‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey are compelled by some indescribable force to rewatch Steven Spielberg’s 1977 spectacle ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ Podcast Manager: Craig Horlbeck Video Producers: Ronak Nair and Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever finish a movie and the next thing you know, you're totally obsessed? That's happened to me. Like, I'm talking about ordering a book about 70s film lighting. You done that, C.R.?

• 0:10Sean Fennessey?

  I have, yeah.

• 0:11Bill Simmons?

  Or buying the soundtrack on vinyl. Kind of obsessed. Whatever it is, Prime helps you get more out of whatever passions you're into or getting into. Head to amazon.com/prime and follow your obsession wherever it goes. It's big ass 70s month on the rewatchables. You missed Death Wish last week.

• 0:29Sean Fennessey?

  Is that... What's big ass about Death Wish?

• 0:31Chris Ryan?

  Do you want to weigh in on...

• 0:32Bill Simmons?

  Big ass movies.

• 0:33Chris Ryan?

  Vigilante justice while we have you here?

• 0:34Sean Fennessey?

  I believe in it. I believe it's the right course of action.

• 0:37Bill Simmons?

  That was where I laid on hottest take. We're doing Close Encounters this week, a movie that, um, maybe needed more time in the oven, but we're pulling it out anyway. Like a beautiful thing of banana bread.

• 0:49Chris Ryan?

  This brioche is a little soft in the middle.

• 0:51Bill Simmons?

  Just hoping it's delicious. Holy shit, was this an undertaking. But Close Encounters of the Third Kind is next.

• 0:58Speaker 03

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• 1:33Speaker 04

  Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The experience of an ordinary man, shared by people from all over the world, drawn to a single spot by a compulsion they don't understand to witness the most dramatic event in the history of the human race. And when the communication begins, it is fantastic. Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• 2:12Bill Simmons?

  All right, I'm Bill Simmons, that's Sean Fantasy, The Big Picture, Chris Ryan, The Watch.

• 2:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Bill Simmons?

  What else are you up to?

• 2:18Chris Ryan?

  You know, just-

• 2:18Bill Simmons?

  Top three draft picks?

• 2:19Chris Ryan?

  Watching a lot of tape, watching a lot of highlight mixtapes on YouTube right now.

• 2:24Bill Simmons?

  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I saw it in the theater.

• 2:27Sean Fennessey?

  Whoa.

• 2:27Chris Ryan?

  Did you?

• 2:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Sean Fennessey?

  Tell us about it, was this a-

• 2:31Bill Simmons?

  Not only did I see it in the theater, I think I saw the re-release in a drive-in, vague memory.

• 2:36Sean Fennessey?

  The 1980-

• 2:37Bill Simmons?

  Vague memory.

• 2:38Sean Fennessey?

  The 1980 re-release?

• 2:39Bill Simmons?

  1980 re-release, I think I saw it in a drive-in, but I'm not, I'm, don't confirm, don't confirm that to the Washington Post or anything, but it's just a vague memory.

• 2:47Sean Fennessey?

  I'll alert the Library of Congress.

• 2:48Bill Simmons?

  Vague, vague drive-in memory.

• 2:49Chris Ryan?

  There's nobody there, it's okay.

• 2:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I saw this movie in 1977, I gotta be honest, I was six years old, it kind of, or seven years old, it kind of freaked me out.

• 2:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Sean Fennessey?

  Understandable.

• 2:57Bill Simmons?

  Uh, didn't really love the ending, and then, uh, and had no, no, you know, the dad's going on the, on the UFO at the end, I'm like, what the fuck?

• 3:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Bill Simmons?

  Dad, are you gonna go? Like, it was like one of those.

• 3:09Chris Ryan?

  I think that was the intention, right?

• 3:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 3:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think Steven Spielberg agrees with you right now as well.

• 3:13Bill Simmons?

  This movie is, uh, just incredible. What, what was the re-watch like for you, CR?

• 3:17Chris Ryan?

  Dude, this might be like, one of the best directed movies I've ever seen. Uh, is there a bad shot in this movie? Is, like, you could freeze-frame any single thing from this film, and it's a painting, but it's, you know, it's Spielberg kind of at, like, his tools have matured by this point, after Jaws.

• 3:35Bill Simmons?

  But he's still 29?

• 3:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and he's got, but he's got so much energy, and all of the things he's trying, and all the things he's doing, and even the stories about the way he made it, which almost sounds like, more like the way, sometimes Scorsese makes movies, where it's like, we're gonna try this, we're gonna try that, we're gonna try this, I wrote something the night before, or Coppola. That kind of, it has that energy, it has that, like, pure auteurist energy, which I know, he obviously is one, but often relies on, you know, you know, screenwriters to contribute to the story and stuff like that. This really feels something, something different in his catalog.

• 4:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's breathtaking. It's one of only three movies that he has a screenplay credit on. And you can tell that it comes from a deep, deep part of his soul. And it's hard not to watch the movie and not feel like he's making connections that maybe he doesn't even ultimately realize are there in his life, in his heart, in his mind. And his kind of quest for something bigger than himself is just a big part of all of his movies.

• 4:31Bill Simmons?

  His childlike wonder.

• 4:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. And but like, we kind of like make fun of that, right? Like the Spielberg face and his always seeing the world through a kid's eyes. But this is also just a very dark and sad movie about kind of losing your grip on reality and obsession and becoming consumed by something and not even fully understanding why. So it's just bizarrely mature for a 29 year old, fairly like sheltered kid.

• 4:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Sean Fennessey?

  From Arizona, you know, it's just an odd thing.

• 5:00Bill Simmons?

  I wrote my notes. They don't make them like this anymore.

• 5:05Chris Ryan?

  That's why you're you.

• 5:07Bill Simmons?

  Just we say this sometimes with the rewatchables. They don't make them like this.

• 5:10Sean Fennessey?

  They don't.

• 5:10Bill Simmons?

  The pace is just not like it would be made now. The actors, the patience that he has with like the wide shots where now they would have just CGI shit. But like I watched with my wife and daughter last night, the second time in a week. And my daughter was like, did they, they put those stars in? And I'm like, no, they couldn't really do that back then. I think they were just caught lightning in a bottle with Muncie, Indiana.

• 5:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Bill Simmons?

  In this house and just everything about it, just everything in the way it moves and watching Dreyfus just lose his mind over the course of 90 minutes. And he's staying aside somehow. And then the last 20 minutes is unbelievable.

• 5:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Bill Simmons?

  It's like the ultimate payoff where they go over the mountain. And then they look and Melinda Dillon's face kind of does the jaw drop. And then it's like, wait, what's going on here?

• 5:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Bill Simmons?

  It ties into a bunch of 70s shit that we'll talk to, but it's just such a cool, constructive movie.

• 6:03Sean Fennessey?

  So this came out like six months after Star Wars. And you were saying when you saw that in theaters, that there was a divide, that there was like the jocks and there was the Star Wars kids. Did this movie like bridge that gap? Cause this is a really big hit as well.

• 6:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Chris Ryan?

  Or do you feel like kids were like, what the fuck happened here?

• 6:21Bill Simmons?

  This, this wasn't like Star Wars. This was kind of its own thing. And the cachet of it was that the guy from Jaws made it. That's the only thing I remember. But it tapped into all this UFO stuff that my experience with UFOs, and I think everybody's was up until this time was aliens were potentially evil. They're coming to get us, they're gonna invade us. That was like all the programming from the radio stuff in the 30s and 40s.

• 6:45Chris Ryan?

  Day the Earth stood still.

• 6:46Bill Simmons?

  The movie shows in the 50s and 60s and it was all like, watch out, they're coming. And this movie just flipped it. And they're like, what if they're not coming? What if they're just really interested in finding out more about us? Which, which now seems like the easiest flip to make, but back then was like a crazy movie.

• 7:04Chris Ryan?

  The movie is way more optimistic and romantic about the otherworldly, the extraterrestrial than it is about the human. Like, I think it's actually a pretty cynical movie about humanity in a lot of ways.

• 7:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Chris Ryan?

  But about the wonders that could be above us and out there. It's incredibly like wide eyed and affirmative. You get that, you know?

• 7:26Bill Simmons?

  But think about 20 years later, it's we're in Armageddon, Independence Day mode where it's like aliens are coming, they're gonna fucking get us again.

• 7:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Bill Simmons?

  And that's kind of the generational response to whatever was going on here where there's way more hope in outer space, I think.

• 7:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think don't fear the unknown seems to be the thing that Spielberg was driving towards that Dreyfus talks about what attracted him to it. That there had never really been a science fiction, large scale movie that was about the potential hope and optimism of connecting with other people. But I don't know, like, I don't think the movie is necessarily down on humanity.

• 7:59Chris Ryan?

  That might be like a little bit cute to say it that way, but I think that like ultimately like it's more just that like you associate with Spielberg and almost saccharine view of like the family unit or something like that. And that everything is sort of rooted in the relationship between children and parents. And I think that it's a little bit. Outside of that, like even though there are obvious elements that he would continue to refer to over the course of his career, it just feels like a different group of people than I find in most Spielberg's movies to me.

• 8:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Bill Simmons?

  Well, there's also no villain.

• 8:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Bill Simmons?

  Even E.T. has villains. I don't know if there's a villain in this movie.

• 8:34Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think there is. He, he said that he wished he could have made this before Jaws, in part because he was inspired by Watergate, that the idea of like a mass government cover up was compelling to him and kind of blending that with his interest in genre movies. But you could tell like in the time that passes between Watergate and his opportunity to make this movie, like he kind of loses interest. Like this is one of the softest government conspiracies of all time.

• 8:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Sean Fennessey?

  Like people find their way onto this platform at the end of the movie, like civilians, and they're like, you should join in. You know? It's such a like an open, not conspiratorial way of seeing what would happen if this happened in our world.

• 9:11Bill Simmons?

  It's like Scientology.

• 9:12Chris Ryan?

  It was just like, and the whole thing that the government's doing to the people around Devil's Tower is like putting them to sleep. Like it's like they're very, it's like the kind, yeah.

• 9:21Bill Simmons?

  Well, you talk about the paranoid seventies, which we've discussed in the past here, but this is a whole genre that I love, by the way. This should be a 2B category. Conversation, All the President's Men, Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, Capricorn One, Shanna Syndrome, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All of it's a response to Watergate and Vietnam and not trusting government. By the way, there's 20 more movies, but those are the headliners. So it feels like this is part of that era.

• 9:47Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:48Bill Simmons?

  But I agree with you. It feels like Spielberg also lost interest in something along the course of it, because they start making this in 73 and that's right around the time you would have started thinking like, what's the government hiding?

• 10:01Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Bill Simmons?

  What else are they doing? JFK assassinations, previous decade. But it also like starts this whole sci-fi era. That's like the modern sci-fi era with Star Wars, because we get those two. We get Superman and Star Trek. In 1981, we get Alien, Empire, Superman 2, and Flash Gordon. We get E.T., Blade Runner, Star Trek 2, and The Thing, just in 1982. So something flips, and it's like modern sci-fi all of a sudden, but I think it starts with Star Wars in this movie.

• 10:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, this movie to me also is like, I remember we were doing Days of Thunder. We were talking a little bit about it kind of ushering in the 90s and getting out of the 80s, but still having like 80s residue as it dove into the 90s. Feel that way about Close Encounters 2. There's obviously a lot of 70s in this, and there's a lot of the neuroses and stuff that was in the air in this movie, but there also is an element to where it's so predictive that it feels like it's 1983 in this movie, even though that's six years later.

• 11:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, there's like a six-year window where this movie could have come out. Because to me, E.T. and this movie are pretty close, but there's a five-year difference when those came out.

• 11:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Bill Simmons?

  It's the same kind of childlike wonder, what if the aliens are here to be our buddies? The government's a bad guy, but not really.

• 11:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's just not pessimistic, and all of those other movies that you talked about ultimately end on these moments of like, ah, I guess we're just kind of screwed as a society, and this movie doesn't feel that way at all.

• 11:29Bill Simmons?

  Like Body Snatchers.

• 11:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's in a world where everyone has been consumed, you know? Like, that's the bleakest ending of all time.

• 11:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Sean Fennessey?

  And this one, even though I think it's so sad, the end of this movie, it's not... Yuri doesn't seem... He seems excited.

• 11:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Sean Fennessey?

  He's, he gets what he wants.

• 11:48Bill Simmons?

  He's like, do they have same-game parlays up there?

• 11:51Chris Ryan?

  You guys are HBO?

• 11:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, so he blends the paranoid 70s with the modern sci-fi era, but as a Steve Spielberg movie.

• 11:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Bill Simmons?

  I call him Steve.

• 12:00Sean Fennessey?

  Love Steve.

• 12:02Bill Simmons?

  And it's an unbelievable follow-up to Jaws, which is the other piece of this. He makes Jaws, which basically, we talked about in Star Wars. Star Wars gets all the credit for kind of ruining movies and where we went, but Jaws kind of started it.

• 12:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, the first real blockbuster.

• 12:16Bill Simmons?

  Everyone wants to be Jaws and wants to own all the movie theaters, and he starts that, and he's 27 at that point. And he's in what's next mode, and he's probably the most scrutinized director of that era, other than Coppola at that point in 75. Scorsese, Schrader, all those dudes, De Palma, they're all kind of like indie bands underground. But he follows it up with this, which it feels like a ballsy move.

• 12:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Bill Simmons?

  To follow up Jaws with a way bigger, more ambitious movie.

• 12:48Sean Fennessey?

  He's got this great knack, though, don't you think, of knowing when to capitalize on his previous success? You know, like, if you look at going from, um, Jaws to this, this is a real, like, blank check kind of a movie. Like, you know, you've written your ticket, or like, launching DreamWorks when he does, or doing Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same year. Or, um, you know, like, knowing when to flip back to blockbusters after making an awards film and that kind of like, he just has this fascinating sense of career navigation that I think eludes a lot of his peers because they're so driven by their artistic inspiration. And he is art and commerce. He is like, he makes movies for people. He doesn't make movies for himself, even though the movies are often about himself.

• 13:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, there's a Dreyfus quote that's on the, like, on one of the posters for Close Encounters. I think it might have even been like a press release announcing its production or something like that, and Dreyfus talks-

• 13:40Bill Simmons?

  Was the quote, can I snort that out?

• 13:42Sean Fennessey?

  Did he go on the record with that one?

• 13:49Bill Simmons?

  Hard straight surface?

• 13:56Chris Ryan?

  There was a quote about how Steven Spielberg is basically able to balance the big picture and be able to be like, I can tell this huge story for as many people as possible to enjoy, but also is like, super concerned with the detail of every shot. And you can feel that in this movie, you can feel that in all of his films, but especially his best ones, where it's the, like, thing that's all the way in the back of the frame that on the fifth time you watch it, you're like, he did not fucking do that, did he? That's in there? But when you're just watching it just to watch it at a drive-in, it still works. You know, it's, you don't have to have, like, um, a key to understand this movie. It can just play as this guy has an experience, chases it all the way across the country,

• 14:40Chris Ryan?

  gets in a fucking spaceship, it's pretty cool. Or you can watch it and be like, did Vilma Zegman do that? Like, that's crazy.

• 14:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, well, Jaws, this movie, E.T., three movies that have now been all out for at least 40 years. Jaws will be 50 years this year. And you can still watch it. Like, producer Craig will probably have a kid at some point, I'm guessing, in the next 10 years. And 10 years from now, we'll be able to watch all three of those movies with that kid, and they'll probably hold up. Even though a lot of it's dated and the clothes are weird and there's no phones, but- It's something like eternal.

• 15:14Chris Ryan?

  You don't think producer Craig's child will have an AI visor surgically implanted on the side of its head? As it drinks Soylent?

• 15:24Bill Simmons?

  It's very possible.

• 15:25Chris Ryan?

  And is making bets?

• 15:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, not ruling it out. She's betting on the outcome of each scene. Spielberg. So inspiration came from him and his dad watched a meteor shower once in New Jersey. Somehow that led to this movie.

• 15:39Chris Ryan?

  Can I ask, were you a big space kid, UFO kid?

• 15:42Bill Simmons?

  Really wasn't.

• 15:43Chris Ryan?

  No, okay.

• 15:43Bill Simmons?

  There was a couple TV shows. Lost in Space was okay.

• 15:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Bill Simmons?

  Never liked Star Trek.

• 15:49Sean Fennessey?

  What about The Twilight Zone?

• 15:50Bill Simmons?

  Twilight Zone, it kind of always freaked me out. I was an only child, so that, I don't know.

• 15:55Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 15:56Bill Simmons?

  Just never got there.

• 15:57Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 15:57Bill Simmons?

  I never really was a big space kid.

• 15:59Sean Fennessey?

  What does being an only child have to do with The Twilight Zone?

• 16:00Bill Simmons?

  I don't know. It's a show you need to talk about with somebody else.

• 16:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, okay. Your parents are like, shut up, we're not talking about The Twilight Zone.

• 16:07Bill Simmons?

  Put sports back on. I don't know, just never got there. How about you?

• 16:11Chris Ryan?

  I think when I was a kid, I probably was a little bit more dinosaurs and knights in armor. But these movies, no, yeah. You're not a King Arthur guy?

• 16:22Bill Simmons?

  Dinosaurs and knights, it's the worst porn search I've ever heard. Dinosaurs and knights in armor.

• 16:28Chris Ryan?

  They don't knock it until you try it.

• 16:30Sean Fennessey?

  You love when a knight just kind of gets in there.

• 16:32Chris Ryan?

  2025, you gotta really push it to get there, you know what I'm saying?

• 16:36Sean Fennessey?

  You see the backside of that T-Rex?

• 16:39Chris Ryan?

  Let me see, raptor.

• 16:43Bill Simmons?

  Were you a space guy?

• 16:44Sean Fennessey?

  I was interested in UFOs, yeah, sure.

• 16:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that, I never really made the UFO crossover, even when X-Files was happening.

• 16:53Chris Ryan?

  And even on like, what was the?

• 16:54Bill Simmons?

  I was always more interested in the autopsy shows on HBO than the UFO side.

• 16:59Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 16:59Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's entirely.

• 17:00Bill Simmons?

  The DNA stuff.

• 17:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's entirely possible to me, though, that this movie coming out before I was born, while you seeing it at its release, almost like dictates the way that we saw, like our relationship to space and UFOs. Like this being a warmer, softer idea around that makes it not something that like your parents feared or that you feared. And also, you know, we talked about this when we did E.T., like E.T. came out the year I was born. And I think also E.T. just made every kid want to have a friend who was an alien. Like that, that just felt.

• 17:30Bill Simmons?

  Well, it also depends on when you see it. Like, I saw ET and we talked about when we did the ET pod, but like when they're on the bikes in the air, you're just like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. This one I saw, I was probably a little too young, but could still see it.

• 17:43Chris Ryan?

  It's also mostly, it's about a middle aged man. I mean, there's not a POV. Okay.

• 17:49Sean Fennessey?

  Like, he's thirty-three.

• 17:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Chris Ryan?

  Well, because it's nineteen seventy-seven, he looks like he's forty-five.

• 17:55Sean Fennessey?

  He's got three kids and owns a house and has been doing his job for twelve years, but he's not as old as you think he is.

• 18:01Bill Simmons?

  He's carrying older. No stakes though for him.

• 18:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, unfortunately.

• 18:07Bill Simmons?

  Had that in a category later.

• 18:08Chris Ryan?

  Kind of surprised Ronnie didn't pop a couple of menthols, but we'll get into that.

• 18:11Sean Fennessey?

  She kind of has a look.

• 18:12Bill Simmons?

  Somebody could have done it. So Spielberg does his own science fiction film called Firelight, which he made on his own when he was eighteen, then used some shots for this movie. He wrote a short story in nineteen seventy about a midwestern farming community and a light show group of teenagers saw in the skies. So he had all these little weird Spielberg pieces, then did the Columbia Dale in seventy-three. Initially, it was about UFOs, Watergate and a government cover-up. That's how they sold it. As Sean said, it flipped. And then a bunch of writers came in, including our guy Paul Schrader.

• 18:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, we've got some intel on that.

• 18:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, Roy was into some escort service. That's how, that's how he met Melinda Dillon's character.

• 18:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he was always mixing Pepto Bismol and whiskey together.

• 18:54Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Sean Fennessey?

  No, it was like, it was a military movie.

• 18:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, there's a really, I found an interview with Schrader. This is gonna go in internet research, but I guess technically it's a newspaper, so. Schrader said Stephen wanted to make a film about a common man. That was my argument with him. Who the fuck wants to see that? This is supposed to be the greatest event in the history of the earth. At least make the character equal to the event. But Steve felt audiences wanted to see movies about ordinary people. Shakespeare's audiences wanted to see Macbeth. They didn't pay to see a play about a porter, but Steve wanted to make a movie about the porter, a guy who would go off to Mars and start a chain of McDonald's.

• 19:30Bill Simmons?

