‘Zodiac’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey pick up a shift at the SF Chronicle as they revisit David Fincher’s mystery-thriller ‘Zodiac’ starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic 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 Angry Orchard Hard Cider. Halloween's just better with a scary movie and something good to drink. Angry Orchard's limited edition glow-in-the-dark thriller variety pack is the perfect companion. It even includes a mystery flavor can featuring the iconic ghost face from Scream. Don't get angry, get orchard this Halloween. Find Angry Orchard in a store near you or visit angryorchard.com. Angry Orchard, cider company, LLC. Angryorchard.com. Please drink responsibly. Angry Orchard is a hard cider with other natural flavors. This episode is brought to you by Searchlight Pictures, Wild Horse 9.

• 0:41Bill Simmons?

  John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, I like those guys, star in the sharp-witted comedy thriller from Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh. Writer-director of The Banshees of Inisherin and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, set in the 1970s, filmed on location on Easter Island. Malkovich and Rockwell play CIA agents Chris and Lee, who are caught in a dangerous game of secrets and survival. Also starring Steve Buscemi, another one of my guys, Parker Posey and Tom Waits. Wild Horse 9 is being hailed by critics as a revitalizing shot of pure entertainment and easily one of the best films of the year. Don't miss Wild Horse 9, only in theaters November 6th. Get tickets now.

• 1:29Bill Simmons?

  The Rewatchables is brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network. This is our first podcast that we are running, not only on Spotify as a video, but on Netflix as well. That's Sean Fantasy, he hosts The Big Picture.

• 1:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:40Bill Simmons?

  That's Chris Ryan, who's on The Big Picture sometimes as well. And on The Watch, you're still doing that, right?

• 1:44Sean Fennessey?

  I still crank it out.

• 1:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, and we've been doing the Rewatchables.

• 1:47Sean Fennessey?

  Wait, what's The Watch?

• 1:48Bill Simmons?

  The Watch, it's a TV culture pod, right? It's a landman podcast.

• 1:52Chris Ryan?

  Culture pod.

• 1:53Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, first I'm hearing of this.

• 1:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Sean Fennessey?

  We have other pods?

• 1:56Bill Simmons?

  We do, we have other podcasts.

• 1:57Sean Fennessey?

  Exciting.

• 1:59Bill Simmons?

  We have been circling this one for a long time because we already did it. This podcast goes.

• 2:05Sean Fennessey?

  You've been circling it for a long time.

• 2:07Bill Simmons?

  On the original, we've been doing this podcast since 2017. It has evolved, we've added all these different categories. This is a movie that's on Netflix, so we're gonna try to do some movies to start out that were on Netflix. And this is one we wanted to redo over and over again. I did with you guys, my top 50 most rewatchable movies of the 21st century. And I had a copy paste accident and somehow cut Zodiac out accidentally, which you reminded me of at the end. I flipped out. Proof of Life was in there, but turned out that was a 2000 movie, not eligible. So I moved Zodiac belatedly into that spot, but we were making it up to Zodiac and the Zodiac Killer.

• 2:44Chris Ryan?

  Somewhere David Fincher is like, it's all been worth it. I made it on the bills list finally.

• 2:49Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he's a Netflix guy too, right? So maybe he's watching.

• 2:52Bill Simmons?

  Anyway, Zodiac is next.

• 3:07Bill Simmons?

  2007. Top 10 movies. Spider-Man 3.

• 3:13Sean Fennessey?

  Box office. Not your favorites.

• 3:15Bill Simmons?

  No, box office. Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, Transformers, Pirates 2, Harry Potter 3, I Am Legend, Born 2, National Treasure 2, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and 300. That was our top 10 box office.

• 3:33Chris Ryan?

  It's pretty rough.

• 3:34Bill Simmons?

  Here's what also came out in 2007.

• 3:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Bill Simmons?

  There Will Be Blood.

• 3:38Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 3:38Bill Simmons?

  No Country For Old Men, Zodiac, Michael Clayton, Juno, American Gangster, Superbad, Knocked Up, Charlie Wilson's War, 310 Yuma, Gone Baby Gone, Eastern Promises, Assassination of Jesse James.

• 3:51Chris Ryan?

  By the coward Robert Ford. He often doesn't get mentioned in the title.

• 3:54Bill Simmons?

  I'm sorry, Robert Ford. And out of all of those, Zodiac was the slowest burn. I saw it in the theater. It was like, I thought this could be more like Seven. It's slow, it's methodical. And somewhere over the last 10 years, this movie roped me in, so why? Like roped me in as a real hardcore rewatchable.

• 4:14Sean Fennessey?

  Can I, can I very quickly answer why I think it could have been a little bit different and might have roped us in quicker before I do that?

• 4:21Bill Simmons?

  Go.

• 4:21Sean Fennessey?

  The movie was supposed to come out in 2006. And it was too long, according to the studio. And they had to cut it down. And so it went from being a December awards player to a February 28th movie. And that's a little discussed aspect of this movie that I think might have changed its slow burn nature. Obviously, the movie itself is a slow burn.

• 4:41Bill Simmons?

  Sure.

• 4:42Sean Fennessey?

  You're meant to revisit, reimagine, to be kind of unsatisfied at the end of it.

• 4:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Sean Fennessey?

  Anytime we talk about a serial killer movie on this show or elsewhere, it's all about the hunt for the killer. Seven is so satisfying because we get that great resolution. It's devastating, but it's.

• 4:58Bill Simmons?

  Tough, tough for Brad Pitt, but it's satisfying for everybody else.

• 5:01Sean Fennessey?

  We at least find out what happened. The whole point of this movie is the unknowability of evil, the unsolvability of these stories. We're probably gonna spend an hour here trying to solve this case.

• 5:11Bill Simmons?

  No, we, we actually are gonna solve it. Spoiler. Ciara and I have found out the killer. That's coming at the end.

• 5:17Sean Fennessey?

  But the, you know, the ingenious idea of the movie is it's not Dirty Harry. This, you can't just solve it. And so it, it allows you to kind of accept that unknowability and then focus more on how the movie is made. What's interesting about the people. It's not just the case, but the world at that time, the cities that he's interested in. And then, then we can understand it too. It's this like beautiful, personal story about David Fincher's adolescence.

• 5:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I, I think it's almost unknowable on the first watch. You know, I mean, when you, when you spend time with this movie, especially like as we get ready for a rewatchable, we watch a movie usually like a couple of times during this week and.

• 5:54Chris Ryan?

  I found myself noticing things in the back of frames, gestures that people make, little like hints of what's about to happen three scenes later, that I never would have gotten in a movie theater in 2007 on the first watch. It's like a demanding, really like, almost an endurance test of a film, because you're constantly having to pay attention to every single thing on 100% of the screen. It's not just like, here's an actor, nothing else is in focus. They say something very, very clearly, and then it winds up happening. It's like so much information, visual and expository, that you're trying to keep track of. So it's almost made to be studied, rather than just like, oh, that was a good five o'clocker, now I'm going home.

• 6:38Bill Simmons?

  The other piece of it, it's kind of a good hang, which we talk about with rewatchables. Like, you can also throw it on and just have it on and half-watch it, because the music and everything, and there's always like, every 20 minutes, there's another really good scene.

• 6:52Chris Ryan?

  Usually when we do these, by the time we finish the recording, my big thing is I go home and I close the tabs on all the things I've been reading about the movie, and then I don't watch the movie again for like, five years. I kind of want to watch Zodiac tonight.

• 7:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know you, you know exactly what you mean. I've seen it twice now in the last three days, and I watched it with the commentary. And right before I got here, I was like, I needed another watch.

• 7:14Chris Ryan?

  Or I just like, I want to hear you guys talk about it, and then I want to go home and think about what you said and watch it again.

• 7:19Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right.

• 7:20Bill Simmons?

  Well, that was, there was a Fincher quote about this. What was his quote, that a movie isn't done, it's abandoned? I have it in my notes somewhere, I'll find the exact quote. But he was basically like, I never finished making Zodiac, I just had to stop making it to make another movie.

• 7:35Chris Ryan?

  Is that how you feel about trade value?

• 7:37Bill Simmons?

  That's how I feel about those rewatchables. We're never gonna be finished.

• 7:41Sean Fennessey?

  This is part two, maybe we'll do part three. You guys have been reheating for years.

• 7:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I wasn't on the first one.

• 7:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Bill Simmons?

  And it's interesting, one of the reasons I wasn't on the first one, was I wasn't totally there yet with the movie as a rewatchable. And it must have happened over COVID. But this movie all of a sudden was on more, at least in the ways we watch stuff. And then it was on the streamers lot, it was on Netflix a lot. And it was just like, I'll throw this on, and the music's good in the beginning, and you just get sucked in.

• 8:08Sean Fennessey?

  It's stature has really grown in the last 10 years. I mean, Chris and I have done like, 15 podcasts about Fincher at this point. We wrote a column about David Fincher together like, 20 years ago. We've been kind of like studying him through our friendship. And I, is it safe to say this is your favorite? Cause this has been my favorite for about 10 years.

• 8:27Chris Ryan?

  It is, yes.

• 8:28Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 8:28Bill Simmons?

  Really?

• 8:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And I, I was thinking about it last night and thinking about just, I mean, I don't, there's probably 500,000 words of just Chris and I texting each other about David Fincher.

• 8:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Sean Fennessey?

  But it did dawn on me while watching this movie that Chris's dad was a newspaper man and my dad was a police detective. And this is a movie about a newspaper man and a police detective trying to figure something out.

• 8:50Bill Simmons?

  Wow, the symbolism of you guys.

• 8:52Chris Ryan?

  Well, I mean, I think it's also, you're exactly right. And it's also, you can tell that this is a movie that's incredibly personal to Fincher and also shaped what a diabolical, perverted, cynical worldview he has because he watched this demon rise out of the night in the Bay Area and never get caught. And he was just like, that's what life is. You're driving on a fucking road one night and the guy starts flashing you from behind? And you pull over to get help and then he tries to throw you out of a car. I mean, it's like, that's real life. And that was kind of like, I think of all the directors, sometimes I think Fincher has it the most right. You know, even though that's the hardest thing to accept.

• 9:31Bill Simmons?

  Producer Craig Horlbeck is with us as well. He joins us for every rewatch of us. Craig, if somebody's flashing their lights at you and telling you to pull over because there's something wrong with your tire, keep going. It's one of the lessons of this movie.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  One of our biggest nitpicks watching last night, we were watching and we were like, who is ever gonna pull over if somebody's just honking and flashing their lights at you on the freeway? Why would you ever pull over?

• 9:51Bill Simmons?

  And it's a creepy man by himself. I think this, the late 60s, early 70s was the most trusting time we've ever had in America. This was, these were half of the shows back then where hitchhikers getting kidnapped and serial killers just running a mock. People showing up at sorority houses, just going to town.

• 10:10Sean Fennessey?

  I think that there was, um, the possibility of good Samaritan ship back then. Now, like.

• 10:15Bill Simmons?

  It was a more hopefulness.

• 10:16Sean Fennessey?

  We just ignore each other. People just don't talk to each other. Like being neighborly is increasingly not a thing in this country. Back then, if you needed help, in theory, a stranger would help you.

• 10:27Bill Simmons?

  Like my wife told me today that California is passing some law that you can ask for a drink lid for a drink when you're at a bar and they have to give it to you.

• 10:34Chris Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 10:35Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's where we are in 2026. In 1971, pull over, there's something wrong with your tire. Oh, I'm gonna fix it for you. Okay, sounds great.

• 10:44Sean Fennessey?

  That's really funny.

• 10:45Bill Simmons?

  Um, 2007.

• 10:48Bill Simmons?

  There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Zodiac, just those three.

• 10:53Bill Simmons?

  We always romanticize, especially on this pod, about like, oh, my God, 75.

• 10:58Chris Ryan?

  That's our 75.

• 10:59Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 10:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Bill Simmons?

  I didn't feel this way in the moment in 07. And maybe I was just more cynical about culture and movies and TV and everything, but like, There Will Be Blood took me, I would say, five, six years to really understand, and I think getting older was a piece of that. Uh, not There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men.

• 11:17Chris Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 11:17Bill Simmons?

  There Will Be Blood was one of those, like, that was amazing. I don't know if I'll ever watch it again. It's like, why am I watching this again? And then you watch it five times. And then Zodiac was a slow burn, too. It's interesting because I think Michael Clayton felt like it was on the level with those in the moment, and I don't think it is at this point.

• 11:33Chris Ryan?

  I disagree, but it does seem like it has not. I, I disagree. I disagree.

• 11:38Bill Simmons?

  You did, you disagree personally, or you disagree like?

• 11:41Chris Ryan?

  I disagree personally.

• 11:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but not big picture.

• 11:43Chris Ryan?

  Do you think it's regarded in the same, in the same class as?

• 11:47Bill Simmons?

  I do not.

• 11:47Chris Ryan?

  Blood and, and?

• 11:49Sean Fennessey?

  Um, it's a very different kind of movie. It's just, those other three movies are really maximalist movies, and it's a much more like, kind of restrained character study. But I do think that it is probably the number one movie that people point to when they, um, try to explain how devastated they are about what's happened to Hollywood over the last 15 years, about why can't we have that anymore?

• 12:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Sean Fennessey?

  All four of them, though, it's not just that it feels like our 75, they all feel like 70s movies.

• 12:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:16Sean Fennessey?

  And Michael Clayton just, just feels like a very familiar character study from the 1970s.

• 12:21Chris Ryan?

  And for Fincher and Gilroy explicitly were like, I'm trying to make a 70s movie. Like those, that's, that's the playbook I'm following here.

• 12:29Bill Simmons?

  You know what else helps with those three? The directors.

• 12:31Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 12:32Bill Simmons?

  You Fincher and the Collins and, and you have a PTA, obviously. But then some of the other movies that came out. That, you know, Superbad knocked up the combo that, that was really when the comedy era.

• 12:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Bill Simmons?

  Like, those are two of the better done comedies that we've had, and you go all the way through.

• 12:50Sean Fennessey?

  I think you can. You can, based on the box office list that you just rattled off, like, you can look at, you can feel the transition fully taking place, right? Like, I always mark Spider-Man in 2002 as like the shift and the success of that movie, and the fact that the third Spider-Man movie happens within five years. And then, you know, we're pretty much in this ceaseless run for 20 years.

• 13:10Bill Simmons?

  I was looking at the sequels in Box Office Mojo, and it's like, out of the first 30 movies from Box Office gross, it felt like 18 of them were sequels.

• 13:19Chris Ryan?

  And what, Dark Knight and Iron Man are the next year?

• 13:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Bill Simmons?

  Right. Zodiac's First Weekend.

• 13:26Bill Simmons?

  The film was outgrossed by Wild Hogs. Wild Hogs beat it. Shout out to Mike Tolan.

• 13:32Sean Fennessey?

  Wild Hogs rewatchables, when?

• 13:34Bill Simmons?

  Wild Hogs crushed it.

• 13:36Chris Ryan?

  I didn't mind that movie when I watched it.

• 13:39Sean Fennessey?

  How many Tim Allen movies have been on the rewatchables?

• 13:41Bill Simmons?

  Zero.

• 13:41Sean Fennessey?

  Zero.

• 13:41Chris Ryan?

  That's kind of surprising, I guess.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Santa Claus, classic.

• 13:44Bill Simmons?

  Uh, and then, uh, Second Week 300 blew it out, and the movie didn't do that well, like, barely made back its money, but I think, as in the physical media era, it's, it'll be fine. We'll do, it'll do okay.

• 13:56Sean Fennessey?

  It's doing, it's doing great now. I mean, I, I think what you said before is right. It's like, it's just fun, kind of fun to have on, even though it's about the most depraved thing in the, in recent history. I mean, it's, it's such an awful story.

• 14:08Bill Simmons?

  It has two of the most disturbing murder scenes of any kind of non-horror movie, combined with the basement scene at the end, which is one of the creepiest scenes, I think, ever filmed.

• 14:17Chris Ryan?

  And one of the, the, the most disturbing interrogation, criminal interview scenes.

• 14:22Sean Fennessey?

  I, I have a theory about this, too, about the movie's sustainability, which is that, you know, it's shot on digital, and most movies that are shot on digital, we kind of complain about and say that they don't look right, that they look kind of off or otherworldly, or there, it's, there's too much clarity somehow, it doesn't have the grain of film. But because Fincher is so good at shooting digitally, it looks like the highest level version of mostly what we look at now. So like, it feels familiar, it feels like watching streaming TV, but it's so well-made and so clear and so specific that it's not like looking at an artifact in a museum. It still feels modern, even though it's set in the 1970s, and it, like, I think to younger audiences, too, it's a movie that kind of makes more sense than just popping Chinatown in.

• 15:08Bill Simmons?

  Want to do 4K transfer now or later?

• 15:10Sean Fennessey?

  It's a really unusual 4K transfer just because it's like it was a movie that is shot digitally basically in 1080 so it shouldn't look good. And then you pop the disc in and you're like, they spent a fuck ton of time improving it. It looks better on 4K now than it did in movie theaters. I can't think of very many examples where that's true.

• 15:24Chris Ryan?

  It's right up at the edge of this looks too good.

• 15:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Bill Simmons?

  It looks so good that they use, one of the things about this movie is he uses, I think, a different actor for each kill scene.

• 15:34Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 15:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:36Bill Simmons?

  And you, the, the transfer is so good that you can actually tell they're different actors.

• 15:41Chris Ryan?

  But I think you're supposed to be able to.

• 15:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 15:44Chris Ryan?

  Like, I think you're, it's supposed to lead to the ambiguity of like, who was this guy? Was there more than one?

• 15:49Bill Simmons?

  It definitely wasn't the short guy in the basement. Can rule him out. He's too short.

• 15:53Chris Ryan?

  Is that Bob Bond?

• 15:55Bill Simmons?

  No, our guy from, uh.

• 15:56Sean Fennessey?

  The movie poster guy.

• 15:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Bill Simmons?

  Our guy from Welcome Back, Cotter.

• 15:59Chris Ryan?

  No, I mean, Bob, wasn't the guy's name Bob Bond?

• 16:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Bill Simmons?

  Uh, I wrote down things I like about Zodiac and why I think it has the power that it does.

• 16:08Bill Simmons?

  Meticulously researched and executed. So there's, the, the, the big three for this is All the President's Men, this and Spotlight. I think are weirdly similar movies, even though they're completely different, about completely different thing and the style of them is different. But they're both like people trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle and newspapers are prominently involved. And what is this? How do we figure this out? Right? And we love all those movies. We've done all of them on rewatchables. I had Spotlight in the most rewatchable list.

• 16:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Bill Simmons?

  Which I think stunned people, but I watched it all the time because I love the process of it.

• 16:41Sean Fennessey?

  What number was that? Do you remember?

• 16:42Bill Simmons?

  It was like in the, I'm gonna say the teens.

• 16:45Sean Fennessey?

  Higher or lower than Proof of Life?

• 16:48Bill Simmons?

  It was, it was higher.

• 16:49Chris Ryan?

  So wait, is Zodiac going right into the Proof of Life slot or is it actually higher?

• 16:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Chris Ryan?

  Uh, you say meticulously researched. It's worth mentioning that David Fincher and James Vanderbilt, the screenwriter, re-interviewed all the living witnesses, cops, newspaper people that they could find who were involved with this case. And basically redid the police work and used police reports as like a baseline for their.

• 17:14Bill Simmons?

  Well, they spent 18 months on it.

• 17:16Chris Ryan?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 17:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I mean, that's like, I don't think anyone would ever do that again.

• 17:19Chris Ryan?

  Well, I'm gonna do that for Book of Basketball.

• 17:24Bill Simmons?

  Book of Basketball 2?

• 17:25Chris Ryan?

  I'm gonna get Isaiah Thomas, I'm gonna be like, hold on.

• 17:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, hold on.

• 17:29Chris Ryan?

  You, what's the secret?

• 17:30Sean Fennessey?

  Are you adapting Book of Basketball for a narrative feature film?

• 17:33Bill Simmons?

  Yes. It ends with a serial killer. Did you know they spent 18 months doing this?

• 17:38Chris Ryan?

  No, but that makes sense. It's also very venture to do that. I mean, every take is 60 takes.

• 17:43Bill Simmons?

  Panic Room 02?

• 17:44Sean Fennessey?

  Five years go by between movies.

• 17:46Bill Simmons?

  And he was supposed to do this Black Dahlia project that he wanted. It's interesting in the research. He envisioned it as this like movie mini-series, this five-part thing.

• 17:55Chris Ryan?

  He's basically circling Mindhunter for about 15 years.

• 17:58Bill Simmons?

  But that, so I guess that would have been HBO?

• 18:02Sean Fennessey?

  One of the only places it could have gone.

• 18:04Bill Simmons?

  Netflix didn't even exist back then. Either HBO or Showtime, where else would that even go?

• 18:07Chris Ryan?

  Him pushing into digital and him pushing into streaming, like he's a couple of years ahead of everybody for a while there, yeah.

• 18:13Bill Simmons?

  So, anyway, that's one. It's a two-part movie where it's like, the first, the first half of the movie is basically Zodiac. He's killing people. How do we figure that? And then the second part is all about the impact that all those murders had on all of these characters that were in there. And I like how there's a clear shift when it says four years later. We're now in a different movie, but it's the same movie episode. But I like how they just shift. It's a horror movie that's not a horror movie. It's super scary, but it's not, it's not Saw. It's not Halloween 2. Reporting procedural, only unlike in Spotlight and All the President's Men, they never solve it.

• 18:55Bill Simmons?

  And then the big one, which I think, you know, is the easiest point to make about this, but it's this movie about fucking crazy obsession. Only in this case, what happens if you're obsessed with something and you never get an answer?

• 19:08Bill Simmons?

  Which is how CR feels about Joel Embiid.

• 19:12Sean Fennessey?

  You don't feel you have the answer at this point?

• 19:14Bill Simmons?

  No, because Joel Embiid will go out and he'll torch the rockets and then CR's like, maybe this case isn't closed.

• 19:20Chris Ryan?

  I've been chasing the wrong guy!

• 19:21Sean Fennessey?

  Joel Embiid is Rick Marshall.

• 19:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, so I don't know, anything else other than that stuff? I mean, the acting's superior and then it's one of the best filmmakers of the last 30 years.

• 19:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's also like, you know, he's just got a roster of people that he's been working with forever. You know, like Ren Klice, the sound designer and Donald Graham Burt, the production designer. Like, he just has this coterie of genius artisans who all know exactly how to work with him. And so he, he always gets what he wants. You might not always like what he gives you and he's, you know, the last few movies have been much more divisive for him. But I think that this is kind of him going to phase two and getting like, basically entering one of the most impressive sequences of movie making that we've seen in the century. And the movie itself, like the obsessiveness thing is just what resonates with me the most. Cause I'm one of those people, like we're all three of us are just like, we're rabbit hole people.

• 20:16Sean Fennessey?

  Like, we just get super into the stuff that we care about. We can't get outside of it sometimes, we can't see past it. And we like do lose the forest for the trees, but sometimes the trees are worth spending time on, you know? And I, I really love that aspect of it. And I also am getting like, I'm starting to really realize the intention of the movie the older I get. The first time I saw it, I was like, oh, Arthur Lee Allen, that's the answer. Cool, this is like a very convincing way of explaining this movie to me. And then over time you realize it's Arthur Lee Allen to these guys. But that's not enough. And it not being enough actually makes it interesting to spend more time thinking about. So it's like, it's pretty profound.

• 20:56Bill Simmons?

  Don't you think that's why we end up in the basement?

• 20:58Sean Fennessey?

  Among other places, yeah.

• 21:00Chris Ryan?

  I think there's a lot of Zodiacs.

• 21:01Bill Simmons?

  It's definitely Arthur Leon, wait, is it?

• 21:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. The scary thing about the moniker is that it could just stand in for evil. And that there's evil in the, one of the two basements in California and there's evil out in the highway. And there's evil with this guy who likes going skin diving, you know what I mean? Like, there are different, like basically physical representations of what this thing, the Zodiac is. Now, I don't know if Fincher saw it as like a symbolic kind of, you know, more allegorical piece. I think he was very much doing it as a piece of journalism. But to Sean's point about the obsession, I think the thing that jumps off the screen, especially after you watch it a few times, in the making of documentary that comes with the 4K, but you can also watch it on YouTube, I think the prop master or the set designer talks about how, when they were doing the San Francisco Chronicle building.

• 21:49Bill Simmons?

  That's cool.

• 21:50Chris Ryan?

  That, you know, they basically have recreated this newsroom inside of a post office in Los Angeles to shoot in. And they went to The Chronicle and then they had to go to a library in Michigan that had all the old microfiches for 1969 San Francisco Chronicle newspapers. And they were like, we reprinted them on authentic newspaper so that they were just around in the news, in the newsroom. And I was like, I don't know that. That could have just been a pile of, you know, New York Times is from last week if you wanted to. But I feel like the actors knew. And I feel like the people who were like, working on the movie really did feel like they built this monument that, and, and it jumps off the screen somehow. And maybe it helps to know it, but you know what I mean?

• 22:35Chris Ryan?

  Like you can feel the extra 10% that went into this movie.

• 22:39Bill Simmons?

  That's why, one of the reasons I like Almost Famous so much. Like every single aspect of it. He's like, this has to be perfect.

• 22:45Chris Ryan?

  That's a 60, that's a 71 telecaster.

• 22:47Bill Simmons?

  This is what this hotel in LA looked like in 1971. And this is what the ashtray looked like.

• 22:50Sean Fennessey?

  But two movies made by guys reflecting on when they were 13 years old. I mean, that's really a big part of it too. Like when we, when we were thinking about, even you were describing Fincher being obsessed by the Zodiac and he describes him as kind of like his boogeyman. Like, I, I literally was like, that's kind of what Larry Bird was for you. You know what I mean? It's like, he is like, he is legitimately, not in a scary way, but he is like, a figure from your past when you were young, who looms large. And like, these people, these things, they imprint on you and then you just kind of spend your whole life thinking about them.

• 23:20Bill Simmons?

  But I would have loved nothing more than a Zodiac like Syracuse or running through Massachusetts or New England. I would have, as, as a little kid, I, it would have been the most fascinating thing happening in my life.

• 23:31Sean Fennessey?

  And I mean, it completely explains his filmography. Like, look at all the crazy depraved shit that he's into because of the way that he gets fascinated by this stuff.

• 23:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we watched Seven. I, my son is banging out all these 90s and 2000s movies and we watched Seven the other night. And, uh... You just forget, like with some of these twists at the end. He's like, that's not gonna be Gwyneth Paltrow's head in the box, is it? And I'm like, I don't know.

• 23:59Bill Simmons?

  We'll see. But, uh, but yeah, it's, it's, it's fun to relive some of this stuff through people. Zodiac is one that, like, he didn't want to watch that one with me. He's like, I'm finchered out. He'd watch Seven and Fight Club. He's like, I've had enough of fincher. I was like, well, you'll circle back.

• 24:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's a different energy, too. You might want to be a little bit older.

• 24:17Bill Simmons?

  It's, well, it's also, these fincher movies are invasive.

• 24:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Bill Simmons?

  Even Panic Room, which is a relatively simple movie, that's, that's not, you don't, that's not a double feature.

• 24:28Chris Ryan?

  He's manipulating us, yeah.

• 24:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Well, You Love Mine Hunter is your favorite TV show probably of all time.

• 24:33Chris Ryan?

  I mean, it's, it's.

• 24:34Bill Simmons?

  Of the last 15 years.

• 24:35Chris Ryan?

  It's definitely one of the best shows of the 21st century, I would say that.

• 24:39Bill Simmons?

  And it's got some umbilical cord to this.

• 24:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I think that you can see in, um, I think the, the Lee interrogation is essentially like a blueprint for a lot of what happens in Mine Hunter, where they're going to these sort of notorious killers and being like, what can we learn from you to help us to profile and to help us catch people in the future? And like, it equally large, you know, there's a bunch of stuff in Northern California in Mine Hunter, but it's, you know, it's equally about obsession.

• 25:07Bill Simmons?

  John David Carroll.

• 25:09Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, John Carroll Lynch.

• 25:10Bill Simmons?

  John Carroll Lynch, whatever his name is.

• 25:12Sean Fennessey?

  John Carroll, so that scene in particular, which I'm sure we'll spend time on.

