The Cars That Ate Paris

Bonjour! Erm...we mean... G'day mates! Our Peter Weir series PODNIC AT HANGING CAST kicks off with Weir's 1974 feature debut The Cars That Ate Paris, a film about the guy who plays Napoleon in the Bill & Ted movies getting stranded in a quirky and murderous Australian town. We're getting into the origins of the Australian New Wave, the various "calling card" projects that Weir made in the beginning of his career, and this film's spiky car which Ben has a lot of affection for, obviously. Check out the Steve Martin Cold Open - Saturday Night Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXBPW0_B5I0&t=239s Listen to Griff on Comedy Bang! Bang! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-thanator-around-your-neck-anna-konkle-griffin/id316045799?i=1000745707375 Check out Dirty Laundry on Dropout https://youtu.be/HHoGMR_qNpI?si=7qAUS42-TtHOYBct Sign up for Check Book https://blankcheckpod.substack.com/welcome, the Blank Check newsletter featuring even more “real nerdy shit” to feed your pop culture obsession. Dossier excerpts, film biz AND burger reports, and even more exclusive content you won’t want to miss out on. Join our Patreon for franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. http://www.patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter https://x.com/blankcheckpod?lang=en, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/blankcheckpod/?hl=en, Threads https://www.threads.net/@blankcheckpod?xmt=AQGzctAh4mbWTwYzCV1pzNT6AMV9o99EOfymi8TLR5mTde0 and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/blankcheckpodcast/! Buy some real nerdy merch https://kinshipgoods.com/blankcheck Connect with other Blankies on our Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/s/gpcOkQr8Sv or Discord https://discord.gg/Q6YGSR3JrA For anything else, check out BlankCheckPod.com https://www.blankcheckpod.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:02Griffin Newman?

  David.

• 0:03David Sims?

  Yep.

• 0:03Griffin Newman?

  We did a live show.

• 0:04David Sims?

  Yeah, remember?

• 0:05Griffin Newman?

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

• 0:12David Sims?

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

• 0:15Griffin Newman?

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

• 0:18David Sims?

  Yeah, hey.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Hey, everyone, or should I say, oh?

• 0:20David Sims?

  Oh.

• 0:22Griffin Newman?

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

• 0:31Speaker 03

  So just a few more days.

• 0:33David Sims?

  Yes.

• 0:33Speaker 03

  You can get it at dynasty.tv.

• 0:36David Sims?

  Dynasty.tv.

• 0:37Speaker 03

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

• 0:43David Sims?

  Oh, yeah. I was moving things around.

• 0:45Griffin Newman?

  Laptop was on.

• 0:46Speaker 02

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

• 0:48Griffin Newman?

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

• 0:50David Sims?

  I was locked in.

• 0:51Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, very locked in and you were funny.

• 0:53David Sims?

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

• 0:56Griffin Newman?

  Oh, thank you.

• 0:57David Sims?

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

• 1:02Griffin Newman?

  You might see me shine Marie's shoes.

• 1:04David Sims?

  Exactly.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:07Griffin Newman?

  If that gets you off.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10Speaker 03

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

• 1:39Griffin Newman?

  148 people live in the township of Podcast and every one of them is a murderer. Where exactly is Podcast? What kind of people live there? What are they trying to hide? Why do cars mean so much to them? What are these cars? They're the cars that ate Podcast.

• 1:59David Sims?

  So the town's Podcast, but the people are also Podcasts at the end of the day.

• 2:06Griffin Newman?

  What? I mean, what I just said?

• 2:07David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Griffin Newman?

  You're wrong. I, in fact, kept the word people.

• 2:12David Sims?

  No, but you said it's the Cars of the Day podcast. I guess instead of Paris.

• 2:16Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. The only word I was subbing out was Paris.

• 2:18David Sims?

  Good job.

• 2:19Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Damn it. All right.

• 2:20Griffin Newman?

  It was clean as hell.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  I, all right, we, I'm.

• 2:23Griffin Newman?

  Trying to fucking logic police me. My logic's airtight.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  I said this before we started recording. I showed up very late to today's recording session and I.

• 2:32David Sims?

  By check with Griffin, David, and this has been.

• 2:33Griffin Newman?

  That you don't introduce the show.

• 2:35David Sims?

  I just didn't.

• 2:36Griffin Newman?

  What is happening?

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Well, that's what I'm saying. We needed to just provide some context that I was quite late and that I am shaming myself currently at this moment.

• 2:45David Sims?

  Shame.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Shame on me.

• 2:48David Sims?

  God, Steve McQueen must be here.

• 2:51Griffin Newman?

  Shame on you.

• 2:52David Sims?

  He made a film called Shame.

• 2:53Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Oh, wait a second. Knock, knock, knock, ding dong.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Oh no, who could it be?

• 2:59Griffin Newman?

  It's Michael Fassbender's giant flaccid penis and he's here to shame you, Ben.

• 3:04David Sims?

  Fame, shame. Wow, I almost said fame. Uh, this is his penis.

• 3:11Griffin Newman?

  Can I do my?

• 3:11David Sims?

  I was trying to do like, you know, kind of cheap flapping.

• 3:13Griffin Newman?

  Can I do my impression of it?

• 3:14David Sims?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 3:19David Sims?

  These are such outdated jokes. Fassbender dick jokes? Jesus. It's 2026, guys.

• 3:25Griffin Newman?

  This is how we start a new mini series. It's great.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  So yes, we're kicking off a new mini series.

• 3:29Griffin Newman?

  David noted me.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  And I, I'm sorry.

• 3:32David Sims?

  I wasn't noting you.

• 3:32Griffin Newman?

  Tried to cuck me doing the intro.

• 3:35David Sims?

  Oh, boy.

• 3:35Griffin Newman?

  Ben changed himself. We all do impressions of Fassbender's penis. Just the sound.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, what else is there to do an impression?

• 3:45Griffin Newman?

  And this is why we're not going to video.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  This is why. Listen up, venture capital.

• 3:52Griffin Newman?

  I know you all want to see David's impression of the whale poster.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  You do.

• 3:56David Sims?

  And believe me.

• 3:57Griffin Newman?

  Oh, oh, fuck. Can I, can I take a picture fast enough? Fuck, fuck, fuck.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  It's too late.

• 4:03Griffin Newman?

  Fuck.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Did you get it?

• 4:04Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:05Griffin Newman?

  My phone was front facing. Fuck.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Why was your phone front?

• 4:12Griffin Newman?

  I don't know. Ben slept in.

• 4:16David Sims?

  Okay. Well, I want to say a few things, but first I want you to just introduce this podcast right away, Griffin.

• 4:21Griffin Newman?

  Well, that's so kind of you to suggest. You're a dear friend and I'm sure you would never, ever try to run me off the road and take the intro.

• 4:30David Sims?

  Just thanks, just because it's a new, new mini series.

• 4:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, that's why we're starting off strong.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  We're starting off so strong. I'm wearing all of my clothes backwards.

• 4:41Griffin Newman?

  Ben has shoes on his hands and gloves on his feet. He's got, it's, it's quite cold outside, so he's wearing a beanie on his butt. And long johns on his head.

• 4:55Griffin Newman?

  It's quite a sight to see, my friends.

• 4:57David Sims?

  Yeah, my face is coming out of like the little back porthole.

• 5:00Griffin Newman?

  Yep, yep, yep. It's really good. And once again, this is why we're not going to video because it's theater of the mind.

• 5:06David Sims?

  What's the podcast called?

• 5:08Griffin Newman?

  The podcast is called Blank Check with Griffin and David.

• 5:10David Sims?

  Thank you.

• 5:11Griffin Newman?

  It's a very professional podcast. It is rigid. It is formal. It of course is, according to Time Magazine, one of the 100 greatest podcasts of all time. Do you think they'll listen to this and rescind it?

• 5:24David Sims?

  Yeah, take us off. And you know what? We're on a pretty tight ship.

• 5:28Griffin Newman?

  We do.

• 5:28David Sims?

  And I'm not actually certain what a tight ship is.

• 5:32Griffin Newman?

  I'm gonna say, when I look around, I, I say, yep.

• 5:35David Sims?

  Look, I'm gonna push back and let me tell you why.

• 5:37Griffin Newman?

  A ship can both be tight and riddled with holes.

• 5:40David Sims?

  We are doing today.

• 5:41Griffin Newman?

  They're two separate things.

• 5:42David Sims?

  We're recording an episode that was originally, I think, scheduled sometime in like October or November.

• 5:49Griffin Newman?

  The first time it was bumped, it was bumped because I had had my like third dental surgery in 12 months.

• 5:56David Sims?

  Yes, you, you bumped it then.

• 5:57Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 5:58David Sims?

  Then it was scheduled for a couple of days ago. You bumped it again.

• 6:01Griffin Newman?

  Ben and I had just flown back from LA the night before.

• 6:03David Sims?

  You agreed to the scheduling of it when you knew you were traveling.

• 6:07Griffin Newman?

  I'm optimistic. Here's another thing I do. I book travel and I'm like, yeah, I'll take a six A M flight.

• 6:12David Sims?

  I said, this is a bad idea.

• 6:14Griffin Newman?

  You're correct. But I always think that tomorrow is the first day of me being the most high functioning man in the world.

• 6:22David Sims?

  Finally, today, it's time to record this episode. Then Ben's narrowly because he slept in.

• 6:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 6:28David Sims?

  So I really feel like this episode.

• 6:32Griffin Newman?

  No, I wasn't clapping. I was, I was doing the fast bender.

• 6:34David Sims?

  Fender's car.

• 6:35Griffin Newman?

  Oh, God. This has been the episode that felt impossible for a little while.

• 6:39David Sims?

  Yeah, which is dumb because it's like a guest free episode about a rather sort of small, short movie.

• 6:47Griffin Newman?

  But that's why it's also.

• 6:48David Sims?

  Beginning of things.

• 6:49Griffin Newman?

  Easy to just spike it over the net.

• 6:51David Sims?

  In my opinion.

• 6:52Griffin Newman?

  That's next week's problem.

• 6:53David Sims?

  Yeah, well, again, this is a mindset I don't share, but okay. All right. So there's my little shame. That's my shame. Finger's been pointed and wagged.

• 7:02Griffin Newman?

  Well, can I shame you for a second?

• 7:03David Sims?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 7:04Griffin Newman?

  It's time for me to introduce the podcast. It's called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.

• 7:08David Sims?

  Sorry, I'm David.

• 7:09Griffin Newman?

  It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby. We are finally

• 7:26Griffin Newman?

  kicking off our mini series on the great Peter Weir, one of your favorite filmmakers, one of your pet projects.

• 7:33David Sims?

  I would say more a pet project than a favorite filmmaker. Obviously he is a filmmaker I like a lot and he's made a lot of movies I've made. But I've just.

• 7:41Griffin Newman?

  He's made a lot of movies that you have made.

• 7:43David Sims?

  That I've made, that I've liked. But he, I have long just also looked at him as like a perfect blank check, perfect blank check candidate because of the variety of movies he made. Like just the, the kind of the genres.

• 7:55Griffin Newman?

  You love a, an app sampler platter director.

• 7:58David Sims?

  I love a genre hopper.

• 8:00Griffin Newman?

  Your, your boils, your onlies.

• 8:02David Sims?

  I love a poo poo platter.

• 8:03Griffin Newman?

  I feel like those are the ones you love to push. Can I ask you now that Weir is happening, who is your next?

• 8:11David Sims?

  Someone else asked me this question and I couldn't tell them the answer. Someone asked me that. They're like, okay, you got Weir over the line. That's where that was been your, and I was like, fuck, I don't know. I, I, do you, I mean, like.

• 8:22Griffin Newman?

  I feel like I, I have in my head who I thought you would say is it Tony Scott time?

• 8:27David Sims?

  Oh, that would be good.

• 8:29Griffin Newman?

  But he's the opposite of that.

• 8:29David Sims?

  He's the opposite.

• 8:30Griffin Newman?

  He is the opposite of that.

• 8:31David Sims?

  He could not shake his inheritance.

• 8:34Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 8:34David Sims?

  You know, like.

• 8:35Griffin Newman?

  Which I feel like the Griff picks are usually a person who does one distinctive thing so fucking well that I love and can't get from anyone else.

• 8:45David Sims?

  Fucking puppet man.

• 8:46Griffin Newman?

  Excuse me.

• 8:48David Sims?

  Sorry, uh, Jim Henson.

• 8:49Griffin Newman?

  That mini series would be comprised of two puppet men, one of whom eventually put the puppets down.

• 8:55David Sims?

  My

• 8:56Griffin Newman?

  But the ones I've, the ones I've pushed over the line up until now as well are like Lynn Ramsey

• 9:00David Sims?

  And Tim Burton.

• 9:02Griffin Newman?

  Tim Burton, certainly, yes.

• 9:03David Sims?

  Like, okay, so when we did the, you know, we did our March Madness tournament a few years ago, where we each got

• 9:08Griffin Newman?

  Oh, this is a good experience.

• 9:09David Sims?

  Guys, right?

• 9:10Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 9:11David Sims?

  So the guys in my region.

• 9:12Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, let's see how many of them we've gotten.

• 9:14David Sims?

  Done, uh, three of them.

• 9:16Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 9:17David Sims?

  We've done Peter Weir.

• 9:18Griffin Newman?

  It's happening now.

• 9:20David Sims?

  Jane Campion and Danny Boyle, right? Those were three guys on my, my list.

• 9:25Griffin Newman?

  Give me your other five.

• 9:26David Sims?

  Karen Kusama, who, you know, was an eighth seed and she's making another movie, I hear, you know, we could do her someday.

• 9:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, she might be on the bracket this year.

• 9:34David Sims?

  Can't remember. No, because she beat Peter Weir, remember?

• 9:37Griffin Newman?

  Oh, right. Weird. Weird.

• 9:40David Sims?

  The Archers.

• 9:41Griffin Newman?

  And by the way, we're gonna make it weird. Duh, this whole mini series.

• 9:46David Sims?

  The Archers, Powell and Pressburger.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Blank check, weird, duh, again.

• 9:50Griffin Newman?

  Yep. David, you're unhappy right now, but think about how happy you're gonna be when those bumper sticker sales come in.

• 9:58David Sims?

  They better come in

• 10:00Griffin Newman?

  High.

• 10:00David Sims?

  Keep like They better come in really. Are we charging $400 per bumper sticker? What's our plan here?

• 10:07Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Premium.

• 10:10David Sims?

  Do catch, do a catchphrase too many times on podcast. Create bumper sticker, question mark, profit.

• 10:16Griffin Newman?

  Ben and I covered in flop sweat. They're, they're really premium. Look how shiny. We used a hollow sticker.

• 10:22David Sims?

  Powell and Pressburger.

• 10:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 10:24David Sims?

  Would love to do them someday.

• 10:25Griffin Newman?

  That's a shared dream for us.

• 10:25David Sims?

  Yeah, exactly. That's, that's not quite a

• 10:27Griffin Newman?

  That's a meeting in the middle.

• 10:28David Sims?

  Wong Kar Wai, probably the closest answer I have to your question. Steve McQueen. I, I'm kind of disinterested in Steve McQueen right now. I haven't loved the last couple of things he made.

• 10:42David Sims?

  Mike Lee, maybe my true answer, but

• 10:47David Sims?

  Uh, you know, a hefty lift, a big filmography, a guy who, you know, made challenging movies. Big ish film.

• 10:55Griffin Newman?

  My, my big takeaway from Burton is if I'm pushing my guys up a hill, tight series.

• 11:01David Sims?

  Right? Yeah. Burton really asked a lot.

• 11:03Griffin Newman?

  Where I'm like, double up the Keatons, Lynn Ramsey's five. Uh, okay. Wait, is that the rest of you? Did you?

• 11:10David Sims?

  That's it.

• 11:11Griffin Newman?

  Okay. Who?

• 11:12David Sims?

  Who's on yours?

• 11:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Yes, please.

• 11:14David Sims?

  Yes. Very useful question.

• 11:16Griffin Newman?

  And I said, please, like a gentleman.

• 11:18David Sims?

  Thank you. That's a big thing in my house right now. So thank you.

• 11:21Griffin Newman?

  You're, oh, you're teaching the please and thank yous?

• 11:22David Sims?

  Well, we've been trying to teach it for a very long time. It feels like there's been, been some backsliding.

• 11:27Griffin Newman?

  From the boss baby?

• 11:29David Sims?

  Yes, from my daughter. Yes.

• 11:30Griffin Newman?

  Well, to be fair, time is money.

• 11:32David Sims?

  I know, but maybe she doesn't need to, as she's almost five, point at her water bottle and go, empty. Maybe she could say, please, can you get me some water? Something along those lines.

• 11:42Griffin Newman?

  That's kind of funny.

• 11:43David Sims?

  And I go like, what was that? And she goes, it's empty. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, I wasn't asking for meaning. I was asking for maybe a different way of, different tone.

• 11:54Griffin Newman?

  That is how the boss baby would act though. That's some swimming with sharks shit.

• 11:58David Sims?

  Your, your guys, so some, as with, uh, you know, some of your guys we've now done. We've now done Martin Brest.

• 12:06Griffin Newman?

  Ding.

• 12:07David Sims?

  We've now done Lynn Ramsey.

• 12:08Griffin Newman?

  Ding.

• 12:09David Sims?

  And we've now done Buster Keaton.

• 12:10Griffin Newman?

  Ding.

• 12:11David Sims?

  Your remaining guys that you had on your.

• 12:13Griffin Newman?

  It's wild that this is like an even balance of.

• 12:14David Sims?

  It is. Well, this is the job we do, right?

• 12:16Griffin Newman?

  This is the job we do. That people think they pay us for the podcast. No, no. They pay us for the scheduling.

• 12:24David Sims?

  You had Terrence Malick. I think also a bit of a shared one for us.

• 12:28Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 12:28David Sims?

  Would love to do.

• 12:28Griffin Newman?

  And, and one that we've come close to, we've.

• 12:31David Sims?

  We'll do it sometime.

• 12:31Griffin Newman?

  We've thrown them on the spreadsheet.

• 12:33David Sims?

  Where's my Jesus movie, Terry?

• 12:35Griffin Newman?

  That's the real thing.

• 12:36David Sims?

  Where's my Jesus? He's making a Jesus movie? He's been making it for 10 years.

• 12:40Griffin Newman?

  Ben?

• 12:40David Sims?

  It's like.

• 12:41Griffin Newman?

  Oh. Principal photography wrapped February.

• 12:45David Sims?

  February?

• 12:46Griffin Newman?

  February 2020.

• 12:49David Sims?

  Oh shit.

