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Pulp Blotter #26 - Megalopolis · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Mark Pracht: We… we have enough people…
• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody! Welcome back to the Pope Blotter Book Club on 22 Panels, where I wish… I wish that there was a good comic adaptation of Shane, because… because that's… that's,
• 0:15
  Tad Eggleston: Very much on Mark and Sean's
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: radar right now, as they're… they're deep into rehearsals. When does it open?
• 0:25
  Mark Pracht: We open August 29th.
• 0:27
  Tad Eggleston: August 29th.
• 0:29
  Mark Pracht: Previews begin the 21st.
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: Mark has informed me that we can't go for 4 hours today because it's unprofessional if the director shows up late.
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: I think that that just means that he's not enough of a debutante director yet.
• 0:48
  Mark Pracht: I'm.
• 0:49
  Tad Eggleston: I'm certain there are some directors that are expected to show up late.
• 0:53
  Sean Harklerode: He's a total debutante.
• 0:56
  Mark Pracht: Bush.
• 0:57
  Mark Pracht: Yo!
• 1:02
  Sean Harklerode: Don't sell yourself short.
• 1:05
  Sean Harklerode: He's the bell of the ball!
• 1:07
  Mark Pracht: Oh my god. Stop.
• 1:12
  Mark Pracht: Sean's… Sean's just embracing his… his role as the big bad guy.
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, that's a good thing to do, too.
• 1:23
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:24
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:27
  Mark Pracht: In the great words of Leonard McCoy, don't bury yourself in the part.
• 1:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's… that's not a bad, bad thing either. So,
• 1:42
  Tad Eggleston: Megalopolis. I, I didn't manage to rewatch the movie itself. I did watch Megadoc, and I did… did reread the comic.
• 1:52
  Tad Eggleston: And I appreciate it more every time.
• 1:56
  Tad Eggleston: And… and that's where I'm gonna go right now, and then I want thoughts from… from everyone else, because…
• 2:04
  Tad Eggleston: I know that in a global sense, I'm in a minority for how much I like Megalopolis, but I don't know that I'm in a minority in this room. And you guys might have better words for it.
• 2:19
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I, I had, purchased the movie.
• 2:22
  Sean Harklerode: And did not get to rewatch it. I have seen it, but I didn't get to rewatch it for this, so I also regret that.
• 2:31
  Sean Harklerode: But, this is my first time going through the graphic novel.
• 2:35
  Sean Harklerode: And, you know, I enjoyed it.
• 2:40
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, I enjoy both.
• 2:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:43
  Sean Harklerode: it's… It's a little indio… it's… Well, no.
• 2:49
  Sean Harklerode: It's very idiosyncratic.
• 2:51
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely.
• 2:52
  Sean Harklerode: And so it's… I can just see the difficulty that Chris Ryle and Phillips had
• 3:00
  Sean Harklerode: Adapting something that seems so personal.
• 3:05
  Sean Harklerode: to Francis Coppola.
• 3:10
  Tad Eggleston: what…
• 3:10
  Sean Harklerode: It's, it's, it's definitely very interesting in that…
• 3:13
  Tad Eggleston: I did, like, I should have tossed this out. I did get to talk to Chris Ryle about this, if you go back in our archives. One of the things that Chris Ryle and I talked about was this book. And one of the things that he loved about the experience is Francis gave him very little direction.
• 3:31
  Tad Eggleston: In fact, more times than not, when he talked to him, he said, no, no, no.
• 3:35
  Tad Eggleston: I want this to be Chris Riley and Jacob Phillips Megalopolis.
• 3:39
  Tad Eggleston: You know, the idea is that you're gonna take the same source material and do your thing with it.
• 3:47
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, they weren't even, like, really shared on set designs or things like that.
• 3:57
  Mark Pracht: I… I only laugh because I feel like…
• 4:06
  Mark Pracht: Okay, to start off with, I'm a huge fan of this movie.
• 4:11
  Mark Pracht: I'm a huge fan in that I acknowledge that it has problems. I acknowledge that it is… it is probably too ambitious for
• 4:22
  Mark Pracht: You know, its reach, its reach exceeds its grasp.
• 4:30
  Mark Pracht: And… but…
• 4:33
  Mark Pracht: I find it so energizing to watch somebody who is clearly a… to watch something created by someone who is clearly an artist.
• 4:42
  Mark Pracht: trying to…
• 4:45
  Mark Pracht: exceed his grasp, you know? And I think that it is endlessly interesting to watch. I think that there's…
• 4:52
  Mark Pracht: plot lines and stuff that kind of meander and don't quite wrap up. I think there's things that are…
• 4:59
  Mark Pracht: incredibly silly about it, but I also think that that's a feature, not a bug.
• 5:04
  Mark Pracht: Right. I think that there are things that are…
• 5:11
  Mark Pracht: just upliftingly exciting about it. I… the first time I saw this movie was at the Alamo Drafthouse in Chicago, basically by myself in the theater, because, you know.
• 5:25
  Mark Pracht: the narrative around it was so skewed. And, you know, I got to the end of that movie, and…
• 5:32
  Mark Pracht: I found myself crying, because, I don't know, it was this image of the baby and all of the… the…
• 5:38
  Mark Pracht: the world being built around it, so it… something about it just really struck me.
• 5:45
  Mark Pracht: I will say, I think that…
• 5:49
  Mark Pracht: Even if they weren't provided with actual set designs and things like that, clearly the concept was clear.
• 5:56
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
• 5:57
  Mark Pracht: There's a lot of connection to it.
• 6:01
  Mark Pracht: And, Fran…
• 6:03
  Tad Eggleston: Francis apparently wrote a very detailed script.
• 6:06
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 6:08
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and they were given the shooting script. So they were given the same material that the set designers were given, and that…
• 6:16
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so… so, I mean, it wasn't… wasn't intended to look completely different, at least the way I understood it. But, it was also, like, you get to make your decisions on…
• 6:27
  Tad Eggleston: You know, what scenes to cut, what scenes not to cut, what dialogue to mess with, you know, you get to make decisions on how this or that looks.
• 6:37
  Mark Pracht: That's what…
• 6:38
  Dan Newland: That's what surprised me the most, when I read it.
• 6:42
  Dan Newland: was that I had heard you say that, you know, it's… this is not an adaptation, this is a separate… a separate thing.
• 6:50
  Dan Newland: And then when I read it, I'm like, this is pretty much the same thing.
• 6:55
  Dan Newland: because the dialogue is almost exactly… because I just watched the movie, like, a day ago, before I read this. The dialogue's almost exactly the same. Most of the scenes and things are very much the same. There's a few places that are changed, and there's times when…
• 7:11
  Dan Newland: Yeah, some of, you know, the
• 7:14
  Dan Newland: the… the wedding place looks different, and I can see what you mean by step direction and stuff like that. But as far as the story goes, it is a very…
• 7:25
  Dan Newland: Faithful, very almost point-by-point, straight-on adaptation of the movie.
• 7:31
  Dan Newland: I didn't see.
• 7:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and that…
• 7:32
  Dan Newland: Hardly anything.
• 7:33
  Tad Eggleston: Amazing.
• 7:34
  Tad Eggleston: It was happening simultaneously.
• 7:38
  Tad Eggleston: And I think… I think that says… I mean, Coppola was working on it for 40 years, so that probably says a lot to how well he'd laid out his vision.
• 7:47
  Tad Eggleston: Before anybody…
• 7:48
  Dan Newland: It's weird.
• 7:49
  Tad Eggleston: started.
• 7:49
  Dan Newland: the only things I really saw that were different
• 7:52
  Dan Newland: Were, in many ways the things that it appears Sheila LaBeouf.
• 7:57
  Dan Newland: screwed up.
• 7:58
  Dan Newland: by making him change while they were doing stuff, because it appeared in Megadoc that Shia is every bit as much of a pain in the ass to work with as he has ever been, right?
• 8:10
  Dan Newland: And so there's, like, that scene where he's sitting down at the table with the… with his uncle or whatever. None of that's actually in the movie… er, in the book, probably because it didn't exist until…
• 8:23
  Dan Newland: Until… Kind of that was… that was forced in by… by the.
• 8:27
  Mark Pracht: No, I mean…
• 8:28
  Sean Harklerode: Voigt got him on the project, right?
• 8:31
  Dan Newland: Yeah.
• 8:32
  Tad Eggleston: I think he'd originally been on the project.
• 8:36
  Tad Eggleston: like, I mean, because again, the project has been how many decades in the making? So, like, he'd been on the project in one of the false starts way back when.
• 8:46
  Tad Eggleston: And Voigt vouched with… vouched for him to keep him on it, even after all of the issues that he'd had.
• 8:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's weird, I… I had a weird…
• 9:00
  Tad Eggleston: like, just to hit it quickly, because I don't want this to be all about the Megadoc, but I had a weird feeling with Shia, because, like, I could get how it would strike me as a pain in the ass, or how it would strike a lot of people as a pain in the ass, but I also felt like he was actually trying to understand and
• 9:20
  Tad Eggleston: work on it, and… and that he, like…
• 9:24
  Tad Eggleston: Clearly, he and Francis didn't have the best.
• 9:30
  Tad Eggleston: rapport.
• 9:31
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but I felt less like Shia was trying to say, I must do it this way, than he's like, this is the way I see it, I'm trying to understand how you see it.
• 9:43
  Mark Pracht: Well, and I don't… I don't think that… I don't think that… I think that Francis got frustrated with
• 9:50
  Mark Pracht: Okay, again, let's… we don't want to make this all about the Megadoc, which is fascinating.
• 9:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's amazing.
• 9:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I think it's also fascinating, because you also see brief glimpses of the other versions that he'd been working on over the years, you know, the table reads and things like that, and the other actors that had come in, gone. But, I mean, I think, you know, even Francis has said that he thinks that Shia is really talented, and that he…
• 10:16
  Mark Pracht: he was working to try to make it better, but it was frustrating because he also had a hundred other things to deal with, right? Right. You know? And it's like,
• 10:26
  Mark Pracht: I think that… I think that that is all…
• 10:29
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think it's super interesting. I… I really… I like Shia's performance in the movie. I think that it is… it is…
• 10:39
  Tad Eggleston: What's wrong.
• 10:39
  Mark Pracht: wall, and I always appreciate that. I mean, I, like, even… I think John Voight is balls to the wall in that movie, and I think he's great, too. I… I mean…
• 10:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, having watched Megadoc now, I wonder if part of…
• 10:54
  Tad Eggleston: part of the reason that this didn't cohere quite as much is the George Lucas prequel problem, which is that he's made such a big thing…
• 11:05
  Tad Eggleston: and he decided to do it all himself, rather than choosing the role that… like, I feel like this is a different movie if, if…
• 11:14
  Tad Eggleston: if Francis handpicks a director, And is a hands-on executive producer.
• 11:21
  Tad Eggleston: Or, if Francis handpicks an executive producer.
• 11:25
  Tad Eggleston: And is the director that he is, but doesn't have to do the same level of…
• 11:31
  Mark Pracht: I think… I think that it's not… it's not Megalopolis.
• 11:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's possible, too.
• 11:36
  Mark Pracht: and this is… this is a… it's a recurring thing with Francis Ford Coppola, right? And suddenly this is becoming a movie podcast, but it's a recurring thing.
• 11:44
  Tad Eggleston: I think that's fair with this one. We'll get back.
• 11:46
  Mark Pracht: It's, you know, the way that this thing worked…
• 11:51
  Mark Pracht: was very similar to how Apocalypse Now worked.
• 11:56
  Mark Pracht: And it turned into something that is a magnificent piece of film. It's very similar to how One from the Heart worked, and that turned into an even bigger disaster. Like, to the point where it, you know, destroyed the studio that Francis was trying to build, you know? And I think… I think Francis just has this
• 12:15
  Mark Pracht: You know, he talks about art, and he talks about creation, and he talks about
• 12:22
  Mark Pracht: film in all the same way, which is that he wants it to be this sort of, like,
• 12:29
  Mark Pracht: cooperative… Like…
• 12:33
  Mark Pracht: group that just creates things, but with him in charge, right? And I think that that's… that's… there… there is hubris, and there is ego in Francis Coppola, and…
• 12:46
  Mark Pracht: in a way, like, what's really funny when you bring up Lucas is that
• 12:52
  Mark Pracht: Lucas, in his own way, built the same damn thing.
