wanted to pose is is late nights suddenly relevant to kids?

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Well, that's a great question, because as all other channels
of information get muted or realigned, shall we say that
your one hold fest is the court jester. As was
in the time of of old, every castle, every kingdom

(02:23):
had a court yester that would mock the king to
keep him online and not just be surrounded by yes men.
And that mocking was supposed to be a teaching element,
an ability for the king to understand what is going
on with the common man in his kingdom, his tenants,
and all those lords and ladies. And so I would

(02:46):
think that this is a continuation of that. But is
it relevant? This is the problem I single handedly made
CBS lose so much money by watching all of my
Stephen Colbert on YouTube. Now YouTube can't shell out fifteen
million dollars.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
There's carriage fees. Yeah, they there was a big announcement
just recently about NBC Universal and their new carriage deal
with YouTube. So yeah, there's a financial partnership there. You
didn't lose money. In fact, they they probably made money
because you watched it on YouTube versus watching it on CBS,

(03:26):
because you're not a Nielsen household.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Oh well there's that. But then still they've got to
sell advertising. They still, you know, thirty second spots.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
But they calculate the audience, right don't they through Nielsen's
They don't calculate through they're not measuring the actual boxes.
I don't think right, it's all still Nielsen versus Is
Nielsen still a thing?

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Is there Nielsen boxes and houses on TVs? I can't think.
So it's got to be all digitally.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
We're it's got to be a digital How do you
do we we we need to research that, that is
a question, right, we we don't know how I'm writing.
I'm typing this in the notes for Next Time.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Our time I knew anybody who had a Nielsen box
was when the Lone Gunman first was gonna air, and
I told him to go watch watch our show to
get our ratings above a six point seven.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
And I didn't do it, So you was you. I
just stolen silence uh Nielsen Box with every intention of watching.
So any way, but what I what I was wanted
to follow up on with what you said about the

(04:47):
the the gesture, you know, clowning the king. Suddenly the King.
I think we'd gotten so used to that though, and
there'd been such a proliferation of shows, such a decrease
in audience size for any one of them, but suddenly

(05:08):
the King pushes back hard and doesn't like it, and
all and all of a sudden, audiences go, well, I
would like to watch this now, And so all of
their ratings are upright, so across the board, and look
even Jimmy Fallon. There was an article just a couple

(05:32):
days ago, you know, I mean, there was a lot
of discussion about what a Cowardy is because he said
in an interview that he wants to stay away from
the politics. He wants to play it. He wants to
do the jay Leno right down the middle, except on
like jay Leno, play it right down the middle, because
let's not get ourselves. Jay Leno was merciless over certain
figures in the media whose lives he destroyed. That did reflect,

(05:57):
as it turned out, where his politics were. Anyway, the
point is it was an article that interview that Jimmy
Fallon gave, and he talked about his philosophy. He can
have whatever philosophy he wants. Honestly, I don't care. But
I became aware of it because of the commentary surrounding it,
and it made me wonder, when was the last time

(06:19):
I read anything about Jimmy Fallon?

Speaker 3 (06:21):
Well, there's that, right, I mean, as far as I know, Yeah,
I didn't even know he was still on the air. Frankly,
I had a friend who was a writer on that
show for a couple of years and said it was
a miserable existence and that he just wanted to sing
karaoke with his showbiz friends and not even discuss a

(06:42):
point of view or joke material or you know whatever.
He just wanted to see. He just watched the others
late night talk shows that goes, why can't we do that?
And then it was like, because they're doing it, so
it was up to them to come up with some
original you know motor.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
The point that I'm just making if it even matters,
but it does seem like we were ready to barry
as an institution late night shows right in the wake
of Colbert getting canceled, and indeed we might still soon,
but we do have a pulse and a heartbeat in

(07:26):
this genre right now, and it's going to be very
interesting to see what happens as we lead up to
that cancelation and whether that cancelation, I mean, heart of
me still believes they're going to have to try to
throw a bunch of money to keep that group together
in some form as the date approaches.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, streaming somebody, somebody will have the pockets to pay.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
For or I'm saying ab I mean CBS doesn't have
the pockets. I mean they're owned by Paramount and the
CBS which was just bought by David Ellison and his daddy,
Larry Ellison, who just shelled out billions of dollars to
co own TikTok with Rupert Murdoch and are trying hard
to buy Warner Brothers Discovery so they have the money.

(08:14):
Wasn't Ellison just named like the second richest man or
briefly the richest man in the world, so they have
all the money they need to keep, which is why
the amount of it's losing every year. Is it losing it?
Is it not? Does it even matter? Like seem so strange,
But the point that I'm saying is it'll be interesting

(08:36):
to see whether they make some sort of at least public,
even if it's not worth the paper it's written on
because they know it's too late and it can't be accepted.
But make some public offer or you know, some offer public,
some offer public, Yeah, to keep the team together, albeit

(08:59):
in a slightly different forms, so that they can maintain
This is about cutting down costs, right, So maybe it's
not in front of a huge audience at this theater.
It'll be very interesting to see if something happens, and
it'll to me it'll be a sign of just how
relevant or irrelevant it's believed that this franchise has become.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Right, because if it is relevant, you would want to
well yeah, but well I guess you'd pay for that
for relevancy. But if it's irrelevant, then no one cares
and the ratings just fall off the cliff.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
You know. The one element that continues to be valuable
in what we call television, albeit quite frequently. It's on
streamers now, but across the board is the live.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
Event, right, the sports game, the boxing.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Match, Saturday Night Live, Saturday Night Live. Why still Saturday
Night Live fifty one years later. But we're saying late
night talk shows are dead. Well, part of it can
be the proliferation of talk shows and how many interview
kind of shows there are, but we've had that in
the past. I would say that it would be really

(10:24):
intriguing if someone went to a true live show again, Oh,
mud have recorded at five o'clock in the afternoon. What
if you did a real late night show.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
That was live, because Steven's done live once before, particularly after.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Some big, big numbers.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah, and that always went flawlessly. So I'm not sure
why the delayed taping unless they worry they started.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Well, yeah, I'm sure logistically it's a nightmare because it's
not done that way, right, but the very fact it's
not done that way on Netflix. John Mullaney's Everybody's in
La that was live, that was live in primetime, but
it drew an audience, So I don't know. I think

(11:18):
that the appeal of that might be something someone wants somewhere.
Let's go look at Okay, I did reveal something that
I wanted to speak about, and I didn't know how
well linked they were. But yeah, this Paramount merger with Skydance,
which leads to now the same people owning Paramount and

(11:41):
CBS and TikTok and trying to get Warner Brothers Discovery.
What a b a myth that will be? Yea and
how dangerous will that be?

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Well, that's the thing. If Paramount and Warner Brothers merge,
are they a single studio or do they keep both
brands alive?

Speaker 2 (12:03):
I'm sure they would keep both brands. I mean the
question for Warner Brothers Discoveries Chief executive Officer David Zasloff
and his board will be whether to accept Paramount's bid
or to wait and move forward with their own planned
splitting of the company into two, which we discussed, a

(12:24):
linear cable network's driven entity called Discovery Global and a
studio and streaming service to be called Warner Brothers. And
it's very intriguing and so odd to be discussing this
at a time when, like Warner Brothers Man the year
they're having theatrically right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Did they nail some scripts.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Every movie that's moved the needle has been Warner Brothers.
They've had so many films that they've opened at number one,
and original content in many cases that they've opened in
number one. I mean they are positioning themselves to really
to reboot the fortunes of their entire operation, it seems,

(13:08):
and doing it in a way that we've long advocated,
which is, can't you start with the theatrical and let
the streaming be downstream? Right?

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yes, that's the whole point. Downstream, get the theatrical, get
the conversation, that's the word of mouth going, so that
by the time it comes to streaming, people would have said, oh, yeah,
I wanted to see that.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
But if any fear that I had over Larry Ellison
becoming a latter day Rupert Murdoch, and already the comparisons
were a little bit too close for comfort. I felt
like with not only buddying up literally palan around with

(13:54):
the President in order to get your merger approved, but then,
you know, canceling one of his biggest critics, but then
but then throwing a huge amount of money at South Park.
It all evoked again memories of wait, how is the
same guy giving us Fox News but also giving us

(14:14):
The Simpsons, right, you know, like the cognitive dissonance, right
that so often is the byproduct of what we call
commerce in the modern age. It was astounding how similar
this felt to me. And then you find out, wait,

(14:35):
what his partner in TikTok is Rupert Murdock.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
Because they realized, you know, media, it has power, and
you know, to acquiesce that power to someone else is ridiculous.
And and as you well know, these guys know nothing
about filmmaking. They don't, you know, It's just there's an
executive in the boardroom going and this year's by for

(15:00):
all total movie making is you know, one point two billion,
and they say, can you make that one point one billion? Yes, sir,
And then they just stroke a lie and then down
the crew where they fire somebody at the front office
or something, and they get the shaft. But that that
guy at the top could not give a crap about
the products coming out.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
I think one of the histories of filmmaking that you know,
a prism through which you could analyze not just the
art but the business of filmmaking, right, is under the
heading doing more with less constantly? Can you do it?
You know, with less? And oh we don't have quite

(15:43):
the financial resources. We got to do this, I mean
going back to the beginning, right, like the earliest moguals,
we can call them, setting up shop literally here in
my neighborhood where there was nothing. Right, Can you do
more with less? Boy? They did that right, and they
built this city. And they built it not on rock

(16:04):
and roll but on a silent film anyway. Yes, that
kind of power base from which they operate the moguls,
like the Rupert Murdoch's and the and the Larry Ellison's,
is not to cover over the fact that, boy, they

(16:30):
have a lot of blind spots when they get to
that point, right, and it never proves they're undoing. Rupert
Murdoch is still Rupert Murdoch somehow, Like I don't even
understand how the dude's alive. He's six hundred years old,
Like doesn't he didn't his sons take over the business

(16:51):
before we were born, Like I don't even know what's
going on anymore in his hyperbaric chamber. But he's never
gone anywhere. No one's toppling him him. But he takes
some hits from time to time and loses some serious capital,
and in so doing, it feels to me every time

(17:13):
he does it, his power does get diminished, right, because
the perception of him as all powerful gets revealed as
not being true.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Right, And then that is where you have to play
catch up, or you pivot, or you buy TikTok whatever.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
But yeah, but so please Warner Brothers Discovery, Please please
don't don't let Larry Ellison and therefore the President of
the United States have fake news CNN. Please, Okay, don't
you think it's all about that Trump? Trump wants CNN?

