Raging Bull with David Krumholtz

The boxing days of youth

0:00Blank Jack with Griffin and David. Blank Jack with Griffin and David. Don't know what to say or what to expect. All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Jack. Go get him, champ. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. I'm the podcast. You unhappy with this? I love that. Okay. No, no, no. I'm very happy. The other one I was thinking about doing is... If you podcast, you podcast. If you lose, you still podcast. There's no way you can lose.

0:46what's the word there uh win if you win you win if you lose you win you still win there's no way you can lose right yeah no i liked what you did i thought that was great thank you and for the listener at home my handwork was perfect oh yeah my form was immaculate you're not a amateur boxer thank you thank you for asking uh you ever boxed i trained with a boxer yeah like sort of a workout thing right and then i pinched both nerves one nerve in each shoulder and went to a chiropractor

1:18and he fixed me but i part of him fixing me meant i wound up with a an elbow that locks up for the rest of my life what age was this 30 31 okay yeah so he fixed one thing and by breaking another thing yes yeah uh my my father made me uh train in boxing to toughen me up when i was upper single digits and i hated it and your weight was also upper upper single digits at that time right my weight was a lower single digits i could not crack 100 pounds well single digits would be one pound

1:53lower single digits i'm gonna ask you trained and did the person hit back no it was all kind of sparring but it was at like a real boxing gym and your father made you do it yes my father used to my father was trying to toughen you up talked about before a uh degenerate uh gambling addict whose favorite bar was jimmy's corner are you familiar with jimmy's corner jimmy's corner one no i'm not but on uh 44th street owned it was owned he's sadly passed away but jimmy glenn who was a boxing corner man and so he had jimmy glenn the owner of this bar who was an old former boxer and

2:30that's just when you're trying to get your kid a little bit of you know tlc what you want to do is ask your favorite bartender correct right this is like me at nine oh my god uh and my brother was so jealous and my brother was a very uh physically rambunctious child who would sometimes attack other kids just kind of like randomly he had so much excess energy he'd start wailing on them and he wanted to box and my parents were like this is a terrible idea and it was like a year and a half two years maybe of me begging my parents to let me stop and my brother begging to let him start

3:03wow and finally the switchover happened and the second my brother boxed he completely balanced out it like solved him and he had a golden gloves he was a licensed fighter he almost went pro as like a featherweight but the two years that you boxed you came away feeling like an inferior physical specimen crummy you get me i do you get it hard yeah yes i hated it it was like you didn't have a napoleon complex prior to which i did this it only made it correct infinitely worse especially because

3:38my brother's also a little guy i don't got no no giant brother it's why when i shake your hand you really squeeze the shit out i squeeze really hard and i locked in on your eyes by the way i do the same thing but your squeeze you got to do it is squeezier than mine yes and we did a hug i did a i did a full body squeeze i pinched those nerves i don't want to insult you but i didn't feel that

Improv and brotherly love

3:59happen i think this is a good energy for this episode though because you know we're talking about you know confrontational yeah and brotherly love brotherly love sort of the thin line here between insecurity and you know manhood i became his manager i kissed my brother's wife on the mouth this is what happened yeah what you kiss on the mouth for what you kiss on the mouth who does yeah with your mother sure is this is this the greatest repetition movie yes i picked a quote that was obviously saying the same thing 87 times but that's part of why i picked that well it just feels like

4:29the way his brain has been smushed like he he's got a cycle through phrases over and over to kind of like get to the phrase yeah it's also part of the performance obviously all improvised which is great it's good good performance who's the lead guy in this huh but obviously all all improvised but but you know with improv you know this that you feel there's that there's that oh the joke didn't land let's try it again yes yes and genuinely because of the chemistry between him and pesci yeah great

5:04stuff comes out of the repetition correct yeah and and look scorsese i'd say master of repetition in general he's good at the rhythmic repetition of dialogue he's good at making conversation feel real but i think you're right i think the punch drunk nature of this and how kind of like emotionally unevolved these guys are means that he gets a lot more latitude to just like they can just repeat the same thing for five minutes straight and just escalate the intensity of it i came away thinking how in the world could they have ever made this movie without joe pesci i mean yet they just found

5:37him randomly yeah like as we'll talk about it so so well de niro watches this thing and goes i bet i would have incredible chemistry with that actor yeah and they meet and they have legendary immediate chemistry that then they're thrusting on to film right but carries through other films you know how that is so strange yeah that that that de niro intuited that well especially he is the guy

6:09at this moment he is like the new brand oh right he's already gotten one oscar he's done taxi driver yes mean streets deer hunter deer hunter and the godfather too yes so he is the guy he's the guy he's it's undisputed the confidence is through the roof he could get anyone to play his brother could get anyone to play his brother and steamroll them yes and the movie's watchable yeah and he goes i'm gonna let this little guy fucking chew me out oh it's amazing yeah it's amazing joseph pesci

6:41oscar nominee for this film sure that little joey can sing i think that was the name of his album wasn't it little joe sure can little joe sure can sing that was his album yeah griffin what's this

Directing an uncharismatic animal

6:52podcast this podcast is blank check with griffin and david i'm griffin i'm david i said i'm david you kiss my wife you kiss my wife kiss my wife on the mouth david david's laughing sorry kiss my wife i would just not want to hang out with jake lamont i'll just say it yeah i just i don't think i'd find him very charming crummy we just did uh new york new york which will have come out the week before this right okay correct because last waltz is in between last controversially we're doing on

7:24patreon i'm sorry he's got too many documentaries but um i made the argument that jimmy doyle is of all the scorsese de niro characters that's the last one you want to date um now watching this movie i was i was questioning it i was waiting he's pretty tough pumpkin is rupert pumpkin's not great yeah but he's gonna what he's you know he's gonna annoy you he's gonna annoy you to death right yes i mean lamada though lamada lamada there's some risk there's some occupational hazard yeah yeah he's a very very tough customer he is um no but like we were kind of talking about how

8:00jimmy is so uncharismatic on top of everything like you know the no redeeming quality right he's very very tough to imagine why you'd be around him in any sense but lamada is similar but i guess he has some swagger to him initially he also has sort of can like you can see and and that's what's brilliant about this film yes is we're presenting an animal yes we're telling people that he's an animal and yet a raging bull if you will a raging bull and yet they find a genuine humanity yes

8:35in this guy and there are he has three kids he has moments of being a peaceful to some extent person he just wants to be a comedian that's all he wants you know all this stuff he's like ripper pumpkin in that sense yeah and that's such a ridiculously fine line to make work that only de can do it and what are you what are you what were you doing in that first screening of this film

9:05sitting in the audience yeah how confused were you about what you were being asked yeah based on your cinematic knowledge up until 1980 what you were being asked to feel as an audience member about this guy well even that was scorsese's reluctance to making the movie of like who cares about this fucking guy i don't like this guy i don't want to spend time with this guy right this guy's unpleasant he's a bore yes in both spellings sure sure right three spellings oh boy uh sure b-o-o-r b-o-r-e b-o-a-r

9:43yeah yeah kind of yeah yeah he's got them all it's an incredibly watchable film given how tough it is to watch i guess is the way to you know that's the sort of timeless film yes that elevated the art especially of the biopic specifically which was not really a thing that much and was a very limited thing i think it was very in a very specific vein sort of creates the the map for what a biopic in an ideal way would be the modern biopic right because there's obviously there's there's the old

10:16boring hollywood like the story of louis pastor right or what you know like that kind of pride of the yankees kind of stuff yeah where it's like this nice guy that i say nice guy this at this moment which is that it is truly an honor to talk about well thank you so much for asking me to talk about this film because i there's only a small handful of films that i bow to this is one of them oh yes what else has always been oh god let's not start because we're going to get into territory where it's a big people oh no it's a small hand what's in the end you know there's a couple other

10:51scorseses in there and a couple other you know there's some couple spike lee's and spielberg's and kubrick's and you know that kind of thing um but i'm this is one for the ages it completely validates the entire art form of cinema i mean it really does and and all that all the people that work to make great cinema happen yes and it ends in such a meta way it's it's akin to what tarantino later did

11:22in inglorious bastards yes where the final line is i believe this is my masterpiece essentially you know scorsese does that in this film and says this is my masterpiece it's also him thinking it's the last movie he's ever going to make or certainly the last studio movie he's ever going to make i think as much as he's calling a shot it's because he thinks it's the last chance he has to call a shot right i should say this is a podcast about filmography as directors who have

The blank check director curve

11:49massive success are on their curves this is the compulsion i must say the full thing no yeah but orientate people i have to orientate people this is many people's first episode i'm sure directors who have massive success early on in their careers such as taxi driver and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby like new york new york which he is coming straight off of and it's the biggest bounce of his career this is a mini series on the films of martin scorsese it is called podcast fellas we are the titular podcast fellas today we are talking raging bull

12:23with returning guests the raging bull himself david krumholz now that's the sound of me ray of like snorting you're not from the bronx you're from queens right yeah so you could be the queen's bull you can't bronx bull i yeah i guess so you know i always just because of the name queen i there's always a feminine sure uh i so what's the feminine version of a bull uh cow cow yeah the queen's cow yeah you can always think of the alliteration too what's

12:54an animal with a q well you're getting into tricky territory now ben yeah that's tough what animals do exist with q quail quail quail oh the queen's quail yeah i like that you're smiling yeah what kind of noises do they make probably a little right some kind of the queen's quail gets in the ring yeah there's a lot of others there's the quokka oh yeah the quokka uh which is kind of like a weird little like furry guy little marsupial yeah that's an uh it's like an australian down down under animal

13:28have you been to australia i have you've made a movie or two and i feel like i made a movie last year that that takes place in new jersey and we shot it in melbourne australia that's hollywood 3.0 that sure is we've coined hollywood 3.0 today for to describe just like the fucking nonsense that goes on day to day hollywood 3.0 uh what was the new jersey movie what the heck it's a movie that's coming out on christmas day perfect this year called mr irrelevant oh yeah with um with a super

13:58random yes it's supposed to be very good it's testing off the charts it is hollywood 3.0 it is actually it actually is yeah john tuggle story i think we need more sports movies i think it's a it's a gap i mean it's for this absolutely jonathan levine directed i hear absolutely beautiful i hear it's like there's it's a it's a wonderful film going experience i have truly heard this we have friends who were at a cinema con where they showed off a large chunk of it and people were like elevating yeah yes i it's it's it's levitating i think it's the darkest of the dark horses for

14:32oscars well well well they called him mr irrelevant and yet michael shannon's in it right playing bill parcells michael shannon is playing bill parcells that is casting that makes a lot of sense yeah um and i have a little sneaky funny good role in what do you what are you playing at none of your business no i play um shut the fuck up so it's about the new york giants new york giants in 1983 they had an equipment manager uh who was with them for at least 30 years i think named whitey sure whitey good and you know for i the chance to play a whitey for me

15:07you need one finally one in your in your camp yeah and so uh whitey had retired and was kind of listless they have this young player who gets diagnosed with you know questionably survivable cancer is likely gonna croak it's awful it's tragic he's 21 or 22 years old and uh they call they decide the nfl and the giants decide to do everything they possibly can to save this kid's life to try

15:41and uh pay for it all and they call whitey and they go what are you doing he's like i'm missing you know i'm missing the uh the action of being part of the team and they go how about you will you drive this kid to all his appointments so this older man who's retired becomes this kid's chauffeur and watches him slowly die that's a good part it's a good part um i enjoyed myself bill parcells uh you know what they called him griff mr relevant no the big tuna one of the one of the great sports

16:15names of all time why did he get that name i'm not really sure where the name came from uh famously bill's heart bill parcells looked a lot like my dad and people would mistake my dad for bill parcells who is see that looking at you very famous like you know when i was a kid like he was the coach of the giants and then he was the didn't he wasn't he the coach of the jets for a minute like he was yeah he was a new york figure this was my father of course new york in the 80s with howie mandel your father thought your father looked like howie mandel his father you know when his dad had the

16:46curly hair and how he had the curly hair i can see we will post like a glove hello over the head over the head we will post on social media the side by side of howie mandel in this era and my father but people would kind of raging bull style be like hey mandel you big timing me wow oh you think you're too good for your fans mandel you know who my dad looked like who son of sam david burkowitz and literally was from queens lived in the same neighborhood good time and dogs talk to him and david burkowitz was a mailman and so was my dad yeah the only difference was that burkowitz had blue

