Pod Insights The Rewatchables ‘Eddie and the Cruisers’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Van Lathan About this episode The dark side's callin' now nothin' is real. The guys head to the Jersey Shore to watch Eddie, Wordman, and the gang in ‘Eddie and the Cruisers' starring Tom Berenger, Michael Paré, and Ellen Barkin.
Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic
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Transcript 20,655 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:07 Bill Simmons? The Rewatchables is brought to by The Ringer Podcast Network. Where you can find Ringer Tailgate with Van Lathan.
2:14 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
2:15 Bill Simmons? And Higher Learning.
2:16 Speaker 02 And Higher Learning.
2:17 Bill Simmons? And Midnight Boys.
2:18 Speaker 02 You guys gotta raise the roof.
2:20 Chris Ryan? Do you guys have, is this like a, this is like the thing you guys do for it?
2:23 Speaker 02 Well, Joel invented raising the roof.
2:25 Chris Ryan? Okay. We investigated that on the NFL Draft Show and, and he's right. I believe he did invent raise the roof.
2:31 Speaker 02 Joel invented raising the roof.
2:32 Chris Ryan? Didn't Arsenio Hall raise the roof?
2:34 Bill Simmons? No, it was Joel.
2:35 Speaker 02 No, Joel invented it.
2:36 Bill Simmons? Ringer Tailgate is like the, what was the album Michael Jackson put out before Thriller?
2:40 Speaker 02 Off the Wall.
2:40 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
2:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:41 Bill Simmons? It's in the Off the Wall stage. Thriller's happening this season.
2:44 Chris Ryan? I feel like it's like the Velvet Underground first record. Like, everybody who hears Tailgate's gonna start their own podcast.
2:49 Bill Simmons? Anyway. CR, just came, coming off CR Month. Uh, America was captivated.
2:56 Chris Ryan? Where do I go from here?
2:57 Bill Simmons? Sad. America wants to know when it's happening again. You know what we did? We kept CR Month going. We brought the little chocolates out at the end of the dinner.
3:06 Chris Ryan? That's right.
3:07 Bill Simmons? Put it on the check and we said,
3:09 Speaker 02 Oh.
3:09 Bill Simmons? Hey, here's a little extra free chocolate. I know you already paid.
3:12 Speaker 02 I thought, hold on for a second. You said we brought the little chocolates out at the end of it. I thought it was like, am I the little chocolate? I'm like, what's happening?
3:19 Chris Ryan? No.
3:19 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:20 Bill Simmons? That's what I was saying.
3:21 Chris Ryan? He kind of gestured.
3:22 Speaker 02 He gestured to me, we brought the little, I'm like, wow.
3:25 Chris Ryan? Dylan and I were like, you know what we need for CR Month is like an Amaro after the big meal.
3:29 Bill Simmons? Yeah, like a little after dinner drink. Compliments of the house.
3:33 Chris Ryan? No, no, no. Drinks are on the house.
3:37 Speaker 02 The house.
3:37 Bill Simmons? A movie we've circled for five years. And this is a victory lap for us because this is only a couple of times this has ever happened.
3:43 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
3:44 Bill Simmons? Where we badgered America and the streamers and the companies to just basically revive movies that we love.
3:50 Chris Ryan? One thing about corporate America is they listen.
3:52 Bill Simmons? They do.
3:54 Bill Simmons? Eddie and the Cruisers is next.
4:10 Bill Simmons? All right, Eddie and the Cruisers. Best musicals ever, Grease, Eddie and the Cruisers, and that's it.
4:16 Speaker 02 There's only two.
4:17 Bill Simmons? Drops off right after that. Those are the big two. There's no even big three, it's a big two.
4:22 Chris Ryan? All that jazz, there's a lot of really big musicals.
4:24 Bill Simmons? Grease, Eddie and the Cruisers, drop off. Chicago, I don't want some Oscars.
4:30 Speaker 02 Right.
4:32 Bill Simmons? I know my story with this, Van. I was surprised you liked this movie because we'd never talked about it. And then you were like, I love this movie. So what was your history with it?
4:41 Speaker 02 The film beat me into submission.
4:43 Bill Simmons? Yeah. Because it was on for eight straight years?
4:45 Speaker 02 It was on so much. This is the biggest fuck your algorithm movie ever. Everything now is controlled by an algorithm. You get told what to watch. My 80s and 90s algorithm was just superior. Because they kept, it was probably not even a computer program, it was some guy named Jim. That would be in charge of programming what was on HBO. Some dude, right? And they put this movie on until I had watched like Major League and all that. That's a guy from time until I had watched stuff with Ellen Barkley. So I'd go, you know what? Fuck it, I'm gonna watch it. And then after that, I watched it every single time it was on television, every time.
5:20 Bill Simmons? Same for you?
5:21 Chris Ryan? I have a weird relationship to this movie, which is I'm sure I watched it in its heyday on HBO when it was on in the 80s, like every other minute. But I think that like, if I remember correctly, one day I was in the car and I was like, whatever this song is rules, and it was Dark Side.
5:37 Bill Simmons? Oh.
5:38 Chris Ryan? Because the soundtrack popped off in the mid 80s because of the HBO revival of this movie. So I think Dark Side, I was like, what's this band? And it was like, it's a band with a movie about it, but the band isn't real. And that blew my mind.
5:55 Bill Simmons? My background was 1984, flipping channels and watched the last six minutes of this movie, including the surprise ending.
6:02 Chris Ryan? Okay.
6:03 Bill Simmons? And I was like, huh.
6:06 Bill Simmons? Week later, watch it from the beginning. Now I'm furious. I know the surprise ending. Think about how long it was on cable though. And then it was on over and over again. And I think it's one of the 20 movies I've seen the most of my life. Yeah. I know all the words to everything. I know all the scenes, like, and I'm not proud of it. It was just on all the time. We had less channels and they didn't have a lot of movies. Like CR, you have the HBO little guides next to you.
6:30 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
6:31 Bill Simmons? On that, uh, on that little stand over there. They didn't really have a ton of movies. They, cause they only had licenses for whatever. So they would just rerun the same, like they ran either the first or the second Rambo was just on. All. Three times a week.
6:45 Chris Ryan? Yes.
6:46 Bill Simmons? Nine o'clock at night. Back to school with Rodney Dangerfield, all the time. So this was just, and the thing, and the thing with music movies is, you know, you, ah, I'll just watch this part. And all of a sudden you've watched a half hour. The middle of this movie, there's what 15 minutes in the middle when he goes to the lounge to see Sal Amato.
7:04 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
7:05 Bill Simmons? That is just like one of my favorite 15 minute stretches in a movie. And, uh, I'm taking you back to HBO, 1984, Craig. Here's what they had boxing. This is when, when Tyson was, was coming into his own. They had the comedy specials because they had Eddie Murphy, Delirious and George Carlin and some of those guys.
7:24 Chris Ryan? When is comic relief around now?
7:25 Bill Simmons? Not yet. That's 86. Not necessarily the news that started, which was like their answer to SNL. The Hitchhiker.
7:33 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
7:33 Bill Simmons? Which had nudity in every episode. Basically the premise of The Hitchhiker was somebody fucks somebody else and then they die. And that would be the episode.
7:40 Chris Ryan? Is there any hitchhiking involved or?
7:42 Bill Simmons? At the end, the guy would, the guy would have his little, he would have his little fortune cookie. Right. Thing. CR thought CR month would give him immortality. What he didn't realize is it would kill him. And then he would just walk away with the stomach out. Uh, first and 10 with OJ. They would have some concerts. Diana Ross had a pretty famous concert around there every once in a while. Um, and then just movies, lots and lots of movies. They weren't really making the original movies yet at this point. I think that the Terry Fox story, maybe one or two others. So something like Eddie and the Cruisers, once it got in the rotation, that was it. But what's crazy is this movie bombed when it came out and found life on HBO.
8:20 Chris Ryan? Yes.
8:20 Bill Simmons? Which led to On the Dark Side, Finding Radio, Radio Station, what, a year after it came out?
8:26 Chris Ryan? Yeah, and the fact is, is that the band Eddie and the Cruisers from the movie almost mirrors the story that Eddie and the Cruisers tells. Where people are like, wait, what's this band? And like even, you know, John Cafferty winds up getting like a cup of coffee because of this band, because of this movie, but like, it's essentially the same story as the movies minus the possibly missing Bob Dylan-esque figure.
8:50 Bill Simmons? So you think John Cafferty should have done that?
8:53 Chris Ryan? Tried to fake his own death?
8:55 Bill Simmons? For like 10 years, yeah.
8:56 Chris Ryan? Been interesting.
8:56 Speaker 02 Interesting move. But it doesn't just become like a regular hit. The song like goes like number three.
9:03 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
9:03 Speaker 02 It's like a gigantic.
9:04 Bill Simmons? Yes, I actually have it. It became, it was the number one song on the rock billboard charts. It was number seven overall.
9:12 Speaker 02 Number seven overall.
9:13 Bill Simmons? Um, there was a week where it was number one, The Fix was number two, Bruce Springsteen, Lindsey Buckingham, David Bowie, and U2 were the top six.
9:21 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
9:22 Bill Simmons? That was the level it was at. It was, it was on all the time.
9:24 Speaker 02 Consider that though. Consider how much, I mean, obviously the song starts to get radio play and stuff like that. But think about how much the movie has to be on for that song then to make it from the movie.
9:37 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
9:37 Speaker 02 Into people's minds, then radio, then, and this is a year after the film, has already, it's like, that's almost would be impossible for it to happen now.
9:47 Bill Simmons? Also a crazy music year. It's not like 1980. I think 1984 was like a real achievement. That was like so many major stars at that point.
9:54 Chris Ryan? The, uh, I was reading, The Washington Post did an article about this movie's staying power.
9:59 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
9:59 Chris Ryan? And they talked to the writer, Sherman Alexie, who's this great novelist who wrote Reservation Blues. And he actually had this great quote, it was, "The VCR turned movies into songs, into hit songs." So movies that you could play over and over and over again. And that's basically what this pod was originally about, was about movies that you wound up. Just walking in midway through, maybe only sitting down for one or two scenes. I don't want to get up and go to dinner yet because this might happen in this movie. And that's kind of like what happens in any of the cruises is if like you're passing by and you're like, oh, wait, is, are they about to go to the writing of Dark Side?
10:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:36 Chris Ryan? Okay, I'm gonna stick around for, watch them write Dark Side.
10:38 Speaker 02 Interesting. What is the pod about now, CR?
10:40 Chris Ryan? Well, it's just about, I think it's more about great movies, right?
10:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:43 Chris Ryan? Or movies.
10:44 Bill Simmons? I, but that was the initial conceit of the, of the pod. To me, it's like, there's maybe like five or six moments where HBO became like really part of pop culture. And the fact that it could take this movie that bombed and was nothing and turn it into a iconic rewatchable movie for everybody who grew up in the eighties and nineties. That's like up there with the Eddie Murphy Delirious concert that really like pushed him to another level. Comic relief. Them having like real boxing, like I, I think I watched, I want to say I watched Cooney Holmes or one of those in eighty one. Maybe it was Prior Agüero, just fights that they would have just, you would have to go closed circuit.
11:24 Bill Simmons? And instead they were on HBO and, and some of the comedy specials they had, it just all of a sudden felt like, it's like, holy shit, they're mainstream. And they got inside the NFL. That was a huge deal.
11:34 Chris Ryan? It's kind of the model Netflix is doing now, right?
11:36 Bill Simmons? Yeah. And it's funny because I was, I was going back and reading the perception of HBO in eighty three, eighty four, where they were like, we don't want people to come to theaters. And it was basically all the same Netflix dialogue we'd have forty years later.
11:51 Bill Simmons? Michael Prey in two thousand and eighteen, talking about this movie, said, "The whole idea is to leave your mark on the world and impact people, to make them think." And in that way, I think the movie was pretty successful. We didn't get much of a theatrical run, but we've got history.
12:07 Chris Ryan? Is that your Michael Prey voice?
12:08 Bill Simmons? I didn't do my Michael Prey voice yet. But this movie is so beloved that they end up making a sequel that for some reason Van watched recently. I don't acknowledge the sequel. I didn't like the sequel.
12:18 Speaker 02 I've seen it before. The sequel, just like, it wasn't even on as much. They didn't put it on, on, on cable as much.
12:24 Bill Simmons? He had a must, Eddie has a mustache in it. The music's not good.
12:28 Speaker 02 You could tell that, obviously, like most sequels, they thought, hey, there's fertile ground to continue this story, but they didn't think of actually a way to actually story first, continue the story.
12:38 Bill Simmons? So Craig, we've talked about this movie for five years. You don't have to tell us what you thought yet. But what was in your head? What did you think it was gonna be versus what was it?
12:48 Speaker 04 I gotta say, when you texted, I didn't know what the movie was about at all. And when Bill texted us saying, "It's a 95-minute musical drama," I was kinda thrown off my tilt there a little bit. You and musicals, I don't usually put together. I don't even know if I'd really call this movie a musical. It just has music in it.
13:03 Bill Simmons? Yeah, that's fair. There's like eight, nine musical moves though.
13:07 Chris Ryan? The musical performances are legion and they're like, we're doing the whole song.
13:10 Speaker 04 Yes. I mean, the movie opens with pretty much that full song.
13:13 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
13:14 Speaker 04 The movie.
13:14 Speaker 02 Oh, good.
13:15 Speaker 04 No, you go ahead.
13:15 Speaker 02 I call something a musical if the music drives story. So if the music in the movie drives story, a lot of people think that it's a musical if the dialogue is sung at some point.
13:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:28 Speaker 02 But if the music, like in this movie, the musical numbers drive different story points. And to me, that makes it a musical.
13:36 Bill Simmons? Well, we gotta talk about Michael Perre.
13:38 Speaker 04 Okay.
13:38 Bill Simmons? This was, this was literally the apex mountain for him. And he had a couple other at bats, but Eddie became his signature guy. He's lip syncing everything.
13:48 Speaker 04 Yes.
13:49 Bill Simmons? And it's one of the best, I'm trying to think of a better lip syncing where it really seems like he's singing. The voice of the band sounds like his voice. He's got the charisma of a leading guy. The way he moves around the stage. Really convincing. The only other one I can really think of is Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.
14:09 Speaker 04 Which won him the Oscar.
14:10 Chris Ryan? I thought, I think Shalhoub is pretty good as Dylan, doing like when they're like recording.
14:14 Bill Simmons? I thought he was actually singing though, wasn't he?
14:17 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I just mean like the way he moves around with a guitar and like, like.
14:20 Bill Simmons? But I'm saying Michael Perre never sings in this.
14:22 Chris Ryan? Right.
14:23 Bill Simmons? Like Shalhoub sang, Val Kilmer, who we talked about in The Doors, was incredible, but he's actually singing. This is him lip syncing the whole time and it actually works. It shouldn't work.
14:32 Speaker 02 He also pulls off mysterious rock star, super awesome. The whole movie is based around this mystery.
14:41 Speaker 02 That there was just more going on with Eddie than we thought there was. Right? And even in death. And for your first role, this is his first big deal, right?
14:48 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
14:49 Speaker 02 For your first role.
14:50 Bill Simmons? They found him.
14:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, for him to be like, brooding, rock star, mysterious guy, he really sells that really well. And if he doesn't work, then obviously the whole movie's.
14:58 Chris Ryan? Being an actor in a band is probably like being an actor in a basketball movie. Like, you can either choose to get the guy who looks right playing music, or the guy who's like, the good actor who you can like, cut around. Like, I don't think, I know Berenger like, learned a bunch about like, playing keyboards. But they are cutting around Berenger's, they never show Berenger's hands, really.
15:18 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
15:19 Chris Ryan? They are, they got Eddie like, in full wide shots, like, walking around with the guitar, his guitar moves.
15:25 Bill Simmons? Going into the crowd at one point?
15:26 Chris Ryan? Kind of mimic, like, they're pretty close. Like, I don't know how, whether he learned to play guitar for this, but it was, it looks pretty good to me, I mean.
15:33 Bill Simmons? He's also, carries himself like, the leader of a band. Like, you actually buy that he's in charge of the band. He's ordering these guys around. And the movie taps into, I don't know, there's some pretty cool themes in this that I don't even really fully know if they, what they were getting into when they wrote this. I don't know how much thought they put into the script, but about the concept of like, how great can somebody be?