  Always like the backhanded compliments from the other directors for him.

• 19:35Bill Simmons?

  It's pretty funny. There's a lot of envy. But he went, he went back hard at Schrader. He, he had.

• 19:40Sean Fennessey?

  He said it was the worst script he'd ever read.

• 19:41Bill Simmons?

  He said it was the worst script that's ever been turned into a studio. Yeah.

• 19:45Chris Ryan?

  It's available online.

• 19:46Sean Fennessey?

  I, I thought what Spielberg said many years later was interesting about this, which is that he understa- his idea at first was that it should be a cop or a soldier. And that that sense of authority and trust that comes from those figures could be powerful in telling the story like that. And that's why he presented it that way to Schrader. And then he thought about it some more after reading Schrader's script. And he was like, people in uniform are not relatable to regular people. They're figures that exist outside. They, they manage society, they're not in society. And.

• 20:15Bill Simmons?

  This was Rick Caruso's problem when he wore a suit every day. Couldn't relate.

• 20:18Sean Fennessey?

  There's something to it.

• 20:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 20:19Sean Fennessey?

  And if you just put it on an Oxford and unduct it, you know?

• 20:22Bill Simmons?

  Put on a half zip.

• 20:24Sean Fennessey?

  But just making it a guy who works for the power company. Completely changed the perspective when you're watching the movie. I don't know that I really like intellectualize what's the job of the guy who I'm following in the story that much, but maybe it is subconscious.

• 20:38Bill Simmons?

  I watched 77, then I watched the directors. They cut out a scene when he's about to get promoted from the The Ash Girl. Yeah. And it's not in there. We don't really know anything about his job in this movie. He's just like off, gonna do. So I guess the, the point Spielberg, I guess, wanted to make in his final cut was this is just, doesn't matter what his job is. Yeah.

• 20:58Chris Ryan?

  And I think everything you need to know about him is that he seems incredibly frustrated. As he is like sitting in a cramped living room with three children and his wife.

• 21:06Bill Simmons?

  Well, the lesson really is don't have three kids.

• 21:10Sean Fennessey?

  Can confirm.

• 21:11Bill Simmons?

  Peter, Peter Biskin, it was a big month for him on the rewatchables. Yeah. He wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. He had a whole thing about this movie. And said, Spielberg's movies in particular colored by longing for the absent dad. A nostalgia for authority. His families are often fatherless. The plots are set in motion by the moral and emotional vacuum at the center of the home. And resolved by father surrogates. A little harsh. But not untrue.

• 21:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well.

• 21:40Bill Simmons?

  This is the Old Testament to that, then.

• 21:41Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, but I don't, do you want to get into it now? I mean, I think we understand his story very differently now. And, and his relationship to his parents is completely different. And so you've got 40 years of Spielberg movies that are more or less in that thematic vein that Biskin is writing about. But he learned a lot of things near, nearer to the, in the last 10 years about his parents that indicated that it was actually like his mother who was the cause of his parents' breakup and that his father did not abandon them, but in fact, there was an affair and like, it's all in The Fableman's. And if you watch The Fableman's, you understand his life completely differently. And now to watch all of his movies where he's got all this frustration and regret and anger about the way that his dad like a quote unquote abandoned them, but that isn't actually what happened. It puts such a strange lens on all these movies.

• 22:26Sean Fennessey?

  Because like, when you're a kid, you think you know what's going on with your parents and you have no idea. You have no clue what's really between them. And so for him to be like processing this for 30 years of the most popular movies of all time is so interesting.

• 22:36Bill Simmons?

  You agree with that?

• 22:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I think that, that he, the crucial thing that he said is that he would not have made the same movie if he had had children. Which I'm sure we're going to talk about a lot about Roy's decision making throughout this movie.

• 22:49Bill Simmons?

  Have a couple of spots.

• 22:50Chris Ryan?

  But that, that is like one of the most important things that he brings up. So it's like, yeah, I think you're right. He's making a lot of these films relating to his parents, but he's also making a lot of these films with his own kind of self-perception as a parent.

• 23:04Bill Simmons?

  Or he's making three versions of the same film, because that's what happened. He released The Theatrical in 77. It did amazingly well. It saved Columbia. Columbia was going broke. Their, their whole bacon depended on this movie doing well, and it did. But they rushed it. And they rushed it, I think, six, seven months ahead of when he wanted to do it. So then when they said they were re-releasing, he's like, I'm cool. I'll get behind it.

• 23:27Chris Ryan?

  Isn't this fucking crazy that the two biggest movies-

• 23:29Bill Simmons?

  But I have to redo it.

• 23:31Chris Ryan?

  Of this year and two of the biggest movies of the last 40, 50 years are Star Wars and Close Encounters, and both directors are like, this was just the version that I was ready, that, that was ready at the time when I had to turn this thing in.

• 23:43Bill Simmons?

  I think it's a good lesson in creativity, though. Turn them, sometimes maybe you're overthinking it too much, maybe turn it in. Cause even like the stuff they add in the special edition. The studio's like, we'll pay for this, we'll market it.

• 23:57Chris Ryan?

  That's why you do the redraftables, right?

• 23:59Bill Simmons?

  But they say to him, you have to show the inside of the spaceship, which they do. So if you get the 4K Blu-ray of it, they have the three versions. So we see the inside of the spaceship in that version. And I don't want to see the inside of the spaceship.

• 24:12Sean Fennessey?

  I don't either.

• 24:13Bill Simmons?

  That the whole point of this movie is you kind of don't know what's out there or what's in there, anything.

• 24:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Roy could get fucking vaporized the second he steps on that ship.

• 24:20Bill Simmons?

  So Spielberg agreed to it because he wanted to make all these other changes and cut all this fat from the movie that always drove him crazy. And then that he agreed to the spaceship, that drove him crazy. So now we get the director's cut in 98, which is the kind of official version.

• 24:34Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that's the best version. I think that's the one that features some new stuff from the 80s version, like the Kotopaxi, the finding the ship.

• 24:40Bill Simmons?

  Some good edits.

• 24:41Sean Fennessey?

  And it's cleaner, you understand LaCombe and Niri a little bit more than you do in the theatrical cut. But you don't have the spaceship interior, which I don't, I don't really get the appeal of that sequence at all. Ebert like loves that sequence and I don't get it at all.

• 24:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he really did. Well, Spielberg said they gave him 1.5 million to work on the special edition, which is a lot of money back in 1980. Anyway, huge hit for Steve, follows it up with 1941, which was not a huge hit, but leads to everything that happens in the 80s.

• 25:12Sean Fennessey?

  Do you, I know you did the Book of Basketball 2.0, but is there any part of you that wants to go back to the Book of Basketball? And like take a chapter out, add two more chapters in the middle, redo it.

• 25:22Chris Ryan?

  Say, oh, like I, now that.

• 25:23Bill Simmons?

  I would change so many things about it.

• 25:25Chris Ryan?

  Now that I've had 10 more years of LeBron, I want to say this, you know?

• 25:29Sean Fennessey?

  Set aside your fingers don't work, why don't you do it?

• 25:32Bill Simmons?

  Because my fingers don't work.

• 25:33Sean Fennessey?

  Is that the only reason?

• 25:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's the only reason.

• 25:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's so interesting because I totally agree with you, the compulsion of Lucas and Spielberg to just keep going back to these movies that at release were five-star all-time masterpiece classics.

• 25:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Sean Fennessey?

  Were movies that are like, these movies will live for 100 years. And they're like, eh, I got a couple of notes on for myself.

• 25:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I gotta get Jabba in here.

• 25:57Bill Simmons?

  The only thing.

• 25:57Sean Fennessey?

  Can you imagine if Jabba was in Close and Gathers? R2, isn't R2 underneath the spaceship?

• 26:02Bill Simmons?

  The only thing I can identify with, because obviously the dumb NBA book I wrote wasn't remotely like these two movies, but. You get, you go down the line with something where you have a deadline. And at some point, there's no going back. And you kind of have to finish it, even though deep down, you're like, like in that case, I just should have split that into two books. And it was so, it's so obvious now, like, why don't I just do the first book? And then the pyramid could have been the second book.

• 26:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Bill Simmons?

  But when you're like 75% down the road, you can't stop. And I assume sometimes that happens with a movie too, where it's like, it's gotta come out November 77. And you're just like, all right. And you just put your head down and you try to get to the deadline.

• 26:41Sean Fennessey?

  Is that how you felt having to recap the Alexander Diderio episode of True Detective?

• 26:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I wish I could go back.

• 26:52Sean Fennessey?

  Should I make this two episodes?

• 26:53Chris Ryan?

  I would just digitally edit out Andy.

• 26:56Bill Simmons?

  Andy's being just uncomfortable.

• 26:59Sean Fennessey?

  I'm here with my co-host, Jabba the Hutt.

• 27:00Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Bill Simmons?

  That's where you really need Amir Joe House to come in as a special guest host.

• 27:04Chris Ryan?

  I think 11:30 PM, Bad Mike Joe House.

• 27:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Chris Ryan?

  Would do a great job.

• 27:09Bill Simmons?

  Um, anyway, Dick.

• 27:10Chris Ryan?

  Oh, wait, I was just gonna say that just as far as the tinkering, you know, obviously we'll get to the part where, you know, eight different writers worked on this movie and tried to help him with it. And clearly like, he was relying on collaborators, but I do get the feeling like as he, you know, he would wake up and be like, hey, I wrote something last night. And so while we're here, let's shoot this and let's go try this. I wonder if the nature of the way he made the movie led to him wanting to kind of endlessly tinker on it. And because it was never, this is Tony Kushner's script and we are gonna nail it.

• 27:42Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 27:43Chris Ryan?

  This is David Koep's script and we are just gonna honor it.

• 27:45Bill Simmons?

  There's a lot of fun stuff about how much he actually wrote and whether he's even a good screenwriter. And it seems like there was like eight, nine people involved. There were two people helping him rewrite it. And one of the ways people ding him when the people weigh in is like, ah, he can't write a script. He doesn't know what the fuck he's doing with that, so.

• 28:02Chris Ryan?

  Julia Phillips put that in a very colorful way.

• 28:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I forgot about that book. I actually, I want to read that this summer. Cause there's an uncut version too of the Julia Phillips.

• 28:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think that they expanded it.

• 28:12Bill Simmons?

  She's just, she's just.

• 28:13Chris Ryan?

  Speaking of director's cuts.

• 28:15Bill Simmons?

  She's got the Uzi out.

• 28:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's called You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.

• 28:18Bill Simmons?

  Well, and she never worked again.

• 28:19Chris Ryan?

  So she was one of the producers, her and her husband, Michael, right?

• 28:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's a scabrous memoir of her time in Hollywood, snorting so much cocaine.

• 28:26Bill Simmons?

  She snorted so much cocaine during the filming of this movie that they bounced her.

• 28:30Chris Ryan?

  Mm hmm. From post-production, right?

• 28:31Bill Simmons?

  Early on the cocaine thing too, 1977, like that's pretty early to ruin your career with cocaine. It's like the tale.

• 28:37Chris Ryan?

  I'm sure there's some, some.

• 28:38Bill Simmons?

  Start of it.

• 28:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Guys out there who'd be like, I disagree.

• 28:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. No, it's like the first year though, where people.

• 28:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Bill Simmons?

  Were really doing that. Anyway, Dick Dreyfus, Jaws 75. Close Encounters and Goodbye Girl in 77 wins best actor for Goodbye Girl. A good example of that category, we always wanted for the Oscars.

• 28:58Chris Ryan?

  Best year.

• 28:58Sean Fennessey?

  Best year.

• 28:59Bill Simmons?

  Best year. We have to had big things in at least two movies. The all time easiest, but it could be anybody. It could be director, it could be a screenwriter, any, anyone. I don't know why they don't do that. We've never found out a good reason.

• 29:12Sean Fennessey?

  I, you know, just add it to the list of the 300 categories I've given for free to the Academy Awards.

• 29:17Bill Simmons?

  Best, best year.

• 29:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Bill Simmons?

  No brainer. Uh, passes on Jaws two, a movie that we will do on the Rewatch at some point.

• 29:24Sean Fennessey?

  Jaws was good.

• 29:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Bill Simmons?

  And then from 78 to 81, The Big Fix, The Competition, and Whose Life Is It Anyway? A movie that he says afterwards, he has no memory of making because by that point he was doing so much cocaine that it actually like burned a hole in his brain and he can't remember.

• 29:40Sean Fennessey?

  He kind of gets it back with Let It Ride and Stakeout. He gets a couple of good ones.

• 29:43Bill Simmons?

  Big, what about Bob?

• 29:44Sean Fennessey?

  What about Bob?

• 29:45Bill Simmons?

  Big Dick Dreyfus comeback, 86 range.

• 29:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Which you never would have predicted because he's such an unlikely star in the first place.

• 29:52Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Sean Fennessey?

  So him like having a comeback.

• 29:54Chris Ryan?

  Him is like being a more nebbish Dustin Hoffman is an incredible.

• 29:57Bill Simmons?

  Well, it starts with American Graffiti, which I should have mentioned. He also passed on the China Syndrome.

• 30:03Bill Simmons?

  And he left all that jazz during rehearsals.

• 30:05Sean Fennessey?

  Is he gonna be in the Michael Douglas part? What part was he?

• 30:07Bill Simmons?

  Michael Douglas part.

• 30:07Chris Ryan?

  What was he gonna play in all the jazz? Schreider's part?

• 30:09Bill Simmons?

  He left the Schreider part.

• 30:11Chris Ryan?

  Get the fuck out. Really?

• 30:13Bill Simmons?

  Left the Schreider part and they replaced him with Schreider. Couldn't get the hang of it.

• 30:17Sean Fennessey?

  That's so much better. Dreyfus would have been terrible.

• 30:19Chris Ryan?

  My god.

• 30:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's a rough one.

• 30:24Bill Simmons?

  Who's Dreyfus in the last 25 years?

• 30:28Chris Ryan?

  Speaking of they don't make them like this anymore.

• 30:30Bill Simmons?

  Mid 70s Dreyfus. Who is it?

• 30:33Sean Fennessey?

  God.

• 30:34Bill Simmons?

  Cause now I just feel like they would have put Jonah Hill in this movie. No shots fired at Jonah Hill.

• 30:39Sean Fennessey?

  Jonah was started as a comic actor. This guy was like a dramatic actor.

• 30:43Bill Simmons?

  But don't you think they would have just put like comic actors in here now? They don't let ugly people lead blockbusters anymore.

• 30:48Sean Fennessey?

  And that's true. He's just, he's just way too normal looking. He just looks like a guy at the grocery store.

• 30:53Chris Ryan?

  A lot of the guys who I would be like, oh, maybe it would have been this person have just, they just get made into superheroes and eat like three times their body weight in protein to look better, but like Toby Maguire has a little bit of Dreyfus-ish vibes.

• 31:08Bill Simmons?

  But it's all people that also could have played a superhero.

• 31:10Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 31:11Bill Simmons?

  It's like Paul Rudd.

• 31:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, right.

• 31:13Bill Simmons?

  Woody Harrelson.

• 31:14Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right. But these are all guys who like, after six months in a lot of creatine slash HGH, like literally can put on spandex, you know, like Richard Dreyfus can't do that. But I mean Spielberg has said it multiple times, and I think this is, this one's the best example of it. That he is like his ultimate emotional stand-in. That when he's making a movie that he feels personally connected to. Obviously Jaws, this film always, there's a handful of movies that he makes where he's like, I need to get something across about how I feel. This movie is about how Steven Spielberg feels. And Dreyfus is the best at that, even though this is like one of the greatest casting what-ifs of all time. The list of people that he went to for this part is amazing.

• 31:51Bill Simmons?

  I also watched The Goodbye Girl recently. In the past six months. No idea how he won best actor. It's just inexplicable. Solid movie, but basically a really well-written rom-com and Dreyfus is just.

• 32:06Sean Fennessey?

  But shouldn't it be Marsha? Did Marsha Mason win? Like, it shouldn't. She should have been the one who was like the focus of the awards campaign.

• 32:11Bill Simmons?

  Dreyfus just comes in. He's coming in hot.

• 32:15Sean Fennessey?

  He's like a dick out of work actor.

• 32:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and she's, she's got a kid.

• 32:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:19Bill Simmons?

  But he's like full-fledged Russell Westbrook 2017-ing it. He's like, I'm also gonna grab all the rebounds. He's just doing everything.

• 32:27Sean Fennessey?

  2017, that's when Against Westbrook was published. Do you remember that? Yeah.

• 32:31Bill Simmons?

  So he's got that performance, but then he's got this one, which is so much more interesting of a performance. And of course, he wins for the other movie. But I think he's just fantastic in this movie.

• 32:40Chris Ryan?

  This movie was pretty criminally overlooked, I thought.

• 32:41Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, but like.

• 32:42Bill Simmons?

  I think this is his best performance. I really do. Like, and I think I've seen all of the Dreyfus movies. I think this is his best one. He's like unravels over the course of 90 minutes in a way that, I don't know, I think there's some real art to it.

• 32:56Chris Ryan?

  He was nominated for Mr. Holland, right?

• 32:58Bill Simmons?

  He's great. Mr. Holland is pretty good.

• 33:00Sean Fennessey?

  Um, he's got.

• 33:02Bill Simmons?

  He was nominated for it. He was.

• 33:04Sean Fennessey?

  How many Oscar nominations does he have?

• 33:06Bill Simmons?

  Did you guys do that? Yeah, we didn't invite you because you don't like that movie that much.

• 33:10Sean Fennessey?

  That's a great pod, though. That was me and Van. That was really fun.

• 33:13Bill Simmons?

  I think that's when Van, that was his initiation to get into the Rewatch.

• 33:16Sean Fennessey?

  Was that the first one?

• 33:17Bill Simmons?

  Mr. Holland's. One of the first ones. Yeah.

• 33:19Sean Fennessey?

  That was a very fun episode.

• 33:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think.

• 33:24Chris Ryan?

  I love how it's an initiation. You gotta go kill a guy.

• 33:27Bill Simmons?

  Be Mr. Holland's opus of this. Explain the Rowena part.

• 33:31Sean Fennessey?

  Is this like, this is one of the most egregious Best Picture stumps of all time, isn't it?

• 33:36Sean Fennessey?

  It's amazing to me that it's not nominated, especially given the crop of what it's up against.

• 33:41Bill Simmons?

  I want to talk about that right after this break because this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Life is about choices.

• 33:49Bill Simmons?

  Including the Oscars, when they screw up, some best actor stuff and some best movie stuff. We love to go back and wonder why they made the choices they did, which as we get in the seventies and eighties is pretty crazy with the Oscars. At State Farm, their goal is to help you make decisions that you feel good about. That's why with the State Farm Personal Price Plan, you can choose the right amount of coverage to help create a competitive price. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. Okay. Annie Hall wins for Best Picture. We covered this in Star Wars.

• 34:34Bill Simmons?

  Star Wars is nominated. The Goodbye Girls nominated Julia and The Turning Point.

• 34:40Chris Ryan?

  Haven't seen that. I don't think.

• 34:42Sean Fennessey?

  I have because we did a 1977 draft on The Big Picture and I watched it. And it's a perfectly adequate drama about ballet.

• 34:50Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:52Sean Fennessey?

  And it is.

• 34:52Bill Simmons?

  It's just the way it worked back then.

• 34:53Sean Fennessey?

  But.

• 34:54Bill Simmons?

  Close Encounters was like too popcorny and too.

• 34:57Sean Fennessey?

  But this movie got nine Oscar nominations.

• 35:00Bill Simmons?

  Spielberg got nominated for director, which is the weirdest part of it.

• 35:03Sean Fennessey?

  And it, but it does, it's not like it's Armageddon where it got like all the effects and sound stuff. It's like it got a supporting actress nomination, you know? It won for cinematography. There was a special achievement Oscar for the sound effects editing for this movie. So it got, it was acknowledged as an important film. So for it to not hit Best Picture is so strange.

• 35:26Chris Ryan?

  It's not a kid popcorn movie. It's like asking really deep questions and it's going places.

• 35:33Bill Simmons?

  And it was a phenomenon. It was the third biggest movie of the year. So Goodbye Girl got for Best Picture, not for director. That's, and Spielberg got for director, not the movie. Turning Point got both, which I think is the year's pass. And then Dreyfus doesn't get nominated at all for this movie. And I guess is there a rule you can't be in the same category twice? I don't know. Or it's just, has that happened? Has anyone ever been best actor for two movies out of the five spots?

• 35:59Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I believe it has happened, but the, the reason that the director of, um, The Goodbye Girl wasn't nominated is because it's the same director of The Turning Point. It's Herbert Ross. They're both Herbert Ross movies.

• 36:11Bill Simmons?

  So that's why Dreyfus couldn't get the double best actor either.

• 36:14Sean Fennessey?

  No, you can get nominated twice in the same category for the same performances, but it's usually very hard because there's, there's a lot of vote splitting historically.