• 12:56
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 12:57
  Mark Pracht: He did it in a much more… methodical and controlled manner.
• 13:02
  Tad Eggleston: That's one of the things that was really cool about having Lucas in the dock, is that he actually even talks about it like that. Francis just walks off the cliff. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do this so I can do that.
• 13:16
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah
• 13:17
  Mark Pracht: I'm gonna… I'm gonna… I'm gonna make sure that I've built a parachute so that when I walk off the cliff, I know what's gonna happen, right? You know, and I think that that is… you know, like, it's… it's…
• 13:30
  Mark Pracht: I remember, if you've ever seen Hearts of Darkness, which is the.
• 13:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 13:34
  Mark Pracht: fantastic documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. You know, like, Lucas…
• 13:40
  Mark Pracht: this insane idea, the insane ideas that floated around Apocalypse Now, about, like, we're gonna get a small film crew and go into Vietnam during the war and shoot this movie, you know, and Lucas is like, well, that was… that was John Milius' nutsie idea. I don't think that I was gonna really do that. But, you know, and he's telling Copley, he's like, you know, if you get this huge crew and you go down to
• 14:05
  Mark Pracht: the Philippines, they're just gonna eat you alive. And they get basically dead, you know? And the thing is, is like.
• 14:11
  Mark Pracht: the deal with Coppola is that he does these grand, huge things
• 14:16
  Mark Pracht: he said it himself, he's like, if I have some money and I spend it audaciously, then I can do something. And I wouldn't want him any other way, right? Right. And I love… I love, you know.
• 14:32
  Mark Pracht: the last… the last act of his film career, which I think, you know, he's, like, in his 80s now, so I think.
• 14:39
  Tad Eggleston: 85?
• 14:40
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, we've got… yeah, we've got to look at this as sort of his last act. You know, he did…
• 14:46
  Tad Eggleston: This could be the last.
• 14:48
  Mark Pracht: It could be the last, he's talking about another one, but I don't know.
• 14:50
  Tad Eggleston: Easy? Okay.
• 14:51
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, but he's done, like, he's had these incredible ideas about, exhibition. Like, there was a movie that he made really low budget with Val Kilmer called Twixt.
• 15:08
  Mark Pracht: Which was some sort of vampire movie. But he actually took it around the country as a roadshow, and was…
• 15:17
  Mark Pracht: Editing the film live.
• 15:20
  Mark Pracht: As the audience watched it.
• 15:23
  Mark Pracht: So he would be like, oh, the audience is responding to this plotline, we'll give them more of that. You know, and it's like… That's crazy.
• 15:29
  Mark Pracht: it was… it was nuts, and sometimes it didn't work. But he was, like… I think he tries to make…
• 15:38
  Mark Pracht: I think he's really trying to make film into theater, because, you know, famously, there's the sequence in this movie where, in larger markets, like in the first week.
• 15:50
  Mark Pracht: There was an actual actor that would walk out into the movie theater.
• 15:55
  Mark Pracht: and ask…
• 15:55
  Tad Eggleston: Didn't happen.
• 15:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, there, the, there's the,
• 16:00
  Mark Pracht: the press conference sequence where Caesar is answering questions, and an actor would actually walk out into the theater with a microphone.
• 16:09
  Mark Pracht: And ask the question of the screen.
• 16:12
  Mark Pracht: And then he would respond. And, like, that stuff is incredible. Like, I… people say that it's nuts, but I'm like, it sounds awesome, you know?
• 16:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, nuts and brilliant can be…
• 16:26
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 16:26
  Tad Eggleston: side by side.
• 16:30
  Mark Pracht: I will say…
• 16:31
  Tad Eggleston: And… To bring it.
• 16:33
  Mark Pracht: Back to the comics, sorry, I get really excited about this whole thing.
• 16:35
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 16:36
  Mark Pracht: But to bring it back to the comic, the one thing that was in this comic that I don't think is in the movie that I was like, that makes sense, is there's a moment where it… the book, in, like, one line, explains the whole time-stop thing.
• 16:54
  Mark Pracht: Caesar says something like, an artist is able to stop time.
• 16:59
  Mark Pracht: And I was like.
• 17:01
  Mark Pracht: Because, like, it's one of the things in the movie that I was like, okay, I accept that this is happening, but I'm not quite sure how or why.
• 17:09
  Mark Pracht: But then it's right there, it's in the comic, so… Right.
• 17:13
  Dan Newland: In the movie, I don't think that's in there, but then when he loses the ability to stop time.
• 17:20
  Dan Newland: Julia, or whatever, goes and talks to him, and she gives him the speech about how, of course you can, all artists can always, or whatever, and then…
• 17:29
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 17:29
  Dan Newland: he does the kiss, and gets his powers back, and they stop time together, or whatever. The one other thing for me that I missed.
• 17:36
  Dan Newland: Is there's a point where they talk about the four…
• 17:39
  Dan Newland: the four elements, or whatever, that are important to a society or whatever. I think some of the…
• 17:46
  Dan Newland: a little bit of some of the really more talky philosophical stuff did actually get taken out, which is crazy considering how much is still in the movie, because there are a few lines in here that I think are actually pretty useful that were not actually in the movie, so…
• 18:02
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 18:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, a mixture between the handful of things that I think did get taken out in the movie, and…
• 18:10
  Tad Eggleston: just the fact that being able to decide my own pacing in a comic makes such a difference. I… I felt like one of the reasons that I appreciated the movie the way I did is because I had read the comic first.
• 18:24
  Tad Eggleston: And because I love the comic so much, like, the comic allowed me to take both the…
• 18:31
  Tad Eggleston: the close-up, view of… of… of human strife and… and human…
• 18:39
  Tad Eggleston: jealousies and competitiveness and ego, whatnot, while also taking the 10,000-foot view of, like, this attempt. Like, everybody's trying to make a better world, and some of them just, like…
• 18:58
  Tad Eggleston: they have very different views on what a better world will be. Like, it's such an allegory for making art, it's such an allegory for the world itself, it's like… like, what I love about this is that it asks the big questions, rather than giving you any answers.
• 19:17
  Mark Pracht: 100%. 100%.
• 19:20
  Dan Newland: It's also, I think, ahead of the ti- of its times, by a couple of years, in that, you know, he's thinking about this and doing it, and you can see…
• 19:30
  Dan Newland: I mean, and maybe it changed a bit because of when he made it, but you can see not only the echoes of Trumpism in it, but I think that when you look at what Caesar's actually doing.
• 19:42
  Dan Newland: You know, what he's really saying is…
• 19:45
  Dan Newland: Because there's basically the conservative side, and then the mayor seems to be more of a… what I'd call a classic Democrat.
• 19:53
  Dan Newland: Somebody was like, we can't worry about making things better, because we've got people to feed, and roads to build, and things that need to be done.
• 20:01
  Dan Newland: And…
• 20:03
  Dan Newland: he's more like… Caesar's more like the sort of leftist who's like, no, we need to actually worry about making a better world, and the environment, and all this other stuff.
• 20:13
  Dan Newland: And it's possible that's going to mean that there's going to be additional suffering in the current. That we can't let… what is it, let the now destroy the future, or something like that.
• 20:24
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 20:26
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, like, look, Caesar flattens
• 20:30
  Mark Pracht: A whole section of the city.
• 20:31
  Dan Newland: Of housing. Right. You know, right?
• 20:33
  Mark Pracht: for his project. And, like, I mean, I… part of… look, look, I…
• 20:41
  Mark Pracht: I, in a lot of ways, respond to Francis's
• 20:47
  Mark Pracht: thesis that… because I think he… I think Francis does see himself as Caesar. I think that, you know, we can't let the now destroy the future, right? I think that he believes that a world full of art and beauty will actually lift up the whole world
• 21:03
  Mark Pracht: to a better place. And I… and I think that there's some truth to that. But it's also, like, what I admire is that Caesar is not…
• 21:15
  Mark Pracht: there's no excuse made for some of the crazy shit that he does, right?
• 21:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yup.
• 21:23
  Mark Pracht: And… and that the… the mayor, specifically, is… Not positioned as, like, a…
• 21:30
  Mark Pracht: horrible person, but as somebody who just wants the system to work, you know? Right. And then, I mean, and even,
• 21:43
  Mark Pracht: Was it Cassius, the uncle?
• 21:45
  Tad Eggleston: Rather.
• 21:46
  Tad Eggleston: Crassus.
• 21:47
  Mark Pracht: Crassus, Crassus. Like…
• 21:49
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, he… he's sort of… I think he sort of represents, like, a kind of clueless
• 21:57
  Mark Pracht: you know, wealth Like, they just live their lives, and he doesn't… like, he's like,
• 22:03
  Mark Pracht: whatever, you know, I don't think…
• 22:05
  Mark Pracht: Obviously, you know, you have the… the…
• 22:08
  Tad Eggleston: They have a lot of clueless wealth.
• 22:10
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 22:11
  Sean Harklerode: bottom.
• 22:12
  Mark Pracht: like.
• 22:12
  Sean Harklerode: Fitzgerald, right? Yeah. The rich are not like us.
• 22:18
  Mark Pracht: But, I mean, like, and, and, you know, and then you've got, well, you've got, you know, you've got WOW Platinum, who's just.
• 22:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 22:26
  Mark Pracht: Manipulating the system for her own benefit, you know, has control of the media and is able to… to… to…
• 22:35
  Mark Pracht: position herself.
• 22:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, unfortunately.
• 22:37
  Mark Pracht: place possible, and then you have… Yeah. Go ahead.
• 22:42
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I was just gonna say, I think the way that…
• 22:44
  Tad Eggleston: All of that was… was framed in a…
• 22:54
  Tad Eggleston: like, 3 time periods, very much. You've got the ancient Rome, you've got the current slash roaring 20s, so I almost… I almost counted as 2 time periods there, and this futuristic time period, but maintaining that there has always been, essentially, like.
• 23:12
  Tad Eggleston: 4 big…
• 23:14
  Tad Eggleston: power groups, the one being the dreamers, the next being the, we want to make the system work the best that it can, the next being the
• 23:25
  Tad Eggleston: all I want is power, and I'll do whatever I can do for it. And then the one after that being, I was born into power, and I don't even know what I'm doing with it, because I just have all this money, and I'm having fun.
• 23:41
  Mark Pracht: Well, and you also have the, the, I have all this money and power, and again, the Labouf character, which I can't remember the name either.
• 23:51
  Mark Pracht: who…
• 23:53
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, oh, I just had it, and I forgot.
• 23:55
  Mark Pracht: Out of pure spite.
• 23:58
  Mark Pracht: decides to burn everything down, right? Like, he has no…
• 24:03
  Mark Pracht: cogent philosophy. I mean, that's… and that's the… to… to Dan's point, that's sort of the Trumpist thing in there. Like, there is no…
• 24:12
  Mark Pracht: cogent political viewpoint, or policy, or… or… or philosophy. It's just…
• 24:21
  Mark Pracht: Fuck all you people, you know? Right. And,
• 24:26
  Mark Pracht: And what I… what I, you know, I think that…
• 24:32
  Mark Pracht: I think that it's interesting that that character is clearly sort of the villain of the piece, but it's also sort of like… he's portrayed as sort of sad and pathetic the whole time.
• 24:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 24:42
  Mark Pracht: Right? And he's manipulated by everybody, right?
• 24:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 24:45
  Mark Pracht: So, I mean… I don't know, I think… I just think…
• 24:50
  Mark Pracht: you know, we talk about all this stuff that's in there, and I think that… It's about…
• 24:56
  Mark Pracht: 5% too much.
• 24:59
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 25:00
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe, but…
• 25:01
  Mark Pracht: I think that's.
