The Worst Movie Ever Made? with Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson

From the bonus vault!

What actually makes a movie “bad”? In this bonus episode, Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of the film podcast Unspooled tell Sarah the story of what many consider to be the worst film of all time: the 1987 adventure comedy Ishtar. From the movie’s chaotic production to its perplexing public ridicule, together they analyze whether Ishtar is as bad as people say or if our culture just loves to jump on a snarky bandwagon. Digressions include James Cameron schadenfreude, $19 AMC pretzels, and The Hangover for the AARP crowd.

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https://www.unspooledpodcast.com/

Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler:
linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonster

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Transcript

YWA - The Worst Movie Ever Made

Sarah: Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we make fun bonus episodes, one a month, in fact. And this week we're sharing one with you to give you a sense of the kind of shenanigans we got up to back there behind the curtain. And in this case, it's a discussion about the worst film ever made, or is it? Elaine May’s Ishtar, with Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of the Unspooled Podcast.

And in case you're curious about other episodes we've done in the past year or so, don't worry, I have a little list for you. We've talked about Bigfoot with Lulu Miller, Elvira Mistress of the Dark with Eve Lindley, that time Kim Kardashian wore a Marilyn Monroe dress for some reason with Eve Lindley and Caroline o' Donahue, about Christmas ghosts with Chelsey Weber-Smith, and of course, most recently about one of my favorite phenomena, when a doll has their own little doll, also with Chelsey Weber-Smith, and Survival Tips with Blair Braverman. 

We're so lucky to have people who pay to subscribe to these episodes and support the show that way, and who have done so in many cases for such a very long time. And so here's a preview of the kind of bonus stuff that we're trying out and having fun with. And either way, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About the podcast where we've talked about the worst Oscars ever, and now we're talking about what some have called the worst movie ever. But is it? And why do we choose the things that we say are the worst, as the worst? Why did Showgirls win all those Razzies when clearly it's perfect?

With me today are Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of Unspooled. Welcome. 

Amy: Hello. 

Paul: Hi. We are so excited to be here. We are big fans of this show, and excited to bring some real culture to you today as we talk about a very misunderstood film. 

Amy: It's true. On Unspooled, we mostly talk about the films that the culture at large has deemed classics. And so it is such a treat to get into a movie that the culture at large has deemed God awful, absolute trash, the punchline for everything bad that could ever happen in the world.

Paul: We are, of course… 

Sarah: And of course we are talking today, please. 

Paul: About the Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman film, Ishtar. A movie that became such a joke that a comic strip like The Far Side, who never made pop culture references, I believe has one pop culture reference comic, and it is an Ishtar joke. 

Amy: Yeah, it's called, I think something like The Video Store of Hell. And when you go in, the only VHS tape is Ishtar. And we should say actually, to Gary Larson's credit, he admitted later that he had never even seen Ishtar. He was just going off of Ishtar’s reputation. And he was like, that was mean. I take it back. Of all the comic strips I've ever done, I regret that one. 

Sarah: It's really good to know that Gary Larson rescinded that statement, and also that he doesn't regret any of the other ones.

Paul: Well, you know, look, the cows really never complained. They felt like his insults to them were very justified. 

Sarah: Well, he does imply that they use tools. So, you know. 

Paul: I will say this, it's a different podcast, but there was a script for a Far Side movie, which they did shoot scenes of, that probably would have topped Ishtar as far as being a movie ridiculed for being absolutely awful.

But what's interesting about this film and that Far Side cartoon, is I would argue most people didn't see Ishtar. But it was a joke, and it becomes this thing, this kind of rallying cry. And I think that a lot of times we see this in our society where we just kind of gang up or we heard it was bad or we, conversely, we hear it's good and we're all fans.

It's a weird way that we interact with culture. We don't even know that we like it. We just are kind of following popularity lemmings. We're either going to follow you off the ledge of the cliff or push you off the cliff. 

Amy: Yeah. And I find it so capricious. Because it's like, what if I told you there's a director who puts their cast through hell, and makes them do 50 takes of one scene without giving them any notes of what to do and what to make it better?

I could either be talking about Stanley Kubrick, who generally recognizes the greatest genius in ways that we've kind of examined at the show. Or it could be talking about Elaine May and how she made Ishtar, and why she never got to direct another film again. 

Sarah: Interesting. Or about David O. Russell for that matter.

Paul: Whoa. David O. Russell's a whole different story. David O Russell's kicking people. Elaine May is just driving them crazy, like with Kubrick. 

Sarah: Ah, good for her. 

Amy: I heard she bit somebody in the editing room. 

Paul: Okay, there we go. So fair. 

Amy: But I also heard she did it as a joke. Who knows? 

Sarah: Okay, so we are against biting people, but if there is a place to do it, it's in the editing room.

Paul: Elaine May is known as a difficult filmmaker in the sense that at one point when she was going to lose final cut on a film, she stole her own movie to keep it away from the studio. Like it had to go to court for the movie to get back to the studio. 

Sarah: I could see myself doing that, honestly.

Amy: Well then maybe you have a little bit of Elaine May in you, which I think is a compliment in many ways. Elaine May comes out being a comedian, a writer, an actress with a string of hits, having her fingerprints all over movies like The Graduate. A movie that we have very much covered on Unspooled. And I actually think some of the jokes you put in are kind of what kill it.

But that said, even when Elaine May starts making hit movies, everybody loves comedies that make back tenfold their budget. She's a little nervous about putting her name on those too. She is a perfectionist, and perfectionism can be maddening. But I actually want to examine on this podcast, why is this person the one who took all the blame? Because this is a gigantic story with a lot of people making a lot of bad decisions. 

Sarah: Why is Fawn Hall synonymous with Iran Contra, which might be related? 

Amy: Exactly. What do they have in common? 

Paul: Well you know, this movie is really interesting because for Hollywood, these are some of the biggest players imaginable at the time. 

In the early eighties, you have Warren Beatty, who is sitting on top of at least the Hollywood world. And like Amy said, Elaine May is this secret comedy genius. She's been behind movies like The Heartbreak Kid. And one of the things we haven't touched on, if you're not familiar with Elaine May, she was a part of Nichols and May, this transformational comedy duo that blew the minds of so many people in the 1950s. 

They were doing two-person improvisation. They were rock stars. They were together, or they weren't, read the book. Every book will give you a little bit of a different story of what that was. But what they were, were legends.

So Elaine May is a legend beyond her film. She is a comedy genius. So for her to team up to make a comedy with Warren Beatty, that sounds exciting. And then you add Dustin Hoffman to the mix, who's also at his peak. You know, this is kind of like The Avengers of neurotic comedy. 

Amy: Well, and one thing that these stars have in common is that both Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman owe Elaine May, feel like part of their success is due to Elaine May. Because even though Elaine May hasn't directed a movie since the seventies, she's been doing a lot of uncredited screen rights. She did a lot of work on Reds, which won Warren Beatty his best director Oscar. And she did a lot of work on Tootsie. And so these two guys are like, she's our secret genius. Let's help her. Let's make her famous. Let's make her the director of a movie that combines all of our star clout. There's no way that this is going to fail. We're going to do Elaine May the biggest solid that's going to make her reputation golden. 

Paul: And it's a goofy, buddy, musical spy caper, about two terrible lounge singers who stumble into a Middle Eastern coup. Now, on its surface, that's a great place for Elaine May to play. Because like I mentioned, she is coming off of one of the famous comedy duos. So to make a movie about lounge singer, comedy duo, that feels right in the wheelhouse of what Elaine May can do and has lived through. 

And because it's Warren Beatty, they want to go big. They want to shoot in the Sahara, they want camels, they want all of it. And because it's Warren Beatty, studios go, “Sure, yeah, you could take your friend and let them make a movie.” 

Sarah: Where in time are we? 

Paul: Well, at this point Ishtar comes out in ‘87, so we're about mid. 

Sarah: Oh wow. Yeah. That's later than I thought for some reason. 

Paul: Yeah. Okay. So I would imagine this probably is developing probably from like ‘84 to ‘85. Is that about right, Amy, would you say? 

Amy: Yeah, it's about that. 

Sarah: Yeah. But they're so extremely established. 

Paul: Yes, yes. 

Amy: Established, but also with suspense. Because you know, we mentioned Reds, we mentioned Tootsie. Neither Beatty nor Hoffman has really made a movie since. So there's this buildup. When are they going to act again? When are we going to see them again? And from start to finish, they go four and a half years without being in a movie. It's like waiting for Oceans 13 or something. when am I going to see that super group again? 

Paul: Soon, Amy. Soon it's going to happen. But also, Elaine May is in this same kind of career quietness, right? Because she has made The Heartbreak Kid, a movie which is truly great. I just want to shout out The Heartbreak Kid. You can't find it really anywhere because it was, or it is owned by a pharmaceutical company in a very weird twist of fate. But it is a fantastic film. But she hasn't made anything for quite some time.

I mean, Mikey and Nikki was 1976. That's the movie where she stole the print, and that was right after The Heartbreak Kid. So she has been from 1976 to 1987, hasn't touched a movie from the director's chair. 

Sarah: Right. 

Paul: But she's making very odd films every step of the way. Nothing is normal for her, and that's kind of her game. She doesn't like simplicity. I don't think that she likes structure. She wants things to feel fat and weird. 

Mikey and Nikki, they talk about these scenes where they would just keep on rolling. The script would end and she wouldn't cut the camera for 20 minutes. You know, as long as they had a camera in the mag, they would just keep on going.

Amy: Yeah. There's a really funny specific story where the leads of Mike and Nikki, they walk off the set. One of them is having a conversation somewhere in the back with one of his buddies, the other guy's on a smoke break or something. The camera guy's still rolling. And when he finally just cuts being like, “What am I doing?”, Elaine may yells at him. She's like, “You don't know. They could come back. What if they come back?” 

Paul: I love this. 

Sarah: It's the Nixon approach to filmmaking. He gets kind of roll and see what happens. 

Amy: Yeah, and that's the thing. I think some people would say, whoa, she really is this improvisational genius. And other people would say, does she have any idea what she's doing? What is happening? Does she have any idea how much film costs? 

