Who's That Knocking at My Door / Boxcar Bertha

a new podcast a new podcast I'm trying to put like a 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 oh 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 he gets credit for being like I suspect this Martin Scorsese might be the most classic important figure in the next half century of American movies from Ebert yes he said a new classic the poster 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 have ever seen and then it has a second pull quote but then above the title itself no quotes it just says a new classic does say that so it uses the pull quote well accredited to a film critic and then it also just says like we're gonna 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 IMDB mentions 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 basically saying this movie is maybe retroactively interesting if you know that this guy goes on to become exactly what it is yes um but excuse me let me do hard reset here blank check in 2026 was a free podcast Bertha was just a little bit freer than most yes I know that tagline America in the 30s was a free country yes and it's Bertha was j-e-s apostrophe a just a little bit freer than most yeah yeah um it's a good it's actually a good poster it is it's got a train on it it's a great title and of course exploding this miniseries is titled Podcar 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 Podcar Birthcast David's eyebrows have hit the ceiling I'm waiting for you to be done and to introduce our podcast this is blank check with Griffin and David I'm Griffin it's a little bit freer than most uh it's a podcast about filmographies directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a lot of credit for their work and their work has been 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 that then sets us 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 on this podcast I guess that's well James Cameron he's the king of the world yeah he is the king of the world Christopher Nolan these days I guess he's kind of making a run at that kind of a career I guess my my distinction is yeah no you're right these these are now elder statesmen these are living legends they've got the long body of work yes they are we're talking about movies six decades of work now with these guys uh this is from the 60s who's that knocking on my door 1967 there were a couple I think iterative releases on seven decades he is in his seventh decade of making movies he is currently filming yes a film he's filming a film folks in his seventh decade of being a picture he's filming a film that we will cover on blank check in 2027 I assume or 28 you never know sometimes he takes his time in the edit he'd be slow sometimes that's true if your movie is three and a half hours long every test screening this one's shorter right I don't know okay I I feel very strongly where I'm just like he can do what he wants he can do what he wants he could do what he wants like if he wanted to make these movies 82 minutes long and have four hours of deleted scenes on the criterion disc 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 yeah right it's Transformers versus G.I. Joe it's a very simple battle between two forces it's predominantly featuring TikTok stars yes 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 two-hour movie uh did Hugo crack two right it's two and six two hours six minutes okay that's probably just a little bit of time I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't over 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 oh color of money is an even two hours and and no after hours king of comedy those are both under two hours obviously after hours is very very short that's sort of the point 80 it's not quite that was like 90 something minutes it's short you know come on by his 97 minutes by his standards that's I'll take as much as you got I'm not complaining about Alice is under mean streets is under today we're talking about two two 90 somethings and right uh his first two films were about 86 minutes yes I mean this is a humongous but it's gonna be a lot of long boys for us it is it's a humongous 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 Scorchese Marty Scorchese on main feed blank check in a series we're calling podcast fellas that's right yeah yeah Ben yeah producer Ben yeah blank check doing Marty Scorchese look Scorchese oh I actually I just am now remembering I have a new bit I want to debut on this first hell yes this is a new bit I want to debut on this first episode this is a new bit I want to debut on this first episode this is a new bit I want to debut on this first episode this is a new bit I want to debut on this first episode hell 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 yeah 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 three hour plus episodes in the last 10 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 like childhood and shit although you know what I'm not going to do that he's done that plenty you can just watch any of the documentaries he's like yeah was that born in Queens you know interesting impression yeah I know I got to get there with him got to get there with him okay a little more like Rizzo the rat well wait a second they're not a million miles away perfect example new listeners sometimes we go off on tangents sometimes we go off on tangents here's another thing we should say to new listeners vis-a-vis my uh Marty Scorchese joke the thing about blank check 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 here we are on blank check uh you voted for him in March Madness over Tony Scott people's champion the biggest loser in America Martin Scorsese finally got his moment in the sun he finally eked out a win and we decided in the interest of I mean we can't impose bravity 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 it's sort of an independent film independent before such a thing really existed the early days yeah who's that knocking at my door who's that knocking at my door yeah sure yep and then box carvertha for higher work right new world pictures Roger Corman or at this point it wasn't new world it was American it's AIP American international yeah and uh 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. Night Shyamalan we use the term in the mean street episode the 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 then there are a few examples of a movie like mean streets early in someone's career 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 thoroughly 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 Boxcar 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 that David's pants were around his ankles. Now I said to my wife like, this is kind of the last one I'm going to watch during this that's like arguably bad. And I don't even think Boxcar Bertha is like a terrible movie. You're more negative on it than I am. But I'm not like, this is the last one where I think it's in my opinion, you can kind of be like, ah, that movie just, you know, didn't work or is bad. You could, 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. You know, I get that. Like, I'm not complaining. Right. But it's like, the rest are interesting to masterpieces. 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. Masterpieces. Right? Yes. Then you have highly 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. Right. 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 knocking at my door is him making a deeply personal movie before he's figured out how to make an engaging film. Right. And entertaining. Right. 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 putting 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. Our Goodfellas episode is five minutes of us going, Goodfellas sucks. Raging Bull basic. What if we put him on the bracket? Yeah. Encouraged like, like, yeah, yeah, no, of course. 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 phony. Every episode is us like, another stinker. What a jamook. F. Yeah. Also, I don't like his personality. I don't find him charming at all. Yeah. And why are you so short, Marty? You even make me look tall. No, no. My contrarian take would be like, I actually think he's too tall. Yeah. He should shorten up. Yeah. Hunch up, Marty. He should talk faster. Stop snipping them brows, Marty. I think there should be less women in these movies. All right. Okay. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Marty, bigger glass is please. I can barely spot them on your face. The glasses should touch your cheeks. That's how big they are. Oh, this guy, he drolls 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 that knocking at my door, Boxcar Bertha. Martin Scorsese. JJ forgot to prepare a dossier for this one. No, he worked really, really hard to get it to us in time. Lack 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, it's the first Marty movie you guys all saw before I start this. Oh, wow. First one I saw in theaters must have been Gangs of New York. Same. And I'm wondering if that. In theaters or just saw period? Or we can answer both. You can answer both. Because for me, I know theaters, the answer is Gangs of New York. Same. And I'm wondering if that was the first one I saw, period. I had definitely already seen Taxi Driver by then because I was such a normal and well-adjusted. kid. 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. Yeah. 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 as shorthand for infamous filmmaker. Serious filmmaker but I think I saw it and then said to my mom, like, so where does that rank? And then started seeing others. As a kid growing up in North Jersey, Oh, yes. This might surprise you that the first film of Martin Scorsese that I ever saw was 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 and his films across your life, but that there's a 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 Earth. 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 him. A protective relationship. And not not in the way that I think he's obviously it would be crazy to think he's a hack, but it's just it's you know, I'll make it with a loser. I'll make 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. I can't engage with it. I understand that New Jersey has a couple of Italian residents. 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. So, you know, it's like they weren't owning him, but they were loving right. It's like the Pope Frank Sinatra Scorsese. But I mean, like with Springsteen, at least it's like that guy is Jersey is 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. David, crack open that dossier, please. Martin Charles Scorsese, the great American filmmaker, was born. Well, 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 shove that down our throats. Was born November 17th, 1942 in Flushing, Queens. Did you know that? I knew he was a Queens boy. Parents are Charles and Catherine Scorsese, the children of Sicilian immigrants. So they are, you know, they are the first generation born here. Marty's the second. Both of Marty's parents were born on Elizabeth Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Charles worked in, like, shipyards and then, like, pressed clothes, I think. Catherine, they both worked in, like, 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, you know, saved his life when he was a tiny baby, but he thinks it basically, like, allergies. Asthma. Touch and go. Trouble breathing. Barely made it out of infancy. But then it's like his whole childhood, he's got, like, a bad set of lungs. You know, like, he's a little, you know, whatever. 