• 25:02
  Tad Eggleston: to me, that goes back to what you were saying about, A, taking the big swings, and B, like, if you're really gonna try to do this allegory for… I mean, because this… like…
• 25:14
  Tad Eggleston: like the… why can't I remember the name of the… the substance?
• 25:19
  Tad Eggleston: you know, if you're… I mean, this is essentially.
• 25:21
  Mark Pracht: Oh, a mega… mega… megalaton? Megadon?
• 25:25
  Dan Newland: Eagle on it.
• 25:26
  Sean Harklerode: along. Right.
• 25:27
  Tad Eggleston: Mega lunch.
• 25:28
  Tad Eggleston: But this is essentially the artistic theory of everything.
• 25:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, rather than the physics theory of everything, this is the artistic theory of everything. So, like, to leave out any of these parts isn't quite right. Just like Dan and I discussed briefly earlier today, because he was on the regular podcast.
• 25:48
  Tad Eggleston: the fact that, like, it also feels like sometimes there's not enough connective tissue, but that's, I think, a feature, not a bug, because
• 25:59
  Tad Eggleston: When you're dealing with so much, nobody can actually… Hold it all.
• 26:06
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 26:08
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so even presenting it all doesn't seem appropriate, because which storyteller would be able to… I mean, in some ways, I almost wish that the thing was told by, like, a bard.
• 26:21
  Tad Eggleston: And, and you were aware that… you won'.
• 26:24
  Dan Newland: It kind of is, though. It kind of is.
• 26:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 26:26
  Dan Newland: or sort of is, in the movie, at least. Right.
• 26:30
  Mark Pracht: Well, and… and I… you know, the… the… The movie starts with… a parable. Right. You know?
• 26:38
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think that it is… But also, it's sadly…
• 26:47
  Mark Pracht: one of those… it's kind of… I think that the storytelling and the ambition of it
• 26:53
  Mark Pracht: flies in the face of this binary thinking world that we live in, you know? Yep.
• 26:58
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 26:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and also, I think we've become accustomed to the idea that movies are supposed to be passive entertainment, and you cannot watch and enjoy this passively.
• 27:13
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 27:14
  Tad Eggleston: because.
• 27:14
  Dan Newland: This is an outfit.
• 27:15
  Tad Eggleston: Questions that you ask.
• 27:17
  Dan Newland: This is actually one of the questions I had to ask you guys, is that when I think about not only the movie, but the book.
• 27:24
  Dan Newland: You know, if you think about… he's been working on this for 40 years, right?
• 27:29
  Dan Newland: If you think about… say, Kubrick's 2001.
• 27:35
  Dan Newland: Or you think even about, you know, Apocalypse Now.
• 27:39
  Dan Newland: They're not that different, really, in terms of being movies that are incredibly difficult.
• 27:46
  Dan Newland: To understand and have narratives that don't make a lot of sense, and don't really give you all the answers.
• 27:53
  Dan Newland: But they both made tons of money and won all sorts of awards. And it… is it just a matter of, you know, is this Coppola's problem? Or is this just the problem that the audience has basically become so weak, we've atrophied to the point.
• 28:09
  Tad Eggleston: I actually have a theory on that, but I want to hear Sean and Mark first.
• 28:14
  Mark Pracht: I'll let Sean go first.
• 28:17
  Mark Pracht: I could go.
• 28:18
  Sean Harklerode: Well… I would say…
• 28:22
  Sean Harklerode: Look, your duty as an entertainer is to entertain, so I hate blaming the audience when the audience isn't entertained, because…
• 28:32
  Sean Harklerode: That's your duty, is to entertain them. You don't get to choose
• 28:37
  Sean Harklerode: Who… who buys tickets to your show?
• 28:40
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 28:41
  Mark Pracht: 100%.
• 28:42
  Sean Harklerode: However… I will say that, you know, this film…
• 28:50
  Sean Harklerode: And the book, you know, both take a lot of narrative leaps, and there's…
• 28:58
  Sean Harklerode: a lot of things that are sort of unquestioned and philosophical statements. I mean, I love the fact that it starts off with the Oscar Wilde quote that a map without utopia isn't worth drawing, or something like that.
• 29:12
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 29:13
  Sean Harklerode: Because… I mean… There is a… an optimism to this vision.
• 29:25
  Sean Harklerode: Even though it, you know, it's mired in the excesses of everything,
• 29:34
  Sean Harklerode: And I think Dan and I were talking about the Tomorrowland movie.
• 29:39
  Sean Harklerode: On the last podcast, or maybe after.
• 29:42
  Sean Harklerode: Where I don't think people are… People can accept optimism anymore?
• 29:49
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 29:50
  Sean Harklerode: Right? Everything has to be a dystopia.
• 29:55
  Sean Harklerode: And I think…
• 29:57
  Sean Harklerode: Francis is a filmmaker who wears his heart on his sleeve. You can say that he has hubris and…
• 30:04
  Sean Harklerode: etc.
• 30:06
  Sean Harklerode: But in the end, he's a true believer.
• 30:08
  Sean Harklerode: Right? He really believes all that about, this is art.
• 30:12
  Sean Harklerode: And, you know, he put his money where… he put his vineyard where his mouth is, right?
• 30:18
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 30:19
  Sean Harklerode: so…
• 30:23
  Sean Harklerode: I come down between the questions of art and commerce so much. You know, what's… what's content and what's art?
• 30:33
  Sean Harklerode: And we're so used to content, right?
• 30:36
  Sean Harklerode: Like, this is not… you can't… you can't watch this on the second screen.
• 30:42
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 30:43
  Sean Harklerode: if this were a Netflix show, they'd have… it'd be 4 hours long, because they'd have to input dialogue every, you know, 5 minutes explaining what's going on.
• 30:54
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 30:55
  Sean Harklerode: Which is, you know, I think you've heard Matt Damon talk about that.
• 30:59
  Sean Harklerode: It's the film that… Francis wanted to make.
• 31:04
  Sean Harklerode: And I really admire him, you know, just giving this to Chris Ryle.
• 31:10
  Sean Harklerode: And saying, here's my script, you make yours,
• 31:17
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know if any of that made sense, but…
• 31:20
  Tad Eggleston: Made sense to me.
• 31:21
  Mark Pracht: Okay. I think it… I think it makes entirely sense, and I mean, and you've… you've heard me talk about this all the time, you cannot blame the audience if they don't like your work. You absolutely cannot. Your job is to make your work accessible to your audience. I think, I think that when we talk about Apocalypse Now or 2001,
• 31:41
  Mark Pracht: I don't think that this story is as good as either one of those stories, or as elemental as either one of those stories.
• 31:52
  Mark Pracht: Although, you know, Sean and I have been at panels at Comic-Con where some guy goes up there and talks about how much 2001 sucks, and I'm like, oh, okay, I don't know what you saw, but alright.
• 32:05
  Mark Pracht: I think that the big problem…
• 32:10
  Mark Pracht: In my opinion, is that there is a whole swap Of audience out there.
• 32:17
  Mark Pracht: that… is listening to A very small, or is being influenced by a very small snippet of people
• 32:28
  Mark Pracht: who feel like they have to say something about everything, and it has to be binary. It either has to be the best thing they've ever seen, ever in their lives, or the worst thing that's ever been put on screen. And I think that that…
• 32:41
  Mark Pracht: mentality has seeped out into the general culture to the point where people just kind of go like, well, I don't even… like, either they're so sickened by the argument about it that they just think, that doesn't sound like fun.
• 32:57
  Mark Pracht: or… They just say, well, somebody said that sucked, you know?
• 33:02
  Mark Pracht: like, I think that…
• 33:05
  Mark Pracht: you know, I can point to a number of times where this has happened. I think that,
• 33:09
  Mark Pracht: john Carter.
• 33:11
  Mark Pracht: is a movie that I love quite a bit. And I know, I mean, again, I don't think it's the greatest movie of all time, but the narrative around it was so…
• 33:20
  Mark Pracht: defined Before it ever opened.
• 33:24
  Mark Pracht: that… people just decided not to go, and I think…
• 33:28
  Mark Pracht: I think that most recently with Supergirl. I think that…
• 33:32
  Mark Pracht: whatever you may think about that movie, like, I said this on someplace, I was like, you know, I think most people went to that movie, and they were like, I liked it, or I didn't like it, and that was all the… that was the end of it, right? They went home.
• 33:45
  Mark Pracht: But when you go onto virtually every platform, and somebody is having an argument about
• 33:53
  Mark Pracht: whether that movie is good or bad, or… and what it means about you, if you think it's good or bad, it immediately makes me, as an audience member, go like, well, Jesus Christ, that does not sound like a fun time.
• 34:08
  Mark Pracht: Or that doesn't sound like an interesting time. It doesn't sound like something that I would want to go see. And then they just don't go, right? And I think that…
• 34:18
  Mark Pracht: But I do think… To… to make a long story longer.
• 34:24
  Mark Pracht: I do think that Francis, has a… storytelling style.
• 34:33
  Mark Pracht: that has not really evolved with the times. I think that…
• 34:41
  Mark Pracht: I would not want anyone else to direct this movie.
• 34:45
  Mark Pracht: But he's worked with other screenwriters at times, and I think that that might have helped him.
• 34:51
  Mark Pracht: I think that, I think that he is making… I think if this movie had come out.
• 34:59
  Mark Pracht: 76… 82, sometime like then. It probably would have been received with a much more…
• 35:08
  Mark Pracht: A, the Francis Ford Coppola
• 35:13
  Mark Pracht: market value would have been much higher, and more people would have wanted to engage with it as a work of art. But I think that most people, when it came out, engaged with it, as Sean said, as content.
• 35:25
  Mark Pracht: And… I'll never forget, I follow Francis on Instagram, and some guy got on there and was, like, berating him about making this movie and how stupid it was. And why didn't you just make a Batman movie?
• 35:39
  Mark Pracht: And I had never gotten more livid about online discourse than when somebody said that.
• 35:49
  Mark Pracht: to an artist
• 35:51
  Mark Pracht: as accomplished and as worthy of respect as Francis Ford Coppola. And Francis, to his great credit.
• 35:59
  Mark Pracht: actually engaged with this guy, and he said, why would I want to do that? There's already been…
• 36:05
  Mark Pracht: A half-dozen great Batman movies.
• 36:09
  Mark Pracht: What's the point of making another one?
• 36:13
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 36:14
  Dan Newland: Interestingly, by the way, there were points during this movie
• 36:19
  Dan Newland: when you've got the rich, you've got the rich brooding guy standing out on the big, you know, gothic ego over the city, and then he's taking flowers and, like, going into the alley, like… like Bruce Wayne does every year for his mom and dad, where I'm like, this is kind of a Batman movie.
• 36:38
  Mark Pracht: Yep.
• 36:38
  Sean Harklerode: But…
• 36:40
  Dan Newland: The other thing that is interesting…
• 36:42
  Mark Pracht: Man had gone off and studied architecture.
• 36:44
  Dan Newland: Exactly! He finally decided to do what he's supposed to, and instead of hanging around in the alleys, he puts his money to work actually making Gotham better by, you know, using that best brain in the world to do something. You know, the the weird thing is this last summer, though, and I think it goes into this too.
• 37:04
  Dan Newland: I'm starting to… I'm starting to believe that as much as those of us who are sort of on social media and everything think about how all… everybody's being affected by the discourse around people trying to cancel movies and whatever.
• 37:18
  Dan Newland: it's weird how most movies in the end end up kind of getting what they deserve. Like, Supergirl was not a great movie, right?
• 37:27
  Dan Newland: Odyssey now?
• 37:29
  Mark Pracht: Oh, I'm sorry!
• 37:31
  Dan Newland: Odyssey comes out, and it is, like, you know, similarly, it's got all sorts of, there's a black woman in it playing… playing Helen of Troy and whatever.
• 37:41
  Dan Newland: Makes God knows how many billions of dollars, because people just…
• 37:45
  Dan Newland: didn't care, and they wanted to go see it. And it's a pretty fantastic movie, you know? Spider-man's making a ton of money now. Right. So I think that… that we can overestimate that. I do think, though, that if you go back and look at the conversation.
