Who's That Knocking at My Door / Boxcar Bertha

[music] A new podcast. A new podcast. I'm trying to put it like in New York. A new podcast. Do you know what the tagline for who's that knocking at my door was? A new movie? A new classic. Ooh. That's fucking bold. It's a bunch of pull quotes and most notably Roger Ebert, who was an early champion of this movie and dined out on that for decades, as he should have. As he should have. He gets credit for being like, "I suspect that this Martin Scorsese might be the most classic, important figure in the next half century of American movies." It's from Ebert. Yes. He said a new classic. The poster, David, has a big quote. It says a new classic. A great moment in American movies as a film. It has something to say to everyone. A stunning impact. The most evocative description of American life I've ever seen. And then it has a second pull quote, but then above the title itself, no quotes. It just says a new classic. I'll save that. So it uses the pull quote, accredited to a film critic. And then it also just says like, we're going to say it about ourselves. Now, of course, there's an alternate tagline here, because this is a two movie episode. So excuse me while I reset. By the way, I'm going to be mentioned one other tagline for who's that knocking at my door, which I have to imagine was for a re-release, which was Mean Streets was just around the corner. Well, there's Streets. A tagline. Streets have corners. A tagline basically saying, "This movie is maybe retroactively interesting if you know that this guy goes on to become." Exactly what it is. Yes. But excuse me, let me do a hard reset here. Blankcheck in 2026 was a free podcast. Bertha was just a little bit freer than most. Yes. I know that tagline. American The 30s was a free country. Yes. And Bertha was J.E.S. apostrophe A. Just a little bit freer than most. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually a good poster. It is. It's got a frame on it. It's a great title. Exploding. This mini series is titled "Pod Car Birthcast." No, no, no, no. We're spending the next five and a half months talking about Martin Scorsese. And of course, we are naming the entire series after a second film. Pod Car Birthcast. David's Ibaros have hit this way. I'm just waiting for you to be done and to introduce our podcast. This is Blankcheck with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. David. It's a little bit freer than most. It's a podcast about Photography's directors who have massive success are really on in their careers in our given a series of Blank checks to make whatever crazy, passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby. Today we're not talking about massive successes. We're talking about two early primordial films that set the stage for next week, a breakthrough the likes of which has rarely happened in American cinema. But then sets it off in a wild career of what we're discussing amongst the biggest careers we've talked about. It's him and Spielberg. I mean, these are the biggest guys we've talked about in this podcast. I guess that's. Well, James Cameron. He's the king of the world. Yeah. He is the king of the world. For Nolan these days, I guess he's kind of making a run at that kind of a career. I guess my distinction is that no, you're right. These are now elder states, man. They're elder states. They're living legends. They've got the long body of work. Yes. They are. We're talking about six decades of work. Now, with these guys, this is from the 60s. Who's that not going to my door 1967? There were a couple, I think, iterative releases on it. Seven decades. He is in his seventh decade of making movies. He is currently filming a film. He's filming a film, folks. In his seventh decade of being a picture film, he's filming a film that we will cover on blank check in 2027. I assume. Or 28. You never know. Sometimes he takes the key. He be slow sometimes. That's true. He's three and a half hours long. Every test screening. This takes one to one quarter, right? I don't know. Okay. I feel very strongly where I'm just like, he can do what he wants. He can do what he wants. If he wanted to make these movies 82 minutes long and have four hours of deleted scenes on the criterion disk, I'd be fine with that. I'm just like Marty, show us everything you got now. I obviously would like him to do whatever he wants, but it's just the pitch of the new one just sounds a little more. It does. Intimate. Smaller, maybe. Right. Right. It's Transformers versus G.I. Joe. It's a very simple battle between two forces. It's predominantly featuring TikTok stars. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Hemsworth leads a Ragtag team of TikTok stars to be the mediators between the Transformers and the G.I. Joe's. That is his next film, right? For Skydance. Yeah. Here. I'm just looking. I'm trying to find his last sub to our movie. Which McCugal cracked too, right? It's two and six, two hours six minutes. Okay. That's just a little over two. Is that his shortest film of the 21st century? Yes. It is. Yeah. Bringing out the dead is two hours and one minute. Okay. So though it feels longer, compliment, it moves fast. It's got a lot in there. Right. But I think after hours, color of money is an even two hours. And after hours, King of Comedy, those are both under two hours, obviously after hours is very short. That's sort of the point. 80. It's not quite. That was like 90 something. It's short. You know, come on. By his 97 minutes. By his standards. I'll take that much. Oh my God. I'm not complaining about his name. Alice is under. Mean streets is under. Today we're talking about two 90 somethings. And right. His first two films were about 86 minutes. Yes. I mean, this is a humongous film. It's going to be a lot of long boys for us. It is. This filmmaker, a humongous career and a filmmaker who, you know, for how large he looms in the culture, his name is often mispronounced. And so we obviously just want to get ahead of this on this series and make sure we're communicating this correctly. We will be talking about the films of Marty Scorchisi. Marty Scorchisi on main feed blank check. And Scorsese. And a series we're calling podcast fellas. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ben. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Boy and check. Do it. Marty Scorsese. Look. Scorchisi. Oh, actually, I just am now remembering. I have a new bit. I want to debut on this first call. Yes. This is the perfect place to do it. Yep. Hey, new listeners. Welcome to the podcast. The bit is pretending like this show is still accessible to people who haven't been in it for years. I think what I'm going to try and do is I'm really going to try to do some work to engage with some new listeners to try and just make them feel like they've got somebody who's just like guiding their hand a little bit. Sure. We're not trying to push new listeners away. In fact, we welcome them. I just understand it can seem daunting. Yes. Yes. So guys, you're tuning in. Sometimes the episodes go a little long. Yeah. Okay. Don't let that scare you. No, it's like Martin Scorsese movies. It's rewarding. But maybe, given that we've recorded two, three hour plus episodes or like we've recorded I think four or three hour plus episodes in the last ten days. There were some big movies. Right. Maybe we can keep this one a little light. Oh, wait. We have to like talk about Martin Scorsese's entire childhood and shit. Although, you know what? He's done that plenty. You can just watch any of the documentaries. He's like, eh, was that born in Queens? You know? Interesting impression. Yeah. I know. I got to get there with him. Okay. And go for like RISO the Rat. It is second, they're not a million miles away from it. Perfect example. New listeners. Sometimes we go off on tangents. Here's another thing we should say to new listeners vis-a-vis my, uh, Marty Scorsese joke. The thing about Blank Trek is sometimes I mispronounce things on purpose because it's funny. And sometimes I do it not on purpose because I don't know how to talk. True. And I ask you to assume that it's always me doing it on purpose. It's always a ha ha ha. Always. So. Yeah. So on Blank Trek, uh, you voted for him in March Madness over Tony Scott. A People's Champion. The biggest loser in America, Martin Scorsese, he finally got his moment in the sun. He finally eaked out a win. And we decided in the interest of, I mean, we can't impose brevity on Mr. Scorsese, but, you know, where we can. We will try to make this miniseries not take over a year of this show. So we are combining his first two efforts, the, I guess, you would call it sort of an independent film before such a thing really existed. The early days? Yeah. Who's that knocking in my door? Who's that knocking at my door? His first feature. Yep. And then box carvertha. And for higher work. Right. New World Pictures, Roger Corman. All right. At this point, it wasn't New World. It was American. It's A.I.P. American International. Yeah. The, you know, the two films that are sort of the films before his, you know, real debut film of Mean Streets, much as like the sixth sense is kind of M.N.I. Chamon. We use the term in the Mean Street episode, the phenomenon of the second first film, a movie that crystallizes the director's thing so thoroughly that it basically in everyone's mind becomes the first movie because it's, quote unquote, the first real one. And there are a few examples of a movie like Mean Streets, early in someone's career. where you're just like, "There we go, there it is." It's fully realized we're off to the races. He never makes a movie ever again that doesn't really feel like a Martin Scorsese movie. You can argue about the effectiveness of each of those as films on their own. - I said to my wife, who sort of came in halfway into me watching "Bruzcar Bertha." First I said, "Yes, I'm jacking it." - No, I didn't say that. No, I said to my wife, like. - This movie does have a lot of trains in it. It's fair to assume the David's camp where he has his ankles. - Now, he's in a way of like, this is kind of the last one I'm gonna watch during this, that's like arguably bad. And I don't even think Boxcar Bertha is like, "You're more negative on it than I am." But this is the last one where I think it's in my opinion, you can kind of be like, "Ah, that movie just didn't work or is bad." If you're saying that about the other ones, I mean, of course you can say like, "Oh, I don't like New York, New York." I get that, like I'm not complaining. - Right. - But it's like, the rest are interesting to Masterpiece. - I would say, you basically have three types of movies for the rest of his career. - You have Masterpieces. - You have movies that just work to some degree. - Masterpiece. - Right? Then you have tightly regarded films. - Really interesting, risky, personal swings. You have something that might not quite hit, but it's something that's coming out of his soul, right? And is a very genuine effort and doing something very artistically daring. And then the third thing is what for most people would be a kind of strategic career move movie, a paycheck gig, you know, a favor gig. But all of those movies I would argue are defined by the fact that Martin Scorsese chose to make them. It's not just well he did this to get back in good graces. All of those movies become defined not just by the idea that he made it, but what he contributed to that movie. Anything that would be impersonal ends up becoming very personal through him. - Boxcar Bertha is the last impersonal movie he makes. Who's that knockin' at my door is him making a deeply personal movie before he's figured out how to make an engaging film. - Right, and entertain. - Where he's just getting his hands on the toolbox. - Right, and Boxcar Bertha's got pretty good craft in it, but you feel that he doesn't have anything on the line. He's not puttin' himself in it in the same way. And from next week on, that's not the case. Would you agree? - I would agree, except I think Goodfellas sucks. - Yes, well of course. - That's our take that we're working towards. - Yeah, goodfellas episode is five minutes of us going, Goodfellas sucks, Raging Bull Basin. - What if we put him on the bracket? Encouraged like, yeah, yeah, no, of course we, we're excited to do Scorsese that we do. And we're like, oh by the way, we think he stinks. - We all agree, this guy's a fucking phone man. - Every episode is us like, another stinker. - What a jammu. - F. - Yeah. - Also, I don't like his personality. I don't find him charming at all. - Yeah, why are you so short, Marty? - Really even make me look tall. - Oh no, no, my contrarian tick will be like, I actually think he's too tall. - Yeah. - He should shorten up. - Yeah. - Hunch up, Marty. - He should talk faster. - Stop snipin' them brows, Marty. I think there should be less women in these movies. All right, okay, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Marty, bigger glasses, please. I can barely spot them on your face. - Because you should touch your cheeks. - That's how big they are. - Ah, this guy, he drools on and on. Can't you speed up the conversation a bit, Marty. Get to the point faster and use your hands to express yourself. - This fucking loser. - Today we're talking about who's the knockout my door box car, Bertha. - Martin Scorsese. - JJ forgot to prepare a dosage for this one. - No, he worked really, really hard to get it to us in time. - Black of interest, he said. - Also, there's just not any information out there about this guy. I think we are the first podcast to talk about Martin Scorsese. - Well, that's the first Marty movie you guys all saw before I start this. - Oh wow. - First one I saw in theaters must have been eggs in the yard. - Same, and I'm wondering if that-- - Theater's or just saw period. - Oh, you can answer both. - I mean, you can answer both. For me, I know theaters, the answer is gangster New York. - Same, and I'm wondering if that was the first when I saw period. - I had definitely already seen Taxi Driver by then 'cause I was such a normal and well-adjusted kid. But I'm trying to think if I would have seen much else. Like, I don't think I had seen. I know, but I'd seen Goodfellas. I definitely saw Goodfellas when I was like an early teenager. I guess that would be it. - Yeah, no, I think that was the first one I saw because I understood the weight and importance with which that movie was being presented. And I knew Martin Scorsese by reputation as this is the guy everyone uses a shorthand for infamous filmmaker, serious filmmaker, but I think I saw it and then said to my mom like, "So where does that rank?" - Now as-- - And then started seeing us-- - As a kid growing up in North Jersey. Oh, yes, this is my surprise to you that the first film of Marty Scorsese that I ever saw, it's Goodfellas. - Yeah. - Now Ben, we were talking about this the other night. You were saying you have a bit of an interesting relationship to Martin Scorsese in his films across your life, but that there's an interesting opportunity, there's potential in this series. Do you want me to say it? - Remind me. - You were saying that you grew up with the most annoying people on-- - Yes, yes, yes, yes. - Obsessively watching his most popular films and taking all the wrong lessons from them and reading them in the dumbest, most superficial way possible-- - 100%. - And that it did not cause you to resent those movies, but it did cause you to kind of push away from them. - Definitely. - That you kind of reject a protective-- - And not in the way that I think he's-- - Obviously, it would be crazy to think he's a hack, but it's just, you know what, I'll bet it was a loser. - Yeah, I thought it was a freaking loser. - Now it's this kind of the same way with Bruce Springsteen for me. Where it's like obviously, the guy's an incredible songwriter, you know, put out incredible albums, but it just was so jammed down my throat. I was like, I can't. - Now this can't engage with it. - I understand that New Jersey has a couple of Italian recipes. - Scorsese is not a Jersey guy. - He's not. - So it's a little bit of like, the classic Jersey thing. I'm like, yeah, but he's making movies about us mooks. - Yeah. - So you know, it's like-- - They were alping him, but they were love and response. - It was like the Pope, Frank Sinatra, but I mean, like with Springsteen, at least it's like, that guy is Jersey, he's from there. - And Ben, I don't know if you know this, but you know how most of us we grow up in our childhood bedrooms, we have floor. Yes, you can stand on it. - Right. - Bruce didn't have that. There was a hole in the floor of his childhood bedroom. - Not right. - The thing we stand on that we rely on, he didn't have that. - For me, it was about not fitting in with the community where I grew up. So I felt like I needed to differentiate myself from the pack. And so I was drawn to outsiders, artists, musicians, filmmakers that felt worlds away than the culture that the people around me engaged in. (upbeat music) - David Crack open that dossier, please. - Martin Charles Scorsese. - The great American filmmaker. - Was born, excuse me, we don't pay JJ to editorialize. We will decide whether or not he's a great American filmmaker. Don't tell us that. Don't share that down our thresholds. - Was born November 17th, 1942. - Influshing Queens. Did you know that? I knew he was a Queens boy. Parents are Charles and Catherine Corsica Scorsese. It's a silly name. The children is a silly name again. So they are the first generation born here. Marty's the second. Both of Marty's parents are born on Elizabeth Street and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Charles worked in shipyards and then pressed clothes, I think. Catherine, they both worked in the garment district for a long time. Marty has an older brother named Frank. You may have heard this before Griffin, but Marty had a bit of a bad pair of lungs. - Yes, he caught an illness when he was a tiny baby. Probably pertussis, like whooping cough or something. You know, like there was an epidemic. A nice doctor supposedly sort of saved his life when he was a tiny baby, but he thinks it basically like allergies, asthma, pet tumblebreed. - Fairly admitted. - His whole, but then it's like his whole childhood. He's got like a bad set of luck. You know, like he's a little, you know, whatever. He's, he's a little fragile. - Still to this day, it affects, I'm sure, the way he was raised, you know. If you come that close to losing a child, that early on, your parents are gonna do everything they can to really try to keep you safe. And that fragility I think gets into the head of the child. - The great documentary that Rebecca Miller did last year. - Is it called Mr. Scorsese? - Yeah, Mr. Scorsese, that was on Apple TV. - Talks about this. He talks about it in the Richard Chicklebook conversations with Scorsese, which JG wanted me to shout out because he's using it a lot for this stuff. And also I should shout it out anyway, 'cause I've read it, it is fantastic. It is one of the great like, critic director, discourse, you know, works ever. But like he grew up in Corona in Queens, like, you know, back then obviously that part of Queens, But I think it was very. heavily Italian. I mean, it's more suburban. It's suburban. Like there's no big buildings there, and it's not like cramped like lower Manhattan was. It's like front yards and two family houses. They had a yard. They had a little tree, and they were forced to move back because Charles got an argument, the move back to the lower east side, move back to the little way, because Charles got an argument with the landlord. And I feel like in the documentary, Scorsese talks about like what, you know, it was the classic kind of like, you know, was there maybe something shifty or was it just like, you know, ego, bravado kind of stuff. But something face could not be loaded. Yes, right. And he talks about it as being like cast out of paradise. Yes, paradise lost that he was taken out of a place he remembers feeling safe and comfortable and thrown into what felt like an unstable scary environment. And it's a humiliation. They're moving back to essentially a tenement, this tiny two room apartment on 253 Elizabeth. Now of course, you would have to be in charge of some sort of oil or aluminum deposit to afford an apartment on 253 Elizabeth. You're like a creative director. I mean, I guess you could probably buy like a studio apartment for like $900,000 that has like a toilet in the middle of the room. I was going to say the walls are made of toilets that don't work but have unflushed in them. You could maybe get the room that's portrayed in who's knocking at my door. That's just the fuck room. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's still a very large amount of money. But you got to live there with the fuck room guys. The fuck room guys are still there. They can't kick them off the lease. So 253 Elizabeth, so I work in Soho. Well, you work for blank check production. That is true. But I also work with the Atlantic and I work in Soho. And Elizabeth Street between Princeton, Houston, you know, is where he grew up. And like, it's like, you know, what Prince Street Pizza is. All the tourists love to go there now around the corner square slices. They're talking around the corner from there. Yeah. Anyway, so his dad wasn't in the mob, but like definitely new plenty of people who were and I feel like was sort of like often mixed up in the local kind of it's hard not to be at that time entwined in these things. And even if you're trying to distance yourself away from them, there's a what do you think you're better than me kind of thing. I mean, it's part of what's interesting about the sort of mystery of them losing the house in Corona, where you're like what he too close or was he too far these things. He tells this story about like the landlord maybe thought that that was a little too mobbed up and there was like a fight someone picked up an axe, the landlord picked up an axe at some point. The dad is like this intense guy, according to Marty. And I feel like, you know, his parents are so present in his early work, right? Like he does Italian American documentary about them. They look so much like him. They do. They look like him. And his mother is just this like incredibly warm and interesting figure. His dad is definitely a little more unknowable. Like or like a, you know, firm kind of like soft spoken. Right. Anyway, seven people living in three rooms, then they got some rooms down like in two, the first they were like 240, I don't know he talks about, you know, like I wait, we don't need to go through every single apartment that he lived in as JJ included Zillow list. Well, I can look him up again. I bet you these days pretty pretty price. Lowry side is pretty rough as he says, you know, kind of like the dead end kids in old movies. It's close to that. Kids running up and down the street. You had a garbage can. You would get piece of wood. Now you got a sword and a shield. You play around. But also Marty spending a lot of time looking out his window at kids acting up because his parents are so worried about his dang lungs. He talks about their being unknowingly trained into the act of being an observer of being the watcher of looking at everything through this frame and also just like doodling a lot. Drawing what he sees, the things he can't engage you again. You can see in the Scorsese dock, the storyboards he made. And it's crazy. Yes. It's not like, oh, yes, some stick figures. And you can see that this guy has like a visual sense. It's like these very, very complex, beautiful like drawings of like stories he's imagining and movies he wants to make. I think it was Rebecca Miller being interviewed by her buddy Sean fantasy on the big picture. But she was saying like, you know, I have a difficult relationship with the idea of genius and I question the label. But when he showed me his storyboards as a child, I was like, this is a level of genius we're dealing with. It also takes effort and it takes craft and it takes intelligence. It's not like people are just gifted, but you look at the storyboards he was doing when he was like 12 and he's like drawing out full color Roman epic sequences. Yeah. Yeah. Right. There's a lot of Romans. I mean, right. He was like obsessed with right those kind of epic. Oh my gosh. This is really impressive because it's not only is like his technical kind of mastery of illustration so strong, but you're like he immediately just kind of got composition. He understood camera movements. He understood visual visual storytelling. And he's not just like drawing a comic book. He specifically like drawing out a movie. To some degree, this guy just like completely absorbed and understood this language and was able to spit it back out perfectly. So Martin Scorsese, you know, hangs out with the kids. There's the rough kids, but he is often the kid with his back against the wall trying not to get too much in the fight. Little Italy back then is for real. Little Italy basically like housed him down to canal Elizabeth over to like Mulberry, but like five or six or under. Yeah. Sicilian. The way he puts it, Elizabeth Street was mainly Sicilian. That's interesting to me. I wonder if it really did work that way, where it's because little is essentially three streets. It's it's Mont Mulberry and Elizabeth, which are like, now it's now you call. I mean, little Italy barely exists and you call some of it no Lida, which is offensive, you know, it is so offensive. Yeah, it sucks. But like, you know, architecturally and culturally now, it's all kind of one thing. But imagine like just the like ultra-perochialism of like, yay, you know, the Northern Italians, they were and then then the Palatins there on Mott, where on Elizabeth, what I mean, like, that's what came to New York is about and that was what New York thinks that New York is a hundred years prior. My point, if you let me finish my sentence, is that New York was like that for well over a century. I think a little bit. It would immigrate and then they'd just be like, this is our block. Yes, a little bit. You know, a lot of these would sort of mount and there was the sense of this weird like, we know this is the great American melting pot, but there's also a sort of baked in defensive tribalism of like, this is where we come from and this is our family. I think that that continues though. I think it's a little new neighborhood. New neighborhood. But the block by block thing is what passed. I think there's a little less of that now because there's less tenements. It used to be like pack and people in stronghold. It was like the neighborhood's really sectioned off. No, but I mean, I mean, like, when I worked as a labor reporter, you would, I would, you know, that's where I was started. I'm right. The guy in New's community is like, you know, this little pocket here. It knows on park, you know, like you would find, yes, it's all so fascinating. I'm a geography a nerd. I'm a New York nerd. I love all this stuff. But mostly he would live in a little Italy, but he does say, sometimes you got to stand out under Queen's sea other Italian community people. Sometimes you go to 42nd Street. Catch a picture. A picture. You go to the picture houses. Oh, I like the sound. So I don't know if you guys know this, but Martin Scorsese likes movies. This is going to be a recurring thing we discuss on this mini series about the films of Martin Scorsese. How much he likes films. Movies. He says around the age of three, his asthma is not great and his father would just take him to see lots and lots of movies. His father liked movies. His father had been a film buff in the 30s. So he's passing it down. The first image here, remember seeing a true color trailer for a Roy Rodgers movie in which he was wearing fringes and jumped from a tree onto his horse. His father says, you know who trigger is? And then and he went like Scorsese goes like this. It's by the truck finger. And he's like, no, it's the horse's name. And I'll take you to see it next week. How much that horse makes? He's got a studio contract. He gets a bucket of apples every day. And then he gets 10% of the apples they bring in at the box office. I'll read some of this quote that JJ says is important, but it's like half of it's like so long. So I was made to think I couldn't do anything physical. I had to be very careful and was sort of coddled in a way. So the rich will go into the movies with your father. It didn't matter what film you saw. It became important to me. It was a matter of going to Lowe's Commodore on Sixth Street and Second Avenue, which is now part of New York University. It's a film or east between those two. The Academy of Music, which is gone now on 14th Street. We were always walking into the middle of a film. There was a sense of peace there, too. There really was. You had faith when you went into the church and you had faith when you went into the movie theater, too. Imagine Griffin. That's what it should be. There should be a movie theater every 10 blocks in New York City, Griffin. And it should be playing movies all the time when you just walk in. I agree. It is walking in the middle of fucking what's out right now. Project Hill, man. Yeah, there we go. It's it is funny, you know, for how much Martin Spurs has, he now represents like the sanctity of cinema, right, and the purity of it. He talks about that every time he fucking walked into a movie theater, it was like an insane asylum. He was like in those days. I think it was a bunch of like latchkey kids, especially if it's like a kid thing. Right, right. Yeah, like, right. But he's just like people just walk in and out at random moments. It's basically running movies all day and you have like shorts and newsreels and whatever. And so people just like buy a ticket, show up whenever, sit down for like five hours, leave it any point. People are screaming and throwing popcorn. There's the moment, Matt Nay, I love so much the Jodhante movie, where you see them go into the movie palace for the first time and they open the doors and it's it's just like mayhem. It's like ultimatum. I also just to your point I wanna throw at, I imported this lovely blu-ray box that from the fine folks at Imprint in Australia, Martin Scorsese films of faith, which is a last temptation condone and silence put together, but I found it very funny just how blunt this is. On the back of the box, it has an image from condone and then a quote from Martin Scorsese. My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it, nothing else. I mean, I think he eats a meal once in a while. According to him, he eats faith and he watches movies. I know very reliably that he loves the dumplings of the town downtown. So some of the early movies, bad in the beautiful, first movie he sees about the process of filmmaking. He loved Westerns. Day the Earth should still, the sci-fi film. One of his first great theater experiences at the Academy of Music, a couple thousand people reacting to it. The Howard Hawks thing, that was an amazing experience. The shock, the humor, the overlapping dialogue, the monster, two thousand people jumping at once. What an amazing experience. Now, his mother is responsible for one of his formative memories. She takes him to see "Duel in the Sun," which had been condemned by the church. That's a King V door movie. I don't remember why they condemned it, but who knows? They were condemning everything. Because you're supposed to duel under the moon, of course. And he was too scary for him. I mean, that's a 46 movie. He must have been, he was like four years old. - Yeah. - This is what I'm saying. The people would just bring up baby ears a bit later. - I know, I know. - He couldn't watch the end. It was also frightening. And my mother kept yelling, "Look at it. You took me here to see it. Now watch it." So I guess even at four, he's like marching up to his mother and being like, "I want to see "Duel in the Sun." - I love movies. I'm sorry, brief side tangent ban. I have some terrible news. I hadn't even told you this. - But I just got a text that we had a cancellation for an upcoming George Lucas talk show date. - We were going to have Doug Bradley as a guest. Pinhead himself. - Love Pinhead. - And I was planning to get him to sign your lament configuration on. - Why is he canceling it here? - Apparently Pinhead booked a movie. - Well, you know what? But it's good that he's getting work. Good job, Pinhead. The whole fucking thing that rocks about him is he's a scouser. He's from Liverpool. And like, when you hear him in like a podcast where he's like, you know, he has a scous accent. And like the idea of like, oh, I would get in trouble. I can try. I'll try it. But like the idea of Pinhead being scousers, just really funny. Anyway, 1948. Scorsese gets a television set. One of the first families on that block, a 16 inch RCA Victor. So now he starts seeing even more movies. Perfect. - Good. Was the problem. Old movies, I guess. Like, I mean, whatever on television. I think they show a lot of British cinema. He says, like, Alexander Corda. Beef of Baghdad, you know, and then some Italian film. On Friday nights, they would show things like bicycle thieves or Rome Open City, like these, you know, more challenging near-realist Italian film. - I feel like filmmakers of his generation, this come up in other series, talk about this, that also, you know, far fewer channels, very few. But movies would replay. - Of course. He says a lot of these guys are studying one movie for like four weeks as a child. - That's the thing. He says million dollar movie, which is like a million dollar movie in the '50s. - Yeah. - Would just show the same film like five times a week. - Yeah. - And he would just watch it again and again. - It would be the movie. - The mother would be like, turn it off and try to be like, no. - I'm kale's a poffman. - The power press burger film, which is so beautiful. - One of the most beautiful movies ever made. - Now, of course, he saw it in black and white on a 16 inch RCA Victor TV with commercial breaks. And it still mesmerized him. But obviously, like, a lot power press burgers. Maybe the one single most obvious influence visually on the work of Barnes for says. Like, you know, like obviously there's a million other things in the soup there. But like you watch New York, New York, you're like, he's trying to make a power press burger. Like style. Like he's making it. - Yeah, it's the use of color throughout his movies and how important he talks about color being and how he conceives of things comes from them in so many ways. - One of our favorite filmmakers, filmmaking teams, ever, a series were always there and to do. - Yeah, we'll do them right now, actually. - Yeah. - Series canceled. - Marty. - Hit the bricks. - He didn't see Citizen Kane until he was 14 or 15. - Thanks, man. (laughing) - Gotta get those letterbox sets of Marty. - Face the cast, taste. - He remembers seeing it at the Taliah theater or Taliah, I think, on 96th Street, along with John Ford's The Informer, not the good movie. - Look, he likes a lot of movies. Also, he'd write, he'd write. He draws those storyboards, as we know. So we referenced that already. He was very obsessed with like biblical epics or movies, but his father is not seeing this and going, ah, an artistic streak. Perhaps I should foster this. - I'm so excited. We have a picture of this is embarrassing. I'm throwing these away. (laughing) - The fuck is this? Who do you think you are? Martin Scorsese. - It is funny to just be the guy that gets used as shorthand for great director for decades and imagine. - You're no Marty Scorsese. - Marty Scorsese. - He's dad being like, "Martin Scorsese, what, what, what, what, what do you have to say about movies?" No one cares. - So I guess his parents are not deeply religious, he says, but he lives in Italy and so he gets sent to Catholic school. He went to St. Patrick's Elementary, which used to be, it existed until, I think I looked it up recently, like until 2015 