Inland Empire with David Rees

Only on Blank Check would an episode about David Lynch’s deeply destabilizing INLAND EMPIRE turn into a heartfelt celebration of creativity and the human experience. David Rees joins us and brings receipts - including literal receipts for every movie ticket he purchased in 2007 and his high school newspaper review of Twin Peaks (a pan) - as we gush about David Lynch’s singular position in American culture. Plus, we delve into tons of Laura Dern context, discuss dreams where you inhabit a different person, and spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the Snuffy Smith comic strip. Listen to Election Profit Makers https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/election-profit-makers/id1136826256 Watch DickTown on Hulu https://www.hulu.com/series/845eca18-d4d6-46a3-a575-212f4b98fea3 Watch Going Deep with David Rees on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU1s1j3e6eU The Box Office Game is Sponsored by Regal Cinemas: Sign up for Regal Unlimited today http://blankcheckpod.com/regal and get 10% off your 3 month subscription when using code BLANKCHECK Sign up for Check Book https://blankcheckpod.substack.com/welcome, the Blank Check newsletter featuring even more “real nerdy shit” to feed your pop culture obsession. Dossier excerpts, film biz AND burger reports, and even more exclusive content you won’t want to miss out on. Join our Patreon for franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. http://www.patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter https://x.com/blankcheckpod?lang=en, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/blankcheckpod/?hl=en, Threads https://www.threads.net/@blankcheckpod?xmt=AQGzctAh4mbWTwYzCV1pzNT6AMV9o99EOfymi8TLR5mTde0 and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/blankcheckpodcast/! Buy some real nerdy merch https://kinshipgoods.com/blankcheck Connect with other Blankies on our Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/s/gpcOkQr8Sv or Discord https://discord.gg/Q6YGSR3JrA For anything else, check out BlankCheckPod.com https://www.blankcheckpod.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:02Griffin Newman?

  David.

• 0:03David Sims?

  Yep.

• 0:03Griffin Newman?

  We did a live show.

• 0:04David Sims?

  Yeah, remember?

• 0:05Griffin Newman?

  Ranking Scorsese at the Bell House in Brooklyn. We did the definitive power ranking of Martin Scorsese things.

• 0:12David Sims?

  Uh, it was so fun. Uh, it was very silly.

• 0:15Griffin Newman?

  Ben and Marie were with us and they're with us right now.

• 0:18David Sims?

  Yeah, hey.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Hey, everyone, or should I say, oh?

• 0:20David Sims?

  Oh.

• 0:22Griffin Newman?

  And thanks to our friends at Dynasty Typewriter. It was livestreamed for the first time ever. But also, the replay is still up there, but only until October 30th.

• 0:31David Sims?

  So just a few more days. Yes. You can get it at dynasty.tv. Dynasty.tv. It's $20. We had a blast and the Spreadmaster really got to work. Oh, yeah. I was moving things around.

• 0:45Griffin Newman?

  Laptop was on.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'd have seen you that happy.

• 0:48Griffin Newman?

  You were thrilled. You were like a pick and share.

• 0:50David Sims?

  I was locked in.

• 0:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, very locked in and you were funny.

• 0:53David Sims?

  Thank you. You were funny. You were also funny.

• 0:56Griffin Newman?

  Oh, thank you.

• 0:57David Sims?

  And if you want to see like, you know, Griffin's shine box on camera, it's the only way to see it.

• 1:02Griffin Newman?

  You might see me shine Marie's shoes.

• 1:04David Sims?

  Exactly.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're into that sort of content.

• 1:07Griffin Newman?

  If that gets you off.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10David Sims?

  So once again, that's at dynasty.tv.

• 1:39Griffin Newman?

  Some podcasts change. Well, they don't change, they reveal. They reveal themselves over time, you know?

• 1:47Griffin Newman?

  Kind of a low energy.

• 1:49David Sims?

  You didn't want to do like brutal fucking podcasting, something like that. I'm trying to think of like, it is true that even though Inland Empire has lots of dialogue, it's, it's not like a movie where I'm like so quotable.

• 2:02Griffin Newman?

  Bam, I kicked him straight in the podcast so hard they go crawling into his brain for a refuge. He went down like a $2 whore.

• 2:09David Sims?

  Um.

• 2:10Griffin Newman?

  I was the other, there are consequences to one's podcasts and there certainly would be constant podcasts to wrong action. I fucking blew with whatever gives a shit. What would you do?

• 2:21David Sims?

  Sims. I would just do this. Fucking podcasting.

• 2:24Griffin Newman?

  Okay. See Ben's right. This is the right way to open with a quote for this movie is an eerie stare.

• 2:30David Sims?

  Yeah. Can you do it for me? Thank you. And with the teeth out, you're doing the trying to do the teeth.

• 2:34Griffin Newman?

  And just imagine like holding a light bulb two inches below your chin. Just blowing your face out.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  You could say, hey, this feels just like dialogue from our podcast.

• 2:45Griffin Newman?

  That is good.

• 2:47Griffin Newman?

  How many times have you seen this movie?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Three times.

• 2:50Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:50David Sims?

  I've seen it four times.

• 2:52Griffin Newman?

  Well, it's not a competition.

• 2:53David Sims?

  Well, you kind of set it up like one.

• 2:55Griffin Newman?

  No, because I feel like our guest today. The movies we've had you on for, you're very particular, but when you come on, it has to be kind of a totemic film. We always.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  At least to me it does.

• 3:05Griffin Newman?

  Door is wide open. And there are other things we've kicked around that you've almost done, but it feels like it has to be the right kind of thing. But I also feel like despite the fact that you were a man who was very thorough.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:16Griffin Newman?

  Dare I say can be obsessive within certain passions and interests.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:20Griffin Newman?

  I think there is a ceiling on how many times you watch a movie. So even the movies that are the most impactful for you. I feel like you've never gone beyond five. Is that right?

• 3:30David Sims?

  You're not really a big re watcher.

• 3:32Griffin Newman?

  Twenty eight days later episode, I feel like you said that was the most you've ever watched.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  And that was at five times.

• 3:37Griffin Newman?

  That's my memory.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  So I think I've seen, yeah, twenty eight days later, five times. And I think, I don't think I've ever seen a movie six times, but I think there's multiple movies I've seen five times.

• 3:48David Sims?

  Not even as a kid, you wouldn't watch like, you know, whatever, some comedy.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Well, we didn't have a VCR for a long time.

• 3:56David Sims?

  Sure. And you probably didn't have like cable.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  No, my parents did not pay for it.

• 4:00David Sims?

  That's I.

• 4:01Griffin Newman?

  So no control. You're at the mercy of, of the network programmer.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 4:06David Sims?

  Flipping around, watching the same movie. Movies over and over.

• 4:08Griffin Newman?

  But there was no like going to see Star Wars six times in theaters.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  No, that would have been an indulgence that would have been beyond my parents imagination. But I wonder over the course of my life, have I seen Star Wars like all the way through five times?

• 4:22David Sims?

  Possibly, but then we're not, we're not talking about like, right about that of like, yeah, through osmosis, some movies are always playing.

• 4:29Griffin Newman?

  Intentionality, I guess is what we're asking.

• 4:31David Sims?

  I like, I like the way you're putting it of like, right, you go into your parents as a young person and being like, I'd like to see Star Wars again. And they being them being like, you already saw that.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  But you've already seen, you've already seen it once. The tech is exhausted. There's nothing more to see.

• 4:44David Sims?

  Like the outlay happened.

• 4:46Griffin Newman?

  Right. It was like, we have Star Wars at home, except it was you have Star Wars in your memory.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Right. You can watch it whenever you want.

• 4:52Griffin Newman?

  That's why we paid for it the first time. So it goes in there.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  No, I, I saw Inland Empire, the first time I, the first and third times I saw Inland Empire were two great, great experiences with movies.

• 5:07David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  I mean, when I, when I, when we were talking about David Lynch and, and you said, are you interested in any of these? And I was like, I would do Inland Empire. Part of what I was thinking was I have a memory of the first time I saw this movie as being so

• 5:23Speaker 03

  fucking great. And since I agreed to do it, I was like, well, now I have to do my due diligence. I should rewatch it. I haven't seen it since it came out in the theaters.

• 5:32Griffin Newman?

  The fabled third time.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  And I saw it the second time.

• 5:35Griffin Newman?

  Oh.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  With friends, which was good. And then the third time was, well, I can't wait to talk about the third time because the third time was really special. And I related, I related to the movie in a way that I've never related to another movie. And for me, it took the movie to a whole new level where all of a sudden like this is my, this is my favorite thing David Lynch has ever done.

• 5:56David Sims?

  Then it's great that we have you here on what podcast?

• 5:59Griffin Newman?

  Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.

• 6:02David Sims?

  I'm David.

• 6:02Griffin Newman?

  It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby. This is a mini series on the films of David Lynch. It is called Twin Pods Firecast with me.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 6:23Griffin Newman?

  But I should say it is a mini series on the films and television series of David Lynch, because today we are talking about, to date, his final theatrical film. His final feature film. But this mini series is obviously far from over.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Wait, are you guys doing Twin Peaks?

• 6:39David Sims?

  Of course.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  The whole, all of it?

• 6:41David Sims?

  It kinda can't not, you can't do David Lynch and not do Twin Peaks, you know?

• 6:45Speaker 03

  Are you doing one episode or episode?

• 6:47David Sims?

  No, we are doing, no. Six total episodes on Twin Peaks.

• 6:51Griffin Newman?

  Plus, wow, plus Firewalk with me.

• 6:54David Sims?

  That's right, that's right. So seven, I suppose.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  You guys are doing a complete rewatch of the whole shebang.

• 6:59David Sims?

  That is correct. We have already.

• 7:00Griffin Newman?

  First time watch. For me, first time watch.

• 7:02David Sims?

  And for Ben, for most of Twin Peaks. For most of, right.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Do you know what I have here, Griffin? Well, we'll get to this.

• 7:09Griffin Newman?

  Okay, we'll get to that.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  But I have, I have someone else's recollections of the first time they ever watched Twin Peaks. When it aired.

• 7:16Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  So we can get into that.

• 7:18David Sims?

  We should talk about that.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Compare notes.

• 7:20David Sims?

  But yes, we are doing season one, season two.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  And the return.

• 7:23David Sims?

  We're splitting the return into four episodes.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:25David Sims?

  It's just quite a dense.

• 7:26Griffin Newman?

  It's interesting, because any other, I guess, look, when we did Wachowski and Cameron Crowe.

• 7:32David Sims?

  We did do their television shows.

• 7:34Griffin Newman?

  The Wachowskis and Cameron Crowe, and that those two mini series, the most recent product they had done was TV. And we did the seasons of their now largely forgotten TV shows.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 7:43Griffin Newman?

  And then we kinda went, we never want to do TV ever again. And so we made that a rule, and obviously, the Wachowskis and Cameron Crowe hasn't made another thing. But the Wachowskis did. This is such a bizarre example of like, with other people, we'd be like, well, the series ends with England Empire. TV doesn't count.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:00David Sims?

  Yeah. But I mean, obviously, it's also, look, we did the Wachowskis and Cameron Crowe, and they didn't even like, direct every episode of. But obviously, Twin Peaks: The Return is, you know, all directed by David Lynch. He made it all as.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  And it won an award at a film festival, right? Like at Venice or something, they gave it to him, or it was on SAG and Sound as best movie of the year.

• 8:19David Sims?

  We'll talk about it, but right, some people now try to sort of claim it as a movie. I used to be very resistant to that. Now that I know how he made it, I'm a little more open to it. He didn't. Quite make it as traditional television.

• 8:30Griffin Newman?

  Look, we're doing four episodes on The Return and one of them will obviously be entirely devoted to whether or not it's okay to log it on Letterboxd. We'll spend a full episode litigating that. It's an interesting conversation.

• 8:42David Sims?

  People love that kind of film analysis.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Can you not put TV shows on Letterboxd or mini series?

• 8:49David Sims?

  David.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  What?

• 8:50David Sims?

  It's, it's, it's a contentious topic amongst fidgety nerds.

• 8:54Griffin Newman?

  We're, we're, I mean, we're doing the bit now.

• 8:57David Sims?

  Largely you cannot.

• 8:58Griffin Newman?

  So annoying about this.

• 8:59David Sims?

  Largely television is not on Letterboxd because it's quite unwieldy, but certain projects are.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Projects.

• 9:05David Sims?

  Such as Twin Peaks The Return.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  That's allowed to be on Letterboxd?

• 9:08David Sims?

  Well, allowed is a funny, it's a, you know, if you can smush stuff into their database, then, you know, it's not like Letterboxd has total control over this.

• 9:17Griffin Newman?

  People still fight this with the urgency of like, Donald Trump is lowering the esteem of the office. He is setting a precedent we will never be able to revert.

• 9:26David Sims?

  If I cannot log Twin Peaks The Return 50 times on Letterboxd, you know, why am I?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  But Letterboxd is mostly for feature films. It does, you can't like go and look up like.

• 9:35Griffin Newman?

  Here's an interesting thing.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  CSI New York on Letterboxd.

• 9:37Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  It's not like IMDb where everything, okay, got it.

• 9:41Griffin Newman?

  But here's an interesting thing on Letterboxd, you cannot log Twin Peaks. You can log Twin Peaks, the European cut. Of the pilot.

• 9:51David Sims?

  You can, which was sort of a theatrical.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 9:54David Sims?

  Yeah, yes. Northwest Passage it's called.

• 9:57Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 9:58David Sims?

  The pilot.

• 9:58Griffin Newman?

  So usually there's that kind of delineation, but then short films are on there and TV movies are on there and it starts to get slippery. That's not what we're talking about.

• 10:07David Sims?

  And you love Twin Peaks, but we're not here to discuss.

• 10:09Griffin Newman?

  Today we're talking about Inland Empire, his last feature film. And as of the time we're recording this, there's been a lot of hand wringing recently about him saying that he, due to health, cannot. Be on set, making a feature film away from his home, which people took as a retirement notice. And then he put out a press release saying, I am not retired. I will never retire.

• 10:30David Sims?

  He also said he had quit smoking and then lovingly described the experience of setting tobacco on fire.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Setting them on fire.

• 10:39David Sims?

  Me want to spark up.

• 10:41Griffin Newman?

  We were texting. I was like, this is the best argument for cigarettes I've ever read. They sound incredible.

• 10:47David Sims?

  While he is saying like, I have not touched a cigarette in two years.

• 10:50Griffin Newman?

  Like I barely can leave my home. If I take three steps, I almost crumble.

• 10:55David Sims?

  I shouldn't laugh, obviously.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  I think, I think the press release ended with the immortal sentence, I'm filled with happiness and I will never retire.

• 11:02Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  It's like so glorious.

• 11:05David Sims?

  Um, but clearly, you know, he may not make a traditional feature film again. We don't know. He's 78 years old and he does have emphysema. And who knows what the future holds for David Lynch.

• 11:14Griffin Newman?

  Let's congratulate Ben Hozier on quitting smoking. By the way, I saw Ben hovering around the mic.

• 11:20David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Griffin Newman?

  That press release hit you hard.

• 11:22David Sims?

  It did. It was hard to read because here's the thing, it's a terrible habit, but damn, is it fucking cool.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Can you imagine how many cigarettes he smoked?

• 11:31Griffin Newman?

  That's like, no one makes it look cooler than.

• 11:32David Sims?

  When it was like David Lynch's emphysema, I was like, that's not, that's like saying like the sky is, but like I've never not seen a picture of that man. Like he's always smoking.

• 11:42Griffin Newman?

  Have any of you watched that David Lynch, the art life documentary?

• 11:45David Sims?

  I saw that. Yeah. Right.

• 11:47Griffin Newman?

  There's the, I believe the opening credits play out over a static, like three minute shot of him just like lovingly smoking a cigarette while sitting back and looking at the painting.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Is that the?

• 11:59Griffin Newman?

  That he just finished. And I'm just like, great. This is the fundamental image of him as a guy.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Is that the thing where he, I was thinking about this when I was thinking about Inland Empire. He's, he's, he's like, if you want to know if a work of art is finished, you take a stick and you tie a ball to the stick on a piece of string and you point it at the painting, the stick will tell you. If the painting is finished and then he does it and you just wa- is that what you're talking about? That thing? Cause I know I've seen a video of that.

• 12:31Griffin Newman?

  Is it in that thing? Or is that just another? There's been so many of these things.

• 12:34David Sims?

  He's making rice? Is that what he's making? Or fried egg or something like, you know, he has his cooking videos? I don't know, man.

• 12:41Griffin Newman?

  Look, he's the king of content. The man's been putting out ten, he's been pitching ten for decades. Our guest today, returning to the show, from Going Deep with David Rees, a show I mistitled recently in an episode.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 12:56Griffin Newman?

  I combined it with How To with John Wilson.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  I'll take it. I need all the help I can get. That was, his was a hit show.

• 13:02Griffin Newman?

  Is, is, I have to ask this every time you're on the show. Is it streaming anywhere? Is it back anywhere? Do we know?

• 13:07Speaker 03

  I think you can watch, I think you can watch some of it on Amazon.

• 13:11Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  And some of it on YouTube.

• 13:13Griffin Newman?

  I'll take that.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:14Griffin Newman?

  David Rees.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  And Dick Town starring Griffin.

• 13:17Griffin Newman?

  Dick Town?

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:17Griffin Newman?

  Well, and starring David Rees and John Hutch.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:20David Sims?

  Season one is on YouTube, for sure.

• 13:22Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:23Griffin Newman?

  Thank God.

• 13:23David Sims?

  Not sure what season. Uh, David Rees is here. Hi, David. How are you doing?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  I'm good. It's nice to be in, uh, it's nice to be face to face with all you guys.

• 13:30Griffin Newman?

  In the realm.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  After almost two years.

• 13:33Griffin Newman?

  More. Well.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Last time was, uh, his wedding.

• 13:35Griffin Newman?

  Yes, but not, uh, seeing you in person. It's been two years. I thought you were saying.

• 13:40David Sims?

  Season two is on Amazon. It's all on Amazon.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Great.

• 13:42David Sims?

  Purchasable.

• 13:43Griffin Newman?

  Episode in person, I believe, has been five years? Is that possible?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  I think the last time we did one, it was, I was on a Zoom.

• 13:50Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So it's been a long time. Whatever the last time, yeah.

• 13:53Griffin Newman?

  A sight for sore eyes.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  You too. I like your mustache.

• 13:56Griffin Newman?

  Hey, you know what? I was shaving and I was like trimming around and I decided to keep the stash and I was like, the test of this is gonna be if Rees approves.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 14:05Griffin Newman?

  That was my thought. I was like, if this works with David, I'm holding on to it for a bit.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:08Griffin Newman?

  And if he doesn't like it or he doesn't mention it, gone.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  I'm into it.

• 14:12Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  I'm into it.

• 14:13Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 14:14David Sims?

  So the last one you did in person with us, was it Spirited Away?

• 14:16Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 14:17David Sims?

  Yeah, right.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  And you were in a different studio than I remember. You were in Manhattan.

• 14:20Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:22David Sims?

  Um, and since then, right? You've come on for 28 days later and uh, something else, right?

• 14:27Griffin Newman?

  There were a couple of episodes that almost happened, didn't. If we wanna fucking crack open the books. Mammy Vice was a thought.

• 14:34David Sims?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right.

• 14:35Griffin Newman?

  You were gonna do one of the Buster Keaton episodes?

• 14:37David Sims?

  Oh, that's right. But then we, then you wanted 28 Days Later. So we, right. Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. Cause I live kinda near Buster Keaton's old studios.

• 14:43David Sims?

  And you love that guy.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  I do. Yeah.

• 14:46David Sims?

  So do I.

• 14:47Griffin Newman?

  So do I.

• 14:48David Sims?

  Nah, you don't think he's so great.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Oh, you weren't, you weren't into him?

• 14:51David Sims?

  No, he's, he spirited us doing Buster Keaton. He's a huge fan.

• 14:54Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. But I'm fascinated that, yeah, you'd only seen this once. It had a massive impact on you. And then in your two revisits in prep for the podcast, it grew.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  So the first, yeah. So I brought a couple of documents with.

• 15:09Griffin Newman?

  Carefully organized.

• 15:10David Sims?

  Classic, David.

• 15:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 15:11David Sims?

  Couple of documents, big notebook filled with notes.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  You know, I gotta show up with all my paperwork, right?

• 15:16Griffin Newman?

  It looks like an evidence layout, like when they take all the knives out of the Joker's pocket.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  This movie is weird.

• 15:21David Sims?

  Now, you say you were at the bodega at 5:30 PM. That's what you're saying?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  So I have three documents. Um, I'll, why don't I list the documents and you tell me in which order you would like me to present my case?

• 15:33Griffin Newman?

  Fantastic.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  The first is a green spiral notebook filled with, I guess, six pages of, of sloppy notes that represent my reaction and recording of the second time.

• 15:42Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  I watched Inland Empire.

• 15:44Griffin Newman?

  And what was that? Can you, can we tie that back?

• 15:46Speaker 03

  That was last week.

• 15:46Griffin Newman?

  Okay. Okay. Wow.

• 15:49David Sims?

  Wait, last week was the second time?

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yep. Second and third times. I watched it for a second time and then among my friends, a particular decision was made. And then two days later, we watched it for a third and transcendent time.

• 16:00Griffin Newman?

  We got a great story on deck.

• 16:02David Sims?

  You hadn't seen it before.

• 16:04Griffin Newman?

  No, I watched it last night.

• 16:04David Sims?

  This is the one you've never seen.

• 16:05Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Exhibit B is, uh, so I, so I saw.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  I saw it when it was released theatrically in North Carolina. I was in Chapel Hill in the spring of 2007. I think technically it came out in 2006.

• 16:21David Sims?

  It came out December 06, but a slow, small release. So yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  So I saw it on, I have the date. I saw it on the 10th of March, 2007, at the Carolina Theater in Durham.

• 16:36Griffin Newman?

  A day after my sister's ninth birthday.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  The Carolina Theater is a grand old theater.

• 16:41David Sims?

  Yeah, gorgeous.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  And it was the perfect place to see this movie because it was like 10% capacity. You know, it felt like.

• 16:49David Sims?

  It's like you're at Club Silencio.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 16:51David Sims?

  Right, yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  And I went in absolutely cold. It's one of my favorite memories of going into a movie absolutely cold. All I knew was David Lynch had a new movie out. I'd seen Mulholland Drive.

• 17:01David Sims?

  Right.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Probably once in the theater and once on VHS or DVD. I like David Lynch. As Exhibit C will point out, I will prove, I beg your pardon, I have a longstanding relationship with David Lynch.

• 17:13Griffin Newman?

  I almost feel like we lead with Exhibit C because it feels like that's the earliest point.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Oh, you want to go chronolo- okay, forget Exhibit B, forget, okay.

• 17:20Griffin Newman?

  Because we often ask our guests, what's your history with X with this artist or cover?

• 17:25David Sims?

  Right.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Okay, Exhibit A, renumbered. Yeah. Holy shit. Jury's cheating their pitch. Objection, objection.

• 17:33David Sims?

  The court will come to order.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  I mean, fellas, I'm about to set it off with Exhibit A. This is the May 18th, 1990 edition of The Proconian, the official newspaper of Chapel Hill High School.

• 17:49Griffin Newman?

  Wow, let's say also perfectly preserved.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  It is called The Proconian because it discusses the pros and cons of life at Chapel Hill High.

• 17:57Griffin Newman?

  That is a good fucking name.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:59David Sims?

  Why is it every newspaper?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  31. Yeah, yeah, it goes way back.

• 18:04David Sims?

  Wait, so you're allowed to be like, hey, I got a con this week. I don't like doing homework. Can we get that on the front page?

• 18:10Griffin Newman?

  That's kind of a regular column. It's a revolving door of who takes the mantle.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, on the front page, one of my buddies, Matt, he wrote an article about how the Chapel Hill High School Counseling Department was encouraging students to limit their college admission, entrance attempts to five. They wanted to cap the number of colleges you applied to. And the article goes on to say, like, that was really, I reread, so I reread this whole issue the other night because I hadn't thought it, you know, I haven't thought about this in what, 34 years?

• 18:39Griffin Newman?

  Every issue from your years there?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Well, Griffin, I kept every issue in which I was the movie critic for the Proconian.

• 18:47David Sims?

  So what's the, can you tell me the year again? I'm sorry.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Sorry. Yeah. It's 1990. So this is spring of my senior year of high school.

• 18:54David Sims?

  Right. Okay.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  Senior year in high school.

• 18:56David Sims?

  The Proconian is a daily newspaper, right? You guys.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Twice daily. It was morning and evening edition. Yeah. And it's still on paper. No, it was every Friday, I think. It was a weekly paper.

• 19:06David Sims?

  Weekly is for high school paper.

• 19:08Griffin Newman?

  That's nice also to give you the weekend to sort of really sit with it.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Digest everything. Yeah, totally. So I had an entertainment column. It was called the three bean salad of entertainment. The three beans of the salad were movies, TV shows and music. Those were three of my interests.

• 19:25Griffin Newman?

  The three great beans of society.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  And like every fucking know it all high school boy, I just used this platform to announce hyperbolic justifications for why the Minutemen are the best band that has ever existed, or you know, whatever, just justify all my tastes.

• 19:41David Sims?

  Did you have an editor? Like, how much?

• 19:43Speaker 03

  Well, the editor was my high school girlfriend. So I actually had quite a bit of.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, what's interesting about this edition is that I like.

• 19:58Griffin Newman?

  Yell a lot.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Remember when, um, remember, so remember on Spirited Away when I brought in like one of my favorite pieces of criticism? Nigel Andrew, six out of five stars.

• 20:07Griffin Newman?

  In the history of the.

• 20:08David Sims?

  And you checked with him and he maintains.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. Just such a great, such a great, um, also it's another well preserved piece of newspaper criticism. Well, the wonderful thing you'll remember is that that was six out of five stars. Well, now, when I paid close attention to page 10 of the Proconian,

• 20:29Speaker 03

  where the, where the column title is, it doesn't say three bean salad of entertainment. It says four bean salad of entertainment. And then the column begins, as Burger King says, sometimes you gotta break the rules.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  So I broke a few-

• 20:44David Sims?

  Did Burger King say that?

• 20:45Speaker 03

  I think, I think that was a thing back in the 90s. So I broke a through, I broke a few rules, ordered a Whopper and changed the name of my column. What is the fourth bean? Because now, of course, it used to be the three bean salad of entertainment, but now there's a fourth bean. Right? So like Nigel Andrews, unknowingly, of course, I was like, let me acknowledge upfront what you're all thinking, which is what happened to the three bean salad of entertainment? Why is it now a four bean salad of entertainment?

• 21:11David Sims?

  We've all gotten used to that.

• 21:13Griffin Newman?

  It's all three beans. We've all committed to a prism through which we understand.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 21:18Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  What the fourth bean was this week, I decided to review all the comics in the Chapel Hill newspaper.

• 21:26David Sims?

  Oh.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  So I added them as a fourth bean. The fourth bean is, is um-

• 21:30Griffin Newman?

  The funny pages.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, the funny pages.

• 21:32David Sims?

  Your take on Curtis or whatever.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Prince Valiant, two stars. The Born Loser, 4.5 stars. Kathy, .6 stars.

• 21:39David Sims?

  Wait, you just bodied Kathy out of the root with Kathy's funny. She likes chocolate.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Okay, do you want to, do you want to hear my review? I mean, I'm, I haven't looked at Kathy in a long time and you have to remember I was a high school boy and I was a total asshole. So it was probably some misogyny, but here's the review of Kathy, Kathy by Kathy. How do you pronounce her last name?

