'True Romance' with Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey

Hey, it's Liz Kelly. Here are a few things to check out in the Ringer universe before the end of the week. We've got an oral history on the movie Rounders 20 years later going up on Thursday. So read that and then check out the Rewatchables episode that Bill and Sean did on the movie earlier this month.

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Must be White Boy Day. It ain't White Boy Day, is it? Sure or I miss the Rewatchables coming up. From the director of Top Gun and Beverly Hills Top 2.

Hello, baby! Claire? I'm a married man, buddy. A con man.

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These are cops. Not since Bonnie and Clyde have two people been so good at being bad. True romance. All right, Sean Fancy is here.

Chris Ryan is here. It's the 25th anniversary of this month of True Romance. A much imitated movie that, when it came out in 1993, was like an atomic bomb. It was like, what is this?

It was a rollercoaster ride. There were a ton of actors. Many of them I knew at the time in 1993 and some I didn't know as well. We know all of them.

And it really holds up. It's probably about 10 minutes too long. Felt a little fat in a couple parts. But it has some of the great scenes of the 90s.

And a lot of people at the top of their games, Chris Ryan. Yeah. This came out when I was, I guess I was 15. And that time period in your life between like 15, 18, 20.

It's like, whatever the coolest thing you've seen is the coolest thing you've ever seen in your life. And that was definitely the case for this run of Reservoir Dogs in 92, True Romance in 93. And you can even bring in a lot of other stuff. Like Wu-Tang Clan's album came out a month after this, I think, in 93.

And it's no understatement to say that my life changed in that year. Just in terms of introducing me to a whole world that I didn't know about. I think Check Your Head came out then, the Beastie Boys record. Yeah.

Which is another big, like there's so many references. There's this whole world of like movies and soundtracks and records you don't know about. And it was just so intoxicating, man. And I still, I think Tarantino just was like kind of a big bang for me.

Like he was kind of a comic. And I still like, I'm just so gassed on everything that he, he's ever really done. But this movie for all its, its problems and problems in retrospect is, it still rocks. Sean?

Yeah, I think Chris hit on something really smart there. What? This is one of those movies that shows you about a hundred other movies. There's so many other movie posters.

There's so many movies playing in the background of movies. There's so many songs that you'd never would have heard if you hadn't seen them in these scenes. There's so many actors who you wouldn't have thought would have been right for parts like this and they find their way in. You know, Tarantino, I guess, Tony Scott, the director.

And the same way that Wu-Tang and the Beastie Boys introduced you to new stuff. They introduced you to a million things in this movie. Some of it is like way over the line and some of it is ridiculous and purposely trying to poke at you. But man, he just showed you so much new stuff.

It was such a sensory overload. It's such a fun movie. It's like a big brother movie. It's like where you see it and then you see Christian Slater and Saul Rubenek talking about fear and desire.

And somebody leans over and says, you know, that Stanley Kubrick movie. Like, I don't know that. I don't think I've ever seen Walking and Hopper really in movies before when I was this young. I mean, I think maybe, but like never like this.

Yeah, maybe Hoosiers before this. I'm trying to think of what are the big movies that those guys were in that you would have seen when you were 12 or 13. I think it's hard to overstate the Tarantino dialogue and how unique it was at the time because it's been so ripped off ever since. You know, Reservoir Dogs was the first one.

But even like in this movie, when the first time we meet Gary Oldman is with Sam Jackson, they're doing a drug deal and they're talking about eating pussy. And that stuff just wasn't in movies. Yeah. And characters who were, you know, it was basically good guys, bad guys, cops, drug dealers.

And those people didn't have conversations like that. And he was able to make all these people likable that were actually bad people. And I don't remember, I guess the Godfather did it to some degree that, you know, that was like a family mafia movie. But the way he just entered this world in the dialogue, he always knew it was a Tarantino movie.

Oh, yeah. And you could read, I remember getting all the books. I would go to like a Walden Books or Brentano's or whatever the bookstore was. And I'd buy the scripts and I'd read them.

Like, they're actual books. It was incredibly fun to read. The script is really, really fun to read. You know, and he's obviously drawing a lot from like a More Leonard and stuff.

It's the Detroit setting. A lot of crime movies from the 70s. But the thing that was also happening was within the world of these movies, within the scripts and within the actual cinematic universe. He was building a cinematic universe at that time.

Characters where there would be lines like, did I, Joe, do a damn if I know. Or there'd be scenes that kept coming up. Like cops being like, you have to act. Talking about acting.

You know, like the Tim Roth monologue in Reservoir Dogs. And then that kind of comes up again with Tom Sizemore being like, act, motherfucker, you're an actor. You know, these ideas are popping up. And then with Pulp Fission, later on, you start to find out that there are actually these connective characters that are happening here.

But even so, in True Romance, like they mentioned Lance runs a comic book store in Detroit. Lance winds up, I don't think it's the same person, but that's the name of Eric Stoltz's character in Pulp Fission. Like, there's just like this feeling like you're being led into this whole other world of references, jokes, and sayings, and also characters that may share the same world. It feels like all the characters from those three movies could have intersected in a different movie.

She's mentioned in the movie before this, as a partner that Mr. White used to work with when they were robbing banks together, which is Harvey Kytel's character. Yeah, it's weird. It's one of those things where Tarantino, if you had met him, I think, in real life, you would have thought like, this guy is the classic archetype of the obnoxious video store clerk, record store clerk, you know, in this movie, the comic book store salesperson, who just knows more than you, is kind of obnoxious, has a ton of information, but to get to the information, you're like, oh man, I gotta talk to this guy.

But in movie form, him doing his vision of the world was so bracing and so effective and so fun. And this movie is like, it's one part autobiography, one part fantasy, you know, one part aspiration of what he wanted to be. There's something so funny to watch somebody try to put themselves on screen in that way, and also like make themselves Christians later, which is not who Gwen Tarantino is. Yeah, I think he struggled with that part, the casting part of it.

There was one thing when I was researching it, there was like a 500-page screenplay, that was basically three different movies, where Alvin ends up going on the road with Mr. White from Reservoir Dogs. Yeah, I mean, his story is worth noting at this point, because I feel like this is right, he sells this and he sells Reservoir Dogs, he keeps Reservoir Dogs to direct for himself, and Tony Scott wanted to direct both of these movies. He was paid 50K for True Romance, used that money to fund Reservoir Dogs, and then gave Tony Scott the choice.

Right, and then the thing that's really interesting is that obviously he's this outsider, he's working at a video store in Manhattan Beach, he's friends with Roger Avery, they're kind of like, he's been trying to get work, but once it happens for him, it goes zero to 60. He's immediately considered no-tour. One thing I wanted to ask you, because you were probably older, when was the first time you heard about him, and did you hear about Reservoir Dogs before the theaters? Because there was a lot of talk about Tarantino, it was like, all those actors who were in this movie were like, I have to be in this.

Yeah, and Reservoir Dogs played Sundance, and it was like a major thing when I played Sundance. But did you... I saw True Romance first, and then circled back and saw Reservoir Dogs. I never saw Reservoir Dogs in the theater.

I think it came out, I think I was in college and I just missed it. I think it was like one of those things that didn't even... It's not like a huge hit, you know, it was like it was a box office. Yeah, and it wasn't in, you know, 5,000 theaters, it wasn't those things.

I saw True Romance in the theater, and there just wasn't movies like that. I think now people have tried to imitate those type of movies so many times, where this exhilarating ride with characters and actors that are really going for it, and a couple twists and turns, and some big-ass scenes, but in 93, that wasn't happening. And it was also a pretty weird time for movies, not necessarily a good time. You know, it was a very generic kind of...

Yeah, it's right at that tipping point from going from like Driving Miss Daisy into that, like, the Sundance Bratz moment where Robert Rodriguez, and Cassino, all these guys come along, and then Fincher, and then movies change. Like, movies in the 90s change a lot. This is kind of, you're right, this is like a crux point. We're setting up 96 to 2000, which is one of the best five-year movie runs ever.

But 94 is one of the best mainstream movie years ever. But that, 90, 91, 92, it just wasn't that good. It was a lot of sequels. It was a lot of people being disappointed.

That's when Liam Goldman was writing a lot for New York Magazine. She's constantly like, what the hell's going on? How's everybody missing on this stuff? Where are movies going?

And then this movie happened. Liam Goldman's the big picture. That's all of his essays collected. Yeah, it's basically 88 to 93.

And, you know, a lot of it's like, yeah, Pretty Woman, how did this happen? Richard Gared made 10 straight terrible movies, and then all of a sudden he's in the biggest... But there was really no rhyme or reason what was going on. What was really not going on was a lot of creativity.

Yeah. And then Tarantino came in. It's like, oh, movies. Oh, cool.