maybe, but like it's, so this is what I wanna talk about, all right. So I don't know if you guys know this, but they're St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. New York has St. Patrick's Cathedral, like the big ass fuck off Cathedral, it's up, you know, mid to the right, yeah, exactly. But that was the second St. Patrick's Cathedral, guys. The first St. Patrick's Cathedral is in Little Italy. It's on prints between Martin Mulberry. - Right? - The thing you said you had to reveal in this episode. - Yes. - David said he was sitting on a hot scoop. - Yes. And you guys have definitely seen this, you know, maybe haven't been in the church, but it's right there. - Yeah. - You know, in the middle of Soho, you're like, "Whoa, there's a big old church." - It very much sticks out. - It's a very old church, like it was built, I mean, by American standards, not by European standards, by European standards, it's like a 12-year-old, but you know, it's like 250 years old or whatever. - Yeah, impressive, yeah. - It's called now St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, which is a little rude, I think. It's a technically St. Patrick's, a Basilica, but you know, that's Pope language. Let's see, when was it built? - 1815, so yeah, you know. - It's just so funny 'cause of the neighborhood where it's like, you pass a little wave a-- - Right, and then you're like, "Ah, yes, "work it up by a belt for $800." And it's like, "Yes, but once this was like the seat of, you know, working class Catholic power." - Great. - So there used to be a school across the street. Now it's condos, but on Prince Street was the Catholic school across the street. That's where he went. He was an altar boy at St. Patrick's Cathedral. - Okay. (laughing) - Where are we going with this, David? - No, we said this was exciting. (laughing) - And we all know that. It always works out for everyone just by reading. I, the other day, toured St. You can tour it. There's catacombs underneath. - Cool. - I like that. - And you can tour them. Bones. - Now, on this tour guide, which was, you know, it was with my friend Blythe. My friend Blythe was like, "Hey, do you want "to get dinner or drink?" And I'm like, "Oh, sure." And she's like, "Or we could do something cool?" And I'm like, "What's cool?" I'm trying to do fun New York experience. - Catacombs match. - And she was like, "Catacombs?" And I'm like, "There are catacombs." We go on this tour. First we go around the graveyard. There's an ancient graveyard there. Again, by American standards, like, you know, hundreds of years old, very cool. Our tour guide was, imagine like sort of an Irish guy from Brooklyn. - Can you imagine this? - Call it a dolly to dolly. - No, no, no. Not an Irish guy from Ireland. Little, little, green-tailed and little. - Hey, I don't know what you're talking about, but, you know what, but, but, but, but, but. You know that kind of guy, right? And at one point, he's like, "Who here's toured like catacombs in Europe?" And I'm like, you know, I've been to like the ones in Paris, right? With those bones. - Yeah. - And he's like, "All right, all right." So, as our air condition, okay? There's no skeleton down here. - What? - No skeleton? - I mean, there are skeletons hidden away, but, you know, there's no like random bones. - Not visible, yeah. - Have you ever been. - So American that there's air condition. - Is there a condition? - Have you ever been to the fucking catacombs? - It's still a little terrifying. - No, I tried going the last time I was there and I didn't make a reservation enough out from when we were in town. - It is as extreme as you would imagine it to be, where you're just like, you go through a tunnel. Oh, it's just an endless walk lined with bones. - Yeah, so cool. - And the other thing with the Paris ones, especially, is you're like, "Right, if there was not someone with me, "I would get lost immediately and die down here." - Yes, it feels like a maze. - It feels like a labyrinth. It goes on forever. It's so many skulls, like so many. And they're not like behind glass. You're just walking through and being like, "That skull." - And they're like, "Don't touch the skull." - Hundreds of years old. Anyway, but out on this tour, he was like, "Hey, anyone know Martin Scorsese?" And I was like, "Yeah, I've heard it." Yes, and he was like, "It was an altar boy here." And I was like, "Of course he was." This was the church. - This was the church. - This was the little church. - This was the little little church. It's one of those New York things that you walk into like this grand cathedral. I mean, look, I took a fucking picture. You just can't believe that this is just sitting here in the middle of New York. 'Cause like, he'd do his prayers and then walk right across the street to rat. rice to riches. Like look at that. It's gorgeous. Yeah. It's pretty. So nice. I feel like a thing he talked about. And we're getting at this. I love Catholicism guys. And what if that's my rubios now. This is a trad podcast. Um, I'm into Catholicism in that weird JD Vance way. We don't have Blainecheck has always been a deeply spiritual podcast. Um, I was going to say, I feel like it's a thing that came up and the Rebecca Miller doc becomes up in a lot of his talks of just like he was a fragile boy. He was nervous, probably an extension of his physical fragility. He was in a rowdy neighborhood. Yeah. And the picture house and the church were the two places he felt safe. The calm places and the thing about the church especially is the, uh, the rougher types, the mob whatever they're not messing with the church. No one's going to be named. It's the one place that's basically safe. He had a very influential man named Father Prince Bay, who was like a young priest, been tore for him. Kind of a hip priest. I think he says, like he played the guitar. Oh, do you really? Yeah. I think so. My joke's not funny. I was just accurate. Um, he felt that the, um, he was a big fan of, uh, on the waterfront, introduced Martin to just say he loves the car mold and the character. Car mold and so fucking good in that movie. Car mold and I'll say it. Pretty good actor. The original kind of is Car mold in the original Karen's boy. Definitely because Car mold is like a good looking guy, but he's got that like big nose. Huge. And like it kind of just makes him sort of like, you know, like yeah, affable and interesting and whatever. But I feel like he's a definitional kind of formative archetype of the kind of guy that you and I lose our minds over, right? I love it. Have loved for decades. My guys got a honker. He's got a honker. It's, it's, you really do feel like you could squeeze it in the noise. And then we go, uh, like, uh, yes. Um, Father Prince Bay finally saw taxi driver and said to Marty, I've always told you, too much good Friday, not enough Easter Sunday. And Marty's like, he nailed me. Um, anyway, so all very formative for him. Uh, he doesn't totally fit in. He wants to be a priest. He enrolls in seminary school, but he just can't take a study seriously enough. Like you need to like fucking learn Latin and shit. And I just feel like all Marty wants to do is watch movies. It's funny when he talks about how close he feels like he came to becoming a man of the cloth. And then you hear from like his family and his childhood friends. And they were like, he was never gonna fucking be able to pull this off. I know he feels like he was being pulled between these things. But it was just like, it's pretty short-lived. At 14, he enrolls in a junior seminary called Cathedral College. So I'm here for a side. He's expelled after a year. He says he didn't have his mind on his work. And he'd fall in love with a young lady. These are not going, you will not be a priest with this kind of behavior, my friend. But thank God, uh, the cinema claim to him. As he says, like, he's basically like, my parents were not religious. I liked Father Prince of pay. And I liked, you know, the neighborhood priest kind of the neighborhood church thing. But like, this is not pushed on me. Yeah. And I probably just didn't have quite enough of the drive, you know. So he gets kicked out of that. He goes to Cardinal Hayes, which is a high school in the Bronx. He's still thinking about maybe going to like Jesuit University of Fordham, up in the Bronx, Fordham's Catholic University. That's where his friends are. But bad grades. He was interested in English literature and read lots of books and stuff like that. But he says it wasn't easy for him to read. He says it wasn't part of our cultural makeup, but I was ready to tell further. I don't know. I just feel like he's you know, he's he's not academic, right? Like he he figures this all out later. Like he's just not right. Yeah. Comes from a working class family. Yeah. Um, not even that. There was a lot of working class kids who were, you know, climbing, you know, I said rapidly shooting up to the right. You know, this is what happened in America, but it's not seeing it in his day-to-day life. That's what he says. Like, it's like there, what there wasn't a culture of it in his family, right? Of like, you should read fucking Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens or whatever. And he loved and he loved movies. Number one thing he loves is movies. Not books. He makes a short film called Vesuvius 6, an 8-millimeter thing, which is shot on the roofs of Mont Street with white sheets. I'm going to guess he didn't completely recreate Mount Vesuvius. They're so clips of this in the Rebecca Miller thing, but it's him doing his, yeah. He says he basically like learned some things about camera angles, you know what I mean? Yeah. And then he gets a catalog from the New York University Washington Square College. It's not even called NYU back then. And they have a department called TMR, television, motion pictures, radio, and he thinks I'm going to go into radio just kidding. But, you know, it's in the village. It's right where he grew up. It's just one neighborhood up. What if we found out that the great pain of Martin Scorsese's life is that he wanted to be a drive-time radio guy and he couldn't hack it? It would be so funny if he wanted to be like right on Howard Stern. Yeah. And he's still. Do you think he's ever been on Howard Stern? Well, I'm going to look it up. Keep it right. Digging through the dossier. I'm sure he has. So, Haig Manugin? Oh, yes. Very influential early like teacher for him, Armenian American professor. He's in. Who's that knocking in my door, I think, briefly. So he shows him. Lumière movie. He shows him great train robbery. Greed. Maybe all the way up to like early Philemi. Like these are the kinds of movies he's showing him. Scorsese, they had to do a report in a movie he liked. He wrote a report on the third man. And he gave me a B plus. Because he said, remember, this is only a thriller. We were opposite ends of the poll in a way. He preferred like Open City. I liked everything. And this is important to Marty and all the new brats. I feel like the movie brats are like, we love Westerns. We love noir. We love fucking Hitchcock. Whereas like the older guard. That's entertainment. Right. You know, I mean, sure, it's fun. Yeah. It's funny to say about the third man too. Yes. Well, what were you about to ask Ben? I wonder, does it maybe have something to do with TV growing up with having access to all of these different kinds of genres? I think TV is so new. It's more the picture house thing. And those movies would just show the like the trashier movie. You could just sit there and just watch all day. I think that's a lot of it that these guys really dug in and studied the kind of form and construction of these things. And there's like, there's artists for you here while not presenting themselves serious does not seem he has ever been a guest on the Howard Stern show. There are many clips of other people talking about. Coward. Coward. He has done it in Friedland. Shud. You do hot ones. That might kill him. Would he die if he had let's let's let's be careful. I don't know what Marty's dying to just sniffing those hot sauces might be dangerous. French New Wave is happening while he's in film school. It's very, very liberating for him. He says, uh, here's Shimon one or more. Juliz Jim. Uh, Viversavi. My pin is that those are good movies. They're good movies. Yeah. Just thinks about things like Anna Karina's reading a letter and then there's a jump cut to a man folding it up. He's gone up and taken out of her hand. You're breaking narrative, right? You know, I mean, obviously this is the whole thing with a French New Wave where you show people now and they're like, I don't get it. Right. And you're like, you have put to literally hadn't met them. Right. And then, you know, Casabades is out there. Yeah. Shadows has been released. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like by that. Yeah. This is happening in New York. And he made that on a 16 millimeter camera in New York City. So it can be done. And it was a scrappy, iterative movie. Shot it right over a bunch of years and all right. It's like this guy just kind of eaked it out. Yeah. So, uh, he works on some shooting student stuff. He's a cinematographer or the photographer for a short called iniesta. And then his first short is called what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this. Now we're going to explain title. We're going to talk about these early shorts, including this one, right? Yes. That's all I'm going to do a picture. That's kind of box set. Right. Yes. That's on there. Telling American Big Shave. Yeah. In 65, he also marriages his marriages. He marriages. He marries his college girlfriend Lorraine Brennan. They have a daughter Catherine, his oldest daughter, who is very present in his life, but clearly has a complicated relationship with him when she's young because he's like divorces her mother and then they divorce in 71. And then he's like, you know, being really regular through all of the sevens. It's a big thing that, uh, who's that knocking on my door is about, but he still talks about how much shame there was associated with the idea of even like socializing with women and how kind of sinful it was unless you were immediately just going to make an honest woman out of her and get married and start a family, you know? And I think Marty was always a little bit horny and felt the need to be like, well, then I guess I just got to get married again. He got married a bunch. There's some marriages. There was some marriages. How old was he when he became a dad? Well, of his, of the first child, uh, uh, yeah. I mean, Jesus, yeah, he would have been like 23, 24, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So pretty young, not like insane, but. And he still talks about like when he was like, you know, if I wanted to date someone, I felt like I had to marry them. Who's that knocking at the door? It was actually written as the seventh second part of a series of films meant to explore his adolescence. The first was going to be called Jerusalem Jerusalem. It's the sort of half-finished screenplay he wrote where his protagonist called J.R. later called Charlie. It's, you know, me. Street's main characters called Charlie, in which they've like spent three demons to always spend some days in a religious retreat, you know, sounds a little less exciting. Hi, Manugian is his first producer, you know, helps him make this movie. His father raises $6,000 for him from a student loan. He thinks it's the first student film shot in black and white 35 millimeters on the East coast. Interesting. That's, it is wild to think about. It's that early. Things being that nascent because even just like film school is a new thing. Part of the idea of cleaning, of course, and I think it was mostly technical. Like it was mostly like, yes, well, we now make film and television and stuff. Right. Here's how to do that. Right. Because then it's like the new wave is happening. Right. So like the art is so exciting and there's challenging. It's different. Yeah, not too, not too generalized, but it used to be more like fucking joining the circus. Like you would just like get on a fucking bus to Hollywood and get off and be like, what can I do? And then you just learn everything, you know, from like carrying crates and shit. But even though the technology has been around for at that point 50 years, it's not very accessible. I think basically we're very early in like you could get your hands on a 16 millimeter camera, maybe that's more portable and you could maybe like make a movie for not as much money, right? Yeah. Like you develop the film yourself. It's still going to be harder. You're going to have to cut it with scissors and shit. A 35 millimeter camera is still a thing that's like kind of locked behind gates. You know, it's it's really hard to get an opportunity to work with something like that. There's more. They're very few film schools. They're all very new. And it's so expensive. There's a barrier of entry. And you got right. Correct. Yeah, but it yes. Yes. And it's the complicated thing. So these things had basically been built around like institutional knowledge. Like there wasn't really a pipeline and it also was and it speaks to what we're saying of like the sort of snobbishness against commercial cinema. There was this battle of like, is this a fucking serious thing? You know, do we need to be like training people and how to make movies? Is that like an intellectual exercise or is that like learning how to work an auto plant? Harvey got down. They put in a publication called show business and he comes in and Marty has a friend called Bill Minken, who's a comedian, sit behind a desk for this. Harvey comes in and Bill Minken's like, Marty, his coach and would be like, what are you doing here? I was like, I am so mad. And he's like, there's no ad and basically go to him into an argument. And then they like watch the argument. And then Marty is like, that was great. And Harvey is like, why didn't you tell me like to improv something? I can do that. Like, why are you doing