Oh is boots.

It's showed.

People say good money to see this movie.

When they go out to a theater, they want clothed sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth.

Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring, none at all.

After all these years, I thought I knew you, but you turned out to be a stranger.

We are fighting for our lives there.

My family must survive.

Yes, the most shocking experience of their lives.

Doubly shocking because it can happen to you.

Still, right my trailer, what are you gonna do?

Cola cops, they're busy with the new highway petroth corect.

The lawless are on the loose, making it necessary for law abiding citizens to make their own law.

I could going fire as shadow of the heads.

Maybe that'll upset them.

Right, there are no civilians.

We are all at war.

Give me a gun.

I'm good with a gun.

We'll stay here and I'll kill them.

This is civilization's jungle after the jackals of society have ruthlessly ravaged it, ending the world of decency.

Hm.

I killed two men.

I tried to kill them too, but I missed.

I just wasn't a good enough shot.

Welcome to the projection booth.

I'm your host.

Mike White joined me once again as Ms.

Emily and Travia hey Hey also back in the booth after far too long as mister Howard A.

Rodman.

Hello.

We conclude Sci Fi July with a look at Ray Milland's Nick in Year Zero, based on the stories Lot and Lot's Daughter by Ward Moore.

The film also stars Miland as Henry Baldwin, the patriarch of the Baldwin Family, a Los Angeles family on a camping trip that turns into a desperate fight for survival.

Along with Miland, the film stars Gene Hagen, Mary Mitchell, and Frankie Avalant.

It's an early entry in the nuclear apocalypse subgenre, released in the height of the Cold War anxiety.

We will be spoiling this film as we go forward, so if you don't want anything ruined, turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen it.

We will still be here.

So, Emily, when was the first time you saw Panic in the Year Zero?

And what did you think when you first asked me about this movie.

I was trying to remember if I had seen it, because there's a whole bunch of movies that are very similar between probably about a thirty year gap, and as I started looking at it and I'm like, yeah, I've seen this.

Wait, no, that's The Lays of Grass.

Wait i've seen this.

No, that's eight other movies that this could have been.

Five was the other one I kept thinking it was, and then I went to watch it.

I'm like, oh, wait, this is Panic in the Streets, which I always write accidentally instead of Panic in the year ero.

But then I finally watched it and said, oh, no, I have seen this, and I watched it maybe five.

This years ago.

I feel like this might have been a Netflix disc at the time, where it wasn't that easy to find, and it was always one that would come up in different Apocalypse books of all these movies that I had on my checklist to see, and it didn't leave much of an impression back then, which is why I didn't remember if i'd seen it or not.

Rewatching it this week in this place of time in the year twenty twenty five, it played really differently.

I won't say in a bad way, because I think there's stuff about the film that obviously we'll get into politically socially.

It was a really different experience watching it today than maybe five ten years ago when we weren't quite where we are in the world right now.

Howard, how about yourself.

I came to this film by a very different path Italy.

So when I was growing up, there was an institution in New York called the Million Dollar Movie, which was a TV broadcast in movies, and at that point there was not enough programming to fill an entire programming day for some local stations, so they would either broadcast what was clearly filler, I mean on some of the It's hard to believe now, but the ratio of Hamburger to Hamburger Helper on some of these local stations was a bit dodgy, or they would just rebroadcast something and on the Million Dollar Movie for whatever that week was, they would show the movie every night, and sometimes multiple times on weekends.

So if you saw the movie on a Monday and you liked it, you just kept showing up.

And there were a couple that were cult favorites among me and my tea bopper friends, and I think one of them was Panic in the year ero exclamation point and to tell tales out of school although I think the Statute of Limitations has passed on this.

Myself, my friend Adam Duhan who Harold Duhan who later became Adamduhan and a blessed memory, and the late Walter Becker, late of Steely Dan.

The three of us and sometimes some friends would sit on a couch either in my living room or Walters, and we would have in preparation, gone to the local drugstore and bought as many bottles of Romolar as they would let us get away with, which was a cough syrup which in that day and age actually contained codeine as opposed to more useless substitutes.

And we would get woozy on Romolar and watch Panic in the year ero, and loved it so much that we would come back the next night to do it again.

So that was my introduction to the film.

I'm jealous.

I wish that was mine.

In some ways, I can't quite put my finger on it, but the story of nuclear family in a post nuclear world spoke to us, especially with the aid of ob eights.

Yeah, my story is not nearly as impressive.

No, no Steely Dan, no codining.

Nothing.

I remember probably similar to you, Emily.

I probably saw it around the time of those Netflix stays.

I don't know if I saw it in or if it was on cable, but yeah, I definitely saw this around the early two thousands, and it left a little bit of an impression on me.

I remember liking it, and I always love nuclear apocalypse movies.

I don't know why, probably just because growing up in the eighties and being threatened by that, growing up and watching Thread and The Day After After.

Yeah, so all of that was been great to me.

So going back and seeing some of these earlier ones, which just seems so quaint and they really don't talk about radiation whatsoever.

There's really no problem with radiation.

And I've complained about this before on the show where we've gotten back to now where people are like, Oh, we'll just drop a nuclear bomb in that hurricane.

Sure, that'll get rid of it.

We'll just throw a new at Godzilla, who's five miles off the coast of San Francisco.

That's not going to be a problem, is it.

I came to The Day After late because I missed it in the initial broadcast.

I was too young, But I think it was the sci Fi Channel before it was the Siphy channel back when it was SciFi in ninety four.

Maybe they aired it and it was just a random day.

Where I'm like little teenage me is flipping around and lands on this movie and doesn't know what it is.

But for the next I think three and a half hours, and they just aired it in it's entirety.

I just sat there and probably turned progressively like more action as.

The movie ended, and looked around and said, wait, this was a wait you thought this was oh oh god, And it launched that obsession.

And it was much later when I saw Threads.

So just imagine the world that it could have been.

Yeah, Threads was like the real deal of the day after Scared the Bejesus Side.

Yeah, tell us it changed Reagan's view on nuclear war, right.

But then you see Threads and you're like, oh my god.

There is now a film called Television Event, which is about the nineteen eighty three broadcast of the Day after.

Oh Wow, it's excited.

It's a documentary as interviews with Nick Meyer, who directed it, whom you may know better from the Sherlock Holmes seven Percent series or Star Trek to Rapid Kahn and this came quotes the interviews with Nick but also footage with Ted Kopple, Carl Sagan and Me Kissinger, Robert Tomara, William F.

Buckley, Junior, Elie Vizelle.

It's that kind of thing.

So if you're into not only post apocalypticism but the history of post apocalypticism as received by the American public, I think you would enjoy it.

I'm definitely gonna have to check that one out because for whatever reason, and I don't know if it's just nostalgia, but it's all right.

No Blade of Grass, as you said, Testament, Yeah, oh boy.

Another good one.

Damn Nation Alley with Dominique Sanda.