I mean, one of the running jokes about Mikey and Nikki is that she used up, I think, three times as much film stock on that movie as Gone with the Wind. As Gone with the Wind!

Paul: It's amazing. And for years you didn't even get to see her cut because the studio recut it to make it more palatable. That's been happening a lot to her. You know, that also happened on The New Leaf with Walter Mattau.

But this movie is interesting because not only is she back in the director's chair, but she gets the highest budget ever given to a female director. 

Sarah: It's like when they sent Sally Ride into space, it feels like. Where they're like, alright babe, if you fuck up in any way, we're not going to let any more women do this. So have fun. 

Amy: Yeah. It does feel like you get gigantic tests. I mean, even the production designer of Ishtar, this man Paul Sylbert, he was sticking up for Elaine May. He said, “This woman had not made a movie in 10 years. And then the first thing she had to do was paint the Sistine Chapel.” 

Now, we should say the eighties, by the way, was a time that Paul and I reminisce about a lot. Where you had really profitable blockbuster, big budget comedies in theaters. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: You know, now it's almost hard to imagine anybody spending this type of money, $47 million, even in 1980 money, on making a big budget comedy. But this is like, this is Ghostbusters era. You can take a big swing, you can afford it. 

Sarah: Right. 

Amy: She really admires Hoffman. She really admires Beatty. They know each other, and she knows some secrets about them. She knows that before they both became major actors, they wanted to be singers. They had a piano act kind of separately. They were club guys. There's another world of both of them, where if they had followed their original passion, maybe they would've been just mediocre singers and not movie stars. 

And that's sort of what this movie is about. Honoring these guys who are pretty lousy musicians, but they're going for their dreams. I really like the opening stretches of this scene, where you're just watching them screw around at the piano and chasing this artistry that they're lousy at but they're sincere about it. 

Paul: And I know we've already talked about how Elaine May has a very peculiar way of doing things. We want to talk about peculiar. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman are also very meticulous performers who, in every story that I've ever heard, never feel like it's fully right, or that they're fully there. Or they're so fully there that they can't do anything else. They are not easy performers. So you have somebody painting the Sistine Chapel with two people watching, going, I don't think that's exactly right. 

Amy: Well wait, but, or grabbing the paintbrush and doing it themselves. And then painting over the next one, and then painting over the next one.

Because this is a movie that winds up with all three of them hiring their own editing team and being like, no, this is my code of the movie. This is my code of the movie. And they're all backstabbing each other, going behind each other's backs to the studio bosses. I mean, this is a movie with three personalities crammed into a gigantic blockbuster, that even at its scale, can probably only afford one of these personalities to take charge.

Sarah: Right. 

Paul: But that opening sequence that you're talking about, that's so funny. It’s these two actors in a nutshell, right? They're trying to make a jingle. They're trying to make a perfect, they are obsessed with being perfect in a way or creating a big hit. This movie is about these guys trying to find success, trying to make it work.

And I love how mercurial they are in that opening. They're bad, but they are very impassioned about being bad. And I think that's a funny thing. Like they work hard, but the result is bad. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: Well actually, I think they're coming up with something that maybe should be your new theme song, Sarah. I mean, it's telling the truth can be dangerous business. I think you should just rock that. 

Sarah: I think so. I think that could be a nice treat after this many years. There's also something very charming to me about getting to consume the not very good output in a different medium of people who are very good at a different thing that they do. Because there's kind of an innocence to it that I think can be, I don't know, it's just something I like. 

Amy: Well, yeah, especially I think with Warren Beatty in these scenes. Because Elaine May's having so much fun taking playboy, Oscar winner Warren Beatty, and making him be a doofus who's afraid of women hating him.

Paul: I love this.

Sarah: Doofus Warren Beatty is my favorite. 

Paul: Yes, I agree. 

Amy: He’s so good. 

Paul: He's very funny in this. And that's one of the weird things about this film is, and we'll get into it as we keep on talking about it, but there are some legitimately great things about it. And performances are one of them, across the board.

Amy: Well, I might disagree on all the performances, but I think Beatty is fantastic. I mean, when he is looking at Dustin Hoffman and he's wishing that he had Dustin Hoffman's game and he's like, “Oh, the way you walk, you can only do it with a small body.” 

Sarah: A little bit of Midnight Cowboy. 

Paul: A little bit, yeah. Just a tinge. Now, I think in New York, this filming is going okay because the movie starts off in a very contemporary setting. Where the film really starts to go off the rails, at least from a production standpoint, is when they decide that they're going to go… well, originally they wanted to go to the Sahara, but they decide to shoot Morocco instead. It's a cheaper stand-in location. 

Amy: I actually want to say this was not Elaine May's call. 

Paul: Okay. 

Amy: Elaine May was like, let's shoot this in America. Let's keep the cost low. And at this time Columbia, who they're making this movie for, is owned by not Sony, but Coca-Cola. 

Paul: Yes. 

Amy: And Coca-Cola has this global empire, of course. And Coca-Cola has a lot of money tied up in Morocco that they need to spend or use. So it's Coca-Cola's idea to put this film in Morocco. They steer this ship towards disaster. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Paul: Coca-Cola's like, go there as a business choice. Now again, you asked when this movie was being made. 1985 October is when they are in Morocco. And just to put this in some context, there is some real-world regional instability here. You have terrorism, guerilla war. 

Sarah: Yeah, I was going to say. 

Paul: Yeah, this is not the best time to be in Morocco. So much so that before shooting at some locations, they had to be swept for landmines. 

Sarah: Yeah. And at that point, if I were Elaine May, I'd be like, told you. But you know, you can't argue with Coke money.

Paul: No. I mean, that's it. You have to go where Coke tells you to go. 

Amy: But it does also mean they're getting kidnapping threats for Dustin Hoffman by the PLO. I mean, stuff is bad. 

Sarah: I mean, he's so easy to stuff in a bag and run away with, you know? 

Amy: That's the thing about having a small body. 

Paul: So they're there. And here's the thing, once they get there, they're not making too many concessions. They're in a foreign land, they have fears of kidnapping. Their sets might be war zones, but there're still going to ask for some big things. They want a blue-eyed camel, they want that blue-eyed camel. They have to figure out where they can get a blue-eyed camel. 

Sarah: Who do you even start asking about that kind of thing? I guess there would be camel wranglers that you would be working with, I guess. So these are the things that make the film industry so fascinating. 

Amy: But then there's the psychology on top of that where they do exactly what you're thinking. They go to find a camel wrangler, and they immediately find a perfect camel. They're like, oh, that's the greatest camel. We should get that camel. But you know what? We've got this budget. What if there's better camels? That kind of perfectionism disease sets in. 

Sarah: Yeah. You got to just go with the camel that's right in front of you. The obvious problems. 

Paul: Hey, don't look at gift camel in the mouth. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: But they did it. They go hunting for more camels. They interview a whole bunch of camels. They spend tons of time and money on this camel quest. They never find a camel as good as that first camel. They have to go back to the people who tried to sell them that first camel and say, “We're sorry. Can we buy that camel now?” And those people say, we ate it. 

Sarah: Oh yeah, I was expecting it'd be like, it's double now. But that's actually just, nope, that's not good for the camel. 

Paul: It became dinner. 

Amy: But that's the tenor of what's going on here. You know, you can hear the psychosis in the stories that are coming out where everyone is trying too hard and in the process making stuff worse.

Paul: And again, they're shooting themselves in the foot. You know, we're talking about a lot of production nightmares. And as somebody who definitely studies this on how did this get made, I know that it can go in two different directions. You can get things that come out like The Room. Tommy Wiseau's The Room, not Bri Larson's Room. Or you can get something like Apocalypse Now, which goes through heart attacks and shutdowns, and actors showing up or not showing up. And you get this classic. 

So just because there's a troubled production doesn't always mean there's going to be a bad film at the end of it. You know, sometimes those mistakes, sometimes those tensions make a better film.

Amy: Well, and actually the DP here, Vittorio Storaro, he is the DP who did Apocalypse Now. So he is like, “I'm in my zone, man.” But he's coming in not so much I would say as Elaine ‘ guy, he's coming in as Warren Beatty's guy. Because he did Reds, and then together they'd go on and do Dick Tracy, Bulworth. 

Sarah: Ah, Dick Tracy.

Amy: Paul, you have been on a ton of movie sets, I'm sure you understand this pattern of, where is everybody's allegiance? Who's going to get listened to the most? When you're Warren Beatty, you have an Oscar for being a director, aren't you going to carry as much weight when you tell the DP what to do? 

Paul: Well this is the kind of the problem everyone's looking about where their bread is buttered, in a certain realm in television. And I'm going to put this as a very big, you know, there's going to be people who are like, well, technically, but I'll tell you that in television, the showrunner is king. 

The showrunner is the person who it's their idea and they hire the directors. Sometimes they work in tandem with the director. Everybody is allegiant to the showrunner for the most part. In film, it can get blurry because a lot of the times the A-list talent is the star. Now there are director's stars, and it's like, it's a director's medium. Film is a director's medium. You hear that a lot. But, you know, there is this rule in the DGA about partnerships. Basically like the Cohen brothers, if they direct together, if they ever break apart, they can't rejoin as a partnership. That's a rule that the DGA has. 

Sometimes you can. There's a little bit of a tweak that you can make to it. Like, yes, you can come back. But the real reason that they put this in place is because there was a time when lead actors would say to the director, “Well, we're directing it together. I'm in it with you, so we'll be co-directors on this.” So that law was kind of put in place so lead actors wouldn't kind of usurp the director.

Sarah: Yeah. Which makes sense. Because if there wasn't a law against it, then probably 35% of lead actors would at one point try successfully to do it. 

Paul: Oh, I listened to a gigantic actor tell me that he wrote a handful of giant films. And when I looked, not even a co-written by credit, no credit on the page.

But I think that sometimes a big actor will feel like, well, I added that line. I'm a writer on this movie. I talked about that shot. I should be directing this movie. 