• 12:50Griffin Newman?

  It is the last completed unreleased film shot entirely in the before times.

• 12:55David Sims?

  He's been tinkering away at it ever since.

• 12:58Griffin Newman?

  Cause the guy doesn't really do reshoots. Presumably he has shot no post COVID footage.

• 13:03David Sims?

  No, I think he's just.

• 13:04Griffin Newman?

  He's just in the edit forever.

• 13:05David Sims?

  Finding his rhythms.

• 13:06Griffin Newman?

  But I just love that there's one movie that is still from the before times that we haven't seen.

• 13:13David Sims?

  And so maybe that will be the moment for Terry. We've also got 70's Altman, of course, long a pet product feud. Cassavetes, similar. Joe Dante, who we're always in this liminal thing. I think, again, a guy we both kind of want to do, but we're just like, could he just make another movie?

• 13:28Griffin Newman?

  I transparently hate his.

• 13:31David Sims?

  You don't like.

• 13:31Griffin Newman?

  Last film, and I don't want to end on it.

• 13:33David Sims?

  And then Preston Sturgis, another.

• 13:36Griffin Newman?

  Sure.

• 13:36David Sims?

  Say shared.

• 13:36Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 13:37David Sims?

  A fun, exciting one. Ben, by the way, of your guys, we have only.

• 13:42Griffin Newman?

  Cause Ben won this year.

• 13:43David Sims?

  He did. He won this March Madness with John Carpenter.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  A very, very strong contender.

• 13:47Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  That was my number one seed.

• 13:49Griffin Newman?

  When we put the bracket together, we were immediately like Carpenter probably takes this.

• 13:53David Sims?

  Yep.

• 13:54Griffin Newman?

  Ben's, Ben's winning.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  The other picks, I don't know if they're at the top of the list.

• 13:59David Sims?

  David S. Ward, I feel is never going to happen.

• 14:01Griffin Newman?

  We've ruled him out.

• 14:02David Sims?

  We're kind of doing him piecemeal.

• 14:03Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Right. Do Major League.

• 14:05David Sims?

  Can I? We'll do Major League on Patreon.

• 14:06Griffin Newman?

  Can I see if I can guess the other ones if I can remember correctly?

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 14:10Griffin Newman?

  Okay, so, so David S. Ward, Carpenter, Ernest Dickerson, I remember vividly being in there.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:16David Sims?

  Correct.

• 14:16Griffin Newman?

  Penelope Sphorus?

• 14:17David Sims?

  Yep.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:20Griffin Newman?

  Harmony Koran, I assume?

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 14:21David Sims?

  Harmony Koran.

• 14:22Griffin Newman?

  Spike?

• 14:23David Sims?

  Spike Jones.

• 14:24Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, Spike Jones.

• 14:25David Sims?

  Another guy where I'm kind of like, can he make one more thing like it's, you know?

• 14:28Griffin Newman?

  Yes, it would be.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  That's what it feels like.

• 14:30Griffin Newman?

  It would be nice. At this point, we'd probably have to combine Spike Jones and Charlie Kaufman.

• 14:36David Sims?

  Sure, but that, that's kind of fun.

• 14:37Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it's kind of fun, but Spike's just been working too infrequently.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:42Griffin Newman?

  I, I feel like you dropped Linklater at the last second, or was he on there?

• 14:47David Sims?

  Linklater was not on there.

• 14:49Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, Mike Judge was?

• 14:50David Sims?

  Correct.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 14:51Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 14:52David Sims?

  The other one I do not, did not remember that Ben picked this guy.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  One more.

• 14:56Griffin Newman?

  There's one more.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Now.

• 14:58Griffin Newman?

  Oh, Danny DeVito.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:59David Sims?

  How do you remember that one? I didn't remember that was a Ben guy.

• 15:02Griffin Newman?

  I remember anything Ben has ever done.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Well, there you go. Thanks. I mean, and DeVito, I would say out of the whole bunch feels like the one that would be something we could do eventually as a, like a palate cleanser between.

• 15:16Griffin Newman?

  It's fun.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Mini series.

• 15:17Griffin Newman?

  It's fun.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  It's a nice little like four movie, short little series.

• 15:21Griffin Newman?

  I would love to do it.

• 15:22David Sims?

  As, as.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  As a shorty.

• 15:24Griffin Newman?

  As friend of my life, friend of the show, past and future guest, Sarah Rubin said, Danny DeVito, short series for a short man.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:33David Sims?

  And then there's some good stuff in the guest region. Yeah, we've done any of those.

• 15:38Griffin Newman?

  We've done none of them. Oliver Stone, Jackie Chan, Joe Johnston, Kelly Reichert, uh, Gore Verbinski, of course. That's five. And then the other three would have been, I'm trying to remember who we asked. Yoshida picked, oh wait, did someone pick Wolfgang Peterson?

• 15:58David Sims?

  Richard Lawson did.

• 15:59Griffin Newman?

  Richard Lawson did. Yoshida picked, huh? Tell me, I'm blanking.

• 16:05David Sims?

  Coran, who is a big Yoshida favorite. And then, um, J D Monta picked Jacques Dati.

• 16:11Griffin Newman?

  Of course.

• 16:11David Sims?

  Obviously.

• 16:12Griffin Newman?

  Dumb.

• 16:12David Sims?

  Haven't done any of those.

• 16:13Griffin Newman?

  Dumb for me to not put those together.

• 16:15David Sims?

  No, that's fine.

• 16:16Griffin Newman?

  Peter Weir is finally happening.

• 16:18David Sims?

  Peter Weir is finally happening. And what is the title of this mini series? Griffin.

• 16:23Griffin Newman?

  The title of the mini series is Podnik at Hanging Cast.

• 16:27David Sims?

  That's so true.

• 16:28Griffin Newman?

  That is, of course, his guarantor. But it's a weird case where this is his first film. And yet Podnik, excuse me, Picnic at Hanging Cast, happens kind of like irrelevant of this.

• 16:42David Sims?

  It does. That's true. We will discuss that on this episode. He doesn't-

• 16:45Griffin Newman?

  Higher to begin developing this after, uh, Picnic, when he has finished the script for this movie and is prepping it based off his short film work.

• 16:54David Sims?

  That's right. And we can delve into all of that. But today on Podnik at Hanging Cast, we are of course discussing his first theatrical film.

• 17:01Griffin Newman?

  And, and owner-

• 17:01David Sims?

  The Cars That Ate Paris.

• 17:03Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say owner of one of the best titles in the history of film.

• 17:05David Sims?

  It's a good title. Uh, and it's a more literal title than you'd think with a title like that.

• 17:14Griffin Newman?

  Here is my history with this movie. I'm a movie obsessed teenager. Can you believe it?

• 17:21David Sims?

  We need some, uh, like, you know, fucking ass Woody Allen mu- music over this, right?

• 17:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 17:26David Sims?

  Some like Drew Gershman shit.

• 17:27Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, some ass Woody Allen music. Like a clarinet played via butt.

• 17:32David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 17:35David Sims?

  You know, I'm a child in New York. I love the movies. You know, I can't, I can't do it.

• 17:42Griffin Newman?

  The, the digital set top box takes over for cable.

• 17:46David Sims?

  Okay, sure. Yeah.

• 17:47Griffin Newman?

  So now there's-

• 17:48David Sims?

  Kind of TiVo-esque device is what you're referring to?

• 17:50Griffin Newman?

  Yes. And there's now also the ability to like, uh, scroll through the, uh, the digital-

• 17:57David Sims?

  The guide.

• 17:58Griffin Newman?

  The guide.

• 17:58David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Griffin Newman?

  And so what I do every day when I come home from school is I check out the next week of TCM programming.

• 18:05David Sims?

  Very, very, very good little cinephile.

• 18:07Griffin Newman?

  Thank you. Cause I'm getting activated and I'm like, what's the furthest I can go ahead in the schedule and mark to record anything that feels like a good watch? And I'm going like, oh, Paper Moon, uh, da, da, da, da, da. Oh, this, oh, that, right? And then I'm like, The Cars That Ate Paris.

• 18:26David Sims?

  Num, num, num.

• 18:27Griffin Newman?

  I see that title, I hit record. Family dinner, I go to my parents.

• 18:31David Sims?

  Joe over here.

• 18:32Griffin Newman?

  I, I did hit record, Joseph. I go to my family dinner table and I say to my parents, I just found like the movie with the weirdest title of all time on TCM.

• 18:42David Sims?

  You're not gonna believe it. It's called The Cars That Ate Paris.

• 18:45Griffin Newman?

  I guess they're playing some weird junky like, uh, genre movie. That must be what this is. And my parents-

• 18:53David Sims?

  Sort of true.

• 18:53Griffin Newman?

  But then my parents were like, that's Peter Weir's debut film.

• 18:56David Sims?

  Well, they knew.

• 18:57Griffin Newman?

  And I'm like, Peter Weir, the director of Master and Commander, who at that point I just think of as like, Tony Awards-y.

• 19:04David Sims?

  Sure. You probably knew him for Dead Poets.

• 19:07Griffin Newman?

  Truman Show.

• 19:08David Sims?

  Master and Commander.

• 19:09Griffin Newman?

  I'm like, this is like a sophisticated grown up director who makes like popular films that are smart and literate. And so then I go, oh, the title must be metaphorical.

• 19:21David Sims?

  Right, right, right, right. When you say the cars ate Paris.

• 19:24Griffin Newman?

  Right. This isn't gonna be like a Roger Corman movie. I'll watch it and it will be about like a divorce. And for whatever reason, that's the title. And then I watch it and I'm like, oh, it is, it is actually about a town called Paris. It's not Paris, France. It's a fictional Paris in Australia. Uh, and a town where cars kind of eat up everything.

• 19:46David Sims?

  So you watched this as a teenager, eh?

• 19:48Griffin Newman?

  Correct.

• 19:49David Sims?

  Cause I didn't.

• 19:50Griffin Newman?

  I did.

• 19:50David Sims?

  I'd never seen it until Mad Max Fury Road came out, which has the spiky- Cars and people were like, ah, as you might know, that is an homage to fellow Australian new wave, you know, uh, call, you know, peer, Peter Weir and his first film. And I was like, oh yeah, right. I guess I've heard, you know, and I like, when I was a teen, when I was in college, I famously did a course of New Zealand cinema and I had dug deep into that, but I've never really dug into

• 20:16Griffin Newman?

  Play some Peter Weir ass music.

• 20:18David Sims?

  Well, except he's from Australia.

• 20:20Griffin Newman?

  Say Peter Jackson. I fucked up the whole thing. I should have said ass Peter Jackson music. Also, what does Peter Jackson music sound like? Howard Shore?

• 20:29David Sims?

  You're, you're lost right now and I'm not going to help you.

• 20:34Griffin Newman?

  Go on with your story.

• 20:36David Sims?

  I'm good. Well, I'm going to open the dossier, actually.

• 20:39Griffin Newman?

  I was going to say.

• 20:40David Sims?

  Yeah. Um, but no, so I didn't watch until then. And I, and I think I sort of checked it off then being like, oh, right. I've never seen Peter.

• 20:46Griffin Newman?

  When we cover George Miller, it was a pre JJ era, um, a much lighter, easier era for us.

• 20:51David Sims?

  Right. JJ, our researcher who sucks and hate.

• 20:55Griffin Newman?

  He sucks shit.

• 20:55David Sims?

  He's great. We love him.

• 20:56Griffin Newman?

  He's like the ass Woody Allen music of men.

• 21:01Griffin Newman?

  I was going to say, look, JJ has done the podcast a great service with his research. And when we did George Miller, we didn't have his help.

• 21:07David Sims?

  Right.

• 21:07Griffin Newman?

  He just makes our lives a lot more difficult because we have the added burden of needing to fire him every day.

• 21:12David Sims?

  It's a lot of paperwork.

• 21:13Griffin Newman?

  It's so, people don't understand our HR department is, is like literally on fire, trying to process the firing and rehiring every other day.

• 21:23David Sims?

  Well, it's just a gerbil that Ben has. That's our HR. If we just stuff the papers in there and he just shreds them, which is, you know, great for the gerbil. He's building like a nest, but it's no good for us.

• 21:33Griffin Newman?

  Well, cause then we have to hire an assistant to the gerbil has to tape the papers back together and file them.

• 21:40Griffin Newman?

  In theory, we should, we should fire the gerbil. The gerbil is kind of the bottleneck of the whole process.

• 21:45David Sims?

  We can't fire the gerbil.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  The gerbil's in a union.

• 21:48David Sims?

  Intricate system we've developed.

• 21:50Griffin Newman?

  Friend of his and it's like a whole interpersonal mess. What I was going to say.

• 21:55David Sims?

  JJ, yeah.

• 21:55Griffin Newman?

  It's the kind of context we probably would have had had JJ worked on the show in the George Miller era. But George Miller, like basically fully cites this movie as the thing inspiring him to make Mad Max.

• 22:06David Sims?

  Right. Cause when he makes Mad Max, it's because he was out there doing like kind of DIY ambulance work or whatever, piecing together a little bit of money, making this movie over the course of months.

• 22:15Griffin Newman?

  But it's both seeing Peter Weir and being like, fuck, this guy's from Australia. He just went out and made this.

• 22:21David Sims?

  Right. I can do this too, maybe.

• 22:22Griffin Newman?

  Right. There's the sort of like, kind of Richard Linklater slacker, slacker style activation that happened for a lot of young American filmmakers in the nineties. But also he sees like spiky cars and he's like, fuck.

• 22:35David Sims?

  Cars room.

• 22:36Griffin Newman?

  An entire movie out of this shit.

• 22:38David Sims?

  But that's the thing, because of the Mad Max connection and because of the Aussie new wave, Aussie exploitation, you know, repu- I was like, right. So this is going to be like a gnarly car movie about fucking gangs and shit. It'll be Mad Max-y. And then it's not quite that.

• 22:53Griffin Newman?

  It's an odd film.

• 22:55David Sims?

  It's an odd little sort of social comedy.

• 22:57Griffin Newman?

  I like it a lot.

• 22:58David Sims?

  With a bit of car, you know, antics, a bit.

• 23:01Griffin Newman?

  Quite, quite a bit. I mean, it is.

• 23:03David Sims?

  Solid amount.

• 23:04Griffin Newman?

  It's, it's like the core of the movie.

• 23:08David Sims?

  But it has way more like fusty Australian guys than like Mad Max does.

• 23:13Griffin Newman?

  I feel like.

• 23:14David Sims?

  They both have Bruce Pence, of course.

• 23:15Griffin Newman?

  I joke that you think of and talk about Australia, the continent, as if it is really the world of Mad Max at all times. But in reality, I feel like this movie is what you think Australia's like. You're like, there's crazy spiky crashing cars sometimes. Not all the time.

• 23:37David Sims?

  Sometimes. Uh, well, and also I think I have, I, I, we talked about this a little bit on the next episode because we just recorded that one. And I was raised in England and I like, I think I have like their prejudices, you guys relax.

• 23:52David Sims?

  Towards Australia, uh, coded into me in a way that surprises me sometimes. Does that make sense? You know, England is so derisive of all like former British colonies or like, you know, whatever vassal states in a way that like, is a little shocking sometimes.

• 24:09Griffin Newman?

  It's the one time you activate like grandpa who fought in Vietnam mode and you're like, the fuck is this?

• 24:14David Sims?

  The thing I remember.

• 24:15Griffin Newman?

  Where's this coming from?

• 24:16David Sims?

  The thing I remember was my father, who was a very like tolerant and liberal man is.

• 24:23David Sims?

  Disdain for the Welsh.

• 24:27David Sims?

  I shouldn't laugh because it's not like he was like racist because of course the Welsh, it's a very tiny nation of people, you know, attached to England that are very obviously, you know, they're very, very similar in many ways, but he had this like little kind of like, oh, they're so silly, you know, where I was just like, what did they ever do to you? You've never like had a bad experience with Welsh people and he, it was clearly just from his childhood, like it had been like, you know, drilled into him like, oh, well, the Welsh are very silly, you know?

• 24:57Griffin Newman?

  One of my favorite bits in Austin Powers.

• 24:59David Sims?

  Yes, I mean, that's, that's what it's making fun of.

• 25:01Griffin Newman?

  Two things I truly hate. People are intolerant of other races and cultures and the Dutch.

• 25:06David Sims?

  And the Dutch. I do a hundred percent what he's making fun of. Just that thing of just like, also, it's like, you're English. You don't get to have this opinion, you know, like you, you, you need to sit down.

• 25:17Griffin Newman?

  But that's why I'm saying this movie feels closer to your perception of the Australians because it's like sometimes they're wearing a mayor sash and being like, we run a proper town.

• 25:28David Sims?

  This is a normal town where nothing weird happens.

• 25:31Griffin Newman?

  A bunch of swastikas in it and they got ropes pulling and shit.

• 25:34David Sims?

  Oh, fuck.

• 25:36David Sims?

  Um, I'm going to open the dossier, guys.

• 25:38Griffin Newman?

  Please do. Ben, I assume you had not seen this before?

• 25:40Speaker 03

  No.

• 25:40Griffin Newman?

  And did you like this?

• 25:42David Sims?

  I did.

• 25:42Griffin Newman?

  Feels like a Ben movie.

• 25:43David Sims?

  Very weird though.

• 25:44Griffin Newman?

  It's, it's weird. It's kind of weird energy. It's got like a weird pace to it that again,

• 25:50David Sims?

  doesn't suggest exploitation movie exactly, right?

• 25:53Griffin Newman?

  It's a little weird.

• 25:55David Sims?

  Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. Um, so Peter, Lindsay.

• 26:02Griffin Newman?

  Ooh, interesting.

• 26:03David Sims?

  Lindsay, we're like from Freaks and Geeks.

• 26:05Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, JJ's rehired. That's the kind of shit we wouldn't have found out on our own.

• 26:08David Sims?

  His middle name seems to be from his father. That his father was Lindsay Weir as well. So his father was this kind of like disaffected Michigan teenager in like an army jacket? That's interesting. Yeah, Lindsay Weir. Was born 1944. Sydney, Australia.

• 26:25Griffin Newman?

  The capital.

• 26:26David Sims?

  The capital. No, Canberra is the capital, but Sydney is the biggest.

• 26:30Griffin Newman?

  Canberra, the capital.

• 26:30David Sims?

  Canberra, Canberra. I'm sorry. I apologize to all listeners if I fuck up Australian pronunciations. I all, I believe Canberra, which I'm sure I'm saying wrong right now, is one of those classic like shibboleth words for Australian accents.

• 26:44Griffin Newman?

  You know, like shibboleth words?

• 26:45David Sims?

