Look Who's Talking Too with Max Minghella

The Ubriacco family are back and - can you believe it? - they’re still talking! Actor and filmmaker Max Minghella joins us to talk about Look Who’s Talking Too, the contractually-obligated, quickly produced sequel to Amy Heckerling’s surprise hit. We’re talking about Mr. Toilet Man (he eats your pee pee and poo poo), Elias Koteas’ Mr. Scary Uncle Man (he has a gun), and Mr. English Man (David Sims, who grew up in London). Plus, Ben continues to flesh out his “Look Who Hath Talked” prequel, and Griffin becomes the first person with the courage to ask, “Who was the first baby?” 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. Yep. We did a live show. Yeah, remember? Ranking Scorsese at the Bell House in Brooklyn. We did the definitive power ranking of Martin Scorsese things. Uh, it was so fun. Uh, it was very silly. Ben and Marie were with us and they're with us right now. Yeah, hey.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Hey, everyone, or should I say, oh? 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.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  So just a few more days.

• 0:33Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  You can get it at dynasty.tv.

• 0:36Griffin Newman?

  Dynasty.tv.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  It's $20. We had a blast and the Spreadmaster really got to work.

• 0:43Griffin Newman?

  Oh, yeah. I was moving things around. Laptop was on.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  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. I was locked in. Yeah, very locked in and you were funny. Thank you. You were funny. You were also funny. Oh, thank you. And if you want to see like, you know, Griffin's shine box on camera, it's the only way to see it. You might see me shine Marie's shoes. Exactly.

• 1:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:07Griffin Newman?

  If that gets you off.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10Speaker 02

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

• 1:39Griffin Newman?

  Mikey's back and about to face his greatest challenge, his new podcast. That's the tagline. That's the tagline. It's pretty bad. You said I should do it. No, I said it's kind of what you think it would be, but I mean, it's fun. It's fine. The title is Look Who's Talking 2. It's kind of sells itself. 2 is underlined, just in case you didn't realize they've changed the title. And you got two babies chewing on the title. You've seen the, you've seen the poster. You of course have seen the, but you have the poster tattooed on your chest, right? It's on my back.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Does the first poster have the headphones?

• 2:12David Sims?

  The first poster has only the sunglasses.

• 2:14Griffin Newman?

  Only the sunglasses and it's true baby, no hair, right?

• 2:18David Sims?

  A hairless child.

• 2:19Griffin Newman?

  An infant, a hairless infant.

• 2:21David Sims?

  And the, and the, and the, the headphones are gone for now.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:25Griffin Newman?

  But the whole family's now above the title and the dogs are underneath it.

• 2:29David Sims?

  Travolta and Ally have joined.

• 2:31Griffin Newman?

  That's a spoiler for third.

• 2:32David Sims?

  The Wilson-esque, sort of, you know, peeking over the fence vibe.

• 2:37Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:37David Sims?

  Uh, they're sort of peeking over the fence.

• 2:39Griffin Newman?

  Were the Look Who's Talking posters the ultimate, uh, inspiration for Wilson?

• 2:44David Sims?

  In Home Improvement.

• 2:44Griffin Newman?

  In Home Improvement. Did Tim Allen go in and say, and here's my big, here's my, my closer? Imagine a character who's perpetually in a state of Look Who's Talking poster.

• 2:56David Sims?

  The show starts in 91.

• 2:57Griffin Newman?

  The show starts in 91.

• 2:58David Sims?

  I mean.

• 2:59Griffin Newman?

  Two of them are already out.

• 3:00David Sims?

  That's pretty circumstantial, but I'm willing to, uh, say that yes. Home Improvement is ripping off Look Who's Talking.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Same year as Baby Talk.

• 3:08Griffin Newman?

  Well.

• 3:09David Sims?

  Baby Talk.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  TV spinoff.

• 3:11David Sims?

  Yes.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Of the Look Who's Talking.

• 3:12Griffin Newman?

  This is the thing we talk about in the last episode and it's going to branch into far more conversation in this episode. Same.

• 3:19David Sims?

  Both ABC.

• 3:20Griffin Newman?

  Network.

• 3:21David Sims?

  Right? Home Improvement's ABC, right?

• 3:22Griffin Newman?

  Yes. That the, that the entire life cycle of Look Who's Talking, which spawned three movies and two seasons of television, is compressed within four years. On top of that, it also spawns a $20 million lawsuit, a divorce, a dissolution of a marriage. Like I just.

• 3:41David Sims?

  A secret child.

• 3:42Griffin Newman?

  I, I, I was tipping this off right before we started recording, but I started going down the rabbit hole because JJ Birch, our researcher, who I must say is fired because I watched this movie, this film is deranged. I'm like, I need a lot more answers than I have. He, he submits to us a slim volume. So I start going to the hyperlinks to look for more answers. And the more, the deeper I dug, the less answers I got, the more questions that were raised. And I was like in a spiral last night akin to Robert Graysmith and Zodiac. I was starting to lose my mind.

• 4:18David Sims?

  What answer do you want?

• 4:19Griffin Newman?

  So many.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Me too. I was with you. I really went on a hunt on this fucking.

• 4:24David Sims?

  Okay.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  And I couldn't find anything because the movie raises a lot of questions. It's sort of like watching an MRI.

• 4:32Griffin Newman?

  Yes, thank you.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  And.

• 4:34Griffin Newman?

  The more data you have, the more you need.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, my first headline question is, what's going on with Mikey's mouth movements?

• 4:46David Sims?

  Okay.

• 4:46Griffin Newman?

  Great question.

• 4:47David Sims?

  There's plenty to talk about.

• 4:47Griffin Newman?

  The first question is, who is talking?

• 4:50David Sims?

  Right. Who is talking? What is being heard?

• 4:53Griffin Newman?

  Because last time it was pretty easy to zone in on that, just one. This time we got two, three. If you count the toilet, four.

• 5:01David Sims?

  Mel Brooks.

• 5:03Griffin Newman?

  Mel Brooks.

• 5:03David Sims?

  Yeah, so if you count the toilet for it, look, I watched this movie last night.

• 5:08Griffin Newman?

  You gave it a very rude one and a half stars on Letterboxd.

• 5:10David Sims?

  I thought that was very generous of me. Uh, the first thing I did, it's, you know, spring break, all the children are home.

• 5:19Griffin Newman?

  Congrats.

• 5:19David Sims?

  Uh huh.

• 5:20Griffin Newman?

  Look who's talking in your household.

• 5:21David Sims?

  Exactly. And I look at, whoa, what's the running? I gotta watch this thing. What's the running time? Eighty-two minutes. Mwah!

• 5:29Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 5:30David Sims?

  As I correctly predicted, movie actually ends at seventy-five minutes. The credits are not short.

• 5:35Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 5:36David Sims?

  Lovely and short.

• 5:37Griffin Newman?

  It was about a buck fifteen soaking wet.

• 5:39David Sims?

  And I'm like, is this the first time we have discussed a basically kind of irrelevant movie? Like, you know, all your questions aside.

• 5:48Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 5:48David Sims?

  Since like, what, like, I was just sort of thinking it's like Spielberg, David Lynch. We've been like tackling all these things where like, even when it's a minor work.

• 5:57Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 5:57David Sims?

  Like an always or whatever, you're still like, I wanna pay attention. This is a great filmmaker. I'm not saying Amy Heckerling isn't, but I don't think anyone was really checked in for this one.

• 6:08Griffin Newman?

  Well, this is, I'm gonna push back.

• 6:10David Sims?

  Dunston was not around.

• 6:13Griffin Newman?

  This is what I find fascinating about this movie is it almost feels like experimental non-narrative art.

• 6:18David Sims?

  That's one way to talk about a bad movie. Another way is that no one bothered to write a script for a sequel that just kinda had to happen right away.

• 6:27Griffin Newman?

  Here's what I'm gonna push back on. I think it's the opposite problem, which is they demanded a sequel right away. They had no overriding idea outside of we promised the sister at the end of the first movie. Right? That's the one thing they have to deliver.

• 6:40David Sims?

  Yeah, they uh, they, they, they tease that.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  They promised Joan Rivers will be back.

• 6:44Griffin Newman?

  Right, and then, of course, she's not.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  She's not back.

• 6:46Griffin Newman?

  But they have promised some shrill pitched comedian will have zingers out of a baby's mouth. I think this movie has like eight trillion ideas in a sort of like showing up late for a presentation with like a bunch of loose paperwork notes scribbled like furiously being like, okay, what about this? Like pinning it to the board. Like this movie keeps setting up threads and ideas that it doesn't really know how to pay off.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  I was quite happy when you guys said that, you know, cause originally I was maybe gonna do the first movie. And then we landed on this one and I was happy that we're doing this one because I am fascinated fundamentally with sequels.

• 7:28Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Especially in this kind of period of time.

• 7:31Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  And there's something about, even David, you, you hit the nail on the head. The movie is such a product of a rushed production.

• 7:42David Sims?

  It has to happen now.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  It just has to happen right fucking now.

• 7:45David Sims?

  The, the, you know, the little energy of a surprise hit, it's gonna dissipate. We need, like, we cannot wait.

• 7:52Griffin Newman?

  And we teed this up a little bit in the last episode, but to your point, David, even more so. I think this is the first time we've covered one of these, a phenomenon we've talked about a lot, which is specifically in the eighties and nineties, if you had a comedy hit, immediately it's like, hey, gun to your head, you have to make a sequel and it needs to be out the next calendar year. Like comedy sequels were made on a Saw franchise schedule of like, this is annual.

• 8:21David Sims?

  Sure.

• 8:22Griffin Newman?

  And you, you pump them out until the, it runs dry.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  What was the distance between, cause the other movie I was thinking about a lot, well, two movies I thought about a lot watching this was Drop Dead Fred.

• 8:31David Sims?

  Okay, okay.

• 8:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  And Three Men and a Little Lady.

• 8:35Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 8:35David Sims?

  Which I have seen. I am proud to say that I have seen.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  I've also seen, and I recall being an equally sort of catastrophic rush sequel.

• 8:44David Sims?

  It's the exact same problem where it's like, this has to be a baby. The minute it's not a baby, we're, we have a huge issue.

• 8:49Griffin Newman?

  No, there was a three year gap on that. Between Three Men and a Little Lady. They had to let her grow up.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  I think this is a more interesting movie as a result of its rush production.

• 9:01David Sims?

  Now, Three Men and a Little Lady is directed by Ernie Ardaewino, who I consider a minor auteur.

• 9:08Griffin Newman?

  Who did Dirty Dancing, right?

• 9:09David Sims?

  Directed Dirty Dancing, which is a wonderful film. He won an Oscar for the documentary He Makes Me Feel Like Dancing.

• 9:15Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 9:15David Sims?

  He was a great, you know, sort of gay filmmaker in the eighties, like, big fan of his. Uh, he made Sister Act, which is great. Made Three Men and a Little Lady, which is a disaster. Uh, he made something called Chances Are with Cybill Shepherd and Robert Downey Jr. Interesting movie. Never heard of that. Uh, and then he made the really weird Nutcracker movie with Macaulay Culkin.

• 9:37Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 9:38David Sims?

  Which I think kind of rocks, and then he died of AIDS.

• 9:41Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 9:42David Sims?

  Fascinating career. Anyway, not important to look who's. We haven't even introduced the podcast.

• 9:45Griffin Newman?

  We haven't. Look, this is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.

• 9:48David Sims?

  I'm David.

• 9:50Griffin Newman?

  Kind of a throwback.

• 9:51David Sims?

  I took a second.

• 9:52Griffin Newman?

  You took a second.

• 9:53David Sims?

  I'm, I'm, I'm warming up, I'm sure.

• 9:54Griffin Newman?

  It's a podcast where filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers. So just making Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

• 10:02David Sims?

  Sure.

• 10:02Griffin Newman?

  Or Look Who's Talking, one of the highest grossing films of 1989.

• 10:07David Sims?

  Hit!

• 10:07Griffin Newman?

  At the time, the highest grossing international performer that Columbia Pictures had ever released.

• 10:16David Sims?

  Oh, yeah. Wow.

• 10:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:18Griffin Newman?

  Uh, and are given a series of blank checks, make whatever crazy passion products they want. Or, or are legally forced to pump out a Look Who's Talking sequel 14 months later.

• 10:29David Sims?

  Yep. Yep.

• 10:30Griffin Newman?

  Uh, this is a mini-series on the films of Amy Heckerling. It's called Pod Times at Ridgemont Cast. And today, Look Who's Podcasting 2. It's us.

• 10:38David Sims?

  Yep, we are podcasting 2.

• 10:41Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 10:41David Sims?

  And who's our guest?

• 10:42Griffin Newman?

  Our guest today, long overdue on the main feed.

• 10:45David Sims?

  He's, he's popped in. He popped in one time on the, on the special features feed.

• 10:50Griffin Newman?

  For the Ocean's Eleven, for the Sinatra Ocean's Eleven, which was, it was actually kind of distracting that you popped in because we were running so hot on that episode.

• 10:57David Sims?

  Oh, no, I thought we were sound asleep in sarcophagi.

• 11:00Griffin Newman?

  No, we were like, Max came in and he interrupted us. And we were like, this is the last thing we'd need right now is something new to talk about because this movie is boring as fuck.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Max comes in and we're like, hey, baby, how you doing?

• 11:12Griffin Newman?

  Ring-a-ding.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:14Griffin Newman?

  We threw some bones.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:15Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Uh, Max Miguel.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Thrilled to be here, guys. Long-term listener.

• 11:21David Sims?

  You sound really bummed out.

• 11:23Griffin Newman?

  No, you're deep in thought.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  There's a lot to talk about.

• 11:26David Sims?

  You guys keep saying that.

• 11:28Griffin Newman?

  There's so much to talk about.

• 11:29David Sims?

  Ben?

• 11:30Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 11:32David Sims?

  Was your talk about meter, you know, was it maxing out as you watched this movie?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say it was maxing. No.

• 11:39Griffin Newman?

  I feel, I feel maxed out. I mean, look, this episode's maxed out.

• 11:42David Sims?

  Hey. Yes, that is true.

• 11:44Griffin Newman?

  We're taking it to the max today and no one can argue with that.

• 11:47David Sims?

  Um, look, Look Who's Talking 2 is a film by Amy Heckerling and it came out in 1990 and it didn't even do that badly.

• 11:55Griffin Newman?

  It made like 60, a little hair under 60 domestic.

• 11:58David Sims?

  Yeah, in comparison to the first, it did poorly, but who expected any less, right?

• 12:03Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 12:03David Sims?

  I doubt the good people at TriStar were like, you know, damn it, Heckerling, you know, like, they were like, yeah, sure.

• 12:10Griffin Newman?

  This is another thing we talk about.

• 12:11David Sims?

  We're wringing blood from the stone, right?

• 12:13Griffin Newman?

  For a long time, the formula was like, your sequel makes 40% of the previous film. And you just keep doing that until it no longer is profitable. Now there's the expectations that sequels grow. And there was the sort of collection of, I think, in particular, 80s action films that very quickly got canonized through VHS.

• 12:34David Sims?

  You mean those sort of the Rockies and the Rambo's and all that?

• 12:37Griffin Newman?

  The Die Hard 2, Rambo 2, Terminator 2 bump, Lethal Weapon 2 is another example where those all grew.

• 12:43David Sims?

  You're right, those went up.

• 12:44Griffin Newman?

  Two went way up. None of those movies, the first one made 100 and then the second one exploded and then the sequels were big. Comedy sequels in particular is part of them being like, rush it out. If we make 40% of what the last one did, we're still good. Um, and a lot of these other franchises stopped at two. Look Who's Talking, of course, pushed out a third one without Heckerling, which then was calamitous.

• 13:06David Sims?

  Right.

• 13:06Griffin Newman?

  That one makes less than 10 million.

• 13:08David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 13:09David Sims?

  That was a kind of who asked for this movie.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Which I think is even shorter, David, than this one.

• 13:14Griffin Newman?

  Oh, David, you're in for a good time.

• 13:16David Sims?

  I unfortunately looked it up as we are covering that on our Patreon.

• 13:20Griffin Newman?

  Yes, on our Patreon. 245?

• 13:22David Sims?

  It is a brutal 95 minutes long. Wow. Oh, no. I know. I mean, I was really devastated to learn that. I was hoping it was the Arrested Development, the, you know, maybe is making the movie. Oh, sure. And she keeps saying like, it's the best 53 minutes. Like, the time keeps going down every time she, anyway.

• 13:41Griffin Newman?

  Max, you've been a friend of the podcast for years. I have been. We heard that you and Jamie Bell, a fellow friend of the podcast, guest years ago, still has Ben's recording kit.

• 13:50David Sims?

  What's up with Jamie?

• 13:51Griffin Newman?

  We should get him to send that back. We should.

• 13:53David Sims?

  We should get him to be on the show again.

• 13:54Griffin Newman?

  Well, that's the real thing we're trying to do. If you're listening, mate, send back the fucking recording.

• 13:58David Sims?

  No, Jamie, keep it. And pick a, you know, whatever. It's honestly fine. It wasn't like very expensive gear.

• 14:05Griffin Newman?

  It was cheap. Ben, we'll get it back to you. But we started messaging with you guys about coming on the show. Yeah. The original plan was that you guys were gonna do Miami Vice. Oh, yeah.

• 14:16David Sims?

  Oh, that's right.

• 14:17Griffin Newman?

  That you were the other two friends and that we were just gonna bro out on Vice together. We have to revise. We have to revise. Yeah, we'll do that. But I forget what it was.

• 14:26David Sims?

  We could revise.

• 14:27Griffin Newman?

  But like, travel plans changed and one of you two could make it and the other one couldn't. And there was a vote of solidarity of, I refuse to go on without my brother, which is why that episode was guestless, right? Then we eventually got Jamie to do Contact, but like. Great episode, by the way. Once or twice a year, we'll message you guys and be like, anything here? And you guys are always like, only want to come on if it's the right thing, right? Like, interrupting the Ocean's Eleven commentary. Exactly. We're always talking to you, but we're always looking for the right episode. You were at Toronto promoting a film that you directed that was premiering there, Shell. And I saw a headline from an interview that said, one of your biggest inspirations on the film was the Look Who's Talking movies. And I messaged you immediately. And I was like, Max, it's on the fucking spreadsheet. This is a done deal.

• 15:12Griffin Newman?

  It's non-negotiable. You have to talk Look Who's Talking with us. I'm so happy you reached out. I have a long.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  I have a long history of the first Look Who's Talking film.

• 15:22David Sims?

  A good film.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  When I was, I was trying to do the math on this, but it was when I was four years old. Look Who's Talking one was, I don't know if you guys were like this, I, when I was young, I used to watch movies just over and over.

• 15:36David Sims?

  Same, and you and I are similar ages, Max.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Really similar, very similar lives. My, my, my history is basically an overlap of both of your childhoods. If you guys were to combine, it might look like.

• 15:50David Sims?

  A horrifying thought.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Horrifying, horrifying thought. So anyway, I watched this, I watched Look Who's Talking one on repeat for about a year straight. I, I fell quite deeply in love with Kirstie Alley, which in retrospect was a little eccentric, but I was really obsessed with her and.

• 16:08David Sims?

  She's pretty, got the big hair.

• 16:11Griffin Newman?

  The hair.

• 16:12David Sims?

  You know.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  She was, she was pretty sexy.

• 16:14David Sims?

  Yeah, she's, she's a real, real fucking woman, you know, nineteen eighty nine.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  She was a real woman, also I was on Cheers at the same time, so I was getting double trouble. And I put together a package for her over, over a course of about a year where if I had like a pack of M and M's, I would save an M and M and put it into the package.

• 16:36Griffin Newman?

  And the idea was that this was eventually gonna be your gift offering to Kirstie Alley, wow.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  To Kirstie Alley, and it, it was, you know, I was told it was sent to her, I'm sure it wasn't, I really hope it was thrown into a trash.

• 16:48David Sims?

  Kirstie Alley on an envelope, put it in a mailbox, we'll see what happens.

• 16:53Griffin Newman?

  If you wanna send stuff to Kirstie Alley, you have to bury it under this tree in the backyard, that's how she'll get it.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  I'm sure it just went straight to the dub, but she's, I got an autographed headshot.

• 17:04Griffin Newman?

  Wow, okay.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Somehow, somehow I managed to get an autographed headshot, so that lived on my bedroom wall for, for quite a long time.

• 17:10Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  And this movie, look, when you see this movie at four years old.

• 17:14Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  It's pretty educational, I mean, I'm talking about the first.

• 17:17Griffin Newman?

  David doing the loudest paper bag crankle of all time.

• 17:19David Sims?

  Sure.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  It's quite educational, you're learning how the birds and the bees and all of that stuff, and it is a nice balance, you know, I think like you, Griffin. My parents didn't show me kid movies.

• 17:35Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 17:35David Sims?

  They found them like too cynical, sort of like you don't need that sort of trashy stuff.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Well, the censorship wasn't like you can't watch movies where people have sex. It was like you can't watch bad movies. So I remember I really wanted to see Three Ninjas. I wasn't allowed to see that because it was considered crass.

• 17:50Griffin Newman?

  This was similar to my parents.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  But any Woody Allen movie, totally fine to watch.

• 17:56David Sims?

  But once the Three Ninjas knuckled up was an exception made?

• 18:00Speaker 03

  No, no exceptions were made. I had to sneak off to see Suburban Commando. That wasn't permissible.

• 18:07Griffin Newman?

  What about when the clock hit high noon at Magic Mountain? Is that Mega Mountain?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 18:12David Sims?

  Uh, high noon at Mega Mountain, I believe. Uh, fucking, I don't know.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Anyway, I don't even know where I was going with that.

• 18:22David Sims?

  Well, you're talking about like a lot of these, the kid stuff didn't slip through the cracks for you, but I guess this one did.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  This was of a perfect balance because a movie is very juvenile, but it has these sort of adult themes. And it's why the second movie.

• 18:36Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  It all goes wrong. It's like this balance that's quite, you know, delicately handled in the first film.

• 18:44Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Just all goes off the fucking map.

• 18:47Griffin Newman?

  Have you rewatched the first one recently?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  I did, I watched it before.

• 18:50Griffin Newman?

  Great. So I had this, this profound experience that was covered in last week's episode. Where if you had asked me before we recorded, I was like, I have seen all three of those movies over 10 times. Because I watched them all repeatedly when I was a child. And then watched the first one for the podcast and was like, I have never seen this before. I'm not recognizing most of these scenes and everything I remembered being from this movie is actually in the second one.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 19:17David Sims?

  You have seen this one a million times because it was on TV all the time.

• 19:20Griffin Newman?

  Two and three were on the Disney Channel constantly. And my parents were so weird about what they would and wouldn't allow me to watch. There was some connection to what you were saying, but then they also had their own weird eccentricities. But anything that was on the Disney Channel, they assumed had been vetted and was okayed, even though that was not really the case. That early 90s Disney Channel was kind of a fucking junkyard. And so I saw two and three so many fucking times, but have not seen them in 30 years. And I was like, there are things that are burned into my memory. And after watching one and being like, man, one's really fucking good. This is so much more of a movie and this has surprised me and I haven't seen this.

• 20:00David Sims?

  And also, one is a story about two people and their characters that you kind of like. And the baby stuff is in there and is funny, but it kind of lifts out of the movie in a way. And it's like just sort of fun seasoning. But Kiersey Alley, you're with her.

• 20:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 20:13David Sims?

  She's going through a crazy thing. George Segal cheats on her or whatever, you know, knocks her up and then leaves, all that stuff. Travolta, is she gonna figure it out with this guy? He's so charming. He drives a cab. These characters have integrity.

• 20:27Griffin Newman?

  I get so ant-

• 20:27David Sims?

  The characters have no integrity in Luke's talking too.

• 20:30Griffin Newman?

  Characters have integrity.

• 20:30David Sims?

  This movie is-

• 20:31Griffin Newman?

  Say that to Mr. Toilet Man.

• 20:33David Sims?

  Straight up, I would say, and I was shocked. It shocked the conscience, to use like legal language, to see how Amy Heckerling did Kiersey Alley's character so dirty in this movie. She transforms the character just for like plot reasons, essentially.

• 20:48Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 20:48David Sims?

  Yeah. It sucks. I mean, I'm not, I can't be mad because I don't really care.

• 20:52Griffin Newman?

  I want to finish my point.

• 20:53David Sims?

  Fine.

• 20:53Griffin Newman?

  Which is, when I go to re-watch this last night, I'm sort of like, okay, is this gonna be even better than I remember? Cause the first one over-delivered so hard. And this has loomed so-

• 21:04David Sims?

  Going into this with high expectations.

• 21:06Griffin Newman?

  Large in my memory. And I was just like, there are images that are so burned in there. There are dialogue exchanges that I feel like I can recite, even though it's been three decades. And very quickly, I was like, this movie is deranged. It is unhinged. It is so much stranger than I remember. And I was trying to figure out, like, why was this so big for me growing up? Cause it wasn't just, I was watching it because it was on. I was excited when it was on.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  I liked the film a lot as well as a kid.

• 21:34Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  And I totally missed-

• 21:37Speaker 03

  The fact that this was poorly received was a weird movie.

• 21:39David Sims?

  Right.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  It wasn't as good as the first.

