May 3, 2025 • 32 mins
In this explosive episode of The Hollywood in Toto Podcast, we dissect late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s shocking interview with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—an exchange that veers beyond comedy and into the realm of fat shaming and political hypocrisy. Was it just tasteless humor, or a calculated move to push a deeper leftist agenda? We break down what Kimmel’s approach really says about mainstream media bias, and why this same media helped cover up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline during the 2024 election cycle.
Plus, we go deep into cinematic history with author and film historian Nat Segaloff, who joins us to talk about his powerful new book, The Rambo Report. From First Blood to the explosive sequels, the Rambo franchise isn't just action-packed entertainment—it’s a mirror held up to Hollywood's evolving politics, American values, and our collective view of patriotism, masculinity, and military heroism.
Don’t miss this hard-hitting conversation that peels back the layers of pop culture and politics in ways no mainstream outlet dares to
--------------------------
"The Rambo Report" - https://www.amazon.com/Rambo-Report-Films-Three-Legend/dp/0806543574
Subscribe to HiT's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HollywoodinToto
Read Hollywood in Toto - https://www.hollywoodintoto.com
Lend a hand: Leave a tip! https://hollywood-in-toto.ck.page/products/hollywood-in-toto-tip-jar
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto
Get free 'Virtue Bombs' chapter: https://hollywood-in-toto.kit.com/76d165e450
Read: "Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul" https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Bombs-Hollywood-Woke-Lost/dp/1637580991
Plus, we go deep into cinematic history with author and film historian Nat Segaloff, who joins us to talk about his powerful new book, The Rambo Report. From First Blood to the explosive sequels, the Rambo franchise isn't just action-packed entertainment—it’s a mirror held up to Hollywood's evolving politics, American values, and our collective view of patriotism, masculinity, and military heroism.
Don’t miss this hard-hitting conversation that peels back the layers of pop culture and politics in ways no mainstream outlet dares to
--------------------------
"The Rambo Report" - https://www.amazon.com/Rambo-Report-Films-Three-Legend/dp/0806543574
Subscribe to HiT's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HollywoodinToto
Read Hollywood in Toto - https://www.hollywoodintoto.com
Lend a hand: Leave a tip! https://hollywood-in-toto.ck.page/products/hollywood-in-toto-tip-jar
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto
Get free 'Virtue Bombs' chapter: https://hollywood-in-toto.kit.com/76d165e450
Read: "Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul" https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Bombs-Hollywood-Woke-Lost/dp/1637580991
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This week in the Hollywood and Toto Podcast, Jimmy Kimmel
goes back to work for his masters, the Democratic Party,
but in a pretty unusual way. And we talked to
author Nat Segelof about his new book, The Rambo Report.
Five Movies, One Legendary Character. I think you're gonna like
this conversation. So many cool behind the scenes stories and yeah,
(00:21):
Rambo matters. Then and now, welcome to the Hollywood and
Toto Podcast. Entertainment news and reviews, without doubt, woke Hollywood, narrative,
free speech, free expression. Now that's entertainment.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And here's your host, Award winning film critic Christian Toto.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Jimmy Kimmel has a curious side hustle.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
He's been busy since twenty oh three with Jimmy Kimmel
Live on ABC and hey, Jimmy Kimmel, that's a pretty
impressive run. Late Night is brutal, and he's been doing
it for quite some time. But he also does work
on the side for the Democratic Party. Now, we saw
that last year pretty aggressively when he not only co
mceed a fundraiser for President Joe Biden, he covered up
(01:19):
President Biden's decline. Now, there was an epic freeze up
of President Biden during that event, and later on on
National TV, Jimmy Kimmel said, oh no, he's fine. Don't
trust your eyes. Nothing's wrong. Go away.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It's a cheap fake sounds.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
Try not something so big.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Now. I don't know what the DNC is paying Jimmy Kimmel.
Maybe these are in kind contributions. But if there is
some sort of payment going forward, he deserved double that week.
That was just going above and beyond the call of duty.
Epic work, Jimmy Kimmel. If you can lie like that
for us, anything's possible. So bravo. Little golf clap there,
(02:01):
and he's been doing it again just this week now.
Kimmel recently interviewed Governor J. B. Pritzker. He's the overseeing Illinois.
There's some problems in that state. But of course the
two of them didn't go into that at all. It's
more of a friendly, positive chat. But what they did
talk about is Pritzker's weight.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Now, Pritzker is a heavy set fellow. There's no escape
in that. There's no avoiding that. And in recent weeks,
President Trump has made fun of that and as Ben
Shapiro often says, that's bad Trump because you don't make
fun of someone's weight, you make fun of their policies.
You make fun of the things they say. And very
recently Pritsker has said some terrible things. He played it,
(02:48):
took a page out of Rachel Zegler's playbook, which you
never do, and said the Republican should never know peace. Now,
when a ding bat Starlett says that it's embarrassing, it's
bad pr and it could potentially hurt their movies, which
it did with snow White. When a governor says that,
when somewhat of national significance says that, well, that's a
(03:10):
terrible thing. It's cruel, and it could inspire violence. Of course,
the legacy media they reviewed it, or they talked about it,
oh so briefly, and then they moved on, no clarifications,
no questioning how terrible that kind of a sentiment is.
And listen, legacy media is the legacy media. You just
(03:31):
can't hate him enough. They stain their legacy on a
daily basis. And this is just another example. What is
relevant is the total silence from the mainstream media. So
obviously Jimmy Kimmel wasn't going to talk up that particular
part of pritzker shtick.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
He's going to talk about other things. But one of
the things that two of.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Them focused on directly, and which seemed odd at first
when you don't at first glance, is Pritsker's wait now again,
Trump made fun of it. Not cool, But then Jimmy
Kimmel made fun of it again and again and again.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Hey, all of a sudden, you can't.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
You can fat shame to JB. Pritzker's face. He's sitting
right there. They're doing fat jokes. I thought fat shamming
was just not really cool anymore. You can't make movies
like Shallow how for example, you can't make fun of
people's weight. It's just cruel. It's problematic. So why is
Kimmel doing it to the governor's face?
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I suggested that maybe we come up with some nicknames
for you then you can give to him, because you
just don't want to lame one. You know, nobody wants
to lame nicknames. Here's the list. JB Pizza mm hmm.
I like this, JB back ribs, JB back up. Could
(04:50):
be a song with that too, you know, jb lt
uh huh j biggie.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
The governor is smiling about it, laughing about it, just
sitting there like a good little victim. What's going on?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
We are so confused.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Well, here's exactly what's going on. These things are in
an accident.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
When it comes to late night television, we have a
lot of pre interviews. That means the producers, the people
behind the scenes will pull aside a guess and say, hey,
have you been on vacation recently? Do you have any
funny stories or anything you can kind of focus on
that would be charming and delightful for our audience. That
happens all the time. It's a normal part of late
(05:32):
night TV. So all those great interviews, they're really I
don't want to say pre plan but certainly a thought
going into it. There's a momentum to it that is
not organic, Okay, just is what it is. And that's
doubly so. When a political candidate or a governor comes
on a show like Jimmy Kimme Alive, they have planned
this out. They are not going to throw fat jokes
(05:55):
at the governor out of the blue, unacceptable with never
happened conceivable. So the two parties clearly colluded on this.
We're gonna tell fat jokes. We're going to embrace this
issue because they want to defang it. They want to
make fun of Trump for saying it, and they want
to show that Pritzker he can roll with the punches.