• 25:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Sean Fennessey?

  Um, is one of the most electrifying people talking to each other scenes I can ever remember in a movie theater.

• 25:23Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 25:24Sean Fennessey?

  In the movie theater, I was vibrating during this scene. Now, it ultimately is not as impactful as you think it's going to be. Cause also it's like, it's like an hour and a half and in the movie, you're like, wow, we're getting near the end. They found him. I didn't know anything about the Zodiac. I was not like a serial killer kid growing up. I didn't really follow this stuff. And the fact that the movie is just like, okay, that happened. And now we've got an hour more of movie and the, the, the next hour is just like, well, we don't really know.

• 25:49Chris Ryan?

  Well, it's just really.

• 25:49Sean Fennessey?

  Crazy choice. That's an amazing choice.

• 25:51Chris Ryan?

  For somebody like Ben who's like, okay, I watched Seven, I watched Seven and it's about these two. Cops who learn to work together to bring down this

• 25:59Bill Simmons?

  When there's sin, so he's like, oh, what's the next sin?

• 26:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's like, but it's David, you know, it's, it's the Kevin Spacey sin that takes down David because it's like, he goes, he covets his wife. It's like, I get it. I get it. With this, it's like, they catch him. And then because an eccentric handwriting expert disagrees with them, the Zodiac Killer is free.

• 26:24Chris Ryan?

  Even though his brother and his sister-in-law are like, he's the Zodiac.

• 26:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, in the same glove size, same shoes.

• 26:31Sean Fennessey?

  But it's like, it runs even deeper if you even believe in that idea because it's like, they did catch him for pedophilia and he was in prison for years. So he was off the street.

• 26:40Chris Ryan?

  And the letters stopped.

• 26:41Sean Fennessey?

  And the letters stopped. And then it takes them years to even figure it out.

• 26:45Bill Simmons?

  The letters and murders both stopped.

• 26:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, there's just like, it's all, it's not just about obsession. It's also about information overload and getting lost in the information. And you can see by the end of the movie that Toski has just gotten lost. You know, that he has just, because there's been so much.

• 26:59Chris Ryan?

  Fucking Armistead Mopin came and did a drive by on him, man.

• 27:01Sean Fennessey?

  That was a tough one. We'll get into that.

• 27:03Bill Simmons?

  You know, that scene you talk about when they interrogate him, how great that was. And it's, I, probably my most rewatchable scene because it's so much fun to watch. And the three actors kind of sizing him up and the faces Ruffalo makes in that scene. Where he's just, he's trying to stay deadpan, but you can see he's like.

• 27:22Chris Ryan?

  When he's like, I, I suppose you'll want to know about the bloody knives in my trunk.

• 27:26Bill Simmons?

  And they're just like.

• 27:27Sean Fennessey?

  I was like, that's a nice watch. May I see it? May I see it?

• 27:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. He sits down and he crosses his legs and, what's that guy's name? Elias Coteas?

• 27:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Bill Simmons?

  And he just sees the boot and he's like.

• 27:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Bill Simmons?

  Does one of those, but there's like 10 of those. One of the things with Fincher that, you know, he's such a stylistic, awesome director, right? And you think of him like how things look. He's a music video guy. He's so good at people talking. And I don't know if it's because he makes them do 800 takes for every scene. But he has some of the best dialogue scenes we've had this century.

• 28:03Sean Fennessey?

  He talks, he definitely talks a lot in the commentary for this movie about making sure that the human behavior is right, making sure that it feels appropriate to how people would act. But I think he also does stylistic stuff, to your point, in that scene in particular, where he doesn't do a lot of singles directly down the barrel of the camera in the whole movie.

• 28:20Chris Ryan?

  Except for this.

• 28:21Sean Fennessey?

  In that scene, in that scene, you see every single person looking right into the camera.

• 28:26Chris Ryan?

  It's the only time we get the killer's POV.

• 28:29Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 28:29Chris Ryan?

  Because they're staring at him.

• 28:31Bill Simmons?

  Our guy Michael Mann is good at this, too. Like, our favorite, when we did Thief, our favorite scene was the diner scene.

• 28:37Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 28:38Bill Simmons?

  Where it's just two people talking for a while. Now, Michael Mann had probably not as good as dialogue as, as the Fincher movies were. Like, I don't think Michael Mann could have done the first social network scene. That would not have been in his movie.

• 28:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, yes, right. I, I mean, like, look, like, Fincher at this period is moving into, like, this new phase where he's on digital, and his whole thing is, he hates sincerity, and he hates earnestness in performance. So basically, like, there are two, I want to talk a lot about, like, David Fincher and, you know, running a gulag while he's shooting this thing, and like, it's one of my favorite elements of talking about this movie.

• 29:14Sean Fennessey?

  This is the movie, too, where that myth started.

• 29:16Chris Ryan?

  Yes, because of Downey and Jill and all, yeah. And, but basically, he's like, there's two things. A, I want them to, like, push past the point where they're, like, acting to achieve a single take that is the right take. Like, he's like, let's, let's actually work, let's actually find something interesting. And second of all, the actors on his screen, as Mark Ruffalo said, is like, they're 10% of the screen. He's also looking at the way light hits the glass in the background.

• 29:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Chris Ryan?

  And if you watch some of those newspaper, the newsroom scenes, just try, go, go watch one of those on, on, on, online, and watch the people walking around in the background. It looks like real life. It's not three people going, cantaloupe, brew bar, blah, blah, blah, to each other. It's people actually doing jobs in the background. And apparently, Fincher would be like, yeah, man, like, she would not be going to that office because she works for this guy, so she has to go to that office. Like, that level of understanding of, like, 100 yards.

• 30:14Bill Simmons?

  I mean, Fincher might be the Zodiac guy.

• 30:16Sean Fennessey?

  I, you know, he obviously kind of relates in some ways to the methodologies of these crazy people.

• 30:21Bill Simmons?

  The actual Fincher quote was, "Films aren't finished, they're abandoned." Um, so you mentioned the run he goes on here is this Benjamin Button, which randomly I watched last night.

• 30:33Chris Ryan?

  He shoots that immediately after this.

• 30:35Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I would have cut the lady in the bed, hospital, old Cate Blanchett. Just would have cut every scene with that. It's That would have been my note. If Dave was coming to me, like, "Hey, what should I do, Simmons?"

• 30:47Chris Ryan?

  Maybe he should come over for a pod and you're just like, "Here's some notes for you."

• 30:50Bill Simmons?

  Just start, start with young Button.

• 30:52Sean Fennessey?

  He'd probably enjoy that.

• 30:52Bill Simmons?

  Start with young.

• 30:53Chris Ryan?

  Turn his mic off, just let him talk.

• 30:56Chris Ryan?

  So it would be like the top 50 pod.

• 30:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Chris Ryan?

  Top 50 problems with your movies.

• 31:00Sean Fennessey?

  We could redo the top 50 pod with him, too.

• 31:03Bill Simmons?

  You don't agree with me? Cut her out.

• 31:04Chris Ryan?

  So you like Limitless.

• 31:05Sean Fennessey?

  That is probably my least favorite David Fincher movie. Um.

• 31:10Chris Ryan?

  Mine, too.

• 31:10Sean Fennessey?

  It, it is

• 31:12Bill Simmons?

  It's really interesting to watch, though.

• 31:14Sean Fennessey?

  Technical marvel and a fascinating idea. Um, and you can see him trying to like get his arms around sincerity.

• 31:21Chris Ryan?

  I feel like, I wonder whether or not, like, he was like spent from Zodiac and was like, "I can do all the like surface level, like, technical brilliance of this, but there's not."

• 31:29Bill Simmons?

  It's a whimsical fantasy romance.

• 31:31Chris Ryan?

  Maybe there's not like a full idea in there. I don't know.

• 31:33Bill Simmons?

  It's a really fun swing and a miss.

• 31:35Sean Fennessey?

  It's the, it's also the only, like, proper literary adaptation that he did. Like, obviously, uh, Fight Club was a novel, but like a kind of more classical, old school movie. And like, he had circled a number of movies like that for years, including like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And it's kind of the closest he got to make, like, making a John Huston movie. Um, but the thing I was gonna say about that is that he's not a writer-director. And like, unlike most of the people that I lionize, they're all like auteurs. They're writer-directors. He is like going script to script. And he has his writers who he likes, but, you know, the, the James Vanderbilt script, that was just like Disney optioned the Graysmith book, and then it fell out of

• 32:15Chris Ryan?

  And he wrote it on spec.

• 32:17Sean Fennessey?

  And then Vanderbilt wrote it on spec because he loved the story and loved the book. And then somehow they sold it and he just kind of came on to the project for hire. And that makes him very different. Like, it makes him very different from, I think, a lot of the way that we think about the great filmmakers of the last 30 years.

• 32:31Bill Simmons?

  So he, so this movie Zodiac, Button a year later, Social Network.

• 32:39Bill Simmons?

  And then uh.

• 32:40Sean Fennessey?

  Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl.

• 32:41Bill Simmons?

  Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl. And that's all in like, what, six years?

• 32:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, seven years through Gone Girl, right?

• 32:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Sean Fennessey?

  That's an amazing run. And all those, to me, all of those movies, maybe with the exception of Button, get better every time you watch them.

• 32:54Chris Ryan?

  Yes. I recently rewatched Dragon Tattoo and I was like, this is absolutely awesome.

• 32:59Bill Simmons?

  The cast.

• 33:02Chris Ryan?

  Is this a 22-person cast? Like, 22 people deep? Like, it's, it's nuts.

• 33:07Sean Fennessey?

  This is the cast they designed Dion Waiters for.

• 33:10Bill Simmons?

  Jake Gyllenhaal coming off, broke back at a nice point in his career. Donnie Darko was like, oh, two.

• 33:16Chris Ryan?

  And Jarhead.

• 33:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, and so it was kind of like, hey, this guy, he might be something, and this was an important movie for him. And he's the star of the movie. Ruffalo. Who was now in that zone of like, I'm gonna do a weird rom-com that sucks. I might do a decent rom-com, I'll be in this weird indie movie, then I'll be in an awesome movie. Then I'll be in another weird movie, then I'll be in another awesome movie. Like, he was just all over the map. But he'd been collateral a couple of years earlier. This movie. And it's just every few years, he had, have another good one. I love him in this movie. Really important Downey movie? This was like right at the start of the comeback? Was it almost Down and Out there in the mid 2000s?

• 33:51Sean Fennessey?

  Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, and then this, right?

• 33:53Bill Simmons?

  Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang's like three years earlier.

• 33:55Chris Ryan?

  I think he had been like, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang was like, now I can be insured again. And now, and then.

• 34:00Sean Fennessey?

  Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, this, and, and then Iron Man the next year. That was it.

• 34:04Bill Simmons?

  Anthony Edwards, one of the most successful TV actors of all time.

• 34:08Sean Fennessey?

  Secret sauce of this movie.

• 34:09Chris Ryan?

  For sure.

• 34:11Bill Simmons?

  Logan Roy.

• 34:13Chris Ryan?

  Brian Cox.

• 34:14Bill Simmons?

  Brian Cox.

• 34:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Bill Simmons?

  Uh, Charles Fleischer we mentioned, who, uh, the old people can remember from Welcome Back, Carter, was also Roger Rabbit, one of those guys.

• 34:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. He was, uh, the head of Arcade, he was R.K. Maroon, head of Maroon Studios. You guys remember that from Roger Rabbit?

• 34:29Chris Ryan?

  I don't.

• 34:29Sean Fennessey?

  No? Maroon cartoons? You guys remember that?

• 34:32Bill Simmons?

  Sean was attracted to, uh, Jessica Rabbit.

• 34:35Sean Fennessey?

  I mean.

• 34:36Bill Simmons?

  Redhead.

• 34:36Sean Fennessey?

  She was my Zodiac Killer.

• 34:39Bill Simmons?

  Zach Grenier.

• 34:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Bill Simmons?

  One of those guys?

• 34:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:42Bill Simmons?

  Might remember him from Philadelphia?

• 34:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Bill Simmons?

  He was kind of the one who came around and had Andy's back a little bit.

• 34:47Chris Ryan?

  And this is the ju-

• 34:48Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:48Chris Ryan?

  He's the Justice Department guy in this.

• 34:50Sean Fennessey?

  He was, uh, he was in Fight Club. He's Ed Norton's boss in Fight Club.

• 34:53Bill Simmons?

  Philip Baker-Hall.

• 34:56Chris Ryan?

  Sherwood.

• 34:57Bill Simmons?

  I love hard, sharp bees and butter in my ass. That's just what I like.

• 35:02Chris Ryan?

  It is funny when he's like pruning his bushes when Jalen Hall comes and sees him. I'm kinda like, I kinda think he's gonna say. Funny nice lines.

• 35:12Bill Simmons?

  Jake, everything's going to video.

• 35:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's a simple man.

• 35:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Elias Cateas.

• 35:20Bill Simmons?

  Little James LaGrosse, just a tiny, just a whiff.

• 35:22Chris Ryan?

  Get the last scene.

• 35:23Sean Fennessey?

  Little dash at the end, yeah.

• 35:24Bill Simmons?

  Little dash at Donald Logue.

• 35:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Logue.

• 35:26Bill Simmons?

  John Carroll Lynch.

• 35:27Chris Ryan?

  James LaGrosse has one of my favorite lines in the movie where he's like, good for him.

• 35:33Chris Ryan?

  When he's like, yeah, that guy's gonna go catch the Zodiac.

• 35:35Bill Simmons?

  John Carroll Lynch, fresh off Fargo.

• 35:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Bill Simmons?

  This was kinda the peak for him.

• 35:39Sean Fennessey?

  He was Mr. Gunderson, right?

• 35:42Bill Simmons?

  Dermot Mulroney, not sure why he's in this movie. And Chloe Sevigny.

• 35:46Sean Fennessey?

  Fincher said Dermot Mulroney.

• 35:47Bill Simmons?

  One of Sean's idols.

• 35:48Sean Fennessey?

  Chloe Sevigny, we will talk about momentarily, maybe the hottest she's ever looked. Uh, Dermot Mulroney, Fincher says, he was just like, just one of my favorite guys, doesn't really have anything to do in this movie. I don't know why he did it. We put him in a fat suit. I thought it was funny.

• 36:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he has like a very glaringly potbelly that is not fake.

• 36:04Sean Fennessey?

  They never worked together before. It's like, why is Dermot Mulroney was kind of a movie star.

• 36:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 36:08Sean Fennessey?

  He's in four scenes and he's like, interesting. Go get him. Like, he has nothing to do.

• 36:12Chris Ryan?

  What do you wanna do? Okay. Take a night off.

• 36:17Bill Simmons?

  Where does this rank for Jalen Hall performances for you?

• 36:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's the last in a very important era, but it is not my favorite era. It's the wide-eyed, innocent weirdo era.

• 36:28Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 36:29Sean Fennessey?

  Which is like how he got launched with Donnie Darko.

• 36:31Chris Ryan?

  Is Prisoners before this?

• 36:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's after.

• 36:33Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 36:33Sean Fennessey?

  And so right after this stretch, this was gonna be what's the most 2007 movie, uh, 2007 aspect of this movie for me. One of them was, um, immediately after this, end of watch, prisoners and enemies, enemy comes. And then he's like, we're off. Like, I am a fucking weirdo in every movie.

• 36:50Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 36:50Sean Fennessey?

  My eyes are bulging out of my head.

• 36:51Chris Ryan?

  I do something strange.

• 36:52Sean Fennessey?

  I've just blown a line of cocaine directly into my cortex and I have insane energy no matter what. And he still holds that to this day with like ambulance and, uh, Roadhouse and everything else he's been doing. This is the last time it was like, he's sweet. Is there something wrong with him? You know, like, that's kinda the energy that he's giving.

• 37:11Bill Simmons?

  10 years later, we're like, there is something wrong with him.

• 37:13Chris Ryan?

  We gotta do Prisoners just for Jalen Hall being like, why, why are you shopping for kids' clothes?

• 37:21Sean Fennessey?

  Detective Loki.

• 37:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 37:23Bill Simmons?

  It was funny doing a podcast with per- in person with him, which I did probably like seven, eight years ago.

• 37:29Chris Ryan?

  Was that for the Boston Marathon movie?

• 37:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, when we had our old offices. Totally normal guy.

• 37:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Bill Simmons?

  I kept waiting him for, to be super weird and he just wasn't.

• 37:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I met him. He was, he was totally normal, but in every movie, he's like, you wanna go do heroin?

• 37:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Sean Fennessey?

  Seems insane.

• 37:44Bill Simmons?

  Downey is just playing all, it's like Downey karaoke in this movie. He's playing all the hits.

• 37:49Chris Ryan?

  I wanna get like a little patron saint necklace of Downey in this movie and wear it all the time.

• 37:54Sean Fennessey?

  Aqua Velva?

• 37:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Bill Simmons?

  Downey's in his own movie that I also would have watched. If there was like a Paul Avery, there, there's this fleeting three seconds when, uh, Gyllenhaal's character is walking home from work and he peeks into that bar.

• 38:08Chris Ryan?

  Morty's, yeah.

• 38:09Bill Simmons?

  And all the people from this paper just getting bombed. That was newspapers in the eighties, nineties, two thousands. Like you finish work, there was some dive bar, like at the Boston Herald, it was J.J. Foley's. Everybody would go to Foley's after.

• 38:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, there was a bar across the street from the Inquirer that.

• 38:24Bill Simmons?

  It was like a prerequisite.

• 38:25Chris Ryan?

  Allegedly had a phone line directly to the copy desk, so the copy desk could call the bar.

• 38:30Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:30Chris Ryan?

  To ask questions.

• 38:31Bill Simmons?

  Every city has them.

• 38:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Bill Simmons?

  And it was just like, I could have spent another 20 minutes with those guys just talking about like fucking Dr. J. Is Dr. J coming?

• 38:41Sean Fennessey?

  One of my favorite cuts in the movie is late in the movie after, when Avery's like really kinda bedraggled and they cut to him and he's sitting in the bar and he's got the oxygen tank in the bar with him.

• 38:50Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 38:50Sean Fennessey?

  He's so chatty.

• 38:53Bill Simmons?

  And then Ruffalo.

• 38:54Chris Ryan?

  He left it all on the floor, man. Come on, what do you want from him?

• 38:56Bill Simmons?

  Ruffalo, so he's in You Can Count on Me. That was like his arrival movie and that's 2000. And he kinda had, this could be the next one vibes for a while. I don't think it a hundred percent happened for him the way maybe we might've thought when we were buying his Topps cards.

• 39:13Chris Ryan?

  You, you say that and I, I know what you mean, but he's also the Hulk and he was just in task. I mean, like, I feel like he's had like a really solid career, you know?

• 39:21Bill Simmons?

  But not, you wouldn't.

• 39:23Chris Ryan?

  I think he's a little too idiosyncratic to be, I don't know, who are you thinking of?

• 39:28Bill Simmons?

  I've never.

• 39:28Chris Ryan?

  Like, I mean.

• 39:29Bill Simmons?

  I've never been able to get a handle on what his career.

• 39:34Bill Simmons?

  Preference was because he just made a couple. How much you paying me? I'll take it.

• 39:40Chris Ryan?

  I know.

• 39:40Bill Simmons?

  But then he was also like, I really care about the craft. I'm just in it. And it's like, which, which are you? Which, which one? Are you the craft guy or are you the paycheck guy?

• 39:49Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, he's both. He's like, I'm.

• 39:51Bill Simmons?

  Well, I think that's the problem.

• 39:51Sean Fennessey?

  I'm 13 going on 30. I'm now you see me. I'm, uh, you know, I'm in Poor Things. I'm in Shutter Island. Like, I work with the greatest filmmakers of all time. I've also made six Marvel movies. Um, I don't, I kind of respect it. I like.

• 40:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, you know what we really learned about him? They knew. They knew when you cut him loose.

• 40:16Chris Ryan?

  This is a good, um, this is the pepper to that salt. This is like him just being like, finish the book. Like, he has some great lines and some great turns and like, Toski could be like, you could really put a lot more mustard on this one and he doesn't. He keeps him really like kind of grounded.

• 40:36Bill Simmons?

  Especially because the guy he's playing was a pretty legendary 70s.

• 40:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Bill Simmons?

  Detective because he's tied in with Dirty Harry and all this stuff.

• 40:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's.

• 40:44Bill Simmons?

  Pretty well-known guy.

• 40:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Bill Simmons?

  I think this is my second favorite Ruffalo performance.

• 40:48Sean Fennessey?

  After you can count on me?

• 40:49Bill Simmons?

  You can count on me is the, the best. I think that's the best he's ever been in a movie.

• 40:53Sean Fennessey?

  And you can count on me. He seems like a real person, you know, he seems like somebody you've met. And there's like something very tangible about kind of like the mistakes that he's making. Um, and he has become like a little bit more of a caricature-ish kind of actor, but he's very entertaining. Like the spotlight thing is very memorable, but like, is, is it good acting? Like, it's not particularly good, but it's appropriate for the movie. Um, I feel this way in the Marvel movies where I'm like, is Mark Ruffalo just like doing bits? Like, what is this?

• 41:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Sean Fennessey?

  But he's obviously capable of a lot. The Toski role is like a real performance where he's changing his voice, changes his posture. Um, Fincher talks about all the stuff he brought to it where like Toski at the time he learned was really having trouble with ulcers. So when he walks into the diner and he gets half of the BLT from Armstrong.

• 41:40Chris Ryan?

  Takes the tomato off.

• 41:41Sean Fennessey?

  Takes the tomato off because it would bother his stomach. He starts popping Tums during the movie. You know, he's taking antacids because he's having stomach problems. They don't explain any of that stuff. But he, as like a very serious actor, he's like, I'm going to spend time with this guy, research him and make choices. I don't always feel like he does that, but when he does do it, he's pretty much elite.

• 41:59Bill Simmons?

  It's a very calculated, cultivated, manicured performance.

• 42:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 42:04Bill Simmons?

  I really like it.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  It's very, very, very, very under control. Did you watch Task?

• 42:08Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's, I mean, like, if you, if you want to see late period Ruffalo absolutely cooking.

• 42:12Bill Simmons?

  He didn't watch Task because he watched Poor Things seven times, just cranking it out.

• 42:16Sean Fennessey?

  Saw it a couple of times. It's got some good stuff.

• 42:18Bill Simmons?

  No, Begonia.

• 42:19Sean Fennessey?

  Saw Begonia a couple of times. Liked it.

• 42:21Bill Simmons?

  Director's commentary.

• 42:23Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't see that.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Your ghost director's.

• 42:25Sean Fennessey?

  Did he do that? Did he do one for that?

• 42:26Bill Simmons?

  I don't know. Uh, Jalen Hall, Downey, Ruffalo. Your favorite out of those three, Craig, in this?

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Ruffalo. I think Ruffalo's great. I think he's been the least corrupted by Marvel in my mind. I almost think part of it is because he never had to physically transform like the rest of these guys in the Marvel movies. You just become action figures.

• 42:44Bill Simmons?

  Wears a bunch of tennis balls and becomes the whole guy.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  And Ruffalo has always looked and seemed like a normal person. And I think it's why he's just a floor raiser in every movie. I love Ruffalo. Robert Downey, I think going back now, I had never seen Zodiac until yet last night. The RDJ shtick, the Iron Man shtick is like fully cooking in this movie.

• 43:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  And it is a little weird to kind of play with that. It's still enjoyable and I think he's very good in it. But it's hard not to be like, I'm kind of watching Tony Stark here a little bit.

• 43:11Bill Simmons?

  I felt this set that way a little bit, too.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  But in the moment, I'm sure you were like, oh, my God.

• 43:14Bill Simmons?

  I liked it, though. No, because the movie needed it. It needed a weirdo.

• 43:18Sean Fennessey?

  He is like that in Chaplin, you know, like he is like that in every movie. Like, that was his thing.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  This is his thing. This is like what he does.

• 43:24Bill Simmons?

  He's definitely in that in Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield. I don't know what he's going for in that movie.

• 43:28Sean Fennessey?

  He is. I mean, he's always kind of that, like, yammering, sarcastic, smarter-than-everybody guy. That's his screen persona, right? And it just so happens that he, yeah, at like 48 years old, managed to turn it into the biggest thing that happened to movies in the 21st century.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:44Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna take a break and then, uh, there's an Oscars discussion we need to have. And we're gonna talk about the actual Zodiac killer and what we think happened. This episode is brought to you by Viori. All right, let's talk about a category we appreciate. Clothes that stay in the rotation. Viori earned that spot. Their core shorts are good for workouts, travel day, weekend, whatever. And the Strato Tech T ridiculously soft. It's the kind of gear you keep reaching for because it's comfortable while still looking put together. Get 20% off your first purchase at Viori.com/rewatchables and discover the versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by Truvia. Sweeteners are like movies.

• 44:28Bill Simmons?

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• 45:01Bill Simmons?

  2007 Oscars, March 2008. This movie just gets shut out.

• 45:05Sean Fennessey?

  Zero.

• 45:06Bill Simmons?

  Does it make Best Picture?

• 45:07Chris Ryan?

  I was shocked by this.

• 45:08Sean Fennessey?

  Zero.

• 45:09Bill Simmons?

  No Best Director?

• 45:10Chris Ryan?

  If you were doing the big picture back then, would you just have quit?

• 45:15Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it came out in, it came out in late February. And back then, that was a problem. Now, everything everyone wants came out in March. Sinners came out in April. It's no longer a problem. They've changed the calendar, but if you put your movie out in February, you're telling the world in 2007. Don't, don't worry about this. You don't have to vote for this.

• 45:32Bill Simmons?

  Best Picture, no country wins. Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood. If we're doing that again, it's just cracking the list. I don't know who gets bumped.

• 45:41Sean Fennessey?

  Juno would go out. Juno would go out.

• 45:43Bill Simmons?

  Juno had a moment though in 07.

• 45:45Sean Fennessey?

  It was a huge movie.

• 45:46Bill Simmons?

  People got really excited about it.

• 45:47Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 45:48Bill Simmons?

  There were new actors people got fired up about. It was a Jason Reban.

• 45:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I like it. I think it's a good movie.

• 45:53Bill Simmons?

  I like it. I think it gets bumped by so many.

• 45:54Chris Ryan?

  I really like Atonement. I mean personally.

• 45:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Bill Simmons?

  Directors was, uh, Coens won. Julian Schnabel?

• 46:03Sean Fennessey?

  Schnabel.

• 46:03Bill Simmons?

  Schnabel? The diving bell in The Butterfly?

• 46:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you seen that one?

• 46:07Chris Ryan?

  Tavier, yeah.

• 46:08Bill Simmons?

  Jason Reban, Tony Gilroy, and Paul Thomas Anderson.

• 46:12Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't, forgot Gilroy got nominated.

• 46:14Bill Simmons?

  Best Actor, which I think Jake would have been eligible for.

• 46:17Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 46:20Bill Simmons?

  Guy named Daniel Day-Lewis.

• 46:21Sean Fennessey?

  You think he takes it from DDL?

• 46:22Bill Simmons?

  I think, I think we're gonna keep that where it is.

• 46:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's a good one.

• 46:26Bill Simmons?

  Clooney.

• 46:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good win.

• 46:29Bill Simmons?

  Tommy Lee Jones in The Valley of Elah. Elah? Elah? I don't remember.

• 46:35Chris Ryan?

  I can't remember, honestly. It's been a minute since I-

• 46:36Sean Fennessey?

  It's a biblical reference.

• 46:37Chris Ryan?

  Saw that haggis.

• 46:38Bill Simmons?

  Viggo Mortensen.

• 46:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. For Eastern Promises.

• 46:41Bill Simmons?

  Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd, the demon barber. What the fuck were we doing there? Jesus Christ.

• 46:48Sean Fennessey?

  We were really enthralled to Big Depp at this time.

• 46:51Bill Simmons?

  Jake could've taken that spot.

• 46:53Sean Fennessey?

  Big Depp and Big Burton. You seen that, Sweeney Todd?

• 46:56Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 46:57Sean Fennessey?

  Have you seen it staged?

• 46:58Bill Simmons?

  I saw it on Broadway.

• 47:00Sean Fennessey?

  Did you really?

• 47:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I saw it in the, as a play.

• 47:02Sean Fennessey?

  Who, do you remember who was in the lead?

• 47:04Bill Simmons?