fucking Jamie Kareny, Kennedy experiment on me? Marty did accent. Marty did. I was like, yes, the hell out of Kytel. Kytel was working as a court stenographer. So I think that tends to be kind of a nine to five job. So I think making this movie was really annoying. Harvey kind of tells the kind of guy, just his vibe, his look, his, his generation where I'm like, you could tell me he was doing any job before he became an actor. And I would believe there was no job. He was a sea captain. I'm like, yeah, of course. And then he he's docked and he started acting in movies as a lion tamer. They shot it over the course of many months, right? Like they had so much trouble matching scenes. They said they would shoot in a building. They blow the lights. They'd have to wait for hours to like reset everything. They didn't know what they were doing. The first version is 65 minutes long. It's called bring on the dancing girls. Yes. They screen it for people. It's terrible. Right. And this was just I want to make a film about like male camaraderie. I want to try to capture what I see and the guys I grew up with and my generation and all of that. So we got to make a movie out of this man, but Ben, it is basically that. It is basically Marty going like, this is the web series. This conversation we're having right now. None of the girl stuff is in it. Yeah. It doesn't have the girl stuff. It's just guys. None of it's written. She's not cast. It's not shot. That's not part of the conception of the movie. There's no, I mean, there's like a girl in it, but there's no confrontation. I'm saying the character of the girl, all of that is a secondary shoot later. This movie is just guys being dudes. It's just guys being dudes. So in 66 people don't like it. He says he has no money. His marriage is already falling apart. He's got 50 minutes of a dude hanging out movie that no one wants. Right. He's got with Martin who's an early collaborator of his and works on Mean Street and other things. There's neither of them have any money, but they start thinking about things. Somehow, they get $37,000 from Hig and from Joe Wilde, another student who's a lawyer, to finance the rest of the picture which involved scenes with a girl. They needed an actress. They needed a 16-millimeter camera. They were going to cut that in with some 35-millimeter stuff they had shot. They start shooting in some real locations. The way he puts it is, I realize I was in the process of combining two styles. Let's say cast of Eddie's with Ford because it's like these two movies essentially get turned into one movie are very differently made because he's learning. Previously, tried to shoot sequences with that dialogue, tell the source through images, but it didn't work. They find this actress, Dean of Bethune. They call her Hig and Kitelle back. Her mother was a big actress of the early American theater and radio. She was on the original Superman radio show. Eva Bethune was also a dancer. I'm sorry. No, I'm saying Ivy was the mother. Yes. In Eva Bethune was also a dancer. She later started her own acting school company that sort of became her legacy, but didn't have many acting roles. No. She's only got a few film credits. Kitelle is back to working as a court stenographer. They cut his hair and stuff and he's like, "I fuck you. This is annoying." You also have to imagine this is like, what, a year, 18 months later? And it's like, I got to do more of that shit with the guy who fucking x'd me. This is around the time he also makes the big shave. Yeah. That's his breakthrough. Right. That one's a prize at a festival of American cinema, experimental cinema. Right. So that gets him a little bit of attention. People cover it then, but it's a true, short, dialogue-free film that is pretty experimental and an allegorical metaphorical. But it has a really big impact. It is talked about as a calling card thing as they're sort of arising film intelligentsia and the sort of critical community of New York City. He's immediately kind of propped up as this guy's interesting. Now he has a new cut. He calls it, "I call first." He screens into the Chicago Film Festival. Roger Ebert of the Sun Times gives it a great review. Am I wrong in thinking it is literally Roger Ebert's first published review? Not sure about that. Okay. But I can tell you that he said, he called it a marvelous evocation of American city life announcing the arrival of an important new director. He did kind of nail it from the hat. This is the thing. Roger Ebert dines out on this for the rest of his life. There's many accomplishments, but being able to brag about like, "I fucking called it." I saw this at the earliest possible showing and I was like, "I put my money down on Martin Scorsese having a good career as a film director." And Scorsese also says that it kind of made him or at the very least empowered him. David, do you have your own version of that? Oh, like the movie I called my shot or I don't know, I don't think so. I think I was the first person to say Holtzo Transylvania is good, right? That was a risky position at that time. I wasn't actually literally asking. I was hoping that you would come up with like, I don't know, something dumb. Okay. But there's still a chance later. And new listeners, we do this sometimes. We do this sometimes. Sometimes we see it a bit. So he tries to get it in the New York Film Festival. He says, they told me I was living aesthetically beyond my means, which is funny. He goes to Europe, takes it around there. He meets a Italian director, sorry, Italian Joseph Brenner associates, a soft core porn distributor, says, if you add a nude scene, we'll distribute this. So he adds the nude scene. Yes. It was not Ebert's first review, but it was the first review, Scorsese God. It was the first review of that movie, God. Yes. But this is very illustrative of this era of filmmaking. If you were making an independent film. You could screen it for someone and they'd just go like, if you can find a way to throw like five tits in this, I can get it on like five screens. Right. But truly they'd be like, they'll give you $20,000, find a couple of boobs, edit them into the movie. And that's like, I can make my money back on that. They're in Amsterdam. They fly Harvey Kytel, who I assume is the middle of like, you know, you're on or I have to answer. Yeah. So Amsterdam, they got, as he puts it, a bunch of girls and did the crazy nude scene to get that in there. And you know, they, he looks back on the film and sees its flaws, but you know, it's part of he in the context of the late 60s, free love, the sexual revolution. And here's this guy who can't like fuck a girl because he likes her and like his two afraid of sex. It's like, it's, it's like, it's out of sync, but in a good way, right? You know what I mean? I think this movie's fascinating. I actually like it a lot. I think it is one of those movies where it's failings and it's limitations actually kind of give it more power because it's sort of. of about how unsettled it is with itself, and all the things this guy has not yet worked through in himself. It's such a pure primal scream of Scorsese, and I also think past Mean Streets, his movie stopped being about him. They could come about his obsession and his worldview, and they're all very personal. Sure. And Mean Streets is about him, but as about him, he did live in a train station in Paris and meet a robot. Well, those are his best friends, they got time and time to write. They write all of his favorite things. Mean Streets, as we'll talk about next week, is this fascinating pivot point where he has a self-insert character played by Catel, but then it feels like he goes like, "Wait, what if I build the whole movie out of the De Niro guys? The guys I know, not me at the center of the story?" And who's that knocking at my door is like a movie about him. It is like Scorsese, like almost as a therapy session of a film, working through all of his concerns and spilling them out. And the form of the movie, even in its weird segmented production, and its development across years, and all this sort of wedged-in pieces, feels like it's a representation of what he's battling inside of himself in that way. It's messiness to me. It's not me saying it's a perfect film, or that's a masterpiece, but that I think it's a really engaging thing to watch. I like this. I think it is mostly interesting, as a movie made by Martin Scorsese. It's just an interesting blueprint for him, and the music is good, and the camera work is interesting. But it is not a good movie, like in terms of like, if you just showed up to someone who never seen a Martin Scorsese movie, they would be like, "I love that." It's an interesting first work. Yeah. It's got some stuff in it, and because you know who made it and like, you know where it's, like, it has all this fascinating, like blueprint material. Which is interesting. One could call it a bit of a brosetta style. I think that's almost a stretch. He thinks that's a stretch. He's kind of like, I don't, I don't know. He's like, "I didn't get the emotions right. I dislike the movie. It's a rough sketch." But, you know, Kitelle's good. I think Zina Bethune is good. I think the camera work is good. I like what I, you know, good necker music style. He's got Thalma editing this one, and then they don't re-team again for another couple pictures. No, for more than a couple, yeah, for a little while. But especially knowing that he gave her such a weird batch of footage, you know, shot across years in different formats, in different eras. He's doing really interesting stuff in the construction. Stuff with the boys hanging out, you know, like, some of that is fun. But like, you have mean streets, which does it a lot better. So like, you can always just obviously see mean streets in a little bit. Yeah, you know, all these guys. This is a movie where those things are like, fighting each other. It's not even like, well, here's a rough version of this and a rough version of that. Like, the nature of how it was made means that you have these scenes that are just the uncut form of Guy's rough housing and then cutting to like an entirely different mode of filmmaking with these like more intimate dialogue scenes shot an entirely different film format. And the two sides of the movie like clashing against each other because Thalma's actually using new wave editing rather than like invisible editing and making something out of the juxtaposition between the two. I love Thalma. You guess who else likes this movie? Roger. No. Guess who else? Who? Gaston Radys. Oh, well, yes. He digs it. He knows a lot. At least, or at least he notices the talent. Sampon notices. So that is who's that knock into my door before we move on to Berk's Barber. That's all we're going to say about who's that? No, I'm saying that's the end of the dossier on who's that. Do you think we should talk about the movie a little more and then do the box card dossier section? We should also you can do a box office game. I think we should do a little. Yes. And but no, no, no, I'm not saying we're done with talking about the movie, although it is it's a slight movie in terms of narrative, obviously, but no, it's, you know, I saw it years ago when I was like, I'm going to watch every single Scorsese movie, right? You know, like so then I was like, let me clear it out. And I found it very interesting. This time, I was a little kind of like, I had just watched Mean Street because we did just break that up. We've only one other one. We just take one leap frog. And I was just the whole time being a little bit like, right, well, there's mean streets. Yeah, but that's okay. That's maybe that's maybe you problem that mean streets is fresh. And you know, three years later. I know. So we know how good it's going to get. You're right. Ben, what did you had you seen this film before? I had never seen it before. What did you make of? Who's that knock into my door? Well, the boys reminded me of a lot of characters I grew up with. In particular, smart Joey reminds me of a bunch of guys where they're always mad, but seem and like seemingly don't want people to be around, but also want people around. It's really interesting that now I know the process of how this film was made. Because it did feel really disconnected. Right. You kind of have to know that it was made that way to get me enjoyment out of it. Because otherwise, you're like, what are the fucking swings this thing is doing? Yeah. Right. Because it's just, I mean, it almost feels like someone made a parody of a Scorsese movie with no money, right? We're like, let's do some music. And then it's like a bunch of guys go like, what are you doing? You know, and you're like, right, this is like what you're supposed to write. The parody and the guys like, but I love Jesus, you know, the violence being so corny, sure, and not well thought out. And yet it looks like they're kind of really hitting each other in an amateur way. It's also like every piece of the puzzle, though, you know, like one of the first scenes is a guy just talking to a girl about fucking the searchers. It's so long that you're like, you have her attention, you're losing her body. Like there's that, there's, you know, that thing of like, the theory that filmmakers are always just remaking the same movie over and over again. Hopefully they're refining it and stretching it and, you know, morphing it and whatever it is. And it's like, this isn't like the model for, in final form, what his movies will be from here on out, but it is him identifying every single thing he's going to do. What the sensibility is, what the style is, like just dumping all the puzzle pieces out in the floor is kind of fascinating to me. Yeah, totally. It's a very interesting thing to watch. And yeah, I mean, Harvey's good in it. I mean, obviously, again, it's the building box of better Harvey stuff, but like he's so compelling. It's also this is the only time he's playing Marty this much in all the scenes with the shirt, you mean doing a little bit more like Marty than where it feels like he's like, I get it. I'm this is based on him. You know, which I think is a common thing. You hear about this all the time lead actors who are kind of sort of mirroring their director, even in cases where the character isn't an evident kind of self-insert. And this is the only time where I feel like I've seen Kitelle take on the qualities of scores, right? Because the mean street's character is more thought through a little quieter, more reserved. It feels like he's building a character based on the thing that scores as he wrote. I do miss a deniro type. Like he doesn't have a good guy to push against. No, as you said, the kind of rough guys are all a little generic, you know? It is the moment he finds deniro, it changes the entire course of his career. You know, like that guy walking into the bar is just like, oh, wait a second. If I have something like this in the mix, my movies can suddenly like, it's gasoline in the tank. I like Xena Bethune a lot. Yeah. I think she plays the character with some depth and agency, even though again, I don't feel like she's been given very much. I mean, let's say what this move is. Down to not give it a character name. She is the girl. She's girl. They give her, they give her a proper title. She is the girl. Oh, I think she's just girl. I mean, I'm seeing here, girl. Yeah. Maybe I thought I saw the girl in it. It's also the kind of classic thing of Marty's like, well, we need the boys need different names because there are multiple male characters. The girl could just be called girl. Excuse me. There's a second female character. His mommy. Well, I'm sorry. In the, in the sort of sex scene. Yeah, well, that's there are multiple girls in the dream, but they're not even numbered. They are not. They are just girl in dream. There is also a couple girl at party. There you go. Yes. This is the only scores sizing movie that's only on DVD. And even like on iTunes, it's a standard deaf version. I don't know that he's ever cared to like, you know, refurbish it. No, there was, there was an early 2000s, like Warner Brothers Corsese box set where this was an exclusive DVD for a while. And it was like, that's the one way we're getting that film back in circuit. And it basically feels like that DVD master is what is still rentable. They never like thought to like put it on a blu-ray with mean streets or something, you know what I mean? That's the kind of move they do. Like, yeah, I just kind of throw it in. I mean, we'll talk about, you know, Boxcar Bertha, which was the other sort of like a banded one for a while, just got this big cinematograph. I bought it. I bought it. I watched it. Same. But that, that feels like, well, that has more of a curio aspect of being a Korman movie and fitting into that era of genre pictures and whatever. It feels like inevitably someone's got to put out a better version of who's that knocking. I'm sure it's just an important American film history. I agree with you, but I think that is largely how it's regarded, right? Like no one's, I don't know. I mean, even Shaman told me he's he's remastered. And - You've worked on "Train With Anger." - It's still not available. - Well, because I was like, are you gonna release it? And he was like, I can't even bear it. Yeah, he was like, I wanted to show it to my kids in like that format. I have no idea if I wanted to do anything more. And I'm like, I get it. 