• 21:56David Sims?

  Guy Swite.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Guy Swite? I gave it point, .6 stars. It says, oh my. Here's the basic Kathy strip. Panel one, Kathy sits behind her desk. Panel two, she says-

• 22:09David Sims?

  So you're doing, you're cold reading this.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I haven't looked at this. Panel two, she says, it's so awful. Panel two, she says, I don't look good in a bathing suit. Panel three, mass hysteria. Kathy yells, oh. Panel four, Kathy looks guilty. Lines of exasperation shoot from her head. Kathy says, I need chocolate. There, now you never have to read the stupid strip again. What an asshole.

• 22:35David Sims?

  I mean-

• 22:36Speaker 03

  But I mean, that reflect, you know, that reflects my sense, you know, where I was, where I was at the time.

• 22:41David Sims?

  That was where America was on Kathy.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:42David Sims?

  Kathy blazed a lot of trails. I'm very pro Kathy.

• 22:45Griffin Newman?

  That's kind of like the lights camera Jackson, uh, girl's trip review.

• 22:49David Sims?

  Oh yeah? What was he, what happened with him?

• 22:50Griffin Newman?

  No, it wasn't that. What was the one, uh, book smart where he said, my, my grandmother always said, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

• 22:57David Sims?

  Right.

• 22:57Griffin Newman?

  And they just stares down the camera for a minute in silence.

• 23:01David Sims?

  What was your favorite funny page? Like, what gets the highest?

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Uh, Snuffy Smith.

• 23:06David Sims?

  Snuffy Smith?

• 23:06Speaker 03

  By Fred Laswell. I gave five stars.

• 23:10David Sims?

  That's interesting, because I think of Snuffy Smith as like the sort of gasoline inhaling, like, absolute nonsense. Where it's like Barney Google's a little too erudite for people. We need a yokel character to kind of like bring the laughs.

• 23:25Griffin Newman?

  Can you, what was the case for Snuffy Smith?

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Snuffy Smith, the art, especially the Sunday pages, the art was beautiful.

• 23:34David Sims?

  Yeah, Snuffy Smith is kind of a cool style.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  It looked really, really good. It was just silly. I mean, it was like one of those things when you're in high school and I think it was, I don't think it was a deliberate decision, but it's like you and your friends are like, let's all get really into Snuffy Smith. And say this is the best cartoon and that'll be our thing. It's like, we're the Snuffy Smith gang.

• 23:53David Sims?

  Yeah, I'm really sorry to do this. I know this is a big dense movie. I just have to know what other funny pages you reviewed. Just, just the names.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Oh, alright.

• 24:00David Sims?

  And I just want to see if any of the others I want to hear.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  I'll run through all the, all the, I'll give you the titles and the stars. Okay, we'll do that. Prince Valiant, two stars. Frank and Ernest, four stars. Outland, one star. The Phantom, 3.6 stars. Calvin and Hobbes, four stars. The Born Loser, 4.5 stars. Kathy, 0.6 stars. The Far Side, 3.4 stars. The Family Circus, 2.5 stars. According to Guinness, 3.7 stars. Peanuts, 4.6 stars. Snuffy Smith, five stars.

• 24:29David Sims?

  I mean, you're putting Snuffy Smith over Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. You're being a bit of a high school contrarian.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  I was a high school.

• 24:35David Sims?

  Right. I know at that point Carl Schultz's art was.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Every week where I could just do whatever I want. You know, it's like, I mean, wait till I read this fucking review of Twin Peaks. I mean, if you think this is bad.

• 24:46David Sims?

  Cueing up him reviewing.

• 24:48Griffin Newman?

  And by the way, we've already established it's a dense movie. We have to talk about, we haven't even gotten to the Twin Peaks thing. I just want to read quickly a Snuffy Smith script.

• 24:55David Sims?

  A straight. Like, recent?

• 24:57Griffin Newman?

  No, it's from 86.

• 24:58David Sims?

  Okay. Uh, I believe Barney Google and Snuffy Smith still runs and you read it and you're like, who on earth even knows what this is about? Well, like what this is.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  The original strip, I think, was from the early 20th century.

• 25:10David Sims?

  It's the longest running.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Right. And Barney Google is gone. Like, he hasn't been a part of it in like 100 years.

• 25:17David Sims?

  I think it's literally still called, though, Barney, Google and Snuffy Smith.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Oh, I wonder. Yeah.

• 25:23David Sims?

  But, okay, where we, please read me a Snuffy.

• 25:25Griffin Newman?

  It's gonna be from 06. I have a hard time reading the handwriting on the date on it. But it's, uh, they're playing poker, uh, Snuffy and his friend. I, excuse me, I don't know the character's name. And he says, balls o' fire, Snuffy. I'm tired of all your cheating. Put up your dukes. Your spelled Y-O-R.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 25:45Griffin Newman?

  It's only a two-panel strip.

• 25:46David Sims?

  Yeah, Snuffy Smith is usually two-panel.

• 25:48Griffin Newman?

  Just set it on play.

• 25:48David Sims?

  Someone insults.

• 25:49Griffin Newman?

  Which I'm starting, no, I'm starting to see David's case here, which is, there's a cleanness to it.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  It's so clean. It's so freaking clean. It's like ammonia.

• 25:58Griffin Newman?

  So balls of fire, Snuffy. I'm tired of all your cheating.

• 26:00David Sims?

  You mean harmful?

• 26:01Griffin Newman?

  Put up your dukes, right?

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Toxic.

• 26:03David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Griffin Newman?

  And then second panel, Snuffy has dropped the cards and he's holding up two pennants, pendants that say JMU. He's putting up his dukes.

• 26:12David Sims?

  Oh, wow. That's so bad.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  That's more litera, that's like more referential.

• 26:18David Sims?

  Can I read you today's Snuffy Smith?

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Are they still making Snuffy Smith?

• 26:21Griffin Newman?

  We have to talk about the movie. After we talk about 20.

• 26:23David Sims?

  Snuffy is talking to, I think his friend is called Doc, if I remember. Why should Snuffy says, why should one feller get to decide everything?

• 26:31Griffin Newman?

  Oh, wow. David's making a choice in the voice.

• 26:32David Sims?

  And Doc says, hmm, you know, you're right, Snuffy. Okay. Panel two, Doc is flipping three coins in the air and saying, I'll flip Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  That's good. That's good. That's a good comic. I will defend that one. That's good.

• 26:52David Sims?

  Don't really get it, but I sort of.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  I really get it. Yeah, that's, yeah.

• 26:58David Sims?

  It's just like the logic of Snuffy saying, I don't like how one person decides everything, which I think Snuffy's trying to talk about, like executive power.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Could be.

• 27:05David Sims?

  And Doc is interpreting it as like the. Coin.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  It's actually, it's actually kinda awesome.

• 27:12David Sims?

  The president on the coin is kinda making the call.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:15David Sims?

  Right.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:16David Sims?

  So he's gonna flip three coins. Now, I don't know how flipping three coins is really gonna help him make any decisions is the only thing I'll say.

• 27:23Griffin Newman?

  Well, sure, but if there were a sense of closure, then the strip would end. There has to be a yearning. There has to be something unresolved with Snuffy.

• 27:29David Sims?

  John Rose is the current.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, Fred Laswell must be long, long retired, if not deceased.

• 27:35David Sims?

  Uh, yeah, but anyway, it's just really funny that you you put Snuffy on top.

• 27:40Griffin Newman?

  Back to the pro con and for.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 27:43David Sims?

  John Rose has been doing it since 1998.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 27:46David Sims?

  So I was 12 years old.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right. So in the same, the same issue of the pro con and I reviewed Twin Peaks, which was airing at the time. This I have reread. This is a, it's a tough read. I mean, this really.

• 28:03David Sims?

  Reading your high school writing.

• 28:04Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say, there's a precedent forward on this podcast and you couldn't come off worse than I did. So please proceed.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Right. I'm not gonna read all of this review. I will just read the thing that I remember being so proud of when I wrote it. I can't believe David Lynch recovered from this cutting remark. The critic says, I don't like Twin Peaks. It moves too slowly for television. It's pretentious to the point of being overtly obnoxious. Director David Lynch has not changed the face of television for the 1990s. He's just made a tired genre more surreal. That's no great feat.

• 28:43David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 28:45David Sims?

  I see. I thought you were gonna be like, hey, guys, check out this crazy show on ABC, Twin Peaks, but you're like, no, no.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 28:53David Sims?

  The hype storm is, you know.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  A little Armin White up in here like, oh, everyone's talking about this great show, the liberal elites. It actually is kinda boring and weird.

• 29:01Griffin Newman?

  Masses are falling for.

• 29:03David Sims?

  Yeah, exactly. With your Snuffy Smith is actually the best shit.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Some contrary.

• 29:07David Sims?

  Yeah. Like where you're like the common man, the simple tales, you know.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  But, but what's interesting and I had forgotten about until I reread this review was at, at the time I had seen Eraserhead because so what I say is, um. Oh God. Um, I talk about some other stuff and then I say, Eraserhead is weird and it represents Lynch at his best. Eraserhead is actually extremely bizarre.

• 29:29David Sims?

  Hmm.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Hot take and has some of the more disturbing images in the history of American film.

• 29:33David Sims?

  Right. So you're like Twin Peaks two sanded down for it. Right.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  But the weirdness in Eraserhead is not without purpose. It's a twisted sort of symbolism and makes the film agonizingly personal. Twin Peaks is not very personal. It's actually quite alienating. Anyway, so I had seen Eraserhead.

• 29:52Griffin Newman?

  Do you know when in the arc of Twin Peaks, this review came out? Like, how much of the show were you commenting on?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Well, if it's spring of 1990, I think it was probably within the first few weeks. I don't remember when it actually premiered.

• 30:04Griffin Newman?

  The first season is eight episodes that started late. Like it was like March to May or March to April or something.

• 30:11David Sims?

  That's right.

• 30:12Griffin Newman?

  I'm just curious if you're like reviewing the pilot or if you're like.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Probably the pilot and maybe one other episode. I honestly don't remember.

• 30:18Griffin Newman?

  Wow. Okay.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:19Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  But I know I watched it. I mean, I would have, I would have actually watched an episode.

• 30:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  The only time I, the only, only time I behaved unethically as a, as a column, entertainment columnist was I actually reviewed a Guar concert before I went to it because we had to get the thing into press and Guar was playing that night, but I had seen Guar so many times. I was like, I know what's gonna happen. So I just reviewed it before actually seeing that particular, yeah.

• 30:45David Sims?

  Shock. Yeah. It's a little different from a long running.

• 30:49Griffin Newman?

  I tried to just talk about embarrassing high school newspaper things.

• 30:52David Sims?

  Yeah. Cause there's definitely enough, no like history of you saying like stuff on mic or in paper that might.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  So were you a high school movie critic?

• 31:01Griffin Newman?

  I, I had a, I had a column called Griffin's Top Five. That was, it was usually more of a, it was a humor piece. It was a, I'd come up with a weird top five list.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 31:12Griffin Newman?

  Maybe it was top 10, it was top 10. It was top 10. Uh, but there was, they would, I feel like at the end of the year, they'd ask a couple people to do end of year movie lists and you'd have like four competing ones.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 31:25Griffin Newman?

  On the page. I wasn't the regular movie critic.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Right. I see.

• 31:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  And you wanted to put on that sex tape and they wouldn't let you?

• 31:32Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. You know, La Creche Martell's The Holy Girl at number three, Paris Hilton Sex Tape, number 10, I believe was my original list. And they wisely said, absolutely not.

• 31:47Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 31:47David Sims?

  Yes.

• 31:51David Sims?

  Is that the Cine's cow?

• 31:52Griffin Newman?

  The Cine's cow is back.

• 31:53David Sims?

  Haven't heard from her in a while.

• 31:54Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, she's reactivated because she's horny for chicken fingers.

• 32:00David Sims?

  Okay.

• 32:00Griffin Newman?

  And she's excited for the streaming debut of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

• 32:05David Sims?

  Wow.

• 32:05Griffin Newman?

  The cow likes chicken.

• 32:08David Sims?

  Remember cow and chicken? Let's look it up. While you tell the great listeners about the great stuff on MUBI.

• 32:14Griffin Newman?

  Well, MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you. Curating and elevating visionary filmmaking, all handpicked, always. That's what MUBI does. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

• 32:26David Sims?

  Yes.

• 32:26Griffin Newman?

  One of my favorite movies of the year.

• 32:27David Sims?

  Absolutely.

• 32:28Griffin Newman?

  You can feel the rush now at home. There's a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.

• 32:34David Sims?

  That is a line in the movie.

• 32:35Griffin Newman?

  In the new movie from Jane Schomburg, Past and Future Guest.

• 32:38David Sims?

  Past and Future Guest, a great filmmaker, a great podcast guest.

• 32:42Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 32:42David Sims?

  Great friend.

• 32:43Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 32:44David Sims?

  This movie rocks. It's got, of course, it stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.

• 32:49Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 32:50David Sims?

  Legends, and I tip my cap. But Zach Cherry.

• 32:52Griffin Newman?

  Performances, friend of the show.

• 32:53David Sims?

  Friend of the show, Zach Cherry.

• 32:55Griffin Newman?

  Zach Cherry.

• 32:55David Sims?

  Also in it.

• 32:56Griffin Newman?

  This is true.

• 32:57David Sims?

  Such a cool movie. Won the Queer Palmit Can. If you haven't heard about this movie, I don't know what's going on with you. But like, it obviously has, it was out in theaters this summer and now it's on MUBI.

• 33:08Griffin Newman?

  Hannah Einbinder plays a filmmaker attempting to reboot the Camp Miasma franchise, trying to track down the original final girl from the first movie to make some sort of legacy sequel, who's played by Gillian Anderson, who lives at the summer camp.

• 33:22David Sims?

  At Camp Miasma, yes. And you know, and then they hang out and it's regular.

• 33:26Griffin Newman?

  What happens? It's one of those Hollywood's out of ideas. No, it's very much a movie about Hollywood being out of ideas while being an example of there still being new stories to tell.

• 33:38David Sims?

  It's now streaming exclusively on MUBI and you can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com slash Blank Check. That's M U B I dot com slash Blank Check for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 33:50Griffin Newman?

  They got so many great movies on there to watch, but worth it for 30 days for Miasma.

• 34:01Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 34:01David Sims?

  Yes?

• 34:02Griffin Newman?

  He lurks in shadow. He slips into dreams. He casts no reflection. Audible presents Bram Stoker's Dracula, a new full cast audio thriller starring Ella Purnell as Mina Harker, Jonathan Bailey as Dracula, and an A-list cast, including Maggie Gyllenhaal as Van Helsing, Amy Lou Wood as Lucy, David Johnson as Dr. Seward, and many more. That is an all-star cast.

• 34:23David Sims?

  Yeah, this new full cast thriller locks Mina Harker in a battle of minds with the Count. When Mina's fiance, Jonathan Harker, Louis Partridge, vanishes in Transylvania, Mina pieces together letters, diary entries, and chilling testimony to hunt the predator stalking those she loves, only to discover Dracula's already hunting her.

• 34:42Griffin Newman?

  Joined by the enigmatic Van Helsing, Mina and a small fearless band race against time to stop this ancient terror. Using her intellect, her resolve, and a gift for drawing the unseen lines between clues, Mina may just hold the key to bring down the Count, if he hasn't already found his way inside her mind.

• 34:58David Sims?

  Featuring a haunting original score by Elon Eschery and a spatial dolby-atmos sound design, Audible's Dracula invites you to welcome literature's most shadowy figure into your home. Feel the terror of being hunted and the thrill of the hunt. Don't miss this year's best new audio thriller, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Audible's new full cast original adaptation. Written by Robin Ahern, now on Audible. Listen to the darkness. Go to audible.com/listen to Dracula.

• 35:33Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 35:34David Sims?

  Yes?

• 35:34Griffin Newman?

  Ugh.

• 35:35David Sims?

  Uh-oh.

• 35:36Griffin Newman?

  It's November.

• 35:37David Sims?

  Ah!

• 35:38Griffin Newman?

  And you know what that means, the old stereotype about November.

• 35:41David Sims?

  Turkeys?

• 35:42Griffin Newman?

  One long sprint to the finish line.

• 35:44David Sims?

  Oh, of course.

• 35:45Griffin Newman?

  Packed schedule, questionable food choices, and somehow a social calendar that got way fuller than you planned. And I ain't talking about Sam Fuller. We're not covering him yet in the podcast.

• 35:53David Sims?

  No, though, maybe we should.

• 35:55Griffin Newman?

  We might get there eventually.

• 35:56David Sims?

  I can't remember. Big Red One. You call it the Big Red Podcast.

• 35:59Griffin Newman?

  Listen, when things get complicated, not when life is easy and when you got time for a whole routine, right now, when everything is full and something has to give one scoop, cold water. Every morning before anything else, as I like to say, scoop, there it is.

• 36:13David Sims?

  You do like to say that every morning you text me scoop, there it is. And that means I now know that you had your AG1.

• 36:19Griffin Newman?

  And I'm awake.

• 36:20David Sims?

  Uh, but yeah, you're, I know you're, you're a daily AG1 user and it's basically the, uh, the glue that holds your internal organs together at this point.

• 36:29Griffin Newman?

  It's not just marketing. AG1 Next Gen is backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials, not weekend a study.

• 36:36David Sims?

  Thank you for that.

• 36:37Griffin Newman?

  Four independent studies with key nutrient levels improved within three months of consistent use. This is the thing I like about AG1. They're not resting on their laurels. They constantly work to better themselves.

• 36:49David Sims?

  Yes. AG1, they've got now AG1 Pro.

• 36:53Griffin Newman?

  For the professionals.

• 36:53David Sims?

  Same daily drink now with the performance and recovery layer built in. So you've got five grams of Cre vitalis, a premium German made creatine monohydrate, and one of the most studied compounds in sports science, plus CAH MB for muscle production and zinc carnosine for gut support.

• 37:12Griffin Newman?

  Thank God.

• 37:12David Sims?

  Next gen is the foundation. Pro adds what your body needs to recover.

• 37:16Griffin Newman?

  You might be having some big meals this November. AG1 is what you need to keep your gut in check. Keep things, as I like to put it, regular.

• 37:24David Sims?

  Yes. So for a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/check and get a free immune support bundle, including omega three fish oil and vitamin D three plus K two with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/check. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Blank Check sent you.

• 37:55Griffin Newman?

  Anyway, David Lynch, great American artist.

• 37:58David Sims?

  So you liked. You didn't like Twin Peaks as a young man. Did you come around on Twin Peaks or on David Lynch generally?

• 38:06Speaker 03

  I think before the Showtime thing started, I I think I rewatched all of season one. I don't think I've ever seen all of season two of Twin Peaks. I think I just bailed at some point.

• 38:18Griffin Newman?

  It feels like everyone does. Ben and I are currently working through it.

• 38:21David Sims?

  The same thing with season two.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 38:23David Sims?

  There is the certain point, I think, where we all kind of drop off with like certain.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  And I think that's because he wasn't involved as involved in it or something, or he was, or the other guy wasn't involved or something like that, right?

• 38:34David Sims?

  Everyone was a little less involved and it was a little more chaotic.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:36David Sims?

  I think there's much to love about season two, but it's it's hard to feel motivated to watch it, especially before knowing that Return is coming.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:44David Sims?

  Where it's kind of like, well, I know this didn't really get to, you know, kind of resolve itself artistically, like blah, blah, blah. But it is worth watching season two if you ever have the time to get to the final episode, which is quite, quite amazing.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  I think I have watched the final episode.

• 39:01David Sims?

  I think a lot of people just skipped ahead. And which is understandable.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  And I've never seen the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk With Me.

• 39:07Griffin Newman?

  Oh, interesting. I would say it's quite good.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  I've heard that, yeah.

• 39:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Um, but I have watched The Return and that was a, you know, really special experience.

• 39:18Griffin Newman?

  Do you feel like Fire Walk With Me, is that the only Lynch movie you haven't seen possibly?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  No, I haven't seen a number of them. I realized coming over here. I've never seen The Elephant Man.

• 39:28Griffin Newman?

  My favorite.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  I think when I was a kid, I think, I think when I was a kid, The Elephant Man was always on HBO. I could be misremembering. So I don't want to say like, oh, I watched it like it through osmosis, but I think it presented as so heavy and intimidating.

• 39:44Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  That childhood, David.

• 39:46Griffin Newman?

  Couldn't handle it.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Maybe was just like, uh, that's, I'll never be grown up enough to watch The Elephant Man.

• 39:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  It's in black and white. Like what? So I've never seen that and I, and I've never seen the straight story.

• 39:57David Sims?

  I would, you would, I think you'd really like the straight story.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Really? I am excited. I mean, I'm excited to watch it.

• 40:03David Sims?

  On Disney Plus.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:04David Sims?

  If you have.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 40:05David Sims?

  Plus, yes.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  And I think, I think I've seen all the other ones. I saw a racer head in middle school because.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  I had this, I had this great book. It was called Cult Movies by Danny Perry. Have you guys ever heard of that book? He published three of them and in the eighties.

• 40:24David Sims?

  Yes, I have heard of this.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  If you wanted to know about weird movies, he published these three collections of his like idiosyncratic personal essays and reviews of cult movies. And I like turned me on to like a lot of amazing movies and he wrote about Eraserhead and included some stills in the essay. I think there's a photo of the baby and my friends were like, well, we, we definitely gotta see this movie. And also at the time in the eighties, I lived in a college town. So like, I think at the record store, I think they had Eraserhead posters, you know, the iconic image of what's his name with the hair backlit? So I think it was like an image. It was like, it had a currency, like.

• 41:03Griffin Newman?

  We talked about that in our Eraserhead episode, that it's just like, if you're someone who's kinda trying to find the subculture in any way.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Yeah.

• 41:10Griffin Newman?

  And art, that's just an image that somehow gets exposed to you at a young age.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:14Griffin Newman?

  I remember having, I had an Entertainment Weekly issue that I want to say was from oh, two or oh, three, that was like their definitive ranking of the top 25 cult movies of all time. And I probably kept that issue for 15 years.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like those books I had.

• 41:29Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, the cult movie books.

• 41:31Griffin Newman?

  Right. But like to get that issue when I was in high school and be like, well, here's the guide. If I watch these 25 movies.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Totally, right.

• 41:38Griffin Newman?

  I have some sense of like the weird corners of film and then I can go deeper from there.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:43Griffin Newman?

  In each direction.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  How am I gonna get a copy of El Topo and watch it?

• 41:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Because that sounds really crazy.

• 41:49Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, when a lot of this stuff felt like Superstar, the Karen Carpenter story was on that list.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 41:54Griffin Newman?

  And they mentioned in the write-up, you can't watch it.

• 41:57David Sims?

  Makes you wanna watch it.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  At the time that I was doing all this cult movie research, remember there was no, there were no DVDs. There was obviously no streaming. It was just like VHS, like, and maybe they'll have it, maybe they won't. So Eraserhead was something that we really wanted to see. And I remember like we had a slumber party. It was like, we got it, we got it. Tonight is Eraserhead night. And then we watched it and it was great, you know?

• 42:16David Sims?

  It is to me, the definitive cult movie.

• 42:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Yeah. So aside from your distaste at the time for Twin Peaks.

• 42:24David Sims?

  Yeah, well, you just got it. You know, you saw through the.

• 42:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 42:26David Sims?

  Through the fog.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  I saw through society's lies. Yeah.

• 42:30Griffin Newman?

  You were otherwise pretty in the bag for lunch, it sounds like.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Well, I think for years, I mean, I only knew him from a racer head like I don't think I saw Wild at Heart until I was in my twenties.

• 42:42David Sims?

  You probably didn't see Lost Highway.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  I only saw Lost Highway last year when it was in revival.

• 42:47David Sims?

  Pretty good, right?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty good. And Mulholland Drive, I saw in the theater when it came out and then maybe once or twice afterwards on DVD or something.

• 42:56David Sims?

  So let's take you to.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  And Dune, and Dune I never saw.

• 43:00David Sims?

  Just check it out.

• 43:00Griffin Newman?

  I can't believe Hodgman has let you get away with that.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Well, he summarized it for me like 50 times, but yeah, I remember once we were on tour and we were at a, we were performing in Alabama in this great venue called The Bottle Tree. It doesn't exist anymore. And when it was over and we were hanging out at the bar, they were playing David Lynch's Dune in the background. And it was just like, I've never seen someone struggle as much as like John trying to be sociable and make and, and talk to other people while also just like his eyes are.

• 43:27David Sims?

  Watching a movie he's seen 80 times.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I've never seen that either.

• 43:32David Sims?

  Okay.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Cause it just looks like, I don't know, man.

• 43:34Griffin Newman?

  Okay. So when, when you walk into Inland Empire in Chapel Hill.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  In 2007.

• 43:40Griffin Newman?

  In 2007, you're, you're not like, David Lynch is my god. I'm obsessive. I'm encyclopedic. He's made a couple of things that you love deeply.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I really, really liked Mulholland Drive and I think that is like, he was just in the pocket on that one. Like it, he was in the sweet spot and um, you know, there's just moments, there's moments in that movie that are just so affecting. Um, just like, I think, I think one, I think the thing, I think one thing that David Lynch does better than anyone, he does it in the final scene of the Twin Peaks, The Return. He does it with Naomi Watts masturbating in Mulholland Drive and he does it in Inland Empire is a sense of almost just like cosmic desolation.

• 44:33Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Just an utter.

• 44:36David Sims?

  Reduced to rubble, someone who has been reduced like.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  A hollow feeling that is so haunting. Like it woke, like when we finished watching the return, like it woke me up that night. That when that that shot of him where he's like, what, what's the line? What year is this against an absolutely black sky? They must have CG'd the sky to make it just totally matte black. And the same with Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. When it's like you're back in reality and the brick, she's masturbating and that brick wall is like, it's like going in and out of focus or whatever. It's just like.

• 45:08David Sims?

  Yeah, I think that's really rude because I usually jerk off to walls, you know? It's.

• 45:13Griffin Newman?

  They have the right curves. If it's that kind of like, what is it? Almost like a stucco kind of thing. Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  It's, um, I think he's so good at that. And it's also a feeling that, anyway, so when I went to see Endland Empire, it was like, I like David Lynch. I'm not gonna.

• 45:30David Sims?

  You're not there with two like flags being like.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  No, no. It's like, oh, David Lynch has a new movie out. Like, I've never seen a movie at the Carolina. It's supposed to be a great theater. I'll go see what, oh, sure. Go check it out.

• 45:41Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  And what's interesting is when we get to exhibit B, one, I mean, one of the reasons that this memory is so special for me is that I remember it in the context of thinking that was a great year for me going to the movies. 2007.

• 45:56David Sims?

  About this, right? You, I mean, it's a great year.

• 45:58Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:58Griffin Newman?

  Right. Cause this, this falls into 2007 for you.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  So right.

• 46:02Griffin Newman?

  Seven thought of as sort of like a higher watermark. A big. It's kind of a second 1999 of a lot of major young American auteurs.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  So exhibit B is a printout of my Excel spreadsheet that I kept for tax purposes. I was a freelancer, so seeing movies was a tax write off, according to my accountant. So I have like over 20 years of just like all the movies that I paid money for. And, I mean.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  It's crazy. If you like, specifically, I realize, if you like bro-y elevated genre movies that end with an unresolved kind of crappy feeling, this is your year.

• 46:39David Sims?

  So true.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Children of Men, The Departed.

• 46:44Griffin Newman?

  Some of these are late 2006 that you've seen early 2007.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:47Griffin Newman?

