The Fall Fest Lineups Are Here, Plus Guest Critic David Thomson on His Provocative New Book

13:11Anne Thompson:I loved his last movie. It was very good.

13:13Ryan Lattanzio:Take five. Yeah, yeah.

13:14Anne Thompson:And that debuted in Toronto, I remember.

13:16Ryan Lattanzio:And then Prima Fosse. Well, we knew that one. That's the opening night film, which is with Cynthia Erivo. And it's based on a play that actually Jodie Comer was in and I saw on Broadway.

13:26Anne Thompson:I saw it too.

13:28Ryan Lattanzio:Another one, of course, I'm curious about. Well, look, there's another Canadian premiere of a new Andrew Haig movie, which means you'll be seeing it at Telluride. There's also Alpha Gang from the Zellner Brothers. International premiere, you'll see that at Telluride. And as far as the world premieres go out of that section, the one I'm excited about is the latest take on Bad Lieutenant, this time from Takashi Miike, who's taking over for Abel Ferrara and Werner Herzog.

13:56Anne Thompson:And Venice is coming clear as well.

13:58Ryan Lattanzio:So I was up very early this morning covering the Venice lineup. I'm a bit tired. Excuse any speech impediments. It's a little scary. It's very international leaning in the way that Cannes was. A lot of this stuff just isn't going to travel. Directors that people were hoping for, like Tom Ford, Iñárritu, those didn't show up. I don't know that Digger's going to be at a festival anymore unless they take it to Telluride. I mean, Iñárritu has gone there before. They're not going to show that at a festival. No, that's out. It's Warner Brothers.

14:27Anne Thompson:It's just not their thing. Yeah. There's too much risk. There's too much to lose.

14:32Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, so that's over. So Inyaritu will not be at his usual stomping grounds. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but I mean, just talk about a few bits and bobs that stood out to me. There's redemption for Werner Herzog's bucking faster, which, as you know, he was offered by Thierry Fray Moe an out of competition spot at Cannes, and he rejected that. He wants his actress to be able to compete. Those actors being Kate Aruni Mara, who play sisters who are so codependent that they speak in unison. So I'm really eager to check that one out. There is a movie called The Echo Chamber by Andrea Pallaro with Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli, and Susan Sarandon, which is adapted from a script by Bertolucci, which is apparently about his life.

15:16Ryan Lattanzio:And speaking of Bertolucci, Luca Guadagnino is not taking a year off the Lido as expected. He will be debuting a highly personal seven-hour Bernardo Bertolucci documentary, which it sounds really fun to go and do that, but that is a whole day at Venice. And I work as a trade critic there, and I'm on deadlines, so I can't do it. Anyone who's listening, please send me a link. Also out of competition, Gael Garcia Bernal has another film called Ombre Al Agua. his former Itamama cast member Diego Luna had a movie at Cannes that wasn't so good. So hopefully this is an improvement. Then we have a Laura Poitras short called They're Here, which is co-directed by Rachel Lauren Mueller.

16:05Ryan Lattanzio:And this sounds like it's straight for the live action short, documentary short Oscar. It's about the inhabitants of Minneapolis who resisted the ICE occupation in January. So this is another secret Laura Poitras project. Then we've got Paul Schrader movie, Casey Affleck movie. The headlines about that double bill are going to be super fun. Then we have Vim Vendors, who has a new documentary, Jury President Maggie.

16:30Anne Thompson:Oh, by the way, Paul Schrader just celebrated his 80th birthday.

16:33Ryan Lattanzio:Happy birthday. If you're listening, I don't think you are. Maggie Gyllenhaal, she has a short, which is about Marilyn Monroe, called Flesh Impact with Dakota Johnson, who I'm gathering is playing Marilyn Monroe. I don't know how I feel about that. and then a couple other little ones Cornell Mondrusco you know pieces of woman director he's got a new movie again with Alan Burstyn Taika Waititi, Pamela Anderson who knows about that one something called Father Joe with Kiefer Sutherland and Al Pacino which is about a priest that's stealing from drug traffickers to donate to the poor Luke Besan wrote this movie I don't know about that one either but otherwise we had a lot of the expected films, Florian Zeller with Bunker, which I hope to God is better than The Sun, which was his last movie.

17:21Ryan Lattanzio:Martin McDonough, obviously, Wild Horse Nine. We're all excited about that. Li Cheng Dong, Possible Love. That's supposed to be great. Then there's another one that I'm very interested in, which is called Dao, which is by Ilya Kurzanowski, which he has been filming for about 20 years. And apparently, he had a very problematic set where he kept all of as actors in character for years and enclosed with unsimulated scenes of violence.