Sarah: I had it say with, I changed that, that was my preposition. 

Paul: And you know what? You're like, that is kind of this ego that you have to deal with. So yes, to Amy's question, there is this allegiance. Who am I paying attention to? Who is going to be my meal ticket? And I would argue that if you're on this set, your meal ticket's going to be Warren Beatty or Dustin Hoffman, ultimately. You know, just because their track record is more solid and they would be right.

Amy: Yeah. Even if they've gone four and a half years without making a movie, that's still less than half of what Elaine May has gone. If you're looking for a job, stick with them.

Paul: Now I will say you brought up the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro.

Amy: Yes. 

Paul: This guy is not the right person for this movie. This is a person who is shooting Ishtar like it's Lawrence of Arabia. It looks like a desert epic. And he and Elaine May are at each other's throats because she wants to shoot it like a comedy, and he's trying to shoot it like an epic. 

And at this point, Warren Beatty, who has worked with him, is like, “Well, let's trust him. He knows how to make things look good.” But what looks good in a comedy doesn't always look good in an epic. It's a different medium. There are different techniques that play there, so that's a real source of tension. And to know that your lead star is going to side with the DP, that takes away a ton of Elaine May's power.

Sarah: And does that kind of thing happen to male directors that much with someone who has, you know, a fairly important job like DP being like, “No”? 

Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Sarah: Okay, interesting. 

Paul:  Here's why I'll say it. Because the A-list star is the person, and probably not to the top 10 male directors, that's probably not happening. 

Sarah: Right. 

Paul: But I will say that if you're a new director, you come in, you talk to a lot of these younger directors that you're like, oh my gosh, my first opportunity to work on a big movie. And they are there truly as a figurehead to get beaten up by everybody else. They're like, put there and let us tell you what to do. I've seen it happen. I've been on sets. 

Sarah: [inaudible] hire, kids. Dream about doing Foley. 

Paul: Oh, it is a mess. It is a mess. I will tell you that, I mean, I even know a giant actor and a giant director who came to blows on that.

Like actors sometimes are coming at it from the point of view of I need to protect myself. There's a great article in Entertainment Weekly, I recommend this all the time. It was for Last Vegas, the Michael Douglas, he's getting married, but they're all old. And he goes there with Kevin Klein and Morgan Freeman, and it’s a Hangover for the AARP crowd.

Sarah: Yeah. Or like those Jane Fonda ensemble movies for guys. 

Paul: Exactly. So there's a round table and Entertainment Weekly, where they are all talking about working with directors. And Morgan Freeman says, “Oh, if a director tells me how to do a scene, I just ignore him”, and everyone starts laughing like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't listen to the director. No, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Like his job is to put the camera where the camera is. We don't listen to it. Like it's not even a quietly kept idea. It's just right out there. It's like, I know how to do me. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: Now we should say, there is a producer out there who doesn't like that this is how Hollywood is run and he's British. His name is David Putnam. Because he made movies like Chariots of Fire and he had this reputation in Hollywood as a guy who had a better way of doing this than Hollywood has been run. He's like, “I don't like expensive movies. I think we should be making more lower budget movies. I think movie stars shouldn't have this much power.” 

I agree with a lot of what he was saying back then. And this guy becomes the head of Columbia Pictures in the middle of the Ishtar shoot. He is the absolute wrong tempo if you want to help shepherd this movie across the finish line, because Ishtar represents everything he's trying to prove that Hollywood shouldn't be.

Hollywood shouldn't be controlled by the Warren Beattys and the Dustin Hoffmans of the world. Who by the way, as expensive as this movie is, over $10 million of its budget goes to their salaries. It was this expensive in part because of their fees. He doesn't like that. He doesn't like the clout that they have. 

So it's in David Putnam's interest if Ishtar is a flop, because then he can turn around and say, “See, we need to stop doing this. You guys need to listen to me.” 

Paul: And this is a big deal. Whenever a new person comes in midstream, what they want to do is prove that the person before them was an absolute failure because they can't take credit for that success. 

Sarah: God, it's almost like it's political or something. 

Amy: Oh, it's very political. 

Paul: It truly is.

Amy: It's incredibly political. It's Severance x12.

Paul: I mean, you saw it happen in this year where Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi, who run Warner Brothers, before Minecraft and Sinners came out, they were like, well, guess what? These two suck, and these movies are going to suck. And they wreck this studio. 

And then all of a sudden Minecraft is a big hit. And then the tide turned as like, well, they weren't actually really involved with it. That was before them. And then Sinners comes out, well, but technically that doesn't really work. And then when One Battle After Another came out, they're like, ah, you see? It didn't make as much as we thought, but now that movie's already made $200 million internationally.

I just think that there's always this like kind of jockeying position when you're the head. You kind of root for failure in the past because then you can, like Amy said, make your point in the future. 

Amy: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's any parallel to this happening in modern politics where previous people are getting blamed for what's happening, but, you know. 

Sarah: I don’t know either. But just from a purely entertainment perspective though, I feel like there's a way that the public can kind of become complicit in this, or that that kind of is in tune with the way we like to operate. 

Because we love, I don't know, it feels like with the kind of technology we've had in the past a hundred odd years, culture has been able to move faster. And so we're at this kind of continually faster pace of that was the old thing, this is the new thing. A thing so specific that it's going to be really easy to get tired of it very soon. 

Amy: Yeah. I feel like whenever anybody gets anointed the Internet's next boyfriend, they should just run and hide, because that never works out well for anybody.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Paul: Now, I will say that adding to all of this onset pressure of getting this movie done, being in a hostile territory, gossip is leaking out throughout the entire production. 

Sarah: As it does. 

Paul: Elaine May hated the heat and the sun. She dressed very bizarre. People said that she looked like a stormtrooper on set because she was wearing these very big glasses, she had a parasol. She was in all these things to keep her away from the sun. 

Amy: As a person who sunburns, I want to say, get it girl. I believe in you. I would love to walk around in nothing but gigantic sunglasses and gauze all the time. 

Sarah: Oh God. Yeah. 

Paul: Well, crew members would joke that she was dressed for a lunar landing when she stepped outside. And there were people in Morocco who were convinced that she was one of the celebrities from the film that was hiding from assassins. 

There's a town in Morocco called like Ouarzazate. They used to call her the Phantom of  Ouarzazate, so she had that. 

Amy: You know, I would like her to put her crow's feet next to, the DP’s crow's feet, and they can see who aged better.

Sarah: That's true. 

Paul: She's 93. She's alive and kicking, so she's doing so of them well and then, you know, you also have Warren Beatty who is a famous cocksman, I guess. So you're getting these stories about who is he out with, who is he going with? Is he with that woman? You know, all these photos coming out of who is he wining and dining in Morocco? No one, but it still was gossip. Again, all of this is just fueling the bad thing.

Amy: To be fair, we should say part of why he's keeping it in his tunic is that the woman he's seeing at the time, Isabelle Adjani, is in the movie. She's the female lead who's dressed as a boy and walking around, and he's got to try harder to get some private time.

Sarah: I love how Warren Beatty at this point onward, was like, “I only make a movie once every few years. But if I do, it's with the potentially very difficult woman I'm dating right now. So that's fine.” 

Paul: You know, it's always a good time to work with the person that you're in a relationship with. 

Amy: Well, but it does seem to have added a lot of tension to this set. Because everybody says that Adjani did not get along very well with May. And I don't know who's to blame for that, but it sounds like May wasn't particularly nice to her.

Paul: Well, I think that May is having a hard time over, you know, we've talked about all the issues, but she's going through certain periods of the film not talking to Warren Beatty. There are these moments where there is this action scene that they have to shoot, and Warren Beatty's over shoulder telling her how to do it. And she's like, “You want to do it? Go do it.” And apparently, he froze. 

But these are the stories that are coming out. So we have romance, we have nobody talking to each other. Elaine May looking like a storm trooper. And I will say, just to make sure that everyone gets a little bit of this, Dustin Hoffman, a lot of people saying, “Oh, he's method on this movie. He's so method. He doesn't realize he's in comedy, he still thinks he's in Rain Man.” So there like, what's true, what's not true doesn't make a difference. What's getting back to the gossip rags is that every part of this movie is a disaster. 

Amy: Yeah. I mean, people are thinking this movie isn't even going to finish getting made. Like there's buzz that this is going to fall apart before it's even done. 

Sarah: So it's kind of like Titanic. 

Amy: It's exactly like Titanic. Except Titanic winds up being great. 

Sarah: Except that all worked out. But I feel like it's hard to remember now is that the way people talked about it when it was in production was like, oh boy, this is going to be, it feels like people were like sharpening their knives, getting ready to have a schadenfreude feast on James Cameron. Which would be nice, but it hasn't happened. 

Paul: Absolutely. We want to watch people fail. Right? I think that that's a part of, we raise people up and we want to tear them down. You know, I think we saw it this year with Taylor Swift's album. It was like, okay, now she's happy, so now she sucks. And actually, that's a symbol of this. And you know, we love to love our stars. And we love to not let them get too big of a head. 

Now, you might believe that it's three stars that are fighting that's causing the problems of this film. But Amy, do you want to… I can talk about it, but I don't know if you knew about this in some of your research. Maybe it was because they had a curse because they pissed off a vulture. Did you hear about this? 

Amy: No. Please tell me about the angry vulture. 

Paul: Alright, so there is a time when they're trying to shoot a scene with a vulture. The vulture's supposed to be landing next to Warren Beatty, and Elaine May shoots this landing scene over 50 times. And there is a rumor around set that she has upset the gods in a way. Like people felt like this film was cursed because they were messing with animals, they were messing with landscape. So this may be all just because a pissed off vulture started a sandstorm and wreaked havoc on this set. Who knows? It could be anything. 

Amy: Well, who knows? But I do think if Vulture Magazine had been around back then, they would've been having a field day with any sort of stories from this set. And yeah, you're right. You brought up the fact that she has been messing with the sand. 