Yeah. And he obviously stimulates something in the people who are working with him. But most of all, what was interesting was that after Dogs came out, and he obviously set himself up as this auteur who's going to direct his own work, but then you have Tony Scott's reading of his work, like Tony Scott's rendition of his script, and it looks like Beverly Hills Cop. It looks like Top Gun.

It's got Jeffrey Kimmel shooting it. It's got Hans Zimmer music. It's really, really interesting. And this is sort of right where I think there starts to be a critical recognition of what Tony Scott brought to the movies and what he did specifically.

He's become kind of a hip director, posthumously. But back then, people kind of like Tony Scott as the guy who made, like, Jerry Brown movies, right? Yeah. Well, he did The Hunger in the late 70s, early 80s, and people are like, this guy's a great artist.

And then he does Top Gun, Never Hill's Cop 2, and he's a Hollywood guy. He's a slick Hollywood guy. But did everyone feel that way? Because I love Tony Scott.

Yeah, I didn't care what, like, Peter Travers thought. So he rips off, Tony Scott rips off, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop 2, which is a great movie, and was super satisfying, and made a lot of money, and everybody came out of the theater and was like, that was awesome, I loved it. Days of Thunder, Cruise, the racing car movie. Revenge was his only miss, the Kevin Costner movie, which didn't work and probably should have.

I don't really know what happened. But it sort of lived on as, like, a film tumbler, like, look at this still from Revenge. It's so awesome. But then, Last Boy Scout was when there was backlash.

And I remember being disappointed with Last Boy Scout, because it was, like, Bruce Willis at the height of his powers. Damon Wayans, like, everybody's just so ready for another Eddie Murphy. It's like, hey, funny black guy. And action movie and there's sports, and people just wanted that to be awesome.

It's actually kind of better than... Shane Blackstone, right? Yeah, I think it's better than people remember, but at the time it was just considered kind of, it didn't totally work. Famously horrible production.

Like, everybody on the movie hated each other. Everybody hated Bruce Willis, Joel Silver and Tony Scott didn't get along, then influenced his true romance. Yeah, it's funny. Tony Scott, though, at the time, I think everybody was like, he's all sizzle no stick.

Like, he doesn't really have anything to say. He's just got amazing style. And, you know, there's a case for that, but him with a good writer and a good movie star is awesome. Yeah, and then he does true romance in Crimson Tadier, which Tarantino did a little bit of dialogue polish on.

There's a Christian Slater moment that has to be mentioned. He does Heathers, which was a really important indie movie and really creative in a thing. It was him and Winona. I hardly believe that movie got made now.

It's basically like a school massacre. It's really dark. I don't know. It was dark 30 years ago, and that would be even a dark about one of my favorite movies of that year.

I even remember where I saw it. I just fucking loved it. And then he does Pump Up the Volume, which is this iconic 90s indie great soundtrack. Christian Slater invented podcasting.

Christian Slater. I'm a real volume, invented podcasting. So we talked about that. When did we first talk about that?

I don't remember. We've talked about it before. Christian Slater 100% invented podcasting. He's the original Joe Rogan.

He's the up here, man. We actually should do like a rewatchable or a second watch or something in that movie because I think people would be stunned that it really didn't invent podcasting. Then he does Robin Hood. Then he does Untamed Heart.

Yeah. And it's kind of falling apart in a tiny pit for him because there's this moment where he's like, that's the next Jack Nicholson. It sounds like he had somewhat of a rocky offscreen. Yeah, he had some substance and stuff.

Yeah. He was arrested multiple times. He also was a child actor because he was in a couple things when he was like 15, 16. He was a legend of Billy Jean.

Yeah, he was in a cube. He'd done so much stuff. But I had a lot of personal equity in Christian Slater. I think a lot of people did.

It was like, that's Art Nicholson. That's going to be our guy. And it didn't happen. And then he's thrown into romance.

They dye his hair. And it was kind of like make or break for him. He ended up being really good in it. But he was actually the sell of the movie.

Winds up having like a pretty much lost decade after that. What's interesting is Brad Pitt's in this movie right after Thelma and Louise. So he had some smoke and cachet. It's kind of surprising they just didn't have Brad Pitt as the lead of this movie or at least push for it.

It doesn't seem like that even ever occurred then. But it was always later. One of the things that's really interesting when you go back and read about all the movies of this era is how many different people were going for these parts. And also just in terms of the production schedules, I can't remember what Brad Pitt did right after Thelma and Louise.

Was that Seven? That's right. A California movie? No, Seven was like 94, 95.

He did the Thelma and Louise which I'm going to say was 90 or 91 because I was in college and then made a couple weird movies. He made like California. California Legends of the Fall. There's a handful of movies in that.

But he's like I'll just do like three days. I just want to be in it. There's a couple people like him and Val Kilmer who was just like can I just have a part? I'll do anything.

Yeah, I'll do anything. Val Kilmer I think would have been too old. Yeah, he would have been. But he worked with Scott in Top Gun.

So, 92% of Rotten Tomatoes, Sean. Don't care. Robert Ebert. Really like this movie.

Roger Ebert, the great Roger Ebert. The great Robert Ebert. Roger Ebert and Robert Ebert. Roger Ebert.

Come back on the rewatchable. It's the last three that we've done. He's really liked. Hard to believe the most famous and good film film film of all time.

I was worried about his taste. A box office failure. It bonded. Yeah, it is.

Spent 12 and a half million made 12.3. It's tough to tell. It's funny to read the stories about them trying to do the test ratings and the marketing of this movie. They didn't really know how to sell to the audience.

And also, like you said, people didn't really know how to deal with a movie like this. The reviews, we live in a culture now where he's like, oh my God, this is offensive about everything. But the reviews of this movie, people are like, this movie's way over the line. When people were in the script, I think for sure, again, was like, this movie's like real racist.

And they have to work through it and totally, I mean, that's a whole other thing where it's like, this isn't like going back and be like, oh yeah, everybody was like, all movies were like this. No movie was like this. No movie was like Reservoir Dogs. No mainstream movie made by a guy like this.

Yeah, the dialogue in these movies is still pretty scandalous. Dogs had, the ear cutting scene was the big one from that that became a whole story. Whether that went too far, should that have been in the movie? Should this be rated X?

But if there was a conversation in the beginning, you're kind of like, is this really happening in a movie? Like, I can't believe this. I was trying to think what the legacy of this movie was before we get to the categories. I would say it's peak Tony Scott.

It's really Tony Scott throwing all his pitches. It's a complete game, 15 strikeouts, seven walks, three hits, kind of Tony Scott movie. If you're going to say, I'm trying to explain to somebody what Tony Scott is, I have to show them a Tony Scott movie, it would probably be this movie. It's got incredible scenes with cars, it's got an incredible shootout, and it's got men and women looking beautiful, and dialogue clicking.

Also, he's the master of, you know what this shot needs? Steam coming out of a grate. You know what this shot needs? All the streets have to be wet.

Everything should be neon. Everything should be blue light hitting her face. It's a painterly movie. You know what else it has too?

There's a Tony Scott thing. It has a train. There's so many trains in Tony Scott movies. He loves the things that are moving all the time.

I'll say this, when I was a kid, obviously when you're a teenager, you basically have your hometown and maybe the one or two, three places your parents have ever taken you in your life. This movie made LA look like another planet. I think it's interesting to listen to the cast members talk about, they were all obviously young, had some money, probably were partying a lot, and it kind of captured this moment in Los Angeles of shady producers, everybody going out for auditions, everybody trying to get movies, and all these people were in this movie at the time, and the film that they're in kind of reflects their life, and it sounds like it was a very fun-loving set in terms of how much they partied and stuff like that, and especially given what happened to a bunch of the people in this movie. The player was like that too, Swimming with Sharks.

