Christine with Scott Wampler & Eric Vespe

my asshole brother bought her back in september 57 that's when you got your new model year in september brand new she was she had the smell of a brand new car it's just about the finest smell in the world except maybe for podcast they smell so good i mean i knew that was what i was going to do the variation was obviously oh man there's nothing finer than being behind the wheel of your own car except maybe for podcast but i like that that one's more drawn out it's smell smell is funny smell is funny roberts blossom right that's the same we covered before because he was the dad in uh what's called citizens band correct uh handle the care aka handle the care yes but he's also he's he's the kind old man who seems scary right in home alone that's how i know he's the nice old man marley i believe old man marley correct uh but a great name just a great uh sort of a salty old character actor the addition of the back brace in this movie whatever this thing is that he's wearing yep it's like a scoliosis brace or whatever it really completes the look uh roberts blossom we love him we love him not as much as we love of course one of our favorite people to talk about in this podcast thank god back in the pocket robert prosky he's your virtual background today for today's recording one of our ultimate dudes stupid virtual background i was trying to cup his head he's so i just i didn't know his face i didn't know about his face in this movie he is he's got sour lemon face the entire movie he's so gross is he not one of the finest junkyard actors of our of our time yes i do it yourself garage yeah oh he is just the looks that he is uh throwing in this are incredible yeah oh a very quick uh parallel science engine before i introduce this podcast or our show the premise itself yes yeah uh or guess um the uh when i was re-watching the thing for last week's episode uh kurt russell keeps on saying fukes over and over again right uh because one of the guys on the base is fukes and i was like why is this like why am i getting such a deja vu from kurt russell saying fukes over and over again what other movie is a character in fukes that i'm confusing this with and then i realized it's fucking used cars where both of the jack warden characters are named fukes and it's literally kurt russell saying fukes in two different movies over and over movies a couple movies a couple years apart too yeah yeah i just something was hitting my ear about russell saying fukes in that exasperated tone uh but that's this isn't a fukes cast it's not it's not we thought about it and jack warden is not robert prosky but they're similar that's the thing that links them in my mind right i would have i would have loved to seen a prosky versus warden movie like ready versus just two grumpy junkyard owners who won't talk to each other yes because it's a perceived slight from like 30 i don't like that guy yeah he gave me i don't know he gave me a bad look in an 82 i don't like that guy he gave me what for uh-huh no like was there ever a movie with robert prosky and jack warden together it feels like there should have been i don't know would have been too grumpy too cranky yeah folks this is blank check with griffin and david i'm griffin i'm david and i did collaboration search and no prosky and warden cross out ever wow yeah it's like dan st jermain the comedian had a great bit about um uh ides of march being uh freddy versus jason for a depressed man because it had giamati and uh psh's rival campaigners uh people should look it up there's really good impressions of both of those guys comparing who is more depressed about their life circumstances but this is a podcast about filmographies directors who have massive success early on in their career and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby and this is a this is a post bounce have we come up with a good term because the guarantor is the thing that gives you the blank check right we have not come up with a post bounce recovery i don't know i don't know what this is a mortgage is this i'm messing up term you know but it's like a credit report yeah he's like in arrears right now right right it's a it's a rebound movie it's i gotta prove to them that i can get the thing done again uh kind of movie uh because we're talking about the films of john carpenter who certainly fits that description uh it's a miniseries called a podcast and uh this is uh his only stephen king adaptation which doesn't sound like an odd stat except for the fact that this is a man who was working in the 70s 80s and 90s primarily in the horror genre and it feels like that was 30 percent of what got produced in the studio so at that point in time yeah george romero hogged all the other ones right it is kind of wild though that it's like pretty much all the canonical studio horror guys of this era did at least one king you had to do a king at some point and carpenter almost did fire sir right right it was just like you're gonna have to do it at some point and um you know coming off of the thing which you know bizarrely the most detested movie of all time at its release and this huge commercial flop for carpenter taking on a king movie probably was like well i guess i gotta do a marvel movie just to prove right like i just need a surefire right it was like he was the one of the most uh preeminent sort of genres in film certainly commercially uh i was reading in in the dossier of a research for this episode that like to put context it was just like clancy wasn't a thing yet grissom wasn't a thing yet like he was the one kind of novelist who was a brand in and of himself in a way sort of we talked about uh the weird neil simon mega franchise of the 70s the 80s yeah no i mean there's no no question even with those guys at the height of their power maybe jk rowling it kind of hit the status that stephen king did but like even michael creighton or dean coons al sells king right believe it or not uh but nobody knows who the fucking coons is you know outside of popular right yeah yeah king stephen king did a really great job of making himself a brand uh because i mean he did an american express commercial in the 80s you know for god's sakes like he was on talk shows and you know he's kind of this weird guy with a weird voice and he had thick you know coke bottle glasses you know there was just something you know like perfectly fit he has the perfect name to be a horror icon right off the top of it stephen king of course he's writing horror horror books uh and then he looks like you know especially at the time he kind of looked like a weirdo so you know it's you know but he had that yeah he had the enthusiasm and all that stuff so he made himself a brand in an era where like that just wasn't done by authors you know peter straub wasn't a known face but you know red by people in the ghost story probably sold more than anything that king you know had written up to that point so if you folks can already tell we brought in some experts this week oh yeah this is christine we're talking about the killer car movie and we have scott wonkler and eric bestie from the king cast to help put this in perspective for us give us the context oh maybe this is a stat it's hard to double check but i someone i know jokingly referred recently to maximum overdrive being one of the only movie posters featuring the director primarily visually that's dina de laurentis man you know like hitchcock had done that before hitchcock was like yeah featured on his movie posters but he's not even in it like i'm just looking at this one here that is stephen king's masterpiece of terror directed by the master himself and the primary image is stephen king ripping through the truck with a cross to be fair he is in the movie he has a camera oh he is yeah right up front he's a guy that gets hit in the beanbag with a uh uh like a can of soda out of a machine no he's at an ATM he's at an ATM remember oh that's right that's right i'm thinking the baseball coach yeah i just think like this poster treats him as if he's tom cruise like everyone else on the poster is a centimeter tall including amelia weston as like yes it was a big star have you seen um have you seen the trailer the trailer is him yes just talking to the screen for like half of the trailer right yeah which by the way yes that was like a hitchcock thing obviously like hitchcock had trailers like that where he would just explain his movie to you um but it does speak to hitchcock was also on tv on a weekly basis you know his own career had gone on for decades he directed a best picture winner like all this shit and stephen king just within a decade went from being like novelist to film franchise to kind of the name himself you know right yeah and and again that's like dino playing the the full huckster thing to the to the hilt you know he knew that i have no doubt that you know that that movie wasn't great but he knew that stephen king was a star more so than anything else and so that's what he sold it on for sure and that trailer is fucking hilarious like that's just one of the best trailers ever i'm not scared the hell out of you he's not wearing his glasses so he's kind of cross-eyed yeah it's iconic i love it it's just always funny when you have the things like because i guess i mean what shining doesn't have stephen king's the shining right it's not until he remakes it it still gets to primarily be let's see stanley kubrick's the shining yeah he's credited of course but yeah no but he's not like on the poster famous poster yeah no it's just a masterpiece of modern horror i'm thinking of like o-tor directors who have done stephen king movies and like dead zone is stephen king's the dead zone but carpenter gets john carpenter's christine even though the movie is obviously being sold on king as well well that's a john carpenter thing like that's john carpenter's everything that's just his thing david cronenberg doesn't like david cronenberg's the fly you know it's like i don't know maybe it's an ego thing maybe it's a name brand thing i have no idea what that is oh sure i mean i know i know it's like carpenter had just sort of established that as the president at that point but it's like when you see that the movie is called stephen king's dead zone you're almost surprised when you're like carpenter directed this and they're not even mentioning that they're still sort of framing it as stephen king's thing you know i'm trying to figure this out like when the first yeah let's see the dead zone is definitely stephen king's the dead zone yeah i don't know yeah i mean there's also the variation in like whether they use that in the title for the movie or on the poster in the marketing right i mean i honestly think that it really just happens to be because stephen king and adaptations of his work is why we started all podcasts about it um are just so intertwined that is the reason why i think he's such a pop culture icon is because everybody even if they never read a stephen king book they ingested a dozen stephen king stories just for osmosis everybody's seen misery you know everybody's seen stand by me everybody's watching redemption everybody's seen carrie you know so like people know his work just through the adaptations so you know the shining blah blah blah if you watch nothing but the simpsons and saturday night live you would pick up on plenty of king you know material right there's there's so much uh there and it's also just the fact that the guy was so fucking prolific worked so fucking fast pumping him out these fucking long ass books right christina's what like 600 pages right i just want to be clear that had nothing to do with the mountains of cocaine he was he was i mean well yeah i i have not read as much stephen king as you guys but yeah sometimes you read a book and there's like a whole hundred pages be like was this just like an evening for him like just like busting you know so much coke and be like yeah then this happened you know just that's how it always feels read read the tommy knockers and you'll feel like you just got out of a three-day bender in vegas it's it's that novel sweats when you hold it in your hand there are books that he admits to having no memory of writing right right for sure like the actual act of writing it is a blur for him he just knows that it could go into tommy knockers specifically right right and dreamcatcher he was pretty much in haze on from you know he got hit by that pain med one right yeah he wanted to call that did you know he wanted to call that book cancer and his life talked him out of it wow yeah i don't know that book and movie very legible and very very obvious yeah it definitely doesn't scream i am on goofballs and in great pain oh god i didn't write anything to distract me from the horrible pain in my bones stitching themselves back together and he wrote that thing longhand he wrote that like just on legal pads that book is like 900 pages long or some crazy shit it's kind of wild how much him getting hit by that car was like a news story considering that it wasn't the kind of thing that often happens now where like someone's injured and all the twitter is doing like prayer hands and candle circle and going like we can't lose you it was just like everyone thought it was so funny and i think it has to do with the idea that he like reads to people as this weird supernatural figure more than a man even down to just like yes how goofy he looks and how big he is i just remember it was like immediately people were making like the fucking late night talk shows were doing monologue jokes about it that showed no consideration for this guy's pain it was just like what a weird curio this giant scary novelist was hiking through the woods in the middle of the night like it's a spooky thing you know like a chupacabra jumped in front of your car well and it's a guy that's written about i mean we're talking about one of those stories he's written you know about a car that runs people over the gauge creed in that cemetery gets hit maximum overdrive is all about cars running people over so there's a weird it felt like the beginning of a stephen king book yeah yeah that's the inciting incident mr mercedes another one he's got a weird thing with cars i recently came to the realization that king also has a weird thing with corn you know maybe we were just talking about this no no he's a big freak on the leash guy producer man incredible contribution thank you no but like you know there's corn on the cob is like a recurring motif in a lot of stephen king stuff and uh if i ever get to corner that guy on our show uh one of my first questions is gonna be all right what's the deal with corn we gotta talk about the corn now there's children in it that is used to stab people in a lot of stephen king stuff sleepwalkers a cop gets stabbed by an ear of corn johnny def eats corn at the end of secret window while wearing braces i would like to point out yeah what a weird fucking there's see when you obsess over this and you do a podcast about a single author you start picking up on really random bullshit and as you'll see as this conversation goes on i'm sure my friend and i interviewed um uh nicholas cage once uh for a magazine that didn't really exist uh when he was doing ghostwriter spirit of vengeance press and we had tried to watch all of his movies in like two weeks leading up to that i watched like 80 percent of them right before the the sort of avi learner red box boon of him doing eight movies a month um but we were like trying to chart weird uh you know repetitive elements in his movies and see how much them were conscious did he was he tracked the material because these things he put these things in them and we were like why are there so many wolves in your movies and he's like i don't think i've ever done a movie with a wolf and then we were like here are 12 instances of films in which you come face to face with a wolf and have a profound moment and he's like oh yeah i guess so i don't know i guess i just think wolves are cool they are just like there was no interiority there you know i wonder if king could tell you like my dad used to yell at me to finish my corn so it's like a figure of menace or if you bring up to me be like i don't know is there corn in my work i don't know it's that it's gonna be the second version because we had steven weber on the show once and he was the he played jack torrents in the miniseries version of the shining and uh unlike the kubrick one uh steven king was there on set for every minute of that he was super hands-on and like weber told a story about how um like there's this turn of phrase right and there's got words talking about some sort of pattern of a carpet it's like a stanza's worth of poetry in the middle of the book yeah right and he was like oh this is the perfect thing and he interpreted because this is the way jack torrent's feeling in this moment and all that he's like i'm gonna go ask king about it since he's right there behind the monitor and he goes up to king and asked me about it because i don't know when i was writing it that's i just looked down and that was the thing on my carpet that's what my carpet looked like i was probably drunk and that was a pattern on the floor yeah also for a guy to write that many books he has to be just existing in some kind of like flow state you know oh yeah well he regularly brings in people to you know um i don't know about regularly but he has on several occasions like brought in people that are basically act as historians for him and will correct um you know mistakes that he's made with things that he's written you know yeah he did that on the dark tower to keep the lore clean and he um his own mythology yeah his own mythology you know and he's been he's been piecing that own mythology together since he was in college so it's like 40 years worth of stuff we'll just forget things yeah that's wild i wait i had a point i forgot keep talking guys well i guess my favorite king book is past cemetery which is an obvious choice and i have not read every king book by any means there's a lot of them uh yeah Um, I mean, why is that? It just, it's so boring. But like, you know, I read it when I was probably a late teenager, somewhere in there. And it's like just that, you know, that early part of the book where he wakes up and he's got the dirt all over his feet.

