(upbeat music) - I've decided to keep a journal. - Hey everybody, welcome to Pauled CastiFarming, the podcast about film culture politics and Paul Schrader, where we watch every film written and/or directed by American filmmaker Paul Schrader and explore how they speak to their moment, and this one shows us by two guys. One of the guys, my name is Jake Serwin. - I'm one of the guys, my name is Ian Ryan, and we are not introducing our guest yet, but we're so excited to have him, and of course, huge fans of his, big influence on the podcast. And the surprising thing-- - Right, I've been gaining a lot of weight. - That's right, yep, sorry, in case. - I was just thinking like, this guy's got a, the premise of this guy's podcast explains a little bit why maybe the host health is declining, and then our podcast is unrelated to that. - No, no. - Yeah, we're still just falling apart. - In free fall, yeah. - Something about the form, I guess. - And of course, we were delighted when he, I mean, he's kind of an inspiration to us in a different way, 'cause he, of course, emailed us, and this was when we were still doing the Clint Eastwood season, and he said, he wanted to get the word out about autofocus, and I wasn't quite sure what he meant about that, but he said. (laughing) And I'm gonna ask him about that when we talk to him, and there was one other question I think about all the time, he finished his email, he said, "PS, is that watch really for real?" And I want to ask him when he meant by that, so we'll see, in a little bit. - I mean, look, I can tell you right now, the watch is based on a real watch that was available, apparently. - Okay. - I don't think it switched from the actual time, I think it just did the fuck time thing. - Mm, I saw it, wow. So it's sort of like, it's more of a bracelet in that way. - Beautiful, okay. Jake, how are you doing, my friend? - I am doing just fine. I see did anything happen to me, no. - Oh, wow. - So, doing normal, how are you? - I'm doing normal as well, yeah, had a nice week. We're deep into the rainy season here, so it's raining daily, I love it, it's gorgeous. - Nice, yeah, oh yeah. - We've drizzled on me when I left the office, not the brag. - Okay, yeah, big ups. - And this is gonna age really well too, a lot of people listening to this being like, "Oh damn, I should go see if it's raining." - That's true, yeah. - All right, let's quit the bullshit. Real quick, if you'd like to support the show, you can subscribe to our Patreon, we're for $5 a month, you'll get a bonus episode. Every other week, covering Clint Eastwood movies, we used to talk about that guy. From before playing Misty Formi, all kinds of Clint ephemera, it helps us keep this feed free, so if you'd like to support the show, please visit patreon.com/podcastyformi. We just did an episode about the Bruce Willis, Yojimbo remake, "Last Man Standing," and it has a great two pay story, so if you wanna hear a two pay story, check that out. All right, it's not just me and Ian today, we actually, we got a group group. - That's right, yeah, we sure do. - Let's bring in our guest, really excited, our guest today is a writer and podcaster from the Doughboys and Get Played. Nick Weiger is here, how you doing, Nick? - Hi, Nick. - Hey, buddy. Thanks for having me. - Oh, the classic catchphrase. - Oh, yeah, shivers, yeah. - Yeah. - It's an OG, Bob. (both laughing) - I mean, honestly, I think of this movie as like, 'cause I'll admit I hadn't seen this film before we watched it for this episode, and I think of this as like one of the Weiger movies. - I mean, I wasn't joking, I think I learned about this movie from Doughboys. That part was true. - Wow, I think it's kind of a, you know, among Schrader's filmography, I think it's kind of underseen. And, but I do think it's like an addition to be like a very, I mean, like a funny movie, despite, I'm not sure how much of that is intentional. I think it is meant to be a comedy, some of it for sure. And, but I think it's just also like a really gripping portrayal of like addiction and particularly sex addiction, which isn't something, I feel like there's a lot more, you know, just fiction and film in particular about like alcoholism and drug addiction, but sex addiction is not a thing that's dug into as much. And so it's kind of interesting to see like a, this biopic about a guy who was, I mean, I'm trying, I was trying to think of a more, a contemporary sitcom analog, but like, like kind of like a Kelsey Grammar maybe? Like, you know, like, it wasn't- - Kevin James and who knows. - Kevin James, yeah. But not like the biggest show. Like it wasn't like, it's not Jerry Seinfeld, it wasn't the star of like the hugest show, but it was a very popular show. And then the guy who had kind of a kind of weird long tail afterwards. - Right. - And I don't know, I just, I find it a really, really compelling movie. - I mean, if Seinfeld had been up to some of this stuff, they wouldn't have been able to put those videos online. - That's true. - Yeah. - That would have been a whole issue. You know, well, we'll get into it. First, we gotta, we gotta get to our signature segment, the two questions. - We gotta. - We're talking about the movie way too early in the show. This is not how we do things around here. The two questions is our signature segment where we ask you the two questions. Nick, you're our guest. Were you able to come up with a question for us today? - I do have a question, but I think it kind of maybe got stepped up, I'll just ask it anyway, but I do have a backup I can pivot to, but my question is gonna be, what time is it? (laughing) - I mean, I believe it's fuck time. - You're on a different time zone. - It's a much time where you are. - It's fuck minus one, I think that's it. - Oh, got it, yeah. - Is it fuck there? Man. I mean, it's a good watch. - It's a great watch. The watch is so funny, and I mean, it's just like, it's, I don't know if you can get the real watch. So for people who haven't seen the movie, and if you haven't seen the movie, I would recommend watching it. The moment referring to Willem Dafoe, who plays a character named John Carpenter, but not that John Carpenter. - Right. - Who is Bob Crane's good friend, and basically his pal, his partner in crime, and going to all these orgies and swinger events, but he is hitting on a woman, a disinterested woman in a strip club, and he has a watch, and he says, do you know what time it is? And he shows her the watch, and it's like a, you know, an early digital watch, like a Casio kind of digital watch, and he hits a button on the watch, and it changes to a very crude animation of sex, and says, so he says, do you want to know what time it is? Shows the animation, says, it's fuck time, and the woman just like walks away. - It's all the details, it's like a gold Casio, so it's kind of right. - Yes, right, yeah. - When you can tell, you can tell that like, 'cause it's 2002, like the compositing, and like the digital work that was required to put this in the movie was not like simple, you know? - Somebody had to work on this for like a little while. - Yeah, it's 'cause it's not like, you can tell it's enough, it's in post, it's not like a practical watch they have, but it still is a very funny moment. - Do you think anybody, 'cause I know you can get like, like an Apple watch app that makes your watch look like Dick Tracy's watch or whatever, do you think anybody has made the fuck time Apple watch skin? - This is why we need to get the word out about autobocus. This thing with more, and the zeitgeist, this is what it is. - This is part of your campaign, okay. - Right, you got some brothers in the tech industry. - I sure do, yeah. - And you wouldn't even be able to work on this? - Set their sights on this, tell 'em to quit their six figure jobs, yeah, I'll get on this, yeah. - Yeah, for a seven figure job, being the fuck time Apple watch guy. Well, thank you for the question, Nick, I've got one for the panel here. - Lay it on us. - Now, this is, you know, Bob Crane, I think his second act, as it were, was sort of cut short, but inspired by the film and also the recent, I was reading Pat Sajak, I believe, is retired, or is going to retire from Wheel of Fortune. - Yeah, I think he retired recently. - And he's got his next job lined up, and they were reporting this in like variety or whatever, that he was going straight from Wheel of Fortune to community theater in Hawaii, doing Operation Murder, I think, or Prescription Murder, the stage play that originated the character of Colombo? - Yes, exactly, yeah. - Like he's not playing Colombo. So this is like true love of the game stuff. - Yeah. - But anyway, inspired by this, is there a celebrity like second act, or sort of retirement career that you would most like to have? - This is a good question, so we're saying like, not like, oh, I'm gonna be Tom Hanks, or Denzel Washington, where I'm going to have decades of relevance. But like, I did a thing, I was known for a thing, and then I pivoted to something else. - Right, like as an example, there's a director, I think it seems James Glickenhouse. - Okay. - He directed a bunch of like movies that basically like the McBane on The Simpsons was like riffing on these. They were just, you know, the exterminator, the soldier, the protector. - Right. - And then he pivoted, and is now like a managing, he's like an owner and manager of like a Formula One company. He's like so much richer, and totally out of the industry entirely. But somebody like that. Is there anybody like that you'd like to? - Oh, so that makes me think of two people who had similar arcs. One, I think is more known, which is Sammy Hagar making Cabo Wabo tequila. And he, I think, is just a guy, and another guy who was like, you read, I read his book, I read my life in rock, and it's a, it's a, it's so much of it. You just are reading this, and it's like this guy is like a business genius. He's a marketing genius, and that's really like his true passion. Like he's better at that than he is at music, you know? And whatever you say, I'm a fan of Sammy Hagar's music. I'm a fan of his Van Halen era. But it is like, you look at his success, and he made so much more money from Cabo Wabo tequila. - Sure. - And more money than anyone affiliated with Van Halen. Like it was like he's awake by far the richest guy. - Interesting. - Because he made this liquor brand that sold for like $300 million to SeaGrams or whatever. But, so that's one, but the other one is Jamal Mashburn, the former NBA player who ended up having, he became a very, very successful post-career of having chain restaurants. And that feels very on-brand for me. Like if I could have been an NBA player who's, you know, very, he was pretty successful, has like a, like a 15 season career. And then as a second act, I own like, you know, 400 Papa John's. - Right. - Like that feels like, I like that arm. - Like Rick Ross with the wing stuffs. - Exactly. Rick Ross is a good example. - You're the guy who invested in Blaze Pizza whatever his name was. (laughing) - He's doing okay. - Yeah, he seems fine. - That's an interesting thing, because LeBron has Blaze Pizza, and then Dwayne Wade, his Miami Heat teammate, and friend ended up having 800 degrees pizza. So I think these two Miami Heat champions like had rival made-to-order pizza pie places. - With heat themed names. - With heat themed names, yeah. - That's crazy. I think for me, the one, and this is, you know, maybe less kind of a quisitive, less lavish lifestyle. But I really envy Sam Neal, who's sort of semi-retired to like a vineyard and farm in New Zealand. - I'm coughing your thing with a different person. We're on the same page, yeah. - If you've seen any of his social media presence, it's all just Sam Neal looking for one of his chickens who's wandered off, and then he goes and finds her, and he's like, you know, there you are. Darling, come back, come back in. Such a naughty girl. And then it's, or like, the pigs found their new shed, and they love it, you know? And every once in a while, he pops out of retirement to be in Jurassic Park Five and get more money for chicken coops, you know? - That sounds great too. - Yeah, sure. - I would honestly skip the acting part. I would go straight to the winery and chicken posts. - I love what about you. - I, well, I like Nick's answer, and I will say I, you know, I think about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writing kids' books that I think are fairly popular, not even just on the strength of big. - Oh yeah, right. - Because kids don't care about famous NBA players, so obviously that's not why they're into the books. - He writes novels too, didn't he write a book? - That may be true. - From the perspective of microp forms. - Microp forms, yeah. - Yeah. (laughing) We both do this. - No, he's written a few of those, I think. - What a couple of insane, actually, what a trio of insane guys, yeah. - Hey, I told myself I wasn't gonna do any Doughboys inside jokes, but I have to say, we are a couple of Kareem's men. - Yeah, that's, yeah. - I love that. That's the last one. - Yeah, okay. - Looks like he's written three books in the Microft Home series. - Okay, wow. - Microft forms Microft and Sherlock, and then Microft and Sherlock, The Empty Bird Cage. - Hmm, I'm intrigued by this last one. - Yeah, he has like a sub stack, like he writes, you know, he'll write like-- - He does, he does. - Long form pieces about his thoughts on, but he's just like an extraordinarily smart guy in addition to being very good at basketball. - I mean, I think he was involved in some type of newsletter thing with Adam Agoyan and a bunch of other people, where they would lead and done them, where they would send out like experimental pieces every week. So interesting, fascinating. But I would pick, honestly, Isabella Rosalini, who also I believe lives on a farm, and also spends all her time making people come out to the farm and then making them do stuff on the farm if they want to interview her, which is wonderful. - Right, Isabella Rosalini just like, Instagramming her sheep, yeah. - Yes, that's great. - He's still my salad. - I think if you're like that famous, that level of fame, maybe there's some sort of, you know, draw towards the, you know, pastoral sort of, like, remove myself from society, I can finally get some peace and privacy. I like, I just don't, you know, I don't like a, people love the rural life, that's great, that's for them. I'm more of like, I like to be in the middle of things, I like to be in a little bit more of a more populated area where I can kind of take the train and take the bus or whatever. So that aspect of it is less appealing, but I do like the, like not being just super capitalist about it, but to your point, Jake, because it was like, so yeah, so much of the, like, it's like success leads to, your reward for success is you get to work more, you know, you have another business and that leads to, the end point of that is like Ryan Reynolds or The Rock where it's just like, your whole thing is just having as many companies as possible, having as much branding as possible. - Right, owning a football TV, or whatever it is. - Yeah, one, I think we've discussed on the show before the new The Rock's Papa Tui men's grooming products venture where The Rock is selling shampoo. - Yeah. - He doesn't need to be doing that. I saw it in debit card, he doesn't need a debit card. - Oof, this is tough. - I mean, I don't know, now I'm thinking about getting a Rock debit card like as a bit, would that be funny? Was it, is it through like, is it through like, cash app or something? - I'm sure it's true, I'm sure, I think I'm sure it's through some predatory lender. I'm sure there's like, there's some aspect of it of like, yeah, it's a debit card, but actually, whatever you're paying 4% on every purchase or something. - Right, adjustable rate debit cards. - Yeah, exactly. (laughing) - So now it comes directly from your account, but you're still paying interest on it. But there's a, the thing that baffled me about The Rock is like, 'cause then he becomes a cross promotion guy. Like you got so many hustles that you have to be, I'm promoting my thing while I'm promoting my other thing. - Yeah. - So what was the, was it DC League of Superpets? Was that the one where he was the voice of crypto or the super dollars? - I believe so, yeah. - So there was a really weird video I watched where it was like him promoting that, but it was in conjunction with his Tequila brand, Terra Mona Tequila. - Terra Mona, yeah. - So he's promoting Tequila at a children's animated movie. - Yeah, like it's an audience of families. It's like, so great to be here at the special screen, advanced screening sponsored by Terra Mona Tequila. And he's like, what are you hitching? Like, these two things should not be coexisting. - Hey kids, you can't, you can't drink this yet, but we are hiring over at the, the Agave farm. Come on down. (laughing) - Sounds stressful, honestly. - It does sound stressful. - Yeah, yeah, he, I mean, I think this is a griffin Newman observation, but The Rock does seem exhausted all the time. Like he doesn't look like he's enjoying himself. - I felt that with, when I watched some wall burgers, or whatever the, I can't remember the name of this, this wall, wallberg show. But when we covered wall burgers on Doughboys, whatever that horrible reality show he has. - Wall street, yeah. - Wall street, yeah. - It's, I watched some of that. And I was like, this man's life seems utterly joyless. He's just going from meeting to meeting to event to event. He seems exhausted, he has no energy. And then there's even a point where he's playing in the backyard with his pool, with his kids in a pool. And it just seems like he's not even into this. Like this is just a thing he feels like has to have in the, he, this in and of itself is part of his branding. It's like, I'm doing this. - Right. - So this will be in my reality show. - I'm a hustle guy, yeah. - It's all like a good father. - Yeah. - Exactly. - In the same machine, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - You get a, like a reminder on your phone to spend time with your kids, you know. (laughing) It's like, but I think this kind of, this segues nicely into our film today. - Sure does. - 'Cause we're, so much of it, it's about celebrity appearances and personas and real lives. We're talking today about