  I just want to clarify.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. The freaking, um.

• 46:51Griffin Newman?

  Cause you have There Will Be Blood and No Country at the end of the year.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Yep. You have Zodiac, freaking Zodiac.

• 46:56David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Michael Clayton.

• 46:57David Sims?

  Yep.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Easter promises.

• 46:59David Sims?

  The feeling you're talking about is present in all of it. You're right.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Gone Baby Gone, which actually I rewatched recently when I was looking at this spreadsheet. It got me so psyched for Gone Baby Gone. I rewatched it and that might be getting up towards five times.

• 47:11Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  I freaking love Gone Baby Gone. I think it's so good and I think some of the sequences are so exciting and I think Casey Affleck is fucking mesmerizing in that movie.

• 47:20Griffin Newman?

  He is.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Before the Devil Knows You Dead, speaking of feel-good movies.

• 47:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  I mean, Jeepers Creepers.

• 47:26Griffin Newman?

  Do you know what I almost think was in the water that year? And I'll make it 2006 to 2007.

• 47:31David Sims?

  Bush and the Iraq War.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was wondering, what is it?

• 47:34Griffin Newman?

  I think, I think a lot of it is there was like the immediate aftermath of How Do We Reckon with 9/11 and a lot of movies that were trying to tackle it more directly. Or there was all the sort of like po-faced Iraq war movies.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. These are all taking elliptical approach and that's why they're.

• 47:50David Sims?

  More just in the.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:52Griffin Newman?

  It's like, it took five or six years for people to be like, I want to make a movie about this mood I'm feeling, rather than actually trying to talk about the event.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Zodiac for crying out loud. Zodiac, I saw. I mean, when I was thinking back on Inland Empire, when I think back on that memory, I think back of, of just being in the stick it of just like really good movies. Now, Inland Empire is obviously an outlier. Like, as much as I like Zodiac, like Zodiac is not Inland Empire. You know, like, it's just, it's, Inland Empire is just doing something completely different.

• 48:23Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  The movie that I saw just about a week after I saw Inland Empire comes the closest to the experience I had watching Inland Empire is this fucking Romanian movie. Did you ever see a Romanian quote unquote comedy called The Death of Mr. Lazarus?

• 48:38David Sims?

  Of course. Yeah, yeah, I remember that one. That was hot shit, though.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  It was when Romanian cinema, it was after four months, three weeks, two days.

• 48:47David Sims?

  Romanian new way. Christie Pew. I'm bad on pronouncing Romanian names, but it is one of those things, right? Where they're like, there's a great new comedy out of Eastern Europe. And I'm like, hmm, is it two and a half hours long?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Two hundred, two and a half hours of an elderly alcoholic dying in real time as he is kicked out of multiple hospital emergency rooms.

• 49:09David Sims?

  It's basically, people in Romania are like rolling in the hospital. This is the best shit I've seen in here. Why is this funny?

• 49:15Griffin Newman?

  It's bureaucracy refusing to let this guy die.

• 49:17David Sims?

  It's making fun of, you know, institutions, right?

• 49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Another great experience of just going into a movie called, I saw it in Chapel Hill. There's an art, an indie cinema that was actually started by my old, my old high school English teacher, Bruce Stone. It's called The Chelsea, and it's still in operation. And you could go there and just like, and watch all these funky, like, I saw Akira there when Akira came out. I saw The Vanishing there when The Vanishing was first released, speaking of another great feel-good movie.

• 49:45David Sims?

  Yeah, that ends really happy.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so it was like, yeah, there's a new comedy out of Romania, The Death of Mr. Lazarus. So I went in cold. It's like Inland Empire. It's a long movie.

• 49:57David Sims?

  It's, yeah, it's two and a half hours long.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  And at the end of it, an older guy on the front row literally yelled out, that's it? He was so pissed. He's like, yeah, that's it. He died. Like, it was in the title. You can't be disappointed. Like, you're not getting your money back.

• 50:13David Sims?

  I think it actually, from what I remember of the movie, it ends with them being like, okay, we're finally going to do like a brain operation on you. And the movie's like, well, leave it off here. We're gonna, we're gonna let you guys go now. And you're just like.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  No, I think he dies on a stretcher. I think it's a.

• 50:26David Sims?

  He's definitely on the table. I can't remember. Yeah. I haven't seen it. I mean, it is in the title that he dies. So, you know, don't be.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  So my memory of Inland Empire is coupled with my memory of just being like, what a great year for movies.

• 50:36David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  I like bro-y movies that end on a bummer note. I thought Death of Mr. Lazarus Coo was fun. Like, I don't need to see it again. But you know, it's like, if you saw that recent movie from Romania called Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World. Did you see that? Fucking awesome.

• 50:52David Sims?

  Yeah. Another two and a half hour movie.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely. An absolute grind.

• 50:57David Sims?

  Yep. A comedy in a interesting way.

• 50:58Griffin Newman?

  East of Bucharest. Did you see that? That was around.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  That was.

• 51:01Griffin Newman?

  Oh, six oh seven. Very funny, very bleak Romanian comedy.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:05David Sims?

  That one, I think, is at least short. I'll give that one credit.

• 51:09Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 51:10David Sims?

  I don't know what the rule is about Eastern European films needing to be very long.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  So.

• 51:15David Sims?

  So you saw Inland Empire in this beautiful.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  I saw it in this beautiful, empty, almost empty theater. I went and just being like, oh, David Lynch has a new movie. And that's all he knew. And I remem- I just, I just remember it as just like a great experience. Like, rewatching it was interesting. I had misremembered a lot of the movie. And I'd obviously forgotten a lot of it. It's been 17 years. But there's some, you know, this, the, the shot of Laura Dern running towards the camera on that outdoor path, and then you close up on her face, and she's got this agonizing grimace that's really her overlit. My memory of that night is seeing her face on a fucking, it was like

• 52:00Speaker 03

  one of, it was like, one of the biggest things I've ever seen, if that makes sense. The, the, the hugeness of her emotion and seeing it on a big, huge screen. I just remember being just like, absolutely like, uh, I don't know. It was just like, really intense. And then the other thing I remember is the credit sequence with Sinister Man, and just a feeling of absolute relief and euphoria and catharsis.

• 52:30David Sims?

  There is a huge relief to the, to the credits in the theater, because it is an incredibly long movie, and it is quite punishing at times. Uh, and the ending is fun and the music is so good. And there, yeah, there's just that sense of like, okay, I, I can kind of turn my brain back into low power mode a little bit. I've been straining, especially the first time you see this movie, I think you're like,

• 52:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 52:51David Sims?

  I've been strained to kind of keep all these placements and try and think about what they are. While another part of my brain is like, don't worry about it. Like, just soak it in or whatever. But you, if you're watching a movie, you can't help but try to grasp a narrative, I think.

• 53:04Griffin Newman?

  Absolutely.

• 53:05David Sims?

  Unless you're very, very used to like avant garde cinema where you're like, oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Like, I'll just bathe in it.

• 53:09Griffin Newman?

  I, I breathe, uh, early in this, uh, series, uh, we've recorded, uh, almost all the episodes up until this point. Basically all of them, but they haven't come out yet. So I just want to inform you, uh, Sims made a joke and maybe the eraser head episode, that his glib analysis for all David Lynch movies, when people try to unlock them, was just gonna be, it's about a guy who loses his keys.

• 53:33David Sims?

  It's clear what this movie is about. It's a guy who lost his keys. It's like, that's my jokey.

• 53:38Griffin Newman?

  Like you, you have.

• 53:38David Sims?

  I put the evidence together here and this represents the keys. This represents the guy.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  There are two stories in all of human history. Guy loses his keys, guy finds his keys.

• 53:48Griffin Newman?

  That's basically Sims' bit. I just want to point out, he's been proven somewhat correct, maybe four times across this series. Two minutes and 12 seconds into this movie, a, a couple, a man and a woman in silhouette, subtitled in Polish.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:06Griffin Newman?

  We don't really have our bearings yet.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Face is blurred out, interestingly.

• 54:09Griffin Newman?

  Start having an argument about, I don't have the key.

• 54:12David Sims?

  Yep, it's true.

• 54:13Griffin Newman?

  Four of these movies do involve.

• 54:14David Sims?

  Key imagery.

• 54:15Griffin Newman?

  Losing keys.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's into keys.

• 54:18David Sims?

  You're, you're not wrong. There is a lot of keys.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Passageways and portals. I mean, that's obviously like one of his recurring motifs and obsessions, right?

• 54:27Griffin Newman?

  You had your line on, I think the spirited away episode where you said that you think all movies are puzzles or dreams. And it's a thing we cite a lot and think about a lot on this show. And I think.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Well, not all movies, but like movies that you sit with and you, you know what I mean? Like.

• 54:42David Sims?

  Flubber is a puzzle, you know, Mr. Donnie.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Those ones you ruminate on, like you think about, right? Like, can they, can it be solved? Like, is it, is it about finding the solution or just like being in a feeling?

• 54:52Griffin Newman?

  Isn't what's interesting about Lynch, that he kind of makes films that are simultaneously puzzles and dreams?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Well, that's why I think Mulholland Drive is in the pocket.

• 55:00Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Cause that's in the sweet spot.

• 55:02Griffin Newman?

  It's the best version.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  Cause you can watch it.

• 55:04David Sims?

  Fun with it as a puzzle or not.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  You can watch it both ways.

• 55:06Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Inland Empire, I think you can't solve it all the way. I mean, this is the reason that I really come to love this movie is I think part of it was that, you know, it was like improvised. Like he didn't really have a script. Like he was just like.

• 55:22David Sims?

  And we can talk about that.

• 55:24Griffin Newman?

  We, I mean, we should crack open the dossier, but I watched this movie last night for the first time with the like, I'm not going to try to solve this because I understand the way he made it.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:33Griffin Newman?

  Not as intentionally designed with a like simple codex in his mind.

• 55:38David Sims?

  I think there is still a sort of story you can pluck out of Inland Empire, but it's sort of like Mulholland Drive where you don't have to do that.

• 55:46Griffin Newman?

  At the very end, I suddenly had a read on it. I'm, I'm sorry. I feel like I interrupted you.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 55:51Griffin Newman?

  Thing you were about to say about not trying to solve this movie or whether it is solvable.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the solution is in the, is in the posters. It's like a woman in trouble.

• 55:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 55:59David Sims?

  Like what more for me? Magic, right? Yeah. Of like, there will be an emotion at the center of the story I'm telling you that will get through to you no matter how it's being communicated.

• 56:11Griffin Newman?

  And a performance that is so locked in that even if the actor herself does not really understand what movie she's in or what.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Right. Was there's a quote where she's like, I can't wait to see this movie and figure out what the fuck I was doing.

• 56:24David Sims?

  Right. She, she talked about her and Justin Theroux would just kind of be like, what do you think this movie is about?

• 56:28Griffin Newman?

  Right. But the difference is that she's in almost every shot.

• 56:31David Sims?

  Well, no, she's not. She's not in quite a lot of it.

• 56:34Griffin Newman?

  She's in a lot of it.

• 56:35David Sims?

  Of course. It's a big crazy performance.

• 56:38Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 56:39David Sims?

  Uh, but it was funny at the time.

• 56:42Griffin Newman?

  That you can kind of stay locked into whatever she's playing at that moment.

• 56:45David Sims?

  That the movie became this kind of like early internet meme because David Lynch rented a cow and went on the street and did an Oscar campaign for Laura Dern. And people were like, in a way she should get an Oscar nomination. She has like 40 Oscar clips. She delivers monologues. She does accents. She cries. She dies like, and the same time people were like, can you please be serious? No Oscar voter is going to respond to this movie. Um, but, uh, it was, it was such a thing at the moment where I feel like the, his Oscar campaign became more famous than the movie.

• 57:17Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say, in a certain way, despite not getting her nomination that she was never gonna get. It has proven more effective than most Oscar campaigns and that we all remember the campaign.

• 57:28David Sims?

  The campaign.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 57:29Griffin Newman?

  It's like that and the fucking Melissa Leo, I'm buying out ads myself that say consider.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Those are the two for your consideration campaigns that people still talk about.

• 57:37Griffin Newman?

  And they're the two times that people went crazy, right? That they were just like, fuck your like model of how you do this.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  And good for them.

• 57:44Griffin Newman?

  And Melissa Leo, I totally support that. Like, go for it, yeah. And David Lynch doesn't get the nomination he wants.

• 57:49David Sims?

  But he got, he got attention.

• 57:50Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 57:51David Sims?

  And he knows how to, all right, yeah, I will, we have research on the film, so I will. Right, okay. Uh, crack open our dossier, yes. Mulholland Drive, of course, came out in 2001. Uh, and David Lynch doesn't really have any plans for another movie after that. He's much more interested in the internet.

• 58:07Griffin Newman?

  Hmm.

• 58:07David Sims?

  And his-

• 58:08Griffin Newman?

  Doing his dumb land.

• 58:09David Sims?

  Right, his own website.

• 58:10Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 58:11David Sims?

  Maybe starting his own television station is something he talks about. He starts davidlynch.com and for $10 a month, people will remember this, you would get his daily weather reports, um, something called Out Yonder, where he and his son Austin would talk to each other.

• 58:26Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 58:27David Sims?

  I'm not sure I've ever seen those.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  I've definitely seen the weather reports.

• 58:29David Sims?

  Of course.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Blue skies and golden sunshine.

• 58:32Griffin Newman?

  Um, he would, uh, speedrun levels of Sonic and Knuckles.

• 58:36David Sims?

  Uh, yeah. Dumb Land, which we talk about a little bit on our, do you remember Dumb Land? It was sort of an animated, crudely animated thing about dumb people.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Actually, yeah, right. I get it confused with the comic he had that never changed. The angriest dog in the world or whatever it was called, where it was the same art every single time or something.

• 58:54David Sims?

  Yeah, um, something called Head with a Hammer. Oh yeah, I remember that, which was sort of like an office drone satire. Something called Blue Bob, which was a blues, industrial blues album he made with the guitarist John Neff.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 59:05David Sims?

  I mean, it's David Lynch stuff.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Industrial blues.

• 59:08David Sims?

  And-

• 59:08Griffin Newman?

  But he was almost like doing an early version of a Patreon sort of idea of-

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, yeah, yeah.

• 59:13Griffin Newman?

  You pay your subscription, here's all my stuff.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:15Griffin Newman?

  This is where all of it will go.

• 59:17David Sims?

  In 2002, he released Rabbits, which is probably the most famous thing that came out of all of this famous quote unquote, which, uh, footage of which of course is inland empire. We talk about it that on our short film episodes as well. Have you ever seen Rabbits?

• 59:31Speaker 03

  I've only seen it in the inland empire.

• 59:33David Sims?

  Um, and so, you know, you've got Scott Coffey, Laura Herring and Naomi Watts in rabbit suits, doing this strange sitcom and they are in the rabbit.

• 59:42Griffin Newman?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:43David Sims?

  Confirmed.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Whoa, really? It's really them?

• 59:45Griffin Newman?

  That's cool.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  That's.

• 59:48David Sims?

  Laura Herring.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  I mean, if you're gonna do it, do it like that's what's so wonderful about him, right? Just fucking, yeah, yeah.

• 59:53David Sims?

  Laura Herring said her approach was, I closed my eyes and I followed his instructions.

• 59:59David Sims?

  David Lynch dot com shut down in the mid 2000s.

• 1:00:03Griffin Newman?

  Classic second dot com bubble.

• 1:00:05David Sims?

  He did. Yes, he did. Keep up the weather reports sporadically and they sort of still exist. But he realized, he said, you can't charge people for a site you don't update all the time. So I lost interest in it.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  Would that others would take the same lesson.

• 1:00:18Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say, he was quick to figure out the grind that doesn't a lot of people.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:23David Sims?

  Uh, and then he went from internet to the most analog form of generating creativity, walking and running into Laura Dern, his new neighbor. He hadn't seen her in a while. Dating Billy Bob Thornton, apparently.

• 1:00:39Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:40David Sims?

  And they ran into each other on Yon Street, just walking around.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  That.

• 1:00:46David Sims?

  And they were like, you know, we should do something together.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Are you serious? That's how this happened?

• 1:00:51David Sims?

  Because like, what would the last thing she'd have been with him like?

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Wild at heart.

• 1:00:55Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. It had been 10 years.

• 1:00:57David Sims?

  More than 10 years.

• 1:00:58Griffin Newman?

  I just want to quickly.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Oh, and Blue Velvet, I've seen Blue Velvet, sorry.

• 1:01:00David Sims?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:01:03Griffin Newman?

  Don't spend time on this. I just want to quickly just jump back and circle a thing that I think people forget, which is that Billy Bob Thornton left Laura Dern for Angelina Jolie.

• 1:01:12David Sims?

  Yeah, he was, he was dating some really fancy folks.

• 1:01:15Griffin Newman?

  In that crazy, whatever it was, 18 months, two years of the Billy Bob Angelina thing.

• 1:01:20David Sims?

  This.

• 1:01:20Griffin Newman?

  The quiet narrative was, and Laura Dern is sad.

• 1:01:24David Sims?

  Right, right, right, right. That he had dumped her. Yes.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Do you want to know something really crazy that I remember about Billy Bob Thornton? I think about this so often on a fresh air with Terry Gross, the interview show. She once interviewed him. And he said, he was like, yeah, I'm, he was like, I really get freaked out by old furniture. Like, I can't, I can't buy antique furniture or secondhand furniture. It like freaks me out. It really disturbs me. I have to buy new furniture. I think about that all the time.

• 1:01:52Griffin Newman?

  I believe.

• 1:01:53David Sims?

  Do you think there's a point at which his furniture becomes too old for him?

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wonder. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Anyway.

• 1:01:59Griffin Newman?

  I, I believe he has like held up film productions if they set dress. I, the thing about him is like his phobias and hangups are like complete and unbreakable.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:02:12Griffin Newman?

  And there are many of them.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  It's not an affectation.

• 1:02:15Griffin Newman?

  But I know the antique one like carries over into all aspects of his life.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 1:02:19David Sims?

  They ran into each other and they're like, we should do something together. So David Lynch is like, let, let me just film you doing some stuff. Uh, and she says she did tell her agent at CAA, I'm going to do this. And her agent was like, what's he paying you? And, uh, Lynch said, well, the internet rate is $100. And so he paid her $100. Uh, and they shot this lengthy monologue, which is, you know, basically lots of it is in the film, which is her talking. They're called the Mr. K monologues in the film, but it's her, when she's talking with the sort of southern accent recounting these things to a, the spectacled man.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  One of the actually creepiest characters in the movie.

• 1:02:55David Sims?

  Yeah, he's pretty creepy.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Performance is so unsettling.

• 1:02:58Griffin Newman?

  He is.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Of the guy behind the desk.

• 1:03:00David Sims?

  It's all shot in his painting studio, which they made a sort of set inside of. And, uh, she started speaking and they stopped twice, once for an airplane, once to reload the camera. Just apart from that, they just did long, like 45 minute takes.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  But we should emphasize they were not reloading the camera with film.

• 1:03:18David Sims?

  No.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Because this movie is not shot on film.

• 1:03:21David Sims?

  No, you, you love to come on for movies that were shot on.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:26David Sims?

  Fax machines.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:27David Sims?

  Say, um, Griffin, what are you looking up?

• 1:03:29Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Eric Crary, who plays Mr. K.

• 1:03:31David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:03:32Griffin Newman?

  Is kind of a Monty Montgomery situation.

• 1:03:34David Sims?

  Right. He's a film producer, right?

• 1:03:36Griffin Newman?

  He, here are the titles he held on this film in Lind Empire. Okay. He of course functions as an actor, playing the role of Mr. K. He also was associate producer. He also was production supervisor. He also was camera operator at times. He was part of the construction team.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  This is, but this is how all movies should be made.

• 1:03:55David Sims?

  It certainly is how this one was made.

• 1:03:56Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57David Sims?

  I mean, yeah, I mean, is the camera supervisor just someone who's like, hey, did you turn it on?

• 1:04:00Griffin Newman?

  Maybe.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Like make sure there's no film in that camera and make sure that thing looks like absolute garbage.

• 1:04:05Griffin Newman?

  He was Mary Sweeney's assistant on Mulholland Drive.

• 1:04:08David Sims?

  Yes, right.

• 1:04:09Griffin Newman?

  So you're like, here's his like,

• 1:04:10David Sims?

  He's just in the world.

• 1:04:11Griffin Newman?

  Longtime partner, creative collaborators assistant, who then he's like, I'm working on a new thing. I don't really know what it is yet. Can you come and be the person Laura Dern monologues to? And also as the project grows, he starts putting them in all these different places.

• 1:04:26David Sims?

  They do this and producer Jay Singh recounts that Lynch afterwards was just like, what if this was a movie? And was just very excited. And so.

• 1:04:37Griffin Newman?

  2006, still a time where a lot of people would look at that and go, well, what we should do is reshoot this on film.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  And so you're like, never going back to film.

• 1:04:46Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Never going back to film.

• 1:04:49Griffin Newman?

  My biggest cultural memory of this movie, having not seen it until last night. But remembering reading reviews and interviews at the time was that he kept on referring to, and I don't know if this is in the dossier, the digital camera as my, my beautiful little ugly thing.

• 1:05:05David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:05:06Griffin Newman?

  That he was in love with like.

• 1:05:08David Sims?

  We'll talk about it, but he could have shot this on higher quality digital film. It was available to him.

• 1:05:13Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:05:13David Sims?

  He shot on very low quality.

• 1:05:15Griffin Newman?

  Liked that it was ugly in a way.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  It looks so, uh, it just makes, it looks forbidden. Like it looks like you shouldn't be watching it. It's perfect.

• 1:05:23David Sims?

  So he starts writing pages, Jeremy Alter, uh, who's a location manager on Lost Highway, a friend, you know, starts helping him type pages up and stuff. And they would just sort of sporadically shoot things. They, they, they refer to Jeremy Irons coming on board as the moment from when the film shifts from like a project they're working on to like a film they're.

• 1:05:41Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:05:42David Sims?

  Like Jeremy Irons, I guess makes them all be like, I guess we should like come correct and like act like this is a feature, not just like weird David Lynch shit.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  I, so that was one of the things.

• 1:05:51Griffin Newman?

  More structured.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And his, and his performance is completely naturalistic as opposed to everybody else who's acting like they're in a dream. And when he showed up, when I rewatched it for the second time last week, he was one of the things I had forgotten about. It was like, what the fuck is Jeremy Irons doing? He's lost. Like what is he doing here? Not to mention Mary Steenburgen and just all these other.

• 1:06:09Griffin Newman?

  William H. Macy, basically reprising his role from Seabiscuit for one shot.

• 1:06:13David Sims?

  Yep. There's more of that on the, you'd like, they filmed plenty of, like, that's the whole thing. They're just filming stuff. Um, David Lynch insisted that he could smoke at any location where he was shooting. So they had to find strange locations to film. Because it's the 2000s, smoking is going out of vogue, like smoking in public places.

• 1:06:33David Sims?

  He would do things like say like, hey, Jeremy, write this down. I need six black dancers, a blonde Eurasian with a monkey on her shoulder, a lumberjack sawing wood. Natasha.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  Right, that's for the credits, the closing credits.

• 1:06:44David Sims?

  Like, he would basically just be like, see if you can find this, this, this.

• 1:06:47Griffin Newman?

  Well, like a past and future guest, a friend of the show, Drew McQueeney, uh, messaged us some months ago when we, uh, when Lynch won March Madness. And told us that he's in the special thanks for this movie. I don't know, is it one of the scenes that's in the film or is it?

• 1:07:01David Sims?

  I believe so.

• 1:07:02Griffin Newman?

  I couldn't identify which one it is, but that he got a call from his friend who was working in some department on this movie. And was like, do you still have an empty room in your apartment? And he's like, yeah, my roommate moved out two days ago. I haven't found like a sub letter yet. And he's like, can, like, we'll be there in like three hours.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  Can we smoke in it?

• 1:07:19David Sims?

  20 minutes. He shows up, I have the text here and he's with David Lynch. David Lynch is like, can I use your room to shoot my new film? Drew says, yes, of course. And that night.

• 1:07:30Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:07:31David Sims?

  So not even like later.

• 1:07:32Griffin Newman?

  Like, oh, this is a location scout. You'll get back to us in two months, you'll come here.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Not on, not on this one.

• 1:07:38David Sims?

  Uh, he shows up with Mary Sweeney, a cameraman, Laura Dern, four young European women shoots for five or six hours. And after that would call Drew every few weeks and call, ask him what Drew says was just random questions about things.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Wait, David Lynch would call him?

• 1:07:55Griffin Newman?

  Yes, cool.

• 1:07:56David Sims?

  It's cool. And that's why he has a special thing.

• 1:07:58Griffin Newman?

  Yes, I mean, Dern always said, like, I'd wake up every morning and go, I wonder what we're gonna shoot. And I'd like arrive on set and he'd deliver me pages he'd written the night before. But also that's how like all of the department heads, if those even are really proper titles on this film.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:08:13Griffin Newman?

  Are processing it. And then everyone in real time is sort of like. Great. Like, it's a movie made like it was chopped or something, you know, where it's like, here are the ingredients. Now figure out how to put this together in the next six hours.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Right. Shake it all up in this big metal bowl.

• 1:08:27David Sims?

  As Lynch says, I never saw any hole, W H O L E. I saw plenty of holes, H O L E S, but I didn't really worry. I would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that. I didn't know how they would relate. Production lasted about three years. Initially, it was self-funded. At a certain point, he goes to Studio Canal and he's like, I'm making this. It's gonna be vaguely this. And they gave him a few million dollars. Um, he's obviously shooting it on a Sony PD 150.

• 1:08:56Griffin Newman?

  But what's also big here? He is credited as the cinematographer. I think in a lot of the film, he is physically the one operating the camera.

• 1:09:04David Sims?

  He is the cinematographer, editor and composer, like, you know, a lot of his-

• 1:09:08Griffin Newman?

  Mary Sweeney, obviously, usually did his editing. And he said, in this case, like, there's no script to go off of. There's no order to put these things in. I was the only one who could edit it because I was the only one who had any sense, like, of looking at the footage and trying to figure out what it meant to me. But I think the whole point of the process of this movie is him just being like, how do I basically reduce this art form to like pencil on paper? Like, even from the time he's at AFI, it's like, well, you need a crew of a certain size and you need film. It has to be processed and there's a structure and all of this sort of stuff. You know, like, film schools do not just teach you the creative aspects and the language of film, but they also try to train you in, like, how to behave like a proper film production. They try to teach you how to be like upright

• 1:09:53Griffin Newman?

  and upstanding and have everything covered. And this feels like him, at this point in his 60s, being like, how do I turn filmmaking into something as direct as my painting? Where it's like, I'm just moving, I'm holding the camera, I'm writing stuff, I'm handing it to people, I'm cutting it, I'm just like, it's whatever I fucking feel like in the moment.

• 1:10:14David Sims?

  The way he talks about it is also how Soderbergh talks about it. This like, this liberation of like, I don't have to take all day setting something up. Like, we, you know, we're no longer bound to, uh, you know, he calls film a dinosaur and a tar- Much like Soderbergh, he now has kind of gotten over it. It's not like he doesn't like digital anymore. But now he's like, ah, film's nice. And yeah, I might use it again. Who knows? You know, they kind of get nostalgic, I think. But there's something liberating, I think of just like, oh, I just put the camera here and we're ready to go.

• 1:10:43Griffin Newman?

  Liberation is the world word. But but Soderbergh is so often working with writer collaborators, working with some kind of like, pretty fixed honed piece of text. And then he likes the challenge of like, how do I simplify the workday around this, the process, the language of the movie itself. Lynch is also like generating the language in real time.

