Taxi Driver with Tracy Letts

You poddin' to me? Well, listener, actually - we are podding to you. For nearly FOUR HOURS. The great Tracy Letts joins us to talk about Scorsese's monumental Taxi Driver, a film that is both fully ingrained in the American psyche and completely surprising and effective on every rewatch. Of course we're gonna spend our longest episode ever talking about it! This week, we discuss Paul Schrader's "God's Lonely Man" fixation, Ben's uncle's experiences as a New York City cab driver, the 1976 Oscars, Taxi Driver's themes of male loneliness and white supremacy, the incredible performances of Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, and how totally normal it is to go to a porno theater on your second date. Oh, and there's plenty of physical media talk. Taxi Driver discussion begins at 46:52 Listen to the 1976 Draft ep of the Big Picture https://open.spotify.com/episode/6CrUFsBll143Vk0ONS2tn6 Check out MVD Marquee https://mvdshop.com/products/new-york-new-york-collectors-edition-4k-ultra-hd?srsltid=AfmBOopUGttzkBFfi6ekwOwaXSJU3GmhsG3qmL6LVTaf_N7FANNJRgF2 / Radiant https://www.radiancefilms.us/ / Vinegar Syndrom https://vinegarsyndrome.com/ Buy The Haunting to listen to Tracy and Sean do a commentary https://diabolikdvd.com/product/the-haunting-scream-factory-4k-uhd-blu-ray-preorder/ Watch Bette Davis and Robert Wise, Oscars 1987 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIrqJU0pjPs Watch "The King of Horror" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwfziq-pQDo Read Transcendental Style in Film https://www.ucpress.edu/books/transcendental-style-in-film/paper Read You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/130629/youll-never-eat-lunch-in-this-town-again-by-julia-phillips/ Read Drama: An Actor's Education https://www.harpercollins.com/products/drama-john-lithgow?variant=32205506773026 Read Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet “By Mark Jacobson https://nymag.com/news/features/50177/ Listen to Marty go Hogg wild https://open.spotify.com/episode/3KuLhxtGagWdAOoOZvrqqD 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.

• 0:21Griffin Newman?

  Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere, in bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man. Juneth. My life has taken another turn again. The days can go on with regularity over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next, a long continuous chain. Then suddenly, there is a podcast.

• 0:47David Sims?

  What's the word there?

• 0:48Griffin Newman?

  Change?

• 0:49David Sims?

  I thought you might do, "Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads."

• 0:52Griffin Newman?

  I thought about that.

• 0:53David Sims?

  You know, you might do that one.

• 0:54Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 0:55David Sims?

  There is a man who would not podcast it anymore. I don't know.

• 0:58Griffin Newman?

  "I'm God's loneliest man" does feel to me like the best line in this film.

• 1:03David Sims?

  Hey, this is a movie with some nice little pieces of writing in it. Yeah, sure, that's a good one.

• 1:10Griffin Newman?

  It is crazy. If you ask most people on the street, like, "Name movies that you think are well-directed or well-written," right? Like, just, even if you haven't seen it, what are the movies that you think of that people talk about as being, like, serious, highbrow examples of great American direction and great American screenwriting? And this film was snubbed in both Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards in 1976.

• 1:33David Sims?

  Well, you know, they're not too smart.

• 1:35Griffin Newman?

  No, but that's wild that it didn't get...

• 1:38David Sims?

  It's not wild. It's about a psychopath who kills a couple of guys in a brothel.

• 1:44Griffin Newman?

  It got four Academy Award nominations, it got Best Picture.

• 1:46David Sims?

  I think that's more a sign of what a, you know, what a breakthrough it was. Do you want to know, though, who...

• 1:53Griffin Newman?

  Yes. No, I know the lineup is insane.

• 1:55David Sims?

  Well, do you want to know who beat out Scorsese in Director? It's very interesting.

• 2:00Griffin Newman?

  You're saying who's like...

• 2:01David Sims?

  There's three nominees in Director who were nominated for Best Picture, and then there's two substitutes.

• 2:07Griffin Newman?

  Is this the same year as Bound for Glory?

• 2:09David Sims?

  It is the same year as...

• 2:10Griffin Newman?

  So Hal Ashby doesn't get nominated.

• 2:12David Sims?

  Hal Ashby also snubbed.

• 2:13Griffin Newman?

  Rude.

• 2:14David Sims?

  A good director, obviously.

• 2:15Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. The first Steadicam movie.

• 2:17David Sims?

  That's so true.

• 2:18Griffin Newman?

  It's very true. Okay, so the three that do connect, obviously, are all the president's men.

• 2:24David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:25Griffin Newman?

  Network and Nashville?

• 2:26David Sims?

  No.

• 2:27Griffin Newman?

  No, not Nashville, sorry. Network and...

• 2:29David Sims?

  The Best Picture winner of 1976. Our guest knows it.

• 2:32Griffin Newman?

  Oh, it's Rocky.

• 2:33David Sims?

  Rocky. Because he was just drafting these movies.

• 2:35Griffin Newman?

  That is wild that John Avildsen...

• 2:37David Sims?

  He does win.

• 2:38Griffin Newman?

  ...wins Best Director, and Martin Scorsese was not nominated for Best Director. And I say, I say, no offense to anyone who might have worked on the film, I play Rocky. Who plays John Avildsen in the film?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  You talking to me?

• 2:48Griffin Newman?

  I'm talking to you.

• 2:49David Sims?

  This is great.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  See, I thought that way.

• 2:52David Sims?

  He was, he had it in the...

• 2:53Griffin Newman?

  You got what you wanted, Ben.

• 2:55David Sims?

  In the holster.

• 2:56Griffin Newman?

  It couldn't have been better than that.

• 2:57David Sims?

  Wow, thank you so much.

• 2:58Griffin Newman?

  And what delivery, what presence. Uh, who plays Avildsen in I Play Rocky?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Jay Duplass.

• 3:06David Sims?

  Oh.

• 3:07Griffin Newman?

  That's pretty good casting.

• 3:08David Sims?

  That's interesting, yeah.

• 3:09Griffin Newman?

  That's pretty good casting.

• 3:10David Sims?

  Because I think Avildsen is kind of like, he's like a tough Chicago guy, right? Like, he was sort of like, yeah, like a...

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Jay's great in the movie.

• 3:16David Sims?

  Workaday, well, Jay Duplass.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Well, I haven't seen the movie, but he was great when I saw him. Although I never saw him act in the movie. So, in other words, Jay may stink in the movie, I don't know, I haven't seen it.

• 3:25Griffin Newman?

  You saw him in hair and makeup. He had the look.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I saw him at dinner.

• 3:29Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  He was great at dinner.

• 3:31Griffin Newman?

  Okay, so you didn't even see him. Maybe the look's bad. Maybe they put a clown wig on.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  So he was wearing a great jacket.

• 3:36Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 3:37David Sims?

  It is just interesting to consider Best Picture that year, right, goes to right, you know, and so, yes, Director, you've got Avildsen, Pacula, and Sidney Lumet.

• 3:45Griffin Newman?

  And then the two substitutes.

• 3:47David Sims?

  Lyna Vertmuller for Seven Beauties, so a, you know, groundbreaking, the first woman nominated for directing. And Bergman? Ingmar Bergman for Face to Face. Which is like, they gave, you know, they gave Bergman a lot of noms post, you know, sort of in his later career. But that's the sort of, I forgot about Face to Face. Like, I remember Cries and Whispers, Breaks Through, and all that, you know, like, Fanny Alexander.

• 4:09Griffin Newman?

  Our guest just did a 1976 draft on Big Picture.

• 4:12David Sims?

  No one drafted Face to Face, right?

• 4:14Griffin Newman?

  No one drafted Face to Face.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  I didn't. I mentioned it in the honorable mentions, just because of Ullman's performance. It's not, it's not, you know, it's not top-tier Bergman.

• 4:21David Sims?

  It's not a Bergman I've seen, and I know it's one of the ones that was, that was for television, and there's different versions and all that.

• 4:28Griffin Newman?

  It is just fascinating that 1976 was the first female Best Director nominee. It doesn't happen again until 93? What year's piano?

• 4:37David Sims?

  That sounds right.

• 4:38Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 4:39David Sims?

  93.

• 4:40Griffin Newman?

  And then doesn't happen again until 2003.

• 4:42David Sims?

  2003 is Sofia Coppola, right? That's the third time?

• 4:46Griffin Newman?

  Right. When we've had four since then, like, it's doubled.

• 4:49David Sims?

  Oh, maybe even more, right? I mean, it's gotten a little less unusual for a woman to direct.

• 4:54Griffin Newman?

  Two Chloe Zhao nominations.

• 4:55David Sims?

  And Kathryn Bigelow won.

• 4:57Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, she's the first to win. She's the fifth... No, she's the fourth ever nominee.

• 5:02David Sims?

  I think she's the fourth nominated.

• 5:04Griffin Newman?

  Yes, and she's the first to win.

• 5:06David Sims?

  And then you had, scrolling down here...

• 5:09Griffin Newman?

  Champion second nom.

• 5:10David Sims?

  You had Gerwig in 2017 for a little movie called Lady Bird, in which the man to my right says...

• 5:16Griffin Newman?

  This is true.

• 5:17David Sims?

  Says, "Fuck," maybe the best single line delivery of the word "fuck" I've ever heard. "Oh, fuck," I believe is the line.

• 5:24Griffin Newman?

  To me, it's Doritos.

• 5:25David Sims?

  Well, look, there's a lot of good line readings. I'm just, is it "oh, fuck" or just "fuck"? I think it's "oh, fuck." It's when she tells you she got into, you know, NYU or whatever.

• 5:35Griffin Newman?

  It speaks to the quality of the performance, though, that we both were thinking, there's a one-word utterance...

• 5:41David Sims?

  "oh, fuck."

• 5:42Griffin Newman?

  ...that lives in my mind forever, and we had different answers. Doritos.

• 5:46David Sims?

  And then you're forgetting, of course, that Emerald Fennel was nominated for...

• 5:50Griffin Newman?

  I was not forgetting. I was building the drumroll up to, of course, the most worthy nominee in the history of Best Director.

• 5:55David Sims?

  And Justine Triere was nominated a couple of years ago for Narnia Fall, and Carly Fargé was nominated for The Substance, and last year, Chloe Zhao again. Yeah, so it's gotten much, you know, look, we're celebrating that now often one woman will be part of the five.

• 6:13Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 6:14David Sims?

  And we're celebrating that, obviously. Yeah, right. Golf clubs all around for the Academy. More women direct movies now. Still not that many, but more.

• 6:22Griffin Newman?

  The other thing is that now the Academy feels increasingly international, and you almost always have a foreign Best Director nominee, and you almost always have a couple international films in Best Picture. And as Sean called out in the 76 draft, in the 70s, the Oscars were all about this. It was like, suddenly, the Oscars were like...

• 6:43David Sims?

  The Oscars are pretty cool in the 70s.

• 6:45Griffin Newman?

  They were stretching their arms around it.

• 6:46David Sims?

  At least nominee-wise.

• 6:47Griffin Newman?

  Beyond everything interesting happening in Hollywood, they were like, bringing in foreign performances, first female Director nominee, foreign films in Best Picture and Best Director lineups, and then by the 80s, they're just like, "We're back to our fucking bullshit." And it's finally come back around now, 40 years later.

• 7:03David Sims?

  Prestige cinema sort of changes in the 80s.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Oh, very much.

• 7:07David Sims?

  If that, right? Like, 80s cinema is rich. There's lots of great...

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Rocky and Star Wars start that.

• 7:13David Sims?

  You're responsible for this. But you know, when you think about movies like Out of Africa, the sort of like, you know, Gandhi, these like, big epics of the 80s, it's like, those are absent in the 70s, and they come back.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:23Griffin Newman?

  You could argue, though, that there's something in the Taxi Driver, Rocky divide specifically. These two movies, right? These two character studies of kind of lonely men in cities that are merging a kind of like neo-realism with some kind of more classical Hollywood traditions. But Taxi Driver is using that entirely to make you feel bad, and Rocky is using all of that to make you feel great. And the second that kind of code is cracked with Rocky of like, "Here's a way to make a traditionally crowd-pleasing Hollywood picture that still feels kind of edgy and artistic," it's a little bit game over? Beyond just Star Wars making like, this is just pure blockbuster shit, it's like,

• 8:07Griffin Newman?

  well, then we'll just give the Best Picture to the thing that's closest to Rocky.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Well, if for no other reason than just the happy ending. I mean, Hollywood had been addicted to the downer ending for a lot of years. People were thirsty for a happy ending. I mean, they waited till Rocky II to make it a kind of a dumb happy ending, but one has the good happy ending.

• 8:29Griffin Newman?

  One could argue that's the brilliance of Rocky, and the thing they really fucking cracked is, how do you have a classic 70s new Hollywood downer ending that also feels like a triumph? And if you can do that, then who wants just the digging into the depths of how broken men are?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Well, credit to Sylvester Stallone for that screenplay. I mean, he, he, he found a way to walk that line.

• 8:54David Sims?

  It's nuts.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Great way. But I remember as an 11 year old, watching the Academy Awards, uh, who had loved Rocky in the theater. I was still enraged that Rocky won best picture. I knew that was, that was.

• 9:06David Sims?

  At the time, you were like, this is nonsense.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  At the time.

• 9:09David Sims?

  Was there a movie you were rooting for?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Well, I'm, uh, All the President's Men or Network or Taxi Driver.

• 9:18David Sims?

  Right. But even at the time, you knew like, those are the good movies.

• 9:21Griffin Newman?

  I think about, I run the simulation in my head of watching this Oscars live. And I just have to imagine Network winning three out of four acting awards and best screenplay. Going into the final chunk of the night, it must've felt like, well, this is inevitable. And then suddenly everything swings Rocky for the final two big awards.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Right. I'd like to redo some of the Academy Awards from that year. Do you mind?

• 9:46Griffin Newman?

  Please.

• 9:47David Sims?

  Oh, I've got it open right here.

• 9:49Griffin Newman?

  Beatrice Straight, I think is a bad win.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I'm gonna give the Academy Award for Best Picture to All the President's Men.

• 9:53Griffin Newman?

  Sure, respectable.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  I'm going to give the Academy Award for Best Director to Alan Pacula for All the President's Men.

• 9:59David Sims?

  So over Taxi Driver, the film we're here to discuss today.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Over Taxi Driver. I think All the President's Men's one of the, one of our, one of our all time greats. For Best Actor, I'm going to move Peter Finch into Supporting Actor. Because William Holden is the lead in the movie.

• 10:17David Sims?

  Obviously Finch is not all over that movie.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  I'm gonna move Peter Finch into Supporting Actor and I'm gonna kick out, uh, I don't know, Ned Beatty. I'm gonna kick out Ned Beatty.

• 10:27David Sims?

  Why don't you kick out, it's tough. It's interesting because it's right. It's Beatty, Olivier for Marathon Man. And then two Rocky guys, Young and Burgess Meredith, both of whom are, are pretty fun.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  You're not gonna kick out Burgess Meredith.

• 10:40David Sims?

  No, of course not.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Go ahead, make an argument for kicking out Burt Young.

• 10:43David Sims?

  Burt Young's pretty great in the first Rocky. Like, he lays it on thick after that, but like, yeah.

• 10:48Griffin Newman?

  Well, and then he brings it back around when he fucks the robot. Is All the President's Men.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Loves the robot.

• 10:53Griffin Newman?

  Is All the President's Men, it's implied heavily that he fucks the robot. Is All the President's Men.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Who fucks a robot?

• 10:59David Sims?

  Paulie. In the fourth Rocky, there's a robot that Burt Young's character falls in love with.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Oh, maybe. I haven't seen four. It really went off the rails, didn't it?

• 11:08David Sims?

  You've seen four, but you just don't remember that because it's nonsense. I mean, four is also like 78 minutes long and has four montages and anyone, everyone just remembers the Dolph Lundgren scene, the Russian stuff.

• 11:19Griffin Newman?

  My brother is a boxing fanatic and we watched Rocky together. My dad was like, this is a big moment. I'm gonna show you boys Rocky. And I was like, that's good. And my brother was like, I need to watch every Rocky film. And I was like, I think I can tap out here. And he gets the box set and he's watching all of them. And I was kinda checked out when, oh, okay, James, he got the living room TV. There's another Rocky movie on tonight. So he's going through two and three and I'm not paying attention. Oh, Mr. T's in this one? Okay. He fights Apollo again? Okay. And then I just walk in at one point in Rocky four and I go, he's got a fucking robot now? And they go, yeah, Rocky bought Paulie a robot for his birthday. Cause I guess Rocky's like a millionaire now. In the universe of the movies. And then I was back in because of the robot.

• 12:04Griffin Newman?

  And they, there is a scene that implies that Paulie has physical relations with the robot. I need to figure out what the line of dialogue is, but there's a line that pained for me.

• 12:13David Sims?

  Okay. Can we get back to relitigating the Academy Awards?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  So you're gonna take out Ned Beatty and.

• 12:17Griffin Newman?

  To this point, I just wanna say, I'm, I'm more inclined to give Ned Beatty the supporting win. I think that's one of the greatest one scene performances in history. It's true supporting shit.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  If you feel that way, then we'll kick out Burt Young and we'll keep Ned Beatty.

• 12:32Griffin Newman?

  I think that's.

• 12:32David Sims?

  But you don't like, you don't like Robards enough to give him the win.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  I love Robards and this is a heartbreaker, not to give Robards the win, but we're gonna give it to Peter Finch.

• 12:42Griffin Newman?

  Is Julia.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  For Best Supporting Actor.

• 12:44Griffin Newman?

  Before or after All the President's Men?

• 12:46David Sims?

  It's after, which makes it all the weirder. I think I'm gonna double check that, but.

• 12:51Griffin Newman?

  Cause it's two consecutive years.

• 12:52David Sims?

  He wins two years in a row and you're like, oh, well, they must've been, the second one must've been President's Men because he's just so good. It was undeniable. It's like, no, they decided Julia was undeniable.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's almost like they gave him two awards for All the President's Men.

• 13:04David Sims?

  Right. Oh, that's kinda, who's he? Dashiell Hammond or something? He's like, yeah. So I haven't seen Julia, but I assume it's a lot of him being like, oh, I love booze.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Well, it's not a lot of him doing much of anything. He's really not very, very, he's not in it very much.

• 13:17David Sims?

  It's, you know what? I gotta watch Julia. I gotta put my money where my mouth is to fully agree that he should not have won that Oscar.

• 13:23Griffin Newman?

  But in this alternate reality, we're putting Finch in supporting. We're giving him.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Best Supporting Actor. We're gonna give him Best Supporting Actor. He's a heartbreaker to, to, I mean, just a heartbreaker. One of those years.

• 13:33Griffin Newman?

  Robards will get the Julia Award next year as a makeup for All the President's Men.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Sure, fine.

• 13:37Griffin Newman?

  And then Burt Young, we're giving him the makeup for Rocky four when he fucks the robot.

• 13:41David Sims?

  He'll get that.

• 13:41Griffin Newman?

  And we put him in Best Lead Actor for that.

• 13:43David Sims?

  You have a best actor slot open.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And I'm giving it to Robert Redford for All the President's Men.

• 13:47David Sims?

  His best ever performance.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And I'm giving the award to Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

• 13:52David Sims?

  He's pretty good. I mean, I think De Niro.

• 13:55Griffin Newman?

  De Niro is pretty good in this film.

• 13:56David Sims?

  Was never gonna win because he had won an Oscar two years prior.

• 14:00Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 14:00David Sims?

  And of course he does eventually win a few years later for Raging Bull.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I gotta thought about that too, but keep going.

• 14:07David Sims?

  Is he losing that one?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yes, he is.

• 14:08David Sims?

  It's gone. You, you Thanos snapped it away from him.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  I'm pulling that away from him because I'm gonna take Timothy Hutton.

• 14:16Griffin Newman?

  Put him in lead.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And I'm gonna correct the category here. I'm gonna put him in lead and I'm gonna give him the.

• 14:20Griffin Newman?

  I think that's very respectable.

• 14:21David Sims?

  Ordinary people, yeah.

• 14:22Griffin Newman?

  Do you know what the De Niro situation is very parallel to? Denzel winning the supporting for Glory.

• 14:29David Sims?

  For Glory and thus he doesn't win for Malcolm X.

• 14:31Griffin Newman?

  Later, there's Malcolm X and everyone's like, fuck.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  They just gave him an Oscar.

• 14:34Griffin Newman?

  We just gave him an Oscar. I know this is a leading man performance and this is now one of the definitive screen performances in American film history. But can we do it again?

• 14:44David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Who's he up against in Malcolm X?

• 14:48Griffin Newman?

  Malcolm X, he loses the scent of a woman.

• 14:50David Sims?

  Right.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  And that's a makeup award for Pacino.

• 14:53David Sims?

  This is the, this is.

• 14:54Griffin Newman?

  The ultimate makeup.

• 14:55David Sims?

  The magic of trying to fix the Oscars.

• 14:57Griffin Newman?

  It's a fucking Sephora award.

• 14:58David Sims?

  Where you're just like, right. Okay. So we need to give Pacino award. And then, so you start digging back.

• 15:02Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 15:02David Sims?

  Where you're like, okay, should he have won for like Dog Day Afternoon or whatever? And then like.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  You should, I'm gonna take it away from Nicholson. I'm gonna give it to, uh.

• 15:09David Sims?

  Right. Cause that's, that's Nicholson's for Cuckoo's Nest. Is that his first win?

• 15:14Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:15David Sims?

  Right. No, of three, of course. But the other two are for James L. Brooks movies that you don't even like. Not to call you out.

• 15:23Griffin Newman?

  But then do you give Nicholson an award before that or after that? Like, do you, is your sliding door that Nicholson gets Chinatown?

• 15:32David Sims?

  You can give Nicholson Chinatown. Uh, that's a fun one.

• 15:36Griffin Newman?

  Do you give him Easy Rider?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Chinatown. Uh, I'm not giving him Easy Rider, but if I give him Chinatown, then I'm taking the award away from Art Carney, who everybody loves to shit on.

• 15:46Griffin Newman?

  I know.

• 15:46David Sims?

  And you love to defend.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Right, I know. I love Art Carney.

• 15:49David Sims?

  Now he's got a cat or something?

• 15:51Speaker 02

  He does. Have you never seen Harry and Tonto?

• 15:53David Sims?

  Never seen. It's a hardish movie to wa, uh, to find, right?

• 15:58Griffin Newman?

  Was there even a Twilight Time disc?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:00Griffin Newman?

  Nearly a Twilight Time disc.

• 16:02David Sims?

  Right. So, right. You, but you could.

• 16:04Griffin Newman?

  Title I've ever seen.

• 16:05David Sims?

  You could do some, that's, or you could give Pacino the Oscar that year for Godfather two over Art Carney as well.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Can I give Nicholson the award for Last Detail?

• 16:15David Sims?

  Yes, you can. Now you're taking it away from Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger. I feel like that's okay. Right, right. You're feeling happy about that.

• 16:21Griffin Newman?

  Have we fixed everything now?

• 16:23David Sims?

  I will say also in that year, you could give it to Pacino for Serpico, but I think Last Detail is a better performance than Serpico.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  But like, I think in some ways, Last Detail is sort of the.

• 16:34David Sims?

  That's Nicholson distilled.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really is.

• 16:37David Sims?

  Which I mean, Cuckoo's Nest is, has a lot of the same DNA.

• 16:40Griffin Newman?

  I feel like Nicholson also talks about feeling that Last Detail is his best performance and his best movie. I feel like he has said in interviews, it is his favorite.

• 16:50David Sims?

  I mean, you could also give it to him for Five Easy Pieces over George C. Scott for Patton. Georgie didn't even want the Oscar.

• 16:56Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, in fact.

• 16:57David Sims?

  He didn't show up.

• 16:58Griffin Newman?

  According to George.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  That's a pretty undeniable performance.

• 17:01David Sims?

  But like Lynn, let's give George an Oscar for like Doctor Strangelove or something. Let's keep going back.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  What, what year is the hospital?

• 17:08David Sims?

  So the hospital is the year after. And then you're, you're taking Hackman's away for French Connection. I'm not sure you wanna do that.

• 17:14Griffin Newman?

  Well, but then could you give Hackman, could you give Hackman for Conversation? What's the ripple effect of that?

• 17:20David Sims?

  That's, so that's 72. You're taking away Brando for The Godfather. Kind of an iconic screen performance. Now, it was his second Oscar.

• 17:28Griffin Newman?

  Who did Brando play in The Godfather?

• 17:29David Sims?

  He played The Godfather.

• 17:31Griffin Newman?

  Oh, he played The Godfather. Okay.

• 17:33David Sims?

  No, I mean, I love playing this game with the Oscars because it is so infuriating for people I know where they're like, why did Leo win his Oscar for The Revenant? I'm like, you don't understand. He was due. You know, they had missed him on this one and this. And I'm like, well, why'd they miss him on that one? You don't understand. The guy who won that year was due because he missed on this one, you know, like, and it just never ends.

• 17:53Griffin Newman?

  What's fun about this game is when you can identify one that is actually a clean lift.

• 17:58David Sims?

  Like the Lemon for Save the Tiger.

• 18:00Griffin Newman?

  Where you're like, actually, we could just pull that out and slot everything in around it and everything's fine. Cause so often it is the cause and effect where you're like, well, fuck, I can't take it away from that guy.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Tiger also, uh.

• 18:12David Sims?

  That's Avellson, right?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  What's it about? He's a, he's a salesman in a midlife.

• 18:17David Sims?

  That sounds like bullshit.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Or, uh, not a salesman. He works in the garment industry.

• 18:22David Sims?

  Garment. There you go.

• 18:23Griffin Newman?

  And that's his second win, right?

• 18:25David Sims?

  Cause he won a supporting one for Mr. Roberts. Yes. Yeah, it's weird that Lemon, who's a great actor and one of Hollywood's great figures, has two Oscars, both for movies where you're like, huh? Like, okay, that's what he won for?

• 18:40Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 18:40David Sims?

  He went for the fucking apartment? He won for Mr. Roberts?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  He probably should've won for like The Odd Couple where he's fantastic.

• 18:47Griffin Newman?

  Am I wrong in thinking that he wasn't even nominated for The Apartment?

• 18:51David Sims?

  That you are in fact wrong. He was nominated and he lost to Burt Lancaster for Elmer Gantry. And I think we can take that one away.

• 18:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 19:00David Sims?

  We can kick it over to Lemon.

• 19:01Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 19:02David Sims?

  And then we'll give it to Lancaster for, I don't know. Come on, come on, guys. Help me out here.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  The Leopard. Uh, an incredible success. Yeah.

• 19:11David Sims?

  Yeah, well, why not?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  The swimmer.

• 19:13David Sims?

  How about Lancaster for the swimmer?

• 19:14Griffin Newman?

  Even a fucking-

• 19:15David Sims?

  It's a good movie.

• 19:16Griffin Newman?

  Gold watch, uh, local hero.

• 19:18David Sims?

  The swimmer is a-

• 19:19Griffin Newman?

  That would, that would be a good lifetime of achievement.

• 19:22David Sims?

  Well, The Leopard's amazing.

• 19:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 19:24David Sims?

  It does have that thing of, oh, that's the, that's the Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman in HUD. That's a tough.

• 19:31Griffin Newman?

  We just got into this because of-

• 19:32David Sims?

  Fuck. I have him-

• 19:34Griffin Newman?

  Why did we get into this?

• 19:35David Sims?

  I having him winning for Sweet Smell Success on my personal Oscar ballot, but I have him in supporting.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 19:41David Sims?

  But I think that's defensible.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  I do.

• 19:43David Sims?

  Cause he's supporting in that film.

• 19:45Griffin Newman?

  A Color of Money episode to come later down the line. We got into this exact same conversation of the ripple effect of why Paul Newman has to win for Color of Money.

• 19:55David Sims?

  Uh, right, because like-

• 19:56Griffin Newman?

  Which is another very frustrating-

• 19:57David Sims?

  You're like, why didn't Newman win for HUD? And it's like, well, Sidney Poitier won that year. That's kind of a big deal. Like, why didn't he win for?

• 20:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 20:03David Sims?

  Cool Hand Luke. Who won Cool Hand Luke year? It's Stiger for In the Heat of the Night, which is your Best Picture winner. I'm giving it to, uh, Paul Newman for Cool Hand Luke. And then I don't have to give it to him for Color of Money because I have to say Color of Money year? He's number five on my list. He's number five behind Dexter Gordon, Bob Hoskins, William Hurt, and James Woods.

• 20:22Griffin Newman?

  Hoskins, you're number one? He's thinking. Folks, he's thinking.

• 20:27David Sims?

  The Dexter Gordon performances is great and it's great that they nominated it. It is one where you're just like, this is just the guy, right? Cause he's just kinda sitting there going like, I love saxophones. And you're like, this is cool.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  It's not as easy as it looks to just be the guy.

• 20:40Griffin Newman?

  Hey.

• 20:41David Sims?

  You know what? You got a Tony, I don't have no Tony.

• 20:44Griffin Newman?

  This is true. This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.

• 20:47David Sims?

  I'm David.

• 20:48Griffin Newman?

  This is a podcast about filmographies. Directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they shoot a bunch of people, baby. Uh, this is The Guarantor.

• 21:04David Sims?

  I wanna know who he wants for 86 Best Actor, but yes, this is sure. This is Martin Scorsese's Guarantor.

• 21:09Griffin Newman?

  This is the film that you could argue minces Martin Scorsese as Martin Scorsese. He is that for the rest of his life and for the rest of time.

• 21:18David Sims?

  Yeah, sure.

• 21:19Griffin Newman?

  I mean, even if he never-

• 21:20David Sims?

  He has his ups and downs.

• 21:21Griffin Newman?

  Made a movie again after this, even if he never made a good movie again after this, he would be in the annals of history forever. And certainly he knew how to capitalize upon this for the rest of his career, even with the ups and downs.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Um, how many of these have you guys done of Scorsese?

• 21:37David Sims?

  Uh-

• 21:38Griffin Newman?

  We've only skipped ahead for one. Otherwise we've been basically going in this order.

• 21:42David Sims?

  So I guess this is our fourth.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  You're really just getting started.

• 21:44Griffin Newman?

  We're getting started.

• 21:44David Sims?

  Yeah, we're pretty early, which, which feels appropriate.

• 21:47Griffin Newman?

  We haven't done Alice yet. We have done Color of Money already. Otherwise we've just been running up to this.

• 21:53David Sims?

  Who's That Knockin', Boxcar Bertha, Mean Streets. We've done those.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  So you can tell me who's done those with you?

• 21:59David Sims?

  Sure. Uh, Miriam Bale did Mean Streets with us. We didn't do Who Is a Film Critic? Uh, Boxcar Bertha and Who's That Knockin'? We had no guest. And then, uh, last Color of Money, we had, uh, we had the great Chris Ryan.

• 22:10Griffin Newman?

  We all know that, yes.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Okay, so you got a long way to go. Uh, the reason I ask is, have you seen everything? Have you now seen everything in the Scorsese?

• 22:18David Sims?

  I have seen every Martin Scorsese film, but for a couple of, uh, documentaries that he's put out in more recent years.

• 22:24Griffin Newman?

  Those, that's some real Patreon shit.

• 22:27David Sims?

  Um, but I've certainly seen every Scorsese feature.

• 22:29Griffin Newman?

  I have not seen, uh, Kundun. Kundun. I've not seen Last Temptation.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 22:37Griffin Newman?

  And I've not seen Age of Innocence. Those are my weird blind spots.

• 22:39David Sims?

  So you don't like the ones without, uh, guns, huh? Huh? You just want the gangster pictures? He makes a movie with a Dalai Lama and you're like, skip.

• 22:47Griffin Newman?

  I dislike his films where the title is the blank of blank.

• 22:52David Sims?

  Right, the Color of-

• 22:53Griffin Newman?

  That bit doesn't work because I also, I have seen Wolf of Wall Street, but yeah.

• 22:57David Sims?

  King of Comedy.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Is it, uh, is this a fair question to ask at this point in the process? What your favorite Martin Scorsese?

• 23:03Griffin Newman?

  I think it might be this film. I, I, someone asked me this just last weekend when I told them that we were starting up our Scorsese and they said, what do you think is the best one? And I, I just knee jerk went, it's a little bit hard to argue with Taxi Driver in my mind. I might, as we go through chronologically and re-watch the other ones, change my mind. It's not like on this re-watch, I went, no question, iron lock, no way anything's beating this. But it does feel like the purest text to me in a way of everything I think he does exceptionally. And is the ultimate example to me of a movie that only he could have made.

• 23:41David Sims?

  Tracy, what is your answer? My answer is unfortunately the very boring answer of Goodfellas.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  That's your number one Scorsese.

• 23:47David Sims?

  And then I would, I think, well, and we'll see how this series goes. After Hours, Last Temptation, and Taxi Driver are the sort of other contenders for me. Those are my favorite Scorsese movies. I like most of his movies, pretty much all of them.

• 23:59Griffin Newman?

  My take would be that I think Goodfellas is the peak of his filmmaking and that this is textually his richest film.

• 24:07David Sims?

  It's a great movie.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Uh, Taxi Driver's my first by, by some distance. I, uh, King of Comedy is probably next for me.

• 24:16David Sims?

  Pretty great.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  After Hours is-

• 24:18Griffin Newman?

  After Hours.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Way up there.

• 24:20Griffin Newman?

  That is my personal favorite, but in a, it just kinda hits me way. I would never argue it's the best, but I do think it's way up there.

• 24:26David Sims?

  Now, as we all know, you hate the nineties. And so Goodfellas is that, the nineties excess of Goodfellas.

• 24:31Griffin Newman?

  You were banned from VH1 because you kept pitching them.

• 24:33David Sims?

  Griffin, I thought I'm making the same joke. I couldn't figure it out.

• 24:36Griffin Newman?

  Storm out of their offices and go, here's the pitch. It's just me talking ahead.

• 24:40David Sims?

  How do I do a VH1?

• 24:40Griffin Newman?

  Saying how every pop culture thing from the nineties is dumb trash for babies.

• 24:45David Sims?

  You're not a nineties guy.

• 24:45Griffin Newman?

  No comedians.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Uh, I, this has already gotten a bad rap. I like the nineties. There are things about the nineties I absolutely love. Uh, and I like Goodfellas.

• 24:56David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  It's not top tier Scorsese for me, but I like it. I'm, I'm no dummy. I recognize how good Goodfellas is.

• 25:03Griffin Newman?

  It's just immaculately made.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  It absolutely is. And there are, you know, some of the set pieces in it are undeniable.

• 25:10Griffin Newman?

  It's got like five of the most watchable scenes in history.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Really amazing. I, I, I will admit that when, um, Ray Liotta slams the door in my face at the end of the movie, e- even in the movie theater in 1990, I was kinda like, well, fuck you too.

• 25:27David Sims?

  I, I know some people who felt that way. I remember that.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  I think when, again, when we talk about the Academy Awards, and I, I'm not gonna make an argument for Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas, but I wonder if that was part of the, part of the reason that Academy voters went, oh, well, fuck, you know, fuck.

• 25:44David Sims?

  Of course. The movie ends with him being like, this sucks. I gotta live in a fucking house. I'm a schnook. I eat noodles with ketchup and it's like, I mean, obviously it's all, but I think some audiences are like, you're lucky you're alive, you dumb motherfucker.

• 25:56Griffin Newman?

  It's not a unique thought.

• 25:58David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Griffin Newman?

  But I very strongly subscribe to the theory that the ending is the most important factor towards a Best Picture win.

• 26:05David Sims?

  Right.

• 26:05Griffin Newman?

  It is what is-

• 26:06David Sims?

  How are people walking out of the theater?

