Heavyweight Presents: The Messenger

22:45The whole family is currently in New York, where Michael's wife Katie is producing a movie. It turns out that Katie's movie is the reason for Michael's update. An associate producer on the movie, his name's Dan. Michael explains that while out for dinner with Dan, they started talking about the industry, by which I mean the show business industry. And one of the things people in the industry enjoy chatting about most is how they got into the industry. So Michael told Dan the story of The Messenger, about the director, Quincy, about the producer, Pat Croce. And Dan is from Philly. Dan's parents are family friends with the Croce's.

23:28You're kidding. Show Biz Connections. In this life, there's not a thing that doesn't come down to show biz connections. It's not what you know, when you know, where you know it, or why you know it, but whom you know. Pat Croce was the executive producer on the movie, the one who ultimately shut it all down. So with Quincy unwilling to talk, he's our best shot at figuring out why Quincy had lied. At some point, Pat had to have demanded an explanation from Quincy. Dan agrees to talk to his mom, who agrees to talk to Pat's daughter, who agrees to talk with Pat, who then agrees to talk with me. Mr.

24:10Croce? Call me Pat. This is Pat, Pat, Pat, Croce. One thing I like to say about your heavyweight podcast is that it always inculcates a high vibrational frequency. Can you say more about the high frequency? Well, in the realm of form, if we're going to transcend form... Pat Croce has a white goatee that ends in a point at his chest. He's in the Zen Den, a large room above the barn on his 53-acre estate. His walls are covered in Chinese and Tibetan calligraphy. He says that these days, he seldom makes any media appearances. Is there any reason for that? It's a great question you interviewer, you.

24:54Well, 10 years ago, something happened. My mind cracked. Pat's mind cracked in a meeting for one of his restaurants. He owns several. Among them, the Rum Barrel, which is pirate-themed. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, what the hell am I doing here? I don't really give a shit about the next great grouper sandwich. This is just more. I always was seeking more. Another win. Another standing ovation. Another bestseller. Another. Another. More. More. There was never enough. Never. What Pat realized was that in spite of all his successes, he wasn't really happy. And so he tried to change his way of thinking.

25:37But it was a slow process. The ego in me was, if I can change my mind, that'd be another great bestseller. And I would go back on the speaking game. It was all ego, all commercial. But that's how grace hooked me.

25:56Everything that unfolds is perfect. I have this adage, the past has served its purpose perfectly. But most people are cherry pickers. Well, I wish that would have changed, or I wish this were. No! The purpose of the past, Jonathan, there's only one purpose. To bring you and me right here and now. Okay. The past to me is smoke off the end of my cigar. For me, the past is also smoke off the end of my cigar. Juicy wafts of precious smoke to be hysterically clawed at like a rabid raccoon attacking a helium-filled garbage can. And so I ask Pat to go back to the past and explain how he became involved with Quincy, Michael, and The Messenger.

26:41He says it all began in Key West, at the pirate-themed museum he owned that sat beside the pirate-themed restaurant he also owned. And you get to know all the piratical personalities on that island, one of which was Reef. And Reef is a salvager, and he's really got a piratical nature. He would even dress as a pirate, and I really loved him. One day, Reef asked Pat for a favor. Could Pat meet with his son Quincy, who wanted to make a movie? And we got talking, and he turned me on to this script that he has been writing. And you liked it. Oh, sure. Are you kidding me? It's talking about this young boy who has an effect on the ending of World War II.

27:22And you hadn't known that story. I hadn't known that story. Oh, no. I had never heard of it. What was your impression of Quincy when you first met him? Oh, I liked him. And I believed everything Quincy told me. When Quincy's Lie came out, Pat was furious. Prior to 10 years ago, before my mind cracked, he's lucky he didn't cross my path or else he wouldn't be walking. You mean that literally?

27:52Let's say no, since this is being taped.

28:04I'm pretty street savvy. I couldn't believe that I got buffaloed like this. As someone I thought was a friend, you know, a friend, a Key West friend. I was so hurt that I was angry. And when I'm angry, the old Pacrochie, the old corner guy, man. And not only did I lose the money, but all the contacts that I made for him to get him in USA Today. I opened all these doors through all my relationships. And then all of a sudden, when I realized that it was a fraud, that it was phony, I mean, I had to go and apologize to everyone. But Pat says that these days, he doesn't have time for rumination or regret.

28:46And even though I am here at peace, my body has bone marrow cancer. I'm on chemo every 12 hours of chemo meds. Incurable. However, I don't regret that. I don't, nothing. Oh, wow. Jonathan, it's only my body. It's not me.