There's like four or five movies from this era that was kind of like Hollywood looking at itself, which was great because we didn't have the internet back then, I didn't know anything about Hollywood. I just had a couple books that I read and that was it. I love watching these movies now too, having lived in LA for a while, like when Floyd gets confronted by the gangsters and he's giving them directions about how to get the Beverly Ambassador, and he's like, just go down Beachwood for a while, make a right, and keep going. it's like i know what that means now he's actually trying to give them directions to sunset boulevard and you know like when i was 13 i didn't know what that was it is slightly more fun to watch this movie when you're in la this is one of the craziest casts we've ever had christian slater patricia arquette rapaport bronson pinchot saul rubideck dennis hopper james gandolfini gary oldman christopher walken chris penn tom sizemore brett pitt val kilmer sam jackson i think this was the first movie that was like fucking we're going for it we're just here's the all-star team i think it has the most five minutes or less great performances of maybe any movie ever yeah where people have such limited screen time but they're awesome when they're on screen i mean like sam jackson balkilmer gary oldman and it's all rumenac it's the best it's the best it was like number one for deon waiters but this is actually almost it's self-aware it's self-aware of deon before deon is deon it's like they know that they're only going to do six pages of subscript and they're going to light them all on fire craig uh craig the producer who's doing the pie today who hadn't seen before he was like man all these actors are really going for it yeah it's kind of it's kind of like i'm getting in the game i'm jacking up shots because you're talking about that time period in movies and then tarantino comes along if you're an actor you must be like it's like going from playing plotting half-court basketball to doug mo offense you know it's like all of a sudden you're just you're throwing going up and down the court as fast as you can and it's probably really thrilling yeah i mean white men can't jump was another example of like man this is really original dialogue i'm not i'm not used to this but for the most part it was a lot of like in the line of fire with cleanest with john malkovich type of movies movies you could tell from the poster what it was and where it was going in some cases it's guys trying to recreate how they talk to their friends and in some cases it's guys taking like detective novels and kung fu movies and stuff that they like and like just turning them to the left a little bit um but you know the tarantino voice has been written about over and over and over again it's like it's it's one billion it's one in ten billion like just somebody like that also ultimately someone who doesn't play by a lot of dramatic rules because what he's basically saying is like all the voices of the voices in my head yeah and everybody is going to sound in a certain way it's not like those characters it's not like the voice deviates when it's someone who's maybe not as well read or hasn't seen these movies or is everybody here has an anecdote everybody here has this performative monologue everybody here has these little like ability to do this pattern that is just all in one dude's brain yeah i'm probably under overrated or underrating uh 92 93 because they were good movies i guess they were just not movies like this i was looking at like the domestic grosses so you had jurassic park mrs outfire the fugitive the firm sleepless in seattle indecent proposal in line of fire pelican brief schindler's list cliffhanger free willy philadelphia ground day grumpy old man cool runnings dave rising sun demolition man i keep going but there wasn't a movie like this but there were like very smart castle rocks and christian you know movies like yeah all those movies you named i feel like dave is one of the only ones that has like a distinct voice point of view like you know drastic park is a perfect movie but it's a big blockbuster yeah when you get when it gets a little further down the list it gets a little more interesting like alive sure that's okay um the piano falling down menace to society poetic justice those movies have a voice in point of view the crying game um there are some movies falling down justice this one was one of the kind but the worst part of this whole tarantino era was all the terrible movies they spawned later it was really that was attacks you know i like a lot of those movies this is a funny thing we have amongst friends i don't love amongst friends amongst friends really interesting that's a long island movie two days in the valley well two days in the valley and things to do in denver when you're dead were the two movies that really got killed for this yeah people were like these two movies are ripping off tarantino so hard but b minus tarantino is still better than c minus anything coming out i still like things to do in denver yeah yeah let's take a break we'll do the categories let's talk about dc do you like dc do you love dc are you what some people might call obsessed with dc what's dc i'll tell you you need to get to dc universe it's the only place where you can watch the all-new live-action titans which premieres this fall not to mention young justice outsiders doom patrol swan thang star girl harley quinn all come your way in 2018 new episodes come out every week dc universe has features that you have to see for yourself like a world-class comic reader that even works on your big screen tv thoughtfully curated regularly refreshed library 2,500 modern classic titles members only store full of exclusive merchandise discussion forums look it's not another streaming service nobody needs that it's what you might call the ultimate dc membership available on your ios android devices as well as roku apple tv google chromecast join now just $7.99 a month or better yet grab an annual membership for $74.99 save 20 join today at dc universe.com and since we're here do you find yourself distracted forgetting things make mistakes at work 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think there has to be five choices clarence versus drexel clarence goes back to get the money from drexel so if you haven't seen this movie in a while clarence falls in love with this hooker that uh his boss hires him and they just they get married and he decides she's a call girl though she's a there's a difference he says he decides he has to emancipate her from the pimp he just he can't handle it he's got to go like get his stuff and make it clear to the pimp she's with him now drexel's five you played by garyldin yes that leads to a shootout he takes the wrong suitcase and they end up going on the run suitcase full of cocaine yeah first rewatchable scene clarence goes to confront drexel second one hopper versus walkin i think which might be the most famous scene of both of their careers it's possible wow gandolfini versus alabama a complicated scene i love how all these are verses the coke sale with the beverly uh ambassador not when it goes when it all goes bad but when slater shows up and he's talking about uh he's talking about his movies and then he's being wired from home in a body bag we're called body bags too got more and then uh finally the big shootout the big three-way tarantino's second three-way shootout in two movies what is the most rewatchable scene i personally think it's clarence versus drexel is one of the great five minutes of the 90s i just can't get enough of it i think it's the sicilian story it has to be how can it not be it's tarantino's favorite scene he's ever written or at least it was whenever but this last time i read about it and it's it's like three-dimensional chess i can't believe how good that scene is here's a fact yeah you see uh so cms have black blood up into their hearts and you know if you don't believe me uh you can look it up hundreds and hundreds of years ago you see uh the more has conquered sicily you know that too 100 i think one you got christian walking playing a sicilian which is a ludicrous choice he's the least italian person i've ever seen in my life and he pulls it off yeah you've got hopper who's at this fascinating moment in his career when he has like survived the nine stages of fame he's done horrible things in his life he's been an amazing trailblazer filmmaker he's been a celebrated actor academy award nominee he's been heroes he was shooter he was uh frankie blue velvet he was all these characters and he actually chris texted me this last night he's like so warm and like powerful in his movie his performance his relationship with clarence the way that they talk to each other the way that they set up that relationship in like three minutes yeah and then you get to this moment in that scene he's so incredibly good and just the dialogue is amazing the way that all the characters sort of gangsters surround them in this circle the way they're shot it happens in like the middle of the day but it looks like it's three o'clock in the morning it's so darkly lit there's a spotlight on them and then the dialogue is crazy it's two guys telling crazy i'm the anti-christian you got me in a vendetta type of mood i mean are you kidding me it's crazy all right you talked me into it wait you i just i love drexel is one of my favorite characters gary oldman was pretty famous at that point he abandoned dracula he was a guy that everybody talked about as like this is going to be one of the next great actors and out of all the people in this movie seeing it 25 years ago i was like is that gary oldman like you didn't even know what's going on why what's wrong with this why why is he having why is he talking like a like a black guy what's happening right now let's see we're sitting down here man he's negotiating you got me giving up your shit that's a mystery to you but i know exactly where your white ass is coming from say if i ask if you want some dinner and you bet everyone start trying to ask myself this motherfucker he's coming down like he ain't got a Kevin award and who knows maybe he don't it was such a strange i don't even know what the 2018 version of casting would be him in that role there's some disagreement necessarily about like where the inspirations for the character come from yeah tony scott and gary oldman disagreed about that right yeah tony scott says uh that gary oldman called him in the middle of the night was like i got it i figured out who drexel is he's my drug dealer and then when gary oldman was asked about it gary was like fucking tony scott's trying to get me arrested and then his version was he just started a bunch of black kids outside his trailer and was emulating them tony scott had a really big heat check way after this movie where he gave crazy interviews and clearly didn't like christian slater and took credit for a lot of stuff yes i don't know gary he's a complete tarantino original character though yeah he's fascinating every single word he says is entertaining i just think it's just so rare in movies to come across a sicilian scene it's also just like this is another example of i don't know if they do drexel and they shoot it basically the way that reservoir dogs are shot just pretty flat the lighting is pretty you know obviously because of the uh because of the budget it was they shot reservoir dogs for the most part in a warehouse you know and if you shoot drexel pretty straight up and you don't have the music and the lights and he's throwing chinese food or he's like having an egg roll all that stuff this may just not work at all like that's where tony scott kind of makes this movie something completely different in tarantino canon that's why i think that's the best tony