  I saw it in Boston. I saw it with my dad.

• 47:05Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 47:06Bill Simmons?

  That's what it was.

• 47:06Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Oh, I mean, also a movie about a serial killer.

• 47:09Bill Simmons?

  I might've seen it a little too young. I was like, what's going on? They're eating these people?

• 47:13Sean Fennessey?

  This barber's a demon?

• 47:14Chris Ryan?

  That's the problem. It wasn't seeing Halloween when you were like, hey.

• 47:18Sean Fennessey?

  Coming up next, top five demon barbers.

• 47:21Bill Simmons?

  Best actor in a supporting role. This is when it gets tough. Bardem wins for No Country. Fine. I support it. Casey Affleck and Jesse James.

• 47:30Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 47:30Sean Fennessey?

  Really good.

• 47:31Bill Simmons?

  Really good.

• 47:31Chris Ryan?

  Really good.

• 47:32Bill Simmons?

  Seymour Hoffman. Charlie Wilson's War. He's really good in that movie.

• 47:37Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible.

• 47:37Bill Simmons?

  I can't kill him in that.

• 47:38Sean Fennessey?

  He owns the movie.

• 47:39Bill Simmons?

  Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild. That feels like an old guy getting rewarded by the Oscars and then-

• 47:44Sean Fennessey?

  It is a good performance, but it is exactly what you just described.

• 47:47Bill Simmons?

  And then Wilkinson for Michael Clayton, who's good.

• 47:49Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 47:51Bill Simmons?

  Ruffalo probably takes that Holbrook spot, I'm guessing. Right?

• 47:54Chris Ryan?

  Ruffalo over Downey.

• 47:57Bill Simmons?

  You tell me.

• 47:59Chris Ryan?

  It's Downey for me, but it's also a personal, I, he's also playing my kind of music in this movie.

• 48:04Bill Simmons?

  Let's, let's go with either. I think one of those guys has to be in there.

• 48:08Sean Fennessey?

  I think in a just world, it's the kind of thing where, you know, we just, we just saw two actresses get into supporting from sentimental value. Like, why would you not just put both guys in from Zodiac, you know?

• 48:20Bill Simmons?

  This was actually the worst of all of these. Best writing adapted screenplay. No Country wins. Atonement, Away from Her, Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and There Will Be Blood. Zodiac. I guess- Which I spent four years on. And the screenplays, I just don't understand that one at all. But this speaks to how the movie was regarded in 2007, which it was not.

• 48:44Sean Fennessey?

  I think Fincher was considered such a commercial director. And a lot, most of what he was doing, because he came out of music videos, was oriented around success and, you know, Seven being such a surprise hit after recovering from the Alien Three issue. That this movie being a commercial failure, I think, was really held against it around all this stuff.

• 49:05Bill Simmons?

  You and Alien Three guys here?

• 49:07Chris Ryan?

  I like the look of it, but I think it's, it's got a lot of, I mean, he, he had a terrible time making it. I think there was a lot of recutting and rewriting and stuff.

• 49:16Bill Simmons?

  All right, so we mentioned this movie was adapted from Zodiac 1986 and Zodiac Unmasked in 2002. And they spent all this time interviewing witnesses, suspects, our family members, suspects, the surviving victims, they interviewed mares. And Fincher said, so much time had passed, memories are affected, the different telling of the stories, we changed perception. So whenever we had doubt, we went with the police reports. Ruffalo's character basically says that in the movie.

• 49:45Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:45Bill Simmons?

  When he's telling, um, Gray Smith to basically, you gotta give this up. He's like, this, too much time has passed, people can't remember shit anymore. So I feel like Fincher slid that in there.

• 49:57Sean Fennessey?

  It's almost like the philosophy of the movie, right?

• 49:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. It's like, if you don't spring on it now, we're in trouble.

• 50:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Bill Simmons?

  Vanderbilt, the writer pitched the story as, what if Gary Trudeau woke up one morning and tried to solve the son of Sam? Interesting. They didn't want to glamorize the killer. Fincher said, quote, "That would have turned the story into a first-person shooter video game. We didn't want to make the sort of movie that serial killers would want to own."

• 50:24Bill Simmons?

  I like that, because you're not, if you're like a future possible serial killer, you're not watching this like, Arthur Lee, I want to be this dude. This guy's really cool.

• 50:35Chris Ryan?

  Amazing things that I found about, when reading about the actual Zodiac killer, is that there's a couple of unconfirmed Zodiac letters where he's like chiming in on movies. He's just giving takes and he's like, Exorcist, really good satire.

• 50:49Chris Ryan?

  And like, there's even one that they're not sure it's from him, but he's like Badlands, like he hates Badlands.

• 50:56Chris Ryan?

  It glorifies murders.

• 50:59Bill Simmons?

  So there, so there was a bunch of unconfirmed material and it just could have been some wacko writing.

• 51:03Chris Ryan?

  But it was, it was like this guy like just shooting from the hip.

• 51:06Sean Fennessey?

  We gotta, we gotta get the Zodiac Killer's top five most rewatchable movies.

• 51:09Bill Simmons?

  Podcast.

• 51:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, seriously. Can he, can he bounce back on your list, you know?

• 51:15Bill Simmons?

  He's weighing in on Rick Barry and the 75 Warriors. I believe in these guys.

• 51:20Sean Fennessey?

  Is he into Devil Wears Prada? Where does he land on that one?

• 51:22Bill Simmons?

  Oh, he probably would have loved that. Zodiac timeline. So they don't have the first attack in the movie?

• 51:29Chris Ryan?

  For a very specific reason, though.

• 51:31Bill Simmons?

  Explain.

• 51:32Chris Ryan?

  Well, they don't have any living witnesses and they say they were like, we're not going to start with something where we can't. The show, the ones that they depict are ones that they had living witnesses to be able to like corroborate some of the details about.

• 51:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it also allows the movie to be both, um, introduce a kill at the very top, but also be in media res for the rest of the people around it. So like the newspaper and the cops get to be like, we know there's an issue. Like something is building here as opposed to starting all the way beginning.

• 52:00Bill Simmons?

  So when you watched this for the first time last night, did you think the murders at the beginning of the movie were the first murders? Or did it make sense as they explained it that there was a murder before it?

• 52:08Chris Ryan?

  I assumed they were the first murders, just watching it.

• 52:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, see, I think it's a little bit of a flaw in the movie. I don't think they made it clear enough.

• 52:14Chris Ryan?

  Riverside is the first murders?

• 52:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 52:17Sean Fennessey?

  But he, but Fincher says that he's not totally convinced that Riverside is Zodiac. That there is like, that's part of the genius of the movie, right? Is that there's so many incidents in which people are claiming credit as Zodiac for doing them. But Zodiac is, whether he's smart or crazy, or however you want to describe it, we don't really even know what he's responsible for.

• 52:38Bill Simmons?

  I gotta be honest, it was.

• 52:40Chris Ryan?

  Much more ea- it was easier to try and like read about the Kennedy assassination than it is to read about Zodiac Killer. Because the Zodiac, it just has so many like differ- different like perspectives and permutations and like, this could have been him and there's five guys over here who think it's him and then this guy. It's, I think just the fact that it took place over so many years, over so much mileage, so many miles. Like, it's just much more complicated to wrap your head around.

• 53:08Bill Simmons?

  So Lover's Lane, that one that starts the movie, that's July 69.

• 53:12Chris Ryan?

  That's Darlene Ferron, right?

• 53:14Bill Simmons?

  They get, and the guy, Mike Majo, survives. We see him at the end of the movie. One month later Zodiac letter to the San Francisco Chronicle with the coded messages. Gets, and then September kills the two law students on the, on the water bank.

• 53:29Sean Fennessey?

  Lake Bariessa.

• 53:30Bill Simmons?

  I, I can re-

• 53:30Chris Ryan?

  Kills the one, kills the girl.

• 53:32Bill Simmons?

  Okay, but and the other guy survives, yeah. I can recreate some of the screams later if you want, tell me.

• 53:38Sean Fennessey?

  Like privately?

• 53:39Bill Simmons?

  Well, I can do the, I'll do my Quint Jaws impersonation just for that.

• 53:43Chris Ryan?

  Save them for when Taven comes back from his Achilles, yeah.

• 53:50Bill Simmons?

  Gray Smith makes the Dangerous Animal of the Mall connection to the Most Dangerous Game 1932. Sean, you have that on 4K?

• 53:58Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I have the Eureka edition of it on Blu-ray, yeah, 1932, quality film. Joel McCray, right?

• 54:05Bill Simmons?

  What was going on in this movie? The villainous Count Zeroff hunting live human prey?

• 54:10Sean Fennessey?

  You never read this story? This was, uh, this was like, uh, this was given to us in 7th grade English class.

• 54:14Bill Simmons?

  I remember the story. I don't understand why they made it a movie in 1932.

• 54:18Chris Ryan?

  And then they made it again with Ice T, right?

• 54:20Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, yes, that game, that movie's, is it called Trespass?

• 54:24Chris Ryan?

  No, isn't that just called The Most Dangerous Game? Or game?

• 54:27Bill Simmons?

  I feel like they make this movie every 10 years. Didn't they do the, what was the COVID year? There was-

• 54:31Chris Ryan?

  The Hunt.

• 54:32Bill Simmons?

  The Hunt. It's like, let's hunt humans.

• 54:34Sean Fennessey?

  What is that Ice T movie?

• 54:36Bill Simmons?

  It's not called Trespass. I thought it was called Dangerous Game.

• 54:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, maybe it's called Dangerous Game.

• 54:40Sean Fennessey?

  Anyway, the, the original movie is-

• 54:42Chris Ryan?

  Surviving the game.

• 54:43Bill Simmons?

  Surviving the game.

• 54:44Chris Ryan?

  The game, that's right.

• 54:46Sean Fennessey?

  Is only like 80 minutes. You can feel that they're stretching out a short story, but it's a pretty good movie for the 30s.

• 54:52Bill Simmons?

  Then we get the cab driver shot and killed, Zodiac mails the bloodstained shirts to the Chronicle.

• 54:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 54:57Bill Simmons?

  Taunting letter. He's talking a lot of smack.

• 54:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah, kind of the Anthony Edwards of serial killers.

• 55:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. He's staring at the bench.

• 55:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:08Bill Simmons?

  Little Dillon Brooks in there. Someone claimed to be Zodiac starts fucking with this lawyer, Melvin Belly, on a talk show, ends up, but it's not really him. Then our guy Roger Avery, played by Downey, finds this 1966 Riverside murder

• 55:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:25Bill Simmons?

  that he thinks is tied to it that the police missed. Then they interview Arthur Lee Allen in 71. They notice the Zodiac watch. So he's the Zodiac watch. He's got same gloves, same glove size. He's got the boots. He's kind of moved around in the general vicinity of where these murders were. We don't find out to the end of the movie that he lived near the first victim.

• 55:47Chris Ryan?

  Yes, because he, right.

• 55:48Bill Simmons?

  Um, yeah. Also has a trailer full of fucking weird shit, including a wooden dildo. And there's 19 other things that seem suspicious, but the handwriting expert just kills it. He's like, nah. Nah, it's not him.

• 56:01Chris Ryan?

  Well, it's, it's really hard to watch it and just understand the difference between circumstantial and hard evidence. You know, and like the idea of like coincidence versus like incrimination.

• 56:10Sean Fennessey?

  There's just a dramatic thing where they just can't get a warrant to search his trailer before he cleans out his trailer and moves. I mean, that's the most important thing that happens in this entire case. If they're able to search him and if they had approached this differently.

• 56:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Sean Fennessey?

  We might not have a movie or even a case. It might just be totally different.

• 56:28Bill Simmons?

  CR, how would you compare this to Pablo Torres' aspiration investigation? Lot of circumstantial evidence, but can't find the smoking gun. And Ballmer versus, uh, Arthur Lee Allen.

• 56:41Chris Ryan?

  He should have dressed up.

• 56:42Sean Fennessey?

  They kind of have a similar vibe.

• 56:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, similar vibe.

• 56:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, they do.

• 56:45Chris Ryan?

  Ballmer and Men who.

• 56:45Bill Simmons?

  Pablo's spinning out a little bit like Grace Smith there.

• 56:49Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not the CEO of aspiration and I wouldn't tell you if I was.

• 56:53Chris Ryan?

  Oh, you're talking about why we planted those trees. Well, I can explain that.

• 56:58Bill Simmons?

  Kawhi Leonard was paid properly, under the cap rules. Um, then stuff stops.

• 57:06Bill Simmons?

  Not so coincidentally, Arthur Lee Allen's in jail for the second time for molesting people.

• 57:11Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Bill Simmons?

  Another red flag.

• 57:13Chris Ryan?

  Definitely.

• 57:13Bill Simmons?

  And adding that to his draft, draft combine file, multiple molestation.

• 57:19Chris Ryan?

  Jesus Christ.

• 57:21Bill Simmons?

  By 1976, Gray Smith is just losing his mind, announces he's writing a book, starts getting the heavy breathing phone calls because guess who's out of jail? Arthur Lee Allen. And he figures out he lived close to the first victim, figures out the birthday thing, which they somehow fucked up, where he mentioned, I'm gonna kill somebody today, it's my birthday. And all the circumstantial evidence. By the way, it's Ambidextrous, we forgot to mention that part. And then, eight years later,

• 57:50Bill Simmons?

  after Gray Smith's book has come out, Mike Majoe, somehow they have not asked to look at an Arthur Lee Allen photo for 12 years here. They're like, what about this guy? He's like, yeah, that's him.

• 58:02Chris Ryan?

  Eight out of 10, pretty good, yeah.

• 58:04Bill Simmons?

  And then Arthur Lee Allen dies of a heart attack. And that's basically the case against Arthur Lee Allen.

• 58:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:08Sean Fennessey?

  Part of the genius of the movie is the way it portrays bureaucratic disorder. The fact that there are so many police departments and police officers and detectives.

• 58:16Bill Simmons?

  And no internet.

• 58:17Sean Fennessey?

  And no, right, no centralizing force, really. The fact that the FBI is not as involved in this case as it would be in 2025 is kind of fascinating.

• 58:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Sean Fennessey?

  Like, Mindhunter in part is about the kind of development of forces to account for these kinds of crimes. And that doesn't exist here in the same way. And so you've just kind of got all of these local precincts and districts, some from major cities, some from much smaller towns in California.

• 58:43Bill Simmons?

  And all these rules where they couldn't really cross the line.

• 58:46Chris Ryan?

  Just think about like what Gray Smith's project is that he tells Avery about on the houseboat. He's like, I was just thinking if we could just write everything down. And if we could just basically like organize all the facts of the case, that it might jog something loose. But we take it for granted that there would be this database that has all that information. You know what I mean? It's like, it's the same thing with hospitals where you're like, they used to just have, you know, the charting by hand. And it would be like, sometimes if somebody screwed something up, that would be a huge deal. It's the same thing for. Police work back then where it was just like, one guy has a telefax, the other doesn't. One person took good notes, the other didn't. You know, like, one guy's pissed at that other jurisdiction and, you know.

• 59:26Sean Fennessey?

  In fact, Fincher says that the movie exists and that the entire investigation kind of operated in the way that it did was because Armstrong, Anthony Edwards's character, took such good notes. That there were so, there was so much detail and information that they could even just pull from for the movie, let alone for the investigation itself. And if you don't have that raw material, you can't solve crimes, you can't do your job the way that you're supposed to. It's really interesting because like, we think of that shit as really boring. And I, I remember for years hearing from my dad about like, the kind of drudgery that comes with police work. But, when you're trying to solve a major crime that is national news, you need to put all that information somewhere.

• 1:00:05Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's why all three of those movies we mentioned earlier spotlight all the presidents been in this movie. The drudgery you can feel, it's like, fuck, alright, gotta go through these files.

• 1:00:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's boring.

• 1:00:14Bill Simmons?

  All the president's men has that famous scene when they're in the library and it just like, the crane goes up and they're just like, alright, guess we gotta go through these.

• 1:00:22Sean Fennessey?

  That's like you on Basketball Reference, you know, it's like, this isn't gonna do itself. I gotta get all this data.

• 1:00:26Chris Ryan?

  I gotta find out what this guy's nickname is.

• 1:00:29Bill Simmons?

  Arthur Lee Allen, other stuff with him, taught high school students when he was a teacher how to use letter symbols and then decode them. That was on the record. Uh, an incredible swimmer. And then, uh, found with a bloody knife the same night as the bluff murders, which he said was used to kill a chicken that day.

• 1:00:48Sean Fennessey?

  For dinner, yeah, normal.

• 1:00:49Bill Simmons?

  And then, uh, again, multiple pedophilia, uh, stuff, so there was, and lived in a trailer full of squirrels and weird shit. And he checked every box except for this one handwriting thing. So there was this other thing, this happened in December, so last month. An amateur sleuth, self-taught cryptography expert, named Alex Baber, in West Virginia.

• 1:01:15Bill Simmons?

  Who said, one of the reasons he was able to pull this is because he has autism that makes him fixate on things until he can figure out what happened. And he used all of these AI programs. And he claimed that he figured out the Zodiac thing. And a lot of it came down to the 13 letter names with the mysterious symbols. He put it through, it came back 71 million. Then it came back and he kept narrowing the number down until he could narrow it down to 14 and landed on this name Marvin Merrill, who was an alias assumed by Marvin Margolis, who was investigated for the Black Dahlia murder, who was 21 at the time, and had all of the same stuff the Zodiac killer would have done. Was a Navy medic, was good at

• 1:01:57Bill Simmons?

  like, just doing it, quick amputations and shit like that. Was really bitter about how the Navy thing happened. And then a year before his death, did this drawing of somebody named Elizabeth, that looked like the Black Dahlia. And this guy Alex Babers, like, this guy did both.

• 1:02:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Bill Simmons?

  These were the two great unsolved murders of the 20th century, or serial killer, or whatever. And this guy's saying, I've solved it.

• 1:02:26Chris Ryan?

  It's actually like the demon of, like the devil of California, right?

• 1:02:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The only thing that I always stumble on whenever I hear that kind of insinuation that the Black Dahlia killer and the Zodiac killer were one and the same is like, there's a great distance to travel to commit these crimes. And where the person is living and how they're doing that. And you hear this over and over again. It's like, so somebody had like a 14 hour round trip visit to Marin to go murder a 19 year old, you know?

• 1:02:53Chris Ryan?

  But is the implication that he was in Southern California, up to the Riverside killings, and then moved up to the Bay?

• 1:02:59Bill Simmons?

  I mean, you could do that stuff back then. Now you can't. Like the guy who, what was the guy in North Dakota, wherever that was recently, who killed the, randomly killed like the four people in that, in that dorm?

• 1:03:11Chris Ryan?

  Mm hmm. Oh, in Idaho.

• 1:03:12Sean Fennessey?

  Idaho.

• 1:03:13Bill Simmons?

  And he was studying, he was studying criminal law or something creepy. But he came, he drove and then he drove back to where he was thinking he would, but then didn't realize his cell phone was being tracked. These guys always forget about the cell phone. Craig, what are some of the mistakes you make as you as you kill people around Southern California?

• 1:03:29Sean Fennessey?

  Up and down the coast.

• 1:03:30Chris Ryan?

  I've had to stop. It sucked. Yeah, I mean, you know.

• 1:03:33Sean Fennessey?

  You also, you do have, you have a legacy in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Northern California.

• 1:03:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, serial killer hotbeds.

• 1:03:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I didn't realize, I didn't realize Fincher was from North Bay, from Marin.

• 1:03:44Sean Fennessey?

  You didn't realize this was a sting operation and we've identified you as a serial killer?

• 1:03:48Chris Ryan?

  This is a catch and prey.

• 1:03:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. My buffalo was right outside.

• 1:03:51Chris Ryan?

  Not super far from where I grew up.

• 1:03:52Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. The reason I don't think the Bayberry theory is true, because I don't think somebody would shut that off for 20 years.

• 1:03:57Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:03:58Bill Simmons?

  I think you're, once you're, once you're going, you're going.

• 1:04:01Chris Ryan?

  There was also somebody, there was like a University of Maryland, trying to remember who was like responsible. There's something called like Case Breakers, that's like a bunch of ex FBI, Justice Department people and, you know, like they basically tried to solve cold cases.

• 1:04:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Chris Ryan?

  And they named someone, it was this guy Greg Post, but he was like, he made, that was almost like, sounded like really true detective-y, where he had like a criminal posse and would like indoctrinate people into this crew and they would like maraud Northern California, but...

• 1:04:34Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's another theory with this.

• 1:04:36Chris Ryan?

  I think there was some DNA with Sherry Bates that they were linking to him or something. I can't remember, yeah.

• 1:04:40Bill Simmons?

  Well, that, one of the other theories is that this was multiple people.

• 1:04:43Chris Ryan?

  Yes, that's the one I, I think I described.

• 1:04:45Sean Fennessey?

  I think I do too.

• 1:04:46Bill Simmons?

  The film kind of taps into that a little bit with, with the basement guy. And could people have been working together?

• 1:04:53Chris Ryan?

  The creepy thing about Bob Vaughn in the basement scene is the idea that there is a connection between these different people.

• 1:04:59Bill Simmons?

  I wrote the posters.

• 1:05:00Chris Ryan?

  Yes, but that they all knew each other and that they were all kind of like on the same frequency, so to speak.

• 1:05:06Sean Fennessey?

  I'm such an Occam's razor person with this stuff, though, and we talked about this when we did JFK on the show, right? Where you guys were like, I'm ready to spend four hours trying to figure out where all the pinboard lines meet.

• 1:05:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Sean Fennessey?

  And to me, like...

• 1:05:17Bill Simmons?

  I feel like we didn't go far enough.

• 1:05:18Sean Fennessey?

  And, and we can, well, we can read JFK as soon as you want, because I'd love to watch it again, but... In the movie and based on anything that I've read, it feels very clear to me that Arthur Lee Allen killed Darlene. That's the one thing that I'm like, this makes too much sense.

• 1:05:32Bill Simmons?

  And Mike Mijoe kinda knew who it was, right?

• 1:05:34Sean Fennessey?

  He identifies him, the distance between them, the pre-existing relationship, the way in which the murder is happening because of the information that he had around that. So that's one thing that you can kinda put your arms around and say, this makes a lot of sense. It's everything else, the information splatter, the variation in the crime style, that is just a little bit harder to make sense of.

• 1:05:55Bill Simmons?

  That he might have gotten help, yeah. Seventy million dollar budget made eighty-five million dollars.

• 1:06:02Bill Simmons?

  Barely made even. Bad, little bad for Fincher. It was like, wait, we give you a lot of money for this.

• 1:06:06Sean Fennessey?

  That was worldwide too, in the US, made like thirty-five million dollars.

• 1:06:08Bill Simmons?

  He got it all back. I mean, like, he just goes on this run now. He turned out fine.

• 1:06:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Bill Simmons?

  A hundred and fifty-seven minute runtime. We have a new category in twenty twenty-six, the Craig Century Club. Craig feels like every movie should be a hundred minutes. Craig, this was a minus fifty-seven.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:06:24Bill Simmons?

  What are your thoughts? What's the ideal runtime?

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  I understand that this movie is supposed to feel like this long, painful process, and it needs to be long. It can't be a hundred minutes. I'm willing to admit that. I think you could have probably cut fifteen minutes. MGM was gonna make this movie, and they had a hard rule that said two hours and fifteen minutes max, and then ended up taking it to Paramount. There is, I think, a section in the middle where it's kind of ruffalo, just running into dead ends for a while, that starts to feel slow. It's like the first, the Robert Downey Jr. first fifteen minutes is great. The Gyllenhaal stuff really picks up and flies at the end. I do think there is, there is a fifteen-minute chunk in the middle that could probably be cut, to be honest.

• 1:07:02Bill Simmons?

  Directors cut its longer, and they add a two-minute kinda interstitial when it does the four years later. He cut something about basically all the music over the four years, and basically ventured it up.

• 1:07:15Chris Ryan?

  And some news, like, reports of like, oh, and now this is happening.

• 1:07:18Sean Fennessey?

  The screen goes to black.

• 1:07:19Bill Simmons?

  I would have put that in. I feel like that part of the movie is pretty clumsy, where it's like clearly edited.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Bill Simmons?

  He almost seems pissed off. It's like, fine, here's your four years later graphic. Fuck you, motherfuckers. I just spent four months making this two-minute montage. Four years of movies.

• 1:07:34Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there's rumors, there's rumors of a three hour and 10 minute cut that was submitted to the studio that they that I I haven't seen.

• 1:07:42Chris Ryan?

  It's not, I mean, they did a really nice 4K and there's a director's cut on the Blu-ray with like, that has the extra Avery and and.

• 1:07:50Sean Fennessey?

  A little bit of stuff, not a lot.

• 1:07:52Chris Ryan?

  It's all like 40 seconds or something like that.

• 1:07:54Bill Simmons?

  Sean, I said on the another 48 hours rewatchables.

• 1:07:57Sean Fennessey?

  Haven't heard that one yet.

• 1:07:57Bill Simmons?

  Days ago. That that is my number one, release the cut. So there's 25 minutes extra. And apparently another 40 minutes and it's a totally different movie that actually makes sense.

• 1:08:09Sean Fennessey?

  Zodiac killer is in that film?

• 1:08:10Bill Simmons?

  They don't, they don't do that. And there's no sign that that cut is even exists in a warehouse.

• 1:08:15Chris Ryan?

  We gotta, we gotta find out from Walter.

• 1:08:16Bill Simmons?

  Paramount butchered it at the last minute. They decided it needed to be 95 minutes.

• 1:08:20Chris Ryan?

  But there's all this Iceman stuff in it.

• 1:08:22Bill Simmons?

  Minutes out.

• 1:08:22Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:08:24Bill Simmons?

  But that's, what's your number one, release the cut?

• 1:08:27Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, the Snyder cut. No. I, I don't know. Most of the cuts are out there, right? Like the legendary ones like Kingdom of Heaven and Blade Runner and all that's, all that stuff's been made available to us, right?

• 1:08:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, we had, we were doing this for the another 48. I couldn't really think of another one besides.

• 1:08:42Bill Simmons?

  The one I, the other one I came up with was Eyes Wide Shut, release the Kubrick right before he died cut.

• 1:08:48Sean Fennessey?

  The interview, there was, there's an interview with the editor of that film that came out when the Blu-ray, when the 4K was released at the end of last year. And he said, the version that is on the Criterion Disc is the version that Kubrick wanted out, that that it has not been edited.

• 1:09:01Bill Simmons?

  When the camera pans back, you can see the gun being pointed at him as he says it.

• 1:09:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Bill Simmons?

  By the Illuminati.

• 1:09:07Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I, it's possible that there's another version of that movie.

• 1:09:11Bill Simmons?

  What happened? He's dead.

• 1:09:14Bill Simmons?

  Watch party is another category for us where we decide what is the best setting for a watch or a rewatch.

• 1:09:19Chris Ryan?

  This is a true solo one for me.

• 1:09:21Sean Fennessey?

  This is such a funny.

• 1:09:22Bill Simmons?

  This is a CR solo?

• 1:09:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, this is like everybody.

• 1:09:26Sean Fennessey?

  T-shirt, no pants?

• 1:09:28Chris Ryan?

  The straight, the tubing, yeah.

• 1:09:29Bill Simmons?

  This is, my wife went to New York for the weekend.

• 1:09:36Chris Ryan?

  I'm porky bigging it all day for this one.

• 1:09:38Bill Simmons?

  The stupid.

• 1:09:41Bill Simmons?

  Oh my god. Roger Ebert, our guy.

• 1:09:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Bill Simmons?

  Every rewatchables, we read the Roger Ebert review, four stars. He said Zodiac is the all the president's men of serial killer movies. Sign me up with Woodward and Bernstein, played by a cop and a cartoonist. Then he says Fincher is an elegant stylist on top of everything else. Here he is, he finds the right place and style for a story about persistence in the face of evil. Raj, you like this? Checked a lot of boxes, characters, plot, story.

• 1:10:12Sean Fennessey?

  I can always count on Raj, except when you can't. I do think that it's kind of weird to try to have a conversation about evil and the idea of evil. But it comes up over and over again in all these Fincher movies. And he's like, definitely thinks it's a little funny.

• 1:10:28Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:30Sean Fennessey?

  But also is completely terrorized by it and the idea that like, these people died. You know, like, it's not a joke.

