Who's That Knocking at My Door / Boxcar Bertha

0:00a new podcast a new podcast i'm trying to put like a new york a new podcast do you know what the tagline for who's that knocking at my door was

0:32a new movie a new classic oh that's fucking bold it's a bunch of pull quotes and most notably roger ebert who was an early champion of this movie and dined out on that for decades as he should have as he should he gets credit for being like i suspect this martin scorsese might be the most classic important figure in the next half century of american movies from ebert yes he said a new classic the poster david has a big quote it says a new classic a great moment in american movies as a film it has something to say to everyone a stunning impact the most evocative

1:07description of american life i have ever seen and then it has a second pull quote but then above the title itself no quotes it just says a new classic does say that so it uses the pull quote well accredited to a film critic and then it also just says like we're gonna say it about ourselves now of course there's an alternate tagline here because this is a two movie episode so excuse me while i reset by the way i'm to be mentions one other tagline for who's that knocking at my door which i have to imagine was for a re-release which was mean streets was just around the corner well

1:42there's streets a tagline have corners tagline basically saying this movie is maybe retroactively interesting if you know that this guy goes on to become exactly what it is yes um but excuse me let me do hard reset here blank check in 2026 was a free podcast bertha was just a little bit freer than most well yes i i know that tagline america in the 30s was a free country yes and it's bertha was j e s apostrophe a just a little bit freer than most yeah yeah um it's a good it's actually a good

2:19poster it is it's got a train on it it's a great title and of course exploding this mini series is titled pod car birthcast no no no we're spending the next five and a half months talking about martin scorsese and of course we are naming the entire series after a second film pod car birthcast david's eyebrows have hit the ceiling i'm waiting for you to be done and to introduce our podcast this is blank check with griffin and david i'm griffin i'm david it's a little bit freer than most uh it's a podcast about filmographies directors who have massive

2:53success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby today we're not talking about massive successes we're talking about two early primordial films that set the stage for next week a breakthrough the likes of which has rarely happened in american cinema that then sets us off on a wild career of what we're discussing amongst the biggest careers we've talked about it's him and spielberg i mean these are the biggest guys we've talked about in this podcast

3:27i guess that's well james cameron he's the king of the world yeah he is the king of the world for nolan these days i guess he's kind of making a run at that kind of a career i guess my my distinction is that no you're right these these are now elder statesmen these are living legends they've got the long body of work yes they are we're talking about movies six decades of work now with these guys uh this is from the 60s who's that knocking at my door 1967 there were a couple i

3:57think iterative releases on seven decades he is in his seventh decade of making movies he is currently filming yes a film he's filming a film folks in his seventh decade of being a picture he's filming a film that we will cover on blank check in 2027 i assume or 28 you never know sometimes he takes time in the edit he be slow sometimes that's true if your movie is three and a half hours long every test screening this one's shorter right i don't know okay i i feel very strongly where i'm just like he can do what he wants he can do what he wants he could do what he wants like if he

4:30wanted to make these movies 82 minutes long and have four hours of deleted scenes on the criterion disc i'd be fine with that i'm just like marty show us everything you got now i obviously would like him to do whatever he wants but it's just the pitch of the new one just sounds a little more it does intimate smaller maybe right yeah right it's transformers versus gi joe it's a very simple battle between two forces it's predominantly featuring tiktok stars yes yes chris hemsworth

5:01leads a ragtag team of tiktok stars to be the mediators between the transformers and the gi joes that is his next film right for skydance yeah here i'm just looking i'm trying to find his last sub two-hour movie uh did hugo crack two right it's two and six two hours six minutes okay that's probably a little over is that his shortest film of the 21st century yes it is yeah bringing out the dead is two hours and one minute okay so though it feels longer compliment it moves fast it's got a lot

5:36in there right but i think after hours oh color of money is an even two hours and and no after hours king of comedy those are both under two hours obviously after hours is very very short that's sort of the point 80 it's not quite that was like 90 something minutes it's short you know come on by his 97 minutes by his standards that's i'll take as much as you got i'm not complaining about alice is under mean streets is under today we're talking about two two 90 somethings and right uh his first two films were about 86 minutes yes i mean this is a humongous filmmaker a lot of long voice for us

6:11it is it's a humongous filmmaker a humongous career and a filmmaker who you know for how large he looms in the culture his name is often mispronounced and so we obviously just want to get ahead of this on this series and make sure we're communicating this correctly we will be talking about the films of marty scorchese marty scorchese on main feed blank check martin scorchese in a series we're calling podcast fellas that's right yeah yeah ben producer ben yay point check doing marty

6:45scorchese look scorchese oh i actually i just am now remembering i have a new bit i want to debut on this first hell yes this is the perfect place to do it yep hey new listeners welcome to the podcast the bit is pretending like this show is still accessible to people who haven't been in it for years i think what i'm gonna try and do yeah is i'm really gonna try to do some work to engage with some new listeners to try and just make them feel like they've got somebody who's just like guiding their hand a little bit sure we're not trying to push new listeners away in fact we welcome them i

7:19just understand it can seem daunting yes yes so guys you're tuning in sometimes the episodes go a little long yeah okay don't let that scare you no it's like martin scorchese movies it's rewarding but maybe given that we've recorded two three hour plus episodes or like we've recorded i think four three hour plus episodes in the last 10 days there were some big movies right maybe we can keep this one a little light oh wait we have to like talk about martin scorchese's entire like childhood

7:49and shit although you know what he's done that plenty you can just watch any of the documentaries he's like that was a born in queens you know interesting impression yeah i know i i gotta get there with him gotta get there with him okay a little more like risco the rat well wait a second they're not a million miles away from each other perfect example new listeners sometimes we go off on tangents sometimes we go off on tangents here's another thing we should say to new listeners vis-a-vis my uh marty scorchese joke the thing about blank check is sometimes i mispronounce

8:20things on purpose because it's funny and sometimes i do it not on purpose because i don't know how to talk true and i ask you to assume that it's always me doing it on purpose it's always a ha ha always so yeah so here we are on blank check uh you voted for him in march madness over tony scott people's champion the biggest loser in america martin scorchese finally got his moment in the sun he finally eked out a win and we decided in the interest of i mean we can't impose brevity on mr

8:52scorsese but you know where we can we will try to make this miniseries not take over a year of this show so we are combining his first two efforts the i guess you would call it it's sort of an independent film independent before such a thing really existed the early days yeah who's that knocking at my door who's that knocking at my door he asked yep and then boxcar vertha for higher work right new world pictures roger corman or at this point it wasn't new world it was american it's aip american international yeah and uh the you know the two films that are sort of

9:29the films before his you know real debut film of mean streets much as like the sixth sense is kind of m night shaman we use the term in the mean street episode the the phenomenon of the second first film a movie that crystallizes the director's thing so thoroughly that it basically in everyone's mind becomes the first movie because it's quote unquote the first real one and then there are a few examples of a movie like mean streets early in someone's career where you're just like there we go there it

10:02is it's fully realized we're off to the races he he never makes a movie ever again that doesn't really feel like a martin scorchese movie you can argue about the effectiveness of each of those as films on their own i said to my wife who sort of came in halfway into me watching boxcar bertha first i said yes i'm jacking it no i didn't say that no i said to my wife like this movie does have a lot of trains in it it's fair to assume that david's pants were around his ankles now i said to my wife like this is kind of the last one i'm gonna watch during this that's like arguably bad and i

10:38don't even think boxcar bertha is like a you know you're more negative on it than i am but i'm not like but like this is the last one where i think it's in my opinion you can kind of be like that movie just you know didn't work or is bad you could if you're saying that about the other ones i mean of course you can say like i don't like new york new york i you know i get that like i'm not complaining right but it's like the the rest are interesting to masterpiece i would say you basically have three types of movies for the rest of his career you have masterpieces you have

11:11movies that just work to some degree masterpieces right yes then you have highly regarded film really interesting risky personal swings you have something that might not quite hit but it's it's something that's coming out of his soul right and is a very genuine effort and doing something very artistically daring and then the third thing is what for most people would be a kind of strategic career move movie a paycheck gig you know a favor gig but all of those movies i would argue are defined

11:43by the fact that martin scorsese chose to make them it's not just well he did this to get back in good graces all of those movies become defined not just by the idea that he made it but what he contributed to that movie anything that would be impersonal ends up becoming very personal through him boxcar bertha is the last impersonal movie he makes who's that knocking at my door is him making a deeply personal movie before he's figured out how to make an engaging film right and right where he's right he's he's just getting his hands on the toolbox right right and boxcar bertha's got pretty

12:18good craft in it but but you feel that he he doesn't have anything on the line he's not putting himself in it in the same way and and from next week on that's not the case would you agree i would agree except i think goodfellas sucks yes well of course that's our take that we're working towards yeah five minutes of us going goodfellas sucks raging bull basic what if we put him on the bracket yeah encouraged like like yeah yeah no of course we yeah we're excited to do scorsese that we do