Speaker 4 (17:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Oh my, what what do we think his post presidency
gig is? Which one of these Which one of these
enterprises is he going to be given?

Speaker 3 (18:08):
Oh? Yeah, right, because he's just hungry for showbiz and
fame and nothing else.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Anyway, Hey, speaking of TikTok.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
Yes, are you putting a video up?

Speaker 2 (18:22):
No? I mentioned I mentioned this to you as an
aside during the week. But but last week, right, I
revealed my rather brutal assessment of the generic mediocrity of Superman.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yes, but.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
The but what occurred to me in the wake of that,
and I shared this with you, But was the small
bone screen effectiveness of that movie, and it dawned on
me the entire sections of that movie were made in
such a way that they would play a great on

(19:02):
a phone ball device, because indeed, I kind of became
intrigued by the movie when I would see entire scenes
released to the tiktoks and the instagrams and social media's,
you know, these long form reels. Entire scenes were lifted
and put on there right, and so like when John

(19:24):
would describe them, I knew those scenes because I'd already
seen them in their entirety, and I had to go, yeah,
those kind of play those do leave me, against my
own better judgment, intrigued about this movie. And then I
saw the movie on a big screen and they don't
play those scenes, but they played really well on my

(19:46):
small handheld device. And I have to believe that a
lot of smart people were figuring out how to make
these eye catching, heart tugging scenes grab an audience that
was going to be lying in wait, trying, you know,

(20:07):
maybe going to see it sitting on the fence, because
nobody needed another Superman movie until they did. And I
think for a large part of the audience, I young
people who had been moving away from these kind of
movies right and suddenly went en mass to the movie.

(20:29):
I think it was this release of these scenes to
social media that did it, and because this is how
they're consuming so much of their entertainment, and those scenes
played great that way.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Huh. That's fascinating because it would explain why the movie
felt so disjointed, Like what would you know, a giant
monster fight in the middle of the movie, What was
it that came out of nowhere? It was? It was
over and over again. There were tons of these moments
where it was just it's like, what, I'm whiplashed, And

(21:03):
you know, as Patty pointed out, it's he's also on
his back back foot the entire movie. He's never at all, uh, super,
He's mildly all right for most.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Of it, moderately alright, man.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
I'm muddly all right. Man, that's exactly I watched that.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
So we're gonna play this clip we discussed the Great
Silent film Joan of Arc with our pal John Lawler.
Now we're gonna Now we're gonna shift the cinematic emphasis
back to Dean's Baileywickh of Winnipeg for the long waited

(21:46):
sequel to No So I saw for the first time
ever Dean Hangland. Uh huh. And and I saw it
on the big screen huge at the ted Man Theater.
That's the below ground theater at the Rerenzo Piano Academy Theater.

(22:09):
So you know, it's like a pyramid, right, Like, it's
not shaped like a pyramid. It's actually shaped like an
orb a sphere. But but like the pyramids, the idea
is right. You see half of it, which is above ground,
but then below ground is the other half of it,
and it becomes, you know, the same shape. So the

(22:31):
Rerenzo Piano Academy Museum, it's it goes underground equally and uh.
And so down there is the ted Man Theater and
which I kind of in some ways prefer it's a
cozier but it's like stadium seating and the screen more
of like what a modern imax, I guess would be like.

(22:53):
And so you start at the top, you come in
at the back, and you go down and you can
find exactly, you know, the angle you want on the screen.
And so if I go down like halfway, I'm just
looking straight ahead. I'd never have to look up or
down or you know, so anyway, that's not the part
of the story that's interesting. But that's where I saw

(23:13):
Carl Carl Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Oh,
you're kiddy, I had never seen it. Now, this is
a film that, to this day, on the recent sit
and sound pool still twenty first greatest film of all
time according to film critics and historians and educators, and

(23:35):
the thirtieth greatest film of all time according to contemporary filmmakers.
And I had I had never seen it, and.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
That is stunning.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Well foreign case. Oh it's it's considered right like the
first truly modern film performance. And it was that actress,
miss Falconetti's final acting performance, so she's given a lifetime
of experience to bear on her final performance. But first,

(24:11):
just some historic perspective. It did come with a with
a score that was very powerful. That's part of the restoration.
But what was interesting to learn was Dryer never bothered
to either write or have written a score. He either said,
play whatever you want or play nothing. So it would

(24:32):
be interesting to watch that film without any literally any sound. Yeah,
but so I'm watching it and I'm I'm it's not
just her performance. I mean, god, the influence this would
have on the the the burgeoning well expressionist movement in film,

(25:00):
because the way those faces are framed and photographed, it's
it's it's the trial of Joan of Arc from the
actual minutes of the trial which were preserved, and so
it's it's almost kind of a documentary sort of recreation
as we would do. And in fact there's an influence.

(25:21):
Might it have been the first feature film to reenact
from actual documents events? Possibly that would be that would
become a trope of television crime drama, crime dramas or
documentaries or biographies for for years and years and years

(25:42):
in the future. But also the faces cast, like how
this film was cast for its faces, doesn't that, you know,
evoke as a precursor Fellini how he would go about
making his films, and so you see like, okay, from

(26:02):
the jump, it's impossible not to be aware. Oh yeah,
I can see the shadow this casts on so many
great filmmakers. But also once again, like I would say,
almost tropes of filmmaking. But I will talk about the

(26:24):
historic context of it, because this is where I want
to end with, is how how much is context we
were talking about Superman last week of how much of
its context and we'll know in a few years, but
what kind of is a drag twofold about this movie
is it's almost impossible to put yourself in the context

(26:44):
of it anymore. So I want to end there. But
but before that, it was kind of cool that you
know Dryer was born in Copenhagen. The filmmaker was born
in Copenhagen. He was Danish. And it was a film

(27:08):
theater in Copenhagen where a full print was discovered because
several decades ago it was believed that it couldn't be
restored because it was believed that it was lost. This
really critical film, really important film in French culture, which
again we'll talk about in a minute when we talk

(27:28):
about context. But here it is the Danes coming back
to save the day and in Copenhagen.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
What year is that print discovered? Because I remember watching.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
This, I'm gonna guess seventies. I'm gonna guess it was discovered.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah, because I guess the restoration got me noticing it
and then I saw it, I guess before film school.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
But I need you to explain this to me and
I can do the math, but I need you to
explain it to me. Oka and John, you might actually
be able to explain it to me also. But the
running time for that film is one hundred and two
minutes fully restored, unless you screen it at twenty four

(28:16):
frames per second, which is what it's screened as the remaster.
So the running time is now eighty four minutes. Oh okay,
it's the same movie, but it's four frames per second faster,
so it's eighteen minutes shorter, and from a math standpoint

(28:37):
it makes sense. I don't understand why. So what we're
saying is it was shot in twenty and projected in
twenty or that was the speed generally at which they
did project silent film for a long Timeah.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
Well, no, you had a hand cranked camera back then,
so you over cranked on love scenes and undercranked on
comedy scenes. So if you even look when Chaplin started
using I guess it was going.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Are we talking cameras or projectors cameras?

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Oh, start with cameras, So projectors had motorized at that point,
so they were going at a constant rate. So if
I overcrank, I have more frames, so it seems slower.
So my love scene will seem almost dreamlike depending on
how fast. If you're under cranking, you're at eighteen frames.

(29:36):
Everybody's like Keystone Copst. We're walking a bit jerky and
funny and really quick and all of that stuff.

Speaker 4 (29:42):
If it's played back, if it's played back at.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
Yeah, at twenty four, the speed of it helps the
communic physicality of it, right, because you're surprised, you're quickly
surprised and stuff.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
And maybe and maybe the horror of it. Now. Dryer
didn't make in his career a lot of features. He
lived a long life. That was the thing. I thought
he must not have made a bunch because he didn't
live a long life. He lived to be a really
old man, and he would just he'd pull even more.