Maybe the most famous story about Elaine May's extravagance was that when they were trying to figure out where exactly in the Moroccan desert they were going to film, they had a couple limitations. One of them is they have to make it by a very nice hotel because people want to go and sleep in a very nice hotel at night. They looked around, they finally found one that had these dunes that Elaine May had been describing. You know, the big rolling sweeping ones. The ones that you see in the Sex and the City movie.

They get there, they're like, we did it. We did it. We did it. And then May, when she woke up and walked outta the hotel in the morning and looked at the dunes, she was like, “Oh no, this won't do, I don't want them to be rolling. I want them to be flat.” And the best option they had was to spend 10 days bulldozing the dunes to be absolutely flat.

Now, one or two people say that this is absolutely not true, but pretty much everybody else is that a thousand percent happened, and it would kind of fit the psychology. Because I think she feels like she's getting under fire from every side. And one of her ways of dealing with avoiding making a mistake is just to try to delay doing anything as long as she can. You know, she would take reshoots of what she had done the day before in the morning, because she was worried about people yelling at her about doing something wrong the next time around. Do you know those people like that who get so in their head about making a mistake that then they can't go forward?

Sarah: Yes, it's me. I'm Elaine May. I have a lot to think about. This also reminds me of the story of when Michael Cimino was making Heaven's Gate, that he knocked down an entire frontier town because he was like, “It needs to look slightly different than this. We're going to redo the whole thing. It's going to be great.” Which, that's a whole other episode. 

Amy: It is a whole other episode. But because these films are coming out, I think pretty close to each other, I think they're snowballing, right? There's a sense of, hey, all these guys, all these auteurs are leading us. 

Sarah: The [inaudible] of directors mad with power.

Amy: Exactly. 

Paul: And again, I think that there's a battle here between press and production, right? You have, we already talked about this studio head who's kind of hoping it fails to prove his own point. 

Amy: And also, I should say, because he specifically did not like Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, this guy David Puttman said in public to the press that he thought Dustin Hoffman had a malevolent energy. And he also said that he thought Warren Beatty should be spanked for wasting so much money on Reds. 

Sarah: Oh wow. 

Paul: Oh, I didn't know that. 

Amy: And Warren Beatty might've liked the spanking, but hey. 

Sarah: Alright, let's all spank Warren Beatty. I'm sure he would hate that. 

Amy: Oh no. Please don't spank me for spending money. 

Sarah: No, no. Don't spank me, Diane Keaton. 

Paul: And we already know that this idea of wanting to see a star fall from grace, but I think it was amplified also by the fact that they weren't really letting press on set. And that is a big deal. Like, can you see all these big blockbusters, part of the allure of it is you send out press to give goodwill.

Press is cut off from the set. So it is this other thing of, now they're kind of pissed off, you've made enemies of everybody. You have two stars who are not known for their public personas or being outgoing, effusive in the public, I guess. You have a studio head who's against it. The press is against it. Everyone is against it. 

And now you take this Moroccan shoot, and you bring it to the states. You bring it to the states where you think, okay, things are going to get easier now that we are in New York. But no, it gets worse in New York. Which is interesting because, like I said earlier, it feels like the New York stuff is really working for me in a way.

Like I really love the way the movie starts, but it's way more tense when they're back home because they have all their resources to stay away from each other. And then they're also working with extras and crews that are like, well, no, no, we can't shoot this much. You know, in Morocco, I think they had a pretty easy way of manipulating everybody to work very long hours.

Amy: Yeah. I mean, you're there, you're in that summer camp mindset. It's like, well, we're all in this together. 

Sarah: Hmm. 

Paul: And, you know, I think what happens is that ability or that inability of Elaine made to move on, to make a quick decision, that became the real problem with New York. 

A wardrobe person said something like, “In Morocco, we lost time to weather. In New York., we lost time to the clock.” You know, she would do 15 passes on a tiny gesture like a doorman shifting extra weight, a piece of paper landing on the counter. She was allergic to one take solutions.

And so now this is the other thing that happens that's even crazier. That DP that we talked about, his whole team stayed on, that Italian team, his whole camera department stayed on. But there were new union rules in New York that required a full parallel American crew. So now you have two camera crews. You have two grips, two electric, you know, like they have duplicates here. So now the warring in the top line of the actors and directors are being multiplied behind the camera.

Sarah: It's a little bit inefficient. Just a little bit. It also feels like we have, I want to do the political comparison again because it does feel like these are two areas of great American pageantry, and that there's this kind of maybe relationship between the press and a movie that's in production that's a little bit like, you know, when we're in kind of primary season and the candidates are running and you have the press buses that are going around with them and there's this like symbiotic relationship. 

Which, I mean, things have gotten weirder in the past 10 years, but in the past there's been a fairly defined sense of etiquette about who has access and how the rules to that work, and that people get very upset when that gets destabilize. And it also seems like in Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, you have two stars who have been so successful and maybe have developed fat enough heads that they kind of don't feel like they have to play ball maybe. 

Amy: I think that's exactly right. And what's interesting to trace is that when all this is going on in 1987, all of these figures are clashing and it heads, and the person taking the blame by the press was Warren Beatty. They were calling it “Warren's Gate”, because we love coming up with names that remind us of other things 

Paul: All back to Heaven's Gate, which is again, Michael Cimino. We're talking about this thing that doesn't leave culture. Like it's like, what? No. Is it that bad? 

Amy: We recently did an episode on Water World, and people were calling Water World, “Fishtar”. So it just keeps rolling forward. 

Paul: I wonder though, in this day and age, will we ever have a flop as big as this, that unites everybody, that people actually care about? Like sure, there are these, “I hope so” flops, right? But it's kind of a fun thing that culture can all agree, that was a flop, you know? And there are movies that are disappointing, but this idea of the multi-billion dollar movie, like they don't fail. I don't know if they fail, you know? 

Amy: You make me want to say Morbius, but it's not quite to the same scale. I just love that people trolled Morbius so hard, that they wound up putting it back in theaters. Because they thought people would go see it, at least as a joke. And then still nobody came.

Sarah: Yeah, we don't joke that way in this economy. 

Paul: No, you can't. You can't. But by the way, I also think that Jared Leto just doesn't quite understand that it was a joke. Like I think he thought people loved Morbius, and the same thing with Tron. I mean, it’ll never more depressing than watching Jared Leto enter a theater for Tron: Ares that was half full, that were not excited to see him on opening weekend. I was like, oh no, I feel bad for this guy. 

Amy: I know. But that's the thing. Hollywood is just a level of so many people making different mistakes. Like Jared Leto might be taking the fall for Tron, but who are the executives who didn't realize that most women under 35 absolutely cannot stand him and will not see anything he's in.

Sarah: Because we're scared of him. He's creepy. 

Amy: Exactly. 

Paul: Yeah, I get that. 

Amy: Exactly. So he didn't cast himself, is what I'm saying. 

Paul: Now, I think also when they get back to New York, there's two things at play. It's the part of the film that I think is more character based. So this is requiring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty to really find these characters.

And honestly, if you talk to a lot of people, Dustin Hoffman was really adept at improvising. Warren Beatty, not so much. So they start getting some tension between the two of them. Because Warren Beatty starts to get what people perceive Dustin Hoffman would be playing these characters. Like, okay, that off note isn't exactly the right way of being off note. We needed to be more like this. You know, everything became really tense. 

And now Elaine May is trying to find all this funny stuff and the stuff that you brought her in for, and now Warren Beatty is tightening up. But it doesn't come off badly on camera. Like we said, he's very funny in these scenes, but they're not having fun. 

But I think the real thing that's looming in New York is the editing room. Oh, shoot, we're almost done. We have to finish this. And finishing it, I think, I don't know if you've ever worked on a project, it is the scariest moment. Because like, okay, well, once we wrap, we wrap. Did we get it? Did we not? And that became the final stage of this utter mess. 

It's a mess. It's a messy shoot that now is, how do we fix it? Or do we have enough to fix? Or is it actually great? No one really knows. 

Sarah: And then also you have to confront the thing that you just did. 

Amy: Well, yeah. And you have to wonder who is going to wind up taking the fall for this. And what I find fascinating is maybe it would be easier to be able to analyze Ishtar if it was either extremely good or extremely bad. But I would say the final project is fine. Fine. If something is fine, then it's harder to take a stance on it. So you just go with whatever the extreme opinion is. I think Ishtar is actually very good in certain parts. 

Sarah: What, to you both, is truly an extremely bad movie in your estimation and why? What makes that classification? 

Paul: It's an interesting thing because I believe, and Amy and I have had this discussion in the past. A movie like The Room, Tommy Wiseau's room.

Paul: Bring it up twice, should be on the list of best movies ever made because it's such a bad film that it requires as much study because there's something so unique to it. 

Sarah: Like Manos: The Hands of Fate. 

Paul: Yes! 

Amy: Paul's been making this argument to me a lot, and I haven't totally got on board. But go ahead, Paul.

Paul: But I guess what I'm fascinated by is, film at its core is a passion project, right? People are coming to tell a story that they really, really want to tell. And I think most failures are based in that idea that this is something I needed to get out. And you can look at a painting, and you can say, “That's the most beautiful thing ever” Or you can say, I” don't get it.” And we don't afford that to film, we have to judge it. It's good, it's bad. It's right, it's wrong. And it's the only art that we really look at like that. 

Sarah: Right. 

Paul: You know, and I always see that comedy falls into this category a lot, which is like, it's funny, it's not funny. Well, we don't do that with drama. 

Sarah: Yeah. There's not a list of the top 10 worst symphonies. Or probably there is. 

Paul: Right, exactly. Right. Symphonies that are so bad. They're good. And I feel like anytime you're making art, there's going to be art that doesn't connect. It doesn't mean it's bad. 

We just watched The Wiz. And The Wiz is, I think, so fascinating on so many levels. Like Amy and I said, it's a big swing and a miss, but there are so many things that they're hitting too. It's just like, it's not completely great. So I hate I think that a great bad movie is a movie that isn't watchable, but a piece of garbage.