15:55 Chris Ryan? Right.
15:56 Bill Simmons? You know, that, like, they're making these, they're selling out this club every night, everyone in the band is delighted to, to be there. And Eddie's like, pursuing something that's a little higher than everybody else that he's with. And that's really all he cares about, and the other guys don't see it, it's kinda cool. We've seen this theme in some other movies and TV shows, but I, I like how they do it in this.
16:17 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
16:18 Speaker 02 Well, it's based on a novel, right?
16:20 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
16:20 Chris Ryan? It is.
16:21 Speaker 02 And.
16:21 Bill Simmons? The novel's more of like, a mystery.
16:23 Chris Ryan? Yeah, it's like, somebody is like.
16:24 Bill Simmons? Did he get killed?
16:25 Chris Ryan? There's like a murder, like, was Eddie murdered?
16:26 Speaker 02 Interesting, I have thoughts on that at the end, by the way. Um, but, i- it seems as if, the, the, from what I've researched, the novel is like, uh, incredibly important, like, people were saying it's one of the best rock and roll novels ever. So there was some.
16:41 Bill Simmons? PF Kluge?
16:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:42 Chris Ryan? Klug?
16:43 Bill Simmons? Kluge, something like that. Uh, I give Michael Perey two possible awards that we have in flex categories we never use. The Sasha Jenkins Award for Actor, you can't believe that it become a bigger star.
16:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:56 Bill Simmons? And the Ted Levine Award for a performance so good and distinct it might have inadvertently ruined his career.
17:01 Chris Ryan? Ted Levine also on something very bad is going to happen.
17:04 Bill Simmons? Oh, really?
17:05 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
17:06 Bill Simmons? Were you surprised when you watched this that this was his peak, Michael Perre?
17:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, I had that same category written down as a flex possibility. I think he has incredible stage presence that like his physicality is so good when he's the scene where Eddie's at the college. He's talking to the crowd, there's like that edge, there's a suspense where you're like, I think this could turn dark, he's angry.
17:25 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
17:25 Speaker 04 And he kind of like commands the attention of everyone there and is holding you on that like edge of I don't know if something's gonna happen. It's pretty impressive.
17:33 Bill Simmons? He's really good.
17:35 Speaker 04 He's good, he's good on stage, the stuff offstage where he's just delivering lines, he's not as great.
17:39 Speaker 02 I mean, he's, he's limited in that.
17:41 Speaker 04 But on stage, he's great.
17:42 Chris Ryan? Director gave him hell too, so it sounds like it was like a tough shoot in that regard.
17:46 Bill Simmons? Because like in Grease, Travolta is just really good. Like you watch that and you're like, yeah, that guy's good at this.
17:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:52 Bill Simmons? And that's how I feel about Perre, except he's somehow not singing. And then you have Berenger, you mentioned, Wordman, who did this and Big Chill in the same year.
18:02 Speaker 02 The word man.
18:02 Bill Simmons? Big Chill, massive movie, like kind of a generational adult movie.
18:06 Speaker 04 Sure.
18:07 Bill Simmons? He's with all these actors, he's with Lawrence Kasdan, but he's also in this, which doesn't do well. And he's probably a little embarrassed by this one and then somehow they both live on.
18:15 Speaker 02 Do you put Berenger in the William Peterson, like what happened? Because he, both guys, William Peterson, of course, you know, I love William Peterson. Both guys seem like they have everything to be just like one notch higher.
18:31 Bill Simmons? So I would argue he actually delivered on some of that.
18:34 Speaker 04 Okay.
18:34 Bill Simmons? Cause he, Platoon, he gets nominated, that's a great part. Someone to Watch Over Me, Ridley Scott, we love that movie. He's in Shoot to Kill, Betrayed, Last Rites and Major League, all in like two years. Like he had like, I don't know, a seven year run of like he was leading movies.
18:48 Chris Ryan? It's not unlike, if you take the, the group of guys who was in, uh, Big Chill, you know, he and William Hurt had really good eighties.
18:57 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
18:57 Chris Ryan? And then started to fade.
18:59 Bill Simmons? And get passed by the cost, there's this whole next couple of guys.
19:02 Chris Ryan? Goldblum and Klein pushed through the nineties, pretty much.
19:05 Speaker 02 So that's what I'm saying though, I'm saying that like, uh, I mean, when you think about it, the nomination for Platoon is like a big, huge deal and he's fantastic in that movie, like terrifying, but. Klein and Goldblum is what I would have thought, just like a little bit more. Cause he gets to a point then, by the time you get to the sniper era, he's almost out of, I love that movie.
19:26 Chris Ryan? And a substitute, yeah.
19:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, like he's almost out of gas and being taken seriously.
19:29 Bill Simmons? Think possible he led a mildly hard life?
19:32 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I mean, he still has.
19:33 Bill Simmons? He looks pretty rough and sliver, and that's 1993, and it looks like he's 20 years older than this.
19:38 Chris Ryan? He's in Inception, which no one is seeing, he's in Inception. I haven't seen him much recently.
19:44 Bill Simmons? There's an amazing what if with him. Do you know what TV show he turned down?
19:48 Chris Ryan? No.
19:49 Bill Simmons? Sonny Crockett.
19:50 Chris Ryan? No shit.
19:51 Bill Simmons? He turned it down.
19:53 Speaker 02 That straight up doesn't work. In no way, shape, or form.
19:56 Chris Ryan? It doesn't work if he's Sonny Crockett?
19:58 Speaker 02 Nah.
19:59 Bill Simmons? I think he has too much baggage at that point, cause he's been in movies and we know who he is. Don Johnson had no, nobody knew who he was.
20:05 Chris Ryan? Right.
20:05 Speaker 02 Don Johnson is.
20:06 Bill Simmons? I think Berenger could have done it, though.
20:07 Speaker 02 Aw, man, Don Johnson is, he's beautiful, he's a little slimy, he's a little mysterious. Like, it's a completely different show with Tom Berenger.
20:16 Bill Simmons? Don Johnson's funny. No, you're not, you know I love Don Johnson.
20:19 Speaker 02 Of course.
20:20 Bill Simmons? But I think Berenger, it would have, it would have been okay.
20:22 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
20:23 Bill Simmons? I always liked him. I always thought there's some, there's some Costner with him, there's some leading man stuff, like, like he, he's good in this role, he's good at playing a cop. Platoon's probably the biggest, I don't know, swing he took. But major league, he's just kinda like the good guy. Like, you're like, that guy's a solid guy, I trust this guy.
20:42 Chris Ryan? He's like Kevin Costner with, like, with, with like a more, like, weathered face, you know what I mean? But he can play sports, he can play action, he can do that stuff, yeah.
20:54 Bill Simmons? Tell you one thing.
20:55 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
20:56 Bill Simmons? Pretty incredible chemistry with him and Ellen Barkin.
20:59 Chris Ryan? Him and.
20:59 Bill Simmons? She's ready to fucking hop on him in every scene.
21:02 Chris Ryan? They're like four, seven and seven deep.
21:04 Bill Simmons? Yeah. She's just sitting on his desk. Like, every, like, every scene she's bringing it, she's not in the movie, for some reason, I remembered her being in the movie more than she was.
21:12 Chris Ryan? I know, it's like she's in three scenes that seem to have been shot, like, in a completely different set.
21:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:17 Chris Ryan? You know, it's wild to go back to movies like this and watch it when, like, everybody in the film is probably like, it's, like, Matthew Lawrence is in this movie, he's like, got more screen time than Ellen Barkin, right?
21:28 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
21:29 Chris Ryan? To go back and be like, can you tell that Joey Pants, Ellen Barkin, and Tom Berenger are the ones that are really gonna pop out of this cast?
21:36 Bill Simmons? Right. So he, she was in Diner the year before, and this year was in Tender Mercies and Eddie and the Cruisers and. Started coming up. Uh, the smoking is, I don't know when we're gonna cover that. I don't think she doesn't have a scene where she's does isn't.
21:53 Chris Ryan? And Berenger's always.
21:54 Bill Simmons? Banging a cancer stick.
21:55 Chris Ryan? The only place Berenger doesn't smoke is school, is, is, is high school, it's class.
21:58 Bill Simmons? Elite smoking movie. And everybody is like really smoking. They're not like, don't give me the fake cigarettes. They're, they're sucking them down.
22:04 Speaker 02 It makes sense too, sucking them down. Wow. It, it, it, it, it, uh, it makes sense too. Rock stars.
22:11 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
22:12 Speaker 02 The life they live, making them seem cool. She's pretty cool. She's a cool character. She's not in the movie that much.
22:18 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
22:18 Speaker 02 She's smoking at that time that was seen as a little bit sexier. It's a character a little something to do.
22:22 Chris Ryan? Do you like this movie ironically at all? Or are you like sincerely Eddie and the Cruisers is like just a great film?
22:29 Bill Simmons? I'm a hundred percent sincere with it.
22:31 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
22:31 Bill Simmons? Well, it taps into something else that I really like. The, well, I love, I love bands kind of on the rise. And bands coming up with songs on the fly in scenes that make no sense. They're two minutes long and they come up with a hit song. But I like the concept of, and this, we did this a little bit in the Counting Crows documentary when it seemed like he did the first album. And then Duritz like kinda goes off the deep end and it doesn't seem like they're ever gonna record again. And the guys in the band are like, I just was almost touching the sun.
23:01 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
23:02 Bill Simmons? And now I'm just back to my life? Like what just happened? And I like the theme of like these guys for like 18 months had it. And now it's like Sal Amato's at the fucking Holiday Inn Lounge with Eddie Ripoff guy.
23:14 Chris Ryan? And Joey Pants is drinking Pepto.
23:16 Bill Simmons? He eats pizza in the locker room, in his dressing room. They're followed by some lady on the piano who's like, um, but I, and the guy Kenny's a blackjack dealer and it just doesn't kinda work out for anyone. I think that happens a lot.
23:30 Chris Ryan? Joanne's doing choreography.
23:32 Speaker 02 It happens. Yeah. You know, I think when I watch the movie again, to your point, it is dated, right? I mean, obviously it's dated. It came out a long time ago. And even in performance, like all these people grew so much as performers, like after this movie to me, like the,
23:48 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
23:48 Speaker 02 The, the scene where, where there's a fight between Eddie and Joey Pants' characters and it just like does not look real at all. It doesn't look like there's any real rage happening. It's very demonstrative. But. The themes of the movie and like we were a part of this really amazing thing. And this was as good as it was going to get. And we really didn't know it. We thought it would go on for like a long time. And Eddie's, his search for greatness being the thing that actually sabotaged the run of the band. That, we see that.
24:17 Chris Ryan? Or even like the idea that Frank coming into the band. And being like, let's do Rambo poetry and like really get deep. Is what breaks it up because that's always like one of my favorite moments is when Sal yells at him in the studio like. We were fine before you showed up.
24:34 Speaker 02 It was you.
24:35 Chris Ryan? We could have played Tony Martz like. Forever, you know, like we, we could have just been the best band in Ashbury Park, but instead.
24:42 Bill Simmons? I mean, you could make this movie every 10 years. You could have done a hip hop version of this movie in the nineties and said it. You know, said it was some group in like 1984 that. Self-combusted and we're ahead of their time.
24:54 Chris Ryan? The hardest thing to do about. In movies like this is to make the song or songs, but the songs specifically, because there's always got to be one. A song that people want to hear.
25:05 Bill Simmons? Yeah, and this one has like four.
25:07 Chris Ryan? But it has one main one and then it also had, and that's the same thing for that thing you do. Like that thing you do has some good songs, but what you want is to hear. All these different iterations of that thing you do and the same thing with Dark Side. You want to hear them do Dark Side three times.
25:22 Speaker 02 All you have to nail in a movie like this is the music. That's it. If the, if you nail, it's hard to even conjure a film. To where you like the songs, particularly the main song and in some way you don't respond to the music because. If like for that thing you do, which I'm gonna talk about later, that song is so good. It's so catchy that you could see why The Wonders got famous so quick.
25:45 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
25:45 Speaker 02 And why they couldn't recreate it because it was such lightning in a bottle. And with this one, they sell you on the fact that Eddie and the Cruisers are dope. And that's really all the movie has to do to like create the mystery around the band.
25:58 Bill Simmons? Did you watch Daisy Jones and the Six?
26:00 Chris Ryan? I did.
26:01 Bill Simmons? Did you watch it, Greg? Did you watch it?
26:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:04 Bill Simmons? So that has some of the themes of this of like, you're watching this band try to put it together. It's going back and forth and it's trying to do all the 2020s. There's slight mystery to what we're watching, all that stuff. But for the most part, same kind of themes and not being able to keep it together.
26:21 Chris Ryan? And good music in that, too.
26:23 Speaker 02 Five Heartbeats, we'll talk about it later, like a movie like that, they got a banger of a song out of it. It makes, it orients the whole movie.
26:31 Bill Simmons? Joey Pants was the other one we didn't talk about. Who has this in Risky Business, Guido the Killer Pimp in 1983. Goonies running scared of the bomba and then Midnight Run in 88. He is a full-fledged that guy in 1983.
26:45 Chris Ryan? He's also, to my, my taste, blowing everybody off the screen in this movie. Like, he is clearly so good, and not only that, knows exactly who this guy is. I can't tell if he's wearing a prosthetic nose or not, or if he's just really young, but he looks-
27:00 Bill Simmons? The hair is definitely a little weird.
27:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:02 Chris Ryan? But he, he is the guy who's like, I, to your point, he's like, I had it for one second. Like, you bet on all these bar bands and you get lucky with one of them.
27:12 Bill Simmons? Right. I struck oil, now I'm a DJ in New Jersey.
27:15 Chris Ryan? And now I'm like, sitting in a overhead lighting in an overnight shift at a, at a radio station.
27:21 Speaker 02 So much so to where he pulls some Scooby Doo shit.
27:23 Bill Simmons? Right.
27:24 Speaker 02 Like, the desperation-
27:25 Chris Ryan? We didn't get into that, yeah.
27:26 Speaker 02 Trying to, like, take on Eddie's persona and do all of that stuff. It's like, they sell that, they kind of create that at the beginning of the movie. Look, he's working in this small little room, word man comes in, he has all of these ideas. Maybe we can be technical consultants. First time I ever heard of a technical consultant on a movie.
27:45 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
27:45 Speaker 02 Maybe we can be in the movie. And do you know how desperate he is from that time on?
27:50 Bill Simmons? So, I, I think my favorite Joey Pants in this is when they're on the roof, the, which is a great scene. And they're just, Frank's like playing that song and he's like, can't, can barely sing. And he's sitting there, he's like-
28:02 Chris Ryan? Dark side coming.
28:04 Bill Simmons? And he's just a sound, he's there laughing, and he's like, and he's like, this guy can't sing?
28:09 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
28:10 Bill Simmons? He can't write? He can't? And he just like eviscerates him, but it's just classic Joey Pants. And you can see all the seeds for, who's the Sopranos character?
28:18 Speaker 02 Ralphie? Ralphie.
28:19 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
28:19 Speaker 02 Ralphie, Cypher, it like, it's like all of the, the, the characters that like made him famous, there's a little bit of them in that role.
28:27 Chris Ryan? Mark Coen, Bill Bonds is right there, yeah.
28:30 Bill Simmons? Did you tell fucking Jack?
28:33 Chris Ryan? Everybody's telling me to go fuck myself.
28:35 Bill Simmons? Uh, the Beaver Brown Band we mentioned, they were found by Lou Eisen, the, uh, or Kenny Payne, the technical consultant for the film who was Lou Eisen, the executive who's like, bunch of jerk offs, $10,000.
28:49 Bill Simmons? Found these guys and they wanted the cruisers to be this Jersey bar band. So there's some, there's some shades of Springsteen in this, which I think was a bigger deal in the eighties.
29:01 Chris Ryan? Massive. You, you're like, I watched this a hundred percent seriously. I watched this like 70, 30. I think the 30 comes from the fact that there is a break in the space time continuum of rock history that happens in this movie that I cannot get over.
29:16 Bill Simmons? What is it? Tell us.
29:18 Chris Ryan? Well, Eddie and the cruisers sound almost exactly like Bruce Springsteen.
29:23 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
29:23 Chris Ryan? Bruce Springsteen would have started in the, uh, early mid seventies and really starts to sound like Eddie and the cruisers or vice versa in the mid seventies. They make tender years in 62 or 63 and they're working on season in hell in 64. That predates the Bob Dylan record, Bring It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. It predates the Beatles doing Rubber Soul and Revolver. It predates.