  You know, like a shibboleth is like, um, for fuck's sake, I now have to explain this is it's from the Bible. It's like a password that you would say to prove your faith. It's like, uh, what's the inglorious bastards where he holds up? Like if you say Canberra wrong, which I think I am continually, it's like one of those words that you say a little different.

• 27:03Griffin Newman?

  I think it's pronounced Cthulhu.

• 27:06David Sims?

  Anyway, uh, his dad is a real estate agent, served, uh, in Australian, um, for the Australian army in World War II as an air raid warden. But obviously Weir was born in 44, so near the end of the war. Both sides of his family are from Scotland, from the United Kingdom mostly, but, uh, they were Australian through and through. They were not like backwards looking. They were fourth generation immigrants, so, you know, they're very deeply Australian. He remembers at a certain point, trying to dig through his family history just out of interest. And was kind of astonished that like they didn't have records on where they came from, where all this. And he feels like this is an Australian phenomenon. He's like, I've asked lots of Australian, what records they have?

• 27:52David Sims?

  And it's kind of like, no, they left their past, like tabula rasa. We left where we came from. Records are gone. We left our myths behind.

• 28:03David Sims?

  He says, it helps me understand why many of our films are period films, why Australian audiences are so drawn to them because of this need for myth.

• 28:11David Sims?

  We don't have lineage to be snobbish about, right? Like, it's like, kind of, uh, we're rebooting. All interesting. Moved around throughout his childhood, mostly in the Sydney area. It seems they settled in a place called Vacluse, not sure, eastern suburb of Sydney. So his dad was a real estate agent again. So they would keep like flipping houses. He's kind of a house flipper. No television, pre TV kind of generation. So he says he grew up on the streets bouncing balls around and I don't know, the gang of kids running about and jumping on trams and exploring caves. It sounds pretty fun. Yeah.

• 28:56Griffin Newman?

  Goonies ass childhood.

• 28:57David Sims?

  Yeah, seriously. Yeah. They lived at the top of a little hill. There was a big suspension, but she says he was always in the water. He was snorkeling. He was fishing. He would watch the ships go out. So

• 29:10Griffin Newman?

  This is so similar to your upbringing, Griffin.

• 29:14David Sims?

  By water, of course, for Griffin, it was Fifth Avenue.

• 29:17Griffin Newman?

  Yes. The wild waves of Fifth Avenue. I also obviously never watched TV as a child.

• 29:23David Sims?

  No, yeah, you weren't. Yeah, you weren't a big TV kid. He

• 29:26Griffin Newman?

  My parents owned one and I said, no, thank you.

• 29:28David Sims?

  Here's something he might have shared with you. He loved comic books.

• 29:31Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 29:32David Sims?

  The Phantom, our famous, the purple clad hero of pulp adventure. He loved Scrooge McDuck.

• 29:39Griffin Newman?

  Well, the Carl Barks books.

• 29:41David Sims?

  I guess so. I mean, it feels like he would have been too old for those, but whatever, whoever was writing Scrooge back then, maybe Carl Barks was.

• 29:47Griffin Newman?

  I think so. And if not, yeah.

• 29:50David Sims?

  And he loved to have pictures. He loved to go see the pictures.

• 29:52Griffin Newman?

  He loved to go see the talky pictures.

• 29:54David Sims?

  Westerns, the serials, you know, all that stuff.

• 29:57Griffin Newman?

  Can we throw out our buddy Sean Fantasy, past and future guest, coming up on this very mini series.

• 30:03David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Griffin Newman?

  Was in New York. We went to a bar with him. We got drinks at a hollow nickel.

• 30:09David Sims?

  Yeah, we did. That's right.

• 30:11Griffin Newman?

  And they had a big screen projector.

• 30:14David Sims?

  Yeah. And they were doing a pulp series.

• 30:16Griffin Newman?

  We walk in.

• 30:17David Sims?

  I mean, I think they didn't announce it or anything.

• 30:19Griffin Newman?

  No, but we walk in, they're playing Dick Tracy.

• 30:21David Sims?

  Yeah, cool.

• 30:22Griffin Newman?

  In the time that we're there nerding out about the dorky as shit in the world.

• 30:27David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Griffin Newman?

  And my girlfriend was like, how many drinks did you guys have? And I was like,

• 30:30David Sims?

  Two.

• 30:30Griffin Newman?

  Two. And then we just sat at the table for an additional three hours after our second beer and we're just like, have you ever looked at the box office weekend? It was

• 30:40David Sims?

  This is true.

• 30:41Griffin Newman?

  Incomprehensible, but um, in the time we're there, they play Dick Tracy. They go straight into the Rocketeer and then into the Phantom.

• 30:50David Sims?

  Yeah, well, as we were leaving, the Phantom was really just starting to pop off.

• 30:54Griffin Newman?

  But we're like, this is the fucking

• 30:55David Sims?

  I was like, is the shadow next?

• 30:57Griffin Newman?

  Series we pitch in chronological order.

• 30:59David Sims?

  I know. So if, uh, if you work at the Hall of Nickel and you were, uh, programming that.

• 31:05Griffin Newman?

  Well, the bartender did when I, when I closed out said, hey, man, love the cast.

• 31:09David Sims?

  Oh, wow.

• 31:09Griffin Newman?

  And he snapped and pointed his finger at me.

• 31:11David Sims?

  Wow.

• 31:12Griffin Newman?

  And I had never heard anyone say apostrophe C A S T before.

• 31:18David Sims?

  Oh, like drop the pod, it's cleaner.

• 31:20Griffin Newman?

  He just went, love the cast. And I was like, does it look like my arm is broken? And I made him repeat it four times because I didn't understand what he was saying, which then made me look like a narcissist.

• 31:32David Sims?

  Uh, it sounds like a real Griffin story.

• 31:45Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 31:45David Sims?

  Yes.

• 31:46Griffin Newman?

  Mmm.

• 31:49David Sims?

  Is that the city has cow?

• 31:51Griffin Newman?

  The city has cow.

• 31:51David Sims?

  Haven't heard from her in a while.

• 31:53Griffin Newman?

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

• 31:58David Sims?

  Okay.

• 31:59Griffin Newman?

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

• 32:03David Sims?

  Wow.

• 32:04Griffin Newman?

  The cow likes chicken.

• 32:06David Sims?

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

• 32:12Griffin Newman?

  Well, movie 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 movie does. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

• 32:24David Sims?

  Yes.

• 32:25Griffin Newman?

  My favorite movies of the year.

• 32:26David Sims?

  Absolutely.

• 32:27Griffin Newman?

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

• 32:33David Sims?

  That is a line in the movie.

• 32:34Griffin Newman?

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

• 32:36David Sims?

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

• 32:40Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 32:40David Sims?

  Great friend.

• 32:41Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 32:42David Sims?

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

• 32:47Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 32:48David Sims?

  Legends and I tip my cap, but Zach Cherry.

• 32:50Griffin Newman?

  Performances, friend of the show.

• 32:51David Sims?

  Friend of the show, Zach Cherry.

• 32:53Griffin Newman?

  Zach Cherry.

• 32:54David Sims?

  Also in it.

• 32:55Griffin Newman?

  This is true.

• 32:56David Sims?

  Such a cool movie. One that Queer Paul McCann, if you haven't heard about this movie, I don't know what's going on with you, but like it obviously has, it was out in theaters this summer and now it's on movie.

• 33:06Griffin Newman?

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

• 33:21David Sims?

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

• 33:25Griffin Newman?

  What happened? 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 an example of there still being new stories to tell.

• 33:37David Sims?

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

• 33:49Griffin Newman?

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

• 33:54David Sims?

  Damn right.

• 34:00Griffin Newman?

  David.

• 34:00David Sims?

  Yes.

• 34:01Griffin Newman?

  Shop.com is giving away $1 million in shop cash.

• 34:05David Sims?

  Wow. Shop has all the stores you love and lets you track every order in one spot.

• 34:10Griffin Newman?

  I love that. It's very convenient.

• 34:12David Sims?

  And now 1,000 shoppers are each going to win $1,000 in shop cash, just in time for the holidays.

• 34:19Griffin Newman?

  You get gifts for everyone on your list or get yourself something a little merry and bright. Find exactly what you're looking for at shop.com.

• 34:28David Sims?

  Uh, got stocking stuffers, maybe the sickest luxury items. Cookware to kicks, toys to high tech, even tinsel and tree toppers. Type in what you're looking for to instantly search every shop at once. Okay. That's shop.com. You can just go click around, find brands you love, search across all the stores, track every order in one spot.

• 34:51Griffin Newman?

  From cult favorites to the world's biggest brands, score suite deals and checkout fast, all at shop.com. Enter to win the $1 million shop cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 35:22Griffin Newman?

  David.

• 35:23David Sims?

  Hmm.

• 35:23Griffin Newman?

  It's not cuffing season for me, it's hosi season for me. And this year, that meant finally upgrading my new mattress from Lisa.

• 35:31David Sims?

  Lisa.

• 35:32Griffin Newman?

  It's supportive, comfortable, and just what my body needs after a long day. It makes crawling into bed on a chilly fall night feel like luxury.

• 35:40David Sims?

  Yeah, I have a Lisa too. They've got a lineup of beautifully crafted mattresses tailored to how you sleep.

• 35:45Griffin Newman?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:46David Sims?

  Each mattress is designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. They've got eco-friendly materials.

• 35:53Griffin Newman?

  Maybe you hear eco-friendly and you go, oh, but I'm gonna sacrifice comfort.

• 35:56David Sims?

  No.

• 35:57Griffin Newman?

  Nope.

• 35:58David Sims?

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• 36:46Griffin Newman?

  Peter Weir loved comic books. This is where you pick up the.

• 36:50David Sims?

  Oh, yeah. And he loved the pictures. He liked, you know, American movies. He liked Hammer horror films. He distinctly remembers seeing the great French film, The Wages of Fear. One of the greats.

• 37:03David Sims?

  Did he watch a lot of Australian cinema? Not really, he says. He mentions movies like Bush Christmas and Jeddah, but I think like.

• 37:11Griffin Newman?

  This is pointedly a fallow period.

• 37:13David Sims?

  Yeah, there's not a ton of Australian cinema maybe for him to even touch on. He loves Jacques Tati. Right. And that actually suggested what his earlier is interest was, which is performing. He wanted to tell stories, but like, you know, by performing them. And then he liked to plan these sort of elaborate games. He would play like war games with his friends that he would kind of set up. Uh, he was very creative.

• 37:40Griffin Newman?

  He, he talks about how he felt like he explored enough kind of, um, uh, areas leading up to landing on film directing that helped him understand different aspects of it. That he worked in plays. He was doing sketch comedy. He was doing all these different things that ended up feeding into filmmaking.

• 38:04David Sims?

  He went to a sort of all boys boarding school where she didn't really like, he did about a year at the University of Sydney and dropped out. Um, you know, he was sort of into the student life, but it seems like he wasn't that into, you know, whatever.

• 38:20Griffin Newman?

  Frigging homework.

• 38:22David Sims?

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, he had, did have a cool experience with some professor who was teaching about William Blake. And he like, uh, took a poem apart in front of them and he was like, he was basically like deconstructing this William Blake poem. And Peterborough got really mad and was like, I love this poem. Like, I hate how he's like dismembering it to like, show us the technique. And he's basically like, that's Dead Poets Society. Like I put that back at Dead Poets Society many years later.

• 38:47Griffin Newman?

  Dismembering it like, like taking apart a structure or like gerbil style ripping it.

• 38:53David Sims?

  Who knows? I mean, there's no mention of a gerbil, but who knows?

• 38:56Griffin Newman?

  Call that a callback.

• 38:57David Sims?

  He leaves college. He goes into real estate, the family business, makes a little bit of money, you know, basically like 18 to 20. Buys a one-way ticket to Europe, wants to go just check it out, you know? And gets on a ship. I mean, back then,

• 39:14David Sims?

  I think traveling by air from Australia was basically impossible because it was so fucking far. Right? You would have had to stop to refuel so many times. So you would travel by boat. You would get on a boat that would go for weeks to get you to, you know, wherever you're going.

• 39:28Griffin Newman?

  My grandmother talks about this all the time. She is in her mid to late nineties.

• 39:32David Sims?

  Yes.

• 39:32Griffin Newman?

  Right? Uh, excuse me, early thirties.

• 39:38Griffin Newman?

  Maybe started to listen, but she is like, I don't know why you take all these expensive flights. It's so nice to go on a boat. I went on a boat to Australia and it's great. You just go to the docks with a suitcase and you wave at a man and you give them just whatever money you have in your pocket and they give you a room. And she just thinks that's a thing we could do.

• 39:58David Sims?

  Unfortunately, I think that truly doesn't get it. I think

• 40:00Griffin Newman?

  No, it doesn't exist.

• 40:01David Sims?

  There's only one passenger liner left, which is the Queen Mary, which goes from New York to London. You know, whatever, like not even New York. It's like Southampton to New York or whatever. But that's the only ship that remains, the cruise cruise ship that remains. That's like, we go from one place to another. All other cruise ships are like, you know, we go to a bunch of vacation.

• 40:18Griffin Newman?

  Let me take you back home.

• 40:19David Sims?

  And then we take you home. Right.

• 40:20Griffin Newman?

  No, I think she went on the Queen Mary once and most of the time she just like waved down the King Kong ship.

• 40:27Griffin Newman?

  She brings this up all the time.

• 40:28David Sims?

  Good for her.

• 40:29Griffin Newman?

  You should do it. It's fun.

• 40:30David Sims?

  I mean, it's the theory.

• 40:32Griffin Newman?

  Do you have a time machine?

• 40:35David Sims?

  So he arrives in England and it's a cool time for England because it's the mid 60s flower power, anti Vietnam, swing in London, you know, he meets some cool guys like Austin Powers and no, I'm

• 40:47Griffin Newman?

  Basilex position.

• 40:51Griffin Newman?

  Mrs. Kensington, the original.

• 40:54David Sims?

  Right. The, the, uh, the earlier Kensington.

• 40:56Griffin Newman?

  He was quite groovy.

• 40:59David Sims?

  So he has fun, but then he says at a certain point, he just runs out of money. And he decides to come back to Australia in 1966 with his wife to be.

• 41:09Griffin Newman?

  What?

• 41:10David Sims?

  He has a fiance, Wendy Stites.

• 41:13Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 41:14David Sims?

  Who he's still married to.

• 41:15Griffin Newman?

  That.

• 41:16David Sims?

  They're a long running marriage.

• 41:18Griffin Newman?

  That's impressive.

• 41:19David Sims?

  And basically they, you know, they sort of wrestle with it, but they decide he, the way he puts it is we decided we could just deal with the shortcomings of Australia. Uh, I my guess is it's just like Australia is a less like cosmopolitan place back then. Again, just cause like it's fucking far away and there's not jet travel as as much.

• 41:39Griffin Newman?

  Well, we're also talking about a guy who's like the tip of the spear in the Australian new wave, which wasn't just, oh, here's like a new wave of voices in Australian cinema. It was basically here's Australian cinema starting up again.

• 41:54David Sims?

  A little bit, I think.

• 41:55Griffin Newman?

  You know, so like he, there's not really a culture supporting the thing he does yet.

• 42:02David Sims?

  So he comes back, tries to do some TV work, starts writing letters and shit, starts working for Australia's Channel 7.

• 42:10David Sims?

  And does like sort of news stuff, I guess, for them, working in a, well, he says he kind of like worked as a stagehand. Then he makes a tiny little short film, basically gets his hand on a camera that he can use on the weekends, right? A film called Count Vim's Last Exercise. Uh, I don't know much about it. Do you?

• 42:32Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 42:33David Sims?

  Neither do I.

• 42:33Griffin Newman?

  Great. Moving on.

• 42:34David Sims?

  Uh, he, it got him a promotion. He gets a job directing film sequences for a variety show called The Mavis Bramston Show, a sketch comedy show. I'm sure it was subtle stuff. I have no idea. Then he produces a second little irreverent short film called The Life and Flight of Reverend Reverend Buckshot, uh, which is the story of a birder turned Christian evangelist. Uh, it has not been widely screened, but it won him a young filmmaker award. And so he leaves Channel 7. He has no idea where his career is heading. He doesn't have like a grand plan. Stands another job in sort of like government film unit, doing documentary filmmaking, does some of that.

• 43:18David Sims?

  I mean, it's a real 10,000 hours thing of like, you know, he's really working with very little sort of money and like sort of semi-professional stuff. And just like slowly like building his craft and all that. Uh, makes some little documentary movies, makes a comedy television film called Man on a Green Bike. They don't, Jesus.

• 43:40Griffin Newman?

  What, David, are you angry that he paid his dues?

• 43:44David Sims?

  So angry. No, it's just a very long dossier.

• 43:47Griffin Newman?

  Just start making features already.

• 43:49David Sims?

  Uh, gets asked to direct a segment in an anthology, television film called Free To Go.

• 43:54Griffin Newman?

  This I have seen.

• 43:54David Sims?

  Segment is called Michael.

• 43:55Griffin Newman?

  I have seen this because it is on the, uh, there is a French Blu-ray of Cars That Ate Paris and The Plumber. That is, I think, the only hi-def disc that exists of either movie in any country. Uh, but it has the Michael segment on there. I have not seen the full anthology, but it's like three different portraits of the young person in Australia at the time. And Michael is interesting because it's kind of a bit of, um, it, it's a little analogous to, uh, Amblin.

• 44:29David Sims?

  And because it's about like kind of a countercultural guy.

• 44:32Griffin Newman?

  It's about a guy who can't hang with the counterculture.

• 44:35David Sims?

  Right. He's trying to be a cool 60s hippie, but isn't, is a bit of a poser.

• 44:39Griffin Newman?

  He's a rich kid.

• 44:39David Sims?

  Right.

• 44:40Griffin Newman?

  Who feels like he should be engaged with the sort of like politically.

• 44:45David Sims?

  And John Travolta is an angel?

• 44:47Griffin Newman?

  Yes. He chains smokes. He's a little unconventional. This guy hasn't shaved in two days.

• 44:53David Sims?

  So this film wins an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Film.

• 44:57Griffin Newman?

  Can I finish my observation about this film quickly? Because I took the time to watch it.

• 45:00David Sims?

  Of course.

• 45:01Griffin Newman?

  Uh, Amblin, you know, is like a very short, kind of like poppy, funny, stylish, almost music video where the reveal.

• 45:10David Sims?

  Spielberg.

• 45:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 45:11David Sims?

  That's the Spielberg short.

• 45:12Griffin Newman?

  The reveal is.

• 45:13David Sims?

  No dialogue.

