Latest / The Kulturecast / Three Days of the Condor (1975) — "They'll print it."

Transcript

Three Days of the Condor (1975) — "They'll print it." · The Kulturecast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: We're in Wayne Media.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: This section's been hit.
• 0:48
  Speaker 3: Robert Redford.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Level of damage.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: Everybody.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Dr. Lapp, Janice, Ray, Harold. Everybody is dead.
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: In the next three days, everyone he trusts will try
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: to kill him. I'll need your help.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Have I ever denied you anything?
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: This week, CBS Sunday Night Movie at 9, 8 Central
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: and Mountain Time.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the CultureCast. I am your host,
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Chris Stashew, and I'm joined by my good friend, all
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: the way from the Great Plains of West Texas, once again,
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: joining us, the professor, Dr. David D. Perlmutter. Howdy, Chris.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: And also joining us for the first time on this show,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: he is someone that I get to say has been
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: podcasting longer than I have, which is not a thing
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: that happens very often. He has been the host of
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: The Conspiracy Skeptic for, well, since 2007, so you do
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: the math, I won't. He has also written two books
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: that I'm sure he will also tell us all about,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Your Friend and Mine, soon to be a frequent, maybe
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: hopefully frequent guest, depending on how this goes, host of
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: The Conspiracy Skeptic, Carl Maymer.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me on. I've been a big
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: fan of your show for a long time, and I
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: am just delighted to be on finally as a guest.
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: And we were discussing offline, you know, you have to
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: call Dr. Perlmutter, Dr. Perlmutter. I get to call him David,
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: but you can both address me as the podfather, okay?
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I really don't think I've met anyone.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: There's only one other person I know. And technically, since
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: like you mentioned, you had been doing another show before
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: the show that you now hosted even earlier than that one.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: You are the person I have met who has been
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: podcasting the longest. So I think that that title is
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: well earned. So before we talk about Three Days of
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: the Condor, which is why you're here on this episode, Carl,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: tell my audience who may not know what the conspiracy
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: skeptic is, A little bit about yourself, a little bit
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: about your show, kind of what they would hear if
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: they were to go and listen to your show over
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: on your feed. Yeah.
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, as it sounds, Conspiracy Skeptic, I cover
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: conspiracies not too far into the past. You know, I
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: don't go back to like the 1400s and like, you know,
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: the Catholic conspiracy in England or something like that. But
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: I cover things that are recent modern history. From a
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: skeptical point of view, I have guests on. I've had.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: David, Dr.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: Perlmutter. I've had him on a number of times, and
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: he's always been an excellent guest, as I'm sure you
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: have discovered. And yeah, I've been doing that since 2007.
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: Before that, going all the way back to 2006, I
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: was living in Seoul, Korea. I was doing another podcast
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: called Seoul Survivors, and that was a lot of fun.
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: Just always had the podcasting bug Um, then I wrote, uh,
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: I've written a couple of books, one called the skeptics
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: book of lists. And then I came out with a
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: follow on called the conspiracy skeptics book of lists. And
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: three days of the condor was in one of my lists,
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: like a 12 conspiracy themed movies or TV shows. And
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: then I kind of pitched it to David and I'm like, Hey,
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: why don't we do, why don't we do three days
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: of the condor on, on, uh, on Chris's show. And
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: he's like, I can hook you up.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: The professor makes things happen with just the snap of
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: a finger and the magic of the academic wand, I guess. Carl,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you, as someone who, and I
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: used to host a show called Scary Stories We Tell,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: which I would say is more in line with what
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: you do in terms of talking about kind of, you know,
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: parapsychological conspiracy theories, stuff like that, kind of in that
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: same corner of the world versus this show so much.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: But again, I was part of both. So I would
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: consider that kind of the Venn diagram overlap. I am
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: so curious because, again, this is a film that takes
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: place in the 70s, but we are looking at it
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: in 2026 you know the film came out in 1975
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: September 25th which means we are recording this the 23rd
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: of September so right near the anniversary of the film
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: coming out as someone who has been podcasting for a
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: long time who has been watching film and been part
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: of the conspiracy conversation what Yeah.
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, good question. And Dr. Perlmutter, I'll just call
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: you David. I'll just call you Dr. Perlmutter. So we're
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: all on an even field there. Him and I actually
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: discussed this quite a lot. And the big thing is
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: really what we call the barrier to entry that in
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: the 70s and the 80s and in the 90s, if
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: you wanted to be a conspiracy theorist or at least
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: one that got some attention other than, you know, you know,
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: the guy filling your tank every week, you know, as
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: your sole audience, you, you had to do a lot
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: of research and you had to write books and read
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: books and stuff like that. And now it's just kind
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: of like ship hits bridge conspiracy, pump that out there. Um,
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: you know, fire in Hawaii conspiracy, pump that out there. And, uh, yeah.
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: And it's really this democratization of conspiracy theories, maybe that
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: it's like you get a conspiracy theory and I get
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: one and you get one. So, yeah.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Everything there is now a conspiracy theory.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Which makes it like that. You know, everything is
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: if everything is the end of the world, nothing is
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: the end of the world. That's kind of what it
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: feels like now.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: Exactly. And it's just it's just yeah, it's just. As
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: I say, when I started doing my podcast in 2007,
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: this was a lot of fun and it's not fun anymore.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Well, and that was that was kind of the question
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: I had for you, because that was kind of the
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: sense that I started Scary Stories in 2020, right at
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: the beginning of the year. And we ended right at
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: the beginning of 24 because every alt. I made the
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: mistake of having co-hosts who had real lives, unlike myself,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: who like you, like you've already alluded to, does a
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: lot of recording and that kind of eats up a
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: lot of my time. And even then in that four years,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: things had become less fun to talk about in terms
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: of conspiracy theories, in terms of kind of The level
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: at which conspiracy theories were operating. I mean, I remember
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: in the 90s growing up as a kid, like the
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: books that I would get from the library would be
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: books about conspiracy theories that were things that were being
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: talked about in the 70s. Like JFK, like the Bermuda Triangle,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: like aliens and UFOs and stuff like that. And it
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: feels like those things are no longer part of conspiracy
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: theory argument or conversation. Those things are their own thing now,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: which I think is also a very strange thing that
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: has happened where now there's this delineation between Bigfoot, UFOs,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: other things, and then conspiracy theory stuff like this. It
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: used to all be lumped into one thing, but because now...
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: So conspiracy theory, like you said, has a little bit
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: of a different tone to it. Those things cannot be
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: lumped in with that anymore because the fantastical and the
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: seemingly real, if you have those two things in close comparison,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: it starts to feel like, well, why am I believing
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: something this fantastical? And is this just as fantastical? And
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know, like conspiracy theories, they're just not as
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: fun as they used to be. And I'm glad you
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: said it because I have felt the same way for
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: a long time.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I want to add to what you both
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: said about how this movie sort of marks that transitional
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: period from the prior age of conspiracy theories to the
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: modern age of conspiracy theories.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: So I remember.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: Watching this movie in the theater, not when it came out.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: I don't know why. I think I saw it on
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: one of those college movie nights.