17:19eyes and my dad had brown i can think of one other and also he didn't commit murder well there's that that's the difference i was thinking how good a mailman was david burkowitz bad i have to imagine i can't imagine he was very good i probably ate the letters right i don't know if he was in a paper eater uh i have recurring dreams coincidentally in which i'm pulling large pieces i'm in public in a situation where i need to talk to people yeah and in the dreams i'm pulling endless amounts of paper

17:51chewed up paper out of my mouth oh it's in there already it's in there already and i have to stop and they're very vivid realistic dreams i have to stop and pull paper out of in between my teeth out of my throat oh and then i looked up like what those mean and i think they said something like you know obviously they're anxiety dreams but yeah something to the of like you have something you you need to get off your chest something unspoken yeah you need to read what's on the paper that's the answer that's how you resolve it's all chewed up man

18:21it's all bits of unfold it piece it back together take a blow dryer we're talking about mulch we're talking about i mean inception you know that's you always right like that's it's like you always have to find like the weird papers oh yeah dream and that's like where the secret is right and that's how you come up with a great idea to retire and let someone else you worked with chris and you should text him every time you have a weird dream being like hey inception guy explain this dream you do this i don't have any way of contacting because he doesn't have a goddamn phone yeah he doesn't have well beyond that uh i don't think uh chris would uh want to

18:55oh you gave a phenomenal performance i don't think that matters uh to to to him or me to be honest with you i just think it'd be funny if it's like when you know a doctor yeah and you're like hey look at this mole or you know like hey chris you did inception what's this dream meme anyway people's

The mount rushmore of acting

19:14weird dreams yeah yeah uh david krumholz is here david krumholz is here oh yeah okay the last time you were on the show we talked about sensible woman who is you know we're talking the other giant of this era well you're gay he's talking the other best actor yeah you know he did pacino's best actor trophy and this is de niro's best actor trophy yeah yeah i wouldn't call pacino the only other giant i think i think there's a triumvirate you're right who's the third hoffman yeah of that era of that era those are the three guys who are chasing those are the three

19:47and they're they're rewriting the rules of acting yes and they're three guys who i feel like a generation prior hollywood would have been like well you're not a movie star like you don't you don't have the look of a movie star right they look like a butcher right they are ethnic american ethnic they're small they're kind of like they got they're handsome but they got kind of funny faces right you know they're not do they make those movies do they make well maybe the graduate but do they make uh midnight cowboy raging bull and let's say serpico today not

20:20really no or dog day yeah they don't raging bull is the closest in that like hollywood will still respond to it because it's a boxing movie right and like a true story real person movie what is it with serpico i mean maybe that feels like a tv show it definitely is a tv the answer is that all three of those things would be tv shows now you know which is a shame yeah um i i think there is sort of like a mount rushmore of the the male acting performances the leading male performances

20:50okay that people like lose their minds over that are sort of held up as the highest right right so scent of a woman is number one scent of a woman's number one number two is scent of a woman chris o'donnell right that's right yes uh no i think i think it's like it's raging bull sure it's raging bull for sure i think it's if you combine the two godfather pacino performances sure right dog day is no definitely not you're way off really yeah you're getting crazy what do you think uh jimmy stewart and it's a wonderful life or well that's quite a good performance yeah um i think denzel and malcolm x is

21:24denzel malcolm x yes absolutely are we are we talking streetcar are we talking on the waterfront you know you kind of have to put brando i think it's probably on the waterfront god almighty i'm gonna go nicholson cuckoo's nest jack is sort of outside you know because he's not an ethnic american he's straight down the middle he's straight down the middle no yeah that's true what is in fact what is jack nicholson isn't he irish i don't know yeah i would imagine yes new jersey's on

21:54mm-hmm uh but we're not here to talk about jack we're not no but this irish german english and welsh dissent there you go this is still a performance that people use as shorthand oh 100 percent i think this is raging bull yes yeah you know i saw this film when i was 21 for the first time okay it changed everything for me because up until that point i had only really wanted to do comedy do comedy done comedy uh there was no i or or you know cartoonish character shit

22:28suddenly i watched this film and thought i could do that i don't know how but if i just try you want to do that like trying the goal has changed to do that yeah if i could do 10 percent of the immersion and the intimacy and the intensity of what de niro did in raging bull i could do 10 percent i would get dramatic jobs the intimacy thing is fascinating it it's just an an outrageously

23:00monolithic performance yes it's arguably the greatest lead performance ever that is very arguable yeah i think i mean no one's going to call you crazy for saying certainly not it's a reasonable opinion i also think it's something where you i have the experience of like i watched this film i was very struck by it as a young man or what you know like obviously it's a totemic film and that's a tough and then back when you were a featherweight i've never been a featherweight i'm sorry i hit this height when i was 13 i've always been a big boy yeah um and then you you know

23:37you have a few years from it you're like oh but isn't that it's just him screaming and yelling isn't it then you watch the movie again you're like i forgot how good this movie or like and how good like and i forgot how it's not whatever the stereotype i think intimacy is the over the top you said it that's the whole that's the magic factor it's the volcanic stuff you're you know let me bring my

Sound design and black and white

23:56let me bring my bantamweight perspective to this perfect okay god damn it the sound editing in this film yeah is a new roadmap suddenly for all sound editing going forward the intimacy of the sound of that film there is no film that sounds like raging bull to this day there are attempts but there so you are as an audience member being whispered to you're being shouted at

24:29they're speaking to your soul it's it's brilliant sound editing do you know the thing that so much of it by the way is adr clearly yes oh yes but that marty drove everyone crazy because he insisted that every punch every flash bulb be a unique sound that they not repeat any specific sounds which a lot of it's like foley work and it's over the top in a certain way and the context you know when he's in miami with at his house and he asks the photographer to take a picture that they could

25:01pay for us for us get in here sweetheart and they surround him and the moment the first flash goes off you hear one of his children scream yeah you're oh my god just whatever standard film had come to just scorsese manipulating the shit out of what was before to create something incredibly profound and new i'm gonna i'm gonna go even one higher than you i think this movie is very well directed

25:33when i was watching it i said who is the scorsese kid um yes and chapman chapman dp yes there's not a frame in this movie that isn't a painting it didn't win the oscar which it's you know the oscars are not the end of the world but it's shocking yeah for cinematography what did tess the polanski film which i'm sure jeffrey unsworth like i'm sure had gorgeous vistas of the moors right you know like i'm sure that is a in my dim memory a pretty movie sure but this is one of

26:09those things where one you can show five seconds of raging bull in some clip package yeah as you see all the time in these kind of de niro or you know you'll see him rolled out at award shows or on tv and you're just you lean forward and any shot cannot believe how this movie an insert shot would get that response and why black and white do we have theories oh we can talk about it i'm sure that'll be in the research because i think there was a lot of reasons for the black and white um and just no one's made a sports movie look this good i know it's reductive to call it a sports

26:41movie but no one's made like boxing look like this ever again and just the with the smoke and the you know just that you're in his mind in there well yeah and theater of it and the sort of just the slaughterhouse of it what were you gonna say no the contrast of how beautifully lit almost theatrically lit the boxing matches are with the crudeness of how the rest of it yes the natural light through through it all yeah it's just well the key to this movie is you know

27:15marty said i don't want to do this i don't get this and de niro kept on insisting we'll get into this in depth but then he finally figured out he was like oh boxing's a metaphor boxing doesn't matter i can't think of this as a boxing movie it's about getting in the ring it's about whatever that thing is in your life and let's face it scorsese doesn't need to be directed with but this is the movie where he lets de niro sort of direct they're collaborating they're right on a higher this is this is a 50 50 job yes in fact i can open the doss the trust is through the roof what require what is

27:50required of de niro see i'm now i'm gonna watch behold as i marry this into a discussion about ai okay let's do it what's required i could have done this movie we agree what's required of de niro is this genuine raw soul searching sort of an access that he is displaying to his own emotional nuance his his the the complicated levels of who de niro is as a person who an actor should be as a person right someone who emulates humanity in nuanced fashion that arguably no actor before after

28:29had and to give of that to bear himself raw he had to have trained mentally for this not just physically right and you know that this is all stuff you know as an audience member and two different physical states and two different physical states one misshapen yes which is also two different mental states married to those yeah and the confidence the nero's confidence who's 36 at this point when he makes this movie that's disgusting he's playing a 19 year old though yes right right essentially at the beginning yeah um it's through the roof and the uniqueness

29:04of de niro that he has to face and live with the burden of de niro's uniqueness applied to the uniqueness of jake la mater and there is no way and you know this watching it there is no way that de niro is not in some sort of existential pain playing this character yes and also there's something clearly that drew him to it correct that he needed to express this role is a sacrifice and a

29:38half that he's and he's giving it's giving it's constant giving now you have to be human to understand the true depth of not only the performance but of the film you have to be right now here's where i married into ai let's do it who on would you you don't want to watch uh an ai basketball game do you why would anyone why do we watch things to it right yeah sports because it's human beings which we are doing what we can't do okay you cannot expect ai to make an impact

30:15with audiences in a way that film can film i mean real i should say real people can't humans can um on film because the audience is human everybody's talking about when they have these arguments about ai they go you know well what's the difference between a human actor and an ai actor and an ai will learn from me from what humans do everyone discounts the audience the audience is human it can only empathize with humanity well and that's the challenge of raging bull is like it's not like i

30:48want you to understand that jake lamotta is a good guy or even that jake lamotta is sympathetic in a way of like you know here's why he behaved this way it's not a like don't you understand jake lamotta just had it and that's why he was such a piece of shit it's not that it's more just you need to look at this darkness and this existed this exists this is part of the human existence and right and understand the nightmare of the human spectrum that he was on and that there's something to relate to which is true taxi driver too that makes it all the more compelling like you know that that you're

31:21like there's something to relate to even though he's a fairly despicable person pretty much all the time and also that there's like a a sacrifice here not just in the characters but in the making of this movie that is a thing that ai can ever experience i mean this is the conversation right now i just think it's like it was such a good fucking knockout punch is just like everyone flipping their shit over the odyssey everyone circles back to the same thing which is like this looked really difficult to make sure this was not easy and i'm appreciating the sacrifice and the

31:52effort of this and i want to see it on the biggest screen and it's like that's a fucking knockout punch uh the people who don't want to pay for it's not just ai it's also just you know the the years we went through people being like eh no one wants the movie experience anymore you know like that that's being refuted is is is lovely uh you know scorsese is not an insular filmmaker right he's but so many you know because well because he himself is a cinema expert right but so many

32:24filmmakers make movies quote unquote they say this for themselves you know you've got to make the movie for yourself be happy with it and then the audience will love it no scorsese goes i'm the audience for my own film i am all kinds of versions of that audience i am the highfalutin highbrow erudite guy sitting in the back row and i'm also the kid in the front row right and what can satisfy everyone and he's anticipating how the audience will feel and he's literally framing shots and directing scenes

32:59from that perspective the greatest trick that scorsese pulls in this film is challenging the audience like what in the world are they supposed to be feeling yeah you know taxi driver is a straight drama yeah right okay now this movie it's a brutal comedy it's a funny tragedy sure um it's it's so many things in stark contrast it's comedy love family bonds violence paranoia sympathy rage disgust sorrow

33:32uh horror uh you know uh peace triumph success ego tranquility the burden of ambition you know and ultimately it's the story it's exactly what it should be which is the story of one life to tell a story about the pugilistic nature of all lives and all life yeah and just it's it what an what an undertaking and if he fucks it up and he didn't even think he should make the movie yes and

34:03if he fucks this up people are come out of the theater going that director is a psychotic person and his career is like or close to it because his career is already in a little bit of trouble and it's sort of like right you know why do you do that i think the fact that he doesn't really care about sports which he's very upfront about matters a lot in the movie too because i like sports movies like i like a schematic sports movie just fine like i enjoy an underdog story i enjoy this shit but you know so many sports movies lock into like okay well we need to see where he initially succeeded

34:35and then he was brought low with this battle and like his biggest triumph in this movie on in the ring is like grinning like a freak at sugar ray robinson being like you didn't knock me down yeah sugar ray robinson's just like what okay that's not a win right and it's just like you literally lost that he's so separated from whatever the point of boxing is yes you know moment in life and like at no point is there like the scene where someone's like you did it here's the belt like you you know

35:05like the arc of his career is this sort of like just this dim noise in the movie at best i also think there's a core he buys a building at one point yeah and they're like from fights and he's like and you're like jesus he's a fucking landlord like this guy uh he can't be served a steak without having a panic attack i also i think the core thing this movie is about in a lot of ways is like the thing you're great at being a detriment to every other aspect of your life everything that makes him a good boxer well if your ego it's also about ego danger yes if you don't have emotional