12:48and we're like oh by the way we think he stinks we all agree this guy's a fucking phone every episode is us like another stinker what a jamook f yeah also i don't like his personality i don't find him charming at all yeah and why are you so short marty you even make me look tall no no my contrarian tick would be like i actually think he's too tall yeah he should shorten up yeah hunch up marty talk faster stop snipping them brows marty i think there should be less women in these movies all right

13:25okay i'm kidding i'm kidding marty bigger glasses please i can barely spot them on your face should touch your cheeks that's how big they are oh this guy he drolls on and on can't you speed up the conversation a bit marty get to the point faster and use your hands to express yourself this fucking loser today we're talking about who's that knocking at my door boxcar bertha martin scorsese jj forgot to prepare a dossier for this one no he worked really really hard to get

13:57it to us in time lack of interest he said oh so there's just not any information out there about this guy i think we are the first podcast to talk about martin scorsese well it's the first marty movie you guys all saw before i start this oh wow first one i saw in theaters must have been same and i'm wondering if that theaters or just saw period or we can answer both i mean you can answer both because for me i know theaters the answer is gangs to new york same and i'm wondering if that was the first one i saw period it was i had definitely already seen taxi driver by then

14:28because i was such a normal and well-adjusted kid um i'm trying to think if i would have seen much else like i don't think i had seen i know but i'd seen goodfellas i definitely saw goodfellas when i was like an early teenager yeah i guess that would be it yeah no i i think that was the first one i saw because i i understood the weight and importance with which that movie was being presented and i knew martin scorsese by reputation as this is the guy everyone uses a shorthand for infamous filmmaker serious filmmaker but i think i saw it and then said to my mom like so where does that rank

15:04now and then started seeing as a kid growing up in north jersey oh yes this might surprise you that the first film of martin scorsese that i ever saw it's goodfellas yeah now ben we were talking about this the other night you were saying you have a bit of an interesting relationship to martin scorsese and his films across your life but that there's a there's an interesting opportunity there's potential in this series do you want me to say it remind me you were saying

15:36that you grew up with the most annoying people on yes yes yes yes obsessively watching his most popular films yeah and taking all the wrong lessons from them yes and reading them in the dumbest most superficial way possible 100 and that it did not cause you to resent those movies but it did cause you to kind of push away from them definitely that you kind of reject a protective and not not in the way that i think he's obviously it would be crazy to think he's a hack but it's just it's you know he thought he was a loser i'll make i thought he was a freaking loser now it's this kind of the same

16:11way with bruce springsteen for me where it's like obviously the guy's an incredible songwriter you know put out incredible albums but it just was so jammed down my throat i was like i can't now i can't engage with it i understand that new jersey has a couple of italian residents scorsese is not a jersey guy he's not so it's a little bit of like the classic jersey thing i'm like yeah but he's making movies about us mooks so you know it's like they weren't owning him but they were loving

16:42right it's like the pope frank sinatra right but i mean like with springsteen at least it's like that guy is jerseys from there and ben i don't know if you know this but you know how most of us we grow up in our childhood bedrooms we have floor yes you can stand on it right bruce didn't have that fuck there was a hole in the floor of his childhood bedroom not right the thing we stand on that we rely on he didn't have that for me it was about not fitting in with the community where

17:13i grew up so i felt like i needed to differentiate myself from the pack and so i was drawn to outsiders yeah artists musicians filmmakers that felt worlds away than the culture that the people around me engaged in david yes bark bark bark bark bark what's going on dog days of summer true

17:53oggy doggy august okay it's the perfect time to hit reset before the autumn rush begins and honestly i'm stroking my chin here and i can't think of a better place to start then my closet uh-huh where i want to reset that's why i love shopping at quince yeah because they're about fewer better pieces their clothes are made with premium materials and they're built to last designed to ones you reach for a day after day so you don't need to overstuff your closet i hate overstuffing my closet i think that's it's a fair thing if you're still hanging on to the same worn

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19:00offers or go to quince.com slash check get free shipping on your order in 365 day returns now available in canada and the uk too that's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash check david crack open that dossier please martin charles scorsese the great american filmmaker was born excuse me we don't pay jj to editorialize we will decide whether or not he's a great american

19:31filmmaker don't tell us that don't shove that down our throats was born november 17th uh 1942 in flushing queens did you know that i knew he was a queen's boy parents are charles and katherine scorsese sicilian the children of sicilian immigrants so they are you know they are the first generation uh born here uh marty's the second both of marty's parents are born on elizabeth street in the lower east side of manhattan charles worked in like shipyards and uh then like pressed clothes

20:02i think uh katherine they both worked in like the garment district for a long time marty has an older brother named frank you may have heard this before griffin but marty had a bit of a bad pair of lungs yes he caught an illness when he was a tiny baby probably pertussis like whooping cough or something you know like there was an epidemic a nice doctor supposedly sort of you know saved his life when he was a tiny baby but he thinks it basically like allergies asthma trouble breathing his whole but

20:33but then it's like his whole childhood he's got like a bad set of you know like he's a little you know whatever he's he's a little fragile still to this day it affects i'm sure the way he was raised you know you if you come that close to losing a child that early on your parents are going to do everything they can to really try to keep you safe and that fragility i think gets into the the head of the trail the uh great documentary that rebecca miller did last year uh is it called

21:04mr scorsese i already forgot that was on apple tv talks about this he talks about it in the rich trickle book uh conversations with scorsese which jg wanted me to shout out because he's using it a lot for this stuff and also but i should shout it out anyway because i've read it it is fantastic it is one of the great like critic director discourse you know works ever but like he grew up in corona in queens like you know back then obviously that part of queens i think was very heavily italian and it's more suburban it's suburban like there's no big buildings there and it's not like cramped like

21:37lower manhattan was it's like front yards and yeah two family house they had a yard they had a little tree and they were forced to move back because charles got an argument to move back to the lower east side move back to literally because charles got an argument with the landlord and i feel like in the documentary scorsese talks about like what you know it was the classic kind of like you know was there maybe something shifty or was it just like you know ego bravado kind of stuff right but something face could not be loaded yes right and he talks about it as being like cast out of paradise yes

22:12paradise lost that he was taken out of a place he remembers feeling safe and comfortable and thrown into what felt like an unstable scary environment and it's a humiliation they're moving back to essentially a tenement this tiny two-room apartment on 253 elizabeth now of course you would have to be in charge of some sort of oil or aluminum deposit to afford an apartment on 253 elizabeth you're like a creative director i mean i guess you could probably buy like a studio apartment for like 900 000 that has like a toilet in the middle of the room i was gonna say the walls are made of

22:49toilets that don't work but have unflushed shit in them you could maybe get the room that's portrayed in who's that knocking at my door that's just the fuck room yeah yeah right exactly like four four again it's still a very large amount of money but also you gotta live there with the fuck room guys the fuck room guys are still there of course they can't kick them off the lease so 253 elizabeth so i work in soho well you work for blank check production that is true but i also work for the atlantic and i work in soho and uh elizabeth street between prince and houston you know

23:23is is where he grew up and like it's you know you know where prince street pizza is of course all the all the tourists love to go there around the corner square slices we're talking around the corner from there yeah anyway uh so his dad wasn't in the mob but like definitely knew plenty of people who were and i feel like was sort of like often mixed up in the local kind of it's hard not to be at that time entwined in these things and even if you're trying to distance yourself away from them there's a what do you think you're better than me kind of thing i mean it's part of what's interesting about

23:57the sort of mystery of them losing the house in corona where you're like was he too close or was he too far from these things he tells this story about like the landlord maybe thought the dad was a little too mobbed up and there was like a fight someone picked up an axe the landlord picked up an axe at some point the dad is like this intense guy according to marty and i feel like you know his parents are so present in his early work right like he does italian-american the documentary about them they look so much like they do they look like i mean like a little right like yes and then and

24:32his mother is just this like incredibly warm and interesting figure yes his dad is definitely a little more unknowable like or like a you know firm kind of like soft-spoken right anyway seven people living in three rooms then they got some rooms down like in two the first they were like 240 i don't know he talks about all this you know like i we don't need to go through every single apartment that he lived in has jj included zillow listing well i could look him up again i bet you these days pretty many price um lori's side was pretty rough as he says you know kind of like

25:03the dead-end kids in old movies it's close to that kids running up and down the street you had a garbage can you would get a piece of wood now you got a sword and a shield you play around but also marty's spending a lot of time looking out his window at kids acting up yeah because his parents are so worried about his dang lungs he talks about their being uh unknowingly trained into the act of being an observer of being the watcher of looking at everything through this frame and also just like doodling a lot drawing what he sees the things he can't engage in the rough again you can