• 21:40David Sims?

  No one's telling you that.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  I just forgot about it.

• 21:42Griffin Newman?

  There was a third one, so I was like, people must have loved this one. They demanded that the dogs.

• 21:46David Sims?

  The gravy train rolled on.

• 21:47Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  But I had a very similar experience when I sat down to watch this yesterday and I was like, oh, this is, this totally doesn't work.

• 21:54Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Instantly.

• 21:55Griffin Newman?

  But in trying to reverse engineer my connection to it, uh, I, I was like, there is some weird thing to this movie. Of the, the babies talking is a much larger element in this than it was in the first.

• 22:08David Sims?

  Sort of, right. But still, still not that crucial plot wise, but there's more of it.

• 22:12Griffin Newman?

  Plot wise, I would say it's even less important, but there is certainly more of it. There are more characters talking and they talk more often, right?

• 22:19David Sims?

  Yes.

• 22:20Griffin Newman?

  Um, but I think that, that weird balance of what you're saying of like, it is a movie that is sort of told from the perspective of children, sort of. And has this like heightened comical, like these are the anxieties of like potty training. Or like things coming to life in your bedroom when you're going to sleep, like these real kind of kids I view anxieties blown up. And then the other half of the movie is like adults dealing with adult shit above the heads of children.

• 22:48David Sims?

  Taxes.

• 22:48Griffin Newman?

  Taxes.

• 22:49David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Griffin Newman?

  I just think there was so much in this movie that I was like, I don't know what's going on, but this feels like a glimpse into the grown up world. Having a layabout brother who's staying on your couch for too long and figuring out what you can write off as a business suspense. And going through marital troubles, like it is such an odd marriage of, the first one is really not a family film. It is like a movie.

• 23:13David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Griffin Newman?

  For grownups. It is basically like an adult rom com and like a working woman movie. That has this high concept baby hook that is so much less of the movie than like the cultural reputation would suggest. And then this is actually just this Frankensteining of two things.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Well, it feels very bifurcated. It's like you sort of switch between potty training subplot.

• 23:35Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Slash of nightmare visions.

• 23:38Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Sort of a nightmare on potty training.

• 23:41David Sims?

  Yes.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  And then.

• 23:42David Sims?

  I have recently lived through.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm sure this is very relatable, actually.

• 23:46David Sims?

  No, no, I would say this doesn't really describe. There's one moment where it kind of hasn't an idea of how it actually works, but we can carry on with that.

• 23:53Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  And then, yeah, and then this sort of. Breakdown of a marriage. It's weird that they decided to really create so much tension in the relationship when the charm of the first film

• 24:08Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  is how these opposites attract.

• 24:12Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  And also to skip over the wedding. Right? Because they're already married in the second one.

• 24:17Griffin Newman?

  This movie's relationship-

• 24:18Speaker 03

  I was like, why the fuck did you miss the wedding?

• 24:21Griffin Newman?

  This movie's relationship to time is insane. But I think part of it is that-

• 24:25David Sims?

  Which the first movie is a little bit too.

• 24:27Griffin Newman?

  A little bit.

• 24:27David Sims?

  It does a lot of sort of jumping and you just kind of get it.

• 24:31Griffin Newman?

  But this is even more crazy where it's just like, there were weird gaps of like, sometimes it feels like the movie is spending 20 minutes of screen time on 15 minutes of real world time. And sometimes like five years elapsed in the middle of a cut.

• 24:47David Sims?

  Not five years, but certainly this film takes place over, I would say, 18 months from my sort of knowledge of babies, which is extensive. Uh, not to brag.

• 24:58Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 24:59David Sims?

  In terms of like where the daughter develops from.

• 25:02Griffin Newman?

  You have your own trilogy, yeah.

• 25:02David Sims?

  And two, maybe two years, I guess, if we're counting conception, which the movie does begin with. We do actually rewind.

• 25:09Griffin Newman?

  Well, I was gonna say, they fuck themselves immediately with the ending of the first movie. And how do you build the sequel from this?

• 25:15David Sims?

  Right.

• 25:15Griffin Newman?

  Because the first movie ends with them kissing, right? Having this sort of like reconnection moment. And then immediately cuts to internal sperm flying towards the egg. And then cut to delivery room. Female baby is born. Julie?

• 25:31David Sims?

  Oh, great question. What are the names of the characters in this movie?

• 25:35Griffin Newman?

  Joan Rivers coming out of the baby's mouth.

• 25:37David Sims?

  Uh, the, the, the girl is called Julie.

• 25:41Griffin Newman?

  Nailed it.

• 25:42David Sims?

  There you go. Um, yeah, all four children have the last name of Travolta's character.

• 25:49Griffin Newman?

  Hmm.

• 25:50David Sims?

  U, U, Ubriaco?

• 25:52Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 25:53David Sims?

  Despite, uh, Bruce Willis, Mikey, uh, not of course, being the biological son of Travolta.

• 25:59Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 25:59David Sims?

  But I guess, you know, when they got married, even Molly takes the name. They all- Become ubriacos.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Did anybody else think that Mikey in this one looked younger than Mikey at the end of the first one?

• 26:11Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  Or was that just me?

• 26:12Griffin Newman?

  It is a different Mikey, right?

• 26:13David Sims?

  Of course, they have to, they reset the kids every time, I think. I mean, like, if you look at the poster for now, it's, you know, obviously brand new kids.

• 26:20Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 26:20David Sims?

  I mean, yeah, so I think it's like, because like, by the end of this movie, Julie is kind of walking, right? Like, she takes her first steps and stuff.

• 26:29Griffin Newman?

  To the Tristar music.

• 26:31David Sims?

  Love, I love, I love that. Doing it to the Tristar music.

• 26:36David Sims?

  Not to leap ahead in the action.

• 26:37Griffin Newman?

  This film's second Tristar bit.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Second Tristar bit, they really wanted to know who made the film.

• 26:43David Sims?

  What happened there?

• 26:45Griffin Newman?

  But this is what I'm saying.

• 26:46David Sims?

  Is that like temp music and then just no one decided to take it out?

• 26:50Griffin Newman?

  This is a movie with no overriding idea.

• 26:52David Sims?

  To be clear, just because-

• 26:53Griffin Newman?

  And like 8,000 scraps of ideas.

• 26:55David Sims?

  Because our listeners may not check in with this movie. Yes, when Julie takes her first steps, the sort of familiar music of the Tristar logo.

• 27:08David Sims?

  That plays while that happens.

• 27:10Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 27:10David Sims?

  The, the, the music that goes through every parent's head when their children start walking.

• 27:14Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 27:15David Sims?

  They think of a Pegasus.

• 27:16Griffin Newman?

  A mighty Pegasus inside a triangle.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  I, I love that moment in the film, unapologetically.

• 27:22Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  And there were other things in the movie-

• 27:24Griffin Newman?

  I think this movie has slam dunk moments.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  In the back half, I quite liked.

• 27:28Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  It did, it did sort of win me-

• 27:31David Sims?

  Back half.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Ben is looking at me like, I'm a sick person.

• 27:34David Sims?

  The final 38 minutes is what you're referring to?

• 27:36Speaker 03

  I was just, by the end of the film, he's like, I was like, you know what? Didn't hate it.

• 27:41Griffin Newman?

  I, I think you and I are completely aligned on this, and a lot of this is probably-

• 27:46David Sims?

  But you have a bit of nostalgia for this thing, which I do not.

• 27:49Griffin Newman?

  And it being burned into our DNA, but I also was trying to watch it objectively, and I'm like, I cannot argue this movie is not a mess. It is an absolute disjointed mess. There were moments where I was just like, fuck, these 30 seconds are good. Here's an idea, here's a successfully landed joke, here's a little stylish bit of filmmaking, here's a fun performance moment, and then like, when it would cut to the next thing, I'd be like, this movie has no shape.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  There are moments of filmmaking on that. There was these little things where you go like, oh yeah, of course it's Amy Heckerling. It's not made by.

• 28:20Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Nobody.

• 28:21Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Um, there's a beautiful shot when she runs into the airport hangar and.

• 28:26Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  I mean, that's gorgeous.

• 28:27Griffin Newman?

  But even just like, that sequence is so, and the house burning, the apartment burning is like so high production value. For like, nothing.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the D, the DP who also shot the first one, there's a very specific aesthetic to these movies. I mean.

• 28:44David Sims?

  Uh, Thomas Del Roof.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  I don't know, I don't know if it's good or bad, but it has a real look to, they both have a real look. It's kind of backlit. Slightly soft porn.

• 28:53Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Feel.

• 28:55David Sims?

  They do have the fuzzy.

• 28:56Griffin Newman?

  They have a Cinemax look.

• 28:57David Sims?

  And like, there's a lot of neon in her house, which is never explained.

• 29:01Griffin Newman?

  Bra love is the sign she has above the TV, it looks like.

• 29:04David Sims?

  Which is the same deal in the first movie where she's just sort of decorated the whole house with neon and you're kind of like, I feel like she's just done that because they like how it looks, not because it makes sense for her character, but it doesn't matter. Um, but it does give the whole thing, it's basically the same apartment. I assume that it filmed again in Calgary or whatever, like it was not New York.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Well, there's more New York exteriors in this one for sure.

• 29:26Griffin Newman?

  I think there is like, she got like one day of New York.

• 29:29David Sims?

  Right.

• 29:30Griffin Newman?

  Um, cause there are a couple of specific New York locations, but most of it was still in Vancouver, which as JJ dug up in the dossier, part of that was more lax child labor laws.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 29:42David Sims?

  We can look at the dossier. Now, the thing that bugged me about this movie is the, the thing I was saying about Kirstie Alley's character Molly, who is now Ubriaco, I guess, Molly Jensen, is that a, uh, plot point in this well-designed humming script. Is that her brother shows up, played by, uh, um.

• 30:04Griffin Newman?

  Elias Coates.

• 30:05David Sims?

  Casey Jones himself.

• 30:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 30:06David Sims?

  And.

• 30:07Griffin Newman?

  Oh shit.

• 30:08David Sims?

  Yeah, that's him.

• 30:09Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 30:09David Sims?

  He had the, he didn't have the long hair, but that's that guy.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:13David Sims?

  And he's sort of coded as like, kinda like a conspiracy theorist or whatever. He's like a little wacky.

• 30:19Griffin Newman?

  Travolta refers to him as a fascist. He seems to want to be a cop. He carries a gun around all the time.

• 30:23David Sims?

  Right.

• 30:24Griffin Newman?

  He is introduced wearing an NYPD hat.

• 30:26David Sims?

  But he's not a cop. Such a piece of shit. He sucks. He like, very obviously sucks.

• 30:31Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 30:31David Sims?

  This is, he's not an ambiguous character. Like, the audience is not supposed to look at this guy and be like-

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Doesn't he say he's pretty racist when he first comes in?

• 30:37David Sims?

  He says weird, he's always saying weird. He kinda feels like a-

• 30:40Griffin Newman?

  He's complaining about like immigrants.

• 30:40David Sims?

  Right, like an early 90s version of like a kinda red-pilled guy in some way.

• 30:45Griffin Newman?

  But also, the movie's, like, in his behavior is incredibly clear. When characters talk about him in the movie, you could think they're talking about different people. Where it's like, Travolta's like, he sucks. Kirstie Alley seems to be like, look, he's my fuck-up brother. I feel bad for him. Olympia DeCockes seems to be like, he's the golden boy. Why can't your shitty husband be more like our son?

• 31:09David Sims?

  Right, so there's a little bit of that going on.

• 31:11Griffin Newman?

  He is seemingly very good at accounting.

• 31:14David Sims?

  Right, he has like a weird brain that's kinda good for that, I guess, but everything else about him is odd.

• 31:20Griffin Newman?

  But he wants to be a cop or a vigilante.

• 31:22David Sims?

  Yeah, ninja, or Casey Jones, possibly. Right, right. He wants to go find the turtle.

• 31:26Griffin Newman?

  Or like Dog the Bounty Hunter, or Ice Agent.

• 31:30David Sims?

  He's like, he has a gun, as you said.

• 31:33Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 31:33David Sims?

  And Travolta, who is kinda the same character he was in the first movie in this, he's basically just being like, nice Vinnie Barberino kinda guy, right? Is like, hey, he has a gun in the house. We have two small children. We should not have a gun in the house.

• 31:47Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 31:47David Sims?

  And Kirstie Alley's like, relax. And I'm like, that is not the character from the first movie. I 100% agree. She actually goes like this, is it loaded? Yeah, right. And he says, no. Yeah, and it's so crazy, and it's obviously only for a stupid plot thing to happen later, right? It's Chekhov's gun, the worst form of Chekhov's gun.

• 32:04Griffin Newman?

  But then the Chekhov's gun-

• 32:05David Sims?

  It barely makes sense what they use it for, yes.

• 32:08Griffin Newman?

  Yes, jump all the way to the end. The Chekhov's gun of it is that someone- You know what? We should save this for later. I want to zoom out.

• 32:17David Sims?

  But that's where I was just like, I can't believe Amy's given up on her somewhat sort of like pseudo, you know, autobiographical protagonist here. Like, you know, in the first movie, she's a bit of an Amy Heckerling. She's going through an Amy Heckerling situation.

• 32:31Griffin Newman?

  Here's the single biggest thing, and this can lead us into the limited context that exists for this favorite dream of a movie, is that she says she was basically legally forced to make this movie.

• 32:45David Sims?

  Right, which we can talk about.

• 32:46Griffin Newman?

  That she did not want to do it. And her quote was like, "The story's done. The baby talked. There's nothing left to say." That in her mind, it's like there is an arc to that first movie, which is like this adult rom-com happening in this single mother story that is her working through the Ramus thing. Do you know the Ramus shit?

• 33:04David Sims?

  I do.

• 33:04Griffin Newman?

  Okay, good.

• 33:06Griffin Newman?

  But also, this, I think what is a good rom-com hook of like, single mother, meeting a guy, and not being able to judge him based on, "Do I like him, but could he be a good father?" Which is where the device of the baby talking is like effective in the movie is in the last 30 minutes, when Mikey is like expressing to the audience his inner monologue of being like, "Dude, get it together. I want you to be my dad." And the character has this internal frustration of not being able to get who he wants to be his parents together happily, right? And then at the end, the baby says the one word. It's Dada. And in Amy Heckerling's mind, like, complete story. And you introduce a baby sister at the end, and it's a fun little stinger joke.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  I'm tearing up as you remind me of the beautiful.

• 33:52Griffin Newman?

  It works.

• 33:52David Sims?

  Right.

• 33:53Griffin Newman?

  And then Tristar is like, "You obviously are making the baby sister movie right away."

• 33:58David Sims?

  Yeah, I mean, she, she kind of played herself, right?

• 34:01Griffin Newman?

  She did.

• 34:02David Sims?

  Having the teaser.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  One thing I'd love us to do, guys, before we wrap up the app, is...

• 34:06David Sims?

  I think we're done, actually.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Okay, we're done?

• 34:08David Sims?

  I'll see you later, Max. Yeah, 32 minutes, pretty good, actually.

• 34:11Griffin Newman?

  Two hours on the clock, two hours on the clock.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  That's not bad for this film.

• 34:14David Sims?

  No, no.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  Go ahead, go ahead. What would, what would be the better path to take?

• 34:20David Sims?

  With this movie?

• 34:21Griffin Newman?

  I, I, I have some thoughts.

• 34:22David Sims?

  I'd love, I'd love to hear you.

• 34:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, let's, let's pin this.

• 34:25David Sims?

  Okay, let's pin it.

• 34:25Griffin Newman?

  Let's pin this.

• 34:26David Sims?

  Come back to it.

• 34:26Griffin Newman?

  But, but she basically says, I, I had no idea, right? And like Bob Gale and Zemeckis have talked about this too, that Back to the Future 2 ends with the like, "Your kids, Marty." And Universal was like, "How ingenious that you set this up perfectly for a sequel." And they were like, "That was a dumb joke in our minds. We never thought we'd make a sequel."

• 34:44David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:44Griffin Newman?

  And in fact, we fucked ourselves.

• 34:46David Sims?

  It's kinda like Nolan having the Joker card.

• 34:48Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 34:49David Sims?

  When Batman Begins, where he's always insisted like, eh, you know, it just felt like a good button for the movie. It didn't feel like this insistent kind of like, "The next movie is the Joker, get ready."

• 35:00Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 35:00David Sims?

  But obviously, everyone who sees the movie is like, "I cannot wait to see who the Joker will be."

• 35:04Griffin Newman?

  I, I love Back to the Future Part 2, but like Gale and Zemeckis have always said, "If we had planned for that to be a sequel setup, Jennifer would not have gotten in the cart with them." Like, that was the biggest single storytelling mistake we made, is then Back to the Future 2 has to be like, "Fuck, what do we do with Jennifer?" Because we put her in the shotgun seat, right? And similarly, I think Heckerling is just like, "Well, at the end of the movie, we'll just like cut to them kissing, puppet sperm, delivery room."

• 35:31David Sims?

  Right.

• 35:32Griffin Newman?

  Nice little button, and now Columbia's insisting that the sequel happen.

• 35:37David Sims?

  Right.

• 35:37Griffin Newman?

  The weirder part of all of this, and she doesn't talk much about this movie. She's like, "I hated doing it, I felt totally lost, it was a miserable experience."

• 35:45David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Griffin Newman?

  Uh, "I don't even wanna talk about it." But the other part of this is there's this giant $20 million lawsuit, that the first movie comes out, October of 89, the lawsuit is filed at the beginning of 1990. Look Who's Talking 2 comes out the end of 1990. And the lawsuit is fuzzy. It's in the dossier, but basically, this couple said that they had made a short film at AFI, Amy Heckerling's alma mater, that was adapted from a short story, that was about a hyper-intelligent baby that could speak to its parents. A more heightened sci-fi premise.

• 36:26David Sims?

  Right, right. Sort of a baby genius, if you will.

• 36:29Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 36:29David Sims?

  Yes.

• 36:30Griffin Newman?

  Twin Kaplan, the best friend character in these movies, later Heckerling's producer on Clueless and Loser and regular stock company player, was Amy Heckerling's secretary slash assistant? They met in the early 80s? When she was just a struggling actress and Heckerling was like, come work for me.

• 36:50David Sims?

  Right. And we love Twink Caplin.

• 36:53Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 36:53David Sims?

  She's charming.

• 36:54Griffin Newman?

  The couple who do this short, which I believe was called Special Delivery.

• 36:58David Sims?

  Uh, yes. Uh, it was, uh, the couple is, uh, um, what are the names? Uh, Jeannie Myers and Rita Stern.

• 37:06Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 37:06David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Griffin Newman?

  So maybe it was not a couple, but this duo, right? They submit it to Heckerling's office. Twink Caplin receives it, corresponds with them for months, is like, can you show me more materials? Then after several months is like, I, I, I think we're gonna pass.

• 37:23David Sims?

  Yeah, we don't see a film.

• 37:24Griffin Newman?

  They never interact with Heckerling directly. This is in the mid eighties. Then in 1987, they pitch it separately to a subsidiary of Tristar. And they're like, interesting, we think there might be something here for a TV movie. It never happens. Then in 89, Look Who's Talking comes out, makes a gazillion dollars. These two file a lawsuit like immediately. The lawsuit is not resolved until April of 1991. Months after Look Who's Talking 2 comes out. But they were suing for $20 million. There are always these cases where like Finding Nemo comes out and then someone's like, in 1946, I FedExed a package that said, what if fish talk to Disney?

• 38:08David Sims?

  And now you owe me 800 billion.

• 38:09Griffin Newman?

  Right. And these suits usually get thrown out of court.

• 38:12David Sims?

  Right. Or, right, whatever. Exactly.

• 38:14Griffin Newman?

  Right. There are the rare exceptions of like the Art Buckwald Coming to America case. This was settled for some undisclosed amount. They did not get the case thrown out. The judge ruled that there were too many similarities.

• 38:28David Sims?

  Um, there's often also, uh, these cases often do get, like a payoff is made essentially.

• 38:32Griffin Newman?

  Totally.

• 38:33David Sims?

  And like, no one gets to talk about it and that's that.

• 38:35Griffin Newman?

  And Twink Caplin's like, we can't talk about it, but we're very happy with the end result. Sort of framed it as like, we feel like we won, but it can't be talked about. But somewhere within this lawsuit, it seems like there's some entanglement that then amounts to Columbia forcing her to make the second movie.

• 38:51David Sims?

  It is not explained why exactly she had to do it, but yes, she had to do it. She brought along Neil Israel, her husband.

• 38:57Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 38:58David Sims?

  To co-write it, uh, although obviously we, you know. He's not the actual father of the child they had together. That's Harold Ramis. We talked about this all.

• 39:06Griffin Newman?

  And reports vary. This is where I go full Robert Graysmith. But by many accounts, they are divorced by the time this movie comes out.

• 39:13David Sims?

  They certainly did not last much longer.

• 39:15Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 39:16David Sims?

  This film was filmed in Vancouver, much like the last film was in Calgary, sorry. And apparently, Canada has, has or had less restrictive child labor laws. So they could have more time with the toddlers. That was necessary. Filmed for 61 days, which is so funny. I mean, it's just funny. I know it's not. I mean, it's just like.

• 39:38Griffin Newman?

  You've directed two features.

• 39:40David Sims?

  Days now.

• 39:40Griffin Newman?

  How many days did you have on your two movies?

• 39:43Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, don't even ask me that question. It's too painful to ask. I mean, 61 days is, is interesting for this film. It doesn't feel like a movie that's been made.

• 39:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 39:51David Sims?

  I think they just did it slower back then. I guess they had a lot of kid wrangling to do. That is the one thing I guess that does cramp your time. But 61 days, like Steven Soderbergh could make, you know, all six Lord of the Rings movies in 61 days or whatever now.

• 40:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, they had to get the lips moving.

• 40:08David Sims?

  That's true. They had to get the lips moving. They had two days of exteriors in New York.

• 40:13Griffin Newman?

  Two days of dialogue. Yeah.

• 40:19Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 40:19David Sims?

  Yes. Mmm. Is that the C S cow?

• 40:25Griffin Newman?

  The C S cow is back.

• 40:25David Sims?

  Haven't heard from her in a while.

• 40:27Griffin Newman?

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

• 40:32David Sims?

  Okay.

• 40:33Griffin Newman?

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

• 40:37David Sims?

  Wow.

• 40:38Griffin Newman?

  The cow likes chicken.

• 40:40David Sims?

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

• 40:46Griffin 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.

• 40:56Griffin Newman?

  Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

• 40:58David Sims?

  Yes.

• 40:59Griffin Newman?

  One of my favorite movies of the year.

• 41:00David Sims?

  Absolutely.

• 41:01Griffin Newman?

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

• 41:07David Sims?

  That is a line in the movie.

• 41:08Griffin Newman?

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

• 41:10David Sims?

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

• 41:14Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 41:14David Sims?

  Great friend.

• 41:15Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 41:16David Sims?

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

• 41:21Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 41:22David Sims?

  You know, legends, and I tip my cap, but Zach Cherry.

• 41:24Griffin Newman?

  Performances, friend of the show.

• 41:25David Sims?

  Friend of the show, Zach Cherry.

• 41:27Griffin Newman?

  Zach Cherry.

• 41:28David Sims?

  Also in it.

• 41:29Griffin Newman?

  This is true.

• 41:30David Sims?

  Such a cool movie. Won the Queer Paul McCann. 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, uh, this summer and now it's on movie.

• 41:40Griffin Newman?

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

• 41:54David Sims?

  Yes. And you know, and then they hang out and it's regular.

• 41:59Griffin Newman?

  What happens?

• 42:01Griffin Newman?

  It's, 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, uh, an example of there still being new stories to tell.

• 42:11David Sims?

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

• 42:23Griffin Newman?

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

• 42:28David Sims?

  Damn right.

• 42:33Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 42:33David Sims?

  Yes.

• 42:34Griffin 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.

• 42:55David Sims?

  Yeah, this new full cast thriller locks Mina Harker in a battle of minds with the Count. When Mina's fiance, Jonathan Harker, uh, Louis Partridge, uh, 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.

• 43:15Griffin 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.

• 43:31David 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, Ramstoker's Dracula, Audible's new full cast original adaptation, written by Robin Ahern, now on Audible. Listen to the darkness. Go to audible.com/ListenToDracula.

• 44:06Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 44:06David Sims?

  Yes?

• 44:06Griffin Newman?

  Ugh.

• 44:07David Sims?

  Uh oh.

• 44:08Griffin Newman?

  It's November.

• 44:09David Sims?

  Ah!

• 44:11Griffin Newman?

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

• 44:13David Sims?

  Turkeys?

• 44:14Griffin Newman?

  One long sprint to the finish line.

• 44:16David Sims?

  Oh, of course.

• 44:17Griffin 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.

• 44:26David Sims?

  No, although maybe we should.

• 44:27Griffin Newman?

  We might get there eventually.

• 44:28David Sims?

  I can't remember. Big red one. We could call it the Big Red Podcast.

• 44:32Griffin 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.

• 44:45David 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.

• 44:52Griffin Newman?

  And I'm awake.

• 44:53David 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.

• 45:01Griffin Newman?

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

• 45:09David Sims?

  Thank you for that, boy.

• 45:09Griffin 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.