• 45:14Griffin Newman?

  That this guy's like a dork and a poser, right? And it's very much like, I can't do this, even though the girl wants to sleep with him. He like runs off and the guitar case is empty. And it feels very telling of Spielberg being like, I'm a kid like playing pretend. Michael does not feel autobiographical. Michael feels a kind of satirical of a type of

• 45:40Griffin Newman?

  someone who does a dalliance with performative politics.

• 45:43David Sims?

  Right, okay.

• 45:44Griffin Newman?

  It starts off kind of like docudrama style. A lot of like newsreel footage and sort of music, rock music and whatever. And then it goes into this guy trying to go to like meetings and protests and things like that. And he just like, it feels interestingly kind of critical of people who don't actually give a shit.

• 46:10Griffin Newman?

  For a guy who I think retains a socio-political interest throughout all of his films.

• 46:15David Sims?

  He does.

• 46:16Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 46:17David Sims?

  So the film does pretty well. And so he gets some money to make another film, which some sort of argues is debut. It's a 50 minute film. It's called Holmesdale.

• 46:26Griffin Newman?

  Yes, this is what gets him both the juice to make Cars That A Paris, but also gets him on the radar to be offered Picnic At Hanging Rock. So it's the real calling card.

• 46:39David Sims?

  Holmesdale's 50 Minutes, as I said, it's about the staff of a hunting lodge. That's kind of like torturing their guests. I think they made it for like a few thousand dollars. It was an unhappy like process. Everyone was stressed out and tired and hungry and all this shit. But he says it probably kind of fed the story in a good way, like that they were all just like in this decaying estate, like at each other's throats. He says, uh, it's his closest thing to like a Hitchcock movie. Like it's like a, you know, weird little black comedy.

• 47:09Griffin Newman?

  You can watch it on YouTube. I think it's quite good as well. It is interesting that his early work and this kind of stops at Cars That A Paris is more kind of like heightened comedic satirical. It's not straight up comedy and it's dark and there's still some grounding, but there's a sort of stylization to these movies and tone. Yeah.

• 47:31David Sims?

  After this, he goes on another trip. He wants to visit both LA, you know, he goes to America and London, visits like film studio, you know, he's trying to get more info, more skills, more whatever, exposure to big stuff. He goes to London, he works at L Street Studios on Ken Russell's movie, The Boyfriend, the Twiggy movie.

• 47:52Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 47:53David Sims?

  God bless Twiggy.

• 47:54Griffin Newman?

  We love Twiggy.

• 47:57David Sims?

  He meets Alfred Hitchcock, who's making Frenzy, normal movie.

• 48:03Griffin Newman?

  Whew, and Alfred Hitchcock, normal guy.

• 48:06David Sims?

  But it's like Frenzy is amazing, interesting movie, but it's like Hitchcock being like, well, it's like the seventies and I was like, I can, I can just kind of be out in the open with what a fucking freak I am.

• 48:17Griffin Newman?

  Nothing has to be coded anymore.

• 48:18David Sims?

  And he makes it, everyone's like, whoa.

• 48:20Griffin Newman?

  Dude.

• 48:20David Sims?

  And he's like, oh, I guess I'll die.

• 48:22Griffin Newman?

  Code, go back to coding.

• 48:28Griffin Newman?

  It's just so funny that he was like the king of like the visual metaphor.

• 48:32David Sims?

  I'm hinting at things. It's all woven in. Yes, right.

• 48:35Griffin Newman?

  And then he like sees Brian De Palma and he's like, oh, I can tell people what I like.

• 48:38David Sims?

  Sky jerk gets off on fucking strangling ladies and people are like, relax.

• 48:42Griffin Newman?

  Sorry. Do you know what's one of my favorite bits of all time? The, um, the great Steve Martin, gonna put on a show tonight, SNL opening monologue. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 48:53David Sims?

  Yes, of course I do. Yes.

• 48:54Griffin Newman?

  In the nineties where it's like, I've decided I'm gonna care again.

• 48:57David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Griffin Newman?

  It's maybe the best SNL cold open, like non-political cold open ever, but all the cast members come out and one by one are inspired by the fact that Steve Martin gives a shit again and they're like reinvigorated and Farley does his bit of the song about how he's not gonna get drunk and everything. And then Phil Hartman comes out and he's like, week after week, I put on these wigs and these makeup, but tonight I'm gonna let the real Phil Hartman shine through. And Steve Martin goes, that's not a good idea, Phil. And he goes, alright.

• 49:25David Sims?

  Funny. It's pretty funny.

• 49:27Griffin Newman?

  I like it. I don't know. It makes me laugh.

• 49:29David Sims?

  Uh, so he works on all these movies. Okay. Look, he meets Hitchcock. I don't fucking know.

• 49:34Griffin Newman?

  You do know. In the dossier, it's right in front of you.

• 49:37David Sims?

  It's a, it's a formative trip for him. It's great for him to meet people like, you know, Hitchcock, uh, even though he's just like, uh, but, uh, how do you do? And he's just like, mm-hmm, you know, but nonetheless, like Peter Weir is like, this is, this cements for me. I want to make movies.

• 49:53Griffin Newman?

  To be fair, Hitchcock was attempting to answer the question, but he had a full roast turkey in his mouth. Wow.

• 50:01David Sims?

  Um.

• 50:02Griffin Newman?

  The man liked to eat food.

• 50:03David Sims?

  He was a big boy. Uh, God bless him.

• 50:05Griffin Newman?

  It's not just that he was big. It's the stories are that he would have like fucking four dinners in a row.

• 50:10David Sims?

  He would, right. That's the famous thing where you would have a big, like multi-course dinner.

• 50:14Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 50:15David Sims?

  And then when the waiter would come at the end, he'd go, let's do it again.

• 50:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 50:18David Sims?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just run that back, baby.

• 50:21Griffin Newman?

  All the courses again. You go back to salad?

• 50:26David Sims?

  You know, maybe people should do that more. Do kind of a like, we climb the mountain, then we descend. You know, start and end with salad.

• 50:34Griffin Newman?

  I mean, our version, our contemporary version is the bang bang.

• 50:37David Sims?

  Yeah, but the bang bang is just, that's just like, that's like people being like, I'm awful, but I found a word that, so now it, now it's okay. Where's it? I got a burger and then I got fried chicken. I'm like, well, that doesn't sound like a good idea. But it was a classic bang bang.

• 50:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 50:53David Sims?

  No, but then again, I did a bang bang recently.

• 50:56Griffin Newman?

  I did.

• 50:56David Sims?

  So, you know, so, you know.

• 50:58Griffin Newman?

  I did a comedy bang bang recently.

• 50:59David Sims?

  Well, I haven't listened yet. It's in the feed, though.

• 51:01Griffin Newman?

  It's, I, I'll say this, Reddit is calling it an episode.

• 51:08David Sims?

  I had a great time. Reddit has already ruled it out as a contender for the best.

• 51:12Griffin Newman?

  Maybe one day.

• 51:14David Sims?

  Uh, I did, but yeah, I went to the Village Cafe, which is a place in, in, uh, in South Brooklyn, you know, it's a Azerbaijani food, right? Got some lamb skewers, some rice. I was like, this rocks. But I was so deep in Brooklyn. I was like, you know, there's this pizza place I've been meaning to go to. And like, I'm never here. And I went and got a slice of pizza. What are you gonna do to me? Are you gonna nail me to the cross?

• 51:37Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 51:37David Sims?

  That's why they, that's why they killed Jesus. Too many bang bangs.

• 51:40Griffin Newman?

  Bang bangs.

• 51:41David Sims?

  Um, so.

• 51:42Griffin Newman?

  That's why they killed Jesse J as well.

• 51:44David Sims?

  While he's.

• 51:46Griffin Newman?

  Bang bang.

• 51:47David Sims?

  Oh, the song, right. Bang bang. And what happened to her?

• 51:50Griffin Newman?

  That they killed, killed her on the cross.

• 51:52David Sims?

  You're right. Six months in London, he says he wrote the outline for the Cars Today Paris. The treatment for the last wave and the treatment for the plumber, which these are all movies.

• 52:01Griffin Newman?

  I love.

• 52:02David Sims?

  Like it's like a creatively fertile moment.

• 52:04Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:06David Sims?

  It shows to him, yes, I am a director. I'm not, I don't want to perform. I don't, right? You know, I like cement that for him. It also shifts him away from comedy because a lot of the early stuff he'd done was a lot more, you know, openly, nakedly comic.

• 52:21Griffin Newman?

  He never made mod night, but he did. Yeah.

• 52:23David Sims?

  He did. I'm gonna whip this at you. I'm joking. I would never do that. I would only throw something at David Early.

• 52:30Griffin Newman?

  Which famously, the last time you threw a wall.

• 52:32David Sims?

  I threw a wall at him. I needed him to be quiet.

• 52:34Griffin Newman?

  You still haven't gotten your credit card back from.

• 52:37David Sims?

  Wait a second. He also, one, one reason he says he, he moves away from comedy is when he's in London, he sees Monty Python. And he's like, these guys are pretty fucking good. I'm not, I'm not gonna, yeah, I'm not gonna do anything remotely approaching this.

• 52:51Griffin Newman?

  It's also funny to imagine seeing Monty Python on TV and being like, oh, fuck. So they did it. They got sketch comedy on TV. Guess that's no longer an option.

• 52:59David Sims?

  Sure.

• 53:01Griffin Newman?

  They're the ones who get to do that.

• 53:03David Sims?

  He returns to Australia and in fact, Graham Bond, who's an old collaborator of his, said, I'm about to do something called the anti-Jack show. I mean, truly, I'm trying not to be.

• 53:12Griffin Newman?

  I think it sounds very good. It's of course a show where men had their hands taped to their thighs and couldn't jack off.

• 53:20David Sims?

  I don't know what the anti-Jack show would have been, but it's something they had done on the radio sometime.

• 53:25Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 53:25David Sims?

  And he's like, we got like a 13 episode order. And Peter Weir is like, I'm out, man. Like, I don't, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do sketch comedy. I want to concentrate on film. So he turns down what sounds like a fairly guaranteed thing. He makes one more documentary for the Commonwealth Film Unit, the sort of government group he was working for, which is called Whatever Happened to Green Valley? Which is about an area, like a working class area where people have been moved out of the city into state provided housing. So he does a little documentary. Cars that ate Paris, though. Let's get to that. The idea came while he's traveling through Europe. He's driving through France. He comes to a little section of the road. There's a barricade. There's a heavy mist. There's two frightening looking characters behind this barricade.

• 54:09David Sims?

  They had highway jackets with like, you know, red crosses on, right? You know, whatever, like they look official. And they stop the car, direct us down a detour, and they go down this fucked up detour. And are, and then like as Peter's driving, he's like to his wife, like, why did we accept that? You know, like, like, we just kind of went along with what they told us to do. But like, why? Like, they barely presented anything to credentials or anything like that. You know, they didn't ask for the permit. They didn't tell us why we were, you know, not allowed to go down this road. And he just starts like inventing the crazy, you know, conclusion of that, right? He's like, what happens if it's basically like a town is doing that for like a nefarious reason?

• 54:53Griffin Newman?

  Right. The sort of like core hook to this movie, if there is one, is a town that is somehow benefiting financially and structurally from people crashing their cars.

• 55:07David Sims?

  Yes. It doesn't totally make sense.

• 55:11Griffin Newman?

  No.

• 55:11David Sims?

  That is the idea.

• 55:12Griffin Newman?

  It's not, it's not a literal.

• 55:14David Sims?

  It's sort of like, what if, you know, you wanted to kill people, but you knew you would get in trouble if you went around shooting them with a gun because you could get caught. But what if you just basically made them all have car accidents? Then it's just like, well, they had a car accident, not our fault.

• 55:28Griffin Newman?

  And then there are like, you know, corpses that can be experimented on. There are junked cars that can be rebuilt, like basically the whole

• 55:36David Sims?

  Spikes.

• 55:36Griffin Newman?

  Kind of societal, uh, a structure of this town is built around the things they're able to pull from the wreckage of the cars.

• 55:42David Sims?

  They're scavenging. Yes. One inspiration for him as well. Built around.

• 55:46Griffin Newman?

  But it's also not just like, oh, they, they make people crash cars so they can steal their wallet. If they wanted to do that, they would make David upset. No, but, but yes, there's this whole complicated system of all the different things they extract from the cars and how it feeds.

• 56:00David Sims?

  There's this lore that this would happen in Cornwall and the British coast like long ago, that they would like have lighthouses and then they would move them or turn them off to have ships wreck on the coast. And they would go like loot the ships, right? It's the same idea. It's a weird kind of scavenging, pirating thing. He writes out these like what he calls short stories, but they're basically treatments. They're intended to be turned into movies. He would record the scripts onto tapes, do all the voices and sound effects. Funny to think about because again, I do think of Peter Weir as a, a serious guy.

• 56:34Griffin Newman?

  I was watching, you know, some special features yesterday. You came into the office.

• 56:38David Sims?

  Yeah. Not like deadly serious, but like, you know, he's, he's like a, he makes these like prestige movies. He seems very smart and like sophisticated.

• 56:46Griffin Newman?

  I got this interview up on the big screen. We look at each other and we're both like, I find him very relaxing.

• 56:51David Sims?

  He is relaxing. He's got a very calm tone.

• 56:53Griffin Newman?

  But he seems very like, just kind of like straight, focused blunt.

• 56:57David Sims?

  So sort of hard for him to imagine him like,

• 57:00Griffin Newman?

  Doing bits.

• 57:00David Sims?

  Doing bits into a tape recorder, but that's apparently what he was doing.

• 57:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 57:04David Sims?

  Um, and so, uh, that's how he's kind of processing this story. He, uh, thinks it's going to be a more of a comedy as it develops. It's like gets darker and darker.

• 57:16Griffin Newman?

  You feel him pivoting within this movie, like starting it out, thinking that he's primarily going to be a comedy filmmaker and finding some other voice along the way.

• 57:27David Sims?

  He takes it to Keith Gowan, old friend. Uh, they work on it together. They take it to a third writer called Piers Davis, who'd worked on Holmesdale. And they all, you know, they're the three credited writers, you know, they all kind of build the script up together. He calls it eventually a thriller with an underlying social comment on capitalist way of life and motor cars, and how we place this importance on them in our society. But above all, I want to make an entertaining story. Okay. Um, Australian film production. It's hit a low point, Griffin, in the decades following World War Two. Australian Prime Minister in the, uh, in 1970, John Gordon. Let me look up, is he a good guy or a bad guy?

• 58:10David Sims?

  Uh, he pioneers, uh, the Australia, Australian Film Development Corporation to try and start making like homegrown movies again, government subsidized. Uh, and this is sort of the beginning of what you call the Aussie new way.

• 58:25Griffin Newman?

  Basically slowed down to nothing. There's a real incentive to, to kickstart the industry back into gear. Yeah.

• 58:33David Sims?

  Seems like he was kind of. Kind of center right guy.

• 58:37Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 58:38David Sims?

  I don't know. I can't, I can't really get into it.

• 58:39Griffin Newman?

  Quite a look.

• 58:40David Sims?

  He does.

• 58:41Griffin Newman?

  What was his opinion on Beef Tallow?

• 58:44David Sims?

  Haven't checked on that. I think in the seventies, everyone was pro.

• 58:48Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 58:49David Sims?

  Right? That, that goes away later.

• 58:51Griffin Newman?

  I mean, his vibe.

• 58:52David Sims?

  His vibe is Beef Tallow. He's a bulldog. He's got a bulldog kind of look. So they, the, the Australian Film Development Corporation invested about 125,000 Aussie bucks. The total budget was about 200 grand. Small budget, but you know, it's, it's, you know, they get to make a movie.

• 59:11Griffin Newman?

  They made a movie. They did in fact, make a movie and he talks about, uh, and his producers on this talk about how they learned a lot from Hal and Jim McElroy specifically, who worked with him on the next couple of movies, how they learned a lot from how hard it was to pitch this movie, both in getting money and in getting an audience, that it's like, it's hard to explain. It's not really focused on a specific thing. And that, you know, and in a big way, like not, you have to make a movie with the poster in mind first, but.

• 59:47David Sims?

  A little bit like they want something that will sell and that will matter to people. They shoot it in New South Wales, about 250 miles from Sydney, you know, to, you know, a more sort of obscure or backwater part of the country, I guess. I don't know, you know, they, and they, they make the film. We're going to discuss the film now.

• 1:00:07Griffin Newman?

  The lead actor in it, Terry Camilleri. It is his debut film.

• 1:00:12David Sims?

  Sure. He's Napoleon. Damn it. Sorry. I took it from you.

• 1:00:16Griffin Newman?

  Did you recognize this? Did you clock this Ben?

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:00:19Griffin Newman?

  The lead guy in this movie.

• 1:00:20David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Griffin Newman?

  Is the man who delivered what might've been the finest supporting performance in film in 1989. Napoleon Bonaparte in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 1:00:31David Sims?

  The only thing I remember is when he's, um.

• 1:00:34Griffin Newman?

  Piggywiggly?

• 1:00:34David Sims?

  Oh, or no. Bowling.

• 1:00:36Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:00:36David Sims?

  And he misses and he goes like, like he's like, I remember that being really.

• 1:00:40Griffin Newman?

  I'm not exaggerating. That performance is.

• 1:00:41David Sims?

  He's very funny.

• 1:00:42Griffin Newman?

  Top to bottom fire. It is unbelievable.

• 1:00:46David Sims?

  He is-

• 1:00:47Griffin Newman?

  Hit the water slide pushing past kids to go down first?

• 1:00:51David Sims?

  Uh, not to, not to spoil like way ahead, but uh, he is the guy in the bathtub in The Truman Show.

• 1:00:57Griffin Newman?

  Big time.

• 1:00:58David Sims?

  Like, you know how The Truman Show has all the viewers that we keep cutting to? He's the bathtub guy.

• 1:01:02Griffin Newman?

  He's got an incredibly distinctive look. It is weird to see him in this movie.

• 1:01:06David Sims?

  It is.

• 1:01:06Griffin Newman?

  One of those guys where you're like-

• 1:01:08David Sims?

  He's supposed to be sort of an everyman in this one.

• 1:01:10Griffin Newman?

  But, but also you're like, wasn't he born 45? And you're like seeing him in like 30 and you're like, we're almost there.

• 1:01:28Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 1:01:29David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Griffin Newman?

  This episode is brought to you by XYZ Films and the acclaimed new documentary Capturing Bigfoot.

• 1:01:35David Sims?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:35Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:01:46David Sims?

  It is an iconic video.

• 1:01:48Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:02:10David Sims?