35:41intelligence correct yes if you're not in conversation with yourself yeah because he's a fighter yes that's a great fighter right who is able to piece together a pretty normal life on paper on right he's got the kids he's got the family yeah that's a big thing but he becomes a clown yes he becomes more than just an actual comedian slash clown his life is a clown is clownish yes his whole life yeah david yes i'm i'm ready to get my nutrition into gear and you know what i i'm gonna thank

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36:59check at huel.com slash check that's h-u-e-l dot com slash check new customers only thank you to huel for partnering and supporting our shop i'm gonna open the dossier to tell you some stuff about this so can i just ask you one quick question

Scorsese on the brink

37:24before you open it go ahead did you fuck my wife yes thank you okay i just appreciate that's the answer i fucked your wife i fucked your brother i fucked you whatever um scorsese in the later half of the 70s is doing a lot of stuff we redress this to some extent uh on prior episodes on top of the last waltz in new york new york he even worked on a broadway show called the act with eliza minnelli who he was having an affair with at the time he had no idea what he was doing he was sort of soft fired more kind of like he agreed to step aside and let a experienced broadway hand come in to kind

37:58of quote-unquote fix things he was also having a very sexually charged affair with cocaine the drug he was doing a lot of drugs yes uh in 1977 he goes to the telluride film festival which is very early uh to present an award to michael powell one of his heroes the great british director and michael powell says to him like my dear boy what are you doing here aren't you working on a play and scorsese's like that's when i realized like i was not cut out for theater i didn't understand like you know at this point he wants to make gangs of new york that's going to take him a second a

38:33little bit obviously a little bit of time he makes american boy which we discussed in our scorsese short episode it's fascinating that the profile of steven prince have you ever seen that crummy no you would very good be intrigued by you would be very intrigued by it okay it's just him interviewing a guy who's got insane stories um and the the adrenaline shot back from the dead from pulp fiction is stolen from that movie that is true that's a story he tells yes wow um and he's got raging bull which is a movie he doesn't want to do but de niro has basically been trying to get him to do since 1974 he came to him on the set of alice doesn't live here anymore and said read this book by

39:09jake lamada i've like optioned it there's some some good scenes he's an interesting character de niro who is obviously a tough interview in that when you ask him like why did you do raging bull he's like i don't know it's interesting you know like he's just uh but he says like i like the book because i thought it had some good scenes to repeat this a good scene is something that you think has a lot of dramatic possibilities and irony and humor and something that people can relate to it's a very simple and bland statement but you can imagine i guess de niro just reading the book

39:41and being like well this scenario is something i can play out in my head as something that would be very dramatically compelling and even talking back to the sort of point of getting in this character's head and this sort of spiritual connection he was feeling he like admits when he reads it the book is poorly written yes even de niro admits this book is bad but scorsese does not like the book it's like a portal into this guy's brain like even i think the failings of the writing are telling him something as an actor that someone's going to have to process dramatically into something that works as a story but he's seeing the scenes and he's seeing the way

40:15this guy's brain works de niro robert robert de niro is the joe de maggio of acting please explain as i'm a huge joe de maggio had an amazing reputation for doing incredible things on the field athletic things right but making them look easy sure to the point de niro is simple yeah he is very simple deliberate yeah he i don't think there are any firm choices in his style i think he goes he lives in the moment and is and accesses whatever is necessary to tell the story if any strategy goes into

40:53that i'm sure there's some and of course extreme uh emotional intellect yes extreme but hyper subtle but it's natural yeah there's a nature to de niro that acting wasn't allowed to have yes especially on film up until really until he came on the scene you weren't and maybe brando you could argue but even brando's a little like you know making deliberate choices and speechifying and you could almost say that brando sort of had to fit the mold because he would have been so far ahead of his time that no one

41:27would have understood him he would have he wouldn't have worked he needs to have one foot in the style of film at the time but brando now has laid the groundwork yes for de niro to be as naturally simplistic but also acrobatic and as any actor had ever been and i don't think there's been an actor since very few it's hard to i think there are people maybe who have gotten into that realm in a singular performance or in a brief period i don't think there's someone who has a body of work

42:00that embodies what you're saying in the same way i also think that he has always been so mysterious about his process for how much this is known as you know the great sacrifice movie and the physical transformation movie and all of that the built-in inherent mystique of de niro right where's this coming that he's this shape-shifting guy who then he avoids interviews he doesn't want to talk about what acting is he has a reputation notably bad right he has a reputation for being very quiet on set not

42:33saying much being a quiet person yes and compare this to spooky pacino and hoffman who are incredible but we know the legends right of what they went through and what they were thinking and how they strategize their roles right and here he is and he's reading this book and he goes like hey marty this is bad we should make this movie you're like why so he's like i don't know i want to play this one thing well i think there's two times because the irishman is another situation where de niro keeps coming to marty being like yeah i just think this would be interesting and marty's like i don't get it

43:05and like takes him a while right yeah marty doesn't like that the book says that there's in the book they kind of try to rationalize everything jake did like there's always a reason for the violence for what he did which scorsese is just uninterested in he also is like cinematically i didn't like boxing because the boxing shit we would see as a kid either filmed fights that maybe would be projected in a movie theater or movies would be from like one angle camera all the way the back it was boring yeah right but he agrees with de niro there are incidents in the book that are interesting right

43:37like he can see that mardick martin who had already worked with scorsese on who's that knocking on my door and mean streets and new york new york and the last waltz uh is handed the book marty's kind of like i don't know if i want to do this but you know here here we go he calls jake lamotta this the bull in the china shop he's cursed because he's so macho but he's so fragile about women right just takes a woman essentially like looking at him weird for him to completely collapse and become an insane you know violent aggressive you know it's like you can tell how insecure he is right

44:09he writes a draft uh he integrates some things that marty maybe wants about his family like there's something about a fig tree in staten island that his like grandfather had cool uh de niro is like i fucking hate this like this isn't what i'm going for at all so then they hand it to paul schrader who obviously had already worked on taxi driver and who has a very deep understanding i feel like about male fragility broken man right and at one point um marty's like let's do it as a play

44:42they think about that it's a bad idea de niro is getting increasingly mad new york new york comes out to bad reviews kind of the first time marty's just gotten bad reviews like people are just like thumbs down and thanks to de niro de niro's that's true yeah yeah uh julie his scorsese's marriage to julia cameron has just collapsed uh you know he's feeling very disillusioned about everything he's using a lot of drugs uh scorsese thinks basically that he wanted to die right he's just kind of like pushing it to its limit and he kind of hits a brick wall 1978 he says september

45:161978 after telluride after like uh the play collapses he's hospitalized he spends four days in the hospital is this the heart attack yes yes he physically collapses he's hovering between life and death according to him de niro comes to see him they talk very openly about everything he's going through the official charge is internal bleeding okay or the official like thing on the chart damn you have to be doing a lot of drugs devastating so and he's he's you know he's fragile he's a tiny asthmatic man right yeah true sure and i met him marty fairly recently recently and he i i

45:55can attest to his tininess he's very he's very small but he's energetic i had uh a fortunately brief and pointless conversation with him i didn't know what to say to them to him it was a very strange circumstance i'm not going to get into the whole story but i was sitting almost directly across from him at a dinner at a luncheon table oddly sitting also next to f murray abraham neither of us knew why we were invited to this thing but it was our big uh grand uh uh uh you know

46:31meeting with him f murray had never met him he that's kind of wild and uh so he's 80 f murray's he's sitting there and i i don't know what to say to him and and and an introduction from his casting director um goes goes poorly in other words she says hey marty this is david krummel he's a tremendous actor and he he doesn't hear it literally doesn't hear that that's tough and she doesn't try again and so i'm thinking i should say something and he starts talking about styles of

47:02chinese food okay like szechuan hunan and he says that he in his opinion szechuan is the best we're not talking about favorites he's simply saying empirically that szechuan is the best chinese food i disagree and i say for me it's cantonese classic sort of old school new york chinese and he says cantonese really and i say yes i feel like it's because it's you know very new yorky and whatever

47:32and he looks at me like i'm a moron and switches the subject to something else i had ruined the train of thought and that was it that's the whole my whole interaction with martin scorsese is that we disagreed on the best chinese food style and uh he moved on for me in that moment and you'll take it to the grave well he'll get to his grave before i will so i'll take it to his grave maybe i'll go visit his grave drop off some cantonese with you know some lobster cantonese yeah and that's

48:07with all due respect to the great one of the greatest right of course whose movie we are of course discussing i guess de niro basically gets marty to agree to this in the hospital in the hospital which is maybe a little bit pressurized but whatever robbie robertson scorsese's roommate at the time which is a great person you want to be roommates with if you're trying to kick coke right and robbie robertson says like i noticed scorsese finally kind of got back the anger that always

48:38helps him work where it's like i can't live without doing this you know what i mean like he he suddenly got his sort of you know his druthers motor yes right perhaps um he himself was a raging a bit of perhaps crushed by ambition yes he says burdened by ability brought back in that ring helped him understand a little bit more about the character uh to he wanted to make a film about self-destructiveness obviously right like to sort of lay that bare he reviews the film as kind of a rehabilitation for

49:11himself he says i don't want to explain a person with like one freudian term i don't like let's take all that out so we're not going to make a movie about how like his dad was mean to him and that's why he's a piece of shit which is interesting too by the way so the the brotherly bond and in the film really that is the only representation of family oddly they never if ever really ever talk about their parents we don't know why he they both what home they came from and why they're like this

49:42these two brothers interesting i also think the brother had been minimized in the first prior projects yes it's interesting schrader similarly is not interested in this project yeah he's trying to make american gigolo you know he's sort of transitioning to being you know more of a director director himself so it's like no one de niro is the engine like both scorsese and schrader are like i don't know you know they take schrader's script with paul's blessing to a caribbean island saint martin i believe and just work on it for weeks together they combine characters they rewrite the

50:16dialogue de niro if he's due credit on a script it's this one according to you know like like he's very involved but neither of them submitted so they didn't even attempt it's credited to martin and schrader yeah um the other thing that gets changed is they they greatly minimize the presence of the mob in his life right and the sort of fear of the mob coming in for him because they're just like we've done this that's not what this movie's about who needs this this is cliche schrader had written a long like three page masturbation monologue good in which uh lamada is in prison

50:51trying to jerk off and failing because he's such a failure who have amongst us have not been there bob and marty took that out because they felt it was too much schrader says one of the best things i ever wrote don't know why they took it out and he's filming it next year right but scorsese was honestly like you know like it was just it's impossible to show this kind of stuff and like retain anything in terms of like the audience's interest i gotta pitch camera from the point of view of the penis sure that's how you show it it's just him going um whatever the final result is a script that people

51:25like de niro hangs out with the real jake lamada a lot lamada is on set for some of the boxing scenes um it's interesting because i wonder what he thought of the movie lamada lived to be like a hundred years old yeah which is crazy pretty crazy it's that's the way like the french people eat chocolate and drink wine all day you're like maybe this is the key to long life you just get in the ring and have your face fucking beaten in he says that on set he would kind of be like oh i was such a son of a bitch like he would be self-deprecating but in kind of a charming way it must be wild to watch

51:56people act out these scenes from your life in a movie that's not glamorizing you well wait a second there's a lot there's no way lamada lets this happen without thinking in some way it's glamorizing you're right he has to there's no way there's on that set not going they're making a movie about me baby i'm a legend that might have become part of a wider conversation mount rushmore you know as we all know they de niro gets incredible shape to make this movie and then they take a four month

52:28break and de niro goes on what they call essentially a pasta tour he just goes to northern italy and france for four months stuffing his face to get the weight to play later jake that sounds like the greatest trip i'm currently on a pasta tour i'm i might go on like a 30 to 40 year pasta tour currently had pasta just last night made great pasta um i'm like kiss where i keep saying like this is the final pasta tour and then i extend it for another three years um apparently jake lamada in his real

53:01act would recite shakespeare and the end of the movie was him doing that and michael powell again the esteemed director was just like that's not gonna work no like shakespeare's just all wrong for this so they they instead go for the on the waterfront because that's kind of like that's his iconography that's also a truth is stranger than fiction thing where if that were in the movie you'd be like this is too much of a flourish this is pretentious the real guy would never yeah but but yeah the the the on the waterfront thing is is a risk too it is because if you think about it the movie ends in