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 going to 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? I already forgot. It was on Apple TV. Talks about this. He talks about it in the Richard Schickel book, Conversations with Scorsese, which J.G. wanted me to shout out because he's using it a lot for this stuff. And also, I should shout it out anyway because 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, I think was the very heavily Italian. And it was 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 yeah. Two family house. They had a yard. They had a little tree and they were forced to move back because Charles got in an argument to move back to the Lower East Side, move back to Little Italy because Charles got in 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, right? Impossible to say, but something. Face could not be saved. 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 shit 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. Yeah, right. Exactly. Like for, for again, it's still a very large amount of money, but also 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 for the Atlantic and I work in Soho. And Elizabeth Street between Prince and Houston, you know, is where he grew up. And like, it's, you know, where Prince Street Pizza is. Of course. All the tourists love to go there now. Lines around the box. Around the corner. Square slices they say. We're talking around the corner from there. Yeah. Anyway, so his dad wasn't in the mob, but like definitely knew plenty of people who were. And I feel like was sort of like often mixed up in the local kind of scenery. 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, um, losing the house and Corona where you're like, was he too close or was he too far from these things? He tells this story about like the landlord, maybe thought the dad was a little too mobbed up and there was like a fight. Someone picked up an ax. The landlord picked up an ax 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, the documentary about them. They look so much like him. They do. They look like him in old age makeup. Right. Like, yes. And then, and his mother is just this like incredibly warm and interesting figure. Yes. His dad is definitely a little more unknowable. Yes. 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 day were like 240. I don't know. He talks about all this, you know, like I, we don't need to go through every single apartment that he lived in. Has JJ included Zillow listing? Well, I could look them up again. I bet you these days, pretty petty price. And Lower East Side was 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 a piece of wood. Now you got a sword and a shield. You play around. But also, Marty's spending a lot of time looking out his window at kids acting up. Yeah. 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, 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 in, the roughhousing. You can see in the Scorsese doc, the storyboards he made. They are insane. And it's crazy. Yes. It's not like, oh yeah, 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 Fennessey on the big picture. But she was saying, like, you know, I have a difficult relationship with the idea of genius and I, 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. Yes. Yeah. Right. There's a lot of Roman stuff. I mean, because 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's 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 Houston down to Canal, Elizabeth over to like Mulberry, but like five foot 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 Italy is essentially three streets. It's Mott, Mulberry and Elizabeth. Which are like, it's now you call, I mean, Little Italy barely exists and you call some of it Nolita, which is a made up, you know, term. 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 parochialism of like, yeah, you know, the Northern Italians, they were, and then the Neapolitans, they're on Mott. The Sicilians, we're on Elizabeth. I mean, like that's what Kings of New York is about. And that was what New York. Kings of 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. Where it was like people would immigrate and then they'd just be like, this is our block. A little bit. You know, like families 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. With newer immigrant groups. But the block by block thing is what fascinates me. I think there's a little less of that now because there's less tenements. It used to also be like a fucking stronghold. It was like the neighborhoods were 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 sort of like, all right, the Guyanese community is like, you know, this little pocket here in Ozone Park or whatever, you know, like you would find. Yes. It's all so fascinating to me. I'm a geography nerd. I'm a New York nerd. I love all this stuff, but mostly he would live in Little Italy, but he does say sometimes you go to Staten Island or Queens, see 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 thirties. So he's passing it down. The first, the first image he remembers seeing a true color trailer for a Roy Rogers movie in which he was wearing fringes and jumped from a tree onto his horse. His father says, do you know who trigger is? And then, and he went like, Scorsese goes like this. It's by the trigger finger. And he's like, no, it's the horse's name. And I'll take you to see it next week. Do you know 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. Oh, 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 ritual going to the movies with your father, it didn't matter what film you saw 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 the Fillmore East, but in 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, you had faith when he went into the movie theater to 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. And you just walk in. I agree. It is walking in the middle of fucking what's out right now. Uh, project Hail Mary. Yeah, there we go. Sure. It's, uh, it is funny. Uh, you know, for how much Martin Scorsese now represents like the sanctity of cinema, right. And the purity of it. He talks about that every time he, uh, fucking walked into a movie, theater, it was like an insane asylum. Like he was like in those days, I think it was just a bunch of like latchkey kids, especially if it's like a kid thing. Right. Right. Yeah. 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 at any point. People are screaming and throwing popcorn. There's the moment in matinee. I love so much. The Joe Dante movie where you, you, you, you, you, I see them go into the movie palace for the first time and they open the doors It's just like mayhem. It's like Altamont. I also, just to your point, I want to throw out, I imported this lovely Blu-ray box set from the fine folks at Imprint in Australia, Martin Scorsese Films of Faith, which is Last Temptation, Kundun, 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 Kundun 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 at the town downtown. So, some of the early movies. Bad and the Beautiful, the first movie he sees about the process of filmmaking. He loved westerns. Day the Earth Stood 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. 2,000 people jumping, 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 Vidor 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. It was too scary for him. I mean, that's a 46 movie. He must have been. He was like four years old. What's he doing taking. This is what I'm saying. I know, I know. People just bring up movies. This is how they made him. I know, I know. He couldn't watch the end. It was also frightening, you know. 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, Ben. 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. We love Pinhead. And I was planning to get him to sign your lament configuration off to bring it back 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. Yeah. And like when you hear him in like a podcast where he's like, you know, he has a scouse accent and like the idea of like, oh, I would get in trouble. I can try. I'll try. But like the idea of Pinhead being scouse is 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. This 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 Korda, Beef of Baghdad, you know, and then some Italian film on Friday. I don't know. On Friday nights, they would show things like Bicycle Thieves or Rome Open City, like these, you know, more challenging near-realist Italian films. I feel like filmmakers of his generation that's come up in other series talk about this, that also, you know, far fewer channels, very few, but movies would replay. Of course. Right. 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 was like a program in the 50s, would just show the same film like five times a week. Yeah. And he would just watch it. And he would watch it again and again. It would be the movie of the week. And his mother would be like, turn it off. And he'd be like, no. I'm getting something different this time. The Powell-Pressburger 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, Powell and Pressburger is maybe the one single most obvious influence visually on the work of Martin Scorsese. 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 Powell and Pressburger like style. Like he's making the. Yeah, just 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 we're always threatening to do. Yeah, we'll do them right now, actually. Series canceled. Marty, hit the bricks. He didn't see Citizen Kane until he was 14 or 15. Fake fan. Got to get those Letterboxd stats up, Marty. Basic ass taste. He remembers seeing it at the Thalia Theater or Thalia? Thalia, I think, on 96th Street along with John Ford's The Informer. Not a good movie. Look, he likes a lot of movies. Also, he draws those storyboards, as we know. So we referenced that already. He was very obsessed with like biblical epics, war 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 maker. Instead, he's like, this is embarrassing. I'm throwing these away. 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. You're no Marty Scorsese. Marty Scorsese. Imagine his dad being like, Martin Scorsese, what will you ever have to say about movies? No one cares. So I guess his parents are not deeply religious, he says, but he lives in Little 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 want to talk about. All right. So I don't know if you guys, you guys know this, but there's 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-town, 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 Prince, between Mott and Mulberry. Is this 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 you 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, 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 technically St. Patrick's Basilica, but you know, that's Pope language. Let's see, when was it built? 1815. So yeah, you know, over 200 years old. It's just, it's so funny because of the neighborhood where it's like you pass a Laueve. Right. You're like, ah, yes, where can I buy a belt for $800? And it's like, yes, but once this was like the seat of, you know, working class Catholic power. So it's, 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. Where are we going with this, Dave? You said this was exciting. And we all know that always works out for everyone just fine. I, the other day, toured St. You can tour it. There's catacombs underneath. Cool. And you can tour them. Bones. Now, on this tour guide, which was, I was with my friend Blythe. My friend Blythe was like, hey, 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 much? 