All right, here we go. Quiet, quiet. Roll up. Hello and welcome to the Big Picture Podcast, where we take a look at the latest movie news, the films of today and yesterday, and put them all into some sort of context.
Seated across the microphone from me is my compatriot on this journey today, Richard Drees. And seated across the microphone from me is my always lugubrious traveling companion and FilmBuffOnline contributing editor, Natasha Bogutski. How are you doing today, Natasha? Hey.
We are away from our day jobs now. It's a rare Monday evening recording. That's good stuff. Well, thank you.
Yes. If we took commercials, I would gladly take a commercial from Writers Tears Scotch. Yes. Because that is a product I feel very good in endorsing.
Yes. I'm sure that they also celebrated the WGA possibly coming to terms. Well, I don't think you would celebrate the WGA winning their contract and everything that they wanted with Writers Tears so much as a Scotch brand called Studio Tears, which would be a much more apropos thing. But yeah, you do bring a good point.
As of last night, around 9pm Pacific time, midnight our time, it appears as if the Writers Guild and the AMPTP have reached an agreement ending a five-month, almost five-month long strike. I think it was mid-April. Yeah. Yeah, it's been historic.
It's been educational, how these things work. It's going to get really cold soon, so I'm glad they're wrapping it up. I want to say it was the 2008 strike happened in the winter, though. Because I remember going up to the writers' picket line in New York one day when I had to be in the city and I bought two jugs of coffee from Dunkin' Donuts and I brought them to the picket line.
Aww. I'm showing my solidarity because you know us. You know me. We are always going to be siding with the writers on this stuff.
I'm still pissed that I didn't find the time to go up and picket. I actually had an open invitation from two different writers that I know in New York who are WGA who were like, if you are around, feel free to. And you know, I do feel bad. Now, SAG is still going.
We have friends in, I think she's in New York right now, who are SAG. We have friends in Vegas who are SAG. We probably know somebody in Los Angeles who's SAG. So of course, we're, you know, supporting them as well.
If it's still going, I'm off Friday, October... Uh-oh. Friday, October 13th. That's New York Comic-Con weekend.
But yeah, maybe come in. I'm sorry. No one's going to be at Comic-Con. They're going to be out on the street picketing.
Yeah, in terms of that, yeah, that's the one thing. I think we talked about this last time when we talked about the strike. I would be surprised if they'd even be picketing around the Javits. Oh, God, if they did.
Don't cross that picket line. No, I wouldn't. I would suck. But I feel bad for Joel.
Yeah, our good friend Joel Meadows of Tripwire Magazine. Wonderful folks there. He is leading a panel on being a comics journalist in Britain. That's going to be Thursday, I think it's at 10:30 at the Javits Center during New York Comic-Con.
I'm going to be there because he asked me to film it for him. And he's also serving Jimmy Dodgers and Jaffa Cakes. Yeah, well, that's the other reason I'm going to be there. No, I'm going to be there because...
Grab as many as possible for me. My stories have gone bare. I know. Even if he hadn't asked me to film, I definitely would have been there to support him.
And his partner Andy in Tripwire, who's a great guy too. And I'm looking forward to seeing both of them. It's like the one time a year we get to hang out because, you know, that pesky Atlantic Ocean is in the way, mostly. But yeah, that's exciting that New York Comic-Con is coming up.
I think we're going to squeeze one more episode of this in before that. And then I come back from Comic-Con. I have like three days and then I turn around and it's the Philadelphia Film Festival. I think we discussed that our Halloween one was going to be a double feature, correct?
Yes. Yes. Oh boy, here we go. Yeah.
We've got to figure out when we're going to record that. But yeah, October is going to be a crazy month. If we have to record it prior to New York Comic-Con and you just sit on it, we'll sit on it. That's fine.
We've done that before. Yeah. A little peek behind the curtain here as you listen to our production meeting. Well, yeah, we all of a sudden turned this into a production meeting.
Sorry, guys. So anyway, back to the strike ending. Well, hopefully ending. The WGA and the AMPTP have reached a tentative agreement.
Now they get the lawyers to write it all up and then each side looks at what the lawyers have written and make sure that it's all what they agreed in and nobody's trying to sneak in little other things in there that shouldn't be in there. And then it goes to the members of the Writers Guild to be voted on. This is a process that could take a week or two still. The guild has asked, they said, we're going to stand down on our picketing until then.