53:33such a ridiculously stark meta way right it's multiple layers of meta it's de niro reciting the monologue from on the waterfront he's reciting it flat without emotion without passion clearly saying that these words of dialogue require some sort of uh illustriousness some sort of performance quality some entertainment that this guy does just does not have so then that ends and he does his

54:05on the boss on the boss on the boss on the boss on the pocket and then scorsese speaks to the audience with a bible passage he does it's the once i was blind but now i can see literally describing the intention invention and impact of the moving image literally saying we were blind we didn't have movies but now we can see and it's it's the empathy machine argument it's like this is the best way to understand other people is through movies right and here's the risk of that there's the risk in the shakespeare there's the risk in this it's essentially it can be viewed as a pat on the back

54:40as scorsese going this is my masterpiece i fucking did it i'm making more than just a film about a boxer i'm making a film about film it's it's it's again tarantino saying having you know brad pitt say it's a masterpiece it's bold it's but if you are a guy who knows you are an incredibly talented filmmaker and loves film and is losing the chance to make films because because of one film going awry new york new york and you're a drug addict yes and your wife leaves you you might be

55:16losing life you you've lost your love you've lost your wife leaves you you have a child that he's basically not going to raise okay so you have a choice at this moment you either end the movie with some shakespearean bullshit yeah or you come right out and and basically say to the audience in a pleading way i deserve to make films yeah i look at this damn thing films are my passion once i was blind and now i can see and here here it is raw as fuck and also i refuse to self-destruct

55:51in the way that this man did i refuse to be stuck hammering the fucking jewels out of my championship belt and do you come away going scorsese knew exactly what he was doing when he made this film or do you go there's no way he could have known the true impact of what this film is on a humanistic level is it an accident that this story that he didn't want to tell about this dopey egomaniacal

56:25violent conflicted boxer is it an accident that it turns out to be emblematic of of of human frailty itself does he know he's making that movie when he's making it i think he knew he had nothing to lose and i think that got him into a flow state right that is what he connected to in the boxing sequences of that feeling of just being in there and it making sense and the beauty of it right even how beautiful it is yes you know i will also say about the bible bible trader was like what the

57:00fuck is that about he was like huh what are you trying to say there's some salvation it is also you know an attribute to his film teacher uh haig p manuvian oh yes yes who had passed away you know right after it says in honor of him yeah and i do feel like he is talking about like what this person did for him as well like you know changing his view of how he understood and and understood film um the the other thing i read was that i think the schrader version was more intercutting between the the older lamada and his glory days if you can call them that and they made the big structural

57:36decision of like it's bookends right it's one flashback rather than a series of him recounting his whole life dewey cox style originally was more structure than right yes which so many biopics are now right yes right yeah yeah and you are in walk hard are you not you are i'm in walk hard i'm in ray you're in both yes you basically need yourself i basically parodied myself i'm in the springsteen movie did not see it which came out recently uh well yeah they deliver us from nowhere i heard he had a hole in the floor where most people stand that kind of gets cut out of the movie

58:07does it really that's interesting oh wait can i tell a juicy story please okay i'm gonna do this because i haven't told this story yet about that so we're gonna take a little sojourn into springsteen deliver me from nowhere world briefly and you can choose to cut it if you want to uh my scene is my one-on-one scene is with jeremy strong i have playing uh john who's playing john land out i have heard what everyone has heard that jeremy strong is stays in character and blah blah

58:38blah okay and so yes i'm a little scared of jeremy strong when i show up to the set and i'm also ready to fight i'm like if he fucks with me now if i have to work around this guy i'm ready to bash him i saw the film you play the the head of like columbia i had yes and uh whatever i think cbs records and and yes that that's correct and and and so i have this scene i've only have two scenes in the movie the second scene is me hearing the first version of springsteen's uh nebraska and and and and not

59:12understanding how it's marketable and you know why we're doing why we're going in this direction and landau jeremy strong is making the case okay for having to happen something that springsteen okay so show up on set jeremy strong nicest guy he's not in character he is in voice he's doing the affectation a big difference that is often the case when you hear stories about people staying in character it's not where they're like they're talking to you about craft services they're just

59:43holding on they're just holding on to the accent yes yes so he's doing that and so i'm in and he's very sweet and and wonderful and he's a great actor and i'm relieved and we shoot the scene and he says after the first take he says i wrote a monologue for this scene that i'd like to try on film now mind you springsteen is there landau is there yeah while we're filming scott cooper directing sure he does the monologue the hole in the floor the hole in the floor monologue is written

1:00:17by jeremy strong and it's long and i'm thinking not bad by any stretch of the imagination but i'm thinking selfishly i'm like well this scene just became a six minute scene sure or an eight minute scene and if they love this monologue yeah this is all that's going to be in the movie sure is me sitting there listening to this monologue and i'm thinking oh shit they cut and they come away and they go no way it was never said this monologue is no no springsteen's like no landau's like no

1:00:51cooper is like no jeremy strong god love him does not take no for an answer it does not let me try again let me try again let me try again and so he does a paraphrased version of it on the next take and the next take and it's it's changing it's evolving is he shortening it uh no he's not shortening it it's just changing he's trying to find the the profundity in it um and and and they got it and we step off set while they set up the next shot and i hear jeremy strong speaking to scott

1:01:28cooper about it and all i hear really is him making his case for it and saying sean told me to fight for what i want as an actor pen i don't know interesting and i'm just standing there and i said william scott pretty funny and pretty funny and you know what jeremy strong if he was a true supposed asshole would have gotten upset he laughed his ass off lovely human being i i i interviewed him for that movie i was very charmed by him he's a very nice human being normal guy and um all that

1:02:02to say i don't think he's that then i see the trailer for the film and the trailer is that monologue but then they cut the monologue out of the man so wait so i'm like holy shit it's in the monologue that they didn't like made the movie and now i'm starting to go wait a second am i like how there's no way people are going to sit through an eight minute scene and if that's in the movie then i wonder what was cut yeah i reach out to scott cooper i say wow i can't believe you know that made the

1:02:32movie and he goes oh it's not in the movie and it's not the monologue from the trailer is not in that it is not yeah it's amazing i watched the whole movie waiting for the trailer so it's a wonderful marketing thing that yeah yeah that jeremy wrote haphazardly conversation they had on set with like kind of sum something up so maybe we use it for the trailer yeah um no i talked to him about for that movie and i said you know your whole goddamn process is so insane but was it weird that you had the guy and could go check with him yeah versus like half these movies where it's like you're

1:03:04playing some dead person there's no right and instead this is like he's fucking sitting over there and you can go is that better is that worse like and he was kind of like it was interesting i mean he wasn't raging bull was the same way la mata is there he is there he is there and it's like that strikes me as something that could be difficult if he tries to interfere but i don't think he was there at all there's no way he he did because he's probably feeling lucky they're doing it right and also they do they make him in moments into a monster yes you know i don't think there's a human

1:03:38being on earth that would sit there and go yeah make it more monstrous i mean i think it's vital that you start with him as a monster like that i mean not just not the you know with the stake yes where you're just like good god this guy's like at his you know peak or whatever almost and he's a piece of shit yeah and larry calls him an animal he called me a fucking you're an animal larry your mother you know he's an animal your mother's an animal he goes to the mother right away all the time

Joe Pesci and Kathy Moriarty

1:04:05a lot of money he loves bringing up the mom yeah joe pesci just was a child actor on the new york stage had not been in a film from 1961 hey let's twist until 1976 is the death collector right which is the tv movie that they end up seeing right yeah he was worn out he'd given up he didn't really like the business of acting he likes acting as an art he says like you know but he was pretty sick of hates the hustle yeah he catches wind that they want him for this role he figured it was like a small role and was basically like give it to a working actor who wants it i'm running a restaurant

1:04:38in the bronx for some friends of mine i feel like joe pesci the story's like he's helping some friends of his out he's just helping a friend uh i was out of that place in hollywood where you're at everyone's mercy all the time you know he basically just you know he's sick of it then he meets marty and bob he saw working with the movie different it was all as you said because de niro had somehow seen the death collector on tape and was like this guy's interesting and there's a scene i guess in that movie where he runs a crap game and they liked his energy i haven't seen the death collector

1:05:10and you know they just like the way he talks um and that's how that happens kathy moriarty joe pesci had seen her picture in a club liked the look of her she'd never acted she was 19 which defies logic you watch this performance and you assume they cast a 30 year old who's playing young well she's got that great old person voice it's insane he's got that great a little she's got a little bit of smokiness in the voice she's got more than and she is stunningly beautiful yes in a classic film she's a beauty yes yes but they

1:05:45obviously needed someone who is kind of flinty and tough and like you know could stand up to everyone and i don't know how they get that out of a picture in a club but i guess they meet her and they they get it they shoot the fight scenes for 10 weeks they shoot then they shoot dramatic scenes for 10 weeks then they take a four month break everyone is paid yeah while de niro is on his eating tour they shoot the damn thing for 20 weeks 20 weeks insane then a four month break and then he comes back and they do the rest of it which is not too much not too much okay but i mean right the old

1:06:17the the older lamada stuff is is not heavy running time right you know if you add it all up no it's like a half hour 15 minutes i think it's a half hour okay yeah it's the last half hour they when they just start doing some prep they he shoots some eight millimeter footage of bobby training in a gym and michael powell again scorsese's mentor is like the gloves wouldn't be red back then because he had like red boxing gloves and he's like you know back then gloves were basically like that kind of like dark it's maroon brown or black and marty is basically like we got to do this in black and

1:06:50white number one i want to differentiate from the rockies and all the other sort of boxing movies right now like i want to look different because those movies are all bright reds and blues and all that right at this point rocky is all american flag and number two and this is a nerdy scorsese reasons he's really upset that color stocks are fading like eastman film yes the colors like not lasting i guess in terms of preservation and yeah uh and then beyond that he's just kind of like it'll look period it'll look like an old like daily news photo from the era right like it'll have that that

1:07:23great argument that is what the movie gets at right for me yeah and then in the book apparently it opens with jake lamada's first sentences when my memories come back to me i have the feeling that i'm watching an old film in black and white marty says i don't remember that but apparently that is in there can i say there's a haphazard result the out of it which is which is yes let's say you know yes there's an old feeling to it there we're telling a classic story a crude raw story there's no color it's black

1:07:56and white his life is black and white it's either that he's got it together and he's handling his life well or he's a complete another dark maniac right black dark maniac but there's also this haphazard effect on the comedy because we're seeing comedy clearly in you know deliberate comedic moments mixed in with violence it's the three stooges it's that pattern yes it softens it in a way

1:08:26yeah if it's in color it's almost too vivid if you see the blood and the blood is red it's almost too much i was gonna by accident in a way yeah it is it the black and white of it softens the comedy yeah if this movie were in color it would be talked about as one of the most violent movies of all that is very true yes yeah and obviously he'd already had that experience that's right david yes we hate repeats when it comes to broadcast television that's true boring but we

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1:11:30for new stuff every single day who's your favorite evie luci uh evie he wanted to do the ring scenes as if like the viewers are the fighter right yeah and i you know you're not cutting to the audience much like you never really see them going like get him or whatever like and they're pretty abstracted even in the background of shots as you said it's a lot of smoke and a lot of just black backdrops uh frank warner the the foley guy sound effects guy used melons

1:12:07he would fire rifles into them and stuff like he did all kinds of weird sound effects uh obviously at some points they dropped the sound which is so scary and impressive and then they bring it back to really get you producer ben i'm realizing in another life you could have been a foley artist yeah it feels like some real ben shit interesting down and go what sounds like a punch shoot a rifle into a melon totally that's the way your brain works yeah it seems really fun to come up with those concepts yes experiment and as i said everyone is different they didn't want to repeat sounds so they did like a

1:12:40massive massive number of takes and different techniques uh and then obviously also this is the reunion of marty and thelma schoonmaker uh who will edit all the rest of his films yes this was i think voted by the editor society she won the oscar she won the oscar but i think it was voted the best edited film of all time was there a sound editing oscar at this time let's take a look here there's a sound oscar i think there wasn't but let me see because you know remember they would sort of do like special best sound look it did go to the empire strikes back which does have pretty good sound

1:13:12yeah high bar there uh it was nominated of difficulty yeah uh but the best sound was given was not the empire strike back it raging bowl was nominated for best one two oscars one for editing and one for robert de niro robert de niro won for this yes he did okay for acting for acting in this acting it's it's obviously this is um although i think he wasn't there maybe for godfather i think it's the first time i think that's correct am i crazy to say that he hasn't won an academy award since that's correct he is two he has exactly two wow and i feel like it's been