(30:15):
He'd be more Kubrick than Kubrick in terms of the
delay between movies. And sometimes but but after this, his
next great film is Vampire and and so I'm wondering
what you're describing. Couldn't that also work? You know that
sudden speed for a horror film. Almost allah are modern

(30:39):
jump scares.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Oh yeah, totally. And it would be up to the
cinematographer because apparently you're if you're shooting twenty four frames
per second. You're using the opera of the envil scene
from Barbarasville d D D duh. And if you had

(31:02):
that song in your head, that's your hand crank speed
at twenty four frames. So anything under that you're doing comedy.
And then if you're over cranking, you're slowing down the
action for love scenes.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Okay, So Rudolph Matte, who would become a huge director
in Hollywood, but who was a cinematographer of so many
silent classics masterpieces, did not use a hand crank camera
for them. So interesting though that is and would explain why, okay,

(31:35):
are we projecting it at twenty or twenty four? Did not,
So I'm back to not understanding because I did experience
sometimes where it's, oh, that's moving too quickly, like that
was fast. They're too fast. It's almost slightly comedic how

(31:55):
they're moving. Now, this is a movie, as Dean will recall,
where oh my god, there's scenes with hundreds of extras
and you see them now at twenty four frames per
second for maybe a second and a half. Yes, the
shots are so quick of any context. It's really elaborate.

Speaker 4 (32:16):
Close up, Yeah, that's what I was just seeing in
the trailer.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Painting painting like portraits and with pathos, uh, you know,
or villainy or you know, being depicted. But those few
moments where you actually see movement within the frame, sometimes
it is jarring how quick they are.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
It's really at the end with the burning at the steak.
I mean, that seems way more jarring than everything else
which is contained within a cell.

Speaker 4 (32:49):
Boiler oiler alert. I wanted to watch this movie now,
I don't know that I have to.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
Yeah, you do, it's really amazing.

Speaker 5 (33:00):
Yeah, that's pretty wild. Just yeah, I'm seeing from like
trailer elements.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah, yeah, but didn't France, I mean, technically what was
his name? The French film industry had sort of taken
off on its own, separate from Edison's cameras a lot
of the same technology, but they had different film stock,
they had different projectors and cameras, so.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
There was no standard frame rate at that time. They
could be twenty, they could be twenty four and drier. Yeah,
here's the complication that I just found out. He shot
it at a variable frame rate, which I take to
mean sometimes he used twenty and sometimes he used twenty four.

(33:48):
And that then begs the question, Okay, but you really
only can show it at one frame rate? Yes, you know,
unless you're unless we're going to stop here in for
the next scene. We're going to Okay, let's change the
settings and now we can go not anymore though, now

(34:08):
it's digital.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
All right, digital, I can rework that. But wasn't this
a digital projection they didn't have.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Well, it's digital projection.

Speaker 4 (34:16):
Yeah, you wouldn't be able to do it that way though.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
No, you wouldn't be able to. Yeah, you would still
have to stop it, and you would still have to
you know, or you're setting up multiple projectors with different
files loaded and you could go, you know, one to one,
but you know, like multiple project like the changeover in
a in a film projector with the dot on the right.
It's only a matter of time. It's just that those

(34:39):
projection systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, So who's
going to do that anyway? So that was really confusing
to me, like, you know, how can I how can it?
But it's but it's the beauty also of movies, where
again we talk about the compression of time being what
makes cinema so oh unique, and it literally extends to

(35:05):
how you're playing, how you're playing it back and watching
it versus watching it on TV. I mean, anybody who's
delivered a video of even a certain length, when you're
in post on something, even a corporate thing, you know,
you do face the what's the run what's the actual
time on it? Because the database is going to be

(35:28):
different depending on how it's being reviewed by yourself or
by your clients, et cetera, and by the platform it's
going on. So it's it's interesting. I I was thinking again, John, actually,
when you were saying that you were looking at it,
I bet this film had to have been a huge

(35:51):
influence on on photographers, on still photographers. Sure how portrait
photography would change.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
That lighting that intense? I mean your lighting ratio before
that was always you'd have a fill light and you'd
have your key light, and that ratio would be sort
of five to five to two, was it? This is
three times brighter than that one or something. But this
thing is the contrast. I mean, it's like six to zero.
It's just your blacks are so black and you're and

(36:23):
the skin highlights are like what It almost reminds me
of that Canadian portrait photographer Karsh, Joseph Karsh. He did
Winston Churchill's famous portrait and George Benard Shaw looking over
as glasses, and all of them were some he got
accused of, you know, greasy skin because he made the

(36:44):
lighting so intense that everybody looked like that, really oily skin.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
The first thing that came up for me. I'm sure
John is searching him too. The first thing that came
up for me, in addition to photos of Karsh is
there's a photo of Bogart and a photo of Muhammad Ali.
He's looking back at the camera, but they both look
like they could have come out of the passion of
Joan of Arc. It's like the passion of Humphrey Bogart

(37:10):
and he's being judged by Muhammad Ali, which and I
would see that movie.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
I would see that movie, do so.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
I mentioned the context, and this is where I want
to end. Man, two levels of context, and I'll let
you address them in whichever order you wish, but here's
the order in which they occurred to me. I came
out of the movie thinking I probably should have read

(37:44):
about Joan of Arc before before seeing this movie. I
knew who Joan of Arc was I vaguely knew the
if you'd asked me, was this a story set in
fourteen thirty one? That I couldn't hell you I get. Really,
I have a hard time holding dates of certain centuries

(38:09):
of European.

Speaker 4 (38:10):
History, Yes, century, one hundred years.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
More exactly like, and how many hundred years worse did
they have? And are we having one now? Like? I
can't keep track of because so much of we've talked
about this, So much of history is delineated by these
epochs of violence, right And I include in violence things
like plagues, right like. But but these, these periods of

(38:38):
destruction and devastation is what defines so much of history.
And what I do love about human beings is no
matter how much that's true, the same periods of time
are at least as much defined by acts of creation,
by art, by works of art, It is as viable
away of viewing histories. And I have an easier time

(39:01):
holding on to my concept of the dates based on
acts of creation. It starts to become the same story
for me when it's stories of destruction and devastation, but
stories of creation, so much are built upon each other
and in conversation with each other that that's how I

(39:23):
can tend to remember these things. So I wish I
had read about this a little bit before and realized,
you know, why would this young woman, who we can
say a bit fantastically, you know, help free France, you know,
a teenager, but like you know, why burned at the stake,

(39:45):
you know, for her hubris of saying that she was
from God? Oh, because that part of the church was
controlled by Anglo influences. And again here's a part of
history where there was no Anglican church, a Catholic country.
And so as France is seeking its its independence from

(40:12):
British rule, from Anglo rule, you know, this, this gal
is this hero. And I wish I had understood a
little bit that distinction, because then, oh, now I'm starting
to understand why a silent film, you know, like I,

(40:32):
I can easier, you know, more easily understand why why
we're making a Ten Commandments in America when we are
because of culturally what's going on? So Dryer makes this
film in twenty eight Why why Yeah, the story of
Joan of Arci is cool, but why this one? Why

(40:53):
the trial? We're not doing the battle, We're not doing
the heroic thing. We're doing the just the come up,
as it were. And although decades later, in the fourteen hundreds,
the Catholic Church overturned her conviction and deemed her a hero.
Will good for you. What do we do with her

(41:17):
charred remains? Yeah, okay, bring her back? Oh we can't.
Oh well, they do become sanctified, which I guess in
your belief system in the church is all that really matters,
because this life and death is not as important. It's
about what happens afterwards. So she gets to be in
hallowed ground. But in the nineteen twenties, the Pope Benedict

(41:43):
whatever two and a half, Benedict two and a half,
I don't know. I also can't keep trying my popes. Well,
I mean, you need at least two Benedicts. One egg
Benny is not enough, I think. But anyway, names her
Hey Saint of Parish in that year, in the nineteen twenties.

(42:06):
This happens in the nineteen twenties, I think nineteen twenty two,
and so, oh my goodness, of course she has become
this huge figure coming out of the Napoleonic Wars, right,
this important symbol of freedom for the people, especially for
the working classes because she was a peasant girl. But

(42:29):
then nineteen twenties, yeah, the Catholic church. You know, she
becomes a patron saint, and so the context of Dryers
film of her trial and persecution, Oh my god, the
contextual weight. Oh yeah, for a largely Catholic world. Right,

(42:50):
Where were movies shown at that point? Probably mostly the
Catholic world, including America, including the New World. The power
that that story had, there's no way for me to
recreate that context for myself.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
No, not when you realize, yeah, that influence and everybody
would have resonated a she's the patron saying of Paris,
and so how proud are you culturally versus your religion
and seeing it be doing some dickish moves during the
interrogation to say the least.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Well, and so then why I'm in America? But I
hear you say, but in America, Phil, we weren't a
Catholic country, and we've we've always yeah, we've always been secular.
We're so secular now we separate church and state on
a daily basis, so gracefully, so easily. Boy, you know,

(43:51):
nineteen twenties, nineteen twenty eight, when this comes out right
on the eve of the Great Depression. So here's this
peasant girl. But of course, the labor classes and the
agrarian classes in America weren't doing great in the twenties. No,

(44:11):
so the symbol of this girl would have really had
great resonance here in this country as well.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
Now. I don't know if it showed at a lot
of theaters here though, because I think it was considered
a foreign film, and I think the restoration only put
the English sub No, that's not true. They would already
have the English subtitles because there was always international That
was the joy of silent films that played internationally, because
you just had to swap out subtyptitles. Except if there

(44:45):
was one film, you had the film a different ending.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Guys, Oh, you are correct. I'm sorry, you are correct.
Because of censorship, Oh, it could not be widely distributed here.
And I was wondering that the context of that. I'm
watching there's John there's naked breasts in this movie.

