S3E11: A Demon Knight Sequel?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between costart and Touchstone Productions and the Dads from the Crypt podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of the how not to make a movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Gil will join us shortly. First, though, please, if you like our content, and there's a way for you to express that, like via a button, have at it. Better yet, subscribe to us. There's a lot of really cool stuff happening, and we're about to take out a new streaming horror black comedy tv series called are you afraid? And you definitely want to keep abreast of that. [00:00:55] Speaker B: Flesh eating ghouls. [00:00:57] Speaker A: For a long time, we humans have been deeply afraid of vampires and zombies, sin or paramedics. Fair enough. Vampires and zombies are scary. But neither vampires nor zombies are real. Plush eating ghouls, on the other hand, are real. They've been living in our shadow for thousands of years, hunting us, feasting on us, treating us like food. But some ghouls are tired of of living in the shadow of their food. Those ghouls have decided it's time to leave the shadow and put us in our place where we belong. On the menu, it's an eat or be eaten world, flavored by fear, filled with the monster we should have been. [00:01:42] Speaker C: Afraid of all along. [00:01:44] Speaker A: Fresh eating. [00:01:44] Speaker B: Cool. [00:01:45] Speaker A: Are you afraid? Better be coming soon. On the one hand, this episode of the podcast is a sequel to our first chat with Ethan Reef and Cy Voris, the longtime screenwriting team who wrote tales from the crypt presents Demon Knight. But on the other, this episode's a whole story unto itself. We'll talk about why there's never been a sequel to Demon Knight, when in a way, the whole point I make in horror movies is to create a sequel factor. From the moment that demonite opened, its audience has been crying out for a sequel, demanding one up until this episode of the podcast, if you'd have asked me, will there ever be a sequel to Demon Knight? Id have given you the same answer weve given for 30 years come January. Well, its complicated, but no, there will never be a sequel to Demon Knight. Whether times have changed or circumstances have, id like to withdraw that no. And replace it with a, you know, all things being equal, there could be a sequel to Demon Knight. First, what would it take to make a demon Knight sequel happen? There are rights issues and assholes. It's Hollywood. And second, if there were to be a sequel, what would the story be? Well, we're going to talk about every last bit of that, and we'll talk about how Cyan Ethan's love of Hong Kong action movies put them in a room at DreamWorks. DreamWorks owned three words, kung fu panda, but couldn't figure out what the movie was until Cyan walked in the room and laid it out for them. And we'll talk about Cynthia's considerable tv of, including Brimstone and. And nightfall. Still, as you'll see in here, we've only just scratched the surface with Ethan and Si. There's so much more to talk about. [00:03:33] Speaker B: But first, I was watching a prison escape movie from, like, the sixties last night. [00:03:40] Speaker A: That's the voice of Cyborg, like, a. [00:03:42] Speaker B: You know, Nazi King. [00:03:45] Speaker C: You were watching the great escape and. [00:03:47] Speaker A: The voice of Ethan Reef? [00:03:49] Speaker B: No, I was watching a more obscure movie called password. The password is courage with. Oh, no. [00:03:54] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:03:55] Speaker B: Bogard. But it's shocking what all these people got away with in the camps, like, the Americans and the British with, like, secret radios and stuff. And I know it's all documented. And I was thinking, is the only way they could have gotten away with this is because they didn't have, like, cameras and microphones, they didn't have security apparatus in those days. It's like, you know, these guys are, like, literally building ham radios and digging tunnels under the noses of, like, they. [00:04:22] Speaker C: Got away with it most of the time. And then when the german jailers called, like, spot inspections, most of the time, stuff got found and they got punished, and then they started from scratch, building stuff that's like that. I read the book, the memoir, the wartime memoir that that movie's based on, which is an incredible book. I've never seen the movie. The biggest thing in the book is when he literally purposely sneaks into a concentration camp because he's heard. They've heard rumors that there's, like, a. A jewish british prisoner or canadian prisoner who's being held in a concentration camp instead of a POW camp because he's a jew. And he literally breaks into the concentration camp. And if I remember correctly, in the real story, he can't find a guy, and he just. It blows his mind. The conditions and the circumstances. [00:05:14] Speaker B: Yes. And in fact, in reality, he. The real guy that Dirk Bogard plays in this bridge. [00:05:19] Speaker C: I'm telling you, I read the book. [00:05:21] Speaker B: Oh, no, I know. I'm saying I did some more research. Actually testified at Nuremberg. Oh, yeah, he was a guy because everybody else was, like, from the camps of. He was a guy who actually went real time because he snuck in. He saw the conditions at the camp when it happened. Now, this movie was apparently a hit amongst in Britain in the sixties, but very mixed reviews. Controversial because it's a very lighthearted not ho to the Hogan's heroes elementhouse. And because there, there's. And now you look back and say, here's a guy who, like, freed jews from a concentration camp, and I don't. [00:05:57] Speaker C: Think he freed anybody. [00:05:58] Speaker A: Oh, he did. [00:05:58] Speaker B: He did. [00:05:59] Speaker C: He did. [00:06:00] Speaker B: Oh, he did. Yes, he did. Because what they did is they took out. [00:06:03] Speaker C: I don't know if that's. I don't remember that from the real. [00:06:06] Speaker B: Story I did there. I just did the research. He did. What they did is they took dead bodies of french and polish prisoners and then took their passports and id clothes and gave them to jewish prisoners to sneak the jewish prisoners out of. But the point is that they made this very light prison escape movie. And the real story is this guy, like, was in Auschwitz and, like, help people. So even in the. [00:06:31] Speaker C: I mean, he was there for hours or days, not for years, but he. [00:06:34] Speaker B: Held people as well. [00:06:35] Speaker C: He's an incredible hero. I'm just saying, apparently. [00:06:38] Speaker B: Wait, wait. And apparently there was an Auschwitz sequence in, like, the last ten minutes of the movie that they cut out because people are like, you can't suddenly put. [00:06:49] Speaker C: So when I asked you my question, you buried the lead, which is there is no concentration camp element in the movie. [00:06:59] Speaker B: No. [00:06:59] Speaker C: You just did your own research after watching the movie. [00:07:02] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. [00:07:03] Speaker C: In your head. It nailed it to one thing. And when I specifically asked, said, is that element, which is the most memorable element from me, of reading the guy's wartime memoir in the movie, you launched into telling us about the real story of him. [00:07:20] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:07:21] Speaker C: But again, here's where we got one shot in the movie that you saw. [00:07:25] Speaker B: Yes, but here's what. Here's why it adds up. Because there was. [00:07:29] Speaker C: I didn't say it doesn't add up. Just doesn't add up as a response to my specific, which is that there. [00:07:38] Speaker B: Was a concentration camp sequence in the. [00:07:41] Speaker C: Movie, but you didn't see it because it wasn't in the movie. Back in. [00:07:44] Speaker B: I know, but I'm telling you, they filmed it and they cut it out because people were like, you can't put Auschwitz last five minutes of this movie. [00:07:52] Speaker C: That's interesting for this conversation, but it has nothing to do with answering my simple question that I started out answering. [00:07:58] Speaker D: So let me ask Alan a question. I don't want to interrupt you guys. Alan, you want to go? Please? [00:08:04] Speaker B: We can just. [00:08:05] Speaker C: The last thing. Hang on. Sorry. [00:08:07] Speaker B: We can take over the podcast and just argue about this movie for, like. [00:08:10] Speaker C: An hour and a half. [00:08:11] Speaker A: Oh, my God, please. [00:08:12] Speaker C: It's interesting that it was turned into a generally lighthearted prison Pow, World War Two POW camp movie, because the memoir that I read that the guy actually wrote was not lighthearted at all. I mean, it has its moments, like, almost like most combat soldier or marine or airmen or Coast Guardsman or whatever, memoirs of bits of dark humor. But it was. It was a pretty serious, grim story. [00:08:44] Speaker A: So this. This adaptation, this film adaptation took some serious tonal liberties, is that what you're saying? [00:08:50] Speaker C: I mean, I don't know. I would say I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like it had. It struck a different tone. I'm sure there are still life or death stakes. And like sighs said, it isn't as extreme as Hogan's heroes, but it sounds like it is a different tone, which. There's nothing inherently, you know, wrong with that. It's just interesting. [00:09:12] Speaker B: I realized, I just. How did we get on this thread? Because we're talking about surveillance technology in 2021. [00:09:18] Speaker C: Yeah, because you were saying it was so lighthearted and fun and the german authorities didn't know while they were building all secret communications equipment. And if they had modern technology like these guys have to record their podcast. [00:09:35] Speaker B: Exactly. Bring it all back around. There you go. It's a circuitous route, but we do there eventually. [00:09:44] Speaker D: And so here we are by way. [00:09:46] Speaker A: Of circuit his roots. Here we are. [00:09:50] Speaker C: Well, what is it, five minutes later? Yeah. [00:09:52] Speaker B: You're going to call that out, right, al? [00:09:54] Speaker A: That's if you listen to the last time that we all sat down. No, no, I. Well, why would. [00:10:04] Speaker B: That's your prerogative. [00:10:05] Speaker A: Oh, my God. To me, this is all. This is all gold. [00:10:08] Speaker C: Hey, is that a bordello of blood poster on the wall behind you? [00:10:13] Speaker A: It is. [00:10:15] Speaker C: Cool. [00:10:17] Speaker A: One that has taken much abuse. Yeah. [00:10:24] Speaker D: Notice I don't have one hanging behind me. [00:10:30] Speaker A: Yeah, no, mine sat for a very long time in a garage, in the back part of a garage, and I didn't give a fuck what happened to it. [00:10:39] Speaker C: That's interesting. So, like, it literally, as you. As you did your own, like, healing from whatever negative aspects of that experience you act, that's. That poster is like the physical manifestation of the trauma and the healing. And now, I would never have known that it had been in a. In a damp, mildewed corner of a garage or dusty corner of a garage, because it looks proud. [00:11:03] Speaker B: Good. On the wall, proudly displayed on the. [00:11:06] Speaker A: Wall, if you were standing here in the office and you looked at it, you go, oh, my God. [00:11:09] Speaker D: Yeah, it is the blood is real blood? [00:11:16] Speaker A: Yes, it is. Those are real spatters. Anyway, so I'm so glad that you guys agreed to continue our conversation because we did not really. We just scratched the surface. Yeah, we got to that boring story about demon Knight and left out so much of life outside. And after Demon Knight, Demonite helped. [00:11:44] Speaker C: Demonite was really the. Our breakthrough to the studio level, you know, and actually our purpose still sort of must exist. Like, people must go from, you know, doing cell phone movies or straight to streaming movies to being hired for an assignment or selling something original to the movie studios that remain. [00:12:11] Speaker B: And actually, yes, our first studio writing job. We were hired by the universal executive on Demonite. Nina. Oh, my God, I'm blanking her name. [00:12:24] Speaker A: Nina Jacobson. [00:12:25] Speaker B: Nina Jacobson to Ryan, went on to. [00:12:29] Speaker C: Work at Amblyn DreamWorks. [00:12:34] Speaker B: Yeah, she hired us from Demon Knight and to write a movie for her for universal that never got made. But it was great. That was like, oh, we got our first actual