scott scene because the music's perfect that weird crazy techno music and the light he's pushing the light swinging back and forth and the whole dialogue where he's just like see if you had said this then i might have been like this is a crazy motherfucker but like instead you gave up everything and i gave up nothing and he's like putting the light back and forth i mean it's just and it seems like slater's super intimidated and he's just kind of listening and then he's like well first of all and then he has an answer for the seven questions i don't know i just love that i'm not watching the tv because i've seen the movie already it's the mac from 1972 and i'm not hungry uh what's the best feel free to throw in your own uh additional ones here gandolfini young gandolfini now as this is age you have this whole tony soprano experience with him and um he's basically auditioning to be tony soprano in this movie i mean so many of the things that he does are in tony soprano i love this movie and it was one of the first dvds i bought and i watched it a lot of times in the 90s before tony soprano happened he was always the guy from this movie to me it was always like wow that guy's amazing i don't know who that guy is where's he from um this and he's barely get shorty and i always thought that those were like the two poles of tony soprano but tony soprano's like so sweet and so charming and so evil and so menacing and so violent and like that's that's him it's doing the audition next one age the best floyd as he probably invested well you go no yeah go down go down go down beachwood you guys want to smoke a ball go down beachwood and drive a while and then he's gonna turn right okay and then you go and keep driving and you keep driving floyd was did some cleaning products floyd was uh an a plus plus in the 90s and especially in the dvd era and especially if you were getting baked at two in the morning like i may have done a few times in the 90s and floyd was kind of our spirit animal it was interesting i don't step on the internet research but i didn't know this so i did it that judd apatow the whole idea of pineapple express came from they love floyd and they're like what would have happened to floyd chase the italians the perfect thing about floyd too is it's not like in tropic thunder when tom cruise is doing a cameo and he's just like i'm gonna work it so hard and make it like i'm almost trying to go viral in that movie yes it's like red pit is actually just like i'm just gonna land this funny couch man and i'm gonna like say a couple of stuff is largely improvised by pit he's just like so perfectly woven into the fabric of the movie he's not trying to do anything else but the three times you see him you're like i can't believe i got so lucky as to see this this performance the thing about it is though he's the most important character yeah because he's the person who gets them all together for the shootout at the end of the movie i mean he really is the turning point yeah and the whole don't condescend me man i'll fucking kill you like that part which is my favorite line of the movie uh don't condescend me as a guy i need to start saying that to you more often don't condescend me fancy i'm like kill you you could kill me i will say with the brad pitt thing and i can't remember if we've talked about this in the rewatchables before he has this alternate path where he's one of the great character actors of all time yeah where he's created like these 15 non-essential but super memorable fun he just could have done that but he was almost like he was so handsome yeah i mean like he still does that up through i mean like burn after reading where he's just like i'm gonna play this like waste of space but it's just gonna be it's actually probably what he was born to do and what he would probably prefer to do but he's unfortunately the most famous person in the world seven he's not brad pitt he's it's like there's some character he put thought in that i can't even really describe that i think is a time where he's coming to material that's not written necessarily for him whereas i think everything after that has started to be created for him in some way or shape or form yeah that's a good way to put it it also sets up this relationship with tarantino now like yeah 15 years later now the tarantino's next movie starring brad pitt once upon a holiday next year so that's another age of best dennis hopper is uh slater's dad we talked about but there's something so fucking like about dennis hopper especially as he got older like you're really attached to the shooter you're really attached to the guy in this movie even like the villain in speed it was hard to root against him i didn't really want to accept evil dennis hopper i just like also it's actually a crucial scene the clarence clifford scene because we always talk about the dialogue or like the these two lovers on the run as that's this plot point but that's really economical film writing to communicate a lot about who clarence was yeah it's like he's like you're just like your mother you know i haven't seen you in three years hopper's obviously supposed to be a recovering alcoholic because he doesn't drink beer but he can you know he's like what's the strongest thing you got he's got i got a seven up in there you learn so much about clarence and why he might be the kind of guy who's going to throw it all away just for this one chance and that's actually brilliant writing that's the thing that gets underrated about tarantino because we're also dazzled by the structural stuff and the dialogue but almost because tony scott told this movie much more straightforwardly we get to see some of the bare bones stuff that tarantino does that's so good that seems funny too because it has two lines from two classic movies that tarantino just lifts and puts into the movie you're just like your mother is something that hopper says in rumblefish yeah that's the reason he gave him that line and uh the beer line mcclaren's is like beers all i ever eat is uh from the last picture show and those are just like there's little tiny things like that throughout this movie that tarantino lifts puts in and when i first heard i was like what a cool line i love beers all i read and then 10 years later you see last picture show and you're like oh shit he did that you know he dropped a little easter egg in this movie yeah it was pre-internet and movie quotes and pulling stuff from the past and stuff was just a little more important now it's kind of a renaissance because the twitter gifts now when people have reactions to stuff on twitter they'll just grab moments from movies but that was kind of like people actually talked like that in the 90s that's why when i started writing my column i would throw that shit in the thing because that's how me and my friends we just did movie lines all the time like that was one of the ways we connected another one what's age the best this one's for you chris ryan sizemore and penn together yeah just like the cop show we never got that i would have loved them on fox like like this 12 episode fox cop show that got canceled tom sizemore he wasn't quite able to have to do them together yeah i mean can you imagine a more uh drug-addled set yeah i think i think so i mean we saw i saw a live read of uh the script a couple years ago at the ace hotel that right incredible cast of people we got it wasn't right so they had christian slater do alabama and clarence play wow uh the cops were the duplass brothers and it was like actually i was like oh i would love to see a duplass brothers like straight up cop movie of them playing these guys yeah uh yeah sizemore and penn are incredible in this they're incredible i misspoke it was it was a writing thing this was the lineup of people that did it it was jk simmons reading the part of clarence as a strange father nice kevin pollock doing walk-in john favreau did gandalfini mark and jay duplass as the trigger happy tops keegan michael key and paul sheer were drexel and ellie blitzer wow may whitman was a number of characters i guess and jason siegel's foyd jesus yeah another one's age the best coming home in a body bag is just fucking fun the entire uh saw rubenek as as joel silver and brought to the show as much of the screeners or the dailies and he was the whole like joel silver lee domowitz thing and then ronson pinchow being his assistant the blonde uh security boris yeah boris he's like i forgot to tell you something leave i hate cops uh and then dick richie constantly trying to be like did you know i'm an actor yeah i love lee donowitz so much one of my favorite movie characters of all time save it for dion waiters because it's a fascinating dion waiters argument the last one that's the best for me is the han zimmer score yeah so it's really really distinct i like it it makes me happy and i think it gives the movie a little bit of uh levity here's a movie nerdery for you so that score is based on a composition from the 1500s by a german uh composer i think in carl orf yeah and then that score is picked up and integrated into badlands the terrence malick movie from the 70s and then hans zimmer essentially redoes it for the score and then true romance starts with patricia arquette's voiceover which very much makes city spacex voiceover in badlands yeah this is just a movie full of stuff that is pulled the best parts of stuff from other stuff yeah what's age the best by the way of all those things like i think that of all the things in it i just really go back to this as like the peak of tony scott's like just neon vision of urban america i still am responding to the dialogue yes you know the way that it's written and obviously it's like so over the top and violent and offensive but like that was the point that is the point it's pulp and i don't know the game of anyone is like obviously they predicted one of the biggest i would say game of any it's this yeah it's like watching i don't know michael jordan college or something like oh there's michael jordan 37 in north carolina like that means something i don't know uh what's the worst smoking movie theaters i was like oh because for the most part this movie could come out right now yeah there's a couple small things i think danoffini beating the shit out for 10 minutes probably yeah wouldn't come out today i don't think they would do that i don't know they could do drexel today probably not although here's the thing i don't know that you can do the sicilian i honestly like i think that i had the eggplant speeches i know i think they would have done it i think i think people get way been out of shape about it 2018 because we live in the everybody has to be perfect all the time outrage society and everyone will line up for that one tarantino why does he keep doing this he's gonna do crazy shit once upon a time in hollywood this whole cycle of like can you can you not do this i still think he's doing the movies that he wants to do thing is like he always describes himself as a dude who grew up around mostly black people who had a lot of black friends as a kid and so he feels like he has access to this experience and he always writes about it and he always has sam jackson in his movies and every time this comes up sam jackson is like quen's not a racist quen's cool i love quen's dialogue and he really understands something and this we go through this every single time so the sicilian speech he said is based on a conversation that he had with a guy that he was friends with who was black who told that story he puts it in the words of a white guy so it's more offensive the sicilian speech also is rooted in a very like that's a very true life kind of character of a guy who's like very lonely and reads a lot of history books and is like i know a lot about the world because i read it's a fucking guy that i've definitely met over the course of my life who's just like guess what you read this book you didn't read this book i'm going to tell you something about this and you're like oh great here i am going for a ride with this guy and and that's the thing i think is a very important distinction about this is that there's like probably for better or for worse we're losing our ability to distinguish between the creator and the creation and whether or not the characters that we see on the screen should match our moral values right and whether or not seeing somebody with moral values that you find reprehensible at times it still makes them worthwhile characters by the way it's art and it's fake i've never had that problem i'm also a white man so i've never been like really like the target of the things that would make me upset about it but with tarantino it comes from a tradition of pulp crime gritty fucked up people who are not good nobody in this movie is good and like even clarence in alabama for as much as you like them are essentially criminals and it's just like you just have to kind of like change your compass a little bit when you're watching this stuff and i guess i'm just personally like way interested in these kinds of people but i never get confused about whether or not like tarantino is racist or he thinks like this is really cool what's happening to patricia i kept let's talk about the other stuff in the movie we talked about this last week with branders too it's like this is a movie about dirtbags and crooks they act a certain way i put the eggplant speech down for this but at the same time i don't think it's age bad but i just think the country's changed and in whatever new prison when people like oh what is this but the whole point of that is those are the characters he's not condoning the dialogue and the guy's hopper's basically knows he's gonna die and he tries to get him and he's like the worst possible thing he can think we should still be able to do that movies the gandalfini arcette scene i'm gonna defend the scene and i think it could still happen in 2018 the whole point of this movie is everybody's bad the behavior has to be over the top to warrant like you know that we're invested in these characters and she's the hero of the movie and she wins the scene she kills him and it goes so over the top in a way that is you can't believe it she's this hooker who has had this come around and i'm rooting for her i'm invested in her i want i want them to sell the suitcase and now the gandalfini's in the hotel room and she's for some reason not scared doesn't turn around and run tries to deal with him it goes super duper dark he's just pounding her and she survives and gets out of it like to me it's no different than uma thurman and kill bill or something there's also like the i don't feel like it's like a domestic violence no no i don't think it gives this movie like a tremendous amount of gravity and maybe it's it's uncomfortable to watch maybe it's like unwatchable to some people i don't really understand why but so much of the beginning of this movie and up until this point is fantasy it's a fantasy of clearances to have a woman like alabama her name is a fantasy like nobody's named that she looks like a pickup girl who walks off of a poster everything about what happens for them where like he kills a drug dealer and it's a bag full of coke and they get a cadillac how does a guy like that have a cadillac like that drives off to the desert he's going to get from detroit to california in a snap and everything about it is this dream and then this ends that dream because this is the consequences of all the fantasy i mean obviously the dresser scene is violent he gets his face punched in a little bit but this is the guy who's seeing elvis in the bathroom and then finally the scene happens and it's away from clarence and this is like who these guys really are this is what they're willing to do to people and it completely changes the sort of stakes of the movie and by the way gandalfini sets it up really well in the scene you know let me take a look at you he plays he plays it almost almost like he's a masochist you get a shot at me you stab me but he's almost like there's something likable about him until he actually starts hitting her where it's like oh he's kind of flirting with her there's this weird dynamic that i can't remember seeing before and then it gets violent but he sets up it after he hits her a couple times and then he goes you know the first time you kill somebody and he's just he's a fucking psycho and the whole point of it is that guy's a psycho yeah and she has to defeat him to keep going i'm so into it by the end of that when she kills him you're like yes she's hitting him with a rifle um i just think it's great the only thing that will get legislated is when tarantino does stuff like this it's very it's not beautiful it's usually very gross and raw and real tony scott makes really beautiful things and this those scenes are weirdly shot beautiful there's like a slow motion when she goes through the shower there's her getting pushed against the mirror there's all this like art film stuff going on she kills him at the end it's almost like a like a caveman killing like a woolly mammoth and i think that people would be like this that is a glamorization of stuff like this and it's also the scenes are it's basically three scenes cut up because they keep coming back to it it's just really long it's just a lot of time spent us watching patricia architect her ass kicked and she kills him in like 30 seconds but there's just so much time spent showing her getting beat up but i think today you just wouldn't have it that way it would probably be the other way like he knocks her around for 30 seconds and then she beats him for three minutes yeah totally it's like the one thing about that scene is that it's not like he comes back and recipes i think it smashes right into bronson pinch i'm getting arrested right now is that the next scene which is like hilarious but it's almost like totally a little bit of a collision with like what you're exactly going for it with the immediate next scene is him getting a blowjob in a car and the lady knocking the cocaine all over i think it's the most important scene in the movie because after that you're like hey anything is possible and they will absolutely kill these two people that i've become attached to and you don't totally feel that way until then right the actual answer for what's age the worst is this anecdote about tony scott came up with what he calls a quote persuader when trying to get patricia arquette to get to where she didn't be emotionally for the scene he would occasionally slap her before they started shooting and it became such an occurrence that she ended up approaching him and asking him for the persuader before they're having scenes later in movies and then he jokingly said after it's called english school of directing i'm positive that wouldn't go over well in 2018 it was kind of hard to read in 2008 it was kind of crazy indefensible and weird that's just a weird story really fucking weird so that came out there's a maximal history that you can read online and that's just in there like one of the stories like oh yeah he's the slap patricia arquette that's a story you hear about directing like 1957 not 1993 definitely like the late 60s and 70s like peck and paw and he's just like him and charlie hessner beating the shit out of each other before she shot or something like that that was the snl sketch that belushi played peck and paw like beating the shit out of this cast members uh casting what ifs couple good ones for alabama tarantino wanted joan cusack what fucking genius he wrote this in the late 80s joan cusack no i mean like he's the one man like that's so smart and genius she's amazing joan cusack is amazing that he's like he's a you can't raise your eyebrow at that this guy put john travolta in pulp fiction i don't think she has enough sex appeal for the character personally i always thought that weirdly that joan cusack never got to roll the show off her sex appeal okay she's she's pretty sexy in um this is the joan cusack could she have pulled off a sexy character argument that we've been waiting for i agree i thought that was an interesting idea i mean the thing is that patricia arquette is so hot and so it's hard to see anybody else but really scott wanted drew barrymore i mean i'm sorry i told you scott and uh so 93 drew barrymore was i think a year before mad love which i remember seeing in the theater because i love drew barrymore and i wanted to see her play like a crazy girlfriend who was unraveling and i think she could have pulled off alabama and i think it was the right point of her career where she had this career baggage and she had some drug alcohol stuff and we kind of got her shit back together i think she would have been good in this movie and i actually think she would have been an a-lister after this movie patricia arquette for whatever reason this did not propel her to i mean i guess the reason is only 12 million yeah but she's fucking iconic she's amazing my high school girlfriend started like curling her hair the way like patricia arquette has because she was like immediately like this complete model like model of cool like immediately and it's a role that some of the actors now would absolutely murder somebody for what's funny about too though is like i think we talked about magic dream girls a couple episodes ago she's totally fake i mean she's totally this creation the whole not just the setup that gets her into clarence's life but everything about her i'm listening to the um the commentary with tarantino last night of the movie and he literally says on the on the commentary he's not he's not embarrassed about it he says i just didn't have a girlfriend until i was 25 yeah and i was writing this movie and i was like he's just inventing his dream girl a girl who will watch kung fu movies with him chicken beer yeah and just hang out and and be funny and have a lot of sex and smoke and this is it's just what he wanted and she's for whatever reason she's just the perfect actress to embody that idea in his head jack plaque was cut from the movie he played an usher in the kung fu movie theater val kilmer desperately wanted to play clarence you mentioned that earlier tarantino originally viewed this role as like david carrie and i think being a little bit more of like an older loser and so i think that was probably like if kilmer had got it that would have been like a guy approaching middle age more than a pretty cool dude like who's like happens to be working at a comic book store in detroit this was a really good casting what if tom sizemore initially cast as james gandalfini's character wasn't comfortable with the scene that required him to beat up patricia arquette asked to play the police cop and said recommended gandalfini because they've been in a play together gandalfini gets his big break i didn't know that that's an interesting one four degrees of tom sizemore yeah you want to hear a little riff right now or riff right now about uh when he goes for the heat check against the nero the bank is worth the risk for me the action is the juice long pause yeah for me and the nero's just like just staring right at him he's just like sizemore's like this is my cutaway where i act against the nero and he's like for me the action is the juice this is like the iso for michael man iso's for tom sizemore and he's like all right post up the nero and sizemore's like i got this cutaway long dramatic pause michael man gave tom sizemore is michael man's joking no and michael man's tips yeah he just keeps giving him shots he's like i'm gonna put you out there and give you minutes the only thing that doesn't make sense about that sizemore story is that like a year later he's a natural born killer that's like the most disgusting person in the history of time so yeah so the idea that he's not comfortable beating up tricharquette's character on camera and then he played that fucking evil prison warden detective i think he might have had some domestic violence stuff in his past maybe yeah i mean he famously made how he plays tons of substance issues but i hate to close them uh the joey pants award named after joe penaliano two great ones in here ed louder ed louder is the guy he was um eddie albert sidekick in longest yard he played the quarterback oh yeah he was the head coach in young blood he's been in basically 100 sports movies and he's the bald guy he's kind of like not as attractive as ed harris and is in those movies in the 70s he's the lieutenant yeah so he's the lieutenant in this right and then the other one is saul rubineck who i'm not positive everyone knows that's all rubineck's name is saul rubineck they just kind of know him from things like oh that guy why the fuck did he know your name you little piece of shit you're gonna forget what I do for the next 20 years your fucking career is over i treated you like a son you fucking stabbed me in the heart fuck you fuck you fuck you yeah that guy's not mandy he's a guy yeah so i think he wins for this one well this is the iconic saul rubineck performance to end also this is going in joey pants not in dion waiters then well he's also eligible okay so i just want to throw out two more people victor argo is one of uh christopher walkens oh yeah yes yeah and also conchata farrell who's the casting agent who's like he's just like hey over there like michael michael rapaport's audition and he's just like thanks so much mr richie we'll give you a call it's great let's take a break and then we'll get to the most important dion waiters award we've ever had hey imagine learning new recipes from gordon ramsey or photography tips from amy libovitz now you can with masterclass masterclass offers online classes taught by the best in the world each class shot with cinematic production quality offers on-demand lessons loaded with exclusive content you'll find only on masterclass choose from classes taught by over 35 masters including malcolm gladwell ron howard astronaut astronaut chris hadfield and so many more new classes are always being added whether you're pursuing your passion or developing your career you'll find a masterclass for you masterclass is even featured by the new york times vanity fair and espn i think this is a really cool idea um and i'll be interested to see how many things they added maybe at some point they'll have a rewatchables class we just talked about what makes a rewatchable movie the rewatchables listeners can unlock access to every masterclass for you right now at masterclass.com slash rewatchables unlimited access to over 35 world-class masters all for one surprisingly low annual price once again masterclass.com slash rewatchables for unlimited access to masterclass learn from the best in the world at masterclass.com slash rewatchables all right we're back i don't know what to do with this these are individually you have probably five dion waiters award winners it's like one of those oscars categories where all the movies could win um val kilmer can't even crack the top five for this i have a sixth what do you think of the zelvis just generally yeah it's fine when the doors when's the doors 1990 that's what a moment for kilmer just floating around hollywood being like what what rock star can i be by the waker sorry anytime you're ready for the rewatchables the doors i'm here you know my number i'm here can you just do val kilmer's 93 really quickly yeah the real mccoy a little underrated tombstone yeah incredible wow that's incredible tombstone obviously tombstone that's like one of the all-time great supporting performances ever gary oldman is drexel the white pimp who thinks he's black brad pitt is floyd a character so great that spawned by pineapple express years later christopher walken playing the sicilian and somehow pulling it off james dan doffini as the most evil kind of hitman assassin person is hopper count as the end waiters so he's only got two scenes all right so i got six then so hopper and then uh a surprise entry saw rubenek are we not gonna put pincho in there i feel like he's in it too much he kind of has a big part i feel like him and rapoport are both in this movie and too many scenes guys amazing you want to do the award well no i mean i just think that like his scenes he got the script uh when he was finishing perfect strangers and he'd been in beverly hills cop right he's the guy working at the art gallery was it two years they brought him back for two he was so popular in one they brought him back for two the roller coaster scene is just incredible like the world like apparently all of them were you're throwing up or high on queen is doing that scene because they need to be sedated why did they have to film that for two days who fucking knows like what is this movie but i just think he's great i do want to ask a question wait a second can we go backwards with ronson print show sure risky business he's one of tom cruise's buddies and he's really good at that he's cop one cop two perfect strangers was just flat out hit i mean that was like a very popular show for a long time and then true romance he's in this thing not a bad like 11 year run for bronson i think he became a punching bag after the fact but it was kind of unfairly i was just gonna say that i think he probably didn't have the career deserved which is a weird thing to say about bronson pinch he's pretty good he's great i mean elevator scene too is really great with the size more and pen just being like you know he's bluffing elliot he's bluffing and elliot's just like i want to go him and andrew mccarthy i think were two people that for some reason became punching bags yeah andrew mccarthy was the weekend of bernie's movies and him and jonathan silverman was like fuck those guys yeah yeah um there was like there was a kind of like light comic actor that could be a star in 1989 but not be a star in 1999 and yeah whatever reason those guys didn't really get it can i ask a walking question yeah are the two scenes he's ever done in tarantino movies to watch speech and pulp fiction in this yeah that's fucking nuts if we ever do pulp fiction on the show we're going to spend 30 minutes on the winaki speech that's like one of my favorite things that ever happened in a movie it's crazy that walking got to do both of these speeches that's insane it's so crazy so i don't even know what to do with this i do want to give the shout out to saw ruben i'm doing a joel silver impersonation at like the height of joel silver to cocaine he's what i hear about better than that i can't really make you the winner i love when he does the most of the least like olden bars what the fuck are you doing olden gandolfini pit all these people are like they have a lot to work with in the parts and then so we're smoking and driving on the pch hell yeah why are you calling me on sunday uh i don't know who you got this right i think this is the first war i can't really decide it's like something between it's pit ruben ecker or walking for me i love i love olden but like i think you know fanny just he's in three scenes and he's out of control yeah and older might have the line in the movie it's a white boy day it's still probably like white boy day i'm it's honestly saw ruben ecker walk for me because he's never done anything else i need your decision making here because your decision making all of those other characters have great careers you know they all went on to do amazing shit they won oscars and emmys and everything like for ruben eck the highlight reel starts here also the original thing is that ruben eck didn't know it was joel silver he was like i'm just doing a thing and they're like yes you are yes also the character is not written as joel silver the character is just written as a producer and tony scott who hated joel silver made him joel silver like that's really great and so honestly tony scott gets a lot of credit for the ruben eck performance because he molded him into it but holy shit i just love that character so funny yeah i guess like the whole conceit behind deon waiters is somebody comes in and has a heat check right and we always do the basketball box score analogy and you would do that this is one where it's all ruben eck's like the 11th man on the team and shouldn't have been able to score 20 points in seven minutes we shouldn't even be we shouldn't be talking about him right now without the shit going on which i think is the definition of the unwaiters when i quit the ringer will you be like i dreamt you like i'm sorry to step in the heart why do you know his name elliot why do you know his name the best one that you said it earlier is that thing the body bags too i've got more taste in my penis like just the way he delivers that he's also like uh elliot what did this cost me he's like 357 000 and he's like elliot i swear someone is stealing from you it's really good uh all right i don't know i expect all ruben eck was like 20 to 1 odds people who have thought about this movie less would say oldman 10 out of 10 right because oldman is doing on twitter when you announced everybody was like it's going to be floyd or drexel it's going to be floyd or drexel and we understand that we accept that but i just love ruben eck yeah watch the movie closely ruben eck is the correct winner half-assed internet research tony scott changed the ending because he loved the characters originally clarence died and alabama got away with money and he just didn't want clarence to die do you like the ending i don't like how to get shot in the eye i don't like that clarence gets named if we're gonna have him live i want him to have both of his eyes just like a shot in the shoulder um i think it's fascinating that quentin tarantino wound i think it's interesting that they they did shoot both apparently uh i think there's a version of it where he dies right i i love that like tony scott just liked him too much and just didn't want to go it's classic tony yeah um i want to see maybe we should make a ringer video montage of all the characters who ended up on the beach playing with their kids at the end of the movie is it the same beach in mexico that's always just perfect and you just go down there you bring three hundred thousand dollars in a suitcase and you're just able to just buy a place on the beach and you're good to go picture like red talking to alabama you know what are they talking about yeah and paul walker and jordana brewster for fast seven and there's just a question what a beach great place elvis's estate would not allow them to use any elvis music do you like the music in this movie i would love to talk about it i love the you'd obviously like to open the movie with an elvis song but charlie sexen's graceland is a great song that's the song that opens the movie it's basically charlie sexen doing elvis really awesome song it's a weird mishmash of music though yeah so especially since tarantino's movies are so tightly controlled in terms of the music to have just like randomly a late period aerosmith song plays you're just kind of like what the fuck that goes way out of sight i gotta say i actually thought the music's a missed opportunity and you could that should have been what stage of the worst i'm thinking about it you could have you could grab on like the pixies and all these kind of uh post-alternative punk type bands you get out shine by soundguard yeah that's the one song that's i love the hello baby big bopper thing when he's on the phone with dick ritchie and i love the weird bro live song that's on when dennis hopper's walking