Speaker 4 (45:11):
No way, I know what I'm doing. Later today there's a.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
Baby's sucklin on a nipple, which in this country was
a no fly. It's still a no fly z And
if you're doing it in public. That that really saddens
me that it wasn't seen widely here because the other
element of context for it. And this is why I

(45:41):
love the ted Man Theater much as I love the
Picture Palace, as we still have. But for me, this
experience of walking in through the back, I'm coming in
off the world. I'm going down into the earth. You know,
you gotta wind down to go down. And then I
enter from the back and I still have to go

(46:02):
deep down into this cavernous space a little bit john
like the experience of the theater we performed in where honestly,
I used to always kind of be hesitant about the
Barnes Doll Gallery Theater because wait a minute, you enter
from up top top, and then you enter kind of
through these narrow spaces. Yeah, you can take an elevator,
but the or you're doing the stairwell, which is pretty narrow,

(46:25):
and then the lobby is a little bit claustrophobic, like
it could this really be a good atmosphere and environment,
But once you are in the bowl of that theater space,
my god, is it this cave that contain It's a
cauldron of energy. And that's how I feel about this

(46:48):
theater and the big screen, and I'm seeing these images
writ large, and I was reminded again as I am
every few years hopefully, but of what you know Felini
called the sacred aspect of film, and he meant literally
the not thematic content though that, but the aspect ratio,

(47:13):
the window into the soul, the sacred nature of it.
And has any film ever utilized it to more sacred
power than this film? And that's why it makes me
sad that it wasn't released widely in this country, because
cinemas were built at that time to amplify that sacred aspect.

(47:39):
You are sacrificing your individual identity and losing yourself in
this communal experience that is enormous and encompassing.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
Wow, it makes me want to go see a movie. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
The night before I drove out of town, I went
back to the ted Man Theater at the Academy to
see Louis Boonewell's nineteen sixty one masterpiece Veridiana.

Speaker 3 (48:13):
Oh Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:14):
Though it did not make the twenty twenty two Sit
and Sound Critics Poll, which again we sort of discussed,
like why is Louis Boonwell all of a sudden big deal. No,
he's not a big deal. For the first time, it's
a big deal to me that he's pass a like
he used to be all over that list and now
suddenly he's not. And I wondered why, like, is surrealism

(48:36):
has it lost its appeal? Or was it just that
he he was hailed so widely for so long that
you know, it's kind of like, yeah, yeah, we get it.
He's great. Let's come on, let's have you know, like
the way Citizen Kane is not number one anymore, you know,
first Vertigo and now Jean Dielman, Like, was it is

(48:58):
it to a degree people saying yeah, yeah, we know,
but let's just have a different number one. So anyway,
it didn't make the list this time. It was another
one that was kind of surprising, but it still does
check in at number fifty two on the Filmmaker's List,
and it is a truly beloved Spanish film, perhaps the

(49:20):
most influential of all Spanish films of all time, having
influenced generations of modern filmmakers. And it was also a
bit of a holy grail for me personally because I'd
never seen it. I always wanted to see it as
I always want to do with Boonwell on the big screen,
because you know, you want to take in his knees

(49:42):
on sin. You want to be able to appreciate, be
captured by the tone and the spell that it's casting,
so that the surrealism especially can really work its magic
on you. And you don't want to be doing this
so much right the looking down and reading the subtitles
and then catching up. You want to be able to
see the subtitles in your line of vision and catch

(50:03):
up while seeing everything in the frame. And so it
was a bit of a holy grail because a couple
of years ago I thought Lily and I were going
to go see it at the Cinema Tech at the
Lows Feels three. Only it turned out when we got there, haha,
we didn't have tickets. She assumed, well, there's no way
this thing will sell out. I've never even heard of this,
and it had, of course sold out. There's a standby

(50:25):
line if you want, and I look outside. You mean
the line that's all the way around the block is
the standby line. So there was a little bit of
a tantrum that was thrown that day. I'll leave it
at that, Yeah, let's look at it as a happy
story about the sophistication of our neighbors when it comes

(50:47):
to cinema. Anyway, it's a comedy that frequently had me
laughing out loud, as they say, though I was usually
maybe the only one doing so in a fairly well
attended screening in the ted Man. But by the end
there's a uproarious laughter. Oh really, I just feel like

(51:11):
people need permission, and permission structures are really important, especially
when Okay, it's a foreign film, we don't want to
be laughing at it. And then this involves the church,
so I don't know. Maybe this isn't supposed to be funny.

(51:31):
Maybe this is supposed to be sacred, this piece like
the Joan of Arc right, and anyway, I think the
story of the movie, of the release of the movie,
as sometimes is the case with Boonwell, is as interesting
as the movie itself. The movie won the Palm Door

(51:52):
in nineteen sixty one at the can Film Festival, but
was banned in Spain. So Spain submitted it because the
country back then like the Foreign Language Film OSCs now
the International Film osks, the country had to submit it,
and so they submit it to can. It wins the

(52:12):
top prize and then the country proceeds to ban it.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
The gating because of March is supposed to be in
a marketing tool.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Exactly, well it still was. It Just like, we'll just
sit on that for sixteen years, but the marketing will
still be good. Remember that sixty one poem door because
it was denounced by the Holy See due to the
film's criticism of the Catholic Church. Oh and in fact,

(52:44):
sixteen years it would be before it would be released
there two years after the death of Franco there was
a belief that they were keeping it in reserve out
of deference to him. And yet so seventy seven it
comes out. But by twenty sixteen it's getting voted the

(53:04):
greatest Spanish film of all time in a poll of
three hundred and fifty big wigs in Spanish cinema at
that time. Yeah, the have you seen this? Have you
seen Ridion?

Speaker 3 (53:18):
No, I've dyed to see it.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
Actually beautiful black and white. A nun Verridiana is preparing
to take her final vows, but she has to go
visit her uncle Don Him played by Boonwell stalwart Don
Fernando Ray because her uncle financed her education, though she's
only ever met him once, so she has to go
see him before he dies before she can take her

(53:42):
final vows. He lives as a recluse on a large
but decaying a state and mansion, so the thematic expressions
are already there. They're all there for you. Before long,
the uncle becomes obsessed with how much he his niece
resembles his late wife, and he tries to seduce her

(54:05):
to woo her. Is even prepared to rape her, but
pulls back from this effort at the last moment and
ends up hanging himself out of guilt. Wo you heard
me correctly. This is a comedy.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
Yeah, I'm not laughing. Well, I am laughing.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
You are laughing.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
It's dark, I gonna say.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
A surrealist comedy of course. Anyway, this experience inspires Veridiana
to leave the nunnery and move to the estate full time,
though it ends up inherited in part by Don Jaime's
disavowed illegitimate son Jorge. He pictures turning it into a

(54:47):
successful moneymaking enterprise, while she utilizes the locale as sort
of a refuge, a mission, if you will, for the
homeless and the impoverished a neighboring village, and it leads

(55:09):
to a thematic takedown of the idea that the poor
are innately honorable, which really, I'm sure pissed off some
religious figures who sort of gained power on a structure
of belief based on how, oh the meek shall inherit

(55:30):
the earth someday because they're so good. They're so good.
This says, no, they're really not. They're as bad as
everybody else, and it leads to a hilarious sequence culminating
in a parody of da Vinci's Last Supper. No so,
the Bord of Sensors had a lot to be upset
about with this movie, but apparently the thing they were

(55:54):
most upset about was the original ending, Whereina enters her
cousin's room i e. The room of her uncle's illegitimate son,
and slowly closes the door behind herself, making it clear
she has now decided to forswear her innocence. Oh so,

(56:15):
a new ending was written and filmed, far less explicit.
It just involves the sun and Verdiana and the housekeeper
sitting down to play a game of cards, but there
is no mistaking that it's an even darker, more kind

(56:36):
of vile, ending far more racy just through the banality
of what they're sitting down to do. It's somehow so
much more racy, Which is always the thing I love
about Boon Weell is how often the banal becomes the
source of such controversy in his work. And so the

(56:59):
implication was mighty and powerful and yep, we can't see
this movie for sixteen years.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
Wow, now you've sold that. I'm gonna look for it.
Have you found it on any streamers or are you gonna
just tell me it's TCM again.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Oh, I had found it on a streamer at some point.
I'll try to look that up. I think it may
actually be Max. HBO Max has it.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Wow, that would be fun if that was, because.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
Like you keep getting upset that it's TCM. TCM is
all on HBO Max.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
Not Hell. That's the thing. I couldn't get that Dean
Martin special that you talked about a couple of years ago,
that's nowhere.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
On that airs like every week on TCM. I can't
not watch that. I mean, I don't want to. It's
the Ludovico technique. I am plucked down into the couch
my eyes are held open, and I'm forced to watch
that thing once a week.

Speaker 3 (57:55):
Well, it's highly entertaining, I assume.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
So another movie I want to ask you about, because
I bookended my trip with the night before I left,
I went to the Academy's ted Man Theater. The night
I came back, I went to the Academy's Tedman Theater
to catch a seven thirty PM screening of Jean Vigo's
landmark nineteen thirty four film Latalante.

Speaker 3 (58:21):
Oh Latalante. Oh Yes, I did I see that whole thing?
I don't think I have.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Actually, I bet you would have watched it in film school,
That's what I bet. I mean, that's when I saw it,
and I remembered it like remembering a dream. Oh right,
And that wasn't a bad way to remember it. Actually,
As it turns out, the design of the sets and

(58:50):
the way the shots are set up and framed kind
of hung in my memory. The cinematography was by Boris Kaufman,
who who had previously shot Vigo's Zero for Conduct and
who would go on to lens many masterpieces for both
Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumett, including On the Waterfront and

(59:13):
Twelve angry men.