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

• 1:02:22Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:02:31David Sims?

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

• 1:02:34Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:02:34David Sims?

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

• 1:02:41Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:02:55David Sims?

  I'm something of an expert in cryptozoology.

• 1:02:57Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:03:00David Sims?

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

• 1:03:15Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:03:31Griffin Newman?

  David?

• 1:03:32David Sims?

  Yes?

• 1:03:32Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:03:53David Sims?

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

• 1:04:13Griffin Newman?

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

• 1:04:29David Sims?

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

• 1:05:03Griffin Newman?

  David.

• 1:05:04David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:05:05Griffin Newman?

  People cut the cord. Means the death of the repeat, the rerun. But where, where do repeats still exist? In your closet.

• 1:05:13David Sims?

  Ah, the sweater that goes with everything, Griffin. The tee you somehow always reach for first?

• 1:05:18Griffin Newman?

  It's, it's, we know the feeling.

• 1:05:20David Sims?

  Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy. That's what Quince does best.

• 1:05:23Griffin Newman?

  Quince.

• 1:05:24David Sims?

  This is true for me. I will say I go to Quince. I buy a thing like a polo shirt, a sweater, whatever. And I'm like, oh, I like that. Guess I'll get a bunch more. Cause now that's what I'm gonna put on.

• 1:05:35Griffin Newman?

  Quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and merino wool. The styles are timeless, versatile, and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day.

• 1:05:49David Sims?

  Love it. They got those 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters. Those start at just $60.

• 1:05:54Griffin Newman?

  I love those.

• 1:05:54David Sims?

  Giving you the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand. Without that luxury price tag and, look, it's starting to get chillier. You're gonna need layers, right? How about you just do Quince for every layer, huh?

• 1:06:07Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07David Sims?

  Jacket, sweater, shirt.

• 1:06:09Griffin Newman?

  David, you know what I love?

• 1:06:10David Sims?

  What?

• 1:06:11Griffin Newman?

  The ultimate commuter pants.

• 1:06:12David Sims?

  Oh.

• 1:06:13Griffin Newman?

  Cause I'm commuting constantly.

• 1:06:15David Sims?

  Beep beep.

• 1:06:16Griffin Newman?

  Yep, that's me. David, I like these. They're just clean. They're comfortable. They got the right amount of pockets.

• 1:06:22David Sims?

  Wow. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know. It was blank check. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:06:51David Sims?

  All right. So Cars, They Paris. So yeah, how do we describe this film? It's a, it's a

• 1:06:55Griffin Newman?

  Starts with him.

• 1:06:56David Sims?

  Movie, although apparently there's a US cut that's 74 minutes. What the hell is that?

• 1:07:00Griffin Newman?

  That's crazy.

• 1:07:00David Sims?

  Must be just like trying to get all of it, you know, like be as all action.

• 1:07:05Griffin Newman?

  I think that this was an early New Line release. They retitled it The Cars That Eat People. It was several years later.

• 1:07:11David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:07:12Griffin Newman?

  And they specifically sold it as a thriller.

• 1:07:14David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:07:15Griffin Newman?

  Like, the fuck is going on in this town?

• 1:07:17David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  The poster has so much information.

• 1:07:20Griffin Newman?

  Yes. But there are many posters. David and I were just going through this that we've both become, as David put it when I walked into the office.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  On time presumably.

• 1:07:29David Sims?

  Griff was 15 minutes late. I was on time.

• 1:07:31Griffin Newman?

  You're not one to raise your eyebrows today. That's all I'm gonna say.

• 1:07:35David Sims?

  I guess who can raise his eyebrows?

• 1:07:37Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, David's allowed to. His eyebrows just hit the ceiling?

• 1:07:42David Sims?

  Yeah, my eyebrows are perma-raised, I would say.

• 1:07:46Griffin Newman?

  David said, "I've gotten your sickness." And I said, "What do you mean?" We both now obsessively, methodically, choose the posters for every log on Letterboxd. Because Letterboxd gives you a default poster graphic, but very often, it's not a true poster.

• 1:08:04David Sims?

  No, it's a poster with all the words removed and all the title billing.

• 1:08:08Griffin Newman?

  It's sort of like an iTunes poster. It's not a theatrical one sheet.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  But then, do you upload your own image?

• 1:08:13Griffin Newman?

  No, other people upload them. We haven't quite gotten to the stage of uploading our own.

• 1:08:18David Sims?

  I believe you can if you truly.

• 1:08:19Griffin Newman?

  You absolutely can. And sometimes I look and I go, "These options are great." Do I go hunting? But the posters for this movie are wildly different. Some of them are very informational. That very long tagline I read, "Some of them are super graphic." The new line one, "The Cars That Eat People," is like a car eating a guy. Like depicting things that don't happen in a movie.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  But I feel like it's the spiky car.

• 1:08:44Griffin Newman?

  The spiky car is the big thing.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is so fucking cool.

• 1:08:48Griffin Newman?

  It's very, very.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Because it's a car, but it's covered in spikes.

• 1:08:53Griffin Newman?

  Yes, that is kind of the thing it has going on. The movie opens with like a kind of like picturesque drive. A happy couple. And then you watch them get into like a big wreck. And you immediately see the way the town gets to work in extracting them and the vehicle, the wreckage.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  But the town doesn't sabotage. It seems like it's just a random accident. Am I wrong?

• 1:09:24Griffin Newman?

  Um, it's not.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Like he, his tire pops.

• 1:09:29Griffin Newman?

  What is your read on it, David?

• 1:09:30David Sims?

  I, I think it's all, I mean, you're right. That like, it seems accidental, but like, we do learn that, you know, this is their whole ploy, right?

• 1:09:41Griffin Newman?

  Right. So it does.

• 1:09:42David Sims?

  Who knows?

• 1:09:43Griffin Newman?

  I, I read it as, not that there's like something supernatural going on, but that they have perhaps.

• 1:09:49David Sims?

  Just put shit all over the roads or something. I don't know.

• 1:09:51Griffin Newman?

  Twisty turns, like they're rigging it in a way that it's sort of like a skill course.

• 1:09:57David Sims?

  They're closing roads, I guess, so that you have to go on the bad roads, maybe.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  They're just strewning nails about.

• 1:10:03David Sims?

  Yes. Yeah, maybe they are.

• 1:10:05Griffin Newman?

  Look, this is a good movie, but it also is like a first film and feels like a first film. And it's one of those things where I wonder if you talk to Peter Weir, he'd be like, yeah, I watched the cut and realized we didn't explain that.

• 1:10:16David Sims?

  Truly no idea. Don't know what his like, you know, I mean, I think he's fond of this movie. Like.

• 1:10:22Griffin Newman?

  I remember us seeing, uh, Buckaroo Banzai at Nighthawk, a movie we both like a lot.

• 1:10:28David Sims?

  I, I like that movie a lot, but that movie is, is more, more extreme than this one in terms of like, you're like, oh, they just didn't know how to make a movie for some of this.

• 1:10:36Griffin Newman?

  Right. And a lot of times when we cover first films on this show, they're varying levels of like fluency and like Peter Weir is absolutely someone who already at this point knows how to put images together. Knows how to work with actors. But like you hear these stories of like first time filmmakers to them, watch the cut of their movie. And they're like, oh, I didn't explain that at all. Now I understand storytelling, you know?

• 1:11:00David Sims?

  Buckaroo Banzai, which is a unique object, anyone can agree, is also just right, a specific scenario where you're like, it's like someone trying to make a movie sort of five times more ambitious than Cars in Eight Paris in terms of the storyteller. Just in terms of like, there's aliens, there's government, you know, government secret societies. There's musical sequences. There's where you're just like, guys, this is a lot to put on your plate for movie one.

• 1:11:24Griffin Newman?

  Complex visual patterns.

• 1:11:25David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:11:25Griffin Newman?

  Right. The sort of like reveal of the true forms of the aliens.

• 1:11:29David Sims?

  There's moments.

• 1:11:30Griffin Newman?

  Oh, there's.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Just the looks.

• 1:11:33Griffin Newman?

  I mean.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  The rolled up.

• 1:11:34Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Sports jacket.

• 1:11:35Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  The rolled up sleeves on a sports jacket.

• 1:11:37Griffin Newman?

  Cowboy Jeff Goldblum.

• 1:11:38David Sims?

  Just the whole concept Buckaroo Banzai has of like, he's.

• 1:11:44David Sims?

  Sort of internet intergalactic secret agent. And he has the coolest band in the world. What's his band? Well, it has three saxophones. You know what I mean?

• 1:11:53Griffin Newman?

  He forgot he's also a surgeon.

• 1:11:54David Sims?

  Yeah, that's like, but I love the idea, of course, piling it on. But then they're like, and he's got the coolest band in the world. His band has three saxophones. And you're like, that doesn't sound cool. And they're like, does this look cool? And I'm like, yes, it does.

• 1:12:04Griffin Newman?

  It actually does.

• 1:12:05David Sims?

  It's the coolest shit I've ever seen.

• 1:12:07Griffin Newman?

  That is a true 50 years ahead of its time movie. Where you're just like, now the culture has caught up to a point where you're like, here's the pitch. It's like it's the eighth movie. It's like, we all know this character.

• 1:12:19David Sims?

  We're just diving into the middle. Meet Buckaroo Banzai, but you already know him.

• 1:12:22Griffin Newman?

  It's funny that he's everything at the same time. I cannot imagine how insane that movie felt upon release. You know, I know, like friends of ours, like, like Hodgman have talked about it, like, being the weird kid at school and seeing it and being like, I get this. This is like a transmission from a future I want.

• 1:12:40David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:12:40Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40David Sims?

  Everyone else is angry. But I, I got it.

• 1:12:43Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Has a little bit of that energy where you're like,

• 1:12:49David Sims?

  A little bit.

• 1:12:50Griffin Newman?

  You know, there are first films that are like, the first album syndrome thing of like, someone's been waiting to make a movie their whole.

• 1:12:57David Sims?

  They've got all their bangers.

• 1:12:59Griffin Newman?

  And they know, like, there's a very specific story they want to tell. And then their first movies that feel like a drafts folder. And a little bit like you're still in film school in the sense where you're like, I got a bunch of ideas I want to try out. You know?

• 1:13:12David Sims?

  Very interesting.

• 1:13:12Griffin Newman?

  And I think this movie is fairly cohesive, but it's also inscrutable at times.

• 1:13:18David Sims?

  It's cohesive in that it has a, uh, you know, it has a good narrative engine, which is this guy gets trapped in this town.

• 1:13:25Griffin Newman?

  Right. After you see this original crash, you see this guy and his brother driving. They get in a similar crash. His brother dies, he survives, wakes up in the hospital.

• 1:13:32David Sims?

  And it's him basically learning the fucked up thing about this town.

• 1:13:36Griffin Newman?

  This town's sort of bringing him in closer.

• 1:13:38David Sims?

  And then weighing, do I? Participate in the fucked up thing about this town.

• 1:13:42Griffin Newman?

  It's a little.

• 1:13:43David Sims?

  Or whatever, right? Like, am I wrong?

• 1:13:45Griffin Newman?

  No, you're right. The narrative engine of it is like Twilight Zoney, where it's like you wake up in an accident, something weird has happened. It's a normal town that's inviting you in and then you start to realize how many weird things are going on beneath the surface. It's just the weird things that happen are like varying levels of abstract.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  But do you think he's aware all along or when, when does the character figure out what this town is really up to?

• 1:14:10David Sims?

  It's kind of when he starts working at the hospital, maybe he starts to feel like, right? Like it's sort of there, right?

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  It's unclear.

• 1:14:18David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Griffin Newman?

  I, I like Terry Callum.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  He's a little bit of a dope.

• 1:14:21Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say, I like him a lot. I think this is a fun performance. It's another thing that you feel like you make one movie and then learn a big lesson from it, which is he's a really passive character. He's really quiet and he kind of goes with the flow, you know? He's sort of like in a trance with the whole thing. There's not a lot of him like getting seduced by the town, nor is there him being suspicious. And like putting up his guard. So you don't feel like he's trying to solve a mystery and you also don't feel like there's a clear sense of this guy that's getting corrupted. It does just sort of feel like he's sleepwalking through the whole situation until things get very scary at the end.

• 1:15:04David Sims?

  It is not a movie, right? That's heavy on action until the big climax, right?

• 1:15:10Griffin Newman?

  No, but there are crashes throughout.

• 1:15:12David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Griffin Newman?

  Yes. And they're, they are excitingly constructed. You can see it sparking Miller, not just, oh, look, someone shot a car in Australia. There's a language to the car crashes that is very visceral.

• 1:15:25David Sims?

  Part of the thing he has to overcome is like, he's now scared of driving. So he can't escape because he's like, doesn't want to get back in a car because he was in a car crash.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  Well, he reveals also that he hit someone.

• 1:15:41David Sims?

  Right, right. He's, he's got like trauma.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  I think he says he hit and killed an old man. So very traumatic experience.

• 1:15:48David Sims?

  Yeah, in Australia, that just would happen all the time, I think.

• 1:15:51Griffin Newman?

  I do think this is part of what I like about this movie is it does feel like it's texturally engaging with how scary cars are.

• 1:15:56David Sims?

  Oh, that's what you like, right? Cause you're like, I don't trust them cars. They've all got spikes to me.

• 1:16:00Griffin Newman?

  Right. But also that he's just like, I shouldn't have this amount of power in my hands, which is the reason I don't drive. It's the number one reason I don't drive. The, like, my psychological anxiety about the act of driving is secondary to, I don't trust myself to do it correctly and not cause damage.

• 1:16:20David Sims?

  I love driving. It's so fun.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 1:16:23David Sims?

  It's rocks, right Ben? The open road.

• 1:16:25Griffin Newman?

  It's all yours.

• 1:16:26David Sims?

  Cause my thing with driving is like, I, I don't, you know, I, I think cars are, are bad for society. I don't like the way the cities are built for cars. I don't like the way the country depends on cars.

• 1:16:35Griffin Newman?

  I don't like that they have eyes on the wind field.

• 1:16:37David Sims?

  Mass transit, very pro, we need less cars in our life. But if I'm driving a car, I'm like beep beep.

• 1:16:43Griffin Newman?

  Vroom, vroom.

• 1:16:44David Sims?

  Exactly. I'm like, here we go.

• 1:16:46Griffin Newman?

  Kachow.

• 1:16:47David Sims?

  Like, I mean, I guess I don't like being in traffic, but I don't hate it that much.

• 1:16:52Griffin Newman?

  I also just need to remind you guys that I grew up in New York City, the mean streets of Greenwich Village. My father was like hot committed to having a car in the city and driving, which is a terrible experience.

• 1:17:06David Sims?

  Yeah. I mean, um, yeah, having a car in Manhattan that you actually want to use is dumb.

• 1:17:12Griffin Newman?

  And he was, you might be really surprised to hear this, an incredibly anxious driver.

• 1:17:17David Sims?

  Well, it's Myerwood's stories, right? Yeah. It's, it's the opening scene where Sandler's just melting down, looking for a parking spot.

• 1:17:25Griffin Newman?

  Right. Yeah. Since that movie came out.

• 1:17:27David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Griffin Newman?

  But it's like, the entire car became an extension of his tense body. And every part of it was stressful to him. Like being in traffic was stressful.

• 1:17:35David Sims?

  You've got some fucking hangup. It's just your dad was stressed out as your kid all the time about that thing.

• 1:17:40Griffin Newman?

  Buddy.

• 1:17:41David Sims?

  But how does this relate to milk and eggs? No, you like milk?

• 1:17:44Griffin Newman?

  No, I don't like milk.

• 1:17:45David Sims?

  Right. Milk and eggs. Is your dad yelling about eggs?

• 1:17:48Griffin Newman?

  No, eggs I just think are gross and all of you are insane.

• 1:17:51David Sims?

  I'm just trying to see if there's like a childhood.

• 1:17:53Griffin Newman?

  I told you the milk thing, right? I just did this on Dirty Laundry at SF Sketch Fest, the dropout show. Thank you for having me. Where you had to, uh, get people to guess whose dirty secret was, was whose.

• 1:18:07Griffin Newman?

  I loved the bottle. Much like your daughter, I'd tap the table, I'd go empty. Right?

• 1:18:14David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Griffin Newman?

  And I wouldn't drop the bottle because I was such a creature to comfort. And my parents were like, you are too old. You gotta drop this.

• 1:18:24David Sims?

  It is a classic moment that comes. You gotta wean.

• 1:18:26Griffin Newman?

  And they were doing anything to wean me and I was just, I was, I was immovable on this issue. And one day I woke up and there was a glass of milk on the table. And I was like, the fuck is this?

• 1:18:39Griffin Newman?

  And they were like, this is milk. And I was like, I'm sorry. No worries, but you've made a mistake. Milk actually comes in a bottle.

• 1:18:47Griffin Newman?

  This is a cup of some shit I've never seen before in my life. Milk has a nipple at the top. And they were like, no, this is what milk is now. And I was like, oh, cool. I'm never drinking milk again.

• 1:18:58David Sims?

  How old were you?

• 1:18:59Griffin Newman?

  I was like, five.

• 1:19:01David Sims?

  You were still drinking from a bottle?

• 1:19:02Griffin Newman?

  This is the point. And my parents were like, enough is enough. And I was like, yeah, I'm not drinking milk. And they were like, okay, you're five. Let's see how that goes. And I haven't had milk in over three decades.

• 1:19:15David Sims?

  I would say by the time you're five, you certainly do not need to be drinking milk anymore. It's a personal choice at that point.

• 1:19:21Griffin Newman?

  I don't know. I'm five, six and my bones are made of glass. Mistakes might have been made.

• 1:19:27David Sims?

  We were kids.

• 1:19:28Griffin Newman?

  Timmy failure.

• 1:19:29David Sims?

  When we were kids, the predominant thinking was pump your kids filled with milk.

• 1:19:33Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, every celebrity had the fucking mustache.

• 1:19:35David Sims?

  Now you are very much told like, do not do that because then your kids won't eat food.

• 1:19:39Griffin Newman?

  Then why am I tiny?

• 1:19:41David Sims?

  Because your parents are tiny.

• 1:19:43Griffin Newman?

  Oh, so it all goes back to my dad, doesn't it?

• 1:19:45David Sims?

  Your mother is the tiniest person I've ever seen.

• 1:19:49Griffin Newman?

  People don't understand how tiny my mom is.

• 1:19:50David Sims?

  Hardly Dwayne The Rock Johnson. He's not a huge guy himself.

• 1:19:55Griffin Newman?

  Oh, now it's funny to imagine my dad. Doing Dwayne The Rock Johnson shit.