And I, as somebody who's sat through a lot, I can delineate . It's a very small, subtle delineation, but I would often say that the more passionate the director is, the better the bad is. And when it's more work a day like Sharknado or like Gary Busey’s The Ginger Dead Man, like when it's a paycheck movie, not so great. 

Sarah: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. That's an important distinction. 

Amy: Yeah. I think that's what I felt, too. You know, because I'm a film critic for the Los Angeles Times, and it's when a film smacks of that cynicism that Paul's describing, that sense that the people involved in making it are like, eh, the audience will take what we give them. That's when I really think a film is bad if you're going for it. 

Sarah: Because when you're like, why am I here? 

Amy: Yeah. If I feel like you're insulting me by what you put on the screen because you don't think I know that this is bad or something. If you feel like, give them something. They're going to be holding a phone in their hands anyways. It doesn't matter. Just save the cat on this page and then have Liam Neeson punch the kidnapper on that page. That's when I absolutely check out. 

But a film like Ishtar, which is trying to do so many wonky tones all at once, I'm going to be on the side of this even when I think there are scenes that are terrible. I mean, honestly, I really, I think there's just one specifically, maybe two specifically terrible things about Ishtar. I just don't think Dustin Hoffman's very good. 

Paul: Mm. 

Amy: I actually think this movie works if somebody else besides Dustin Hoffman is playing this lead, because Warren Beatty is fantastic. Warren Beatty's kind of going for this John C. Riley in Stepbrothers thing. You know, he's really great. I mean, he is almost full Andy Kaufman when he’s got a headband on and he is playing the bongos and he's up on stage. 

It's the energy that Dustin Hoffman has in this film that I find totally off, because he is doing the Midnight Cowboy thing. He's the bossy guy. I find him very unlikeable in this movie as a character, and to me, that makes the whole thing sink. I don't like him. I don't care about him. I think he's kind of crass. And he is not crass to me in a charming or funny way. And so the weight of his character drags the whole thing down.

Paul: I think that he actually played too much into character in a weird way. I mean, I know he said that he was really good at improvising. I think he knew this character. And this is a real, like, as somebody who has done a lot of performing, you bump into a person like this, right? And I don't think he did the heightened version of it. I think he did the real version of it. 

Amy: Right. He didn't make it right, the guy didn't make it. And he's a little sour and grumpy about it, but not in a way you want to be around him. 

Paul: And so I think that he's right in the pocket. But it goes to show you, well, what pocket should he be in? Because this is a movie where I think everybody is in a different film. And that to me does fall on Elaine May's shoulders. Because I would say that Isabelle Adjani, she's acting like she is in a political thriller. 

Amy: Oh, a thousand percent. She's totally off base for the movie that I want this to be.

Paul: Right. And she would always ask these questions and she's like, “Well, I'm reading the script and it's a screwball comedy.” And Elaine May is like, “No. You are straight.” And so she was kind of, you know, and she said that she would do it. 

But then you look at Charles Grodin. Charles Grodin is, I love Charles Grodin. Not the later Charles Grodin as much, when he was hosting a CNBC show. But I like this era Charles Grodin, he is perfection. I think he's funny. I just love this era of him. I think he's great. 

Amy: Yeah. And I think his CIA scenes are really funny and have kind of only gotten funnier and darker the older I've gotten.

And the more I know about how the CIA works, I mean, when Ishtar comes out, we haven't heard the stories yet that the CIA is funding groups like the Scorpions to write songs like Wind of Change to try to bring about democracy in the Iron Curtain. That's what this movie is about. We didn't know that that joke was so real.

Sarah: I like Charles Grodin in Beethoven, when he enters a hamburger eating contest with his dog. 

Paul: I mean, who doesn't? I mean, Charles Grodin, I love his memoir. It would be so nice if you weren't here, which is just a beautiful collection of stories.

But, you know, Elaine May, I want to go back to her beginning for a second. She is an improviser. She's someone who is like, I can feed off the energy of an audience. That's her background. And I also come from that background. I have directed, I have written, I have produced, one of the things that I think being a good improviser has given me is the ability to make a decision and just lean into it. And that’s what improv is. You make a choice and you have to be committed to it. 

It seems like Elaine May took the idea of, well, I made that choice, but what if I made this choice or that choice? Like she actually saw a much higher view of it. I think it's like Amy Pohler said when she was teaching classes back at UCB, I love this quote. She's like, “Improvising is like driving a car, only through the rear-view mirror. You only know where you've gone.” And I love that idea. And I think that Elaine May was constantly just questioning, well, were we in the right place when we went there? And I think that that's why maybe on a given day she's giving different notes. She doesn't know. 

I don't think like she was bullied as much as her lack of clarity of what this movie should be created. A world in which everybody got to bring their own quirks to it and then created a lot of friction. Because the truth is, you know that story about the sand dunes? I get that. I understand how films work. She scouted that sand dune, she saw that sand dune. They don't just show up there and see the sand dune unless she's not doing her job. You know? And if that's the case, then she's at fault. 

It's sort of like, there are a couple things that always ring false to me. I think that she is neurotic. I think that in many respects, to Amy's point earlier, and this is what I was going to try to all tie it all to, I think she's Dustin Hoffman. I think that that's why she likes just Dustin Hoffman in New York. And I feel like that little bit of anger, that bit of being persnickety is her. And this is a movie where she sees himself in him. 

Sarah: Well, why do you think that she was able to direct movies that kind of stayed on the rails in the past? Is it just too big of a budget and too many moving parts? 

Paul: She never really did. 

Sarah: Okay. 

Paul: She never, I mean, truthfully, I've read her book, I've watched every one of her films. Every one of her films was an unmitigated disaster, and the only one that really stayed true was Heartbreak Kid. Because that was a movie where Neil Simon forced her to stick to the script, forced her to stay in her lane. 

Sarah: Interesting. 

Paul: And that was a big issue with the two of them. But every other movie ended, two of her movies ended in court, New Leaf and Mikey and Nikki both ended in court. 

Sarah: And Frankie and Bobby and Carol and Alice. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Paul: All of them. 

Amy: But they were good. 

Paul: They were good. Yes. 

Amy: You almost feel like Hollywood will forgive that if you are good, if the thing is good.

Paul: But I think that she made one good movie, one fully good movie. I love Mikey and Nikki, but I would say I screened that recently and people walked out. 

Amy: Really? 

Paul: Oh, yeah. I mean, I love it. I love it. I just want to be like, you have to look at that movie, it's very experimental. It's very bizarre. It's unlikeable characters. I love it, but it does not fully work. I believe that to be true. I hate to say it, but I can look at it. I can step back from my own love of it. 

But Heartbreak Kid is the only movie that I think, from beginning to end, is a good movie. In a weird way, I look at her and I go, oh, I'm so bummed because maybe writing is where she did excel. Because she does have all those great things and she's a great performer. I mean, even up until this day when she was on The Good Wife, as that judge on The Good Wife, she's awesome. I love her. She's great in Small Time Crooks. Whatever she pops up in, I feel like she's always very good. 

I mean, she's the reason why I think The Birdcage, she kind of helps Mike Nichols come out. I mean, The Birdcage is obviously dated at this point, but writing is her strong point. And I think that's where she can go in a million different directions. I think actually committing to the writing is being a director, and that's hard. 

Amy: Oh, this is what I have to say. I think that one of the old Nichols and May jokes that she puts in The Graduate is the crux of why I don't think The Graduate is very good. 

Paul: Well, this is a hot take. 

Amy: Okay, so I'll try to keep this short. You know how there's the scene in The Graduate when Dustin Hoffman is showing up at the hotel room for the first time to meet Mrs. Robinson? 

Paul: Yes. 

Amy: He's nervous. She takes an inhale of her cigarette. He kisses her for the first time while her whole mouth is full of cigarette, and then she exhales and just looks at him. That is a direct bit from the old Nichols and May skits. That's a skit they used to do about two teenagers making out in a car. And there it's in the movie because it got a hit on stage. 

thought it was funny there, but when you put it in this movie with these two characters, I feel like it doesn't work at all. And it kind of destroys the whole movie because at that point, my question is, why would this grown ass woman go to bed with this guy for the first time who's such a dummy? What is she getting out of this? 

Sarah: She's bored.

Amy: Dude, she could have anybody better than this, you know? 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Paul: So you like the Robert Redford version? Like the version that people patently were like, don't know, we can't get this Robert Redford? 

Amy: Well, even if that joke was in the Robert Redford one, I don't think it would work. Because I think at that point, any woman who's just looking to get her rocks off, she goes and finds anybody else who might be slightly better.

Paul: Okay. I hear that. 

Amy: I'm just saying, so I'm saying sometimes even the writing doesn't fit the character. 

Sarah: This is where I confess that I haven't seen The Graduate. 

Amy: Oh gosh. Well, it's fine. 

Paul: I think it's better. I think it's better than fine. Here's the thing that I'm kind of obsessed with. You know, we talked about the editing. Who knows what happens in the editing? We know that there's three cuts. We know that there is a lot of debate, and Elaine May loves to be editing all hours of the day. So they have this, finally they are able to get a workable thing. They release this movie and there we go. This movie comes out and I think everybody gets what they want.

The press gets, “Ha-ha, we told you.” David Putman gets, “You see, I know how to make movies” And then when you look at the actual numbers, they're modest, they're not catastrophic. The budget and the press coverage of it made a normal looking return look like a disaster. And every time it came out, and I kind of look at this to one battle after the other, it's like, why are we rooting for this? 

This movie is critically acclaimed. It's nominated for a bunch of… why are we rooting for like… Didn't it make $50 million in the opening weekend. It's like, what do we care as the general audience? What do we care what a movie makes? Why is that in the conversation? I think that that's so fascinating. 

Sarah: We certainly don't know the bottom line of appliances that we're buying, right?

Paul: Yeah. It's such a very ridiculous thing that we are like, what's it to me? I didn't lose money, I didn't invest in this. But yet we are like, oh, the studio lost a lot of money. And how does that affect any of us? 