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: This was in the 80s.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: And I had vaguely heard about it, but I saw it.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: So I think this was early 80s. And I was
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: sitting there with, I guess, 99.5%. 9% of college students.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: I was actually a master's student. This is late 80s.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: And I remember sitting down and somebody who was younger
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: than me, because I vaguely heard something about the plot,
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: somebody who was younger than me said, oh yeah, this
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: is Robert Redford and he's a CIA agent. It must
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: be some conspiracy or something. And I thought, you know,
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: if this was a movie made in the 50s about
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: the FBI or, you know, a security agency, that wouldn't
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: be the exact first thought out of the gate, the
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: expectation that it's a conspiracy theory. And I actually, it
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: reminded me, again, setting the stage for, we're going to
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: talk about the sort of the cultural place of this
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: film late 70s, Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Vietnam War, assassinations. Everyone
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: of every political stripe is suspecting the government of something,
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: and sometimes they're right, and suspecting big corporations of something,
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: and sometimes they're right. I remember in parallel with Another movie,
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: late 80s movie, Sean Connery. You've reviewed it, I assume.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: I just haven't heard the podcast in your Sean Connery podcast.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: The Presidio with Mark Harmon. And that I also saw
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: in the theater. I don't know why I saw it
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: in the theater. It was a terrible movie. But I'm
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: sitting in the theater, and there's a murder at the Presidio,
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: which is the sort of Western Pentagon at the time.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: And Sean Connery at some point says to Mark Harmon,
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: there's a conspiracy. And it's the CIA and drugs.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: And I know the.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: People who wrote the movie, who filmed the movie, who
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: acted in the movie, had some expectation that an audience
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: would be going there and would be sitting in the
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: theater and going, but everybody in the theater burst into laughter.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: Because by the late 80s, claiming that there was a
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: government conspiracy... was no longer something that you included in
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: a thriller and you got any thrills out of. Sidney
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Pollack famously said, there's no message in this movie, it's
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: just a thriller. And I wonder whether that was positional
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: of him to say, we know by late 70s that
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: trying to send a message that the government might be
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: up to no good was embarrassing as a message for
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: a movie. And so we're just going to stick to
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: this as just a thriller.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, when this movie came out, it's one
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: of those movies like China Syndrome, where, you know, the
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: movie China Syndrome came out, and they weren't really expecting
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: big box office, and then Three Mile Island happened. And
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: this was kind of a movie, too, where it sort
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: of came out, and it was like, you know, it
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: was going to be an okay movie. And then right
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: at that time, I believe it was the New York Times,
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: they started leaking, it was called The Family Jewels, And
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: the CIA, right around the time of Watergate, they're like,
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: maybe we should actually kind of figure out what we've
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: been doing. And if, you know, if our books are
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: ever open, you know, what would they kind of hang
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: us maybe, you know, literally on? And so they compiled
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: a big list of all the terrible things they're doing,
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: the assassinations and, you know, infiltrating, like domestic spying and
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: those kinds of things. And then, you know, they put
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: it in a big file. And then some of that
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: got leaked out to the New York Times. And that
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: became like headline news just as Three Days of the
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: Condor was hitting the theater. So suddenly it was like
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: people who maybe like the FBI had a fairly noble
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: view of the CIA, you know, because I don't know,
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: was it like Yale or Princeton? One of the Ivy
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: League colleges was always kind of traditionally liberal. recruiting from
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: one of those Ivy League colleges. But, you know, the
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: CIA was for a long time was perceived as, you know, these,
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: you know, these Yale Princeton graduates, you know, very waspy,
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: you know, very, you know, very upstanding, you know, people
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: and not involved in really a lot of nasty, dirty tricks.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: Speaking of nasty, dirty tricks on this episode of the CultureCast,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: we are going to be talking about Three Days of
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: the Condor. So let's get right into it. So the
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: film is directed by Sidney Pollack on a screenplay by
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Reifel. It is based on
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Six Days of the Condor, so it's half as many
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: days of the Condor in the film. The film stars
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: like we've already talked about a little bit. It is
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: a Robert Redford conspiracy film. Hey, John Houseman is here, Dr. Perlmutter.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: talking about him, he's not a law professor this time.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: He's a man who yearns for the days of war.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: The film is shot in New York City, which ends
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: up playing a character unto itself, especially New York City
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: of the 1970s. One of the times that I find
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: to be very hard to replicate any other time than
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: when you were filming it right then and there. Like
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: you guys have already talked about a little bit, this
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: film sits in the post-Watergate run of The Conversation, The
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Parallax View, and all The President's Men comes out right
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: after this film, which obviously also stars Robert Redford. And
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: this film is in the vein of those films. The
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Parallax View we have covered a couple years ago. I
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: think it was actually last year, Dr. Perlmutter, you and
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: I covered it. So this is kind of the next
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: logical step in terms of covering these kinds of films. So... Carl,
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: let's get back to you real quick in terms of
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: the film, because I want to know when you saw
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: it for the first time. But I also want to
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: know specifically, because you are Canadian, I am curious, as
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: someone who is Canadian versus being American, as someone who's
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Canadian versus American, how does the American paranoia in the
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: film strike you? And how does that reflect with you
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: as someone who's Canadian?
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: I have people that I know that are Canadian, but
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: I've never asked them this question. And I feel like
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: this question is uniquely suited for someone who does what
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: you do. But what does that look like in Canadian
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: politics or the Canadian culture in terms of that paranoia
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: that is so, like Dr. Perlmutter already said, readily apparent
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: in the way that these Robert Redford films of a
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: certain time or Warren Beatty films of a certain time
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: were so able to convey? What did that look like
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: and what does that look like now?
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: Well, You know, in Canada, I mean, not to disparage
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: my fellow Canadians, but we're kind of America-lite. So, I mean,
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: we are enmeshed in American culture like, you know, as
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: you guys are. So, you know, Watergate. I mean, as
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: a child, I remember watching Watergate, you know, on TV,
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: the Watergate hearings. Yeah, I'm pissed off. I can't see,
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: you know, Rocket Robin.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Hood, but.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: There was a guy named Ehrlich, man, you know, and
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: that was pretty cool. So, you know, but but yeah,
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: I mean, it doesn't strike me as like, what the
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: hell are those crazy Americans doing down there? You know,
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: it was it. Yeah, it doesn't strike me as as
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: kind of unusual.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: And more, I guess, broadly, what are your thoughts on
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: just three days of the Condor? First time you saw it,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: the usual kind of opening questions here to start the episode. Yeah.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I call it the banality of national security.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: It starts off with some branch of the CIA, and
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: their job is to analyze publications and look for codes
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: and look for anything suspicious being published, and they translate
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: books into English and Robert Redford's character, that's primarily his job,
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: is kind of an analyst and look for anything really,
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: really weird. And, you know, their cover is that there's
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: some historical society, and they're working out of a very
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: nondescript building in New York. And, you know, I mean,
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: it strikes me as that is probably, you know, the
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: way the CIA really operates, you know, that... it's, it's
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: incredibly banal. It's all about, I mean, today PowerPoints, but,
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: you know, whereas in my job, you know, my PowerPoint is,
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: you know, how to better explain something to the customer,
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: you know, their PowerPoints are about, you know, uh, you know,
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: who do we kill next, you know, kind of thing. So,
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: so it's, it's kind of fascinating in, in that, that,
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: you know, that, and I think the audiences in the seventies, um,
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: they really probably were really taken by what they think
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: was maybe, you know, behind the scenes of the CIA.
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: And so, yeah.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Dr. Perlmutter, same questions to you, sir.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: I thought this film, when I first watched it, was
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: a passable thriller. I did not understand the plot. I
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: just thought it threw this... hand grenade of CIA cover-up
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: something but what I remember after watching it walking out
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: and there was a bunch of other graduate students and
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: like we went for coffee or something and I said
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: could someone explain to me why and and this is
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: not giving away the plot of this old movie but
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: like very early in the movie in the office where
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: Robert Redford works quietly reading books in you know in
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: his jeans but which uh Carl you're gonna want to
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: talk about jeans in the 70s but He, everybody's killed. Okay, well,
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: that's a good, that's a, you know, why are they
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: being killed? Like, what, what incredible secret? Again, I would
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: assume the secret was somebody was transmitting the plans of
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: our latest hydrogen bomb or just, you know, the alien,
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: the alien autopsy or something, you know, high level, and
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: then it mumbles and stumbles into like oil for something somewhere.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: And I guess that was my conclusion. These other people
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: who explained it to me said that, yeah, really going
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: with what Carl said, it was the banality of conspiracy,
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: of willing to kill people for really reasons where they
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: didn't need to be killed. I've read stuff online about
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: this movie over the years, and nobody's fully explained to
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: me why somebody reading a publicly published published book would
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: trigger mass murder of your colleague, right? So right there,
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: it threw me off back in the 80s. And my
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: rewatch of just a I guess I'm going to go
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: with Sidney Pollack, that there was this MacGuffin of, you know,
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: a conspiracy, just insert conspiracy, which is really the point
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: is that nowadays conspiracies, because they're so common, because as
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: Carl was pointing out, like no event happens that within
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: 15 seconds, you can't go to Reddit or, you know,
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: 4chan or whatever. And you're not going to see, well,
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: don't you, didn't you notice in the background there, there
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: was a white van and there was a glove and,
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: you know, just, There's a conspiracy right away. So the
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: word conspiracy seems to have been robbed of all meaning.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: And Carl and I and our mutual friend Julie Brannon
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: did our analysis of Disclosure Day on Carl's podcast.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: And we were doing what we like to call God's work. Good.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: And we were shaking our head going like, Steve, nobody
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: associated with that movie apparently had watched Three Days of
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: the Condor or watched any movie or read any Internet
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: site since the late 1970s, since E.T. or Taken, because
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: they were acting as if like there is a conspiracy
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: going To hide aliens will make the entire audience drop
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: jawed with astonishment and going, what?