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's real. I mean, I think one of the reasons a movie is so exciting is it's it's so intuitive. Everything about it, right? The shooting of it, the writing of it, such as such as it is, and then the editing of it, obviously. So in a way, you know, David Lynch is all into meditation and all this kind of stuff.

• 1:11:24Griffin Newman?

  I haven't heard that.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  And this feels like the closest he gets to, I don't know what you call like a flow state or whatever.

• 1:11:30Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  And he did it for a whole movie, which was like bonkers, like.

• 1:11:33Griffin Newman?

  Over three years.

• 1:11:36Griffin Newman?

  On and off, obviously.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:11:38Griffin Newman?

  Yes, he was.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  But I can't remember another movie that I've seen, I can't remember another feature film that I've seen in a real movie theater that is so intuitive.

• 1:11:47Griffin Newman?

  No, I don't think there's another film quite like this. And a lot of it is like The Process and him having a reputation.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  Right. I don't know who could make him, right?

• 1:11:57Griffin Newman?

  That people could trust him to do that.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:11:59Griffin Newman?

  That he had like, in certain ways, it feels like this would be a lot of people's weird first film they made.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:12:06Griffin Newman?

  Before they figure out how to hone their thing.

• 1:12:08David Sims?

  This is also just, this is basically an avant garde film, and it is the only avant garde film a lot of people have seen because they saw it because it's a David Lynch film.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:12:17David Sims?

  Like famous people are in it.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:12:20David Sims?

  And it's kind of got a foot in each world a little bit, you know, versus like something you would see at a art museum or at a, you know, at the.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  But that's why it's so damn good.

• 1:12:30David Sims?

  I sure.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  Because movies always have to have a screenplay. And like screenplays are great, but it's like.

• 1:12:35Griffin Newman?

  They're for nerds.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  No, but seriously, don't you kind of think, don't you kind of get sick of it after a while? Like, of course. Like, a good, a good movie and it has a screenplay. Oh, the script is so good. Oh, I loved how they resolved act two, you know, or this character's theme was, uh.

• 1:12:50Griffin Newman?

  Sounds like you're doing a direct impression of this podcast.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? Like, I like, I like good screenplays. They're a lot of fun.

• 1:12:57Griffin Newman?

  But there's something liberating.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  They make movies really good. But to go, go, I mean, this is the thing about like, to go to a big theater and sit in the dark at this massive screen in an almost empty, I remember it as almost empty theater, and just watch a terrifying dream.

• 1:13:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  And knowing on some level, this is inexhaustible.

• 1:13:18Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  Because I will never be able to solve it because it wasn't made with that part of the brain or something like this is, this is intuitive. This is pure emotion. And there's just like, you can fit, you can solve it like, oh, she is the Polish prostitute. Or, oh, the family in the house wasn't her family, quote unquote, you know, and by her, I mean either Sue playing Nikki or Nikki, like, who cares? Just to sit in that space and, and be like, like.

• 1:13:50Griffin Newman?

  Really lost his keys.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  I mean, it's just like, it's so wonderful. It's like, yeah, like David Lynch is just doing his thing. It's so awesome that I'm sitting in a fucking movie theater, just watching David Lynch do his thing.

• 1:14:02Griffin Newman?

  Well, and I think this is the breakthrough of the technology changing, right?

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:14:06Griffin Newman?

  Is that like, there was a baseline that a movie cost, the amount of crew people you needed on set.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  You could not afford to be intuitive because, yeah.

• 1:14:16Griffin Newman?

  Correct. Yeah, exactly. You need to hone your ideas, even in a movie that is abstract, or even in a film that is avant garde. You need to come kind of correct.

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Griffin Newman?

  Have some clear plan and sense of how to get all of this done. And he's like, not just rethinking the language of how the movie looks, but how he operates on a day to day basis. And we've talked so much across the series about his whole thing of like his routines around creativity. Where he's like, I have to be creative every day. I eat the same thing every day. So that leaves the space for my brain to wander. And then there has to be some expression of it, you know, whether I'm painting every day or things like the weather, which people were like, what is this? Is this a bit? And it's like, no, it's all part of the just like, I need to do stuff and maybe something interesting comes out of it. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it's shared, maybe it isn't. But like the gears operate. And then it felt like for him, every three or four years, he'd be like, and now here's a movie.

• 1:15:10Griffin Newman?

  This is like a finished work.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:13Griffin Newman?

  I do a lot of stuff on a daily basis, but this is, these are the works that are real, concentrated, focused, resolved in some way, even if they feel ambiguous. And then this is the opposite. This is him making a movie out of basically his daily routine of creative exploration.

• 1:15:30David Sims?

  Laura Dern famously told the BBC before it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, "I don't know who I was playing and I still don't know. I'm looking forward to seeing the film tonight to learn more." She references Catherine de Nive in Repulsion as like a big influence in terms of like playing a dismantled person is how she puts it. Oh, that's interesting. Basically like, I think David was giving me several characters. There may be aspects of a same person or a same vibe or whatever.

• 1:15:58Griffin Newman?

  And Repulsion has that same kind of like inscrutable reality vibe.

• 1:16:03David Sims?

  Yeah, you're in someone's troubled mind and you can't tell what's real or not. Justin Theroux says, "Inland Empire is close to a spiritual opus as you're gonna get. It's powerful. It's got all these inexplicably unforgettable images. A character standing behind a tree hiding a Christmas light, for instance, so strange and yet you remember it."

• 1:16:24Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 1:16:25David Sims?

  Yes?

• 1:16:25Griffin Newman?

  Uh, uh, who are you wearing?

• 1:16:28David Sims?

  Uh, who am I wearing?

• 1:16:28Griffin Newman?

  I'm doing like an impression of a red carpet correspondent, asking who you're wearing right now.

• 1:16:32David Sims?

  Well, I am wearing Quince.

• 1:16:36Griffin Newman?

  Well, well, well, what a Quince, Quincy dense.

• 1:16:40David Sims?

  It's a Mongolian cashmere zip-dense sweater.

• 1:16:44Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:16:45David Sims?

  It's a sort of a brown. Would you agree?

• 1:16:47Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it's like maybe like a, what would you, a chocolate?

• 1:16:50David Sims?

  Sure, I have been seated next to people wearing this item of clothing and they have brushed against me, not to brag, and gone like, "So soft."

• 1:16:57Griffin Newman?

  Oh, a soft boy. But listen, the best pieces in your closet are the ones that you can count on whether you're heading to work, going out, or keeping things casual. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy. This holiday season, it's where I'm shopping for myself and everyone on my list.

• 1:17:14David Sims?

  Quince does rock. It's got high-quality staples made with these premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere. 14 karat gold?

• 1:17:24David Sims?

  Italian leather.

• 1:17:25Griffin Newman?

  Mama mia.

• 1:17:26David Sims?

  All timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites long after the holidays. These cashmere sweaters, like the one I'm wearing, start at just $60. Lineup doesn't stop there. You've got premium down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories, everything your loved ones need to stay warm and look put together all season long.

• 1:17:46Griffin Newman?

  And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag.

• 1:17:58David Sims?

  Um, so yeah, obviously I'm wearing Quince sweater right now. I've got Quince bedding at home. Ooh, they've got Christmas stockings.

• 1:18:06Griffin Newman?

  Oh, well, well, well.

• 1:18:07David Sims?

  They got tree skirts. Garlands, if you want to go Christmas mode.

• 1:18:11Griffin Newman?

  Your tree deserves to be dressed in Quince as well. And when it comes to gifting, Quince has a lot more than clothing. Think fine jewelry, leather bags, the aforementioned hotel quality bedding, chef-grade cookware, and five-star luggage. Basically, plenty of ways to find something special for everyone on your list. If you want to give the gift of quality this holiday season, download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, that's a year, now available in Canada and the UK, too. Ding dong. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Blank Check. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  Verizon knows that holiday math can be complicated.

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  Okay, let's see. We got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts? Wait, oh, what did we get Aunt Sandy? And the dogs. Oh, can't forget the dogs.

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

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• 1:19:27Speaker 03

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• 1:20:08David Sims?

  So they shot a lot in LA, a little bit of Paris, and a lot in Lódz, I think is how you say it.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  That's all the Polish stuff, yeah.

• 1:20:16David Sims?

  Lynch fell in love with it. He went there typing, photographed some abandoned factories, which sounds like something that David Lynch would do, and really liked the weather, the raininess, the big electrical plant.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  It has a Pittsburgh vibe, right? It has, yeah.

• 1:20:33David Sims?

  It's like an old city.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  Faded industrial stuff.

• 1:20:35David Sims?

  But then it's got all this industrial stuff too.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  Probably has like electrical homes in the evening that he can buy.

• 1:20:41David Sims?

  He loves electricity.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, he's a good sound designer.

• 1:20:44Griffin Newman?

  Have you ever been to Poland?

• 1:20:44David Sims?

  I have never been to Poland.

• 1:20:46Griffin Newman?

  It is unbearably sad.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  Whoa, cool, really?

• 1:20:49Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah. In a way, that's like kind of fascinating and profound. I mean, I am predominantly Polish in heritage.

• 1:20:56David Sims?

  As am I.

• 1:20:57Griffin Newman?

  But is not a thing. Really?

• 1:20:59David Sims?

  Yes. Well, I'm my mom's side, not my dad's side.

• 1:21:01Griffin Newman?

  I'm 50% Polish.

• 1:21:03David Sims?

  Scots and French or whatever.

• 1:21:05Griffin Newman?

  My family has like no sense of like Polish pride.

• 1:21:08David Sims?

  No, they left, as did mine.

• 1:21:10Griffin Newman?

  That's the thing, it was like, we moved on.

• 1:21:12David Sims?

  It's not a national pride thing. It wasn't a country, well, it might have been a country, yeah.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  Wait, what makes it sad? Just...

• 1:21:18Griffin Newman?

  I don't know how to verbalize it. And I do think this comes across in the movie. I was trying to crack why Poland, and maybe it is just he went there and started filming there and then was like, well, then I guess I need to have Polish characters or whatever. There is this sort of like cosmic sadness. I feel like I had heard people say shit. About like this city is still haunted by its past or whatever. And I'd always be like, you're being metaphysical. That's not a fucking thing. It's a city. People are sad like nine 11, New York felt sad after that because the people were sad. I don't think New York still feels haunted in like the ground in that same kind of way. And then I went to Poland when I was like 20 or 21 to Warsaw. And I was like, this place has like ghosts in it.

• 1:22:04Griffin Newman?

  Like it just, and, and there's something about you can feel in the way it was like destroyed and rebuilt.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:12Griffin Newman?

  What remains of old Poland and what has been rebuilt both feel reflective of like this unspeakable horror that happens in the middle of these two points. And it just feels like there's a fucking heaviness there, which I swear extends to like the air.

• 1:22:28David Sims?

  Let's talk about inland empire. The only other thing about the production is obviously just because of the digital film, he could shoot incredibly long takes. It meant he had a mountain of footage that he himself edited over the course of six months in Final Cut Pro. And the, the resulting thing is the film inland empire, which was released in theaters in not like wide, but like was shown to Americans and took some people by surprise, I would say.

• 1:22:55Griffin Newman?

  This movie has its own Twin Peaks, the missing pieces type thing.

• 1:23:00David Sims?

  It's what also happened is what it's called.

• 1:23:02Griffin Newman?

  Things that happened.

• 1:23:03David Sims?

  Right. That's it.

• 1:23:04Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. But there's an additional 75 minutes of stuff.

• 1:23:07David Sims?

  I've never watched them.

• 1:23:08Griffin Newman?

  Me neither.

• 1:23:08David Sims?

  Yes. It's on the disc.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Is the, so is the movie that I saw in 2007, the same version that I watched last week on iTunes or however we watched it?

• 1:23:19David Sims?

  He did, he made some minor changes.

• 1:23:21Griffin Newman?

  Okay. He did a fascinating, incredibly complicated and bizarre restoration process for this movie.

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  I read about that where it's like, make it look good and then make it look like shit again or something.

• 1:23:31David Sims?

  They had to use like AI tech to like clean up and then read filthy, I can find this or it was weird.

• 1:23:39Griffin Newman?

  We, we will, we will post on social media, the actual document and the wording when this film had its re-release in theaters and the Criterion release that explains it. But basically it was like, there was a certain amount of upscaling that happened at the time relative to 2006 technology to give it a little more detail. So it would look a little less shitty projected on a huge screen. But that was an artificial sharpening.

• 1:24:04Griffin Newman?

  And a more limited sort of like, I don't know.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  So I can say the important thing is, can I say that I had the authentic inland empire experience? Because I saw it on a big screen in 2007.

• 1:24:14Griffin Newman?

  Correct.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  And half the time I couldn't tell what the fuck I was looking at.

• 1:24:17Griffin Newman?

  What he's done since then is they like dumbed it down and they went through a process to take away the sharpening from the theatrical release.

• 1:24:24David Sims?

  And they down scaled it to SD.

• 1:24:26Griffin Newman?

  To the blurriness of the original footage and then they used more advanced AI sharpening.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  AI was like, I've never been asked to do something like this before.

• 1:24:34Griffin Newman?

  But he's obviously not trying to make it look like film. He was just like, I need to make it a little easier to delineate between shapes on screen.

• 1:24:42David Sims?

  So, yeah.

• 1:24:43Griffin Newman?

  And it was like seven passes back and forth to, yeah.

• 1:24:46David Sims?

  I, I did see this restoration at the IFC Center, which to me is like where you need to see a David Lynch movie. Cause the IFC Center is such like a, a hallowed museum of like early 2000s New York film culture. I still like going there to see anything. It's a totally nice place, Bob, but you know what I mean? Like that reel they play in front, do you know what I'm talking about? At the IFC Center, they play this reel of like, oh, like directors come here to talk about their movies. And it's so much the same reel from like 2006 of like, you know, Spike Lee discussing passing strange. Or it's like, they've never updated it. It's sort of adorable.

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  I like places like that.

• 1:25:21David Sims?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:25:22Griffin Newman?

  But I also feel like original run, this movie played for like, what felt like a straight year at IFC. And even the restoration release felt like it played for a very long time.

• 1:25:32David Sims?

  I think it's just regularly playing there. Honestly, it kind of has never been gone.

• 1:25:36Griffin Newman?

  In a weird way, more than his other films.

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  Wait, so when you saw it the other day, did you see it on the theater?

• 1:25:41Griffin Newman?

  I saw it last night. I projected here on the screen directly behind you in the office.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  Okay, alright.

• 1:25:46David Sims?

  Um, what'd you think?

• 1:25:47Griffin Newman?

  I will admit, it is a slightly hard movie to talk about having seen only once. I, I felt like, I, I, some of it isn't scrutable. I was very engaged by parts of it. I was like, I have no idea to talk about this. And then truly in the last 30 seconds, I was like, before the end credits, I was like, oh, I think I have a handle on this.

• 1:26:09David Sims?

  So what's your take?

• 1:26:09Griffin Newman?

  I don't know if my take is super reductive and dumb, but I think it's truly his movie. And, and it makes sense that this is what he would get to as the through line from the process of how he made it, which just starts from, I should film Laura Dern doing stuff, right? I think this is his movie of being like, what is acting?

• 1:26:31Griffin Newman?

  You know, like, certain directors will talk about, like, I am mystified by the process of watching great actors work. Directors who are up there, close with them, holding their hands, and are still, like, there is some weird supernatural conjuring, where they are able to pull something from the depths of whatever it is, their subconscious, their memory, their research, whatever it is, right? And here's, like, David Lynch going through these experiments of filming Luridurn doing stuff, and he's able to give her shit without context. He's able to pivot wildly, give her no prep time, and somehow, without fail, she constantly drops into something that feels incredibly rich, specific, honest, earned,

• 1:27:11Griffin Newman?

  deep. And I think as the movie goes on, he's starting to, like, try to make sense of, like, what is this? I understand my own creative process, and my conversation with my subconscious, my unconscious, you know, and trying to get to a flow state and everything. But the idea of physically embodying that, and making it something that feels real enough, that it passes people's bullshit test, in this fake medium, right? Which he's sort of trying to collapse the wall of the medium in real time. When you get that final shot before the end credits of her sitting back on the couch, it's like, in this Mulholland driveway, this whole movie has almost been a contemplation of how to figure out this character. And you

• 1:27:50Griffin Newman?

  saying, like, she is the Polish sex worker, right? It's like, well, part of it is, okay, she thinks she's just having to engage with this text, and if it's about a relationship, then does she actually need to sleep with the guy? And then she finds out, oh, this is actually based on an older film, and there's a Polish curse connected to it. So then she's going back to the original text. Gives me goosebumps. I want to talk about that part. It's so crazy. But then she's trying to, like, figure out, like, Polish history. Like, it's the way you'll hear certain actors, and sometimes it feels kind of foofy and academic, and you're like, is this actually necessary? Of like, well, of course, I had to read 10 books about Poland, because the character's Polish, even though it's a present day film or whatever. Like, the feeling of the lines being blurred, of like, you think you're

• 1:28:32Griffin Newman?

  watching an hour of this woman's life decay, and then that, at her absolute lowest point, is followed by Jeremy Irons being like, and that's a wrap on, we're done with her scenes, and now back to her. Like, the whole movie is just like, what is this weird fucking thing that some people are able to do?

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  That is such an interesting take. It is, I would have never thought about any of that. Maybe because I'm not an actor, but I will.

• 1:28:58Griffin Newman?

  That's my fear is that I'm running it through the prism of my own experience and whatever. Cause I just think of like the, the opening of the couch, right? Before she gets the monologue from Grace Zabritsky. This thing that's also implanted in her head that sort of then becomes like part of the process. And the way that actors will talk about like, you know what? This weird other thing happened to me when I was filming and it wouldn't seem like that had anything to do with the project, but it kind of got worked into my performance.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, right.

• 1:29:25Griffin Newman?

  That story starts to become a thing. The whole thing is like, I have this exciting audition.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, she really wants to get the role.

• 1:29:33Griffin Newman?

  Right. This woman just sitting kind of like cross legged on a couch, just thinking about like, how do I get my head around this character?

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  How did the movie make you feel?

• 1:29:44Griffin Newman?

  Uncomfortable.

• 1:29:47Griffin Newman?

  I would say.

• 1:29:48David Sims?

  Sure.

• 1:29:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, confused and uncomfortable. I, a, a lot of it is what you said, the sort of cosmic hollowing out. That I think he's able to capture better than anyone in this feels like a movie that is made up almost entirely of those moments. I think it has like a real hammer blow versions of it, but I also think that's kind of a through line on this movie. Almost on a scene to scene basis, more than most of his films.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:15Griffin Newman?

  What were you about to say, Sam? Sorry.

• 1:30:16David Sims?

  I don't know. Can't remember.

• 1:30:17Griffin Newman?

  Okay. Um, Ben, had you seen it before?

• 1:30:21David Sims?

  No, no.

• 1:30:22Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. What'd you think?

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  How did it make you feel?

• 1:30:24David Sims?

  It's fucked up. No, it made me feel, um, confused, but I love throughout all of his work, the dreamlike nature of it. And so, once you can just kind of let go and lock in, I found myself getting really lost in the world, but also kind of in my own just. Internal interior worlds and thinking about dreams I've had and and recurring motifs that have keep coming up throughout my life. You know, again, dreams and imagery and and just it's it's it's easy to space out and not feel like you're losing out on too much.

• 1:31:09Griffin Newman?

  But that's also, I think, kind of a cornerstone of certain avant garde cinema and especially avant garde cinema that's done at feature length or even extreme lengths. I mean, this is his longest movie.

• 1:31:22David Sims?

  Must be.

• 1:31:23Griffin Newman?

  Right, has to be.

• 1:31:24David Sims?

  Yeah, I would think so, yeah.

• 1:31:27Griffin Newman?

  I I I've invoked this before, but I remember reading this review of Goodbye Dragon Inn. A fantastic film, but a film that famously ends with like an eight minute unbroken shot of an empty movie theater.

• 1:31:39David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  Oh, that sounds good.

• 1:31:41David Sims?

  I I I apologize if I missed. Have you ever seen?

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  I never heard of it.

• 1:31:45David Sims?

  Si Ming Liang, I'm sorry. I got that. He's like a Malaysian filmmaker, but he's mostly, you know, Taiwan new wave guy. The Hole, have you ever seen The Hole?

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:31:54David Sims?

  You would love it.

• 1:31:55Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, you should dig in.

• 1:31:56David Sims?

  Check it out.

• 1:31:57Griffin Newman?

  But it's a movie about a movie theater on its last night of operation, playing an old martial art epic.

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  I gotta say this, like, the one of the things that David Lynch does so well is, um, well, we'll talk about this when I talk about the third time I watched this movie. But images of movie theaters in movies.

• 1:32:15Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  It gives me such a shimmering, uncanny feeling.

• 1:32:20Griffin Newman?

  Well, so this Goodbye Dragon Inn is made up almost entirely of that, right?

• 1:32:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I gotta see it.

• 1:32:25Griffin Newman?

  And it's like sparsely attended and it's all these employees, it has maybe 20 lines of dialogue.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm in.

• 1:32:30Griffin Newman?

  A lot of it is watching the movie in the movie. There's a real movie from the distance of an empty theater.

• 1:32:35David Sims?

  It's so funny because, right, I'm like, like, I was like this young film fan, I saw The Hole and I saw what time is it there? And I was like, I'm so pumped for this guy. I'm now on board. And then Goodbye Dragon Inn really felt like him being like, oh, I'm even a little bit considered now. You you are about, you are in for.

• 1:32:52Griffin Newman?

  It's his kind of kindness.

• 1:32:53David Sims?

  The most limiting distancing experience.

• 1:32:55Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:32:56David Sims?

  Now you've come around to that movie, but I remember the time being like, huh, I don't know what to make of that one. That one kinda went over my head when I was 17.

• 1:33:02Griffin Newman?

  I remember reading this critical discourse around this movie, probably happening in fucking Time Out New York, and people fighting over it, right? I think maybe two different critics debating it and saying like, I get the impact of having such an extended, long, final shot of this empty theater, the resonance of it, and now it's over.

• 1:33:23David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:24Griffin Newman?

  But is there anything that you get from the shot being eight minutes that you don't get from the shot being three minutes? Was sort of their argument. And this person retorts like, when something extends to that length, part of it isn't asking you to engage and just give your full focus to watching it for eight minutes. It's what Ben said. It's sort of, it becomes about what you think about while that's going on.

• 1:33:48David Sims?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:33:49Griffin Newman?

  Different way of watching and engaging with a movie where you're used to, it's holding your hands and it's begging for your attention. And this is saying, what else does this make you think of?

• 1:33:58David Sims?

  And it's the, it's the classic, I was Kiaristami quote about like, I like films that make you, like that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Like those are the films I like. Like, I don't, I'm not trying to keep you awake, buddy. I'm trying to actually put you to sleep.

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  Verizon knows that holiday math can be complicated.

• 1:34:16Speaker 05

  Okay, let's see. We got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts? Wait, oh, what did we get? And Sandy and the dogs. Oh, can't forget the dogs.

• 1:34:27Speaker 04

  Know what doesn't need math? Simplicity Plan from Verizon. One plan, one price. Just $30 a line per month for you or the whole family. The holidays are complicated. Shopping our best deals and switching to Verizon is simple. For new customers, $30 per line includes auto pay and switch discount. Additional taxes, fees, and terms apply.

• 1:34:47David Sims?

  Inland Empire. I saw it when it came out, uh, and it had an impact on me and I was so like into Mulholland Drive and like David Lynch, that I liked it. But I remember sort of emerging with like Laura Dern though, like what an interesting emotional experience I had with her, right? And then every time I would revisit the film, I would always be like, I really remember the sort of premise of like, she kind of gets lost in a movie she's making that's cursed. And I really remember the ending. And I always forgot that there was like, a lot of Polish and a lot of like,

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:35:19David Sims?

  You know, wandering around in like industrial spaces in the middle. And that's, this is the first time, because when I saw the restoration, I was like, a lot of Poland, right? I always forget about the Poles. This time I was like, I am prepared for all the Polish stuff. I am prepared for the monologues. I am, you know,

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  And the whole, and the whole life with Smithy, the domestic drama going on in the house inside the soundstage. Yeah.

• 1:35:41David Sims?

  And I really kind of engaged with it a little bit more in a somewhat linear manner of like, right, this is about some sort of curse or recurring recursive like story that happens to this woman who has an affair and maybe gets murdered by the, what the other woman and, you know, maybe is sort of being tormented by the other man and like, the rabbits are this, the, you know, the Polish people are this, the, the, the lost girl who's watching TV.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  Right, crying.

• 1:36:13David Sims?

  Is this like, you know, it's like, we're seeing just different versions. And of course, the movie version of her is this, but also the real version of her seems to be this, like she's seen always married to this guy, you know, who's this Polish guy, like, you know,

• 1:36:27Griffin Newman?

  I keep going back to the Twin Peaks, it is happening again.

• 1:36:29David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:36:30Griffin Newman?

  Thing as such, like a key statement for Lynch, and especially his like fixation on the violence that is done to women and the cycles that like support it in society and how they process it, that it's like, all of this shit is a continuum.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:36:45David Sims?

  And I do get the sense in the film that, that something has happened at the end to maybe break the cycle, that she

• 1:36:52Griffin Newman?

  It ends with us.

• 1:36:53David Sims?

  She destroys some sort of monster, like that crazy thing we see at the end, that not just her face, but then the sort of other odd weeping sort of clown face.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:37:06David Sims?

  She shoots the phantom, the hypnotist. Yeah, right. And then, and then when we're seeing Grace's, like, it feels like, yeah, there has been some shift or some

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  Oh, I think it's definitely a happy ending.

• 1:37:16David Sims?

  Right. This is kind of a happy ending.

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Griffin Newman?

  And they all dance.

• 1:37:20David Sims?

  Then they all dance to a similar man while someone saw the log in doors, normal, which is what I do when I feel like I'm kind of

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  I remember being I got so amped when the guy sawing the lock showed up. It's like, it's all happening. It's like that Ron Paul meme. It's all happening or whatever Rand Paul or whoever is.

• 1:37:38David Sims?

  It's Ron. Ron is the one who was all happening.

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  Oh my God, it got me so saint. I was so excited.

• 1:37:43David Sims?

  Cause the thing about Ron Paul is he does look like a little elf from another dimension. Rand Paul, you're just kind of like, no, I don't want to see that.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:37:51Griffin Newman?

  Ron Paul looks like a time bandit. Right?

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:37:56David Sims?

  Yeah. Um, anyway.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  The quote I think about, the quote I think about when I think about this movie is, I can't remember who told me this quote, but somebody who had some experience in psychiatry or psychology or something, I was explaining some dream I had had where I was like, I can't remember if we talked about, did we talk on 28 days later about how I used to have these recurring nightmares about being attacked by zombies?

• 1:38:15Griffin Newman?

  I think we did.

• 1:38:16David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  Right. So I was talking about like, oh, I dreamt I was back in my parents' house and all these zombies showed up. And I knew if I opened the door, like they would tear me alive, tear me apart or whatever. What do you think those zombies represent? And this friend said, the thing you need to know about dreams is everyone in your dream is you. It's all you. And that for some reason helps me make sense of Inland Empire when I'm like, well, wait a minute. Now, in this scene, she's referring to her husband by the movie name, but in this scene, she's in, you know, it's a woman in trouble.

• 1:38:47David Sims?

  It's alarming though, when you dream of being someone else.

• 1:38:51Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know if you dream, you meet, wait, hold on. Are you saying that you can dream that you're inside somebody else?