that stuff feels really tarantino to me the stuff that is like techno music yeah i was like drexel listening to techno anyway it's kind of weird yeah yeah he probably would have but that techno scene i think you needed the music for the problem settling vibe but you're right yeah we think would have been good uh let's get let's drexel's weird eye came from the dracula prop box really that's funny gary oldman said tony and i had tea at the four seasons and he said look i can't really explain the plot but drexel's a pimp who's white but thinks he's black and gary oldman said that was all i needed to hear i said i'll do it saul rubinek said i was auditioning and tony said you got him exactly right that's joel you nailed him and i said sorry i'm confused joel joel silver he said i had no idea who that was they filmed the hotel drug deal at the abandoned ambassador hotel where robert kennedy was shot which is it's near the end of beverly right as your bet they hit silver lake on the 101 my daughter actually practiced there for half a year at virgin high school and i had no idea that the ambassador was next to it because now it's a dog hospital oh it's like a dogs and cats hospital i knew none of this so it was abandoned and they renamed like the schools in that neighborhood rfk yeah all that stuff is named after kennedy yeah also there's like a funny line where in the world history that maxim did i think where sizemore was talking about how they got his death in one take at the beginning of the shootout so he had to lie on the ground with feathers in his mouth for like oh yeah yeah um the director intended to shoot walkin's part of the scene first walkin begged him to shoot hopper first and scott noticed walkin finding his character as he watched hopper's half of the scene play out but that was cool yeah that's cool apparently warner brothers was going to change the title to reckless hearts terrible and uh arquette slater and tony scott basically threw their bodies in front of the law with tarantino probably would have killed himself if that happened the drug money exchange scene was supposed to be at a zoo and the location fell through that's how they ended up at six flags gindolfini got into character as mob enforcer virgil by staying at a dingy hotel and not showering he looks unclean yeah he didn't change his underwear i think so last but not least slater and arquette seems like uh there were sparks on and off the set yeah definitely seems like they were having sex i said we met with patricia christian had a woody from the first time he saw her yeah trish fell in love with christian he was her they had true romance our cat said uh romantic magnetized relationship a sexual attraction goodness christian slater it was love at first sight working with patricia was tricky because i was in a relationship we both made it time to be professional but that age it was difficult the phone with scene is one of the more believable sex scenes in movie history yeah he's like ram his tongue in her mouth he's going for it yeah so there you go apex mountain i think got all the people who obviously weren't apex mountain like brad pitt rubeneck uh rubeneck slam dunk there's never been more of an apex mountain kid rubeneck's like in a theater production of on golden pond he's like i'm doing my best work rubeneck was in one of my favorite cable movies and the band played on about the uh about uh how they tried to hide aids in the 80s and he has like some great rubeneck scenes in that too rubeneck is also an all-time long order guy he's been on like 40 yeah i love rubeneck big winner of this podcast apex mountain christian slater i'm gonna say yes i'm gonna go heathers too early i think it's pump up the volume because he mentioned podcasting yeah good point all right none of us pick broken arrow or hard brain broken arrow sure that's when travolta that was a real comeback that's when the wheels came off the steering wheel he's just started going for it patricia arquette she's had some incarnations yeah i was yeah yeah i'm gonna wait because she goes on wait a second no i'm not okay yeah not personally i personally subjectively i don't think it's this personally for me it's true romance but career-wise it's got to be winning an oscar is this category supposed to be personal or no i just agree with you i think i like i have so much of a deeper it's supposed to be when they were at the peak of their powers in their career and they had their most options and the most people um respected what they were doing and the whole thing a lot of bad stuff she had a rough rough next seven eight years yeah tony scott i unequivocally for me yes this is the coming off so you think there's over man on fire yeah because he had had these commercial hits and then it faded and people like we sure tony scott's good and then boom and then that leads to crimson tired and the combo of those he's never his career was never in better shape than somewhere between true romance this is a flop though i think crimson tide is the same time it wasn't top gun what are you talking about it wasn't a flop with critics top gun's one of the biggest movie hits of all time that influenced an entire generation and basically launches tom cruise i'm trying to remember no i i don't even like top gun that much here's the counter i never felt like that was a tony scott movie when i saw top gun disagree no but you were eight years old i'm telling you what it was like yeah when he came out it was a part of all his work yeah yeah but in the time it was not like well who directed this it was like well tom cruise is the biggest star in the world okay tom cruise was the narrative out of the movie true romance he was part of the narrative and i think that that's why i would say apex mount for but i see the top gun thing because top gun was one of the five biggest movies of the 80s i mean it's definitely not this is my favorite tony scott movie so that's not no no i know after after about 25 podcasts i realized that that's what he picks about i don't understand any of the categories you don't understand apex mount it's a little bit elusive it's like the mvp award everybody sees it differently can i throw this at you yeah the most critically acclaimed movie he did out of the out of these eight is that true somebody that was searching for critical acclaim but was a commercial success and now this movie he kind of had his real chops as a director gosh i wonder if this movie's not that well reviewed i guess i guess it is right you said yeah no but the critics liked it even either liked it that fucking crank uh bronson pinchow i'm going cop one cop one and he was like one of the breakouts what's he offer ed murphy when he comes in the gallery oh an espresso i think i'm looking at denaro yeah the action is the juice is the definition of apex mountain when you get to the top of apex mountain someone says the action is the juice chris pen i know it's dogs it's got to be yeah nice guy eddie walkin hell no no what is a walking apex he's a fucking deer hunter yeah can i make an early 90s walking case sure snl host it i looked it up uh fall of 92 that's when he did trivial psychic and stock talk which were like two of the best sketches in the history of the show trivial psychic is still like probably one of the seven best sketches in the history of the show uh then he has this movie 93 and then pulp in 94 and somewhere along that whole line it was like this awesome walking walking stance yeah where it was like everyone was in on christopher walken it was like part ironic but part he was a really good actor and if there was like that's when like was it was a jay moore who does the walk imitation all of it it just felt like walken had like a real moment there in that three-year stretch but deer hunter has to be the russian roulette deer hunter i think that's his apex mountain here are my three favorite super weird walking performances okay one is true romance it's more of a heat jack performance two is king of new york oh yeah which is fucking amazing if you haven't seen king of new york watch it that's the way right yeah three is wayne world two i can't overstate which by the way same year is true romance yes so that's the that's the next time you're talking about this side is just that in deer hunter i actually do believe he's playing russian roulette one of the most convincing performances ever also in things to do in denver in the 90s great yeah that's true treo buscemi or michael k williams for this movie they all would fit yeah if you gotta pick one i have a definitive choice for this michael k williams yeah i think he easily could have been in the same jackson any of the jackson scenes yeah totally would fit in i think he could have been i don't know i just think he would have worked in this movie could buscemi have been dick richie that's interesting or a little old or elliot bliss i think i think he's a little old for elliot because in 93 though he looks a little old and you can imagine dick is like going out for like dicaprio walberg like those kinds of like he wants to be in that generation right that's that's what he's supposed to be but Shami's like a little like Coen Brothers-y guy Mark Ruffalo they knew there's only one choice Bruno and Boris the bodyguards they're just going for it the whole time they have like three lines I fucking hate cops I think Rubenek might win this one I think Rubenek might win this one Rubenek could almost replace Ruffalo here the Elliot I treated you like a son and you stabbed me in the heart as they knew fun what a run for Mark Ruffalo it's over thanks for playing Mark Ruffalo what a great 57 episode you stabbed me in the heart I'm going to be doing a rom-com rewatchable to the man I'm just going to be like I treated you like a son and you stabbed me in the heart alright awesome Bruno and Boris congratulations we can't give it to Rubenek if we name the award after him Boris and Monty whatever their name is Picky Nets I only have three how much money does a movie theater manager have to buy a call girl for an employee's birthday not inexpensive can I be honest with you I'm not really sure on the economics of call girls in 1993 Alabama's only been a call girl for four days in this movie so that's my next one can I give you a quick little LA tidbit too that movie theater is the Vista on Sunset oh shit really wow really did you do the exterior of the Vista all the exterior of the Vista Tarantino tells a great story about how they put the Sunny Chiba triple feature up on the marquee at the Vista and his movie nerd friends would drive by it and they would call him and be like dude you're not going to believe the Street Fighter feature yeah that's the movie trope of the hooker who's only been a hooker for a couple days one of my favorite movie devices I'm a hooker but only since last Thursday I've only had two tricks would they really get out of the Beverly Ambassador at the end of that movie Slater and Arquette well not according to Tarantino there's a thousand cops down there she's carrying them they're both covered in blood they're carrying a suitcase nobody even looks they're sideways at them best quote don't condescend any man now I know I'm pretty but I ain't as pretty he's a couple titties he must have thought it was White Boy Day it ain't White Boy Day is it if there's one thing this last week has taught me it's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it I love that son of a bitch was right she tastes like a peach I like the gun line I think it's a good senior yearbook line for the kids out there the high school students I would use that one I know that Richard one thing this last week has taught me it's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it if there's one thing this last week has taught me it's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.

