The Worst Movie Ever Made? with Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson

From the bonus vault! What actually makes a movie “bad”? In this bonus episode, Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of the film podcast Unspooled tell Sarah the story of what many consider to be the worst film of all time: the 1987 adventure comedy Ishtar. From the movie’s chaotic production to its perplexing public ridicule, together they analyze whether Ishtar is as bad as people say or if our culture just loves to jump on a snarky bandwagon. Digressions include James Cameron schadenfreude, $19 AMC pretzels, and The Hangover for the AARP crowd. More Unspooled:https://www.unspooledpodcast.com/Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler:linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonster More You're Wrong About:linktr.ee/ywapod Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

• 0:13Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we make fun bonus episodes, one a month, in fact. And this week, we're sharing one with you to give you a sense of the kind of shenanigans we got up to back there behind the curtain. And in this case, it's a discussion about the worst film ever made, or is it? Elaine May's Ishtar with Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of the Unspooled Podcast. And in case you're curious about other episodes we've done in the past year or so, don't worry, I have a little list for you. We've talked about Bigfoot with Lulu Miller, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark with Eve Linley, that time Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe's dress,

• 0:56Sarah Marshall?

  for some reason, with Eve Linley and Caroline O'Donoghue, about Christmas ghosts with Chelsea Webber Smith, and of course, most recently, about one of my favorite phenomena, when a doll has their own little doll, also with Chelsea Webber Smith, and survival tips with Blair Braverman. We're so lucky to have people who pay to subscribe to these episodes and support the show that way, and who have done so, in many cases, for such a very long time. And so here's a preview of the kind of bonus stuff that we're trying out and having fun with. And either way, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy it.

• 1:46Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we've talked about the worst Oscars ever. And now we're talking about what some have called the worst movie ever. But is it? And why do we choose the things that we say are the worst as the worst? Why do showgirls win all those razzies when clearly, it's perfect? With me today are Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of Unspooled. Welcome. Hello.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Hi, we are so excited to be here. Big fans of this show, and excited to bring some, you know, some real culture to you today as we talk about a very misunderstood film.

• 2:24Sarah Marshall?

  It's true, on Unspooled, we

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Mostly talk about the films that the culture at large has deemed classics. And so it is such a treat to get into a movie that the culture at large has deemed god awful, absolute trash, the punchline for everything bad that could ever happen in the world.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  We are of course-

• 2:40Sarah Marshall?

  And of course, we're talking today, mhm, please.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  About the Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman film, Ishtar. A movie that became such a joke that a comic strip like The Far Side, who never made pop culture references, I believe has one pop culture reference comic, and it is an Ishtar joke.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's called, I think, something like The Video Store of Hell. And when you go in, the only VHS tape is Ishtar. And we should say, actually, to Gary Larson's credit, he admitted later that he had never even seen Ishtar. He was just going off of Ishtar's reputation. And he was like, that was mean, I take it back. Of all the comic strips I've ever done, I regret that one.

• 3:21Sarah Marshall?

  It's really good to know that Gary Larson rescinded that statement. And also that he doesn't regret any of the other ones.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Well, you know, look, the cows really never complained. They felt like his insults to them were very justified.

• 3:34Sarah Marshall?

  Well, he does imply that they use tools, so you know.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  I will say this, it's a different podcast, but there was a script for a Far Side movie, which they did shoot scenes of, that probably would have topped Ishtar as far as being a movie ridiculed for being absolutely awful. But what's interesting about this film and that Far Side cartoon is, I would argue, most people didn't see Ishtar, but it was a joke. And it becomes this-

• 4:00Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Thing, this kind of rallying cry. And I think that a lot of the times we see this in our society, where we just kind of gang up, or we heard it was bad, or conversely, we hear it's good and we're all fans. You know, it's a weird way that we interact with culture. We don't even know that we like it. We just are kind of following, you know, like popularity lemmings. We're either gonna, you know, follow you off the ledge of the cliff or push you off the cliff.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I find it so capricious, because it's like, what if I told you, there's a director who puts their cast through hell and makes them do 50 takes of one scene without giving them any notes of what to do. What to make it better. I could either be talking about Stanley Kubrick, who is generally recognized as the greatest genius in ways that we've kind of examined at the show, or I could be talking about Elaine May and how she made Ishtar and why she never got to direct it on the film again.

• 4:49Sarah Marshall?

  Interesting. Or about David O. Russell, for that matter.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Well, David O. Russell's a whole different story. David O. Russell's kicking people. Elaine May's just driving them crazy, like with Kubrick.

• 5:00Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, good for her.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  I heard she bit somebody in the editing room.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Okay, there you go. So fair.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  But I also heard she did it as a joke. Who knows?

• 5:08Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, so we are against biting people, but if there is a place to do it, it's in the editing room.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Elaine May is known as a difficult filmmaker in the sense that, you know, at one point when she was going to lose final cut on a film, she stole her own movie to keep it away from the studio. Like it had to go to court for the movie to get back to the studio.

• 5:30Sarah Marshall?

  I could see myself doing that, honestly.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Well, then maybe you have a little Elaine May in you, which I think is a compliment in many ways. Elaine May comes out being a comedian, a writer, an actress with a string of hits, having her fingerprints all over movies like The Graduate, a movie that we have very much covered on Unspooled, and I actually think some of the jokes she put in are kind of what kill it. But that said, even when Elaine May starts making hits, movies everybody loves, comedies that make back tenfold their budget, she's a little nervous about putting her name on those, too. She is a perfectionist, and perfectionism can be maddening. But I actually want to examine on this podcast, why is this person the one who took all the blame? Because this is a gigantic story with a lot of people making a lot of bad decisions.

• 6:13Sarah Marshall?

  Why is Fawn Hall synonymous with Iran-Contra, which might be related?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. What do they have in common?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know, this movie is really interesting because for Hollywood, these are some of the biggest players imaginable at the time, right? In the early 80s, you have Warren Beatty, who is sitting on top of at least the Hollywood world, right? And like Amy said, Elaine May is this secret comedy genius. She's been behind movies like The Heartbreak Kid. And one of the things we have Been touched on, if you're not familiar with Elaine May, she was a part of Nichols and May, this transformational comedy duo that blew the minds of so many people in the 1950s. They were doing two-person improvisation. They were rock stars. They were together or they weren't.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Read the book. Every book will give you a little bit of a different story of what that was. But what they were, were legends. So Elaine May is a legend beyond her film. She is a comedy genius. So for her to team up to make a comedy with Warren Beatty, that sounds exciting. And then you add Dustin Hoffman to the mix, who's also at his peak, right? You know, this is kind of like the Avengers of neurotic comedy.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Well, and one thing that these stars have in common is that both Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, oh Elaine May, feel like part of their success is due to Elaine May. Because even though Elaine May hasn't directed a movie since the 70s, she's been doing a lot of uncredited screen rights. She did a lot of work on Reds, which won Warren Beatty his Best Director Oscar. And she did a lot of work on Tootsie. And so these two guys are like, she's our secret genius. Let's help her. Let's make her famous. Let's make her the director of a movie that combines all of our star clout. There's no way that this is gonna fail. We're gonna do Elaine May the biggest solid. That's gonna make her reputation golden.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And it's a goofy, buddy musical spy caper about two terrible lounge singers who stumble into a Middle Eastern coup. Now, on its surface, that's a great place for Elaine May to play. Because like I mentioned, she is coming off of one of the famous comedy duos. So to make a movie about lounge singer comedy duo, that feels right in the wheelhouse of what Elaine May can do and has lived through. And, you know, because Warren Beatty, they wanna go big. They wanna shoot in the Sahara. They want camels. They want all of it. And because it's Warren Beatty, the studios go, sure, yeah, you could take your friend and let them make a movie.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Where in time are we?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Well, at this point, Ishar comes out in 87, so we're about mid.

• 8:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow. That's later than I thought for some reason.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, you know, I would imagine this probably is developing probably from like 84 to 85. Is that about right, Amy? What'd you say?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's about that.

• 9:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but they're so like extremely established.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Established, but also with suspense because, you know, we mentioned Rez, we mentioned Tootsie. Neither Beatty nor Hoffman has really made a movie since. So there's this buildup. When are they gonna act again? When are we gonna see them again? And from start to finish, they go four and a half years without being in a movie. It's like waiting for Ocean's 13 or something. When am I gonna see Rez team up with this super group again?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Soon, Amy. Soon, it's gonna happen. But also Elaine May is in this same kind of career quietness, right? Because she has made The Heartbreak Kid, a movie which is truly great. I just want to shout out The Heartbreak Kid. You can't find it really anywhere because it was, or it is owned by a pharmaceutical company in a very weird twist of fate, but it is a fantastic film. But she hasn't made anything for quite some time. I mean, Mikey and Nikki was 1976. That's the movie where she stole the print, you know? And that was right after The Heartbreak Kid. So she's been from 1976 to 1987, hasn't touched a movie from the director's chair.

• 10:17Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  But she's making very odd films every step of the way. Nothing is normal for her, and that's kind of her game. She doesn't like simplicity. I don't think that she likes structure. She wants things to feel fat and weird. You know, Mikey and Nikki, they talk about these scenes where they would just keep on rolling. The script would end and she wouldn't cut the camera for 20 minutes. You know, as long as they had a camera in the mag, they would just keep on going.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a really funny, specific story where, you know, the leads of Mike and Nikki, they walk off the set. One of them's having a conversation somewhere in the back with one of his buddies. The other guy's on a smoke break or something. The camera guy's still rolling. And when he finally just cuts being like, what am I doing? Elaine May yells at him. She's like, you don't know. They could come back. What if they come back?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I love this.

• 11:07Sarah Marshall?

  It's the Nixon approach to filmmaking. You just kind of roll and see what happens.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's the thing. I think some people would say, whoa, she really is this improvisational genius. And other people would say, does she have any idea what she's doing? What is happening? Does she have any idea how much film costs? One of the running jokes about Mikey and Nikki is that she used up, I think, three times as much film stock on that movie as Gone with the Wind. As Gone with the Wind.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  It's amazing. And for years, you didn't even get to see her cut because the studio recut it to make it more palatable. That's been happening a lot to her. You know, that also happened on The New Leaf with Walter Matthau. But this movie is interesting because not only is she back in the director's chair, but she gets the highest budget ever given to a female director.