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: I can't believe that's the plot. This isn't we I
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: don't know if you guys mentioned this in your episode
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: you did on Disclosure Day, but we forgot to mention
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: it on ours. So I will mention it here. The
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: thing that's crazy to me is this a film like
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Disclosure Day existed in a post ancient aliens universe where
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: it's like one of the most popular TV shows on
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: History Channel. And it's like the entire conceit of that
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: show is they've been hiding aliens this whole time. I
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: just oh, my God.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: The entire conceit of one billion social media and Internet
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: posts can't be made into a movie. And you have
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: the audience astonished by the conclusions and that that apparently
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: was lost on on. the creators of Disclosure Day. But
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: I think this movie was one of the first generation
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: of movies that basically demonstrated that, boy, you're going to
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: have to come up with something bigger than government agency
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: doing something dastardly to shock us. Or what I think
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: has happened in Hollywood now, it's a plug and play.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: It's what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin. Like, okay, Insert government
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: conspiracy here for Jason Bourne or John Wick or whatever. Or,
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: you know, if you look at Prime or Netflix, they've
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: got one of these types of short run series where
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: there's somebody chasing somebody because of some government conspiracy every week.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: And somebody watches them, but nothing is shocking.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think. This movie, and I'm not
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: a film student, but to me, this is one of
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: the movies where it was like the CIA has to
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: capture one of their own. And how does the CIA
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: capture somebody who is practicing the tradecraft and can use
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: all the tricks of the trade and avoid capture? And
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: not only avoid capture, but use those to figure out
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: why do they kill everybody, including his girlfriend or his
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: wife or something in the office? Why do they kill everybody?
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: And then, uh, and then, and then, uh, you know,
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: how do I keep myself from being killed?
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: So it, it, it, but they don't later movies have
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: kind of taken that basic plot, you know, uh, you know, insider,
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: we got to get him. He's gone rogue. Uh, but,
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: but they've sort of empty, you know, this guy is
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: like super fighting skills and can, you know, shoot people
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: with guns from, you know, a mile away and things,
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: things like that. Uh, but yes, but to me, I
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: can sort of see the evolution, like, like, you know, like, uh,
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: I don't know, Jason Bourne or, or, or, Mission Impossible,
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: those kinds of things. But, I mean, at the heart
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: of it, right, it's just very mild-mannered guy working in
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: a very nondescript office, and he's just reading books. And
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: he stumbles on something that's kind of weird. Like, you know,
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: this book has been translated only into three languages, like Dutch, Spanish,
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: and Arabic. And he's like, hmm, that's weird. And he,
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: you know, passes that up the line. But as it
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: sort of turns out, they've, you know, he's starting to
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: stumble on this CIA conspiracy to foment a war and,
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: you know, and America's going to seize the Middle East,
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: their oil fields. Because again, this is coming around the
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: time or just on the heels of the, you know,
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: the OPEC oil embargo, right? So I think- Previous to that,
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: Americans just like, we got cars, we got gas, and
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: we go. And it was really the first time Americans
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: had to really start thinking about like, you know, where
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: the hell does our oil come from? Oh my God,
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: it's not Christians, you know, and that kind of worried
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: Americans a bit. So it's kind of playing on that paranoia.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: And you both put this kind of already in perspective,
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: but as someone who had not seen the film until
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: just recently. I do think now we, as people dialed
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: into culture, even at all, even a little bit at
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: this point, I think we do take for granted how,
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: and you already put it pretty well, Carl, the idea
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: of the democratization of the internet and what the internet
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: and access to information has allowed for conspiracy theories to do.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: Now that conspiracy theories are easily like, now that information
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: is easily accessible and you don't have to go to
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: a library is really what this boils down to. Whatever
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: information you're accessing, at least reputable information, and you can
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: take that however you'd like, but I'm talking about in
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: terms of published papers, scientific information, things that people were
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: using before to make, you know, not educated guesses, but
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: decisions based on scientific evidence that is readily accessible now,
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: even for a cost on the Internet. And the Internet
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: in allowing that to happen has made, I think, people
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: for better and for worse, in some cases, more educated
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: and more insular in their beliefs on things and more
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: unyielding in their beliefs on things, for sure. And in
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: a time and place, like 1975, a film like this
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: would have felt, I mean, again, yeah, it's coming out
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: around the time where these things are coming out, but
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: it would have felt kind of not, it wasn't shocking.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: It's just more like, again, like we've already alluded to,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: like it's coming out in a time and a place
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: where people are already kind of getting wise to this
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: and their understanding that this is happening for real. It's
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: not just a film thing. It's not just a thing
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: that people can dream up in a writer's room in Hollywood. Like, no,
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: this has actually happened. And maybe not to the dramatic
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: theatrical effect of a film, but it's happening in a
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: way that is still rather nefarious. And the nefarious nature
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: of it, I think, is what the film I think
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: it's interesting the parts of the film that are kind
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: of musings on and you already brought this up, Carl, like,
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: why are they doing what they're doing? And what is
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: the point behind all of this? And once, you know,
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: if the CIA or FBI or whomever looks inward on
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: itself and the things that they're doing, would they like
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: what they see? And it's like, well, no, clearly not.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: The family jewels thing. It's I mean, that's a very
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: kind of again, that coming out around the time of
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: this is such a big deal because Seymour Hersh is.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: reporting i mean again i what's crazy to me and
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: and you brought it up already how this kind of
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: came into being in what universe what is it ever
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: a good idea to compile all of our misdeeds into
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: one document like i'm not saying like that i'm not
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: saying that doing misdeeds is okay to begin with but
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: here let's make one centralized document that you can essentially
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: look through and find all the misdoings and misdeeds and
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: misgivings all in one document in case we ever get
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: audited yeah Exactly.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: Well, we did a little bit of light assassination. Yeah.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: Some fomenting of regime change. It's just like, yeah, just
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: a little bit, just like a dash here, a touch there.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: It's it's crazy to me that that's the thing. All
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: that to be said, though, as someone who is watching
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: this has and has only seen it, you know, again,
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: recently and is watching it through the lens of someone
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: who's only seen it recently. It's a very interesting film
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: because I think it does kind of fit very well
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: into the parallax view, all the president's men, kind of
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: that world of, you know, the conversation, like these conspiracy,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: conspiracy movies about not, not real. Well, again, all the
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: president's men is a real conspiracy. So that's maybe the
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: only one that I can't say to those other ones,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: but Those other two are about fake, quote unquote, conspiracies
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: that are kind of based on real things or are
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: inspired by real things. I mean, all the president's men
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: is like, this is the real thing about the real thing.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: And it's like, OK, but I like how the conversation
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: parallax you in this film are kind of of a
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: piece together in terms of being about conspiracies, not anyone
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: in particular, specifically in terms of real world, but inspired
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: by this kind of amalgamation or public understanding of things
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: that the CIA or FBI can do and are doing.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: And like you said, Carl, at the time, CIA involvement
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: in domestic affairs was I don't I mean, it's probably
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: I don't know if it's worse now, but the 70s
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: were when things were at their real kind of like
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: churn and burn worse because they were doing some they were.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, we know that they're doing things now, but
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: I think in the 70s they were doing things to
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: a extent that probably even something like the family jewels
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: doesn't document fully.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I think the American public, I mean,
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: they got, they knew there was such a thing as
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: the CIA and they thought they were doing something in,
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: you know, Europe to combat communism. And they're doing stuff
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: in Southeast Asia. But until this came out and then
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: the family jewels started to be leaked, the American public,
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: I don't think, had a great idea that, you know,
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: the CIA is spying on you guys. And I mean, yeah,
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: they may be spying on the Black Panthers, whatever. But,
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: you know, no, they're spying on journalists and they're, you know,
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: they're spying on your kids at school and things, things
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: like that. And so I think, you know, the movie
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: came out first and I think people might've thought it
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: was a little bit far fetched, but because it was
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: released at the same time that the family jewels started
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: to be leaked that, you know, people kind of could,
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: could buy this as not like far fetched, but as like,
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Right. This is happening. And this
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: is a movie kind of, you know, uh, the, the,
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: the movie version of the family jewels.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And this movie is a time capsule, but it
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: does have these odd, but I guess would have been
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: predictable cultural resonances. Any of everybody who isn't old enough
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: to have watched the Seinfeld TV show, uh, look up
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: on YouTube, uh, Kramer versus the U.S. Postal Service. And
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: Kramer was the sort of wacky designated character on Seinfeld.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: And he decides one day that he's just not going
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: to take any more junk mail and he wants to
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: cancel his mail. Well, this massive conspiracy mobilizes against him.
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: And his friend, who's a Postal Service employee.
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: Gives him this speech.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Newman gives him the almost exact speech that Max
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: von Sydow gives to Robert Redford in this movie. And
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: I recognized, and of course, if it was going to
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: be in a sitcom, people, they expected it. People didn't
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: need like, oh, you mean like in Three Days of
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: the Conjurer? People just knew it because it had entered.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: Sort of like Liam Neeson's speech, you know, about I'm
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: going to find you.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, yeah. It's become a meme speech.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: This was one of the first movies that had a
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: meme speech that, of course, many movies have had. Casablanca
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: can be part of the culture on YouTube and on
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: TikTok without seeing the movie. So that was one part
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: is that it has these sort of cultural transfer points.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: I don't know whether The Simpsons has done a three.