• 38:02
  Dan Newland: Which is one of my favorite movies.
• 38:05
  Dan Newland: The conversation would make about $150,000 if you put it in theaters these days.
• 38:10
  Mark Pracht: Right? Sure.
• 38:11
  Dan Newland: Because it is the slowest-ass movie in the history of cinema. And this one feels a lot that way. It is… like you say, you know, if it had… that's why I was thinking, I'm like, if it had been done in the 70s, this is a man out of time. If he'd made it when he was first thinking of it.
• 38:27
  Dan Newland: it would have been received completely differently, because I don't think this is a movie
• 38:32
  Dan Newland: That is made for modern audiences, even though its message is exactly what modern audiences.
• 38:38
  Tad Eggleston: Let's see.
• 38:41
  Dan Newland: And this…
• 38:41
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna…
• 38:42
  Dan Newland: Unfortunate, I think. I wish that he had used.
• 38:45
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna… I'm gonna…
• 38:47
  Dan Newland: How to do that.
• 38:48
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna agree with most of what everybody has said, while also saying that I don't think that there's…
• 38:55
  Tad Eggleston: I think from an audience, standpoint, It's aspirational, more than…
• 39:02
  Tad Eggleston: towards an audience. I don't know that it would have worked for a 78 audience, because there are two things that I think massively limit the audience, and also why I really wish we would make it more available on streaming, because I think the more people who didn't go to see it while it was available to see, but were willing to…
• 39:21
  Tad Eggleston: go, oh, let's see what everybody's talking about. I think a lot of them would wind up getting sucked in. But I think that there are two problems from a critical standpoint, and from… from…
• 39:35
  Tad Eggleston: to a certain extent, a societal standpoint, particularly if you're only seeing it once, if you're not sitting with it, if you're not being able to think about it. And that's the first, is…
• 39:47
  Tad Eggleston: We don't like hopeful movies.
• 39:50
  Tad Eggleston: What's the biggest difference between 2001, Apocalypse Now, and this one? This one has hope!
• 39:58
  Tad Eggleston: But that leads to the second, and particularly…
• 40:02
  Tad Eggleston: possibly bigger problem. We really hate hopeful movies where the heroes are flawed.
• 40:10
  Tad Eggleston: The possibility that we could be looking at, oh, this is who our hero should be, but he's a deeply flawed and maybe not likable character.
• 40:24
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 40:24
  Tad Eggleston: makes it that much harder for us to, like… And then the third thing is that it's actually fun at times, and for whatever reason, when we're talking about great movies, the more fun they are.
• 40:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 40:41
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 40:42
  Mark Pracht: I always… I always thought that that… where… that there's that line
• 40:47
  Mark Pracht: where Adam Driver's like, did you go to the club?
• 40:51
  Mark Pracht: Somebody made that into a joke, and I thought it was fucking hilarious.
• 40:55
  Tad Eggleston: Right!
• 40:56
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I was just like… and it was intentionally so. Right. It wasn't like he was making some weird choice that, you know, it was like…
• 41:05
  Dan Newland: Driver was the one guy who, of everybody in that movie, he was…
• 41:09
  Dan Newland: truly fantastic. I mean, I enjoyed Calgary Plaza in it a lot.
• 41:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, I thought Aubrey Plaza did a pretty.
• 41:16
  Dan Newland: But I think that as far as just nailing it, Driver really did. The one other Batman note here, by the way, is that I think that when you hear them talking at the big party, when Julius.
• 41:27
  Tad Eggleston: Well, there is that point where he just goes, I'm Batman, I mean…
• 41:30
  Dan Newland: Well, exactly.
• 41:31
  Tad Eggleston: Decent.
• 41:32
  Dan Newland: She kind of does, because they're wandering along, and she's like, you know, you don't have to…
• 41:37
  Dan Newland: be like this. You don't have to drink and do drugs and whatever. He's like, you could be a good guy. And he's like, you know, if you're a good guy, people want to destroy you. And if you're a bad guy.
• 41:47
  Dan Newland: And he kind of leaves it like, they'll just kind of let you do whatever you want. And she fills and she says, they'll kill you. But I think he really is doing the Batman and Bruce Wayne Playboy kind of thing.
• 42:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 42:00
  Dan Newland: Keeping that persona in the public.
• 42:02
  Dan Newland: So that people will not put them on a pedestal, so they feel they need to lock him down.
• 42:07
  Dan Newland: Because he's got those flaws, he's able to sort of get a pass a little bit more.
• 42:13
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and there's also so much truth to that. I mean, like…
• 42:20
  Mark Pracht: Well, look, I…
• 42:21
  Tad Eggleston: The two best men that have been president in my lifetime are Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, regardless of how good presidents they were, just as human beings, far and away, the two best men, and how much of their presidencies were spent with people just trying to find
• 42:40
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever they could find.
• 42:44
  Tad Eggleston: Because… because we don't want to have to, like, deal with anybody on moral grounds.
• 42:53
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think that… I think that the society as a whole, and man, this is getting to an interesting conversation, I think society as a whole is so obsessed with,
• 43:07
  Mark Pracht: imposing your own morality onto the people around you, you know? And I'm not even talking about, like, I'm not talking about criminal acts, I'm not talking about,
• 43:15
  Mark Pracht: I'm not talking about, you know, things that are,
• 43:19
  Mark Pracht: legally actionable. I'm talking about, like, how you choose to live your life, right?
• 43:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 43:26
  Mark Pracht: Like, and… and it go… like, and I'm not…
• 43:29
  Tad Eggleston: Both socially and economically.
• 43:31
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I see it… and I see it go back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, right? And… and the thing is, is like, it's because… and I…
• 43:41
  Mark Pracht: I… I truly feel like…
• 43:45
  Mark Pracht: That there are forces on both sides of the political spectrum who are desperately, desperately wanting to have a totalitarian state.
• 43:54
  Mark Pracht: Where they can just tell everybody what they have to do and how to do it.
• 43:58
  Mark Pracht: And that… is scary.
• 44:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think that there's probably an element of that. I think there's also an element of
• 44:06
  Tad Eggleston: people want to behave how they feel most comfortable, but the only way they can believe that that's the moral way to behave is if everybody else behaves that way, too. We have this… we have this really deep issue with, oh, this is how I live my life, and this is how you live your life, and both are okay.
• 44:28
  Dan Newland: It's…
• 44:28
  Mark Pracht: But yeah.
• 44:28
  Dan Newland: actually, I read a book a while ago. It's actually a series of sci-fi books. It's mostly just sort of for fun. It's called the Babaverse series.
• 44:38
  Dan Newland: But they… one of the planets they went to…
• 44:41
  Dan Newland: The guy started talking about, like, you know, the golden rule, and that idea of…
• 44:46
  Dan Newland: How you should treat other people the way that you would like to be treated.
• 44:51
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 44:52
  Dan Newland: And they're like, The people there were like, you've got it completely wrong.
• 44:58
  Dan Newland: You need to obey what they call the Iron Rule, which is that you should treat people the way they want to be treated.
• 45:04
  Dan Newland: that one of the problems we have is this idea that somehow, if I think that life should be a certain way.
• 45:13
  Dan Newland: I should then try to treat other people that way. Well, if that's not the way they want to live, then that's not really the right way to treat them. And this golden rule thing gets in the way for us. You know, that everybody thinks the world should be
• 45:26
  Dan Newland: the way we would like it, and that other people would be happy too if the world would… you know? If I'm not gay, everybody should be not gay, and I'll be happy then.
• 45:36
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 45:36
  Dan Newland: And that's just not the way it works, you know? And so… Yep.
• 45:41
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I don't.
• 45:42
  Dan Newland: This is interesting for me.
• 45:43
  Mark Pracht: I… I think that our society would be much better If we could embrace the… I don't care.
• 45:56
  Mark Pracht: And I mean that in the most benign.
• 46:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:00
  Mark Pracht: and… and non-confrontational way. Like.
• 46:05
  Tad Eggleston: I do care if you're bleeding to death on the street, I will do something about it. I don't care if you did something with your life that has no impact on my life or anybody that I care about whatsoever.
• 46:18
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 46:19
  Mark Pracht: Exactly. So, like, I mean, you know, like.
• 46:23
  Mark Pracht: everybody has to have an opinion on every fucking thing, right? And it's like…
• 46:29
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, but what… how does that… how does that affect you?
• 46:32
  Mark Pracht: And maybe, like, if we could all stop for a minute and say, does that have anything to do with me?
• 46:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, to be fair, Mark, this is an opinion.
• 46:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I know. I know.
• 46:46
  Tad Eggleston: I know. And I could say that because I share it, and I try to… try to acknowledge that, like, yes, I am taking a side, even in my not wanting.
• 46:55
  Mark Pracht: Am I not wanting to decide. Right. But, I mean, like, you know, if you… in the words of a great philosopher by the name of Neil Peart, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. So, but, no, I think that…
• 47:13
  Mark Pracht: to bring it back to the story, I think that there's a ton of stuff in this that is super interesting. Like, like, you know, Francis is obviously advocating for some sort of utopia, right? Some sort of artistic utopia, right? But…
• 47:29
  Mark Pracht: What we see is that we have to tear down a bunch of people's homes
• 47:35
  Mark Pracht: to create a utopia, and it's the thing is, like…
• 47:39
  Tad Eggleston: Is he advocating for it, or is he proposing that it's not something that we should rule out?
• 47:46
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, like.
• 47:48
  Tad Eggleston: And that's one of the.
• 47:49
  Mark Pracht: advocate.
• 47:50
  Tad Eggleston: Appreciate it.
• 47:50
  Mark Pracht: Kate is…
• 47:51
  Tad Eggleston: is…
• 47:51
  Mark Pracht: Advocate… Advocate is kind of a…
• 47:55
  Mark Pracht: loaded word, okay? Right. But he does put that quote at the beginning of the movie.
• 48:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 48:02
  Mark Pracht: Okay? So, but, and that Caesar…
• 48:05
  Tad Eggleston: But even… But even that quote isn't about having a… having
• 48:11
  Tad Eggleston: the world be a utopia. Right. It's about there being a utopia.
• 48:17
  Mark Pracht: on the map. Does the map get you there, or is the map just a series of goals?
• 48:22
  Sean Harklerode: Like, there's all sorts of ways how to get there.
• 48:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 48:24
  Mark Pracht: A map shows you that.
• 48:25
  Tad Eggleston: Or is Utopia a choice, or is Utopia, like, I mean…
• 48:32
  Tad Eggleston: Could the person who doesn't like what Utopia represents decide to live somewhere else?
• 48:37
  Sean Harklerode: This is why you guys need to watch TomorrowLink.
• 48:42
  Tad Eggleston: I, I haven't.
• 48:43
  Tad Eggleston: list.
• 48:43
  Mark Pracht: I do. You know what?
• 48:45
  Mark Pracht: when, when I got Disney+, the first things that I looked for was Tomorrowland?
• 48:52
  Mark Pracht: And, actually, the Lone Ranger.
• 48:55
  Mark Pracht: because I hadn't seen The Lone Ranger since I saw it in the theaters, and I thought it was not as bad a movie as people want… made it out to be.
• 49:03
  Sean Harklerode: Armie Hammer, Johnny.
• 49:04
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I, and I, and I was like…
• 49:08
  Mark Pracht: I'd like to rewatch both of those. And neither one was available.
• 49:14
  Mark Pracht: I think Tomorrowland is now available.
• 49:16
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 49:17
  Mark Pracht: and I do want to watch it, but… and obviously, you know, the Lone Ranger has all sorts of baggage attached to it now, but…
• 49:25
  Mark Pracht: it…
• 49:27
  Sean Harklerode: It's an entertaining…
• 49:28
  Mark Pracht: I… I would say, I remember that summer, after I saw that movie, the last act of that, the…
• 49:37
  Mark Pracht: I was like, this is the best directed movie of the whole summer.