'Cause it's like, it's a very amateurish movie. - I was looking up, I was like, what are there other holes I need to plug in my like blank check disk collection of the main feed episodes? And I was like, am I wrong about this? And I double-checked. Like, "Prainger never got any." - It didn't get even like a VHS. - I don't believe. So it certainly never got any DVD or anything. - I certainly don't. There's no way it got a DVD right, yeah. - Right. - You can watch it on the internet or kind of. - I mean, that's where we watched it. I believe 10, 11 years ago. - There's been a long time ago. - 10 years ago. - Yeah. Now I wanna see if there is a VHS. And do I need to buy the VHS? And is "Praing With Anger" a porch movie? These are important questions that will be settled later. It does seem like there was a VHS. - Are you really encouraging him right now? - Sound insolent. - I think I need to encourage him. He's true. He's the snowballing down the hill long ago. - Yeah, he's not even bidding. He's just buying now. - What will be he will be? - Oh yeah, he buys it now. - Excuse me. The thrill of the hunt's about to come. - Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't buy it now. - I'm actually kind of lazy enough. I'm more than buying the VHS. - Yeah, Griff is kind of the like, best offer, eight cents lower. What do you think? - Yeah, you don't understand how much time I waste a week trying to like- - Put that in your cart, they'll notice. And then they'll contact you. - Yeah, that's my real strategy. And it doesn't all the time. - Yeah. - I saved dollars this week. At least six? - Fantastic. So, what else, yeah, there's a nude scene. - Oh yeah, what else? - It's like, again, the camera stuff is fun. He's doing camera stuff. Like there's moments where he's like, doing like birds eye view shit, where you're like, I mean, it's the kind of first film stuff where you're like, you didn't need to do that. You know, it's not. It's not really suggesting anything, but clearly you just wanted to see what that would look like. - Some close up kissing? - Yeah. - And the eyeball close up. - I don't think people should kiss in movies. - Can we say, this movie doesn't have this kidding. - The story of this movie is a guy who- - JR. - You could say it's trying very hard to fit in with the boys, right? There seems to be something a little more thoughtful, a little more sensitive within him. He likes just sitting in nature and taking it in. But he knows that's, you know, maybe that's not true. - It's not cool. - Right. - Sally Gagaz is not gonna like that. - Right. So he goes out and gets drunk and they punch each other and they talk about who was and he meets a girl that he likes. - Yes. He's going to go on the Staten Island ferry and he's talking to her like he's about to fucking, you know, go to Antarctica. He's like, yeah, I mean, Jesus. But he bright, he meets her at the ferry station, I feel like. That's where he talks to your off about the searchers. They mentioned Jeffrey Hunter. Does, you know, who, do you know who he is? - Yeah. - I don't. - Jeffrey Hunter's in the searchers. He's also Captain Christopher Pike. Is this other famous role? - Captain, Captain Christopher Pike was the captain of the Enterprise on the original pilot of Star Trek and they recast him because they thought he didn't have the juice and they replaced him with William Shatter. - Who did have the juice? - He did. - He did. - Captain Kirk has the juice. He is almost like Mr. juicy juice in terms of how much juicy he had. - But it is basically like. - But they recut the pilot footage into a later two-part episode. - They did. - That is true. - Where Captain Pike was the kind of rejected and scorned. - Well, he basically, they canonically made him the captain that Kirk had replaced. - Right, and he got burned up in an accident. - And he's in a big kind of robot body wheelchair. - Yeah, pretty cool, actually. - He's actually a really cool guy. And Bruce Green would place him in the JJ movie. - Right now. - It's an excellent performance study hand. - Could place him in somehow. - And somehow. - He's really, really good. - But it's just funny that in Martin's Chris as he's first movie, someone says, Jeffrey Hunter. - I'm like Captain Pike. - Captain Pike. - Anyway, yeah, he meets a girl. And he likes her. - He's having kind of a secret romance with her. And it feels like he both is trying to shield from his boyfriends that he has feelings, that he has a romantic attachment to a woman who he wants to talk to who's bringing he is interested in. And also his overwhelming Catholic guilt. - Well, it is also at that time he's still living at home. We talked about this a little bit on our Mean Streets episode. And you can't bring this girl around your mom. - No. - You get in trouble. - No. - And people who live alone at this age are seen as deviance. The only reason you could possibly want to do that is so you could have premarital sex, the worst thing in the world. - I actually love it. Big fam. - I can't wait. - Wild coming from the two married guys in the room. - You guys fuck that one away. - Um, so what was I gonna say? - Um, they have this attachment and then-- - He won't have sex with her. - Yes. - 'Cause he doesn't want to spoil her. - He doesn't want to spoil her. And she reveals to him. - A bit retrograde. - Yes. - That she is a survivor of sexual assault. - Yes. - And he has a very negative response to it. - He is not mature enough to grapple with that in a good way. - That she feels dirty and tarnished. What did you do to encourage that? Why were you even with that guy in the first place? - He's so selfish and has no empathy. He makes me very mad. - He just doesn't, he's not mature enough. He cannot handle it. - It's all about him. - There's a part of him that could have empathy but he cannot access it. - Well, right. If we can parse this for a second, right? I mean, this is the whole kind of like tightly wound Catholic guilt, ball of wax is like all I want is to have sex. I am told that if I have sex, that's the worst thing I could possibly do. So there's this, the Madonna and the Horde bifurcation, right? Of like I can go ran out of apartment and have my own fucking like boom boom sex orgy because that's the way I get my rocks off without tarnishing the sanctity of a woman I actually care about. And then the notion that she has had sex in any form when he feels like he cannot allow himself to have sex with her even if the sex she had was a rape, was violent, was not of her own agency is a thing that he can't process because all he wants is to have like intimate relations with her which he feels like he cannot do without ruining her. - It is a movie about his maturity. This is not a plot driven movie. This is the closest thing the movie has to like an emotional arc or a story and it's basically not developed into over halfway through. And I think like the note of maturity in this film, the thing that shows a little bit of understanding from Scorsese who at this point has just not processed his own shit enough to be able to make a film with enough objective distance. I give him credit for understanding that the end of this movie when he goes and tries to do the like you know what? I apologize, I forgive you. That she's like fuck you. - That's what I like, right? He's like I'll marry you anyway and she's like you clearly cannot handle like what has happened to me and do not have like the right feelings for this. - You watched me from the 1960s and you're worried that the guy is gonna be rewarded for saying I will accept you even if you are too. - The thing you told me and I have will, yeah. - Right, I accept you. - Now instead, she's like fuck off and he goes to the church and doesn't know what to do with herself, it's got Scorsese. - Woo, woo, yeah, right. - What's up, Ben? - Let's play the box office. - Well yeah, thankfully we've gone to the end. - Yes. - Uh-huh. - And we're not talking about the end, which is the needle drop. - Oh, sure. - And it's a song that's "Things" by a group that also thinks, go on. The doors. - Oh, it's just, I had this know where I'm just like, ah, good. The doors are in this movie. Just what I mean is they were, they were hot stuff. - This was, right. - He was at the tip of the spear on this one. You do have to give him credit. Like people were pointing out. - There are only a couple of years old at this point. - It's credited as, it's list is like a '67 movie but I think the final sort of round of shooting they do to add the boobs and the boom boom man maybe happens in '68. - I'm not sure about that. It was released in American '68 but it was screened in Chicago in '67. - But I think what Ibert Tull was a slightly earlier version. - That is possible. - I don't know. - I saw someone interrogating that the, this is the end comes out in 1967 and they were like, that's a really fast turnaround but it seems like maybe the song was only added when the film got proper distribution in '68. - Anyway, come on baby, light my fire. That's not the song better. - He walked down the whole way of the ancient gallery. - Yeah, just, just, Ben just take us to back and think of him being the first one to ever be like, hey, you hear the song from the doors? I'm not saying you're gonna give him credit. - No, no, no, no, this is the real question. Right, Ben, it's 1967. You are Ben Hossley. - Bloop, you've been dropped in there. Someone puts on the doors. - Bell bottoms or whatever. - Do you like it? Someone's like, hey, if you've never met, I'm gonna spin a groovy tune. You've never met a guy who likes the doors, right? You've never met a guy who's built his personality. You've never been in a college dorm room and seen a poster of Jim Morrison. - Right, you're a high schooler, let's say, 1967. You're walking around Greenwich Village, you walk into a record store, it's playing. No one even introduces it to you. No one recommends that you're not associating it with a person. You're hearing it fresh, what's this I hear? I'm hearing this for the first time. Wow, what is there to say? Do you think you hate them that much just from the music alone? - I will give you that I wouldn't hate them. - Sure. - It wouldn't be your thing, it wouldn't be, yeah. But I would be at least interested 'cause they have a unique. going. Yeah. This fucking drunk poet idiot and an organist. Yeah. When do you think was number one of the box office when this on Jim Morrison was kind of an organist as well if you know what I'm saying. When this quote unquote came out and famously in America. What do I think was number one of the box office in 1968? September, you know, 16 September, 1960. I can give you a hint. It's a film that features an actor who liked this movie. He was also director. John Casabattis. The dirty dozen. Nope. Rosemary's baby. Rosemary's baby. Interesting. Which was number one for a million weeks. Like, you know, it was such a big hit. Number two of the box office in film we've covered on this podcast. Number two is a film we've covered on this podcast. It's something of a totemic film, huh? Is it a 67 picture or 68? It's 68. It's a 68. It's a totemic film. Is it a Kubrick? Yes. It would be 2001. That's right. Yeah. Quite totemic, do you agree? You said it not I. Number three. It's really crazy to think that this movie we just saw came out at the same time as that movie. That's why that movie is that crazy thing. Right. Yeah. It really is. It's it's not just that movie looks good for 1960. Like, it looks good for 368. And everything else, you know, was was just like on a different planet. Number three, the box office is a romantic comedy film. It stars Sydney Poitier. That's what I'm giving you. Just sure with love? No. Good guess. And it's not, guess who's coming to dinner? No. It's a lesser known. It's a lesser. But I mean, I think I know it isn't a known title. I'm not sure. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'll give you more hints. Directed by Daniel Man. Okay. You know, made a lot of movies. Who's the leading lady of this picture? Abby Lincoln. But I can, you know, great, great African American singer. Okay. I can tell you the bow bridges in this film. Carol O'Connor. Oh, did he have some opinions on a character in this? Yeah. I can tell you, the score was composed by Quincy Jones and he wrote the title theme song as well, which was nominated for best song at the Academy Awards. And it is the title of the movie. It's not like, what the fucking love isn't many splendor. You're not that far off. I'm gonna give it to you. It's for love of Ivy. Oh, sure. Here's another film. Number four at the box office. Let me look it up here. Look it up here, please. Is a 1968 British film scarring Oscar Werner. Okay. Good actor. I love Oscar Werner. And Barbara Ferris. Okay. I can't say I've heard of this one. Get directed by Kevin Billington. I don't think you've got this one. Does there seem to be a genre attached to this picture? Drama. Drama. That's helpful. A famous male conductor gives an interview to an attractive female reporter. He speaks to, frankly, and ends up being given an unwanted sabbatical from conducting. So probably something like tar. That was going to say he begins an affair with the reporter during his blank, which is the title of the movie sabbatical, close, interlude. And the accumulation of difference in their ages and background begins to mount. I don't know. Sounds okay. Oh, he was like like a orchestra. Yeah, not a train. I was like, it would be funny if she's like train the train. Yeah. Number five at the box office is a 1967 film, Griffin. That's how successful it's been. It's been in the box office for 39 weeks. It is a another totemic movie. It is a romantic comedy drive. It is the, yeah, the highest grossing film of 1967 graduates. Yeah. Uh, yes. I mean, 1967 obviously is the the pictures of revolution year. That's the, that's the bonding pie, graduate line, uh, and then Dr. Dulittle, of course, great. The most revolutionary film of all. But I was just looking at my, my 67 letter box. It is insane. How good that year is. 67, even just for international cinema, when you take away, like sort of what was happening at the Oscars, fucking great movie here. It's fucking, you know what? On every movie. If you throw a, you know, dart at an old movie, you're like, God damn, like it's the best playtime game out in 67. Yeah, weekend, came out, Lou weekend. Yeah, that's a, that's a regular ass movie. It is. My wife almost divorced me over that movie. Really? No, no, no. You took her to see it. I took her to see it. She was like, Oh, fuck, I was like, sorry, I remember this being a little, a little more narrative than. Yeah. No, it's just what if just like people, well, though, that's the first part, but then it's just people talking about communism while they're sandwiches. He loved doing it. He did love. Well, it's really the start of him being like, what if this is a lot of the movie? Anyway, some of the other films in the top 10 are the odd couple, fun. Rachel, Rachel, yeah, the Paul Newman, directed. I've never seen it. Yeah, they're right. Yeah. Hang them high, which is, which is a Clint Eastwood film that he didn't direct, but like Ted Post, it's kind of like, you know, in the Eastwood sort of, you know, just now, so I put it out for probably dead. Yeah, those fuckers. A film called Hutons in the Pill, which is a British comedy, a Ronald Neem film. It's a really good title. That I assume is kind of like your classic like British kitchen sink, some kind of comedy, like where they're like, well, it's like, ooh, the pill is new. Yeah. And it's about the contraception. Yeah. And then a movie, a leave-and-cleaf called movie called The Big Gun Down. Now, can I turn about as fair play? Can I throw a little game at you? Yeah, sure. Do you think you can? Yes, but get it Western. Yes. The top five highest grossing films of the year, 1968. 1968 in film. And I will say two of the films that were just in the top five. That's about to say, 2001's in there. Yeah, where do you think it is? One or two. Two. What do you think would it be in it? In 68. Is the odd couple in there? Odd couples number three. There you go. Odd couple made a robust 20 million dollars, 2001 to 21, and one film beat them both with 24. It is a film that won one of the major acting categories this year. It's the arrival of a giant star and a star. We're very familiar with on this podcast. Oh, funny girl. Yeah. That was the number one movie. Yeah, it's funny that a local New York act like that somehow be the highest grossing film. Well, it's funny that there was a girl. Well, the premise of the film. People were laughing just when they saw the mark. This is a funny girl. They even see the poster. Is Rosemary's baby on the top five? Rosemary's baby is number seven. Okay, but it was so big head. It was always a very big hit. It's plan of the apes in the time. Plan of the apes is number six. Okay, both of those did 15. Okay, give me a hint. Can you guess four and five? Four is. I don't want to use the word, but it's it is a it is a giant action film classic. It weirdly did not become a franchise, but has often been threatened with a remake. Oh, well, it's correct. And number five, fun. Not my favorite. Number five, but very sexy. It's a musical. It's a musical. I don't want to get funny girl. I don't want to give you the obvious hint, but it's a musical. 