But they did say, if you want to go support the actors, who were very good with supporting us. If you want to go help them with their picket lines, be our guest. So the writers aren't back to work yet, but they are helping with the SAG, Screen Actors Guild, strike picketing now, which is nice. I mean, there was a lot of co-joining of those picket lines anyways.
So I don't see much in terms of picketing action changing in terms of how many people are out. It's just in terms of how many signs you're seeing for each guild. Where do you get these signs? Because if I go up to strike on Friday, I want to be having one in my hand.
The guild has them. They hand them out? Yep. Some people make their own.
I'm going to miss seeing a lot of strike signs. They were getting clever. Yeah, they were getting clever a while ago. They've been really fun the whole time.
It's just a creative way to... The one about, you know, about I will spoil the ending of Succession. I was like, I mean, good on you, mate, but please don't. Just for me, the viewer.
I know. There was a lot of... I still call it. Well, when this all started back in the spring, how long did I say this strike was going to go to?
End of the year? Initially, I was saying October. More recently, I was a little bit more pessimistic and I thought maybe the end of the year. Well, SAG was definitely end of the year.
Writers Guild, I think, was fall. It's going to be interesting, though, I think. I don't know how quickly AMPTP will turn around and start to engage with the Screen Actors Guild after they finalize this. Do they take a couple of weeks to allow some more hurting on the part of the actors who are out of work?
Or do they go, OK, we have a kind of template for a lot of the same and similar issues that the Screen Actors Guild wants. And we know that they're going to push for parity in their contract. So I think they're going to probably hop right onto it because the way it's looking now, get the writers back to work. It gets to be anywhere between like five to eight weeks to start getting scripts ready for sitcoms and dramas.
Dramas take a little more time. If they can get back to work and get back in front of the cameras late November, they can still have like a shortened spring season of TV that would start airing like beginning of March, middle of March and run through the end of May. You can do 13 weeks. Boom.
Like right there. Maybe into June a little bit because a lot of these shows have international contracts where they owe a network in England, a network in Peru or wherever, wherever they're sending these other shows around the world to. They owe them a season of television. And, you know, depending on what the contract says, they might have to.
That season might have to be a minimum of 13 episodes. I'm curious of how they might have these contractual obligations that could screw them. And that's how they pay for a lot of this stuff because just showing in the U.S. doesn't pay for the production of these shows anymore.
I'm curious of how the awards season promotion is going to happen. I know Ferrari is not gonna pass because Neon, which is not a part of AMPTP, is adhering to the rules of what SAG is looking for. Mm hmm. Yeah.
They got the temporary agreement waiver. So Ferrari is definitely already out there as a front runner. Poor things. I don't think people were in Venice for that.
Nope. It still won. I know that, yeah, we had Toronto recently because Ben Barnes and a few others were there to support their film called The Critic. But that's I think that might have filmed offshore with European actors and it was premiering at Toronto.
So they don't really need to adhere to SAG. It's funny that the stuff that was at Toronto that didn't have like weren't SAG productions like that film. Like, surprisingly enough, this is how I'm gonna work this in. It's not making sense.
The Talking Heads documentary, which was made 40 years ago. Well, SAG still existed I saw this when I watched the Reputation concert, which you can find on Netflix. It's actually really good. She tends to weave a story throughout her entire show, as well as presenting you with great music and putting on a show itself, like lots of, you know, pyro and everything.
You're also finding a story throughout it. Well, there's the, if I may. The story of the album, but this is the story of her entire career. It's the eras.
It's every single album. And if I may, though, this Stop Making Sense from reviews 40 years ago through now, all kind of point to the fact of how that concert is presented with just David Byrne singing the first song with acoustic guitar, drum track, slowly band members come in for each song. It's about one man's loneliness. My gosh, the song Psycho Killer, for goodness sakes.
One man's nervousness about the world. And then slowly people come in and join in and it becomes a community and this music starts playing. There's a little bit of gospel in there. There's some Afro-Cuban rhythms.
There's, you know, a lot of dance grooves and some rock guitar and all this other stuff. And it's literally after like the first 25 minutes, the next hour is a big giant dance party. So it's lots of cool lighting and different stagings. There's a killer one-er shot of just the stage for like a good, a good percentage of one song because just that performance is amazing.