17:48Anne Thompson:So this sounds a little Lars von Turing.

17:51Ryan Lattanzio:I was just going to say that. And then finally, the other movie that is a standout, which will bring A24 back to Venice is Primetime, the To Catch a Predator biodrama starring Robert Pattinson as the host of that.

18:05Anne Thompson:Obviously, that's the one I was talking to Fred Berger about the other night, the producer of La La Land. And I've been curious to see where that was going to turn up. And here it is. Venice. There it is.

18:16Ryan Lattanzio:A24 will be back on the Lido. They were there, yes, last year with Smashing Machine, which got really good reviews. And then that kind of dissipated into the lagoon, if you will, after departure. After departure. Okay.

18:31Anne Thompson:All right. So now we can do the math. And it's not official where, you know, Telluride has this whole policy of not announcing its lineup until you get there. and so forth, but if you do the math and look at what's been announced at all these festivals and what's a North American debut, a Canadian debut, an international debut, whatever it is, you can figure it out. So the likely Telluride suspects are a long winter, El Sonor, which I'm hearing good things about, the Palme d 'Or winner from Cannes, Fjord, Inc., the opening night for New York. Venice, excuse me, Venice. La Bola Negra, which we just talked about.

19:11Anne Thompson:Minotaur from Cannes. The Debut, which I'm very excited to see, from Jesse Eisenberg. Tenzing, which goes along with Everest, The Other Side. These are two Everest movies. Everest, The Other Side is a doc. Tenzing is a narrative. And Everest, The Other Side is, of course, Chive, Asarhilia, and Jimmy Chin, but mostly Jimmy Chin. It's him.

19:36Ryan Lattanzio:Also at Venice, yeah. And another movie directed by exes this year, if you count Los Javis with La Bola Negra. That's right.

19:44Anne Thompson:That's right.

19:44Ryan Lattanzio:Trend story.

19:46Anne Thompson:No, I've been curious about them because they really had a producing relationship, you know, a producer-director relationship, director-director relationship. So I'm curious to see if that continues. But they had a lot of projects in the works, so obviously they're going and not jump aside. And then there's a movie called Tender Loving Care and, of course, the can hit Club Kid.

20:08Ryan Lattanzio:Tender Loving Care being Mike Lee, of course. It's a secretive film.

20:12Anne Thompson:And then, so Bleeker has some decent films. They've got that and they've got Alex Gibney's Musk also.

20:18Ryan Lattanzio:Which is four hours. And also a Venice. So I'll be spending part of my day there as well.

20:26Anne Thompson:And that's what Alex did with the Paul Simon movie. He went into, I remember going to see it And it was so long and everything. And nobody went except me. It was in Toronto. And it was a really good movie. And he eventually sold it. But it was an issue, you know?

20:42Ryan Lattanzio:Well, it's good he already has a distributor here. But I thought after OJ Made in America, we weren't doing these four to eight hour documentaries and calling them a feature anymore.

20:53Anne Thompson:We shall see. We shall see.

20:55Ryan Lattanzio:So why don't you give us a report on the ins and outs of the dozen states' attorneys trying to stop the Paramount-Werner's merger and where we're at.

21:02Anne Thompson:So the judge did grant a temporary restraining order, which means that Paramount has to hold off on closing the deal. But the judge will decide whether to grant a preliminary injunction quite soon, August 3rd, which is good for Paramount, which has a clock ticking with billions of dollars at stake as time goes on. There are various deadlines they have to pay by the month, I think$650 million or something. On the other hand, the judge warned that she wasn't the slightest bit interested in hearing about the streaming competition, which Paramount was expected to make a key part of their arguments.

21:37Anne Thompson:So it's getting interesting. But in the end, Paramount will probably make some concessions to get out of a prolonged court battle because time is not on its side. And the Writers Guild, which is also seeking a preliminary injunction to at least temporarily halt this merger, is hoping to align the timing of its case with that of the dozen state attorneys general. And then they got, Paramount got good news on Wednesday, which is that the European Union regulators blessed the deal with conditions. So Paramount was required to make concessions, including pledging to end its stake in United International Pictures.

22:17Anne Thompson:That makes sense. And Paramount needs to clear one more international hurdle, which is the UK in the United Kingdom. antitrust authorities are continuing to question the deal. So that's what's going on.