Yeah. It's just one of those like seminal moments reading a book where I was like, holy shit, I can't go to sleep now. You know what I mean? Like, like, uh, yeah, I like a lot.

I like basically Andy Stephen King that I pick up. I feel like I've read like a dozen of them or whatever. But I was just thinking Pet Sematary. This is right.

This is a thought from 10 minutes ago. But like that has the trucks rumbling down the road. He's really freaked out by vehicles. That's all.

That's all. That's what? That's the same year as Christine. He cranked that shit out.

It's the same year, right? Same novel. Well, I think it was published the same year. It was the same year.

Yeah. He wrote it much earlier. That's one of like a very infamous thing. Because that was one he said he was never going to publish because it was too disturbing.

Even for him. Because he's working out as a, you know, father of a bunch of young kids. He was working out a lot of his own fears in that. And like, wait, because when you ask Stephen King, he gets that question all the time.

What's here, Stephen King? And he'll go, like the dark or spiders or whatever the hell. But like when you can, when he doesn't answer it with a joke and he answers seriously, it is, you know, it's, he's like, it is walking in to check on my kids and they're not breathing. You know, it's like, that is the real fear.

That's the thing. You know, every once in a while then he'll pull out the serious version of that. But that's what, you know, that book was disturbing for him. It was disturbing for his wife.

It was disturbing for Tabitha. And they were like, he essentially said he was going to shelve it. And he talked for years about. Yes, that's right.

I remember the prologue. Right. And he talks about all this. Yeah.

And then he essentially had a book deal he's trying to get out of. He was moving on the Viking, I think, or he was leaving Viking, one of the two. And he owed one more book and he didn't want to give him the new one that he was writing. So he just pulled Pet Sematary off the shelf.

He said, all right, you can have this one. And it turned out to be like legit one of his most scary books. Like there's not, there's not a whole lot of Stephen King. And as somebody who's read everything he's written, you know, obsessively and examined it.

I'm not really scared that often by Stephen King stuff. Like I love reading it. I'm entertained by it. I love his characters.

There's moments in it that really get under my skin. There's moments in The Shining, do that for me. Yeah, there's a couple of things. Yeah, in The Shining specifically, there's a couple of moments.

But Pet Sematary is almost from beginning to end, just a bleak, dark, get under your skin and stay there. It feels meaner than most King stuff does. Revivals is a recent one that he wrote that kind of hits the same notes by the end. But even that one is not as bleak the entire way through.

There's like a sense of doom throughout Pet Sematary that you just can't shake. There is no really easy respite, you know, to find in that book. Hell yeah, that's, yeah, I guess that's right. But I have not read Christine.

And I do think of that as one of the sort of big, hefty ones that I never got around to. Well, that was right. I mean, the process of adaptation for this movie was pretty much just, we're only going to make a fourth of this, right? Like, there's just too much.

This is in the state where he's turning them out. I mean, because the movie comes out like three months after the book comes out, or within the same year, certainly. It was optioned as a manuscript. And that and Cujo kind of were presented at the same time.

And there was such a feeding frenzy for his movies. I mean, ironically enough, David, did you see who the producer is who put this movie together and brought Carpenter on? Well, I'm not sure. Tell me, because, I mean, we have our dossier, obviously.

Is it Richard Cobritz? Oh, it's Richard Cobritz. We were just reading that out. Yeah.

Yes. Well, we watched Someone's Watching Me, guys. I don't know if you guys have ever seen Someone's Watching Me, the TV movie, John Carpenter made. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, which is a good movie. But because it's a TV movie, it ends on a freeze frame of the main character's face. And then it just goes, executive producer, Richard Cobritz. And it's kind of like, kind of jarring, right?

Kind of jarring, like, next up on NBC, it's the local news. Like, you know. And so, that's funny, Richard. And then I was making fun of Richard Cobritz.

Like, clearly. TJ Hooker episode or something. Yeah, exactly. But he must be.

Well, he's not. He is. He's a producer. I looked into it.

Yes. And then the Firestarter adaptation that he was close to going on had been shit-canned. And so, he goes straight to Carpenter and offers it to him. It's entirely because of his experience on Someone's Watching Me.

Right. Do you guys like Cujo? Are you Cujo fans? Yeah.

I've seen the movie. I've never read the book. The book's good. And the movie, I think, is the most interesting of the two.

I hadn't seen it since I was a kid until we did an episode on it. Like, sometime within the last year. Oh, we had fucking, who was it? Mark Danielowski.

The guy that wrote House of Weeks. He came on and did Cujo. And we had Dee Wallace before him. Oh, yeah.

We interviewed Dee Wallace about it. But, you know, before one of those, I revisited it for the first time since I was a kid. And my memory of it was that it was just, you know, two people trapped in a car with a dog. But on revisitation with a, you know, a more developed cinematic palette, I found it way more satisfying.

And now I'm kind of like, that movie's undervalued. I really, really like it. And particularly, you know, in the universe of King adaptations. Where does Christine rank for you guys?

Right. Not specifically numerically, but, like, in the sort of larger canon, as due to our such experts on the films and the books, where is Christine in the pack? I might be a little bit atypical in that, like, listen, talking just as a, because I'm a film geek first and foremost. That's kind of what I started.

I started as I came to King through the movies, like most, you know, people I think did, at least in my generation. And, you know, and I'm a huge John Carpenter fan. Like, massive. I think the run that he makes between Assault on Creasing 13, Do They Live, is all-timer.

So, I think this is one of the weakest of that group. And I think that there are moments in this movie that are fucking great. The show-me moment, you know, with Keith Gordon, you know, kind of, and Christine reassembling herself. This is amazing.

The imagery of the car on fire, you know, chasing people down is really rad. And I also am very nostalgic for that time period where you can, you know, just a film grain of this era and the character actors that pop up and all this stuff. Like, I'm very nostalgic for it. But I still, I probably value this less than most people who love King and King's stuff do.

I don't think it's a bad movie. I just think it's, to me, it's a little forgettable. Yeah, I think it's mid-tier. I think it's, like, mid-tier overall.

And it's just not one, if I wanted to sit down and pick a random Stephen King movie and watch it, Christine would not be one of the firsts that comes to mind. You know, I would go with Kujo, I would go with The Shining, or I would go with, you know, there's plenty I would get to before Christine. Yeah, Shawshank. I'm inclined to agree with you, Eric, but it really is like, you look at his 70s, 80s run, right?

He doesn't really miss until the 90s. It's like, this sort of, by default, has to be his weakest movie. Yes. But the fact that this is the weakest movie in that run, A, speaks to how much the dude was just on fire for, like, 16 years, and B, the fact that he hit the ground running so hard.

Because this feels like it's maybe, like, the first movie of a director who then goes on to really get his shit down. You know? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, this is definitely, you can tell that there's a one-for-them mentality here, and we've touched on that a little bit already.

Yeah. And it's fascinating, just as you mentioned, this is him working within the studio going, okay, I made this movie, I thought it was great, nobody liked it. The studio didn't like it, audiences didn't like it. It turns out to be, like, one of the most, you know, long-term successful movies of his career, but at the time, huge flop.

And this is him going, okay, I can make a dependable, bankable thing. And it's really interesting when you look at, especially when you consider that Firestarter was what he was originally going to do when he dove into Stephen King's world. He wanted to make that a road movie, is my understanding. Like, his script was a father-daughter, you know, tale on the road.

And he, funnily enough, you look at Starman. Starman, yes, absolutely. And you go, this is the Amblin version of Firestarter, his version of Firestarter. You know, it's a nice alien version of Firestarter.

It's his road movie, you know, people on the run being chased by government agents or whatnot. You know, it's, he was doing interesting things around here, but then he was still able to pop off. Like, I think one of Carpenter's most underrated movies is Prince of Darkness. Like, I love Prince of Darkness.

I think it's, it is both weird and gets bogged down in scientific gobbledygook, but it's also one of the scariest things he's ever made. Like, I think that Prince of Darkness is scarier than Halloween, personally. Like, I just think that the Tony he sets in, like, you know, almost a cosmic horror that he almost dips into with that thing is, is just in the madness. It's really, really terrifying.

And, you know, that was kind of a miss, too, in Big Trouble in Little China, one of my all-time favorites of his. Huge, it was another big miss, but, like, those are all the ones that seem to survive, you know? I mean, the quote that I think is really telling about this movie, uh, let me just get this directly. This was, I guess, some sort of career retrospective interview he did for Variety in 2019.