And just watching it from that audience vantage is spectacular. All right. So I'm going to throw you a question. This is us.
This is our generational fight right now. I know we are going to go back and forth. Slightly, slightly. When I realized that the music is maybe not of your style, believe me, my husband made fun of me the other day for it.
But then the next morning... I'm surprised actually Darren hasn't given me any shit about coming to this too, but... But the next morning, he handed me his phone in the car. We were driving to an event in Scranton.
So we had a good 30, 40 minutes to kill. And he said, put on your favorite Taylor Swift song. He was very curious as to why I thought the way I thought. Okay.
And I presented him with the song, I Did Something Bad from the Reputation album. And one of the things I love about it is it's an anthem. It's not so much a, I'm a sappy lovesick. I'm not going through a breakup.
I'm saying, if you come at me, I'm coming at you. Okay. And that's really what it is. It is very much a power song.
And I love it because of that. Also the way she sings it is phenomenal. Okay. But the question I have to present to you is, and I know I'm presenting this early, so it'll give you some time to mull it over.
Okay. You're not expecting an answer immediately now. No, God, no. Okay.
I want you to think about it. And when we come back to this podcast after seeing it, I'm going to present that question again. Okay. Is this the new Stop Making Sense?
You are evil. In terms of the next, actually, not even one generation, but two generations or three down the road. But is this going to be the one that carries over for the next 30 years? Who knows?
We'll see. We'll see. Now, the feature we were going to talk about today was a retro review of Now Voyager, the fantastic Betty Davis film from 1942. 42, yes.
I think it's 42. But before we do. So either 41 or 42 or 43. Paul Henry had shot it and then went off and did Casablanca.
So that's to put it into perspective. The schedule went over on Now Voyager. And both he and Claude Raines were a little late. And they kind of had to rearrange some of the schedule on Casablanca because of this film.
Just one thing I found out while doing the research this afternoon. But before we kind of do get to all that, I did want to hit on a little bit of a sad note as we were getting ready to do this. I know where you're going. Yeah.
As we were getting ready. Literally, Natasha was here and we were setting up microphones. It was announced that sadly, David McCallum, the actor who was in for one generation in CIS. And Chucky!
Chucky! And for us older generation, he was in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the original TV series that from the 60s that came about during the Bond spy craze and kind of distinguished itself from all of the other imitators out there. It's odd because... What happened to him?
That's what I'm trying to look now. It says just natural causes. You didn't say he passed away. Yes, he passed away.
I'm sorry. There you go. David McCallum died of natural causes surrounded by family at New York Presbyterian Hospital, a spokesperson for CBS announced he was 90. He had a good life.
He was in two very strong, long running shows, both impactful in their decades. He was a musician. He was in a handful of movies. There's one that stands out to me, although it's not truly beloved amongst all groups, but The Watcher in the Woods, also with the great Betty Davis, one of her last movies.
Fantastic little horror film that came out of Disney. Yes, Disney did horror for a while. There's a whole era of Disney from like the 70s and early 80s where Disney was just kind of nuts. They tried everything.
And it's fascinating to me. And I kind of want to get back to David McCallum. But that was the era that gave us like Tron. Yes.
It gave us the black hole. Yeah, I was just thinking of the black hole. Especially the last 10 minutes of that movie. What was the guy who was like a superhero, but he had like wings, like the great...
Condorman. Huh? Condorman. Condorman.
Thank you. I just brought back a memory. Holy crap, you should see his face. You just ruined three years of psychotherapy now.
It's not a good movie. Also had live action things like Connecticut Spaceman and King Arthur's Court. You're forgetting about Race Witch Mountain. Yeah, the two different Witch Mountain films.
Oh my god, those things. Um, yes, anyways. I'm not quite, really quick. I'm not quite certain if this is Disney or not.
It always felt like it was, but it felt like it wasn't. And it scarred me so much, I can't go back and rewatch it. Something Wicked This Way Comes. That's a great film.
That's a great little weird film. And it's... Ray Bradbury and Jonathan Pryce. Match made in heaven.
So much so, I can't watch it. I'm firmly of the belief that there should be scary movies for kids. We grew up on, I grew up on Goosebumps. Yeah.