29:14Before we get off, I ask Pat Michael's burning question. Why did Quincy lie? But Pat says he doesn't ask the why questions. Only Quincy, Pat says, if he goes deep, can answer that. Pat and Quincy haven't spoken for decades. Their last interactions were angry ones, right after Quincy's lie came out. All the same, Pat offers to reach out to Quincy. He contacts a friend who he thinks might have Quincy's phone number. I don't have high hopes, but Pat and Quincy do end up speaking. And afterwards, for reasons I can't discern, Quincy agrees to speak with Michael.

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32:45I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover, a show about people who lead double lives. we're presenting a special series from Australia. It's all about a family who was conned by a charming American. When you marry someone, you feel like you really know them. I was just gobsmacked as to what's going on here. Does the name Leslie Mnookian mean anything to you? Oh, you bet. Never forget her. Listen to Deep Cover Presents Snowball, wherever you get your podcasts.

33:21and Quincy is arranged. And while we wait for Quincy, I ask Michael the opening question I learned in J school. Um, are you in a bathroom? No, this is our tiny little kitchen in our apartment. It's late at night and Michael gives me a tour of his darkened New York apartment. There's our Carson's little lunchbox. Very sweet. Where is he right now? Carson is asleep. What a lazy bones. And then. Hello? Quincy enters the chat. It's been almost 20 years since he and Michael were together on set. Quincy was 25 at the time. He's in his 40s now. It's nice to see Michael's face. I haven't seen his face in a long time.

34:04I know, it's good to see you. Michael and Quincy begin by reminiscing about their time together, about making the movie. There were two scenes that really stand out for me. One is when all the kids were in the diner. They exchange memories from what feels like unfraught territory, stuff like the casting and the fun of being on set. My favorite scene was doing the U-turn. You had me drive stick shift, and I lied. When I auditioned, you were like, can you drive stick? And I was like, I can drive stick. I couldn't drive stick. Really? Oh, I never knew that. I know. And I was, like, stalling out, like, grinding the gears.

34:43It feels like Michael is trying to make Quincy comfortable, show that Quincy wasn't the only one capable of a lie. I was like, I'm a fraud. This is disaster. The guy we rented the car from was pulling his hair out to him. I thought this kid could drive. But it doesn't take long before the conversation turns to the elephant in the room. And it's Quincy who brings it up. I remember wanting to reach out to you in the years that passed. Yeah, I felt a lot of guilt. Because this film, everybody had put so much sweat and tears into it. And it was just nothing. It, like, evaporated. And I thought, my God, I've failed every single person.

35:23And then I became, like, national news. And then the blogs were writing about me.

35:31Because The Messenger got a colossal amount of press, when the truth came out, Quincy received a proportional amount of backlash. Similar to how the tidal wave of The Messenger's success hit Michael, the bad news about the messenger's failure hit Quincy. He was at the airport, reading that day's newspaper over someone's shoulder. And they were reading the article about me and how I had lied. And that hit me like, I'd say a ton of bricks, but a ton of bricks would have felt like a pillow compared to what that was. How were you coping? I was in denial. I kept going back to this, like, excuse of, well, the Titanic, right?

36:12The Titanic, it's a fake movie. It's based on a true story. There was no Jack and Rose. And yet what I had done was totally different. I mean, I was literally trying to pretend that this other actor I had hired was Thomas Jones. And it took me a year or two to sort of come to terms and just be like, man, I really fucked up. Which brings us to the question of why. Why swap a random old man for Thomas E. Jones? To explain, Quincy starts with how he came to the story of The Messenger in the first place. I had been working that summer at the Truman Little White House in Key West, and sort of in my onboarding at that museum, they told us to read David McCullough's Truman biography.

36:57And it was in that book that I saw this one sentence about Thomas E. Jones and The Messenger. And it was literally one sentence, one sentence in parentheses, in the middle of a thousand-page book. And I thought, what an amazing story. But Quincy thought, you know what would make it an even more amazing story? If he could find Thomas E. Jones, interview him, and include that interview in the movie. And in Quincy's telling, he did look for Thomas Jones. I had hired literal investigators to go find this person. Two different guys. And they both said, like, you know, we can't find him, but we found these two death certificates to kind of match up.

37:40So the death certificates felt like enough. Quincy concluded that the Thomas C. Jones he was looking for probably was dead. And I didn't share that with anybody because in my head, I just saw the story rolling out. It was like we were going to tell the story and in the end you saw the real guy. And I couldn't get away from that story. And in the absence of the real guy, the next best thing was a fake guy. Oh, well, the deceased Thomas Jones will never know. And anybody that sees the movie, it's going to be so great, and they're going to be crying and laughing at the end of it that they won't care.

38:12For this role, there was no casting, no auditions. In fact, the part of Thomas E. Jones wasn't played by an actor at all. He was actually a tour guide at the Truman Little White House. Quincy had asked a work friend from the museum to do the job. And then the real Thomas Jones found me. And I certainly remember that feeling. It was like a disgust I felt for myself.