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. He's, you know. Our tour guide was, imagine like sort of an Irish guy from Brooklyn. Can you imagine this? Coy-ta-toy-ta-toy. No, no, no. Not an Irish guy from Ireland. Little, little. It was kind of a little easy. Hey, I don't know what you're talking about, but, you know, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. 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, I've, you know, I've been to like the ones in Paris, right? With the bones. And he's like, all right, all right. So, ours are air conditioned, okay? There's no skeletons down here. What? No skeletons? I mean, there are skeletons hidden away, but, you know, there's no like random bones. Have you ever been- So American that there's air conditioning. It's air conditioned, yeah. Have you ever been to the fucking catacombs in Paris, Ben? It's a little spooky. No, I tried. 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, let me 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- Being like, that skull. And they're like, don't touch the skull. Hundreds of years old. Anyway, but on this tour, he was like, hey, anyone know Martin Scorsese? And I was like, yeah, I've heard, you know, yes. And he's like, it was an Alta boy here. And I was like, of course he was. Yeah. This was the church. This was the church. This is the Little Italy Church. Even though, like, 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 know, you just can't believe, like, that this is just sitting here in the middle of New York, because, like- Right across the street to. 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. What if that's my review? This is now. This is a trad podcast. I'm into Catholicism in that weird J.D. Vance way. We all know Blank Check has always been a deeply spiritual podcast. I was going to say, I feel like it's a thing that came up in the Rebecca Miller doc, but comes 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 other thing about the church, especially, is the rougher types, the mob, whatever. They're not messing with the church. No one's going to be mean to a priest. It's the one place that's basically safe. He had a very influential. Man named Father Prince Bay, who is like a young priest mentor for him. Kind of a hip priest. I think so. I mean, he says like he played the guitar. Oh, do you really? Yeah, I think so. My joke's not funny. It 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 Carl Malden character. Carl Malden is so fucking good in that movie. Carl Malden. I'll say it pretty good actor. The original kind of is called in the original Karen's boy. Like definitely because Carl Malden 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 have loved for decades. My guy's got a hunker. He's got a hunker. You really do feel like you could squeeze it and the noise would go. Oh, God. Like. Uh, yes. Um, Father Prince finally saw a 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 anyway. So all very formative for him. 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 going to 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, which is on the Upper West 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 the cinema claimed him as he says. Like he's basically like my parents were not religious. I liked Father Principe and I liked, you know, the neighborhood priest kind of the neighborhood church thing. But like that's not pushed on me. Yeah, like I probably just didn't have quite enough of the drive, you know, so it 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 is a 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. Says it wasn't part of our cultural makeup, but I was ready to delve further. I don't know. I just feel like he's, you know, he's not academic, right? Like he figures this all out later. Like he's not right. Yeah, it comes from a working-class family. Yeah, 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 he's not seeing it in his day-to-day life. That's what he says. Like it's like 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 film. Which he shot on the roofs of Mott Street with white sheets. I'm going to guess he didn't completely recreate Mount Vesuvius. I think they show clips of this in the Rebecca Miller thing. But it's him doing his, yeah, his homage to the epics. 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, but, you know, it's in the village. It's right where he grew up. It's just, you know, one neighborhood up. What if we found out that the great, 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? I'm going to look it up. Keep digging through the dossier. I'm sure he has. So, Haig Manoogian? Oh, yes. Yes. Very influential early like teacher for him. Armenian American professor. He's in Who's That Knocking at My Door, I think briefly. So he shows him Lumiere movies. He shows him great train robbery, greed, maybe all the way up to like early Fellini. Like these are the kinds of movies he's showing him. Scorsese, they had to do a report on 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 pole 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 are like, oh, yeah, but that's that's those aren't serious. Well, 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. Maybe, but I think TV is so new. It's more the picture house thing of 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 artistry here while not presenting themselves as serious does not seem he has ever been a guest on the Howard Stern show. There many clips of others. Of other people talking about Howard Howard Baba. We he has done Adam Friedland should you do hot ones? That might kill him. Would he die if he let's let's let's be careful. I don't know what Marty's diet is 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 Hiroshima mon amour Julie Jim. Viewer savvy. My opinion is that those. Are good movies. They're good movies. He 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 the 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 dude literally hadn't met them right and then you know Cassavetes is out there. Yeah shadows has been released. Yeah, right. Yeah, 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. Be done and it was a scrappy iterative movie shot it right over a bunch of years and right. It's like this guy just kind of eked it out. Yeah, so he works on some shooting student stuff. He's a cinematographer or the photographer 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 on title. We're going to talk about these early shorts including this one, right? Yes, we're going to do a kind of box set, right? Yes. That's on their Italian-American big shave. Right? 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've divorced in 71 and then he's like, you know being really regular through all of the 70s. It's a big thing that 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 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. You got married a bunch. There's some marriages. There are some marriages. How old was he when he became? Dad? Well of his of the first child. Yeah, I mean, geez. Yeah, he would have been like 2324. I think yeah. So pretty young like insane, but he still talks about like when he was like, you know, if I want to date someone I felt like I had to marry them. Who's that knocking at the door? It was actually written as the seven second part of a series of films meant to explore his adolescence. The first was going to be called Jerusalem Jerusalem. It's a sort of half-finished screenplay. He wrote where his protagonist. called JR, later called Charlie, who it's, you know, streets is the main character is called charlie uh in which they like spend three humans boys spend some days in a religious retreat you know sounds a little less exciting hi manugian uh is his first producer you know helps him make this movie his father raises six thousand dollars 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 yeah because even just like film school is a new thing part of the idea of training 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 it used to be like the new wave is happening so like the art is so exciting and it's challenging it's different not to not to generalize 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 a film yourself it's still gonna be harder you're gonna 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 like it's like it's like it's you know it's it's really hard to get an opportunity to work with something like that they're very few film schools they're all very new and it's so expensive there's a barrier of entry and you gotta buy yeah but it yes yes and it's a complicated process but 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 in auto plant harvey got done harvey answers an ad they put in a publication called show business and uh he comes in and marty has a friend called bill minkin who's a comedian sit behind a desk for this harvey comes in and bill minkin's like marty has coached him to be like what are you doing here harvey's like i answered an ad and he's like there's no ad and basically goad him into an argument and then they like watch the argument and then uh marty is like that was great and harvey's like why didn't you fucking tell me like to improv something i can do that like why are you doing fucking jamie kennedy kennedy experiment on me marty did accent marty it sounds like he x the hell out of kaitel kaitel was working as a court stenographer uh-huh so i think that that tends to be kind of a nine to five job so i think making this movie was really annoying harvey kaitel's the kind of guy just his 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 yeah right there was no job he was a sea captain i'm like yeah of course and then he he docked and he started acting in movies he was 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'd 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 make a film about a male camaraderie and try to capture what i see and the guys i grew up with in my generation and all of that so we kind of make a movie out of this man but ben it's 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 right 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 hangout movie that no one wants right he teams up with mardick martin who's an early collaborator of his on works on mean streets and other things there's neither of them have any money but they start thinking about things and somehow they get 37 000 from haig and from joe weill another student who was 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 the some 35 millimeter stuff they had shot and uh they start shooting in some real locations um he said the way he puts it is i realized i was in the process of combining two styles let's say cassavetes 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 without dialogue tell the stories through images but it didn't work they find this actress dina bethune they call harry kytel back her mother was like a big actress of the early american theater and radio she was on the original superman radio show uh eva bethune was also a dancer i'm sorry i know i'm saying ivy was the mother yes and 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 um right film credits uh kytel's like 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 gotta 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 wins his breakthrough right that wins a prize at a festival and he's like i'm gonna do more of that shit with the guy who fucking x'd