Fix You

this date is. I don't like that we're uh twelve hours no more, we're more than twelve hours since my podcast landed on Patreon and I got two fucking comments too. I don't like that shit at all. What are you busy today? Something going on? It's not tax Day? What's going on? Why is nobody talking? I don't like that shit I'm reading here. Well, let me start by saying, I don't think I don't think many of you have heard of the name of somebody called Lil Tay, right.

I mean, I know there was like some controversy a couple of years back, some young influencer and her parents and all this kind of shit. But what is this? Lil Tay is now eighteen, and she says her only fans account broke the record. And this is after she turned eighteen. Her only fans account broke the record to the point where her only fans numbers when it comes to like the first day of Going Up is equivalent to Sidney Sweeney and Sabrina Carmenteron. Lil Tay is a nothing,

little eighteen year old nothing. She got the single day subscription Crown, not only fan, she took it from Bad Barbie. Cash me outside, girl. I mean, this is insane. This goes eighteen years old, and she says her dms are flooded with celebrities and athletes looking to get a piece of her. She's eighteen, she doesn't even look eighteen. She got her first seven figure payout within three hours, not

thirty hours, three hours. This ship's gonna be starring a movie soon, this little girl, because that's all Hollywood cares about. Now she has a music career. She thinks she's gonna get to She's channeling Tellus Swift, using the Taylor Swift blueprint as a pop star, but she's not getting anywhere near the amount of traction she did with music as she does on only fans. She's a little, tiny kid,

she's eighteen. And I know there's stories about heard in the past from two to three years ago where people said her father and her mother were, you know, using her life to get money, and they're pushing her and prodding her and exploiting her. But I don't think so. I see the way this girl operates. I don't think there are many kids out there who are doing well on OnlyFans where their parents are forcing them to do it.

I don't believe that. I can't believe even kids who were born into a great life, like the Charlie Sheen daughter, money for decades, money for a generation. But yet let me get my tits blown up and go on only fans. Oh no, oh no, let me get the implants out. They hurt me, they bother me. But my mother's doing it, so I got to do it. This is the most disgusting breakdown of the American family, if you could even consider Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen an American family. But

this is the breakdown. It's disgusting. Mommy, you're doing only offense. Why can't I daddy has tiger blood and aids. Why can't I go bananas? It's just so disgusting. But look up for little Tay if you like that little eighteen year old, disgusting little sexuality. The girl can barely do anything outside of sucking on a blowpop. But if that makes you horny, oh my god, you're sick. You're sick.

She's not even I hate to even say this, she's not even an eighteen year old who has Like I remember Courtney Stodden, who blossomed in sixteen, You go, oh my god, this girl, no, Lill Tay is nothing. And yet there's some creepy motherfuckers out there who want to see everything about her so gross. By the way, as often as the case, I watched movies galore, you know, I watched all sorts of stuff on Prime and Netflix

and Hulu and Apple, you name it. I did catch a documentary on Prime over the weekend, and it's a story I already knew about. We did this on Mysteries and Scandals, and it's the story of this crazy nineteen fifty sixth movie called a Conqueror. And that movie has become infamous among people who love movies not only for its casting of John Wayne as the Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan. Also there are a number of suspicious deaths that followed the filming of this movie, which was done downwind of

a nuclear testing site. And here we are nearly seventy years later. That's why I had to watch this, this documentary, because this is the most this is the biggest Hollywood fuck up of all time. It's one thing to produce a bomb, but to produce a bomb that kills actors and everybody else on the staff, on the crew, You've never seen that before. You'll never see it since. So seventy years later and the makers of this documentary, The Conqueror Hollywood fall Out on Prime, I suggest you see it.

And it tells the story of this community of Saint George, Utah, which was what they call a down wind community from where our government was conducting nuclear power tests. And every bomb day dropped there was stronger, like I said the other day, bigger than Eiroshima, bigger than Nagasaki. And they let everybody in America, especially Utah, Nevada, think there's nothing to worry about, you know, just go about your business, you guys, know we all did it when it came

to the Cold War. We all were supposed to get under our desk and hold our head, or lay out in the hallway and keep our heads against the wall. All horseshit. There were even videos we saw of if you're riding your bike outside and you hear a horn, drop the bike, jump outside, get down beneath the picnic table, anything, even a curb, hold your head. You might survive such horseshit.