Speaker 3 (59:15):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
This film Latlonte checks in at number thirty four on
the Sitan Sound Poll Critics list of the greatest films
ever made and number forty six on the Filmmaker's List,
both of which are I don't know, in some ways
sort of surprising to me, again, given that like Boonwell
isn't But I think again, Vigo was forgotten for so

(59:40):
long that the rediscovery still feels almost rebellious, and he
was so rejected, so utterly rejected, that I think it's
almost a matter of pride plus who he influenced. My

(01:00:02):
favorite part of the film involves the timeless and and
rather haunting performance play of the woman playing the wife
of the captain of this barge. It's almost entirely revolves
the story revolves around this crew of this barge, this
three person crew, uh, and the wife of the skipper.

(01:00:22):
And anyway, the actress Dita Parlow as the wife. Really
it's a it's a pretty haunting performance that through the
years holds its appeal. I love that how the director
Jean Vigo got the script and said, you know what
I'm changing. I'm changing the character of the dog because

(01:00:44):
the mate the engineer had a dog and he the pear.
Jules is the character's name, And anyway, Vigo gave him
ten cats instead.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
Because that's so much easier to direct, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
And every frame is so controlled, but damn if these
cats don't all end up with their own character and
each end up making a mark, and so often these
cats are so gifted at finding the perfect place within
the frame to go naturally. I think Vigo knew a
lot about cats. He said, Man, if we get him

(01:01:20):
one of those funnel speakers for his phonograph, I bet you,
I guarantee you one of these cats is going to
curl up in it, just naturally, and it'll be so
great in the frame, so it leaves, I mean, these
cats leave an indelible impression, and again also add to
kind of the dreamlike quality of the whole thing. It's

(01:01:43):
a sometimes shocking, sometimes comedic, just fever dream of Romanticism.
And like I said, it was utterly rejected by contemporary
audiences in nineteen thirty four. The full eighty five minute
version wasn't restored until nineteen nine because it was deemed
to be confused and incoherent. And phrase I loved at

(01:02:08):
the time, willfully absurd was used as a bad thing.

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
Jeez, that's my superhero name.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
But again, we've talked about how absurdism might really be
having a moment and finding its power. Now, so will
wilfully absurd that could be a cinematic wheelhouse all of
a sudden. And so it was deemed and this is
a direct quote from the pages of Gomont's inner memorandum

(01:02:39):
the distri distribution companies in memorandum commercially worthless. And so
one could argue that the phrase commercially worthwhile is a
contradiction in terms total And so it was butchered, cut
down to sixty five minutes, and lo and behold released

(01:03:00):
to utter indifference. Right, so often throughout history, and I
love that people are still doing this. When was the
film that was cut way down and then released ever successful?

Speaker 3 (01:03:13):
Yeah? I can't think of the singles.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
So here, here's a great idea. Let's ride the horse
in a direction it doesn't want to go. What could
go wrong? Anyway? I'm not saying the longer version would
have been a hit in any of these historic cases,
but you would have saved the money you spent redoing it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:34):
Right, Think of that if it's commercially worthless. Just let
it sit as is, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
Yeah, and then the money that you've spent restoring it,
release the Snyder cut or don't, but just just don't
change it in the first place. Anyway, the spirit of
Vigo's work, both in this and Zero for Conduct, what

(01:04:01):
a powerful little movie that was about you know, boys
in a private school. It would eventually the spirit of
his work would eventually prove so attractive. It's devoid of
flourishes or decoration, so his approach could be described as

(01:04:22):
very classical. Again, it's nineteen thirty four, but the movie
is nevertheless feverishly brimming with ideas in a way that
is just you know, I'm not a huge fan of
nineteen thirties movies. Yes, I know well that classical style
often doesn't really do it for me. But again, it's

(01:04:45):
so choco, a block full of ideas. It's hard not
to kind of get swept away by it, even as
I'm being shocked by it at times he himself Vigo,
and I think this is one of the reasons where again,
unlike maybe a boon weel Veridiana, which also was met
with you know, problems, a problematic release in its age,

(01:05:11):
only to be reclaimed and championed, but now to have
somehow kind of slipped from our collective grasp of the
movies that need to be remembered. Here's a law to
launt that's still firmly in the discussion at number thirty
four for crying out loud of the greatest films ever made,

(01:05:31):
and I think part of it is Boone. Weell lived
such a long, productive life, right, and Vigo lived a
very short life with very few films. He didn't live
long enough to find out that he had given birth
to poetic realism in the movies em He did not

(01:05:55):
know that he therefore would be a godfather figure of
influence for the French New wave.

Speaker 3 (01:06:02):
Oh Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
He contracted tuberculosis at twenty one years wow, and was
so weakened by the grueling work he put in on
making law talant, building this barge on a sound stage
and those sets, and then doing the water born scenes,

(01:06:23):
so he was too weakened to defend it from those
who sought to destroy it. That battle proved too much
for him to bear, and he died at the time
of its nineteen thirty four release, at the age of
twenty nine Wow. So his works were all but forgotten
by World War Two, but starting in the late forties

(01:06:43):
after La Talant and Zero for Conduct were both re
released in New York City in nineteen forty seven and
earned rave reviews, including by one James ag Oh look
At That, the writer of Night of the He called
Vigo one of the very few real Originals who have

(01:07:06):
ever worked in film. Franz Wa Truffo was fourteen when
he first saw the film. He and his French New
Wave colleagues would ensure the film's reappraisal took hold. The
great Yugoslavian filmmaker Emir Costa Rica considered Vigo a poet,
pays tribute to him in several of his own films.

(01:07:29):
Other filmmakers to pay overt homage to Vigo in their
works include and Lautalon. Specifically include Bernardo Bertolucci in Last
Tango in Paris and Leo Kurox in The Lovers on
the Bridge, which I just saw.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Oh, I'm gonna go look for those right now.

Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
And we'll close with a bit of a discussion we
had with again John Lawler this past week surrounding Robert Redford.
The painter. Yes, Bert backrack score for Birch Butch Cassidy
and of course because you can't resist his song for
the Blob and the aforementioned Knight of the Hunter. Yay

(01:08:14):
Robert Redford. His desire was always to be a painter.
Did you know that?

Speaker 4 (01:08:20):
I did not know that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:22):
Where's his artwork?

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
That's what he trained for, did he really? Yes? See,
I would send clips or interview things Redford had said
to lil and you know, and she would say, we'll see.
Because he was he trained to be a painter, he
could really see things very clearly, or you know, how

(01:08:43):
he wanted them to be. I think when you start
to get to him as a director, it makes a
lot of sense.

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
Yeah, I could see that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
His first film, Ordinary People. I always gravitate towards brilliant.
The casting is in that, right, Like taking Mary Tyler
Moore America's Sweetheart and having her play a kind of
mother that is very real but that we'd never seen
depicted before, right, was brilliant. But yeah, each I mean

(01:09:18):
those close ups. It's a very close up heavy film,
but those are portrait shots, those close ups in them.

Speaker 3 (01:09:24):
Yeah, now you say that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
But I wondered uh, painting and acting? Now what what
could the benefit be or how could it translate? How
could an interest in painting and a even a perhaps

(01:09:47):
a lack of skill, but still a training towards it.
How could it translate those those abilities?

Speaker 3 (01:09:57):
Well, it be color, your ability to mix color, color harmonies.
It's the same way you would read a line. I
would color my line reading in a certain way so
that it would be of the whole. Does that make
sense that you are crafting your monologue, let's say, in

(01:10:21):
a way that is harmonious, the same way of paintings
harmonious in terms of its color choices and palette and
all that sort of thing. So I could see that
if you're thinking that way in terms of mixing and
intuitively too right, I mean intuitively you pick colors, but

(01:10:44):
also if you're trained in the color wheel and color balances,
and you underpaint purple when you're painting green over top
so that that green would really snap. Anytime you're painting
a tree, if you're doing it in oil, you always
put purple under it, because then the green just really
pops off the canvas, same way than when you're you know,

(01:11:05):
doing horror or you're reading. You know, you're supposed to
be a bad guy. You have a definite sense of
humor under the whole monologue of your evil villain, because
then it's actually makes your evil even more intense that
you have glee and gleam in your eye when you
say it, as opposed to her the villain.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
Right, So, how about the understanding the frame?

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
Oh, how how to compose?

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):
Yeah, how to modulate what you're doing based on the
understanding of the frame and knowing how that is going
to read for an audience.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
Yeah, you know, I did a workshop one time and
I had the actors do extreme close up because we
were working on the X files and anytime you sort
of nudged out a frame, the youll cut, even though
you were doing the best monologue of your life, but
you're being too large for the way that camera. So
I had all the actors just, you know, have the

(01:12:09):
frame so tight on them that they actually had to
deliver their lines. They were doing seatwork, but deliver their
lines without offty, not a frame, and it was so
hard and you yelled cut and they were body's going
fucking That scene was going brilliantly, I know, but the
mandate of this exercise is to stay within the frame,

(01:12:30):
because that's going to happen on set.