auto focus, which is directed by Paul Schrader. Have you ever heard of him? Released October 18th, 2002, which was the day Ian was born. (laughing) It's a new bit. - Wow. - Yeah, I'm fresh. - Can I ask, can I ask about another bit while we're talking bits? Ian, your zencaster name on the app we're using is the classic cat. What's going on there? This may be a running thing in the podcast that I'm just not clued in on. - No, no, no. This is, I mean, me having strange names drawn from the films is a running thing. But this is-- - Oh, got it, got it. - I believe one of the, how does he refer to them? Like late night joints that he plays drums at. - Oh, yeah, it's okay, okay. This is the signage out of sight of one of the strip clubs. - I think so, yeah. - I did, yeah. - I did consider calling myself Fran Sinatra as well, which I think was a letter. (laughing) - That'd be good. - It's Sinatra, Deena Martin, and I can't remember the other one. - Jerry Lewis with the two orders. - Jerry Lewis, Jerry Ryan, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Nick, we talked about it just a second ago, but what's your relationship to this movie and to Paul Schrader more generally? Like, what's your sort of history with it? - Thank you for asking. So I saw autofocus in the theater in 2002. I just remember reading, I don't remember whose review it was. I probably was Ebert, although I didn't revisit Ebert's review, but I feel like that is this feels like the kind of movie that Ebert would be like, like, oh, this is actually great. Although I looked at the poster and it maybe is this. This is less, this is a little bit less flattering for myself, but the poll code on the poster on IMDB is brilliant. You can't take your eyes off the screen. Harry Knowles ain't it cool news. (laughing) So maybe old Harry got me to go out to the multiplex and watch an autofocus. - Yeah, I see them, yeah. - I mean, Harry Knowles and Bob Crane and Roger Ebert, they shared a similar fixation. I would say. - They're all photo nuts. - Yep. (laughing) - But anyway, I saw it in the theater and I really liked it at the time and some of it really stuck with me and became things that I would think about and reference. And then I rewatched it later. And then in advance of this episode, I watched it twice. So I watched it two more times. Those are both really fun and illuminating rewatches. But it's a movie I really like. It might be my personal favorite Paul Schrader movie in terms of what he's directed. - Wow. - But you look at his whole filmography, obviously, he has some staggering masterpieces. Like I think when he talks about his own work, he's like, it's like, I'm sure you've talked about that. - Mishima, he likes a lot. - Yeah, Alex Ross, Harry Doc that's on Criterion that I also watched in advance of this. But he's like, he's talking about Mishima, which is maybe his best film or first reformed. - Those are probably his top two. But in terms of just my own fandom, it might be autofocus. Now, as far as him more generally, I will say that I'm in the midst of a full rewatch or a full watch down of his entire filmography. Some of his movies I had never seen, including big ones like "Blue Collar." I watched for the first time when "Blue Collar" is great. That's awesome. And you mentioned Griffin Newman earlier. Griffin was trying to get me to watch that for years. I finally did. But I was always more, I was conscious of his works as a director, like a flexion. I think that's another one he likes. And this movie, obviously, but I always thought of him more as a writer. And I was always kind of maybe more, I guess, if anything, more recently, you've gotten more respect for his eye as a filmmaker. And 'cause he doesn't necessarily have a strong, you all are the experts who maybe you've noticed more. Doesn't seem like he necessarily has a super strong house style, where you can kind of look at something and identify it aesthetically as a Paul Schrader movie. He seems to operate in a bunch of different looks. - He has a few tricks that he'll reuse, but he likes to mix it up as well. - Yeah, he likes to have these different registers that he moves through. - Yeah, but I do feel like as a writer, there's actually a little bit more thematic commonality and he kind of hits the same sort of beats. He ends multiple movies, ones he's directed and other ones that others have directed in the same sort of way. And I also feel like I don't know how interesting his movies are, the ones that he's directed that he hasn't written. So I guess I always thought of him more as a writer, you know? - Yeah, he's an interesting character. I mean, he obviously, he'll always point out that he did some rewrites to a script, even if he didn't-- - Sure, love to say this. - Right, right. And similarly, he'll talk about his films, you know, he'll say, I've done a number of films that were like in an interview I watched in preparation for this, he was the interviewer asked him if this is his most controversial film. And he said, I've done a number of films that were controversial and lists several Martin Scorsese films that he-- - A whole lot of preparation, right. - And so I think there's definitely like an authorial voice, even in the ones, I guess in the selection of projects. And he talks in a number of interviews about how, you know, Bob Crane, he was approached to do a number of biopics and none of them were that interesting, but Bob Crane sort of aligned with the characters that he had come up with himself in his single-mindedness in like total lack of self-knowledge, like a Travis Bickle or something. - Right, yeah, that's a good point. - And so I think, you know, barring a few financially motivated decisions that we've covered and will cover, I think he's always there whether he wrote the script or not, but he's a weird guy. He's a really, he's a very strange character. I mean, I think he's like kind of a freak, but I love him. I think it's just like he's really just, he's always trying stuff. And, you know, I just watched a, I'd not to get ahead of where you're going with your podcast, but you know, I've watched some of the movies, like the canyons dying of the like doggy dog. It's like a real rut he finds himself in before he comes back with first or formed. It's kind of, it's honestly amazing that he made first or formed after making those three movies. 'Cause he's just like, this guy is cooked. He's like, Blake, Kurt, Brian, DiPama, you know. But even all of those are still like, there's still stuff about that's interesting. It's still like, I feel like you're taking a big swing here. And I admire that. I don't feel like you're trying to like, like I'm gonna play the hits or I'm gonna do something safe or just overly commercial or something like that. I feel like you're just trying a big swing and just, but none of these are landing. - Yeah, I think he's like inherent kind of obstinacy, his, the pleasure he takes in, not doing what people want has helped him to preserve some kind of like artistic integrity. Even when he's making the canyons or something. - Yeah, right. - Which it's, that's been having like a sort of a reappraisal. I actually haven't seen it yet. I'm excited to talk about it and probably get a bunch of people mad at us, but he's got a-- - Still got a way back next week then. - Exactly. But he's got like a, I don't know, he's a little stinker in a way, but that allows him, I think, to like, retain some kind of, I'm an artist's stance as well. - Yeah, and I think he's so honest with himself to a fault and has maybe, I mean, he is a person who understands audience reaction. I mean, it's an intentional artist, but we talked recently about his TV movie, Which Hunt, which he made as an attempt to show how commercial of a filmmaker he could be, he could say. - Absolutely bizarre exercise, yeah, so. - One of those movies that people will upload to YouTube in their entirety and nobody takes it down. They just let it be there. So I actually skipped that one. Is that worth watching? I guess I should watch it. - I'm afraid I'm gonna give it a hard no for my-- - Yeah, I would maybe watch the trailer for it and go, huh, and then move on. But I do want to ask you Nick, 'cause I don't think I realize that, or whether you're, 'cause you've done, you've like written and directed a lot of comedy stuff, but were you ever, or are you ever, you know, hoping to someday do like a more dramatic thing? Did you ever, did you fancy yourself a filmmaker, a cinematic artist? - Yeah, good question. I mean, like, you know, I didn't go to film school, so all my skills are self-taught, but like, I am a guy who likes to like edit video. You know, that was what, when I was working back at the now defunct web video company Funny or Die, like I started there like editing, and then I started, ended up, you know, writing and directing stuff as well. But like, the, like, I, yeah, I like, I like more dramatic stuff. I like science fiction a lot. I like genre stuff a lot, but I think that probably if I thought where I was, what I was going to be doing, you know, or what I wanted to do when I was younger, I think it was probably taking inspiration from stuff that was like comedic, but like dramatic stuff with comedic elements, like the Cone Brothers, you know what I mean? Like, I was like, oh, like a movie like Fargo, that's like the kind of thing I'm interested in making. And so something like autofocus is the same sort of thing. It's like, this is a very dark, serious story about self-destruction, but it is like grimly funny. It is, it is dealing with a lot of like, like, just dark comedy, and just also just like the absurdity of existence. So I guess so, but I don't know. I feel like that answer is too high-falutin. I mean, the answer is like, like, I will, I'm also kind of mercenary as far as just whatever I'm writing to make money. And just like the way any, I feel like any industry works, but particularly creative ones is like, once you get known for something, then you get just kind of put into that. You're just kind of hoarding off in that little cul-de-sac. And so I've just got, I started working in what's called comedy variety, like talk shows, award shows, sketch shows, and that's what, that's the work I get offered. - But you don't have like a drawer full of scripts about, you know, on Wii or whatever? - No, I mean, I'm like, I'm too lazy to have a drawer full of scripts, that's part of the issue. Like I just, you admire the productivity of someone like Paul Schrader, 'cause it's not easy to make like a movie every like two years for like, whatever, like four decades, however long he's been going. - He does have this kind of, he seems to not have the whole like, difficult writing thing. You know, the thing where people, people say, nobody likes writing, they like having written, like I think he might actually like writing, which is-- - Yeah, he might, I'd be super interested in what his writing process is. I don't know if there's another criterion doc that I didn't watch that's up right now with one of his collections, and that's one thing I would be interested in the insight of like, so much of the Alacharks Perry doc, which is awesome, and I wish I was feature like, is about his like, process in a post-production and on set, and I would just be interested in how he, what it's like when he sits down at his, you know, aptiva or whatever kind of old computer he's got. - He's got like a very rigid process. He's talked about-- - He does, yeah. - I think a BAFTA podcast. - Okay. - It's like a, from a lecture or something he gave, but he has like a, it's surprising for a guy who's so, often so concerned with like, moments of transcendence and grace that he has like a very-- - Mechanical. - He'll make like charts, you know. - Right, yeah. And I mean, it's not even like he's gotten lucky at the sense of just everything he does gets put on screen. I think there's, I don't know, 20 unproduced screenplays that people are aware of publicly, so he's, he's just pumping them out and some of them make it, some of them don't, and I think initially, he talks about drinking heavily while he was writing and then maybe about 15 or 20 years into his career. He tried to stop doing that, so I'm not sure what else, what else we know about how it does it. - At some point during the drinking, he added cocaine as well, which I think also correct it. - Yeah, yeah. - That'll do it for you. So let's, let's talk about autofocus. - Let's talk about the film, yeah. - Ian, do you want to give us one of your trademark quick plot summaries? - Be happy to, yeah, they've been growing in size over the last few episodes. - All right, Bob Crane, he is a radio personality in Los Angeles, and the film begins, yes, exactly right. And he is, on screen, he comes off as kind of like a, I don't know, wanna be Carson or something, but he also is a kind of amateur drummer and has all these sort of like half baked parts of his public facing personality. And he, a couple of things happen simultaneously, he gets cast on Hogan's Heroes as the lead as Hogan. And also, he comes into contact with a man named John Carpenter, John Henry Carpenter, and this man is a video equipment salesman. He sells VTR equipment at like a very high end, you know, this is late '60s or early '70s. So this man also creates in him this, the seed of interest in women as an outlet, filming women, taking pictures of them, having sex and filming himself, having sex with them, sharing videos with each other. And basically over the course of the film, he goes from being a family man who's getting interviewed by like Christian talk shows and stuff, has like the singular example of shining virtue in Hollywood or something like a standout. And over the course of the film, Nick sort of referenced it earlier, but it follows kind of what we might recognize as like a drug film narrative or something where the addiction becomes more pronounced, we see how it affects his life, his career, his family. But it has this very distinct feeling because it's not like a substance abuse thing, it doesn't necessarily like rack his body or something. It is something that feels like it should be manageable or he keeps insisting, I'm normal at the end of the film. So it's like, you know, adjacent to socially acceptable urges that he just does not out of handle. And then at the end of the film, his career is totally shot, he's doing dinner theater, this extremely bizarre play called Beginner's Luck where he's one of the big lines we see repeated to the point of alienation is, I can't remember talking about what his wife looks like. - Yeah, terrific. And then he finds out basically that there's no chance he can get back into Hollywood unless he ditches this addiction that he has because he keeps, in addition to being addicted to filming women, he's addicted to sharing the pictures of himself and women that he has had sex with. So he tries to leave his friends, John Carpenter and it's not entirely clear what happens, but somebody murders him in a hotel room and that is the end of the film. - Yeah, thank you Ian, it's one of those movies where I'm one of those stories where you can hear it in like a minute like that and it sounds sort of cut and dry, but there's so much weird levels to it in, sort of unreconciled contradictions to the man and to everyone's behavior. And I don't know, it's stuck with me. It's also unlike, I think unlike a, not to skip to the ending, but like unlike a, a lot of drug films, it seems to offer like kind of no lesson, like the end of the movie, it sort of ends and it's all like meaningless, I think in a sort of a way that is dark as many Schrader films are. There's like, there's just sort of nothing, there's nothing on the other side, you know, we've learned nothing, he's learned nothing. It's kind of badass in that way. - Yeah, I mean, it was like, I think if there is maybe any sort of morality to the film, it's just kind of like, or I guess just maybe a takeaway for the viewer in terms of what not to emulate here, it's just this kind of like empty pursuit of lurid pleasures, you know, it's just a, he seems, he becomes, let me say that a more straightforward way. It's like, I feel like like sex guys are like fucked up, right? It's just like, there's like something about like, like out of all the addictions, and I know that like, like many can be more destructive, obviously like a gambling addiction can absolutely just level your life, just when your credit, destroy your finances, - Your children's lives, everything. - Exactly. - I was like, but there's something about being a sex guy that's so like depraved, and I don't even, I'm not even saying this with judgment, like I try, I'm maybe something of a prude personally, but I fancy myself as sex positive guy, and people can have whatever kinks they have, and whatever arrangements they like, but he pushed it so far. And I also think part of that is, because he just swung the pendulum so far to the other direction, which I think you see a lot of times like very often, it's like someone who's whatever, like very super into, they're very addicted, and then maybe they swing all the way over towards being like an evangelical Christian, and then like they've gone too far. It's like the opposite kind of arc for him, where like he starts in this very sort of uptight lifestyle where he's just going to church regularly and consulting with a priest on personal matters, and married to his high school sweetheart, and then the opportunities of fame, allow him these sexual conquests that just come to completely take over his life and just ruin it. - One of the things that is so strange about Bob Crane also is that this is like his only vice. I mean they show him drinking a little bit in the movie, and in the book, "The Murder of Bob Crane", which is the film like credits as a source, and is written by Robert Grace Smith, who's the Jake Gyllenhaal character in "Zodiac". - Yes, he has the "Zodiac" author, yeah. Did you read the book? - I read most of the book. - Okay, I tried to track it down, it's out of print. - It deals with, I can send you a PDF, it deals with a lot of, like mostly the investigation, and I think the way that the script came about, which we can get to in a second, is like the script started as kind of a detective story, and then that got completely cut out of it, which I think is fascinating. - But the thing with Crane is that like, he