• 36:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, and he has to be best actor. You couldn't have squeezed him. And the only actor that got nominated was, uh, our girl Melinda Dillon.

• 36:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Bill Simmons?

  Can't wait to talk about her.

• 36:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 36:31Bill Simmons?

  Anyway, Dreyfus, um, he ends up winning, so it works out great. Truffaut's in this movie?

• 36:36Chris Ryan?

  He is, man.

• 36:36Sean Fennessey?

  Hell, yeah.

• 36:37Chris Ryan?

  Frank.

• 36:39Chris Ryan?

  Your boy.

• 36:39Bill Simmons?

  Obviously wasn't understanding the significance in 1977 as I was holding on to my dad terrified, wondering where, where, uh, the dad of three kids was going on a spaceship, but, um.

• 36:51Sean Fennessey?

  Do you want to do the belt for Truffaut films? You know, like, does it go like Wild Child and then Ben Bored, Stolen Kisses, The Last Metro? Like, what, how, what do you think? Where does it end?

• 37:01Bill Simmons?

  Truffaut Month?

• 37:02Chris Ryan?

  The, should we do Truffaut? Yeah, that'd be great.

• 37:06Bill Simmons?

  Jules' Gym?

• 37:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Four Hundred Blows?

• 37:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, this was his only role in an English language film and his only acting role in a film that he did not direct. And Spielberg, in one of the great heat checks of all time, who's barely done anything, is like, I'm gonna get this guy in my movie and he's just gonna act in it.

• 37:22Sean Fennessey?

  It worked.

• 37:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 37:23Chris Ryan?

  And Truffaut's like, I don't really act. Like, I just do my thing.

• 37:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Chris Ryan?

  And he was like, perfect.

• 37:28Sean Fennessey?

  He's also like, I don't speak English. I can't really understand what you guys are talking about.

• 37:31Bill Simmons?

  And also, half of the acting he has to do in this movie is basically like, just look at that wall over there because we're gonna put these special effects in later.

• 37:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Bill Simmons?

  And, uh, I don't know, I like him.

• 37:40Sean Fennessey?

  He's tremendously effective in this movie. He's really good.

• 37:43Chris Ryan?

  Helps that Balaban is just like, like, that's a great interpreter to have for him. Yeah.

• 37:48Bill Simmons?

  What is, is there any other equivalents of this? Of Truffaut being in a Spielberg movie?

• 37:53Chris Ryan?

  Well, you know.

• 37:54Bill Simmons?

  Like the fourth Spielberg movie ever made?

• 37:56Chris Ryan?

  Well, David Lynch was just in a Spielberg movie.

• 37:58Sean Fennessey?

  That's true. David Lynch was in The Fableman's, playing a director.

• 38:00Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like John Huston was in Chinatown. Like there were, there like.

• 38:05Bill Simmons?

  John Huston in Chinatown is a good one.

• 38:06Sean Fennessey?

  There were, there were, there were examples of this, because you know, a lot of.

• 38:09Bill Simmons?

  Sidney Pollack in As Wet Shit, he fucking vest on.

• 38:11Chris Ryan?

  Sidney Pollack and Michael Clayton too, really good.

• 38:14Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, like Scorsese played Vincent Van Gogh in Curacao was Ron. You know, or no, Curacao was Dreams. Like it, it's something that like directors would do for each other as a sign of admiration.

• 38:25Bill Simmons?

  But not for a director who's 29 and has had one hit.

• 38:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 38:28Bill Simmons?

  Just, just a weird choice, but I like it.

• 38:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's cool.

• 38:33Bill Simmons?

  He's like, what if Roy has a threesome with Linda Dillon and UFO? UFO alien. Just kind of rat it.

• 38:41Chris Ryan?

  That would be very, very true foe.

• 38:43Sean Fennessey?

  It would.

• 38:44Bill Simmons?

  John Williams did the score for this movie.

• 38:46Chris Ryan?

  What a year for this guy. Talk about best year.

• 38:49Sean Fennessey?

  He sure did.

• 38:49Chris Ryan?

  Talk about best year. Start, is it Close Encounters and Star Wars in the same year?

• 38:54Bill Simmons?

  Did the score? And then Spielberg edited the film to match the score.

• 38:58Sean Fennessey?

  Insane.

• 38:59Bill Simmons?

  Cause you said John Williams was blacked out during Star Wars. He might have still been blacked out.

• 39:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Bill Simmons?

  Just like fucking grinding it out.

• 39:05Sean Fennessey?

  He said they did 300 five note combinations. To get to the place where they wanted to go with this score. And that this is the one that they landed on. And he wrote the movie around the combination. I don't even know. Spielberg is just, he's an alien, you know, where it's just like, he just sees and understands things that everybody, even the people who work really closely with him are just like, how did you know that this was gonna work?

• 39:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, like there's certain things where I'm like, did you build this entire film around the people in the Indian, like the Indians pointing at the sky? Like, does the, the film itself like explodes when that happens?

• 39:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Chris Ryan?

  But I'm like, did you have that in your head when you were writing it? Did you know you were gonna get that image?

• 39:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Bill Simmons?

  John Williams, seventy-five to seventy-eight, Jaws, Close Encounters, Star Wars, Jaws Two, and Superman.

• 39:53Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty good.

• 39:54Bill Simmons?

  Just five of the highlights.

• 39:55Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty good.

• 39:56Bill Simmons?

  Then he's like, I'm gonna come back in eighty-one and eighty-two with Raiders and ET back-to-back.

• 40:00Chris Ryan?

  This is low-key been John Williams' month, too, I guess.

• 40:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, and then he's like, I'm gonna rip off another forty-plus years.

• 40:05Sean Fennessey?

  Did he do the score for Death Wish as well?

• 40:07Bill Simmons?

  I don't think he did.

• 40:07Chris Ryan?

  Hancock did, man.

• 40:08Bill Simmons?

  I don't think they asked him. Yeah, I heard me Hancock did it.

• 40:11Chris Ryan?

  That'd be great if his pseudonym was Herbie Hancock. When I like to do a little jazz over some vigilante killings.

• 40:18Bill Simmons?

  Would you be surprised if John Williams had an alter ego, though, like Garth Brooks did?

• 40:22Chris Ryan?

  Uh, no, I'm not.

• 40:23Bill Simmons?

  It was just like, yeah, I love making, I love low-budget horror movies.

• 40:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Will Johniums.

• 40:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Nineteen point four million dollar budget made three hundred and six million, third biggest movie of nineteen seventy-seven.

• 40:35Sean Fennessey?

  Sheesh.

• 40:36Bill Simmons?

  Raj gave it four stars when it came out, then another four stars in nineteen eighty, and wrote, "I thought the original film was an astonishing achievement, capturing the feeling of awe and wonder we have when considering the likelihood of life beyond the earth. This new version gets another four stars. It is quite simply a better film, so much better that it might inspire the uncharitable question, why didn't Spielberg make it this good the first time?" Settle down, Raj.

• 41:01Sean Fennessey?

  Um, what do we do then? You know, like when, when Meltzer has a five-star match, but then he revisits the tape and sees that he missed a couple of holds, and he's like, can we do a five-and-a-half-star match?

• 41:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Sean Fennessey?

  Like, how do you go from a higher than four?

• 41:15Bill Simmons?

  I didn't realize that went through the spanners announcer's table in this two-match.

• 41:19Chris Ryan?

  Do you think, uh, this is Spielberg's greatest achievement?

• 41:24Bill Simmons?

  I still think it's Jaws.

• 41:28Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 41:29Bill Simmons?

  Degree, degree difficulty of Jaws is ninety-nine point nine out of a hundred. I still don't understand how they made that movie.

• 41:36Sean Fennessey?

  There's a lot of...

• 41:36Bill Simmons?

  He's in the ocean for like, how many months when we did that? Like, he's in the ocean for six months.

• 41:41Chris Ryan?

  I, I think that there are better movies that he has made. I think visually, this is like, as virtuistic as it gets. Like, there are things in this movie, and I know a lot of that could be Zigmund, and it could be like, the different people working in special effects. The totality of the visual achievement for me is like, the best he gets.

• 42:00Sean Fennessey?

  Because of my age, there's something about Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, and then soon Saving Private Ryan, where it felt like he was kind of coming back for his middle age to be like, just so you know, I am the greatest of all time. That those three movies in three completely different ways are, they stand alongside.

• 42:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 42:20Sean Fennessey?

  This and Jaws to me.

• 42:22Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's a different question, right? Degree of difficulty, it's gotta be Jaws, though. Just have fucking crazy that movie was. This is, feels like the most majestic movie he made.

• 42:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:35Bill Simmons?

  E.T.'s probably the most relatable. Like, it's just, E.T. was a phenomenon.

• 42:40Chris Ryan?

  Raiders is maybe the most fun.

• 42:42Bill Simmons?

  Raiders is the most fun, and then Schindler's List is the most meaningful. Jurassic is like, he learns all the lessons from his earlier movies and just throws into that. And then Saving Private Ryan's like, probably the best pure filmmaking. Like, the battle scene, the first 20 minutes is probably the peak of his career, right?

• 43:00Sean Fennessey?

  Dobbins and I were just saying this on the pod, though. I genuinely think 50 years from now, people will also look at West Side Story and Fableman's as part of this, like, top 10, 15.

• 43:10Chris Ryan?

  Twilight.

• 43:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, him kind of in his final stage, understanding how to make a movie better than anybody, and still pouring himself into it. So, I don't know.

• 43:17Bill Simmons?

  You know who also liked this movie? Our girl Pauline Kael.

• 43:20Chris Ryan?

  How about that?

• 43:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Said, "Very few movies have ever hit upon this combination of fantasy and amusement. The Wizard of Oz, perhaps, in a plain or down home way." She's a big fan.

• 43:32Bill Simmons?

  Steve.

• 43:33Chris Ryan?

  Are there any haters out there on this movie?

• 43:37Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna get to that.

• 43:38Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 43:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well, can I point something out about Ebert and Siskel? Because I went back and rewatched their segment about it. And they both did something that we do all the time, that I think is really interesting, and I think it's important to clock commentary about movies, even movies that are considered all-time great in real time. They both are like, this movie kind of drags a little bit. The second act is a little soft in the middle, and it's not that great, which is something you would say about just kind of any movie that you see on an ongoing basis.

• 44:05Chris Ryan?

  Like the Roy making the mashed potato mountain, kind of?

• 44:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think the lead up to Going to Devil's Tower. And I don't know that that's like, I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but now when we talk about a movie like this, it's so sacred and so important, and you're asking, is it literally his greatest achievement? Arguably the greatest American filmmaker out, since John Ford, whatever.

• 44:26Sean Fennessey?

  Now, we like genuflect at it. But even in the time when it came out, critics have this desire to be like, nothing's perfect, like, just so you know, even though you stole our breath, you could have like tightened this up a little bit, which I find very funny for a movie that is so meaningful to so many people that endures 50 years later, that that's not even really found in Ebert's review. In his written piece, he doesn't say like, oh, it kind of sags a little bit in the middle. But on TV, he found himself like reverting to this comment that you can make about any kind of movie.

• 44:58Chris Ryan?

  We just did it on Star Wars where we're like, there's a lot of droids in the first 30 minutes of this movie. I'll say this, I, I kind of agree with him about Close Encounters where it's like, oh, okay, that, that 15 to 20 minutes of Roy losing it is slow. But there are even in those sequences, moments visually where you're like with Roy on the phone with Ronnie and the fucking tower is on the TV and the tower is on his table. And you're like, turn, turn, turn. And you realize like the way he has blocked it, the way he's framed it is literally taking over your brain because you're like, he just has to look at the TV. Just look at the TV before it's too late. Look at the TV. And you're like, oh, my God, that's just like a really small domestic scene. And he's still at the top of his game doing it.

• 45:42Bill Simmons?

  I can only judge it with the, my version of PR and basketball. The Zoe Simmons looking down versus looking upscale. And there was a lot of looking down at her phone the first 20 minutes. But then when he gets to the railroad tracks and the first car behind, then the second car, the lights go up. It got definitely.

• 46:02Sean Fennessey?

  This was her first time?

• 46:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Chris Ryan?

  4K?

• 46:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is, is arguably the case for physical media.

• 46:10Chris Ryan?

  I can't, this is really important to say.

• 46:13Bill Simmons?

  When do you want to do this?

• 46:14Sean Fennessey?

  I, I mean, whenever you want, but just like this movie in 4K.

• 46:17Bill Simmons?

  Well, do your three, do your three movies.

• 46:20Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, what did I, I forget what I said. What did I say?

• 46:21Bill Simmons?

  The three movies that have three different versions of them?

• 46:24Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, um, it's this, it's Blade Runner and it's Apocalypse Now.

• 46:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Sean Fennessey?

  That the great thing, obviously, one of the great things about physical media is you get to see these various editions of the movies that are made over time. But those are also three movies that. Kind of didn't look great on TV and don't look great on streaming. But when you put those three discs, those three 4K discs into your machine and you can watch any of the versions you want to, you ascend to heaven. You know, you're like, this is how it was supposed to be seen.

• 46:51Bill Simmons?

  I think it's a really, we make this point all the time. This is one of the all time best examples of it. This movie got killed by square TVs and crappy quality. It did not, it was not a movie that was on TNT and TBS for a hundred years, the same way some of these other ones were. And then when you watch it with the wide TV and the light and it's fucking.

• 47:11Chris Ryan?

  Might be the longest great shock order I've ever like compiled and I don't know if I've ever seen it look this good. Like I, I might have actually been watching Close Encounters like 10 times.

• 47:24Bill Simmons?

  The White House with the stars is like breathtaking, but there's like 40 of those.

• 47:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Roy and Jillian meeting as all the people are swarming by them.

• 47:34Sean Fennessey?

  The India sequence and just the, the detail of the hordes moving in the background while there's action happening in the foreground. I mean, the entire final 20 minutes.

• 47:43Bill Simmons?

  The first five minutes.

• 47:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  The shot of the clouds behind the devil's tower. I couldn't figure out, like, did they add those clouds?

• 47:49Chris Ryan?

  When they climb over the mound.

• 47:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:51Chris Ryan?

  And the camera goes up with them and then shoots up.

• 47:54Sean Fennessey?

  Just Barry opening the door and the wave of orange light. It's, there's just so many moments in this movie where you, that are jaw dropping.

• 48:02Bill Simmons?

  Most rewatchable scene. I really liked the air traffic controller scene.

• 48:06Chris Ryan?

  Oh my God, it's awesome.

• 48:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's good.

• 48:08Bill Simmons?

  TW517, you wish to report a UFO over?

• 48:14Bill Simmons?

  The guy's like, nah, I didn't see anything.

• 48:17Chris Ryan?

  I wouldn't know what to report.

• 48:19Bill Simmons?

  Good.

• 48:21Speaker 06

  That was really close. Area 31 is out of 340 on the traffic. Ask them if they want to report officially. EWA 517, do you want to report a UFO over?

• 48:37Speaker 06

  EWA 517, do you want to report a UFO over?

• 48:42Speaker 06

  Negative, we don't want to report. Area 31, do you wish to report a UFO? Over.

• 48:51Speaker 06

  Either we want to report one of those either. Uh, Aries 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind of a?

• 48:59Speaker 06

  I would know what kind of reports to file, Senator. Uh, Aries 31, uh, me neither. I'll try to track traffic to destination of it.

• 49:06Bill Simmons?

  But everything about that scene, which shouldn't really be a good scene at all.

• 49:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 49:10Bill Simmons?

  All the actors are really good. The way he does the camera, he's building suspense and it's just like a guy on a radio.

• 49:16Chris Ryan?

  He does something where he, uh, the main air traffic controller is talking and talking to the pilots. And as he pulls out another guy, then another guy keeps putting their face in the frame and saying something different about what could be happening. He's like, oh, is this military running like rocket launches like over there? And like, do we have some private plane doing it? And then you, it's just, it's just such masterful filmmaking and you subconsciously retain all this information about a situation that ultimately doesn't really matter.

• 49:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Chris Ryan?

  But it's just great.

• 49:44Sean Fennessey?

  Builds the tension beautifully. That's what Kevin Nagandi should have done during the draft lottery. You know, he just let it blur. He was like, the Sixers lost their pick. It's like, just, hey, settle down. Like, don't overreact.

• 49:53Bill Simmons?

  Well, they needed this Spielberg move, like he does it in this scene a couple of times. He's really good at either zooming in on somebody's shocked face or zooming back from somebody's shocked face. So we needed like just a shot of Jay Billis, like the slow version of Jay Billis, like in complete awe of what was happening.

• 50:10Sean Fennessey?

  Or Daryl Morey in the moment when we saw it revealed.

• 50:14Bill Simmons?

  The little kid, Barry, waking up with his room going bonkers.

• 50:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's amazing.

• 50:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Sean Fennessey?

  The monkey with the symbols.

• 50:22Bill Simmons?

  This is another one where I just have to say in 1977, we did not have like a ton of awesome special effects for scenes like this. Now this is a layup. You just CGI shit and the monkey, but like

• 50:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Bill Simmons?

  Just from a how, how are they doing this standpoint? That scene was huge.

• 50:36Sean Fennessey?

  I see this, this scene in particular as like a tremendous precursor for Poltergeist. Like his room is just reminds me of that kid's room at the clown in Poltergeist.

• 50:45Bill Simmons?

  Really great Boston University shirt on that kid.

• 50:48Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 50:48Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 50:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:49Bill Simmons?

  I really like it. Like that in Boston represented.

• 50:51Sean Fennessey?

  Why was he wearing a Boston University shirt in Muncie, Indiana?

• 50:54Chris Ryan?

  I bet that's where his dad who bounced on him went.

• 50:57Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow. What are you saying about Bostonians? You see what he just indicated?

• 51:01Bill Simmons?

  This is a movie about child abandonment.

• 51:03Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 51:05Bill Simmons?

  Travis's UFO encounter all the way through the highway chase. The fake out with the second car that I mentioned, where it turns out to be the UFO is clearly the, "Okay, motherfucker!" The word for the exact moment, the movie goes up a notch.

• 51:20Chris Ryan?

  It's also the Fortune 3 clap for the most giftable moment of him being like, taken up by the light.

• 51:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the flashlight mistake still hits.

• 51:28Chris Ryan?

  That hit, that, I, I used that in my mind when Sixers got the third pick.

• 51:33Chris Ryan?

  "I'm watching Rutgers!"

• 51:38Bill Simmons?

  Him almost hitting the kid in his truck.

• 51:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Bill Simmons?

  It's a great, oh no, you just think the kid's gonna get pancake? And then the UFO's going by and then them chasing him, the one guy goes off the cliff, like that's, holy shit, that's a great seven minutes.

• 51:51Chris Ryan?

  All through the, the Told Plaza. Do we still have Told Plazas?

• 51:55Sean Fennessey?

  We do.

• 51:56Bill Simmons?

  I assume, I don't remember anything about seeing this in the theater, other than being scared at the end, but I assume when the lights go up behind him, that was probably a noise made by the audience.

• 52:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Bill Simmons?

  Right? Like, oh, like Sinners had that a little bit when, when she walks away, Josh Allen's wife, when she walks away from the group.

• 52:17Sean Fennessey?

  She's formally being addressed now. Her name's Hailee Steinfeld.

• 52:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Bill Simmons?

  When Josh Allen's wife walks away.

• 52:22Chris Ryan?

  Drake May would never allow his, his, his wife to be in the film.

• 52:24Bill Simmons?

  No way. And all of a sudden that vampire ends up behind him.

• 52:28Sean Fennessey?

  Bill's won the AFC East nine times in a row.

• 52:30Chris Ryan?

  Thought about that, yeah.

• 52:31Bill Simmons?

  Drake May's not marrying actress, he's got a seventh grade girlfriend.

• 52:35Sean Fennessey?

  Well, God bless him for that.

• 52:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he's a loyal guy.

• 52:41Bill Simmons?

  Love Drake May, he's all I have now. Jason Tatum's out for a year, I just have Drake May.

• 52:46Sean Fennessey?

  I was waiting, okay, so we're in minute fifty-one?

• 52:50Chris Ryan?

  I asked Sean if he was gonna bring Jason Tatum up and he was like, "No, I don't think so." And I was like, "I definitely am."

• 52:54Bill Simmons?

  It's fine, I knew it was coming.

• 52:59Chris Ryan?

  Now the, you know.

• 53:00Bill Simmons?

  The Northern India scene?

• 53:01Chris Ryan?

  Thoughts of where is the GT?

• 53:07Bill Simmons?

  My god.

• 53:10Sean Fennessey?

  For the record, I have not said anything. I, before we go to India, the one thing that's really cool about the first 20, 30 minutes is you're like, that's a spaceship. Like, there's no confusion. There's no like, oh, what is this conspiracy? It's like, that's a fucking spaceship from outer space.

• 53:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Sean Fennessey?