• 1:38:57David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  What?

• 1:38:58David Sims?

  Like who? I've had, okay. The Fonz? Here's a great example of a recurring.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  Wait, you mean you're not you in your dream?

• 1:39:05David Sims?

  I'm someone else. Who are you?

• 1:39:07Griffin Newman?

  Ben, give your example and then I want to build on this.

• 1:39:10David Sims?

  Uh, so I, I have this recurring dream that's kind of set in this world that's similar to where Bruce Willis is, before he goes back in time in 12 monkeys. I'm underground and it's this kind of like dirt factory. And I'm like inhabit this worker who's controlling this equipment, like a crane, like operator. And, but my job is like harvesting potato people. That's the best.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Well, sir, I understand like, that's not your job in the real world, but how do you know you're not you in the dream?

• 1:39:45David Sims?

  Because I can see myself.

• 1:39:49David Sims?

  And see a reflection of myself.

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  You can look in a mirror in a dream and see not your face looking back at you.

• 1:39:55David Sims?

  Such cinematic dreams.

• 1:39:56Griffin Newman?

  But here's my question, because I'm the same way, Ben. In that moment, don't you go, oh, interesting, I'm this guy in my dream. Like, when I dream as other people, it's like being John Malkovich style. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  What the fuck are y'all on about? How can you not be yourself in a dream? It's just you.

• 1:40:13Griffin Newman?

  But this is what I'm saying. It's being John Malkovich where it's like, I'm inside this body.

• 1:40:17David Sims?

  It's like watching a movie, but also knowing that, like, I'm in this.

• 1:40:23Griffin Newman?

  So that's the weird wrinkle.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  You guys thought Inland Empire was weird. This should be your favorite fucking, this should be like watching like Toy Story to you guys. That's so much crazier than any dream I've ever had.

• 1:40:32Griffin Newman?

  Now may do a tree with that one. But I, no, I, I, it's the same thing where I'm like, oh, it's interesting that I'm someone else in this dream.

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  You don't have that, right?

• 1:40:41Griffin Newman?

  In the dream.

• 1:40:42David Sims?

  I don't know what they're talking about.

• 1:40:42Griffin Newman?

  My consciousness is in that other person. I'm perceiving being this other person with all my thoughts and experiences and personality. So I'm never fully like, of course, I couldn't be someone else entirely because it's going to be me thinking.

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  It's a matter of embodiment. Like, I am in a different person's body right now.

• 1:40:59David Sims?

  I do not have that kind of lucidity, but my dreams, as I remember them.

• 1:41:02Griffin Newman?

  We kind of dream like the cobbler, if that makes more sense. That's an easier way to explain it.

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  I don't know what that is.

• 1:41:07Griffin Newman?

  Classic Adam Sandler, Tom McCarthy movie in which a cobbler literally unlocks the ability to walk in another man's shoes by wearing the shoes of his client. And he gets to beat him for a couple hours.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 1:41:18Griffin Newman?

  Won the Razzie, I think, for worst picture.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  Is this a David Lynch joint?

• 1:41:22David Sims?

  Uh, no, my dreams are always the same. It's always just, I have to do something. I keep getting like way later distracted by all this weird shit.

• 1:41:30Griffin Newman?

  You're trying to get the Inland Empire episode down to 90 minutes and somehow it's stretching up.

• 1:41:35David Sims?

  Well, we got, oh, well, we just hit 90.

• 1:41:37Griffin Newman?

  Fucking nail that shit.

• 1:41:39David Sims?

  Uh, good job. Yeah.

• 1:41:40Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 1:41:41David Sims?

  So, right, the first chunk of Inland Empire is about an actress named Nikki Grace. Yes, we have other things that we're seeing, such as this. Hotel room.

• 1:41:54Griffin Newman?

  Well, I mean, you saying you always.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Do you know what a whore is? That's one of the early lines of dialogue.

• 1:41:59David Sims?

  It is. It's definitely like, it's setting you up for like a chill time.

• 1:42:03Griffin Newman?

  You saying you always forget how much Polish there is in this movie.

• 1:42:07David Sims?

  It does kick off with it.

• 1:42:08Griffin Newman?

  I'm clocking about 10 minutes until Laura Dern appears.

• 1:42:12David Sims?

  Yeah, I think you're right.

• 1:42:13Griffin Newman?

  With the hallway conversation, then you're.

• 1:42:14David Sims?

  You start out with an honestly awesome and haunting title screen with this crazy noise and you're kind of like rubbing your hands together. Yeah, yeah, truly.

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  The sound design in the opening is great.

• 1:42:28Griffin Newman?

  But then you have like the lost woman watching rabbits on the TV like during all of that for 10 minutes before ostensibly the main thread of the movie.

• 1:42:37David Sims?

  If you actually, well, I actually have like a synopsis that I can go through. There's an introduction to Axon N, the longest radio play in history, which we occasionally will return to some kind of, you know, these are, like I said, these are all sort of renderings of the same sort of drama of some kind of like betrayal and cuckoldry or whatever. You have, uh, you know, right? This black and white footage of actors blurred out, you know, and this horrible kind of sort of sex worker situation. You have the girl watching rabbits on TV.

• 1:43:09Griffin Newman?

  And the immediate sense that this is her in the aftermath of something traumatic, that she is watching TV in an attempt to process or at least take her mind off of her. Right.

• 1:43:19David Sims?

  But then she's seeing rabbits, but she's also seeing inland empire. She's seeing like Grace Sabriski on the screen a little bit. And then you have the rabbits taking two Polish guys to a strange sort of hotel room lobby banquet area.

• 1:43:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, big fancy room, a grand room. Yeah.

• 1:43:37David Sims?

  And they talk about an opening and if they understand each other, which is language that the movie uses a lot, like over and over again, these and, uh, something's going on there. And then we're with Laura Dern and I'm like, okay, great. We're like classic Hollywood setup, movie actress. She's got a new role.

• 1:43:52Griffin Newman?

  Ian Avacromby as a butler. Like, you're like, I get this. We're dealing in orchid type.

• 1:43:58David Sims?

  She seems to live in some sort of like incredibly like awful mansion.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  The Feng Shui in her house is so fucked up. And like, it's really something.

• 1:44:08David Sims?

  You do kind of get the sense that it's her husband's vibe or aesthetic, or like, she seems to have married some kind of.

• 1:44:14Griffin Newman?

  Some weird old money guy.

• 1:44:16David Sims?

  Yeah, or like, you know, guy who's a tycoon in of terrible things or something, right? Like, like.

• 1:44:21Griffin Newman?

  He's a fucking shipping magnate.

• 1:44:23David Sims?

  Yeah, it's like, what's your, you know, what's your job? He's like, uh, import, export. And you're like, oh, right, okay. And it's awful in there. And like, the digital photography kind of enhances, it makes it look kind of dark and depressive. And like, there's curtains and then you see the light coming through, you know, in this like. Is air specific too? It is, yeah. It's so nails. I mean, like, the way people are dressed really, like, brought me back to that time. But the way that that space in particular looks, it just, it looks like what a fancy person thought was like. It must be a real. Royal and nice and classy, right? This must be someone's house.

• 1:45:00Griffin Newman?

  Well, it's like Queen of Versailles too. Like, I feel like this is when they start filming that movie that is documenting someone ruining their life, trying to make a version of a house like this that's 100 times bigger.

• 1:45:12David Sims?

  This has to be a real place.

• 1:45:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:14David Sims?

  Right?

• 1:45:14Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, they weren't building sets for this fucking movie.

• 1:45:17David Sims?

  It looks like a trashy house in California, though, for sure. Someone who has money, but has no taste.

• 1:45:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:45:25David Sims?

  And then luckily, it's what you want in a David Lynch movie. Grace Sabriski comes to kind of like, cool everyone off.

• 1:45:32Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:33David Sims?

  Just really settle you and make you feel like normal and not freaked out at all.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  Lesson of this movie, never talk to your neighbors. Never invite them into your home.

• 1:45:43David Sims?

  I remember watching this film on TV at one point in my room in college with headphones on. And the whole thing where when she's just talking about a folk tale and putting a Polish accent and brutal murder, like having to turn the TV off, like, and like, take a break, you know?

• 1:46:01Speaker 03

  That fisheye lens, he's shooting her in a fisheye and then Laura Dern is in a regular lens. And then eventually he shoots Dern in the fisheye. And then you're like, oh, shit, it's about to pop off. Yeah, it's so great.

• 1:46:13David Sims?

  And she does a Lynch trick I really love, which I feel like, you know, where she points to the couch. And then we're sort of Laura Dern is on the couch with her friends and we've moved forward in time.

• 1:46:23Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:46:24David Sims?

  Without any transition, really.

• 1:46:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  The couch where she winds up at the end of the movie.

• 1:46:28David Sims?

  Indeed.

• 1:46:28Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 1:46:29David Sims?

  All the scenes with her and her friends are really funny to me, too, because it's like, you know, they are being normal.

• 1:46:36Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:46:36David Sims?

  Right? It's just.

• 1:46:37Griffin Newman?

  They're not in David Lynch.

• 1:46:38David Sims?

  Right, but then the aesthetic of it is so impressive that you're like, what is going? Why am I just seeing them chat?

• 1:46:44Griffin Newman?

  Well, that's so much of what I remember the discourse being around this movie when it came out was like, you know, some people, and looking back, it was more positive than I remembered. People were just like, if you're in on Lynch, this is uncut Lynch. This is the most unbridled Lynch you're ever gonna get. We're fucking eaten, right? And then the counterpoint was like, I just don't get why it looks so ugly. And this was a thing that was also circling around Michael Mann movies at the time.

• 1:47:09David Sims?

  Yeah, Spike Lee, anyone who was trying this stuff.

• 1:47:12Griffin Newman?

  Right. Why would you choose to use something that looks worse? And it was part of like Lynch doing these interviews where he said, my beautiful ugly thing, you know, and certainly like Mann talking the same way where it's like, it frees me up. I used to be someone who obsessed over having the light in exactly the right place in these immaculate frames, but there's something that it just becomes so organic now.

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  And I also think.

• 1:47:35Griffin Newman?

  Weighs a pound rather than like.

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  Well, there's the production, there's the production advantages.

• 1:47:40Griffin Newman?

  10 pounds.

• 1:47:40Speaker 03

  But, but I do think that the way this movie looks, it really does to me look like a dream. It looks like how my dreams look, which is a lot of like gray diffuse light.

• 1:47:53Griffin Newman?

  My dreams are also all kind of blurry.

• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56David Sims?

  Yeah, it's kind of off.

• 1:47:56Speaker 03

  It looks like, it looks simultaneously like, like, like a snuff film, like, like we said earlier, like something you like truly illicit, but then also when you remember it, when I remember this movie and the palette, it's like remembering a dream because it kind of the lighting reminds me of a dream and the griminess, the murkiness of it is the murkiness of a remembered dream. And like, I think it really works. Like, even if he could have shot on a handheld camera that like shoots in 4K and looks terrific, this was the right choice, I think.

• 1:48:28David Sims?

  There's no other way to think about this.

• 1:48:30Griffin Newman?

  And there's like weird artifacting and abstraction that happens with like this level of DV footage. So my, my limited experience in film school before I dropped out was that like, you know, when they talk about film as a medium and they, people are trying to teach you how to work with it. It's like, here are all these magic tricks where you can do this and suddenly on film, it looks like this thing that's a hundred times greater.

• 1:48:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:48:56Griffin Newman?

  Right? And video is the opposite where everyone's like, if you film like this, it's going to look like shit. No matter what, you can't get around this. You can't be in any environment with fluorescent lights. You can't do this. You can't do that. Right? Like all these things they try to warn you away from that he is kind of barreling headfirst into. Because how wrong it ends up looking is able to very cheaply conjure the kind of feeling and imagery that he used to have to like slave over.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so evocative.

• 1:49:28Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he can, I mean, he can obviously make like a beautiful movie.

• 1:49:31David Sims?

  Yeah. Kevin has, and I wonder if he made like, if he had made like six more films like this, would the magic of this film and the way it looks be a little like, you know, hurt by that.

• 1:49:42Griffin Newman?

  It is what is fascinating because at the time and the way he did it, you're just sort of like, it's bizarre. He didn't go through a phase where he just kept doing.

• 1:49:49David Sims?

  Yeah, I'm just gonna keep right improvising.

• 1:49:51Griffin Newman?

  Even if most of them didn't end up being feature films, if some of them ended up being fucking web series or whatever it is, it's interesting that then there's like kind of a shift in a gap after this.

• 1:50:01David Sims?

  Right. That's why this is not just like him being like, well, I filmed for three years and cut it together. It's like, no, he had eventually a thrust, you know, of storytelling with it. What were you gonna ask?

• 1:50:12Speaker 03

  Did he make a thing on Netflix where like he's.

• 1:50:14David Sims?

  Talking to a monkey?

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  He was like, he and the monkey like solving crimes or something?

• 1:50:18David Sims?

  He's interrogating the monkey like he's a cop and the monkey is.

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  Is that a movie?

• 1:50:23David Sims?

  It's a short film.

• 1:50:24Griffin Newman?

  Twenty five minutes? Yeah.

• 1:50:25David Sims?

  Netflix bought it at a certain point. It's like, he made it independent.

• 1:50:28Griffin Newman?

  He self-financed it. It was a big project. He talked about it a lot.

• 1:50:31David Sims?

  What did, what did Jack do?

• 1:50:33Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Or what Jack's, yeah. We covered it on our Patreon.

• 1:50:38David Sims?

  Yeah, it's called What Did Jack Do? You know, he's done a lot of stuff like that over the years for his own.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  Like what Rabbits was, it sounds like.

• 1:50:44David Sims?

  Right, right. And then some things got incorporated and some things kind of just, and then he occasionally will do things like where Dior is like, can you do a commercial for Dior? And he's like. It's gonna be weird. And they're like, great.

• 1:50:54Griffin Newman?

  But as you said, this is the only time he did this when it started to feel like, is this gonna be his model moving forward? He's just filming all the time. And whenever he feels like, oh, this might actually be a movie, he'll start shooting more intentionally and cut it together. And instead, this is like an absolute weird one off experiment and already weird experimental career.

• 1:51:14David Sims?

  And then we have the sort of film section of the, the early production section of the movie. She's onstage, you know, at Paramount, on the Paramount lot. Near where, you know.

• 1:51:26Speaker 03

  Is that where, is that where that was the filming location?

• 1:51:28David Sims?

  Yes, because David Lynch loves, I think the scenes, I think it's in Sunset Boulevard, which are set at the Paramount lot. And like, has great like admiration for the Paramount lot. Is this like sort of halled old?

• 1:51:39Griffin Newman?

  It's a beautiful classical.

• 1:51:41David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:51:41Griffin Newman?

  Yes, it feels really preserved.

• 1:51:44David Sims?

  Um, and so we meet Kingsley Stewart, Jeremy Irons in like, you know, Irons mode. As like the pretentious director and then Justin Theroux is the kind of, as Devon, the, you know, sultry star.

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  I don't know if I knew he was in this.

• 1:52:00David Sims?

  Oh, really?

• 1:52:01Griffin Newman?

  And just because, you know, we, we've been trying to record chronologically, we did, I think Mulholland Drive was actually the most recent Lynch episode we had done before this. When they revealed Justin Theroux sitting in an audition. I, I think part of my struggle for the first, let's say, hour to hour and a half of this movie was like, Lynch, I'm waiting for you to make the case for why this isn't you just still exploring the same things as Mulholland Drive.

• 1:52:26David Sims?

  Right. Cause it's Hollywood again. It's a, you know,

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:29David Sims?

  weird dream tale again.

• 1:52:31Griffin Newman?

  And Theroux is here again. Like there's the, a lot of the dynamics feel very similar.

• 1:52:36David Sims?

  But, um,

• 1:52:37Griffin Newman?

  It becomes its own thing.

• 1:52:39David Sims?

  Yeah. You sort of get this sense like there's this thing where they appear on a talk show that's hosted by Diane Ladd and pronounced by William H. Macy. This sense that like, maybe Laura Dern's character Nikki has some sort of scandal in her past that, uh, Justin Theroux's character is right. Someone who always hooks up with his co-stars. There's like a sauciness.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:53:00David Sims?

  And then kind of my favorite scene in the movie is when they're shooting the film and, oh, Harry Jean Stanton there obviously is there.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Looking for money?

• 1:53:09David Sims?

  Yes, and

• 1:53:11Griffin Newman?

  Wearing a suit and smoking.

• 1:53:12David Sims?

  Right, sees something and

• 1:53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is one of the things I remember from 2007.

• 1:53:18David Sims?

  Yes, like it's in the dark, you know, back there and they go and look and I remember in the theater, as someone who had seen Mulholland Drive, being like, am I about to be like scared out of my fucking skeleton?

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:53:30David Sims?

  Is something crazy going to happen?

• 1:53:32Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:33David Sims?

  And it's not, it's more just this unnerving, dreamy, please talk about it. You're raising this yellowed note.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  Well, I just wanted to, I mean, actually, we should remember Fear Seben 47, the number that comes up a lot. So this is the four of 47, but during this initial meeting,

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  Kingsley says something.

• 1:53:55Speaker 03

  After, after Justin throws like a runoff to try to find whatever Harry Dean Stanton pointed at and was like, there's something there, right?

• 1:54:02David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  This line is so scary to me when Kingsley's like, all right, I'm going to tell you guys the truth. We're actually remaking a movie. And then he says, is this movie?

• 1:54:14David Sims?

  German film.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, they discovered something inside the story. And the leads were murdered.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  One of my real heebie jeebie things really gives me the heeb, well, murder, of course, is

• 1:54:30David Sims?

  Murder just doesn't

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  Haunted, I don't like it. Haunted Productions.

• 1:54:35David Sims?

  Sure.

• 1:54:35Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:54:36Speaker 03

  Like the King in Yellow.

• 1:54:38David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:54:39Speaker 03

  You know, the, the weird tale where it's like, there's this haunted play and when they start to perform it, they all go insane. That kind of stuff. The idea of, I was thinking about last night. Really what freaks me out is humans, there's something so uncanny about this ancient tradition and art that we all recognize and love. Humans putting on special clothes and pretending they are other humans and acting out a story for people who are watching them in the dark. That is so fucked up and disturbing when you think about it. Like if you take, if you take it out of like, just the fact like, we've always done that. Like, what are you talking about? It's totally normal. And so.

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  The idea of movie productions, or TV productions, or theater productions being cursed, where you're in the middle of the production, you uncover something, or something is revealed, and then it ends in despair, madness, death. That's so freaky to me.

• 1:55:39Griffin Newman?

  Have you seen In the Mouth Madness? The Carpenter movie? That's basically about a book that makes people mad in that kind of way.

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  See, I need a list of like, I wanna, I wanna have a little film festival, or just watch.

• 1:55:50David Sims?

  But like, the classic thing of like, am I now, is this actually about me? Am I in it?

• 1:55:55Griffin Newman?

  Like, getting, yeah. This is my fucking read on the movie, that it's this thing of like, what is acting? Is it convincing yourself you are that person? Is it thinking a lot about that? Is it researching the things around it? You know? Like, that's part of what is being conjured here. How are you able to bring emotions out of nothing?

• 1:56:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:56:15Griffin Newman?

  Are you taking from actual emotions somewhere else in your life? Are you just empathizing and relating to the thing? What I find interesting about that scene is it ends up getting to this curse, right? There is a severity to which, the tone in which Jeremy Irons, who is an actor who is capable of great severity, who can deliver anything with like, a sense of grave importance that makes you sit up, right? In discomfort, if that's what's being asked of him. Where he reveals like, this is actually based on an older Polish film? And Lerdurn's response to that is as if he's already revealed that there was a curse and a murder, right?

• 1:56:58Griffin Newman?

  Like, she's like, you told us this was an original text.

• 1:57:01Speaker 03

  Right, it's like the real Hollywood IP reaction.

• 1:57:03Griffin Newman?

  You told us this wasn't based on anything.

• 1:57:05Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:57:06Griffin Newman?

  Where I like, sat forward in my seat and went like, wait, what just happened in this scene? Why is her response so extreme? And it's like, she can already sense that this is going to a bad place in a weird way before you even get to the curse and the tragedy and all of that.

• 1:57:21Speaker 03

  This is one of the big like story scenes. It's like one of the only scenes where it's really like, here comes the story. Like I'm an, and you're like, I'm really gonna hang on to this as we go out to see.

• 1:57:32David Sims?

  Someone explains something.

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:57:34David Sims?

  Everything else, maybe you can sort of piece it together or go back later and sort of look at stuff. No one's actually saying.

• 1:57:41Griffin Newman?

  But it makes sense that that was their attitude in terms of like bringing irons on. And when irons was on set was like, these scenes are more structured. His dialogue that he clearly like had time to memorize is able to sort of just like roll off. And these scenes like are communicating clear things.

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:58:00David Sims?

  Yeah. So there's right. There's this sense of there may be playing with kind of some kind of darkness here by engaging with this story again, even though the story they seem to be doing is just a melodrama. It's just like a romantic melodrama about an affair.

• 1:58:14Speaker 03

  On high and blue tomorrow.

• 1:58:15David Sims?

  A very different.

• 1:58:18David Sims?

  Should we keep moving? You've got this notebook. Yeah. Is this exhibit C? Yeah. I'm like, when?

• 1:58:23Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I do this every time. It's just the notes that I took when I was watching it for the second time. I mean, it's.

• 1:58:28David Sims?

  Talk about your.

• 1:58:29Speaker 03

  There's no, there's no insights. It's just me recording what happened. So like later I can go back, especially with this movie and be like, uh, what happened exactly?

• 1:58:36Griffin Newman?

  Is now a good time to introduce the experiences of the second and third viewings? I don't want to force your hand on this.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  Oh, I know. Yeah.

• 1:58:44Griffin Newman?

  Cause you talked about the first viewing a bit.

• 1:58:47David Sims?

  Yeah. Well, we talked.

• 1:58:48Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah. So I watched it in 2007. I remembered it as a great night at the movies, but it wasn't a movie that I felt like, like.

• 1:58:55David Sims?

  I gotta see that all the time.

• 1:58:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So then I was talking to my friends that I play music with, playing a band together. And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna talk about inland empire. And they were like, oh, inland empire. Like, never seen that. One of them, Robert, had seen it. He was like, let's have a.

• 1:59:10David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:59:11Speaker 03

  Come over to my house and I have a projector and we can watch inland empire. And I was like, great. Cause all I don't have it. I just have a laptop. I was like, I don't want to watch this fucking thing on my laptop. Cause I remember it as this big to like overwhelming night at the movies, you know? It's like when David, you know, you guys talked about the David Lynch iPhone thing where he's like, now when you see a movie on your phone, that whole thing.

• 1:59:32Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Such a sadness.

• 1:59:34Griffin Newman?

  It's, it's that and the clip where they ask him about product placement and he says, bullshit.

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:39Griffin Newman?

  Fucking bullshit.

• 1:59:41Speaker 03

  Bullshit.

• 1:59:41David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:59:42Speaker 03

  Get real.

• 1:59:43David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:43Speaker 03

  Anyway, so we went over to Robert's house and we watched it. And that was like my time to, you know, take all my notes and all that stuff. And I was like, yeah, it holds up. Like, it's pretty good.

• 1:59:53David Sims?

  Right. You had a good experience here, but not, nothing like, like a bolt from the.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:59:57Griffin Newman?

  But you felt like, okay, no, I, I feel secure in the fact that I picked this as the episode I want to do.

• 2:00:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot going on in this movie, obviously. There's stuff, most of the stuff I had forgotten. I, I thought a lot of the movie was her burning holes in camisoles and trying to save prostitutes. And that's, I thought it was like Mission Impossible, you know, like, I gotta burn another hole so I can jump through a wormhole and go save more prostitutes. But it wasn't that at all. It was like so much more, like, I think in retrospect, I tried to put a story on it.

• 2:00:27David Sims?

  Of course.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:28David Sims?

  Easiest way to engage with it.

• 2:00:29Speaker 03

  Right. Just like you do with dreams, right? You try to find a narrative or make sense of it. Then what happened was, we were like, you know what we should do? Cause after we watched it, we were, they were like really into it. It's like, we should score it.

• 2:00:44David Sims?

  Wow.

• 2:00:46Speaker 03

  We should go to our practice space and set up a projector and screen the movie and mute it. And respond to it with sound and music. Like, we'll do a live improv score of Inland Empire. Fellas, this was one of the great creative experiences of my adult life. It was, it was just three of us. It wasn't the, the full group because people were traveling and stuff. But Catherine and Brian and I went to the practice space. I was like, this is.

• 2:01:17David Sims?

  Catherine didn't know Brian well.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:01:19David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  And, um, we had, we had a drum kit. We had like rototoms. We had bass and guitar at, you know, it's like, we set everything up like, okay, we're going to set everything up. So that we can just move from sound source to sound source. So like, I had like a, one of those Korg bass synthesizers. Cause I know like Lynch is great at those like low tones with like textures. We had a Volca bass. I bought a cello bow so that we could bow the cymbals for that iconic horror, you know, when you hold, you like stabilize the bell of the. And then you drag the bow on and it's like makes all these crazy overtones.

• 2:01:54Griffin Newman?

  This is like fucking John Bryan at Largo, just everything.

• 2:01:57Speaker 03

  We were about to geek out.

• 2:01:59Griffin Newman?

  The muse can take over us.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:02:01Griffin Newman?

  Move over to any.

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  I brought a tape recorder and all these cassette tape loops I had made, you know, where you get the texture of the tape and the, the repeating click of the tape loop where you've spliced the tape and all that stuff, you know, and uh, just had, just I had all this stuff set up and it's like, all right, let's uh, turn out all the lights. And um, we'll start watching the movie on the projector and we'll just, we, we will engage with the movie. You know, we'll try to reflect the movie back to itself with sound, right? And we had just watched the movie two nights earlier, so we kind of knew in a way what the dynamics were, right?

• 2:02:44David Sims?

  Right, you had things you could anticipate.

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And it was so fun and exciting. And we took like two breaks, like we took a break like at an hour and then a second break like within the last forty five minutes of the movie. Um, so it wasn't nonstop for three hours, but it was so great. Like I'd never, like, I've like played guitar, noodled on guitar while I'm watching a movie at home where it's like, hey, just play along to the soundtrack or something, but I'd never like replaced the movie's audio and tried to really express what I was feeling about the movie or what the characters were feeling like through, through making music or noise or just sounds, right? Like a lot of it is just like sounds, right? Cause that's what he does.

• 2:03:27Griffin Newman?

  I'm curious, did you have the film muted or at a low?

• 2:03:29Speaker 03

  Mute, no muted.

• 2:03:30Griffin Newman?

  Muted captions on.

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  No captions.

• 2:03:32Griffin Newman?

  No captions.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  No, just.

• 2:03:34Griffin Newman?

  Just work off of images and the fact that you'd all as a group watched it fairly.

• 2:03:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:03:39Griffin Newman?

  Very recently.

• 2:03:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, two days earlier, I think it was.

• 2:03:42Griffin Newman?

  I feel like we must have talked about this in the Buster Keaton series, but it is fascinating how in a, in a pre-sound era, a lot of those classic silent films either original score lost or original score was never recorded, obviously.

• 2:03:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. You just have no idea what it was like to see that movie.

• 2:04:02Griffin Newman?

  Or even the ones, and wherever you were seeing it screened, if it was live accompaniment, it was subject to reinterpretation. But also even the ones that do have a quote unquote definitive score, there are so many people today who like write new scores for them.

• 2:04:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:04:17Griffin Newman?