• 1:10:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Sean Fennessey?

  And yet there is this real sense of black humor in the movie and a real acceptance of not knowing, never knowing what really happened.

• 1:10:45Chris Ryan?

  I think his way of showing, his way of showing empathy and sensitivity to the victims is by not making their deaths seductive and not making their deaths, he doesn't romanticize them at all.

• 1:10:58Bill Simmons?

  Well, so he has seven guys, the fucking craziest person probably who's ever killed anyone in a movie.

• 1:11:05Chris Ryan?

  But is like, oh, this guy would have won Jeopardy. You know what I mean?

• 1:11:08Bill Simmons?

  Like, you have The Game, which is the craziest prank anyone's pulled on a family member, I think.

• 1:11:13Sean Fennessey?

  Such a mean spirited movie.

• 1:11:15Bill Simmons?

  That movie's nuts. You have Fight Club, which is just, uh, one of the kind of secretly most vicious, Ben was watching the other day, I was like, I forgot how fucking crazy this movie is.

• 1:11:26Sean Fennessey?

  Chaos at your fingertips in that movie.

• 1:11:27Bill Simmons?

  Panic Room, which is basically these three burglars just going as far as you could possibly go to torture.

• 1:11:35Sean Fennessey?

  Tortured a single mom and her 12 year old.

• 1:11:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Then you have this movie. Then he kind of cools off a little bit.

• 1:11:42Chris Ryan?

  Gone Girl's pretty perverted.

• 1:11:44Bill Simmons?

  Then it goes back to Gone Girl.

• 1:11:45Sean Fennessey?

  Dragon Tattoo's crazy.

• 1:11:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Dragon Tattoo.

• 1:11:47Sean Fennessey?

  Some of the torture scenes in Dragon Tattoo were so vicious.

• 1:11:49Bill Simmons?

  Benjamin Button, he cools off.

• 1:11:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Bill Simmons?

  Comes back with Social Network, the biggest sociopath he's ever done a movie about, Mark Zuckerberg. Uh, Dragon Tattoo and then Gone Girl. So for the most part, he's really fascinated by what makes somebody kind of break.

• 1:12:06Sean Fennessey?

  And what encourages them to do things that we know are not, in polite society, are bad.

• 1:12:11Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Sean Fennessey?

  Are wrong.

• 1:12:12Chris Ryan?

  My favorite Fincher quote is still, "People are fundamentally perverts," and I find that interesting. It's paraphrasing.

• 1:12:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. But you guys have 500,000 text, text words back and forth about Fincher movies.

• 1:12:24Sean Fennessey?

  Couple of perverts.

• 1:12:26Bill Simmons?

  Would've been funny if during this whole run, he just made like one random sports movie like Glory Road.

• 1:12:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Bill Simmons?

  It's like, I'm going back to the 1960s, the first all-black starting five.

• 1:12:35Chris Ryan?

  Guys getting corrupted by like a betting ring and shooting steroids the entire time.

• 1:12:39Sean Fennessey?

  You'd watch it, though. It'd be meticulously crafted.

• 1:12:42Bill Simmons?

  Honestly, I'd watch anything Fincher did.

• 1:12:43Sean Fennessey?

  Me too.

• 1:12:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Bill Simmons?

  I just think there's a style to his stuff that you know immediately. It's like when we always talk about writers, when you can cover the byline and know who the writer is. Like Fincher, you know. Alright, most rewatchable scene. The Lover's Lane murder is fucking creepy.

• 1:12:59Bill Simmons?

  I don't like flash, flashlights as a murder scene gimmick really freaked me out.

• 1:13:04Sean Fennessey?

  Just putting the flashlight on top of the gun.

• 1:13:06Bill Simmons?

  Just like, when they do this, it never goes well. The hurdy-gurdy man, that was just an amazing, uh.

• 1:13:12Chris Ryan?

  I love all the Vallejo stuff at the beginning too, just like that.

• 1:13:15Bill Simmons?

  The fireworks.

• 1:13:16Chris Ryan?

  Static, tracking shot of the suburbs and the fireworks and stuff.

• 1:13:19Bill Simmons?

  It's a really, really good first six minutes. Like it's, you're just, you're in.

• 1:13:23Sean Fennessey?

  Puts you right in the, in the place at that time. And also, if you think about it through the eyes of Fincher, it's like him just like rebuilding his childhood.

• 1:13:34Bill Simmons?

  I want to, uh, just mention Grace Smith reading the decoded letter with Roger watching along. We get a little back and forth with them.

• 1:13:41Sean Fennessey?

  In The Chronicle.

• 1:13:42Chris Ryan?

  Paul. You keep saying Roger.

• 1:13:44Bill Simmons?

  Why did I say Roger?

• 1:13:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, because it's Roger Avery from Pulp Fiction.

• 1:13:47Bill Simmons?

  Thank you for correcting me. Paul. Why did I keep saying Roger?

• 1:13:49Chris Ryan?

  Because we know who Roger Avery is.

• 1:13:52Sean Fennessey?

  Screenwriter.

• 1:13:52Bill Simmons?

  Paul Avery.

• 1:13:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Sean Fennessey?

  Paul Avery is the journalist. Thank you, Chris.

• 1:13:56Bill Simmons?

  I knew I was gonna have name mess ups in this.

• 1:13:59Chris Ryan?

  You got a lot on your mind. You're trying to find the Zodiac Murder.

• 1:14:04Bill Simmons?

  And then, uh, when they, we find out he gave himself the name, I am the Zodiac. Uh, the bluff murder.

• 1:14:12Sean Fennessey?

  Do you have a version of that? When did you say, I am the, the Boston sports guy?

• 1:14:16Bill Simmons?

  Well, that was when there was a Boston movie guy.

• 1:14:19Chris Ryan?

  Were you sending coded messages?

• 1:14:21Sean Fennessey?

  Is that what it was?

• 1:14:22Bill Simmons?

  This Boston movie guy doing reviews. You probably hated, you were probably reading them age 12, being like, this guy sucks.

• 1:14:28Sean Fennessey?

  On microfiche? Like, how was I getting access to them? The Boston movie guy?

• 1:14:32Bill Simmons?

  Boston movie guy. So I was like, I'll be Boston sports guy.

• 1:14:35Chris Ryan?

  And then maybe me and the movie guy can, no?

• 1:14:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we might've, we might've tried a cross promotion thing. Didn't work out that great.

• 1:14:41Sean Fennessey?

  Huh, interesting.

• 1:14:42Bill Simmons?

  Uh, the bluff murder. In the running for most unsettling murder scene ever. I don't know what, there's no music. You don't know it's coming. All of a sudden you see the knife and then just people getting stabbed and screaming. It's awful.

• 1:14:57Chris Ryan?

  Such a tough rewatch because you're just like, dude, look up. You know, like his girlfriend is like, hey, there's a guy watching us. And he's just like, ah, it's a free country.

• 1:15:07Bill Simmons?

  It's fine.

• 1:15:08Sean Fennessey?

  Apparently it was accurate to how that actually happened. Where is it? Brian Hartnell, the guy who's, who is stabbed but survives was, tried to disarm the guy. You know, tried to be kind of casual and comfortable so to kind of keep him at peace. So he wouldn't attack him, but he's wearing an all black jumpsuit and a hood.

• 1:15:26Bill Simmons?

  And the necklace.

• 1:15:27Sean Fennessey?

  And then, and just, it looks like the living embodiment of murder.

• 1:15:30Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Bill Simmons?

  I think murders in peaceful locations are creepier too.

• 1:15:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:36Bill Simmons?

  They're like this nice idyllic place.

• 1:15:37Sean Fennessey?

  In broad daylight. That's the other thing about that murder is everybody's alone. And it seems like it should be the most beautiful experience you could possibly have with someone you care about.

• 1:15:51Bill Simmons?

  Dennis Thieves Benihana Award, would you go scene stealing location for the bluff or somewhere else?

• 1:15:55Chris Ryan?

  I'd probably go Morty's, the bar, but.

• 1:15:59Sean Fennessey?

  I like the diner at the end.

• 1:16:00Chris Ryan?

  Diner at the end. There's some great diners in this movie.

• 1:16:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Bill Simmons?

  Um, next rewatchable scene, Logan Royd does a live TV show with fake Zodiac.

• 1:16:09Bill Simmons?

  Sam, I need to get back to the Pierce family today. Are you in or you out?

• 1:16:15Sean Fennessey?

  Melvin Belli is such a beautiful 70s figure. We don't have people like that anymore.

• 1:16:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:19Sean Fennessey?

  Or it's like, that guy was a famous lawyer who would just show up on TV all the time.

• 1:16:23Chris Ryan?

  Some Melvin Belli knowledge, he was the one who suggested to the Rolling Stones that they move the venue to Altamont.

• 1:16:29Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:16:30Chris Ryan?

  We might want that one back.

• 1:16:31Sean Fennessey?

  He's in Gimme Shelter. He's literally portraying Gimme Shelter.

• 1:16:34Bill Simmons?

  Guy's spinning a lot. He had his hands in a lot of things. You stop it with that gas chamber shit, Sam. I need to know, in or out? Well, fuck off. I can't watch Brian Cox in anything after Succession. I literally can't. I just wait for him to become Logan Roy.

• 1:16:49Sean Fennessey?

  Not even Hannibal Lecter?

• 1:16:51Bill Simmons?

  No. No. Logan Roy ruined him for me.

• 1:16:54Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:16:55Bill Simmons?

  In a good way.

• 1:16:56Sean Fennessey?

  He is also the voice of McDonald's.

• 1:16:58Bill Simmons?

  I think about that when he does that, too.

• 1:17:00Sean Fennessey?

  Him going ba-da-ba-ba-ba. That's the craziest thing that's ever happened. That's fascinating.

• 1:17:04Chris Ryan?

  I think he's actually done like a lot of VO stuff and I'm just like, damn, this guy must just be like, the direct deposit must just be amazing right now.

• 1:17:11Sean Fennessey?

  He loves money.

• 1:17:11Bill Simmons?

  Eat this filet of fish or fuck off.

• 1:17:15Bill Simmons?

  The Ione Sky car ride scene.

• 1:17:17Chris Ryan?

  I just have holy fucking shit written down for this.

• 1:17:21Bill Simmons?

  This is a great rewatch because she's so stupid. First of all, she has her kid. It's like, what are you doing? Why are you pulling over? And then he's like, I fixed it. She's like, oh, thank you. And then the terror of realizing he didn't fix it. And then they do kind of the, it's almost like a No Country For Old Men jump cut ahead of time where you think something horrible has happened.

• 1:17:40Sean Fennessey?

  When she's screaming on the side of the road.

• 1:17:42Bill Simmons?

  Throw the baby out. Baby was fine. Just walking with a limp, I guess. I'm gonna throw your baby out the window.

• 1:17:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Sean Fennessey?

  Please don't do that anymore.

• 1:17:55Bill Simmons?

  I just wrote down for the next scene, Downey and Jake just cooking. And it starts with that, does it bother you when people call you shorty? Does it bother you when people call you retard? And then he goes to Downey and it's like, people call me retard? It's like, no.

• 1:18:09Chris Ryan?

  No, he's like, do people call me names?

• 1:18:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Sean Fennessey?

  The laugh line when Shorty hits him with that, though, is really, really funny.

• 1:18:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah. And it keeps going. They end up with the Halloween card, the gun range. I just like when they're hanging out.

• 1:18:22Chris Ryan?

  You, you're, you've been around the block a couple of times. What do you think Shorty's comp package was? Coffee guy in the Chronicle newsroom?

• 1:18:29Bill Simmons?

  I think he's doing fine.

• 1:18:30Chris Ryan?

  Do some shoe shine in? Like, what is, what, does that got 5% bumps every year or what?

• 1:18:34Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna say that probably, probably a checkered history for him in his twenties.

• 1:18:38Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:38Bill Simmons?

  Might have, uh, might have spent some time.

• 1:18:40Sean Fennessey?

  Had some trouble, yeah.

• 1:18:41Chris Ryan?

  Knows his way around a switchblade, maybe.

• 1:18:42Bill Simmons?

  Might have been incarcerated for a couple of years there, so he's happy to be working.

• 1:18:46Chris Ryan?

  I just love that towards the end of the movie, when Downey is getting basically fired, and he's like, "Shorty, let's go for one." Shorty's like, "Yeah, sure." He's like, "Shorty, you're fucking working here, man."

• 1:18:54Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Sean Fennessey?

  But there's a scene between Avery and Gray Smith before that, where they go to the bar together, the Aqua Velva scene, where they're getting to know each other.

• 1:19:02Chris Ryan?

  Coded.

• 1:19:03Sean Fennessey?

  Which is one of my favorite scenes in the movie. And there's a great moment when Avery's like asking Gray Smith about himself, and he's like, "What do you like to do?" And he's like, "Uh, I love to read. I enjoy books." And Avery's like, "Those are the same thing."

• 1:19:14Chris Ryan?

  That's the same thing.

• 1:19:18Chris Ryan?

  And he's like, "We could no longer ignore this drink."

• 1:19:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Chris Ryan?

  The whole scene where he's just like, "You wouldn't make fun of it if you tried it."

• 1:19:24Sean Fennessey?

  And then cut to an hour later, Avery's drinking them in the bar.

• 1:19:26Chris Ryan?

  And he's just doing bumps while Gray Smith is like, "Look at my codebreaker book."

• 1:19:30Sean Fennessey?

  They're so good together.

• 1:19:33Bill Simmons?

  Interrogating Arthur at work, we talked about this scene.

• 1:19:36Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah, that's...

• 1:19:37Bill Simmons?

  I think this is my most rewatchable scene.

• 1:19:39Sean Fennessey?

  That's it.

• 1:19:39Bill Simmons?

  I love this scene. Uh, searching Lee's place.

• 1:19:44Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm, the squirrels?

• 1:19:46Bill Simmons?

  Squirrels. The wooden dildo is the fucking grossest thing you could have probably added to this movie.

• 1:19:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:19:53Bill Simmons?

  I like searching. Can we get a search warrant? We can? Oh, we got one. And then we go in and whatever the place is of the person, the bad guy.

• 1:20:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Bill Simmons?

  It's just way more disturbing and awful than you would ever imagine. Buffalo Bill's still number one most disturbing place.

• 1:20:07Chris Ryan?

  I think if you're gonna, we could build a small Mount Rushmore of disturbing places that get, uh, searched. It's definitely Arthur Lee's, uh, trailer, Buffalo Bill's basement.

• 1:20:18Chris Ryan?

  The house in the drug dealer house in Gone Baby Gone with all the newspaper on the windows.

• 1:20:23Bill Simmons?

  Something in Seven. There's a couple of different Seven locations.

• 1:20:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there's, I mean, the, the David Desmalchin house in, in Prisoners, right?

• 1:20:32Chris Ryan?

  Oh, that's great. That's the top five right there.

• 1:20:33Sean Fennessey?

  You know, where he opens his suitcase and it's got the snakes in it. That's fucking incredible.

• 1:20:37Bill Simmons?

  Second Prisoners reference.

• 1:20:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 1:20:40Bill Simmons?

  Kind of lurking now.

• 1:20:41Sean Fennessey?

  Circling, yeah.

• 1:20:42Bill Simmons?

  The basement scene.

• 1:20:45Chris Ryan?

  Rick didn't draw any posters. I do the posters myself.

• 1:20:51Bill Simmons?

  The, Joe and I was like.

• 1:20:53Sean Fennessey?

  That, that's, this is the one scene for me that when I saw the movie, I was like, this is one of the most scared I felt in a movie in, in, in my entire life, seeing it in a movie theater. And now it does not, doesn't work as much. Doesn't hit as hard. I think I have, I don't, I don't know. I feel it's, I've seen it too many times. It's the only movie, only part of the movie I feel that way about.

• 1:21:10Chris Ryan?

  Because you feel like it's totally different or because you, it's like, it feels like so.

• 1:21:15Sean Fennessey?

  He's trying to scare you and I know. He's doing like movie stuff.

• 1:21:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Sean Fennessey?

  In that scene where he's trying to make you uneasy. The whole movie makes you uneasy because of what really happened.

• 1:21:23Bill Simmons?

  I think the worst nightmare you could have is somebody is willingly going into somebody's basement and then realizing you might not get out.

• 1:21:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:21:31Sean Fennessey?

  That's upsetting. Yeah.

• 1:21:33Bill Simmons?

  And it's the way he shoots it, like, he's, he starts backing up. He's like, okay, I'm gonna get going. And the guy just turns the lights off and he's in the dark and it's like, all right, what's happening?

• 1:21:42Chris Ryan?

  I mean, yeah.

• 1:21:43Bill Simmons?

  Also, like hearing the footsteps on the top. What was going on there?

• 1:21:47Chris Ryan?

  I think it's illustrative of Grace Smith, the character in the film, finally confronting the stuff that Chloe Sevigny's character was so worried about.

• 1:21:55Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Chris Ryan?

  You know, where she's just like, you're putting yourself out there, going on television, you're writing about him, like.

• 1:22:01Bill Simmons?

  Well, and you're so obsessed. This guy's like, let's just go back to my house. He's like, sure.

• 1:22:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, he was, he brings his baby at the middle of the night to, to meet with Toski, like.

• 1:22:10Bill Simmons?

  Also, they get in the house, closes the door and the guy locks it from the inside and takes the key. And at that point, Grace Smith should have been like, wait, what's going on?

• 1:22:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Sean Fennessey?

  That's kind of what I mean, but that's kind of what I mean about the way that the movie is made where when you're watching the movie for the first time, you're like, this is getting really, really uncomfortable. But then when you watch it with a little bit of distance, you're like, they showed us the key locking, you know, to make you uncomfortable, but it's still, it still is really effective.

• 1:22:36Chris Ryan?

  Also, this weird fifty, fifty, I mean, we could talk about this later in the pod, but like. That point in the movie, you're experiencing the case the way I think Fincher wants like you to think Graysmith's experiencing and it's so manic and it's so like

• 1:22:52Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:52Chris Ryan?

  All of a sudden, it's like, everything is about Rick Marshall and you're like, wait, what? Like, what happened with?

• 1:22:57Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good point. And who is Rick Marshall? Yeah, we don't even know who we're talking about.

• 1:23:00Chris Ryan?

  Weird, random, anonymous phone call and now all of a sudden, we've got a new-

• 1:23:03Bill Simmons?

  I have a new suspect, yeah.

• 1:23:07Bill Simmons?

  Jake goes to Ruffalo's house because he figured out the birthday thing.

• 1:23:10Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:10Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:11Bill Simmons?

  I think, this is one of the things I miss about the seventies and eighties is you could just show up at somebody's house and it wasn't completely insane.

• 1:23:18Chris Ryan?

  You want to test that out and have-

• 1:23:20Bill Simmons?

  No, I don't think you can do it anymore.

• 1:23:21Chris Ryan?

  You're just like, I'm just knocking on your door.

• 1:23:23Bill Simmons?

  CR!

• 1:23:23Chris Ryan?

  Bill, did you see overtime and Beatz back?

• 1:23:27Bill Simmons?

  CR, it beats back! You have to get out of bed. Your wife goes, "I'll make some Folgers."

• 1:23:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:35Chris Ryan?

  Of the three of us, I think he would like that the least.

• 1:23:37Sean Fennessey?

  It's, I don't want to be, I don't want to be disturbed.

• 1:23:40Chris Ryan?

  But not any more than that.

• 1:23:41Bill Simmons?

  I don't like when people come over.

• 1:23:44Sean Fennessey?

  And yet.

• 1:23:45Bill Simmons?

  Jake, last thing, Jake goes to see Lee at the hardware store, which I think also gets the Fortune 3 Clap Award for most giftable moment. The, the stare down.

• 1:23:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Bill Simmons?

  I think, uh, I think, what's the, John Carroll Lynch?

• 1:24:00Sean Fennessey?

  John Carroll Lynch, yeah.

• 1:24:01Bill Simmons?

  Great face changes in this movie by him.

• 1:24:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Bill Simmons?

  Cause he has like a nice face, right? Where he's like, "Hey, can I help you?" But then it drops into the evil face. It's a really hard thing to do and he does it very subtly.

• 1:24:15Sean Fennessey?

  He's a really talented actor. You mentioned that he's in Fargo where he's just kind of pure warmth, right? He's just supporting Marge throughout that whole movie. He's in Sorry Baby, this movie that came out this year, where he has a very similar thing where he's really empathetic to Eva Victor in the movie, in one scene. But in this movie, he seems like he could be the most deranged person in the history of America.

• 1:24:34Bill Simmons?

  So what do you have for us who watch more?

• 1:24:35Chris Ryan?

  Can I just throw one that you, you didn't mention?

• 1:24:37Bill Simmons?

  Yes.

• 1:24:38Chris Ryan?

  Which is, uh-

• 1:24:39Bill Simmons?

  Is it with Roger Avery?

• 1:24:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, it's Toski and Armstrong doing the crime scene for the taxi cab murder. Uh, that's the first animal crackers moment and it's also just- It's just Fincher making a mini cop movie in the middle of this movie where it's like they shot that in LA and used Bay Area digital backdrops to like recreate the San Francisco street, but it's got all the like, yeah, but you're not dumb because you waited for him to just park the car, you know, like all the recreation and the forensic stuff and the pathology stuff is so awesome. And then that last shot of Toski gets out of the cabin, he like kind of walks right up to the camera and then the David Shire music is really hitting. It's just awesome, awesome. But it's, it's the interrogation.

• 1:25:23Bill Simmons?

  What do you have?

• 1:25:23Sean Fennessey?

  I have two more that we didn't talk about. One is the first time that Gray Smith meets with Toski and he's like, I can't allow you to help, but go talk to Narlow, N A R L O W. And then the second one is my single favorite scene in the movie, other than the interrogation, which is door to door, that final breakfast meeting between Dave and Gray Smith.

• 1:25:44Chris Ryan?

  With the salt and pepper shakers.

• 1:25:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And he says Darlene worked at the House of Pancakes in Vallejo. I walked it. That, that scene while watching the movie, the first time, when it felt like they were explaining to you, we know, this movie knows who the Zodiac Killer is. Like it is so convincing because of the conviction that Gyllenhaal has and the way that Toski reacts where he's like, I was right, we were right. And then he just leaves. He's like, thanks for breakfast, puts money on the table, walks out, it's over. And then you do get the Jimmy Simpson moment after that, but like it gives you this sense of satisfaction, but then the movie doesn't let you have the satisfaction at its conclusion with the title cards, like.

• 1:26:21Chris Ryan?

  Well, I guess you have to decide whether or not you find Gray Smith and Arthur Lee in the hardware store satisfying.

• 1:26:28Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right.

• 1:26:30Bill Simmons?

  What'd you have for most rewatchable seeing it first time?

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  Interview, the interrogation with Lee and the watch thing and the shoe, it, it felt the most like Usual Suspects where you're sitting there picking up on things, watching people piece things together.

• 1:26:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Bill Simmons?

  It's a great scene.

• 1:26:45Sean Fennessey?

  May I see it? May I see it?

• 1:26:47Bill Simmons?

  You already did the what's the most 2007 thing about this movie, which is wide eyed, crazy Jake Gyllenhaal. It's when we go backwards of movies, it's almost like we have to do, what's the most 1970s thing about this movie? And I think it's Folgers Coffee.

• 1:27:02Bill Simmons?

  Because it was really, that was the only coffee for ever.

• 1:27:05Sean Fennessey?

  We did have it in the eighties, because I remember it in my house.

• 1:27:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Something shifted, I don't really know what, but it was basically, I don't even know, was there another coffee?

• 1:27:15Sean Fennessey?

  I think Folgers Crystals was cooking in the nineties too, right? But then, for some rea- I mean Starbucks, really.

• 1:27:20Bill Simmons?

  And Starbucks killed the Seattle Supersonics and Folgers.

• 1:27:23Chris Ryan?

  But would you put Folgers, were people putting Folgers in like a Mr. Coffee, or were they putting boiling water in it?

• 1:27:28Bill Simmons?

  It was the old school.

• 1:27:29Chris Ryan?

  Because there's instant coffee, you just pour the hot water and mix it.

• 1:27:31Bill Simmons?

  My mom might have been the first person I knew, that anyone knew, who had like a nice coffee machine. My mom loved coffee, still loves coffee. But we always had like a nice coffee machine in the eighties, and she really cared about grinding it.

• 1:27:45Chris Ryan?

  Like, when's the last time you had, I can't even imagine.

• 1:27:48Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe like an Airbnb or something?

• 1:27:49Chris Ryan?

  What it tastes like.

• 1:27:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Bill Simmons?

  Bad. I would also say for a seventies thing about the movie, just coordinating investigations between cities.

• 1:27:57Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:58Bill Simmons?

  It just would be different now.

• 1:28:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, can I give you one other two thousand and seven thing?

• 1:28:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Sean Fennessey?

  I do think it's a really interesting example of Gen X art, and like, Gen X kind of looking back at their childhood, and, not to get too high-minded about it, but it's like, right before Obama, it's right before this kind of like shift culturally.

• 1:28:21Bill Simmons?

  Sean's cooking.

• 1:28:21Sean Fennessey?

  And kind of like reckoning with the end of the summer of love, and what the seventies could have been, and then how they turned out so toxic and dangerous, and it felt very chaotic to live in that time. This kind of desperation to have like, a little bit more peace culturally, like, I'm reaching a little bit, but the movie does feel like him kind of reckoning with some of those feelings.

• 1:28:38Bill Simmons?

  I like it.

• 1:28:39Chris Ryan?

  I had a hottest take that I think I just should say a little bit about here, which is that, I think that if you want, you know, we talked about what would be a good double feature, a good triple feature would be Zodiac, Boogie Nights, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Because it's these three filmmakers doing basically memoirs, but they don't put themselves as the central character. They tell a story about something that was like, happening at their childhood that shaped.

• 1:29:06Bill Simmons?

  I threw Almost Famous in too, it's the fourth one.

• 1:29:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, all four of them, totally.

• 1:29:10Bill Simmons?

  That was good. I felt like I was watching Embiid back somebody down on the foul line there. Just, Sean was cooking.

• 1:29:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's great. Is this before or after you tried to injure Mitchell Robinson?

• 1:29:21Bill Simmons?

  Wow, I love giving this award out. The Steven Seagal shitting on himself award for most unbelievable anecdote from the actual film shoot.

• 1:29:29Bill Simmons?

  I mean, the takes thing is always the funniest thing about researching a Fincher movie. It's hilarious how much the actors hate it. Gyllenhaal said, quote, "You get a take, five takes, 10 takes, some places 90 takes. There's a stopping point. There's a point at which you go, that's what we have to work with." But we would reshoot things. And there comes a point when I would say, well, what do I do? Where's the risk? Downey said, "I just decided, aside from several times I wanted to Garrett him, that I was gonna give him what he wanted. I think I'm a perfect person to work for him because I understand Gulags." And then Ruffalo said, "He makes Michael Mann look like he's working on a McDonald's hamburger line during rush hour." Fincher's response, "If an actor is going to let the role come to them,

• 1:30:14Bill Simmons?

  they can't resent the fact that I'm willing to wait as long as that takes." You know, the first day of production in San Francisco, we shot 56 takes of Mark and Jake, and it's the 56 take that's in the movie.

• 1:30:24Chris Ryan?

  Yes. I think that the reason, one of the reasons why this was breaking their brains is that this is like among the first times probably any of them are shooting digitally. And there would be scenes where they'd be on take 22, and Fincher would be like, delete the first 20 takes. Like, from the, from the memory chip. And these guys would just be like, what are you talking about? Like, what are we doing? But I think he gets among the three best performances these guys have ever gotten, given. And there are different actors, like Chloe Sevigny talks about this. Ben Affleck has talked about this, where he's just like, I like it. I like that he, he's like, I wanna work, I wanna do takes. I don't think we're going for the right thing.

• 1:31:09Chris Ryan?

  We're trying different things. And he's also making sure that the background extra and the glass on the desk are all where they need to be.

• 1:31:16Bill Simmons?

  I think if we were all actors, Sean would like it, because he would really appreciate the craftsmanship. He'd be like, whatever it takes, David. Chris would secretly bitch about it, but be a good soldier. And I'd be the one like, this fucking guy, this motherfucker, I've done 35 takes. Asshole.