• 1:20:00David Sims?

  Funny to imagine.

• 1:20:01Griffin Newman?

  It is funny to imagine. What if they announced Rampage two? But we're replacing Dwayne The Rock Johnson. With Peter Newman.

• 1:20:10David Sims?

  Well, I'm into it.

• 1:20:11Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12David Sims?

  So what happens in the Cars of the Day Paris? So our main character, as you say, it's Arthur, played by Terry Camilleri.

• 1:20:19Griffin Newman?

  The mayor is sort of taking him under his wing.

• 1:20:21David Sims?

  The mayor is named Len Kelly. He's played by John Millian, who's like, I think, a sort of legendary at the time, like Australian character actor guy, had done lots of theater, did, you know, British stuff as well.

• 1:20:35Griffin Newman?

  He's in Crocodile Dundee.

• 1:20:36David Sims?

  He is in Crocodile Dundee.

• 1:20:38Griffin Newman?

  He is in Crocodile Dundee, but he's also, he's in Billy Budd, he's in The Longest Day.

• 1:20:44David Sims?

  In fact, Crocodile Dundee 2, I think, is basically his last performance. He's like the buddy. He's like the old buddy.

• 1:20:50Griffin Newman?

  Walkabout, like, he's in most of the iconic Australian movies.

• 1:20:55David Sims?

  Oh, right. He's the dad in Walkabout, which is not an important role because they die.

• 1:20:59Griffin Newman?

  And tremendous amount of TV.

• 1:21:02David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:21:03Griffin Newman?

  He's playing like a fucking cartoon idea of an old timey mayor, like top hat, holding on to like his like jacket lapels, big sash that says mayor.

• 1:21:15David Sims?

  He's pretty funny.

• 1:21:15Griffin Newman?

  He's funny. Yeah. But he's, he's got a wife and two daughters who Arthur finds out are not actually his, that they are children that they adopted from wreckages.

• 1:21:28David Sims?

  Okay, yes, that's right. Yeah, it's all part of the sort of weird scavenging that they're doing.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  One of the daughters has a scar. You can see that the mom insists she hide.

• 1:21:42Griffin Newman?

  That was clearly caused by an accident.

• 1:21:44David Sims?

  Like however they got her. And then, yeah, and then they give him the hospital job.

• 1:21:49Griffin Newman?

  Can we acknowledge?

• 1:21:49David Sims?

  Like, you can work at the hospital. It's kind of like Doc Hollywood.

• 1:21:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it's exactly like Doc Hollywood.

• 1:21:54David Sims?

  You know the movie Doc Hollywood? Michael J. Fox is a big shot plastic surgeon or whatever, you know, he's like a doctor, right?

• 1:22:01Griffin Newman?

  From Hollywood.

• 1:22:02David Sims?

  And then he's driving his hot rod, right? Somewhere and he crashes it in it's, I mean, it's also the premise of cars.

• 1:22:10Griffin Newman?

  I was gonna say.

• 1:22:11David Sims?

  He crashes it in like a small town and he like wrecks some fence or a gazebo or whatever the fuck.

• 1:22:16Griffin Newman?

  And they're like your sentence.

• 1:22:17David Sims?

  Your sentence is right. You gotta work off your, your debt by being a local doctor.

• 1:22:22Griffin Newman?

  And he's like, what? I mean, I'm cool.

• 1:22:23David Sims?

  I'm a big shot. I'm Michael J. Fox over here. I got sunglasses.

• 1:22:27Griffin Newman?

  I gotta fix this fence.

• 1:22:28David Sims?

  And then he falls in love with the small town.

• 1:22:30Griffin Newman?

  He loves.

• 1:22:31David Sims?

  This one instead, they're like, okay, you can work here. You can kind of get your strength back. You can, you know, wait to be ready to drive a car again.

• 1:22:37Griffin Newman?

  The town's bad.

• 1:22:37David Sims?

  He's in the worst town.

• 1:22:38Griffin Newman?

  Right. And the movie Cars Ben is about kind of a hot shot car who's a race car. He's driving too fast. He wrecks a fence in a town.

• 1:22:48David Sims?

  He does.

• 1:22:49Griffin Newman?

  And the cars are like, you gotta stay here. And he's like, what? I hate this. Wow. And then he, he comes to love the town and the cars don't eat Paris, but they do eat food.

• 1:23:00David Sims?

  Yeah. So the town of course is called Paris. That's why it's called that.

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  Um, it's just very funny and it's a thing we find in America as well.

• 1:23:08David Sims?

  Of course.

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  Where you'll, I mean, Paris, Texas.

• 1:23:12David Sims?

  Well, yeah, New York is, is littered with it where they would just be like, well, we need names for these towns upstate. Let's just name it after famous old cities.

• 1:23:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Paris Hilton.

• 1:23:21David Sims?

  That's a person's name. That's true.

• 1:23:23Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. But she's American.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  One of my favorite examples of this is in Pennsylvania, there's a town called Jersey Shore.

• 1:23:31Griffin Newman?

  That's really funny.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  And so you'd see this road sign like Jersey Shore, 50 miles or whatever.

• 1:23:37Griffin Newman?

  Do you feel like you've gone through a wormhole?

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  Like that, that's crazy.

• 1:23:41Griffin Newman?

  Didn't we?

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  We're so far away from that.

• 1:23:44Griffin Newman?

  Uh, I just want to call out one of the, uh, the vehicle wreckage scavengers, kind of the main one in the film. Uh, Charlie is played by the actor Bruce Spence. And I don't know if you put this together, but he was the gyrocopter pilot. In The Road Warrior.

• 1:24:01David Sims?

  So that's one of our oldest bits because you said that to me, I guess, when we were talking.

• 1:24:05Griffin Newman?

  Matrix.

• 1:24:06David Sims?

  Matrix, or was it Star? No, Star Wars, Episode Three.

• 1:24:08Griffin Newman?

  Oh, it's T on Me Don.

• 1:24:09David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Griffin Newman?

  But then I bring it up again in Matrix Revolution.

• 1:24:12David Sims?

  But the first time you brought it up to me, I was kind of like, okay. But then, of course, we have basically covered every iconic film that the unusual looking man, great actor Bruce Spence has been in, but for one, Griffin.

• 1:24:26Griffin Newman?

  We have, we have more coming up.

• 1:24:28David Sims?

  Well, well, of course, he's, what do we have coming up?

• 1:24:31Griffin Newman?

  I'm, I'm not gonna say it, but we have a Bruce Spence movie on the calendar again later this year.

• 1:24:37David Sims?

  That's right, we do.

• 1:24:38Griffin Newman?

  We do.

• 1:24:39David Sims?

  We do. But there's one guy, one, we, he's the voice of the mouth of Sauron in the extended edition of Return of the King.

• 1:24:46Griffin Newman?

  Which when we cover Peter Jackson, we have to do the extended, right?

• 1:24:50David Sims?

  We do, although I think they are, it is very worthy of debate whether the extended editions are better. I think that.

• 1:24:57Griffin Newman?

  It's part of the debate, but we have to do them.

• 1:24:59David Sims?

  We do, but it's gonna be an interesting bridge to cross because like, they're, they're different and it's interesting to consider the differences.

• 1:25:09Griffin Newman?

  And Ben, you're gonna have to do two cuts of every episode.

• 1:25:12David Sims?

  I mean, I think.

• 1:25:13Griffin Newman?

  For six different episodes.

• 1:25:14David Sims?

  There's an argument for something like that.

• 1:25:16Griffin Newman?

  I think we.

• 1:25:17David Sims?

  The problem is that The Hobbit also have extended editions.

• 1:25:21Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21David Sims?

  And no one's really out here being like, those are all so good.

• 1:25:25Griffin Newman?

  Has anyone?

• 1:25:26David Sims?

  I've never heard anyone say they're really worthwhile. They, I believe they exist because they were like, we'll just do what we did with Lord of the Rings, right? Well, people love extended editions.

• 1:25:35Griffin Newman?

  What if Peter Jackson put out compressed editions of The Hobbit movies?

• 1:25:38David Sims?

  I compressed it into one fucking movie. That might win people over.

• 1:25:42Griffin Newman?

  That, I know it's been said a thousand times and I have no new observations. It is one of the craziest things that's ever happened. It's like three giant books, three movies, and it was hard to whittle the books down. And they were like, you're ready to adapt The Hobbit? And he's like, yeah, three movies. And you're like, you know, hobbit is like a third the length of Lord of the Rings books. And he's like, it's gonna have to be three movies that it even went from two to three.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  But we got, we got smog. Smog.

• 1:26:10David Sims?

  Smog.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  You mean, we got him. You mean, we shot him.

• 1:26:12Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, we call it.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  But we got one of the finest performances, mocap performances, maybe of all time.

• 1:26:18Griffin Newman?

  It is the funniest shit of all time.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  I watched that. You always say this on the show. I mean, you both do. You're like, I watch that once a year. Like next thing.

• 1:26:26David Sims?

  I just.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  I watch the behind the scenes of.

• 1:26:31David Sims?

  Cumberbatch.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  Cumberbatch.

• 1:26:32David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  The motion.

• 1:26:33David Sims?

  Doing the mocap scenes.

• 1:26:35Griffin Newman?

  But my favorite thing is all the people at Wetter were like, yeah, I mean, this wasn't usable.

• 1:26:41David Sims?

  They, they do say like, we, we did our best, but it's not, it's not like the dragon's face is this.

• 1:26:47Griffin Newman?

  Well, it's just like, they were like, look, Gollum is like, he's a hobbit, but he's got the basic anatomy of a human being. Right? He's like a weird like zombie hobbit, but he's got arms and legs and a head and like eyes and nose and mouth in the right place. You can transfer those tracking dots and you're like Benedict Cumberbatch gets on his tummy and you're like, well, his mouth is 15 feet long. He doesn't have arms.

• 1:27:12David Sims?

  He's the dragon.

• 1:27:13Griffin Newman?

  His legs are tiny.

• 1:27:14David Sims?

  I mean, and you know.

• 1:27:15Griffin Newman?

  You're like, you can't transfer that data onto the model we've already built. No.

• 1:27:20David Sims?

  Like, he was always a dragon.

• 1:27:22Griffin Newman?

  Right. He was like, so mocap, right? And they were like, um, I think just like.

• 1:27:26David Sims?

  And here's the.

• 1:27:28David Sims?

  And they were like, we haven't even turned it on yet.

• 1:27:30Griffin Newman?

  He was apparently so enamored with the idea of what Andy Serkis had done that he was like, I've always wanted to do mocap. And they were like, cool. And just let him do that. And we're like, uh, it was helpful to like, we could reference it.

• 1:27:50Griffin Newman?

  We could look at it.

• 1:27:51David Sims?

  I mean, they used the audio.

• 1:27:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, they did.

• 1:27:53David Sims?

  And I'm sure that the audio compared to what you could have captured if he was just standing in a quiet booth.

• 1:28:00Griffin Newman?

  No question.

• 1:28:00David Sims?

  And he.

• 1:28:01Griffin Newman?

  Superior. No question.

• 1:28:02David Sims?

  He, um, he does the necromancer as well. Like he, he plays multiple like mocap parts in those Hobbit movies.

• 1:28:10Griffin Newman?

  Right. Much like he played Dormammu in Doctor Strange.

• 1:28:16Griffin Newman?

  Remember he was a big head?

• 1:28:18David Sims?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18Griffin Newman?

  What's Dormammu up to these days?

• 1:28:20David Sims?

  I'm sure we'll find out. I'm sure he'll pop up in Avengers Doomsday, be like, I'm still here.

• 1:28:25Griffin Newman?

  Dormammu will return to Avengers.

• 1:28:27David Sims?

  Better. Dormammu rocks.

• 1:28:29Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, Dormammu's good.

• 1:28:31David Sims?

  Um, so the Cars That Ate Paris, what happens in this film? What are, you know, like, what, what, what do we need to fill in?

• 1:28:37Griffin Newman?

  Bruce Spence is rad as hell in this and it's important because it's like, George Miller sees this.

• 1:28:44David Sims?

  Yeah. And it's like, I want this guy because Bruce Spence is in Mad Max's one and two, right?

• 1:28:49Griffin Newman?

  Yes, he plays different characters.

• 1:28:51David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:28:51Griffin Newman?

  Yes. Uh, but no, but there's like a hundred percent a straight line to George Miller seeing this being like, oh my God.

• 1:28:56David Sims?

  Oh no, he's in two and three. I always.

• 1:28:58Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:28:58David Sims?

  Yeah, he's not in one.

• 1:29:00Griffin Newman?

  George Miller had to feel like he had built up his bones enough to be able to ask the great Bruce Spence.

• 1:29:06David Sims?

  Uh, the other films Bruce Spence is in, just to shout him out. So the whole thing with him is that he's like, is he seven feet? He's not quite that, but he's really tall.

• 1:29:14Griffin Newman?

  He's got one of the longest.

• 1:29:15David Sims?

  He's got this elongated head.

• 1:29:17Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:29:18David Sims?

  That like, just is so interesting. He's got this sort of big mouth and he plays, uh, like I said, the mouth of Sauron. He plays the train man in the Matrix Revolutions and he plays, uh, what's the guy in Star Wars called Teyon Mad- Madon?

• 1:29:35Griffin Newman?

  Teyon Medon. He's also, he's in Dark City. He's in Ace Ventura, When Nature Calls.

• 1:29:40David Sims?

  Yes, that I cannot remember.

• 1:29:42Griffin Newman?

  He's, uh, in the, the good PJ Hogan, Peter Pan.

• 1:29:45David Sims?

  Right. He was in apparently Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Men Tell No Tales. Can't say I remember that one.

• 1:29:52Griffin Newman?

  I haven't seen that one. Mayor Dick's Gods of Egypt. He's of course in I Frankenstein.

• 1:29:57David Sims?

  Apparently he's in The Chronicles of the Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I will be watching.

• 1:30:01Griffin Newman?

  You'll, you'll get into it.

• 1:30:03David Sims?

  In my Narnia project this year.

• 1:30:05Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:30:05David Sims?

  I'm reading all the books.

• 1:30:06Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Uh, and he's the, the voice of Chum in Finding Nemo.

• 1:30:10David Sims?

  And he's done a zillion TV shows and stuff and he's just an interesting guy.

• 1:30:13Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, he fucking rules and you should have been excited the first time I brought him up.

• 1:30:17David Sims?

  Never gotten over it.

• 1:30:18Griffin Newman?

  It's taken you 11 years. You acted like, what the fuck are you talking about? Who gives a shit? He's a legend.

• 1:30:25David Sims?

  He is a bit of a legend.

• 1:30:26Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, he is. Thank you.

• 1:30:27David Sims?

  And he's good in this. He plays one of the freak guys in the city.

• 1:30:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Guess what? Good casting.

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

  He collects Jaguar, um, the metal statues.

• 1:30:38Griffin Newman?

  Ornaments.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  The ornaments on the car.

• 1:30:40Griffin Newman?

  Or ornaments. Yeah.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  I love how for the, the gang, the young people gang,

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  their cars are all covered in graffiti, all fucked up. They look like they're, they could be in a, a roller derby.

• 1:30:54David Sims?

  Jerk.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  Is that a roller derby?

• 1:30:56David Sims?

  Absolutely. Yes. But you mean, wait, do you mean like a destruction derby?

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00David Sims?

  Although there's another word for it, which is Jim Kana.

• 1:31:03Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:31:03David Sims?

  Which is like an Australian motorsport.

• 1:31:06Griffin Newman?

  It's the sport of driving as fast as you possibly can. And it's, it's an evolution of them, a history of doing the same thing with horses. And it's not that it's like specifically like destruction derby. It's that you're just like, you just go as fast as you can and whatever happens, happens. And then at some point, I think that evolves into like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we just tried to wreck as much shit as possible and made it a little safer? It's just wild that there was a sport that's just like, how fast can this horse go? And then they create cars and they're like, I mean, obviously let's just push it to the limit.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  Really fun. But what I wanted to say is the design of the young people gang, they all wear car emblems.

• 1:31:49Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  That they've pulled from the various cars that, that have been.

• 1:31:53David Sims?

  And what would yours be then?

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  What would my car be? Or, I don't know.

• 1:31:59Griffin Newman?

  If you could design any hood ornament.

• 1:32:02Speaker 03

  If I could design any hornet.

• 1:32:04Griffin Newman?

  Hood ornament.

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  Hood ornament. I guess I would just do a pig.

• 1:32:10David Sims?

  Or a big bone?

• 1:32:11Speaker 03

  Or a big bone.

• 1:32:12Griffin Newman?

  Or a big bone.

• 1:32:12David Sims?

  But, but no, but yeah, no. Also, like if you were going to steal a hood ornament and have it be your totem.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  Just want to put that right on the record. That never happened.

• 1:32:24David Sims?

  You know, do you? Yeah. Do you want a Jaguar? Do you want a little Beamer Shield? I'm trying to think of like what the hood ornaments are.

• 1:32:30Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I'm looking at Swan.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  I mean, they're all Mercedes for prize, just because when you're a kid, you don't know anything. And you're like, that's fancy.

• 1:32:38David Sims?

  I think it is pretty fancy, isn't it?

• 1:32:41Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:32:43Griffin Newman?

  I found one of Bugs Bunny holding a shotgun. That would be mine.

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  But I just mentioned it because I think it's so visually striking and feels very proto Mad Max.

• 1:32:55Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I don't admittedly know enough about Australian culture in the 1970s and what this movie is coming out of to completely parse what I think Weir is working through. But it does feel like there is a through line in all of his movies of this sort of like clash of cultures that is very in conversation with the weird short history of Australia. As you said, David, that it's like a hard reset town of people just landing there, like pushing the indigenous aside and being like, this is ours now and we're going to try to like model it off of other successful colonialist societies.

• 1:33:37Griffin Newman?

  And so this idea of there being this town where they're just like, yes, we know how to be a town. This is a town where town things happen. And then there's this weird shit going on.

• 1:33:47David Sims?

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:33:48Griffin Newman?

  Like

• 1:33:48David Sims?

  I was hoping my hat.

• 1:33:49Griffin Newman?

  It is this town that is like only in conversation with itself and hostile to the rest of the world, but also the town is at odds with itself. There was this kind of ongoing roar between the older and the younger citizens of the town. And the younger citizens feel more chaotic.

• 1:34:05David Sims?

  They want to be crazy and the older citizens just want to have like a nice fancy town where they can have fancy parties, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:34:11Griffin Newman?

  But everyone's doing the crazy fucked up thing. The only disagreement is that the old people are like, let people die. Rummage their bodies and their wreckages and then have a very nice dinner.