25:38see in the scorsese doc the storyboards he made are insane and it's crazy yes it's not like oh yeah some stick figures and you can see that this guy has like a visual sense it's like these very very complex beautiful like drawings of like stories he's imagining and movies he wants to make i think it was rebecca miller being interviewed by her buddy sean fantasy on the big picture but she was saying like you know i have a difficult relationship with the idea of genius and i i question the label but when he showed me his storyboards as a child i was like this is a level of genius we're dealing with

26:09it also takes effort and it takes craft and it takes intelligence it's not like people are just gifted but you look at the storyboards he was doing when he was like 12 and he's like drawing out full color roman epic sequences yes yeah right there's a lot of roman stuff i mean because right he was like obsessed with right those kind of epics yeah oh my gosh this is really impressive because it's not only is like his technical kind of mastery of illustration so strong but you're like he immediately just kind of got composition he understood camera movements he understood visual

26:42visual storytelling and he's not just like drawing a comic book he's specifically like drawing out a movie to some degree this guy just like completely absorbed and understood this language and was able to spit it back out perfectly so uh martin scorsese you know uh hangs out with the kids there's the rough kids but he is often the kid with his back against the wall trying not to get uh too much in the fight little literally back then is for real little literally basically like housed in down to canal elizabeth over to like mulberry but like five foot six or under yeah

27:16sicilian uh the way he puts it elizabeth street was mainly sicilian that's interesting to me i wonder if it really did work that way where it's because the lily is essentially three streets this is it's mott mulberry and elizabeth which are like it's now you call i mean little lily barely exists and you call some of it nolita which is a made up you know it is so offensive yeah it sucks um but like you know architecturally and culturally now it's all kind of one thing but imagine like just the like ultra parochialism of like yeah yeah yeah you know the northern italians they were and then then

27:49the neapolitans they're on mott the sicilians we're on elizabeth what i mean like that's what new york is about and that was what new york is a hundred years prior my point if you let me finish my sentence no is that new york was like that for well over a century i think a little bit would immigrate and then they'd just be like this is our block yes a little bit you know families would sort amount and there was the sense of this weird like we know this is the great american melting pot but there's also a sort of baked in defensive tribalism of like this is where we come from

28:19and this is our family i think that that continues though i think it's a little new new neighborhoods but the block by block thing is what fascinates me i think there's a little less of that now because there's less tenements it used to also be not packing people in stronghold it was like the neighborhoods were really sectioned off no but i mean i mean like when i worked as a labor reporter you would i would you know that's where i was sort of like all right the guyanese community is like you know this little pocket here in ozon park or whatever you know like you would find yes it's all so fascinating to me i'm a geography nerd i'm a new york nerd i love all this stuff but mostly he

28:50would live in little italy but he does say sometimes you go to stanton island or queens see other italian community people sometimes you go to 42nd street catch a picture a picture you go to the picture houses oh i like the sound so i don't know if you guys know this but martin scorsese likes movies he does this is going to be a recurring thing we discuss on this mini series about the films of martin scorsese how much he likes films movies he says around the age of three his asthma is not great and his father would just take him to see lots and lots of movies his father liked movies his father

29:23been a film buff in the 30s so he's passing it down the first image he remembers seeing a true color trailer for a roy rogers movie in which he was wearing fringes and jumped from a tree onto his horse his father says do you know who trigger is and then and he went like scorsese goes like this and he's like no it's the horse's name and i'll take you to see it next week do you know how much that horse makes he's got a studio contract he gets a bucket of apples every day and then he gets

29:5310 of the apples they bring in at the box office i'll read some of this quote that jj says is important but it's like half of it's like so long so i was made to think i couldn't do anything physical i had to be very careful and was sort of coddled in a way so the ritual going to the movies with your father it didn't matter what film you saw became important to me it was a matter of going to lowe's commodore on 6th street and 2nd avenue which is now part of new york university at the fillmore east but in between those two the academy of music which is gone now on 14th street we were always walking into the middle of a film there was a sense of peace there too there really was you

30:24had faith when he went into the church and he had faith when he went into the movie theater too imagine griffin that's what it should be there should be a movie theater every 10 blocks in new york city griffin and it should be playing movies all the time and you just walk in i agree walking in the middle of fucking what's out right now uh project hail mary yeah there we go sure it's uh it is funny uh you know for how much martin scorsese now represents like the sanctity of cinema right and the purity of it he talks about that every time he uh fucking walked into a movie

30:56theater it was like an insane asylum like he was like in those days i think it was a bunch of like latchkey kids especially if it's like a kid thing like right yeah right but he's just like people just walk in and out at random moments it's basically running movies all day and you have like shorts and newsreels and whatever and so people just like buy a ticket show up whenever sit down for like five hours leave at any point people are screaming and throwing popcorn there's the moment in matinee i love so much the joe dante movie where you you see them go into

31:27the movie palace for the first time and they open the doors and it's just like mayhem it's like ultamont um i also just to your point i want to throw out i i imported this lovely blu-ray box set from the fine folks at imprint in australia martin scorsese films of faith which is a last temptation kundun and silence put together but i found it very funny just how blunt this is on the back of the box it has an image from kundun and then a quote from martin scorsese my whole life has been movies and religion that's it nothing else i mean i think he eats a meal once in a while according to him

32:02he eats faith and he watches movies i know very reliably that he loves the dumplings of the town downtown so some of the early movies bad and the beautiful first movie he sees about the process of filmmaking he loved westerns day the earth stood still the sci-fi film one of his first great theater experiences at the academy of music a couple thousand people reacting to it the howard hawks thing uh that was an amazing experience the shock the humor the overlapping dialogue the monster two thousand people jumping at once what an amazing experience now his mother is responsible for one of his formative memories she takes him to see duel in the sun

32:37which had been condemned by the church uh the uh that's a king vidor movie i don't remember why they they condemned it but who knows they were condemning because you're supposed to duel under the moon of course and he was it was too scary for him i mean like that's a 46 movie he must have been he was like four years old what's he doing taking this is what i'm saying people just bring a baby into the theater i know i know she couldn't he couldn't watch the end it was also frightening you know and my mother kept yelling look at it you took me here to see it now watch it so i guess

33:10even at four he's like marching up to his mother and being like i want to see duel in the sun i love movies um i'm sorry brief side tangent ben i have some terrible news i hadn't even told you this but i just got a text that we had a cancellation for an upcoming george lucas talk show date we were going to have doug bradley as a guest pinhead himself and i was planning to get him to sign your lament configuration why is he canceling apparently pinhead booked a movie well you know

33:41what but it's good that he's getting work good job pinhead the whole fucking thing that rocks about him is he's a scouser he's from liverpool yeah and like when you hear him in like a podcast where he's like you know he has a scouse accent and like the idea of like oh i would i would i would get in trouble i i can try i'll try but like the idea of pinhead being scouse is just really funny um anyway 1948 score says he gets a television set one of the first families on that block a 16 inch rca victor so now he starts seeing even more movies perfect good this was the problem old

34:18movies i guess like i mean whatever uh on television i think they show a lot of british cinema he says like alexander korda thief of baghdad you know and then some italian film on friday nights they would show things like bicycle thieves or roam open city like these uh you know more challenging near realist italian film i feel like filmmakers of his generation this come up in other series talk about this that also you know far fewer channels very few but movies would replay of course right he says a lot of these guys are studying one movie for like four weeks as a child that's

34:51the thing he says million dollar movie which is like a million dollar in the 50s yeah would just show the same film like five times a week yeah and he would just watch it again and again it would be the mother would be like turn it off and be like no i'm tales of hoffman the powell pressburger film which is so beautiful beautiful movies ever made now of course he saw it in black and white on a 16 inch rca victor tv with commercial breaks and it still mesmerized him but obviously like a lot powell and pressburger is maybe the one single most obvious influence visually on the work of

35:26martin scorsese like you know like it obviously there's a million other things in the soup there but like you watch new york new york you're like he's trying to make a powell and pressburger like style like he's making the use of color throughout his movies and how important he talks about color being and how he conceives of things comes from them in so many ways uh one of our favorite filmmakers filmmaking teams ever a series we're always threatening to do yeah we'll do them right now actually yeah series canceled marty hit the bricks uh he didn't see citizen kane until he was 14

35:57or 15 fake loser gotta get those letterbox stats up marty basic ass taste he remembers seeing uh it at the talia theater or thalia talia i think on 96th street along with john ford's the informer not a good movie uh look he likes a lot of movies um also he right he'd write he draws those um storyboards as we know uh so we we referenced that already he was very obsessed with like biblical epics war movies

36:28but his father is not seeing this and going ah an artistic streak perhaps i should foster this i'm so excited we have a study is like this is embarrassing i'm throwing these away the fuck is this who do you think you are martin scorsese it is funny to just be the guy that gets used as shorthand for great director right for decades and imagine you're no marty scorsese marty scorsese imagine his dad being like martin scorsese what what what what what you