• 11:57Sarah Marshall?

  It's like when they sent Sally Ride into space, it feels like, where they're like, all right, babe, if you fuck up in any way, we're not going to let any more women do this. So have fun.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does feel like you get gigantic tests. I mean, even the production designer of Ishtar, this man Paul Silbert, he was like sticking up for Elaine May. He said, this woman had not made a movie in 10 years. And then the first thing she had to do was paint the Sistine Chapel. Now, we should say the eighties, by the way, was a time that Paul and I reminisce about a lot, where you had really profitable blockbuster, big budget comedies in theaters. You know, now it's almost hard to imagine anybody spending this type of money, $47 million, even in 1980 money, on making a big budget comedy. But this is like, you know, this is Ghostbusters era. You can take a big swing. You can afford it.

• 12:43Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  She really admires Hoffman. She really admires Beatty. They know each other and she knows some secrets about them. She knows that before they both became major actors, they wanted to be singers. They had a piano act kind of separately. They were club guys. There's another world of both of them where if they had followed their original passion, maybe they would have been just mediocre singers and not movie stars. And that's sort of what this movie is about, you know, honoring these guys who are pretty lousy musicians, but they're going for their dreams. You know, I really like those. Opening stretches of this scene where you're just watching them screw around at the piano and like chasing this artistry that they're lousy at, but they're they're sincere about it.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And I know we've already talked about how Elaine May has a very peculiar way of doing things. We want to talk about peculiar. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman are also very meticulous performers who in every story that I've ever heard, never feel like it's fully right, or that they're fully there, or they're so fully there that they can't do anything else. Right? They are not easy performers. So you have somebody painting the Sistine Chapel with two people watching going, I don't think that that's exactly right.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Well, that way, but or grabbing the paintbrush and doing it themselves and then painting over the next one and then painting over the next one. Cause this is a movie that winds up with all three of them hiring their own editing team and being like, this is my cut of the movie. This is my cut of the movie. And they're all backstabbing each other, going behind each other's backs to the studio bosses. I mean, this is a movie with three personalities crammed into a gigantic blockbuster that even at its scale can probably only afford one of these personalities to take charge.

• 14:19Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  So, but that opening sequence that you're talking about, that's so funny is kind of these two actors in a nutshell, right? They're trying to make a jingle. They're trying to make it perfect. They are obsessed with being perfect in a way, or or creating a big hit. I mean, this movie is about these guys trying to find success, trying to make it work. And I love how mercurial they are in that opening. They they are, they're bad, but they are very impassioned about being bad. Right? Like, and I think that's a funny thing. Like, they work hard, but the result is bad.

• 14:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Well, actually, I think they're coming up with something that maybe should be your new theme song, Sarah. I mean, it's like telling the truth can be dangerous business. I think you should just rock that.

• 15:05Sarah Marshall?

  I think so. I think that could be a nice treat after this many years. There's also something very charming to me about getting to consume the like not very good output in a different medium of people who are like very good at a different thing that they do, you know, because there's like kind of an innocence to it that I think can be, I don't know, it's just something I like.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, especially I think with Warren Beatty in these scenes because Elaine May is having so much fun taking Playboy Oscar winner Warren Beatty and making him be a doofus who's afraid of women hating him.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  I love this.

• 15:40Sarah Marshall?

  Doofus Warren Beatty is my favorite.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  He's so good.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  He's very funny in this and that's one of the weird things about this film is, and we'll get into it as we keep on talking about it, but there are some legitimately great things about it and performances are one of them across the board.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Well, I might disagree on all the performances, but I think Beatty is fantastic. I mean, when he's looking at Dustin Hoffman and he's wishing that he had Dustin Hoffman's game and he's like, oh, the way you walk, you can only do it with a small body.

• 16:11Sarah Marshall?

  A little bit of Midnight Cowboy.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  A little bit, yeah, just a tinge. Now, I think in New York, the filming is going okay because the movie starts off in a very, you know, contemporary setting where the film really starts to go off the rails, at least from a production standpoint, is when they decide that they are going to go, well, originally they wanted to go to the Sahara, but they decide to shoot Morocco instead. It's a cheaper stand-in location.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  No, I actually want to say this was not Elaine May's call.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Elaine May was like, let's shoot this in America. Let's keep the cost low. And at this time, Columbia, who they're making this movie for, is owned by not Sony, but Coca-Cola.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  And Coca-Cola has this global empire, of course, and Coca-Cola has a lot of money tied up in Morocco that they need to spend or use. So it's Coca-Cola's idea to put this film in Morocco. They steer this ship towards disaster.

• 17:05Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Coca-Cola is like, go there as a business choice. Now, again, you asked when this movie was being made, 1985, October is when they are in Morocco. And just to put this in some context, there is some real- World regional instability here, right? You have terrorism guerrilla war.

• 17:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's this is not the best time to be in Morocco. So much so that before shooting at some locations, they had to be swept for landmines.

• 17:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and at that point, if I were Elaine May, I'd be like, told you. But you know, you can't can't argue with coke money.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  No, I mean, that's it. You have to go where coke tells you to go.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  But it does also mean they're getting kidnapping threats for Dustin Hoffman by the PLO. I mean, stuff is bad.

• 17:52Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, he's so easy to stuff in a bag and run away with, you know?

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Oh, that's the thing about having a small body.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  You know, so they're they're there. And here's the thing. Once they get there, they're not making too many concessions. You know, they're in a foreign land, they have fears of kidnapping. Their sets might be, you know, war zones, but they're still gonna ask for some big things. You know, they want a blue eyed camel. They want that blue eyed camel. They have to figure out where they can get a blue eyed camel.

• 18:27Sarah Marshall?

  Who do you even start asking about that kind of thing? I guess there would be camel wranglers that you would be working with.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  I guess so.

• 18:34Sarah Marshall?

  These are the things that make the film industry so fascinating.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Right, but then there's the psychology on top of that where they do exactly what you're thinking. They go to find a camel wrangler and they immediately find a perfect camel. They're like, oh, that's the greatest camel. We should get that camel. But you know what? We've got this budget. We're here. What if there's better camels? That kind of perfectionism disease sets in.

• 18:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you gotta just go with the camel that's right in front of you.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:57Sarah Marshall?

  There aren't any obvious problems.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Hey, don't look a gift camel in the mouth.

• 19:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  But they did it. They go hunting for more camels. They interview a whole bunch of camels. They spend tons of time, money on this camel quest. They never find a camel as good as that first camel. They have to go back to the people who tried to sell them that first camel and say, we're sorry. Can we buy that camel now? And those people say, we ate it.

• 19:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. I was expecting to be like, it's double now, but that's actually just.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 19:24Sarah Marshall?

  That's not good for the camel.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  It became dinner.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  But that's the tenor of what's going on here. You know, you can hear the psychosis in the stories that are coming out where everyone is trying too hard and in the process, making stuff worse.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And again, they're shooting themselves in the foot. You know, we're talking about a lot of production nightmares. And, you know, as somebody who definitely studies this on how did this get made? I know that it can go in two different directions. You can get things that come out like The Room, Tommy Wiseau's The Room, not Brie Larson's Room. Or you can get something like Apocalypse Now, which goes through, you know, heart attacks and shutdowns and actors showing up or not showing up. And you get this classic. So just because there's a troubled production doesn't always mean there's going to be a bad film at the end of it. You know, sometimes those mistakes, sometimes those tensions make a better film.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Well, and actually, the DP here, Vittorio Storaro, he is the DP who did Apocalypse Now. So he is, I'm in my zone, man. But he's coming in not so much, I would say, as Elaine May's guy. He's coming in as Warren Beatty's guy because he did Reds. And then together they'd go on and do like Dick Tracy, Bullworth.

• 20:33Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, Dick Tracy.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  I mean, Paul, you've been on a ton of movie sites. I'm sure you understand this pattern of like, where is everybody's allegiance? Who's going to get listened to the most? When you're Warren Beatty and you have an Oscar for being a director, aren't you going to carry as much weight when you tell the DP what to do?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Well, this is the kind of the problem. Everyone's looking about where their bread is buttered. You know, in a certain realm in television, and I'm going to put this as a very big, you know, there's going to be people like, well, technically. But I will tell you that in television, the showrunner is king, right? The showrunner is the person who's, it's their idea. And they hire the directors. Sometimes they work in tandem with the director. Everybody is allegiance to the showrunner for the most part. In film, it can get blurry because a lot of the times, the A-list talent is the star. Now, there are director stars and it's like, it's a director's medium. Film is a director's medium. You hear that a lot.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  But, you know, there is this rule in the DGA about partnerships. Basically, like the Coen Brothers, if They direct together. If they ever break apart, they can't rejoin as a partnership. That's a rule that the DGA has. Sometimes you can, there's a little bit of a tweak that you can make to it, like, yes, you can come back. But the real reason that they put this in place is because there was a time when lead actors would say to the director, well, we're directing it together. I'm in it with you. So we'll be co-directors on this, right? So that, that law was kind of put in place so lead actors wouldn't kind of usurp the director.

• 22:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which makes sense because if there wasn't a law against it, then probably 35% of lead actors would at one point try successfully to do it.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I listened to a gigantic actor tell me that he wrote a handful of giant films. And when I looked, not even a co-written by credit, no credit on the page, right? But I think that that's sometimes a big actor will feel like, well, I added that line. I'm a writer on this movie. I talked about that shot. I should be directing this movie, right?

• 22:38Sarah Marshall?

  I had it say with, I changed that. That was my proposition.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  And you know what? You're like, that, that is kind of this ego that you have to deal with. So yes, to Amy's question, there is this allegiance. Who am I paying attention to? Who is going to be my meal ticket? And I would argue that if you're on this set, your meal ticket's going to be Warren Beatty or Dustin Hoffman ultimately.