  And depending on like what release of a Buster Keaton film you get, from which like disc manufacturer, label, it'll have like two or three different scores. And you're like, this fundamentally alters the movie.

• 2:04:28David Sims?

  It's fucked up when you watch.

• 2:04:29Griffin Newman?

  We all think about. Right. You're like, well, Sherlock Jr. is a definitive film. We all can talk about that and have the same experience. And it's like, no, are you watching the fucking like, uh, the Coen Media Group disc? Are you watching the Kino Lorber disc? Are you seeing it projected with live accompaniment? And we think about like film being such a finite fixed thing. And like the director's intent, you're seeing everything as they wanted it. When for the first couple of decades, it was just like, no, this is, there's this whole big component that is one of the most emotional components of film storytelling.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:04Griffin Newman?

  That is very like individual experience based.

• 2:05:09Speaker 03

  One of the reasons I think it worked so well and was so exciting was because this movie does, as a movie, have a lot of obvious like, it was, it was improvised, right? And it's so fluid and so open.

• 2:05:21David Sims?

  I mean, he would write things and give them to people on the day, but a lot of it is right.

• 2:05:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:05:25David Sims?

  It's just him capturing behavior.

• 2:05:27Speaker 03

  So improvising back to it felt really appropriate.

• 2:05:31David Sims?

  I love it.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it felt like.

• 2:05:32David Sims?

  Did you record this?

• 2:05:34Griffin Newman?

  I was just gonna ask.

• 2:05:35Speaker 03

  We recorded it, but stupidly I like, I didn't set the levels on the zoom recorder before we recorded. It was like really loud. So it's like all blown out and compressed. It doesn't sound, I mean, it's kind of perfect actually for the movie.

• 2:05:45David Sims?

  It does sound like the right vibe.

• 2:05:46Speaker 03

  Well, we got one thing right. It sounds like shit.

• 2:05:48David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Speaker 03

  Just like Hill and Empire.

• 2:05:53David Sims?

  I don't know. You should just do something.

• 2:05:55Griffin Newman?

  You should.

• 2:05:56Speaker 03

  Though, and the way it ended was, well, we'll talk about that when we talk about the

• 2:06:00Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:06:01Speaker 03

  Cause we ended it in a way where I had a, like, almost like a genuinely new experience. It was awesome. Anyway.

• 2:06:07David Sims?

  Fun having David on the show.

• 2:06:09Griffin Newman?

  It's always a treat.

• 2:06:10David Sims?

  Um, so I mean, myself, by the way, I'm talking about having me on the show.

• 2:06:13Griffin Newman?

  You won't have you on often enough.

• 2:06:16David Sims?

  So after all of the things we were just talking about, we have this sort of interlude with Julia Ormond as a character called Doris.

• 2:06:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:23David Sims?

  Who's talking to a police person and she has a screwdriver inside of her.

• 2:06:28Griffin Newman?

  There is, it is destabilizing anytime a quote unquote, like,

• 2:06:31David Sims?

  A known actor, yes.

• 2:06:33Griffin Newman?

  Actor shows up in this film and you're like,

• 2:06:35Speaker 03

  She, she looks familiar.

• 2:06:36Griffin Newman?

  She was.

• 2:06:37David Sims?

  Great actor.

• 2:06:38Griffin Newman?

  Is a great actor, but is sadly kind of like largely known as this incredible example of like the star making machine where she was in Legends of the Fall, right?

• 2:06:49David Sims?

  That was her big early Hollywood movie.

• 2:06:51Griffin Newman?

  And then it was like, everyone in Hollywood decided she was the one and they cast her in the Audrey Hepburn role in the remake of Sabrina. And there was this New York Times article about the making of a star. That's like,

• 2:07:03Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:07:03Griffin Newman?

  Julia Ormond's been going through the conveyor belt for the last year and a half. Everyone has anointed her. There, everyone's now weighing in on what her haircut should be in her dress. And this is the moment that she's going to become an A-lister. And then that movie does not connect.

• 2:07:17David Sims?

  Is despised, I would say.

• 2:07:18Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18David Sims?

  Yeah. Kind of a classic, like, what do you think you're doing remaking Sabrina in the first place?

• 2:07:22Griffin Newman?

  And it's kind of,

• 2:07:23David Sims?

  Stop taming her down her throat.

• 2:07:24Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Everyone was just like, enough of this. And now she's become someone who will pop up every couple of years and like, she is the daughter in Benjamin Button is very good in that.

• 2:07:32David Sims?

  You know what though? You love Mad Men, right?

• 2:07:34Griffin Newman?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:07:35Speaker 03

  Mad Men?

• 2:07:35David Sims?

  Do you like Mad Men?

• 2:07:36Speaker 03

  I like it. I don't know if I've seen all of it.

• 2:07:38David Sims?

  Meghan's mother in Mad Men. If you remember Meghan, the French Canadian, uh, girl that Don marries.

• 2:07:45Griffin Newman?

  Second wife.

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 2:07:47David Sims?

  She, she has this imperious French Canadian mother, uh, Miss Calve, who then ends up with, spoiler alert, uh, Roger Sterling.

• 2:07:53Griffin Newman?

  This is the thing. She's just become kind of a really interesting character actress.

• 2:07:57Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 2:07:58Griffin Newman?

  Who will pop up and you'll be like, Julia Ormond, she's still good.

• 2:08:01Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 2:08:02Griffin Newman?

  She never stopped working, but it, there were these two phases of all this energy around her for her throttling and, and then on the other side of her throttling way down and being like, I'll just show up and play with David Lynch.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  Do you know who I thought she was? I thought she was the actress who did that thing where she dressed up as bugs and had sex.

• 2:08:19David Sims?

  Isabella Rossellini.

• 2:08:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I thought it was.

• 2:08:21David Sims?

  A classic Lynch collaborator.

• 2:08:22Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 2:08:24David Sims?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:08:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:08:26David Sims?

  And makes sense. So another sort of raven haired, you know, Euro tinged actor.

• 2:08:33Griffin Newman?

  Who kind of looked like a forty's icon. Movie starlets. They have that kind of classical beauty. Yeah.

• 2:08:40David Sims?

  Like, right. Julia Urmann never got to be the, maybe even the level of star that Isabella Rossellini was, but that was her, right? The thing was, it's like, wow, this woman, she's a throwback. She's this, right. The camera loves her and she's gorgeous.

• 2:08:52Griffin Newman?

  She is elegant. She is grace.

• 2:08:53David Sims?

  She also played Guinevere in First Night in that like two year explosion before she then gets, does Smileless Sense of Snow and becomes a bit of a punchline. But yeah, she's sort of one refraction of this story, right? This, the, when she appears.

• 2:09:09Griffin Newman?

  Well, the ripple effect, I mean, you're dealing with this kind of like broken chronology of the movie of like, what happened to this woman? And then two hours later, we get the scene of her finding out that this affair has happened. You're not really centered within it, but you're almost seeing kind of like these projections of the ripples of damage.

• 2:09:29David Sims?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 2:09:30Griffin Newman?

  Small actions.

• 2:09:31Speaker 03

  It's a network of associations and characters.

• 2:09:34David Sims?

  Right. Then we have, we have various things that are sort of like flitting between them making on High and Blue Tomorrow, sort of flirting on set, off, you know, off camera.

• 2:09:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47David Sims?

  Justin Throw has a strange conversation with Nikki's mu- husband.

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  Pure trick.

• 2:09:53David Sims?

  Right. Who's this kind of like bland, grumpy Polish guy.

• 2:09:58Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:59David Sims?

  Who says, talks about like the bonds of marriage and enforcing them and all that.

• 2:10:03Griffin Newman?

  But you do have, he's playing the trick a lot of you're deeply in a scene and then it's like, cut. Oh, that wasn't reality. It starts to create this pattern of destabilization where you can be so far into a scene and still not really know what reality you're dealing with.

• 2:10:20David Sims?

  And the most brilliant part of that is right when they're having sex, it's all blue. And then she says, this sounds like dialogue from her script.

• 2:10:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29David Sims?

  And Kingsley's like, what's going on? Cause they are shooting this. Like she's gone the other way.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  That's a really uncanny move, that line. It's really, really scary.

• 2:10:37David Sims?

  And that, that is really when things are, uh, we, we sort of start to exit the loose frame, plot framework that we're in, which, which is easier to grapple with of like, okay, they're on a movie and like, reality is blurring. I get it.

• 2:10:51Griffin Newman?

  She kind of goes to advanced study and is like, what about the history of commodification of women as an industry?

• 2:10:58David Sims?

  That's when she is basically just like completely immersed and, you know, ends up basically going into the movie. I don't know how else to describe it. Going, kind of going through a portal. How would you describe it, David? Like?

• 2:11:13Speaker 03

  This is when, with the grocery bag, when she sees Axon and she walks in and now she is the person that Harry Dean Stanton saw during the table read.

• 2:11:20David Sims?

  Justin Theroux, like pressing his head up against the window.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  Right. And he can't see her. And now she is in what we thought was a prop house and is now a new reality. She's in an actual house and the reverse is like, when she looks out the window, like there's a yard out there.

• 2:11:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Speaker 03

  And then it's like, yeah, through the looking glass.

• 2:11:37David Sims?

  Right. I guess the closest way to understand it is she is inside the film in some sort of way. Right?

• 2:11:42Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:11:43David Sims?

  Because now we're kind of in this world where there's this sort of chorus of, uh, they're called the Valley Girls, of these sort of women. Are they, you know, are they like representations of her feelings? Are they kind of like an external force that's trying to help her or?

• 2:12:01Griffin Newman?

  One of them is Jordan Ladd, right?

• 2:12:02David Sims?

  I think so. I can tell you.

• 2:12:04Griffin Newman?

  Lord Dern's cousin?

• 2:12:05David Sims?

  Sure.

• 2:12:06Griffin Newman?

  Oh.

• 2:12:07David Sims?

  Yeah. Jordan Ladd, uh, Taryn Westbrook, uh, Kristen Care. There's a bunch of them. And I think they change sometimes. Like it's not the same, like group every time. Like classic David Lynch trick.

• 2:12:20David Sims?

  They like to do things like dance to the locomotion.

• 2:12:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, we're like, well.

• 2:12:24David Sims?

  Yeah, you know, also like.

• 2:12:26Griffin Newman?

  When they do that, they seemingly multiply it.

• 2:12:27David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:12:28Griffin Newman?

  It becomes like 10 of them.

• 2:12:29David Sims?

  Right. They like to check out each other's boobs. They like to talk about.

• 2:12:32Speaker 03

  There are some great shots of Laura Dern leaned up against the wall, looking at them like, what the fuck? It's so funny.

• 2:12:40David Sims?

  Yeah. It's the thing that I feel like has populated the internet the most is just shots of Laura Dern, head against the wall, smoking a cigarette with this kind of vacant, like, I don't know what I'm doing.

• 2:12:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:12:52Griffin Newman?

  Can we like, take this moment to kind of dig into Laura Dern more?

• 2:12:57David Sims?

  Sure.

• 2:12:57Griffin Newman?

  Because there's, there's the stickiness of the cow campaign, right? And part of that is, at this point, Laura Dern had gotten an Oscar nomination, very young.

• 2:13:08David Sims?

  Yeah, for, um.

• 2:13:09Griffin Newman?

  Ramblin' Rose.

• 2:13:10David Sims?

  Ramblin' Rose.

• 2:13:10Griffin Newman?

  But she's what, 20 or 21 in that movie?

• 2:13:13David Sims?

  Is she that young, Les? She was born in 67.

• 2:13:15Griffin Newman?

  She would have been like 23.

• 2:13:17David Sims?

  Okay. You know, but like, but obviously she's Hollywood royalty.

• 2:13:20Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:13:20David Sims?

  The daughter of Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd.

• 2:13:22Griffin Newman?

  She's very young when she is in Jurassic. She kind of has this like crazy arc.

• 2:13:26Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, she was in Jurassic Park.

• 2:13:28Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:13:28David Sims?

  But like before.

• 2:13:29Griffin Newman?

  That's the thing. She was in like the highest gross movie as the female lead.

• 2:13:33David Sims?

  Before Ramblin' Rose, she has quite a long come up. Like, it's like.

• 2:13:37Griffin Newman?

  Fabulous Stains.

• 2:13:38David Sims?

  Yeah, Fabulous Stains, Teachers.

• 2:13:41Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:41David Sims?

  Which she's one of the students in Mask. Obviously, she's like fairly significant part in that.

• 2:13:45Griffin Newman?

  I think she's the best performer.

• 2:13:47David Sims?

  I would, might agree. She's good in that. And then Smooth Talk, which was like.

• 2:13:50Griffin Newman?

  That's her breakthrough.

• 2:13:51David Sims?

  Right. This breakthrough, which is this early Sundance 80s breakout film, which is good. It recommends people seeing. And then, of course, Blue Velvet is, you know.

• 2:13:59Speaker 03

  Oh, right. Girlfriend.

• 2:14:01David Sims?

  First experience of Lynch and then.

• 2:14:02Griffin Newman?

  She talks about.

• 2:14:02David Sims?

  Wild at Heart and Ramblin' Rose.

• 2:14:04Griffin Newman?

  Her parents, very famous established actors, right? And she's one of these sort of like children of the industry. Industry babies, if you will, nepo babies, who was sort of like, I didn't have the intent to be an actor. I sort of started getting thrown into stuff in this way that I think makes people angry and envious of people who have this kind of access to the industry.

• 2:14:26Speaker 03

  Because it sounds disingenuous.

• 2:14:28Griffin Newman?

  Well, I think she is genuine about it, but it was sort of like, I didn't want to be an actor. My parents didn't want me to be an actor. I'm around. Suddenly they can't cast a role. I'm doing two lines in something, then it becomes a larger supporting role. I didn't really think of myself as an actor until I was already five or six credits in.

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  Until I saw the cow.

• 2:14:46Griffin Newman?

  Right. And then, as you're saying, there was this arc and then it's sort of like, oh, smooth talk. Now she's kind of like fully realized owning this as sort of like a profession.

• 2:14:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:14:55Griffin Newman?

  And as a craft and whatever. And then, yeah, works with really interesting directors, has these interesting parts. But by the time she gets to Jurassic, she's like a veteran. She's been doing it for like 10 years and she's also 25.

• 2:15:08David Sims?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, she is quite young in Jurassic Park, but she projects. I feel like she projects sort of experience partly because she's been in movies for 10 years at that point. Partly because she's.

• 2:15:19Griffin Newman?

  There's an.

• 2:15:19David Sims?

  In khakis and you know.

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's like a super scientist, right?

• 2:15:22David Sims?

  Right, right. And then she kind of, you know, she kind of has a good, she's great in A Perfect World. Obviously Citizen Ruth.

• 2:15:30Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:15:31David Sims?

  Is a great performance that gets her a lot of indie further.

• 2:15:36Griffin Newman?

  Is incredible on that.

• 2:15:37David Sims?

  Yeah, but I do feel like it's kind of like the Kate Winslet thing after Titanic, slightly less intense version of her. Where Kate Winslet really just does not make a studio film for years.

• 2:15:45Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:15:46David Sims?

  She does weird indie stuff. She, you know, works with cool directors if she wants to. She's like, she, Laura Dern doesn't really make, she makes October Sky and 99.

• 2:15:56Griffin Newman?

  I want to make, I feel like when you hit 2,000, Laura Dern starts to enter weirdly a space similar to Julia Ormond. Obviously minus the backlash, right? But of like every two years she shows up and people are like, oh, right, Laura Dern. Laura Dern's really good. And then she kind of disappears from people's minds again. Like one of her only studio movies in that era in the 2000s is uh, fucking Jurassic Park 3, where she has this bizarre role where like that movie's marketing is. Fucking Sam Neill is back. Alan Grant is back. She's not in the marketing at all. I remember going to the theater and being like, she's in this too? And then her role is she's now a stay at home mom with two kids.

• 2:16:37David Sims?

  Someone calls her on the phone and is like, hey, can you get a plane over there?

• 2:16:40Griffin Newman?

  I don't really do that Jurassic thing anymore. And she's in like four scenes, but all within a kitchen.

• 2:16:45David Sims?

  Huh.

• 2:16:46Griffin Newman?

  And, and yeah, then she'll like pop up in things and be good. When We Don't Live Here Anymore comes out, a movie that had a lot of Sundance buzz and people were like, this performance is incredible. David Denby writes this very horny review that says she's maybe the best American actress. And then it's like, she kind of dissipates again. This movie felt like this sort of monument built to like, take Laura Dern seriously. We need to stop taking her for granted. And it works in some ways.

• 2:17:15David Sims?

  I think it works.

• 2:17:15Griffin Newman?

  She continues on this other path. And then I feel like it took another five or six years before.

• 2:17:21David Sims?

  It's five years. I think it's.

• 2:17:22Griffin Newman?

  It's starting with Wild, really.

• 2:17:24David Sims?

  No, I know. I think it starts with Enlightened. It's like.

• 2:17:27Griffin Newman?

  Oh, you're right.

• 2:17:27David Sims?

  It's like she does this and then, yeah, she continues on the path. I think that she largely chooses for herself. If she does stuff if she wants to, you know? And it's often odd little indie movies or whatever. And then she does the HBO show Enlightened, which is not a, I mean, in the middle, she did play Catherine Harrison recount, which is kind of the other kind of Laura Dern thing. Like Laura Dern can give you really big, sassy acting if you want it, right? She can do other stuff too, but she can play like a, a big sort of goofy part.

• 2:17:55Griffin Newman?

  She's in Mike White's You're the Dog, where she goes pretty big, but she's incredible in that. And I remember that being experienced for me of being like, where's Laura Dern been? Why isn't everyone using her all the time? He writes Enlightened for her off of that.

• 2:18:07David Sims?

  Did you ever see Enlightened? I think you'd love it.

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  I did. That's where she, working in an office and she wants to organize or get political and every, she's just like annoying the shit out of everybody.

• 2:18:17Griffin Newman?

  And it was two seasons of people being like, why aren't people watching Enlightened? Why isn't this winning Emmys? And it never really grabbed.

• 2:18:23David Sims?

  Kind of invented the half hour dramedy that.

• 2:18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. That's exactly, yeah.

• 2:18:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I think you're right.

• 2:18:28David Sims?

  When people were like, I don't get it. It's not that long, but it made me feel sad too. And, but it is kind of funny, but also like, I'm really moved. What, what's going on here? Right?

• 2:18:37Griffin Newman?

  Then off of that, Wild is one of those famously short amount of screen time versus nomination performances, where she's just kind of undeniable in three flashback scenes. And it feels like everyone going like, right, we should celebrate every single time.

• 2:18:51Speaker 03

  What is Wild?

• 2:18:52David Sims?

  Um, it's an adaptation of the Cheryl Strayed memoir.

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:18:56David Sims?

  Sorry, Reese Witherspoon, not Reese.

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  It's a she's like the Appalachian trailers. Yeah.

• 2:19:01David Sims?

  It's a movie I think is magnificent and it's it's people put it in the sort of chick movie basket or the like, yeah, good, not great.

• 2:19:12Griffin Newman?

  Vandy project to get an Oscar nomination showcase.

• 2:19:14David Sims?

  I've seen it several times. I think it is an incredible movie, which is shocking to me, given that I largely despise the work of the man who made it. I he seemed like a nice guy and he died, which is very sad, Jean-Marc Bellet. But.

• 2:19:29Griffin Newman?

  Who then does Big Little Lies, which she's also in.

• 2:19:32Speaker 03

  The best show.

• 2:19:33Griffin Newman?

  This web of collaborators.

• 2:19:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:19:37Griffin Newman?

  Who are going like, I need to build more shit for Laura Dern.

• 2:19:40Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:41Griffin Newman?

  She's Reese Witherspoon's dead mother, and I think she truly has like seven minutes of screen time.

• 2:19:46David Sims?

  Very brief. She's this luminous. Her mother is gone at this point, but it's she's this luminous presence in her memory.

• 2:19:52Griffin Newman?

  It's like three.

• 2:19:53David Sims?

  And it's perfect Laura Dern, just like she's like a fucking planet.

• 2:19:57Griffin Newman?

  She's undeniable, but that's the everyone leaned in and we're like, we have to nominate this, right? I know it feels insane because she's not in it very much. It was seen as a slightly surprising nomination.

• 2:20:08Speaker 03

  It was like the guy in Into the Wild.

• 2:20:10Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:20:11Speaker 03

  What's his name?

• 2:20:11Griffin Newman?

  Hal Holber.

• 2:20:12Speaker 03

  He has one scene, but didn't he get nominated?

• 2:20:14Griffin Newman?

  He's got more, but yeah.

• 2:20:15David Sims?

  But it's a couple scenes. Yeah. He's so amazing in that movie. But he says he wants to be his grandpa. That shit, that movie rock. That's another movie I love.

• 2:20:23Griffin Newman?

  That movie was. 2010s feels like Laura Dern finally like fucking achieving icon status.

• 2:20:30David Sims?

  Right. And then it's like, right, she wins an Oscar. She's in Star Wars. She's, you know.

• 2:20:34Speaker 03

  What did she win an Oscar for?

• 2:20:35David Sims?

  She won an Oscar for Marriage Story, where I feel like she's sort of.

• 2:20:38Speaker 03

  Oh, she's the crazy lawyer.

• 2:20:39David Sims?

  Divorce lawyer. It's kind of like the Big Little Lies thing. It's like, right, she can give you this like big comic.

• 2:20:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:45David Sims?

  You know, annoying personality or funny personality, you know, like she's been doing that her whole life.

• 2:20:50Griffin Newman?

  This in like a cynical way, but it almost feels like a calculated, you know what? If someone gave Laura Dern this kind of monologue, she would win an Oscar. Like, Bombak was just like, it's just waiting there for someone to take advantage of it.

• 2:21:02Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 2:21:03Griffin Newman?

  If you just have her do this for 15 minutes in this kind of structure, people are going to flip out.

• 2:21:08David Sims?

  I feel like she's kind of at her most workaholic now. It might just also be because, you know, actors get older, they're less occupied by, you know, their kids or, you know, they go into the other side of that.

• 2:21:20Griffin Newman?

  Beloved. I feel like everyone just values her so much now as they should. And even like that show Palm Royal, the Kristen Wiig fucking Carol Burnett show. Laura Dern acquired it and developed it and then was like, I'm too busy to star in it. I'll ask Kristen Wiig to do it. I have other shoots to do. Like she's kind of just fucking been on top of the world for a number of years now, I would argue.

• 2:21:44Speaker 03

  So let me ask you a question about her and Inland Empire.

• 2:21:46Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:47Speaker 03

  So obviously we're saying like David Lynch, obviously is and loves Laura Dern, right?

• 2:21:53Griffin Newman?

  Is an incredible on camera presence and even shot on the worst camera in the world is just radiant, as we're saying.

• 2:22:00Speaker 03

  But given the fact that she never really knew what was going on.

• 2:22:04Griffin Newman?

  I think this is.

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  Is it still acting? Like, is it still good acting?

• 2:22:07Griffin Newman?

  Well, this is my whole take on why this movie is about acting and why that's what he ends up finding as the spine across it as he's watching her react to this method of shooting is like, this is in a weird way, the purest form of acting, but also how many people on earth can do this? Like so fucking few. It's like maybe double digits for like, who can hold the camera, understand how a shoot works, understand the mechanics of acting, but also on camera acting, which is a very different thing and be this quick of a process of material, be able to like identify the truth in a scene without any real time to study it or crack it.

• 2:22:48Speaker 03

  Which is how lived experiences now that I think about it.

• 2:22:50Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:22:51Speaker 03

  When we act like in quotes, live our lives, express ourselves.

• 2:22:58Speaker 03

  We don't have, like, you can have a sense of what the arc of your life is like, or what this weekend is going to be like, but we don't have a screenplay. So I guess in a way it does make sense. This was shot like day by day. The way life is lived, right? Day by day. And she just had to react in any given moment, I guess, to how she was feeling.

• 2:23:13Griffin Newman?

  And that also means you kind of got to be perfect in every take.

• 2:23:17Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:23:17Griffin Newman?

  Right? Cause it's like, there's no sense of intentionality or like strategy she can imply to how she constructs this performance. It's like in the way people saying that like acting is reacting and just being present, responding to your scene partner. It's like that's what she's doing with David Lynch.

• 2:23:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:23:34Griffin Newman?

  He's her scene partner, right?

• 2:23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:37Griffin Newman?

  She's reacting to what he's giving her. And I think he's just going every day. It's why he fucking rented a cow. Where he's like, I've watched the mechanics of this woman working. I give her nothing. And suddenly she gives you something that like most actresses would spend four months studying to crack that monologue.

• 2:23:54Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:23:55Griffin Newman?

  Like, how is she capable of this? And also is one of these people who is not, by all accounts, precious about her process, is not a method actor, quote unquote, in any way we think of, right? It's just like, I don't know. I just sort of feel it and I get there.

• 2:24:10Speaker 03

  So you like this performance?

• 2:24:11Griffin Newman?

  I think it's incredible. I think it's stunning. I think she's one of the best actors alive. Um, and I think she can be so entertaining, which now she gets a lot of credit for, that sometimes the like actual grit of the depth she can go to if she wants to. She doesn't often do this sort of torrid, tortured shit.

• 2:24:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:24:33Griffin Newman?

  Is taken a little for granted, I think. I know I keep saying this over and over again. Um, but I think this film is so fascinating in her arc and much like Mulholland Drive, there is this feeling in both cases of these narratives of these women who are just like, I am waiting for the opportunity to show everyone what I have in me. Which is most struggling actors is this feeling of like, I've got all this shit bottled in me. I got these feelings I need to get out of my system and someone just needs to give me the space for catharsis.

• 2:25:05Speaker 03

  You're talking about the characters in the movies or the actual working actors who are collaborating with David Lynch?

• 2:25:11Griffin Newman?

  The characters in the movie, I think.

• 2:25:13Speaker 03

  Like when Naomi Watts has that incredible audition scene in Mulholland Drive.

• 2:25:16Griffin Newman?

  Because it's a complete overlap of she, the actress, is feeling the exact same thing the character's feeling. This is her chance. Laura Dern, I don't think is feeling that. Laura Dern is like, this is a fun experience of working with my buddy David.

• 2:25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're working on a little project together.

• 2:25:29Griffin Newman?

  Right. But what she's playing is someone who it does feel like in the immediate pressure of, I got this big audition. It's like, is this a chance for something different for me?

• 2:25:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:40Griffin Newman?

  Maybe it's not the Naomi Watts, I'm unknown and this is gonna make me immediately a star. But it's like, is there a thing inside of me I haven't gotten out yet?

• 2:25:49Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:25:50Griffin Newman?

  And, and you know, he's like, these two movies, back to back, with some years in between, both of them had very bizarre processes to getting to the finish line, are both sort of about this, like, this sense of desperation of like, if you really have something you want to say in an industry that is kind of like inherently ugly, evil, feeds on that desperation.

• 2:26:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:15Griffin Newman?

  Feels lecherous and predatory, even just every cut to like Harry Dean Stanton's face is like, is this guy a problem? There constantly just being some guy in a suit watching you and nodding approvingly or like frowning like the Sphinx.

• 2:26:30Speaker 03

  And then hitting you up for money.

• 2:26:31Griffin Newman?

  Right. And then she's like spiraling into despair.

• 2:26:34David Sims?

  But I also feel like there's this sense of like, this is a different take. But it's like, you have this melodrama they're making. It's like, what if we keep tunneling down into a story? Does it always come back to some sort of folk tale that is like, once there was a child and he went into the world and then there was evil?