68. Oh, well, is it Oliver? Correct. The fifth highest grossing film of the year. Because that's the whole thing with the Biscayne book. He's like, wow, you know, Holly would say, and then it's like, yeah, well, let's not forget the next year. They're like, Oliver, bring them all bigger. And funny girl for about that. Right, right. It was at least funny girls a little more like, but the next year fresh was more classical. Yeah, you have rosemary's baby there at seven, you have two thousand one at two. But then, you know, funny girl odd couple, plan of the apes is the beginning of something new. Number eight was the Ziffer Ali Romeo and Juliet, normal film, no legal problems there. Number nine, of course, was yours mine and ours. I have heard of it. Peter Fonda Lucille Ball movie that's basically rift on in licorice pizza and was remade with Dennis Quaid and Renee Russo. Right. That's my favorite movie of all time. The remake. Right. But it's the movie itself was a cheaper by the dozen ripoff that then got remade as a ripoff of the cheaper of by the dozen remake of the sequel. And then number 10 was line and winter, which is also a best picture contender, I guess. Yeah, but not the winner. Right. Right. I always forget. I always man for all seasons is the one that won best picture. Line and winter just wins like acting awards, right? Because that burn wins. She ties with with stress and stress and yes, let's talk about box car bertha. Let's talk about now. I have also only seen this film once before I watched it for today's podcast, Saudon Haskell out of a sense of completion is a game. Yeah. Yeah. It is a film directed by Martin Scorsese. He did make in 1972. Yeah. Yeah. Now I will tell you that after who's that knocking he was hired to film. Direct a film called the honeymoon killers. It was brought to him by an agent. His engine, Harry Uffland, his script was very long. He couldn't connect with the material. And he said he wanted to try to make it in the style of a crawler or dryer film. The producer's loved hearing. Interesting news is that he was fired one week into shooting. Yep. Essentially because he was like shooting master shots with no coverage. He was an artist. He was not going to make, you know, whatever the people wanted him to. Hey, this is a business kid. This is when they're starting to say, we don't got time for your fancy stuff. So he picks up some odd jobs, write some dialogue for a Dutch thriller called obsessions. He does some editing work, street scenes, does camera work for Woodstock. We're going to get to that. We're going to get them because that's a big one. Huge one. He was the artist and resident of the Film Society Lincoln Center. Did some instruction at NYU. Oliver Stone, one of his students. Michael Wadley, who photographed, who's that knocking, comes to, and Thelma, she's a screw maker, right? Wadley is the director of Woodstock. So he brings him and Thelma in, right? To work on that movie. It's a significant American film. I would say Woodstock, right? Like it's like, it's like, again, one of those things where you're like, well sure, this is the Woodstock movie. With like the movie, with this, but you're like, yeah, but like, this kind of concert movie didn't exist. This film itself is major. It's not just that it was a, like, a pro shot of a famous concert. Right. Have you seen the Woodstock movie band? Oh, yeah. Yeah, like, because it's, it's got really experimental abrasive editing style. And it has like, you know, it's fucking like, Scorsese and George Lucas operating cameras and shit. Like there is this sort of weird thing of, right? Because it was made by an NYU professor. It's got the like, the future of movies working in all the crew positions, influencing the language and everything. And then it also sort of works as like a cultural moment, document, documentary of the phenomenon of what's happening there. Like all of the sort of talking head and reviews of the concert goers are fascinated. Would you have gone to Woodstock? Oh, yeah. Sounds like a pain though. It does. Yeah, but it was just so worth it. Yeah. I know my dad, he regrets not going. Ben, I know you feel like, oh, man, the concert must have been the exciting part, like going there, seeing it, watching it. But what if I told you, the closeted gay man who rented out his parents' backyard for the festival has a story of his own that might be interesting enough to fill an entire film. What are you talking about? Well, in order to take Woodstock, Dimitri Martin had to offer a night. My is the strong might be enough to fill. Sure. You couldn't just take it. He had to give it to you at first. I really did forget all about that. How could you forget? That's the most interesting part of Woodstock. We all wanted to see the movie about Woodstock. Who owned the field? Where the guy doesn't watch any of the performance. Scorsese ends up out in LA. Who's that knocking's being shown there under the title of J.R.? Roger Korman sees it. So Roger Korman, obviously, at this point, was already a very established figure. Right. He had already directed tens of movies by the 70s, again, to the point where he focuses more on producing and running his own studio. The 60s is the height of little shop of bars and man with the X-ray eyes. When he's personally directing all the four movies a year. And he sees it and says, I like this. Would you want to direct a sequel to my film, Bloody Mom? Have you ever seen that film? Never. I had only winters, I know. I have because one of the two Demi, Roger Korman films is only available on a double feature Blu-ray with it. I think, uh-huh, crazy. I think Crazy Mama, and Bloody Mama, maybe? That'll be funny 'cause there's two mamas. Yeah, am I right? He's like, it's got guns, it's got costumes. Scorsese's like, I'll do it. Korman says, I'll see you in six months, love a script. And I was like, oh, geez, okay. You know what I'm wrong about that? But I've seen the movie anyway. It's interesting. Mama goes bad. You know, whatever. Instead, you know, subscribe to say, like, six months. Forget it. And instead, he does some post-production on a documentary called Medicine Ball Caravan, which is about 154 person bus and truck tour. Bus and truck. Rex Reed. What's it? I can't remember. You know what it, he referred to something as a bus and truck. It's a Spider-Man thing. Did he refer to Spider-Man as a bus and truck Superman? Is that what it is? I can't remember. I think that's what it is. I think it's his review of the first Spider-Man movie. Yes, a Batman bus and truck. I considered Spider-Man a bus and truck version of Batman. We probably spent seven minutes on that in that episode. I just remembered boggling our minds and we couldn't breath until we figured out what bus and truck men. Rex is the best. He's the same person. Which it basically means second tier touring performance of a previously Broadway show. Yeah, right. It's like you take it out, but like, right. But you're like the show city enough you can fit the entire set of bus and truck. Guys go in the bus. That goes in the truck. Here we go. Yeah, that's my take on Batman, by the way. If James Gunn is accepting pitches. Anyway, I met a small guy. There's a bus and truck tour spreading the gospel of flower power out in the 60s. You know, it's another kind of like hippie-ish documentary. He says working on that was a huge pain in the ass. Almost kills him. He gets about back to California. He meets Georgie Lucas. He's making THX one more three or he already knows him. But like, you know, Georgia's hangs out with George. Francis Coppola is there. Okay. Brian DePolma, he'd already kind of worked with in New York a little bit. I know it's like a group of brats. Seriously. We also got to know Steven Spielberg, who is making television shows for Universal. Okay. He's doing a little bit of helping cast if I could use some sound effects for mini and mosque events. Hell yeah. That move. That move. That move. He's a little out of circulation. Am I wrong? Is it? I feel like there's been like five years of a certain corner of the internet that's like. Millions of people just aren't talking about it. No, I feel like it's not available. Maybe it's not. And people are crossing their fingers and hoping Criterion's about to announce it. I watched it not that long ago, but I guess it's kind of like, must have been on Criterion or something. At one point, he needs sound effects for a fight. So, of course, as you just hold cast of it, someone punches him and then report it. You know, that sounds like some real thing. Anyway. Yeah. Then Roger Korman calls. It's been a few months. And says, I have script, Bloody Mama 2, which is then based on his box cover. His wife, first, there's a demand for Bloody Mama 2 because Bloody Mama is performed well. They start already developing that. And then his wife locates a book. The book is called Sister of the Road. And basically sort of Yankee Swaps goes, like, what if what we have pegged as Untitled Bloody Mama Project becomes box-car birth? This feels like a better way to service the same sort of niche. The script does end as the movie does with a crucifixion. I had nothing to do with that, says Martin Scorsese. This is actually a revelation. Yep. Because you figure you watch it. You're like, it was Marty just like, "I need you to get a crucifixion." Right, right. Like Jesus. Yeah, favorite guy. He gets a bunch of $600,000. And he's basically told, do what you want. Stand of that number. So he throws in some references to the archers. He throws in some Wizard of Oz, you know, winks. The cinematic graph release has, you can watch it with the TCM intros. Yes, it does. As part of a Corman series where Corman was interviewed by Manquit himself. And Corman said that Scorsese was literally the first filmmaker he ever worked with who had storyboards, had storyboarded them himself and had done the entire movie. Not just all three of those things, but any of them. You know, Corman was like, we're running gun. I, how do I approach a day? I got to get a close up of the main actor. Once I'm done with that, I should probably get the other person's close up. Maybe a shot of the two of them together moving on. Right, now take your breath. Right. It's because they don't spend over the budget. Make sure you have a little bit new to you. Nothing crazy, but, you know, we need some moves. The fascinating thing about Corman, I don't know if you've ever seen him, Ben, 'cause we use him a lot as like shorthand for stuff. He is the most kind of like square, protrition man. He's like a sitcom dad from like leave it to be for. And was just like very much like, "Well, that's what the kids want to see." You know, like he wasn't Russ Meyers where he felt animated by his love of the boobs or the blood or any of these sort of like things, but he was just like very open-minded. You know, he was very like, he got to chase the trends. And the whole classic thing with him was like, here's the exact amount of money you have. Here's like the locations. Here are the things that need to be in the movie. What I need on the poster, you know, the title, but like outside of that, I leave you, you know? He would sort of go like, "You got 10 days and $4 to make whatever you want." And he would always say to people, and this is why there's sort of the shorthanded Roger Corman film school that so many people graduated from. He's like, "If you make this movie well enough, you'll never have to work with me ever again." You know, you graduate off of me, but this is a way to like get the experience under your belt and so many people rise out of his ranks. - Of course, as he says, the movie's part of like a sort of exploitation genre that starts with wanting a class. - I was gonna say, it feels very on the road kind of movie. - Yes, the young lover. - He's like, "Slasher movies are still four or five years off." This is the kind of gory exploitation movie of the moment. And indeed, he did have 500 storyboards. He did that 'cause he didn't wanna get fired again. He was afraid of a honeymoon killer situation. Then he shows up with the storyboards, and Corman like takes a quick look. He's like, "Do you wanna see these?" And he's like, "No, that's fine." Like, "Whatever you wanna do." - He did say in the "Mankwitz" thing, he was like, "It was the first time a filmmaker ever came to me and I could see the entire movie before it was made." That he had so clearly worked it all out and it played. But I also imagine he was like, "You're over-prepared, throw out 300 of these storyboards, "you're not gonna have time to film them." - That is true. They did not have a ton of, they shot it in Arkansas. He said, "It still kind of looks like the depression back, "you know, at that point. "24 days straight shooting." Now you fucking make, you know, a 24 movie with that. But back then, that wasn't a lot. Roger at one point, Corman takes him aside at one point and says like, "You don't have a chase scene." Like audiences do like those. Like, this is a kind of bunning. hide thing and then and so Marty's like, okay, can I have another day if you want me to shoot a chase scene? And he's like, no, no, no, no, just figure it out. He's doing some camera movement stuff that I feel like is very proto-Marty. Yep. He loves to move the camera, especially the final shoot out into the crucifixion or I guess off of the crucifixion, yeah, feels like a real a true Marty sequence. They pretty fully realized. Film previews at the Pantages Theater. The audience loves in the plots. Korman came out smiling. Sam Arkoff looks at him and says, I got to tell you, it's almost good. He's feeling good about himself. No one's going to be able to burst his balloon. And score says he says, that's pretty good. And he says, I'm actually excited. Yeah, almost good. Almost good. But that's but that's what you want out of the Korman experience, right? Good job, kid. Oh, a hundred days you delivered it plays for an audience. You're you're moving up the ladder. He shows now it's to be fair. It is Kasevedi's is showing a rough cut, two hours. And Kasevedi says, Marty, you just spent your whole life, your whole your your life making a piece of shit. It's a good picture, but you're better than the people who make this kind of movie. That is the part that usually gets left off the story. He's like, you have done a fine job with this. You are not going to be an exploitation director. You've got something else. You're wasting your time. And this is clearly not a movie that matters to you. You know, like so what? Do you want to be a guy who can deliver for other people? And I think part of that score says his whole thing or Kasevedi's whole thing. Excuse me. There's like the infamous radio show where he starts like ideating and comes up with the idea for shadows in real time. And it's extension of him complaining about everything he found frustrating about American filmmaking as an actor. And how he felt like things were too dramatically safe that they were not. They were limiting actors, you know, that the camera was dictating everything and stylization and sort of hollowness and ascend mentality in all of this, right? And who's that knocking at my door for all of its failings, its limitations, you know, it's it's roughness has some of that quality. And you know, it is a movie that is touching third rails, it is talking about things that aren't talked about. It is depicting unappealing characters, you know, with uncharismatic behavior. Things like this that you're just like a guy like Kasevedi's is going to look at it and go, you actually have shit to say. You're not just here someone who's going to technically service whatever piece of material. There's clearly stuff you're working through. Imagine if this guy could refine what he's saying. And then he sees this movie that's like, great job. Who gives a fuck? You took some assignment and you did okay. Are you really going to get stuck wasting your life for 20 years doing that? Obviously clearly resonating with Scorsese because he's telling the story six years later. The answer is that the movie is a pretty good exploitation movie. But my problem with it has always been like because I think Scorsese is not suited to making this kind of movie. It's not fun. I agree. The really good Korman movies are fun and wacky. Have the shaggy energy you kind of want. This kind of live fast eye young, leave a pretty corpse. Wanton sort of counter cultural thing is so outside of his milieu. He doesn't totally know how to dramatize people who would not be racked with guilt. For every one of these to say so early in his career and he's right. He hasn't gotten to tell these stories properly yet. It's about Fox Carburetha played by the great Barbara Hershey who I love. And of course he works with again in Last Mutation of Christ. Do you work with her any other times? It's just that but she gives him the book when they're filming this movie. That's what starts his obsession with oh, I got to make Last Mutation as a film someday. So putting her in that is a real kind of full circle moment. She rolls we talked about her a lot on Portia of a lady because that's her one Oscar nomination. But it is fascinating because we were sort of talking about where she was at in the 90s. When she got that nom when she had had this sort of like second wave of her career, relative to what her reputation was at this time, which is she hits the scene as part of this couple with David Karadine. They were like flower children and everyone's like is this person actually a good actor or is she just like some hippie who keeps giving weird interviews and get a press? There's a few actors like that. I feel like in that era. But it feels like she really got tagged with this. Yeah. Yeah. And sort of became like the hippie version of like Sydney Swini or something. But they're like why the fuck are we talking about her? There was like a real like anger and an amazzo towards her. You see like her interviews are like very defensive. Some of the stories are her and David Karadine do a playboy spread when this movie comes out. Basically restaging their nude scenes from this film. That's people like why are you showing us like your private lives, you know, when the movie already exists? They have a child together. She breast feeds that child. I believe on the Dicavit Show. One of the movies she does after this, there's a sequence with a bird that she has to keep catching. And after like 10 takes, she realizes that she's accidentally broken the Seagull's neck. And she is so affected by this emotionally that she changes her name professionally to Barbara Seagull. And keeps being like, I must honor this Seagull. We had an emotional connection. I don't like that. And his spirit should be remembered. And would like get into arguments with producers where they're like, we're not putting Barbara Seagull on the poster. That sounds dumb. All this to say, it's this era where it's like she's compelling on screen. But is she just naturally kind of charismatic? Or is she actually a good actress? And also every time she says stuff, she annoys us, why is she this hippie lady? It's just interesting to me that this moment is kind of like the ground zero of that, which then by the 80s, she like sort of wins back everyone to like, oh, fuck, has she become one of the better American actresses for a couple of years? Entity. She's so good. She