• 1:31:31Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's right. I really like Systems. He's a Systems guy. Um, I think there's also something. He, he talked about, um, shooting that door to door sequence at the end and they filmed it and they looked at it and they were like, this isn't right. And Gyllenhaal is not the expert in this scene. He's the guy who has to know more than Toski. He had, he's the guy who has to have all the information and is explaining it. They went back and reshot it and he explained how, when they reshot it, Gyllenhaal brought his dad, who's a filmmaker. And that his dad's presence psychologically made him do it better? And then didn't explain that. And he is one of those filmmakers who, I don't, he's not purposefully torturing actors.

• 1:32:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Sean Fennessey?

  But he does think about their psychology and how they work. And I do think that sometimes he gets that reputation because he's like, this is how I can get the best out of you.

• 1:32:23Bill Simmons?

  Well, who's the number one guy who did this? Kubrick? And he basically like showed you about a nervous breakdown in the shining.

• 1:32:30Chris Ryan?

  And Kubrick, I mean, like there, there's like legendary, just like open a door 74 times, you know, like.

• 1:32:35Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:32:36Chris Ryan?

  Uh, there's an amazing moment in the behind the scenes or the making of Doc for Zodiac where Gyllenhaal's walking through the Chronicle newsroom and he's taking a bite of a donut. And Fincher's like, cut. And like, you know, Gyllenhaal's kind of laughing because he's eating a donut. And Fincher's laughing and he's like, yeah, I want you to eat, like take a bigger bite. And Gyllenhaal's like, ha, ha, of course you do. Like, and Fincher's like, yeah, no. Go back, go back and eat a bigger bite of it.

• 1:33:01Sean Fennessey?

  Another really funny one in one of the docs where they, it's a very quick moment, but they're, they're interviewing Gyllenhaal during the making of a, of a scene and he's like, yeah, I'm like really good at insert shots, right, David? Like, I'm really good at inserts? And David's like, yeah, yeah, you are. It's the masters that are not very good. You know, like the main, the main shot of you acting, you're not good at that? He literally says that to him while they're making the movie.

• 1:33:23Bill Simmons?

  Jesus.

• 1:33:24Sean Fennessey?

  And he's giving him shit, but he's giving him shit in like a truthful way.

• 1:33:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's tough. He can be tough.

• 1:33:30Bill Simmons?

  Well, I was gonna say this later, but one thing I noticed when I watched Fincher movies is when people are eating. It's like Anthony Edwards is eating a turkey club at one point and there's another part where Ruffalo's eating a burger.

• 1:33:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Bill Simmons?

  And it's hard not to think like, I wonder if he had to eat like

• 1:33:44Chris Ryan?

  Also Ruffalo.

• 1:33:45Bill Simmons?

  Fifty-eight burger bites.

• 1:33:45Sean Fennessey?

  He takes a real bite of that burger.

• 1:33:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, like if he made him do fifty-eight takes of that, did he just have to make himself throw up?

• 1:33:52Chris Ryan?

  I have never seen a man grip a hamburger the way Ruffalo does.

• 1:33:54Sean Fennessey?

  I know, he's holding it, right?

• 1:33:55Bill Simmons?

  I don't think he wanted to eat it. He's probably like, I'm gonna fucking throw up.

• 1:33:57Chris Ryan?

  He's a vegetarian too. I don't know if they put like a Boca burger in there or whatever. We didn't have his great Impossible Meats back in oh seven.

• 1:34:04Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna take a break and then we're gonna do What Stage's the Best. This episode is brought to by Ethos. As a parent, life insurance feels like a no-brainer and just gives me peace of mind knowing my family will be taken care of. And Ethos makes getting it fast and easy. Apply online in minutes. Get up to three million in coverage with no medical exam, just a few simple health questions. Take ten minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com/rewatch. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash rewatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary.

• 1:34:41Bill Simmons?

  Before we do What Stage's the Best, new category, this is a two twenty, two thousand twenty-six-er. The Dennis Peck Relationship Test, named after Richard Gere in Internal Affairs, who you just wanted to keep away from everybody's relationship.

• 1:34:57Bill Simmons?

  Gray Smith and Chloe Seventy's character, I'm gonna say Dennis Peck could have broken this one pretty quickly.

• 1:35:02Chris Ryan?

  I, I think some Dennis Peck out there seems like he did.

• 1:35:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think somebody, I think she got Dennis Peck.

• 1:35:08Sean Fennessey?

  The funniest thing about it is, from the moment they meet, he's giving you every single sign to run the other way. Not get invested in this guy.

• 1:35:16Chris Ryan?

  I think, I like the line that she has where she's like, this was just a first date that went on for a couple of years or that never ended.

• 1:35:22Bill Simmons?

  Yes.

• 1:35:22Chris Ryan?

  Cause like, it, it, that, that happens sometimes.

• 1:35:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:26Chris Ryan?

  It's like you, you date for a while and then all, oh my, wait, we're living together. That was weird, you know?

• 1:35:30Bill Simmons?

  Honestly, I blame her. Like you saw, he showed you all of his cards on date one. This guy's a fucking weirdo.

• 1:35:36Chris Ryan?

  This is because you're just like, I never told you, baby. I always said I'd be watching twelve hours of football. Every Sunday.

• 1:35:43Bill Simmons?

  I do think.

• 1:35:44Chris Ryan?

  You knew when you signed up for me.

• 1:35:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you do. How much basketball I watch.

• 1:35:47Sean Fennessey?

  The movie doesn't explain it, but just through her performance, you can tell she's just a woman who is like, I'm ready to settle down. I'm ready to find somebody and just have a family.

• 1:35:54Chris Ryan?

  She's on a blind date with a guy. Yeah.

• 1:35:56Sean Fennessey?

  She's just such a fox in this movie. Her and the glasses and the long hair. Oh, my God.

• 1:35:59Bill Simmons?

  Want to start what's aged you best with her?

• 1:36:01Chris Ryan?

  She's got such a great sense of humor like Seven, he does, because there's an interview with her where she's just like, well, I think they wanted to make Gyllenhaal less hot, so Fincher made me dress really frumpy.

• 1:36:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so they're supposed to seem like very like normal and Gray Smith is a cartoonist, right? He's not a cool guy, but it's undeniable. I mean, both of them are beautiful.

• 1:36:20Bill Simmons?

  Another what's aged the best is just true crime the last two decades.

• 1:36:24Sean Fennessey?

  That was my number one. Not just true crime, but the obsession with it.

• 1:36:28Bill Simmons?

  This movie's ahead of the game with that.

• 1:36:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Bill Simmons?

  And then podcasts come, documentaries come, Netflix. I watched the three-part Zodiac thing they did last year. This week I missed it when it was out. I don't know how I missed it.

• 1:36:39Sean Fennessey?

  This is the Zodiac speaking, right?

• 1:36:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, as usual, those three parters probably could have been just, you know, an hour 25, dragged it out a little bit, but it was interesting.

• 1:36:48Sean Fennessey?

  There's some, there's a couple of, um, there's one really good one on the Blu-ray that is, that I think is also called, This is the Zodiac Speaking, but is an hour and 40 minutes and features interviews with all of the major, major figures who are still alive.

• 1:36:59Bill Simmons?

  Do you think Zodiac would have been a good nickname for somebody in basketball? Like if Anthony Edwards was just his nickname was Zodiac.

• 1:37:05Chris Ryan?

  Well, would you have done it, what about if it was for Zdradus Algoskus? And we were just like, ah, big Zodiac.

• 1:37:11Sean Fennessey?

  The post killer.

• 1:37:12Bill Simmons?

  Is that a better football or basketball nickname?

• 1:37:14Sean Fennessey?

  The drop step killer.

• 1:37:15Chris Ryan?

  Basketball.

• 1:37:16Bill Simmons?

  Basketball, yeah.

• 1:37:17Chris Ryan?

  Back in, you know, back in like the Steve Atwater days, it would be great if a free safety was nicknamed Zodiac.

• 1:37:22Bill Simmons?

  Or Ed Reed.

• 1:37:23Chris Ryan?

  Because he just like kills in discrimination.

• 1:37:24Sean Fennessey?

  I thought you were going to say a quarterback that throws a lot of hospital balls.

• 1:37:29Bill Simmons?

  Two is the Zodiac killer. You can't decode his hospital passes. Late 60s, early 70s, San Francisco. Just seeing that in a movie's aged you best.

• 1:37:39Chris Ryan?

  Like post hippie, fall of the hate kind of like.

• 1:37:43Bill Simmons?

  I had this later, but.

• 1:37:46Bill Simmons?

  There's something about the city back then that really kicked everybody else's ass.

• 1:37:51Sean Fennessey?

  About San Francisco. You've, you've done this before. We, when we went to San Francisco like six or seven years ago, you were like, this place is the best.

• 1:37:58Bill Simmons?

  I think other cities caught up.

• 1:37:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Bill Simmons?

  Like when you see like a place like Boston now, Boston is much nicer and more spread out, has more things going than it did in-

• 1:38:06Chris Ryan?

  This is kinda like you saying that the Celtics are doing what the Pacers did even better than the Pacers.

• 1:38:09Bill Simmons?

  I'm not, I'm not doing a basketball thing. But Boston built up. San Francisco never had to build up. San Francisco was like, look how fucking cool this is.

• 1:38:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's just an unusual place.

• 1:38:18Bill Simmons?

  Alcatraz is over there.

• 1:38:19Sean Fennessey?

  Lots of character.

• 1:38:19Bill Simmons?

  We have hills, we have trolleys. Like, it's just, it's the best movie location of any city. It's not even close.

• 1:38:25Chris Ryan?

  There's also, I mean, obviously it's the cinematography and the music in this movie, but there's something about his version of San Francisco just feels haunted. It's, it seems like it's night 75% of this movie. And it, it is also like a little bit of a California thing where you're just like, man, there could just be something behind that fence over there. There's just, there could be something up that hill over there. And it's, it's a weird state too, because like you do have like, for as much as there's LA and, and San Francisco, there is like super rural parts and like trailer parks and like-

• 1:38:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's a big part of this movie, is the kind of like disconnected various styles of small towns that comprise most of Northern California. I mean, Northern California is not San Francisco and the Bay. It's like, it's a lot of different kinds of small cities and towns that are like-

• 1:39:13Chris Ryan?

  Santa Rosa, Vallejo, yeah.

• 1:39:15Sean Fennessey?

  Rural or lower middle class and, you know, have these small police precincts. And the fact that the movie spends a lot of time in those places, I think makes it different too.

• 1:39:23Bill Simmons?

  There's two, there's three movie locations that I think you just instinctively know where you are as you're watching a movie. And I think San Francisco's one of them. Um, New York, obviously. And then, uh, I think LA is the other one if it's certain parts. Otherwise, like Boston, they, they have to, they have to show Fenway. You know, Chicago, they have to show the wide shot of the cities. For the most part, cities can be-

• 1:39:45Sean Fennessey?

  Downtown LA.

• 1:39:46Bill Simmons?

  Pretty amorphous.

• 1:39:47Sean Fennessey?

  Or Hollywood.

• 1:39:47Bill Simmons?

  I guess Vegas and New Orleans could technically count.

• 1:39:50Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:51Bill Simmons?

  But San Francisco, you always know you're in San Francisco in these movies. I like the San Francisco building thing, which I know is a big film nerd. That he shows the the time lapse.

• 1:40:00Sean Fennessey?

  The transcontinental, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:02Bill Simmons?

  The transcontinental is another what's edge of best. What do you have for what's edge of best here?

• 1:40:05Chris Ryan?

  Uh, all of, uh,

• 1:40:06Sean Fennessey?

  Transamerica, sorry, Transamerica.

• 1:40:08Chris Ryan?

  Downey's, uh, mutterings to Gyllenhaal, especially his art criticism, but like, sweet mother of Christ, what are you drawing? And Jesus, Harold Christ on rubber crutches, Bobby, what are you doing? You're doing that thing, that thing I don't like that starts with L. Like, all of their banter and stuff kind of culminating at Morty's. Uh, I also just, on these repeated viewings, like, the way that the film changes tonally when the protagonist of the movie switches from Toski to, to, um,

• 1:40:36Bill Simmons?

  The four years later bump.

• 1:40:37Chris Ryan?

  And the way it feels different, the way the investigation is not as, um, ordered and documented, and it feels way more like a solo album, like, he's got nobody helping him, the way that Toski had Armstrong and everybody else. And it's just an incredible shift in the movie.

• 1:40:54Sean Fennessey?

  There's two other things that I really like about it that still resonate. One is just the general premise of the movie, which is like the unsolvability of mundane tragedy. Like, we have a lot of examples of this over history where you'll never really know what happened, even if somebody got convicted of a crime. Then the other thing is,

• 1:41:11Sean Fennessey?

  Gray Smith represents this idea that I think most people I know are experiencing right now, which is using external problems in the world to kind of divert yourself away from what's going on at home, what's happening in your career, like, who, who you really are in the world, and just kind of getting locked in on stuff that isn't about you and doesn't really matter to you, but using it as a portal and like,

• 1:41:32Bill Simmons?

  You just described the internet for the last 10 years.

• 1:41:34Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, that's what it, and that's really what we've all kind of become. We've become kind of trapped by that idea. And this, even just doing the podcast for this movie, I'm not a very big Reddit person, but I was on fucking Zodiac Reddit for like an hour, just reading about Don, Donald Cheney and who that person is and how he figures into this story. And it's like, Gray Smith is kind of the original poster in a lot of ways, you know, like, he really does kind of represent a lot of what the, the, the kind of attitudes of people who live online now.

• 1:42:02Chris Ryan?

  And he's always an outsider. So he's like, even at The Chronicle, he's doing cartoons, he's like, kind of lurking at those meetings he's probably not supposed to be in. And then when he becomes like the primary investigator, like, nobody takes him seriously because they're like, you're not a cop, you're not a, you're not a journalist, like, what are you doing?

• 1:42:20Bill Simmons?

  I have Downey's comeback as a what's aged the best and what it means in the context of his career, this movie and then Iron Man.

• 1:42:27Sean Fennessey?

  That's a really good one, yeah.

• 1:42:28Bill Simmons?

  The Fincher catalog and just what this movie means, I think has aged the best. I don't want to say he needed it, but he kind of needs it when you think like, holy shit, like I think ultimately you're talking about a director that can make 20 movies, 30, whatever, but there's usually like five to eight that people are gonna.

• 1:42:45Chris Ryan?

  It's interesting to think about what his personal passion projects are. Like it's definitely Zodiac and Mank. I wonder what else he would.

• 1:42:53Bill Simmons?

  One for two.

• 1:42:56Sean Fennessey?

  Love Mank, but Zodiac and Mank are both clearly about his dad. I mean, they're, you know, they're just, they're obsessions of his dad. He talks about his dad a bunch on the commentary and, you know, his dad was just in this milieu at the time. And, uh, you know, like all people, he's kind of haunted by the positives and the negatives of that experience.

• 1:43:14Bill Simmons?

  I had Paul Everly's Water Place, which I want to give the Amanda Dobbins Award for best piece of real estate. I don't know how much that place cost, but I thought, I thought his place was fucking cool.

• 1:43:26Chris Ryan?

  But it's in.

• 1:43:26Bill Simmons?

  Whatever that was.

• 1:43:27Chris Ryan?

  Is it supposed to be in Sacramento?

• 1:43:29Bill Simmons?

  I don't know where it was, but I thought it was cool.

• 1:43:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Bill Simmons?

  That seems like a great place to end up if you're an alcoholic who's gonna die of pulmonary emphysema.

• 1:43:35Chris Ryan?

  What's the commute if you're, is he living in like Marin? Like where's he living?

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  That could have been in like Alameda or something. I'm not really sure.

• 1:43:41Bill Simmons?

  I liked it.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  The commute.

• 1:43:42Bill Simmons?

  Just, he's just gonna smoke cigs there and fucking drink till he dies.

• 1:43:45Chris Ryan?

  Reference to the, there's more people die in the commute in the East Bay than this guy, this crazy guy's ever killed. And he like points out the window as if.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  So that, then he maybe he is in Alameda or Oakland or something, if he's in the East Bay.

• 1:43:56Bill Simmons?

  I had the Chronicles office and how they recreated it. Ebert made a good point about, there's a couple of scenes where it's just empty or pretty empty. And that really is what it's like to work for a newspaper. Like you go in the morning, there's like five people there.

• 1:44:08Chris Ryan?

  My dad would sometimes take me by the Inquirer on Sundays and it was always like, this place is like Disneyland.

• 1:44:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's like a movie set.

• 1:44:15Sean Fennessey?

  But the, and it's always that there's nobody there in the morning and everybody starts showing up around four o'clock when deadline time starts to come around.

• 1:44:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Uh, the soundtrack is effective, includes Three Dog Night, Donovan, Soul Sacrifice by Santana. Really good. Crystal Blue Persuasion. And then we get, as we move into the late seventies, it turns into a little yacht rock. Little Steely Dan. Sorry, Donald Fagan. Uh, Boss Gags, Jerry Rafferty. Start sneaking them in.

• 1:44:43Sean Fennessey?

  All your guys.

• 1:44:43Bill Simmons?

  No Christopher Cross.

• 1:44:47Bill Simmons?

  So Downey cruising to the Sean Penn I brought my own pack award for excellence in onscreen smoking.

• 1:44:54Chris Ryan?

  I mean, it's.

• 1:44:55Bill Simmons?

  It's really.

• 1:44:55Chris Ryan?

  It's a higher level. I don't think he, I think he's smoking filterless. So that's like another level. You know, you mean?

• 1:45:02Bill Simmons?

  He's doing where he has the no hands. He's talking, the cigarette's coming this way. He's puffing from it and then blowing out of his knees and nose and still just keeping the scene. It's incredible stuff.

• 1:45:15Chris Ryan?

  I spent five years trying to perfect that. I think that.

• 1:45:17Bill Simmons?

  Effortless.

• 1:45:18Chris Ryan?

  The also, my favorite lighting of a cigarette in this movie is when he's reading the law, the, the letter from the Zodiac and he's like, and then I will, you, you were driving around on your motorcycles and he's just like clicks his lighter and lights a cigarette and doesn't miss a line.

• 1:45:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:33Chris Ryan?

  There's a couple of like, the cigarette is halfway into his mouth, like scenes where I'm just like, this guy is born, born to do it, you know?

• 1:45:42Sean Fennessey?

  I felt like I was in like an art seminar, you know, it was like, it was learning about, you know, Degas.

• 1:45:48Bill Simmons?

  If we did Mount Rushmore and De Niro's gotta be in there, obviously.

• 1:45:53Bill Simmons?

  I think Downey might be one of the four.

• 1:45:55Chris Ryan?

  The runner up in this movie is, is Claire Devault. Great smoking scene.

• 1:45:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:46:00Chris Ryan?

  Great smoking scene.

• 1:46:01Bill Simmons?

  They do a good job of really making her seem like she's seen a few things in her day.

• 1:46:06Chris Ryan?

  She's been to a couple of paintings.

• 1:46:07Sean Fennessey?

  That's one of her skills as an actor. Yeah.

• 1:46:09Bill Simmons?

  There's been some.

• 1:46:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Uh, great Jack Gordo award, what'd you have, Sierra? This, this is tough.

• 1:46:15Chris Ryan?

  How long you got?

• 1:46:16Bill Simmons?

  Uh, opening city fireworks is pretty cool. I don't, I, there's too many choices.

• 1:46:21Chris Ryan?

  There's a couple of like the, just the digitally recreated moments, the fireworks, the overhead shot of the taxi cab, et cetera. I have one, um, that's kind of subtle, but I, I have just seen pictures of them shooting it where Fincher is kind of like right close to them while they're acting or right when they're about to shoot it. And it's the Jalen Hall 70 in the phone booth outside of the restaurant. And the way it's lit and the way it looks and it's kind of romantic and it's I just it's a personal favorite of mine.

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  I love that she's in the phone booth with him, which makes no sense.

• 1:46:52Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  She has that great line like, is this some weird ploy for you to for you to make me go home with you?

• 1:46:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Chris Ryan?

  She's like, I'll get the food to go.

• 1:46:58Bill Simmons?

  We should mention Great Shot Gordo Award is the most cinematic shot. I guess I have to ID some of these awards if there's new audience. Named after Gordon Willis.

• 1:47:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:47:05Bill Simmons?

  Our guy Gordo.

• 1:47:06Sean Fennessey?

  I have I just have like three that are all connected. One is the shot of um the Zodiac Killer coming over the hill in Lake Bariessa.

• 1:47:15Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:15Sean Fennessey?

  Then the cut to um is it Harnell's Harnell's face? The way that it holds on his face while he's being stabbed.

• 1:47:24Chris Ryan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:47:24Sean Fennessey?

  And then immediately cutting to um the woman's torso when she's being stabbed, which is the most upsetting thing in the movie is when you see the knife going into her body. And then the choice that they made there, which in most movies now, if you did it, you'd be able to tell and it would be terrible. But all the blood that you see when she's being stabbed is all digital. And the reason that they did that is because they didn't want to have to redo costumes every time they did a take. So if they did 50 takes of that sequence, every time the blood could be digitally recreated. Just like Little's filmmaking stuff there where maybe that had been done before, but I don't think so. And he's kind of at the forefront of this technology. And you would never for a second when you're watching the movie like, oh, that's fake blood. It looks good enough and it's moving fast enough that he's doing the job.

• 1:48:07Chris Ryan?

  The also on the director's comedy commentary, Fincher's like, she was a champ. She was like, we did this like 60 times and she she never complained.

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

  Amazing Golden Gate Bridge shot, there's an aerial looking down that looks like an Apple screensaver.

• 1:48:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:23Sean Fennessey?

  Even just that first push in on the city and he talks about rebuilding the Embarcadero Freeway, which doesn't exist anymore because it fell apart during the 89 earthquake. So he's like, just the idea of rebuilding this freeway that I grew up with was interesting to me.

• 1:48:35Chris Ryan?

  He fucking brought trees, he choppered trees into the Lake Bariessa uh.

• 1:48:41Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah, to recreate the buff.

• 1:48:42Chris Ryan?

  Because the there were the trees had changed since the time it had gone.

• 1:48:45Bill Simmons?

  Some producers like, David, what if we don't have the trees? So get the fuck out of here. You're off the set. Kate Cuddy Pursued Happiness Award for Best Needle Drop.

• 1:48:55Chris Ryan?

  I have inner city blues.

• 1:48:57Bill Simmons?

  I thought hurdy-gurdy when it kicks in, when he starts shooting them.

• 1:49:00Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's the most memorable one.

• 1:49:01Bill Simmons?

  The songs in the background and then it gets loud.

• 1:49:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I have, I really like Bernadette in the bar. That one's great, the four top song.

• 1:49:08Chris Ryan?

  He also does like a little bit of a Scorsese, Thomas Schumacher thing where he starts it midway through and it's just the vocal pops in and then it's like, it's a little bit of like, like a DJ thing. It's really good.

• 1:49:22Bill Simmons?

  New award.

• 1:49:25Bill Simmons?

  Excited, Craig?

• 1:49:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:27Bill Simmons?

  The David Fincher Award for wow, this director may have been a fucking lunatic. It goes to David Fincher. For this tidbit. He digitally added hair to the closeups of Jake Gyllenhaal's nickels as he draws or holds letters because Fincher felt Gyllenhaal's hands were quote, too hairless and pretty.

• 1:49:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:52Bill Simmons?

  He digitally added hair to his knuckles.

• 1:49:54Sean Fennessey?

  Just looking for accuracy.

• 1:49:55Bill Simmons?

  What a fucking maniac. I love it. Anyway, that's the first time we got to hand that award out.

• 1:50:00Sean Fennessey?

  Congrats to David.

• 1:50:01Bill Simmons?

  We have the Sean Fantasy Award for stealth homage that gives every movie nerd a criteria orgasm.

• 1:50:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so there's obviously a couple of, you know, clear ones we've talked about already. Most Dangerous Game, All the President's Men, that's like the blueprint for the movie. My favorite tiny little homage is when they're interviewing the kids. One of the kids who's being interrogated by the police officers, when they ask him, what did he look like? They say he looked normal. And that is a direct reference to Bong Joon Ho's Memories of Murder, which is the 2003 serial killer movie where someone says that about the killer in the movie. Memories of Murder, which is hugely influenced by Seven and Fincher and Bong Joon Ho are in this like career long back and forth.

• 1:50:46Chris Ryan?

  Zodiac is a total masterpiece.

• 1:50:48Sean Fennessey?

  He's like, Bong Joon Ho is like, my greatest in theater experience is seeing The Social Network. Like, these two guys are kind of fascinated with each other. I've never seen them talk to each other before.

• 1:50:57Bill Simmons?

  I don't like how Fincher has this many allies. Like now he's with Tarantino. I like when directors hate each other.

• 1:51:03Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he's like, the homies with Steven Soderbergh too.

• 1:51:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I like Feud. We need to go back to Feud.

• 1:51:08Sean Fennessey?

  I like when all the like.

• 1:51:09Bill Simmons?

  We need to go back to Paul Schrader just lighting everybody up and calling them sellouts.

• 1:51:12Sean Fennessey?

  You don't want, you want it to be Bird and Magic. You don't want LeBron and Steph being friends.

• 1:51:15Bill Simmons?

  No, I don't want everybody in the dream team with their arms around each other.

• 1:51:18Chris Ryan?

  Watching rough cuts.

• 1:51:19Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I love that. That movie was a masterpiece. Um, let's do Craig, you do a flex. I'll, I'll move.

• 1:51:25Chris Ryan?

  Can I throw one criteria orgasm in there?

• 1:51:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Chris Ryan?

  Just cause I, I, I thought of it was when, uh, Gray Smith gets the first breather call. And he picks it up and it's like on Gray Smith and then it pans to the right and closed.

• 1:51:39Bill Simmons?

  She's in the background.

• 1:51:39Chris Ryan?

  He's in the background and it goes, it's a little Rosemary's baby where it's like Ruth Gordon on the phone. And you're kinda like looking over there. Like I kinda like that.

• 1:51:47Bill Simmons?

  Good one. Flex Craig, go ahead.

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  Lot of options. I wanna get one out of the way quickly. Is there a porn parody for this movie? Yes, there is. There, it's called The Zodiac Killer starring John Holmes.

• 1:51:58Bill Simmons?

  What?

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:52:02Chris Ryan?

  Let's fire it up. Let's watch it together.

• 1:52:04Bill Simmons?

  I, did you read, what were the details? Was he a killer or was he the cop? He must've been the cop.

• 1:52:09Speaker 03

  He was the cop. Okay. And the Zodiac Killer kills and then has sex with women and then.

• 1:52:14Chris Ryan?

  Wait, after the kill or he has sex with them and then kills them?

• 1:52:17Speaker 03

  And then kills them and then, and then John Holmes is on the hunt. Um.

• 1:52:22Bill Simmons?

  I, I. I wonder if was he Johnny Watt in this?

• 1:52:24Speaker 03

  It was, it was sixty-three minutes, so it does pass the century.

• 1:52:31Sean Fennessey?

  Imagine if it was three hours.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:52:33Bill Simmons?

  Sixty-three minutes. I could've gone longer.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  I prefer the porn parody. I saw a clip of it. It's not in 4K. Does not look as good as.

• 1:52:40Sean Fennessey?

  It's a real film job.

• 1:52:40Chris Ryan?

  Did you download it on your work computer?

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  Uh, no, we kept that on the personal device.

• 1:52:44Bill Simmons?

  I didn't know John Holmes was gonna be in the Zodiac podcast. It's great.

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  Um, the other one I'll do is the Vincent Chase Award for are we sure this character was good at his job? I'm going right at Zodiac. Lower kill rate than Drake May's completion percentage. Are you, the double murders at the top of this movie? He can't kill either guy. He can't finish the job. He lets both guys live. Crazy. Uh, he wore a watch that said Zodiac.

• 1:53:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Kind of a miss there. Uh, slipped up, revealed his birthday over the phone. Claimed to be a lefty, wore the watch on the wrong wrist.

• 1:53:14Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:15Speaker 03

  Wore a giant name tag that said Lee at the hardware shop. It's kinda the Bob Cousy of serial killers.

• 1:53:20Chris Ryan?

  It would be great if he had.

• 1:53:21Bill Simmons?

  Plumber's.

• 1:53:22Chris Ryan?

  His name tag said Zodiac.

• 1:53:25Chris Ryan?