And he said, I needed a job after the thing because nobody would hire me. So this came along and I took the job. And it turned out better than it had any right to. That's, that's the line that I think is really telling.

Like, he very much says this was the first time in his career that he was sort of for hire, that it wasn't a passion project, that it wasn't a thing that he developed. And even he is surprised that it's better than the level of passion he had going into it, which I think speaks to the fact that this guy kind of has too much respect for film as a medium and too much contempt for the amount of, like, lazy, arrogant, sloppy assholes working to ruin shit in the industry at the time, that he, like, cannot shit out a movie at this point, you know? Like, as much as he's like, I just gotta show up, make my days, get it done, have a respectable hit, he's like, I guess I cared more than I thought I did. You know, it's just a little bit better in every sense than it has any right to be.

Yeah, it's a testament to his ability as a craftsman. As you said, if this is him doing something without his heart in it, it's better than most people who are trying really hard to make a good thing. Right, and the movie is a pails in comparison to our films where you're just like, I cannot believe how much he put into this. Like, he's just putting a Herculean amount into every single aspect.

Like, um, well, it's just about Christina. It's like you said about, like, now it would be, oh, jeez, I guess I make a Marvel superhero movie. We're like, this is also, I have to imagine at the time, kind of an eye-rolling project for, you know, hoity-toity critics. It was like, oh, he's doing a Stephen King movie.

What's it about? Oh, it's the one about the killer car. Okay, right? Like, isn't, you know, this is probably a movie people look down their nose at a little bit in 1983.

Especially when you consider that 83 is, like, Cujo and Christine. These are the two manuscripts that are up for grabs and make it to a King movie. And it's like, wait, so one's, like, a car and one's a dog? Like, I guess it writes itself, you know?

All I need to hear is Stephen King makes the bad dog movie. Stephen King makes the bad car book, you know, whatever. And then it's just like, okay, one, it's about teenagers. The other, it's a mother.

It's not, okay, yeah, sure. I get it. I get it. I get it.

You know? It just almost maybe feels like formula on its face. Blankies, quick question and be honest. When was the last time you actually thought about how much fiber you were eating?

Not protein, not calories, fiber. In the U.S., fewer than one in 10 adults hit their daily recommended intake. And fiber isn't a bonus nutrient. It's foundational.

That's where Huel comes in. On those days when I got to rush to the studio to tape an episode and I need a quick and healthy meal, I reach for one bottle or one soup that gives me everything a real meal is supposed to give you. The Black Edition ready-to-drink has 35 grams of protein, 7 grams of fiber, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, it's gluten-free, and it's under five bucks. Or let's say on the days that I want something a little more customizable, I use the Black Edition powder.

I can add it to whatever and get 40 grams of protein, same complete nutrition, just a different vibe. The RTD and Powder Duo has become my insurance policy against chaotic days and makes staying consistent so easy. Limited time offer. Get Huel today with our exclusive offer of 15% off online with our code CHECK.

At Huel.com slash CHECK. New customers only. Thanks, Huel, for partnering and supporting our show. David?

Yes? You look like a man who doesn't know that Fast Growing Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers. I had no idea! Yeah.

Well, David, they have all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs and houseplants. My home is littered with all of these, and they're all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. It's like your local nursery, but anywhere you live with more plants than you'll find anywhere else. And whatever you're looking for, Fast Growing Trees helps you find options that actually work for your climate, space, and lifestyle.

For me, all-inclusive. I'll take any kind of tree you've got. Griffin, I know you're, you know, a green thumb. Yeah.

And I think you're going to agree with me on this. You know, you go to a garden center, and you just find it so overwhelming and inconvenient. You took the personal statement out of my mouth, Ben. That is how I feel.

And then, here's the other thing. You try to hire some landscapers. It's too expensive! I'm so tired of spending every day of my life on the phone with landscapers.

Listen, with Fast Growing Trees, it's just so reassuring that you know you're going to order plants, and they're guaranteed to be healthy and to thrive. But let me guess, when the trees arrive, it takes a really long time for them to grow. They have their life and thrive guarantee. It promises your plants are happy and healthy.

No greens are required. Just quality, quality plants you can count on. Plus, get ongoing support from trained plants experts who can help you plan your landscape, choose right. Plants, learn how to care for them every step of the way.

Can you imagine if Wally had a promo code for Fast Growing Trees? That movie would have been installed. It never would have even existed. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials.

Up to half often select plants. And listeners of our show get 20% off their first purchase when using the code CHECK at CHECKOUT. That's an additional 20% off. Better plants have better growing at FastGrowingTrees.com using code CHECK at CHECKOUT.

FastGrowingTrees.com code CHECK. Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's go together. Use CHECK to save today.

Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Firestarter, he was going to do with Lancaster, who wrote The Thing, and then, in fact, ended up never making another movie ever again. And that was going to be about $30 million.

It was going to be a bigger budget thing, sort of at the same level as The Thing. And Richard Dreyfuss was going to be. He was going to have a big, proven, at this point, Academy Award-winning movie star in it. And then when The Thing underperforms, they bring in, what's his name, the eventual writer of this movie, Bill Phillips.

Because I think their thing was, everyone was freaked out by how fucking cold and cynical and bleak The Thing was. Is that Carpenter's tendency, if we let him go all the way, we need to bring someone in who's more cuddly. And Bill Phillips' own admission was like a very cheery, kind of blue sky screenwriter. And the studio's calculation was, split the difference, end up with something in the middle.

Carpenter can make it scary. Bill Phillips can't write scary. Bill Phillips can put a motion in the thing, and Carpenter can't. So they assigned him to rewrite and redevelop Firestarter with Dreyfuss.

Carpenter, you know, pre The Thing, had negotiated this deal. He had been on a big hit run. Stephen King's a big deal. He's got Richard Dreyfuss.

So Universal agrees to pay or play for the movie, which means that whether or not the film gets made, John Carpenter's going to get his full salary. It was arguably the one time in his career where he had that kind of clout. Pretty much the only time, right, right. But Universal was increasingly dubious about making the film and certainly giving him that much trade of freedom.

So they slash the budget in half. They go, like, you want a 27? We'll give you 14. And Carpenter's very known for it.

He writes to the specific dollar amount. He knows how much everything's going to cost. He understands the production logistic. He plans on a movie to that scope.

He could not cut his idea in half. And it was either, I don't make the movie and I get paid, or I make the movie this way and it's going to suck. I'd rather just not make the movie. So he walks, which I think perhaps even fucks up his reputation a little bit more, which then just gets saved by, what's his name, Koblitz having the Christine rights and wanting him.