• 22:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  You know, just because their track record is more solid and they would be right.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, even if they've gone four and a half years without making a movie, that's still less than half of what Elaine May has gone. If you're looking for a job, stick with them.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Now, I will say, you brought up the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yes, Storaro.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  This guy is not the right person for this movie, right? This is a person who is shooting Ishtar like it's Lawrence of Arabia. It looks like a desert epic and he and Elaine May are at each other's throats. Because she wants to shoot it like a comedy and he's trying to shoot it like an epic, right? And at this point, Warren Beatty, who has worked with him is like, well, let's trust him. He knows how to make things look good, but what looks good in a comedy. Doesn't always look good in an epic. It's a different medium. It's there are different techniques at play there. So that's a real source of tension. And to know that your lead star is going to side with the DP,

• 24:00Speaker 01

  that takes away a ton of Elaine May's power.

• 24:03Sarah Marshall?

  And does that kind of thing happen to male directors that much with someone who, who has, you know, a fairly important job like DP being like, no.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. Here's why I'll say it. Because the A-list star is the person, right? And, you know, we're not probably not to the top 10 male directors. That's probably not happening, right?

• 24:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  But I will say that if you're a new director, you come in, you, you talk to a lot of these younger directors that you're like, oh, my gosh, my first opportunity to work on a big movie. And it's they are there truly as a figurehead to get beaten up by everybody else. Right there, like they're like, put there and let us tell you what to do. I've seen it happen. I've been on sex.

• 24:44Sarah Marshall?

  Hey, higher kids, dream about doing Foley.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Oh, it is, it is a mess, it is a mess. I will tell you that, um, I mean, I even know a giant actor and a giant director who came to blows on that. Like actors sometimes are coming at it from the point of view of I need to protect myself. There's a great article in Entertainment Weekly. I recommend this all the time. It was for Last Vegas, the Michael Douglas, like he's getting married, but they're all old and he goes there with like Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman. And they're, they're, it's a hangover for the AARP crowd, right?

• 25:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, or like those Jane Fonda ensemble movies for guys.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. So there is a round table in Entertainment Weekly where they are all talking about working with directors. And Morgan Freeman says, oh, if a director tells me how to do a scene, I just ignore them. And everyone starts laughing like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't listen to the director. No, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, no, his job is to put the camera where the camera is. We don't listen to it. Like, it's not even a quietly kept idea. It's like just out there. It's like, I know how to do me.

• 25:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Now we should say, there is a producer out there who doesn't like that this is how Hollywood is run. And he is British, his name is David Putnam. He is known because he made movies like Chariots of Fire. And he had this reputation in Hollywood as a guy who had a better way of doing this than Hollywood has been run. He's like, I don't like expensive movies. I think we should be making more lower budget movies. I think movie stars shouldn't have this much power. I agree with a lot of what he was saying back then. And this guy becomes the head of Columbia Pictures in the middle of the, of the Ishtar shoot. He is the absolute wrong tempo if you want to help shepherd this movie across the finish line. Because Ishtar represents everything he's trying to prove that Hollywood shouldn't be. Hollywood shouldn't be controlled by the Warren Beatties and the Dustin Hoffmans of the world.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Who, by the way, as expensive as this, as this movie is, over $10 million of its budget goes to their salaries. It was this expensive in part because of their fees. He doesn't like that. He doesn't like the clout that they have. So it's in David Putnam's interest if Ishtar is a flop. Because then he can turn around and say, see, we need to stop doing this. You guys need to listen to me.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Well, this is a big deal. Whenever a new person comes in midstream, what they want to do is prove that the person before them was an absolute failure. Because they can't take credit for that success.

• 27:13Sarah Marshall?

  God, it's almost like it's political or something.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Oh, it's very political. It's incredibly political. It's severance times 12.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  I mean, you, you saw it happen in this year where, uh, Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi, who run Warner Brothers. Before like Minecraft and Sinners came out, they were like, well, guess what? These two suck and these movies are going to suck and they wrecked the studio. And then all of a sudden Minecraft is a big hit. And then the tide turned and was like, well, they weren't actually really involved with it. That was before them. Then Sinners comes out like, well, but technically that doesn't really work. And then when, uh, one battle after another came out, they're like, ah, you see? It didn't make, uh, as much as we thought. But now that movie's already made $200 million, right? Like internationally, but I just think that there's always this like kind of jockeying position. When you're the head, you kind of root.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  For failure in the past, because then you can, like Amy said, make your point in the future.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's any parallel to this happening in modern politics where previous people are getting blamed for what's happening, but you know.

• 28:15Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know either, but just from a purely entertainment perspective, though, I feel like there's a way that the public can kind of become complicit in this, or that that kind of is in tune with the way we like to operate because we love, I don't know, it feels like with the kind of technology we've had in the past hundred odd years, culture has been able to move faster. And so we're at this kind of continually faster pace of like, that was the old thing. Blah. This is the new thing, a thing so specific that it's going to be really easy to get tired of it very soon.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like whenever anybody gets anointed the internet's next boyfriend, they should just run and hide because that never works out well for anybody.

• 28:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Now, I will say that adding to all of this onset pressure of getting this movie done, being in a hostile territory, gossip is leaking out throughout the entire production.

• 29:08Sarah Marshall?

  As it does.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Elaine May hated the heat and the sun. She dressed very bizarre. People said that she looked like a stormtrooper on set because she was wearing these very big glasses. She had a parasol. She was in all these like things to keep her away from the sun.

• 29:22Sarah Marshall?

  Henry James, stormtrooper.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  As a person who sunburns, I want to say, get it, girl. I believe in you. I would love to walk around in nothing but like gigantic sunglasses and gauze all the time.

• 29:32Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Well, crew members would joke that she was dressed for a lunar landing when she stepped outside. And there are people in Morocco who were convinced that she was one of the celebrities from the film that was hiding from assassins. There's a town in Morocco called like Ozar Zatzi. They used to call her the Phantom of Ozar Zatzi. Like, so she had that.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  You know, I would like her to put her crow's feet next to, you know, the DP's crow's feet and they can see who aged better.

• 30:05Sarah Marshall?

  That's true.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  She's 93, she's alive and kicking, she's doing some of them well. And then, you know, you also have Warren Beatty, who is a famous coxman, I guess, you know, so you're getting, you know, you're getting these stories about like, who, you know, who is he out with? Who is he going with? Is he with that woman? You know, all these photos coming out of, you know, who is he whining and dining in Morocco? No one. But it still was gossip. Again, all of this is just fueling the bad thing, you know? Then they had-

• 30:32Speaker 02

  To be fair, we should say that part of why he's keeping it in his tunic is that the woman he's seeing at the time, Isabella Johnny, is in the movie. She's the female lead who's like dressed as a boy and walking around. And he's got to try harder to get some private time.

• 30:46Sarah Marshall?

  I love how Warren Beatty, at this point onward, was like, I only make a movie once every few years, but if I do, it's with the potentially very difficult woman I'm dating right now. So that's fun.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's always a good time to work with the person that you're in a relationship with.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Well, but it does seem to have like added a lot of tension to this set because everybody says that Johnny did not get along very well with May. And I don't know who's to blame for that, but it sounds like May wasn't particularly nice to her.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, you know, May is having a hard time over, you know, we've talked about all the issues, but she's going through certain periods of the film, not talking to Warren Beatty, right? There are these moments where there is like this action scene that they have to shoot. And Warren Beatty's, you know, over her shoulder telling her how to do it. And she's like, you want to do it? Go do it. And apparently like he froze, but these are the stories that are coming out. So we have romance, we have nobody talking to each other, Elaine May looking like a stormtrooper. And I will say, just to make sure that everyone gets a little bit of this, Dustin Hoffman, a lot of people saying, oh, he's method on this movie. He's so method. He doesn't really, he's in a comedy. He still thinks he's in Rain Man, right? So they're like, what's true, what's not true, doesn't make a difference.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  What's getting back to the gossip rags is that every part of this movie is a disaster.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, people are thinking this movie isn't even gonna finish getting made. Like, there's buzz that this is gonna fall apart before it's even done.

• 32:08Sarah Marshall?

  So it's kind of like Titanic.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Exactly like Titanic, except Titanic winds up being great.

• 32:14Sarah Marshall?

  Except that all worked out. But I feel like the, you know, it's hard to remember now is that the way people talked about it when it was in production was like, oh, boy, this is gonna be. It feels like people were like sharpening their knives, getting ready to have a shot and fry to feast on James Cameron, which would be nice, but it hasn't happened.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We wanna watch people fail, right? I think that that's a part of, we raise people up and we wanna tear them down. You know, I think we saw it this year with like Taylor Swift's album. It was like, okay, now she's happy, so now she sucks. And actually, that's a symbol of this. And, you know, we love to love our stars and we love to not to get, let them get too big of a head. Now, you might believe that it's three stars that are fighting that's causing the problems of this film. But Amy, do you wanna, I can talk about it, but I don't know if you knew about this in some of your research. Maybe it was because they, they had a curse because they pissed off a vulture. Did you hear about this?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  No, please tell me about the angry vulture.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  All right, so there is a time when they're trying to shoot a scene with a vulture. Vulture's supposed to be landing next to Warren Beatty, and Elaine May shoots this landing scene over 50 times. And there is a rumor around set that she has upset the gods in a way. Like, this is like, people felt like this film was cursed because they were messing with animals, they were messing with landscape. So like, this may be all just because a pissed off vulture started a sandstorm and wrecked havoc on this set. Who knows? It could be anything.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Well, who knows? But I do think if Vulture magazine had been around back then, they would have been having a field day with any sort of stories from this set. And yeah, you're right. You brought up the fact that she has been messing with the sand. I mean, maybe the most famous story about Elaine May's extravagance was that when they were trying to figure out where exactly in the Moroccan desert they were going to film. They had a couple of limitations. One of them is they have to make it by a very nice hotel because people wanna go and sleep in a very nice hotel at night. They looked around. They finally found one that had these dunes that Elaine May had been describing, you know, the big rolling sweeping ones, the ones that you see in like the Sex and the City movie. They get there, they're like, we did it, we did it, we did it. And then May, when she woke up and walked out of the hotel in the morning and looked at the dune, she was like, oh no,

• 34:27Speaker 02

  this won't do. I don't want them to be rolling. I want them to be flat. And the best option they had was to spend 10 days bulldozing the dunes to be absolutely flat. Now, one or two people say that this is absolutely not true, but pretty much everybody else says that a thousand percent happened. And it would kind of fit the psychology because I think she feels like she's getting under fire from every side. And one of her ways of dealing with avoiding making a mistake is just to try to delay doing anything as long as she can. You know, she would take like reshoots of what she had done the day before in the morning because she was worried about people yelling at her about doing something wrong the next time around. Do you know those people like that who get so in their head about making a mistake that then they can't go forward?