29:51 Bill Simmons? Eddie was ahead of his time, man.
29:53 Chris Ryan? No, it's beyond ahead of his time. Like Ray Charles and the Shirelles is what was on in the radio. They would not have a rock band with a sax player doing rock opera seventies music. And you're asked to believe that like, this guy is basically Dylan going electric, but without Dylan having ever happened. Like the only thing that drives me nuts about this movie is that if they just said it in 73, then they would have been able to be like, yeah, we're trying to get like this feeling back. And then it's just 10 years later in, in 83, when they're like Eddie disappeared, but now 10 years later, there's a revival. But the idea that this is happening at like sock hops is kind of like Marty McFly going back and, and starting rock and roll in back to the future.
30:38 Bill Simmons? Oh, man.
30:38 Speaker 02 So all fair points. One of my favorite white supremacist scenes of all time.
30:42 Chris Ryan? Yes.
30:42 Speaker 02 Marty invents rock and roll. I love that. Is this done to make Eddie seem like he is a once in a generation rock visionary?
30:51 Chris Ryan? Book is set in like the doo-wop era.
30:54 Speaker 02 I see what you mean.
30:54 Chris Ryan? And they made it more like, we want this to sound like Jay Giles Band, John Mellencamp.
31:00 Speaker 02 Because they go from Runaround Sue, they go from covering Runaround Sue.
31:03 Chris Ryan? Yes.
31:03 Speaker 02 Straight to Dark Side, and it's like.
31:06 Bill Simmons? And then Season in Hell.
31:07 Speaker 02 And then Season in Hell, by the time Season in Hell comes out, they're like in excess. So it was like.
31:11 Chris Ryan? But when Season in Hell happens, they're like, this is like avant garde, and I'm like, this sounds like an Eagles song from the long run. Like, it's not that.
31:19 Bill Simmons? What other movies you want to ruin now, CR? The Warriors? Could we ever get 40,000 gang members in one spot?
31:25 Chris Ryan? No, I'm just saying, this is an easy fix that they they chose not to make. I don't know why.
31:29 Bill Simmons? I think they could have made, definitely could have made it three, four years later and probably not lost anything.
31:34 Chris Ryan? I think they really wanted the innocence of the early 60s.
31:37 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
31:37 Speaker 02 Well, in that scene at the college, they literally pull up and Sleepwalk is playing, right?
31:42 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
31:42 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
31:43 Speaker 02 Which is the scene, the the song, the instrumental that you play to say, hey, we're in the 60s and the 50s, it was a different time.
31:50 Chris Ryan? Yeah, Stand By Me.
31:51 Speaker 02 Stand By Me, and Sleepwalk is playing, and then they come on there and just their energy completely disrupts everything that the college has going on.
31:58 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
31:58 Speaker 02 If they were playing that disruptive music.
32:00 Bill Simmons? Way ahead of their time, CR.
32:01 Speaker 02 In 63, like what would they have been playing?
32:02 Chris Ryan? It's just, these guys are doing.
32:03 Bill Simmons? Would you have laughed at the Rolling Stones?
32:05 Speaker 02 Exactly.
32:05 Chris Ryan? I wouldn't have, because they didn't exist in this universe. You know what I mean? Like, Eddie, apparently they don't go on Ed Sullivan. The Beatles are not on Ed Sullivan in this universe.
32:13 Bill Simmons? Uh, they had the sax player from Beaver Brown, Michael Antunes, is the sax player in the movie. That was the only one they cast over Wendell.
32:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:23 Bill Simmons? No lines.
32:23 Speaker 02 Tough. Well, he does, he makes an impact.
32:26 Bill Simmons? He makes an impact.
32:26 Speaker 02 I got things to say.
32:27 Bill Simmons? Zero lines. Um, they, uh, the album, they re-released the soundtrack in the fall of 84, a year after the movie came out. And it goes quadruple platinum and all this shit, and even Tender Years peaked at 31. So two, two top 35 hits, um, and it just kept going and going. So the director is Martin Davidson. He wrote the screenplay of the sister and, uh. Basically got screwed over by the studio who paid for it. Couldn't figure out how to release it properly and it ended up on HBO and he was like, nobody's ever gonna see my movie. Not realizing HBO was about to come.
33:03 Chris Ryan? And not realizing that the rewatchables would force streamers to put it on. I did shout factory.
33:08 Bill Simmons? The real reason we're doing this is because we need Kiss of Death back. And if we have an Eddie, we brought Eddie and the Cruisers back to life, much like Eddie Wilson at the end of this movie. And now Kiss of Death has to be next. Craig, 95 minutes, plus five on the Horrill Beck scale.
33:23 Speaker 04 Five under par, pretty impressive. This movie is as good as it is and is as enjoyable as it is because it's 95 minutes. If this movie is two and a half hours, it's unwatchable.
33:33 Chris Ryan? Oh, my God.
33:34 Speaker 04 Unwatchable. And it just goes to show you how much that matters. Like, the 95 minutes is a part of why this movie is so great.
33:42 Chris Ryan? So that being said, for my probably answerable questions, I have some questions about what you would like to see more of.
33:47 Bill Simmons? Hmm, yeah. So, one of the reasons it hit on HBO was it was 95 minutes. They could put it on an eight and it would be done at 9:35 and they could go right into a comedy special. Five million dollar budget made 4.7 million. Roger Ebert, two stars. Eddie and the Cruisers is all build up and no payoff. He wrote that. They could have had a good movie here. They had the cast for one, they even had the music. The soundtrack is terrific. But the ending is so frustrating, so dumb, so unsatisfactory. Gives a bad reputation to the whole movie. Um, I have a counter for Raj.
34:22 Chris Ryan? Go fuck yourself.
34:23 Bill Simmons? Wow. First, go fuck yourself, like with a capital F. Like to start there. I really liked the ending. I love that he lived. I mean, granted, I saw this first when I was 15 years old, but him coming back with the beard and being like, oh, my God, he's fucking alive.
34:38 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
34:39 Bill Simmons? He was alive the whole time because they're hinting at it, but you don't actually think they're gonna do it. And then they actually do it and I don't know, I'm still into it.
34:46 Speaker 02 But to Roger's point, it doesn't really mean anything. By the time we find out that he's alive.
34:52 Chris Ryan? It's the last second.
34:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, by the time we find out that he that he's alive, what?
34:57 Bill Simmons? Well, he wanted respect, right?
34:58 Speaker 02 He did want respect.
34:59 Bill Simmons? Right. Now he's watching through a window on his TVs.
35:02 Speaker 02 Season of hell and all of that stuff.
35:03 Bill Simmons? I finally got my respect.
35:04 Chris Ryan? It's too bad you saw it the way you saw it because I would like to know whether you thought watching the movie, you're like, is Eddie breaking into people's houses and looking for the season in hell tapes?
35:15 Bill Simmons? Yeah, I didn't see, I knew the ending. Well, let's find out from Craig, who knew nothing about the movie. So the twist ending, what did you think?
35:21 Speaker 04 Well, unfortunately, I I knew there was a sequel called Eddie Lives.
35:26 Speaker 04 I think it's tough. Um, I didn't have a problem with, I I thought, yeah, I I considered maybe, I I didn't know what was gonna happen in a nice way. I was, I was let down by the Joey Pants ending, to be honest, because I, they just signaled that way too clearly. I actually thought that was gonna be like a classic red herring, because he was so ridiculous, he would be my first culprit. I thought it was gonna be like Sal Amato, who wanted to be the leader, and that's why he killed Eddie, or it was Eddie coming back or something like that.
35:51 Chris Ryan? Sal Amato cut his brakes, is that your?
35:53 Speaker 04 That was what I thought, yeah, cuz I thought he was like, you're screwing us up, I can lead us to the promised land by doing Run Around Sue for 20 years. Uh, but I didn't have a problem with the ending. To me, like, the movie's already over at that point, and it's just like a fun button at the end.
36:06 Speaker 02 It's definitely over. The movie kinda overs with the rekindled romance between Wordman and Eddie's girl. Classic Dirty Mackin, Hatton, Cucking, happening in this movie behind Eddie's fucking back. Wordman, are you crazy?
36:19 Bill Simmons? It's tough, some guy code being broken.
36:20 Chris Ryan? He's lucky he just called him Toby Tyler and and made him work for it, you know?
36:24 Speaker 02 But like, the the movie to me, it was always, there's no real story. Like, I I I enjoyed this movie. This is like, legitimately, this made me homesick for Louisiana. Like, I watched the movie, and it felt like it, I'm back in General Jackson, Baton Rouge, Gardere, it's night pizza, Eddie and Cruisers and so on. But like, it's not actually like a real movie in any way, shape, or form. She starts off, and she's gonna be looking for him. That just kinda goes nowhere.
36:52 Chris Ryan? They get rid of that.
36:53 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
36:53 Speaker 02 Like, they just fucking go, okay, like, really, if the movie was driven by her trying to get this story.
37:00 Bill Simmons? You're talking about Ellen Barkin.
37:01 Speaker 02 Ellen Barkin, the the payoff would almost make more sense.
37:03 Chris Ryan? It's two framing devices, because it's got, they've gotta get Ellen Barkin to Tom Berenger, but when they get to Tom Berenger, it becomes him going around, meeting people from his past, and having these reveries remembering his days with Eddie and Cruisers.
37:16 Bill Simmons? I don't think we were putting a ton of thought into stuff in the 80s. But we were having fun, though. We were having a great time.
37:22 Speaker 02 And we were fucking having fun.
37:23 Bill Simmons? Stuff didn't add up, we didn't care, cuz it was like, on the dark side of the movie.
37:26 Chris Ryan? Somehow came out two years before Highway 61 revisited, who cares?
37:29 Speaker 02 But wasn't it better, though?
37:32 Speaker 02 But wasn't it better, wasn't it better sitting down and like finding reasons to like what the fuck you were watching?
37:38 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
37:39 Speaker 02 It was better like to say, hey, this has great music. This is a cool story. You have an interesting lead, or I guess Tom Berenger's the lead. You have an interesting character here. Just sit down for, for 90 minutes and have a good time rather than get off and like pull everything apart and overanalyze it?
37:55 Bill Simmons? Also, yeah.
37:57 Speaker 02 It was more, you just had more fun with movies.
37:59 Speaker 04 Well, it's like, and it's what you get out of it being 95 minutes. It would be, you could explain it more if they added 20 minutes to get into some stuff, but then is it as enjoyable of a movie? No.
38:06 Bill Simmons? Probably not. Take a break, we'll do the categories. This episode is brought to by Ethos. As a parent, life insurance feels like a no brainer. It just gives me peace of mind knowing my family will be taken care of. And Ethos makes getting it fast and easy. Apply online in minutes. Get up to 3 million in coverage with no medical exam, just a few simple health questions. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com/rewatch. That is E T H O S dot com slash rewatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary.
38:44 Bill Simmons? All right, most rewatchable scene, opening credits. That's how it's done, CR. Yeah. Cold open. Dark side's coming now, nothing is real. And this is them To meet everybody. Doing Dark Side at the college, I would imagine, yeah. And then, uh, it cuts to Ellen Barkin on her like 17th sig of the day. It's like 12:30 in the afternoon.
39:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:06 Bill Simmons? Um, given Dog walking every guy in the
39:08 Speaker 02 Room full of guys, she's just dropping lady all over them.
39:12 Bill Simmons? They're all in love with her and, uh, she does, you ever hear of a poet named Arthur Rimbaud?
39:16 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
39:17 Bill Simmons? Committed suicide, not in the flesh. Put up the mind and soul.
39:24 Bill Simmons? Pretty good hook. Yeah. Good song.
39:26 Speaker 02 Everybody's skeptical. You're fucking crazy. Eddie fucking died.
39:31 Bill Simmons? Who cares Maggie, what's the hook?
39:33 Speaker 02 What are you doing? What's the deal? And she's like, and that's why you think that the story's gonna be through her perspective. But the scene sets up the entire film.
39:41 Bill Simmons? We got Wordman's flashback to meeting the cruisers at the Tony Mart. Wordman, Frank Ridgeway. Jersey Source 62. Needed a Cezor. Yeah. Timely pause. Barkin goes to see Frank at school, sits on his desk. Gives him a business card? The night Eddie died, the cruisers died with him.
40:05 Speaker 02 Right.
40:05 Bill Simmons? He was my friend, you I just met. Fake cruisers band at the Sal Lounge, leading into the memory of being on the roof creating On The Dark Side. Which might have been the best seven minutes of the 80s. I don't know.
40:19 Speaker 02 The whole fucking decade.
40:20 Bill Simmons? Hagler Hearns and this. Better than Danger Zone, better than. Hagler Hearns and maybe this. Get away from her, you bitch. I love Fake Eddie. Fake Eddie comes out with this 1983 lounge band and has the leather jacket and kills it. We get the whole Word of Music thing. Get the performance with the coming back to the cover guy wrapping it up. But we get to, I just love when, watching somebody create a song from scratch.
40:48 Speaker 02 Yeah. I also love any scene where a band is together creating a song and there's an unexpected missing ingredient. Like there's an unexpected look, style. So he does it twice. He does it when he's explaining to them, we're gonna marry what we do at bar rock with high literary concepts and all of that. But then he does it again. Listen, like he's got something that nobody else has. And the difference between Eddie and the rest of the band is Eddie can hear it and they can't.
41:19 Bill Simmons? Michael Pare said, uh, the scene on the roof, which is awesome. He said, I've been told that that scene at Top of Tony Mart is the way rock and roll happens. You take a melody and just make it rock and it just sort of happens. It's one of the most flattering things you can say.
41:34 Chris Ryan? I mean, it's an awesome scene.
41:36 Bill Simmons? Nothing is funnier than when a, when a hit song comes together in a movie in two minutes.
41:40 Chris Ryan? I fucking love it.
41:41 Bill Simmons? Like, hey, come in, play the.
41:42 Chris Ryan? Pare is like, what, are you on vacation?
41:46 Speaker 02 Jump into this motherfucker.
41:47 Chris Ryan? And he literally comes in on time, note perfect, and is like boom, boom.
41:51 Bill Simmons? The sax guy comes in, he's got a solo already planned out. Girl comes in on the drums, Joanne banging the, banging the thingy.
41:58 Speaker 02 I love also when like, everybody catches the vibe.
42:01 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
42:02 Speaker 02 And then they have to be a part of it. People start dancing, hitting the tambourine and adding melodies. Also, they got a song. When that Beatles documentary came out, did you watch that?
42:09 Bill Simmons? Yeah, it was a little like this, actually.
42:11 Speaker 02 It was, it was. It was like.
42:12 Bill Simmons? It just took 15 minutes.
42:13 Chris Ryan? Yeah, and there would be like lots of like dudes being like, did you watch the Johnny Carson show last night? That was really good.
42:20 Speaker 02 Cause you think about Get Back and you think that like, when you think about some of the songs that the Beatles made, you think that these songs were like handed down from like the gods and given to Lennon and McCartney. And you just see him going, what sounds best, two song? Is it fucking two song or things? What should we put in the song? And after they fucked around till they hit on something that people will remember forever.
42:40 Chris Ryan? But they just have this, like Dark Side comes out fully formed.
42:43 Speaker 02 Right.
42:46 Bill Simmons? I thought Berenger does a good job, even though you never see his hands of like, he's got like this head knob and, and, uh, Pare in that scene where he's like, he's just so happy it's happening. And you can feel like the, uh, the Eddie charisma.
43:00 Chris Ryan? Yeah, for sure.
43:00 Bill Simmons? It's a good scene. That leads to Sal's last song with the fake Eddie band, right into, uh, Wild Summer Nights. We go back to 63. We go Wild Summer Nights, right into Tender Years. Really good parade performance again, but ending with the Berenger piano. The sax guy coming over.
43:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's fucking awesome. Yeah.
43:20 Bill Simmons? Putting the elbow on the piano, just like, yeah.
43:22 Speaker 04 Do you have a favorite not dark side Eddie song?
43:26 Bill Simmons? Tender Years is good. Tender Years is good. It's like just a flat out solid song. I don't know if you noticed this though, but it comes back to Sal after Tender Years and they're wrapping up. And they play some oldie book goodie song and all the people in the audience are holding cigarette lighters.