(06:16):
He's fine. He can laugh at himself.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
Ha ha ha.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And if he doesn't lose weight between now in twenty
twenty eight, when we're assuming he may run for the presidency,
well he's already accepted this issue. He's embraced this issue.
He's discarded this issue, and we can all laugh about it. Heck,
he's just like us. So that's what Jimmy Kimmel does.
He is a shill for the Democrats. He's proven it
(06:41):
again and again and again. He recently told Rolling Stone
magazine that his show now is a place for people
to scream. We just lost Ruth by the great comic actress,
and she was just all about the funny. It just
seems like the complete opposite of what a Ruth Buzzy
would do is what Jimmy Kimmel's doing now. He cares
about partisanship, he cares about scoring points, he cares about
(07:04):
pushing Democrats forward. He cares about attacking Trump, and the
one thing he doesn't care as much about it's laughter.
It's comedy. There's screaming and there's laughter. Kimmel wants to scream. Well,
that's wonderful, and I just don't know how as a
late night comedian that really flies enough people still watch
(07:26):
the show. It's I guess it's therapeutic for liberals. But
at the end of the day, you would think that
a late night host would be all about the funny.
Not Jimmy Kimmel. It's all about his masters, the Democrats,
and he will do whatever they want him to do
to make sure that that message comes forward.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
And that's not remotely funny.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
In the field, we had a code of honor.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Who watch my back? I watch yours back? Here we
got nothing, sir? Do we get to win this time?
Day Tree, First Blood. That's the wit and wisdom of
John Rambo, of course, the star of five action movies
spreading across decades, famously played by Sylvester Stallone, one of
(08:20):
his two iconic heroes, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo. Very
different figures, very different souls, and endless conversations about what
they mean in the big picture. Sometimes they overlap directly
with pop culture. Sometimes they intersected with politics. Sometimes presidents
name check them. Along the Way, that's the Rambo history,
(08:43):
that's the Rambo legacy. And it's all covered in a
new book, The Rambo Report, my author Nat Segeloff. Now
what Segeloff does is he captures all five films, gives
us descriptions of what happened on screen, talks to the
author who first wrote First Blood and who set this
whole project in motion. So much more, even the actors
(09:03):
who are considered to play John Ramble Along the Way,
how Kirk Douglas intersected with the franchise. Oh so briefly.
There's so much interesting information here. And if you're a
movie fan, if you're a Rambo fan, if you love
Sylvester Stallone in particular, there's lots of great details about him,
the way he worked behind the scenes. Listen, he's a
(09:24):
big star, and he's got a big ego, and he
got stuff done and it's fascinating to behold. And for
all these reasons, I wanted to have Nat on the show. Now,
Nat is a published author. He's got so many books
to his credit. He's been a movie publicist, he's been
a professor, just everything you can imagine. Nat has done.
A couple of his more memorable titles include The Extorcist Legacy,
(09:47):
Fifty Years of Fear, and Say Hello to My Little Friend,
A Century of Scarface. Great books and great titles too.
So I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Nat about
the Rambo Report, about John Rambo's, specifically Sevester Stallone's character,
and why we're still talking about it today, and we
are and we should be well. Natt, thanks for joining
(10:09):
the show. Now you've done so much writing around Hollywood.
I'm curious why Rambo and why now. It's a great topic,
and I think at any point along the way along
this franchise you could have tackled it. But it does
feel kind of like a zeitgeide moments in a way,
just because of Stallone, because of politics, because of Hollywood,
(10:29):
because of this figure who still remains so much of
a part of us. Talk a little bit sort of
entering this project because it sounds like a slam dunk
for me. But you're you're the writer.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
What was the impetus for this book?
Speaker 4 (10:41):
A couple of the then diagrams had to overlap before
it actually worked out to write the Rambo Report. One
of them was that my publisher seems to like me
writing about franchises. I've done the exiorousist legacy about the
Ectorsis books, I've done Scarface. I'm talking about with them
with some more. And publishers have two things that make
them really around. One of them is nice even numbered
(11:02):
anniversaries of movies and Rambo is forty. The second one
is forty and franchises, and I seem to be branded
at Kensington Citadel as the franchise guy. The other thing
was that David Morrell, who wrote the original novel in
nineteen seventy two First Blood, is an old friend of mine.
We've known each other for years since Sterling Syllafon introduced us,
and it never occurred to either of us maybe we
(11:22):
should sit down and do the actual Rambo book. And
the third one, of course, is the notion of Rambo
being a kind of a symbol for American involvement in
other cultures and other countries around the world quite literally
for the last fifty years. And I thought I could
combine them all and write about Rambo's influence and also,
as it turns out, write about veterans and veterans affairs
(11:44):
and talk about the very important issue of PTSD, which
is addressed in the book.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
You know, when you think about the Rambo saga at
the very beginning in the original book form he dies,
obviously you had to kind of change that. This is Hollywood,
and certainly Stallone had a a I for sequels. Talk
a little bit about sort of that pivotal moment, and
do you think that the powers that be beyond Stallone
(12:10):
suspected the longeoparty this character would have.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
It was a surprise to everybody, including Stallone and the producers.
In the original First Blood, John Rambo comes back from Vietnam.
He's searching for the last of his connections and a
man named Golroy, who Delmar was supposedly the last person
served in his platoon. He's gone sheriff raps the amount
of town and Rambo says, I'm not going to take
it anymore. And it's really the first time that an
(12:34):
American soldier comes back in wages war against America, in
this case in America who didn't appreciate the veterans, which
was very much the case in the early nineteen seventies
that was the genesis of First Blood. At the end
of First Blood, Rambo dies. Now, when the movie was made,
they put a scene at the end, and by the way,
I'm not concerned about spoilers, because if you haven't seen
(12:54):
the movie by now, tough you should have seen.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
That's on you.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Rambo is supposedly killed by Colonel Troutman, the man who
created it, which is a kind of a poetic closure.
But in the movie they have it so that Rambo
actually helps Troutman kill him in a scene that was
deleted but is available on sub versions on the DVD.
And after they shot that scene, Stallone huddled with director
Ted Kakkiff and said, you know, I think Rambo has
(13:21):
to live because I don't want to give the message
to veterans that the only way out of your problem
is to die, which I thought was a terrifically uplifting
thing and a very wise thing to do. And so
they shot the other ending while they were up there.
Now there's some dispute as to whether they all went
back and shot it later or there, but both Krenna
and everyone else says, no, we shot it there. We
did the ending as it is now in the film.
(13:42):
But of course when they decided to make a sequel,
they said, well, it's a good thing we didn't kill him.
And in the book, when David Morrell was novelizing these
scripts for numbers two and three, he wasn't sure how
to bring Rambo back because it wasn't like, you know,
the Bride of Rakenstein when the monster falls through the floorboard.
He simply said, very simp In my book, Rambo dies.
(14:02):
In the movies, he lives, and then we're off on
the Adventure of Rambo First Blood Part two. So the
sequel wasn't really in visions at the time. They had
no idea the film was going to take off like that.
But what it did, they said, we'd better make a sequel.
And then the whole scrambling around to make the sequel.
It's part of the story in the Rambo Report, how
these guys really had a tiger by the tail.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
The book really does a grade of illustrating the behind
the scenes chaos, the star power, the deals, the wheeling
and dealing. But I was curious drill down a little
more into why First Blood was so unique. You mentioned
a soldier basically the clearing war in his own country.