37:04ever have to ever have to say about movies no one cares um so i guess uh his parents are not deeply religious he says but he lives in little italy and so he gets sent to catholic school he went to saint patrick's elementary which used to be it it existed until i think i looked it up recently like until 2015 maybe but like it's so this is what i want to talk about all right so i don't know if you guys know this but there's saint patrick's old cathedral new york has saint patrick's cathedral like the big ass fuck off cathedral it's up you know midtown right yeah exactly but

37:38that was the second saint patrick's cathedral guys the first saint patrick's cathedral is in little italy it's on prince between mott and mulberry is this the thing you said you had to reveal in this episode david said he was sitting on a hot scoop yes and you guys have definitely seen this you know maybe you haven't been in the church but it's right there yeah you know in the middle of soho you're like whoa there's a big old church it very much sticks out it's a very old church like it was built i mean by american standards not by european standard by european standards it's like a 12 year old but you know it's like 250 years old or whatever yeah impressive

38:12yeah it's called now saint patrick's old cathedral which is a little rude i think it's a technically saint patrick's uh basilica but um you know that's that's pope language let's see when was it built 1815 so yeah you know it's just it's so funny because of the neighborhood where it's like you pass a laueve right you're you're like ah yes where could i buy a belt for 800 and it's like yes but once this was like the seat of you know working class catholic power uh so it's

38:46like so there used to be a school across the street now it's condos but on prince street was the catholic school across the street that's where he went he was an altar boy at saint patrick's cathedral okay uh where are we going with this david you said this was exciting and we all know that always works out for everyone just worried i the other day toured saint patrick's old cathedral you can tour it there's catacombs underneath cool and you can tour them bones now but on this tour guide which was uh let it was with my friend blithe my friend blithe

39:23was like hey you want to get dinner or drink and i'm like oh sure and she's like or we could do something cool and i'm like what's cool i'm trying to do fun new york experience catacombs much and she was like catacombs and i'm like there are catacombs we go on this tour first we go around the graveyard there's an ancient graveyard there again by american standards like you know hundreds of years old very cool he's you know our tour guide was imagine like sort of an irish guy from brooklyn can you imagine this no no no not an irish guy from ireland little little hey i don't know what you're talking

39:56about but uh you know uh you know that kind of guy right and at one point he's like who is toward like catacombs in europe and i'm like i've you know i've been to like the ones in paris right with the bones yeah and he's like all right all right so ours are air conditioned okay there's no skeletons down here what no skeletons i mean there are skeletons hidden away but you know there's no like random bones have you ever been so american that is air conditioned air conditioned have you ever been to the fucking it's still a little spooky no i tried going the last time i was

40:30there and i didn't make a reservation enough out from when we were in town it is as extreme as you would imagine it to be where you're just like let me go through a tunnel oh it's just an endless walk lined with bones yeah so cool and the other thing with the paris ones especially so you're like right if there was not someone with me i would get lost immediately and die down here it feels like a maze it feels like a labyrinth it goes on forever it's so many skulls like so many and they're not like behind glass you're just walking through and being like that skull and

41:00they're like don't touch the hundreds of years old anyway and but on this tour he was like hey anyone know martin scorsese and i was like yeah i've heard you know yes and he's like it was an alta boy here and i was like of course he was yeah this was the church this was this is the little little church even though like it's one of those new york things that you walk into like this grand cathedral i mean look i took a fucking picture uh you know you just can't believe like this is just sitting here in the middle of new york because like he'd do his prayers and then walk right across the street to rice to riches like look at that it's gorgeous yeah it's pretty so nice i

41:35feel like a thing he talked about and we're getting i love catholicism guys what if that's now this is a trad podcast um i'm i'm into catholicism in that weird jd vance way we all know blank check has always been a deeply spiritual podcast um i was going to say i feel like it's a thing that came up in the rebecca miller doc but comes up in a lot of his talks of just like he was a fragile boy he was nervous probably an extension of his physical fragility he was in a rowdy

42:09neighborhood yeah and the picture house and the church were the two places he felt safe the calm places and the other the thing about the church especially is the uh the rougher types the mob whatever they're not messing with the church no one's going to be mean to a priest it's the one place that's basically safe he had a very uh influential man named father principe who was like a young priest mentor for him kind of a hip priest i think so i mean he says like he played the guitar oh do you really yeah i think so my joke's not funny it was just accurate um he felt that the um he was a big

42:44fan of uh on the waterfront introduced martin to just say he loves the carl malden character carl malden's so fucking good in that movie carl malden i'll say it pretty good actor the original kind of is carl malden the original karen's boy definitely because carl malden's like a good looking guy but he's got that like big nose huge and like it kind of just makes him sort of like you know like yeah affable and interesting and whatever but i feel like he's a definitional kind of formative archetype of the kind of guy that you and i lose our minds over right i love have loved

43:20for decades my guy's got a honker he's got a honker it's a big boy you really do feel like you could squeeze it and the noise would go ahoga like those old cars yes um father principate finally saw a taxi driver and said to marty i've always told you too much good friday not enough easter sunday and marty's like he nailed me um anyway so all very formative uh for him uh he doesn't totally fit in he wants to be a priest he enrolls in seminary school but he just can't take his study seriously enough like you need to like fucking learn latin and shit and i just feel like all marty wants to

43:55do is watch movies it's funny when he talks about how close he feels like he came to becoming a man of the cloth and then you hear from like his family and his childhood friends and they were like he was never gonna fucking be able to pull this off i know he feels like he was being pulled between these things but it was just like it's pretty short-lived at 14 he enrolls in a junior seminary called cathedral college which is on the upper west side he's expelled after a year he says he didn't have his mind on his work and he'd fall in love with a young lady these are not going you will not be a priest with this kind of behavior my friend but thank god uh the cinema claimed him as

44:31he says like he's basically like my parents were not religious i liked father principate and i liked you know the neighborhood priest kind of the neighborhood church thing but like that's not pushed on me yeah like i probably just didn't have quite enough of the drive you know so he gets kicked out of that he goes to cardinal hayes uh which is a high school in the bronx uh he's still thinking about maybe going to like jesuit university of fordham up in the bronx fordham's a catholic university that's where his friends are but bad grades he was interested in he in english literature

45:05and read lots of books and stuff like that but he says it wasn't easy for him to read says it wasn't part of our cultural makeup but i was ready to delve further i don't know i just feel like he's you know he's he's not academic right like he he figures this all out later like he's just not right yeah it comes from a working class family yeah um not even that there was a lot of working class kids who were you know climbing you know rapidly shooting up right you know this is what happened but he's not seeing it in his day-to-day that's what he says like it's like there was there

45:38wasn't a culture of it in his family right of like you should read fucking thomas hardy and charles dickens or whatever and he loved and he loved movies number one thing he loves is movies not not books he makes a short film called vesuvius six uh an eight millimeter millimeter thing which he shot on the roofs of mott street with white sheets i'm gonna guess he didn't completely recreate mount vesuvius clips of this in the rebecca miller thing but it's him doing his yeah he says he basically

46:10like learned some things about camera angles you know what i mean yeah and then he gets a catalog from the new york university washington square college it's not even called my you back then and they have a department called tmr television motion pictures radio and he thinks i'm gonna go into radio just kidding but uh but you know it's in the village it's right where he grew up um it's just you know one neighborhood up what if we found out that the the great uh the the great pain of martin scorsese's life is that he wanted to be a drive time radio guy and he couldn't hack it it would be so

46:43funny if he wanted to be like right um howard stern yeah and he's still do you think he's ever been on howard stern i'm gonna look it up keep digging through the dossier i'm sure he has uh so uh haig manugian oh yes uh very influential early like teacher for him uh armenian american professor um he's in who's that knocking at my door i think briefly so he shows him lumiere movies he shows him great train robbery greed maybe all the way up to like early fellini uh like these are the kinds

47:17of movies he's showing him scorsese they had to do a report on a movie he liked he wrote a report on the third man and he gave me a b plus because he said remember this is only a thriller we were opposite ends of the pole in a way he preferred like open city i liked everything and this is important to marty and all the new brats i feel like the movie brats are like we love westerns we love noir we love fucking hitchcock whereas like the older guard are like oh yeah but that's that's those aren't serious that's entertainment right you know i mean sure it's fun yeah it's funny to say

47:51about the third man too yes well what what were you about to ask ben i wonder does it maybe have something to do with tv growing up with having access to all of these different kinds of genres maybe but i think tv is so so new it's more the picture house thing of those movies would just show the like the trashier movies you could just sit there and just watch all day i think that's a lot of it that these guys really dug in and studied the kind of form and construction of these things and there's like there's artistry here while while not uh presenting themselves as uh serious uh does