studio job, you know, where. Here's an idea. You pitch something. They said, that's great. They pay you to write it. It was like, wow. [00:12:53] Speaker C: So that it was a rewrite, I think it was a page one rewrite. I think they had a script and, you know, or they had had several drafts of this script, and then they hired us to do a new funny. [00:13:03] Speaker A: I. I remember suddenly conversations with Nina about the script, and she was really. She was a huge fan of yours. [00:13:11] Speaker C: No, that makes perfect sense. [00:13:13] Speaker B: Also, what was important about demonite, ironically, is when we started getting into television, because we had written demonite, everybody wanted us to create a horror show because initially we had done, because the X Files had broken. And that was big here. [00:13:29] Speaker A: Alas, we froze for a second. Xi was telling the story of taking something other than a horror movie pitch into a studio pitch where a horror movie was expected. [00:13:39] Speaker B: Hey, that's great. But you guys worked on the tales of crypt movie. We won a horror series from you guys. And so after a while, if enough people tell you you're drunk, you're probably drunk. So we were sort of like, well, are we crazy? We should come up with a horror show. And that was our first. That then that, ironically, was our first television project. [00:13:56] Speaker C: Yeah, that's. That's sort of true. That's sort of true. If you dig a little below the. Further below the surface. It was several years later, and because of demonite, we had, we had done a bunch of other feature horror assignments, actually. So we had like, a list of credits that would precede us when we would show up on this first attempt to sell our first tv pitch, which, like Sigh says was a kind of like a mission impossible action thriller, but. [00:14:30] Speaker A: This got you all that. The you now, you had heft. You had legitimacy in the eyes. [00:14:36] Speaker C: Well, we had enough haften legitimacy to be able to go and the doors would be open to hear our pitch. But we would pitch the show, and what they would say to us was, yeah, that violates one of the fundamental tenants of network television, which is no foreign content, which was back in the day. This is like 1997 or 98. And I remember I would say to them, my response was, well, but if you boil down the essence, this show that we're pitching you to, its essence, it's basically a bunch of Americans in white hats going overseas to kick the ass of a bunch of various different foreigners in black hats. Does that really violate the tenants of network? And they were like, yeah, it's just about. People don't like to go overseas. [00:15:28] Speaker B: The answer is, in the late nineties, it did violate all the television. [00:15:32] Speaker C: Yeah. And so then they would, like Sigh says, it wasn't really about demonite. It was about, oh, you guys, you did this thing. Demonite. You did. We had sold this other big script called Slayer. You did what you call it. You did a draft of a version of the latest version of Freddy versus Jason. [00:15:54] Speaker B: Had we done that? Had we done. [00:15:56] Speaker C: At that point, we had racked up a ton of hard credits and also this other project that was made, I think, years later by a different director and production team than had hired us. But this project called the Gathering, and they were all, like, high level, you know, a or b, because they were a horror genre of major studio projects, and they were horror. And so, like Si says, they looked at that and what had happened was, I mean, maybe. I don't know. Did si. Did you just mention this? I don't think so. Like, the screening aspect. [00:16:29] Speaker A: Can I go back? Can I go back half a step? [00:16:33] Speaker C: Well, yeah, but Sai mentioned X Files, I think, and maybe, I don't know if you mentioned Buffy the vampire slayer was another big one. And then the last thing was scream had just come out. And as you guys know as well as anybody, the horror genre had basically been Mia, bordering on dead until Scream came out. And then everybody wanted horror. And so we went into all these meetings, like Sy said, we gave them our pitch. They were impressed by us, our credits, and even the way we pitched. But our pitch violated a fundamental tenet of network programming. And they said, like Sai just quoted hey, we'd love to be in business with you guys if you come back with a horror show. And like he said, we heard. We literally, it was one day. We went to the first meeting, that's what they said. Went to the second meeting, that's what they said. We went to lunch. Went to the third meeting after lunch. That's what they said. We went to, like, maybe a fourth meeting. That's what they said. And then we looked at each other when we left. We're like, fuck this. This is ridiculous. We should just pitch them a horror show. [00:17:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I do want to jump in and say that. One of the things I always thought about is even says there was that period where horror, at least in mainstream studios, was sort of dead until scream came out. And I always thought that the tales from the crypt, essentially buying and producing demonite was a good thing, but a double edged sword. Because the great thing is that was like the only horror game in town theatrically at that period in the nineties. So the fact that that script got bought by you guys and made under the umbrella of Tales of the Crypt means it got a bigger budget and a theatrical feature. But had we sold demonite or had it been made on a smaller budget, straight to video, it would have not gotten a theatrical release. But, Ethan, I joke that we would have done like, seven demonite sequels by now, all like, straight to video. You know, there would have been a whole one of those weird mini franchises. [00:18:32] Speaker A: Like, oh, isn't that not the biggest question? [00:18:35] Speaker C: It might have gotten a small theatrical. Theatrical release at the start. I think most of those movies, if they were back then at a certain level, you know, if you think back to the. The genre films that got a limited theatrical release just in order to qualify for whatever the financial end of their video release was, you know, it was. I think it would have got a small theatrical release, but it wouldn't have been anywhere near what, what we ended up. You know, how many theaters and with the. With the advertising budget that demonite had with tales from the crypt, it wouldn't have been anything in the same. [00:19:12] Speaker A: But, but, and there's a huge but because of what happened and the way that the rights got tied. [00:19:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:19:21] Speaker A: There can't be sequels. And that sucks because this was a movie that had had a whole mythology ready to explode. [00:19:30] Speaker C: Yeah. I'll tell you, you know, it's funny. That reminds me of a kind of a cool story that I'm sure sy will remember, which is like, sai's family, his parents and my family, my parents nobody has had anything to do with the entertainment industry in any way, shape, or form, or, you know, specifically the movie business or later the. For us, the television business. And I think both of our sets of parents were pretty much supportive of our, like, crazy, you know, creative ambitions or professional ambitions, which is a separate thing, which is cool. But my dad, I always remember my dad of blessed memory, who died, you know, whatever, more than a decade ago after demonite came out and he saw it. I'll always remember him saying something to me along the lines of, well, there's got to be a sequel, right? I was like, oh, wow, that's kind of cool, you know, because, you know, my dad was. My dad was 16 years older than my mom. My dad, like, fought in World War two, and my mom was born in 1940, so my dad was. Huh. [00:20:45] Speaker A: What did your dad do? [00:20:47] Speaker C: Well, he was. He was in the signal, in the army signal Corps, attached to the air corps in first in imperial British India, and then he flew over the hump and China to China, and then in the Pacific, you know. Oh. But anyway, but the thing is, you know, he was from, like, a different era of popular culture, and it wasn't like he was a dinosaur frozen in Benny Goodman past or something or whatever, but it always stuck with me and, like, touched my heart and soul, you know, that my dad saw demonite and was like, hey, when's the sequel coming out? They got to make a sequel, right? [00:21:25] Speaker A: I mean, what your dad did in the war is great, but after the war, what did he do? What did he do for a living? Because, know, my dad was a surgeon, and so I had the same, you know, to my family, this business was a mystery. [00:21:39] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's an element of that. My dad. My dad. Father owned and ran a ship's chandler shop on the south street seaport. So my dad grew up, like, being incredibly handy. He could, like, drive anything, sail any small, you know, boat, fix anything, repair anything, whatever. And he ended up, after the war, he basically became, like, a cabinet maker. And then he did, like, every different craft job in sort of carpentry and whatever, window. Window treatments and things. Different, different stuff. And then he ended up managing a lumberyard, actually the biggest lumberyard in the Bronx, New York. Yeah. [00:22:33] Speaker B: My favorite story about Ethan's dad relating our careers is at one point, we wrote a science fiction pilot with, like, aliens in it, and Ethan's dad described it crazy. Ah, you guys wrote a snakehead show? [00:22:47] Speaker D: Like what? [00:22:48] Speaker B: Yeah, a show with snakeheads. You know, alien guys. [00:22:51] Speaker C: Guys with snakeheads yeah, I had pitched it to him. I think I pitched it to him. He said, oh, yes, a snakehead show. Yeah. Which was pretty accurate, actually. [00:23:01] Speaker A: What did your dad do? Si. [00:23:03] Speaker B: My dad was a social worker in Cincinnati, Ohio, working on the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the ghettos of Cincinnati and Kentucky. So. And he would drag me around occasionally to work. So, yeah, he was, he was a, he was a do gooder for a while. That was that. [00:23:23] Speaker C: Drag him around. So. Sigh. Could see how the other half lived. [00:23:28] Speaker B: Which wasn't too far, how we were living far away from how we were living at the time, either. So, you know, it's funny, I don't want, I don't want to jump off, but I want to because something, I remember we were talking about demonite sequels. Ethan and I actually came up with two. This will be, this will be interesting. [00:23:45] Speaker C: For the talk about this in the last podcast. [00:23:47] Speaker B: No, I don't think we. I don't think we did. We came up with two demonite sequels. The first one was basically taking Jerilyn and slightly flipping the script, whereas the first one was set in the abandoned hotel church in the middle of nowhere. This was going to be totally urban. It was going to be in like. So Geraldine is chased to sort of burnout neighborhood in like the Bronx or. [00:24:16] Speaker C: Cleveland or dead Stuyvesant Brooklyn. [00:24:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And basically it was a housing project and you had the characters instead of being in the hotel, it was all the characters that lived in this, like, low rent housing project that were going to be the characters that the collector was trying to seduce and face off the demons. So that was the Demonite two and then the third one. I don't know the mechanism for it, but I know the idea was that jerilyn was going to team up with other demon knights from the history, from the lineage of Demonite. So we could potentially bring back Bill Sadler as breaker. There would be like a medieval guy. There would be a guy. So there would be different demon knights to do sort of the final all out battle against the collector and his minions. [00:25:04] Speaker C: Of course, the other thing that you guys know as well as we do from all our many years unto decades in the industry is that if Demonite had been made as a low budget, straight to video, with or without limited theatrical release, initially version of the movie, and then it was when it was time to make the sequels, we could well have been fired off the sequels and replaced or even never even hired on the sequels because it's not like even though you guys did that to us, not to backtrack to that whole story. [00:25:37] Speaker A: Oh, but why not? [00:25:39] Speaker C: That's. That's what happens most of the time, as. As we know, you know. So there's no