22:30Ryan Lattanzio:Paramount, it's in their best interest to make some concessions. Otherwise, these shareholders are getting a payday, an early payday. They owe them a lot of money.

22:40Anne Thompson:Ryan, what's your recommendation for this week?

22:42Ryan Lattanzio:I'm continuing my trend of recommending repertory films, which this week in LA, New York and San Francisco opens Manhunter, the final cut, which is Michael Mann's Hannibal Lecter movie, which is a director's cut, which actually is the version that is the version I first saw 13 or whatever. It came out in 2003 and it's on the DVD, but now this is a 4K restoration. And this is the first adaptation of a Thomas Harris book. This one based on Red Dragon. You have Detective William Peterson, who is tasked with consulting Hannibal Lecter, who's played by Brian Cox, to take down a terrifying serial killer who's played by a super creepy Tom Noonan.

23:25Ryan Lattanzio:This is Michael Mann's third movie. It's not often the favorite of people who are - It's a good movie. It's a very good movie. Yeah, and the favorites for Michael Mann heads are often The Insider and, of course, Heat, which we're going to see a sequel from. But I'm going to go back and watch Manhunter again this Friday because I haven't seen it in a long time. You know, when I was 10 years old, I watched Silence of the Lambs on TV. And my parents were basically like, well, you can watch whatever you want now. And I was really obsessed with it. And so I saw this one when I think it was a little too young.

23:59Ryan Lattanzio:And, you know, I've come back to it and I'm excited to see it in the theater on Friday. And what about your recommendation?

24:05Anne Thompson:I've got a television recommendation. I was over at my daughter's house and she knows me very well. And she said, have you ever watched couples therapy? And I said, no. So I think it just started a new season. So we started that season. And the star of this is Orna Guralnik, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst based in New York, who is amazing. I have been in therapy my whole life, but I have never had a shrink like this. I wish I could. I think she charges$750 an hour or something.

24:40Ryan Lattanzio:These people are getting it for free. They're getting it for free. And they're probably getting paid on top of it.

24:43Anne Thompson:No, I don't know about that. But they have a, she does this amazing work with four couples a season. And these couples are challenges. They're not easy. They're not easy at all. And you watch her maneuvering and keeping them on point. Then she goes and talks to her gang of experts who sort of help her out. She has several different advisors. It's very good. It's well done. This is not a trashy reality TV show. This is a very, very well-made show.

25:12Ryan Lattanzio:No, not at all. You know, I often watch couples therapy on the plane. It's always on Delta. And Dr. Orna seems like a great psychotherapist. I do have to say that a couple months ago, I saw her moderate a Q &A for Beef Season 2. She's a great therapist, but not the best picture moderator because she was applying those psychoanalytic skills to the Q &A where she's asking Yoo Jung Yoon about the death drive or something. And these people just got off a plane and they don't know how to respond to that. So in terms of a moderator, no, but she makes for great television and therapy.

25:46Anne Thompson:All right. Welcome to prolific author David Thompson, who has written yet another book about the history of cinema. Most self-respecting cinephiles have his biographical dictionary of film on their shelves. I assume you do, Ryan.

26:01Ryan Lattanzio:Of course, yes.

26:02Anne Thompson:So I have the 1975 original and the new updated version. And I have a whole shelf on my wall that includes suspects, Nicole Kidman, Try to Tell the Story, Murder in the Movies, Movie Man, The Whole Equation, Overexposure, and America in the Dark. And that's just a sliver of what he's actually written. And if you know his writing, it's not just fun to read, but it's often surprising, idiosyncratic, snarky, and even poetic. So to put it another way, he's not playing it safe or looking over his shoulder. His most recent book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, takes us through the history of film but argues something surprising.

26:42Anne Thompson:So David and I go back to Film Comment magazine when I worked for a couple of years in the early 80s in the bowels of Lincoln Center. David what were some of your favorite film comment pieces if you were to remember what they were I remember doing a piece about telephones in film and I remember I always sort of had a very good collaborative relationship with Richard and um Corliss yeah and we and we sort of put together all our memories of telephone scenes and and the piece grew and I don't know what happened I also did a piece about moustaches in film which I think I I I can't say it was the first time it had ever been dealt with but but I realized how complicated the issue was as I did that piece.

27:44So anyway, the things I enjoyed most about Film Comet was that Richard would encourage and even provoke me into doing unexpected things because I think I'm more often at my best doing unexpected things.