• 2:26:53Speaker 03

  Right. He saw his reflection. Isn't that what it is? He saw his reflection and evil followed him into the world.

• 2:26:57David Sims?

  And you're like, right, right, right, right. If we just sort of like keep dissembling and iterating, right? Over and over on some like, oh, I've written this melodrama and it's, it's, you know, indicative of this and it's a reference to that. And it's like, right, but at the end of it all, of the big tunnel, it's like, we've been telling the longest story forever and the story is just like, there's evil in the world or a person transgressed against something.

• 2:27:22Speaker 03

  The Twin Peaks stuff.

• 2:27:23David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:23Griffin Newman?

  Which is also interesting when so much of Lynch's work is, I'm starting with like a well-worn, proven, American genre staple. And going into those cliches and then starting to pull them apart, reconstruct them. But I'm starting with a very basic noir setup or whatever it is.

• 2:27:42David Sims?

  A woman in trouble.

• 2:27:44Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:27:44David Sims?

  He's like, the film's about a woman in trouble. And you're like, yes, sure it is. Laura Dern is in trouble.

• 2:27:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:27:50David Sims?

  But then also the film starts with a person, a woman, we don't know the name of or really anything about in a hotel room, who's clearly in trouble.

• 2:27:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:27:59David Sims?

  And then we're seeing this snowy Polish street.

• 2:28:04David Sims?

  Suddenly or whatever. And like, you know, we're seeing the valley. I don't know. Like, there's just lots of versions of the same thing happening in different reflections. And that's, that's what the movie's about to me. Who's the wide eyed actor? I think he's a Polish actor who plays, I think, her husband. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like when she is sort of inhabiting the working class. Version of.

• 2:28:35Speaker 03

  When they're in the little house and they're having their domestic thing.

• 2:28:38David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:28:39David Sims?

  But he's all, it's this, right?

• 2:28:40Speaker 03

  That's the same.

• 2:28:41David Sims?

  Guy who's the fancy Polish guy.

• 2:28:44Speaker 03

  It's the same actor who is her husband in real life.

• 2:28:47Griffin Newman?

  He's just opening her, his eyes much wider.

• 2:28:50David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:28:50David Sims?

  He is really striking, but scary. He's a scary presence.

• 2:28:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some intense, intense presences in this movie.

• 2:29:00David Sims?

  There are some mugs.

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some mugs. There's some mugs up in this one. Yeah, for sure.

• 2:29:05David Sims?

  Cause the thing is, I'm also looking up and, you know, we've been at it.

• 2:29:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:09David Sims?

  Are we gonna get through it? We are, because it, at this point, there's less.

• 2:29:14Speaker 03

  Now it's mostly vibes. Like, you don't have to worry about like, oh, we forgot the car chase where they realized that the diamond was actually in the.

• 2:29:21Griffin Newman?

  I'll tell you the shot that blew my mind. It's when he does the slow camera pan away from Laura Dern that within the shot transitions to Poland in the early 1900s.

• 2:29:33Speaker 03

  That's dope. And also the match fade between the guys in Poland at the table who reposition themselves so that they're synced up with the rabbits.

• 2:29:41Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:29:41Speaker 03

  That scene is awesome.

• 2:29:43Griffin Newman?

  But I also, I feel like that time travel shot, basically the movie entering a portal.

• 2:29:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:29:48Griffin Newman?

  Right? Is the kind of thing I have seen so many, like, I don't know, the fucking, the walk or Gangsta New York does a version of at the end where it's like, we're good, staying in this location, but traveling through time. And now I'm used to so many versions of this shot that are like, big showcase of CGI.

• 2:30:04David Sims?

  Skyscrapers get built.

• 2:30:05Griffin Newman?

  Right, or falling down or whatever it is.

• 2:30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:08Griffin Newman?

  And this is just truly, he's on her face. The camera is clearly on a tripod. It swivels and as it swivels, the color pulls out of the image. It goes to sepia and then you see like a horse drawn carriage.

• 2:30:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:20Griffin Newman?

  And then on the other side of the camera, when it lands, here are women dressed in period clothing. And you're like, oh, I guess we've traveled through time. It's so simple.

• 2:30:29David Sims?

  You're no, it's a good call. You're making me want to rewatch it. It is very cool. And I do think, like you said, he does get so much out of it. It's so freaky being there.

• 2:30:39Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:39David Sims?

  The landscape is so cool.

• 2:30:42Griffin Newman?

  And can I throw out my quick?

• 2:30:44David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:30:44Griffin Newman?

  So I was talking to someone, a native of Warsaw when I was there. And I was like in the downtown area and I was like, I find it so relaxing here. I'm used to cities like living in New York where it's this tightly compressed grid and everyone's crammed in and everyone's rushing. And here like the streets are so wide, the sidewalks are so wide. Everything feels so open. Why aren't all cities built like this? And she was like, well, they built it like this for the rallies.

• 2:31:16Griffin Newman?

  And I was like, that's why this place is sad. Like there's shit like that. Where anything you can point at where you're like, there's an interesting vibe to no cities laid out like this. And you're like, that's the thing they destroyed. We built it this way because of this. That's the last vest. It's the only building that didn't get burned down.

• 2:31:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:31:32Griffin Newman?

  And there is, I just think there's something he's tapping into of that cultural identity. I just feel like in my experience, the people of Poland just carry that shit with them. It just feels deep in there. And the fact that he's using so many Polish actors, he's not just hiring actors to put on Polish accents.

• 2:31:52David Sims?

  Right. First thing he shot in Poland when he's there, you know, taking pictures of factories and shit. And he's like, I kind of want to write something and film it is the scene where it's the three old men at the table. And that was just right. That was like a fragment that he came up with. And he's like, I'm going to go from here, but like, that's, that's the beginning of whatever this genesis is. She burns, you know, she, the valley girls tell her to maybe burn a hole in a, you know, in, in, in some tights or whatever. And look through the silk. And we start to see right, things like the rabbits again, the lost girl again. The husband attacking his wife or mistress. Things like her talking, you know, the Lord during monologuing to Mr. K, right? All of that stuff starts to pop.

• 2:32:37Speaker 03

  That's the stuff at the table when she has the accent and she's bruised up.

• 2:32:40David Sims?

  She's saying fucker a lot. Yeah, sure is. Yeah. The locomotion is happening then. Also they danced to At Last, I think they had a James song. You know, what else have we got? There's a Beck song at one point. Right. One of the wild.

• 2:32:56Speaker 03

  When we land on.

• 2:32:57David Sims?

  Black Hollywood Boulevard. Yeah. That's later. Yeah, that's a. You have the backyard party where some of the valley girls are there where Smithy, her husband in this reality has ketchup all over his shirt. And he's, they're all talking absurdly and like very surreally like have the hot dog. That shit is definitely, I think, if you are just like, I'm gonna go see a movie tonight at the IFC Center when you're like, should I, I'm not, and I have no disdain for this, like, should I leave? Like, right. Have I just completely, like, I just feel like I have spaghetti in front of me.

• 2:33:30Griffin Newman?

  I've read the temperature wrong. This is not the night I wanted.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:33:33Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:33:33Speaker 03

  Like, yeah, cuz sometimes with David, like, especially in the return, when it's like 20 minutes of a guy sweeping a floor, it's like, are you fucking with me? Like, what's going on really? Like, come on, level with me, bro. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah. But that's the scene, the backyard scene is important, isn't it? Because that's when Smithy's like, yeah, I'm gonna go take care of these animals with the, with this group of people, which is something that beat up Laura Dern describes to the guy at the desk in, uh, when she's talking.

• 2:33:59David Sims?

  When she's talking, right, in the monologues, right, we're sort of seeing versions of that. We should also say that she introduces the idea of the Phantom. Yeah. It's just an important character.

• 2:34:08Speaker 03

  And the climax, that's who she cheats.

• 2:34:10Griffin Newman?

  Five star.

• 2:34:10Speaker 03

  Who she shoots. Right. Yeah. Totally.

• 2:34:12David Sims?

  The Phantom is sort of.

• 2:34:14Speaker 03

  Another hot mug. Intense mug, that guy.

• 2:34:17David Sims?

  Right. For sure. Is sort of the villain of the film, if you want to be.

• 2:34:22Griffin Newman?

  It's kind of the Thanos. Yeah.

• 2:34:24Speaker 03

  Bob. Yeah.

• 2:34:25David Sims?

  He seems to, I guess, be, you know, the husband of the other woman, maybe, right? Or some, you know, the lost girl, the girl we see in the, in the hotel room. But I also, at one point, we see a guy with a red light bulb in his mouth, being weird. That's the Phantom. But I also.

• 2:34:44Griffin Newman?

  He also is Axon M or whatever.

• 2:34:47David Sims?

  I guess so. But also, I think the crazy iconic image of Laura Dern's face blown up on her head with the.

• 2:34:54Speaker 03

  On his head.

• 2:34:55David Sims?

  Yeah. On his, you know, right, that's him. Right. Right.

• 2:34:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the boy who saw his reflection and evil followed him into the world. It's like one of the great David Lynch doppelganger moments where it's like, oh, right, everyone in your dream is you. Right?

• 2:35:08David Sims?

  Um, yes, right. Yes, that's, that's a good way of thinking about it. Uh, at some point, someone mentions Inland Empire, which is really funny cuz. It almost feels like late in the movie, they're like, has anyone actually said inland empire in this movie?

• 2:35:21Speaker 03

  David Lynch is like, there's one thing we forgot to shoot. Someone has to say the name of the movie.

• 2:35:26David Sims?

  Even though from my limited understanding of LA, this is not really set in the inland empire. It's mostly.

• 2:35:32Speaker 03

  No, it's set in LA. Yeah, it's set in Hollywood on the soundstages and stuff.

• 2:35:35David Sims?

  I think someone said to David Lynch, like, I grew up in the inland empire. And he was like, inland empire.

• 2:35:41Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a perfect, it's a perfect name for a David Lynch movie because inland empire sounds like a poetic way of saying like your dream space.

• 2:35:50David Sims?

  Right. Yeah. What is, it's just this giant fucking boring.

• 2:35:54Speaker 03

  It's what you drive through to, to, uh, to get to Palm Springs.

• 2:36:00David Sims?

  Oh.

• 2:36:00Speaker 03

  But it's huge. I mean, it's a huge metropolitan area. Uh, it's flat. It's east, east of LA.

• 2:36:06David Sims?

  You know, huh. And it's a lot of desert and then just like suburban kind of right areas and right, you know?

• 2:36:12Speaker 03

  But the movie is not set in, I mean.

• 2:36:15David Sims?

  No, it's not.

• 2:36:16Speaker 03

  Not geographically. Psychologically, I think it's supposed to be like an inland, inland empire.

• 2:36:21David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:36:21Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:36:22David Sims?

  Uh, if you think, David was pointing at his noggin.

• 2:36:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:26David Sims?

  The, the real inland.

• 2:36:28Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's as in as you can get.

• 2:36:30David Sims?

  I can't get through all of this, but you know, what we're eventually getting to is sort of the, the quote unquote, end of on high and blue tomorrow. Where suddenly Laura Dern Sue, whoever, uh, is with the valley girl. She's back in her house and she sort of gets transported to the streets of LA. She's being attacked by the valley girls or yelled at.

• 2:36:49Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:36:50David Sims?

  She's saying, I'm a whore. No, no, that, I'm saying like, you know, I'm saying like the sort of end.

• 2:36:56Speaker 03

  I'm a whore. I'm afraid. And she starts laughing.

• 2:37:00David Sims?

  Uh, and yeah. You know, she ends up being sort of beaten. The Mr. K monologues kind of end and she gets like stabbed and dies on the street. Uh, with Terry Crews there.

• 2:37:16Griffin Newman?

  I'm glad he made it.

• 2:37:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:37:18Griffin Newman?

  You know, like, just because David Lynch, you know, the work output slows down the last 20 years.

• 2:37:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:37:26Griffin Newman?

  There are a lot of modern actors who never got to work with him, which is why you get so many people jumping in on the return. Just like, I'm glad Terry Crews made the cut. I'm glad he's.

• 2:37:34Speaker 03

  Was he famous at this point?

• 2:37:36Griffin Newman?

  He's a former football player. But he had done like White Chicks and Friday After Night.

• 2:37:40Speaker 03

  Isn't he in Idiocracy? When was Idiocracy?

• 2:37:41David Sims?

  That's true. He probably done Idiocracy.

• 2:37:44Griffin Newman?

  Did, I think, narrowly escape into four theaters this same year.

• 2:37:49David Sims?

  2006, yeah.

• 2:37:50Griffin Newman?

  Right. But he's basically.

• 2:37:51David Sims?

  Everybody Hates Chris started the year before.

• 2:37:53Griffin Newman?

  He's a growing kind of comedy character actor.

• 2:37:58David Sims?

  I mean, I remember when I saw him in Everybody Hates Chris, because I think I didn't see Idiocracy till a couple of years later on, like, video or whatever. I was like, where did they find this guy? This guy is fucking hilarious.

• 2:38:06Griffin Newman?

  That was my feeling in White Chicks, a film I mostly find dire. And then you're like.

• 2:38:10David Sims?

  Be kind of brilliant.

• 2:38:11Griffin Newman?

  That's the thing. If we rewatch it now, are we gonna have a Jack and Jill style reappraisal?

• 2:38:17Griffin Newman?

  Anyway, he's incredible in that. Yeah, basically playing the nobody's perfect role. Anyway, yeah, Terry Crews is in there.

• 2:38:24David Sims?

  Yeah, there are these three street people is what they're called in the, in the credits. One of them, played by the actress, maybe sort of singer called Nay, who is later in Twin Peaks The Return, gives this incredibly long monologue about a friend of hers that is very compelling, but completely inscrutable, at least.

• 2:38:43Speaker 03

  About Nico, her friend who I assume is like a sex worker or something. And then something very bracing. And it's really, really.

• 2:38:53David Sims?

  Awful, physical description.

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  When she says, yeah, she has a hole in her vagina that goes into her intestine. And it's like this really grounding, horrifying moment where you realize, like, for all of David Lynch's love of his, of his female char, his female characters and all the violence that happens to them throughout all, so many of his movies and just how, how awful men can be to women and then. But it, but it also so often feels allegorical in a way, as graphic as the visuals can be, but something about this line of dialogue is just like, oh, right. This is what violence.

• 2:39:28Speaker 03

  Does.

• 2:39:29Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:39:29Speaker 03

  And does that make sense?

• 2:39:30Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:30Speaker 03

  Very, very striking and bracing and sobering.

• 2:39:34Griffin Newman?

  I mean, I keep going back to this, but like the discourse after Blue Velvet of people arguing over whether the film was exploitative.

• 2:39:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:39:44Griffin Newman?

  I think in every film after that, when he wants to deal with violence against women as a subject, he really feels a responsibility to be like, I'm not dealing with this as a plot point.

• 2:39:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:39:58Griffin Newman?

  I actually need to engage with the effects of this.

• 2:40:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:40:02Griffin Newman?

  You know, like, and part of it is, I think him genuinely trying to, and this is so much what Twin Peaks is about, wrap his head around like, how can this level of evil exist? How can people perpetuate this level of harm? You know, and, and how do people survive that? I think that's the other side of it.

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  That's the big part of it.

• 2:40:19Griffin Newman?

  He's fasting. Right. How do people go on from this sort of thing? And that whole monologue is being delivered to Laura Dern, who is then off camera. You're not sort of cutting back her reaction shots.

• 2:40:29David Sims?

  Just the actor.

• 2:40:29Griffin Newman?

  There's almost like five consecutive minutes where you're holding on her and almost forgetting Laura Dern is there. And she's been stabbed at this point already.

• 2:40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's bleeding to death.

• 2:40:38Griffin Newman?

  Is bleeding out on the street.

• 2:40:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:40:40Griffin Newman?

  And this, like, the film reaches like such a pinnacle of discomfort. And what you're saying, that's sort of like absolutely barren, hollow despair. And then you see the fucking seat of a camera crane and Jeremy Irons calling cut and doing the fucking picture wrap applause.

• 2:40:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:40:56Griffin Newman?

  It is so destabilizing to have the rug pulled out from under you and be like, yep, movies.

• 2:41:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:41:03Griffin Newman?

  Acting.

• 2:41:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:41:04Griffin Newman?

  Which is of course what you're fucking watching.

• 2:41:07Speaker 03

  And you would think for a lot of directors, they'd be like, they would end there and be like, good enough. It was all a movie.

• 2:41:12David Sims?

  Instead, the film continues for a while. Laura Dern does not speak again in the film. She's like in a strange fugue state for the rest of the movie.

• 2:41:22David Sims?

  It's clear that like what, me saying it's clear right now.

• 2:41:26Speaker 03

  It's patently obvious that what actually happens is.

• 2:41:30David Sims?

  It feels like whatever recursive kind of like dream she was locked in, she has exited.

• 2:41:39David Sims?

  To some extent.

• 2:41:39Speaker 03

  You read it as, okay, we are back.

• 2:41:41David Sims?

  A little. And like, she, she went into this loop and like, was sort of moving through worlds or moving through stories.

• 2:41:47Griffin Newman?

  Which is also very fucking Mulholland Drive of like, hmm.

• 2:41:50Speaker 03

  Right. We've landed.

• 2:41:52David Sims?

  And yeah. Now she, she seems to be sort of empowered or in, you know, filled with some sort of knowledge because she then goes to find the phantom and destroys it.

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:42:06David Sims?

  Essentially.

• 2:42:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:42:07David Sims?

  Like, we're watching her, she goes into this movie theater, right? And then she.

• 2:42:11Speaker 03

  This whole sequence is so awesome.

• 2:42:13David Sims?

  On the screen, it is incredibly awesome. This is right, the point at which if you did make it through the middle chunk of the movie, you're kind of like, I don't know what's going on, but I am right. So transfixed.

• 2:42:24Griffin Newman?

  You also in this section get, am I wrong? The lost woman back in the hotel room now, instead of watching rabbits, watching the movie we've been watching.

• 2:42:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then Laura Dern comes in and kisses her and that sends the lost girl or lost woman back into the house.

• 2:42:39Griffin Newman?

  Which is, for me.

• 2:42:40Speaker 03

  And reunites with her husband and the son.

• 2:42:42Griffin Newman?

  A key part of my reading, which is like, why, why do this? Why pursue this? Why? Almost like what you were saying about like this weird tradition of dressing up and entertaining strangers in the dark. Like, why make a fucking movie? Why try to act? Is like, in that instant, oh, instant, a woman sitting on a bed in a hotel room after a bad experience, flipping through channels, lands on something that for 45 seconds helps her process her shit. Which isn't to say that art is therapy for others, but that it's about finding things that you can actually connect with in some way. You know, that helps sort of reveal things to you or make you make sense of your own life that aren't just reflecting back

• 2:43:23Griffin Newman?

  the things you know you like, but are challenging in a way that pulls something new out of you. That sometimes can be productive.

• 2:43:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 2:43:32David Sims?

  And I mean, I don't know how to describe exactly what it is, but she moves through these sort of industrial spaces.

• 2:43:38Griffin Newman?

  Kind of Lynchian.

• 2:43:41David Sims?

  And confronts the Phantom, who is first the Phantom man, right? And then is this odd projection of her face? And she shoots him.

• 2:43:50Speaker 03

  Which is another thing I remember from seeing it in 2007 on the big screen. The face, first we see her face as she runs towards the camera along that pathway. And then we see that same face kind of crapily, uh, put over the Phantom's face. The, I gotta say, no one does shitty FX better than David Lynch.

• 2:44:09David Sims?

  He's the, yes.

• 2:44:11Speaker 03

  In, in the return, when she opens her face, like, he has such, he knows exactly how crappy special effects can be, where it actually somehow like adds to the uncanniness or the drama of it, that it kind of just looks like, like even the title, the, what, I don't know what he, what font this is, Inland Empire, it's like Helvetica, but like he compressed it and it's like so janky, but it's like so great.

• 2:44:37Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say, the poster is very graphic design is my passion.

• 2:44:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:44:42Griffin Newman?

  It's so, it's so terrific. Weird emotion.

• 2:44:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:45David Sims?

  Yeah, actually, I don't know his process, but he does kind of feel like a guy who just played around with like iPhoto.

• 2:44:51Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:44:51David Sims?

  In the early 2000s on a Mac, like messing with pixels.

• 2:44:54Griffin Newman?

  But that's his whole DavidLynch.com era is just like, what can I do with this new fancy computer machine?

• 2:44:59David Sims?

  When I talked to Jane Schoenbrun about, um, I saw the TV glow, like.

• 2:45:04Griffin Newman?

  Great film.

• 2:45:05David Sims?

  Right. They told me that so much of the VFX conversations were that they were too good, because it's kind of impossible for them to not be pretty good, even on a lower budget these days.

• 2:45:16Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 2:45:16David Sims?

  How do we degrade this without it feeling too insane? You know, like to what, you know, no, show me that earlier rendering you had that looked fucked up. Why did you, you know, not why did you clean it up, but like, can we get it back to that? You know?

• 2:45:27Griffin Newman?

  It's what I find so interesting about what feels like a truly like new wave of, for 20 or 30 years, we've had people who are influenced by David Lynch, but it often feels like they're trying to copy Lynchian stuff, rather than finding their own version of what Lynch was able to express. And rather than trying to copy his visuals or language, they're starting to figure out their own language, but tapping into a similar creative process, or finding things that have some weird uncanniness or some inexplicable.

• 2:45:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:45:59Griffin Newman?

  Power, like that movie is a great example of that for me. Where I'm just like, have you seen that film?

• 2:46:04Speaker 03

  I saw the TV glow.

• 2:46:05David Sims?

  You like it, I think.

• 2:46:06Speaker 03

  I think it's really depressing, isn't it? It's about two kids bonding over.

• 2:46:10David Sims?

  I don't think you would really find it super depressing.

• 2:46:12Speaker 03

  It's got some of the absolute hollowed out shit.

• 2:46:15David Sims?

  It is a melancholy to, to upsetting, to disintegrating.

• 2:46:19Speaker 03

  I can't get hollowed out too often, but the next time I'm due for a hollowing.

• 2:46:23David Sims?

  When you're in a.

• 2:46:23Speaker 03

  Check it out.

• 2:46:24David Sims?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so after destroying the phantom, we're, you know, we wind towards the end. Seems like the lost girl is freed. Like it feels like the rabbit, Nikki goes to the rabbit's house.

• 2:46:36Speaker 03

  Four, seven.

• 2:46:37David Sims?

  And she goes through the door and is in their place. And she's like, you say, ends up back on the couch, smiling, wearing a gown. And then we have a lovely dancing scene. Laura Herring is there and Natasha Kinsky is there.

• 2:46:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. My man sawing the log, Twin Peaks shout out.

• 2:46:55David Sims?

  Yeah, you know, a lot of, a lot of, anyway, it's really good. And people exit being like, uh, that was great and I loved it. I don't know.

• 2:47:05Speaker 03

  So let me.

• 2:47:05David Sims?

  Open to $24 million, right? Number one at the box.

• 2:47:08Speaker 03

  Let me tell you what happened. My experience of the end of the movie, watching it for the third time, when we were playing along to it. Something really interesting happened. So at this point, we've been, we've been engaging with the movie for like, what is like two hours and 45 minutes? And now we reached this final sequence, which is now it is so explicitly David Lynch dealing with his, some of his favorite themes, which is people watching other people through the radiator, through the closet door, on screens, on TV screens. And now Laura Dern is like watching herself. She first, she sees a snippet of the movie she was in. Then she sees herself and she goes up the stairs. All this crazy stuff is happening.

• 2:47:52David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:47:53Speaker 03

  So we're playing, like making noises and sounds, all this stuff, playing music. I remember that the music in the actual film is like a ballad. It's like a really melodramatic, beautiful, traditional song, right? That he probably co-wrote with somebody. So I was, I had this little tape loop of like some old snippet of like a symphony or something. It's like orchestral strings, but it's just a little loop. It's like two seconds or something. So it's just looping and looping with like an echo pedal, like making it get bigger and bigger and more abstract. And it's like, we're reaching this climax and drummer's going crazy on the cymbals and everything as we're watching Laura Dern watching herself. And it's like, we know everything is wrapping up because we watched the movie. Like, we know where it's headed. It's headed to this resolution.

• 2:48:36Griffin Newman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:48:37Speaker 03

  Something really, a really great accident happened, which is that we stopped playing too soon. We stopped playing before the end of the movie so that that final shot of Laura Dern in her blue dress, sitting on the sofa, looking at us, you're hearing like this echo fade away and the cymbals fade away. And then we just kind of like, because we're facing the screen, we've been facing the screen the whole time. We kind of just sat in silence and looked at Laura Dern looking at us. And I like, I got goosebumps. It was a really great moment because it was like so loud, you know, and also just thinking about like, I've known, I've been like, I've fucking like watched Eraserhead like 34 years ago.

• 2:49:21Speaker 03

  Like David Lynch has been such, I'm not a completist.

• 2:49:24Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 2:49:25Speaker 03

  I'm not a super fan. It's like, this guy has been a part of my adult life and a certain part of my sensibility, like my whole life. And now we've just like engaged with this movie in a way that I've never engaged with a movie before. This movie is the last movie, could be the last movie made by a guy who was so into the, the porousness between dreams and realities and self and doppelganger and all these things and screens and watching and being watched. And now it's like, this thing has ended and we're just looking at Laura Dern and she's looking at us as if we had just, as if it had been like an honest collaboration. The spirit of this movie, the fact that he's so freaking creative, like there are a lot of

• 2:50:06Speaker 03

  great auteurs and great directors, like Paul Thomas Anderson isn't pointing a stick at a painting with a ball attached, trying to figure out if the painting is done. You know, like, this is a true artist. This guy is a true artist.

• 2:50:20David Sims?

  He has tunneled into another dimension in a way.

• 2:50:22Speaker 03

  And it was so.

• 2:50:23Griffin Newman?

  And it has had a monastic, almost commitment to the idea of what it means to be an artist as a way of life. Not just, I make art, but like, this is my primary identity.

• 2:50:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. And there was something so cool and uncanny, but like, in a happy way, to be facing Laura Dern as if we had all just finished, like, we did it, we're back. Laura Dern is back on her sofa. A woman in trouble can relax for a fucking minute.

• 2:50:49Griffin Newman?

  We've all finished a hot yoga class.

• 2:50:51Speaker 03

  And we fit, our ears are ringing, like, we're, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like that kind of feeling. And just sitting in silence because we had muted the movie and just looking at Laura Dern. And it was almost like, because so much of David Lynch is about these, right, portals, openings, passages, keys. I had this crazy feeling that the world of the movie, like, when you're watching a movie, you know that the world of the movie is this two-dimensional plane that the light is being projected on, and you kind of enter into it. But in this moment, I had this crazy feeling that the world of the movie is moving towards me in a third dimension. Like, I'm in it now. I don't, like, you know what I mean? Like, it was just, I don't know how to explain it really, but it was like, holy fuck, like,

• 2:51:33Speaker 03

  we're kind of in this movie, because this is a movie about moving between planes and realities, and like, we kind of did that. Like, when it was over, I said, you know what? I think I love this movie. Like, I love Inland Empire. It gave me such a special experience of engagement and creativity, and, and being in, being in active conversation with the movie, that is really difficult, if not impossible, to quote, "understand."

• 2:52:04Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:04Speaker 03

  But by using a non-verbal technique of noise-making and music-making, like, to really, like, try to get a handle on it. It was so awesome, and I'm so grateful to David Lynch. For being a somewhat commercially viable director who can make something that can kind of like change the way I engage with movies like this dude is the greatest living American director like there is no one like him. There's no one like him. No one can do what he did.