me festival of american cinema experimental cinema right so that gets him a little bit of attention we we will cover it then but it's it's a a true short dialogue free film uh that is pretty experimental and and allegorical metaphorical but it has like a really big impact it is talked about as like a calling card thing as there's sort of a rising like uh film intelligentsia you know 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 in 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 um 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 house this is the thing that one roger ebert dines out on this for the rest of his life he has 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 like 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 saw i called my shot or i don't know i don't think so i think i was the first person to say hotel transylvania is good right that was that was a risky position at that time i wasn't actually literally asking it was i was you were being funny yeah yeah i was hoping that you would come up with like i don't know something dumb okay there's still a chance later and new listeners we do this sometimes we do this sometimes sometimes we seed a bit so he tries to get in the new york film festival he claimed he says they told me i was living aesthetically beyond my means which is funny um he goes to europe you know takes it around there he meets a italian direct sorry italian um joseph brenner associates a soft core porn distributor says if you add a nude scene we'll distribute this it was so he adds the nude scene yes it was not ebert's first review but it was the first review scorsese got it was the first review that movie got uh yes but this is very illustrative of this era of filmmaking of 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 like truly they'd be like i'll give you twenty thousand dollars find a couple of boobs edit them into the movie and that's like i can make my money back on that um they're in amsterdam they fly harvey keitel who i assume is the middle of like you know your honor i object yeah right to amsterdam they got as he puts it a bunch of girls and did the crazy nude scene uh to get that in there and uh you know they he looks back on the film and sees its flaws but you know it's part of he in 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 is too afraid of sex he'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 is fascinating i actually like it a lot i think it is one of those movies where its failings and its 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 like pure primal scream of Scorsese. And I also think past Mean Streets, his movies stop being about him. They become about his obsessions and his worldview, and they're all very personal. Sure. And Mean Streets is about him. He was about him. He did live in a train station in Paris and meet a robot. Well, those are his best friends, the Atomitons. They write all of his favorite things. Mean Streets, as we'll talk about next week, is this fascinating sort of pivot point where he has a self-insert character played by Cattell, 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 like spilling them out. And the form of the movie even in its weird like you know, segmented production and it's like development across years and all this sort of like wedged in pieces feels like it's a representation of what he's battling inside of himself in that way. You know, like it's messiness to me is 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's it is mostly interesting as a movie made by Martin Scorsese. Like 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 it 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 of the who made it and like, you know, where it's like it has all this fascinating like blueprint material. Yes. Right. You know, like which is which is interesting. One could call it a bit of a Rosetta stuff. 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. Like you know, he's like, I didn't get the emotions right. I dislike the movie. It's a rough sketch, but you know Kytel is good. I think Xena Bethune is good. I think the camera work is good. I like what I, you know, the music stuff. He's got Thelma editing this one and then they don't reteam again for another couple pictures. 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 and 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. You know, 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 guys roughhousing and then cutting to like an entirely different mode of filmmaking with these like more intimate dialogue scenes shot in an entirely different film format and the two sides of the movie like clashing against each other because Thelma is actually using new wave editing rather than like invisible editing and making something out of the juxtaposition between the two. I love Thelma. Guess who else likes this movie? Roger Ebert. No. Guess who else? Who? Cassavetes. Well, yes. He digs it. He notices. At least, or at least he notices the talent. Senpah notices. So that is Who's That Knocking at My Door before we move on to Boxcar Bertha. That's all we're going to say about Who's That Knocking at My Door? No, I'm saying that's the end of the dossier on Who's That Knocking at My Door. Do you think we should talk about the movie a little more and then do the Boxcar dossier section? We should also, we can do a box office game. I think we should do a little. Yes. 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 Streets because we did just record that episode. We've only recorded one other episode. The only, we just did one leapfrog 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 it's going to get right. Ben, what did you seen this film before? I'd never seen it before. What did you make of Who's That Knocking at 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 any enjoyment out of it because otherwise you're like, what are the fucking swings this thing is doing? Yeah, right. Because it's just kind of, I mean, it almost feels like someone made a parody of a Scorsese movie with no money, right? Where they're like, let's do some music. And then it's like a bunch of guys go like, hey, hey, walk out, what are you doing? You know, and you're like, right. This is like what these movies are like. You're totally right. The parody part. And then the guy's like, but I love Jesus. 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, I mean, like one of the first scenes is him, a guy just talking to a girl about fucking the searchers for like so long that you're like, you have her attention. You're losing her, buddy. 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, whatever it is. And it's like, this isn't like the 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 on 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 blocks 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 girl. Sure, you mean he's doing a little bit more like Marty than Dean Streets, right? Right, where it feels like he's like, I get it. This is based on him. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 Keitel take on the qualities of Scorsese. Right, because the Mean Streets character is more thought through and a little quieter, more reserved. Right, it feels like he's building a character based on the thing that Scorsese wrote. I do miss a De Niro 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 De Niro, 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 movie is. Down to not giving a character name. She is the girl. She's girl. They give her a proper title. She's the girl. Oh, no. Oh, I think she's just girl. I mean, I'm seeing here girl. Yeah, maybe. I thought I saw the girl in the end credit. 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. I'm sorry. In the sort of sex scene, 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 Scorsese 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 an early 2000s like Warner Brothers Scorsese 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 circulation. 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. That's the kind of move they do. Like, you just kind of throw it in. I mean, we'll talk about, you know, Boxcar Bertha, which was the other sort of, like, abandoned one for a while, just got this big cinematograph 4K. I bought it. I bought it. I watched it. Same. But that feels like, well, that has more of a curio aspect of being a Corman 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 will happen. It's just 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 Shyamalan told me he's remastered - Yeah. worked on Praying with Anger. It's still not available anymore. Well, because I was like, are you going to release it? And he was like, I don't know. I'm kind of embarrassed. Yeah, he was like, I wanted to show it to my kids in like that format. I have no idea if I want to do anything more. And I'm like, I get it. Because it's like, it's a very amateurish movie in so many ways. I was looking up, I was like, are there other holes I need to plug in my like blank check disc collection of the main feed episodes? And I was like, am I wrong about this? And I double checked. Like Praying with Anger 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? Right. You can watch it on the internet archive. I mean, that's where we watched it. I believe 10, 11 years ago. Long time ago. 10 years ago. Yeah. Now I want to see if there is a VHS and do I need to buy the VHS and is Praying 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 insulation. You think I need to encourage him? He's. It's true. He's snowballing down the hill long ago. Yeah, he's not even bidding. He's just buying now. What will be, will be. Oh, yeah. He buys it now. Excuse me. The thrill of the hunt's a big part of it for me. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't buy it now. I'm actually kind of lazy enough. I'm more the buy it now type. Riff 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 does it 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? That's like, again, the camera stuff is fun. He's doing camera stuff. Like, there's moments where he's like, doing like bird's 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 would like, what that would look like. Some close-up kissing. Yeah. The eyeball close-ups. I don't think people should kiss in movies. Can we say this movie doesn't have a lot of. Just kidding. The story of this movie is a guy who. J.R. You could say is 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. That's not cool. Right. Sally Gaga's 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, right, he meets her at the set, like at the ferry station, I feel like. That's where he talks her ear 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. It's his other famous role. 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 Shatner. Who did have the juice? He did. Captain Kirk has the juice. Yes. He is almost like Mr. Juicy Juice in terms of how much juice he had. But it is basically like. Then they recut the pilot footage into a later two-part episode. That is true. Where Captain Pike was the kind of rejected and scorned previous. 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 Greenwood plays him in the JJ movies. Right. And now. It's an excellent performance. Steady hand. Who plays him now? Ensign Mount. He's really, really good. But it's just funny that in Martin Scorsese's first movie, someone says, Jeffrey Hunter. Oh, sure. And I'm like, Captain Pike. Captain Pike. Anyway, yeah. 