28:05Anne Thompson:Well, you're fearless, for one thing. You don't give a shit what anybody thinks about what you write, which is wonderful. Oh! I'm filled with fear. But I do feel a sort of compulsion to get into it, too. Well, you do that in this book. What I love about this book is the way you take us through history, and you riff on many of our favorite movies as if they're old friends. And you do what a critic should do. You show us different ways to look at them. And thank you for this. I really appreciated reading this book.

28:44Ryan Lattanzio:You turned to writing about TV in recent years as well, including series like Sopranos and Breaking Bad. And I was thinking about, you know, and this comes up in the book, also how the golden age of TV is really responsible for bringing into a more mainstream consciousness, maybe this idea of the antihero, which is a huge figure in film history. which you talk about characters like the slightly creepy Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo or Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead or Jack Nicholson's detective in Chinatown. And then, of course, obviously Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane. Is it that these characters have been too glamorized or misunderstood?

29:26Ryan Lattanzio:What's your take on this idea of the antihero? Well, I mean, I think the anti-hero is actually the way most of us live most of the time, which is that we would like to be heroes. We like to be heroes to the people in our family, the people close to us. We like to be liked. And yet we have learned that we frequently let ourselves down in that capacity. We tell lies. We take the easy way out. We are fearful too often. And we don't act upon every good instinct we feel, and we feel bad about that. In other words, I think the anti-hero is a sign that audiences were growing up. Audiences began in film with absolutely distinct areas, hero and villain, and there were codes for how you presented one or the other.

30:42Heroes were good-looking, villains were not. Villains often had moustaches, and And they behaved badly as if they were freed by the label that you had on them. And I think as time went by, it became easier to see, or more necessary to see, that real people weren't like that, that they were very untidy mixes of impulses and behaviors. and there was no reason why film, if it was growing up as a medium, could not come to terms with seeing the good and bad at the same time in a person, rather in the way the novel had been doing for a long time. And, you know, it's quite a while since American film, let's say, has really presented an unflawed hero figure in a film.

31:53I just think audiences would start to laugh at a character like that. and I mean you mentioned Chinatown which I think is a very interesting step along the way because there you've got a private eye and the private eye for quite a while had been an honored and an honorable figure in our iconography we believed in his wish to find out the truth I mean think of Bogart in The Big Sleep nearly 30 years later in Chinatown, Jake Gittes would have laughed at that Philip Marlowe because he was so much an antique. And that's not to say that Jake Gittes is a complete picture of the private eye in our culture.

32:50But he is a man who seems to be and would like to be thought of as well-meaning, and he does great damage. He doesn't do it deliberately, but it happens from what he's up to and and for me i find it hard to take seriously stories that don't have that dimension to them so in the odyssey i've been the very happy position of not having seen it yet

33:25Anne Thompson:Oh, no. And I have not seen it yet for a perverse reason, which is I know that it is essential to have seen it. I could have guessed that you might have said, oh, no, when you learned that I hadn't seen it.

33:42Ryan Lattanzio:So I'm putting it off. I was going to say I thought you hadn't seen it already, actually. I don't know why. I just had that intuition. i've been i've been doing a lot of other things in connection with this book and and um uh i would i would like to see it in imac 70 and and as you know hard to get it's hard to get yes so i mean i

34:10Anne Thompson:would be content to see it on my phone this afternoon oh stop he's just he's pulling our leg I am not pulling a leg at all. I do not agree with the notion that there is a fundamental difference between seeing it in the ideal form and seeing it in a far less ideal. I think an extraordinary amount of the dramatic content of The Odyssey would be there on my phone. you're probably right but you would miss a great deal of the visual content i wasn't did you i read the richard brody review did you read this ryan the richard brody of the odyssey i got very angry at this review i often get angry at richard's review he is basically saying oh it's not as good as the poem it's not giving us the real ancient greece it's modernizing the story and he's pissed off at that.

35:07Anne Thompson:And then he says that it's good storytelling, but the visuals aren't interesting.

35:12Ryan Lattanzio:I just, well, Richard Brody's tastes are very legible. It's like, you know what he likes and he doesn't like already. And I knew he was going to take that movie to task. He would be

35:22Anne Thompson:a contrarian. Absolutely.