But I think that, to Amy's point, this film is neither here nor there. I think a lot of critics did talk about this movie like we're talking about it now. It's like, that's kind of confusing. And then there are other people who just wanted to jump on the bandwagon and be like, it's all worse. But I don't even know what you would say. You know? I don't know. It's not overly long. It just feels like it was just the public shaming finally, you know, like that was it. 

Sarah: And then it was this overinflated thing that we wanted to enjoy the downfall of. But it maybe wasn't as that, like its last betrayal was not even being as bad as we were maybe hoping. 

Paul: Right. 

Amy: Yeah. You could almost be mad at it for not being worse. I would like to see somebody take the Ishtar script and just remake the movie, because I think the script is pretty good. I think the script's really funny. I think the script would work absolutely well today and I think the music is wonderful. The music is written by Paul Williams. All the songs that are weirdly catchy even though they're bad. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: Paul Williams being the guy who wrote Rainbow Connection is one of his biggest hits, who is fantastic. He's in this movie, Phantom of the Paradise. It's all about what a musical genius he is. 

Sarah: I was going to say, isn't he the Phantom of the Paradise himself?

Paul: Yes. 

Sarah: Yes. Yeah.

Amy: He is. I adore Paul Williams. I think he's fascinating, even though he says that what inspired  the music of Ishtar, his answer to that question is, “Stolichnaya and a bunch of chemicals.” He was not sober the entire time he did it, but they're fantastic. I challenge, Ari Aster to remake Ishtar with the exact same script, and I bet it’d be fine. I bet it'd be better than fine. I bet it'd be good. 

Sarah: I would go see it. 

Paul: Now, we've spent about an hour talking about this film and how it ballooned terribly. The budget was insane. Now, this, again, I want to put it in context. The year is 1987. If you don't know it, I guess my question to you is, what do you think it did cost?

Sarah: Oh, as a way too expensive movie that people were upset about, $70 million. 

Paul: Okay. $51 million. $51 million. Now, I mean, that's big. But I do feel like it's when you hear about it. 

Sarah: But in today money. 

Paul: Yeah. And I'll give you some comparison. I mean, this is interesting, so Untouchables that came out the same year, that was about $25 million. Predator, which was a low budget action movie that cost 15 million. Superman 4, which was kind of a flop, that's $17 million. 

Sarah: is that the Richard Pryor one? 

Paul: No, this is the worst one. This is the quest for peace with solar Superman. But what the studios were kind of loving was anything over this $14 million range was what they were freaking out at. Because what they were having great success with at the time was Throw Mama From the Train, $14 million. Good Morning, Vietnam, $14 million, The Lost Boys, $8 million. Dirty Dancing, $6 million.

They wanted more of those, because most budgets live between $6  million and $20 million. So they were double, they were two movies. But if you think about that, two movies worth, it's not crazy.  

Sarah: It's not the way Titanic was going, right? Or you know, before it came out it was like, people would have to see this incredibly long movie multiple times for it to make enough money back for us to not be embarrassed. That never happens, and then somehow that happened. 

But I mean, it's not the kind of thing you could count on, but this is really just kind of like, oh, we went kind of overboard, but not historically. 

Paul: And I think what this movie lacks, honestly, is what we were talking about earlier through all this creative tension, physical set tensions, crew, all that sort of stuff. What it lost was the passion, the original idea. And I think that if this movie stuck with that, we would have something. But I think what we got was just something that is a movie. It hits the beats, it does the thing, 

Sarah: Which is kind of the worst thing. 

Paul: It becomes the thing. It becomes the thing that we talk about, which is like, that's why I feel like this movie is so odd. There are great things in it, but it doesn't feel like anyone cared at the end. 

Sarah: Right. 

Paul: It's almost like a bad relationship. It's like, oh my God, this is the person I married. Oh, everything is great. And at the end they're like, ah, I guess I don't even remember that person. You know, it was a couple weeks.

Sarah: You're like, why are we here? 

Paul: Yeah. 

Sarah: There's two people at Costco with no meaning. I mean, this is where I make my inevitable plug for the Final Destination series, because I feel like there's something, they’re so good. And there's something so great about basically a slasher series where if you compare it to Friday the 13th, that has basically a new director with every installment, right? Who it seems like is being tested out for whether they can do something better. 

And the Saw movies were made by the same relatively small group of people pretty consistently. And I won't really try and defend the ethics of it. That's not the same thing as saying I really like them. But you can really tell that all those movies are somebody's baby. 

Paul: I totally agree. I think that what I love about James Wong is he makes crazy movies, too. And not everyone works. And yes, for every Conjuring, there might be one that just falls a victim on the side. You know, I think when you keep it tight or you have like, again, it's a point of view. It's a point of view. 

I love the Final Destination movies. I love this last one. And particularly, I love how they brought it all together. It's silly, it's fun. And by the way, they know the movie they're making. I did a movie called Piranha 3D, directed by Alex Aja, who made a wonderful French movie called High Tension, which was so very tense. 

Sarah: I have to admit, I've complained recently on this very show about how strongly I dislike the plot twist in that movie. But I was fully on board before we got around to that, and that's what made me so angry. 

Paul: I also agree with that. I'm not against. I don't disagree. 

Sarah: How is she driving the very truck that she was chasing, but go on. 

Paul: But I will say when we made Piranha 3D, Alex Aja wasn't trying to make High Tension. He got what he was making. Which was a movie with Piranha and 3D in the title. And he leaned into it and it became fun. And that's a movie that I think made like $75 million at the box or some crazy amount of money at the box office. Because he was playing it. I mean, it's the reason why he made a movie years later called, Gator or Sewer Gator. It's one of the best movies. 

Sometimes you just have to understand what you're making. And this is a movie that feels like, yeah, no one understands what they're making. Final Destination, it's almost like you can't mess it up. It's going to be Rube Goldberg devices to cause death, and that's it. The crazier they are, the more fun we're going to have with it. 

Sarah: Oh, you either like it or you don't. 

Paul: Yeah. 

Amy: Yeah. Very much. As a critic, I love finding those movies that know exactly what they are and excel at it and hoisting those up, even if they're just B movies. Like last year on my top 10 list, I put Smile 2.

Paul: Oh yeah.

Amy: Because Smile 2, Sarah, have you seen Smile 2 yet? 

Sarah: No, I saw Smile one and I didn't like it. But I've heard from my friends that Smile 2 was very good. Yeah, I've heard from Chelsey Weber-Smith, actually. So there you go. 

Amy: Smile one is absolutely mid. Smile 2 is a masterpiece. It is an absolute masterpiece.

Sarah: Okay. See, I love it when that happens. 

Amy: Oh yeah. It hits it out of the park. It absolutely hits outta the park. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like the direct sequel to an underwhelming horror movie is almost the perfect place to do something great, because nobody sees you coming. You know?

Paul: I a hundred percent agree. It's like this is why I also believe, like I worked on Galaxy Quest for about two years. I loved my experience on it. But what I hated about it was that everyone had a very strong opinion about it. Everyone had a reason about why it worked, and then they wanted to make sure that you incorporated their opinion about it.

And I think that that's deadly because that's why I think IP is bad. And I think this is why we are having this glut of mediocre films that come out of IP because people expect too much. Like the best IP to do is IP that no one cares about. Like, let's make a Logan's Run sequel. Like, let's do that. So let's have a movie that no one has an opinion on. Because once you have an opinion on it, you kind of lose the ability to be a director or a writer. You kind of have to just be, I mean, I know it's fan service. But I mean, people say it, but it's also like you live and die by that.

Amy: Yeah. And I do get flinchy when movies like Ishtar become the shorthand for making something bad, because you're saying we don't want movies that take a big risk. You know, I wish that we were making fun of the Morbius’s of the world that are playing into gigantic franchises and playing it safe and then being bad. Let's let the ambitious disasters, let's let them have their own lane.

Paul: And I fear that we are now past the point of no return with this. Because now if there's any hesitation, that movie's going to streaming. Ishtar would've gone to streaming, right? There would've been some decision made along the way, and we would dump it over there. And maybe that's the choice. 

I love what Adam Sandler did in making his movies at Netflix. He's like, I'm taking the critics out of it. It's going to be on the front page of Netflix when it comes out. Like it, hate it. Who cares? You can't rake me over the coals for this. And I think that the movies that they've made there spawn the gamut of being great and weird and not so great and whatever, but it's like he's just making things without the fear of that box office number, or out of that fear of that.

And I think it's the reason why you see Predator: Badlands killing at the box office. Because you if Prey came out in the theater, which I wish it would've, but if it came out in the theater. less people probably would've given it a chance. And then because they loved Prey, they saw Badlands.

Sarah: Yeah. Which is a long game. 

Paul: It's a long game. Yeah. 

Amy: Yeah. No, wait, I want to draw a line. You're saying you're drawing a line that's uniting critics in the box office into one lump. I think we could stick up for stuff that fails at the box office. I think public box office failure is its own different Rubik, because I loved Adam Sandler's movie Hustle. And I would've gone to the mat to try to get people to see that movie. 

Paul: Oh, and you know, I'm sorry. You're right. That's a different reporting. That's entertainment reporting. And entertainment reporting, that's different than critics.

And I think that what we actually, and I speak about this with the most high regard, we need more critics like Amy, who are thinking so critically about film and are respected voice that you can listen to. There's so few of those. I think they're getting less and less with papers dying off, with cuts across the board on all these magazines, everything. You're losing this voice. 

And it's a shame because we need the voice of critics that we trust to introduce us to movies, to show us, maybe you won't like this. We were talking about this the other day, a movie, won’t someone Fuck my Son, this movie that Amy saw. 

Amy: Yeah.

Paul: Yes. 

Amy: Can I say, “fuck my son” on this podcast? 

Sarah: Oh yeah. 

Paul: I tried to keep it clean. 

Sarah: I can say it as many times as you want. It's really up to you. 

Paul: See, this is great. 

Amy: Fuck My Son. It's very weird and people should go see it 

Paul: And that's what we should be looking for. But I think a lot of review culture is in that world of like, let's dunk on it to get that one liner in the Rotten Tomatoes review, so you get that splat. And I really respect critics like Amy, and there's a handful of great critics out there that really introduce you to it. 