• 26:07Griffin Newman?

  What is the feeling you give them? Our buddy Amanda Dobbins, I think, hit the nail on the head when she saw One Battle After Another and said, the moment the needle dropped-

• 26:16David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Griffin Newman?

  For American Girl kicks in, he's probably won himself Best Picture.

• 26:20David Sims?

  You're winning over a certain sentimental portion of the audience.

• 26:24Griffin Newman?

  That's not bailing out the integrity of its ideas, but still feels like a triumph and has everyone leave in feeling up. And I remember being surprised that Enora won Best Picture because the ending is such a downer. But yet you can't deny that the ending is-

• 26:38David Sims?

  It's sort of the best part of the movie.

• 26:39Griffin Newman?

  It's a gut punch. It's, it's, it's the perverse showpiece and that maybe is a-

• 26:44David Sims?

  It's my argument for why Titanic made $2 billion.

• 26:47Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 26:47David Sims?

  You walk out happy.

• 26:48Griffin Newman?

  It's the ultimate example.

• 26:49David Sims?

  They all fucking died.

• 26:49Griffin Newman?

  It is the ultimate example.

• 26:50David Sims?

  And yet you walk out and you're like, I feel elated cause she goes to the dream world and marries Leo.

• 26:55Griffin Newman?

  They slipped the fucking atom on that one. Is why James Cameron is James Cameron, cause he said, I can figure out how to make everyone walk out of Titanic cheering. Hearts full. But that certainly is a Scorsese problem is his endings are usually very challenging. It is funny that the thing he finally wins Best Picture for is his most mocked ending.

• 27:13David Sims?

  Yeah, The Departed, yeah.

• 27:14Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. That everyone jokes about the shot of the rat and how unsubtle it is.

• 27:19David Sims?

  I like the shot of the rat.

• 27:19Griffin Newman?

  Uh, I don't dislike it. Uh, our guest today is that guy. Oh, fuck, it's the king of Doritos. Return to the show very quickly. By popular demand, I will say I received a multitude of texts saying-

• 27:34David Sims?

  Get his ass back.

• 27:34Griffin Newman?

  Truly. And secondly, when we finished recording our first episode with you, you said, what are you guys doing next? We said Scorsese. David said, what would you pick? You said Taxi Driver and we look at each other and go, fuck, we might have to do that.

• 27:48David Sims?

  Sounds fucking good to me.

• 27:50Griffin Newman?

  It's a quick turnaround, but we might, we might just fucking have to do that. Tracy Letts.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 27:55Griffin Newman?

  Physical media, back in the room.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Third chair on the big picture.

• 27:58Griffin Newman?

  I knew that we weren't bringing you disc this time, so we weren't gonna-

• 28:01David Sims?

  That's canonical and we all know that. No one can dispute it.

• 28:03Griffin Newman?

  Uncontested.

• 28:04David Sims?

  We speak it into law by saying it on this podcast.

• 28:06Griffin Newman?

  Um, I knew we weren't gonna, uh, spend an hour going over, uh, Blind by Disc, a challenge.

• 28:12David Sims?

  Oh, yeah, right. We thought we'd get straight to the movie. We didn't get you a bunch more, uh, random trash, uh, movies to add to your collection.

• 28:18Griffin Newman?

  That we did basically start with half an hour of alternative Oscar history across the credits.

• 28:22David Sims?

  That's true.

• 28:23Griffin Newman?

  It feels like the, the correct spiritual sequel.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  By the way, the, the gift you, you got me, I, I've, I've yet to tuck into some of them, but my kids love, uh, The Nanny showed my kids Mouse Hunt.

• 28:36David Sims?

  Oh, there you go. That's a big win.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Because, uh, the-

• 28:39David Sims?

  And they liked it.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  The nanny loves it.

• 28:42Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  And so she, she knew it.

• 28:43David Sims?

  She already, she already knew it.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  She knew it.

• 28:44David Sims?

  She was like, this is a great movie.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so she was excited to show that to the kids and the kids.

• 28:48Griffin Newman?

  It's a very practical movie. When you talk about your kids liking Dark Crystal and such.

• 28:54David Sims?

  Right. In my head, your DVD collection is like Raiders of the Lost Ark when they put the thing on the shelf, where it's just like an endless hallway. There's like a, a forklift.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  It is a bit like.

• 29:05David Sims?

  Like, I'm like, how does the nanny or anyone even know like where Mouse Hunt is?

• 29:09Griffin Newman?

  Is there a robot arm? Is there a Dewey Decimal System kinda punching the code to locate?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Well, look, the stack you gave me sat on the kitchen island for about a week before it got entered into the system.

• 29:19Griffin Newman?

  So the nanny- It was accessible.

• 29:20David Sims?

  And you know what? That's my physical media system too, is the stack piles, then I'm like, it's time to get this stuff up, you know?

• 29:26Griffin Newman?

  It's funny that I, right. I try to like theme the stacks and then one of the stacks is themed around new purchases. And then that stack gets so big that I'm like, I gotta work that into the other themed stacks.

• 29:36David Sims?

  Right.

• 29:37Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 29:38David Sims?

  Right.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  So Mouse Hunt, yeah.

• 29:39Griffin Newman?

  Mouse Hunt, yeah.

• 29:40David Sims?

  Okay, good, good to know. Yeah, any other? Yeah, I mean, you just did your physical media council. No, no other big news on the, on the world of Blu-rays? I don't know.

• 29:47Griffin Newman?

  I mean, New York, New York just announced on 4K. I of course imported the Australian imprint disc, which has some features that are not being carried over.

• 29:54David Sims?

  I have that disc as well.

• 29:55Griffin Newman?

  To the 4K release, but the 4K release does have both cuts.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I see. Uh, so the New York, New York I have is just a blue.

• 30:04Griffin Newman?

  I think it's-

• 30:04David Sims?

  Mine too, yeah.

• 30:05Griffin Newman?

  It's domestic blue.

• 30:06David Sims?

  Right, right.

• 30:07Griffin Newman?

  And then the imprint Australian release is three discs.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't have that.

• 30:12Griffin Newman?

  And it has both cuts and a lot of special features. But this is-

• 30:16David Sims?

  I'm gonna get the 4K.

• 30:17Griffin Newman?

  MVD Marquee.

• 30:18David Sims?

  I'm gonna get the-

• 30:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, the fine folks at MVD Marquee. Uh, Ben, you seem a little too excited by this conversation. If you wanna just chill out a little bit.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  All right, I'll settle down.

• 30:28Griffin Newman?

  Just cause it's, it's a little unbecoming how ripped up you are.

• 30:30David Sims?

  No, I know. I'm on the edge of my seat about to-

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Fall on the floor.

• 30:34Griffin Newman?

  That's my concern is that you're gonna trip your teeth.

• 30:36David Sims?

  Your vinegar syndrome, your, your radiance. Do you do any of those kind of?

• 30:40Speaker 02

  I do the radiance subscription.

• 30:41David Sims?

  Okay.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Seems pretty good. I've been, I've been debating any of these. And there are a couple that I, I just order every, they don't have subscriptions, but I order every release.

• 30:49Griffin Newman?

  When, when the monthly announcement happens.

• 30:51David Sims?

  The monthly announcement.

• 30:51Griffin Newman?

  This was, when Ben was trying to pick which disc to buy for you and our buddy Ben David Grabinsky was consulting on it. His really valuable advice to Ben was certain labels you might just need to rule out.

• 31:03David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Griffin Newman?

  Certain labels Tracy might just be at all to card.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  I don't subscribe to the vinegar syndrome because they, they'll do a lot of, uh, genre horror, like nineties or two thousands.

• 31:13David Sims?

  Yes.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Genre horror that I'm not so into.

• 31:16Griffin Newman?

  Vinegar syndrome has never released a film that is less than a minta classic.

• 31:20David Sims?

  Yeah, they definitely haven't taken, right, the worst trash and put it in the most beautifully designed package.

• 31:26Griffin Newman?

  More selective than the criteria in collection. That's the other thing I got multiple texts about is five different people upset by us mocking how good of a package they put together for Congo, including Matt Singer.

• 31:38David Sims?

  It's a great pack.

• 31:38Griffin Newman?

  Who wrote the booklet for Congo.

• 31:40David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Griffin Newman?

  My friend Alex Perlin, who Congo is his favorite movie and his bachelor party was, let's go back to my place and watch Congo.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  People are, defending the movie Congo.

• 31:49David Sims?

  And, and defending its, right, its prestige package.

• 31:52Griffin Newman?

  That we, that we pinpointed it as the ultimate example of, does this need this good of a release?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Oh, well, come on, that's hot trash.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 32:05Griffin Newman?

  Supreme Delroy Lindo performance. You can't argue with that.

• 32:08David Sims?

  Monkey, monkey talks.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  The monkey talks.

• 32:11Griffin Newman?

  The monkey, Amy.

• 32:12David Sims?

  The monkey is, the monkey, you mean Ernie Hudson, right? Not Delroy Lindo, right?

• 32:16Griffin Newman?

  No, Delroy Lindo's got a one scene performance.

• 32:18David Sims?

  Oh, that's right. He's like the, uh, the, like, the warlord. Yes, that's right.

• 32:23Griffin Newman?

  I'm not racist, my friend.

• 32:24David Sims?

  I've seen, I was just, I was worried you were for a second.

• 32:27Griffin Newman?

  I'm not.

• 32:28David Sims?

  I've seen Congo.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  I was worried you were racist.

• 32:30David Sims?

  I was, I've seen Congo one.

• 32:32Griffin Newman?

  In fact, I'm not racist.

• 32:34David Sims?

  I know that Congo's a very important movie for some people as we're describing where it was like they were the right age.

• 32:38Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 32:39David Sims?

  They saw this weird ass Jurassic Park-y kind of movie and it, not, I've seen it, I think, 1.5 times. I do own the vinegar syndrome Blu-ray.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  I do too. I own that goddamn shoebox.

• 32:49David Sims?

  I do have.

• 32:50Griffin Newman?

  I went, I went to the store in Pittsburgh recently and I was, I was running my fingers across that box and I was tempted, but I still haven't pulled the trigger on it.

• 32:58David Sims?

  Tracy, you were gonna weigh in on the monkey.

• 33:01Griffin Newman?

  Amy.

• 33:02David Sims?

  So fucking stupid. Thank you for weighing in. Perfect. Okay, great.

• 33:07Griffin Newman?

  I was talking about this with Matt Singer, who wrote the essay in the booklet.

• 33:11David Sims?

  Great Matt Singer.

• 33:12Griffin Newman?

  It is so funny to me that Jurassic Park is obviously humongous, right? And everyone's like, okay, how do we fucking follow this trend? Steven Spielberg's producer is going to adapt a different Crichton book.

• 33:25David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Griffin Newman?

  And the hook is, you think fucking dinosaurs are scary? What about gorillas? A thing that.

• 33:34David Sims?

  Talking monkey.

• 33:35Griffin Newman?

  Species that does currently exist on our planet.

• 33:37David Sims?

  Right, and is less scary.

• 33:39Griffin Newman?

  And the trailers made it seem like they're gonna go to the jungle and gorillas are gonna fuck them up. And the movie is 90% of its runtime, just people having kind of intellectual, hard science conversations next to a talking monkey.

• 33:53David Sims?

  Should we let this monkey talk? Was that a good idea?

• 33:55Griffin Newman?

  At the end, they go in a cave and they fight monkeys for like five minutes and the movie's over.

• 34:00David Sims?

  Oh my god.

• 34:00Griffin Newman?

  It's funny that they didn't even try to adapt it to make it more Jurassic Park-y. It is just a classic Crichton, like, I don't know, I'm a little interested in the science of this.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Maybe I should do that radiant subscription. The radiant subscription is really good, is really worth it. Uh, and like I say, there's a couple, Indicator, I get every release from Indicator.

• 34:19Griffin Newman?

  But not subscribed, you just, you just add all.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  They don't have a subscription, or I would. Flickr Alley, I get every release from Flickr.

• 34:26Griffin Newman?

  I love Flickr Alley.

• 34:27David Sims?

  Damn, I don't really, no, so they do a lot of very old, you know, twenties and thirties, right? Like, that's their thing.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Silent movies.

• 34:32David Sims?

  Yeah, that's, yeah.

• 34:34Griffin Newman?

  I've been thinking of doing the.

• 34:35David Sims?

  My whole problem when you go on the big picture to talk discs.

• 34:38Griffin Newman?

  Activates.

• 34:39David Sims?

  It's just, it's like my accountant calls me and is like, what happened?

• 34:42Griffin Newman?

  Physical media high council episode came out. I, I cannot tell you how many carts I checked out. The, the amount of money I spent.

• 34:49David Sims?

  Crazy. Well, you know, we should say, since we're talking up all of these different companies. And, you know, we also do complain on this show a lot that we're, the office is just filled to the brim with stuff.

• 35:02Griffin Newman?

  Negative space. It's too much negative space, empty shelves.

• 35:04David Sims?

  Love some swag every once in a while.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Ben's just like, send up the free stuff. Oh, sure, yeah.

• 35:09Griffin Newman?

  Do you know what often happens now when I, when I order from these boutique labels?

• 35:12David Sims?

  They send you a little message?

• 35:14Griffin Newman?

  They put in a little note.

• 35:15David Sims?

  I appreciate them.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  I've had a couple of little notes.

• 35:16David Sims?

  I like the note.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Over the years.

• 35:17David Sims?

  Hey, we appreciate you. Thank you.

• 35:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 35:20David Sims?

  It's all good. I'm happy to spend, happy to spend on things I think are worthwhile and valuable, such as, uh, fancy Blu-rays of Congo.

• 35:28Griffin Newman?

  I mean, what we're doing is important and noble and everyone should salute us. They should hit their pots and pans with the sticks, uh, when we walk down the street. Um, I was going to ask you.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Hold on, before you ask me.

• 35:39Griffin Newman?

  Please.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  The haunting 4K, do you have it yet?

• 35:41David Sims?

  Yes.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Is it out?

• 35:42David Sims?

  I mean, I pre-ordered it.

• 35:43Griffin Newman?

  I don't have it.

• 35:44David Sims?

  I can't remember if it's out.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Sean and I do a commentary on.

• 35:46Griffin Newman?

  Really?

• 35:46David Sims?

  Very excited about that.

• 35:47Griffin Newman?

  On the original?

• 35:48David Sims?

  Yeah, it's the, uh, the Robert Wise.

• 35:50Griffin Newman?

  I gotta, I gotta order that.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Beautiful, by the way.

• 35:52David Sims?

  And you know when Robert, when, when Paul Newman won his Oscar for The Color of Money, he wasn't there. And Robert Wise accepted on his behalf, starts to say like, Paul really appreciates this. Betty Davis is next to him.

• 36:03Griffin Newman?

  Betty Davis and Robert Wise were presenting the award.

• 36:05David Sims?

  And Betty Davis cuts Robert Wise off and is like, I just want everyone to understand, this is Robert Wise and he's a really great filmmaker.

• 36:11Griffin Newman?

  Oh, right, no, you're right. It's, Betty Davis is presenting.

• 36:14David Sims?

  Right.

• 36:14Griffin Newman?

  Robert Wise was sent on his behalf.

• 36:16David Sims?

  Robert Wise is trying to be like, Paul really, and Betty Davis is like, will everyone give a little respect to Robert Wise? He may be old, but he, he made the sound of music. He may, you know, like, she starts, and he's like, oh, thank you, Betty. And then they walk off.

• 36:30Griffin Newman?

  They play the music. Nothing.

• 36:32David Sims?

  It's the weirdest thing.

• 36:34Griffin Newman?

  Uh, I want to talk about Taxi Driver, but I just need to close the loop on this. The radiant subscription.

• 36:38David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Griffin Newman?

  Does it include the sub-label? What is the name of the label?

• 36:41Speaker 02

  No, you have to, uh.

• 36:43Griffin Newman?

  But they do offer a subscription for that?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:46Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  You have to, that's, that's an extra, that's an add-on.

• 36:49Griffin Newman?

  What's it called again?

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Transmission.

• 36:51Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Which is Stuntman and Vampire's Kiss and Cutter's Way was transmission? Or was that regular radiant?

• 36:57David Sims?

  Stuntman was, uh, was regular. Vampire's Kiss was as well. Night of the Juggler, they did it.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yes, Night of the Juggler, do you know that one?

• 37:04Griffin Newman?

  I've never watched it.

• 37:05David Sims?

  Yeah, James Brolin, right?

• 37:08Griffin Newman?

  Heard great things.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  We, Carrie and I had a great time with that. That thing is batshit. It's, the thing is just goes batshit.

• 37:14David Sims?

  Brolin made a lot of like hefty trash, I feel like, right? Like, that was sort of Brolin's lane, like, in the seven, like.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  What a hair, what a.

• 37:22David Sims?

  Yes, such a, he's a, he's an animal. Like, when you see him in Amityville, you're like, this guy is, right, he's an ideal.

• 37:29Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Very close to being the only American Bond, as we talked about when we did those Patreon episodes.

• 37:34David Sims?

  Impossible to imagine. It's sort of a bizarre thought.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Very close?

• 37:38Griffin Newman?

  There's a screen test.

• 37:39David Sims?

  He was supposedly like seriously considered, doesn't really, wasn't it one of those times where they were trying to get like Connery to?

• 37:45Griffin Newman?

  Possibly.

• 37:46David Sims?

  Knock like 250K off his quota or whatever.

• 37:48Griffin Newman?

  I think he was in it twice.

• 37:50David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Griffin Newman?

  And there is an extended screen test. There's also a fascinating extended screen test of him doing Planet of the Apes.

• 37:56David Sims?

  Now Tracy, are you testing for Bond?

• 37:58Griffin Newman?

  A really good question.

• 37:59David Sims?

  Amazon's on the hunt. Denis Villeneuve is available, you know, I was looking around.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  I, when they get serious, I might consider testing.

• 38:08David Sims?

  You can be a Bond villain. That'd be fun.

• 38:10Griffin Newman?

  No, he should be Bond. Let's not fucking take an offer out of him. They should get serious.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  I worked with an actor named Anthony Higgins. Uh, you would probably recognize him maybe from Raiders of the Lost Ark or maybe from, uh, uh, The Draftsmen's Contract.

• 38:25David Sims?

  Peter Green, he's a cla, to me, that's a classic. He's a British guy. He's like, he plays British guy.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Proper British guy.

• 38:31Griffin Newman?

  In Raiders?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Isn't he in Raiders? Isn't he one of the?

• 38:34David Sims?

  He is, let me double check that, cause I do feel like you're right. He's in one of them, isn't he?

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Am I making it up?

• 38:40David Sims?

  Uh, yes, he is Major Gobler. He's one of the fucking Nazis, you know?

• 38:44Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Uh, he's a very good actor.

• 38:47David Sims?

  Very, big Shakespearean actor.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  And he's in a couple of old Hammer films.

• 38:51Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Uh, and under a slightly different name. I think it was Anthony Corley or Corlin or something.

• 38:56David Sims?

  Corlin, yeah, yeah. Taste the Blood of Dracula, he's in that one.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  He told me a great, uh, Christopher Lee story, but also he was up for, uh, Bond at one point.

• 39:05David Sims?

  Wow.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  They brought him out a couple of times to test for Bond, and it, the whole reason they were doing it was because, uh, Roger Moore was bitching about his contract.

• 39:14David Sims?

  But she did like, after every single movie.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  We will get somebody else. And when I worked with him, he was like, thank God, I did not get James. I, he was really genuinely.

• 39:25Griffin Newman?

  No, I'm not a Zingy now.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Genuinely grateful that he was not.

• 39:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  James Bond. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, because I can walk over here to the off license and make a bet and nobody's gonna bother.

• 39:35David Sims?

  Um, now, you mean the off-track betting. You don't mean off. In Britain, the off license, that's where you get your booze.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  That's where we work.

• 39:41David Sims?

  The offie.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, that's where you get your booze?

• 39:44David Sims?

  Yeah, so the whole thing in Britain is you can't get booze at the grocery store. It's like the, the, the, the corner store. You have to go to the offie, which is next door.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  But they call the off-track betting something different in England too.

• 39:55David Sims?

  I would, I thought of that as like the bookmaker or whatever. I mean, like Ladbrokes, you know, like, but yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:00David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Uh, anyway, booking, I mean, I don't know.

• 40:04David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  He's a, he was a lovely guy. Can I tell you my Christopher Lee story? This has nothing to do with Taxi Driver.

• 40:09Griffin Newman?

  I will say, just a future plug, we're getting ready to later in the fall do Dracula on our Patreon.

• 40:16David Sims?

  Yes.

• 40:16Griffin Newman?

  So we're doing one of each kind of major Dracula. So we're doing the first Christopher Lee.

• 40:22David Sims?

  Right, we'll do Lucchese, we'll do Lee, we'll do.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Am I getting a call for that?

• 40:25David Sims?

  Sure, you wanna come by?

• 40:27Griffin Newman?

  Cause I'm pretty obsessed with those hammers, right?

• 40:29David Sims?

  You want the Langella? Do you want the?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  No, I want Christopher Lee.

• 40:31Griffin Newman?

  You want Christopher Lee?

• 40:32David Sims?

  Okay. My mom said the classiest person she ever interviewed in her entire life. Like, truly, like.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Well, here was, uh, Anthony's story. So he works with him on Taste the Blood of Dracula. And the first time he works with him, it's raining, of course. It's always raining.

• 40:46David Sims?

  Sure.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  And, uh, uh, they've got Christopher Lee waiting in a, in a taxi. What do we call them in England? The taxi?

• 40:52David Sims?

  Minicab, maybe?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Minicab, black car, whatever. Uh, so he's waiting until the rain passes. And so they, they take Anthony from the trailer and they put him in the car with Christopher Lee. And Christopher Lee's in the full, uh, Dracula getup. And he's introduced to Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee says,

• 41:11Speaker 02

  "Oh my God, this, this weather is just dreadful."

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Long pause. Oh my God, these teeth just don't fit in my mouth. I was so uncomfortable wearing these teeth. Oh my God, this cape, what this cape is made out of. I can't breathe. And it's just, it's just a litany of complaint and just unbroken.

• 41:31David Sims?

  His fourth Dracula performance.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  And he's sick of it. And just unbroken stream of complaint. They make the movie. Thirty years later, Anthony is cast in one of these TNT biblical, right? One of these mini series, right?

• 41:52Speaker 02

  John the Baptist, right? And he's flown out to, he's flown out to some desert location in the Middle East. And he comes out of the trailer and they lead him into this holding tent where they're getting ready to shoot. And he sees in the holding tent, in a long flowing robe, Christopher Lee, sitting waiting, you know, he's got a long beard and now he's an old man. And he goes, he's excited to see him after thirty years. And he sits down and Christopher Lee says, oh my God, this sand, just sand is getting everywhere. This robe is so hot, I can't even breathe. It was like as if it had never stopped.

• 42:26Griffin Newman?

  Have you found this Tracy? That certain actors, it almost feels like the discomfort and beyond that, the complaining and the struggle is like the heart of their process.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 42:41Griffin Newman?

  That they need the motor of the irritation.

• 42:43David Sims?

  To answer your question, it's the film, the TV series is Moses, in which Ben Kingsley, I found it. Ben Kingsley played Moses, Christopher Lee played Ramses.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  He must have killed that.

• 42:54David Sims?

  Anthony Higgins played Korach. Not sure. He's sort of like a rebel from the Bible. I don't, I don't know really, but, but very funny to imagine. Fine, put the fucking Egyptian headdress on me, you know?

• 43:09Speaker 02

  The unbroken string of complaint is the way some actors have to like get through the day.

• 43:14David Sims?

  Especially if you're Christopher Lee. You served in the, in the British Secret Service. You killed people. You like, you know, where, and then it's like you made forty unbroken years of monster movies and shit, right? He never was in a movie that probably had like a high budget. Like he was the king of these British genre films.

• 43:32Griffin Newman?

  I mean, I feel like it was going around again recently, but the clip of him doing an interview after being knighted or given an OBE.

• 43:40David Sims?

  I mean, I guess he was in like, you know, Man with the Golden Gun or whatever. That sort of stuff. He would have a better trailer.

• 43:47Griffin Newman?

  The interviewer said, well, there, there you have it. Christopher Lee, the king of horror. And he went, the king of horror? I haven't made a horror movie in forty years. And he started listing all the different characters he played. And I'm like, my God.

• 43:59David Sims?

  You're kind of the king of horror.

• 44:00Griffin Newman?

  You did play Dracula like fifteen times. And it's not even like that was your core franchise. You did it like six times for Hammer. And then you just said like, open game, who wants to pay me to play Dracula in anything?

• 44:11David Sims?

  He did.

• 44:11Griffin Newman?

  He made Italian Dracula movies. He did American Dracula movies.

• 44:15David Sims?

  He's the best.

• 44:16Griffin Newman?

  He rules.

• 44:16David Sims?

  I remember when my mom saw, like she interviewed him for, I can't remember for what. It was in the early two thousands. And we watched a ton of Hammer horror movies because she was like, I'm scared. You gotta watch these with me. And we were, we had a great time. This is a long time ago.

• 44:28Griffin Newman?

  That's so funny that for her, from her childhood, she was like, these are primal fears.

• 44:33David Sims?

  I'm freaked out by these. And I was like, I'll watch them, you know, like, and then we saw, you know, and he'd been in Lord of the Rings at that point. And then we saw Attack of the Clones, which a movie my mother like had no interest in whatsoever, right? She probably just watched, she was like, I need you to show me his part at the end, right? And when he watched, she was just like, he's just got instant, even in this, this garbage. Instant gravitas. Like when he's just delivering these lines about the force and lightsabers.

• 44:57Griffin Newman?

  I am loathe to invoke Aina Cool News, but I have a very distinct memory because of the, the timeline of when that would need to shoot. It was before Lord of the Rings, which must've been the first time I saw him as well, before I learned about Christopher Lee. But this is when I actually learned who Christopher Lee was. There was an Aina Cool News headline, which was scoop, you will not believe who is playing the new villain in Star Wars, Episode Two. I clicked the link and it says like, guys, I've heard this reliable sources, cannot say who, but are you seated? And then it was scrolled down and it was dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Like you truly had to physically scroll down the site. And then it was just a photo of Christopher Lee, blood running down his

• 45:38Griffin Newman?

  face, woman in his arms, neck bites. And then it just said, Christopher fucking Lee.

• 45:45David Sims?

  And this, this impressed upon me. Clearly you've never forgotten.

• 45:48Griffin Newman?

  Who is this important? Who is this legendary?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Episode two, by episode two, you mean Empire Strikes Back?

• 45:52David Sims?

  No, unfortunately you mean Attack of the Clones.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Oh, I see.

• 45:55David Sims?

  It's in the mid two thousands.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good system.

• 46:00David Sims?

  It is wild that Lucas in the eighties is like, call Empire Strikes Back, Episode Five. And I was like, what? And he's like, just do it. Come on.

• 46:09Griffin Newman?

  Right. Because people forget that when Star Wars was released, it did not say Episode Four.

• 46:14David Sims?

  It doesn't say Episode Four.

• 46:15Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 46:15David Sims?

  It's just called Star Wars.

• 46:16Griffin Newman?

  Right. I think when they re-released it right before Empire, he added Episode Four. So everyone who had seen the movie eighty times and had it memorized was like, fuck is this Episode Four shit? What are you talking about?

• 46:26David Sims?

  No, it was retroactively titled Episode Four.

• 46:29Griffin Newman?

  After?

• 46:30David Sims?

  After Empire Strikes Back.

• 46:32Griffin Newman?

  Insane.

• 46:33David Sims?

  So it was Empire Strikes Back, people sit down, can't wait to see the second Star Wars movie. And the scroll begins, Episode Five. And everyone's like, why is it that?

• 46:41Griffin Newman?

  Do you think people in the audience went, did I miss?

• 46:44David Sims?

  Yes. I'm sure people were just like, what? Like, yeah, I don't know.

• 46:48Griffin Newman?

  Were there three in between? I just somehow didn't catch? Taxi Driver. I don't know if you guys had this experience watching the movie this time, but upon this re-watch, I was quite taken with the fact that it is Taxi Driver.

• 47:02David Sims?

  Oh, sure.

• 47:03Griffin Newman?

  That I just kept going like, this is the most fucking Taxi Driver movie in the world. It is wild to re-watch movies that feel like every single thread, every single like fiber is canonized. It's hard to just kind of watch them fresh as like a movie.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  And yet I did.

• 47:22Griffin Newman?

  It rules.

• 47:23David Sims?

  This is just, and I want to hear, I know Tracy, that you saw this film as a, as a child, or you saw some of it and were taken away? What's the story?

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the story is, and apologies if there are any crossover listeners who've heard this before, but my folks took me to see a lot of material made for adults when I was a kid. It took me to see Serpico when I was six years old. That's the earliest, most egregious example, I think.

• 47:53Griffin Newman?

  They never went full Travis Bickle date night, but they were taking you to?

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Well, in fact, they did. When I was ten, we went to the drive-in movie theater to see Taxi Driver, the year it came out. Now, where I come from in Oklahoma, and the, when I grew up, drive-ins were very much a part of our movie going culture.

• 48:12David Sims?

  I was gonna say, did you have a picture house that you went to? Was it all drive-ins? Or what, what town in Oklahoma are you from?

• 48:17Speaker 02

  A small town called Durant, Oklahoma, a town of about twelve thousand people. And when we moved there in nineteen seventy, there were three screens in town. There was the Plaza Theater, which was the old single screen in the middle of the town. And then there were two drive-in movie theaters. There was a, a drive-in called The Ship Drive-In, named after its owner, Ship Bullard.

• 48:39David Sims?

  Oh, I love it. It's not like it was naval.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Although there was a big ship, beautiful neon ship on the sign out front. And then there was the Skyview, which showed pornographic films on the south side of town, which you could actually see from the highway driving down the road. Yeah. Which of course we called the Skin View lovingly.

• 49:00David Sims?

  But here's, here's the Plaza. I found it.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  That's the Plaza.

• 49:04David Sims?

  It's still there. It's not a theater anymore.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  It looks like the last picture show, doesn't it?

• 49:07David Sims?

  Yeah, it really does. Yeah. It's a big one screen theater.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I worked at that theater as a projectionist. I projected Wrath of Khan in that movie theater.

• 49:16David Sims?

  Best movie ever made. That rocks. That must have, every time that James Horner's course, scores, you know, spools up. Happiest person in the world.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  So at The Ship, I would also work at The Ship. I worked at The Ship more than anywhere else. But when I was ten, we went to The Ship Drive-In as a family to see Taxi Drive.

• 49:33Griffin Newman?

  Perfect.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  And we got about, and I checked the time when, on the re-watch a couple of nights ago, I checked the time, because it's when Jodie Foster and Travis go back to her.

• 49:46David Sims?

  And she's like trying to take off her clothes. So it's about an hour into the movie?

• 49:49Griffin Newman?

  It's later than you think. That's what.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  About an hour fifteen, hour twenty.

• 49:53Griffin Newman?

  It's what really struck me watching it this time, is that obviously you see her and you see sport early, but the movie doesn't really kick into what people remember the movie being until it is about seventy-five percent over.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 50:08David Sims?

  Yeah. You're not quite sure what's going to happen with this guy.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  And because the movie was considered pretty transgressive for the time, for mainstream Hollywood fare, and because we had already seen some, some startling stuff in the movie up to that point, my mom turned to my dad and said, Dennis, I'm very uncomfortable.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  So he put the car in gear and we, and we left.

• 50:30David Sims?

  God bless. I also like to imagine the drive-in for, and then just every five minutes, a car just kind of peels out as the movie goes on. And he goes to the porn movie with civil, every couple of cars peel out. You know what I mean?

• 50:43Griffin Newman?

  I probably see this movie when I'm like 13 and its reputation preceded it so much that I knew where it was going. I have to imagine your parents sitting there at that time with a character who is unlike any put on screen in a major movie up until that point. There's a genuine concern of like, is he gonna fuck this kid? Like, what's, what's going to happen?

• 51:06David Sims?

  Sure.

• 51:07Griffin Newman?

  Right? I'm watching it knowing this is going towards violence.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  And we don't really know who Jodie Foster is, so we don't actually know how old the actor is playing the part. But in any case, we leave. Now, this is 1976. It's not like, I can rent the movie.

• 51:24David Sims?

  Yeah, you're not gonna catch it on Netflix in nine months or whatever.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  My folks go back to see the movie the next night. They go back by themselves to see the movie.

• 51:32David Sims?

  So they were intrigued. They were hooked.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  They were intrigued. They wanted to see it. And then they narrated for me what happened through the rest of the film, since I guess, you know, he, he doesn't wind up fucking the girl. They felt it was all right to narrate the rest of the movie. And my dad even acts out the, the hand to the, to the temple as he's right with the, the bloody fingers. He's firing, uh, firing into his, and he's lost his mind. And then he, he, he describes this and he acts this out. And then my mom is the one who says, and then there's a coda at the end of the movie in which there's this letter written by her parents and, and Sybil Shepherd gets into the car and mom said, I think it's all fantasy. I don't think any of that stuff is actually real. So credit to my mom for, for picking up on that.

• 52:18David Sims?

  Right. She didn't walk out of there being like, Trent said everyone says he did a good job. I guess he was the hero.

• 52:22Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. We, we haven't talked about, I haven't brought it up that much in our 11 years of doing this podcast, but I more and more think it is a key part of how I ended up being the way I am today. And obviously this was driven by me already neatly being so interested in movies. But if my parents went out for like a grown up date night to go see a movie, I would stay awake even when I was supposed to be in bed with the lights off. I would stay awake for them to come home so that they could narrate to me what the movie was in the same kind of way. And I think my parents were similarly very good at doing it.

• 52:56David Sims?

  Yeah. They could finesse it for you.

• 52:58Griffin Newman?

  But would also add their analysis to it.

• 53:00David Sims?

  Right.

• 53:00Griffin Newman?

  So there are a lot of movies, not this one, cause you know, I'm sure my parents told me the basic shape of Taxi Driver, but like, I remember them trying to explain Trainspotting to me. And when I finally watched Trainspotting, you know, seven years later, I was like, oh, that's that scene. And this is what they left out, or that's where they editorialized or things like that. But I do think that's, a parent wouldn't do that unless they felt like their kid wanted that.

• 53:25David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 53:26Griffin Newman?

  But I do also think that only supports and trains the kind of insane brain that we have to just wanna digest these things constantly. And especially when you're sort of being told like, these things are so close, but you can't watch it just yet. You're hearing the breakdown of what it is.

• 53:43David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Griffin Newman?

  And someone explaining what their reaction to it was. And this is one of those movies where I wish I could have had the experience of watching it without knowing what it was and where it was going.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 53:55Griffin Newman?

  Even just one time in my life.

• 53:57David Sims?

  And I. When do you end up seeing it? Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Probably not until I'm 18 years old, do I wind up going to a video store and renting it. And I remember even then, what we were talking about the video store days, when you go with your family and try to.

• 54:09Griffin Newman?

  Pick the one.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Pick the one. Or no, we weren't talking about it. You were talking about it on the podcast I was listening to while I was driving here.

• 54:16Griffin Newman?

  Green car.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  See, I can't keep reality.

• 54:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 54:19David Sims?

  It's fine.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Straight.

• 54:21Griffin Newman?

  You've been on a big picture run that similarly I was saying, when you came in, I've listened to three episodes with you in the last 10 days.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Well, I remember one of those video store moments, you know, I'm finally gonna get a chance to see Taxi Driver. And I remember my dad being kinda like, really? I mean, he's like, he didn't feel the need to watch it again.

• 54:40Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 54:40David Sims?

  Yeah, sure.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  He had enjoyed it and he, and he, and he was greatly respectful of De Niro's performance in particular. But I, he was, I think he considered it kind of an ugly thing that would need to be revisited.