  And you know that you're in a movie where there, there aliens are, if not, they're not gonna show up, that he, what he's experiencing is real, even if it feels like a dream.

• 53:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Unlike when Jason Tatum went down, and it wasn't a dream.

• 53:38Sean Fennessey?

  Well.

• 53:38Bill Simmons?

  It was real.

• 53:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well, perspective matters.

• 53:41Bill Simmons?

  The northern India scene.

• 54:14Sean Fennessey?

  I texted you guys when I was rewatching it, because I was like, this is, my, I, my bones are chilled by this. I, to me, I was like, this is movies to me, to make something like this.

• 54:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Chris Ryan?

  It's the.

• 54:23Bill Simmons?

  Now they would just CGI all the extras.

• 54:24Chris Ryan?

  It's the directing version of the Rick Dalton Award. It's like, holy shit, dude. Every shot, every like, camera movement.

• 54:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Chris Ryan?

  The fingers, like, the crowd.

• 54:33Sean Fennessey?

  But just hearing that five note thing sung by those, the Indian men, and even though you don't know where the movie's going, the first time you see the movie, you're like, there's something special about this melody. I don't know what it is, but he's communicating to you that this sound matters.

• 54:50Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Sean Fennessey?

  Which is just great movie making.

• 54:52Bill Simmons?

  They come from Linda Dillon's house and take Barry.

• 54:55Chris Ryan?

  Incredible.

• 54:56Bill Simmons?

  Right through the dog door. Never, don't have a dog door is one of the lessons of this movie.

• 54:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Bill Simmons?

  Just open the door, let your dog out.

• 55:01Sean Fennessey?

  You've never had one?

• 55:03Bill Simmons?

  First of all, it's, it's like, just an invitation for burglars. They're always like, just big enough for somebody to squeeze through.

• 55:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 55:10Bill Simmons?

  Well, but if you have a burglar crew.

• 55:12Sean Fennessey?

  You think Penguin and Richard could fit through a dog door?

• 55:14Bill Simmons?

  No, I think Richard Dreyfuss could have.

• 55:16Chris Ryan?

  Oh, it's like if you have Ocean's Eleven, you gotta have the servant, the sleigh guy.

• 55:19Bill Simmons?

  One short guy, yeah.

• 55:22Sean Fennessey?

  Dog door in Indiana, too. It's like, it's fucking cold there.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  True.

• 55:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  Like, what are you doing?

• 55:27Bill Simmons?

  Dog doors don't exist anymore.

• 55:30Bill Simmons?

  Like, if I went to somebody's house and they had a dog door, I would, I wouldn't know what was going on.

• 55:33Chris Ryan?

  You wouldn't trust them.

• 55:34Bill Simmons?

  No, I would just be like, what are you guys doing?

• 55:37Speaker 05

  My family has a dog door, so how dare you?

• 55:39Bill Simmons?

  Which family?

• 55:40Speaker 05

  My, my parents.

• 55:42Bill Simmons?

  They still have a dog door?

• 55:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it goes to the backyard where it's fenced in.

• 55:46Bill Simmons?

  Oh, well, that's acceptable.

• 55:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Is there, do you, do you lock the dog door at night?

• 55:50Speaker 05

  No.

• 55:51Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 55:51Sean Fennessey?

  They live in a warm other city.

• 55:53Speaker 05

  They live in the Bay Area.

• 55:54Chris Ryan?

  And they're a lot, a lot of tall thieves there, so they can't get into the dog door.

• 55:57Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 55:57Bill Simmons?

  But if people get over the fence, they're getting in your house anyway.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  Well, I guess. I mean, if all the doors are locked.

• 56:05Sean Fennessey?

  Let's FaceTime them right now and tour your parents' home, just so we can get a look.

• 56:10Chris Ryan?

  Let's stage a robbery to see what they were back.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  That's honestly a good idea. We could do that.

• 56:14Bill Simmons?

  I have some nitpicks about that Melinda Dillon house scene in a second.

• 56:17Sean Fennessey?

  Picturing Tom Noonan with a map to Craig's parents' house.

• 56:23Chris Ryan?

  This is out there.

• 56:23Sean Fennessey?

  It's out, you gotta grab it.

• 56:25Bill Simmons?

  I enjoy the big air, Air Force Town Hall.

• 56:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:28Bill Simmons?

  Just because I like Town Hall scenes.

• 56:30Sean Fennessey?

  This is a UFO.

• 56:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 56:32Chris Ryan?

  And it's also good because it's one of the few times in the film that I think Roy is like, that I didn't want, I don't want to be like this.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:44Chris Ryan?

  But it's, like, I didn't want to see this, is the line he has. It's good, it's cool.

• 56:48Bill Simmons?

  Well, one of the best scenes in the movie is the mashed potatoes scene.

• 56:57Speaker 07

  I can't describe it, what I'm feeling, what I'm thinking.

• 57:06Speaker 07

  This means something.

• 57:10Speaker 07

  This is important.

• 57:16Bill Simmons?

  I wrote down Spielberg is the GOAT of these scenes. I don't know why he's so good at them.

• 57:20Chris Ryan?

  It's like the pouring the wine, the wine scene in, uh, in Jaws, like when they're sitting around the table.

• 57:26Bill Simmons?

  Or the kid, or the kid imitating.

• 57:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Bill Simmons?

  Mm-hmm. But he's just really good at, like, the most normal family thing is happening, but there's something also major happening. Please pay attention. The little kid in this scene is so good, the eldest son, just watching him and his, his mouth starts crivering and he's like, my fucking dad's losing his mind right now.

• 57:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Barry gets a lot of the praise for this movie as, like, the great kid actor, with the kid who plays, uh, near his eldest son is really, really good.

• 57:50Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he's excellent.

• 57:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 57:53Bill Simmons?

  I have, uh, I have three left. Roy loses his shit and starts throwing things into his house.

• 57:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Bill Simmons?

  When they eavesdrop on the UFO communication before they go down and then the whole ending. I don't know. How do you, how do you separate? We get Barry back.

• 58:10Chris Ryan?

  We need Larry from Los Angeles.

• 58:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Roy gets a red USA jumpsuit. Roy's going in spaceship. We're done.

• 58:18Sean Fennessey?

  I love when, uh, did we, are we gonna talk about Heineck? When the Heineck emerges with the pipe?

• 58:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Sean Fennessey?

  Like just as the aliens are coming out. That's a, that's a great moment.

• 58:27Bill Simmons?

  What's the most rewatchable?

• 58:29Chris Ryan?

  I'm probably gonna go Roy's Close Encounter. The truck.

• 58:34Sean Fennessey?

  Railroad crossing. Yeah, me too.

• 58:36Bill Simmons?

  I really like the mashed potatoes, you know? This is turning into my favorite category. What's the most blank thing about this movie? In this case, the most 1977 thing.

• 58:44Chris Ryan?

  I had kind of a funny one for this that I hadn't occurred to me before, but the most 1977 thing about this movie is that World War II is only 30 years prior.

• 58:53Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 58:53Chris Ryan?

  So they're all like, these guys disappeared in 1945. And it's like, yeah, well, that's actually just, that's younger than this movie is to us.

• 59:02Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 59:02Chris Ryan?

  You know, or that's more recent than this movie is to us. So.

• 59:05Bill Simmons?

  What'd you have?

• 59:06Sean Fennessey?

  I love that, uh, Roy's just got the TV on all the time. And he, you can only get information by keeping the TV on, you know, like the news reports flashing and then he's watching the Daffy Duck cartoon. And then they, it cuts out and something else cuts in and this idea that like, it's not just the no cell phones. The no cell phones, like even today Spielberg talks about how he's like, nobody ever says to me, it's weird that there are no phones in Close Encounters, cause it's not when you're watching the movie, you're just flowing with the characters. But people don't use TV that way anymore. They don't just like turn on channel two and let it stay on for six hours.

• 59:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:39Sean Fennessey?

  They're so determinative with what they want to do.

• 59:41Chris Ryan?

  Out McAfee live.

• 59:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 59:46Bill Simmons?

  I have.

• 59:47Chris Ryan?

  McAfee has DeChambeau on. This is great.

• 59:51Sean Fennessey?

  McAfee has the marionette alien.

• 59:54Bill Simmons?

  Shams, what happened with that lottery?

• 59:55Chris Ryan?

  McAfee's got LaCombe and Balaban.

• 59:59Bill Simmons?

  I have for this category.

• 1:00:01Sean Fennessey?

  LaCombe on McAfee would crush. That would be a great segment. Speaking French.

• 1:00:06Chris Ryan?

  That would actually probably be Aaron Rodgers' favorite episode of McAfee is these two guys just being like.

• 1:00:10Sean Fennessey?

  Aliens are real.

• 1:00:11Bill Simmons?

  He would then want to debate LaCombe.

• 1:00:13Chris Ryan?

  I want to debate LaCombe.

• 1:00:15Bill Simmons?

  A McDonald's sign with only 24 billion serves.

• 1:00:18Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, good one.

• 1:00:19Bill Simmons?

  Rotary phones. The TVs. Neighbors hanging out in the street? We don't get that anymore?

• 1:00:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Bill Simmons?

  And if we get it, you assume that, um, something bad is about to happen?

• 1:00:30Sean Fennessey?

  Come over to my neighborhood. I live in a very friendly enclave. Yeah. I got kids. They're outside.

• 1:00:35Chris Ryan?

  Everybody's got a dog door because everybody trusts each other.

• 1:00:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. That's right. In the real America where we don't lock our doors.

• 1:00:39Bill Simmons?

  Here are my two favorites, though. A three-year-old kid named Barry?

• 1:00:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Bill Simmons?

  It's just never happening.

• 1:00:44Sean Fennessey?

  That's so confusing.

• 1:00:45Chris Ryan?

  That kid better become Barry Morgan.

• 1:00:47Bill Simmons?

  Maybe the last year you named your kid Barry?

• 1:00:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Bill Simmons?

  And then, uh, this is the number one. They're eating dinner. There's just a thing of whole milk in the middle of the table.

• 1:00:57Sean Fennessey?

  Well, whole milk is back.

• 1:00:59Bill Simmons?

  Oh, it's back?

• 1:00:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Right, Craig? Whole milk is back?

• 1:01:01Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 1:01:02Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:01:02Chris Ryan?

  When's the last time you took down a glass of whole milk?

• 1:01:04Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I learned within the last few years that I'm lactose intolerant, so it's been some time.

• 1:01:08Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:09Sean Fennessey?

  But for the first 37 years of my life, I would have a glass of milk and be like, I feel terrible. And not understand what was happening.

• 1:01:17Chris Ryan?

  Here we are.

• 1:01:18Bill Simmons?

  There it is.

• 1:01:18Chris Ryan?

  So wait, you, oh, do you do like oat milk and cereal now?

• 1:01:22Sean Fennessey?

  Nope. I eat cereal dry, unfortunately.

• 1:01:24Chris Ryan?

  I forgot about that.

• 1:01:26Bill Simmons?

  You raw dog cereal? Oh, my God.

• 1:01:29Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, no.

• 1:01:29Bill Simmons?

  Who does that?

• 1:01:30Sean Fennessey?

  I do it and my daughter sees me do it and so now she does it because she's like, that's how you eat cereal.

• 1:01:35Chris Ryan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:01:36Bill Simmons?

  I think almond milk's pretty good with cereal.

• 1:01:38Sean Fennessey?

  It isn't bad, but, uh, I just have an association with all milks now. I have no milk in anything.

• 1:01:44Chris Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Chris Ryan?

  Didn't we do like 10 minutes on cereal for one meal?

• 1:01:46Bill Simmons?

  He and I did. Did you see they're trying to ban Apple Jacks? Or they're trying to say it's not healthy?

• 1:01:51Chris Ryan?

  The woke mob came for Apple Jacks?

• 1:01:53Bill Simmons?

  No, man. The Maha crew was just like, oh, we can't call this like part of your healthy breakfast anymore. And it's just like, all right.

• 1:01:58Sean Fennessey?

  Who's calling Apple Jacks part of your healthy breakfast?

• 1:02:00Bill Simmons?

  Apple Jacks?

• 1:02:03Chris Ryan?

  When they do like Saturday morning cartoon ads.

• 1:02:05Bill Simmons?

  They think it's like apple slices.

• 1:02:07Chris Ryan?

  They're like, if you eat a bunch of broccoli, Frosted Flakes is technically part of your filthy breakfast.

• 1:02:12Bill Simmons?

  That's like the most un-American thing. We need Trump. Maybe Trump can use his powers for good. Save Apple Jacks.

• 1:02:19Sean Fennessey?

  Trump coming out for Count Chocula.

• 1:02:20Bill Simmons?

  I heard a thing today. Not gonna be Trump.

• 1:02:26Bill Simmons?

  What's age the best?

• 1:02:31Bill Simmons?

  People being amazed that UFOs exist?

• 1:02:34Chris Ryan?

  That's cool. Yeah. People still do that.

• 1:02:36Bill Simmons?

  Well, now UFOs exist. We're seeing them all over the place constantly.

• 1:02:40Sean Fennessey?

  Should we like, let's go, let's do it. Like, so they, they exist. There is life on other planets. That those, that life has come to this planet. Like, you, you believe that?

• 1:02:51Bill Simmons?

  I think we've had a lot of evidence the last few years.

• 1:02:53Sean Fennessey?

  You don't believe it?

• 1:02:55Chris Ryan?

  I kind of stand with the guy from the news network in the, in the air force meeting where it's like, if it's happening so much, like, why don't we have like really irrefutable footage?

• 1:03:05Bill Simmons?

  I think that's the problem is we do have video now, though.

• 1:03:08Sean Fennessey?

  Do we?

• 1:03:08Chris Ryan?

  Do we?

• 1:03:10Bill Simmons?

  CR is like, I still believe in the long two and no UFOs.

• 1:03:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17Chris Ryan?

  I hate the infield shift. I love Apple Jacks and fucking UFOs.

• 1:03:21Bill Simmons?

  I think Star has to throw 130 pitches.

• 1:03:24Sean Fennessey?

  And no sex before marriage.

• 1:03:27Bill Simmons?

  15 round heavyweight fights.

• 1:03:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and whole milk.

• 1:03:32Chris Ryan?

  Okay, so you're just like, there, it's out there. They're out there. Area 51, they're constantly flying around. Okay.

• 1:03:39Bill Simmons?

  Think so. I don't think that's controversial anymore.

• 1:03:42Sean Fennessey?

  I definitely think there is life in other galaxies. I'm not unconvinced that they've been to our galaxy. I believe they probably have. That's just something I believe and can't prove.

• 1:03:55Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Sean Fennessey?

  This planet, I don't believe it.

• 1:03:58Bill Simmons?

  We haven't confirmed anything for our planet. That something has come to this planet.

• 1:04:01Sean Fennessey?

  So the line is ready to confirm.

• 1:04:02Bill Simmons?

  How do you explain Yanis and Tadakuba?

• 1:04:05Chris Ryan?

  Well, there's a line in this movie where it's like Einstein was probably an alien.

• 1:04:09Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:11Bill Simmons?

  What else do you have for What Stage's the Best?

• 1:04:13Chris Ryan?

  There's a lot of really cool recurring images when you re-watch the film of like Roy looking at maps, Roy stuck at a crossroads, very reflective of the characters like inner life, but without explicitly saying, "This guy's at a crossroads. He doesn't know where he's going."

• 1:04:29Bill Simmons?

  Like the end of Cast Away?

• 1:04:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and then there's like a lot of really awesome imagery of Roy is always like going against a crowd. Like a crowd is running towards him and he's like, "I have to go through this to get to the other side." So just really always being conscientious of like reflecting character with that. And guy, man, Gillian Roy really got something, you know, that like desperation that we went through something.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  But it's not romantic.

• 1:04:55Chris Ryan?

  I know, but it's like when they see each other like on the lookout, like the next day, they're just like, "Fuck, only the two of us understand this."

• 1:05:02Bill Simmons?

  I think they could have gotten at it.

• 1:05:03Chris Ryan?

  He gets a little...

• 1:05:05Sean Fennessey?

  Tension over. Melinda Dillon has something special.

• 1:05:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Sean Fennessey?

  She just does.

• 1:05:08Bill Simmons?

  I had her in What Stage's the Best.

• 1:05:10Chris Ryan?

  She's just good.

• 1:05:10Bill Simmons?

  Gear for her.

• 1:05:11Sean Fennessey?

  Something special.

• 1:05:12Chris Ryan?

  Uh, my last What Stage's the Best is when a guy in Mission Control figures everything out before everyone else. He's just like, "Excuse me, wait, it's longitude." I feel like that happens in any Mission Control situation, like one dude just sort of sees the whole chessboard.

• 1:05:28Bill Simmons?

  What do you have, Sean?

• 1:05:30Sean Fennessey?

  I think this movie in 2001 are the most responsible for the current wave of great event filmmakers that we have. So Nolan, Villeneuve, Bong Joon-ho, Guillermo del Toro, they're all hugely inspired by this movie. A lot of their movies are kind of grasping for what this movie gets. That's this like complicated mix of cynicism and wonder, this idea of like something bigger than you, but grounding all of those movies in family stories.

• 1:05:57Bill Simmons?

  Unfortunately, it leads to Zemeckis making Contact.

• 1:06:00Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, him too, and he was like his apprentice at this time.

• 1:06:04Sean Fennessey?

  I like Contact, but okay. Uh, motion control cameras used again?

• 1:06:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Sean Fennessey?

  As on Star Wars and Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001, bringing them to this movie so that they can have effects that like Craig shouted out the clouds. That's just something that he created and mapped onto just a regular 35 millimeter shot of the sky, which is just incredible.

• 1:06:23Bill Simmons?

  So Craig's pro that and Dog Door so far.

• 1:06:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's quite a list. Uh, Spielberg writing credits?

• 1:06:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, written and directed by Steve Spielberg.

• 1:06:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Sean Fennessey?

  Close Encounters AI and Fableman's, that's it. That's his whole career.

• 1:06:36Chris Ryan?

  The AI one's a little weird, right?

• 1:06:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he like completed something.

• 1:06:41Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he sure did.

• 1:06:43Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, also age the best is Bob Baker designing the marionette.

• 1:06:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Sean Fennessey?

  I go to Bob Baker's Marionette Theater on the regular with my kid.

• 1:06:50Bill Simmons?

  Um.

• 1:06:51Chris Ryan?

  Future thriller. Incredibly creepy to welcoming.

• 1:06:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Gene Siskel called this movie a fairy tale for adults, which I've always thought was the best way to describe it.

• 1:07:01Bill Simmons?

  Huge Gene Siskel year.

• 1:07:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Bill Simmons?

  Fever came out this year.

• 1:07:04Chris Ryan?

  I would say that the last thing I have for what's age the best is the pop culture durability of small town suburban America. And so like basically from this movie, 3T, through Goonies, all the way through Stranger Things. People have returned to this as the setting for it, something amazing is happening here, you know, something adventurous is happening here.

• 1:07:25Bill Simmons?

  The dog door.

• 1:07:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Sean Fennessey?

  There's a really good, you're gonna make fun of me, but it's fine. There's a really good review of this movie written by Christopher McQuarrie, the Mission Impossible director on Letterboxd. And he writes long reviews, so I would say great writer. And he wrote something that has never communicated in the movie, literally, but is true, which is that all who come in contact with the alien spacecraft are imprinted with a fragmentary vision which compels them instinctively toward a common objective. That if you have been, if you have encountered the alien, you're drawn to Devil's Tower. That like something is pulling you, but he like nearly can't even figure out the words to explain how he feels.

• 1:08:10Sean Fennessey?

  He just feels it, which is how people tend to make choices in their life. You know, they just like, something happens and then they just like, instinctually, I have to do this thing. But there's no scene where they're like, here's the lore of the alien. And the alien has a, they dropped a seedling from the sky and a plant grew and it made people smell something like, it doesn't have that science fiction thing of over explaining everything that I just think makes the movie feel so timeless.

• 1:08:35Bill Simmons?

  There's been movies since where the person only he can see.

• 1:08:40Bill Simmons?

  The thing, I feel like it's been ripped off every time we've ever seen a movie.

• 1:08:44Sean Fennessey?

  Man on Fire.

• 1:08:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, Field of Dreams. Field of Dreams is a really good example. More would say the best for me, Roy's sunburn, I always thought was really smart, really funny. The half-faced sunburn. The little kid is just incredible, Barry. There's a good cast in What If with him, but he just makes some great faces, very likable. I never feel like he's in total danger.

• 1:09:05Sean Fennessey?

  Did you read the story of how he got that performance out of him? Or hear Spielberg tell it?

• 1:09:10Bill Simmons?

  He would only do like one or two takes, right?

• 1:09:12Sean Fennessey?