35:23Ryan Lattanzio:And he's complaining that there were no gods. It doesn't have the Zeus's pantheon of the council of gods that are debating Odysseus's fate and that everything is, is refracted through this more mortal lens, but he's obviously he's a purist about the poem, which is based on oral tradition. There is no right version of the Odyssey. There you are. All of this demonstrates that you can be right and wrong at the same time. Richard Brody for me has often in the past been a sort of reliable, a bellwether because when he loved to film, I seldom did.

36:03Anne Thompson:his own his main virtue and he's a very nice man and i like him a lot in person his main virtue is how much he loves french cinema and john godard and so forth and i give him credit for that godard is a treat wonderful book yeah all right we digress i'm going to ask you one more question which is are you saying and eventually you seem to say this at the toward the end of the book very directly in the godfather section are you saying that many films are bad for us that fantasy is a dangerous thing oh i think unquestionably fantasy is a dangerous thing and you would not really dispute that i mean if you put somebody in a perilous situation in life it is far better that they try to deal with it accurately than if they enter into a fantasy.

37:01So that, for instance, if you feel that global warming is a great threat, it's surely far better and far more likely to have success and to preserve the human race to analyze what is happening in global warming than to say, oh, it's really just a test sent to us by the gods, and if I put on armor and sandals and a sword, I can contest it. What I'm saying is I think there is always, for men particularly, in action adventure films, a legend, an underground legend, that whatever the problems, you can deal with them. Well, I think you can only deal with them by understanding them, which means close attention to what's happening and what's wrong and finding an accurate answer, not a fantasy answer.

38:06I am very suspicious and cautious of fantasy, and that really is at the heart of the uneasiness I feel about film altogether.

38:19Anne Thompson:Because the Godfather has us rooting for the bad guys and you seem to feel that this is a... No, I think the Godfather makes men particularly want to be part of the gang. Yeah, yeah.

38:32Ryan Lattanzio:Well, David, I'd love to know actually what the origins of the book even were. Was it that you were feeling disillusioned about the current crop of movies, you know, and how they've become refracted through our own political present? And a lot of what you've talked about is patterns that have paved the way for Donald Trump's presidency. Well, if you go back to my first book, which I'm not urging you to go back to because I don't think it's a very good book. Which one is it? It was called Movie Man. Oh, I have it. And it was published in 1967 before Ryan was born, I suspect. We won't go into Anne's birthday.

39:13But a lot of the uneasiness I feel now is there in that book. So I have always had mixed feelings about the medium I love as much as any. And I think what's emerging in this conversation is that I'm a creature of mixed feelings. I do think that as I came to this task, and it arose out of conversations with my editor at Simon & Schuster, my thinking was enormously focused by the president we have been suffering. And, you know, to go back to The Godfather, Donald Trump seems to me to be a fantasist who believes deeply in the gangsterism of The Godfather. And I think that is too dangerous for us to indulge any fantasy answer to what's happening.

40:26the reality has to be dealt with. So, I mean, the origin of the book is it's deep-seated, but it really came into focus, I suppose, in 2016. And then the amazing conflict of interest that faced us all in realizing that we the people had voted for this man twice. That says so much about the unreliability of every principle of the American project and the American dream. Things that I have bought into in a way that you two haven't, in that I was not born American. I am an American citizen now and I came here and I've been here longer than I lived in England, I think, principally because the American project appealed to me enormously.

41:32Anne Thompson:let's go back in time to um one story that i just love in your biography which is how you got involved with michael powell yeah and affected the romance that he had with thelma shoemaker which is one of the great romances of all time yeah well i was teaching at Dartmouth, I think it would have been 1979, when a letter came to me that had been forwarded to me by a publisher in London. And it was four pages, handwritten, black ink on cream paper, a letter from Michael Powell, a man I had never met in England. But you had liked his films. I loved his films, and I had said that in the biographical dictionary, and he had seen it, and he was writing to say thank you for what I said.

42:34And we got into correspondence, and quite quickly, I said to him, if you were ever in America or interested in coming, we'd love to have you at Dartmouth for, I don't know, a weekend or something like that, you know, and talking to students and showing a few films. And he wrote back immediately when.

43:02And the talk developed. And very quickly, thanks to people at Dartmouth who could find a bit of funding, we made a deal whereby Michael would come for a term, not just a weekend, and he would take our best students and make a film of some kind. What he did was to make an extract from a bigger film that he planned at that time, which would be from Ursula Gwynne's The Earthsea Trilogy. And they shot, I don't know, about 15 minutes of film on 35mm. They made sets, they found actors. And I became very close to Michael, obviously, in that time. And one day, one Friday in the morning, he came into my office and he said, David, how do I get down to New York City quickly?