43:43 Speaker 02 Lighting their lighters up.
43:44 Bill Simmons? And he finishes it and it cuts to the crowd and there's this lady in the front row, it's like this.
43:51 Bill Simmons? Could be a really funny social clip. This extra is just going for it. She's making like five bucks for three hours, just like throwing herself into it.
44:02 Bill Simmons? Sound word man eating pizza I enjoy.
44:05 Bill Simmons? I, so let me test drive this one for you. Cause Sal's really going for it. He's got the sweaty lip. Seeing pizza, he's about to start crying. I think he might be a Peter North Award for most effort loaded into one movie.
44:18 Speaker 04 Matthew Lawrence?
44:19 Bill Simmons? Yeah, it's like he's got this nothing bass part. He's throwing himself into this full speed, a hundred percent.
44:25 Speaker 04 You kind of need him in this movie too.
44:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, you do. Think about the little soliloquy that he does after a song and he's sitting down there and he's telling them. Remember when you used to driving around and things getting wild in the backseat and you're touching on her and all of this stuff. And everybody's starting to feel, remember that first time? Remember that first time?
44:41 Speaker 04 This is, this is my flex.
44:43 Bill Simmons? What is it?
44:43 Speaker 04 Salamato, I, I used the Bam Adebayo, where the fuck did that performance come from?
44:49 Speaker 04 Mel from 90210, dude, nuts. Salamato in the nightclub, like he could have been at the Copacabana. He was smooth as butter.
44:56 Chris Ryan? Because he always had that. He was just like, I can't be Eddie, but I'm really close.
45:00 Speaker 04 He's fucking nice on stage that night. He's pretty good.
45:03 Bill Simmons? So he had, he was in, he was the gay guy in San Elmo's Fire. He lived across the hall from Demi Moore. And then peaked in 90210, he was David Silver's dad, David's pops. He served, he served Donna Martin champagne, got her drunk. She passed out at the high school graduation. And then wasn't allowed to graduate and they revolted and it was all because of Salamato. Salamato serving underage kids champagne. I thought he was great in this. The Toby Tyler move we mentioned into Frank and Maggie. Which I think, I think every scene with Berenger and Barkin is just really good.
45:36 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
45:37 Bill Simmons? And I had this coming later, but Barkin like hates this movie.
45:41 Chris Ryan? Yes.
45:42 Speaker 02 Hates it. She fucking.
45:44 Bill Simmons? She shit all over it.
45:45 Chris Ryan? She shit on it.
45:46 Bill Simmons? That was to pay the rent.
45:47 Speaker 02 That was to pay the rent. We didn't know who was in charge. The movie fucking sucks.
45:51 Chris Ryan? Everybody was on drugs.
45:52 Speaker 02 Everybody was on drugs, like, and she, she hints to being actually mistreated on the movie in a way. If you watch how viciously she treats the film.
46:02 Bill Simmons? Hurt my feelings.
46:05 Bill Simmons? Wendell dies right into Eddie crying and being able to sing Tender Years.
46:09 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
46:10 Bill Simmons? My friend died last night. Season hell going sideways. This is what I've been waiting a year for. A bunch of jerk offs making weird sounds.
46:21 Speaker 02 That guy, that guy is funny as fuck. He's so fucking mad.
46:26 Chris Ryan? Was that Lou Eisen?
46:27 Bill Simmons? Yeah. He said that $10,000.
46:29 Speaker 02 He gave him 10 grand and they came back with some experimental bullshit when he's trying to get the kids at the fucking sock hop to dance.
46:35 Bill Simmons? Really funny. And, uh, we ain't great. We're just some guys from Jersey. If we can't be great, then there's no sense in ever playing music again, Sal.
46:45 Speaker 02 That's why I think before every tailgate.
46:47 Chris Ryan? It does haunt Eddie through the sequel Eddie Lives. You know, he's like, I just don't want to get up on stage unless it's going to really mean something, you know?
46:55 Bill Simmons? And then the ending.
46:59 Bill Simmons? That's it for rewatchable. What do you got?
47:03 Chris Ryan? I'm gonna go.
47:04 Bill Simmons? Rooftop?
47:04 Chris Ryan? Writing Dark Side. Yeah.
47:06 Bill Simmons? I think that's me too.
47:08 Speaker 02 That's what it is.
47:08 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
47:09 Speaker 02 Though, did you enjoy Eddie in the flashback in the fucking junkyard castle?
47:17 Chris Ryan? Palace of Depression?
47:18 Speaker 02 The Palace of Depression.
47:19 Bill Simmons? Which apparently actually exists.
47:20 Chris Ryan? It did, yeah.
47:21 Speaker 02 Like, I love that scene because that's when Eddie, when Eddie starts to crash out towards the end of the movie, the middle to the end of the movie. Those are my favorite parts of the movie. He crashes out in front of.
47:30 Bill Simmons? Comparing himself to the Edsel?
47:32 Speaker 02 Yep.
47:33 Chris Ryan? I think it's cool because for the most part, it's all of Berenger's happy memories of it. And then it's like when Joanne is like, Kenny and Joanne are like the ones who were like, it wasn't all happy, you know? Like, it was like, there was some dark shit.
47:46 Bill Simmons? Yeah. And then CR is like, this wouldn't have even existed. It's two years first Dylan, you dumb motherfuckers.
47:53 Bill Simmons? What's the 1983 thing about this movie?
47:58 Bill Simmons? No caller ID.
47:59 Chris Ryan? Oh.
48:00 Bill Simmons? Really jumps out.
48:01 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
48:01 Bill Simmons? When Joanne keeps getting these calls, now you would just be like, who's this number?
48:05 Chris Ryan? She couldn't even, I don't even think they had star 69 yet.
48:08 Bill Simmons? Watching a row of TVs through a department store window.
48:12 Speaker 02 Definitely.
48:13 Bill Simmons? Is very 1983.
48:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:15 Bill Simmons? That doesn't exist anymore.
48:16 Speaker 02 It's a trope that continued to come back up.
48:19 Bill Simmons? Now it'd be like a homeless guy with no pants on, watching through a Best Buy and then peeing on the window. Now it would have been the end of it in the theaters.
48:30 Speaker 02 What are you talking about?
48:32 Chris Ryan? Is Eddie the homeless guy?
48:33 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
48:33 Speaker 02 Eddie's a homeless guy.
48:34 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
48:34 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
48:36 Chris Ryan? I have a couple here for the 83. One is, uh, Dark Side just sounds like Bryan Adams or South Side Johnny or John Mellencamp. So like very classic early mid 80s rock sound. And then Ellen Barkin working for Media Magazine, which is in fact a television news program.
48:53 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
48:54 Chris Ryan? Was like a very big thing, at least in Philly, they had one of these, I think it was called.
48:58 Bill Simmons? We had one too, in Boston.
49:01 Chris Ryan? I think it was called like Entertainment Magazine or Entertainment Week or something like that, but it was like two hosts.
49:06 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
49:06 Chris Ryan? And then they would be like.
49:07 Bill Simmons? Hard hitting stories.
49:09 Chris Ryan? Bruce Willis and Sybil Shepherd, they're back on screen for Moonstruck. See, Moon.
49:13 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
49:13 Chris Ryan? You know, like, and it's, it's, it was just like a really weird phenomenon back then, regional entertainment news programs.
49:19 Bill Simmons? Yeah, it would be the celebrities that passed through that they were in an interview.
49:23 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
49:23 Bill Simmons? But then it would be like a hard hitting piece about some school that lost its funding for the school play.
49:28 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
49:31 Speaker 02 One, the smoking, very 1983, how much smoking they have in it.
49:34 Chris Ryan? Maybe even more than 83 was. They had non-smoking sections by then.
49:38 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
49:39 Speaker 02 The, the smoking. Also, the fact that in this part of the 80s, they just did not give a fuck about aging or de-aging or anything like that in any way, shape or form.
49:50 Chris Ryan? This is.
49:51 Speaker 02 Like in, in no way, shape or form.
49:52 Bill Simmons? Berenger's exactly the same age.
49:54 Speaker 02 They don't give a fuck. They would, they would take you, mess your hair up a little bit.
49:57 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
49:57 Speaker 02 Put you in an open shirt, you're 14 years old. Like you're fourteen, like you're fourteen, you're fourteen. He in this movie is eighty-three, right? He's thirty-four or whatever. So when he joined the band, he was fourteen or fifteen years old.
50:09 Chris Ryan? I think it's supposed to be seventeen, thirty-seven, but this is, this is another problem with the space-time continuum.
50:14 Speaker 02 Right, it's like Joey Pants. He looks the same, then they, they give him a little baldy. He's, he's twenty years older, the whole nine. Just in the eighties, he just didn't care. You're younger, it doesn't matter.
50:24 Chris Ryan? Joanne barely looks different.
50:26 Speaker 02 She looks almost exactly the same, they just changed her wardrobe.
50:29 Bill Simmons? She just looks great.
50:30 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
50:32 Bill Simmons? Yeah, they didn't put a lot of thought into this stuff. It almost makes you think they, they thought it was gonna be nineteen sixty-eight and then they decided in the editing to shave six more years out of it or something.
50:43 Chris Ryan? Yeah. I think it's closer to the book, yeah.
50:46 Bill Simmons? Berenger basically looks exactly the same. There's no difference at all. Uh, for the Floyd Gondole butter on my ass and lollipops in my mouth for something I just enjoy. I said it already, but watching in a movie or a TV show, a band create a song from scratch gets to me every time.
51:01 Chris Ryan? I have, when the quiet part of a rock song makes way for the loud part of a rock song via isolated guitar riff and hand claps.
51:07 Bill Simmons? Hmm.
51:08 Chris Ryan? It's just good stuff when it's just like,
51:11 Chris Ryan? here we go, Dark Side's about to kick in.
51:15 Speaker 02 Sleepwalk being a, like a fucking soundtrack for like the fifties and sixties.
51:20 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
51:20 Speaker 02 It always gets to me, but also I like Frank's Dirty Mackin, man. Frank don't, Wordman don't even give a fuck. She walks into the bar, he, he sees her, he's like, oh shit, a little something walking in, what's going on right now? And then fucking Eddie comes in and he kinda tamps it down, but as soon as Eddie is gone,
51:36 Bill Simmons? He's trying to get that ass though.
51:38 Speaker 02 He's right back on his shit, trying to steal Eddie's girl.
51:40 Chris Ryan? Some bad things happen.
51:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:41 Chris Ryan? I actually watched it like two or three times, being like, did I miss the part where she's like, me and Eddie are on a break? It's like, no, she's right back in Eddie's arms, like the second after he makes out with her.
51:53 Bill Simmons? It's tough shit, man.
51:54 Speaker 02 Can't trust them. Chris Rock will do a song about it.
51:57 Bill Simmons? Woman empowerment, 1963.
51:59 Speaker 02 She can sleep with whoever she wants, Bill.
52:02 Bill Simmons? She wasn't being shadowed.
52:03 Speaker 02 He doesn't own her.
52:04 Bill Simmons? Uh, would take the best. Mentioned a couple already, but uh, I think Wendell is, is a home run in this movie cause he has no lines, but you feel him in the movie, which made me wonder, do we create the Wendell Newton Award for best performance with no lines?
52:20 Bill Simmons? Zero lines. Have we ever had a no line? It's weird cause it's not even like, hey, man, grab me a Coke. It's nothing. Doesn't speak.
52:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:29 Bill Simmons? Doesn't even say like, yeah. Nothing, not even one word. Heroin, very powerful.
52:37 Speaker 02 But you know his whole fucking life story by watching him play with Eddie and the Cruisers.
52:41 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
52:42 Speaker 02 You know exactly. He's playing for a long time in a jazz band. Eddie heard him someplace, brings him into the Cruisers and changed his fucking life. Him and Eddie have a whole song. He even ta- taught Eddie some music. He was Eddie's like musical Obi-Wan to a degree.
52:55 Bill Simmons? This was the Springsteen issue for this movie when they thought it was a Springsteen ripoff. Cause Clarence Clemons was the, probably the biggest he'd ever, most famous he'd ever had in 1930. Yeah. Um, Hall of Fame smoke we mentioned. I like Jersey Shore in the sixties. I have Jersey Shore. Also liked Jersey Shore in the seventies, the eighties and the nineties. It was really fun to go to.
53:15 Bill Simmons? I like when Eddie gives Frank the green light to write songs and then he does the, that's the most you'll ever get out of me, word, man. The little like bonding on the beach. And then, uh, Berenger just is completely committed to this all the time. But I like at the end, the end's ridiculous when Jo- Joey Pants is like, I'm gonna get the tapes. We're gonna get, I'm gonna make the best deal we can. He drives away and Berenger comes flying in. He's like, go get him, dog.
53:45 Bill Simmons? Just makes me laugh. What do you have for what's aged the best?
53:48 Speaker 02 Um, like, this is oriented around a conspiracy theory that Eddie is still alive.
53:54 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
53:54 Speaker 02 That was very much alive then. That was the heyday of Elvis is somewhere hanging out in Montana. We did it again in the nineties.
54:02 Chris Ryan? Was D.B. Cooper a big thing?
54:04 Speaker 02 Cooper.
54:04 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
54:05 Speaker 02 We did it again in the nineties. Tupac lives in Jamaica.
54:07 Bill Simmons? Tupac's the best one.
54:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, like, all of this.
54:09 Bill Simmons? Still like thirty percent. Thirty percent he might be.
54:12 Chris Ryan? Andy Kaufman, people thought.
54:14 Speaker 02 Andy Kaufman, like, the conspiracy theory that the movie is wrapped around, that's really aged good. I want to hear your Tupac theory, though. What happened to Pac? Pac's alive? Like, where is he?
54:25 Bill Simmons? Just saying, I would believe that one the most.
54:27 Chris Ryan? Did he get shot, though?
54:28 Bill Simmons? Like, he's, like, in hiding. Um, no, sadly, he died, but that was the one I really wanted to believe. In the late nineties, I really tried to talk about that.
54:38 Chris Ryan? It's a Bill Simmons exclusive. He can confirm that Tupac is dead.
54:42 Bill Simmons? If you put Drinks at Me in, like, nineteen ninety-eight, I would have gone nuts for it.
54:46 Speaker 02 We all thought it. Like, everybody was in, and it was so funny.
54:49 Chris Ryan? Because he was still releasing music.
54:50 Speaker 02 Bruh, it was funny because, like, my mom caught me up on it one time. My mom goes, remember how stupid you used to say we looked? Where we would say that Elvis was still living or something like that. Remember how they all are doing the same thing? I was like, but this is different.
55:03 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
55:03 Speaker 02 I got pieces of autopsy, music is still dropping, he said this on this song, if you listen to it right there, these Jordans that he's wearing in his video, mama, these Jordans wasn't even out.
55:13 Bill Simmons? It was really good. It died, I'm gonna say, like, early two thousands. It became ridiculous, but it did have a really good two-year run.
55:19 Speaker 02 Right.
55:20 Bill Simmons? Great Shot Gordo Award, most cinematic shot.
55:23 Chris Ryan? I don't have a specific cinematic shot. I want to give a shout-out. Really good extras acting in this movie. All the bar scenes with the crowd, everybody's, like, acting like someone at a bar.
55:34 Bill Simmons? Concert's great.
55:35 Chris Ryan? The college concert's great, yeah.
55:38 Bill Simmons? Big Kahuna Burger Award, best used food and drink. Sal's pepperoni pizza?
55:42 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
55:43 Bill Simmons? As you know, I love a good, old-school, greasy slice. He never takes a bite out of it, though.
55:48 Chris Ryan? There's also a lot of people drinking what seemed to be seven-and-sevens, which is a very eighty-three, you know, like, that early, kind of like, eighties drink.
55:59 Bill Simmons? Chet Swakwa, Brock Linder.
56:01 Speaker 02 They both come from that scene. The PBRs, though. The PBR tells you what kind of guys these fucking are. One of beers, the fucking PBR.
56:10 Chris Ryan? And Schlitz, they're drinking Schlitz too.
56:12 Bill Simmons? Yep. Ches Rockwell, best character name. Frank Ridgeway is pretty good, the word man Frank Ridgeway.
56:18 Chris Ryan? I had Salamato, but yeah.
56:19 Bill Simmons? Salamato's good too. Uh, Denethys Benihana Award scene stealing locations, gotta be the junkyard.