• 54:51Griffin Newman?

  It certainly is.

• 54:52David Sims?

  To, to my mother, this was the definition of an adult movie that I was not, you know what I mean? Where she was like, well, you can't rent a movie like Taxi Driver. You know what I mean? Like, it was the definitional R-rated movie that was not available to me until I was older. Taxi Driver. Like, she's like, that's the most grown up movie ever made. It is not for young David. And I was like, what? It's about a, I get taxis all the time. I'm a, my Manhattan kids.

• 55:17Griffin Newman?

  Nice guys. They know directions.

• 55:18David Sims?

  What does he do? He takes people the wrong way? Like, what do you mean? He's a taxi driver. Like, how scary can he be?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Now, wait a second. You're from England, right?

• 55:26Griffin Newman?

  Well, Tracy.

• 55:27David Sims?

  Tracy, you're gonna get the story and no one's allowed to make fun of me. I was born in Manhattan.

• 55:31Griffin Newman?

  My mantra.

• 55:32David Sims?

  Uh, my mother is from Utica, New York, upstate. My dad is English, uh, from Serbiden in London. Uh, and when I was nine years old, my dad got a job in London and he moved, and we all moved with him to London. I lived in London for 13 years.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  I see. So your first nine years spent in Manhattan.

• 55:49David Sims?

  New York kid, Upper West Side, date the ninth in Amsterdam, baby.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Oh, and you're, you've never left this, you're.

• 55:54Griffin Newman?

  I've never left, but here's the twist. My mother's secretly British.

• 55:58David Sims?

  Well, I thought, yeah, or she's European, I think of her.

• 56:00Griffin Newman?

  Well, but this, this is why I'm saying secretly.

• 56:03David Sims?

  Right.

• 56:03Griffin Newman?

  Because she's actually British, but she was basically raised French.

• 56:06David Sims?

  Right. And she's got French ancestry or whatever.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Ben, where are you from?

• 56:10Griffin Newman?

  French stepfather.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Jersey.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah? Born and raised.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  And been here ever since. Never been in the central time zone.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  No.

• 56:18David Sims?

  No? Cause you went to college in New York?

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I went to the New School.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  And just stuck around since.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  See, one of the reasons I wanted to establish this, other than my curiosity about my friends at Blank Check, one of the reasons I wanted to know this is also because you have to realize that as a little kid, living in Durant, Oklahoma, a town of 12,000 people with a movie theater that looks like that.

• 56:37David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  What the world of Taxi Driver looks like to a kid like that.

• 56:41David Sims?

  Of course. And just to America, like, like, I assume, like, so much of America's watching this movie is like, right, that's New York. That's what it's like. It's like murder around every corner or whatever. Yeah.

• 56:51Griffin Newman?

  When, when I was born, my father worked in an office in Times Square. I think he basically had that office until I was five. And so I did, I do have very primal early memories of the pre-Disney Times Square.

• 57:06David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Griffin Newman?

  Where we would go to visit my father, which was the area that's still most purely felt like this, you know? And even going to Times Square during the day as a child aided by a mother, you know, it's not like I was being accosted in a stroller. But it did, it did look the way this movie looked.

• 57:25David Sims?

  Right.

• 57:26Griffin Newman?

  And it had that weird energy to it. Everything was just kind of unseemly and edgy and felt desperate.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  And the way this movie looks is remarkable, right?

• 57:37Griffin Newman?

  It's insane.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a, a testament to Michael Chapman, who I assume we'll talk more about, but also a testament to, uh, Scorsese and, and Schrader's vision of New York as a kind of hell on earth.

• 57:50Griffin Newman?

  Absolutely. It is a thing I think about all the time. And it hit me while watching this film where I was like, this is what I'm fucking talking about. I hate how overlit almost all evening stuff is.

• 58:02David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Griffin Newman?

  I find it is so evocative to be in dark places where you actually can't see stuff. And almost all movies feel the need to make things more legible than they would be in real life. And I understand that part of it is, especially in the history of film, that film stocks were so slow.

• 58:19David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Griffin Newman?

  That you needed to overlight, even if you wanted to make something look dark. Gordon Willis films.

• 58:24David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Griffin Newman?

  Still would have used infinitely more lights than we would need to use today to shoot something on video, to just be able to get any image that registers.

• 58:31David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 58:32Griffin Newman?

  And yet, this is a movie, especially in the opening and the sort of opening credit sequence, where I'm just like, God, I love how much you cannot see. It makes it so much scarier. It's part of the hell on earth thing, that you have this insane contrast between these neon lights that are both the fixed lights of the locations and the headlights of the cars going by, kind of smudging through time and space, and then just voids of blackness.

• 58:58David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Griffin Newman?

  Just what the fuck is happening there?

• 59:11Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 59:11David Sims?

  Yes?

• 59:12Griffin Newman?

  Mmm.

• 59:15David Sims?

  Is that the City's Cow?

• 59:17Griffin Newman?

  The City's Cow is back.

• 59:18David Sims?

  Haven't heard from her in a while.

• 59:19Griffin Newman?

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

• 59:24David Sims?

  Okay.

• 59:25Griffin Newman?

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

• 59:29David Sims?

  Wow.

• 59:30Griffin Newman?

  The cow likes chicken.

• 59:32David 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.

• 59:38Griffin Newman?

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

• 59:52David Sims?

  Absolutely.

• 59:53Griffin Newman?

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

• 59:59David Sims?

  That is a line in the movie.

• 1:00:00Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:00:02David Sims?

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

• 1:00:07Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:00:08David Sims?

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

• 1:00:13Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:14David Sims?

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

• 1:00:16Griffin Newman?

  Performances, friend of the show.

• 1:00:17David Sims?

  Friend of the show, Zach Cherry.

• 1:00:19Griffin Newman?

  Zach Cherry.

• 1:00:20David Sims?

  Also in it.

• 1:00:21Griffin Newman?

  This is true.

• 1:00:22David Sims?

  Such a cool movie. Won the Queer Palm at Cannes. 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 MUBI.

• 1:00:32Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:00:46David Sims?

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

• 1:00:51Griffin Newman?

  What happens? 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.

• 1:01:03David Sims?

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

• 1:01:15Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:01:20David Sims?

  Damn right.

• 1:01:26Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 1:01:27David Sims?

  Yes?

• 1:01:27Griffin Newman?

  Nobody likes bank fees. Why would you like them?

• 1:01:31David Sims?

  When I was younger,

• 1:01:32Griffin Newman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:33David Sims?

  I really would have benefited from a bank that did not charge me fees anytime I did anything, basically, which is, I feel like, what I was always dealing with.

• 1:01:41Griffin Newman?

  Chime. That's where Chime comes in. Chime.

• 1:01:44David Sims?

  They're changing the way people bank. They're not like traditional banks who charge fees and get keep perks and rewards. They offer the most rewarding fee-free banking, all with no overdraft fees, no monthly fees, and no minimum balance fees. Okay?

• 1:01:58Griffin Newman?

  We love being fee-free. We love it.

• 1:02:00David Sims?

  You're gonna get 5% cash back on a Chime card in a category of your choice, like gas or groceries.

• 1:02:05Griffin Newman?

  My two favorite things.

• 1:02:06David Sims?

  Uh, all while building credit through regular everyday spending with no credit check, and you can grow your money faster with a savings rate that's nine times the national average. And if you're ever in a pinch, SpotMe lets you overdraft up to $200 fee-free.

• 1:02:20Griffin Newman?

  Fee-free?

• 1:02:20David Sims?

  So, join the millions who are already banking fee-free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to chime.com/blankcheck. That is chime.com/blankcheck. Sign up now. It only takes a few minutes.

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Qualifying direct deposits required. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for details.

• 1:02:59David Sims?

  Can I offer a take, though?

• 1:03:01Griffin Newman?

  Please.

• 1:03:02David Sims?

  A little bit of a, a small take. I also do think it's kind of a beautiful and seductive movie. Like, as much as it is, like, New York is terrifying, and, like, I'm also watching, and I'm like, this is romantic. Like, it's a little romantic, right?

• 1:03:15Griffin Newman?

  It's got that impressionistic thing.

• 1:03:16David Sims?

  You're a little, you're a little enchanted by him. I think it's crucial to Taxi Driver, that you're not just like, this is a freak, I'm watching a freak in the freak show. The fact that he's handsome, that he's got the little bits of De Niro twinkle amongst the, you know, disturbing-

• 1:03:32Griffin Newman?

  I wanna put parameters around it because I really wanna resist the temptation to, to draw the comparison too many times.

• 1:03:36David Sims?

  Don't bring it up. I know what you wanna bring up.

• 1:03:38Griffin Newman?

  What?

• 1:03:39David Sims?

  He wants to bring up Todd Phillips's Joker.

• 1:03:41Griffin Newman?

  It just, I-

• 1:03:42David Sims?

  Which is a, you know, which is kind of ripping off this movie.

• 1:03:44Griffin Newman?

  It's thoroughly ripping off this movie.

• 1:03:45David Sims?

  Very, yeah, this and Keanu Reeves comedy.

• 1:03:47Griffin Newman?

  I assume you have not seen this film.

• 1:03:48David Sims?

  I have. I've seen Joker.

• 1:03:48Griffin Newman?

  You've seen Joker?

• 1:03:49David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Griffin Newman?

  I had not re-watched Taxi Driver since seeing Joker or Folliata. And it was astonishing to me, A, just how wholesale the ripoff is, in ways I kind of forgot how one-to-one some of the elements are, but B, that it just fucks up that exact equation, which is just, the characterization of Travis Bickle is so perfectly dialed in on when is he pathetic? When is he sympathetic? When is he empathetic? When is he terrifying? When is he unknowable? And the soup of that, and the dance of that, and what feels like, the, the absolute distinction is that this is a movie, defined by what, to me, is the master stroke of the movie,

• 1:04:30Griffin Newman?

  and the moment where Scorsese becomes a generational genius, is in the payphone conversation when the camera moves away from him. This is too painful.

• 1:04:39David Sims?

  One of the first camera moves I ever learned about, as a teenager. Like, it's Ebert, or someone talks about it in a review, where they're like, notice how the camera can't look at it.

• 1:04:48Griffin Newman?

  I, I watched the movie and went, wait a second, what the fuck is going on? Like, paused the VHS, and then asked Jeeves, what is this? You know, because I was just like, something has happened that-

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Was Jeeves helpful?

• 1:05:00Griffin Newman?

  Yes, he went well, sir. Uh, but it felt like something has happened here, right? Like, Dylan just went electric. Like, the language just changed in some way. I don't understand, but I understand what it made me feel and what is the intent of this. And Joker is a movie that's, as you're saying, is, look at this fucking freak.

• 1:05:18David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:18Griffin Newman?

  That is showing you-

• 1:05:19David Sims?

  And let us not, not, not mention Joker again, please.

• 1:05:22Griffin Newman?

  Well, of course, only refer to him as Richard T. from here on out. But it is a movie that, he, he is so captivating, and it's not a traditional charisma, and it's also kind of unlike, to me, the other banner breakthrough 70s, new leading men, new Hollywood performances. It, it's still impossible to pin this fucking thing down.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Now, that statement is something I really felt on this re-watch, uh, getting ready for this. And for me, it's a hallmark of great movie-making, great art, the way it continually shifts and changes, and you have a hard time getting your, your arms around just what the hell it is. And it, obviously, the film is fixed. The film hasn't changed in 50 years, and yet, your relationship to it changes, the person you are changes, and it's, it's, uh, just sort of endlessly fascinating, the myriad ways to look at it, to look into it, to, to, the, the question about, uh, perspective, about point of view in the movie,

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  which is pretty, pretty profound question you have to ask yourself.

• 1:06:31Griffin Newman?

  Changes every time I watch it.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  You're talking about the, the, the romanticism of the city, David, which is not only present in the way it looks, but also, obviously, in the very lush, uh, score, right? They're part of the-

• 1:06:45David Sims?

  Right from the start.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Bernard Herriman score, right, with the lush saxophone, uh, which is argued about, right?

• 1:06:51David Sims?

  Yeah, is it too much? Is it too heavy?

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53David Sims?

  Right, yeah, I think the score's incredible, too.

• 1:06:55Griffin Newman?

  I also, I kind of forgot completely-

• 1:06:56David Sims?

  It is interesting when these young guys are using the sort of, the craftsman of their idols, right? Like Herman Hitchcock's guy, you know what I mean? Like, and I imagine those relationships were odd. And like Spielberg, even with Williams-

• 1:07:09Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10David Sims?

  Who's older than him. He's not, like, totally, you know, old, but like, right, like that-

• 1:07:15Griffin Newman?

  But Williams is a guy who basically-

• 1:07:16David Sims?

  I want someone who has a hand on the prior generation.

• 1:07:18Griffin Newman?

  Williams had just popped at the end of the old school.

• 1:07:22David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:07:23Griffin Newman?

  Um, versus someone like Herman, who was the old school.

• 1:07:26David Sims?

  But I love the Herman score. Do you love the Herman score? I mean, where are you on the Herman? It is very heavy. I, you know, like, it's very intense.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  You know, Carrie watched the movie with me, and she had said after, I was just asking her the question about it, and she had said, you know, she said, "The truth is that the wrong score would isolate him even further. He would look even smaller to you than he does. And it's important that he not look that small, he not look that infinitesimal, because you're trying to get inside him, right? The movie's trying to put us inside his point of view."

• 1:07:59David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  And that the score is somewhat successful at doing that.

• 1:08:02David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Basically, the score has two essential themes that just get replayed over and over.

• 1:08:06Griffin Newman?

  I wanna call out the sub-theme, because there's the obvious Taxi Driver theme that we all think of, that feels very-

• 1:08:11David Sims?

  It's essentially just theme from Taxi Driver, for sure.

• 1:08:13Griffin Newman?

  Over and powering. But then there's the kind of deep, like, duh, sustained, which is the really important counterbalance of, this isn't just romanticized, this guy's kind of, the narratives he tells himself. It is like a musical embodiment of the, like, wrong note playing inside of this guy constantly, that he's trying to drown out with the other theme.

• 1:08:38David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Griffin Newman?

  Ben?

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  What's up?

• 1:08:40Griffin Newman?

  A lot of the Scorsese series is going to be a journey for you, re-watching movies that were ruined for you by annoying people you grew up with. This is a thread we've established.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of Jersey knuckleheads who just were obsessed-

• 1:08:52Griffin Newman?

  Read Scorsese movies the wrong way.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  With the, you know, violent movies.

• 1:08:55Griffin Newman?

  Travis Bickle's fucking awesome. Yes. What a cool guy.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, taking all the wrong lessons.

• 1:09:01Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  I mean, when I first saw this, though, I, I was so enamored with the edginess of New York City.

• 1:09:09David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  That was really what drew me in.

• 1:09:12David Sims?

  By the time we were watching it, it's not like New York stopped being edgy, but this New York is gone, so it's sort of like, that's also a little romantic of like, right? When New York was really porn theaters and scuz and like, yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  And this is, this is, I don't know exactly when it's set, because it was released in 76, but it also, for me, I just, I have so much romanticism for 77, because that was the year of punk, CBGBs.

• 1:09:36David Sims?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:09:37Griffin Newman?

  But I think it is kind of important that Travis Bickle's predating that.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  I know, right?

• 1:09:43Griffin Newman?

  You know?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  Even the Mohawk.

• 1:09:44Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Right? Like, which became a, a staple haircut with punks.

• 1:09:50Griffin Newman?

  But, but I just mean that there's not a productive subculture that he could find as an outlet.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:09:57Griffin Newman?

  You know?

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  I, I feel you, yes.

• 1:09:58Griffin Newman?

  A lot of Travis Bickles take the off-ramp to punk.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Griffin Newman?

  Which is a better way to excise those emotions.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:05Griffin Newman?

  Rather than just spiraling in your own head and turning to violence.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  That's right, because before 1977, the, a Mohawk was a sign of mental illness, right? Barely lost your mind.

• 1:10:17David Sims?

  I mean, I think it'll be in the dossier, but right, someone, basically, like a Vietnam vet who, like, told Schrader, like, when someone shaved their head into a Mohawk in my unit, they were about to do something insane.

• 1:10:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28David Sims?

  Like, that was not a sign of someone being like, you know what, I wanna a spicy haircut today. Like, it's more just like, I'm gonna go into the jungle and knife people.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Because they're referencing more so indigenous-

• 1:10:38David Sims?

  Like tribal, exactly. Like, that's what they, yeah.

• 1:10:40Griffin Newman?

  I also think it's fascinating for how much the legend of De Niro is, in the 70s, this is the most fucking committed actor in the world. And when he gets the, the Raging Bull part, it's the, can you believe the weight he gained and lost and all of this? That he famously would not shave his head into a Mohawk. The Mohawk is prosthetic. It is incredible-looking prosthetic, but he clearly was like, no, no, no, if I shave my head into a Mohawk for real, my career is over. I can't work again. I, I will be a pariah. I can't walk the streets with that when I'm not filming.

• 1:11:18David Sims?

  Right, it can't be seen looking like that, right?

• 1:11:20Griffin Newman?

  A, I don't wanna shaved head. B, I don't wanna have to go home with a Mohawk for three weeks.

• 1:11:25David Sims?

  Have you worked with De Niro?

• 1:11:26Griffin Newman?

  No, never met him.

• 1:11:27David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  Have you had a Mohawk?

• 1:11:29David Sims?

  Never had a Mohawk.

• 1:11:30Griffin Newman?

  Got him.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  What is the wildest haircut you ever had?

• 1:11:33Griffin Newman?

  It's a good question.

• 1:11:34David Sims?

  You're looking at it.

• 1:11:36Griffin Newman?

  You're looking great.

• 1:11:38David Sims?

  Fantastic.

• 1:11:41David Sims?

  So Taxi Driver, yes. So, okay, so you see it as a young man. I, when you said you liked Taxi Driver to us last time we saw you, I was like, I, I, I maybe note an influence in some of Tracy's work.

• 1:11:52Griffin Newman?

  There was a line.

• 1:11:53David Sims?

  You have written about disturbed individuals.

• 1:11:56Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:56David Sims?

  I have no idea if you perceive that at all, or if it's, you know, just kind of like, that's in the mix.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Influences are, who knows how they work on you, you know? Certainly, this was a.

• 1:12:05David Sims?

  You never were like, I'm gonna write my Taxi Driver.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  No, no, no. And I have to say, I don't know when I, well, probably upon first watching it, not when I was 10, but I mean, when I was 18 or whatever, I probably recognized a lot of the craftsmanship at work. And yet, I think it was probably only over repeated viewings that I started to recognize, oh, it's not just a Scorsese, De Niro joint.

• 1:12:31David Sims?

  Right, it's Schrader.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Right. It's, Schrader is a huge part of it. The cinematographer, the score, the editing. I mean, Scorsese surrounded himself with a team to, to help deliver this, this whole, whole movie.

• 1:12:47Griffin Newman?

  And this is, in my mind, a classic, like, three authors film. I think you have to give equal kind of authorship to Schrader, De Niro, and Scorsese.

• 1:12:54David Sims?

  And I think that's true of Raging Bull, and I think it's true of, well, those are, I mean, because like, the later Schrader, Scorsese collaborations are very interesting.

• 1:13:04Griffin Newman?

  I think the same is true of Bringing Up the Dead.

• 1:13:06David Sims?

  Well, for one, Cage is not as vital, you know, an author. He's a great, it's a great performance, but De Niro clearly was a somewhat equal creative partner with Martin Scorsese anytime he worked with him.

• 1:13:16Griffin Newman?

  They were developing.

• 1:13:18David Sims?

  Right, right, right. Bringing Up the Dead is great, you know, Last Impression of Christ, these are great movies as well, but.

• 1:13:23Griffin Newman?

  But there's a brotherhood between, I mean, I think it's even different than, than Scorsese and DiCaprio. There's something about.

• 1:13:29David Sims?

  Yeah, I think DiCaprio's a little bit more like, I am your instrument. You know, I think he has input.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Well, you, you can see it in the work that Schrader then goes on to do as a director, right? He takes as much of the lineage of Taxi Driver with him as Scorsese does on his track.

• 1:13:46David Sims?

  Right, and Schrader's still got it. I mean, like, all his movies are about some weird fucking guy who lives in a motel is insane.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  God's Lonely Man, right? That theme kept.

• 1:13:57David Sims?

  Writes in a goddamn diary. I, what was it? Master Gardener, I think I saw at the New York Film Festival. The second Joel Edgerton opened his diary and started, the whole audience laughed. We were like, how can we not? I mean, I liked the movie, but we were like, he's at it again, he's writing stuff down. We're hearing an inner monologue.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  You guys have not done Schrader, have you?

• 1:14:16David Sims?

  No, we haven't. No, I, I mean, I'd love to do him. He's got such a fascinating career. And of course, you know, all his Facebook posts, you know, bring me such joy.

• 1:14:25Griffin Newman?

  Alex Ross Perry sent us like, three this morning.

• 1:14:28David Sims?

  But like, you know, he was never really a blank check guy. I mean, the closest is like, Mishima or something, where it's like, he got to kind of.

• 1:14:35Griffin Newman?

  Or the Exorcist movie they canceled.

• 1:14:37David Sims?

  Yeah, he is fascinating. He's so fascinating.

• 1:14:39Griffin Newman?

  Can I read, I was, I logged this on Letterboxd this morning, and then I, I was looking at other reviews, and I saw that Schrader had logged it in 2022.

• 1:14:48David Sims?

  Logged a review of Taxi Driver?

• 1:14:50Griffin Newman?

  I wouldn't classify this as a review, but I want to read what he wrote, because I think it's really interesting. March 5th, 2022, he says, "I included a front piece quote on my first script Taxi Driver from Thomas Wolfe. 'The whole conviction of my life rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central inevitable fact of human existence.'" And then this is what reminded me to read this, David.

• 1:15:14David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:15:14Griffin Newman?

  "I've attached a front piece quote to my last script." He says "last," and he also spells script, S-C-T-R-I-P-T.

• 1:15:22David Sims?

  Yes, and I think the account you're using here, is like, it's taking his other writing and sort of correcting it on Letterboxd, right? So like, he posted this somewhere else.

• 1:15:29Griffin Newman?

  "Front piece quote to my last script, Master Gardener, from Leonard Cohen, quote, 'And I choose the rooms that I live in with care. The windows are small and the walls almost bare. There's only one bed and there's only one prayer. I listen all night for your step on the stair.'" End quote. "Twixt the two is the arc of hope that living can bring."

• 1:15:48David Sims?

  There you go.

• 1:15:49Griffin Newman?

  And I was watching one of the things on the 4K.

• 1:15:53David Sims?

  Yeah, I watched the 4K for this.

• 1:15:54Griffin Newman?

  There's a, there's a.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Is it the 4K that's in the Columbia box set?

• 1:15:59Griffin Newman?

  They have finally issued a standalone release as well.

• 1:16:01David Sims?

  I got the standalone version of it. I have issued the Columbia box sets, please forgive me.

• 1:16:07Griffin Newman?

  I'm a fan of the Columbia box sets. David thinks they take up too much space.

• 1:16:09David Sims?

  They're gigantic.

• 1:16:10Griffin Newman?

  They fuck with the shelf.

• 1:16:11David Sims?

  They're gigantic, and I'm getting like, Gandhi.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  I just was wondering if there's any upgrade from the, from the.

• 1:16:17Griffin Newman?

  It's the exact same disc in different packaging.

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  That's what I thought.

• 1:16:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah, identical disc. But there's, there's like a 20-minute Schrader looking back on Taxi Driver thing. And he said, I'm gonna paraphrase him poorly here, but it was a thing that really jumped out to me. He's like, the, the central problem with characters like Travis Bickle is that they think loneliness is like a disease that's been put on them, and loneliness is a choice.

• 1:16:40David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:16:41Griffin Newman?

  Then he said, like, "As a guy who struggled with it myself, loneliness is a thing you inflict upon yourself."

• 1:16:46David Sims?

  Indeed.

• 1:16:47Griffin Newman?

  It is a choice you make.

• 1:16:48David Sims?

  But I mean, like, that is so, so, so commonly what you see now with these people on the internet, incels, any, anyone who's basically like, "It's someone else's fault, or it's society's fault that I am lonely, without a wife, without a job, whatever." I don't know, you know?

• 1:17:07Griffin Newman?

  And, and that, corners of the internet have now basically become a crowdsourced inner monologue. The things that Travis Bickle is telling himself are now a conversation happening between hundreds of disaffected young men, talking to each other, or podcasting, or fucking YouTube-ing, or whatever, you know? It's, it's like, that's what the conversation is. I mean, it's, it's part of the weirdness of the fucking time we live in, where it's like, people are bonding over how they feel completely alone and isolated, rather than connecting through that.

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you think Travis would have been on the internet?

• 1:17:45Griffin Newman?

  I mean, this is another thing. You're like, in a way where it's like, Travis is two years later, what happens if he has access to punk, right? What if he drops a guy off at CBGB's one night? I'm like, that probably, he turns out better.

• 1:17:57David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Griffin Newman?

  But if he's, in the time of the internet, I think he turns out worse. I, I think it's actually, he gets too much positive motivation.

• 1:18:05David Sims?

  Yeah, he's like a, he's a super poster on 4chan.

• 1:18:08Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah. He's top 1% commenter on Reddit. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  See, I, again, talking about the, the nature of the way this movie transforms for me over time, I mean, I'm 60 years old now, and I, and Travis now looks like a young man to me.

• 1:18:25Griffin Newman?

  I mean, he says he's 26 in this movie.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:18:28David Sims?

  How old would De Niro have been? Yeah, that sounds almost right. Yeah, right.

• 1:18:32Griffin Newman?

  He said 26 in this, and I, I had the fucking Last Crusade, my face melted thing.

• 1:18:37David Sims?

  He was a little older. De Niro's like 32 in this movie.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  So, but 32 to me now is really, is really young.

• 1:18:45Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  And I don't know that I've ever seen, or noticed Travis as a young person before. And I, I just felt so much more sympathy for him on this watch than in the past. And I actually got a little mad about that, about the, this idea that Travis is the first incel, or the, you know, that he's the birth of the, you know, that, oh my god, the, the prescience of these people to make a movie about an incel before we knew what incels were.

• 1:19:12Griffin Newman?

  Recognizing a thing that was already existent.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  But I hate those motherfu, I mean, fuck those guys, right? Those guys are fucking losers, and I hate those.

• 1:19:20David Sims?

  It would be really funny if you came on the show and you're like, but incels, they get a bad rap. They ain't so bad.

• 1:19:25Griffin Newman?

  Let's, let's give another shade.

• 1:19:26David Sims?

  It's involuntary what's happening to them.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Maybe not a hot take, but.

• 1:19:30David Sims?

  No, but I agree with you. I hate those motherf. I mean, Marty says in more recent interviews, he's like, I feel like half the people in the world are Travis Bickles. And we were trying to make a movie about someone distinctive here, you know, and now it feels not distinctive.

• 1:19:42Griffin Newman?

  I think the weird collaborative group nature of the kind of incel community, which in and of itself should be an oxymoron, right? There, there is a greater degree of like, self-pitying.

• 1:19:55David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Well, what, I didn't do any research on incels. Who started this shit?

• 1:20:00Griffin Newman?

  I, I mean, it's impossible.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Some huge fucking losers.

• 1:20:04Griffin Newman?

  That's actually the correct answer.

• 1:20:06David Sims?

  I mean, it's, but it's what Griffin said, which is somewhat interesting of like, right, it's sort of lonely or angry people find each other, and this was the argument for the internet of like, we'll connect, and thus we will not be lonely, but instead of actually connecting, they just discuss their loneliness. Like, the only connection is over what they're angry about, or whatever. I, I don't.

• 1:20:26Griffin Newman?

  I think one of the moments that under discussed actually is a real radicalizing moment for Travis in the film is even his first meeting with the other cabbies, that he cannot connect to them.

• 1:20:41David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:20:42Griffin Newman?

  That here are other guys who like, live in the darkness. These are the guys who can get him a gun and know all the people, and are sharing stories of their kind of like, torrid, lascivious behavior and, and experiences and whatever. And he does not know how to enter that conversation. And it's not just because he hasn't had the same life experiences as them. He, he just doesn't know how to relate to other people. And these people are connecting to each other and going like, you're right, and you're right to say it, and they're pumping each other up.

• 1:21:11David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:21:12Griffin Newman?

  And that's so different than the Travis Bickle thing.

• 1:21:14David Sims?

  We have no real sense of like, Travis's life, right, or his backstory. Obviously, we know he's a veteran, but like, do we know where he's from, or he has family, or anything like that? Does that ever come up?

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  He writes a.

• 1:21:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, he writes to his parents.

• 1:21:27David Sims?

  He writes to his parents, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  But we don't, do we know where he sends that?

• 1:21:31Griffin Newman?

  Let's find out.

• 1:21:32David Sims?

  I don't know that it comes, I'm not sure. Like, and we don't need to, like, it's fine.

• 1:21:36Griffin Newman?

  I mean, so much of it is this entire generation of men who were drafted into a war that we shouldn't have been fighting in the first place, and then were just sort of spat back out onto the streets. And it's like, you figure it out now.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  But clearly, the relationship with the parents is, is important because, because of what he doesn't know.

• 1:21:56Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Clearly, his parents haven't done a great job. They haven't narrated to him the movie they saw that night while he was with the babysitter.

• 1:22:05Griffin Newman?

  And, and they especially didn't explain to him what the movie was saying. This is not a guy who was broken by the war. This is a guy who was never raised properly, who probably wasn't wired properly, and then was put into an hyper-extreme situation, treated as just, you know, one of anyone, and then spat back out, and now he's just completely fucked.

• 1:22:28David Sims?

  I'm gonna open the dossier here. We got our research, of course. This film starts with that rascal, Paul Schrader, a film critic. If anyone's ever read Transcendental Style in Film, his public, you know, his big, his book on Ozu and Bresson and Dreher, it's the best. But he was not a filmmaker yet, he's a film writer. He is, marriage has fallen apart. He was married to Janine Offa Wall, right, the great production designer. He loses his job as a critic. He says he's in a dispute with the AFI. I do feel like Paul Schrader is always basically like in a fight with someone. Yeah. Like, he's always pissing somebody off or whatever.

• 1:23:03Griffin Newman?

  I'm just gonna call out quickly. I never settled upon, but Scorsese and Schrader have said just Midwest.

• 1:23:11David Sims?

  Okay, right. Much as, and Paul Schrader is from, where's he, like Minnesota or? Yeah. He's like a Calvinist, right, like, anyway. But he says, seventy-three, he's living in his car in LA, riding around all night, drinking heavily, going to porno movies because they were open all night, and for no other reasons. Yeah. Uh, and crashing someplace during the day. The Pussy Cat Theater in LA was one of his haunts. Uh, he says he'd go there to sleep and no other thing. Yeah. I'm adding the part. Uh, and then he goes to the ER because he like doubles over in pain and he has an ulcer. He's twenty-seven, and he says, like, I realize I hadn't really talked to anyone in a month. And I'm basically like about to die. I'm like driving around in a metal coffin in my car

• 1:23:56David Sims?

  in a busy city. I'm completely alone. And then he says he hears the song, the Harry Chapin song Taxi. Uh, and then Arthur Brenner shoots George Wallace, the Alabama governor, who's running for president when he, when he gets assassinated.

• 1:24:12Griffin Newman?

  That's funny that this movie basically was like a P tier Griffin moment where he saw three things at the same time and was like.

• 1:24:17David Sims?

  Taxi.

• 1:24:18Griffin Newman?

  Driver. Um, just based off of what you said.

• 1:24:22David Sims?

  And he just puts those things together. He's like, I might as well be honest. It was this weird, like, conglomeration of these things.

• 1:24:27Griffin Newman?

  I'm not implying that it ever gets to Travis Bickle levels of darkness. I am curious if you gentlemen have the same experience. I never feel more mentally unwell than when I have been physically ill. When I have like, I am sick in bed and kind of isolating for four or five days. And I come out of that, in that way you're saying where like, he's like, huh, I kinda haven't talked to anybody in a month?

• 1:24:49David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:24:50Griffin Newman?

  Where I just go like, what the fuck am I thinking?

• 1:24:52David Sims?

  See, I.

• 1:24:54Griffin Newman?

  I mean, you have a house full of handles.

• 1:24:55David Sims?

  I was about to say, I'm a very social person, and so I do require, I do like to, you know, I'm extroverted. I like to see people, it charges my batteries, blah, blah, blah. Now, the idea of like, David, you're gonna be bedridden for five days. I'm like, sounds like a vacation. Am I not gonna die? Sounds great.

• 1:25:10Griffin Newman?

  I just feel like.

• 1:25:11David Sims?

  I don't know where you are on this, Tracy.

• 1:25:12Griffin Newman?

  The imposed state of you shouldn't interact with people. And I certainly felt extreme versions of this in, in lockdown as well, where it's like, it actually, the safe thing to do is to not go out and talk to people.

• 1:25:24David Sims?

  Lockdown, the most extreme.

• 1:25:25Griffin Newman?

  And then you just go like, the fuck is my brain thinking?

• 1:25:27David Sims?

  Um, yeah, I don't know, Tracy. Are you a lonely guy? Are you an introverted person?

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:25:35David Sims?

  Question.

• 1:25:35Griffin Newman?

  You've talked about not wanting to leave your house recently, but that's obviously because of the AV setup.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  I'm a, I'm a homebody. I've always been a homebody.

• 1:25:43David Sims?

  You always have, right. It's not like, yeah.

• 1:25:44Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  And, you know, I can go out and be social and, and then I, and I have a, my social anxiety always happens after the fact. Like, once I'm home and I go, oh, why did I talk, why did I say anything to anybody? Why don't you just be quiet?

• 1:26:00Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I, I have.

• 1:26:03Griffin Newman?

  I have that and anticipatory. It's hard for me to get myself to go to a place. And then I feel terrible about everything I did or said afterwards. When I'm there, I'm vaguely okay.

• 1:26:15David Sims?

  Paul Schrader says he wrote the screenplay in about ten or twelve days continuously.

• 1:26:19Griffin Newman?

  It definitely feels like one of those.

• 1:26:21David Sims?

  Girlfriend's house, and he just wrote and wrote and wrote.

• 1:26:24Griffin Newman?

  I almost feel like this is the kind of movie you can't write if you think about it too much.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  I think that's probably right.

• 1:26:29Griffin Newman?

  It needs to just be coming out.

• 1:26:31David Sims?

  Yep. You know, he had to create the plot, like, that was the one thing he needed, like, okay, he wants a girl he can't have, or he tries to kill the politician.

• 1:26:39Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it's like one of those Taxi Driver things where he tries to kill somebody to impress a girl.

• 1:26:44David Sims?

  Uh, he says, you know, came from the gut, like largely, and his sort of oft-repeated line, but it is a good one. He's like, I wrote the character so I wouldn't become him, essentially.

• 1:26:54Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55David Sims?

  You know what I mean? Which is a good, it's a good line.

• 1:26:57Griffin Newman?

  It's also the fascinating, not to jump ahead, but the Scorsese versus Schrader thing of, Schrader always felt like a guy who was dangerously close to fully becoming one of his characters. He was right on the edge, and he speaks about like his hedonistic impulses and all that stuff. And Scorsese felt like, feels like a guy.

• 1:27:18David Sims?

  Michigan, not Minnesota, by the way, I apologize.

• 1:27:20Griffin Newman?

  Good, good correction. Scorsese feels like a guy who, you know, sits alone in a room and is self-punishing for even having the thoughts of the mental experiment of doing things.

• 1:27:32David Sims?

  Scorsese, you're saying?

• 1:27:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, because he's like sort of housebound when he's a boy and all that.