And that's what I want. I want more people to be telling me what I should be watching and how I should be doing. Not a hot take of, this sucks, this is bad.

Sarah: Yeah. Good point. 

Amy: Oh buddy, you win. I'll send you a pizza. 

Sarah: Well, and also I feel like when people talk about film criticism, of course, the legendary shorthand is like, oh, Pauline Kale, she was mean. 

Paul: Right. 

Sarah: Which is true. She was very good at it. But also, I feel like what people don't mention as much, is that she would champion movies. And that she's exactly part of the reason that Nashville was really seen by anybody, and therefore why we have Robert Altman, arguably. 

Amy: Exactly. Because I think critics really want to be the people who find talent and raise it up, which has gotten very hard for critics to do now. Because there's so many little movies coming out every single week. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: Like 15 tiny movies. 

Sarah: But that's a fun thing to do. Because I feel like there's this sort of, as everyone becomes a content creator, that's interesting. Because there's a thing in Heartburn, which of course Nora Efron wrote basically about being married to Carl Bernstein - speaking of Dustin Hoffman - in a way that being married to a columnist was like being married to a cannibal. Because things had barely stopped happening before he was munching on them and putting them in his column. And now everyone gets to live like that.

And it sucks because everyday people wake up trying to turn the fairly normal events of their lives into some kind of content that they can then monetize because there aren't any other jobs. And it's kind of nice to be reminded that even if you have to make your life into a content mill, it may be more difficult to think of things that you enjoy as opposed to describing things as if they're worse than they are in order to get attention.

And of course complaining is important, but you do have the option as a critic of rather than restating or overstating something to be kind of epically worse than it is, you can make it your business to try and share things with people that you think deserve to be enjoyed more.

Amy: Yeah, exactly. The job of being a critic has shifted a lot in even just, you know, I've been doing this game since I got into college, and it shifted a ton even in that time, too. It being less about find and dunk and more about dig up and elevate to be a curating voice as much as a critical, negative slamming voice. 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love to slam on something. Of course, I'll definitely slam on the movies when it deserves it. But there's so much stuff out there. 

Sarah: Well, some movies you do want you to do that to them. 

Amy: Yeah. There's so much stuff out there that I think it's more valuable to find what's good right now, even if it means watching a bunch of movies I don't write about because I don't think I can write about them.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. 

Paul: And I feel like I have to acknowledge that I do a podcast called, How Did This Get Made?, where we dunk on movies. But I will say that the idea behind it, and it's always been our rallying cry, is these movies that we are watching, they're so bad, they're good. These are movies that you want to watch with a group of friends. These are movies that we are spending an hour and a half talking about, not because this sucks, this is the worst. We've all made movies, we've all directed, or we've all been a part of different processes of film. And we have a respect for it and how things can go off the rails. And I still believe that's also an art.

Like one of the best things I ever did growing up was I would go to the movie theater every Friday. I would see whatever it was. I have a very clear memory of going to see a movie called, Threesome, with Lara Flynn Boyle and Billy Baldwin, I believe. I don't think that movie is good, but I remember just going and then going to Denny's afterwards and just sitting around just goofing around about it, talking about it. That was part of the experience. 

And movies can have all those things. It doesn't mean not everything has to be There Will be Blood. Not everything has to be, you know, I believe that there's a space for movies like Venom, but yet not everything has to be the Marvel version of the thing. So I'm a big believer, in dunking for dunkings sake, That's bad. Just having fun, enjoying conversation, right? Art becoming art, I think it's good. 

Amy: Yeah, it's true. I actually hope people see even the movies I do dunk on. Because at least they're interesting to talk about. Like if there's nothing to talk about, then I don't think anybody should see it. But most movies have stuff you want to talk about afterwards. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: You want to get into it. I love the conversation that starts even when you're like, that sucked. 

Paul: Absolutely. 

Sarah: Yeah. Well, it's great to see something that's so infectiously bad that you really want to tell people about it, you know? And I feel like one of the themes here is, because I feel like one of the most annoying kinds of movies today is the Netflix movie that whether or not it was written by AI, people can incredibly argue that it was. And that has people saying expository things the whole time because they assume you're cleaning your baseboards. Which you probably are. And where it just feels like nobody ever really cared, like not a single person, like everyone is just there to be like, whatever. You know? We'll, yeah, we'll get it done, it'll be fine. And they just care about it as much as it's possible to care about putting together IKEA furniture, where you do end up with basically the thing that you planned on getting. But I mean, that's actually a bad metaphor. IKEA furniture can be very exciting. 

But you know, what we're talking about is continuing to love the human element of movies where like, I mean, my example of a great bad movie, Manos - the Hands of Fate, which kind of got discovered outside of being a super underground thing because it was on an episode of MST3K in 1993, is incredible because somebody who has no business making a movie, thinking through how to do it as if no one has ever done it before. And badly. And one of those things where you're like, I know that this was somebody's passion project, but why? Why did they clearly care so much about this terrible story? 

And you do end up with some kind of element of human connection when you interact with something either that you love or that you think is just kind of baffling in that way and that's not there for kind of letting it be made and shoved at us by the algorithm and not really a real person.

Amy: Yeah. I think exactly what you're describing is probably one of the next movements that's going to surge up. I am absolutely terrified about AI scripts ruining this industry. But I think you're only going to ruin it for a minute, and then people would rather watch.  

Sarah: That’s very exciting news.

Amy: I hope so. 

Sarah: For prediction. So, yeah, I like it. I choose to believe you. 

Amy: I want to think that they're underestimating the audience. I really have more faith in audience members than they do. And now that I think of something like Manos, everybody will want to watch it because it'll feel alive. You'll feel the fingerprints on it like you're describing.

Paul: Well, I think what we're always going to get to, what I love about going and doing shows live, is that it is a unique experience between you and the audience. And that is something that is not going away. If anything, touring is growing because I think people want a unique experience. What I think the future of cinema is - and yes, I said cinema – is creating a public space where movie theaters are doing small things like Hundreds of Beavers, and having the cast come in for a weekend so it almost feels like a Broadway show where you're getting to see a very special presentation of something with a Q&A, or where you are bringing back classics. 

I brought my kids to go see Back to the Future for the 40th anniversary in IMAX, which was amazing and so much fun. We saw Jaws 50th. It's like, I think that we have to reconceptualize what the movie theater is. And I think we've seen that in how we serve food there. And people can have their own opinions about that. That's fine. I don't care. 

But what the movie theater needs to become is just we're no longer making enough movies to be like, every weekend there's three new movies. So you go there and whatever it is, it is. It's more like how do we create an event space? How do we create something? 

And I think Taylor Swift, God bless her, has done that, too. Like I'm making these movies that are going to air in the theaters and I'm making personal deals with the theaters. It's like, cool. That's awesome. Why don't we make movie theaters like libraries? Why don't we do like, all right, Pluribus is coming out, we'll screen the first two episodes at the AMC. And yes, I could get it for free but isn't it cooler to watch with a bunch of people or a finale, like seeing the Lost finale with a bunch of people is one of the best things ever. I love that. 

Sarah: And I feel like this is a great time, speaking of Vidiots, for independent movie theaters and also for places where film can live or where video specifically can live archivally, because of how much stuff you can't access that's not on streaming because of random copyright issues or whatever else.

But you know that there's this, not in a way that's that predictable, but I feel like I can see people returning to what physical media gives us. And like you were saying, these physical gatherings around media. Which I think is always been about that as much as the story itself. And it makes me think of the Great Depression and how they would have dish night at a movie theater where you would go and they would have prizes and raffles and you can get dishes. And you were incentivized to come out and spend money because times were tough and they needed to incentivize it.

Which is all to say that I'm still upset about the time I paid like $19 for a pretzel at an AMC theater in Seattle. But also, heartbreak feels good in a place like this. 

Paul: I want this pretzel to be better. 

Sarah: Biggest is so big. If it could be half as big and better, I would be very happy. 

Paul: A hundred percent. I mean, I'm a big pretzel person. I do think what you're saying is, you know, I haven't really put a label to this. It's cost effectness too, right? Because if I'm paying $20 to go see a movie, I need it to be good on some level as a now dad of two kids. 

You know, for me, my wife and my kids will go see a movie. It is conservatively like $150 with snacks and all that sort of stuff. 

Sarah: Because how much Disneyland costs in the eighties. Ans I realize there's inflation and everything. 

Paul: But it's a high price to pay. And so what we've done is we've gotten rid of, I'll take a chance on this. I know we've tried a million times with like, oh, well what if we do the movie pass or whatever it is. Yeah, that’s great. But that's not for everybody. That's not going to be for everybody. It's just an impossibility. So why not find ways to make it better, make it interesting. If you can't lower those prices, find other ways to bring people in so you're like, well, at least I saw something, at least I saw the cast of this movie. Or at least I had a unique experience. Because if I'm just paying maybe $10 or $15 less than seeing a live show, I'll go see the live show or I'll spend my money there.

We are definitely in a stage of gathering. I believe that in a very big way. So can movie theaters, can corporations lean into that? And that's the question. Honestly, at the end of the day, it's not what can movie theaters do? It's like, well, corporations, is it effective enough for them to do that? And I don't think that they know if that is true. 

Sarah: I think we're going to start doing dish night again. 

Amy: I mean they should. And I think like they have spent 15 years competing with streaming and television by making bigger and bigger and bigger movies with higher and higher price tags. And I heard this one studio executive back in the eighties have a great idea. What if we just made cheaper movies? 

Paul: Well, I'm a big proponent of that. I mean as somebody who has worked in that medium, yes, yes. 

Amy: Well, there we go. We've come full circle to Ishtar and what killed it, ultimately. Sorry. 

Sarah: It's been more life affirming than I expected, to be honest. Maybe the real bad movies are the friends we made along the way.

Paul: Well, look at us. We just spent a good amount of time talking about this film. There's stuff to talk about here, right? And whether it's about the production or it's about the film, this movie is made, it became a joke. It became the only Far Side cartoon where Gary Larson apologized because he didn't see it. You know, it's like there is something about that, you know? 

