Mean Streets with Miriam Bale

7:45David Sims:Yeah, arms crossed.

7:45Griffin Newman:Arms crossed? Yeah.

7:46David Sims:Yes. It should be all of us back to back to back, arms crossed, but I want to be Ellen Burstyn and Alice doesn't live here anymore. Cool.

7:54Griffin Newman:And I want to be the clockwork thing in Hugo.

7:57David Sims:Yeah. The automaton. Yeah.

7:59Griffin Newman:That's what I want to be.

8:00David Sims:Yeah. And he's writing down the name David Spaghetti. That's what the automaton's doing with its pen.

8:06Griffin Newman:All right. Well, if we're calling it out, then I want to be De Niro and Casino with those big sunglasses. Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. That'd be good. Maybe I want to be Sharon Stone in Casino, I guess. Maybe we should just all be in Casino.

8:17David Sims:Maybe we should just be Casino.

8:18Griffin Newman:I like Pesci in the Casino. When I was a kid and Casino came out. And I was nine. Yeah, nine. 95, right? Yeah. And I was like, well, I know Casino has dice. And so I really appreciated that Joe Pesci was holding a pair of dice on the poster. Oh, sure.

8:33David Sims:Because I was like, what's this movie about? Dice? Like, they make dice? They roll dice? If I'm paying$8, I better get dice. I don't want to just see cards. I just remember my mom being like, it's really violent.

8:44Griffin Newman:And I'm like, why? And like, aren't they rolling like playing board games?

8:48David Sims:They roll the dice and they win or they lose.

8:49Griffin Newman:Aren't they playing? Well, he has dice. He's literally holding a pair of fucking dice on the poster.

8:54David Sims:How violent can Gatsy get?

8:56Griffin Newman:Exactly.

8:57David Sims:We'll get to that in some months from now. But watching Casino in 4K is quite an experience because you can see that Joe Pesci's face is literally being pulled back by strings.

9:08Griffin Newman:He looks crazy in that movie.

9:10David Sims:That whole era of Pesci, he like wouldn't get a facelift. No. but would put like rubber bands yes underneath a wig and all those movies now like my cousin Vinny's the same way were you watching you're like what the fuck is going on with this face we were never supposed to see this this clearly yeah yeah

9:30Griffin Newman:beautiful yeah who's our guest we have to introduce our guest or are we talking about

9:35David Sims:the movie first we have to say that this is an episode on Mean Streets Mean Streets The Guarantur yeah

9:41Griffin Newman:absolutely

9:42David Sims:yes a phenomenon I would maybe call the second first film?

9:49Griffin Newman:Sure. Your first real debut. Right. You make other movies, but this is your debut. Like Cameron with the Terminator.

9:55David Sims:Yeah. And the Shyamalan with Sixth Sense. Right. Right. Where this is the first, most people on the street, if you ask them, would say this is the first film. But it's also because this is the movie where everything clicks and the rest of the career is off to the races. We're talking about Mean Streets. Wait, is Boxcar Bertha? It doesn't count. I mean, of course it counts.

10:13Griffin Newman:It probably counts. But like, you know, this is kind of also his debut. You know what I mean? I mean, I think Who's That Knocking is like very him. It is. That kind of is the spanner and the wrench. Yeah. I mean, some of those. Yeah. The like party scenes and stuff. You know, I would make an argument even more than being the debut of like Scorsese style. It is. I mean, especially with the movement and the music, which we'll get into. But like, I actually, this is more of a wild take. I'm excited to hear this. I think this is the debut of De Niro. Yes. Oh, yes. That's the big thing. He made a lot of movies before.

10:55Griffin Newman:He'd been in stuff, but not in any significant way. And I think it's almost accidental. Because like, you know, he was maybe going to play Charlie or like wanted to. And then the only thing left was playing this role. And it wasn't what he was going towards before. Before that, he was like, you know, in the De Palma movies. And, you know, he's just so experimental.

11:18David Sims:Yeah. Yeah. But he's also kind of like a cipher. He's always this like weird creep. Yeah. And then all of a sudden he comes and he's this like crazy Italian-American. And that's who he is. It's not what he becomes known for. This performance is kind of unique in his career. It undeniably is like what makes him stick.

11:37Griffin Newman:Yeah. Did he ever play like this kind of wild card? because it's like the untouchables or whatever where he's over the top. That's different.

11:44David Sims:It's different. He's gone big before and he's played like charismatic before. But I do think the wild card thing is kind of unique and it's like off of this, Coppola, Kasim, and Godfather Part 2, which is more what we think of. Yeah, that's still right. It's the focus, Kasaturn. Right, there's a scariness, but it's quiet. What's he like? I've never seen the gang who couldn't shoot straight. Okay, I was hoping you'd bring that up Because I feel like I'm one of 30 people who have seen this. It's like a couple years before. Let's say our guest today is Miriam Bale, maybe breaking the record for longest time in between appearances.

12:18David Sims:But incredibly excited we could get you on this because I feel like you have a lot of early Scorsese context takes. Sure. This is one of your. My guys? Yeah. Right. You're not supposed to say that here. No, we say that here. We say that proudly here. Yeah, I love him. I mean, this was like, I could, I mean, I could just get into it. This was, well, I saw Goodfellas like way too young, way too young. And like, it kind of changed my life in a way. But I saw Mean Streets when I was in, I was studying film production. Okay. And this is such a, you're in film school, you love this movie. It has like lines and a bar and sheets, you know, just has all these like accessible things.

13:03David Sims:It also kind of has the story of like this. This is kind of the patron saint movie of just like go out and just make the movie that only you can make. You know, the ethos of what this comes out of and how it does feel like the full emergence of a person. Yeah. Yeah. But even more importantly, it's sort of I mean, it's it's the personal film like the, you know, the Cassavetes personal film. and Cassavetes really encouraged him to make this movie because he'd made Boxcar Bertha and he was like, you've just spent a year of your life. He shat all over it. Cassavetes is so mean. I know. He said that he gave him a big hug.

13:41He was always remembered. He came in and gave him a big hug.

13:44Griffin Newman:It's so, I've never forgotten it whenever I forget, because it does feel like something you would really, you know, made him make mean streets, right? The Cassavetes was like, you wasted a year of your life.

13:53David Sims:Ben, the legendary story is that Cassavetes was a mentor of Scorsese's and he shows him Boxcar Bertha, which is like the first movie he does for hire. And he goes, congratulations, you just wasted a year of your life making a piece of shit. And then from there, basically kind of like grabs him by the lapels and says like, you need to make the movie that only you can make, the personal film, the film about you, the thing that comes from you. And Scorsese says like that, I never would have, it would have been difficult for me to feel emboldened enough to prioritize Mean Streets, which we'll get into.

14:30David Sims:He had spent like seven years kind of drafting and noodling on had Cassavetes not said that to him. Yeah.

14:36Griffin Newman:Anyway, sorry. But it is, you know, do you think Scorsese is going to say, like, you know, come on, Vinegar Syndrome is going to put out a really nice addition of Boxcar Bertha. This will be interesting. People will watch it and be like, oh, there's stuff here. It's not nothing. Come on, John. Give me a break. I think John said there's stuff here. It's like the actors are good,

14:52David Sims:but it's a piece of shit. It also feels like Cassavetes, like that's what he was like as a director with actors. Like he was a very keen psychological manipulator of knowing what's the thing I need to say to a person to get what I need out of them. And I think the subtext of that story is he knew that's the way it would fire up Scorsese

15:13Griffin Newman:to actually make the move. Right. But gang who shouldn't shoot, who couldn't shoot straight, the 1971 James Cole show. Yeah. Oh, wait, I was going to say about this film. Can I finish? Oh, yeah, right. I can go all the way. All the way back. So, yeah, I saw this in film school and I loved it. And I was in a sound class, Dan Olmsted, the greatest sound mixer. So I wrote a paper on this and was really interested in the music and how so much of the movement was cut to music. And I was so into that. And unfortunately, or fortunately, no, I think unfortunately, it led me down a path of writing about movies.

15:59Sure. It's terrible, terrible news. Yeah. And it kept going. And then also, I would say that this film is like a personal film, like we were saying about Cassavetes. But it's also a genre film. It's like, and the combination of that is why this is like, yeah, the film's like, this is the urtex for these kind of things. It's like, and that was the next step for me, as you guys might know, as I was here before, just listing off films from the 40s.

16:23David Sims:Hell yeah. This is, I'm going to go back to that. This is like, he was really inspired by these like, you know, these especially Warner Brothers crime films of the 30s.

16:35Griffin Newman:He loves the Cagney movies, right?

16:36David Sims:Like Roaring Twenties. Yeah, for sure. But what if you take the plot mechanics out of it? What if it's also a Hangout movie? Yeah, no. And then so for me, the next step for me for Scorsese is like he I I think he is as important as like a film scholar as he is a filmmaker. Like I think like and a film preservationist like I think that that so soon after this, I watched like the personal journey through American film. The best. Yeah. And then it was just like my life has changed. Like I was, you know, and so that's my origin story. Right. No, I mean, when I said it's the second first film, it's not that I because I like Who's That Knocked My Door a lot.

17:14David Sims:And I think Boxcar Birth is interesting, but it's more that thing of like, right, he makes kind of a traditional first film that is like a small, personal, focused thing. And then he makes an impersonal genre exercise. And then this is the movie where he's like, I figured out the entire thing. I have figured out how I can use genre to make my personal statements. Here's the style. Here's one of my key collaborators, you know, something in. It's fascinating to have this be the like, you know, Keitel De Niro two-hander movie. It's not like those two guys don't coexist in the same movie ever again, but it does feel like there's a bit of a baton pass here.

17:56David Sims:He always says, like, the three actors I had this kind of, like, final connection with in my career were Keitel, De Niro, and DiCaprio. They're the three guys where there's just been the unspoken language. And Keitel starts out as, like, his Antoine Daniel. It's like, this is my representation on screen. This is the prism through which I'm expressing my things. and then, you know, it's one of those moments where an actor enters a movie, where a character enters a movie and a star is born definitively, inarguably, in a moment. De Niro at the bar in Jumping Jack Flash, like, changes the course of American movies.

18:33David Sims:Yes, absolutely. You see Scorsese watch what's happening on screen and going, like, there's shit I can do if I have this piece of technology here that I never even considered before. Well, I think his intro is also the mailbox. the you see him and to me that's like you see him and it's like I mean let's just take a moment to appreciate how good looking he is so hot in this movie he is so hot the haircut Robert De Niro

19:00Griffin Newman:is incredible I was obsessed with it in high school like the bits it's like Oasis you know Oasis I know Oasis entering the rock and roll Hall of Fame like you know on the sideburns yes but it has the like the kind of like severe bang It's so good. That's what I love about it is that it is the haircut of a guy who probably doesn't think that hard about the haircut he's getting, but he still looks like cute. A mod rocker. Yeah, exactly. And a casual. It's great. But he's so, yeah, I would say Robert De Niro, he's sort of the mascot of many black women. We love him. Well, obviously, he's got a type that is, you know.

19:41David Sims:Miriam, do you know the awakening story? No. I think I've told this anecdote like five times on the podcast because I do think it's one of the funniest things to ever happen. Okay. But, you know, Awakenings, where he plays this guy with this medical condition who was like frozen in his body. Yeah. Basically fully paralyzed for like years and years and years. And there was a scene they were shooting where Robin Williams and De Niro were in a cab or in the back of a car, at least. And it was in the period before he has the awakening. So here's De Niro, this incredibly focused, famously sort of intense Methody actor.

20:14David Sims:And he's fully, you know, frozen. And they're just driving around New York City. And this guy on the street corner is yelling stuff out. Oh, hey, Mork! Hey, De Niro! And De Niro's just locked in, you know, unconcerned. Robin Williams is like focused. And then the guy goes, Bobby, you still like that black pussy? Did he break? Yes. that's amazing yes and Robin Williams was like it was the only time he ever broke and he kind of just looked at the guy and like nodded

20:47Griffin Newman:smack he's the best he's the king he's my favorite I mean I always shout out to his off menu podcast appearance where they ask him so what's your favorite appetizer he's like oh I don't know whatever they want to give me and they're like well no you have to pick the premise of this show is your dream menu

21:02David Sims:and he's like I'd ask the chef whatever's good

21:06Griffin Newman:and they're like

21:07David Sims:don't you own restaurants? And he's like, yeah, just tell them do whatever they want.

21:10Griffin Newman:Yeah. And they're like, okay, well, what about the food at your restaurant? He's like, yeah, it's good. This is what I mean. I'm not saying this was the birth of De Niro, like his type. I'm saying this is the birth of him as a person. Do you remember? Because he has zero persons. Yes, Miriam. It's so fascinating. Do you remember the Who's Hotter De Niro Pacino debate on Twitter? Do you remember that? I think I missed it. It was such a war. It was a few years ago. Yeah. And it is just one of those things where it's like, I don't know. Pick your day. Aren't we who you prefer? They're such different guys.

21:42Griffin Newman:They're both sexy. They're also both kind of odd. They're both these funny little guys, but they both can also kind of shock you with how beautiful they are.

21:51David Sims:De Niro was more conventionally handsome. De Niro's a little more handsome. Pacino's so pretty. Yeah, because Pacino's so pretty. Pacino's more pretty, and Pacino's a little scary, you know? I prefer De Niro, but I think that Pacino's beautiful. Yeah, he's gorgeous. He's so beautiful.

22:11Griffin Newman:Yeah. I mean, I guess we're not going to talk about it. Talk about what? We're not going to talk about young Pacino? No, young Pacino in Scorsese's career. You know, you got to wait for old Pacino.

22:20David Sims:Ben and I just spent the weekend in Wisconsin with J.J. Birch, our researcher. That's right. And he was saying, I don't know if he made it into the dossier because J.J. vets his information very thoroughly, but he asked me, he was like, had you ever heard this anecdote that Scorsese wanted Pacino to play Johnny Boy and Pacino just straight up turned it down? And then they don't work together, obviously, for like 40 years. I mean, like Pacino had already been in The Godfather.

22:51Griffin Newman:So like it would have been like, right. I mean, yes. Well, Pacino is supposed to be in the gang who couldn't shoot straight. And that's how. Oh, that's interesting. And then De Niro got it because he was making The Godfather. but I hadn't heard that about for Mean Streets and Pacino who was who he wanted to play which doesn't make sense at all Jon Voight yes that's crazy yes that's interesting right but I think that was also a little bit of like would that appease the studio right exactly and we can look at the dossier but like wait because you mentioned it again the gang who couldn't shoot today I just want to ask what is De Niro that's in Jerry Orbach is the star oh my god that's the crazy thing this is the crazy thing it's like it was written for Marcello Mastrioni That sounds pretty good.

23:33Yeah. And then he admitted towards when they were getting close to production that he couldn't speak English.

23:41David Sims:Perfect. Perdone. It's the right time. So they replaced him with Jerry Orbach. Of course. We love. One to one.

23:49Griffin Newman:Yeah. I mean, Jerry Orbach makes more sense as like a New York tough. He's not Italian, but he was, you know. Yes. He was close enough.

23:57David Sims:Right. It would have been weirder to have Marcelo Mastrodi. Yeah. Okay. And De Niro actually plays an Italian. He plays an Italian, like a kleptomaniac Italian.

24:05Griffin Newman:Mario Trantino. Yeah. So is he silly? Like, is he kind of in more of a Christian mode? So this is a weird thing is like, I've interviewed De Niro, and I think one of the things he really hates, I mean, you know, he barely says anything in an interview, but I think you can tell he's annoyed with this idea that he started comedy in the 2000s with Analyze This or with like Midnight Run or something. because he was doing comedy in the beginning. And like he was doing comedy with De Palma. And this is like a straight up comedy. Is it good? No, it's not. It's very bad. Right. It's so bad. It's like very, it doesn't work.

24:41So they were thinking at first Mean Streets would be kind of like the gangster comedy. And there was like, oh, like the gang who couldn't shoot straight. But then the gang who couldn't shoot straight didn't work. It was a failure. So at first they were like, oh yeah, De Niro will be in like shorts. and shooting. And, you know, when we see him, when he walks down that street you were talking, in the bar, he's like in his boxers. So I think in the beginning he was like doing these kind of zany comedy roles. I mean, this is the thing. He's like, we're talking about Little Italy, but like De Niro's from the village.

25:17Right. He's from like, he has artist parents. He went to the Little Red School. It's very different. He's like, he's like, it's so, it's like a couple blocks, but it's such a difference. And he talks about it.

25:27Griffin Newman:I didn't know those guys. as well, like in the Marty doc. He had proximity. He understood it. He saw these things. And he's Irish Italian. Right. He's not full Italian. Right. He's Irish. His mom is Irish. His father is Irish Italian. His mother is like a sort of Dutch English. Oh, yeah. Like Waspie. And his dad was like a lapsed Catholic. So there was no real like religion in the same way. Like it's not like it's not the Marty thing of like. I mean, Marty is just like a child's cartoon of a little Italian American. and boy. Well, you know, with his vaguely mobbed up dad and his mom just like constantly stirring a big pot of sauce.