guarantee, unless we had also been, like, the directors or producers of the first version, there's no guarantee that it would have been, like, such a smooth path creatively, even despite whatever, you know, budgetary challenges there were. [00:26:00] Speaker D: But have you. Have you ever explored where the rights lie? [00:26:05] Speaker B: Well, okay, this is funny. I literally had a conversation with Ethan about this. We do have underlying. Well, let's put it this way. When the copyright law, right now, the. [00:26:16] Speaker C: Rights lie in the crypt with the crypt keeper. [00:26:19] Speaker B: But after 35 years, so in about seven years, Ethan and I and Mark Bishop, I believe, get the rights back to the underlying material, which was the screenplay. And I know there was some separation of rights issue, because when there was the demon Knight novelization done at the time of the movie. [00:26:42] Speaker C: They dropped the ball, and they didn't give us our explicitly written and signed off on right of first refusal to write the novelization, which was in the contract. So they had to pay us, like, a penalty and maybe the fee on top of that, whatever. It wasn't a ton of money, but. [00:27:02] Speaker B: At least, you know, the point was, it wasn't malicious. They assumed, oh, it's tales from the crypt, so it must be adapted from the comic books. We already have the rights to it because the people who were licensing it and the people who were handling novelization didn't know any better. So that's where the thing is. So we already had a bit of a separation of rights triumph in that sense of. I do believe if we're still around in seven years, we all might be able to make some sort of demonite sequel. We just can't have the crypt keeper in it. So there you go. [00:27:32] Speaker D: Because I've been asked a number of times about demon Knight and about a sequel and a remake and all that, and I've always said, well, I don't know who controls the rights. I don't know if it's still with the partners or if they had to give it to Warner Brothers when they got the distribution. And I said, wouldn't it been? [00:27:48] Speaker C: Or you mean because not to universal for distribution or. [00:27:52] Speaker D: I'm sorry. [00:27:53] Speaker C: Not to universal. [00:27:55] Speaker D: I'm sorry. Universal. Yeah, universal. [00:27:57] Speaker C: Yeah. I think they're with Universal, but maybe they're with the partners or with, like Chris says. Yes, seven years down the line, the original screenplay, underlying rights, which, like he says, we know, are separated or will be separated then come back to us. [00:28:17] Speaker B: So who knows if we're all still around. There's a long awaited demon made sequel. [00:28:23] Speaker A: For all because there is a huge audience out there that has been hankering and hungering for a sequel. And, yeah, I think they'll still be there. And there's hope. Hope springs eternal. That blood will get refilled from that. [00:28:44] Speaker B: We wrote, I was going to say we done it. We worked on a project with will Smith a few years ago, and Jada Pinkett was somehow involved creatively or whatever. And it was pretty funny because we said, hey, we wrote demonite. And she was sort of like, I. [00:29:02] Speaker C: Mean, again, Jada Pinkett was involved by. She was there at, like, a couple of the meetings with us, and she couldn't talk because she was on vocal rest. [00:29:13] Speaker B: So that was the second time. That was the second time. The first time, she was just sort of like, ah, that's cool. You know, she just was like, whatever. But I do feel like, again, I feel like there was this netherworld where. Where the sort of demonite fan base was just sort of growing and growing and growing unbeknownst to everybody on some level. So I think it was sort of in that realm of like, oh, yeah, that movie that, you know, that we made, you know, in 1995. [00:29:43] Speaker D: The only thing that you could think about, it seems to me, is if you wrote a new script, didn't call it Demon Knight, didn't. And made it different enough so that they couldn't sue you for, you know, infringement of demon Knight. But by the guys who brought you demon knight, then, you know, you get some benefit of, you know, where it. [00:30:07] Speaker C: Came from, I guess. [00:30:08] Speaker B: But it wouldn't really be demonite. Let's just wait seven years. [00:30:11] Speaker C: An interesting proposal or scenario. I'm not sure about that one. [00:30:17] Speaker A: You okay? Wait, wait. Hey, don't. Don't. Don't give up yet, okay? It's Damon Daemon. And that's. [00:30:27] Speaker C: I think. I think. I think the point size, from my perspective, which is maybe a little more like realpolitik or whatever, the only real point of size hall owe the underlying separate separated rights and copyright law allowing them, or requiring them to return to us in another seven years, is once that happens, if we're. If it does happen in the future or whatever, then we can still call it demonite with a k because that was the title of the original screenplay. As long as it doesn't say tales from the crypt presents. And like you said, as long as the framing device isn't there, you know. [00:31:12] Speaker B: And maybe in that sense it might be easier for some studio to make a deal to do a remake or to do a sequel or reboot and maybe even at that point get Tales of the Crypt to slap their name on it because it's not, it's a separate deal. It's not involved in the same labyrinthian. [00:31:30] Speaker C: Inspection by adding that that requires all the people involved in tales from the crypt to make some kind of agreement. [00:31:36] Speaker B: Which is, yeah, you never know. You never know. [00:31:38] Speaker C: Also, I honestly, not to be the Debbie Downer, but I don't know that, like, the studios are going to be lining up, banging on our door to be able to be the ones who released a back from, wait a minute. [00:31:51] Speaker B: Everything, everything has been rebooted now. In the last IP is IP, everything is rebooted. [00:31:58] Speaker A: I honestly think you take the script and redo it and really recommence the mythology. [00:32:07] Speaker C: Do you mean like remake it and start rematching that, to me, thinking again in the, like, more harsh, not just like shits and giggles, POv. Remaking it and starting from scratch, maybe that's, maybe that's more legit. But then at the, at the same time, I don't know, a portion of the audience might not appreciate, you know, have it, remaking it and they might. [00:32:33] Speaker A: Just still come to compare. [00:32:36] Speaker C: Right. [00:32:38] Speaker A: Look, you're, it's, the bar isn't like remaking, you know, Freddy Krueger. I mean, you know, it's not, it's not that. [00:32:45] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:32:47] Speaker D: Have you, have you guys ever gone to universal to have a conversation about you guys wanting to remake it or make a sequel? [00:32:55] Speaker B: No, I think, you know what? [00:32:56] Speaker C: It's, I think we've gone to them about other projects that we did with them. [00:33:00] Speaker B: No, no, but we. [00:33:01] Speaker C: No, no, we never, we never did. [00:33:03] Speaker B: No, because we, you know, look, we were still moving forward actively with our careers, I think, at this stage. And also really the whole sort of demonite, the sort of demonite fan base explosion is recent enough, at least in the last decade. [00:33:20] Speaker C: It was the 20th anniversary is what really kicked it off. So that was, whatever, 2015, I guess. But now that's almost ten years ago. Yeah. [00:33:30] Speaker B: It's not out of question. At some point it's just the question becomes like, well, how much? I think because of the whole thing with tales from the crypt, it just always seemed like it was just a tangled web that could never be really unusual. [00:33:43] Speaker C: Now we're like, literally, what, one year away from the 30th anniversary? [00:33:47] Speaker B: Is that true? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 95. At January of 95, it came out so crazy. [00:33:55] Speaker C: That is crazy. [00:33:56] Speaker D: Unreal. [00:33:56] Speaker A: And we're all still alive, even crazier. So, all right, what hath demon knight wrought so suddenly? Brimstone. [00:34:11] Speaker B: Yes. Ironically, I think because we didn't really feel, for reasons explained ad nauseam in the last podcast, we didn't really feel that much ownership of the final product of demonite. When Ethan and I did Brimstone, which was another supernatural show that had to do with the devil and God and mankind and all this stuff, we actually, we restoled the method of killing demons from demonite, which is blowing out the windows to the souls, the eyes. We stole that back from you guys and put it into Brimstone as one of the ways the hero kills the escape damn souls. [00:34:57] Speaker C: And our defense of that has always been the same, that at least we stole from ourselves. [00:35:02] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You can't steal from yourself. Who can you steal from? [00:35:07] Speaker A: Did anyone ever point that out? [00:35:09] Speaker C: Not really. Not in the, that time, demonite was not, I mean, you know, demonite is not really like a cultural, a pop cultural phenomenon. So we, I guess the one good thing about that is we didn't have to, we didn't have to, you know, be called on the carpet by all the authorities as we were. [00:35:30] Speaker A: Okay, let's talk about those authorities, because the horror community, the authorities are really thorough, and I'm speaker one. [00:35:37] Speaker C: Well, but no, those are, that's a different set of authorities, Alan. I'm talking about the studio and network authority, Warner Brothers television, and talking about Fox TV, huh? [00:35:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I wasn't talking about them. [00:35:51] Speaker C: No, we, people brought, it was brought up occasion. Remember when that show came on? It was literally like the dawn slash infancy of the Internet. And I remember being on some version of like a fan chat room or something, like when we were on the air and trying, because the studio had like, encouraged us to engage with that stuff. It was literally in its infancy. It's embryonic, whatever. And there was at least one, maybe two or three, you know, individuals out in the world of the horror fandom who said, oh, is that, you know, that's like, you know, in demonite. And it was us. So again, we didn't shy away. We weren't ashamed of taking one detail that we had, you know, put into another story and putting it into this one. Because the stories were very different. They had to overlap. They had, you know, they shared certain elements and maybe a certain sensibility, but they were very, very different stories. [00:36:56] Speaker A: Why would you not borrow from yourselves. [00:37:00] Speaker C: From your lips to the cinema and tv? [00:37:02] Speaker B: God year borrow from the best. [00:37:06] Speaker A: Holy shit. You know, there were a number of, during the heyday of the Broadway musical in the twenties and thirties, you know, certain songs would go from show to. [00:37:16] Speaker C: Show to show, circling back to my dad. [00:37:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:37:20] Speaker C: My dad came back from, uh, world War two, and actually in between coming back from World War two and sort of, uh, marrying my mom and, you know, starting our family or whatever, he actually went to Israel for a year right after the war of independence. And at the time, he went with a kind of in secret, uh, with a bunch of, uh, young, you know, world War two veteran american Jews in the northeast. And the whim, the jewish women who they married, they all got married, and then they went as a group, ostensibly to, like, France, but really to Israel. And then when they got to Israel, he and his. His wife ended up on a kibbutz up near. Up near Syria and Lebanon. And he was there for one year. And like I said before, he was an incredibly handy guy. He could build, you know, build anything, repair anything. And obviously at a new kibbutz, relatively new kibbutz, you would think that would be really in demand. And when he went along with the whole group of people, they were all kind of like half socialists, you know, if not full blown socialists. Sure. [00:38:36] Speaker A: Kibbutzniks, yeah. [00:38:38] Speaker C: And so he was there for a year, and the entire year he had one job, which was to be a chicken farmer, even though there was stuff that he saw, in his opinion, not, you know, not being built or repaired the way it should have been. And, you know, he tried to, you know, offer his