This wasn't a typical action movie by any stretch. I mean,
(14:44):
Stallone doesn't speak that much talk about how unique it
was at the time, and I think that's such a
different beast than the other Rambo films, but it is
such a unique property.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
There's a couple of differences between the book and the
movie that I think answered the question you just raised.
The book, which was really one of the first action novels,
and in First Blood was really one of the modern
action film remembers nineteen eighty two, but they weren't making
a lot of shoot him up films. That was really
one of the first action films in the modern sense
of a hero going out and doing something. And that
(15:15):
is that in the book, Rambo kills everybody. In the movie,
he doesn't kill anyone in the movie. They kept him
kind of pure in a way. Anybody who dies, whether
it's gulf falling out of the helicopter, or guys who
try to run him off the road or others, everyone
dies by their own folly. That was important to keep
Rambo almost pure. Now, he does cause a lot of
other trouble, which is why he's on the rock Pilot
(15:37):
at the beginning of the second film, but they wanted
to keep his character more honest, more pure, and only
reactive to other people who are doing things to him.
That I think was a very wise decision, and because
the great actors know how to react more than act
it was perfect crist Alone, who, nevertheless, I think, turns
into just a spectacular job, especially in the first half
(15:58):
of the film, and I don't think he's been given
enough credit for it.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah, you know, he's such an interesting presence because he's
has this Polluca like image, handsome, muscular, and yet through
the years, I've just always been impressed by how smart,
how intuitive is I mean, I don't think you get
to be a movie star and a TV star into
your late seventies without having real a sense of star power,
what the public wants.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And I can go on and on. What's your sense
of stallone?
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Because in the book you see ego, you see control,
you see wisdom, you see intelligence. It has it's about Rambo,
But your book does really capture stallone in a fascinating way.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
You know, there's a great line in Billy Wiler's and
Charles Bracketts Sunset Boulevard. When everybody talks about Norman Desmond
and Cecil B. De Mill says, you know, a dozen
press agents working over time can do terrible things to
the human spirit. Stallone has been Claudette grab that in
the line so many times over the years, and by
the way, some of them is quite warranted. I think
(16:58):
Christopher Reeves said, for two years after you be come
a star, you don't go to the bathroom. I think
Stallone probably made some enemies along the way and was
very difficult. But let's face it, he was the guy
on whose shoulders these films were resting. He can't take
any chances. He's the guy who're going to criticize if
he doesn't say hello to a crew member one day,
they'll say, oh, well, Sli is just being stuck up,
(17:18):
when in fact he has a lot of stuff to
go through. Now. Mind you, he also sometimes doesn't treat
people very well. There were tons of firings on his films,
and he wanted his certain vision to be exercised, and
he sometimes did not achieve the vision himself, so he
would get a rid of other people to do it.
That's what happens if you're a star. Unfortunately, but he
also makes hundreds of millions of dollars for people, so
(17:40):
that is tolerated. I think his transition from First Blood,
which is kind of an interesting, downplayed film until it
takes off to the other Rambo films, really talks about
how Stillone himself became a major action star. You know,
when they put him in First Blood, he was not
a major star. He was just the who was in
Rocky and no one figured that he could play this
(18:02):
action figure. But he rose to the occasion, to say
the least.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
The franchise really evolved in many many ways and became
kind of, you know, in some eyes, a gung ho
Reagan esque franchise in ways that don't really align with
the first movie in the film, but talk about how
that image evolved and how it overlapped with the political
(18:28):
imaginations at the time.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
It's interesting you mentioned Reagan because the President in nineteen
eighty five touted how wonderful First Blood, Too Rambo was
and how he said Reagan was obviously a Republican because
he's able to go around and enforced things, and Stallone
instantly reacted and said, Rambo is not political. Whatever Stallone's
views were, it was quite different. But Rambo was not political,
and he still is never political in the entire series.
(18:52):
He's fighting for a cause. Now it may be a
loss cause in some cases, but it's a cause that
is a point of honor. He's going back to rescue
his creator, who's going back to rescue his adoptive daughter.
In the fifth film, he's working with some missionaries in Burma,
and other times he's the lone man. He's charing going
(19:13):
across the river. He's the man who is bringing some
sort of solution to pain. And that is really the
tragedy of Rambo as a character and as a man.
He's not really at home unless he's fighting somebody. What
a horrible fate to confer upon somebody. He's defined by
the number of people that he kills.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
One of the things I found so fascinating about your
book is that a lot of the cultural conversations about
the film, how it overlap with the real world about
Sta Loan, it felt like it could have been written
that these fights were happening today and not in the
nineteen eighties or even or and beyond. Then did you
were you intrigued by that part of it? How sort
(19:53):
of some of the cultural conversations around the film and
its real world implications. It felt very modern to me.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
One of the most difficult things that film critics have
to do, and that film students sometimes have trouble grasping,
is to put themselves into the context in which a
particular old film was released. In fact, when I was
teaching film criticism at Boston University, that was the biggest trick.
They would see wide Shoulders on Rosalind Russell in a
nineteen forty one movie, and they say, how I O
(20:21):
update the film was well, yeah, I was out of date.
It's forty years old. But that's the trick that critics
have to do. And when people watch the Rambo movies,
which are very much relics of their time and yet
describe their time, they have to remember what was going
on in the world. I didn't set out to write
a political book, but I knew that I could follow
Rambo through fifty years and see the history of Americas
(20:42):
intervention in other cultures and subsuming them if I simply
wrote about what the films were about. In the first one,
He's Come Home, and the second one goes back to Vietnam,
and the third one, He's in Afghanistan, then he goes
to Burma, then he goes into Mexico. Each of these
describes a place that I am Erica found themselves either
entangled or invading in one way or another, culturally or militarily.
(21:06):
And Rambo in this case, was the symbol of that.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
It is fascinating, you know, And I think along the way,
when you have an artist like Stallone who's so near
and dear to a character much like Rockey of Balboa,
I don't see him phoning it in. I sense a
real attachment to this figure. Like you mentioned, Stallone's personal
politics maybe not aligned with Rambo, and he kept those
(21:31):
two apart. Talk about how Stallone has managed to be
successful for so long.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I'm intrigued to that.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I've enjoyed the first two seasons of Tulsa King. It's
not a great show, it's not art, but it's wildly entertaining,
and he's so good in it. Just talk about how
do you make what keeps a star like Stallone ticking
in a way?
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Listen, If I could answer that, I'd be the star
and he'd be writing books. You know, How does anybody
know how Willy Wonka makes the best chocolates. It's something
that he is and does that he has that he
recognized it himself and managed to pull out and sharpen.
I don't know how it's done. We search for them
all the time, and he's one of the last few
big effing stars around.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Yeah. I don't want to give too much away, but
there's sort of a sub theme in the book where
Stallone had many interviews with a certain journalist, and it's
worth reading the book for that alone. It's so precious
and so interesting and I don't I don't want to
give much more of it away, but it's I just
found that particularly fascinating as someone who's interviewed actors over
the time, and obviously you have as well.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
I'm hoping to get a call from Stallone saying, well,
what did you write about me? You know, he wasn't
available for me to interview him. He wasn't available, as
a nice euphemism for his agents stood in my way,
and believe me, I tried over and over again. Yeah,
one agent said how much will you pay? And another
agent said, he's working on his memoirs, but it's no
reason he couldn't talk to me for two hours His memoirs,
(22:58):
by the way, are called The Steps and it's coming
out in October. But there was so much information about
him anyway out there, and I was able to obtain
interviews that were shot for one of the earlier DVD
releases which have never been released for some of the
actors like Richard Quenna and Brian Denny who have since passed,
and I was able to use that material with permissions
(23:18):
and with clearances and revealed them for the first time
in the book. I mean, there's nothing scandalous, but there
certainly has a lot of stuff that I think is
interesting in the Rambo Report.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Absolutely we mentioned prior to the MIC's going on. I
really felt you can hear Stallone's voice throughout the book.