26:06Griffin Newman:And him looking out a window with asthma. Right. And them living in a tiny apartment with a bunch of people. And like, you know, like everyone in the neighborhood knows each other and they play stickball and shit.

26:16David Sims:But there's something to De Niro. De Niro's priests. De Niro having like the same reference points without the same lived experiences in a way. Yeah. That I do think gives him this sort of like this expressive elasticity in what he can put on screen that's different than Scorsese's very like personal experience. Yeah. Well, I think that they're both kind of outsiders because of the whole asthma thing. So they're both kind of like know the thing, but I don't see either of these guys getting in big stakes, big fights. You know, I think they're there. Yes, they're observers. They're insider, outsider.

26:49So that's like where they overlap.

26:51David Sims:It's a thing Scorsese said that while I'm making the movie about my experiences and being this age and growing up with these people and all of this. And then he said, I think years later when he rewatched the movie, he's like, this is actually about like my dad and my uncle. Well, Charlie, that's his dad. Right. He's like, this isn't my lived experience. I said it in the present day. I gave it the milieu of the songs I grew up on and the outfits and the language. But actually in terms of the characters.

27:17Griffin Newman:He didn't have this crisis of like, am I too close to this criminal life and all that? Right. Like in the same way.

27:24David Sims:Right. He was like, am I going to be a priest or a director? wasn't. He was too little to get in trouble. But it is this thing that is a little lost time. I think you're right, Miriam, which is like those early De Palma movies, because what De Niro and De Palma go on to do separately are so different and loom so large. People forget that those early movies are like closer to like Matt Johnson films, that they're like weird sort of exercises. they're almost like multimedia projects and they're really kind of using De Niro as like if not a purely comedic figure it's like this is a guy who's just like boundless energy pushing boundaries I said bound fucking twice and then Mean Streets is harnessing that into a dramatic context and then Godfather Part 2 like just sets the mold for how he's seen forever.

28:20David Sims:A little bit. I feel like he was like a phenom. There was, obviously, Panic at Needle Park happened pretty early, and even when people were like, are audiences ready for this guy as a leading man? There was a type he had established in the way he could sort of hold the center and the focus and this nervy, sort of unconventional protagonist that was very different than what De Niro was doing up until this point. You know, I have a question. what do you think his like natural accent is because i don't think it's a really good question i don't think he has one i mean i think it's i think he has a voice yeah and i think like you hear it in those you know he's right right he talks like this and he has like he's kind of gravelly and you hear it in the things and it's like great but i think that he obviously you know from his italian american family he heard some of this in his neighborhood but i think it's kind of I think it's kind of a role.

29:12I think he's sort of like, you know what you hear about Peter Sellers? Like, just kind of a blank.

29:18Griffin Newman:Right, and then like he would just reflect something, you know, but he was, right, if there was no real guy that you could find. It's interesting.

29:25David Sims:I mean, he is famously one of the worst interviewers, interview subjects alive, right?

29:29Griffin Newman:Essentially always, although once in a while you'll see like someone he knows essentially get a little more out of him. Yeah. I mean, and don't ask him about our president Donald Trump, who I support, but De Niro's. What does he do? He applauds him. He hands him medals. He has a couple nitpicks about him. Pats him on the back. My favorite thing about De Niro is just, and it's, and these guys, to be clear, I don't support Donald Trump. But like, you know, just like when you're like, he's such an amazing actor. He's got such a long legacy. He's like, oh, I watch MSNBC all day. I think Trump sucks.

29:58Griffin Newman:You know, like they're just so like regular boomer dad about politics.

30:02David Sims:And also every time he gets up and is like, I'm presenting the breakout artist award to Harris Dickinson. Fuck Donald Trump. He does it with an energy as like, maybe this takes him down. Yeah, right. You're like, I think it might be time to say it. Trump no good. Yeah. He's so crazy about it. But then maybe he's the only one who's not crazy about it. That's right.

30:21Griffin Newman:I think Bobby's right. Yeah. He absolutely is.

30:24David Sims:I was going to say that I have heard people who have worked with De Niro in interviews been like, he's very protective of his process. Totally. That unlike Peter Sellers, where there was this kind of like, there is no me. I am just weirdly like a conduit for these things. I can't talk about this shit. That De Niro, there like is a very specific process, but it's entirely internalized. And that part of it for him is that he feels like it needs to be private. Yeah. So that even the people who are right up next to him are like, there's something going on. It's not just that he's like a savant. It's not just that he's like a cipher.

31:04David Sims:There's intentionality and there's like work and there's effort. but he really doesn't want to talk about what he's pulling from.

31:11Griffin Newman:I wouldn't be able to go up to him and be like, would I be able to talk to him about the Mets or something? That's my feel. Can I get him just chatting? I think just from the brief time that I tried to interview him, he's communicating, but it's not in words. It's all in body language, which is really hard to transcribe. Yeah. But he's communicating really well. I just think he's sort of somewhat nonverbal. And so you get this kind of like nonverbal guy who meets motor mouth Marty.

31:38David Sims:That's also what's so interesting about him being a motor mouth in this. I was struggling to think of another performance where he is this verbal. I mean, like I think of, I don't know.

31:50Griffin Newman:Where he's nonstop, you know? Where is he nonstop? Because there's like stuff in his later career, like Silver Linings Playbook, where he has like big kind of like yelly speeches and stuff.

32:00David Sims:But that's the De Niro explosion. It's the explosion.

32:03Griffin Newman:What about the comedian? I haven't seen his set yet. Have you seen Taylor Hackford's The Comedian? No, I missed it. I remember it. He does a lot of stand-up comedy. In my memory, it's De Niro-esque. But he's still doing, you know, this.

32:18David Sims:But I was going to say, isn't that like a movie where people go, it feels unnatural to watch you do this?

32:23Griffin Newman:I mean, my brain is erased. It clearly is a trauma response. So, yes.

32:27David Sims:That movie is co-written by Jeff Ross. Good. Does he talk a lot in Dirty Grandpa?

32:33Griffin Newman:let me see your ass. That's what I imagined Dirty Grandpa saying. Yeah. You know, I have seen it. There's the part of Dirty Grandpa where he raps, right, doing karaoke. Yeah. And he asks the audience if he can say the N-word and they say that he can and then he does, right? I've seen that clip. Well, I've just seen that clip because people have posted, because the whole thing with De Niro is like he made 200 movies. Yeah. 140 of them are bad. Right. And so you can find these clips where it's like, do you know that De Niro did this? Right. You know, it's like people post Al Pacino doing Dunk a Cheeto.

33:04Griffin Newman:I was going to say. Give it a break.

33:06David Sims:De Niro has endless that. The stuff that De Niro has done on screen is wild. But I think you're right that when he does something that feels outside of the sort of basic cultural understanding of the De Niro archetype, it basically just gets memory washed. People just don't keep that shit in their head. It doesn't matter.

33:26Griffin Newman:He's still bulletproof. Right. He could make shit for another hundred years and maybe he will.

33:30David Sims:But even when he does it well, like even when he stretches outside of his sort of obvious movie star persona successfully, I feel like within five years, people are still just reducing him to the 10 big performance. You've seen Alto Nights. I have.

33:44Griffin Newman:So he's two characters in that. Are either of them big?

33:47David Sims:You know what? Yes. Like one of them's big? I actually think he's very good in Alto Nights.

33:51Griffin Newman:Frank Costello is probably the bigger one? Or like which of the two guys?

33:55David Sims:One of them, he is clearly playing Pesci. One of them, he's playing like more the elderly De Niro archetype. And one of them feels like him doing, trying, it looks so fun to be the Joe Pesci guy in a movie. Because I guess that's the other part of it is Pesci starts to be the Johnny boy standing next to De Niro as the strong silent type, right? As the person who's struggling to communicate with words. That's true, actually. Well, so I think there's some conflicting stuff as far as biographies I've read. But I think that they started shooting with Harvey Keitel. So basically, it was October. The festival was coming.

34:39They didn't have all the funding. They didn't have everything together. So they're like, if we don't shoot now, we have to wait until next year in October to do it. So they shot some stuff with Harvey Keitel. And this is where I'm not sure. But I think he met De Niro, met Scorsese or officially really met at some party at Christmas after that October. And so then he was like, oh, you can play anything, but you can't play Charlie because it's already this. And he was annoyed.

35:09David Sims:Yes. He wanted to play Charlie. He wanted to play Charlie. But then he ran into Harvey Keitel on the street and they were just like, they started laughing. They were just like, okay, you're an actor too. This is going to be fine. But I think, yeah, so he played the Joe Pesci. He played the crazy guy. Right, right, right. And that's just something he doesn't get to do much. Altonites, he does play the old man version of it. You're right.

35:31Griffin Newman:And Altonites is as good as Mean Streets, right?

35:33David Sims:No, it's better than Mean Streets.

35:35Griffin Newman:Okay, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Marty could never. Do you think Marty saw Altonites? Do you think Marty sees everything De Niro makes? Definitely not. Like, De Niro's like, I made a movie with Sebastian Mendeskow. You gotta watch it. And Marty's like, okay.

35:47David Sims:Life is short. I think he watches most of it. No way. Because he watches a lot of movies. Yeah. But it does feel like he's very invested in Bob's career. You know? Like, it does feel like there's a sense of, like, I want to keep up with what Bob's doing. I think De Niro hasn't seen all the movies De Niro's done. I'm sure he hasn't. Yeah. Wait, you guys keep saying that there aren't a lot of, like, wild card roles for De Niro. But what about, like, Cape Fear and Jackson?

36:17Griffin Newman:But those are all like scary guys, right? And it's like, Cape Fear, he is so, so big. That is so true. But like, by wild card, I mean the kind of jokey, like character in a group of guys where there's the wild card who's kind of like, he might put a fucking firecracker in a mailbox, right?

36:35David Sims:And the guy who's the motor.

36:36Griffin Newman:Yeah, who's just like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. And it's like, so often, yes, there's stuff like Cape Fear, but like Brazil, he's so funny and weird. Yes. but that movie is not a reality-based movie.

36:50David Sims:Those also feel like when he's doing kind of character actor stuff. Right. Even Cape Fear where he's like a lead, but he's obviously not the protagonist of the story.

36:58Griffin Newman:But like in the 80s, in the 70s, it's the Godfather II stuff. So it's like 1900 and last, right, like all that. In the 80s, it's the Raging Bull stuff. So I feel like it's like.

37:09David Sims:Transformation.

37:10Griffin Newman:That's true. But also just like, you know, more like intense, scary characters. I want to sort him by chronology here because actually this is there's so much to talk about I know we haven't even started I know God I mean this is all about it we're talking about De Niro no because I think you are right Miriam I guess he really didn't make a lot of movies in the air but like Once Upon a Time in America is like that the mission is like the angel heart these like stoic characters and then like the 90s I've never seen Jackknife have you ever seen Jackknife? I've never seen Jackknife that is a classic I would pull that off the shelf at Blockbuster or at the video store all the time being like, what is this movie?

37:48Yeah.

37:49Griffin Newman:Vietnam Bat movie. And the poster is just a painting of De Niro with a beard and a Boston Red Sox hat. He does have a Red Sox hat. But you know, the 90s of like, Goodfellas, let's put Cape Fear aside, but like, Goodfellas, Bronx Tale, you know, Casino, Heat, Sleepers, like these movies, Ronin, where he's just like the impassive guy. And he also did do like Jackie Brown and This Boy's Life and Frankenstein. He did a lot of weird shit, too. Jackie Brown, he's so funny. But Jackie Brown, the whole thing is how withdrawn he is. I know. He's hysterical. And then he breaks. Oh, yeah. That's another kind of wild card.

38:22But I mean, it's a silent until he breaks.

38:24Griffin Newman:The sex scene in that movie makes me laugh so hard. Thank you. You read my mind. This is his sexiest era. He and Jackie Brown. For me, I think this is, I mean, I thought this before I was middle-aged. What about Midnight Run? I always look back for him. He's so hot in Midnight Run. He's so hot in Midnight Run. Midnight Run is one of his best performances, but I wouldn't say his hottest. I feel like there's something about that a little bit later. Yeah, just that 90s. You like sad mustache De Niro.

38:54David Sims:I love it. Yeah, I think that it's just, I mean, I just think it's objectively his hottest. I mean, some might say this is Mean Streets. I don't know. Yeah. I guess Wag the Dog is almost him doing something similar.

39:07Griffin Newman:He's fucking great in Wag the Dog. To this. Yeah. Right? I love that performance.

39:12David Sims:Like, it's... He rocks.

39:14Griffin Newman:You know what? De Niro's not so bad. I like that guy. We think De Niro's a good actor.

39:17David Sims:Yeah. That's our official stance on Blank Check. I think what is Miriam is what you're saying, that, like, Coppola was mentor to all these guys, right? He watches Mean Streets and is like, fuck, that's my young Corleone. And that's not an obvious move. It was kind of genius to see him and go, like, if this guy stops talking, but that energy is still there, it's going to be really captivating to watch. and that's a performance where he doesn't talk that much and all the talking he does is in Italian. And he wins an Oscar basically for physical presence and for how much he's able to communicate just in his body silently.

39:52Yeah. Before the gang who couldn't shoot straight, he went to Sicily.

39:57Griffin Newman:To learn Italian. To practice Italian. But the character is from Calabria. So I think, like, was he gaming for this? Like, was he? I don't know. Yeah. I think they're going to do a prequel. I'm going to beat Brando.

40:21David.

40:21David Sims:Yes. I got myself into a real pickle. Uh-oh. I thought it'd be funny to put on some Groucho Marx glasses. Uh-huh. Very, very funny. Very funny. Classic. I've been stuck wearing them for five years because it's such a hassle to replace your glasses that once I made that commitment, now I'm walking around with the big schnoz, the eyebrows, the mustache, all times.

40:41Griffin Newman:I know what you're saying. Glasses cost hundreds of dollars. You know, you just kind of live with whatever you've got. Wait a second. What about Zenni Optical?

40:47David Sims:David, I forgot about Zenni Optical.

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41:53Griffin Newman:All right, I'm going to open the dossier, actually, just so we can stay on track a little bit. So Mean Streets, originally called, Miriam, do you know? Season of the Witch. She's fascinating. You know, and they, Marty correctly was like, Cage is going to want that. I assume Nicholas Coppola was what like five years old Yes yes He was like we'll save that for Nick Cage Yes Is it a reference to the Donovan song? I think it's reference to the song and to the festival Right and all that You know it's like the kind of like you know You're playing with the devil Yeah yeah I mean the way the club is like all red And it's like the underworld or you know Like Mean Streets is better Mean Streets is a great title I don't think Mean Streets can really be beat as a title This is his long gestating passion project he works on it with his college classmate Marty Martin sorry I just want

42:39David Sims:I wanted to no no I wanted to be correct about this the movie they're watching with Vincent Price yes is that the Witchfinder General

42:53Griffin Newman:I mean that's a classic Vincent Price movie but I don't think it would be it looks like a dumber Vincent Price movie it's a Roger Corman movie which is Witchfinder General is the Vincent Price movie that's like really intense. And like his performance in it is so magnificent. It's not trashy. Right. But there is the Season of the Witch movie. Well, that is a Romero movie that has two titles. No, it's not. Okay, okay. It's not a reference to anything. Okay. So, Marnic Martin. So Marnic Martin worked on what? On Who's That Knocking at My Door? On New York, New York, on Raging Bull. And what you like.

43:30Griffin Newman:You know, like the early Scorsese collaborator. Am I saying it right? This is our first episode. Martin Scorsese? How do I say it? Scorsese. Scorsese. Miriam, I feel like you... I feel like it's Scorsese. Scorsese. I feel like I've heard him say Scorsese. He's one of those guys who's kind of like, oh, it's funny. You know what's funny? I saw an old comedian talking on the David Letterman show, and he was like, Coppola. And he was like, Coppola? He's like, he doesn't know how to pronounce his name. This was in the early 80s. And he's actually right. It's the classic thing that these Americans don't know how to pronounce their...

44:06Griffin Newman:I mean, his name is a transcription error. Yeah. The family was Scorsese or with double Zs in Sicily, which means Scottish or something, like, you know, in Italian. And it was changed when they, you know, moved. Yeah. Because someone wrote it down wrong or whatever.

44:23David Sims:I feel like the effort to correct the last 15 years has been towards Scorsese versus Scorsese. Right. Yeah.

44:31Griffin Newman:Everyone used to say Scorsese, and that's wrong. Yeah. I think. Yeah. Ben? I've just been saying that the whole time. Yeah. You're wrong! All right. I think. Scorsese. Okay, so. Do you feel okay? How do you, do you feel familiar enough to say Marty?