48:24not seem he has ever been a guest on the howard stern show there are many clips of other people talking about coward coward he has done adam friedland he should you should do hot ones that might kill him would he die if he let's let's let's be careful i don't know what marty's diet is just sniffing those hot sauces might be dangerous uh french new wave is happening while he's in film school it's very very liberating for him he says uh hiroshima mon amour julie jim uh the viewer savi my opinion

48:56is that those are good movies they're good movies he just thinks about things like anna karina's reading a letter and then there's a jump cut to a man folding it up he's gone up and taken out of her hand you're breaking narrative right you know i mean obviously this is the whole thing with french new wave where you show people now and they're like i don't get it right and you're like yeah but dude literally hadn't right and then you know cassavetes is out there yeah shadows has been released yeah right yeah by that yeah this is happening in new york and he made that on a 16 millimeter camera in new york city so it can be done and it was a scrappy iterative movie he shot it

49:31twice over a bunch of years and right it's like this guy just kind of eked it out yeah so uh he works on some shooting student stuff he's a cinematographer or the photographer for a short called iniesta and then his first short is called what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this now we're gonna excellent title we're gonna talk about these early shorts including this one right yes that's all on this kind of box set right yes that's on their italian-american big shave right yeah in 65 he also marriages his marriages he marriages he marries his college girlfriend

50:06lorraine brennan they have a daughter catherine his oldest daughter who is very present in his life but clearly has a complicated relationship with him when she's young because he's like divorces her mother and then they've divorced in 71 and then he's like you know being really regular through all of the 70s it's a big thing that uh who's that knocking on my doors about but he still talks about how much shame there was associated with the idea of even like socializing with women and how kind of sinful

50:36it was unless you were immediately just going to make an honest woman out of her and and get married and start a family you know and i think marty was always a little bit horny and felt the need to be like well then i guess i just got to get married again he got married a bunch there's some marriages there was some marriages how old was he when he became a dad well of his of the first child uh early 20s yeah i mean geez yeah he would have been like 23 24 i think yeah yeah so pretty young

51:06not like insane but and he still talks about like when he was like you know if i want to date someone i felt like i had to marry them who's that knocking at the door it was actually written as the seven second part of a series of films meant to explore his adolescence the first was going to be called jerusalem jerusalem it's a sort of half-finished screenplay he wrote where his protagonist called jr later called charlie it's you know mean streets his main character is called charlie uh in which they like spend three humans boys spend some days in a religious retreat you know sounds a little less

51:39exciting high manugian uh is his first producer you know helps him make this movie his father raises six thousand dollars for him from a student loan he thinks it's the first student film shot in black and white 35 millimeters on the east coast interesting that's it is wild to think about that early things being that nascent yeah because even just like film school is a new thing part of the idea of training of course and i think it was mostly technical like it was mostly like yes well we

52:09now make film and television and stuff right here's how to do that right because then it's all like the new wave is happening so like the art is so exciting and it's challenging it's different not to not to generalize but it used to be more like fucking joining the circus like you would just like get on a fucking bus to hollywood and get off and be like what can i do and then you just learn everything you know from like carrying crates and shit but even though the technology has been around for at that point 50 years it's not very accessible i think basically we're very early in like you could

52:42get your hands on a 16 millimeter camera maybe that's more portable and you could maybe like make a movie for not as much money right yeah like you develop a film yourself it's still gonna be harder you're gonna have to cut it with scissors and shit a 35 millimeter camera is still a thing that's like kind of locked behind gates you know it's it's really hard to get an opportunity to work with something like that they're smaller they're very few film schools they're all very new and it's so expensive there's a barrier of entry and you gotta buy yeah but yes yes and it's the complicated

53:13but these things had basically been built around like institutional knowledge like there wasn't really a pipeline and it also was and it speaks to what we're saying of like the sort of snobbishness against commercial cinema there was this battle of like is this a fucking serious thing you know do we need to be like training people and how to make movies is that like an intellectual exercise or is that like learning how to work an auto plant david yes bark bark bark bark bark what's going on dog days of summer true augie doggie august

53:53okay it's the perfect time to hit reset before the autumn rush begins and honestly i'm stroking my chin here and i can't think of a better place to start than my closet uh-huh where i want to reset that's why i love shopping at quince yeah because they're about fewer better pieces their clothes are made with premium materials and they're built to last designed to ones you reach for a day after day so you don't need to overstuff your closet i hate overstuffing my closet i think that's it's a fair thing if you're still hanging on to the same worn out basics and that's me i'm loathe

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55:36for three months 90 dollars for six months or 180 dollars for 12 month plan required 15 dollars per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy see terms harvey gottell harvey gottell answers an ad they put in a publication called show business and uh he comes in and marty has a friend called bill minkin who's a comedian sit behind a desk for this harvey comes in bill minkin's like marty has coached him to be

56:06like what are you doing here or harvey's like i answered an ad and he's like there's no ad i basically goad him into an argument and then they like watch the argument and then uh marty is like that was great and harvey's like why didn't you fucking tell me like to improv something i can do that like why why are you doing fucking jamie kennedy kennedy experiment on me marty did accent marty did it sounds like he acts the hell out of kytel kytel was working as a court stenographer uh-huh so i think that that tends to be kind of a nine-to-five job so i think making this movie

56:39was really annoying harvey kytel's the kind of guy just his his vibe his look his his generation where i'm like you could tell me he was doing any job before he became an actor and i would believe yeah right there was no job he was a sea captain i'm like sure yeah of course and then he he docked and he started acting in movies he was a lion tamer they shot it over the course of many months right like they had so much trouble matching scenes they said they would shoot in a building they blow the

57:09lights they'd have to wait for hours to like reset everything they didn't know what they were doing the first version is 65 minutes long it's called bring on the dancing girls yes they screen it for people it's terrible right and this was just i want to make a film about like male camaraderie i want to try to capture what i see and the guys i grew up with in my generation and all of that so we gotta make a movie out of this man but ben it's it is basically that it is basically marty going like this is the web series this conversation we're having right now none of the girl stuff is in it

57:43yeah it doesn't have the girl stuff it's just guys none of it's written she's not cast it's not shot that's not part of the conception of the movie it's no i mean there's like a girl in it but there's no confrontation i'm saying the character of the girl all of that is a secondary shoot later this movie is just guys being dudes it's just guys being dudes so in 66 people don't like it he says he has no money his marriage is already falling apart he's got 50 minutes of a dude hangout movie that no one wants right he teams up with mardick martin who's an early collaborator of his

58:14uh and works on mean streets and other things there's neither of them have any money but they start thinking about things and somehow they get 37 000 from heig and from joe weill another student who's a lawyer to finance the rest of the picture which involved scenes with a girl they needed an actress they needed a 16 millimeter camera they were going to cut that in with the some 35 millimeter stuff they had shot and uh they start shooting in some real locations um he said the way he puts

58:47it is i realized i was in the process of combining two styles let's say cassavetes with ford because it's like these two movies essentially get turned into one movie are very differently made because he's learning previously tried to shoot sequences without dialogue tell the stories through images but it didn't work they find this actress zina bethune they call harvey keitel back her mother was like a big actress of the early american theater and radio she was on the original superman radio show uh eva bethune was also a dancer i'm sorry i know i'm saying ivy was the mother yes and eva bethune

59:20was also a dancer she later started her own acting school company that sort of became her legacy but didn't have many acting roles no she's only got a few um right film credits uh keitel's like back to working as a court stenographer they cut his hair and stuff and he's like i fuck you this is annoying you also have to imagine this is like what a year 18 months later and it's like i gotta do more of that shit with the guy who fucking x'd me right this is around the time he also makes the big shave

59:51yeah that's his breakthrough right that wins a prize at a festival of american cinema uh experimental cinema right so that gets him a little bit of attention we we will cover it then but it's it's a a true short dialogue free film uh that is pretty experimental and and allegorical metaphorical but it has like a really big impact it is talked about as like a calling card thing as there's sort of a rising like uh film intelligentsia you know and the sort of critical community of new york city

1:00:22he's immediately kind of propped up as like this guy's interesting now he has a new cut he calls it i call first he screens in the chicago film festival roger ebert of the sun times gives it a great review am i wrong in thinking it is literally roger ebert's first published review not sure about that okay um but i can tell you that he said he called it a marvelous evocation of american city life announcing the arrival of an important new director he did kind of nail it from

1:00:52the house this is the thing that one roger roger ebert dines out on this for the rest of his life he has many accomplishments but being able to brag about like i fucking called it i saw this at the earliest possible showing and i was like i put my money down on martin scorsese having a good career as a film director and scorsese also says that it like kind of made him or at the very least empowered him david do you have your own version of that oh like the movie i say i called my shot or i don't i don't think so i think i was the first person to say hilton transylvania is good right that was