I think tried to maintain the, I mean he looks like those posters that like a guy would have in his dorm room that says like, "Beer, it's good for you", or whatever. He looks like the fallout guy. Like he looks like a kind of '50s cartoon of a good upstanding white man, and he tried to sort of maintain that and like act as if, showing everyone who came into his house, pictures of him having sex was like perfectly fine. I mean, he was trying to make real change, and it didn't work out for him, but I think he was going for something, you know? - Yeah, that's the part that fascinates me, I think, is that we'll talk about his sons, I'm sure. We must talk about his sons, all of them are named Robert Crane, because he did the George Foreman thing. - He did, but part of what fascinates me, and I think you guys are both touching on it, is that when he was trying, yes, that's exactly right, yeah. Part of what he's doing is like trying to push things in a positive way, I mean, he's in the late '60s, and he's not even made to feel comfortable about what we would probably now consider in the sex positive sense, like normal desires, normal interest in yourself and other people's bodies, but because all of that lies beyond the haze code, the acceptable version of sexuality for this time, particularly for an actor, it basically gets mixed into this disgusting gumbo with non-consensual taping of people, and John Henry Carpenter was abusing underage girls, and Bob Crane was showing his son deep throat after a baseball game, so-- - '77 or something, yeah. - Yeah, and those are some of those things that are not depicted in the movie, by the way, but there is context of Scotty, who one of his sons, who is a character of the movie, has talked about as dad was showing him those photos and videos when he was very, very young. - Yeah, so it's a full-- - It does get touched on a dialogue, but we don't have a scene of him showing it to him. - You're right, yeah. - But it's sad to consider that in this, like you're saying this campaign that he has for making this stuff accessible, he doesn't have like a roadmap. You described him, Jacob's being somebody who has no self-knowledge. She doesn't even realize like maybe even which of these things is distinct from the other, because they all have the same social response, basically, so to him, they're all something that he pursues with like privates, perian interest, and maybe tries to share with others. - Yeah, and I think one of the weird things about sex addiction, and same with like eating disorders, specifically like overeating disorders, is that you can't, like they are things that people sort of have to engage in in a healthy way, like you don't ever need to drink alcohol, or snort cocaine, or gamble, or whatever to survive, but like there's this sort of fuzzy area where like a sex guy can insist, like this is natural, this is how we're supposed to be acting, but nobody-- - Yes, right. - Nobody has the like, humans, they'll say the humans were not supposed to be monogamous type thing, but nobody says like, you know, humans were like supposed to do poppers, like that's like our-- (laughing) - Genetic code. - Caveman times, yeah, some poppers are keto, you know. So they have that kind of, I don't know, plausible deniability or something that makes them especially slippery, and Schrader's covered sort of sexual weirdness a number of times obviously like Travis Bickle taking his date to the porno theater and not understanding that that's weird. - Honest mistake. - Yeah, he was, he thought everybody goes there. - It's a movie, lots of couples come here, yes. - Hardcore sort of again, showing, kind of showing the opposite of Bob Crane, he's like an upstanding Godfearing man who ventures into the world of sex and emerges unscathed. - But yeah, but his daughter there, like who you know is in the film is like, she's like that scene at the end when she confronts him or when he confronts her and she's like, I wanted to do it, you know, like I was into it and it's like, oh, this is her, this is her youthful rebellion against her upbringing. - Right, yeah. And we don't really get like any, I feel like there's no psychology to Crane in the film, like there's no kind of real indication of where any of this comes from. He just sort of, he just likes it, which from the book, from what I understand, he like resisted any kind of like attempt to explain this. This is just something he liked to do. And you mentioned Scotty, his son who took a major issue with the film, who his sort of line on it has been like my dad was a proud pervert, basically. And he like, there was no decline. There was no like, he said he wasn't a Pat Boone character corrupted by Hollywood. He was just a guy who always loved this since the late 50s long before he was Hogan and just kind of caught up with him, basically. - Yeah, and they kind of have that portion of the arc in the movie where Rita Wilson's character has a great Rita Wilson performance, by the way. She's so good as his first wife, as his high school sweetheart, who he goes to church with, but like she confronts him about the, he's got porno magazines from that time. Like he's like very much like an interest in a pornography and more deviant sex, even before he's going to orgies and filming them with his friend. - Yeah, it's like, it's in there. At no point does he seem like ashamed of it though. He seems sort of just perplexed by, he's I guess trying to cover it up 'cause he's hiding it in the, in his dark room or whatever. But like, we don't ever get a moment of what am I doing here from him, really? - Yeah, he's also kind of defiant there too. 'Cause like she, you know, like, and she's like, why do you have those in the garage? And he's like, why do I have to hide him? Like a high school boy, you know, or whatever. Like he's like also kind of, yeah. He doesn't seem like a guy who does a lot of self-interrogation or, you know, I guess in modern terms, you would be like dudes will really show there. - Yeah. - Show their seven year old son deep throat instead of going to therapy. - Yeah, it would rather be bludgeon to death since Scottsdale, Arizona, than up there. (laughing) Yeah, it's, I did have a sort of a filmmaking question in that scene where I think it's that scene. It's one of the scenes where he's having an argument with Anne Crane, his first wife, the Rita Wilson character in the kitchen. They have a pool in the backyard. And the pool is very like actively, it's been disturbed and it's throwing like very cinematic reflections all over the place. When they do scenes like that, is there like a PA who has to go out there and just like wiggle his hand in the water right before they shoot the scene? I feel like this is a thing I've noticed before. Like is this, is this standard to just make the pool look interesting in the background? Did you guys notice this? - Great question. Yeah, no, it is, I mean, it feels like a choice. I guess it's possible it could just be a windy day, but I think that I would guess they probably have someone with a paddleboard back there or something between takes, just like stirring up the pot a bit. I think something's going on. - Very funny to think about this. - I don't know, but I mean, there does seem to be a lot of thought into the composition. - Oh, I was just going to get into that, yeah. - I imagine that's like a detail he's, you know, he maybe sets the frame and is just like, oh, okay, what if we, instead of making that stagnant, what if that seems kind of turbulent back there? - Sure, I mean, I guess it's thematic, yeah. - Yeah, there's also like so much, and I think I do really like about the way the movie shot, especially when it starts to go into so aggressively handheld in the second half is like, there's so many shots of Bob in frame in the movie and then him in the background, like on a TV. Either he's currently being filmed, or it's Hogan's heroes, you know. It's just always like, I guess, what I kind of feel like it's conveying is just like, this is a dude who's like always performing, he's always artifice, there's no separation between the man and his characters, 'cause he's just always working at angle. - Yeah, from the beginning of the film, basically, we get this set, I didn't even realize it was intentional for the first couple of minutes, I just was kind of upset by how like clinical and empty all the composition and framing is, and it took me a while to realize that like, I think it was probably in that kitchen scene, or one of those kitchen scenes, that this is like a Father Knows Best sitcom set. - Right, yeah, shooting with like linoleum and everything's in turquoise and beige and-- - He's got that insanely bright red cardigan. It's like fluorescent, like the kind of, I assume the yarn they made that out of is like illegal now kind of a thing. What's the fiesta wear, the radioactive ceramics from like the '20s? - Yes. - Yeah, I actually have a quotation here from an interview that the trader gave. He said, "In the color palette, the hair and makeup and wardrobe, the change in film stock and camera style, the music, and in some ways even the writing, the writing is much more disconnected at the end than it is at the beginning. And therefore, if the writing is more disconnected, the performance gets more disconnected too. The goal was just like an addict wakes up one day and realizes he's living a different life. What happened to my old life? Where did it go? When did it change? In the viewer, there's wait a second. This is not the movie I was watching an hour ago. Where did that movie go? When did it become this movie? That's the effect we were after. It was a fairly simplistic notion in the beginning, but in the execution, I think it became more sophisticated. So there's this shift from mad men color palette to, by the end of it, when he's meeting with this agent toward the end of the movie, it looked like a caustic operas film or something. It's like very handheld, washed out. It's saturated, yeah, yep. Right, yeah. He said he was very inspired by WandaVision, sort of the transition from-- Oh, yeah, it comes across very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. It becomes modern family at the end. All right, but there's a couple like transitional moments that, for example, I think the first scene where he's at John Carpenter's house and they have two girls come over and it cuts to them. Like he's like getting a drink poured for him. And it really is, it takes your breath away almost 'cause it's the first shot that doesn't have this sterilization to it. It's like a close up of both of them. They're shot in like this warm, intimate light. And suddenly you realize what you've been watching up until that point. And like he said, there's a couple of moments as the film progresses. Like we get a straight up jump cut while he's trying to dial Carpenter when he's like basically trying to get his fix later and realizes that he depends on this guy. So yeah, it's got a lot, a lot of little details that add up to this sense that you're describing. There's a moment early on where he is, he's like, I think it's when he's first playing the in one of the strip clubs. He's like playing the drums. He gets gigs playing drums in strip joints. He gets to kind of give himself like a more legitimate reason to be there. And the announcer who's, and it's just one of those incredible shots of a guy. He's sitting on a stool, his cummerbund is like up to his chin. And he's just like spilling off of his stool and saying, you know, on the drums from Hogan's heroes, Mr. Bob Crane, and it cuts to him. And he gives the same kind of like green and wave that he would give like on the tonight show or something. But like you're in a, you're like playing drums in a strip club. Yeah. He just, he can't turn off the kind of like showmanship thing. It's also interesting that, and on that note, in the depiction, 'cause you'll run into this, and my point of reference was I very briefly worked with Jeff Goldblum on something, and he's a guy who like completely leans into the way, specific ways he's famous. Like if someone brings up Jurassic Park, he loves it. Could not love it more, you know what I mean? It's just, and that's what Colonel Hogan, or I'm calling Colonel Hogan, that's what Bob Crane feels like, there's never a point, 'cause people are constantly doing like the "HOLGUN", you know, during the Colonel Clink thing towards him. He seems to love it every time. He seems to knock it sick of it and lean into it. And he likes that aspect of it. He's not at all worried about being, you know, like typecaster being known as one thing. He just wants to keep the train running. Yeah, I wanna return to what you're talking about, Nick, building directly off that, where you were saying that he is on a video all the time. He likes to see himself on video, and it doesn't really matter whether it's him having sex in like a CD motel room, or it's him, you know, he asked the bartender to switch to Hogan's heroes to be able to pick up women. Real quick to build on that, I was looking up Bob Crane online for normal reasons. And YouTube is full of like, compilations of his 18 millimeter footage of hotel rooms. Like he was just one of those guys who filmed everything. Yeah. And so he would just like, film a little tour of the room that they put him up in when he was doing beginner's luck in Atlanta or whatever, which is a great town for dominance by the way. No, I'm glad you interrupted (laughs) since the answer is for dominance. Yeah, because I think that's, it's a beautiful synchronicity we have here with video because obviously I think for most of us, we appreciate what a video represents in terms of being able to capture a moment. There's all these details that would be lost in your memory if he tries to just recall it. But on the flip side, it's vacated of like emotional interiority and the context that comes with actual history of people's lives. Or you know, you don't see the arguments that happens before the kid's birthday on video or something. But I think it makes sense that Crane loves this because seemingly that's how he engages with his whole life is that it doesn't seek out this interiority or this continuity of self or something or this idea of who he should be. He just likes to see that he was and he likes to see that other people are seeing that he was also. Oh, it's like he has like a parasocial relationship with himself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's well said. And that brings me, I think, to the, you know, but I think maybe the most memorable scene in the movie and certainly what I've referenced on "Doboys" incessantly, which is the moment where Bob Crane is watching a video of a, and this is the one that begins with, like he's talking to the, she's like, is this a camera? And again, you want me to turn it off, pretends to turn it off and she's like, he's like, feel better? She's like, yeah. And so he's still filming "The Encounter" which has its own obviously dark layer to it. But like he's watching that by himself in the basement of his family home and then John Carpenter, Willem Foe's character comes in and they're watching it. And it's like, as Greg Keneer as Bob Crane is watching this, he goes like, this is making me, making me hot. And he just starts jacking off and then Willem Foe just joins and he's jacking off. And these two guys, these two bros are jacking off together, which is fine. But the aspects of it of like, to what you were talking about Ian with, just kind of cataloging his life is like, he can't remember what city this was. He doesn't remember what her name was. Like these details are completely fuzzy to him. It's like a thing he didn't even participate in now that he's watching and masturbating to. And he just had like so much of this footage. Yes. Just huge photo books. To talk about Scotty a little bit. So Scotty was, so there's Bob Crane Jr. Who was his son from his first marriage, the marriage to the Rita Wilson character. And that's the character at the, we see as an adult at the end. Yes, that's the Bob Crane Jr. Yes. And he participated in the production. He was a like a consultant or whatever. And appears in the film also as an interviewer briefly. Yes. And he apparently was paid like $20,000 according to Scotty. Scotty is Crane's son with Patty, the character played by Maria Bello, who by the way, you know who loves Maria Bello, is the minions. Wow. Wrote that down two weeks ago. Okay, so. Is that true Dave? Oh, there it is. Yeah, Dave says, Dave says it's true. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate it. Have you seen "Despicable Me 4" yet? I did see "Despicable Me 4," yeah. Wow. Can we get an exclusive? What's your, what are your thoughts? I would have liked more minions. Okay. I mean, without going into it at length, I think they kind of got in the, this is the way that the franchise has now been bifurcated into "Despicable Me" and "The Minions," which is a different timeline, which is basically like the "Grew" prequels. Right. I think because they have these minions focused movies now with the M4, they're like, "Well, it should be more about the family." Sure, sure, sure. So it's so much about the human characters and it's just overstuffed. There's too much, there's just too much of it. And I, like, it never really finds its footing narratively. And also, the big thing, they promise in the trailer that they base their entire marketing around is the Mega Minions, who are a home run. I love the Mega Minions. They're the minions, like "Minions of Engers." They're so, so funny, but they are like kind of, they're like a C or D story. They're really put on the back burner to spend to put the focus on "Grew" and his relationship with his new baby. It's and his daughters and his wife. So it's kind of muddled. They kind of kangaroo jacked it in that way. They very much kangaroo jacked it. It was a big time kangaroo jack or a snow dog. It's a snow dog, it's the same sort of thing. They kind of misdirected it with the marketing, but it worked beautifully, obviously. This is gonna be another hugely successful movie. I mean, yeah, it's making, it's doing a Boff-O-B-O, but good news. They did just announce that "Minions 3," I believe, is, it's got a release date in like 2027 or something like that. - Here's why I'm bullish on "Minions 3." I was actually just talking to Griffin Newman about this. - Pierre Coffin, who directed "The Original" and is "The Voice of the Minions" is returning to "Direct Minions 3." So that's a really, really encouraging sign. - Hey, look, conquering hero. - He's great, yeah. I love that. Love to hear that. It's like they're bringing back daddy to fix it all, yeah. - It's like Sam Raimi directing "Dr. Strange 2." So it's like, "Hey, here we go, all right, here we go." - There we go. Scotty Crane is, I mean, it's hard to, I don't, Ian and I were discussing this. You can't really fault the guy whose father showed him deep throat when he was seven and was then brutally murdered. - For maybe having an unconventional relationship with sex with his father with-- - Anyway, this guy is going to behave is understandable. - Absolutely an impossible life. Everything is stacked against him. - That being said, he did pick one of the more interesting ways to live your life, to talk about. So this is from, I believe from a New York Times story. So it says, Scotty, who is 31, has feuded for years with his half brother, Bobby, who is 51 and lives in LA. Scotty has publicly cast aspersions on Bobby's. Legitimately, Bobby has done the reverse. Quote, "My father had a vasectomy in 1968 and Scotty was born in 1971." Bobby says, "That's all I have to say." So they're like, literally, he's literally saying you are not my father's son, like, right. And then Scotty is the one who started bobcrain.com, which was a website that was both, I have here, this is from bobcrain.com from the homepage. You can only access on the internet. - The internet archive, yes. - This website is dedicated in loving memory to Bob Crane. It is designed to share with you what a wonderfully talented, diverse, and complex man Bob Crane was. Immediately below that. What can I expect to see in the members only section of bobcrain.com? 40 years before Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, Bob Crane was pioneering amateur pornography for the first time ever. See the controversial photographs and videos that may well have cost Bob Crane his life. Totally uncensored photos and videos of Bob and friends letting it all hang out, including group sex shots. The material on this website has never before been available to the public. So he was like, four, I saw different accounts of this, but for either like 395 or 1995, he was-- - 395 was a three-day trial. - Okay, there you go, yeah, yeah, thank you. - Yeah, that written down somewhere, yeah. - Right, Ian called in sick to work to watch all these videos, he's-- - I did investigate some of the free tour, I will say. - Sure, sure, sure. Well, we're responsible journalists. - Yeah, all right, so have to be comprehensive. - But yeah, I mean, this guy was like profiting off of his famous and famously murdered father in the way that he knew how to, but like-- - Yeah, I texted you, Jake, because he also objected to a lot about this film, and I think some of it was fair because if your father is a-- - I believe this is from the article he wrote called "Raging Bullshit." - That's right, yeah, he'd published a few, but yeah, that's one of them. - Basically, the thing that he decided to be to get notoriety for is like, I hate the movie autofocus. - Well, in fairness, he and his mom, Patti, had already written a script called "A Couple Different Things," but one of them was F-stop in reference to this being of a photo nut of his father. - And also, I think to the murder, stopping his father from effing. - Yes, okay, there you go, there you go. - The ultimate title was "Take Off Your Close and Smile." So this was also going to be a sex-centric movie, but that's also strange that you and your mom are writing a movie about your dead dad, her dead husband, or I guess, ex-husband, but the father of her kid, and it's like, but we're gonna delve into his sex life. It's like, their whole relationship with that just seems very, at least a divergent from the dorm. - Right, yeah, I mean, Scotty objects to Maria Bello not stuffing her bra for the film. He's like, my mom has bigger cans, and you need to take things better. - God, that's so weird. - It is so weird, but he's also objecting to some legitimate things that I guess, if your father's already basically being cast in a pretty objectionable or at least questionable light, he tries to say that his father never filmed anybody without their consent, which I don't know if it's true, but some of this I understand where he's coming from, and he also has a fairly mature position on not wanting to go to John Carpenter's trial, because he says something like, my father's gone, pursuing this man or trying to punish him, it's not something that I'm interested in watching, which it requires a lot of distance. At the same time, in an article that I sent to you, Jake, and I'm sure you remember this article when it came out, Nick. This was in Gene Simmons Tongue magazine, volume 1 from 2002. - Another guy who has a photo book of sexual conquest, so it's a commonality between those two fucking machines. - And also a guy who said that depression didn't exist, and then he wrote a book about the 27 Club, like exclusively about people who killed themselves. Anyway, Gene Simmons, be on the show next week. - That's right, yes, we're so excited. So in this article, the author describes Scotty saying that he's gonna go to the first screening, and that he's gonna make his objections known, and he basically does this, he lies about his name, he gets into the screening, and on his way out. - Well, he doesn't lie about his name, he says my name is Robert Crane, and they're like, "Oh, great, you're on the list." And he's like, "I am a different Robert Crane." And then-- - Yeah. - And he gets in there, and they figure it out, and they're gonna kick him out, and he reaches into his pocket, and throws hundreds of cards into the air for bobcrain.com. - They're stickers into the air for bobcrain.com. - Yeah, and this is the thing where it's like, look, a son protecting his father's legacy, or trying to object to the misrepresentation, all of this, I'm very sympathetic to, it's mixed with so much self-promotion stuff, and one of the interviews, he casually also mentions the fact that, you know, I didn't go to the trial because I was working, recording a couple albums at a time, one of them was for Sony, this is the grunge era, so you can imagine it was a big deal. - Right, yeah. - And you're sort of like, what, I mean, what is the purpose here? What are we trying to do? - If you look up a picture of this guy, of Scotty, the main picture that you can find, he looks exactly like Johnny Drama from-- - He does. - He's very much style himself as Johnny Drama. - Yes, yeah. It's a, there's another article, and this is from, and I love sites like this, 'cause it's such an, of an era, but it was a MortisTV.com. - Oh, yeah, MortisTV. Classic. - Classic TV news. But this was a 2002 article that has that picture, and then also is just, you know, giving a lot of context for explaining who this guy was. And first off, the thing you said Ian, which is also in this article, is just like, he's like, he never filmed anyone without consent. I think there's part of, obviously, an agenda there, though, too, because he's the guy who's selling these videos and-- - Right. - So like, he has to say that from a purely, you know, a capitalist side of things, but he, the other thing he strongly objects to is like, my dad did not have a dick implant. Like, he did not have peanut implants with that size. In fact, if you watch his videos, you can tell he had no need for a peanut island. - Right, I've got here, Scotty insists that his internet venture is not exploited. First of all, he also, in some where he said that it's illegal to host pornography on the internet for free, so he had to jar it for it, which I don't think was ever-- - But maybe in 2002, might've caught some people, like, oh, it's probably right, yeah. - I feel like internet laws for a long time were just like, schoolyard rumor. Like, no one knew what was going on. - Oh yeah, that's like all the ROMs, like you would download back in the day. They would be like, you must own a physical cartridge to download this ROMs. Like, that sounds like bullshit, but all right, yeah. - And none of us ever went to a forum to try to get a login for a website that had pictures of naked ladies on it, and then like a, obviously fake FBI warning came up saying, - This is the police, yeah. - Your IP has been logged, and none of us were then worried that our dad's windows were gonna get kicked in by a SWAT team, none of us had that experience. Anyway, Scotty insisted his internet venture is not exploitative, he adheres to a strict, if you've got it, flaunted philosophy. Quote, "Bob Crane was very talented," Scotty said, "very gifted, a great father, "and he had a very large penis." By the way, I don't only resemble him from the neck up. All Bobby has to do is drop his pants and I'll be able to see if he's really Bob Crane's son. Maybe he's afraid to let me see. - Jesus. - And then Schrader for his part said, "I could never have dreamed these people up." Actually, I don't think Dream is the word. Fantasize is more accurate. Wouldn't it be great if there were these kinds of characters for every movie? Bad behavior is so compelling. Sony knows that it's in their interest to let Scotty flip out, like his father, Scotty can't tell when he's acting in a counterproductive fashion. Like his father, he just wants the attention and isn't too discerning about what he gets attention for. So. - Yeah. - Yeah. I don't know. I mean, here's a question. I mean, really more of a declarative statement. Bob Crane just would have been a podcaster. He would have been a podcaster with an only fancy, and he would have done great. - For sure. For sure, the sort of era he would have thrived in. I think there's also like, I mean, this is touched on a little bit. - I think he also would have been like a mega guy, right? Like he seems like he's pretty right wing. He's like upset. - He was a problem, yeah. - Yeah. And he's upset that they're making like jokes about Reagan, you know, towards the end of, or I guess, I guess, I don't know when he was, when actually he was killed, if he was, he lived through Reagan. - It must have been Nixon, I guess, or something. - So yeah, he was upset about jokes about Nixon. - Right, right, right. - That's not a great look. - Yeah. - Yeah. - So like, he's just like, yeah, I think that absolutely would have been, like this would have been the era he could have gotten away with that. I don't know, it's just, he is a fascinating guy. And I guess that's so much of what's, what works about this movie for me. It's just like, it's like, again, I already said like kind of a, you know, psychological profile of this guy, but it's just like, that's what it feels like. It's just like, oh, we're trying to figure out exactly what's going on with this guy, and no one ever really figured it out, but it just, the fascinating to watch him spiral and self-destruct. - He's like, he's very opaque as a psychology, which is, I think I have a piece with a lot of Schrader protagonists, except that he never has the sort of moment of grace that is often at the end, like he doesn't have the pickpocket ending where he gets to sort of realize-- - Reach out. - Through a connection to someone else. And that's, there's basically like an opportunity there, I think, like if he had, if he had been able to let go of his hang-ups about John and stretch the boundaries of his sexual orientation, like maybe he would have been able to find that transcendence, I don't know. - Right, 'cause it's a, and from my reading about the murder trial, a big part of why, in addition to the Scottsdale police and competence and just like it being a very long time before that it actually went to trial, like 14 years, I think it is. And in addition to that, it was that they could never really figure out a motive. And that is one thing that I like about this script is that just like, it's hinted at, but it's never made explicit why John Carpenter might wanna kill his friend, you know? Like it's not like super cut and dry because it's not cut and dry in the investigation and it's not clear in the trial and the jury was just like, we just don't understand why this guy would have done this, you know? So it's kind of hinted at, and part of that is what I think you were driving at, which is just that Bob is maybe unsure about his own sexuality and the way he is acting out is that he is attacking his friend, he's making homophobic cracks about John Carpenter, he's like overreacting and like repulsed when he's, this is the thing we've referenced like it's an orgy, it's a group group when John Carpenter's hand is on his ass during an orgy and like, as the movie progresses, it seems like he's showing his dick to his friend, like he's like, it seems like they're just openly naked in front of each other and having groups sex together, it seems like that's like a barrier, he's gotten past, but he also still needs to create some sort of psychological separation between what he's doing and how he views himself and the way he does that is by projecting it onto his friend. - Yeah, he makes that edit of-- - Yeah, he does like a fan cam. - Yeah, right. - Like a homophobic fan cam, it's a little different. - Exactly right, yeah, there's like K-pop music in the background. - Yeah, I think it's, you know, we've discussed it several times for obvious reasons on our Paul Schrader podcast, but if we're considering how people wrestle with forbidden sexuality and how maybe positive stuff gets lumped in with negative stuff or how they draw an arbitrary line, we talked about it on American Jigalow, Julian K, that character has the same sort of sense of like, I'll do anything and actually society's views on sex are very close-minded except there is a line where doing like gay stuff, he doesn't use that word, is like a whole different realm, basically. He has to preserve-- - He has done it, but he doesn't want to go back to it. - Yes, exactly, right, yeah. And I think if we're figuring out like this man who was never comfortable in the marriages he was in, he never figured out how to be in like a conventional relationship, a relationship that he felt settled in, it's fascinating to see that, you know, the relationship that persists through two of his marriages is this relationship with John Carpenter and it's this relationship where they can be jerk-off buddies and, you know, the lines are certainly beyond what we would associate with conventional heteronormativity and yet he uses it as an excuse to like dig in deeper basically on some of this to say there are still some things that are not acceptable. - And it's almost, I mean, maybe it's too Freudian or too obvious, but there's a way that like, in sort of documenting and showing off his very prolific heterosexuality, there is maybe a sense of like, he's trying to prove something, right? Like obviously he does like having sex with women. - Certainly. - He has the whole monologue about how he loves breasts. But I, you know, I was thinking like, if he had, if he and Carpenter had had more sexual contact with each other, like could everyone have turned out happier? I don't know, I mean, obviously. - Yeah, who knows? I mean, it certainly seems like he's grappling with that and that's like a thing he kind of like refuses to engage with in some level. And but yeah, that does seem to be a thing that seems to be something of a barrier for their friendship and perhaps it ultimately resulted in its destruction and his death, but you know, we don't know for sure. - Yeah, it's really interesting that also, and we were talking about this earlier, but like that this comes from a true crime book because the true crime element of this, and I think I was reading some IMDB comments by some people who are like fans of Bob Crane who watched this movie and were kind of disappointed by it as they were expecting more about like, well, what happened with the murder, what happened with the, it's really just like one scene at the end and then a little bit of a post-death monologue to kind of wrap everything up, but it's really not a true crime story. It's, it's, and so like to just, I don't know, I find it fascinating just as a work of adaptation to just start with that and then end up with this. - Right, I mean, a tiny bit of script context. So there's this guy Michael Gerbosi or Gerbosi who he was basically just like a, you know, classic LA Striver guy. He says, "I made a food delivery to Todd Roskin, "one of the producers of the film. "I was working as a delivery driver "at a well-known deli in Los Angeles. "I would love to know which deli this was." - Mm, the horror- - And the horror- - Catters, mm-hmm. - Yep, makes a lot of sense actually. Yeah, an order came in from the house literally next door to where I was living. When I dropped the food delivery off at Todd's house, I told him I was his next door neighbor and that led to a discussion that eventually weeks later led to him handing me the book, "The Murder of Bob Crane" that he had found in a bargain bin at Samuel French bookstore. Todd and I ended up optioning the rights of the book together and outlining a proposal that we would later run by Scott Alexander and Larry Karazooski. So Scott and Larry are sort of the biopic kings and especially the unlikely subject biopic kings they wrote at wood. - Yep. - Dolomite is my name, big eyes, the Tim Burton film. So they- - The OJ story. - The OJ, yeah, the American crime story. - Yep. - So Gebrowski basically is like, he's a more or less a first time screenwriter and just happens to like do the thing where like a white guy keeps showing up at somebody's office until they take a meeting with him and Alexander and Karazooski were apparently very supportive and like helped him figure it out. And then Schrader says he was getting a bunch of like sort of sleazy biopic stuff. Shown to him, including the Mitchell brothers. Do you not put the Mitchell brothers? They were like two, these two brothers who were, they started a porn theater in San Francisco. They ended up, I think they directed behind the green door. Yeah, they directed behind the green door that which was like one of the big like crossover porno hits after Deep Throat and then one of them murdered the other one. So like that was another, there was a John Holmes biopic that I think he got sent but he picks this one and then he says he basically like he took all of the investigation stuff out of it. So it's a true crime adaptation that stops before the investigation, which I appreciate because I find that stuff can be. Also lurid and indulgent and pro cop a lot of the time, yeah. For sure, yeah, there's kind of no way it's it's, I guess if you focused on the incompetence of the police, they could make it not feel like cop again but so often they are anyway. There is plenty of incompetence by the police. I think just because as everyone keeps saying, Scottsdale was a small town then they are not equipped to handle the murder of a famous person. And so. Yeah, they had like what, they were having like one murder investigation a year at the time of this event. And, you know, doing crazy stuff like, like shaving his head at the crime scene to see where the like what the wounds look like. Right. And like letting his co-star from the dinner theater, like chain smoke in the apartment because she had discovered the body and was freaked out but then her like ashes are just getting everywhere. Like it's all kinds of all kinds of incompetence but that's all sort of left out and we just get this little, this little tag at the end. Like it's, we find out it's a Santa Boulevard, post-death narration in like the last 25 seconds. And he says, I can't blame him. He was a cool guy in his way. That's how it is. Men gotta have fun. It's a great line. End of film. And like, yeah, I mean, there's something about the kind of, the insight persists even after he's murdered. He can't even name what's happening here. Well, yeah, I was talking to you, Jake. 