wins back-to-back best actress awards at Cannes. Is that right? One of the major festivals. She won two consecutive lead actress awards. Here I go looking on her IMDB page. She will answer your question. You are correct. It's Ken. Yeah. She won best actress for shy people. Yes. The con, con. That was the one where people went like, have we been sleeping on Barbara Hershey? Is she actually an interesting actress? And then she wins a sort of tie award for the film world apart with the other women, like the three leads of that film, Jody Mayan, Linda Muzzi, I think her name is. Never seen that film. I have seen boxcar breath. Did either of you ever want to be a tramp? No, now Ben, you brought some interesting, you did your own research for this episode. We talked about Ms. Kido coast episode about living off the grid. It's not appealing to me. I love the grid. I want to live on the trunk. I'm sure we did that bit in that episode. I don't even remember a digital frontier, right? Biodigural jazz. Well, young Ben was quite thrilled by the idea of venture. You pack a bindle? Pack a bindle? Because I had gotten obsessed with Bob Dylan, which led me to Woody Guthrie and reading all about his escapades. There's just, there's romance there. And yet, you know, thinking about taking a shit in the woods, right? Yeah, there you go. You know, add that to the soup. No, that's the part that really scares me off. Yeah, that seems rough. Kind of a deal breaker for me, for sure. Yeah. There's not enough age you want in the world to make that a smooth process. I think, you know, we're coming up on two hours. I don't want to spend too much time on this. I think I want to just maybe more shout it out, but I did in fact bring a hobo book, which it's called, mostly true, the West's most popular hobo graffiti magazine is published by microcosm publishing. It's available now on paperback. We'll put a link in the description. It's basically a book that spots spotlights beloved railroad artists. There is a whole kind of scene and community of people who would ride the rails and would use chalk draw these little cartoons as well as leave little messages to other writers. Yeah. Here's a little diagram. I'm holding the up and showing the hobo codes that had like different, you know, messages and, you know, a little secret hidden meanings to these symbols that they would leave for other writers to know. I'm just realizing you've invoked how important Dylan was to you. I'm crying out many times and people may not know that most times we try to throw a Ben's choice on the schedule. You have thrown out. Don't look back as an option. Dependent Baker. We're obviously not going to get to cover this, but we are going to get to do a fucking Dylan Scorsese episode on Patreon. We're going to get, let's, let Ben go off on bot. I'm so excited. I'm going to go off on bot. Man's going to talk about, but the whole thing with Dylan obviously is that Dylan had a relatively normal middle class upbringing in Minnesota. Then he appears and he's like, yeah, I joined the circus when I was picked up this way of playing. From the cowboys. It's not like this. Hey, fucking words. So can I say it? Incredible bit. You was kind of a complete unknown if you think about it. How would that feel though? So anyway, Box Barbertha. Box Barbertha. - She's a girl, her dad's playing crashes, kind of an arresting start to the film. - I think it's a really good opening and Bernie Casey. - He doesn't actually crash, of course. He's abducted by aliens later. He will defeat the aliens at the Battle of Independence Day. We all know that. - Oh sure. - 'Cause Randy Griskoop, Duster. - Yep, yep, yep, yep. Took a second, got it. - You know, that's in that movie. - Yes. - I remember when I walked out of Independence Day when I was 10, you know, 'cause you know, they defeat the mother's ship. - Yeah, it's very satisfying. - And they say, the reason you're still free. - Exactly. - And they say, like, now send the message to the other ones and I say to my dad, like, what they said, like, make sure you have like a spare crop duster weirdo to fly into the fucking ship. Like, what's the message they said? Like, they said, like, you won't believe it. It was kind of a day of sex mocking it. Right at the end there, we were out of missiles. But Randy Quaid, we didn't even want to give him a ship, he's so crazy. - He wasn't even meaning to fly into the ship. - He was just trying to get away from the Hollywood Bushwackers. - The Bushwackers were after him. I had like a Mandela effect. The last time I watched Independence Day, sometime the last 10 years, I recently watched it, hence my bringing it up. - And I was like, ready for the satisfaction of the Randy Quaid moment. And I was like, what the fuck? I vividly remember there being a shot of him in like an old tiny-- - They filmed that and didn't use it. - Correct. - Yes, they filmed that. - In my mind, I had edited the deleted alternate ending that was deemed too goofy. So then they put him in like a proper fighter jet. - I think it was deemed basically like, hat on hat on hat, you know where it's kind of like, don't tell me that like we've already got all this shit going on and then he's like, by the way, I'm also in a crop zone. - And his plane's like (barking) (barking) - He's spitting like fucking ever clear into the gas tank. - Oh my God. - Yeah. - Oh my God. - Anyway, her dad dies. - The depression hits and she starts freight hop in, which I guess is like a cooler version of fucking hitchhiking. It's just freight car comes by, I get in. Can we close it going? - The great Bernie Casey. - Sure. - Who I feel. - Football player? - Yes. - He played for the 49ers, I believe. - He often later becomes a very kind of stern stoic figure. - Go on. - This movie he gets to sort of be the wild car, sure. - Which is fun to see young Bernie Casey. - Von Morton, who is like a bank robber who I guess worked with her dad or whatever, like I can't remember. And then she hooks up with Big Bill Shelly. Played by David Karate. A striking man. - He has one of the most interesting faces. - Slender sort of figure. And yeah, this face is cool guy. - Yeah, crazy acting dynasty. His father Ben appears in the movie as well. - Right, of course. John Karateen, he's Sartora. I mean, John Karateen is like your classic. Like, he's in all those monster movies and stuff. - John Karateen, I mean, this is the crazy thing. I believe Bella will be the mill guy. - Bella LaGosie only played Dracula one time. - Because he played Dracula in three different movies. - LaGosie or Karateen? - Karateen. - Right, that's what I was gonna say. I think LaGosie only ever does the original. And then Karateen does most of the like, Dracula meets movies. - Right. - Like, Evan Costello meets Frankenstein. It's Karateen is Dracula. - Yeah. - He was, he spent more time playing Universal Dracula. - I'm excited to watch Dracula. - I am too. That's why I'm making this connection point. But it's just funny that that guy takes over. - We're gonna do it on Patreon. - We're doing it on Patreon. We're doing it on Patreon. - We are doing the commentaries. - Don't forget, you must watch Dracula play. - Yeah, it's Ben. And when you watch the Dracula, you must do these with your hands. - I'm moderately for you Ben. - Because he is very hard to do my cause. - He wants to have this sex. - Box Godbirth is a flawed film. - Yeah, he got very, very premise and Bernie Casey as the other members of a kind of a train robbery crew that kind of knocks together. Bill Big Bill is a union organizer, but they start a bustin' up trains. - I just wanna connect the stuff. For Ben, Ben my favorite Bernie Casey role and the thing that he looms largest in my mind for doing is he is of course the teacher in Bill and Ted's excellent adventure who warns them that they will not get a passing grade on the class unless they do the greatest history presentation of all time. - Haven't you brought this up before? - I brought up that Napoleon in Bill and Ted was a poor Ricky Calamari. He's also, I believe he's feeling lighter in the never seen ever again, the sort of off-brand bond. He's in spies like us. - Yeah, he's a great actor, but Bernie Casey basically is like the inciting incident in Bill and Ted. He has the stakes and he has a couple of my favorite line deliveries of all time. 'Cause he's reading off to them how insufficient their essay was or their paper was. - Oh yeah, that is funny. He is funny in that. And he said, "So Bill, what you're telling me essentially is that Napoleon was a short dead dude." - Funny. - And then he also has, "It seems to me the only thing you've learned is that Caesar is a quote salad dressing dude." - That's pretty funny too. - That's some of the funniest shit of all time. - Also, the Caesar salad dressing was invented in Mexico. Thank you for saying that. - Well, this is the bit Bill and Ted don't know what they're talking about. - Did you think it was invented by Julius Caesar originally? - Yes. - Bill and Ted were dumb. - He was like, "Venny, Vity Vity, we should cross the Rubicon." Also like, I'm thinking like mayo, vinegar, maybe some anchovy. - While I'm at it, while we're here. - But you got to mash the anchovies up. - Yeah, really fine. - 'Cause they put thing in things. It's all funny mash-mobbing, that's so neat. - But yes, this movie basically becomes, you know, a rag tag gang by a sexy couple. - Right, isn't it so funny that it's called Boxcar Bertha? Before I saw this movie, when I was a teen, and I heard that Martin Scris says he had like a sort of bad movie called Boxcar Bertha, I was like, is it about like a big old lady who like drives a train? Like, Boxcar Bertha sounds like a sort of six year old lady with like a flying bear. - Exactly. - Yeah, exactly. Not like the sexiest, you know, hoochie gangster he ever did see. - Yeah. - Right, which is what she is. She's beguiling. - She is very appealing in this film. - Yeah, she's like fucking hot, he's a handsome lady. - She's a handsome lady. - She's a handsome hippie lady, I say. - Is it hippie before hippie, right? Because it's like the thirties or whatever. - But it has the time. - She has the opportunity to honest to it. - Yes, it's bringing, yes, much like Bonnie and Clyde, it's a period film that's bringing the vibes and the feelings of the era in which it is made. - 'Cause it's nice to see that they're not passing judgment on her character. - No. - No, I mean, that's what they thought that the kids wanted. - They're like climbing movies. - Right, yeah, and the Bonnie and Clyde rip offs where they're like, yeah, they're free spirits. - I was gonna say. - Fuck the bank. - I find the 70s, Korman films. And especially like the ones of this stripe, just they are weirdly comfort food watches for me. There is something to, and I was trying to crack why I find them so appealing and relaxing to watch. There is something to the kind of like post BBS and Bonnie and Clyde, like, okay, fuck. Like, easy riders ahead, Bonnie and Clyde's ahead. These kids want weird shit. They don't want morals and ethics in their movies, right? Is everything sort of like a political statement or is it just about like a vibe and a feeling? And so a guy like Korman, whose job is just deliver things into like proven genres. The genre that he's trying to emulate now is like, I don't know, like actors have an interesting moments. You know, like energy bouncing off each other, doing some shit, you know, like it doesn't have to lean too hard into genre plot mechanics. And you have these filmmakers who most of whom like rose into becoming their own people, who had a solid understanding of craft. And then they're just kind of like, accidentally very interesting vibe hangout movies. - Yeah, this has some vibes. I find the air of these films very, very comforting. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Comfort food. - It's like a weird, like, yeah, I don't find discomforting it. - It's not that I find the story of the film or the emotions of the film. - Oh, it's a great thing. - I like the style of filmmaking. - I like hobos. - Yeah. - Well, we know you like hobos and you would wanna be a hobo and follow the hobo code. - Yeah, so make the symbols. - I love real culture. - But they are mostly bank robbers. - Well, that's the thing. - Right, they're not really just like, hey, wherever really my hat, that's my home, they're more like, give me your money, I have a cut. - They start out with good intentions. - They're trying to go against the-- - Right, this means some veil road over there. - Yeah, he's got a H. Buckram, Sartoris, played by John Carey. - That's the John Carey. - That means he's a real real boss. - A phenomenon I love when close relatives are in the same movie not playing relatives. - Sure, but they are playing opposite figures. - Yes. - This is exciting. - But not father and son. - No, he's got, you know, he's got a tie in a big beard, a mustache or whatever. - That's mean. He's a grumpy old man. And yeah, I mean, what happens to this movie? He ends up in a chain gang. They get arrested. - Yeah, they get arrested. - Bill and Vaughan go to the chain gang. - Birth up becomes a woman of her life. - Some things learned into, yes, into doing being a boss. - And in fact, our character refers to her as a hula. - This is true. - Yes. - This is true. - And. Uh, it kind of goes on for a bit and I'm kind of like, um, but I'm just like, I'm down with this hangout. And then she runs into Vaughn at a bar. And he's like, Bill has broken out of jail. And she goes back to the bill. Right. Yeah. And of course that ends in him being crucified against a pretty broken. He's aged a lot. Yeah. They fuck a lot as well in like the hay. Yes. Oh, yeah. I was going to ask you a lot of fucking first time. You had sex on a bail. Hey, yeah. I just wasn't ready for a man. I rented a hotel room that I said, hold on. I'll be back in one second. Winner on the box of the bodega said, where's your hay? Do you have straw? I'll free laid it out gingerly on the bed. I have obviously been to like events where you sit on a bail of hay. Some candles. Right. You know, like, have you done that too close to the hay? You know, you're into like an event where like you're sitting on a bail. Like a hoot man. Yeah. Yeah. Your classic hoot wanted to like a couple weddings that are where like kind of outdoor kind of pharmy weddings for it's like, Hey, we just put down some bills like, you know, like, and every time you sit in the bail, Hey, you're like, you know, chairs rock. Yeah. One of the better inventions. Yeah. A little itchy. Yeah. You know what? Just because this is a square doesn't really mean it should be sad. We just ordered new chairs for the office. I'm so fucking excited. When are they coming soon? Yeah. We've had the same chairs for years, which we've inherited. And we just suddenly were like, what have we got new chairs? We got like fucking nice chairs. Now of course, Griffin briefly suggested we get like the Emperor's chair. I want to be really pleased. Oh, he's so mad that I brought this up. He's mad. He's mad. He's mad. I'm not mad. I just don't like the framing of the story, which is after we all agreed on getting chairs that are actually comfortable and won't hurt our back. Sure. I as a self-own son, I want you all to know that I considered recommending these. It was after agreeing. It wasn't like by some company. It was called like Bob's rip off of nerds. It's called legal robot. And they have an official license with Lucasfilm. This is a high quality product. And I know point tried to sway the vote. I had already signed off on the grown up chair. I'm looking at other shit. Pretty sure that I think said something like how do we get three nice chairs in one stupid chair for Griffin? Yeah. And this is what I don't like is acting like you're the one who put it in the chat. As a self-own, I said I was going to eat your self-owning and you're like, Oh, no, I'm being old. I just I want credit for for framing myself as the joke. Rather than acting like I did something runestly. It's just funny that you showed us that shit because I done the fucking $1,600. Real crafts people have to work on that. You think the emperor is sitting on bullshit? It's a high quality chair. Okay. Anything else about Boxcar birth that we want to discuss? It's just crazy that she's like anyway, what's up with you? And he's like, I don't know. And they're like crucified as man. Well, I would say, and this is something that you see with stories from this era. It's crazy how Americans were so anti-communist that it like essentially, if you're an Amtrak employee, you could just murk people and get away with it. So well time. Yeah, it's crazy to me. Yeah. No, I mean, I just like I like these movies. I felt the same way watching the the Demi. Cormons. And when Cormons sort of swings later this decade more in the 80s and to more creature features and Star Wars ripoffs, I find those movies compelling in a different way. But this moment of him trying to figure out how to replicate the youth picture and the rebel picture, the New Hollywood shit. I just find the weird like middle ground of Cormon doing that with a limitation on budget and developing filmmakers. And I think there's just some weird energy that comes out of those movies. So I find this compelling to watch. It's not great movie. As as Kezbae said, like he, he did the job well. He delivered a movie that cuts together. That is true. I mean, there's no question that right. Like it's, it's a functional movie and like it's a functional stuff and like that. But you can feel the lack of understanding of the characters and personal investment. And I just feel like junkier might be better. Yeah. Like it's, it's just one of those things where like, right, the artiness almost gets in the way of, like, it can go junky. But it, this isn't the type of yeah, he really, he doesn't have to push this to the more expressionistic limits. If that makes sense. It's the debate over Shutter Island. All those years later, I feel like where some people are kind of like, this