44:47David Sims:Can we just call, can we give ourselves permission to call him Marty? Marty, of course. Marty, yeah. You've worked with him. I have. I called him Marty.

44:53Griffin Newman:I have been in his office and screening room. Sure. He wasn't there.

44:57David Sims:Yeah.

44:58Griffin Newman:But I watched Killers of the Flower Moon in his office. I'm sure I'll bring up a million more times. I was going to say, that's where you saw the Super Mario Galaxy movie.

45:07Griffin Newman:So, Marduk and him sat down. They work out the structure of this movie. They work out the characters. They work out the incidents. I guess, who's that knocking at my door? This was originally meant to be a continuation.

45:19David Sims:A continuation of that. Yeah, an Anton Doaniel style. I'm following this guy, Charlie, will be my analog across stages in life. And when this movie came out, he said he was going to make a third film of him settling down and having a family that was... Fucking bed and board or whatever, like the third. But also like Italian-American. Like I want to represent my family life that I've put into this documentary through this fictional character. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was written but never made. It's kind of boring. It's kind of in a fun way. I don't think I read it, but so he started this Mean Streets season in The Witch in like, did you say the date?

45:54Like mid-60s, right?

45:55Griffin Newman:It's like 65 is where he puts it, basically maybe 66, like, and obviously it's inspired by his life a little bit, but as you guys already said, like, he wasn't in a gang. They didn't really get in fights. They hung out in bars and picked up girls or whatever, but, like, they didn't even smoke pot, he said, like, really. Like, you know, we were not, like...

46:15David Sims:He's got asthma, for God's sake.

46:15Griffin Newman:He's got asthma. He didn't really do the hard stuff. No. Years later, Marcus Percezi would, yes,

46:22David Sims:identify his nose and the possibilities.

46:25Griffin Newman:Ah, my lungs aren't connected. Well, they are, but I mean...

46:29David Sims:It's a less direct route.

46:31Griffin Newman:Yeah. Marty has been working, to be clear, was working on Mean Streets for a long time before The Godfather was ever thought of. Because when this movie comes out, I think it draws comparisons to The Godfather because press is probably a little Italian gangster. That's an epic film. Obviously, this is the opposite. The priest who has the young man test his hand against the flame of a candle, that comes from a retreat. he went on with, you know, other boys. You know, so that's a memory that's real. As you said, Miriam, right? One of you two said, like, it's really his father, he realized, is the story.

47:10Griffin Newman:Film screenplay initially was much harder on the religious aspects to make a story of a modern saint in his own society, but the society happens to be gangsters.

47:20David Sims:But also more reflective of our friend Marty's personal experience, which was like, do I go into the parish or do I make movies? You know, really being pulled between the two as equal forces rather than in this where it just feels like it's kind of a thing hanging over his head, but not the active tug. Yeah, so I think like some of the difference, so I think some of the religious stuff changed and then also he developed the Teresa character a little more. And then I think a big influence on developing the screenplay was Sandy Weintrape was his girlfriend at the time. Right. And her dad was a studio exec.

48:03And she's in the film, I think, playing Heather Weintrape.

48:07David Sims:Mm-hmm. So she said, you got to put some more of your funny stories in there. You know, like, I think he had his, like, things like, put in the MOOC story, put in the Firecracker story, put in this kind of stuff. So I think, yeah, what do you guys think? I mean, maybe we're not ready for that, but what do you think of the women in this film? look it is and and he talks about it it's why he went straight to alice doesn't live here anymore after this because even from this film people were saying and this guy doesn't really know to put women on screen right like this early on he felt the need to combat that yeah it definitely feels like um it's interesting i i think amy robinson's really fucking good in this movie I also think it's interesting that in the way we're talking about this being positioned as an autobiographical film, but him acknowledging I didn't actually really live, you know, walk the walk and talk the talk of these characters.

49:02David Sims:I watched these guys that her and her epilepsy does feel. Oh, OK. She's Amy Robinson's Teresa. Yes. Who is De Niro's cousin. Right. Right. And Charlie's love interest. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and she was friends with, I think she worked with De Palma, so she knew like Margot Kidder. Yeah, she worked on sisters and stuff. But her epilepsy feels a little bit like an analog for Scorsese's asthma to me. Maybe, yeah. This feeling of, here is someone in and of this community who's looking to get just a little bit out.

49:38Griffin Newman:And one is treated a little, like it's not a community that I know how to empathetically deal with someone who has a condition.

49:45David Sims:But like you can't be tough. You can't be in this action because you're too delicate and everyone being right.

49:52Griffin Newman:Yeah. Read the women. I also just think it's like it is fairly reflective of what I imagine these men like how they perceived women. Maybe. I mean it's not like who's that knocking straight up sexist. Just garbage. Like someone named girl. Like just real bad. I would say I mean I think Marty is pretty down on who's that knocking. Right. Like he's like it's kind of sucks. like I mean in a nice way but he's sort of like it's kind of a mess I agree who's that knocking is so juvenile like not and not in like a humor way or anything it's just like it's just all these ideas bouncing around in his head but yeah I mean like you know look Anna Paquin will be silently sitting for every episode I already made that clear right of course she's sitting right there Anna Paquin she won't speak at any point

50:36David Sims:she's a guest on every episode we don't want to hear you complaining about how rarely we ask her questions. Right. So, okay. Scorsese. That's what's interesting to me, though, is I think he relates a lot to the Teresa character, but he's obviously not building the movie around her and she's kind of treated almost like a secret in the film. Totally. Yeah, he's ashamed of her. Right. Or ashamed of the relationship. But the movie hides her in a way that's similar to the way that Charlie treats her. Yes. Which is a thing you get into with Scorsese. It is the same with the Anna Paquin thing. Literally will be a running discussion for like decades of his career of if he is sidelining women, when is that an oversight or failing of his?

51:21David Sims:And when is it a very pointed statement? Yeah, I think like, yeah, it's something like people will say that about like PTA. And I don't agree with it there. But with Scorsese, it's hard. You know, it's not his strength. I mean, he's gotten into it like he's obviously like more recently Killers of a Flower Moon interesting he's grown into it

51:45Griffin Newman:he's grown he's like done but like for this film it kind of feels like oh you make a movie you gotta have a woman like you know like it's kind of like you make a dish put a little salt in it she's a conflict she's a story element not really a character

51:59David Sims:I think by the way that's why he says yes to Alice it's not an I'll prove them thing it's a I should work on this right like if I want to be an actor's director let me figure out different rhythms of actors, not just working with like actors of a different gender, but also just like, here's a different milieu, here's a different like cultural type. I need to have that range. At this point, he's making films where the women represent what women were when he was growing up, which was these men are obsessed and driven by sex, but also kind of need to compartmentalize it yeah i don't know it's not as as interested as the the the the romance if you will but i want to talk about the other woman um who was probably what first drew me to this film in that there's that opening scene where um or it's very early on where charlie uh keitel is like watching the woman who's a stripper jeannie bell playing diane i think diane and um yeah diane And it's so beautiful.

53:04And you've got these like really beautiful close-ups that are kind of abstracted. And I love this woman. She's so beautiful. I looked her up. She is a fitness influencer. Currently? Yes. Wow. On Instagram. She was the world's oldest competitive jump rope skipper. Good for her? Yeah. At the time, she was a Playboy model. She's just gorgeous. And she goes by Annie Judas now. You can find her on Instagram. but um yeah i think i love her i love her presence in this but you know so there's that scene where he's like well she's really good looking yeah she's black she's the most beautiful thing i've ever seen right but he's like but she's black right like obviously doesn't make a difference and that's that's grisesi's i'm pretty sure that's his because you know they they alternate

53:50David Sims:interchangeably cutting between kytel doing voiceover and him doing voiceover yeah this really personal thing it's like he's saying that so i'm gonna say this is my other wild take is like this is a film about race like you know like there's that with like in there but then he like he stands her up the what is it moulinian do you know it's a slur yeah it's a slur and then he's like and then there's someone who's kissing an n-word and like moulinian means eggplant like

54:17Griffin Newman:that's that's the right you know it's from the sicilian i mean it's a nasty thing like it's a nasty thing to say i know and um so maybe i should have said the m-word i don't know but like i feel like that's part of the religious thing, the changing of this Italian-American family. You know, talking about Francis of Assisi, but like what is his real sense of empathy? Because there's these like dueling ethnic groups. I think that's a key theme in this.

54:40David Sims:I think it's also going back to the Little Italy talk, what confounded me about Little Italy as a child. But what I didn't understand is like this is this idea of almost fighting against the melting pot of not just America, but New York specifically, where that's the great promise. But then also it's like, but these five blocks, it's just us. Yeah, it's just us. And we're going to maintain tradition and evolve tradition to figure out what the Italian American experience is versus the Italian experience. But also Italian gets first billing over American. And so there's that feeling of like, we got to keep everyone at a distance because we can't lose what we are.

55:22David Sims:And even if it's not driven by like racial animosity, I think there's that protectiveness where even just to make a gangster film, a crime film in the 70s and not keeping those things on the sidelines in the same way that you're keeping the women's at the sidelines is like what this movie is really about, which is sort of like a masculinity crisis of its time. Yeah. I mean, masculinity crisis, but so much of identity. So I say it's about race, but really what I mean is it's about racism. It's a really interesting thing about this movie is that he goes and tries to pitch it to Corman, to finance.

56:00David Sims:And Corman's like, yeah, I love that. Can you make it a blaxploitation movie? Oh, yeah. Can you take the same script and, like, cast it with Black actors? Because that is in vogue right now. That there had been enough successful Black exploitation films that he was like, that's sellable. The Italian-American version of this movie doesn't really have a precedent, especially before Godfather came out. But even post-Godfather, it's like, well, that's Tony. That's sort of the class of the old mafioso kind of thing. you know he says like I said I'd consider it because you always have to say you'd consider anything but I don't know that I really would have known how to make that movie and it goes against the exercise of what's driving him to make this in the first place which is what we're saying like what's the most personal thing I can make what's the thing I understand the most and the blind spots of this movie are I think a self-conscious awareness of what he doesn't understand if that makes sense.

57:01Yeah. You know, like he was, one of his teachers at NYU or maybe it was just called Washington Square University or something then, but like had said, you know, make what you know. He said there was no one else like him in his classes. Like there's no one else that was from this like, you know, lower middle class. From the neighborhood.

57:19David Sims:I know. And like, again, a few blocks away. Right. Yes. Yes. It was a whole different world.

57:24Griffin Newman:Yeah. And NYU was not what we think of it as, you know, now at all.

57:29David Sims:No, he also said, like, he'd be going and, like, studying, like, English literature and then meeting his childhood friends at clubs that are, like, the clubs you see in this movie. Right. Yeah. Like, they were two completely disconnected worlds, even though they were five blocks away from each other. Yeah. He said, like, De Niro says when he brings the Weintraub girls, he's like, they're from the village. You know, like, there's this other world.

57:52Griffin Newman:Yeah. So he brings Mean Streets to AFI. They are just starting their feature program. and he says the outline he'd written was ridiculous. There was no female character basically at all. It had no characters. It had basic elements. Gets turned down there. He takes it to Joe Brenner, who's a sex film distributor, who's the guy who distributed Who's That Knocking? And he said, no, probably because it's just not, you know, sexy enough. One of the old professors at NYU told him, hey, no one wants to see films about Italian-Americans anyway, so forget about it. So that's like a subnaught the guy who's encouraging him.

58:25David Sims:Yeah, it's like he's shopping around a genre film that doesn't conform into any of the sellable areas of genre at this point in time.

58:32Griffin Newman:Totally. I mean, he invents a kind of movie here. He does. He does. Right. So instead, he works obviously on Woodstock, editing Woodstock, which is, you know, a formative Scorsese thing. And he enters Roger Corman's orbit. We talked about all that last week, I'm sure. So, Boxcar Bertha. Jay Cox, who's working at the New York Times. Cox spelled like the cool way. Multiple penises. Right. He's the one who shows John Cassavetes who's that knocking at my door. And Cassavetes responds to it and says like, what's the film you're dying to make? And he's like, I have this thing, but it needs a rewrite.

59:09Griffin Newman:And Cassavetes says, well, rewrite it then. Right. You know, like, what are you waiting for? Cox obviously is a guy who works with Scorsese a bunch. Yeah. You know, over the years.

59:17David Sims:But that's also very indicative about why Scorsese or why Cassavetes said the like you wasted a year of your life making a piece of shit because he knows the thing he wants to make. Right. Totally.

59:30Griffin Newman:So Sandy Weintraub, obviously, he's dating at the time. She's the one who says, right, put in the funny stuff, take out the religious stuff. So he puts in the pool hall. He puts in the mook scene and the firecrackers and all that stuff. It ends up in Corman's hands. And Corman is basically like, I've just made The Cool Breeze, which is like, it was sort of like a blaxploitation asphalt jungle. And so he's the one who's like, yeah, could we make this a blaxploitation movie, essentially, like an all black cast? And Scorsese's like, I don't think so. Corman does still eventually agree to distribute the film, but then Warner Brothers ends up distributing it.

1:00:06Griffin Newman:So I guess Corman backs out when it becomes more of a real thing. But there's a tribute to Corman in there.

1:00:12David Sims:A lot of Corman crew. I mean, this is one of those movies where when you get into it, it's like the money appeared and then disappeared like six times. It kept coming together and falling apart, but it would happen in quick enough rotations that the movie never fully collapsed. Jay Cox was married to Verna Bloom. Right. Who I remember best as being Dean Wormser's wife in Animal House. Sure. My version of the way you're describing Goodfellas, Miriam, a movie I watched way too many times before I was 10 because my father basically treated it as the Bible. But she was the one who I think helped locate the money that freed him from being dependent on Corman.

1:00:52Griffin Newman:It costs about$150 ,000, I think. Jonathan Taplin is also very important, who is the touring manager for the band. That's who I believe Verna Bloom connected with. Right.

1:01:04David Sims:She saw that he was talking to Corman and that he was, that he felt like I can see Marty in a month starting to bend on his principles in order to get the money he needs. And it's going to dilute the movie he actually wants to make. So she goes and finds. 300 grand.

1:01:19Griffin Newman:300 grand.

1:01:20David Sims:She finds the money. But in a way that wouldn't make him have to constantly justify his decisions.

1:01:27Griffin Newman:You'll make it in Cleveland. Yeah. Then the money falls through. And then they end up with$175 ,000 and they get some other stuff from like CFI Labs. I don't know. They scrape money together. Obviously, he had written Charlie for Harvey Keitel because it was essentially going to be a sequel to Who's That Knocking? Like you guys said. And then he decides to separate it, which is smart. Right. At one point, Jon Voight is involved, but then they shoot the festival stuff before they even start doing pre-production. And at that point, Harvey is basically locked in. Jon had already done Midnight Cowboy.

1:02:03Griffin Newman:And apparently, Voight says to Scorsese, like, I'm too famous. Like, you need unknowns. Like, you need, like, this needs to feel real or whatever.

1:02:11David Sims:There's the other thing, which is we were talking about it when you came in, David, and I was watching. There's a Q &A discussion between. We were watching a Linklater interview. Linklater and Scorsese, Rick and Morty. And it was a series called Game Changers that the DGA was curating of like movies that changed the industry. And Linklater was like, this is the definitive game changer for like filmmakers taking their careers into their own hands and self realizing what they want to do. But he was talking to him about how much of this movie was shot in L.A., which is the craziest fucking thing that like more than 90 percent of this film was shot in Los Angeles.

1:02:50David Sims:Right. And the New York exterior stuff they did, especially San Gennaro, is so impactful. And then Scorsese finds the right locations in L.A. without building sets that he can sort of double that you don't question it when you're watching it. And Linklater is asking him, were you concerned at all about like the concession of needing to move to L.A. and if you were going to lose some of the authenticity in the character. And Scorsese was like, well, I wasn't concerned because we just didn't have money. Right.

1:03:17Griffin Newman:It's like you need to make the movie.

1:03:17David Sims:We just need to make the movie. There was like no principal stance that could be taken. But the other thing he said was he kept saying, but I got the guys. I knew I cast the right people. De Niro and Keitel are...

1:03:29Griffin Newman:It's not an act. They're New York guys. David Proval, they find him at this John Voight workshop as with Richard Romanos, but they're both Brooklyn. They're New York guys. These guys have a shared language. Amy Robinson is from New York.

1:03:40David Sims:If I put them in the same room, even if that room's in LA instead of New York, they're going to talk like they're in New York. That's what the audience will connect to.