1:13:44buzzing around is it time to finally give him a third since silver linings right silver linings and um fire moon he was nominated for both there's a long gap like he doesn't get nominated between cape fear and silver linings is that right i think that's right yeah i don't know what his third oscar would have been exactly i mean it should have been the intern have you seen the intern no he's phenomenal in the intern yeah he plays an intern um this is the ordinary people year obviously that's

1:14:15what wins best picture and director yeah wow what a year good lord yeah it beats obviously timothy hutton wins supporting actor over um pesci pesci and mary steenbergen wins best supporting actress from melvin and howard which is a good win a lovely performance yeah uh over kathy uh and best adapted screenplay wasn't even nominated which is somewhat shocking yeah well but if you think about it not really because the movie is heavily improvised yeah there's no doubt is there even a script there are multiple scripts there are but it's not like they stuck to it yes there's no way and to me

1:14:49the most shocking win yeah the loss is the cinematography loss yeah um so uh there's yeah let's talk about the film there's two scenes in this movie one that i don't like and one that i absolutely love

Champagne balance and comedy

1:15:02given to okay the only scene i don't like in this movie because it's a little on the nose foreshadowing is them at you know on their first date mini golf they lose the ball she shoots it into some structure on this mini golf thing and they the ball doesn't come out and i felt like okay he's telling us that this guy's gonna lose everything that you know sometimes you take a shot and it doesn't end up doing anything

1:15:33right um okay so that felt that in retrospect watching and i was like okay this this scene is a little like the screenwriting 101 i'm uh you know and that's not to knock anything but it's not right alternately alternatively i don't know how to speak this the bit with the champagne glasses stacked yeah at the end yes representing balance yeah sure and scorsese at that point deep into this

1:16:04film now we're about an hour and 45 into the two hours yeah when we're past his career and he's now this is running the club so why is that scene in this film right it's him proving himself that he can balance this thing but scorsese is playing now with what he established like what is the he's saying to the audience you don't know what to feel do you yeah yes there is no balance you're watching our lead character balance this this thing excess he's balancing you can't balance how you feel i know

1:16:35you can't i'm scorsese i made a movie that it is confusing you yeah you don't know what to feel and if you feel disturbed maybe that's the only thing you feel because you just don't you're used to being told what to feel or assuming what you should be feeling and this movie is so cross genre there's 10 genres you don't know what to feel and so you're conflicted you're uncomfortable and honestly watching that balancing and his pride in it to me is the goriest moment of this movie

1:17:12a movie filled with blood the goriest moment is him doing this champagne balance and smiling and getting the congratulations from the few people that are gathered around that there's something so disturbing about that moment it's so gross the employee comes up and says your wife is here and yeah just couldn't be any more decisive right he's just like let me do this that's the real point of it for me is that what he's balancing is an overflowing amount of alcohol for nobodies right and

1:17:43it's like what is the victory it's an incredibly tense scene because we've watched him fail to navigate the simplest human interactions throughout the movie and anytime this guy fucking sits down for dinner or talks to someone you're like is he gonna explode is he gonna and then you can feel the tension in the scene and in the audience of being like are the fucking glasses gonna fall over yeah is he gonna scream at someone he does the fake out he does the fake out and then you're so you're tense because you've spent your whole life with this guy

1:18:17it feels like just being on edge about what i'm like monster he can be and then he does it and you're like huh i feel triumphant and then you feel bad about that yeah you're like he did a good job and then it's just like just there's this kind of revulsion and there's this weird triumph to it that's what i love about this movie yeah the same with him in the prison cell where you feel bad for him yeah but then you're also just like he's a monster like you know and like he made out with a 14 year old at a club it's and uh yeah you know at his club as the owner as the and and when he

1:18:53says the like what i mean she she his defense isn't even i didn't know she was right it's what does she look 14 to you and then say that and then there's that the side by side of her as she is and her high school or whatever yeah and you're just you're just like i'd want him locked up and then he's you know pummeling the wall and you're just like you know i well what is locking you know like what what satisfaction am i getting out of this i already knew he was like this broken animal to get i it's well also he won't let you look away he dissolves into banging his head

1:19:28against the cement wall saying dummy over and over again and then that turns into boxing practice like he resorts back to the one thing he knows which is to try to punch his way out of stuff this is the kind of movie you exit the theater and the person you're with goes what'd you think yeah and you're afraid to answer in an elaborate way of a thousand thoughts but you don't want to be wrong yeah and so you say it was great and that's all you say it's very well shot because whatever you say whatever you say says a lot about you yeah and that's what and so and that's exactly what

1:20:05he's doing he's putting the audience in such an awkward position how do you is he was he likable was he fun to follow was he funny was he was he is he a disgusting human being you know we all spend the majority of our lives negotiating with the reality of who we are and not ever accepting who we really really are and it isn't until the i'm a dummy dash my head that we see the pain of accepting

1:20:36who you really really are who jake finally accepts he is a dummy you're so stupid you're so stupid yeah you ruined everything yes you're a bum you know um it's it's and it's brutal to do that but it's also brutal to negotiate with the reality so there's the rock and the heart place you know what i mean i also think it we would be crazy not to talk about the style of comedy in this film can we do that please so we're now entering into this nuanced sort of circumstantial comedy

1:21:11there's not a single written joke in this movie there's just little things being said behavioral maybe in behavioral maybe just and it's gutturally funny and a lot of it's also just rhythmic it's correct there's no clever witty banter to it yeah it's the opposite of witty banter yes and some of these lines i wrote down if you don't mind there's the he says when he throws the fight and uh billy fox i think or jimmy is it billy fox uh let me look at i think it's billy fox is the

1:21:46fighter he fights who does a bad job making it look like a real fight he can't sell it because he's too embarrassed and he ends up getting suspended lamada gets suspended and he's looking at the paper and we've had this this this very funny uh physical bit where he uh he smacks pesci says smack me let me show you something just smack me and he smacks him and pesci boom it falls down yeah that's so hot he doesn't even do that he goes put your hands up right right there's not even a smack and lamada just puts his hands up and pesci falls straight down that's right yeah there's also in that

1:22:20scene he picks up the de niro picks up the paper and says look at this look how they make me look they make me look like a bum like a mama luke and pesci goes i googled pesci goes a what and he goes like the mama luke of the year it's just like you know there's no way they don't know while they're making it that that's funny and while and while they're editing these who knows what's not in the movie from all that improv there's no way it's not improvised like the mama luke of the year um

1:22:52that's one of my favorite then there's the uh there's the moment where he throws the fight he knows it looked bad he's crying his eyes out in stark contrast to the fight where he i believe he loses it's in the beginning he loses the first fight we see him in yes um he loses but like there's a somewhat moral victory of correct you kind of had him yeah yeah i think it's that fighter maybe it's one of the sugar ray fights but he's sitting in the the whatever the dressing room or whatever

1:23:23it'd be afterwards and there's a real peace yeah he got what he needed out yeah it's like post coital for him yeah he's sitting there everybody else is kind of freaking out oh yeah that's right joe pesci's like they fucking robbed you right you know and he's sitting there going it's all right it's all right and he says he goes ah you know maybe i deserve it maybe i've done some bad things in my life all of a sudden you get oh there's some emotional intelligence there some awareness you know what a weird thing to say from this crude guy to say you know what maybe it's just karma

1:23:56you know but later there's the scene where he throws it and he's well there's a small hands bit but later he's crying hysterically yeah and his trainer goes you know what don't fight ever again it's a free country don't fight ever again i that line has me screaming and then his his trainer that old man yes starts to cry yeah but before you know what don't fight again it's a free country don't fight again i just think the small hands thing is so big because as you said like he loses the opening

1:24:28fight but he has inner peace because he feels like he proved what he needed to prove right and then after he wins what is the biggest fight of his career he cannot get over the fact that he never will be able to achieve what he wants to achieve that's right that physically he is incapable of actually getting i can't get the fight that proves that i'm the best and then you got pesci yes what is wrong with you why would you care about that that's crazy that's sick you know what's talking about you want to fight joley you'll never you're a heavyweight you're a middleweight he's a heavyweight yeah it's never going to happen right logically like who gives a shit you worry about shit it's the things you

1:24:59worry about that that's why you're sick bastard that's why you're fat fuck which it's so it's so good but pesci is let loose the the heavyweight thing is really telling yeah where like you can tell a modest like well but i wouldn't actually be the best unless i could fucking like knock down right and it's just like well you're not fucking capable of that you are literally not large it's irrelevant and like even if it'd be true you if you went to the weight of a heavyweight you would just be a ball yeah so like so get over it's what he gets to at the end of the movie he never gets

1:25:31over it yeah he never gets up you know she beats sugar ray one time who is kind of the king of his division and that's something but you can tell like from there on and that's very early in the movie but there's no way he's gonna ever feel like he won't never feel exactly vindicated in his in his and everything falls apart right the the the the comic engine of this movie that really the movie hinges on the comedy or else it's it's it's too miserable to watch is the brother dynamic it's a brother comedy two very different brothers one's a handsome tall really physically fit beast animal

1:26:07and his you know wise cracking but sensible uh little pugnacious napoleon complex tiny brother you know they both have the same size hands but other than that there's nothing and there's a ton of comedy for that and even that becomes tragic yes you know he beats the shit out of his brother and then he tries years later to to you know his brother won't hug him back yeah help him kiss me come on kiss me give me a kiss basically hug attack him yeah give me a kiss give me a kiss and he won't do it he never does it he gets in his car he says yeah i'll call you pesci does yeah you know you'll call

1:26:42me yeah i'll call you sure yeah yeah you know it's it's it's like everything goes to shit yeah scorsese's going you want me to be cruel i'm gonna take the funny stuff away now i'm gonna make the funny the stuff you were watching in the beginning that really you you were enjoying i'm gonna take that away i'm gonna ruin that for you you know there are certain films and certain filmmakers who have no problem being mean to an audience you know that you know let's let's stick it to them let's make them bleed and scorsese has to he you know it's the visceral reaction that he wants he's

1:27:18not trying to get anyone going again no erudite responses are necessary to a scorsese film right you're not he doesn't want people walking out analyzing the shit which is what we're kind of doing today true right yeah that's true this is not what he wants he wants you to come out in pain feel something feel something so visceral yeah panic uh you know fear cape embarrassment you know just yeah embarrassment i think a lack of identity you don't want to admit who how you felt about the

1:27:49movie because you don't want to like think make people think you're crazy if you say i like la mata right or i relate to him or i sympathize he wants you to think he's got he's got you on the ropes how's that how's that scorsese you got us on the road you motherfucker i think there's another thing and it's because i love martin scorer no but it's what he does over and over and over again and he sparks this discourse among his viewers of like well i wasn't supposed to sympathize with that was i is this movie irresponsible does he sympathize with this and he's just like human behavior like like

1:28:22this happens all the time right and in the world of film yes very very few filmmakers attempt to tackle the thing that kubrick's all of kubrick's movies are about which is the fight between the consciousness uh of humanity and the subconscious nature of animal instinct and that that inherent battle you know you you really man that's a tough line in a film but if film is made for anything it's for that and that's a real uh ambitious thing to do very few filmmakers can pull it off this is

1:28:59if if at this point if scorsese hasn't done it with taxi driver this is him and putting an exclamation point on i can do this as a filmmaker i can show you a film that will get to the base issue of humanity and very few filmmakers can do it completely in a full way where the where the message is clearly sent and yet there's mystery as to how well it's done if that makes sense in a way

1:29:33i think there's another massive thing going on does it too yes i think yeah i think the other massive thing going on here is scorsese i mean you were talking about the comedy of this he unlocks how much the comedy helps all of this go down because laughter is involuntary you can make people laugh at bad behavior without judging it's a thing that just happens that just happens and this is all involuntary totally there is no single like i said written or deliberate joke and hard to put your finger on why is this funny this is belly laugh stuff and new york new york has the same very

1:30:04repetitive recursive improv but it's not funny and it's it's actually just punishing and so you're sitting there off you're thinking i hate this guy because i don't like spending time with him there's nothing even entertaining about spending time with him versus if it's entertaining if you can locate what is both the comedic and dramatic motor of a scene and just wind that up it's it's what he said when he read the book there are scenes in this i see that there are scenes incidents setups in this that are interesting and if you can make those entertaining the audience is with you