the uh he's got he's got to view christine though in that in that context it's kind of a consolation prize right oh yeah you know like he's he's definitely like we've established he's working for hire on it but elevating the material process just because his natural talents as a filmmaker but also if i'm him i'm like well i really want to do this one but i guess this is sort of it's also a stephen king and you know i can make it scary and blah blah blah yeah and i don't think he's like right he's desperate to do just any stephen king thing right like he's interested in firestarter for specific reasons that's sort of the same zip code you know yeah exactly and like firestarter is sort of a movie so i don't know if drew barrymore was going to be in it when he made i don't know i don't know how much so there was anyone attached to it yet but like christine it's like well the movie stars the car and then we'll cast a bunch of you know smaller names am i crazy or did i hear that um uh we were talking we had a phil nobile jr the editor-in-chief of angoria and he has like a deep dive on the fire started it almost was and we had him on the show i think he said that um how was it heather o'rourke caroline from poltergeist oh that makes sense yeah there you go another right another uh child girl star blessed by spielberg right yeah um when i like find the the quotes about why carpenter took the movie aside from just like i needed a job i was unhirable they were the only people willing to hire me i was tired of not making a movie i was a you know feeling antsy all that sort of stuff he's just like look i like high school movies i thought that's a fun genre i haven't worked in that they showed me the car the car looked nice it was a beautiful car i thought i could do a lot with the car and it's a rock and roll movie and that was cool like it was like three isolated elements he was like this story didn't really appeal to me in the way the fire starter did i didn't find some thematic depth in it i just like these are fun elements to play around with why not the milieu right of the right i get to do a greaser movie with like a rock and roll soundtrack is definitely a big big way for him to talk himself into it right he wants to do one of those and he also had the freedom to like cast all these great like old character actors you can tell he just wanted to work with like robert proski harry dean santon um you mentioned robert blossom uh yeah i mean there's all over the the guy named stewart charno who's like it was the nerd that popped up in every 80s movie uh i was like oh who's he who does he play wait so we're trying to don vandenberg is what oh yeah but if you look at his face it's like oh yeah he's literally in every high school you know movie of that era well there's also steven steven tash who is one of like the bully kids with the the real angular sideburns is the guy that bill murray fussed with at the beginning of ghostbusters i couldn't figure out why he looks so familiar especially in the scenes where he's scared it's because he's the guy getting electrocuted when he guesses the wrong card i never put that together yeah exactly yeah which by the way that's such a great fucking joke yeah like i know that this isn't about ghostbusters but that opening always cracks me up every single time i watch it and the the cherry on top isn't that he's just like vanquins being horny for the cute college girl it's the fact that the other kid is actually showing psychic right and he's totally ignoring it for you know there's no reason for him to punish that guy no they could both be right uh he's electrocuting the dude um yes able to cast a lot of good actors um but i think you know the biggest change he makes that feels very carpenter to me from the book which i admittedly haven't read is the car is just bad the car is evil like the car is like the shape right it is a manifestation of evil it was always evil it will always be evil with king he sort of like straddles the line between is the car itself the thing or is the car possessed by bad owners does it have the spirit or is it the thing that makes the people bad and this is like he adds this prologue which apparently king didn't really like as much as he gave him freedom to do whatever he wanted and make those choices where it's just like the second this car comes off the assembly line is killing people you look at the poster for this movie and the tagline is huge letters how do you kill something that can't possibly be alive and then smaller fonts massive block of text that says she was born bad plain and simple somewhere deep on a desert dark in assembly line christine like i just love that it's so good the whole poster is so good but i do love that idea where it's like you know once in a while there's just a car born bad like that that's just how it is we don't need to explain this anymore it just wants to chomp you up you guys get it you know you buy a new car and it's evil and your wife chokes in it you know it happens all the time but yeah you're right the whole marketing on this is great the poster's great the trailer i don't know if you've seen the trailer recently but the teaser for it is it's just all these like i think it might be percy rodriguez or somebody like with a good early 80s trailer voice is talking about christine but as if she's a woman and you're just seeing like curves like her curves and you don't realize at the beginning you think it's like a james bond kind of you know you're seeing a woman's hip lying down or something and it ends up being the car and i'm watching this this is hilarious this is god imagine seeing this in a theater yeah i had that trailer on 35 i saw that out yeah it is a great teaser um the marketing is great uh on this whole thing you can tell that they had a lot of good trailers good stuff to market i mean i think the movie itself is is good it's good it's solid it's solid it's good i don't think it's amazing i don't think it's the best king i don't think it's the best carpenter i don't think it's even the best of that era but you know you see why this was very attractive to him because it had to carpenter because like look at how easy of a sell it was you know like as long as he didn't you know just turn in uh just unwatchable garbage like he had kind of a fire hit there it's also a hell of a lot better than the fucking firestarter movie they made that's true yeah so i'm sure i'm sure that was satisfying firestarter was so cheap in comparison firestarter is interminable like i cannot stand watching that movie firestarter is mark lester correct who is the director of um fuck what's the terrible movie that he made that i know well now i gotta look it up i can't remember anyway i do remember firestarter being boring as shit that's sort of like one of those classic where you're like i'm in for a stephen king movie baby give me the thrills and i'm being yeah and there's like three minutes at the end where fireballs are destroying people and watching them in the trees and you're like why isn't the rest of the movie like this i found this uh uh cobert's uh quote uh the producer because you know like king's tendency is to mythologize things right and like this evil is the stem of a curse of a wrong done generations ago and has seeped in and survived you know it sends a passion and carpenter just loves this idea that like some things are just bad there are just actual pure forces of evil in this world they are evil because that's what they were placed on this earth to do and that is all they will ever do nothing traumatized them you know nothing went wrong uh it's evil going right and cobert was talking about them picking like right off the bat the car's just bad that's just what we're doing the car's just bad it's always been bad there's no backstory and then he said uh months later after they made that decision king mentioned a comic essay by james thurber that he read about objects that had simply been born bad like a can opener that was just meant to cut your finger in a sense that's what we're saying about this car it's not the ghost of a dead owner it's not a skeleton rattling in the back seat it's just that this car has a way of adopting weak people capturing their minds and giving them a sense of security and sense of power in exchange it rules the owner yeah what about that movie the mango that's stephen king right the haunted laundry machine yeah right that is that's what that movie is about yeah that literally folds you like laundry like it's actually what it does it's not yeah it's not like a washing machine it's like an industrial laundry right like a big washer it's like the length of you know a warehouse floor and it looks like something you know tim burton designed when he was like particularly depressed or something you know it's all like rusted and got these like fanciful swirls on it and shit gears and shit so he really would just pick a thing yeah the mangler is like so expanded from the source material though and that's that's just one of those movies that's like you could sit and talk about the mangler for a couple hours no problem there's a lot to chew on in that movie and it'll be a very fun conversation but the process of actually watching uh fucking the mangler is real rough as we found out wow there's there's a mangler two and three mangler two yeah mangler 2.0 uh is like the the spirit of the mangler is somehow like uploaded into the computer system at this um like prep school that has been shut down for i don't know holidays or some shit and there's some students that are remaining on campus i think because they're being punished for something we uh we haven't done that one yet but i've watched it um that the mangler reborn my buddy scott sizer is in from the tick which was meant to be a hard reboot of the mangler only three years after mangler 2.0 they just wouldn't let the mangler live dormant that mangler franchise that all the public demanded right it's odd that they were so persistent on the mangler well you know that's the kind of shit that like was just all over the shelves at blockbuster and was probably getting you know rented left and right and you know there was enough to justify sort of like children of corn you know if there's enough business in that ancillary market to um to justify keep making them and they're making them very cheap you know why not it's a name people recognize and yeah but i defy you to find someone who's watched all three mangler movies like the mangler was one of those movies like a kid in high school told me about it was like the scariest fucking movie i ever saw was this movie called the mangler about a fucking washing machine and i mean that's why i watched it and i just remember it being it's a toby hooper right like late toby hooper yeah like the whole thing is very like it's hard to pinpoint the tone of it it's it's really strange eric what's the name of the fucking guy like the lead guy we love this guy in the main ted levine ted levine's in it and he's like the lead and he is so it's like a rare lead performance from ted levine and he's also like one of his eyeballs is always bulging out and he's like wearing this bizarre jacket through the whole goddamn thing even though he's in a shane black movie like yeah yeah he'd fit in kiss kiss bang bang kind of so he's investigating this laundry press but meanwhile robert england is like the owner of the the laundry factory or whatever the fuck you would call it and he's like running around laundry factory well it's a factory and a laundry is inside of it so it counts and but he's running around like a three-piece suit but he and with like a robot leg or some shit and like sexually harassing every woman in sight he's got like those four scamp leg braces on yeah yeah it's it's so fucking weird again this is this is good shit to talk about but in practice i don't know maybe we should do the mangler trilogy on patreon he might have robert england delivers every line as a physio sam as well like yes it is it is the most bonkers and he's got like a dead eye like contact lens and those 90s england performances where he's like oh i know what people want from me right he doesn't need to worry this doesn't work without the pretty makeup yeah yeah uh wishmaster i'm trying to go to robert england uh that's he's in urban legends right the opera he did that phantom yeah did he direct that one yes i think he did the phantom of the opera one yeah i think he sure did he also directed a movie called killer pad i mean anyway that sounds kind of cool sounds kind of fun right yeah he's in that maybe what is it ten thousand maniacs or something right yeah yeah and like he uh his character in that is sort of along the lines of the mangler but like more of a more of a colonel sanders type whereas in you know uh the mangler he's he's just more put together which is just really weird to see him in that outfit in the midst of this like dirty ass factory that's you know at the centerpiece of which is this you know house size laundry press it's like literally folding people in half if they get too close to it both people like laundry that's what it does it does straight up again this is the most fun shit to talk about but when you guys do watch that shit for your patreon uh you're gonna be in pain like it is it is real tough to get through but it is super fun to talk about yeah yeah it looks unforgivably long i mean i haven't seen it in a long time but it's like 106 minutes like what are we doing here that thing should be 80 minutes long christine is christine kind of surprisingly long too for carpenter carpenter is such a 90 minute movie maker like in the and it's like killer runny's on and then this is star man they're a little you know they have a little more room to breathe like i feel like christine kind of doesn't get to the scares for a while like it's a lot of you know scene setting and characterization and stuff like that i just want to quickly correct i was wrong robert england did not direct phantom of the opera but i did in trying to confirm that find the poster for this movie which is incredibly bizarre because the poster for phantom of the opera is freddy krueger and it says robert england was freddy now he's the fan of the opera and it's freddy holding up a little fan of the opera mask what other instances are there of one character being used to promote an entirely different movie that that character does not appear in this is more egregious than stephen king appearing this is wild this is like the most insane this makes you think that freddy krueger is going to be haunting the opera right it's like a deadpool uh promoting a free guy yes the tagline is an all new nightmare well that's all they had to work with on that one apparently illegal i hope everyone went to jail who was involved in it christine uh he gets his manuscript uh cobert brings it to him they write a script they're like great you film in eight weeks it comes out that year it was also a very very quick movie what like in terms of the shoot yes yeah just the entire development process it was just like the book comes out while they're filming uh it's blowing up the charts the movie's in theaters like four or five months later um everyone's trying to recapture that fucking box out of gold from carrie yeah yeah yeah uh he wants to cast kevin bacon very badly i think that uh repeats itself in starman uh bacon auditioned for this uh they're gonna cast him uh correct and then he gets offered footloose and takes that set i don't buy him as a nerd i could buy him i don't either yeah he's been a really good dentist and it's it's a thing i like about keith gordon in this movie is he is actually a loser at the beginning of the film not because and yet he pulls off the transformation to creep at the end the thing that's impressive is the transformation right you're looking you're like i don't think i can buy this i'm gonna buy this guy's anything but a dork those glasses really do a lot a lot yeah this was the original he's all that yes oh yeah for sure that leather vest though is not a great look it's terrible it's a terrible look that's pretty rough but i just feel like most often they will do the kevin bacon version of the casting where it is like the first 45 minutes kevin bacon is slouching and using like nason x and he has the taped up glasses and you're not buying it and then he becomes what you knew he always was meant to be whereas there's more tension as you said david you're watching the first half of this movie you're like well this is just gonna be embarrassing when this guy tries to act off it's gonna be like bully mcguire and spider-man 3 and it really it works it makes it's one of the more unnerving aspects of the movie the fact that he actually does become so sociopathic and that he underplays it you know well it's because he's not trying to play cool i think that's where a lot of instinct would be that okay i'm now the cool guy you know because the whole thing's an allegory you know you can read it as an allegory anyway you know this guy losing his virginity right and he's becoming a man and you know he's not gonna be as nervous and as awkward because he's not nervous about all that stuff he's found a woman you know the woman just happens to be car um he's horny for that car though he's far hornier than for his extremely attractive girlfriend yeah but yeah but like the fact that the turn isn't into a cool greaser or whatever it is it is a guy that is instantly creepy like he's got confidence and you can see how that works out for him in certain ways but like it is a legit like kind of disturbing performance i wouldn't quite put it in the same category as nicholson in the shining you know when he's doing like a dead eye stare you know out but it's kind of that same ballpark where it's like you this guy you wouldn't trust to be if he was in the same room with you it's like being in the room with a loaded gun i agree and i think watching all these carpenter movies so close together it is a thing i noticed throughout his filmography he is really good at whether it's just that he's good at casting or he's good at guiding shaping these performances but so many of his these movies require a character to have like a fundamental change on sort of like a cellular level where it is whether it's you know they experience some sort of trauma or shock and they lose their their joie de vivre or they turn evil or whatever it is something like star man where he's learning how to be a person gradually these movies always have these transformations that have to be sold not through prosthetics but by a shift in energy from the actor they're always done pretty uh specifically but also in a believable understated uh manner it is also interesting that this is uh keith gordon and john stockwell both of who go on to become directors after that yeah keith gordon he didn't make the singing detective remake or whatever the movie version of it yeah yeah and what's what's it called waking the dead is that the movie yeah which is not a bad movie i i haven't seen it in 20 years i remember that being like a pretty solid moody drama right yeah and he like directs prestige television now he does homeland and fargo leftovers yeah um and then john stockwell kind of in the opposite direction uh john stockwell who you know handsome guy uh did what did he do uh let's see i'm taking well he's also he did blue crush right and crazy beautiful fuck did he also do i love crazy beautiful he did blue crush and into the blue black back to back he should have done into the blue that was that was uh you know uh a hat on a hat or whatever god into the blue is truly like these people look good in swimsuits in the movie right i don't even know what the plot of that thing is that's the plot albert and walker they're not wearing a lot okay yeah josh brolin's the villain uh josh brolin sure is scott khan's in that one apparently um blue crush is the one with um kate bosworth right correct and michelle rodriguez and then a third person on the poster who never made another movie i i uh i have an interesting story about that because i met kate bosworth on the set of rules of attraction i went to i was on rules of attraction for two days uh doing set visit for any cool news which i was writing for at the time and um in it back then she was that was like one of her first things and of course i remember just being struck by you know different colored eyes and she was super sweet and all that and then i saw her in you said it's probably super cringy look at it now because i was like 20 writing it but i wrote a review for it then i went to i was invited to the premiere of rules of attraction and and i get like tackled by kate bosworth at the premiere and she gives me a big kiss on the cheek and thanks me for my review of blue crush so that is my blue crush anecdote i don't remember anything about the movie but it did earn me a kiss on the cheek in kate bosworth david yes you have an intentional air about you today well i'm more intentional than what i wear day to day oh i'm leaning into pieces that feel easy comfortable and put together i'm sure you can get those from anywhere right oh quince oh he's showing tag on me um it's uh been my go-to because very clean fits very nice fabrics yeah don't they don't feel like cheap fabric i hate dirty fits i hate cheap fabrics i am it we're in you know if the weather's getting warmer i really rely on my quince polo shirts for the kind of like exactly like a formal enough piece of clothing i don't go to the office but it's comfy yes because we do have a dress code here so they got those 100 pima cotton tees with a softness they got a feel oh and for those people david is touching the fabric can't sit that same balance relax and comfortable i gotta tell you uh i recently had a birthday and my in-laws sent me a quince gift card because they know i like quince so much and i am itching to spend this that's a really strong endorsement right yes um everything at quince is priced 58% less than what you find a similar branch because they work with those ethical factories they cut out the middleman getting premium materials without the markup i've got this cashmere zip okay david is showing me oh nice cashmere zip sweater very nice yeah i wear it all the time it's got pockets um so refresher every day with luxury you actually use head to quince.com slash check for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in canada too that's quince.com slash check for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash check both of you guys have read the christian book correct yes sure the book there is like the presence of the previous owner right the robert blossom character's brother roland yeah and in the movie essentially that scene is roland scene in the movie roland sells the kid the cards not his brother so um so essentially robert blossom is playing roland he's playing the guy that dies um his brother is in the book but he kind of he's a normal guy he comes in and essentially is there to give um arnie's some backstory or arnie dennis a backstory on you know the history of the car um so i don't know why the decision was made because he is playing the creep old creep that on the car it feels like they're just streamlining it and they're also you know nodding to the fact that christine is just born bad versus the backstory of the book where it's a little more complicated that's what i read was a they wanted christine to have like no backstory in that sort of sense uh more just kind of set up the trail of bodies of other people you know taken but b that um they didn't want i guess this sort of like ghostly specter of the previous owner because they thought it was too similar to american werewolf in london but that was a specific thing where they were trying to avoid the griffin dunn character of like oh and this past guy who didn't make it is haunting the kid i don't mind the idea of the car just being bad and i wanted to ask you guys this earlier like do you care like i know you haven't read the book but like in general in a movie where it's like if it just it just is that way or it has a whole backstory like i don't need a whole fucking backstory on everything you know i think it's bad it can depend case by case but like by and large i kind of prefer if you just go look you're seeing the bad car movie you've already bought into the idea that this is a movie about a bad car why we need to explain what are we the game from that or if it's as simple as kujo where it's like well it got bit by that don't worry about it right you know that's it i just think yeah it's usually a waste of time and energy and i do think there is more mythic power like i got amped i'd never seen this movie before and i got amped at the realization of oh shit they're starting with the factory line and she's already taking down people like i just i'm so all in right and i was just like great great this is exactly how pristine the killer car movie should start i hope they never circle back and dig in deeper and they don't and i was very very pleased well i'm the one thing that i'm curious about because george labet um as portrayed in this movie like he wears the back race you made mention of the back race he's wearing in the book there's a reason for that because uh he dies and then arnie starts picking up his mannerisms we have in the movie where he starts calling people shitters and all that and he starts you know almost being possessed not just by the car but by roland le bay himself this old creepy dude um and by the end of it arnie is wearing that back race that he's hurt himself during the process and so he's like he's just more physically transforming into into this you know old crotchety bastard you could see him in some alternate universe you know if he had to survive the story some alternate universe of him like selling christine to the next kid you know of being that guy i like the thing that colin said of just like the idea is that the car can identify weak insecure people you know and then becomes this corrupting force rather than it being about the legacy of one guy and i also like that like once again unexplained but you can extrapolate from the blossom thing and the level of contempt he had for this car and trying to get his brother to quit it and watching his like daughter and his niece and his uh sister-in-law both die at the hand of this thing that he at some point got injured in the car you know yeah like himself that this is you know he fucking tried in vain and he made it out alive but the car still got something out of him um i i just i i don't know i prefer it not being about any one person and that's the thing i like a lot about um having the prologue on the factory line you know it's just like even if we're mostly gonna be haunted by the most recent previous owner we also recognize as david said you take two guys out in the very beginning of the movie and creatively creative kills i like both kills yes but in both cases you just go like okay she's just like a homing beacon you know right yeah i think that you're right i buy that and i also think that there is an element to the book where the book gets really creepy is with the ghost of roll and stuff but you you don't really need that for the the movie so much but there is a moment towards the end that i really wish was in the movie and it would have still spoke to this where the car uh picks off um arnie's dad like she essentially the car attempts arnie's dad into the car and kills him and then during the whole finale where she's you know trying to run down you know dennison and the girlfriend i'm sorry for blicking on lee lee's her name and she like during that whole section the car is trying to kill these guys in the in the movie it's arnie is there driving in the book arnie is not there the matter of fact they set up this whole thing to kill the car while arnie's out of town because they're trying to save their friend and uh but there is somebody in the car that somebody is the fucking rotting corpse of his father who was dead in that car and and there becomes a certain moment and it reminds me a little bit of anaconda but there comes a certain moment where during the fight it just regurgitates it spits out the body of the father and it is the most like fucking out of left field gross thing and the way it affects the characters i was just like man i would love to see that maybe brian fuller will do that part when he does the uh the adaptation right it's fuller fuller's doing it for blum now right in theory yeah well no it's sony it's sony but i think blum's producing it yeah okay he'll do a sony thing but is that actually happening because like ryan fuller no offense just often is attached to things that never take off it was announced only in june so it's a pretty first reason yes okay he's a friend of our show and he's kind of kept us up to date on that he um last i heard uh he's working on it and or i think i think right now he's done with it and waiting you know to uh to hear what happens next um but i do know that he he told us that he um he got a personal go-ahead from king to do it that king had you know held off on uh signing off on any further christine stuff since since carpenter did that one that's interesting do you think that's because king thinks this movie is good or why why i wonder why like because i know stephen king can be a little changeable on his opinions on adaptations you know what if i had to guess if i had to guess i'd say stephen king's a big cannibal fan that's probably true that makes sense yeah and knows fuller uh just from from that i don't know maybe here you know we had a big episode with fuller where he came on and you know basically deconstructed christine through the lens of being a trans allegory and and that uh it's really interesting every time he's on the show it's like he's coming at these things from an angle you would never expect and it's just it's really fantastically listen to how that guy's brain works you know i don't always understand what he's saying but but i you know it's fascinating to listen to and you know um you listen to that stuff you understand why brian fuller gets every job that he wants whether or not it comes to fruition like that guy could go into a room and sell anybody anything sure you could talk into eating your own hand like no problem yeah it's like his enthusiasm is infectious his his point of view is always very smart and educated and deeper than you'd imagine it being so if it does happen then i think it could be something special i don't know you know anything could happen you know that all you we're in an industry where where you know all the surefire kids can still die on the vine if the right they're the wrong person is at the wrong spot at the wrong time so and i do think because it will be the it will be more faithful to the source you're gonna you're gonna get it's not gonna just be it's a bad card you're gonna get the ghost dad right yeah right and in that case you know i'm fine with that i'd love to see that two versions of this exist and you know we get that version of it and it makes sense that that's the version of the movie that's just not the version that christine that carpenter was interested in making i got this quote that our researcher that i love from uh like 2014 not from that long ago where they asked carpenter like does steven king like the movie and he said i don't know steven king loves everything then he hates it he's a weird-ass guy just weird started out started out as a teacher what the hell do you want i don't know that last part i love crotchety john carpenter it's the best and i do think you know king often will turn on adaptations of his work but i don't i have no sense of what he thinks of this movie he probably values it's a john carpenter movie i mean that's you know it's obviously a major person the impression i've gotten just just talking to fuller about it is that he holds it pretty high regard um but i i could be reading too much into you know the anecdotes they share so i don't know it sounds like he's maybe flipped on and off with it uh i found some quote somewhere about where he was carpenters talking about that uh king was upset that they had changed a lot of the deaths and how they played out obviously like the prologue stuff is invented but then once you get into the main body of the film and carpenter's response was like yeah well like one of the bullies in the book it's like he chases him down and he runs over him and then it just says in the book that he like turned into a puddle of grease and i was like that's not very cinematic i'll have him like catch on fire and like run over the guy like he was like thinking visually about stuff which i think king can sometimes i feel be very literal-minded in his adaptations and he goes back and forth on whether like uh what is a necessary reinvention for the medium versus when he's like well why didn't they just do it the way i wrote it the shining being the prime example and lisey story being another recent example because that is like you know straight up the book he wrote every episode of it and i like that to begin with and then the tone of it just started wearing me down where it was like so depressing and so just grim you know watching julianne moore's character you know just get fucking dogpiled by life and this and you know dame dahon no one wants to see you know like and eventually the tone of that one wore me down and i didn't finish it it was on a technical level it was like um beautifully made and other than saying maybe clive owen with a little one note in that role like julianne moore was great in it dahon uh despite being he's just a very slappable looking guy you know um but yeah it works for the character and he like brings a weird kind of menace to it that's interesting that i hadn't seen him do before um where it's less reliant on like ticks and shit like that and it's it's more uh steady staring and like you know holding a gaze and and kind of physically imposing a little key board and creepiness but again the tone which would i would i would argue matches the tone of the book it just wasn't a thing i wanted to watch an hour of every week and it's this is you know going back to what you were saying about you know the necessities in the art of adaptation and making something cinematic right um it doesn't just because it was great on the page does not mean that it's going to be great you know filmed yeah and i you know carpenter is just a very cinematically minded person and i think for him you know like fuller doing a more drawn-out version of this digging into all the mythology makes sense for what he does well as a writer and for carpenter it makes so much more sense to get to the meat and potatoes version of this and just deal with it and i like the fact that he's turning it into also a little bit more of a like uh meek shall inherit thing you know it speaks to like here's this guy who was so put upon at the beginning of this film right like he's got this one friend but otherwise like people are fucking stabbing his yogurt you know his parents keep on giving him the business and he just sort of takes it all in the chin like he's like kind of infuriatingly refuses to stand up for himself and i say this is a deeply beta person you're looking at this guy going like come on like push back a little bit have a little more respect yeah you want to just wedgie the shit out of him right right like and he's one of those guys who is just a target because you're just like come on dude like give me something walking swirly basically right right and the second he gets lured into christine it's like he has such a power trip you know it's not that he becomes cool it's that he becomes this very dark asshole because he now has sort of the confidence he lasts black before and then immediately uh sort of curdles and turns into something that he points at other people like even the scenes where it does not feel like he's directly being controlled by christine it is clear that he just kind of loves now being able to be a creep you know and not give a shit and everything you know and i also like that in so many ways christine really feels like she is the main character of this thing especially because it will jump between the the three young leads arnie and dennis lee but you know for long stretches you might not see one of them and a lot of the transformation that arnie goes through happens like in between scenes you know you're not seeing a gradual step by step you're not watching every scene he comes into his power a little bit more there'll just sort of be a jump and everyone goes like whoa arnie what happened to you you know and as you also watch stockwell like mellow out more and lee's concern increase it's i like the way it all plays out right i mean at the end of the day this is a story about addiction yeah so this is you know you you could uh you make the case very easily that christine's drugs you know drugs and crime and all that stuff and that's why the parents are so adamant that he stays away from it but the more they demand he stay away from it the more appealing it is for him to do and it also for him it represents freedom you know independence that he doesn't have um and all that stuff is just so rich stuff to to mine that it can like live in the subtext and i think that's why there are moments in the movie that really do like strike you like the the show i keep mentioning but the show me moment is like my favorite moment in the movie because because that is the moment that like he just fully embraces um you know being in control of the car but being in control of his life and you know he makes a demand essentially instead of he's not passive you know he's actually stepping up and not blinking in the face of this unbelievable thing also that he has fully accepted the car is magical at that point like up until that scene people talk about the car like i don't know this is gonna sound crazy but it's almost like the car has a mind of its own and like here's a scene where he stands in front of a car and issues a command and the car does the thing and he's not surprised at all you know yeah he's under it i mean he's so in its way by that right right but he also right right um that scene is also just on a technical level it's like you know they're just playing footage in reverse but it still feels like such a fucking magical special effect for real right it's stunning to watch the car inflate it's just like it's still unreal imagery it's real movie magic and that's something that like i really hope brian when he attacks his version of it doesn't forget because the one thing you don't want is for christine to turn into transformers you know well that's the thing if you if you overdo it like then it won't the simplicity of it is what makes it work so well here i mean there's a reason why when you like watch the lord of the rings like the most impressive shit is how they use force perspective and in camera and stuff you know and it just that works so much better than you know popping people in and all that stuff which they had to do in hobbits and stuff and it's even that like the amount of compositing that does exist in lord of the rings is largely compositing actors into models yeah real elements yeah you know they were filming two real elements separately and putting them together um i mean this car just fucking looks incredible which carper said was one of the things that got him on board was like oh this is the this looks great i can shoot the shit out of this like it looks so fucking cinematic and they bought 14 of them and just like buffed them all up and it's my buyer right so it's a the level of destruction they do the car is so severe i mean there's the scene where he's chasing the guy and the guy runs down the alleyway and the alleyway is too narrow and christine's crushing herself yeah and you're just like the fact that you're seeing that actual sort of slow destruction of the car over and over and over again and able to see it magically come back to life and just you know the reflective quality of like a really nice vintage sports car from a director who knows how to light stuff really well you would have to be you would have to be trying to make that car look bad you know it's so right i just don't know if there are other things you can do with this material on a story level but i question if you lose a lot of power the second you put one iota of cgi onto that car or make it a tesla sure sure well the scariest cyber truck yeah the weird cyber truck they do they do uh run over people without somebody driving so right exactly yes yes perfect okay cars just looked very good i wish i knew more about vintage cars but i truly do not because i see this car and i'm like this isn't a you know unbelievable looking machine but also you see a lot of cars from the late 50s and you're like this thing looks like all the cars that everyone was driving around looked unbelievable someone explain this to me yeah i only know one thing about vintage cars triples is best it's just it's so good looking i know if you got like one accident in this thing the car would just actually kill you i mean like you're not even a haunted car but if your body just like hit the dashboard it would basically safety glass everything the whole thing you're gonna get stabbed by the hood somehow yeah i'm like very much not a car guy and i feel like when cars jump out to me in movies they usually are very much movie cars and do not look like anything that would ever be driven in the real world right like concept right right right like goofball banana concept like i like the homer you know to me i'm like oh that's an elegant classic car right oh yeah you like that one yeah right just simple clean but like this is an example of me seeing a real world classic car in a movie going like holy shit that's the coolest fucking thing i've ever seen and my virtual background is like a little like hot wheel style set with tiny keith gordon and john stockwell figures but i was like googling while watching this movie like what is the best like hot wheel scale diecast christine i could get like i'm just like i want a fucking christine on my desk what's out there there's there's a good variety i mean hot wheels themselves had it at one point and there's two other companies that had their larger scale ones but they also throughout the years have produced them in the like junked up for sale version and then the classic shiny version and evil version while the windows are blacked out you can find them pretty cheap i think the one i want there's one that comes with a little diorama of the pratsky garage no pratsky but that feels oh maybe think of robert i saw just like on twitter just a couple of weeks ago somebody had made made one of like exactly what you're talking about it was like it's a cube and around the car was the garage and the car sitting in the center of it but it was it was gorgeous this little fucking thing this guy put together i was like god i would love to have that just i'm not even a big christine fan i would love to have it it's just a good fucking thing yeah it is it's bewitching us guys this car wants to let us over we have to be careful i say we do whatever christine tells us to do it's gonna play an ironic song it's gonna get us it's a proto bumblebee yeah yeah no i'm wearing a back brace right now so yeah so i'm well on my way the robert robert's blossom scene just like a great version of the friday the 13th play guy i also i love that the car looks so bad like it's so bad right it's so bad because you expect that it's like well of course the kids i'm watching the movie for the first time i'm like how is he gonna fall in love with this evil car because the car looks so nice right and you have this massive chime jump i'm like oh the eerie thing is that the car is still going to be in pristine condition no it looks worse than any car's ever looked and it's overpriced like it's not even like oh he wins the car he doesn't want it but it is that siren song thing of like stop the car back up i need to go see this thing and everyone's like what are you talking about what are you doing yeah right but it's preying on the vulnerability of this guy knowing that he could be corrupted yeah i also this is this movie is right around happy days is still kind of on top right like yes are we still talking like are we still into happy days in 83 years it's kind of uncool at this point it's jumped the shark it's still on the air but it has officially jumped the shark i don't know just like this movie is kind of i know it's not set in the 50s but it's sort of got that sort of interesting repudiation of the whole kind of you know hyper masculine greaser thing like it's kind of the nasty you know side of that the bullies are very much greaser inspired even but they're like crude and like awful like they're just like nasty they poop on the car and almost to the person like 35 years old yes yes yes and also i'm like wait are we in high school here or are we in like you know industrial college like what is this like especially the guy like buddy represent it's just like that they pulled that guy out of a gold's gym you know and william ostrander uh it is incredible how old he looks uh i mean the movie takes this shift in the last hour where it becomes like harry dean stanton is the fourth lead and now you know you've got this american psycho style like cat and mouse you know on the trail he's convinced that keith gordon's wrong but i do like the angle of like keith gordon is not there for most of us right like he knows the car is evil he knows that the car has corrupted him but when harry dean stanton is asking about these things he's not covering up for specific incidents because even though he hates these fucking guys and at this point he's purely happy that they're dead he also like doesn't know that this happened necessarily right he has a real alibi the car is actually doing murder like when harry dean stanton's sipping around it's not like harry dean stanton's like you know i just got hunted this car is unilaterally committing crime but i just i love that term because like when he's complaining about the guys fucking with him and i think it's when he's yelling at his parents about the car being destroyed before the show me scene and he like he's like crying about the fact that they shit on the hood right like it's just like the indignity of these people right they have no humanity this is not something you brush off right and then like he's gotten his revenge the car has gotten his revenge he's now acting more low-key about everything he's fucking started big-dogging his parents like he doesn't give a shit anymore harry dean stanton comes sniffing around and he's like you know it's interesting your girlfriend came to me said you were really upset about uh this these guys attacking your car uh you know you're really proud of this restoration job you did there's one million job where you're able to replace every part without any color differentiation in like under a week it's weird people usually report these kinds of things to the police and show photos and he's like i don't know it wasn't a big deal i could forgive those guys and there's just that really cutting line delivery where harry dean stanton looks at him and goes like they defecated on the hood of your car like the guy's gotten over it and harry dean stanton is trying to remind him like they really disrespected you there was poo poo on your hood a guy named muji did doo-doos on your car this is not something a man forgives i really love this is what this is the year before we come in i love harry dean stanton just playing a pretty normal guy like when he shows up in a movie and you're like oh what's sinister sort of like or odd or kind of quirky things about that he's kind of just the detective on the case in this one at the end he's just kind of like could you get rid of the car guy yeah that thing was bad so speaking of we should probably like talk about the button on this movie as well that that whole uh is the car still alive even though it's crushed into a block uh thing yeah well the whole final standoff is great between christine and the forklift because you do get to a point i think which is necessary for movies like this building an actual sense of dread of how could you possibly stop this thing is there any way to destroy it right uh and the forklift is just like okay i guess the approach is relentlessness just attack it from every angle non-stop and don't let it recharge right exactly don't give it room to reinflate and then you have the hard cut to the block now it's in the perfect compact wall-y trash block right and then they give that with a great fake out where the oldies start playing like oh my god a guy walks by with a boombox or whatever that is so cheesy but i i gotta know i fucking love it i mean is i hate rock and roll the last proper line of dialogue in the movie i think so then there's the um it like holds on the thing and then like one of the little metal pieces like planes out right that's the the final shot of the movie yes yeah christine's coming back baby not to spoil but in the book christine