Stuff like that. And some people are like, oh no, we can't have anything scary for our kid. I'm like, no, you need some scary stuff for your kids. That just helps them process.
And I think kids enjoy being, you know, scared a little bit when they know they're kind of safe. Yeah. They can see a scary movie. Oh, yeah.
I've heard many times of like the Daleks from Doctor Who scaring kids and they like run behind the sofa. But knowing that they're like mom and dad are there and, you know, they're okay. Yeah. It's a fun scare.
But getting back to... Betty Davis and David McCallum. Yes. We'll get to Betty Davis in a moment.
Well, I was taking us back to, you know, Watcher in the Woods. Okay. But David McCallum, it's funny because just yesterday, as I was telling you before we started recording, I was kind of surfing the YouTube algorithm letting, you know, it kind of take me wherever. And it kicked out a promotional film, short film, you know, that was used by the network to send out to affiliates to introduce them to the show.
Man From U.N.C.L.E., right when it came out. So the actors are there playing their characters, speaking to the camera. You know, it's like, hello, my name is Elliot Correction. I'm partners here with Napoleon Solo.
We're members of, you know, the United Network Command for Law Enforcement, U.N.C.L.E. And, you know, it was a neat little piece of promotion that I'd never seen and really, I don't think anybody at the network ever intended anybody to see beyond the affiliates and certainly not 50 years later. So it was just a nice little moment to see that kind of history and then unfortunately to hear this. And I was also actually thinking of another series he had done recently, too.
I was looking around. I can't seem to find anywhere called Sapphire and Steel. Never heard of it. It's a weird British series with Joanna Lumley and him playing like these supernatural investigators.
It's kind of like a precursor to the X-Files, but their characters aren't necessarily government agents. They might be agents for another supernatural kind of power thing. It's very weird, very mysterious. Is there a version of Torchwood?
Not even that. Really? Yeah. Like I'm not exactly sure how to phrase it because they kept things so vague in the show.
It's kind of hard to describe. I've only seen like one or two episodes. I read a lot about it, like in like magazines about British TV and stuff like that, that I was devouring in my youth. And I've never seen like the full series, but it was something I was thinking about within the last week or two of like, hey, Silver and Sapphire and Steel, Not as familiar.
She was the next on the list. I'm not as familiar with her work, so I cannot have an opinion on this. And here's here's the third option that Hal Wallace had before Betty Davis found out that this uh this film was being going to be made. And then she, she kind of went out campaigning to Wallace and Wallace finally gave it to her.
But the number three person on Wallace's list for this film, Ginger Rogers. Wow. Yikes. Now that is the case of, she definitely couldn't fucking done it.
No, no. I, I like Ginger Rogers' work a lot. Yeah, but yeah, I don't think she would have, unless, unless there was some kind of hidden reserve of really dramatic actor that she had that we never got a chance to see. And this would have given us a glimpse of that and maybe pushed her career off in an entirely different direction than it did go through the forties and fifties.
I don't see it either, unfortunately. Joan Crawford probably could have. Ooh, yeah, Crawford. Um.
And if she was willing to be stripped down from her usual appetites. She'd be close to the bottom of my list, but I would say Marlene Dietrich. Ooh, Dietrich would be interesting. I was thinking maybe Mary Astor, but I think she would have been a little too old.
Too old. Yeah, too old. If they had done this movie, you know, 10 years or five years even earlier, she might've been better for it, but they make it when they make it. I guess we should kind of at least uh take a moment.
Uh, if you haven't seen Now Voyager, uh, press pause because we're going to get into a lot of spoilers, I think, as we have this conversation. Um, go check it out. It's a wonderful movie. I'm not sure if it's on Criterion Channel or not right now.
It isn't. Um, but, uh, but I think you can rent it through Prime. Okay. We have a young woman played by Betty Davis who has been trapped by her mother for all of her life.
She's considered a spinster. She has a mental breakdown and a wonderful psychiatrist by the name, uh, played by Claude Rains, uh, suggests that she take some time to herself at a psychiatric facility and then go out on her own for a bit. She comes back a changed woman after taking a voyage on the sea and falling in love with a brand new independence. And mama don't like that.
Nope. No. And that's my summary. Okay.
Okay. That sets up all the conflict in the second half of the movie, really. Here's the thing I didn't know. This is based on a novel.