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: The Simpsons must have done it. They've done every other
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: movie in the history of humankind. And then the, I
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: want to go to the Max von Sydow character. Max
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: von Sydow was this great, great actor. And he would
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: just show up in every movie as almost all, I mean,
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: he played Jesus Christ in the greatest story ever told
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: by George Stevens.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: I'm correct on that, right?
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: And so that's a range, right?
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah. He played a lot of what we call heavies,
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: I think.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but typically he played A German general or, you know,
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: here he plays this ultra professional assassin. And I think
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: one of the other things this movie predicted is if
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: you go back in time to movies in 50s and 60s,
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: even bad guys and good guys had some sort of
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: ideology behind their bad guy and good guy. But Carl
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: is referring to banality and the idea. And so a
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: little bit of a history lesson for, I guess, some people.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: some younger folks, is that Hannah Arendt, this philosopher who
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: wrote a book called The Banality of Evil, talking about
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: the Nazis. I think there's been a sort of revisionism
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: since then where she claimed that she was doing a–
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: this was during the trial of a famous Nazi in Israel,
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: Adolf Eichmann. And she said she looked at this guy
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: and he looked like such an ordinary bureaucrat. And so
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: she coined this term, the banality of evil. And it
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: really– has resonated to the present day because Max von Sydow,
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: you get an idea that if he got a phone
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: call from China, he got a phone call from Iran,
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: he got a phone call from Canada to do a hit,
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: he would say, okay, great, just give me the information.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: Here's where you deposit the money in the Swiss bank.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: I'll take care of it. Day of the Jackal, the
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: original Day of the Jackal had a very similar, in fact,
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: James Fox, who played the assassin in Day of the
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: Jackal and Max von Sydow could have just traded roles
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: in this. So this character of the evil killer who
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: has no ideology, he's just doing it professionally really well.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: I think it has, if you see it today on
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: a Netflix series, Amazon Prime, Apple or something like that,
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: Max von Sydow helped draw that character out for us.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, yeah, that's the thing that the Max
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: von Sydow character, he is a, you kind of, you
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: assume through the movie that he's, you know, he's very
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: aligned and he's working for the CIA. He's very partisan
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: of the CIA. And then, you know, kind of jumping
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: to the end, he ends up like killing the guy
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: who hired him in the CIA, like the deputy director
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: of Middle Eastern affairs or something. And once that guy
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: is dead, Max von Sydow is like, well, my contract's done.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: And then just let's, you know, you think he's going to,
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: he's going to pop, you know, Robert Redford and he's like, eh,
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: have a good day. You might want to disappear. They're
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: going to come looking for you and maybe go to Europe.
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: You know, the, the, the, the croissants are nice, you know, and, and,
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: and that's it. And then you're kind of like quite
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: shocked by, you know, that, oh, he's just this very apolitical,
• 35:54
  Speaker 3: just tell me to kill somebody. I'll kill somebody. And
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: then I'll kill people on the other side as well.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: I don't care.
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, he did care that off very well.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: And Dr. Perlmutter, like you mentioned, with the banality of evil,
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's kind of the thing that, I don't know,
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: that I think it's something that people my age say
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: it's like, what a boring dystopia, right? Like that's, I mean,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: you know, the dystopia as it was promised by I
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: think that was the first film you and I ever
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: talked about, Professor, was Soylent Green. And that is a
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: rather like it's less banal than the dystopia we live
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: in now. But I guess it's well, I don't know.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: I guess like it depends, like people being scooped up
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: and being turned into food like is pretty messed up,
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: but the government not admitting to it. would not be
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: surprising even if they were or weren't doing it. But
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: even that is more exciting than the dystopia we live
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: in now in terms of those kinds of things happening.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: And the evil that goes on as we perceive it now,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: it is and has always kind of been now done
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: behind the kind of ledger books and Excel spreadsheets. I mean,
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: I think often of The Sopranos where James Gandolfini is like,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: you know, How is it OK that the businessmen are
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: killing more people than we ever could with what they're doing?
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: And they don't care. And they're essentially like causing all
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: kinds of harm to the world in a multitude of ways.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: And how is it that what they're doing is protected
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: and what we're doing isn't when they're making more people's
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: lives worse than we ever could? And it's like, I mean,
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: I do wonder that because, again, like the banality of
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: it is like a big corporation like Dole or somebody,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: you know, taking advantage of workers in Costa Rica or
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: whatever it is, you know, I mean, there's there's all
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: those cases like South American, like fruit, fruit laborers being
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: taken advantage of or Nestle or companies like that. It's like,
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: how banal is that evil when it's the people that
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: sell candy bars? Jesus, it's like the It's like Skynet,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: you know, or I'm trying to remember at the Universal Studios,
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: they had a ride, the Terminator 2 ride. And in
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: the line for the ride, they had like a fake
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: Skynet thing. And it was like Skynet. We make everything
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: from consumer goods to nuclear warhead. And it's like that.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: That is now the world we live in. It's where
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: it's like, you know, Disney, they own everything from making
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: movies to, you know, Again, they don't make missiles, but yet,
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: I guess. It's one of those things where the dystopia
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: we live in now is just like, it's just a
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: capitalist dystopia of everybody just wants to make more money
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: and everything is more expensive. Okay. I mean, this movie, I.
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: Mean, for me, I'm a computer nerd. I'm also a
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: computer history nerd. The first 15 minutes, what to me
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: was the most interesting, because you're kind of, you know,
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: Robert Redford, he comes in. He comes into his little office.
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: And the first thing that strikes me is he's wearing
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: like jeans and like a sweater vest. Now, again, we
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: have been living in a world where casual dress is
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: just the norm. But, you know, people in 1975 were
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: going to think this is kind of odd. A guy's
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: just coming in in jeans into a workplace. And he
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: gets in there. And then the woman kind of at
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: the front desk, again, you know, If you're going to,
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: you know, if we're going to show a gun in
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: the third act, you better introduce it in the first act.
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: You know, she, we can see she has a pistol
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: in her drawer and it's explained that, you know, basically
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: she keeps it there because she doesn't want to be
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: mugged in New York, which again was 1975 New York.
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: You know, you, you, would have been wise if everybody
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: was kind of carrying a gun because it was it
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: was a rather dangerous city at the time so anyways
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: so he goes behind like the the locked door but
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: they they do have like badges magnetic badges and then
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: um we kind of see this like it's like a
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: Remind me now of like the AI that are, you know,
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: kind of auto reading books. And there's something that's kind
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: of like scanning pages of a Chinese book. And then
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: you flip to like this teletype, the old dot matrix
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: printer days. It's kind of doing a live translation, which
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: is not technology that actually existed back then. And then
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: there's like computers. And again, we don't, Everybody has a computer.
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: Everywhere you turn in my house, there's a computing device someplace.
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: But the 1975 viewer would be like, whoa, they have computers.
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: There is something really going on here. It's the American
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: Historical Society on the outside. They've got technology. I can't
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: even fathom how that is that is done. And I
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: love that part. And then what I thought was good
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: with the director, he does a very good job of– because,
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: I mean, if you read the plot on Wikipedia, you
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: know everybody in his office is going to get smoked
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: except him. But the director does a very good job
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: of making those characters actually likable in a very short
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: amount of time. You know, you really like his girlfriend.
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: You like every character you kind of like. And then
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: you're very, to me, at least I was, very upset
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: when they die. The best part, and this is what
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: I think is kind of brilliant, is Robert Redford's director,
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: this very old man. And then you're looking at this
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: actor and you're going, that's a toupee. He's wearing a toupee.
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: And then he gets killed on some stairs. And then
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: you kind of see in the background, there's his body.
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: And then there's his toupee a couple of flights down.
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: I'm like, that's awesome. But yeah, so I just love
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: that part because it reminds me of what was kind
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: of fun about Mad Men was there was always that
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: kind of like, wow, we used to live like that.
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: You know, we smoke in an office and, you know,
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: we just would throw our trash out the car window
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: as we drove and people would drink and You know,
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: and the harassment in the office was just expected, you know.
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: And so to me, watching that movie had a bit
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: of a now was sort of like, wow, yeah, remember,
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: we lived like that. And of course, the World Trade Centers,
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: I mean, they're frequently used as, you know, sort of
• 42:07
  Speaker 3: establishing shots. You know, we're in Washington.
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: Nope.