That vehicle that Jan, Michael Vincent and George Prepar drive around so cool.

I love that.

I think there's so much to it.

I think there's a lot of there's the era if you live through it.

I think it's the same with the ombie apocalypse.

It is that weird wish not wish fulfillment, but there is an aspect of I know what I would do, I know how i'd survive.

I live near York.

I'm going to die in the first bomb.

I hope if everything goes well, because I don't want to deal with that the reason I think ombies caught on eventually when they did.

Like growing up, we were big ombie fans, and we always just did the scenario of Okay, we're walking at night, what happens as ombie comes out.

Most apocalyptic movies or apocalyptic movies are putting normal everyday people in these situations.

Right.

Sure, you have your road warriors and you have your kind of more extreme, but this, right and the movies around this time were very much the pure nuclear family.

You know exactly who you could be in the scenario, and if you're a good man, you can figure out how to survive it.

And save your family.

And I think there is a lot of that, And this is where it gets into that weird territory that I'm sure we'll go into of today in twenty twenty five, where it's become a source of pride.

I think there are this idea that there are people that kind of secretly want World War three to happen because it would give them a chance to show off why they keep their guns and why they need their rights and why they have all of this, and it justifies things.

But at the same time, like you get it, it's really appealing it's very exciting to.

Watch absolutely emily that there is a certain kind of wish fulfillment here, which is God.

If there were a nuclear or I could unleash my inner Jordan Peterson, I could show them what an alpha I am.

Yeah, I don't have to put on pants, I don't have to comb my hair.

That could be a chad.

I grew up in the nineteen fifties under the shadow of the bomb, and we would regularly have duck and cover drills in school, and all kinds of cheerful nostrums like don't look out the window, the fireball will melt your eyeballs, but stay safe under your desk, as if getting under the desk in PS one ninety six Q Class five would save you from a holocaust that would melt everything else in the world.

And I remember, I'll come out of the closet on this.

My mother was a communist, was a Stalinist.

Oh thing, I got to make a phone call.

Yeah, sure, feel free, Statute of limitations once more.

And she said, these things are stupid.

If there's a nuclear war, we're all going to die.

So that's a good thing.

The next time there was a duck and cover grill at PS one ninety six Q.

I didn't go into the desk, and my teacher said why not, and I parroted what my mother had said, which was that there's a nuclear war, We're all going to die.

And she sent the other principal's office, and I assumed I was going to get lectured and maybe do detention, god knows what.

And it was the weirdest goddamn thing.

The principal, a guy named Abraham Pauschner, the principle of PS one ninety six, talked to me in a kind of rambling way for twenty maybe thirty minutes about the fact that we were all going to die, and it is death that gives life meaning but also renders life meaningless.

It was like I expected to be reprimanded.

Instead I got Albert Camu.

A philosophy lesson.

And then after he was finished talking about death meaning they need to I said, go back to class.

And that was That was one of the weirder things of a very weird childhood.

Yeah, I have a similar mother involving duck and cover story, because my mother grew up also in the fifties and about sixteen seventeen years ago, as she lived in Russia for a year.

I was teaching English there and I had a class of adults, lawyers and professionals, and my mother had come to visit and it brought her to the class.

And it was fascinating because my mother has never really been abroad, and she's talking to Russian and she's saying to them, growing up, you guys were the enemy.

I was so scared of you.

And she's going through what it was like, and she was talking about duck and cover and how we thought you were going to bomb us.

So when they a bell would ring and then we'd all have to go.

Under the desks.

And my students, who were probably in there, like early thirties, late twenties, looked in they were just so, wait, you went what was your school like?

You had a bomb shelter?

No, we just went under the desks.

Wait, you went under a desk for a nuclear bomb.

And it finally hit my mother, Oh my god, we weren't going to survive.

Why do they make us do that?

Better late than never?

Yeah, it took the Russians to teacher that.

And I also think I believe that you're right to draw the parallel between the sort of wave of postal apocalyptic films, which in some ways morphed into ombie apocalypse films, many of the same.

We are barricaded here in our house, everybody outside is either radioactive, and a lot in connection with these films are the kind of inciting incident, if you will.

Is a big externality the bomb drops, But really there about community, neighborhood.

How thin is the veneer of civilization?

What does it take to strip us away from our quote unquote civilized selves and turn us into Hobbsey?

And I've got mine.

After I rewatched Panic in the year ero this week without the aid of coughs here, I was reminded of a nineteen fifty nine Twilight Zone episode which you may be familiar, called the Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

Do you know that one?

Yes?

I thought you were going to say the one in the Bombshelter.

I' forget the name of it, but there's one where a family has built a bomb shelter and they're not letting the other family in.

Oh yeah, Maple Street is the episode that may be want to write.

Actually, the episode Emily is referring to is the Shelter Season three episode three of The Twilight Zone.

Let me just quote Rod Serling if I might.

This is sort of afterward to the episode.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosion and fallout.

They are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightening search for Escapegoat has a fallout of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn.

And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined only to the Twilight Zone, do you do?

It's amazing to look at some of the films that were coming out around this time.

We spoke earlier this year about On the Beach.

I forgot that we had already done a post apocalyptic film this year.

On the Beach nineteen fifty nine, The World of Flesh and the Devil nineteen fifty nine, The Day the Earth caught fire in nineteen sixty one.

I would consider le Jetee to be a post of Black Ealliptic Film nineteen sixty two, Ladybug, Ladybug nineteen sixty three, Fail Yeah, Fail, Safe and After Strange Love in sixty four, Peter Watkins The War Game in nineteen sixty five, who ironically we've already done Late August in the Hotel Ozone that was nineteen sixty six.

None to just continues from there.

Of course, it's never really gone out of style, I don't think.

But yeah, that's a killer list of amazing films.

Interestingly, on this list I'm looking at there is the Creation of the Humanoids, which we covered quite a few years ago, also written by Jay Simms, who wrote the screenplay for this.

Jay Simms probably best known these days for writing The Killer Shrews, one of the best mystery sites Theater three thousand movies.

And then also that same year The Giant HeLa Monster came out as well, which he wrote, also a good MSD episode.

Yeah, this guy's knocking them out of the park.

Music coordinator for this who is Al Simms?

Did all of the bikini movies, any movie with bikini in the title, Bikini, Beach Party, Goldfoot, and The Wild Bikini, The Return of Doctor Goldswood, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini Bikini Al Simms, I mean it's he is in the Bikini Cinematic universe.

He owns Music League, and I love the Less Baxter movie and the Al Sims music in this and I actually found on Spotify there is a soundtrack album.

I would listen to this soundtrack out of context.

I think it is a really good soundtrack.

I like the idea of this jazzy score over It's very incogruous in a way because it's getting back to and here you have wild drums and saxophone.

But there are times where this score is just so intrusive that I think it genuinely affects.

