The 1982 Movie Draft

We’re drafting again! Sean, Amanda, and Chris are joined by the resident physical-media king of 'The Big Picture,' Tracy Letts, to draft movies from 1982 and take stock of the biggest ways the film world has changed in the past 40 years. Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Tracy Letts and Chris Ryan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Video Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi everyone, it's Amy Poehler and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. In preparation for that, I asked some of my friends to send in some videos and give me some advice.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Just be yourself and the guests will come. Don't be the celebrity that this is their like sixth thing they're doing.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I love true crime and cooking podcasts. Is there any way you could combine the two? Well, everyone has an opinion and a podcast. So, join me for Good Hang. It's rough out there. We're just trying to lighten it up a little.

• 0:30Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is presented by Audi. The all-new, fully-electric Audi Q6 e-tron is a huge leap forward, featuring effortless power, serious acceleration, and the most advanced tech of any Audi ever. Experience technology that puts you center stage with a panoramic digital stage, plus an optional screen for front seat passengers, so they can kick back with a movie. Q6 e-tron is not just a new EV, it's a new way to experience driving. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. Always pay careful attention to the road and do not drive while distracted.

• 1:04Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about 1982. We are drafting again, which means Chris Ryan, CR, is here.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:14Sean Fennessey?

  We are also joined by a special guest and returning champion, Tracy Letts. Movie fan Tracy Letts. You have many other descriptors that could apply, but today you are a movie fan. Welcome back.

• 1:25Speaker 04

  What a pleasure to be on the Big Picture. What a pleasure. What a pleasure. Hi, everybody.

• 1:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Hello. What a pleasure to have you back.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  It's great to have this moment of peace before we do battle in this big draft. Are you a competitive drafter? Do you look at this as just a pure celebration of cinema?

• 1:40Speaker 04

  I would be competitive if I felt that the result was in question.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, got it.

• 1:46Sean Fennessey?

  So, you have frankly, quite arrogantly, been taunting me about the future of a draft experience here. And you have...

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Confident.

• 1:57Sean Fennessey?

  Confidently, okay. You had a year in mind from the very, very beginning. You always wanted to do this year.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  I don't remember me saying 1982.

• 2:06Sean Fennessey?

  The first time we met, you said, "I have a year. I have the year. You haven't done this year. I don't know why you haven't done it." You threw a few other years at me, but you said, "We should do 1982."

• 2:16Speaker 04

  I don't envy you people and your memories.

• 2:21Sean Fennessey?

  It's honestly haunting me at this point, phase of my life. I mean, I was just joking with you the other day. I can't remember emotional, personal experiences nine days ago.

• 2:30Amanda Dobbins?

  But is it related to the history of film? And or is it like a footnote in something than Sean's? Sean's got it locked down.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Who financed a 2011 independent horror film? He's got it.

• 2:40Sean Fennessey?

  I got that. I can hold that. Uh, 82.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:43Sean Fennessey?

  Why was this the pick for you?

• 2:45Speaker 04

  I don't recall.

• 2:46Sean Fennessey?

  You don't even know what you're talking about. No, that's ridiculous.

• 2:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Just refer to the text.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  I'm absolutely truthful in that I do not recall ever saying the year 1982. It's a great year. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm delighted to be drafted in 1982. No, it is not a bit. I don't, I have no recollection.

• 3:04Sean Fennessey?

  Walking the streets of New York, I remember this vividly. And we were talking about movies that were released in that year. You were telling, I want to see you were telling me some stories of movies you had seen in the theater as a young man. As a young kid.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  I'm not cursed by these things you people call memories.

• 3:19Sean Fennessey?

  That's, that's, that's incredible. Okay. Well then do you, what does 1982 mean to you? If anything, if it's nothing, I'll just go to Amanda.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  No, no, it means a lot. Well, were any of you alive in 1982?

• 3:29Sean Fennessey?

  I was born in the year 1982.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  There you go. Well, this is your birth year, right?

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  I was gonna bring that up after he finished his soliloquy that doesn't exist, apparently.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  You're not quite born?

• 3:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, not there.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I was five.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  You were five in 1982? Well, gather round. From the hills and valleys, they gather round to hear about 1982.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  It was morning in America.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  I was 16 at the beginning of the year. Would turn 17 that year. So finishing junior year of high school and beginning senior year of high school. So yeah, obviously a huge year for me and personal life and my relationship to the movies. Uh, I was, you know, a, a, a king of the virgin super dorks.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Chris? I was in a band called Virgin Super Dorks.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  I just played rhythm guitar there.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  I, uh... In Oklahoma? In Oklahoma, in a small town in Oklahoma. I think it's the year... Maybe, uh, probably this happens at different ages for different people, but I think it was the first year for me that I started to own my super dorkness and I started to realize, oh, this might actually be a benefit. This might be an asset and not a... You know, I can stop torturing myself about what people in high school think. I don't actually live on the island with the other English schoolboys. I'm gonna go out into the world, you know? And so, uh, I started to celebrate that, I think, as a sixteen-year-old.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  You know, as a senior in high school, we were able to take fewer hours in high school and able to take college courses at the local college. So I started taking theater classes. I had discovered acting at fifteen. I discovered acting the year before. So I was a fledgling artist. And so, that changed everything for me. It changed my outlook, my attitude toward art, certainly. You know, you start to develop, uh... Well, you start to develop your taste, really, and you start to say, these are the things I like and these are the things I don't like. And, uh, and of course, you're very arrogant about that stuff. You believe that your way is the right way.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  So, it was a key year in that way.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  What was the sort of, uh, movie theater situation with where you were growing up there? And like, did you have to travel to go to... Were there art house theaters back then? Or was it just like one movie theater town or...?

• 6:02Speaker 04

  There were no art house theaters. So in my town, there was, uh, at this point, the pornographic drive-in had closed.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  So there was just the theater downtown, single screen.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  A pornographic drive-in?

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Pornographic drive-in, yeah. He said with great curiosity.

• 6:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I had some.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Call my financial advisor.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  It was called the the Skyview. In our in our town, we called it the Skinview because you could see it driving down the highway. That closed by this point by 1982. So there was the ship drive in. And I worked there. It was my summer job was working at the drive in. I mowed the lawn. I brought in the broken speakers to be repaired. I worked the snack bar, cooked the food, sold the food, and I would sometimes operate the projector. We had these big platter reel projectors. Do you know what these are? It's it's so you could instead of having to switch between two arc light projectors with every reel switch,

• 7:00Speaker 04

  you would put the all the reels would arrive in their in their canisters, brutalist style. And the guy who ran the the theater, he actually had an editing bay in the projection booth and he would splice.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  The different reels together and put them on this enormous platter reel, horizontal platter reel. And so that way you could start the movie and the movie would just run. Of course, Durant, Oklahoma, drive in in 1982, the the prints were all chewed up and stretched. Quite often, the the nudity had been snipped out of the out of.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  I was gonna ask if you did any Fight Club style subliminal messaging into the to the to the reels.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  I didn't ever get to that myself. It was a little advanced for me, but I think they were clipping them not because they were censoring them. I think that just horny projectionists were making their own.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  You know, we didn't have a we didn't have the access back then that you have now.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Real heroes.

• 7:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yeah, just but those were just for stag parties. Yeah, that's fun times. You think you would have done well in 1982, Oklahoma?

• 8:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Would I have done well in 1982? I think by by 88, I could have been thriving.

• 8:11Sean Fennessey?

  Is that because that's the year of working girl?

• 8:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, sure, yeah.

• 8:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's convenient.

• 8:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, and, and we're not far away from when Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron is doing her thing, you know, eighty-two, I don't know a lot about eighty-two, and it's funny, so, when I do the research for these, these years that predate my film awareness, or existence, like, it's funny what gets handed down to you by your parents, and I love my parents, and they taught me a lot, but like, a pretty bad job on like, the popular cinema of the seventies and eighties, they just didn't think to put me in front of things with some notable exceptions, which may come up during the draft. So, this is a year where I had a lot of, of blank spots, because the other way that I would educate myself, besides like,

• 9:00Amanda Dobbins?

  what becomes canonized, or, you know, at least like, called classic, is the Oscars. And, this is an interesting year at the Oscars, sort of, I, I guess, remembered, but, um, maybe not, the winners are not like, what I would seek out, I don't know.

• 9:18Sean Fennessey?

  As with most Oscar years, there's some interesting choices.

• 9:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Very Oscar-y. So, I don't know, I have some favorites, but it's not, it, my list might be eccentric, my, my, it also might involve some Googling at some point, depending on how the draft order and the genres work out, but that's okay.

• 9:37Sean Fennessey?

  This is, this is my birth year, as we said, and thank God that happened, you know, where would we all be, would we all be together? I think we're all. If not for that, thank you, thank you. Every day I wake up and I say. Eighty-two, yeah, thanks Cindy and Ed. Um, my parents were not cinephiles, my mom was a big movie fan, my dad, not so much, big readers, my parents, readers of fiction, and. Like, uptake, or? Uh, sure. Yeah. It could, it could go that highbrow, if you so choose, a lot of Stephen King in the house, my father, a big Nelson DeMille fan, a Long Island cop, he is.

• 10:11Sean Fennessey?

  But I like, I'm not sure, certainly they saw, for example, E.T., the Extraterrestrial, because every living human in America saw that movie in 1982, but I'm not even sure that my parents went to the movie theater to watch Gandhi, which went on to win Best Picture. So I'm not sure if I was necessarily handed some of these movies. I mean, we've talked many times over the years about how we were kind of drawn to the glow of the TV set showing the Academy Awards and that being an entry point into this kind of movie love. And then also, you know, on the side, this is also a great year for genre movies. There's a great number of science fiction thriller movies that I'm sure will come up a lot in conversation.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Great year for comedy, too.

• 10:49Sean Fennessey?

  It was.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Really surprising, deep comedy.

• 10:52Sean Fennessey?

  And mature comedy, too. Not quite the same, like juvenile sort of thing that you think of. I don't know, you're five years old, your parents take you to the movies, your father's a film critic.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was working at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I don't have any clear, like, actual legitimate memory. I asked my mom and she was like, I'm pretty sure we took you to E.T. So E.T.'s probably one of my, one of those movies that I don't remember a time it wasn't in my life. Now, I spent a lot of time, like, not really checking for that. Like, I've never really gone back until we did rewatchables recently. Or not recently, that was probably two years ago, but like...

• 11:24Amanda Dobbins?

  It was, Max was two months old and I was on leave listening to it and like weeping. It was just like as soon as the music, I was just like, ah! Yeah, it was three years ago.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  But yeah, that was definitely like one of my, my first memories of like a movie always being in my life, like, you know, and then that, I, I even remember like the explosion in Reese's Pieces popularity. I think like that lasted for years after that. So yeah, I mean, I was...

• 11:49Speaker 04

  I think they were, weren't they made for that movie? I don't think they existed before E.T. I think it was a movie tie-in.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  That would, that would make sense. So yeah, and then, um, one of the things that struck me, and the reason why I was asking you about like the infrastructure of like how you watched movies back then is to take it full circle to where we are now is how many of these movies were very difficult to watch, uh, over the last couple of weeks to try and find a decent copy of it or a decent looking print of it, which a lot of this stuff is on Tubi or, you know, is... Kind of like an example of like what happens when we turn over all of our movie watching to techno- technology companies is you just lose swaths of cinema history here.

• 12:31Sean Fennessey?

  You've just put the ball in the tee for the king of physical.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Well, I figured.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Well, I saw almost all these movies in the movie theater. At this time, of course, I'm at the movies every conceivable chance I had. So I saw most of these movies on the big screen. But of course, we're also only a couple of years away from home video. And so you would re-watch these movies over and over again on VHS. Or if you had missed them the first time around, you'd see them for the first time on VHS. And it's only now seeing them in Blu-ray or 4K that you go, oh, man, that VHS really sucked.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  I don't really remember what this movie looked like at all.

• 13:08Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny you say that. I was just saying on an episode of the Rewatchables that The Blues Brothers, which we did an episode of, was that one of the first times in a long time where while watching the movie on Blu-ray, I thought, I wish I was watching this on VHS. And there is a quality to some of these movies too, where it's the first time you saw it.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:23Sean Fennessey?

  And that grain and that skipping, you know, image felt more natural. There is, there is a refinement going on with the presentation of some movies that kind of should look a little shitty, you know?

• 13:35Speaker 04

  That's probably true.

• 13:36Sean Fennessey?

  Even like the movies, like I re-watched Swamp Thing this week, Wes Craven's Swamp Thing.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  Which we projected of the ship drive-in.

• 13:42Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, did you?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Oh, I clearly remember.

• 13:44Sean Fennessey?

  I have no intention of drafting it. Uh, not one of the most successful Wes Craven movies, but you know, it's a guy in a rubber suit. And you're watching this beautiful presentation that's been made on the Blu-ray and I'm like.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  That's a guy in a rubber suit.

• 13:56Sean Fennessey?

  You know, and not even in an amusing way, like in a shitty way.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:00Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, so sometimes there are some downsides to being able to see it in the most pristine quality. But some of this stuff is, there's also what is canon and what is not canon. And a lot of the Academy Awards did do some work to make canonize some movies, but then there's other movies, Gandhi Springs to mind.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 14:14Sean Fennessey?

  Is that a beloved Hollywood classic?

• 14:17Speaker 04

  I don't think it is, though it was certainly an important movie at the time. I mean, think about it, nobody had ever seen an Indian lead in a movie before.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Uh, not in America anyway. They had never seen that before. And obviously the story of, you know, a very important and influential person. Now, is it done in this very stately, somewhat dry, David Lean retread kind of way? Yes. Kingsley's performance in the center of it is undeniable. So there was a sense, and it was at the time, of course, when the Academy was going to honor the movie that is considered quote unquote important. Right, right. And that was the important movie that year. And it's not a bad movie. I don't mean to suggest it's bad, but it hasn't stood up over time. You know, certainly a

• 15:09Speaker 04

  a colonizer's viewpoint of Gandhi, but some, some people would even tell you the, the hagiography of it. Hagiography? Hagiography. Hagiography. Is, is also inappropriate. I just throw it out there.

• 15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  No, we're just not, you're not the pronunciation expert.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Maybe you should give him your brainwash or something.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  I actually took a class in Irish hagiography in Ireland. So that, that word is.

• 15:32Sean Fennessey?

  Was that word founded in Ireland?

• 15:34Speaker 03

  No, but it is. I heard that word a lot.

• 15:38Sean Fennessey?

  Um, any, any other stray thoughts about sort of what this year represents? Try not to give away too many of the titles at the top of the conversation.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't want to do that. Um, I think.

• 15:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Five-year-old Chris, what were your interests?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Uh, slumber party massacres.

• 15:50Sean Fennessey?

  Hell, bet.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, yeah, a lot of really good B-movies from this year, I would say. Like a lot of really fun cult, cult classics from this year.

• 16:00Sean Fennessey?

  How did you go back and do your research?

• 16:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, you, you make a letterbox list, which I look at, and then I find stressful because I need, uh, I need written words along with the images.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Can I make a suggestion? You know what I do is I take the Wikipedia list of all the movies released that year and I just write down the ones that I've seen.

• 16:19Amanda Dobbins?

  That is also what I do.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:21Amanda Dobbins?

  We've talked about that before.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Our methodology.

• 16:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's our methodology.

• 16:24Sean Fennessey?

  Can I tell you?

• 16:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 16:25Sean Fennessey?

  The overlord of 1982 cinema actually added some notes and corrections to my long letterbox list.

• 16:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow. Okay. You're just, you're, you're there in the comments?

• 16:34Speaker 04

  I'm just doing the work.

• 16:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Are you a commenter generally?

• 16:37Speaker 04

  No.

• 16:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  Not at all.

• 16:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Just stupid people.

• 16:40Sean Fennessey?

  Are you?

• 16:41Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I'm not.

• 16:42Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Just publicly on video, three times a week?

• 16:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Unfortunately, yeah. Only one date, uh, in exchange for money.

• 16:48Sean Fennessey?

  Only one date.

• 16:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, okay. Yeah. So I went through and, and did a list of what I'd seen. And then I knew which categories we would be selecting in. And so I started trying to fill in, in a slightly strategic way to be able to have enough picks.

• 17:04Sean Fennessey?

  Without revealing any of the titles, were you moved by anything that you didn't expect?

• 17:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Let's see, was I moved?

• 17:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, moved, emotionally touched by the cinema.

• 17:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I wouldn't say like emotionally, you know, I wasn't brought to tears. I laughed. Maybe I didn't cry and things and things stayed with me. But but I would agree with Tracy that it was more genre and comedy that that we'll see how drama goes for people.

• 17:35Sean Fennessey?

  I did want to cite that in unusually soft, you're a dramatist, sort of a soft year for drama.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  Very.

• 17:42Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a stronghold category in this in these drafts.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:45Sean Fennessey?

  So that may be one of the most competitive categories. Have you thought about strategy?

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 17:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  Oh, God, I have thought of nothing else.

• 17:56Sean Fennessey?

  So a lot of that is determined by.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Draft order.

• 17:58Sean Fennessey?

  Draft order.

• 17:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Draft order, yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:00Sean Fennessey?

  And have you been speaking with Bob on the side or no?

• 18:03Speaker 04

  No, I haven't spoken with Bob. We haven't spoken, have we, Bob?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  The envelope of cash was not from you. Is that your name?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Robert. I'm not going to rig it for Tracy. He wants to be to win it fair and square.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 18:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Sean Fennessey?

  Where will we? Where will you be setting the vote?

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Huh?

• 18:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, where what social media platform do you want this vote to take?

• 18:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Or I mean, you can also just collect ballots.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  I don't. I don't care about the vote.

• 18:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Good, thank you.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Oh, you'll just know deep down.

• 18:32Sean Fennessey?

  In an objective fashion?

• 18:33Speaker 04

  We will know deep down.

• 18:35Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  Regardless of the vote.

• 18:38Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's sort of a godlike admission there.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  Well, we we.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  This is a game the four of us are playing.

• 18:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, that's true. That well, is it? Do you think it's a game? That's an I like that as a ontological question. Do you see this as a game?

• 18:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, but sometimes I, you know, wake up and and choose violence and sometimes I just want to hang out. Like the last one that we did, the Best Picture one, that was more fun.

• 19:06Sean Fennessey?

  It was more friendly.

• 19:07Amanda Dobbins?

  You made a couple of, you know.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Observations.

• 19:09Amanda Dobbins?

  To see our choices.