56:24 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
56:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks right.
56:26 Bill Simmons? Uh, CR, you have a flex category.
56:28 Chris Ryan? Uh, Vincent Chase Award, are we sure this character was good at his job? Frank.
56:33 Speaker 02 Oh, Word Man.
56:34 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
56:34 Bill Simmons? The Word Man?
56:35 Speaker 02 Oh, I thought you were almost certainly gonna go with, with Joey Pantsy.
56:38 Chris Ryan? I wouldn't say that Word Man is blowing my mind with his words. Like Dark Side's a good song, but I don't know if you deserve the title Word Man for Dark Side.
56:48 Bill Simmons? Whoa, whoa, Tender Years, won't you wash away my tears?
56:52 Chris Ryan? He also steals his bandmate's girl, which I know, it's a knock for me in terms of being in a band and having a bandmate, uh, and he kind of forces them into a life of obsolescence when you spring season of Hell, Season of Hell on them. If it wasn't for Frank, they probably would have made Tender Years Part Two and done fine.
57:09 Bill Simmons? Barely play this synth.
57:10 Chris Ryan? Yeah, exactly.
57:11 Bill Simmons? Had to be taught just how to do this.
57:13 Chris Ryan? He's like, he's like, no, play these cool chords. He's like, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.
57:18 Speaker 02 Word Man kind of a bitch.
57:21 Chris Ryan? That's what I'm saying.
57:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, no, you, you know, I thought this, we talked about.
57:24 Bill Simmons? I'm having a great time.
57:25 Speaker 02 Like, Word, Word Man kind of a bitch. Word Man fucked up everybody's life, stole somebody's girl.
57:30 Chris Ryan? Class traitor.
57:31 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, exactly.
57:32 Chris Ryan? He's basically like a little art.
57:34 Speaker 02 Word Man is straight up hoe.
57:35 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
57:35 Speaker 02 Like, he, he, he gets to the college, he is like really slumming it. What did they say to the department, you're dropping your ass, hanging out on the, like, that's what Word Man is doing.
57:43 Chris Ryan? Well, that's what Eddie says to him, he's like, I didn't say better, I said different.
57:48 Speaker 02 Hmm.
57:48 Chris Ryan? You know?
57:49 Bill Simmons? Yeah, you'd like this movie.
57:50 Chris Ryan? Of course I do.
57:51 Bill Simmons? You're like ninety, ten.
57:52 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
57:52 Bill Simmons? I didn't like the seventy, thirty. Butch's Girlfriend Award Week, Link of the Film. Doc's plan of torturing Joanne and everyone else for the tapes and wrecking their apartments over just asking them if they had the tapes. I don't know. I have some notes. Maybe just ask Joanne, hey, do you have the tapes?
58:10 Speaker 02 We never really come back to the fact that he walked into his apartment and it looks like someone was killed there, signs of a struggle, like going crazy. He was like, all that stuff, it just comes to the movie.
58:20 Bill Simmons? It's just like, go get him, Doc.
58:21 Chris Ryan? What's age the worst is Tom Berenger's acting when he sees that his apartment's been trashed. First of all, he's working at a, he's a school teacher.
58:28 Bill Simmons? He's in a trailer.
58:28 Chris Ryan? He was in a trailer park in Vineland, New Jersey, but he walks in, it's completely destroyed. He's like, okay, starts smoking a cigarette and answering his phone.
58:39 Bill Simmons? What's age the worst? The sequel.
58:43 Speaker 02 Ah, tough.
58:43 Bill Simmons? Why did they do this?
58:46 Bill Simmons? They, eighty-nine for some reason gave us, wait, eighty-eight and eighty-nine gave us Caddyshack Two.
58:51 Chris Ryan? Another forty-eight hours.
58:53 Bill Simmons? Another forty-eight hours, which we've gradually decided we liked. There's just a bunch of bad ones where they were just, just trying to capitalize, I think, on the rewatchability of these movies on cable. And like, maybe these dumbasses will go see a shitty version of a sequel.
59:07 Chris Ryan? You know how you don't remember the pods we did during COVID?
59:10 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
59:11 Chris Ryan? Did we do another forty-eight hours like two, two months ago?
59:13 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
59:14 Speaker 02 We did, we did.
59:16 Bill Simmons? We did. Did you get the COVID vaccine again?
59:18 Chris Ryan? No, I just.
59:19 Speaker 02 Boy, Bill's going for it. I can't wait till what happens in a couple of months.
59:23 Chris Ryan? What happens?
59:23 Speaker 02 Bill's right on the edge, guys. Here are the things that are being said.
59:26 Chris Ryan? But what's gonna happen?
59:26 Speaker 02 Did you get the COVID vaccine a little bit? It's going further. It's, let's watch.
59:29 Chris Ryan? Oh, you think he's getting red pilled?
59:31 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
59:31 Bill Simmons? I don't, I don't remember anything that happened in twenty twenty or twenty twenty-one.
59:35 Speaker 02 What you're saying is because of.
59:36 Bill Simmons? Apparently the Bucks played the Suns in the finals.
59:40 Speaker 02 I'm telling you, it's getting, look, it, so what's age the worst is that, okay, so there's, how many black guys are in the group?
59:47 Chris Ryan? One.
59:48 Speaker 02 It's one.
59:50 Speaker 02 He died.
59:55 Speaker 02 It would have been one thing if everybody in the cruisers like had a drug problem if they were sharing needles and the whole deal like it was the eighties they missed an opportunity one of the guys could have like become HIV positive I shared a needle with fucking Two black guys. Two black guys.
1:00:11 Speaker 02 The poor guy gets replaced and is just like, I just want to say that the greatest saxophone player who ever lived died. This motherfucker's holding his saxophone like, god damn, we're trying to keep up with this and that that's what's age the worst.
1:00:21 Chris Ryan? Let me ask you a question, it's probably unanswerable. End of the day, Wendell goes home, you think he's like, man, I'm in this great band, saying the cruisers, I play sax, I don't talk a lot, but man, I love being in this band, or do you think he's like, shit, I gotta get back into a hard bop combo, I gotta get back to jazz.
1:00:40 Speaker 02 What a good question. Is he calling home being like, man, some of the stuff Eddie wants to do is stuff like I've never fucking heard before.
1:00:46 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:00:46 Speaker 02 Or is he like, fuck, how did this happen to me?
1:00:48 Chris Ryan? Yeah, how am I playing?
1:00:49 Speaker 02 I knew fucking Miles Davis.
1:00:51 Chris Ryan? A 12 second solo.
1:00:52 Speaker 02 Right.
1:00:52 Chris Ryan? Over a terrible blues rock band.
1:00:54 Bill Simmons? So do you think Frank never would, it's realistic that Frank never would have known that he overdosed in heroin at the uptight motel?
1:01:00 Chris Ryan? Yeah, man, it's, it's crazy. Like, like, I guess that's
1:01:03 Bill Simmons? Cause Kenny the Blackjack there was like, where were you, man? When are you gonna wake up?
1:01:07 Speaker 02 This goes into my hottest take later.
1:01:09 Bill Simmons? Okay.
1:01:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:11 Bill Simmons? What's age the worst? None of these characters ran into each other for 20 years?
1:01:15 Chris Ryan? And they all live in the same state where there's not a ton to do.
1:01:17 Bill Simmons? 20 minutes apart?
1:01:19 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:01:19 Bill Simmons? They never had some sort of 10 year reunion, nothing? I thought that was weird. The Springsteen shadow we mentioned, mentioned Alan Barkin hating this movie. I have one more big one. Does anyone have anything else?
1:01:30 Chris Ryan? Uh, they hinged the entire insult of Eddie's insult of word man on stage at the college on the Toby Tyler character from like a Disney movie that was around back then. I don't really know if that's really hidden in 2026. People are like, oh, yeah, Tyler. Uh, and Van mentioned it, Berenger and Schneider look like they don't look at all day older than when they were in high school. Oh, one more thing. We gotta fix this. Amazon and Apple, their posters for this movie are the Sal Amato band.
1:02:02 Bill Simmons? Oh.
1:02:02 Chris Ryan? It's fucking crazy. It's Eddie and the cruisers and you're like, neither Eddie nor Berenger nor Barkin are in the poster. It's Sal Amato and his Holiday Inn band.
1:02:12 Bill Simmons? That ties into, uh, what, by what stage the worst was. And then this is, I'd like to do this as a public service, um, to all the streamers watching this right now.
1:02:21 Chris Ryan? All of them.
1:02:22 Bill Simmons? Including Netflix. So this movie's ending, right? Surprise ending with Eddie in the window and he's got the beard. And the, and the closing credits come on. Amazon's counting me down in the bottom right corner because it's about to send me to the next thing.
1:02:37 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:02:38 Bill Simmons? And now I really want to hear the ending and you have to like grab your phone or your remote, frantically try to stop it. So they don't send me to like fucking Harry Potter, season seven, or whatever they're gonna send me to. And it's like, fuck off.
1:02:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:02:51 Bill Simmons? Let me enjoy the end of a movie for 20 seconds before you're sending me to your next thing. So you can bill your fake streaming hours to me when all I did was leave my TV on and you pretended I watched something else. Fuck you.
1:03:04 Chris Ryan? Some of your best work, Bill.
1:03:05 Speaker 02 This is what, this is the fucking shit, bro. This is the shit.
1:03:08 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:03:09 Bill Simmons? It's fucking bullshit.
1:03:10 Speaker 02 Fucking can't stand it. Can I finish?
1:03:12 Chris Ryan? God forbid they don't push you to the next show.
1:03:14 Speaker 02 You know what, Bill? Good for you.
1:03:16 Bill Simmons? Thank you.
1:03:17 Speaker 02 Good for you for saying it despite current business situation.
1:03:20 Chris Ryan? No.
1:03:22 Bill Simmons? Cross the board.
1:03:22 Speaker 02 Like, let me watch the fucking movie before you give me five different things to watch.
1:03:29 Bill Simmons? Change my settings and be like, you know what? You can't do this for 30 seconds.
1:03:32 Chris Ryan? I don't want to live in a country where we can't say, it's time for me to watch the next episode. I'll click over to that now. If you need someone to spoon feed you the next episode of the next movie before you've come to the conclusion of the artistic statement that you are taking in. We're done as a nation.
1:03:51 Speaker 02 Right.
1:03:52 Chris Ryan? We're done as a country if that's the case.
1:03:54 Speaker 02 You know what? I wonder what the actual calculation is here because I bet they don't want it to get too deep into the credits before you've already.
1:04:02 Chris Ryan? They don't even want you to think.
1:04:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:04 Bill Simmons? They want us on the next thing.
1:04:05 Speaker 02 They want you on the next thing to keep you on the thing. It's ruining.
1:04:09 Chris Ryan? And for shows, if you end on a cliffhanger, you're counting on the fact that somebody's like, I have to see what happened to this nurse in the pit. Start the next episode.
1:04:16 Bill Simmons? Anything to add, Craig?
1:04:18 Speaker 04 It's anti-below-the-line. I want to see who lit the movie. Let me see their names. Say their names.
1:04:22 Chris Ryan? Who's the A D? Sorry, I care about these things.
1:04:25 Bill Simmons? Stop telling us you actually care about the movie industry and you won't let us see closing credits for anything I watch.
1:04:31 Speaker 04 Who was Sal Amato's assistant on set? I want to know.
1:04:33 Bill Simmons? Yeah. It was the key grip. Really annoying. All right, we'll take a break and then come back with Van's Flex.
1:04:42 Bill Simmons? Ruffalo Hannah Rubenek Partridge over acting word Kenny the drummer?
1:04:46 Speaker 04 When are you gonna wake up?
1:04:48 Chris Ryan? I had Joey Pants.
1:04:49 Bill Simmons? What are you getting so mad at Wordman for?
1:04:50 Chris Ryan? He really goes for it.
1:04:51 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:04:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:04:52 Bill Simmons? He's like, this is my one scene. I'm gonna get really mad at Ridgeway.
1:04:55 Speaker 02 You guys are gonna like it. I have Eddie whenever they're not on stage.
1:04:59 Bill Simmons? Oh.
1:05:00 Speaker 02 Whenever they're not on stage.
1:05:02 Bill Simmons? Just going for it?
1:05:02 Speaker 02 Eddie is just fucking going for it. He puts his whole body into when he shoved, what you call it? Like whenever they're not on stage, Eddie is dialing it up in the middle of it, man.
1:05:13 Chris Ryan? My favorite part of that Kenny scene is when he's like, you remember those days in the backseat of a car balling some chick?
1:05:20 Speaker 02 Balling some chick.
1:05:21 Chris Ryan? And then your song comes on.
1:05:23 Bill Simmons? I should put ballin' in what's age the best.
1:05:24 Speaker 02 Ballin' some chick.
1:05:25 Bill Simmons? When was the last time ballin' was said?
1:05:28 Speaker 02 It was when they didn't, they didn't like they cut to the audience and all the guys in the audience are like, yeah, I remember that.
1:05:33 Speaker 04 That's Chris and Sean. You remember back in the day we were ballin' some chick? The watch comes on?
1:05:40 Bill Simmons? Uh, Ben, you have a flex.
1:05:42 Speaker 02 All right, so it's a list. Top five fictitious bands ever.
1:05:46 Bill Simmons? Okay.
1:05:46 Speaker 02 Okay, I do not have Eddie and the Cruisers in this just because we're doing the movies. Uh, number five is Josie and the Pussycats.
1:05:54 Bill Simmons? Okay.
1:05:55 Speaker 02 You gotta count them. Iconic shit. Number four, I got the Wonders, man. I'm a that thing you do truther.
1:06:02 Bill Simmons? Punch it in.
1:06:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, like, I love that movie. It's almost lost time that I talk about as much as they should.
1:06:08 Bill Simmons? Should we add it to the list?
1:06:10 Chris Ryan? I think it's a really good rewatchable.
1:06:11 Bill Simmons? Okay.
1:06:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, I love that movie. Uh, number three, Spinal Tap. Gotta have Spinal Tap in there. Rest in peace, Rob. Um, number two, The Five Heartbeats.
1:06:22 Bill Simmons? Okay.
1:06:22 Speaker 02 Now, this is an underrated fictitious band. The music is fantastic.
1:06:27 Bill Simmons? Robert Townsend.
1:06:28 Speaker 02 The Robert Townsend, shout out to him. The story is very reminiscent of Temptations, obviously, but they're amazing. Their music was amazing, too.
1:06:36 Bill Simmons? I like that movie.
1:06:37 Speaker 02 Number one, for me, Stillwater.
1:06:42 Speaker 02 Stillwater from Almost Famous. Fantat- they, they sound like a real band. They have the real band chemistry and angst. Stillwater.
1:06:52 Chris Ryan? Can I ask a follow up question?
1:06:53 Bill Simmons? Good lead singer presence, too, by Jason Lee.
1:06:56 Chris Ryan? No, forget the movies that those bands are in. Best music of a fictitious band.
1:07:01 Bill Simmons? Hmm.
1:07:02 Speaker 02 So, to me, it would be, excuse me, The Five Heartbeats, The Wonders, Eddie and the Cruisers.
1:07:08 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:07:08 Speaker 02 They gotta be, they gotta be up there. And the Stillwater stuff is awesome to me. It sounds kinda like-
1:07:13 Bill Simmons? Stillwater's really good.
1:07:14 Chris Ryan? I just don't think Fever Dog is as good of a signature song as Dark Side or-
1:07:18 Speaker 02 Dark Side, yeah.
1:07:19 Chris Ryan? Yeah. Or That Thing You Do.
1:07:20 Bill Simmons? Yeah, that's fair. It was a good list. I, I wanna like nitpick and say you missed one, but I can't think of one that you missed.
1:07:26 Speaker 02 So there was one thing that I couldn't really decide. I went back and forth with Kim Berg about this, is- The Revolution in Purple Rain.
1:07:37 Bill Simmons? Doesn't count.
1:07:38 Speaker 02 Okay, because he's not playing Prince.
1:07:39 Bill Simmons? Nah, it doesn't count.
1:07:41 Speaker 02 I think they're called the-
1:07:42 Bill Simmons? Because Wendy and Lisa are in his other band.
1:07:44 Speaker 02 Everybody has the regular names, the time is in it, but we couldn't decide whether or not that was technically a fictitious band or not, because if they are, they're obviously number one.