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, whose brain he is interested in, and also his overwhelming Catholic guilt. Well, because also at that time, he's still living at home. We talked about this a little bit on our Mean Streets episode. And he's. You can't bring your. This girl around your mom? No. You'll get in trouble. No. And people who live alone at this age are seen as deviants. 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. Wild coming from the two married guys in the room. You guys fucked that one up. So, what was I going to say? They have this attachment and then. He won't have sex with her. Yes. Because he doesn't want to spoil her. He doesn't want to spoil her. She reveals to him. A bit retrograde. Yes. 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. It makes me very mad. He just doesn't. He's not mature enough. He cannot handle it. It's all about him. It's 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, you know, the Madonna and the Whore bifurcation, right? Of like, I can go rent out an apartment and have my own fucking like boom boom sex orgy because that's the way I get my rocks off without telling 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's, it is a movie about her about his immaturity. 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 watch a movie from the 1960s and you're worried that the guy is gonna be rewarded for saying, I will accept you even though you are tarnished goods. I've worked through the thing you told me and I have, yeah. Right. I accept you. No, instead, she's like, fuck off. And he goes, the church and doesn't know what to do with himself is classic Scorsese. Yeah, right. What's up, Ben? Let's play the box office. Well, yeah. Thankfully, we've gotten 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 stinks by a group that also stinks. Go on. The Doors? Oh. It's just that I had this note where I'm just like, ah, good. The Doors are in this movie. Just what I need. I guess they were hot stuff, right? He was at the tip of the spear on this one. You do have to give him credit. Like, people were pointing out. They're only a couple years old at this point. It's credited as, it's listed as like a 67 movie, but I think the final sort of round of shooting they do to add the boobs and the boom boom in 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 Ebert saw was a slightly earlier version. That is possible. I don't know. I saw someone interrogating that 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, but he walked down the hallway of the ancient gallery. Ben, just take a step 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've got to give him credit. No, no, no. This is the real question. Right. Ben, it's 1967. You are Ben Hosley. Bloop, you've been dropped in there. Someone puts on The Doors. Bell bottoms or whatever. Do you like it? Someone's like, hey, check out. If you've never met. I'm going to 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 it. 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'll 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 because they have a unique. keep going yeah this fucking drunk poet idiot and an organist yeah what do you think was number one in the box office when this jim morrison was kind of an organist as well if you know what i'm saying when this quote-unquote came out and famously what do i think was number one at the box office in 1968 september 18 you know 16 september 1968 i can give you a hint it's a film that features an actor who liked this movie he was also director john cassavetes the dirty dozen nope uh rosemary's baby rosemary's baby interesting which was number one for a million weeks like you know like it was such a big hit number two at the box office a 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 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 the craziest thing in the right yeah it really is it's not just that that movie looks good for 1968 looks good for 3068 and everything else you know it was was just like on a different planet number three at the box office is a romantic comedy film it stars sydney poitier uh that's what i'm giving you just sir with love no good guess and it's not uh guess who's coming to dinner no it's a lesser known it's a lesson do you think i know it is it a known title sure yeah i'm not sure i'll give you more hints directed by daniel mann okay uh you know made a lot of movies who's the lady and lady of this picture abby lincoln but i can who's you know a great great african-american uh singer okay i can tell you that beau bridges in this film carol o'connor oh did he have some opinions on a character in this yeah uh 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 fucking love is a many-star movie it's not like love is a many-star movie it's not under 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 starring oscar verner okay good actor i love oscar verner and barbara ferris okay i can't say i've heard of this one hmm get directed by kevin billington i don't think you've got this 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 too frankly and ends up being given an unwanted sabbatical from conducting so far that sounds like tar i was gonna 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 a like an orchestra yeah not a train i was thinking it would be funny if she's like tell me about how you drive the train yeah number five at the box office is a 67 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 graduate it is the yeah graduate the highest grossing film of 1967 graduate yeah uh yes i mean 1967 obviously is the the uh pictures at revolution year that's the that's the bonnie and clyde graduate and then dr doolittle of course great the most revolutionary film of all but i was just looking at my my 67 letterboxd 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 it's fucking you know what every movie if you throw a you know dart at an old movie you're like god damn like it's the best playtime came out in 67 yeah weekend came out lou weekend yeah that's a that's a regular ass movie yeah it is my wife almost divorced me over that movie really no no but you took her to see it i took her to see it she was like the 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 eat 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 uh some of the other films in the top 10 are uh the odd couple fun rachel rachel yeah the paul newman directed i've never seen it now they're right yep hang them high uh 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 i think that universe just announced they're putting it out on 4k probably did yeah those fuckers like probably a film called prudence and the pill which is a british comedy a ronald neem uh film it's a really good title that i assume is kind of like your classic like i don't know what it's called but i don't know what it's called but i don't know it's called like british kitchen sinky kind of comedy like where they're like well it's like oh the pill is new yeah and it's about the contraception yeah and then a movie a lee van cleef cult 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 like a spaghetti western guess 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 i was about to say 2001 in there yeah where do you think it is one or two two what do you think would have beaten 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 could somehow be the highest grossing film well it's funny that there was a girl 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 in the top five rosemary's baby is number seven okay but it was so big hit it was oh it's a very big hit is planet of the apes in the top and if 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 bullet correct and number five fun not my favorite number five but very sexy is a musical it's a musical i don't know funny girl i don't want to give you the obvious hint but it's a musical 68 oh well is it uh oliver correct because that was the fifth highest grossing film of the year because that's the whole thing with the biskin book or he's like wow you know hollywood's and then it's like yeah well let's not forget the next year they're like oliver bring them all and funny girl for best actress and right right it was at least funny girl is a little more like but the next year fresh was more classical yeah you have rosemary's baby there at seven you have 2001 at two but then you know funny girl odd couple planet of the apes is the beginning of something new number eight was uh the zaffarelli romeo and juliet normal film no legal problems there number nine of course was yours mine and ours i have heard of it the uh peter fonda lucille ball movie that's basically riffed 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 by the dozen remake of the sequel and then uh number 10 was lying in winter which is also a best picture contender i guess yeah but not the winner right yeah 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 hepburn wins she ties with with strice strice hands yes let's talk about boxcar bertha let's talk about now i have also only seen this film once before i watched it for today's podcast saw it in high school out of a sense of completionism again yeah yeah um it is a film directed by martin scorsese he didn't make the film in 1972 yes yes now i will tell you that after who's that knocking he was hired to film to direct a film called the honeymoon killers it was brought to him by an agent his agent harry uffland his script was very long he couldn't connect with the material and uh he said he wanted to try to make it in the style of a curl through your door dryer film i'm sure the producers loved hearing interesting uh 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 artiste he was not going to make you know whatever the people wanted hey this is a business kid this is when they're starting to say we don't got time for your fancy stuff um so he picks up some odd jobs write some dialogue for a dutch thriller called obsessions he does some editing work uh street scenes does camera work for uh uh woodstock we're gonna get to that okay we're gonna get that because i'm gonna get to that that's a big one a huge one uh he was the artist and resident of the film society lincoln center did some instruction at myu and uh oliver stone one of his one of his students uh michael wadley who photographed uh who's that knocking comes to and almost use screen 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 yeah 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 the movie 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 ben 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 interviews of the concert goers are fascinating would you have gone to woodstock oh yeah sounds like a pain though it does yeah but it was just so worth it yeah like 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 it might is the strong might be enough to fill sure i you couldn't just take it he had to give it to you first i really did forget all about that how could you forget that was 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 performances scorsese ends up out in la who's that knocking's being shown there under the title of jr roger corman sees it so roger corman obviously at this point is already a very established figure right he had already directed tens of movies by the 70s you're getting to the point where he focuses more on producing and running his own studio the 60s is the the height of you know little shop of horrors and man with x-ray eyes when he's personally directing like you know yeah four movies a year yeah um and he sees it and says i like this would you want to direct a sequel to