But this documentary is really good, tells the story about these bombs that were set off near where the film was shot, and at the time the Conqueror was filming in the Utah Desert just outside the town of Saint George was Saint George was one hundred and thirty seven miles downwind from this Nevada test site where the government conducted more than how many do you think, twenty thirty fifty, one hundred and twenty tests, nine hundred nuclear tests, nine

hundred some of those tests, some of those mushroom clouds went as high as forty thousand feet. The Atomic Energy Commission the AEC, for years had told the locals there was not to worry about. It's nothing to way no. And then some ranchers be again to complain about their sheep. There was a big sheep hurting crowd, and they're like, hey, my sheep were dying. Not only that they gave these mysterious blemishes and blotches and infections on their skin. No, no, no, no,

that's just a happenstance. There must be something in the earth, must be what you're feeding them now, I don't think so. They're all dying mysteriously, dozens and dozens and hundreds, and the hundreds of sheep are dying. And a bunch of ranchers who would raised these sheeps for decades, they knew, they knew what they were doing. But at one point most of their sheep were dying with these big, ugly lesions on their bodies. It didn't make any sense. They'd

never seen this before, hundreds of dead sheep at their ranch. Now, sheep were one thing. But after the movie was completely shot, people in town began to notice that a very high rate of cancer among people involved with the filming. Ninety one out of two hundred and twenty crew members developed the illness that's almost fifty percent forty six and died the director was named Dick Powell. John Wayne was the star,

Susan Hayward was the star. Agnes moorehead All three of them eventually died of cancer as well, even Pedro armand Dadis. He was a very accomplished Mexican actor and the only non white member of the film's cast. He died by suicide when his cancer became terminal and he could no longer take it. Not for nothing, there were a bunch of local Native Americans. I forget the name of the tribe, but they were used as extras for a huge crown,

a crowd in battle scenes. They didn't keep records of the people's names who worked as extras, but the cancer rates among them was sky high, and tons of them died of cancer. I mean, you watched the film, which I did over the weekend, if you have the patience, it's awful. I mean, it's just really bad. I'll take you as my wife. See that's supposed to be John Wayne acting as Ganga's Khan. I take you as my wife. See no, no, it doesn't really work. So bad absurd features,

the eyes, the slits, the high eyebra. It was so bad. Meanwhile, there was like a Shakespearean kind of dialogue. And they wrote this with Marlon Brando in mind, because he was the first one they looked after. And they then Brando finally crapped out after he saw face and what it would look like to try to look like Genghis Khan. He said, now I want nothing to do with this.

John Wayne stepped in, and you know, with him there, the tough guy from the tough guy from Hollywood making those cowboy movies and shit, maybe he could change his screenplay and make it fun. He was the duke after all. The producer is Howard Hughes. Okay, he produced The Conqueror, and he was nuts. As we know, around this time he began to He didn't hide, he wasn't disappearing, but he did want to have an affair with Susan Hayward, one of the stars he made that very well known.

Matter of fact, people think he cast her with that in mind period, which happened all the time in Hollywood. He got his way and had a fleet with her, like he did with every one of his leading ladies. But this movie began to be such a failure for how it used that it almost it probably began his descent into staying alone in a hotel room watching a

movie over and over again, his nails growing longer. People assistance making him tuna fish sandwiches by first cleaning the can of tuna fish, pouring the tuna fish out, throwing the can away, making sure the bread was clean. I mean, this guy was a fucking nut. But one thing Howard used did was he took sixty tons of the desert sand from this area and he delivered it to the RKO Pictures soundstage and Hollywood so they can film the interior scenes with the dancers and et cetera, a lot

of dance numbers. Instead of flying them out to Utah, let's keep them on the lot, throw some you know, real live sand, and let them do their dance numbers there now. According to the documentary, epidemiologists warned of the difficulty of, you know, identifying a single cause for one cancer. John Wayne himself was very skeptical of a connection between the filming and the disease striking the cast and crew. He even said, look, you know, Dick Powell and armand