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: Now we're back to New York World Trade Center. Which is,
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: you know, kind of difficult, I think, to see.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: Well, and that's, you know, again, we're recording this, you know,
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: right around the time that this movie came out in 1975,
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: but also a couple weeks removed from 25 years, you know,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: having passed of 9-11. And it is hard to... not
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: think about that when you see the world trade centers
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: in a film. And I believe Cliff Robertson's character is
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: actually in the world trade center. It works in the
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: world trade center. So, I mean, we're even, I mean,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: to go even a step further, we're like inside of
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: the world trade center a couple of times. So I
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: want to talk a little bit about Cliff Robertson. What
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: an interesting kind of character, a kind of character that
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: we don't see very often in these kinds of movies.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: I'm used to seeing the, CIA spook as a cigarette
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: smoking man type not the kind of stoic somewhat like
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: again I want y'all's read of the Cliff Robertson character
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: because I think for me he's the most interesting character
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: in the movie because he's a character we don't see
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: in these kinds of films very often which is the
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: the CIA spook with the heart of gold is what
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: it feels like like he's I don't know how else
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: to put it so I put it to you Carl
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: and then Dr. or the professor what do you guys
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: think of the Cliff Robertson professor character, I guess not what,
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: and professor, you can speak to this as well. Like,
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: what do we think about the way his character is
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: portrayed in the film? And is this a character that
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: shows up in other kinds of films as well? Yeah.
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: So when I was watching this originally and then rewatching
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: it all these years gone by, I was thinking both
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: of you know that my ideology is I love complexity, nuance,
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: and thoughtfulness. And I weep that we don't have enough
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: of it in our society and our media. And I
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: was watching this movie and I was thinking, Cliff Robertson's
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: character is all of those things. They made, I think,
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: a very wise decision to eschew what you would expect
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: somebody in that position to be like and made somebody who,
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: he doesn't have a lot, he doesn't have an origin
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: story and like lots of backstory, you know, things that
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: tell you who he is. But I want to tell
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: you who I thought he was and what I thought
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: he stood for, which I think for stuff, movies made
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: today that are about the 70s or the 60s or
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: the 50s, I think they leave this out. During World
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: War II, there was a deep concern that we were
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: fighting these two fanatical empires of Germany and Japan with democracy.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: which in the 1930s, democracy was seen by many people,
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: not just communists or fascists, but many people were despairing
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: that democracy was just weak as a form of government,
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: as a form of economy, as a form of military.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: And they're really, you could argue, one of the reasons
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: Japan and Germany wrongfully thought that they could take on
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: the United States and win was dismissing the decadence of
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: American democracy. But we, the Americans and the Canadians and
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: the British too, and the Australians, we're worried about that.
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: And we've talked about that in some of the shows
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: before about like how that comes out in films of
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: the time where we're going like, geez, you know, how,
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: how does, how does a Canadian boy who was playing
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: base hockey and then suddenly is drafted has to go
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: fight a Japanese soldier or a German soldier who's been
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: raised for the last 10 years to die gloriously, right?
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: The Canadian boy wasn't thinking that way, right? And so
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: Cliff Robertson, to me, represents that old concern that like, yeah,
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: we're in a democracy and we have rules, but like
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: our enemies get to break all the rules. Like the
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: KGB didn't sit around and like, gosh, you know, should
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: we do this or not? Or like, is this breaking
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: some rule or something? They just did whatever they wanted.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: They killed whoever they wanted. They spied on whoever they
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: wanted internally or they spied on themselves.
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: They shot themselves.
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: I mean, what's shown in this movie, you know, the KGB,
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: you look at history of KGB, a lot of purges
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: by the KGB were of KGB, you know, or the previous,
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: the NKPD, previous, you know, the Cheka and whatever. So
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: I think he represents this ambiguity that like, gosh, you know,
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: we're getting our butts kicked in the Cold War. Because remember,
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: we only remember Cold War by the ending, which is
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: like the Soviet Union collapsed. And for now, they're still
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: in the United States, right? But if you read a
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: history of the intelligence war, the Soviet and Soviet-style agencies
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: like the Stasi of East Germany and the KGB, they
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: consistently won every intelligence battle. I mean, they had Hundreds
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: and hundreds of spies in the United States who were
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: never caught. We just knew they existed, but we never
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: found out who they were. And they probably spent 40
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: years in government and just retired on a pension.
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: And so to me, Cliff.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: Robertson represents this sort of borderland between how do we
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: win this Cold War, which still in the 70s was
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: considered to be vitally important to do, and how do
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: we have any rules at all? And I just thought
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: that was a good character to have.
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, sort of continuing with that, there's a
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: really nice scene between Cliff Robertson and John Houseman. And
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: John Houseman is kind of the guy at the very
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: top of the CIA. And so Robertson's talking to John Houseman.
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: And I got to mention, when we talk about John Houseman,
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: in my day, he was known in a commercial for
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: a brokerage firm, and his line was, you know, we
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it. And, you know,
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: people of my age will always be burned in our brains.
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: But anyways, yeah, so he's talking to John Houseman, and
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: I feel like the Cliff Robertson character had not served
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: in anything. Sorry, coming back to Mad Men, you know,
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: Mad Men was like three generations in that office had served. One,
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: World War II, and the Korean War. And then all
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: the new people that were coming in the office hadn't served.
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: And there was this.
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: Cultural break between them and and same thing with with
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: uh so cliff robertson he's not served and he's talking
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: to a guy who was in world war one and
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: was in world war two and then he says to
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: him he says to him uh you know uh you
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: know do you do you miss that kind of action
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: and then uh houseman responds no i miss that kind
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: of clarity so you know so yeah it's um You
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: kind of feel like Robert said he wishes he was
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: in an environment where he had that kind of moral clarity.
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: This person is the enemy. I'm allowed to do all
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: these terrible things that person all i can play all
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: the dirty tricks on the germans i want and i
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: feel real good at the end of the day but
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: i don't think his character felt really good about yeah
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: we had to shoot up a whole office of people
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: that just like computers and enjoy sandwiches you know.
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: I do like the idea of the inability to determine
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: who the enemy is now forces us to look inward
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: on ourselves and determine, well, maybe the enemy comes from within.
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: And it's the thing that we have seen, to speak
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: to the 9-11 of it all, if you go and
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: read anything about 9-11, you'll know that 9-11... It's not
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: a conspiracy about the buildings coming down or who did it.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: It's more a lack of ability of two organizations to
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: work together to get something done ahead of time to
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: prevent it. That's the problem with 9-11 now, as the
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: information has come out so much longer. As time has
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: gone on, it turns out that it was just like
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: the Challenger. Failing at many levels more than one can
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: only create a problem in an event of that level
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: of significance and awfulness. And that's kind of... When we
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: look at conspiracies now and someone like the Cliff Robertson character,
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: those people who do the jobs of his character now
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: in real life, in the real world... I think their
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: job must be so much more difficult than, you know,
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: in John Houseman's time. And I think that that is
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: why someone with Cliff Robertson's demeanor in this film is
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: so kind of interesting as a character, because it just
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: you don't see the discerning FBI or CIA agent very
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: often in terms of the upper to mid-level management role. Normally,
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: these are the characters that are talking down to other
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: people and telling them how not good of a job
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: they're doing, or they're in just kind of like a
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: a leadership role a la To Speak to the X-Files,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: Skinner in that show, or they're shadowy like Cigarette Smoking
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: Man in that show. But it's interesting because it's almost
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: what you would hope would have happened in real life
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: for those organizations moving forward out of the 70s. Obviously,
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: that's not what happened because something like 9-11 does happen
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: because of organizational problems between two agencies being unable and
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: unwilling to work together, which is just again, it's wild
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: to think about. But this film, I think, kind of
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: preaches an idea of like, you know, this insular behavior
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: and turning on one another. And, you know, well, they
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: maybe figured something out. Possibly. We don't know. We got
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: to kill them just because. And we'll just, you know,
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: hire somebody from the outside who doesn't have any affiliation
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: with any of this to do it because they'll do
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: it without question. It almost is like, yeah, the Max
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: von Sydow character is not really the villain. He is
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: just the tool through which the villains or villain of
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: the film acts. And I don't know, I find Max
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: von Sydow's character also very interesting because he's just doing
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: a job. That's it. It's almost like Anton Chigurh with
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: a smile as opposed to a scowl, which I think is, again,
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: he's just doing a job. His job was to get
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: the money back. He couldn't. He had to kill Josh
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: Brolin to get the money back. I don't know what
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: you want to say. Like, you know, he's got to
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: kill these people. And then he kills the guy at
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: the end of this movie. And he's like, yep, they don't.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: I don't have a beef with you at all. So
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: they're not paying me. The contract with him is over.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: So you're good. Like, oh, OK.
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: Well, I was going to say, coming back to one
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: of your more original questions about, you know, the Canadian
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: perspective in terms of conspiracies. I mean, we have our
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: nutty ideas here. But Canadian conspiracies tend to stay the
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: same year to year. America wants to take our water.
• 53:04
  Speaker 3: America wants to take our potash. America wants to take
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: our oil, that kind of thing. America wants to invade us.
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: Whereas when we look down into the States, America is
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: this pendulum. Sometimes the big conspiracy are foreigners. It's the Russians,
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: the commies. And then the pendulum swings. Oh, no, it's the...
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: people with inside America. They're, you know, the conspiracies about them.
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: And then, you know, five, 10 years later, it swings
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: back to there's somebody else outside of America. So there's
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: always this swing. And I think for more modern times, right,
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: that the, you know, American conspiracy theories had always been
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: the communists. They're, you know, Red China and Russia, they're
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: out to get us. And this movie is like, no, no, no,
• 53:56
  Speaker 3: the what became known as the deep state right you
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: don't know that the deep state is the conspiracy. And
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: I think that was something that was kind of novel.
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: But I have to talk about, well, first, Robert Redford.
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: I don't know about kids today, but I always say,
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: back in the 70s, the man your mother dreamed of
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: was not your dad. It was Robert Redford. He was like,
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: him and Paul Newman were like the two sexiest men
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: through the entire 70s. So he's in this movie. And
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: then he has to, you know, obviously get away from
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: the killers. And he, you know, he goes to a
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: couple of safe houses and finds they've been taken out.
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: And he's got to find someplace else. And so he
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: kidnaps Faye Dunaway. And then, you know, she brings him
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: back to her apartment. And then eventually he kind of
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: ties her up and he's got to go do something else.
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: And he comes back. And for reasons I cannot understand,
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: other than that she kind of had After he ties her,
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: they make passionate love. Now, first I'm thinking she's been
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: tied up for like four or five hours. She's going
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: to smell like urine. Okay. So, you know, that's not addressed,
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: you know, but so he makes passionate love to urine soaked,
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: you know, fade on away. I don't know. But then
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: if she just like, you know, she's, had the magical
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: Robert Redford D and she just switches over to his side.
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: And that did made no sense whatsoever.
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's interesting because I remember.
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: Please make sense of it for me.
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: Well, it's, it's the saddest, oldest misogynist trope Hollywood has
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: to offer. And, you know, you go back to Hitchcock, 1935,
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: the 39, 39 steps, you know, like I actually remember
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: doing a little module on, um, this in the 90s
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: you know all these hollywood films remember in the 80s
• 55:55
  Speaker 2: and 90s for the first time especially the in the
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: 90s we had no means no like we had to
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: actually point this out like you know 5 000 years
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: of civilization and fine and finally we're saying no means
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: no but In movies, there was still this idea that
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: you'd have the leading man, almost always, assault a woman,
• 56:17
  Speaker 2: do something bad to a woman, but she comes around
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: and falls in love with him by act two. And
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: that's just so common.
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: I still see it now.
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: I think it needs to die as a motif in
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: Hollywood films. But I think that was my only explanation
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: of what happened there is that Well, he's Robert Redford,
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: and that's what the filmmakers and everyone associated with it thought.
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: I couldn't understand her role in the plot. Not just, well,
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: Robert Redford has nothing to do for half an hour,
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: but what was she actually doing there? Moving the story forward,
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: except proving Robert Redford can do whatever he wants. Because
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: if they're making a list of villains in this film,
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: he's on the list.
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: If he, like, told the police.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then that guy over there, he kidnapped a woman,
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: you know, beat her, tied her up, kept her against
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: her will for two days.
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: Now, which one was that?
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: It was that guy over there, Robert Redford.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: What?
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: And then possibly in a quid pro quo situation took advantage.
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: In my research and the notes for this episode, that's
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: the one thing that I kept looking at is, like,
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: not the the thing to kind of talk about specifically.
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: But the thing that we did need to mention, like
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: the Faye Dunaway of this movie, she is the parallax
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: view doesn't have a love interest the way this movie does.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: And the parallax view doesn't need one. This movie did
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: not need a love interest like at all. This is
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: a this is a kind of vestigial tale of screenwriting
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: filmmaking that was in the nine. It was was present,
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: I guess, up until maybe the 90s, but was definitely
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: present in the 70s, which is the lead character needs
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: a love interest and it needs to be someone of note.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: And there are movies that were coming out. I mean,
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: we could probably go back and forth, you know, tit
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: for tat for five to 10 minutes about movies coming up,
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: probably up until maybe even further than the 90s. I
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: would say in the 2000s and teens, they were stopping
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: to do it somewhat, but it was still there. I
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: guess it probably hasn't completely gone away even now. But
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: I think that again, like I just think that people's
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: expectations are different. But There was a time and a
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: place where people expected lead characters to have a love
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: interest in the film. And it was kind of, you know,
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: got to give something for the men, the women, the kids.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: And it's like, you know what? Like, I'm glad that
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: we don't need that anymore because Faye Dunaway is I
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: wouldn't say she's miscast, but her character is given no
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: autonomy of her own. And to say she has Stockholm
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: syndrome might be being nice. But it is, again, the
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: back and forth between her and Robert Redford is really icky.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: And it doesn't serve the film at all. And the
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: fact that it's on the poster, front and center of
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: the poster of the film, is wild to me. Because
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: it is barely a part of this movie in terms of...
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: any it's it would be like putting it would be
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: like putting Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen on the poster
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: for Star Wars like it says no bearing on the
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: this that has more bearing on the plot than this
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: does in the plot of this film like she has
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: no bearing on the plot whatsoever it's completely removed from
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: her character and all it does is like you guys
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: both alluded to make Robert Redford really less of a
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: hero than I know he's being meant to be by
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: the people making this film they didn't put that in
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: the film thinking it would be something that would make
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: the character feel kind of off-putting and icky I know
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: that for a fact because in 1975 that was not
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: a thing people thought it just wasn't.
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah yeah I mean, how lucky for her, right? But yeah,
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, she definitely bolted on. But I recall
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: when they came out with the film adaptation of Hunt
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: for Red October, they're like, where is the romance, the
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 3: woman character for romance? And like, well, it's just a
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: bunch of dudes on submarines. There's no romance. And they're like,
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: I don't know if we can make that film. And
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: so they kind of had to have like, um, it
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: was a Gates McFadden kind of at the beginning of
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: the movie, you know, by honey kissing, um, you know, the, the, the,
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: the super spy guy. And, uh, and, and that was it,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: you know, that was the female character. So, so yeah,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: so I, I do. And I think I was reading
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: some details about this film and yeah, I mean, fade
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: in a way herself realized that she doesn't serve any
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: purpose in this film, other than to just to be a,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 3: you know, uh, you know, the love interest of, of, of,
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: Robert Redford. And then she kind of pushed to like,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: I need a little bit more character development. So that's,
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: I think, why they did the whole thing, her photographs
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: and like, you know, why is every... nobody's in your photographs.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 3: Why are you so lonely? Or something like that. And
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: I think she pushed for that, but yeah.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 2: Don't you love psychoanalysis by the person who has kidnapped
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 2: you and beaten you and held you against your will?
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: That's the person I want analyzing me. Yeah, that's like
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: Stockholm Syndrome therapy.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah. She does allude to like, You know, like, you know,
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: the nature of her photographs and why they're all so solitary.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 3: She does allude to, like, I will tell you at
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 3: some point. And I don't even know if she ever
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 3: really told him or if it were... I have a question. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: Does she survive the movie?
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: She does, yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: No, because on the internet, that's argued about, that Max
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: von Sydow took care of her. And that's why he's saying...
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 2: You know, if she had been alive, I would have
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: expected for him to say, why don't you get together
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: with that girl of yours and, you know, or something
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: like that and go hide. But he doesn't say that.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: You're right.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: It's interesting how, you know, the internet fills in and
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: we don't know, of course, but.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: I mean, on that, too, like, I mean, the movie
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: does end with, like, you know, so Robert Redford, you know,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: has the files, and then he brings them to the
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 3: New York Times, and then Max von Snyder, that's where, oh, no, no, no, sorry,
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: Cliff Robertson, kind of his, it's kind of his boss, like,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: his boss's boss. That's sort of his relation to Robert
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: Redford's character in this CIA hierarchy. And so Robert Redford's like,
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: I've given him the files, you know, you're done for.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: And he's like, no, what have you done? We're screwed.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: You know, this is all out in the open. We
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: can't take over the Middle East oil. We get this
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: out in the open in America. is going to run
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: out of oil and we're doomed. And our job is
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: to just make sure that, you know, people can put
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: gas in their tank every day and they don't care.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: They don't care who we kill or what we kill.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 3: And knowing, all right, fair enough. But then it ends
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: in a very, I think it's called a girl or
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 3: the tiger ending where it's like, he gives them the
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: New York times, the papers. And then Clifford Robinson's like, well,
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: what do you do if they don't do a story?