my film bloody mama have you ever seen that film never i have only winters i know i have because one of the two demi roger corman films is only available on a double feature blu-ray with it i think uh-huh uh crazy crazy i think crazy mama and bloody mama maybe funny because yeah two mamas yeah he's like it's got guns it's got costumes scorsese's like i'll do it corman says i'll see you in six months i'll have 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 so scorsese like six months forget it and instead he does some post-production on documentary called medicine ball caravan which is about 154 person bus and truck tour bus and truck rex reed what did i can't remember you know what 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 view of the first spider-man movie yes uh 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 remember boggling our minds and we couldn't rest until we figured out what bus and truck rex is the best he's an insane person which it basically means second tier touring performance of a previously broadway show isn't that right it's like you take it out but like right right you're like shitty enough you can fit the entire set put it on a bus and a truck guys go in the bus that goes in the truck here we go yeah batman that's my take on batman by the way if james gunn is accepting pitches anyway medicine ball kevin there's a bus and truck tour uh 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 big gets about back to california he meets georgie lucas he's making thx 113 or he already knows him but like you know george is hangs out with george francis coppola is there okay brian depoma he'd already kind of worked with in new york a little bit or no one'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 cassavetes do some sound effects for minnie and moskowitz hell yeah that movie rules it does rule does rule like that movie'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 world where it's been kind of like it's been kind of like it's been kind of like in a way like in a way like in a way like it's been kind of like in a way like in a way like in a way like in a way like people are constantly 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 right i don't know at one point he did sound effects for a fight so uh score says you just hold cassavetes while someone punches him and then record it you know that sounds like some real anyway stuff yeah then roger corman calls it's been a few months and says i have a script bloody mama too which is then you know i don't know if i'm gonna be able to do it but i'm gonna is boxcar bertha his wife first there's a demand for bloody mama too because bloody mama has performed well they start marty 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 boxcar bertha 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 this is actually a revelation yep because you figure you watch it you're like was marty just like and you should get crucified again right right like jesus my favorite guy uh he gets a bunch of six hundred thousand dollars and he's basically told do what you want stay under that number so he throws in some references to the archers he throws in some wizard of oz you know winks the the cinematograph release has uh you can watch it with the tcm intros yes it does that's right it's kind of a corman series where corman was interviewed by manquitz 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 gotta 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 bra off right don't spend over the budget make sure you have a little bit nudity nothing crazy but you know we need some boobs the fascinating thing about corman i don't know if you've ever seen him ben because we use him a lot as like shorthand for stuff he is the most kind of like square patrician man he's like a sitcom dad from like leave it to beaver 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 by his love of the boobs or the blood or any of these sort of like things but but he was just like very open-minded you know he was very like you gotta chase the trans 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 to on the poster you know the title but like outside of that i i leave you you know he would sort of go like you got 10 days and four dollars to make whatever you want to make and he would just like leave you you know he would just like leave you you know he would sort of go like you got 10 days and four dollars to make whatever you want to make and he would just like leave you you know he would sort of go like you got 10 days and whatever you want and 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 scores as he says the movie's part of like a sort of exploitation genre that starts with bonnie and clark i was gonna say it feels very on the road kind of movie yes the young lover he's 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 because he didn't want to get fired again he was afraid of a honeymoon killer situation then he shows up with the storyboards and corman like see like takes a quick look he's like you want to see these and he's like no that's fine like whatever you want to do he did say in the mankowitz 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 sort of like a movie that was like a movie that was like a movie that was like a movie that 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 um that is true they did not have a ton of they shot it in arkansas uh 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 an 824 movie with that but back then that wasn't a lot roger it one point corman takes him aside at one point and says like you know you don't have a chase scene like audiences do like those like this is a kind of bonnie Clyde thing. And then 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. 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 shootout into the crucifixion, or I guess off of the crucifixion. Yeah. Feels like a real, a true Marty sequence. Pretty fully realized, in my opinion. Film previews at the Pantages Theater. The audience loves and applauds. Corman comes out smiling. Sam Arcoff looks at him and says, I gotta tell you, it's almost good. He's feeling good about himself. No one's gonna be able to burst his balloon. And Scorsese says, that's pretty good. And he says, I don't get too excited. It's almost good. Almost good. But that's what you want out of the Corman experience, right? Good job, kid. Oh, 100%. You made your days. You delivered. It plays for an audience. You're moving up the ladder. He shows, now, it's to be fair, it is, Cassavetes is shown a rough cut. Two hours. And Cassavetes says, Marty, you just spent your whole life, whole year of 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 of 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 in there. 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 is Scorsese's whole thing, or Cassavetes' 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 an 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 the sort of hollowness and the sentimentality and all of this, right? And who's that knocking at my door for all of its failings, its limitations, you know? Its 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 Cassavetes is going to look at it and go, you actually have shit to say. You're not just here as 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 this? Obviously, it clearly resonates with Scorsese, because he's telling the story 60 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's not suited to making this kind of movie, it's not fun. I agree. The really good Corman movies are fun and wacky. Have the shaggy energy you kind of want. Right. This kind of like, live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse. Right. You know, like wanton sort of countercultural thing. Is so outside of his milieu. He doesn't totally know how to dramatize people who would not be wracked with guilt over every one of these decisions. And it's so early in his career, and he's right. He hasn't gotten to tell these stories properly yet. It's about Fox Garbertha, played by the great Barbara Hershey, who I love. And of course, he works with again in Last Temptation of Christ. Does he work with her any other times? It's just that, but she gives him the book when they're filming this movie. Right. That's what starts his obsession with, oh, I gotta make Last Temptation as a film someday. So putting her in that is a real kind of full circle moment. She rules. We talked about her a lot on Portrait 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 Carradine. 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 getting 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, yeah. And sort of became like the hippie version of like Sidney Sweeney or something where they're like why the fuck are we talking about her? There was like a real like anger and animosity towards her. You see like her interviews are like very defensive. Some of the stories are. Her and David Carradine 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 breastfeeds that child, I believe, on the Dick Havoc 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 years? Entity. She's so good. She wins back to back Best Actress Awards. Is that right? One of the major festivals. She won two consecutive lead actress awards. Here I go looking on her IMDb page to answer your question. You are correct. It's Ken. Yeah. She won Best Actress for Shy People. Yes. The Conchalosky movie. 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, Jodi May and Linda Moosey, I think her name is. Never seen that film. I have seen Boxcar Brother. 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 in our Mosquito Coast episode about living off the grid. It's not appealing to me. I love the grid. I want to live on the Tron grid. Call me and I'm sure we did that bit in that episode. I don't even remember. Digital Frontier. Right. Biodigital Jazz. Well, a young Ben was quite thrilled by the idea of adventure. You'd pack a bindle? Pack a bindle? Because I had gotten obsessed with Bob Dillon, which led me to Woody Guthrie and reading all about his escapades. There's just romance there and yet, you know, thinking about taking a shit in the woods, right? Yeah, there you go. You don't 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 AG1 in the world to make that a smooth process. I think, you know, we're coming up on two hours, so 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. It's published by Microcosm Publishing. It's available now on paperback. We'll put a link in the description. It's basically a book that spotlights beloved railroad artists, there is a whole kind of scene and community of people who would ride the rails and would, using chalk, draw these little cartoons, as well as leave little messages for other riders. Here's a little diagram I'm holding up and showing you. The hobo code. That had like different little, you know, messages and you know, little secret hidden meanings to these symbols that they would leave for other riders to know. I'm just realizing you've invoked how important Dylan was to you growing up 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. 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 Bob. I'm so excited. Going to go off on Bob. Ben's going to talk about Bob. I'm a hobo. 