• 19:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we couldn't help but lightly mock you, but we were kind to each other.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  I listened to that podcast on my trip to Los Angeles and I have to say. There were some choices there I just didn't agree with.

• 19:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, no. Okay, let's.

• 19:22Sean Fennessey?

  Well, feel free.

• 19:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, here, let's go.

• 19:23Sean Fennessey?

  Though you were not a commenter.

• 19:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Instant feedback, yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Oh, I didn't understand the sting and I didn't understand Barry Lyndon.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Because you don't like, do you don't think the sting is?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  I love the sting. I love Barry Lyndon. I just thought there were better things available to both you, gentlemen.

• 19:37Sean Fennessey?

  Barry Lyndon, I was just like, I'm just gonna make a weird choice.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  I'll also say.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  No, because I don't think you made any mistakes.

• 19:42Sean Fennessey?

  As we said, you got your board.

• 19:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you. Thanks so much.

• 19:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you were, you were, some might say you were given your board.

• 19:46Amanda Dobbins?

  You always say that, you know, I'm sorry that I have my own view of the world.

• 19:51Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's easy when you're only picking three movies, you know?

• 19:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  It's also, it's easy to Monday morning quarterback before, you see the blitz coming, you have to make some calls, you know?

• 19:59Sean Fennessey?

  We're gonna, we're gonna find that out right now. You're saying, this is a Super Bowl winner who's kind of doing some gloating about his defensive line.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  If I step on a rake, I'm gonna be the first one to say at the end of this thing, you guys were, you guys won it.

• 20:13Sean Fennessey?

  Listen, we've been raising families, you know, we haven't been at these fancy award shows like you, like, we've been busy this weekend, you know? We haven't had all this time for strategy, you know? You, you, you power through nine episodes of Zero Day, you're writing the second season.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  You know who I saw at the, at the SAG Awards last night?

• 20:30Sean Fennessey?

  Who did you see?

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Hitmaker.

• 20:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah, he looked great.

• 20:33Sean Fennessey?

  I got, I got some in the room reports from him about the, certain, certain moments, certain moments of the show.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Who's Hitmaker?

• 20:40Amanda Dobbins?

  That's really annoying.

• 20:41Sean Fennessey?

  Who's Hitmaker?

• 20:42Speaker 04

  He has not listened to our podcast.

• 20:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Tim has my number.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Oh, Simmons?

• 20:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Simons?

• 20:47Sean Fennessey?

  Simons, yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:50Sean Fennessey?

  Do you want to get some coffee?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Too much cough medicine this morning.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  This is what happens when I do a watch pot at 8:30 in the morning.

• 20:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow, we love you.

• 20:56Sean Fennessey?

  Blame London.

• 20:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Sean Fennessey?

  Um, you saw him in, in the flesh?

• 21:01Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 21:01Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, just on TV?

• 21:02Speaker 04

  I just saw him on TV.

• 21:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, yeah.

• 21:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he was there.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Standing and applauding for Jane Fonda, I think.

• 21:06Amanda Dobbins?

  He did, yes. And it was like a very, I thought he had a good.

• 21:09Sean Fennessey?

  You thought he should not have done that?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  I just thought, look at Hitmaker going on, living his big, very fancy life.

• 21:17Sean Fennessey?

  He, as always, this was true of the Globes too. We were just texting with him the whole time. I was just texting with him the whole time, um, which was fun. Uh, I, I'm very happy for his success.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  As am I.

• 21:29Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, okay. Just making sure. And his name is Timothy Simons, just so you know.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  I only know him because I text him about this, uh, professional women's golfer who smokes cigarettes on the golf course. That is literally what we text him about.

• 21:40Sean Fennessey?

  Your, your, your dream girl? We were gonna do a draft order and I think we probably should at some point. Bob?

• 21:47Amanda Dobbins?

  What's the, what's the technology here?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  The technology is once again random.org because as you guys know, maybe the listeners don't know, I moved this past weekend, so all my stuff is still everywhere. So I couldn't even find the titles. I'm sorry.

• 22:01Sean Fennessey?

  You said you're moving to Doylestown, Pennsylvania to honor the brutalist?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. I'm gonna be in one of the seven Philadelphia cop shows.

• 22:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  That Chris has personally commissioned from the various studios.

• 22:12Sean Fennessey?

  The mailman from Easttown has arrived.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Okay, we have the list order here. Going first will be Sean.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Rigged, rigged, fucking rigged.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ. First he pulls this, "You wanted 1982, Tracy? Wow, I get to pick first on my birth year."

• 22:32Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Who's next?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Uh, Tracy's next, then CR, and then Amanda, you're on the turn.

• 22:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 22:37Sean Fennessey?

  I never even imagined this was possible.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  I got jobbed.

• 22:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I, I have to be honest, this could go incredibly sideways. That's okay. That's okay.

• 22:46Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. My head is spinning.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  It's an interesting first pick.

• 22:51Sean Fennessey?

  It is. I think there are a lot of good choices here.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there's some category, uh, scarcity, I would say, in some places.

• 22:58Sean Fennessey?

  There is. There is.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Although a master genre bender like you.

• 23:02Sean Fennessey?

  Genre bender?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, when you're like the winged serpent is in fact a drama.

• 23:08Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think? Well, we can all share if you're comfortable. What do you think is the weakest category? Can be personal preference.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Technically, it's drama, but you can move a lot of stuff into drama if you want.

• 23:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Can you?

• 23:20Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 23:21Amanda Dobbins?

  We're gonna find out.

• 23:22Sean Fennessey?

  You don't want to reveal?

• 23:23Speaker 03

  I think it's drama.

• 23:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 23:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think it is as well. But that's not, I mean, is that where the heart goes when you think of my favorite movies from this year? And that actually begs the question of the exercise. Is it your favorite movies or is it the right movie to choose in the right category at the right time? This is a movie with a, this is a year with a lot of movies I really love.

• 23:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Stop vamping.

• 23:41Sean Fennessey?

  Why?

• 23:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Because you don't know what to do.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  So wait a minute, it's not a game? So you're saying it's not a game?

• 23:48Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'd love to, I'd love to evolve definitions, you know?

• 23:51Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't come into the draft with a plan for if you get first or second pick?

• 23:56Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I really don't do that. I, one of my favorite activities is, you know, is making lists of movies.

• 24:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 24:02Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I don't make them in any particular order, other than just in the category that they exist. I don't have like, I need to get this one, I need to get this two, I need to get this three. If that's a, if that's a fault, I accept.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Unless it's an Avengers Infinity War, right? That's when you're like, I need to have that.

• 24:16Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't like when you took that film from me. It was Endgame and not Infinity War.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Which, which one is Carrie in?

• 24:22Sean Fennessey?

  She's in Endgame. Actually, she's in both? No, Endgame.

• 24:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Wait, who is she?

• 24:27Sean Fennessey?

  She is, I can't recall the character's name.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Proxima Midnight.

• 24:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, what does Proxima do?

• 24:32Speaker 04

  I've never seen the film, nor has Carrie.

• 24:34Sean Fennessey?

  She's a CGI figure who is one of the children of Thanos. She is an intergalactic demigod warrior who I think is felled by five female Marvel superheroes.

• 24:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, when they do their girl power thing?

• 24:50Sean Fennessey?

  That's, well, I think she's in both. Cause they, they, they, she meets her-

• 24:55Speaker 01

  According to IMDb, she is in both. We can confirm.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Uh, I believe they went to her for the second one. And they asked her to be in the second one. And she said, well, the first one is the most successful movie ever made. You're gonna pay me any more money? And they said, no, we're not going to pay you any more money.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, we have an update. It's in parentheses, voice uncredited for Endgame.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, because, uh, and she said, well, you're not gonna pay me any more money. Then I don't think I'm going to do it. And they said, well, you know, you should feel yourself fortunate to be part of the Marvel Universe. So she declined, but I think they put her in it anyway.

• 25:28Sean Fennessey?

  The character is there maybe with no lines.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  There you go. So they own the image.

• 25:33Sean Fennessey?

  She's a fairly important character in the first film.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Is she?

• 25:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, she's one of the like lead villains.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  We would have made a bigger deal out of this, but it would have involved us watching the movies and we weren't going to do that.

• 25:45Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'll tell you something, they're both good. And then, you know, her performance is wonderful. The fact that she's not credited and didn't perform the second film doesn't mean I didn't want to draft it. I like that.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Have you, have you made your choice for 1982 yet?

• 25:56Sean Fennessey?

  Is Endgame available?

• 26:00Sean Fennessey?

  No, I really haven't. I really haven't, if I'm being 100% honest with you.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  I bet I know what's going through your mind.

• 26:05Sean Fennessey?

  Tell me.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Which is that you know that you probably should take a certain movie in a certain category for the sake of like knocking that out. But that it's not the movie you would like to say, I picked this first.

• 26:16Amanda Dobbins?

  First in the draft.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  The number one pick is tough, you know, you gotta pick.

• 26:19Sean Fennessey?

  That's exactly right.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of guys go out there and they're just like, give me the best quarterback, but you want to take the offensive lineman that's going to get you to the playoffs.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  I think that's probably, I think.

• 26:30Sean Fennessey?

  I think he's right. I think he's right. Can I, no, I don't even want to say what I think the right pick is.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  No, you cannot do that.

• 26:36Sean Fennessey?

  I shouldn't do that. Should I?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  I mean, you could do what you want, but it's not fun.

• 26:43Sean Fennessey?

  I'll, I'm just gonna take my favorite movie.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 26:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Look at you. You're a brave man.

• 26:48Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, thank you very much for acknowledging, for seeing me as I am. In thriller, horror, sci-fi.

• 26:57Sean Fennessey?

  I will take The Thing, John Carpenter's masterpiece.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 27:01Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, which.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Amazing film, masterpiece.

• 27:06Sean Fennessey?

  Is it the right strategic choice? Perhaps not, but I'm standing on business today.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Best thriller, horror, sci-fi movie that came out that year?

• 27:14Sean Fennessey?

  In my estimation, it is. I know that there is a significant contender for that category. Happy to hear one of you take it. You know, could I have taken some of these very, very good dramas to clear that category off the board? I could have, but I don't give a fuck. I also wasn't listening when Bob revealed the other orders, so who's your next?

• 27:34Speaker 04

  I'm next.

• 27:34Sean Fennessey?

  You have any thoughts on The Thing?

• 27:36Speaker 04

  I loved The Thing. I saw it in the movie theaters.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  R.I.P. Practical Effects. My god, the great.

• 27:44Sean Fennessey?

  Rob Botin, yeah, the great effects man.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  Kurt Russell, fantastic. I think Keith David's first movie.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:52Sean Fennessey?

  Is that true?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  I think it is.

• 27:54Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. They are magical together.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Great Keith David, great ensemble cast, right? Richard Dicard, David Clennan, Wilford Brimley.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  It goes on and on. It's a bunch of, bunch of great actors. The great practical effects, the great score.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Oh my God, the score is so good.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Uh, I love The Thing. It's a great film. Thumbs up.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Have you seen The Thing?

• 28:20Sean Fennessey?

  Is it?

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Too scary?

• 28:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Have I seen The Thing? No, I haven't. And I would have rewatched it, or I would have watched it, but it was one of those things where I knew that it would be either a Sean thing or a you thing, you know, pretty easily. So sometimes I like kind of tier my watching in terms of like, I don't need to go.

• 28:39Sean Fennessey?

  You could, you could have kneecapped one of us by taking it rudely, but that's not what this is about.

• 28:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Your wife wears like a C is for Carpenter t-shirt, like to the playground very often, not just on Halloween. And I love that about Eileen and I love that about you. So I, you know, I decided to enter this with some generosity.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Reynolds Woodcock scene of you dressing Eileen, but like putting her in vintage movie t-shirts.

• 29:02Sean Fennessey?

  Now today, wear the fast binder hat. Yeah.

• 29:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Well, John Carpenter is, is, is a genius, is a wonderful, is a, is a living legend. Um, I, I think this is his best movie. Do you think this is his best movie? You think Halloween is his best movie?

• 29:15Speaker 03

  No, I think this is. Yeah.

• 29:17Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Although I think I've seen Big Trouble in Little China the most.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  It was not a big hit.

• 29:22Sean Fennessey?

  No, it was a bomb.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  It, it was a bit of a bomb when it came out. It kind of got rediscovered a little bit later, but uh, it, you know, it's part of this lore about the sci-fi movies. I think this critic, Chris, I, I'm, I'm not going to get his last name right. Chris Nasha, Nasha.

• 29:37Sean Fennessey?

  Nashawati, yes.

• 29:37Speaker 04

  Nashawati has written a book about this summer of sci-fi because so many of these movies came out within about eight weeks of each other. Uh, including The Thing, which is maybe one of the reasons, uh, it wasn't as successful.

• 29:50Sean Fennessey?

  In the summer of ET, it had a different energy, obviously. And this is a very dour existentialist, kind of punishing movie in many ways and very gross also. Um, I did, I, I, we did an episode about The Thing some years ago during COVID and Carpenter came on the show, which was a real thrill for me.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 30:06Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay. You're up with a second pick.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 30:11Amanda Dobbins?

  So, did you come in with a strategy? Did you have a first pick?

• 30:15Speaker 04

  I did.

• 30:15Amanda Dobbins?

  In mind? Did Sean take it?

• 30:17Speaker 04

  He did not.

• 30:18Amanda Dobbins?

  So, so you know where you're going?

• 30:21Speaker 04

  I do, but the fact that I'm picking second as opposed to first-

• 30:24Speaker 03

  But the lights are bright, aren't they? The lights are bright, you know?

• 30:28Speaker 04

  Changes the, uh, right?

• 30:29Sean Fennessey?

  Not so easy to come off the couch, is it?

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Also, I want to give time for, you know, the, uh, the banter.

• 30:35Sean Fennessey?

  I was giving it to you with all my things. He talks about Aki for five minutes. I can't even do Proxima Midnight here.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:43Sean Fennessey?

  How did you remember Proxima Midnight, but you haven't seen the film?

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Well, she's, I mean, my God, you should see all the Proxima Midnight shit she signs when we're out about-

• 30:52Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding?

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Oh, more Proxima Midnight than anything else.

• 30:56Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, because those are the people, right? Those are the ones with the-

• 30:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but it's not her face, so it's just a-

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Oh, way more than Gilded Age. The Gilded Age fans are not out there with the photos.

• 31:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm bringing her alarm clock to sign.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  All right, first pick. You also kind of can't go wrong, because there's so many great stuff at the-

• 31:22Speaker 03

  I'm very, very, very curious about your methodology here. Do you have a sheet for every genre? Do you have a sheet for every category, rather?

• 31:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I noticed you have a cover page also, so that I can't see, yeah, okay.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  And I have a master list at the back of how I-

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 31:36Sean Fennessey?

  I see, okay. This is very Peter Jennings.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Did you have to find a printer at a Los Angeles hotel to do this?

• 31:44Speaker 04

  No, I printed this at home in New York and brought it with me. Uh, with the first pick in the 1982 draft, I will take, in the category of drama, The Verdict.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, you took it from me.

• 31:56Sean Fennessey?

  So, that was the-

• 31:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 31:57Sean Fennessey?

  That was, yeah, was that the consensus number one overall?

• 32:01Speaker 04

  It's the clear drama number one.

• 32:04Sean Fennessey?

  Because drama has so much scarcity.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Unless you want to start being like, well, you could say that there's drama scenes in this sci-fi movie or in this comedy, you know?

• 32:13Sean Fennessey?

  I have some, well, we can get into it, but I have some- Some thoughts about movies that I think are considered one thing, but should be considered another thing. And we can debate that here.

• 32:23Amanda Dobbins?

  The trick about the verdict is that it's also eligible in blockbuster.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  It is.

• 32:28Amanda Dobbins?

  So, and, and I assume in Oscar.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  In Oscar, yes.

• 32:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. This is Paul Newman's winning Oscar performance.

• 32:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Is it? No, I thought it was Color of Money.

• 32:37Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, you're right. Color of Money.

• 32:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it should be.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Ben Kingsley won, and Ben Kingsley was not going to be denied that year. It was kind of a weird Oscar year in that way. A lot of people who weren't going to be denied that year meant that some other people who might have won the award in any other year didn't win.

• 32:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  And I think, you know, certainly, I won't say it's Newman's best performance, but it's on the Mount Rushmore of Newman's best performances, no doubt.

• 33:02Sean Fennessey?

  We are hoping to do an episode. He would have been 100 years old this year. So we're going to do an episode about his entire career.

• 33:08Amanda Dobbins?

  You just have to get through all of your, all your Blu-rays.

• 33:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, those 1950s Warner Brothers films are not going to watch themselves. Who's going to watch the Young Philadelphians if I don't watch it, you know?

• 33:18Speaker 04

  I will.

• 33:19Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  When's the last time you saw The Verdict?

• 33:22Sean Fennessey?

  We actually did do it on the rewatchables. Roughly two and a half years ago, I want to say. Fantastic episode. Bill has a great affection for the movie as well. A Boston movie, though, filmed in New York.

• 33:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 33:32Sean Fennessey?

  And just bang on brilliant performances in the whole movie. James Mason also fantastic in this movie.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  James Mason never won a competitive Academy Award.

• 33:39Sean Fennessey?

  Crazy talk.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  Unbelievable. Jack Warden.

• 33:43Sean Fennessey?

  I was thinking of James Mason. Your boy Brady Corbeil recently was mentioning that the guy Pierce's character very clearly modeled on a James Mason-esque in this era kind of figure, which was like.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  I can't remember. What was the story with this is like Mamet wrote the script, then they had 10 people rewrite it, and then they begged him to come back and just rewrite his.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Well, I think eventually Lumet got his hands on the, on the Mamet script and was like, why aren't we making this? This should be the one we're making. I think there was some tinkering with it after, from Mamet's original version of it. But it's Mamet's best screenplay.

• 34:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, without question.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  It's an incredible screenplay. It's worthy of study, that screenplay. It's a great piece of work.

• 34:23Sean Fennessey?

  Bruce Willis, anybody? Bruce Willis.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  In extra.

• 34:27Sean Fennessey?

  Standing in the courtroom. Very visible. You can see him in that wide shot, you know, when he gives the final. Yeah. Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  It's like, really, the reason half-ass internet research category of rewatchables exists is for scenes like that.

• 34:39Sean Fennessey?

  You know who's a motherfucker is Milo O'Shea. He is a motherfucker. The judge, he's wonderful in this movie, but he is like one of the great villains in movie history. Um, Andre Bartoia Bartokiac as well, uh, shot the movie and he was just given an award at the ASC Awards over the weekend by Michael Douglas for his work as a cinematographer. He shot many great Lumet movies. Wow. Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Great fact.