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: And he's like, well, of course they're going to do
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: a story. I don't know. And then it ends. And
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 3: you don't really know if the New York Times ever
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: does the big expose. And then, you know, he doesn't
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: have to go to Europe and spend his life like
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: smoking unfiltered cigarettes and eating croissants or something.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: What a terrible life that sounds like he would be.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: I do like the Cliff Robertson at the end where he's,
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: you know, he is having that conversation with Robert Redford.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: He's like, you know, what do you think is going
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: to happen when the oil runs out? They're going to
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: want us just to go and take it. They're going
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: they're not going to. want us to ask they're gonna
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: want us to just go and impose our will and
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: yeah You know, Cliff Robertson was right like that, that
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: I think that is kind of as time has progressed
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: and as we've seen in the world that we live in,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: like his character is not wrong. And that's kind of
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: I think that's the cynicism that's at the center of
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: this movie. And you mentioned it already, Carl, like the
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: idea of like the way the film ends is I mean,
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: it's kind of like Serpico, right? It's like, you know,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: here it is like they'll do something about it, won't they?
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: And it's like, yeah. I mean, you hope, right? It's
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: a hope. But we know because of the world that
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: we live in, that hope is sometimes a foolish endeavor.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: And I do like that the film leaves us at
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: that moment because, you know, you can read the ending
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: however you want. I think that probably the film would
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: err on the side of optimism, I think, just out
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: of the sense that it's an American made film with
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: an American audience in mind. But I do like that
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: they stop one half step shy just to give us
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: that little kind of note to end on which feels
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: very 70s of the film sure yeah I.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: Was thinking 70s that the last conclusion the finale is
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 2: possible disclosure that there's not something after that you know
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: just to update so a television series I liked at
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 2: least the first season of and I thought it was
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 2: really well done and it stars Chris Pratt which I
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: I thought he's I think he's a fun comedic actor
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: I just I don't see him he doesn't sell for
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 2: me very well when he's a ruthless killer, but The Terminalist,
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: which is almost an identical movie, TV series plot. I mean,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 2: there's a conspiracy and it comes out, but the conspiracy
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: is like the middle. And then Chris Pratt being this
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 2: killing machine to get even is the modern way to
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 2: end the film. And I thought about that. It's like,
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: would you do a film today And, of course, Disclosure
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 2: Day was that film. That's why it felt so odd that, like,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 2: someone would think, and so we will disclose the truth.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 2: Roll credits. And I think in 2026, we expect, like, and?
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: And what else?
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 2: What's going to happen? But I guess it was a
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: more innocent time. It's innocent and cynical. What's interesting is that, like,
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 2: the first thing I will do is take this information
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: to the New York Times, you know, cut, fade to black.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: But what does happen there? Will they print it and
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: so on? I'm not sure you can end the film
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: like that today.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: Can you?
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 2: But besides, unless you're Steven Spielberg.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's why people had such a negative reaction
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: to David Fincher's Zodiac was they didn't tell me what happened.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: It's like, well, but it didn't solve it. Go read.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: They're still crowing about it on the Internet. 20 years
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: later or however long it's been since Zodiac came out
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: at this point. Pre-Iron Man coming out. So, like, 2007. So,
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: we're still no further along with having solved that. Like,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: I think you probably... You would not be able to
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: end this film this way now. You would have to
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: end it in a different kind of open-ended way that
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: they do things now. Where it would be, you know,
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: like the... I don't know. I think maybe for certain
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: audiences you could, but I don't think you could make
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: a film as mainstream as this one, I think is
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: probably the better way of putting it. You could still
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: make indie and art house films that are completely unintelligible
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: and that are just all over the place even. And
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: no one is expecting you to, like... We're gonna really
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: kowtow to, like, modern audiences. But if you're making a
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: film with Robert Redford, who is effectively, like... Like you
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: already alluded to, Dr. Perlmutter, one of the big people
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: at the time, if not the biggest... You know, like
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: you said, Carl, like, good-looking men at the time, like, well-known, recognizable. No,
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: I do not think you could do that with that
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: level of star anymore, because people would be... Unless it's, like,
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: a horror film. But that's about... That's about it. Like,
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: that's really it. Like, people... I mean, even now, I
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: think Western audiences and I think specifically American audiences want
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: to be sent out on a high note. And this
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: movie is like, you know, half step of a high note.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: It's two thirds of the way there, three quarters even maybe.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: But it yeah, I think now people would be like
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: an unsatisfying ending. Like, duh. You know, I watched Resident
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: Evil over the weekend and people are upset about the
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: ending of that film. Like, I won't spoil it, but
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: they're upset about the ending. And my response is the
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: ending is well earned and it makes perfect sense. but
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: people didn't like it because it's kind of a bummer.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: And it's like, so what? It makes narrative sense. And
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: that's the director and film writers intent. Like, okay, sorry,
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: you didn't like it. That doesn't discredit everything that came
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: before it either on top of everything else, which drives
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: me as someone who talks about film nuts, that it's
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: like the ending does not in some cases discredit everything
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: that came before it. Sometimes it does, but every case
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: that is not true. It is not always the case
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: that a bad ending or an open ending or a,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: Ambiguous ending ruins the film. If that's the way you
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: feel about it, that's pretty fatalistic in the way you
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: view things.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: Coming back to the whole pendulum swinging thing, I mean,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: I think before this movie, say, showing the protagonist shooting
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 3: an American. government official uh wasn't a good thing to
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 3: put in a film i don't think audiences really like
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 3: the idea of the protagonist killing you know american civil
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 3: servants and and then um And then coming back to
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 3: when David and I did the podcast and Julie Brennan
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 3: did the podcast on Disclosure Day. I mean, if you
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: look at like at ET, you know, the bad guys
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 3: were the FBI. They are FBI and they are bad
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 3: guys and bad things can happen to those FBI guys.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 3: But then on Disclosure Day, the bad guys are not
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 3: the FBI. They're just some private corporate security firms. And,
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: you know, disclosure, they couldn't show, you know, American law
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 3: enforcement being killed as the bad guy. So, you know,
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: another sort of interesting pendulum swinging between can we kill
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: cops in our movie? No, we can't kill cops in
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: our movie.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: David, someone at your school needs to do a study
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 3: of that. When is it okay to kill cops in movies?
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: When is it not okay to kill cops in American cinema?
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: Well, it was part of the Hays Code, as you recall.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: It was around for a long, long time as the
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: law shall not be defeated.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: So, of course, as I've argued on both of your shows,
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: but especially here on CultureCast, censorship isn't always a bad
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: thing when great artists work within the lines. Sometimes most
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 2: of the great art of history has been done under
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: severe restrictions of some kind. And a lot of the
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: great gangster movies got around that by they have the
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: gangster having a high life and successful and killing lots
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: of people and as long as in the last minute
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: he's gunned down and so the law is not defeated,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: then it obeyed the Hays Code. Yeah, but they were,
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 2: by the 70s, as Chris mentioned, Serpico was a big
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 2: deal because, just to remind our younger audience, Serpico was
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 2: an actual New York City police officer who testified against
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 2: corruption in the police force, which was endemic at that
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 2: time in major cities. It was just part of the
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: way of life of having a big institution in a
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 2: big city, almost anything, especially New York City. And we
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 2: were just, every day in the New York Times or
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: the Washington Post, I mean, right now, the cultural telescope,
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: the backwards telescope, where we just look through the big
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: end and see the small thing, pretty much, maybe vaguely,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: people remember from their high school history textbook, Watergate, right?
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's it, in terms of scandals of the 70s.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: But there were just so many. And so just my
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 2: wrap up for this film is that I think it
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 2: is a tremendously helpful, if you want to understand American history,
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: not necessarily like anything in the film is real, but
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 2: that you're getting a view of what the culture, especially
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 2: of paranoia, suspicion, cynicism, lack of faith in every institution.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: This is when it was really, starting to crystallize and
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: we're still living in the reverberations of that.
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: Today there was um there was you know so that
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: minutiae i noticed in in this film it it's not
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 3: relevant of anything but i i made a note and
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 3: i gotta mention it um the uh there's a there's
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 3: a scene in a hospital and uh and a nurse
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: is at her desk and she kind of pulls out
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 3: a novel to read. And, uh, if you, if you
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 3: kind of, it's very easy to miss, but the, um, the, she,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: she's reading alien horizons by, uh, a writer named William F. Nolan,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 3: which probably doesn't ring any kind of bell whatsoever. But
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 3: if I said he co-wrote Logan's run, then you're like, Ooh, yeah. So,
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: I was trying to figure out, because a lot of times,
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 3: especially in TV shows today, you know, a character will
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 3: be reading a book, and that's always kind of, that's
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 3: some big hint, you know? Like, what is that book
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 3: really hinting at? And I'm trying to think, is there
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 3: anything about this book that is tied to the movie
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: hinting at anything? And I did some research in the book,
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: and I'm like, you know what? I just think She
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 3: needs to be reading a book to make it look
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 3: like she's really not paying attention to the, to the
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 3: monitors of, you know, the, the heartbeat monitors of the patients.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 3: And so probably somebody on, on the, on the, you know,
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 3: the crew just handed her whatever he was reading here.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: Just read this. So that's the only thing I can figure.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 3: And then, um, uh, there's a scene all day parking. Chris,
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: you don't live in New York. Do you live in
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 3: New York?
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: I do not. Okay.
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: All right. So, yeah. So is it all day parking $ 3. 33?
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 3: I did a little calculation. That's $ 20 in today's dollars.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 3: But I feel you can't park for $ 20 all day
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: in Manhattan. My wife can park all day in Toronto
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 3: for $ 20, but Toronto's not Manhattan, so I don't know
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: what the average parking rate in Manhattan is. But yeah,
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 3: so apparently in 1975, you could park all day for
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 3: $ 20 in today's dollars. But there was one scene where
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: Robert Redford, he's got a key and he goes to
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: a locksmith and he's trying to get out from him, like,
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 3: what is this key connected to? You can tell me
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 3: there's a code on it or something. And the guy
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 3: who plays the locksmith is an actual locksmith. I guess
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 3: in the 70s he had a radio show about locks
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: and picking locks and stuff like that. And so they
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 3: just grabbed him and then He appears in this movie
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 3: as himself.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: I want to mention something that I think we've all
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: kind of talked about now at this point about this film,
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: and that's the way conspiracies used to be. And like
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: you just mentioned, Carl, the way things used to be
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: in New York City. I mean, I can't imagine paying
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: $ 20 to park anywhere in a major American city for
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: a whole day. I know that the last... Not the
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: last time I was in Chicago, but two times ago,
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: it was $ 30 an hour to park near The Bean
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: in downtown Chicago, which is, I mean, absurd, obviously, but
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: also they're trying to get people that are coming to
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: visit out of town or whatever. Things have changed so
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: much that when we watch films like this film, we
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: can't help but notice the things that have changed in
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: society more than just, oh, the way we talk about conspiracies.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: But I mean, we... It's wild. We are living in
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: a time so far removed from 1975 that when it
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: was 1975, 50 years before 1975 was 1920. So, I mean,
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: the people in 1970 looking at 1920 may have felt
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: the same way we do now looking at 50 years later.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: 50 years ago now. I mean, a little over 50
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: years now, really. It's weird because the things that have
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: changed are a lot visually, but in terms of socially
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: and culturally, so much has changed as well. And like Dr.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: Perlmutter said, it does feel like this movie is right
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: at that cusp of that, of when things are going
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: to change and people are going to be more tuned
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: into things. I mean, I think of the 90s with
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: the X-Files and the paranoia that surrounded the 90s and
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: where that show came out of but Chris Carter has
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: talked about a lot of things that he grew up
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: watching inspiring him to make the X-Files and this was
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: probably one of those things if not in a kind
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: of grand open kind of ended paranoia of those kinds
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: of things that he was seeing in the 70s and
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: It's kind of a bummer that we can't recreate a
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: film like this now in terms of making something like
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: this because conspiracies aren't... I know Dr. Perlmutter said it
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: and Carl said it as well and I'll mention it
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: as well. There's a conspiracy for everything now. Anything that happens,
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: there is a conspiracy. And that being the case makes...
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: conspiracy theories just at large way less interesting because it
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: used to be kind of its own niche thing. And
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: now that ancient aliens is a thing and it's as
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: popular as anything ever has been, there's ancient alien con.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: You want to go meet Giorgio Tsoukalos? You can go
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: do that. Like, that's great. You want to spend your
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: hard-earned money to go meet Dave Childress and Giorgio Tsoukalos
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: and listen to them talk? Cool. I mean, I would
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: if they came anywhere near me, I might take them
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: up on that. And that's my point. Like, it's it's
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: no longer hiding in kind of the shadows of things anymore.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: Conspiracy theories and counterculture of that variety is, I think,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: as popular now as it's ever been. I mean, the
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: 70s was a time when it was like that in
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: terms of mainstream acceptance of the Bermuda Triangle and aliens
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: and stuff like that, you know, in search of the
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: bizarre and things. But we are living in a time
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: now where it feels like To even talk about conspiracy
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: theories is to miss the point that conspiracies don't have
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: to happen in private anymore. They can just happen out
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: in the open. Literally. In the time we live in now,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: conspiracies just happen out in the open. And people denying
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: that they're happening feels way worse than a conspiracy to
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: assassinate JFK and all these people were in on it
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: and nobody's ever said anything. Do you know how hard
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: it is to keep people quiet unless you kill them?
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: It's impossible. That's always... The hard thing with old conspiracies,
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: you know how hard it is to keep people quiet?
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: It's very hard to keep people quiet. And I think
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: that that is willed out now in the world that
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: we live in where everybody having access to a phone
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: and a camera and the ability to post. things to
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: the Internet or get things from the Internet has made
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: what a conspiracy theory or a conspiracy is in general.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: so different and such a different way. We have to now,
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: as people who talk about them or watch films that
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: have them in them or things of that nature, we
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: have to kind of approach them differently because the way
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: that the public conversation is being had about them is
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: so different from five years ago, let alone 10, 20, 30,
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: or when this film was coming out, you know, 50
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: years ago. Carl, when you're not joining me here to
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: talk about movies with... the good old professor, where can
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: people find you and the things that you work on?
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I guess, uh, right. So, uh, my conspiracy
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 3: skeptic podcast, uh, you can find me, you know, on iTunes,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: the conspiracy skeptic, uh, my website, why rad.com Y R
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 3: a D.com. I go force forward slash CS conspiracy skeptic.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 3: That's my, my website. Uh, My two books, The Skeptic's
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 3: Book of Lists and The Conspiracy Skeptic's Book of Lists,
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 3: those are both on Amazon. I try to earn enough
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: to pay for one oil change a year. I'm getting
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 3: real close. Year's closing out. I'm going to get real close.
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 3: Need an oil change, people. But I'm also going to
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 3: be coming up with my third book, which would be
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 3: The Skeptic's Book of Lists 2. Um, yeah. So do
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 3: you find me and revelant of almost nobody in your audience,
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 3: but I'm having a hell of a time trying to
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 3: get press attention for this. Um, I've started a literary
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 3: prize in Canada called the KJ Memer award for humor
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 3: and student journalism. So, uh, kids who are working for
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 3: the student newspaper can send me their work in the
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 3: me and my judges. We will find the funniest university
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 3: newspaper article of the year, uh, and that kid gets $ 1, 000.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 3: So I'm self-financing that. But I'm having a hell of
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: a time getting, like, CBC or the Toronto Star to
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: do a story on it. Like, I think they would
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 3: do an article about that. But, yeah, you heard it
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 3: here first, people.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: Well, we'll do as much as we can to spread
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: the good word, because as someone who was in journalism
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: school in college at the University of Missouri and wrote
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: for the school newspaper, I know that that is— it' s fun—
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: But it's also kind of, you know, it's a little thankless. So,
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: you know, to deal with that. To be able to
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: have somebody to be like, well, you're doing a good job.
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: Here's some money for the good job you're doing is
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: better than any praise some upperclassmen might give you. I
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: know that much. So as for me, you can find
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: me at weirdingwaymedia.com where all the shows that I work
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: on can be found, including the one that I do
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: with the professor, which is called Required Viewing, which shows
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: up once a week on Thursday on the CultureCast feed.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: And if you want to hear us talking about films
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: that you should be watching for a multitude of reasons
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: that's where you would go to do it if you
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: want to kick a couple dollars my way patreon.com slash
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: culture cast is where you can do that but like
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: rate and review the show on iTunes and Spotify in
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: that order if you want to money helps but reviews
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: and stuff like that works better word of mouth is
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: still a thing especially in the world of making content
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: where people can't see it Carl thank you so much
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: for joining us this was a lot of fun it's
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: good to talk about a movie that you know Makes
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: me yearn for the days of when conspiracy theories were, quote, fun, unquote.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 3: It is always a joy to be on a podcast
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 3: you listen to and really enjoy. So thank you for
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: having me on.
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate the kind words as well. And we'll
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: catch you on the next episode.