1:07:56 Chris Ryan? We just did an 80's soundtrack.
1:07:57 Bill Simmons? And the time doesn't count either.
1:07:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:07:59 Chris Ryan? The only one I would add to it is Sex Bomb from Scott Pilgrim.
1:08:04 Speaker 02 From Scott Pilgrim.
1:08:05 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:08:06 Speaker 02 That's a fucking Miss Bavan.
1:08:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:08:08 Bill Simmons? What about the Matt Damon band in Euro Trip? Scotty doesn't know.
1:08:13 Speaker 02 Scotty doesn't know.
1:08:14 Chris Ryan? Dan Band, real band, right? The Dan Band? Oh, Hey, That's My Bike. Hey, That's My Bike from Reality Bites.
1:08:20 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:08:21 Bill Simmons? That's a good one.
1:08:22 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:08:23 Speaker 02 Oh, CB4.
1:08:24 Bill Simmons? So we never see Citizen Dick in singles, we just hang out with them.
1:08:27 Chris Ryan? But they are Mud Honey, so they're pretty good.
1:08:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. Wait, wait a minute. Oh, yeah, no, they're only fictitious band in singles, because everybody else is like Alice in Chains.
1:08:36 Bill Simmons? They never perform, though.
1:08:38 Speaker 02 They do Trust Me, I'm Dick.
1:08:39 Chris Ryan? Touch Me, I'm Sick, yeah, or Touch Me, I'm Dick, yeah.
1:08:41 Speaker 02 Touch Me, I'm Dick, yeah.
1:08:42 Bill Simmons? We see them on stage doing it?
1:08:43 Chris Ryan? No, we just hear their record.
1:08:45 Bill Simmons? Yeah, yeah, we don't see it, though.
1:08:46 Speaker 02 Touch Me, I'm Dick.
1:08:48 Bill Simmons? That's a good one. CR thinks Luke Wilson could have been Harrison Ford hottest take award.
1:08:56 Bill Simmons? I don't know how hot of a take this is, but if this movie had two more great songs in it, what happens?
1:09:04 Bill Simmons? Does this become Grease?
1:09:07 Speaker 02 The level to which Grease is better than this movie is difficult to articulate.
1:09:12 Bill Simmons? So, no.
1:09:13 Speaker 02 I mean, Grease is better in every way, right?
1:09:15 Bill Simmons? I'm aware. Except for, except for everyone in the movie is 38 years old, playing high school kids, yeah.
1:09:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, true.
1:09:22 Chris Ryan? So, would you want another song that was like Dark Side, or do you feel like we needed like another Joanne solo song?
1:09:30 Bill Simmons? Well, I was gonna do this later for either nitpick or unanswered world, but you assume all the songs we hear on The Dark Side, Tender Years, they're all on some album, right?
1:09:40 Chris Ryan? They're on Tender Years.
1:09:41 Bill Simmons? That gets released in 63.
1:09:42 Chris Ryan? Yeah, they're on Tender Years.
1:09:43 Bill Simmons? We don't know anything about the release of that album, how well the songs did, how famous were they? Did they get to go on the Ed Sullivan Show?
1:09:54 Chris Ryan? No.
1:09:55 Bill Simmons? We know nothing. We only know that they're back in the studio, that they got $10,000 to do their album after it.
1:10:00 Chris Ryan? We don't know if John and Paul saw Eddie and the Cruisers on TV and were like, we should start the Beatles.
1:10:07 Bill Simmons? Right, right. But there's this whole missing section. So Craig asked, like, I love that this movie's 95 minutes. I actually agree with them. I think you could maybe cut out seven minutes and add, I just wanna know what happens when the album comes out. And did it make them more successful? Did one of the songs become a top song? And then, so we have heard another song during that whole stretch.
1:10:29 Chris Ryan? Here's my take on that, is that most records in the early 60s like that were a collection of singles for the most part.
1:10:35 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:10:35 Chris Ryan? And so like, I think that those songs were probably like a collection of like the 10 things that they were playing that were the biggest original songs that they had when they were playing live, but it wasn't like, here's our LP. It was like songs people were pretty familiar with.
1:10:49 Speaker 04 So was, was The Dark Side on Tender Years? But I thought Frank helps them write Dark Side. So Frank knew them before Tender Years?
1:10:57 Chris Ryan? I bet they don't do darks, I don't think they did Tender Years until after he had been in the band for a while.
1:11:01 Speaker 04 So then what did Sal mean then when he was like, we were doing just fine without you?
1:11:04 Chris Ryan? Cause I think he was like, we were just playing bars, doing runaround soup.
1:11:08 Speaker 02 They were already moving, like.
1:11:10 Speaker 04 But Tender Years took them to a whole nother level.
1:11:12 Speaker 02 I know, but it seems like that.
1:11:15 Chris Ryan? It was uncalled for from Sal.
1:11:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, fuck Sal. It feels like that word man joining the band was the, uh, the final piece to them becoming like a mainstream kind of successful band. But to your point, we don't know how successful.
1:11:27 Bill Simmons? If there's one more great song in this movie, I think it, I think something different.
1:11:31 Chris Ryan? Can I do a hottest take with piggybacks off of this?
1:11:34 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:11:34 Chris Ryan? Which is that the best part of this movie, which is also like the thing that I think fucks this movie up is that they play Dark Side first. And it's out of context of the entire movie, they just play the best song that these guys have to open the film.
1:11:48 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:11:48 Chris Ryan? And even though that happens at the college, which we know is a dark moment for the band, if you make us wait to hear Dark Side. And you get to see them do the big full band version of Dark Side after you've seen them write it. It blows the fucking top off the movie. It's so much better.
1:12:07 Speaker 02 But that would denote that the movie had a regular story structure, which it doesn't because it really is not that concerned.
1:12:14 Bill Simmons? So that's where if you had that extra great song, that song leads the movie and then it all leads to Dark Side, which is their biggest song.
1:12:19 Chris Ryan? But if the movie starts with Tender Years.
1:12:21 Speaker 02 Oh, you could start it with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:12:22 Chris Ryan? I guess, but I think people would be like, yeah, it's a pretty good song, but it starts with Dark Side. You're like, whoa, holy fucking shit. This is pretty good.
1:12:29 Speaker 02 You know what? To, to your question though. At the beginning of the movie, I guess, is when they frame how successful of a band that they've become.
1:12:38 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:12:38 Speaker 02 It's she's trying to talk about, but even as she's doing it, she's almost informing them of how big they were. It's not like they had, like, they, it's not like they were like, oh my God, it's Dark Side from Eddie and the Cruisers. It's still kind of ambiguous to a degree.
1:12:53 Bill Simmons? There's a talk show, five minutes, them going on a talk show or an Ed Sullivan type show that could have been in this movie. That would have been fun.
1:13:01 Chris Ryan? Do you have a hot take?
1:13:02 Speaker 02 I do. Um, I think Word Man tried to kill Eddie. Um, I think he actually killed the saxophone player. I think this entire movie.
1:13:11 Chris Ryan? He cooked up a hot shot for Wendell?
1:13:12 Speaker 02 I think he did, because there's no way.
1:13:13 Bill Simmons? That's why I lived in a trailer.
1:13:14 Speaker 02 To your point, there's no way he didn't know. I think actually his jealousy, because I watched this movie, this, it doesn't make any sense. He's openly trying, Word Man's fucking crazy, guys. He's openly trying to fuck with Eddie's girl. Can you imagine? We all work together. We're a band. Can you, can, can, can you, can you just imagine we're at like, I don't know, Ringer party or something like that? And I'm just over there with one, like one of y'all's wives, like trying to figure out what the fuck is up. Like what, like is, is, I, this shit is, it, it blows my mind every time I watch this. My dad used to fucking hate it.
1:13:47 Bill Simmons? Also, maybe she didn't, Eddie didn't make her toes curl.
1:13:50 Chris Ryan? Van is really on to something because if, if you come to the end and it turns out Word Man is the one who's been flipping people's apartments up and down. And it's Kaiser Soze. And he did his own, the reason why he didn't get upset when he saw his apartment is because he's like, I know I did it.
1:14:06 Bill Simmons? Kaiser Soze ending at the end?
1:14:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah, where he's just like, all I wanted was the tapes to get out of there so I could get out of my dumb teacher job.
1:14:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. Guys, let me tell you something. In Eddie and the Cruisers 2, Eddie is performing music, but he still refuses to let people know that he is Eddie.
1:14:22 Chris Ryan? He's like, I'm Joe West.
1:14:23 Speaker 02 He's Joe West, right? Do you know why? Because he's fucking scared of Wordman. So the whole reason why Eddie has gone into hiding.
1:14:30 Chris Ryan? Is that true? I haven't seen Eddie in the Cruisers, Eddie, Eddie lives in a long time.
1:14:34 Bill Simmons? He's a pseudonym.
1:14:34 Chris Ryan? But is he scared of Wordman?
1:14:36 Speaker 02 No, this is in my brain. He's scared of Wordman because he knows Wordman tried to kill him, which is why he's hiding. This whole thing, Wordman is fucking crazy.
1:14:44 Bill Simmons? So when we see Eddie at the end, Eddie and the Cruisers, one walking away, Wordman's behind him with a weapon.
1:14:49 Speaker 02 He's stalking him.
1:14:50 Bill Simmons? But you don't see it because Amazon has already cut to the next Harry Potter season seven.
1:14:56 Bill Simmons? Casting whatevs. Uh, Pare claims they were ready to replace him with Rick Springfield.
1:15:02 Speaker 02 Oh, that's interesting.
1:15:02 Bill Simmons? And that, uh, he had to do that first concert where he had to lip sync all the songs and act like Eddie. And if he sucked, they were going to replace him. And Rick Springfield admitted that he did, uh, he did think about trying to get the part.
1:15:17 Chris Ryan? Would be cool.
1:15:18 Bill Simmons? Instead, he lives on in Jesse's girl on Boogie Nights. That ends up being his legacy, even though we don't see him.
1:15:23 Speaker 02 If Rick was in it, it would have been a box office success, I bet. Would have more people would have seen it.
1:15:27 Bill Simmons? Pare was discovered in a New York City restaurant working as a chef. So still hope for Dave Chang. Even in his mid 40s, he might still be an actor. Um, weird one. This isn't a casting whatev, but one of the people in the opening scene that when Maggie's telling them about Rimbo, Scott the Mustache, Barry Sand.
1:15:46 Chris Ryan? Mm-hmm.
1:15:47 Bill Simmons? He was an original Letterman producer in the first five years of the show and was on camera a lot.
1:15:53 Chris Ryan? Really?
1:15:54 Bill Simmons? And I never understood why he was in this movie. It's really strange. I mean, that's like a deep, deep Letterman cut.
1:16:00 Chris Ryan? That's it.
1:16:01 Bill Simmons? The NBC.
1:16:01 Chris Ryan? Only you would grab that, yeah.
1:16:02 Bill Simmons? But it was just fucking weird. It would be like if Daniel Kellison was in the movie, just randomly, just in a scene. Best that guy, Joey Pants not eligible. Uh, John Stockwell is in this, the lead guy from Christine and also in Top Gun. He's the guy that knows.
1:16:15 Chris Ryan? He's Wizard from Top Gun, yeah.
1:16:17 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:16:17 Chris Ryan? The werewolf, I can't remember, yeah.
1:16:19 Bill Simmons? But the winner is Mi- Mitchell Lawrence.
1:16:21 Speaker 02 Mitch, yeah, for sure. Matthew Lawrence as a.
1:16:24 Bill Simmons? Mitchell Lawrence was his brother.
1:16:26 Speaker 02 Twin brother, right?
1:16:27 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:16:27 Speaker 02 A twin brother.
1:16:28 Chris Ryan? Okay.
1:16:28 Bill Simmons? Yeah. Matthew Lawrence.
1:16:30 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:16:31 Bill Simmons? Not Mitchell Lawrence.
1:16:31 Chris Ryan? Matthew Lawrence also now does, or did, sports talk radio in Lexington, Kentucky.
1:16:37 Bill Simmons? Wow. How many episodes does David Silver's dad in 9020, do you think, if you had to guess?
1:16:43 Chris Ryan? How many episodes is what?
1:16:44 Bill Simmons? Was he on 9020? No.
1:16:46 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:16:47 Bill Simmons? Thirty-six.
1:16:48 Chris Ryan? Oh.
1:16:49 Bill Simmons? You're basically on the show at that point.
1:16:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:16:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:16:51 Bill Simmons? They did over 200 shows.
1:16:53 Speaker 02 What we've never talked about is a 9020 parent ranking, because you have.
1:16:57 Bill Simmons? He's the best one.
1:16:58 Speaker 02 What about not, what about, what about Dylan's fucking dad? Dylan's dad was the man.
1:17:03 Chris Ryan? Who was Dylan, who played Dylan's dad?
1:17:04 Speaker 02 That guy, that was the, that, we've seen this guy, that, that, that guy.
1:17:08 Bill Simmons? Jack McKay.
1:17:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, like Jack McKay was the man, he's shady, what is he?
1:17:11 Bill Simmons? Blew up, though. Should've, should've looked out for his family better.
1:17:14 Speaker 02 But he was like some kind of fucking mobster or something like that, was he not?
1:17:16 Bill Simmons? I would've thought you would like David Silver's dad, because he was like, constantly, uh, messed around with the dental assistants.
1:17:22 Chris Ryan? You don't like Brandon and Kelly, uh.
1:17:24 Speaker 02 Brandon and Kelly's parents got on my nerves.
1:17:26 Bill Simmons? Yeah, they were terrible.
1:17:26 Speaker 02 They, they, they, they got on my nerves, the whole family I didn't enjoy.
1:17:30 Bill Simmons? Actually, my favorite was Kelly Taylor's mom, because she had the drug problem and was.
1:17:34 Chris Ryan? Oh, Brandon and Brenda, Brenda, is that where, Brandon and Brenda?
1:17:37 Speaker 02 And then also Steve's mom, because she was like, famous.
1:17:39 Bill Simmons? Yeah, famous.
1:17:40 Speaker 02 She was kind of cool.
1:17:41 Bill Simmons? Dionne Waiters Award, Ellen Barkin? Unless you want to give it to the, I didn't pay for a bunch of jerk-offs, making weird sounds.
1:17:48 Chris Ryan? No, I think Barkin.
1:17:49 Bill Simmons? Uh, recasting couch director city, can I offer you Michael Keaton as Kenny the drummer? Just randomly being in this movie?
1:17:55 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I could take that, that's good.
1:17:57 Bill Simmons? It's like a year after night shift, just looking for work still?
1:17:59 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:18:00 Bill Simmons? Gets this big scene playing as a blackjack dealer?
1:18:03 Speaker 02 It's going crazy.
1:18:03 Chris Ryan? I like it when Kenny puts the comic book down and just gets on a kit and just immediately just like lays into it.
1:18:10 Bill Simmons? The Van Lathan Award for, did this movie need more black people?
1:18:13 Speaker 02 No, we were treated poorly. Um, it, it, but, but no, it doesn't. Perfect.
1:18:18 Bill Simmons? Okay.
1:18:18 Speaker 02 And that's another thing about these 80s movies. Don't fucking put it, not where we, just do the thing, okay? Just do the thing.
1:18:26 Chris Ryan? It's a white band with a black saxophone player.
1:18:27 Speaker 02 It's a white band, black saxophone player, that's cool. You know what I'm saying? We don't need to, it's, it's, it's fine. I'm, I'm telling you, it's fine.
1:18:35 Bill Simmons? Craig has a flex category.
1:18:37 Chris Ryan? I did it, it was the, um, Bam out of bio, to Salamato.
1:18:40 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, you did.
1:18:41 Chris Ryan? Where the fuck did that come from? Him at the nightclub.
1:18:42 Bill Simmons? First time somebody did Bam out of bio is a flex category. The eighty-three point game, it's gonna live on forever. Uh, half assed under research, Berenger said he did not try to learn piano. Did practice some keyboards in his trailer. It's, well, while he read Biggs, chilled that long.
1:18:57 Chris Ryan? Is that a euphemism? Yeah. The practice and keyboards, don't bother me.
1:19:00 Bill Simmons? Matthew Lawrence did learn how to play the bass.