• 35:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, it's me. I'm Elaine May. I have a lot to think about. This also reminds me of the story of when Michael Samino or Camino was making Heaven's Gate, that he, wasn't it that he like, knocked down an entire frontier town because he was like, it needs to look slightly different than this. We're gonna redo the whole thing. It's gonna be great. Which that's a whole other episode.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  It is a whole other episode, but because these films are coming out, I think, pretty close to each other. I think they're snowballing, right? There's a sense of, hey, all these guys, all these auteurs are leading us.

• 35:40Sarah Marshall?

  And the city of directors mad with power.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  And again, I think that there's a battle here between press and production, right? You have, we already talked about the studio head who's kind of hoping it fails to prove his own point.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  And also, I should say, because he specifically did not like Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Like, this guy, David Putman, he said in public to the press that he thought Dustin Hoffman had a malevolent energy. And he also said that he thought Warren Beatty should be spanked for wasting so much money on Reds.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  And Warren Beatty might have liked the spanking, but hey.

• 36:16Sarah Marshall?

  All right, let's all spank Warren Beatty. I'm sure he would hate that.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Oh, no, please don't spank me for spending money.

• 36:23Sarah Marshall?

  No, no, don't spank me, Diane Keaton.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  And we already know that, like, this idea of wanting to see a star fall from grace, but I think it was amplified also by the fact that they weren't really letting press on set. And that is a big deal. Like, you see all these, you know, big blockbusters. Part of the allure of it is you send out press to give goodwill, press is cut off from the set. So it is this other thing of now they're kind of pissed off too. So you've, you've made enemies of everybody. You have two stars who are not like known for their public personas or being outgoingly, you know, effusive in the public, I guess. You have like a studio head who's against it, the press is against it, everyone is against it.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  And now you take this Moroccan shoot and you bring it to the States. You bring it to the States where you think, okay, things are gonna get easier now that we are in New York. But no, it gets worse in New York, which is interesting because like I said earlier, it, it feels like the New York stuff is really working for me in a way. Like, I really love the way the movie starts, but it's way more tense when they're back home because they all, they have all their resources, their resources to stay away from each other. And then they're also working with extras and crews that are like, well, no, no, we can't shoot this much.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  You know, in Morocco, I think they had a pretty easy way of manipulating everybody to work very long hours, you know?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you're there, you're in that summer camp mindset. It's like, well, we're all in this together.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think what happens is that ability or that inability of Elaine May to move on, to make a quick decision, that became the real problem with New York. A wardrobe person said something like, in Morocco, we lost time to weather. In New York, we lost time to the clock. You know, she would do 15 passes on a tiny gesture, like a doorman shifting extra weight, you know, a piece of paper landing on the counter. She was allergic to like- One take solutions, you know, and so now this is the other thing that happens. It's even crazier that that DP that we talked about, his whole team stayed on that Italian team, his whole camera department stayed on, but there were new rules, union rules in New

• 38:42Speaker 01

  York that required a full parallel American crew. So now you have two camera crews, you have a grip, two grips, two electrics, two, you know, like every, they have duplicates here. So now the warring in the top line of, you know, the actors and directors are being multiplied behind the camera, literally.

• 39:00Sarah Marshall?

  It's a little bit inefficient, just a little bit. It also feels like we have, I want to like do the political comparison again, because it does feel like these are two areas of like great American pageantry and that there's this kind of maybe relationship between the press and a movie that's in production. That's a little bit like, you know, when we're in kind of primary season and the candidates are running and you have like the press buses that are going around with them. And there's this like symbiotic relationship, which I mean, things have gotten weirder in the past 10 years, but in the past, there's been like a fairly defined sense of etiquette about who has access and how the rules to that work and that people get very upset when that gets destabilized. And it also seems like in Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, you have two stars who have

• 39:44Sarah Marshall?

  been so successful and maybe have developed, you know, fat enough heads that they kind of don't feel like they have to play ball, maybe.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly right. And what's interesting to trace is that when all this is going on in 1987, all of these figures are clashing in at heads and the person taking the blame by the press was Warren Beatty, that they are calling it Warren's Gate, because we love coming up with names that remind us of other things.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  All back to Heaven's Gate, which is again, Michael Chiumino, we're talking about this thing, that this thing that doesn't leave culture, like it's like, is it that bad?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  We recently did an episode on Waterworld and people were calling Waterworld fish tar, so it just keeps rolling forward.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  I wonder though, in this day and age, will we ever have a flop as big? As this that unites everybody that people actually care about. Like, sure, there are these flops, right? But it's kind of a fun thing like that culture can all agree like that was a flop, you know? And that was, you know, there are movies that are disappointing, you know? But this idea of the multi-billion dollar movie like they don't fail. I don't know if they fail, you know?

• 40:51Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  You make me want to say Morbius, but it's not quite to the same scale. I just love that people trolled Morbius so hard that they wound up putting it back in theaters because they thought people would go see it at least as a joke and then still nobody came.

• 41:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, we don't joke that way in this economy.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  No, you can't, you can't. But by the way, I mean, I also think that Jared Leto just doesn't quite understand that it was a joke. Like, I think he thought people loved Morbius. And the same thing with Tron. I mean, I'll never be never more depressing than watching Jared Leto enter a theater for Tron Ares that was half full that we're not excited to see him on opening weekend. I was like, oh, no, I feel bad for this guy.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  I know, but that's the thing. Hollywood is just a level of so many people making different mistakes. Like Jared Leto might be taking the fall for Tron, but who are the executives who didn't realize that most women under 35 absolutely cannot stand him and will not see anything he's in?

• 41:44Sarah Marshall?

  Because we're scared of him. He's creepy.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get that.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. So he didn't cast himself is what I'm saying.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Now, I think also when they get back to New York, there's two things at play. It's the part of the film that I think is more character based. So this is requiring, you know, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty to really find these characters. And honestly, if you talk to a lot of people, Dustin Hoffman was really adept at improvising. Warren Beatty, not so much. So they start getting some tension between the two of them because Warren Beatty starts to get what people perceive Dustin Hoffman would be playing these characters like, okay, no, that note, that off note isn't exactly the right way of being off note. We need to be more like this, you know? Everything became really tense and now Elaine May is trying

• 42:39Speaker 01

  To find all this funny stuff in the stuff that you brought her in for. And now Warren Beatty is tightening up, but it doesn't come off badly on camera. Like we said, he's very funny in these scenes, but they're not having fun. But I think the real thing that's looming in New York is the editing room. Oh, shoot, we're almost done. We have to finish this and finishing it. I think, I don't know if you've ever worked on a project. It is the scariest moment because like, okay, well, like, once we wrap, we wrapped. Is do we get it? Do we not? And that became

• 43:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  The, the final stage of this utter mess. It's a mess. It's a, you know, a messy shoot that now is, how do we fix it? Or do we have enough to fix? Or is it actually great? No one really knows.

• 43:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And then also you have to confront the thing that you just did.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, you, and you have to wonder who is going to wind up taking the fall for this.

• 43:33Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  And what I find fascinating is maybe it would be easier to be able to analyze Ishtar. If it was either extremely good or extremely bad. But I would say the final project is fine, right? And when something is fine, then it's harder to take a stance on it. So you just go with whatever the extreme opinion is. I think Ishtar is actually very good in certain parts.

• 43:58Sarah Marshall?

  What to you both is like truly an extremely bad movie in your estimation and why? Like what makes that classification?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  You know, it's an interesting thing because I believe, and Amy and I have had this discussion in the past. A movie like The Room, Tommy Wiseau's Room, Bring It Up Twice, should be on the list of best movies ever made. Because it's such a bad film that it requires as much study. Because there's something so unique to it.

• 44:29Sarah Marshall?

  Like Manos, The Hands of Fate.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Paul's been making this argument to me a lot and I haven't totally got on board, but go ahead, Paul.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  But I guess what I, what I, what I'm fascinated by is film at its core is a passion, a passion project. Right? People are coming to tell a story that they really, really want to tell. And I think most failures. Are based in that idea that, you know, this is something I needed to get out and, and you can look at a painting and you can say, that's the most beautiful thing ever. You can say, I don't get it. And we don't afford that to film, you know, we have to judge it. It's good, it's bad, it's right, it's wrong. And it's the only art that we really look at like that.

• 45:10Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  You know, and, and I always say that like comedy falls into this category a lot, which is like, it's funny, it's not funny. Well, we don't do that with drama.

• 45:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, there's not like a list of like the top 10 worst symphonies, or probably there is.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Right. Symphonies that are so bad, they're good. And I feel like anytime you're making art, there's going to be art that doesn't connect. It doesn't mean it's bad. We just watched The Wiz. And The Wiz is, I think, so fascinating on so many levels. Like Amy and I said, it's a, it's a, it's a big swing and a miss. But there are so many things that they're hitting too. It's just like, it's not completely great. So I hate, like, I think that a great bad movie is a movie that isn't watchable, but it's a piece of garbage. And as somebody who's sat through a lot, I can delineate that. It's a very small, subtle delineation. But I'd often say that the more passionate

• 46:06Speaker 01

  the director is, the better the bad is. And when it's more workaday, like Sharknado, or like Gary Busey's The Ginger Dead Man, like when it's a paycheck movie, eh, yeah, not so great.

• 46:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's an important distinction.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's where I would fall too, you know, because I am, I'm a film critic for the Los Angeles Times. And it's when a film smacks of that cynicism that Paul's describing, that sense that the people involved in making it are like, eh, the audience will take what we give them. That's when I really think a film is bad. If you're going for it.

• 46:41Sarah Marshall?

  Cause when you're like, why am I here?