• 45:21David Sims?

  Um, yes, AG1, they've got now AG1 Pro.

• 45:25Griffin Newman?

  For the professionals.

• 45:26David 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 CAHMB for muscle protection and zinc carnosine for gut support.

• 45:44Griffin Newman?

  Thank God.

• 45:45David Sims?

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

• 45:49Griffin 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.

• 45:57David Sims?

  Yes. So for a limited time, visit drink AG1.com slash check and get a free immune support bundle, including omega three, fish oil and vitamin D three plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 next gen or AG1 Pro. That's drink AG1.com slash check. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Belank check send you.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  I want to hear more about the research. Tell me more.

• 46:31Griffin Newman?

  Well, this is the problem is that it seems like however this lawsuit was settled, no one involved can talk about it anymore.

• 46:41Griffin Newman?

  So she'll just give these offhand comments of like, it was like a big mess. Twin Kaplan has a couple of times been like, I can't say a single thing, but we're happy with how it turned out. The, the people who pitched special delivery have never been able to talk about it publicly.

• 46:55David Sims?

  Put it just is, I was kind of made to do the second one. I was not delighted with it. The suit was filed in 19, like they approached in 1985. Yeah, it does. I can see why they had to settle on this. The timing is just, it doesn't look good.

• 47:08Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 47:08David Sims?

  You know, um, and, uh, even though it is a married couple who learns that their unborn child has a full adult consciousness and a genius intellect. So that is not, look who's talking, but whatever. But according to heckling, somehow that lawsuit ensnared her into making look who's talking to the specific mechanics are not clear. Uh, she was forced into doing it for legal reasons. She said, uh, this was not a fun experience. And she's also, I think, having the sort of existential panic of, am I just making talking babies movies now, right? Like, is, is this my life now? Joan Rivers.

• 47:45David Sims?

  Was replaced by Roseanne Barr. Doesn't really explain why.

• 47:48Griffin Newman?

  I mean, they threw out the classic, like, scheduling difficulties.

• 47:51David Sims?

  Oh, fuck off. Joan Rivers is available.

• 47:53Griffin Newman?

  Exactly. Any people say that about animated films, I'm like, that is bullshit.

• 47:56David Sims?

  Uh, I can see that they were just like, Roseanne's hot, hot, hot. I mean, I get that.

• 48:00Griffin Newman?

  They were like, Joan Rivers is a funny end of movie joke, but if we're actually making the sequel, don't we want a name on the poster that's as exciting as Bruce Willis is the voice of this baby?

• 48:10David Sims?

  I guess so.

• 48:10Griffin Newman?

  Which in 1990, saying Roseanne is the other baby is like a slam dunk.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  I remember at the time, feeling like a huge get.

• 48:17Griffin Newman?

  Right. You're, you're just, even as a child, you're like, that's funny. I'm laughing already.

• 48:21David Sims?

  Well, but as a child, you are so familiar with celebrities who have one name.

• 48:26Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 48:26David Sims?

  Like, those are the celebrities that first enter our lives. The Roseans, the Madonnas.

• 48:30Griffin Newman?

  She's so big. You don't even have to finish. She's one and done.

• 48:35David Sims?

  The Arsenios.

• 48:35Griffin Newman?

  Right. Um, and also has a very distinctive voice. Like, people impersonate Roseanne.

• 48:41David Sims?

  Now, famously, the early trailer, The Stings.

• 48:44Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello.

• 48:48David Sims?

  Sting was one where I was like, it took me a while to be like, so his name's like not Sting at all, right? Like, it's not like his name is like Sting Jones. Like, and he dropped the Jones. He just made that up, huh?

• 48:59Griffin Newman?

  You know what? Roseanne is kind of the rare example in the, in the list we just did of like, it is just her first name.

• 49:05David Sims?

  Same with Madonna. Same with Madonna.

• 49:07Griffin Newman?

  I, right. I always forget that that is her first name.

• 49:09David Sims?

  Cher, right? Cher, for sure.

• 49:11Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 49:12David Sims?

  Um, another one, very good. Uh, Cheryl is, Cher is Cheryl. But still.

• 49:17Griffin Newman?

  Still.

• 49:17David Sims?

  Um, Richard Pryor famously is the voice of the friend child in the early trailer, and apparently his performance tested horribly.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  I saw the trailer for the first time yesterday.

• 49:28David Sims?

  What's the vibe? I have not seen this trailer.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Well, they really, they really push him in the trailer.

• 49:33Griffin Newman?

  But that first teaser is-

• 49:34Speaker 03

  And Richard Pryor, like-

• 49:35Griffin Newman?

  It's fascinating because that first teaser, speaking of how quickly this movie was pushed around, is like 60% footage from the first movie. It's like, remember Mikey? And then it shows you a bunch of clips from the first movie and they clearly just have like a few soaking wet clips from dailies of the second one, but they like call out Richard Pryor. He of course has already, like, his health struggles have progressed.

• 49:59David Sims?

  Yeah, this is not, right, like primo Richard Pryor.

• 50:03Griffin Newman?

  And in that clip on YouTube, which is very low quality, his voice is not very clear. Like, I could see it testing poorly, being less of a thing of like, we don't think Richard Pryor's funny, and more like, this guy is struggling to speak. Yes.

• 50:16David Sims?

  Uh, so he's replaced with Damon Wayans. Uh, In Living Color premieres sort of right before this movie comes out, like a few months before, so like, Damon Wayans is starting to get hot, yes. Uh, Kirstie Alley got 2.5 million dollars for the film. And it came out December 14th, 1990, 14 months after its predecessor was released. And it made 48 million domestic, which is, well, 100 million dollars less than the first movie, so it's not good.

• 50:43Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 50:43David Sims?

  But it's still enough money. Uh, and I'm seeing here, this can't be right, so JJ may be fired, that the reviews were negative?

• 50:51Griffin Newman?

  Weird.

• 50:52David Sims?

  Not sure, that seems crazy to me.

• 50:54Griffin Newman?

  Max, can you talk about, because we have not gotten to Seashell yet, sadly. Can you talk about?

• 51:00Speaker 03

  I should have brought it for you guys.

• 51:02Griffin Newman?

  The influence it had on your film? In what way? And how much of it is just sort of like the memory you had of Look Who's Talking versus what it actually is?

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Well, what's, sorry, what was the name of that actress we were just talking about? Who, um, who was the assistant?

• 51:20Griffin Newman?

  Twink. Twink Caplan.

• 51:21David Sims?

  Twink Caplan.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  Twink, right?

• 51:22Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 51:23David Sims?

  She's in Clueless as well.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  There's a character in, in Shell, played by S- Esti Hyman, who is, I would say, very influenced by the twink character in Look Who's Talking.

• 51:34David Sims?

  In Look Who's Talking?

• 51:35Speaker 03

  In the Look Who's Talking movies. Shell is a, is a very eccentric, hopefully really fun movie that's very much made, probably for people who listen to this show. It sort of exists within, um, the world of studio movies of the late 80s and early 90s. And not in a... Um, not in a cynical way. It's trying to sort of earnestly emulate a sort of piece of studio product from that period of time. And all of the things that come with that, including sort of strange studio notes and reshoots. And, you know, I, I hope the movie contains all the textures that a movie of that period might have. Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  And, um, yeah, look who's talking. The aesthetic of it, there's a slightly, even the first one, right? There's something slightly nightmarish about it. Yes.

• 52:29David Sims?

  Oh, the puppetry too, and the.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:32David Sims?

  Yeah, you know, it's a bit of a dark movie. There's weird fantasy sequences, heads exploding, things like that.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it has the sort of the veneer of like a fun kids are talking and. Right, right. Is John Travolta, but there is something slightly ominous bubbling underneath the surface all the time. And so hopefully Shell has a similar, um, energy.

• 52:52Griffin Newman?

  We were, we were talking right before record about, and it's, it's what I love about you, that we were talking about the films of Walt Becker.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 53:00Griffin Newman?

  And you talking about which ones you had seen recently, since your reappraisal of him as Volker Ortor. You were apologizing for certain movies you hadn't seen in too long, where you're like, well, I saw it before I understood who he was.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Well, you guys are totally responsible, we're now we're getting off topic, but for my fascination with Walt Becker, um, the old dogs episode, guys, if you haven't heard the old dogs episode. The live episode, that is, um, top five for me all time, blank check. I should be listening to that one. I've listened to it probably seventeen times.

• 53:34Griffin Newman?

  Insane.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Um, but to what, cause you get to watch along this fucking batshit movie with incredibly entertaining commentary. Um, he's a really interesting, he's a really interesting guy. He's fascinating.

• 53:46David Sims?

  And you think that the aesthetic here reminds you a little bit of the later Becker, the kind of family film.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  No, it doesn't. This movie, this movie, I do want to talk about this though, cause this movie was small. I, I mentioned Drop Dead Fred and. Yeah. Three Men and a Little Lady. It also is in the canon of. Dark sequels.

• 54:04Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Gremlins two, the new batch, there is some stuff here, right?

• 54:09Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Bay Pig in the City.

• 54:10Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  But going to Gremlins two, the kind of, the tri, the, the tri star.

• 54:15Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Jingle, like even the, the, the Mr. Ed at the beginning of the film.

• 54:21Griffin Newman?

  Yes, which Gremlins two does with the Looney tune.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:25Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  We're starting to get into that territory of.

• 54:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Children's films with a little bit of a weird.

• 54:32Griffin Newman?

  And, and Gremlins two is the absolute best version of this, where it's also a like, hey, we have eight thousand ideas.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:39Griffin Newman?

  Movie.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  It's overflowing with ideas. It kind of throws away the first movie, not entirely, but kind of like, don't worry about.

• 54:47Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Though, I mean, some of those characters are still here, but like, that's not what's gonna happen now. And you're very much like, that's fine. Like, it's a new movie. This movie, it's the same build, you know, it's the same rooms.

• 54:59Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  So it's a little harder to kind of just be like anarchy.

• 55:02Griffin Newman?

  Well, the reason I'm just reinvoking Walt Becker is not because I think Walt Becker shares a commonality with the movies we're talking about, right? But I think he's one of weirdly, the last standing examples of, I, I talk about what you were getting at with Shell, right? This era of filmmaking where like, they allowed enough personality to come through. Directors still had enough control while making things that were designed to be mainstream, popular entertainment, right? There were still mid-budget movies that were healthy, that are being supported by the studio, where the stakes are low enough

• 55:42Griffin Newman?

  that they'll let you do your weird shit to a degree, but then that has to be balanced with studio note shit. There was some odd Frankenstein middle ground.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  I call it, so it's like the test screening period to me in my mind. It's like, that's, that is the filter system that everything has to go through and has to pass.

• 56:02Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  And you're right, before that, the filmmaker gets to be. Much more expressive than probably a contemporary studio gun behind.

• 56:10Griffin Newman?

  But there's almost like a feast or famine thing now of you hear about a lot of like big franchise movies where they pre-schedule extended reshoots. And they're like, look, on set, we will let the director do a couple takes their way. And then the producer's gonna weigh in and insist that they do a couple more normal takes. And then they let the director put together their cut while having another editor put together the most normal cut. And then they test screen both of them. And then they go into the reshoots to either amplify what they like that the director did, or tone it down and make the more sort of like banal version of it. Like, they have this whole choose your own adventure system to prevent there forever being any personality that's

• 56:53Griffin Newman?

  too irreversible on a like $200 million scale. And I think if people get a lower budget, they're fighting much more adamantly for like, I'm gonna make this exactly the way I want with no concessions, because it is so rare that anyone gets any kind of opportunity like that. That this sort of like negotiation career filmmaking of heckling being like, look, if I check like six boxes they want, will they let me do my six things over here? And this movie doesn't have overriding, I have things I want to say, but it has like moments and sequences and ideas that feel like things that excite her, even if there's no larger excitement.

• 57:38David Sims?

  Right.

• 57:38Griffin Newman?

  And I think that's part of like the weird soup of this movie and her even being like, I was miserable and I was forced to do this. And I'm like, but there's stuff here. Um, I, I do think part of it is that it's like, you get into this.

• 57:55David Sims?

  There's no stuff here, by the way. But carry on.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  Dude.

• 57:58Griffin Newman?

  Max and I are gonna fight on this.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  David.

• 57:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Why are you being so cruel?

• 58:01Griffin Newman?

  The potty, Mr. Potty eats poo poo and pee pee.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  People watched really hard on this film for 61 days.

• 58:08Griffin Newman?

  61 long days.

• 58:10David Sims?

  A baton death march.

• 58:13David Sims?

  Making Look Who's Talking To for two whole months. Uh, yeah, the, the, the potty joke is funny.

• 58:18Griffin Newman?

  It's not a joke.

• 58:19David Sims?

  Is it funny? It's, well, I got, it's sort of same, like, this film begins with first, yes, we have the long, and again, for a 75 minute movie, possibly too long, kind of feels like making your font to 20 point where it's like, the sperm and the eggs. And I'm like, is it gonna be different than last time? And they're like, well, we have the diaphragm joke now.

• 58:37Griffin Newman?

  First it opens with the Tristar Pegasus running and Bruce Willis doing a Mr. Ed impression.

• 58:44David Sims?

  He does do that.

• 58:44Griffin Newman?

  Narrating the Tristar fanfare.

• 58:46David Sims?

  I mean, I think we were all asking for that. And I think, I think it pays out like a slot machine.

• 58:50Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 58:51David Sims?

  Like $5.

• 58:52Griffin Newman?

  Then it starts with diaphragm shots.

• 58:53David Sims?

  Then it's, then we have, right, the, the, the repeat of the first movie's fertilization with, plus a diaphragm. So there's an extra layer of, um, you know, protection.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  What, here's the question, though, because Bruce Willis is once again voicing the sperm. Christie Alley is voicing the egg.

• 59:12David Sims?

  Yes.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  And the diaphragm.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  And the diaphragm. But that, that is, so, but then, shouldn't it be Travolta's sperm?

• 59:19David Sims?

  I don't know how much we should be getting into gender on Blank Check, but it's interesting that these sperms are male at all. I'll say this. Now, they're male because they're coming from the man. I get the, I get the thinking, right?

• 59:31Griffin Newman?

  Well, and it also, look, in the first movie, you're starting.

• 59:35David Sims?

  I understand.

• 59:35Griffin Newman?

  This arc with the one little sperm who becomes Mikey.

• 59:39David Sims?

  Bruce Willis who.

• 59:39Griffin Newman?

  So of course it has to be voiced by Bruce Willis.

• 59:40David Sims?

  You know, all fertilized eggs are female until during the process, uh, one chromosome gets introduced. So biologically, maybe everything should be female. And then there's some point at which a flip gets switched, but, uh, might be too complicated for viewers to understand this. I don't know.

• 59:58Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 59:59David Sims?

  What's important is that it goes on from, this is not my point. My point is after all of that, the film begins, and the first thing we see is Bruce Willis baby, uh, Mikey, getting tormented by monsters, uh, in his room, right?

• 1:00:15Griffin Newman?

  This is where I was gonna correct you. That's being crosscut with the conception because that's the whole thing.

• 1:00:19David Sims?

  Oh, sure. Right. It's the same, right. They're happening at the same time.

• 1:00:23Griffin Newman?

  They're doing a little foreplay.

• 1:00:24David Sims?

  They're doing a little bit of hanky panky.

• 1:00:25Griffin Newman?

  She's making sure that the diaphragm's in. And then he starts screaming because his dolls are being possessed.

• 1:00:31David Sims?

  But it's quite.

• 1:00:32Griffin Newman?

  Which are being done with like puppet master style.

• 1:00:35David Sims?

  It's kind of scary.

• 1:00:36Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36David Sims?

  Straightforwardly scary. And you're like, well, kids do get scared of toys. I, I understand the gag here, but this is just kind of a scary vibe for this movie.

• 1:00:44Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:00:45David Sims?

  As Max is saying, like, to kick off with.

• 1:00:48Griffin Newman?

  That's when I was like.

• 1:00:48David Sims?

  It's just kind of like demons are here.

• 1:00:50Griffin Newman?

  Fuck, I was right. Five-year-old Griff was right. This movie's a masterpiece. Let's go. Like, when in the first four minutes, it's thrown all of this out. Yes. Um, but right, then Travolta basically puts the kid back to bed. Then they fuck. Then the opening credits happen to the impregnation.

• 1:01:08David Sims?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:01:08Griffin Newman?

  Right. The one sperm makes it through the diaphragm, sneaking through.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  But shouldn't have been Roseanne's voice as the egg? Do you know what I'm saying? The logic doesn't make sense.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 1:01:17David Sims?

  I think there's just no right way to do this, probably, right? Like, it's just kind of like, you're, you're snookered no matter what you try.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Or it should have just been, uh, fucking what's his name with the silly voice who's the gym coach or whatever.

• 1:01:30David Sims?

  Godfrey?

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  It should have been Godfrey's fucking voice.

• 1:01:32David Sims?

  More Gottfried, I'm happy. Like, if this movie wanted to over-index on Gottfried, I'd be giving it a thumbs up.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  It should have been the sperm and egg.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  There wasn't enough Gottfried at all.

• 1:01:40Griffin Newman?

  Certainly not.

• 1:01:40David Sims?

  There's not nearly enough Gottfried, and he was still rudely given a Golden Raspberry nomination.

• 1:01:44Griffin Newman?

  Jossie's Gym.

• 1:01:46David Sims?

  That's his, that's his sort of play center thing.

• 1:01:48Griffin Newman?

  Right, his version of Gymboree. I think it's Jossie's Gym. The font is weird on the sweatshirt.

• 1:01:53David Sims?

  Um, so, uh, yeah, just like sets a weird tone, the monsters. I don't know. Max, thoughts?

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  It's the tone of the film. The whole movie's got that weird.

• 1:02:04David Sims?

  It does.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Nightmare energy to it.

• 1:02:06David Sims?

  It's got nightmare energy. We sort of, we lose track of Kirstie Alley's job. We kind of see her once where she brings the kid to the office and gets reprimanded.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and notice, notice that the male character, sort of the antagonist of that scene.

• 1:02:21David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Also is talking about some kind of medical issue that he's having. I believe, which sort of nods to the first film when she goes on the date with the touped

• 1:02:32Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  accountant.

• 1:02:33David Sims?

  And that guy did have a toupee vibe, the mad accountant guy.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  But I feel like Amy Heckerling associates a certain kind of man she finds unattractive with them talking about their bodily functions.

• 1:02:43Griffin Newman?

  But also, am I wrong in thinking that the boss at the office who lambasts her for bringing the kid to work is Neil Israel, her husband at the time who co-wrote the movie?

• 1:02:54David Sims?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:02:55Griffin Newman?

  I think so.

• 1:02:56David Sims?

  I mean, sure.

• 1:02:57Griffin Newman?

  Which is also funny to slot him into one of these parts.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  It is interesting, meta-layer to it all.

• 1:03:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04David Sims?

  He is Mr. Ross, and look who's talking to him, I believe. Yes, that's him.

• 1:03:07Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07David Sims?

  Wow. Playing just like an absolute turd.

• 1:03:10Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11David Sims?

  Like, just come in for one scene and suck.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  It is a film of, like, independent sequences that feel almost entirely unrelated to one another.

• 1:03:23Griffin Newman?

  Right, which is where it works. I mean, just like, look at this fucking still image of teddy bear with glowing red eyes and a literal little demon imp over its shoulder. It's not just like, oh, the kid's worried that if the lights get turned off, the stuffed animals are gonna come to life. He's literally worried that, like, demons are creeping on his shelves, waiting to possess the toys.

• 1:03:47David Sims?

  Uh, yes.

• 1:03:48Griffin Newman?

  That is two minutes and 25 seconds into Look Who's Talking To.

• 1:03:51David Sims?

  Now, I think, maybe you guys don't agree, but we have all had that experience as young children, or trying to get to sleep in your dark bedroom, and, you know, you start to imagine weird shit about the stuff in your room. Your previously gentle toys do take on a nightmarish aspect.

• 1:04:07Griffin Newman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:07David Sims?

  So it spoke to me.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  It spoke to me too, and I think she's quite intuitive about understanding a very young child's brain in both movies. Even there's a scene in this movie where, you know, it's all from Roseanne's POV, and the kids are all kind of coming in, and, oh, sorry, the kids, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley coming on, they're sort of looking at her, and it is quite Terry Killian-esque.

• 1:04:27David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  And then they leave, and she's just with the nanny, and I thought that that was quite, quite an interesting little moment. Like, I did connect to it. I found it quite visceral.

• 1:04:38Griffin Newman?

  Angry.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  That's what it feels like to be a baby.

• 1:04:40Griffin Newman?

  The core issue of this movie to me is that she has, like, an overabundance of Mikey ideas.

• 1:04:47David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Griffin Newman?

  There's a little bit of a sense of what to do with Julie in relation to Mikey.

• 1:04:52David Sims?

  Uh huh, right.

• 1:04:53Griffin Newman?

  She has no idea what to do with Travolta and Ally.

• 1:04:56David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Griffin Newman?

  And they are your main actors.

• 1:04:59David Sims?

  Right. Um, the birth sequence, which is not long after, because they do a little bit of in utero stuff with a freaky puppet, but it's, it's, you know.

• 1:05:12Griffin Newman?

  The movie after, after the opening credits, the movie basically jumps to her being eight or nine months pregnant.

• 1:05:18David Sims?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:18Griffin Newman?

  Like then now there's a time jump to she is at the end of her pregnancy.

• 1:05:22David Sims?

  Um, but the birth sequence is a C-section where the, the cord is wrapped around the baby's neck. And there's, you know, the mildest suggestion of like, oh yeah, this is like a stressful birth. Also kind of dark and nightmarish.

• 1:05:36Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:05:36David Sims?

  You know, like especially because the puppet, the baby puppet this time is really.

• 1:05:40Griffin Newman?

  Is really strange.

• 1:05:41David Sims?

  It's not, it's not good. I don't know if they rushed it.

• 1:05:43Griffin Newman?

  It's very 2001 dream child made while blindfolded.

• 1:05:47David Sims?

  Is the puppet as bad in the first movie? Maybe it kind of is.

• 1:05:51Griffin Newman?

  But this is like a thing I have a fondness for is like how bizarre looking the baby puppets are.

• 1:05:56David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:05:57Griffin Newman?

  But yes.

• 1:05:58David Sims?

  Yeah, but, uh, again, like, right. It's like, so that's dark. And then, yeah, once the baby is born, the vibe is basically like Travolta and Ally at each other's throats. Travolta's struggling in his new pilot career. Ally just kind of mad at everybody.

• 1:06:13Griffin Newman?

  They flash totally past the marriage, right? It's like, we're starting the movie with the insemination. Then we're jumping ahead to she's late in her pregnancy. Then there's the scene where she goes to visit Olympia Dukakis. And she's complaining about how much she hates Travolta, refers to her, him as her husband. And you're like, oh, so they're married now. That happened. That happened somewhere.

• 1:06:37David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:06:38Griffin Newman?

  And Dukakis is sort of like, he's a schlump. He should be more like your brother.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  She's the MVP of these movies, I think.

• 1:06:44David Sims?

  I mean, Dukakis is, she's just solid, like as a rock, right? She's never gonna, and she's in the third one, too.

• 1:06:50Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, she sticks with it.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Bless of it coming back for the one.

• 1:06:53David Sims?

  I think Siegel might return for the third one.

• 1:06:55Griffin Newman?

  That sounds right. Well, we need a closure on that.

• 1:06:58David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00David Sims?

  Yeah, that's right. I wonder what he must, like, because I feel like they must just have to introduce more tension into the marriage.

• 1:07:09Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:07:10David Sims?

  I guess.

• 1:07:11Griffin Newman?

  But they're like doing his accounting.

• 1:07:14David Sims?

  Who's accounting?

• 1:07:15Griffin Newman?

  Travolta, because she comes from a family of accountants.

• 1:07:17David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:07:18Griffin Newman?

  Everyone in her family is an accountant.

• 1:07:19David Sims?

  Right, and it's Amy Heckerling's dad, of course, once again, playing the dad.

• 1:07:22Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:07:23David Sims?

  With the, with the adding machine.

• 1:07:24Griffin Newman?

  And they're doing the math on how little Travolta is making as a flight instructor, even though Mikey keeps defending that's not his main job and, and Kirstie Alley's defending it's not his main job. And they're sort of like, he's gotta kick it into gear. He's gotta be more like your insane fascist, right-wing vigilante brother.

• 1:07:43David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:07:43Griffin Newman?

  So the movie's like trying to set up, like, what is their drama gonna be? When, what you don't want is for their relationship to go through trouble. Because the first movie is setting up actual obstacles towards them ending up together.

• 1:07:57David Sims?

  Right, but we're settled on like, they have chemistry and work.

• 1:08:00Griffin Newman?

  It's a victory.

• 1:08:01David Sims?

  Exactly, yes.

• 1:08:02Griffin Newman?

  And I think, to, to take the pin out of like, what should this movie be, right? I couldn't land on quite the right thing. But you want it to be like them going through a struggle, not with their relationship to each other.

• 1:08:16David Sims?

  Sure.

• 1:08:17Griffin Newman?

  But just like, his career is taking off. They're both working. They have two kids. How do they handle all of this? Almost a sort of like, how do we find time to keep our relationship fresh and engage with each other? Versus like-

• 1:08:32David Sims?