• 49:40
  Mark Pracht: and… You know, then it blew up, but…
• 49:45
  Mark Pracht: I also have… I also have many theories about that movie, but I only saw it, like, once, so who knows if I'm right. But,
• 49:52
  Mark Pracht: Anyway,
• 49:54
  Mark Pracht: But my point being is this, and I think that it's kind of baked into the philosophy, baked into the…
• 50:02
  Mark Pracht: this questioning nature of this film, right, is that here, Caesar is trying to build a utopia, right? And he has to tear down a bunch of people's homes for it. And I think that one of the things that is really hard to grapple with is that
• 50:17
  Mark Pracht: Almost every utopia is built on somebody's being…
• 50:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 50:23
  Mark Pracht: quashed, right?
• 50:24
  Tad Eggleston: And…
• 50:25
  Mark Pracht: Sean's gonna hate that I bring this up, it's when I think about Star Trek The Next Generation all the time. It's like, somebody's not happy. Somebody somewhere in the Federation ain't happy.
• 50:37
  Mark Pracht: Like, not…
• 50:38
  Sean Harklerode: Card's brother!
• 50:39
  Mark Pracht: That's true! It's true. But you know what I mean. Like, if ever… if there's no conflict and no one… and granted, I'm talking about the first, like, season and a half.
• 50:52
  Mark Pracht: the Roddenberry version of TNG, where no one argues, and everybody's happy, and no one has any problems, and it's like, sounds like somebody has problems that we're just not seeing on screen.
• 51:08
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I… I… I'm an educator, so, like…
• 51:13
  Tad Eggleston: I… I often dig into anytime there's a miracle that occurs in any state, and altogether, too often, when
• 51:23
  Tad Eggleston: When you have Test rates go up, or even…
• 51:28
  Tad Eggleston: Dropout rates go down, when you start digging into it, it's like, oh, they dropped out or were pushed out right before they were counted for dropout rates.
• 51:40
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 51:42
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 51:45
  Mark Pracht: That's right.
• 51:45
  Dan Newland: Immediately, like.
• 51:46
  Tad Eggleston: The dropout rate of 8th graders was significantly higher, but dropout rate is counted by the number of freshmen that don't graduate.
• 51:55
  Mark Pracht: Nope.
• 51:57
  Dan Newland: Well, and even… even, like, in the book, you know, he talks about how this… this future city, it's all about learning, creating, developing, celebrating.
• 52:06
  Dan Newland: There's no idea of working, there's no idea, really, of even money anymore. Like, it's a revolutionary reconstruction of society. There are going to be a lot of people who like the idea of money, and like the idea of inequality, who are going to be very angry in this, or if they just don't want to sit around being.
• 52:23
  Tad Eggleston: But I also thought of that in terms of both what he'd created, which in some ways is the ultimate AI,
• 52:32
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, the real machine learning that we're looking at right now, where, like, how do you build a society
• 52:43
  Tad Eggleston: As work becomes less necessary.
• 52:48
  Sean Harklerode: Which, you know, is something that… Are we looking at?
• 52:53
  Tad Eggleston: You know? I don't know.
• 52:54
  Dan Newland: I would say if you're.
• 52:55
  Sean Harklerode: You're feeling.
• 52:56
  Dan Newland: Your belief is that suddenly 9… 95, 98% of the population is no longer needed anymore, and can be safely not fed, and shuffle off the coil, and there'll just be enough…
• 53:09
  Dan Newland: You know, people to keep the machines running, and the wealthy sort of happy, and that would be fine.
• 53:16
  Dan Newland: I don't think they're making a plan for the rest of us.
• 53:19
  Mark Pracht: No.
• 53:20
  Tad Eggleston: Not at all.
• 53:21
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, that's the whole point of, you know, universal basic income that people talk about.
• 53:26
  Sean Harklerode: But look, we live in America. I don't think universal basic income's coming anytime soon.
• 53:30
  Dan Newland: seem like it. Right.
• 53:32
  Sean Harklerode: So, like, can you imagine… You know…
• 53:36
  Tad Eggleston: I can't imagine it, I don't.
• 53:37
  Sean Harklerode: I can imagine it, but can you imagine trying to get that passed through Congress?
• 53:41
  Mark Pracht: But,
• 53:42
  Tad Eggleston: Again, I can imagine it. I…
• 53:45
  Sean Harklerode: I do… I find it… I can't…
• 53:47
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know what we'll have to experience to actually make it happen.
• 53:51
  Sean Harklerode: And, I mean, this is… well, it is political, but, I can't read or watch this
• 53:59
  Sean Harklerode: story without thinking of the fountainhead.
• 54:03
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 54:04
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 54:05
  Sean Harklerode: And maybe it's just the architecture, but…
• 54:10
  Sean Harklerode: you know, I feel like this is…
• 54:13
  Sean Harklerode: a corollary to The Fountainhead, right? Because that's all about John Roark's self-actualization.
• 54:22
  Sean Harklerode: And people are getting in his way.
• 54:26
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 54:26
  Sean Harklerode: And in this, it's Caesar's self-actualization, but he's trying… at least he intends to bring everyone with him.
• 54:40
  Sean Harklerode: But…
• 54:41
  Sean Harklerode: You know, and you can see Ayn Rand in the background going, this is not gonna work. It's not gonna work. Yeah.
• 54:47
  Sean Harklerode: But, so I just find…
• 54:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's… I mean…
• 54:54
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things that I love about this is that it asks that question. It asks the question of, why won't this work?
• 55:01
  Tad Eggleston: It asks the question of, why won't Crassus' world work?
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: It asks the question of, why won't… Frank… Cicero's world work.
• 55:14
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 55:15
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, they're all cohesive visions.
• 55:19
  Tad Eggleston: That all have deep, deep flaws.
• 55:23
  Dan Newland: In a meadow way.
• 55:25
  Dan Newland: this asks that same question of, kind of, our current world in one way, and that is, why is it that Megalopolis the movie didn't work, and why is it that probably…
• 55:36
  Dan Newland: You know, this… deeply thoughtful hardcover sold about maybe a thousand times fewer copies than the latest Absolute Batman.
• 55:46
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 55:47
  Dan Newland: Right? I mean, the simple fact is that I would love to know how successful this was.
• 55:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm betting…
• 55:54
  Dan Newland: We didn't sell a ton of copies.
• 55:55
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 55:56
  Sean Harklerode: Caesar doesn't have an axe on his costume.
• 56:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I think… like… As is so often the case with adapted work, like, They're tied together.
• 56:10
  Mark Pracht: Well, 100%.
• 56:11
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 56:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 56:14
  Tad Eggleston: And I… I… I drifted away from… when Mark was talking about just appreciating the… the… the audacity and… and the… the… just…
• 56:26
  Tad Eggleston: jump-off-the-cliff nature of the way… the way…
• 56:29
  Mark Pracht: I'm glad you appreciated what I was saying enough to drift off.
• 56:34
  Tad Eggleston: We all drifted off.
• 56:37
  Sean Harklerode: I didn't.
• 56:38
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't push back in.
• 56:41
  Tad Eggleston: Other people talked, Mark, and I didn't.
• 56:44
  Mark Pracht: internet.
• 56:44
  Tad Eggleston: corrupt.
• 56:47
  Tad Eggleston: I was thinking that, like, making this graphic novel Synchron… you know, in… in…
• 57:00
  Tad Eggleston: in time with the movie. I mean, it's not the first time it's been done. Both Alien and Star Wars had their adaptations made at the same time the movie was being made.
• 57:10
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 57:10
  Tad Eggleston: Star Wars, famously, with way less…
• 57:16
  Tad Eggleston: participation. I mean, they didn't even know what color to make the lightsabers.
• 57:21
  Tad Eggleston: and Alien with way more. They had them on set, they showed them all sorts of things, they got to see, I think, an early version of the film, that sort of thing.
• 57:30
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, I love the appreciation of the sister mediums.
• 57:38
  Tad Eggleston: and that…
• 57:40
  Tad Eggleston: That there really is something that can be told, or shown in a comic that might not be there in the movie, and vice versa, and, like.
• 57:49
  Tad Eggleston: I wish, like, if I had…
• 57:54
  Tad Eggleston: if I had a theater and a comic shop, like, I would want to do the… the… the…
• 58:02
  Tad Eggleston: Pick up your book on Saturday.
• 58:06
  Tad Eggleston: you know, or pick up your book on Monday, come watch the movie on Saturday, and then we'll discuss both afterwards on a regular basis.
• 58:13
  Tad Eggleston: Because I think that… that, like, it… it… particularly put together, it's such a fascinating… Look at, at existence.
• 58:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, politics, art, humanity.
• 58:32
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 58:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 58:34
  Tad Eggleston: And, like… Well, I mean, yeah.
• 58:37
  Mark Pracht: I always thought… I always thought that, like, I think that part of having the graphic novel is that, like.
• 58:46
  Mark Pracht: Francis, like, Let's be realistic, he put his entire
• 58:51
  Mark Pracht: Fortune into making this movie, right?
• 58:54
  Mark Pracht: And I think he was trying to make it as much of a multimedia
• 58:58
  Mark Pracht: sort of experience as he possibly could to try to generate as much money as he possibly could to refill the coffers. Probably taking off from Lucas, right? I think if he thought he could have gotten Megalopolis action figures in stores, he probably would have.
• 59:14
  Mark Pracht: And he also wanted to sell it as a big, spectacular
• 59:19
  Mark Pracht: spectacle, right? That you would want to go to the theater to see, right?
• 59:24
  Mark Pracht: And I have long thought, That the rollout of this film should have been much smaller.
• 59:33
  Mark Pracht: I think Coppola should've… like, he did this later on, after it was open. Like, he played…
• 59:40
  Mark Pracht: the Chicago theater. They showed the movie, and then he had a Q&A afterwards.
• 59:47
  Mark Pracht: Where he sat on stage and answered questions. And,
• 59:51
  Mark Pracht: I think that that should have been the first rollout. Do it as a roadhouse thing, where they would go from city to city to city, and show the theater. You would have got all the die-hard people who really wanted to see it would have paid to come out and see it. And then…
• 1:00:06
  Mark Pracht: they would have had this interaction with Francis, and they could have sold this book in the lobby, you could have sold merchandise, you could have sold all that stuff.
• 1:00:15
  Tad Eggleston: I could have made it part of the ticket.
• 1:00:17
  Mark Pracht: Right. And you could have also done the things that… that some of the larger venues got, which was the live actor coming out to answer the question, you know, and all of this really audacious stuff that was in the movie that got replaced as it
• 1:00:35
  Mark Pracht: was put into theaters where, you know, you just couldn't do that. And…
• 1:00:40
  Mark Pracht: Then you could have had a larger theatrical release.
• 1:00:45
  Mark Pracht: And… again, I think this has been mentioned here a couple of times, like, his… his…
• 1:00:54
  Mark Pracht: Seeming desire to not have this be on streaming or in home media is… really frustrating.
• 1:01:03
  Mark Pracht: Because he seems to want it to be solely a theatrical experience. I mean, like, I got a 4K of it that I had to order from England,
• 1:01:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:01:12
  Mark Pracht: So… You know…
• 1:01:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, seriously, I think… I think that this is the movie that if he…
• 1:01:20
  Tad Eggleston: If it was available, and particularly available, like…
• 1:01:24
  Tad Eggleston: not to purchase, but actually streaming. If it was on Prime, or HBO, or Disney+, or something that lots of people have, and they didn't have to pay extra for it, you would have tons of people who would decide to…
• 1:01:37
  Tad Eggleston: Watch it just on a lark.
• 1:01:40
  Tad Eggleston: And I would be willing to bet that, like, 1 in 5 of them, if it was still in the theater somewhere, would go, oh, now I want to go see it on a big screen.
• 1:01:49
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, why…
• 1:01:50
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty interesting.
• 1:01:51
  Sean Harklerode: Mega Doc.
• 1:01:52
  Tad Eggleston: towards them, or whatever. Right.
• 1:01:54
  Sean Harklerode: Megadoc was on the Criterion channel. Why was this not on as a companion? You know, it's usually the other way around. Hey.
• 1:02:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I could so see, like, this feeding… like, there are plenty of movies that I've seen first streaming that when I see an opportunity to see them in the theaters, I'm all over it.