help or whatever, and they were like, just do what you're told and go far, you know, take care of the chickens. And after a year of being a chicken farmer, he was like, I'm done with this. I'm going back to the Bronx. [00:39:10] Speaker B: So back to the Bronx? [00:39:12] Speaker C: Back to the Bronx. And so he left with his wife, and they actually got divorced. So that was my father's sort of like, previous marriage. And it also, from my perspective, it cured him of the illness of socialism. So I would drink to that. [00:39:31] Speaker D: You know, just going back for a second just to put some perspective into this. When you were talking earlier about pitching and people wanted you to do a certain thing, they wanted you to do horror because you had a success in horror. To add a little perspective, when we were doing tales from the crypt, I was looking at directors from all over the world and came upon one director, and I really liked his little movie. And I went to the partners and said, you know, we should let him do with tales. And he was who what? And they batted it down. So I went to HBO, even though I was, you know, they probably could have fired me if they, if they knew that. And HBO said, look, we don't, we don't want to get involved in that. We don't know who this guy is, you know, so, so the answer was no. And I had, I had had conversations with this guy and I said, I really want to get you up here to do it to an episode. And they totally blew me off and said, there's no way we're going to do this. And that was the beginning of a friendship with Guillermo del Toro that's lasted all these years. But they wouldn't let me bring in Guillermo del Toro to do a tailsome. [00:40:41] Speaker C: La crib because he wasn't Guillermo del Toro. He was Guillermo del Toro aspiring, in training. [00:40:49] Speaker D: He was a mexican director from Guadalajara. That's what they said to me. So why are you so interested in this guy? And I said, just, just look at this little movie. [00:40:59] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:41:00] Speaker D: And they didn't care. [00:41:02] Speaker C: Yeah. We've had, we've had experiences like that in our position as showrunners on, I think probably on almost every show. Oh, he's gone again. On almost every show we ever ran, there was a guy. Sigh what was the name of the guy? A young guy our age or maybe even a little bit younger, who we hit, who we had seen, just like what you were talking about. We had seen a sample of his work and we invited him to come by our office, our production offices at Brimstone, our first tv show. And we hit it off with him and he brought us, he brought us some action figures, which was kind of hilarious. You remember who I'm talking about, don't you? [00:41:49] Speaker B: Vaguely. [00:41:50] Speaker C: And, well, he went on, no, Gil was just telling a story about. [00:41:57] Speaker B: I heard Gil's story. So, wait, who he went on to do. [00:42:02] Speaker C: He went on to be a pretty successful director. [00:42:05] Speaker B: What did he do? What else did he do? [00:42:07] Speaker C: Are you kidding? You usually tell me all the stuff he does. You're the guy who stayed in touch with him. Are you kidding? From Brimstone, the guy who came by the office who we wanted to hire as an episodic director. And Warner Brothers said, no way. He's experienced. [00:42:23] Speaker B: I don't, I'm blank. [00:42:25] Speaker C: He'll remain nameless, but he really did become a big shot director. [00:42:29] Speaker B: I thought you were going to tell. No, I thought you were going to tell. And this is not demonite or Brimstone or tales from Crip related. I thought you were going to say that when Ethan and I lived in New York before I came out here and then Ethan came out here, we started out in Chinatown and watching all these Hong Kong movies in the eighties and where, this is where you could see them in New York, Chinatown. So we would see all the John Woo movies, the Choi Hart movies, the. [00:43:02] Speaker C: Jackie Chan movies, Ringo Lamb. [00:43:05] Speaker B: And early on when we came out here, we kept pushing. Even for these straight to video movies, we kept pushing John, like, you gotta hire this John Woo guy. [00:43:13] Speaker C: He's amazing. [00:43:14] Speaker B: He's incredible. And to similar to gills think you're like, how do you crazy? Some guy from China. Forget, that's nuts, you know? And then fast forward to a few years later. And literally we get a phone call from Brian Witten, who, you know, Joel's assistant at the time working the crypt, who he's got. He says, I got Joel Silver, I got Stallone, and I got Wesley Snipes in the car, and I'm in Lahambra at some chinese video store. What movie should I rent? I said, I know you guys. You guys are the experts on these movies. So. And that, the irony is that sort. [00:43:49] Speaker C: Of, there's one other. There's another anecdote connected to that which always stuck with me, where we had gone. We were hired to do some moderate budgeted action movie, to write it or rewrite it or whatever. And we were in the office of the guy who was like, the head of development at the production company, a small studio. And when it got, like, green lit, we said to him, like, listen, you've got to consider these directors because nobody knows about them, and they're all incredibly talented. And I think, and like si said, it was like John Woo and Ringo Lamb. Those are the two guys whose sensibility, whose, like, cinematic styles seem to us the easiest, most seamless to transition to a straightforward american filmmaking, right? Because one of the things that made those Hong Kong movies that Cy and I became huge fans of so amazing was the way they mixed up and cross pollinated genres. And even, you know, that would not necessarily translate so seamlessly to the american filmmaking world. But John Wu and Ringo Lam, their style was the closest thing to kind of a straightforward american action filmmaking, you know, very, very high quality action filmmaking sensibility. So we gave him these two names and we even gave him, like, lists of movies to watch, or like, one or two movies for each director to watch to convince him. And he had the answer that I just quoted of, like, that's crazy. What are you guys from China or whatever? And what happened was we went back to that exact same guy's office like, two or three years later, just on the rounds of pitching a new project, or they wanted to talk to us about an assignment. And I don't think I. Even though I'm more of, like, the confrontational sob guy, I just. It just made a mental note of it. He had, at that point, he had, like, a giant killer poster. [00:46:05] Speaker B: John Woo the killer. [00:46:07] Speaker C: I was kind of John Woo's breakthrough Hong Kong movie that became kind of a cause celebrity around the world with, you know, cinephiles and filmmakers or whatever, and sort of, like, thrust him into the limelight for being hired in Hollywood or wherever else in the world. And he had a poster giant post. [00:46:30] Speaker B: Two, three years later. Yeah. Now, it was cool. [00:46:34] Speaker C: You realize we told you about this. [00:46:36] Speaker B: Guy, like, three years ago, and you. [00:46:38] Speaker C: Said, we were hired him on one of your $2 million fucking movies and actually million dollar movie. [00:46:44] Speaker B: And then the ultimate punchline. [00:46:45] Speaker C: I didn't say that. I just, you know, bought it. [00:46:48] Speaker B: Well, the ultimate punchline is we got to work with John Woo. Years later, we wrote an action comedy called Bulletproof mom. [00:46:56] Speaker C: No, we only wrote it because they hired. They brought us in. [00:46:59] Speaker B: But my point is, John Woo was the producer on that and even was a crazy, convoluted Hollywood story because we had somehow, we had gotten a meeting with John Woo's producing partner, Terrence Chang. And he was really impressed by us because we knew all of John Woo's movies back and forward, and we had done some stuff. We had some street cred. And he said that I think John Woo had broken out in american films, and I think he had done. He was shooting Broken Arrow with Travolta, but it hadn't come out yet. But he really loved working with Travolta. And John Woo's dream was to have a project that would team Chow and fat from the Hong Kong movies with John Travolta. And Ethan and I went back and, like, literally, like, probably later that day, we called Terrence Chang. We got a great movie. We got a perfect John Travolta Cheyenne fat movie. We pitched it to Terrence Chang. He loved it. He pitched it to John Woo. John loved it. Ethan and I go into our first, like, at that point, the biggest Hollywood meeting of our careers, because now we're going to William Morris to meet with John Travolta's agent. John Travolta is going to be on speakerphone from location and we're going to pitch him this movie because he loves working with John Woo. And we have this project and everybody's into this. And a couple, a couple things. [00:48:20] Speaker C: We were William Mars clients at the time. So it was, our agents brought us. [00:48:24] Speaker B: Right before we go into the meeting, our agent leans over and says, now the guy you got to get on board. Is John Woo's producing? No, is John Travolta's producing partner. His manager producing partner. You got to get him on board because Travolta will do anything he says. And if he says something weird during the pitch, don't let it throw you. He's got Tourette's. So. And then boom, this is right before we have to go in and do the pitch. This is a true story, Al. [00:48:53] Speaker A: Fucking hilarious. Oh, but, okay, so that, that's a great setup. Holy. [00:48:58] Speaker B: So we get through the pitch. It's, the guy's a little shaky. [00:49:04] Speaker C: We went in and the agent, because it was in Travolta's William Morris super agents office and he got Travolta on the phone. And Travolta was on the phone. And Travolta was literally on the phone for, like, to do a kind of a meet and greet, you know, hello and then say goodbye. He was literally there on the phone. [00:49:32] Speaker B: It was like, if my guy likes it, I'll do the. [00:49:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and you're gonna spend the whole time I got, if I was shooting the scene, it's your eyes. I'm tight on your eyes. Looking at him the whole time. [00:49:44] Speaker B: Wait, waiting for him to, like, say something. [00:49:48] Speaker C: Speaking for myself, Alan, I tried very hard not to do that. I was very self conscious. [00:49:54] Speaker A: I don't want to do that. [00:49:56] Speaker C: But it's a struggle. [00:49:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:59] Speaker B: So this is, this is a long, but the punchline is worth it. Okay. So we pitched this thing. They love it. It's great. It's, we're doing this movie and this, at this point is the biggest project that Ethan, I have ever worked on. Right. We're now writing a John Travolta Cheyenne fat John Woo movie for whatever. The studio, whatever. It's great. During the time when all this stuff. [00:50:23] Speaker C: There was no studio yet, it was, they were expecting to have a beating war, I think. [00:50:29] Speaker B: Slam dunk. It's a beating and Columbine happens and. [00:50:34] Speaker C: But it was literally like, we did this pitch on a Thursday or a Friday, I don't know. And then literally Columbine happened like, that day or the next. [00:50:45] Speaker B: And everything they're showing like, these psycho kids that shot up this place, they're all inspired by violent movies and everything they're showing on the news is the Matrix and scenes from John Woo movies. And so we get the call literally, like Monday or Tuesday. John Woo doesn't want to do any more hyper violent movies for a while. He wants to lay low, reconsider what he wants to do next. And the whole project, classic Hollywood, falls apart sort of over the weekend. And, Ethan, weren't you getting on a plane to go? [00:51:19] Speaker C: No, it was. It was. I got on. My wife picked me up in Beverly Hills and we went to, like, lax, where my wife and our, our son, who at the time was, I don't know, whatever your columbine was about, he was probably like a year old or something. We went to LAX to fly to China because my wife's from China, and we had this long planned trip. And then that, that happened. And the next, what happened was John Wu was in Australia actually shooting, wasn't he? What was he was getting? [00:51:53] Speaker B: Or he's prepping mission impossible to. And it was. [00:51:56] Speaker C: The thing is, like, I guess what side described was on a lot of american television, but it was the only thing on, like, australian, you