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. If I feel like you're insulting me by what you put on the screen because you don't think I know that this is bad, or something. If you feel like, oh, give them something, they're going to be holding a phone in their hands anyways. It doesn't matter. Just save the cat on this page and then have Liam Neeson punch the kidnapper on that page. That's when I absolutely check out. But a film like Ishtar, which is trying to do so many wonky tones all at once, I'm going to be on the side of this, even when I think there are scenes that are terrible. I mean, honestly, I really, if I could, I think there's just one specifically. Maybe two specifically terrible things about Ishtar. I just don't think Dustin Hoffman's very good. I actually think this movie works if somebody else besides Dustin Hoffman is playing this lead.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Because Warren Beatty is fantastic. Warren Beatty's kind of going for this John C. Riley in Step Brothers thing.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  He's really great. I mean, he's almost full Andy Kaufman when he's got a headband on and he's playing the bongos and he's up on stage. It's the energy that Dustin Hoffman has in this film that I find totally off because he is doing the midnight cowboy thing. He's the bossy guy. I find him very unlikable in this movie as a character. And to me, that makes the whole thing sink. I don't like him. I don't care about him. I think he's kind of crass and he's not crass to me in a charming or funny way. And so the weight of his character drags the whole thing down.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  I think that he actually played too much into character in a weird way. I mean, I know he said that he's really good at improvising. I think he knew this character and this is a real, like, as somebody who has done a lot of performing, you bump into a person like this, right? And I don't think he did the heightened version of it. I think he did the real version of it. And I hate to say like a he rainmanned it.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  The guy who didn't make it, the guy who didn't make it and he's a little sour and grumpy about it, but not in a way you want to be around him.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Right. And so I think that he's right in the pocket, but it goes to show you, well, what pocket should he be in? Because this is a movie where I think everybody is in a different film. And that, to me, does fall on Elaine May's shoulders. Because I would say that Isabel Ajani, like, she is acting like she is in a political thriller.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Oh, a thousand percent. She's totally off base, too, for the movie that I want this to be.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Right. And she would always ask these questions and she's like, well, I'm reading the script and it's like a screwball comedy. And Elaine May is like, no, you are straight. And so she was kind of, you know, and she said that she would do it. But then you look at Charles Grodin. Charles Grodin is, I love Charles Grodin. Not the later Charles Grodin as much, when he was hosting like a CNBC show. But I like this era Charles Grodin. He is perfection. I think he's, he's funny. I just love this era of him. I think he's in his, he's great.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think his CIA scenes are really funny and have kind of only gotten funnier and darker the older I've gotten and the more I know about how the CIA works. I mean, when Ishtar comes out. We haven't heard the stories yet that like the CIA is funding groups like the Scorpions to write songs like Wind of Change to try to bring about, you know, democracy in the Iron Curtain. That's what this movie is about. We didn't know that that joke was so real, you know?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:58Sarah Marshall?

  I like Charles Grodin in Beethoven when he enters a hamburger eating contest with his dog.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I mean, who doesn't? I mean, Charles Grodin, you know, I love his memoir. It would be so nice if you weren't here, which is just a beautiful collection of stories. But Elaine May, I want to go back to her beginning for a second. She is an improviser. She is someone who is, can feed off the energy of an audience. That's her background. And I also come from that background. I have directed, I have written, I have produced. One of the things that I think being a good improviser has given me is the ability to make a decision and just lean into it, right? You just like, and that's what improv is. You make a choice and you have to be committed to it. It seems like Elaine May took the idea of like, well,

• 50:44Speaker 01

  I made that choice, but what if I made this choice or that choice, right? Like she actually saw like a much higher view of it, you know, where I think it's like Amy Poehler said when she was teaching classes back at UCB. I love this quote. She's like improvising is like driving a car only through the rearview mirror. You only know where you've gone. And I love that idea. And I think that Elaine May was constantly just questioning, well, were we in the right place when we went there? And I think that that's why maybe on a given day, she's giving different notes. She doesn't know. She doesn't, I don't think like she

• 51:20Speaker 01

  was bullied as much as her lack of clarity of what this movie should be created a world in which everybody got to bring their own quirks to it and then created a lot of friction. You know, because the truth is, you know, that story about the sand dunes, I get that. I understand how films work. She scouted that sand dune. She saw that sand dune. They don't just show up there and see the sand dune unless she's not doing her job, you know? And if that's the case, then she's at fault, right? Like it's sort of like, there are a couple of things that always ring false to me. It's like either she's I think that she is neurotic. I think that in many respects, to Amy's point earlier, and this is what I was gonna try to all tie it all to, I think she's Dustin Hoffman.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  I think that that's why she likes Dustin Hoffman in New York. And I feel like that little bit of anger, that bit of being persnickety is her. And this is a movie where she sees herself in him.

• 52:16Sarah Marshall?

  Well, why do you think that she was able to direct movies that kind of stayed on the rails in the past? Is it just like too big of a budget and too many moving parts?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  She never really did.

• 52:27Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  She never, I mean, truthfully, I've read her book, I've watched every one of her films. Every one of her films was an unmitigated disaster. And the only one that really stayed true was Heartbreak Kid, because that was a movie where, oh my gosh, what's his name? Neil Simon forced her to stick to the script, forced her to stay in her lane. And that was a big issue with the two of them. But every other movie ended, two of her movies ended in court. New Leaf and Nikki, Frankie, uh, uh,

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Mikey and Nikki.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Mikey and Nikki, both ended in court.

• 53:02Sarah Marshall?

  And Frankie and Bobby and Carol and Alice.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  All of them.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  But they were good.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  They were good, yes.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  You almost feel like Hollywood will forgive that if you're good, if the thing is good.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Right. But I think that she made one good movie, one fully good movie. I love Mikey and Nikki, but I would say, I screened that recently at Vidiotz, and people walked out.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Really?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I love it. I love it. I don't want to like, I just want to be like, you have to look at that movie. It's very experimental, it's very bizarre, it's unlikable characters. I love it, but it does not fully work. I believe that to be true. I hate to say it, but I can look at it, I can step back from my own love of it. But Heartbreak Kid is the only movie that I think from beginning to end is a good movie. You know, and in a weird way, yeah, I look at her and I go, oh, I'm so bummed, because maybe writing is where she did excel, because she does have all those great things. She's a great performer. I mean, even up until this day, when she was on The Good Wife, great as that judge on The Good Wife. She's awesome. I love her. She's great in

• 54:06Speaker 01

  The small time crooks, you know, she, whatever she pops up in, I feel like she's always very good. I mean, she's the reason why I think the birdcage kinda, she helps Mike Nichols come out. I mean, the birdcage is obviously dated at this point, but writing is her strong point. You know, and I think that's where she can go in a million different directions. I think actually committing to the writing is being a director, and that's hard.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Oh, this is what I have to say. I think that one of the old Nichols and May jokes that she puts in The Graduate is the crux of why I don't think The Graduate is very good.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Well, this is a hot take.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so I'll try to keep this short. You know how there's the scene in The Graduate when Dustin Hoffman is showing up at the hotel room for the first time to meet Mrs. Robinson?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  He's nervous, she takes an inhale of her cigarette. He kisses her for the first time while her whole mouth is full of cigarette and then she exhales and just looks at him. That is a direct bit from the old Nichols and May skits. That's a skit they used to do about two teenagers making out in a car. And there, it's in the movie because it got a hit on stage. People thought it was funny there, but when you put it in this movie with these two characters, I feel like it doesn't work at all. And it kind of destroys the whole movie because at that point, my question is, why would this grown ass woman go to bed with this guy for the first time? Who's such a dummy? What is she getting out of this?

• 55:20Sarah Marshall?

  She's bored.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Dude, she could have anybody better than this, you know?

• 55:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  So you like the Robert Redford version, like the version that people patently were like, don't know, we can't catch Robert Redford.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Even if that joke was in the Robert Redford one, I don't think it would work. Cause I think at that point, any woman who's just looking to get her rocks off, she goes and finds anybody else who might be slightly better.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Okay, I hear that.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, so I'm saying sometimes even the writing doesn't fit the character.

• 55:44Sarah Marshall?

  This is where I confess that I haven't seen The Graduate.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  It's fine.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  I think it's better, I think it's better than fine. Here's the thing that I'm kind of obsessed with. You know, we talked about the editing, who knows what happens in the editing? We know that there's three cuts. We know that there is a lot of debate and Elaine May loves to be editing all hours of the day. So they have this, you know, finally they are able to get a workable thing. They release this movie and there we go. We, you know, this movie comes out and I think everybody gets what they want. The press gets, haha, we told you. David Putman gets, you see, I know how to make movies. And then, you know, when you look at the actual numbers. They're modest. They're not catastrophic.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  The budget and the press coverage of it made like a normal looking return look like a disaster. And like every time it came out, and I kind of look at this to one battle after the other. It's like, why are we rooting for like, this movie is critically acclaimed. It's, you know, nominated for a bunch of, why are we like rooting like up didn't make 50 million in the opening weekend? It's like, what, what do we care? As like the general audience, like what do we care what a movie makes? Why is that in the conversation? I think that that's so fascinating.

• 57:05Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Like, we certainly don't know the bottom line of appliances that we're buying.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's such a very ridiculous thing that we are like, what's it to me? What's like, I didn't lose money. I didn't invest in this, but yet we are like, oh, they lost the studio a lot of money. And how does that affect any of us? But I think that like to Amy's point about, you know, this film, it's neither here nor there. I think a lot of critics did talk about this movie like we're talking about it now. It's like, that's kind of confusing. And then there are other people who just wanted to just jump on the bandwagon and be like, it's all worse. It's but I don't even know what you would say. You know, I don't know, you know, it's, it's not like overly long. It just feels like it was just the public shaming finally, you know, like that was it.

• 57:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. And then it was this overinflated thing that we wanted to enjoy the downfall of, but it maybe wasn't as that like its last betrayal was not even being as bad as we were maybe hoping.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could almost be mad at it for not being worse. I would like to see somebody take the Ishtar script and just remake the movie. Because I think the script is pretty good. I think the script's really funny. I think the script would work absolutely well today, and I think the music is wonderful. The music is written by Paul Williams, all the bad songs that are weirdly catchy, even though they're bad.

• 58:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Paul Williams being the guy who wrote, you know, Rainbow Connection is one of his biggest hits, who is fantastic. He's in this movie Phantom of the Paradise. It's all about what a musical genius he is.

• 58:34Sarah Marshall?