38:43In the aftermath, Quincy left the film world for many years. He was fired from his job at the Truman Museum. He eventually found work clerking in a bookstore and making wedding videos. While this was the first time a lie of Quincy's had been so brutally exposed, he admits that the lying itself was something he'd been leaning on since his teen years. You know, I had come from a fairly poor family in Key West, and I had attended a very exclusive prep school up in western Massachusetts called Deerfield Academy, where I had no business being there. And so I felt this sense of just always needing to exaggerate.

39:22It would be like, oh, I'm going to Paris for winter break. And I'd be like, oh, gosh, Paris, it's great. Like, you know, I didn't even know what country it was in. It was like a daily thing. Freshman year, someone had a picture of Jimi Hendrix, a poster. And I remember looking at his name and thinking it looked kind of French. And I was like, oh, I love Jai Mai Hendry. And I remember him looking at me and being like, what?

39:52For Quincy, Lize became a beautiful wall between himself and everyone else. Lies protected him, but also isolated him. It took the collapse of the messenger to finally get him to stop. And it was actually very relieving, because it took a lot of weight off my shoulders that I didn't have to make every story 10 % better. I didn't have to. As hard as that was, that was the most important lesson, full stop period of my life.

40:27After we did The Messenger, I didn't take that as anything that stopped me. When Quincy is done sharing the effects The Messenger had on his life, Michael shares the role it played for him. Seeing the camera, seeing the crew, it blew my mind. I didn't know that this was possible. I didn't know that this is what it looked like, and I was in. It's Quincy and The Messenger that inspired Michael's career. But it isn't just that Quincy gave him a professional life. He gave him a life. I married this beautiful person who, she's a movie producer, and we have this amazing kid called Carson who's two and a half years old.

41:09And all of this life that I have, this partner, this career, this kid, it comes from this wild, weird, random moment in Cleveland, Ohio, where you decided to cast me in this short film. And it's all this to say, like, I never got to just thank you. I've always appreciated that door that you showed to me and allowed me to walk through. That moment, that time, that invitation that you gave me to be on set changed the entire direction of my life.

41:48That means a lot to me. I look back on that time with totally different eyes. It was one of the most difficult things in my life. And I can't tell you how meaningful it is to me to hear that someone had something good come out of it. Because it certainly didn't feel like that. I was convinced that it would ruin everyone's life. because that's what I was feeling at that moment. Quincy just assumed anyone involved with the messenger would still be furious with him. And so, a few weeks back, when he saw Pat Croce's name pop up on his phone, he says he almost felt too scared to pick up. But when they spoke, instead of yelling at him, Pat told him it was time to let it go.

42:45As soon as he said those words, let it go, I just sat out in front of my house and cried for a good 20 minutes. I didn't know before we talked today, actually, genuinely, what you were going to say today. You know, I met you as this person I looked up to. You're going to make me cry. I'm really, really genuinely happy for you. Thank you for taking time just to talk to me, but really thank you for the life I got to have because of it.

43:29Recently, I got to share in that life. One day, leaving our New York studio, Michael says he's off to meet his wife, Katie. Her crew is filming just a few blocks away, and Michael asks if I'd like to come, and I say, sure. On the corner of 20th Street and 7th Avenue, shooting is in full swing. The movie stars John Turturro as an aging pickpocket who ends up with a thumb drive containing a crypto wallet on it. Michael and I are waved past the protected perimeter, and Katie gives me a pair of small headphones. As I watch take after take of John Turturro slamming down a payphone and screaming fuck in fake fury, I feel like a 10-year-old on a field trip.

44:14All around us, the city bustles as normal, while we are tucked away in our make-believe world. watching make-believe things. It's all a lie, of course, but one that we're all in on. And action!

45:02Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damaged deposit Take this moment to decide If we meant it, if we tried Or felt around for far too much From things that accidentally tried

45:39This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Kalila Holt and me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Mohini McGaucer and Phoebe Flanagan. Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Special thanks to Lucy Sullivan, Karen Shikurji, and Nazanin Rafsanjani. Our production counsel is Jake Flanagan. Emma Munger mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, and Bobby Lord. Additional scoring by Blue Dot Sessions, Bobble, Principal, and Shanghai Restoration Project. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow us on Instagram at heavyweightpodcast or email us at heavyweight at pushkin.fm.

46:20We'll be back next week with a new episode.

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47:14Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Terms apply. I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover, a show about people who lead double lives. We're presenting a special series from Australia. It's all about a family who was conned by a charming American. When you marry someone, you feel like you really know them. I was just gobsmacked as to what's going on here. Does the name Leslie Manukian mean anything to you? Oh, you bet. Never forget her. Listen to Deep Cover Presents Snowball, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.