• 35:03Sean Fennessey?

  Fun timing.

• 35:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Charlotte Rampling.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  She's great.

• 35:06Amanda Dobbins?

  On your all time list.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  She is on my all time.

• 35:08Sean Fennessey?

  She is absolutely on my all time. Wasn't she slapped by Paul Newman in this?

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Very publicly.

• 35:13Sean Fennessey?

  Punch, I think. Yeah, it was a punch.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  In like a, at like a hotel lobby. Yeah.

• 35:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, not ideal. These were the times, 1982.

• 35:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:23Sean Fennessey?

  Some were working in drive-ins, some were slapping women in bars.

• 35:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, you're next.

• 35:29Sean Fennessey?

  No, you're next.

• 35:30Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Oh, am I next? I'm third?

• 35:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I have the turn.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Okay, um.

• 35:34Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick, Tracy. That was, that was the right pick.

• 35:36Amanda Dobbins?

  I just deleted that off my list. So that's how you know you did it correctly.

• 35:39Sean Fennessey?

  That was the right pick.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  All right, for Oscar nominee, I'm gonna take E.T.

• 35:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 35:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Um, that is partially out of category scarcity. Also adore E.T.

• 35:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Uh, truly beautiful film and hoping I can get something else I like on the turn. So.

• 35:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. In, I'm, I'm getting what would have been my number one pick from a strategy perspective.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 36:06Amanda Dobbins?

  In thriller, action, horror, sci-fi, I will be taking Blade Runner.

• 36:09Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  God damn it, didn't really see that coming.

• 36:12Sean Fennessey?

  You need to be ready for that.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Well, she was like, I didn't watch the things. I was like, maybe.

• 36:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I've seen Blade Runner and I live in Los Angeles, you know, like, come on, Team Ridley forever. Um. Probably my second favorite of Ridley's movies after Alien, but like, in terms of the influence and you know, we say this every time. It's like a very weird, hazy day in Los Angeles or a hazy evening and you're just like, oh, it's Blade Runner time and creating an entire world and cinema language. That's number one.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  Not only is that the right pick, that's the right order.

• 36:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  Alien, then.

• 36:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you so much. I appreciate your support.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Uh, watch the final cut on Saturday night, I think. Um, five star masterpiece. Just so gorgeous. Just such an incredible experience. Do you have a favorite cut, favorite release?

• 37:03Sean Fennessey?

  I've kind of gotten them confused over the years. I do believe I've watched the final cut the most because it was, was it first issued on DVD, LaserDisc? I don't even know.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  No, there was like a, um, he redid it. He kind of, there was like a, an anniversary version that stripped away the voiceover, but he didn't do the remastering and like the color corrections or anything like that. And there are some criticisms of this last version of it where people think he got, it's too teal or something like that. Like that they don't love it, but I thought it was incredible.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  Did you know I don't, I don't care about director's cuts? I mean, I don't think they make any difference. They all look alike to me. I mean.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  The VO difference is notable, like cause you know, Deckard is really present in the beginning of the film, just kind of being like, and then this is this guy and this is this guy. And like so.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  But they're all kind of the same movie. I mean, even when I watched like the different versions of, uh, Orson Welles's Mr. Arkaden, I'm like, they're all great. They're all great. They're all kind of the same movie. They're, yeah, I guess they're kind of different, but.

• 38:06Sean Fennessey?

  There are some movies that, you know, excise entire characters and then they restore.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:12Sean Fennessey?

  Forty minutes or in the case of Kingdom of Heaven, speaking of Ridley Scott, two hours of a movie that can be meaningfully different.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  I never watched the Napoleon.

• 38:21Sean Fennessey?

  I never did either. The Napoleon extended.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  I was waiting for someone to be like, he did it. It's, this is amazing.

• 38:26Sean Fennessey?

  That did not come through the trend, so yeah, no one, no one really.

• 38:29Amanda Dobbins?

  They were just kind of like an extra forty minutes. I mean, I liked the original.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  I enjoyed this one. Don't you?

• 38:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I do, and thank you for letting me Google. Um, in drama.

• 38:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I will be taking what I, I think this is 100% eligible for drama despite its title and it is the king of comedy.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 38:50Amanda Dobbins?

  What? You're not gonna take it? I mean, I

• 38:52Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. I was gonna, I was just technically released in the US in eighty-three, wasn't it?

• 38:56Speaker 04

  No, no. It's eighty-two.

• 38:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, is it?

• 38:58Speaker 04

  No, no. It's eighty-two. You're right on eighty-two. And I think you're fine to take it in drama.

• 39:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. I mean, it, it, you know.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  More drama than comedy, probably.

• 39:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, the most underrated of the Scorsese.

• 39:09Sean Fennessey?

  It was released in the US in eighty-three.

• 39:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, no.

• 39:12Sean Fennessey?

  Which is usually what the rule is.

• 39:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, no.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  It's on mic. Wait, wait.

• 39:17Sean Fennessey?

  It was released in Iceland in December eighteenth, nineteen eighty-two.

• 39:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, dear. That's tough.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  How did we fuck this up?

• 39:25Sean Fennessey?

  February eighteenth, nineteen eighty-three.

• 39:27Amanda Dobbins?

  All right, Mr. Letterboxd.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Wasn't it on your list?

• 39:30Amanda Dobbins?

  What the fuck? Do the research.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  I've had it on all my lists.

• 39:33Sean Fennessey?

  Weren't you the ombudsman of my list?

• 39:34Speaker 04

  I was. I was. Total miss. Total miss.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  I was wondering why Infinity War was on the nineteen eighty-two list.

• 39:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And there's the New York, the

• 39:44Sean Fennessey?

  Perhaps it was a bear trap that I said.

• 39:46Amanda Dobbins?

  nineteen eighty-three. All right, well, I'm pretty fucked here now.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  I'm sorry.

• 39:50Amanda Dobbins?

  It's okay. It's not your fault. I appreciate your support. I guess.

• 39:54Sean Fennessey?

  Chris, I would have gotten right by me.

• 39:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  You can always count on me to really be buttoned up.

• 40:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Was that payback for?

• 40:02Speaker 03

  No, it wasn't. It was, it was, I, I didn't mean to be, I wasn't being dick. I was actually just saving us from a bunch of like, actually.

• 40:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, actually, oh, from, from people. Okay. So what am I gonna do here?

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Oh, God. I'm mortified. This is gonna bother me.

• 40:19Sean Fennessey?

  Um, well, it's a great pod moment. That's really all I care about.

• 40:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm up, I'm upset about this, but that's okay.

• 40:25Sean Fennessey?

  Better you than me.

• 40:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, take a deep breath.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  I would have absolutely, it'd come back to me. I would have absolutely taken King of Comedy.

• 40:34Sean Fennessey?

  I had it at the top of my comedy list. Did it not have a festival premiere?

• 40:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I was literally just Googling, like, you know, but it doesn't seem

• 40:42Sean Fennessey?

  Surprising that it wouldn't play New York in the fall.

• 40:44Amanda Dobbins?

  But it was not appreciated.

• 40:46Sean Fennessey?

  No, but before its release, you might imagine that it was Martin Scorsese.

• 40:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but they were, I don't know.

• 40:52Sean Fennessey?

  This film did, bombed pretty profoundly.

• 40:54Amanda Dobbins?

  So, I

• 40:55Sean Fennessey?

  Nineteen million dollar budget, two point five million dollar box office for a Robert De Niro movie in nineteen eighty-two, directed by Martin Scorsese.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  And it is, again, clearly on the Mount Rushmore.

• 41:04Sean Fennessey?

  Five-star masterpiece.

• 41:05Speaker 04

  My Mount Rushmore of Scorsese movies.

• 41:07Sean Fennessey?

  Mine as well. Five-star masterpiece.

• 41:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 41:09Sean Fennessey?

  Not for me. But not LG.

• 41:11Amanda Dobbins?

  The next film, the next film is not a five star Martin Scorsese masterpiece, but it does have sentimental value to me. And I am going to stay on drama. Well.

• 41:23Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, my.

• 41:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Am I going to do this in drama or am I going to do it in Oscar? I don't know, I can get frisky with Oscar later. Okay, I'm going to do it in drama. Even though I don't really think any of you will take this. Um, I mentioned earlier that because of, of my age, I was sort of like beholden to what my parents showed me from this year for a long time. And there was very like a famous 1982 movie that my wonderful father, who taught me almost everything I know about movies, sat me down for and said, okay, this is it. You're like, here we go.

• 41:56Sean Fennessey?

  I know where you're going.

• 41:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And like here is, this is cinema. I can't wait to share this with you. I'm an only child. It was a real father, daughter moment. And he put on Barry Levinson's Diner.

• 42:07Sean Fennessey?

  Nice.

• 42:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and my response was, Dad, I'm seven. And what the hell is this?

• 42:11Sean Fennessey?

  What's going on with this popcorn box? Do you think she was prepping you for this exact day?

• 42:15Amanda Dobbins?

  But it does, you know, it all adds up, right? We, we do see how, you know, Diner in 1989 led to where I am today.

• 42:23Sean Fennessey?

  You're barking, barking right now.

• 42:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I have since seen it and like it very much. Not as much as my dad, who is just like the only person in the world looking forward to the new Barry Levinson film. Like.

• 42:34Sean Fennessey?

  The Alto Nights.

• 42:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Re, you know, like does Tin Men speeches like at Christmas dinner? I don't know what like my dad.

• 42:40Sean Fennessey?

  Tin Men?

• 42:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Sean Fennessey?

  That's a forgotten one.

• 42:43Amanda Dobbins?

  He's just like, that's really underappreciated and just reenact it.

• 42:45Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good movie.

• 42:46Amanda Dobbins?

  It is a good movie. Um, and you know, you, you have met my dad. He's not like prone to just reenacting films, uh, anywhere, especially at Christmas dinner. Uh, but Diner is the classic and a great movie.

• 42:58Sean Fennessey?

  Should this be Knox's debut when we do the Alto Nights? And he can talk of the cinema of Levinson?

• 43:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, sure, we can call him in.

• 43:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 43:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I think I, the last time that I volunteered him on this podcast, it was his reaction to Amelia Perez. And he was like, I did not know that was going to be public. So could you screen things?

• 43:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Fair. Um, I'll, I'll give him a call, but anyway.

• 43:19Sean Fennessey?

  He was particularly fond of Carlos Sofia Escón's work, yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Sorry, you've taken this in drama, yes?

• 43:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I have, yes. I mean, it does have comedic elements, but I think ultimately like a coming of age drama.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  It could go either way, absolutely.

• 43:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 43:30Sean Fennessey?

  Do you, do you see it this way, that the blurring of the genre labels was more common then versus now? Because I-

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Not necessarily. I don't think so. I think there are just some things that are comedy dramas. And I think we just happened to hit on a couple of them here. King of Comedy and Diner definitely fall in that category. It was a real moment, that movie, certainly in the, in these young actors' lives, right? It was that ensemble. And it was, I remember clearly that it was, there was a real call, again, for an ensemble acting award uh, at the Academy Awards.

• 44:05Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  As a result of movie, Diner, Right Stuff, Right, around the same time, people were saying, these movies are just not gonna be uh, honored, uh, at the Academy Awards for performances, but the ensembles of these movies absolutely should be.

• 44:19Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that would be a good thing?

• 44:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:20Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I'm not quite sure I understand why that isn't the case, why that doesn't exist, that particular award. Cause obviously this that we, last night, we're pre-taping this, the SAG Awards happened last night, Conclave won, Best Ensemble.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And it-

• 44:33Sean Fennessey?

  That would be a way to honor that film at the Academy Awards.

• 44:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Need more famous, like visible, need, you know, more performing categories.

• 44:42Sean Fennessey?

  Performers on stage to win awards. Yeah, I agree.

• 44:44Amanda Dobbins?

  We want to keep the crafts too, but you just, you want some famous people on the screen.

• 44:48Sean Fennessey?

  Seems like a good idea.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  And if you went back, you would find a movie every year, going back in time, where you said, well, that would have been the Ensemble Award winner for that year.

• 44:58Sean Fennessey?

  You've just given me a great idea episode.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  To do the, the Ensemble Award for every year?

• 45:03Sean Fennessey?

  Wonderful idea.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  Uh, Diner, I saw at the USA Film Festival. I think that's what it's still called. It's the Dallas Film Festival. I used to make my dad take me down there to see some, some movies, uh, around that time.

• 45:15Sean Fennessey?

  That's awesome.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, saw Diner before it was released.

• 45:17Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Terrific, terrific movie.

• 45:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great movie. Uh, I believe, is it?

• 45:22Speaker 03

  My turn.

• 45:23Sean Fennessey?

  Your pick, Chris?

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Well, we'll just get a little chalky here and I got E.T. and Oscar. I'll take 48 Hours and Blockbuster.

• 45:29Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 45:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Um, I guess to our previous conversation, 48 Hours, is it comedy because Eddie Murphy goes nuclear five times in this movie?

• 45:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Big screen debut.

• 45:40Sean Fennessey?

  Otherwise a violent cop drama.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  It's just like a 1970s cop movie. Yeah. And like the last half of it or the last 40 minutes of it are essentially like a chase through San Francisco, but it's a great San Francisco cop movie, too.

• 45:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I do feel like this, you and Bill referenced 48 Hours on rewatchables more than almost any other.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  We were just in Austin, Texas. There's a chain in Austin called Torchies, which is also the, the bar that Eddie Murphy, uh, goes into in, in 48 Hours. And we made a lot of 48 Hours jokes because of that.

• 46:08Sean Fennessey?

  It seemed like a very nice torchy. Is that a chain of some kind?

• 46:11Speaker 03

  It's, it's become a chain, I think. Yeah.

• 46:13Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. But 48 Hours fan?

• 46:15Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. And saw it not long ago, in fact, for the first time in a very long time. And I was really taken by what an eighties movie it is. I mean, I know what you say is true, that it could very much be a seventies buddy, cop, cop buddy picture. But the look of that film, uh, the, the, the way the climax of that film plays out, uh, I mean, I think it really set a template for action movies in Hollywood.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  The Weapon.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  That lasts to today.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  And to see those guys in their, you know, in their, in their big shoulder pads and, and the, you know, the neon and the, and the smoke in the alley. I mean, it's just like, oh my God, it was mimicked so many times. Such, it's such an influential movie. It's, I don't know if it's my favorite Walter Hill movie. I don't know if it's my favorite Nick Nolte or Eddie Murphy movie, but it's a terrific, it's just terrific. And it's so trend setting. It's unbelievable.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  I will say also, perhaps the best year anyone had, the best 1982 anyone had was Brian James, who was in 48 Hours and Blade Runner.

• 47:25Sean Fennessey?

  He was also in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez that year, which is a movie I just watched for the first time. How did you get that? How did you pull that out of your back pocket? So I'm a big fan of Brian James's work and I clocked him in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez and thought, wow, this cast is absolutely stacked. And I like Bill find the retconning of his character in Another Forty Eight Hours to be a crime against cinema. What, that he was actually the killer? Yeah, that's not ideal.

• 47:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 47:47Sean Fennessey?

  Spoilers for Another Forty Eight Hours. But he does have kind of that energy. Sure. You could see why he was.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  He was great. He was a really great actor. That's a, that's a mighty good pick, that Forty Eight Hours. That's good stuff.

• 47:58Sean Fennessey?

  Not really one of my movies, to be honest. Not, I don't dislike it or anything, but I just never. Are you saying that just to be different? No, no, I didn't. I didn't see it when I was young. Like, I didn't see it till I was like thirteen. What's your favorite Eddie Murphy blockbuster from that period? Oh, good question. Like his acting? I saw Trading Places first and a lot, and I love that movie.

• 48:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But I think.

• 48:16Sean Fennessey?

  Coming to America is a big one for me.

• 48:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm with him where Trading Places got handed down.

• 48:23Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 48:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And Forty Eight Hours, or whatever, is just, like, I've seen it, but I more know it through you and Bill referencing it. But everything that Tracy said about it, like, setting the template for the.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Well, and I've heard you guys talk on the show before about the, the minting of movie stars and how rare and difficult it seems to be these days. This year, nineteen eighty-two, we'll get to some more of it, but, oh my God. Eddie Murphy is just like, you, you've graduated.

• 48:50Sean Fennessey?

  And he was like twenty-two. I mean, he was so young.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  He was twenty.

• 48:52Sean Fennessey?

  Twenty. That's unbelievable.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  And just like, you're in. You've graduated. You are a movie star and you're gonna get your first choice of material. It's unbelievable.

• 49:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  And there was a palpable sense in the movie theater, sitting there in an audience, like, that guy's a movie star. We'll follow him anywhere. Really great. Is it my pick?

• 49:11Amanda Dobbins?

  It is.

• 49:13Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know where you're gonna go here. I'm curious.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  I'm gonna go to all the right places.

• 49:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so how many of your, how's your strategy going right now? Anything off the board? Okay, that's great. We just like to, you know, check in. Any, any feedback you want to give us, you know, far away through the draft?

• 49:30Speaker 03

  This is one of my most populist.

• 49:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm okay. It could get, it could get a little dicey.

• 49:35Sean Fennessey?

  A little gamey.

• 49:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, no verdict and no king of comedy is, you know.

• 49:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, put you on the crosshair.

• 49:43Amanda Dobbins?

  That was like a one, two that I, that I needed.

• 49:45Sean Fennessey?

  But you shouldn't have rewatched Emily in Paris for the fourth time. You could have been boning up.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  We could also, I mean, this may be a, this.

• 49:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And I loved it. And it's evil, but I love it.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  It's her zero day.

• 49:57Sean Fennessey?

  Strong performances.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  This might be a good place where Amanda could trade me Blade Runner for E T and a pick. You know, we could get like some action.

• 50:04Sean Fennessey?

  You would give up a pick?

• 50:05Speaker 03

  No, I would move up in front of her, maybe on one round or something.

• 50:08Sean Fennessey?

  I would welcome it if you so chose.

• 50:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I love E T, but that was a good, that was a good pick.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Uh, in thriller, action, horror, sci fi, I will take the road warrior.

• 50:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. This was number two on my board.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  Speaking of fully minted movie stars, it's just like, oh my god. It was just like, that guy's a movie star and I'll follow him anywhere. I, to my mind, I think it's the greatest action movie ever made. It's number one on my action movie list.