• 1:02:15
  Tad Eggleston: The world has changed enough that a lot of people don't see… I mean, between it being more expensive, between…
• 1:02:24
  Tad Eggleston: Us reaching a point in society where we're more comfortable not having to do things together.
• 1:02:30
  Tad Eggleston: you know, where those of us who have sensory issues are… I mean, I went to see Odyssey in the theater, but I, like… I scoped…
• 1:02:38
  Tad Eggleston: theaters, and I found the one that when I bought my ticket, I was the only one in the theater.
• 1:02:46
  Tad Eggleston: There wound up being about a dozen.
• 1:02:49
  Tad Eggleston: But none of, like, for the most part, I got, like, my space to myself.
• 1:02:54
  Tad Eggleston: And that I can handle way better than… like, because for me, it's not just a different experience because, oh, we've got a crowd, it's got a… it's a different experience because a crowd makes me anxious, it can make my skin crawl, it can make me feel all sorts of sensory things to have…
• 1:03:09
  Tad Eggleston: Nothing to do with the movie.
• 1:03:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know,
• 1:03:14
  Mark Pracht: I hear and respect that, Tad, but I do think that…
• 1:03:19
  Mark Pracht: part of, you know, what we were talking about earlier, about the reaction to this, and why people don't go to things, and this sort of binary thinking, I think that it is driven by
• 1:03:34
  Mark Pracht: Not being in a room experiencing a story together, right?
• 1:03:40
  Tad Eggleston: I think that there's absolutely truth to that, but again, to me, that means we should do anything and everything that will
• 1:03:49
  Tad Eggleston: Have people go into the room together, and, like, having it only available for a limited amount of time.
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Without the ability to see it first, you know, I mean…
• 1:04:04
  Dan Newland: I don't think there's a lot of people who are gonna pay 15 bucks to go and see a movie once they've already seen it on their screen at home.
• 1:04:12
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:04:12
  Dan Newland: There will be a few, but it's limited in numbers. But I mean, I will note this, my daughter, 20 years old, we watched it together, because she watched Megadoc with us, and she's like, okay, this is just crazy, I gotta see this.
• 1:04:27
  Dan Newland: She liked it. She liked it a lot. She liked it better than I did, I think. And she's like, yeah, this makes perfect sense. You know, he's a guy who… he's like, you know.
• 1:04:36
  Dan Newland: lost in time, because he… he's regretting his past, and he's hopeful for the future. And so, you know, but… but I think that this is a movie that really could have made him for a new generation, because there are a lot of younger people who I think are sick of the cynicism of our… of our generations.
• 1:04:56
  Dan Newland: And are ready for some more hopeful stories. Because the world around them is complete shit, you know?
• 1:05:02
  Tad Eggleston: That's an even bigger.
• 1:05:03
  Dan Newland: That's good.
• 1:05:04
  Tad Eggleston: Likely to go and see a movie.
• 1:05:06
  Dan Newland: Correct.
• 1:05:07
  Tad Eggleston: Sight unseen, sight unseen.
• 1:05:10
  Dan Newland: Put on video.
• 1:05:11
  Tad Eggleston: from the guy that made Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, which they acknowledge are great movies, but aren't ones that make them feel good.
• 1:05:21
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 1:05:24
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, there's also Tucker, A Man in His Dream, which is one of the most feel-good movies I've ever seen.
• 1:05:29
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:05:31
  Mark Pracht: despite the fact that the man's life is ruined at the end, I'm like, yeah!
• 1:05:35
  Sean Harklerode: Don't forget Robin Williams and Jack.
• 1:05:37
  Mark Pracht: Help.
• 1:05:38
  Tad Eggleston: I like Jack.
• 1:05:42
  Tad Eggleston: So, I watched it recently, and I remembered that it's also got Bill Cosby, and that makes it a little more…
• 1:05:48
  Tad Eggleston: difficult…
• 1:05:52
  Mark Pracht: But I, you know, like, I… but I also think… I think…
• 1:05:56
  Mark Pracht: this is really… this is really an interesting conversation, quite frankly. I think that this idea that
• 1:06:05
  Mark Pracht: You have to know what you're gonna get before you wanna go see it is also a very detrimental.
• 1:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely!
• 1:06:16
  Mark Pracht: experiencing new things. Like, I… and look, and I understand what you're saying in terms of the economics of the world right now, but I mean, like, that's also really sad. Like, I mean, I went and saw things, you know, like, in my heyday of film going, when it was, you know, from, like, my late teens to the…
• 1:06:36
  Mark Pracht: to mid-30s, you know, I… I would go see anything.
• 1:06:40
  Mark Pracht: I would pay my 15, 20 bucks, and I'd go into a theater, and I'd see a movie. Whatever it was, didn't matter.
• 1:06:47
  Mark Pracht: romance, comedy. I never really was much for horror, but, I mean, like, but I'd say.
• 1:06:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Bo, what? I mean, first, was it 15 or 20 bucks, then?
• 1:06:59
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, in the 80s, it was probably 10 bucks.
• 1:07:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I remember how upset in the 90s I got when they raised prices at Cineplex Odeon to 8 bucks.
• 1:07:13
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I always remember spending at least 10 bucks. I mean, that's…
• 1:07:17
  Tad Eggleston: But you were pro- were you getting popcorn or candy, too?
• 1:07:21
  Mark Pracht: True.
• 1:07:22
  Mark Pracht: But I'm.
• 1:07:23
  Tad Eggleston: And you were getting out for…
• 1:07:24
  Tad Eggleston: 10, 15 bucks. I mean, that's.
• 1:07:26
  Mark Pracht: No, I mean, like, with popcorn and candy, I was getting out for about 20 bucks.
• 1:07:30
  Mark Pracht: Listen, I went and saw Return of the Jedi one night, and I swear I sold it with a bunch of other kids, and I think we… I spent $55 just on candy. So, I mean… because I was… I had already seen it once, and I was up and back, and up and back, and I was like, I need more Swedish fish.
• 1:07:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:07:48
  Mark Pracht: And then I brought it in the car.
• 1:07:50
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, and for that matter, like.
• 1:07:54
  Mark Pracht: I could run.
• 1:07:54
  Tad Eggleston: theaters have vanished. I mean, when I was a kid, like, the first run theater was $8, but I also had a $1.50 theater in town.
• 1:08:03
  Mark Pracht: But, look.
• 1:08:04
  Sean Harklerode: My brother just saw Spider-Man at the $5 theater. It started at the $5 theater.
• 1:08:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I did manage to…
• 1:08:12
  Sean Harklerode: credits off.
• 1:08:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I did manage to see Odyssey for $10, because I both saw a matinee, and I saw one of the theaters that's cheaper, but… but, like, that's part of the thing, is… is… we need to have…
• 1:08:26
  Tad Eggleston: like, it's really only the small chains or the independent theaters that ever work at a low price. There are 3 huge
• 1:08:36
  Tad Eggleston: Theater chains that, like, seem to go out of their way to make it so you have to… like, they're practically competing with you going to the real theater.
• 1:08:48
  Dan Newland: So are you… are you guys… you don't have… because we've got a, you know, in Fargo, we've got a company that owns all the theaters, pretty much, but every Tuesday is $5 night, and then all the concessions are reduced as well, and every Thursday is, like, $5 for students night.
• 1:09:06
  Dan Newland: So there's 2 nights a week where anybody who's, like, a student or young folks can go to the movies for $5, and then get, like.
• 1:09:13
  Dan Newland: relatively cheaper concessions as well. So they're arguing that.
• 1:09:18
  Sean Harklerode: AMC is, for members, is cheap on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It's half price.
• 1:09:25
  Tad Eggleston: But they also charge for the number.
• 1:09:26
  Sean Harklerode: These are $7 for a movie.
• 1:09:28
  Dan Newland: The one thing, though, I think you… we'd all have to agree on is that Coppola misjudged the market.
• 1:09:37
  Mark Pracht: 100%.
• 1:09:37
  Dan Newland: It's no longer really in tune with how people are seeing movies, how willing people are to go out and experience a challenging piece of art.
• 1:09:46
  Dan Newland: How willing people are, how able people are, in some cases, to be able to go out into that, pay 10 bucks, sit in a room with a bunch of people and the like, and that that has then impacted the ability of him to get this very…
• 1:10:00
  Dan Newland: deeply personal story out to people. Because I think, really, his audience is literally one person.
• 1:10:07
  Dan Newland: Right? He made this movie for him as sort of a gift to himself, for all the work he'd done, with the idea that this is going to be sort of his gift to America and the world, as this vision of what he thinks we could become if everybody starts to understand and appreciate their arts better.
• 1:10:26
  Tad Eggleston: Honestly, I'm curious as to how this movie will be looked at 20 years from now.
• 1:10:32
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's a movie that's gonna age better than a lot. I think it's one of the, you know, one of those where, like, the number of people who like it will only increase. I don't think anybody who likes it
• 1:10:46
  Tad Eggleston: We'll stop liking it.
• 1:10:49
  Mark Pracht: Well, as long as they can see it. And that's also part of where we talk about the distribution, and not allowing it to be streamed, and that kind of thing. I would say, I totally agree. I think that he misconstrued a lot of things. I also… but I also think that it's just the market
• 1:11:09
  Mark Pracht: was… and I totally agree that I think in 20 years it's gonna have a much better reputation, but I also think that that's gonna be, like, it was…
• 1:11:19
  Mark Pracht: Not… it was a huge movie.
• 1:11:22
  Mark Pracht: that wasn't…
• 1:11:24
  Mark Pracht: preordained IP, it wasn't a superhero movie, it was something that was truly a work of an independent artist, and I think that
• 1:11:36
  Mark Pracht: in 20 years, when we're looking back at the sea of… of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the DC Universe, and all of this stuff that… that…
• 1:11:47
  Tad Eggleston: It's gonna stand out?
• 1:11:48
  Mark Pracht: It's gonna stand out as something that was personal.
• 1:11:52
  Tad Eggleston: You…
• 1:11:52
  Mark Pracht: And… and real, you know, in a very…
• 1:11:55
  Tad Eggleston: Here's another question.
• 1:11:58
  Tad Eggleston: We regularly hear… of… of…
• 1:12:02
  Tad Eggleston: So many current movies costing $300, $400 million, and this one was made for $120 million.
• 1:12:11
  Tad Eggleston: What does that say about
• 1:12:13
  Tad Eggleston: the… the bloat in… in movie budgets. I… I've long suspected that… that movie budgets aren't Actually, as… as…
• 1:12:26
  Tad Eggleston: Accurate as they could be, because so much gets contracted out.
• 1:12:30
  Tad Eggleston: that would have been done in-house before. So there's not only the cost of materials and the cost of labor, there's the profit for the other company that's often only in other company in name.
• 1:12:45
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:12:46
  Tad Eggleston: So my question is, is this actually an example of the fact that, like, when a $200 million movie gets made, the people putting up the money have already, like, paid themselves?
• 1:13:00
  Tad Eggleston: 50 or 100 million dollars?
• 1:13:04
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think that.
• 1:13:05
  Dan Newland: But I mean, he also didn't have to pay a director.
• 1:13:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:13:09
  Dan Newland: and…
• 1:13:10
  Dan Newland: I mean, he's got a big star in it, but he doesn't really have a cast full of… you know, John Voight is not getting a ton of people calling him.
• 1:13:18
  Tad Eggleston: No, I get that.
• 1:13:20
  Dan Newland: Justin Hoffman in the movie, so he probably didn't spend.
• 1:13:23
  Tad Eggleston: Probably got most of them at scale.
• 1:13:26
  Mark Pracht: And… well, and it's also a chance to work with Francis Ford Coppola. You know, I think that…
• 1:13:32
  Mark Pracht: Mega… Megadoc makes that pretty clear, that a lot of people were like, I want to work with Coppola. And, so that… that drives prices down. Also, I mean, like.
• 1:13:43
  Mark Pracht: I was fascinated watching the whole thing about the special effects team, and how he fired everybody, and, you know…
• 1:13:50
  Dan Newland: Yo.
