Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 15: Making the Impossible Possible – The Visual Effects of The Walk

Guest: Kevin Baillie Even a death-defying high-wire artist has to start somewhere. As a boy, Philippe Petit dreamt of performing daring feats for dazzled crowds. As an adult, his life’s ambition came true when on August 7, 1974, he successfully walked between the Twin Towers, 110 floors up with no harness or net! Our guest Kevin Baillie’s journey also reads much like a film script. By the age of seven, after being inspired by films like Back to the Future, he had already chosen his career path and was best friends with Ryan Tudhope, with whom he would later co-found the visual effects studio Atomic Fiction. With his dream, much determinacy and hard work, Baillie was working at Skywalker Ranch at just 18 years old! Flash forward; Baillie is the Visual Effects Supervisor on The Walk, and along with the team at Atomic Fiction, worked with legendary director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Flight) to bring Petit’s seemingly impossible stunt to life in The Walk. In this highly anticipated film staring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it is the absolutely stunning visuals that make this vertigo-inducing journey so believable, a feat that meant recreating the twin towers and New York in the 70s. Baillie has worked with Zemeckis on multiple films. Remember the gut-wrenching plane crash in Flight? That was his work! His resume also includes work on Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, Hellboy, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Sin CIty and Star Trek Into Darkness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 36m
Broadcast on:: 20 Oct 2015
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hi, I'm Christina Yerling-Biro, I guess when you know, you know. According to the new movie The Walk, the real-life Philip Petit saw his first wire-walking act at the age of eight, and he knew this was what he was destined to do. And on August 7, 1974, Petit walked across a steel cable strung between the Towers of the World Trade Center, an event that went down in history. And at age seven or eight, my guest Kevin Bailey and his buddy Ryan watched and were blown away by the visual effects in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, George Lucas' films, and maybe most importantly, Robert Zemeckis back to the future. And they knew this was their destiny. Two days after high school, they were working at the Skywalker Ranch under George Lucas, and some decades later, they're doing spectacular never-before-seen effects with none other than Robert Zemeckis. There's something impossibly wonderful about that. Visual effects supervisor Kevin Bailey and his team at Atomic Fiction have worked with Zemeckis before, creating the spectacular and almost too realistic plane crash in the movie Flight, starring Denzel Washington. Now he and the team have created the vertigo-inducing visual effects for the new movie The Walk, showing in 3D. Robert Zemeckis' dazzling cinematic recreation of Petit's Walk in the Sky. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the Frenchman in the lead. "Welcome to New York. Anything to declare?" "I'm going to a hang a high wire between the two Towers of the World Trade Center and the Walk on It." "Girl arc." "No matter where I was going or what I was doing, I was always searching, looking for the perfect place." "To hang my wire." "Whoa, I need you to help me pull this off." "I got just the guys." "Now it starts." "Come on, expect me, I'm in a red zone." "I'll figure out how to get the wire across." "I think we should wait." "Oh!" "This is extremely illegal, not to mention dangerous." If you want to check out some behind-the-scenes images, pictures and trailers of The Walk, before we get into the interview, go to popcultureconfidential.com. Zemeckis has a history of creating movies about unbeatable optimists, there's Back to the Future, Forrest Gump and Castaway. The Walk really starts to soar in the second half when we follow Petit and is assembled crew to New York to plan and execute what he calls his artistic coup, a totally crazy and illegal act. It becomes like a heist movie as they break into the towers which are still under construction and finally complete The Walk. Petit's real walk between the towers was 110 stories up, 13,050 feet or 400 meters above ground and he used a 55 pound 25 kilogram balancing pole without a net, without a safety harness, nothing. Kevin Bailey has previously worked with movies such as Star Trek Into the Darkness, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and Hellboy and he co-founded his own company Atomic Fiction with that childhood friend Ryan. Mr. Bailey and Atomic Fiction were not only tasked to create the stunning effects, the World Trade Center and the New York City of the 70s but also in a way honor the legacy of the twin towers who after 9/11 became a symbol of disaster but during Petit's walk were a symbol of something quite the opposite. Little effect supervisor Kevin Bailey, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me on the show. I've never felt such enormous fear of heights and vertigo while sitting very comfortably in a movie seat as I did watching this movie. Is there a key effect that made this real would you say? Well, first of all, it's great to hear