• 50:38Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I think Bill Hader said the same thing to me once upon a time.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  Well, Bill Hader is also from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

• 50:43Sean Fennessey?

  That's very true.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  And, uh, the road warrior has a lot of resonance for us there.

• 50:47Sean Fennessey?

  These days. Similar vibes.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Mel Gibson's favorite of the three, for what it's worth?

• 50:52Sean Fennessey?

  It is his favorite. Quite a year for him, nineteen eighty-two.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  He was living dangerously.

• 50:56Sean Fennessey?

  Another Australian film. Um, he was an amazing movie star.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  He was, uh, I mean, again, that sense in a movie theater when a guy comes out and you're just like, I'll follow you anywhere.

• 51:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  Uh, uh, you, you don't have to do anything. I'm totally with you. Uh, and of course, the incredible action. It's just, it's a great, thrilling, and it holds up. Some of those things, you know, you look at an action movie from the nineteen sixties, you look at some early Bond and it's like, eh.

• 51:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  That thing holds up.

• 51:28Sean Fennessey?

  You can see all the. You know, they hear about the Spielberg brain chemistry where he knows how to block a scene better than anybody and it's all in his head. George Miller is very similar, where you can see even with limited resources, he knows exactly what he wants.

• 51:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's the purest one, because the first one doesn't quite go full dystopia, and the third one has Tina Turner, which I love, but also some other stuff.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  It's such a great story, too. It's like, just like on a very basic foundational, like, these guys are safe but stuck, and they have to make a run for it. It's such an awesome cinematic thing to watch.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  There's a cool thing in that movie. When he steps forward to say, "I'm the one, I'm the one who will drive you," there is behind him John Wayne. I don't know if it's a cardboard cutout. I don't know if it's a guy who looks like John Wayne, who's dressed like John Wayne. I mean, watch it again and look for the guy behind him. It's hard to take your eyes off of Mel, but there's a guy behind him who's definitely put there to evoke that silhouette.

• 52:31Sean Fennessey?

  So Road Warrior comes off my board. Fortunately, it did already take the thing, so I'm not too wounded by that. I have two picks.

• 52:41Sean Fennessey?

  Do you find that there's scarcity in Blockbuster?

• 52:44Speaker 03

  To some extent.

• 52:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's an interesting Blockbuster year.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  I've also taken two Blockbusters with my first two picks, even though I already selected. You know what I mean? Like, I kind of took up a little bit of space here with mine. There were honestly strategic picks for a man known to pick with his heart.

• 53:00Sean Fennessey?

  I neglected to cite the threshold for the Blockbuster category this time around, and I should share it. You guys knew this ahead of time, but it was $40 million or more was the threshold that we're using. There are 16 films eligible in Blockbuster. So far, three are off the board: E.T. The Extraterrestrial, 48 Hours, and The Verdict.

• 53:23Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not sure if my, I'm not sure if my heart is really calling to me on any of these though, even though there's some scarcity.

• 53:32Amanda Dobbins?

  There's some brand names.

• 53:34Sean Fennessey?

  There are definitely some branding and some movies I dig for sure.

• 53:39Sean Fennessey?

  How would you, how does this sound to you? Is the film First Blood a drama?

• 53:47Sean Fennessey?

  You haven't seen it, so you can't weigh in.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  So that was gonna be, this is an interesting.

• 53:51Sean Fennessey?

  Cause not, it's not Rambo 2. This is First Blood. This is the first film.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  You haven't seen it, so you can't weigh in.

• 53:57Sean Fennessey?

  This is, this is a char-

• 53:58Speaker 03

  You can do what you want.

• 53:59Sean Fennessey?

  This is a character study.

• 54:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I have seen it.

• 54:01Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 54:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Because I edited the Vietnam series.

• 54:04Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, okay.

• 54:04Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 54:05Sean Fennessey?

  And you would say that this is- I was just making a joke.

• 54:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Eat it. Um, I mean, you're right that it's not Rambo 2. I don't know. It's are we feeling generous?

• 54:16Speaker 03

  What would you have done if she had taken Blade Runner in drama?

• 54:21Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I think it's probably more appropriate if you wanted to have a delineation that it be in a thriller than in a drama. I don't know if it has a classic dramatic elements. Rambo is a character study about a Vietnam veteran. It does have action elements, but they're not as big and bold as you might think. It is described on Wikipedia as an action film.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  I'm a guest.

• 54:44Sean Fennessey?

  No, I-

• 54:45Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 54:47Sean Fennessey?

  Feel free to weigh in. I'm, I'm curious what the room thinks.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  When you're listening to these and somebody does a little bit of a backdoor, you know, category fraud exercise like this, or do you get mad?

• 54:57Speaker 04

  It's totally subjective. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't.

• 55:02Sean Fennessey?

  You're, you're, you're being too polite.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  I, I will say that I have seen dudes do, uh, the monologue from the end of this in, as audition pieces.

• 55:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Have you? Wow. Okay.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  I have. It's just like, that's, it doesn't work.

• 55:22Sean Fennessey?

  There's some good acting in this movie. I like that you. Richard Crenna and Brian Dennehy are both excellent in this movie.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  It's a very good movie. It's very well acted. Ted Kaczynski was a terrific director.

• 55:31Sean Fennessey?

  Very good. Underrated. Weird career.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Weird career. Weird sort of all over the place. Yeah. North Dallas 40.

• 55:39Sean Fennessey?

  Great movie.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Wake in Fright.

• 55:41Sean Fennessey?

  His best movie.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  A great.

• 55:43Sean Fennessey?

  Australian thrillers. He did Fun with Dick and Jane, the comedy.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  I just watched a Ted Kaczynski movie that I was like, holy shit, this is good the other day.

• 55:49Sean Fennessey?

  He was Canadian, Ted Kaczynski. He was Canadian.

• 55:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I believe he was Canadian.

• 55:53Sean Fennessey?

  Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He had a very odd career. This is his... If you say it's an action movie, if you say it's an action movie, I accept.

• 56:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm willing to accept it.

• 56:04Sean Fennessey?

  As a drama?

• 56:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Until the great 1983 snafu, you were going to accept King of Comedy in drama. And I think, you know, that is a drama with some literal comedic elements. So.

• 56:18Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 56:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm okay. I'll open it. Rambo 2, obviously not, but.

• 56:22Sean Fennessey?

  No. No, that's the thing is the franchise becomes very different after this movie. And I think partially because the movie was sold on this very famous Drew Struzan poster, who drew the Star Wars posters, where he's holding an automatic rifle on the cover with the bullet. The bullet.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Bandolier.

• 56:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, the bandolier. Thank you.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Glad I could help.

• 56:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, a man who knows his artillery.

• 56:47Sean Fennessey?

  And that's.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Hagiography.

• 56:49Amanda Dobbins?

  You were.

• 56:49Sean Fennessey?

  And it's bandolier.

• 56:53Sean Fennessey?

  I'll take First Blood in drama.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  We'll see how the streets react.

• 56:58Sean Fennessey?

  I don't really give a shit what the streets say.

• 57:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Your approval rating?

• 57:03Speaker 04

  Now, wait a minute. We do get to now make snarky comments about the fact that you've chosen it in drama.

• 57:07Sean Fennessey?

  Of course, guys.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  If we accept it, and then we make snarky comments.

• 57:10Sean Fennessey?

  Make your comments.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  I want to say, you know what I am? I'm not, I'm not disallowing it. I'm surprised. Maybe I'm a little disappointed. There's lots of dramas, especially for a fiend like yourself who loves to scour obscure films. I'm surprised you're not like, oh, this, this, this.

• 57:27Sean Fennessey?

  Honestly, he was disappointed by a lot of the dramas that I've visited preparing for this episode. Not disappointed by other categories. I feel like there's a bounty in other categories, but like, without naming names? These are often the third or fourth or fifth favorites of some of my favorite directors that were made this year, so I chose not to go with that.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Well, blow our minds, man.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  You choose twice, don't you?

• 57:48Sean Fennessey?

  I do. I have another pick. Did you have a snarky comment you wanted to share?

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 57:53Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  I'll save it.

• 57:56Speaker 04

  I'll save it for when I need it.

• 57:58Sean Fennessey?

  In Blockbuster.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:01Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think I need to take right now before things get unfortunate.

• 58:06Sean Fennessey?

  I will take Poltergeist.

• 58:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I watched this.

• 58:10Sean Fennessey?

  You did?

• 58:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and I had seen, I mean, because obviously the little girl with the hands on the TV is an iconic image, so it's like, oh, yeah.

• 58:17Sean Fennessey?

  That's CR every Sunday night.

• 58:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I would have taken it.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Watching Zero Day. How did you feel as a homeowner watching this?

• 58:25Speaker 04

  You've taken Poltergeist.

• 58:27Amanda Dobbins?

  It was more like that's how I feel about TVs. You know? So.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  And you took it in?

• 58:32Sean Fennessey?

  Blockbuster.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Blockbuster.

• 58:33Sean Fennessey?

  You moved the headstones, but you didn't move the bodies. Which is a very chilling line reading in this movie. You know, Toby Hooper, the great Toby Hooper, director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Perhaps the most influential of the horror filmmakers. This movie, long rumored to have been a.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  Shadow Spielberg.

• 58:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, a co-work with Steven Spielberg, which I think has been largely debunked at this stage.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  Mostly because Spielberg himself has shouted down that rumor from the beginning.

• 59:00Sean Fennessey?

  That is not the case.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  It's not true.

• 59:03Sean Fennessey?

  A film that absolutely changed my brain chemistry and violently upset me as a young kid. And probably one of the significant movies that put me on the path that I'm in now and seeing every horror movie that is made that I can get my hands on.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  I thank it for it.

• 59:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, we've made great hay of it over the years. It's been a lot of fun. The peeling of the skin while looking in the mirror will live with me forever. Obviously, a film about getting stuck inside the machinery of our obsessions. A film about real estate and why it is evil and dangerous and especially real estate agents and they're evil. Beautiful, sad, weird movie that just so happened to completely capture the American consciousness. What movie, what number was it this year? It was the eighth highest grossing movie of this year and made $76 million, right in front of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

• 59:53Speaker 04

  And it did that thing that ET did too, right? It had that Spielberg suburban.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  Real, here's a real family in.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Something extraordinary could happen in the most ordinary of places.

• 1:00:08Sean Fennessey?

  And that kind of glow around it too, where you thought, you felt like there was something special, the poster, the iconography of the movie.

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  It's really beautifully made too. It's, I mean.

• 1:00:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's damn good.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  It's really effectively made. All right, I have a pick.

• 1:00:21Sean Fennessey?

  You do.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  What am I gonna do? What do you think I'm gonna do? Drama, sci-fi, Oscar nom, blockbuster.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  This is where, this is where everything gets real interesting. I think a lot of our, the, the big titles are kind of off the board now.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  Comedy.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  Couple, couple left.

• 1:00:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think it depends on what you think about some of these classics.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  Well, you took first blood off that list. You took first blood in drama, not in blockbuster.

• 1:00:46Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:00:52Speaker 04

  All right, I, I, I make no bones about this. I'm taking, uh, Tootsie in comedy.

• 1:01:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:01Sean Fennessey?

  So, speak about this movie.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, behind the scenes, you've got Larry Gelbart and Murray Shiskel and Elaine May, uncredited.

• 1:01:10Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Writing the screenplay. And in front of the camera, you've got Terry Gar and Dabney Coleman and Bill Murray at their peak powers. So you just have some comedy geniuses working on this thing. And it was from a time when a comic script

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  was constructed.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Right? It wasn't just people riffing in front of a camera until they hit on something funny. This thing was constructed with jokes and scenes and arcs. And building toward a climax intended to be seen in a theater. And this is something, uh, here, here's where I pull my old man card on you all. This is something that had to be experienced in a movie theater. Because if you watch this at home, after the reveal at the end, right, spoiler alert, uh, after he reveals that he is in fact the actor, Michael Dorsey. When you watch this at home, you will note that for about two minutes, there's just Dustin Hoffman in this ridiculous accent saying over and over again,

• 1:02:13Speaker 04

  I'm, uh, whatever his name is supposed to be. I'm Michael Dorsey. I'm. And it goes on that long because you couldn't hear the dialogue in the theater because of the screams and the gasps and the laughter. It was an explosive reaction in the theater that lasted for minutes. It went on for minutes. And it's because of the construction of that screenplay. It builds to that moment. Of course, Pollock's a great director and knew how to orchestrate all of that. It's a great kind of thing that we don't write with our siloed comedy worlds and watching everything on our phones and YouTube.

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  You don't have that experience as much anymore as you had watching a movie in the movie theater. It's great.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  I do wonder whether or not you could make an argument that everybody bemoans the death of theatrically released comedies. And I think it's usually ascribed to like the changing senses of humor of the moviegoing public or what is and isn't funny. But I wonder if it's equally because they stopped writing them, like writing through like as a film with comic elements rather than here's a scenario where these people can essentially improvise, like you're saying, like, kind of like that post Adam McKay, Apetow style of making a movie where it's like Rogan and Friends kind of joking around. It's interesting.

• 1:03:36Sean Fennessey?

  This has been in the news recently because Judd Apatow at the DGA Awards, I think it was, said, if someone wrote and produced The Hangover today, it would make a billion dollars, that there is still a huge desire to have that exact experience that you're talking about. But he didn't say this part, but I think this is true. Movies like Tootsie, like The Hangover, made studios too greedy about comedy. That if a movie could not make $500 million, they should not make one that makes $72 million.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Well, and certainly we shouldn't spend $50 million to make it and give it like a set piece and have a lot of locations. It should be a house in Vancouver where people just like joke with each other.

• 1:04:17Sean Fennessey?

  But Tootsie, I would say honestly, not to bring you into my drama, but literally, but Tootsie is kind of like First Blood in that it's a comedy, but it's a very sad movie about a confused desperate person with really like high dramatic stakes. I mean, you really, you laugh a lot, but it's taken quite seriously.

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. And.

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  I mean, well, I'm just gonna repeat myself a bunch. It's just, it's so, it's really effective. It's really, uh, and it was very smart that Dustin Hoffman is the guy to play that part and to investigate that character in the very real circumstance that you're talking about, right? That he's a guy who's gonna say, what's this guy all about? What's he, he's not just, he's not just playing for laughs, right? He's playing a larger thing than that. It's just a brilliant comic construction. I, I, I guess it's become complicated by some current politics, but I don't know. I don't see it.

• 1:05:20Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think it has really fallen into that slipstream as much. I think Dustin Hoffman's identity as a public person has fallen into some complexity for sure, but I think, I think it's still seen as like a watermark, you know, watershed movie of the 1980s. Um, okay. Great pick.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  Also, when you look at the blockbuster numbers, right? E T is so far ahead of everything else, but Tootsie is actually so far ahead of everything else in the second spot because you wanted that experience in the movie.

• 1:05:51Sean Fennessey?

  A hundred and seventy seven million dollars in America in 1982 for a character comedy is amazing.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Next pick, C R?

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. In comedy, I'll take Fast Times.

• 1:06:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Damn it.

• 1:06:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. A comedy rush has begun.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  Which in, we did this for rewatchables relatively recently. What did you, what did you say?

• 1:06:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I just deleted it from my list. That's what I was gonna pick next.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Uh, is actually like 70% of drama. You know, like when you watch it.

• 1:06:23Sean Fennessey?

  Same, yeah.

• 1:06:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Sean Fennessey?

  The whole Jennifer Jolie storyline.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, but is just an incredible slice of life. Um, gosh, I'm trying to think of like what my favorite performance.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  The Reinhold stuff is so good.

• 1:06:39Amanda Dobbins?

  It's so good.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason-Leal are so good in it. Demone is an iconic character. It's great.

• 1:06:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Phoebe Cates is just really important.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Heckering and Crow. I wish they'd, I wish they'd made more movies together.

• 1:06:51Sean Fennessey?

  I do too.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  So good.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  So good, I mean.

• 1:06:55Sean Fennessey?

  You were 16 when this movie came out.

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  I know, and it's the same year as Porky's, right?

• 1:07:01Sean Fennessey?

  Don't spoil your next pick.

• 1:07:03Speaker 04

  Which is, which doesn't, doesn't hold up.

• 1:07:06Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Didn't, didn't really hold up in 1982.

• 1:07:10Sean Fennessey?

  Choices in that one, yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  But Fast Times felt more like high school.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 04

  Even though it was not a high school, I, it was not my high school, God knows, but the, the the mall culture and the relationships and it just felt very, it just felt a lot more relatable.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

  Than a lot of the, of course, this was, we were, we were just getting into the teen comedies, right? We're just coming out of slashers and moving into teen comedies for the, the teen dollar. Cause there was, I mean, John Hughes was, what, a year away, I think?

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Eighty-three, yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it, like a freight train was coming and, yeah, it's a great, great movie, great pick.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Too for you.

• 1:07:54Sean Fennessey?

  Must've been nice to grow up in California. That would've been cool.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  You always say that.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  You think?

• 1:08:00Sean Fennessey?

  I just love California, yeah, it's just an amazing place. It's so beautiful here.

• 1:08:05Amanda Dobbins?

  That is also moving brain. When I was watching the, the SAG Awards did a nice, like tribute to LA.

• 1:08:11Sean Fennessey?

  A montage.

• 1:08:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, and they were during, like, the breaks, which is essential, Sean.

• 1:08:17Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was a nice telecast.

• 1:08:18Amanda Dobbins?

  No, but they were very nice and, and I was like, oh yeah, well, now I just like, I'm, I'm movie-pilled, so that's why I love Los Angeles so much, and I see it through those eyes, but I agree with you, that's, that's why we like living here.

• 1:08:27Sean Fennessey?

  Just like being here.

• 1:08:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I was gonna take Fast Times in, in comedy, so.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  I'm sorry. I am sorry.

• 1:08:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I gotta be honest, like you have betrayed our alliance a little bit on this one.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  In this one?

• 1:08:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow. Yeah.

• 1:08:44Sean Fennessey?

  We meaningfully coexist.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  We don't have to get into who threw the first rock, but you knew I was gonna take Blade Rudder.

• 1:08:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I had to strategically.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I could have taken it the first time, I guess.

• 1:08:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, you really, you just volunteered that little info about King of Comedy, you know?

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's true. I'm sorry.

• 1:09:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Sean Fennessey?

  I think you could have had diner and comedy. I think.

• 1:09:05Amanda Dobbins?

  I could have had diner and Oscar.

• 1:09:07Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, you're concerned about Oscar now?