is kind of junky. And I'm to, you know, I'm it's like, well, that's the point. And some of the stuff he's inspired by. But like he has such a prestige scene at that point. And like he's so such a gifted filmmaker that people are like, I can't see past that. Like so the job is like clashes with it. Doesn't work that, that, that's the problem I have there. But I remember that coming up. Yeah. Yeah. Or even like Wolf Wall Street or whatever. Also, I think there's some stuff in Shutter Island. Well, we'll talk about it. I'm gonna save those thoughts for four and a half months from now. Can't wait for that. I was not to repeat myself. Yeah. That's one of your favorites. I love that. Yeah. I love all his movies, except for Boxcar Bertha, which is just okay. Do you put it dead last? No, I put, yes, I put it dead last. I mean, not to spoil my list, but I do have a dead last. Yeah. Sorry. I'm right. I'm more engaged by who's that knocking? Yes. I would have to do that knocking above it just as, right, a little bit more like this is the real Scorsese here, even if it's primal clay or whatever. So the box office though, this film comes out in June, middle of June, 1972. So number one in the box office. Yeah. Yeah, it was that disclosure day spot. Number one of the box office is the film that's going to win best picture of 1972. French connection? No. Is that the year before? I believe so. Okay. So 72 would be the Godfather. That's the one. Interesting that these are coming out the same time. So Francis was his man, Francis. Obviously, Francis right. God started making movies earlier. Francis. But imagine being brother. Hey, Francis, what do you think of Boxcar Bertha? He's like, oh, yeah, not bad. What do you think of the Godfather to bench literally making the Godfather? Yeah, I get. Yeah. And also it's not like the Godfather, which was like, well, respected at the time. It was financially successful. It was right out the gate. The widest theatrical release of all time. It immediately exploded at the box office. And yet look at where they're at now, compared to making films of equal quality. Yeah. Village of the flower moon and mega office. Ben, you sound like someone who hasn't locked it off yet when you make a comment like that. Oh, I've locked. You've locked. I certainly have, but you haven't seen the new. What does it keeps calling impression? It does not. He's like, I'm working on a new wilder cut. I feel like what I released theatrically was a little bit hopeless for making my job. Jim's dad's in it. Yeah. Unrated. Now to control. He said he's working on a new cut. I hope there's so much more Megalon in it. Yeah, they need more. I need more explanations there. Absolutely. Or what if he was just like, I got an MGM original series Greenwood. I don't know. They'll don't greenlight anything like you know again. Megalopolis the show. What was the reporter's name? I don't remember the names. The only ones I remember. She had like a shampoo. Oh, oh, yeah. Well, platinum. Oh, actually, it's really funny. Wow. It was pretty close. No, but it's funny that you bring that up then, right? Because the character's name is well platinum. And on the Doe Boys podcast, we're friends with the Doe Boys, right? The great podcast on their podcast, they say the word wow a lot. That's one of their most frequently uttered words. And also the platinum play club is their highest honor that they bestow upon chains. And so when I was watching the movie and they keep saying, wow, platinum, I was asking myself, is Copa actually secretly a Doe Boys fan, which would actually, it would make sense because they're Copa the Goof Balls. You're almost lost it there. I could feel you kind of like I didn't I had it. Okay. I was so focused. Number two at the box office is an animated film that's for grownups. Uh, is it Fritz the cat again? Fritz the cat. Didn't it just come up in a box office game? I don't know. I think it's I think a different back she did, but we've definitely talked about it before. I think it was a Fritz the cat double feature. That might be true. That might be true. Yes. Number three of the box. Have you seen Fritz the cat? No. It's kind of a bending movie in a way. I think it was still in the box office for Mean Streets re-released with something else. I think you're right. We'll see if that happens next week. Yeah. Number three of the box office is I assume what had to be a filmed version. Yes. A theatrical release of a very famously or escape theatrical review. It's it's a what? It was you may not know what this is, but it was like a British theater review. Okay. Review like RVU. Yeah. It had sketches on sex related topics. That was like kind of a Broadway sensation in the late 60s because it had total nudity and jokes. And can you believe it jokes? That sounds pretty good. And a filmed version of it was shown in theaters on 1972, but many cities banned the screen. It's like the super placement. But it's like something like that. But that's an Arnie movie. Right. It's more. What is this called? It's called Oh, Calcutta. Oh, I know the name. I did not know that's what it was. It's still the eighth longest running Broadway show ever. I actually, and it's been just you know, there's stuff like Chicago. I think that's awesome. It ran for 6,000 shows, you know, for like 15 years. Bring it back. Yeah, maybe bring it back, and Britain, there was a thing called puppetry of the penis. Oh, yeah. Where it was one of those things where it was like at a certain point, you know, ran for years. That crossed over my friend. I know, but it never took on here like it did in Britain. I feel like it didn't set the world on fire. It was big here. And they didn't HBO special. Yes. Trade the penis. Do you know what that show was about then? Yes, I do. Two gentlemen walked on stage. Yeah, explain it to the listeners who may not. And they would puppeteer their penis. It's not like a play that has a clever title. It was two guys being like, here's how you make your penis and balls look like a burger. Would they speak number? Yeah, they'd explain. They'd be like, and hear a goose. The characters don't like they don't. They're not characters. The guys come out. The goose doesn't talk. No, I don't think so. David does the penis have any dialogue in this? I never saw puppetry. I didn't either. I never saw it. I did see like there was like the fuck it was like the Shakespeare one. Not the improvised one, but there was like, you know, Britain would just have these long running things where it was called like the rich. No, there was no dicks, but like the ridiculous Shakespeare company or whatever. Oh, sure. And it would just be like eating some little theater, I guess, and we'll just run for 20 years and people just doing puns and shit. They had to figure it out. Yeah, they had to figure it out. Number four of the box office is a disaster film. It's playing so it's playing. Is it airport? No, it's prior to that. Maybe it is it's playing. No, the first airport is 1970. So this is two years later. And it's not an airport. So it's an airport rip off. Well, it's a set on a plane, I think, rather than on in an airport. Interesting. It stars Charlton Heston. It's not earthquake, is it? No. It's a little lesser known one. I don't really know this movie. I can tell you it was directed by John Gillerman. Uh-huh. Gillerman? Yeah. Uh-uh, who directed King Kong, you know, the King Kong movie. And did you expect one of the planet, the apes sequel? Or, you know, he directed Shafton, Africa? Uh-uh, not seeing that one. Uh-uh, don't. Yes, no, he did. There we go. There it is. This isn't what Charlton Heston, James Brolin, the film is a skyjacked. It's a good title. Pretty good title. Pretty good title. Uh-uh, and number five at the box office is a film directed by and starring Sydney Ponte. Directed by and starring and starring. Um, it is a western. Okay. Oh, oh, uh, what's it called? What's this movie? Perry Belafonte is the other star. Yeah. Yeah. Is it is the title their names? Yes. You've got to just tell me I'm not going to pull it. Buck and the preacher. There we go. Ruby D is also in this film. Yep. I think kind of a, you know, I've always wanted to say it. It's like a masterpiece, but like it has an important movie in in both body as kind of like emerging, like, you know, it's like his first kind of good movie that he directed. Yeah, it's his first movie that he directed. Yeah. Um, yeah. And like a revisionist, western, black characters. It's very interesting. David, I now ask you, can you guess the top five highest grossing films of 1972? Okay. Number one, you're already called. Look up. Of course. 86 million dollars in domestic rentals that year. It was the highest grossing film of all time. Of course, until draws broke 100 right just on an initial couple years later, right? Number two, Cabaret. Cabaret is down at number six. But it wasn't made of robust 20. But this is Godfather 86. The number two movie 42. Godfather, but I mean, yeah. I mean 42 million. It's a big, big disaster movie. Mm, disaster. Okay. Is there a way? It's one of the biggest ones. Okay. Beside an adventure. Correct. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Number three, it is a comedy. And it's a comedy starring kind of a local New York act. It's weird. They sold this many tickets in New York. Don't correct it. How was that big a head movie? That's $28 million. Okay. All right. The next great movie. Yeah. Very fun. Number three, four and five are all films from the fine folks at Warner Brothers. So number four is a Warner Brothers. It is. It's a very new Hollywood version of a revenge film. It's a real movie of its moment movie of its time. I wonder if this movie, it was such a reference point. And I wonder if it's a thing that's a little bit lost now, but it's a big movie. It's not like rolling. It's a shorthand movie. It's a. Oh, deliverance. Correct. That movie's a masterpiece. I love that one. Yeah, but it feels a little asher. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe whatever. The scandal, like the scandalousness of it is a little lesser now, but delivers rocks. I love deliverance. But basically created like 30 years of punchlines and bad jokes. The number five movie of 1972 is a western picture. It's not buck in the picture. A western in 72. Yep. Okay. Bit of a, let's have a movie then. Revisioness, you could say a video maybe certainly a new Hollywood restaurant. It was a film that famously the studio did not believe it. I believe it had sat on a shelf for two years and then became a very big hit. It's okay. It's not like Pac-Gar believe the kid. No, it's not like high-plane thrifter. It's not a Clint. No. Revisioness. Revisioness the right way to put it. It definitely doesn't feel like a conventional western. It's a big director and a big star who will work together many, many times. And I believe this isn't even their first film together. But it's it's a milestone film for both of them. I think it helps kind of make their careers. It's a big. Yo, oh, it's um the gift movie. Jeremiah Johnson. Jeremiah Johnson, the King of the Nod himself. Right. Cabaret is number six. Okay. Deep throat is number seven. Hey, open wide. She's got deep throat. The getaway is number eight. Good movie. Number nine is brother of the wind. Never heard of it. It's an independent film. A mountain man saves four wolf cubs after their mother died. We took some pictures of animals for you. Truly. Yeah. It's Wikipedia entry is two sentences long. There's like nothing about this movie. It was released by Sun International. Number 10 was Lady sings the blues. Oh, you know, I've never seen that. I never have either. I remember my mom just talking about that movie that where she was like, we all thought Diana Ross couldn't pull it off and then she did. Okay. I have a I have a game for you. Do you guys want to guess the most popular drugs of 1972? Absolutely. So I got marriage. You want to get a number of devil's lettuce? Where does a jazz ass acid is getting pretty hot? Do you have a list? Are we counting? What about like over the counter drugs? Oh, like ludes. Quay ludes. ludes. Okay. But they're not counting things like aspirin. Right. We're talking like mind expander. It's a hard one on your living. Yeah. Okay. Is cocaine has a crack the tent at this point? Yeah. Okay. That's okay. It's kind of the doors of drugs, man. It's just entered the scene. They've taken it out of soda and they're putting it into little baggies and it's about to have very successful rebrands. It's had a lot of names. You know, we smoked it in dens. We injected it in our bloodstream heroin. What number is heroin? Give us the numbers on these. It doesn't have like a top to bottom. Okay. How many of the volume? Yeah. Yeah. How many of the 10 have we gotten so far? I didn't specify 10. Okay. Missing anything. He's so relaxed. He's loving. He's basically just missing one last one. You've hit all the big mushrooms. There's one big one. No, they're not counting that. What was that? What was like a a biker truck driver? Oh speed bingo. Oh, okay. Straight up. I'm fed to me. Yeah. They didn't have five hour energy. Yeah. You need it just just another thing. You could just buy over the counter. Yeah. Well, right. Because cocaine used to be in Coca-Cola, but speed used to be in sprite. Isn't that right? I think that's made up. That's me making a better attempt at that. That's good stuff. Love it. Yeah. So box carburet. You know, and who's that knocking? The pieces are there. It's all very interesting. But next week, we will talk about Mean Streets. And I would say it's just a bit of a jump. I think it's a good movie. It's just been a mean. It's also it's just a bit of a jump. It's a bit of a jump. I prefer it. It's just funny house. Of course, as he's like, yeah, I'm working things out. And I'm like, you made Mean Streets one year later. That's the second first film thing where you're just like, where the fuck did this come for? And obviously, watch who's that knocking? You're like, okay, sure. I see the building block. How long has it taken seven movies before he figures it out? And then it's like, no, I had it all actually. Yeah, I mean, yeah. And that episode is out next week. I'm like, check it with Miriam Bale. The great Miriam Bale returning after eight years. Eight years. Eight long years. Not since basic instinct. But tune in for that. And over on Patreon, we're investigating the umbrella corporation currently. I think we are episode drops on August 9th. Yeah. And we started that August first. So yeah, we just just entered the resident evil. But we'll be doing our screen stays. You shorts episode very soon. And also you could always refer to our social media, check out our Instagram or subscribe to our newsletter on Stubstack, where we always have a release schedule listed and up to date. But let's also just clarify this because we had we We had talked it out a little bit in the March madness. - Oh, that preview episode. So it's we are going to just do square charges straight through there is a concentration of it seems like probably enough new releases towards the end of this year that that's going to occupy the spot of where we previously thrown the idea of doing a palette cleanser little stuff. That's shit. We're not fucking doing it. So every narrative scripted film happening on main feed other stuff on page running chronologically save for new release and march band is next year's probably a bunch of shorties guys. It's going to oh, let's commit to it right. Shorties shorties only single did under 10 exact single did G's bought back or finally maybe is going to have his chance to veto baby veto I mean the short king yeah literally yeah it's actually do we fucking do we put baby up in front of the firing squad again for shorties lose or is that rude a lose he needed to be humbled a little bit that guy's had a lot of success exactly so for himself. Yes tune in for many, many months of Marty both here and on our patreon we'll be covering a lot of things like the music docs and the shorts and such. I'm going to go to a meds game now I assume that by the time this post in August the meds have turned everything around and are doing so good. Yeah I've heard things are bad yeah we've lost 12 games in a row. I put my brother and his friend gave on a group text with John fantasy so they can commiserate at the meds together. I just asked that they not remove me so even though I don't understand what they're talking about I can see their emotional meltdowns and things have not been good in that tax group. I would say that I have a very different relationship to sports fandom than that but yes we are objectively a bad baseball team currently maybe will be good someday. Do you want to say here that by the time this episode comes out of course Boba shed is raking by this point I assume god anything I say now it's just like those guys will fall into pits like that simsons episode we're putting on the board Boba shed is raking I definitely go with that means tuning next week for Mean Streets and as always and as always nine more months of this nine more months of hearing people say wha. Being checked with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David sims our executive producer is me Ben Hossley our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas and our associate producer is AJ McKean. This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKean and Alan Smithy research by JJ Birch our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the great American novel with additional music by Alex Mitchell artwork by Joe Bowen Holley Moss and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is minick special thanks to David Cho Jordan fish and Nate Patterson for their production help head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit join our patreon blank check special features for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes follow us on social at blank check pod subscribe to our weekly newsletter checkbook on sub stack this podcast is created and produced by blank check productions.