1:01:29that was a risky position at that time i wasn't actually literally asking i was i was you were being funny yeah yeah i was hoping that you would come up with like i don't know something dumb okay there's still a chance later and new listeners we do this sometimes we do this sometimes sometimes we seed a bit so he tries to get in the new york film festival he claimed he says they told me i was living aesthetically beyond my means which is funny um he goes to europe you know takes it around there he meets a italian direct sorry italian um joseph brenner associates a soft core porn distributor

1:02:06says if you add a nude scene we'll distribute this it was so he adds the nude scene yes it was not ebert's first review but it was the first review scorsese got it was the first review that movie got uh yes but this is very illustrative of this era of filmmaking of if you were making an independent film you could screen it for someone and they'd just go like if you can find a way to throw like five tits in this i can get it on like five screens right truly they'd be like they'll give you twenty thousand dollars find a couple of boobs edit them into the movie and that's like i can make my

1:02:40money back on that um they're in amsterdam they fly harvey keitel who i assume is the middle of like you know your honor i am yeah right to amsterdam they got as he puts it a bunch of girls and did the crazy nude scene uh to get that in there and uh you know they he looks back on the film and sees its flaws but you know it's part of he in in the context of the late 60s free love the sexual revolution and here's this guy who can't like fuck a girl because he likes her and like is too

1:03:12afraid of sex he's like it's it's like it's out of sync but in a good way right you know what i mean i think this movie is fascinating i actually like it a lot i think it is one of those movies where its failings and its limitations actually kind of give it more power because it's sort of about how unsettled it is with itself and all the things this guy has not yet worked through in himself it's such a like pure primal scream of scorsese and i also think past mean streets his movies stopped

1:03:42being about him they become about his obsessions and his worldview and they're all very personal sure and mean streets is about him he was about him he did live in a train station in paris and meet a robot well those are his best friends the automatons right they write all of his favorite things um mean streets as we'll talk about next week is this fascinating sort of pivot point where he has a self-insert character played by cattel but then it feels like he goes like wait what if i build the whole movie out of the de niro guys the guys i know not me at the center of the story and who's

1:04:17that knocking at my door is like a movie about him it is like scorsese like like almost as a therapy session of a film working through all of his concerns and like spilling them out and the form of the movie even in its weird like uh you know segmented production and it's like development across years and all this sort of like wedged in pieces feels like it it's a representation of what he's battling inside of himself in that way you know like it's messiness to me

1:04:50is not me saying it's a perfect film or that's a masterpiece but that i think it's a really engaging thing to watch i i like this i think it's it is mostly interesting as a movie made by martin scorsese you know what i mean like it's just an interesting blueprint for him and the music is good and the camera work is interesting but it is not a good movie like in terms of like if you just showed it to someone who'd never seen a martin scorsese movie they would be like i love that it's an interesting first work yeah it's got some stuff in it and because

1:05:21you know of the who made it and like you know where it's like it has all this fascinating like blueprint material yes right you know like which is which is interesting one could call it a bit of a rosetta stuff i think that's almost a stretch he thinks that's a stretch he's kind of like i don't i don't know like you know he's like i didn't get the emotions right i dislike the movie it's a rough sketch but you know kytel's good i think xena bethune is good i think the camera work is good i like what i you know the music he's got them editing this one and then they

1:05:57don't reteam again for another couple pictures not for more than a couple yeah for a little while but especially knowing that he gave her such a weird batch of footage you know shot across years in different formats and different eras basically he's doing really interesting stuff in the construction this stuff with the boys hanging out you know like some of that is fun but like you have mean streets which does it a lot better so like you can always just obviously see mean streets in a little bit you know this is a movie where those things are like fighting each other it's not even

1:06:27like well here's a rough version of this and a rough version of that like the nature of how it was made means that you have these scenes that are just the uncut form of guys roughhousing and then cutting to like an entirely different mode of filmmaking with these like more intimate dialogue scenes shot an entirely different film format and the two sides of the movie like clashing against each other because thelma's actually using new wave editing rather than like invisible editing and and making something out of the juxtaposition between the two i love thelma you guess who else likes

1:07:01this movie rodriguez no guess who else who cassavetes well yes he digs it he he notices a lot at least or at least he notices the town senpah notices so that is who's that knocking into my door before we move on to birth boxcar birth that's all we're gonna say about who's that no i'm saying that's the end of the dossier on who's that do you think we should talk about the movie a little more and then do the boxcar dossier section we should also we can do a box office game i think we should do a little yes and then but no no no i'm not saying we're done with talking about the movie although

1:07:35it is it's a slight movie in terms of uh narrative obviously but um no it's you know i saw it years ago when i was like i'm gonna watch every single scorsese movie right you know like so then i was like let me clear right clear it out and i found it very interesting

1:07:51this time i was a little kind of like i had just watched mean streets because we did just record that episode we've only recorded one other only we just did one leapfrog and i was just the whole time being a little bit like right well there's mean streets yeah but that's okay that's maybe that's maybe a you problem that mean streets is fresh and you know how three years later i know so you know how good it's gonna get right ben what did had you seen this film before i'd never seen it before what did you make of who's that knocking at my door well uh the boys

1:08:23reminded me of a lot of characters i grew up with in particular smart joey reminds me of a bunch of guys where they're always mad but seem and like seemingly don't want people to be around but also want people around it's really interesting that now i know the process of how this film was made because it did feel really disconnected right you kind of have to know that it was made that way to get any enjoyment out of it because otherwise you're like what are the

1:08:56fucking swings this thing is doing yeah right because it's just kind of i mean it almost feels like someone made a parody of a scorsese movie with no money right where they're like let's do some music and then it's like a bunch of guys go hey what are you doing you know and you're like right this is like what these movies are like the parody and then the guy's like but i love jesus the violence being so corny sure and not well thought out and yet it looks like they're kind of really hitting each other in an amateur way it's also like every piece of the

1:09:31puzzle though you know like i mean like one of the first scenes is him a guy just talking to a girl about fucking the searchers for like so long that you're like you have her attention you're losing her buddy like there's that there's you know that thing of like the theory that filmmakers are always just remaking the same movie over and over again hopefully they're refining it and stretching it and you know morphing it whatever it is and it's like this isn't like the the model for in final form what

1:10:02his movies will be from here on out but it is him identifying every single thing he's gonna do what the sensibility is what the style is like just dumping all the puzzle pieces out in the floor is kind of fascinating to me yeah totally it's a very interesting thing to watch and yeah i mean harvey's good in it i mean obviously again it's the building blocks of better harvey stuff but like he's so compelling it's also this is the only time he's playing marty this much in all the scenes with the

1:10:32girl you mean he's doing a little bit more like marty than right where it feels like he's like i get it i'm this is based on him right yeah you know which i think is a common thing you hear about this all the time lead actors who are kind of sort of mirroring their director even in cases where the character isn't an evident kind of self insert um and this is the only time where i feel like i've seen kytel take on the qualities of scorsese right because the mean streets character is more thought through a little quieter more reserved but it feels like he's building a character based on

1:11:06the thing that scorsese wrote i i do miss a de niro type like he doesn't have a good guy to push against no as as you said the kind of rough guys are all a little generic you know it is it the moment he finds de niro it changes the entire course of his career you know like that guy walking into the bar is just like oh wait a second if i have something like this in the mix my movies can suddenly like it's gasoline in the tank i like xena bethune a lot yeah i think she plays the

1:11:38character with some depth and agency even though again i don't feel like she's been given very much i mean let's say with this down to not given a character name she is the girl she's girl they give her they give her a proper title she's the girl oh no oh i think she's just girl i mean i'm seeing your girl yeah maybe i thought i saw the girl it's also the kind of classic thing of marty's like well we need the boys need different names because there are multiple male characters the girl could just be called girl excuse me there's a second female character his mommy well i'm sorry in the in

1:12:09the sort of sex scene yeah well there are multiple girls in dream but they're not even numbered they are not they are just girl in dream there is also a couple girl at party um there you go yes this is the only scorsese movie that's only on dvd and even like on itunes it's a standard deaf version i don't know that he's ever cared to like re you know refurbish it no there was there was an early 2000s like warner brothers scorsese box set where this was an exclusive dvd for a while and it was like that's the one way we're getting that film back in circulation and it basically feels like

1:12:44that dvd master is what is still rentable they never like thought to like put it on a blu-ray with mean streets or something you know what i mean like kind of move they do like right like you just kind of throw it in i mean we'll we'll talk about you know boxcar bertha which was the other sort of like abandoned one for a while just got this big cinematograph i bought it i bought it i watched it same but that that feels like well that has more of a curio aspect of being a corman movie and fitting into that era of genre pictures and whatever it feels like inevitably