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
It's interesting as a exercise. I don't think I've ever
done that on a set, but in a because generally,
you know, people will after a while figure out what
the framing is and do it. But in an acting
class or in auditions, I've sometimes, you know, given people

(01:12:53):
the note, let's try it again. But what I would
like is I want you to be just nailed to
the ground. You can't move, right, You literally can't move.
And it's a fascinating experience to see because it's what
all the greatest stars I think had two varying degrees,

(01:13:19):
but that ability to be utterly motionless but fully alive.
Every core puscle of their being is energized. And in
the case of this class, I'm not speaking to the
great actors, but in the case of this class, for example,

(01:13:39):
every core puzzle is alive because they're not allowed to
dissipate the energy at all through movement.

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
The gestures of movement or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:47):
Right, And it's a really great thing, like right, I mean, yes.

Speaker 5 (01:13:54):
I feel like that would be a good exercise for me.
I'm I'm a bit I'm a bit of a mover,
but I would I also like the well and that's
probably yeah, But I also like, you know, the idea
that with painting very similar to.

Speaker 4 (01:14:12):
Reading a scene, learning a scene, and so.

Speaker 5 (01:14:15):
Forth, there's like each step that goes into everything you do.
And I remember reading this in an Actor Prepares a
million years ago. The whole idea that like, if you
break everything that happens down into each individual moment, and
you can break moments into moments and those moments into
moments and really pay attention to what it takes to

(01:14:39):
make anything happen in your actual daily life or whatever,
there's a lot of little moments in there. And and
I feel like with painting that's a really good example
of you start with I mean, you could start with
the choice of canvas. Do you want to do linen?
Do you want to do cotton?

Speaker 4 (01:14:56):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
You?

Speaker 5 (01:14:57):
And then all the way through, now I'm paying what
color do I start with?

Speaker 3 (01:15:01):
With?

Speaker 4 (01:15:02):
Which?

Speaker 5 (01:15:02):
What's the first step? Where do I start here to
what's the area I want to focus on? Or do
I want to go for the whole picture? And you know,
get a general sense and then go in for details
and so on and so forth, Like it's I feel like
when I work on lines and when I work on

(01:15:23):
a scene, it's that it's like I see every moment,
you know, you break things down into beats and stuff.
But like even more, you're more like painting where it's like, Okay,
now I'm going to paint this stroke, and then that's
going to lead me over here because now I'm thinking
in this color and this idea and so.

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
And it begins like you were saying, like it begins
even earlier with the okay, making the selection of the material.
I understand that this probably comes at the end, but
like you know, like preparing your brushes, maybe cleaning the brushes,
like you know, it's like the when I'm doing well.
It's why the to do lists, my really broken down

(01:16:05):
to do lists work well for me because it makes
every component part a ritual of it for me, so
that I'm not like, oh, this is the ship I
have to do to get to the ship that I have.

Speaker 4 (01:16:16):
To do.

Speaker 2 (01:16:18):
And that and to realize that that's an accomplishment. Doing
this piece, this setup of it well is an accomplishment.
The art is not the finished thing. The art is
the process. And so I and I think we see
that in his work, Like, you know, he never what

(01:16:41):
we would call the most brilliant artist or you know,
as an actor, never one who has transformed really or whatever.
But shocking the process that you can see not the
not that you see the acting, but no, but you
see all the different component parts that go into it,

(01:17:04):
so that somehow, despite this guy being the most recognizable
person on the planet, you believe what's going on in
the scene.

Speaker 4 (01:17:13):
Yeah, right, yeah, that is true.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
And you know, my favorite example of that is the
is the calling all the phone calls, that master shot
that goes on forever and all the President's men, where
he's at his desk, he's grabbing every phone book, making
every phone call, and he makes mistakes in it. The
actor makes mistakes, The actor laughs at his own mistakes,

(01:17:38):
and the actor keeps going because he knows in the
process of that, isn't that funny that, of course the
guy I'm playing would make mistakes. You can't make all
those things and keep track of all this information without
making mistakes. What's phony would be to always be perfect? Yeah, yeah,

(01:17:58):
And and he is amused by that as an actor,
and it reveals like stress and stress relief and it's
just so lived in a moment, in something that's so artificial,
and uh and I and I don't know. That feels
to me a little bit like painting, like like you know,

(01:18:19):
like you can't you can't always know what you're gonna paint,
like stroke by stroke, you can't always know.

Speaker 3 (01:18:30):
And if you well, yeah, that's called realism or hyperrealism.
I suppose when you're copying a photograph almost pixel by pixel.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
But and as we move forward into the world of digital,
how do you do is that which might have had
a place at one point we I think we go
back to the eighties and nineties and we see that
kind of hyperrealism with the pixels and we go, oh,
that's cool. That's almost like a digital painting. But it
was done by hand. But you know what, that kind

(01:19:01):
of stuff moving forward less interesting because we have computers
making it, we have virtual. What we look for is
the human organic, the organic and uh so that idea
of something and it's not so simple as like the
Wabbi Sabby of a flaw though I think that too

(01:19:24):
flaw making something beautiful because you could argue, like the
example I gave him laughing, is the flaw. But it's
the moment that I remember the most because, god damn it,
it's the most truthful. It like really reveals what it
must have been like to be one of these guys.
And yeah, I wass to say.

Speaker 5 (01:19:40):
It wasn't until like the fourth time I watched that
movie that I realized, oh wait, that's probably just not
even scripted.

Speaker 2 (01:19:45):
Yeah it was.

Speaker 5 (01:19:46):
It just said mister Daalberg, Oh wait, no, mister, and
like he just fucked up and he realized, well, yeah,
of course he'd.

Speaker 2 (01:19:53):
Keep his knowing exactly where like every phone book was
and the pencils were, like he had worked that office.
That was his office. And I don't know why, I
feel like Robert Redford works in that office. When Robert
Redford's not making movies, he works at the Washington Post

(01:20:15):
and the typewriter. And then you find out, well, they
did embed themselves for nine months or a year, Hoffman
and Redford at the Washington Post. And then god damn it,
they built foot by foot They recreated the entire Washington
Post offices on soundstage.

Speaker 5 (01:20:35):
That wasn't an actual built They put that all on
a sound stage.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
That's a sound stage.

Speaker 3 (01:20:39):
That's a sound stage.

Speaker 2 (01:20:40):
Yeh, and so again made by hand, like all these
human components, whereas now, what would we do? It would
be digital? How do you do? It's literally everything other
than that typewriter, maybe that phone and that pencil would
be a digital. How do you do?

Speaker 5 (01:20:56):
Yeah, just be the desk, the desk they work at
would be real, and everything else would just be a.

Speaker 2 (01:21:02):
But I so again getting back to it like that
is almost like a painter and easel in that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:09):
Scene, M right, crafting yet what it feels, yeah, because
that's often what you're painting too, is you try to
paint the emotional reaction you're having to something, so you're
not really depicting it, right, Like the insanity of green.
This is all my whole neighborhood's obsessed with lawns and landscaping,

(01:21:30):
and it's to me just completely insane that you're just
wasting water resources on you know, a lawn, a lot
of all things. Let it go dry right out loud.
It brown's a lovely color anyway, I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:21:46):
It's so it's so interesting that I don't know what
to do with this, where to put this? But this
too Often actors worry about how something's going to look
mm hmm from a sense of ego, right, And I
don't maybe vanity, maybe maybe vanity of course, but but

(01:22:08):
I just mean, I don't mean it pejoratively ego. I
just mean that that's where they're coming from. They're concerned
about how this is gonna look, Uh, even in taking
the role. How will it look to my fans if
I do this in a movie? Right? And that's understandable, right,
because it is a business, and if you've achieved a

(01:22:28):
certain level of success, then it's like, well, what is
everybody gonna hate me if I do this? And yet
what we're saying here is one of Redford's real abilities
was to know how things are gonna look, But he
wasn't thinking about it from a place of how he.

Speaker 3 (01:22:47):
Looks like, Right, it's not superficial, it's internalized how it
will be.

Speaker 2 (01:22:52):
It's literally how this is gonna end up in the canvas.

Speaker 4 (01:22:56):
Although it does help that he's so beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
And it hurts, and it hurts because he he didn't
get to as he said he and this is something
we'll we'll revisit maybe in Chillpack a little bit then,
because you know his whole thing about he always wanted
to play a fiend and or winter soldier, and that

(01:23:21):
was it. Like I rewatched that because he always said
that he wanted to see how modern movies were made
with again the digital around he dos. And uh, but
goddamn it, he got to play a fiend in that
it was genuinely a fiend versus a villain. Right, So
often a villain is defined by what what they are

(01:23:43):
going after, by their circumstances.

Speaker 4 (01:23:45):
But that curly mustache, but that guy.

Speaker 2 (01:23:49):
Is genuinely fiendish because he holds no moral compass and
but does not see himself like a villain, of course,
sees himself like the good guy. So suddenly Redford playing
him is perfect. But anyway, I uh, yeah, I'm intrigued

(01:24:14):
by this. I'm intrigued by so I'm gonna do a
little more research, see if I can find any.

Speaker 4 (01:24:20):
He still so good looking. We hope that he has
an only beans.

Speaker 6 (01:24:27):
All right, so uh sorry, we'll leave it there, silent,
call it the time of death right there at that joke,
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
So we spent, of course a lot of time talking
about the music and highest to Lois and Dean and
I both just momentarily when talking about Redford last last time,
I had to throw Burt Backrex rain drops keep falling
on my head under the bus because it's just like

(01:25:08):
it is such a bizarre, weird kick to the nads
in the middle of that film that monta right.