is is sort of maybe still alive right like he like hears about a car accident he's like could that be christine right yeah the people that survived the story kind of scattered and you know i think it's like a one dude um yeah i think it is i think it's is it i think the christine car itself in the book is like dead but like whatever evil spirit is now maybe going in other it's transferred right right i thought the car that like blows through the wall of the fucking drive-in and take out the guy i thought that like matched the description of christine but i could be missing that wasn't my impression but that doesn't mean that uh that i read it in any great detail and retain that so you might be right uh i started because i'm sticking into this that when they do the the show me sequence that was a car they partially destroyed and then um replaced most of the metal shell with a softer plastic and then they have hydraulic pumps inside sucking it in so that it was able to sort of compress and retract more cleanly than metal obviously right shatter and everything yeah and then it's obviously played backwards uh 15 percent of the budget was just the cars yeah no shit that is funny though they really shelled out on these cars my god it's the star that's their tom cruise yeah you gotta get that right this and blues brothers 2000 had the biggest you know car budget that is what a waste uh just all around it for everything um they only uh only two cars remained attacked at the end of the movie which uh columbia uh requested so that they could um use them for promotional stuff uh send them around and things like that and then immediately immediately destroy them while transporting them by crashing so then i went i was looking for stuff on imdb right and i searched for christine and i mostly get results of actresses with uh christine as their first name of course a weirdly ungoogleable movie yes it's a problem uh christine taylor messing up uh search optimization uh but uh one of the top results is christine movie car which has its own credit on imdb as an actress no shit it's alive born october 31st 1957 so i went oh this is kind of cool someone took the car in the movie and gave it a performer page no christine movie car has zero credits this is not the car that was in the movie this is a fan-built car that someone put on imdb listed as an actress bill gibson's christine movie car is the most expansive immersive christine experience traveling today now with over a decade of thrilling fans under her wheels yeah we need to get the christine car and the green goblin truck from maximum overdrive together i think we need to bring them on the show interview the cars it's just lots of rooms there's events they'll drive it to you maybe do you think you can like book like it's like a children's birthday party like you can book them with the car i just want to go back to my key point this car is not an actor this car has never been in a movie christine is an actor she gets a very good performance in the movie technically it's 14 actors but all of them are good this car has never been in anything this car just goes to fucking birthday parties you go fucking around on imdb son and you're gonna find all kinds of weird shit people look at the trivia section on literally any movie on imdb and you'll see like the most useless fucking knowledge you've ever seen like just plastered 80 000 people found it helpful or some shit i am looking at the slideshows on the christine the movie car website and here she is my favorite thing though is like the pictures say like you know stew bill and me dot jpg me being the car so the car is like the car has uploaded these photos herself like from her digital camera like when somebody sets up like an account for their dog on twitter yes exactly i just love going to colorado this weekend let me ask you this like when i was first thinking about uh you know this traveling living car who's an actor that was not actually interesting i'm thinking like you know thrilling fans like what is it doing it's just sitting there surely in the showroom i don't think people get to drive it i can't imagine they do unless they pay extra but if you had the opportunity like if you knew within a 20 minute drive or something you could go like take a picture with a 58 plymouth fury you know i think i might do that i'd like to see i've never seen one in person so i don't know if i would be thrilled to buy it per se but i i would i would spend a couple hours i think i would go to a movie car show i think if there was specifically a car show that was like here are like 10 fan-made recreations they don't even have to be the original screen used right but if it was like here's the ecto-1 and the v8 interceptor and christine and i get to see all i would make the trip for several i just also want to quickly refute something you said scott that uh i'm going to be trivia is filled with useless information that no one finds interesting uh if not for intv i would not have known that quote keith gordon was nervous about kissing alexandra paul so he asked her to practice first and 81 out of 86 people find that interesting that's the oldest trick in a book jeez christ we've all heard about that very nervous just as an actor is there no follow-up there did you say yes no further information i don't know i just know that he asked weirdly robert frosky hasn't tried the same thing with her but he said keith keith's really worried but you know he said i want to make sure you're ready yeah from my boy keith uh yeah we're we're slandering robert frosky here of course a hero of community absolutely that was the one time you didn't have lemon face on that's it the only other interesting thing here on the ndb trivia is that um the movie was not violent enough to get an r but because there was no pg-13 at this time they were very worried about being caught in pg territory because especially the premise of potentially goofy as kid with an evil car they thought would get written off so they put a couple of fucks in there just to get the operating yeah because it's not a gory movie at all really it's not yeah the scares are not too intense in christine no it's really more just fun it's unnerving and it's fun yeah yeah but like it's walking that goofy line especially with the radio you know the radio gags always going i mean ebert put it perfectly his review he gave it three out of four stars and his review was by the end of the movie christine has developed such a formidable personality that we are actually taking sides during its duel with a bulldozer this is the kind of movie where you walk out with a silly grin get your car and lay rubber halfway down the eisenhower yeah i kind of agree with that you're kind of on christine's side yeah yeah she's just so beautiful you know so you're just and also like i guess so many of the bad guys that she's taken out are such dickheads that you're gonna do some collateral damage of course and we have to forgive christine for that but we can't because she's pretty and also because you know yeah he's killing all those other the lead choking on a hamburger scene is really good uh just to go backwards but i just think that's the movie the moment where i think the movie is playing with the most sort of like interesting supernatural vibes because it's not the violence inflicted by the car it's this weird level of control of like her body right it's locking him out it's turning the lights on blaring the music just for spite and then somehow it's able to make her choke it is such a great um moment for her as a character christine as a character like so much of the success of this movie and you know i'm still saying this to somebody you know it's pretty good you know not not all-timer but one of the great successes is the personality that carpenter is able to give that car yes you you feel the vengefulness of addictiveness the jealousy of an inanimate object which is you know kind of bad shit to hear me actually say that and hear those words coming out of my heart but watching the movie there are multiple moments where i could feel myself projecting facial expressions onto christine like going like christine looks angry you know and it's like i'm adding like a fucking pixar car eyes to it or whatever but it is just a he knows how to shoot it and b that he's about the story beats of it enough that you actually do start sensing intent yeah well like you said it really is i think the most of it is isn't how carpenter shoots it it's the angles he's picking it's the editing choices he's making in those moments where in the joking scene it becomes forensic it becomes a fight scene you know it is right he starts shit with the guy trying to do the heimlich on her like yeah right so like he's possessed the car is evil this guy's a good samaritan leah somehow lost control of her autonomy like there's so many things going at once and it's all underscored by uh classic rock music and that's another thing that's what he has in his favor is just i will always find bad to the bone funny yeah yeah impossible to take that yeah but this is the exact correct use of it you know absolutely and isn't that what they kind of like sold uh carpenter on the whole idea with was with that song because that song is um well let's see like twice yeah yeah that song yeah but that song is new right like at the time right you know that's like and here wait there's something i think we found it i think it's in the um their pitch to carpenter was we have the rights to bad for the bone right bill phillips uh basically was like like i just found this song and he sang it he did the bad and they were like yeah that sounds good and they bought this that was saying they sang that that's sort of the chorus and they were like perfect yeah wow that's amazing yeah um but then but yeah the carpenter score is really good though i like the carpenter score i mean i'm surprised with with alan harworth obviously but also i mean it's nestled in between two movies that he famously didn't score yeah with really different you know with of course like starman and uh uh the thing you know have these wonderful scores but they're well the thing is i guess a little more carpentry it's more moody but uh but the starman score so expansive which i love yeah that's definitely mark only doing yeah doing carpenter but it's more it's more a pest role and then the starman score is a lot more emotional than he usually goes right right let's talk box office this movie when did this movie come out griffin this movie came out you know no remember december 9th 1983 christmas movie of course of course yeah that's the thing it's not exactly where i would put this in the summer or you know halloween like it's a summer movie i think yeah because exactly it's got the back-to-school thing going on it's got a lot of you know it's not actually that dark movie in like you know aesthetically but whatever they put they chunked it out in christmas against two big movies so it's opening number four uh to three million dollars and it's making how much total it's making 21 domestic ironically kind of made the things final right like what did the thing end up with you know as much as like the thing was a huge bomb for him and this was kind of a recovery like another thing made 13 i guess that was pretty yeah okay you have it in front of you what it opened against oh yeah we're about to play the box office game my friends all right so number one of the box office is okay and this is one of those things where i always have to look this movie up because i don't remember it's it's the fourth in a series of popular films okay but the fact that you have to look up that it's four tells me no numbers it's the fourth this is the movie that has the second most famous catchphrase of this character and everyone always remembers that it's i think it's in the first movie it's actually the fourth it's pretty hairy it's right and this is the movie that's directed by but what's it called enforcer i always get this wrong is it magnum i always like this one nope that's the second you now being the third and second okay and then deadpool is the last one it's not the deadpool so now you are you are it's sudden impact this is the movie where he says go ahead make my day um it's the one clint made i've never seen sudden impact it's actually on my watch list you guys do you guys have dirty hairy takes you guys care about dirty hairy i've seen the first i've seen the first one and i've been like a little chunk of the deadpool but um yeah that's about the extent of my knowledge on that i watched the later ones a lot as a kid because they were always on hbo right um so i probably seen the fourth one the deadpool is one like sandra lock in it right like there's i know this is the one with this one this one the most yeah and there's like a shootout like on a boardwalk or like an amusement park boardwalk or something yes like there's a carousel scene i think a big carousel piece yeah so there's this one i must watch over and over again i really like the first one because of the just we're gonna take the zodiac you know or whatever yeah they're all pretty good yeah i do remember really liking that yeah they're like good stupid movies it is wild that the first one's a zodiac movie and they were like huh what this is a franchise right i mean i think the first one was not even like we think it was so it was a huge hit obviously right it's like you know i made 36 million it's not like one of these things where it demands for sure it wasn't rocky right but i think it became just such this cultural touch point you know i mean that the first one 71 and this is what 83 so i guess just once in a while clint would be like let's do another one i think that's the other thing i think clint was obviously such a big star and the western was going increasingly out of fashion and he was like i should figure out another thing i can pick up and put down whenever i want another tough-ass character with a gun what can i do cop right right right just stick with it why not make them all the same guy yeah now number two box office is a seismic movie very big deal movie um i think it's sort of greeted with some kind of like with some critical jeers um but it's a big hit um it's a major star is it sort of no footloose is the singer starman right okay right it's a crime movie it's sort of the moment this star is switching from acclaimed brilliant theater guy who's like the master of 70s acting to the guy he laid the more over-the-top actor that he becomes this is kind of the hinge point this is a pacino movie it's now of course it's a big uh it's a bit oh oh oh it is uh the movie entitled scarface another christmas classic i'm right right like that's kind of that's the moment where he he's unlocked the new thing right yeah um that's like even like bobby dearfield like those movies he made before this that weren't hits like he's still doing the brooding internal kind of you know and then scarface he's just yeah he never quite he couldn't stop he pops he turns into walking right this becomes a thing yeah um scarface do you care about scarface people would never talk scarface yeah i kind of i mean it's like it's one of those movies where i feel like people are either evangelical about it or they're like that movie is garbage everyone is insane for liking it and i kind of respect both opinions yeah i kind of agree with that it's kind of undeniable when you watch it you know it's hard to right now have a little fun with it absolutely but there is that thing i'm just like i've seen the palma movies i've seen pacino movies i know what these guys can do right do you guys like scarface i think my big issue with scarface is that i tend to associate scarface with people like dudes who had scarface posters it's a lebowski issue it's a fight 12 issue well that's the biggest issue it is it's all fair right so we need some distance from that like i should have come back around to some of those movies not the boodocks i think i've only seen scarface like twice i saw it as a teenager and a few years ago i revisited it and it's like i'm kind of like that's that's fine i can't imagine being fanatical about that movie i think it's a good movie but i'm also imagining now like an italian actor being like i'm cupid like if it happens today how furious everyone would get it's definitely not my favorite flavor of the palma like uh i blowout