  I was gonna say, isn't he the Phantom of the Paradise himself?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  He is. I adore Paul Williams. He, I think he's Fascinating, even though he says that, you know, what inspired the music of Ishtar? His answer to that question is Solichnaya and a bunch of chemicals. He was not sober the entire time he did it, but they're fantastic. I challenge Ari Aster to remake Ishtar with the exact same script. And I better be fine. I better be better than fine. I better be good.

• 59:04Sarah Marshall?

  I would go see it.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Now, we've spent about an hour talking about this film and how it ballooned terribly. The budget was insane. Now, this, again, I want to put it in context. The year is 1987. If you don't know it, I guess my question to you is, what do you think it did cost?

• 59:21Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, as like a way too expensive movie that people were upset about, $70 million.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Okay, $51 million.

• 59:32Sarah Marshall?

  All right.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  $51 million. Now, I mean, that's, that's big, but I do feel like it's, when you hear about it.

• 59:38Sarah Marshall?

  Put in today money.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'll, I'll give you some, I'll give you some comparison. I mean, this is interesting, like, so Untouchables, that came out the same year, right? That was about 25 million. Predator, which was a low budget action movie, that cost 15 million. Superman 4, which was kind of a, you know, a flop, that's the, you know, that's 17 million, so.

• 59:57Sarah Marshall?

  Is that the Richard Pryor one?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  That was, no, this is the worst one. This is the quest for peace with Solar Superman. But what the studios were kind of loving was anything over this $14 million range is what they were freaking out at. Because what they were having great success with at the time was Throw Mama from the Train, 14 million. Good Morning Vietnam, 14 million. The Lost Boys, 8 million. You know, Dirty Dancing, 6 million. They wanted more of those. Cause most budgets live between 6 and 20 million, so they were double. They were two movies. But if you think about it, like, two movies worth, it's not crazy.

• 1:00:30Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It's not the way Titanic was going, or, you know, before it came out, it was like, you know, it would, people would have to see this incredibly long movie multiple times for it to make enough money back for us to not be embarrassed. That never happens, and then somehow that happened. But I mean, it's not the kind of thing you could count on. But this is really, is kind of like, oh, we went. Kind of overboard, but not historically so.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  And I think what this movie lacks, honestly, is what we were talking about earlier. Through all this creative tension, physical set tensions, crew, all that sort of stuff, what it lost was the passion, the original idea. And I think that if this movie stuck with that, we would have something. But I think what we got was just something that is a movie. It hits the beats, it does the thing.

• 1:01:24Sarah Marshall?

  Which is kind of the worst thing. Yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Right. It becomes the thing. It becomes the thing that we talk about, which is like, that's why I feel this movie is so odd. Yeah, there are great things in it, but it's not, it doesn't feel like anyone cared at the end.

• 1:01:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  It's almost like a, a bad relationship. It's like, oh my God, this is the person I married. Oh, everything is great. And at the end, like, I guess I don't even remember that person. It was a couple of weeks.

• 1:01:47Sarah Marshall?

  Why are we here?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Sarah Marshall?

  Those two people at Costco with no meaning. I mean, this is where I make my inevitable plug for the final Destination series because I feel like there's something. They're so good. And there's something so great about us, you know, basically a slasher series where like, you know, because if you compare it to Friday the 13th, that has basically a new director with every installment.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:08Sarah Marshall?

  It seems like is being tested out for whether they can do something better. And the Saw movies were made by the same relatively small group of people pretty consistently. And it always like, I won't really try and like defend the ethics of it. That's not the same thing as saying I really like them, but you can really tell that all those movies are somebody's baby.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  I totally agree. I think that like, what I love about James Wan is like, he makes crazy movies too. Like, you know, like not everyone works. And yes, for every Conjuring, there might be one that just kind of falls a victim on the side, you know? I think when you keep it tight, uh, or you have like, again, it's a point of view. It's a point of view. I love the Final Destination movies. I love this last one. And particularly I love how they brought it all together. It's silly. It's fun. And by the way, they know the movie they're making. I did a movie called Piranha 3D, uh, directed by Alex Aja, who made a wonderful French.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Movie called High Tension, which was so very tense.

• 1:03:07Sarah Marshall?

  I have to admit, I have complained recently on this very show about how strongly I dislike the plot twist in that movie, but I was fully on board before we got around to that. And that's what made me so angry. Yeah.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  I also agree with that. I'm not against, I don't disagree.

• 1:03:21Sarah Marshall?

  How is she driving the very truck that she was chasing? But go on.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  But I will say like when we made Piranha 3D, Alex Oja wasn't trying to make High Tension. He got what he was making, which was a movie with Piranha and 3D in the title. And he leaned into it and it became fun. And that's a movie that I think made like 75 million dollars at the box or some crazy amount of money at the box office because he was playing it. I mean, it's the reason why he made a movie, I think years later called like Gator or Sewer Gator. Like Tarantino's like, it's one of the best movies. It's like, sometimes you just have to understand what you're making. And this is a movie that feels like no one understands what they're making. Final Destination, it's almost like you can't mess it up. It's gonna be Rube Goldberg devices to cause death and that's it. The crazier they are, the more fun we're gonna have with it.

• 1:04:09Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, you either like it or you don't.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much. As a critic, I love finding those movies that know exactly what they are and excel at it and hoisting those up, even if they're just B movies. Like last year on my top 10 list, I put Smile 2.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Because Smile 2, Sarah, have you seen Smile 2 yet?

• 1:04:23Sarah Marshall?

  No, I saw Smile 1 and I didn't like it, but I've heard from my friends that Smile 2 was very good.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Sarah Marshall?

  I've heard from Chelsea Webber Smith, actually. So there you go.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Smile 1 is absolutely mid. Smile 2 is a masterpiece. It is a absolute masterpiece.

• 1:04:38Sarah Marshall?

  I love it when that happens.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It hits it out of the park. It absolutely hits out of the park.

• 1:04:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I feel like, like the direct sequel to an underwhelming horror movie is almost the perfect place to do something great because nobody sees you coming, you know?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  I a hundred percent agree. It's like, this is why I also believe, like, I have, I worked on Galaxy Quest for about two years. I loved my experience on it, but what I hated about it was that everyone had a very strong opinion about it, right? Everyone had a reason about why it worked and then they wanted to make sure that you incorporated their opinion about. And I think that that's deadly because like that's why I think IP is bad. And I think this is why we're having this glut of mediocre films that come out of IP. Because people expect too much, like the best IP to do is IP that no one cares about. Like let's make a Logan's Run, uh, you know, sequel, like let's do that. So like, let's have a movie that no one has an opinion on.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Because once you have an opinion on it, you kind of lose the ability to be a director or a writer. You kind of have to just be, I mean, I know it's like fan service, but I mean, people say it, but it's also like, well, that you live and die by that.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I do get flinchy when movies like Ishtar become the shorthand for making something bad. Because you're saying, we don't want movies that take a big risk. Yeah, I wish that we were making fun of the Morbiuses of the world that are playing into gigantic franchises and playing it safe and then being bad. Let's let the ambitious disasters, let's let them have their own lane.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  You know, and I, and I fear that we are now past the point of no return with this. Because now, if there's any hesitation, that movie is going to streaming. Ishtar would have gone to streaming, right? There would have been some decision made along the way and we would dump it over there. And maybe that's the choice. I, I love what Adam Sandler did in making his movies at Netflix. He's like, I'm taking the critics out of it. It's going to be on the front page of Netflix when it comes out, like it, hate it, who cares? You can't rake me over the coals for this. And I think that the movies that they've made there spawned the gamut of being great and weird and not so great and whatever. But it's like, he's just making things without the fear of that box office number or out that fear of, of that.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  And I think it's the reason why you see Predator Badlands killing at the box office. Because you know, if Prey came out in the theater, which I wish it would have, but if it came out in the theater, less people probably would have given it a chance. And then because they loved Prey, they saw Badlands.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is a long game.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  It's a long game, yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, wait, I want to draw a line. You're, you're saying, you're drawing a line that's uniting critics and the box office into one lump. I think. We could stick up for stuff that fails at the box office. I think like public box office failure is its own different Rubik.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  Cause I loved Adam Sandler's movie Hustle and I would have gone to the mat to try to get people to see that movie.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  That was so great, yes.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  It was so good.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Oh, I know, no, and you know, I'm sorry. I'm, you're right. That's a different reporting. That's entertainment reporting. And entertainment reporting, that's different than critics. And I think that what we actually, and I speak about this with the most high regard. We need more critics like Amy who are thinking so critically about film and are respected voice that you can listen to. There are so few of those, I think in a, they're, they're getting less and less with the, with papers dying off with, you know, cuts across the board, you know, on all these magazines, everything. You're losing this voice and it's, and it's a, it's a shame because

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  we need the voice of critics that we trust to introduce us to movies, to show us, maybe you won't like this. We were talking about this the other day, a movie, you know, uh, once someone F my son, this movie that Amy saw.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Fuck my son, yeah. Can I say fuck my son on this podcast?

• 1:08:31Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  I tried to keep it clean.

• 1:08:32Sarah Marshall?

  You can say it as many times as you want. It's really up to you.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  See, this is great.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Fuck my son. It's very weird and people should go see it.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  And, and that's what we should be looking for. But I think, I think a lot of review culture is in that world of like, let's dunk on it to get that one liner in the Rotten Tomatoes review, you know, so you get that splat. And, and I really respect, uh, critics like Amy. And there's a, there's a handful of great critics out there that really introduce you to it. And that's what I want. I want more people to be telling me what I should be watching and, and how I should be doing. Not like a hot take of this sucks, this is bad. You know, it's like, yeah.

• 1:09:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, good point.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Oh buddy, you win. I'll send you a pizza.

• 1:09:13Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and also I feel like, you know, when people talk about film criticism, of course, the like legendary shorthand is like, oh, Pauline Kael, she was mean.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:21Sarah Marshall?

  Which is true. She was very good at it. But also, you know, that she would, I feel like what we don't, people don't mention as much is that she would champion movies and that she's, you know, part of the reason that Nashville was really seen by Amy. Anybody and therefore why we have Robert Altman, arguably.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Exactly, because I think critics really want to be the people who find talent and raise it up, which has gotten very hard for critics to do now because there's so many little movies coming out every single week, like 15 tiny movies.