1:30:36a long way until they start to intellectualize it the map that is established in the late 70s to be able to tell these sort of human frailty stories with comedy with you know part of that map is is annie hall okay woody has done this thing where he goes oh you want to see a movie about human frailty cast me as the lead i'm gonna cast myself as the lead done so by the time raging bull has come

1:31:08out audiences are used to seeing these films about fragile men who uh are crushed by ambition and burdened by their ability and so scorsese i think uses that zeitgeist to then give you something so horrifying la mata is is probably a much much more classically frightening monster movie monster than la mata was

1:31:42as a person yes right there's some um exaggeration there's some in who he is for the film for film's sake well also the density of the story when you're limiting it to the highlights you're seeing disproportionately his explosions and it's it's in my opinion one of the scariest performances i've ever seen when i was 21 especially seeing this for the first time de niro's performance scared the bejesus out of me there are times he truly goes dead-eyed he he gets so animalistic yeah that you

1:32:17go whoa i didn't think a human being was there's a psychotic nature to this performance i also think that like the 70s new hollywood has the rise of the anti-hero that really starts in the late 60s but this is a big shift into like this guy's not even an anti-hero right this is putting the guy you'd never put at the center of the picture right there yeah right right because it's you know something like midnight cowboy has like well ratso rizzo is on the side yeah and you have an innocent who doesn't quite understand what he's getting into at the center that balances it out that makes

1:32:51you feel less dirty from where you're identifying but this is the ratso rizzo movie sort of and again another reason they don't they can't make this today no no well they don't make movies you know pesci when he blew up after winning the academy award for the 90s good fellas yeah suddenly he's doing all you know a couple of the super yes remember uh my cousin vinnie yes you know those movies are great they are but like movies where suddenly hollywood is like what's a vehicle for you

1:33:22what's a vehicle what's your thing right nowadays they don't do that no if you were to ask an executive hey is it a good marketing strategy to make a movie about a freaky person right they would be like we can't do it yeah yes but wouldn't an audience like to see something different different for different sake wouldn't they like to see something like this guy small watching this chubby yes uh strange and and the answer on you know to any layman who isn't a communications major

1:33:53straight out of college who's been who's failed upward into becoming a development executive at a studio is of course we want to see those the problem is those people who make the decisions now are like it's like sabermetrics yeah they just go uh analytically uh it wouldn't work on sabermetrics you know that sabermetrics are ruining hollywood we are in the sabermetric period yes of hollywood three point oh whatever i do love hollywood 3.0 though take it all back hollywood 3.0 is better

1:34:23than ever so then sabermetrics ruin hollywood 2.0 and now we're building something new with 3.0 i hope so i hope so because it's disgusting to be honest i i think this is what the safties do and i think of the scorsese influence that clearly is on their work this is the movie that is the greatest i'm sure and just the sort of the safety thing of like how which can be uncomfortable and can kind of backfire of like how close can we get to a real person that's uncomfortable for you told sort of yeah now have either of you ever met or seen robert de niro i have nothing beyond a sort of a you know

1:34:58sort of press conference type scenario no i have uh and i have told my de niro story on too many podcasts okay but there's a second we will syndicate it had a somewhat awkward encounter i had a very very awkward and wild i kidnapped his kids for about 10 seconds yes i remember i have heard this story it's an unbelievable thing yes saddled with it that you know i kidnapped my hero's kids by accident yes uh he's got twins he's a twin dad like me it was the twins that i kidnapped by

1:35:30by accident by accident by accident there was no deliberate kidnapping it was actually their fault that they got kidnapped that's a but i'm not going to get into the story because anyone can look it up and you'll see that i'm not lying about that part of it yeah but the second story so three years ago i'm at um the sag awards for this oppenheimer year for oppenheimer yeah and de niro is there for killers of the flower moon right and i go to the bathroom the bathroom is back behind the curtains

1:36:01uh backstage and i go to the bathroom and standing in front of the men's room seemingly waiting for someone to come out is robert de niro and i see him and people are asking to take pictures with him and he's obliging i go in and i pee i'm in there a reasonable amount of time i come out he's still out there and i realize he's not waiting for anyone to come out of the bathroom and what has formed is essentially a line of fans lined up to take pictures with robert de niro as if he's like

1:36:36some sort of disney mascot yeah and he's happy to oblige now this is clearly not the de niro of 1980 no there's no way this is the near of 1990 of 2000 this is someone who's accepted being the older states correct older de niro who loves it yeah who loves the praise and so i stand online wow i joined the line now i'd met him years prior i assume there's no way he remembers me and there wasn't i went up to him and i said hi mr i'm an actor too i'm an oppenheimer and i just

1:37:10want to say it's great to me he has no idea who i am uh and thankfully because you know i don't think he loved the story of me kidnapping his children and so so i i said do you mind if i i take a picture with you too and he said yes and i took a picture and he said cheese wow and then i found out that's what he does with every fan picture he he reflexively says cheese i mean you're so here's this guy right so here's this guy who played jake lamotta right who played what's the name of the

De Niro as a public figure

1:37:44character in cape fear yeah oh my god this is a ridiculously complicated actor a person on screen where you're like the devil's here you know correct yes and then and then he did play the devil of court and then it's cheese well there's a little bit of jake lamotta there with his dignity still intact absolutely but especially when he had such a hard pivot to comedy right when he did the comedies and then he did the sort of era of like showing up in weird kind of red boxy movies de niro doesn't get enough credit for being a great comedic actor with a great very funny very funny actor

1:38:17but but you know midnight rum yeah he made himself more of a public figure he made himself the spokesperson of tribeca and started a festival and opened a bunch of restaurants politically charged and with his no wait he doesn't like donald is he pro-oriented david david has he come out on this pretty sure he's taking a wait-and-see approach was it beau is afraid there was some movie where he was doing it no it was megalopolis okay where like he did a q a with coppola uh-huh and maybe marty was there too i can't even remember but obviously he knows coppola

1:38:49yeah and like everyone who was there was like one minute in he's like and by the way trump is no good either and everyone's like he can't help himself he can't second which i love i love and i wonder if the rumor msnbc you know grandpa that it feels very much like there's a personal issue too yes because this is a new york guy yeah and because de niro kind of owns a lot of property in tribeca which is you know and i'm sure trump has his you know i'm there must have been something that

1:39:20happened in the past i just love when he's at that award show and he says fuck trump but he doesn't just say fuck trump he puts his arms up yes yeah he goes i'm strong here's what he does a hulk hogan here's what he said just imagine donald trump directing this film it'll never go anywhere where like i'm sure everyone was like i don't think anyone thought trump was in the running on directing megalopolis by the way you could say that about literally any movie you could say imagine trump directing a cinderella story and i'm like yeah it wouldn't be good the guy's not a good director he lacks the basic experience to direct a motion picture and also i love megalopolis it's a

1:39:53fascinating document that's not something where i was watching it be train on rails thank god trump didn't wreck this one do you remember because it relates back to this movie when it was the early stages of first trump presidency de niro going fuck trump yeah and trump made a public statement about it maybe a tweet wash up robert de niro yes a washed up old chair bum low iq right low right right he's lost his mind and he said i think he made one too many boxing pictures his slam on him was oh he's punch drunk right he's made one too many boxing pictures he made one

1:40:28he made raging bull he made one second one which is grudge match i was about to say no he made grudge match never forget which is de niro versus stallone correct and in this one of trump's favorite movies yeah probably probably but also within the same term he gives stallone like the national medal of yeah true he's definitely seen and stallone's made a couple oh he definitely watched grudge you're not allowed to slam de niro saying too many boxing pictures and be like by the way here's my best friend i'm sorry are you saying this is where you draw the line i have decided and i'm using this episode to speak out against it i do not like donald trump for this one reason

1:41:02david yes red alert uh-oh there's been an outbreak biohazard of a new patreon series it's contagious oh that's so true it's it's uh it's been cooked up in the lab for your pleasure from the fine folks at the umbrella corporation we are covering resident evil the film franchise

1:41:36yes we've got the first franchise six movies yes that beautiful second franchise how many six seven it's got uh the one oh it's got the one we'll be covering all of them on patreon uh doing commentaries on yes the resident evil apocalypse extinction afterlife retribution the final chapter welcome to raccoon city this is an exciting time uh zach craig are a friend of the podcast has a new resident evil coming out and we thought this was a good opportunity to revisit the history of resident evil movies why not why not why can't we why can't we we can check in for that august 1st and it's gonna be

1:42:13running all the way through november 1st followed by your march madness winner dracula dracula himself that's so fun so that's great that's great thank you thank you so much

1:42:37can i take a moment please steal a moment away and just say that i know a lot of amazing actors who would say that without that yes in a world of pacino's and hoffman's and nicholson's and uh and and and gina roland's yes and peter fox that they'd be nothing without robert de niro yeah that robert de niro laid so much groundwork for so much amazing work to come after what and he's still doing it i mean i don't know if you guys saw

1:43:13that um netflix series he did that a lot of people didn't watch unfortunately he plays the president did not watch zero day zero day amazing amazing performance again it's ridiculous it's another character it's another thing the guy he's basically playing joe biden right like an elder statesman president right a big crisis the guy is just the ideal thing and it's all like there's nothing that isn't derivative at this point it's it's one of those things it's like led zeppelin or something

1:43:47or wu-tang clan where it just completely there's no way you can ever say that anything new wasn't influenced by that thing de niro is that i don't know if scorsese is that i think scorsese is a definitely a dynamic filmmaker and definitely one of the for me top three of all time but in terms of completely restructuring the art itself no crumbs left on the plate and that's from from

1:44:18crumholz finishing and that's from crumholz from crumholz god damn it i hate that my name is david crumholz in this moment it's a great i just want to say god i love i just i'm get emotional yeah i'm so glad that robert de niro exists but to me and i think he wants this my guess is he doesn't want to exist he wants his characters to well it's the part of him that hates doing press correct and seems like his toenails are being pulled out what an amazing unique thing that is yeah an artist that

1:44:53doesn't want to take credit for his art in a way and doesn't yeah it's so noble sort of like it came out of nowhere it's noble right the profundity of what he was able to achieve amongst a world of actors wow robert de niro good actor beyond good actor beyond on another level it's like this thing i read about wu-tang once and you know i love the wu-tang clan where it says there's wu-tang and then there's also hip-hop you know sure robert de niro is just its own singular thing actor thing i don't know

1:45:32how to do that i don't know if anyone knows how to be that how to live with that talent all we can all do as a collective especially as ethnic you know american actors i know is strive for that but there's no escaping you there's you'll never be better than robert de niro as an actor you will never be better pound for pound than robert de niro i also and that's okay i think it's like brando where especially other guys of his generation you see that everyone goes this is the new thing to

1:46:08strive for and i think de niro is a thing that people strive for and you can tell when people want to be de niro and of course there's no de niro without brando yeah right de niro just didn't just come out of nowhere but he doesn't feel iterative that's what's different and he blasts that style through the stratosphere yes so so he sees an opening oh shit brando's doing a more sort of nuanced weird subtle off-the-cuff thing that no one else is allowed to do i'm gonna that's going to shoot i'm gonna do that but take it to oh an infinite level that that again i don't

1:46:45there will never be another actor better than robert de niro there will be actors that are good as good and there are you know denzel and you know the list goes on and on there is no such thing as better and then you it speaks to what is acting right what is it is it's a matter of degrees between the worst porn actor no offense to porn i certainly don't want to fend off the pornography acting community and robert de niro that what is the tangible thing that makes de niro better

1:47:20than your worst porn actor well even as you said there is nothing tangible that this movie it's a matter of degrees is going to build to watching this guy give a bad performance night after night right that it takes a level of genius for de niro to understand what a bad performance is yes and to be able to play it i i've seen you know actors play bad actors yeah no one does it as well as de niro no it's sick it's frightening in many ways de niro is maybe the most frightening person on earth that has ever lived are there specific in a way that i love and revere him of course no of

1:47:56course and i would want to hug him and be his friend are there other specific scenes we want to shout out we're talking about the steak scene a little bit steak scene right at the start just to get a uh an impression of like this guy's been a piece of shit yes he's got a wife we're barely going to get to know that you know that he just clearly treats like garbage we're watching the end of his first era yeah he's sort of the beginning of his star his athlete stardom but he's already you know watching out of a marriage because he's an abusive piece of shit uh there's all this stuff