Speaker 3 (01:25:14):
Which inspired Kirk Douglas to do that. I bought a
bike in jeck Lyn Hyde to cry out loud.

Speaker 2 (01:25:20):
But I, in going on this road trip, really availed
myself for the first time of you know, I'm just
going to use my Spotify list bluetooth to the to
the to the car. And I don't usually do that
when I travel. I am try to go like, oh,
I'll do local radio, I'll do you know like but

(01:25:41):
after a little while it was like, now you know
what I don't. Let's just make sure that either my
podcasts or my music are playing. But so one of
the things that I like to do is when when
driving is you know, music from movies and television and
so many tracks from Burt backrack score because he didn't

(01:26:03):
just do the the song, he did the music score
for no.

Speaker 5 (01:26:10):
I thought that was hey, uh Zimmerman nor hermish uh
hermis shermsher herbish, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:24):
Renowned, Yeah, music by Burt Backrack.

Speaker 4 (01:26:28):
What's the other guy I'm thinking about, the schmer Schmermershker.

Speaker 3 (01:26:31):
Guy, Henry Mervin Mervin.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):
And Marvin Hamlish, Marvin Hamlish, the marvelous Marvin Hamlish.

Speaker 4 (01:26:40):
What did Marvin Hamlers do? Then?

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):
Lots of stuff. Let's not talk about Martin.

Speaker 4 (01:26:45):
Sorry, sorry, okay, But here's.

Speaker 2 (01:26:48):
The thing about the burn backrack that I wanted. What
I wanted to bring up was so there, so there'd
be these there'd be these these uh, you know, tracks
that would come up like Escape to South America would
be the title of the track, right, and it's from
the soundtrack to it, or other scenes like you know,

(01:27:08):
under Attack, and these would be interspersed on the Spotify
playlist with you know, Anio Morricone tunes from Once upon
a Time in the West or other. And what was
stunning was in the midst of all these these Burt
back rack pieces from Butch Cassidy were totally countered all

(01:27:30):
the other tracks that would come up from other movies,
where all the other tracks would evoke in my mind
images from the movie.

Speaker 3 (01:27:40):
Oh, you could recall the scenes straight from just here
in the sun.

Speaker 2 (01:27:44):
It's not that I was recalling it would evoke them.
The images would come forward from me based on these
if I knew the movie, of course, Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid nothing, it evoked no images at all.
Like I would read the name of it and go, well,

(01:28:05):
I know that scene, What the hell this could not
have anything to do with that, And then I'm dialing
it up the scene later and I'm going, yeah, that
shitty music is in this, and it's shitty because it's

(01:28:27):
it doesn't jibe it, neither works with it or against it.
It's And I'm not I'm not criticizing Burt backgrack. I
love a lot of burn background stuff. I have a
collection of Burt backrack recordings through the years by many
many different artists. Great songwriter, songwriter, which is a different

(01:28:51):
skill than are a score. And you know where again
the idea that maybe maybe the music coming from the location,
Maybe the music's coming from the characters, maybe the you know,
and maybe sometimes you know, the cheapest room in the house. Okay,
we need an audience to feel this, so let's put

(01:29:12):
this kind of music on to let the audience know
that we're leading them. Right. So I guess what you
could say is you have music that comes from the location,
you have music that comes from the characters, you have
music that comes from the director. But this is coming
directly from the composer and now has nothing to do
with what's going on, right, And yet it isn't that

(01:29:36):
level of excitement of this is awful, This is not
right at all, this is wrong, This is totally counter
to what's going on, which actually, often, as we were
talking about, can work really well in the long run.
But I was stunned. I was stunned, beloved, beloved composer.

(01:29:58):
And it's uh, I mean, it's its highest to lowest bad,
is what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (01:30:06):
But think of the blob.

Speaker 4 (01:30:07):
Okay, if you are so obsessed love that.

Speaker 3 (01:30:12):
The song is so not for a sci fi horror
movie of a thing that comes to town and eats everybody,
it is well, but then it is because you look
at it now ninety years later, it's ridiculous. The movie's
dumb as toast. Uh. Steve McQueen's a teenager, what like

(01:30:33):
all of it is? And to save it, it's it's frozen,
So we send it up to the Arctic where it
actually warms up. Sometimes it comes above freezing up there.
So that wasn't really a great plan on how to
stop a murderous piece of blob. But then to have
that theme song that clearly he didn't see the movie.

(01:30:54):
I don't even think you read the script. They just
called Burt bakrap. Could you do the opening number two
movie called the Blob? Got it? Thanks the Bear of
the Blob? It creeps and creeps and goat like, it's
so unbelievable.

Speaker 4 (01:31:10):
Just real quick though, the sting and the way we were.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
This, Yeah, Marvin Hamlet did do that.

Speaker 4 (01:31:16):
I was like, I was like, what the Robert Redford film?
Am I thinking of? You know, it's the.

Speaker 2 (01:31:20):
Sting anyway, So I'm just saying, beloved movie, beloved composer.

Speaker 4 (01:31:26):
We're talking about the Blob, right.

Speaker 2 (01:31:28):
Hius, Well I'm talking about but Cassidy.

Speaker 5 (01:31:32):
Cassidy, Yeah, for the rangp Phone and I he wrote
that song for that movie, right, yes, just that became
kind of a pop hit.

Speaker 2 (01:31:43):
It's a huge Yeah, it's a huge hit.

Speaker 4 (01:31:45):
And it's funny.

Speaker 5 (01:31:46):
It's like I wrote that for that song or for
that movie. And I was like, oh, I thought they
because when I saw the movie, I thought they ham
fisted it into the movie like, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:31:55):
They sure did one way or another, you know that.

Speaker 5 (01:31:57):
They were like, write us a score, and he's like,
and I've got a pop song.

Speaker 2 (01:32:01):
Hey ride bicycles. Yeah, that's right, I've got a bicycle.
He really talk about how it looked. That's what it was, Dean.
It wasn't about the song. It was Kirk Douglas looking
at Paul Newman and oh my god, look he looks
so free. And of the people riding a bicycle like that,

(01:32:22):
I could look like that.

Speaker 3 (01:32:24):
This is this is what's popular right now with the kids.

Speaker 4 (01:32:28):
I got wheelers, two wheelers.

Speaker 3 (01:32:31):
I bought a bike today.

Speaker 2 (01:32:32):
It's it's an interesting it's an interesting kind of conversation
for people who don't like to deal strictly in the positive.
You know films, good films with with scores that are
just just awful, and that's one of them. So, uh, Dean,

(01:32:59):
you want to close with Night of the Hunter. What
did you want to talk about with Night of the Hunter?

Speaker 3 (01:33:03):
Well, have you seen it lately? Of course, it's like
the first serial killer.

Speaker 2 (01:33:07):
Movie I rewatched all of As you know, Robert Mitcham,
the actor and my father most closely resembled.

Speaker 3 (01:33:16):
Fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:33:18):
He died and we watched Farewell, My Lovely Together, Oh
and every day in addition to watching, as I mentioned
last week in Decent Proposal, my father in the week's
leading up to his death, every day he watched Indecent Proposal,
but he also watched El Dorado with Mitcham and John

(01:33:39):
Wayne Howard, Hawk's remake of his own rio Bravo.

Speaker 3 (01:33:44):
Isn't that something?

Speaker 1 (01:33:45):
So?

Speaker 2 (01:33:45):
Knight of the Hunter the only film ever directed by
Charles Lawton.

Speaker 3 (01:33:52):
And I could see why because this thing is fairly
uneven and a bit lumpy. I'm gonna say is.

Speaker 2 (01:34:00):
This I'm gonna say you're wrong on both those scores.
Let's see how high in the top ten greatest films
of all times?

Speaker 3 (01:34:06):
Six the ending? Do you remember how this thing ended?

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
Are you gonna spoil you guys?

Speaker 4 (01:34:12):
See you guys on a bicycle?

Speaker 3 (01:34:15):
Now?

Speaker 4 (01:34:16):
No town riot, Here's sorry.

Speaker 5 (01:34:19):
Sorry little side note that sort of related, but serial
killers and music. That song Goodbye Horses in Silence of
the Lambs is an example of like the perfect song
put into a movie where the rest was basically scored
and it's just so flipping creepy.

Speaker 3 (01:34:39):
Where's that show up? I don't remember that.

Speaker 5 (01:34:41):
In uh when when he's in the mirror and he's dancing, Oh,
and he's putting on the human skin elements and or
you see what's.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
Going Oh yeah, yeah, I think actually disturbing.

Speaker 4 (01:34:53):
Amazing. You should re rewatch that movie.

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):
It's okay, okay, okay. So the twenty fifth greatest film
of all time on the Sight and Sound poll from
fifty five and as we know, there's huge recency bias
right now, so twenty fifth is pretty incredible and forty
first on the list of greatest films of all time
according to movie directors. Uh yeah, tied with Jacques Tatis

(01:35:18):
Blade Playtime, Oh, Robert Broussol's A Man Escaped and Fellini's
Lestrata Wow, and Antonioni's lav On Toura.

Speaker 3 (01:35:28):
It looked great. I mean he's shot in black and white,
his contrast, the lighting spectacular, the camera work amazing. Shelley
Winters in the car.

Speaker 2 (01:35:37):
Oh my god, she is so good, so good.