1:19:04 Bill Simmons? Um, they, Parry remembers that, uh, when they all played together, it was a little like Stillwater. It was a college concert. The extras were into it, everybody was going nuts and they were really pretending they were the band. And then, uh, the Palace of Depression, was a real place in Vineland, New Jersey. Uh, does not exist anymore. Fraternity House was at Haverford College, or is that?
1:19:26 Chris Ryan? Outside of Philly.
1:19:28 Bill Simmons? Tony Martz was an actual place until the early eighties and then demolished. And then, uh, we didn't mention this, Joanne, played by Helen Schneider, was a pretty famous, like, German music star in the seventies and eighties. Lot of, uh, lot of, like, success, apparently.
1:19:45 Chris Ryan? I kinda like and wish there was, like, ten percent more of her losing it a little at the end. Where she's like, I have to get ready, Eddie's here. And it's like, kind of glorious, wantsing out. And I'm like, oh, yeah, this, do more of that. Like, she's been hanging on, waiting for this call for twenty years, that's great.
1:20:02 Bill Simmons? Like, you go in her room and it's just all weird Eddie mannequin shit.
1:20:05 Chris Ryan? Yeah, Eddie voodoo dolls.
1:20:07 Bill Simmons? Fake Eddie, did some research on him.
1:20:10 Chris Ryan? John Cafferty? Or the Eddie that was with Salamato?
1:20:13 Bill Simmons? The Eddie with Salamato, played by Joey Balin. Put out an album in 1994, if you want to download it on your way home. The Joey Balin's solo work. Apex Mountain, Michael Pare, definitely.
1:20:24 Chris Ryan? Oh wait, I had one more, uh, half-ass internet research.
1:20:28 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:20:28 Chris Ryan? In that same Washington Post article that I mentioned, Berenger claims that they filmed a scene in a roadhouse with the cruisers watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and making fun of it. And he has like a whole thing he talks about, and then after that, after this quote, Martin Davidson's like, we never shot that, that's Berenger bullshit. But I really like the idea that they at least thought about The Beatles in this movie. Yeah.
1:20:53 Bill Simmons? I love when there's like violent disagreements like that.
1:20:56 Chris Ryan? Yeah, it just goes to show you like people were probably using substances while making it.
1:20:59 Bill Simmons? Fucking high as shit.
1:21:01 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:21:01 Bill Simmons? I mean, it was 1983.
1:21:02 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:21:04 Bill Simmons? Apex, that's why we're, the Grandland Oral History will never happen.
1:21:08 Chris Ryan? Cause of the amount of drugs.
1:21:09 Bill Simmons? No, because of 20 years later, people can just start making up shit.
1:21:13 Chris Ryan? Right.
1:21:14 Bill Simmons? Like Bill came back from the All-Star game and he got in this huge fistfight with C.R. Just like, after 20 years. You overrate submarine movies, dickhead. Apex Mountain. Michael Pare, yes. Tom Berenger, no. Ellen Barkin, no. Matthew Lawrence. I'm gonna say, uh, David Silver's dad. Probably. That show's pretty big. Beaver Brown Band, yes. Jersey Shore movies, no, but I also can't come up with a better one.
1:21:45 Chris Ryan? I'm gonna get killed for this for not knowing.
1:21:48 Bill Simmons? Do you claim the Jersey Shore? What's your relationship?
1:21:50 Chris Ryan? I mean, it's adjacent, it's, it's like the summer destination for, for most of Philadelphia. But I don't know of a better Jersey Shore movie than this.
1:21:58 Bill Simmons? Never really figured it out as a great location. Yeah, I mean, not, not a movie, obviously, but the Jersey Shore.
1:22:04 Chris Ryan? Yeah, yes.
1:22:05 Bill Simmons? The show is probably. Oh, the show? Yeah. Yeah. Obviously. Did you like that show? No, no, of course not. Did you ever hang out with those people during your?
1:22:12 Speaker 02 Early Hollywood days?
1:22:14 Chris Ryan? I saw a couple of them.
1:22:15 Bill Simmons? Do you in the situation ever go party?
1:22:18 Speaker 02 See a couple of them. Nah, I never liked that show. As a matter of fact, that show to me is when I realized, oh, you know, I don't have to fucking, fucking like what everybody else likes. It never made this grotesque in a way.
1:22:29 Bill Simmons? Wow, that got dark.
1:22:30 Speaker 02 No, no, I just, I never understood it.
1:22:32 Bill Simmons? I get it.
1:22:32 Speaker 02 Like, everybody was so into it. No, everybody was so into it.
1:22:36 Bill Simmons? I loved it for two years.
1:22:37 Speaker 02 See, I, I just never, I, I, everything else that, that had come from MTV, like, fucking Rolls Royce.
1:22:42 Chris Ryan? Challenge.
1:22:43 Speaker 02 Challenge, all of that stuff into it. For some reason, Jersey George is never fucking.
1:22:47 Bill Simmons? Uh, Arthur Rimbaud?
1:22:49 Chris Ryan? I think that he's had bigger moments than this, yeah.
1:22:52 Bill Simmons? Helen Schneider? Sounds like Germany was pretty hopping.
1:22:55 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:22:55 Speaker 02 What happened? You would have thought that she'd have been around. She was like, what?
1:22:59 Bill Simmons? Went back to Germany.
1:23:00 Speaker 02 Interesting.
1:23:01 Bill Simmons? 1957 Chevys, probably not. Uh, Cruise or Hanks? What about Hanks as Wordman?
1:23:07 Chris Ryan? I, I had Cruise as Eddie. Cause Cruise has priors of doing the outsiders. Do you have Cruise as Eddie?
1:23:15 Speaker 02 Cruise as Eddie.
1:23:16 Chris Ryan? He basically played a greaser in the outsiders, and that's kinda the way Eddie dresses. Like, Eddie is just full outsider.
1:23:22 Bill Simmons? Oh, Craig's all in on this one. Eddie and the cruisers, come on.
1:23:24 Chris Ryan? Oh.
1:23:25 Bill Simmons? Yeah. Come on!
1:23:26 Speaker 02 What are you doing?
1:23:27 Bill Simmons? Okay.
1:23:28 Speaker 02 That makes a lot of sense.
1:23:28 Chris Ryan? And I think you could actually, this is one of the rare times where you could do Cruise as Eddie and Hanks as Frank.
1:23:35 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
1:23:37 Bill Simmons? Scorsese or Spielberg?
1:23:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:23:39 Chris Ryan? I have Scorsese.
1:23:40 Speaker 02 Scorsese.
1:23:41 Chris Ryan? Tri-state area.
1:23:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:23:43 Bill Simmons? Best hang, worst hang. Best hang, Sal?
1:23:47 Bill Simmons? See, you know, his pizza, fun dressing room.
1:23:50 Chris Ryan? Best hang is absolutely Maggie.
1:23:52 Speaker 02 Like, I got Ellen Barkin as the best hang.
1:23:54 Bill Simmons? Good point.
1:23:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:23:55 Bill Simmons? I gotta add Maggie.
1:23:56 Speaker 02 I got Ellen Barkin as the best hang. I got worst hang, Sal.
1:23:59 Bill Simmons? Well, come. Just talk about the old days?
1:24:01 Speaker 02 No, Sal.
1:24:02 Bill Simmons? I had Doc as the worst hang.
1:24:04 Speaker 02 When you think about it.
1:24:05 Bill Simmons? Doc. Doc's a tough hang.
1:24:06 Speaker 02 Sal, you come in there, he, he offers you a slice of pizza, he sits down, the pizza's in his hand, he never fucking eats it, right?
1:24:13 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:24:14 Speaker 02 Pizza's just hanging off, he's always fucked up.
1:24:15 Chris Ryan? Crying and sweating.
1:24:16 Speaker 02 He's crying, he's sweating, he's doing the whole thing. Wordman, he's skeptical of Wordman, which is probably because he knew that Wordman was a psychopath.
1:24:22 Bill Simmons? Right.
1:24:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, so like.
1:24:23 Chris Ryan? I think probably Kenny would be best hang.
1:24:26 Bill Simmons? Playing, yeah, telling blackjack stories.
1:24:28 Chris Ryan? Just talking about balling chicks.
1:24:29 Bill Simmons? I busted these guys counting cards and then we balled in a car.
1:24:34 Bill Simmons? Why didn't you have Maggie in the throw your life away area?
1:24:39 Chris Ryan? That's a good question. You took it out of flex, but that's a really good one.
1:24:44 Bill Simmons? Pick a Nits. Would there have been more interest in Eddie's disappearance or way more interest? I feel like this would have been one of the bigger stories of 20 years.
1:24:54 Chris Ryan? I think that there is something to be said for how local news was back then. So I think it would be a huge deal in New Jersey.
1:25:03 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:25:03 Chris Ryan? And maybe get to Philly, but I don't know if it cracks the Big Apple.
1:25:07 Speaker 02 This speaks to the question of how big of a band they were, they were because that's a part of it. However, they never found a body.
1:25:14 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:25:14 Speaker 02 Being that they never found a body, it's always funny in 80s movies where they go, something, something happened, a body was never found. People would never fucking let go of it. That's the DB Cooper thing.
1:25:23 Chris Ryan? Mm hmm.
1:25:24 Speaker 02 Don't know where he went or what happened to him.
1:25:27 Bill Simmons? We mentioned Berenger's too old for Word Band.
1:25:31 Bill Simmons? We talked about Word Band and Joanna Kiss, Joanna Kissing. So at the end, this is a super nitpick, but Media Magazine's doing their big feature on Eddie and the Cruisers and Eddie Wilson, how brilliant he was. And they're showing video of him at the college concert.
1:25:46 Chris Ryan? Yes.
1:25:47 Bill Simmons? How were they filming that in 1963?
1:25:49 Chris Ryan? Full color video with closeups is what I had. Probably no, no full color video with closeups and editing at the 1963 Spring Dance of Benton College.
1:25:58 Bill Simmons? There were nine cameras apparently there and then, but they're showing the crowd.
1:26:02 Chris Ryan? It's like Sunday night football. Yeah.
1:26:04 Bill Simmons? Yeah. Pretty tough. Come on, Ben. You're not stinking that by me after I've seen this movie 78 times.
1:26:09 Speaker 02 I love it. I agree.
1:26:11 Bill Simmons? Any other nitpicks?
1:26:12 Chris Ryan? Just that the one bit we hear of Season in Hell is pretty vanilla compared to like, they were like, this mind blowing avant garde noise. You can't put it out. It's like, this is just a slow blues song. Like this is not that complicated.
1:26:25 Speaker 02 I guess my big nitpick that I've always had is like, is Word Man fucking Mozart? Like, how you learn to play piano that fast? Where man's fucking around, he's know what he's doing, all of a sudden, he's playing piano, he's got solos?
1:26:37 Chris Ryan? No, where man knew how to play piano, didn't he?
1:26:39 Bill Simmons? Yeah, he has the piano solo earlier.
1:26:40 Speaker 02 He has to play, I'm talking about earl, no.
1:26:42 Bill Simmons? Oh.
1:26:43 Speaker 02 Earlier, like, if I'm not, doesn't Eddie, am I?
1:26:47 Chris Ryan? No, no, no, no. Eddie, Eddie showing him rock chords.
1:26:51 Speaker 02 Oh, so he already knew how to play piano?
1:26:53 Chris Ryan? I know how to do it, but Eddie's like, no, you have to groove down at this end of the keyboard.
1:26:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's why I love this podcast, I've thought about it for thirty years.
1:27:01 Bill Simmons? No?
1:27:02 Speaker 02 No?
1:27:03 Bill Simmons? Craig's ready to go.
1:27:04 Chris Ryan? It's not the movie for nitpicks, sure.
1:27:05 Bill Simmons? Um.
1:27:06 Chris Ryan? I don't think any of these people would have hung out, like, this band makes no sense as humans outside of the band.
1:27:11 Bill Simmons? Oh, I think Sal and Joey Pants would have hung out.
1:27:14 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:27:14 Bill Simmons? And that's it.
1:27:15 Chris Ryan? That's it.
1:27:15 Bill Simmons? Yeah. Sequel, prequel, Prestige TV, all black cast or untouchable, so Prestige TV, I think you could do this, and you'd probably make it an eighties band, and you set it in two thousand, or maybe you make it like
1:27:28 Chris Ryan? Ooh, yeah.
1:27:29 Bill Simmons? The Strokes? Like, that era, early two thousands, New York, and now, and then it's like today.
1:27:35 Chris Ryan? Coming back today?
1:27:36 Bill Simmons? Yeah, where it's like the, the
1:27:38 Chris Ryan? Some song has gotten big on TikTok.
1:27:40 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:27:40 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:27:41 Speaker 02 Think about what we already did. This is begging, begging to be like a Tupac situation. Begging to be like some big prestige deal, where some rapper that we thought was killed in a beef back, but he's alive in the whole nine This is begging to be remade with that exact spin to it.
1:28:01 Chris Ryan? There is
1:28:01 Bill Simmons? You would do it with the yeah, yeah, yes, because you'd change it and make it a female singer.
1:28:06 Chris Ryan? The coolest thing to do would be to, like, basically try to Blair Witch it, where you're like, we've discovered these tapes.
1:28:11 Bill Simmons? Mm-hmm. Oh.
1:28:12 Chris Ryan? And it's like, and now this band, like, it would be basically like a viral marketing campaign.
1:28:17 Bill Simmons? Blair Witch crossed with Eddie and the Cruisers, that's pretty good. Is this movie better with Wayne Jenkins, Fergie the Florist? So many others, or Zane Lowe?
1:28:28 Chris Ryan? Eddie, man. Here you are. You've just seen your own face on Media Magazine, the lovely Maggie reporting it out. Season in hell, never even came into fruition, never came to harvest, never came to flowering. But you, what's you, what have you been doing, man, since Palace of Depression? Tell me, take me to the palace, and let's get out of this oppressive zone.
1:28:54 Bill Simmons? I'm so glad Zayn finally got to interview a musician.
1:28:58 Chris Ryan? Instead of a cop.
1:29:01 Bill Simmons? Bring me back to Tony Mark that day.
1:29:03 Chris Ryan? Yeah. The other option would be Zayn interviewing Wendell, but like Wendell doesn't say anything back. Wendell, man, you played with Bad, you played with Dexter Gordon, now you're on junk. And Wendell's like, no one's ever asked me to record.
1:29:20 Bill Simmons? Oh, man. Just what Oscar who gets it? Soundtrack or original song?
1:29:26 Chris Ryan? I go original song, Dark Side.
1:29:28 Bill Simmons? I'll give you a best music original song that year. Winner was Flashdance, What a Feeling, by the one and only Irene Cara.
1:29:35 Speaker 02 Oh, man.
1:29:36 Chris Ryan? Banger.
1:29:37 Speaker 02 Fame, Irene Cara.
1:29:39 Bill Simmons? Tough nude scene for her in Fame. Saw Fame recently. Really emotionally scarring as a 10-year-old.
1:29:44 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:29:45 Bill Simmons? It's like, now take your shirt off, that creepy photographer guy. Do you like Fame?
1:29:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I do. Fame, like, well, at first, I watched the TV show first. That was the first thing I saw, TV show, then I went back and watched.
1:29:56 Bill Simmons? I saw Fame in the theater, probably a little too early.
1:29:58 Chris Ryan? Probably.
1:29:59 Bill Simmons? H10. You know Fame? Really good idea for a movie. I'm actually surprised they haven't run that back.
1:30:07 Chris Ryan? Are you a Flashdance fan?
1:30:10 Bill Simmons? Not totally.
1:30:11 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:30:12 Bill Simmons? Maniac from Flashdance was also nominated, Over You from Tender Mercies, and then two Yentl songs. I feel like we could have stuck in.
1:30:22 Chris Ryan? Dark Side?
1:30:23 Speaker 02 Dark Side in there.
1:30:24 Bill Simmons? And to maybe bump the second best Yentl song?
1:30:26 Chris Ryan? That would be incredible if it's like Academy Award-winning Eddie and the Cruisers.
1:30:32 Bill Simmons? Probably an answerable questions. What happened to Media Magazine? Maggie moves on to where?
1:30:38 Chris Ryan? I think she...
1:30:39 Bill Simmons? Does she get that, like, doing like Live at Five in New York City, replaced with Sue Simmons?
1:30:43 Chris Ryan? Maybe she moves up to People or Newsweek or Time.
1:30:48 Speaker 02 Um, did Eddie always-
1:30:49 Bill Simmons? And then get lung cancer?