So even though you didn't get him per se, you've
had so many sort of archival interviews that really his
voice is ever present. Do you think that, looking back
at the franchise, that we've misunderstood it to a certain
degree or it's one that's been analyzed aggressively over the
years for all the obvious reasons.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
But are there misconceptions we still have about the Rambo series?
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Well, there are, and there's one that we talked about
when you and I spoke for the book, and that
is a subject of racism, and I'm going to raise
it now because I think that's a false flat. The
films have been criticized in some ways as being racist,
but I'll tell you that's not the intent of the
filmmakers from everything I could tell from any of the
notes or anything else. And also, when you make a
war film and you set the war film in another country,
(24:15):
the people in that country are going to be of
a particular race. I mean, you want to Hamburger, you
go to McDonald's. That's where they live. And I think
now the other problem, and again we've discussed this because
you're an expert in this as well, if you create
a villain but don't give them enough textures or details
so they become just a paper villain. Yes, there is
(24:36):
the temptation to say that it was a racist construct.
But the villains in the Rambow films, the particular ones
that he fights Mano a mano, are quite well developed.
Whether it's the Vietnamese colonel, the Russians who intercede, the
enemies in Afghanistan, or those in Burma, these are pretty
well developed. But it's not every single character of one
hundreds of thousands who are there. So I don't believe
(24:57):
the intent of the films is racist. I believe they
can be misinterpreted that way, and certainly there's some people
to think so. But it's a movie, for Christ's sake,
it's a war film, and you're not going to make
the enemy the equal to our side, otherwise you'll never
care how it comes out.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, I think if you kind of cast dispersions on
films with one dimensional characters, you might be here all day,
because there's a lot of films that fall into that category.
I briefly mentioned Last Rambo, which I was disappointed by.
It felt short, It felt really aggressively violent in a
way that didn't really seem I mean, listen, Rambo is
always violent, but it just seemed over the top. I
(25:33):
want to maybe get put your film critic cat on,
what did you think of the last installment?
Speaker 4 (25:37):
Well, we agree completely. In fact, so does David Morrell,
who says the last Rambo film, Rambo five or Last Blood,
is not really a Rambo film. It's just well, frankly,
I think it's a Liam Neeson film. And he goes
out and get somebody his surrogate where his adoptive daughter
is kidnapped and overdosed by a Mexican drug and white
slavery cartel, and he goes into Mexico to try to Now,
(26:00):
the original script is actually quite elegant and beautifully written,
but it was cut down quite a bit to make
the movie. In the original script there's a woman journalist
who helps him. Well, her sister was taken previously by
the same group of people, and they're actually equals, but alone.
I guess didn't want to have a woman who was
fighting alongside him, although he didn't mind that. In Rambow two.
(26:22):
The other problem with the film is it is just
damned incoherent. If you look at some of the violence scenes.
Maybe they darkened them so they would get a more
beneficial motion picture rating. Maybe they cut I don't know
what it is, but when Rambo goes chasing the bad
guys in the tunnels under his house, you don't know
what's happening, and it's just an inept film. Although it
(26:42):
does have some wonderful moments in it, and I think
his hard to the right place, it simply doesn't work dramatically, certainly,
not what was left of it. Now, if you look
at the film in the international version, which is available
I believe on YouTube for a subscription, they add ten
minutes at the beginning, which really makes the whole film
make sense. In the beginning of Rambo five, there's a
(27:03):
huge monsoon. How there's a monsteron in Arizona. I've never
figured that out, but there is. And he tries to
rescue some hikers who are caught in the rain, and
he can't rescue them all, and he feels guilt that
he wasn't able to achieve his mission, and this guilt
drives him, especially motivates him to go into Mexico and
to try to rescue his adoptive daughter. Without that first
(27:24):
ten minutes, which doesn't look like a Rambo film, unfortunately,
but it is. That explains his character for the rest
of the movie, and it was folly to have cut
that out. But you can still see it if you
want to buy it on one of the streaming services.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
That's very frustrating, but I mean in Hollywood has literate
stories where certain great scenes are cut out or maybe
too much is put back in. Before let You Go,
Net franchises Never Die, Stalloon doesn't let go of franchises.
Certainly he has that instinct within him, and there has
been talk of prequels.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Do you know anything about that?
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Is there any sort of more recent chatter about extending
this seventy eight now? I think I don't think it'd
be wise on many levels Ramped to revisit the character directly.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
But is there any sense that this story could continue?
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Those rumors pop up every now and then that there's
going to be a sequel, a prequel or a television series.
You know, the son of Rambo is insteadied by his
father to go in and clean up. But as Stallone said,
if he was offered Rambo today, he'd have to say Pasadena,
which is his trendy way of saying pass. He probably
couldn't physically do it. If you look at them in
the fifth film, you're wondering if there is cgi there isn't.
(28:30):
I mean, a could youth in him somewhat. But I
think Sloane has reached the elder statement status where he
knows what he can do and he can be entertaining.
I can't speak for him, of course, but I do
believe that the Rambo franchise will live in memory rather
than a current experience.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
It'd be interesting to see what they do with the
modern political climate experiences across the globe. I mean, there
is that potential, but I also would hate to see
it without Stallone's fingerprints all over it.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I mean, it is his baby, and it seems like
it could be.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
I mean that they probably have rainbow handling drones. He
wouldn't go down, so it wouldn't happen. We've been defining
ourselves out of it.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Exactly before I let you go, do you have any
other books in the works or projects. I know you
wear many many hats. I'm just kind of curious what's
next on.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
Your Thank you for asking. When I was waiting for
Kennington to approve the manuscript, I said that for the
Rambow Report, I was able to write another book. And
the other book is called Bogart in Houston. It's about
Humphrey Bogart and John Houston, the six films they made together,
which include The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, and Treasure
(29:42):
of the Sierra Madre, and the adventures they had as people,
with their nine wives and with all sorts of things
in Hollywood. It's It's really a fun story book that
goes into six of the most interesting films ever made,
and I'm very proud of that. That's coming out in October.
October No and also in August, I have the paperback
(30:03):
edition of my Extorosist book, The Extresses Legacy, with an
additional chapter and more information about the most recent Excissis
film and that franchise.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Interesting. That's a that's a dispiriting chapter.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
I imagine, but a necessary one s Wellntt, thank you
so much for joining the show, for sharing your insights.
The book is The Rambo Report. I highly recommend it.
You know, I haven't seen the Rambo films in quite
some time. I'm going to be revisiting them very very soon.
Your book made me do that. But just so many
great behind the scenes stories you're not going to believe.
(30:37):
We didn't get into some of the actors who could
have been Rambo along the way. That is worth the
price of admission just by itself. But you can check
out the book The Rambo Report at Amazon or your
favorite bookseller. And Nat, thanks for sharing a light, shedding
a light on this amazing franchise and for.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
All the work you do behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
At Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
You know you're you're making these films come alive in
a unique way.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
Well, thank you Christian for this opportunity to speak to
your viewers and listeners, and also, by the way, for
your help in getting the book written, because some of
your comments are the most distute in the entire book.