• 1:09:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, no, I'm just gonna do what I have to do, but like, I don't, I don't love it. Um, it's not, not a great Oscar year. Fucking Oscar sheet. See, this is why you're bringing.

• 1:09:18Sean Fennessey?

  But every movie is eligible, right? Not just the big categories. I just list the big categories. So there, it is more expanded than you might think.

• 1:09:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but like. Oscar sheet is missing. I'll get there. Oh, I'm good. No, I'm good. Okay, you're good on Oscar? Um, like, I know it's fine, but I don't really love a lot of the, the, you know, the special ones. Diner was sort of like my, my back pocket and I had to use it. And frankly, I'm looking at the list now and I just forgot to watch Victor, Victoria. Um, so that's.

• 1:09:50Sean Fennessey?

  Could have faked it.

• 1:09:51Amanda Dobbins?

  That's not gonna happen. I do, you know.

• 1:09:54Sean Fennessey?

  What have you got on your board? You got Blade Rudder, great pick.

• 1:09:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Sean Fennessey?

  You got diner, great pick. Those are your two?

• 1:09:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I think so. Yeah, and I get two more.

• 1:10:02Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:10:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so one thing I know I'm gonna do in comedy, I do have a backup. Um, the other Sidney Lumet film from 1982, Death Trap.

• 1:10:10Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, great pick. Yeah.

• 1:10:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, which is a great pick and then like a very Amanda pick, you know, like Puzzle Box. I'm comedy. Comedy, yeah. Um.

• 1:10:19Sean Fennessey?

  Movie sold as, as a mystery drama, but this is actually just a comedy.

• 1:10:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and a send up of a type of, of, of film, you know, and Agatha Christie, like whodunit, that I like very much. Great performances. Shout out Diane Cannon.

• 1:10:34Sean Fennessey?

  Funny movie about a playwright.

• 1:10:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Right. True, too. It's all true.

• 1:10:37Sean Fennessey?

  All true.

• 1:10:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so that's comedy.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Good Christopher Reeve performance, too.

• 1:10:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, wonderful, yeah.

• 1:10:45Sean Fennessey?

  The turn, I don't want to, if you haven't seen the film Death Trap, check it out, it's a fun, fun movie at the movies.

• 1:10:51Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really, really good. Okay. So I guess I gotta go in Oscar because I'm just pretty thin on the ground and I've been like scrolling up and down on the Wikipedia page while everyone's been talking. And I don't have that many options left. So, speaking of movie stars and movie star, well, I guess he was already a movie star at this point, but um, An Officer and a Gentleman, starring, starring Richard Gere.

• 1:11:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yep, in Oscar.

• 1:11:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, in Oscar.

• 1:11:26Sean Fennessey?

  The late great Louis Gossett Jr.

• 1:11:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  Do you just wish Zach would sometimes come by the podcast studio and sweep you off your feet like that?

• 1:11:33Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it is such a great, it's a ridiculous great ending. And, and a great rewatchables that launched one of your

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Byron Mayo, yeah.

• 1:11:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Best characters, but

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  Robert Loggia tugging at his boxers.

• 1:11:48Amanda Dobbins?

  But what stays with me

• 1:11:49Sean Fennessey?

  So much lower parameters in a sequence.

• 1:11:52Amanda Dobbins?

  It is really confusing, but what stays with me is like Bill's imitation of the other woman yelling like, "Way to go!", you know, it's so ridiculous. And in a lot of ways, it's like, I don't really remember the 80s because of my age, but if I were to like, think of the 80s and 80s movies, it is just sort of an officer and gentleman. Like sentimental and then really confusing moments like the whole Byron Mayo situation, you're like, "Why is this happening?".

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  There are sad parts, too, like the whole

• 1:12:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Very sad, not, um, not totally realistic, but also you just gotta hand it to them at the end with that last bit and, and the song, so.

• 1:12:36Sean Fennessey?

  I think of many episodes that we record together as that sequence where Gossett Jr. and Gere fight in a barn. And you're like, why are these two people fighting each other? What are they proving to each other? But you know, it's the emotional connection that you build with your betters, you know? And that's a weird movie. It's weird how big it was. You can understand with the component parts, but when you watch it, it has a lot of oddity to it. But it's still effective.

• 1:13:03Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 1:13:04Sean Fennessey?

  This is like one of the best episodes of that show that we've ever done, for sure.

• 1:13:07Amanda Dobbins?

  It definitely was.

• 1:13:08Sean Fennessey?

  Rewatchables, yeah.

• 1:13:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I find that like, so 78 to like 84. Again, just because of when I was born and like when I like, you know, came online and started watching things. There are, you know, it's been booting up for a while. Um, there is a certain generation of actor and actress who like, it just remain a total mystery to me. And I feel like I'm always like, I just want to watch everything to kind of get like, okay, why was this person a thing?

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  Like, why was Debra Winger a thing?

• 1:13:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And Debra Winger is like a thousand percent, and obviously like very beautiful and has chemistry with Richard Gere. But I just, I feel like I lost the moment. And I guess this is the closest, no, I mean, it's Terms of Adairment, but.

• 1:13:52Sean Fennessey?

  You starred in a film with Debra Winger.

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  I did, I had a great time working with her.

• 1:13:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  She was.

• 1:13:56Amanda Dobbins?

  She was very good, but I just like, I know that she was the biggest movie star.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  She was huge.

• 1:14:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, huge. And I just feel like I totally, by the time I was paying attention, she'd retired or whatever she was doing.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  She was beautiful and charismatic and funny and interesting. And you know, we, when we made that movie, The Lovers, we were one of those situations where you meet somebody in a makeup trailer before you're going to be making out with them as a married couple for the first time in half an hour's time. And.

• 1:14:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Why do they always do that scene first in shooting?

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  I don't know, but we, we, uh, in our conversation, uh, and we got on great from, from, from the get go, but.

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  She asked me about doing the gig and I said, look, it's interesting, it's interesting territory for me. I've not played a lot of, I've not played any leading roles on film. I've played a lot of character parts. That's what I do. And she said, well, the responsibilities are a little different. And I said, oh, talk to me about that. And she said, well, when you're further down on the call sheet, the responsibility is to keep the story moving, right? Get the, get the lines out and keep the story moving. And she said, and when you're the star of the movie, the responsibility is to be interesting. And I had never heard it put quite that way. And it's what Deborah does so beautifully. And she's just interesting. You just want to watch her. She's just fucking watchable.

• 1:15:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  I mean, and not to say that there isn't a lot of skill in what she's doing, a lot of, a lot of work that's gone into it. But she's just so damn watchable and appealing. And yeah, she, she walked away from it when the role started to get less interesting for her. But she's a big part of the success of that movie. The, the star power of her and Richard is a, not to mention the great performance by Lou Gossip Jr. And a big part of the success of that movie.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Loggia.

• 1:15:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Shout out Robert Loggia.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  You have another pick?

• 1:15:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I have two.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  You took two.

• 1:15:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Death Trap and then an Oscar and a German.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  All right, Christopher Ryan. All right. So I have to get a drama and I have to get a thriller, action, horror, sci-fi, and a wild card. Interesting, interesting, interesting. So drama, I'm very curious to hear where you go here. I don't have to do it right now. No, you don't. You can wait. You don't.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  You don't have to do anything.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  I know. Do what you like.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  Stand up and walk out of here.

• 1:16:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Where's the joy, Chris? Let's take a minute and find the joy.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  What do you love?

• 1:16:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause, you know.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Well, I've just been, I've just been so, it's just been like, I, I feel like I'm just ticking boxes on this one, you know? That's too bad.

• 1:16:35Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what I'm saying. Let's break out, you know?

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  What do we do to do that? Give us some gusto.

• 1:16:42Sean Fennessey?

  You've just gotten a firsthand account of what it's like to work with Deborah Winger. Bring something to the table for fuck's sake.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Should I talk about when I first saw Slumber Party Massacre?

• 1:16:53Sean Fennessey?

  If that's as close as you can get, so be it.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  Gosh. Alright, I guess for the action horror thing, for action thriller, horror sci-fi, I'm gonna take Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Whoa, I didn't see that coming.

• 1:17:07Amanda Dobbins?

  What happens in Halloween III?

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  Well, it's not a Michael Myers movie.

• 1:17:10Sean Fennessey?

  This is a very generous question.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  Very controversial.

• 1:17:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Halloween?

• 1:17:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, III is very different.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  It's very different. Sean and I love it.

• 1:17:18Sean Fennessey?

  It might be my second favorite. I think we said it was our second favorite.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Halloween movies.

• 1:17:23Amanda Dobbins?

  You did, I listened to that episode.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  Fifty percent of people were like, "You two get it. You're the ones." And then fifty percent of people were like, "You should never podcast again for putting Season of the Witch up there."

• 1:17:33Sean Fennessey?

  Were you one of them?

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  You've never seen it? It's awesome.

• 1:17:35Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, it's a very cool movie.

• 1:17:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Go ahead.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  It's basically like a side story, and it's like taking the energy of Halloween to tell like a different story about kids basically falling under the spell of a evil toy company.

• 1:17:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, what kind of toy?

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  It's like a little leprechaun, right?

• 1:17:52Sean Fennessey?

  Silver shamrock, yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  And it's kind of like a cult film. It's kind of like a corporate over like Big Brother movie.

• 1:17:59Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of a brainwash movie.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's...

• 1:18:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Where is the silver shamrock drawing the kids?

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  They see it on TV. They see it in commercials.

• 1:18:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, right, but then what is he, he or she? I don't want to gender essentialize the leprechaun.

• 1:18:13Sean Fennessey?

  The sort of factory, the HQ is somewhere in the desert, right?

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pure evil.

• 1:18:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, but and so is, yeah, but what are the kids doing? Like, what is the leprechaun inspire the children to do?

• 1:18:25Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good question. Making them sort of like dead-eyed soldiers for the cause.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Malevolent forces.

• 1:18:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, but like, so what's the fucked up stuff? That's what I'm trying to get you to like, be like, so then like...

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  Are they stabbing people?

• 1:18:36Amanda Dobbins?

  The army, they have like marching kids.

• 1:18:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's not as specific about that part of it. You know, like in The Brood, the great David Cronenberg film, we watched the children are menacing people, you know, they're being very violent. This is more of insinuations of the evil.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  So it's a, this is probably a slightly divisive pick, but I'm gonna go with that. There's a couple of other horror still left over, but I might throw that in wild cards. So I'll take Season of the Witch here.

• 1:19:00Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you did the thing that Amanda asked. You chose a personal pick.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  I did.

• 1:19:04Sean Fennessey?

  A very cool eighties horror movie. I can't believe you haven't seen that one. It's interesting.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  Haven't seen it.

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Goes to you Tracy.

• 1:19:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you're up.

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  You're up, you're up. Oh, it's me.

• 1:19:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  Oh shit. Oh geez, what do I have left? Blockbuster.

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  Oscar. Wild card. Indeed.

• 1:19:26Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:19:29Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 1:19:32Speaker 04

  Oh. Now it does get a little tricky, isn't it? It's a little tricky. It is a little tricky. What's my favorite movie on here?

• 1:19:40Sean Fennessey?

  Not so easy when you're not driving in your car, listening to the pod at 1.2 speed.

• 1:19:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Are you, oh, 1.2?

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do 1.2.

• 1:19:49Sean Fennessey?

  I just guessed that, but many people do 1.2.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  Is that alright? It's alright, isn't it? I'm a busy guy.

• 1:19:53Sean Fennessey?

  You know what I do?

• 1:19:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you do, which is just absolutely.

• 1:19:56Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely.

• 1:19:57Speaker 04

  I can't do it. You can't hear anything.

• 1:19:59Sean Fennessey?

  Double speed, Sean? I've been doing 2X for two years, Bob.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  You listen to The Watch on 2X?

• 1:20:04Sean Fennessey?

  I listen to you guys at 4X, trying to get through it as quickly as possible. That's not true. I listen to you at 0.5.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  I speak pretty fast, that's why I was like.

• 1:20:11Sean Fennessey?

  I want the episodes to be longer. I wish every episode was an hour longer. Slow it down.

• 1:20:15Amanda Dobbins?

  But like, how many hours a day do you have people speaking in your ears at 2X?

• 1:20:20Sean Fennessey?

  Multiple.

• 1:20:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, because that is just a psychological insight into like the world that you have created.

• 1:20:27Sean Fennessey?

  This is a powerful instrument.

• 1:20:28Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's like you are living.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  But how close are you to just being like ChatGPT summarize the Ringer Fantasy Football episode for me?

• 1:20:35Sean Fennessey?

  I would never do that.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:20:36Sean Fennessey?

  Why would I do that?

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Because you're trying to be as effective.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  You guys are about the only podcast that I listen to.

• 1:20:40Sean Fennessey?

  That's very nice.

• 1:20:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Very kind.

• 1:20:41Sean Fennessey?

  How did you find the show? Was it Tim?

• 1:20:44Speaker 04

  I don't remember.

• 1:20:45Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, you don't want to give Hitmaker any credit.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  It was 1982.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  It was. I think it was actually. I think it was Bill and gambling, sports gambling.

• 1:20:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Eventually brought me around.

• 1:20:57Sean Fennessey?

  Brought you over, okay. You are, you're an avid sports fan. Sam Darnold, not back, not back?

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  Uh, we'll see.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Are you guys both Jets Mets?

• 1:21:06Sean Fennessey?

  No, he's, he's Vikings.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  Vikings, Cubs, Bulls.

• 1:21:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 1:21:10Sean Fennessey?

  This is Oklahoma.

• 1:21:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:21:12Sean Fennessey?

  That we're pulling from. Was it parental that they dad pushed you in a direction for certain teams?

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  No, I just, Fran Tarkin was my childhood sports.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  Do you like the Sooners or the Oklahoma State Cowboys or college at all?

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  I kind of stopped following the college game a while back.

• 1:21:28Sean Fennessey?

  Too corrupt?

• 1:21:30Speaker 04

  Uh, that's part of it. Yeah. Actually. Yeah.

• 1:21:33Sean Fennessey?

  Chris, you're pro NIL. Would you like to speak to it?

• 1:21:35Speaker 04

  I participate in a lot of collectives. In Blockbuster, I'm taking Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. This was right behind Poltergeist for me.

• 1:21:45Speaker 04

  Now, I projected Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan at the Plaza Theater. And that was a Plaza Theater had two carbon arc projectors, which was, they were tricky to operate. And I actually fucked that up and the screen went dark for about 20 minutes while I was projecting Star Trek 2 to a packed. I was worried that maybe you were gonna put the last reel first or something like that. I didn't get them out of order, but the screen went dark and had to make a panicked call to my boss.

• 1:22:10Sean Fennessey?

  Can you talk about the transition from the difference between Star Trek, the motion picture, 2.2? And how this sort of saved whatever the Star Trek thing was?

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  There is no Star Trek these days without Star Trek 2. Star Trek 2 saved the entire franchise. The first Star Trek movie was a disastrous misfire. Robert Wise was not the man to direct Star Trek. I don't know, in my own, my own personal proclivities, I'm more of a Star Trek guy than a Star Wars guy. I think I prefer the, I don't know, there's something about the mission. It's just so stupid and open-ended, just like, we're just going out, we're just going out. We're just gonna go and see what, see if we can get into some trouble. Zap down there, see what's up, come back up.

• 1:22:59Sean Fennessey?

  What's going on? It's kind of the good hang of sci-fi franchises.

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  They were so beautifully cast, those characters were, were so specific and, and the, I mean, really, Spock. What a, what an amazing character, what an amazing cultural touchstone Spock was. And, and this movie brought it back to life. I mean, it was everything that you loved about the show.

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  And.

• 1:23:25Speaker 04

  I mean Khan is just a great villain.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Montalban.

• 1:23:30Speaker 04

  And Montalban is just going for it, man.

• 1:23:33Sean Fennessey?

  Truly.

• 1:23:34Speaker 04

  He is just eating the drapes. It's fantastic. It's a great time. It's a lot of fun, this movie. It really did rescue the franchise.

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  This is the one with the worms in the ears?

• 1:23:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 1:23:43Sean Fennessey?

  I was shown this in sixth grade when a substitute teacher came in and did not want to teach the class. And he just put on Wrath of Khan and it was wonderful.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  Really, truly, some of, we really made American film students by like, be like, I don't feel like teaching today, so we're watching Spartacus.

• 1:23:58Sean Fennessey?

  Very, very exciting. So I read this, Nimoy did not want to come back for this and he had to be convinced to come back. And that he lobbied hard for the death of Spock very early on, which then this becomes like a trilogy of movies, two, three and four. Two and four are by far my favorites. I think two and four are great movies, great adventure movies, really fun. I really, really like that. Great pick. Okay. I have two selections. Oh, fun data point for you. I also learned researching Star Trek two, directed by Nicholas Meyer, who was an author before he was a director.

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  The 7% solution.

• 1:24:32Sean Fennessey?

  7% solution, a novel he wrote. His daughter, Dylan Meyer, is engaged to Kristen Stewart.

• 1:24:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, congratulations to them.

• 1:24:41Sean Fennessey?

  I believe Dylan Meyer is also a filmmaker.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Do you ever throw up a live long and prosper?

• 1:24:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't do it. I don't have the gene.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  This is a lot of practice. I was a kid.

• 1:24:47Speaker 04

  It's genetic.

• 1:24:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:24:49Sean Fennessey?

  You can do it or you can't do it. You look like Alice trying to do a peace sign right now. She also can't do a peace. She always goes like this to do peace.

• 1:24:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Max just started counting, but he's doing like the Inglourious Basterds two thing or whatever. I was like, I didn't know you could do that.

• 1:24:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's right, Glazer. Uh, okay. So I have to select, I have Oscar open.

• 1:25:08Sean Fennessey?

  And I have comedy open.

• 1:25:11Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm. Comedy is an easy choice.

• 1:25:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:25:16Sean Fennessey?

  Not because there are a lot of comedies, but there is one comedy remaining that I quite like, which is The World According to Garp.

• 1:25:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm. Okay.

• 1:25:25Sean Fennessey?

  Directed by George Roy Hill, one of the early Robin Williams starring performances, adapted from a John Irving novel. A very good novel. This is.

• 1:25:33Amanda Dobbins?

  You're a John Irving guy?

• 1:25:35Sean Fennessey?

  I read his-

• 1:25:36Amanda Dobbins?

  What is up with John Irving?

• 1:25:38Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 1:25:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, crazy shit happens in those books.

• 1:25:41Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:41Amanda Dobbins?