• 1:27:36Griffin Newman?

  But they're both bonded by this sort of like, my brain goes here. Scorsese's maybe thinking about it a little more anthropologically and then feeling tremendous shame about it. And Schrader's like, let me write it so I don't do it.

• 1:27:49David Sims?

  Right. Schrader also obviously admits, very influenced by Satra. By European, this what he calls the European existential hero, so like, The Stranger, Notes from the Underground, the movie Pickpocket, you know, things like that.

• 1:28:04Griffin Newman?

  All the Bresson films are so man writing a diary obsessively, focused on things.

• 1:28:10David Sims?

  The existential hero's problem always is, should I exist? Right? It's not like, do I want X or Y? He's just like, should I even exist?

• 1:28:18Griffin Newman?

  Should I have been thrust into existence?

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  It's interesting because the, the, well, it's interesting for a lot of reasons, but the, the, uh, so Hollywood movies

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  get aped by European filmmakers. They fall in love with.

• 1:28:36David Sims?

  Right, the, the French New Wave and all the Italian, you know, like, they're like, right, like, we love it.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  And then those seventies, the new Hollywood seventies filmmakers, influenced by those movies, turn it around and they sort of give their version of that. And clearly, that was a very healthy, uh, turning of the soil for, for those various generations. I mean, if Taxi Driver is, uh, American.

• 1:29:02David Sims?

  Bresson.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Bresson, existentialism that comes from film noir from before that. We're, we're all the better off for it.

• 1:29:11Griffin Newman?

  So I, I'm curious to hear both of your takes on this, but I was watching this, trying to like, think about the lineage of how you, you get to Taxi Driver existing, right? From two guys who absorbed a lot of uh, literary work and movies and all of this. I was primarily thinking about, uh, Nicholas Ray and Ilya Kazan and those sort of like, you know, the method, the new styles of acting movies about self-tortured men.

• 1:29:38David Sims?

  Sure.

• 1:29:38Griffin Newman?

  That were always kind of explosive, that were more theatrical, even when they were moving into a more modern style of acting.

• 1:29:44David Sims?

  They're rending garments, they're yelling to the sky.

• 1:29:47Griffin Newman?

  And part of it also is that the social mores of the time are that you kinda couldn't say what was actually going on.

• 1:29:54David Sims?

  Men can't be emotional in that way.

• 1:29:56Griffin Newman?

  Well, there's, there's that. There's literally, that's what the characters are reflecting, but then there's also like, the movies themselves have to render things into deep subtext, or things need to happen off camera, you know? Or the quiet part is never said and something else is screamed out loud. And this feels like, to me, one of the first examples I can think of, of a movie. And Joe, which, uh, Peter Boyle is also in, feels like a kind of an important, uh, link in the chain.

• 1:30:28David Sims?

  The Norman Wechsler movie.

• 1:30:29Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:30:30David Sims?

  Big, uh, favorite of Tarot Team.

• 1:30:32Griffin Newman?

  But where you can kind of be like, the movie is allowed to touch these things specifically, which allows the character to be less explosive. That allows the performance to become more internalized, because you don't need your sort of, you're tearing me apart Lisa kind of moments.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  Right. No, I think that's right. And also, you know, Travis's relationship to violence.

• 1:30:56Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Is, is an important one. I think in this, in the Schrader screenplay, he even states boldly in the prose introduction to Travis that this is a man who's, who, who clearly is, is a, uh, an attractor of violence or a combustible figure, somebody for whom violence is, uh, is part of their essential nature.

• 1:31:19Griffin Newman?

  It's also, I mean, it's just so fucking great that the movie doesn't really try to unpack his backstory at all.

• 1:31:28David Sims?

  No.

• 1:31:28Griffin Newman?

  Beyond just.

• 1:31:29David Sims?

  He doesn't have some monologue where he's like, when I was at Kaison or whatever.

• 1:31:32Griffin Newman?

  He served in the war and he grew up somewhere different than where he lives now. It's all you need to know and you can infer, and this is you talking about like, movies that weirdly change even though they are actually fixed and, and how you perceive them. This is a movie that feels like it has all the answers, but every time I watch it, I just ask myself new questions. And it, it, they're not because of the movie being, um, nonspecific in any way.

• 1:31:59David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:31:59Griffin Newman?

  But sometimes you go, okay, is the violence a reflection of, well, Travis kinda reads like someone who might have been really bullied as a child.

• 1:32:07David Sims?

  Sure, of course.

• 1:32:08Griffin Newman?

  His violence a lashing out of what was inflicted upon him?

• 1:32:11David Sims?

  Runtiness, like De Niro's a little guy.

• 1:32:14Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15David Sims?

  Contributes that, he, he really helps for that.

• 1:32:17Griffin Newman?

  He also plays this, and, and, and part of it is, I mean, you were saying this earlier. I watched this movie a lot when I was a teenager and in my early twenties.

• 1:32:26David Sims?

  Right. I watched it a lot when I was casing this whore.

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  House. I was thinking of a.

• 1:32:30David Sims?

  Current, current.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  I hadn't.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  Good reference for that.

• 1:32:33Griffin Newman?

  Had not seen this film in a while, even though I'd seen it many times. Had not seen this film since being older than the character. And now older, but than the character by some distance. And it's not like I ever looked to him as an aspirational figure. But watching it this time, I was taken by how childlike he seems.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Griffin Newman?

  He really seems like a, it's like big. It's like he's a little boy in a body he doesn't know how to control. And De Niro is playing that in sort of his like weird kind of guilelessness.

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Griffin Newman?

  And, and it does, you're like, is this a guy who never got over not fitting in as a kid? Is his home life defined by parents who were physically or psychologically abusive to him in some way? Or were they just checked out? Was it a lack of protection? Or was it a sense of act of danger?

• 1:33:18Speaker 03

  I think he might also be an only child.

• 1:33:20Griffin Newman?

  He definitely seems to be an only child to me. He reads that way.

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:33:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24David Sims?

  I mean, all only children are one step away, I think, from just, you know, becoming Travis Bickle.

• 1:33:30Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, and we love you, Ben.

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  Hey, take it easy.

• 1:33:32David Sims?

  I'm kidding. Um. We love you. Schrader writes this script. He writes it. I mean, clearly it's like, it's almost like an episode he has. He writes the script very fast. Then he starts hanging.

• 1:33:42Griffin Newman?

  Rocky, kind of similar, by the way. Rocky is a Sylvester Stallone locked himself in a room and like drew the curtains down.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:33:47Griffin Newman?

  For like seven days and just vomited it out.

• 1:33:49David Sims?

  It's a great.

• 1:33:50Griffin Newman?

  I just like the idea of these being.

• 1:33:52David Sims?

  I got so mad at Sean at all, being like, eh, it's a little slow. I like Rocky two. I'm like, get the fuck out of here.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  A little slow. I don't get that.

• 1:34:01David Sims?

  It's Rocky. It's such a beautiful movie. I really think Rocky is almost underrated, even though it won Best Picture and is one of the most famous movies ever made. It's a gorgeous study of like human relationships.

• 1:34:14Griffin Newman?

  Because of what he did to the legacy of Rocky, which is let Polly fuck a robot.

• 1:34:18David Sims?

  Right. The other ones are incredibly fun sports movies. Like Rocky III, I think, is the peak of the like, yes, when he turned these into slick sports movies. They're very good. They're very fun. But there's no comparison. The first one is completely in a league of its own.

• 1:34:33Griffin Newman?

  There's no example.

• 1:34:34David Sims?

  There's a reason it won Best Picture, because it did it all. Like, it made the money, it appeals, but also it is a, you know, a very, very well-made film.

• 1:34:41Griffin Newman?

  But there's also, there is no analog in movies of something that started as kind of focused, personal, emotional art. And then just sort of became pop trash. And then you could argue with Creed, went back again and then back again.

• 1:34:55David Sims?

  Yeah, now, now it's doing the, yeah, it's almost like Creed, they were like, let's make a serious movie. And then they're like, but for the sequels, we can make movies. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

• 1:35:02Griffin Newman?

  Creed's are remaking the Rocky sequels in a way that's fascinating.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  They gotta bring the robot back.

• 1:35:07David Sims?

  They do.

• 1:35:07Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Creed's gotta fuck the robot.

• 1:35:09David Sims?

  Now, listen, listen. So.

• 1:35:12Griffin Newman?

  He's gotta fuck it himself. That's agency.

• 1:35:14David Sims?

  Schrader leaves town for a while. He comes back to LA. He's still a freelance critic, but he feels a little tougher. He writes a review of Sisters and interviews Brian De Palma, and they kind of became butts. And he gives him the script. And then Michael and Julia Phillips, of course, the sort of husband-wife producing team, Julia Phillips, you'll never eat lunch in this town again eventually. Right. I read that book when I was a teenager, because my mom would buy me movie books.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 1:35:41David Sims?

  But I mean, as a teenager, I remember being like, this is a little over my head. Like, I am not.

• 1:35:46David Sims?

  I don't really get what being a producer is. This person seems so angry. But, um, uh, they're, they're preparing The Sting and, which they produce, you know, and they are very taken with Taxi Driver. But they have no idea what to do with it. They're like, this script is incredible. They buy it for a thousand dollars, which is crazy. But they don't actually know how they're gonna like make it into a sort of digestible movie. And then they see a rough cut of Mean Streets. They're talking about doing Taxi Driver with Jeff Bridges. And I guess the director was gonna be Robert Mulligan, uh, who's not a director I know that well, but he made To Kill a Mockingbird. But I don't know, like, I don't know what he's doing in the seventies.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  I mean, he's much older.

• 1:36:29David Sims?

  Yeah, he's older. He'd made like that movie, Summer of Forty Two, the sort of coming of age movie, which is like kind of a hit, right? He made that.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  That's a big hit, right?

• 1:36:37David Sims?

  Horror movie, The Other. Have you, do you know these movies at all?

• 1:36:42David Sims?

  The Nickel Ride, which is a Jason Miller kind of crime movie.

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  Favorite of Sean's.

• 1:36:48Griffin Newman?

  Tracy, we were texting with Hitmaker, because you had listened to our Fearless episode. About how just Jeff Bridges is one of those rare examples of a guy who is thought of, discussed, praised, has won an Oscar, is still eternally underrated. No one quite acknowledges how good he is. This is maybe one of the only cases I've ever come across of hearing a role that Jeff Bridges could have played that would be a disaster.

• 1:37:14David Sims?

  I don't think Bridges makes sense for that.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  He doesn't make any sense, but then it's just also, I mean, De Niro's indelible, right?

• 1:37:22Griffin Newman?

  No one ever could have given a better performance than this, in this role.

• 1:37:26David Sims?

  But so they seen, they see Mean Streets and they go like, Scorsese and De Niro, like this is it. And, uh, they never thought about anyone else again. And, uh, Scorsese knows Julia a little bit. And I guess they talk after he makes Box Herbert, and she's kind of like, come when you've done something better. You know, she was kind of like a bit of a bully or whatever, you know, kind of making fun of him, but in a, in a sweet way. And then they just essentially make a proposal to Marty and Bob's agent of like, you're a package. Like, we want you to do this movie and we want you to do it together. And like, it's not one or the other. It has to be both. Scorsese, he kind of knows Schrader a little bit and meets him through De Palma.

• 1:38:09David Sims?

  He wanted Paul to write, to adapt. Dostoevsky's the gambler for him. And he says he arrives late to dinner. Schrader's sitting with De Palma and they have already cooked up the movie Obsession together while this is happening. And so he's kind of like, I miss my shot. But then the script gets handed to him.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Did Schrader write Obsession?

• 1:38:30David Sims?

  He did, right? Am I wrong? Nineteen seventy, what is that, seventy-six?

• 1:38:34Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:35David Sims?

  Yep, he wrote it. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Not a movie I love.

• 1:38:38Griffin Newman?

  Corey Barker film? He wrote Obsession? That's crazy.

• 1:38:40David Sims?

  Not the recent Obsession, the Cliff Robertson. And part of the reason I don't love it is Cliff Robertson is like such a ham bone in it.

• 1:38:46Griffin Newman?

  What do you think of Cliff Robertson?

• 1:38:48Speaker 02

  Have we talked about this?

• 1:38:49Griffin Newman?

  I don't think so.

• 1:38:50David Sims?

  But we were talking about guys who have an Oscar, though.

• 1:38:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52David Sims?

  You're like, huh.

• 1:38:54Griffin Newman?

  That's certainly a movie that you would get arrested for making today.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  You should read John Lithgow's memoir to read him, uh, just fucking destroy Cliff Robertson.

• 1:39:02Griffin Newman?

  I mean, he was a noted son of a bitch.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  John just clearly hated him.

• 1:39:07Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07David Sims?

  What were they in together? What's the, uh?

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  Obsession?

• 1:39:10David Sims?

  Oh, right. Of course, because he's in so many De Palma movies.

• 1:39:12Griffin Newman?

  Right. De Palma fucking loved Lith. I love that Brian De Palma saw Lithgow and was like, this is my guy.

• 1:39:17David Sims?

  This Frankenstein ass. So you gotta get the camera.

• 1:39:20Griffin Newman?

  The waspiest Frankenstein in the world.

• 1:39:22David Sims?

  Love John Lithgow, to be clear.

• 1:39:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:25David Sims?

  Yeah, so, but Scorsese does, he reads the Taxi Driver script and he's like, well, this is kind of the Russian literature idea I'm thinking of. Like the sort of deepest, darkest, you know, secret type self, you know, movie. This is, this is what I want. And so they're all in. I mean, yeah, it's an interesting story because it's basically like every time someone reads the script, they're like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. There's an interesting quote from Schrader where he says, I wrote a Protestant script. It's like cold, isolated, like it's me. Marty makes a Catholic movie. It's like lush and rich in New York and all this. And like, and that the, the merging is like why the movie's a masterpiece, right? Like, you know.

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  Interesting idea.

• 1:40:07David Sims?

  I, I kind of like that idea. Because I do feel like some of Schrader's movies that he directs himself are chillier.

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13David Sims?

  I mean, extremely chilling. Uh, okay, so blah, blah, blah. Schrader had also written this movie, The Yakuza, of course. He sells that for some money. Marty does Alice. The Phillipses do The Sting. De Niro does Godfather Two. Basically, everyone has a moment of success after they decide on this Taxi Driver project. So they're all coming back to get a little bit of a bigger budget. The budget's one point three million dollars, but that is more than they initially had hoped for. Obviously, no, it eventually goes up to one point nine million.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  You said a little bit more, you mean it's a little bit under what they had just made?

• 1:40:50David Sims?

  They thought they were gonna get nothing to make this movie. And like, you know, they, all of the sort of power of like them, you know, De Niro wins an Oscar, the Phillips win an Oscar. Like, it's like, okay, they get a little bit more money.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  But it is, it's a studio film.

• 1:41:02David Sims?

  It is. It's a, it's a, what, you know, Columbia Pictures. And, uh, Scorsese is, he's already trying to make New York, New York, which is a much more expensive movie, obviously.

• 1:41:13Griffin Newman?

  Crazy that he already wanted to do it, that New York, New York isn't just him flush with the success, thinking he can do anything.

• 1:41:20David Sims?

  Everyone gets bargain basement prices. De Niro gets thirty-five grand, Marty gets sixty-five grand, Paul gets thirty grand. Columbia is still, even at that price, incredibly nervous about the movie. I'm trying to think like if there had been anything quite as sort of lurid as this movie made by a studio in seventy-six.

• 1:41:40Griffin Newman?

  Right. And, and being so.

• 1:41:42David Sims?

  I mean, obviously, there's like trash movies, there's like exploitation films.

• 1:41:45Griffin Newman?

  Is lurid in a different way.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  Midnight Cowboy.

• 1:41:47David Sims?

  But Midnight Cowboy is, is, has a sweet side to it.

• 1:41:51Griffin Newman?

  It does.

• 1:41:52David Sims?

  It's about boys, friends.

• 1:41:54Griffin Newman?

  It is about boys being boys.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  The Godfather's no picnic.

• 1:41:58Griffin Newman?

  This is true.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  But it's classy.

• 1:41:59David Sims?

  I know. Yeah. But it's no picnic. It has a horse's head.

• 1:42:03Griffin Newman?

  How you get there, right? You go, okay, so Midnight Cowboy has the lurid sexuality and the New York grime.

• 1:42:09David Sims?

  When is Death Wish?

• 1:42:10Griffin Newman?

  Godfather has the violence.

• 1:42:11David Sims?

  Seventy-four.

• 1:42:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13David Sims?

  And Death, Death Wish is like an artless, you know, kind of version of this movie.

• 1:42:17Griffin Newman?

  I think it's important that those two movies win Best Picture and breaks down a couple taboo walls.

• 1:42:22David Sims?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Deliverance.

• 1:42:23Griffin Newman?

  This is true.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  There's also, uh, one that's pushing the boundary.

• 1:42:28Griffin Newman?

  I mean, banjo had never been played that fast before.

• 1:42:30David Sims?

  But Deliverance is like, if you go fucking canoeing in the Appalachians or whatever, that's gonna happen. Taxi Driver's like, if you try and get in a cab in New York City, it's sort of the opposite, you know, ends of the, you know, America's a nightmare.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  I mean, they had been falling, I mean, you could argue that Rocky, right? Rocky and Star Wars start to be the end of that.

• 1:42:48Griffin Newman?

  They reestablished the taboos. I mean, I, I just think it can't be overstated that the seventies start with an X-rated movie winning Best Picture. And I think that has to feel like, briefly, all bets are off.

• 1:42:59David Sims?

  I guess the difference I'm noticing here is even Death Wish, but certainly things like Godfather.

• 1:43:04Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04David Sims?

  Midnight Cowboy, even Deliverance, it's like, there's still a hero character. There's someone conflicted about the evil or the violence. Silence being done or whatever. And even Charles Bronson, you know, that's a somewhat sympathetic character in the first Death Wish, obviously. And like, he's, you know, he's avenging a wrong and all this. Whereas this one is like, you're in the head of a psychopathic man.

• 1:43:25Griffin Newman?

  Here's a question I gotta ask.

• 1:43:26David Sims?

  And there's no escape.

• 1:43:27Griffin Newman?

  There might not be an answer.

• 1:43:28David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:43:29Griffin Newman?

  Do we think that part of this movie getting made is that the sort of very interpretive, happy ending and victory at the end of the movie could have been misread by the bean counters who were approving the movie getting made?

• 1:43:43David Sims?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:43:43Griffin Newman?

  That if you're looking at it on paper, even as dark as the film is, you don't know what the performance is gonna be like. Do you imagine it is a film? Because a lot of these kind of grimier, not even the exploitation films, but the sort of genre revenge films would have these wild character swings where the movie clearly was asking you to just go like, and now you like this guy. Now the scenes are being played soft. Now it's sensitive. Now it's a win. Or we made the bad guy so bad that he has permission to do anything. On its face, does this look a little bit closer to a Death Wish if you don't know exactly how they're gonna execute it? I don't know.

• 1:44:21David Sims?

  No, I don't know. That's an interesting question because, you know, we get to a point in the, in the narrative where it seems like Travis kind of comes to a fork in the, right after he, uh, arms himself. He comes to a kind of a fork in the road and one fork takes him to this assassination idea that he's gonna assassinate the presidential candidate.

• 1:44:43Griffin Newman?

  Palatine.

• 1:44:43David Sims?

  And the other road takes him to rescue.

• 1:44:47Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:44:48David Sims?

  Lady in distress. Is the movie unclear? Is Travis unclear of which way it's gonna go until finally we get to the climax of the film? You can't even call it an aborted assassination attempt. He just, you know, he gets out of there before it even.

• 1:45:02Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:03David Sims?

  Transpires.

• 1:45:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:04David Sims?

  Maybe the mohawk was a mistake in that regard.

• 1:45:06Griffin Newman?

  Right, sure.

• 1:45:07David Sims?

  It is also, it's from an era where you could just kind of walk up to a presidential candidate, like, you know, right?

• 1:45:11Griffin Newman?

  Well, unlike now, you know, if there's a White House Correspondence Dinner, security's not gonna let you get anywhere.

• 1:45:17David Sims?

  I mean, that guy didn't get that close, did he, right? He kind of made it to the lobby.

• 1:45:20Griffin Newman?

  It's crazy he got anywhere within the vicinity.

• 1:45:23David Sims?

  But it's like, it's a much more, you know, people are just kind of walking around. I mean.

• 1:45:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Yeah. People were just walking here. That's another taboo that Midnight Cowboy wrote.

• 1:45:31David Sims?

  Hinckley, obviously.

• 1:45:33Griffin Newman?

  He's inspired by Taxi Driver.

• 1:45:34David Sims?

  Inspired by Taxi Driver was able to walk up, right up to Ronald Reagan on the street, getting into a car. But Travis swerves, right? And he goes over and he does the.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  I'll do the nobler thing.

• 1:45:45David Sims?

  I'll do the nobler thing instead. When, I mean, we, what we sense is that he's just gotta get this out.

• 1:45:51Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:45:52David Sims?

  Right. It's a bomb that's gonna explode.

• 1:45:53Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54David Sims?

  Like, you know.

• 1:45:54Griffin Newman?

  I, I, look, I think about the new Hollywood thing a lot and how this happened, right? This brief window. And a lot of it is broken by the BBS films and Easy Rider and the studios going, our shit's not working. Something's happening over here. Maybe we have to.

• 1:46:09David Sims?

  Let's plug into this.

• 1:46:10Griffin Newman?

  Unlearn everything we thought we knew.

• 1:46:12David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:46:12Griffin Newman?

  And so all the kind of rules of traditional what works, what is proper storytelling, yada, yada, yada, go out the window and they start just letting the inmates run the asylum to a certain degree, right?

• 1:46:22David Sims?

  And French Connection and Godfather.

• 1:46:25Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:46:25David Sims?

  I, I, I mean, these movies are, and The Exorcist, they're making tons of money.

• 1:46:31Griffin Newman?

  And not to keep just tying everything back to recent big picture episodes, but in that 76 draft, Sean was going through, you know, what his list of what he felt like was the definitive cultural event film of each year. And the amount of years, right, for that one decade, the amount of years that it lines up with the best picture winner is wild. That would not be the case today where you go, these movies not only won Best Picture, were critically adored, were like esteemed critical objects, were embraced by the public, were massive financial successes, in many cases, also the highest grossing film of their year, almost always within the top five.

• 1:47:09David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:47:09Griffin Newman?

  And they were like pop culture. You know, it wasn't just like a Tony thing that everyone got behind. That's an unusual thing. And part of that is just everyone going like, look, fucking three years ago, none of that would have happened to French Connection.

• 1:47:26David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Griffin Newman?

  This would have been the grimiest thing you'd ever seen, you know? In like, on a, on a double bill or whatever. I think there's something to, even when you're saying, well, this movie places you so inside the head of the character, and it's not until this fork in the road moment that Travis really becomes, you know, potentially this, this figure of revenge or whatever it is. If you're a studio exec reading the script, once again, to run this exercise, do you just go like, I don't know, these seventies movies have all these weird tangents?

• 1:47:55David Sims?

  What's interesting to me about all this is that, yes, Star Wars kills New Holly and Rocky and the, but it's also that the new Hollywood guys start being like, well, I wanna make epics.

• 1:48:05Griffin Newman?

  I mean, what happens.

• 1:48:06David Sims?

  Like Chabot and Friedkin are like.

• 1:48:07Griffin Newman?

  The Blank Check era begins. These people are actually given.

• 1:48:10David Sims?

  Coppola.

• 1:48:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:11David Sims?

  They're like, I can make anything. I can, you know, and then they make this stuff that all, you know, bankrupt studios and it's not like their careers are, for Chabot, his career is over, but for, you know, the other guys, they, they, they salvage it. But I think that's when Hollywood's like, all right, like.

• 1:48:26Griffin Newman?

  Totally.

• 1:48:26David Sims?

  You were fun cheap. You're not fun like this. Yeah, certainly chastened. I mean, uh, Friedkin makes two of the hugest movies ever made.

• 1:48:35Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:48:36David Sims?

  And then bombs so bad with Sorcerer, he can't, he, he has a hard time getting money for his next movie.

• 1:48:42Griffin Newman?

  And, and we will talk about it.

• 1:48:44David Sims?

  Like, when does, I mean, Friedkin is my ultimate, we will do him on the show one day. Cause I do think he's the ultimate Blank Check guy. Where it's just like, all the way up and then Sorcerer, and then it's just like, goodbye. Get the, get out. You are a pariah for 10 years.

• 1:49:00Griffin Newman?

  You, you exist on the margins now.

• 1:49:02David Sims?

  He makes great movies after that. He also makes forgettable movies. He also makes two Tracy Lutz movies.

• 1:49:06Griffin Newman?

  He's never at the center of the culture again.

• 1:49:08David Sims?

  No, no, but he never fully goes away and like.

• 1:49:11Griffin Newman?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:49:11David Sims?

  What's interesting about someone like Friedkin is like, he made stuff like Rules of Engagement. Like he made like very sort of like solid Hollywood entertainment along with the, you know, weird stuff.

• 1:49:20Griffin Newman?

  That's the balance. Like the, the two movies he made of your plays, I think are like both excellent, but those are, feel like a throwback to even his like pre-French Connection shit, right? And then you're also like, sometimes he would just be a studio guy for hired. He would do the hunted or whatever.

• 1:49:37David Sims?

  Hunting's pretty good.

• 1:49:37Griffin Newman?

  Right. But it was like, he couldn't ever do French Connection again. He couldn't ever be like, I am working within the studio system, making the purest version of what interests me.

• 1:49:48David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:48Griffin Newman?

  It becomes a little bifurcated.

• 1:49:49David Sims?

  He would have told, he told me, uh, that it wasn't possible anymore. He said, you know, the, just circumstances change in such a way. It's like, that'll never happen again.

• 1:49:59Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:11David Sims?

  Taxi Driver. Okay. So, uh, you know, John, uh, Scorsese, two big influences for him. John Wayne and the Searchers. He doesn't say much, except that'll be the day. He doesn't belong anywhere. He just fought in a war that he lost.

• 1:50:23Griffin Newman?

  As John Wayne always said.

• 1:50:25David Sims?

  Like haunted.

• 1:50:25Griffin Newman?

  That performance was based on, quote, the loneliest man he ever knew.

• 1:50:29David Sims?

  Right. He's also very interested, influenced, he says, by Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract. He, I guess it worked with Lerner on New York, New York eventually, like.

• 1:50:39Griffin Newman?

  You know Murder by Contract?

• 1:50:40David Sims?

  I've, I, I've seen Murder by Contract. I feel like.

• 1:50:43Griffin Newman?

  Do not know anything about this movie.

• 1:50:44David Sims?

  I feel like it was, cause that's a Colombian noir, right? Like. Vince Edwards, I think? Uh, Vince Edwards is Claude. Boy, pulled that out of my hand. That's pretty impressive. I, like.

• 1:50:55Griffin Newman?

  It's like a taffy bowl.

• 1:50:56David Sims?

  Criterion put up some, long ago, you know, some Criterion Collection, like, uh, Criterion Channel, sorry, series of the, of those Colombian noirs. Those like. Indicator boxes of those Colombian noirs. They're great. Oh, maybe I gotta start busting out that, uh, credit card number.

• 1:51:11Griffin Newman?

  I gotta, I gotta say, that series of words hit like heroin. That went through my bloodstream.

• 1:51:16David Sims?

  Because those Colombian noirs of the late 50s are very interesting because Colombia was sort of the poverty studio and so they made the darker stuff.

• 1:51:22Griffin Newman?

  The skid row movies.

• 1:51:23David Sims?

  Yeah. Where you watch it and you're like, fuck, this is, for the 50s, this is kind of nasty. And that's one of the nastiest. Like, that's the one where the poster is, uh, the, the guy's got a garrote around the woman's neck and she's looking beautiful and he's looking tormented or whatever. And he's like a hitman who's in his own head. And I understand like that he's like, Scorsese's like, that's one of the only Hollywood movies where you're like inside the head of a man who kills people. Like, you know, it's a rare thing. So, anyway, uh, so Scorsese and De Niro, obviously they've worked together already. Only the one time before this now?

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  Only on Mean Streets.

• 1:51:59Griffin Newman?

  We, we talk about this in the Mean Streets episode, but it is fascinating to me that he's always said, they're the three actors I had the real symbiotic connection to and relationship and, and process. And it's Keitel, De Niro and Scorsese, or, or, and fucking DiCaprio, excuse me. Obviously, De Niro becomes the guy, he understands how to filter everything that interests him in for decades. And then DiCaprio becomes the guy who is versatile enough as an actor, but more importantly, is automatic financing and security for whatever he wants to make at a very large scale. Keitel starts out as Scorsese's self-insert. You watch who's that knocking at my door? You watch Mean Streets. Those are clearly him. He places himself into the movie.

• 1:52:44David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:52:44Griffin Newman?

  And then from Mean Streets on, there doesn't feel like you have characters that represent Scorsese, even when Scorsese's in the movie as an actor.

• 1:52:52David Sims?

  Sure.

• 1:52:52Griffin Newman?

  It's like he notices when fucking De Niro enters the bar in Mean Streets, the way the audience reacts and is like, fuck, if I have that kind of power.

• 1:53:02David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02Griffin Newman?

  And that kind of charismatic figure at the center of my movie, I'm pulling the audience in more. And he starts to remove himself in the action and places himself in the kind of worldview and what the film's saying. And it's so funny that the moment he does that switch, he's like, hey, Keitel, you're cool playing like a fucking pedophile pimp and Judas, right? You're cool playing like just the most evil people in the world? I'm gonna keep working with you? But now you just play kind of like unknowable monsters.

• 1:53:33David Sims?

  Yeah, that's true. I mean, De Niro, it's very. Interesting is shooting nineteen hundred for Bertolucci. He's prepping Ilya Kazan's The Last Tycoon, not a very good movie, but at the time a major project.

• 1:53:46Griffin Newman?

  Ilya Kazan's final film.

• 1:53:48David Sims?

  Indeed.

• 1:53:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:49David Sims?

  He like would come from Europe, like on breaks from nineteen hundred and drive cabs around New York City. And then the way Scorsese describes it, then he would just click a button and then he'd turn into Harry Ufflin from The Last Tycoon if he needed to, right? Like he's like, he's got all these modes in his brain.

• 1:54:06Speaker 02

  Was he big enough at that point where would people recognize?

• 1:54:09Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna bring this up, Ben.

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  He'd won an Oscar.

• 1:54:11Griffin Newman?

  But, but he said it happened only one time.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:54:14Griffin Newman?

  That, that basically still he was weirdly anonymous enough. Even though Godfather two was huge and he had won the Academy Award, he wasn't a leading man yet.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:54:24Griffin Newman?

  And he's, he's elusive in Godfather two.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  He is.

• 1:54:27Griffin Newman?

  He's elusive and he's a little transformative and he's so withdrawn in his own way that he, he could just fucking drive a cab. And people weren't like, that's fucking movie happening here?

• 1:54:38David Sims?

  Obviously Jodie Foster is in Alice, doesn't live here anymore. So he has the connection to her. His mother, her, sorry, her mother thinks she's crazy to do, want to do this part.

• 1:54:50Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:50David Sims?

  But Foster's like, I trust him. I think it's a good idea. They had to get approval from the LA Welfare Board, you know, they hire, they hire Pat Brown, the former governor of California to make, to smooth things over. They have adults, her sister Connie is there for some of the more adult quote unquote shots, you know, to make sure.

• 1:55:11Griffin Newman?

  Body double.

• 1:55:12David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:55:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14David Sims?

  Foster says like everyone treated her great and was clearly so uncomfortable. Like basically was just like on tiptoes around her the entire time. Cause they're like, Jesus Christ.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  She was, uh, was she thirteen years old?

• 1:55:25David Sims?

  Twelve.

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  She's twelve.

• 1:55:26David Sims?

  It's crazy.

• 1:55:27Griffin Newman?

  And part of that is she had such a like, part of it's just the deep voice.

• 1:55:31David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure.

• 1:55:32Griffin Newman?

  But she was such an old pro at this point. I mean, she's literally the fucking like Coppertone kid. I mean, you know that Ben, that she is the model of the kid.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  Wait, really?

• 1:55:41Griffin Newman?

  Right? Am I wrong about that?

• 1:55:43David Sims?

  Uh, no, isn't that right?

• 1:55:45Griffin Newman?

  If not for the bottle, she certainly did the commercial. Like she was working from the time she was basically an infant.

• 1:55:50David Sims?

  Damn.

• 1:55:51Griffin Newman?

  Uh, so A, she's such an old pro. B, her voice just always makes her sound wiser beyond her years. Even like now, you're like, oh, she's Methuselah.

• 1:56:02Griffin Newman?

  She does. She's just got, she's got so much like command and authority.

• 1:56:05David Sims?

  She's great act.

• 1:56:06Griffin Newman?

  Always.

• 1:56:06David Sims?

  You ever worked with Jodie Foster?

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  I haven't. I just met her for the first time recently. She's very nice.

• 1:56:10David Sims?

  You know, she's great. Obviously she gets the Oscar nomination. It is an incredibly iconic performance.

• 1:56:17Griffin Newman?

  It's also a thing that still is part of the playbook and it basically never works. But child stars and teen stars are like, fuck, can I find my like taxi driver performance? Where I successfully just totally shed the kitty thing and am taken seriously. And I feel like you get a lot of bad wannabe Sundance movies where like a former Nickelodeon star is like strung out on heroin. And doing fucked up shit to be like, I'm, I'm not Agent Cody Banks anymore or whatever.

• 1:56:48David Sims?

  Columbia decides they need star power. Civil Shepard is essentially parachuted into the movie. She says she threw the script in, into like a garbage can when she read it.

• 1:56:57Griffin Newman?

  She's so good in this movie.

• 1:56:59David Sims?

  But she was basically like, I'd seen Mean Streets. I trusted that they were like De Niro and Scorsese were good. I had like no lines in the script. I had no idea why I was in this movie.

• 1:57:07Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07David Sims?

  Right? You know, like it's, it's a little baffling, but uh, she is, she's fantastic in the movie, obviously.

• 1:57:12Griffin Newman?

  Like she's obviously so effective in Last Picture Show, but that's also such a raw clay performance.

• 1:57:17David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:57:18Griffin Newman?

  Where, you know, is.

• 1:57:19David Sims?

  But she's so good in that movie.

• 1:57:20Griffin Newman?

  No, she is. She is. But this, it's like, what she's doing is so complicated and delicate. In actually selling you on the varying levels of, why would she be kind of interested in him to a point? And what is that point?

• 1:57:37David Sims?

  Right. I personally would not go on a date with Travis Pickle.

• 1:57:39Griffin Newman?

  I wouldn't.

• 1:57:40David Sims?

  Although De Niro's a looker.

• 1:57:41Griffin Newman?

  It's also, it's what De Niro does well, where you watch in real time as he's like winning her and losing her moment to moment.

• 1:57:48Speaker 02

  You fucking get, both of you fucking guys would go on a date with Travis Pickle. Who the fuck are you kidding? Both of you would go on a date with Travis Pickle.

• 1:57:54David Sims?

  He's not that rizzed up when he's, you know, okay, fine. You know, he's hot.

• 1:57:58Griffin Newman?

  Let's go on one date with Travis Pickle. Let's just settle the issue.

• 1:58:01David Sims?

  He took me to this Swedish, you know, porn conception movie.

• 1:58:04Griffin Newman?

  It was educational, scientific.

• 1:58:05David Sims?

  Educational.

• 1:58:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08David Sims?

  The part, uh, that, uh, Kaitel plays sport is written by Schrader to be a black person. And Columbia is like, this movie, even in nineteen seventy six, I think Columbia has the sense to be like, this movie cannot be like he mows down a bunch of black people.

