73: The Midsommar Monster Spectacular with John Levenstein

at Night Call podcast at gmail. Now back to your strange days and lonely nights at eight pm in a research island in the Long Island Sound and you're listening to Night Call. Hello and welcome to Night Call, a podcast for your strange days and lonely nights. I am Tess Lynch in Los Angeles, and with me I have Molly Lambert, and joining us from New York, we have Emily Yoshida and we'll be joined in the second half of the show today by writer John Levinstein to discuss

his new show, Frankenstein's Monster's Monster Frankenstein. But first an Area fifty one update. Yeah, so I can't remember when I saw this, but this was viral at some point, I want to say last Wednesday, so it's old news by now, but the parents it's night call news. It was very up our alley, and I felt like I had to address it on our like I felt like I was a spokesperson for a big company and it was like, yes, we've seen, we we know about the

viral Facebook invite is aware, We've been made awareness. I felt like I was the US government having I'm sorry, but yeah, there was Yeah. It was a Facebook invite to storm area fifty one. Yeah, yeah, started by um, started by an account called oh wait I had it um ship posting because I'm in shambles, so you know it's probably for real and um and yeah at this at this point has over one million rstps, which are joking, means like five people will actually show up for it.

Um but but the uh, the I think the full text of the the invite is just like if we Naruto run, which is a specific style of anime running where your arms are back and you run really first, that they can't they won't be able to stop us. Um. I guess the goal is to The stated goal was to free the aliens. Look, I mean, okay, all of

this is stuff that I am behind in in in theory. Um, I'm just I'm just saying, like I think I was going through the person's account who posted this the ship posting because I'm in shambles, because I was just like, what level of ship posts is this person? Like? Are they a horrible like for Channer or are they just like idiot Team? Yeah, and it seems more like idiot team having a laugh. Like I went through almost their entire history and I was like, there's nothing here that's

like crazily racist or anything like that. As I'll just it's like stilly you know, ship posts. But um, but still, I mean, I think that the person was sort of like overwhelmed by the degree which it went viral and also how many um, dead serious people. Yeah, I was the most interesting thing is that there are the people who are dead serious, the people who are not at all serious, and then the very interesting gray area between them where you just can't tell if these people are

serious or not. Because I was like, I didn't know that we were doing still doing things like this as a joke anymore, right as far as I can tell, in nineteen when people are like re forming a militia and going to the pizza place they like do it. So this also seems kind of ill advised because it's a military base and you're not going to get very far. It's not like the official statement was like please don't,

just please don't. But I've seen a lot of interesting talk around this where people are like, is this a subconscious reaction to wanting to take people out of ice concentrations? Yeah, I mean it does feel like, I mean, why don't you just start a petition to do that? Then? Well? Let yeah, I think four thousand people showed up in

l a um outside a detention center. I think. I mean, in a way, it's like nice to see something that is kind of just like a good framing on how everybody is so frustrated by, you know, just feeling this immediate need to change things and how like everything you do is still insufficient because it's like a massive projected fantasy,

right exactly. Yeah, I mean that was like the joke that I posted was like, we'll totally join in to free the aliens from Area fifty one once we've taken care of a couple of more important things right now. But I mean, I do feel like it's it's Yeah, it could be a joke about it could be a joke about, you know, that kind of powerless feeling of not being able to do anything about everybody in these ice detention facilities. Or it could be a joke on

these like crazy conspiracy things. Yeah yeah, yeah, um and and and in that, in that way, you can understand why it went viral. It just resonates. You know. Sometimes it's fun to just join a group. Uh, more fun than being by yourself, no matter what the group is. Let's talk about a little movie called Midsummer Oh my god, you guys made. We still need some are our respective coastal locations, and then we came together to talk about it. Uh, we've all been very excited to talk about this movie.

We've had some time to think about it, and I wonder if you guys have the same experience that I was very glad actually to have some time to let it breathe in my brain. Uh. When we when Molly and I came out of the l A screening, we we were both like, what does it mean? And then realize it's gonna take a long time to figure it out probably, Um, but we all really enjoyed Midsummer Obviously, if you haven't seen it, you should go see uh,

but don't go with someone you're dating. Probably not. Yeah. Um. I also want to say that another person told me about the Blue Valentine Curse, which tests are spoken about on the podcast before, that if you watch that movie with a significant other, you will break up, and that uh true true spears from the uh This podcast of Self Care podcast said he wants to talk about the plot of Blue Valentine with a girlfriend. That'll do it. They broke up. Yep. You don't have to actually sit

through the movie. You can have a discussion about what you thought about the movie, and that can make you break up. It is um. I I did a poll a while ago on Twitter and only I think it was only like seventy percent of people broke up who were surveyed after watching Blue Valentine. But I'm going to go ahead and say, fake news, a hundred percent of you will break up. I know, I mean it. I was like, what is it going on? Who is messing

with my poll? Um? If you're uh forced a loot of self reflection on the part of everybody, Yeah, about UH bad trips it did trips and bad relationships or just like stale. They don't even need to be like I think the kind of point of the movie or why why a lot of it works to me, is that the relationship doesn't need to be like operatically bad.

It could just be kind of dysfunctional and not like you know, something that people should know both parties should you get out of and just you know, cut their losses. But it doesn't need to be anything, you know. I mean, it's like kind of emotionally abusive and manipulative in some ways, but that's about it. But even still, like that's all it takes to go into this sort of heightened environment of this Midsummer festival and in Sweden and like have

every single aspect of it exposed and open forum. This prompted me to tell to us about the time when I graduated college and I went to visit my college boyfriend who was abroad. We were like technically on a break, but we were like theoretically going to get back together. When I went to visit him, um and I've never been to Europe before, and I got there and he had a new girlfriend that he hadn't told me about because he was like, she's twenty six, so she knows

that it's not serious. And I told her when my old girlfriend gets here, we're going on a trip together. Um. And then we went on a trip together. And it made me think about that a lot during this movie, but we didn't. It wasn't you know. I was mad at him, and then at a certain point I was like, but also got to enjoy this trip. Oh my god, I would not have been able to handle it as well. I remembered when this happened in college. But when Molly told me about it again, I got the chills of

how awful that is. I have a really hard time traveling anyway. So I kind of came I don't think I ever really took a trip. I never took like an extended trip with anyone I was dating, probably because I knew that I would lose. It's a litmus test, you know instantly whether or not it's gonna work. And it's just like this person had already like shown me when I showed up that they were no longer. So then I was like, we're alone on a trip together.

How weird is that? Because I don't trust you any more? But also like going to go on this trip and have to like prove my worth in some weird way. And then we went to Croatia. Instead of you know, horrible things happening, it was fine. We did go to a weird festival though, um in Austria, the weirdest place I've ever been, which this movie also made me think about. And we went to like we were in Vienna, and this waiter was like, go to the festival in the Danube.

And then it was literally like a state fair, like a Viennese state fair. So it was like people cutting up logs with chainsaws and playing Austrian pop punk and like eating fried food. Um well, well, in in Midsummer

we should summarize the plot for those who haven't seen it. Um. It is about a young woman named Danny played by Florence Pew, who is she suffers from some anxiety it seems like already, and then a horrible thing happens to her family, which we shall not spoil here that kind of center to a very dark place for a long time. And meanwhile she's dating this guy whose name I can't remember because he's just like that's Christian, that's right, yeah, but played by Jack Grayner, who um, who is not

the best boyfriend, kind of like a claude. He's in some kind of graduate school and he's an anthropology student, and so him and his buddies have planned this like wild summer trip to Sweden because one of his friends is Swedish, grew up on a colummune and they have this wild festival every summer. So all these dudes are going to go, and uh, these two Danny and Christian are still together for some reason, and she decides that she wants to come along with them, kind of to

their disappointment. So they all go to the festival. They do a lot of hallucinogens, the sun never goes down, and and she has a journey of self discovery among the flower people. It's part of the movie at the end. Um, I have a theory about this movie, Yes, stand by It's my theory the moment I saw it, and I'm gonna stand by it. Weeks later, I think it's movies about white supremacy, y'all. Okay, I'm gonna back that up with because so Molly brought that up and I was like,

he's a little fan. It's not because the first thing I thought was. This movie is about like a white blonde girl and she goes to Sweden and she's accepted. It's it's all scary white people doing scary European things. It's true. If really captures that feeling of being in Europe and being weirded out by the tradition. There's also

I think that well go ahead. Oh and I found a Business Insider article that Um talks about Ari Astor uh talking on a podcast, I believe, or in an interview, but Ruben so there's a cure her in the movie that that kind of is like a commentary on closed societies and incest Um there is this is a commune of people in Sweden and they they go to great lengths to not inbreed, except when they intentionally inbreed, to to produce an oracle basically, and there's an oracle named

Reuben Um and it says in the Business Insider they're like an aster's words. Reuben embodies the political message of the film, which is perhaps partly critiquing the global rise of xenophobia and the return of the far right in Sweden. As Astor said in an interview, if you consider Swedish history, it's a very closed society, and what does that really mean. There are things happening in Sweden right now that are echoes of things that happened in the Second World War.