1:30:50 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, my question is, did Eddie always pull out, or did his boys not swim?
1:30:56 Speaker 02 How did she not get pregnant?
1:30:57 Chris Ryan? Who?
1:30:57 Speaker 02 His girl.
1:30:58 Chris Ryan? Joanne?
1:30:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, Joanne. They're on the road all together, music-filled, lusty, lovemaking-
1:31:02 Chris Ryan? Falling in the back of a car, listening to your own songs.
1:31:05 Bill Simmons? Or maybe not a lot of sex, because he was so driven by the art. That's why she was looking at the Word Man.
1:31:10 Speaker 02 Or like, that's why she got with Word Man. But something doesn't make a lot of sense how there was no like Eddie baby at some point.
1:31:16 Chris Ryan? Yeah, one of my possible answers was just like, what did Word Man think was gonna happen when he, like, when he shows up after his long date with Joanne? And he's like, is it time for us to play? Like, of course Eddie's gonna fuck with you now.
1:31:29 Speaker 02 Right, yeah.
1:31:30 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:31:30 Bill Simmons? Yeah, Toby Tyler got off easy.
1:31:32 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:31:33 Bill Simmons? What did Doc sell the tapes for and what happened next? This is an answer for-
1:31:37 Chris Ryan? The musicals you want now. Uh-
1:31:40 Bill Simmons? It's like-
1:31:40 Chris Ryan? I think it's a, I think it is anticlimactic. I think people are like, this isn't that good. I like, I'd prefer Dark Side, and it just doesn't go anywhere.
1:31:49 Bill Simmons? Does it come out on 8-track?
1:31:53 Chris Ryan? In 83?
1:31:54 Bill Simmons? What were those things, not the CD, but between cassettes and CDs?
1:31:57 Chris Ryan? 8-tracks.
1:31:58 Bill Simmons? 8-tracks, yeah.
1:31:59 Speaker 02 I think the 8-track is dead by 83 though, right?
1:32:00 Bill Simmons? I think it's still around in 83. That was the last year.
1:32:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, like, cassettes, right? No cassettes?
1:32:06 Bill Simmons? I don't think Season Hell does that well.
1:32:08 Chris Ryan? Me neither.
1:32:09 Bill Simmons? And I think it's a big bust, and Doc probably, um, is arrested for fraud in some way.
1:32:15 Speaker 02 How do they position it? Do they do music videos where they get like, because this, this, the age of the video is starting to happen, they don't, but the cruisers are on it.
1:32:22 Chris Ryan? Well, they have all that incredible footage of Eddie and the cruisers playing Bet in College. They could use some of that.
1:32:27 Bill Simmons? Secret handshake club memorabilia that you'd want from this movie? I like the photo of Joanne with the two guys that's in her place.
1:32:34 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:32:35 Bill Simmons? It's pretty weird one, just to have on the wall right now. People are like, what the fuck is that? Eddie and the cruisers, 1983?
1:32:41 Chris Ryan? That's the original Staff of Grantland.
1:32:44 Bill Simmons? Coach, Finstock, Mr. Miyagi work for best, worst life lesson. Guys like, guys like me and you, they strike oil under your garden and all you get is dead tomatoes.
1:32:54 Speaker 02 Oh shit.
1:32:55 Bill Simmons? But that's pretty good by, by Salamata, philosopher.
1:32:58 Chris Ryan? That's good.
1:32:58 Speaker 02 If we can't be great, then there's no sense in ever playing music again.
1:33:02 Bill Simmons? Hmm.
1:33:05 Bill Simmons? Best double feature choice, that thing you do?
1:33:07 Chris Ryan? Mm-hmm.
1:33:09 Bill Simmons? Who won the movie? Beaver Brown Band? And they're still dining on this, forty years later. HBO.
1:33:16 Chris Ryan? Hmm, good call.
1:33:18 Bill Simmons? HBO.
1:33:19 Chris Ryan? I was gonna, I was entertaining Peré. But I think, I think you're right. I think it's Beaver Brown Band. Cause those songs still get played. Those guys still probably make money off this.
1:33:29 Bill Simmons? Craig, let's hear it.
1:33:31 Speaker 04 Had a great time. Loved it. Super likable.
1:33:34 Bill Simmons? Did you watch it with Liz or Solo?
1:33:35 Speaker 04 I tried to get her, I badgered her to watch the movie with me and she wasn't interested. Unfortunately.
1:33:40 Bill Simmons? Just not, she doesn't care as much about The Ringer as she used to.
1:33:43 Speaker 04 I was like fifteen minutes in, I was like, you, you're, this would be fun. We can just throw this on and you can like half-watch it if she don't wanna do it. But, and I think she would've liked it.
1:33:49 Bill Simmons? You should've told her there was like some sort of ad potential out of it. She would've done it at that point.
1:33:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, we could, there's a great sponsorship.
1:33:55 Chris Ryan? She'd be like, Bill's actually in this movie.
1:33:58 Speaker 02 I was almost certain you'd hate it.
1:34:00 Speaker 04 No.
1:34:00 Bill Simmons? No, I knew, I knew he was gonna like it. We don't, first of all, ninety-five minutes, you're eighty percent of the way there with Craig.
1:34:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, like, I, music provides such a high floor. Like, it's, you're like, you're just gonna win forty-eight games with a couple of good songs in it.
1:34:13 Bill Simmons? Yeah.
1:34:13 Speaker 04 And, I don't know, there's a level of like, how much you take the movie seriously and then that allows you to be comfortable and enjoy it.
1:34:19 Bill Simmons? Yes.
1:34:19 Speaker 04 Which is why I think like, I went into L.A. Confidential and I don't think I loved it as much as everybody else did, but my, the expectation versus reality. I didn't, I liked L.A. Confidential, I didn't love it.
1:34:30 Chris Ryan? I don't know.
1:34:30 Bill Simmons? I'd say you need to watch it a couple times.
1:34:32 Speaker 04 I don't know why.
1:34:32 Speaker 02 L.A. Confidential?
1:34:33 Speaker 04 First watch, there's luck.
1:34:35 Speaker 02 You know what?
1:34:35 Speaker 04 Thought it was a little cheesy.
1:34:36 Speaker 02 Can I be honest with you? I get it. It will be hard for me to understand that, because the movie was legitimately the biggest fucking thing in the world. Everybody was talking about it.
1:34:45 Bill Simmons? Eight times.
1:34:46 Speaker 02 And I saw it eight times, I saw it in the theater.
1:34:48 Bill Simmons? And you didn't go into it being like, this is Chinatown.
1:34:50 Speaker 02 That was, that was a boomer response. I could see that. I could see now it being a little tougher for people.
1:34:55 Speaker 04 Also, this movie, I love, I do, I'm, I've always been interested in like the second album theory of a band, you know? I always find that to be interesting. There's a little bit of like, Pet Sounds to this. Brian Wilson, Eddie Wilson.
1:35:06 Chris Ryan? Sure.
1:35:06 Speaker 04 With the Beach Boys and like the controversial Pet Sounds album, nobody liked it and then, you know, down the road, it is a masterpiece. It, this movie.
1:35:14 Chris Ryan? People liked Pet Sounds. It was like Wild Honey or whatever the next one.
1:35:17 Speaker 04 No, I thought Pet Sounds was considered. Very abstract and.
1:35:20 Chris Ryan? Oh, no, it has goodbye. I mean, it's abstract, but it was like it blew up.
1:35:23 Speaker 04 Oh, I thought it came out the gate and was and was not reviewed well.
1:35:25 Chris Ryan? Oh, OK.
1:35:26 Speaker 04 I mean, you would know better than.
1:35:27 Speaker 02 I mean, Pemberton is like that from Weezer, like albums that come out and people go, what the fuck are you doing? And they.
1:35:32 Speaker 04 But is is. And many of the closer to me was like, this is amazing.
1:35:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, what the fuck is Pemberton?
1:35:36 Speaker 04 Is is this kind of movie, the eighties equivalent of like a current Netflix movie like Gaslit by My Husband? Which I have great disdain for and I a movie like that nowadays, but I'm like, is that just what this was in the eighties?
1:35:50 Chris Ryan? I don't know. You know, Bill was like, what's the double feature? In a weird way, I feel like the double feature for this movie should be Legend of Billie Jean. Because it's kind of like the same kind of like regional, local sensation, huge story in my town. But wouldn't have, wouldn't have made it out to like LA where people were like.
1:36:09 Speaker 04 Good point.
1:36:10 Chris Ryan? And I think, I think it's hard to almost replicate that now because of social media and.
1:36:14 Speaker 04 It's just weird that like this movie has looked like you guys are looking back on it with like charm and nostalgia. But I feel like a lot of the current like Netflix movie slop or the streaming movie slop is not looked at that way. Nobody it like honors those films anyway, and they will disappear even if people watch them. But these movies we look back on and we're like, oh, Eddie and the Cruisers, like such a fun, easy watch. But no one's gonna do that to Gaslit by My Husband.
1:36:35 Chris Ryan? Yeah, but we don't know what would happen with some of those movies if there were only seven movies on Netflix and they played them for a year.
1:36:40 Bill Simmons? I would say give Gaslit by My Husband a chance.
1:36:42 Speaker 04 A couple of years to marinate.
1:36:44 Speaker 02 To me, the difference in that is that like those movies, you, first of all, you have to be active in watching those films. You have to go search for the movie and then put it on. That right there means that there had to be a reason for you to do that, right?
1:36:57 Speaker 04 People weren't doing that to this movie. It was on HBO. Didn't it just come on?
1:36:59 Speaker 02 That's the difference. So the difference.
1:37:01 Chris Ryan? We didn't have as much else stuff to other stuff to do. Like people barely had Atari twenty six hundreds back then.
1:37:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, with with Gaslit by My Husband or any of these other movies, there's like this cultural conversation that gets you to go watch the movie because you heard it. With Eddie and the Cruisers, there's none of that. Like I never had one conver- this is the first conversation I've ever had with friends about Eddie and the Cruisers, ever.
1:37:21 Bill Simmons? My only my only was only my mom because my mom loved this movie. We would talk about it a lot.
1:37:25 Speaker 02 Dad would watch it. My dad would be like, you watching them saying people again? Why do people always on TV? But like is is like with this movie was just on all the time and you just had a situation with it. It was almost like.
1:37:35 Chris Ryan? You know what I would compare it to? You don't know if if you listen to an album a lot.
1:37:40 Bill Simmons? You listen to it like 20 times and then like the eighth best song in the album, you're like, "Song's fucking awesome."
1:37:45 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:37:45 Bill Simmons? "I really like this."
1:37:46 Chris Ryan? I love when that happens. When there's that song where you're like, "I don't know about this one."
1:37:50 Bill Simmons? Does that happen anymore? Cause every, these songs are just all released, almost like you can cherry pick them on Spotify now.
1:37:56 Speaker 02 I'ma keep it real with you. I don't know that it does.
1:37:58 Bill Simmons? I don't think it happens in the summer.
1:37:59 Speaker 02 Cause I don't think the albums last long enough for them to like, for that to happen. Like, I think that the artists are dropping music so much, like you're getting so much more stuff. There's so much, I don't think that that happens.
1:38:11 Chris Ryan? I think it happens here and there. Like, The Geese record's a good example of like, there was my original run through it. I was like, "I love these five songs." Then there was like two more, three more that came, became really favorites of mine.
1:38:21 Speaker 04 It's also crazy how much Hollywood screwed up. Like, I can't believe that John Cafferty and The Beaver, like, the fact that they didn't turn into anything is insane to me.
1:38:31 Chris Ryan? It might have been because of the band name. And it might have been because they, people were like, "You're Eddie and the Cruisers." I mean, there's like a little bit of like a poison chalice to that.
1:38:38 Speaker 04 The song you said was number three in the Billboard charts that year?
1:38:40 Speaker 02 Seven.
1:38:40 Speaker 04 Seven? I mean like-
1:38:41 Speaker 02 Like a legitimate hit in a monocultural time.
1:38:44 Speaker 04 We're in a different, completely different world now, but like, nobody even knows who the singers are of the K-pop Demon Hunter songs, and yet, that's like the biggest band in the world. Literally, no one knows who sings it. And yet, they knew this band and these people, and they couldn't get them relevance? And they couldn't get them another album? That's crazy to me.
1:38:59 Speaker 02 Same thing happened to Eddie.
1:39:00 Bill Simmons? When Jack O'N House were here like a year ago, you told me this was on TCM.
1:39:05 Chris Ryan? Mm-hmm.
1:39:05 Bill Simmons? And I recorded it.
1:39:06 Chris Ryan? I was like, "Let's tape it, yeah."
1:39:07 Bill Simmons? And we watched it in the morning and we were all like completely into it. I don't, I don't know, I just think that, I don't think there's a lot of these movies, which is one of the reasons why it's endured a little bit. There's just not enough music movies.
1:39:19 Chris Ryan? If there are, like, or if they, they're in the works, I think all of it is based on whether the song, like, there's-
1:39:26 Bill Simmons? And whether you like the band, right? Well, think about like Rock of Ages with Cruz, was a bomb.
1:39:32 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:39:33 Speaker 02 So stupid, though. Like, you know what I mean? Like, this, that movie almost doesn't take itself seriously. This movie takes itself incredibly seriously. Like, you get the, there's a sincerity about this. Maybe, it's obviously not perfect, but there's a sincerity, like, about the movie.
1:39:48 Bill Simmons? Would you watch a movie about done love story JFK Junior style? About Lenny Kravitz falling in love with Lisa Bonet? We get all the, Lenny's music.
1:39:56 Speaker 02 Entire thing would love it.
1:39:58 Bill Simmons? That'd be, it's a good idea, right?
1:39:59 Speaker 04 Zoe Kravitz plays Lisa Bonet?
1:40:01 Chris Ryan? Oh, shit.
1:40:02 Speaker 02 You like that type of shit? I'm into that.
1:40:04 Bill Simmons? It's a good idea, right?
1:40:04 Speaker 02 I'm into Lisa Bonet.
1:40:05 Speaker 04 I'm into Zoe Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, sure.
1:40:08 Bill Simmons? Everyone loves Lenny Kravitz. I don't even mind that I don't like the NBA NBC song.
1:40:13 Chris Ryan? You don't mind that you don't like it?
1:40:15 Bill Simmons? I just, I'm never gonna, I'm never gonna be mad at Lenny Kravitz for anything. All right, CR month. This was, it's no longer CR month.
1:40:22 Chris Ryan? That's okay, man.
1:40:22 Bill Simmons? The little chocolate right after.
1:40:23 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:40:24 Bill Simmons? Little, little, what are those, those little gum things? What's the one that's, it's got the, there's like different ones that they'll bring out?
1:40:32 Chris Ryan? Well, they've got the mints, you know, chocolate covered mints is usually.
1:40:35 Bill Simmons? That's, I feel like that's lazy when the restaurants do that.
1:40:37 Chris Ryan? Okay.
1:40:37 Bill Simmons? I like when I felt like the dessert, the dessert chef made me something. I like when they, I feel like they prepare something for me.
1:40:46 Chris Ryan? It's true.
1:40:48 Bill Simmons? That's it. Uh, I don't know what's coming next week. This was fun. Good to see you, Ben.
1:40:51 Speaker 02 Of course.
1:40:52 Bill Simmons? Good to see you, CR.
1:40:52 Chris Ryan? See you guys in San Francisco if you're.
1:40:54 Bill Simmons? Oh, yeah.
1:40:55 Chris Ryan? Oh, yeah.
1:40:56 Bill Simmons? San Francisco.
1:40:57 Speaker 04 Two days from now. If this will come out on a Monday, we're there Wednesday.
1:41:00 Bill Simmons? Yeah, I'll do the, I'll do the little intro for that. But yeah, we're gonna be doing Basic Instinct, the three of us with Mallory at the Tony Rempe Theater.
1:41:11 Bill Simmons? Yeah, that's, I think that's.
1:41:12 Speaker 04 Doesn't that guy play for the Rangers?
1:41:13 Bill Simmons? San Francisco, Tony Rempe, he hit like 280 last year. Yeah, we will be there in San Francisco. Thanks to Gahad, thanks to Eduardo as well. And we'll see you next week in the Rewatchmas.
Previous ‘L.A. Confidential’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and Andy Greenwald Next ‘Basic Instinct’ Live From SF With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Mallory Rubin, and Van Lathan Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated