Speaker 1: Warning, this podcast contains spoilers for actually nothing this time,
Speaker 1: but references to a Foundation season two airing now on
Speaker 1: Apple TV Plus.
Speaker 2: Hello.
Speaker 1: My name is Jason Cepcio and I'm Rosie Night and
Speaker 1: welcome to Extra revision of the Crooked Media podcast, where
Speaker 1: we dive deep into your favorite shows, movies, comics, and
Speaker 1: pop culture.
Speaker 3: In this episode, Strike Watch. Then we're heading to previously
Speaker 3: on for an SDCC scene report and a little talk
Speaker 3: about that Barbenheimer box office.
Speaker 2: In the Hive mind as an.
Speaker 3: Interview with writer, producer director David Eskoya, and in the
Speaker 3: Nerd Out, some thoughts on Indiana Jones coming up.
Speaker 1: Strikewatch the historic double Strike continues, and some updates here.
Speaker 1: Dwayne Johnson, who we have been tough on on this podcast,
Speaker 1: has has come up big. We talked about in the
Speaker 1: previous episode how important it is that the most powerful
Speaker 1: and successful members of the WGA and SAG have been
Speaker 1: support have been in this fight to support, you know,
Speaker 1: some of the people who are in the lowest rungs
Speaker 1: of the ladder. And here is Dwayn Johnson who has
Speaker 1: come through with a historic seven figure donation to the
Speaker 1: SAG Fund per variety during the COVID nineteen pandemic. The
Speaker 1: sag after Foundation work to provide financial relief to many
Speaker 1: unions one hundred and sixty thousand members via the foundation's
Speaker 1: Emergency Financial Assistance Program, which will again be used during
Speaker 1: the strike, and just in recent days it has been
Speaker 1: that Dwayne made a truly historic donation to the fund.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think like you made a great point when we
Speaker 3: talked about the strike for the first time, which is like,
Speaker 3: this is the thing that makes us love comic books.
Speaker 3: It's like the people who are most powerful, who have
Speaker 3: the power, looking after the people who don't. And in
Speaker 3: this reporting there was something really interesting which I think
Speaker 3: sums up the power of why a union like this
Speaker 3: when it works like this is really really great.
Speaker 2: Because it was saying that Courtney b.
Speaker 3: Vance, who's the Sagafro Foundation President and executive director Sid Wilson,
Speaker 3: actually wrote a letter to the twenty seven hundred of
Speaker 3: the union's highest earning actors being like, look, we need money,
Speaker 3: Like you're rich, give us money, And I'm like, that's
Speaker 3: exactly how it should be. And I love that Dwayne
Speaker 3: was the one who stepped up and was like, well,
Speaker 3: I'm given seven figures, so who else wants to jump in,
Speaker 3: So I'm ready to see more rich people giving money
Speaker 3: to this, because, like you said, this is for the
Speaker 3: workers who are going to be in a situation where
Speaker 3: they're not going to make healthcare this year. The twenty
Speaker 3: six thousand dollars that they need to make annually is
Speaker 3: not going to happen. I could even be if they
Speaker 3: were still working, that might have happened anyway, with the
Speaker 3: way residuals are.
Speaker 2: So it's really great this is happening. I love to
Speaker 2: see it.
Speaker 4: George R. R.
Speaker 1: Martin, who our good friend, George R. Martin, has came
Speaker 1: in on the strike the King. In his latest entry
Speaker 1: on his not a Blog blog, he has weighed in
Speaker 1: on the strike, calling it quote the most important of
Speaker 1: my lifetime. He continues, no one can be certain where
Speaker 1: we go from here, but I have a bad feeling
Speaker 1: that this strike will be long and bitter. It may
Speaker 1: get as bad as the infamous nineteen eighty five strike.
Speaker 4: Though I hope not now. Of course.
Speaker 1: George has been a member of the WGA since the
Speaker 1: mid eighties, and he also continues with updates about How's
Speaker 1: the Dragon quote How's the Dragon is shot? Mostly in London,
Speaker 1: a little bit in Wales and Spain and various other locations,
Speaker 1: which is why filming is continue. The actors are members
Speaker 1: of the British union Equity, not SAG after and though
Speaker 1: Equity strongly supports their American cousins, British law forbids them
Speaker 1: from staging a sympathy strike. If they walk, they have
Speaker 1: no protection from being fired, breach of contract or even sued.
Speaker 2: That's terrible, terrible, terrible law.
Speaker 3: It's really strange too because England has a history like
Speaker 3: as George actually says in this blog, one of the
Speaker 3: major two parties is called the Labor Party, is built
Speaker 3: on the idea of protecting workers, but that has changed
Speaker 3: as the parties moved more centrist. And it's really interesting
Speaker 3: because the subways in England we call it the Tube, right,
Speaker 3: they have an incredibly powerful union, the Transport Workers, and
Speaker 3: that the fact that their union is so powerful has
Speaker 3: kind of been used to turn union sentiment in the public.
Speaker 2: To be like, oh, well, they're getting it and you're not.
Speaker 3: When the big reminder that we all have about unions
Speaker 3: is if you see someone in a job and you
Speaker 3: see them getting good benefits and going on strike to
Speaker 3: get better pay, and they get paid.
Speaker 2: Better than you.
Speaker 3: Don't ask why they're getting that, ask why you're not
Speaker 3: going on strike to.
Speaker 2: Get it, you know.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of that thing. Yeah, I really I
Speaker 3: was actually even shocked. Even though I knew the union
Speaker 3: protections weren't strong, I didn't realize they were. You can
Speaker 3: get fired and sued by HBO Max if you walk
Speaker 3: not strong.
Speaker 4: Absolutely absolutely nuts.
Speaker 3: Also, wait, I just want to say as well, because
Speaker 3: this is a great This shows how scared the studios
Speaker 3: are right now.
Speaker 2: George R.
Speaker 3: Martin, his overall deal with HBO was suspended. That's right
Speaker 3: June first, which they're doing with a lot of people,
Speaker 3: but you don't expect him to be one of them.
Speaker 1: I think they're doing it, I will say, it seems
Speaker 1: like they're doing it with everybody. They're taking the opportunity
Speaker 1: to not pay people. Now there's a there's a significant
Speaker 1: calendar date coming up in August sometime, which is the
Speaker 1: I'm not sure of the exact day, but it will
Speaker 1: be the point at which contractually the studios have the
Speaker 1: opportunity to cancel some overall deals completely wow by claiming
Speaker 1: force majures. This happened last time and you would back
Speaker 1: them to do it this time.
Speaker 4: You know. One of the talking points you.
Speaker 1: Hear is, oh, so who actually likes this early part
Speaker 1: of the strike because they want to save money, they
Speaker 1: want to get rid of deals that aren't performing.
Speaker 4: I'm sure George will not.
Speaker 1: Be among those who are whose deals are canceled. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think everybody is not. Is everybody on an overall
Speaker 1: is not that cost check Claire, and some of them
Speaker 1: may be maybe done away with in the coming weeks.
Speaker 4: SAG approval.
Speaker 1: SAG has granted approval for thirty nine productions to continue
Speaker 1: during the strike, including two films from the artistic Darling
Speaker 1: studio A twenty four. The list includes two projects from
Speaker 1: A twenty four's the independent production company. The titles are
Speaker 1: Mother Mary starring Anne Hathaway and MICHAELA. Cole, and Death
Speaker 1: of a Unicorn starring Paul Rudd and Jenny Ortega. So basically,
Speaker 1: SAG has kind of signaled that indie projects that aren't
Speaker 1: you know they were, they're going to like forensically look
Speaker 1: through their accounting. But anybody that's not taking money from
Speaker 1: the studios and not is not going to be distributed
Speaker 1: by any of the major players. It's truly an indie movie.
Speaker 1: And as in the case with A twenty four, studios
Speaker 1: who agree tacitly to the WGA and SAG's demands and
Speaker 1: says we'll go by, we'll go by what your proposals are. Now,
Speaker 1: we'll just willingly do that are allowed to continue shooting.
Speaker 1: So if a twenty question is if A twenty four
Speaker 1: can do it, why can't the rest of them? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll see where this goes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what what's have you you been on the picket line? Obviously,
Speaker 3: what's the feeling been on this, because I've seen it's
Speaker 3: been quite controversial. Some people are like, yeah, A twenty
Speaker 3: four are doing it, that's amazing. But some people are
Speaker 3: also like, well, this is giving the biggest name actors
Speaker 3: paid work when people are out on strike who are
Speaker 3: kind of the lowest rung workers who are really need
Speaker 3: that money.
Speaker 1: It it's a little bit of a wait and see.
Speaker 1: I think people, I think everybody understands the idea, which
Speaker 1: is one, support the independent producers out there are truly
Speaker 1: independent film number one, which is just a good thing
Speaker 1: to do, and number two try and create these divisions
Speaker 1: by saying, hey, if you if you agree to our proposals,
Speaker 1: we can serve them and right away like who wants
Speaker 1: to who else wants to come in? You know, that's
Speaker 1: how they notably the agency campaign from a few years ago,
Speaker 1: which I won't delve into, but part of how that
Speaker 1: eventually resolved is you know, the studios one by one
Speaker 1: saying okay, fine, we'll work with you if you were working,
Speaker 1: if we end so, if they can peel off some
Speaker 1: of the members of the AMPTP, that's all for the good.
Speaker 1: That said, I think that there is there's also some Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's see how this goes, because I thought the idea
Speaker 1: was we're not working, so we'll see.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The ampt released a twenty three page document a few
Speaker 1: days ago. We're recording this on July twenty fifth. They
Speaker 1: released this document on July twenty first, and it had
Speaker 1: their version of the I guess last few negotiation rounds
Speaker 1: with sag AFTRA, their proposals and counter proposals. You can
Speaker 1: find that in various places, but the Hollywood Reporter had
Speaker 1: a good write up of it. But there's one thing
Speaker 1: that I wanted to So one of the things that
Speaker 1: of course has been a sticking point is the the
Speaker 1: issue of revenue sharing, you know, aka residuals, which is
Speaker 1: how many writers and actors you know, keep the lights
Speaker 1: on when they're not you know, in the months often
Speaker 1: you know, significant amount of months between jobs. And the
Speaker 1: aptp's position is that they don't want.
Speaker 4: To pay them exactly.
Speaker 1: They don't want to those anymore. You know, they say, well,
Speaker 1: the business has changed, you know, tech has come in Netflix,
Speaker 1: Apple and Amazon, and they have different cultures. Their culture
Speaker 1: is based on secrecy. They don't want to give up
Speaker 1: the streaming numbers. Any kind of revenue sharing sharing and
Speaker 1: the success of a project would necessarily involve the sharing
Speaker 1: of the viewership numbers, and they don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: So in their kind of counter to SAG's revenue sharing proposal,
Speaker 1: the AMPTP statement says, quote, the union is proposing that
Speaker 1: performers share in the rewards of a successful show without
Speaker 1: bearing any of the risk. The union proposes to share
Speaker 1: in success, but not in failure. That is not sharing one.
Speaker 1: This is the way it's been done in the yes,
Speaker 1: of course, like the actors are not putting up their
Speaker 1: own money and mortgaging their houses so that like, you know,
Speaker 1: the project can go through that said throughout the entire
Speaker 1: history of TV, this is basically how it's been done.
Speaker 4: It's been understood.
Speaker 1: Yes, of course the studios are making the capital investment,
Speaker 1: but anything that succeeds beyond a certain set point, then
Speaker 1: it's time to share in the wealth. And the AMPTPI
Speaker 1: now says, well, that's the old thinking, We're not going
Speaker 1: to do that anymore. I don't think that the unions
Speaker 1: should accept that. But number two, this idea that because
Speaker 1: the actors are not taking on a form of like
Speaker 1: scaled capital risk is actually completely wrongheaded. First of all,
Speaker 1: a lot of this is a fight for actors and
Speaker 1: writers to be able to one make their year, which
Speaker 1: has been which is something that's gotten harder and harder.
Speaker 1: Making the year essentially means making enough money through the
Speaker 1: guild through guilt work to qualify for health insurance. Anybody
Speaker 1: who has struggled to figure out, like, where's my health
Speaker 1: insurance coming from? How am I going to get it?
Speaker 1: Can I keep it?
Speaker 4: What am I going to do?
Speaker 1: Understands that like living in a world in which one
Speaker 1: you're trying to make it as either an actor or
Speaker 1: a writer, and two trying to figure out, okay, do
Speaker 1: I need to get some kind of straight job in
Speaker 1: order to get benefits. You're taking a risk in your
Speaker 1: life just going out of the house without health insurance
Speaker 1: and trying to get it one. Two the amount of
Speaker 1: A large part of this struggle is about the amount
Speaker 1: of free work that goes on in this industry, whether
Speaker 1: it's actors spending their own money and time to send
Speaker 1: in a self tape, which you know, part of the
Speaker 1: complaints that actors have is these self tapes are becoming
Speaker 1: more and more intricate with like lighting and like scenes,
Speaker 1: and now it's like not everybody has the resources to
Speaker 1: do this. All of which is to say actors and
Speaker 1: writers take on significant risk. It's not capital risk in
Speaker 1: the same way that the studios do, but they take
Speaker 1: on plenty of risk, and they should absolutely share in
Speaker 1: the success of a project when it succeeds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, completely. And also I mean that you talk about
Speaker 3: self tapes. I also saw that there's been a movement
Speaker 3: for people to get paid for auditions because legally and
Speaker 3: contractually you are supposed to be paid for an audition already,
Speaker 3: but that hasn't been happening for a really long time.
Speaker 3: So even these base protections that you would hope these
Speaker 3: actors are getting for this alleged small investment of time
Speaker 3: that they're giving.
Speaker 2: The studios haven't been paying them anyway.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 1: Well, the strike continues and we'll be covering here on
Speaker 1: Extra Vision up next. Previously on.
Speaker 3: It was SDCC just gone, our first SDCC since Twilight
Speaker 3: took over hall H and invented hall H culture. That
Speaker 3: there hasn't been a major studio presence inside the convention
Speaker 3: because I will say, when you go to San Diego,
Speaker 3: they always have activations, they have things that people can
Speaker 3: do without tickets. You can sign up online, and there
Speaker 3: were still a few of those. I believe FX turned up.
Speaker 3: I believe Hulu turned up with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: But inside there were no major hall H panels. There
Speaker 3: was no DC movies, there were no Marvel movies. There
Speaker 3: weren't even any big TV panels aside from a couple
Speaker 3: of little premieres where there wasn't any talent apart from
Speaker 3: maybe a director who was able to turn up. But
Speaker 3: I have to say San Diego was bumping. It was
Speaker 3: incredibly busy. Tiffany Babb, who's an incredible pop culture journalist
Speaker 3: and comic book journalist at pop Verse did a great
Speaker 3: write up about how she spoke to lots of different retailers.
Speaker 3: Yeah I read that, Yeah great, like Silver Sprocket, one
Speaker 3: of our favorite indie publishers. They said they had their
Speaker 3: biggest preview night ever, and preview nights usually a pretty
Speaker 3: quiet night, mostly.
Speaker 2: For industry folks.
Speaker 3: I spoke to multiple different exhibitors who said it was
Speaker 3: the biggest year they'd had. Qu Bok was also quoted
Speaker 3: in pop Verse, So basically what happened.
Speaker 4: Funk oh, I believe historic.
Speaker 2: Also the Marvel booth.
Speaker 3: They had like a Marvel merch booth there that apparently
Speaker 3: did really really well. Basically what happened was because people
Speaker 3: were not in the whole h Q lines and there
Speaker 3: were not six rounds and people they were. They were
Speaker 3: on the show floor, and you know what I have
Speaker 3: to say, they were also in the panel rooms. I
Speaker 3: did three panels, all of which were busier than most
Speaker 3: panels I've ever done, but the one that really stuck
Speaker 3: out to me, and I think this is representative of
Speaker 3: a lot of people's experience. I did a panel with
Speaker 3: Webtoon called a Golden Age for Women in Comics and
Speaker 3: the idea is was to highlight that women have always
Speaker 3: been making comics, but they've just been raised from the
Speaker 3: narrative and now thanks to webtoon, thanks to incredible indie
Speaker 3: publishers like Black Jerse Press. The publisher Jimmie Larrouser was
Speaker 3: on the panel, women are being recognized for making comics
Speaker 3: even though they've always been here. That is the kind
Speaker 3: of panel I've done at San Diego before about like
Speaker 3: disability or about different aspects of representation. You get an
Speaker 3: eager crowd, but not a necessarily packed room, right. Those
Speaker 3: rooms can hold like two three hundred people. Our Golden
Speaker 3: Ajor Women in Comics panel, which did feature Rachel Smythe
Speaker 3: who makes Laura Lympus, who is arguably one of the
Speaker 3: most famous cartoonists in the world, so I'm giving her
Speaker 3: credit for how many people came as well. But that
Speaker 3: was a one in, one out panel. It was standing
Speaker 3: room only and they had a Q outside.
Speaker 2: To let people in.
Speaker 3: And I started to hear that other people there was
Speaker 3: a Queer Horror panel and that was the same thing
Speaker 3: where they had a Q outside. So what happened with
Speaker 3: haul h not being there is it drove people into
Speaker 3: the show floor. It drove people into the convention center,
Speaker 3: and the coolest thing is people.
Speaker 2: Just were excited. The vibes were great.
Speaker 3: I didn't see anyone who was disappointed or who wasn't
Speaker 3: prepared for the fact this was going to be comics focused,
Speaker 3: and it was just a really wonderful experience. Also, I
Speaker 3: will say there was a lot of great strike support.
Speaker 3: There was lots of cosplayers with strike signs. Actually, like
Speaker 3: Duncan Crabtree Island came on Saturday to speak on a
Speaker 3: panel about AI and voice acting and kind of advocate
Speaker 3: for the voice actors, and there were people giving I know,
Speaker 3: Danny Fernandez, one of our friends of the Pods, she
Speaker 3: was giving out a lot of strike pins. And one
Speaker 3: of the coolest things was they had these signs that
Speaker 3: were like SAG signs, and they said support the strike,
Speaker 3: carry this sign, and people would just hand them off
Speaker 3: to each other, so you'd see like Deadpool carrying it,
Speaker 3: and you'd see and it really kind of opened my
Speaker 3: eyes to the fact we obviously care about this stuff,
Speaker 3: like deeply, not just because we're involved in it, but
Speaker 3: because it's something.
Speaker 2: That we care about.
Speaker 3: We care about it because we love comics. We care
Speaker 3: about it because we love TV and movies. We want
Speaker 3: people to get paid. I don't think the studios realize
Speaker 3: how widespread that mentality is. That you can have a
Speaker 3: kid in a comics accurate Deadpool cosplay because there was
Speaker 3: a lot of comic accurate cosplay, because people didn't want
Speaker 3: to do movie cosplay because they felt like they were
Speaker 3: supporting Struck studios. It was really heartening, not only to
Speaker 3: see the love for comics, but also to see people
Speaker 3: recognizing that they understood why this SDCC was different. It
Speaker 3: was really cool, and I would say if I was
Speaker 3: in charge of SDCC, I'd be having very different meetings
Speaker 3: with the studios next year, like how can you help
Speaker 3: us if you want this platform, we don't need it,
Speaker 3: But if you want the platform of being on hall Ah,
Speaker 3: how much are you going to invest in the convention?
Speaker 3: How much can we use this your resources to make
Speaker 3: this an even better place for comics, for the museum,
Speaker 3: for artists who can't afford an artists Alli table. Because
Speaker 3: the truth is hall H not being there did not
Speaker 3: impact how that show was aside from positively for smaller
Speaker 3: press and artists ali people who felt like they especially
Speaker 3: by the end of the weekend. I heard that Saturday
Speaker 3: and Sunday, it was almost like on the first two
Speaker 3: days folks were walking around kind of being like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I've never really been on the show floor. What am
Speaker 3: I going to buy? Like budgeting out you kind of do.
Speaker 3: And apparently Saturday and Sunday those sales just went absolutely crazy.
Speaker 1: That's great, that's great, and it's you know, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: Now I'm kind of reflecting on the fact that certainly
Speaker 1: in the hall H era, I have never never once
Speaker 1: heard someone talk about the kind of hall Ah culture
Speaker 1: and immense lines and what it takes to get in
Speaker 1: there with any kind of warmth.
Speaker 3: No, you know, it's like I don't want to queue
Speaker 3: out that for two nights.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is only complaints about the slow, whole rigamarole
Speaker 1: of getting through that. And it's nice to see that
Speaker 1: there was almost like a turn of the clock back
Speaker 1: moment of uh, this the energy and the community is
Speaker 1: still here. It's not going anywhere. And to your point,
Speaker 1: maybe there is a conversation about like what the relationship
Speaker 1: will be in the future between the studios in comic Con,
Speaker 1: and hopefully that conversation can make the experience of comic
Speaker 1: Con kind of just better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you make a great point, because I think
Speaker 3: something that was really special. So Dorian Parks is really
Speaker 3: great who's a host and a kind of journalist in
Speaker 3: the same space to us. He moderated the Spider Man
Speaker 3: two panel, which was about the video game, right. But
Speaker 3: what was really interesting was so many it was in
Speaker 3: hallh and so many people who would never have got
Speaker 3: to experience hall Ah got to experience it because that
Speaker 3: wasn't necessarily the.
Speaker 2: Two day wait. So I think there's a lot of
Speaker 2: lessons to be learned.
Speaker 3: And the thing that made me the happiest was my
Speaker 3: worst case scenario was like people won't come, or they
Speaker 3: will come and they'll be really mad, and it will
Speaker 3: affect the people who've invested thousands of dollars, who are
Speaker 3: indy cartoonists, who know that this is the time that
Speaker 3: they can make they can make the bag that we
Speaker 3: can that can be the one show you do that
Speaker 3: really makes you money. And it turns out it was
Speaker 3: the complete opposite. And it was just an absolute delight
Speaker 3: to be there. And because people were on the show
Speaker 3: floor and there weren't Hallah lines, San.
Speaker 2: Diego was actually p a chill to walk around. So yeah,
Speaker 2: it was.
Speaker 3: It was overall just wonderful, and I'm hoping that we
Speaker 3: learn a lot of great lessons and kind of see
Speaker 3: them come into play more as we go.
Speaker 2: Ahead.
Speaker 1: Up next, let's quickly talk about the insane Barbenheimer Weekend.
Speaker 3: Wild.
Speaker 1: Okay, so barbon Heimer Weekend has come and gone. Barbie
Speaker 1: is currently at one hundred and sixty plus million and climbing.
Speaker 1: Oppenheimer as well as around eighty million ish and climbing.
Speaker 1: Both movies are handily beating their projections, and the movies
Speaker 1: are back.
Speaker 4: Folks.
Speaker 1: Here's my manager, Kenny, who you know has been endlessly
Speaker 1: roasting me because I was not able to get into
Speaker 1: eger movie.
Speaker 4: I was not I try, I really tried.
Speaker 1: My Usually my usual move is Friday morning or Saturday
Speaker 1: or Sunday morning, I'll take in a Matt nae whatever
Speaker 1: the new nostalgia, nice Matt wonderful matinee for whatever the
Speaker 1: new movie is. I tried every movie time for both movies,
Speaker 1: and there was like nothing except for like the front
Speaker 1: row seats at at Imax, where you're sitting basically.
Speaker 2: You can see one foot of the screen.
Speaker 1: And you're my fucking vertebrae will snap in half because
Speaker 1: like my head is completely like looking up at the
Speaker 1: top of the screen, and I just couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: But two huge movies obviously a marketing bonanza and one
Speaker 1: of those things a counterprogramming coup in which both projects
Speaker 1: have been burnished by this entire scheme, part of which
Speaker 1: is just like the overall pettiness of Warner Brothers. So
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that has happened in
Speaker 1: the past that led up to this is Christopher Nolan,
Speaker 1: among many filmmakers, was upset with Warner Brothers move to
Speaker 1: take movies out of theaters, only give them a short
Speaker 1: run in theaters and then put them right on Max.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: He's a lover of movies. He wants movies to be
Speaker 1: seen in the movie theater, and evedn't like that, so
Speaker 1: he left his longtime home Warner Brothers, and as a
Speaker 1: kind of like pettiness, I guess they were like, oh, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have our movie a Barbie Open opposite Oppenheimer
Speaker 1: when you do Oppenheimer at your new place. And guess
Speaker 1: what happened. Both movies are succeeding through this because the
Speaker 1: Barbenheimer phenomenon has become a thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's I read a really interesting interview
Speaker 3: with like the head of global marketing from Warner Brothers,
Speaker 3: and it used sometimes I'd never really heard of. So
Speaker 3: there's like, you know, obviously paid advertising, right, which is
Speaker 3: paid marketing, which I have to say, Warner Brothers did
Speaker 3: an unbelievable job of Like they did the weirdest, coolest shit,
Speaker 3: like the they did an architectural Digest video tour of
Speaker 3: the Malibu dream.
Speaker 2: Hat like Barbie Dreamhouse, Like they.
Speaker 3: Just did really weird stuff that kind of hit in
Speaker 3: the ship post era of the Internet that we're really in.
Speaker 3: But he also talked about earned marketing, and that's essentially
Speaker 3: what Barbenheimer comes under the umbrella of which is an
Speaker 3: organic Internet like fun like people getting excited. And I mean,
Speaker 3: this is one of those wild moments where like neither
Speaker 3: of the studios saw this coming. Warner Brothers had it
Speaker 3: Barbie tracking, They had Barbie tracking at seventy five mil,
Speaker 3: and Oppenheimer was tracking for Universal at.
Speaker 2: Like fifty milt.
Speaker 3: These movies made five hundred million dollars globally over this week.
Speaker 2: I was half a billion dollars.
Speaker 3: That doesn't exist without all the people online who made memes.
Speaker 3: It doesn't exist with people like without people like super
Speaker 3: Yuky making t shirts in the Barbie font that say
Speaker 3: do you guys ever think about dying? It doesn't exist
Speaker 3: without it. Incredible artists who made Barbenheimer mash up posters,
Speaker 3: like one of our Discord fans and friends, like Rodrigo.
Speaker 3: He runs this film magazine called Layered Butter, and they
Speaker 3: did a Barbenheimer poster that went totally viral and it's
Speaker 3: now basically used as almost as if it was an
Speaker 3: original official piece of art that both the studios made.
Speaker 2: They didn't.
Speaker 3: Neither of them could ever have imagined that these two
Speaker 3: ridiculously juxtaposed movies would create this fandom. But I also
Speaker 3: think that that comes from Nolan being an auta, Gerwig
Speaker 3: being an auta. Yeah, and this kind of hilarious dichotomy
Speaker 3: between like this serious talkie three hour biopic which I
Speaker 3: always should never have been able to make eighty million,
Speaker 3: that's a superhero movie cat truly insane.
Speaker 2: And then Barbie Witz should be.
Speaker 3: A flop that later finds a cult following, kind of
Speaker 3: like you Know Gem and the you Know Gem and
Speaker 3: the Hologram.
Speaker 2: So that has found less of.
Speaker 3: A cult following, but something like Josie and the Pussycats, right,
Speaker 3: like that's kind of where people expected Barbie to land.
Speaker 3: So Barbie is now the biggest opening weekend of the year,
Speaker 3: beating Super Mario, which by the way, had a ridiculous
Speaker 3: opening weekend, also beating Guardians of the Galaxy one three also
Speaker 3: now the biggest opening weekend ever for a female director,
Speaker 3: beating both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, so beating two
Speaker 3: superhero movies. Also in the international box office, Barbie almost
Speaker 3: made two hundred million dollars over this weekend. And I
Speaker 3: have yet to see Barbie because try seeing that in
Speaker 3: San Diego on SDCC weekend. People were not busy at
Speaker 3: SDCC and today obviously bargain day at AMC. Good tip
Speaker 3: there if you want to save some money seven dollars.
Speaker 3: A team of I looked going with friends from who
Speaker 3: work in the OC, and I looked from every theater
Speaker 3: from like Irvine down to la and it was almost
Speaker 3: impossible to find a ticket that was not in the
Speaker 3: front like three rows. Like this movie's going to keep
Speaker 3: making money. The drop for Barbie from Saturday to Sunday
Speaker 3: was nine percent, which is basically unheard of, and Oppenheimer's
Speaker 3: was also really low by my understanding. So I think
Speaker 3: that the Barbenheimer weekend is over, but the Barbenheimer summer
Speaker 3: is not over. Like sorry to the Haunted Mansion, but
Speaker 3: you're not touching either of these movies this weekend.
Speaker 1: You know, you just know that right now there is
Speaker 1: an entire floor of people, yeah, who work for like
Speaker 1: Apple Studios marketing, who are trying to figure out who
Speaker 1: Napoleon's Barbie is exactly.
Speaker 3: This is what I'm saying, we too, How upset do
Speaker 3: you think every studio is right now that they can't
Speaker 3: be on the phone to like every screenwriter and every
Speaker 3: director being like, so do you want to do like
Speaker 3: Street Sharks?
Speaker 4: Is it like the way?
Speaker 3: Can you think of like an A twenty four take
Speaker 3: on like Street Sharks? Those meetings would be happening if
Speaker 3: the strike was not on, And I know they're all
Speaker 3: sitting there stewing in their juices, writing things like Gritty
Speaker 3: Polly Pocket like trying to find ways that they can
Speaker 3: do this. I love that what is Napoleon is Barbie?
Speaker 1: We can we Russian Indie, Carmen san Diego.
Speaker 3: You know, I feel like those conversations are happening, and
Speaker 3: you know, this is one of those things where the
Speaker 3: real truth is.
Speaker 2: Is there really a lesson here?
Speaker 3: It's hard to know because counter programming has always worked.
Speaker 2: This is organic. You can't really replicate it.
Speaker 3: But the lesson that studios are gonna learn is like
Speaker 3: toy movies, but with like an auto director and also
Speaker 3: like I guess, biopics can make a lot of money
Speaker 3: now if they're programmed against something like that.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, I did see.
Speaker 3: I don't think it was a coincidence that yesterday they
Speaker 3: announced that Ryan Reynolds is rebooting Biker Mice from Mars.
Speaker 2: So I think we're gonna see that.
Speaker 3: What we've been seeing as the IP rush for comics,
Speaker 3: I think we're gonna see that moving back to toys,
Speaker 3: which it hasn't been for quite a long time.
Speaker 2: So that'll be interesting.
Speaker 3: I'm sure we're gonna get many terrible toy movies, but
Speaker 3: maybe some good ones too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I made listen. T re Formers is out here. G
Speaker 1: I Joe has been out here, Lego has been out here.
Speaker 1: The toy movies have been doing well.
Speaker 2: It'll be interesting, but this is the first one that's coming.
Speaker 4: This is a culture. Culture.
Speaker 3: This isn't the top fourth opening weekend of all time,
Speaker 3: only beaten by the Force, Awakens, Infinity War and Ending Game.
Speaker 2: So now toys are in that. They're in that superhero.
Speaker 3: Movie space and it beat Transformers. Dark of the Moon
Speaker 3: is the biggest movie based on a toy. So yeah,
Speaker 3: toy movies are back, baby for.
Speaker 2: Better or for us?
Speaker 1: Up next to our interview with David Escort.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Hive Mind, where we explore topics with
Speaker 3: an expert guest. Today, we're thrilled to welcome writer, showrunner,
Speaker 3: and director David Eskoya to discuss his career, creative process,
Speaker 3: and foundation.
Speaker 4: David, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 5: My pleasure. I'm I'm a fan and I was happy
Speaker 5: to return the favor because you co hosts that other
Speaker 5: podcast you and I did, and it is.
Speaker 4: A delight to do it. So how is your summer going?
Speaker 5: Well? You know, I was I was filming something and
Speaker 5: we got shut down because of SAG and I was
Speaker 5: over in Europe and we got shut down early Saturday morning,
Speaker 5: and then I booked a flight on my phone right
Speaker 5: there and went back to my hotel and packed. Had
Speaker 5: got on a plane about five hours later, and then
Speaker 5: I picketed in La yesterday in ninety five degree. But
Speaker 5: I'm look, it's that it's a crazy, once in a
Speaker 5: lifetime situation and completely justifiable. But I'm also you know,
Speaker 5: after spending the bulk of my last four years over
Speaker 5: in Europe, I'm really grateful to have this time with
Speaker 5: my family and not during a pandemic. So that's this
Speaker 5: over lining for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell it.
Speaker 1: Could you tell us about that? Obviously, this this strike
Speaker 1: is a is another bit of complexity and challenge on
Speaker 1: top of everything that's and it impacts everyone industry wide.
Speaker 4: But like what the show that.
Speaker 1: You were making is so grand and complicated. You just
Speaker 1: mentioned that you were in Europe for a lot of
Speaker 1: the last couple of years. Tell us about some of
Speaker 1: the challenges that you went through producing that.
Speaker 5: I mean, it foundations the most complicated project I've ever
Speaker 5: worked on. And don't we don't film it in sort
Speaker 5: of a volume of VFX box like some of the
Speaker 5: shows out there. We film more than half the show
Speaker 5: on location. In season one filmed in six different countries.
Speaker 5: I think season two filmed in five different countries. We
Speaker 5: do what we call crossboarding, meeting like the schedule gets
Speaker 5: we don't film one episode and then another. Everything gets
Speaker 5: put in a blender. It's incredibly difficult, and it would
Speaker 5: have been difficult even without a pandemic and multiple strikes.
Speaker 5: But it's it's just we just keep you know, we
Speaker 5: had the initial lockdown and then season two lockdown wasn't happening.
Speaker 5: But we actually had many more delays because of COVID
Speaker 5: than in season one because in season one everyone was
Speaker 5: in a bubble, so called bubble. We would take over
Speaker 5: hotels and we would charter flights and it's just like
Speaker 5: the hits keep coming and coming and coming and coming,
Speaker 5: and it's it's awesome. It's crazy because it's the shows
Speaker 5: so weildly ambitious and and I'm so grateful to have
Speaker 5: made the first two seasons. But all of the changes,
Speaker 5: the seismic changes that are happening in your industry are like,
Speaker 5: I worry there the very things that will make a
Speaker 5: show like ours not possible anymore.
Speaker 3: So who knows, you know, Yeah, I mean there's lots
Speaker 3: of things that from basically from the very inception of
Speaker 3: adapting foundation, you're in a situation where it's going to
Speaker 3: be a challenge because there's many things over the years
Speaker 3: that have been called unfilmable, but this is probably like
Speaker 3: one of the most unfilmable US unfilmable things. So like,
Speaker 3: what was the origin of you wanting to adapt it
Speaker 3: or what was your origin with Asmov's foundation and kind
Speaker 3: of how this came to become a TV show?
Speaker 5: Okay, I'll answer that, but I I should qualify I'm
Speaker 5: speaking to you in the capacity as a director, and
Speaker 5: because I've directed episodes two and three of the show,
Speaker 5: and not only am I allowed to promote in that capacity,
Speaker 5: I've been encouraged to promote by one of the two
Speaker 5: guilds I'm involved in. But what was it like? I mean,
Speaker 5: I was given the book by myn'er do well father
Speaker 5: when he was thirteen or I was thirteen, not him,
Speaker 5: he was thirteen. He said, this is the greatest science
Speaker 5: fiction book of all time. You should read it, And
Speaker 5: I didn't read it because I was angry at him.
Speaker 5: And I think I read it in my twenty my twenties,
Speaker 5: and I got some of it, didn't understand what the
Speaker 5: big deal was. We read it in my thirties and
Speaker 5: then over the years because for the first two decades
Speaker 5: of my career is writing almost exclusively features. I was
Speaker 5: offered the opportunity to adapt it a couple of times,
Speaker 5: once with Warner Brothers and once with Sony. Even then
Speaker 5: I just thought, oh, people were thinking, oh, we want
Speaker 5: to do a trilogy of films, and I just didn't
Speaker 5: think it was possible to condense all of that. It's
Speaker 5: anthological in nature. A lot of the stuff's been strip mined,
Speaker 5: you know, by Star Wars and Dune, and how do
Speaker 5: you make it new again? And so I said no
Speaker 5: a couple of times, and over the years, just like everyone,
Speaker 5: i'd hear, oh, this person or that person is trying
Speaker 5: to adapt it. And also I'm not sure I was
Speaker 5: a sophisticated enough writer to have adapted it earlier on
Speaker 5: in my career. But then maybe I don't know. Five
Speaker 5: years ago, streaming had started and people were suddenly tackling
Speaker 5: these big novelistic projects and saying, okay, now you've got
Speaker 5: at least ten hours or twenty or thirty. And then
Speaker 5: it seemed like it might be possible. And I'd had
Speaker 5: enough weighty adaptations under my belt to be crazy enough
Speaker 5: to try. But what was crazy was I was I
Speaker 5: was waiting into adapting foundation at the same time, I
Speaker 5: was waiting into adapting Sandman, but another famous lady, and
Speaker 5: I just thought it was just so surreal. And I
Speaker 5: flirted with Sandman for more than a decade as well,
Speaker 5: and it was they both sort of came together at
Speaker 5: the exact same time. And then it just was a race.
Speaker 5: I was meant to run either one of them, and
Speaker 5: it was just a racist to which one was going
Speaker 5: to be Greenland first and Foundation was so then after
Speaker 5: working the initial adaptation with Neil and then Alan Heimbury,
Speaker 5: allen Heimberg took over that. But I don't know did
Speaker 5: that answer your question? I got lost in my answer,
Speaker 5: by the way. I heard you Rosie describe me as
Speaker 5: a friend of the pod on one of your podcasts
Speaker 5: the other day, and I'm I'm honored to be considered
Speaker 5: a friend of the problem, although you and I have
Speaker 5: never spoken prior to this.
Speaker 2: So you know what Jason's friends my friends friends.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you mentioned that you didn't think that maybe you
Speaker 1: were a sophisticated enough writer.
Speaker 4: Yeah when you first.
Speaker 5: Some people would argue, I'm still.
Speaker 1: Not, by the way, but what do you what what
Speaker 1: is it about your writing evolution that you think is
Speaker 1: it made you able to take on that project at
Speaker 1: that particular time.
Speaker 4: What it changed, what you learned?
Speaker 5: I think that you know, I guess over my career
Speaker 5: I started to become the sort of one of the
Speaker 5: go to guys to adapt to take on like weighty
Speaker 5: IP or complicated IP, and and I just remember I
Speaker 5: think one of the things that changed was when Kris
Speaker 5: Nolan and I were working on Batman Begins, and we
Speaker 5: we had this very methodical approach to Batman in which
Speaker 5: we would try to we would just before we came
Speaker 5: up with a story, we spent weeks just talking about
Speaker 5: what makes Batman Batman and so writing lists of the
Speaker 5: things that we felt were like essential Batman tropes and
Speaker 5: then things that don't make Batman Batman. And then this
Speaker 5: was crazy at the time, but we flew to New
Speaker 5: York and we met with all the editors of DC
Speaker 5: for three days and we asked them the same questions
Speaker 5: and they said, no one in all the decades prior
Speaker 5: to that had ever even asked d C what made
Speaker 5: Batman Batman? And we just thought it was a no
Speaker 5: brainer to do it. And so so then we before
Speaker 5: we even came up with the story, we just thought, Okay,
Speaker 5: have we identified the core DNA of this thing, do
Speaker 5: we have it right? And the editors at d C,
Speaker 5: you know, Paul Levitt and people like that. At the time,
Speaker 5: even Neil Adams, who we talked to, felt that we
Speaker 5: had gotten it right, and then we started building our story.
Speaker 5: And so what's amazing to me is how many people
Speaker 5: don't do that. And so that is an approach that
Speaker 5: I've just applied and everything I've worked on over the
Speaker 5: last two decades is just try to figure out, can I,
Speaker 5: you know, what makes this thing unique? And can I
Speaker 5: tell a story that doesn't betray those elements? And it
Speaker 5: sounds simple, but it's amazing. You know, I've talked about
Speaker 5: this before, but like I had this feeling like with
Speaker 5: a lot of superhero adaptations that they'll think about, Okay,
Speaker 5: what villain are we going to use and then build
Speaker 5: a story around it, as opposed to figuring out what
Speaker 5: makes you know, you know, superhero X superhero X and
Speaker 5: then figuring out what's the right villain to tell that story.
Speaker 5: So Chris and I did not decide we were going
Speaker 5: to start with rajah Ghul or the Scarecrow. We were
Speaker 5: going to tell this story about Batman overcoming his fears
Speaker 5: or bris Wa and overcoming us fears and having all
Speaker 5: these daddy issues, and so fear led to Scarecrow, and
Speaker 5: daddy issues led to Raja goal was you know, one
Speaker 5: of the only villains. Yeah, that was like more parental
Speaker 5: and so I guess the approach was just very holistic
Speaker 5: in that way. And we applied the same things to Salman.
Speaker 5: And in the case of sam Man, we had gaming
Speaker 5: with us and and Alan and I said, we spent
Speaker 5: like three or four days just saying, Okay, you know
Speaker 5: what makes sam Man Samman? What do you think? And
Speaker 5: I did something similar with Robin Asmav Isaac's daughter on Foundation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I was gonna ask, that's really interesting that
Speaker 3: you brought out because I feel like, often as comic
Speaker 3: book fans, people who love this stuff, comics have been
Speaker 3: seen since you know, they first in the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 3: when it was strip comics or whatever, to you know,
Speaker 3: the Worthm Trials, they're seen as like low brow and
Speaker 3: disposable that for kids, you know, that's still something people see.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of incredible to you talking about how
Speaker 3: adapting comics taught you how to adapt these kind of
Speaker 3: huge epic sci fi stories for prestige. Were there any
Speaker 3: other kind of things that you learned from adapting so
Speaker 3: many superho stories and comic books that helped you when
Speaker 3: it came to adapting something like this that takes place
Speaker 3: over thousands of years, the way that comics kind of
Speaker 3: have that modern mythology of going over many many centuries.
Speaker 5: Do you think, Yeah, I do think that it's funny
Speaker 5: if you go to classic comic book storytelling, right, I
Speaker 5: think comic books are the closest to serialized TV storytelling
Speaker 5: is almost any other art form, right, because you've got
Speaker 5: the individual episodes which are akin to the individual issues,
Speaker 5: and then you've got these arcs which would be akin
Speaker 5: to like the season, and then you've got like the
Speaker 5: super arc, right, you know. Yeah, And so because I
Speaker 5: spent so much Si'm reading comics as a kid, that's
Speaker 5: that's just the way structurally, I think. So with regards
Speaker 5: to sam Man and Foundation, we definitely think about, Okay,
Speaker 5: this is a serialized story, but is each episode? Can
Speaker 5: each episode be a complete meal? And then how does
Speaker 5: it fit within the season, and is there a beginning
Speaker 5: and middle and end to the season, And then how
Speaker 5: does it fit with a superstory, and that's definitely something
Speaker 5: I picked up from, you know, Dennie O'Neill or Chris
Speaker 5: Claremont or you know, Frank Miller or something like that.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you about the there anything, Jason.
Speaker 5: We'll see whether or not.
Speaker 1: Well, since we're on the subject of comics, A few
Speaker 1: years ago a letter that you wrote to editor and
Speaker 1: writer at Marvel, Mark Runwald, who's then in charge of
Speaker 1: the Captain America book, emerged and it was you basically, uh,
Speaker 1: giving notes on on a particular storyline and the challenges
Speaker 1: the character faced in that particular era mid eighties, you know,
Speaker 1: Reagan and the White House. Did you always take comics
Speaker 1: that seriously? And were you was it in your mind
Speaker 1: to be a writer at that point, because surely, I
Speaker 1: mean it's not very many people write a like seven
Speaker 1: hundred word letter to the editor to Marvel Comics.
Speaker 5: Yes, and yes, Tom those questions. I mean. I also
Speaker 5: have a letter in the Alan Moore run of swamp
Speaker 5: Thing American Gothic, which y, yeah, in which I incorrectly
Speaker 5: guessed at what was behind like all the various sub
Speaker 5: monsters that were growing out a swamping. But yeah, I've
Speaker 5: probably got about I mean, I will say this, every
Speaker 5: letter I wrote up printed, I probably have about seven.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a solid run.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, but I was I was, you know, growing
Speaker 5: up in Michigan going to my local comic book store,
Speaker 5: and and I I, you know, I don't know, from
Speaker 5: the time I was about fourth or fifth grade, I
Speaker 5: thought about, you know, right, becoming a comic book writer
Speaker 5: first and foremost. And the idea that I would become
Speaker 5: a screenwriter was just crazy. We didn't know anything anyone
Speaker 5: in Hollywood, but comic writer felt like attainable possibly, And yeah,
Speaker 5: I revered them. I just thought because I was coming
Speaker 5: up in the you know, teen Titans when that when
Speaker 5: that started, and I was I was reading you know,
Speaker 5: Burn and Claremont's uncunning X Men while that art was
Speaker 5: happening like in real time, and it was when it
Speaker 5: was I think it was bi monthly, and that was
Speaker 5: just blowing my mind. That was that was one of
Speaker 5: the first ones that really blew my mid mine was
Speaker 5: what was happening with X Men? And I just thought
Speaker 5: it was amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I will say there is a grand tradition
Speaker 3: one of my favorite things. I have a lot of
Speaker 3: back issues and one of my favorite things to do
Speaker 3: is read the letters page, because you actually see a
Speaker 3: lot of letters from people who had gone to write comics.
Speaker 4: For sure, Martin.
Speaker 3: You can go in there and you will find letters
Speaker 3: from like big name people, and you're like.
Speaker 2: Okay, you are the fans.
Speaker 3: So what was it like to then go from being
Speaker 3: one of those fans and then continue that tradition of
Speaker 3: actually getting to write comics.
Speaker 5: Well, the funny thing is I wrote movies before I
Speaker 5: wrote comics. Like a lot of people, yeah yeah, and
Speaker 5: they go. And then I was so I had already
Speaker 5: you know, it was making a healthy living. I'd already
Speaker 5: had Blade come out. And then randomly I was introduced
Speaker 5: to James Robinson, who was on the Starman Run at
Speaker 5: the time, and and we met and we had dinner
Speaker 5: one night, and he confessed to me that he had
Speaker 5: writer's block and he was trying to figure out where
Speaker 5: to go and what to do. And I started pitching
Speaker 5: some ideas for him and he said, that's a really
Speaker 5: good idea. Do you mind if I use that? I said, no,
Speaker 5: go ahead, And then we had dinner a couple weeks
Speaker 5: later and he said, you got any more ideas? And
Speaker 5: then he just said, do you want to start co
Speaker 5: plotting it with me? Because I feel bad I'm using
Speaker 5: so many of these ideas. And so then I did,
Speaker 5: and I co plotted it with him for a while,
Speaker 5: and then he said, hey, DC wants to revive the
Speaker 5: Justice Society. Do you want to just co write it
Speaker 5: with me? And I said, sure, that sounds great, and
Speaker 5: irony there was. James bailed in the second issue. His
Speaker 5: name is still on like like five more issues, but
Speaker 5: he bailed. He had this sort of crisis of conscience
Speaker 5: and I literally I'd only written like two full scripts
Speaker 5: and these he said, well, do you want to keep writing?
Speaker 5: We like it? And I said sure, sure, but I
Speaker 5: need help. And so here's what's really crazy at the
Speaker 5: time was I was also friendly with Geoff Johns, who
Speaker 5: had just written I think he was still like Richard
Speaker 5: Donner's assistant and had just written like I don't even
Speaker 5: know if Stargirl had come out, but he'd like written
Speaker 5: a proposal for something. And I said, hey, Jeff, do
Speaker 5: you want to write this with me? And DC wouldn't.
Speaker 5: I had like really pressure them to approve him to change.
Speaker 5: But Jeff started on JSA with me as like the
Speaker 5: second issue, and then obviously he became Geoff John's, you know,
Speaker 5: with a capital G and a capital J. But I
Speaker 5: backed into comics and you know, just a really weird way,
Speaker 5: and then, you know, we kept it up for about
Speaker 5: four years and and then it became too unwilly for me.
Speaker 5: But that was I loved doing it. I would still
Speaker 5: go back and write comic at some point. I really
Speaker 5: really enjoyed doing it. I didn't do the Marvel method
Speaker 5: though we wrote full script.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, bad to do it in the full part way.
Speaker 4: So how did you break into screenwriting? Then?
Speaker 1: You know, I remember I've told you this story before,
Speaker 1: but in ninety eight I worked in a movie theater.
Speaker 1: So I said, every single movie that came out in
Speaker 1: ninety every single movie that came out that year I
Speaker 1: saw in the theaters, including Blade and Dark City.
Speaker 5: To which movie.
Speaker 2: Crazy?
Speaker 4: So how did how did that happen?
Speaker 5: I broke in two movies. Well, basically, the short version
Speaker 5: is I didn't know anyone in Hollywood couldn't figure out
Speaker 5: how to make a path into writing. So I was
Speaker 5: going to become a cop in Michigan. I was going
Speaker 5: to become a homicide detective. I was going to get
Speaker 5: a degree in police administration go to Michigan State University.
Speaker 5: And then my high school teachers said, oh my god,
Speaker 5: you can't do that. You got to write, which I
Speaker 5: wanted to, but I had a single mom. We didn't
Speaker 5: have much money, and they kind of staged in an intervention.
Speaker 5: They came over to our house for coffee and said you.
Speaker 5: They suggested I applied to USC screenwriting, and my mom
Speaker 5: said we cannot afford it, and they said, just we
Speaker 5: think he can get in and just get scholarships and whatnot.
Speaker 5: And so we had enough money with financial aid for
Speaker 5: me to attend one semester. Wow, and I got in
Speaker 5: and this was an undergraduate degree. And then every semester
Speaker 5: was sketchy. It's like whether or not I could keep going.
Speaker 5: So I worked two or three jobs and I would
Speaker 5: apply for all these grants. But I made it and
Speaker 5: I busted my ass, and I in the program. You
Speaker 5: were meant to come out with one screenplay, and I
Speaker 5: had three by the time I was done. And in
Speaker 5: my last semester, I thought, oh, I'm going to get
Speaker 5: an agent. And I remember reading about this particular a
Speaker 5: agent who'd become an agent. I believe at ICEM at
Speaker 5: the time, which is one of the Yeah, I think
Speaker 5: they're defunct now right.
Speaker 4: No, no longer with it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they'd been absorbed by one of the other mega agencies.
Speaker 5: And I read about this guy who had he'd gone
Speaker 5: through Berkeley in like two and a half years and
Speaker 5: become an agent at twenty three, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 5: that guy seems like a real, you know, firecracker. I'm
Speaker 5: going to I'm going to have that guy be my agent.
Speaker 5: So I started cold calling his office from my dorm
Speaker 5: room and I called I think it was forty two
Speaker 5: business days, but I would say, hey, this is David Goyer.
Speaker 5: You know he talked to so and so. Finally, on
Speaker 5: like the forty second day, it became a joke. I
Speaker 5: was just but I was in my dorm room. I
Speaker 5: was like, what do I want? Yeah, And finally the
Speaker 5: assistant he jumps on the line and says, who the
Speaker 5: fuck are you and why you keep calling me? And
Speaker 5: I realized I forgot like thirty seconds, and I said, listen,
Speaker 5: I'm about to graduate USC film School. I'm going to
Speaker 5: be a giant filmmaker one day. You should represent me.
Speaker 5: You're going to kick yourself if you don't. And there
Speaker 5: was this pause and he said, Okay, send me your script,
Speaker 5: but don't fucking call me every day. It's going to
Speaker 5: take me a while. And by the way, I had,
Speaker 5: I had nothing to lose. I was in my dorm
Speaker 5: room in my underwear and so and I waited two weeks,
Speaker 5: and then I started calling him again and for another
Speaker 5: couple of weeks. Finally he answered, and he said, I'm
Speaker 5: going to sign you. So I got an agent before
Speaker 5: I even graduated. And but what was interesting is he
Speaker 5: said in your script's really good. But I decided I
Speaker 5: was going to sign you even before I read it.
Speaker 5: And I said why, And he's because you were so
Speaker 5: damned tenacious that I just thought this kid's going to succeed.
Speaker 5: And then I graduated and I got a job as
Speaker 5: a production assistant on a studio and it was my
Speaker 5: job to deliver mail ord on the lot and also
Speaker 5: snacks like I had like a hand card with, you know,
Speaker 5: And and I did that for about four months. And
Speaker 5: at the time he said, I thought it was gonna
Speaker 5: write funny, sort of like American Werewolf in London movies,
Speaker 5: And he said, can you write I think Diehard had
Speaker 5: just come out, and he said, can you write an
Speaker 5: action movie? And so I studied some and I wrote one,
Speaker 5: and after four months he said, I think I can.
Speaker 5: I can sell this, and like two days later he
Speaker 5: sold it and he sold us to MGM, and he
Speaker 5: sold it for more than ten times what I was
Speaker 5: making as my yearly salary as a PA. And he
Speaker 5: sold it to Jean Claude van dam And who had
Speaker 5: just come out with Cyborg. And I hadn't watched any
Speaker 5: movies and there I remember that this. He called me
Speaker 5: at work, this before cell phones, and he said, Jean
Speaker 5: Claude Vandam wants to buy your script. Do you know who?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 5: And and I could hear. I could hear him like
Speaker 5: unfolding the newspaper, and he said, there's a there's a
Speaker 5: there's a show at like one forty five at the
Speaker 5: Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Go see it and meet
Speaker 5: with him at like five o'clock. So I feigned sickness.
Speaker 5: I saw this movie, which is terrible. Then then I
Speaker 5: met with them, and I met with him, but he
Speaker 5: was you know, say what you will about him, but
Speaker 5: he was effusive, and he said, you're a great writer.
Speaker 5: And I remember I can't do a Belgian accent. But
Speaker 5: he said, I will protect He said, Hollywood will try
Speaker 5: to destroy you, but I will protect you like an eagle.
Speaker 5: And he and they made the moviet like like two
Speaker 5: months later. I was on the set. So I was
Speaker 5: I was twenty two and it was four or five
Speaker 5: months out of school. And then I kicked around and
Speaker 5: did some other Jean Claudi movies for a while, and
Speaker 5: then eventually I got the gig to write Blade. And
Speaker 5: that was the first time that I Mike Delugo, who
Speaker 5: is running New Line at the time and now it's
Speaker 5: running Warner Brothers, just let me write what I want
Speaker 5: to write and just didn't give me notes. And so
Speaker 5: you know, I guess the proof is in the pudding.
Speaker 5: With that another long answer, Well.
Speaker 2: I was gonna it was a great one, one great answer.
Speaker 2: And I love that gen carelled Vandamn story.
Speaker 3: It makes me very happy as someone who is a
Speaker 3: huge fan of his spincare.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the most gen cole Van Damn thing
Speaker 2: I've ever heard. He's going to protect you like an eagle.
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's talk about Blade, because a it's like
Speaker 3: a fucking masterpiece and b that essentially establishes the superhero
Speaker 3: genre for the next you know, still now it's still
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 5: But yeah, people cite x Men the first one, which
Speaker 5: was great.
Speaker 3: But Blade, Yeah, but it's Blade and Studios. You know,
Speaker 3: you have this, So could you talk a little bit
Speaker 3: about Blade, Like, was that a character you'd come across before?
Speaker 3: Did you go back and read the black and White
Speaker 3: stuff or was this just a story? I mean, it's
Speaker 3: such a cool concept that you were just like, I immediately
Speaker 3: know what this is going to be.
Speaker 5: Well, I was a giant comic book geek anyway, so
Speaker 5: there was almost no Marvel ordazy character that I wasn't
Speaker 5: familiar with. So I had read all of Too Madracula,
Speaker 5: and I'd read the black and white yeah, sort of
Speaker 5: more mature and magazine stories, and I was so I
Speaker 5: was completely familiar with with Blade. And I had heard
Speaker 5: that Newline wanted to make they had had some success
Speaker 5: with House Party and Deep Cover like so called urban movies. Uh,
Speaker 5: And I'd heard that they wanted to do a black
Speaker 5: superhero and so they were thinking Marvel and at the
Speaker 5: time it was Luke Cage, it was Blade, or it
Speaker 5: was Black Panther, And I thought Blade could potentially be
Speaker 5: made for a price because it was a horror film,
Speaker 5: you know, action horror film. And I was also really
Speaker 5: I was watching a lot of Hong Kong action films
Speaker 5: at the time, you know, way before they became in vogue,
Speaker 5: and so I had this, yeah, crazy idea, like movies
Speaker 5: like Bride with White Hair and stuff like that. I
Speaker 5: had this crazy idea to fuse like Hong Kong action
Speaker 5: films with you know, vampire movies with it was just like,
Speaker 5: I don't know why it came up with it, and
Speaker 5: I pitched it, and I and I pitched a trilogy.
Speaker 5: I remember to de Luca and I said, I'm going
Speaker 5: to pitch you the Star Wars of Vampire films and
Speaker 5: he said they and at the time they wanted to
Speaker 5: make it for six to eight million dollars and they
Speaker 5: liked the pitch and he just let me write. So
Speaker 5: the movie that got made is largely the one that
Speaker 5: I wrote. But the funny thing is he said six
Speaker 5: to eight million, and my first draft came in and
Speaker 5: they budgeted it and it came in at forty five
Speaker 5: million and it was R rated. And the crazy thing
Speaker 5: is DeLuca who took these huge risks at the time,
Speaker 5: just said screw it, We're gonna make it. And then
Speaker 5: actually the budget even escalated fifty five million, and people
Speaker 5: were I spawned come out, and people were just making
Speaker 5: fun of the movie before it came out. I remember
Speaker 5: reading early chatter even on like ain't it cool way
Speaker 5: back when?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 5: But I knew what we'd made and I knew we
Speaker 5: had the goods and it was amazing being in those
Speaker 5: first couple of audience previews because you could just feel
Speaker 5: the audience like, oh my god, this is something. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: see me before it was cool.
Speaker 2: Okay, sorry, I just need Jason, I know, we a
Speaker 2: film about it.
Speaker 3: I need to know about the blood rave because it
Speaker 3: is like one of the most iconic sequences ever and
Speaker 3: is now like constantly spoken of it. And also it's like,
Speaker 3: you know the Batman, there's definitely like they have the
Speaker 3: rave sequence there and it's like definitely red and very
Speaker 3: thing that could you just talk about that, like, because
Speaker 3: did you know that that was going to become like
Speaker 3: such an iconic moment.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, look that was in my pitch. Was
Speaker 5: that opening? I mean I pitched that scene in the
Speaker 5: old because I was trying to reinvent vampire movies in
Speaker 5: vampire stories, and and and I just thought, what's the
Speaker 5: most decadent, you know, thing I can possibly think of,
Speaker 5: you know, a kind of vampire let them eat cake
Speaker 5: or something like that. And so that was in the
Speaker 5: first pitch. And then you know, Steve Norington did an
Speaker 5: incredible job shooting it. It was it was completely miserable.
Speaker 5: We shot it in Los Angeles, and we shot it
Speaker 5: over the course of like I can't remember how many days.
Speaker 5: But it was hot, it was summer, and the crew
Speaker 5: had to wear those sort of like white hasmat suits,
Speaker 5: you know, like breaking bad clean suits. Yeah, and it
Speaker 5: was all this fake blood and the floor was really
Speaker 5: sticky and it smelled awful, I mean just awful. And
Speaker 5: you couldn't walk around without your like your feet sticking
Speaker 5: to things, and and it was I mean, it was
Speaker 5: a miserable sequence to film. But I don't know, it's
Speaker 5: it's like we're talking about something that I wrote twenty
Speaker 5: more than twenty twenty seven years ago, Like where did
Speaker 5: I come up with the idea? But I was just
Speaker 5: trying to come up with breaking down the conventions. I
Speaker 5: was trying, Look, don't get me wrong. I love Hammer
Speaker 5: House of Horror films, but I was trying to come
Speaker 5: up with like the anti you know, Hammer vampire story. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and also tip into black exploitation and all of those things.
Speaker 5: It's it's crazy that it worked, yeah, you know, because
Speaker 5: we're sort of fusing so many different elements.
Speaker 1: Sarah writer For a number of years increasingly successful writer,
Speaker 1: you become the go to guy for adaptation, comic adaptation
Speaker 1: IP stuff. As you noted, how do you then make
Speaker 1: the transition to director and showrunner?
Speaker 4: And how hard is that to do?
Speaker 5: Good question? Well, at the time when I started to
Speaker 5: do it, it was very hard because I built up
Speaker 5: ahead of steam as a screenwriter back in the days
Speaker 5: when one could make a good living as a screenwriter
Speaker 5: as opposed to what's happening right now. And I was
Speaker 5: a fast screenwriter, so I could write four feature scripts
Speaker 5: a year, and I was making a really good living,
Speaker 5: and I had had the fortunate well, I would say
Speaker 5: with Blade in Dark City, those were the first times
Speaker 5: I'd worked with, you know, genuinely good directors, and I'd
Speaker 5: worked with some not so good directors prior to that,
Speaker 5: and i'd seen one of the things that's hard as
Speaker 5: a screenwriter is you can have your name on a
Speaker 5: movie or a teleplay and up to thirty percent of
Speaker 5: it could be rewritten by other people, but they won't
Speaker 5: get credit, their names won't appear, but you get the
Speaker 5: blame they massively altered. So I'd had this experience of
Speaker 5: just either being rewritten by people or worked with some
Speaker 5: mediocre or bad directors, and I wanted to retain more control.
Speaker 5: So I wanted to start producing and then eventually directing,
Speaker 5: and I thought, well, I can, I can at least
Speaker 5: be a mediocre director. I mean, you know, maybe at
Speaker 5: the beginning I was. I think I got better at it,
Speaker 5: and it's it's the whole ten thousand hour thing. But
Speaker 5: it's hard because my agents did not want me to
Speaker 5: do it, and we're making money off of me and Dave.
Speaker 4: We got a good thing going yeah and.
Speaker 5: So, and people don't want to give a FIRSTI director
Speaker 5: a shot. So I adapted a book called Zigzag that
Speaker 5: I had a budget for two point eight million dollars,
Speaker 5: and I Wesley agreed to do a cameo. He worked
Speaker 5: on it for six days. He was like the anchor.
Speaker 5: And then I got some other people like Oliver Platten,
Speaker 5: Natasha Leone and John Leguizamo and I worked in that
Speaker 5: movie for a year, and I took what's called scale,
Speaker 5: so I can't even remember what I made to write it,
Speaker 5: something like eighteen thousand dollars and to direct it forty
Speaker 5: thousand and fifty eight thousand seems like a lot, but
Speaker 5: I was making far more than that as a writer,
Speaker 5: and my agents were not happy with me making the shift.
Speaker 1: And how much more complicated because obviously you've been in
Speaker 1: this business now so long and seen so many changes,
Speaker 1: and now you've got productions on TV slash streaming that
Speaker 1: are essentially multi episode movies. How did you put you know,
Speaker 1: it seems like a very daunting task to try and
Speaker 1: put all those tools together and say, now I'm going
Speaker 1: to manage a multi episode, multi season movie that takes
Speaker 1: place on you know, one continent, but across the continent
Speaker 1: and multiple time zones at once.
Speaker 4: You know what, what were the things that you.
Speaker 1: Encountered that you were like, well, I'm glad that I
Speaker 1: had been through these other experiences to let me know
Speaker 1: how to do this.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, I mean, it is daunting. It
Speaker 5: is really hard. It's there are times when I I,
Speaker 5: you know, wish I could work on a show that
Speaker 5: just took place in one city, that you know, one
Speaker 5: time zone, that didn't have a ton of visual effects
Speaker 5: or things like that. But I but it was also
Speaker 5: kind of bit by bit by bit by bit over
Speaker 5: the course of twenty years. So it's just building upon
Speaker 5: what I learned before. And I had, you know, the
Speaker 5: first show that really made some waves was a show
Speaker 5: that I had co created called flash Forward Way Back
Speaker 5: on ABC at the time, and I directed the first
Speaker 5: two episodes of that, And then I had another show
Speaker 5: on Stars called Da Vinci's Demons, which was a little
Speaker 5: more ambitious. It's sort of each one was successfully a
Speaker 5: little more ambitious, and it's it's just building upon you know, look,
Speaker 5: you look at a lot of people, a lot of filmmakers,
Speaker 5: and Chris Nolan started out with you know, following, which
Speaker 5: is most people I've me even seen or heard of,
Speaker 5: and and and then why am I blanking on Momento? Memento? Yeah,
Speaker 5: then Memento and then Insomnia and then you know it
Speaker 5: just he didn't start He was incredibly talented, but he
Speaker 5: didn't start out with inception.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so with something that's also like, you talk
Speaker 3: about ambition, and you've already set up this kind of
Speaker 3: huge challenge for yourself, and then coming into the second season,
Speaker 3: you arguably switch everything up, yeah, and kind of go
Speaker 3: one hundred years in the future and change like one
Speaker 3: hundred plus and change like a lot of the major costs.
Speaker 3: Could you talk about those kind of choices and challenges
Speaker 3: and how that adds to the ambition and the storytelling.
Speaker 5: Well, when I pitched Foundation to Apple, I said, this
Speaker 5: is going to be a crazy hybrid because it's it's
Speaker 5: going to be a cross between a serial ie show
Speaker 5: and kind of a seasonal anthology. And so I said,
Speaker 5: we're going to have, like, you know, a complete story,
Speaker 5: and they're going to be a handful of characters that
Speaker 5: are going to continue from season to season that are
Speaker 5: through the various trusts of science fiction, they are going
Speaker 5: to be effectively immortal. And then we're going to introduce
Speaker 5: new characters each season and they're going to have a
Speaker 5: complete story and then you know, either succeed or die
Speaker 5: or whatnot, and then they won't come back. And I
Speaker 5: just I couldn't really think of a show that had
Speaker 5: pursued that format before, and I thought it would be
Speaker 5: an interesting way to kind of tackle some of the
Speaker 5: more theological aspects of Foundation. And I guess Apple was
Speaker 5: crazy enough to go for it. You know, Normally, normally,
Speaker 5: when you pitch something that just like breaks all the
Speaker 5: conventional rules of storytelling or storytelling as it's known on streaming,
Speaker 5: you're like, oh, you're crazy. That'll never fly, and on
Speaker 5: top of it be hugely expensive. But there were some
Speaker 5: fans at Apple of Foundation and and and that helped.
Speaker 5: And I, you know, at the time, I created it
Speaker 5: with Josh Friedman, who left after the third episode or so.
Speaker 5: But we spent a lot of time on that pitch,
Speaker 5: and each of us had, you know, had a certain
Speaker 5: body of work that we worked on prior to that
Speaker 5: that I guess they, you know, bought our crazy pitch,
Speaker 5: you know, I think that the in terms of changing
Speaker 5: it up, I I I think, on one hand, what
Speaker 5: we did with season two, you could say you're crazy
Speaker 5: to have attempted that, like why not continue what you know,
Speaker 5: why are you just doing a refresh on everything? But
Speaker 5: people seem to have really, you know, gone nuts for it,
Speaker 5: And so I just felt like it would be boring
Speaker 5: if we repeated ourselves or boring if we just I
Speaker 5: just wanted to try something really bold and challenging. And
Speaker 5: I'm kind of amazed at how well Season two has
Speaker 5: been received. I thought more people would be freaked out
Speaker 5: by the fact that we're just we're just jumping forward
Speaker 5: one hundred and thirty years and just introducing a whole
Speaker 5: slew of new characters, and even many of the characters
Speaker 5: that you know are are you know, we're perceiving them
Speaker 5: in a different way. And I love how we just
Speaker 5: start with the first episode and we just plunk you
Speaker 5: in the middle of this black and white film, you know,
Speaker 5: with Harry Seldon, and we just say you got to
Speaker 5: catch up. Sorry, you know, I don't know. That excited
Speaker 5: me and I am amazed though that it didn't throw
Speaker 5: more people.
Speaker 1: I will say that opening scene where Harry is trying
Speaker 1: to knit his mind back together, Yeah, how much of
Speaker 1: that was written? How much of that is Jared just
Speaker 1: kind of going.
Speaker 5: About half So, so we wrote some stuff. I will
Speaker 5: say this, It's it's not all random. Well, because you've
Speaker 5: seen this season, like some of some of the some
Speaker 5: of the stuff that he says loops back around. People go, oh, interesting.
Speaker 5: Jared's a really smart, shrewd guy, and we talked about
Speaker 5: the themes of things that he could talk about, so
Speaker 5: he said everything that was scripted, and then it was
Speaker 5: just kind of an open mic letter rip stream of consciousness.
Speaker 5: I mean, honestly, I would have gone on longer. But
Speaker 5: those that stuff is also really expensive because whether it's
Speaker 5: whether it's the black and white stuff where we're trying
Speaker 5: to erase things, or whether it's the stuff in the
Speaker 5: prime ratio in itself where we're trying to erase crew reflections.
Speaker 5: It's but he's we used there were times when he
Speaker 5: said a bunch of stuff and he said, oh, you're
Speaker 5: not gonna use that. You're not gonna use that. You're
Speaker 5: not gonna use it. And we then ended up using
Speaker 5: a lot of course.
Speaker 3: And then you get that juxtaposition with that like incredible
Speaker 3: action sequence, Oh my dealy naked fighting the assassins, and
Speaker 3: that's like a very different tone shift too. Could you
Speaker 3: talk a little bit about that because the action is
Speaker 3: so great.
Speaker 5: You know, I loved juxtaposing those two scenes together though,
Speaker 5: because there's like one is as heady, kind of hard filmy,
Speaker 5: you know, THHX eleven thirty is you can get and
Speaker 5: then the other one is just kind of a Game
Speaker 5: of Thrones action sequence. But I I again, I wanted
Speaker 5: to challenge the audience and challenge people's expectations of what
Speaker 5: if they'd seen season one, or even if they hadn't
Speaker 5: seen season one and then heard about it, what kind
Speaker 5: of scenes we could take on in the show, because
Speaker 5: I think there was some people had heard about it,
Speaker 5: but maybe there was a barrier to entry because they
Speaker 5: thought it was like too highbrow or too heady or
Speaker 5: exactly exactly, and it is still cerebral, but I thought
Speaker 5: it's a big tent and we can embody a bunch
Speaker 5: of scenes. And I'm excited with you know, I don't
Speaker 5: know when this episode's going to drop, but episode two
Speaker 5: will drop the twenty first, and we also start to
Speaker 5: introduce some more elements and some more dry humor as
Speaker 5: of episode two and particularly with episode three, and once again,
Speaker 5: I'm excited for the audience to you know, on the
Speaker 5: surface of it, it feels like it wouldn't work, but
Speaker 5: it does work, and you realize it's such a foundation,
Speaker 5: is so serious that it's good to have some characters
Speaker 5: that don't take psychohistories seriously or the Empire. It's good
Speaker 5: to have characters like that kind of in your quiver.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, David, this has been such a fun conversation.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 5: My pleasure. And if I can do a tiny plug.
Speaker 4: Yes, please please.
Speaker 5: I've got a little website that i've I've neglected for
Speaker 5: a while, but I've also because of the striking stuff
Speaker 5: Davidescory dot com. I'm doing show notes as episodes drop,
Speaker 5: and I'm also including kind of behind the scenes making
Speaker 5: of photos and things. And so if people want to
Speaker 5: log onto there and I'm going to put together a
Speaker 5: mailing list, they can get some more sort of fun
Speaker 5: behind the scenes details. And that's all I got.
Speaker 4: Cool, that's awesome. Thanks again, David, my pleasure. Up next,
Speaker 4: nerd Out.
Speaker 2: In today's not Out way, you tell us what you
Speaker 2: love them why, a theory or excited chat or a
Speaker 2: quick question we can answer. Matt offers a thought on
Speaker 2: Indiana Jones. Matt begins with some kind words towards us.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Matt. I won't make everybody listen to them,
Speaker 2: but we appreciate.
Speaker 3: You, Matt says, with Indiana Jones back in the limelight,
Speaker 3: I wanted to share a realization I had during the
Speaker 3: last time I watched Traders of the Lost Arc throughout
Speaker 3: the introductory sequence, walking through the Peruvian woods, encountering bats,
Speaker 3: double crossing aids, outsmarting traps, shrugging off scary wildlife, even
Speaker 3: taking a gorgeous relic and surviving a collapsing tomb. Many
Speaker 3: excamation points there is not so much as a hint
Speaker 3: of the legendary John Williams theme. It's only when Indy
Speaker 3: grabs the vine to swing into the water and escape
Speaker 3: his pursuers that we hear those trumpets blare out his motif.
Speaker 3: That got me reflecting on how the heart of Indy
Speaker 3: is truly the escape. He doesn't get to keep the
Speaker 3: Arc at the end of Raiders, or the Shankara stones
Speaker 3: at the end of Temple of the Doom, or the
Speaker 3: grail at the end of the Crusade, or the skull
Speaker 3: at the end of Kingdom. I haven't seen Dile of
Speaker 3: Destiny yet, but I kind of hope it keeps to
Speaker 3: this tradition of Indy getting into something way over his
Speaker 3: hat and just making out by the skin of his teeth,
Speaker 3: because that's who Indiana Jones is. The oh I'm up
Speaker 3: fuck around him. Find out here. Thank you for indulging
Speaker 3: my observation, sending you all the love in this nutsp map.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Matt. I think that's true. I think it's
Speaker 2: all about the escape.
Speaker 4: I think that's true. It's about the close calls. It
Speaker 4: is about that.
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about something we talked about during our
Speaker 1: conversation about Indy, and that's how in the final act
Speaker 1: of most of these movies, the agency goes to a
Speaker 1: higher power, God, aliens, whatever, and it's actually not Indy
Speaker 1: kind of doing whatever the big thing is at the
Speaker 1: very end of the movie. And I was thinking about it,
Speaker 1: and I think, you know, to Matt's point, not only
Speaker 1: is it about the escape, but what makes Indy the
Speaker 1: hero in these stories is the fact that he has
Speaker 1: he is able to put uh whatever the object and
Speaker 1: the power behind the object is in the correct framing.
Speaker 1: He understands like I'm just a man. I'm not I
Speaker 1: don't I'm not going to fuck around with God, Like
Speaker 1: I'm not even gonna interro I'm not gonna mess with
Speaker 1: that right like he has that respect. And all the
Speaker 1: other villains of our various pieces, mostly Nazis never do right.
Speaker 1: They always want to say, Wow, I want to seize
Speaker 1: God's or an alien's power for myself. Indy never does that.
Speaker 1: And number two, uh, you know, kind of attaching this
Speaker 1: observation to Matt's observation. Part of the reason it's about
Speaker 1: the escape for Indy is, think about it. He can
Speaker 1: only he can only go for objects that he can
Speaker 1: carry out in a medium sized duffel bag.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 4: It's not or it's not happening, folks.
Speaker 1: He's got to be able to tuck it into like
Speaker 1: a postman's bag and climb out. So it is often
Speaker 1: about the escape because he was gonna help him carry
Speaker 1: the thing out of there. How is he gonna like,
Speaker 1: how is he gonna get the arc like out of
Speaker 1: tennis and out of the building, Like I guess they
Speaker 1: were gonna have a truck or something.
Speaker 5: But there was come on, there was.
Speaker 2: No gonna happen.
Speaker 1: No, it was never gonna happen.
Speaker 2: Thanks Matt.
Speaker 3: If you have theories, passions, or quick questions you want
Speaker 3: to share, hit us up at extra at crooked dot com.
Speaker 2: Instructions in the show notes.
Speaker 1: A huge thanks to David Eskoyer for being so generous
Speaker 1: with his time this episode, and that's it for us
Speaker 1: this episode Rosie and he plugs.
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm gonna plug mutual aid. It's very hot out there.
Speaker 3: So on Saturday, when I was leaving San Diego, I
Speaker 3: went CVS. I bought twenty eight dollars of water, which
Speaker 3: was like six big cases of water, and I just
Speaker 3: handed it out to all the folks who live in
Speaker 3: San Diego year round. If you were at San Diego,
Speaker 3: there are loads of great mutual aid organizations there that
Speaker 3: you can donate to if you weren't able to be
Speaker 3: there and help out the folks when you were actually
Speaker 3: at the con because you were busy. There's a great
Speaker 3: one called we All We Got SD that's their Instagram handle. Also,
Speaker 3: if you have a freezer that is big and you
Speaker 3: live in America, maybe because a lot of the freezers
Speaker 3: here are really big, put a case of water in
Speaker 3: your freezer. Then when you're driving around, if you see
Speaker 3: anyone just sitting out in the sun, you just give them.
Speaker 2: An icy bottle of water. Cold water saves people's lives
Speaker 2: in these heat waves.
Speaker 3: And if you can't and don't have the time, we
Speaker 3: aren't physically able, there's loads of great spaces, homymade meals,
Speaker 3: community fridges.
Speaker 2: There's loads of different places that you can do it.
Speaker 3: But right now it's really hot and being outside is
Speaker 3: really dangerous, so cold water is a great thing to
Speaker 3: having a fridge, or just throw some throw some crash
Speaker 3: to one of the mutual aid orcs in your area.
Speaker 4: Well said.
Speaker 1: Catch the next episode of x ray Vision Friday, July
Speaker 1: twenty eighth for the finale of Secret Invasion.
Speaker 4: We'll be there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Secret Invasion. It's the final finale, final episode. It's time,
Speaker 2: It's happened.
Speaker 3: Can You can watch full episodes of the podcast on
Speaker 3: YouTube and check out our Twitter at xr V pod
Speaker 3: and our discord hang out with all those core fans
Speaker 3: are always talking.
Speaker 4: About five star ratings, five star reviews. We need and
Speaker 4: we gotta have them. You gotta give them to us.
Speaker 4: Here is five from ash.
Speaker 1: It's the only podcast I prioritize listening to. Wow, if
Speaker 1: you care about any nerd stuff at all, this is
Speaker 1: the podcast for you. I've been a loyal listener since
Speaker 1: episode one and I love the show so much I
Speaker 1: even joined the discord, something I'd never done before.
Speaker 2: Welcome and yeah, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Extra Vision is a Crooked Media production. The show is
Speaker 1: produced by Chris Lord and Saul Rumin and executive produced
Speaker 1: by me Jason Concepcio and our editing at sound design
Speaker 1: is by Facillis Fatopoulos. Video production by Delon Villanueva and
Speaker 1: Rachel guy Eski. Social media by Awa Oglatti and Caroline Dunfie.
Speaker 1: Thank you to Brian Basquez for our theme music.
Speaker 4: See you next time.
Speaker 5: Bye,