This movie absolutely, and you can see it as bretty and if you want to be charitable.

But again, this is a case where it's oh, I get why the codeine helps.

And if I can go off on a tangent and I'm not derailing you.

I also think that in addition to this belonging to the genre of post apocalyptic films, it also is part of another genre, which is the sort of disturbed teenager movie, the cool and the crazy or the delinquents, the kind of Richard becallon cinematic universe that goes through all of this.

He plays Carlolk, but Dick McAllan was it him?

And Scott Marlowe were in all of these movies about beat Nicks disturbed teenage, all of whom were hopped up on Mary Jane and then did bad things.

And in some ways this feels to me like that episode of Dragnet, which is about drugs, or the Delinquent School and the Crazy, where it's about finger snapping, about jazz and about the threat that young and of course the apotheosis of this is rebel without a cause.

And if you look at James Dean's Harrington jacket in that, and if you look at Thank You Abalon's jacket in this, you can see the kind of through line.

But I do think that in some ways, in addition to this being about the nuclear family under threat from the bomb, it's also about the American white picket fence nuclear family being under threat from the teenage rebellion that's just under the white picket fence of the Eisenhower years well, and it's.

Like that teenage rebellion can run wild in this one because there are no police anymore.

So you can take all of those things from the Delinquent movies and take them to their quote unquote logical end, where we've got them armed, very dangerous, going after this family, very open, and then the whole thing with them torturing the girl.

Of course that's where the delinquents would take it if there was no rule of law around.

I feel like this movie had the potential to be really fascinating and great, and I don't think it really gets there, because I think part of the most interesting kernel of the movie is Frankie Avalon character, because he's there as this sort of okay, we the dad is trying to teach him because he knows, okay, I need you in order to the two of us.

Of course, we have to keep the women safe because they can't do anything.

We have to keep you, saying, if you have to learn to kill, but not to enjoy it.

And there's all that, and there's a moment early on, like somewhere in the middle where I can't remember if it's after they shoot one of the beating the kids, but we're Frankie Avalon's smiles and the dad kind of sees it and you see him.

Upset by it.

And that's so that's a story right there, to see where he's gonna go.

And I think not to jump everywhere, but going back to the short stories that this is based on, and I don't know how much that yeah, that is, but my jaw dropped at the end of first short story when I realized what was happening.

But it was so much about the dad looking at his kids and saying, this one's gonna make it, this one's not gonna make it, this one's not.

And I just wish in a way it was a little bit digging deeper into who is Frankie Avalon becoming in this movie?

Is he going to be the dad in twenty years or is he gonna be one of these other delinquents going around and taking other people's property in women and so on.

But I don't And also it's I get it, it's the year and the time, and this wasn't going for that kind of story, but it's just like it.

I'm like, oh, are we gonna pull it now?

Okay, we run out of time.

But I think you're absolutely right to point to that is the kind of moral dilemma at the center of this movie.

I think Raymonland's line to Frankie Avalon and I love this because it so encapsulates all of this.

I want you to use that gun if you have to, but I want you to hate it.

That is a great line, and that.

He says, A big piece of civilization is gone, and your mother wants you to save what's left.

Try to unpack that, A big piece of civilization is gone and your mother, not me, your mother wants you to save what's left.

I think you're absolutely right.

Emily chasits this as a kind of theme, sometimes rather deliberately, sometimes over deliberately, But then does it quite take it to the extremes that, say, a late sixties movie might of really tearying that character apart with any kind of straw dog's kind of way.

There's no real transition to his character.

He looks the same as he did in the beginning, but.

There is that sort of weird smile on his face and I love that moment.

Yeah, so much of this is the Ray milland story.

Of course, it makes sense.

He's the director and his cheapest star.

He does a great job with the direction of this, and I love Raymonland.

I've always enjoyed Ray miland this period of his career was interesting because this was right before he worked with I think was Roger Corman, who did X the Man with the X Ray Eyes.

I can't remember who directed that or he definitely.

Worked with Corman quite a bit.

I mean, he did those movies like the Wilder movie, the Hitchcock movie, Last Weekend, I'm for Murder, but he'd also had directed at this point I'm correct, and if I'm not, please correct me.

A man alone lives been the Safecracker, which are good competent BB minus.

So this was not his directorial debut, and I think he actually knew what he was doing, and not in as when forgive the implicit screenwriterly bias here, but when actors turn directors, sometimes you get a lot of showy performances because oh, look what I can do in acting if I weren't constrained by that director.

And sometimes you get weird, unexpected pieces of genius like Charles Lawton's Not of the Hunter.

But here it feels to me like he is doing a far better directorial job and a I'm not sure that it's self effacing is the right way, but I would say very economical and professional.

It reminds me more of say on that Spectrum, more Howard Hawks than North and Welles.

Just for the record, yes, Roger Carman directed X the Man with the X Ray Eyes also a score by Less Baxter, and yes, that Less Baxter music is intense a lot of the time.

We start with that shot of the.

On the AM radio.

You see an AM radio dial in a car.

We pull back and get that title on there, and yeah, like you guys are saying, as far as this being somewhat post apocalyptic, but somewhat, if not more, a survivalist film and having this is year ero, we were starting from scratch.

This is it, ladies and gentlemen.

Civilization other than that small piece that you're mentioning that your mother wants you to keep is gone.

And we just see the breakdown through so much of the first probably into the second act of this film, as they realize what's going well, they don't ever seem to really realize to me, like it feels like they don't really connect with the fact that Los Angeles is just gone now or at least maybe no, it's so strange, like I said, without the radiation and the destruction, and it just feels like sometimes they're like, we don't want to go into that area, okay, because at the end, aren't they going back to Los Angeles?

The central question is my mom okay.

Yeah, and then we have to just stop asking that very quickly in some ways.

At the beginning of the film is actually the most interesting part to me of this family is going out for a vacation.

They realize what an now we're into their ride, that there are bombs over Los Angeles, and I think this is so much.

And this is where I think this aspect of the short story does feel very much there of it being purely Dad knows what to do?

Who knows why?

I forget what he does for a living.

If they say it, I think they do.

He gets so annoyed that whole short story, at least the first one.

We'll definitely talk about the second one.

But that first short story just feels like I am pissed off at all times.

Just feels like the dad who you don't want to mess with because he's going to turn around.

Dad is always right, don't piss off Dad.

Dad doesn't like you to tap your foot.

Don't tap your foot.

If you were sitting in the back of that car and you said how much longer, he would turn around and literally bite your head off and spit it out The window.

The ory Milan version of that is not He's not that, but he is immediately survivalist of I know exactly what we have to do.

We are not gonna stop.

We're gonna keep driving.

We'll stop at a phone if we can't get your mother.

We're just gonna keep going.

We're not gonna go to the main road.

We're gonna go to a side road.

We are not going to tell the proprietor right away what's going on.

We're gonna go somewhere where they are a little bit less in the know, and they don't know.