Derrees and me, we're all heavy smokers. I mean, come on, you can't lay this on the dirt and on the nuclear testing we smoked two three packs a day. By the way, I heard Jason Momoa on the SmartLess podcast today saying that he was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day during Game of Thrones. I want to throw up. That's disgusting. Oh god, three packs a day. Anyhow, Susan Edward Dick Powell both died in their fifties, way too

young to develop cancer. And as this documentary begins to make clear the longer you watch it, all the people who lived in Saint George, Utah who developed cancer during the same period. A lot of young children were involved as well. And like I said, Howard used was hell bent on having Susan Hayward cast because he was wanted nothing more than to have an affair with the which

he did. But there were weeks and weeks when so many of the stars of the film, they weren't staying at motels and hotels in this little town, but people around town and Saint George gave up their homes or or at least got paid for these movie stars to rent their homes out for the next four or five

six weeks. And that's what they did. I mean, it was like crazy, like Susan Hayward and John Wayne are living on the same block, and John Wayne's son is there, and he admitted later in the documentary he saw on nights where Susan Hayward would be running in the backyard half naked, meeting her dad in the backyard by a pool, and they'd have sex. And John Wayne's son knew about this. It was a wild, crazy time. Howard Hughes eventually said he felt very guilty, he said, actually guilty as hell

about the production of this movie. And as he became increasingly reclusive, he ended up buying every single print of this film and watched it on a loop in his hotel suite in Las Vegas, where he lived out his last days of insanity. And then there were questions about John Wayne's death. People magazine brought it up to begin with, and people in Utah began to investigate, maybe there's a connection between their medical histories aid this movie. They began

to get smart. Lawyers walked in, began to have meetings and let's talk about class action. This class action that you've seen movies, you know how it goes. Senator Orrin Hatch Utah came to their defense, and back in nineteen ninety eight they passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act r ECA, now recently expired, but that was so anybody who lived in that area. A lot of these people assumed that, well, if you're doing these tests in Saint Joe, I know

it's not going to get the Salt Lake City. And people would tell these Utahns, what are you crazy? You think that the radiation material knows to stop at the border of the next city or the next county. No, it gets up in the jet stream and it goes across America and it wraps around the world. Matter of fact, there's a lot of blowback that landed in California too, Southern California. It goes everywhere. That's how stupid we were back then. But this movie is going to go down

on history as the film that kill John Wayne. But I love this whole thing about the sixty tons of dirt that was taken from the radioactive site and then he dropped it at the lot at Archao. But then John Wayne's son tells us that he and a friend went there with a Geiger copter right to check for radio acts activity. And many years later the Geiger Counter was going bananas. That dirt was still very radioactive sitting

on a Hollywood lot. Some people said that dirt was then moved to some studio in Culver City, and then finally Susan Haywood's son said that most of it was delivered to some ranch and semi valley. Who the hell knows, But what a story. All these people dying of cancer, and all these people in Utah they called the down windows, the people who never thought they'd be affected by it. Boy were they ever. So many of them in this documentary you'll see came down with all sorts of cancer.

Everybody in their family did. Makes you sick? How lied to we are? I mean just fucking lied to. You See the whole that these these bombs put in the desert in Utah, you can't. It's like looking at the Grand Canyon. These are like two hundred three hundred foot holes. And like I said yesterday, soldiers who came to watch

this were laying lying in trenches that were built. And one guy said, when the bomb went off, even though his hands were covering his eyes, he could see through his fingers, through his bones, through his friend's work boots. That he could spot the skeletal toes of his friend. That's how whatever kind of light that is from a nuclear bomb? Can you imagine that? But it, uh, it was something else, and then you match that up against something else. I saw this weekend. I've seen it many times,

but I saw Sunset Boulevard and by then away. It's August tenth is when this movie opened, and three hundred of Hollywood's most important studio execs, producers, directors, and stars crowdled into one theater to see Sunset Boulevard. And boy did it just take off? And as the end, and I hope you guys have seen it, the story of an old Hollywood star was trying to make it back, clawing away back to the big time with a young Screenrid Bilt, William Holden, and Gloria Swanson playing Norman Desmond.

It's one of the greatest, fucking it's the greatest film nor movie of all time. Sums up fame like you have no idea, and those end credits come up over the final image of who was this silent film star has been Norma Desmond crawling or slowly walking toward the cat. Fingers are curled up in this demented manner, and these people outside the paparazzi, there's photo photographers outside, and she keeps moving forward, and it's just so sad when she said,

mister the Milla, I'm ready for my close up. It's so sad. But this is what it's like. This is what it's like for so many Hollywood stars who get.