  But he would do something, every time he had a scene where he had to look up at the sky, he said he would bring a present to set. And he would open the present at an elevated spot on the set while he was filming, Carrie Goffey, the actor. And he would very slowly open the ribbon and slowly lift the box and slowly remove the toys so that the kid just stood there like this, waiting to see what was inside the present, his mouth open. And that scene in the movie, when he says, "Toys", it's because he's literally showing him a toy coming out of a box. But it looks like he's watching an alien spaceship. This is like ingenious shit.

• 1:09:49Bill Simmons?

  Steve.

• 1:09:51Bill Simmons?

  I like the giant globe.

• 1:09:53Chris Ryan?

  I was gonna say.

• 1:09:54Bill Simmons?

  Do we have giant globes anymore?

• 1:09:56Chris Ryan?

  I think mostly for ornamental purposes.

• 1:09:59Sean Fennessey?

  What did they say, what did they say it costs?

• 1:10:00Chris Ryan?

  It's $2,500. That was actually in my book about medals. I love that moment. They're like, "It's a $2,500 globe. What are you guys doing?"

• 1:10:08Bill Simmons?

  I, I love it.

• 1:10:09Chris Ryan?

  And when they have to roll the globe down the hallway.

• 1:10:12Bill Simmons?

  Any movie with a plot involving Devil's Tower, I feel like you're just in good hands.

• 1:10:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Bill Simmons?

  It's like, oh shit, Devil's Tower is involved now. 1970s, big family moms calmly navigating their crazy husband. Perfect.

• 1:10:27Bill Simmons?

  That wife is out the door now in five minutes.

• 1:10:30Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't say Terry Gar is terribly calm in the movie.

• 1:10:32Bill Simmons?

  No, she melts down once or twice.

• 1:10:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but she's like, she's trying to like, keep order on the chaos there.

• 1:10:38Sean Fennessey?

  Gotta watch out for her.

• 1:10:39Bill Simmons?

  They called Carrie Goffey one-take Carrie, by the way. Or at least no one-take Jean.

• 1:10:43Sean Fennessey?

  Don't take CR.

• 1:10:45Bill Simmons?

  So little kids wearing numbered football or baseball shirts that don't have a team. This was a total thing in the seventies. I have pictures of myself in those shirts and then it just went away.

• 1:10:56Sean Fennessey?

  Why was it a thing?

• 1:10:57Bill Simmons?

  I don't know.

• 1:10:58Chris Ryan?

  Do you think it's because we realized we could sell?

• 1:11:00Bill Simmons?

  I don't think we commercialized sports team stuff really yet.

• 1:11:03Chris Ryan?

  Do you remember when the first time you had a Red Sox thing was?

• 1:11:07Bill Simmons?

  For Halloween, dressing up as Fred Lynn.

• 1:11:09Chris Ryan?

  But that had to be like an entire uniform. Do you remember like the first T-shirt you got?

• 1:11:14Bill Simmons?

  I think it was later. I just don't think people thought the same way with that stuff.

• 1:11:17Chris Ryan?

  I think you might be right. I'm sure people will be like, oh, you're a fucking idiot. But like, I feel like the first time was when they had like the NBA hats with like the cursive font. Like, that's when I started buying like random other shit.

• 1:11:33Bill Simmons?

  I have a bunch of Celtics T-shirts that for some reason my mom saved that are all different, like Celtic ones from different sizes. So they definitely made them, but I just don't feel like people wore the sports stuff the same way. Maybe I'm wrong. But I just, those T-shirts specifically made me, made me nostalgic. Close Encounters, first collaboration between film editor Michael Kahn and Spielberg.

• 1:11:57Sean Fennessey?

  You know, they still aren't working together.

• 1:11:59Bill Simmons?

  They've never not worked together since this movie, which I thought was really cool.

• 1:12:02Sean Fennessey?

  Michael Kahn's 94 years old.

• 1:12:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Chris Ryan?

  And Spielberg said, this is like, this is the hardest one to edit, right? Because it was just like thousands of feet of shit.

• 1:12:09Bill Simmons?

  Really hard. And then the last one, Melinda Dillon, who was in this and Slapshot same year. Henry Han's wife, which we covered last year when we did Slapshot. She was also in Christmas Story. She was in Absence of Malice. She was in a few other things.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  Which, Melinda Dillon in, is it Melissa or Melinda?

• 1:12:27Sean Fennessey?

  Melinda.

• 1:12:28Speaker 05

  Melinda in Christmas Story and this. She's probably in the two most iconic mashed potato scenes in movies.

• 1:12:34Bill Simmons?

  Right, no question.

• 1:12:35Chris Ryan?

  She sort of is the mayor of Apex Mountain for mashed potatoes.

• 1:12:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, mashed potato mountain. Just a great job by her.

• 1:12:41Sean Fennessey?

  Lives on the, in City Hall at the top of Apex Mountains.

• 1:12:46Bill Simmons?

  Speaking of mashed potatoes, that Big Kahuna Burger Award for best use of food and drink, you could almost change it.

• 1:12:50Sean Fennessey?

  No brainer.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  Close Encounters mashed potato award.

• 1:12:54Sean Fennessey?

  That's good.

• 1:12:55Bill Simmons?

  Big Kahuna Burger is still pretty great.

• 1:12:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:58Bill Simmons?

  Have a taste of that tasty burger!

• 1:13:01Sean Fennessey?

  This is a tasty burger.

• 1:13:03Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna take a break and then do the rest of the categories. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal.

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• 1:14:14Bill Simmons?

  All right, CR. Go nuts. Great Jack Orde.

• 1:14:18Chris Ryan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:14:19Bill Simmons?

  Try to limit yourself to three.

• 1:14:20Chris Ryan?

  OK, we've talked about a couple of these.

• 1:14:22Bill Simmons?

  Bronze and gold.

• 1:14:24Chris Ryan?

  Um, let's see.

• 1:14:28Bill Simmons?

  I think the wide shot of the house with the stars.

• 1:14:29Chris Ryan?

  There are no bad shots. Barry's abduction, I think, and the red light coming through the doorway.

• 1:14:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Chris Ryan?

  Is incredible.

• 1:14:35Bill Simmons?

  Looks at the pits of hell.

• 1:14:36Chris Ryan?

  I mentioned Roy and Jillian in the crowd. I think that might be my favorite. I think Roy and Jillian meeting and coming together, embracing as all those people, the waves of people are getting on and off the train.

• 1:14:48Bill Simmons?

  India is really good.

• 1:14:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50Bill Simmons?

  Like to throw that in there as well.

• 1:14:51Sean Fennessey?

  India is amazing. I think the first time you see the board when they play Williams' five-note score and you see the colors across the board, that's like a chill moment for me.

• 1:15:02Bill Simmons?

  The wind in the first five minutes with the sand and people wearing the things over their face. Like Spielberg's always really good at that for some reason.

• 1:15:11Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Sean Fennessey?

  And then, like you pointed out before, Devil's Tower on TV with the sculpture in the room.

• 1:15:16Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 1:15:17Sean Fennessey?

  You know, and they're side by side.

• 1:15:18Bill Simmons?

  Side by side. Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness Award Best Needle Drop. There's actually no real music in this, just John Williams.

• 1:15:25Chris Ryan?

  I thought it might be interesting to mention just here that Spielberg said he wanted the movie to feel like When You Wish Upon a Star.

• 1:15:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but then it kept getting cut out.

• 1:15:35Sean Fennessey?

  The original cut ended with that, the original version from Pinocchio. And then they, it tested badly, is that what they said?

• 1:15:42Bill Simmons?

  The research was they did it in Dallas and people laughed. Spielberg got hurt, took it out.

• 1:15:48Sean Fennessey?

  It's tough.

• 1:15:48Chris Ryan?

  But I think that that's worth mentioning is like, it's not necessarily a needle drop, but it is obviously a huge influence on the, and they talk about Pinocchio in the movie.

• 1:15:57Bill Simmons?

  The Ches Rockwell and Brock Laners Award for Best Character Name. Roy Neary is really good as a lead.

• 1:16:03Sean Fennessey?

  Is it better than Claude Lacombe?

• 1:16:05Bill Simmons?

  Claude Lacombe is also really good.

• 1:16:06Chris Ryan?

  It's up there.

• 1:16:07Bill Simmons?

  Roy Neary is, that could have been a bunch of 70s lead actors.

• 1:16:13Chris Ryan?

  I like the major wild Bill Walsh, the guy who's just like, I gotta gas these people if you don't get them off the mountain.

• 1:16:20Bill Simmons?

  What do you got for your flex category?

• 1:16:23Chris Ryan?

  It's tough because it's basically, I just gotta talk about the smoking because there's just, Ronnie would be, would be the Chris Ryan Award winner if the main character, I mean, like, it's not the main character, but if Ronnie is just slamming Winstons the entire time, I think she just becomes that much more relatable, the Terry Gar character. And also Melinda Dillon.

• 1:16:46Bill Simmons?

  It's upsetting that she, either of them could have smoked.

• 1:16:48Chris Ryan?

  Some Virginia Slims, whatever they may be. Does Spielberg have many smokers in his movie outside of Saving Private Ryan?

• 1:16:56Bill Simmons?

  No. That's why there's none in here. I think in 77 in Indiana, I feel like everybody's smoking.

• 1:17:03Chris Ryan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:17:04Bill Simmons?

  It's like you're almost looked at weirdly if you're not lighting one up at 8 o'clock at night.

• 1:17:09Sean Fennessey?

  There's cigars in 1941.

• 1:17:10Bill Simmons?

  Ashing through the dog door.

• 1:17:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Bill Simmons?

  Butch's Girlfriend Award.

• 1:17:17Bill Simmons?

  Butch's girlfriend, a word wink, leak of the movie.

• 1:17:21Bill Simmons?

  Sean, you go. Do you have one?

• 1:17:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Joseph Summer as Larry Butler.

• 1:17:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like we could have done a little better.

• 1:17:28Chris Ryan?

  I had that too.

• 1:17:30Sean Fennessey?

  You know.

• 1:17:30Chris Ryan?

  He's like, I'm, I'm from LA.

• 1:17:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I wanted like a little, for a movie that is so realized.

• 1:17:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Sean Fennessey?

  And so well cast.

• 1:17:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Sean Fennessey?

  He'd be my pick.

• 1:17:40Bill Simmons?

  Later. I have Roy Neary, worst family man in any great movie. Just a reprehensible father husband. He's so, it's unbelievable. He's got three kids and a wife. He's like, ah, I gotta follow this thing. I'll see you guys later.

• 1:17:54Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, I can't understand the decision that he makes at the end of the movie, but this is, this is three people that are like obsessed with what they're obsessed with. Like the things that we care about, we care about to a degree that is unhealthy and has led us to this moment in our lives. And in some ways it's been good.

• 1:18:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Sean Fennessey?

  So like, you can't totally castigate a person.

• 1:18:19Chris Ryan?

  I'll save my comments for hottest take.

• 1:18:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:18:21Bill Simmons?

  Roy, one of Roy's kids could have come in with like an ice skate blade stuck out of his head and been like, hold on, hold on.

• 1:18:28Sean Fennessey?

  But like he had.

• 1:18:29Bill Simmons?

  Almost finished with this mound.

• 1:18:30Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not, I can't defend him because I would never leave my kid ever for anything, ever. But if you encountered an alien and he cosmically, it cosmically changed you.

• 1:18:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's what the movie is trying to convey.

• 1:18:41Bill Simmons?

  Same.

• 1:18:42Sean Fennessey?

  There's no going back from this moment.

• 1:18:45Bill Simmons?

  Spielberg himself, who did not have kids when he wrote this movie. Was like, eh, probably could have, probably would have done a couple of different things there.

• 1:18:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:54Bill Simmons?

  You have no sense of any sort of connection. But that's us, this is also the seventies when you just, your kids left for four hours and.

• 1:19:00Chris Ryan?

  And he's, and I think it's worth you pointing out like that he's 33, like he's like, life just got away from me here, you know?

• 1:19:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Bill Simmons?

  That's, that's why he should have been smoking long darts, so.

• 1:19:10Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, three kids before 31 or whatever.

• 1:19:14Bill Simmons?

  He's living in Muncie, Indiana.

• 1:19:15Sean Fennessey?

  Psychotic behavior.

• 1:19:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Well, back then, it was like

• 1:19:19Sean Fennessey?

  I know, common.

• 1:19:20Bill Simmons?

  For, I remember one of my friends when I was a kid, who had like, four or five kids and every time he came home, we would be bummed out because it was just, he just hated everybody and you could just feel it. I remember feeling that when I was like six. Some people in their seventies, they were just like, what hap- maybe, maybe it's still like this now, but you could really be like, what, I have four kids? I met my wife when I was eighteen.

• 1:19:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Bill Simmons?

  Now I'm thirty-two. I'm just gonna get bombed.

• 1:19:51Chris Ryan?

  You don't think Drake's ever just like, god damn, I didn't play the field at all?

• 1:19:55Sean Fennessey?

  He's like, I thought he was a left tackle, but he was a guard, I'm sorry.

• 1:19:58Bill Simmons?

  I'm just gonna get a riot count, not tell anybody. What do you have for weak link?

• 1:20:02Sean Fennessey?

  Meanwhile, Josh Allen childless, living with Haley Stunfield.

• 1:20:05Chris Ryan?

  I had Larry, the jog- the jogging LA guy.

• 1:20:07Bill Simmons?

  What stage is the worst, other than no iPhones or camera phones?

• 1:20:13Sean Fennessey?

  The aliens at the end are not good, like it just doesn't look good. The, the marionette alien looks good and the final alien.

• 1:20:18Bill Simmons?

  The ant alien?

• 1:20:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that one looks good.

• 1:20:20Chris Ryan?

  That one's really cool.

• 1:20:20Sean Fennessey?

  Rimbaldi looks, that looks good, that does the hand signs, but the little girls in the alien suits, it looks terrible. Like, we can be honest about it.

• 1:20:27Chris Ryan?

  I think probably

• 1:20:28Bill Simmons?

  I kinda like it.

• 1:20:31Chris Ryan?

  I wonder if it's, this is literally what has

• 1:20:34Sean Fennessey?

  You're zagging?

• 1:20:35Chris Ryan?

  Is we've kinda done so much cool shit with aliens throughout cinema history, like, would you put this in the top ten aliens you've seen on screen?

• 1:20:42Bill Simmons?

  Seventy-seven though, what are they gonna do?

• 1:20:44Chris Ryan?

  Scott makes the xenomorph like a year later.

• 1:20:46Bill Simmons?

  Like, just, you're getting fifth grade girls, you're getting fifty of them from some town and putting an alien costume on them and you're calling it a day.

• 1:20:53Sean Fennessey?

  Fifteen years later, we get Natasha Henstridge, you know what I mean? Like, we've made great advances in alien interest.

• 1:20:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it was actually seventeen years, seven months later.

• 1:21:03Chris Ryan?

  Not that the The countdown to species has begun.

• 1:21:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. Was this the first time in a major popular movie that they showed aliens?

• 1:21:11Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 1:21:11Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no, you mentioned the day the earth stood still earlier.

• 1:21:14Bill Simmons?

  I was saying in a modern popular movie though.

• 1:21:17Sean Fennessey?

  Um, no, they're, I mean, they're all through fifties and sixties sci-fi.

• 1:21:23Bill Simmons?

  But I'm saying like from mid seventies forward. It's like, this is the demarcation movie for where the aliens would go.

• 1:21:31Sean Fennessey?

  Kinda like, what are the biggest alien movies of the seventies?

• 1:21:35Bill Simmons?

  Do you know they made an alien sequel? Called Aliens, nineteen eighty-six, Chris?

• 1:21:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Bill Simmons?

  Sigourney Weaver?

• 1:21:41Chris Ryan?

  I did, yeah.

• 1:21:42Bill Simmons?

  Just found out about that. Supposedly it's good.

• 1:21:48Chris Ryan?

  Is that the one where Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro are raiding the southern border?

• 1:21:54Bill Simmons?

  I don't think that's it.

• 1:21:55Sean Fennessey?

  If only there was a podcast where you could go back and talk about older movies.

• 1:21:59Bill Simmons?

  Check that out sometime.

• 1:22:00Sean Fennessey?

  And just think about what like what they meant to us.

• 1:22:02Chris Ryan?

  Instead of letting the 2B algorithm dictate it.

• 1:22:05Bill Simmons?

  2B.

• 1:22:09Bill Simmons?

  Not nearly enough cigarette smoking is age the worst. Nobody realizing Roy has PTSD?

• 1:22:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Bill Simmons?

  Cause we don't know what PTSD is at 1977, but he's clearly just completely traumatized.

• 1:22:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, this is like Ronnie could take a beat and just be like, half of his body got singed. Like something clearly happened out there.

• 1:22:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, maybe the, maybe the glaring sunburn on his face, like something horrible has happened here.

• 1:22:31Sean Fennessey?

  She's trying to get him to fix his face with makeup.

• 1:22:33Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:22:34Sean Fennessey?

  She's not very sympathetic.

• 1:22:35Bill Simmons?

  Stealth UFO watch parties that nobody knows about? Probably not pulling that off in 2025.

• 1:22:40Sean Fennessey?

  Probably not. No cell phones.

• 1:22:43Bill Simmons?

  So the TV show Soap, which was a show I really liked in the late 70s. And they had a whole plot where Bert got abducted. That was basically based on this movie. And now that show, nobody even knows that exists. So I'm putting that in what's age the worst. But yeah, they got a half a season of Soap.

• 1:23:00Chris Ryan?

  Out of.

• 1:23:00Bill Simmons?

  Out of basically a Roy Neri plot with Bert. And then he came back from outer space and like wanted to have sex with his wife all the time. She's like, something's going on with this guy. Yeah, Soap, late 70s.

• 1:23:11Sean Fennessey?

  Played Bert.

• 1:23:12Bill Simmons?

  Richard Mulligan.

• 1:23:13Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:23:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. From Empty Nest?

• 1:23:17Bill Simmons?

  The grandmother, grandmother from Who's the Boss was the star. Billy Crystal played.

• 1:23:21Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:22Bill Simmons?

  A gay character, Jody. It was like the first gay character ever. There was a guy with a ventriloquist guy. It's a weird show. I liked it. And then, uh.

• 1:23:33Sean Fennessey?

  I had one of, I had one of those. What's age the worst? Mothership interior in the 80 cut. And then the movie brats being unable to stop fiddling with their creations. I feel like that didn't age well that they did that.

• 1:23:43Bill Simmons?

  Did you have a Ruffalo Hannah Rubinek Partridge overacting award for this series?

• 1:23:46Chris Ryan?

  Not really. I had.

• 1:23:47Bill Simmons?

  I didn't either.

• 1:23:47Chris Ryan?

  I had Balaban when he's just like, explain what's going on, like in the desert.

• 1:23:51Bill Simmons?

  Sean, what do you have for a fucks category?

• 1:23:53Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm, the Zwatanio Award. What happened the next day?

• 1:23:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Sean Fennessey?

  Roy is anally raped repeatedly for 30 years on the spaceship.

• 1:24:04Bill Simmons?

  It's a complete Why?

• 1:24:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Is Ronnie, is Ronnie with a greater Muncie realtor in a week or less?

• 1:24:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Chris Ryan?

  Where she's just like-

• 1:24:17Bill Simmons?

  Probably has to clean out the living room.

• 1:24:18Chris Ryan?

  This is Jack. He has a Cadillac.

• 1:24:21Chris Ryan?

  He treats me really well.

• 1:24:24Chris Ryan?

  You're just gonna have to call him dad.

• 1:24:27Bill Simmons?

  I think that oldest son is definitely robbing a liquor store by age 15.

• 1:24:34Bill Simmons?

  The CR thinks Luke Wilson could have been Harrison Ford. How does take a word? What do you have?

• 1:24:38Chris Ryan?

  Roy gets a lot of heat for abandoning his family.

• 1:24:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Chris Ryan?

  Who I think you could make a case abandoned him in some ways earlier in the film.

• 1:24:45Bill Simmons?

  I like it.

• 1:24:46Chris Ryan?

  If I had the chance to be one of the first human beings to have meaningful contact with an extraterrestrial life form race, I'm hitting the fucking transfer portal. Goodbye, family. Anyone can have a family.

• 1:25:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Chris Ryan?

  I get to go to Mars or wherever. Like, that's incredible.

• 1:25:06Sean Fennessey?

  So do you not fear the unknown? Because that's the big question at the center of this.

• 1:25:10Chris Ryan?

  Well, I think what it is, is that like, there's no other choice for him by this point. Like, this has clearly become like an obsession that he's willing to throw his family away for.

• 1:25:19Sean Fennessey?

  But you're saying you're making the choice.

• 1:25:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:25:22Sean Fennessey?

  And you're saying, I will take, I don't know, who's, what's, what's that dude, Ace? He's gonna go to the Sixers? Ace Bailey?

• 1:25:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:31Sean Fennessey?

  You're like, I'm going Ace Bailey. I don't care what the pundits say.