you say that because I think that's part of the spectacle that makes this movie not only worth going to see but worth going to see in 3D and I'm actually not a big fan of 3D movies in general. I'll usually go see them 2D myself. This is one of a handful of movies that actually deserves to be 3D so it's great to hear you say that. In terms of what really made it effective, I think that it really started with obviously what Felipe Petit, the wire walker himself did, just inherently what he did is absolutely bananas. It's totally insane, 1400 square feet off the ground with no safety gear. I actually had the pleasure of going and being in a helicopter for two days above New York filming reference video of what it looked like from up there and I will never forget the feeling of hovering a helicopter right above ground zero at 1400 feet. Really being in the very place that Felipe Petit did his walk and looking down and that feet, that just sense of simultaneous awe and terror was something that I really brought back to the team and helped work with them to create in the visuals for the film, that profound emotion. Could you understand that he had made it when you were up there, when you were looking down? To be honest, it really truly is one of those feats that my brain cannot comprehend how he did what he did. Felipe, doing the walk, succeeded against all odds. Has he ever mentioned himself to you that he was like, "Shit, this is high?" I mean, is that he actually ever had that fit, or did he never even think about it? Yeah, you know, Felipe himself, who by the way, for the audience that don't know, he's still alive and kick in and walks the wire every day and he actually trained Joseph Gordon Levitt for a week in wire walking technique before the shooting of this film. So a lot of the wire walking that you see is actually Joseph Gordon Levitt walking on the wire himself. And hearing from... But not 110 stories that's your work. Yeah, that's like 12 feet off the ground, which is still pretty high. But yeah, Felipe, he does mention that it was a different kind of heights. It was... He said he was familiar with the void being the space between the things that he's walking. He's familiar with the void, but not this void. Like it was just a different animal completely. And was he ever frightened? You know, I don't know if he'd ever admit to that, but you know, I'm sure that you would have to be crazy not to be scared at times. Although I can only imagine that when he was up there between the wires, I mean, he crossed between the twin towers, I think, eight times. And I can only imagine that he was sort of in that zone, that adrenaline zone, that kind of, you know, thrill junkies get when they're doing what they're doing. You're going to wear a safety belt underneath your costume, attached to a safety line. I am not going to do this walk with a safety line hanging from that height, it will be invisible, no one will have any idea. Years ago, he told me something I always remember. You said you cannot lie on stage. The audience will always know what is inside your heart. I want to get back to sort of the nitty gritty of the actual visual effects, but I'd like to talk a little bit about you, because your own story is pretty fascinating. How, when did you know you wanted to do this? It would be easier to kind of like, to just say that I've always wanted to do this. I think that, you know, there was a time where I was, you know, three or four years old, and my dad brought me to go CET, and he always loves to tell the story about how my popcorn bucket was taller than I was, you know, I had nothing to peek over it. And you know, really as long as I can remember I've been into this. And, you know, when I was seven years old, I met a friend of mine, Ryan, who actually, I co-founded Atomic Fiction, our visual effects company, with Today, so we're still really good friends and work together every day. You were seven. We were seven years old, yeah, and the real turning point, you know, because we always love movies, but the real turning point was when we saw Jurassic Park, and when we saw Jurassic Park and saw those dinosaurs brought to life in such a believable way, it just flipped something in our brains, and we said, "We need to do this." So we went to our high school teacher who was teaching an AutoCAD class and said, "Hey, do you have anything that we could, you know, use to do stuff like this?" And he said, "Well, I have two copies of 3D Studio Release 2 for DOS. I have no idea how to use it. Here's the manual. Go knock yourself out." And so that's what we did. We stayed at school until they turned the alarms on at 6PM, and he let us take the computer's home for spring break and summer vacation, and that just one thing kind of turned into another, and we started doing videos for school assemblies, and then we got a job with Microsoft when we were 15 years old, working kind of in an internship with the school. And finally, we were actually selected to be filmed for a documentary that was funded by George Lucas, and so when George Lucas saw us in that documentary, in the editing room of his documentary, he said, "Well, we've got to have these kids down to Skywalker Ranch and show them around." So that's what we did. We went down to Skywalker Ranch, we were blown away. We saw-- This just doesn't happen. This is like a movie. It was crazy. I mean, you can