• 2:52:36David Sims?

  You're right.

• 2:52:37Speaker 03

  In part because of historical accident and part because like he was an Eagle Scout who got into transcendental like all these particulars like he's just the greatest. I mean, he's the fucking greatest.

• 2:52:47David Sims?

  I mean, he's just like ramping up. You're just like, keep finding another year.

• 2:52:50Speaker 03

  But I mean, like, when I think about it, it's just like so terrific. Like, what a fucking nut job this guy is. And yet he has so much love for humanity.

• 2:52:56David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:52:57Speaker 03

  It's so inspiring.

• 2:52:58David Sims?

  You're right. That's, that's the thing is dark and despairing and hollowed out as it can get. It's not cynical and it's not like punishing.

• 2:53:05Speaker 03

  No, it's not like, yeah, you know, like fucking Neil Butte's always like, look at this play about how shitty people are. Oh, what? You can't handle what ass? It's like fucking easy.

• 2:53:14Griffin Newman?

  Point at dog shit and go, that's dog shit. It smells bad.

• 2:53:17Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly.

• 2:53:18Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, we all agree shitty people are bad.

• 2:53:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:53:21Griffin Newman?

  Who fucking cares? Can I, we, JJ puts so much into all these dossiers or research who is fired, of course, and much more than we can ever say on mic. And in our Elephant Man episode, which was 15 years ago, I think approximately, there was a quote that has really stuck with me that I forgot to bring up in the episode. And I've been like, when is there going to be a relevant time for me to bring this back?

• 2:53:46David Sims?

  Here's the, what's the quote?

• 2:53:47Griffin Newman?

  But it stuck in my cry. I haven't pulled it up here and it feels your, your manifesto you just went on feels like the perfect on ramp to this.

• 2:53:54Speaker 03

  Okay. And then I have a quote.

• 2:53:56Griffin Newman?

  You, even you're talking about him being a semi-commercial artist, right?

• 2:54:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:54:01Griffin Newman?

  The man who largely like helps him transition that state is Mel Brooks.

• 2:54:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:54:05Griffin Newman?

  A guy who also.

• 2:54:06Speaker 03

  This is such a great story.

• 2:54:08Griffin Newman?

  Then takes his name off of the movie because he's like, I don't want people to get the wrong expectation.

• 2:54:12Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:54:13Griffin Newman?

  But his famous tale of like Stuart Kornfeld showing him a racer head as like, you want to see the weirdest shit I've ever seen in my life? And then Mel Brooks is like, this is a real filmmaker. This isn't some guy making some weird gonzo thing. There's like a real filmmaker here. He could make a studio movie, right? And, and then the whole arc we've gone on, obviously it's not done. Next four weeks will be Twin Peaks, The Return, but this is his final feature film as of recording. Mel Brooks has this quote, uh, he's from 2001, many, many years after Elephant Man, looking back on it. And he says, "I felt I was dealing with a true artist with David Lynch. I felt that he was as close to the phenomenon of life and why we're here and why we have to

• 2:54:57Griffin Newman?

  die as any artist I've ever met."

• 2:55:00Speaker 03

  Perfect. Yeah.

• 2:55:01Griffin Newman?

  Perfect. It is such a simple, direct statement for a guy who is often seen as so hard to parse and we're all going to spend decades trying to untangle the webs. But I just think like fucking Brooks hit the bullseye there. And that's what he identified in watching his first film and working with him on his second film. And two very different movies in a lot of ways and similar in other ways. But like, in a way, that's kind of what all of his fucking movies are about. It is why you cannot totally crack them because he's making movies about these unanswerable questions that fundamentally kind of don't make sense. That kind of fundamentally are absurd.

• 2:55:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think-

• 2:55:40David Sims?

  I lost his keys. I don't know why you guys won't-

• 2:55:41Griffin Newman?

  Well, that's what it's about.

• 2:55:42Speaker 03

  You just have to, it's just like with life. You just have to sit with it and react to it and try your best. You know, it's like the Eagle Scout way, you know, it's like-

• 2:55:50Griffin Newman?

  Mel Brooks' other great line was, he's like Jimmy Stewart from Mars.

• 2:55:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:55David Sims?

  Yeah, I love that. I, that, that's right. Jimmy Stewart from Mars.

• 2:55:58Speaker 03

  So when we were done watching the movie and, and packing up our gear and everything and just like marveling at it, like, that was so fun. Like, we gotta do this. Like, we should come up with a list of other movies that we can like do this type of engagement with this, this live scoring.

• 2:56:11Griffin Newman?

  Big Mama's House.

• 2:56:12Speaker 03

  Big Mama's House and, and The Clumps or The Crumps or whatever it's called.

• 2:56:17Griffin Newman?

  Crumps would be good.

• 2:56:17Speaker 03

  We were thinking like, um, who are the other, like, who, who are the other Dave Lynch's? Like, who else can do this? And it's like, well, obviously no one is like David Lynch, right? He's one of a kind.

• 2:56:28Griffin Newman?

  Walt Becker.

• 2:56:29Speaker 03

  But I was thinking about like other artists who just have this fully realized vision. And the, the person I thought of was, um, the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. You guys know her?

• 2:56:40David Sims?

  Of course.

• 2:56:41Speaker 03

  She's famous for these huge metal sculptures of spiders.

• 2:56:44David Sims?

  She loves a big old spider. The movie Enemy uses them, the sort of imagery like that. Yeah.

• 2:56:50Speaker 03

  She died in her late 90s and I was, I had, was really struck with the comparison. So- I never really liked her stuff. It's, it's like, um, she was iconic 20th century feminist artist. She made a lot of sculptures that are like about being embodied and they have like protuberances and all kinds of growths and stuff. And she uses like sometimes untraditional sculptural materials. And it, it's like, feels really intimate and really kind of like icky, a lot of it. But she worked in all different types of media. So, once I was in DC and the Corcoran Gallery was having a lifetime retrospective of Louise Bourgeois, it was like, I don't know, seven decades of her artwork. It was like a true lifetime, because she was in her

• 2:57:34Speaker 03

  90s at that point. My friend and I are like, all right, let's go check it out, see what it is. Room after room of these artifacts of someone expressing all this inchoate, deep, deep stuff through art, through drawing, through prints, through sculptures, through things that look like, like they could have been sets or props in a David Lynch movie. You know, the same type of interest in bodies or like, uh, who, who made Videodrum? That guy?

• 2:58:06Griffin Newman?

  Krenberg.

• 2:58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, that kind of stuff. Like a lot of unsettling, beautiful objects. And, and as I was going, as I was going through the exhibit, I was like, holy fuck. This is, this is a real artist. This is someone who lived their life and, and truly expressed it.

• 2:58:25Griffin Newman?

  I mean, you're asking who else fits into that bucket, the very few American artists we could describe that way. And I got one top of my head.

• 2:58:32Speaker 03

  Who's that?

• 2:58:34David Sims?

  Ben Hosley is pointing at that.

• 2:58:36Speaker 03

  You got that Louise Bourgeois stuff?

• 2:58:38Griffin Newman?

  I feel that Ben is as close to the phenomenon of life and why we're here and why we have to die as any artist I've ever met.

• 2:58:43David Sims?

  Wow, that's a huge compliment.

• 2:58:44Speaker 03

  So, at the, so-

• 2:58:45Griffin Newman?

  And you, you have a similar commitment to, you said, who else would point a stick with a ball at a painting? Ben would do that.

• 2:58:51David Sims?

  I would do that.

• 2:58:52Speaker 03

  He'd bury a pair of pants in the dirt for 20 years. Wasn't that your business model?

• 2:58:55Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:56David Sims?

  Yeah. I'm actually, that's one of the things I'm doing in LA.

• 2:59:00Speaker 03

  Burying pants or digging them up?

• 2:59:02David Sims?

  Burying them.

• 2:59:03Griffin Newman?

  The amount of projects that Ben has done that have, it might never be released, that he kinda does for himself.

• 2:59:09Speaker 03

  That's the way to do it, man. Secret projects. So let me finish this story. So we, we go through this whole exhibit. It's, it's truly like a, an artist's life work. Someone that I had never really engaged with, cause it made me uncomfortable. And by the end of it, I'm like, this is terrific. Like what, what she did is like heroic. And then at the end, the thing that really put it over the edge, and I think this quote is almost like, could be like a capstone to David Lynch's career.

• 2:59:38Speaker 03

  She had a little piece of embroidery. It was like a vintage handkerchief, like a cotton handkerchief with like a blue border. Or like a light blue pattern. It was very old and she had embroidered text on it in light blue and all capital letters. Remember, I'm seeing this after I've just walked through a life's work of like really wrenching stuff, right? Someone really seeking to express themselves, explain the world to themselves, all this kinda stuff. On this, on this little handkerchief she'd embroidered, "I've been to Helen back and let me tell you, it was wonderful." Tears flowing from my eyes, like, holy shit. What an artist. What an artist.

• 3:00:22Speaker 03

  And I really do feel like David Lynch has, has

• 3:00:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:24Speaker 03

  A lot of that energy, especially in this movie, right?

• 3:00:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:28Speaker 03

  It's just like so awesome. It's so inspiring. Yeah.

• 3:00:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:00:34Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:34Speaker 03

  It's just great.

• 3:00:35Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 3:00:36Speaker 03

  It's just great.

• 3:00:37Griffin Newman?

  Thank you for being here.

• 3:00:38Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me back. It was great to see you guys.

• 3:00:40Griffin Newman?

  I, I just like, I, the fact that you'd only seen this movie once and throwing you the Lynch list and you saying, yeah, why not Inland Empire? Gave you the opportunity to have this experience.

• 3:00:51Speaker 03

  No, I thank you guys. No, I mean, yeah, I should thank you.

• 3:00:53Griffin Newman?

  For that, it just feels

• 3:00:54Speaker 03

  No, it's true. It was nice. It was nice to, it was nice to, uh, cause of all the movies that I've come on to talk about, this is the one where I hadn't seen it in a long time and I wasn't sure I loved it. Like those other movies that we've talked about, like I really love all those movies. They're terrific, you know? And this one, I just remembered the memory of like, that was a total cinematic experience the first time I saw it. And so I'm really happy that I got to come back and then have this other total cinematic experience. I think is honestly gonna like, kinda change the way I engage with movies going forward. So thank you to you guys.

• 3:01:25David Sims?

  Can you remind me the date you saw this film?

• 3:01:28Griffin Newman?

  March 10th, 2007.

• 3:01:29Speaker 03

  Oh, on my, on Exhibit B.

• 3:01:33Griffin Newman?

  It was March 10th, 2007.

• 3:01:34Speaker 03

  I saw it on March 10th, 2007. Three days later, I saw The Lives of Others.

• 3:01:42Griffin Newman?

  Good movie.

• 3:01:43Speaker 03

  Yep. 310, we didn't even talk about the remake of 310 to Yuma. Another absolute banger.

• 3:01:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:49David Sims?

  Yep.

• 3:01:50Griffin Newman?

  Ratatouille is best.

• 3:01:52David Sims?

  Secretly a Western, though.

• 3:01:55Griffin Newman?

  We are so excited to say that this week's box office game is brought to you by our friends at Regal. With the Regal Unlimited program, it's an all you can watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Here's what you should do. Follow the link in the show notes or go to the Regal app. Click the unlimited banner and then follow the instructions to sign up and enter promo code BLANKCHECK when prompted to receive your 10% discount on your first three months.

• 3:02:24David Sims?

  So I, we've done the box office game for Inland Empire before. The Weekend, the Holiday came out.

• 3:02:29Griffin Newman?

  Oh, wild. Well, it's been a while. I wouldn't remember this.

• 3:02:32David Sims?

  But we could also do that weekend.

• 3:02:34Speaker 03

  Oh, March 10th?

• 3:02:37Speaker 03

  Well, I, I won't play because I'm looking at all of the movies right here.

• 3:02:40Griffin Newman?

  I would do either. I genuinely don't think.

• 3:02:43David Sims?

  All right. Well, here's the opening weekend. Of course, Inland Empire opens on like, you know, a couple of screens. So it's not in the top. It opens on three screens. Yes, in fact. But number one at the box office is not The Holiday, but it is a new film. It is a kind of amazing action, historical epic directed by a guy who's good at that kind of thing, but also has a couple of, you know, behavioral issues.

• 3:03:06Griffin Newman?

  Ridley Scott? No.

• 3:03:07David Sims?

  No.

• 3:03:08Griffin Newman?

  No, he's got behavioral.

• 3:03:09David Sims?

  Oh, he's done a couple of bad things in his life. I don't know why I'm doing this voice to describe the actions of a sort of an awful guy.

• 3:03:16Griffin Newman?

  He's done a couple of bad things in his life.

• 3:03:19David Sims?

  Huh. Had some bad opinions and also just sort of, you know, been a bad person.

• 3:03:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it's 2006.

• 3:03:25David Sims?

  Yeah, Christmas time.

• 3:03:26Griffin Newman?

  It's December. It's Christmas time. It's historical epic, you said?

• 3:03:32David Sims?

  Yep.

• 3:03:33Griffin Newman?

  Oh, it is the very good film called Apocalypto?

• 3:03:36David Sims?

  Yes, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.

• 3:03:38Speaker 03

  Wow, look at that. Nice.

• 3:03:41David Sims?

  You know, sort of adventure.

• 3:03:43Speaker 03

  Was that you doing Mel Gibson?

• 3:03:45David Sims?

  No, I was just like that thing where it's like, how am I supposed to talk about?

• 3:03:48Griffin Newman?

  He's doing the, this is the voice we affect when we talk.

• 3:03:50Speaker 03

  The bad guy voice.

• 3:03:51David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:55Griffin Newman?

  We all like this movie.

• 3:03:56David Sims?

  Yeah, the movie's, in my opinion, kind of excellent. Ben, you're a fan of Apocalypse, right? I remember you've talked about it in the past. I wouldn't say a fan, but I like that film. Number two at the box office is a. Did you want more? No. Is that an animated film we've covered?

• 3:04:13Griffin Newman?

  Uh, it's an animated film we've covered. Is it, it's not, it's a mechas.

• 3:04:16David Sims?

  No.

• 3:04:17Griffin Newman?

  Uh, and it's not, uh, Musker Clements.

• 3:04:20David Sims?

  No.

• 3:04:21Griffin Newman?

  And it's not a Selic.

• 3:04:22David Sims?

  No.

• 3:04:23Griffin Newman?

  Uh, it's not a bird.

• 3:04:24David Sims?

  No.

• 3:04:27David Sims?

  It's a guy who makes live action and animated films.

• 3:04:29Griffin Newman?

  Sure. Oh, is it the motion picture Happy Feet?

• 3:04:32David Sims?

  It's Happy Feet.

• 3:04:33Griffin Newman?

  It's happy.

• 3:04:33David Sims?

  George Miller's Happy Feet.

• 3:04:34Griffin Newman?

  Tap a tap.

• 3:04:35David Sims?

  Penguin movie.

• 3:04:36Speaker 03

  I've never seen that. Is that good?

• 3:04:38David Sims?

  It's, it's good. Yeah. I kind of prefer Happy Feet.

• 3:04:41Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say, your shit would be Happy Feet 2.

• 3:04:44Speaker 03

  Is that the?

• 3:04:44Griffin Newman?

  You're a Happy Feet 2 man, if I've ever met one.

• 3:04:47Speaker 03

  Is there, is that a real sequel?

• 3:04:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. People don't like it and bomb it rules.

• 3:04:51Speaker 03

  Is that the last movie he made before he made Mad Max Fury Road?

• 3:04:54Griffin Newman?

  Happy Feet 2 was. Happy Feet 1 was such a success that they were like, we will let you make your Mad Max film if you make us a Happy Feet sequel.

• 3:05:01Speaker 03

  Seriously, that's what it was?

• 3:05:02Griffin Newman?

  And then Happy Feet 2 bombs. It's one of the wildest drop offs in box office from one movie to another. And Happy Feet won one best animated film. He gets an Oscar and everyone's like, oh God, we're stuck making this Mad Max movie with him. And then he delivers the best movie ever.

• 3:05:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:05:17David Sims?

  Uh, Holiday is number three. Uh, number four at the box office is a film featuring the character James Bond.

• 3:05:23Griffin Newman?

  Uh, that could be anything.

• 3:05:25David Sims?

  It's a lot of options.

• 3:05:26Griffin Newman?

  It is Casino Royale.

• 3:05:27David Sims?

  Yes. And number five, new this week and underperforming, although it will have major decent legs.

• 3:05:33Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 3:05:33David Sims?

  Not major legs, uh, but we'll get Oscar nominations.

• 3:05:36Griffin Newman?

  Stand down.

• 3:05:37David Sims?

  Got a bunch of Oscar noms, including two acting noms. It's a big adventure, drama, action, very serious. It's about issues.

• 3:05:48Griffin Newman?

  It's underperforming.

• 3:05:50David Sims?

  It's a huge movie star.

• 3:05:52Griffin Newman?

  It's a huge movie star. Is it a cruise? No.

• 3:05:54David Sims?

  No.

• 3:05:55Griffin Newman?

  Is it Blood Diamond?

• 3:05:56David Sims?

  Blood Diamond.

• 3:05:56Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, there we go.

• 3:05:57David Sims?

  Leo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond. And then you've also got the wonderful, incredible Déjà Vu at number six. You ever seen Déjà Vu?

• 3:06:06Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 3:06:08David Sims?

  I think you'd love it.

• 3:06:08Griffin Newman?

  A Sims favorite.

• 3:06:09Speaker 03

  What is it about?

• 3:06:10David Sims?

  It's a Tony Scott film about a, Denzel Washington plays a guy who's investigating a terrorist attack. And then like, is exposed to strange surveillance technology, but he eventually realizes this time travel technology, it's completely insane.

• 3:06:25Speaker 03

  It's like Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal. You ever see that one? That one's good.

• 3:06:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:29Speaker 03

  He's on a train. He keeps like looping back to try to find the terrorists.

• 3:06:32David Sims?

  Weird. It almost feels like I've seen that movie before.

• 3:06:34Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 3:06:36David Sims?

  You've also got Unaccompanied Minors, the Paul Feig kids film.

• 3:06:41Griffin Newman?

  Based on a This American Life story?

• 3:06:44David Sims?

  Yes.

• 3:06:44Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 3:06:45David Sims?

  You've also got the Nativity Story, the.

• 3:06:48Griffin Newman?

  Catherine Hardwicke Manger movie.

• 3:06:50David Sims?

  Yep. Deck the Halls, that's the Jamie Lee Curtis is.

• 3:06:55Griffin Newman?

  Nope, that's Christmas with the Cranks. This one is Dave DeVito and Matthew Broderick fighting over who has more lights on their house.

• 3:07:02David Sims?

  And you have the absolutely reprehensible, the Santa Claus three, the escape.

• 3:07:06Griffin Newman?

  One of the most evil films ever. A kind of Lynchian glimpse into the portals of madness.

• 3:07:11David Sims?

  Now, when, and we really should just be done, but when David saw the film, number one at the box office was a surprise smash hit, R rated action movie.

• 3:07:21Griffin Newman?

  It would be called 300.

• 3:07:22David Sims?

  300.

• 3:07:22Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 3:07:23David Sims?

  Did you see 300?

• 3:07:24Speaker 03

  No, I was too, um, I heard it was fascist and so I withheld my money. I did not want to promote that ideology.

• 3:07:32Griffin Newman?

  Snyder's response was like, yeah, it was. It's about the fascism of. Our war in Iraq, wasn't he saying some shit like that?

• 3:07:40David Sims?

  It's not my favorite of his movies.

• 3:07:42Speaker 03

  My favorite thing is to refuse to see a movie because I've decided it's fascist. That's like my, that's like my hobby.

• 3:07:48Griffin Newman?

  It's good.

• 3:07:48Speaker 03

  And then to announce it proudly to everybody.

• 3:07:50David Sims?

  Right, well, we actually.

• 3:07:50Speaker 03

  I never saw Happy Feet 2, actually. I heard it was kind of fascist.

• 3:07:54David Sims?

  There's a lot of fascist movies in this top, uh, number two at the box office, Big Family Comedy starring Tim Allen and others.

• 3:08:00Griffin Newman?

  Well, it's Wild Hogs, one of the most fascist films of the 21st century.

• 3:08:03David Sims?

  Deeply fascist movie about, uh, the lure of motorcycle gangs. Uh, number three is a adaptation of a young adult classic.

• 3:08:12Griffin Newman?

  It Bridge to Terror Bith.

• 3:08:14David Sims?

  Yeah, hugely fascist movie, of course. Number four, the box office.

• 3:08:17Griffin Newman?

  The Bridge is too fascist.

• 3:08:18David Sims?

  Right, I've never seen it.

• 3:08:19Griffin Newman?

  That's good.

• 3:08:20David Sims?

  I read the book. Um, number four is, uh, a comic book adaptation.

• 3:08:25Griffin Newman?

  Hmm. Is it Ghost Rider?

• 3:08:27David Sims?

  Nick Cage and Ghost Rider, kind of a fascist movie.

• 3:08:29Speaker 03

  Damn, how do you do this, man? Every single time?

• 3:08:32Griffin Newman?

  This is the Matrix inside my head. What, this is why it takes so long for me to respond when you ask me a simple question is because I have to shut down the box office pages.

• 3:08:39Speaker 03

  It's just like running like a crawl in your head at all times.

• 3:08:41Griffin Newman?

  When people ask me what time it is, I'm like, I have to X out of like 17 tabs to get to it.

• 3:08:46David Sims?

  Um, yeah, Ghost Rider, a movie in which Peter Fonda plays the devil. It's kind of a fascist movie.

• 3:08:51Griffin Newman?

  A genuine thing I texted David last night is, you know what I think about a lot that Angel Eyes and Shrek came out on the same weekend? It's true. It's a thing I think about way too often.

• 3:09:00David Sims?

  Number five at the box office is.

• 3:09:01Griffin Newman?

  Who gives a shit?

• 3:09:02David Sims?

  One of the great films of 2007, David already invoked it many times.

• 3:09:06Griffin Newman?

  Uh, it's a holder from 2007.

• 3:09:08David Sims?

  No, no, no.

• 3:09:09Griffin Newman?

  Oh, oh, one of the early films. It's Zodiac?

• 3:09:11David Sims?

  Zodiac.

• 3:09:12Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:13David Sims?

  And then you've also got Norbit fascist, number 23 fascist, music and lyrics, not fascist, breach, not fascist, Amazing Grace. It'd be rude for me to call the movie about the anti-slavery movement fascist, so not fascist.

• 3:09:25Griffin Newman?

  Okay, funny.

• 3:09:27David Sims?

  Yeah, so that's what was that? So actually, yeah, not a lot of the movie, but Zodiac, uh, you did see.

• 3:09:32Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. In the theater, I loved it.

• 3:09:34David Sims?

  I think that's probably the only. Thing you probably saw, well, the lives of others is here, as you mentioned, Pan's Labyrinth. You probably saw that.

• 3:09:41Griffin Newman?

  A lot of those. Very anti fascist.

• 3:09:44David Sims?

  It would be really rude to call them fascists. That would be nakedly anti.

• 3:09:48Griffin Newman?

  You held a press conference to announce you were going to see that movie.

• 3:09:52Speaker 03

  Only high school movie critic David Rees would dare to say that.

• 3:09:56David Sims?

  You'd be like, I see through the veneer here.

• 3:09:59Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 3:09:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:59David Sims?

  We are done. We have podcasted for a long time as we are want to do on our David Lynch mini series.

• 3:10:05Griffin Newman?

  People should watch Going Deep with David Rees now seemingly on YouTube.

• 3:10:09David Sims?

  Dick Town on Hulu.

• 3:10:11Speaker 03

  And Election Profit Makers. Can I plug something?

• 3:10:13David Sims?

  Of course.

• 3:10:13Speaker 03

  Well, is this coming out before or after the election? What's y'all scheduling?

• 3:10:17Griffin Newman?

  After.

• 3:10:18David Sims?

  This is coming out around.

• 3:10:19Speaker 03

  Depending on how the election goes, my podcast might still be going.

• 3:10:22David Sims?

  No, come on. You gotta keep it going.

• 3:10:24Speaker 03

  We'll see. We'll see.

• 3:10:25David Sims?

  Election Profit Makers is a great, is a salve for me every week.

• 3:10:29Griffin Newman?

  Sim talks about it all the time.

• 3:10:31David Sims?

  You and the great John Kimball talking about, you know, skylines and.

• 3:10:35Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:10:36David Sims?

  Foot pedals and I don't know, occasionally politics.

• 3:10:40Speaker 03

  Every so often.

• 3:10:42David Sims?

  It's great. And, uh, you know, I was getting worried for you guys. Things just felt a little despairing in the Democratic Party.

• 3:10:50Speaker 03

  That hollowed out feeling.

• 3:10:52David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:52Griffin Newman?

  It was getting a little lynchey in the presidential race.

• 3:10:56David Sims?

  But things have changed recently and feel a little more energetic. So that's good.

• 3:11:00Griffin Newman?

  Here's another thing I texted you last night. Our biggest takeaway from 2024 should be that presidential campaigns, it should be illegal for them to be longer than six months.

• 3:11:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it should be like parliamentary elections.

• 3:11:11David Sims?

  The Brits have it right. Six weeks and out. Let's just, you know, race to the finish. You can find all the links to David's work in the episode description.

• 3:11:21Griffin Newman?

  Great. Thank you for being here.

• 3:11:23Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. It was really fun. It's great to see all you guys again.

• 3:11:25Griffin Newman?

  Glad we made it happen in person. It was a.

• 3:11:28David Sims?

  Touch and go. We'll talk about it one day.

• 3:11:29Griffin Newman?

  We'll talk about it one day.

• 3:11:30David Sims?

  Griffin, take us out.

• 3:11:32Griffin Newman?

  Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Bardy for helping to produce the show.

• 3:11:38David Sims?

  Marie's gonna be posting a bunch of images on our social that's been discussed in this episode.

• 3:11:44Griffin Newman?

  Great.

• 3:11:44David Sims?

  And you know what? Hey, why not just get ahead of it and say, we're gonna have a newsletter. It might even exist at this point.

• 3:11:50Griffin Newman?

  Hey, love it. Fucking state that intent on Mike. Let's make it happen.

• 3:11:54David Sims?

  Let's Babe Ruth it.

• 3:11:55Griffin Newman?

  Be the newsletter we want to see in the world. Uh, thank you to AJ McKeon for editing the show. He's also our production coordinator. Thank you to JJ Birch for our research. Thank you to Joe Bone, Pat Reynolds for our artwork, Lee Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song. You can go to blankcheckpod.com. There are links to some real nerdy shit, including possibly our newsletter by this point in time. Tune in next week for the first chunk of Twin Peaks that return.

• 3:12:22David Sims?

  Is that right?

• 3:12:23Griffin Newman?

  That's how we're finishing out the rest of the year.

• 3:12:24David Sims?

  No, I know. I just couldn't remember if there was any other.

• 3:12:26Griffin Newman?

  I double checked. Unless some crazy.

• 3:12:28David Sims?

  No, here got moved up in fact.

• 3:12:30Griffin Newman?

  I know. I'm just saying, maybe unless Costner wants to sneak it in there.

• 3:12:34David Sims?

  Yeah, right. That's, that could happen, I suppose.

• 3:12:36Griffin Newman?

  We'll see what happens. But presumably next week, Twin Peaks, the return, barreling straight into that to finish out Lynch with the end of 2024.

• 3:12:44David Sims?

  Bye bye. Oh, and as always, yes.

• 3:12:47Griffin Newman?

  And as always, bye bye.