1:03:47Griffin Newman:They shot, they did 10 days of rehearsals in New York. They shot all the interiors in Los Angeles, a fair amount of the exteriors, including the big crash at the end too. Then they did some hallways and the beach in New York. And the weirdest, we were talking about this before we recorded, when De Niro's shooting the gun on the roof, the roof is New York, because you can see the Empress Dipp building, but the window is Los Angeles. And so like, there's no establishing shots, right? There's no, like, they didn't have time for that. They shot the whole movie in about 27 days.

1:04:22David Sims:This movie has so much accidental language like that, where there's something that you don't even clock the first time about the fact that it's not giving you those establishing shots, that you're just in the places without a feeling of being eased into them. That is just a result of them not having the time to shoot establishing shots in New York, but it becomes its own language. And then the handheld stuff is just like, we didn't have time for fucking tracking shots. We didn't have money for the equipment to do anything more complicated. And you need longer shots. You need scenes playing out in longer takes.

1:04:55David Sims:And you need the camera being able to just move really quickly from one focus to the other. Because that's the only way we're getting our pages done. And the DP on this movie, remind me his name.

1:05:05Griffin Newman:So the DP on this movie's name is Kent L. Wakeford. It was his first movie. He was like a commercial director. Done documentaries and stuff. I think like with the handheld, Altman famously saw it at or I don't know how famously, but saw it at New York Film Festival and said that if he he would have done tracking shots instead of the handheld. And Scorsese was just like, well, if we had, we'd still be shooting it out. Right.

1:05:30David Sims:Right. Right. The other thing Wakefield said was like there wasn't Wakeford, that there was no intentional strategy. But then even when they started watching dailies, it was like, oh, this feels anxious. Yeah. This is a camera language that we've landed on just out of necessity, but it actually is reflecting the energy we want. So then they lean into it. And everything is like that, where it's like, we're doing it this way because we don't have any other options. And then they look at it and they're like, this is a miracle. This actually is better than we could have planned. I don't know how he feels about it now, but I think immediately afterwards, he kind of thought, of course, he thought it was like a little sloppy, you know.

1:06:04But like, it's what I love about it is how like handmade it is. And for me, this is going to be my wildest take of all. But to me, I prefer this to The Godfather. To me, they're very similarly about like— They're such different movies.

1:06:17Griffin Newman:Yeah. It's like, this is the termite Godfather. Yeah. This is like— Right. The Godfather's like the porterhouse, and this is a burger or whatever. You know, like, I mean, they're so different. Like, I love them together.

1:06:28David Sims:I've never loved The Godfather while also never denying its power. Like, I have no complaints about it, but it's just not— It's brutal. Wow, we're going to get killed. No, it's fine.

1:06:39Griffin Newman:Slash movies? Yeah, it's not your movie. That was a big movie for Teen David. I cannot deny it. I love The Godfather. Godfather is great.

1:06:45David Sims:But this is way more my vibe. It's also like that roughness you're talking about is like what people are still chasing today. Like the Safdie's careers are built on can we figure out a way to get back to that feeling? Wait, I was wondering which Safdie's movie is Mean Streets. Is it Daddy Long Lake? Yeah, it's Daddy Long Lake. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right, because that's the personal one.

1:07:07Griffin Newman:Yeah, it's the personal one. And it's something like Heaven Knows What is so about drugs and addiction and stuff. That's more fucking New York, New York. And that they all weirdly become like... Heaven Knows What is their New York, New York. What am I talking about? I sound like an idiot.

1:07:25David Sims:Go ahead, Daddy Long Legs. No, Marty Supremus, they're condemned. No, I was just going to say that the other movies become kind of genre movies. because they start to get so into the kind of like chase structure, the outrunning thing. Go, go, go, right. Which this has that narratively of like, when is shit going to catch up to Johnny Boy? But the movie doesn't have the narrative engine of they're getting closer.

1:07:50Griffin Newman:I said this to you when I came in. Read the Wikipedia synopsis. It's four paragraphs. The final three paragraphs of the last 15 minutes of the movie. There's nothing else. There's no plot in the movie before then because it's just hanging out.

1:08:01David Sims:The first paragraph is a bird's eye overview of the table setting of the movie. And he's dating this girl and he's got Johnny boy and all that.

1:08:09Griffin Newman:And then he's torn between Catholicism and gangsterism. Devoted to 15 minutes. Anyway, at the end, they try to fucking get some money from Johnny boy and it all pops off. Like, that's all that happens in the movie. There's no complex structure here. I mean, it's just about like the ending. And they're banished. And I feel like that happens in, I like not to bring back the Safdies, I feel like that happens in it too. They like end up leaving. That is like, like daddy long legs. But yeah, like it's, yeah, not a lot happens. It is kind of a hangout movie. You hang out in the club with Johnny Boy and the boys.

1:08:39Griffin Newman:You hang out with the mob a little bit. And then you hang out in the church. And you hang out with Teresa in her apartment.

1:08:45David Sims:I was also thinking a lot while watching this of Mikey and Nikki. Oh, meet you in the graveyard. Right. It's like, here's the one who's a little bit more of a straight arrow. Here's the fuck up.

1:08:55Griffin Newman:Why can't you fucking stop it? Right.

1:08:57David Sims:And as much as that's like a one crazy night movie that has hangout elements, that movie is also a funereal march. That movie has the narrative engine of, you know this is going somewhere bad. And Mean Streets, even though everyone's kind of saying, like, you gotta get Johnny Boy under control, it doesn't feel like it's pushing you towards some obvious outcome.

1:09:18Griffin Newman:Mikey and Nikki also, you're kind of like, they've been doing this dance for so long. They're older. Right. This has become untenable. Like, Mean Streets is a little bright. They're young, and it's just kind of this, like, you gotta pick your friends moment of, like, are you really gonna stick with this guy? like can you be a grown up

1:09:34David Sims:that's the thing it doesn't feel like well obviously this movie is going to end with either Johnny Boy getting killed or killing everyone else you're like there's a scenario in which this guy just stops hanging out with Johnny Boy and that's the end of the movie is Johnny Boy fun?

1:09:46Griffin Newman:do we want to hang out with Johnny Boy?

1:09:47David Sims:he's really fun to watch

1:09:48Griffin Newman:hell yeah fun to watch hell yeah when I was a younger man I used to just love the chaos of the character like is it I mean this movie's sort of about when you start to get a little you know like hey could we actually just hang out without you doing something insane like one time, right?

1:10:04David Sims:Getting a little bored of it. One of my best friends in high school was very much a Johnny boy. A Johnny boy. And I was very much the Charlie to his side. Yeah, I would gravitate to those types because they're fun and exciting. There was something about the like adjacency to danger. Sure. Even if I never was the person getting into danger and if anything, I felt like I was the one sort of trying to moderate him. But there was something, I don't know, as a very neurotic, anxious person about watching someone right next to you cross the lines constantly, you know? Yeah. Or just, like, push things to the extreme.

1:10:39Griffin Newman:But I see it now, and he's just so sad and clearly suffering. Johnny Boy? Yeah. Yeah. Is he, wow. Because I think he's suffering because he is stuck. He is stuck. He's stuck in his position. He really, he can't get the job, right? Right. with Charlie's uncle. Charlie keeps denying him. Because he's too chaotic. The mom doesn't want that. Like, they don't want those guys. Right, right. But he can't be honorable like his friends.

1:11:10David Sims:Right, right. Sure. My take is slightly different, which is that he... Everyone's looking at him like, is this guy fucking dumb? Doesn't he realize that he's, like, putting his neck out there, right? That he's not playing this... that shit's going to catch up to him eventually. And I think for him, it's like, what's the fucking alternative? Right. What's the end game? There's not, like, none of the options available to me seem interesting, so why don't I just do what's fun to me? Like, I think it's less that he's sad and that he's trapped and more that there's something he finds freeing in the idea of, like, then I'll just, like, fucking be an instinctual hedonist in a way, you know?

1:11:52David Sims:Like, let me do whatever is most interesting to me at any given moment because the long game just doesn't seem worth playing to me. The long game is a dead-end job. Right. Right.

1:12:02Griffin Newman:Yes. So when they're making this movie, I just want to say in the Lower East Side, the few days that they are, people would come up to them and see the title on the clapper and be like, the movie, nothing wrong with these streets. Call it nice streets. Yeah, these streets aren't so mean. Yeah. What's your fucking problem? They get into a fight with them. What is the matter with you? He sees the title as an homage to like a Cagney movie. You know, right? Like, you know, like to a Warner Brothers gangster movie or whatever. Wait, I think it has a different reference.

1:12:35David Sims:It's a Raymond Chandler essay called The Simple Art of Murder. And it has the line, but down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. So it's about, it's about, it's about Charlie. Yeah, right. That makes sense. The Mean Streets is about like, yeah.

1:12:50Griffin Newman:But it also sounds, I mean, Scorsese is the one saying, like, I was trying to make a kind of homage to those gangster movies of like, you know, it's a punchy title.

1:12:58David Sims:But Jaycock showed him the essay and said, like, that's a good fucking title. Right. And it does have that kind of.

1:13:03Griffin Newman:It's better than Season of the Witch.

1:13:04David Sims:But it has that thing like White Heat where you're just like, those two words are interesting together. Oh, man. White Heat's so normal. I love that movie. Well, speaking of, can we talk about the gangster movies? Yes, please. I think something that he said is that the big movies, the big like Warner's movies that they would watch were Public Enemy and Little Caesar. And he said that he hated Little Caesar. He thought it was like vulgar, very overdone, heavily acted, but loved Public Enemy.

1:13:34Griffin Newman:Little Caesar is Edward G. Robinson, right? Edward G. Robinson. So that's Mervyn LeRoy. And then Public Enemy is William Wellman. So this was the other person who's really important for this movie and for Scorsese is Andrew Saris and the cinema guy, the auteurist. Because when these guys were coming up, it was Andrew Saris and these French guys were appreciating all these like movies that they grew up with. These like junkie movies, like movies that at the time were not seen as like Scorsese. Yeah, they were being just on TV. Crime movies, Western. Totally. Yeah, they were like, and so he was figuring out the ones that he liked and the ones he didn't.

1:14:15And so he was going to, you know, no offense to Mervyn Leroy, but he was not a Mervyn Leroy guy. He was like a William Wellman guy. He was a Fuller guy. He was a Hawks and Ford guy. And so that's really important to figuring out the films, these same films that all feel junky, but some of them are really good and some of them are not. And he was specifically, Public Enemy was about Irish people, but he was like, we can still relate with this, even though it's about Irish gangsters.

1:14:42Griffin Newman:Right, because that's Cagney. Public Enemy is like young Cagney. Yeah, exactly. And it's like what he was really, there's actually also some like street noises. I don't think it's a festival, but something like that. He said he was really influenced by the way that film used popular music in the background. So it was not score, it was source music. The last shot is a record player.

1:15:03David Sims:Sure. And like that was like important for him. So it was important for him to bring in the music because we talked about Jonathan Kaplan. But Jonathan Kaplan probably also helped get all this music. He was the music supervisor. Right. This was the soundtrack he wanted for Who's That Knocking at My Door. He was always like, my movies are going to have a soundtrack that reflects the music of my life. He did not have the budget to get any songs for that movie. Yeah. This one he said it somehow was only like$65 ,000,$75 ,000 for the soundtrack. Of which$15 ,000 was just to the Rolling Stones. $30 ,000.

1:15:38David Sims:$30 ,000.

1:15:38Griffin Newman:The Stones was$15 ,000 each. And they have both Jump and Jack Flash and Tell Me. Yeah. They have Be My Baby, which is the most important one. Yeah. And they have various other, you know, but like Be My Baby was the one that he was like, that obviously was the song. Like we needed that one. Yeah. Those female singing groups right before the Beatles, like that's his music.

1:15:58David Sims:Linklater said a thing in that DJ talk I thought was really interesting where he was like, Like, there are things like Easy Rider that come before this that have famous soundtracks and contemporary soundtracks. He was like, every other music, movie that used popular songs up until this point, it felt like the soundtrack was above the movie. Right. And Mean Streets, to me, feels like the first movie where the music is coming out of the film. Yeah. And Scorsese said, like, yeah, it was important that it's like you're seeing, even when it's not supposed to be diegetic within a scene, that you get the sense that it could be.

1:16:35David Sims:And that often enough you point at this is coming from a jukebox or whatever. It does invent this shit. It does. You can hear the pop and the hiss. He said these were actually his records. Right. Like with bringing a baby. Which is a huge difference, right? It's not just. No, not bringing a baby.

1:16:51Griffin Newman:Bringing a baby. the music thing, I just, it's, I was saying it to my wife last night. I'm like, I was just like, I know this sounds so boring, but like no one had ever done this before. No, it's so true. Like it's, and it seems like the most, like, what do you mean no one had ever like put pop music in a movie before? But it's like kind of no one really done that yet. Not this way, not in this sort of, but the thing is, it's hard to watch this movie and not see all the people who ripped it off. Like Sam Levinson. all the terrible copies that we've gotten we've gotten so far all the all the is one of our great he just released a magnificent new season of his great show euphoria right we've got like we've and the you know the horror movies with the ironic pop music you know and like this and every trailer would like the slowed down like hit song or whatever

1:17:47David Sims:someone's definitely done that right has someone done that and then the film flickers and then a knife cuts. I think it's in, I haven't seen it, but I think it's in like Barbarian or something, right? I think, maybe, is there a movie? There's a lot of baby stuff in that movie. It would make sense.

1:18:02Griffin Newman:Yeah, it's in Barbarian. Yeah. Oh, okay. And so, but like, the thing that's interesting is that, like, and then all the guys, the better than Sam Levinson, I feel like all the, the Gen X guys, all these like, mixtape guys, you know? I kept thinking

1:18:17David Sims:while watching this, it is crazy how much of this movie is in the DNA the early Wes Anderson stuff. Yeah, Wes Anderson, PTA, honestly, Tarantino. And much more. Also, Sofia Coppola. These are people who wrote to mixes, to pop mixes. But the thing is, those were from all over. Those were from all over. They were from all eras. And it really was like a mixtape or something. And they would write in the same way Scorsese would to write the scenes to these songs. But the thing that's different about Meastries is it's capturing a specific era. It's like present tense. It's capturing the 60s and the early 70s.

1:18:57And like those songs, Bill Spector and those stones have been used in these like other kind of mixtape things. But this is something we've gotten away from, which is like capturing a specific era.

1:19:10David Sims:I mean, that's what like Linklater does with Dazed and Confused. You know, it makes sense that he talks about how much that soundtrack felt like eye-opening to him. But, you know, Scorsese won our Mark Madness thing. Marty. It almost came down to him and Wes Anderson. True. And there was a nerd part of me that really wanted to see that matchup happen for the final two. Sure. Because there's that article I'm obsessed with that I think Esquire Magazine did in 1999 that was, who's the next Scorsese? We've decided Scorsese is the definitive filmmaker of the last 50 years. you know the second half of the 20th century this was after Bottle Rock exactly

1:19:49Griffin Newman:and they had like a bunch it was like the Wachowskis were in this people made their case they asked like a bunch

1:19:53David Sims:of different film scholars and critics and then they asked Scorsese and he said Wes Anderson he said Wes Anderson off of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and when he

1:20:02Griffin Newman:shall I tell you all the nominees because it's crazy

1:20:04David Sims:yes I know Andrew Sarris nominated Kevin Smith yes which his essay is fascinating because he's like I know this one sounds crazy right it's basically on the strength of chasing Amy and if he pursues this. Yeah. Is he far from paradise? What is he? I don't know.

1:20:23Griffin Newman:Kenneth Turan nominated David O. Russell, which is interesting because David O. Russell, I could see that at that time. But that's more obvious this guy is going for that nervy comic energy. Todd McCarthy nominated Paul Thomas Anderson. Sure. Tom Carson nominated Alexander Payne. Sure. Although I don't really see that in Payne's work at all. But okay. Elvis Mitchell nominated the Wachowskis, which I think is a fun pick by Elvis. And then Martin E says Wes.

1:20:46David Sims:And he, you know, after Gene Siskel dies, Scorsese does the best of the decade episode with Ebert. Yes.

1:20:57Griffin Newman:I've watched it multiple times. It's so good.