Speaker 3 (01:35:40):
In this, and just the shot of the reeds under
the water, and then there's her body and her hair.
I don't know how they got that.

Speaker 4 (01:35:47):
Where are you are you ruining it? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:35:50):
Yeah, I'm ruining it. Yeah, all right, it's the serial killer.
We don't from the beginning, We don't from the get go.
So and then the kids run off and he's further
than you need to Well, okay, well here's what I
don't understand. The final scenes of courtroom seeing and they

(01:36:11):
and the kid is supposed to point to the preacher
and go, is that is that the killer? And he
doesn't do it. So then the town's enraged and they
and Lilli and Gish has to take all the adopted
kids to the bus stop to flee town because now
the entire town is rioting. And there's a shot where

(01:36:33):
they come down the street and you could see them
crossing the street. Clearly the riotous crowd would see them fleeing,
and then the camera keeps panning and you just see
the preacher being arrested and driven off to another prison,
and they're yelling bluebeard at that kid. I'm not sure
what blue beard means in nineteen fifty five in terms

(01:36:54):
of are you betraying your civic duty by not pointing
at the guy who's the murderer, or but the guy's
arrested anyway. It was so confusing and ending and there
was no one there to explain it to me, and
I read up and nobody had an explanation of like
that final scene. And that's why I was hoping I

(01:37:15):
could talk to Phil who could explain it to you.

Speaker 2 (01:37:17):
Well, now I'm gonna need to watch it again. But
I do know that a lot of its visual references,
and then increasingly its textual references, are direct nods to
silent film classics.

Speaker 3 (01:37:32):
Oh are they now?

Speaker 4 (01:37:35):
Does the crowd get violent?

Speaker 3 (01:37:37):
Yeah? Yeah, they're crashing, they're banging stuff. I mean they're
first at a diner and they're banging against the window,
going there's a bluebird. And then she has to get
all the kids up and run from the diner and
walk very quickly to the bus stop or the bus
station to flee town. And you don't see them getting
to the bus station. You see them walking in front

(01:37:58):
of the riding crowd and the riding crowd and then
people are like running to the riot. It's like, yes,
I guess it's a metaphor, like a reference, a textual
reference to a silent film where the town riots or the.

Speaker 2 (01:38:14):
But I also would wonder what's going on in nineteen
fifty five that.

Speaker 3 (01:38:19):
Would cause some of who doesn't testify at a court case.

Speaker 2 (01:38:23):
I mean, isn't that aren't we right in the McCarthy era.

Speaker 3 (01:38:28):
Well, I guess we are too, right. Yeah, so pointing
that finger is that the guy? Because the kids staring stoneface,
and then a finger of an unseen prosecutor just comes
in front of the kid's face and goes, is that
the guy? And the kid continues to look straight ahead,
and then the crowd in the courtroom goes blue bear
that bastard, Get that kid.

Speaker 2 (01:38:49):
It's interesting because the movie positions itself as a movie
about kind of an evangelical or literally an evangelical good
versus evil discussion.

Speaker 3 (01:39:01):
Right, because he has he has love and hate tattooed
on his knuckles like the first time and love is
good and he does that.

Speaker 2 (01:39:08):
Whole doesn't doesn't Spike Lee revive that in uh do
the right thing? Yeah? Okay, Now I'm really intrigued, And
I could also understand why the film the reputation gets
better and better. I do cinema in two thousand and eight,

(01:39:28):
they're writers, right, this is the the the French film
journal where we get the film author theory. They had
the second greatest film of all time behind citizen k Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:39:41):
I cannot see. But if I if I'm looking at
as a metaphor for for McCarthyism.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
But I would also say, I would also say, the
reason that perhaps it continues to resonate greater and greater
and have better and better reception is that, boy, the
world that we're in now, right, this sort of commentary
on mom righteousness.

Speaker 3 (01:40:10):
And love and hate, this this.

Speaker 2 (01:40:13):
And the and the and and who's gonna care about
the most vulnerable among us? Too? Right? Right?

Speaker 3 (01:40:21):
Because she's the protected. Lillian Gish is so great, uh,
particularly where she stays up all night with her gun
and he's out there singing his preacher song so creepy, fantastic,
and they sing and they're actually singing the same song together,
but her lyrics are slightly different than his, and then
you realize, oh, he's a he's not a preacher at all.

Speaker 2 (01:40:44):
It's like he it's a Uh. Look, first of all, Lawton,
it's the only movie he directs. It's is it fair
to like? I feel like with Stanley Cortez's cinematography, it's
almost this is where expressionism meets its fullest expression, right, Like,

(01:41:08):
this is where the road of decades of German expressionism
into film noir. This is where it hits its apex.
Not to say that it's the best shot film, you know,
per se, I don't mean that, though it's incredibly shot.
Stanley Cortez who filmed it, I mean, among other things,
he did magnificent ambersons, for God's sakes, So the photography

(01:41:30):
is spectacular. But I just mean that, like it's almost
in and of itself a look back and a commentary
on what expressionism has meant in the movies.

Speaker 3 (01:41:43):
Absolutely. You look at the bedroom set where he finally
pulls out his switchblade on chilly winter's and the top
of the ceiling is like the top of a house,
so it's a Mansard roof. There's two forty five degree
angle lines and a window shining light in, but the

(01:42:05):
two lines just black out the screen. So you have
these two pitch black and not even reference to like
there might be a wall. There's no detail in there.
It's just two black triangles on the upper half of
the frame, pushing all of your attention into this two
hander plus a window with the light and the bed,

(01:42:26):
and it's like it's stunning. It's almost like the samubilists
in that German expression one where all the sets.

Speaker 2 (01:42:34):
Are kind of wonky Cowgary.

Speaker 3 (01:42:36):
Yeah, the Night of Doctor Calgary.

Speaker 2 (01:42:38):
The cabinet, the cabin cabinet of Doctor Calgary.

Speaker 3 (01:42:41):
Yes, like it's almost the set, the bedroom set is
almost referencing that movie.

Speaker 2 (01:42:48):
Although we played anti heroes, right, I think, Uh, this
is certainly the most full the first full on villain role,
out and out villain role for Mitcham And uh, of course, uh,
Cape Fear would be a handful of years later, but
this is this is the first one. And I think about, like, again,

(01:43:11):
Lawton only movie, this guy ever directs arguably the greatest
screen actor of all time, right, And and I think
it's really interesting for him to take an actor who's,
you know, so handsome and so likable, so innately likable
and funny and cool, and to cast him and say,

(01:43:35):
all right, let's pull out the darkest stuff, the ugliest
stuff in human nature, and have it be embodied by
someone who's so innately good looking and and you know,
and charming and will use all of it for it.
It's the kind of fiend role again that I think
Redford was talking about with that he always wanted to

(01:43:58):
get to play. And so Lawton doing picking Mitcham though,
is so funny, because of course Lawton was an actor
who and I'm not saying this pejoratively, this is literally
he would play some of these figures. He was maybe
the ugliest actor ever to be on screen Quasimoto. I mean,

(01:44:18):
these were the literal roles that he would play, but
so often so kind of corpulent and ugly and disgusting
and yet revealing gold the inner humanity, and so latin
the director flips the script on that, and so's okay,

(01:44:40):
I've specialized in showing the humanity, the decency looking not attractive,
right now, let's show the indecency of the attractive.

Speaker 3 (01:44:54):
Yeah, everybody charmed by it. I mean that's the thing
that all this town folk are like, Oh, this preacher
is great, what a great guy. So nic Oh my gosh,
you'd be lucky to marry you that guy. But it's
just the last three to five minutes is so John
dropping Lee smack. What a change of tone this thing?

Speaker 2 (01:45:16):
There is a Yeah. I needed to watch it again
because when I watched it, I didn't watch it with
lil I think she was a little burnt out on
Robert mitchell movies at that point. I don't know how
that's possible. Mitcham did make a lot of really bad movies,
and he was almost always interesting in them, And as

(01:45:39):
we talked about Dean might really have been one of
those actors. I would also put Bert Lancaster in there,
but might have been one of those actors who was
good in more different kinds of movies right than almost
any other actor. But so she I didn't want to
see it, and then it seemed like, this doesn't seem pleasant,

(01:46:01):
this seems very unpleasant. Didn't want to watch it with me,
And then she came in at one point where there
is such a h almost I not surrealist, but but
kind of almost like dreamlike, intentionally dreamlike thing where you
you see the falsity of the sets, the force, perspective

(01:46:24):
of the writer in the distance. It's all so like
aged you mentioned. You mentioned Kalagari, So I would say
that this might have been a reference to like Phantom Carriage,
the great Swedish silent film, and so again all these
references to classical silent film. And she saw that and

(01:46:46):
she went, oh, okay, I wanna I'm wanna watch this wait,
I want to watch so I need to watch this
again with her and we'll discuss it. But Night of
the Hunter, Yes, what pedigree this movie also? I mean
written by James ag The movie comes out after he
dies at at age forty five in New York City.

(01:47:09):
He would get up posthumous nineteen fifty eight Pulitzer Prize.
But he had written of Course African Queen, which was
a huge, huge hit and success, and he was a
very beloved novelist, attorney, screenwriter.

Speaker 1 (01:47:28):
Guests of View or Chillpack, Hollywood Hours, Stay at the
Baldwin Hills motor end promotional consideration paid for by Empire
State Gas. From farm to pump, We've got great gas.

Speaker 2 (01:47:45):
Belated spoiler alert

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