And I want to thank you again so much for
your openness and for your willingness and for your point
of view and your beliefs. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
It's pure accidental, but but I appreciate it. Your character
actor of the week is Beth Grant. Well, let's say
for the show this week, again, thank you to Radio
America for having me as part of their great podcast lineup.
I do hope you'll check out hollywoodintoto dot com. It
is my website now and it's eleventh year and it's
(31:34):
got news, reviews, commentary, everything about pop culture from a
rite of center perspective. And you know, one of the
things I like to do on this show and on
the website too, is to connect dots that maybe aren't
being connected, to cover the stories that aren't being covered,
to find new and different angles to entertainment pieces that
are being talked about. Right now, but you know, maybe
(31:55):
this part of the conversation needs more volume. Put it
up to eleven, as they say in Spinal Tap? What
day did the Lord create Spinal Tap?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
And couldn't he have rested on that day too?
Speaker 1 (32:07):
And if you enjoy the show, please give it a like,
subscribe a share, do anything to kind of help those
algorithms push it out to the masses. We'd appreciate it. Well, everyone,
have a wonderful weekend. Doctor's Orders
This week in the Hollywood and Toto Podcast, Jimmy Kimmel
goes back to work for his masters, the Democratic Party,
but in a pretty unusual way. And we talked to
author Nat Segelof about his new book, The Rambo Report.
Five Movies, One Legendary Character. I think you're gonna like
this conversation. So many cool behind the scenes stories and yeah,
(00:21):
Rambo matters. Then and now, welcome to the Hollywood and
Toto Podcast. Entertainment news and reviews, without doubt, woke Hollywood, narrative,
free speech, free expression. Now that's entertainment.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And here's your host, Award winning film critic Christian Toto.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Jimmy Kimmel has a curious side hustle.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
He's been busy since twenty oh three with Jimmy Kimmel
Live on ABC and hey, Jimmy Kimmel, that's a pretty
impressive run. Late Night is brutal, and he's been doing
it for quite some time. But he also does work
on the side for the Democratic Party. Now, we saw
that last year pretty aggressively when he not only co
mceed a fundraiser for President Joe Biden, he covered up
(01:19):
President Biden's decline. Now, there was an epic freeze up
of President Biden during that event, and later on on
National TV, Jimmy Kimmel said, oh no, he's fine. Don't
trust your eyes. Nothing's wrong. Go away.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It's a cheap fake sounds.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
Try not something so big.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Now. I don't know what the DNC is paying Jimmy Kimmel.
Maybe these are in kind contributions. But if there is
some sort of payment going forward, he deserved double that week.
That was just going above and beyond the call of duty.
Epic work, Jimmy Kimmel. If you can lie like that
for us, anything's possible. So bravo. Little golf clap there,
(02:01):
and he's been doing it again just this week now.
Kimmel recently interviewed Governor J. B. Pritzker. He's the overseeing Illinois.
There's some problems in that state. But of course the
two of them didn't go into that at all. It's
more of a friendly, positive chat. But what they did
talk about is Pritzker's weight.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Now, Pritzker is a heavy set fellow. There's no escape
in that. There's no avoiding that. And in recent weeks,
President Trump has made fun of that and as Ben
Shapiro often says, that's bad Trump because you don't make
fun of someone's weight, you make fun of their policies.
You make fun of the things they say. And very
recently Pritsker has said some terrible things. He played it,
(02:48):
took a page out of Rachel Zegler's playbook, which you
never do, and said the Republican should never know peace. Now,
when a ding bat Starlett says that it's embarrassing, it's
bad pr and it could potentially hurt their movies, which
it did with snow White. When a governor says that,
when somewhat of national significance says that, well, that's a
(03:10):
terrible thing. It's cruel, and it could inspire violence. Of course,
the legacy media they reviewed it, or they talked about it,
oh so briefly, and then they moved on, no clarifications,
no questioning how terrible that kind of a sentiment is.
And listen, legacy media is the legacy media. You just
(03:31):
can't hate him enough. They stain their legacy on a
daily basis. And this is just another example. What is
relevant is the total silence from the mainstream media. So
obviously Jimmy Kimmel wasn't going to talk up that particular
part of pritzker shtick.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
He's going to talk about other things. But one of
the things that two of.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Them focused on directly, and which seemed odd at first
when you don't at first glance, is Pritsker's wait now again,
Trump made fun of it. Not cool, But then Jimmy
Kimmel made fun of it again and again and again.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Hey, all of a sudden, you can't.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
You can fat shame to JB. Pritzker's face. He's sitting
right there. They're doing fat jokes. I thought fat shamming
was just not really cool anymore. You can't make movies
like Shallow how for example, you can't make fun of
people's weight. It's just cruel. It's problematic. So why is
Kimmel doing it to the governor's face?
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I suggested that maybe we come up with some nicknames
for you then you can give to him, because you
just don't want to lame one. You know, nobody wants
to lame nicknames. Here's the list. JB Pizza mm hmm.
I like this, JB back ribs, JB back up. Could
(04:50):
be a song with that too, you know, jb lt
uh huh j biggie.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
The governor is smiling about it, laughing about it, just
sitting there like a good little victim. What's going on?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
We are so confused.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Well, here's exactly what's going on. These things are in
an accident.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
When it comes to late night television, we have a
lot of pre interviews. That means the producers, the people
behind the scenes will pull aside a guess and say, hey,
have you been on vacation recently? Do you have any
funny stories or anything you can kind of focus on
that would be charming and delightful for our audience. That
happens all the time. It's a normal part of late
(05:32):
night TV. So all those great interviews, they're really I
don't want to say pre plan but certainly a thought
going into it. There's a momentum to it that is
not organic, Okay, just is what it is. And that's
doubly so. When a political candidate or a governor comes
on a show like Jimmy Kimme Alive, they have planned
this out. They are not going to throw fat jokes
(05:55):
at the governor out of the blue, unacceptable with never
happened conceivable. So the two parties clearly colluded on this.
We're gonna tell fat jokes. We're going to embrace this
issue because they want to defang it. They want to
make fun of Trump for saying it, and they want
to show that Pritzker he can roll with the punches.
(06:16):
He's fine. He can laugh at himself.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
Ha ha ha.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And if he doesn't lose weight between now in twenty
twenty eight, when we're assuming he may run for the presidency,
well he's already accepted this issue. He's embraced this issue.
He's discarded this issue, and we can all laugh about it. Heck,
he's just like us. So that's what Jimmy Kimmel does.
He is a shill for the Democrats. He's proven it
(06:41):
again and again and again. He recently told Rolling Stone
magazine that his show now is a place for people
to scream. We just lost Ruth by the great comic actress,
and she was just all about the funny. It just
seems like the complete opposite of what a Ruth Buzzy
would do is what Jimmy Kimmel's doing now. He cares
about partisanship, he cares about scoring points, he cares about
(07:04):
pushing Democrats forward. He cares about attacking Trump, and the
one thing he doesn't care as much about it's laughter.
It's comedy. There's screaming and there's laughter. Kimmel wants to scream. Well,
that's wonderful, and I just don't know how as a
late night comedian that really flies enough people still watch
(07:26):
the show. It's I guess it's therapeutic for liberals. But
at the end of the day, you would think that
a late night host would be all about the funny.