  At the Ace Hardware.

• 1:53:26Speaker 03

  This guy was winning MVPs, but he couldn't dribble with his.

• 1:53:28Chris Ryan?

  Hey, my name's Zodiac. Can I help you find something?

• 1:53:31Bill Simmons?

  That's a great one.

• 1:53:32Chris Ryan?

  You got a painting job coming up? Like, come on.

• 1:53:35Bill Simmons?

  The Butch's Girlfriend Award for the weak link of the film. I don't, I think this film's great. It was hard to come up with a weak link.

• 1:53:43Chris Ryan?

  Uh, I don't personally understand the Avery trip to Riverside where he's like, an anonymous tip has told me to go to River. I mean, it works out, but that part of the movie, while awesome, is also a little confusing.

• 1:53:59Bill Simmons?

  It felt like they needed an extra Downey scene almost.

• 1:54:01Chris Ryan?

  It's just like, I suppose it's also like, this is where Avery is kind of leaving the tracks and is starting to like, chase shadows a little bit, but that's right, you know, when he, he's like, I need a gun.

• 1:54:13Bill Simmons?

  I have a tiny one, which is, it's fine if you don't show the first Zodiac double murder because they were very like, we only, if we didn't know what happened and both people are dead, we can't show it. But I still think they should have figured out how to mention it in some way. For people like Craig who don't know the story, that there was the murder before the murder. And I don't think they do a good enough job of explaining that.

• 1:54:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:34Bill Simmons?

  It's like very subtle in the dialogue. It assumes the viewer already knows, but I don't, as the movie ages over time, I think, I just think they should have figured out a better way to do that.

• 1:54:44Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if, what I'm gonna say is a picking nit or an unanswerable question or what, what's, you know,

• 1:54:55Sean Fennessey?

  kind of more fits this category, but specifically the Donald Chaney character, who, the guy who gives the performance is totally fine, but the guy who gives all this information about Arthur Lee Allen.

• 1:55:05Chris Ryan?

  He's like, oh yeah, and then he said this and said that.

• 1:55:07Sean Fennessey?

  He said this about the kids bopping off the school bus and taking them out. And he had all this specific detail that, that makes Toski think that, and Arthur Lee think that it's him. You know, there are a lot of interviews with this guy. He's in all the documentaries. In the, in this wider world of the Zodiac, there's a lot of suspicion about his involvement in this story and whether or not he was more involved or whether or not he's making things up.

• 1:55:31Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:55:32Bill Simmons?

  Was this on the Donald Chaney Reddit?

• 1:55:34Sean Fennessey?

  It's all over the Zodiac Reddit. I mean, there's a ton of people who are like, this guy is not credible at all. There's a lot of interviews with him. And so to, to the point that Craig is making, even about the movie where he's like, all of this shit that just seems so. Circumstantial that points directly at the guy that makes him seem like a bad serial killer is effectively backed by everything that Donald Cheney has provided.

• 1:55:54Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:55:55Sean Fennessey?

  And it makes you, to me-

• 1:55:57Bill Simmons?

  Sierra's having a great time.

• 1:55:59Chris Ryan?

  Well, you're totally right.

• 1:56:01Bill Simmons?

  Sierra was just like-

• 1:56:02Chris Ryan?

  And this also happens like 11 times in the Zodiac case where there's like, this guy is the preeminent expert, it turns out he's a con artist, or it turns out like, he makes his living by going to conventions and peddling theories about stuff like that, or-

• 1:56:16Bill Simmons?

  Is that who John Holmes played, or no? Was he somebody else?

• 1:56:18Chris Ryan?

  Maybe somebody else.

• 1:56:19Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:56:19Chris Ryan?

  Or even all the Toski stuff about the letters to Armistead Mopin, and then whether or not he wrote the Zodiac letter and stuff like that, which is like, proven to be untrue, I think, but for the most-

• 1:56:30Bill Simmons?

  That's a good weak link. They could have at least aroused some suspicion with us.

• 1:56:33Sean Fennessey?

  Fincher says that he finds that guy credible. And that the reason that he's portrayed in the movie that way is because he doesn't feel the way that a lot of people have looked closely at the story.

• 1:56:41Chris Ryan?

  It's like, it's like very, like, this is kind of like what Pelikanos and David Simons did with We Own the City, where they're like, "We have decided that this person's version of this is like accurate."

• 1:56:50Sean Fennessey?

  Is at least worth portraying sincerely, right? And that choice kind of shifts the movie in a direction that makes you feel strongly about it.

• 1:56:57Bill Simmons?

  What's aged the worst? I mentioned it earlier, him cutting the two-minute blackout montage of hit songs signaling the passage of time from Joni Mitchell to Donna Summer, replaced it for runtime with Four Years Later.

• 1:57:12Bill Simmons?

  I just, that's a bad decision.

• 1:57:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Bill Simmons?

  That's like when they cut out my favorite Boogie Nights deleted scene of the second AVN Awards, when they show all the reactions of everybody, and they're like, "Yeah, we don't need it."

• 1:57:22Sean Fennessey?

  I'm surprised to learn that's your favorite deleted scene.

• 1:57:24Bill Simmons?

  That's my favorite deleted scene. What do you think my favorite, what did you think it was?

• 1:57:28Sean Fennessey?

  It was a very memorable scene with Roller Girl, Luis Guzman.

• 1:57:31Bill Simmons?

  That was another great scene.

• 1:57:34Bill Simmons?

  So, I had for What's Aged the Worst, there's that scene when Jack and Downy are at the bar we mentioned earlier, just decoding Zodiac shit. I wrote down, I'm five minutes late on these two together.

• 1:57:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Bill Simmons?

  That would have been my note as the studio, like, any more Downey and Gyllenhaal just being weird together scenes? Cause put another one in.

• 1:57:53Chris Ryan?

  There is another one deleted. I don't know if you want to say it's age the best or the worst, because it's both, but they weren't real friends. And, and like Avery and Graysmith were not friends.

• 1:58:03Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:58:03Chris Ryan?

  So that, that is almost the most movie-ish thing about the movie. And it is by far the most entertaining thing in the movie.

• 1:58:11Bill Simmons?

  That's their base down a true story part.

• 1:58:13Chris Ryan?

  Ten more scenes of the two of them going to a fucking Giants game, you know, and be like, oh, yeah.

• 1:58:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:19Chris Ryan?

  You know, smoking in this.

• 1:58:20Bill Simmons?

  Come see the worst, Clifford Ray is back.

• 1:58:25Sean Fennessey?

  That'd be good.

• 1:58:26Bill Simmons?

  I asked that for what stage the worst, Anthony Edwards with a wig on always throws me off. He's just like such like a proven bald guy. That anytime I see him with hair in a movie, I'm like, come on, just have him be bald. He's bald. We know he's bald. He's owned the baldness.

• 1:58:42Chris Ryan?

  I think it's probably accurate to Armstrong's haircut, right?

• 1:58:43Bill Simmons?

  No, I know they had to be. Any other what stage the worst?

• 1:58:46Chris Ryan?

  Uh, no, I had the, the four year gap. It's the most abrupt, weird, you have to like, be like, okay, I got it in my head. I'm making that jump that Avery is washed out, that Graysmith is kind of still on this by himself.

• 1:59:00Bill Simmons?

  Okay. Any for you or no?

• 1:59:01Sean Fennessey?

  Just my certainty that it was Arthur Lee Allen for the like 10 years after I saw the movie. And now the idea that we're just like, the thing that is haunting the guys in this movie is now what haunts the culture of finding the Zodiac Killer? Which is just like, there's more info every day, you know, that you've talked about the special that, you know, the expert who was like, this guy's autistic. And it was him because of this, like that stuff's never gonna stop because it's, it's a cold case.

• 1:59:25Chris Ryan?

  Just wait till, until AI just fully gets its talons into it, you know?

• 1:59:29Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah. Uh, another category we don't get to give out much, the Rose from Titanic award for character who's sneaky sucks. Close 70s character in this.

• 1:59:39Chris Ryan?

  No, what are you talking about?

• 1:59:41Speaker 03

  I would say she's actually quite reasonable.

• 1:59:42Chris Ryan?

  She's pretty cool, man. She knows what she's getting into.

• 1:59:44Bill Simmons?

  Counter, get the fuck out after the first date. Why are you, you're gonna settle down with this fucking lunatic and be like,

• 1:59:50Chris Ryan?

  I thought you were like,

• 1:59:51Bill Simmons?

  I'm raising kids with this guy. And then she's mad at him and it's like, I don't know what you're doing. Your whole life revolves around this. Like, he fucking told you on the first date that he was crazy.

• 2:00:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:01Bill Simmons?

  And you're like blindsided by this?

• 2:00:02Chris Ryan?

  That would be kinda cool if like, if Eileen was like, you sure do watch a lot of movies.

• 2:00:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. What's the deal with all these 4K Blu-rays, Sean?

• 2:00:10Chris Ryan?

  We get, was there a number? They're like, what are you trying to?

• 2:00:13Bill Simmons?

  It's hard to believe. What are we doing? Are we going to dinner? He's like, I gotta watch, I gotta, I gotta do some Spielberg research.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  We gotta bond you home.

• 2:00:19Bill Simmons?

  She's like, oh, I'm taking the kids. I'm going to mom's.

• 2:00:22Sean Fennessey?

  Are you guys surprised this movie resonates with me?

• 2:00:25Bill Simmons?

  I just, it really bothers me that she signs up for this and then takes it personally.

• 2:00:29Chris Ryan?

  A lot of relationships where like, the thing that makes sense for the first three to nine months of it does not make sense 18 months or two years in.

• 2:00:37Bill Simmons?

  Okay, but in this case, it was the first two hours.

• 2:00:39Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:40Bill Simmons?

  They don't even finish dinner on their first date. He's in a fucking phone booth and then she ends up sleeping on his couch.

• 2:00:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:46Bill Simmons?

  He's waiting for a call from his pulmonary emphysema.

• 2:00:49Chris Ryan?

  It's the most exciting date I've ever had. It's like, yeah.

• 2:00:52Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, she's the only female character of note in the film. I mean, there's just not, there's, there's no-

• 2:00:57Chris Ryan?

  Except for June Diane Raphael being like, I'm gonna make the Folgers.

• 2:01:00Sean Fennessey?

  But she's also just playing the wife, you know? Like, there's not really any, there are no women in this world. Like, in the world of, you know, police departments at this time and newspapers, like, they were secretaries, you know? And that's part of the reason why the movie is that way. And I think you could make the case that that, that her character is like, it's basically an active comment on this world at that time by saying like, this woman has infinite patience for her insane cartoonist husband.

• 2:01:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:23Sean Fennessey?

  Who can't make time to take care of his children because he's trying to solve a crime.

• 2:01:27Bill Simmons?

  It's really an advertisement for dating services that I don't think we're around yet.

• 2:01:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Bill Simmons?

  Probably needed a few more.

• 2:01:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Thank you, Raya.

• 2:01:34Chris Ryan?

  Do I have a flex?

• 2:01:36Bill Simmons?

  Uh, you can take one right now.

• 2:01:39Chris Ryan?

  I just had the Rick Dalton Award.

• 2:01:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, what is it?

• 2:01:41Chris Ryan?

  For the greatest fucking acting I've ever seen. Uh, it's, uh, Downey on the houseboat. Being like, somebody should write a book.

• 2:01:50Chris Ryan?

  About what?

• 2:01:50Bill Simmons?

  He's also doing the David Duchovny and Larry Sanders. Am I gonna see your balls hanging out here in this scene?

• 2:01:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, there's a lot of.

• 2:01:58Bill Simmons?

  Is it like, ah?

• 2:01:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's an epic amount of thigh.

• 2:02:00Chris Ryan?

  That whole, the whole houseboat scene is just unbelievable.

• 2:02:03Sean Fennessey?

  The pong going on in the background.

• 2:02:07Bill Simmons?

  The CR thinks Luke Wilson could have been Harrison Ford. Hottest take award.

• 2:02:12Chris Ryan?

  I kinda did a little bit of the, the, the PTA QT thing. But I will also say that I think the thrill, the dark thrill of the Zodiac were to happen today would be ruined by everybody trying to figure out who he voted for.

• 2:02:29Chris Ryan?

  You know, there would be no like, oh, this is cool. Watch out, don't go out at night. Because it would just be like, that motherfucker's a Bernie bro, you know, like, it would just be, it would suck.

• 2:02:39Sean Fennessey?

  It would probably be more like this guy did Jan 6.

• 2:02:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:02:44Bill Simmons?

  Do you have a hottest take?

• 2:02:44Sean Fennessey?

  I do. Um, this is the greatest American crime film ever made. And it's the only crime film that really portrays what it's like to try to solve a crime. And no other movie is really interested in that because that's not very cinematic.

• 2:02:55Bill Simmons?

  Who's second?

• 2:02:57Sean Fennessey?

  Uh.

• 2:02:57Chris Ryan?

  Chinatown?

• 2:02:58Sean Fennessey?

  Gone in 60 Seconds, probably.

• 2:03:01Chris Ryan?

  Death is.

• 2:03:03Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I, I, I, I love Heat, right? That's a great movie. I love Man Hunter. I love the work of Michael Mann. All of those movies are about the psychology and obsession that is portrayed in this movie. But they're not really about like solving the crimes or even doing the crimes in the same way.

• 2:03:17Bill Simmons?

  And this was a real story too.

• 2:03:18Chris Ryan?

  Do you think that it's because it's more of an act of journalism than it is an act of crime solving?

• 2:03:23Sean Fennessey?

  It helps.

• 2:03:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:24Sean Fennessey?

  It helps. And I think the truth is, is that I made that point about our dads because they're kind of similar jobs. You know, they require a very similar kind of ethic. You have to be kind of shrewd. You have to be comfortable digging really deep into things. You gotta be comfortable being bored by the work that you do sometimes. It, there's a reason that there's connectivity between these guys at this time in history because they have a very similar approach to the world.

• 2:03:48Bill Simmons?

  My hottest take, Craig kinda stepped on it earlier, but in the, in a way, maybe he doesn't realize. I'm actually going the opposite way. I think Zodiac was the goat. Now, maybe he didn't finish a couple murders.

• 2:03:59Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:00Sean Fennessey?

  The goat serial killer of all time.

• 2:04:02Bill Simmons?

  Never caught.

• 2:04:03Chris Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 2:04:04Bill Simmons?

  So good, he might have also been the Black Dahlia Killer, which was another one who wasn't caught. Drove detectives and journalists fucking crazy. Created a world that led to books and movies and is still going on Reddit. Ambidextrous. Swimmer.

• 2:04:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. He's like James Harden with a handle.

• 2:04:22Bill Simmons?

  Great nickname. Nobody, what serial killer has ever given themselves a better nickname than Zodiac?

• 2:04:27Chris Ryan?

  You like that more than the Son of Sand?

• 2:04:28Bill Simmons?

  Best, oh, easily. Best gimmick. Son of Sand was just fucking wacko. He was talking to his dog.

• 2:04:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Zodiac, very measured guy.

• 2:04:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:35Bill Simmons?

  Zodiac had his shit together. And I just think he had just a phenomenal run and the fact that nobody has been able to solve this is unbelievable. So I think if you're talking goats, or you're talking Mount Rushmore or whatever with serial killers.

• 2:04:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, getting away with it is number one. You know? It is.

• 2:04:54Bill Simmons?

  Not only getting away with it, but then leaving this whole universe behind of theories and it's basically the JFK assassination for a serial killer.

• 2:05:02Chris Ryan?

  I had no idea.

• 2:05:03Bill Simmons?

  We've solved all the other ones.

• 2:05:04Chris Ryan?

  How thriving the community was. They're still doing incredible work online about this.

• 2:05:08Chris Ryan?

  Every day. Yeah.

• 2:05:10Bill Simmons?

  You can't, when you Google it, so many things come up, you don't even know like which one to click on.

• 2:05:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:14Bill Simmons?

  There's like subreddits to the subreddit.

• 2:05:17Chris Ryan?

  Fifty-five years old.

• 2:05:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20Chris Ryan?

  Like, we don't, you don't even, you don't.

• 2:05:21Bill Simmons?

  And by the way, we're not any closer to figuring out who did it.

• 2:05:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:05:25Bill Simmons?

  It's really, it's a crazy one, but I think Craig made a good point. Like, finish the job.

• 2:05:29Chris Ryan?

  Well, you're going kind of the Bill Russell case here, like, for his time, what he did. Oh, you think Zodiac just played against plumbers? You know what I mean?

• 2:05:36Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, like, they're in the, the pre-internet, pre-departments, being able to coordinate investigations.

• 2:05:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, these police departments and their fax machines.

• 2:05:45Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:05:45Chris Ryan?

  Not exactly.

• 2:05:47Bill Simmons?

  It is fair.

• 2:05:48Chris Ryan?

  Playing the Houston defense.

• 2:05:49Sean Fennessey?

  Do you have like a, the LeBron of serial killers?

• 2:05:54Bill Simmons?

  They all get caught.

• 2:05:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:56Chris Ryan?

  What's aged the worst is serial killers.

• 2:05:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:58Sean Fennessey?

  Right. Serial killing has aged the worst. Yeah.

• 2:06:01Chris Ryan?

  Can't do it.

• 2:06:01Bill Simmons?

  Well, I think it's just too hard. DNA.

• 2:06:04Sean Fennessey?

  To, have you tried?

• 2:06:04Bill Simmons?

  Cameras. No, I just think, I don't think we're gonna see another one, honestly.

• 2:06:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:08Bill Simmons?

  I think it's too hard.

• 2:06:09Chris Ryan?

  There's a camera, every, every house has a Ring camera now.

• 2:06:12Bill Simmons?

  There was a story about there might have been a Houston serial killer, cause they found all these bodies.

• 2:06:16Chris Ryan?

  The body guy, yeah.

• 2:06:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they don't know what happened. Um, I don't believe that one. I think, I think we have too much technology now.

• 2:06:23Chris Ryan?

  And he kind of coasted off other kills that he took credit for.

• 2:06:26Sean Fennessey?

  Which I would argue is clever, cause he completely threw them off the scent in the investigation. It got, you know, like, Mullenax is like, I like this guy. And you're like, well, that, what does that guy have to do with any other kill? And he's like, yeah, but I have evidence that shows that he's connected to this one. So it creates this distortion effect around the investigation. That was really smart. It doesn't mean the Zodiac is like a brain genius, but he, he clearly did things with a, a level of manipulation that does distinguish him from other serial killers.

• 2:06:52Bill Simmons?

  I mean, ultimately, the great serial killers have a calling card. Like Dahmer's like, I just like eating people. Like, this is all an endgame for me. Eating other humans, I, that's my thing. I love it.

• 2:07:05Sean Fennessey?

  Whenever you do this, you make it sound like he looked into the camera and said those words.

• 2:07:10Chris Ryan?

  We're the wet bandits. The wet bandits.

• 2:07:12Bill Simmons?

  Like Ted Bundy's like, I just love the ladies. And, and there's a dark side to it, but that's my thing.

• 2:07:18Sean Fennessey?

  The ladies.

• 2:07:19Bill Simmons?

  Zodiac was like, I actually like being in the mix. Here are my thoughts.

• 2:07:23Chris Ryan?

  But it's so.

• 2:07:23Bill Simmons?

  He was like the first podcaster.

• 2:07:25Chris Ryan?

  Do you know what's interesting too is like?

• 2:07:26Bill Simmons?

  My thoughts on the Dirty Harry movie.

• 2:07:28Chris Ryan?

  Right, exactly. And then there's also.

• 2:07:29Bill Simmons?

  The attention of what he was doing.

• 2:07:31Chris Ryan?

  Even things that weren't Zodiac, like the call to Melvin Belle, which is a guy in an, in, in a mental institution, making the phone call. It goes towards the Zodiac's legacy. It's like Steve Kerr building off of Mark Jackson's work, you know?

• 2:07:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47Speaker 03

  All that hard work that Mark did.

• 2:07:50Sean Fennessey?

  Who drafted Draymond, you know? Ask yourself that.

• 2:07:54Bill Simmons?

  Casting what ifs.

• 2:07:56Chris Ryan?

  Mark was playing Monte Ellis over Steph Curry.

• 2:07:58Bill Simmons?

  It is true.

• 2:07:59Chris Ryan?

  He was saving him.

• 2:08:00Bill Simmons?

  Casting what ifs. Gary Oldman was supposed to play Melvin Belai. Um, but physically they decided it couldn't work, so they got Logan Roy instead.

• 2:08:09Sean Fennessey?

  Ironically, he did go on to play Churchill, who was way fatter than Gary Oldman and won an Academy Award for it.

• 2:08:16Bill Simmons?

  Jalen Hall was the first choice for Gray Smith from Fincher, but if he had said no, they had Orlando Bloom lined up.

• 2:08:25Sean Fennessey?

  You know the story, right, of who it was who tipped Fincher off to the two leads of this movie?

• 2:08:30Bill Simmons?

  It was Aniston.

• 2:08:31Sean Fennessey?

  His best pal Jennifer Aniston, who said, I really liked working with Jake Gyllenhaal in The Good Girl, and Mark Ruffalo in, what's the rom com that they were in together?

• 2:08:42Chris Ryan?

  Just Like Heaven or something?

• 2:08:43Bill Simmons?

  No, Rumor Has It.

• 2:08:43Sean Fennessey?

  Rumor Has It. Was it Rumor, was it from Rumor Has It?

• 2:08:45Chris Ryan?

  Rumor Has It?

• 2:08:46Bill Simmons?

  And then he's like, you like them, why don't you play the Chloe Sevigny role? She's like, no, thanks.

• 2:08:52Bill Simmons?

  No, thanks, I got a rom com to do. Fincher wanted Brad Pitt as Avery before settling on Downey.

• 2:08:58Chris Ryan?

  Basically would have been Floyd from True Romance as a journalist.

• 2:09:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, would have been a little distracting.

• 2:09:05Bill Simmons?

  Can we talk it out?

• 2:09:06Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:07Sean Fennessey?

  Has anyone who looks like Brad Pitt ever been a journalist?

• 2:09:10Bill Simmons?

  Brad Pitt really good at playing down.

• 2:09:13Sean Fennessey?

  True, true.

• 2:09:14Chris Ryan?

  Is this like snatch era Brad Pitt?

• 2:09:15Bill Simmons?

  No, this is mid 2000s. I've settled down with Angelina and we're adopting kids every nine months.

• 2:09:21Sean Fennessey?

  Like Troy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

• 2:09:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Post Mr. and Mrs. Smith, pre Benjamin Button.

• 2:09:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:26Bill Simmons?

  Pre Moneyball.

• 2:09:28Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, he's in Assassination of Jesse James this year.

• 2:09:30Bill Simmons?

  If he's just doing Floyd from True Romance in this movie, I'm not necessarily, I'm willing to entertain it.

• 2:09:36Sean Fennessey?

  The thing is, is that Downey brings the fast talking energy that a guy less smart aleck journalist would have.

• 2:09:42Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:09:42Sean Fennessey?

  And I think you need that. And Pitt doesn't really do that.

• 2:09:45Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:09:45Sean Fennessey?

  He plays dumb really well. He plays low key or burnt out really well. And he's, he's always clever as Rusty in the Oceans movies, but not fast.

• 2:09:53Chris Ryan?

  He's a little bit more, he has a little bit more stoner, whereas Downey has a little bit more uppers.

• 2:09:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:00Bill Simmons?

  Best that guy award. We're saying John Carroll Lynch not eligible?

• 2:10:04Chris Ryan?

  Probably not.

• 2:10:04Bill Simmons?

  At least not for us. Did you know who that was, Craig?

• 2:10:07Speaker 03

  Recognize him, don't know his name.

• 2:10:10Chris Ryan?

  I grabbed two guys from the editorial meeting, which is John Getz and John Terry, the editor in chief and the publisher.

• 2:10:16Bill Simmons?

  I think John Getz is John Getz. I feel like he's been in too many things. John Terry's a good one.

• 2:10:21Chris Ryan?

  John Terry's really good.

• 2:10:22Bill Simmons?

  Charles Fleischer, who's the guy in the basement.

• 2:10:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 2:10:25Bill Simmons?

  He's pretty much that guy. I have two big ones. One of the cops was the priest from The Sopranos who was trying to get it on with Carmella, but not really.

• 2:10:34Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:10:35Bill Simmons?

  Getting drunk with him, father, what was his name, father, uh, can't remember. The other night when he goes on the college tour with Meadow. They're home getting drunk and he, and it seems like something's gonna happen. He throws up. That guy, he's in this. And then one of the cops in the scene you like, the, the, when they go to location.

• 2:10:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:55Bill Simmons?

  Skippy from Kicking and Screaming.

• 2:10:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:57Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:10:58Bill Simmons?

  Who was also Colin, the drug dealer in Beverly Hills 90210, who had that great run. 10 years later ends up in Zodiac. But I think, I think that's a good that guy.

• 2:11:07Chris Ryan?

  That's a great that guy.

• 2:11:08Bill Simmons?

  I think he's on like Chicago Fire now, one of those.

• 2:11:10Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. The problem with doing 500 episodes of this show is that.

• 2:11:13Bill Simmons?

  You know, all the people.

• 2:11:15Sean Fennessey?

  But just to every normal human being, Zach Grenier, Philip Baker Hall, Elias Koteas, James LaGro, Donald Logue, John Carroll Lynch, John Terry, June Diane Raphael, Adam Goldberg, these people are that guys.

• 2:11:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:26Sean Fennessey?

  They are the definitive that guys.

• 2:11:28Bill Simmons?

  We go deep cut that guy.

• 2:11:28Chris Ryan?

  But he's not letting me have John Getz.

• 2:11:30Sean Fennessey?

  Right. Like, if you can't have John Getz, then like, the, the, part of why the movie is so good is that Fincher has the best taste for supporting players.

• 2:11:38Bill Simmons?

  That the graduated that guys.

• 2:11:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:11:40Bill Simmons?

  The priest from The Sopranos, I don't know what that guy's name is.

• 2:11:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:44Bill Simmons?

  The Diane Waiters Award for biggest heat check in the movie. John Carroll Lynch eligible. I think he's in two and a half scenes.

• 2:11:52Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:11:53Bill Simmons?

  Basement guy.

• 2:11:54Sean Fennessey?

  Charles Fleischer. Yeah.

• 2:11:55Bill Simmons?

  Charles Fleischer, one scene.

• 2:11:57Sean Fennessey?

  I had Charles Fleischer and Clay Duvall. Clay Duvall to me is the pinnacle of this category because she has one scene.

• 2:12:04Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:04Sean Fennessey?

  And the camera like doesn't move off of her.

• 2:12:06Chris Ryan?

  By the, by the originalist document, he is right. I had Cox, he's in two full scenes.

• 2:12:12Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:13Chris Ryan?

  And has like, one of the most like, let me put a little bit of seasoning on this. It was like, wow. Like when he gets out of the cab, like, you know, and it like, all the helicopters are swirling. But I, uh, Clay Duvall is pretty high up there.

• 2:12:25Sean Fennessey?

  Low key nomination, Melvin Belli's housekeeper. When she drops the cookies off. She's like, I spoke to him. She's really good in that scene.

• 2:12:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, she was good.

• 2:12:34Chris Ryan?

  He's like, was that important?

• 2:12:36Bill Simmons?

  Recasting couch director or city.

• 2:12:40Bill Simmons?

  Can we talk Anthony Edwards for one second?

• 2:12:42Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:44Bill Simmons?

  Can I, can I tempt you with a little Michael Keaton?

• 2:12:48Chris Ryan?

  Too big for that role.

• 2:12:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so you'll you'll enjoy this. If you have not listened to the commentary, I highly recommend you do because Fincher is constantly using sports references.

• 2:13:00Bill Simmons?

  And

• 2:13:00Chris Ryan?

  Sounds great.

• 2:13:01Sean Fennessey?

  He uses the phrase moving without the ball a lot, and what kind of actors do that? And he described Anthony Edwards as the assist, that he is the living embodiment of the assist. And if you watch him work in movies, even when he's the star, he's making other people seem better. And that was his role on ER in the center of that show. That became George Clooney and Juliana Margulies and Eric LaSalle and all the people who were on that show at that time. And in this movie, he's kind of the most important detective. Toski is not the most important detective. He's the guy who's getting more information, who's getting more stuff down, who's driving the action more, who kind of incites more moments. You just don't feel it because of the way that Anthony Edwards acts. And also, Fincher said that

• 2:13:45Sean Fennessey?

  his kids went to school together, and that's why he's in the movie. He's like, I knew him from getting my kids going to school together.