1:13:15someone's got to put out a better version of who's that knocking i'm sure it's just important american film history i i agree with you but i think that is largely how it's regarded right like no one's i don't know i mean even shamalan told me he's remastered and worked on right with anger it's still not available well because i was like are you going to release it and he was like i'm kind of embarrassed yeah he was like i wanted to show it to my kids in like that format i have no idea if i want to do anything more and i'm like i get it because it's like it's a very amateurish movie in so many ways i was looking up i was like what are there other holes i need to plug in my like

1:13:49blank check disk collection of the main feed episodes and i was like am i wrong about this and i double checked like praying anger never got any it didn't get even like a vhs i don't believe so it certainly never got any dvd or anything i certainly don't i there's no way it got a dvd right yeah right you can watch it on the internet archive i mean that's where we watched it i believe pretty sure 10 11 years long time ago 10 years ago yeah uh now i want to see if there is a vhs and do i need to buy the vhs and is praying with anger a porch movie these are important questions

1:14:20that will be settled later it does seem like there was a vhs um are you really encouraging him right now sound insulation i need to encourage him he's it's true he's snowballing down the hill long ago yeah he's not even bidding he's just buying now what will be will be oh yeah he buys it now excuse me the thrill of the hunt yeah i was gonna say i don't buy it now i'm actually kind of lazy enough i'm more the buy it now riff is kind of the like best offer eight cents lower what do you think you don't understand how much time i waste a week trying to put that in your cart

1:14:54they'll notice and then they'll contact you yeah that's my real strategy and it does it all the time yeah i saved dollars this week at least six fantastic so um what else yeah there's there's a nude scene oh yeah what else that's like again the camera stuff is fun he's doing camera stuff like there's moments where he's like doing like bird's eye view shit where you're like i mean it's the kind of first film stuff where you're like you didn't need to do that you know it's not

1:15:27it's not really suggesting anything but clearly you just wanted to see what would like what that would look like some close-up kissing yeah and the eyeball close-ups i don't think people should kiss in movies can we say this movie just kidding the story of this movie yes is a guy who jr you could say is trying very hard to fit in with the boys right there seems to be something a little more thoughtful a little more sensitive within him he likes just sitting in nature and taking it in but he knows that's you know maybe that's not it's not cool right sally gaga is not gonna like that

1:16:00right so he goes out and gets drunk and they punch each other and they talk about who was and he meets a girl that he likes yes he's going to go on the staten island ferry and he's talking to her like he's about to fucking you know go to our antarctica he's like yeah i mean jesus um but he right he meets her at the set like at the ferry station i feel like that's where he talks her ear off about the searchers they they mentioned jeffrey hunter does you know who do you know who he is yeah i don't jeffrey hunter's in the searchers he's also captain christopher pike this is other

1:16:32famous role captain captain christopher pike was the captain of the enterprise on the original pilot of star trek and they recast him because they thought he didn't have the juice and they replaced him with william shatner who did have the juice he did captain kirk has the juice yes uh he is almost uh like mr juicy juice in terms of how much juice he had but it is basically then they recut the pilot footage into a later two-part episode they did that is true where captain pike was the kind of rejected and scorned well they canonically made him the captain that kirk had

1:17:04replaced right and he got burned up in an accident and he's in a big kind of robot body wheelchair yeah pretty cool actually he's actually a really cool guy and bruce greenwood plays him in the jj movies right and now excellent performance steady hand who plays him now he's really really good um but it's just funny that in martin scorsese's first movie someone says jeffrey hunter oh i'm like captain pike captain pike anyway yeah he meets a girl and he likes her he's having kind of a secret romance with her and it feels like he both is trying to shield from his boyfriends that he has feelings that he has a romantic attachment to a woman who he wants to talk to whose brain he is interested in

1:17:39and also his overwhelming catholic guilt well because also at that time he's still living at home we talked about this a little bit on our mean streets episode and he's he you can't bring your your uh your this girl around your mom no you get in trouble no and and people who live alone at this age are seen as deviants the only reason you could possibly want to do that is so you could have premarital sex the worst thing in the world i actually love it big fam wild coming from the

1:18:14two married guys in the room you guys um so what was i gonna say um they have this attachment and then you won't have sex with her yes because he doesn't want to spoil he doesn't want to spoil her and she reveals to him a bit retrograde yes yes that she is a survivor of sexual assault yes and he has a very negative response to it he is not mature enough to grapple with that in in a good way that she feels dirty and tarnished what did you do to encourage that why were you even with that guy

1:18:45in the first place he's so selfish and has no empathy it makes me very mad but he just doesn't he's not mature enough he cannot handle it it's all about there's a part of him that could have empathy but he cannot access it right if if we can parse this for a second right i mean this is the whole kind of like tightly wound uh catholic guilt ball of wax is like all i want is to have sex i am told that if i have sex that's the worst thing i could possibly do so there's this you know

1:19:16the the madonna and the whore bifurcation right of like i can go rent out an apartment and have my own like boom boom sex orgy because that's the way i get my rocks off without tarnishing the sanctity of a woman i actually care about and then the notion that she has had sex in any form when he feels like he cannot allow himself to have sex with her even if the sex she had was a rape was violent was not of her own agency is a thing that he can't process because all he wants is to have like intimate relations

1:19:50with her which he feels like he cannot do without ruining her it's yes it is a movie about his immaturity this is not a plot driven movie this is the closest thing the movie has to like an emotional arc or a story and it's basically not developed into over halfway through and i i think like the note of maturity in this film the thing that shows a little bit of understanding from scorsese who at this point has just not processed his own shit enough to be able to make a film with enough objective distance

1:20:24i give him credit for understanding that the end of this movie when he goes and tries to do the like you know what i apologize i forgive you that she's like fuck you that's what i like right he's like i'll marry you anyway and she's like you clearly cannot handle like what has happened to me and do not have like the right feelings for this you watch me from the 1960s and you're worried that the guy is gonna be rewarded for saying i will accept you even though you are the thing you told me and i have yeah right i accept you no instead she's like fuck off and he goes to the church and doesn't know what to

1:20:58do with himself as classic scorsese right what's up ben let's play the box office well yeah thankfully we've gotten to the end yes uh-huh and we're not talking about the end which is the needle drop oh sure and it's a song that stinks by a group that also stinks go on the doors oh it's just that i had this note where i'm just like ah good the doors are in this movie just what i mean yes they were

1:21:30they were hot stuff this was right he was at the tip of the spear on this one you do have to give him credit like people were pointing out they're only a couple years old at this point credited as uh it's listed as like a 67 movie but i think the final sort of round of shooting they do to add the boobs and the boom boom man maybe happens in 68 i'm not sure about that it was released in america in 68 but it was screened in chicago in 67 but i think what ebert saw was a slightly earlier version that is possible i i don't know i saw someone interrogating that the this is the end comes out in 1967 and they

1:22:04were like that's a really fast turnaround but it seems like maybe the song was only added right when the film got proper distribution in 68 anyway uh come on baby light my fire and that's not the song but uh he walked down the hallway of the ancient gallery just just ben just take a step back and think of him being the first one to ever be like hey you hear the song from the doors i'm not saying you gotta give him credit no no this is the real question right ben it's 1967 you are ben hosley bloop you've

1:22:36been dropped in there someone puts on the doors bell bottoms or whatever do you like it someone's like hey if you've never met i'm gonna spin a groovy tune you've never met a guy who likes the doors right you've never met a guy who's built his personality you've never been in a college dorm room and seen a poster of jim morrison right you're a high schooler let's say 1967 you're walking around greenwich village you walk into a record store it's playing no one even introduces it to you no one recommends it you're not associating it with a person you're hearing it fresh what's this i hear

1:23:10i'm hearing this for the first time wow what is there to say do you think you hate them that much just from the music alone i will give you that i wouldn't hate them sure it wouldn't be your thing it wouldn't be i yeah but i would be at least interested because they have a unique unique thing going yeah this drunk poet idiot and an organist yeah

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1:25:17what do you think was number one in the box office when this jim morrison was kind of an organist as well if you know what i'm saying when this quote-unquote came out famously in america what do i think was number one at the box office in 1968 eight september 18th you know 16th september 1968 i can give you a hint it's a film that features an actor who liked this movie he was also director john cassavetes the dirty dozen nope

1:25:39uh rosemary's baby rosemary's baby interesting which was number one for a million weeks like you know like it was such a big hit number two at the box office a film we've covered on this podcast number two is a film we've covered on this podcast something of a totemic film huh is it a 67 picture or 68 it's 68 it's a 68 it's a totemic film is it a cubric yes it would be 2001 that's right yeah quite totemic do you agree you said it not i number three

1:26:11it's really crazy to think that this movie we just saw came out at the same time as that movie that's why that in terms of film craziest thing in the right yeah it really is it's not just that that movie looks good for 1960 like eight looks good for 3068 and everything else you know was was just like on a different planet number three at the box office is a romantic comedy film it stars sydney poitier uh that's what i'm giving you just sir with love no okay and it's not uh