• 1:58:21Griffin Newman?

  It will cause riots.

• 1:58:22David Sims?

  In a brothel.

• 1:58:23Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:58:23David Sims?

  Like that's just not going to work for us. And Kaitel, it's basically like, you know, he knows.

• 1:58:28Griffin Newman?

  Parachute him.

• 1:58:29David Sims?

  He knows Scorsese. Come on in. What's your, were you gonna say something?

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  Well, uh, that's interesting. Uh, and I, I, and I think a good choice. But the use of race and taxi drivers, pretty interesting to watch again, to see. Uh, is the point that's being made that the seeds of white supremacy are sown in this character, in this, in this lonely.

• 1:58:53David Sims?

  If that point is being made, I feel it's unintentional, but I'm not sure. I don't really know.

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. Uh, the, the, we, we see.

• 1:59:00David Sims?

  The way they talk about race and you're right.

• 1:59:02Speaker 03

  He uses a lot of racial slurs definitely in the beginning when he's, yeah, like driving around.

• 1:59:07David Sims?

  He's so angry at everyone and everything, right? Like everyone's a target to him.

• 1:59:11Griffin Newman?

  May I get my read on this?

• 1:59:13David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:13Griffin Newman?

  I, I, not to go too global here.

• 1:59:14David Sims?

  Travis Pickle did nothing wrong?

• 1:59:16Griffin Newman?

  Well, yeah, he's the hero of the movie. Obviously he's the lead.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  Not beating the charges.

• 1:59:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Um, I, I think white supremacy is something that is basically, uh, taught. That has to be like passed down, whether it is, you know, in the home or being radicalized by a community in that kind of way. I think there is a more insidious form of racism, and once again, I have the authority to say this. That is people who feel so disenfranchised and isolated and alienated and start just kind of reaching for the guardrails of who can I blame this on?

• 1:59:54David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:59:54Griffin Newman?

  And it doesn't turn into a supremacist ideology. It doesn't become as much of an overriding kind of conspiracy feeling. Uh, it's just a like, fuck them and fuck them and fuck them. Right? And it becomes like really easy to just be racist as a place to put your anger. If you're overflowing with anger in that way. And so that's why I think it's not versus something like, I mean, Schrader obviously writes about white supremacy later, you know? And that's much more of like a religion.

• 2:00:26Speaker 02

  You can't deny the gaze through which we see.

• 2:00:31Griffin Newman?

  Totally.

• 2:00:31Speaker 02

  The black man who is walking down the street raging, I'm gonna kill them all, right? Sort of schizophrenic homeless man. The, the, the point where Travis steps out to have his conversation with Wizard.

• 2:00:42Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:42Speaker 02

  And there are just a couple of black guys walking by and there's a long shot of Travis kind of tracking them. There's the black cab driver who gives him the bang bang symbol as he's walking away from the meeting and calls him killer, I think.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  There's the kids throwing the eggs.

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  Kids throwing the eggs in the bottles at the, at the cab as he walks by. Not to mention, of course, the, the kid who he shoots in the face, uh, in the bodega.

• 2:01:06Griffin Newman?

  I mean, there are two great examples for me in this movie of a studio note based out of fear, actually saving the movie and achieving transcendence. And one of them is this, because I do think if sport is black, it just becomes that. And I think there's something in that at the beginning of the film, he keeps slipping into his anger being focused on race. And he's also like tipping into homophobia, you know? It's any sort of other group in New York City who feels empowered. And I think more than anything, seeing people who are happy and who have a community.

• 2:01:41David Sims?

  It's the twenty fifth hour mirror scene many years later where it's like, yeah, if you live in New York, you can sort of work yourself up about any ethnic community. They're all here. Like, you know, it's easy to like, you know.

• 2:01:52Griffin Newman?

  And all of them have a place and feel like they have some sense of empowerment. I mean, this is so much of the fucking insult stuff as well as, well, I, I'm being told to feel bad for these people. These people feel like they have more than I do. And it's what they can't identify is what they have is community and you don't have that.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:02:11Griffin Newman?

  The culture's not actually placing them above you. They're fighting more than you are. You just feel unhappy. And the fact that his anger is starting to be so focused on marginalized groups. And then you have a white character who is doing such a demonstrable evil that it pivots him. It pivots him into, well, I am empowered now. I must do something about this. This is not my rage unchecked. This is me being an avenging angel. He still shoots that guy in the face, you know? And he views him as less than human because it's him basically using him as like shooting practice. He's using him as a dry run.

• 2:02:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:02:49Griffin Newman?

  But I do think it's important that what really metastasizes him to go full taxi driver mode, if you will, is, well, I gotta save this kid.

• 2:02:58David Sims?

  Yeah, no, it, it is.

• 2:02:59Griffin Newman?

  This is the worst guy. He's not defined by his race. He's defined by what he's doing for a living.

• 2:03:04David Sims?

  The convenience store scene is also like, it's his fantasy kind of working out for him.

• 2:03:09Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:09David Sims?

  He's the cowboy.

• 2:03:10Griffin Newman?

  He's a racist guy, to be clear.

• 2:03:12David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:03:12Griffin Newman?

  Deeply racist.

• 2:03:13David Sims?

  I, I think Travis Pickle has a lot of hate in his heart for other, other races. Yes. But it's also, you know, like that, that goes well for him.

• 2:03:20Griffin Newman?

  Totally.

• 2:03:21David Sims?

  He defends the guy, you know, the, the, the shop owner. He kind of just gets away with it.

• 2:03:26Griffin Newman?

  Part of the cynicism of the film is him knowing.

• 2:03:28David Sims?

  He seems kind of like cool and heroic to himself.

• 2:03:30Griffin Newman?

  No one's gonna care about this kid.

• 2:03:32David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  Yet the shop owner is speaking Spanish to him.

• 2:03:36David Sims?

  He's, he's, he's, right. He's Latino. I mean, yeah.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  And they're seemingly friends.

• 2:03:39Griffin Newman?

  But he thinks.

• 2:03:40David Sims?

  Or at least allies in that moment. Yeah, right.

• 2:03:43Griffin Newman?

  Tells himself he's doing that guy a favor. Right? Like he tells the shopkeeper, he tells himself that what he's doing for the shopkeeper is akin to what he's planning to do for Jodie Foster.

• 2:03:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:03:54Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:03:54David Sims?

  Uh, Scorsese's in the film, of course.

• 2:03:58Griffin Newman?

  What a performance.

• 2:03:58David Sims?

  Uh, he is, he is replacing the actor George Momoa, who I know best from Phantom of the Paradise. But like, kind of like a big guy, you know, he's in Mean Streets. He's in, you know, he's a guy. And he had gotten in an accident making a movie called The Farmer and could not like make it to set essentially, like, you know, he was injured. Scorsese's like, okay, I'll do it. And he says he learned a lot from Bob in that scene. He remembers. Saying like, put down the flag, put down the taxi flag. And Bob was like, no, you make me put it down. He's like, I want you to mean it.

• 2:04:27Speaker 02

  Racist monologue, by the way.

• 2:04:29David Sims?

  Yep. It's a, it's an extremely scary performance. Schrader was really mad. Like, he was like, Why are you fucking taking this part? And then he saw the movie and was like, yeah, he did a pretty good job.

• 2:04:43Griffin Newman?

  His second best performance as an actor?

• 2:04:45David Sims?

  After Shark Tale?

• 2:04:46Griffin Newman?

  No, I was gonna say.

• 2:04:46David Sims?

  The Mandalorian and Grogu?

• 2:04:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:48David Sims?

  What is Scorsese's best? I mean, is it a quiz show? Like, it's like, anytime Scorsese has like a meaty performance, he is pretty freaking good.

• 2:04:55Griffin Newman?

  It's a small role, but it's this. He's, he's just astonishing.

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  Is Martin Scorsese in Mandalorian and Grogu?

• 2:05:01David Sims?

  He voices a four armed, street cart, uh, alien.

• 2:05:05Griffin Newman?

  I regret to inform you that it is maybe the only good performance in the movie.

• 2:05:08David Sims?

  He's pretty good.

• 2:05:09Griffin Newman?

  David and I went to a screening and we turned to each other and we were just like, he's fucking locked in. He's, he's an alien, flat meat dealer. He makes flat meat sandwiches, but it is versus this. Even though Scorsese's not doing it tongue in cheek and it feels like he's committed, it's very much him playing Scorsese. It's him doing the fast talking thing. He's basically a guy that Mandalorian's trying to use as an informant. He's going, I don't know where this guy is. I don't know. I, I, it could be anybody.

• 2:05:36Speaker 02

  I see.

• 2:05:36David Sims?

  He's good.

• 2:05:36Griffin Newman?

  But he's got four arms to gesticulate, which is really the technological breakthrough.

• 2:05:41David Sims?

  They want to make this movie fast and cheap. They even thought about doing it on black and white videotape.

• 2:05:46Griffin Newman?

  Insane.

• 2:05:47David Sims?

  Kind of insane. The budget does go over a little bit, but they, uh, they did draw it out all on storyboards, everything, you know, so that hopefully to, you know, save some money.

• 2:05:58Griffin Newman?

  Marty drew it himself, I'm assuming?

• 2:06:00David Sims?

  Uh, maybe. He says the overall idea, I love this, is to make it a cross between Gothic horror and the New York Daily News, Gothic horror and the New York Daily News. Uh, Michael Chapman says Marty's storyboards, yes, he writes and draws them are the best. They make no pretense of being art. You know, they're just, you know, the basics. He gives you the essence of what he wants you to say, but he doesn't oppress you. Like, I can now do what I need to do.

• 2:06:22Speaker 02

  And what were Chapman's credits before this?

• 2:06:24David Sims?

  So that's a great question. You know, he's, cause he obviously also shoots, uh, he'd only shot two movies before this. The Last Detail, his first movie.

• 2:06:32Griffin Newman?

  Well, well.

• 2:06:33David Sims?

  And then the film, The White Dawn, the, um, Philip Kaufman, like Inuit movie with polar bears and shit.

• 2:06:40Speaker 02

  Oh, it's not Bronson?

• 2:06:41David Sims?

  No, it's, it's Warren Oates and Timothy Bottoms and Louis Gossett Jr. As three whalers.

• 2:06:49Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:06:49David Sims?

  Who are stranded in the Arctic and are rescued by Inuit people.

• 2:06:54Griffin Newman?

  Heard of the best movie of all time before now.

• 2:06:56David Sims?

  I can tell you that it got generally negative reviews. In fact, it's interesting because.

• 2:06:59Griffin Newman?

  So everyone was wrong about it?

• 2:07:01David Sims?

  Chapman goes on to make a movie I watched for our, like, Hope Tour, one day, 1986 draft. What's it called? The Clan of the Cave Bear. I only watched it because.

• 2:07:11Griffin Newman?

  He directed that.

• 2:07:12David Sims?

  Yes. It was nominated for best makeup at the Academy Awards. And I was like, I want to watch any movie nominated for an Oscar that year.

• 2:07:19Griffin Newman?

  We just talked about that recently as well, in the blink of an eye.

• 2:07:22David Sims?

  He could do the lush pastoral nature. He could do that stuff, even though I think of him best for the Marty movies.

• 2:07:30Griffin Newman?

  The fucking grime.

• 2:07:31David Sims?

  Yeah, like for, for This and Raging Bull. I think those are the only two movies they made together, right?

• 2:07:36Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it's interesting, like the.

• 2:07:38David Sims?

  He also did, he did hardcore with Schrader.

• 2:07:40Griffin Newman?

  The Rodrigo Pietro run has been pretty long, but otherwise Marty would jump around with DPs.

• 2:07:46David Sims?

  Well, he uses ball house a lot.

• 2:07:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:48David Sims?

  And then he sort of jumps around. Sometimes it's Robert Richardson, sometime, yeah, he, he tries other people around. It's interesting.

• 2:07:54Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:55David Sims?

  Uh, yeah, but Chapman, um, Scorsese liked The Last Detail. That's why he hired him. Chapman says, we didn't have time. We didn't have a lot of money. I couldn't light the streets with big lights, speaking to your point there. Uh, so we had to get it down to kind of New York light and it turned out that was the right thing to do. He says, thank God I didn't have time and money. Like, you know, everything worked out for me. Uh, when, you know, like when they're shooting Travis Bickle. Scorsese wants Travis basically to be in everyone else's light, you know, but when he's in the frame.

• 2:08:28Griffin Newman?

  That's really fucking smart.

• 2:08:29David Sims?

  He's alone.

• 2:08:30Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:30David Sims?

  Like, even if there's someone over his shoulder, it's like, I don't want to see him. Like Travis is alone as much as possible. And he said it was hard because like Travis is in everyone else's frame or whatever. So it's hard to kind of like, strike that balance.

• 2:08:43Griffin Newman?

  But that, that's when you try to define what is great directing. What are things you can fully credit to the director and not the DP, the writer, the performances? And it is when a movie has a, a kind of set of rules like that, that it establishes for its visual storytelling, that it doesn't break, that isn't too showy.

• 2:09:05David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:09:05Griffin Newman?

  That you could watch the movie a thousand times and never notice that.

• 2:09:09David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:09:09Griffin Newman?

  But it does actually inform the psychological experience of how you're interacting with the film.

• 2:09:14David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:14Griffin Newman?

  That's just genius shit.

• 2:09:16David Sims?

  He studies, Jack, uh, did the film A Bigger Splash for the head on framing, obviously. Uh, it was shot in New York City, summer of 75, incredibly hot. Always raining, very wet. I do, I feel like this is quite a moist movie.

• 2:09:29Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:30David Sims?

  I'm sorry if, you know, that offends anyone. Uh, sanitation workers are on.

• 2:09:34Griffin Newman?

  Not at all.

• 2:09:35David Sims?

  I said the word moist.

• 2:09:36Speaker 02

  Some people have a thing about the word moist. I'm not one of them.

• 2:09:38Griffin Newman?

  Ben wishes it would pick a direction. Moist is just too middling for Ben.

• 2:09:42David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:43Griffin Newman?

  Pick a lane. Go dry or wet.

• 2:09:45David Sims?

  There's a garbage strike going on, so there's garbage everywhere.

• 2:09:48Griffin Newman?

  I mean, what a blessing in disguise.

• 2:09:50David Sims?

  It's like, all these things are right. They're just helping out.

• 2:09:52Griffin Newman?

  It's just all lined up. Yeah.

• 2:09:54David Sims?

  The, uh, the apartment stuff, like Travis's apartment, Iris's apartment, that's just condemned buildings. They would hire a gang to protect them from other gangs. I mean, you know, New York City, greatest city in the world, baby. Come on.

• 2:10:08Speaker 02

  We used to have a country.

• 2:10:09Griffin Newman?

  We used to have a country.

• 2:10:10David Sims?

  We used to have a country. I'm checking here. The country was falling apart.

• 2:10:13Griffin Newman?

  I think we.

• 2:10:14David Sims?

  Mortgage rates were 30%.

• 2:10:16Griffin Newman?

  Drop dead.

• 2:10:17David Sims?

  Cause my mom buys, I think about it all the time. My mom buys an apartment in New York City and I believe it's 76.

• 2:10:23Griffin Newman?

  They paid her $20 to get, take an apartment. Yeah.

• 2:10:26David Sims?

  I mean, she buys it in Amsterdam. Her grandmother calls her and is like, you're going to get murdered.

• 2:10:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:31David Sims?

  Now you have to be a banker to live there.

• 2:10:34Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:34David Sims?

  Like, and truly, like my mom says, the first three months she lived there, the apartment had once been occupied by someone of ill repute.

• 2:10:41Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:41David Sims?

  Because someone would come to the door all the time and rattle the door and bang on the handle. And when she told the doorman about it, the doorman would be like, Ellen, don't you open the door for anyone you don't know, okay? Like, he wasn't like, oh, I'll take care of it. He was just like, listen to me, Ellen, never open the door.

• 2:10:56Griffin Newman?

  I, I.

• 2:10:56David Sims?

  That's where she lived. She bought it with her, you know, anyway.

• 2:11:00Griffin Newman?

  I went to high school with.

• 2:11:01David Sims?

  15 grand or whatever.

• 2:11:02Griffin Newman?

  People who were, uh, absurdly wealthy, right? And, uh.

• 2:11:06David Sims?

  Sorry for ranting about 76 New York.

• 2:11:08Griffin Newman?

  No, there was, there was a kid I went to school with. I went, he invited me over to his, uh, parents' place and they had like a two story thing in Soho. That was insane.

• 2:11:19David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Griffin Newman?

  Was not all made up, but it was just the amount of space was insane. And I went like, oh, did I not realize that, that Eugene also is one of these kids where his parents invented water or whatever, you know? And, uh, I was like, respectfully, what do your parents do? And he was like, my dad's like a painter, but he never really sold anything. Anyway, he like, this was the first apartment he moved into as an artist's studio in like 1968. And at one point the landlord was bored and was like, if you can scratch together like $20,000, it's yours.

• 2:11:52David Sims?

  Wow.

• 2:11:53Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:53David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:54Griffin Newman?

  And just sat on it forever.

• 2:11:56David Sims?

  Crazy.

• 2:11:56Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:57Speaker 02

  I'm currently looking for apartments.

• 2:11:59Griffin Newman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:00Speaker 02

  I have to move. And a notion I've had, cause it's been such a nightmare, it's so expensive, is I need crime to come back.

• 2:12:08Griffin Newman?

  You need crime.

• 2:12:08Speaker 02

  I need the rent prices to come down.

• 2:12:10David Sims?

  Obviously, this is, this is a, it's a complex thought to be having.

• 2:12:14Griffin Newman?

  No, no, no, no, I can answer, I can answer this. I can answer this. Let's just briefly open the gates of Arkham Asylum.

• 2:12:21David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:12:21Griffin Newman?

  Those are fun villains. They'll do goofy themed crime. Penguins robbing banks and shit.

• 2:12:28David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:12:28Griffin Newman?

  Dare I say it, Richard T. Joker.

• 2:12:31David Sims?

  All right. So, uh, last thing before we just talk about the movie more, Bernard Herrmann, very resistant. Scorsese describes him as crotchety.

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  Essentially retired, right?

• 2:12:40David Sims?

  Yes. And Scorsese says, the film's called Taxi Driver, and he says, oh no, that's not my kind of picture title. No, no, no, no, no. And Marty's like, please, can we meet and talk about it? And he's like, well, what's the movie about? And Marty's like, it's about this, you know, like, describes the plot. And Bernard Herrmann's like, no, no, no, no, that's not the kind. And who's in it? And he says, Robert De Niro is in it. And he's like, no, no, no. And then he's like, well, we could have a quick talk. So that's how he won him over. It's an incredible score.

• 2:13:08Griffin Newman?

  Hostess Oscar nomination.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  Didn't Herrmann also do Obsession?

• 2:13:13David Sims?

  No, doesn't John Willie, oh, wait, now I have to look it up.

• 2:13:16Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:13:16David Sims?

  Now I've got to look it up. You're right.

• 2:13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19David Sims?

  It's, it's, cause John Williams becomes De Palma's guy. Or maybe, maybe already, but like, but yes, I think the whole thing with De Palma to me, and I love De Palma. I don't know how you feel about De Palma.

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  Thumbs up.

• 2:13:31David Sims?

  Thumbs up to De Palma. But once in a while, and I'm not the first to feel this way, I'm like, Brian, we know you like Alfred Hitchcock. And he's like, did you? And I'm like, yep, we know. And he's like, I got Bernard. And I'm like, I, I would have gotten it without Bernard, but okay, you got him. Uh, and obsession, which is, obsession is his vertigo, right? That's the one where I'm like, this is too loud. Like, you're, you haven't done enough to mess with it. Like, I like stuff like Dressed to Kill where he's like, here's my psycho. And I'm like, you're a sick fuck.

• 2:13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:59David Sims?

  You know, this is so much sicker. And, and Hitchcock's sick enough as it is. Yeah. Anyway, we'll do De Palma one day, right, Griff?

• 2:14:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, just a lot.

• 2:14:07David Sims?

  It's a lot of movies.

• 2:14:08Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. And the whole series.

• 2:14:09Speaker 02

  How much? Not more than Scorsese's.

• 2:14:12Griffin Newman?

  No, but it's close.

• 2:14:13David Sims?

  It's probably like 20.

• 2:14:14Griffin Newman?

  I think it's.

• 2:14:14David Sims?

  It's a lot of movies. And like, the tail end of his career is not uninteresting, but obviously it gets a little weird.

• 2:14:20Griffin Newman?

  Of the whole series being redacted, which would be a waste of time.

• 2:14:23David Sims?

  And the thing with De Palma, who I do adore, is, you know, movie 14, you're like, voyeurism's a theme. You know, like, it's like, he, you know, he had his bag.

• 2:14:31Griffin Newman?

  What if you looked at boobs from a place where the boobs didn't know you were looking at them?

• 2:14:39David Sims?

  God bless.

• 2:14:39Griffin Newman?

  I mean, it's a really interesting question.

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  Hi, Mom.

• 2:14:43David Sims?

  Recent Radiance on release.

• 2:14:46Griffin Newman?

  Radiance 4K.

• 2:14:47David Sims?

  Never seen.

• 2:14:48Griffin Newman?

  You've never seen it?

• 2:14:48David Sims?

  It's one of the De Palmas I've never seen. I've never seen it. Young De Niro, right?

• 2:14:52Griffin Newman?

  I can't believe I have a movie on both of you guys. Well, it's interesting because it's, uh, it's a little like Who's That Knocking on My Door and some other films we've covered. Dark Star, a little bit like this, where you're like, it's kind of three different movies smooshed together, like genuinely three different production efforts smooshed together. It's a movie that slowly over time became a feature. There's like a whole section of it that is just a kind of, uh, performance piece that De Palma worked on in college. That was filmed on like black and white Super 8 cameras. And the character basically just like collides with that. And then the movie turns into like a documentary about this performance for like 15 or 20 minutes.

• 2:15:34Griffin Newman?

  But then some of it's a kind of just goofy, like dude trying to branch out and live in New York City on his own comedy. It's a real fascinating mishmash of stuff. It's basically a non-narrative movie.

• 2:15:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:15:45Griffin Newman?

  Uh, but it's incredibly stylish and funny.

• 2:15:48David Sims?

  I imagine I'll be getting the discs.

• 2:15:49Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I'll be getting the shit out of that disc.

• 2:15:54Griffin Newman?

  Sometimes we have, we have this physical media thread that you recently asked us about, Tracy, a physical media group text. Years ago, we joked about, can you imagine how disgusted Tracy would be if he ever saw the things we text about in here? Cause it was like, are you the white whale to get to join the group? But the group just, it goes, it just goes hard. As David said, it's a very busy group text.

• 2:16:16Speaker 02

  How many people are on it?

• 2:16:18David Sims?

  Six.

• 2:16:18Griffin Newman?

  Six.

• 2:16:19Speaker 02

  I think, oh.

• 2:16:20David Sims?

  Five.

• 2:16:21Speaker 02

  You made it sound like maybe there were 20.

• 2:16:22David Sims?

  No, it's, it's me, Griff, uh, Sean Fennessy, Alex Perry, David Lowry and Timothy.

• 2:16:28Griffin Newman?

  And Hitmaker. His name's Hitmaker.

• 2:16:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I should be on that.

• 2:16:31Griffin Newman?

  Okay, you can be included, certainly, but, um, sometimes.

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

  I don't know David Lowry and Alex Ross Perry and I.

• 2:16:39Griffin Newman?

  Are best friends.

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  We've, we've had narrow misses. I don't know.

• 2:16:42Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:16:42Speaker 02

  He came to the opening of Bug. Did I tell you about this?

• 2:16:44Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Well, he told me about it.

• 2:16:46Speaker 02

  Did he?

• 2:16:47Griffin Newman?

  I haven't heard your version of the story.

• 2:16:48Speaker 02

  Well, he came to the opening of Bug and then I went to meet, he came, it was Sean's date. And so I went to see those guys afterwards at the party, at the opening night party. And I said, where's Alex Ross Perry? Well, he left. I was like, well, he left. I mean, it was weird not to stick around just to say hi or nice to meet you or thanks for your play. He left. I was like, well, why did he leave? It was like, well, he was embarrassed about the way he was dressed.

• 2:17:11Griffin Newman?

  He was, he was.

• 2:17:12David Sims?

  Oh, that's right. Yes. He didn't, he didn't realize maybe that it was sort of a grand performance like.

• 2:17:18Griffin Newman?

  And he wore the classic Alex Ross Perry uniform.

• 2:17:21David Sims?

  He was wearing like a Slayer t-shirt or something.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  And, um, Zach, Amanda's husband, even asked him, said, what did you think you were going to tonight?

• 2:17:33Griffin Newman?

  Alex is very consistent. I will say this. He is, he is largely unchanging.

• 2:17:37Speaker 02

  I look forward to meeting him.

• 2:17:38Griffin Newman?

  Sometimes I, and maybe, maybe you meet via text first in this thread and your grand introduction to the, to the ecosystem. But sometimes I will shout announces a 4K Steelbook of some dumb baby garbage I love. And I will just post the announcement link to the thread and go, regrettably, I'm pre-ordering the shit out of this.

• 2:17:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:17:58Griffin Newman?

  I have already pre-ordered. I don't even really like this.

• 2:18:02David Sims?

  I mean, you know, Congo.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  I have about three things, three, three launch points.

• 2:18:08Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 2:18:08Speaker 02

  I'm going to take this one first.

• 2:18:11Speaker 02

  And it goes back to my thing about finding Travis more sympathetic this pass through. When I watch King of Comedy and Rupert takes his girlfriend into Jerry Lewis's house.

• 2:18:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:25Speaker 02

  And Jerry Lewis comes home and says, what the hell are you doing here? It's a kind of a cringe comedy, right? It, it does make you absolutely cringe. And it conjures some of those, some of those comedy shows like, uh, The British Office or, uh, Tim, uh, what's his name? Uh, Detroit guy. Tim Robinson.

• 2:18:46Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. I like that you said Detroiters instead of I think you should leave, by the way. Detroiters fucking rules.

• 2:18:51David Sims?

  Great show.

• 2:18:52Griffin Newman?

  Um, I, I think even just the fact that Albert Brooks is in this movie is very telling in that being part of Scorsese's language.

• 2:19:00Speaker 02

  But I, the feeling that Rupert creates in me is different than the feeling Travis creates in me. When Travis fucks up with Cybill Shepherd. I don't feel like, I don't feel like, oh, oh God, this is embarrassing and funny. I feel like, I, I feel real sympathy. I feel like, what are you doing?

• 2:19:19Griffin Newman?

  Tracy, I was thinking about this. I feel like that is a universal experience. I remember, you know, in high school, watching this movie. And when I'd have conversations with people, cause I'm like the movie guy, they're like, I just watched Taxi Driver. Can I talk about Taxi Driver with you? Everyone goes, and that scene where he takes him, takes her to the fucking porno theater and you're going, dude, what are you doing? That everyone has that kind of visceral response of, oh my God, my motherfucker, don't do this. You're so close.

• 2:19:52David Sims?

  To actually changing kind of the trajectory of your life. Cause she's sort of into it at first, in a weird way.

• 2:19:59Speaker 02

  Intrigued enough by him.

• 2:20:00Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. He's, he's close and it's, I think what's so key is that in the scene where he takes her to coffee, he makes a couple observations about her that she feels are correct, that he is seeing her.

• 2:20:14David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:20:14Griffin Newman?

  That she is not just an object for him, that there is some level of him trying to actually engage with her as a human being that I think cuts through. And the same thing when he mentions her desk and whatever, it cuts through anything that's unnerving about him. Rupert Pumpkin is a detestable character. He is off-putting every millisecond he is on screen. Even just down to the look where you're like, my guy, why the fuck is that your haircut? Versus De Niro being hot in this. And it's not like she goes on the date with him just because he's hot. But it also is that there are moments where you're like, sometimes this guy is showing intelligence. Sometimes this guy is showing emotional vulnerability that is appealing. And sometimes he is really unnerving.

• 2:20:56Griffin Newman?

  And the porno scene, you really get the sense of like, he doesn't get why this went wrong. And he says like, no, no, no, no, a lot of couples go see this. And I love that when you're in the theater and she's immediately revolts, you do see that there are other couples there. There are other couples there because that's their fucking thing.

• 2:21:16David Sims?

  Right. That's their peccadillo a little bit or whatever.

• 2:21:18Griffin Newman?

  And this is a blind spot of this guy where his life is so cloistered that he's like, what do couples do? Where do I see couples?

• 2:21:25David Sims?

  Where do I hang out?

• 2:21:26Griffin Newman?

  I don't go to fancy restaurants, so I don't see couples having nice dates.

• 2:21:29David Sims?

  But also how many of the couples in that theater are on their first date? Probably not many. You probably build to like, hey, you want?

• 2:21:36Griffin Newman?

  He doesn't fucking get it, but it's base.

• 2:21:38David Sims?

  I am curious, yellow.

• 2:21:39Speaker 02

  And I think we're saying couples.

• 2:21:41Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, sure. I, I, but who knows?

• 2:21:43David Sims?

  A pair.

• 2:21:43Speaker 02

  A pair of people.

• 2:21:45Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Two turtle doves. Um, it, it does. It, yes, you understand the broken logic of how he got there. And then he says to her something akin to like, I, I can take you to other places. We could go all sorts of places. I don't know what those places are, but you can tell me.

• 2:22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 2:22:02Griffin Newman?

  He immediately realizes, I fucked this up, but tell me what date places are. And it's less that she's so offended by him, I think, and a thing I think Cybill Shepherd plays very well. And more that she's like, I feel fucking stupid that I overlooked a bunch of red flags about this guy and assumed that the good would outweigh the creepy.

• 2:22:22Speaker 02

  Well, part of the appeal for, for her, you have to assume is not only that he's young and good-looking, Robert De Niro and thin and, uh, you know, has a job.

• 2:22:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  Maybe not a great job, but he's employed.

• 2:22:34Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:22:35Speaker 02

  Uh, but also that he does express, maybe awkwardly, but he does express a kind of confidence. I'm walking in off the street to tell you that you're beautiful and I wanted to, and she's obviously flattered by that attention. And then, yeah, takes her out for coffee and.

• 2:22:50David Sims?

  Right. It is technically the second date.

• 2:22:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Ben, show some respect.

• 2:22:55Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sorry. David, show some respect. Ben, I love you.

• 2:22:58Speaker 02

  He, uh, he sits there with her at the coffee shop and what he says, the way he describes how he perceives her.

• 2:23:05Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:05Speaker 02

  Is really, he's talking about himself, right? It all applies to him, the things he says about her. We don't actually think that any of those things he says about her apply to her, but it's very flattering to have somebody say, I know what's going on with you. You're deep and you're complicated and you're going through a lot of stuff or, you know?

• 2:23:23Griffin Newman?

  I think there's another thing going on, which is he's not Albert Brooks.

• 2:23:26David Sims?

  I was about to say, I feel like that's why Brooks is in the movie.

• 2:23:28Griffin Newman?

  The Brooks placement is so important for that reason.

• 2:23:31David Sims?

  Right. He's, Brooks is a nebbish. He's kind of annoying.

• 2:23:34Griffin Newman?

  Yes, he's very annoying.

• 2:23:35David Sims?

  Yeah, he's very annoying. You can tell immediately that she's annoyed by him. Not in some profound way, but just their, their conversation where they're looking, they're not looking at each other.

• 2:23:44Griffin Newman?

  And he has that bit where in the middle of like a run-on monologue, he goes like, I'm in love with you. And then just keeps talking and she just doesn't even acknowledge, she doesn't even give it that much.

• 2:23:53David Sims?

  All day from his ass, probably. She's sick of it. Yes.

• 2:23:56Griffin Newman?

  Bickle is trying to at least engage with her as a human being. Where it just feels like Albert Brooks is like, obviously it'd be great if I could bed this woman. She'd never be with a guy like me. So the only way I can do it is to just say like, well, you're beautiful. I'm in love with you, you know? Versus Travis being like, I think you're broken, which whether or not there's any truth in that, he is trying to think of her as a person within her life.

• 2:24:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:24:18Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:24:19Speaker 02

  And so, but part of his pitch is that he's a confident guy who knows, who, who knows what's best for her.

• 2:24:28Griffin Newman?

  And he's a man of the people.

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  And who, and who knows the next move.

• 2:24:31Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:24:31Speaker 02

  So he can't say to her at the beginning of the date, well, where do you want to go? You, you, you pick the movies. He's gotta be the one to make the choice.

• 2:24:40Griffin Newman?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:24:41David Sims?

  And of course, when he makes the wrong choice, then it just, it all falls apart. The whole illusion is shattered.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  I don't know. Here's, here's my hot take. He should have given the movie a little more of a chance.

• 2:24:52Griffin Newman?

  He should have bought her a Russ Meyer shirt. She should have sat there and considered what was on screen.

• 2:24:57David Sims?

  Also, the movie looks pretty bad. Cause it's this weird sort of sex ed film, right?

• 2:25:02Griffin Newman?

  What do they call them? The Swedish kind of educational films?

• 2:25:05David Sims?

  Yeah. Let me see if I can find the name of it. Like what is the?

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  Well, it's not a real, it's not a real porn movie. We thought it was, we actually thought it was this movie that was kind of popular. It's not. It might use a little footage from it, but.

• 2:25:18Griffin Newman?

  But that was the, this whole, these silos of things like the nudist documentaries or the Swedish like educational films or whatever, where it was like, you're going to get to see something titillating, but the movie is pretending that that's not what its main purpose is.

• 2:25:32David Sims?

  It's called, uh, Swedish Marriage Manual in the film. The film is likely the. Film Sexual Freedom in Denmark or the Swedish film Language of Love. But no one actually knows the answer to this question.

• 2:25:46Griffin Newman?

  But these are basically movies that were purporting to be like marital guides.

• 2:25:50David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:25:51Speaker 02

  Or here's Masters and Johnson study put on screen. There's some scientific element.

• 2:25:58Griffin Newman?

  There's sex ed films for grownups, which is a way to get away legally with screening. Cause also the theater is nicer than you imagine. A lot of the other Times Square theaters.

• 2:26:08David Sims?

  Sure, but right. But I mean, it's a different era, right? It is hard for us to imagine. It's like, yes, okay, it was a bunch of porno theaters. Times Square was very scuzzy. It was. It's not like it was a, but people did go watch porn in theaters in the seventies. Did they not? Like it's, you know?

• 2:26:23Speaker 02

  They couldn't watch it at home, you know?

• 2:26:26Griffin Newman?

  I mean, it's also fascinating that this is the decade where several years you have full on pornographic films in the top 10 highest grossing films of the year. Like there was the phenomenon of an intellectual couple goes to see Deep Throat.

• 2:26:38Speaker 02

  Presuming she had the maturity and the sophistication to be able to handle a little adult material.

• 2:26:46Griffin Newman?

  He thought she was into keynote. He didn't realize.

• 2:26:50Speaker 02

  But she's out of there like 30 seconds.

• 2:26:52David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:53Griffin Newman?

  She, I mean, I do like that he immediately goes like, give it a chance. And then she just sits there so grumpy.

• 2:26:59David Sims?

  It's the Step Brothers joke, which I think about all the time when they're in the tuxes and Seth Rogen's interviewing them. And he's like, it's funny. I get it. And you're overly formal. And then they start to be weird. And he's like, now the tuxes seem fucked up. And it's for her. She's just like, you know, I was willing to roll with you. You're different, but it's interesting. And then he takes her to the porn and she's like, okay, now I know, now clearly I can tell.

• 2:27:21Griffin Newman?

  It's almost a Mr. F moment of just like, there's a bunch of things I'm reviewing in my mind. Yeah.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  Should he have known who Kris Kristofferson was in 1976?

• 2:27:31David Sims?