1:20:59David Sims:But he puts Bottle Rocket on his, like, top 10 of the 90s. Of the 90s, right. He was, like, one of the early champions. And I think versus a lot of these filmmakers who were more clearly influenced by Scorsese and the type of film they were making and the subject matter, he saw like this guy is making movies about his own life and his own worldview that is more analogous to what I did and also the way he is experimenting with form and language and this movie is it's obviously not symmetrical but like Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are a lot rougher around the edges than everything becomes from Earl Tannenbaum's on and even just like the colors of the bar and the energy of the characters and their costumes yes it's like so much of of wes anderson starts here weirdly you know i've never seen the horse thief i haven't either you know

1:21:51Griffin Newman:that the on that list and he's like my number one is this like tibetan movie called the horse thief and i'm like i've always like i gotta watch that what else did he have on that the puppet master he uh he's got uh malcolm x fargo crash uh bottle rocket breaking the waves bad lieutenant Eyes Wide Shut Thin Red Line Borrowed Life and The Horse Thief Borrowed Life is a Chinese or Taiwanese movie that I've also never seen

1:22:22David

1:22:22David Sims:Yes Scott back from Spain Okay lovely and I'm feeling it What are you feeling? Too much Hamon Too much siestaing But it's the

1:22:31Griffin Newman:year of

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1:25:12Griffin Newman:Mean Streets. Should we talk about it? Because, I mean, we've talked about the production just planning. Yeah, well, let's talk about, well, like, back to what you were saying about Wes Anderson and about this as being a very personal thing. I mean, I think they're both also big fans. They're big supporters of, like, classic films. You see those references. But they're also just, like, finding, like, a color and movement to express emotion in biography. Right. And that's kind of what Scorsese has said about this in like the, you know, the commentary for the criterion, I think from the old commentary when I first saw it in like 2004 or something.

1:25:55He says it's hard to describe this as a film. He feels like instead it's like the final culmination of everything I was to do and who I am.

1:26:03David Sims:Yeah. Yeah. There's that synthesizing of personal experience and all the films he had studied. and even you talking about him trying to study and figure out which gangster films dug in on him and which ones bounced off of him. It's like, well, there's two silos. It feels like there are the people where he's recognizing the craft. He's recognizing the formalism of what they're doing and how they're able to express contradictory things through the language of the filmmaking. And then there's the people like Fuller where it's like, what's going on with this guy? You know, there's like some psychology that's seeping into the movie of a personality that you cannot get out of their system, even if they're doing for hire work.

1:26:44For sure, but for Fuller, it was also specifically the movement. And that's when we're talking about this film and we're talking about the difference between, like, who's that knocking. This film moves. It has, like, this, like, dynamic, and I think he called it, like, an involved camera. And obviously we talked about it's, like, handheld. We've got that weird, he's got Harvey Keitel, like, on a dolly. Yeah, where he's, like, going through.

1:27:07Griffin Newman:But he's drunk. It's just like wearing it like a harness. That's so fun. Yeah, I love that shot. Like before there was Steadicam, they invented it. There's this thing. But he said he was really inspired by Fuller, specifically like Shock Corridor and like Park Row because there's all this like movement. Park? Yes. Are you kidding me? I've never seen it. I've seen Shock Corridor.

1:27:25David Sims:I've never seen Park Row. Master. Oh my God. It's a masterpiece. I'm not a huge Fuller.

1:27:29Griffin Newman:Like I like Fuller a lot, but I'm not an expert on Fuller.

1:27:32David Sims:I feel like I've seen like three or four Fuller movies. I want to hit some more of those. What a loser I am. Fuller blank check.

1:27:37Griffin Newman:before Shutter Island. I mean, I've seen like Shock Hoard or Naked Kiss. Obviously, I've seen, you know, Big Red One and, you know, the later ones. Oh, okay. So Park Row, like... Park Row is an early one. I mean, I love Park Row. I used to work on Park Row. Yeah. It's a newspaper movie, I assume. It's totally a newspaper movie. It's like the newspaper movie. It also has... Okay, we'll do another thing in there. It also has... Like, I would like to do a review of that film just listing all the classic cocktails because there's so many. Anyway, it's a great movie. Yeah, so it was... again, like, for Fuller, it was like the movement.

1:28:10David Sims:But hiring a documentary DP, and Scorsese also having come off of being a cameraman himself on Woodstock, where he's holding a camera and feeling that urgency of, fuck, something's happening here. Can we catch it in time? Yeah. It feels like the movie has that energy despite being a scripted film. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of the camera being worried it's not going to catch the thing. Yeah, I mean, he was editing docs the Scorsese was. So it totally makes sense that that combination of that. But it's interesting because this guy, I don't know, I saw an interview and he was talking, they were asking him about like the lighting setups and stuff.

1:28:51I just get the feeling that Scorsese told him what to do because he was saying, oh, why the red in the bar? And he's like, that's just what it seemed like to me. I'm like, you liar. This is totally Marty. This is Duel in the Sun. This is the red shoes. This is like Gone with the Wind. This is Marty.

1:29:10David Sims:I do also agree with him that that's how bars feel. If you take a picture in a bar, it might not look like this. Yeah. But that's what it feels to be inside a bar. No, it's true. It's also there. The movement and the energy of the movie feels like versus Altman, who's like, you know, a god for me. But what I love about the Altman tracking shots is they do feel like a god telling you this is the interesting thing. You might not be drawn to this at first, but I'm slowly going to push your focus over here. Mean Streets is like a panic of can this movie keep up with its characters? You know, you feel the urgency and also the stress of they might be moving too fast.

1:29:54David Sims:They might leave the frame.

1:29:55Griffin Newman:Well, and Charlie is so alienated from, or is so increasingly alienated from his only world, which is these bars and these streets, these mean streets. And like, I think it's just like shots like the Dolly shot just are so good at making him feel a little alienated or separate in a way. Like it's so, and just then the calm of the church, like you, I would hang out at the fucking church. Like if I was, like if I had to grow up in Mulberry City. It looks nice, sure. It's quiet. Yeah, right. It's just like, okay, finally, I can, like, read a book and sit down.

1:30:29David Sims:Well, so Scorsese's, like, a kid where the asthma is so bad that it's like, if I get in a fight, I might die. You know? Like, if someone punches me the wrong way and it takes a while for someone to pull my body up.

1:30:40Griffin Newman:It's in the dock and it's in all, you know, it's like, he was born in Flushing, right? And they lived in Queens. And then they were kicked out of Queens because his dad, like, got in a fight with the local, like, mob. And in the dock, he's like, that felt like being kicked out of paradise. Kicked out of paradise. And like you feel it in this movie I just want the wide open streets of Flushing It's like still an urban environment But I just long for like the relatively open skies I mean and you know that's not a plot in this movie But like the way he makes New York feel In the like the San Gennaro like shots and all that Just like it's alive and it's cool And I'm watching it being like ah fuck it Yeah New York this rocks But like it's overwhelming

1:31:19David Sims:But he also I mean I saw him say in the interview Maybe it was in the Linklater thing as well, that like the entire social life was built around these after hours clubs. Yeah. Where ostensibly what was driving you was the pursuit of women. Right. But women were rarely at these places. Why would they fucking go? You were hoping that one might show up almost by accident that night. What, do you want to drink Rolling Rock with degenerates? Right. So he's like more often you're there with degenerates and you're either recounting your victories with women in the past, which are probably bullshit. Right.

1:31:49David Sims:Right. Or you're telling people your aspirations of what you want to do with women someday. Yeah.

1:31:54Griffin Newman:Or you're just like getting in a fight over pool.

1:31:56David Sims:And he said all these people still basically live with their parents because even though they were driven by sex, it was like if you're living on your own, that's an admission that you're living in sin. Right. It's like the only reason you would have your own apartment is so you could have sex there, which is a thing you like can't do. Even if you're talking about it all the time, you can't be that visible about it. and like he was like the guys who moved moved around the corner you know like the idea of moving to the village

1:32:24Griffin Newman:well it's the old joke like you bid your mother tearful goodbye give her a big hug and then you moved downstairs right you moved to the apartment downstairs

1:32:32David Sims:and the implication is you need your own space you know and maybe it's more you need private space because the work you're doing is violent and unseemly and you need to hide that from your parents but also they're close enough that your mom's gonna fucking come over and make your bed and do your laundry you're still basically it's like living in their garage

1:32:49Griffin Newman:you know? Does Johnny Boy just need money because he's a gambler? Like that's where he's blowing his money? Yeah. I think so. It's mostly just that right? Like it's just like on the horses or whatever. Because he's always trying to get ahead.

1:33:00David Sims:I know. It's tough. But there's no end goal. Like it's important that he's not. Johnny doesn't want to like open a barber shop. Right. He's not. You know what my dream is to someday make enough money that I can move to Boise. You know? But he doesn't.

1:33:13Griffin Newman:There's a farm I want to buy. He can't dream any path forward. His friend's a business owner, right? The other one's working for his uncle. The other one is, like, I guess, making his way up as far as being a maid guy. And he's just kind of stuck.

1:33:26David Sims:He's the loser of the group. The Carradine bar fight, right, that basically plays out without dialogue largely and is like brother actors and ending in a death. Carradine on Carradine violence. Carradine on Carradine action. David and Robert. Yes. Right, yes, yes. And that's what these guys... Recently dead, died, Robert, right? R.I.P. Yes. But that's what these guys are witnessing. And it's like, so right. At any fucking moment, a guy can just walk in here drunk with some petty grievance and shoot you and it's over. Like, what's the fucking point? There is that like, even if you're trying to stay clean out of this stuff and you're not becoming a made man or working, your adjacency to these things puts you on like the battlefront to a certain degree.

1:34:10David Sims:and Scorsese said that that scene is based off of a thing that happened at one of those clubs in his 20s and he was like and we went to the other club that night but it was like a coin flip there were two places that we went back and forth to and we picked the other one and then heard the next day did you hear some guy just came in he got drunk and he was upset and he shot that dude and that guy's dead and it's like that's it could have been us by the difference of like which block we walk down. Are we in trouble? Are we off course?

1:34:41Griffin Newman:No, we're fine. This is what this podcast is. No, I mean, also, like, what other big scenes should we be talking about? Because, again, this is not a film with a very, very, you know, heavy plot. Let's talk about just how personal it is. Like, from the very beginning, we have, like, a scene about German lenses and Jap adapters. Like, you know, we've got Super 8 footage. We've got, you know, it's so about Marty. I just, yeah, I love the mook scene. The mook scene There's a fight that he witnesses at a bar Which is what happens in the movie And it starts with The bartender called you a mook And everyone starts fighting And then someone says what's a mook And the guy's like I don't know You know I looked it up It means big mouth It's like Neapolitan Sort of slang for like Talking too much big mouth There's a Reddit thread That is like every possible iteration of, like, did Scorsese invent it or where did it come from?

1:35:41And it obviously goes somewhere,

1:35:42Griffin Newman:but it's... According to Marty, he later realized, he didn't know at the time, that it's Neapolitan. Yeah. And he is a Sicilian. You know, the Sicilians, the Neapolitans always hated each other and Neapolitans, you know, Naples. And, like, it was a Neapolitan word for, like, a loudmouth Sicilian. A mook. Like, mooka.

1:36:01David Sims:I mean, it is that thing. And I've learned this a couple times, unfortunately on mic on this podcast, but as someone who was raised on like Bugs Bunny and like old comedy shit, I was like so obsessed with all the slang of mid 20th century guys. And then you unpack it and you're like nine out of 10 are like racially charged. Like all these sort of up yours names that the wisecracking characters will throw at people. But you're right that people don't even understand what they're saying. And it's like they're throwing these Molotov cocktails and not quite sure what the impact of them are. You brought Wes Anderson, one of my favorite sort of generic unknown racial epitaphs is when in Royal Tenenbaums when he's like, did you just call me Coltrane?

1:36:43Yes.

1:36:44Griffin Newman:One of the fucking funniest things is in any Wes Anderson movie ever.

1:36:48David Sims:It's so good. Those kind of things where you're like, is that racist? It feels bad.

1:36:52Griffin Newman:The way that Hackman reacts, it feels pretty racist. Right. Right. No, it's so great though. But I love these sort of like. It's so funny. It sort of abstracts some of the language we use. But I have to say, I did say it was about racism. I do want to do my due diligence and say that Mean Streets was the first film to be rated by CORE, the Congressional Congress on Racial Equity. Yeah, it was the first one. And it was declared extremely offensive for its black perspective and because of the stripper and the policeman who's like takes a ride. Oh, sure. I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, I think I would think I would say, I mean, I, again, I really do think it's about these, like, you know, these unknown racial epitaphs.

1:37:38It's about, it's about racism. It's about like that with morality. But I will say what I do find really offensive is the gay couple. That's just. Oh, sure.

1:37:47Griffin Newman:And that must be so far from Marty's understanding at this point. Yeah. I don't think of gay characters in Marty movies. Also, we should call it De Niro's father was gay. De Niro's father was gay.

1:37:58David Sims:Yes. That's another fascinating part of it. I don't know how much that's being discussed at the time. No, no, no, no. But that's what I'm saying. Like, De Niro does have a model in his life. And obviously, he was married to a woman at one point. He was out later in his life, although it was sort of more quietly. Who knows what De Niro knows about his father at this point, what his father self-identifies as and whatever. But his father was a man he lived with who was a more realistic, you know, version of a West Village artistic homosexual man in the 60s, 70s. And this movie presents what feels like the most kind of laugh-in version of that character.

1:38:38Totally. Wait, sidetrack, do you know his mom dated Manny Farber?

1:38:41David Sims:No. Did you know his mom? Yeah. And when they were just like, you know, bohemians in the village and stuff. So I had said that this was like the termite to the godfather. So that's like Manny Farber is one of the great film critics and the whole termite versus white elephant is him. And I guess Manny Farber came up to, he really liked Mean Streets. I don't know what point he reviewed it, but he really liked it. At one point he came up to De Niro at a party and was like, oh, I remember you when you were a kid in like 14th Street. And De Niro just ran away. Wow. Yeah, because I guess his parents split up pretty early.

1:39:16David Sims:Yeah. I think there's something too of like, what, I guess these guys would be like third generation Americans. theoretically? These guys? Yeah. Like their grandparents came, you're saying. Their grandparents immigrated. Yeah, I know what you mean. Their grandparents immigrated probably with their parents as young adults. Yeah, I mean,

1:39:37Griffin Newman:well, Marty's parents were, Catherine was born in New York. I forget about the dad, Charles. Second or third. Yeah, he was born in New York. Their parents were immigrants.

1:39:45David Sims:This sense of this inherited tribalism that isn't even actually motivated by anger in talking about like the racial dynamics of this movie that it feels more like they're just worried about I don't understand what's going on outside of these three blocks, these clubs. The 10 people I know, you know? It feels deliberate. Yeah, it feels like really this changing, like you were saying, like this time period. And even the kind of like corrupt black cop character, it feels like what is driving him is just like, I just don't even want to have to deal with you guys. I love that guy. The way he like accepts the bribery is just like, can you please just make it easy for me to disengage from this?

1:40:26David Sims:I want to just let this be whatever the fuck it is. It's so funny.

1:40:29Griffin Newman:He's like, yeah, I'm going to Jersey.

1:40:31David Sims:You know what?

1:40:32Griffin Newman:Actually, I'm going to Philly.

1:40:33David Sims:Right. But the way he's sort of is just kind of exhausted and being like, actually more money. I changed the ride home. That's where I think the movie is kind of knowingly about how limited their worldview is.

1:40:49Griffin Newman:I mean, they... They live in like forced blocks. Right. The way Teresa's character talks about moving uptown. Yeah.

1:40:57David Sims:She's leaving the country. Yeah, exactly. Good call. Scorsese said that'd be the equivalent of a girl telling you she was moving to Ohio. You're never going to see her again. That's impossible. Right. Can we talk about Kytel a bit?

1:41:10Griffin Newman:Yeah, you know what? I mean, I assume we... We're recording this one a week before. Yeah. Was that knocking because Miriam's in town. I assume we talked about Harvey a little there.

1:41:18David Sims:But Harvey, very important. From this moment on, now that he's discovered De Niro, Keitel becomes more of a stock company player, and more often he is presented as a villain or a rival.

1:41:30Griffin Newman:Like, he's in Alice and Taxi Driver. But he's right. He's a fucking pedophile pimp in Taxi Driver.

1:41:36David Sims:He's literally Judas. But between Taxi Driver and Last Temptation, he doesn't work with Marty. Right. And then is there anything between Last Temptation and Irishman? I was trying to remember if there was, like, one thing.

1:41:49Griffin Newman:maybe not

1:41:50David Sims:it feels like every time he uses him after that other than Irishman which feels like a kind of like isn't this nice to put them all at the same table again I know the other ones it feels like what he's using Keitel to be like I want to show that this guy has range right I want to test him and put him

1:42:06Griffin Newman:in a different light obviously like Scorsese was such a you know he loved bad lieutenant or whatever like he would he would pump you know praise other Harvey stuff

1:42:16David Sims:and I think they remained

1:42:17Griffin Newman:very close and still do. I wonder if Harvey's like, fuck you, why am I not, you know, why do I not get to be your De Niro? Like, why does De Niro get to be your star? On my rewatch, I really had that. I'm like, what happened to Catella after this? He's a great actor.

1:42:32David Sims:This is what struck me watching it, right? Yeah. Is like, it's interesting that he had this guy who was so much the stand-in for him, and then he picks this other guy who was so different from him, who becomes the driving force of his movies going forward, or at least a majority of them. And then you look at the filmography, And you're like, all of these movies are personal in that they are explorations of the things that clearly Scorsese wrestles with constantly. But his movies no longer, past this point, really feel like they're about characters that reflect him. They become explorations of his worldview.