• 1:25:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I think that it's just like, it's not a choice at all. Like, families are great and everything, but like, if you got to be like, the first person to meet aliens, you could start another family.

• 1:25:43Bill Simmons?

  I see it. I, I was thinking like, if my kids were the same age what Roy was, you know, I'd be like, I really want to go, but Zoe's got a game on Saturday. The Pats are playing the Colts Sunday. How much sports am I gonna miss?

• 1:25:58Sean Fennessey?

  This is a complete same.

• 1:25:59Bill Simmons?

  Cruz has the celebration impossible movie coming out.

• 1:26:02Chris Ryan?

  Sateh's ramping up.

• 1:26:04Bill Simmons?

  I heard this new cool liberal has a chance.

• 1:26:08Bill Simmons?

  I'm just saying.

• 1:26:09Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I think about it, though. Entertain it. What do you have for hot takes?

• 1:26:13Sean Fennessey?

  Is this the best movie ever made with a long title? I think it is.

• 1:26:17Bill Simmons?

  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so six words?

• 1:26:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Six or more.

• 1:26:24Chris Ryan?

  What are the Avatar sequels called?

• 1:26:26Bill Simmons?

  I wish you had prepped us for this.

• 1:26:27Chris Ryan?

  Would you call, would you call?

• 1:26:29Sean Fennessey?

  Now you know how I feel.

• 1:26:30Chris Ryan?

  More of the ring, Fellowship of the Ring?

• 1:26:32Bill Simmons?

  Everything Everywhere All at Once?

• 1:26:34Sean Fennessey?

  I think this is a better movie than The Fellowship of the Ring, which is a movie I love, but I think it's better. I think the biggest contender is probably Doctor Strangelove.

• 1:26:41Chris Ryan?

  Oh, or How I Learned to Stop Wearing, yeah.

• 1:26:44Sean Fennessey?

  But, I mean, go through your.

• 1:26:46Chris Ryan?

  Den of Thieves 2: Pantera?

• 1:26:49Bill Simmons?

  Oh, your favorite, the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Richard Cord? Yeah, you're probably right.

• 1:26:57Sean Fennessey?

  Who's Richard Cord?

• 1:26:58Bill Simmons?

  I don't, I just, coward Robert Ford. Richard Ford's an author.

• 1:27:03Sean Fennessey?

  He is an author.

• 1:27:04Chris Ryan?

  He is an author.

• 1:27:04Sean Fennessey?

  He's a great author.

• 1:27:05Chris Ryan?

  He's a sports writer.

• 1:27:06Bill Simmons?

  Birdman had a long one. Borat, Cultural Learnings of America for Big Ben.

• 1:27:11Sean Fennessey?

  We haven't gotten to a film that's better than Close Encounters yet.

• 1:27:14Bill Simmons?

  That's a good one.

• 1:27:14Chris Ryan?

  You sure?

• 1:27:16Sean Fennessey?

  Borat? I mean, Borat rocks.

• 1:27:18Chris Ryan?

  Borat's funnier than Close Encounters.

• 1:27:20Sean Fennessey?

  I agree, I agree. No debate there.

• 1:27:22Bill Simmons?

  My hottest take.

• 1:27:23Sean Fennessey?

  So is it, is it?

• 1:27:24Bill Simmons?

  I think you're right.

• 1:27:24Sean Fennessey?

  That's right?

• 1:27:24Bill Simmons?

  I think it's a good call.

• 1:27:25Chris Ryan?

  Great one.

• 1:27:25Bill Simmons?

  I mean, I don't know if it's a hot take. It's like a lukewarm.

• 1:27:28Chris Ryan?

  You said you didn't have enough time to prep. Look at this.

• 1:27:30Bill Simmons?

  Perfect tape.

• 1:27:30Sean Fennessey?

  I also got that anally raped joke in there too, so that's, I worked hard.

• 1:27:36Bill Simmons?

  Mine is if the 2025 version of this movie would somehow manage to reflect all the things that suck about 2025. Roy would be a fucking lunatic on Reddit every day.

• 1:27:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Bill Simmons?

  Roy's kids would all immediately be diagnosed with collateral PTSD and turned into overmedicated zombies. They'd just be fucking drinking Ritalin shakes. Peter would be protesting the animal sleep gas. And the UFOs never would have come because everyone had a camera phone. They would have been like, these guys with the phones, like, fuck that, we're out. So the movie never happens and Roy's in jail.

• 1:28:09Chris Ryan?

  What, what's he go to jail for?

• 1:28:11Bill Simmons?

  I just for, for what happened to his kids.

• 1:28:13Sean Fennessey?

  Trespassing, yeah.

• 1:28:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he's on Reddit, yeah.

• 1:28:16Sean Fennessey?

  Going to jail for using Reddit. It's gonna be tough for a lot of people out there.

• 1:28:21Bill Simmons?

  Casting what ifs.

• 1:28:22Chris Ryan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:28:23Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:28:24Sean Fennessey?

  This is a crazy one.

• 1:28:25Bill Simmons?

  Steve McQueen, first choice. Impressed with the script, said, I can't cry on cue. I'm not your guy. Cause I'm fucking Steve McQueen. I'm not crying in a movie, motherfuckers.

• 1:28:36Sean Fennessey?

  Spielberg's story about the meeting with McQueen is incredible. McQueen gets the script. He likes the script. He says, I want to meet Steven Spielberg. He invites him to a bar. Steven Spielberg literally said, I had never been to a bar before in my life.

• 1:28:48Bill Simmons?

  Or had sex with a woman.

• 1:28:50Sean Fennessey?

  He's 26 years old. Steve McQueen says, meet me at the Doom Room. They go meet at the Doom Room. Inside the bar, it's a raucous, rowdy bar. He said McQueen had 14 beers. He had three.

• 1:29:02Chris Ryan?

  The Wade Boggs.

• 1:29:04Sean Fennessey?

  He said a fight broke out in the middle of the meeting that they were having. And then McQueen got up as if he was going to enter and try to break up the fight. And then pulled himself back because he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of Spielberg. And finally, he said, I love this script. I really want to do it. I actually cried a little while reading it, but I know that I could never achieve that for you on camera. So I can't do your movie.

• 1:29:30Bill Simmons?

  Fucking Bob Evans is like, yeah, Ally McRae's gonna do a movie with Steve McQueen. What could go wrong? They're gonna be together for three months.

• 1:29:38Sean Fennessey?

  She's gonna meet him at the Doom Room. No big deal.

• 1:29:40Bill Simmons?

  I know he's cool, but how cool is he?

• 1:29:41Chris Ryan?

  Hey, Ally, I know I left a couple of voicemails. You know, no big deal. Call me back.

• 1:29:47Bill Simmons?

  He just sounds like.

• 1:29:48Chris Ryan?

  Send a tweet for me.

• 1:29:49Sean Fennessey?

  How's the getaway going?

• 1:29:50Bill Simmons?

  By all accounts, the coolest actor of all time.

• 1:29:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:53Bill Simmons?

  Like still now to this day.

• 1:29:55Chris Ryan?

  Such a different movie if he's in it.

• 1:29:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. See, he's, I don't think he can be in this.

• 1:29:59Sean Fennessey?

  Ah.

• 1:30:00Chris Ryan?

  He makes more sense for the Paul Schrader version of it, where it's like a little bit more of an action.

• 1:30:04Bill Simmons?

  This movie is, it can't be him. So anyway, James Caan, Dustin Hoffman, Pacino, Gene Hackman all turned down the part. Nicholson's intrigued, but has scheduling conflicts. And meanwhile, Dreyfus already has heard about the movie because he's on the set with Jaws and he's lobbying, lobbying, lobbying.

• 1:30:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, there's some great stories about Dreyfus like sticking his head into Spielberg's office and being like, I heard Nicholson's crazy.

• 1:30:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Chris Ryan?

  We don't want him.

• 1:30:25Bill Simmons?

  But then he wanted a lot of money and points. They back off. They go back to Pacino, still not interested. Nicholson says, no, thanks again.

• 1:30:35Bill Simmons?

  This is in the research. Hackman turned down the role because he was in a troubled marriage and could not spend 16 weeks outside of Los Angeles on location shooting. And then James Caan's like, I'll do it for a million and 10% of the gross.

• 1:30:48Bill Simmons?

  This is a pretty interesting James Caan movie.

• 1:30:49Sean Fennessey?

  I think it could have worked with James Caan. He's like maybe a little too strapping.

• 1:30:53Chris Ryan?

  I think he would have been a little bit more intimidating as a disaffected father, though. Like him getting mad at the family and throwing shit through the window to build the Devil's Tower mud.

• 1:31:02Bill Simmons?

  Well, him coming out of rollerball and doing this, I don't know how you shut off rollerball.

• 1:31:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, it stays with you.

• 1:31:08Sean Fennessey?

  He just has that streak of rage underneath the surface that Dreyfus doesn't have. Dreyfus is always like flummoxed and bent out of shape, but he's not angry. And Caan, I'm like, is this guy gonna throat punch me? Like, he just always looks like he's about to go off.

• 1:31:23Chris Ryan?

  Holy shit, dude.

• 1:31:23Bill Simmons?

  Tell Phil about Brian Curtis.

• 1:31:26Bill Simmons?

  When you're in person with him.

• 1:31:27Sean Fennessey?

  I know, he has a physical intimidation factor.

• 1:31:30Bill Simmons?

  Terry Gahr wanted to portray Jillian but was cast as Ronnie. Meryl Streep and Amy Irving also auditioned for Ronnie. Amy Irving then auditioned to be Steven Spielberg's girlfriend and then mother of his child and wife. Meryl Streep went on to some good things, I heard.

• 1:31:45Chris Ryan?

  She did.

• 1:31:46Sean Fennessey?

  Not familiar with her.

• 1:31:47Chris Ryan?

  She would have been a cool Ronnie. She would have been a cool Jillian.

• 1:31:49Bill Simmons?

  Hal Ashby worked with Melinda Dillon, suggested to Spielberg cast three as for the filming. And then, this was a great casting, what if not for this movie? Stanley Kubrick, have you heard of him?

• 1:32:01Chris Ryan?

  I have.

• 1:32:02Bill Simmons?

  So impressed by Carey Guffey's performance as Little Barry that he wanted to cast him as Danny Torrance. And unfortunately, Guffey was filming The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid and its sequel, Everything Happens to Me. It did not get to be in the shadows.

• 1:32:17Chris Ryan?

  I hope Carey fired his fucking agent. You know, Carey went on to work for Merrill Lynch and be like a finance guy.

• 1:32:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's your guy, right? That's your financial advisor, Carey Guffey. One take Carey.

• 1:32:28Bill Simmons?

  Tough beat.

• 1:32:29Sean Fennessey?

  One click Carey now.

• 1:32:31Bill Simmons?

  Best that guy word. I think Bob Balaban counts, even though now he's Bob Balaban, but for.

• 1:32:36Sean Fennessey?

  I wrote Friends with Truffaut.

• 1:32:39Sean Fennessey?

  At the time, at the time, was anybody like, the only people who were saying who was doing that guy were the cinephiles.

• 1:32:46Chris Ryan?

  Well, you're missing the farmer who saw Bigfoot is the snow snuffle guy from Home Alone.

• 1:32:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Robert's Blossom.

• 1:32:54Chris Ryan?

  That's, that's, that's your answer. Henrickson is also in this?

• 1:32:58Bill Simmons?

  Dan Waiters, I'm just giving it to Carl Weathers because he just died. It's great to see him.

• 1:33:02Sean Fennessey?

  Great. I think it was.

• 1:33:03Bill Simmons?

  I think he should have been dressed like Apollo Creed, but that would have been good.

• 1:33:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Like in the trunks?

• 1:33:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, just stressed up like he came from the set. We don't get to give this out, the Brandy Booth Award. Spielberg's cocker spaniel, Elmer, can be seen when the humans get released. Also appears in Jaws as the Brody family dog. He's in Jaws and Close Encounters.

• 1:33:27Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:33:28Bill Simmons?

  Elmer.

• 1:33:29Sean Fennessey?

  I was gonna give that award to the doggy door.

• 1:33:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the doggy door could happen too. Recasting couch director city, what do you got?

• 1:33:37Chris Ryan?

  None.

• 1:33:38Bill Simmons?

  Okay. What do you have?

• 1:33:41Bill Simmons?

  I had none either. Unless, except that one guy you mentioned that they could have.

• 1:33:45Sean Fennessey?

  Joseph Summer. We could have done a little better if it was John Gazelle.

• 1:33:48Chris Ryan?

  Recasting the director.

• 1:33:49Sean Fennessey?

  Just put just John Gazelle.

• 1:33:50Bill Simmons?

  James Brolin even.

• 1:33:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Bill Simmons?

  Pull him out of the Capricorn one set for two days.

• 1:33:54Sean Fennessey?

  OJ, why not OJ?

• 1:33:56Bill Simmons?

  OJ?

• 1:33:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, that would have been great for the legacy of this film.

• 1:34:00Bill Simmons?

  Recasting couch director city, I came up with every 10 years who I would have casted in the Drifus part.

• 1:34:06Chris Ryan?

  Jesus, let's do it.

• 1:34:08Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:34:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:09Sean Fennessey?

  Cool, go.

• 1:34:10Chris Ryan?

  You're gonna share?

• 1:34:11Bill Simmons?

  1987. Tom Hanks.

• 1:34:16Bill Simmons?

  1997, Will Smith.

• 1:34:20Sean Fennessey?

  Too, too handsome, too, too heroic.

• 1:34:24Bill Simmons?

  He needs to zag though, and he loves aliens.

• 1:34:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:34:27Bill Simmons?

  Who would you have instead in 1997?

• 1:34:29Sean Fennessey?

  But he could have uttered that his catchphrase, welcome to Earth.

• 1:34:32Bill Simmons?

  Nick Cage?

• 1:34:34Chris Ryan?

  Nick Cage could work.

• 1:34:35Sean Fennessey?

  That would have been good.

• 1:34:35Chris Ryan?

  Gear? Too hot?

• 1:34:38Bill Simmons?

  Too old.

• 1:34:38Chris Ryan?

  Ninety-seven.

• 1:34:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. We're in like.

• 1:34:42Sean Fennessey?

  Ninety-seven, I mean.

• 1:34:44Bill Simmons?

  Like Bruce Willis is a little too old.

• 1:34:46Sean Fennessey?

  But, I mean, this is. This is a category that we're gonna talk about, but to me, this is like, this, this is a Philip Seymour Hoffman part.

• 1:34:53Bill Simmons?

  I have him for oh-seven.

• 1:34:54Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:34:56Bill Simmons?

  Two thousand seventeen Chadwick Boseman.

• 1:34:58Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:58Sean Fennessey?

  That would've been good.

• 1:34:59Chris Ryan?

  That would've been great.

• 1:35:00Bill Simmons?

  That's all I got. Craig, what's your category?

• 1:35:03Speaker 05

  Can I go hottest take?

• 1:35:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Speaker 05

  The, um. The, the, the musical communication back and forth scene between the mothership and the humans. It works for the five notes. And then it completely loses you and is, and is just kind of. Awkward and, and weird. Once the spaceship starts playing the tuba. For like ten minutes and they're just like riffing like jazz musicians. Liz and I were laughing and I've seen this movie before, but, um. Yeah, that Spielberg got a little, he was doing tricks on it, as the kid said.

• 1:35:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Bill Simmons?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:35:39Sean Fennessey?

  Steve got over his skis?

• 1:35:41Speaker 05

  The tuba.

• 1:35:42Sean Fennessey?

  Steve and John Williams didn't know what they were doing.

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  And then start coming out. I'm like, alright.

• 1:35:46Chris Ryan?

  Just a couple of notes from old Dog Door here. Dial it back on the music, Steve.

• 1:35:50Speaker 05

  Lose the tuba.

• 1:35:52Bill Simmons?

  It's another director's commentary has to come now. It's like, I heard this Craig Horlbeck.

• 1:35:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Bill Simmons?

  Really made me rethink the musical sequence.

• 1:35:59Sean Fennessey?

  The Horlbeck cut is coming.

• 1:36:00Speaker 05

  I'm removing the music from Close Encounter. It's a Vichy now.

• 1:36:04Bill Simmons?

  Half-assed research.

• 1:36:07Bill Simmons?

  The exact quote on Schrader's script from Spielberg. "One of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned into a major film studio director." Didn't like it.

• 1:36:18Sean Fennessey?

  Tough one.

• 1:36:20Bill Simmons?

  Uh, Schrader's script was, the guy as an encounter goes to the government threatening to blow the lid off to the public. Instead, he and the government spent fifteen years trying to make contact. The USAF and NASA refused to comment, uh, to cooperate in the film. Spielberg thought that was a good sign for the film.

• 1:36:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, what do they have to hide?

• 1:36:36Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:36:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Chris Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:39Bill Simmons?

  Um. "You'll never eat lunch in this town again" from Julia Phillips.

• 1:36:46Bill Simmons?

  Threw daggers everywhere at this film and said Spielberg was a perfectionist.

• 1:36:49Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:50Bill Simmons?

  And that's why she got fired, wasn't the pounds of cocaine she was doing.

• 1:36:54Sean Fennessey?

  How's your memoir, "You'll Never Smoke Heaters in This Town Again," going?

• 1:36:57Chris Ryan?

  You'll never blog in this town again.

• 1:37:00Bill Simmons?

  Six year old girls, 50 of them, played the aliens. They're all from Mobile, Alabama.

• 1:37:07Chris Ryan?

  Must have been a weird casting call.

• 1:37:08Bill Simmons?

  Tried puppetry, didn't work. Doug Trumbull was the visual effects supervisor.

• 1:37:14Chris Ryan?

  Doug.

• 1:37:14Sean Fennessey?

  Doug.

• 1:37:15Bill Simmons?

  Our guy Doug. They, and there is a 3.3 million dollar budget. Their work helped lead to advances in motion, control, photography. Mothership, Ralph McQuarrie, been here for Ralph.

• 1:37:30Chris Ryan?

  Seventy seven.

• 1:37:31Bill Simmons?

  One of the best years.

• 1:37:32Chris Ryan?

  Star Wars and this.

• 1:37:33Sean Fennessey?

  I have him coming up later.

• 1:37:37Bill Simmons?

  This, I'm just gonna read this verbatim. Spielberg was eager to show Truffaut, Truffaut the, uh, hold on, Truffaut the giant landing site set, hoping to impress the other director. Truffaut didn't seem to be impressed at all. Spielberg and his crew later realized Truffaut was used to directing movies in small intimate settings, and he could not grasp the scale of the landing site. When he went into the set of the hotel room where Gillian watches the Devil's Tower newscast, Truffaut stood up and said, now this is a set, and was dead serious. And they were like, okay.

• 1:38:10Chris Ryan?

  This was the spaceship they built, like the sound stages in Alabama for this one?

• 1:38:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Bill Simmons?

  Truffaut was a huge fan. Didn't really get it.

• 1:38:18Sean Fennessey?

  It kind of makes sense if you have seen any Truffaut films. So it makes me wonder why Steven Spielberg wanted him in the first place. He never really made like a space epic.

• 1:38:25Bill Simmons?

  It's a weird one.

• 1:38:26Chris Ryan?

  Do you think this movie is like better or worse if it's like, uh?

• 1:38:33Sean Fennessey?

  Charade de Bardou?

• 1:38:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Martin Balsam or something. Like an American, yeah, like, like there's, because there was casting motives for these guys, but it was all French characters.

• 1:38:41Sean Fennessey?

  I think.

• 1:38:42Bill Simmons?

  I think Hackman would have been interesting.

• 1:38:44Sean Fennessey?

  Just a nerd out, though, like the idea of the barrier of communication is such a key theme of the movie and the idea of Balaban being an interpreter and also that the aliens need interpreters and they take on the human form, but they also have this musical signature. And that this like, how we are connected without language.

• 1:38:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Sean Fennessey?

  Such a powerful idea in the movie that I really like that it is not just a French person, but a French person who's like the 400 blows communicated something so profound to this generation of filmmakers who were in the seventies.

• 1:39:13Bill Simmons?

  Try to pay tribute.

• 1:39:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's him, yeah, paying homage to what Truffaut gave them.

• 1:39:18Bill Simmons?

  John Ford's The Searchers Spielberg watched over and over again as he made the movie.

• 1:39:22Chris Ryan?

  The Horizon Line.

• 1:39:23Bill Simmons?

  That movie always keeps popping into the rewatchables research as like this north star for all these filmmakers of 70s and 80s.

• 1:39:29Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that shot of Ethan opening the door in The Searchers is that the shot of the door opening in Close Encounters. I mean, it's a.

• 1:39:35Bill Simmons?

  Oh, did he want to do a criteria orgasm?

• 1:39:37Sean Fennessey?

  I hadn't thought about it until now, but they're they're connected.

• 1:39:40Chris Ryan?

  Well, there's and then in Fableman's he has David Lynch playing John Ford, talking about the importance of where you set the horizon in a frame. And if you watch Close Encounters with that in mind, you can totally see it.