1:26:46guess who's coming to dinner no it's a lesser known it's a lesson but i mean do you think i know it is it a known title sure yeah i'm not sure i'll give you more hints directed by daniel mann okay uh you know made a lot of movies who's the leading lady of this picture abby lincoln but i can who's you know a great great african-american uh singer okay i can tell you the beau bridges in this film carol o'connor oh did he have some opinions on a character in this yeah uh i can tell you the score was composed by quincy jones and he wrote the title theme song as well which was nominated for

1:27:20best song at the academy awards and it is the title of the movie it's not like fucking love is a many splendor you're not that far off i'm gonna give it to you it's for love of ivy oh sure here's another film number four at the box office let me look it up here look it up here please is a 1968 british film starring oscar verner okay good actor i love oscar verner and uh barbara ferris okay i can't say i've heard of this one get directed by kevin billington i don't think you've got this

1:27:51does there seem to be a genre attached to this picture drama drama that's helpful a famous male conductor gives an interviewer to an attractive female reporter he speaks to frankly and ends up being given an unwanted sabbatical from conducting so far that sounds like tar i was gonna say he begins an affair with a reporter during his blank which is the title of the movie sabbatical close interlude and the accumulation of difference in their ages and background begins to mount i don't know sounds okay oh he was like a like an orchestra yeah not a train i was thinking it would be funny if she's

1:28:23like tell me about how you drive the train yeah number five at the box office is a 67 film griffin that's how successful it's been it's been in the box office for 39 weeks it is a another totemic movie it is a romantic comedy it is the graduate the highest grossing film of 1967 graduate yeah uh yes i mean 1967 obviously is the the uh pictures at revolution year that's the that's the bonnie and clyde graduate line uh in the heat of the night yeah and then dr doolittle of course great the

1:28:57most revolutionary film of all but i was just looking at my my 67 letterbox it is insane how good that year is 67 even just for international cinema when you take away like sort of what was happening at the oscars fucking great movie it's fucking you know what every movie if you throw a you know dart at an old movie you're like god damn like it's the best playtime came out in 67 yeah weekend came out lou weekend yeah that's a that's a regular ass movie yeah it is my wife almost divorced me over that movie really no no but you took her to see it i took her to see it and she

1:29:29was like the fuck and i was like sorry i remember this being a little a little more narrative than yeah no it's just what if just people well though that's the first part but then it's just people talking about communism while they eat sandwiches he loved doing it he did love well it's really the start of him being like what if this is a lot of the movie anyway uh some of the other films in the top 10 are uh the odd couple fun rachel rachel yeah the paul newman directed i've never seen it

1:30:00neither have i yeah hang them high uh which is which is a clint eastwood film that he didn't direct but like ted post it's kind of like you know in the eastwood sort of i think that universe just announced they're putting it out on 4k probably did yeah those fuckers like probably a film called prudence and the pill which is a british comedy a ronald neem uh film it's a really good title that i assume is kind of like your classic like british kitchen sinky kind of comedy like where they're like well it's like oh the pill is new

1:30:32yeah and it's about the contraception yeah and then a movie a lee van cleef cult movie called the big gun down now can i turn about as fair play can i throw a little game at you yeah sure do you think you like a spaghetti western guess the top five highest grossing films of the year 1968 1968 in film and i will say two of the films that were just in the top five i was about to say 2001's in there yeah where do you think it is one or two two what do you think would have beaten it in 68 is the odd couple in there odd couples number three there you go odd couple made a robust

1:31:0720 million dollars 2001 did 21 and one film beat them both with 24 it is a film that won one of the major acting categories this year it's the arrival of a giant star and a star we're very familiar with on this podcast oh funny girl yeah that was the number one movie yeah it's funny that a local new york act like that could somehow be the highest grossing film well it's funny that there was a girl well i missed the film people were laughing just when they saw the mark this is a funny girl they didn't even see the poster is rosemary's baby in the top five rosemary's baby is number seven okay

1:31:37but it was so big hit it was oh it's a very big hit is planet of the apes in the top and the apes is number six okay both of those did 15 okay give me a hint can you guess four and five four is is i don't want to use the word but it's it is a it is a giant action film classic it weirdly did not become a franchise but has often been threatened with a remake oh bullet correct oh and number five fun not my favorite number five but very sexy is a musical it's a musical

1:32:13i don't want to give you the obvious hint but it's a musical 68 oh well is it uh oliver correct is the fifth highest grossing film of the year because that's the whole thing with the biskin book where he's like wow you know hollywood's and then it's like yeah well let's not forget the next year they're like oliver bring them all big and funny girl for best actress and right right it was at least funny girl is a little more like but the next year fresh was more classical yeah you have rosemary's baby there at seven you have 2001 at two but then you know funny girl odd couple

1:32:46planet of the apes is the beginning of something new number eight was uh the zeffirelli romeo and juliet normal film no legal problems there number nine of course was yours mine and ours i have heard of it the uh peter fonda lucille ball movie that's basically riffed on in licorice pizza and was remade with dennis quaid and renee russo right that's my favorite movie of all time the remake right but it's the movie itself was a cheaper by the dozen ripoff that then got remade as a ripoff of

1:33:16the cheaper by the dozen remake of the sequel and then uh number 10 was line in winter which is also a best picture contender i guess yeah but not the winner right yeah right i always forget i always man for all seasons is the one that won best picture line and winter just wins like acting awards right because hepburn wins she ties with with streisand streisand yes let's talk about boxcar bertha let's talk about now i have also only seen this film once before i watched it for today's podcast saw it in high school out of a sense of completionism again yeah um it is a film directed

1:33:51by martin scorsese he didn't came out in 1972 yes yes now i will tell you that after who's that knocking he was hired to film to direct a film called the honeymoon killers it was brought to him by an agent his agent harry uffland his script was very long he couldn't connect with the material and uh he said he wanted to try to make it in the style of a carl theodore dryer film which i'm sure the producers loved hearing interesting uh news is that he was fired one week into shooting yep essentially because he was like shooting master shots with no coverage he was

1:34:24an artiste he was not going to make you know whatever the people wanted hey this is a business kid this is when they're starting to say we don't got time for your fancy stuff um so he picks up some odd jobs writes some dialogue for a dutch thriller called obsessions he does some editing work uh street scenes does camera work for uh uh woodstock we're gonna get to that okay we're gonna get that because that's a big one a huge one uh he was the artist and resident of the film society

1:34:55lincoln center did some instruction at myu and uh oliver stone one of his one of his students

1:35:04uh michael wadley who photographed uh who's that knocking comes to and almost use scoomaker right wadley is the director of woodstock so he brings him and thelma in right to work on that movie it's a significant american film i would say woodstock right like it's like yeah it's like again one of those things where you're like well sure this is the woodstock movie with like the movie with this but you're like yeah but like this kind of concert movie didn't exist the movie itself is major it's not just that it was a like a pro shot of a famous concert right have you seen the woodstock movie ben

1:35:39oh yeah yeah like because it's it's got really experimental abrasive editing style and it has like you know it's fucking like scorsese and george lucas operating cameras and shit like there is this sort of weird thing of right because it was made by an myu professor it's got the like the future of movies working in all the crew positions influencing the language and everything and then it also sort of works as like a cultural moment document documentary of the phenomenon of what's happening

1:36:11there like all of the sort of talking head interviews of the concert goers are fascinating would you have gone to woodstock oh yeah sounds like a pain though it does yeah but it was just so worth it yeah like i know my dad he regrets not going ben i know you feel like oh man the concert must have been the exciting part like going there seeing it watching it but what if i told you the closeted gay man who rented out his parents backyard for the festival has a story of his own that might be interesting enough to fill an entire film what are you

1:36:44talking about well in order to take woodstock dimitri martin had to offer it might might is the strong might be enough to sure i you couldn't just take it he had to give it to you first i really did forget all about that how could you forget that's the most interesting part of woodstock we all wanted to see the movie about woodstock who owned the field where the guy doesn't watch any of the performance scorsese ends up out in la who's that knocking is being shown there under the title of jr

1:37:16roger corman sees it so roger corman obviously at this point is already a very established figure right he had already directed tens of movies by the 70s you're getting to the point where he focuses more on producing and running his own studio 60s is the the height of you know little shop of horrors and right man with the x-ray eyes when he's personally directing like you know yeah four movies a year yeah um and he sees it and says i like this would you want to direct a sequel to my film bloody mama have you ever seen that film never i have only winters i know i have because

1:37:49one of the two demi roger corman films is only available on a double feature blu-ray with it i think uh-huh uh crazy crazy i think crazy mama and bloody mama maybe funny because yeah two mamas yeah am i right he's like it's got guns it's got costumes scorsese's like i'll do it