1:43:05Griffin Newman:Yeah. And of his interests. Or like some psychologics. And also, he doesn't write as many movies. No. And when he does write, it's often an adaptation. You know, like something like Age of Innocence. Yeah. Like Gangs of New York.

1:43:19David Sims:But I wonder if part of that is him recognizing in the sort of like the forcefulness of what De Niro is able to do as Johnny Boy and putting a character that sort of exciting, that much of a wild card into the mix that he's like, I'm kind of a passive protagonist. I'm a guy who looks at the window and watches what's happening, who thinks about it, who will stand a little close to the danger but never actually place myself, you know, in real harm's way. And he wants to start to build movies around characters who are actively moving the plot. So then Keitel becomes sort of an odd duck, you know?

1:43:59David Sims:In a way that maybe his association with him was too strong at the beginning. Yeah, maybe you don't want to get locked into it,

1:44:05Griffin Newman:but then he gets locked into it with De Niro to some extent.

1:44:07David Sims:Which is why he then from that point on is like, Harvey, I'm going to ask you to play all sorts of wild different things. You're just an actor. I'm like throwing interesting challenges at. How do you feel about Harvey, Miriam? I like him. I mean, I was really like, what happened? Like, you know, I was thinking about he's got some great roles. I mean, he's Jewish, right? Yeah. And so that was the whole thing. It was this like Polish Jew.

1:44:27Griffin Newman:His parents were Russian Jews. Yeah. So he was like Brighton Beach guy. So first he was the stand in for Marty. And then, but I was, you know, just now when we were talking, I'm like, could Harvey Keitel have been in Casino? Yeah, totally. Like, in either role. Yes. I mean, it's interesting. Like, Harvey Keitel is a good actor. Yeah. If he's in a movie, it's usually good. Yeah. I mean, his performance. He's in lots of bad movies. Like, I mean, he just was one of those guys who I feel like just made five movies a year for 30 years, right? Like, 80s and 90s, like, he just says a zillion credits.

1:45:03Griffin Newman:and he can do big or he can do restrained. Like, you know, he doesn't feel like an egotistical actor to me. I,

1:45:14David Sims:there's a part of it. And some of this is conjecture on my part, right? But you look at him in like the 70s and the 80s. You look at the stuff he did with Toback, which is very Toback-y and, you know. Of course, yes. It is that he, for a while, I would say until the 90s, really wants to be the lead or the co-lead of the movie. And sometimes these guys do just get into a place where they're like, I'm willing to play the dilemma. I'm willing to play the side character or the villain for Marty, but otherwise I'd rather be the guy. And that sometimes can dictate the choices, you know? There's a lot of weird stuff in the 80s.

1:45:55With Keitel?

1:45:56Griffin Newman:Yeah. When was Piano? Was that the 90s? 93. I love that performance. It's a great performance. We've talked about a fair amount of 90s and 2000s, Kaiko. Right, because we've done Campion, so there's multiple, you know, Campion performances from him. What else have we talked about?

1:46:10David Sims:Well, of course, we did the National Treasure movies on Patreon, probably his two finest performances as Guy Behind Desk. But that's the thing. It's like, what's he doing there? The Declaration of Independence.

1:46:20Griffin Newman:I mean, there's like, right. And which is like, that's just like Thelma and Louise, right? Like, it's like, he does Thelma and Louise, and then he'll just like do that every so often ever since. of like, do you want me to play the tired cop, like clockers? He's good in clockers. Yeah. Like, and he's sort of the lead of clockers, but he's not really. Like, Mackay Pfeiffer is the lead of clockers. But Harvey's like the face. That's the other thing. That's like, right.

1:46:42David Sims:Tarantino and Spike Lee and all these other filmmakers using him almost in a mixtape way.

1:46:48Griffin Newman:He is so good in Reservoir Dogs.

1:46:50David Sims:Yeah, he's incredible. I've never seen it. You've never seen Reservoir Dogs?

1:46:54Griffin Newman:Why have you never seen Reservoir Dogs?

1:46:56David Sims:Is there an active avoidance Or have you just not gotten around to it I don't know I don't know

1:47:03Griffin Newman:It's like 90 minutes long They play it in rep cinemas constantly

1:47:08David Sims:And bars Yeah, exactly

1:47:13Griffin Newman:Kytel is incredibly good in it The whole thing with Reservoir Dogs Like Michael Madsen I assume you know Is kind of like the character That pops or whatever And Buscemi is being so funny And she's doing the James D Kind of thing Right, you know And Kytel is the lead He's the center Super emotional role, and he's so good.

1:47:28David Sims:And it's different, but it does feel like Tarantino is casting him because it's like using an impactful pop song, you know? Ah. There is—he becomes somewhat representational by the 90s for a lot of filmmakers who grew up inspired by the Scorsese movies. And then I think they'll—I don't know. They'll rework him in interesting ways. I mean, even the way Wes Anderson uses him is very fascinating. Wait, which one? Wes Anderson is the end? Fun in Budapest. Yes. Oh, I forgot about that. And he's also in Moonrise Kingdom as, like, the major troop leader at the end. They keep going up the ladder to who's the ultimate troop leader.

1:48:04David Sims:And then you reveal, like, old Harvey Keitel in little khaki shorts. And Keitel's, like, just have to say it. It's not even that he has a great face. He has one of the most fascinating skulls in history. Where you're just like, who has a head like this, right? He just doesn't look like anybody else. and it's hard to read him. It's really kind of fascinating to watch him listen to people because you can't really tell what's going on. And I think similarly when he talks, it sort of feels like a struggle to him. Not that it's nonverbal, but that it's really like an effort to get things out. It's funny because I feel like in press interviews, he's far more gregarious, that he is not a guy who's like incredibly self-serious or protective about his process.

1:48:58David Sims:But then on screen, he plays things that feel often a little bit closer to De Niro maybe as a guy, where this guy doesn't have the language to get what he wants to say out of his system. And also so much of that is just like Keitel's insane body, right? Yeah. I feel like he can also, I mean, maybe I'm just misjudging from certain roles, but I feel like there's like a dangerous eroticism to a lot of his performances. I don't really see with De Niro. Like, I feel like De Niro, De Niro's like, I'm sure a sexy guy, but there's not like a real sexuality within this world. He's weirdly sexual and feels transgressive.

1:49:32David Sims:And he also moves towards that. Right. Like in the roles he takes. But he's got this fucking pit bull thing. You know, he's got this kind of like perma frown. Yeah, I love his walk. And this furrowed brow. And he's so kind of weirdly like compressed. Yeah, he's like stockier, although I don't know if he was really stocky.

1:49:50Griffin Newman:Like, because they're all little guys.

1:49:51David Sims:This is all just how things read on camera, right? I know, it's how it reads on camera. But he's just a guy where you're just like, it's just fucking shoulders and biceps at a time where people in American movies aren't really built, you know? And it's not like he's like a jacked bodybuilder, but he always just had kind of like a weird spilling of muscles in his upper body. He's a funny body, and he shows it off a lot. He likes to show his penis. I've never thought about... Within the context of art. Harvey Cartel's body as much

1:50:17Griffin Newman:well like if you think of like Bad Lieutenant the sort of iconic him like you know when he's like yeah you know he has a funny and then the piano and stuff as Marie would would call out a very deep V too

1:50:29David Sims:I feel like those movies like Bad Lieutenant

1:50:32Griffin Newman:and the piano where he's getting naked

1:50:34David Sims:he's got he's got the V okay

1:50:37Griffin Newman:he's got like a

1:50:38David Sims:tiny little ripped tongue he's got the deep V Miriam is covering her mouth in shock and shame as she should I'm blushing. On the desk there, we have a postcard of Austin Powers frozen in ice because when we watched that movie, Marie Barty said, is Mike Myers cut? And then just kept calling out the deep V. Hytel obviously doesn't have the Austin Powers chest hair. Okay, other scenes we should talk about.

1:51:06Griffin Newman:How about the Vietnam vet party? That feels significant. Yeah. Speaks to the time that it's at. I mean, we're still in Vietnam. But then he gets drunk. Is that where he gets drunk? And he's like blessing. I think he's baptizing people. He's going around with water and baptizing people. But you were thinking specifically of the Vietnam thing of the era. The vet is clearly suffering from his experience there. And he attacks that woman. And then Keitel has that moment where he dances with her in the closet. it oh yeah i forgot about that oh that's weird it's so weird i don't know what to read from it yeah it feels like another story like that you know scorsese remembered or whatever and it like makes so much sense obviously if you threw a party for a vietnam vet and we're like let's set off a bunch of loud noises and streamers and shit that it was like obviously like could be very traumatic

1:52:03David Sims:for them yeah i mean i mean the literal opening of this movie is him lighting the candles in church right? Is that the opening shot? Yeah, I mean, the opening is the monologue. And the narration, which is Scorsese's voice, is you don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it. Rather than it being a movie where the pull is, is this guy going to follow faith? The movie's telling you up front while the guy is going through the motions and the rituals that this is kind of all, not that it's bullshit, but that it can't overpower the rest.

1:52:37David Sims:It's actually like an impossible battle that you've already lost. It's not that it's bullshit. It's just that you have like all these opportunities for like empathy and savior and saving people and like and and real testing of stuff. And then the real work isn't going to happen here in a theoretical space. It's going to happen in your actions outside in the world. Yeah. Yeah. One scene that we didn't talk about is most of this is scripted, but they would do like kind of like, you know, they would do like little sessions. then added into the script. But there is one like improv scene and it's like right after.

1:53:11David Sims:The trash can. Yeah. Yes. Oh no. Yeah, that might be. But I was thinking about when they go into the back room. So when De Niro first walks in, it's the stones and, you know, it's the slow motion and we're really in a Scorsese movie. And then they go into the back room and that's when they're like, they're like the Tuesday after, the Tuesday after this Tuesday, you know, and they're doing all this wordplay and talking about Joey Clams. No, Joey Scalett. No, they're the same person. Yay. and like this whole thing that was all improvised and that was something that um, Chris as he said he was really, I feel like he needed something there and he needed something to set the tone in the comedy and he was really influenced by like Abbott and Costello and Who's On First but also like the road movies and Bob Hope and and um, Bing Crosby and this like, you know, someone always trying to get one over but I think the wordplay is really key in that.

1:54:00I love that scene. The line

1:54:02Griffin Newman:where he's like, which girl? He's like My left or your left. We were sitting, we were on the same side. My left or your left. It's so good.

1:54:09David Sims:But it's all the same shit. It's like, it's rock music and it's like old vaudeville comedy dynamics and it's the language of how people fight with each other verbally. You know, it's all rhythm shit. It's rhythm and word selection, which I feel like are always the thing, like the metronome that his movies go off of. David Denby, when this came out, said that Scorsese has used improvisation better than anyone in American movies so far, which is an interesting line to me because a less of this movie is improvised than people think. It's really those two big moments. But a lot of what you said, there was a really solid script.

1:54:45David Sims:Then they would do rehearsals. And then if they came up with something good, an improv exercise, they would transcribe it and tighten it and just writing. A lot of times when there are these fucking famous moments in movies where people go like and do you know that was actually improvised? It's like that was improvised when they did the blocking rehearsal. Yeah. And then they wrote it into the sides and then they did it 80 times and they refined it. It's not like the moment you're watching is the one time that happened. And this is one where the improvisation is happening developmentally. But I think what they're getting at and even just the way Denby words that, it's like they're talking about improvisation like it's 3D or something.

1:55:21David Sims:Like there's this new technology in movies and people are like, is this a gimmick? Do you make whole movies out of improv? Is this something that you can use as part of the language. It's been going, it was going on for so long, like Gregory LaCava was doing it. Like, it's so interesting when people, like, people are, I mean, you know, if you guys have ever been to an awful Q &A, they're always like, was that improvised? That's everyone's fucking first question. It's so annoying. Just let the cameras roll, you know? But the answer is always, if people see something that sounds, it sounds to them like real dialogue, they want to believe it's improv.

1:55:56David Sims:And, you know, movies, you do fucking a thousand takes of everything. things are like iterative you know it's rarely like improv in the way you think of seeing a fucking improv show where two people are making up a scene from the get-go but i think versus a lot of these other things we're talking about where improv was used as like this is like an interesting formal experiment scorsese kind of figured out a way to harness the energy of improv into more conventional seasoning lightning in a bottle the whole thing is that's the other part of it. Right. If you're like Cassavetes, where those films are less improvised than people think.

1:56:34Yeah.

1:56:34David Sims:But they have the energy of the main purpose of the camera here is to capture what the actors are doing rather than say something with the camera themselves. I think in later Cassavetes movies, he does meaningful things visually, but it's really like serving the performances first and foremost. And to have a movie that has improv energy in it, but also has complicated camera moves, you know, has like three minute traveling shots through an apartment and things like that is where people start to feel like, oh, improv isn't an either or thing. I mean, all these conversations just fucking cycle themselves.

1:57:11David Sims:But it's like what kind of kills the American comedy movie in a way is they all felt really stagnant and high concept. And then improv comes in back into them and people enjoy that these movies feel riffy. but then they all start to feel really visually static because they need three cameras running at the same time to get what actually is a real improv riff.

1:57:41David?

1:57:42David Sims:Yes. Red alert. Uh-oh. There's been an outbreak. Biohazard. Of a new Patreon series. It's contagious. Oh, that's so true.

1:57:55Griffin Newman:It's been cooked up in the lab for your pleasure.

1:57:58David Sims:From the fine folks at the Umbrella Corporation, we are covering Resident Evil. The film franchise.

1:58:06Griffin Newman:Yes. We've got the first franchise. Six movies. Yes. That beautiful second franchise. How many? Six? Seven? It's got the one movie. Oh, it's got the one. We'll be covering all of them on Patreon, doing commentaries on, yes, the Resident Evil. Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, Retribution, the final chapter. Welcome to Raccoon City.

1:58:25David Sims:This is an exciting time. Zach Kregor, friend of the podcast, has a new Resident Evil coming out. We thought this was a good opportunity to revisit the history of Resident Evil movies.

1:58:34Griffin Newman:Why not? Why not? Why can't we? Why can't we? We can. Check in for that August 1st. And it's going to be running all the way through November 1st. Followed by your March Madness winner.

1:58:48David Sims:Dracula. Dr. Acula himself. so fun. So that's great. That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much.

1:59:06So are you guys all the Charlie in your bromance?

1:59:09Griffin Newman:Yes. Yeah. I'm not even Charlie. Am I the Charlie? Are you the Charlie in your male friendships? I don't want to go out with these people. Or maybe you're a Charlie. I feel like you have a little Johnny Boy sympathy.

1:59:20David Sims:I think I'm Amy Robinson. I love this. You're Johnny Boy. David's Charlie. I love this.

1:59:25Griffin Newman:Yeah. I mean I definitely I always Had less tolerance for the The guy who is like let's throw a firecracker In a mailbox I'd be like I'm going home Um I find this movie Invigorating because I love like New York movies I love how Marty tells Any story or whatever this has never been Like my favorite Marty because I don't relate to it very much Um but I do I love this movie though I gotta beef with this movie This is a big movie for my mom. My mom loves this movie. Why does your mom love it? Because she's a New York girl. Like, you know, I don't know. I think it was probably, what, this is 73, so she was 22.

2:00:03Griffin Newman:Yeah. Like, you know, she saw it at the right time, and it was a thundercrack kind of movie for her. Like, the later Martys are too fucked up, I think. Stuff like Taxi Driver. Like, she's seen Taxi Driver. Right. But she's like, oh, but those are so dark, and those are so violent. Mean Streets is sort of the appropriate amount of violent for her.

2:00:19David Sims:It is fascinating, too, where it is a movie where even living 50 years past its release date in a media landscape that is like permanently influenced by what this movie does, you feel like you're watching the Big Bang. It doesn't, you understand that what you're seeing is all of these things starting to crystallize for the first time. Everything he's synthesizing together and what he'll do in the rest of his career and how other people will be influenced by it. Like Bonnie and Clyde feels that way to me too, where even if you've seen all the movies that come after it, when you watch Bonnie and Clyde for the first time, you're like, I can tell this is them breaking the sound barrier in certain areas.

2:00:58David Sims:Same with this, totally, you're right. And there's stuff like MASH, which for how much I love Robert Altman, that's a movie that I think like you cannot watch without context of what it was coming out of and actually fully understand it because so much of what people like my father who saw it in 1970 and were like, this is just no one talked like this, Stories weren't structured like this. When you watch it now, it just feels kind of sloppy. And there's stuff in MASH that I think is incredible. There's stuff in MASH that is beyond retrograde. Sure. I haven't seen MASH in 20 years. But there's also a lot of it that's just kind of mushy.