imagine. During the time we were 17, maybe 16 years old, down at Skywalker Ranch, our jaws were on the table all the time. We got to meet George Lucas. We babysat his kids for like half a day. What did you do with them? They showed us around Skywalker Ranch, and we got chased by wild turkeys at one point. Because they must have a lot of fun toys. Yeah, they've got a lot of fun toys, and there was a surreal moment where we sat down in one of the entertainment rooms and put on a laser disc of Back to the Future, and they started talking about Uncle Speely. And it's like, "Uncle Speely, oh, Spielberg, oh my god, like these kids, he's just Uncle Speely to them." So yeah, we were sufficiently mind-blowing by that whole experience, and they actually didn't offer us a job on the spot. I mean, we saw it a year at high school left to go, but you can rest assured that we did everything we could from that point on to convince them to hire us. And when we were actually about to be done with high school, two weeks before we graduated, we get a call from the producer saying, "Stop sending me letters every month. Stop bugging me." And sending videos, like, "You got the frickin' job." So it really worked out, and that was the beginning of a career that has now been kind of rallying onwards for 18, 19 years. So at 18, you're working for George Lucas Company, and with your best friend that you actually start your company with later, but what would you say that he or his company taught you? Oh, man. I mean, it was the best form of education that we could have possibly asked for. And so it's -- we had each been planning to go to college on our own. I'd gotten into Stanford and MIT, and it was one of those things where my dad was a college professor at the time, or he actually had been recently. And so it was really hard for him to sort of say, "Yeah, don't do college." But in retrospect, it was so the right decision, because it was really everything from just how to be in the workplace to getting into work with George Lucas on a weekly basis and his editors, Ben Burt and Martin Smith, on a daily basis. And the things I learned from them every single day were just absolutely profound in helping to shape my understanding of what makes good cinema. Is there one thing in particular, when you were 16, 17, 15, when they saw you, the Lucas people that you had designed or made that was like impressed them? Yeah, I think that what they saw in the documentary was just the fact that we were two kids in high school who had kind of started to do this stuff on our own. And even today, I think that that kind of self-starter attitude is hard to come by and it's pretty rare. So at the time, it actually didn't really make sense to me why they would be calling us. And what we did in our senior year of high school and our last year of high school was really like, we went just all out, we were working hundred hour weeks to create a video that was so spectacular that they would have no choice to hire us. We just didn't really feel like what we had up until that point was good enough. But what was it actually of? Was it space? Yeah. So in Star Wars Episode 1, there's a scene called the Pod Race where there's these kind of hovering pods and they raced through the desert. And we'd seen a very, very early version of that and been sworn to secrecy. We were never allowed to talk about it, but we'd seen this early version of it. And so we actually went back home and designed something that was sort of similar but different enough where we wouldn't get in trouble, right? So we went out to the forest behind our high school and shot a bunch of video footage. And then created a hovercraft that we flew through this forest and the whole premise of it, we did it for a school assembly where each one of the four classes in our high school had a speeder. One was yellow, one was red, one was blue, one was green. And then they raced against each other for a three minute long video and each class got to root for their hovercraft, right? So it was sort of like a fun bit of entertaining for the school, but it was also very thematically in line with what we knew the Star Wars people were looking for. And then sort of another thing that makes this story or another step in this story that brings it around is that one of your few were mentioning back to the future and then all of a sudden you're working with Robert Zemeckis, which was one of the inspirations who also did The Walk, but you worked with him on Flight as well. Tell me a little bit about working with him. How does he approach visual effects? So it is an absolutely insane honor to work with somebody as accomplished as Zemeckis. And as a kid, you're absolutely right, you know, back to the future and Roger Abbott and films like that were a big part of my inspiration for being in the movies to begin life. And so I'll definitely admit the first movie I worked with him on was A Christmas Carol, which was one of his motion capture films. And the first time I met him, I was literally like shaking after I met him. I was like, oh my God, I met Robert Zemeckis. And you know, now we obviously have a much more casual relationship after having worked together for so long. But working with him is it is also like film school. And I feel like his approach to visual effects is much like his approach to a lot of other aspects of movie making, which is that