Clarence Worley, 1993. I think it's for that in your book first. It's not White Boy Day, is it? Yeah, that is.

I mean, when we said we were doing this, that's what Zach Mack, who's our producers, immediately emailed us. That might have been because there's three white boys talking about this movie. There's like a hundred more. I mean, it looks like she fell off the yugger tree and hit every branch on the way down.

I had that one initially, but I don't feel like that movie created that line. It may not happen. My stepfather was saying that in the 80s. Just kudos to him.

It was probably the first time I heard it and I feel like I heard it for the rest of my life all through high school. That's just one of those things. There's a whole bunch of those, though. I mean, I'm not a whore.

I'm a call girl. There's a difference. There's a whole bunch of stuff that he wrote in this movie that then became kind of in the culture. When I'm with somebody, I'm 100%.

I'm 100%. One of the minor importance, one of the major fucking importance is that I believe you. Can I just, and also just, Vincent Kocati, I'm the Antichrist. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood.

You tell the angels in heaven you've never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you. That's pretty good. himself away and that a woman has 20. Never heard this before since.

Have you Googled? It's so weird. I Googled it. Nothing really came up other than just this one part and might have been Tarantino talking about his ass.

I don't know. I want to believe it's true. It's one of those things. Why 17?

It's such a weird number to get to. It's like a science question. I don't know. Well, if anyone knows, email us at the mailbag at the ringer.com if for some reason there's some truth in that.

Why wasn't Patricia Arquette a bigger star? Why not? Why didn't it happen for her? Why'd it take so long?

I'll say this. I'll say this about Patricia Arquette is that she has a very distinctive vibe. It's just like wholly her own. It's kind of like that.

Her voice is very specific and unique. Her look is unique. So I can kind of see why she didn't necessarily translate over into being in Julia Roberts type movies. But I think it's still sort of sad that she never really got the career going.

She was on Medium for a really long time. She's not a successful career. She's in a couple of maybe not huge movies but I think very memorable movies right after this. She's in Ed Wood and she's in Flirting with Disaster.

And she's one of the stars of both of those movies. Those are really good movies that people like and so watch. But she does have this weird time. She's in Lost Highway but she never was in a big blockbuster.

She's never in a movie that you were like this is the best movie ever and everyone saw it. I'm somebody in the spirit of our friend Leslie Morris. I think she got market corrected by Drew Barrymore. Drew Barrymore is in Fever Pitch but is she really in a ton of movies that Patricia Arquette was rom-coms, Charlie's Angels, Mad Love.

I always thought Patricia Arquette was cool and a little weird and I never thought that about Drew Barrymore. Even though Drew Barrymore was iconic in her time and David Letterman and she did all those rom-com things. Drew Barrymore was weird. We talked about.

Yeah. That was her appeal in the rom-coms is that she was kind of weird but just not weird enough that guys would want to date her. She was really cute though. You know, Drew Barrymore is a little bit more like hard-bitten somehow.

What's Alabama doing right now? She's working in that bow yard with Red. Did you next go? I think so.

Running a surf bar? That's a great question. Clarence has been killed at some point. I think Clarence probably died from complications of not having gangrene in his eye.

Good eye surgery. I'm sure this is on some sort of deep web Tarantino database about how she hooks up with Harvey Keitel's Reservoir Dogs character. At what point? Well, initially it was because Clarence died so Clarence wouldn't move that.

Yeah. She goes on the run as a professional bank robber. Wow, interesting. I have two really good ones for an answer, Bill.

I'm really excited about both of these. Where exactly did Dick, Richie, and Floyd live? I thought, it seems like somewhere up in Beachwood, right? Yes.

Because he said you got to go down Beachwood which leaves me to think they're in the hills just basically you keep climbing down Beachwood and they're somewhere in there. That's right. I think we're Beachwood Cafe. It looks a lot like it looks a lot like the Los Felizos Hills the Franklin Hills.

Like, yeah. When we start the Ringer video series that I wanted for two years where we just go to movie locations or movies we liked we've got to figure out where this was. Right on the internet. This is the most important question of the movie and maybe of my life.

Oh my gosh. Did the Italians kill Floyd? I think they liked him. I think they were like to get a little bit of this guy.

No, they didn't. They leave. They leave. They don't leave?

I thought they leave. You don't know what happens. They leave the first time. The second time, they don't leave.

But Gandolfini comes. He leaves. He leaves. Right, because he tells them he asked the Italians if they want to like have a bow or whatever and they cock their guns.

But then it just kind of ends. We don't know if they kill them or not. Have we mentioned Kevin Corrigan playing an Italian gangster? No.

Kevin Corrigan, one of the most Irish guys of all time? Yeah, that was weird. The last time Floyd appears in the script, the early draft of the script from 92, he just says, well, you go down Beachwood. That's his last line.

There's no like and then they kill him or anything. I think he lives. I think he dies probably of lung disease two years later. Yeah.

Well, they wouldn't have to kill him, right? And that just leaves the trail for them if they kill him. There's no reason to kill that guy. Okay.

The Johnny Chan of this movie. He's just a big winner. He didn't really do anything. I don't know.

Because it wasn't a hit. It's got to be Tarantino, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it kind of it just minted him.

You were just like, okay, this is going to be something that I watch these movies for the next 20 years. I think that that was like, it was a sustainability after Reservoir Dogs. Man, I'm trying to think. I mean, the Slayer thing is weird.

He's almost underrated in this pod. His performance, like we haven't talked about him very much. He's kind of Christian Slater in every movie. Yeah.

I think by this movie, it was like, oh, he's Christian Slater. Even though there's a case we made that this movie is about him being schizophrenic. Like Chris Underline, all the fact that it's all kind of happening in his head a lot of the time. And everything is sort of wishful film.

It's like the woman is exactly the woman that he would dream up. The scenario is a classic crime fiction scenario. You find a bag of money and you're on the run. All the gangsters are so note perfect.

It's like, you know, Vincent Cacati. And everybody likes him. You know, the cops like him. Saul Rubineck likes him.

You know, they all kind of connect with him, which is just highly unlikely because he's a loser working at a comic book store. Right. I think Tarantino wins it because it proves that Reservoir Dogs wasn't just this weird indie fluke that really wasn't that huge of a movie anyway at the time. It established a narrative.

It led to Pulp Fiction. It's belatedly great. It feels very Tarantino-ish. Probably the most personal of all the movies he's made.

Clarence is his proxy. And I would say if you're Tarantino, the dream for this movie is that it didn't do that well and then became really beloved, which is kind of what that's in his will. I think what it's really of this whole thing is what if Tony Scott had done Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino had done for romance? I wonder what changes.

Tony Scott was my runner-up choice. This movie really needed him. And I'm not positive it works in the wrong hands. And I think especially the Gandolfini-Arquette scene in the wrong hands if the tone of the movie is off really goes badly.

Do you think it works in Tarantino's hands though if he's the director? Not in 1993, I don't think so. I don't think he would've known how to direct. He may or may not have done it as long as Tony Scott did it in terms of how long that scene plays, but it would've been closer to the way that the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs is shot, I think.

And he also famously not on the set of this movie. Yeah, is that right? Yeah, he was not present for the shooting, which was obviously common for Springriders, but he was such a big deal at the time. You know, that being said, Pulp Fiction, full-blown masterpiece, he pretty much starts making it three months after this comes out.

It's a 90% blown masterpiece. There's 15 minutes in there that need to come out, so. Are you still fucking telling us about this? Everyone agrees with me about the girlfriend.

No one agrees with you. Every email I get. You get three emails from three loser burner accounts that you invented. And then you're like, yeah, hey, everybody agrees about this character.

No, it's 100%. It's like SportsGuy2002 is tweeting at you. Can we need to do a Twitter poll and settle it once and for all? Bill, let's do the fucking pot.

Yeah, let's do the Pulp Fiction. Don't send me any more tweets from at Syl Bimmons. That's all I'm saying. Syl Bimmons.

Tom Shady 300 is like, sounds good, Bill. Yeah, I know. Bruce Willis' girlfriend stubborn in that movie. Bill, you know what I'm going to say if you ruin Pulp Fiction for me?

You're stopping you the horror! Just remember, you're my number one boy, Chris Rand. That's it for True Romance. Great stuff.

What a great movie. It's on Amazon. It's on YouTube. It is unfortunately not streaming anywhere else and not really on cable.

Get on it. Star Showtime HBO. It was for years. Yeah, now it's kind of faded off.

It's a movie that could never be shown on TNT. So it really has to be the HBO Cinematic Showtime. How about Epix? Where are you in this whole thing?

Epix, get your shit together. Stop showing Creed so much. We are going to be back. React to Craig.

One more episode of the Rewatchables and then we're done with this 20-episode run. Yeah, we'll have a special one in October. We have a couple, but this was, I think, episode 19 and 20. And then we're done.

That's it. Chris Reinshaw, Fancy, thank you. Thanks, Bill. All right, thanks so much to Sean and Chris.

Thanks to ZipCrew. Don't forget to go to ZipCrew.com slash BS. Thanks to Lisa. Remember, you can order your Lisa mattress online at Lisa.com slash Rewatchables with promo code Rewatchables.

Try it risk-free for 100 nights. Ships direct to your door in a convenient box with free shipping and free returns. Get up to $160 off the Lisa mattress or $235 off the luxury Sapira mattress and free shipping on the Lisa mattress at L-E-E-S-A.com slash Rewatchables and her promo code Rewatchables at checkout. We're back next week with one last Rewatchables for this 20-episode cycle.

And then after that, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how bad you guys want more of this. Until then.