• 2:13:48Chris Ryan?

  Among the saddest moments in the entire movie is when Armstrong's like, you keep the car. Because you're just like, fuck, it broke him, you know, like, and you're just like, the whole time you're wondering, and he's kind of getting more tired and exasperated by it. But when he leaves the movie, there's like a certain quality of goodness that leaves the movie. It's like, it's been destroyed by this case.

• 2:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:10Chris Ryan?

  It's really good.

• 2:14:11Bill Simmons?

  Keaton has the Dermot Mulroney role?

• 2:14:14Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 2:14:14Bill Simmons?

  Just trying to work him in here somewhere.

• 2:14:15Sean Fennessey?

  He did that in The Other Guys, right?

• 2:14:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. It would be good to think it just gets Special Agent Ray Nicolet.

• 2:14:23Bill Simmons?

  My other note is, I just don't know why John Slattery is not in this movie, and I don't know who he's gonna play.

• 2:14:28Sean Fennessey?

  John Terry is kind of playing John Slattery, right?

• 2:14:30Bill Simmons?

  John Slattery is just

• 2:14:32Chris Ryan?

  Slattery was in Charlie Wilson's War yelling at Philip Seymour Hoffman.

• 2:14:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, maybe that's why he wasn't in it. Sean, you have

• 2:14:36Sean Fennessey?

  He's stayed in Finnish for four years.

• 2:14:40Bill Simmons?

  It feels like that could be on like the rewatchables 2028 list, Charlie Wilson's War.

• 2:14:45Chris Ryan?

  There's like six

• 2:14:45Bill Simmons?

  It's it's kind of

• 2:14:46Chris Ryan?

  Perfect scenes in that movie.

• 2:14:47Bill Simmons?

  I really think Julia is great in that movie.

• 2:14:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The weak link is Hanks. Miscast.

• 2:14:52Bill Simmons?

  Which has happened a few times.

• 2:14:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:54Bill Simmons?

  Uh, you have a flex category.

• 2:14:56Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I got two really quick ones, one of which we've talked about a lot, but is worth noting, given the intelligence of this category, the Tom Sizemore Action is the Juice Award Best Toe to Toe Moment for a non-star, which is clearly John Carroll Lynch up against Mark Ruffalo and winning that scene. Like him being the most mesmerizing person in that scene, opposite, you know, three really well-known actors, but really Ruffalo coming into his own. And then the Dan Campbell scale for holy shit, are they really going for it right now is the basement scene, where you're like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. And

• 2:15:33Bill Simmons?

  That's good.

• 2:15:34Sean Fennessey?

  It, you know, like I said at the time, when it came out, I felt like we were going to another level of the movie.

• 2:15:41Bill Simmons?

  Half-Assed Inner Research, we mentioned a lot of this stuff already. They used a lot of the photos to try to figure out what stuff looked like back then, how many VW bugs should be in there. The cars are really good in this movie and how they change over the decade. We talked about the digital Thompson Viper Film Stream Camera, which was the first one, movie like this. So there was a, this guy Ray Cantrell made a Zodiac Killer movie, probably not the one with John Holmes, in 1972. They made this movie to try to catch Zodiac in the theater. Did you follow the story?

• 2:16:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, this just, did this just get put out by Eureka or something like that?

• 2:16:19Bill Simmons?

  It's been around for a couple of years. So they make like this bad Zodiac movie, and the guy funds it because he was friends with one of the people who either got murdered or almost murdered. And they showed it in San Francisco for like two weeks, and they're hiding in some part of the theater, like in this freezer, that barely had enough oxygen, scouting all the people that come in. And then they claim at one point, they feel like the Zodiac came in and they talked to them in the bathroom, but weren't able to like keep them. And it's this whole like weird, it's almost like a movie within the movie that probably would be bad.

• 2:16:54Sean Fennessey?

  That's kind of like Snake Eyes. They like set up this whole sting inside of a huge event.

• 2:16:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Bill Simmons?

  Robert Downey Jr.'s four-straw trick that he does with the three straws, picking the fourth, 26 takes.

• 2:17:09Chris Ryan?

  To get it right, or he made him do it 26 times?

• 2:17:12Bill Simmons?

  He showed Fincher, asked to perform it, and then they kept doing it. You mentioned the blood thing. This is a great Mark Ruffalo quote. "I'll never forget when they were negotiating my deal for Zodiac. The studio negotiator literally said to my manager, 'Look, we don't give a shit about Mark Ruffalo. We don't even want Mark Ruffalo in this movie. So you're gonna take what we're offering or forget it.'" That was his memory of how he got the part.

• 2:17:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yep, that's why you hired Rich Paul.

• 2:17:37Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 2:17:40Bill Simmons?

  And then Robert Gracemus cocktail. It's vodka, gin, lemon lime, and blue caracau.

• 2:17:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I've never been a big-

• 2:17:47Bill Simmons?

  That just feels like the vomit special.

• 2:17:49Chris Ryan?

  That's just a Long Island Iced Tea dyed blue, basically.

• 2:17:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's like, "I'm throwing up tomorrow."

• 2:17:53Sean Fennessey?

  I don't even drink blue Gatorade.

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• 2:18:43Bill Simmons?

  Apex Mountain, Fincher? Do we need to explain Apex Mountain now that we're on Netflix?

• 2:18:47Chris Ryan?

  Go ahead. Yeah.

• 2:18:50Bill Simmons?

  Controversial category.

• 2:18:51Sean Fennessey?

  How would you describe it?

• 2:18:52Bill Simmons?

  425 movies in. Apex Mountain. When somebody was at the peak of their powers, career-wise, had the most juice they're ever gonna have in their career.

• 2:19:04Bill Simmons?

  Was this the moment for that? That's technically Apex Mountain, even though we've argued about it forever.

• 2:19:09Chris Ryan?

  I think it is for Fincher.

• 2:19:11Sean Fennessey?

  I do not.

• 2:19:12Bill Simmons?

  I think it's social network for Fincher.

• 2:19:14Chris Ryan?

  But don't you think this is a product of social network?

• 2:19:17Bill Simmons?

  No, cuz it's before.

• 2:19:19Chris Ryan?

  But isn't, oh, this is before social.

• 2:19:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:21Chris Ryan?

  I'm sorry what you're saying.

• 2:19:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, this movie comes after a five-year break off of a successful but modest movie in Panic Room. And this movie did not do well at the box office.

• 2:19:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:33Sean Fennessey?

  And was not, it was really well reviewed, but was not considered a masterpiece at, in its time.

• 2:19:38Bill Simmons?

  He needed social network to have his like, okay, this guy is also a commercial box office guy.

• 2:19:43Sean Fennessey?

  And social network was another for higher job.

• 2:19:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:46Sean Fennessey?

  You know, that was with a script from a well-known screenwriter.

• 2:19:49Chris Ryan?

  I would, creatively, and I know that this is not going, but I think creatively, this is like him.

• 2:19:54Bill Simmons?

  No, you could go creative Fincher as an apex mountain category.

• 2:19:56Chris Ryan?

  I think this is him just like combining some of the deep artistry of his early work and like with the brave new world of the digital photography that he's working with. And obviously has a personal connection to this material in a way that sometimes it doesn't always feel like he does.

• 2:20:12Sean Fennessey?

  I think he is a, he is a re-Apex candidate cuz I think Fight Club is his first Apex Mountain.

• 2:20:18Bill Simmons?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:18Sean Fennessey?

  Because he uses the success of those two movies. Yeah, and he, you know, basically makes a movie about how the only way to fix capitalism is to destroy it.

• 2:20:26Bill Simmons?

  Early 90s Bulls version of the Apex.

• 2:20:29Sean Fennessey?

  And then I think there's, there's never been a higher moment for him than Gone Girl. Where he's like, I can take an airport novel and make it a $500 million movie.

• 2:20:39Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:20:39Sean Fennessey?

  And nobody else can do this.

• 2:20:41Bill Simmons?

  Then he's like, and next up, a Netflix series that CR is gonna love the most.

• 2:20:46Chris Ryan?

  It's true.

• 2:20:46Bill Simmons?

  Serial killer movies, yes.

• 2:20:50Chris Ryan?

  Silence.

• 2:20:53Sean Fennessey?

  That's a tough one.

• 2:20:54Bill Simmons?

  Does that count as a serial killer movie, though?

• 2:20:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. He's got a nickname. He's moving around, he's doing his thing.

• 2:21:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 2:21:01Chris Ryan?

  How's that not a serial killer?

• 2:21:02Bill Simmons?

  No, you're right.

• 2:21:02Sean Fennessey?

  You think this is better than Man Hunter?

• 2:21:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:07Chris Ryan?

  It's a different, it's a, it's a totally different movie.

• 2:21:10Bill Simmons?

  CR is right, Silence. True crime movies, Fantasy Made the Case earlier, yes. Downey, no.

• 2:21:18Bill Simmons?

  Ruffalo, no. Ruffalo as a detective in a movie, Apex Mountain.

• 2:21:24Chris Ryan?

  This collateral or?

• 2:21:26Sean Fennessey?

  Task, TV show.

• 2:21:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:31Bill Simmons?

  I think it's this.

• 2:21:32Chris Ryan?

  He's really bear- he's not in Collateral very much.

• 2:21:35Bill Simmons?

  I love his look in Collateral though.

• 2:21:36Chris Ryan?

  Me too.

• 2:21:37Bill Simmons?

  It's my favorite Ruffalo.

• 2:21:37Chris Ryan?

  Slicked back hair.

• 2:21:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's fucking great.

• 2:21:39Chris Ryan?

  And then Pete Berg running through LA.

• 2:21:41Bill Simmons?

  Him and Pete Berg, that's a separate movie I wanted.

• 2:21:46Chris Ryan?

  I told you that when I talked to him for Task, I basically did Chris Farley on him.

• 2:21:50Bill Simmons?

  Chris Farley, yeah.

• 2:21:51Chris Ryan?

  Where I was just like-

• 2:21:51Bill Simmons?

  Remember that time?

• 2:21:52Chris Ryan?

  Remember in Collateral when you had the goatee? And he was like, "Yeah." And I was like, "That was awesome."

• 2:21:59Bill Simmons?

  Gyllenhaal. It's kinda arguable, cuz he's Brokeback then this, except the movie didn't do that well. So I don't think this can be his apex mountain.

• 2:22:08Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22:09Bill Simmons?

  Probably later, right?

• 2:22:11Sean Fennessey?

  I'm- I- I think his best performance is maybe still Nightcrawler. Um, but-

• 2:22:16Bill Simmons?

  That's a really good movie.

• 2:22:17Sean Fennessey?

  I- I don't- his apex, he- he does- doesn't he do Prince of Persia right before this?

• 2:22:24Bill Simmons?

  Boo.

• 2:22:24Sean Fennessey?

  Cuz that movie stinks, obviously, but that was when he was like, trying to become-

• 2:22:28Chris Ryan?

  He's gonna get ripped.

• 2:22:29Bill Simmons?

  Maybe you were in that end of watch era when he starts doing written-

• 2:22:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's right after this.

• 2:22:33Speaker 03

  Prince of Persia 2010.

• 2:22:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Prince of Persia 2010. So then maybe it's this cuz this allows him to kinda springboard into that.

• 2:22:38Bill Simmons?

  Is it the end of watch prisoners era where he's like, "I'm now an established, you can put me on a poster in different movies and people will probably go?"

• 2:22:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, probably.

• 2:22:48Bill Simmons?

  San Francisco movies, no.

• 2:22:51Chris Ryan?

  But what is? Forty-Eight Hours?

• 2:22:54Sean Fennessey?

  I'd say Bullitt.

• 2:22:54Bill Simmons?

  No, it's probably the one- one from the seventies.

• 2:22:57Sean Fennessey?

  Bullitt.

• 2:22:57Bill Simmons?

  Dirty Harry.

• 2:22:58Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:59Sean Fennessey?

  Both of which are basically based on this story.

• 2:23:01Bill Simmons?

  Uh, Chloe Sevigny?

• 2:23:03Sean Fennessey?

  Nope. Last Days of Disco?

• 2:23:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we did that on the rewatchables. This is a good one, Fincher Villains. I'll give you his nominees.

• 2:23:12Chris Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 2:23:13Bill Simmons?

  John Doe in Seven, Mark Zuckerberg in Social Network, or Arthur Lee Allen in this movie.

• 2:23:22Bill Simmons?

  Unless you want to count Sean Penn in the game.

• 2:23:25Chris Ryan?

  I'd probably go John Doe.

• 2:23:27Bill Simmons?

  Definitely not Jared Leto with the, with the, with the.

• 2:23:30Sean Fennessey?

  With Panic Room?

• 2:23:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The Nepo Thief?

• 2:23:33Bill Simmons?

  I think it's John Doe. When we watched Seven last week, that scene when he's in the car with Brad Pitt and, and he's pushing Brad Pitt and trying to make him mad and say, and Brad Pitt finally steps up, say, "You're a fucking t-shirt." And we were just like, holy shit. Spacey's amazing in that movie.

• 2:23:49Sean Fennessey?

  He is. I, I guess it's just two different versions of villainy, right? Like the Zuckerberg thing is like, the portrayal of Zuckerberg.

• 2:23:59Bill Simmons?

  We should have known. He's trying to, Fincher's trying to tell us.

• 2:24:02Sean Fennessey?

  So acid, man. Like so acid, the way that he sees him as this like sad, pathetic ambition monster.

• 2:24:08Bill Simmons?

  Zuckerberg didn't totally realize it. Remember when Jesse Asberg hosted SNL? Zuckerberg's like, "Yeah, I'll make a cameo." Like he doesn't realize.

• 2:24:14Sean Fennessey?

  He didn't get it. Yeah, he didn't get it.

• 2:24:16Bill Simmons?

  Uh, San Francisco Chronicle, both in real life and then in a movie, I felt like this was.

• 2:24:22Chris Ryan?

  They were right at the center.

• 2:24:23Bill Simmons?

  They were the epicenter of everything.

• 2:24:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You know what's interesting about all of his villains, by the way, is he doesn't psychologize any of them.

• 2:24:31Sean Fennessey?

  He doesn't say, oh, well, like this happened to me and so I'm like this and I do this. Zuckerberg, John Doe, Arthur Lee Allen. It's not like, oh, well, the way he was, his upbringing or he witnessed a traumatic event. He's not interested in that.

• 2:24:41Chris Ryan?

  For the most part, for, for a certain period, like, nobody talked like that.

• 2:24:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:47Chris Ryan?

  They just did things. Yeah.

• 2:24:49Bill Simmons?

  John Carroll Lynch movies? This or Fargo?

• 2:24:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:24:53Bill Simmons?

  John Carroll Lynch? Right now?

• 2:24:56Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:57Bill Simmons?

  Shout out to J C L.

• 2:24:59Sean Fennessey?

  He's doing great. He's a great actor.

• 2:25:01Bill Simmons?

  Shout out to Joka. Donovan music?

• 2:25:05Sean Fennessey?

  Joka, a little close to Joka.

• 2:25:07Chris Ryan?

  I think it's a, a chorus in Goodfellas.

• 2:25:12Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, see, I love the ending of To Die For with Season of the Witch. You know, the season of the witch, Nino dropped into Difor is pretty good.

• 2:25:19Bill Simmons?

  Donovan, secret movie soundtrack, of course.

• 2:25:21Sean Fennessey?

  Or getting absolutely dunked on and don't look back, the Bob Dylan documentary.

• 2:25:25Chris Ryan?

  Cause it's Donovan when Jimmy, when Tommy beats up Billy Bats, right?

• 2:25:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:31Bill Simmons?

  That's the answer. Also, the father of Ione Sky.

• 2:25:34Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. Who of course is in the.

• 2:25:37Bill Simmons?

  See our Apex Mountain for wooden dildos?

• 2:25:40Chris Ryan?

  Uh, yeah, I would imagine. I mean, I can't think of any other example.

• 2:25:44Speaker 03

  It's probably the porn parody, I would say.

• 2:25:46Bill Simmons?

  They still sell those? You still have them or no?

• 2:25:48Chris Ryan?

  Uh, you have to go to a specialty store. It's a craftsman item.

• 2:25:51Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like there's a real splinter issue there that we gotta examine.

• 2:25:53Chris Ryan?

  Not if you get the right kind of lacquer.

• 2:25:55Speaker 03

  High quality.

• 2:25:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I see.

• 2:25:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. You really, that needs a good crash.

• 2:25:58Sean Fennessey?

  Buff it down first.

• 2:25:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:59Sean Fennessey?

  And then you can kinda get that.

• 2:26:01Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 2:26:01Sean Fennessey?

  Get that grease on it. Yeah.

• 2:26:03Bill Simmons?

  Uh, Apex Mountain for actual Fincher movies.

• 2:26:08Chris Ryan?

  What do you mean?

• 2:26:09Bill Simmons?

  Is this the best Fincher movie?

• 2:26:10Chris Ryan?

  Oh, well, I see. This is why I get confused what Apex Mountain is.

• 2:26:13Bill Simmons?

  Well, I just threw that as a bonus category.

• 2:26:15Chris Ryan?

  I think this is the best Fincher movie. Yes.

• 2:26:17Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I do too. It's my, it's my favorite. I mean, what is best? You know, like watching Seven to this day is still just really fun. You know, it's just really entertaining and it still glides. We did, we've done it. I would re Seven tomorrow.

• 2:26:28Bill Simmons?

  I thought Tarantino made a really good case when he was talking about his like best movies of the century or whatever. And he was talking about how he didn't love Zodiac the first time. And every time he watches it, he's just stunned by how amazing it is. And each time it gets better.

• 2:26:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:42Bill Simmons?

  Which I think is a really rare place for a movie to get to where it's like, it's the 11th time I've watched this. Holy shit.

• 2:26:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:49Sean Fennessey?

  I, Mank and the Killer.

• 2:26:50Bill Simmons?

  It's probably this.

• 2:26:51Sean Fennessey?

  Mank and the Killer do not have strong reputations. I would encourage people to revisit them again and look at them and try to give them the same attitude that you were willing to give to Zodiac, to Gone Girl, to Social Network, because they are so rewarding. I think people don't like those stories as much, and I understand that. And some people just watch movies for stories. But if you like to watch movies to understand how a movie is made and what the filmmaker is thinking, there's so much cool shit in both of those movies.

• 2:27:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I agree. At least with one of those two movies.

• 2:27:19Sean Fennessey?

  Alright.

• 2:27:20Bill Simmons?

  Cruise or Hanks?

• 2:27:21Chris Ryan?

  Hanks is Graysmith.

• 2:27:24Bill Simmons?

  It's funny. I thought Cruise is Graysmith.

• 2:27:28Sean Fennessey?

  I think Cruise as Toski I would, I would be interested in.

• 2:27:31Chris Ryan?

  I'd see, I could see Hanks as Toski.

• 2:27:34Bill Simmons?

  Well, we have to pick Cruise or Hanks. You pick Hanks?

• 2:27:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:37Bill Simmons?

  I'm picking Cruise. I think it's fun to have Cruise in this movie.

• 2:27:40Sean Fennessey?

  I do too.

• 2:27:41Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:42Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's Cruise.

• 2:27:43Chris Ryan?

  I like Hanks as Toski, Cruise as Grace Smith.

• 2:27:45Bill Simmons?

  Hanks as Toski is good, but then we lose Ruffalo.

• 2:27:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:51Bill Simmons?

  What about like 1988 Cocktail era Cruise as Jalen Hall's character?

• 2:27:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, that works. That works.

• 2:28:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, good thing this is completely made up. We don't really have to choose.

• 2:28:04Chris Ryan?

  No, because he keeps stats, you know, the advanced analytics.

• 2:28:07Bill Simmons?

  Cruise is like, so when he runs out of the guy's house after he's in the basement, what if my car was parked two streets away? And I really had to sprint. In full speed with the puddles.

• 2:28:18Chris Ryan?

  I think that, I will say that Cruise having done Eyes Wide Shut would be used to doing a hundred takes of something.

• 2:28:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. And I love it, man. Dave keeps telling me to do stuff.

• 2:28:30Chris Ryan?

  I don't know if Hanks has ever done that.

• 2:28:32Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 2:28:33Chris Ryan?

  I don't know if he's ever had somebody who's like, we're doing it again, we're doing it again.

• 2:28:36Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know.

• 2:28:38Bill Simmons?

  He worked with Stan the Man, I mean.

• 2:28:40Chris Ryan?

  Hanks hasn't. Cruise did.

• 2:28:41Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:28:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:43Bill Simmons?

  What, so Hanks were, didn't Dale hey Frank Darabont? Didn't he do this?

• 2:28:47Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 2:28:47Bill Simmons?

  Thought he was a big take guy.

• 2:28:48Sean Fennessey?

  Was he a multi-big take guy for the Green Mile?

• 2:28:50Bill Simmons?

  Freeman's still mad at him for some reason.

• 2:28:51Sean Fennessey?

  Is that true?

• 2:28:52Bill Simmons?

  It's like Freeman, you're in one of the most iconic movies of the last 40 years.

• 2:28:55Sean Fennessey?

  Can't complain. I mean, that set him up for life. Yeah.

• 2:28:59Bill Simmons?

  Scorsese or Spielberg?

• 2:29:02Chris Ryan?

  I have either.

• 2:29:04Bill Simmons?

  No, that's not an answer.

• 2:29:06Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so, two things. Scorsese has never made a procedural. This is not what he does.

• 2:29:13Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:29:13Sean Fennessey?

  He's not interested in this aspect of the world. He's interested in how people move through the world.

• 2:29:18Bill Simmons?

  You know what he is interested in? The Rolling Stones in 1969, 1970 San Francisco.

• 2:29:23Chris Ryan?

  And guys doing bumps and bars.

• 2:29:25Bill Simmons?

  I think it just becomes an Altamont San Francisco. I think it's only set in two years. I don't think he cares what happens after.

• 2:29:30Sean Fennessey?

  It would just fundamentally be a different movie. The same way that like, you can tell that James Vanderbilt's script, which I'm sure was very good on first pass, Fincher changed a lot.

• 2:29:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:39Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like he brought a lot to that. And so, yeah, if Scorsese comes in and he's like, I want to do my version of this and it's, you know, post-Altamont, we're rocking and rolling through this murder time. I mean, he made Summer of Sam, right? Like, he made a movie like this, but he didn't make it about the killer. He made it about what was happening to people around this time. So my answer is Spielberg.

• 2:29:59Bill Simmons?

  I have Scorsese just because I'd want to see the movie.

• 2:30:02Chris Ryan?

  I would just be worried that the Spielberg version of this turns out like the post, which isn't a bad movie, but it's just a little bit more like, we just gotta, we gotta work hard to find this guy.

• 2:30:10Bill Simmons?

  I don't think Spielberg's dark enough for this movie. This movie's dark.

• 2:30:14Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm, maybe.

• 2:30:16Bill Simmons?

  Best hang, worst hang. Paul Avery, clearly best hang.

• 2:30:20Chris Ryan?

  Best barnight, yeah.

• 2:30:22Bill Simmons?

  I think Zodiac, I'm gonna go worst hang. Wanna come back to my house? Wanna come back to my trailer and watch the Warriors game?

• 2:30:29Chris Ryan?

  By far.

• 2:30:30Bill Simmons?

  Hold on, let me put the squirrels away.

• 2:30:31Chris Ryan?

  I laid out a day for us. A little bit of skin diving, then we're gonna cook up some squirrel. I got a bunch of nudie mags.

• 2:30:39Bill Simmons?

  Well, in the Zodiac documentary that was on Netflix in 24, they interviewed these two kids that he had befriended the family. And at one point, he takes them for a trip and they end up, both of them don't remember two days because he drugged them. Because I think he needed an alibi. Also, might have probably molested one of the kids. But it was during one of the, one of the crimes that he committed where he brought the kids with him on location. Or so they said.

• 2:31:03Sean Fennessey?

  But there's another, this is another murder that is not a part of the Zodiac investigation that they talk about, where they say he basically like went down to a beach.

• 2:31:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:12Sean Fennessey?

  And may have killed someone on a beach.

• 2:31:13Chris Ryan?

  Oh, is this the one where he took a shot into a group of teenagers or something?

• 2:31:16Sean Fennessey?

  And then like a day later, there was a murder and they were like, we were just there yesterday and I was asleep in the car.

• 2:31:21Bill Simmons?

  And also, I don't remember the last two days. Yeah. Zodiac, worst hang. Picky Nits. Why is the cartoonist in the high level editorial meetings when they're reading the Zodiac letter, which is probably the most important thing in this city that's happening?

• 2:31:35Chris Ryan?

  He's like, I don't think Avery is in these meetings either. It's just, we needed it for the movie to get everybody sort of connected to the letters.

• 2:31:42Sean Fennessey?

  Getting the information at the same time.

• 2:31:44Bill Simmons?

  Ione, Skye's character falling for the, your wheel looks loose trick. Come on, honey. You got a kid in the car.

• 2:31:50Sean Fennessey?

  Fincher says he definitively does not think that that was the Zodiac. That the Kathleen John story is not the Zodiac. It's just another crazy person on the side.

• 2:31:58Chris Ryan?

  What does he say to her? Like, they don't need much help when I'm done with them or something? God damn it.

• 2:32:02Bill Simmons?

  What are their nitpicks, yeah?

• 2:32:04Chris Ryan?

  The only thing I had, Sean mentioned it earlier, but Toski being like, I can't help you, but if I were to help you, I'd tell you to call Ken Darlow. It's just like, help or don't help, but like, we don't have to make this into the Riddler, you know?

• 2:32:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:19Chris Ryan?

  I.

• 2:32:20Bill Simmons?

  Be funny if NBA trades worked like that. We gotta trade LeBron, shit's falling apart. Sam Presti's like, I can't help you, but if I were to help you.

• 2:32:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:28Bill Simmons?

  Call Orlando.

• 2:32:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:33Bill Simmons?

  They can help.

• 2:32:34Sean Fennessey?

  I'm, I have a sort of, sort of related picking nit just about the insanity of being a police detective where three detectives are in a room, they're talking to the guy they're almost certain is the Zodiac Killer. He's wearing, to Craig's point, a Zodiac watch.

• 2:32:49Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:50Sean Fennessey?

  And they can't get him. And then Toski's like, I'm gonna keep working on this case on and off for the next seven years. I am the sole proprietor of the investigation. But like, he, I don't believe that Toski accepted the handwriting thing. Like, and so what was he actually doing thinking about the case?

• 2:33:09Bill Simmons?

  Well, he makes the point later, he's like, there's been 200 murders in the last four years. Those are other families that want answers. So I think they, I think they just got too spread out.

• 2:33:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:18Bill Simmons?

  Would be my guess.

• 2:33:22Bill Simmons?

  I have another one. I saw this on one of the Reddit things, I'm stealing it.

• 2:33:28Bill Simmons?

  Which normally doesn't happen in rewatchables, but we were all reading so much Reddit when the Zodiac thing, I stumbled across this one. So apologies to who I'm taking this from. Chloe on the first date orders Penne Ale vodka, but asks to substitute a cream sauce?

• 2:33:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:42Bill Simmons?

  That's fucking stupid. Penne Ale vodka is a cream sauce.

• 2:33:46Chris Ryan?

  I don't know how it was made.

• 2:33:47Bill Simmons?

  Can you say, I don't want vodka, can you make it cream sauce instead?

• 2:33:50Sean Fennessey?

  So the real picking nit, and again, this comes from the director's commentary.

• 2:33:53Bill Simmons?

  Didn't exist yet.

• 2:33:54Sean Fennessey?

  Did not exist until the 1980s. Penne Ale vodka with the cream sauce was a recipe that was popularized in the 1980s.

• 2:34:01Chris Ryan?

  So what, what does Fincher say? Like, this is actually a fake order?

• 2:34:04Sean Fennessey?

  No, he's like, we fucked up.

• 2:34:07Bill Simmons?

  Fincher, who recreates the San Francisco Chronicle office.

• 2:34:11Sean Fennessey?

  That is a true picking nit.

• 2:34:13Chris Ryan?

  Can I go back to Apex Mountain and knock this down a couple pegs then?

• 2:34:17Bill Simmons?