So we're gonna buy everything first.

We're gonna pay for everything first, and then we're a good person, we're gonna say, hey, by the way, turn on the news.

Something really bad is happening.

You should shut things down, you should take your stuff and go.

So it's very the evolution of it.

And then immediately the next stop he makes, which is the gun shop, where he similarly, I need a gun, I need this, I need that.

Here's everything, and already it's getting a little bit looser as far as yeay, oh okay, fine, I'll pay you double and then gun laws.

What do you know in nineteen sixty two, I can't sell it to you right now.

You got to come back tomorrow for it.

And he does the trick that the one era of my life where I played PlayStation, I had a stressful job and I would kill an hour in the afternoon by playing Grand Theft Auto and all I would do is drive around and shoot people and do violence dark time in my life.

I'm good now.

But one thing you cannot do is you cannot go into a gun shop and purchase guns and immediately try to shoot the proprietor of that chop in order to not think for them, because the proprietor is going to be faster with the gun than you are.

And I was very happy to be validated in this movie when that happens.

And then of course the gun shop guy comes back.

But there's just something to that of how it quickly progresses into Okay, I was the good guy with the grocery store owner.

I'm a little bit less of the good guy now with the gun store owner.

And now it's we're going down that slope.

The only time that doesn't hold water is if you are Arnold Schwarzenegger coming back in time and able to take out Dick Miller as the gun proprietor anything.

Else phase plasma vifer in the forty range.

It's just what you see, Pal, who's the nine millimeter?

You know your weapons, buddy.

Any one of these is ideal for home defense.

So which shall it be?

All close early today?

It's a fifteen day away on ten guns.

Rifles you can take right now.

You can't do that.

The politics of this film are really interesting because, on the one hand, there's a very strong strain of pakriarchalism.

Father knows best with a gun in his hand.

But there's also some kind of I think some weird left wing politics as well, that that kind of thread through this.

I don't know if this is true, but I have read that ward More was expelled from d wait Clinton High School in New York for his pacifism during World War One.

I do know in a more confirmed way that he was in the Federal Writers Project of the WPA with people like Ralph Ellison and Nelson Algren and Zora Neil Hurston and John Chiever and Studs Turkle and Jim Thompson of all people, and Richard Wright and Saul Bellow, and there was a strong kind of left liberal strain in that too, and I think there is at one and the same time a kind of endorsement of nuclear war would be a very bad thing.

But also if there were a nuclear war, the men stop is to kill other men and protect there women with a strong underlining of the possessory adjective.

Well, that's what I really liked about the second story, Lot's Daughter, because it has a little bit of a kick to that with its ending just for.

Folks who may not be as familiar with the Bible as other people.

Of the story of Lot somewhat similar and so far as moving to I can't remember if he was in Sodom or if he was just as a Gemora.

But there's the whole story of the angels coming in and if they can find what was it ten good men that they would spare the city.

They eventually take shelter with Lot and his family.

All of these people come from outside, so again protecting the family, protecting the house.

But when all of these people show up and they go, hey, you have two strangers in there, basically send them outside so we can fuck them, is how I understand the story.

And he goes, you, no, these are my guests.

Here's my daughters take them.

Yeah, which is great.

Then the angels are basically like, hey, man, you need to get you and your family the fuck out of here.

We're going to lay waste to this city.

Of course, there's the whole thing of them running away.

Lot's wife turns around, and I really wish I remembered her first name.

I don't even know she has a first.

I don't think she has one.

I think it's just Lot's wife.

I think she's missus Lott.

Yeah, my name is Lot, and I'm Abraham's cousin.

I live.

I live in Sodomgamore.

I live really right on the line outside Imamore.

I met my wife about six hundred years ago.

We've been married for like five hundred and.

Ninety eight years.

I'm Lot's wife.

Everybody refers to me as Lot's wife, but I have a name.

I'm Myra, Myra Lott, actually the light of my life for my two daughters, Tracy and Stacy.

Missus Lott turns around, turns into a pillar of salt.

You can color.

You're ready to see if you want to.

Second part of the story, yes, very apropos.

Second part of the story is now Lot is alone with his family, with his daughters, and the name of the second story that this was somewhat based on, I would say it's really much more based on Lot.

And then Lot's Daughter is the follow up story.

And if you remember again in the Bible, Lot's daughters want to perpetuate the lineage, so they get a Lot nice and drunk, and a couple nights in a row they have their way with him, or he has some semi consensual sex with them, or maybe not.

Maybe it's even darker than that.

But yeah, So when we come to ward More's story Lot's Daughter, he now has a new son and his wife is gone and his daughter.

Look at how nice my daughter looks.

And yes, things are falling apart, but she really takes the place of her mother very well.

Fucking dark.

She's stronger than her mother, She's more logical than her mother.

Yeah, the stories are great.

I had heard the name word Moore, but I had never read anything by him, and I immediately.

Added a bunch of his books to my list.

I think in some ways, I actually the first story is just written with such an intensity, and the dad.

Is despicable and you know that dad, you absolutely do.

And so that has a great ending that shocked me, and the second story kind of gives a little bit of upp into and a way I think in the end, I would love to see an adaptation that is a little bit closer to that, because it would be hard to watch, but it would be yeah, evident.

And if you were doing a nineteen fifties adaptation set in car culture of Orpheus, you could call it Orpheus and Furry Dice.

And that's why it makes the big bucks.

I was laughing, of course, as he's going with the ray milland characters going on this quest to get the supplies, get the guns, get the gas.

I love when they stop at a diner and they're talking about how they don't have any eggs anymore, and I was just like, oh, wow, everything old is new.

Again that diner.

By the way, the Saddle Peak Lodge is still there.

Yeah, it is now much grander.

It is a kind of in Calabasas.

It's at four to one nine Cold Canyon Road.

It also appears in episode eighty three of Perry Mason that aired on January thirty, nineteen sixty.

But it's funny when I'm looking at that or the movie ranch that appears in it.

There's a kind of subterranean dialogue between all of the different movies that feature the stock locations that you do when you're shooting on the cheap in Los Angeles.

I forget whether it was Sam Goldwyn or Harry Cohne who's alleged to have said, a tree is a tree, a rock is a rock.

Shoot it in Griffith Parker, don't shoot it.

But there are these sort of trope locations that pop up in movie after movie, and in some ways it takes you out of the film because you're saying, oh my god, saddle Peak Lodge.

I officiated at a wedding at saddle Peak Lodge.

It takes you out of the movie, but also sews you back into this Los Angeles movie world, where there are five or six iconic locales which have doubled for fifty or sixty places in as many movies.

If both of you come to Los Angeles at the same time and I will take you to saddle Peak Lodge and we can make our pilgrimage, I would be very happy to do that.

Blast the jazz, whatever we do.

It took me so long to figure out who was playing the mother in this film, or I knew her from.

I know her as I can't stand it.