he loves to surround himself with people that he trusts. He likes to make sure that everybody feels welcome to give, you know, give input. And he relies on people to bring exceptional levels of work and ideas to the table. That said, he also has an incredibly clear picture of what it is that he wants. And so he brings you this movie, I guess a script to the walk, and you guys start on it. How does this process start? Buildings aren't there anymore. How does the research go? In terms of how we made New York and the towers look the way they look, it was really just a combination of thousands and thousands of photos, both from the internet and scans from books and the photos from the actual walk that Philippe himself did, to I mentioned that we'd been up in a helicopter above New York filming reference footage and photography. We used photos and footage from modern day New York as well, and then some of the stuff we just had to build from scratch. So what we ended up building thanks to all those thousands of reference photos of video footage was a completely digital version of 1974 New York, which is substantially different than modern New York, right? What's the biggest difference? There's a lot of buildings that aren't there now that were then, and then even more buildings that are there now that weren't then. So even buildings that exist today are usually covered by buildings that are new, right? So the view is just tremendously different when you look at it from a detailed perspective. So pretty much there were several hundreds of buildings, probably 10 square blocks around the base of the World Trade Center buildings that we had to literally build every air conditioning unit, every storm drain, every hot dog stand in the street, all from scratch. And when you say build? Yeah, so in the visual effects process, we essentially create a digital version of these buildings, right? So sometimes you see in these making of movies, these wire frames, they look like very, very simple wire representations of the buildings. And then we have an artist go in and apply texture to those buildings. And then we have another artist go in and say, okay, well, I have the shape of the building and I have the texture, but glass is shiny, brick is dull, let's make sure that all that works. And finally, when you have hundreds of buildings together and all the streets and everything has its proper shape and its texture and its surface qualities, then we have to put virtual lights in the scene to mimic the sun in the sky. And once all that's done, there's a process called rendering, which basically takes that very kind of interactive recipe. And it can take 300 to 500 hours for every second of the movie to do what's called rendering to turn it into a beautiful final frame. Two magnificent towers, 100 meters taller than the Eiffel Tower itself, what do you think? I don't know. It looks so, so beautiful, yes, and dangerous and completely insane and you're a madman. Yes, I'm mad, but this is my dream. How big is the team and how long did you work on the walk? Yeah, so at Atomic Fiction, we had a team that was about 120 people for, I would say, probably seven months and then there were two other visual effects companies that worked on the picture, Rodeo and UPP. So probably between all of those companies, there were, I would say, probably close to 300 people. What was the visually most challenging shot, would you say? Robert Zemeckis, he is notorious for doing these very long, sweeping, creative shots. These camera moves that go on forever. And that was also the case in the walk. And for a very good reason is because when you're watching a 3D movie, you want to give the audience time to explore the environment, to actually immerse themselves in and feel like they're there to give you that crazy, intense feeling of heights. And so that in and of itself is really, really challenging because you have New York with all the cars and people down in the streets below, you have the Twin Towers, which need to look absolutely like the Twin Towers. If we screwed the Twin Towers up and did not make those look great, the whole point of the movie would have been out the window. So you have all these components that come together and then Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance on the wire. And to make all that stuff just sit together and some of these shots are 20, 30, 40 seconds long, just everything has to stand out to an incredible level of scrutiny. And I think that that's probably overall the most challenging part of making this movie. What did you learn about tightrope walking? I know nothing other than what I've seen in your movie. There's absolutely kind of a performance art to it, which I hadn't really witnessed before. And then there's also a very, very clear technical component to it that goes all the way as deep from a technical perspective is how to set up how to rig the wire. Because if you rig the wire in a way that's not great, then you're going to fall. So just seeing what they had to go through to rig the wire on a movie set where we had access to forklifts and scissor lifts and tens of people that were dealing with the rig in the wire. There's a lot of math, a lot of strength, a lot of testing. And Philippe, he did that him and like three other guys on the top of the World Trade Center tower covertly at night, right? So it's like with all the