  They keep trying to have dates, but they go wrong.

• 1:08:35Griffin Newman?

  Right, right. Like, that's sort of the charming version of it versus like, all the grown-up stuff in this movie is incredibly hostile. And it's sort of just them yelling at each other for 76 brisk minutes? While Elias Cody S. just fucks things up?

• 1:08:49David Sims?

  I guess, sort of. He's in and out. You kind of forget he exists for a while and then he's back, right? You know what I mean? Like, he's, he's not too consistent.

• 1:08:57Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Griffin Newman?

  But do you think part of that too is like, she's, she's created this setup with the Kirstie Alley character in the first movie that is a reflection of her own personal thing? With, with the Ramis affair, right? Transposing it onto a slightly different set of circumstances. This woman having to be a single mother rather than in a marriage. And then she's created this sort of fantasy movie version of like, and this charming movie star taxi cab driver comes in, charms everyone, wins everyone over. And then it's just like, now her fantasy is played out. What happens next? Especially while her marriage is dissolving in real time while she's making this movie with her husband. So then the movie ends up being this reflection of a couple just being like,

• 1:09:43Griffin Newman?

  "But what the fuck are we doing together?" Like with this weird hostility.

• 1:09:48David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Griffin Newman?

  Which it's like that married to what I think are some genuine observations in why this movie hit for us when we were children, Max, of just like, "This movie kinda gets the way the world looks when you were that age."

• 1:10:02David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  Um, and I also, as a kid, I loved all the tax scenes. I mean, I did. I liked-

• 1:10:09Griffin Newman?

  You loved the tax scenes.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  I liked, I liked that scene when, you know, the tax season scene. Do you remember that scene?

• 1:10:13Griffin Newman?

  Oh, I remember the tax season.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Um, I remember really liking that scene.

• 1:10:17David Sims?

  I'm struggling to remember it. I watched this movie 12 hours ago. What happened is, which scene are we talking about here?

• 1:10:22Griffin Newman?

  Twin Kirsty and Cody.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a Saturday night. They're like, "Why aren't we going out in the town?" And they're all really getting into... Like, David really related to this movie in a different way.

• 1:10:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. It's a good joke where the three of it, Twin Kaplan and Elias Cody have fallen in love. Here's another, this movie's odd relationship with time thing. Twin Kaplan has like five distinctly different hairstyles that almost feel like they happen out of sequential order. When she is introduced, she has like a tight little orphan Annie bob. There's a stretch of scenes where she has the world's longest ponytail. But like the scenes before and after that, her hair is short.

• 1:11:02David Sims?

  Well, when you're shooting for 61 days, maybe continuity just gets away from you. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how else to explain that.

• 1:11:10Griffin Newman?

  They look like wigs, but it also makes me wonder if some of this movie was reconstructed in post. Cause the other thing that comes out is that-

• 1:11:17David Sims?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:11:18Griffin Newman?

  And I was trying to find deeper sources for this.

• 1:11:20David Sims?

  But it's like, you're looking for something that does not exist.

• 1:11:23Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:23David Sims?

  Cause no one ever bothered to report on this movie.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  Cause the lawsuit-

• 1:11:26David Sims?

  Who cares?

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  But the lawsuit probably didn't fucking help anything.

• 1:11:29Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 1:11:29David Sims?

  Right. Everything has to get buried and, yeah, but okay, what, what are you-

• 1:11:32Griffin Newman?

  The Wikipedia and the IMDb, which of course are both fan edited, both have the same claim that when this aired on cable television, which is where I watched it many times-

• 1:11:40David Sims?

  Deleted scenes added.

• 1:11:41Griffin Newman?

  That there was like 20 minutes of extra scenes.

• 1:11:42David Sims?

  Yeah, cause they needed to get it to two hours.

• 1:11:45Griffin Newman?

  Totally. But so they're just like large swathes of these of this movie missing. And one of the things they said there's multiple instances of is that Kirstie Alley keeps having recurring fantasies that are different stylized dream sequences of Travolta cheating on her.

• 1:11:59David Sims?

  Oh, fascinating.

• 1:11:59Griffin Newman?

  And you have the one red Corvette scene.

• 1:12:01David Sims?

  Do you think that's because Travolta's like, hey, I want to fuck some ladies in this movie?

• 1:12:04Griffin Newman?

  Maybe.

• 1:12:05David Sims?

  They were like, all right, we'll do dream sequences, I guess.

• 1:12:07Griffin Newman?

  But the one example of it happens in the tax season scene, which is like the three of after Travolta has left, the three of them are doing taxes together. And Kirstie Alley is like, look at us, isn't this depressing? We're staying at home on a Saturday night doing taxes. And then Twin Cap, Elias, Cody S. and Eunice and say, it's tax season. Like it's their national holiday. And then Kirstie Alley zones out and imagines Travolta like racing with some bimbo.

• 1:12:30David Sims?

  Sort of like a Wild at Heart-esque.

• 1:12:32Griffin Newman?

  Right. But apparently there's like a Yoko Ono, John Lennon parody scene.

• 1:12:38David Sims?

  Sounds a little Route One, but sure.

• 1:12:40Griffin Newman?

  All of this sounds insane.

• 1:12:42David Sims?

  Um, why don't we have any of this footage?

• 1:12:45Griffin Newman?

  I couldn't find it.

• 1:12:46David Sims?

  I'd love to see all this. I'm sure you could find the sort of extended TV cut somewhere. Well, but you know, you might need a week or two.

• 1:12:54Griffin Newman?

  I might need a month.

• 1:12:55David Sims?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:56Griffin Newman?

  I might need a year.

• 1:12:56David Sims?

  You might need to really go deep.

• 1:12:57Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57David Sims?

  Um, could like start hitting up like VHS festivals and be like, anyone record Look Who's Talking To off TV?

• 1:13:03Griffin Newman?

  Cause that's almost definitely the version I would have seen.

• 1:13:06David Sims?

  There's like a corp, there's like a scene where she either threatens to spank or spanks, uh, Mikey.

• 1:13:11Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:13:12David Sims?

  For being bad, the scene where Mikey pushes the stroller without, you know, asking. Uh, and then Kirstie Alley supposedly was like, I object to spanking. I don't, I don't want there to be a spanking scene.

• 1:13:23Griffin Newman?

  Demanded it to be cut, but then it's back in the TV version.

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  To go to, to go to your point though, about the film feeling like it's been reconstructed and post, it is a movie that is filled with ADR.

• 1:13:33Griffin Newman?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  But in quite unusual.

• 1:13:37David Sims?

  Talking.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Some.

• 1:13:38Griffin Newman?

  Some is.

• 1:13:38David Sims?

  Some is the talking. That's not live audio. I don't know if you guys caught that.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Sometimes it's inexplicable. You'll be in like an interior. Scene where there's a very controlled environment. And none of the dialogue seems to have been rewritten, and yet all of the dialogue is ADR'd.

• 1:13:55Griffin Newman?

  Right, and sometimes ADR, like very apparent ADR is punching in for like two words in the middle of a sentence.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  Yep, yeah, I noticed that too.

• 1:14:03Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  I thought all of that was raising a lot of questions that didn't have answers.

• 1:14:07Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:14:09David Sims?

  We, right, we haven't really talked about the fundamental thing, quandary in this movie, which is that Mikey, who I guess by now is two and a half, three, somewhere in there.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  I had no fucking idea how old this kid was. He seemed like he could be 11 months old.

• 1:14:27David Sims?

  He's so, he's, he's an advanced toddler.

• 1:14:30Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 1:14:31David Sims?

  Is.

• 1:14:32Griffin Newman?

  But he's, I mean, he's nine months older than he is at the beginning of the movie, which is the end of the first movie.

• 1:14:40David Sims?

  But, you know, he's.

• 1:14:41Griffin Newman?

  But then truly, seemingly ages.

• 1:14:44David Sims?

  Yeah, I think he goes from sort of like two and a half to three and a half slash four, and she goes from birth to like one and a half, right? Something like that. He is talking in this movie. It's not like the first movie where his thoughts are merely being projected to the audience, and it's a baby, and it's clearly a baby that's just being a baby.

• 1:15:02Griffin Newman?

  And he of course says only one word at the end of the first.

• 1:15:05David Sims?

  He says "dada."

• 1:15:06Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:15:07David Sims?

  A big moment.

• 1:15:08Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:15:08David Sims?

  Uh, in that movie, not in this movie.

• 1:15:10Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10David Sims?

  In this movie, whenever he's talking with the voice of Bruce Willis, the boy is going,

• 1:15:17David Sims?

  he's flapping his mouth.

• 1:15:18Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:15:18David Sims?

  And is saying something.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Constantly.

• 1:15:20David Sims?

  Not, I believe, what we are hearing.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Wait, really?

• 1:15:25David Sims?

  Well, I don't know.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  I, I, I thought he was just not talking to anyone the whole time.

• 1:15:32Griffin Newman?

  Well, they're also.

• 1:15:32David Sims?

  But he is talking.

• 1:15:33Griffin Newman?

  There are moments, see, there's so much to talk about.

• 1:15:35David Sims?

  And he said, right, sometimes he'll say like penis, for example.

• 1:15:37Griffin Newman?

  He says penis several times.

• 1:15:39David Sims?

  No penis, right? There's that whole sequence.

• 1:15:41Griffin Newman?

  That is said in the voice of the child actor, not Bruce Willis. Right, right, like there are times.

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  So they call it out though, but he's not the whole time speaking out loud, I don't think, really.

• 1:15:52Griffin Newman?

  Well, this is what's interesting, is at certain moments, when the lips are flapping, they almost sync up with what Bruce Willis is saying.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Griffin Newman?

  Where you're like, did she have the kid on set do his best to say what she had written?

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Dude, the final button of the movie, when they're sort of, I don't know, sort of standing around together.

• 1:16:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  He is fully articulating words.

• 1:16:15Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:16:16David Sims?

  As, as a child his age would be.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  As a child his age would be, and there's something completely different in, in the voiceover.

• 1:16:22David Sims?

  He's saying something along the lines of like, "I want a cookie." And Bruce Willis is like, "Hey, this kid's right, what a smooth cat over here," like Bruce Willis is doing his bullshit.

• 1:16:29Griffin Newman?

  But sometimes it does feel close and they react to him as if they understand the basic thing he's trying to say.

• 1:16:35David Sims?

  It's illogical.

• 1:16:38Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:38David Sims?

  And we talked about Rugrats, I believe, on the last episode.

• 1:16:42Griffin Newman?

  Yes, we talked about Rugrats.

• 1:16:43David Sims?

  And in Rugrats, I don't know, Max, if you're a Rugrats kid.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  I was a Rugrats kid.

• 1:16:47David Sims?

  We, we, as we sort of dug into, it's like Angelica was on both sides, right? She could speak to the babies and to the grownups.

• 1:16:54Griffin Newman?

  Right. Angelica is sort of, let's say, Mikey's age in this movie.

• 1:16:59David Sims?

  Somewhat of a Mikey, sort of a three-year-old type.

• 1:17:00Griffin Newman?

  Where she's got a foot in each world.

• 1:17:02David Sims?

  Whereas the babies would speak, but only to each other. And it was implied that the, the, the parents just, you know, couldn't hear them essentially when they spoke.

• 1:17:10Griffin Newman?

  But she can sort of be a conduit between the two.

• 1:17:13David Sims?

  That logic, while blurry, is much stricter and more logical than whatever's going on in this movie.

• 1:17:19Griffin Newman?

  Yes, I would agree.

• 1:17:20David Sims?

  Right. Whereas this movie is basically more like, what do you think your baby's actually saying when he's talking, I guess?

• 1:17:27Griffin Newman?

  I mean, look, perhaps I'm being too generous to the film, and I don't think they nail it down. But I read the attempt as the kid has verbal capabilities, but his inner life is richer and deeper than what he is able to say.

• 1:17:45David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Griffin Newman?

  Right? That he is at early stages of language. And so he is able to externalize certain things to the outside world.

• 1:17:52David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:17:52Griffin Newman?

  But they are more simple, like saying the word penis six times. And Bruce Willis is the inner monologue of what he wishes he had the language to express.

• 1:18:01David Sims?

  Then they should have had a distinct voice for that.

• 1:18:03Griffin Newman?

  For which?

• 1:18:04David Sims?

  Interesting. They should have had a, like, a baby voice, even if it is like VO.

• 1:18:10Griffin Newman?

  Like, hey, man. There are. So that is clear.

• 1:18:12David Sims?

  There's no bad ideas right now. We're figuring this out.

• 1:18:14Griffin Newman?

  There are moments where the kid talks in his own voice, I'm saying. Yeah, but there's maybe.

• 1:18:18David Sims?

  It's really just the penis moment.

• 1:18:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I think there's maybe one or two moments.

• 1:18:20David Sims?

  Are there any others?

• 1:18:22Griffin Newman?

  It's a good question.

• 1:18:22David Sims?

  The penis moment is what I'm remembering.

• 1:18:24Griffin Newman?

  Well, we cannot forget the penis moment.

• 1:18:25David Sims?

  Well, we can talk about it right now. It's a scene with absolutely no problematic overtones whatsoever.

• 1:18:30Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 1:18:30David Sims?

  In which, I guess, they're educating Mikey on how he has a penis and his daughter, his sister does not.

• 1:18:36Griffin Newman?

  They're giving Julia a bath and he's very concerned by her lack of penis.

• 1:18:39David Sims?

  Right. And then they start flipping through a magazine, ask him to, they're pointing at every celebrity they see and be like, penis or no penis?

• 1:18:46Griffin Newman?

  Well, first she says, I think we gotta give him the talk. And I was like, are you gonna give him the birds and the bees talk? And the talk is just...

• 1:18:52David Sims?

  There are women and men.

• 1:18:55David Sims?

  Genitals are different. I guess that's what they mean. Yes.

• 1:18:57Griffin Newman?

  So she takes out a magazine and points at like Sylvester Stallone and...

• 1:19:02David Sims?

  Goldie Hawn.

• 1:19:02Griffin Newman?

  Goldie Hawn, George Bush Senior.

• 1:19:06David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:06Griffin Newman?

  Is there a fourth one?

• 1:19:08David Sims?

  I think it's, no, the joke is they land on H.W. Bush.

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  Rule of three.

• 1:19:11David Sims?

  And they can't, and he's like, I don't know. And they're like, ha, ha, ha. Which I guess is basically just saying like, George H.W. Bush is kind of a dweeb. Like, I, it doesn't really track.

• 1:19:21Griffin Newman?

  I think it's Bush.

• 1:19:22David Sims?

  Okay.

• 1:19:23Griffin Newman?

  That's the joke.

• 1:19:24David Sims?

  Do you think so?

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  I think it's a Bush joke, yes.

• 1:19:27David Sims?

  No matter what, it was a better version. I was so afraid of some more kind of...

• 1:19:32Griffin Newman?

  You were afraid they were gonna point to RuPaul.

• 1:19:34David Sims?

  Yeah, kind of homophobic joke or like, you know, a sort of it's Pat situation of like, oh, this lady looks like a man or whatever, some shit like that.

• 1:19:41Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 1:19:41David Sims?

  So that was better, but also I was kinda like, I don't really get it.

• 1:19:45Griffin Newman?

  Yes. But then the kid learns to say penis and says penis out loud in his own voice a bunch.

• 1:19:52David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:19:52Griffin Newman?

  Not Bruce Willis' voice.

• 1:19:54David Sims?

  Sure.

• 1:19:55Griffin Newman?

  Right. I think what this movie is, the Mikey stuff in the movie works a lot better for me.

• 1:20:02David Sims?

  The Mikey stuff in this movie?

• 1:20:03Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:20:03David Sims?

  Yeah, because like, the travails of a toddler is something new, whereas Roseanne's character... Roseanne, the baby Julie is just going through the same shit as we already saw that in the first movie.

• 1:20:15Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:20:15David Sims?

  There's no, there's nothing new there, really.

• 1:20:17Griffin Newman?

  To try to tell the, the story of the kind of like, the, you know, a thing I relate to very strongly, which is the feeling of disruption in your world where you stop being the one baby.

• 1:20:30David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Griffin Newman?

  And there's another thing here.

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  Well, you've actually, because of, because of your sister Romilly, you probably know.

• 1:20:36David Sims?

  I'm also the older.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  This dynamic.

• 1:20:38David Sims?

  We've all experienced.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  I'm an only child, so I don't have this.

• 1:20:40Griffin Newman?

  Same. Okay.

• 1:20:41David Sims?

  Yeah, dude. Well, Griff and I, right, we both endured the entrance of a new, uh, sibling.

• 1:20:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48David Sims?

  Now, you had the additional, you were way older when there was a third sibling, but that feels less traumatic. That's probably more interesting than anything.

• 1:20:55Griffin Newman?

  It was interesting, right?

• 1:20:56David Sims?

  Because by that point, you were kind of engaged with the baby.

• 1:20:58Griffin Newman?

  I had the distance of being like, I'm watching what a baby is like with a little bit of perspective. Versus when James was born, I was three.

• 1:21:07David Sims?

  Yeah, and that's, it's, it's.

• 1:21:08Griffin Newman?

  And I had this real like, who the fuck is this guy?

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  So James is your Julie?

• 1:21:12Griffin Newman?

  James is my Julie.

• 1:21:13David Sims?

  Now, supposedly I got along great with my brother. I've always been told that I was not, I was a smooth transition on that front.

• 1:21:19Griffin Newman?

  Right. I got along horribly with my brother.

• 1:21:21David Sims?

  But even when he was a baby?

• 1:21:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I tried to knock him out of the crib. I didn't like him.

• 1:21:27David Sims?

  Now, what are we talking about here, knock him out of the crib? Like, he's standing up and you're trying to pull him out? What's going on?

• 1:21:31Griffin Newman?

  No, he's sleeping down and I'd be trying to push him. I'd like unlatch the thing. I was trying to push him out.

• 1:21:36David Sims?

  My god.

• 1:21:37Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37David Sims?

  Dude, Ben, I hear stories like this, like there's an extended family story where like someone put a baby down a laundry chute. Like, it's crazy. Children have no real empathy, so you kind of gotta keep your head on a stick.

• 1:21:47Griffin Newman?

  This is why I asked you, when your twins, when your twins was born.

• 1:21:50David Sims?

  They don't understand death, you know?

• 1:21:52Griffin Newman?

  Sure, sure, sure. When your twins were born, and I've continued to ask you semi regularly, how does your daughter get along with them?

• 1:21:59David Sims?

  It's not been an issue.

• 1:22:00Griffin Newman?

  And I ask this with all of my friends who then have a second kid.

• 1:22:04David Sims?

  Because it can be an issue.

• 1:22:04Griffin Newman?

  Because I'm so worried, because I remember being such a fucking little menace to James and being like, let's kick this thing to the curb. Get him out of here.

• 1:22:14David Sims?

  No, I think because my daughter loves like baby dolls and, you know what I mean? Like all of the sort of play of babies, like feeding and shit, right? Like, which a lot of kids do, she just locked in with them as like little toys.

• 1:22:30Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 1:22:30David Sims?

  Pretty quickly. I don't know, she, she loves them. There's been no issue yet. I imagine there'll be issues once they can fuck with her toys. That's sort of like the next level, right? Where it's sort of like, then you've got this sibling who's like messing with your stuff.

• 1:22:42Griffin Newman?

  Well, that's when things got even worse for my brother and I. But you're, you're starting it with them like prepping him to be like, are you ready to be a big brother? And then he has this fantasy sequence of like taking her to F A O Schwartz alone and taking her out on the town. Where it's sort of like, oh, Mikey's excited.

• 1:23:00David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Griffin Newman?

  At the prospect of the responsibility.

• 1:23:03David Sims?

  Right, sure. Like, uh, of being helpful or whatever.

• 1:23:07Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:23:08David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:08Griffin Newman?

  And then the movie kind of can't pick a lane between like, does he feel a need to protect her? Does he not like having her around? It will alternate.

• 1:23:17David Sims?

  Yeah, which I guess sort of.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  Naturalistic.

• 1:23:20David Sims?

  Tracks.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  It's sort of the Mike Lee element of the movie.

• 1:23:23David Sims?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And I think Mike Lee, uh, when I.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  He did a pass on the script.

• 1:23:26David Sims?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:23:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28David Sims?

  No, he did his thing where they did six weeks.

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, if you think this movie is rude to Kirstie Alley's character, it came out of the improv.

• 1:23:35David Sims?

  Right, they did all these rehearsals where it's like, so Elias Cody's, you know, Codyus, Elias Codyus? Elias Codyus?

• 1:23:42Griffin Newman?

  I always say Elias Codyus.

• 1:23:43David Sims?

  Uh, chases a robber out of the house with a gun and, you know, the recycling catches on fire. What would you do? And the babies are like, oh, that's interesting. I assume that Tom Mike Lee works. I don't really actually know.

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  Well, the babies did a pass as well.

• 1:23:56David Sims?

  Babies did a pass, that's.

• 1:24:02Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 1:24:03David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Griffin Newman?

  This episode is brought to you by X Y Z Films and the acclaimed new documentary, Capturing Bigfoot.

• 1:24:09David Sims?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:09Griffin Newman?

  On October 20th, 1967, Roger Patterson captured 59 seconds of film showing a creature walking through the Northern California woods. I wonder if you can log that on Letterboxd?

• 1:24:20David Sims?

  It is an iconic video.

• 1:24:22Griffin Newman?

  Footage that became the most analyzed and debated in history. 59 years later, a reel of 16 millimeter film discovered in a safe changes everything. Capturing Bigfoot reveals the untold story behind the world's greatest mystery told for the first time by Patterson's own son and the people who were there. This is a story about family legacy, broken friendships, and how far people will go to protect a secret.

• 1:24:44David Sims?

  Of course, you got the classic, what they call Patterson Gimlin film. Everyone knows a Bigfoot out in the woods, like the famous Bigfoot picture. This has other stuff shot by him that no one's ever seen. That's what makes this movie different.

• 1:24:56Griffin Newman?

  But we're also talking brand new 4K scans of the original film taken from the Patterson family archives that some historians have called the best rendering of the footage ever seen.

• 1:25:05David Sims?

  I feel like we've all seen that footage as like grainy.

• 1:25:08Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:25:08David Sims?

  You know, that you see, you know, whatever, you see it in a documentary for two seconds. But this is restoring it and making it look much more clear.

• 1:25:15Griffin Newman?

  There's also a companion podcast, the Capturing Bigfoot Podcast, which goes deeper into the legend and lore of Bigfoot and the Patterson Gimlin film, featuring weekly episodes with experts in cryptozoology, urban legends and filmmaking.

• 1:25:29David Sims?

  I'm something of an expert in cryptozoology.

• 1:25:31Griffin Newman?

  Well, of course, yes, but that's more of a hobby.

• 1:25:34David Sims?

  Yeah, this podcast, Capturing Bigfoot Podcast is hosted by the director of the film, Mark Evans, and it's available for free on YouTube and Spotify with exclusive episodes and content available on Patreon to members of the Capturing Bigfoot Society.

• 1:25:49Griffin Newman?

  Capturing Bigfoot is now available to rent or own on Amazon Prime Video. Learn more about Capturing Bigfoot at capturingbigfoot.com.

• 1:26:05Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 1:26:06David Sims?

  Yes?

• 1:26:06Griffin Newman?

  Uh, uh, who are you wearing?

• 1:26:08David Sims?

  Uh, who am I wearing?

• 1:26:09Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:26:13David Sims?

  Well, I am wearing Quince.

• 1:26:16Griffin Newman?

  Well, well, wow, what a coincidence.

• 1:26:21David Sims?

  It's a Mongolian cashmere zip sweater.

• 1:26:25Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:26:25David Sims?

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

• 1:26:28Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:26:31David 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.

• 1:26:38Griffin 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.

• 1:26:55David Sims?

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

• 1:27:05David Sims?

  Italian leather.

• 1:27:06Griffin Newman?

  Mamma mia.

• 1:27:07David 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 good together all season long.

• 1:27:26Griffin 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.

• 1:27:39David 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.

• 1:27:46Griffin Newman?

  Oh, well, well, well.

• 1:27:47David Sims?

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

• 1:27:51Griffin 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.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  The scene I fucking loved as a kid, and I really enjoyed again, maybe just out of nostalgia, was the attempt to get into Total Recall. Uh, okay. Because when you're a kid, all you want to do is go to an R-rated movie.

• 1:28:50Griffin Newman?

  Yes, but, but the other fun angle of it is that Travolta is just like... I kinda wanna see this grown up movie. I got two kids now. I never get a break.

• 1:29:00David Sims?

  Yeah, so it's, it's very, it's appropriate, 1990, right? Like Total Recall is the hot new movie. Has just been released, right? In the summer? Right, that film came out summer of 1990, and it is not appropriate for children.

• 1:29:14Griffin Newman?

  He's taken to a theater that is playing on one screen Total Recall and on the other screen seemingly a compilation of Betty Boop shorts.

• 1:29:20David Sims?

  He does say that the other option is Betty Boop. They don't really explain, which is also kinda grown up.

• 1:29:25Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26David Sims?

  For a cartoon.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  He also, they're separated. He has, he's, he has time on his hands.

• 1:29:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, no, you're right.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  And he's actually just being the worst dad.

• 1:29:36Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  He's like living up to the stereotype of a deadbeat dad.

• 1:29:39Griffin Newman?

  He also cons him his way into the theater.

• 1:29:41David Sims?

  So he does this move that- A charming road. Okay, okay. They kind of explain it as kinda like, the old, "I left my shoe in the theater" trick, and I was watching it being like, damn, that's a good trick.

• 1:29:51Griffin Newman?

  Cause Bruce is going like, "Ah dad, come on, don't do, don't do the shoe."

• 1:29:54David Sims?

  Return of Bruno. Where like, yeah, he like pockets one shoe and is like, "Hey, my kid left his shoe, can I go get it?" And that's how they get into the theater. I mean- I loved that bit.

• 1:30:03Griffin Newman?

  I filed that away.

• 1:30:04David Sims?

  I know, I was kinda like thinking on your feet, Barbara. And the popcorn bucket was also really ingenious.

• 1:30:10Griffin Newman?

  And then when you cut out of the movie, both the kids have chocolate ice cream all over their faces and he's apologizing to them.

• 1:30:15David Sims?

  But did they watch Total Recall? They did.

• 1:30:18Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18David Sims?

  They did?

• 1:30:19Griffin Newman?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:30:19David Sims?

  So why isn't there a scene where, uh, for the next couple of weeks, he's going like, you know, doing some lines from Total Recall, like, what is it, two weeks, right?

• 1:30:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, he should do that.

• 1:30:28David Sims?

  Right, they should do that, or like, "Consider that a divorce."

• 1:30:31Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:30:31David Sims?

  They could do that.

• 1:30:32Griffin Newman?

  But this is-

• 1:30:33David Sims?

  Sharon Stone.

• 1:30:34Griffin Newman?

  She's concerned that he doesn't have enough drive in his life, right? Mostly because of her parents' pressure.

• 1:30:41David Sims?

  Yeah, also he is a taxi driver come, uh, sort of airline, sort of pilot teacher, whatever. He does have a weird kinda life.

• 1:30:49Griffin Newman?

  But he makes like $22 a month teaching classes, and he's like, "I basically don't have enough time to teach classes because I'm busy parenting and driving a cab. What I really want is to actually get a job flying for one of the airlines." Then Elias Cody just shows up at the door with the NYPD cap, is basically like, "I'm here, I'm gonna stay on your couch with my gun." Then she at some point says, like, "He might be able to help you get a job." He somehow hooks Travolta up with what seems to be a like rent your own private jet airline?

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  I think it's the parents, though. I don't think it's the brother.

• 1:31:27Griffin Newman?

  Doesn't, don't they say that he knows somebody?

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  I, you know what? I wasn't paying very close attention.

• 1:31:33Griffin Newman?

  It's a naughty plot.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  So I don't remember the specifics, but I.

• 1:31:37David Sims?

  It's kind of like the Spanish prisoner or whatever. It's just kind of like so dense. There's so many double crosses. Uh, no, I didn't remember who gets him. But it's like a charter airline. Yes. He's basically like the fanciest form of limo driver.

• 1:31:50Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:31:51David Sims?

  Like he's getting off these charter flights and the rich people are like, where's my briefcase?

• 1:31:55Griffin Newman?

  He hates these entitled customers. You basically get to this halfway point in the movie where he hates Elias Codias. Kirstie Alley will not brook any criticism of her beloved brother.

• 1:32:07David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:32:08Griffin Newman?

  He's also stressed out and busy from his job, which she thought would make him happier if he had a sense of purpose. But instead it's causing more fraying at the edges. And then they get into this fight based on the gun because Travolta.

• 1:32:24David Sims?

  It's like there shouldn't be a gun in the home.

• 1:32:26Griffin Newman?

  He walks out in the middle of the night and Codius pulls the gun on him, right?

• 1:32:29David Sims?

  Cody mistakes him for a stranger when he comes home late and pulls a gun on him, which is a sign of Codius maybe not having like the most responsible attitude to gun ownership where he's like, I'm pulling a gun if that door opens.

• 1:32:42Griffin Newman?

  Right. And then at the halfway point in the movie, basically they just split up.

• 1:32:46David Sims?

  Yeah, sort of.

• 1:32:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Griffin Newman?

  He's still around a lot and he comes and he takes care of the kids.

• 1:32:51David Sims?

  Well, cause he is the biological father of one and the de facto father of the other.

• 1:32:55Griffin Newman?

  Does an extended dance sequence at the Gymboree equivalent.

• 1:32:58David Sims?

  Freaking John Travolta we're talking about. I gotta have him dancing.

• 1:33:01Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  He's great.

• 1:33:03David Sims?

  Yeah, he's always great.

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  That seems awesome.

• 1:33:04David Sims?

  Max, you ever worked with John Travolta?

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  I've never worked with John Travolta.

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Ex-Guella John Travolta.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  Never crossed paths. Um, but no, actually it's not true. I met him at the rap party for primary colors.

• 1:33:17David Sims?

  Okay.

• 1:33:17Griffin Newman?

  Wild.

• 1:33:18Speaker 03

  And he wasn't very nice, actually.

• 1:33:20David Sims?

  You would have been a teenager?

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  I guess I was a teenager. Yeah.

• 1:33:23David Sims?

  Why were you at the rap party?

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  Quite excited to meet him and he wasn't particularly engaged.

• 1:33:29David Sims?

  That's too bad. I mean, I'm not like. Stunned to hear this.

• 1:33:33Griffin Newman?

  He's maybe still in character. Well, no.

• 1:33:35David Sims?

  I did Google.

• 1:33:36Griffin Newman?

  That guy was a schmoozer. He would have been nicer.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  He would have done a double handshake.

• 1:33:40David Sims?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  Isn't that what it is? One on the, one on the elbow?

• 1:33:43Griffin Newman?

  He would have been playing sax.

• 1:33:46David Sims?

  I Googled Max Mungella, John Travolta, and all I got was an IMDb piece of trivia from the film Spiral, which you are in. It was from The Book of Saw.

• 1:33:54Griffin Newman?

  You opened the book.

• 1:33:54David Sims?

  Uh, which apparently the police basement vault door in that movie is manufactured by a company called Jules and Vincent. A sly reference to Pulp Fiction.

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  That's right. I remember seeing that actually on the wall and... Oh, oh, cause Sam Jackson's in the movie.

• 1:34:08David Sims?

  Cause Samuel Jackson's in Spiral.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  That makes sense. Now, now I make the connection.

• 1:34:12David Sims?

  There you go. No, I've never looked. Because you weren't like, I'm making a movie. You were like, the Book of Saw has been opened and I simply must follow its commands.

• 1:34:19Griffin Newman?

  I'm stuck between the pages like a bookmark.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. I'm just a small cog in the, in the Saw machine.

• 1:34:25David Sims?

  Well, you're more of a spiral. It's a cog. Spiral, yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  But I'm a John Travolta fan.

• 1:34:33David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  I think he's a movie star. Um, and he's specific, you know, in the first one especially, he's really, he's really charming.

• 1:34:41David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:34:42Speaker 03

  And I do think, look, David is gonna shake his head adamantly, whatever I say. But I do think that Kirstie Alley and John Travolta in this movie carry over a... Some kind of natural rapport. Like, even though they're fighting the whole time, they have a, they have an ease with each other as actors.

• 1:35:00David Sims?

  I know. I'll give you that. I think it's sort of... It's kind of leftover. It's a bit of a half-life from the last movie, but it sort of helps make the movie survive. That they do have...

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Something.

• 1:35:12David Sims?

  The existing chemistry, even if they don't get to really deploy it.

• 1:35:16Griffin Newman?

  Them splitting up doesn't work for me because I, the whole time I'm like, they could talk through this.

• 1:35:22David Sims?

  They just need to have like three conversations. It's a classic rom-com shit, except like, it's kind of the laziest version of it. And...

• 1:35:31David Sims?

  I think also the movie does Kirstie Alley dirty and that she's kind of the problem in all of the

• 1:35:37Griffin Newman?

  Yes, right.

• 1:35:38David Sims?

  Travolta, it's basically like, hey, why don't you make enough money? Why do you care that my brother has a gun?

• 1:35:43Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:35:44David Sims?

  Like, and so you're just kind of like, she's being a pain in the ass, like, which is not fair.

• 1:35:48Griffin Newman?

  Annoyed that he's not happy.

• 1:35:50David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:35:50Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:35:52David Sims?

  And his only complaint is like, hey, we never have sex anymore, you know, or whatever.

• 1:35:55Griffin Newman?

  Right. I hate the, the artificial obstruction in rom coms. And it's part of what I was so pleasantly surprised by in the first one, that it's like, no, there's the moment at like the halfway point where they hook up and then she stops it because she's like, I gotta be responsible.

• 1:36:11David Sims?

  This is, this is almost too intense and I'm, you know, raising a child, a young child.

• 1:36:17Griffin Newman?

  Which feels like a, a human obstacle.

• 1:36:20David Sims?

  Sure.

• 1:36:20Griffin Newman?

  And something that can be resolved through the growth of the characters versus this, it's like the movie is trying to like throw shit at them and that just have both of them react kind of petulantly. And then you get to this insane finale where like-

• 1:36:36David Sims?

  It's a huge question. The finale that you were setting up.

• 1:36:39Griffin Newman?

  Cause we have Elias Kudryas on the couch with the gun, as you said, it's a Chekhov's gun situation.

• 1:36:43David Sims?

  Before we get to that.

• 1:36:45Griffin Newman?

  Somehow this is gonna come back into play.

• 1:36:46David Sims?

  For the first time, I'm the one who's like, if we can backtrack slightly.

• 1:36:49Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:51David Sims?

  There's this kind of great, but then also fully irrelevant moment where Kirstie Alley just gets in her head that Travolta can't be flying tonight. It's stormy outside, she's scared for him.

• 1:37:05Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:37:05David Sims?

  So she drops everything, she leaves the children in the care of her psycho brother.

• 1:37:10Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:37:10David Sims?

  Which is insane, but that's what she does and that sets up what is coming next.

• 1:37:14Griffin Newman?

  Right. She, first she calls and she says, hey, can you reach out to him? And they said, no, he's already in the plane. And she says, can you call him? And they say, no. So then she gets in a cab and she seemingly arrives at the airport within 35 seconds.

• 1:37:28David Sims?

  Uh, right. She gets there weirdly fast.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  And then we cut to some B-roll from Entrapment.

• 1:37:35David Sims?

  Windows unsealed.

• 1:37:37Griffin Newman?

  Right. Then there's a break in from a master thief who's carving a hole in the window.

• 1:37:43David Sims?

  You do get all of that. Who plays the thief?

• 1:37:44Griffin Newman?

  Using expert tools.

• 1:37:46David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48David Sims?

  Played by like the A cam operator. To steal what? Baby clothes? Like, I don't even know what he's after in this house.

• 1:37:55Griffin Newman?

  Seems to only be targeting their.

• 1:37:57David Sims?

  It's one of the most bizarre.

• 1:37:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59David Sims?

  Decisions. Strange contrivance to have the reason they're out of the house be she kind of has this flash of sympathy for Travolta and gets on a plane to tell him not to fly and he's like, woman, will you shut up?

• 1:38:12Griffin Newman?

  She breaks into the cockpit, basically saying, I have a terrible feeling and I'm having like a premonition.

• 1:38:17David Sims?

  It's like a Final Destination situation.

• 1:38:19Griffin Newman?

  That you're gonna die, you need to not take off on this plane. And it feels like she's getting to the point where she like, this forces her to admit, I love you, I want you back.

• 1:38:28David Sims?

  I've never stopped loving you.

• 1:38:29Griffin Newman?

  I had a flash of what my life would be without you.

• 1:38:32David Sims?

  And he's basically like.

• 1:38:33Griffin Newman?

  He's like, shut up.

• 1:38:34David Sims?

  I work in an airport. Like, they would tell me if it's not safe to fly. And then like one second later, like, not safe to fly. And he's like, alright, let's go home. It's just weird. It's just weird writing.

• 1:38:44Griffin Newman?

  Right. And they're like, I guess like you were proven right, but in a way that was unnecessary for you to come here because they were never gonna let me take off anyway, which sort of proves him right, which is he was like, look, if it's not safe to fly, they won't let me fly.

• 1:38:58David Sims?

  He's right.

• 1:38:58Griffin Newman?

  So I will fly until they give me the word, which they then do.

• 1:39:02David Sims?

  And her, and her reason for going there should be them reconnecting and loving each other, which is what's happening, but they don't really, it's not really there.

• 1:39:10Griffin Newman?

  But now we have like.

• 1:39:11David Sims?

  Anyways, there's something. I'd argue that seems too grounded.

• 1:39:14Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:39:14David Sims?

  Exactly.

• 1:39:15Griffin Newman?

  But also, we're like at a tarmac with insane movie rain and we've shown her like cab driving. Like, all of this seems expensive and complicated, right? This is not an easy set piece, even if we don't have like a plane taking off. It's an expensive location. It's weather, it's all of this. Then we're cross cutting with the thief breaking in.

• 1:39:35David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:36Griffin Newman?

  Elias Codius responds, you're like, oh, this is why this character has what they would refer to as these Travis Bickle delusions of being a vigilante. He pulls his gun on the guy who then runs out.

• 1:39:50David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:39:50Griffin Newman?

  And Elias.

• 1:39:50David Sims?

  The guy who's like, hey, man, I was just here for a baby bouncer. I'm sorry.

• 1:39:54Griffin Newman?

  Chases him out to the street.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, he doesn't have any stuff with him at this point.

• 1:39:59Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 1:40:00Speaker 02

  He's like run out because he's been caught.

• 1:40:02David Sims?

  Right. There's no reason to chase him.

• 1:40:04Griffin Newman?

  But this guy's so over cranked with the idea of being a hero. You're like, well, this is why he has the gun, except it doesn't really matter. It's like the gun empowers him to leave, to run down the street in the hopes of shooting this guy, which doesn't happen. And then the second he leaves the kids alone, the apartment catches on fire.

• 1:40:24Speaker 02

  Well, he left a fucking frying pan cooking.

• 1:40:27David Sims?

  Not only that, they left a bucket of paper for recycling, I guess newspapers and stuff like next to the oven.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  Does anybody think this was reverse engineered maybe a little bit?

• 1:40:38David Sims?

  You think like, Kiersey Alley subconsciously has kind of been like, I want to die. I want to die in a fire.

• 1:40:42Griffin Newman?

  You're right that it does feel like some weird Final Destination setup.

• 1:40:46David Sims?

  It does. After the plane thing is Final Destination, then this is a different Final Destination.

• 1:40:51Speaker 03

  Can somebody recut this sequence into a sort of Final Destination teaser? And then submit it to the patrons.

• 1:41:00David Sims?

  Like one of those great teasers where you're like seeing a horror movie, the trailer starts and it's just like someone going like, do, do, do, do frying egg. And you're like, what's this movie? And then they go like, huh, let me go get my knife for, you know, and you're like, oh, it's Final Destination.

• 1:41:13Griffin Newman?

  To what we were talking about earlier.

• 1:41:15David Sims?

  I'm gonna be watching them all, I think.

• 1:41:16Griffin Newman?

  The first movie clearly has the studio note of like, something more exciting needs to happen at the end.

• 1:41:21David Sims?

  And anything.

• 1:41:22Griffin Newman?

  There need to be stakes. So they reverse engineer this somewhat absurd car chase thing where Mikey sneaks into the front seat of a car that's being towed. And then gets stuck in traffic and they have to go save him, which proves that John Travolta cares. And then he says, data, right? And it like is a studio note, but it feels like the exact right size. Oh, look, they got a tiny version of what feels like almost an action scene at the end of this movie. They clearly came to her with a similar thing of like, there need to be stakes.

• 1:41:53David Sims?

  We need a little bit of a juicy climax.

• 1:41:55Griffin Newman?

  And they throw three things at the wall at the same time that all are insane.

• 1:42:00David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:42:01Griffin Newman?

  That are all happening parallel in a way that does feel like it's like, death has an agenda. There is a balance.

• 1:42:09David Sims?

  This family should not exist.

• 1:42:11Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:42:12David Sims?

  Um, and it teaches the kids the lesson that they love each other, I guess.

• 1:42:18Griffin Newman?

  But he's already kind of learned that lesson.

• 1:42:21David Sims?

  I know.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, we haven't even talked about it, but the like dynamic between the brother and the sister. It's so unclear.

• 1:42:29David Sims?

  You know, sometimes he's hot, sometimes he's cold.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  You can't tell if they're even fighting or just like.

• 1:42:34Griffin Newman?

  The juice of the movie.

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  I know, and it's not there at all.

• 1:42:38Griffin Newman?

  Right, because he has this sequence where he like, there's a long montage where he like remembers the first look who's talking. If you haven't seen this movie, it has more montages than Rocky V. Yes. I mean, it's an absurd number. For a movie that's 75 minutes long, it has multiple like End of Horizon and American Saga-esque.

• 1:42:58David Sims?

  We also have. Quite a good reference to them.

• 1:42:59Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 1:43:00David Sims?

  That Damon Wayans, of course, plays another toddler who has some jokes and there is a talking toilet voiced by Mel Brooks to represent the horrors of potty training. I mean, I know we briefly mentioned.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Mr. Toilet kinda is fun.

• 1:43:11David Sims?

  He's good.

• 1:43:11Griffin Newman?

  Mr. Toilet rules.

• 1:43:13David Sims?

  There's no, I have no issues with that. He's gonna bite your tushy if you don't give him poop and pee.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  He sprays blue like spit when he talks.

• 1:43:20David Sims?

  Like kind of cleaning fluid.

• 1:43:21Griffin Newman?

  And they have this weird.

• 1:43:22Speaker 02

  Come on, you're laughing.

• 1:43:23David Sims?

  I love your enthusiasm.

• 1:43:25Griffin Newman?

  On the toilet that then turns into like a walrus mustache and killer vampire fang.

• 1:43:31David Sims?

  The thing that it gets when they're trying to first prep Mikey on toilet training where they're like, you know, you're gonna, you know, is him being like, I don't want to poop outside of my diaper. That's what nobody tells you about toilet training is that kids are like, the experience of pooping into the void is night and day from pooping into a thing that catches it right on your butt.

• 1:43:52Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 1:43:52David Sims?

  And they just don't get it.

• 1:43:54Griffin Newman?

  Well, it's so low hassle.

• 1:43:55David Sims?

  It is low hassle for them. That's true. I think.

• 1:43:57Griffin Newman?

  I poop in the diaper and then you take care of the rest?

• 1:44:00David Sims?

  But like they start to get annoyed by getting changed because it's a fucking pain in the ass when you're like a three year old and you've taken a, you know, a regular person's poop. But like, uh, they just, I think there's something physical about like it getting caught. You know what I mean? I don't know how to describe it.

• 1:44:19Griffin Newman?

  Real thing I think the movie's getting at that I think is smart.

• 1:44:22David Sims?

  I have successfully potty trained my daughter today.

• 1:44:23Griffin Newman?

  Congratulations.

• 1:44:24David Sims?

  Thank you.

• 1:44:25Griffin Newman?

  Only two more to go.

• 1:44:26David Sims?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  Look who's talking reboot.

• 1:44:32David Sims?

  Okay, listen. A lot of people have circled this. Oh, and also, we didn't talk about the baby talk. I don't know if you want to.

• 1:44:39Griffin Newman?

  I have, I have so much more to say.

• 1:44:41Speaker 03

  I watched, oh, go, keep going, Griffin, keep going.

• 1:44:43Griffin Newman?

  Well, I just want to finish this Mr. Toilet thought.

• 1:44:45David Sims?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:44:47Griffin Newman?

  What I like, what I think is smart about this and goes back to my like, she had like scraps of ideas, is that they're trying to potty train him, right? He's against it for all the reasons you just listed, David. I like that he basically cross-references with Damon Wayans. And is like, hey, your parents trying to do this like fucking potty training bullshit? And he's like, yeah, Mr. Toilet, who eats your poop and your pee? And it's that thing of like, oh, right. Parents say different things to their kids.

• 1:45:17David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:45:17Griffin Newman?

  And then when you put kids in a social situation, they start comparing notes and they don't track.

• 1:45:23David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:45:24Griffin Newman?

  Cause you have that earlier thing where Mikey's like in bed trying to fall asleep and he's doing the math on like, okay, so like ninjas are real, but dragons aren't? Dinosaurs used to be real?

• 1:45:36David Sims?

  No, he says like monsters used to be real, but dinosaurs aren't, or is it the other way around? There's like a joke like that, that's pretty funny.

• 1:45:42Griffin Newman?

  But there's a joke of like a kid starting to under, like reckon with real world logic of like which things in stories used to happen in history and which things are completely created. In the way of like kids on a playground, everyone currently has their head buried in their hands as they try to unpack this. But like comparing notes on Santa Claus and the story falling apart. I like that Damon Wayans introduces to him this thing. That is like, my parents told me this and I like it, but to Mikey, it's the scariest shit in the world.

• 1:46:14David Sims?

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, that's different strokes for different folks, I guess.

• 1:46:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18David Sims?

  I don't know. I mean.

• 1:46:19Speaker 03

  This is the benefit of doing a baby writer room.

• 1:46:21Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  They, they give you some insight that you wouldn't get from grown adults.

• 1:46:26Griffin Newman?

  The Mr. Toilet prop. Sold at auction last year.

• 1:46:29David Sims?

  Oh, did it now?

• 1:46:30Griffin Newman?

  In immaculate condition. As part of the big Planet Hollywood auction that happened. When most of the locations closed down, they got rid of the archives.

• 1:46:39David Sims?

  It's a little yellowed. I don't know if we're talking immaculate here.

• 1:46:43Griffin Newman?

  I think it looks pretty fucking.

• 1:46:43David Sims?

  Let me see it.

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, it is fucking horrible. Jesus fucking Christ.

• 1:46:47David Sims?

  Let me see it. It's a horrible image.

• 1:46:49Griffin Newman?

  Oh, God. I was surprised that it only sold for $5,000.

• 1:46:53David Sims?

  Oh, really?

• 1:46:54Griffin Newman?

  For such a hero prop in good condition? Working mechanisms?

• 1:46:58David Sims?

  What do you do with it after you get it?

• 1:47:00Griffin Newman?

  What do you do with it? You call plumber. You hook that bad boy up.

• 1:47:04Speaker 02

  Let's get this thing working.

• 1:47:05Griffin Newman?

  Let's make this functional.

• 1:47:06David Sims?

  You're right.

• 1:47:07Griffin Newman?

  I need someone to eat my poo poo and my pee pee.

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  Ben, if you saw that online on eBay for $5,000, you would be making some phone calls to see if it's doable.

• 1:47:15David Sims?

  Imagine you're a woman.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sure my wife would love that.

• 1:47:18David Sims?

  Exactly. You go on a date and you come home and the guy, you know, hey, where's your bathroom? Oh, it's the second door on the left. You walk in there and you're confronted with Mr. Toilet.

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  And I just want to say, that's the first time I said my wife.

• 1:47:29David Sims?

  Hey.

• 1:47:29Speaker 02

  There you go. And I feel like this is a perfect moment for it.

• 1:47:33David Sims?

  My wife!

• 1:47:33Griffin Newman?

  You would not submit.

• 1:47:34David Sims?

  So romantic.

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I can't wait to report back to her about Mr. Toilet.

• 1:47:39David Sims?

  Um, look, I can tell you that, not to just pull and look who's talking now, but Willis, Barr, and Wayans are not part of that movie, along with Amy Heckerling.

• 1:47:51Griffin Newman?

  The kids have grown up in the third movie.

• 1:47:54David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:47:54Griffin Newman?

  The now is referring to dogs.

• 1:47:56David Sims?

  The voices are just the dogs and...

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  But they did, they found some real act, isn't it? Like Diane Keaton?

• 1:48:01David Sims?

  Diane Keaton and Danny DeVito.

• 1:48:03Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:48:03David Sims?

  The big two. I call them.

• 1:48:04Griffin Newman?

  And David Gallagher from Seven Heaven plays Mikey.

• 1:48:07David Sims?

  Sounds great.

• 1:48:08Griffin Newman?

  Who's now like five or six.

• 1:48:09David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:48:10Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:48:10David Sims?

  Um, but yes, reports of a reboot have bubbled away since 2010 when Neil Moritz...

• 1:48:18Griffin Newman?

  Of the Fast and Furious and Sonic franchises.

• 1:48:21David Sims?

  Said, uh, he was considering a reboot and Amy Heckerling said...

• 1:48:27David Sims?

  Griffin, can you tell me what I'm doing?

• 1:48:28Griffin Newman?

  Oh, she did the John Carpenter, I love the idea of a reboot because if they do that, they'll have to pay me.

• 1:48:33David Sims?

  Exactly. That's like, I have no interest in being involved, but money goes in this hand here, whatever you want to do that.

• 1:48:38Griffin Newman?

  But there are basically three reboot things. Neil Moritz gets the rights.

• 1:48:42David Sims?

  Yep.

• 1:48:42Griffin Newman?

  Hires Jeremy Gerilich, who wrote the breakup.

• 1:48:45David Sims?

  Screen Gems brings in Jeremy Gerilich to write a, uh... And direct.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  The breakup is a phenomenal movie.

• 1:48:52Griffin Newman?

  Breakup's a masterpiece.

• 1:48:53David Sims?

  Yeah. The breakup is the, the, um, the Peyton Reed film.

• 1:48:56Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:48:56David Sims?

  That film was very good.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  Excellent movie.

• 1:48:58David Sims?

  Yes, it is excellent.

• 1:48:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59David Sims?

  And it's the kind of movie we need more of today in our rom com-less, you know, Hollywood.

• 1:49:04Griffin Newman?

  It's what we're talking about where it's like, there are no artificial conflicts. That is a movie actually about people fighting.

• 1:49:10David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:49:10Griffin Newman?

  In a way that feels like on.

• 1:49:12David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:49:12Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:49:13David Sims?

  Um, but, uh, I guess nothing came of that. Kiki Palmer.

• 1:49:17Griffin Newman?

  His qualification, by the way, in writing the film was that he has four children.

• 1:49:20David Sims?

  He has four children, including twins, so he's got me beat by one. Uh, Kiki Palmer on the Nope press tour was basically like, let me at a look who's talking film. I don't, it doesn't need to be relate, you know, it can be a reboot, it could be a sequel, whatever.

• 1:49:34Griffin Newman?

  We can just rip it off. I want to do my version of that. And then Heckling weighed in recently and said her and her daughter.

• 1:49:41David Sims?

  Last year said that her daughter Molly.

• 1:49:43Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:49:43David Sims?

  The inspiration for the first film, of course, was working on a script with her.

• 1:49:46Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:49:47David Sims?

  Uh, who knows if it'll become a thing, maybe, you know? Now that's a little sad in a way, but also a little sweet of like, hey, maybe things came full circle for her. And she decided like, I'll work on this with my kid. Or maybe Henry Heckling was like, how the fuck do I get something made in Hollywood? Do I have to do a look who's talking for?

• 1:50:04Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:50:04David Sims?

  Fine.

• 1:50:05Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:50:05David Sims?

  I don't know.

• 1:50:06Griffin Newman?

  Also, as we've talked about, almost everyone involved in these movies is dead or incapacitated. But I guess the idea is that you do.

• 1:50:13David Sims?

  Travolta's still out there.

• 1:50:14Griffin Newman?

  Travolta's still out there. The idea is that you could do Grown Up Mikey, which I have to assume is the pitch.

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  I was thinking about that because it is the obvious way to go.

• 1:50:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Speaker 03

  But would you lose something by telling the story from a male?

• 1:50:28Griffin Newman?

  I think so.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

  Perspective. Like, I do think there's something really beneficial in that first film.

• 1:50:33Griffin Newman?

  I also think that's probably why the fucking Gerilic Moritz version never came about. Because it's, even if they were writing with a female lead.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  I think Neil Moritz has shown exemplary sensitivity.

• 1:50:46David Sims?

  That's a man with taste.

• 1:50:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:49David Sims?

  And class.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  No, look, he's made some amazing movies. He made, uh, he made so many classic films. I mean, I know what he did last summer is, um, Moritz.

• 1:50:56Griffin Newman?

  I'm, I'm a fan of his work.

• 1:50:57Speaker 03

  Iconic.

• 1:50:58Griffin Newman?

  But I do think we're, we're all agreeing that like the special sauce is that it, the first movie in particular comes from a female perspective.

• 1:51:06David Sims?

  Yeah. And he did the escape rooms.

• 1:51:08Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:09David Sims?

  Where's my third escape room?

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  The first escape room is amazing.

• 1:51:12David Sims?

  It is.

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13David Sims?

  The second one. Well, the whole weird thing with the second one where there's two versions.

• 1:51:17Griffin Newman?

  Yes, and they're radically different.

• 1:51:19David Sims?

  And one is lore heavy and one is not. It kinda hamstrung the whole thing. Yeah.

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  The first one was really promising.

• 1:51:25David Sims?

  First one rocks.

• 1:51:26Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 1:51:28David Sims?

  Look who's talking. I think there's a bit of a stigma with a talking baby.

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:51:33David Sims?

  I think like the baby geniuses movies, the E-Trade ads, it just has such a.

• 1:51:38Griffin Newman?

  Which then became its own sitcom as well, Baby Bob.

• 1:51:41David Sims?

  And what a sitcom it was.

• 1:51:42Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:42David Sims?

  Like, it has such a stigma of like, the bottom of the barrel. Like, if a baby is talking with a digital mouth.

• 1:51:48Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 1:51:48David Sims?

  Where, where you're watching the worst trash imaginable.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  I don't know if AI got involved.

• 1:51:53David Sims?

  Now, I do love it when AI gets involved. My favorite thing.

• 1:51:56Griffin Newman?

  The screenplay, you're saying, right?

• 1:51:57David Sims?

  No, to me, I think AI should be making decisions at every level. Right? Just like in the movie. Right. Design. Casting. Catering.

• 1:52:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:07Speaker 03

  I was really surprised to hear on the, um, what's the last pod you guys put out? It was, uh, Jurassic, right?

• 1:52:13David Sims?

  Park, yeah.

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  That you both had AI as your number one Spielberg.

• 1:52:17David Sims?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a big one for me.

• 1:52:18Griffin Newman?

  Well, no, we were saying, because people have gotten upset about this, and this will be a long settled thing, that when we did our ranking of the first half of his, or the latter half of his career, that we both put it number one there.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Oh, right. The latter half is number one.

• 1:52:34Griffin Newman?

  Our amended, complete form of our.

• 1:52:36Speaker 02

  What's your number one Spielberg?

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  ET, ET has to be.

• 1:52:38Griffin Newman?

  ET's my number one.

• 1:52:39David Sims?

  There you go.

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  Has to be.

• 1:52:40Griffin Newman?

  ET's my number one, you still have AI as your overall.

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  ET's my number two.

• 1:52:44David Sims?

  That's batshit. I'll tell you what's batshit. AI.

• 1:52:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:51David Sims?

  Yeah, AI's the best. Oh, it's so good.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  I actually pitched, uh, an idea last episode.

• 1:52:58David Sims?

  The industry.

• 1:52:59Griffin Newman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:59David Sims?

  For Look Who's Talking.

• 1:53:00Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:01David Sims?

  Let's hear it, Ben.

• 1:53:02Griffin Newman?

  Max, Max might have some good feedback on this.

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  So I'm thinking prequel.

• 1:53:05David Sims?

  Okay. Oh, yeah. He pitched this.

• 1:53:07Speaker 02

  The title, "Looketh Who Talketh Now."

• 1:53:10Griffin Newman?

  Okay, he's actually punched up the title since the last time.

• 1:53:12Speaker 02

  It's set in the Renaissance.

• 1:53:13David Sims?

  Yeah, he's making it sound as polished as it was last time. It was not.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  It's the same, basically redo the first movie.

• 1:53:20David Sims?

  In the Renaissance.

• 1:53:21Speaker 02

  But this time, it's in the Renaissance.

• 1:53:22David Sims?

  So good. It'll cost a lot more. Wait, you are adding a good forty mil to the budget.

• 1:53:27Griffin Newman?

  Just to be clear, Max, last time, his pitch was just, "Look who's talking."

• 1:53:32David Sims?

  Or "Look who spoke," maybe? I don't know.

• 1:53:34Griffin Newman?

  We said, "What does that mean?" And he said, "It's in old times." We didn't have the specifics of the Renaissance.

• 1:53:40David Sims?

  I've refined it.

• 1:53:41Griffin Newman?

  He had committed to a time period.

• 1:53:43David Sims?

  Da Vinci being like, "Okay, hold still, Mona Lisa's," and then like a baby goes like, "Whoa!" And like knocks the paint over.

• 1:53:49Griffin Newman?

  Not to be the hackiest motherfucker of all time, but here's a thought spiral.

• 1:53:54David Sims?

  Imagine like Tom Rothman being like, "That's good." Because I'm like, "The baby that knocks over the paint?" I'm thinking, uh, John Lithgow for Da Vinci. He's like, "Perfect."

• 1:54:04Griffin Newman?

  Lithgow would be good. Here's a genuine thought spiral I went down last night.

• 1:54:08David Sims?

  From the Book of Song. Oh, that's very true.

• 1:54:11Griffin Newman?

  A thought spiral from the Book of Song.

• 1:54:14Griffin Newman?

  Who was the first baby?

• 1:54:17David Sims?

  Who was the first baby?

• 1:54:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19David Sims?

  Uh, I usually, I mean, are we going biblical?

• 1:54:22Griffin Newman?

  Well, this is my que-- I'm like, I know what the biblical answer is.

• 1:54:25David Sims?

  Do you?

• 1:54:27Griffin Newman?

  Cain is, in theory, the first baby.

• 1:54:29David Sims?

  Cain is the first child.

• 1:54:30Griffin Newman?

  Right. They had to raise Cain, which then inspired Brian De Palma.

• 1:54:33David Sims?

  And John Lithgow, let's be clear.

• 1:54:34Griffin Newman?

  Okay, so it all goes.

• 1:54:35Speaker 02

  Isn't that why it's called "Raising Canes?"

• 1:54:36Griffin Newman?

  That's also why, because that kid only ate chicken fingers.

• 1:54:40David Sims?

  Yes, and was a real firecracker. And he did murder his brother when his brother took his Texas toast.

• 1:54:46Griffin Newman?

  Yes, this all makes sense. No, I was just watching these two movies about pregnancy and childbirth and whatever. I did like, by the way, that Colonel Briggs comes back as her doctor again.

• 1:54:56David Sims?

  Yeah, Don Davis does deliver the girl. I appreciate that.

• 1:55:01Griffin Newman?

  But if there was no historical precedent, and in theory, I understand.

• 1:55:04David Sims?

  He was available because they hadn't even struck the sets, probably. They were like, "We're doing a sequel. Just sit right there, Todd." We'll get you a turkey sandwich. What's up?

• 1:55:13Griffin Newman?

  I understand the reality that Homo sapien evolved gradually over centuries, right?

• 1:55:19David Sims?

  More than centuries, my friend.

• 1:55:21Griffin Newman?

  Right. But it is crazy to just think about someone one day being like, I don't feel like I ate that much.

• 1:55:28David Sims?

  Right. Or like, God, these eggs really aren't, they're kind of disgusting to me. I usually love eggs.

• 1:55:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I'm just feeling really bloated. And then to just have a baby come out of you?

• 1:55:38David Sims?

  So you're saying that the first baby was born in an E television?

• 1:55:42Griffin Newman?

  I don't-

• 1:55:42David Sims?

  I didn't know I was pregnant style.

• 1:55:44Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 1:55:45David Sims?

  What's going on?

• 1:55:46Griffin Newman?

  But the reason you reminded me of this is in my insomnia last night at 1:57 a.m., I texted first, I Googled, excuse me, first baby in the world. And AI responded, "It is impossible to definitively know who the very first baby in the world was, as there were no historical records from that far back."

• 1:56:05David Sims?

  Thank you, AI. Thank you for pointing that out.

• 1:56:08Griffin Newman?

  And then, so then I went on to cura.com, the question and answer site. And someone responded, Chuck Sears, BBA in Management Information Systems, "We have no clue. I'm assuming you mean a human baby." I couldn't get any fucking answer to that. I was losing my mind.

• 1:56:24David Sims?

  You couldn't get answers to an impossible question?

• 1:56:26Griffin Newman?

  I think it's a good question. Who is the first baby?

• 1:56:31Speaker 03

  What has this got to do with the reboot? Is this your pitch for the reboot?

• 1:56:34Griffin Newman?

  Well, if Ben's pitching prequel, then why aren't we making it the first baby? Why would we?

• 1:56:40Speaker 03

  Oh, like Look Who's Talking Year One?

• 1:56:42Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Because that worked out really well, too.

• 1:56:45David Sims?

  Look Who's Talking Origins.

• 1:56:46Speaker 03

  These are very, very uncommercial pitches. I'm not sure, honestly, that the legacy of Look Who's Talking has lasted.

• 1:56:55Griffin Newman?

  It does feel like it is completely forgotten.

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  Which is odd to me, because it felt so fucking massive back in the day.

• 1:57:01David Sims?

  But do you think the title would stir the faintest recognition?

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  I don't think it would.

• 1:57:05David Sims?

  It's such a familiar phrase.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  I feel like Three Men and a Baby also, given that that was the highest grossing movie of 1987.

• 1:57:14Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:57:16David Sims?

  Has also not really stuck around. It hasn't. Zac Efron was gonna do it at one point and that never seemed to come to fruition. That's correct.

• 1:57:24Griffin Newman?

  And then there was also a rumor of them doing a Disney Plus Legacy sequel.

• 1:57:29David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:57:30Griffin Newman?

  Of Three Men and a Bride and bringing Danson and Gutenberg and Selleck back.

• 1:57:34David Sims?

  Selleck back, yeah. Look, the thing with Three Men and a Baby is the title does all the work for you.

• 1:57:39Griffin Newman?

  Correct.

• 1:57:39David Sims?

  You're happy as hell. There's three men, there's a baby.

• 1:57:42Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, done.

• 1:57:42David Sims?

  Okay, what's gonna happen? I don't care. I'm involved. There's a creepy ghost in the background of one shot? Cool.

• 1:57:48Griffin Newman?

  Promise of the premise.

• 1:57:49David Sims?

  Uh, look who's... There's a whole urban myth where they have like, it's a standee. It's a standee.

• 1:57:54Griffin Newman?

  From a cut plotline.

• 1:57:56David Sims?

  From a cut plotline, but it looks like there's a ghost in one scene like of Ted Danson.

• 1:58:00Griffin Newman?

  Three Men and a Baby is haunted?

• 1:58:02David Sims?

  Wow. Look Who's Talking?

• 1:58:06Griffin Newman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:06David Sims?

  It's a question to the audience.

• 1:58:08Griffin Newman?

  It is.

• 1:58:09David Sims?

  Who's talking? I don't know. You tell me who's talking. There's no question mark. There is no question mark.

• 1:58:13Griffin Newman?

  No, it's a statement.

• 1:58:14David Sims?

  Yeah. Look Who's Talking! You will look!

• 1:58:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it's not a question.

• 1:58:18David Sims?

  You will pay your $12, you will sit down and you will look to see who talks.

• 1:58:22Griffin Newman?

  It's not a question, it's a demand.

• 1:58:24David Sims?

  And of course... Well, as it turns out, we don't really know who's talking. We really know who's talking and he's honestly not talking, it's more of an inner monologue.

• 1:58:32Griffin Newman?

  I guess, right.

• 1:58:32David Sims?

  It's kind of a lie.

• 1:58:33Griffin Newman?

  The question is, hey, who's listening? Can they hear him?

• 1:58:38David Sims?

  Pay attention! Look Who's Doing ADR.

• 1:58:41Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:41David Sims?

  What if a movie, what if more movies were just called Look? Look! Look at the screen! Watch this! Things will happen! Plots will unfold! Um, yeah, I, I have to assume within the next 10, like, over, under on a Look Who's Talking sequel

• 1:58:57Griffin Newman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:58David Sims?

  in the next 10 years. I'm taking the over. I, I, I think it's gonna happen. Or a reboot, or a whatever. Year one. Da Vinci Code.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  Experience Who's Talking now, VR movie.

• 1:59:09Griffin Newman?

  Okay, there we go.

• 1:59:10David Sims?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:11Griffin Newman?

  Be Who's Talking.

• 1:59:12David Sims?

  You can be the baby. You can talk!

• 1:59:14Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:15Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:59:16Griffin Newman?

  I think you're getting at something though, which is, has, has the legacy of baby geniuses actually fucked with the legacy of Look Who's Talking?

• 1:59:24David Sims?

  I really think we have to mention E-Trade Baby too. Like, that was such a big one.

• 1:59:28Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:59:28David Sims?

  Um, you know, just... One of those things where...

• 1:59:35David Sims?

  They just completely misunderstood what people wanted.

• 1:59:38Griffin Newman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:38David Sims?

  Which was more of that, right?

• 1:59:41Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 1:59:41David Sims?

  People saw it once and were like, yeah, it's funny. And they were like, oh, you want the Etray baby all the time? And they were like, I guess so.

• 1:59:46Griffin Newman?

  Oh, let's, let's talk about Baby Talk briefly.

• 1:59:49David Sims?

  Okay, yeah, so the TV show Baby Talk.

• 1:59:51Griffin Newman?

  So the reason it's called Baby Talk and not Look Who's Talking is that this and the sequel were fast-tracked and they realized that this was gonna be on the air. Originally, the plan was for this to be on the air the same time the sequel was in theaters.

• 2:00:07David Sims?

  Uh, right.

• 2:00:08Griffin Newman?

  There were some production hiccups.

• 2:00:09David Sims?

  It does end up airing after March nineteen ninety-one.

• 2:00:13Griffin Newman?

  So she was like, please change the title so it doesn't take any like, uh, shine off the movie.

• 2:00:19David Sims?

  George Clooney is in season one as a regular.

• 2:00:22Speaker 03

  He is, I watched about twelve minutes.

• 2:00:25David Sims?

  How was he?

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  He seemed quite comfortable on screen. It felt like he might have a bright future.

• 2:00:30David Sims?

  Oh, like the camera loved him, is what you're saying.

• 2:00:33Griffin Newman?

  It's basically his last TV role before he gets ER.

• 2:00:36David Sims?

  Does he talk about Joe Biden?

• 2:00:37Griffin Newman?

  A bunch.

• 2:00:39David Sims?

  Uh, is that true?

• 2:00:40Griffin Newman?

  He keeps on jumping the step.

• 2:00:40Speaker 03

  No, but he has the hair still.

• 2:00:42Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, he's got the big mullet, the power mullet.

• 2:00:44David Sims?

  He had his big, which he has in the early seasons of ER, or the first season. Um, it's not, no, no, no, because ER is not until ninety-four. So after ER, he is on, I'm sorry, after Baby Talk.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  He's in the other ER.

• 2:00:58David Sims?

  He was on the other ER, but that's earlier. That's in the mid-eighties. Uh, he was on a show called Body of Evidence, starring Lee Horsey.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  This is not related to the Willem Dafoe.

• 2:01:10David Sims?

  Not related to the amazing wax-dripping Madonna sex movie Body of Evidence. Uh.

• 2:01:15Griffin Newman?

  Probably one of the best candle sex movies ever made, right?

• 2:01:18David Sims?

  I think so, I think so. Uh, no one has sex with Lumiere, right?

• 2:01:22Griffin Newman?

  No, unfortunately, I, I mean, that was my notes round.

• 2:01:26David Sims?

  On the content reboot.

• 2:01:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, and they didn't like it.

• 2:01:29David Sims?

  Uh, a two-season police procedural that Clooney was the second lead on. And then he gets ER. He was also in a pilot called The Building. Written and starring.

• 2:01:42Speaker 03

  Great title.

• 2:01:43David Sims?

  Uh, Bonnie Hunt, the great Bonnie Hunt.

• 2:01:46Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:47David Sims?

  And it's about a, a lady who's jilted by her fiance goes to Chicago, starts a new life in apartment building across from Wrigley Field. And it's also all about the people who live in the building. The building.

• 2:02:00Griffin Newman?

  I mean, it's a good title.

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  What if there was a building?

• 2:02:02Griffin Newman?

  What if there was a building?

• 2:02:02David Sims?

  What if there was a building?

• 2:02:03Griffin Newman?

  They tried to answer.

• 2:02:05David Sims?

  They only got five episodes and then that was that.

• 2:02:07Griffin Newman?

  The thing I was gonna say about Baby Talk. Baby Talk, Baby Mikey was voiced by Tony Danza.

• 2:02:12David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:02:13Griffin Newman?

  Who makes perfect sense as.

• 2:02:15David Sims?

  He is renamed Mickey.

• 2:02:16Griffin Newman?

  Baby Mickey.

• 2:02:17David Sims?

  In Baby Talk, yes.

• 2:02:18Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Uh, George Clooney played the male lead in the romantic, uh, figure for the first season. But he is not the Travolta. The premise of the show is that the building is under construction and all these construction workers come and visit her a bunch. And Academy Award nominee William Hickey is the foreman of the construction site. And George Clooney is the handsome, hunky construction worker who starts visiting a bunch.

• 2:02:45Speaker 03

  What's the problem? If you look at Look Who's Talking, this is such a natural and organic way to spin off.

• 2:02:50Griffin Newman?

  All these horny construction workers keep coming upstairs and like interfering with her life until she falls in love with one of them. They originally cast an actress named Connie Selica. She filmed five episodes. The show is supposed to premiere in September 90, before Look Who's Talking 2. She hated the show so much, she quit after five episodes. They restarted the season.

• 2:03:11David Sims?

  They shot it all again with, uh, Julia Duffy.

• 2:03:14Griffin Newman?

  A legitimate TV star.

• 2:03:16David Sims?

  Sure, absolutely.

• 2:03:17Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:03:17David Sims?

  Famous most for, uh, Baby Talk.

• 2:03:19Griffin Newman?

  She does, she went on to design women after this, yes. She, uh, after, uh, the first season is lambasted critically, quits the show out of shame.

• 2:03:31David Sims?

  Sure.

• 2:03:32Griffin Newman?

  So then they fire Clooney. And in season two, they recast all parts and Scott Baio is the new love interest.

• 2:03:39David Sims?

  Baio is the new love interest. Baio, I'm seeing here, described the show as a nightmare. To make, so things doing well. And the show concludes its run. And then 18 months later, Look Who's Talking Now

• 2:03:52Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:03:52David Sims?

  Comes out. When asked to comment on the film, Amy Herkeling recently said, ugh, why? I can't watch it. That's all she has to say.

• 2:04:00Griffin Newman?

  The thing I just want to share is that the critics hated Baby Talk so much that when the new stars were cast for season two, they were basically shamed by the press. And on Wikipedia, it says, prior to the second season beginning, the new stars of Baby Talk were interviewed about their decisions to join a show that was so loathed by reviewers. Mary Paige Keller, who replaced Julia Duffy, claimed to have an indifference over the reputation of the show among critics since she had never seen the show prior to replacing Julia Duffy. Scott Baio's defense was, quote, "I did a show for 11 years, Happy Days, that never, ever got a good review. So we hope you guys will love it, but we're just going to do the best we can.

• 2:04:41David Sims?

  Wow.

• 2:04:41Griffin Newman?

  And it's what the people like that's going to stay on." And then the show was canceled. He said it was the worst experience of his life.

• 2:04:47David Sims?

  Cool.

• 2:04:51David Sims?

  Box office came, guys.

• 2:04:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53David Sims?

  Uh, this film came out December 14th, 1990. Mistake when you see what its competition was. It's opening number two at the box office. Eight million dollars. Not bad, but not great.

• 2:05:02Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:05:03David Sims?

  Number one has been in release for five weeks. It's still number one. It's the family movie of the year. It's the movie of the year.

• 2:05:10Griffin Newman?

  In 1990.

• 2:05:10David Sims?

  It's one of the movies of the decade.

• 2:05:12Griffin Newman?

  Is it the motion picture Home Alone?

• 2:05:14David Sims?

  Home Alone.

• 2:05:15Griffin Newman?

  That was pretty bad timing on their part.

• 2:05:17David Sims?

  Yep. You like Home Alone? Sure. Wow, not a Home Alone guy. It's not, it's not an important movie. He hits the guys in the face.

• 2:05:27Griffin Newman?

  The same way.

• 2:05:28David Sims?

  I also, I mean, I grew up with it, but it was not an on repeat movie for me.

• 2:05:32Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 2:05:32David Sims?

  Yes, but it's a classic. Home Alone Two, I have a much softer spot for. Yeah, because we've all been lost in New York.

• 2:05:38Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:38David Sims?

  We all have. In a way.

• 2:05:39Griffin Newman?

  In a way.

• 2:05:40David Sims?

  Max said that very ruthfully.

• 2:05:41Griffin Newman?

  And I've, and I've been found in New York as well.

• 2:05:43David Sims?

  That's true.

• 2:05:44Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I found myself.

• 2:05:45David Sims?

  And our favorite actor's in it.

• 2:05:47Griffin Newman?

  Donald Trump.

• 2:05:47David Sims?

  That's right. Uh, Home Alone, it's number one. It's a big smash hit. Um, no, I meant Brenda Fricker, obviously.

• 2:05:54Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, that, that actually is maybe the single worst movie this could have opened against.

• 2:05:59David Sims?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:06:00Griffin Newman?

  Like, talk about all of their shine being taken.

• 2:06:03David Sims?

  Yeah, it's being just melted by Home Alone.

• 2:06:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:06David Sims?

  So, look who's talking to is making it to number two. Number three, it's a film we've covered on the show. It's a great film. It's just beginning its run. It's in its second week, but I think it's just expanded wide-ish to about a thousand screens. Um, one of your favorite directors, an oddball film.

• 2:06:22Griffin Newman?

  It's a main feed movie. Is it Edward Scissorhands?

• 2:06:25David Sims?

  Edward Scissorhands.

• 2:06:26Griffin Newman?

  Edward Schizerhands.

• 2:06:28David Sims?

  You like that one, Max?

• 2:06:29Speaker 03

  Love that movie.

• 2:06:30Griffin Newman?

  It's good.