2:01:31David Sims:MASH-y almost. David, five profundity points. But at the time, every single thing people were seeing was, that's never been on screen before. Nothing's ever felt like this. It's never sounded like this. It's never looked like this. And Mean Streets still has all of that power, even though we've seen everything it's influenced after. It also, I feel like, you know, your mom was the right age, like 22 or whatever. Like, it's just so captures the, like, in-jokes and language of a friendship group in your, like, late teens and early 20s. You know? Doesn't it?

2:02:04Griffin Newman:Of course. And though I never worked for the mob nor hung out at Italian American Social Club. And say that again. Let's make sure we have that on the record. I never worked for the mob yet. my phone number is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

2:02:17David Sims:I never yet is a funny sentence structure.

2:02:20Griffin Newman:They want to call me and offer me a job. I have never, and I mean never, worked for the mob. I would like one of those jobs, and I may be telling tales at a school here where you do not show up to it and get the money anyway. A no-show job, if they can give me one of those. One of those, please. Like a mob desk job? No, you know, a no-show job. Like the whole thing the mob does, where they're like, you know, we run this union now, and you're going to have five extra salaries. I wonder if the mob is in on podcasting yet. Well, I'm in the audio business. What do you want from me? Legitimate business.

2:02:53Griffin Newman:Hey, I talk to my friends.

2:02:54David Sims:What do you want from me? I make audio go boom. I turn heads into gum. Oh, boy. Wow. I was looking up letterbox logs for this movie. And there was one from Paul Schrader from 2019, the before times, where he just wrote, all caps, Mean Streets. Watched it tonight for the first time in almost 50 years. I'd first seen it in Rough Cut. What struck me most was how well I remembered it line for line, scene for scene, needle drop for needle drop, and how in place Marty's aesthetic was. I was tempted to think, quote, this director's been watching a lot of Scorsese films. Way back then, I knew it was very good.

2:03:33David Sims:I fancied myself a film critic after all, but I didn't realize it was a fucking Roman candle. Perfect. The Roman candle thing really stuck with me.

2:03:42Griffin Newman:Because it is not a movie with this very clear direction to it. It is firing off in all directions.

2:03:47David Sims:And he wasn't seeing it for what it was at the time because also he was part of the movement that it was coming out of. It's so funny. I know.

2:03:55Griffin Newman:It is so funny that Schrader and him and Scorsese start working together because Scorsese's the Catholic thing versus the Calvinist thing. Very different approaches to religious guilt and fervor. Yeah. they've made some good movies together. But speaking of Schrader, do you think that, like, I mean, because obviously... Do you think that his AI Facebook posts are good? Of course I do. I think they're hilarious. We love them. But do you think Scorsese, like, obviously, I don't think his screenplays are his strengths. And I actually think this is one of his strongest screenplays. Even though you're right, it doesn't do anything to say.

2:04:32Yeah, the language.

2:04:33Griffin Newman:Goodfell has the most incredible screenplay in the same way where you're like, Like, is this just improvised? Like, all these guys talking, like, did Scorsese really write this down? Yeah. I mean, what are his other screenplays? Now I want to look.

2:04:47David Sims:But this is, when Departed came out, I feel like he kept making the joke of, like, it took me 40 years, but I finally made a movie with a plot. Yeah. That he always was this guy who, you know, and he's very self-effacing about it, but he talks about it like, it's not even that I don't find that stuff interesting. I'm not good at it. Right. I don't know how to do it. I feel like I've told this story before. Okay. But on the set of vinyl, there was this point. I was in the worst thing Scorsese ever directed, Miriam. Let's wait to see Shine a Light. Okay.

2:05:17Griffin Newman:Let's wait to watch Shine a Light.

2:05:18David Sims:There was a moment in the pilot where there was a boardroom scene with like 15 speaking roles, which is the worst fucking thing in the world to shoot. It's stagnant. Everyone's at chairs. You have to get so much cross coverage. And then the angles are like, fuck, he delivers most of his lines to this guy at one end of the table, but one line to the other end of the table. so we need to get coverage from the other side as well just for that one line. And he comes in and they're like, Marty, what should we get next? And he stands there and he's sort of muttering to himself and he's like pointing and doing directions.

2:05:48David Sims:And he's trying to figure out the math on like what coverage are we still owed? What do I need? What would help me? And he just looks up and he goes, I've just never been good at this stuff. Right.

2:06:00Griffin Newman:Okay, so his scripts are Mean Streets Goodfellas. Wow, no screenplay credit between those two movies. Yeah. Age of Innocence. Casino. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know, and then like Silence, Killers of the Flower Moon, like more recently.

2:06:14David Sims:It's also obviously very hands-on with, his writers are his closest friends, his closest collaborators. He works with the same people often. Jake Cox. It's years and years of development. Cannavale was like, Marty, what the fuck are you talking about? You're Martin Scorsese. You know what coverage you need. And he was like, I really, I just don't have a head for that. and you realize not that he's being like falsely modest but much in the same way that like the anxious camera work is a byproduct of we don't have time to set up multiple shots that a lot of his language comes out of like I'm just not going to do the stuff that doesn't come to me innately I'm going to go to the stuff I feel like I can do better than anyone else and I think similarly he's like I'm not a tight plot construction guy you know and I can do it when I need to and when he does it, it's usually the things that are more conventional genre riffs like Cape Fear or Shutter Island where he's playing in the tradition of a type of movie and then what he's doing is having fun stylistically or making the performances unconventional within it.

2:07:16David Sims:But left to his own devices, it's like what he likes is finding a world. What he likes is like digging into the corners. What he likes is exploring every little sub-dynamic. But he's not someone who is into I think tight story construction. I do want to say as far as like coverage for this one i think because he'd worked on it for so long for like whatever eight seven years um he had drawn everything so he had done fucking artist so he's had done so but as far as like the actual coverage he brought in the boxcar bertha horman team to be like okay how do we do this like efficiently and stuff but yeah so he had drawn like every every scene and so he had a version in his head of what his perfect movie would look like yeah but then the reason you bring in the corman people is they are like the a team they are like the weirdos who know how to just like fuck well actually if we only have five minutes here's the way to do it like they exceed under pressure right also i want to say the different like what makes this film a little different than the rest is he edited it he edited this and right he's not credited because of

2:08:27Griffin Newman:guild rules but he says the original editor who is credited he's got a co-credit but there was a

2:08:33David Sims:guild rule that you couldn't be the sole editor of your own no he's not credited he's not like an additional editing or something i don't think he was credited but he did he said he edited it but

2:08:42Griffin Newman:he couldn't take credit yeah the original edit was terrible by whoever gets credit so this is like so so shoemaker felma shoemaker did um did his first one um who's not knocking but and then so and this one is like, is Marty without Thelma?

2:08:58David Sims:Yes. Right. Well, she's also like working on Woodstock for years. Yeah.

2:09:04Griffin Newman:But Woodstock comes out in 70. Okay. Which he worked on too, obviously. But she is sort of what, and that's where they reconnect. Yeah. But she doesn't come back to him until Raging Bull. Yeah, which is crazy. Like Taxi Driver is edited by somebody else. I forget. Yeah, Marshall Lucas and Todd Rolfe. Oh, I forgot.

2:09:21David Sims:Wait, I actually have some interesting points about Marshall Lucas I'm going to make in the next episode. What were you going to say, Miriam? Well, you can edit this out because it's probably you're going to get to it. But is New York, New York very bounced? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. New York, New York is the first bounce. This is a classic. I mean, this is an arc of. But the way we used to. When the show started and things were more narrow and we were like, we need people who fit into these very classic arcs. the first 10 years of his career are so thoroughly that, of like, you have two developmental movies, then you have the movie where it all comes together that's the guarantor to like, we're gonna let you elevate to Taxi Driver, which is the crazy breakthrough.

2:10:08David Sims:And then he cashes that in on New York, New York, where people are like, you're fucking done.

2:10:12Griffin Newman:And New York, New York is just the classic bounce of like, he spent too much money on a movie that didn't need to be expensive. And he had like, a whole artistic idea of like how to present this story and do a musical differently. It's very similar. And everyone's like, ah!

2:10:24David Sims:It's very similar to Spielberg with 1941 where it's like overloaded with ideas and passion. I can do a different genre. You have overthought this movie. And cocaine. Yes, and cocaine.

2:10:34Griffin Newman:There's a little bit of cocaine.

2:10:36David Sims:And then Raging Bull is the like, I gotta show people I can just like focus it up again. But like, King of Comedy's a bounce.

2:10:43Griffin Newman:He's got a lot of bounces. I'm saying just that part of... No, I know.

2:10:46David Sims:I agree with you. Because who's that knocking is 69 or 70? 67. So it's 67 to, and then Raging Bull is 80. Yeah, that's where there's a real tight, like, sort of, this is how a career develops, grows, crashes, rebounds. And then the 80s are up and down. You disagree, David? I see.

2:11:04Griffin Newman:No, I don't disagree. The 80s are more up. I mean, like, Last Temptation nominally made money. Like, it did ruin things for him a little bit. Yeah. And like his other big bombs are King of Comedy. That's a huge bomb. Like that makes no money. And was framed as an embarrassment. Like people were like shame on you. Right. And Bringing Out the Dead was like honestly like a really big bomb. Yeah. Because that movie is also pretty expensive. And that was, I feel like Bringing Out the Dead is another kind of low point for him career wise of like why should studios keep giving you money? You know like.

2:11:39David Sims:When we were talking about. After that he's been able to do whatever he wants. We were talking about, because the series is so long, do we like split it in half and do we do a little short series in between so that there's a little bit of a break in Marty? And every time... Which we're probably not going to do. It feels like there's enough new releases coming out the end of this year and the beginning of next so that will kind of naturally happen. Yeah, it's fine. But when we talked about it, I was always adamant. The only place to break it up is 1999 to 2001. Right. Because like what happens between the 20th century and the 21st century is Leo unlocks everything.

2:12:10David Sims:and it feels like from Gangs of New York on he's working with bigger budgets than he's ever worked with he's got this hot young star who will do anything for him and everyone is like it's time when's he getting the fucking Oscar and then after he gets the Oscar it's like he gets to do whatever he wants and Bringing Out the Dead feels like the last time there is like an attempt at doing a classic Scorsese movie that doesn't work for people a movie I love and think is a masterpiece but his otter films in the 21st century are him going way outside of his wheelhouse.

2:12:46Griffin Newman:Miriam, are there movies you don't like or love? Good question. Are there Martys you sort of respect or stick up for or whatever? I do not like The Aviator, but that might be partly because I'm too loyal to the source material. I do not like seeing a Katherine Hepburn invitation. I need to see it again. I'm very curious to rewatch

2:13:03David Sims:because I also haven't seen it since release. It's never been a favorite.

2:13:07Griffin Newman:I've seen it since release, but it does so many bananas visual things that I bet I will enjoy on rewatch. I think I would too. And it's like early Leo. Like you were saying that transition. It's really good Leo. I was like, let's see, is there anything? I don't remember loving Bringing Out the Dead. Sure. Possibly worth a rewatch. Yeah. And so I think the only one I haven't seen is The Color of Money. Color of Money rocks. Yeah. I bet. Hot movie. I bet. I never think of it as a real Scorsese, but I know it is. I know it is.

2:13:37David Sims:His 80s are so weird Because that's kind of like a commercial play of like, you got to get back in the good graces of the studio. And it's a big hit. And he gets Newman and Oscar. But there was a little bit of like, Scorsese sold out. Right. And then after hours is him trying to be like, I can be responsible. I can make a low budget thing. I can like get on base. But it's like a comedy. It's not seen as like a major work. It's fascinating how up and down he was there. Yeah. Yeah, but the rest I love. I love, I love, I was saying, if I didn't do this, I would do Shutter Island. Love that film.

2:14:09Griffin Newman:Yeah, I fucking love Shutter Island so much. That's going to be a fun out. I love you guys. I'm in good company. Oh, Miriam, we love you too. I can't wait to see who's going to do Kondoon.

2:14:19David Sims:We have guests lining up around the block. Well, let's just say it. The Dalai Lama is a blankie. I don't know if we can get him because, you know, we ask people to be in person. We don't want to do a Zoom episode, Kondoon famously filmed in the same place as Ishtar. Really? Yeah. Same studio in Morocco. I know that. That fucking rules. I've visited the Kondoon set. It's amazing. And Kondoon, the soundtrack is mostly Rogers and Clark, right? Exactly. They use mostly their, yeah. That's the director's cut. I've never seen Kondoon before and I've never seen Last Temptation. I'm very eager to see it.

2:14:54You've never seen Last Temptation? Never seen it. Last Temptation is amazing. It's the best.

2:14:58Griffin Newman:I just rewatched it, which caused our fans to go insane. being like, they're recording out of order. I was like, nope, I rewatched it, not because of the podcast. Yeah, let us watch movies, please.

2:15:07David Sims:Let me watch my movies.

2:15:09Griffin Newman:Please let us watch movies. Let's do the box office game for Mean Streets, which came out, and I should, actually, before I do the box office game, I should just note its release. It premiered, kind of a surprising choice here, at the New York Film Festival? Huh. I don't know why they picked that one. No, yeah, so it premieres in fall of 73 at the New York Film Festival. Warner Brothers had, you know, it does end up distributing it. They get shopped around and they pick it up.

2:15:39David Sims:And you know what? In that Linklater thing, Scorsese was saying, they showed it to Columbia maybe and they passed on it. They showed it to a different studio first. Paramount. Paramount, thank you. And then they went over to Warner Brothers and he was like, we're there with all the Warner Brothers execs and they're getting their sandwiches delivered. We're screening the movie for the second time in two days. The first day they were like, this is well made kid, but there's no money here. Right. Right. And he's like, I'm spooling my movie up. It's starting. And the guys are arguing over like, is that the corned beef?

2:16:10David Sims:I got the corned beef. And he was like, I'm losing them. And then De Niro came on screen. Right. And one of the guys looked up and went like, oh, this guy's interesting. And then they all started looking and they all started engaging with the movie and they bought it. you have to imagine that's a moment that changes his entire life where he's like, huh, this guy unlocks doors for me. Yeah. There's something here that is undeniable that translates across audiences where if I have this guy in my movies, people are going to watch. Even if he's not famous yet, he makes people lift their heads up and stop paying attention to their sandwiches.

2:16:48Totally. That's so true and such a good story. But also, I think what was happening then is that the guys were like these Warner Brothers those guys were like, oh, I know a guy like that. I know a Johnny. Like he's just like a guy from back home. And that was also the thing for Scorsese. It was like, yes, like if this works for,

2:17:05David Sims:if this is familiar to people, then this works. People don't want to watch a movie about a guy like me. They want to watch a movie about the guys I know. And the movies can still be personal. But yes, if I can put those guys on screen, I really have something.

2:17:18Griffin Newman:So the release strategy, Scorsese was not very happy with, you know Warner Brothers didn't really know what to do and was against them opening in New York because I think New York Film Festival was not really as glitzy back then maybe no and they had no idea how to sell the picture I mean it's funny because the poster is so iconic but don't you think I mean like it's such a famous poster yeah but they don't have stars yet no yeah The Exorcist is coming out around the same time although it is not in the top five so that's not a spoiler thank god okay and warner brothers is more worried about that they don't really care about mean streets um so the film comes out it gets nice reviews it makes three million dollars domestically but it maybe doesn't it's not like a huge hit and it was interesting in that link later convo we watched where link later they were talking about how it got no oscar nominations it got de niro got a couple critics he got like the new york and national yes he got

2:18:18David Sims:It got National Society and New York Film Critics Circle, supporting actor, and it got a WGA nom. But the Oscars ignored it, but Marty was like,

2:18:25Griffin Newman:nobody saw it. It was just not a widely seen movie. The Academy was different, but also just it wasn't really out there very much.

2:18:31David Sims:It didn't feel like we were in the conversation. He wasn't surprised it didn't get the nominations.

2:18:36Griffin Newman:Right. So, when this film was coming out, number one at the box office, this is crazy, is, I believe, I think it's a double feature, The way I'm reading this chart. I think it's a double feature. Well, I don't think this chart is trying to tell me it's a tie. I think that these were double features. Because the first is like an erotic comedy. Okay. You know, I think a bit of a fun, sexy movie for you to go see.

2:19:02David Sims:Humana, humana, humana.

2:19:03Griffin Newman:And then the other is an animated film that is famously raunchy. And I imagine they were being presented together.

2:19:09David Sims:Okay, so Fritz the Cat.

2:19:10Griffin Newman:Fritz the Cat is the animated film. The first one. The 1972, you know, the back she, Fritz the Cat.

2:19:16David Sims:And then it was on a double bill with a sex comedy.