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 a kid. I picked up this way of playing I'm weird. He's just making shit up. Talk like this. It fucking worked. Can I say it? Incredible bit. He was kind of a complete unknown if you think about it. How would that feel, though? Anyway, Boxcar Bertha. Boxcar Bertha. She's a girl. Her dad's plane 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. Because Randy Quaid's a grump 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, because, you know, they defeat the mothership. Yeah, it's very satisfying. And they say, that's the reason you're still free. Exactly. And they say, like, now send the message to the other ones. And I was saying 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 deus ex machina. 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 bushwhackers. The bushwhackers were after him. I had, like, a Mandela effect. The last time I watched Independence Day, sometime in the last 10 years. I re-recently re-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-timey. They filmed that and didn't use it. Correct. Yes. But 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, yeah. 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 top. And his plane's like. He's spitting, like, fucking ever clear into the gas tank. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God. Anyway, her dad dies. Her dad dies. The depression hits. Mm-hmm. And she. He starts freight hopping, which I guess is, like, a cooler version of fucking hitchhiking. It's just, freight car comes by, I get in. Can we call out. Where's 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. Gone. This movie, he gets to sort of be the wild card. Sure. Which is fun to see young Bernie Casey. Please, Vaughn Morton. Uh, who is, uh, like, a bank robber who, I guess, worked with her dad or whatever. Like, I can't remember. You know, like, and then she, like, hooks up with Big Bill Shelley, played by David Carradine. Mm-hmm. A striking man. He has one of the most interesting faces ever. His slender sort of figure and, right, yeah, his face. He's a cool guy. Yeah. Crazy acting dynasty. His father, Ben, appears in the movie as well. Uh, right, of course. Um, John Carradine. Uh, he's Sartorius. I mean, John Carradine is, like. He's, like, your classic, like. He's in all those, like, monster movies and stuff. John Carradine. I mean, this is the crazy thing. I believe Bella. Cecil B. DeMille guy, John Ford guy. Did Bella Lugosi only play Dracula one time? Maybe. He played Dracula in three different movies. Lugosi or Carradine? Carradine. Right. That's what I was gonna say. I think Lugosi only ever does the original, and then Carradine does most of the, like, Dracula meets movies. Right. He did Frankenstein meets Dracula. So, meet Frankenstein, it's Carradine is Dracula. Yeah. Yeah. He was. He spent more time playing Universal's Dracula. I'm excited to watch Dracula. I am, too. That's why I'm making this connection point. That'll be fun. But it's just funny that that guy takes over. We're gonna do it on Patreon. We're doing it on Patreon. We are doing the commentary. Don't forget, you must watch Dracula on Patreon. Yes, Ben. And when you watch the Dracula, you must do this with your heart. I am horny for you, Ben. Yes, he is very horny. Come to my castle. He wants to have you. Have this sex. Bogs called Bertha is a flawed film. Yeah, you got Barry, Barry Premis and Bernie Casey as the other members of a kind of, kind of a train robbery crew that kind of knocks together. Bill, Big Bill is a union organizer, but they start busting up trains. I just want to connect the dots 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, of course, Ricky Calamari. He's also, I believe, he's Felix Leiter in the Never Say Never 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. Because 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. Right. And he said, so, Bill, what you're telling me essentially is that Napoleon was a short, dead dude. Funny. And 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? It'd be funny if it was. Bill and Ted are dogs. He was like, veni, vidi, vici, we should cross the Rubicon. Also, I'm thinking mayo, vinegar, maybe some anise. Anchovies. While I'm at it, while we're here. But you gotta mash the anchovies up really fine. 'Cause they dissolve when you mash them up, and that's so nice. But, yes, this movie basically becomes, you know, a ragtag gang led 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 Scorsese 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"? "Boxcar Bertha" sounds like a sort of six-year-old lady with, like, a frying pan. That sounds like a large barge. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Not like the sexiest, you know, hoochie gangster he ever did see, right? Yes. Like, which is what she is. She's beguiling. She is very appealing in this film. Yeah, she's a fucking hottie, right? She's a handsome lady. She's a handsome hippie lady, I say. It's a hippie before hippie, right? Because it's, like, the '30s or whatever. But it has the time imprinted on it. It does. It does. And the actress, yes, is 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 was made. Because it's nice to see that they're not passing judgment on her character. No. No, I mean— That's what they thought the kids wanted. They're, like, trying to— The Corman movies, right. Yeah, and the Bonnie and Clyde rip-offs were like, "Yeah, they're free spirits." I was gonna say— "Fuck the bank." I find the '70s Corman films, and especially, like, the ones of this stripe, just, they are weirdly comfortable. 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 Rider's a hit. Bonnie and Clyde's a hit. 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 Corman, whose job is just delusional. He's like, "I'm gonna do this." And he's like, "I'm gonna do this." And he's like, "I'm gonna do this." And he's like, "I'm gonna do this." is true. And. Uh, it kind of goes on for a bit and I'm kind of like, you know, but I'm just like, I'm I'm done 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 Bill. Right. Yeah. And of course that ends in him being crucified against a train car. Bill seems pretty broken. He's aged a lot. They fuck a lot as well in like the hay. Yes. Oh yeah. I was going to ask you guys. It's a lot of fucking. First time you had sex. Hey. On a bale of hay? Yeah. I just wasn't ready for a mattress. I rented a hotel room and I said, hold on, I'll be back in one second. Went around the box to the bodega. Said, where's your hay? Do you have a straw? Aisle three. Laid it out gingerly on the bed. I have obviously been to like events where you sit on a bale of hay. With some candles. Right. You know, like have you done that? Not too close to the hay. You know, you ever been to like an event where like you're sitting on a bale of hay. Like a hootenanny? Yeah. Your classic hootenanny. Haunted hay. I went to like a couple of weddings that were like kind of outdoor. Kind of farmy weddings where it's like, hey, we're just putting down some bales. You know, like. And every time you sit in the bale of hay, you're like, you know, chairs rock. Yeah. Chairs are really good. One of the better inventions. A little itchy. Yeah. You know what? Just because this is a square doesn't really mean it should be sat upon. We just ordered new chairs for the office. Yeah. And I'm so fucking excited. When are they coming? Soon. All right. Yeah. Fine. We've had the same chairs for years, which we've inherited. And we just suddenly were like, what if we got new chairs? What if we got like fucking nice chairs? Now, of course, Griffin briefly suggested we get like the emperor. I want to be really clear about this. 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 backs. Sure. I, as a self-owned said, I want you all to know that I considered recommending these. It was after agreeing. It wasn't like. It was made by some company that's called like Bob's Ripoff of Nerds. It's called Regal Robot. And they have an official license with Lucasfilm. This is a high quality product. And I at no point tried to sway the vote. I had already signed off on the grown up chairs. Now I'm looking at the other shit you can get. I'm pretty sure that Marie, I think, said something like, how about we get three nice chairs and one stupid chair for Griffin? Yeah. And this is what I don't like is acting like I'm saying. You're the one who put it in the chat. As a self-owned, I said I was going to. You're self-owned. And then you're like, oh, no, I'm being owned. I just I want credit for for framing myself as the joke rather than acting like I did something earnestly. It's just funny that you showed us that shit because I'd done the fucking sixteen hundred dollars. Yeah, well, real craftspeople have to work on that. You think the emperor is sitting on bullshit? It's a high quality chair. OK, anything else about Boxcar Bertha we wanted? Discuss. It's just crazy that she's like, anyway, what's up with you? And he's like, I don't know. And then they're like, crucify this 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 like, essentially, if you were an Amtrak employee, you could just murk people and get away with it. It's a wild 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 Cormans. And when Cormans sort of swings later this decade, more in the 80s into more creature features and Star Wars ripoffs, I find those movies compelling in a different way. But this 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 Corman 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 a great movie. As Casabay said, like he he did the job well. He sort of 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 it's a functional stuff and all that. But you can feel the lack of understanding of the characters and personalities. And I just feel like junkier might be better. Like it's it's just one of those things where like, right, the artiness almost gets in the way of a good time. And Scorsese can go junkie, but this isn't the type of. Yeah, not really. He doesn't know how 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 junkie. And I'm, you know, I'm like, well, that's the point. And that's some of the stuff. He's inspired by. But like, he has such a prestige sheen 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 yeah, it's like clashes with it doesn't work that that that's not a problem I have there. But I remember that coming up. Yeah, yeah. Or even like Wolf of Wall Street or whatever. Also, I think there's some stuff in Shutter Island. Well, we'll talk about it. We'll talk. I'm gonna save those thoughts for four and a half months from now. Can't wait for that. So it's not to repeat myself. Yeah, that's one of your favorites. I love it. Yeah, I love it. 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, because I'm right. I'm more engaged by Who's That Knocking? Yes, I would have Do's 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. Number one. 