• 2:06:31Speaker 03

  Must be.

• 2:06:31David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32David Sims?

  Okay, so Edward Scissorhands. Number four is a film we've covered on this show.

• 2:06:36Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:06:36David Sims?

  We're really getting into almost all movies on this show at this point.

• 2:06:39Griffin Newman?

  We're very close to having covered all movies.

• 2:06:41David Sims?

  This film wins Best Picture in 1990. It's been out for six weeks.

• 2:06:45Griffin Newman?

  Uh, okay, well, Silence of the Lambs wins in 91.

• 2:06:49David Sims?

  It sure does.

• 2:06:50Griffin Newman?

  We've covered this.

• 2:06:51David Sims?

  We sure have.

• 2:06:52Griffin Newman?

  And it's a Best Picture winner.

• 2:06:53David Sims?

  That's right.

• 2:06:54Griffin Newman?

  It's not Terms of Endearment.

• 2:06:55David Sims?

  No, no.

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  Driving Moustache.

• 2:06:57David Sims?

  Not Driving Moustache, that was in 89.

• 2:06:59Griffin Newman?

  That's 89.

• 2:06:59David Sims?

  You guys are circling this movie.

• 2:07:01Griffin Newman?

  I know.

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  Rain Man?

• 2:07:02David Sims?

  Not Rain Man, that's like 88.

• 2:07:03Griffin Newman?

  We haven't covered that. And Unforgiven, oh, it's Dances with Wolves.

• 2:07:07David Sims?

  Dances with Wolves.

• 2:07:09Griffin Newman?

  There we go.

• 2:07:09David Sims?

  Uh, it's been out for six weeks. It's made only $38 million, so it's just beginning a long and successful box office run.

• 2:07:16Griffin Newman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:17David Sims?

  Uh, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, pretty good. Max, do you care about Dances with Wolves?

• 2:07:22Speaker 03

  I've only seen Dances with Wolves on a plane at the time of release.

• 2:07:27Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 2:07:28David Sims?

  Very young.

• 2:07:29Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:07:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I haven't, I haven't danced with the wolves again.

• 2:07:32Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32David Sims?

  Number five at the box office. Will we ever cover this? We, we debate this director a lot because he had a strong first half.

• 2:07:40Griffin Newman?

  Barry Levinson?

• 2:07:40David Sims?

  Nope.

• 2:07:41Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:07:42David Sims?

  Weak second.

• 2:07:43Griffin Newman?

  Rob Reiner?

• 2:07:43David Sims?

  Rob Reiner. It's one of his better movies.

• 2:07:46Griffin Newman?

  It's not Few Good Men.

• 2:07:48David Sims?

  No, although that one is also good.

• 2:07:50Griffin Newman?

  But this would have been right before that?

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  Misery.

• 2:07:52David Sims?

  Misery. Uh, which rocks. Misery's great.

• 2:07:56Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:57David Sims?

  Oscar winner, of course.

• 2:07:58Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:59David Sims?

  Do you like Misery?

• 2:07:59Speaker 03

  I've never seen this.

• 2:08:01David Sims?

  It's really good.

• 2:08:02Speaker 03

  Isn't that crazy? I've never seen that.

• 2:08:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:03David Sims?

  I don't think it's crazy because...

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  The premise sounds... Small.

• 2:08:08David Sims?

  Sure, and like, it's kind of one of those things where you're like, well, I get it. I've, I get what that is because the character's so ubiquitous.

• 2:08:15Griffin Newman?

  Right, right.

• 2:08:16David Sims?

  That like, I feel like I've seen Misery, but then when you watch Misery, you're like, this is good.

• 2:08:19Speaker 03

  I saw Kathy Bates being interviewed yesterday while we're on the topic of misery, and she looks so beautiful.

• 2:08:25David Sims?

  She's a gorgeous woman.

• 2:08:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, she's Matlock now.

• 2:08:27David Sims?

  And now she's Matlock.

• 2:08:28Griffin Newman?

  She can do anything.

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's really.

• 2:08:30Griffin Newman?

  Have you ever seen, uh, Taking Off, the Milos Forman film?

• 2:08:34Speaker 03

  I've, I've not, this is the first time I'm hearing about it.

• 2:08:35Griffin Newman?

  Which I believe is her first screen credit.

• 2:08:37David Sims?

  And I think it might be Forman's first American film.

• 2:08:40Griffin Newman?

  I think that's right. It's Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin from Cassavetti's Faces.

• 2:08:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:08:46Griffin Newman?

  Are the two leads and it's like two upper middle-class New York parents whose daughter goes missing. And it's basically a night of them freaking out, waiting for their daughter to return home. And it turns out the daughter has run off to audition for an open casting call for a play? With a bunch of hippie musicians? Or maybe it's some, maybe it's not a play. Anyway, Kathy Bates is in it doing an unbroken musical performance. She like sings a song while playing guitar for like four minutes and is smoking hot. And she's credited under some other name.

• 2:09:22David Sims?

  Uh, yeah, cuz she was barely, it was her first appearance, I think.

• 2:09:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:27David Sims?

  Uh, yeah, I don't know.

• 2:09:28Griffin Newman?

  Really good movie, yeah.

• 2:09:29David Sims?

  Number six at the box office, new this week, is a bit of a nineties classic.

• 2:09:33Griffin Newman?

  Sorry, her name is Bobo Bates.

• 2:09:35David Sims?

  Great. Uh, is Richard Benjamin's Mermaids.

• 2:09:38Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:09:39David Sims?

  Uh, with, uh.

• 2:09:39Griffin Newman?

  That's a movie I've never seen.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a big movie for me.

• 2:09:42David Sims?

  That's a great movie.

• 2:09:43Speaker 03

  Cuz the sound, the soundtrack was ubiquitous.

• 2:09:46David Sims?

  Uh, it stars who I consider to be the big three, Cher, Bob Hoskins and Winona Ryder.

• 2:09:50Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:09:50Speaker 03

  And Christina Ricci.

• 2:09:51David Sims?

  Ricci, very young Ricci's in there. She's really good.

• 2:09:53Griffin Newman?

  Make it a big four, make it a big four.

• 2:09:55David Sims?

  Sure, fair enough. I just think it's funny that it's like, who shall we pair with Cher, the statuesque pop singer? Perhaps a five-three British burly man? And you watch the movie and you're like, I love it. They work. This is great. Um, number seven at the box office is The Rookie, one of the more, uh, crass films in Clint Eastwood's filmography.

• 2:10:17Griffin Newman?

  Is that him and Sheen?

• 2:10:18David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:10:19Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:10:20David Sims?

  Uh, yeah, there's a lot of rookies out there, of course, because there's later Dennis Quaid, the rookie, and then there was later Nathan Fillion with the TVs, the rookie.

• 2:10:26Griffin Newman?

  There's also a Rookie of the Year.

• 2:10:27David Sims?

  There was a Rookie of the Year.

• 2:10:29Griffin Newman?

  There was.

• 2:10:29David Sims?

  On screen, and every year in every sport, there is also a Rookie of the Year.

• 2:10:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:33David Sims?

  Uh, number eight at the box office, this is what I wanted to get to, is a little film that's been out for a month called Three Men and a Little Lady.

• 2:10:40Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 2:10:41David Sims?

  So both unwanted sequels were being dumped on audiences.

• 2:10:45Speaker 03

  That is really interesting. I had no idea.

• 2:10:48David Sims?

  And then number nine at the box office is the, uh, new this week, uh, the, um, Sidney Pollock film Havana.

• 2:10:56Griffin Newman?

  Oh, with Redford?

• 2:10:57Speaker 03

  I've always wanted to watch Havana, but that one.

• 2:10:59Griffin Newman?

  And Lena Olin?

• 2:11:00Speaker 03

  That one really missed, didn't it?

• 2:11:01David Sims?

  Yeah. It really missed. I've never seen it. It just has one of those posters that kind of, like, who wants to see this movie? Where it's just like, Leatherface is back. I mean, look at Redford. It looks like you could draw Rhodes on his face.

• 2:11:18Griffin Newman?

  What is the premise of the movie?

• 2:11:19David Sims?

  What if he went to Havana?

• 2:11:21Griffin Newman?

  An American professional gambler who decides to visit Havana to gamble on the eve of the Cuban Revolution.

• 2:11:28David Sims?

  Havana.

• 2:11:30Griffin Newman?

  So it's like Dirty Dancing Havana Nights, where it's like, what if a dance competition happened on the eve of the Cuban Revolution?

• 2:11:36David Sims?

  Right. He does the Roomba with Romulan Gary in this movie. Um, number 10 at the box office is Predator 2.

• 2:11:43Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:11:44David Sims?

  Great movie.

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  These all, a lot of these movies feel like they're made in completely different time periods.

• 2:11:48Griffin Newman?

  Yes, right.

• 2:11:49David Sims?

  Well, expand on that, because I agree with you. Yeah, it is weird.

• 2:11:52Speaker 03

  The idea that Edward Scissorhands doesn't exist in the same universe as Look Who's Talking 2, a film that has the aesthetic qualities of something.

• 2:12:00Griffin Newman?

  This is a real fulcrum point between the 80s and the 90s.

• 2:12:02David Sims?

  You can imagine people walking into Edward Scissorhands and being like, whoa, what the fuck is this?

• 2:12:06Speaker 03

  Completely.

• 2:12:07David Sims?

  Like, compared to the drivel they're being served up.

• 2:12:09Griffin Newman?

  On the opposite of what we were talking about, where we're like, that's a, that's a no notes movie.

• 2:12:13David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:13Griffin Newman?

  That is a this guy made Batman.

• 2:12:15David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:16Griffin Newman?

  We're not going to tell him shit.

• 2:12:17David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:18Griffin Newman?

  That is like a complete vision.

• 2:12:20David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:21Griffin Newman?

  And then Dances with Wolves is like this lunatic somehow got his way and convinced everyone to let him make a three and a half hour epic about how he is the great one.

• 2:12:31David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:12:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:32David Sims?

  Maybe I gotta see Havana. The whole thing with Sidney Pollack is he's made movies I liked, but Sidney Pollack is guilty of making a boring movie. Like, he's done it.

• 2:12:40Griffin Newman?

  Sidney Pollack has made like eight movies that don't exist.

• 2:12:42David Sims?

  Exactly. Like, so like, I love The Firm, which is unhinged, but I have a feeling Havana might be not unhinged.

• 2:12:49Griffin Newman?

  But it's also, right, made like many undeniable masterpieces.

• 2:12:52David Sims?

  Yes, he's made great movies. He was a good director.

• 2:12:55Griffin Newman?

  I said many times before, is like maybe my favorite actor?

• 2:12:58Speaker 03

  Oh, he's just an amazing actor.

• 2:13:00David Sims?

  If Pollack is swinging in, it's bucks, big bucks.

• 2:13:04Speaker 03

  I'm with you, Griffin.

• 2:13:05Griffin Newman?

  If I could have any actor's career, it would be Sidney Pollack over the age of 50.

• 2:13:09David Sims?

  If I could have any actor's chest hair, it'd be those, those gray forests sprouting on Pollack's chest.

• 2:13:17Griffin Newman?

  Your father was producing partners with him. Was it because they had The Interpreter?

• 2:13:21Speaker 03

  They had a company together for a long time.

• 2:13:22David Sims?

  Your dad is a producer on The Interpreter? Do I want, am I crazy?

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  He is a producer on The Interpreter, a movie that had a very normal production.

• 2:13:29Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:13:29Speaker 03

  Nothing strange happened at all during The Interpreter.

• 2:13:32David Sims?

  I wish I knew what you were talking about because the movies vanished from memory.

• 2:13:36Griffin Newman?

  Only someone could interpret that.

• 2:13:37Speaker 03

  Or Random Hearts, which also was a really smooth movie.

• 2:13:40Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. And then they're both producers on Margaret, an infamous movie.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  They are both producers on Margaret.

• 2:13:46David Sims?

  The Interpreter Sean Penn is in, and Random Hearts Harrison Ford is in, and those guys are not grumpy at all. So I can't imagine there were any troubles there.

• 2:13:53Griffin Newman?

  No, neither of those guys has.

• 2:13:55Speaker 03

  That was, you know, Sidney was operating at sort of the end of an era where you would bring in those big guys to do passes on the script. And it's like, there's like the five, the big five.

• 2:14:07David Sims?

  You're like a Robert Towns? Like, who are you thinking of?

• 2:14:11Speaker 03

  I'm thinking more Zaline, Frank, you know, these guys that are just getting inordinate amounts of money to do a few days' work.

• 2:14:20David Sims?

  Right, to do, "I think that, you know, this should happen," right, or whatever, like, whatever it is they do.

• 2:14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there was an investment in, in the screenplay that doesn't quite exist anymore. Whether that was the right way to go about it, I don't, I don't know, but there was a real respect.

• 2:14:36Griffin Newman?

  There was a feeling of like, if we've hired a legitimate director and legitimate stars onto something that could be a programmer, we owe it to everyone to make it a little more literate?

• 2:14:49David Sims?

  Well, like, and Random Hearts is a great example of like, that's a movie that doesn't exist anymore, right? No one remembers that movie, despite it having Harrison Ford, being a Sidney Pollack film. It's based on a bestseller. A-list talent through the, you know, like at every level of it, right?

• 2:15:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:04Speaker 03

  Ninety million dollar movie.

• 2:15:05Griffin Newman?

  Right. And like ninety million dollars because Harrison Ford wanted to do it. So then it became.

• 2:15:11Speaker 03

  We gotta do it right.

• 2:15:12Griffin Newman?

  A big budget movie, right?

• 2:15:14David Sims?

  Yeah, I think. And then you're like, what's it about? And it's like, a cop thinks a congresswoman's spouse who died in a plane crash was cheating on her with his spouse who also died.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  It's like Bounce, basically. It's the same premise as the film Bounce.

• 2:15:31Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:15:32David Sims?

  Pretty much. Another film that audiences were like, no tickets, please.

• 2:15:35Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:36David Sims?

  They walked up to this ticket booth and they were like, I want to make it clear, I won't be buying any tickets to Bounce.

• 2:15:43Griffin Newman?

  Can I buy a ticket just to refund it? But the Pollock thing is so fascinating because I feel like his.

• 2:15:49David Sims?

  But it's like, right, two cucks fall for each other. Sorry, sorry to be, you know, to be crass, but the cuckold did fall for each other.

• 2:15:57Speaker 03

  Well, I wouldn't, you don't watch In the Mood for Love and go like, look at these two cucks.

• 2:16:01David Sims?

  Fucking cucks.

• 2:16:02Speaker 03

  It's a bit of a.

• 2:16:03Griffin Newman?

  I wouldn't word it as a cuck thing. I just think it's more that like the innate premise.

• 2:16:06David Sims?

  They're united by the premise, the idea that both of their partners cheated on each other.

• 2:16:11Griffin Newman?

  I just remember seeing the trailer at some movie my dad took me to and him going, that's going to be a big hit.

• 2:16:16David Sims?

  Max's face when I said two cucks.

• 2:16:19Griffin Newman?

  He looked disgusted.

• 2:16:20David Sims?

  I wish people could have seen it. Uh, yeah.

• 2:16:22Griffin Newman?

  My dad was like, that's going to be a big hit.

• 2:16:24David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:16:24Griffin Newman?

  And I was like, why? And he went, because Harrison Ford's in it and people will see whatever Harrison Ford's.

• 2:16:29David Sims?

  Which was largely true.

• 2:16:30Griffin Newman?

  But that one bombed.

• 2:16:32David Sims?

  I, well, it's, it's in the midst of his tough late nineties.

• 2:16:35Griffin Newman?

  A weird run.

• 2:16:36David Sims?

  With Sabrina in Devil's Zone and Six Days, Seven Nights.

• 2:16:38Griffin Newman?

  But it just spoke to, the premise of that movie was so unappetizing to be like, here are two sad people in mourning because their spouses died. And then they realized that also their spouses were cheating on them.

• 2:16:49David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:16:50Griffin Newman?

  So they're at like kind of two stages of grief.

• 2:16:52David Sims?

  It's a hundred and thirty-three minutes long.

• 2:16:54Speaker 03

  There's a lot of other stuff going on though, because I did watch it recently for the first time and I was like, there's a whole procedural element.

• 2:17:01Griffin Newman?

  Are they trying to solve like the crash?

• 2:17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some, there's some funky stuff and Kristen's character is a politician and there's some stuff going on there. Um, yeah, it's not as straightforward as Bounce, which I keep bringing up for some reason.

• 2:17:19David Sims?

  Now, Bounce is the one with Affleck and Paltrow and it's a Don Roos film.

• 2:17:22Speaker 03

  It's a Don Roos movie.

• 2:17:23David Sims?

  I love Don Roos's first film.

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  That's like quintessential 90s Miramax.

• 2:17:27David Sims?

  Miramax, right, exactly. And it's not based on anything Roos wrote himself, but it's also kind of downbeat. It's like a sort of a sad romance.

• 2:17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a bit melancholic. It has a fantastic onset making of documentary.

• 2:17:41Griffin Newman?

  On the Bounce DVD?

• 2:17:42David Sims?

  That's the kind of unhinged shit that people don't know about Max Minghella.

• 2:17:47Griffin Newman?

  Do you even realize how much of a dork Max is?

• 2:17:49David Sims?

  Who's a successful professional in this business we called show and yet will reveal things like, I watched the Bounce DVD special features and have an opinion on them.

• 2:17:58Griffin Newman?

  I was trying to watch Look Who's Talking To on iTunes and iTunes started bugging out on me and I was like, is this a wifi problem?

• 2:18:05David Sims?

  And then I was just like, no, no!

• 2:18:07Griffin Newman?

  Truly. I put on other movies and everything else was working that wouldn't. So I broke out my fucking Look Who's Talking To full screen DVD. The only way you can watch the movie on physical media. And I was like, I wonder what the special features are like on this? And they had two.

• 2:18:22David Sims?

  Uh huh.

• 2:18:23Griffin Newman?

  Bonus trailers.

• 2:18:24David Sims?

  Wow.

• 2:18:25Griffin Newman?

  Baby Geniuses and one other movie I'm forgetting, but then the other special feature, which was something we were talking about in our News and Deals group text the other day, David. Talent Files.

• 2:18:36David Sims?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:18:37Griffin Newman?

  Where there's just like a still slideshow. You can go through the key figures on the movie and it just lists fun facts and credits.

• 2:18:44Speaker 03

  It's like an Amazon X-ray.

• 2:18:46Griffin Newman?

  Basically.

• 2:18:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:18:47Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, Talent Files. Just John Travolta standing like this with his arms out and it just lists his birthday and where he was born.

• 2:18:54David Sims?

  With his arms out like an action figure.

• 2:18:56Griffin Newman?

  Truly, yeah.

• 2:18:57David Sims?

  Like, show me on the, on the John Travolta where he attacked.

• 2:19:00Speaker 03

  Did we finish the box office, David?

• 2:19:01David Sims?

  We did. We did all 10. I'm sorry. If you want me to repeat them, it was Home Alone, Look Who's Talking To, Edward Scissorhands, Days of Dance with the Wolves, Misery Mermaids, Rookie, Three Men and a Little Lady, Havana and Predator 2. Wow. Number 11 is Child's Play 2, if that lights your fire.

• 2:19:15Griffin Newman?

  The best of the child playing.

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  Did you guys see Better Man? Yes, of course. I mean, it's quite.

• 2:19:21David Sims?

  Max, again, you and I are the same age.

• 2:19:23Speaker 03

  We are.

• 2:19:23David Sims?

  Spent a lot of time in England.

• 2:19:24Speaker 03

  Yes, mate.

• 2:19:25David Sims?

  Was Robbie important to you as a sort of 11 year old? Or were you too cool for Robbie?

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  I wasn't too cool for Robbie. As you know, knowing me, I'm not cool at all. No, I definitely wasn't too cool for Robbie. I would say that watching Better Man, I didn't realize some of the cultural stuff that he was connected to. I'd completely forgotten his relationship with Nicole Appleton.

• 2:19:46David Sims?

  I think a lot of people did.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  Every, no, so Nicole Appleton, Griffin, if you were a teenage boy in London.

• 2:19:52David Sims?

  All Saints was important to you.

• 2:19:53Speaker 03

  Oh, I went to an All Saints concert, but also the Appleton sisters.

• 2:19:57David Sims?

  Speaking my language.

• 2:19:58Speaker 03

  Appleton sisters were definitely on the bedroom wall.

• 2:20:02David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:20:02Speaker 03

  Probably in lieu of Kirsty Alley's headshot.

• 2:20:04David Sims?

  All Saints was an incredible British girl group.

• 2:20:07Griffin Newman?

  Familiar with All Saints. I don't understand.

• 2:20:08David Sims?

  They had two Appleton sisters.

• 2:20:10Griffin Newman?

  firsthand how culturally impactful they were.

• 2:20:12David Sims?

  Neither Appleton sisters seemed to make much artistic contribution to All Saints. Like, it was almost all Shaznay Lewis, I think, was the songwriting, the singing. The Appletons were just kind of there too, but boy, were they babes.

• 2:20:24Speaker 03

  They were babes.

• 2:20:25Griffin Newman?

  When I was trying to make the argument for why that film was great and worth seeing to American people who were just like, I've never even fucking heard of Robbie Williams. I don't give a shit. I'm like, this movie's better, actually, the less you know. Cause shit like the fucking Gallagher twist at the end is mind boggling. If it's not something you grew up reading in the tabloids.

• 2:20:47David Sims?

  Better Man, great.

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  I really liked that film. If you've ever seen it, check it out. It's a, it's an accomplishment. And it's, and it's, it's so indicative, I think, of the time that we're living in, that a movie with that much work put into it and that accomplished.

• 2:21:01David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:21:02Speaker 03

  Has zero cultural impact.

• 2:21:05David Sims?

  Beyond being a sort of instant cult hit.

• 2:21:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. And there were certain other movies that are doing well at the box office right now, which will be left unnamed, which lack, I would say, some of the same.

• 2:21:17David Sims?

  Steve is here. There's Piglins.

• 2:21:20Griffin Newman?

  Chicken jockeys.

• 2:21:21David Sims?

  We have chicken jockeys. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 2:21:23Griffin Newman?

  I just think Better Man.

• 2:21:24David Sims?

  Or what about a King of Kings? I showed you the clip of Pierce Brosnan. He's like, why not a film about Jesus?

• 2:21:32Speaker 03

  Dude, we haven't talked about Shadow League, but I 100% did not know that movie existed.

• 2:21:37David Sims?

  Are we allowed to talk about Shadow League?

• 2:21:39Speaker 03

  I think probably the first rule of Shadow League.

• 2:21:40Griffin Newman?

  You can't talk about Shadow League.

• 2:21:42David Sims?

  But it's fun to mention it.

• 2:21:43Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:43David Sims?

  Uh, no, Ben, you can keep the reference in. It's just people can tear their hair out wondering what it means.

• 2:21:48Griffin Newman?

  To build on what you said, Max, what I found dispiriting was not just that Better Man was kind of ignored, but it was immediately turned into a headline of why would they ever make this movie?

• 2:21:57David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:21:58Griffin Newman?

  That there was this sort of celebrating about how hard it bombed.

• 2:22:02David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22:02Griffin Newman?

  Of like, this is so stupid. They spent this much money on a guy we've never heard of.

• 2:22:06David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22:07Griffin Newman?

  And I just want to keep yelling like, guys, the movie is good.

• 2:22:09David Sims?

  Right, right. Don't worry about Robbie Williams. Yes. Like even if you want to go learn about him, that's fine. Just, just enjoy the movie.

• 2:22:15Griffin Newman?

  But people were treating the release of that movie like it was the Fire Festival collapsing.

• 2:22:20Speaker 03

  No, I agree with you. That people were so like dancing on the grave.

• 2:22:23David Sims?

  This is what's so nightmarish to me about a lot of industry reporting now with Sinners, which looks like it's going to open well, which is good news.

• 2:22:30Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:22:31David Sims?

  But these pieces being written before its release where it's like, what were they thinking giving acclaimed director Ryan Coogler and like well-known actor Michael B. Jordan a budget for a film?

• 2:22:43Griffin Newman?

  That people love.

• 2:22:44David Sims?

  These fools, like Mike DeLuca, it's like they're acting like he's like at the casino throwing money around where I'm like, it's a fairly reasonable package.

• 2:22:52Griffin Newman?

  This is insane back and forth between like writing constantly about how much David Zaslove sucks.

• 2:22:57David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:22:58Griffin Newman?

  Correct.

• 2:22:58David Sims?

  Sure.

• 2:22:59Griffin Newman?

  And then being angry every time at like an artistically interesting film is greenlit under his watch. And being like, these fucking idiots, this shit's gonna bomb.

• 2:23:08Speaker 03

  Ryan Coogler may be the most box office proven filmmaker.

• 2:23:12Griffin Newman?

  Coogler's the thing we have to like.

• 2:23:14David Sims?

  Young Spielberg. He's like, hey, can I have $90 million to make a vampire movie?

• 2:23:19Griffin Newman?

  With my like closest collaborator, my established movie star.

• 2:23:22David Sims?

  And everyone's like, wow, Warner Brothers is really writing some checks they can't cash. And I'm just like, can nothing happen? Is nothing allowed?