• 1:34:24David Sims?

  Because it's all, the whole movie is building to this like, party. That they are doing this weird pastiche of like a fancy high society, British sort of ball or whatever. And like, obviously it's all ludicrous, but yes, that's what they want.

• 1:34:38Griffin Newman?

  A little bit of what was happening in Australia in the seventies at the time and what his early films seemed to be commenting on is this idea of like, much like in America, there is like a new wave of politically engaged, motivated, kind of like boundary pushing young people who are questioning the structures around them.

• 1:35:01David Sims?

  You know, and sometimes you push boundaries and sometimes you miss.

• 1:35:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, that's what the movie's about. This movie's really about getting fired from SNL. If you, if you, if you watch it really closely, he was a sketch comedian.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  These young people though are also part of the murders.

• 1:35:18David Sims?

  Yeah, oh no, they're guilty.

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  They're very guilty. They're just.

• 1:35:22Griffin Newman?

  That's what I find interesting.

• 1:35:23David Sims?

  It's more that the old people to me are pretending they're civilized and the young people really aren't.

• 1:35:29Griffin Newman?

  The commentary is that everyone's doing the exact same thing and they're having a philosophical disagreement about like being hedonist and owning the chaos versus like trying to put airs on top of it. Which I think is like very in line with like,

• 1:35:46Griffin Newman?

  hostilely taking over a country. Pushing the indigenous people aside and then being like, and we are a society of manners. We are now going to build nice houses and rules of like proper etiquette. And this is a moment where I think like younger Australians are sort of carving out their own identity and being like, why are we fucking doing these like impressions of like old British people from 200 years ago? What is this shit? I don't know. That's my read.

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  I think it's a good read.

• 1:36:14Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  I'm so tempted to connect it back to what's going on in America right now.

• 1:36:20David Sims?

  Do it.

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  It's very, I don't know, make America great again vibes.

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  You have like the old guard people who are just like, we need to go back to when

• 1:36:31David Sims?

  Right, they're going along with it because they just have these, right?

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  You know, and it benefited me. And then you have like the psychotic people who are extremely online, who are basically also supporting that, but want to go even more extreme.

• 1:36:46Griffin Newman?

  This is my take.

• 1:36:47David Sims?

  And they're blackpilled, one might call them.

• 1:36:48Griffin Newman?

  Yes. My, my take is that those people, whether they're conscious of it or not, what seems to be driving them is this desire to go back to like caveman times. Like everyone is just looking backwards and being like, fuck, this isn't working. Right? And there's like one side that's like, we agree, this isn't working. Can we push past this and like fix this? And the other side is just arguing about how far back they want to go.

• 1:37:13David Sims?

  I disagree. I think, um, all those guys just have our best interests at heart.

• 1:37:17Griffin Newman?

  Okay, then everything's good.

• 1:37:19David Sims?

  Don't you think so?

• 1:37:20Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  We should actually do an ad reads. Young person's blood, if you put it into you, will make you live forever. Great read.

• 1:37:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Uh, we're, we're so happy to be working with our new sponsors, Young Person's Blood. They're, they're a scrappy little startup. And here's what they do.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  Well, we trust them.

• 1:37:44Griffin Newman?

  They're based out of a small town with winding roads. People getting car crashes. They take all the young person's blood and you can get it shipped to your door once a month in a box the size of a mini fridge.

• 1:37:57David Sims?

  They'll spin it right into your blood.

• 1:37:59Griffin Newman?

  It's a lot of blood.

• 1:38:00David Sims?

  Uh.

• 1:38:01Griffin Newman?

  But the, my favorite part is unpacking it and the blood just all kind of like unfurls. It's an online mattress joke.

• 1:38:08David Sims?

  Yes, that's, that was funny. The, uh, conclusion of this film, the big party that I was referring to.

• 1:38:15Griffin Newman?

  Yes. The, the young people show up with some swastika cars. It is a subtle indication that perhaps they are not.

• 1:38:22David Sims?

  Things are going out of hand.

• 1:38:24Griffin Newman?

  Of the most sound line judgment of morals.

• 1:38:28David Sims?

  Yeah, and there's it's called the pioneers ball. It's like their dumb, you know, fancy dress party or whatever. Everyone goes insane and starts killing each other, I guess.

• 1:38:38Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:38:39David Sims?

  Uh, and Arthur finally like gets the guts to go behind the wheels of a car again.

• 1:38:43Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, I mean, we're not talking about Earth that much because he just kind of walked through the movie.

• 1:38:48Speaker 03

  Well, I think they kill each other, but because there's been so much tension that's been building because the young people have continued to kind of fuck with the town, keep driving through honking their horns, crashing into stuff.

• 1:38:58Griffin Newman?

  The inciting incident for the the final like melee is the young guys damaging this Aboriginal statue. And that is taken as like this great disrespect and offense by the old people who also clearly do not care about the Aboriginal at all. And then that kind of leads to the all out war.

• 1:39:18David Sims?

  Yes, uh, it's exciting stuff. It's cool. It it's cheap. I'm not mad about it, but like, you know, it does not have even the bravura of Mad Max, where Mad Max is cheaply made, but because it's like stark, empty roads, deserts, you know, like where it's like the the car action is so like striking.

• 1:39:38Griffin Newman?

  George Miller does the exact inverse of this, where he's like, that's the point.

• 1:39:42David Sims?

  Exactly.

• 1:39:43Griffin Newman?

  I'm I'm designing this entire movie around that stuff being as high impact as possible. And I'm marrying it to the simplest plot imaginable, which is guy needs revenge.

• 1:39:54David Sims?

  Guy needs revenge cuz family dead.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  It's got one of my favorite things you find in low budget movies. There's a part where our main character, he finally gets behind the wheel and he's being told by the mayor to keep crashing into one of the gang members. And it's done in this way where the the gang member could just get out of the car because he keeps like backing up and then like putting it, you know, it's like a manual and then crashing into him again. And he's just doing that thing of like, no, stop. Oh, please stop. You can't do this to me.

• 1:40:33Griffin Newman?

  It's a low budget film thing. I also think it's an inexperienced film thing. I've certainly been on productions where you're like rehearsing the scene and you go like, and it just hear me for a second. Why wouldn't I just get out of the car? And the director.

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  We have 10 minutes.

• 1:40:51Griffin Newman?

  The director.

• 1:40:52David Sims?

  I swear to God.

• 1:40:53Griffin Newman?

  The director like looks at you with panicked eyes and smiles and goes like, I think it's for this shot to work. I think they just won't even, the audience isn't even going to be thinking that. And then you screen the movie and the first question everyone has is, why didn't they open the door?

• 1:41:08Griffin Newman?

  It's not, when I'm talking about these things, you recognize only after you've made one film and then watch it back.

• 1:41:13David Sims?

  You know, you, and again, you, you can only budget so much time.

• 1:41:16Griffin Newman?

  And you start to get like smart, just you have the instincts in you from going through that process of like, which things are an audience going to bump against and which things will they not care about?

• 1:41:38David Sims?

  Let me see if there's anything here in the dossier that, uh, about the release of the film. Okay. Right. Okay.

• 1:41:44Griffin Newman?

  A big thing about this movie is.

• 1:41:46David Sims?

  Which sort of suggests.

• 1:41:47Griffin Newman?

  It goes to the Cannes Film Festival. It makes quite a splash. Roger Corman is interested. Cars That Ape Paris. That sounds like the kind of movie I would put out. He sees it. They're sort of talking about a deal. It falls apart. And then very shortly after he hires the great Paul Bertel and he goes, I have a title for you. Death Race 2000.

• 1:42:08David Sims?

  Great movie.

• 1:42:09Griffin Newman?

  And obviously this movie does not have a ton to do with Death Race 2000, but in much the same way that it sparked Mad Max for George Miller. I think Roger Corman saw this and is like, I could take this and try to recut it into being more the kind of movie that I put out.

• 1:42:24David Sims?

  Or make.

• 1:42:25Griffin Newman?

  What if I just made a movie where cars just did crazy shit the whole time?

• 1:42:28David Sims?

  Fucking wacky races.

• 1:42:30Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:42:30David Sims?

  With guns.

• 1:42:31Griffin Newman?

  Right. But I think this movie sparked him to be like, oh, you could do this in live action.

• 1:42:35David Sims?

  So Cars That Ape Paris, uh, you know, he, Weir says, I made this to be released internationally. Like I'm trying to bust out of the Australian, you know, bubble.

• 1:42:46Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:46David Sims?

  A little bit. Film was shot in fall of 73. It premieres at 74, probably at the Sydney Film Festival, opens in theaters, was not a big commercial hit, but a kind of like. You know, just starts to play, then it gets taken to can. What you just described happens if Corman gets interested, backs out of the deal at some point. New Line Cinema releases it in America in 1976 titled The Cars That Eat People.

• 1:43:10Griffin Newman?

  Add a narration.

• 1:43:11David Sims?

  Cut it, they add narration. I think they cut it to the bone.

• 1:43:14Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:14David Sims?

  Weir's pretty bummed out by all of that.

• 1:43:18Griffin Newman?

  But Picnic is already moving.

• 1:43:20David Sims?

  Absolutely. Oh my God. Right. At the bottom of this dossier, JJ has put our old employee and pal Nick Loriano, who's now a lawyer. Like went to law school, did like kind of a year of research for us and was like, I think it's time for me to go to law school. Went to law school, graduated, passed the bar, is a lawyer. I mean, love you, Nick.

• 1:43:41Griffin Newman?

  Blank Check, incredible stepping stone.

• 1:43:44David Sims?

  Seriously.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  What kind of lawyer is he?

• 1:43:47David Sims?

  I'm actually not sure the kind, I mean, like, I think he's like, he graduated maybe last year. So he's still doing, you know, he's still early in.

• 1:43:52Griffin Newman?

  Didn't you have to write him a job reference? We got like emails from the bar.

• 1:43:56David Sims?

  Yeah. Just being like, he says he worked for Blank Check for the, you know, and I was like, he did.

• 1:44:00Griffin Newman?

  Right.

• 1:44:00David Sims?

  You know, I just had to confirm.

• 1:44:01Griffin Newman?

  You had to respond and be like, they were like, we're just curious. We know there were some mistakes on the Elaine May series. Was he on staff?

• 1:44:08David Sims?

  No, not at all, not at all. He was not. Love you, Nick. Love you, Masha. They're living, they're doing great. Nick's doing great. But he, he did write a giant overview of the Australian sort of new wave in the film industry and all that. But I am not going to repeat that.

• 1:44:25Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 1:44:25David Sims?

  That's, that would be crazy.

• 1:44:26Griffin Newman?

  Very kind of you, but um, no, I just think it's an interesting case where he designs this to be a calling card film. But the picnic thing has already gone into movement because of the same short film he used.

• 1:44:42David Sims?

  I know, but then.

• 1:44:43Griffin Newman?

  To get this made.

• 1:44:44David Sims?

  He makes two different calling card movies that speak to different skills he has.

• 1:44:49Griffin Newman?

  No, it helps him tremendously.

• 1:44:50David Sims?

  Right.

• 1:44:51Griffin Newman?

  Cause this also has its own success.

• 1:44:53David Sims?

  Yeah. Feels like him, you know, pushing off of Cars That Ate Paris.

• 1:44:58Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:44:59David Sims?

  Right?

• 1:44:59Griffin Newman?

  But also I've shown the range that now people trust me that I've done it twice.

• 1:45:03David Sims?

  Gallipoli, you're like the big prestige stuff he's gonna do next feels like it's pushing off of Picnic. And then when he arrives in Hollywood to make Witness, he is a full package and he makes Witness. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Have you made Witness?

• 1:45:18Griffin Newman?

  I.

• 1:45:19David Sims?

  Hang your head in shame.

• 1:45:22Griffin Newman?

  I am ashamed to say.

• 1:45:25Griffin Newman?

  I'm ashamed to say I've not made Witness even once.

• 1:45:28David Sims?

  I'm going to play the box office game, Griffin. This film came out in America.

• 1:45:34Griffin Newman?

  So this is the new line cut, the cars that.

• 1:45:36David Sims?

  I suppose so, on the 11th of June, 1976. So.

• 1:45:42Griffin Newman?

  First of all, let's say happy birthday to America.

• 1:45:45David Sims?

  Oh, that's true. It was the bicentennial year.

• 1:45:49David Sims?

  Fun. I'm not seeing it in the top 10 here.

• 1:45:52Griffin Newman?

  America is not in the top 10? America is always number one at the box office, in my opinion.

• 1:45:57David Sims?

  Number one, however, is a movie with wheels.

• 1:46:01Griffin Newman?

  Okay. In 1976, is it a, is, no.

• 1:46:05David Sims?

  Wow, I just said wheels and he's guessing. Let's go.

• 1:46:07Griffin Newman?

  No, because I'm like Smokey and the Bandit 77.

• 1:46:09David Sims?

  That's famously 77, of course.

• 1:46:11Griffin Newman?

  Because it's the second highest grossing film. Behind Ben? What was the highest grossing film of 1977? I thought if there was any.

• 1:46:19David Sims?

  Star Wars.

• 1:46:20Griffin Newman?

  He nailed it. I was right. That's the one you would know.

• 1:46:24David Sims?

  Star Wars was the most successful film of that year, but Smokey and the Bandit, which I recently watched for what I think is the first full time. And Sally Field. Come.

• 1:46:36David Sims?

  Hot stuff.

• 1:46:37Griffin Newman?

  Well, how's she gonna call you if she doesn't have your number?

• 1:46:40David Sims?

  Okay. And my number is 1234567891011.

• 1:46:47David Sims?

  The film, this film I'm discussing, though.

• 1:46:49Griffin Newman?

  It's not a bird.

• 1:46:50David Sims?

  No.

• 1:46:50Griffin Newman?

  It's a car movie.

• 1:46:52David Sims?

  It has a, it has a vehicle in it.

• 1:46:53Griffin Newman?

  Oh, but it's not, you wouldn't primarily identify it as a car.

• 1:46:57David Sims?

  I've never seen this film and I know it mostly for its sort of memorable title. It's a very interesting sounding movie in that like the director is interesting. The stars are interesting. And.

• 1:47:10Griffin Newman?

  It's not like Tulane Blacktop. It's.

• 1:47:12David Sims?

  No, that's an awesome movie. That's like a crazy, you know, exploitation movie.

• 1:47:16Griffin Newman?

  The stars are interesting.

• 1:47:18David Sims?

  Yeah, well, so the first star is a comedian.

• 1:47:20Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:47:21David Sims?

  And as, as with all comedians of yesteryear. Nothing weird ever happened with this guy. Oh, actually, a bunch of weird shit happened to him.

• 1:47:28Griffin Newman?

  Okay, so is this one of the Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby movies?

• 1:47:31David Sims?

  You're right on the second in that the star of this film is Bill Cosby, but no, it's not directed by Sidney Poitier.

• 1:47:37Griffin Newman?

  But they also, they did buddy films.

• 1:47:39David Sims?

  I'm not talking about that, though. That's, this is something else.

• 1:47:42Griffin Newman?

  Talking about it and I needed you to tell me that it wasn't one of those.

• 1:47:44David Sims?

  But Bill Cosby is the star. Can I tell you his other two stars?

• 1:47:47Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48David Sims?

  Raquel Welch.

• 1:47:49Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:47:50David Sims?

  And Harvey Keitel.

• 1:47:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, this movie is called.

• 1:47:54David Sims?

  Do you remember? And it's about them running an ambulance service, but like an Indy ambulance service.

• 1:48:01Griffin Newman?

  I know the poster.

• 1:48:02David Sims?

  Yes. It's got a very memorable title. And let me tell you that, uh, Bill Cosby's character is called Mother. And Raquel Welch's character is called Jugs.

• 1:48:15Griffin Newman?

  Interesting.

• 1:48:15David Sims?

  And what is Harvey Keitel's character called? I've given you two of the three words of the title.

• 1:48:21Griffin Newman?

  Gnome?

• 1:48:22David Sims?

  Speed.

• 1:48:23Griffin Newman?

  Wow.

• 1:48:23David Sims?

  Film is called Mother, Jugs and Speed.

• 1:48:25Griffin Newman?

  Oh, of course. There we go. Okay.

• 1:48:26David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:48:27Griffin Newman?

  Took me a long time to put that together.

• 1:48:28David Sims?

  Yes. Uh, I have not seen it. It's directed by Peter Yates, who's like, you know, a real director. Uh, and I assume it's a bunch of crazy car antics and stuff like that. Um, but I mostly, I feel like I mostly know it because it's called Mother, Jugs.

• 1:48:43Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, same. It's a good title.

• 1:48:45David Sims?

  Fuck is that?

• 1:48:45Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:46David Sims?

  Uh, so that's number one at the box office. It's crushing. Number two at the box office is the film that will win best picture in 1976.

• 1:48:53Griffin Newman?

  Rocky?

• 1:48:54David Sims?

  Nope.

• 1:48:55Griffin Newman?

  Rocky 75?

• 1:48:56David Sims?

  Oh, you know, wait, wait a second. I take it back. Rocky wins best picture in 76.

• 1:49:00Griffin Newman?

  Thank you.

• 1:49:00David Sims?

  However, this film is nominated for best picture and wins other Oscars.

• 1:49:04Griffin Newman?

  It wins other Oscars.

• 1:49:05David Sims?

  It does.

• 1:49:06Griffin Newman?

  Is it network?

• 1:49:07David Sims?

  Nope. Good guess, though, because I think that is one. The Rocky year is crazy.

• 1:49:11Griffin Newman?

  The Rocky.

• 1:49:12David Sims?

  It's like the, the, the five nominees are all amazing.

• 1:49:15Griffin Newman?

  Right. Cause, uh, Taxi Driver's in there as well?

• 1:49:19David Sims?

  Taxi Driver's in there, but that's not this movie.

• 1:49:21Griffin Newman?

  All the President's Men is in there?

• 1:49:22David Sims?

  There you go.

• 1:49:22Griffin Newman?

  There we go.

• 1:49:23David Sims?

  The fifth, of course, is Bound for Glory.

• 1:49:25Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:49:25David Sims?

  Possibly the most forgotten, but still good movie.

• 1:49:27Griffin Newman?

  A movie I like tremendously. Hal Ashby.

• 1:49:29David Sims?

  And famous for early Steadicam and all that.

• 1:49:32Griffin Newman?

  It's like the first Hollywood Steadicam movie.

• 1:49:34David Sims?

  So.

• 1:49:34Griffin Newman?

  That camera's smooth as hell.

• 1:49:36David Sims?

  Sure is.

• 1:49:36Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:37David Sims?