I never ever have figured out that that was her.

Oh she is so good.

But when I figured it out, I was like, oh, I see it in the face.

Of course she was in The Big Knife and a whole bunch of other stuff, but yeah, that role and singing in the rain so freaking classic, god.

Is iconic, one of the best supporting performances in a movie of all time.

And then using Franky Avalon as this kind of I guess it would have been a box office draw at this time.

Right, this is before the bikini films.

Yes, I think so.

I feel like he and at least the quick trivia I read like he was already doing me.

Let's see.

I know he was a teen idol as a musical star, but I don't know to what extent he was a movie star.

Reports that he was, but I don't know.

Oh, the Beach Party was sixty three, Operation Bikini sixty three.

Wow, he did a lot of bikini movies prey quickly.

So this is right before, right before I was going to break out, almost right after Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which is what I really remember him for.

And he did a few other things before that, but okay, so he's probably yeah, not quite box office idle, but more the musical hit.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Let's cast this guy in here and bring in some of the teeny boppers.

He looks amazing in this movie.

I didn't really recognize the daughter too much, and speaking of this being such a patriarchal film, she gets barely anything.

She gets nothing.

I was mad because I felt like I was just annoyed because I think it's like, what is it, probably forty five minutes in the film when she finally gets to say something, and what does she say?

Okay, we have to go, Carrie, we found the place we're gonna live as the world ends.

Let's go get it ready, and she says, what a drag?

I'm bored.

Yes, that's great work right there.

But that actress.

I felt bad after because I was so angry at her as a character.

And then I realized she's in Spider Baby.

Oh yes, she is a blonde in Spider Baby, and she's so great in that.

But yes, it's not her fault that she just gets No.

I'm sorry she doesn't get nothing to do.

She does get to get sexually assaulted, which.

Has nothing to do with her.

In the end, it is all about how the dad is said, it's the dad's responsibility and he'll never forget help.

Was he insufficiently good at protecting his women?

It's not about them, it's about him.

Yes, we never see her actual react to it after.

We never see is she recovering, is she defensive, is she anything like?

Nope, you would never know.

This girl just went through it horrific, right, and.

Nabe Molan's wife says, maybe you should talk to her, and you're expecting that will be the next scene, and instead the next scene is Frankie Avalon clumsily trying to pick up the woman that they rescued.

Yes, so there's a second woman in this movie who is also being actually assaulted, and they do decide to help her.

Okay, come stay with us, we'll take care of you.

And I think this woman is not on the market right now, and every scene is just Frankie Avalon make an eye at her, and here I pitched a flower for you.

She does not want that, No, she doesn't.

Should get this woman to a trauma center, right, Now before we move off of actors, I just want to sing praises of a couple of sort of smaller actors.

Dick mcallian, who plays Carl, who is just such an axiom of cinema, all of those beat big movies, the Linklin School and the Crazy that we mentioned, but he had a career that goes through Robin and the Seven Hoods, Von Ryan's Express.

He is a loach in Chinatown.

For God's sake.

Once you see his face, you see it everywhere.

He is almost the Dick Miller of the Beatniks.

You know here he is cast let's just say, not cast against type.

He's doing that thing that he often does.

But I just love, Oh, oh my god, it's Dick mckallion.

And then the other guy who I recognized was the grocery store owner who's an actor named o Z Whitehead, and he's if Kustin Sturgis had his the Allen Quell Company, his stock company of actors, John Ford had a bunch of them too, and he was one of the john Ford Stock Company actor guys.

He's in everything from Grapes of Wrath to Man who Shot Liberty Balance and again, once you see his face.

You see it everywhere.

He's one of that great generation of I guess you could say character actor, although that seems a little insufficient, non leading men.

For the most part, supporting actors who once become aware of them, have great faces, and once you become aware of them, it's like, oh my god, there he is again.

Oh that's whoa And I think Ray Miland, who was an actor, knew in his mental or even maybe physical rolodex whole bunch of guys who could come in do a day or two's work, deliver and do it professionally, not have to be what's my motivation or any of that stuff.

I was thrilled to see Paul Gleason as the gas station attendant about ten minutes in that gets his lights punched out.

There didn't raise me to be a hero for four bucks.

It's that great line, just in case the.

People of my generation need a little reminding.

Paul Gleeson, the principal from the Breakfast Club, you mess with the bully, get the horns.

So great seeing him here where he just looks like he still went behind the ears.

And yeah, it's about thirty minutes in when we finally get the roughnecks coming in here, these teenage hoodlums, and they really become the motivation for the whole second part of the film because we think we're done with them for a little while once they find their new world Swiss family.

Robinson kind of what it feels like for a bit, let's build a house in a cave.

But those of us who make our living screenwriting, he knew that they're going to come back.

You didn't kill them, you had just shot them.

It was a grace.

But they are the kind of motor that kicks you into the second activeness and changes it a little bit from the dominant tone being is ray Miland being going to be able to keep his family together by being an authoritative, strong leader of the population of basically this nineteen sixty two Mercury Monterey custom or what's it going to be like when they are tangling with the anarchy of this new doggie dog world that they're now finding themselves in.

Ray Miland has one of the best ways to enter traffic that I've ever seen when he is trying to get onto the freeway again from a side road, unable to get on there because going back to the short story, That's a lot of it is the traffic and trying to make it through.

And get down this road and not use all your gas just idling.

And here he's trying to get back into the road.

Nobody's stopping, nobody's allowing him to merge.

So do you know what to do?

You just get a big old bucket of gasoline, throw that out onto the freeway, light it on fire, and that gives you a little bit of a path.

Yeah, and look, New York traffic can be rough.

I'm not gonna lie.

I did watch that and think a little super soaker.

I want to give a little plug here if I may to.

I think we all know IMDb a good old m de bath.

I am a CDB International Movie Car Database.

Oh I love that one.

Yes, I have used that one.

I went, of course there to see what kind of car is that?

Because it struck me in many of its sort of configurations and aspect ratio to be a kind of second cousin to the car that let me caution drives in alphabilt.

It's a Mercury Monoabe.

It's a Ford product, and all the Ford products share a base body style, although different trim levels according to IMCDB, whom I trust absolutely explicitly.

It was a nineteen sixty two Mercury Monterey Custom.

It was a fifteen foot can Skill travel trailer in tow and you actually see the can Skill logo at some point, and I love it.

Somewhere there is somebody who cares enough about this to document it.

The interiors were not shot in a nineteen sixty two Mercury Monterey Custom because the Mercury Monterey Custom is a kind of a small ish car.

It is not what we now would consider a compact or subcompact, but it's not one of those large land sharks.

So in order to shoot the interiors capaciously enough, they used a nineteen sixty Mercury Montclair, which is a size level up from that.

Cool.

Okay, you're shooting a movie.

You've got your sort of picture car, but then you're shooting the interiors and now it's cramped.