'Cause I, for me, the struggle that I wanted to figure out taking into, or keeping in mind, Scotty's objections and some of the objections I have maybe to the biopic in general because it's a limited form that tends to reinforce like a single reading or a single understanding of a person's life. But I think in watching the film, it did soften me a little bit on this one, even though we know that Schrader got his hands on it and was very explicit about saying, I wanted to turn this people's lives are not dramatic. I think you've said that quote to me and he wanted to make sure that he could turn this into something that was a film which I think can be exploitative in some ways. But if a film is successful in this sense, I think it's because it makes it clear that it's representing one person's perspective on a moment and I think the closing of the film, the Sunset Boulevard monologue makes it clear that it seems this is supposed to be like Bob Crane's understanding of Bob Crane's life, which I think is more interesting than trying to say. This is definitive somehow or this speaks to being able to understand somebody as they actually are, which I think is a much harder project. No, for sure, that's, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, yeah, he's done similar things with Mishima and like Patty Hearst is also about sort of like a, trying to foreground and like explore what the limitations of someone's perspective is. And we even, we get that sequence where he sort of spaces out on set and has a kind of dream sequence where his, really like one of the only indications we get that he has any anxiety about being found out. Yeah, and even then it's sort of like hyper-explicit when he does talk about it, which is funny. Yes, yeah, but the camera like pulls up a little bit and we get almost like a Mishima shot, like where we have sort of a room in a black void, you know, which happens in Patty Hearst as well. And that combined with like the harsh lights and Angela Betelmenti who's doing the score here as well, there is like a very like David Lynch quality to it, specifically like and Trader even makes a joke about, you know, next I'm doing the, I'm gonna do a Robert Blake movie, ha ha ha, which like that's what Lost Highway is, is like kind of a Robert Blake movie, kind of an OJ movie. And Scotty Crane wanted David Lynch to direct his version of this film. Yeah, well, he also said like, it's a lot like Pulp Fiction, my script, like, oh, okay. He also wanted, I bet he wanted like Jack Nicholson or Tom Cruise to play his dad, you know? Yeah, sure. I was thinking with Rita Wilson, like it would be extremely interesting if Tom Hanks played Bob Crane, just like an actual beloved figure. Yeah, he hasn't quite really had a role like that, right? Unless I'm forgetting something. Well, I mean, the closest is like in, so there's road to Perdition was the famous, like he's kind of a bad guy in it, but he can't resist being Tom Hanks. A little bit in cloud atlas, like one of the stories, he's like, right, sure. He's like a. Antonio Gold. Yeah, yeah. He's like a foul-mouthed Irish or coffee novelist who like murders his publisher or something. Yeah. But then most of the movie, it's the true, true, you know? Oh, right, no, yeah, 'cause there's that part. There is the part where he throws a guy out the window and then there's the other story, yeah, where he's the southern guy. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And he robs his shipmate, right? Or he poisons his shipmate? Yes, yeah, he's like the evil, the one with the, it's like a slave ship or something, right? They're going to the collab or something like that. That sounds right. There's a great clip of Tom Hanks promoting cloud atlas on like maybe the Today Show where they're asking him about the accent work that he learned and he's explaining, he's giving you an example and he just says fucking like by accident on the Today Show and then seeing Tom Hanks realize like, I'm so sorry, it's, I mean, it's ultimately certainly winning because he's Tom Hanks and he goes into like if Mr. Rogers said accidentally dropped an F bomb like he. That's awesome. Yeah, but recommend that one. That movie's insane. He said on some podcast, they think that it was like one of his favorite movies he ever worked on. Oh, I love the cloud atlas, yeah. I think it's okay, it's bananas, but it's so fun. It's a bananas masterpiece about like being nice, a wonderful film. And just such a big swing, which I know I said, but you gotta respect it. The, for the Wachowski's, I will say the, so Greg Keneer plays Bob Crane. I think he's great. I think it's an, it's awesome casting. I think it's a really strong performance. He's so smarmy. He's so like charming, but in a scummy way. It's, he seems so, so phony, but also like so, like Ernest at once, it's, it's great. It's a great performance. Yeah. The other person I saw who was originally cast was Russell Crow, which is really strange to wrap your, your mind around. Oh, yeah. That would not work to me at all. Cause like, no, Keneer is so good at the sitcom stuff too. That's what you need. Yeah, and that's what the, what needs to be foregrounded it. Cause you know what he's on. Did he get a talk show? Cause I know he was on. Oh, yeah, Greg Keneer's talk show. Yeah, he used to watch that. That was, it was like the late, late show. I think he was the host. Yeah. I was saying he took over from Kilbourn or something like this. Yeah. I think it was before Kilbourn. I think that was before. Oh, okay. Cause it was, he was the host. And then he, he got, he, he got cast in as good as it gets. And then I think that led to Kilbourn. I think that, I think Kilbourn came out. I could be wrong with the chronology. He was quite good in as good as it gets. He was also, he was the first host of talk soup, I believe. That's right. Yeah. But then yeah, he's like, it's, it's interesting, you know, when we, when we, when we talked about Clint Eastwood on, on this podcast, we were often talking about how he was basically like undermining his image, like from the moment he had one. Yeah. I feel like Keneer is the same way where like, like, he does mystery men in 1999 where he's sort of like, he's a, he's like a boy scout who is oblivious to the fact that he's like being, being corrupted by, is he, is he in the thrall of Casanova Frankenstein in that film? I believe so if I remember correctly. I mean, he's like, he's like Captain America with a bunch of like NASCAR logos on him, basically. Yeah. And so like, Keneer, he's, he's already sort of ironizing his, his persona, like from the get go in an interesting way. And then there's, there's Kurt Fuller as Werner Klemper, we have to shout out just doing an incredible performance. All time character actor. He, and also in 2019, Kurt Fuller is in the film, Phil, which we all know as the directorial debut of Great Keneer, which is just why that's nice. You know, one of those, one of those actor directed movies where there's like nine Oscar nominees in it, but nobody ever sees it. It's just like buddies doing a favor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. His only, his only directing credit. I'm looking at it now. Wow. I think he's, he was been rumored for Shang-Chi too, but I don't know if they've signed the deal on that yet. Depressed, a depressed dentist in midlife crisis tries to learn why one of his happiest patients suddenly commit suicide in a dark comedic adventure ensues, he directs and stars. That's an extremely actors directorial debut sound. Yeah, it's true. Is it set in the town where Greg Keneer grew up? I once saw, speaking of the Avengers, actually, I once saw a Clark Greg joint. What was that? I was on a date. Okay. And it was playing it like the Lemley and Glendale or something. And he played like an agent, a talent agent who discovers like a very talented young actress who's like 14 and then realizes she's being abused by her parents or something. And it's like, why did you make this up that this is happening in You're the Hero? And then I believe at the end of it, he literally sprouts angel wings and flies into Heaven. Ah, okay. Jesus. I love actors. They're very special people. That rocks. I was going to ask you, Nick, in your experiences at Funny or Die and writing for TV, did you ever meet anybody who, you know, any kind of goody two-shoes public persona folks who turned out to be weirdos? Or just any surprising, maybe the other way around, any surprising real-life personalities? Let's see. I'm thinking, you know, I worked with Diddy. I don't know if there's anything there. That's an interesting one. He didn't seem like a nice guy. Yeah, no, four. Actually, I will say that I worked with Diddy. So this was a Funny or Die video that he came in and he made and that I, me and Andy Maxwell directed. And it was the way it worked out. The only way we could schedule it because he was so busy at the time was it had to be like a 7 a.m. call time on a Saturday. And this is like, "Oh, man, 7 a.m. on a Saturday." Yeah, sorry. Hey, man, we'll see. And his assistant kind of seemed like, "Oh, he might be reticent to do this. We'll see." He showed up early and was like, he was already in the makeup chair when I arrived at like, 650. And then he was off book. And so he won all his lines and was super game. And after the shoot, like he stayed, you know, stayed as long as he needed to shoot everything. And then afterwards, he sent us all Sarak Vodka. And for years, I would be like, "Diddy is the best guy. He's a total pro. He'll give you whatever you want. He's so fun. He's so game for whatever. He's willing to make fun of himself." And like, just completely. But that came about because he said he was a huge fan of Downton Abbey. So we just did a thing where we comped him into a bunch of Downton Abbey footage called a Downton Diddy. Interesting. Anyway, that video I don't think is, I think it's now illegal. You can only see that video now at bobcrain.com. Yeah. Well, it's also, I think it's on the CIA's website because Osama bin Laden headed on his computer. There was those Tom and Jerry cartoon. Yeah. Yeah. You loved, he loved Downton Diddy. He loved Tom and Jerry. And he loved like, Hentai puzzle games or whatever. Yeah. Much a porno video game. It sucks that Bob Crane didn't, would stick around to find Hentai puzzle games. Oh yeah. It would have been super enough for him. Yeah. This is basically, if no real consequence. So Werner Klemper, who played Colonel Klink on the, on, um, Hogan's Heroes, his father was Otto Klemper, who was like a famed composer and, and conductor. Mm-hmm. Who was a protégé of Gustav Mahler. Wow. So wild. So wild. He's like three degree handshakes from Gustav Mahler. Yeah. And life isn't, it's incredible how long life is. Yeah. We were talking about, on, on, uh, on our Mishima episode, or I think I failed to say that one of Mishima's, like, lovers is a, a very prominent, um, drag performer in Japan. Yes. Was and is. Yeah. Was Yukio Mishima's lover and friend. And also voiced the Pokemon Arceus in a, like a, like a 2019, like, direct to, direct to DVD film. Yeah. That's bizarre. Wow. And Pokemon, is that Pokemon three, the movie? Is it the third one? I think it's even deeper than that. It's, I was deeper than that. It's so funny. Yeah. It's, I think a prequel that takes place. It's like the Pokemon Silmarillion sort of, like, Arceus that we've created the world or something like that. I think you're exactly right about that. Thank you very much. We haven't really touched on something that is in the film, which is just the weirdness of Hogan's Heroes being a, a show that was produced in the late sixties. Yeah. About the Holocaust. I mean, not to, you know, I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like 17 to show. It's a company that was sued by. I was going to say, yeah, it gets sued by, I don't know if it's Billy Wild or somebody. I think the writers, the writers of the play. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, and it's, we talked about on our, uh, there's a Clint Eastwood film called Where Eagles Dare, where a lot of the Nazis are played by, like, people who escaped concentration camps or gyms, whose parents were in concentration camps. Yeah. A lot of German actors in, in Hollywood in the mid century were like, escaped German Jews. And like, who do we have? We can do a German accent and look scary. Put them in. Those guys who are also there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's fascinating. In connection with Bob Crane, this idea of like, what distance do we need to be able to put something on video or to transform the meaning of something that's on video to say, you know, I don't want to reference ongoing genocides. But you know, the idea of something that was like less than 20 years out, being something that you could turn into a source of comedy. I'm not even critiquing it. You know, Stolic 17 is a good example of a film that I like a lot. Yeah. I've only seen a little bit of Hogan's heroes. Created by a German Jew himself, Billy Wilder. Yeah. Yeah. And Yale, Diamond, I believe also. Yeah. It just becomes this like a form of therapy for some people, but it's also being watched by people who have no sense of what the actual act means, right? You're producing this thing that is viewed by a great range of audiences. I remember my middle school classmate, whose name was Devin and was like the most Nordic boy I've ever seen, who loved to just yell out of context. Lines from Chappelle's show in the hallway. Yeah. Where like, it's one thing for Dave Chappelle to be like, he would literally yell white power in the Dave Chappelle black white supremacist voice. Right. Just cause it was like a funny thing. It was the same thing as like yelling, yeah, I want cheesy poops or whatever to him. But yeah, out of context, these things are, they sort of lose their, well, they lose their context. He was an example of one of the reasons why Dave Chappelle walked away from Chappelle's show in the first place. Yeah. He was like, you know, Devin, he heard Devin and all the stuff that he was up to. Yeah. Exactly. So when I was reading about Hogan's heroes specifically, it did say that a number of the cast members who played the Germans were Jews. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of them said had a quote that was something like, who better to play not, or who knows how to play Nazis better than Jews, you know. Right. So I think there was a little bit of, yeah, that, that I imagine that was, that was part of the, I don't know, motivation behind casting, but at least like that was like part of the, how those, those actors dealt with the, with, with that task of playing those characters. But it is such a strange moment for this to exist. Like, Hogan's here is the thing I originally learned about the show from The Simpsons because Homer is like talking about, like, there's a moment where a, I can't remember like a, like a, a, a, he has like a spirit vision and it's like comes to him as a founding father and Homer doesn't know who he is. So he's like, ah, fine. And switches to being Colonel Clink from Hogan's Heroes. And I was like, Colonel Clink. And so like, I remember that's how I learned about like Hogan's Heroes and what a weird piece of pop culture it was. Yeah. And like as someone who was born after it went off the air, well, after it went off the air, I like, it was, it was just such a strange thing to reflect back on. And then also to talk, look at the timeline of like, wait, yeah, this wasn't like veterans of who were dealing with PTSD were watching the sitcom that was on network television was making a joke out of all it. Like it was so, so, it was, it's honestly like, like having a, I don't know what the embarrassing is because there's no, there's not like a gigantic global trauma on the scale of World War Two in recent memory, you know. I mean, I guess it'd be like, if there was like a sitcom set in the World Trade Center, like, what is the, what is the compare for American audiences that might be the sort of thing, although I feel like there's so much, then again, there's so much irony immediately. Right, true. Do 9/11 that maybe that that's just always been a way that people dealt with these things and that we're just less conscious of it because no people don't have social media. I don't know. It's interesting, you know, Schrader nods to the, to, to some controversy about it by having a Jewish, like executive buddy mentioned at Bagley Junior. It's Schrader's friend at Bagley Junior, who is like, if you wanted to depict a Nordic alien coming down to like kickstart humanity with a monolith or something, it would be played by at Bagley Junior. But the creator of Hogan's Heroes. I would have to get to this. An old friend of the show, actually. That's right. The character played by, played by Miles Teller on the offer. Wow. Yeah, he, he was also a friend of Clint Eastwood and so he produced, he has two Oscars for Best Picture, one for the Godfather, one for Million Dollar Baby. Because he was just around forever. And he wrote this as like a quite a young man and I think this also complicates the sense of, of like ownership of discussion. He's Jewish. He's Jewish. He's Jewish. But he's an American Jew from the East Coast who, you know, I'm sure new people coming out of the Holocaust, but he's not somebody. He's dealing with his second hand at the closest. Right. So family or generational trauma rather than, than, or like ancestral trauma, I should say, rather than his own experience. Right. Which is not to say that he can'ts, but it just means that it's, you know, murkier than, than an actual survivor doing something like this. I think I always assumed it was like a, a Pepsi version of mash, but it's, it predates mash. It does. Yep. Like by. Well, that's really interesting. Yeah. It's not. There's like, there's no reason to come up with this idea except that that's what you were thinking about, you know. Apparently, like the show keeps contriving reasons for basically like Hogan is working for the US army to like, keep the camp going so that they can use it for like, uh, information gathering and like, like, they have to keep going, which means they have to contrive reasons for the Nazi prison camp to stay open. And it's also like, it's permanently winter on the show. Please really bizarre. It's so funny. Yeah. It's like trapped in a, in an unending hell where you're just like, you're, you're, you're all you ever do is, is, uh, befuddle like this, this lumbering Nazi kernel. You're just getting the better of him, but only to a point that the status quo can reset at the end of the episode. Yeah. It's, it's interesting because like, the movie does, I think pretty efficiently, in addition to the Ed Bagley Jr. scene. Um, and by the way, Michael McKeon also has a, like, just like a quick, like a single scene, but it's just like one of those things. Like, man, what a great bit of casting here. Just coming in here. Just fucking. Yeah. At this point. So he's, he's also now in 2002, married to an Edo tool who is in Paul Schrader's catpeap. So that's right. Yes. Yeah. I found that out recently. Yeah. Um, anyway, so the, in addition to the Ed Bagley Jr. scene, the scene where Bob Crane is learning about it from his agent. Um, it does kind of like, very efficiently. I think it's a nice, a nice piece of writing just to just step through all of these concerns through Bob Crane's character being like, it's like what? It's a Holocaust company. It's like, well, it's set at a POW camp. Like, it's like, they've kind of anticipated all of the responses and they have like, you know, it's not a concentration camp. It's a POW camp. And then like the, you know, like at first, he's like, so it's like a drama is like, no, it's a comedy. You know, it's every, every bit of information that you'd like, but it, but they're trying to soften it at once. Um, I don't know. It, it's the whole thing is baffling that it ever came to exist, let alone become this gigantic. Yeah. It was like a big deal. And, and, uh, I believe that at least in some of the scenes, Greg Keneer is wearing an authentic Hogan leather jacket, which is. Wow. Coolish to me. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then the other cast member, they, they, in addition to her to, um, you know, they, they have a few of the cast that kind of like are in it a little bit, but, but the other one, they kind of spotlight is a Richard Dawson. Of course. Yeah. And Richard Dawson himself, I think something of a famed like kind of like horny guy, right? Yeah. He hosted family feud later in his life and he was, you know, he was kissing women on the mouth. But he didn't have this accent, which is very strange. Oh, interesting. I mean, maybe he dropped it, but like I watched interviews with him that were, at least from the family feud and, and post era and he doesn't have this, like, basically Dick Van Dyke, Mary Poppins accent. Cause I think Michael E. Rogers who plays him is Australian. So like, okay. He's putting this accent on, which is not, this is a famous, but it's like if someone was playing, you know, Steve Harvey and they came out doing like a strong Canadian accent. Like, we all know what that guy talks like. Yeah, that's an interesting choice. It's like, I mean, I guess it's kind of like Tom Hanks and, um, playing Colonel Tom Parker. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. He's kind of invented his own little accent there, but it's really fun. I don't know. I think it, I think it does work for the movie. Sure, sure. And they just call him like the British guy cause it's like, it's so much of like, it's, it's trying to kind of operate in shorthand. And he's more just establishing that he's the link between him and John Carpenter. And he's also like this, this kind of jealous rival that he forces John Carpenter to excise from his life, you know. But that, that's really interesting that he did not have the, that accent. Yeah, it's a strange move. And I think the Dawson character is significant for another reason, which is to serve as a foil to Bob Crane's character. Cause he's also kind of like a freaky fuck guy who likes technology. So all the defining Bob Crane features and he, like you said, he auditioned for the Hogan role. So he's, you know, literally like sliding doors, Hogan. Therefore for the grace of God, yeah. Yeah, but he manages it in like a, you know, whatever, Frank Sinatra speaking of sort of like a way that allows people to be winky and everything's fine. And it doesn't affect your career. And there are versions of this that were basically acceptable and it's not clear where that line is for somebody like Bob Crane. Yeah, I think there's also a little bit of an element of Richard Dawson seems to legitimately have like charisma with women. And he's actually, he's actually versus Bob Crane is using all of these sort of like parlor tricks to kind of like, like, you're like, what is that me on the TV? You know, to try to lean on his fame and use that to parlay it into, you know, sexual opportunities. Now, I know that you're a happily married man, Nick. Yeah, does this ever happen? But do I have a fuck basement? Yes. Going down there later, Jack off with my buddy. Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, and what I love about that saying there, they're just like talking about other stuff too. They're just, they can't. Yes. Can't help a jack off. And he doesn't take his jeans off. I miss Scotty too much. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about your son while you're jacking on. Yeah. But, uh, do you in, in your, uh, wildly successful podcast, uh, life, do you and, and your cohost, do you, do you field, uh, propositions from, from amorous listeners? Uh, this is a great question. I think like anyone who has any sort of platform or prominence, yeah, you end up getting some, you know, unsolicited advances. I think that's just kind of the nature of, of, uh, but, but like, like, uh, to me, it's not, it's not anything that I can't, uh, deflect or, or that I find ever like, you know, threatening or, or onerous or whatever. Right. Thankfully, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that, that always exists, but I think there is a layer of like, even me with like two shitty podcasts that I would not call wildly successful, but whatever, whatever, whatever level of success you want to, uh, ascribe to them. It's like, even someone like me ends up getting some of that. So you can only imagine back in the era of three network television channels. Oh, yeah. Having a top 20 show, just how like you were, he just was, must have been beating him off with a stick. He was just like constantly being approached and the movie definitely conveys that. And he and John Carpenter were beating him off together, but, uh, yeah. It's interesting. The film really depicts these like different layers of fame and like the way that he's, 'cause he's a radio. He's like King shit on radio, like to the point where he can, he can sort of get the Lone Ranger to do his stick with him. Yeah. But then he's still like trying very hard to get TV roles. And so he's, he's sort of, uh, begging and scraping in that way, but then he's big, dogging Carpenter because he's more famous. He's like the famous one in that zone. And then the way that like when he's doing dinner theater, he's coming. He's on the, on the down slope, but the people in the dinner theater with him, they presumably might be like earlier in their career doing this on their way to Hollywood. It's just a, it's a side of, of the industry that you don't see depicted quite as much. These kind of like, continuing to try to hustle for any sort of relevance, you know, and, and, and like, see, he's, we're kind of seeing all sides of it because you're seeing the, you're seeing the, the, it started like after he's already successful. He's got a hit on a radio show. He's on Donna Reed, which was a popular TV show. Yeah. But he's trying to get into movies when he gets offered this, the lead of this, the Hogan's heroes and he kind of can't turn it down. Right. Yeah. But then he ends up like that was, that was it. And I feel like that was like, that was TV for the longest time. You'd get that one big role. And that's it. Like you're, you're, you're basically like, I guess the modern version of that is maybe some office cast members who are kind of like, Hey, you know what? That's your one thing. You were this character on the office and you're kind of having trouble. You're struggling turning that into anything else. Unless you make a million dollars a year on Cameo. Yeah, exactly. What, I mean, that's like the equivalent of, I feel like some people, some people would think of that as dinner theater. Like that's, that's the dinner theater of the era. This, this is a thing like I'm an actor. I feel like I should be doing something, you know, that's high art now. But instead I'm kind of scraping. But the way the dinner theater is handled, it's like, it's a thing, a scene and then editing thing I always love, which is like just before it attempts saying like, I'm not doing it. There's no way I'm doing it. And then the cuts to him doing it. It's just like. Yeah. And I love that there's sort of a montage of like the, the repeated performances of him doing the same thing over and over again. And using the same tricks with his audience banter. Absolutely. The same sort of like bit of smarmy charm and makes it so much nastier yet to see him do it time and time again. When, when you see that he, he starts putting on the, the Hogan jacket on stage. Yeah. I did want to talk about the shifts that we've seen, which I think is a positive one. It's not obviously like a global shift, but at least among, you know, the, the smart and kind of people who listen to this show. From this sort of Hollywood Babylon style, like obsession with the depravity of famous people, whenever they get, they get caught doing something to I think now, uh, people are, are more enlightened about how like the rich and famous have private sex lives also. And I think, uh, you know, I compared to, because like tabloids were publishing these, these, the photos of crane and compromising positions. But nowadays, like, I remember, I think Chris Evans accidentally Instagrammed his penis or something. And there was a, there was a lot of, you know, hey, that was, that was an accident. This is not consensually published material. Let's all respect the privacy of, of Chris Evans and his penis. And I, it's, it's weird how, I mean, it's a good thing, but I think it's, it's, it's interesting how much that's changed where. And same with like, you know, I think, what is it? Tyga has an only fans, the rapper, and he's like continuing to be a rapper too. Like, this is just the thing where you can have both of these. You can have, you can have a, uh, sort of a public sex work career, essentially, and then still still have mainstream success, which is still licensed your name for Tyga bites sold through Robert Earl's empire of ghost kitchens. Yeah, very, very bad chicken tenders from Tyga. Disappointing outing. Yeah, it's a bummer. I believe it. That, that is interesting. I mean, like, yeah, the thing, this is such an obvious thing in Rest in Peace, Paul Rubens, legendary comedian and incredibly comedic influence on so many people. But yes, his, his private life, you know, issue was, was the big thing that I remember for my childhood of just like the idea of like, he was just exiled. There's just like, you're just like done. You're like, you're 10 years in the wilderness. Yeah, because of something you were doing in private that, you know, I mean, in public, but like, in what you, where you assumed you had some sort of expectation of privacy. There's no more appropriate place to masturbate in public. Like, he did everything right and they indicted him, basically. Yeah. And so like you saw, and then you contrast that with the, you know, Rest in Peace, another legendary comedian, Fred Willard, who had a similar sort of incident. And I feel like that was much more of where people were like, leave the man alone. Right. Let him do what he wants to do. He's not hurting anyone, you know? Yeah. So it is interesting to see that shift happen over the course of 20 to 30 years. And obviously we're at a much, a much different place during the lifetime of Bob Crane. Well, if we go back further, the weirdness of it, I think is that, you know, I mentioned the Hays Code earlier in part that comes around because Fatty Arbuckle, there's like a well published incident where you raped somebody. And that was seen as like an indicator of the depravity of Hollywood, which is why you also couldn't show like consensual interracial marriage, right? So like this sense that something that could be in somebody's personal life is a totally beautiful, acceptable thing is held against them in the same way that like a violent act against a person would be held against them, which is bizarre. You're right. It's wonderful that that's becoming better and better. And I think in the film, we see a moment where I think it's Anne, you know, his first wife finds the photos and says, you know, would your son be proud of you? Or what do you think your son would think of this? And it's the same thing, right, where you think, well, is he being shamed? The answer is yes, yes, he will write it back. He's going to monetize these later. We have found out since that yes, everything is fine. Yeah, the question is sort of like, is he being shamed for just having had sex for being a sexual person, or is he being shamed for filming women and cheating on his wife and doing things that maybe do deserve a little bit of reprobation or something? Well, and I also don't even know how much this, and I don't know if we're talking about the film or the public response to him as a celebrity. Maybe we're talking about both at once, but like, I don't know how much the film is like necessarily like saying this guy should be shamed or anything. I think it's more just sort of taught, just interested in interrogating what led to this, like what led him down this path where he just was unable to escape, you know, this is something of a gilded cage he made for himself, you know, where he thought like he was getting as every desire fulfilled, but then he ended up getting the stuff that he was actually pursuing gets taken away from him piece by piece. One thing I really like this is this is a bit of a tangent, but like in the strip club early on the first time he gets convinced to go to the strip club with with Richard Dawson and with John Carpenter. And the drummer from the band goes up to him and is asking about his rate like his radio shows like, Hey, is that really you on the drums? It's like the one time his characters like genuinely offended. Yeah, of course, like I play for the drum. Why would I lie about that? Yeah, that's really funny. Yeah. But that's a thing he's really defensive about and it's, I don't know, maybe that's the thing in and of itself too like maybe his real passion honestly was jazz drumming and his outlet for it was going to fucking go into strip clubs and playing playing the drums so that maybe that's how it led what led to everything. I forget who it is who asked him like what would you like to be true and he says like I'd like to play drums with buddy rich. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Rita Wilson at this time could not get out of period pieces about aspiring jazz drummers. She's in this she's in that thing you do. Someone. Oh, wow. film also says the phrase that thing you do. So it's all connected. I have a bunch of red yarn over it. I wanted to make a connection based on what Nick was just talking about, which is like, you know, what does this film think about Bob Crane? What is its assessment of this or like what. Yeah, if we're if we're stepping back and you know, part of the premise of the podcast is to talk about the implications of this for people interested in left politics or approaching the world with that kind of lens. Jake, you did a wonderful thing. I was told you that you were genius for making a connection between this and sex lives and videotape, which I mean it's in the name of the film, but yeah, I wasn't that impressed with my connection, but thank you so much. So I was I have to film. I like a lot. Maybe love and I rewatched it before we recorded. And there's a moment in that film, which for those who haven't seen it is similarly about a guy who has maybe an unconventional relationship with sex and he videotapes interviews with women where they're sort of given a chance like a liberation moment where they're able to talk about their sex lives, but also he uses these tapes to jerk off when he's alone basically because he's impotent and can't have sex. So there's a moment where he gets confronted about this eventually by Andy McDowell's character and she says like why why do you do this and I have the quote here. His response is why why you don't know who I am. You don't have the slightest idea who I am. Am I supposed to recount all the points in my life leading up to this moment and just hope that it's coherent, that it makes some sort of sense to you. It doesn't make sense to me, you know, and I was there. And I think that's totally fair. I mean, this is something that I love in film when two people are having an argument and both of them are right. I think it's really great. So it's like a story. And her point is, look, I basically what she says over the course of the rest of the conversation is I don't pretend to understand everything about you, but I care about you and now we have a relationship and I want to deal with this thing that is in your life. I can't understand you completely. I basically have to respond to the amount that I can understand. And I think that speaks to this film in the sense like the people in Bob Crane's life. I mean, he's an enigma. He's a bizarre dude. We don't know what his sexuality was exactly. We don't know. Like he said, we don't know the background of why he's drawn to this stuff, why he preferred it over like a successful career. Basically, you can stop doing it. Somebody asked Scotty if he knew if his dad had had any like sexual abuse as a child, then he said his grandfather had some dirty comics, but that's all he knew about. Yeah. It's a mystery. Right. So we can't make a coherent story. And I think the film doesn't try to do that. But I think the people in his life, like we haven't talked about Lenny, his agents sort of confronting the sense of like, look, I don't know what's going on with you, dude. But if we're trying to like meet you where you are and respond to people in the position that they're in, we have to figure out at least some version of the story that we can make sense of. Or like, I don't know, you know, what is our responsibility, maybe returning to the biopic question, if we can't understand other people, but we also have to be in a position to respond to them. I don't know. I'm not sure what the film is saying. I think that's very well put. And I think what's the tragedy of Bob Crane in the film, and I guess in real life, is that like, he recorded the surface of himself. Like he was so conscious of and so carefully documenting like his outward appearance. But he had apparently like no interest in anything going on inside of him. And I think, you know, I was thinking on maybe this is a hack. We're all on our phones so much, aren't we? But like, wow, yeah. So much of how we live our lives now is documented. And if you go on vacation and you don't take photos, did you go kind of thing? I think you're right about this, Jake. In the film that make a big deal, basically every tech advancement, now they have color, now you can put the reel to reels in the cassette. So everything is a little bit faster. He's got to show him the cassette as soon as he gets off the plane. It's a little bit closer, a little bit quicker turnaround. So yeah, you're right, I think. If we're out chasing babes, we can tape Johnny Carson and watch the boy. Yeah, there's, I'll have just a moment of wrap my mind around that. In the in the grace book, he talks about, because I guess in doing research, he watched like all of this stuff. And he talks about how Crane would have tapes where it would be like, whatever, like the great escape off of TV, and then all of a sudden it would just cut to him having sex with two women. Because he just like taped over some, he had, he needed some tape. And so he, he found it where he had, and like, toward the end of his life, like one of the last things he was doing was trying to edit together some version of like a horror film that his, that Scotty wanted to see, but cutting out like the two scary parts or something. So he like, he had Carpenter bring him some like editing equipment. Carpenter would follow him around the country with, as you see in the movie, like those, all those giant like road cases full of video equipment. And he would set up like, like a full like avid sweep in his, in his, in like the whatever the dinner theater equivalent of the comedy condo is because like all these theaters have like some apartment nearby where the lead of the plague and stay. And so yeah, he would just set up this like master console where he could do all of his editing. I mean, the guy was like, he was, I think if he had directed his efforts slightly differently, he could have done some really cool stuff like clearly he had a knack for this. He had a fascination, but like just couldn't stop. Couldn't stop fucking. And well, and also just like the complete absence of separation of like, obviously, like, yeah, he was living a lie to some degree, but there is, but when he's talking about like he's, you know, he's, he's using this video to edit pornos of himself, but he's also, like, he's using the setup to edit these, these video, you know, these, these pornos, but he's also like, but I can use this edit cartoons for Scotty, you know, like he has, it's a dual purpose to him. But he can't, he can't separate that those things might need to be different parts of his life. Yeah, he's like, and that, you know, like the same camera that I think it's the same camera that he's using, like film is wife washing dishes, and then, you know, John Carpenter is using it to film him getting a blowjob. Like it's like, it's so, yeah, it's, it's that, you know, honestly, like that level of it is part of what makes it feel so depraved. Right, right, right, right. It's that he's mixing the two, the two worlds and, and I guess, you know, one, one crane kid said that he didn't have a problem with that and, and neither should we any other crane kid said like, yep, that was his problem. I'll take my $20,000, please. The, the, the, the one thing, just going back to the strip clubs, I will say that the, that C in the, that I'm a strip club guy, but I know that there's like strip club DJs and like club music is like what's going on now. But like, just seeing that there used to be like a jazz quartet playing. Yeah, well, during a strip tease, I'm just like, now I was like, we used to make things. Yeah, like a guy who played with Charles Bingus is up there at like the seven males. Yeah, a guy with a tenor sacks just fucking wailing. They're probably like union musicians like, right. Right. Right. It's beautiful. Plus like, you know, Lenny Bruce is inventing stand up comedy there or whatever like. Although, you know, I've never been to a, I've never really been to a strip club. Me neither. Ian and I were talking about the, the famous, well, famous to us, Brent Weinbach joke about men going to strip clubs like, hey, do you want to go get a boner together? Right. But the closest I got was I was on a, I used to have a job that would sometimes fly me to San Francisco from Los Angeles and I was on the same flight with guys from the sales team. Which is basically just like a continuation of fraternity, like you go straight from fraternity to sales team. And so they're like, telling this is San Francisco, they were saying some strip club, it was the famous, like they have really good fried chicken. Like that, that's a kind of, that's a thing that men say now to go to the strip club. Oh, no, the food's actually good here. And so they were trying to get, they were trying to like head to the strip club quickly before we had to go back to the airport. And I got dragged along because I was like sharing a car with them to the airport, but I managed to look terrified enough that they're like, you know what, maybe we shouldn't. So I got, I got into the, I got basically into the like the anti room of the strip club. And I heard music and I saw like maybe a leg gyrating and then then I was ushered out because I look too scared. I wonder if like, yeah, this is the part of why the, you know, guys like you and me, Jake, it's just like we should avoid a strip club at this point in our lives is because maybe you just turn into Bob Crane. Like, if you reach a certain age, it's like, oh, wow. Okay. All right. I'm a sex guy. Be like P.C.T. Yeah. You didn't even just trip club. I have very briefly older brothers as it was related to your older brothers. Absolutely. None of them would ever do that, which I say with great respect. No, this is also like a college era thing, but it was disgusting and we fortunately left quite quickly, but I worked at a hotel in San Francisco. And I remember very clearly a man while I was working at reception and coming up to me at like 10 45 and waiting until it was just us at the reception basically to be able to come up and say like, well, okay, I mean, I like, I like, you know, you probably know what's up. And where should I go here? I have, you know, just absolutely horrified to be asked this. The guy should have come up to you and be like, Hey, do you know where the nearest games workshop is? I would have, I mean, the metric. I don't know. Look at him in a walk away. Easy. Come on. Yeah, but I also remember speaking to your, do you want to get a boner together? A sleepover when I was probably in eighth grade at like a guy's house who didn't like me that much anyway, but you know, like out of inertia, I'm with the whole group and I get invited. Yes. Yep. And he, he shows me his older brother's websites, which was some type of, you know, bustiladies.com and my biggest takeaway from the sleepover. Some type of bustiladies.com. So I've sponsored this week. Besides being horrified also that, you know, I have to like leave the sleepover with this. I left my contacts outside of the case on accident and in the morning had to put them in and I couldn't help but feel a sort of Christ's punishments for my behavior. And like trying to play with the horns. Yeah. This like dried contact into my eye and leave the sleepover and say that everything was fine. So this actually reminds me this is the second time that Willem DeFoe has played a carpenter in a poster film. It's a great point. Very good point. It doesn't ask what time it is in the other movie now. It's, but he does get with his two ladies. His two. That's true. That's a good point. Yes. My speaking of Willem DeFoe and cranks, she mentioned, she objected and said if they're going to talk about his dick so much, they have to show it. Like you can't, it's sort of a violation of the compact with between author and audience for them to mention how his penis looks and then never show it in the film. And I agree with that. I think they should have. A pro showing hogs and movies, you know, a lot of a lot of actor and hogs havers are very reticent to do so for a variety of reasons. But I think that should be normalized and anyone who, I, you know, hey, like, like, I did also, Shader's had some hogs in his movies. This is the four mentioned American Jigolo. Yeah, so, but, but I, but this is the kind of one where it's like, I don't know how you, because the whole thing is like, if he has a famously big hog and then that doesn't match what the actor has. I don't know what Greg Keneer is packing. Like, then do you have to make a prosthetic and I feel like prosthetic hogs never work. Yeah, I was going to say, always tell their fake and then that's because of the thing where it's maybe better to have it unveiled off camera and then to have Willem DeFoe be like, oh, it's looking good. Yeah, it's like the shark and Jaws. Yeah, I can't remember which interview it is, but somebody asked Paul Schrader about that experience and mentioned, maybe it was the Adam Friedland thing where he says like, oh, you know, Willem DeFoe famously big dick and a Schrader tries to segue it into a story about autofocus and says, you know, Keneer is supposed to, you know, have a big dick in the film and he comes up to me and says, you know, Paul, I'm, I'm normal, which I've just now realized is a famous line from the film to be saying I'm normal. It's a famous line from the Doughboy's podcast, not the call-out-ard guest. It's true. I'm a normal man, I stand by that. Imagine if something ever happened to you, Nick, and then how shocked listeners would be if it turned out that, like, your wife did exist and, like, your girlfriend had into your home, you listened to music while you drive around. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the, the, the hog thing, by the way, kinds of kindness, you get, you get a, you get a bit of a- You get a little DeFoe hog and kinds of kindness, yeah. Yeah, but a little bit of shaft, but I don't know. I think we're making great strides in that. We couldn't afford a wide enough lens with the issue. Kubrick had one, but he, it's locked up in his vault. Yeah, NASA built it for him. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of conspiracy theories about people faking DeFoe's hog. Is that anything? I think the film is, it's funny and, and it's tragic and I think it speaks very much to, like, the difficulty men have connecting to themselves or anyone else. I was reminded also of Elephant, the Gus Van Zant film. Yeah, sure. The scene where they, they have a sexual encounter in the, in the shower, like, before they're going to go shoot up the school because they've never had one before. And, and much was made of this. People that were, were sort of offended by this at the time, but I think, I think it's a year after this, actually, but, but. Wow, is that true? Does Elephant come out one year after Autofoe? That's crazy to think about. Yeah. And it, it, there's a way that, like, male sexual repression is bound up with these violent outbursts, and I feel like, I don't know, I feel like if we, we got a, I don't, this is not glib. I don't mean this to be glib. But I do think that if we were to kind of normalize men fooling around with each other while being nominally straight, just like, just, just, if you need to get your rocks off, like, that's fine. You know, the, the, the, the forbidden behavior of the Greeks. I think if we brought this back, I feel like we could actually solve some problems. I don't really think this. I could leave his buddies behind, you're saying. Uh, yeah, this is, I mean. That's a joke. That's a joke for the movie. Yeah. The line from the film. Yes. Yeah. That's how we become a nasty monster. Uh, yeah. A clever one. I mean, I think, you know, I don't think anybody's, uh, applauding the Internet's effect on people's sexualities exactly, but there is a bit of, I mean, there exists, like, r/jerkbuds and stuff. I think this is like a real. J.O. Buds. Yeah. Yeah. We can share this and it doesn't necessarily have to come with a label about what sexuality you don't or do have. And maybe that's part of the chipping away of this, this edifice that I think you're right, does represent something, uh, hurtful for, for all men. Brett. Yeah. And I mean, it does also feel like that's a big thing, thematically in the film that it's, I think that is a thing that the film is judging. The idea that there is any sort of stigma to, you know, the, the, with their relationship to each other and how they want to try to label that, you know, and that, that, that, that's part of why this, this relationship ultimately becomes, like, talks. I mean, he goes frame by frame, like, there's a brooder film to figure out whether Willem Dafoe touched his ass. Yeah. It's true. And it's also like, he's like, you liked it. And he's like, well, I thought that was the chick. Yeah. You know, he can't even, this guy who's dedicated his whole life towards, like, carnal pleasures can't even accept that something was, was pleasurable. It has something very fascinating about, uh, and I've, I've learned this mostly through the, the guy's podcast, which we talk about on the show. Sometimes guys, podcast about guys. It's a great time and money. What is terrific? Well, I was just going to talk about how, how conservative the, the swinger scene seems to be. Like they're, they're all like Republican, like boat dealership owners. Right. I think because you need that much money to travel to hedonism in Jamaica for 17 days at a time or whatever. But also like, there is a weird way that it seems like, like, uh, a lot of the, maybe the most prominent, like group sex that you hear about comes from these ultimately, like, like white landed gentry types who, it's, it's a, it's a weird overlap. And, but it does exist. And I think if we acknowledge it more, uh, I don't know, something will happen. Yeah, I remember reading this article. I can't remember if it was an Esquire or whatever years and years ago, got 15 years ago, that was about like men who were hired to basically come to, to sex parties for, you know, like swingers. And they were, they were, they were like guys, basically professional studs, American jigalos, if you will. There you go. And they were talking, they were talking about like how like the clientele was all like, yeah, everyone there is like a cop, a judge. Yeah, exactly. It was, it was all like people who were part of like the law enforcement infrastructure. And this was everyone who was into like having these, specifically having their wives be railed by a, by men, they hired. And I think the film sort of traces it back. I mean, you brought up the fact that the Lone Ranger is in the, well, almost very first scene. And I think, you know, it comes up a few times by the way. It's so good. Yeah. But in real life, I believe Donald Henry Carpenter had indigenous heritage and they, they enter a sex party and say something like high hoe silver way. And, you know, to me, besides the obvious joke is the sense that like, this is part of culture. There is like a masculine thing where you can have a bond with somebody and maybe it can even kind of be like a weird, a dom sub thing or like, you know, this power dynamic that exists between men. And yet, like everything else, there's, there's a requirement that it go unacknowledged in the moment that, you know, you know, that it's somebody's hand on your butt that belongs to a man. Then suddenly it's, it's unacceptable. Uh, Willem Dafoe, I'd like, I just, his performance of this would be so good and so funny. And he's so like, just the moments when he gets low status with, with Bob Crane. And, you know, like, like, first there's that first, like, sex scene where Bob Crane is very hesitant and there's the two women and Willem Dafoe says, like, I'm going for the blonde or whatever. And then that gets reversed and Bob Crane just kind of big times. I'm like, hey, they're the reason I'm the reason they're here. I'm going for the blonde. It's like, I was working on it. She's ready to go. Like, you're so like, bro, that's