  And also, I was given to all of, given all of them at like the age of seven.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  There's a lot of sex stuff, and then there's also just a lot of like carnival performers, right?

• 1:25:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  Like, he was a wrestler and then he went on the road.

• 1:25:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And people die randomly, but mostly sex stuff, I guess.

• 1:25:53Sean Fennessey?

  I think there is a general weird energy that I would say has actually been adopted and comported into prestige television. It's like, his movies don't seem as weird, or his, the adaptations of his novels.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  He's in Ozark.

• 1:26:06Sean Fennessey?

  Honestly, they don't just seem as strange as they did in the eighties and then the nineties. I don't know why, I mean, his John Irving's novels were huge.

• 1:26:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that's why, and it's the same thing. It's like, I was allowed to read Grisham and John Irving, like, before I was old enough.

• 1:26:20Sean Fennessey?

  This is a very curious movie.

• 1:26:25Sean Fennessey?

  Features an amazing performance from Glenn Close as Garp's mother, who is a very independent, forward-thinking feminist figure, who becomes pregnant, purposefully astride a dying soldier, so that she can conceive and be a single mom. And she raises this unusual boy, who goes on to become a writer, but just as he is starting to flower as a writer, she writes a kind of feminist manifesto that becomes one of the most popular nonfiction books, essentially in American history, is sort of what the movie tells you, or the story tells you. And then it becomes this interesting character piece about this complex relationship between these two figures, and it's also a romance about Garp and this woman that he falls in

• 1:27:09Sean Fennessey?

  love with, but who is unfaithful to him, and he's such an odd character. Very, very strange movie. Funny, but not in a laughing out loud way. You didn't have that tootsie experience that you had described watching it. George Roy Hill also kind of getting a lot of his personal interests into this movie. There's very memorable scenes where a plane flies into a house. Reminds me of The Great Waldo Pepper. Just a really good movie that I think has kind of been a little bit forgotten.

• 1:27:37Speaker 03

  Not by Bill Simmons.

• 1:27:38Sean Fennessey?

  It is, Bill Simmons is a fan of the movie. This was-

• 1:27:43Sean Fennessey?

  Not eligible for box office, but there were quite a few Academy Award nominations, right? I believe so.

• 1:27:51Speaker 04

  Well, Glenn Close was nominated and

• 1:27:53Sean Fennessey?

  And John Lithgow. Yes, and John Lithgow were both nominated.

• 1:27:56Speaker 04

  And it's funny you mention that about prestige TV because I've often thought, why don't they go back and revisit some of this Irving stuff? I mean, The World According to Garp and Cider House Rules are so ripe for that treat.

• 1:28:08Sean Fennessey?

  More so almost than a movie form. Yeah. World According to Garp is a big story.

• 1:28:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Sean Fennessey?

  It spans a lot of time. Yeah. Anyway, really good movie. I like that movie a lot more than Cider House Rules.

• 1:28:17Speaker 04

  I think people were disappointed because they had certain expectations of Robin Williams. And of course, he was trying to break out of a certain

• 1:28:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  way that people saw him.

• 1:28:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very low key character. It's not the zaniness that you would think. Anyway, uh, okay. I have another pick.

• 1:28:35Sean Fennessey?

  And I'll be making it an Oscar.

• 1:28:40Sean Fennessey?

  What did I say I wanted to do?

• 1:28:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Only you and the voices in your head.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  So you didn't put Garp in Oscar. You took Garp in drama?

• 1:28:49Sean Fennessey?

  I took Garp in comedy.

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  Oh, comedy.

• 1:28:53Speaker 04

  Which would certainly be a, also a comedy, drama.

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:28:57Speaker 04

  Crossover.

• 1:28:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Hmm. Oscar.

• 1:29:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you watch Victor Victoria?

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  You have a Sophie's Choice here.

• 1:29:07Sean Fennessey?

  I have a lot of holes in, uh, in the Blake Edwards filmography. That's not really one I've spent a lot of time with. I probably gotta go back. There's a really good series of episodes of You Must Remember This about Blake Edwards that was related to Ten, as I recall, that made me want to go watch a lot of those, especially those seventies and eighties movies.

• 1:29:25Speaker 04

  He hit a kind of, uh, new gear, starting with Ten, that went through Victor Victoria, SOB.

• 1:29:34Sean Fennessey?

  I have seen, what's the film with Jack Lemmon? Where he's living in his house?

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  That's Life?

• 1:29:38Sean Fennessey?

  That's Life, yeah, which is such a thinly veiled self-portrait. There's crazy movies, super interesting movie. But anyway, I haven't seen a lot of those movies. I, I don't even know if I've seen Victor Victoria, to be honest with you. I'll take Dust Boat.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good pick.

• 1:29:50Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, which is Wolfgang Peterson's, uh, three and a half hour masterpiece about being trapped on a submarine and the absolute hell of that experience, which does reflect the occasional movie draft. You know, sometimes it does feel

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 1:30:03Sean Fennessey?

  Like, not to me, but I think maybe to some others on this panel.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  Is that how you feel?

• 1:30:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, there are some days, especially in our old studios.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  Where we get a little stuffy.

• 1:30:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Which were audio only and, but, you know, no windows and had sort of, they had a, a long, like a, what is the, they were long and narrow and narrow quality to them. That is how I imagine a submarine would be. Yeah, this is a, a classic.

• 1:30:31Sean Fennessey?

  Tight air, you know, that air that you keep breathing in over and over.

• 1:30:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Our colleague Juliette Littman has a very classic, you know, like party question. Space or submarine? Where are you? Where would you prefer to go?

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  Like to spend time or die?

• 1:30:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I'm, well, either.

• 1:30:48Sean Fennessey?

  The eternal question.

• 1:30:49Speaker 04

  You mean, you mean like real, not like on the, on the deck of the, of the Enterprise. You mean like in an actual space capsule?

• 1:30:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, like you're, you're going to space or you're going in a submarine to the, to the deep sea.

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  I'm not, I'm not going to either of those places.

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  He brings up an interesting distinction, which is that I think when I think about wanting to be in outer space, it's often on like, you know, the spaceship from the Martian.

• 1:31:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  Hanging out with Sebastian Stan.

• 1:31:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I would, that would be tough.

• 1:31:16Sean Fennessey?

  That would be me with Jessica Chastain.

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  But, you know, likelihood is that more like you're just like in a rocket, you know?

• 1:31:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, that's true.

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  Kind of going up.

• 1:31:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I think they're both, you know, kind of like silent and oppressive and like the, the great void and also some gravitational issues outside.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Of being crushed at the bottom of the ocean.

• 1:31:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Me too. I like, for me, it's space, no question. Submarines are terrifying to me. And that's before all that other stuff.

• 1:31:40Speaker 04

  I won't even get in the goddamn thing to go up to the top of the, the arch in St. Louis. So I'm not about to get in a rotting space capsule.

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  And yet you so memorably got in that car in Ford Ferrari. Terrified, absolutely terrified. Just.

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  Have you ever been in a submarine movie? Or a movie set in outer space?

• 1:32:00Speaker 04

  Submarine movie.

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:32:01Speaker 04

  Or an outer space movie. It's alright.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Bucket list, yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 04

  Or a bucket.

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  Alright, you have another choice. Oh, Jesus Christ. Is it your final selection? No, I still have. Oscar. Is this going as you expected it would go? Oh, yeah. Okay. Oscar, have you seen the TV version of Dospot?

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:32:24Speaker 04

  I wonder if it's any good.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  Is that more recent?

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  Pretty recent, I think in the last couple of years.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:32:29Speaker 04

  They did a limited series of Dospot. And I don't know if it's any good. And I already did Blockbuster, so I have Oscar and Wild Card left.

• 1:32:42Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  In Oscar, I will take Missing. Okay, good.

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:32:47Speaker 04

  Uh, Costa Gavris movie. Jack Lemmon. Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek. This is my latest screed, it's, I think Sissy Spacek has been underrated.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  I don't think we talk enough about how great Sissy Spacek was. I think she was one of the greats. I think, and I, any conversation that doesn't include her as one of the greats, I just, I just disagree with it. And to watch that movie now, I've seen it not, not that long ago. It's really interesting to note the difference in performance styles between what Sissy Spacek is doing and what Jack Lemmon is doing. He is very clearly from a different, I mean, not, obviously his character is from a different generation, but he's from a different generation of actor. Naturalistic versus studio. What he's doing is, is fussy and performative and what she's doing is locked in. She's great in that movie. She's great.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  Do you have a favorite Sissy Spacek performance?

• 1:33:47Speaker 04

  Well, Coal Miner's Daughter is kind of undeniable. I mean, it's one of the rare times where we gave the Oscar to the person for the right performance, and that definitely was was the one. But I often think about her in these movies in which I just, the movie, for whatever reason, gets forgotten or not remembered as fondly. Though I think Missing is in the Criterion Collection. It is one of those. I mean, the truth is, that movie really holds up. And unfortunately, maybe even more relevant now.

• 1:34:13Sean Fennessey?

  It is. Yes, it resonates. I, it's kind of the end of an era for her as a major leading actress. And it's not totally clear to me why that happened. You know, she did, she made Raggedy Man the year before that.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:34:29Sean Fennessey?

  With Jack Fisk. And then she's in The River and Marie and Violet's Are Blue. And, you know, she makes a big sort of comeback, for lack of a better phrase, in the 90s in a lot of supporting parts. And she starts taking a lot of middle aged female parts. And obviously, the business.

• 1:34:46Speaker 04

  Well, that's what happened to her. I mean, you know, she didn't go cutting on herself. And she, you know, it was at a time. I mean, it's not as true now as it used to be. That, you know, roles for actresses just fell off a table after they hit 40. So she probably just aged out of the good parts.

• 1:35:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's just so crazy.

• 1:35:05Speaker 04

  You know, talking about minting of stars in this year with Mel Gibson and Eddie Murphy, it's also true that with Meryl in Sophie's Choice, again, just kind of undeniable in that movie and all of the work she did in that film. So if Meryl doesn't make Sophie's Choice that year, Jessica Lange almost certainly wins for Frances.

• 1:35:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:35:26Speaker 04

  Which means that Jessica Lange doesn't win Supporting Actress for Tootsie. Probably Terry Garwin Supporting Actress for Tootsie, I think. But

• 1:35:36Speaker 04

  More to the point-

• 1:35:37Sean Fennessey?

  Terry Garth thinks so too. She did think so, I believe.

• 1:35:39Speaker 04

  Did she?

• 1:35:39Sean Fennessey?

  I believe so, yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 04

  More to the point, you know, Meryl, I mean, obviously, she was already a movie star. I think she'd already been... Had she won for Kramer vs. Kramer?

• 1:35:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:35:49Speaker 04

  Right? So she was a movie star, but Sophie's Choice was just like, oh no, she's the movie star. Right. She is our greatest actress. That became cemented, really, with Sophie's Choice this year. And Jessica Lange, right? This was also kind of her year with Frances and Tootsie. It's like, well, she's one of our... She's not just a model who became an actress. She's actually one of our great actresses.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:14Sean Fennessey?

  Did you end up getting that edition of Frances that I hipped you to?

• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  I already had Frances on the imprint.

• 1:36:20Speaker 03

  You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to get past this guy.

• 1:36:23Sean Fennessey?

  Just made him aware of a new addition. Sometimes you'll double up, but not in this case, I guess. Holding on to that Australian edition. Um, okay, Chris.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  I gotta do drama. I gotta do wildcard.

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  I was looking at missing, but for drama, I'm gonna pick one that has, I guess, weirdly a personal resonance, although it's a perverted film. Uh, The Draftsmen's Contract. Peter Greenaway is not a director that I think is particularly in fashion right now. But my dad used to have all these, like, BFI books. And some of the most earliest erotic images I ever saw were from these books-

• 1:37:01Amanda Dobbins?

  That's so beautiful.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  About Peter Greenaway's films-

• 1:37:03Amanda Dobbins?

  It's nice that we can always come back to this.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  Which are, are truly, like, you know, like, there's a lot of kink in these. So this is a movie about, uh, I can't remember when it's set. I guess, like, the 17th century, 16th century, you know? Rich woman who with a, with a frigid marriage has hired a-

• 1:37:21Sean Fennessey?

  An artist.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  An artist to come and do landscape drawings for her. And part of the contract is that she will also sexually pleasure him every day that he turns in one of these drawings. And it's kind of a portrait of class, but also of, like, excess. And it's just, like, got a great style. It shot in 16, but they blew it up to 35. And an incredible act of, like, kind of independent filmmaking. And, and he's such a unique voice. And he just really doesn't come up. The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover, I suppose, is his biggest film.

• 1:37:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  But this is a fantastic one.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  What category did you take this in?

• 1:37:57Speaker 03

  Drama.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  I worked with Anthony Higgins, who plays the lead in Drastman's contract. I did a very bad play with him in London and he was a great guy. I really, you know, he's also in Raiders.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:38:09Speaker 04

  He's one of the, one of the Nazis, right?

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:38:12Speaker 04

  He's a great, a great guy. Had a lot of great showbiz stories. He, he's a guy that they would always tempt with Bond. He was gonna be the next Bond.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Be the next Bond.

• 1:38:23Speaker 04

  The only reason they did it was to get Roger Moore to sign his contract and Anthony knew it. It was like, the only reason you're bringing me out is to get Roger Moore to agree. Because they'd sort of dangle Anthony out there like, well, he might be the next Bond. And Anthony was so grateful that he was not made the next Bond. He would have been really.

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  It's kind of how they treat Jameis Winston now, you know, like, we can always just go get Jameis.

• 1:38:44Sean Fennessey?

  Honestly, future quarterback of the Jets, if I'm guessing. Favorite Bond?

• 1:38:49Sean Fennessey?

  You mean, favorite actor who portrayed James Bond?

• 1:38:52Speaker 04

  Well, I, I think the, the obvious answer for somebody my age is Sean Connery. But the truth is, I'm born in 65, which means, yes, I am the, I'm the first Gen Xer. Gen Xers are turning 60 this year and our Bond was Roger Moore.

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  He just was. I, I know he wasn't great, but he was our Bond.

• 1:39:15Sean Fennessey?

  That's great. That's nice. You, you, you did choose Craig over Pierce, right? You won't choose?

• 1:39:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, Craig over Pierce? Oh, 1,000%.

• 1:39:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:26Speaker 04

  Craig's the best.

• 1:39:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Speaker 04

  I don't, I understand that Craig is the best.

• 1:39:29Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Does anyone pick Dalton?

• 1:39:32Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:39:33Sean Fennessey?

  Now's the time.

• 1:39:34Speaker 04

  I did show, my, my wife had no experience of James Bond. I was like, well, we gotta watch, uh, we gotta start with Sean Connery.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Speaker 04

  So I showed her one Sean Connery and she was lukewarm. And then I showed her the second Sean Connery and she was like, I hate this.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:39:49Speaker 04

  I think this is stupid. These jokes, these, they're like, there's these stupid like cornball double entendres. And I, I just like, the action isn't that great and. This bad guy's ridiculous and she's just like totally out on Bond. And if you're out on Sean Connery, it's like you're not gonna go for Pierce Brosnan.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  Probably not.

• 1:40:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, what about Daniel Craig? Like you, what about Casino Royale?

• 1:40:12Speaker 04

  I wanted to wait long enough for her to forget it before showing her Casino Royale.

• 1:40:16Amanda Dobbins?

  There is some, there is some essential early scenes in Casino Royale that I think might win some people over.

• 1:40:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's supposed to play more straight.

• 1:40:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:24Sean Fennessey?

  It doesn't have that.

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  And she loves Mads.

• 1:40:26Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:27Speaker 04

  So Mads might be the door in.

• 1:40:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and he's phenomenal in Casino Royale.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  Have you done, do you watch like many, we don't keep, keep talking about Peter Greenaway, but I was just curious, like, do you know how like there's certain filmmakers?

• 1:40:38Sean Fennessey?

  I just watched this film for the first time two days ago.

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  What'd you think of it?

• 1:40:40Sean Fennessey?

  The film you just picked. I really liked it. I had seen, um, The Cook, The Thief. Uh, I think it, they're totally singular, right? The way that everything is framed in the movie, they're just, they're very cinematic, but they don't really have, they don't feel like they have a lot of forebearers. So it's a little hard to kind of wrap your head around it visually. Um, I love like the perversion.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Sean Fennessey?

  How, how he's very clearly like, this turns me on.

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  Like, English fine art perverts, Ken Russell kind of like thing. I like that.

• 1:41:08Speaker 04

  I do too. Zed and Two Knots.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I've never, I've not seen that.

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  That's a lot of fun. Uh, oh man, I, I, uh, Belly of an Architect.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:19Speaker 04

  Interesting movie. Then he was like, what are you doing here?

• 1:41:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, okay. Amanda, you've got, are these your final two selections?

• 1:41:27Amanda Dobbins?

  These are my last two picks. I have Blockbuster and Wildcard. So Block, Blockbuster's interesting. I'll just read, there were 16 on the table and many are gone now. Here's what's, so here's what I'm picking from. Number one is E.T., gone. Two, Tootsie, gone. Three, An Officer and a Gentleman, gone to me. Four, Rocky III.

• 1:41:49Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Five, Porky's. Six, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, gone. Seven, Forty-Eight Hours, gone. Eight, Poltergeist, gone. Nine, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which I'm not gonna take respectfully to Dolly Parton, who I love very much. Um, 10 Annie, 11 The Verdict, gone. And then Gandhi, First Blood, also gone. The Toy, Firefox, and the Dark Crystal. And I have to be honest, I don't know what the last three are. So I won't be picking those.

• 1:42:17Sean Fennessey?

  Just for shame.

• 1:42:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 1:42:19Sean Fennessey?

  The disrespect to Clint and Jim Henson is astonishing.

• 1:42:22Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't know Dark Crystal? I know. Do I know Dark Crystal?

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  You've got to show your kids Dark Crystal. What? My boy was way into Dark Crystal by the time he was four.

• 1:42:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, this looks very upsetting.

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  Yes. Dark Crystal is so good.

• 1:42:35Amanda Dobbins?

  What is going on here?

• 1:42:37Sean Fennessey?

  There's also so much devoted to it at the Academy Museum. So many of the puppets are there.

• 1:42:42Speaker 04

  And it's handmade and it's really good.

• 1:42:45Sean Fennessey?

  It's on a very short list for my wildcard selection.

• 1:42:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so, well, it'll be there for you, but I guess, wow, his teeth are really upsetting.