2:19:18Griffin Newman:Yeah, I doubt you've heard the other. It's a sex comedy directed by Paul Glickler. I don't know why I'm trying to give you guys clues. It's called The Cheerleaders. Oh, my God. I was going to say Paul Glickler. Was it The Cheerleaders? I love this movie. Miriam, I was like, make Miriam know. But I didn't want to patronize her. I didn't know. No, I love this movie. Okay, tell me about The Cheerleaders. Let me see. They don't bring it on. They take it off. Okay, I'm guessing that that tagline was put on a DVD later. That's pretty good, though. The Cheerleaders, they're just like— Pretty fucking good.

2:19:46These great softcore films that they made, I think, three of them, and all these experimental filmmakers worked on these.

2:19:53Griffin Newman:The Swing Cheerleaders in 74, and then Cheerleaders' Wild Weekend at one point. I don't know. There's a bunch of them. Yeah, just abstract TNA. Love these films. It's just Cheerleaders having fun. So that was the same week that Mishris came out. Right. That is number one at the box office when Watchtakes comes out. So that is number one. Number two is a martial arts film. Probably the most famous martial arts film ever made. I'm sorry.

2:20:17David Sims:I'm on the Cheerleaders Wikipedia page. Right up at the top, this article needs additional citations for verifications July 2013. Someone flagged this 13 years ago and has not followed up on it. But also there's a section at the bottom that says streaming media. And then it just says the film is often available at licensed streaming movie sites with two citations. Oh, interesting. Feels like a real abandoned wiki page. Yes. Sorry, number two at the box office. What's the most famous martial arts movie ever made? Enter the Dragon. So that's number two.

2:20:49Griffin Newman:Austenus, right? Correct. And that's been in the box office for three months at this point, and it's a huge hit.

2:20:55David Sims:That's another example, though, of like, his other films had been, you know, kind of cult successes. And it was like, he's finally seeded into the consciousness enough that everyone's ready for the big mainstream breakthrough. Warner Brothers makes a Bruce Lee movie, and then he dies, and it becomes a phenomenon. because it's like, fuck, this is the final object. Do you like Enter the Dragon? I haven't seen it. I need to do a double feature with Reservoir Dogs.

2:21:23Griffin Newman:Number three at the box office is a porn film. So I think Cheerleaders is more like softcore, but this is a classic golden age of porn movie. Is it Green Door? Not Behind the Green Door. Misty Beethoven? Not Misty Beethoven, not Deep Throat. It's not Emmanuel. No. No.

2:21:42David Sims:It's not the horny Alice in Wonderland?

2:21:44Griffin Newman:No. No? Devil in Miss Jones? Oh! I knew. Just like name the big ones. The Devil in Miss Jones. The Devil in Miss Jones. The Gerard Damiano, is that his name? Right. Who's the guy that her Reynolds character is basically based on.

2:22:02David Sims:Right. Who also made a movie. I apologize in advance to all of our listeners and our guests. Let My Puppets Come. Wow. Gerard Damiano made a puppet porn film.

2:22:16Griffin Newman:Wow.

2:22:17David Sims:That was not presented as like, this is like a parody of porn. It was like, do people want to jerk off to puppets? Wow. And so the parody, the title's a parody of Let My People Come. And instead it's just horny puppets. I'd like an apology as well. They own it on Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray. Didn't get the slip cover. I need to speak my truth you own it? it's an interesting artifact of film history I'm not saying I get my rocks off watching it, I don't look at puppets that way he bought it for the liner notes

2:22:52Griffin Newman:says Devil and Miss Jones is the best porn movie of that era because it has a plot I saw it at Bologna at this film festival for restorations it was weird to watch a film with like you know all these like academics and stuff but it is right it was it was weird but no it's a it's what i've seen it she she kills herself and then like the devil right is like or the innate like an angel or is basically like there's like an you can earn your place in hell by being a horny lady on earth something i think something like that there's sort of a celestial element to it yeah the cheerleaders has a better plot where like if you want to win the football game, you have to like out fuck the other team.

2:23:38David Sims:Right. I mean, look, we love a good plot. Let My Puppets Come has a plot. Owning, owing a mob boss half a million dollars that must be paid within 24 hours. A group of executives come up with ideas for in films, a pornographic movie. But the characters are puppets. It's kind of, I watch the movie for the story. That's what I watch it for. Number four, the box office.

2:24:02Griffin Newman:This is a crazy box office because it's all kind of like, you know, underground-y kind of movies. It's like a Chinese action movie starring the female Bruce Lee as she was built.

2:24:16David Sims:Oh.

2:24:21David Sims:Is this... Fuck. Sorry, tell me.

2:24:25Griffin Newman:The actor is called Judy Lee. Yes. The film is called Queen Boxer. Okay. Yep. And I've never seen it, but she's like a kickboxer who's taking revenge or whatever. Yes. And yeah, that's number four. That's new this week. And then number five is, well, it's a film that you just told me that the director wanted Marty to be in. Let My Puppets Come.

2:24:49David Sims:This was another thing revealed in the Linklater thing that American Graffiti is basically filming the same time as Mean Streets and that George Lucas wanted Scorsese as an actor in the film to be the leader of the pharaohs, he said. In American Graffiti, which, of course, is one of the biggest hits of 73. And he said, George, I don't even drive. I'm from New York. I'm not a Californian.

2:25:11Griffin Newman:We should note, of course, that Marty is in Mean Streets and does shoot Robert De Niro in the neck with a gun. Yeah. Nice work if you could get it. We didn't really talk about the ending, but the ending is so fucking insane. Like, it really... I love that you just don't know what happens to Johnny Boy, or really to any of them. You know that they're making it to the hospital.

2:25:28David Sims:It's the other part that was making me think of Mikey and Nikki, that it just like the big dramatic burst of violence happens and the movie ends like immediately. And then you get your other clip. You get the big heat when the wife dies and like it's so devastating. So you're like, I don't know. And the weird music, that's such a crazy ending. What were you going to say, Ben?

2:25:48Griffin Newman:When they're on their way to Brooklyn, I wrote down this really funny quote from Keitel. Do I know Brooklyn? Do I know the jungle? and I just love that at that time Brooklyn all the outer boroughs were truly just like no man's land for people in Manhattan it's not even that

2:26:03David Sims:it's just you don't leave your place sure you got your spot this is your neighborhood this is where your people are you know they filmed it in Brooklyn I mean it was it took place in Brooklyn so they could film it in LA yeah I think David already talked about that yeah

2:26:17Griffin Newman:uh yes um so how long has American Graffiti been out at this point American Graffiti's been out for 11 weeks so wow you know uh Three months. I stand. So other films, a reissue of Clockwork Orange is number six. Okay. That's obviously a couple years old at this point. A reissue of Camelot, the musical, is at number seven. And a reissue of The Last of Sheila. Oh, sure. With Richard Benjamin is number eight. Yeah. Then you have Electroglide in Blue at number nine, which is, I want to just double check, you know, this movie. That's like the sort of biker movie, but it's like a sort of spoof of biker movies.

2:26:53Griffin Newman:A little bit. Yeah. Okay, with Robert Blake. Postmodern, yeah. And then there's the movie Hit with Billy Dee Williams, the Sidney Fury movie. Okay. That's like, you know, it's maybe not even blaxploitation, but it's like a sort of like all-black cast action thriller from Paramount, like a big sort of action-y movie with Billy Dee Williams and a young Richard Pryor. I just remembered that when we were talking about the soundtrack, I wanted to mention Michael Schultz's Cooley High, which was two years later and that used all these Motown songs and that he said, recently he said, like, it was dirt cheap to get those songs then and then just like right after this and that.

2:27:34Then they went out. They were everywhere. I'm sorry, what were you going to say? No,

2:27:37David Sims:I was just going to say Scorsese in that DGA thing said Badlands was the closing night film at New York Film Festival the same year. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. What a year. And those two guys being roughly the same age, feeling like putting on the board new methods of like film language for American artists. And he was like, that was the one that had all the heat and the energy behind it. Like we were in the festival and we got a good reception, but the energy was something incredible is happening over here with Badlands. But I guess Badlands ends up actually releasing a little bit later.

2:28:12David Sims:It released in 74, I believe.

2:28:14Griffin Newman:But it was the closing film of the 73 New York Film Festival. The big 73 movie is obviously Exorcist. Yeah. Well, I don't know what wins Best Picture that year. For 73?

2:28:30Griffin Newman:It's not The Godfather, I'll tell you that much. Because that was 72. It is The Sting. Yeah, it's The Sting. Which, you know, was a giant hit that everybody loved.

2:28:37David Sims:But also is a very old-fashioned movie. Not just in being a period piece, but feels. Well, they play the piano like, do-do-do-do-do-do. You know, they do that. It's just interesting that you've already had, like, Midnight Cowboy winning Best Picture and being like, oh, shit, is everything different now? And a couple of years later, they're like, we watch like watching movie stars and expensive costumes pull off cons. We've been going through that in the last 10 years. We keep swinging back and forth. And then Mean Streets plays director's Fortnite at Cannes, right? And that's like you still see it.

2:29:06If you guys go like they do this like kind of screensaver sort of like iPhone kind of collage of all the films that have played. And they always play Mean Streets and Sean Dillman. So it's an iconic director's Fortnite.

2:29:19David Sims:That's also so funny because it must have been like six months after the movie came out in the States, right?

2:29:24Griffin Newman:Yeah. But back then. No, no. Totally. Yeah. So the film obviously holds a special place in Marty's heart because it's so personal. But he says he's never really sat down and watched it from beginning to end because it's too close. And indeed he wanted to make a sequel about Charlie living on Staten Island with a couple kids. Again, I am kind of like, and what is the story of this film? Uh-huh. Like, it can't just be Charlie hanging out. Yeah. Like, does Johnny Boy come back? He's dead. Robo Johnny Boy? Well, you don't know that he's dead. You don't know what happened. Yeah. Like, he gets shot, he's bleeding out, and he, like, runs into the street.

2:30:02Griffin Newman:You assume Johnny Boy is probably not making it, but, like... I've heard him say that nobody dies, but that they can never go back. And, like, that's how he reads it, is that they don't die, or maybe we don't know, but that they can't go back. That if he survives,

2:30:14David Sims:that he needs people basically to think that he's dead, at the very least. They just can't go back, and so they're exiled. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Instead, Warner Brothers, who had released this film and found him very promising, threw him, Alice doesn't live here anymore as a challenge.

2:30:31Griffin Newman:Right, which comes out basically like one year later. So it's like he goes right to that, whereas I assume Taxi Driver. Well, but that's Schrader's thing. So I don't even know that he's nursing Taxi. I don't think after this, of course, he's like, okay, and now? New York, New York. that was his thing I guess that's the next fixation I saw an interview I read an interview and he's like the next thing on his mind is New York, New York because again it's another genre I did the gangster film now I do the musical

2:30:56David Sims:he knows it's going to take a lot of money and a lot of production resources to put that movie together he needs to play the studio game to be able to be entrusted

2:31:05Griffin Newman:because it's the only game back then and like it's funny because it's like alright so Jaws is what 75 yeah and American Graffiti is 73 De Palma's like Sisters is what 72 like what's De Palma doing. De Palma's probably in the weirdest place. Yeah.

2:31:20David Sims:Because what? Carrie's not until 70, 80?

2:31:22Griffin Newman:Carrie's 76.

2:31:23David Sims:76. Okay.

2:31:24Griffin Newman:But so, you know, all these guys are trying shit and doing exciting stuff. Right. But they're not quite, you know, they're not quite atop the Hollywood pile yet. Whereas Coppola is like immediately atop the Hollywood pile after he does Godfather.

2:31:36David Sims:But he was also older than all of them. And he's in San Francisco and he's like doing his own thing. He had made more films before Godfather. He had gone through a whole sort of arc and he was like the mentor to all of them. He was kind of like the camp counselor trying to encourage all of them to follow their things.

2:31:50Griffin Newman:My 73 list is, I mean, like my favorite movies that year are Don't Look Now and Long Goodbye and The Exorcist and Spirit of the Beehive and shit like that, which, you know, like the great hero art. Fucking rules. Spirit of the Beehive is pretty cool. Yeah. That guy rocks. I don't know if you've seen any of his other films, actually. They're all good. I mean, he only made like three. Yeah. Do you like Victor? Riche? Yeah. Riche? Riche? Also a great band. Spirit of the Beehive?

2:32:17David Sims:Really?

2:32:17Griffin Newman:Yeah. Let's be done. Let's stop talking about being screwed.

2:32:21David Sims:Miriam, are there any other sort of general overarching Scorsese takes or thoughts in your relationship with him and his work that you want to throw out as we start this journey for months? I think I've drained the Scorsese love for now. Okay. But I... And we love him forever. Yeah. I mean, he's the best. He's like... The one thing I'll say, the departed, I was wrong about it. People say, like, I used to think it was like he just got the award because, you know, it's a career achievement. The part of it is amazing. Like, now that I've seen more Hong Kong movies, I'm like, this movie fucking rocks.

2:32:58David Sims:It's also, it's just so watchable. When will he work with Mark Wahlberg again? It's crazy because...

2:33:05Griffin Newman:It'd be nice for him to rescue Wahlberg.

2:33:07David Sims:It would be nice, but also I'm like, how disappointed would it be to see them work together again and not reactivate the same thing? I mean, this is another thing I remember. Sorry, but this was public knowledge. But at the time we were shooting vinyl, it was pretty recent that William Monaghan wrote a departed sequel to Star-Walbert. Yes. and Scorsese

2:33:35Griffin Newman:was on board

2:33:37David Sims:to direct it and Warner Brothers said we don't believe that Wahlberg can carry this movie okay it was gonna be De Niro was he was the only one nominated in that film that's crazy although that is also

2:33:48Griffin Newman:crazy that that happened

2:33:49David Sims:but De Niro was going to play it was gonna be the fucking rat in Congress right like the final shot De Niro was gonna play like a corrupt congressman I just died yeah and it was gonna be Wahlberg all this I'm not saying anything prior to it but I just remember you know what would be funny though him.

2:34:05Griffin Newman:What's like the stupidest thing? Like, turns out Martin Sheen didn't die. He's just like in traction. I'm trying to think of like the worst Departed sequel. Sure. Like,

2:34:12David Sims:you know, what else happened? But he was, I think it was at the wrap party and he was like holding court with a bunch of us youngins and he was like, I was ready to make it. The film won Best Picture. It was a big hit. I had Mark Wahlberg. He's a movie star. They wouldn't do it. They said, Marty, you don't see the vision.

2:34:26Griffin Newman:Sure. Well, I mean, that's funny.

2:34:28David Sims:He was like, I've given up on it. I spent five years trying. I'm not. It's over. Miriam, is there anything you want to plug? No. I'm just...

2:34:37Griffin Newman:You're vibing.

2:34:38David Sims:I'm vibing.

2:34:38Griffin Newman:We love it. We love to see you vibe. We're here to vibe. It's very nice to have you on the show again, Miriam. It's so nice to be back. And far too long. It's, yeah.

2:34:46David Sims:Years-long project. There have been other episodes we've circled and then trips change. No, I'm sorry. No, no, no. There's one I would have loved to do. Which? Like, vamps. Vamps. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. which now we've both I fucking love Vamps Vamps yeah I told you hosted a Vamps screening in LA I think that movie's awesome yeah anyway it's such an honor to be on this episode for this series and nice to have you so glad I worked out and thank you all for listening please remember to rate, review and subscribe as we go through five more months of Martin Scorsese

2:35:22Griffin Newman:yes next week will be Alice doesn't live here anymore

2:35:25David Sims:another gangster picture oh god The same thing every week.

2:35:31Griffin Newman:Why don't you try silence? We are going to try. Silent Burstyn. Yeah. Right. She once told Griffin to shut the fuck up. In a nice way. Well, it wasn't nice, but in a more polite way.

2:35:42David Sims:The way she said it was, Griffin, try silence. Who said that? Ellen Burstyn. Academy Award winner Ellen Burstyn. Oh my God. One of the most devastating things that has ever happened to anyone. No, that's incredible. I think to anyone. It was incredible. I wear it as a badge of honor, but...

2:35:56Griffin Newman:And then you went on to become a professional talker.

2:35:58David Sims:Yeah. You know what? You know what, Ellen? You know what, Ellen? Eat this. And it's good that you didn't. Anyway, tune in next week. Tune in next week. As Against Her Wishes, we talk extensively about Ellen Burstyn. And as always, I want to say, I only watch Let My Puppets Come as a student of cinema. That is the only thing. That's the prism through which it's just important for film history, Ben. Sure. And there's some good puppetry in it. I don't endorse what the puppets are doing. I don't like it. They can do it if they want. I'm not telling them they can't do it.

2:36:39Griffin Newman:Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley. Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas. And our associate producer is AJ McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by J.J. Birch. Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in The Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Holly Moss, and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is Minnick. Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help. Head over to BlankCheckPod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit.

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