• 1:13:51
  Mark Pracht: And I think that…
• 1:13:54
  Mark Pracht: One of the Coppola things is I'm always fascinated by his desire to do effects work in camera.
• 1:14:00
  Mark Pracht: you know, his Dracula being… the epitome of that, where they used
• 1:14:07
  Mark Pracht: Pretty much only techniques that would have been available for in, like, 1928, or whatever.
• 1:14:13
  Mark Pracht: To do all of the effects, you know, and then makeup and stuff like that, but…
• 1:14:19
  Mark Pracht: I think that, you know, there's the moment where,
• 1:14:23
  Mark Pracht: Caesar and the… the Megalon is… is rebuilding his face, or whatever, and that… that was apparently done in camera.
• 1:14:32
  Mark Pracht: Like, just projecting stuff.
• 1:14:33
  Tad Eggleston: I think he said he got 70% of it in camera, and they were gonna.
• 1:14:36
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:14:36
  Tad Eggleston: make up 30% of it with.
• 1:14:39
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:14:39
  Dan Newland: I'm surprised the big giant statues were just people painted gray that then.
• 1:14:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:14:45
  Dan Newland: or whatever.
• 1:14:47
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:47
  Dan Newland: would have entirely been CGI.
• 1:14:49
  Tad Eggleston: I felt really bad when he fired his team, though, because she was so blown away to get the job.
• 1:14:55
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:14:56
  Mark Pracht: But I also think that, you know, when you're working with somebody who's paying for everything, and they want it their way.
• 1:15:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yep, no, no.
• 1:15:03
  Mark Pracht: do it their way. And, I mean, like, and, and…
• 1:15:08
  Tad Eggleston: But it also felt like she'd never figured out what his way was.
• 1:15:12
  Mark Pracht: Well, but, you know.
• 1:15:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that was something that came out, is that he wasn't always great, you know, I mean, you'd even hear him say, just do it the way I want, and they're sitting there going, we don't know what you want.
• 1:15:24
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:15:25
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, but that also, that also, I think, speaks to the development of this project over 40 years.
• 1:15:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:15:33
  Mark Pracht: I think that he re-evaluated what it was supposed to be, like, constantly.
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:15:38
  Mark Pracht: new actors, new ideas, new, you know, and I think that… I think that
• 1:15:43
  Mark Pracht: it's very much… I think that working with Francis Coppola is like jazz, where
• 1:15:50
  Mark Pracht: you're… he's improvising, and you've gotta hear the melody he hits, and then work with it. And then, when he changes the melody again, then you gotta shift, right? Right. And I think that… I think that some of those actors, and I think, like, Adam Driver, just was like, I got it.
• 1:16:08
  Mark Pracht: Right. Alright.
• 1:16:10
  Mark Pracht: whatever happens, I'll just react to it, you know? And I think… and I think, like, Shia, where we started this, you know, was trying to make some sense out of it.
• 1:16:19
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:16:20
  Tad Eggleston: He was trying to play classical.
• 1:16:23
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, and I think that… I think that that's super interesting, and I think that… and I think that.
• 1:16:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I think…
• 1:16:30
  Mark Pracht: can…
• 1:16:31
  Tad Eggleston: Go ahead. Finish.
• 1:16:32
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I do think, I do think that… you know.
• 1:16:37
  Mark Pracht: like, let's say Spider- Brand New Day, I don't know exactly how much that costs, but I'm betting it's over $200 million, probably…
• 1:16:43
  Tad Eggleston: I thought I heard close to 3.
• 1:16:45
  Dan Newland: Easily.
• 1:16:45
  Mark Pracht: So, I mean, like, a huge part of that is gonna be that you've got these actors who've been in the other three that now want more money.
• 1:16:53
  Mark Pracht: That there's, you know, Sony has to get their cut, Disney has to get their cut, Marvel has to get their cut, everybody's gotta get their cut.
• 1:17:02
  Mark Pracht: They keep saying, you know, they keep wanting it to be bigger, and bigger, and more spectacular, and like, how much more can we do, and it's like…
• 1:17:13
  Mark Pracht: I don't know, find… find… like…
• 1:17:16
  Mark Pracht: the whole point… the one thing about it is I have not seen it yet.
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:17:20
  Mark Pracht: want to see it, Colleen wants to see it, we're gonna go see it at some point. I know Sean liked it, Dan obviously liked it, because he just gave me a thumbs up.
• 1:17:31
  Dan Newland: Yep.
• 1:17:31
  Mark Pracht: You know, when I watch that trailer, I'm also, like.
• 1:17:36
  Mark Pracht: This seems like it's almost a story that could be a little bit smaller.
• 1:17:40
  Mark Pracht: You know, like, maybe we didn't need to have The Hulk.
• 1:17:45
  Mark Pracht: tear down a building, or whatever, you know? Maybe, maybe, you know, like, it seemed like…
• 1:17:52
  Mark Pracht: You know, but everything's got.
• 1:17:53
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, I think he should've… I think it should have just been a movie with a Spider-Man Hulk fight, a Spider-Man Thing fight, and then a Spider-Man-Wolverine fight, and that's just the movie.
• 1:18:03
  Mark Pracht: So, Deadpool vs. Wolverine.
• 1:18:06
  Tad Eggleston: Except the Spider-Man wasn't in that.
• 1:18:10
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, I don't know, I think… I'm…
• 1:18:16
  Mark Pracht: I'm ready for more movies like Megalopolis. I'm ready for more things that feel like somebody Is it?
• 1:18:27
  Tad Eggleston: The only thing I'm more ready for than more movies like Megalopolis is more movies that have, like, small budgets.
• 1:18:35
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 1:18:35
  Tad Eggleston: and are like Megalopolis. Not in terms of scale, but in terms of…
• 1:18:41
  Tad Eggleston: We're doing this thing because we're gonna try it.
• 1:18:45
  Dan Newland: You know, the problem is, Matt Damon talked about that, actually, a while ago.
• 1:18:49
  Dan Newland: And he said that the movies he liked to make, which are, you know, the Goodwill Hunting kind of movies, they just…
• 1:18:55
  Dan Newland: there is no longer any appetite for those in Hollywood, because the way that the economics work now.
• 1:19:01
  Tad Eggleston: in Hollywood, and this is where I go back.
• 1:19:04
  Dan Newland: 5 or 10 million dollar movie, you've gotta then spend at least that much to advertise it.
• 1:19:09
  Tad Eggleston: But I also…
• 1:19:11
  Sean Harklerode: I also wonder how much of the.
• 1:19:12
  Tad Eggleston: The money they've already made back on the bigger budgets.
• 1:19:16
  Dan Newland: Maybe.
• 1:19:17
  Mark Pracht: What?
• 1:19:17
  Dan Newland: Why would they throw it away?
• 1:19:20
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean.
• 1:19:20
  Dan Newland: If other movies aren't gonna make their money back, then they're just… they just don't make them anymore.
• 1:19:25
  Mark Pracht: It used to be that, you know, you would sometimes make those smaller budget movies for clout, you know? We won an Oscar, we wanted, you know, and the thing is.
• 1:19:34
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 1:19:34
  Mark Pracht: But there was also… at one time, there was also a market for those things, because there was a… there were adults
• 1:19:43
  Mark Pracht: who went to the movies, right? And I think that adults have, like, even more than kids, have kind of been broken of that habit, right?
• 1:19:52
  Mark Pracht: And I think that that's really sad, and that's why, you know.
• 1:19:58
  Mark Pracht: It's… it's the summer all year round now, you know?
• 1:20:01
  Tad Eggleston: Could they be brought back into the habit if movies that they actually cared about were made.
• 1:20:07
  Dan Newland: I think the bigger problem…
• 1:20:08
  Tad Eggleston: For that matter, like, how much money is all but guaranteed in the streaming market on a movie? Like, I always was annoyed when people only looked at first
• 1:20:18
  Tad Eggleston: First.
• 1:20:19
  Tad Eggleston: weekend box office on some of those small movies, because I'm like, yeah, except the first week DVD sales are gonna be so high, they're gonna turn a profit.
• 1:20:29
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:20:30
  Dan Newland: these were out. I think that was true. That was the main thing that now they don't have.
• 1:20:34
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so… Yeah, well, that was…
• 1:20:36
  Mark Pracht: That was part of Matt Damon's whole thing, too.
• 1:20:39
  Dan Newland: Court of Demons thing, yeah, exactly.
• 1:20:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:20:42
  Dan Newland: That streaming does not provide anywhere near that sort of revenue stream.
• 1:20:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:20:46
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, and I know I can speak from direct experience that,
• 1:20:51
  Mark Pracht: you know, I still get… I get a very tiny red, you know, residual check from my Chicago Fire episode.
• 1:21:01
  Mark Pracht: every 6 months. It's never for any streaming.
• 1:21:05
  Mark Pracht: And I bet you people stream Chicago Fire on a pretty regular basis, you know, wherever it's being shown.
• 1:21:13
  Mark Pracht: But I get nothing.
• 1:21:14
  Mark Pracht: And… Like, there's no, like…
• 1:21:21
  Mark Pracht: The other thing that happened, and it was funny, I was just listening, I was just watching YouTube, and it was,
• 1:21:30
  Mark Pracht: Bruce Campbell was talking about how, you know.
• 1:21:33
  Mark Pracht: Hollywood is dead, right? Nobody's shooting anything in Los Angeles anymore.
• 1:21:39
  Mark Pracht: everybody's shipping it out to Europe, or to Canada, or… you know, and for a while, they were going to Georgia, where this movie was shot. And now, the Georgia production facilities are basically done, because Marvel picked up and left.
• 1:21:55
  Mark Pracht: And moved to England, where they could get a better tax break.
• 1:21:58
  Mark Pracht: But… And he was talking about how he's like, you know.
• 1:22:03
  Mark Pracht: I hate to be the one to say this, but…
• 1:22:06
  Mark Pracht: There was a moment there where
• 1:22:09
  Mark Pracht: The unions could have all gotten together and said, we're gonna… we're gonna not push
• 1:22:16
  Mark Pracht: The studios for a couple of years to try to reassert this industry.
• 1:22:22
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 1:22:24
  Mark Pracht: they jumped on it. Like, that… that… those… those two strikes right after we came out of the pandemic.
• 1:22:31
  Mark Pracht: I think… really hurt The industry in terms of maintaining a place in society, you know?
• 1:22:43
  Mark Pracht: I think that…
• 1:22:46
  Mark Pracht: It was a time when they should have entrenched and said, okay, we're gonna defer this for a year, let's get material out there.
• 1:22:54
  Mark Pracht: And get people to have a reason to come back to the theaters. Keep people to have a reason to shoot stuff here, to, you know, and… and it just ended up more and more combative, and…
• 1:23:07
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe, but, I mean… from what I've heard, the… the…
• 1:23:12
  Mark Pracht: No, those strikes had to happen. Those strikes had to happen, I'm just saying that they happened at the wrong damn time.
• 1:23:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. But I don't know when else they… I mean, if anything, they should have held the line harder in, like, their previous strike?
• 1:23:29
  Tad Eggleston: Possibly.
• 1:23:32
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:23:32
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, they were also dealing with tons of stuff that didn't exist.
• 1:23:36
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yes and no. I was just rewatching Studio 60.
• 1:23:40
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, One of the… the plot threads in that was… was…
• 1:23:50
  Tad Eggleston: the… the… the… Network head investing in software that would
• 1:23:58
  Tad Eggleston: Look at a script and tell you what you needed.
• 1:24:03
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so Aaron Sorkin was writing about it.
• 1:24:07
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 1:24:07
  Tad Eggleston: In the early 2000s.
• 1:24:10
  Tad Eggleston: Aww.
• 1:24:13
  Tad Eggleston: You know… I mean, I'm always amazed… But everybody's…
• 1:24:16
  Mark Pracht: Everybody turns out…
• 1:24:17
  Tad Eggleston: that there are things that some people were worried about a long time before
• 1:24:22
  Tad Eggleston: Other people really started paying hard attention to them.