44:09And I said, well, there is a prop plane that flies out of West Lebanon Airport, not West Lebanon in the Middle East, West Lebanon in New Hampshire, that will take you down to New York. So he went and he was going because he had been invited by Marty Scorsese to sit in on the editing on Raging Bull.

44:32Anne Thompson:Wow. He had met Scorsese before. But anyway, he goes down. And of course, in the editing room working with Marty is Thelma Schoonmaker. And the two of them fell in love. I love this story. And as you say, became a famous partnership.

44:54Ryan Lattanzio:So I read the A.O. Scott profile of you and of the new book, and it sounds like you spent a few days together. But one thing that stood out is, you know, he talked about how many books you had in your apartment, obviously, but that you watched The Truman Show in your living room, which it turns out to be a really good example of what you're talking about, of this broken barrier between fantasy and reality. but it got me wondering how big of a physical media collector are you now? I, last year I interviewed Jonathan Rosenbaum who had some 6 ,000 DVDs that he sold in 2024. And I've gone through that where I have shed many discs and it's terribly depressing, but it's also weightlifting in a way.

45:38Ryan Lattanzio:So I wonder what does your collection look like? Well, my wife and I do have a big library, which obviously is film books, but far more than film books. And I'm not sure how many books we have, but we did a culling recently just to make space for more. I have a collection of DVDs, but not nearly as large as the collections you're talking about. and I'm not sure why that is but but um how do you view your films for the most part um I suppose most of the films I see are films I stream and I watch them on what I would call my television set although really it's not a television set in the old sense it's a movie screen, you know, and it's a beautiful picture.

46:41And I do nothing to look after it, to care for it, to improve it. But the image on my television set in the next room to where we're speaking is invariably better than the image I see in movie theaters. I go to theaters quite a lot. and I'm not, I really can't deny what I see before my eyes. The image at home is better than the image in theaters and when people deplore the decline in theatrical attendance, which is unquestioned, they should pay attention to the fact that it's a better image at home.

47:29Ryan Lattanzio:well are you a frequenter of repertory screenings in San Francisco there is between restorations and Criterion Channel and everything Janice is doing and so on obviously a lot of younger audiences are really looking at earlier films in a way that I personally find very heartening well I go to the Pacific Film Archive I used to work there when I was at Berkeley you know what I'm going to say it's a haven It has a very strong, smart audience that goes regularly. I speak there occasionally, and it's very often sold out. And it's a screening, it's a theater of about, I don't know, say 250. I love going there.

48:19The repertory theater scene here, as in most cities, has declined a lot, and there are not nearly as many as there were when I first came here, which was 45 years ago, say, I think.

48:39But I go to regular theatres. I'm sure when I see The Odyssey, which probably will be in the next few days, it will be in a big theatre in San Francisco. but the PFA is the closest I know now to what I still call the National Film Theater which is the BFI Theater in London which is a place I attended like three or four days a week for four years and which was really my university you know in the early 1960s.

49:17Ryan Lattanzio:I worked as an as an usher at the PFA from I think like 2009 to 2012. So this is how I saw the full filmographies of many of the great filmmakers. Yes, yes, yes. And we hope that will keep up because for young people, it means such a lot.

49:38Anne Thompson:So David, I was thinking that this might be your last book. But when I ran into you the other day at a book party, you told me you've already written another one. Yes. I'm terrified of the phrase, last book. I would hope, if I have to die and I'm prepared for that, that I'm writing a book at the time. To stop writing, to stop thinking of books to write, those things are inconceivable. Can you tell us what this one's about? It's a book about Mickey Mouse. Okay. Okay.

50:23Anne Thompson:Mickey Mouse as a character and a beloved creature. As a character, a beloved creature, a brand image, a sort of Pied Piper character for children, a measure of Disneyfication, animation, things I've not much written about before, but I find it very interesting. I can't wait.

50:50Ryan Lattanzio:How are you doing your research? Do you have somebody going through the Disney archives in LA? No, I'm not really. I wouldn't claim this as a researched book. I'm working off Neil Gabler's big book on Disney, which is a very thoroughly researched book. but it's really it's an attempt to come to terms with what Mickey and other characters like Mickey mean to us

51:21Anne Thompson:Well I look forward to it and David thank you so much for coming Well thank you It was so much fun for us Thank you to both of you