1:48:28with frank vincent who basically always plays a guy who's gonna like get the shit beat out of him in a scorsese movie well that's what's great and that's what's so great about good fellas oh well yeah it's scorsese it's scorsese going i can do this twice and and no one's and it'll be better the second time yes amazing the there's the the pool uh you know when they're at the pool talking through the fence right yeah and talking about uh kathy moriarty and you see the sort of the seeds of his um what do you call it uh insecurity being planted right there yes where

1:49:05pesci's like well you know you got this you gotta it's a girl you gotta go on a couple days you gotta go on dates she's not just gonna sleep with you you know like you know and shot through the gate yes like he's in a cage right but lamata's like caging her lamata's missing out like well so you tried yes what you're telling me is you try you try because he doesn't want to be like sloppy seconds or whatever about she didn't go she didn't go right and so then there's a triumph of he gets her yeah um her performance is just amazing because you're just like she's 19 that she's so young but

1:49:39that just like so immediately you understand like oh this is so much more than he can handle like you know like he just thought he was like getting some pretty young girl that's where i can't believe that she's actually 19 because the amount of like presence and command she has holding her own in these scenes against these guys she's probably scared shitless and she probably it it scared her into intimidated i should use the that's the word intimidated shitless and intimidated into just hanging on for dear life and not fucking a damn thing up and by the end of the movie she's playing 10 15 years older than she is right and you buy it totally buy it you it feels more like

1:50:15it's a 30 year old playing young at the beginning than it does like a teenager playing old at the end the contrast between the scene where early on where where he tells joey you know hit me punch me and joey you know beats the gives him a real good beating and even opens one of his cuts you know come on you that's not come on you can hit me harder what's wrong with you fuck a psycho want me to hit you hard boom boom boom and the scene later the did you fuck my wife scene where

1:50:48there's no physical violence yeah but it's the the emotional violence between two brothers you know you're sick but you know you sick guy you know how how dare where do you get balls big enough to ask me that where do you get balls big enough to ask me did i fuck your wife you know and and how hurt how much more painful it is to watch these two brothers give me the right answer hurt each other like that yeah yeah but the older brother hurt him you know i believe joey's indignity at the

1:51:21questioning and i believe jake's like oh well he's not saying it yeah so it must be true yes and you know jake probably did hear things and is it true yeah did did vicky suck joey's dick like she says she does later and also talks about how how his dick is bigger than than jake's at this point he had a bigger dick than you too she knows that'll upset him she knows it or did it is it true at this point joe pesci have a schwance well i think he did and de niro has a micropedes i don't think you get that pesci energy from nowhere uh i think yeah pesci's got a good hog at this point let's ask him how many

1:52:00years have passed since yes since the the frank vincent incident so you're like he's been holding on to this for like 10 years yeah and whatever oh i don't know if it's that in the movie yeah oh no it's more like two three years even still like still yeah no he's holding on to he must have heard something yes you know he just wants the truth out of his brother he just can't get over this idea five years i just five years okay there you go yeah if you were this angry to attack this guy this badly what other reason could possibly exist other than my wife at the center of it right their

1:52:34relationship the brothers you know collapses in 1950 that's when the fight is he loses that final fight to sugar rain 51 you see didn't go down yes but you see pet you know joey at home watching it knowing like it's because i'm not there as part of this he's just kind of like he can't be controlled anymore he's just wants to be murdered in the ring essentially or at least to prove something by like taking this ungodly beating and not falling down right like the cuts you know to pesci watching it at home where he's just it's not i mean i don't even get the sense that he's like i'm failing my

1:53:07brother but he is kind of like i understand that a piece of it's unbalanced now right yeah exactly there's also another scene toward the end where you know this is post-arrest post-jail time he's now doing stand-up as the opening act for a stripper that he's fucking he doesn't have his own club anymore in a tiny dive bar in new york city yes and a guy is in the crowd heckling him saying you're not funny you suck and we know that jay clamata as we know him would normally beat the fuck out of the guy yeah

1:53:39but he doesn't he just kind of agrees he's like yeah i do suck you're gonna try to make me come out of retirement yeah yeah yeah you're pissing his drink for me bartender in other words he's he's he's completely castrated well there's no part of him that is even fighting anymore i think beyond that you know he knows he physically can't do it anymore right but he chooses stand-up there's the earlier scene where he goes to the club and sees the performance and i think he recognizes something in that guy of like this is the closest thing to what i do you are fighting the audience right and the

1:54:11command that guy has when he's able to throw off all these street jokes but land them is a thing he envies and what is scorsese's follow-up for agent bull king of comedy well is there something in between or is it straight it's a good question no i believe it's no it is right yeah yeah yeah but it is it is a thing i mean clearly right movie about a delusional comedian something in that sticks with he's evolving yeah yes there's a there's a there's absolutely it's like a part two almost right and that guy is much closer to being a successful comedian la mata just like it's back

1:54:43to what we were talking about the rhythm's all wrong you watch his stand-up and he's saying these jokes that are just a little bit off there's the king of comedy the spiritual sequel to raging bull i kind of it's got it's part of the trilogy with with taxidermy right like you know like just like de niro trying to plumb the depths of like a psychology we we are like yes transfixed by but terrified because obsessed with being a different type of guy but you know why though because he must be fascinated with de niro yes scorsese's probably fascinated with i guess you're trying to crack him

1:55:14a little bit trying to crack that man well you watch mean streets and it feels like watching a director fall in love with a star you know it feels as extreme as bogdanovich introducing as sybil shepherd or whatever there is those that introduction it's like what the fuck is this that i have found and i'm going to spend the rest of my life chasing this and studying this from all angles and of course de nero no doubt is aware that he seriously stepped in some shit yeah getting to work with martin

1:55:47scorsese no one understands him better than this guy and no one knows about him it's that he's just one of the greatest filmmakers period end of story he's got the right guy in his corner it's amazing the symbiosis the whole thing rare rare rare rare rare rare um i love them stitching the meat talking about rare and pesci timing how quick they can do the stitch up on the cut there's little details like that uh nicholas colisanto coach from cheers yes this is his last movie role and do we know what great actor is an extra in the film we looked this up right before john totoro he's in the first

1:56:23club scene yeah they sit down at the table and who's sitting there a very young john totoro first credit it's yeah but he doesn't say a word yeah yeah um that's sort of like the lingering element of the mob stuff you know that's in the movie still but sure sure tone down yeah because like that's a different story yeah like we're trying to get inside the brain of this man there's no doubt that the mob was had heavy influence on new york's boxing scene in the 40s and 50s but that's the least interesting thing going on that's what i'm saying like the movie is kind of like yeah

1:56:56right that's de grueger uh yeah michael botolucho's in this film is like a soda jerk okay like you know like you know just funny to think about yeah guys who had tiny little roles um there's a lot of people in the movie like that they're sort of hanging around but like it it really is basically just the the three yeah like people like frank vincent frank vincent nicholas colisanto you know like they're in and out for little bits right um his dad's in this movie charles scorsese this is

1:57:27the first one for the first time it's like one of the monsters yes i mean and we talked about this in the scorsese shorts episode we did on patreon but italian american and american boy really i think teach him the rhythm that he wants to replicate in his dialogue yeah it's how to get improv to get the feeling of that sort of conversational pattern the back and forth and so much of his parents fighting in italian american is the feeling of yes the family fight scenes in this movie no and that's the other thing about this movie and like all great scorsese movies not all not all of them have this

1:58:00but it's it's indelibly italian it is american yes yes a question is la mata in the movie i thought at one point that he's the referee that hands he's definitely the belt over yes i think that's who he plays to de niro and de niro finally wins the championship there's a shot of the referee walking toward the camera and i feel like that is la mata but i might be wrong maybe i'm wrong i might be wrong maybe la mata is not in the movie yeah i'm not seeing anything actually i don't know not sure he was certainly there he said that de niro got so good at boxing that he was like i think that guy

1:58:35could have like held his own in the ring like he was impressed with him but obviously he's also you know he's being a schmoozer according to imdb la mata is not in this yeah i i couldn't find him either yeah he does have like a weird semi-resurgence of acting roles la mata yes he's in a 87 movie called hangman he's a detective and maniac cop in 88 he's in a movie called mob war so he does sort of and he has like credits leading up to this i can't believe you just said mob war why do you

1:59:07know mob war i am in mob you're in mob war no i'm kidding no okay you believed it though i did believe it's believable that i would believe it like as a nine-year-old i would be in a movie called could have been possible yeah sure you could have been limit little jimmy down the street little jimmy jim balumbo um we haven't mentioned jim balumbo a wild thing about this movie is that

The 1980 box office

1:59:30it's produced by erwin winkler who not only had produced new york new york yeah which was his biggest failure but also produced the rocky movies like he's he's willingly signing off to make an anti-rocky i think that was part of the appeal yeah it's it's bold of him though yes it is bold of him but i mean he's obviously part of the problem with new york new york is he's not someone who'd ever made a musical before and so as a producer they keep running like wildly over schedule and all this with this at least he knows like exactly how to do it but this was an expensive

2:00:03movie yes uh sure it cost 18 million dollars and it made like 25 it wasn't a success per se yeah on release we can talk about that just to tell you a couple other things you know when they're in the final edit they have like some deadline it was opening on friday and it's like sunday they gotta be done they have a print uh where they have to get it like over to the lab by midnight and marty doesn't like that there's this one scene where a minor character played by marty's father is ordering a drink ordering a cutty sark the the whiskey and marty's like you can't hear him saying it

2:00:39you can't fucking hear cutty sark and they're like too bad we're done yeah we gotta get that and he says i'm gonna take my name off the film and they're just like winkler apparently is just like yeah okay well you can take your name off the film but it's going to the lab yeah you know like they finally had to like calm him down and scorsese's like i realized i was finally i was near collapse like i basically had walking pneumonia it wasn't a drug thing anymore but the movie like just wiped me out and it comes out it's not really a hit but it is well received there are some holdouts

2:01:11can be vincent can be in the times kind of panned it pauline kale who's obviously tough always tough to predict she kind of panned it how what in the world how what this is oh my what what right with what righteousness can you pan raging bull oh my god that disgusts but as you said people didn't have a frame of reference for it it was who gives a shit and yes they did you know citizen cane baby yeah there's people didn't get citizen cane at the time god i hate oh my god um this is

2:01:47enraging knowing this enraging bull uh kinkley tries to shoot reagan the day before the oscars and the oscars get postponed well scorsese shows up to the oscars for this movie surrounded by bodyguards yeah i guess that's everyone so the security was just insane he dressed them up and just fancy tuxedos and acted like they were just his entourage but he was worried that he was going to get shot right telma schoolmaker wins the only other oscar for editing and she says like it was

2:02:18marty's oscar i felt like i was winning for the fight sequences and those fight weekend sequences were designed by him you know what i mean like as much as i did a good job editing the film like i felt like i was shot for the trophy yes right and obviously like robert redford wins and ordinary people is an excellent movie and like was kind of an earthquake it's like this is the thing i try to tell people when they're like i can't believe like marty lost it was a much bigger hit it was a much bigger hit but it was also just like a new kind of movie in a way and it was talking about stuff that movies weren't really like starting to talk about yet it's kind of like upper middle class like

2:02:51psychological crisis and we know how much oscars just will not respect comedy sure and ordinary people is a flat straightforward drama yes and this movie is raging bull are the chances of it winning hurt by it being somewhat funny and it's also just a movie that everyone is not sure what to think about i also i think ordinary people is like a difficult film it is emotionally like challenging film but it ends with catharsis it ends with the son telling the mom off and the audience doesn't

2:03:22leave feeling good but they leave feeling like some progress and knowing what they've been what they've been told to feel and feel it yes no this is subversive this is provocative yes i also i just want to call out uh kathy moriorty most of the reviews are sort of like where the fuck did they find this person she gets an oscar nomination she follows this up with neighbors the john avilson belushi ackroyd movie true and then she gets in a really bad automobile accident and doesn't act for like another five years and it does kind of really throw her career out of whack she had like intensive

2:03:55back surgery i believe um but also she just said that there was this thing of like everyone discovers her goes like this is the great new ingenue immediately can you lose the accent that there was this real push of like how do we get rid of the thing that made you unique in the first place that's sad that's unfortunate she's still working to this day she owns uh i don't know if it's still open but she owned a very popular pizza mulberry street mulberry street pizza in beverly hills yeah