  If I was on a date and somebody ordered Penne Ale vodka, but then wanted to substitute it for cream sauce, I would have made, I gotta make a call right back. I'm out.

• 2:34:25Sean Fennessey?

  Sorry. Hey, this girl I'm here with has a head injury and I can't date her.

• 2:34:28Speaker 03

  I have a small picking nit on behalf of my mother-in-law, who was there watching the movie with us last night. When Melanie and Gray Smith are arguing about how Gray Smith is kind of starting to gain notoriety in the paper. He goes, ah, well, no one's, he's not gonna read Herb Kane. And my mother-in-law shouts out, everybody read Herb Kane.

• 2:34:47Sean Fennessey?

  And then we found out that Zodiac did read Herb Kane.

• 2:34:50Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:50Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:34:51Chris Ryan?

  He actually mentions Herb Kane in a letter, right?

• 2:34:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:54Bill Simmons?

  It's a good one.

• 2:34:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:55Sean Fennessey?

  Oversight by Gray Smith.

• 2:34:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:57Bill Simmons?

  Sequel, prequel, prestige TV, all black cast or untouchable, became prestige TV.

• 2:35:01Chris Ryan?

  They did Mindhunter, yeah.

• 2:35:02Bill Simmons?

  Is this movie better with Wayne Jenkins, Fergie the florist, Buffalo Bill, Doris Burke, or someone else CR?

• 2:35:11Chris Ryan?

  Uh, if Fergie wrote one of the Zodiac letters.

• 2:35:14Speaker 03

  You better keep your kids off that school bus, or I'll take them out the Zodiac way. I'll shoot the front tire and then pick the kiddies off and they come bouncing out.

• 2:35:27Speaker 03

  You're gonna do this for me.

• 2:35:31Chris Ryan?

  I don't know what that voice is, but it's sort of.

• 2:35:33Bill Simmons?

  I love it. It's become Bono crossed with Fergie the florist. I thought for sure you were gonna do Doris.

• 2:35:39Chris Ryan?

  DB?

• 2:35:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:40Sean Fennessey?

  Mr. Zodiac.

• 2:35:41Bill Simmons?

  Mr. Pro Zodiac, we see the patience with all your symbols.

• 2:35:47Sean Fennessey?

  I'm trying to decipher your game, Mr. Zodiac.

• 2:35:50Bill Simmons?

  And I cannot. Just one Oscar who gets it. Venture.

• 2:35:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:55Bill Simmons?

  Probably an answerable questions. I have two good ones. Do you guys have any?

• 2:35:58Chris Ryan?

  Who's the Zodiac?

• 2:36:01Bill Simmons?

  Well.

• 2:36:01Sean Fennessey?

  I have the same thing down here.

• 2:36:05Bill Simmons?

  In these movies or TV shows, why don't cops realize that the serial killers always start with somebody they know? This seems to be the big revelation with 20 minutes to go in the movie. Silence of the Lambs, he knew her. He knew what he covets. It's like, yeah, no fucking kidding. This is every murder.

• 2:36:22Chris Ryan?

  All the stuff with Darlene and Mike kind of being like, we, we know who this is. It's so creepy in the movie.

• 2:36:29Bill Simmons?

  Just go back and interview everybody in there.

• 2:36:31Chris Ryan?

  The recognition of.

• 2:36:33Sean Fennessey?

  I, okay, so this is kind of, this is related to that. I wanted to ask you both initially, if there was ever anything that was not related to the work that you do, that you would have been willing to kind of throw your life away to explore the way that Gray Smith did?

• 2:36:48Bill Simmons?

  For CR, it's Edie Falcone, Cobbland.

• 2:36:51Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not sure if that requires a life's work. It might be a life's fascination.

• 2:36:55Chris Ryan?

  Like, do I have like an obsession that I would take so far that I would get rid? Well, depends on like.

• 2:36:59Sean Fennessey?

  But it can't be like, related to the Sixers or prestige television.

• 2:37:03Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 2:37:04Sean Fennessey?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:37:04Chris Ryan?

  That's the problem with what we do is that we get to bring the passions into our professions. It's the best part about what we do.

• 2:37:11Sean Fennessey?

  Genius.

• 2:37:11Chris Ryan?

  But like, uh, what would be something?

• 2:37:15Bill Simmons?

  Like the MCL?

• 2:37:16Sean Fennessey?

  But, okay, so my follow-

• 2:37:18Chris Ryan?

  The MCL?

• 2:37:18Sean Fennessey?

  If we, if you guys don't-

• 2:37:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, just learning about the ligament.

• 2:37:20Chris Ryan?

  What's up with you? Come on, you know, like-

• 2:37:23Bill Simmons?

  I didn't like how the Sixers looked last night. I'm officially threatened.

• 2:37:26Sean Fennessey?

  So, did you specifically ever seriously consider criminology?

• 2:37:32Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 2:37:33Sean Fennessey?

  Forensic science?

• 2:37:34Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 2:37:35Sean Fennessey?

  Serial killer investigation?

• 2:37:37Bill Simmons?

  No. I would do that. I told you guys, I would do these deep dives with like, all the president's men, then I'm just like throwing myself in a water gate for three weeks.

• 2:37:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:37:44Bill Simmons?

  In 1991.

• 2:37:45Sean Fennessey?

  But-

• 2:37:45Bill Simmons?

  But I would always get bored and move on to the next thing.

• 2:37:47Sean Fennessey?

  But for what?

• 2:37:49Chris Ryan?

  But I-

• 2:37:49Bill Simmons?

  I don't, just for that weird thing that we have.

• 2:37:51Sean Fennessey?

  Right, but he's doing this just for fun too.

• 2:37:53Chris Ryan?

  The Zodiac?

• 2:37:54Sean Fennessey?

  Robert Krisma.

• 2:37:55Bill Simmons?

  No, but at some point, he starts seeing dollar signs. He's like, I can turn this-

• 2:37:58Sean Fennessey?

  You think that's what it was?

• 2:37:59Bill Simmons?

  I think at some point. I think he was obsessed with it, but then was also like, wait, I can make money from this.

• 2:38:05Chris Ryan?

  Wonder if Melanie wishes she hung out?

• 2:38:07Bill Simmons?

  I have a really important unanswerable.

• 2:38:11Bill Simmons?

  Was there an easier job, ever, than 1970s handwriting expert?

• 2:38:17Bill Simmons?

  What were your qualifications?

• 2:38:21Bill Simmons?

  It's, what made somebody better than somebody else? Basically, this guy just brings out a magnifying glass and he's like-

• 2:38:27Sean Fennessey?

  Ugh, and a big glass of whiskey.

• 2:38:30Chris Ryan?

  But you can't tell, like-

• 2:38:31Sean Fennessey?

  Nope.

• 2:38:31Chris Ryan?

  Can you tell that, like, somebody does a-

• 2:38:33Sean Fennessey?

  No, two different-

• 2:38:33Chris Ryan?

  A K with three strokes or two? Like, would you be able to do that?

• 2:38:36Bill Simmons?

  This guy's fucking bombed with the giant Sherlock Holmes thing. And he's deciding burger cases.

• 2:38:42Sean Fennessey?

  Never heard of a magnifying glass described as a giant Sherlock Holmes thing.

• 2:38:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. It's like, oh, hold on, let me get my monocle. I'll really be able to tell this.

• 2:38:52Sean Fennessey?

  I'm gonna zag on this. I got a very specific real wor- real world reason for that. Woke up early this morning to get it ready to come over here to do the pod. My daughter Alice is awake, and she's sitting at what we call the messy table where she, you know, draws and colors and stuff. And she's learning how to write. She's got her notebook open. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I get out of bed at seven o'clock in the morning. She's already awake, sitting at this table by herself, drawing in a notebook.

• 2:39:15Bill Simmons?

  I was worried you were gonna say Zodiac symbols.

• 2:39:17Sean Fennessey?

  Well, her, her drawing does somewhat recall some of the Zodiac cryptography. But you can already see at four and a half that she has like patterns with the way that she draws letters. She has a style. There is like a kind of perverse art to individual handwriting. I've never spent any time studying it. I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but just watching her develop, like literally learning from nothing to I can draw A, I can draw L, I can draw I, you could kind of see now this, this guy, Philip Baker Hall. He might've been a full-blown alcoholic for all we know.

• 2:39:52Bill Simmons?

  He's like, could a killer be ambidextrous? No, not, not in my 38 years.

• 2:39:57Chris Ryan?

  Sean's story reminds me of when I was first learning how to draw and like in kindergarten, one of the first things I kind of learned how to replicate were ninjas. I knew, I realized how to draw ninjas and in kindergarten I did like basically a mural of death of ninjas killing each other and they had to have me talk to like a child.

• 2:40:15Bill Simmons?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 2:40:17Sean Fennessey?

  You're like the kitten insidious.

• 2:40:20Chris Ryan?

  But it was just because it was the first thing, like an older kid was like, if you ever want to draw a ninja, this is how you do it. It was like three triangles and a guy like blood splurting out of his bed.

• 2:40:30Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:40:33Chris Ryan?

  The I am not Paul Avery button?

• 2:40:37Bill Simmons?

  That was a good one.

• 2:40:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:38Bill Simmons?

  I like that.

• 2:40:39Sean Fennessey?

  Houseboat.

• 2:40:42Sean Fennessey?

  To your point.

• 2:40:42Bill Simmons?

  It's not really memorabilia. I'll allow it.

• 2:40:46Bill Simmons?

  I'm going with the not want, the wooden dildo.

• 2:40:49Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:49Bill Simmons?

  That just seems like an awful artifact. Like imagine that behind Sean's head right now. What's that? It's a wooden dildo from Zodiac.

• 2:40:58Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe don't put it there.

• 2:40:59Chris Ryan?

  Maybe they can digitally insert it like Fincher would.

• 2:41:03Bill Simmons?

  Probably like one of the, uh, one of the original letters or all of the original letter recreations that they did for the Zodiac things would be a cool thing to have.

• 2:41:12Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, the, uh, one of the actual letters that were written.

• 2:41:14Bill Simmons?

  His scrapbook is cool too, the, his whole scrapbook of all the newspaper cast in the murders. That would be cool. Coach Finstock, Mr. Miyagi Award for best or worst life lesson.

• 2:41:25Chris Ryan?

  It's really a throwaway line in this movie, but it's not finished until you type it up. It's a really good life lesson.

• 2:41:32Bill Simmons?

  Which is basically movies aren't finished, they're abandoned.

• 2:41:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:35Bill Simmons?

  I had, don't ever give up figuring out a murder investigation, even if it costs you your family and your sanity, because it might lead to a David Fincher movie. Just keep going. Keep pushing.

• 2:41:48Bill Simmons?

  Fincher might be waiting for you. He loves obsession. Just keep going. Best, uh.

• 2:41:53Chris Ryan?

  Did you have a life lesson?

• 2:41:55Sean Fennessey?

  Can't top that.

• 2:41:57Bill Simmons?

  Best double feature?

• 2:41:59Chris Ryan?

  All the presidents, man.

• 2:42:01Sean Fennessey?

  Dirty Harry.

• 2:42:02Bill Simmons?

  I had Dirty Harry. I want to go, after this movie, I need a change of pacer. I'd go Dirty Harry first, then I would do this.

• 2:42:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, Dirty Harry is the exciting version of this story that is solved. Zodiac is the real version of the story that is unsolvable.

• 2:42:19Bill Simmons?

  It is, I never really fully realized that till I was doing the research, how much Dirty Harry kind of informed, um.

• 2:42:26Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't it Scorpio in Dirty Harry and then so close to Zodiac and?

• 2:42:30Bill Simmons?

  How they kind of just ripped off Zodiac and made Dirty Harry with it, with Clint Eastwood.

• 2:42:34Chris Ryan?

  It's just, it's also such a different, like, you know, there was just so much more local media back then, so the idea that Toski would be like this character in the newspapers and be a character based on him in the Tales from the City columns and that bullet and Dirty Harry would have like his gun style and stuff like that.

• 2:42:52Sean Fennessey?

  So I was watching some interviews with Toski and Ruffalo's performance doesn't really sound like him. You know, Ruffalo does that like, what, what did you say? What do you mean by that? Like that kind of whispery, kind of chattery style? And Toski talks more like a lot of cops that I knew growing up, which were just like, kind of like, what do you mean, buddy? Come on over here, you know, like, kind of like Metropolis detective guy. And it sounds like what Ruffalo is doing is like, I haven't had my coffee yet, Dirty Harry. Like, he kinda is doing the Clint Eastwood voice. The like, well, do ya punk in his voice? So it's this weird thing where like, those movies are in such harmony together that even in the

• 2:43:35Sean Fennessey?

  performance of Toski, and he met Toski, he like spent time with him for the role, but he's not trying to do an impression of him. It's really interesting.

• 2:43:41Bill Simmons?

  It's interesting also that they're, they're police officers, but we never see him actually in an action scene or anything.

• 2:43:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:47Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:47Bill Simmons?

  We never see him like-

• 2:43:49Chris Ryan?

  The most cop thing he does is the taxi cab crime scene.

• 2:43:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 2:43:52Bill Simmons?

  We never see him like, wait, who's that? And like, dude, chasing, holding the gun up.

• 2:43:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:57Bill Simmons?

  I don't think he ever holds a gun in the movie.

• 2:43:59Chris Ryan?

  No, he has it holstered, but it's-

• 2:44:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's got that easy access holster.

• 2:44:03Bill Simmons?

  Who in the movie?

• 2:44:03Chris Ryan?

  Fincher.

• 2:44:04Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed. Right?

• 2:44:07Bill Simmons?

  Pretty easily Fincher.

• 2:44:08Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:44:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I mean, did the Zodiac Killer win the movie?

• 2:44:13Chris Ryan?

  Cause he got away.

• 2:44:14Sean Fennessey?

  Well, cause his myth is, is furnished by this film.

• 2:44:20Bill Simmons?

  I think it's notable how much this movie's still on. Like, I feel like it's been, I know it's leaving Netflix, maybe at the end of January. And I'm sure it'll come back. But it feels like people continue to consume this, which was ironically one of my cases with Limitless when we did the 50 most rewatchable. I looked at where Limitless was just streaming right now on that Just Watch app. And it was on like, Amazon, Paramount, like it's literally everywhere because there's a reason people keep clicking on this.

• 2:44:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 2:44:53Bill Simmons?

  I never, when I saw Zodiac in 07, I never thought that would be the destiny of this movie as a rewatchable in your life movie.

• 2:45:00Chris Ryan?

  Usually what we would call a rewatchable is something that's like 90 minutes to two hours that has like recognizable peaks and valleys that you can be like, oh, I want to stay for this, or I can leave for that.

• 2:45:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:11Chris Ryan?

  And with Zodiac, it's almost more like prestige television, where you could watch this in 40 minute bursts if you wanted to. There are little breaks here to like, you know, with the fade out, you can step away if you want to and start it again the next day. So I wonder whether or not some of its success is its relationship to what would become Mindhunter and the way that Fincher wanted to tell this kind of story.

• 2:45:34Sean Fennessey?

  There's something else related to it too, that I, I kinda meant to say at the beginning of the conversation is- It's hard to do most rewatchable scene for the movie because the scenes are so short. There are not a lot of scenes where you're like, oh, I was here for 10 minutes.

• 2:45:46Chris Ryan?

  The cutting style of this movie reminds me a little bit of Oppenheimer and later period Nolan, that where it's like really dense, important scenes that are like 30 seconds long.

• 2:45:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. It feels like elaborate montage, the whole movie. It's a funky movie, you know, like it's not like, the point you just made about how Ruffalo's never running with a gun, like that's obviously a very intentional choice, but it's so different from almost any other movie of its kind.

• 2:46:14Bill Simmons?

  Do we ever see Downey typing?

• 2:46:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:16Sean Fennessey?

  We just see him at the desk.

• 2:46:17Chris Ryan?

  Calls him a latent homosexual.

• 2:46:19Bill Simmons?

  All right, Craig, what's your take? You never saw this movie.

• 2:46:21Speaker 03

  Never saw this movie. I would argue, I know you said you like to watch this with no pants on alone. I think this is a decent family watch. I think it's a generational connector. Because I watched, I was texting my dad as I watched it. I watched it with Liz's parents and there's a lot of like, they described to us how things worked back in the day. We were asking questions, but it was made in 07, so there's modern filmmaking to it. I'm more familiar with Fincher films than my parents or her parents, and yet they knew everything about living in California in like the 70s and 80s. So actually, and it's not really as gory as I thought it was going to be.

• 2:46:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:53Speaker 03

  Even the deaths, like you said earlier, they're not sensationalized or romantic at all.

• 2:46:57Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 2:46:57Speaker 03

  They're a little tame, at least to what I'm used to and what I expected coming into a Fincher film.

• 2:47:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:02Speaker 03

  I think it's why, like you said, you were a little bit lukewarm when you first saw it. I feel like you do kind of back into this movie because you go in expecting something completely different. And then now, I mean, even hearing you guys talk, I'm like, this really, it felt like creepy All the President's Men.

• 2:47:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:16Speaker 03

  And you end up respecting that and it's a movie you really want to dig into. You have to turn your phone upside down. And after the movie was over, we talked about it for 30 minutes and it's almost a puzzle that is not meant to be solved.

• 2:47:27Bill Simmons?

  Family movies, Zodiac.

• 2:47:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. It kind of is, I think.

• 2:47:29Sean Fennessey?

  It brings the fam together.

• 2:47:31Speaker 03

  Because it's not really a puzzle. I mean, half the time I didn't know what was going on and we kind of discussed how all these names and all these connections were pretty blurry.

• 2:47:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:38Speaker 03

  We had trouble with that and we realized this is more just about detectives.

• 2:47:42Chris Ryan?

  The turn when it goes to Graysmith and the way that they leap to Marshall is like, you have to really be dialed in on like, pieces of paper that they've got or like quick conversations that they have.

• 2:47:52Sean Fennessey?

  So since I want to see it again soon, you think I should show it to Alice tonight? What do you think we should do?

• 2:47:57Speaker 03

  Not the John Holmes film, maybe this one?

• 2:47:59Sean Fennessey?

  Got it.

• 2:48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. But this is totally a movie.

• 2:48:02Bill Simmons?

  Craig's asking his mother in law, what's the wooden dildos back then? Did they really have those?

• 2:48:06Speaker 03

  Well, one thing I texted my dad, who was a police officer, I was like, there's a moment where they go up to this thing that's literally says police telephone on the street.

• 2:48:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 2:48:14Speaker 03

  And there was a phone in there. I've never seen that before in my life.

• 2:48:16Chris Ryan?

  Did he say that those were?

• 2:48:17Speaker 03

  He's like, oh yeah, those were a thing. He's like, right when I started, they basically disappeared when people got cell phones.

• 2:48:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:22Speaker 03

  But yeah, never seen those before. But this movie was great.

• 2:48:25Bill Simmons?

  Huge thumbs up.

• 2:48:26Speaker 03

  Big thumbs up. And it's like, it's something you need to revisit. Like, I already want to go back and now watch this again.

• 2:48:31Bill Simmons?

  All right, so strong. So we had another 48 hours. He liked that one. Just One of the Guys was bad. So now we've, now we've rallied back.

• 2:48:38Sean Fennessey?

  I got the rare, like panicked text from Craig about Just One of the Guys on like a Friday afternoon where he was like, hey, man, just like level with me. What's going on with this one?

• 2:48:47Bill Simmons?

  That's it for the first rewatchables on Netflix. Sadly, uh, these aren't going to be on YouTube anymore, but happily they're going to be on Netflix.

• 2:48:54Chris Ryan?

  I think we blasted past the running time of the film.

• 2:48:56Bill Simmons?

  We did that.

• 2:48:57Chris Ryan?

  Podcast running time.

• 2:48:58Bill Simmons?

  Also, uh, if you have Netflix, you can click on the watch list thing for all of our podcasts, but especially, this one's once a week. So anytime we do a new one, it'll just pop up on the thing. And we're going to try to do Netflix movies over the course of the next like two months at least. So follow me on Twitter because I will tell you what's coming or my podcast, Bill Simmons podcast.

• 2:49:19Sean Fennessey?

  What's coming next?

• 2:49:20Bill Simmons?

  Let you know. There, I don't know what the order is, but I know, uh, we're circling wild things pretty hard. Ace Ventura, which we've never done.

• 2:49:29Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 2:49:29Bill Simmons?

  That's on there. And then, uh,

• 2:49:30Sean Fennessey?

  Two, two, two, two formative films.

• 2:49:33Bill Simmons?

  The recast away is looming.

• 2:49:35Chris Ryan?

  But is it going to be a solo recast away?

• 2:49:37Bill Simmons?

  It will not be a solo because I did Cast Away by myself during COVID. Which I still feel like was my 81 point game.

• 2:49:44Sean Fennessey?

  That was your apex mountain.

• 2:49:45Bill Simmons?

  Kobe has his 81 point game. I have solo Cast Away during COVID.

• 2:49:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:49Bill Simmons?

  Um, but we need to redo that one at some point. But we have a lot of good ones. There might be a Michael Mann movie doing live in Los Angeles.

• 2:49:56Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 2:49:57Bill Simmons?

  Next one, but, uh, that's it for rewatch.

• 2:49:59Sean Fennessey?

  The key, live?

• 2:50:00Chris Ryan?

  It's Black, it's Black Hat, actually. Yeah, we're going to explain it.

• 2:50:02Bill Simmons?

  And then, um, Big Picture, which is also going to be on Netflix.

• 2:50:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:07Bill Simmons?

  And then a lot of rumors about live right after the Oscars.

• 2:50:10Sean Fennessey?

  So some rumors.

• 2:50:11Bill Simmons?

  Could happen.

• 2:50:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Where's it going to be taking place? Am I going to be inside of the Dolby Theater?

• 2:50:16Bill Simmons?

  Literally might be here.

• 2:50:17Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Will I be onstage receiving an Oscar live podding?

• 2:50:20Bill Simmons?

  I was very upset about Joel Edgerton. I get it. It was a loaded category.

• 2:50:24Sean Fennessey?

  You can't be surprised.

• 2:50:25Bill Simmons?

  It just hurt my feelings.

• 2:50:26Sean Fennessey?

  You just can't be surprised.

• 2:50:27Bill Simmons?

  That was my, that was my number one that I, I was like, ah.

• 2:50:30Chris Ryan?

  Were you happy about F1 getting best pick?

• 2:50:32Bill Simmons?

  I, they did, they put the one popcorn movie in, right?

• 2:50:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:35Bill Simmons?

  So that beat, what, Avatar?

• 2:50:38Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I, I, I, I thought Weapons would have been the choice because it was a little bit more critically acclaimed, but it made sense to me.

• 2:50:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, even if it was sacrificial.

• 2:50:45Bill Simmons?

  Glad people came around to my side on Weapons. Keep it out of the category.

• 2:50:49Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think, I don't think that's what happened.

• 2:50:51Bill Simmons?

  I think people, I think I started it.

• 2:50:53Sean Fennessey?

  You think because it wasn't nominated for best picture that everyone decided Weapons isn't good?

• 2:50:56Chris Ryan?

  Jesse Buckley nominated?

• 2:50:57Sean Fennessey?

  Here's the thing, when, when.

• 2:50:58Bill Simmons?

  Once I talked about it, Hammett a little bit, I think that really helped her campaign.

• 2:51:02Sean Fennessey?

  Nice job. Good, just good job. Did you get, did you get the check from Focus Features for pushing Hammett the way that you did?

• 2:51:06Chris Ryan?

  I would actually give you back.

• 2:51:08Bill Simmons?

  I was one of the first ones that said, wow, she was really great in that movie.

• 2:51:10Chris Ryan?

  I'll give you back a month of my salary if you get Jesse Buckley on your pod.

• 2:51:13Sean Fennessey?

  My god.

• 2:51:15Bill Simmons?

  I would love her.

• 2:51:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:16Sean Fennessey?

  She's amazing.

• 2:51:17Bill Simmons?

  She's great.

• 2:51:18Sean Fennessey?

  She's a great actress.

• 2:51:19Bill Simmons?

  Great job. Uh, Mescal was tough too, for supporting.

• 2:51:22Sean Fennessey?

  What about Mescal?

• 2:51:23Bill Simmons?

  And Mescal. I call him Mescal.

• 2:51:26Chris Ryan?

  It's like he plays second base for the Angels.

• 2:51:30Sean Fennessey?

  Luis Mescal?

• 2:51:31Bill Simmons?

  He just signed with the Rangers.

• 2:51:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Padres right fielder.

• 2:51:33Chris Ryan?

  Did you see Paul Mescal, big Red Sox fan?

• 2:51:36Bill Simmons?

  I, is he really actually that?

• 2:51:38Sean Fennessey?

  What? Paul Mescal's a big Red Sox fan? He's from fucking England.

• 2:51:41Chris Ryan?

  He got obsessed with the Red Sox. He said, in an interview.

• 2:51:46Sean Fennessey?

  So lame.

• 2:51:47Bill Simmons?

  What was your number one snub? I didn't hear your pod yet.

• 2:51:50Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, what was my number one snub?

• 2:51:53Bill Simmons?

  Accident and?

• 2:51:54Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it was just an accident, I think was a movie that people thought was gonna go there, but I didn't predict that. Um.

• 2:51:58Chris Ryan?

  No other choice?

• 2:52:00Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I didn't, I never thought it would get in. It's tough because it's like, versus, predictions versus movies that I liked. You know, I don't, I don't know if there was like a massive overlook.

• 2:52:07Chris Ryan?

  Are you surprised?

• 2:52:08Sean Fennessey?

  In the act, I mean, Chase Infinity, maybe for one battle after another, was probably the one that most people thought was gonna happen.

• 2:52:12Bill Simmons?

  Loaded category.

• 2:52:13Chris Ryan?

  Plemmons?

• 2:52:14Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, loaded category, but also I thought just category fraud that she was, she was supporting. I mean, Plemmons was great in Begonia. Did you watch Begonia?

• 2:52:25Bill Simmons?

  I did.

• 2:52:26Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's too bad.

• 2:52:28Bill Simmons?

  What'd you think?

• 2:52:31Bill Simmons?

  There's certain movies that just aren't my kind of movie.

• 2:52:33Sean Fennessey?

  You're not a Yorgos guy.

• 2:52:34Chris Ryan?

  Me neither.

• 2:52:34Bill Simmons?

  I'm not, I am 100% not.

• 2:52:36Sean Fennessey?

  And you're out on Yorgos too.

• 2:52:37Chris Ryan?

  I do not like Yorgos movies.

• 2:52:39Bill Simmons?

  I am in the, I appreciate, I appreciate Yorgos exists.

• 2:52:43Sean Fennessey?

  Look at you guys, like, you're horny for each other right now.

• 2:52:45Chris Ryan?

  No, it's not that.

• 2:52:45Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 2:52:46Chris Ryan?

  It's, it's just, it's funny.

• 2:52:47Bill Simmons?

  I'm glad it exists.

• 2:52:47Chris Ryan?

  We're on minute, three hour and six minutes.

• 2:52:50Sean Fennessey?

  Is it because he tends to center women in his films? Is that the issue?

• 2:52:53Chris Ryan?

  Ah, just, no, it's not.

• 2:52:56Sean Fennessey?

  No, okay.

• 2:52:57Chris Ryan?

  It's not.

• 2:52:57Bill Simmons?

  Not my cup of tea.

• 2:52:58Sean Fennessey?

  Got it.

• 2:52:59Bill Simmons?

  Not my cup of tea.

• 2:53:00Sean Fennessey?

  So when Emma Stone's character in Poor Things kind of realized her agency as a woman.

• 2:53:04Chris Ryan?

  Do you like Yorgos movies?

• 2:53:05Sean Fennessey?

  I do, yeah. I had him on The Big Picture for Begonia, which I thought was a cool movie. Not like the best movie of the year, but I thought it was cool.

• 2:53:14Bill Simmons?

  CR?

• 2:53:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:15Bill Simmons?

  Great to see you as always.

• 2:53:16Chris Ryan?

  Great to see you, man.

• 2:53:17Bill Simmons?

  Sean Fantasy, great to see you as always.

• 2:53:19Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Bill, you too.

• 2:53:20Bill Simmons?

  Thanks to Gahow. Thanks to Craig, thanks to Eduardo as well. We will see you next week on the Rewatchments.

• 2:53:38Bill Simmons?

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