  I think so. He's like, cause that's the year of a star is born, right?

• 2:27:35Griffin Newman?

  Which, as Amanda called out, was the second highest grossing film of its year.

• 2:27:38David Sims?

  Okay, but and like me and Bobby McGee or whatever, like his big, you know, that's 1970s. So he's a pretty established.

• 2:27:44Griffin Newman?

  Like that's him making the leap to movie star after being a hyper famous songwriter and then a hyper famous singer in his own.

• 2:27:51David Sims?

  It's very conscious that Scorsese, he never listens to music. You never hear any music in this man's life. He doesn't have a record player at home.

• 2:27:58Griffin Newman?

  We're hearing his internal soundtrack. There's no actual music. Yeah.

• 2:28:01David Sims?

  And Scorsese very consciously was like, I don't want a lot of digetic music or whatever, you know, like I don't want him to be like spinning records or whatever. But he doesn't have any interest.

• 2:28:10Griffin Newman?

  Vinyl. He could, you're right. He could have been.

• 2:28:13David Sims?

  He could have become a DJ.

• 2:28:14Griffin Newman?

  He could have been spinning plates. Yeah.

• 2:28:15Speaker 02

  His record player is broken. He tells us.

• 2:28:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:28:18Speaker 02

  And so is something else up there in my opinion.

• 2:28:21Griffin Newman?

  Okay. Wait, that's point one.

• 2:28:22Speaker 02

  Well, I just want to know more about the Kristofferson thing because like you guys talked about this actress that Tim Simons didn't know, and I didn't know her either.

• 2:28:30David Sims?

  The great Lily Collins.

• 2:28:32Speaker 02

  Lily Collins. I never heard of her.

• 2:28:34Griffin Newman?

  I, I think there's a reasonable argument that I, I think Kris Kristofferson in this moment is more conventionally famous than Lily Collins. And I, obviously there was more of a monoculture then.

• 2:28:44David Sims?

  To be clear, we're also making fun of Hitmaker because he's on a hit Netflix show and she's the star of the most popular show on Netflix, Emily in Paris. And I'm like, you haven't run into her at one of their, you know, Empire Galas or whatever Netflix is always up to.

• 2:28:59Griffin Newman?

  You also just need to understand, we're in this group text, right? Where it's like, let's share the opinions on the film industry that none of us want to share publicly. Let's post the fucking pre-orders of new disc announcements and whatever. And then Tim will just sometimes swing in with a thing that feels like it's coming straight from Jupiter. We're about to meet up with Tim for dinner. Ben, Marie and I are going to meet up with Tim and Sean for dinner. And it's like 30 minutes before we're supposed to meet for dinner and Tim just goes like all caps. Lily Collins is Phil Collins' daughter? Who the fuck is Lily Collins? And we're like, why are you asking this now?

• 2:29:36David Sims?

  Why was he?

• 2:29:37Griffin Newman?

  I don't know.

• 2:29:38David Sims?

  Okay.

• 2:29:38Griffin Newman?

  We, we eventually figured it out, but I feel like the chain of logic was really bizarre.

• 2:29:42Speaker 02

  So you think he should, you think Travis should have known who Kris Kristofferson was in 1976?

• 2:29:47Griffin Newman?

  There's a better argument. I don't think it's like him not knowing who Frank Sinatra is. I think it's a well selected celebrity where he's enough on the cusp that you're like.

• 2:29:55David Sims?

  It's also, he's appealing to young people.

• 2:29:57Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:29:57David Sims?

  Like, you know, he's selected, I feel like because he was a cool musician.

• 2:30:01Griffin Newman?

  It's telling you that this guy is not locked in. He's not with it. It's not telling you that the guy's an imbecile and he doesn't know anything.

• 2:30:08David Sims?

  But he does not seem like someone who's concerned with popular culture.

• 2:30:13Griffin Newman?

  He lives in his own head. He watches Swedish educational films.

• 2:30:16Speaker 02

  And we see him later watching a pornographic film that seems more tradit- traditionally porn, right?

• 2:30:22Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  Pornographic. So at least he has that much awareness. Take her to the, to the pseudo documentary as opposed to the.

• 2:30:31David Sims?

  Are you building a slow case for Travis Bickle did nothing wrong? Is this what's happening here?

• 2:30:36Speaker 02

  I'm not at all. I'm, I'm.

• 2:30:37Griffin Newman?

  He did some wrong things, but he was actually good at dating is your, is your argument. Specifically and exclusively good at.

• 2:30:44David Sims?

  You think Sybil kind of gives him, you know, a bit of a hard time.

• 2:30:47Griffin Newman?

  Is this a movie about Sybil Shepherd fumbling the bag?

• 2:30:50Speaker 02

  She's, she's out of there pretty quick. He doesn't give him, you know, he calls her back. He sends flowers. Oh, here's another thing. Why are the flowers in his apartment?

• 2:31:00Speaker 02

  He's sending her flowers, but the dead flowers are in his apartment.

• 2:31:03Griffin Newman?

  I mean, you're right. Like are they getting bounced back?

• 2:31:05David Sims?

  Yes. Maybe it's like she did not accept, returned to sender.

• 2:31:08Griffin Newman?

  That's what I think it is.

• 2:31:09David Sims?

  She like turned it away.

• 2:31:10Griffin Newman?

  Or that he's continuing to send flowers to her.

• 2:31:12Speaker 02

  Do that? You send flowers to somebody, they reject them? They bring them to you?

• 2:31:16Griffin Newman?

  Not 1-800-FLOWERS, past sponsor, of course. They would never do that.

• 2:31:21David Sims?

  I think that if Sybil takes him in and if he dates her for a little while longer, whatever, like if things work out a little bit better. He's still going to go on this road. It's going to fall apart at some point. There, this is not a movie where it's like, you know what? If he just found this nice lady and kind of like, he would have settled down. It's like, no, it's already all so close to the boil with him.

• 2:31:45Griffin Newman?

  I don't think he could be permanently saved by the love of a good woman, but I do agree with Ben that I think his life goes in a different direction. And I certainly think it avoids the, the worst extremes. If he is able to stay in a functional, healthy relationship and learn from it, even if it doesn't last forever.

• 2:32:02David Sims?

  I just don't think he would be.

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  But this is, you know.

• 2:32:04David Sims?

  There's gonna be something.

• 2:32:05Speaker 02

  He, he focuses his affections on, you know, beautiful model, right? Sybil Shepherd was a, was a cover model for the concept.

• 2:32:15Griffin Newman?

  Sybil Shepherd was the ultimate kind of just like image of a woman that drove men insane. So that is what she represented in the culture.

• 2:32:22David Sims?

  She's gorgeous.

• 2:32:22Speaker 02

  Like the problem with a lot of these fucking incels, maybe you just need to lower your standards.

• 2:32:26Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Our, our buddy, Chris Gethard, who will have been on the Mandalorian episode, always says, if you're complaining that women don't find you interesting, maybe the problem is you need to be more interesting. You know?

• 2:32:37Speaker 02

  Or find the women who do find you interesting. I mean, it's like, why?

• 2:32:42David Sims?

  We're gonna solve this today, guys. We're gonna fix the incels.

• 2:32:45Griffin Newman?

  No, but there, there are a lot of, you know, I, it's a gripe of mine. And in high school, I was very obsessed with a lot of the high school movies where it's the nerdy guy who's obsessed with the most conventionally beautiful, you know, prom queen girl. And she'd never even look at a guy like me. And that's seen as this sort of note of like, is there almost a classism in her? That she won't consider the smart, interesting guy. And almost always in those films, you're like, yeah, well, you're not considering your fucking sarcastic female best friend. You're doing the same fucking thing. You want to date the hottest person.

• 2:33:16David Sims?

  Well, that's because those eighties teen movies are like Charles Dickens novels where like they, there's the interesting female character. This is, this is a great comparison I'm making. I'm really liking it. And then at the end, it's like, yeah, but also he has to marry the placid, fair haired lady. Like, you know, every, and like, yeah, at the end of the John Hughes movies, it's like, but by the way, he gets the babe. Sort of like traditional babe, because that's what you want, isn't it? Isn't that what the audience is looking for?

• 2:33:40Griffin Newman?

  Although the fucking audience revolted to Pretty in Pink and they had to reshoot the ending.

• 2:33:44David Sims?

  Sure.

• 2:33:46David Sims?

  So Travis, okay. So he, yes, he fumbles the bag with Sybil Shepherd. He is, he takes this job. Movie starts with him at the taxi depot essentially getting pitched on the job because he can't sleep, right? Like that's sort of the original thing here. He's just like, I'm up all night anyway. I'll drive a cab around.

• 2:34:03Griffin Newman?

  What year does Taxi, the sitcom start? Is it, it's within like 24 months of this, right?

• 2:34:11David Sims?

  1978.

• 2:34:13Griffin Newman?

  Okay. I just know that James L. Brooks said the reason he thought to create a sitcom around Taxi Dispatch Station. There was a big New York Magazine article about one night on the graveyard shift. And he found it fascinating that everyone who worked there, it was, this is a transitional survival job.

• 2:34:37David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm just gonna do this for. Six months. How long you been doing it? Fifteen years?

• 2:34:40Griffin Newman?

  Right, but but all of them were like, I do this at night because my real passion is this at the day, and I haven't been able to actually make it a livable wage yet.

• 2:34:50David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:34:50Griffin Newman?

  And it feels like in this interview scene, part of what this guy is sort of sniffing out is like, why do you want to do this? You don't seem to be saying, I need to pick up this so I have the flexible hours in order to do this with my other time. It's not about spending time with your family, or taking care of a parent, or following some other passion or hobby. It's like, you just want to drive the cab? That's a little bit odd.

• 2:35:16Speaker 02

  You ever had a friend who drove a cab?

• 2:35:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:20David Sims?

  You did?

• 2:35:20Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've had a couple.

• 2:35:22Speaker 03

  My uncle drove a cab from eighty to eighty-three.

• 2:35:27David Sims?

  In in New York City?

• 2:35:28Speaker 03

  In New York City.

• 2:35:28Griffin Newman?

  Your uncle who's a listener?

• 2:35:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:35:30Griffin Newman?

  And a cinephile.

• 2:35:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:31David Sims?

  Probably an intense time to be driving a cab in New York. I mean, it's basically always an intense job.

• 2:35:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, he worked the graveyard shift, so six P M. to six A M.

• 2:35:41Griffin Newman?

  And he had to pick up like ghouls and goblins.

• 2:35:42David Sims?

  Because the the way New York City's cabs work is that there's just six to six for both. There's no swing shift because they don't want anyone to get the sort of like better end of anything.

• 2:35:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:53Speaker 03

  And he, reflecting on that time, he he said, he shared with me, he totally risked his life by doing that job. It was really dangerous. He thankfully never had any kind of incident other than people running out on their fare.

• 2:36:08Griffin Newman?

  But he felt that it was always.

• 2:36:10David Sims?

  It's always a possibility.

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  It was a crazy time.

• 2:36:14Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:14David Sims?

  Yeah. Yeah, it was. You never drove a cab?

• 2:36:17Speaker 02

  No, I didn't. I had a friend, Will Kern, and he wrote a play about it called Hell Cab. And then they turned Hell Cab into a movie called Chicago Cab.

• 2:36:28Griffin Newman?

  Oh, I believe directed by John Tontori and Mary Sobolski, parents of our friend Ray Tontori. Past and future guests, the late, great Mary Sobolski, a legend.

• 2:36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:39Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:39Speaker 02

  I I'm in that movie briefly.

• 2:36:41Griffin Newman?

  Really?

• 2:36:41Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's made in Chicago.

• 2:36:42David Sims?

  You play sports fan?

• 2:36:43Speaker 02

  I do, in fact, be a sports fan.

• 2:36:46David Sims?

  Are you? What? What team?

• 2:36:47Speaker 02

  I'm a Bears fan.

• 2:36:48David Sims?

  Of course. The Bears.

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  But everybody I've ever known who's driven a cab

• 2:36:54Speaker 02

  believes that they've, that they're performing a valuable public service.

• 2:36:58Griffin Newman?

  That is a great way of putting it, Tracy, and I feel like there's a similar kind of.

• 2:37:03David Sims?

  It's like the safety net of travel, like in a city like New York where you're like, well, if all else fails, maybe I can grab a cab. Like, that used to be sort of like, yeah.

• 2:37:11Griffin Newman?

  It it also, it also feels like they talk about it as if it was, I backpack across the world for five years.

• 2:37:21David Sims?

  That's something crazy that I did in my past.

• 2:37:23Griffin Newman?

  That it is an extreme form of interpersonal immersion into like the breadth of humanity.

• 2:37:30David Sims?

  I remember I read the book Hack by Melissa Plot. Now goes my Mel Plot, came out as non-binary later in life, but like,

• 2:37:39David Sims?

  great book about someone who just was like, I'm twenty-five, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with myself, I'm gonna start driving a cab.

• 2:37:44Griffin Newman?

  That's every friend of mine who grew up, people I know who also grew up in New York City and were just like, I'm in my early twenties, I haven't figured out my thing yet. Your screen keeps turning really bright red.

• 2:37:53David Sims?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I don't know. There was, there was an app.

• 2:37:56Speaker 02

  He's got worn out.

• 2:37:57Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say red tube.

• 2:38:01Griffin Newman?

  It's reflecting on your eyeballs.

• 2:38:02David Sims?

  This is how I get off. I watch porn and like, do not touch myself in in public places.

• 2:38:06Griffin Newman?

  While talking about cinema.

• 2:38:08David Sims?

  You would not be the first.

• 2:38:09Griffin Newman?

  But they just, they'd be like, I need a thing to do.

• 2:38:12David Sims?

  But what's interesting is like, they talk about how by the end of their time as a cabbie, they had a bit of a hair-trigger temper.

• 2:38:20Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:20David Sims?

  And it's not so even so much the the people in your cab. It's just the the act of driving all the time in New York City where you just, a lot of rage starts to radiate out of you, and like, everyone is, you know, cutting you off and trying to get you and blah, blah, blah.

• 2:38:32Griffin Newman?

  I've talked about it so much, but I I do not have a driver's license. I do not drive. I've driven one time on camera for an unreleased independent film. And so much of my fear of driving is that my dad drove way too much in the city.

• 2:38:45David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:38:46Griffin Newman?

  My dad was weirdly addicted to driving in the city, and it's such a terrible experience. He was not good at handling the stress of it. And so all of my associations are, why the fuck would you ever do this? Not all of my associations, but all my primal associations are being in bumper to bumper, hair-trigger, yeah.

• 2:39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Ken, he had been, you know, was a working musician and composer. But it was hard, and he was, he would be in between jobs.

• 2:39:11David Sims?

  You don't even make that much money.

• 2:39:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:13David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:14Speaker 03

  And so at some point, after doing all these different kinds of odd jobs, he decided, yeah, to start driving a cab. And he was telling me that in one night, you could make like two hundred bucks, which was like, you know, a decent amount of money back then.

• 2:39:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:27Speaker 03

  But the thing that he did, like Travis, is he would drive anywhere. He would pick up whoever and drive to Staten Island.

• 2:39:36Griffin Newman?

  He'd cross state lines.

• 2:39:37Speaker 03

  Drive to White Plains, drive to Jersey. But like, the real deal cabbies, they were, they were refusing.

• 2:39:44David Sims?

  I'm not fucking going uptown.

• 2:39:45Speaker 03

  They were refusing.

• 2:39:45David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:39:46Speaker 03

  And they were one hundred percent racially profiled.

• 2:39:48Griffin Newman?

  Right, of course.

• 2:39:49David Sims?

  Yeah. So, okay, so he's a cab driver.

• 2:39:52Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:39:52Speaker 03

  He's a cab driver.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  We've gotten as far as Joe Spinell in the movie Taxi Cab.

• 2:39:57Griffin Newman?

  Driver, he's great at dating. Women just don't get it.

• 2:40:00David Sims?

  Those early scenes are right with him with like Peter Boyle, Harry North, North up, Norman Matlock. I'm trying to think like who those guys are. And even though those guys are all, you know, kind of scumbaggy or whatever, Travis is so apart from them. Like, he doesn't fit in with them at all.

• 2:40:19Griffin Newman?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 2:40:20David Sims?

  I know, no, we talked about it.

• 2:40:21Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:22David Sims?

  Peter Boyle really well cast.

• 2:40:24Griffin Newman?

  Really well cast.

• 2:40:24David Sims?

  He's such a, yeah, he's such a good actor. I love the like seventies Peter Boyle.

• 2:40:29Griffin Newman?

  But this is right. This was his last kind of chance in his mind to find a community. These seem like guys who would be on the same wavelength as me, and he can't even crack the conversational rhythm that these guys have.

• 2:40:41David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:40:42Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:42Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, let's face it, Travis may not be very bright. I mean, there are things like, what's moonlighting? Right? When he asks the question, what's moonlighting?

• 2:40:54Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:40:54Speaker 02

  There's certain things, it's just like, wow, you you don't actually know that word.

• 2:40:58David Sims?

  He's a little born under a rock or whatever. Yeah.

• 2:41:00Griffin Newman?

  I said, I said he's a little like big, where he's like a kid in a grown-up's body. There was always this sort of whisper that De Niro was supposed to be in Big. And then Elizabeth Perkins did an interview recently, and she was like, my screen test was with him. We prepped the movie with him.

• 2:41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's.

• 2:41:19Griffin Newman?

  His reps asked for more money, the contract fell apart at the last minute, and then Hanks jumped in. And I always thought like, that movie would be such a fucking disaster with him in it. And then you watch this, or on this re-watch, I was like, he does really feel like a six-year-old. Where the way he asked these things, like what is moonlighting, doesn't have the self-consciousness of an adult who is unintelligent. It has the energy of a child who's actually just trying to collect information.

• 2:41:46David Sims?

  We're in his head pretty early. We're hearing his monologue right away, right? It's not like, this film, it's it's what you're saying, Tracy, that even you, you're walking in as an eighteen-year-old, or you know, knowing that he's gonna go on a rampage. I would love to watch this movie not knowing.

• 2:42:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:03David Sims?

  Yeah. It's it's impossible. Like, it's the same with Psycho or whatever, these movies where as a kid, I'm like, I know, I know one thing about this movie.

• 2:42:09Griffin Newman?

  Well, even just beyond.

• 2:42:10David Sims?

  Watching this movie, just thinking like, what's he gonna do? I don't under, why am I with this person? Like, why am I with this person?

• 2:42:17Griffin Newman?

  Beyond knowing the violence is coming because the violence itself is iconic, we also like, you and I, all three of us are born into a world like after the Jodie Foster shit.

• 2:42:27David Sims?

  Sure, yeah, exactly.

• 2:42:28Griffin Newman?

  Where you're just like, there are copycat crimes that we just know.

• 2:42:31David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:42:31Griffin Newman?

  Before we know the movie.

• 2:42:33David Sims?

  Right. And I feel like right away, you know, he hates everyone around him and he kind of wants them to to be washed away, like. So it's not shocking what happens. I guess, I'm trying, I'm trying to unpack this as I think about it. It's more, it's just like, it's hard to reckon with this movie, or to to consider this movie as as a tense thriller. I think of it as a character study.

• 2:42:58Speaker 02

  I do, too.

• 2:42:59Griffin Newman?

  I watch this movie as if I am seeing like a production of Hamlet, if that makes sense. Where it's like, right, well, I understand the basic tenants of this story and how it exists in our culture and is referenced all the time, and now I'm gonna watch it for the first time.

• 2:43:11David Sims?

  But the first time you watch it, not knowing things, it must have been like, is he gonna attack this girl?

• 2:43:17Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:43:17David Sims?

  Is he gonna shoot this, you know, politician?

• 2:43:19Griffin Newman?

  Is it a romance with the girl earnestly? Is the movie gonna try to sell me on that? Like, anything? But how unseemly it starts.

• 2:43:26David Sims?

  I do feel like, yes, I know this movie has many a sort of fan who doesn't get it or whatever. But it's hard to watch this movie and think like, I think this guy's gonna figure it out. He's gonna rescue someone. He's gonna, he's gonna be an avenging angel, whatever.

• 2:43:38Griffin Newman?

  Wild to consider that this film can be misread with how clear its perspective feels communicated at all times. And even just in the performance, which doesn't feel judgmental, but feels so considerate of his brokenness.

• 2:43:57David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:58Griffin Newman?

  You know, when people try to make this kind of movie today, it actually does get muddled. Where you feel like it has too much judgment, contempt for its characters, or it's a little bit too much into fetishizing, you know, their transcendent moments, or whatever it is. And this movie feels like so cut and dry in like, this is a movie about being a broken man. Period. Like, that's how it starts, that's how it, what it is from beginning to end.

• 2:44:26David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:27Speaker 02

  Isn't the, are you going through the movie chronologically?

• 2:44:31David Sims?

  Sort of. I, I have a, it's, it's just not a heavy narrative film.

• 2:44:37Speaker 02

  No, it's not.

• 2:44:38David Sims?

  Like, the first things after we discuss is, is the Betsy thing, which we, we sort of went through.

• 2:44:43Griffin Newman?

  The first thirty to forty minutes are mostly driven by Sybil Shepherd.

• 2:44:47David Sims?

  But we're hearing things in his head, like he sees her and is like, she's like an angel.

• 2:44:51Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:44:51David Sims?

  Like, the city cannot touch her. Like, you're already hearing this kind of like insane dialogue in his head.

• 2:44:57Speaker 02

  So, topic for discussion.

• 2:44:59Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:45:00Speaker 02

  The breaks in point of view.

• 2:45:03Griffin Newman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:45:03Speaker 02

  There are basically three. There are two scenes in the campaign office between Sybil Shepherd and Albert Brooks.

• 2:45:10Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:45:11Speaker 02

  And then there's the scene between Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster.

• 2:45:15David Sims?

  Yes.

• 2:45:15Speaker 02

  Where we see the pimp working his, his, uh, his magic on her. Uh, what about those, what about those?

• 2:45:24David Sims?

  It's interesting.

• 2:45:25Griffin Newman?

  I think you need to understand in both of those cases where the place of objective reality is. Because they are figures that he projects so much onto.

• 2:45:33David Sims?

  It's important to see Sybil and Brooks see De Niro through their eyes.

• 2:45:40Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:45:40David Sims?

  See Travis through his eyes and be kind of like, you know, tingling with, you know, like just understanding like how strange it is that he's, yeah, I think that's vital. The scene with sport and Iris is different. I'm not sure what that's doing, except, you know, giving her a little dab. And maybe contextualizing just, but we already know she's in an abusive situation.

• 2:46:03Griffin Newman?

  It takes it from being intellectual to being emotional. You can't watch that and not feel a desire for some justice to be carried out, even if it's not what Travis is gonna do. I, I think that's the function of that.

• 2:46:17David Sims?

  What do you make of this? Again, you, you wrote Killer Joe. It's like you, you, I'm not, I'm not saying like you copied Taxi Driver. I'm like, with Killer Joe, I'm sure you were thinking of like, do I exit this guy's perspective? Do I stay in it? Like, is that too tough for the audience to just be in this guy's head the entire movie?

• 2:46:34Griffin Newman?

  You were saying it's tough to like trace influences and things like that. I do just think there's a similarity in this and some of your plays. Uh, the grode your plays in your, in your oeuvre that are like, this is really digging in on the people that society doesn't even wanna look at.

• 2:46:51Speaker 02

  Oh, well, that would be good. I mean, if, if I took that from it, wouldn't that be a great thing? Uh, but, uh, uh, because I, because I think that's important.

• 2:47:00Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:00Speaker 02

  But I, I ask myself when I watch it, it now seems like such a sharp break from his.

• 2:47:06David Sims?

  It is.

• 2:47:06Speaker 02

  Right? Because as you're saying, you're not only in his head, we're way in his head.

• 2:47:09David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:09Speaker 02

  And so to suddenly transport out of it is like, is it a mistake? Would the movie be stronger without those three scenes?

• 2:47:17David Sims?

  Is it in service of the audience? Like, that's what I wonder. Like, is there that thought of like, the audience needs a release?

• 2:47:22Griffin Newman?

  I think there are two.

• 2:47:23David Sims?

  A brief release. I don't know.

• 2:47:24Griffin Newman?

  I think one is it's in service of the audience, not just to need the release, but to also understand, have some grounding in a real reality. Because part of it is, are we getting somewhat seduced into the idea that Travis should do this? If we are seeing in real time the actual dynamics of Jodie Foster's situation, to some degree, does that make us want some, if not bloodshed, justice, right?

• 2:47:50David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50Griffin Newman?

  I think the second interpretation is you could read these sequences, and especially that one, as a projection of Travis's mind.

• 2:47:59Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm, that's the order in which I wanted to introduce.

• 2:48:03Griffin Newman?

  Great.

• 2:48:03Speaker 02

  This, because that's the next question I wanna.

• 2:48:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:06Speaker 02

  Entertain. There's been a lot of conjecture over the years about where the movie parts from reality, even down to my mom's first viewing of the movie in the drive-in, right? It's like, well, I think maybe some of that stuff was fantasy. And I know that the filmmakers have at various times addressed this question themselves, never very satisfactorily. Nor do I think they're necessarily the final arbiters of that decision.

• 2:48:30David Sims?

  They are not.

• 2:48:31Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 2:48:32David Sims?

  But I also feel like they all seem to slightly disagree and they also don't wanna be definitive.

• 2:48:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:48:38David Sims?

  Like, they don't wanna totally be like, oh, did you not fucking get that that was a dream, idiot? You know?

• 2:48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:42David Sims?

  And then there's like that moment where Schrader, no, De Niro, one of them was like, let's do a sequel. And I remember some people being like, hold up, sequel? Is he even alive?

• 2:48:51Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:48:52David Sims?

  Why would there be a sequel?

• 2:48:53Speaker 02

  Right. Yes. Carrie, Carrie last night after we watched it was just like, the motherfucker got shot in his carotid artery. He's fucking dead.

• 2:49:00David Sims?

  He's not in good shape at the end of the movie. I'll say it. 911, let's call it.

• 2:49:05Griffin Newman?

  I, I also always think about, there was, Scorsese did a podcast with Joanna Hogg, I think it was for the 824 podcast.

• 2:49:12David Sims?

  It's one of my favorite podcasts ever recorded.

• 2:49:14Griffin Newman?

  And he said a thing that I think about all the fucking time.

• 2:49:17Speaker 02

  Who, who said this to Joanna Hogg?

• 2:49:19Griffin Newman?

  Martin Scorsese. Who directed Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.

• 2:49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:24Griffin Newman?

  And he said, um, she was talking about having to do like a press tour for the first time. And that this interview felt like the first real conversation she was having after weeks of people asking her to confirm their interpretations of the film, or asking her to explain the film in ways they didn't understand, and how she was so loath to do that. And he said, what you have to do is offer them something else.

• 2:49:47Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:49:48Griffin Newman?

  You know, she said, I don't wanna be someone who's difficult, who refuses to do press, but I also don't wanna say these things. I don't think that helps the function of the art itself with its own integrity. And he said, you take the question they ask and you offer them something else instead. So Scorsese himself has admitted, and for a man who had to deal with a lot of controversy across his career, and the interpretation of films, and being asked to explain himself, that the strategy he eventually landed on is, I, I'm not gonna give people what I really think, to some degree.

• 2:50:17David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:18Griffin Newman?

  I'm, I'm gonna find a way to three-card monte a little bit, so let the movie still have its own integrity.

• 2:50:23Speaker 02

  How much of them, how much of it do you think is, is quote unquote, real?

• 2:50:29David Sims?

  What's interesting to me, when I think about this stuff, because you can pretty flatly kind of just take the movie, it's like, sure, it's basically real. And like, then, you know, the epilogue is, is sort of a fantasy or kind of a commentary to the audience or whatever.

• 2:50:44Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:50:44David Sims?

  Right. I also just, I do think about like, how handsome De Niro is as a bit of a fantasy we're seeing, right? And the fact that he starts to focus on like, there'll be no more poison in my body, like 50 pushups a day, right? Like his whole like regimen.

• 2:51:00Griffin Newman?

  And he's already trimmed to begin with. It's not like he starts the movie doughy.

• 2:51:03David Sims?

  Yeah, like, the way he looks and is perceived, especially.

• 2:51:08Griffin Newman?

  Perfect amount of stubble. His skin is so clean.

• 2:51:11David Sims?

  Is a little too nice.

• 2:51:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:13David Sims?

  And then the way people react to him doesn't strike me as like they're seeing the De Niro I'm seeing.

• 2:51:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:51:20David Sims?

  Now, of course, people start to really be disturbed by him once he's got the mohawk, once he's, you know, like, and I don't know. Like, I mean, I, to me, this is just a fun thing to think about. This is not like, this is not a movie that needs solving in the slightest. Right? Like, it's, it's not a movie where I'm like, you have to know what's going on at the end. There's clues.

• 2:51:39Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:40David Sims?

  It's vital that you see in the final scene that weird look cross his face, obviously. Like, you need to understand, like, he's not feeling great, you know?

• 2:51:51Griffin Newman?

  I mean, this is why it's, this is a movie.

• 2:51:53David Sims?

  It's all still inside of him, but apart from that, you can just sort of like, is he just imagining all of this? Is he just imagining Sybil getting in the car? Like, who knows?

• 2:52:00Griffin Newman?

  This is an endlessly fascinating movie to unpack and pick at, because even to what you're saying, I'm like, that's a really good read. On the other hand, you could say this movie is kind of about the weirdness of, if you are a handsome person, or even let alone just a conventional enough looking person, people grant you more leeway.

• 2:52:20David Sims?

  Skip by a little bit for.

• 2:52:20Griffin Newman?

  You watch the scene where he's talking to like the security detail.

• 2:52:23David Sims?

  Well, but that scene, I feel like the security guy immediately clocks him as a huge threat. Right? Yes.

• 2:52:28Speaker 02

  Well, and his.

• 2:52:29David Sims?

  And asks for his address.

• 2:52:30Speaker 02

  Psychosis seems to, uh, seems to kind of swing back and forth, seems to waver. There are times in the movie where he seems sicker than other times, and it's one of the.

• 2:52:40David Sims?

  And he's letting more of his inside thoughts out, you know, talking about like, he needs to deal with this. He needs to get these people out of here.

• 2:52:45Speaker 02

  I think it's one of the, I think it's one of the all-time great screen performances. I really do. I, I.

• 2:52:52David Sims?

  Completely.

• 2:52:53Speaker 02

  One of the reasons is, is that issue of mental health, the, the, the, the projection of mental illness that De Niro creates moment to moment, scene to scene.

• 2:53:07Griffin Newman?

  Not indicating ever.

• 2:53:08Speaker 02

  No, the sort of in and out quality of it, right? Where, when he's talking to Iris, he seems very lucid and, and, and on it. And then when he's talking to the, to the secret service man, right? He's just ready to, ready to bust out and make trouble.

• 2:53:25David Sims?

  Yes. And then he'll kind of like, the way he smiles, because clearly Travis knows enough, like, if I smile at someone, that'll diffuse.

• 2:53:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:35David Sims?

  Tension.

• 2:53:35Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:36David Sims?

  That I'm sort of perceiving. And of course, anytime he does that, he looks crazy, not to use these words in this, like, but you're just going, why the fuck is this guy smiling? He just said he wants to like wipe, you know, to get rid of a bunch of scum or whatever, you know?

• 2:53:50Griffin Newman?

  Let's remember that he's 26 years old, right? And people with latent mental illnesses, often that is when they start to experience, you know, in the time between.

• 2:54:00David Sims?

  A Vietnam veteran suffering from.

• 2:54:02Griffin Newman?

  Totally, totally. Right. There's PTSD and whatever, but I, but I don't think this movie argues that he is solely the byproduct of PTSD.

• 2:54:10David Sims?

  No, no. I mean, I don't know.

• 2:54:12Griffin Newman?

  This movie argues is that supercharged man who never should have been put in that position after, to begin with, and was not given the support coming out of it.

• 2:54:19David Sims?

  Right. That's, it's that more as well of just kind of like, right, and then we put these guys into a war that made no sense. They were traumatized, and then we just kind of brought them back and we're like.

• 2:54:28Griffin Newman?

  But I, you know, I had friends, people I grew up with who then had a psychotic break at some point in their early to mid twenties. And when it's starting to happen, you question your perception of what's going on, because sometimes these people are unbelievably convincing.

• 2:54:44David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:45Griffin Newman?

  And then they start to have behaviors that are aberrant, but they're small. And often it's like, well, he's always been funny, or he's always been kind of a wild guy. The same things that were originally kind of appealing charismatic about the person start to just get a little bit oversized. And to some degree, it is like, the fact that he is a handsome guy, the fact that it is De Niro, and he has a certain undeniable level of magnetism. You know, even when he's playing a broken sad guy, you do see people sizing him up. And I agree with you that the security detail guy immediately is like, okay, this guy's a fucking problem. But also, he is relating to him in a way where he's like, let me try to psychologically contain this situation.

• 2:55:29David Sims?

  Yeah. Yeah. Hey, no, yeah, you can join the squad.

• 2:55:31Griffin Newman?

  If he's a different looking kind of guy, he maybe just physically apprehends him immediately.

• 2:55:36David Sims?

  Um, there's the scene where he tells Boyle essentially like that I'm having like violent thoughts.

• 2:55:42Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:43David Sims?

  And, you know, I feel like there's a few scenes like that. There's the scene with the Secret Service guy. There's a few scenes where essentially he's kind of like red alert, FYI.

• 2:55:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:52David Sims?

  And it's sort of the scenes you sometimes, the stuff you hear about with people who do a bad thing.

• 2:55:56Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:55:56David Sims?

  Where people are like, you know what? In retrospect, he said this thing that was like very uncomfortable. The great irony of Boyle's character being named Wizard when he's anything but, you know?

• 2:56:07Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:56:08David Sims?

  Just totally hapless at helping his friend.

• 2:56:11Griffin Newman?

  But but holds that, I mean.

• 2:56:12David Sims?

  I mean, and Wizard tells that sex story at the start of the movie.

• 2:56:15Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:56:15David Sims?

  Where you're like, well, this is made up, you know?

• 2:56:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:17David Sims?

  And it's in that sort of like, schoolyard way of like, oh, you just made up a story to entertain everyone.

• 2:56:23Griffin Newman?

  Do we not think that also perhaps feeds into Travis's bad second date where he's like, the story is this guy made a bold move.

• 2:56:30David Sims?

  He took his dick out and it was good.

• 2:56:32Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:56:32David Sims?

  I can do stuff like that.

• 2:56:34Griffin Newman?

  He was applauded.

• 2:56:36Griffin Newman?

  A ticker date period.

• 2:56:52David Sims?

  We should also though, point out too, that he has that, uh, interaction with Jodie Foster's character.

• 2:57:01Griffin Newman?

  Oh.

• 2:57:02David Sims?

  That happens pretty early, right? Cause she like, he almost runs her over.

• 2:57:06Griffin Newman?

  That's within the first thirty minutes, but then she kind of disappears from the movie for a while.

• 2:57:10David Sims?

  And he gets kind of almost paid off a little bit.

• 2:57:13Griffin Newman?

  Well, Kaitel comes and pulls her out.

• 2:57:15David Sims?

  Like a crumpled up twenty.

• 2:57:16Griffin Newman?

  Throws a twenty.

• 2:57:17David Sims?

  But he keeps holding on to the twenty.

• 2:57:19Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:57:20David Sims?

  Throughout the movie.

• 2:57:21Griffin Newman?

  Right. It's also fascinating when he finally reconnects with her. And a lot of times passed in the movie, and you imagine a chunk of times passed in the real world as well, that he's like, you remember me from our defining incident? You know, that to him, as you're saying, he's really holding on to this, like, should I have stepped in? Did I not prevent something from happening? Which means that I think when he sees her the second time, he's so relieved that she's still alive. And he's like, I cannot let this happen a second time. I cannot do nothing. And she has no memory of even the event he's talking about, because that's like, every day of her life, probably.