And the films they made are eternal. They still play every day, and we watched them. I mean, will you ever get bored of seeing Humphrey Bolgron and Ingrid Bergen on the tarmac of Casablanca. Of course you will. But the thing about Sunset Boulevard was it was the first film where it really showed proof that stars get old and the business begins to surpass them. And that's such a scary moment for a big star. We know it now, we've seen it happen to many of our favorite actors

and actresses. But you know, back in nineteen fifty, it didn't happen so often. There are second acts and third acts and sometimes even fourth acts in pop culture. People reinvent themselves. They have fresh personas, new mediums. Some of them age with grace or good plastic surgery. But back in nineteen fifty, it was shocking that an actress who was so great and beautiful could grow old. It was very disarming to females in the business. I mean, you

know the talking pictures in the late nineteen twenties. Once that ended and Hollywood took these women, it was like we lost a dozens of dinosaurs, people that so many moviegoers loved. They were all gone when the medium changed to talkies. Some survived, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Joe Crawford. You know, a couple of handfuls of them survived, they made a big life for themselves, but many didn't. But the point was, back then, the way Hollywood did things

is no one saw the movie stars age. And that was the town's big secret. It was a big lie, but it was also a big secret. But by the late nineteen forties there was, you know, some rumors, some rumblings. Betty Davis, may West, Jimmy Cagney, Katherine Hepburn, whose actors who sounded like nobody but themselves, they're turning into their forties. Now. Now the men were allowed to get older, Beaugart could get older, you know, men were treated like scotch. The

older the better. The women couldn't get past their horizons of aging. And the fifties would be an era where a beautiful woman like Audrey Hepburn would have to play a love interest to Humphrey Bogart who was thirty years older than her in Sabrina, or Gary Cooper who was twenty eight years older in Love in the Afternoon. That's

just the way it was. It still happens nowadays. But you got to watch these two films, the Big irony is that while Sunset Boulevard was looked up to in the movie industry as a big hit, a triumph for Glorious Wantson, but the message to audiences and the future was not great. It was the opposite. It was that movie stars will continue on even after we're done with them. And that kind of dips into what we're talking about

with Ai now, which I mentioned the other day. Just as he went from talkie, from silent films to talkies, now we're going from talkies to this AI era and it's pretty goddamn scary. I mean, you look at the like. As much as I loved Sunset Boulevard, I always will, it wasn't lost on me that when I watched Demi Moore's movie The Substance three times several months ago, it's

the same kind of movie. It's just done differently. Glorius Watson was being edged out for younger actresses to mean more, and The Substance is being edged out chemically, same movie, just different tactics. But the more they make these movies, the more they're telling you that the old has to go and the new has to come in. I'm not sure what that's going to mean. You know, I'm not sure what that's gonna mean moving forward. So many beautiful actresses I don't want to see their careers cut short

five years from now. But like I said yesterday, there were meetings at big time agencies saying, do not treat your actors and actresses your clients like they have thirty year careers. They might have five years and they're done. You got to change your business plan. And that's what everybody's doing now. I want you to watch these movies. I want you to watch the documentary about The Conqueror just see how crazy Hollywood was back then, and then do the best you can to watch Sunset Boulevard if

you haven't seen yet. It's the best film warrant movie of all time. William Holden and Glorious Wantson are insane together. And you know, I wish it made more of a splash on pop culture. I know it did to a degree, but sometimes I talk about it and people don't know what movie I'm speaking about. It gets me pissed off because it's so important. It's so important if you think about Hollywood and you think about where we're headed, what we're losing, what it's going to all amount to be.

But Norma Desmond was Glorious Swanson's last major role, and it totally embodied all the aspects of celebrity that the culture avoids until time to feed on the bones. Like we see all the time. Sunset Boulevard is about well, it's about madness. It's about getting what you want and then the madness that comes with it. It's about absolute egotism and what it takes to remain a star. And like I've said, achieving fame is one thing, keeping it

is another. And the moral of Sunset Boulevard is that fame is a drug, but it's the withdrawal that kills you,

not the drug, the withdrawals. And frankly, this show would not be complete unless I spoke about what happened five years ago today when I was told by a list her name Andrea Blatnick, that she had a puppy for me, and we agreed to meet in Death Valley, halfway between here, Shittsville and Nevada, and that's when she handed that beautiful little puppy, Tootsie to me and my son Rackell, and we drove home with it. And it's been five years, and to say that my life was not upended and

completely shaken and stirred. I mean, it's beyond comprehension. What's happened in five years changed my whole life. That little puppy, that woman who brought that puppy, and the amount of love I felt for both of them.

for a reason. Til t He was for a reason, Andrew was for a reason, Death Valley was for a reason.