Did you realize that this novel was the third out of a series of four books about this family that the author wrote? I was not aware of that actually. Yeah, which kind of struck me as interesting. Um, because I'm like, ooh, I wonder what the other books are about in terms of this family.
Do we learn more about the mother? The mother, how she got to be such a domineering bitch. We hear, we see a little more about uh the character of Tina, maybe in book four. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, who's, um. Her lover's daughter. Yes. Uh, do we find out more about um the sister-in-law and uh some other, some of the other members of the family who kind of just like breeze in and out of this movie really fast?
Um, I want a whole, whole novel just devoted to Mary Wick's nurse character. I knew you were gonna bring that up. I knew you were gonna bring that up. Mary Wick's is always freaking lovely no matter what she does.
Wonderful character actress, decades-long career. Mary Wick is in this movie as a nurse, a wisecracking nurse, of course. Of course! She's always wisecracking.
She's wisecracking as the, uh, the hotel lobbyist in White Christmas. She was wisecracking as a gargoyle in the 95 Hunchback of Notre Dame animated film. Wisecracking as a nun in Sister Act. In Sister Act.
And when the angels spirits, where angels go, trouble follows. Uh, for those who have seen Sister Act, she's Sister Mary Lazarus. You know which one that is. Um, and she gets a great line that the first time we saw this, I saw this movie, I was rewatching it again, uh, this weekend.
She got a great line that made me laugh out loud. And it's like right in her first scene where she's introducing herself to Betty Davis, who's just come back from her six-month ocean voyage with all this newfound confidence. And she goes, Pickford's my name. Dora, not Mary.
And I howled. Yeah, it's just like, like anybody would have like confused her for Mary Pickford of all things. But it's a great funny line. Yeah, it's a good line.
It's a little bit of a dated reference, but if you get the reference, it's funny. Well, it's, it wasn't dated at the time though. No, no, it wasn't. So, um, so that was fun.
You know, it was fun to see her, you know, pop up for this here and then unfortunately disappear. But I like sassy, I like sassy wibbit, sassy character actresses. Um, there's a few. Um, oh gosh, who was I thinking of from just spring, oh, Thelma Ritter from, from uh Rear Window.
Or All About Eve. Yes. Why couldn't we have never gotten a movie where Thelma Ritter and Mary Wicks just like, like a road movie. Oh my God, Thelma Louise it.
No, just make it a road movie like the old Hope and Crosby films. How awesome would that have been? It's two women. It wouldn't have sold.
I know, unfortunately, but it would have been awesome. Or, or just make them for some reason the, the love interests in the movie in a, in a Hope and Crosby movie. And my brain just went to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Mary Wicks and Thelma Ritter. Oh dear God.
What are we thinking? And Thelma's playing Marilyn. Oh no, that's, that's gonna haunt you. You're gonna be having dreams about that later.
Nightmares. Um. We're just two little girls from Little Rock. We're just two.
Um, no we're digressing again. Yes, swirling. Sorry, guys. Anyway, now Voyager.
Yes. Um, but there's another, there's another line in there too that made me chuckle. Um, and it was absolutely not intended. It's only because of things that happened in the intervening decades that made this line funny.
Okay. It's when the, they're on the boat, the boat's coming into Rio de Janeiro Harbor, and she's pointing out landmarks along the way to Paul Henry. And she goes, oh, and he goes, ah, Copacabana. There is music in that name.
And I go, yeah, Barry Manilow thought so. You're trying not to laugh. I'm trying not to sing it. You're trying not to, you're trying not to validate my stupid joke.
It's like, Copacabana. But, but, so again, it's always fun. It's always interesting to see how things get filtered through the decades. Um, but this is an incredible performance.
And the one thing that remains constant through the decades is its treatment of mental illness and, um, psychoanalysis and like, you know, and the treatment. It's well done. It's amazingly well done for a movie from the forties. And I think even now you look at it and go, you know, this doesn't feel dated.
This doesn't feel like, oh, we're going to take him and give him shock treatments because one of the writers read an article in a magazine about shock treatment. So that's what we're going to do now. It's, it's very sympathetic. It feels very realistic.
I think the doctor himself is one of the best characters in the film. He's more interesting to me than Paul and Reed is as the love interest. Yeah, and he didn't want to take the role either. Because it was, he felt it was too small.