• 2:57:57David Sims?

  Right. But the dynamic is that he wants to protect her. I do think he also wants to have her, right? Like, you know, it's like, he's, he's wrestling with his own kind of dark, you know, like, experience of his sexuality, which feels like nascent.

• 2:58:11Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:58:11David Sims?

  And like, so mysterious.

• 2:58:13Griffin Newman?

  Well, also that he's so childlike that he almost relates more to her of like, you two are stuck in this adult world that's kind of scary that you don't understand.

• 2:58:21David Sims?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:58:22Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 2:58:22David Sims?

  Cause like, I feel like at the time, some of the discussion around her character was like, this, is this just too patently shocking? Is this just designed to shock? The fact that she's so young, you know, like, and I'm like, no, she has to be a child.

• 2:58:35Griffin Newman?

  She does, yeah.

• 2:58:36David Sims?

  Cause it is the only way he can relate. And it's like such a, the sociopathic thing of sociopaths responding to animals and children in a, you know what I mean?

• 2:58:44Griffin Newman?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:58:44David Sims?

  You read about this?

• 2:58:45Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:58:46David Sims?

  It just all makes perfect sense to me. And, I mean, Schrader has this whole story of like, look, I'm not going to litigate Schrader all day, but you know, where he says, like, I picked up a girl while I was researching this, and I realized very quickly she was like underage and a drug addict, and I had Marty meet her, and she was the one who put sugar on the peanut butter and jelly. That's where we got that idea from. When Schrader says things like that, I'm like, okay, okay, Paul. Much as like later when he was like, you know, I would like hang out, you know, in gay sex clubs, just to sort of see what it did for me.

• 2:59:18Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:18David Sims?

  And I'm like, okay, Paul, well, I hope it did something. And now recently when he's like, I had an AI girlfriend, but she dumped me.

• 2:59:25Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 2:59:26David Sims?

  He, the man expresses his thoughts and interests online and.

• 2:59:30Griffin Newman?

  Our researcher JJ texted, are you still recording with Tracy? Might want to address this. And the Facebook post is, AI female friends, all caps. Out of a desire to understand male female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment. I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation, and so forth. She fell into evasive patterns redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation. And JJ responded, modern day Travis Bickle, freeze an AI female friend from a data center shooting spree.

• 3:00:08Griffin Newman?

  I just had to read that to give JJ the comedy point.

• 3:00:10David Sims?

  I want to say, of course, that JJ, I texted JJ privately, we're not reading that shit. So I'm glad, of course, that we did read it.

• 3:00:16Griffin Newman?

  Of course, you had to. And what a mistake to text him that privately.

• 3:00:19David Sims?

  Well, I think it was a hubristic move that I knew, I knew what I was doing. I knew we would eventually probably end up reading that shit.

• 3:00:24Griffin Newman?

  Thanks for the alley-oop, buddy.

• 3:00:25David Sims?

  Yes. Um, so yeah, he gets guns, uh, the gun scenes.

• 3:00:29Griffin Newman?

  He does.

• 3:00:29David Sims?

  The gun salesman, man. What a, what a classic. He's like, I got guns. He also got some dope grass. Hash, you want a Cadillac? You want a Tiger?

• 3:00:39Griffin Newman?

  Where does he have the Cadillac?

• 3:00:41David Sims?

  I don't know.

• 3:00:42Griffin Newman?

  Is he like, it's around the corner?

• 3:00:43David Sims?

  This guy's just got in on anything.

• 3:00:46Griffin Newman?

  I also.

• 3:00:46David Sims?

  Anything you want.

• 3:00:47Griffin Newman?

  I love that this guy is like, he thinks he's in Death Wish. He is the functional character in the movie who helps the hero gain the power he needs to solve everything.

• 3:00:58David Sims?

  And this actor was the subject of a Scorsese documentary short.

• 3:01:05Griffin Newman?

  Uh, the, the, the.

• 3:01:06David Sims?

  Oh, is the.

• 3:01:07Griffin Newman?

  The character is Easy Andy. The actor is Steven Prince. Uh, tell me, uh, what, oh, American Boy. Yes, right, right, right, right. Which comes out in between this.

• 3:01:17David Sims?

  It's, it's this guy monologuing. He's like a recovering heroin addict, I think. And he's just telling crazy stories.

• 3:01:23Griffin Newman?

  We'll tell, uh, we'll cover it on, we're gonna, I think, do a Patreon episode on the Scorsese shorts criterion set, which that's part of.

• 3:01:31David Sims?

  Right.

• 3:01:32Griffin Newman?

  There's a shot in this, it's another, just like, this guy's a fucking genius moment, where this dude holds up the gun, the gun he's gonna, you know, become Travis's first gun, and the camera cranes up with the gun, from the perspective of the gun, basically, and Travis looking at it. And it's like, he is ascending into a higher form with the introduction of this weapon. But rather than it being a kind of obvious Spielberg shot of the camera and the gun raise up, and Travis is looking, you know, wide eyed in wonder at it, Travis like looks away for a second. And it doesn't feel like it's an imperfect take that was chosen, obviously. It's that he can't even kind of face the power of what

• 3:02:17Griffin Newman?

  he's saying he needs.

• 3:02:19David Sims?

  Right.

• 3:02:19Griffin Newman?

  That it's like he's staring into the sun.

• 3:02:22David Sims?

  There are some camera moves in this thing that are.

• 3:02:24Griffin Newman?

  It's insane.

• 3:02:25David Sims?

  The thing down the hall that you mentioned, the, the few times that the camera hovers sort of objectively over a tabletop, and we see the, the various items on the top of the table.

• 3:02:37Griffin Newman?

  Because you say objectively, but then I feel like this is a movie that pulls off its camera editorializing its characters in a way that's, it's part of why I just, it's so hard to imagine misreading this movie. Because it does things to throw you off center.

• 3:02:55David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:56Griffin Newman?

  In, in even just the experience of watching the sequences to deprive you of what could be the wrong kind of juice.

• 3:03:03David Sims?

  Well, Carrie noted too, the, the, the number, and she was right, it struck me last night in the watching, the, the number of sort of montage-y.

• 3:03:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:12David Sims?

  Um, interstitial moments between the, right, him traveling, or him watching TV, or making a sandwich, or whatever the hell he's doing.

• 3:03:21Griffin Newman?

  And the score swelling.

• 3:03:22David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:22Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:23David Sims?

  There's a lot of that. So, you know, credit, credit to the editor, because a lot of that's done, uh.

• 3:03:30Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:31David Sims?

  Marshall Lucas.

• 3:03:32Griffin Newman?

  Supervising editor, Marshall Lucas, which I have some interesting things, uh, thoughts about her. I'll tell you off mic.

• 3:03:36David Sims?

  Uh, Tom Roll. He's kidding.

• 3:03:38Griffin Newman?

  Do you know who Marshall Lucas is?

• 3:03:40Speaker 02

  I don't guess I do.

• 3:03:41Griffin Newman?

  Marshall Lucas was the first wife of George Lucas and she is responsible or largely credited for after the original cut of Star Wars was a mess. She's the one who came in and fixed it and is often credited specifically with saving the trench run.

• 3:03:55Speaker 02

  Oh, nice.

• 3:03:56David Sims?

  Your favorite sequence of all time in any film ever made.

• 3:03:59Griffin Newman?

  Tracy.

• 3:03:59Speaker 02

  I will, I will. She's a great. As I ponder the fourth Star Wars movie. She's a great.

• 3:04:04David Sims?

  Editor of the seventies.

• 3:04:05Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 3:04:07David Sims?

  Uh, should we talk about, uh, are you talking to me at all?

• 3:04:10Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it is, it is funny. Uh, in, in this way, talking about watching movies where the reputation precedes them so much, right? Sometimes you're dutiful cinephile and you try to go through history and cross the things off the list. You get to the scenes and you're just doing the pointing at the screen meme of like, got it, there it is. And the scenes have become so big out of context that it's actually hard to engage with them within the body of the movie itself. It is insane how much this scene transforms entirely if watched in the context of the film.

• 3:04:42Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:04:44Griffin Newman?

  Because if, whenever it's cut into fucking clip packages of the history of movies or even, you know, it's painted on a mural, the side of Pete's parlor or whatever, it does just look like a cool badass guy doing cool badass stuff. And within the scene, it is like so bizarre. It, it's deeply, deeply strange. And you know, it's the famous story that it's improvised and it was basically just like, not, not B-roll, but it was, you know, Scorsese is saying like, just do some stuff.

• 3:05:10David Sims?

  They were behind schedule. Yeah, I'm sorry, you know, like, you know, they were, they were in like five days over schedule on a 40 day shoot and he just started doing stuff and Scorsese was just like, just film it. We just need to be done. Like, so just whatever he does, let's just film it.

• 3:05:26Griffin Newman?

  You also imagine, you know, talking about the amount of montages in this movie. Like this is the kind of thing that would just possibly be three seconds of, you know, non-speaking cutaway, were it not capturing some weird lightning in a bottle. And the fact that it is, I'm sure you have the same hangup, but when people talk about things that are improvised in movies, 99.9% of the time, what they mean is something was improvised during a rehearsal and then it was written down and then it was replicated 40 times. And, and coverage starts to be dictated by the thing.

• 3:06:02David Sims?

  Right.

• 3:06:02Griffin Newman?

  It, it was written on the day, but it's not a spontaneous moment that actually happened. This you can feel, this is something that just fucking happened and they got it. And thank God there was not like a hair in the gate.

• 3:06:15Speaker 02

  And I'm pretty sure, shooting into the reflection.

• 3:06:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:19Speaker 02

  It looks like the, his reflection in the, right? De Niro is reversed.

• 3:06:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:24Speaker 02

  You can see it in his face that he's reversed. No, it's really great. I mean, obviously the, the, it's not just the delivery. It's not just the way it's shot. It's not just the placement. It's also just the universality. And you talk about, uh, a little kid, the little kid in Travis.

• 3:06:40Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 3:06:40Speaker 02

  It's a little kid. It's a little kid.

• 3:06:42Griffin Newman?

  It's him acting out being a cowboy.

• 3:06:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, being a tough guy, having a tough guy conversation with somebody else. Everybody's done it at some point. Now, hopefully they've done it innocently, at a more innocent time in their life without actual plans to go in and massacre a bunch of people.

• 3:06:58Griffin Newman?

  It's also the reason why I didn't do it for the fucking intro is because when it's cut into these montages, it's like you hear him say it three times. And when you watch the scene, he says it like 10 times. There's something bizarre about how ritualistic it becomes. It's not just one moment of this guy being tough. It's him like trying out different reads.

• 3:07:19David Sims?

  That's what I love about it. It's pathetic.

• 3:07:21Griffin Newman?

  It's pathetic.

• 3:07:21David Sims?

  He doesn't know how to talk to people, even when he's trying to be a scary cowboy.

• 3:07:25Griffin Newman?

  It's also.

• 3:07:25David Sims?

  He has to rehearse it.

• 3:07:26Griffin Newman?

  It's a weird thing to say, right? It's a weird thing to get upset about.

• 3:07:30Speaker 02

  You talking to me?

• 3:07:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:32Speaker 02

  Especially if, as he says, there's nobody else around here.

• 3:07:35Griffin Newman?

  Right. It feels like the broken version of who the fuck do you think you're talking to? Right?

• 3:07:40David Sims?

  Yeah, of course. Like, and like, I've had those moments and I'm sure you have too, where you're on the subway, there's someone who clearly wants to pick a fight.

• 3:07:46Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 3:07:47David Sims?

  And if you look at them, if you lock eyes with them, then they will start to be like, hey, what, what are you looking at? You know, like, and, and you're like, oh God, now I have to.

• 3:07:54Griffin Newman?

  I had a guy literally knock my hat off recently for that. And we were on an escalator.

• 3:07:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was an accident.

• 3:08:00Griffin Newman?

  I, I, I thank both of you for apologizing. Ben, is there anything you want to say now?

• 3:08:06David Sims?

  No, I meant it.

• 3:08:07Griffin Newman?

  Because it has happened three times. Three times today.

• 3:08:11Griffin Newman?

  No, it was like a, a escalator going up the, um, uh, Whitehall station.

• 3:08:16David Sims?

  I hear you.

• 3:08:17Griffin Newman?

  Which is a pretty steep escalator.

• 3:08:18David Sims?

  Big old escalator.

• 3:08:19Griffin Newman?

  And I'm literally just looking up it and the guy just fucking knocks my hat off.

• 3:08:24David Sims?

  Wow.

• 3:08:24Griffin Newman?

  And was like.

• 3:08:24Speaker 02

  Riding down the other side?

• 3:08:26Griffin Newman?

  Riding up.

• 3:08:27David Sims?

  He just sees you from behind him.

• 3:08:29Griffin Newman?

  We're both riding up. He's one step ahead of me. He's facing towards me.

• 3:08:32David Sims?

  Hmm.

• 3:08:32Griffin Newman?

  So first of all, he wanted to fight. He's already looking in the wrong direction up the escalator. I am looking to see, is there a room to walk? Or am I stuck just standing here riding it out?

• 3:08:43Speaker 02

  Kick his ass?

• 3:08:45Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, of course, Tracy. What do you think? Look at me.

• 3:08:48David Sims?

  Broom onto the W train. Now.

• 3:08:50Griffin Newman?

  But it was, everyone else was kind of watching.

• 3:08:52Speaker 02

  Did you make an ironic comment?

• 3:08:54Griffin Newman?

  I, I went, I'm looking at the escalator. I did say that. And I had my AirPods in and I'm stuck just riding it for the remaining like 45 seconds. And I just played the game of like, I'm listening to a podcast, I'm not engaging with you. But he wouldn't stop talking. And it went from like, you're upset because I could fuck your wife to you're gay to, like, it's cycled through everything, but it felt, it felt kind of you're talking to me. You're right, David, that it is that type of thing of a guy who's just like, I'm looking for a reason that someone wants to fight me so that I feel like I'm not instigating it.

• 3:09:31Speaker 02

  Uh, so imagine being upset because somebody could fuck your wife.

• 3:09:34Griffin Newman?

  I know.

• 3:09:37David Sims?

  Crap.

• 3:09:38Griffin Newman?

  I had a good, I had a good conversation the other night where someone asked me if I was married and I said, no. And he said, not at all?

• 3:09:46David Sims?

  So just to, we, we need to wrap this.

• 3:09:49Griffin Newman?

  Unpack that for the rest of my life.

• 3:09:51Speaker 02

  I'm going for the record, man.

• 3:09:53David Sims?

  No, no, we have another episode to record after this. We gotta wrap soon. Uh, but no, okay. The Palatine character, I take him as kind of a John Lindsay. I don't know, like a sort of patrician, kind of a good guy, a little well-meaning, but a little disconnected, right? Like, it's a good performance. It, it's the kind of liberal-ish politician in the city that was kind of like, we all need to band together to.

• 3:10:14Griffin Newman?

  It's important that it's a, it's a.

• 3:10:16David Sims?

  Help things out.

• 3:10:16Griffin Newman?

  Presented as a man of the people.

• 3:10:18David Sims?

  Right.

• 3:10:18Griffin Newman?

  And it feels like there is no consideration of the world that Travis lives in, let alone the world that Sailor lives in.

• 3:10:24Speaker 02

  He's full of shit.

• 3:10:25David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:25Speaker 02

  He's a phony.

• 3:10:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:28David Sims?

  Um, but, uh, like, it sort of makes sense that Travis would be like initially intrigued and then he's like, no, no, no, you're a phony. You need to die. Right.

• 3:10:36Griffin Newman?

  I like that he also positions it as if like, he almost went into a career in politics. That, you know, part of the sliding doors for Travis is like, yeah, I almost devoted my life to supporting this candidate as if that's a career.

• 3:10:48David Sims?

  Right. The Mohawk moment, it's like the camera's on a rope. I don't know, like, I don't know what the move is exactly. Cause it's like the scariest thing. And again, imagine seeing this movie not knowing that.

• 3:11:00Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:00David Sims?

  Like, cause the way you see his legs and it just jerks up to see that he's cut his hair like that and you're like, Jesus.

• 3:11:05Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:06David Sims?

  Like, what's going on? And I mean, this is where we're kind of like, right?

• 3:11:10Speaker 02

  We've already, I'm sorry, just to double back a little bit.

• 3:11:13David Sims?

  Please double back. Uh, I, I, I'm, I'm now kind of out of narrative. Like we're, I'm basically just at the end. I'm trying to think of like what I might've forgotten.

• 3:11:20Speaker 02

  Well, just, uh, Jackson Brown. Let's talk about Jackson Brown.

• 3:11:24Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 3:11:25Speaker 02

  Odd.

• 3:11:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:26Speaker 02

  An odd, uh, needle drop.

• 3:11:29David Sims?

  Late for the sky, I believe.

• 3:11:31Griffin Newman?

  Uh. Also, as you said, there's very little like contemporary music in this thing. There's very little music outside of the Herman score that you hear anywhere.

• 3:11:40Speaker 02

  It seems to suggest that this Jackson Brown song is playing on American Bandstand. Listener, let me tell you.

• 3:11:46David Sims?

  Jackson Brown was not that kind of guy.

• 3:11:48Speaker 02

  Was not on American Bandstand.

• 3:11:50Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 3:11:51Speaker 02

  Just odd and feels all Scorsese, right?

• 3:11:55David Sims?

  Sure.

• 3:11:55Speaker 02

  That's musical taste.

• 3:11:57David Sims?

  Yeah. And like, we're still only a couple of years removed from Mean Streets where him bringing that kind of music to a movie is novel.

• 3:12:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:03David Sims?

  This kind of like very current music.

• 3:12:05Griffin Newman?

  That is part of it. I wonder if that truly is just, he tried to hold himself back from doing any needle drops.

• 3:12:12David Sims?

  Drops, right, yeah.

• 3:12:13Griffin Newman?

  But as the king of needle drops, he was like, I kinda wanna put one in there.

• 3:12:16David Sims?

  He wanted to do Hooked on a Feeling for the, for the brothel massacre.

• 3:12:19Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 3:12:20Speaker 02

  Wait, yeah, where, where is the needle drop?

• 3:12:22Griffin Newman?

  A movie to perfect day by Hooked.

• 3:12:24David Sims?

  Uh, the needle drop.

• 3:12:25Griffin Newman?

  It's when he's getting ready for basically his mission to save Iris.

• 3:12:28David Sims?

  Like watching TV and he's got the gun and he's going to click, click, click, you know, uh, feeling normal. That's when I'm feeling normal.

• 3:12:36Speaker 02

  Uh, the, there's that one and then there's the, the soap opera that he watches as well where he's clicking on, on the soap opera before he destroys the television.

• 3:12:45Griffin Newman?

  And, and testing the limits of how far he can kick. I mean, it reminds me, once again, it reminds me of when you're in school and you're testing how far back you can kick your chair at the desk. And the teacher goes like, don't fucking do it. Don't fucking do it. Uh, but he's, he's playing that same game of chicken with the kind of laws of physics of tipping that thing over. Wanna call out, uh, Diane Abbott, who is De Niro's first wife.

• 3:13:11David Sims?

  Of course, she's the, the, the, the theater girl, the concession girl.

• 3:13:14Griffin Newman?

  I just think it's telling that the first time he goes to the theater before the bad date, he also like doesn't understand that this is not a theater that's gonna have like a complete concessions display, that that's not what people come here for. That he keeps asking for all sorts of different things that they don't have. Uh, it's also funny to think of that being a moment where two people fell in love.

• 3:13:38Speaker 02

  Also the, the fact that he believes that the girl who works the concession stand at the porno theater would be responsive to the single guy hitting on.

• 3:13:46Griffin Newman?

  Why do you think she took the job? She wants to meet guys.

• 3:13:47David Sims?

  She loves to meet these, the clientele. They're wonderful people.

• 3:13:51Speaker 02

  Um, I think the Jackson Brown is weird.

• 3:13:53Griffin Newman?

  I do too.

• 3:13:54David Sims?

  Fair enough.

• 3:13:54Griffin Newman?

  If there, if there is one.

• 3:13:56David Sims?

  Scorsese apologized.

• 3:13:57Griffin Newman?

  If there's one imperfect element of the movie, it's that for me. It doesn't bump too hard.

• 3:14:02David Sims?

  Let me see if there's any writing on this.

• 3:14:03Griffin Newman?

  I agree with you that it's the only decision that doesn't feel 100% correct to me.

• 3:14:07David Sims?

  It was a big moment for Jackson Brown, I believe.

• 3:14:10Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 3:14:10David Sims?

  It was, uh, a breakout moment for him. Um, you know, he's diverted to attacking sports brothel because the Palatine.

• 3:14:21Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:21David Sims?

  Attempt doesn't even really happen, you know, like, cause he's chased off. Feels like he picks the softer target. Or whatever.

• 3:14:28Speaker 02

  And he's got to kill somebody.

• 3:14:30David Sims?

  He's got to fucking do this. And he's built the slide for the gun.

• 3:14:34Speaker 02

  He's got to, he's got to relieve whatever this pressure is that's building up in him. And the only way to do it is to fucking kill somebody. And even after he kills sport, right, there's that great bit where he walks over and takes a seat on the stoop.

• 3:14:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:48Speaker 02

  And just like, as if he's feeling his body to feel like, did that do it?

• 3:14:52Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 3:14:52Speaker 02

  Was that, did that, did that get that feeling out of me that I need to get out? Nope, not enough.

• 3:14:58Griffin Newman?

  I gotta do more. And the, it took them three months to prep the tracking shot of the entrance into the building.

• 3:15:05David Sims?

  They had to like, cut out the ceiling or whatever, all this crazy stuff.

• 3:15:09Griffin Newman?

  Right. Um, I mean, this is the benefit of shooting in a New York full of condemned buildings, but I think basically they would film a proper day of stuff. And then at some point, just do a run through of that shot.

• 3:15:19David Sims?

  Right.

• 3:15:20Griffin Newman?

  To just get their reps in before they actually built up to filming it.

• 3:15:24David Sims?

  Obviously, famously, the whole sequence is desaturated. It looks kind of brown. This was to satisfy censors.

• 3:15:30Griffin Newman?

  The other accidental miracle, miracle. I couldn't decide if I want to say miracle or miraculous.

• 3:15:36Speaker 02

  Miracle.

• 3:15:37Griffin Newman?

  Miraculous.

• 3:15:38David Sims?

  Doritos.

• 3:15:39Griffin Newman?

  Doritos. Um, miracle of studio intervention.

• 3:15:43David Sims?

  Yes. I, I do think it's interesting. Michael Chapman is the one dissenter.

• 3:15:47Speaker 02

  In seek of. I heard that on the drive in, listening to your podcast.

• 3:15:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:52Speaker 02

  When your guest said, in seek of.

• 3:15:56Griffin Newman?

  In seek of?

• 3:15:57Speaker 02

  In see, instead of in search of.

• 3:15:59Griffin Newman?

  Oshers.

• 3:15:59Speaker 02

  What's his name? I like that guy.

• 3:16:01Griffin Newman?

  Hitmaker?

• 3:16:02Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Uh.

• 3:16:03Griffin Newman?

  J D Amato.

• 3:16:03David Sims?

  J D Amato from the Truman Show episode.

• 3:16:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:16:06David Sims?

  Yes, he's a great guy.

• 3:16:07Griffin Newman?

  He's gonna get a tattoo that says, I like that guy. Tracy Lass on his chest.

• 3:16:10David Sims?

  He'd be thrilled to hear it. He's the best.

• 3:16:12Speaker 02

  I like that. I, I, I don't know who he is, but.

• 3:16:14Griffin Newman?

  He's a genius. Yeah. He's a dear friend. He's a great filmmaker.

• 3:16:18David Sims?

  Filmmaker director. He's a great guy. Um, uh, author now, written by his book.

• 3:16:22Speaker 02

  Miracle.

• 3:16:23Griffin Newman?

  Miracle. But, but I think, and Sean made this argument as well. I think it lends the movie in the same way that the, because Chapman didn't have access to the lights, New York starts to feel unreal in the way he films the evenings. The studio mandate, do you know about this, Ben?

• 3:16:46David Sims?

  No.

• 3:16:46Griffin Newman?

  They were gonna give the movie an X rating.

• 3:16:48David Sims?

  Yes.

• 3:16:49Griffin Newman?

  Because it was too bloody in this sequence. And there is a sort of, uh, marginally apocryphal thing that Martin Scorsese was about to go, Travis Pickle himself on the studio executives, uh, to demand that they released it his way with a loaded gun, which has always seemingly been very overstated, that it was more Scorsese while in the mindset of this movie being like, I wonder if I went in with a gun, if they would listen to me, rather than making plans, uh, which is like a false narrative. But they were saying like, you gotta cut the sequence or the movie's not gonna get released. And he couldn't solve it.

• 3:17:24Speaker 02

  But that's like, what would the movie be then? How would it end?

• 3:17:28Griffin Newman?

  Well, they were like, you have to cut around it. You can't be this explicit. We need to like shred it to ribbons.

• 3:17:32David Sims?

  Okay.

• 3:17:33Griffin Newman?

  And then they basically, I think accidentally landed on this idea of, oh, if we push it a little bit, and we desaturate the colors and it stops being a vivid red, does it start looking less objectionable to?

• 3:17:45David Sims?

  Yes.

• 3:17:46Griffin Newman?

  The MPAA. And they accepted it. But so the weird muddy brownness of it all, I think feels like, the way Sean put it is, he enters a like, literal descent into hell.

• 3:17:57David Sims?

  Yes.

• 3:17:57Griffin Newman?

  You know, I think the fact that it is so, uh, unearthly.

• 3:18:01David Sims?

  Right.

• 3:18:02Griffin Newman?

  Is, is to the movie's benefit, in my opinion.

• 3:18:04David Sims?

  I agree. I do think it's, Chapman is like, it's sad the original colors are gone. They're gone. Like you cannot recover them, like whatever the original prints.

• 3:18:13Griffin Newman?

  A permanent chemical process to get the current look.

• 3:18:16David Sims?

  There used to be, I think, some examples of like that they, but it's gone. Like the whatever, whatever that is, is gone. And Chapman's like, it looked great. He's the one that did it. And I'd be interested, interested to see it. To me, the, right, the desaturation, it's part of the movie. I, you know, I first watched this movie in like, a basement when I was 14 years old with my like movie-loving friends. And it blew my mind. And yes, I just wonder about it.

• 3:18:39Griffin Newman?

  It also, it looks like dried blood in an interesting way. You know, it looks more like a crime scene after the fact in real time.

• 3:18:48Speaker 02

  It just looks so fucking gratty.

• 3:18:51Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 3:18:52Speaker 02

  It just looks fucking gratty and, and, and sticky and, uh, and, and violent, you know, exceedingly violent. I guess there's, there's kind of an inside joke about the fingers that get blown off the guy's hands, because Albert Brooks has had the bit earlier about how would you light a match?

• 3:19:10Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sure.

• 3:19:11Speaker 02

  If you're missing these fingers on my hand.

• 3:19:12David Sims?

  Think about that.

• 3:19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19:13David Sims?

  But all of the violence is, it's kind of like Fargo, these other early violent movies I saw.

• 3:19:19Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 3:19:20David Sims?

  Every little bit of it is just in my brain. Like just written in my brain, like the knife through the hand.

• 3:19:25Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:25David Sims?

  The fingers getting blown off. Just like, it's so well presented. You can see it so clearly. Every moment is so shocking. The worst is when he, you know, shoots the guy in front of her just because she's there and she's, it's so horrible for her.

• 3:19:40Griffin Newman?

  I'll say, we didn't spend too much time on it because it was a double episode, but in the boxcar Bertha episode, I didn't shout out how well constructed, I think that sequence is of the final shootout. I know we were calling out how violent it was, but it has that same kind of visual clarity and really kind of intentional, this is the camera move for just this one action, kind of construction to it.

• 3:20:03David Sims?

  He makes films for, shoots films very well.

• 3:20:05Speaker 02

  Uh, did you guys discuss the John Cassavetes element of boxcar Bertha?

• 3:20:09Griffin Newman?

  Big time.

• 3:20:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 3:20:10David Sims?

  All right, well, I just wanted.

• 3:20:11Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Tracy, don't worry.

• 3:20:13Speaker 02

  Well, look, now, I've been listening to your episodes and I, you know, what happens that I listen, I go, oh, did anybody talk about that?

• 3:20:20David Sims?

  You can always text us now.

• 3:20:21Griffin Newman?

  You can always text us now.

• 3:20:22David Sims?

  Get in our ear.

• 3:20:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:23Speaker 02

  Uh, my, you know, the story I told you about, uh, the, my buddy whose dad worked for the FAA. You know, that kind of thing comes up. It's like, oh, I'd like to tell those guys.

• 3:20:33Griffin Newman?

  Hey, we love it.

• 3:20:35David Sims?

  We will always be very, very happy to hear from you.

• 3:20:37Speaker 02

  Reminds me, I know we're on to Scorsese and not Peter Weir, but I did want to tell you something I forgot to tell you when we were on Air of Living Dangerously. There was a video store in, uh, London, England, and they had, um, eclectic categories for the films.

• 3:20:54David Sims?

  Do you remember what it was called? This video store?

• 3:20:56Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 3:20:56David Sims?

  Fair enough.

• 3:20:57Speaker 02

  But eclectic categories, you know, nasty nuns or treble on the highway or whatever the hell. And then some of them were broken down by star. Oh, here's the Harrison Ford section. Here's the, uh, and so there were a variety of Tom Cruise section, variety of movie stars. But there was one section called The French Guy With The Big Nose Who Was In Green Card.

• 3:21:23Griffin Newman?

  That's really good.

• 3:21:25David Sims?

  That is who he is. Are you a Dep R G fan?

• 3:21:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:21:28David Sims?

  I'm the lone Dep R G defender on that episode. Yes, not the person. The screen presence of the eighties and nineties.

• 3:21:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, uh, Jean de Floret, Manon in the Spring and.

• 3:21:37Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, those are fucking good movies.

• 3:21:39Speaker 02

  Fucking great shit.

• 3:21:40Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:41David Sims?

  All right. Do, do we feel good about? I feel good about what he does. I think it's good.

• 3:21:45Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, that's the question. And that's all we need to settle here today. Travis Pickle is a hero and we applaud him.

• 3:21:49David Sims?

  A problem is dealt with and, you know, everyone exits happy.

• 3:21:54Griffin Newman?

  Necessary action. Yeah. It's, it's what we're talking about with Rocky. The audience leaves feeling up. There's a win.

• 3:21:59Speaker 02

  I'm watching it. It's so fucked up. He goes through two guns.

• 3:22:02David Sims?

  He does. He's got the first gun where he.

• 3:22:05Speaker 02

  Where he's like trying to end his own life.

• 3:22:07David Sims?

  And then he, right, he produces the little gun, the slide gun.

• 3:22:10Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:11Speaker 02

  So fucked up.

• 3:22:12David Sims?

  Um.

• 3:22:13Speaker 02

  And he can't move the arm because he's been shot in the upper, uh, upper arm.

• 3:22:18David Sims?

  Yeah. And gets shot in the right shoulder or whatever.

• 3:22:20Speaker 02

  I wonder why that guy shot him in the shoulder and not in the head since he was walking right up.

• 3:22:25Griffin Newman?

  So distracted by the mohawk. He went, who would ever hurt a gun like that?

• 3:22:28David Sims?

  It all makes, the clumsiness of the violence all tracks.

• 3:22:31Speaker 02

  It's fantastic. It's fantastic.

• 3:22:34Griffin Newman?

  It's part of what makes the movie so hard to.

• 3:22:37David Sims?

  Synced up there.

• 3:22:38Griffin Newman?

  Pinned out. You almost what?

• 3:22:39David Sims?

  Our ums synced up there.

• 3:22:40Griffin Newman?

  Oh, that's nice. Did we harmonized?

• 3:22:44Griffin Newman?

  Um, it's, you missed your opening there. It's part of what makes this movie so hard to pin down is, as much as it feels like a fantasy sequence of, well, this is how this guy thought he would be greeted. You can imagine a world in which that happens. You can imagine a world in which people show up to the aftermath of this and go, wow, this guy was an angel, a crusading hero. He saved this young woman's life. And who cares about the people he killed? I don't think that's what happened, but I believe that could be a media spin on it.

• 3:23:16David Sims?

  Oh, no, you totally, I believe that, yes, he could have gotten away with this essentially. Yes.

• 3:23:21Speaker 02

  But then you don't believe that Sybil Shepherd gets into the back of this cab.

• 3:23:28Griffin Newman?

  That is the one thing in the movie that undeniably is fake to me.

• 3:23:31David Sims?

  Right. It's like, there's no way. She's like, hey, you know, I had the wrong idea about.

• 3:23:35Speaker 02

  You and when you murdered all those people, it really turned my opinion on you.

• 3:23:39Griffin Newman?

  She magically like appears in the rear view window.

• 3:23:42Speaker 02

  And the way she shot in the rear, right with her, there's like a fan blowing her, blowing her hair in the shot and, and she's almost not seen at all in any context other than in that rear view mirror.

• 3:23:54Griffin Newman?

  And her performance is completely different than how she plays every other second she has on.

• 3:23:58Speaker 02

  So if that's not true.

• 3:24:01Griffin Newman?

  Then.

• 3:24:01Speaker 02

  In the shit before it. It would seem to be not true.

• 3:24:07David Sims?

  That's, that's a very plausible read. The only way I can think about it is like, yes, he's been rewarded in a way. He gets away with it and that they're like, well, clearly you were attacked by these lowlifes and you rescued this girl, I guess. And like, okay, whatever. You're not under arrest, sir. And he's driving his cab again. And he's the same fucked up guy.

• 3:24:30David Sims?

  But he had, and he looks in the mirror, right? He looks in the rear view mirror. You see him distressed by something or what, right? And then, you know, some part of his brain engages. It's like, no, no, no. What's gonna happen is suddenly Sybil's gonna show up. Like you can imagine that that's the only fantastic part to him, but it all feels dreamlike to me. Always has. The way the camera moves feels dreamlike. I don't know. Just everything about it does. Doesn't bother me. I, I don't worry about it.

• 3:24:56Speaker 02

  Scorsese did say at one point, and I hear your point, Griffin, that perhaps, you know, he's bullshitting his way through an interview, which is entirely plausible, but uh, he did say at one point that he hoped to convey the idea that in that, in the last moment that the movie is on a loop. The movie resets and is beginning again from the very beginning.

• 3:25:19Griffin Newman?

  Well, that's, that's the other part of it is.

• 3:25:21David Sims?

  That's one way it went.

• 3:25:22Griffin Newman?

  You saying, sure. You saying if, if that's not true, then isn't everything that came, or what came right before isn't true about the Sybil separate moment. Is he has his like kind of victory lap. He has you hearing the, uh, the letter that her parents write, which sounds so robotic and unnatural.

• 3:25:41David Sims?

  Of course.

• 3:25:41Griffin Newman?

  Like in it today, it plays like it's a weird AI deep fake thing. It has that unnatural kind of rhythm to the actual language and the speak, the speech patterns.

• 3:25:53Speaker 02

  Not to mention, that's not the story of this girl.

• 3:25:55Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 3:25:56Speaker 02

  This girl didn't leave a happy home with two happy parents.

• 3:25:59Griffin Newman?

  First question is, what about your parents?

• 3:26:01David Sims?

  High and low for the.

• 3:26:03Griffin Newman?