know, tv because they don't have as many. They didn't have as many channels back then. It was like all australian news network or whatever, and all they did was. Was show clips, you know, talk about Columbine and show these clips from various action movies. And John Woo decided. [00:52:22] Speaker B: So it was, we were, like, devastated for, you know, weeks, and then it was sort of. There's. There's sort of, it ended up being aaa double rebound for us because at first we said, okay, our movie got mired in this terrible tragedy and all this stuff. But it. It is a good idea because clearly, you know, we were going to get this movie made with Jallian Fat and John Travolta and John Woo. Isn't there somebody else we can pitch it to? And at the time, Richard Donner had either finished, I don't know if it come out yet, or he had finished shooting lethal weapon three with Jet Li has the bad guy, another Hong Kong film star. So we basically pitched the same movie to Dick Donner as a jet leave vehicle instead of italian fat vehicle. And Dick Donner loved it. And we got it set up at Disney, never got made. [00:53:21] Speaker C: Then we went, we went to Disney with Dick Donner and Jet Li. [00:53:25] Speaker B: And Jet Li. So that's comeback triumph number one. That, like, okay, we reset the project up someplace else with a different Hong Kong star and a different director then because John Woo and Terrence Chang liked it so much and had to love that pitch. They came to us not too long after with this independent comic book called Bulletproof Monk, which had had like two issues made ironically and even more ironically. The lead character, the bulletproof Monk, wasn't in any of those issues. There was no, he was like a sort of a mystical title character that was referred to off. [00:54:05] Speaker C: There were three issues, but they only brought two to give to us. [00:54:08] Speaker B: Yeah, there was two or three. Yeah, right, exactly. It was the whole. But they said, hey, we love this title. Cheyenne fat loves this title. And we thought, you guys are great. Can you guys come up with something based on this threadbare, you know, really virtually no source material, which, and this is just a general thing about Ethan and I, we really made our backs. We made our career on doing original material for the most part. So the best scenario for us, if there is ip, is to have the most threadbare ip possible. So we can basically say, oh, it's based on this comic book. But the reality is Ethi made up 98% of the movie or the story. So that was a perfect scenario. And we got to meet Cheyenne fat and we got in business with John Woo again and the movie actually got made. And so the whole joke is from this, like, crazy meeting with the Tourette syndrome Travolta and then Columbine, you know, eventually it all worked out in the end. So. And I would say there's, wait, there's one last. I keep forgetting there's a third punchline. Because when we wrote Bulletproof Monk before the movie got made, the script was a bit of a hot commodity in town for a while. And that got us a meeting at DreamWorks, which resulted in Kung fu Panda, which Ethan and I. [00:55:35] Speaker C: And it was, you know, it makes sense because bulletproof Monk had a lot of asian, east asian cultural content in it. And when DreamWorks was looking, DreamWorks had the title Kung fu Panda and had developed, tried to develop a movie from it, an animated movie from it for like a year in house at DreamWorks and hadn't gotten to a place they were satisfied with or whatever. So it made sense in a way that they called us because we were screenwriters who had at least some knowledge, familiarity, you know, understanding of the environment. [00:56:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So anyhow, so that was a long story, but with not one, not two, but three. [00:56:26] Speaker A: Positive punchline, but actually the destination that we wanted to head to anyway, which was kung fu Panda, just to chat about that briefly, but just to go. [00:56:35] Speaker D: Back for 1 second. I think the moment that you missed was when they came back to you and said, we're going to, we're not going to do, who doesn't want to make a movie like this? I think you should have waited a couple of days and called back and we said, we thought about this. We've changed the whole thing around. The lead character now has Tourette's. [00:56:53] Speaker B: There you go. Travolta would be back into the movie. Yes. Travolta is signing up. Oh my God. [00:57:02] Speaker C: Do you remember the one John Travolta quote that I actually remember hearing him say over the speakerphone, his agent at his like giant, you know, desk introduced, everybody was in the room to him. [00:57:20] Speaker B: Right. [00:57:20] Speaker C: And I don't know, there were probably, there had to be close to nine people in the room from various, you know, sources or whatever. And I just remember John Travolta saying, like, everybody's there for me. They're all there for me. [00:57:37] Speaker B: Typical movie star. Charming, self deprecating, but letting you know that he's the most important person in the room. [00:57:44] Speaker C: He's an ultimate humble braggest. You guys are all there for me. [00:57:47] Speaker B: I remember when we worked with Will Smith. Will Smith would come into the meetings with a t shirt that said El Jefe the boss. And like, you know, he didn't really say. And he was charming and cool because he didn't have to say anything because it's like, he's El Jefe. [00:58:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:05] Speaker B: Okay, kung Fu panda. You know, we've talked about this more recently a lot. I think that, not to get into the gory details, I think the fact is that, the fact that, again, Ethan had been in China, his wife is chinese. Even before the eighties when we saw these Hong Kong movies in Chinatown, I used to love kung fu movies when I was a kid. Would go to the local grindhouse, the equivalent. Yes. The Cincinnati, Ohio, which is a very conservative suburban city, does have, especially in the seventies, does have really, you know, bad neighborhoods with like rundown theaters that would show all these kung fu movies. And I would go see these movies when I was, you know, not too young, maybe like junior high school. So like, we had a love of this material. And the thing that I always remembered is that dreamworks, for some reason, they kept, they kept trying to, the inspiration for the movie kept being like these japanese Kurosawa movies. And I, Ethan and I sort of were like, this isn't, these aren't kung fu movies you guys are ripping off. This is like, and we love. [00:59:20] Speaker C: I mean, speaking for myself, and I think samurai films and other, other. [00:59:26] Speaker B: It's apples and oranges, you know, it's apples and oranges, so. [00:59:30] Speaker C: Exactly compute, you know, and I think that the thing had literally compiled this huge binder of, like, reference material in house at DreamWorks for kung fu panda. [00:59:44] Speaker A: But all the wrong references. [00:59:45] Speaker C: Well. [00:59:48] Speaker B: It'S not the wrong references. It's just their development team. [00:59:50] Speaker C: That's a little harsh, but not completely wrong. It depends what you want to take from all of these samurai movies and martial arts movies. [01:00:01] Speaker A: What did they want to make? All right, take a second. [01:00:04] Speaker B: They kept wanting to make, there's a cursor movie called Kagamusha, which is basically about a beggar who they basically, I think the king gets killed or the emperor gets killed, and they take this beggar and they turn him into the emperor. That was the movie they kept pushing on us all the time. [01:00:20] Speaker C: The Shadow warrior, the imitation. [01:00:23] Speaker A: Why? [01:00:23] Speaker C: You know, just that. [01:00:24] Speaker B: Washington. [01:00:28] Speaker C: You'Re at a loss. [01:00:31] Speaker B: I don't know. We had a similar. [01:00:33] Speaker C: Because of identity, because it was like some kind of play on identity, you know, even though they never. We were the ones, it may seem very obvious, but we were the ones who were, like, the most unlikely hero, you know, because a fat panda is not what you think of as a martial arts hero or, you know, kick ass martial artist. [01:00:58] Speaker B: The big inspiration for us, when it. [01:01:00] Speaker C: When they, they didn't. They, they didn't, they didn't really hit on, which is a little surprising internally. Or at least they didn't focus on the comedy slash absurdity of right handed doing kung fu. They treated it more. And it may have been whatever one or two in house exec, creative executives were the ones who actually got the assignment, you know, to, like, work on this stuff. Or, or maybe it was like the groupthink from the development team or something, but they focused in terms of the tone. It was much more serious, and it was much more grim, and there was something to life or death, high stakes in the story. That's a good thing. That Sinai thought was a good thing, but in terms of, in terms of the tone and how much fun you should just intrinsically have with a kung fu martial arts hero who's a panda, it wasn't really, it was, they hadn't really, like, hit on that. [01:02:07] Speaker B: The two big inspirations for Ethan and I, one was there's a, there's an old school, like, late seventies Jackie Chan movie. I think it's, I think it's like the young master or maybe it's the first drunken master. And the thing is, he's based janitor at the kung fu school, saying he's the biggest fan. He idolizes all these kung fu stars, but he's like, nobody, right? He's the janitor. [01:02:34] Speaker A: Here's the weird thing. To me. They had really, conceptually, they had three words, right? That's really all that they had kung fu panda, right. And they never looked at the three words and went, wait, wait, hold on. I mean, really, it's the most obvious thing. [01:02:50] Speaker C: Again, I wouldn't. [01:02:52] Speaker B: Everything obvious. [01:02:54] Speaker C: I wouldn't be that harsh. Only because I think the reason, whether it was conscious or subconscious, the reason that that project got on to the development slate there is because, again, consciously or subconsciously, the people who made those decisions knew on some level, kung fu panda. [01:03:19] Speaker B: Wow, that's a funny idea. [01:03:21] Speaker C: And we've always, I've always said we didn't come up with that title. And just those three words, it's like, brilliant. It's just amazing. [01:03:30] Speaker A: You know, you're making a fair point, Ethan, in this. And it's kind of, we have all gotten studio notes from. And the thing about notes, whenever we get them, is often, all right, what the person giving the note is after actually might be a good point. They're just not able to articulate it the way that would. The shortest distance between two points. And that often is the fight that we are having. It's all right. You haven't, you saw something, but you don't know how to put it into words. Well, words that can help me resolve anything that's bothering you. [01:04:14] Speaker C: I think the other, but the other version of that that we've had a lot of experience with is they put their focus, they put their finger on something, and they. That they identify as a weakness or a soft, you know, soft spot or a problem. And they're right. [01:04:35] Speaker B: I. [01:04:35] Speaker C: But their proposed, this is what you have to do to solve it or fix it or repair it or make up for it is completely wrong and makes it ten times worse. And so then you have to try, and I'm sure you guys have a lot of experience with this together, and probably, maybe individually, you have to try and, you know, find a way to emphasize the positive of the note, which is, you're right, there is a problem. Let it. We'll go and we'll solve it without explicitly embracing their suggested solve, which to them is like, you know, perfect, but which, you know, will make many more problems and be worse than what I have come to. [01:05:20] Speaker B: The humbling conclusion recently, and Ethan may not agree with this, but I feel like, as a screenwriter, because you're part of this giant machine, right, you have to depend on actors and directors and costume people and technicians, everything. Cinematographers. I feel like we're only as good as our collaborators. Meaning, if you have a shitty director, no matter how great your script is, a shitty director can fuck up a movie. I remember our first, one of our first Hollywood scripts. We wrote this really cool, elaborate action set piece set in an abandoned construction site. And it had cool, like, band saws and rebar props and guys falling through. And the director, who was a lazy fuck, was like, you know, I'm going to shoot this in a warehouse with some boxes. And it was like, what? This is terrible. We, like, wrote this great sequence, and it was like this lazy, terrible director did the most boring version of it, possibly. And then even when you talk about notes, you're also. I feel like the best things that Ethan and I have done that gotten me, have gotten through the grind of the development process, because we had really smart development people, smart executives, smart people who a. They were trying to make the same movie as we were. That's huge. A lot of these things fall apart, not because people are stupid, but because they have different visions for the material than you do. Ethan and I have one vision for a movie. The executive thinks it's going to be something else entirely, and those visions will never add up. But also, if you have smart people and everybody's making the same movie and you get good feedback and you get good ideas, then we can run with it, and it's great. And I think all the. I feel like the things that we've done that have turned out really well are really the result of having smart collaborators and not being cock blocked by just dumb notes or dumb people that, and they're writing the checks, they're paying the bills. So we went back and forth for a long time in our careers. It's an endless discussion. Do you fight these people? Or do you sit there and say, well, if I tell them to fuck off, they're going to fire me and hire somebody else to do this. So at least if I'm going to do these changes, at least I have some control over how it's executed. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's sort of an, you know, it's an endless process that I think every writer in Hollywood has to deal with, you know? [01:08:08] Speaker C: Well, I think one thing I'll say, though, is that director that side described as lazy. He wasn't lazy. He was not creatively interested or engaged in action. And to him, doing, shooting the elaborately detailed two page action sequence that we had written, set in a construction site, was. Was pointless. [01:08:41] Speaker B: No interest. No interest. [01:08:43] Speaker C: So the first thing that he went to as the easiest, cheapest, fastest. And so, I don't know, he could focus on. He could focus on the character and their dialogue, so to speak. You know, I think he wanted to focus a little bit of dialogue in there was. And I remember he actually said, we'll reset it. He was. He was polish, actually. And he said, we'll reset it in an empty warehouse or an abandoned airplane hangar. And we were like, those are the two biggest cliches for action action movie ever, right? The great train robbery in, like, 1911 or what are you crazy? You know, I mean, we didn't say, what are you crazy? But. But it, you know, that's where it was. That it ended up being reset. [01:09:28] Speaker B: And I will say, and I'll just talk a little bit more about this particular movie because it's sort of funny. It was our very first official Hollywood job. It's actually pre demonite. And I know in the last podcast we talked about this Dolph Lundgren movie. We did men of war, which was our first job, sort of on the ground in Hollywood. This predated that by a year or two. And it was a rewrite, page one rewrite. It was an insurance fraud action movie, and it was straight to video. Okay, insurance fraud thriller. But we were like, it was our first Hollywood. And Ethan and I were like, God damn it, we're going to write the Citizen Kane of insurance fraud thrillers. We wrote the. We totally committed 110%. We had no perspective that some lazy, disinterested director was going to do this or that. It was going to go straight to be. We were just like, we are writing the greatest movie of all time. [01:10:30] Speaker A: Double indemnity meets die hard. [01:10:33] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. What happened was we flew out to LA on spec. We had gotten a manager in LA who had read demonite and our two other maybe had just read demonite, actually, or I don't remember. I think he maybe had just read demonite, and he had talked to us over the phone from LA. We had never met him in person and started to represent us here and submit that script to try and get us low budget writing jobs. And this opportunity arose and he got in touch with us and we flew out to LA on spec. [01:11:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I was like, basically, I got you a pitch meeting, but you have to be here tomorrow to finish the movie. [01:11:23] Speaker C: He sent us the scripts. He sent us, like, two copies because of the old days, you know, he sent us hard copies of the screenplay. We read the screenplay on the flight out and talked about what we thought was good, bad and indifferent about it, what we should do to improve it. He picked us up at LAX, drove us to the office. We went up and we had our pitch meeting. And then we ended up getting the job. [01:11:53] Speaker B: But wait, Ethan, you have to tell a story. We pitched it. There was a young guy who was like, son. He was like the son of the. [01:12:01] Speaker C: Studio, the son of the guy who had founded the company. And he looked like a surfer. [01:12:07] Speaker B: He was. [01:12:07] Speaker C: I mean, he was, like, in his thirties, blonde with long hair and a beard. And he didn't really say much during our pitch. Ask us many questions or, you know, I don't even remember if he ever laughed at any of the comedy or humor. We had worked into it or whatever, like everybody else did, and everything was done. We could tell we had acquitted ourselves well. That doesn't mean you're going to get hired. But at least we had acquitted ourselves well. And at the very end, this guy that's talking about, he kind of, like, leans forward and sort of, like, half raises his hand and says, so wait, let me understand this. Just before you guys leave, you flew out here just for this meeting? [01:12:52] Speaker B: Because to him, this is a grown up, straight to video movie we're banging out. And who, like, really, this guy had been. [01:13:00] Speaker C: This guy was born to a big shot, you know, Hollywood producer who then. [01:13:05] Speaker B: Was what now they call Nepo babies. [01:13:08] Speaker C: He was founded his own mini studio. They had their own off. They had their own building in Hollywood right across from a man's chinese theater and a little bit to the west, like on that same block. And which probably you guys know who we're talking about now. Not that it's, like, secret and just the idea that we had taken up that we had paid for plane tickets out of our own pockets to come to Los Angeles to go to that conference room and do our dog and pony show for him and his colleagues, just for this crappy, in his mind, low budget, nothing, you know, project. It's like he couldn't put it together. [01:13:49] Speaker B: We were. He was like, couldn't. He couldn't put it together. The movie did get made. I don't think it was. It was straight to video. I don't think it was ever released in North America. We got a. We got a DVD copy. [01:14:03] Speaker C: Yeah. And it was not the not. [01:14:04] Speaker B: There was no release in North America in any form. The DVD. Yes, the DVD habit is like a region twelve UK or the Philippines. It starred Robert, Davey and. And they spelled my name wrong in the credits. [01:14:20] Speaker C: I forgot that part, man. [01:14:22] Speaker B: Then, then this is the days when you had hundred percent. You had to be in Hollywood or nobody took you seriously. [01:14:30] Speaker C: But you know what? Wait, Ty. I got one thing that just hit me I've never thought of for. Because that, that was like 1991. I think when we. It was 1990 or 1991 might have been freaking 1990 when we first went out and got that job. So that's literally like whatever, 34 years ago. I never thought before. Maybe that guy, the blonde surfer Junior guy. Maybe when we left he was the one who said we have to hire. [01:15:04] Speaker B: Those guys blew all the way out here. [01:15:06] Speaker C: You gotta go. He did a good job. And they actually came here just for. [01:15:11] Speaker B: They care about this crap. [01:15:13] Speaker C: Maybe the tone of his comment was so incredulous, it was low key. He wasn't like, what a bunch of eating. He was just like, you guys actually flew out. [01:15:24] Speaker B: I know. It's amazing. [01:15:25] Speaker C: This as possibly being positive in the. [01:15:30] Speaker B: After we left, it's true. [01:15:34] Speaker C: Maybe he's the reason we got that job. [01:15:36] Speaker B: So then we went back to New York and because we weren't out here, nothing happened forever, right. For another year. Then we came out again. We got a job and we can talk about this. We got a job essentially ghost writing, doing a rewrite, a page one rewrite for. And there was a very successful straight to video guy named Albert Pune who did a lot of movies. His biggest, he did a movie called I think Sword and the Sorcerer that came out like three weeks before Conan the Barbarian and was like a big low budget hit. But he was basically a straight to video director and he had written a low budget action movie and he, you know, and he wasn't really a writer. He had the concept, but it had like a sort of martial arts thing. And Ethan and I basically got also. [01:16:28] Speaker C: A little bit of a romantic comedy. Got the job to romantic relationship and also. So we did this entire job from the east coast. Yeah, we did it before anybody lived in LA. We would fly to LA sometimes for meetings or to try and get a job that our manager had set up. But we still were both on the east coast when we got this gig. [01:16:50] Speaker B: So we wrote this. It was like a page one rewrite and it got made. It's called. And our names aren't on it. It's called Brain Smasher and it stars Andrew Dice Clay and Terry Hatcher. [01:17:03] Speaker C: And I reveal this because, consumed with. [01:17:07] Speaker B: Laughs, Andrew Dice Clay plays a bouncer. Terry Hatcher is a alternate. [01:17:12] Speaker C: The alternate title. There's two or three titles. Maybe one title is just brain Smasher. Another title is Brain Smasher a love story. And the other title is the bouncer and the model. [01:17:26] Speaker B: Yes, the bouncer or the bounce of the beauty. And so Andrew Dice, he didn't come. [01:17:30] Speaker C: Up with any of the titles. [01:17:31] Speaker B: Andrew Dice plays a bouncer. Terry Hester is a model. And somehow they get involved with a mystical chinese flower. [01:17:39] Speaker C: And Terry Hatcher, the model's older sister, is an archaeologist, and she flies, comes. [01:17:45] Speaker B: Back crazy, but it's fun. And I remember again, the cultural thing, talking about the authenticity that he thought it would bring. There was a thing in the script where they were being pursued by ninjas, but they were from China. So, Ethan, I put a running gag into the movie where everybody thinks the bad guys are ninjas, and the bad guys keep saying, we're not ninjas. Ninjas are japanese. We're chinese. You know, it was like a whole. We've made it a whole gag in the movie. So to this day, the only thing I know about this movie in retrospect is that I was in the bookstore and I saw Andrew Dice Clay had written a memoir, an autobiography, and there's actually a whole chapter on brain Smasher. Mostly he claims that he had a torrid affair with Terry Hatcher on the set of a brain smasher because they shot it in Seattle. So I don't know. It's a memorable movie for that reason. For Andrew Dice Clay, at least. [01:18:46] Speaker C: So it's the closest thing in terms of. In terms of tone, it's the closest thing we ever wrote to, like, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad World. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's a mad, mad Madden Man World is one of the greatest films ever made. Like, if I was on trapped on a desert island and I got to have, like, three or four movies or something, that would probably be one of the movies I would bring with me. [01:19:09] Speaker A: It's funny you bring that up, Ethan, but. [01:19:12] Speaker C: But I'm not. I'm not intimating that brain smasher is anywhere in the same league as that movie. I'm just saying internally, tone and sensibility. [01:19:25] Speaker B: One last thing. I'll say we live. [01:19:26] Speaker C: That was something we brought to it. [01:19:28] Speaker B: I would say we literally got paid the checks. [01:19:32] Speaker C: Yeah, literally. [01:19:33] Speaker B: The checks stamped on the checks were in lieu of credit because we weren't going to go to the writers Guild. There was no. It was, it was like a total ghost writing job. [01:19:44] Speaker C: Our manager, we were already paid the actual fee for the rewrites, for the page one rewrite. That was not a lot of money, but it was money. And then, and the director, Albert Pune, I think he saw the finished film and he thought it was not bad at all. And he really wanted to have the credit just say written and directed by me. By him. And so our manager called us and basically, I don't want to say strong arm because we were a consenting adulthood, but I still remember, I can't remember how I agreed to this because it was, if I tell you the sum of cash in the checks that psy got one and I got one for identical amounts, this is in like probably 1993, maybe. I don't know, maybe 1994, I don't know. Or maybe 1992, whatever. It was literally fucking pennies. It was 500 fucking dollars apiece. And, and I didn't want to say yes because we had seen, we had actually gotten from the company they had sent us and we had watched, we had watched the rough cut with a bunch of, like, outside his apartment. He, he held like a screening or something. We had like tons of friends. [01:21:18] Speaker B: It was the citizen Kane of Andrew. [01:21:20] Speaker C: Versus rough cut was shockingly good. The finished movie, I would say, actually wasn't quite as good, but that's, that's neither here nor there. And the idea of taking five, even though we were both relatively lower class people at the time, we didn't. [01:21:39] Speaker B: Desperate at the time, but I mean. [01:21:42] Speaker C: We could, we could feed ourselves. There might be like a lot of ramen noodles or whatever, but we were not starving. And the idea of taking $500 in place of this work, having our names on something that I was at least a little bit proud of at that time. And I just remember our manager basically saying, because I don't think I, at least for me, I didn't acquiesce in the first conversation, but, like, by the third conversation was like, if you guys don't agree to this, it's going to be really hard, you guys. You know, I don't. I don't know that he actually said, like, I think it was like the way Joel Silver said to you, oh. [01:22:22] Speaker B: No, Ethan, it was more, you don't want credit on this movie, trust me. [01:22:27] Speaker C: Oh, really? [01:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:22:28] Speaker C: That's what he said to you was. [01:22:31] Speaker B: On his way down. And it was like, trust me, this is nothing you guys want credit on. It's not going to help your careers. Take the money. [01:22:40] Speaker D: And let me ask you a question, and this is the. Probably the most important question for this event. Did the manager insist on taking his 10%? [01:22:52] Speaker C: That's a great question. You're literally like the borscht belt punchline machine. [01:22:57] Speaker B: I don't remember. [01:22:58] Speaker C: Oh, my God. Probably. But I mean, you know, I mean, that's only right. You know, whatever. $50 to him. You know, 500. I remember because that's the thing. I wish I. For a long time, I might still have it somewhere, but it might be in a basement in Brooklyn, or maybe it's in a box of storage paperwork that I have where it literally on the fucking. On the fucking check stub, it says payment in lieu of credit. [01:23:33] Speaker B: Yes. [01:23:34] Speaker C: I mean, we weren't members of the writers guild at the time yet. I don't think so. It was legal, whatever. But I just remember thinking like, that's incredible. [01:23:45] Speaker B: You know, al, you were saying something about the desert island. I don't remember what you were. [01:23:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You know what I've decided as. As we've been having this conversation is that this is not part one of two. This is part one of many. This. We could go on and on. This collective group of people could go on and on and on. So rather than find an endpoint, there is no endpoint to the conversation. So as something that we do occasionally with people who we have on it, it's a five by two, okay? If you were stuck in either a desert island or a pod that you're being shipped out to Mars and back. [01:24:25] Speaker C: That'S much more 21st century. [01:24:28] Speaker A: There you go. But the problem is that the pods, great shape, but the entertainment system is just all fucked up. Five movies and two songs is all that they had space for. It's all the memory that's left. But five movies and two songs that you could watch and listen to again and again. [01:24:48] Speaker B: Wow. Five's hard. I can do three off the top of my head. Five. [01:24:53] Speaker A: Go for it. Go for it. [01:24:54] Speaker B: Well, my go to three favorite movies are apocalypse now, assault on precinct 13, and ironically, Mel Brooks, the producers, the original producers. So those are my easy top three. Beyond that, I don't know. It's a mishmash of dozens of crazy cool movies, but those are my top three. [01:25:23] Speaker A: Why? Why those three? [01:25:26] Speaker B: I don't know. They had the most impact on me when I was young. You know, when I saw apocalypse now in the theater, I was probably 15 years old or something, and I was like, I couldn't watch tv for, like, six months because it was such a visually compelling movie with compelling themes. And then you'd go home in those days and put on television. It was these overlit sets with people talking like, I can't watch anything after I've seen this movie. It just blew my mind. Precinct 13, because it was like, it's action, it's funny, it's suspenseful. It was made for virtually nothing. And I think it was just when we talked before that, that was one of the inspirations for Demon Knight in terms of, like, we can make a movie in one location. That can be amazing. I just love Precinct 13. It's just really funny. The score is incredible. It's one of Carpenter's best scores. And the producers, just because it's like the funniest movie ever and it's so subversive and it, you know, obviously people know it now from the Broadway musical, but it had so much legs that it, like, you know, it's like talking about something never going out of style. It's like, came in a way it. [01:26:39] Speaker C: Never went out of style. Not to interrupt, but because this is your thing, but, like, when you and I first met, and we both loved the producers, which is in, like 1986, nobody cared about, talked about the producer, like, nobody except people who loved it or, you know, whatever. Also, I will say a big pop culture phenomenon. [01:27:03] Speaker B: I would also say Ethan and I bonded also over. We love the original Star Trek, the William Shatner Star Trek, which was a seminal thing for both Ethan and I on different parts of the country when we were kids. I mean, I love, my first curse word I ever saw on television was William Shatner at the end of, I think it's city on the edge of forever, says, let's get the hell out of here. I was like, oh, my God. He said hell on television. And I was watching repeats, so I didn't even see it when it was broadcast in 1967. People must have flipped out. But I know Ethan and I both love the original Star Trek also. What about you, Ethan? [01:27:42] Speaker C: Another movie not to launch into my answer to the. [01:27:46] Speaker A: Oh, no, no. [01:27:47] Speaker C: I'm saying another movie that we bonded over, I think, before we even talked about the producers was the Richard Lester three Musketeers. [01:27:58] Speaker B: Oh, that would be number four. The Richard Lester three Musketeers. [01:28:02] Speaker C: Yeah. All right, so I guess I'll pick up from there. So the thing about that, I don't know. It's very hard to do five movies like Sigh said or whatever, although he did three with no problem. I don't know if I would put the Richard Lester three Musketeer movies. Movie in my top five. But it had a huge impact on me as a kid seeing it because it was like action adventure with life or real world life or death stakes. It was also history. And it, to me, it was, like, gritty, realistic in my, you know, boys eyes. Boy who was obsessed with history. It was a gritty, more realistic version of history than I had seen on most of the movies, historical period pieces that I watched on tv or whatever. And it was fun, but it wasn't like there were no jokes. People didn't tell jokes for laughs, but there were even laugh out loud moments of humor. And it, like Si was saying about apocalypse now, it was, like, visually striking and memorable, and it had its own style and. And the music, again, the music was. So maybe I should put that in the top three. [01:29:25] Speaker B: Then you only have to name movies. [01:29:27] Speaker C: Okay. The host asked the question and he said, five. You're not the host. [01:29:35] Speaker B: That's fine. [01:29:36] Speaker A: It was negotiable. [01:29:37] Speaker D: But you could be the host. Wait a second. [01:29:40] Speaker C: So probably number one for me. And it actually bugged me after the last one of these that we did that when, when you guys asked about, like, what's a movie that, you know, you always remember or was very important to you that I didn't answer. I said gunga dinner, which is one of my favorite movies and would probably have to be on that list, which is a very old movie from 1939. [01:30:03] Speaker A: Carrie Grant. Isn't that good? [01:30:05] Speaker C: Yeah. Cary Grant McLaughlin. Sam Jaffe as gunga din. [01:30:10] Speaker A: Yep. [01:30:12] Speaker C: I always identified with the villain played, which is an indian leader of college. Well, he says, called I'm trying to. Indian leader of a religious political movement in India against the British Empire. And he's the guru. And at one point in the movie, heading into the big finale, when the three heroes have been captured by his forces and they're in, like, a face to face confrontation with him, they may have actually taken him prisoner and they're holding him, trying to negotiate with his army. And one of them, like, either Cary Grant or Victor McLaughlin says, or the other. The other guy says, fairbanks. Douglas Fairbanks. Yeah. Junior says, you're mad. I think it's Victor McLaughlin. You're mad. And then the mad guru sort of launches into this amazing monologue where he basically says, I'm mad. You know, they called. They called Caesar mad. They called Alexander mad. And surely Napoleon had this of the lot. See what wisdom lies beneath my madness? And so that that scene and that character and that movie had such an impact on me that my email that guru. Yeah, I should. Don't, we shouldn't say that out loud, even though I know very few people are watching or listening. Still too many. [01:31:49] Speaker A: There's a fifth. There's a sequence of 15 numbers and letters and tables that are in no one could possibly get. [01:31:57] Speaker C: And also there's the specific, you know. [01:32:00] Speaker B: Specific deluge with emails. [01:32:02] Speaker C: Anyway, so that, you know, mad Guru is like a moniker that I took upon myself for whatever reason. Because even when I saw that movie the first time and I was probably like, I don't know, seven years old or something, there was something incredibly compelling and, and legitimate about the fact that this guy's the villain. But when he gets to have his say to the three heroes, he sounds like they're equal. Or, and then he has that. He gives that speech and then he says, and I'm going to show you that, you know, you all love England. Well, I love India. India is my country, and I can die for it as heroically as you can die for yours. Then he jumps into a snake pit filled with deadly cobras. So for whatever reason, to me, that was like a very, I don't know, it was a powerful. [01:33:05] Speaker B: What Ethan learned from that, that we, you always want the villain when the villain has their say. If you do your job well as a writer, you want the audience to go like, okay, I hate this guy, but he sort of has a point. You know, you really, you want to get that, you want that element of like, okay, well, I know he's a bad guy and he's killing everybody, but, yeah, okay. [01:33:27] Speaker C: It's not, I mean, that's, that's, you know, obviously that's boiling it down to a particular, you know, essence or whatever. [01:33:32] Speaker B: Ethan, two more movies. Two more movies. [01:33:34] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, no, I mean, that's, that's the movie that I was talking about before that. I felt bad. I had not mentioned, when I did mention Gunga Din is a movie that's probably even closer to my heart, which I actually saw in the theater when it was first released. And I think I was ten years old because I'm pretty sure it's from 1975, which is the wind and the lion, written