• 1:42:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, so I know what I'm gonna do here. Despite Rocky III giving us Eye of the Tiger, which is really important. Uh, I mean, it is. It's very important. My high school cross-country team trained. We did our own training montage. Don't worry about it.

• 1:43:11Speaker 04

  It was our senior song. We had to vote on a senior song, and it was Eye of the Tiger. I voted for Beatrice.

• 1:43:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Four straight state championships, okay? So. I'm not doubting it. Whatever you want to say. Like, we did it. Um, you know, I was a child once, so I'm gonna take Annie.

• 1:43:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I had assumed you would take that.

• 1:43:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, this is a classic. Um, and probably one of the first movie musicals that I saw. Or like, in that grouping, but like, one of the good ones, in my opinion. And now with Knox, we're going through all of them. And I just really, I can't watch The Music Man again, respectfully. But, uh, Annie's great.

• 1:43:50Sean Fennessey?

  And you can teach him about the Great Depression.

• 1:43:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, sure, you know. Um, and a great cast, and like, probably like, my first introduction to Carol Burnett, Carol Burnett, Aubrey, like, all of those, Tim Curry, you know, everyone.

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  And it is a hard-knock life, as it turns out.

• 1:44:05Amanda Dobbins?

  It is. Yeah. So.

• 1:44:08Sean Fennessey?

  Is it?

• 1:44:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it is.

• 1:44:09Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:44:10Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. All right. I'll take your word for it.

• 1:44:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And then Wild Card is probably my favorite movie of the year, which is, and it's just a very Amanda pick. Evil Under the Sun.

• 1:44:21Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is another of the Agatha Christie adaptations starring Peter Oostman as Eric Coolparo. It's not as good as Death on the Nile, which was like in 1978 and is just a legendary movie. The original, please don't watch the new ones. They're awful. Uh, but Evil Under the Sun is a, is a very good Agatha Christie mystery as well because I read all of them. I, I recommend it and stacked cast, very fun.

• 1:44:50Speaker 04

  Who directed that?

• 1:44:52Amanda Dobbins?

  This is.

• 1:44:52Sean Fennessey?

  Terrence Young?

• 1:44:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Guy Hamilton.

• 1:44:54Sean Fennessey?

  Guy Hamilton.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  Another Bond.

• 1:44:55Sean Fennessey?

  Different Bond guy.

• 1:44:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, exactly. But you know, it's Maggie Smith, Jane Birkin, James Mason again, Diana Rigg, like, you know, these people. It's just, it's, it's really fun. This one's set somewhere in the Mediterranean.

• 1:45:07Sean Fennessey?

  He's at Oostman?

• 1:45:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Speaker 04

  He was never phoning it in, Peter.

• 1:45:12Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I mean, it was very, it's, it's very big and like this could have gone in comedy probably, but, um, even though it is a murder mystery, but really fun.

• 1:45:22Sean Fennessey?

  I took Alice to see The Great Muppet Caper at, uh, Vidit's yesterday afternoon and, uh, very well. I mean, it's a, it's a real platform for Miss Piggy, who is a.

• 1:45:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:45:33Sean Fennessey?

  She's a big hero in the home right now, so it went over very well. Um, and you know, for Charles Grodin fans, that's a core text.

• 1:45:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Sean Fennessey?

  But, uh, Peter Oostman gets like 90 seconds and he makes a meal out of his 90 seconds. He really, he goes for it. He didn't, never didn't go for it.

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  Is Austin Pendleton in that movie?

• 1:45:53Sean Fennessey?

  No, he's in.

• 1:45:55Speaker 04

  He's in the first one.

• 1:45:57Sean Fennessey?

  He's in the first one. He is, uh, he is Charles Durnings henchman.

• 1:46:02Speaker 04

  Right. I heard a young actor once ask him what it was like acting with the Muppets and he got mad and said, it's like acting with cloth.

• 1:46:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. You took your two?

• 1:46:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  I have wild card left.

• 1:46:20Sean Fennessey?

  You're... What are you gonna do?

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  I'm gonna take personal best.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  Whoa, I didn't see that coming.

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Nice pick.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  So I was watching, uh, the Yakuza recently.

• 1:46:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  Um, this Sydney Pollock movie with Robert Mitchum, uh, in Japan crime film. And I'd forgotten that Towne did a rewrite of the Schrader script, that he's accredited, um, co-screenwriter. So I kinda went on a little bit of a Robert Towne jag, like both trying to find stuff that was like, suggested that he had rewritten, but also stuff they had written. And I realized I had not seen Personal Best, maybe ever?

• 1:46:52Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  If I, if I had, I did not remember it. And what really struck me about it this time, it's a coming of age movie and a love story about a track star who, uh, in Oregon, who's training for the Olympics and Scott Glenn, Mary Ellen Hemingway is the track star, Scott Glenn plays her coach, is, uh, how amazingly like Towne directs all the running sequences and the training sequences and how wonderfully cinematic it is, but it's got a great script. And I wasn't sure if this was like a controversial movie or not, do you think?

• 1:47:22Sean Fennessey?

  Because of the sexual politics?

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:24Speaker 04

  I don't think it was popular enough to be controversial.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was very well received. I went back and read the Pauline Kael review of it and like the Stanley Kaufman review of it, but I thought it was a fantastic movie.

• 1:47:35Speaker 04

  People just weren't up for it, for whatever reason. They weren't...

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  This guy loves track.

• 1:47:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's an unlikely...

• 1:47:40Speaker 03

  Robert Towne.

• 1:47:40Sean Fennessey?

  He does, he does. It's a very unlikely choice though, given what his CV was before that too. And I think they didn't totally know how to sell it. It's a, it's an odd movie.

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Sean Fennessey?

  Um, but very interesting.

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  I really dug it.

• 1:47:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's cool. What's it? What's the film right after that that he makes? Doesn't he make another film?

• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  Star, six star?

• 1:47:56Sean Fennessey?

  No, no. I mean, he ma- he makes Ask the Dust and, uh, he had another late, later period film that he directed. I can't remember, but I thought he had one more film in the eighties. Oh, Tequila Sunrise.

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:07Sean Fennessey?

  Tequila Sunrise.

• 1:48:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:48:09Sean Fennessey?

  Which is, you know, an attempt to make something more commercial, more commercially viable.

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  There's, uh, just, just for fun, this was his uncredited writer run, was Godfather, Parallax View, Marathon Band, Heaven Can Wait, Reds.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  And then, you know, Crimson Tide and Armageddon later.

• 1:48:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and Warren on speed dial, as we all know, having read that Peter Biskin book. Uh, okay, Tracy, you have a wild card selection.

• 1:48:34Speaker 04

  I know, and it's the, I'm actually more torn about this.

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  This is the hardest pick.

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  Any other category, because you're like.

• 1:48:41Amanda Dobbins?

  They're scribbling out now on the paper.

• 1:48:43Speaker 04

  And do you, do you, are you trying to fill out a, a, a card? Are you trying to just go with your heart and say, this is the thing that I've seen most? This is the thing I will go back to most often.

• 1:48:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:57Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm really torn between about three movies here, but I am gonna go with my heart.

• 1:49:05Speaker 04

  Eating Raoul.

• 1:49:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:07Speaker 04

  Uh, is my wild card pick. I saw this at the USA Film Festival. Paul Bartel and Mary Wornoff were there. I had a terrible crush on Mary Wornoff. Uh, and then about 20 years later, uh, Killer Joe, my first play, opened in New York, and I was, uh, living in Los Angeles at the time. And Paul Bartel called me and asked me to go out to lunch with him. And we went to, uh, DuPars. And he just wanted to meet me because he'd seen the play and he liked it so much.

• 1:49:37Speaker 03

  That's so good.

• 1:49:38Speaker 04

  It was just a lovely, generous, friendly guy who was just like, I just want to hear your story and how you came to write this thing. And I'm just a fan and I just think it's great. It was just such a lovely, and then he died a couple of years later. I'm so sad. Eating Raoul is not only funny as hell, but there's something about the indie spirit of it and the fact that a guy would spend years of his life trying to make this goofy, strange, very LA comedy.

• 1:50:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:07Speaker 04

  Uh, and yet again, scripted, the, the climax of this movie, uh, the, the hot tub. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. The hot tub is just a great, hilarious, uh, galvanizing moment in the movie theater. Uh, Eating Raoul, still a lot of fun. Watched it not that long ago, still a lot of fun.

• 1:50:29Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick. I ca- I can't say I'm surprised that Paul Bartel liked Killer Joe. I feel like that's kind of in his zone. Um, all right, so I have the last pick, which is my wild card.

• 1:50:44Sean Fennessey?

  Lots to choose from here. A lot of strange things. I think I'll go with Fitzcarraldo.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  This is on my list.

• 1:50:51Sean Fennessey?

  Werner Herzog's epic story about a man trying to drag a ship up a mountain.

• 1:51:02Sean Fennessey?

  Certainly one of the craziest acts of movie making in the, you know, the same year Les Blank's Burden of Dreams was released, which is a documentary about the making of the movie.

• 1:51:09Speaker 03

  Almost outshadows the movie.

• 1:51:10Sean Fennessey?

  I think it has kind of subsumed what Fitzcarraldo is. But for whatever reason, I think of actually the way that you and Carrie watch movies. My wife and I in the 2000s got into a weird Herzog thing where we just watched every movie he had made up until that point. I think it was around the release of Rescued Dawn. Was that the Christian Bale movie that he made?

• 1:51:33Sean Fennessey?

  And this was by far our favorite of all of them, more than A Gear of the Wrath of God, more than, you know, Nosferatu. And is just an insane concept for a movie that is actually based on a true story and is beautiful and sad. And really like, you feel the pain of the people that are in the story and the pain of the people who are making this story come to life. So that's my wild card.

• 1:51:57Speaker 04

  There's, you won't often hear me acknowledging a meme, but there's a great one where he puts on an album. He's demonstrating the Victrola he's got there and he puts it on and meme, it's a Steely Dan song. And he's just, it's just fantastic. And everybody's just like drifting away slowly.

• 1:52:22Speaker 04

  That's a great pick.

• 1:52:23Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks. So we're done.

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  Should we recap our picks?

• 1:52:26Sean Fennessey?

  Well, let's, should we do some, some honorable mentions first?

• 1:52:29Speaker 04

  Hell, yes.

• 1:52:30Speaker 03

  I gotta throw out a couple of B movie genre movies. Vice Squad.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  Great.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  Which you can see a poor version of on Tubi is a absolutely disgusting LA noir with a truly, truly unhinged Wings Howser performance as a pimp.

• 1:52:46Sean Fennessey?

  If you enjoyed the film Maxine, there's a lot from Maxine that is pulling from Vice Squad, yes.

• 1:52:52Speaker 03

  Also, Amityville 2: The Possession, a really good horror movie. Damiano.

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  Damiani, is that his name?

• 1:53:00Sean Fennessey?

  Damiano Damiani, an Italian filmmaker who barely spoke English, who made a movie that feels completely disconnected to the original Amityville horror.

• 1:53:09Speaker 03

  With Burt Young.

• 1:53:10Sean Fennessey?

  I find incomprehensible, this movie. It's fun to watch.

• 1:53:13Speaker 03

  And, uh, one last one, there was a couple of TV movies from this year that I really enjoyed. One was, uh, The Shadow Riders, which is a Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott western adapted from a Louis Lemoine movie, uh, book that was like on TBS my entire childhood, and, uh, Executioner's Song, the, the adaptation of the Norman Miller novel. Tommy Lee Jones is Gary Gilmore.

• 1:53:37Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:53:38Speaker 04

  There's a, uh, there's a European cut of that with a lot of nudity. It didn't make it onto American TV.

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  I'll have to look that up.

• 1:53:45Speaker 04

  Just FYI.

• 1:53:46Sean Fennessey?

  Was that, splice that of the reels that you were showing at a certain point? Uh, any other wild cards you guys would like to cite?

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  You?

• 1:53:54Sean Fennessey?

  Grease 2? Grease 2. Michelle Pfeiffer. That's true. Speaking of movie stars.

• 1:53:58Speaker 04

  We projected that at the ship driving. I remember Grease 2.

• 1:54:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Go over well?

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  I don't recall.

• 1:54:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  Chan is Missing, Wayne Lang's first movie?

• 1:54:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06Speaker 04

  I loved Grease.

• 1:54:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. It was a great one.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:09Speaker 04

  Chan is Missing, I just watched it a couple of days ago in preparation for this draft, and it was one of the, one of the ones I was really juggling for wildcard. It's a great movie. It's a great, did you know it's one of the most successful movies ever made?

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  In terms of its budget to box office?

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  Twenty thousand dollar budget.

• 1:54:25Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:54:25Speaker 04

  Twenty thousand dollars and made 1.2 million at the box office. That's a 60x ROI.

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:54:31Speaker 04

  I don't know a lot about it, but, uh, it's pretty good.

• 1:54:35Sean Fennessey?

  Um, this is a legendary cult horror year for a variety of reasons. Some movies we've selected, some we didn't select in particular pieces. The Spanish-American Juan Pique Simón movie, which is one of, in the conversation for most deranged horror movie of the 1980s, about a chainsaw murder. Um, The House on Sorority Row.

• 1:54:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:55:00Sean Fennessey?

  And also Slumber Party Massacre.

• 1:55:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:55:02Sean Fennessey?

  In the same year. So you can, you know, to the Porky's and Fast Times point, young men. At this time, they wanted something particularly specific.

• 1:55:12Speaker 04

  The slasher just it blew up for two, right? The peak year was 81 and then by 82 it had kind of started to really play out.

• 1:55:22Sean Fennessey?

  But anybody with $120,000 could go make one of these.

• 1:55:25Speaker 04

  And still make money off.

• 1:55:26Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right. Cue The Winged Serpent, also a cult horror classic directed by Larry Cohen. It's about a winged serpent terrorizing Manhattan.

• 1:55:34Speaker 04

  Living in the Chrysler Building. Great method performance by Michael Moriarty at the center of that thing, just like, nobody told him that he was in a bad movie. Cause he's going for it.

• 1:55:46Sean Fennessey?

  I think I said that to you when we were talking about it. I'm like, he is locked in in this movie. You know a movie I have not seen, but that people say kind things about is My Favorite Year.

• 1:55:55Speaker 04

  Oh, I love it. It's a great movie.

• 1:55:56Sean Fennessey?

  See that movie?

• 1:55:57Speaker 04

  Peter O'Toole. You would love that movie.

• 1:55:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I would, okay.

• 1:56:00Speaker 04

  You should put that on your list. That's a great movie.

• 1:56:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:03Speaker 04

  Directed by Richard Benjamin, based on his experiences as a page.

• 1:56:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that this does seem.

• 1:56:09Speaker 04

  NBC while they were making your show of shows.

• 1:56:11Sean Fennessey?

  Is it Marklin Baker? Is he the star?

• 1:56:13Speaker 04

  It is. And Joseph Bologna plays the Sid Caesar part. And Peter O'Toole, it's a great Peter O'Toole performance. That's really good. It's a nice Warner Archive Blu-ray of that as well. Say Amen Somebody, a great documentary from that, your joyous documentary about gospel singers. Just if you, if you're feeling bad about the world right now, get Say Amen Somebody and feel better about yourself. Also available on Canopy. Do you know about Canopy?

• 1:56:47Sean Fennessey?

  Certainly do. I have a library card.

• 1:56:49Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a, that's a really good service.

• 1:56:50Sean Fennessey?

  Explain what it is if people don't know.

• 1:56:53Speaker 04

  If you have a library card, you can get the streaming service Canopy. That's all that's required. And it's actually a pretty replete little streaming site.

• 1:57:00Sean Fennessey?

  I just, I watched for the first time the movie Nine Songs, a Michael Winterbottom movie. You're familiar with this movie?

• 1:57:07Speaker 04

  Oh, you're not?

• 1:57:08Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think so.

• 1:57:09Speaker 04

  I'm surprised you're not.

• 1:57:10Sean Fennessey?

  It features nine individual live performances and interspersed with a love story, a sort of physical love story, between a man and a woman who have real intercourse in the film.

• 1:57:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:57:21Sean Fennessey?

  That is portrayed in between the musical performances.

• 1:57:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's available on Canopy.

• 1:57:25Sean Fennessey?

  Do I have a reputation as a pervert now on this? It's a 71 minute film with porn in it.

• 1:57:32Speaker 04

  Keep going. What else we got? Quest for Fire. Yeah. Uh, Jean Jacques Anod, is that how you say his name? Uh, which is about early man. Caveman, yeah. With, uh, Ron Perlman and Everett McGill and Ray Don Cheong. Uh, terrific adventure about early man. Those movies don't usually work, but they actually did the work on that one. Uh, Anthony Burgess did the, uh, the sounds, the language that they're using and, uh, Desmond Morris did the, the movement. I mean, they, they actually put some work into creating the world of early man. Uh, Paul Mazurski's Tempest, which is great comedy drama with, uh, you know, based on the Shakespeare play with, uh, Cassafetti's, Jenna Rowland's. Who Am I This Time? Do you guys know this? I don't. No. Jonathan Demme,

• 1:58:17Speaker 04

  Christopher Walken, Susan Sarandon. It's an hour long film based on a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. short story. I do not know this one. Who Am I This Time? Haven't seen it. Great romantic comedy with, uh, it's only an hour long, but it is, I think it was originally shown on American Masters or American Playhouse, something like that. Great movie. Koyana Scottsi. Yep. Uh, there's a lot of, it's a lot of fun, depending on your state of mind. Smithereens. Just watched this yesterday as well. Familiar with this movie? Yes. Smithereens. Smithereens, uh, the first American independent movie to, uh, play in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Yes. It's a very good punk, uh. It's Susan Seidman's movie. Oh, is this before Desperately Seeking Susan? Yeah. And it's got a great, uh,

• 1:59:02Speaker 04

  Score by the Phileas. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. And Richard Hell, uh, plays a, a large part. Oh, okay. In the movie. It's good. Uh, Barbarossa, a good outlier Western directed by Fred Chapisi with a screenplay by Bill Whitliffe, who is a great, uh, Texas writer with, uh, Willie Nelson and Gary Busey. And if you, uh, if your picture of Gary Busey is Gary Busey now, then you've forgotten what a great actor Gary Busey actually was. He was really a superb actor. Really good Western. Veronica Voss.

• 1:59:33Sean Fennessey?

  Fast forward.

• 1:59:33Speaker 04

  Fosbinder had two movies this year, right? Carell and his last two movies.

• 1:59:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:59:38Speaker 04

  This year, I think in eighty two.