  And she says something like, I think they're probably happier that I'm, I'm not there anymore, whatever. So right. All of that feels completely unnatural and, and false. But there is the moment where he just kind of sits in the cab in self-satisfaction. The cab is empty and then suddenly she's in the back through the rear view mirror. You could argue that's another kind of branching point, but it's also like the movie has created so many choose your own adventure. Where does reality stop thing that we're so far down the branching timeline that who fucking knows anymore? It just feels like that's why that's the demonstrable. There is no way this is fucking happening because you don't see her approach the car. I think you don't hear the door open or close. She's just there.

• 3:26:48Griffin Newman?

  And she just satisfies everything he wants to hear in life.

• 3:26:52David Sims?

  The film was a huge commercial success.

• 3:26:55Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Now I do want to define because I, I think this is important running thing for the rest of his career. Scorsese's always talked about that unlike the other movie brats, he never had the seismic success.

• 3:27:07David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:07Griffin Newman?

  That minted him for the rest of his career. He didn't have a Carrie, a Godfather, a Star Wars. This was his biggest hit until Color of Money, I think, basically.

• 3:27:17David Sims?

  Yeah. It makes $27 million at their domestic box office. It didn't, it costs less than two. Like it was a huge, and especially for a movie like this, that's unheard of. It's crazy. He certainly, he thought New York, New York was the commercial movie he was working towards. He's like, I'm making a musical with Liza Minnelli. Everyone will like it.

• 3:27:34Griffin Newman?

  It's about the world's worst boyfriend.

• 3:27:36Speaker 02

  And multiple Academy Award nominations and obviously a big part of the Columbia catalog moving forward.

• 3:27:43David Sims?

  It also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, uh, jury president Tennessee Williams and like, uh, he, he remembers like, he, it premieres at Cannes, a trade paper runs a story that Tennessee Williams hated the film. He goes to get dinner with Kostas Gavris and Sergio Leone. And he gets a call from a publicist like late at night being like, you're going to win the Palme d'Or, by the way. So you gotta stay in France. Like you can't, you know, you're not going home. And they were completely shocked. He was completely shocked essentially that this movie went over, you know, I don't know. Um, and yes, of course, then John Hinckley did try to shoot Ronald Reagan.

• 3:28:22Griffin Newman?

  That did happen.

• 3:28:23David Sims?

  Uh, and, uh, Jodie Foster.

• 3:28:25Speaker 02

  Didn't try to shoot him.

• 3:28:26David Sims?

  Yeah, he shot him. Right. Tried to kill Ronald Reagan and failed. And Scorsese thought like the way his movie was talked about in that context was unfair. Uh, that's sort of how it always is. You know, I don't know.

• 3:28:40Griffin Newman?

  Like canceling my doctor's appointment.

• 3:28:42David Sims?

  Jesus. No, Griff, we're almost done.

• 3:28:43Griffin Newman?

  I, it's, I wouldn't make it there in time.

• 3:28:45Speaker 02

  No, it's okay because I'm going to take you guys down a rabbit hole. Yes. Question.

• 3:28:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:52Speaker 02

  How do you identify with Travis Bickle?

• 3:28:56Griffin Newman?

  I love this.

• 3:28:57David Sims?

  I love New York City, baby.

• 3:29:00David Sims?

  Greatest city in the world. So I, I completely, I'd love to drive a cab around, see all the sights.

• 3:29:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:06David Sims?

  Meet all the people.

• 3:29:07Griffin Newman?

  The answer David wants to learn.

• 3:29:08David Sims?

  I love New York.

• 3:29:10Griffin Newman?

  The best routes, the best times of day.

• 3:29:11David Sims?

  Exactly.

• 3:29:12Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:12David Sims?

  I'd crush being Travis Bickle.

• 3:29:14Griffin Newman?

  Uh, I mean, I'm a cinephile, obviously. Uh, my favorite date activity.

• 3:29:18David Sims?

  You love to go to the movies.

• 3:29:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Uh, I get frustrated if the concessions selection is limited.

• 3:29:23David Sims?

  I do not identify with Travis Bickle's view of the world, really in any way. I struggle to really identify with, uh, the other people is the problem. You know what I mean? Like that, that sort of fundamental thing of like.

• 3:29:32Speaker 02

  So what do you, because there has to be some level of indicate identification for you to like this movie, I think.

• 3:29:39Griffin Newman?

  I, I feel like I, I, I can jump in here if you want to think about this a little more. I think I'm very prone into falling into, we live in a society frustration of people who are breaking the social contract, right? Which I think is different than what he's doing. But I think there is some relatable element of even if his ire is very often completely misplaced or kind of unfounded in anything real and tangible, that frustration of hell is other people when it feels like you can't find your way through the thing. I also think in my worst moments, I flirt with the kind of loneliness as a choice sort of thing of, and it's especially when there are things like I have a fucking head cold and I'm in a period of prolonged self-isolation.

• 3:30:21Griffin Newman?

  Or, you know, you know, as an actor, you work, you shoot a thing, you go to another place. You're overstimulated for three days and then you have five days off and you're in a foreign land or a foreign city and you're sort of like, who the fuck am I? I don't understand anything and it's easy to sort of slide into that. It never, I'm just not like a violent person. That's not how my brain ideates, but I, I do connect to that sort of part of it. Of like, if you don't catch yourself, you'll start to get into this like, do I not understand anyone? Does no one understand me? Kind of self pity cycle.

• 3:30:58David Sims?

  Um, yeah, I really think the way I identify with him is just like.

• 3:31:02Griffin Newman?

  Okay. So David chose.

• 3:31:03David Sims?

  New York, New York.

• 3:31:04Griffin Newman?

  You just like New York.

• 3:31:05David Sims?

  Activating a person in interesting ways. I, I really think that's what speaks about this. It's, it's interesting that you're challenging me because I, I was obsessed with this movie when I was a teenager and it certainly was not because it was really speaking to me. I don't know.

• 3:31:21Griffin Newman?

  Speaking to you as like a.

• 3:31:23David Sims?

  There's something romantic to me about being outside of the world and in it at the same time.

• 3:31:28Griffin Newman?

  Here we go.

• 3:31:29David Sims?

  Which I think New York is the greatest city for. Like I feel this way about hotels.

• 3:31:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:34David Sims?

  Where it's like, you can be in a giant hotel amongst all these people and no one talks to you, no one knows who you are. And there's something kind of titillating about that or like, you know, whatever, just sort of like stealthily interesting, right? And New York is the best place for that. You can walk around among all the people like, and no one, you know, if you don't want to, no one will talk to you and no one will try and help you out. If, if that's how you want to exist in the world, something kind of exciting about that to me. Does that make sense?

• 3:32:00Speaker 03

  No, totally. Yeah. I love that, that, that feeling of being anonymous.

• 3:32:05David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:05Speaker 03

  Just observing the world and not feeling, feeling outside of your body.

• 3:32:10David Sims?

  And I hate Harvey Keitel.

• 3:32:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Well, yes.

• 3:32:12David Sims?

  Right. That's how I identify. I just wanna, I just wanna shoot that guy.

• 3:32:16Speaker 03

  God, the look.

• 3:32:17David Sims?

  That look. The look, I have a couple of notes.

• 3:32:20Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:20David Sims?

  I don't know. He's not pulling it off.

• 3:32:23Griffin Newman?

  My notes are go further. Is that the answer for you? I think you, similar to me, get frustrated by people not behaving properly in a like, you are not showing respect.

• 3:32:34David Sims?

  You don't like rudeness, that's true. Yes, that does trigger me, and I think it does for a lot of people, but I think though, what I lock into is, as an only child and someone who's always been a self-described loner, I think that this movie really captures what can happen to a person when they get so isolated and are not socializing and how scary it can be and what can happen, how extreme it can get.

• 3:33:05Speaker 02

  I think I identify with just the worst, most base impulses of him. I think I do identify with his solipsism and his loneliness and his self-aggrandizement and his hatred for other people and his self-hatred for himself. I identify with all of it. I mean, I hope I'm healthier now than I used to be. I hope we're all, you know, getting better out there. But I think that's part of it.

• 3:33:35David Sims?

  I mean, take a look at America.

• 3:33:37Speaker 02

  I think that's part of the.

• 3:33:38Griffin Newman?

  David's giving a thumbs up and saluting our president, Red Hulk, of course.

• 3:33:41Speaker 02

  I think it's part of the real genius of the movie and of the screenplay is that there's something very honest and self-appraising about the look at some of our baser instincts activated by loneliness and.

• 3:33:59Griffin Newman?

  Okay, so here's a take. You've just activated in me. I feel like people talk a lot about Curb Your Enthusiasm and how Larry David is this avatar for like, I wish I could just say that shit. I wish every time something fucking annoying happens or there was something, why is it this way? I could just be the asshole. And of course, no one wants to actually be that guy. And Larry David also talks about how he's not that fucking guy. He doesn't actually behave that way in the world. That's why he writes it. Is that the comedic version of what Taxi Driver is expressing kind of dramatically?

• 3:34:38Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I think Travis would be so much healthier if he were able to.

• 3:34:42Griffin Newman?

  If he were funny in any way.

• 3:34:43Speaker 02

  If he were able to express himself to other people. He doesn't have the power of expression. He hasn't been given any tools. He hasn't been exposed to movies to know that porn is bad. He doesn't know who Kris Kristofferson is. He doesn't know what moonlighting means. He doesn't have friends or family. He can't even talk to the other cab drivers. He's just, he's, I don't know if he's been robbed of all of that stuff, but he's certainly never been given it.

• 3:35:14Griffin Newman?

  Yes, and I think my therapist said a thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently, that is, just very simply, depression makes a very strong case for itself. And that sort of fear of, had I not been raised properly, could I have ended up like this guy? Given the wrong circumstances and events, do I end up here? He's the worst version of what we all feel we could potentially become if everything went wrong. That's what you're relating to is the fear of, how far am I from this guy? I want to believe it's as far as possible.

• 3:35:48Speaker 02

  Right? Even the title Taxi Driver is just.

• 3:35:50Griffin Newman?

  Some fucking guy picks you up in a cab.

• 3:35:51Speaker 02

  Just a fucking guy. Just a fucking guy with a fucking job.

• 3:35:54Griffin Newman?

  You hail him down.

• 3:35:57David Sims?

  This film came out February 8th, 1976. Sort of crazy to consider that it came out, you know, that early in the year.

• 3:36:03Griffin Newman?

  Right, so it wins the Palme d'Or after it's.

• 3:36:05David Sims?

  But that's much more.

• 3:36:06Griffin Newman?

  No, yeah.

• 3:36:07David Sims?

  Number one at the box office is the best picture of 1975, according to the Oscars. Or are we playing the game? We're playing the box office game. Bringing it in, baby.

• 3:36:16Griffin Newman?

  So 1970 is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

• 3:36:18David Sims?

  That's right.

• 3:36:19Griffin Newman?

  There we go.

• 3:36:20David Sims?

  Which is number one for just weeks on it, like many more weeks after. Nice. Dominates the box office for a very long time. Good movie. Number two at the box office, Griffin, is a film that we have discussed because one of its stars, right, one of its stars wins an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1975, and he's in a Martin Brest movie that we discussed and liked.

• 3:36:43Griffin Newman?

  Oh, it's the Sunshine Boys?

• 3:36:46David Sims?

  Herbert Ross is the Sunshine Boys, Walter Matthau and George Burns. Saw both those in the theater. George Burns, of course, we're just fascinated by, you know, like his whole, like, became a movie star again in his 70s and 80s, you know, and had this run.

• 3:37:00Griffin Newman?

  Going in style.

• 3:37:01David Sims?

  Have you seen the Brest movie Going in Style? Oh, yeah. Great movie.

• 3:37:06Griffin Newman?

  Lovely movie.

• 3:37:07David Sims?

  Better Lee Strasberg performance there than in Godfather Part Two. I would agree. That's a very, very, very good performance.

• 3:37:12Griffin Newman?

  That is a movie that does not even have a Blu-ray release, not even a Warner Archive.

• 3:37:16David Sims?

  Outrageous. How did I watch it? Martin Brest directed. His first film.

• 3:37:20Griffin Newman?

  That's what's crazy. He directed that movie when he was like.

• 3:37:22David Sims?

  I thought it was Tony Bill.

• 3:37:23Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 3:37:24David Sims?

  No. Tony Bill's dead in a ditch. No, I don't know.

• 3:37:27Griffin Newman?

  There's some similar film Tony Bill did that I'm gonna get to the bottom of.

• 3:37:30David Sims?

  But Sunshine Boys I've never actually seen. Have you seen, do you have a take on the Sunshine Boys? I mean, you saw it, you said, I don't know. Oh, very funny. I mean, Neil Simon, write jokes, Matthau's very funny. Number three at the box office is one of the great movies of 1975. One of your favorite movies ever, I'm sure, Griffin, your favorite director.

• 3:37:50Griffin Newman?

  It's not Nashville.

• 3:37:51David Sims?

  Not Nashville.

• 3:37:52Griffin Newman?

  Because Nashville didn't do that well.

• 3:37:54David Sims?

  Nashville was not really a box office contender. It is one of the great movies of 1975 from one of Griffin's favorite directors. It's not Jaws.

• 3:38:01Griffin Newman?

  And it's not a Lumet.

• 3:38:02David Sims?

  No, it is a Lumet.

• 3:38:03Griffin Newman?

  It is a Lumet.

• 3:38:04David Sims?

  Yes.

• 3:38:05Griffin Newman?

  It's not network, because that's 76.

• 3:38:07David Sims?

  Oh, it's Dog Day Afternoon.

• 3:38:08Griffin Newman?

  One of the greatest movies ever made.

• 3:38:09David Sims?

  Exactly. Probably, is it Lumet's best movie?

• 3:38:14Speaker 02

  I'm gonna say yes.

• 3:38:15Griffin Newman?

  He made The Wiz.

• 3:38:17David Sims?

  Yeah, that's so true.

• 3:38:18Griffin Newman?

  I love The Wiz so much, Tracy.

• 3:38:21David Sims?

  Number four at the box office, okay, let's get weird here, is a film, I just have to double check what I know about this.

• 3:38:29Griffin Newman?

  I just want to call out that Marie is waiting on the other side of the door.

• 3:38:32David Sims?

  Should we bring her in?

• 3:38:33Griffin Newman?

  She's now texting her top five guesses.

• 3:38:34David Sims?

  Bring her in!

• 3:38:35Griffin Newman?

  She's listening, yeah.

• 3:38:36David Sims?

  Oh, Marie, are we gonna? You're gonna have it out. Are we gonna throw down? We're gonna have it out? Here she comes, Marie Barti! Hi, Marie. Look at her! Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Oh my God, she's got so many bags of gifts.

• 3:38:50Speaker 05

  I have so many bags. I have a bag full of toys for you.

• 3:38:52David Sims?

  I know. She's got a bag full of toys for my kids. I'm very excited about it.

• 3:38:55Griffin Newman?

  You were correct. It was Dog Day. You got Dog Day right.

• 3:38:58David Sims?

  The fourth film is an erotic film, based on an erotic novel that is. Emmanuel. Not Emmanuel. It is a, I want to say, it's sort of French and German. The Story of Oh. Correct. And what's the name of the director? My favorite name of a director of erotic film. Just Jacqueline. Just Jacqueline, AKA Just Jackin'.

• 3:39:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, Just Jackin'.

• 3:39:19David Sims?

  Never seen. Never seen The Story of Oh? No. Worth seeing.

• 3:39:24Griffin Newman?

  And Tracy just gave two very meaningful points to David.

• 3:39:27David Sims?

  Gave it kind of like a Brian Windhorst, like, point to the sky.

• 3:39:30Griffin Newman?

  Worth seeing.

• 3:39:32David Sims?

  It's a classic example, right, of these kind of like soft-core-ish, you know, arty, sexy movies making box office, you know, noise. Corinne Clary was great. You know, she would become a Bond girl. Yeah, she's in Moonraker. Yeah, and she was, she's also in a very good Jalloh called Hitchhike with Franco Nero. Very good Jalloh. Sounds good. I had on The Devil's Honey recently, because I'm trying to watch every 86 movie, which is a movie that begins with someone playing a saxophone between a woman's legs and my wife.

• 3:40:03Speaker 05

  I own that on Blu-ray.

• 3:40:04David Sims?

  Yeah, we both have the blue. Terrible transfer. I have it too. And my wife was like, what the fuck is this? And I was like, I don't really have an explanation for you here. Number five at the box office is, okay, I don't know this movie, I'm gonna look it up. Odd title. Okay, it is a, it's a war movie?

• 3:40:22Griffin Newman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:40:23David Sims?

  Oh, is it war? No. No, no, no, sorry. It's sort of, no, it's like a mountain man movie, like a trapper movie. Is it The Mountain Men? No.

• 3:40:32Griffin Newman?

  It's not Grizzly Adams.

• 3:40:33David Sims?

  No.

• 3:40:34Griffin Newman?

  Is it kind of Grizzly Adams runoff?

• 3:40:35David Sims?

  Jeremiah Johnson. It's not that. These are all better movies, I feel.

• 3:40:39Griffin Newman?

  Does it have a known actor in it?

• 3:40:40David Sims?

  Is it Charlton Heston? No, the actor is Mike Mazursky, who's this sort of a famous, kind of like, tough guy. He was like a big, brawny guy who played a lot of heavies. Yeah, I don't know this movie.

• 3:40:52Griffin Newman?

  Is this a studio picture?

• 3:40:53David Sims?

  It is from the great people at Pacific International Enterprises, so no.

• 3:40:58Griffin Newman?

  I love their work.

• 3:40:59David Sims?

  It is directed by Tay Garnett, and it's about a trapper who gets lost.

• 3:41:05Griffin Newman?

  It's not Trapper John.

• 3:41:06David Sims?

  No, the film is called Challenge to be Free. I do not know that. Although it also had the subtitle, or another title, Mad Trapper of the Yukon.

• 3:41:15Griffin Newman?

  Well, that's a better title.

• 3:41:17David Sims?

  And it's about the Mounties are trying to get a trapper. I think Tay Garnett was like, classic Hollywood director, maybe playing out the end of the string. I might be making that up. No, I think you're right. He died three years later, but he, like, he directed the Delana Turner Postman Noize Rings twice. He did the Clark Gable movie China Seas, like, you know, he was, yeah. China Seas? I mean, that's in the 30s. He died a couple years. We've also got, okay, Blackbeard's Ghosts. What is that again? That's Peter Ustinov as Blackbeard. It's a Disney movie. Is that a?

• 3:41:49Griffin Newman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:41:50David Sims?

  Is that fun? Is that good?

• 3:41:51Griffin Newman?

  That's sort of them trying to do.

• 3:41:52David Sims?

  Robert Stevenson, you know, the, you know.

• 3:41:54Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 3:41:55David Sims?

  I saw that thing. Sure, there you go. I did not say, I haven't seen the Trapper movie. That's the. Now you're intrigued.

• 3:42:01Griffin Newman?

  It's stuck in your craw.

• 3:42:02David Sims?

  Challenge to be free. Number seven is the John Huston epic, The Man Who Would Be King, which I feel like was.

• 3:42:20David Sims?

  A little bit of a bomb, like, or, right, sort of an under performer.

• 3:42:24Speaker 02

  Compared to its box office, it's just a little of another time.

• 3:42:29David Sims?

  Sean Connery, Michael Caine, who both were like, we had a great time, but I think, yeah, kind of a relic. And then you've got-

• 3:42:35Speaker 02

  Rudyard Kipling, I think, right?

• 3:42:36David Sims?

  Yes.

• 3:42:36Speaker 02

  Based on Rudyard Kipling.

• 3:42:37David Sims?

  That's correct. Another guy who's, he's a little out of fashion these days. Uh, number eight is the Canadian drama Lies My Father Told Me, uh, which is like a sort of a domestic drama about an Orthodox Jewish boy in like twenties Montreal.

• 3:42:53Griffin Newman?

  I mean, this is speaking to the Slim Pickens in nineteen seventy six draft slate.

• 3:42:57David Sims?

  I, yeah, so the director is Jen Kadar, not, not a director I really-

• 3:43:01Speaker 02

  Who's the lead?

• 3:43:02David Sims?

  Of course, it's Jeffrey Linus.

• 3:43:05Griffin Newman?

  Oh, of course.

• 3:43:06David Sims?

  I know. I don't know the movie, although the title is actually about, like, I feel like I've heard that in Lies My Father. Number nine of the box office is the great film, really a great film, uh, but it's from seventy five, uh, Hester Street, the Joe McLeod Silver movie, which is so fucking good.

• 3:43:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:23David Sims?

  That's a great New York movie.

• 3:43:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:25David Sims?

  And then the number ten is a Gene Hackman movie I don't really know called Lucky Lady, the, the Stanley Donan-

• 3:43:31Speaker 02

  Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli.

• 3:43:33David Sims?

  Liza. It's like a prohibition, yeah. It's like a prohibition kind of like rump, right?

• 3:43:40Griffin Newman?

  Like-

• 3:43:40David Sims?

  Yeah. They're all in costumes.

• 3:43:42Speaker 02

  It stinks on ice.

• 3:43:47David Sims?

  Is there a blue in that one?

• 3:43:49Griffin Newman?

  I think so.

• 3:43:50David Sims?

  Oh, there's a Shout DVD I'm seeing here.

• 3:43:53Griffin Newman?

  That's actually rude.

• 3:43:54Speaker 02

  Who directed that?

• 3:43:55David Sims?

  Uh, directed-

• 3:43:56Speaker 02

  Like Mark Riedel or-

• 3:43:56David Sims?

  Directed by Stanley Donan, also, you know, kind of in his dotage.

• 3:44:01Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:02David Sims?

  It's his second to last movie, I think.

• 3:44:04Griffin Newman?

  I think Ben unfortunately has some news to report.

• 3:44:06Speaker 02

  I do have some news.

• 3:44:07David Sims?

  Uh-oh.

• 3:44:08Speaker 02

  This, uh, has now crossed the threshold.

• 3:44:11David Sims?

  Oh, boy.

• 3:44:11Speaker 02

  It is, in fact, our longest episode of all time.

• 3:44:14David Sims?

  But we only, we've only-

• 3:44:16Griffin Newman?

  You're not thinking about ads, baby. You're not thinking about ads.

• 3:44:18Speaker 02

  Wesley's episode.

• 3:44:19David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:20Speaker 02

  And even though we recorded for four hours-

• 3:44:23David Sims?

  Oh, we actually cut some stuff out.

• 3:44:24Speaker 02

  Cut sort of together.

• 3:44:26David Sims?

  Right.

• 3:44:27Speaker 02

  It was three hours, forty-seven minutes.

• 3:44:29David Sims?

  Right. Where this had no tangents we were all moving is, is going out, uncut.

• 3:44:34Speaker 02

  Yes, no.

• 3:44:35David Sims?

  Now, Marie, you wanna pick a fight with Tracy?

• 3:44:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm about to say, we can go on for longer, cause I have a lot of things I wanna say to you, sir.

• 3:44:41David Sims?

  Let's hear it, Marie. This is Marie Barty, the wonderful Marie Barty.

• 3:44:43Speaker 05

  Hi. Uh, for people who are maybe listening to this podcast for the first time-

• 3:44:49Speaker 02

  And who have made it to hour four.

• 3:44:51David Sims?

  I'm just gonna throw on the Manchester City game, just don't mind me.

• 3:44:55Speaker 05

  When Tracy was last on the podcast to talk about the year of living dangerously, uh-

• 3:45:01Speaker 02

  Great Up?

• 3:45:01Speaker 05

  Great Up. He did mention, or, or ask, who was that other person, the woman, who wasn't paying attention in, uh, House of Dynamite? She must have been looking at her phone. She doesn't watch movies.

• 3:45:18David Sims?

  Right. There was a detail she doesn't watch movies.

• 3:45:20Speaker 05

  She doesn't know how to watch movies.

• 3:45:21Speaker 02

  I said she doesn't know how to watch a movie.

• 3:45:23Speaker 05

  Well, Mr. Let's, I, I mean, I could be, correct me if I'm, if I'm wrong here, guys, but I think I'm the only person in this room right now who has a degree-

• 3:45:31David Sims?

  Hmm.

• 3:45:32Speaker 05

  In watching movies.

• 3:45:33David Sims?

  That's true. I do not. I have a degree in reading books and fat lot of good it did me.

• 3:45:36Speaker 05

  I almost had my mother ship me my diploma with honors to show to you that I graduated from NYU's School of Cinemas.

• 3:45:45David Sims?

  New York University.

• 3:45:47Speaker 05

  Yes, uh, but I never take my phone out at the theater unless it's, uh, what was that movie called I didn't like? Skin in a Rink?

• 3:45:53David Sims?

  Skin in a Rink, which seemed to terrify you so much, you actually needed a distraction.

• 3:45:56Speaker 05

  I had my head in my, um, my sweater and my jacket and I was texting people to be less scared, but, um-

• 3:46:03David Sims?

  Excited for his new movie this year.

• 3:46:04Speaker 02

  You were looking away.

• 3:46:05Speaker 05

  I was, not on the phone.

• 3:46:07David Sims?

  You're saying you were kind of zoning out.

• 3:46:08Speaker 05

  I was zoning out. There was a man in front of me who was vaping and it was very distracting.

• 3:46:14Griffin Newman?

  You saw it at the Nighthawk, did you not?

• 3:46:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:46:18David Sims?

  I saw it at the Angelica.

• 3:46:19Griffin Newman?

  A dine-in theater?

• 3:46:20David Sims?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:46:21Griffin Newman?

  That does have more stimuli.

• 3:46:23David Sims?

  There's more distraction there.

• 3:46:24Speaker 02

  And listen, I've been trying to quit cigarettes and sometimes I get an urge.

• 3:46:30David Sims?

  Sometimes you're, you're considering nuclear war and you're like, I gotta hit that pen.

• 3:46:34Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:46:35David Sims?

  Um, yeah.

• 3:46:36Griffin Newman?

  Marie might have just been briefly considering whether or not to order the nachos. She might have been watching someone else get nachos delivered to them.

• 3:46:43David Sims?

  Imagine eating-

• 3:46:44Griffin Newman?

  Smoke might have been blurring the screen.

• 3:46:46David Sims?

  Imagine eating chicken tenders while you're watching a nuclear war film.

• 3:46:50Speaker 05

  You know, I'm actually trying to remember what I ordered, because I do always order a full meal when I go to the Nighthawk.

• 3:46:55Speaker 02

  All right, here's what I'm gonna do.

• 3:46:57Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:46:58Speaker 02

  I'm gonna offer an apology.

• 3:46:59Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 3:47:01Speaker 02

  I apologize to you for saying that you don't know how to watch a film. Clearly, you do know how to watch a film.

• 3:47:07Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 3:47:07David Sims?

  Marie loves movies.

• 3:47:08Speaker 02

  Kindly suggest that you give House of Dynamite an uninterrupted spin.

• 3:47:14David Sims?

  An olive branch right now, and now you have to watch House of Dynamite again.

• 3:47:18Speaker 05

  You know, I, I might do that. I might take you up on that.

• 3:47:21Speaker 02

  I think you'll like it better on a second pass.

• 3:47:22Speaker 05

  Uh, actually, probably.

• 3:47:25David Sims?

  Do you think it got a bad rap? Cause I'm also not very positive about that movie on that episode and you, you gave me a pass.

• 3:47:31Speaker 05

  We all love you in it.

• 3:47:34David Sims?

  Talk about-

• 3:47:34Speaker 02

  Do I think it got a bad rap?

• 3:47:36David Sims?

  Uh, yeah, sure. It got kind of a, you know, you know.

• 3:47:38Speaker 02

  I think it got a bad rap.

• 3:47:39David Sims?

  Kind of, it got kind of ignored or whatever.

• 3:47:41Speaker 02

  I, I don't think Netflix, uh, I don't think a streaming experience was the right way for that.

• 3:47:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:47:48Speaker 02

  I know, but I just don't-

• 3:47:49David Sims?

  A problem.

• 3:47:50Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't think, uh, so, and I do say that the, the sort of film Twitter, the film, the guys on film,

• 3:47:58David Sims?

  Yeah, those guys.

• 3:47:59Speaker 02

  Letterboxd guys.

• 3:48:00David Sims?

  Where are them?

• 3:48:00Speaker 02

  There's a kind of, uh, conformity of opinion that happens on those things that, uh, I find a little, uh-

• 3:48:07David Sims?

  This is undeniable.

• 3:48:07Speaker 02

  Suspect.

• 3:48:08David Sims?

  Sort of a Travis Bickle kind of-esque type of character.

• 3:48:12Speaker 02

  Listen, you screwheads, you fuckers.

• 3:48:18David Sims?

  We did it. We did it. I think we're done on talking about Taxi Driver, but it has been such a delay having you on, Tracy, truly, truly.

• 3:48:24Speaker 02

  Always a pleasure. Thank you, guys. Uh, Dracula, we have a Dracula date.

• 3:48:29David Sims?

  All right, you come on, you come on back for, for Christopher Lee specifically, not Legosi?

• 3:48:33Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 3:48:34David Sims?

  You want Legosi, go screw.

• 3:48:35Speaker 02

  Christopher Lee's my Dracula.

• 3:48:37Griffin Newman?

  We do also sadly need to grant you the award for longest episode record ever.

• 3:48:41David Sims?

  Wow, where'd you get that?

• 3:48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, wait, what is that? That's an Academy Award, is what that is.

• 3:48:46David Sims?

  No, but I'm saying more, what is that, just?

• 3:48:48Griffin Newman?

  Uh, Frish bought it for Critical Darling, so I need to buy a new one now?

• 3:48:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely not taking this with me.

• 3:48:53Griffin Newman?

  Okay, great, then. Frish gets it back.

• 3:48:55Speaker 02

  Like some random garbage that he just had lying around.

• 3:48:58Griffin Newman?

  It's a Frish prop!

• 3:48:59David Sims?

  Last, last time we gave a bunch of garbage, let's not forget our discs.

• 3:49:02Griffin Newman?

  That's true.

• 3:49:03David Sims?

  So, giving Tracy garbage is a-

• 3:49:07Griffin Newman?

  Tracy, anything you wanna plug?

• 3:49:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:49:08Griffin Newman?

  Radiant subscription?

• 3:49:09David Sims?

  My favorite thing is that you're just, like, absolutely not. You have films in production, you have creative work.

• 3:49:15Griffin Newman?

  Hi, Mom on 4K.

• 3:49:17David Sims?

  Sure.

• 3:49:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, thanks, guys.

• 3:49:19David Sims?

  Yes, thank you so much, uh, and come back soon, yeah, for Dracula, I guess, that'll be a move.

• 3:49:24Griffin Newman?

  I guess we'll talk to you very soon in News and Deals. Hopefully you don't get scared off by the Bickle-esque behavior.

• 3:49:31Speaker 02

  Can't wait.

• 3:49:31Griffin Newman?

  Of six men stirring each other up. Yup.

• 3:49:33David Sims?

  He wants in on the chat.

• 3:49:34Griffin Newman?

  He has asked for it.

• 3:49:35David Sims?

  He wants in.

• 3:49:36Griffin Newman?

  Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe, uh, over on our Patreon right now.

• 3:49:43David Sims?

  No idea.

• 3:49:43Griffin Newman?

  We are doing Resident Evil.

• 3:49:46David Sims?

  Oh, that's right, we are.

• 3:49:47Griffin Newman?

  But we will then, after that, be going on to the, uh, the Dracula pictures.

• 3:49:51David Sims?

  Yeah, and next on the main feed is New York, New York.

• 3:49:54Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 3:49:54David Sims?

  Yeah, with, uh, yeah, well, we'll see, we'll see.

• 3:49:57Griffin Newman?

  Let's say it, then we can cut it if we need to.

• 3:49:58David Sims?

  Lin-Manuel Miranda, unless he's busy, yes.

• 3:50:01Griffin Newman?

  Uh, and as always, uh, I texted our buddy Matt Singer, who wrote an article for Screen Rant about this matter. Singer, settle a bet happening in record presently. Do we think Paulie fucks the robot? And Matt Singer said, I kinda think it's the other way around. The robot fucks him.

• 3:50:25Griffin Newman?

  Obviously going at the end of the episode.

• 3:50:26Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't start rolling tape, I'm sorry.

• 3:50:28Griffin Newman?

  What the fuck are you doing?

• 3:50:30Speaker 02

  Dude, I don't know.

• 3:50:31Griffin Newman?

  Relax, I'm joking, I'm joking, I'm joking.

• 3:50:34Speaker 02

  All right, we'll, we'll catch up, listeners.

• 3:50:36Griffin Newman?

  I thought you were doing, I thought you were doing that on purpose for Mike.

• 3:50:40Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, I wasn't doing, I was legitimately pitching the idea first to make sure you were comfortable.

• 3:50:46Griffin Newman?

  The problem is-

• 3:50:46Speaker 02

  For the listeners, because we're putting this at the end of the episode, I didn't start rolling tape.

• 3:50:50Griffin Newman?

  I'm not actually angry at you. I'm sorry. I thought we were recording.

• 3:50:53Speaker 02

  The idea that he would open with the famous fucking quote, cause there's a mirror in our office space that is, he could just turn and look right into it.

• 3:51:02David Sims?

  You're basically asking Griffin to imitate, I think, the most widely cited piece of acting of all time.

• 3:51:08Griffin Newman?

  That's problem one. That's problem one, okay?

• 3:51:09David Sims?

  You know what I mean?

• 3:51:10Griffin Newman?

  So I was standing in my mirror.

• 3:51:11Speaker 02

  No pressure.

• 3:51:12Griffin Newman?

  I was practicing it. First of all, I was like, how do I get the voice right without being the fucking guy who does the shitty De Niro impression? Especially because this performance is different than the way he's usually impersonated, right?

• 3:51:23David Sims?

  He's so good.

• 3:51:23Griffin Newman?

  And I feel like a lot of people erroneously do a Travis Bickle impression like it's Meet the Fockers era De Niro. It's morphed. Right, you're talking to me. And then I'm like, it's impossible to do without starting to do the face shit, so then you look silly, right? Cause then you're doing a bad physical impression and a bad vocal impression at the same time. And then the third problem is, I was just looking at the text.

• 3:51:47David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:47Griffin Newman?

  And I was like, in actuality, it would just be me saying seventeen times, you podcasting to me, which does not flow very well. The syllable thing is chunky.

• 3:51:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:51:59Griffin Newman?

  And I didn't wanna do podding. I'm just telling, this is behind the scenes.

• 3:52:03Speaker 02

  It, it makes sense.

• 3:52:04Griffin Newman?

  So this is what I'm gonna do instead.

• 3:52:05Speaker 02

  Great, and we should now start the episode.

• 3:52:08Griffin Newman?

  Right, but this, what you're hearing right now is actually the end of the episode.

• 3:52:10Speaker 02

  This is all just like nonsense, we'll put it the end of the episode, Tracy.

• 3:52:13Griffin Newman?

  So now we're gonna start the episode.

• 3:52:14Speaker 02

  But before you start the episode-

• 3:52:16Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 3:52:17Speaker 02

  Is it a little warm in here?

• 3:52:18Griffin Newman?

  It's a little warm in here.

• 3:52:19Speaker 02

  I've got the air, I got the air running. I came in early.

• 3:52:22David Sims?

  I've said, I've said all I need to say.

• 3:52:24Griffin Newman?

  Um, it, it ebbs and flows.

• 3:52:26Speaker 02

  Like, listen, there's gonna be hot takes, I, we'll do what we can.

• 3:52:29Griffin Newman?

  The room might get a little steamy because of the takes.

• 3:52:31David Sims?

  Yes, we do our best to keep it cool in here, but, you know.

• 3:52:33Griffin Newman?

  I got a hot take. Here's one. Taxi Driver Mid? I'm joking. Maybe the best movie ever made. Okay, this is the end of the episode. Bye.

• 3:52:43Speaker 03

  Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hostly. Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas, and our associate producer is AJ McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by JJ 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.

• 3:53:28Speaker 03

  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.