not my type. And then he just has no choice. And you end up feeling bad for this total creep, this guy who, again, is a monster probably himself. But I did like his in-home slot machine. I don't really know why you have that. But that was cool. Just to play, you know, just to. Yeah, Dafoe is, Dafoe is wonderful in the film and, like, I think it's a use his, his mix of warm and terrifying. Like, he can be both the Christ and the green goblin at the same time. Yeah, we should say speaking of in-home slot machines. The real John Henry Carpenter was born on the Morongo mission band reservation out in Riverside County. And yeah, I think he was like, he had some indigenous heritage and some Spanish. So the FBI, full-blooded Indian license plate is, I think he mentions it as sort of a stolen valor situation. Well, he starts with it. He says like, like, he has the license plate frame that says FBI and he's like, full-blooded Indian. Well, like, he's immediately like, I'm a fraud. I'm a shifty guy. But I mean, like, nothing about me is exactly real, you know, or as it seems. But I can imagine, you know, this, this, in modern times, he would just be the engineer of the Bob Crane podcast and like show them all the new, the new recording equipment and they would have, like, whatever porno ladies on and pull in like three million dollars a year doing only fans or whatever. It's just they, they're men, men born at the wrong time, I think. It's called Zenka, Bob. I can record the entire podcast within a Chrome browser tab. I need a moment of wrap my head around that. I mean, it doesn't work on Firefox yet. Stern now, right? You're just describing, like, Stern gas. I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating that Carpenter was, was like head of the video wing of Sonycom in the U.S. Like before it was even so easy. I was sure the Elvis thing was going to turn out to be a lie and it seems to have just been true. Yeah. No, yeah. No, like he, he, yeah, he talks about selling it, you know, like equipment to Elvis. He ties selling high-fives to like, and video equipment like Tommy Smothers, who's a good celebrity. Yeah. The era. And yeah, it's, it's, and then with the point where he's like, he's completely towards the end when he's completely cocked by technology and he's kind of like, you're getting a beta cam, aren't you? Yeah. He does, no one needs this, uh, contacted at a corporation anymore to get consumer electronics. Yeah. It's now just available at, at whatever your department store is. He was the keeper of the secret knowledge and now it's made publicly available. And, and Schrader talks about being, uh, uh, sort of inspired by boogie nights or, or saying sort of the boogie nights is like the better way to do this, like to, the fictionalized biopic basically. Um, and maybe also to your point, Nick, I think maybe he saw the, uh, the lousy prosthetic penis in that film and decided to keep it in the audience's imagination. I feel like the, the Dirk Diggler prosthetic looks like, I don't know. It's like a sleeping bat or something. Like it doesn't look right to me. Mm. No one's figured out flesh prosthetics. They all, they always look off. I do like, I do like that scene a lot and I think that, you know, part of how it's shot just like it being, you know, a reflection and pretty, it's, it's, they did, they do some stuff where you kind of like, your mind allows you to, to over look that a little bit. But yeah, I think they just showed like a full frame like close up of, of, of Keneer's prosthetic large penis. It just would have taken you out of it. Although apparently the Keneer, the, the Bob Crane at the end that gets bludgeoned to death, that's a, that's a rubber Greg Keneer. That's like a didn't register. Yeah. Which, it looks incredible. That's incredible. And I remember thinking like, wow, they're just hitting him. Like, how are they doing this? And it's like, yeah, it's a totally fake Keneer. I guess the lighting, they, they matched there. They got the lighting dialed in so that it, you know, it, it reads like real, but yeah, it's a, the coldness of the, the murder scene is also pretty, pretty effective, pretty unnerving. Yeah. I think it draws from the other reference that he, that traitor makes is to a Joe Wharton, the Joe Wharton biopic, prick up your ears, which is also about a playwright who was gay and was ultimately killed by his lover for maybe. Directed by Gary Oldman, I think. Is that true? I mean, he's the star. He directed it. And also Alfred Molina in the, the, the co-starring role there. But yeah, I mean, the fact that we also have, I think in that film, a kind of sleazy, maybe stereotypically queer character who ends up being sympathetic because they're just like so little place for him that the fact that he gets sidelined and dismissed makes it impossible not to feel sorry for this guy to some extent. Oh, directed by Stephen Freer's. I should say, I was thinking of nil by mouth, which is, that was directed by, by Gary Oldman. But yeah, it's like, it's so funny how Schrader, Schrader knows that he is in this lineage of, like, a serious art cinema. But like, he will, he will occasionally confuse people by making this apparently silly movie about Bob Crane starring the guy from talk soup. But like, he, he's on a whole different trajectory from, from what everybody else thinks he's doing. And like, he, this is, I think, his follow up, like his last, the last produced film that he was involved with was bringing out the dead, I believe. That sounds right. Yeah. Like, you know, well received and now even more appreciated. A score says he film, and then he's going to go straight from this to Dominion prequel to the exorcist. Yeah. Which, you know, he takes over from John Frankenheimer also, which is. Right. That I recently watched. I guess that'll be next week's episode of the, is that what's coming up next? Yes, it will. It will. And, and that's the one where like, Renny Harlan reached, edited and reshot it enough that he's got his own version of it that comes out and like, Dominion doesn't get released theatrically, I think. And then you get into like dying of the light where, where Schrader disowns it and he, he releases his cut via bit torrent. He does. Yeah. So he's, we're beginning, we're, we're getting into the wilderness here where I think this is kind of the last gasp of the first, the first like respectable Schrader. Here before his, his, his comeback. So this is an exciting moment for us. We're about to have several worst times than we have been. Well, you still got the Walker coming up. The walker is pretty legit. Yeah. With, with, uh, I get to bust out my Woody Harrelson impression. Gonna have some friends. That one. You're very southern Woody Harrelson. Yeah. You won't cut a page. You gotta stick your bottom teeth out and then you have to let there be carnage. That's another big part of it. Of course. Yep. Two or any final thoughts on the film auto focus? I'm going to jump in because I have a stupid one only. We finally completed our goal. We always talk about Schrader being a UCLA boy. We're a couple of UCLA boys. Oh, yeah. And we have our guests on the, the pod this week, UCLA boy as well. That's right. UCLA, just like that director in hardcore. Exactly. UCLA. Yep. Yeah. UCLA is haunting the podcast. It sure is. The good, very, the guy who knows more about movies than anyone I know. My buddy Ryan Perez, very, very talented writer and has his own podcast, Momma Needs a Movie. But like, he, yeah, he, he was the first person who zeroed in on that detail for me. But yeah, he also went to UCLA. We gotta get Perez on the show. Yeah. You should absolutely get Perez on the show. He's, he's, he's, uh, he's in your, he's in the Gungen style video, right? He is. Yeah. And I mean, I know it was a long time ago, but it is, it remains just truly a wonderful piece of filmmaking. God bless you. No, it's, it's quite something. Uh, any final thoughts, Nick before we put that on in a bar to, uh, pick up on women. Yeah. Put it on. Me up there. Oh, weird. Like viral, funnier dive. That was a bad question. Have you guys ever asked somebody at a bar restaurant to change a television? I have. Yeah. I have, but it's been sports related. But yeah, I was going to guess it might have been like an NBA thing. I would not, in fact, fairly recently for some reason they didn't have the NBA finals game was about to start an ABC and they didn't have it on the bar TV. And I'd specifically gone there. And as so I was, I was the guy to ask, but I was not going to be the only person who's going to ask. Um, but yeah, did, uh, any of it on that? I haven't. Although this is one of the situations where probably, I believe we've talked about this before because it happens in the Clint Eastwood film. Absolute power. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, sure. Change it to the, uh, the Gene Achman. Right. And that's a film, that's a film where someone forces the president to take his own life, which is not relevant to our present moment in any way. And I'm not, I haven't been thinking about it even a little bit. If that happened, if absolute power, the ending of absolute power happened in real life, it was like, that'd be like one of the biggest stories in the world. It was so cool. Like I came in and forced the president to commit suicide to what he's talking about. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Um, my, my final thoughts, I just say like, if anyone hasn't watched this film, who's listening to this, I, I think it's a great watch. I think it's a, it's a really, and I think it's like a fun movie as bleak as it is. I think it has like a lot of, a lot of moments of levity in it. And I think also that just like the living in that era of Hollywood, when radio was still like huge and was still like a very relevant thing and then that that also like TV was figuring out what it was exactly. Yes. And there was also such a gulf in esteem between nowadays, everyone does everything, but there was a time when like there was like another doing a movie doing super dad. Oh, wow. That's a whole another level of success beyond doing a lousy sip. Absolutely. Yeah. And so that, that aspect of the, even the non CD parts that are portrayed in this movie are really capably done and it's really, it's just, it's just interesting, um, as it lives in that kind of, kind of TV, you know, the other thing I would say is that, that I looked up the, I don't know why I didn't think, didn't think to do this earlier, but it's like an IMDB trivia and I have this, this up. The LED watch that Carpenter uses to entice women throughout the movie is inspired by an actual watch sold in the back of pornographic magazines in the 1970s and 80s, offered by a company called Leisure Time Products. The watch was gold toned with a black faux lizard skin band, unlike the watch in the film. It was analog and its face was emblazoned with the phrase time to fuck, which would illuminate red every 30 seconds. Wow. So the, the actual watch was less, yeah, it was less subtle than the one that he's got in the movie. What is the use of that? The watch retailed for the modern equivalent of $150. Wow. Imagine spending $150 on a novelty time to fuck what? Just apropos of nothing, just want to remind people of Patreon.com/podcast before me. There's two hosts, don't forget. Uh huh. Yeah. And we each have two wrists. Yeah. I'm just imagining like, what is the use of the time to fuck watch that, that flashes every 30 seconds, because like, you can't surprise anyone with that, because you're just walking into a room glowing, right? And then also like, if you're wearing it to show off to your friends, ha ha ha, great watch. And then you're going to want to take it off because it's bothering everybody. Like, what a, what a bizarre product. Yeah. I'm imagining the guy who wears it on the inside of his wrist, like one of those guys. Right. It was just for him, basically. It's like Mark Walberg. This is what he does to schedule his, his stuff. Most of the time, it's time to wake up. Yeah. Yeah. I think that probably what it was was a gag gift, like I think you probably got it for your whatever. It's a gag gift. It's a gag gift. It's a gag gift. That's a thing. But if you maybe pull your, your, maybe the office buddies would pull your, your money and get it for a dude's birthday, 40th birthday or whatever, and you know, there you go. Show this to your wife. Yeah. Um, I would love to have the actual thing. Uh, we will, we'll do some digging. We might have to, this is a continuing quest for the, and listeners, if you, uh, if you find a functioning time to fuck watch on, uh, Depop or whatever, please, uh, shoot us an email, podcasting for me, gmail.com. We got one last thing we got to do before we, we're at things up and that is, of course, the sexual obsession check in, gotta do it, um, which is, uh, not, it's not as scary as it sounds. Now, Paul Schrader was in a few months ago, he was talking about his, his upcoming film, which I believe is, we now know is called non-compost-mentus, and he had the following to say about it. I'm never written a script about sexual obsession, and so that's the one I'm doing now. So he says he's never written a script about sexual obsession and here on the show, we're just, we're just checking in and seeing if he's ever written a script that's not about sexual obsession. We have a couple candidates, but we're going to check in. Do we think the film thought a focus is about sexual obsession? Uh, yeah. Wow. Yeah, I think so, because there's a, there's a pretty strong case that it could be delving into that. It does impinge upon the plot. At least a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one could argue that maybe the obsession involved sex, but it's actually about something else. But I think that's, that's splitting hairs. Yeah. I think so. And even though Schrader didn't write the principal draft of the script, all of his rewrites seem to be directed at making it more about sexual obsession. So that seems fair. Right. On his mind. We're fascinating, man. There's some great pictures of him from the autofocus sort of press run where he has a tiny little soul patch because it was two dozen two. Sure does. Yeah. Oh, wow. What a look. It looks like a, like a pinky nail, like worth of hair just below his lip. Listen to a lot of real big fish and directing, right? Good news. Cool. Yeah. He turned down the real big fish biopic. I did it. All right. That I think about does it for our autofocus episode. So thanks again to Nick Wiger for joining us today. What a treat. Yeah. Hey, speaking of, that's, that's your bread and butter is treats. Mm. Oh, that's true. That's a, that's a big thing of talking treats all the time. You're working on anything. You don't plug anything for, for the listeners. Yeah. People could check out, uh, doe boys though, the podcast about chain restaurants and get played my video game podcast. Doe boys cause me and Mike Mitchell and get played is me and, uh, Matt Apadaka and Heather and Campbell and both of those are available on the head gum podcast network. So check that out. Also go watch autofocus. It's a, it's a really fun movie and I'll, and if you haven't watched any other Shrader, maybe you're new to the podcast, um, and, uh, maybe you're new to this, that, this filmmaker, there's, there's got a lot of, he's got a lot of great films. So, uh, I, I, I, I'm a, as a guy, I'm a fan of and I've really enjoyed going through his filmography and I've, I've, I've really loved the opportunity to talk about this film at length. So thank you so much for having me. So much. That's truly, truly a delight and, and, uh, just a dream and doe boys, despite all odds, still great. I don't know how you guys are still good at it. It's still really good. Yeah. It shouldn't be good anymore. You guys are constantly lamenting how it's been more time than you expected and, uh, it's, yeah. I mean, you're right that it's surprising, but you're wrong that it's bad or that it was ever bad. So no, it's like, I mean, it might be better, which that's bizarre. Wow. Are you? Yeah. Whatever you guys are, what, you know, keep it, keep it to yourself. We can't have a, have this kind of knowledge getting out because then, I mean, this show needs to get worse to the point that Ian and I can stop doing it, but truly, uh, Nick, thank you for being here. It's just really fun. I'll, I'll say I, I can divulge that bitch and I, because we're back in person at the headgum studio, uh, we do a pre-show ritual of doing a lot of focus recreation. So this is, yeah, huge for us. Oh, I have a plug actually. I remembered this from William Defoe's appearance on WTF, like seven, eight years ago. And Aaron asks him, he brings up the, the couch jack off scene in auto focus and Defoe's like, yeah, it's, you know, it's natural. And there's like, there's an exchange. You can hear them make eye contact, I feel like, and like, I don't know what happened. So anyway, check that out. Sure. Yep. I think it's on YouTube. You don't have to, you don't have to get behind the paywall there. Check out the William Defoe episode of WTF. Uh, yeah. Also, and also that, that, that just makes me think it when they go to the wide shot and you can kind of see William Defoe's, uh, you know, as, as John Carpenter, a jack-in-off from behind, he is a really stretching that thing out. It's like he's cocking a shotgun with a load of fucking black powder rifle. What's going on? It's a, it's got a, it's got a blunderbuss that man. Um, remember to, uh, subscribe, rate us, write a review. It helps us on the algorithm. If you like the show, tell a friend, tell your dad, uh, film yourself listening to the show. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram and podcasting for me. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, or you're interested in co-hosting a two-person post-rader podcast, you can email us at podcastyforme@gmail.com. Thank you to Jeremy Allison for our artwork. As we mentioned next week, Dominion prequel to the exorcists is going to be truly something. Ian's getting his P-Soup ready now. I don't know if that appears in the film actually. Haven't seen it. It could be, yeah. Prequel to P-Soup. Um, like it's P frozen peas, maybe. P-Soup, the rise of grew. All right. Uh, that's going to do it for us. Thanks for listening, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)