  Um, but no, this is, uh, All the President's Men.

• 1:49:40Griffin Newman?

  Okay. A terrific picture. Have you ever seen it, Ben?

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:49:43Griffin Newman?

  It's, you're just like, why isn't every movie this?

• 1:49:49Griffin Newman?

  A little bit.

• 1:49:49Speaker 03

  Adding it to the list.

• 1:49:50Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:51David Sims?

  Um, all the president's friends. So that's.

• 1:49:53Griffin Newman?

  Do you know what it's about back?

• 1:49:54David Sims?

  Hilariously a summer movie.

• 1:49:56Griffin Newman?

  It's about what, what if we.

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  President's boys.

• 1:49:59Griffin Newman?

  What if we couldn't trust the president of the United States of America?

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:50:03Griffin Newman?

  What if crimes were happening? Of course, journalists would be able to hold them to account. We'd fix the problem.

• 1:50:10Griffin Newman?

  David, what's next at the box office?

• 1:50:12David Sims?

  So that's number two. Number three at the box office this week is a Western. Kind of a, uh, you know, kind of a revisionist Western.

• 1:50:22Griffin Newman?

  It's not a Clint.

• 1:50:24David Sims?

  No, it is not. No, it's two major movie stars.

• 1:50:29Griffin Newman?

  Oh, is it the, um, it's two major movie stars.

• 1:50:33David Sims?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:34Griffin Newman?

  Young or old?

• 1:50:35David Sims?

  One of them's on the older end of his career, uh, but he's had a, you know, in the seventies, he's had his big comeback.

• 1:50:41Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:50:41David Sims?

  He's won an Oscar recently.

• 1:50:42Griffin Newman?

  Is it a Wayne?

• 1:50:43David Sims?

  Nope.

• 1:50:44Griffin Newman?

  No, no, it's not a Wayne.

• 1:50:47David Sims?

  Not John Wayne.

• 1:50:48Griffin Newman?

  He's had a big seventies comeback.

• 1:50:50David Sims?

  Yeah, he's not, he's not like a Western actor.

• 1:50:52Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. And then the other guy's young.

• 1:50:54David Sims?

  Uh, younger. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Uh, I would say he, he got his, he became a star a little later. Like he's probably in his thirties, but at this point he's a huge star.

• 1:51:04Griffin Newman?

  At this point, he's a huge star.

• 1:51:06David Sims?

  Certainly.

• 1:51:07Griffin Newman?

  Certainly.

• 1:51:08David Sims?

  Uh, it is not a film I've ever seen.

• 1:51:10Griffin Newman?

  1976.

• 1:51:11David Sims?

  Uh, I think at the time it was seen, it was like.

• 1:51:17Griffin Newman?

  Missouri Breaks?

• 1:51:17David Sims?

  Flop. And like then it.

• 1:51:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah, Missouri Breaks.

• 1:51:20David Sims?

  It's the film is, uh, Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks starring Marlon Brando.

• 1:51:24Griffin Newman?

  Jack Nicholson.

• 1:51:24David Sims?

  And Jack Nicholson.

• 1:51:25Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26David Sims?

  You've also got Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton, Frederick Forrest.

• 1:51:29Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Must've been a dry set.

• 1:51:31David Sims?

  Uh, good.

• 1:51:33Griffin Newman?

  Joke about how all those people like to drink.

• 1:51:35David Sims?

  Oh, sure. Right, right, right. Um.

• 1:51:37Griffin Newman?

  I don't know.

• 1:51:37David Sims?

  M. Night Shyamalan.

• 1:51:38Griffin Newman?

  Got a second episode to record today.

• 1:51:40David Sims?

  We do. M. Night Shyamalan's old. If you remember Rufus Sewell keeps asking for the title of this movie. And it's like a sign of his dementia.

• 1:51:48Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:51:49David Sims?

  As he's getting old on the beach.

• 1:51:50Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:50David Sims?

  Just thinking about that recently.

• 1:51:52Griffin Newman?

  No one does it like M. Night.

• 1:51:53David Sims?

  Missouri Breaks feels like a film I own on disc because like Radiance put out a gigantic box of it. I'm not sure if that's true, but even if it isn't, it will be at some point, right? You know what I mean?

• 1:52:04Griffin Newman?

  Yes.

• 1:52:06David Sims?

  Where I'll, I'll look it up and it'll be like, yeah, this movie was a huge bomb. And I'm like, interesting. $60, you say? Uh, number four, the box office. How you doing Bear?

• 1:52:17Griffin Newman?

  How am I doing Bear?

• 1:52:18David Sims?

  Bear.

• 1:52:19Griffin Newman?

  Well.

• 1:52:20David Sims?

  Great.

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  Wait, that's the name?

• 1:52:22David Sims?

  No.

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:52:23David Sims?

  Fourth of the box office is a film I've never heard of. I'm looking it up. It is a crime drama. A prison drama. It's got a young Tommy Lee Jones in it. I can tell you that much.

• 1:52:33Griffin Newman?

  Okay. Is it?

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  And he still, of course, looked like a old hound dog.

• 1:52:38David Sims?

  He has looked like an old hound dog since he was born.

• 1:52:40Griffin Newman?

  Is it the Tommy Lee Jones, William Devane movie?

• 1:52:42David Sims?

  No, that's, um, Rolling Thunder.

• 1:52:45Griffin Newman?

  That, that's the title I was looking for.

• 1:52:46David Sims?

  Uh, no, it's a film I've never heard of. It directed by Michael Miller, starring Yvette Mimi. Uh, the sort of, uh, ingenue of, of, of, and it's got Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Carradine.

• 1:52:59Griffin Newman?

  Is it called Lock Me Up, Why Don't Ya?

• 1:53:01David Sims?

  It's called, it's called Lock Me Up, Why Don't Ya? In, in the least surprising news of all time, it was at one point selected by Tarantino for the first Quentin Tarantino Film Festival.

• 1:53:11Griffin Newman?

  Doesn't sound like his kind of thing.

• 1:53:12David Sims?

  The film is called Jackson County Jail.

• 1:53:15Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:53:16David Sims?

  Yes.

• 1:53:16Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 1:53:16David Sims?

  And it's just one of those movies where I'm like, does Quentin Tarantino scroll, scroll, scroll? Yeah, he likes this one. Okay. It's like a drive-in movie, you know? Uh, and then number five at the box office, uh, is a film I have heard of but not seen. It is a, another sort of exploitation movie. It's like a rape revenge film. Uh, starring, um, Margot Hemingway, not Mariel.

• 1:53:40Griffin Newman?

  Oh.

• 1:53:41David Sims?

  But Mariel is also in it.

• 1:53:42Griffin Newman?

  Yes, fuck, because I think this is Mariel's first movie.

• 1:53:46David Sims?

  I think so. She plays Margot's sister in the film.

• 1:53:48Griffin Newman?

  I believe we talked about this in our Star 80 episode, Normal. Um.

• 1:53:54David Sims?

  That's an episode I definitely haven't erased from my memory at all.

• 1:53:58Griffin Newman?

  I remember every episode vividly and I, part of that's obviously I re-listen to all of them every night. I queue them up. Like that one Flaming Lips album on different players around my room and now I have a thousand players.

• 1:54:14Griffin Newman?

  This movie is, is it, is it the character's name?

• 1:54:17David Sims?

  No, it's something a girl might wear.

• 1:54:20Griffin Newman?

  Lipstick.

• 1:54:20David Sims?

  That's right. The film is called Lipstick.

• 1:54:25David Sims?

  And I've never seen it. Lamont Johnson movie. Was also quite controversial at the time, I think, because it's a lurid.

• 1:54:35David Sims?

  You've also got One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which won Best Picture the prior year. Still hanging out in June.

• 1:54:39Griffin Newman?

  Yep.

• 1:54:40David Sims?

  You have a film called, and I'm going to guess this film probably wasn't an Oscar contender. Poor White Trash. Part two. Scum of the Earth.

• 1:54:50Griffin Newman?

  Who's got that IP?

• 1:54:53Griffin Newman?

  Is anyone working on that?

• 1:54:55David Sims?

  Have no idea what the fuck that is. Wikipedia is like, never heard of it.

• 1:55:00Griffin Newman?

  Stars Laurence Olivier?

• 1:55:02David Sims?

  So I see it was, it was initially called Scum of the Earth. And then it was re-released under the popular title. Poor White Trash.

• 1:55:09Griffin Newman?

  Great.

• 1:55:10David Sims?

  Anyway, it looks like it's a movie about like Beethoven or something. And then you've got. New this week, the, the, um, Dario Argento film, Deep Red.

• 1:55:19Griffin Newman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:20David Sims?

  Which I recently watched my disc of that. I got a new disc of that one.

• 1:55:23Griffin Newman?

  Congratulations.

• 1:55:23David Sims?

  Pretty fun movie with David Hemmings and those big bushy brows.

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  I've never watched any of his films.

• 1:55:30David Sims?

  Argento?

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:55:31David Sims?

  They're fun.

• 1:55:31Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32David Sims?

  They're a good time.

• 1:55:33Griffin Newman?

  You like colors, Ben?

• 1:55:34David Sims?

  Do you like women getting impaled?

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  I would say I like colors.

• 1:55:39Griffin Newman?

  Okay.

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  Not a big and pale guy.

• 1:55:42David Sims?

  Well, then you're going to be, you know, up and down on these ones.

• 1:55:44Griffin Newman?

  Come see, come saw.

• 1:55:46David Sims?

  They, you've still got The Exorcist.

• 1:55:49Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:55:50David Sims?

  Already hanging out.

• 1:55:50Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51David Sims?

  And then you still have got a great movie, The Bad News Bears, a baseball classic. That's what's in the box office when, uh, but, but I mean, it's, it's a gnarly box office. It is a lot of fucked up seventies exploitation movies.

• 1:56:03Griffin Newman?

  It's a grimy town.

• 1:56:04David Sims?

  Like as much as you're like, okay, sure. There's also All the President's Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But even those are, you know, edgier movies.

• 1:56:10Griffin Newman?

  And those are, those are like disillusioned movies.

• 1:56:12David Sims?

  Totally. And then you're like, okay. And then what was the kind of like, you know, sort of sillier fare? And it's like, it's a bunch of like really nasty stuff.

• 1:56:19Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20David Sims?

  Yeah. Good times.

• 1:56:21Griffin Newman?

  Right. Like movies, the movies with the one liner, what if a guy got shot?

• 1:56:28Griffin Newman?

  What if a person was bad?

• 1:56:32David Sims?

  Entirely true.

• 1:56:33Griffin Newman?

  What if crimes happened?

• 1:56:35David Sims?

  What if crimes happened? Well, next week.

• 1:56:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39David Sims?

  Pretty different vibe.

• 1:56:40Griffin Newman?

  Pretty different vibe.

• 1:56:41David Sims?

  Is approaching, right? We don't have anything in the way. We're going right to Picnic and Hanging Rock next week.

• 1:56:46Griffin Newman?

  Yes, we're doing the vibe shift. We're taking a picnic. Jane Schoenbrunn, the great filmmaker, returning to the show.

• 1:56:51David Sims?

  That's right, to talk about Picnic and Hanging Rock. So enjoy that. And then, of course, yes, going forward, we've got Peter. We are Peter. We are Peter. We are. We're gonna take one little break for Mandalorian Grogu, but that's not till the end of May. So we're on the We're train.

• 1:57:05Griffin Newman?

  We're on the We're train.

• 1:57:06David Sims?

  Weird.

• 1:57:07Griffin Newman?

  Can we? Should we announce our Mandalorian guest?

• 1:57:10David Sims?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:57:11Griffin Newman?

  I cause.

• 1:57:11David Sims?

  Barring some, you know, future scheduling problem. He's on the spreadsheet.

• 1:57:16Griffin Newman?

  Gethard.

• 1:57:16David Sims?

  Chris Gethard.

• 1:57:17Griffin Newman?

  Main feed, Star Wars movie.

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  He's back.

• 1:57:20Griffin Newman?

  He's back. And I'm going to promise all of you that we will spend 40 minutes at the top talking about Spider-Man 2.

• 1:57:27David Sims?

  We're gonna stay on topic. Yes, we're bringing Geth in for that episode and Griff is promising to watch all of Disney's live action Star Wars TV shows to catch up.

• 1:57:38Griffin Newman?

  I have watched Obi-Wan Kenobi.

• 1:57:40David Sims?

  Yeah, he watched that one and weirdly didn't feel motivated to watch a lot more.

• 1:57:44Griffin Newman?

  You know what's the worst feeling in the world? To like, watch a third Obi-Wan Kenobi episode? Most boring shit I've ever seen in my life? And then be like, I'm still awake? Do you know what I'm saying? Like.

• 1:57:57David Sims?

  How am I not in my Odin sleep, my eternal slumber?

• 1:58:00Griffin Newman?

  To be fighting insomnia so hard, put on the most boring shit anyone's ever made and then still be awake at 3 o'clock in the morning.

• 1:58:07David Sims?

  This is the mistake I made. I put on Antiques Roadshow last night when I couldn't sleep. Too exciting.

• 1:58:12Griffin Newman?

  Too exciting. Obi-Wan has the opposite problem.

• 1:58:15David Sims?

  I'm gonna do Obi-Wan.

• 1:58:16Griffin Newman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:16David Sims?

  I know.

• 1:58:17Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's like eating, it's like eating a turkey Alfred Hitchcock style.

• 1:58:22David Sims?

  Genuine question, what is next for you?

• 1:58:25Griffin Newman?

  I.

• 1:58:25David Sims?

  Which one will you tackle next?

• 1:58:27Griffin Newman?

  I think it is, is it Andor season one? I'm going through in.

• 1:58:30David Sims?

  Oh, you're trying to go in release order? Okay.

• 1:58:33Griffin Newman?

  I think that's right.

• 1:58:34David Sims?

  Yeah, I would assume so.

• 1:58:35Griffin Newman?

  I think it's Andor season one, then Mando season three.

• 1:58:40David Sims?

  Cause you, sorry.

• 1:58:43David Sims?

  Wait, because like, is the idea, we're doing live action only?

• 1:58:47Griffin Newman?

  Live action only.

• 1:58:48David Sims?

  Uh, so you've seen Mando, season one and two.

• 1:58:50Griffin Newman?

  Correct. And book, I opened the book. I opened the book and trust me, I closed it and put it back on the shelf.

• 1:58:57David Sims?

  Uh, yes. So the next thing for you to watch is Andor, season one.

• 1:59:00Griffin Newman?

  It's happening, folks. You can stop haranguing me.

• 1:59:02David Sims?

  Uh, and then you're going to make the incredibly foolish decision of not just watching Andor, season two, which is what you should do.

• 1:59:09Griffin Newman?

  I'm gonna space it out.

• 1:59:10David Sims?

  Oh, that's a terrible idea.

• 1:59:11Griffin Newman?

  I'm gonna watch Man- It is Mando three next.

• 1:59:13David Sims?

  Then it would be Mando three.

• 1:59:15Griffin Newman?

  Then it's Ahsoka?

• 1:59:17David Sims?

  Then it's Ahsoka, season one.

• 1:59:19Griffin Newman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:59:20David Sims?

  As someone who did watch it, oh my, oh my God. Then the Acolyte you have seen.

• 1:59:25Griffin Newman?

  Acolyte I have seen.

• 1:59:26David Sims?

  So you don't have to watch that. Then Skeleton Crew.

• 1:59:28Griffin Newman?

  Yes. And then Andor, season two.

• 1:59:30David Sims?

  Andor, season two, carry on top.

• 1:59:31Griffin Newman?

  Look, I understand that I'm depriving myself of joy and forcing myself to crawl back through the fucking Shawshank Redemption poop tube. But I think it will make it that much more satisfying. The other side, when I'm standing in the rain and the Thomas Newman music is blaring.

• 1:59:47David Sims?

  My fear is you'll just give up.

• 1:59:49Griffin Newman?

  I'm not gonna give up.

• 1:59:50David Sims?

  He's not kidding.

• 1:59:50Griffin Newman?

  I've, I'm, I never give up, never surrender. That's from Star Wars, right? Uh, anyway, yes, Peter Weir. We're doing it just with a little break from our friends, the Mandalorian and Gregor.

• 2:00:02David Sims?

  There you go.

• 2:00:03Griffin Newman?

  Yeah. Uh, thank you all for listening. Please remember, rate, review and subscribe. Tune in next week for Picnic and Hanging Rock with Jane Schoenbrum. And as always, ciao.

• 2:00:19Griffin Newman?

  David pushed his mic away in disgust.

• 2:00:24Speaker 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 Bardis 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, Ollie Moss and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is Minic. 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

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  and bonus episodes. 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. Okay, I'm rolling.

• 2:01:22Griffin Newman?

  Well, wait a second, I'm not ready.

• 2:01:23David Sims?

  I don't give a shit.

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  That's okay.

• 2:01:26Griffin Newman?

  Fuck you.

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  But we're ready to go.

• 2:01:28David Sims?

  Fuck.

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  I don't give a shit. Fuck. This is the first in the mini.

• 2:01:32David Sims?

  Fuck.

• 2:01:33Speaker 03

  God.

• 2:01:33David Sims?

  Unfortunately.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  I'm happy to shame myself as a cold opener.

• 2:01:38David Sims?

  You know, I kind of shame you.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  No, no, that'd be a little shame.

• 2:01:41David Sims?

  There should be a little shame on the books.

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  And I'd, what was the shame? It was like a Channel 4, like Eyewitness News.

• 2:01:51Griffin Newman?

  Oh, sure. Shame on you.

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, remember this?

• 2:01:54Griffin Newman?

  The big cartoon finger graphic.

• 2:01:56David Sims?

  I do not remember that.

• 2:01:57Speaker 03

  You don't remember this?

• 2:01:57Griffin Newman?

  Oh, my dad was obsessed with shame on you.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  It was like one of those classic things where the local news has some correspondent who like goes to local businesses, struggling local businesses and like yells at them because they have like a dirty bathroom.

• 2:02:13David Sims?

  Right.

• 2:02:14Griffin Newman?

  Or it'd be like, an old woman would be like, the pamphlet said bananas were 15 cents and I went to the store and they charged me 20. And then he goes in with like a camera crew.

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  What's the matter with you? He's like, you've ruined this lady's experience with getting bananas.

• 2:02:33Griffin Newman?

  Shame on you. And then a big cartoon finger like points at the guy.

• 2:02:38Speaker 03

  Yes, that's what I want. I want you guys to burst in with the camera crew and shame me.

• 2:02:44Griffin Newman?

  Big cartoon finger.

• 2:02:45Speaker 03

  With a big cartoon finger.