Amy: He did finally watch it on an airplane. That was when he finally decided to watch Ishtar. Kudos to the airplane movie. I love you forever. 

Sarah: There's something about the kind of consumer need for something to be really, really bad, where like, even if it's not that bad, we're going to kind of force it in. Because maybe ritualistically, we just need a terrible movie every once in a while. It just feels good. 

Paul: Can I just say, as somebody who has really grown to love the Hallmark Lifetime films, there is a joy in those films. Like, are they good? I'm going to say yeah, they are. They're a different definition of good. 

Sarah: But the Tori Pones are really good.

Paul: Oh, and look, you know why I know that they're ? Because Netflix is trying to make their versions of them and they can't quite nail it. 

Sarah: No, because they're not demented enough. 

Amy: Hot Frosty is good. 

Paul: Hot Frosty. Yes, I agree. But we're also talking about there's channels that are already in early November playing get ready for Christmas. They're playing two months of every night Christmas movies because they got this backlog. I just think it's a secret sauce that they know how to make. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's also like I learned a lot from Lifetime movies. For example, that if you're Cheryl Ladd she lad and you're a single mom and you're dating a new guy and he seems great, he might frame you for drug possession and then you'll go to prison and learn about feminism in a way you never imagined, intersectionally. 

I loved the things that I learned that I didn't expect to learn, which are sometimes you have to pick the first camel. 

Paul: Yes. 

Sarah: And better to have movies that feel human and fall short of expectations, maybe even hugely, than movies that feel like they were made by nobody. And, what else Paul and Amy? What are you going to leave us with on this beautiful Ishtar day? 

Paul: Well, I guess the question is, is it the same to become culturally known for being an example of what not to do as it is to be an example of what to do? Because there are so many movies that fail. There are so many movies that are not good. But when you are transcending all of those and standing head and shoulders above it, I think that might be worth something, too. 

Amy: I think what I would say is go see a movie for yourself. Just go see a movie for yourself. Don't be Gary Larson having to apologize later. You know, figure out what you think about a movie before you just abide by the buzz.

Sarah: That’s in the spirit of You’re Wrong About.

Amy: Exactly. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's fun to hate something, but you know, maybe check it out and you might actually enjoy it. And then that'll be kind of fun because you can be a contrarian. 

I also feel like my answer to the question of, is it better to be known as a legendary flop or a legendarily great at your job kind of a person? Is that it does feel maybe equally arbitrary. You know, where like if somebody makes what seems to be a great movie, does that mean that the director is great, or does it mean that people who we don't know to credit for it being great, were the ones who nudged it over the line or the sort of the secret sauce because so many people are involved and so many factors are there.

So it feels like whether you're known as one of the greats or one of the great flops, feels more arbitrary than we would maybe like. And then there's someone like Melville who destroyed his career during his own lifespan with the only thing we read that he wrote anymore, which is Moby Dick. And which people hate it because it's so boring. But also it's so great because sometimes great things are boring and that's another stance I feel passionately about. 

But I feel like that can be freeing too, where it's like you can't really control how people are going to receive what you do, so you just kind of have to do the thing that you care about most. And hopefully, people will pay you for, that's nice too. 

Paul: I say this too, like I think that as an actor and a writer and a director and all these things, you can't control the outcome. 

Sarah: Mm-hmm. 

Paul: You can only control the time that you spend on something, and you have to enjoy that time. You learn from that time, good or bad, you make mistakes and that's all part of growth, right? We can't just succeed, succeed, succeed. 

And I think the things that I have brought with me in my career has been a lot of lessons learned by failure. I think you learn a lot more by failure than you do by success. I know that that's an old adage on some way, but it's like you do because you're forced to critically look at what went wrong. And you can't just say, well, it was the audience.

I can also say I made a great show, the show Black Monday with Don Cheadle and Regina Hall and Andrew Renolds and Casey Wilson. I loved making that show. It was one of the most creatively fulfilling experiences I had. It aired on Showtime in a time of hour-long dramas, and no one had Showtime that I knew.

And while we got good reviews, no one watched it. We got to do three seasons, which was a blessing to do that. But it was also like, yeah, I can't control it more than it was great. So when I look back on it, I don't look back on, oh, I wish we would've gotten more press, or I wish we would've had more seasons. I can only look back on it and go, I had a great time. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: It's a really good show, by the way. 

Paul: Oh, thanks.  

Amy: I’m really glad you made it. 

Paul: I am too. And it's like, but that's the thing, that's what we look back on, on our deathbeds, right? We're not looking back at the box office receipts. It's like, ah, well at least we made a lot of money.

Sarah: Or if you were, that would be very depressing. And then you say rosebud and… 

Paul: Yeah, exactly. 

Amy: But I think that's true. Because I mean, this is a time where it feels like the creative worlds are falling apart and goals are shifting. And one of the goals I just keep hearing about from all of my friends in all of the different wings of filmmaking and writing and podcasting and music that everybody's in, is just like, how can I at least figure out how to feed myself while enjoying my life every day as much as humanly possible?

Sarah: Yeah. 

Amy: Like even if mansions are off the table, can we at least have a life that we enjoy? 

Paul: Absolutely. 

Sarah: Right? Yeah. I think most people, I don't know about most, but I feel like a lot of people, especially now, recognize how precious it is to just have some sense of community and stability in getting to eat enough of the food that you like and getting to come together in community creatively, or I guess to go to the movies sometimes. It's great. 

Amy: It's true. 

Sarah: I don't know, it feels also just great to I guess engage with a human in entertainment and feel like you're watching something that wasn't made as cynically as possible. And also, you know, I like the ultimate sin of this Netflix type of bad movie is that it doesn't care if it's wasting your time. And I think that's one of the big things too, is just to feel like the thing I'm consuming, even if I don't like it, this was made by somebody who valued the time that they put into it. 

Amy: It's true. And I'm realizing I said mansions, thinking of the standards of Dustin Hoffman getting paid five and a half million dollars for making Ishtar. Most of my friends just want to know that they can make rent. But that's fine. 

Sarah: Yeah, that would be amazing.

Paul: I often have said that I've worked in a world of entertainment that is very much like a construction worker. You know, you build one building, you move on to the next one. And it's like, what I think people are really lamenting right now in Hollywood is it used to be easy to make a living in Hollywood. You get staffed on a show, you'd be a guest star on a show. And that's what I think has been going away is this middle-class version of Hollywood. 

You know, it's not even just breaking in, it's a reason why you have, and no offense to Pedro Pascal, but for Pedro Pascal films in summer, why do we need that? We don't need that. We should have more people, you know, but it's like, but everyone's like too nervous. Take a chance. We got to get them in there. But are those movies making irrationally more money than others? I don't know. But people know them. That's going to work. 

Sarah: Or I imagine even on the level of just that it used to be, and I hope it still is, but it does seem like people are making every effort they can to chip away at this. That if we replace extras with AI, then that's actually, there was a time at least when you could basically make a living doing that.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. And you learn. That's the other thing, too. You learn this is a business of mentorship, right? And at the end of the day, AI is cheating on some level, right? But I also believe that it's not about is AI bad? I think there's going to be a lot of things that we're going to get outta that.

The same way that your phone can make a movie and you can edit it on your phone, right? Like when I was a kid, I would've killed for that. I'm watching my kids go nuts to be able to make movies. Like, that's all I wanted to do. And I got the Big V, you know, I get the camcorder, so there's going to be tools and techniques.

But what we can't let it do is take away the fun stuff. Right? It's like I don't want my AI to create art. I want my AI to pay my bills or set up my finances, that's what I want. 

Sarah: If we're asking the robots to create art while we count our money, then we have things backwards.

Paul: Yeah. 

Amy: Guys, have we just solved Hollywood? 

Paul: We did. 

Sarah: Let's go see Ishtar. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Sarah: This has been beautiful. And let's all go make some bad art, and maybe if we intend to make bad art, it'll accidentally loop around and be good or whatever. Let's go make some art with our friends.

And Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson, tell us about your show, and if there's an episode that you recommend for people who haven't listened yet. If maybe there's a place that you would like to start, I guess a favorite that either of you have. 

Amy: Well, half of me feels like if this is the sort of conversation people are into, they should definitely listen to our Waterworld episode. Which is all about decisions and directors and clashes and egos and buzz, and people gunning for disaster. It is a movie that, by the way, we got to show this summer at the Los Feliz 3 here in Los Angeles to a packed house that had a blast. It was really fun getting to see that large, and we thought maybe nobody will ever get to see Waterworld large again because this movie has just been known as a disaster.

But we are not usually known as the bad disaster flop movie show. We are Unspooled. We started by going through the entire AFI top 100. And now we have just been going through other major lists, the Letterbox Top 250, the IMDB top 250, and The New York Times 1,000 Essential Films. But also, really just talking about what we find really interesting.

You know, Paul and I are just really curious people in the world of movies. So every week we just talk about something like The Wiz recently and just get to pull apart how it was made, how we feel about it, how something can look like a disaster and feel like a disaster, and yet be fascinating.

Paul: Yeah, I think that if you're looking for a place to start on the show, like Amy said, Waterworld is great if you want to hear about a flop. But the truth is, find the movie that you like. I think that that's always the best way into a movie podcast. Don’t let us introduce you to a movie you've never heard of before.

I think our show works great as a book club, but also a remembrance. Like, oh, you love ET, let's talk about ET. You love Back to the Future, let's go there. Start off there and get the vibe of the show and disagree with us, agree with us, whatever you'd like to do. But I think that's the best way in.

Amy: Yeah. 

Paul: Find your favorites. 

Amy: We have done over 300 movies. We recently brushed up our Back to the Future one because that's a film that we just continually find new things in all the time. New conversations. 

Paul: Yeah. 

Sarah: Thank you so much again for joining me, and thank you for, I don't know, just reminding people, whoever needed to be reminded, that it's just fun to make stuff. Let's go do that. 

Amy: Let's go do that. 

Paul: I love it.