There you go, there you go, Because again I do think there is part of the way that the far right pushes their ideology is to be like, we have to go back to this older, more innocent time. And you know when everybody was the beautiful girls everywhere in flower crowns and everything was great, um, and all we had to do was kill some people for the crops every once in a while, and I did get super And and also the Nazis are very into, uh, you're like this kind of esotericism. A lot of the the

Nazi love love that weird occult stuff. And turns out that the form of Swedish paganism was the same form of paganism in Germany, so there is a common history there. Um. You should take our nightcall from Let's have some inside intel. This is a night email, I believe right, it's a night email from I'm probably totally mispronouncing as Oscar. Yeah,

I'm Osgar. You might note me as Bordo Blues on Twitter, writing to you from Stockholm, Sweden, to hopefully share something of use to your episode about Midsummer as well as my general bewilderment I felt because of the experience around this film. I saw the film and it's European premier here with a bunch of producers in the Swedish actors present A few days after Midsummer's Eve, which we observe as a holiday, always landing on a Friday, making the

following Saturday, Midsummer's Day, a day off. Hundreds of thousands of people leave the major cities for their hometowns, unless you're from Stockholm like I am, to be with their extended families and maybe raise a maypole and ring, dance around it and definitely eat fermented or pickled herring with potatoes and then get very drunk on beer and schnaps. You drink up, you sing a song, you fill the glasses, you repeat, all of which can lead to messy situations.

Even the official website for Sweden points out that quote legend has it that the night before Midsummer's Day is a magical time for love. It still is in a way. During this night many a relationship is put to put to the test under the influence of alcohol, the truth will come out, which can lead both to marriage and to divorce. So he Oscar goes on to talk about, Um, a group of people like cliff diving while they were drunk and that ended very badly. Um, somebody got impaled

on a they did. Uh. People being careless and not noticing bears sitting in the middle of a desolate for forest. Road fires that people like burning out of control because they're too drunk to handle them. The disasters befalling the poor tourists in the film are at least to me, just exaggerated and more murderous than this stuff you almost always here has happened to someone you know every summer.

The wild disorientation you feel from the constant light isn't strange either, despite living with very little light for seven to eight months, then your constant sunlight during summer is still jarring, even if you've lived your all your life. Your mind doesn't really adjust to it, and you need black outlinders and sleeping mass to get through the days with two hours of twilight not dark for a few months. And that's just in Stockholm, which isn't in the North.

Florence Pugh looking exactly like someone you'd run into it a Midsummer celebration or just wandering around here in general, adds to the uneasy feeling of it all being just a little too close to home, just like a two four. Buying the Midsummer hashtag on Twitter did, which added an emoji of her whaling, which became truly strange when Swedes started tagging their Midsummer photos. I want to say, yeah,

this is really interesting. I learned about Midsummer maybe like a year ago because a friend of mine went um and it was very much like the setup for this movie. It was my friend Mike Hernando Stern went with his friend Max, who Swedish, back to Max's hometown for Midsummer and I said to him, are you sure you want to go into the forest with a bunch of like white Swedish people. You know you're a Mexican Jewish person. Are they going to sacrifice you for the crops um?

And then there was a movie about it, so well, I think that's just my personal stereotype of all pagan celebrations is that I think I'm going to be the one who gets killed. Also, you love pagan celebration. I feel like we've talked about this so many times, like yeah, well I think I mean, obviously, this movie is in many ways a remake of The wicker Man, which is about another place sort of a weird ethno state removed

from time where they still do the pagan things. So I did get really into researching uh pre Christianity, uh and found out that a lot of the stuff in Midsummer ripped from the headlines. Um. There, we didn't make up a lot of stuff, just like totally whole cloyeah.

Something called something called a bloat Apparently blo with an accent t um was a thing that you had to do every summer where they would sacrifice a few people to ensure that the crops remained, uh going good of course, um, and that being a widespread phenomenon among every culture and pre Christianity. It is really weird and interesting how everybody like refers back to that as this time of brutalism, when obviously we live in an extremely brutalist, horrible time

now that is just sanctioned. And you know, some of what they were saying was very seductive of like oh, we just acknowledge that, like you killed the old generation and that's how you get the new generation. Also, by the way, friend of Pod Colin Dicky, wrote about Midsummer for Mother Jones, and his take on it was that it was basically a commentary on people criticizing socialism, which I was like, also a very interesting read. Right, well,

so this is more where I fall with this. I don't think it's not about white supremacy, and I think that that the I mean, well, the reason that it takes place there's for like very boring industry reasons because he got an assignment from a British that's true. I think the fact that it's Sweden is part of what makes it interesting because of all those things being played