• 1:59:40Sean Fennessey?

  You have a preference Veronica Voss versus Carell?

• 1:59:42Speaker 04

  I'll take Veronica Voss.

• 1:59:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Carell back in the news.

• 1:59:44Speaker 04

  Mark Maron's favorite movie.

• 1:59:46Sean Fennessey?

  Veronica Voss?

• 1:59:47Speaker 04

  Veronica Voss.

• 1:59:48Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. That's his favorite movie?

• 1:59:49Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:59:50Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. It's a bold pick.

• 1:59:52Speaker 04

  Richard Pryor, Live on the Sunset Strip.

• 1:59:54Sean Fennessey?

  Almost so good in comedy.

• 1:59:55Speaker 03

  I was thinking about it. This is night shift for the two comedies.

• 1:59:59Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, Night Shift too. I didn't even think of that. Uh, Live on the Sunset Strip was just on HBO nonstop.

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:00:04Sean Fennessey?

  In the eighties. And so I've seen it a hundred times. I mean, so many parts of it, so many times.

• 2:00:09Speaker 04

  Did you happen to check out the box office for that on the box office list?

• 2:00:12Sean Fennessey?

  It did well, right?

• 2:00:13Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 2:00:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 04

  Richard Pryor, this was a big year for Richard Pryor.

• 2:00:17Sean Fennessey?

  But it was, it was kind of like that first Chappelle special on Netflix after he had been gone for a period of time. Because there was this feeling like he had something to say after all of these incidents that he had had with addiction. And, you know, all, all the trouble that he was having too. He's amazing in that movie. That's like, is that the greatest standup comedy film ever?

• 2:00:36Speaker 04

  Well, he's the greatest standup comic and that's a pretty good record of it right there. Smash Palace, a New Zealand movie with Bruno Lawrence, directed by Roger Donaldson. Roger Donaldson is the father of India. Is that her name?

• 2:00:48Sean Fennessey?

  India Donaldson, yes.

• 2:00:50Speaker 04

  Donaldson, who directed.

• 2:00:51Sean Fennessey?

  Good One.

• 2:00:52Speaker 04

  Good One this year. Roger Donaldson, very good. They'll get mad at me if I say that's part of the Australian new wave because it was in New Zealand. But the truth is, it is considered part and parcel of Australian new wave, which was really thriving that year. And La Balance, which I just rewatched, a French movie that's credited with kind of bringing back the policier. Natalie Bay is in the movie. She won all the awards for the movie and it's a good pimps and, and gangsters French.

• 2:01:22Speaker 03

  I gotta check that out.

• 2:01:23Speaker 04

  French thing. Yeah, it's good.

• 2:01:24Speaker 03

  We didn't mention Year of Living Dangerously, uh, which is Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson.

• 2:01:28Speaker 04

  Because it doesn't qualify.

• 2:01:30Speaker 03

  At all?

• 2:01:31Speaker 04

  This is what we found out. It's actually eighty three.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. Uh, Creepshow. And then I was gonna ask you, have you ever seen the Still of the Night?

• 2:01:41Speaker 03

  Roy Scheider and Meryl Streep. It's a basically a Hitchcock pastiche.

• 2:01:44Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 2:01:44Speaker 03

  Robert Benton directed it. Meryl Streep said it is the worst movie she has appeared in, which I disagree with.

• 2:01:50Sean Fennessey?

  When, when did she say it?

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  Uh, on Watch What Happens Live, like 10 years ago, so I don't know.

• 2:01:55Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 2:01:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah, there have been some since then.

• 2:01:58Sean Fennessey?

  What else? The Entity?

• 2:02:02Speaker 04

  Barbara Hershey being raped by a ghost?

• 2:02:04Sean Fennessey?

  Crazy movie. Upsetting film in some ways. Remarkable special effects for the time, which is a stupid thing to say about a movie about rape, but there are incredible special effects. You know what I saw for the first time that I really liked is White Dog?

• 2:02:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, Sam Fuller.

• 2:02:18Sean Fennessey?

  Sam Fuller movie about a, a dog that is trained to attack black people and the attempt.

• 2:02:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, no, I did not. That is not where I thought you were going.

• 2:02:26Sean Fennessey?

  Where did you think I was going?

• 2:02:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. You were just starting talking about dogs. And I was like, oh, well, okay.

• 2:02:31Sean Fennessey?

  I love dogs. I would not love this dog. This is, this is a mean dog. This is a dangerous dog.

• 2:02:35Speaker 03

  This is one of his last movies, right?

• 2:02:36Sean Fennessey?

  It is. It's like a great confrontation about the idea of can, you know, that it's clear that racism can be trained into someone, but can it be trained out of them? As someone who has been taught to see the world that way, come to, you know, obviously it's metaphorical because it's about a dog, but, uh, Paul Winfield plays a dog trainer who attempts to convert this racist dog into a, a dog that doesn't see color.

• 2:03:00Amanda Dobbins?

  On racist dogs? Does it work?

• 2:03:02Sean Fennessey?

  Which sounds ridiculous. I don't want to spoil the film.

• 2:03:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 2:03:04Sean Fennessey?

  It has one of the great endings, I think, of the year 1982.

• 2:03:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 2:03:07Speaker 04

  Entity, White, White Dog double feature.

• 2:03:11Sean Fennessey?

  Basket Case, Frank Heninlotters, um, very small body horror comedy about, um, a boy and his severed brother who lives in a basket and murders people.

• 2:03:24Speaker 03

  What were we doing back then?

• 2:03:25Sean Fennessey?

  This is probably, this is one of the most important movies to watch if you liked The Substance, is something that I will say.

• 2:03:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 2:03:34Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Shoot the Moon? What about Shoot the Moon?

• 2:03:37Speaker 04

  Really good. I mean, the, not great, but really good. And there was, and because it was not great, because there are things about the movie that are a little wet or don't quite work. It's overshadowed some of the really good qualities that movie. Especially the performance of a young actress named Dana Hill in that film. Who, the same year she appeared in a TV version of Carson McCall's Member of the Wedding. And she was a great actress who died unfortunately way, way, way too young. She played, she, because of her diabetes, she was much smaller and often played juvenile roles. Even though she was an older actress and the diabetes killed her a couple of years later.

• 2:04:21Speaker 04

  She was a great actress and it's a great performance by her. And you know, it's Albert Finney and Peter Weller and Karen Allen and Diane Keaton. It's a great cast.

• 2:04:31Sean Fennessey?

  Very good movie.

• 2:04:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:33Sean Fennessey?

  Coppola's One From the Heart.

• 2:04:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:04:35Sean Fennessey?

  Famous fiasco.

• 2:04:36Speaker 04

  Oh, really? This was 82? Oh, I wish I'd known that. Oh, well.

• 2:04:41Sean Fennessey?

  I think a movie that had a very, very bad reputation when it was released, but has been revived. Revived in multiple times, most recently last year.

• 2:04:49Speaker 04

  Tom Waits music for that? Tom Waits and Crystal Gale.

• 2:04:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  You like author, author? I love author, author. Israel Horovitz. Yeah. Writing about his personal experiences, even though he's gotten, gotten in some trouble and then he died. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, it's a lot of fun. Yeah. Bob Disher, very funny in that movie.

• 2:05:08Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of getting into trouble, Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, you know, Woody Allen.

• 2:05:12Speaker 04

  Good stuff.

• 2:05:13Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.

• 2:05:15Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 2:05:15Sean Fennessey?

  Steve Martin, fun comedy.

• 2:05:18Speaker 04

  Last American Virgin.

• 2:05:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What about Chris?

• 2:05:22Speaker 04

  This is a teen comedy and, uh, it's just a, kind of a cheapy, uh, T and A teen comedy with a surprisingly dark ending. The end, it's worth watching Last American Virgin to see that ending and go, whoa. I did not see this movie. Breaking that dark. I gotta check this out. Gregory's Girl, actually made a couple of years earlier, but released in America that year. Bill Forsyte's coming of age drama, uh, comedy, uh, a lot of fun.

• 2:05:55Sean Fennessey?

  The big one we haven't mentioned, which is Conan the Barbarian.

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:06:00Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of a year that introduced us to movie stars, we'd seen Arnold Schwarzenegger before.

• 2:06:06Sean Fennessey?

  But I feel like this is the, this is the concretizing moment of Arnold's massive forecoming celebrity. And it's a, a cool, real metal version of a movie where you've got this collision of the original story.

• 2:06:22Speaker 03

  Millius wrote this?

• 2:06:23Sean Fennessey?

  And John Millius wrote and directed.

• 2:06:24Speaker 03

  Oh, I did.

• 2:06:25Sean Fennessey?

  Actually, it was written, co-written, originally written by Oliver Stone. It's Oliver Stone's script, but you can see Millius has also brought a lot of his foreboding masculinity to the story. Very strange, amazing James Earl Jones performance as the villain in this movie, wearing quite the wig.

• 2:06:43Speaker 04

  It's just not my.

• 2:06:44Sean Fennessey?

  Not your thing?

• 2:06:45Speaker 04

  It's not my thing.

• 2:06:46Sean Fennessey?

  You don't, don't get into fantasy?

• 2:06:48Speaker 04

  I got on the airplane to come here to LA and we got on, no, no, I was coming back from New Zealand. I was just in New Zealand. So it was a long, 15 hour flight. And the guy, I don't know, you guys watch what other people are watching on the airplane?

• 2:07:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course.

• 2:07:00Speaker 03

  Constantly.

• 2:07:01Speaker 04

  So the guy crossed the aisle from me, before the plane even took off, he started on the first Lord of the Rings.

• 2:07:07Speaker 03

  Oh, that's actually like, cause you can do that for a long flight and you can watch the three of them and be done. It's a trick. It's a kind of a trick.

• 2:07:15Speaker 04

  He, he did.

• 2:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:16Speaker 04

  He watched all three of them back to back to back. I've never seen them and watching them over his shoulder. I was just like, I don't, I don't get it.

• 2:07:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm with you. Yeah.

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  Probably not the way Peter Jackson intended those films to be seen.

• 2:07:26Sean Fennessey?

  That was my other thought.

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  Without any sound. From Tracy Lenz's performance. I did something once where I was sitting next to a guy who started watching The Dark Knight. And he was watching it and I just kept kind of looking over. I was watching like a game on, on, it was like on a JetBlue flight. And he's watching Dark Knight and I was like, man, Dark Knight looks pretty good right now. And so, but then I decided the game was boring and I was going to watch Dark Knight two, but because he had been watching Dark Knight for 45 minutes, I fast forwarded it to catch up to him. So then he looked over and I was also watching Dark Knight exactly timed to his. And I was just like, you know.

• 2:08:07Amanda Dobbins?

  You didn't exchange words?

• 2:08:09Speaker 03

  Not a single word.

• 2:08:10Sean Fennessey?

  And you said, why so serious?

• 2:08:14Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let's recap our picks.

• 2:08:15Speaker 04

  Hold on, Tenebrae.

• 2:08:17Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I forgot about Tenebrae.

• 2:08:18Speaker 04

  Dario Argento, Jallo, uh, good stuff. Uh, Class of 1984. Good little exploitation movie.

• 2:08:26Sean Fennessey?

  So many horror exploitation movies from this year.

• 2:08:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, right?

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  And they're all like 75 minutes long.

• 2:08:31Sean Fennessey?

  Why, why did you say at the top of this that you didn't pick this year when you so obviously did? What was that about?

• 2:08:36Speaker 04

  I did not pick this year!

• 2:08:38Sean Fennessey?

  I'm so confused.

• 2:08:40Speaker 04

  I, I, I don't know what to tell you.

• 2:08:41Speaker 03

  We would've done it anyway, cause it's your birth year. Don't we do the birth years?

• 2:08:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have done 77 and 84. So you probably said to me, you know what we should do is 1982 because it's my birth year.

• 2:08:51Sean Fennessey?

  That did not happen. I'm, I'm almost certain of it.

• 2:08:54Speaker 04

  Sitting there very confidently with your Porter Wagner coiff.

• 2:08:59Sean Fennessey?

  I'll take that as a compliment.

• 2:09:02Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let's recap our picks. I went first, so I'll go first.

• 2:09:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:09:06Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, in drama, I selected First Blood. A little controversial, I feel good about it. In comedy, I selected The World According to Garp. In thriller, action, horror, sci-fi, I took The Thing. In blockbuster, reminder the threshold was 40 million or more, I took Poltergeist. In Oscar, I took Das Boot. In wildcard, I took Fitzcarraldo. Two West German productions in my sleep.

• 2:09:28Speaker 04

  Okay, congratulations.

• 2:09:30Sean Fennessey?

  Who'd have thunk it?

• 2:09:31Speaker 04

  It was the last year of the new German cinema movement. In drama, I took The Verdict. In comedy, I took Tootsie. Sci-fi, action, thriller, horror, I took The Road Warrior. In blockbuster, I took Star Trek II. In Oscar nominee, I took Missing. And in wildcard, I took Eating Raoul.

• 2:09:50Speaker 03

  In drama, I took The Draftsmen's Contract. It's a hard, hard word to say for me. Uh, in comedy, I took Fast Times at Ridgemont High. In sci-fi, horror, thriller, I took Halloween III: Season of the Witch. In blockbuster, I took 48 Hours. In Oscar, I took E.T. And in wildcard, I took Personal Best.

• 2:10:11Sean Fennessey?

  Love that for you. Amanda?

• 2:10:12Amanda Dobbins?

  In drama, I took diner. In comedy, I took death trap. In thriller, action, horror, science fiction, I took Blade Runner. In blockbuster, I took Annie. In Oscar, An Officer and a Gentleman. And in wildcard, Evil Under the Sun.

• 2:10:26Speaker 03

  I feel like you and I had a mutual destruction pact in this one.

• 2:10:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 03

  It was like, once one of us lost, we had to take the other one down.

• 2:10:33Amanda Dobbins?

  It was tough. A little bit, that's like order, draft order, you know? And it's kind of like taking one from the other, but yes.

• 2:10:38Sean Fennessey?

  Did this go as you thought it might?

• 2:10:39Speaker 04

  Well, other than Bobby sticking it in and breaking it off, uh, yeah.

• 2:10:49Sean Fennessey?

  Take it up with the internet. I didn't have nothing to do with it.

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  I, I, I thought it was, you know, a king of comedy would have changed things if that had ever been.

• 2:10:56Sean Fennessey?

  Would have changed things. Do you have anything you'd like to promote before you say goodbye?

• 2:10:59Speaker 04

  Oh, God, no.

• 2:11:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thank you for doing, thank you for not doing that.

• 2:11:02Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I have no.

• 2:11:03Speaker 03

  Can I promote some stuff?

• 2:11:04Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, please feel free.

• 2:11:05Speaker 03

  Uh, the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

• 2:11:07Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  They've had a parade. They've all done podcasts.

• 2:11:11Sean Fennessey?

  This is airing in March.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  I have no, I have nothing to promote.

• 2:11:13Sean Fennessey?

  Anything you'd like to promote?

• 2:11:15Amanda Dobbins?

  A jam session?

• 2:11:16Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:11:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. The, the actual fun time I have on this.

• 2:11:19Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, how dare you.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:21Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  You don't like talking about sex comedies and exploitation, are you?

• 2:11:25Sean Fennessey?

  We were talking about Halloween three for nine consecutive minutes.

• 2:11:28Amanda Dobbins?

  And you did a great job recapping it for me.

• 2:11:30Speaker 04

  Uh.

• 2:11:30Speaker 03

  You were like, what do they do? What do they?

• 2:11:33Speaker 04

  Have we been doing this for like three hours? Has this been?

• 2:11:35Sean Fennessey?

  It's over two hours.

• 2:11:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:37Sean Fennessey?

  This is how it goes.

• 2:11:38Speaker 03

  The drafts are long.

• 2:11:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:39Sean Fennessey?

  Y'all, aren't you having fun?

• 2:11:40Speaker 04

  I, I have a great time.

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  He was better about not accusing me of having right wing politics because you're here. But other than that, this is pretty much how it goes.

• 2:11:46Sean Fennessey?

  What's that? Um, well, thank you to Tracy Letts. This was very generous of you.

• 2:11:51Speaker 04

  It's my pleasure. I, I do want to point out that I did send in a couple of questions to the mailbag.

• 2:11:56Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 2:11:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's right. Yeah, Bobby.

• 2:11:58Sean Fennessey?

  Do you want them answered now or should we address that later?

• 2:11:59Speaker 04

  Well, the question was about the third chair. It was like, I think we all, can you give some clarity to the third chair? Because I'm pretty sure that Tracy Letts should be the third chair of the big picture.

• 2:12:09Sean Fennessey?

  This is the email that Tracy Letts sent to the big picture?

• 2:12:12Speaker 04

  Well, I, I signed it to, you know, concerned listener or something.

• 2:12:17Speaker 01

  So real, uh, man of the people moment that you just emailed the same email address that everyone else did because there's just, there was no way I was gonna go with Neil in a haystack.

• 2:12:27Sean Fennessey?

  You could have texted us. Um, I, you know, I think it's all out there. It's all possible, you know? We don't, we don't wanna give too much away.

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  You're welcome to it. I have a lot of projects going on. You wanna know what I have to promote? My movie podcast. It's called The Odyssey. It's about when the Odyssey is coming out.

• 2:12:45Speaker 04

  Well, you, you are the, you're, you're the first chair of the TV podcast.

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  You know what? Everybody keeps me on pins and needles though.

• 2:12:50Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 2:12:51Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's just like Andy, Bill, you.

• 2:12:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:53Speaker 03

  I think you've got a bright future.

• 2:12:55Sean Fennessey?

  I think, I think you're gonna do great.

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 2:12:57Sean Fennessey?

  As soon as you get your own show, I think you're gonna do really great.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Chris, do you wanna weigh, do you wanna weigh in on the armor situation with The Odyssey? Cause no, we got, we're making content.

• 2:13:08Speaker 04

  So wait a minute, he's in armor, but he's also piloting a helicopter in downtown Los Angeles. Do I have that line?

• 2:13:15Speaker 03

  We haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet.

• 2:13:17Sean Fennessey?

  You will though.

• 2:13:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's what you're here for. Uh, thanks Tracy.

• 2:13:20Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me. You guys are great.

• 2:13:23Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Amanda. Thanks, Chris. Thanks to Jack Sanders. Thanks to our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on today's episode. Next week on the show, which is in March, we're watching The Alto Nights and discussing what we are calling Garbage Scorsese.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:13:37Sean Fennessey?

  We'll see you then.