• 1:09:48Sarah Marshall?

  But that's a fun thing to do, you know, because I feel like there's like this sort of, as everyone becomes a content creator, there's like this interesting, because there's like a thing in Heartburn, which of course Nora Ephron wrote basically about being married to Carl Bernstein, speaking of Dustin Hoffman in a way. But like, being married to a columnist was like being married to a cannibal, because things had barely stopped happening before he was munching on them and putting them in his column. And now like, everyone gets to live like that, and it sucks because like everyday people wake up trying to turn like the fairly normal events of their lives into some kind of content that they can then monetize because there aren't any other jobs.

• 1:10:28Sarah Marshall?

  And it's kind of nice to be reminded that like, even if you have to make your life into a content mill, like it may be more difficult to think of things that you enjoy as opposed to describing things as if they're worse than they are in order to get attention. But like, it's probably, and of course complaining is important, but you do have the option as a critic of like, rather than restating or overstating something to be kind of epically worse than it is, you can make it your business to try and share things with people that you think deserve to be enjoyed more.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. The job of being a critic has shifted a lot in even just, I've been doing this game since I got into college and it shifted a ton even in that time to it being less about find and dunk and more about dig up and elevate. You need to be a curating voice as much as a critical negative slamming voice. I mean, don't, don't get me wrong. I love to slam on something. I will definitely slam on the movies when it deserves it. But there's so much stuff out there.

• 1:11:26Sarah Marshall?

  Well, some movies, yeah, do want you to do that to them.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's so much stuff out there that I think it's more valuable to find what's good right now, even if it means watching a bunch of movies I don't write about because I don't think I can write about them.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  And you know, like I just, I feel like I have to acknowledge that I do do a podcast. Called How Did This Get Made? Where we dunk on movies, but I will say that the idea behind it, and it's always been our rallying cry, is these movies that we are watching, they're so bad, they're good. These are movies that you want to watch with a group of friends. These are movies that we are spending an hour and a half talking about, not because like, ah, this sucks, this is the worst. We've all made movies, we've all directed, or we, you know, or we've all been a part of different processes of film, and we have a respect for it and how things can go off the rails. And I still believe like, that's also an art. Like, one of the best things I ever did growing up was like, I would go to the movie theater, every Friday, I would see whatever it was. I have a very clear memory of going to see a movie with, called Threesome,

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  with like Laura Flynn Boyle and Billy Baldwin, I believe. I don't think that that movie is good, but I remember just like going and then going to Denny's afterwards and just sitting around, just like goofing around about it, talking about it. That was part of the experience is like, and movies can have all those things. It doesn't mean like, not everything has to be, there will be blood. Not everything has to, you know, like, I believe that there's a space for movies like Venom, you know, but yet not everything has to be like the Marvel, you know, version of the thing. So I'm a big, I'm a big believer in dunking for dunking sake, that's bad, but just having fun, enjoying conversation, art becoming art. Yeah, I think it's good.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. I actually hope people see even the movies I do dunk on because at least they're interesting to talk about. Like, if there's nothing to talk about, then I don't think anybody should see it. But most movies have stuff you want to talk about afterwards. Yeah, you want to get into it. I love the conversation that starts even when you're like, that sucked.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:13:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, well, it's great to see something that's like so infectiously bad that you really want to tell people about it, you know? And I feel like one of the themes here is like, because I feel like one of the most annoying kinds of movie today is like, the Netflix movie, that whether or not it was written by AI, people can incredibly argue that it was, and that has people saying expository things the whole time, because they assume you're cleaning your baseboards, which you probably are. And where it just feels like nobody ever really cared, like, not a single person. Like, everyone is just there to be like, well, Whatever, you know, well, yeah, well, we'll get it done. It'll be fine. And they just care about it as much as it's possible to care about, like, you know, putting together Ikea furniture.

• 1:14:04Sarah Marshall?

  We're like, you do end up with basically the thing that you planned on getting. But I mean, that's actually a bad metaphor. Ikea furniture can be very exciting. But you know, that what we're talking about is like, continuing to love the human element of movies. We're like, I mean, you know, my example of a great bad movie, Manos, The Hands of Fate, which kind of got discovered outside of being a super underground thing because it was on an episode of MST 3K in 1993.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:14:31Sarah Marshall?

  Is incredible because it's, you know, somebody who has no business making a movie, thinking through how to do it as if no one has ever done it before.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:41Sarah Marshall?

  And badly and feeling, you can tell. And one of those things where like, you're like, I know that this was somebody's passion project, but why? Why did they clearly care so much about this terrible story? And you do end up with some kind of element of human connection when you kind of, when you interact with something either that you love or that you think is just kind of baffling in that way. And that's not there for kind of letting it be made and shoved at us by the algorithm and not really a real person.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think exactly what you're describing is probably one of the next movements that's going to surge up is I am absolutely terrified about, you know, AI scripts ruining this industry.

• 1:15:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  But I think you're only going to ruin it for a minute. And then people would, they would rather watch.

• 1:15:26Sarah Marshall?

  That's very exciting news.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  I hope so.

• 1:15:29Sarah Marshall?

  Prediction. Yeah, I like that. I choose to believe you.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  I want to think that they're underestimating the audience. I really, I really have more faith in audience members than they do. Again, that I think of something like Manos, everybody will want to watch it because it'll feel alive. You'll feel the fingerprints on it like you're describing.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Well, that's, I think, where we're always going to get to. What I love about going In doing shows live is that it is a unique experience between you and the audience and that is something that is not going away. If anything, touring is growing because I think people want a unique experience. But I think the future of cinema is, and yes, I said cinema, is creating a public space where movie theaters are doing small things like hundreds of beavers and having the cast come in for a weekend. So it almost feels like a Broadway show where you're getting to see a very special presentation of something with a Q and

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  A or where you are bringing back classics. I brought my kids to go see Back to the Future for the 40th anniversary in IMAX, which was amazing and so much fun. We saw Jaws 50th. It's like, I think that we have to reconceptualize what the movie theater is. And I think we've seen that in how we serve food there. And people can have their own opinions about that. That's fine. I don't care. But what the movie theater needs to become is just, we're no longer making enough movies to be like, every weekend, there's three new movies. So you go there and whatever it is, it is. It's more like, what, how do we create an event space? How do we create something? And I think Taylor Swift, God bless her, has done that, too. Like, I'm making these movies that are gonna air in the theaters and I'm making personal deals with the theaters.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  It's like, cool, that's awesome. Why don't we make movie theaters like libraries? Why don't we do like, all right, Pluribus is coming out, we'll screen the first two episodes at the AMC. And yes, I could get it for free, but isn't it cooler to watch with a bunch of people or a finale? Like, I, you know, like seeing the Lost finale with a bunch of people was one of the best things ever. I love that.

• 1:17:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I feel like this is a great time, you know, speaking of videos, for independent movie theaters and also for places where film can live or where, you know, video specifically can live archivally because of how much stuff you can't access that's not on streaming because of random copyright issues or whatever else. But, you know, that there's a site, not in a way that's that predictable, but I feel like I can see people returning to what physical media gives us and these, and like you were saying, these physical gatherings around media, which I think is, you know, It's always been about that as much as the story itself. And it makes me think of the Great Depression and how they would have, you know, dish night at a movie theater where you would go and, you know, they would have prizes and raffles and you can get dishes and you were incentivized to come out and spend money

• 1:18:14Sarah Marshall?

  because times were tough and they needed to incentivize it, which is all to say that I'm still upset about the time I paid like $19 for a pretzel at an AMC theater in Seattle. But also, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  I want those pretzels to be better.

• 1:18:29Sarah Marshall?

  They get so big. If it could be half as big and better, I would be very happy.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I mean, I'm a big, I'm a big pretzel person. I do think what you're saying is, you know, I haven't really put a label to this. It's cost effectiveness too, right? Because if I'm paying $20 to go see a movie, I need it to be good, right? On some level, as now as a dad of two kids, you know, for me, my wife and my kids to go see a movie, it is conservatively like $150 with snacks and all that sort of stuff, you know, like, you know, it's like we're.

• 1:19:05Sarah Marshall?

  Because how much Disneyland cost in like the eighties, which is really,

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:09Sarah Marshall?

  and I realize there's inflation and everything, but.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's a very, it's a, it's a high price to pay. And so what we've done is we've gotten rid of like, I'll take a chance on this. I know we've tried a million times with like, oh, well, what if we do the movie pass or whatever it is? Yeah, that, that's great, but that's not for everybody. That's not going to be for everybody. It's just an impossibility. So why not find ways to make it better? Make it interesting. Like if you can't lower those prices, find other ways to bring people in. So you're like, well, at least I saw something. At least I saw the cast of this movie or at least I had a unique experience. Because if I'm just paying maybe $10 or $15 less than seeing a live show, I'll go see the live show or I'll spend my money there. We are definitely in a stage of gathering. I believe that in a very big way. So can movie theaters, can corporations?

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  Lean into that. And that's the question. Honestly, at the end of the day, it's not like, what can movie theaters do? It's like, well, corporations, is it effective enough for them to do that? And I don't think that they know if that is true.

• 1:20:09Sarah Marshall?

  I think we're gonna start doing Dish Night again.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  I mean, they should. And I think like, they have spent 15 years competing with streaming and television by making bigger and bigger and bigger movies with higher and higher price tags. And I heard this one studio executive back in the 80s have a great idea. What if we just made cheaper movies?

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a big proponent of that. I mean, somebody who has like, worked in that medium. Yes, yes.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  Well, there we go. We've come full circle to Ishar. And what killed it ultimately? Sorry.

• 1:20:37Sarah Marshall?

  It's been more life-affirming than I expected, to be honest. Maybe the real bad movies are the friends we made along the way.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Well, look at us. We just spent a good amount of time talking about this film. There's stuff to talk about here, right? Like, there is, you know, and whether it's about the production, or it's about the film, like, this movie is made, it became a joke, it became the only far side cartoon where Gary Larson apologized because he didn't see it, you know? It's like, there is something about that, you know?