So they kind of did go back and goose up his role a little bit, but it's, it's a great role. Um, I think it's the back and forth between Claude Rains and Betty Davis, particularly when she's taking charge of Tina, is hilarious and so natural. It's a great scene. It's a fantastic scene.
Oh my God. It's so well written. And I think, I think it kind of speaks to the innate understated charm that, um, he has as an actor that we see over and over again. Maybe not, okay, maybe not Claude Rains when he's the invisible man, but.
Or as the Phantom of the Opera. Yeah, but um, in these other like, you know, I don't want to call them second bananas, but you know, like the lead supporting role. He often, you know, has, has a very smooth and easygoing uh charm and he'd draw you in. Yeah.
And you're just like, I like him. Yeah. Anytime he shows up in something. Even in Casablanca where he's slightly slimy while doing it.
You're like, I still like the fucker. Yeah, that guy. Yeah, yeah, Captain Renault is a grade A creep. Oh, you're, you're a 17-year-old married woman who needs a pass to get out of Casablanca.
Well, stop by my office. Yeah, he's, that's a creepy character. Oh God, yeah. You know, he's probably gonna rape her.
Yeah, he traded a lot of sneakers for passes out of that city. Um, but because Claude Rains plays right off the bat. And I don't know if he's ever done anything that's quite equaled. Probably because within those first two, they gave him a really big like role and they said, show us what you can do.
And he didn't do much. That's something to think about. Yes. Again, you know, I don't necessarily want to discount, you know, he could be doing fine work in these other things.
It's just he wasn't able to break back out of where he was to get those great roles like he did those first two times here. But I've got a question for you. Does the mom in Now Voyager trip or did she purposefully fall down those stairs? Oh, she purposefully fell down the stairs.
Okay. Okay. That's how I read it. It's so freaking obvious.
OK, when I first saw it, I had that thought. I was like, wait, did she just like purposely throw herself down these stairs? Or am I seeing a little bit of bad stunt work? Or do I have lever to heaven on my mind?
And I saw that cringe right there because lever to heaven stairfall is a whole horrible thing in and of itself. Her character actually threw herself down the stairs. Okay. Okay.
That's because... It's obvious from the way she looks back up towards the bedroom. It could have been a looking back up and then misplacing, you know, her foot, you know, just not watching where she was stepping. No, she screwed up.
I wanted to give, even though the mother's horrible, I wanted to give her at least a slight benefit of the doubt. You're hilarious. Your character is like a stereotypical caricature villain. Like, there's nothing really, there's nothing really redeeming about that woman.
No, no. And that's that's another reason why I'm interested in the other books in this quadrilogy of novels about this family in Boston. Simply because, again, how did she get that way? Why is she so bitter?
Why did she... They have the one line about if you have a child late in life, they're the ones who's going to comfort you in your old age. And I'm like, wow, you're just talking about, I just gave birth to my indentured servants, you know, and that kind of like grossed me out on a certain level. Because she was not planned for.
She wasn't wanted. Yeah. But that's having a woman means that, you know, she has someone to take care of her in her old age. Yes, but that then allows Bette Davis to draw a parallel between like how she interacts with Paul Onreed's daughter, Christina, later on in the film.
Yeah. And that's one of the many great screenwriting moments of how layered and how awesome this film really is. I've seen it twice now in like the last two, three weeks. I look forward to watching it over and over because I think there's some really layered stuff that's really good going on here.
And, you know, both times I've watched it, I've seen things like, oh, that's interesting. And I think there's a lot more to dig through this movie. So if you haven't seen it, we recommend checking it out. And of course, if you haven't seen it, why are you still listening?
Right. Because we just blew a bunch of stuff here, man. A lot of spoilers. Sorry, we warned you.
But did you have anything else that you wanted to hit on on this? Guys, go freaking watch it. It's amazing. That it is.
And that's all I have. That's fair enough. That's a good poster pull quote. I think on that silly note, though, that about wraps us up for this week.
Remember, you can find us online at bigpicturepod.com and we are now available on iTunes and Google Play. So either use the link in the show notes post or head directly there, search and hit subscribe. And if you've liked what you've heard, please give us a positive review because that always helps us connect with new listeners. And that'll be next time right here on The Big Picture Podcast.