• 1:24:27
  Mark Pracht: Much like Francis Ford Coppola was paying attention to how we have to be.
• 1:24:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah!
• 1:24:32
  Mark Pracht: A more artistic society.
• 1:24:35
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but also, like, if he started this 40 years ago, that means he started it under Reagan.
• 1:24:40
  Mark Pracht: Oh, I know.
• 1:24:41
  Tad Eggleston: of the writing on… I mean, this is something I love about comics, too. Like, there's no set of creators that I think is more forward-thinking than your… than… than, like…
• 1:24:51
  Tad Eggleston: comics creators. Like, the number of… the number of things that, like, are almost… well, are certainly considered too fantastic for the movies that are put in comics.
• 1:25:02
  Tad Eggleston: And then it's like, oh, wow!
• 1:25:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yup. Wait a minute!
• 1:25:07
  Dan Newland: So I have… I have a… kind of getting back to this bad boy. I have… I have a… I have a what-if question for you guys about what maybe the man should have done.
• 1:25:19
  Dan Newland: So, you know, going back to the whole Batman… Question.
• 1:25:23
  Dan Newland: If he had done this adaptation, said, I want a comic book adaptation, But for the comic book.
• 1:25:31
  Dan Newland: The only change I want you to make is to rename the lead character, Bruce Wayne, and call it, like, Batopolis. But leave everything else exactly the same. How many copies would this have sold?
• 1:25:45
  Dan Newland: And how much it would have helped Megalopolis actually get into people's minds.
• 1:25:50
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we would have to clear it with DC, but yeah.
• 1:25:53
  Dan Newland: I mean, yeah, do it through DC, and just have DC do an Elseworlds story with Coppola, where Adam's Driver is Bruce Wayne.
• 1:26:03
  Mark Pracht: I think that in relation I think…
• 1:26:09
  Tad Eggleston: Just the Joker? I mean, do you… I cast…
• 1:26:12
  Mark Pracht: Well, obviously, it's the Shia LaBeouf character.
• 1:26:14
  Dan Newland: Yeah, LeBouf is the Joker, for Christ's sakes!
• 1:26:17
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah, look, I think that… I think that…
• 1:26:21
  Mark Pracht: There's no doubt that that would have sold better.
• 1:26:24
  Mark Pracht: There's no doubt.
• 1:26:26
  Mark Pracht: You put bad on something, it's gonna sell.
• 1:26:29
  Dan Newland: It's gonna sell.
• 1:26:30
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 1:26:33
  Dan Newland: I don't know.
• 1:26:33
  Mark Pracht: I think that that would just be…
• 1:26:35
  Tad Eggleston: Really great, disgusted face.
• 1:26:37
  Dan Newland: It would be awful, it would be completely… but it's sad, because what I mean is that people will find…
• 1:26:45
  Mark Pracht: story.
• 1:26:45
  Dan Newland: If it's in.
• 1:26:47
  Tad Eggleston: I'm in… I, I actually…
• 1:26:49
  Mark Pracht: 100%.
• 1:26:50
  Dan Newland: Sometimes, if you want to take something really great and get people to buy it.
• 1:26:54
  Tad Eggleston: I, I actually…
• 1:26:55
  Dan Newland: Find a way.
• 1:26:56
  Tad Eggleston: This is where I wish we had better sales data, because I would love to see U.S. versus international sales on this, because I would be willing to bet that as long as they have a European partner, it's sold, like, significantly better in Europe than it has here.
• 1:27:14
  Mark Pracht: Well, I think.
• 1:27:14
  Tad Eggleston: Because I feel like this is…
• 1:27:15
  Mark Pracht: in Europe.
• 1:27:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, because I feel like this is way up their alley in terms of the sensibilities of what they actually seek out.
• 1:27:23
  Tad Eggleston: Which, I mean, that says whole… massive things about American culture.
• 1:27:33
  Tad Eggleston: That I don't necessarily want to do now, but we've touched on.
• 1:27:37
  Sean Harklerode: The last thing here, you know, I pledge allegiance to our homeless family.
• 1:27:42
  Tad Eggleston: I loved that.
• 1:27:43
  Sean Harklerode: And to all the species which it protects, one Earth, indivisible, with liberty, education, and justice for all.
• 1:27:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:27:52
  Sean Harklerode: you know… And, you know, juxtaposed with the birth of a baby.
• 1:27:59
  Sean Harklerode: Right. You know… And the human adventure is just beginning.
• 1:28:07
  Mark Pracht: just beginning.
• 1:28:08
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 1:28:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well… Mark and Sean deserve to have lunch before they have to go to their… rehearsals…
• 1:28:21
  Mark Pracht: What's launch?
• 1:28:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you know, it's that thing that you're supposed to do from time to time so you don't pass out from
• 1:28:28
  Tad Eggleston: From lack of calories later today. Hydration and some calories, Mark. That's all I'm asking. Water and calories. I don't care if you find good food, as long as it's not completely unhealthy and it has calories, because I know how much you're going to be running around at rehearsal.
• 1:28:46
  Tad Eggleston: I've never even seen you at rehearsal, I can just imagine.
• 1:28:50
  Tad Eggleston: That, that, like, you're, you're you dialed to 11.
• 1:28:57
  Mark Pracht: Did Sean have something to say about that? It seemed like he did.
• 1:29:02
  Tad Eggleston: Is it dialed to 12?
• 1:29:03
  Sean Harklerode: Sure. And watches everyone.
• 1:29:05
  Tad Eggleston: Does he?
• 1:29:07
  Sean Harklerode: Sits there and judges and directs.
• 1:29:10
  Tad Eggleston: That's all he does?
• 1:29:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's… that's what he does during the, the, the, the…
• 1:29:16
  Tad Eggleston: the, like, preview performances, kind of, but I've seen him during preview performances, and he's a ball of energy, writing a ton of notes, and trying to goose the crowd into laughing when they're supposed to laugh, and clapping when they're supposed to clap.
• 1:29:34
  Mark Pracht: Ha ha ha, ha!
• 1:29:35
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly!
• 1:29:36
  Mark Pracht: Huh.
• 1:29:36
  Sean Harklerode: We all know that sounds.
• 1:29:38
  Mark Pracht: What'd come.
• 1:29:39
  Sean Harklerode: Backstage.
• 1:29:42
  Mark Pracht: Well, you also know that… I think… I think that most people backstage can tell when it's… it's well-earned as well.
• 1:29:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:29:49
  Mark Pracht: But, look, I, I think, this, this was… I loved reading this book.
• 1:29:56
  Tad Eggleston: I think…
• 1:29:57
  Mark Pracht: I think that what… just to sort of wrap up my thoughts, is, like, I think, like, with Dan, I was kind of hoping for something a little more off the film.
• 1:30:10
  Mark Pracht: Because I did feel like it was a pretty straightforward adaptation.
• 1:30:14
  Mark Pracht: I… so… and I think that kind of shows in the fact that we'd spent a lot of time talking about the movie, because…
• 1:30:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:30:22
  Mark Pracht: It is.
• 1:30:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because it is the story.
• 1:30:26
  Mark Pracht: I, I mean, I…
• 1:30:27
  Tad Eggleston: camera angles are different on some of the stuff, I think.
• 1:30:32
  Mark Pracht: I just… I think that… I think that the art is really cool and really evocative. I thought it was very interesting that apparently
• 1:30:39
  Mark Pracht: Mo- that, like, they clearly didn't get the,
• 1:30:46
  Mark Pracht: Likeness rights for most of the cast.
• 1:30:49
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even think they knew all of the cast when they started drawing it.
• 1:30:54
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, like.
• 1:30:55
  Tad Eggleston: it became…
• 1:30:56
  Mark Pracht: Caesar kind of looks like Adam Driver, but, you know, whatever.
• 1:31:00
  Tad Eggleston: There were some things that were known and other things that weren't known. So, I mean, it was… that… I don't remember the details of what… what… what Chris told me, but that was deliberate, is they didn't want it…
• 1:31:12
  Tad Eggleston: to… to look… Exactly like anybody, because they were working in tandem.
• 1:31:19
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:31:20
  Tad Eggleston: and things.
• 1:31:20
  Mark Pracht: But I would say to anyone listening that
• 1:31:27
  Mark Pracht: it's well worth reading, and I think it's well worth seeing the film and, making your own mind up about it.
• 1:31:34
  Mark Pracht: And that's… I'm not saying you'll love it, because…
• 1:31:37
  Tad Eggleston: that.
• 1:31:38
  Mark Pracht: it is… it is a… it is what I would call a deeply flawed masterpiece, in my opinion. Yep. So…
• 1:31:45
  Tad Eggleston: And I would say, even if it wasn't deeply flawed, again.
• 1:31:49
  Tad Eggleston: it asks big questions. It doesn't give answers. And that's…
• 1:31:55
  Tad Eggleston: That's a harder movie to love. It requires audience participation.
• 1:32:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 1:32:03
  Tad Eggleston: Which, again, I think that's the single biggest thing that has changed in cinema in my lifetime, is we have so many fewer films
• 1:32:13
  Tad Eggleston: that… require audience participation.
• 1:32:18
  Tad Eggleston: At least out of Hollywood.
• 1:32:20
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it seems like there's a more thriving indie scene than I realized. I've been discovering it, because comics creators are actually pretty on top of it, and I keep getting recommendations from them.
• 1:32:33
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:32:33
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, like, look, think of it this way, if E.T. came out now.
• 1:32:39
  Mark Pracht: There would immediately be a sequel.
• 1:32:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:32:43
  Mark Pracht: Like, there'd just be no question about it.
• 1:32:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:32:45
  Mark Pracht: N.
• 1:32:47
  Mark Pracht: you know, the blessing of being Steven Spielberg is that you have enough clout to say, yeah, no, we're not gonna do that.
• 1:32:53
  Mark Pracht: Right. We're not gonna remake Jaws. We're not gonna, you know… and…
• 1:32:58
  Tad Eggleston: What do you mean, there's how many Jaws movies?
• 1:33:01
  Mark Pracht: Those are… those are bad sequels, and… but…
• 1:33:04
  Tad Eggleston: Dawes 3D, baby!
• 1:33:08
  Mark Pracht: But, I mean, but, you know, IP is everything now. Right.
• 1:33:12
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:33:13
  Mark Pracht: And making sure that you can mine everything out of it.
• 1:33:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and for that matter, not having to pay for original, you know, I mean, again, I know people in Hollywood, they have easier times…
• 1:33:26
  Tad Eggleston: Pitching reboots.
• 1:33:28
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, of course.
• 1:33:29
  Tad Eggleston: Then they do pitching.
• 1:33:32
  Tad Eggleston: Completely original material.
• 1:33:34
  Mark Pracht: I was just watching, Corridor Crew, you know, the VFX YouTube channel.
• 1:33:41
  Mark Pracht: And they were talking about the last… the live-action Last Airbender.
• 1:33:46
  Mark Pracht: show that's on Netflix.
• 1:33:48
  Mark Pracht: and they were showing this sequence, and they showed what it looked like in animation, and what it looked like in live action, and I was like.
• 1:33:56
  Mark Pracht: What?
• 1:33:57
  Mark Pracht: why… why would you remake this? Like, it's.
• 1:34:00
  Tad Eggleston: It's insane.
• 1:34:01
  Mark Pracht: the same thing.
• 1:34:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:34:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:34:04
  Mark Pracht: Moana!
• 1:34:05
  Mark Pracht: Why do we need a live-action Moana? I don't…
• 1:34:08
  Tad Eggleston: It's not even an old movie. You're not even… you're not even introducing a new generation to Moana. It's the same generation that liked the…
• 1:34:19
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Anyway, but yes, I do need to, start getting ready.
• 1:34:23
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, for Mark Pracht and Sean Harklerode, soon to be in Shane at the City Lit Theater in Chicago, for Dan Newland, who is contemplating launching a new podcast very soon.
• 1:34:40
  Tad Eggleston: And myself, this has been the Pulp Lotter.
• 1:34:43
  Tad Eggleston: Book Club on 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.