and directed by John Melius, which is a very odd almost. It's not exactly a standalone genre of its own, but it sort of is action adventure. This action adventure movie. It's Sean, basically. Okay. Sean Connery plays an islamic extremist. [01:34:16] Speaker B: That's true. [01:34:17] Speaker C: That's basically the way you could, like, pitch that movie, which is kind of amazing, but it's a period piece that takes a real historical incident and turns it into a Hollywood movie, like I'm the big history guy. The real historical incident has probably 25% to 50% overlap with the movie. In reality, the character that Candace Bergen in 1975, who is an incredibly beautiful, regal looking, a blonde woman. Blonde, sort of like waspy, blue blood New England american character, the real version of her was a greek american immigrant who was a guy. [01:35:09] Speaker B: That's the difference. [01:35:11] Speaker C: So it's very gender. [01:35:12] Speaker B: The gender thing was a big difference. [01:35:14] Speaker C: Yeah, it's very, very different. But I loved that movie. And, you know, I go back to that movie semi regularly, and it always holds up for me. And the thing is, it has moments, even though it tells a very straightforward, serious drama about an international incident involving a moroccan rebel kidnapping an american woman and her two kids and holding them for ransom and gunboat diplomacy and military intervention. And the world in, like, 1905, on the brink of potentially World War one, which would really break out less than a decade later. And again, it's inspired by real incidents in Morocco, even though it involves all of those high stakes, serious historical drama issues. It's also got its moments of humor. And it also. I feel like having read a lot of the stuff that was written back in the day when I was much younger and I cared about, like, film, a little bit about film criticism and cinema studies and stuff. I never saw this discussed, which is that I think the wind and the lion is simultaneous content and criticism because there are moments in the wind and the lionhead when the writing, even though it stays, it never breaks the fourth wall and says, like, oh, we're making a movie. And this is what's odd or absurd about the story in the movie or doesn't fit in with the world in 1975 from our story from 1905. Even though they never do that, they do sort of pop the air on the balloon of some of the sort of like, you know, stuffier elements that go along with the historical drama. There's this incredible moment at the White House where Teddy Roosevelt is having this big state dinner. And one of the guests at the state dinner is the japanese ambassador. Right? And John Houston plays John Hay, who was the secretary of state at the time. And in the lead up to the Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt, giving his big, like, toast, John Houston leans over to the japanese ambassador, who looks a little bit like a lean sumo wrestler in a. In a, you know, dress, you know, western dress suit. He leans over to him and he picks up the silverware and taps it against the glass and says, you likey forky? And puts the glass down, right? And then the scene goes on. And then Brian Keith, as Teddy Roosevelt, stands up and, or actually, no, then Brian Keith says something about being ready to cut the cake or something, but he gets cut off because the japanese ambassador stands up and raises his glass of champagne and makes a toast and says, may the, may the wind or the effect of Teddy Roosevelt in Panama because they have this Panama canal cake, right. Be in Panama. Be the same as the wind he has blown to Japan and Russia because the russo japanese war had just ended in a peace treaty negotiated by Teddy Roosevelt, which, that's a historical aside, be the same as the wind. He is blown to the far east, peace and respect and the triumph of goodwill. And Tati Roosevelt is like, oh, and he claps and everybody claps. And then the japanese ambassador sits back down and leans over to John Huston and goes, you like his speechy? And it's 1975. It's 1975. And I mean, I was only ten years old, but I, there's, and that's not the only moment like that in the movie. [01:39:47] Speaker A: But didn't Chuck Milius also do a fair amount of work on Apocalypse now script? [01:39:55] Speaker B: He wrote the original Helios land there. [01:39:57] Speaker C: He wrote the original screenplay and a bunch of rewrites. And then Michael Hare, who was the journalist who wrote dispatches, like, was hired to write narration, voiceover narration, and Coppola. [01:40:10] Speaker B: Did the rest of stuff. Hey, wait, I have two songs. I have two songs. [01:40:14] Speaker C: Okay, but wait, I got to finish my movies. I'll just list them without their impact. Okay, it's, this is an old movie. [01:40:24] Speaker B: Can't talk about your other movies in. [01:40:26] Speaker C: The detail that you said. I just list them without any, any elaboration. I would probably have to put it's a wonderful life on that list. There's a movie that I love is the only thing I'll say as elaboration is, is a much darker movie than people generally regard it as very dark, as a happy go lucky, joyful Christmas movie. And it's actually very, very dark, although it has, you know, it's certainly redemptive and cathartic and as arguably a very happy ending. [01:40:58] Speaker A: It basically, you know, it's built around a suicide attempt. [01:41:01] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So a very, a deeper movie than, you know, some people might give it credit for, at least gave it credit for at the time when I was watching it as a kid. And then what else? There's so much to choose from. Oh, man. I mean, I'm also, I do I did grow up watching a lot of foreign films, mostly on PBS. And probably I would put. I might have to. [01:41:34] Speaker B: Suspense. [01:41:35] Speaker C: Yeah, I might have to put. Oh, you know what? I'll put burn. I'll put burn. A underrated masterpiece, another historical period piece. So maybe I shouldn't put burn. I should put something like swept away. [01:41:49] Speaker B: But you can put burnout. [01:41:51] Speaker C: Burn. [01:41:51] Speaker B: Well, you. [01:41:52] Speaker A: Just. [01:41:52] Speaker C: Because you don't like swept away, but. [01:41:54] Speaker B: An underrated Jillo Pontecorvo movie with screenwriter. [01:42:00] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:42:01] Speaker B: With Brando. In an underrated Brando performance. I was gonna say, I know this here's a weird one. The movie I've seen more than any other movie. I've seen jaws more than any other movie because it's my wife's favorite movie. And every year we have to, at 4 July, have to go see or watch Jaws on television or see it on screen. So I've literally been married 30 years. So I've seen jaws at least 30 times. I mean, I don't know how many times I saw what originally came out. I like Jaws, but it's not one of my favorite movies. But I've now officially seen Jaws more than any movie ever made. [01:42:41] Speaker C: All right, I'm going to mention. [01:42:45] Speaker A: I'm going to throw away right there because it's a similar story. I've seen Life of Brian 30 times because I'm married to a Brit. And every Christmas we do life of Brian. [01:42:55] Speaker B: Life and Brian. [01:42:56] Speaker C: You know, a movie for a while, I would have put on the list of top five. I'm not going to put it on right now because it's just, there's something else I want to talk about. But what about Jabberwocky? Do you know Jabberwocky? [01:43:07] Speaker A: Sure. [01:43:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:43:08] Speaker C: I love, I love Jabberwocky, man, but. [01:43:11] Speaker D: All right, I think next, I think. [01:43:13] Speaker C: Two titles which are recent for me, relatively, much more recent than everything else I said. And they're both comedies, right? And they also fit into what Xi said about movies he's seen more than any other. I'm not saying I haven't seen these movies more than any other, but I love, I love them. And I try to rewatch them with my kids who are old enough to enjoy both of them now, which are little Miss Sunshine and. And Tropic Thunder. Tropic Thunder, for me, may be the most entertaining running time, like, consistently entertaining of almost any movie I've ever seen in my entire life. And again, I think Tropic Thunder qualifies as simultaneous content and criticism because it's a straight up comedy. The moments of straight up legit action movie power. For instance, the greatest one of the great. No, no, this is the last bit, which is. And also, having lived in China and spent time in China, the. The subtitled Mandarin. I'm a. What kind of, you know, what kind of farmer talks that way? You know, a lead farmer, motherfucker. And then blasting away with the AK 47s, or m will say, to bring this moment is pure fucking scene. [01:44:50] Speaker B: I will say Tropic Thunder is the comedy version of Apocalypse now. [01:44:55] Speaker C: I'll say it legitimately. Yeah. [01:44:59] Speaker A: Beautifully brought around. You want to throw in two songs, son? [01:45:03] Speaker B: No, no. Okay. [01:45:04] Speaker A: Okay. [01:45:05] Speaker C: I will. Because I. [01:45:06] Speaker B: Okay. If he doesn't have to do it. [01:45:09] Speaker C: I mean, that's a tough one, but I would probably say. I would probably say, God, man, that's tough. Like, AC DC is a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll, which has the bagpipe solo. And Metallica for who you. For whom the bell tolls, which reveals me to be what I am, which is a old school metalhead boy, boy, boy. [01:45:36] Speaker B: So I'm gonna. Weird. [01:45:37] Speaker C: There's no motorhead or misfits on that list. But I. There's only. If you're asking for two songs, those are. [01:45:43] Speaker B: All right. I'm gonna go the opposite. I'm gonna go really old school. I'm gonna say an incredibly obscure Elvis Presley song called Lonesome Cowboy, which I somehow. Somehow. A friend of mine had this single when I was a kid. I listened to it endlessly. And it's this really haunting song. It's just Elvis and a guitar with sort of a male chorus that pops in occasionally. There's, like virtually no orchestration at all. And he just sings about. It's a bizarrely, somewhat cliche, but bizarre meditation on loneliness. [01:46:21] Speaker A: Lonesome cowboy. [01:46:23] Speaker B: Lonesome cowboy. Look it up by Elvis Presley. And then there's a Sam Cooke song. A change is going to come, which is like the greatest, most haunting civil rights song of all time, which I think I like also because my father was a social worker. So there's something. And came of age in that era. [01:46:45] Speaker C: So, yeah, my version of that song would probably be Iron Maidens, the trooper, which is like charge of the light brigade. Historically, of course. Of course it would be from the crimean war. Yeah. [01:46:58] Speaker A: You know, guys, this is another 2 hours. We basically. And, you know, and I still feel like we've but scratched the surface. [01:47:06] Speaker B: We haven't talked about. Wait, we haven't talked about our. We haven't talked about process. [01:47:12] Speaker A: No. We have not. We have not. [01:47:13] Speaker B: We haven't talked about being writing partners. [01:47:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:47:16] Speaker B: We haven't talked about our Emmy and Golden Globe nominated series sleeper Cell, and we haven't talked about our screenplay. Nottingham, that became the Russell Co. Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie, which was a crazy story in itself. So topic next time. [01:47:35] Speaker A: So this will continue. We are. This is a disease that will not go away. [01:47:41] Speaker B: You opened pandora's box. I know you must regret it at this point, but you opened holy. [01:47:47] Speaker D: We're making up for the last 30 years. [01:47:49] Speaker C: Come on. [01:47:51] Speaker A: I'm going to sign off to the podcast momentarily. But hang on, guys, because Gil and I got. [01:47:58] Speaker D: But I got. We should do this next week. I got to go because I got a dog that splatters about the foot burst. [01:48:03] Speaker A: Okay. All right. So in that case, guys, thank you again for sitting in. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in, as usual. We'll see you all next. The how not to make a movie podcast is executive produced by me, Alan Katz, by Gil Adler, and by Jason Stein. Our artwork was done by the amazing Jody Webster and Jason, Jody, along with Mando, are all the hosts of the fun and informative dads from the Crypt podcast. Follow them for what my old pal the crypt keeper would have called terror living crypt content.