2:04:27uh i think four locations i think in south southern california so uh that's you know like the film i would say is pretty quickly though i think highly you know what i mean like it was the most nominated film that year yes and it's just kind of like maybe the financial thing is not you know obviously a movie like this pays long dividends when it becomes such an established classic and all that the next one king of comedy that's the one where i feel like marty again is starting to sweat and then like the next two movies he makes are both kind of like well i gotta make something

2:05:00after hours and uh and uh i need to get back in the color of money yes uh and obviously i love both those movies but like you know it's it's not until last temptation i feel like that marty is again making like his whatever i like a more direct vision of his agrees uh the box office game this film griffin came out on november i get it right uh 14th okay 1980 uh first in new york city or you know unlimited release but it is on the top 10 here okay at number 10 it must have opened at like the

2:05:32ziegfeld or something sure crazy person right it's making 185 000 number one at the box office it's not a film we've covered but we've covered um works uh one of the writers on this we've covered her directorial works okay so is it it's either a nancy or it's nora is it heartburn nope is it a nancy yes i mean she wrote it is it private benjamin it's private benjamin there we go you got any private benjamin thoughts oh i haven't seen that movie in a very very long i haven't i haven't seen

2:06:04that movie it's fun it's very fun yeah i like what i like about it is that it's like you know it's kind of dark it's kind of all over the place like it's a wacky movie but it's like it's got a you know opens with a death firmness to it yeah uh it's a fascinating film it was a huge hit yeah uh and it got uh nancy we got three oscar nominations total uh and it's been number one i think for like two months it's a big hit runaway smash number two at the box office we just talked about best picture winner in 1980 ordinary ordinary people another big hit uh so you know we're in this like

2:06:36you know so far like we've got a comedy we've got a drama this is movies that have stood the test of time number three at the box office which was i would say a flop um a film from a very uh very good director a female director of very few obviously were out there back then um but this was kind of her like mainstream swing and it doesn't work it's a comedy and a drama i don't know if you know this movie i mean maybe you do it's a it's a female director who's the female is it petty marshall no she wasn't directing it's not like joan micklin silver it's not but it's sort of

2:07:09it's more in that realm it's someone who had made an indie film in 1978 that isn't a wonderful bloody whale bloody whale okay uh and this made girlfriends in 78 and this is her this is her studio film yes from columbia okay the stars are michael douglas and jill clayberg ooh charles groden in a supporting role oh what's this movie called um it's got a little bit of an anonymous title after this she only makes tv movies because like it's kind of like well that didn't work and you're a lady so uh it's not starting over no it's not seems like old times i'm throwing out other

2:07:42movies that have posters with two smiling actors it's got a song that's sung by diana ross and it's named after the song oh uh what's it called it's called it's my turn there we go um but it was kind of bodied by critics it even rudely got like a golden raspberry nom in like the sort of early evil years of that organization one strike you're out on her career very much so yes it's like joe clayberg's like a divorcee maybe or she's like a professor and then she meets this like widow dad who's played by michael douglas and they have a you know romance i think you know it's pretty low stakes in a way but

2:08:17i've never seen it i should see it number four at the box office it's one of your favorite films of 1980 it's one of my favorite i think it's your favorite film by this director we've covered it on the podcast it's a movie thief nope nope that was a good guess solid guess yeah uh it's a another best picture nominee of the year um and it's another kind of like smaller director making a more mainstream film smaller director making a more mainstream director we've covered it on this podcast it's one of you said it's one of griffin's one of my favorites and i ranked it as their top

2:08:49film you think i think this is your favorite of his films well yes and he's obvious he's a totemic director he recently died recently died yes he recently died he did hmm what's that like recently like last year oh last year last year and he's one of my guys uh no i would say not as much one of your guys maybe more one of my guys than your guys given that we covered him on the show i feel like he's more one of my guys but this is your favorite the biopic it's a biopic

2:09:21whoa yes um it's a true story biopic biopic it's a true story biopic in 1980 um it's not it's not star 80 no no uh bob fossey didn't die last year no um why why am i blanking on this because it's sort of one people forget it was not made for eight oscars whoa so it tied raging bull for the most noms that year actually who's the star of this picture it's give it away john hurt

2:09:51john oh it's the elephant man elephant it is my favorite it is my favorite you're right uh nominated for eight oscars one none that way but it is no of course it is and yet it is of course it is uh so that's also i think it more of a hit in a way than that was yeah number five of the box office is a film from one of your favorite directors but i think it is not one of your favorites of his it's a sort of a more mainstream movie from him it's not popeye no because i love that movie is a

2:10:23movie i love this is who's maybe your favorite director beyond robert altman beyond robert altman is it lumet no that's another choice obviously for you it's not verhoeven no this is like an obvious it's a pretty big guy for you you want to do him on the show i've worried it'll be a little samey um you've worried i think he's a great filmmaker as did martin scorsese you've worried that it would be samey i've wanted to do him what why am i blanking on these today

2:10:55give me something is it gilliam no no what's the genre of this movie it's a crime thriller okay yes it's got a sort of you know it's like him doing his version of a crime movie of a sort of like popular oh this is gloria john cassavetes gloria there we go which is a film i just feel it's not like you don't like gloria no i love gloria i think it's it's not your favorite of his it's not my favorite but it's up there okay i love gloria i mean it's a great movie yeah rules why did i think you didn't like it as much i have no idea okay all right yeah all right i'm wrong yeah i love gloria

2:11:27do you not like any cassavetes movies um i've never seen um love streams i like love streams yeah i've never seen big trouble right i've never seen the one i still haven't seen right otherwise i think i like them all you like cassavetes yeah yeah i mean uh yeah i i guess i feel like i want to say every time i've watched a cassavetes film i feel the this is weird to say but i feel

2:12:07the camera in a weird way if that makes sense the camera uh announce itself a little bit it kind of takes me out yeah um but i'm not wrong that gloria is like you know him being like it was him trying to play the studio game yeah like can i make you a more kind of straightforward like movie with a premise that you can kind of sell and and it did fairly well right fairly well and she got an oscar nomination and she fucking rocks in it yeah um but it still has plenty of people screaming while the camera is close to their face and so don't you worry the little boy won the razzie

2:12:40i believe which was really rude this is it's the first year of the razzies where they're like do we hate the shining yeah you know and then like later even the razzies are somewhat embarrassed by their first you know awards um number six at the box office so that was the five number six is uh fade to black okay which is a horror like comedy it's like a weird lindy movie uh where a cinephile starts to turn into like famous film characters to kill people that sounds i've never seen it it

2:13:11sounds very cool i've seen it like written up as a sort of like forgotten cult classic uh very popular in france and that's when you know a movie's normal of course uh number seven of the box office is the musical drama the idol maker oh yeah first taylor hackford film yes speaking of ray which you were in i'm yes correct ray sharky starring ray sharky and peter gallagher which uh derek c in france and ryan goslin kept threatening to remake somebody stop him i know it didn't happen i don't know anything about it except that it's sort of like about a singer like who becomes famous it's about

2:13:44it's about like a producer manager i think right it's about the one who makes the idol maker i heard a story about a party at ray sharky's house in the early 80s in the hollywood hills in which a live pig was slaughtered ray sharky one of the darkest figures of the post new hollywood movement yeah yes uh i believe that story if you go to ray sharky's wikipedia page you'll believe any story about um number uh eight at the box office is the stuntman the great peter oh yes movie richard

2:14:15wonderful film yep uh number nine is a movie i've never heard of called kill or be killed okay which is oh a south african martial arts film cool that was that was called karate olympiad retitled kill or be killed and released in 1980 in the united states wow wow never heard of it and number 10 at the box of us raging bull right okay there you go there we go that's the box office of the year a very a very interesting package of movies people had interesting movies to show you in 1980 things were happening you know what i mean like gloria ordinary people elephant man are all in the top

2:14:47take your pick it's a good oscar year it's a potpourri it is a good oscar yeah so yeah so that's raging bull uh david anything uh you want to plug plug start a podcast plug i mean plug it's great i hate to hear myself do this but i'm in a sports film it's my first sports film called mr irrelevant comes out christmas day a week after doomsday and dune three perfect perfect time lots of people be in theaters yes it's an alternative yes film to those big giant movies go see it i hear

2:15:25it's lovely i have yet to see and i hear it's it's it's wonderful testing through the roof did we mention that we mentioned it's testing through the roof it's testing through the roof so that's all i got uh that and um i'm playing a grateful dead show tomorrow night this won't air no this won't air on time this is gonna come out in like a month but i'm gonna plug it mid september knowing yes that it will be months late you're playing i'm playing at the orange lantern in paramus new jersey playing grateful dead with with a band called golden string fiddle okay

2:15:58by the time you hear this i will have played this show okay uh i just want to let people know i'm doing that's what i do with my life i play it a place is called the orange lantern in paramus guitar uh no i play bongos if you must know nice but i sing the only reason i play bongos is because all i did was sing you needed something and i was i was asked to yeah to pick up an instrument and the easiest thing was the bongos perfect yeah and an incredible bongo play i believe it you have the

2:16:32intensity for it i'm a real bongo boy yeah uh thank you for being here dude you guys are awesome and this one it really is an honor to be asked to do this particular we were floating names we're floating ideas and the second your name came up it felt kind of right i'm just glad like you've never asked me to do like a holocaust thing drama or some sort of like jewish theme thing no talmudic movies i really appreciate that yes i figured you guys have that covered to some extent do you feel like that's usually what you get asked to do i just don't know no i'm not saying that i just don't like the idea

2:17:06that i'm the go-to jew for that i have no opinion on on those sure yeah oh tune in next week for the king of comedy with uh yes yes straight up the king of comedy himself love it um we're getting into it is rupert pumpkin funny sure our argument is almost he got close over on patreon a few days ago we released our episode on the last waltz hey we did it we're sorry it's on patreon this is

2:17:37the longest filmography we've ever covered what are you doing beyond uh the king of comedy you're doing last temptation we're doing everything you're doing everything we're doing the whole film that's why last waltz is on patreon because we're doing everything you're doing what is that the one with brad pitt uh the one brad pitt yeah you gotta do that one what's the one with brad pitt you said everything isn't it with brad pitt i don't think so you think he departed on india no seven years in tibet you're confusing seven years in tibet you're conflating kundun and seven years in tibet two films that uh angered the chinese government that

2:18:11were released by the same time similar times right around yeah 97 98 yeah you know i've never seen seven years in tibet i haven't either that was a classic where people like wow the studio's really taking a risk with this and pitt's taking a risk and china's like condemning the film and it came out and everyone was like beautiful mountains you know i mean the mountains look fucking great unbelievable uh and how about the film i mean like he climbed over all those mountains like they had nothing to say about should we watch it as per i'll check it out yeah wait who's the lead in seven years in tibet brad pitt oh it is brad yeah yeah it's just that's not scorsese no

2:18:43scorsese did kundun seven years the lead of kundun a child a young chinese man i mean like some playing the uh well you see why it's an easy of course it would be funny if pitt was like i will be playing the dalai lama any questions pretty bold pretty bold um no he's playing like uh you know right like it was like he was like a mountaineer who climbed everest i think he was there for like six years eight years something like that

2:19:15uh thank you all for listening thank you for listening thank you for being here crummy thank you for having me it's a lovely this is a great there's a brain trust here that's what we call ourselves we call ourselves the brain trust uh please remember to rate review and subscribe and as always david yes you fuck my wife you fuck my wife look at me look at me look at me answer my question you fuck my wife you fuck my wife what kind of a question is that i

2:19:48i'm mad you asked the question where do you get both bigger

Credits and final thoughts

2:19:51blank check with griffin and david is hosted by griffin newman and david sims our executive producer is me ben hosley our creative producer is marie bardi salinas and our associate producer is aj mckeon this show is mixed and edited by aj mckeon and alan smithy research by jj birch our theme song is by lane montgomery in the great american novel with additional music by alex mitchell artwork by joe bowen ollie moss and pat reynolds our production

2:20:24assistant is minick special thanks to david choe jordan fish and nate patterson for their production help head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all the real nerdy shit join our patreon blank check special features for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes follow us on social at blank check pod subscribe to our weekly newsletter checkbook on substack this podcast is created and produced by blank check production and we're back streaming on peacock may

2:20:54i present to you the award-winning staff of the toledo truth teller slap me let's draw something loose yes i like that the certified fresh series returns your boss you always like this or is this just an oh no this is mad oysters everybody there's a certain satisfaction when you work with someone maybe we could be a family you sadistic pig the paper new season streaming september 9th only on peacock this show gives me a reason to live