resources that we had to make it technically sound, to make it technically safe and able to be walked on. He had to do all of that under wraps in an environment that must have been almost impossible to work in. Yeah, that's the most, I mean, for the viewers, we'll see it later. It's almost as impossible to understand how they pulled off getting on top of there with all the gear and all the stuff they did to make it work, then the walk itself. Yeah, it almost makes the walk itself seem like the elegant and almost easy part of it, right? But at one point, Philippe Petit says that he sort of, he laid down actually on the wire and he said, I have to sit here for a while because I realize I'm never going to see this view again because the police were waiting for him. But I'm thinking, did he say anything when he saw your effects? You know, I actually haven't seen Philippe since he saw the movie. He did watch it in New York. Him and Bob Zemeckas watched it together. And the message I got back from that was Philippe really loved the film. And that's actually a giant compliment because if there's anyone on the planet that's going to have critique about the film and how he's portrayed or how New York looks from up there, I mean, he's the one person in history that actually was there. And to hear that he loved the movie was probably the biggest compliment out of any viewer that it could possibly get. Yeah, I'm thinking he must have been pretty emotional because he's the only one who sort of saw it from that perspective that you're showing him again, so to speak. Talking about, you were mentioning that the Twin Towers had to look. Post 9/11, of course, the Twin Towers have come to really symbolize so much tragedy and hurt and did you feel any responsibility considering the history of the towers? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the whole team felt an immense responsibility to the towers and I think that's been the case through the entire seven to eight years of this movie. It's kind of been in the making, is that the goal has always kind of been to make the movie sort of a love letter to the Twin Towers and remind people of what they used to stand for. And so the tricky bit of that is everybody, because the towers were so much in the news and also part of everybody's everyday lives for the people that lived in New York. Everybody actually has a different memory of what the towers look like and that's actually for good reason because the towers, they're metal, they're sort of this anodized aluminum material and so depending on the weather and what time of day it is, they actually did look different. They were very much so kind of chameleon-like, if it was a dark stormy day, they would look dark gray, almost black and then when it was a bright, sunny day, they would look almost white. So we really had to kind of like do a lot of work on the technology side to make sure that the way the towers behaved in their environment really looked good, looked the way that people might remember them on that particular kind of day. And we built so little of the real thing on set, I mean, we built about a 40-foot-by-60-foot corner of the roof. Just basically the roof, right? Exactly, exactly. Just basically the corner of the roof and enough where they could, anything they needed to walk on, we built for real on this big green screen stage, but everything else, the roof itself was 200 feet by 200 feet. I mean, there's not a stage in the world that's big enough to actually build the real thing. So we had to do digital extensions on everything and the skin of the tower itself is fully digital all the time. And it's kind of like a scary proposition, right? Because a lot of people, I think, see, they go to see movies and they're like, "Oh, there's too many effects in it and this looks CG, this looks digital," and it kind of takes you out of the story. Well, we couldn't afford to do that here. We're doing so much digitally, but we had to make it look like we were doing nothing digitally, right? And so that was the whole goal is to make the towers look the way that people kind of remember it and then also make people forget that there were any visual effects in the movie at all. Have you gotten any reactions from people that, you know, it's beautiful to see them again or, you know, that type of thing after what happened? Yeah, we've definitely gotten those kinds of reactions and I think one of the test screenings that we did very early on in the film actually, where the visual effects weren't even close to being done, it was really, really great because this small group of people, it was about 20 people, we asked them, "Do you feel like this is a positive portrayal of between towers?" And everybody raised their hands and said, "Yes, absolutely." You know, there's, you know, it was just very emotional for us. And I think that that's, it's a good thing, you know, we don't want to, there was such a real danger of inspiring negative emotions, you know, bringing back the thoughts of 9/11. And I think that once people see this movie and are engrossed in the story and the experience of being up there, yes, of course, you know, that that will be something that's in the back of people's heads. But I think that the purpose is to really bring people back to what was so good about the towers and what was so good about this experience and really come away with a