Not Jimmy Kimmel. It's all about his masters, the Democrats,
and he will do whatever they want him to do
to make sure that that message comes forward.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
And that's not remotely funny.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
In the field, we had a code of honor.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Who watch my back? I watch yours back? Here we
got nothing, sir? Do we get to win this time?
Day Tree, First Blood. That's the wit and wisdom of
John Rambo, of course, the star of five action movies
spreading across decades, famously played by Sylvester Stallone, one of
(08:20):
his two iconic heroes, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo. Very
different figures, very different souls, and endless conversations about what
they mean in the big picture. Sometimes they overlap directly
with pop culture. Sometimes they intersected with politics. Sometimes presidents
name check them. Along the Way, that's the Rambo history,
(08:43):
that's the Rambo legacy. And it's all covered in a
new book, The Rambo Report, my author Nat Segeloff. Now
what Segeloff does is he captures all five films, gives
us descriptions of what happened on screen, talks to the
author who first wrote First Blood and who set this
whole project in motion. So much more, even the actors
(09:03):
who are considered to play John Ramble Along the Way,
how Kirk Douglas intersected with the franchise. Oh so briefly.
There's so much interesting information here. And if you're a
movie fan, if you're a Rambo fan, if you love
Sylvester Stallone in particular, there's lots of great details about him,
the way he worked behind the scenes. Listen, he's a
(09:24):
big star, and he's got a big ego, and he
got stuff done and it's fascinating to behold. And for
all these reasons, I wanted to have Nat on the show. Now,
Nat is a published author. He's got so many books
to his credit. He's been a movie publicist, he's been
a professor, just everything you can imagine. Nat has done.
A couple of his more memorable titles include The Extorcist Legacy,
(09:47):
Fifty Years of Fear, and Say Hello to My Little Friend,
A Century of Scarface. Great books and great titles too.
So I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Nat about
the Rambo Report, about John Rambo's, specifically Sevester Stallone's character,
and why we're still talking about it today, and we
are and we should be well. Natt, thanks for joining
(10:09):
the show. Now you've done so much writing around Hollywood.
I'm curious why Rambo and why now. It's a great topic,
and I think at any point along the way along
this franchise you could have tackled it. But it does
feel kind of like a zeitgeide moments in a way,
just because of Stallone, because of politics, because of Hollywood,
(10:29):
because of this figure who still remains so much of
a part of us. Talk a little bit sort of
entering this project because it sounds like a slam dunk
for me. But you're you're the writer.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
What was the impetus for this book?
Speaker 4 (10:41):
A couple of the then diagrams had to overlap before
it actually worked out to write the Rambo Report. One
of them was that my publisher seems to like me
writing about franchises. I've done the exiorousist legacy about the
Ectorsis books, I've done Scarface. I'm talking about with them
with some more. And publishers have two things that make
them really around. One of them is nice even numbered
(11:02):
anniversaries of movies and Rambo is forty. The second one
is forty and franchises, and I seem to be branded
at Kensington Citadel as the franchise guy. The other thing
was that David Morrell, who wrote the original novel in
nineteen seventy two First Blood, is an old friend of mine.
We've known each other for years since Sterling Syllafon introduced us,
and it never occurred to either of us maybe we
(11:22):
should sit down and do the actual Rambo book. And
the third one, of course, is the notion of Rambo
being a kind of a symbol for American involvement in
other cultures and other countries around the world quite literally
for the last fifty years. And I thought I could
combine them all and write about Rambo's influence and also,
as it turns out, write about veterans and veterans affairs
(11:44):
and talk about the very important issue of PTSD, which
is addressed in the book.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
You know, when you think about the Rambo saga at
the very beginning in the original book form he dies,
obviously you had to kind of change that. This is Hollywood,
and certainly Stallone had a a I for sequels. Talk
a little bit about sort of that pivotal moment, and
do you think that the powers that be beyond Stallone
(12:10):
suspected the longeoparty this character would have.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
It was a surprise to everybody, including Stallone and the producers.
In the original First Blood, John Rambo comes back from Vietnam.
He's searching for the last of his connections and a
man named Golroy, who Delmar was supposedly the last person
served in his platoon. He's gone sheriff raps the amount
of town and Rambo says, I'm not going to take
it anymore. And it's really the first time that an
(12:34):
American soldier comes back in wages war against America, in
this case in America who didn't appreciate the veterans, which
was very much the case in the early nineteen seventies
that was the genesis of First Blood. At the end
of First Blood, Rambo dies. Now, when the movie was made,
they put a scene at the end, and by the way,
I'm not concerned about spoilers, because if you haven't seen
(12:54):
the movie by now, tough you should have seen.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
That's on you.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Rambo is supposedly killed by Colonel Troutman, the man who
created it, which is a kind of a poetic closure.
But in the movie they have it so that Rambo
actually helps Troutman kill him in a scene that was
deleted but is available on sub versions on the DVD.
And after they shot that scene, Stallone huddled with director
Ted Kakkiff and said, you know, I think Rambo has
(13:21):
to live because I don't want to give the message
to veterans that the only way out of your problem
is to die, which I thought was a terrifically uplifting
thing and a very wise thing to do. And so
they shot the other ending while they were up there.
Now there's some dispute as to whether they all went
back and shot it later or there, but both Krenna
and everyone else says, no, we shot it there. We
did the ending as it is now in the film.
(13:42):
But of course when they decided to make a sequel,
they said, well, it's a good thing we didn't kill him.
And in the book, when David Morrell was novelizing these
scripts for numbers two and three, he wasn't sure how
to bring Rambo back because it wasn't like, you know,
the Bride of Rakenstein when the monster falls through the floorboard.
He simply said, very simp In my book, Rambo dies.
(14:02):
In the movies, he lives, and then we're off on
the Adventure of Rambo First Blood Part two. So the
sequel wasn't really in visions at the time. They had
no idea the film was going to take off like that.
But what it did, they said, we'd better make a sequel.
And then the whole scrambling around to make the sequel.
It's part of the story in the Rambo Report, how
these guys really had a tiger by the tail.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
The book really does a grade of illustrating the behind
the scenes chaos, the star power, the deals, the wheeling
and dealing. But I was curious drill down a little
more into why First Blood was so unique. You mentioned
a soldier basically the clearing war in his own country.
This wasn't a typical action movie by any stretch. I mean,
(14:44):
Stallone doesn't speak that much talk about how unique it
was at the time, and I think that's such a
different beast than the other Rambo films, but it is
such a unique property.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
There's a couple of differences between the book and the
movie that I think answered the question you just raised.
The book, which was really one of the first action novels,
and in First Blood was really one of the modern
action film remembers nineteen eighty two, but they weren't making
a lot of shoot him up films. That was really
one of the first action films in the modern sense
of a hero going out and doing something. And that
(15:15):
is that in the book, Rambo kills everybody. In the movie,
he doesn't kill anyone in the movie. They kept him
kind of pure in a way. Anybody who dies, whether
it's gulf falling out of the helicopter, or guys who
try to run him off the road or others, everyone
dies by their own folly. That was important to keep
Rambo almost pure. Now, he does cause a lot of
other trouble, which is why he's on the rock Pilot
(15:37):
at the beginning of the second film, but they wanted
to keep his character more honest, more pure, and only
reactive to other people who are doing things to him.
That I think was a very wise decision, and because
the great actors know how to react more than act
it was perfect crist Alone, who, nevertheless, I think, turns
into just a spectacular job, especially in the first half
(15:58):
of the film, and I don't think he's been given
enough credit for it.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah, you know, he's such an interesting presence because he's
has this Polluca like image, handsome, muscular, and yet through
the years, I've just always been impressed by how smart,
how intuitive is I mean, I don't think you get
to be a movie star and a TV star into
your late seventies without having real a sense of star power,
what the public wants.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And I can go on and on. What's your sense
of stallone?
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Because in the book you see ego, you see control,
you see wisdom, you see intelligence. It has it's about Rambo,
But your book does really capture stallone in a fascinating way.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
You know, there's a great line in Billy Wiler's and
Charles Bracketts Sunset Boulevard. When everybody talks about Norman Desmond
and Cecil B. De Mill says, you know, a dozen
press agents working over time can do terrible things to
the human spirit. Stallone has been Claudette grab that in
the line so many times over the years, and by
the way, some of them is quite warranted. I think
(16:58):
Christopher Reeves said, for two years after you be come
a star, you don't go to the bathroom. I think
Stallone probably made some enemies along the way and was
very difficult. But let's face it, he was the guy
on whose shoulders these films were resting. He can't take
any chances. He's the guy who're going to criticize if
he doesn't say hello to a crew member one day,
they'll say, oh, well, Sli is just being stuck up,
(17:18):
when in fact he has a lot of stuff to
go through. Now. Mind you, he also sometimes doesn't treat
people very well. There were tons of firings on his films,
and he wanted his certain vision to be exercised, and
he sometimes did not achieve the vision himself, so he
would get a rid of other people to do it.
That's what happens if you're a star. Unfortunately, but he
also makes hundreds of millions of dollars for people, so
(17:40):
that is tolerated. I think his transition from First Blood,
which is kind of an interesting, downplayed film until it
takes off to the other Rambo films, really talks about
how Stillone himself became a major action star. You know,
when they put him in First Blood, he was not
a major star. He was just the who was in
Rocky and no one figured that he could play this
(18:02):
action figure. But he rose to the occasion, to say
the least.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
The franchise really evolved in many many ways and became
kind of, you know, in some eyes, a gung ho
Reagan esque franchise in ways that don't really align with
the first movie in the film, but talk about how
that image evolved and how it overlapped with the political
(18:28):
imaginations at the time.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
It's interesting you mentioned Reagan because the President in nineteen
eighty five touted how wonderful First Blood, Too Rambo was
and how he said Reagan was obviously a Republican because
he's able to go around and enforced things, and Stallone
instantly reacted and said, Rambo is not political. Whatever Stallone's
views were, it was quite different. But Rambo was not political,
and he still is never political in the entire series.
(18:52):
He's fighting for a cause. Now it may be a
loss cause in some cases, but it's a cause that
is a point of honor. He's going back to rescue
his creator, who's going back to rescue his adoptive daughter.
In the fifth film, he's working with some missionaries in Burma,
and other times he's the lone man. He's charing going
(19:13):
across the river. He's the man who is bringing some
sort of solution to pain. And that is really the
tragedy of Rambo as a character and as a man.
He's not really at home unless he's fighting somebody. What
a horrible fate to confer upon somebody. He's defined by
the number of people that he kills.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
One of the things I found so fascinating about your
book is that a lot of the cultural conversations about
the film, how it overlap with the real world about
Sta Loan, it felt like it could have been written
that these fights were happening today and not in the
nineteen eighties or even or and beyond. Then did you
were you intrigued by that part of it? How sort
(19:53):
of some of the cultural conversations around the film and
its real world implications. It felt very modern to me.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
One of the most difficult things that film critics have
to do, and that film students sometimes have trouble grasping,
is to put themselves into the context in which a
particular old film was released. In fact, when I was
teaching film criticism at Boston University, that was the biggest trick.
They would see wide Shoulders on Rosalind Russell in a
nineteen forty one movie, and they say, how I O
(20:21):
update the film was well, yeah, I was out of date.
It's forty years old. But that's the trick that critics
have to do. And when people watch the Rambo movies,
which are very much relics of their time and yet
describe their time, they have to remember what was going
on in the world. I didn't set out to write
a political book, but I knew that I could follow
Rambo through fifty years and see the history of Americas
(20:42):
intervention in other cultures and subsuming them if I simply
wrote about what the films were about. In the first one,
He's Come Home, and the second one goes back to Vietnam,
and the third one, He's in Afghanistan, then he goes
to Burma, then he goes into Mexico. Each of these
describes a place that I am Erica found themselves either
entangled or invading in one way or another, culturally or militarily.
(21:06):
And Rambo in this case, was the symbol of that.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
It is fascinating, you know, And I think along the way,
when you have an artist like Stallone who's so near
and dear to a character much like Rockey of Balboa,
I don't see him phoning it in. I sense a
real attachment to this figure. Like you mentioned, Stallone's personal
politics maybe not aligned with Rambo, and he kept those
(21:31):
two apart. Talk about how Stallone has managed to be
successful for so long.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I'm intrigued to that.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I've enjoyed the first two seasons of Tulsa King. It's
not a great show, it's not art, but it's wildly entertaining,
and he's so good in it. Just talk about how
do you make what keeps a star like Stallone ticking
in a way?
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Listen, If I could answer that, I'd be the star
and he'd be writing books. You know, How does anybody
know how Willy Wonka makes the best chocolates. It's something
that he is and does that he has that he
recognized it himself and managed to pull out and sharpen.
I don't know how it's done. We search for them
all the time, and he's one of the last few
big effing stars around.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Yeah. I don't want to give too much away, but
there's sort of a sub theme in the book where
Stallone had many interviews with a certain journalist, and it's
worth reading the book for that alone. It's so precious
and so interesting and I don't I don't want to
give much more of it away, but it's I just
found that particularly fascinating as someone who's interviewed actors over
the time, and obviously you have as well.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
I'm hoping to get a call from Stallone saying, well,
what did you write about me? You know, he wasn't
available for me to interview him. He wasn't available, as
a nice euphemism for his agents stood in my way,
and believe me, I tried over and over again. Yeah,
one agent said how much will you pay? And another
agent said, he's working on his memoirs, but it's no
reason he couldn't talk to me for two hours His memoirs,
(22:58):
by the way, are called The Steps and it's coming
out in October. But there was so much information about
him anyway out there, and I was able to obtain
interviews that were shot for one of the earlier DVD
releases which have never been released for some of the
actors like Richard Quenna and Brian Denny who have since passed,
and I was able to use that material with permissions
(23:18):
and with clearances and revealed them for the first time
in the book. I mean, there's nothing scandalous, but there
certainly has a lot of stuff that I think is
interesting in the Rambo Report.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Absolutely we mentioned prior to the MIC's going on. I
really felt you can hear Stallone's voice throughout the book.
So even though you didn't get him per se, you've
had so many sort of archival interviews that really his
voice is ever present. Do you think that, looking back
at the franchise, that we've misunderstood it to a certain
degree or it's one that's been analyzed aggressively over the
years for all the obvious reasons.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
But are there misconceptions we still have about the Rambo series?
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Well, there are, and there's one that we talked about
when you and I spoke for the book, and that
is a subject of racism, and I'm going to raise
it now because I think that's a false flat. The
films have been criticized in some ways as being racist,
but I'll tell you that's not the intent of the
filmmakers from everything I could tell from any of the
notes or anything else. And also, when you make a
war film and you set the war film in another country,
(24:15):
the people in that country are going to be of
a particular race. I mean, you want to Hamburger, you
go to McDonald's. That's where they live. And I think
now the other problem, and again we've discussed this because
you're an expert in this as well, if you create
a villain but don't give them enough textures or details
so they become just a paper villain. Yes, there is
(24:36):
the temptation to say that it was a racist construct.