But the idea that there's somebody who cares enough about cars and cares enough about movies to actually do that research.

And here we are because somebody is obsessive and that shit crazy in the best possible sense.

We get to rebel in these things that we now know that we would never have known on our own.

My head is off.

I would believe that my dad would have done that.

However, my dad isn't good enough for the Internet to have executed that, because he is somebody who would watch this kind of movie and say that can't be the inside of that car if that's too small.

And just a memory I have is as a child, Barbie's nineteen fifty seven Chevy was the car for Barbie.

It was this pink Chevy and my dad was helping me put it together when I was like eight years old, and remember him doing it and putting it down and looking at me and being very torn about something and saying, I'm really glad they did this because it's a toy for kids and they should have this.

But I just have to say, in nineteen fifty seven, there would not have been seat belts in the backseat of this car.

I am disappointed that one of my other favorite movie databases, the Internet Movie Firearms Database, does not have an entry for this, because then they'd be able to tell us all of the guns that we're seeing.

There's multiple guns, and they play huge plot points, and they're apparently very easy to aim.

And fire.

Everybody's really quick at figuring that out.

Somebody's letting me down.

That is very disappointing.

Or the movie Internet stock location, which I imagine that's where.

Yeah, I know, you know where all of these locations are.

But I love when they go from real location and then walk right onto a set and we are so set bound for quite a lot of this second act where we're just walking through a bunch of either fake trees or trees they've just planted on a sound stage.

Man oh man, does that really just bring a battle where it's no, we're on a sound stage all.

Yes, they had three weeks.

That feels like it.

Yeah.

One of the things I love about the Arcoff Nicholson movies and the Corman New World stuff is let's make a virtue of necessity.

We've got no money, we've got three weeks, We've got these actors, we've got these locations.

But we're making a movie, so we're gonna.

Make it something.

Also, I think really neat about a kind of stark, undecorated end of the world film, very different movie, but also about the end of the world in a very different way.

Something I love is the just blandness of the visuals of the movie, the rapture where it just feels there is nothing visually interesting, and that is deliberate and it just puts it in a different headspace when you watch it.

I mean, have a little bit of that here.

Where there's no I think we see a mushroom cloud quickly.

There's no real visual style or like attempt at pinache to the movie.

And it's fine because let's see focus on the story.

These days, if we were to see a roland emerate post apocalyptic movie, we would go for the special effects in some ways.

Well we'd have twenty minutes of that mushroom, Yeah, we would.

In this there is one shot of a mushroom clud in one shot of a sort of ascending whatever.

Clearly either stock footage is primitively matted in, but maybe not even.

But that's not what we came for.

We didn't come for the glander of the special effects, or the awe of it, or the shock of it, or the oh my god, that looks so real.

We're here for something else.

We're for good storytelling, and that's what we're getting with this.

Like I love so simple, this whole idea of the reintroduction of these hoodlums done in such a beautiful way, and maybe a reference to Moses.

This whole thing where mom's doing laundry, daughters on the shore, and mom accidentally drop a shirt or something into the water, and we follow that down.

Then we go past the daughter, and then we keep going down and then a hand reaches in and pulls it up, and sure enough, it's one of those tufts that we saw before.

Who's just oh, somebody's around here, okay, And.

If that thing came from upstream, we're gonna go there and find the humans to prey on it.

A long time ago, there were some women by the shore of a river, not unlike the one we see in the movie, and floating down through the rushes is a basket with a little baby, and they say, oh my god, it's a basket with a baby in it.

And they pluck it out from the rushes and they go to the pharaoh and present this child to the pharaoh and say, Pharaoh, look at this baby.

It's the most beautiful tube we've ever seen.

And the pharaoh looks and says, this baby is really ugly, and the women say, but he looks so good in the rushes.

That's a lot of bull just.

Into terms of exposition.

There is lightning, hope it doesn't rain.

It came from behind us, and there's a sense that okay, could be lightning, could be this, could be that, And then there's a second one that wasn't lightning.

Maybe they're testing.

So the existence of one could be anything.

The existence of two therefore means purpose.

It reminds me a lot of any random plane can crash into the World Trade Center.

Once the second one crashes, that something else, or Goldfinger saying the first is happenstance, the second is coincidence, the third is enemy action.

There is something about the other hue dropping, which I find an extraordinarily beautiful piece of storytelling, of narrative, unminding that it's done here and again, Like many of the things, is some of this dialogue cheezy assolutely, but the storytelling is done with I think great economy and intent.

And I love the fact that if you're operating on a very limited number of shooting days and a very limited budget, the thing that we'll get you through again and again is the storytelling is you know what really comes through.

The efficiency, the fact that it opens and very quickly, and we don't need a lot of backstory.

We don't need to know that it's the Russians, or it's World War three or instance, or that it is very immediate setup of here's dad, here's mom, the kids, they're lazy teenagers.

Let's go here.

It happens now we move into action.

It is within the first five minutes.

I think that he is heading to the grocery store and with a plan, and some movies move like that, and I think it's for the better, but very easy to make that opening a good fifteen minutes.

Before we get to them back in the car going to the grocery store.

It's lean and economical, and there's not so much wasted effort in this film, because we know we're in the grips of storytellers.

When there does seem to be something that momentarily doesn't make sense or what's that about or where's that coming from, we have the faith that they will in very short ordered pay off that setup.

I'm very surprised that Frankie gets shot towards the end here and that we actually don't see him recover.

We have the scene with the doctor that kind of fixes him up a little bit and then can't really do too much more, sends him off on their own way and they get stopped by the military, and of course, being a fan of twenty eight days later, I think, okay, now you're dead.

Oh no, this is even worse.

But they flag him down.

Okay, it's all right.

Basically it's okay to go back to Los Angeles.

Guys.

It's like a misstanding instead.

And then that great title car of there must be no end, only a new beginning.

What a way to end this right, and it's oh my god, there's this car.

They're all gonna die, and it turns out, thank god, it's the police, which is in some ways the mirror image of a Jordan Peele ending.

There's a big difference between this family and Chris in that movie, right, And that is the thing.

I don't think this movie intended in any way to be overly conservative nuclear family.

I don't think it was as politically minded as that.

But the way it watches today is just this is the American way.

We have this perfect family.

Of course they're white, but this entire movie is but just that this.

Okay, yeah, they're doing it right, they're Christians, right, they are saying grace before their meals.

They might kill people, but that's because they have to protect their own.

And see even in the end, what is the policeman or the army guy say as he waves them over.

That's fid more, five more, one by more that are okay.

They come from the hills, no radiation, sickness, yep, five good ones.

We're rebuilding.

We've got five perfect specimens of Christianity.

And they are clearly upstanding because they still were shaving and Raymlan still wearing his hat, so we know it's going to be okay.

This is the kind of people we want to continue in society.

And again in twenty twenty five, that read a little icky.