into it. And like, honestly, as somebody who reads a lot about like Germany leading up to the Nazis, like a lot of the stuff that the Nazis used, like the Nazi youth came out of stuff that Germans already did and loved. That all had to do with like scouting around outside and being in groups and living communally, and the other branch of that is like hippies, you know,

comes out of that. So obviously it's like, I don't know, Tess was just also talking about something she heard about that was like a tech attempt to update communes, but it costs so much money. Yes, it's like eight dollars a month for just a bedroom, and then you get to enjoy communal suffers. I was like, well, oh, I

was just gonna say. I mean, so, I don't think that it's not about white supremacy, and I think that that imagery is like being used very intentionally of just like the creepiness of a town or a village just full of white people, like dressed in white Like I think that that he knows what he's doing with on

the aesthetic level there. But I think I think the way that the movie hits deeper for me, and it's not not it's not in opposition to that as a theme, but I think it's like maybe a little broader is this idea of like how a community can make your

individual feels feel bigger. So that is like obviously a phenomenon that happens with the all right, that happens with these sort of how people get radicalized online, but it also happens in more mundane ways, and I think like this kind of shows it happening through a breakup and like I was just thinking about like, you know, sometimes you see somebody on Twitter or something who is having a hard time or is mad about something um and you know, because it's Twitter, you get the very brief

cliff notes version of it. But then if you do that, you can get like a chorus of people and your mentions like like grieving with you, telling you that you're right to feel upset in some cases, like drumming up your feeling of being upset, like providing an echo chamber to make your individual feeling that up until then you were feeling by yourself a big shared thing that is even more justified and can be weaponized really easily too.

And I think, and I think, yeah, I think what we're all saying is like and then that feeling of group nous, which is a good thing in some ways, can be like manipulated in two directions, and those directions and fascism and that is where it feels like everything is going right now anyway is into one of those two directions. So yeah, I think the movie, I mean,

we all really liked it. It obviously provoked a really strong reaction and all of us, which I think, well, I also, yeah, I mean, I I really liked it, and it's been interesting to see how people have responded to this also compared to how they responded to Hereditary, Ariaster's last movie. Because I really like Hereditary, but like it didn't really get under my skin, which feels weird because it's like very creepy on a very kind of

profound level and it's very upsetting. You're probably the only person who got more creeped out by this one than that one. I didn't, you know, it's not that I got more creeped out by it. Like in many ways, Mid Summer isn't really trying to be a horror film, and the way that Hereditary is it's kind of funny. It's like yeah, it's like, yeah, it's funny. It's like kind of just more an intense experience than much less so than just like like a horror genre. But that's

why comedy is how it felt. Sure, Yeah, I mean yeah it has yeah, but I think, like I think that it kind of depends on how how for me. I don't really have a huge like family, and I don't like the dynamics of a family are not dynamics that I obsess about a lot. Because it's just never been a big part of my life. But like relationships that I have with other people, like even just like the experience of traveling with people who don't want you to be there, that kind of stuff is all like

very deep for me. So like that was very I felt this one on a much deeper level. It finds like the good veins of discomfort to tap into, because I definitely, I mean, like Creditary, I think maybe it is just like it affects you more, maybe if you have a sibling when you're just like that feeling of like yeah and caring about them. But yeah, I think I think like all we would agree that, like all

the readings are valid. Well, I read something interesting that um where are Aster said that he wanted the movie to function where the first for the first viewing, you see it as kind of like a straightforward story and the hard to have like their own you know, motivations and like Danny kind of comes in and and it's

a story about her like interacting with them. But then he wanted, you know, on subsequent viewings for you to kind of see the harda as like the externalization of how Danny is feeling and how you know, they are all of these scenes where they mimic her grief and they mimic her anger, and so in a way, it's it's he said, it was like a fairy tale for Danny, where to everyone else it was like a horror story. But to her it's like a fairy tale. And I think, like all of our Asters, I mean all of our

Asters movies, and I've only seen two of them. I didn't see his um his first, which was The strange thing about the Joneses is that the name is a short but they all deal with families and dysfunction within families,

mental illness within families. UM. And I think pretty much, I think most people who have a family can understand what it means to to be to have a family member who has either you know, either their neurotypical or they have a mental illness, and how that kind of becomes this thing that's specific to your family, that's closed off and you can't really share with people outside your family. UM,

I don't you know. I feel like in the beginning this setup of Danny's family experiencing this tragedy and her needing to reach out beyond her actual nuclear family for support and being very isolated within that in a way, her traveling to a commune where the family is not necessarily biologically related, but they all share the same kind of like mythology, so so there's no family secret, there's

no family shame. It's a shared shame. But again it's like they're all creepy white people with blue eyes, and yeah, but this is something that I think everybody's experienced, regardless of if you're like a part of the area nation

or not. Right, like you can feel alien especially like like people who are gay and like don't feel included in their family find a second family outside of it, Like there are a lot of positive applications exactly exactly and wanting to find a family outside of your own family.