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  He did finally watch it on an airplane. That was when he finally decided to watch Ishar. Kudos to the airplane movie. I love you forever.

• 1:21:15Sarah Marshall?

  There's something about the kind of like, the consumer need for something to be really, really bad. Where like, even if it's not that bad, we're gonna kind of force it in, because maybe we're realistically, we just need a terrible movie every once in a while. It just feels good.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Can I just say, as somebody who has really grown to love the Hallmark Lifetime Films, right? There is a joy in those films. Like, are they good? I'm gonna say, yeah, they are. They're not, well, they're a different definition of good.

• 1:21:45Sarah Marshall?

  But like, the Tori Spelling ones are like, really good.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Oh, and look, and you know why I know that they're good? Because Netflix is trying to make their versions of them, and they can't quite nail it.

• 1:21:55Sarah Marshall?

  No, because they're not demented enough.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Hot Frosty's good.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Hot f- yes, I agree, but we're also talking about like, you know, there's channels that are already in early November playing Get Ready for Christmas. They're playing two months of every night Christmas movies because they got this backlog. I just think it's like, it's a secret sauce that they know how to make.

• 1:22:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's also like, I learned a lot from Lifetime movies. For example, that if you're Cheryl Ladd and you're a single mom and you're dating a new guy and he seems great, he might frame you for drug possession and then you'll go to prison and learn about feminism in a way you never imagined intersectionally.

• 1:22:31Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I loved kind of the things that I learned that I didn't expect to learn, which are sometimes you have to pick the first camel.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:39Sarah Marshall?

  And better to have movies that feel human and fall short of expectations, maybe even hugely than movies that feel like they were made by nobody. And what else, Paul and Amy? What are you gonna leave us with on this beautiful Ishtar day?

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Well, I guess the question is, is it the same to become culturally known for being an example of what not to do as it is to be an example of what to do? Because there are so many movies that fail. There are so many movies that are not good, but when you are transcending all of those and standing head and shoulders above it, I think that that might be worth something, too.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  I think what I would say is, go see a movie for yourself. Just go see a movie for yourself. Don't be Gary Larson, having to apologize later. You figure out what you think about a movie before you just abide by the buzz.

• 1:23:32Sarah Marshall?

  That's in the spirit of you're wrong about.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:23:34Sarah Marshall?

  It's fun to hate something, but you know, maybe check it out and you might actually enjoy it and then that'll be kind of fun because you can be a contrarian. Yeah, I also feel like my answer to the question of, is it better to be known as a, you know, legendary flop or a legendarily great at your job kind of a person is that it does feel maybe equally arbitrary, you know, where like, if somebody makes what seems to be a great movie, does that mean that the director is great? Or does it mean that people who we don't know to credit for it being great were the ones who Over the line or the sort of the secret sauce and you know, because so many people are involved and so many factories are there. So it feels like whether you're known as one of

• 1:24:18Sarah Marshall?

  the greats or one of the great flops feels more arbitrary than we would maybe like. And then there's someone like Melville who like destroyed his career during his own lifespan with the only thing we read that he wrote anymore, which is Moby Dick and which people hate it because it's so boring, but also it's so great because sometimes great things are boring. And that's another stance I feel passionately about. So I but I feel like that can be freeing too, where it's like you can't really control how people are going to receive what you do. So you just kind of have to to do the thing that you care about most. And hopefully the people will pay you for it. That's nice, too.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  I say this too, like, I think that as an actor and a writer and a director and all these things, you can't control the outcome. You can only control the time that you spend on something. And you have to enjoy that time. It's you learn from that time, good or bad. You know, you make mistakes and that's all part of growth. Right? It is we can't just succeed, succeed, succeed. And I think the things that I have brought with me in my career has been a lot of lessons learned by failure. I think you learn a lot more by failure than you do by success. I know that that's an an old adage on some way. But it's

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  like you do because you're forced to critically look at what went wrong. And you can't just say, well, it was the audience, you know, but I can also say, I made a great show, the show Black Monday with Don Cheadle and Regina Hall and Andrew Rannells and Casey Wilson. I loved making that show. It was one of the most creatively fulfilling experiences I had. It aired on Showtime in a time of hour long dramas and no one had Showtime that I knew. And while we got good reviews, like no one watched it. We got to do three seasons, which was a blessing to do that. But it was also like, yeah, I can't control it more than it was great. So when I look back on it, I don't look back on, I wish we would have gotten more press, or I wish we would had more seasons. I can only look back on and go, I had a great time.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  It's a really good show, by the way.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  I'm really glad you made it.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  I am too. And it's like, but that's the thing. It's like, that's what we look back on, on our deathbeds. Right? We're not looking back at the box office receipts. You know, it's like, ah, well, at least we made a lot of money.

• 1:26:36Sarah Marshall?

  Or if you were, that would be very depressing. And then you say rosebud and.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  No, but I think that's true. Cause I mean, this is a time where it feels like the creative worlds are falling apart. And goals are shifting. And one of the goals I just keep hearing about from all of my friends in all of the different wings of filmmaking and writing and podcasting and music that everybody's in is just like, how can I at least figure out how to feed myself while enjoying my life every day as much as humanly possible, you know?

• 1:27:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Like, even if mansions are off the table, can we at least have a life that we enjoy?

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:27:11Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah. I think, I think most people, I don't know about most, but I feel like a lot of people, especially now, recognize how precious it is to just have some sense of community and stability and getting to eat, you know, enough of the food that you like. And getting to come together and community creatively, or just to go to the movies sometimes is great on top of that.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 1:27:38Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. It feels also just great to, yeah, just engage with the human in entertainment and feel like you're watching something that wasn't made as cynically as possible. And also, you know, I mean, like the ultimate sin of like this Netflix type of bad movie is that it doesn't care if it's wasting your time, you know? And I think that's one of the big things too, is just to feel like the thing I'm consuming, even if I don't like it, this was made by somebody who valued the time that they put into it.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  It's true. And I'm realizing I said mansions, thinking of the standards of Dustin Hoffman getting paid five and a half million dollars for making a star. Most of my friends just want to know that they can make rent, but that's fine.

• 1:28:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that would be amazing, you know?

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  I, I often have said that I have worked in a world of entertainment that is very much like a construction worker. You know, you build one building, you move on to the next one, you know? And it's like, and, and what I think people are really lamenting right now in Hollywood is it used to be easy to make a living. In Hollywood, like you get staffed on a show, you'd be a guest star on a show. And that's what's I think has been going away is like this middle class version of Hollywood. You know, it's not even just breaking in. It's you now are like, it's the reason why you have, and no offense to Pedro Pascal, but four Pedro Pascal films in summer. Why do we need that? We don't need that. We should have more people, you know, but it's like, but everyone's like, I'm too nervous. Take a chance. We gotta get them in there. But are those movies making irrationally more money than others?

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  I don't know, but people know them. That's gonna work.

• 1:29:05Sarah Marshall?

  Or I imagine even on the level of just, you know, that it used to be, and I, I hope it still is, but it does seem like people are making every effort they can to chip away at this. That if we replace extras with AI, then that's actually, you know, there was a time at least when you could basically make a living doing that.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. And you learn. That's the other thing too. You learn that's, this is a business of mentorship, right? And at the end of the day, AI is cheating, right? You know, on some level, right? But I also believe that it's not about like, is AI bad? I think there's gonna be a lot of things that we're gonna get out of that. The same way that your phone can make a movie and you can edit it on your phone, right? Like we couldn't, like when I was a kid, I would have killed for that. I'm watching my kids go nuts to be able to make movies. Like, that's all I wanted to do. And, you know, I got the big V, you know, I get the camcorder. So like, yeah, there's gonna be tools and techniques. It's, but what we can't let it do is take away the fun stuff, right? It's like, you know, it's like, I don't want my AI to create art.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  I want my AI to pay my bills, you know, or, you know, or set up my finances or, you know, like, that's what I want.

• 1:30:14Sarah Marshall?

  Right. If we're asking the robots to create art while we count our money, then we have things backwards.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Guys, have we just solved Hollywood?

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:30:24Sarah Marshall?

  Let's go see Ishtar.

• 1:30:27Sarah Marshall?

  Well, this has been beautiful and let's all go make some bad art. And maybe if we intend to make bad art, it'll accidentally loop around and be good. Or whatever. Let's go make some art with our friends. And Paul Shear and Amy Nicholson, tell us about your show. And if there's an episode that you recommend for people who haven't listened yet, if maybe there's a place that you would like to start, I guess a favorite that either of you have.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Well, half of me feels like if this is the sort of conversation people are into, they should definitely listen to our Waterworld episode, which is all about decisions and directors and clashes and egos and buzz and people gunning for disaster. It is a movie that, by the way, we got to show this summer at the Los Feliz Three here in Los Angeles to a packed house that had a blast. It was really fun getting to see that large. And we thought, hey, maybe nobody will ever get to see Waterworld large again, because this movie has just been known as a disaster. But we are not usually known as the bad disaster flop movie show. We are unspooled. We started by going through the entire AFI Top 100. And now we have just been going through other major lists. The Letterboxd Top 250, the IMDb Top 250, and the New York Times 1,000 Essential Films,

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  but also really just talking about what we find really interesting. You know, we're, Paul and I are just really curious people in the world of movies. So every week, we just talk about something like The Wiz recently and just get to pull apart how it was made, how we feel about it, how something can look like a disaster and feel like a disaster and yet be fascinating.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, you know, if you're looking for a place to start on the show, like Amy said, Waterworld is great if you want to hear about a flop. But the truth is, find the movie that you like. I think that that's always the best way in to a movie podcast. Like, don't like let us introduce you to a movie you've never heard of before. I think our show works great as a book club, but also a remembrance club. Like, oh, you love ET? Let's talk about ET. You love Back to the Future? Well, go, well, let's go there. Like, start off there and get the vibe of the show. And disagree with us, agree with us, whatever you'd like to do. But I think that's the best way in.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Find your favorites.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  We have done over 300 movies. We recently brushed up our Back to the Future one, because that's a film that we just continually find new things in all the time, new conversations.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you so much again for joining me and thank you for. I don't know, just reminding people, whoever needed to be reminded, that it's just fun to make stuff. Let's go do that.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Let's go do that.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  I love it.