I know it was a different time and it's not intended that way, but I think it just feels so specifically a particular portrait of America, if you will.

I would maintain though, that there is a certain kind of in movies of Lake Ifew's early sixties.

It's all going to be all right, which we the audience know that the.

Scars left by the movie will persist.

Down onto many generations.

And I think it's Hollywood's way of giving you what, on the level of plot is a happy ending, but on the level of emotional attack is an undertail.

I think a lot about Nick Ray movie Bigger than Life, where Ray Milan does a lot of courtizone and turns crazy and tries to kill his son another biblical haha, and at the end of it, they're in the hospital.

They've finally figured out that it's a cortizone that's been driving him to these delusions, and they're going to get him off of it, and he's going to be a good dad again, and the family's going to be together again.

And they all gather around the bedside in the hospital, but Nick Ray shoots it out of slight Dutch tilt, and you're looking at it and you're realizing, oh, no, for the purposes of whatever, the equivalent of Father Breen and the Hayes Commission, yes, everything's going to be all right, But boy, is that not the message the visuals are telling us.

And I think there's something of the same thing going on here, which is ostensibly he's going to get to the hospital and he's not going to die.

They're probably not even gonna have to Amtibata's lag.

We're going because civilization is going to be okay.

But nothing in the pit of my stomach, either medicated or unmedicated, tells me that this world is going to be okay.

And I like that there's a lot of that stuff going on.

When Ray Millan says for the next few days, you're going to have the kind of togetherness you've always dreamed of unpacked that what does that mean in terms of expectations for nineteen fifties white Christian families and what we know of the world, or the kind of weird is this Frankie Avalon's coming of age through trial.

I just keep coming back to that line, where what do you do when your dad says I want you to shave every day, or in Rick's case, maybe every other day.

So much of this movie takes place in that car that we're talking about.

We almost start in the car, but we definitely end in the car, maybe what twenty thirty minutes out of the car, but that we have the credits playing over them still driving is wild for me.

And we go back to that radio so many times in the end credits.

And I found it fascinating that at the beginning of the movie, when the title comes up, it's all in black letters with a white outline.

At the end of the movie, it's now in white letters, no black outline.

It's almost like it's giving us hope through just the font choice.

I'm like, am I stretching?

I don't think I am, because they're being so deliberate about these end credits.

And the music too.

The music is very triumphant and cheery and yeah, we got this, We're going in the right direction.

Yeah, the right people survived.

This family vacation from hell, starting off with Raymonlan there with this fishing rod.

He's just like, Oh, I can't wait to go out with my family and catch some big ones.

Me and the boy.

We're gonna bond out in the river.

When civilization gets civilized.

I'll rejoins being like sixteen and being in the backseat of the car of your parents gone fishing.

Like it sounds like help that moment in the short story to go back to that when they have to put the dog out of the car.

Yes, I'm reading it.

I'm like, oh, this dad is already awful.

And of course the dad says no dog, and almost there's a part of me that it's terrible because my Internet database is does the doogdie dot com.

That's what I look at anytime there's an animal in a movie, and I just need to separate myself from the emotionality of having to worry about this animal.

But it's such a powerful moment in the short story.

It is such a way to establish somebody as willing to throw their young child's dog out the window of the car to move on and survive.

I would not have wanted to see that, but I think it would have gone a.

Long way in establishing exactly what kind of man, or what kind of person Raymland was going to be could be to have him say, put.

The dog outside.

I don't think there's any coming back from it, though.

It's one of those things where a lot of audience would just never walk out the screen rightfully.

You can do anything you want to a Uman in a movie, but you harm a dog.

That's talks, don't heard anybody.

They're perfect save the cat.

You were talking about Rame Miland at the beginning with a fishing rod, and it starts weirdly with an apology thanks for the help.

I'm sorry, and I'm sorry thanks for the help.

Is very sarcastic there's a way in which, although they don't underline it, we are in the first act watching Raymond land go from a guy who was a little bit in the parlance of the time, henpack.

His wife is snarky at him, and he's apologizing to the guy who can take command.

And that is such a common trope of movies in late fifties early sixties too, which is to see the Jim backus wearing an apron and rebel without a cause, being the sort of, to use that period word, emasculated husband either succeeding or failing into becoming the man that his son needs him to be.

It's a good point too, because in the beginning there the husband and wife's interactions are very playful and sex like.

They're making jokes about I'm gonna pull over and because the kids are sleeping, and it feels like such.

A different marriage.

Once the story kicks in, suddenly their relationship which seemed positive enough for a couple married probably twenty years at that time, but that how it.

The affection seems to go very quickly once she is an obstacle.

I think to him, on we can't survive your way.

You're not necessarily wrong and wanting us to.

But we're not going to do that because otherwise.

We'll be dead.

Sorry about your mom, but sorry, but yeah, that's it.

We got them a bun.

Yeah.

But I love the way that whether we're talking about this as again nuclear family in a post nuclear world, or whether we're talking about this as a sort of father knows best but with weaponry, or whether we're talking about this as the near of civilization versus the anarchy of lawlessness, whether we're talking about it as a fifties beacon a disturbed teenager movies and the threat they present to the white picket Daincet Eisenhower family, whether we're talking about it as Frankie Avalon's Coming of age.

Whatever.

Of the ten or twelve films that are embedded in this one, they're all in really good sink.

They don't seem to be warring with one another or competing for control of the narrative.

What is the central metaphor it's me?

You know, it's me.

They all seem to be there as different flavor and notes, which make this a kind of rich stew There's a little Carter mom, there's a little Annis, maybe there's It just makes me happy.

I'm very happy too when it comes to the presentation of this film because I had only ever seen it full frame, and the scan of this that I think it was Radiance put out widescreen looks great.

This movie looks better than I ever thought it had before.

And I don't want to say any looks better than it has any right to.

But it just looks fantastic, and I thought, I'm going back to Milan.

He's like, okay.

Apparently he felt overwhelmed by the shooting schedule and working with AIP was, like you said, probably very much a trial.

But I think he knocked it out with some good stuff.

I won't say this is a great movie, but I sure did have fun watching it.

I want to, just as a footnote, keep a shout out to the guy who shot it, who is Gil Warren King, who shot thirty forty features, most of them have little note to be candid.

As a cinematographer, you often don't get your choice of projects.

You can start out as a cinematographer on The Lucy Show and end up shooting The Lucy Show.

Has actually happened.

As a footnote to a footnote, Gil Warrington's mother lul Warrington was an actress and was at the time when she was working for Universal, the only woman director in the entire world.

There certainly was Alice Ki Bouchet, and there certainly was Dorothy Orsner and people that our generation is just now beginning to recover the histories of.

But I love the fact that here's a guy who spent his lifetime as a good, serviceable and I don't say that as a majority cinematographer serving the material over a long span.

With a mom who was the only woman film director in the entire freaking world.

What era was she directing?

Early tease, It's never been easy for a rooman director.