• 1:39:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:39:53Bill Simmons?

  Tops made 66 trading cards and 11 stickers in 1978 of this film. Dreyfus.

• 1:40:00Sean Fennessey?

  Wait, were they like, here's Ronnie, here's our numbers.

• 1:40:04Bill Simmons?

  Literally.

• 1:40:04Sean Fennessey?

  Three kids.

• 1:40:05Bill Simmons?

  This is what they did.

• 1:40:06Sean Fennessey?

  One meltdown.

• 1:40:07Bill Simmons?

  Dreyfus and Truffaut did not want to be in the card set and are not in it.

• 1:40:12Chris Ryan?

  So everybody but Richard Dreyfus and Francois Truffaut has a Tops card from Close Encounters?

• 1:40:16Bill Simmons?

  It's not even just Tops cards.

• 1:40:18Chris Ryan?

  Like Larry?

• 1:40:18Bill Simmons?

  They're scene stuff. It's this weird thing they did for a while.

• 1:40:21Chris Ryan?

  Is that on eBay? Like, do you think that's?

• 1:40:22Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah, but not that much either.

• 1:40:24Chris Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:40:25Bill Simmons?

  Jaws has cards, Rocky I and Rocky II have cards, E.T. has cards. There's a lot of them.

• 1:40:31Sean Fennessey?

  When are we doing Ringer cards?

• 1:40:34Bill Simmons?

  There's been offers.

• 1:40:36Sean Fennessey?

  Big Waz.

• 1:40:38Chris Ryan?

  Brian Curtis, the killer.

• 1:40:41Bill Simmons?

  Throat Slitter.

• 1:40:44Bill Simmons?

  So the version of their cards were like about Ronnie Nieraner, children and some of the other characters. I don't think it did that great.

• 1:40:51Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:51Bill Simmons?

  Apex Mountain Spielberg, no.

• 1:40:55Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it has to be Dreyfus.

• 1:40:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, definitely Dreyfus.

• 1:40:58Bill Simmons?

  Dreyfus 77 is about as apexy as it gets.

• 1:41:01Sean Fennessey?

  Right?

• 1:41:02Bill Simmons?

  UFOs in a movie.

• 1:41:08Chris Ryan?

  I think so. I think what what's Independence Day?

• 1:41:11Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it really could be. It really could be.

• 1:41:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, cuz this is specifically a UFO.

• 1:41:20Bill Simmons?

  Plus it starts.

• 1:41:21Chris Ryan?

  It's not like a spaceship, it's not aliens, we're talking UFOs.

• 1:41:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, I think in the 50s, when movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still were coming out, and films were so important to the culture, and the amount of people that saw that movie, you could say Klaatu, Barat, and Nick Too, and all that stuff that came out of those movies, was huge, and we don't necessarily have the perspective on it, since what we cover on the show is basically the last 50 years, but for the, for the post, you know, the new Hollywood era, this is probably the most important UFO movie ever made.

• 1:41:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Bill Simmons?

  I think I agree. UFO sunburns, definitely.

• 1:41:57Chris Ryan?

  For sure.

• 1:41:58Bill Simmons?

  Truffaut?

• 1:41:59Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 1:42:00Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:42:00Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna say no. Melinda Dillon?

• 1:42:04Chris Ryan?

  Same year, right?

• 1:42:05Sean Fennessey?

  With Slapshot. Pretty good.

• 1:42:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Mashed potatoes?

• 1:42:10Chris Ryan?

  Henry.

• 1:42:14Bill Simmons?

  Mashed potatoes?

• 1:42:15Chris Ryan?

  Certainly as a building material, yeah.

• 1:42:17Bill Simmons?

  Did this maybe movie make you wanna have mashed potatoes when you saw them?

• 1:42:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I'd felt the same way.

• 1:42:23Sean Fennessey?

  Do you?

• 1:42:24Bill Simmons?

  There's a lot of mashed potatoes, though, for five people.

• 1:42:26Chris Ryan?

  But that's how they used to get down in Muncie in the 70s, right?

• 1:42:29Bill Simmons?

  It's a lot of.

• 1:42:29Sean Fennessey?

  It was like whole milk.

• 1:42:30Chris Ryan?

  But that's out of the box.

• 1:42:32Bill Simmons?

  She should've been smoking those Virginia Slims as she was eating the mashed potatoes. Like, bite, smoke.

• 1:42:37Sean Fennessey?

  That's appetizing, yeah, for sure.

• 1:42:39Bill Simmons?

  Movie dads losing their minds, probably not. I think it's still The Shining.

• 1:42:44Sean Fennessey?

  Good.

• 1:42:44Chris Ryan?

  Technically, Henry Hill's a dad in the second half of Goodfellas.

• 1:42:48Bill Simmons?

  Garrett!

• 1:42:51Bill Simmons?

  Muncie, Indiana, I'm gonna say yes.

• 1:42:54Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:55Chris Ryan?

  Any big basketball players from there?

• 1:42:58Bill Simmons?

  Probably. Terri Gar?

• 1:43:03Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna say the Tootsie era, when she started to go on Letterman.

• 1:43:06Sean Fennessey?

  And was she nominated for Tootsie?

• 1:43:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:08Sean Fennessey?

  She was, right? So I would say Tootsie.

• 1:43:11Bill Simmons?

  NBA players from Muncie, Indiana include...

• 1:43:15Bill Simmons?

  Alan Level, he used to be on the Rockets. Jay Edwards, Craig Neal, nobody, nobody that famous.

• 1:43:21Chris Ryan?

  That's not, Bob Knight hadn't started the whole Bloomington talent factory.

• 1:43:25Sean Fennessey?

  And you believed that he had the right way of coaching.

• 1:43:28Bill Simmons?

  How about those red American tracksuits?

• 1:43:30Chris Ryan?

  Those are awesome. Those are going to be in my memorabilia.

• 1:43:32Bill Simmons?

  The dream team, maybe break those back out.

• 1:43:34Chris Ryan?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:43:35Bill Simmons?

  Bad parenting.

• 1:43:37Sean Fennessey?

  Bad parenting at Apex Mountain?

• 1:43:39Bill Simmons?

  In a major box office smash movie?

• 1:43:42Sean Fennessey?

  I see This Boy's Life's probably up there.

• 1:43:43Bill Simmons?

  But as a smash.

• 1:43:46Sean Fennessey?

  Bad parenting in a smash movie?

• 1:43:48Bill Simmons?

  You'll remember me!

• 1:43:49Chris Ryan?

  Do you think John McClane is a better or worse dad than Roy Neary?

• 1:43:54Sean Fennessey?

  He seems like a pretty good dad.

• 1:43:55Chris Ryan?

  He puts himself in a lot of danger.

• 1:43:57Sean Fennessey?

  But he's not, not his children.

• 1:43:58Chris Ryan?

  I mean, he could have said, you know what, like if we lose Bidelia, like I have to be there for my children.

• 1:44:02Bill Simmons?

  Roy Neary drove his family away.

• 1:44:05Sean Fennessey?

  He just abandoned them.

• 1:44:06Chris Ryan?

  So did John McClane eventually.

• 1:44:08Sean Fennessey?

  But then they reunited, marry Elizabeth Winstead. You know, she comes back and live free or die hard.

• 1:44:13Bill Simmons?

  Cruise or Hanks? I think it's Hanks. But I would have also really enjoyed Cruise.

• 1:44:18Chris Ryan?

  Cruise basically does a version of this in War of the Worlds.

• 1:44:22Sean Fennessey?

  Don't you think that Cruise would be better at the obsession part? Hanks is more the everyman, which is useful. But Cruise being the guy who's like, I gotta go to Devil's Tower, you buy it more.

• 1:44:34Bill Simmons?

  It depends on what year of Cruise I'm getting. So like, if it's 87, maybe, because we don't have a ton of background with him yet.

• 1:44:41Chris Ryan?

  It's hard to imagine.

• 1:44:42Bill Simmons?

  But if we're in the late 90s with him, I'm just assuming it's going to become an action movie.

• 1:44:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And it's hard to imagine Cruise as like a guy working for the Muncie Power Department.

• 1:44:50Bill Simmons?

  That's right. Whereas Hanks, you could do.

• 1:44:51Chris Ryan?

  Has he ever had like a normal job? Because even in Color of Money, he's still like a fucking incredible pool player.

• 1:44:58Bill Simmons?

  But bartender in Jamaica?

• 1:44:59Chris Ryan?

  He's the best bartender of all time, or the second best, depending on who you ask.

• 1:45:03Bill Simmons?

  I have him number one.

• 1:45:04Sean Fennessey?

  He was just a, he was a normal senator in Lions for Lambs.

• 1:45:07Chris Ryan?

  That's true.

• 1:45:08Bill Simmons?

  What do you have, Craig?

• 1:45:10Speaker 05

  Uh, Hanks.

• 1:45:13Bill Simmons?

  Scorsese or Spielberg? Spielberg. By the way, Spielberg, ninth rewatchables movie.

• 1:45:18Chris Ryan?

  I think-

• 1:45:19Bill Simmons?

  Tied for the lead.

• 1:45:20Chris Ryan?

  With who?

• 1:45:20Bill Simmons?

  With Tony Scott.

• 1:45:22Chris Ryan?

  Nice.

• 1:45:23Bill Simmons?

  And Michael Mann.

• 1:45:23Chris Ryan?

  Nice.

• 1:45:24Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:45:25Chris Ryan?

  And we still have a few Spielbergs on the board though, too, right?

• 1:45:27Bill Simmons?

  I don't like that Mann is now in a tie.

• 1:45:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you gotta get Public Enemies on the board.

• 1:45:32Bill Simmons?

  We gotta, we gotta, there's some work left.

• 1:45:35Sean Fennessey?

  It's time for the keep.

• 1:45:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, it's time for-

• 1:45:37Bill Simmons?

  Mann should be number one. What role would Philip Seymour Hoffman have played clearly, uh, Roy and Harry? Okay, picking nits.

• 1:45:46Chris Ryan?

  Or Jericho Mile and how Logan's run.

• 1:45:49Bill Simmons?

  My biggest picking nit-

• 1:45:50Chris Ryan?

  It's okay, you're okay.

• 1:45:51Bill Simmons?

  And you can clearly tell it's a movie written by somebody who didn't have kids yet.

• 1:45:55Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:56Bill Simmons?

  No mom is letting their kid go out that dog door.

• 1:46:00Chris Ryan?

  Even in the, the, the-

• 1:46:01Bill Simmons?

  There's no way.

• 1:46:02Chris Ryan?

  Raise yourself, heel hole era.

• 1:46:04Bill Simmons?

  First of all, there's like, moms get like crazy strength when their kids are in danger.

• 1:46:08Chris Ryan?

  Even-

• 1:46:08Bill Simmons?

  She's holding on to the kids with dog door, she's not letting go.

• 1:46:11Chris Ryan?

  But this isn't like a carjacking, like, this is like, this isn't a car, like, this is like, I have a red light. Shit is coming through the vents.

• 1:46:19Bill Simmons?

  How about the kid, she's in the kitchen freaking out and the kid just climbs away and goes out the dog door, like-

• 1:46:24Chris Ryan?

  She would be holding on to the kid the entire movie.

• 1:46:26Bill Simmons?

  You're holding on to the kid, all you-

• 1:46:28Sean Fennessey?

  The minute something like this happens, the, your instinct is just to go take, grab your kid.

• 1:46:31Bill Simmons?

  The whole point of being a parent is you're putting the kid above your own safety, your life, everything. That's just, it's the fucking DNA of it, and you're just like this with your kid the whole time.

• 1:46:41Chris Ryan?

  I would know, I'd just be watching Dylan Harper tape.

• 1:46:46Bill Simmons?

  Well, I don't think Spielberg knew, I think-

• 1:46:48Sean Fennessey?

  It does raise the question, why the fuck is there a dog door with a three-year-old in this house anyway? This is, I know this is the dog door episode now, but how can you have a dog-

• 1:46:55Chris Ryan?

  She's not even that freaked out the first time he goes outside, though, like-

• 1:46:59Sean Fennessey?

  She's freaked out in the kitchen, though. And Melinda Dillon even says that she's freaked out.

• 1:47:03Chris Ryan?

  She's like, Barry, where are you going? She's kinda like, Barry, what are you doing?

• 1:47:06Bill Simmons?

  That was the seventies, though, we, we've covered this, we just, we're gone all day, our parents never knew where we were.

• 1:47:10Sean Fennessey?

  We let our three-year-olds wander in the street.

• 1:47:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I told you, we used to go to the Chestnut Hill Dump.

• 1:47:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Bill Simmons?

  Just for the day. Come back at like 7:30.

• 1:47:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I used to go to the Bada Bing, every day after school, after fifth grade.

• 1:47:22Bill Simmons?

  Bada Bing was there.

• 1:47:23Chris Ryan?

  Look how you turned out.

• 1:47:24Bill Simmons?

  Here's another parent nit, nitpick.

• 1:47:28Bill Simmons?

  So Barry comes off the UFO. She's like, Barry, Melinda Dillon is the mom. Oh, my God. I just feel like you're inspecting your kid first. That kid comes off, I'm picking him up.

• 1:47:40Chris Ryan?

  Taking a look.

• 1:47:41Bill Simmons?

  I'm making sure all the digits are there. Do you still have two feet? Do you still have arms? Do you have hands? I'm just looking at you.

• 1:47:46Sean Fennessey?

  Is he an alien?

• 1:47:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you're just, you're inspecting him before you interact with him.

• 1:47:51Chris Ryan?

  I think that there is a real untapped sequel potential of like Barry, something that happened to Barry.

• 1:47:57Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I have that in unanswerables.

• 1:47:59Chris Ryan?

  Barry the Omen.

• 1:48:01Bill Simmons?

  1989 Barry in high school, yeah.

• 1:48:03Chris Ryan?

  Barry Omen versus Damien Omen.

• 1:48:08Bill Simmons?

  Barry Omen's good.

• 1:48:13Bill Simmons?

  They don't kill any animals. They just sleep gas them with the, what's going on?

• 1:48:17Chris Ryan?

  That was an odd bit. I.

• 1:48:19Bill Simmons?

  Sleep gas, huh?

• 1:48:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's weird.

• 1:48:21Chris Ryan?

  I thought for a second that the major was lying.

• 1:48:24Bill Simmons?

  Sleep gas Craig?

• 1:48:26Chris Ryan?

  Why?

• 1:48:27Bill Simmons?

  I don't know. I just want to test it out.

• 1:48:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You blaspheme John Williams, you get sleep gassed.

• 1:48:34Bill Simmons?

  And then my, my last one, the pilots come off the UFO. My first question is, what, what year is this?

• 1:48:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Bill Simmons?

  Where am I?

• 1:48:43Sean Fennessey?

  Those guys are super chill. Like they haven't thought.

• 1:48:45Bill Simmons?

  Hi, I'm Bob Gordon, US. I'd be like, where am I? What year is this?

• 1:48:51Chris Ryan?

  What do you think hits those guys first is like the craziest thing?

• 1:48:55Sean Fennessey?

  Baseball's integrated?

• 1:48:58Chris Ryan?

  What the fuck?

• 1:49:04Bill Simmons?

  There's some professional basketball they get, 1945 to 77.

• 1:49:07Chris Ryan?

  Hey, Garrett has how many home runs? What?

• 1:49:11Sean Fennessey?

  Why is it only about baseball?

• 1:49:14Bill Simmons?

  They're just super racist about baseball. Who is this Reggie Jackson?

• 1:49:19Chris Ryan?

  Right off the spaceship, yeah.

• 1:49:21Bill Simmons?

  Reggie Jackson has a candy bar?

• 1:49:23Sean Fennessey?

  What's up with the guy who's greeting them when they're getting off the plane and he's, he's just like, Lieutenant, welcome back? What is that guy's problem? Why is he trying to assuage those guys?

• 1:49:33Bill Simmons?

  There wasn't one guy that's like, what year is this? It's 1977. What? 1977? Like this is like the, I'll step on my sequel now. The sequel is these guys going back to their families and their wife is 32 years older.

• 1:49:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:49Bill Simmons?

  And they're just like, ah.

• 1:49:54Bill Simmons?

  I'm sure this is gonna work.

• 1:49:57Bill Simmons?

  I'm just a 24 year old gunner.

• 1:49:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00Bill Simmons?

  I left World War II. Now I have a 58 year old wife.

• 1:50:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I just think Ty Cobb is the best thing that ever happened in baseball.

• 1:50:10Bill Simmons?

  Totally misunderstood. His kids, their kids are older than them, potentially.

• 1:50:14Chris Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:50:15Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 1:50:15Bill Simmons?

  It's just had so many questions.

• 1:50:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Chris Ryan?

  It's really cool back to the future thing. Yeah.

• 1:50:21Sean Fennessey?

  It would have been distracting for a guy to be like melting down and being like, what do you mean 1977? But the whole time you're watching it, you're waiting for someone to have any reaction. They have no reaction.

• 1:50:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:30Bill Simmons?

  I would have had a lot of sports questions. I just would have wanted to go through every year to see if the Red Sox won. All right, just don't tell me if they won or not. Let's go. Forty six. Cardinals went, fuck. Forty seven. Yankees went, fuck. Forty eight. It just goes. We get to 75, it's like, well, Reds, Red Sox final, say your.

• 1:50:55Sean Fennessey?

  And then you would have only had to wait another 27 years.

• 1:50:58Chris Ryan?

  Right. What if they got off and they were like really scared of Barry? They're like, no! You guys didn't bring Barry back to you!

• 1:51:07Chris Ryan?

  The devil!

• 1:51:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that could have been another sequel. Barry just going nuts. What other nitpicks do you have?

• 1:51:13Chris Ryan?

  Uh, you know, the, the conspiracy being for the greater good and like how nice everybody involved in the military and the science community are.

• 1:51:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:22Chris Ryan?

  It's more of like an Age of the Worst, probably, but it, it's a very warm version of, we're really trying to look out for everybody's best interests here.

• 1:51:29Bill Simmons?

  Spielberg sucking up to the Illuminati, trying to get in.

• 1:51:31Sean Fennessey?

  Good day.

• 1:51:32Bill Simmons?

  Good to have that too.

• 1:51:32Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I think it's a little suspicious how the centrality of power that someone like LaCombe has on American soil. That's a little weird. That probably isn't likely to happen.

• 1:51:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, good point.

• 1:51:43Chris Ryan?

  That is funny when, when Roy's like, he's not even American.

• 1:51:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Uh, there's an incredible moment on Steven Spielberg's Inside the Actors Studio. Do you know what I'm referring to?

• 1:51:54Bill Simmons?

  I saw that when it happened, but I don't remember it.

• 1:51:57Sean Fennessey?

  So it's, it's, this is a real thing that happened. James Lipton is interviewing him. And this is what Lipton says. He says, your father was a computer engineer. Your mother was a concert pianist. And when the spaceship lands, they make music together on the computer. Suggesting that Roy Neary's boarding the spaceship represents Spielberg's wish to be reunited with his parents, for them to be reunited as a couple. And in the moment on the show. It like dawns on Spielberg, like what he has done and doesn't realize.

• 1:52:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Sean Fennessey?

  And it's a very beautiful moment about how you kind of create things and don't necessarily understand how you're bringing ideas and feelings inside of yourself and putting them in the world. But I'm like, how the fuck did he not like ever put that together?

• 1:52:37Chris Ryan?

  Well, the subconscious is a very powerful thing, man.

• 1:52:40Sean Fennessey?

  Like, he's talked about this movie nonstop.

• 1:52:42Chris Ryan?

  You're right.

• 1:52:43Sean Fennessey?

  For 25 years at this, at this point, when he's being interviewed. Like, there have been multiple documentaries made about this movie where he's reflecting on what it means. And it took James Lipton at the Actors Studio to coordinate these ideas.

• 1:52:56Chris Ryan?

  Did he say that before or after Fableman's? I bet I seen before, yeah.

• 1:52:59Sean Fennessey?

  Before, before, yeah. It was like 20 years ago.

• 1:53:01Bill Simmons?

  Inside the Actors Studio, I got nostalgic. Now it'd be Spielberg on Theo Von's podcast, too. It'd be like, how'd you make that UFO? Think it was fucking cool, man.

• 1:53:09Chris Ryan?

  You like yogurt? Yeah, me too.

• 1:53:12Sean Fennessey?

  At the time, everybody was like, James Lipton, what a blowhard. What, this, this, this pompous ass. But he was so good.

• 1:53:18Bill Simmons?

  He really was. Any other pick of nits?

• 1:53:22Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, no, I, I, I think the prevailing one to me is what Chris said, which is like, the government sure is friendly in this movie.

• 1:53:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's really kind of strange.

• 1:53:31Chris Ryan?

  Like, even having like a televised meeting with the people who feel like they've been vanished or like had experiences and just feeling, you guys, your concerns are really valid.