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 is his mentor. Obviously, Francis Wright got started making movies earlier. But imagine being like, hey, Francis, what do you think of Boxcar Bertha? He's like. Oh, yeah, yeah, not bad. What do you think of The Godfather? I'm too busy literally making The Godfather. You like that? Yeah. And also, it's not like The Godfather, which was like well-respected at the time. No, it was like the most financially successful film ever made. It was right out the gate, the widest theatrical release of all time, and it immediately exploded at the box office. And yet, look at where they're at now, comparatively. Making films of equal quality. Yeah. Pillars of the Flower Moon and Megalopolis. Ben, you sound like someone who's like, oh, I don't know. You sound like someone who hasn't lopped it off yet when you make a comment like that. Oh, I've lopped. You've lopped? I certainly have. But you haven't seen the new. What does he keep calling it? It's my impression it doesn't help him die. He's like, I'm working on a new wilder cut. I feel like what I released theatrically was a little too restrained and mild. Jim's dad's in it. Yeah, unrated and out of 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 green. I don't know. They'll green light anything. Like, you know what I mean? Megalopolis, the show. What's the reporter's name? I don't remember the names. The only ones I remember are ShamWow. Oh, yeah. WowPlatinum. Oh, WowPlatinum. Which is actually, it's really funny. ShamWow is pretty close. No, but it's funny that you bring that up, Ben. Of course I remember WowPlatinum. Because the character's name is WowPlatinum. And on the Doughboys podcast, we're friends with the Doughboys, right? It's a 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 WowPlatinum, I was asking myself, is Coppola actually secretly a Doughboys fan? Which would actually, it would make sense because they're Coppola goofballs. You almost lost it there. I didn't. I could feel you kind of like. I didn't. I had it. I was so focused. Number two at the box office is an animated film that's for grownups. Is it Fritz the Cat again? Fritz the Cat. Didn't that just come up in a box office game? I don't know. I think it's a. 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 at the box. Have you seen Fritz the Cat? No. It's kind of a Benny 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. Spoiler. Yeah. Number three at the box office is, I assume, what happens. It had to be a filmed version. Yes. A theatrical release of a very famously risque theatrical review. It's a. What? It was. You may not know what this is, but it was like a British theater review. Okay. Review like R-E-V-U-E. That had sketches on sex related topics. That was like kind of a Broadway sensation in the late 60s. Wow. 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 not like The Secret Policeman's Ball, but it's like something like that. But that's an R-E-E 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 in 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 did an HBO special. Yes. Betray the penis. There we go. Do you know what that show was about, Ben? 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? Yeah, they'd explain. They'd be like, and here, a goose. But the characters 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 show? I never saw puppetry of the penis. I didn't either. 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 people's dicks did Shakespeare? No, there was no dicks, but like the ridiculous Shakespeare company or whatever. Oh, sure. And it would just be like, in some little theater, I guess, and we'd just run for 20 years of people just doing puns and shit. They had it figured out. Yeah, they had it figured out. Number four, The Box Office is a disaster film. It's plane centered. It's plane, is it airport? No. It's prior to that. Maybe. It is, it's plane centered. No, the first airport is 1970. So this is two years later. And it's not an airport sequel, so it's an airport ripoff. 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 who directed king kong you know the the king kong movie and didn't he direct one of the planet the ape sequel or no he directed shaft in africa uh not seeing that one uh don't yes no he did there we go there it is um this isn't what's charleston heston james brolin the film is skyjacked it's a good title pretty good title pretty good title uh and number five at the box office is a film directed by and starring sydney poitier directed by and starring and starring um it is a western okay oh oh what's it called what's this movie harry belafonte is yeah yeah star yeah is it is the title their names yes you've got to just tell me i'm not going to pull 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 it's not like a masterpiece but like it has you know an important movie in in both bodies kind of like emerging like you know it's like his first like kind of good movie that he directed yeah it's his first movie that he directed there you go 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 already called the god of course 86 million dollars in domestic rentals that year it was the highest grossing film of all time of course until jaws broke 100 right just on initial a couple years later right uh number two cabaret cabaret is down at number six but it wasn't made a robust 20 but this is godfather 86 this number two movie 42 godfather but i mean yeah thank god i made 42 million it's a big big disaster movie mm disaster movie okay is there a way it's one of the biggest ones okay beside an adventure correct yes yeah yeah okay number three it is a comedy and it's a comedy starring kind of a local new york act uh it's weird they sold this many tickets in new york alone correct how was that big a hit movie that's 28 million dollars okay all right the next great movie yeah very fun number three four and five are all films for this movie and it's a comedy it's a comedy it's a comedy it's a comedy it's a the fine folks at warner brothers so number four is a warner brothers it is uh 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 do you agree with me that it feels a little sure yeah yeah i mean whatever the scandal like the scandalousness of it yes is a little lesser now but deliverance rocks i love deliverance but basically created like 30 years of punch lines and bad jokes the number five movie of 1972 is a western picture it's not bucking the preacher uh western in 72 yep okay bit of a have a movie then revisionist you could say a neo maybe certainly neo a new hollywood western it was a film that famously the studio did not believe in 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 pat garrett billy the kid no it's not like high plane drifter it's not a clint no revisions revisionist 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 hmm 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 yeah oh it's um the gif 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 she's got deep throat uh 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 dies we took some pictures of animals for you 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 though 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 uh do you guys want to guess the most popular drugs of 1972 absolutely sure so i marriage you wanna marriage coming in at number one okay devil's lettuce where does uh i guess acid is is getting pretty hot on there do you have a list it's lsd are we counting yeah what about um what about like over-the-counter drugs oh like lewds quail lewds let me go okay yeah but they're not counting things like aspirin right we're talking like mind expanders it's a hard one yeah on your mind it's a hard one it's a hard one on your liver yeah okay is cocaine has it cracked the 10 at this point or is it okay it's in there cocaine's sort of right yeah sort of the doors of drugs then it's just entered the scene they've taken it out of soda what about uh and they're putting it into little baggies and it's about to have a very successful rebrand it's had a lot of names you know we smoked it in dens we injected in our bloodstream okay heroin show me heroin what number is heroin give us the numbers on these they're it doesn't have like a top to bottom okay how many valium yeah yeah crash how many of the 10 have we gotten so far uh i didn't specify 10 okay uh missing anything you're missing it looks so relaxed he's loving this you're basically just missing one last one you've hit all the magic mushrooms there's one big one no they're not kind of what was that what was like a a biker truck driver oh speed bingo okay just fucking a straight up amphetamines maybe they didn't have five hour energy yet you needed to 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 that attempted a job that's good stuff love it uh yeah so boxcar bertha 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 a but i mean it's also it's just a bit of a jump it's a bit of a jump up i prefer it's just funny how scorsese'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 from and obviously you watch who's that knocking you're like okay sure i see the building block how long does it take him seven movies before he figures it out and then it's like no i had it all actually yeah um and that episode is out next week on blank check with miriam bale the great miriam bale returning after eight years eight years eight long years not since basic instinct uh but tune in for that and over on patreon we're investigating the umbrella corporation currently i think we are yeah episode drops on august 9th yeah and we started that august 1st so yeah we just just entered the resident evil but we'll be doing our scorsese shorts episode very yes and also you can always refer to our social media uh check out our instagram or subscribe to our newsletter on sub stack where we always have a release schedule listed and up to date but let's also just clarify this because we had we had talked it out a little bit in the march madness uh episode We are going to just do Scorsese 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 had thrown out the idea of doing a palate cleanser, little Scorsese intonation. We're not fucking doing that shit. We're not fucking doing it. So every narrative, scripted film happening on main feed. Other stuff on Patreon. Running chronologically, save for new releases. And March Madness next year is probably going to be a bunch of shorties, guys. It's going to be, oh, let's commit to it right now. Shorties. Shorties. Shorties only. Single digis. Under 10, exactly. Single digis. Walt Becker finally maybe is going to have his chance. DeVito, baby. DeVito. I mean, the short king. Yeah, literally. Yeah. It's actually, do we fucking, do we put Beatty up in front of the firing squad again for shorties? Don't lose. Or is that rude? Don't lose. He needed to be humbled a little bit. That guy's had a lot of success. Exactly. So full of himself. But 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 Mets game now. I assume that by the time this posts in August, the Mets 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 Gabe on a group text with John Fennessy so they can commiserate about the Mets together. I'm also on a group text with John Fennessy about the Mets. I just ask 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 we'll be good someday. Do you want to say here that by the time this episode comes out. Yeah, of course. Boba Shett is raking by this point, I assume. God, anything I say now, it's just like those guys will all fall into pits like that Simpsons episode. No, we're. Put it on the board. Boba Shett is raking. I definitely get what that means. I like that. Tune in next week for Mean Streets. Yes. And as always. And as always. Nine more months of this. Nine more months of hearing people say, hoo-wah. Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley. Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas. And our associate producer is A.J. McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by A.J. McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by J.J. Birch. Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery and the Great American Novel with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie 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 Feedback, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us on social at Blank Check Pod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.