What are you talking about?

Actually mean, that's why we have so many of them?

Now, Look two of them at Oscars, Come on, if three of them, we're fine.

It's the white male directors who are having trouble getting work these days because they're the people who are really being discriminated against.

It really upsets me sometimes.

My mom was pretty extraordinary woman, very gutsy, and was a single working mom, and she was working for the American Cancer Society helping produce their public service announcements.

I'd cancer with a checkup and a check made enough money to support her and support me, and she didn't want to be the client on the set anymore.

She wanted to be one of the filmmakers.

So at age thirty seven in nineteen sixty, as a single working mom, she went to NYU Film School when no women went to film school.

She held her own.

Her mentor was Haigemnugian, who was Marty Scorsese's mentor and old generation of people.

If you look at the end of Raging Bullet, says I was and now I see this film as dedicated to Hey Glen ag and he was that guy.

And she got her ass pinstrel out as the only woman in class and made her requisite sixteen milimeter black and white movie of the Pigeons in Washington Square Park.

When she got out of film school, she wanted to be a director, and nobody knew quite what to do with that.

Oh, Dorothy Arsner and Lul Wonging were just utterly unknown.

Nya Svarda was doing directing in France, but nobody really knew about it.

Barbara Hammer, I think was making some wonderful soft hour in any porn films, but they wasn't considered director.

Barbara Logan was several years down the pike.

It was just what is that woman?

Director just did not compute, and so she wanted to be an assistant director, thinking that might be a path, and people said, we've got one.

There was a woman named Nancy Littlefield who was a first a d in New York and it was.

Like, we have a woman ad and maybe she got sick one day, so she became a script supervis and that was a dub did her well when she did it for the rest of her life, and she was very good at it, and a lot of directors.

Liked working with her, and she trained the next generation of script supervisors.

And I think a lot about what she sacrificed as a single working mom in order to raise me, the dreams of her own that she put on the back burner in order to have and raise a child.

And I'm grateful for that, but I'm even more grateful in many ways for what she refused to sacrifice to be a single working mom.

And I think my life is so much the richer because of what she said.

She was unwilling to give up simply because she was a woman and a mother and to the extent that I'm here now talking about panic in the year ero exclamation point.

A lot of that really is due to what she told me I would be capable of by her words, but also by her example.

This may not be the appropriate list, but I just want to say thanks.

On that note, we're going to take a break and play preview for next week's show right after these brief messages, Ladies and.

Gentlemen, Baby Jane Hudson, I real no let to daddy.

Is ussis Helen Love?

I wonder if you can guess who I am.

I'm Baby Jane hutch The hell was Baby Jane Hudson.

I've written a letter to Duddy say.

My sister doesn't ever go out.

She so not fit to receive visitors.

Jane, I want to talk to you.

I'm afraid I have bad news.

You'll probably have to sell the house.

Yeah, I'm ever gonna sell this house, and yeah, I'm ever gonna leave it.

She's sick and she's not getting any better.

You mean, Jane, I think she seems much better lately.

I was cleaning the cage the bird got out.

Yeah, you wouldn't be.

Able to do these awful things to me.

If I were still in this chair, what your heart land?

You are in that chair, Jane.

Please don't do this to me.

Jane, Jane Please.

That's right.

We'll be back next week to kick off a celebration of Victor Bruno with a look at his brover performance in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Until then, I want to thank my co hosts Emily and Howard.

So, Emily, what is the leadest with you?

Apparently not talking about Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

I guess we'll have to listen to that.

One would have happily joined that episode, Mike.

But in the meantime, I sometimes write about movies over at Dudley Dollshouse dot com and then the wonderful Christine Niek Peace and I do a podcast together also on Weird and Wait Media, The Feminine Critique.

And our next episode which will probably be out by the time this drops.

And it's us kin to read grouping together and talking about our favorite beach movies?

Will Frankie avalon show up?

I can't say, oh, come on.

A discussion of beach movies unless you're just talking about a beach that makes you old.

Spoiler alert That would totally be on my list because that Zaney Bonker's dumb movie keeps showing up on the sci fi or ciphy channel now and time it's on, I'm like, oh, leave this on, it's entertaining.

I never said I had good taste, by the way, just to be clear on that.

While we're on the subject of beach movies.

So there was a family of v Andese intellectuals called the Coners Kohner and because fascism, they came to the United States, and Paul Koner became a literary and talent agent and represented people like John Houston.

Paulconer represented him and the guy who wrote Tredudency and Madre represented all kinds of people for several generations.

I think he represented them vendors towards the end of his life.

And his brother, Frederick Kohoner, who was a scholar, was in essence the first person to get a PhD in film history, even though that category didn't quite exist from the University of Vienna, and this very cultured Enny Gray found himself in Malibu, blinking in the sunlight.

He was writing little novels.

There was one about Kiki of Montparnas.

The lovely book.

I like it a lot, but feeling displaced and not quite knowing what to do between what his life would have, should have could have been had not the Nazis come to powers and this weird sun dappled life.

He was now living in malibuups and so just for kicks, he decided to write a little book about his daughter and her friends playing it on the beach called Gidget.

What we know of this beach movies today really is the kind of weird fever dream of a comically or tragically displaced Viennese intellectual.

And Howard, what's the latest with you, sir?

He just finished writing a pilot for what we hope will be a limited series called The Last Baron, based on the book of the same name by Tom Sankton.

It's a nonfiction book about the kidnapping of the Baron and from in front of his house in Paris in nineteen seventy eight by a gang of leftist idiologues and petty carthieves and all kinds of unhealthy mental excitement among the members of his family.

No, I'm not going to pay his ransom.

You pay us.

So there's that, And then I think this is the first place I publicly said this, but two of my novels, A very early novel which is set in March of nineteen thirty three in Berlin in the filmmaking community, when all these people were trying to decide whether they should keep on making films for the Nazis or just take the next train to Paris and get the fuck out to novelical Destiny Express.

And then a much more recent novel called The Great Eastern, which is my scrolling, lavish literary, nineteenth century anti colonial adventure novel.

There were going to be what are you issued next year in uniform editions, so I get to be a novelist again and still get to romp in the playfields of filmed entertainment.

And my current project is working on a screenplay for one of my very favorite French noir authors, again named John Patrick Manchett, who wrote a lot of books that became some good movies, some in different movies, some Alan de Lowell movies.

French bleak existential noir is like mother's milk to me, and I'm very happy that I get to work in the Manchett's cinematic university.

I just was recommending Destiny express on our episode we did don Metropolis to kick off sci Fi July, so very appropriate that we're now talking with the author of that here and the wrapping up episode.

Thank you so much for that shout out, and I would like to remind your audience not to pay any extra for a first edition because there's no other kind.

Thank you so much folks for being on the show.

Thanks to everybody for listening.

If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on.

They are all available at Wordingwaymedia dot com, especially to our Patreon community.

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