• 2:23:29Griffin Newman?

  We're also like recording this.

• 2:23:30David Sims?

  I'm sorry that I'm so mad about this when it seems like Sinners will do just fine.

• 2:23:34Griffin Newman?

  We're recording this the day that Sinners is coming out and deadlines like Thursday previews were good, but we all know the break even point for this movie. And I'm like, let us fucking play.

• 2:23:45David Sims?

  It's like, it only got 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Will that be enough? What do they want? What, what do they want?

• 2:23:51Griffin Newman?

  It's now maybe over indexing to a $50 million weekend, but will it have legs?

• 2:23:55David Sims?

  Will be arrested watching this movie, so it seems like a bomb to me.

• 2:23:59Griffin Newman?

  Shut the fuck up! Our world is collapsing. Let good movies exist. This is a victory if they sneak through the system.

• 2:24:09Speaker 03

  Also, what was the other highest grossing original movie recently? It was Nope, wasn't it?

• 2:24:13David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:24:13Griffin Newman?

  Yes, they're comping it to Nope.

• 2:24:14David Sims?

  They're comping it to Nope, which did great.

• 2:24:16Speaker 03

  Which did great too, and it's like, nobody draws any conclusions from any of this.

• 2:24:21Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 2:24:21David Sims?

  Right, and Nope is, it's like, it costs the same amount of money, open to the, probably the same amount of money, made probably, you know what I mean? And everyone was like, "Yeah, that's a one-off though, that'll never fucking happen again." And I'm like, "Well, not if you don't let it."

• 2:24:32Griffin Newman?

  Every trade is like, "Look, we all know the one conclusive lesson from the box office in 2025 is that any movie with Chicken Jockey will be a hit." "We should all be making Chicken Jockeys."

• 2:24:43David Sims?

  Mike Lee's Chicken Jockey is approaching.

• 2:24:46Speaker 03

  I wonder what's going on. I have been wondering about the Minecraft 2 negotiations.

• 2:24:50David Sims?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:24:51Griffin Newman?

  They must be insane.

• 2:24:53Speaker 03

  Because they got them over the fucking back end.

• 2:24:55Griffin Newman?

  They do.

• 2:24:56Speaker 03

  I mean, that is, you could just ask for...

• 2:24:59David Sims?

  Like, seriously, Mojang-

• 2:25:00Speaker 03

  Only green M&M's.

• 2:25:01David Sims?

  Right, well, Mojang should be like, "So it's gonna be a courthouse musical, we're thinking Lady Gaga." Like, they should just make Folly Ado again. Minecraft Folly Ado, yes.

• 2:25:10Griffin Newman?

  Here's who I would love to be right now: Jack Black.

• 2:25:13David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:25:14Griffin Newman?

  Sitting back going, "Hey Warner Brothers, I'd love to hear you argue why I'm not important to the success of the second Minecraft movie."

• 2:25:22David Sims?

  Right, right.

• 2:25:22Griffin Newman?

  Which, by the way, they tried to do that shit with Goosebumps. They were like, "We don't need to fucking pay you, we'll make Goosebumps 2 for half as much money." They test screened it. Kids' first note: "Where the fuck is Jack Black?"

• 2:25:33David Sims?

  Where is President of America Jack Black?

• 2:25:35Griffin Newman?

  They like, paid him $2 million to come in and do reshoots for two scenes.

• 2:25:38Speaker 03

  We have all been collectively naive about the prowess of this actor. I've always loved Jack Black. I will confess, I didn't really put it all together until this, this movie. It was like, oh wait, they always open.

• 2:25:52Griffin Newman?

  Here's what's wild. You step back and you're like, he not only has conclusively been the biggest family star, like family movie star for 25 straight years, kind of uncontested, without dips. Like, his bombs are not family movies.

• 2:26:10David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:26:10Griffin Newman?

  His bombs are grownups.

• 2:26:11David Sims?

  Something like Clock in the Walls, like, does fine.

• 2:26:13Griffin Newman?

  Does it? Heady Million Domestic or whatever. Right. Beyond that, you're like-

• 2:26:17Speaker 03

  That was all Blanchett, because kids go nuts.

• 2:26:19Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:26:20David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:21Griffin Newman?

  Kate the Great.

• 2:26:21David Sims?

  Right, and that was, obviously, Roth. The Roth fans were showing up for that one.

• 2:26:25Griffin Newman?

  But you're like, kind of no one has had a run that big?

• 2:26:29David Sims?

  No, he's unbeatable.

• 2:26:30Speaker 03

  I mean, the Jumanji movies made just unspeakable amounts of money.

• 2:26:34Griffin Newman?

  Two Jumanjis, four Kung Fu Pandas.

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  Oh, fuck, you're right.

• 2:26:37Griffin Newman?

  Two Goosebumps, one house with a clock in its walls.

• 2:26:40David Sims?

  Just the one, so far.

• 2:26:42Griffin Newman?

  Shark Tale.

• 2:26:42Speaker 03

  A School of Rock.

• 2:26:43Griffin Newman?

  Minecraft, School of Rock, Nacho Libre was also a hit.

• 2:26:46David Sims?

  Nacho Libre did well, considering it's Nacho Libre. His only real flop is Gulliver's Travels, which still, like-

• 2:26:52Griffin Newman?

  Made money over something?

• 2:26:53David Sims?

  Made money in, like, Moldova or whatever.

• 2:26:55Speaker 03

  So Emily Blunt had to pull out of Iron Man 2, right, for that one? That's sort of the legacy of Gulliver's Travels.

• 2:27:01David Sims?

  To be clear, this is what Talking with Max is usually like. He was pretty locked in for the Look Who's Talking To discussion, but mostly, it's kind of, right, bouncing from Hollywood ephemera, you know, and box office data, things like that.

• 2:27:12Speaker 03

  Could you tell? Was that obvious from doing a podcast with him?

• 2:27:15David Sims?

  This whole podcast has ADHD.

• 2:27:17Griffin Newman?

  But this is how we became friends.

• 2:27:18David Sims?

  Mine is just undiagnosed.

• 2:27:19Griffin Newman?

  Is you basically reaching out to us and being like, my brain sadly works the same way.

• 2:27:24David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:27:24Griffin Newman?

  Has all of these things rattling around.

• 2:27:26Speaker 03

  Look, there is something about, as I brought this up at the top of the podcast, I mean, David and I are basically the same age, grew up in the same school system-

• 2:27:35David Sims?

  Yep.

• 2:27:35Speaker 03

  At the same time, probably saw all of these movies in the same theaters, probably-

• 2:27:40David Sims?

  What was your theater? Were you-

• 2:27:41Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, like, Finchley Road 02, Muscle Hill Odeon.

• 2:27:44David Sims?

  I went to the Muscle Hill Odeon a lot. I was more of a Holloway Odeon boy. You lived in Muscle Hill, right?

• 2:27:48Speaker 03

  I also loved, no, I was a hamster boy, but I also loved, I love that Odeon 2. The whole, uh, yeah, I mean, these are-

• 2:27:55David Sims?

  I mean, I would go to the Camden Odeon a lot. Hallway Odeon was my main.

• 2:27:59Speaker 03

  Camden Odeon was a bit glossy, but.

• 2:28:01David Sims?

  It was very grotty. Yes.

• 2:28:04Speaker 03

  But we have a, we have a lot of shared history. And then Griffin, I feel like we have an insane amount of shared history because your father filmmaker.

• 2:28:11Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:28:12Speaker 03

  Mother not born here, but sort of intellectual, slightly eccentric.

• 2:28:18Griffin Newman?

  And I think that thing of like us independently becoming film nerds and then having a parent who could be like, if you're interested in this, I can explain this shit to you.

• 2:28:27David Sims?

  Right. And I can kind of, I can tell you some things, right? I can kind of provide context. Yes.

• 2:28:33Speaker 03

  So I feel deeply connected to this podcast on a spiritual level. And as you know, very grateful for its existence.

• 2:28:41David Sims?

  Would you go to the HMV that was in like the top by the Hampstead Station?

• 2:28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:45David Sims?

  I spent like half my life there.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47David Sims?

  Just because that would be the thing where you go in and be like, I've got 10 pounds. I'm walking out of here with one to two CDs. Like, so I gotta really think.

• 2:28:54Speaker 03

  Not to sound, not to sound like John Travolta sneaking his children into Total Recall, but there was a great trick you could do at HMV, which is if you opened your CDs from the left side and not the right side, you could keep the tags on.

• 2:29:07David Sims?

  Go ahead.

• 2:29:08Speaker 03

  Copy the CD. Take it back. Get it returned.

• 2:29:11David Sims?

  You could burn the CD.

• 2:29:12Speaker 03

  So yeah, I went there many times and I don't think I ever spent a dollar.

• 2:29:17David Sims?

  Wow.

• 2:29:17Speaker 03

  Or a pound.

• 2:29:18David Sims?

  Or a pound. Yes. Come on. It's the UK.

• 2:29:21Speaker 03

  Or a euro.

• 2:29:24Speaker 03

  What else were you haunts, David, as a youngin?

• 2:29:27Griffin Newman?

  Well, Pound, Poundland. Did you go to Poundland?

• 2:29:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, we pounded out.

• 2:29:32David Sims?

  No, I only went to Poundland at university when I had no money. And a place like Poundland is actually kind of.

• 2:29:37Speaker 03

  Cockfosters?

• 2:29:39David Sims?

  I have been to Cockfosters. Have you ever been to Cockfosters?

• 2:29:41Speaker 03

  I've never been, but it makes me laugh every time.

• 2:29:44David Sims?

  It's always funny. If you get out there, there's a big woods you can go into. I went there once.

• 2:29:48Speaker 03

  And the next station is Cockfosters.

• 2:29:51David Sims?

  This is a train to Cockfosters.

• 2:29:53Speaker 03

  They really hit it.

• 2:29:55David Sims?

  They really hit it.

• 2:29:56Speaker 03

  Cockfosters.

• 2:29:58David Sims?

  What were my haunts? Oh, you know, the internet cafe on, uh, on Regent Street. No, I don't know. I mean, what was my life back then? I went to Rowan's. You ever go to Rowan's?

• 2:30:07Speaker 03

  I didn't.

• 2:30:08David Sims?

  The bowling alley in Finchley, uh, Finsbury Park?

• 2:30:11Speaker 03

  No, I don't think I did.

• 2:30:12David Sims?

  I went there all the fucking time. It was a bowling alley. You could pay 50 pence to enter.

• 2:30:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:30:17David Sims?

  You had to give them some money to get in there. There was a bowling alley. There was a big bar where you could get food. And even 13 years old, like, it's perfect.

• 2:30:24Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 2:30:24David Sims?

  And there was a giant arcade. Like, you know, arcade cabinets.

• 2:30:27Speaker 03

  Well, the bowling alley, do you ever go to the Acton Warner Brothers Theatre?

• 2:30:31David Sims?

  No way. I mean, when would I have ever been in Acton?

• 2:30:34Speaker 03

  Because I would go to, that also had like a bowling alley and a arcade thing.

• 2:30:40David Sims?

  Sure.

• 2:30:40Speaker 03

  Saw lots of important movies there. Daylight.

• 2:30:42David Sims?

  Great movie. I saw it on a plane, but great movie.

• 2:30:44Speaker 03

  Really good fucking movie. And The Fifth Element, I saw twice at that theatre.

• 2:30:48David Sims?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:30:49Speaker 03

  I do remember only-

• 2:30:50David Sims?

  Were you in Acton because like the BBC was over there? Like, why were you in Acton?

• 2:30:53Speaker 03

  BBC one, BBC two. Um, I don't know. I think I just went, because it was a, a place you could see daylight. Um, I do, um, I think Griffin, you're like this as well. I don't remember anything in my life. I can't remember what I did yesterday. I remember exactly where I saw every movie.

• 2:31:09David Sims?

  Me too. That is unfortunately a sickness of mine as well. I would go to Notting Hill and get, uh, go to the computer exchange, which was right outside the station, and spend hours there. Like, remember when, before the internet, you just had to go to a store? And just like, it's like, I'm just gonna be in the fucking record store all day because I can buy one record.

• 2:31:27Griffin Newman?

  I spent half of high school at the, uh, Union Square version mega store. That was my version of the HMV you're talking about.

• 2:31:33David Sims?

  Look, when I came to America, I would go to a mega store, purchase mega stores, yeah.

• 2:31:36Griffin Newman?

  I just wanna, I'm not looking for a medal, but I just want to call out how I'm not even doing the bit of being annoyed that I can't do the bit. I just let you guys-

• 2:31:48Speaker 03

  I was pretty proud of you, Griffin. I was gonna-

• 2:31:50Griffin Newman?

  For eight minutes, I wasn't, I wasn't scratching myself. I wasn't biting my tongue. I just let you guys talk about local UK haunts.

• 2:32:00David Sims?

  Now, you're not an Arsenal fan, right?

• 2:32:02Speaker 03

  No, I'm not. We really should have, mate, we should avoid, we should avoid, we should avoid football as a subject.

• 2:32:07David Sims?

  But you didn't grow up going to football games, or-

• 2:32:10Speaker 03

  I did. No, I, I, and I'm a diehard football fan, but the, if I get into explaining who I support and why-

• 2:32:18David Sims?

  Now, and we've gotten into it off the mic.

• 2:32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's not talk about it. I will, I will-

• 2:32:21David Sims?

  I'm just trying to think of other things I did in England besides like go to school. Just mostly what I had to do.

• 2:32:27Speaker 03

  Where did you go to school?

• 2:32:28David Sims?

  CLS.

• 2:32:29Speaker 03

  Oh, right. City of London. I am working with a filmmaker right now, I think, went to City of London, Mickey Down.

• 2:32:35David Sims?

  Huh. Must have been younger than me.

• 2:32:37Speaker 03

  Who's one of the creators of Industry. I'm pretty sure he was a City boy as well.

• 2:32:41David Sims?

  Hey.

• 2:32:41Speaker 03

  Probably your age. You might have been there at a similar time.

• 2:32:44David Sims?

  It was a classic. He's a couple of years younger than me, maybe. It's a classic. Uh, my parents were like, fuck, you got in. Like, you know what I mean? Where it was like, and I later I asked.

• 2:32:55Griffin Newman?

  What do you mean?

• 2:32:56David Sims?

  It was a test school and I, I got a, I got a scholarship, like I got money. And like, my parents were like, basically, they were kind of like, I mean, take the test, you know, but they, they basically weren't like, oh, well, so, you know, they were quite surprised. And I remember later I asked my teacher, God bless him, Mr. Phillips, and I believe he's now retired, like, cause he interviewed me. He was my interview. I remember. I was like, oh, you know, do you remember your interview? And he was like, yep. Your math score was right on the line. And it was one of those like, oh, if he could, if we like him in the interview, well, you know, then we'll think about it. So he did tell me that I, I just.

• 2:33:30Speaker 03

  Were you, did you have an American accent?

• 2:33:32David Sims?

  I did.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  Was that tough for you?

• 2:33:33David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:33:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can imagine that was hard.

• 2:33:35David Sims?

  Especially if you remember in the early 2000s, America's rep in the UK was a little dodgy.

• 2:33:41Griffin Newman?

  Did, did the school boys do the reverse version of the bit to you? Did they do like, oh, really? Did you grow up in New York?

• 2:33:47David Sims?

  No, they didn't really do that. No, I just got a lot of shit from like American. No, they weren't that creative. I mean, George W. Bush was president and then we went into Iraq and Britain had, you know, went into Iraq too. You know what I mean? Like, America was just very unpopular.

• 2:34:01Griffin Newman?

  Turned out, let me check my notes here quickly.

• 2:34:03David Sims?

  A plus. I'm seeing here that George Bush is standing behind to sign that this mission accomplished. So I assume it went great.

• 2:34:09Griffin Newman?

  Close the book on that one.

• 2:34:11David Sims?

  Uh, no, I got some shit. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. It was fine. It was like my life. My life was that I was the weirdo.

• 2:34:17Speaker 03

  But you, you seem to have a positive.

• 2:34:20David Sims?

  I'm a pretty positive fella.

• 2:34:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, memory of it, right? When you talk about, when you have to talk about your time in England in every episode, because it's forced upon you.

• 2:34:28David Sims?

  Given that I went to a uniformed school that was all boys, that was like this kind of posh school, not as posh as some, you know, like your Westminster.

• 2:34:36Speaker 03

  He's pointing at me, by the way.

• 2:34:37David Sims?

  I don't know where you went to school.

• 2:34:38Griffin Newman?

  This, by the way, just feels like we're just having a catch up conversation. This is usually us going to like get lunch.

• 2:34:43David Sims?

  I gotta go, yeah, yeah. You, but where did you go to school? You went to St Anthony's, I know that.

• 2:34:46Speaker 03

  I did, and then I went to UCS.

• 2:34:48David Sims?

  Oh, sure. Oh, UCS always seemed cool.

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  UCS, um, the school of Alex Garland.

• 2:34:55David Sims?

  Yeah, there you go. Did they have the, the pinstripes?

• 2:34:58Speaker 03

  We had a horrific maroon and black stripes.

• 2:35:01David Sims?

  It was one of those things where it was just like mug me, just this like glaring symbol. Because I remember I wore black and I was kind of like, oh, our uniform is boring. And my mom was like, no, no, no, like, that's good. You don't want to be like advertising like, uh, yeah.

• 2:35:15Speaker 03

  It was a hideous uniform.

• 2:35:16David Sims?

  Yeah, uh, CLS, it was, it was a good school. I had good teachers. I, I have a lot of love for some of my teachers.

• 2:35:22Speaker 03

  This is really interesting, I think, to a lot of, um, your listeners who've tuned in to hear about.

• 2:35:26Griffin Newman?

  This is either going to be people's favorite thing, or this is the moment where everyone unsubscribes.

• 2:35:31David Sims?

  And I fell in love with the movies more than anywhere else.

• 2:35:35Griffin Newman?

  Hey.

• 2:35:35David Sims?

  And we all go into the Holloway audience and to the screen on the hill and

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:40David Sims?

  To the fucking Notting Hill Gate and the, you know, Everyman and the, the Phoenix in Finchley. Did you ever go to the Phoenix?

• 2:35:45Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 2:35:45David Sims?

  That's a great theater.

• 2:35:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:35:46David Sims?

  And I believe that's still going strong.

• 2:35:48Speaker 03

  Good, I hope so.

• 2:35:49David Sims?

  Yeah, go check it out.

• 2:35:50Griffin Newman?

  Uh, Max, is there anything you want to plug?

• 2:35:52David Sims?

  London.

• 2:35:52Speaker 03

  Nothing I really want to plug.

• 2:35:54David Sims?

  Oh, come on, Max.

• 2:35:55Speaker 03

  I want to plug this podcast.

• 2:35:56David Sims?

  Hey.

• 2:35:56Speaker 03

  I'm so thrilled to be on it.

• 2:35:59Griffin Newman?

  It's long overdue.

• 2:36:00Speaker 03

  Glad we did it finally. I will return with, um, Jamie Bell, my much more charismatic cohort, and, uh, either we'll revise or figure out something else.

• 2:36:10Griffin Newman?

  Absolutely.

• 2:36:13David Sims?

  You're in The Handmaid's Tale. That's in its final season. I am. It's just ending.

• 2:36:16Speaker 03

  It's, uh, I think airing now?

• 2:36:19David Sims?

  Yeah, it's airing now. I think, I think, right, this is the last season, right?

• 2:36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:23David Sims?

  I'll confess, I don't know what your character's up to anymore, but I assume it's all very- Good things, mostly good things.

• 2:36:27Speaker 03

  You and me both, my love. Um, I couldn't tell you what he's up to, but I shot it. Um, and, uh-

• 2:36:33David Sims?

  You're filming industry right now.

• 2:36:35Speaker 03

  I'm filming-

• 2:36:35David Sims?

  Right, you're in C3 of Industry 4?

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  Four.

• 2:36:39David Sims?

  Four.

• 2:36:39Speaker 03

  Season four of Industry. Um, check out Shell, which will be out later this year at some point.

• 2:36:44David Sims?

  It will?

• 2:36:44Speaker 03

  It will be.

• 2:36:45David Sims?

  Excited to see that. Who's got Shell? Who, who picked up Shell? You can't tell me.

• 2:36:48Speaker 03

  I don't know if I can say that yet, but it'll, it'll-

• 2:36:50David Sims?

  Now, is Kit Harrington still in Industry?

• 2:36:52Speaker 03

  He is, he's, and, yes, yes.

• 2:36:55David Sims?

  Is he a good lad? Is he a fun hang, Kit Harrington?

• 2:36:57Speaker 03

  One of, one of the nicest people I've ever met.

• 2:36:59David Sims?

  He's very small. Very little.

• 2:37:00Speaker 03

  He's, well, look, I'm not, I'm not a massive Luton fan either. No, it's an amazing group of people. It's been, um, a lot of fun.

• 2:37:09David Sims?

  I love that show. I think it's great. Ooh, Kieran and Shipka's in this season. I'm seeing here. And Cal Penn, wow. Claire Forlani, I have so many questions.

• 2:37:17Speaker 03

  I got to work with Claire Forlani the other day. I will just finish with this. And had no idea that she was in the show or gonna be on set. And that's a big fucking deal.

• 2:37:28David Sims?

  Yeah, Meet Joe Black.

• 2:37:29Speaker 03

  I mean, I lost my mind and, um, I tried to explain to her that Meet Joe Black is like a really important film. I think to basically men who were 14 at the time that Meet Joe Black was released.

• 2:37:44David Sims?

  Uh huh.

• 2:37:44Speaker 03

  It is a movie that has an insane relevance to teen, people who were just teenage boys when that film came out.

• 2:37:51David Sims?

  Is she like, what are you talking about? I thought that movie just didn't do well. Like, she's just sort of like, forget it.

• 2:37:55Speaker 03

  I don't think she's conscious of the fact that it is, um, so meaningful to a lot of people.

• 2:38:00David Sims?

  It's a good movie. We were very positive about it on this show.

• 2:38:03Speaker 03

  I will, you know, cause I'm also a Die Hard Succession fan.

• 2:38:05David Sims?

  Sure.

• 2:38:06Speaker 03

  It is quite strange how much overlap there is between those two projects.

• 2:38:11David Sims?

  Industry and Succession?

• 2:38:12Speaker 03

  No, Succession and Meet Joe Black. I feel like Meet Joe Black has a lot of Succession-

• 2:38:17David Sims?

  Interesting. Like, supporting, well, oh, yes. Yeah, cause it's got, you're right. I mean, it's sort of the, the, the, right, the, the guy giving away the business and completely.

• 2:38:26Speaker 03

  When I first saw Succession, the pilot, I remember being like, is this, is it the same universe as Meet Joe Black?

• 2:38:31David Sims?

  How great would it be if Joe Black showed up in the final episode of Succession? I buy it on the network and then finally Brad Pitt shows up. He's like, who the fuck are you? Everything's gonna be Iri.

• 2:38:43Griffin Newman?

  Okay, I think that's the end of the episode.

• 2:38:44David Sims?

  Thank you, everybody.

• 2:38:45Griffin Newman?

  Thank you for being here. Thank you all for listening. I nailed one successful callback. Tune in next week, not for Look Who's Talking Now, that will be happening over on our Patreon.

• 2:38:55David Sims?

  That's right.

• 2:38:56Griffin Newman?

  With our good friend Rebecca Alter.

• 2:38:57David Sims?

  In fact, next week, Griffin, we shall be having a final reckoning.

• 2:39:02Griffin Newman?

  A final reckoning.

• 2:39:03David Sims?

  With Mission Impossible. One assumes the final film in the franchise?

• 2:39:07Griffin Newman?

  We'll find out.

• 2:39:08David Sims?

  You never know.

• 2:39:08Griffin Newman?

  We wait with bated breath. You seem unconvinced. No, so this doesn't come out till? Late May. May? Oh my god.

• 2:39:16David Sims?

  It's April now, it's not that crazy.

• 2:39:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:18David Sims?

  Um, but yes, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning approacheth.

• 2:39:22Griffin Newman?

  And then we'll, we'll return.

• 2:39:24David Sims?

  Clueless.

• 2:39:24Griffin Newman?

  After that, Clueless with Heidi Gardner.

• 2:39:26David Sims?

  That's right. We can tell you that Heidi Gardner is the guest on this episode because we recorded it.

• 2:39:30Griffin Newman?

  Your favorite movie.

• 2:39:31David Sims?

  She's showing up. And it's my favorite movie. And she was such a good guest.

• 2:39:34Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:39:35David Sims?

  It'd be funny if I was like, and she stank. Oh, she shits the bed. But the movie's good.

• 2:39:39Griffin Newman?

  It's a great episode. Um, so thank you all for listening. Look forward to that. And as always, just remember that Mr. Toilet Man eats your poo poo and your pee pee.

• 2:39:55Speaker 01

  Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley. Our creative producer is Marie Bardy Salinas. And our associate producer is A.J. McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by A.J. McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by J.J. Birch. Our theme song is by Lain Montgomery and the Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Holly Moss, and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is Minnick. Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help. Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit. Join our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes.

• 2:40:40Speaker 01

  Follow us on social at Blank Check Pod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.