• 1:53:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Chris Ryan?

  You know?

• 1:53:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:43Chris Ryan?

  I wish I could tell you some of something else, give you an answer.

• 1:53:45Bill Simmons?

  Sequel, prequel, prestige, TV, all black cast are untouchable. I still like the idea of the, the prestige TV sequel of these guys coming back to their families off the ship.

• 1:53:55Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:55Bill Simmons?

  And maybe it's like, almost like an episode of Lost. Each episode is Senator Aaron, one guy, trying to re-acclimate himself with his now-aged

• 1:54:02Chris Ryan?

  End of the first season, Roy comes back?

• 1:54:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, Roy comes back.

• 1:54:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06Bill Simmons?

  But it's 2007. You think this is an untouchable?

• 1:54:11Sean Fennessey?

  He thought about making a real sequel many times. And he was, it was presented to him as it could have been a huge windfall, and he never pursued it. And it's not that he's above sequels, he's made sequels. But, um, it's interesting.

• 1:54:22Bill Simmons?

  So you'd have to have Roy in the sequel if Spielberg was doing it.

• 1:54:26Sean Fennessey?

  I think that would be interesting. The time to do it would have been in the early 2000s. You know, it would have been when you had crossed that 30-something year threshold.

• 1:54:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:34Sean Fennessey?

  And Dreyfus was still acting.

• 1:54:36Bill Simmons?

  Semecus was like, I got this.

• 1:54:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:38Bill Simmons?

  Spielberg's like, fuck this shit.

• 1:54:41Bill Simmons?

  Fucking Contact. Now I'm not, now I'm never making a sequel.

• 1:54:44Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think it's been ruined. That wasn't.

• 1:54:46Chris Ryan?

  I love it. Spielberg turned into you. Now I'm fucking never doing it.

• 1:54:50Bill Simmons?

  Fuck this.

• 1:54:51Chris Ryan?

  How about that?

• 1:54:52Sean Fennessey?

  I believe Spielberg likes Contact, just for the record.

• 1:54:55Bill Simmons?

  Okay. Is this movie better with Wayne Jenkins, Danny Trejo, Doris Burke, Sam Jackson, No, Byron Mayo, Barney Cousins, Tony Roma, Harling Mays, Chris Collinsworth, Daniel Plainview, Long Legs, or Wilford Brimley in The Firm?

• 1:55:08Chris Ryan?

  Didn't you have somebody in addition you wanted to add, or no?

• 1:55:10Bill Simmons?

  You want to go first?

• 1:55:11Chris Ryan?

  Sure, I can do Doris Burke talking about Roy's oldest son.

• 1:55:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:15Chris Ryan?

  "We see you, Brad. You may not be able to solve fractions, but now you're gonna have to solve being the man of the house. Your crybaby father has chosen a life of the unknown, out in outer space, instead of taking you to Pinocchio. So get ready to learn drywall, buddy. At least until Terry Garr finds a silver fox somewhere on the Muncie single scene."

• 1:55:39Bill Simmons?

  I think you've turned this into Byron Mayo as Doris Burke.

• 1:55:44Chris Ryan?

  Did you feel like DB and-

• 1:55:46Bill Simmons?

  You didn't throw in a young man there, that's better.

• 1:55:48Chris Ryan?

  We see you, young man.

• 1:55:49Bill Simmons?

  That young man, that young man-

• 1:55:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:52Bill Simmons?

  Has found something in that cereal box.

• 1:55:54Sean Fennessey?

  What's the kid's name?

• 1:55:55Chris Ryan?

  Brad.

• 1:55:56Sean Fennessey?

  Wouldn't it be Mr. Brad?

• 1:55:57Chris Ryan?

  Mr. Brad. Did you think that RJ and DB were doing a, kind of in New York's pocket for that game?

• 1:56:03Sean Fennessey?

  What?

• 1:56:04Bill Simmons?

  Kind of.

• 1:56:05Chris Ryan?

  You didn't think so?

• 1:56:06Bill Simmons?

  Oh my god.

• 1:56:07Chris Ryan?

  They were like, "Oh, this is another really tough foul against Jalen."

• 1:56:11Bill Simmons?

  You mean when Josh Hart tripped Tatum?

• 1:56:13Chris Ryan?

  And they were like, "Well, for the injury."

• 1:56:15Bill Simmons?

  And they were like, "Ah, that was where his foot goes."

• 1:56:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's been a very pleasant hour and 50 minute podcast.

• 1:56:19Bill Simmons?

  Well.

• 1:56:20Sean Fennessey?

  That was not a dirty play.

• 1:56:21Chris Ryan?

  I just rolled the grenade in there and walked out.

• 1:56:26Bill Simmons?

  I have a-

• 1:56:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's totally ridiculous. You're ridiculous.

• 1:56:29Bill Simmons?

  I have a new character for this.

• 1:56:31Chris Ryan?

  As a, you know, non-partisan observer, I'm just saying.

• 1:56:35Bill Simmons?

  Out there just rooting for the Knicks. Jay Williams from First Take.

• 1:56:40Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:56:41Bill Simmons?

  I have, new character.

• 1:56:42Sean Fennessey?

  Not from Duke University or the Chicago Bulls from First Take.

• 1:56:46Bill Simmons?

  Where it goes around and everybody agrees on something and it goes to Jay Williams. I know Claude the Cone pulled it off. I know he brought all those airplane pilots back and I know he established actual contacts with the aliens without our planet being destroyed. I get it. But how hard was that really? How hard was that really? That's my question, guys. So he figured out six sounds of a synthesizer. Now he's a hero? Where was the science? That's my question. Because are you a scientist or a music producer? If I need a music producer in 1977, guys, I'm getting Brian Eno. I'm getting Alan Parsons. I'm not getting Claude the Cone. And that's all I'm saying.

• 1:57:28Bill Simmons?

  Jay Williams from First Take. Thank you. New debut. Way to go in your Brian Eno bag.

• 1:57:37Sean Fennessey?

  One day, every member of the sports media will be a member of this.

• 1:57:41Chris Ryan?

  It's like, to college, y'all.

• 1:57:45Bill Simmons?

  Just want to ask her who gets it.

• 1:57:47Chris Ryan?

  Wait, did you have any?

• 1:57:48Sean Fennessey?

  I do think that there's a really good case for Wilford Brimley saying, and what does she find in that spaceship Mitch? Heartbreak.

• 1:57:55Chris Ryan?

  Heartbreak. She goes down to her local.

• 1:57:58Bill Simmons?

  The Devil's Island?

• 1:57:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Devil's Tower. What does she find, Mitch?

• 1:58:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Did I say Devil's Island?

• 1:58:05Chris Ryan?

  Devil's, you did, but that's Devil's Tower. Maybe that could be the sequel. Close Encounters Four, Devil's Island.

• 1:58:14Bill Simmons?

  Just want to ask her who gets it, Steve.

• 1:58:16Sean Fennessey?

  I wrote John Williams.

• 1:58:18Chris Ryan?

  Honestly, also, maybe Vilmos, the cinematographer.

• 1:58:21Sean Fennessey?

  He did get it.

• 1:58:22Chris Ryan?

  But he.

• 1:58:23Sean Fennessey?

  He did get it.

• 1:58:24Chris Ryan?

  Did have a little bit of assistance on this one, didn't he?

• 1:58:27Sean Fennessey?

  They did reshoots and he was not available for the reshoots and some of the reshoots were done by John Alonso Doug Slocum, who shot the Indiana Jones movies and, uh, shit, another like incredibly accomplished cinematographer.

• 1:58:40Chris Ryan?

  Not Nestor Almandros.

• 1:58:41Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, someone else.

• 1:58:45Bill Simmons?

  I have Steve.

• 1:58:46Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:58:46Bill Simmons?

  Probably an answerable questions. Did Roy ever come back?

• 1:58:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What happened to Roy? Did he ever see his family again? Why don't people age on the ship?

• 1:58:55Bill Simmons?

  A rare case of like, a sequel actually would have answered some questions. But on the other hand, it's kind of cool never knowing whether Roy came back or not.

• 1:59:01Chris Ryan?

  What do Ronnie and the family think when they come home and see what Roy's done to the house? And she gets back from her sisters. She's like, I have this ranch house.

• 1:59:09Bill Simmons?

  I think you're calling like the sanitarium.

• 1:59:12Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:13Bill Simmons?

  Right? Like if this guy ever comes back, we have to lock him up with a straitjacket. Cause there is 500 pounds of dirt and trees in my living room right now.

• 1:59:23Speaker 05

  And Ronnie will have no idea what happened to him, right?

• 1:59:25Sean Fennessey?

  No. But we do know culturally what happened to Barry Omen. You know, and that he is the Antichrist. And so that will give us some sign.

• 1:59:31Bill Simmons?

  What was Barry like around 1989? Just in high school, shooting red darts through people's faces.

• 1:59:39Chris Ryan?

  Why does Roy? Like, what is the reason for Roy getting fired?

• 1:59:44Sean Fennessey?

  Unclear.

• 1:59:45Chris Ryan?

  Because?

• 1:59:45Sean Fennessey?

  He just didn't show up to work, maybe?

• 1:59:47Chris Ryan?

  Well, or is he speeding around in his truck and like too much? Too much reckless driving? Cause I, I feel like a lot of people in Muncie are like, something really fucking insane happened that night. So like, why would you get fired the next day?

• 2:00:01Bill Simmons?

  I agree. There was something missing from that, especially in the 77 cut. He's getting promoted.

• 2:00:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Bill Simmons?

  And then he goes right there. So it's almost like a scene is missing.

• 2:00:09Chris Ryan?

  I guess a lot of things happen. What is it like? They're basically like urge, like you wonder whether or not like Roy is being put in position to follow this link? To like get out to Devil's Tower.

• 2:00:22Bill Simmons?

  Melinda Dillon's husband, who we never seen this movie. What if it was hand to hand? And he got transferred from the Indiana team. He played college at Boston University.

• 2:00:34Chris Ryan?

  That's why he has the shirt?

• 2:00:36Bill Simmons?

  Got transferred over.

• 2:00:37Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of checks out.

• 2:00:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. So you can't say it wasn't.

• 2:00:39Chris Ryan?

  That would be great if like she gets back from Devil's Tower. Paul Newman's waiting for an a leather overcoat.

• 2:00:46Sean Fennessey?

  Who's the closest NHL franchise to Indiana? Is it like the Blue Jackets?

• 2:00:50Bill Simmons?

  Well, we did have the Indianapolis Racers.

• 2:00:52Sean Fennessey?

  The Blues?

• 2:00:52Bill Simmons?

  The W H A in 1977, the Racers were, Gretzky played.

• 2:01:00Bill Simmons?

  Any other unanswered?

• 2:01:03Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 2:01:04Bill Simmons?

  What piece of memorabilia would you want from this movie? Or not want?

• 2:01:07Chris Ryan?

  Uh, jumpsuit, certainly.

• 2:01:10Bill Simmons?

  Jumpsuit was magnificent.

• 2:01:11Sean Fennessey?

  Clay Mountain sculpture, for me.

• 2:01:13Bill Simmons?

  I have the cymbal banging monkey toy. But I also like the B U shirt.

• 2:01:18Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see the movie The Monkey?

• 2:01:20Sean Fennessey?

  The horror movie that came out this year?

• 2:01:21Bill Simmons?

  I did not see that because the reviews were mixed, but I will see it at some point.

• 2:01:25Chris Ryan?

  I have a weird memorabilia question, because I have to say that just the one shot of the McDonald's, I like had like the urge, where I was like, should I go get a fucking Big Mac right now? Like, this is, because you get, you see the arches.

• 2:01:36Sean Fennessey?

  Can I ask you a question?

• 2:01:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:36Sean Fennessey?

  When that happened, was your wife out of town?

• 2:01:38Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:01:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. But I didn't go. And I do want to know, memorabilia wise, is a 1977 McDonald's burger taste much different?

• 2:01:48Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 2:01:49Chris Ryan?

  Than a 2025 McDonald's burger?

• 2:01:51Sean Fennessey?

  Good question.

• 2:01:53Sean Fennessey?

  That wasn't a lot of that.

• 2:01:54Chris Ryan?

  Probably the same.

• 2:01:57Chris Ryan?

  My wife did not want to have this conversation. You'd be surprised.

• 2:02:00Bill Simmons?

  Do you think Roy Neer is should have been a verb, like? I just Roy Neered it last week. Just fucking left.

• 2:02:06Chris Ryan?

  Does that mean like when you abandon your family to go golfing or something?

• 2:02:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I just did it.

• 2:02:10Sean Fennessey?

  You're saying that's what Josh Hart did to Tatum? He neered him?

• 2:02:14Bill Simmons?

  Roy neered him? Coach Finstock award for best life lesson. It's okay to dump your family, as long as you're trusting your gut.

• 2:02:21Chris Ryan?

  That's why I'm hot as steak, yeah.

• 2:02:22Sean Fennessey?

  Is it justifiable if the aliens are real?

• 2:02:28Chris Ryan?

  It's a leap of faith, you know?

• 2:02:31Sean Fennessey?

  Do you, do you support the reading of the film that none of that is really happening?

• 2:02:35Chris Ryan?

  Oh, that it's all in his head?

• 2:02:36Sean Fennessey?

  And then Neer is having a psychotic break?

• 2:02:39Chris Ryan?

  Oh. Triggered by?

• 2:02:41Bill Simmons?

  It's like how in Top Gun Maverick, he dies in the first 10 minutes?

• 2:02:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's one of those.

• 2:02:45Bill Simmons?

  That's my favorite one ever.

• 2:02:47Chris Ryan?

  So he's going to heaven?

• 2:02:48Sean Fennessey?

  The death dream, yeah.

• 2:02:49Chris Ryan?

  It's, it's heaven when he gets to the top of Devil's Tower?

• 2:02:53Sean Fennessey?

  No, I think it's just a mass delusion.

• 2:02:55Chris Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:02:57Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. It's just an interesting, interesting line of thought.

• 2:02:59Bill Simmons?

  I feel like if it's a mass delusion, he's probably having sex with Melinda Dillon at some point on the mountain.

• 2:03:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:06Bill Simmons?

  Just gonna throw one in there quickly.

• 2:03:07Sean Fennessey?

  You Hanrahan's wife?

• 2:03:10Sean Fennessey?

  Love slapstick.

• 2:03:11Bill Simmons?

  Threesome?

• 2:03:13Bill Simmons?

  Best double feature choice? I have Starman with Jeff Bridges.

• 2:03:17Sean Fennessey?

  That's a good one.

• 2:03:18Bill Simmons?

  I really like that movie.

• 2:03:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I have.

• 2:03:20Bill Simmons?

  I've probably seen that movie more than just about anybody.

• 2:03:23Chris Ryan?

  The carpenter movie.

• 2:03:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I love Starman.

• 2:03:25Sean Fennessey?

  The tonally, those are really matched.

• 2:03:28Bill Simmons?

  You know that movie, either of you, Craig, Jack?

• 2:03:31Chris Ryan?

  Jeff Bridges.

• 2:03:32Bill Simmons?

  It's like a really great Jeff Bridges movie.

• 2:03:34Sean Fennessey?

  Similar like.

• 2:03:34Bill Simmons?

  1984.

• 2:03:35Sean Fennessey?

  Curiosity and wonder and it's it's not cynical or mean in any way. It's the rare un.

• 2:03:44Bill Simmons?

  He has these.

• 2:03:45Sean Fennessey?

  Carpenter movie.

• 2:03:45Bill Simmons?

  What does he have, like 10 special balls? And he can use each one. He like saves a deer with one of them and.

• 2:03:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:50Bill Simmons?

  Then he starts running out of balls, like literally.

• 2:03:55Chris Ryan?

  I had Asteroid City, which is a Wes Anderson movie from a few years ago about alien visitation, but also very melancholy about family.

• 2:04:02Sean Fennessey?

  That's a good one. There was a special feature on the 4K that I think was made

• 2:04:10Sean Fennessey?

  maybe seven or eight years ago, and it's three kinds of Close Encounters is the name of it. And it's an it's a three interviews, one with Spielberg, one with Denis Villeneuve, and one with J.J. Abrams. And J.J. and Denis talking about how the movie kind of changed their lives and how they see movies. And then one with Spielberg kind of talking about the movie 40 years later. And in that documentary, Spielberg says, I think Arrival is the best movie about alien encounters since Close Encounters. Like, I think that this is the absolute pinnacle of this kind of a film.

• 2:04:44Chris Ryan?

  That would probably be tough for J.J., who made Super 8 and is basically like trying to make Close Encounters.

• 2:04:49Sean Fennessey?

  Super 8 is not uttered once during this documentary.

• 2:04:52Bill Simmons?

  Didn't he make Cloverfield, whatever that one was too?

• 2:04:55Sean Fennessey?

  He didn't direct it, yeah.

• 2:04:57Chris Ryan?

  Who won the movie?

• 2:04:58Bill Simmons?

  Spielberg?

• 2:04:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yes.

• 2:05:00Chris Ryan?

  He's also making another UFO film right now.

• 2:05:02Sean Fennessey?

  He is.

• 2:05:02Chris Ryan?

  That we didn't talk about.

• 2:05:03Bill Simmons?

  It's Chasing Ghosts.

• 2:05:05Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we've never done War of the Worlds too, and War of the Worlds is totally in conversation with this movie.

• 2:05:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Sean Fennessey?

  Craig.

• 2:05:12Chris Ryan?

  Wait, what was that?

• 2:05:14Sean Fennessey?

  War of the Worlds compared to this movie?

• 2:05:16Chris Ryan?

  But do you like War of the Worlds?

• 2:05:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's fine.

• 2:05:18Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:19Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's good.

• 2:05:20Chris Ryan?

  I think it's very good. But I don't think it's as good as Close Encounters.

• 2:05:25Sean Fennessey?

  Craig?

• 2:05:27Speaker 05

  My tuba thoughts aside, I do love this movie.

• 2:05:30Chris Ryan?

  It feels shame.

• 2:05:31Speaker 05

  I do. I love this movie. Spielberg is my, after watching this, it just reconfirmed why Spielberg is my favorite director. I still think he just makes movies. Like Spielberg movies are what movies are supposed to be. He makes the platonic ideal of movies to me. Like, they are how you are supposed to feel after watching something. Like, there's no better feeling than the first shot of a Spielberg movie. Like, you see the camera coming down, you just, like, feel it.

• 2:05:56Speaker 05

  And I actually think this movie does not resonate super hard with my generation, or has not endured the same way other Spielberg films have. And I honestly think it's because he made E.T. too soon, after this. Like, if he just waited 15 years after Close Encounters to make E.T., I think Close Encounters is a way bigger movie for people my age.

• 2:06:15Bill Simmons?

  I think the rewatchability of it on the 80s, 90s TV apparatuses really hurt it.

• 2:06:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21Bill Simmons?

  It was one of the rare ones. It was just really hard to watch. They could never get the camera right when they would pan and scan on it. Just never was the same kind of impact.

• 2:06:29Speaker 05

  And I just think if you're a parent and you want to show your kid an Alien movie, you're picking E.T. You're like, you're never gonna pick this one first.

• 2:06:34Chris Ryan?

  I wonder whether, but this has had, like, a sort of cinematic studies revival. Like, it's a big Letterboxd movie. It's a big, like, people are like, this is a top-three Spielberg.

• 2:06:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's been re-released theatrically a couple of times. And I think it's widely seen as, even though I think it's actually a very mature portrait of parenting, one of Spielberg's most mature movies. And so, it's like, E.T. is a movie you watch when you're a kid. Jurassic Park is a movie you watch when you're a kid. Jaws is a movie you watch when you're a kid. As you're starting to get into adult life.

• 2:07:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:05Sean Fennessey?

  And having real responsibility, it's a very powerful movie.

• 2:07:09Bill Simmons?

  All right.

• 2:07:09Chris Ryan?

  You did a great job.

• 2:07:10Bill Simmons?

  Close Encounters. Did a great job, what?

• 2:07:13Chris Ryan?

  Just, just on this pod, you were like, I'm nervous, I, you know, I wanted more time in the oven.

• 2:07:17Bill Simmons?

  I felt like we needed more time, much like Spielberg making the movie.

• 2:07:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:20Bill Simmons?

  We did fine.

• 2:07:20Chris Ryan?

  We may not have gotten Jay Williams.

• 2:07:21Sean Fennessey?

  I was just gonna say you brought Jay Williams to the table. And we'll be forever changed because of that.

• 2:07:26Bill Simmons?

  Thanks to Craig and Jack, as always, you can watch this on the Ringer movies.

• 2:07:29Chris Ryan?

  And thank you to Ronic.

• 2:07:30Bill Simmons?

  Channel as well, and thank you to Ronic. And we have one more big ass 70's movie next week, which I don't know what it's gonna be. It was great to see you guys, thank you.

• 2:07:38Chris Ryan?

  Thanks, Joe.

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

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