But the villains in the Rambow films, the particular ones
that he fights Mano a mano, are quite well developed.
Whether it's the Vietnamese colonel, the Russians who intercede, the
enemies in Afghanistan, or those in Burma, these are pretty
well developed. But it's not every single character of one
hundreds of thousands who are there. So I don't believe
(24:57):
the intent of the films is racist. I believe they
can be misinterpreted that way, and certainly there's some people
to think so. But it's a movie, for Christ's sake,
it's a war film, and you're not going to make
the enemy the equal to our side, otherwise you'll never
care how it comes out.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, I think if you kind of cast dispersions on
films with one dimensional characters, you might be here all day,
because there's a lot of films that fall into that category.
I briefly mentioned Last Rambo, which I was disappointed by.
It felt short, It felt really aggressively violent in a
way that didn't really seem I mean, listen, Rambo is
always violent, but it just seemed over the top. I
(25:33):
want to maybe get put your film critic cat on,
what did you think of the last installment?
Speaker 4 (25:37):
Well, we agree completely. In fact, so does David Morrell,
who says the last Rambo film, Rambo five or Last Blood,
is not really a Rambo film. It's just well, frankly,
I think it's a Liam Neeson film. And he goes
out and get somebody his surrogate where his adoptive daughter
is kidnapped and overdosed by a Mexican drug and white
slavery cartel, and he goes into Mexico to try to Now,
(26:00):
the original script is actually quite elegant and beautifully written,
but it was cut down quite a bit to make
the movie. In the original script there's a woman journalist
who helps him. Well, her sister was taken previously by
the same group of people, and they're actually equals, but alone.
I guess didn't want to have a woman who was
fighting alongside him, although he didn't mind that. In Rambow two.
(26:22):
The other problem with the film is it is just
damned incoherent. If you look at some of the violence scenes.
Maybe they darkened them so they would get a more
beneficial motion picture rating. Maybe they cut I don't know
what it is, but when Rambo goes chasing the bad
guys in the tunnels under his house, you don't know
what's happening, and it's just an inept film. Although it
(26:42):
does have some wonderful moments in it, and I think
his hard to the right place, it simply doesn't work dramatically, certainly,
not what was left of it. Now, if you look
at the film in the international version, which is available
I believe on YouTube for a subscription, they add ten
minutes at the beginning, which really makes the whole film
make sense. In the beginning of Rambo five, there's a
(27:03):
huge monsoon. How there's a monsteron in Arizona. I've never
figured that out, but there is. And he tries to
rescue some hikers who are caught in the rain, and
he can't rescue them all, and he feels guilt that
he wasn't able to achieve his mission, and this guilt
drives him, especially motivates him to go into Mexico and
to try to rescue his adoptive daughter. Without that first
(27:24):
ten minutes, which doesn't look like a Rambo film, unfortunately,
but it is. That explains his character for the rest
of the movie, and it was folly to have cut
that out. But you can still see it if you
want to buy it on one of the streaming services.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
That's very frustrating, but I mean in Hollywood has literate
stories where certain great scenes are cut out or maybe
too much is put back in. Before let You Go,
Net franchises Never Die, Stalloon doesn't let go of franchises.
Certainly he has that instinct within him, and there has
been talk of prequels.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Do you know anything about that?
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Is there any sort of more recent chatter about extending
this seventy eight now? I think I don't think it'd
be wise on many levels Ramped to revisit the character directly.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
But is there any sense that this story could continue?
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Those rumors pop up every now and then that there's
going to be a sequel, a prequel or a television series.
You know, the son of Rambo is insteadied by his
father to go in and clean up. But as Stallone said,
if he was offered Rambo today, he'd have to say Pasadena,
which is his trendy way of saying pass. He probably
couldn't physically do it. If you look at them in
the fifth film, you're wondering if there is cgi there isn't.
(28:30):
I mean, a could youth in him somewhat. But I
think Sloane has reached the elder statement status where he
knows what he can do and he can be entertaining.
I can't speak for him, of course, but I do
believe that the Rambo franchise will live in memory rather
than a current experience.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
It'd be interesting to see what they do with the
modern political climate experiences across the globe. I mean, there
is that potential, but I also would hate to see
it without Stallone's fingerprints all over it.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
I mean, it is his baby, and it seems like
it could be.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
I mean that they probably have rainbow handling drones. He
wouldn't go down, so it wouldn't happen. We've been defining
ourselves out of it.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Exactly before I let you go, do you have any
other books in the works or projects. I know you
wear many many hats. I'm just kind of curious what's
next on.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
Your Thank you for asking. When I was waiting for
Kennington to approve the manuscript, I said that for the
Rambow Report, I was able to write another book. And
the other book is called Bogart in Houston. It's about
Humphrey Bogart and John Houston, the six films they made together,
which include The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, and Treasure
(29:42):
of the Sierra Madre, and the adventures they had as people,
with their nine wives and with all sorts of things
in Hollywood. It's It's really a fun story book that
goes into six of the most interesting films ever made,
and I'm very proud of that. That's coming out in October.
October No and also in August, I have the paperback
(30:03):
edition of my Extorosist book, The Extresses Legacy, with an
additional chapter and more information about the most recent Excissis
film and that franchise.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Interesting. That's a that's a dispiriting chapter.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
I imagine, but a necessary one s Wellntt, thank you
so much for joining the show, for sharing your insights.
The book is The Rambo Report. I highly recommend it.
You know, I haven't seen the Rambo films in quite
some time. I'm going to be revisiting them very very soon.
Your book made me do that. But just so many
great behind the scenes stories you're not going to believe.
(30:37):
We didn't get into some of the actors who could
have been Rambo along the way. That is worth the
price of admission just by itself. But you can check
out the book The Rambo Report at Amazon or your
favorite bookseller. And Nat, thanks for sharing a light, shedding
a light on this amazing franchise and for.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
All the work you do behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
At Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
You know you're you're making these films come alive in
a unique way.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
Well, thank you Christian for this opportunity to speak to
your viewers and listeners, and also, by the way, for
your help in getting the book written, because some of
your comments are the most distute in the entire book.
And I want to thank you again so much for
your openness and for your willingness and for your point
of view and your beliefs. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
It's pure accidental, but but I appreciate it. Your character
actor of the week is Beth Grant. Well, let's say
for the show this week, again, thank you to Radio
America for having me as part of their great podcast lineup.
I do hope you'll check out hollywoodintoto dot com. It
is my website now and it's eleventh year and it's
(31:34):
got news, reviews, commentary, everything about pop culture from a
rite of center perspective. And you know, one of the
things I like to do on this show and on
the website too, is to connect dots that maybe aren't
being connected, to cover the stories that aren't being covered,
to find new and different angles to entertainment pieces that
are being talked about. Right now, but you know, maybe
(31:55):
this part of the conversation needs more volume. Put it
up to eleven, as they say in Spinal Tap? What
day did the Lord create Spinal Tap?
Speaker 4 (32:04):
And couldn't he have rested on that day too?
Speaker 1 (32:07):
And if you enjoy the show, please give it a like,
subscribe a share, do anything to kind of help those
algorithms push it out to the masses. We'd appreciate it. Well, everyone,
have a wonderful weekend. Doctor's Orders
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