positive feeling of like, you know, it's like a close family member that's died, you want to remember them for the good things that they did in life. And I think that that's what this movie is. We can't only remember the twin towers in tragedy, we have to also understand that a human face was put on the towers by this artist. That's beautiful. That's part of the point of telling this story is an homage to these buildings that are meaningful to us. It's madness. Yes, it's madness. No one in his right mind would attempt this thing. But that's why I must do it. And the movie is premiering at the New York Film Festival, sort of bringing it home or full circle, which is pretty amazing. And I'm thinking you guys might be, might be Oscar talk coming up as well. You were taken with dinosaurs and the DeLorean and E.T. What do you think the 13 year old kids today are impressed by in terms of movies? You know, that's actually a really, really good question. And I think that probably asking a 13 year old is better than asking me because I'm definitely... You're too old now. I'm just thinking if there's something, I mean, if you can in your work and if you're sort of what people are asking for, if it's different landscape or if they're still impressed. You know, I think they're still impressed. And I think that the thing that is really great to see for me because so like I'm, you know, nephews and nieces that, you know, they'll go see a movie and, you know, like one of the big blockbusters superhero movies. And they'll kind of sit through it and, you know, they'll smile and every once in a while, you know, they'll talk about it afterwards. But you know, those movies are, they're amazing technical achievements, but they're so just over the top all the way to the end, right? So it's more of a fantasy than a representation of reality. And what I'm kind of seeing them reacting even more to is movies that can make them feel like they're somewhere else, right? When you watch a movie like The Avengers, it's an amazing experience, but you don't feel like you're there. And because it's so unlike anything that you could ever experience, whereas there was actually a 15-year-old that I talked to that went in soft flight. And he said afterwards he had nightmares about the plane crash, right? And it was, it wasn't because it was so over the top. In fact, a lot of the times you're just in the cabin of the aircraft. You're not even seeing what's outside, but the way that Bob Zemekus did that scene and the way that we executed the visual effects, it was, it made it realistic, it made it feel like you were there. And so I think that's kind of what the walk is too. It makes you feel like you're up there between the Twin Towers with him without going overboard. And then kind of moving forward to like, you know, what people in the future are going to be watching. I think, you know, virtual reality and high-end gaming are going to be challenged in the same way where it's going to be very easy to give people sensory overload and make an unbelievable but still very spectacular experience. And I think the real challenge for filmmakers and content makers is going to be making experiences that you actually believe that you're there. And for a second, you can lose yourself in those moments. And so I think that's kind of what, you know, the kids these days want to see. And I think actually even the more mature audiences, you know, will want to see that too. What's the next project for atomic fiction? Yeah, so we are working on Deadpool, which is sort of this comic book, anti-superhero movie is hilarious, so we're working on that with Fox and then we're ramping in on the next Star Trek movie with Paramount. And we are actually working with Bob Zemeckis to get his new movie off the ground, which is a World War II movie. I just saw that today with Brad Pitt, right? That's right. That's right. And about a week before my son was born, he was born five weeks ago. So six weeks ago, we just spent five days flying around from, you know, London and various other places in Africa and Europe to go and see if we could find some good locations to shoot for that film. So that movie is already kind of in the works. Congratulations. If you and Ryan would have known this when you were eight, right, we wouldn't have believed it. It's like you are going to be over Europe on a Gulfstream jet with Bob Zemeckis. I would have just been like your father. Thank you so much, Kevin. This was really fun and I'm so honored to speak to you. Well, thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show. And I love, I've listened to a bunch of your stuff and you interview some really interesting people. So I'm very honored to be amongst them. Thank you so much, Kevin Bailey, for the interview. The walk is premiering both in the U.S. and in Europe very soon. Thank you so much for listening. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The homepage is popcultureconfidential.com. This show is edited by Tom Hanson, music by Carl Bori, produced by Renee Vitistet and myself, Christina Yarling Biro. Thank you for listening. Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Volanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. Even that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win. Why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking available wherever you get podcasts? [BLANK_AUDIO]