is like one of my all-time favorite movies and blowout's my favorite and you know fan of the paradise and carrie and untouchables you know that is that is my diploma like i i think scarface i'm glad people love it but it's not mine guadagnino is still supposed to do that right in theory he is but he was addicted to announcing that he was going to remake iconic movies for a while he was always attaching himself to these remakes of movies we're like luca both of them did it was maybe one of the last scripts that both of them worked on yeah i mean that alone that alone sells a ticket to me and i think it's supposed to be diego luna i think he was supposed to do with anton fifa i don't know if he's still on board but there were there were competing scarface projects there was ones that were like supposed to be an updated version of the de palma like cheese fest one and then there were other ones that were supposed to be like more of the old the paul mooney yeah the howard hawks movie right now right and then i also think there i at times it seemed like their approach has been like just do another one it's like it's star is born just what is the new scarf is for this guy just needs to have a scar on his face anything else from the two previous movies as long as there's a mountain of cocaine somewhere we're gonna be happy number three okay that is the best picture winner for 1983 it's only covered on this podcast it's a huge uh terms of endearment it's terms of endearment right the number two movie at the box office for that year behind return of the jedi that's right i just i will always call out that kind of fact that like it used to be the best picture winner was the highest worst film of the year and if it wasn't it was because there was a star wars and the best picture winner was still number two it's the only other movie in 83 to crack a hundo yeah return of jedi is like 250 million dollars over terms of endearment makes 108 um number four is christine uh opening to three million dollars on a thousand screens and number five is a musical um i feel like we're gonna cover it on this podcast one day as a director barbara streisans yentel i know you want to cover yentel you can't slip that one by me she's an easy three movie we probably might have to do her stars one i guess because that's yeah you know there's a couple movies with her where she didn't direct them you kind of have to toss them in i feel like but like yes didn't you also bring up prince of tides the other day in a very similar way we were like prince of tides which we will of course someday cover on this podcast i gotta do streisans why not yeah that's what the people demand let's uh we could do streisans and as you said it's like it's only really three movies we could also do a bonus episode on her basement wall that's the weirdest shit ever it's one of the greatest blank checks in history do you not know this no tell me tell me i don't know what you're talking about her huge uh mansion compound that she lives in with james broland she's like i love shopping more than anything but i'm so famous i can't go to normal people's stores anymore more so her entire basement is like a shopping mall with stores and employees who work at cash registers and she walks into like her fake banana republic and looks at the stack of seven sweaters and goes like do you have one in small and they're like we'll check in the back it's role play she's already bought all the inventory they buy things in the wrong size that she has to look for the right thing i swear maybe someone else wants to go maybe what if i wanted to go she'd be like oh maybe they have your size i don't know when i read i forget where i read about that but i got the distinct impression that only barb is allowed to shop you don't think i could knock on the door and be like hey i heard you have a banana republic is there sale going on this weekend she comes in and finds you sitting in her rainforest cafe that was there was the off-broadway play buyer and seller which was about an employee in barbastrice and seller waiting all day for her to come in and buy something i don't think anyone else goes in there i get it that's funny imagine clocking in every morning and thinking i might just be here for nine hours yeah it's a fascinating idea yeah like we would have to go we'd have to try and go we'd have to go that'd be the best fucking job ever are you kidding me you'd just be sitting there fucking watching tv and shit all day and then there'd be like a motion sensor activated or the ding of an elevator or something and then suddenly you're like what if what if like one of the stores though is like everyone has you know i'm sure we all do has like a problem store every time you go there something is horribly wrong right but you still have to go in there from time absolutely so maybe uh strike hand has the equivalent of that so imagine being the employee at that store where it's like not only may you be sitting around all day but if you know barbara's coming in she's looking for something to get mad about because that's her imaginary problems that's that's the story she karen's out yes she's the worst customer what do you mean that you're at a small like and they're like you told us to order all mediums what do you mean you're at a small like play along i'm trying to do it you can't break the fourth wall you're not allowed i'm trying to find pictures of this but it is like a main street it's like a fake hobble street that then has different storefronts that sell different items so it's like an outlet mall yes it's like it's like one one main hallway in a like a shopping mall that you would do if you had you know strike sand level i would absolutely do this i would do this are you kidding me i would do well my question is like is there something like would you like rebuild mars 2112 in your home you know like is there some like clothes themed restaurant or store that you would resurrect like is there something like that that's a good idea mars cafe maybe think it might be cool to have a suncoast yeah you build something that doesn't exist anymore yeah right yeah right look my version of this would probably be a virgin mega store right i would like a sega world maybe i don't think there are any sega worlds anymore but i used to go to sega world all the time you know i would love love to imagine exists in barbara strike sand's little mall is a shoe store with al bundy as the uh the shoe salesman like just that's what fucking uh ed o'neill just does now when he's not just like one shift a week yeah as al bundy and i mean yeah that's like the ultimate which i think i'm gonna hire hire somebody to play their fucking role all the time i posted the link in the chat but there's like a bizarre magazine slideshow of this and one of them is like uh one store has a gift wrapping table so she can make employees wrap gifts that she just bought from her own inventory of her own store it's so fucking bizarre it's so bizarre as well that this is in harper's bizarre and it's being presented as like you know barbara strike sand's fashionable life and not like barbara strike sand's insanity further confirmed by her insane fake store right barbara strike had a disassociated episode that built them all do you think the employees are hourly or do you think their salary i don't know and i wonder this constantly i would i would pay money to have just a like to sit and have a beer with someone that works at barbara's mall i think i don't know how much it was based on reality because i think a lot of this is like secretive right to some degree like even her doing this bizarre photo shoot was kind of a big deal 10 years ago because she had sort of like kept it a little bit low-key for a while but that's like oh absolutely i wouldn't tell anybody about this shit i think that play is about like he's like a struggling actor who worked at disneyland when he gets fired he picks up the job here like it's like that kind of circuit of like she wants to hire performers because they have to play their role you know i like you know i like that kind of thing you know i like that kind of thing i think i think i think i this this photo thing is all like the subject not subjects but like the whole thing's built around like oh it's not real stores this is just how i display my stuff but it's it's stores and there's also i might add a nightmare photo of her cradling a porcelain doll yes yes true true nightmare shit how's that b's all where do you think the line of weirdness begins because for me the demarcation line is the employees if you just had like a play mall to set up like set up if you could walk around in and pull shit off shelves that's one level of psychosis but like to actually go to the effort of hiring human beings and having them work there that's where it crosses into like you need to talk to somebody about this it's like michael jackson you know neverland ranch obviously there's a bunch of uh stuff about neverland ranch that we don't want to talk about but like just even on the service even if it was all good clean fun he just decided i'm gonna build an amusement park you know in my thing and have you know this is different because even right even though it was for salacious ends part of it was like i want other people to be able to ride yes exactly he was bringing like scores of children through there and their parents and who fucking knows who else but this is just barbara it's just it's i want to be able to shop without anyone recognizing me it's it's like right this is all evidence of why we should do barbara stricent on the podcast that happens sometimes yeah i guess so and speaking of michael jackson he would just he would just shut swords down and go in and shop by himself i don't know why she would she just wouldn't do that and point of things that was his thing right he would just be like right and then yeah people are just running around packing everything the last photo i posted in the chat is the the underground main street mall made over for christmas hey look at festive now do you think do you think that she organizes this or it's someone's job to redecorate everything for christmas to surprise her here's my question maybe it's just happening all by itself and no one knows what's going on it's a magical mall it's got a life of its own yeah we got a night at the museum situation going on here i think i think it's somewhere up the middle group i think it's like yeah she has she has someone whose job is to redecorate them all for christmas every year but she doesn't know what it will look like right so that part is the surprise but she knows there is that nice feeling of like oh new york city in november oh the christmas decorations have gone up like it just happens overnight one day and you're a little surprised by it you know i'm sure she wants to replicate that feeling of being like oh already uh pods of cast miniseries coming to 2022 i guess yeah gonna happen just go store by store just ignore the movie side of things just go store by store you don't need to break into that mall and record an episode in there before you don't really want to that would be sick to wrap up we would all get arrested uh some of the other things by our own fake police yes and we would be dragged in front of dry sand court you know no dry sand prison does she have barbara bucks you think instead of like using regular currency probably steve kundberg is playing mahoney and he's a security guard in the mall um a christmas story you got the big chill you got uh the jason knockoff never seen ever again you got all the right moves with tom cruise yeah the other one is a good movie uh the smurfs and the magic flute which is apparently some sort of belgian smurf movie that uh came out in the states like many years after it had premiered in uh europe right okay play a major part they do not appear until 35 minutes into the film the film is 74 minutes long sounds pretty bad this is the jaws of smurfs movies because okay because this this movie was made by payo who is the creator of the smurfs and then in the 80s hannah barbara get the rights of the smurfs and make the american cartoon and this has no association with that cartoon but was released then in theaters to capitalize on the cartoon so the kids know weird is that's just that's the only reason i mentioned it just seemed like a weird little you know made a few million bucks they did that a lot in the 80s by the way i know it's another topic but like i remember they put like trick children well they put like the he-man they like put two he-man episodes together and released those secret of the sword baby yeah yeah i remember that that very vividly has a big he-man kid not like he-man this is bizarre though uh hey me too uh this is bizarre because it's not it's it's like if you went to the theater it was different than the thing you were watching gargamel's not in this smurfette's not in this no gargamel no gargamel that was an american creation yeah yeah that was smurfette right yeah i know huge problem yeah um anyway we're done christine guys i think we talked more about orchestration small but you know that's honestly more fascinating than christine and scarier yes that picture of the porcelain doll is scary than anything john carpenter's ever never done absolutely uh guys uh king cast obviously people should listen to we agree uh you've certainly done a good job of selling the fuller episodes trying to queue up now i want to dig deep into all the things he was teasing about his christine and you'll hear you'll hear some uh some indications of kind of what drives him about the story and so what i think that uh i mean he his angle that was very clearly a um he wanted to give us a queer reading of christine um i don't know if that's necessarily going to be what the movie is but it just kind of shows what's appealing to him on a character level and on like a subtext level with that with that story so i think you'll have a really good understanding of at least how he's going to approach the material listening to that episode uh that sounds good anything else you guys want to plug not really just our show uh we got when is this uh when is this airing this is dropping it's october 16 uh october uh no september 19th oh this is this is more more this is closer okay well right after this airs we've got some amazing guests lined up between now and the end of the year and uh of course we got patreon uh patreon.com backslash king cast and um we just got some surprises up our sleeves it's uh it's a fun show and if you're even remotely a stephen king fan i would i would recommend two episodes drop every one day you can find us on twitter at king cast 19 uh awesome thank you guys so much for coming on extending your knowledge no we need to get you guys on for something i'm just a dork i'm just a you know i'm no expert i just but i love the guy griffin where are you at and you're steven have you have you read a lot of king i have not i don't think i've read a single king i've seen a good number of the movies but now that i maybe like the idea of reading something specifically to come on the show using guys let's talk we'll figure it out well thank you so much for having us this is great hey thank you so much for coming on and thank you all for listening and please remember listening please remember to rate review and subscribe thank you to marie bardi for our social media thank you to lane montgomery and the great american novel for our theme song and people should check out their new album extremely loud incredibly online you can find it where music sounds uh apple music bank and stuff like what have you thank you to uh joe for our artwork jj birch nick lariano for our research go to blankies.com for some real nerdy shit and you can go to patreon.com slash blank check for blank check special features where we are uh trekking into uh the tombs of the mummy that's right that's right we're in the middle of that we're getting wrapped up in the mummy as i would call it it's mummy in the bank it's mummy in the bank thank you for that a joke you'll hear me make several times over the next couple months yep i will not quit it uh and tune in next week for our episode on starman with returning guest katie rich that's right and as always my fundamental question is does barbara streisand small have a food court it's just a sparrow and they do they give out samples you