I think that's why for her it's a fairy tale, is because even though there are so many fucked up things happening among this this group, there, there were already so many fund up things happening in Danny's own Like the issue was that she could not share that with people, like no one understood, and now she's in a place where, Yeah, you found a quote from Ariastar also that supports my thesis about how the people of color who come on the trip are all killed off and not well yes,

so yeah, they basically I'll find it basically it was that they are not they are not chosen to be mated with. Yes, the idea of beplaicitly because it's to keep the like it's well, yeah, I mean it's it's just something that you do notice of, like, okay, well the people who are sticking out as not being white Arian people are you know, dispatched with it reminded, I

don't know, just like this the creepy atmosphere. And again maybe I'm bringing my own reading to it because of my own feelings about Germany and like you know, europe Pian paganism and you know, places that weird places in Europe. But you know, I always find all that kind of culture really creepy, and the fetishization of it by Americans especially to be really creepy. You know, all the sort

of like Scandinavian cooking. It's like, what are we really Well there's also I read a theory that was not it wasn't backed up by a lot of stuff, but it was very interesting that the student, the you know, whatever anthropology student who ends up inviting these these other friends of his to visit. It's his village, it's his family.

There's a theory that maybe he chose Danny, and that the whole tragedy that happens to Danny earlier is in fact orchestrated by this student because he's basically trying to bring her into the fold. I saw it as that he found a person who was coming out of like

an abusive, fucked up situation and prayer. Yes, but it's also it's technically she's she's like twenty five, it's her birthday, and according to the Harda Seasons of Life, which plays a really big role in the narrative of the movie, she's in her own midsummer like, she's literally in the middle of the summer season of her life. So, I mean it does seem as though she was kind of

like hand picked. Yeah, And I remember at the beginning being sort of like, oh, why did they pick such a like Jennifer Lawrence looking ask girl, uh, you know, and then I was like, oh, because it wants to be you know. Yeah. Also, I'm not a hundred percent positive on this, but I'm pretty sure like Florence Pierre is not a natural blonde like they made her blonde for this movie, and I think that's also shows how intentional it is, you know. Yeah, I mean she's really

great in the movie. She's so good. She's so good. Everybody was good, and I liked the creepy guy who brings them all in. He was really good. I thought, Yeah, he's like a really interesting character. I think, like the whole part where he like draws the picture of her and like he really is so kind to her, more so than anybody else on the trip. Yeah. So yeah, needless to say, we've all been thinking about this movie a lot. So seeing it, yeah, I mean just to

oh well, just to plug a little bit. I didn't pretty long interview with Ari Astor on Vulture that you can read. Um, I think it's in our newsletter, that our Night Call newsletter that we sent out. It was in yeah, this month's I feel like this movie really captures the feeling of being in another place, of being in somewhere that is not your home, and having to decide if you are going to feel homesick or just like give yourself over to how different it is. Yeah, Um,

Nightcall Commune coming soon, No, thank you, no way. Communal tables as far as the eye can see. Nightcall, Commune will be like a bungalow court, so everybody has their own space. That's a good idea. Can I briefly just introduce U is a palate cleanser email from a listener about the cat fox? Okay, because I must um. We got a listener email the other day. The subject was cat fox bit my brother and I'm just going to

force us to read this now, Dear night Call. I was listening to the episode where you talked about the cat fox, and as you described it, I slowly began to realize that it might be the animal that bit my brother. A few years ago, my younger brother was on a hiking trip in Corsica and late one night on the trail, he was attacked by an animal that he said looked like a giant cat or a fox. Not wanting to take the chance that it might have been rabid, he cut his trip short and found a

hospital that could examine the bite on his foot. For years, my family of made jokes about the fox that attacked him on vacation and how strange it was considered they don't normally go near humans. I called him and asked him to look up this animal. He said that the place where it was discovered is the exact part of the island where it happened. Also the fact that they're nocturnal and aggressive also fits with his story. So all the oh, they're cute, don't go looking for the cat

fox unless you want to get bit. Wow yep, thank god. Okay, what if I do want to get bit because I want to turn into a wear cat fox? I think you might just get rabies and die. So don't do that. You can might feel the same. I mean, you can just go in another kin direction. What if I get rabies? But I feel like I've become a cat fox? Yeah,

mysterious burglaries keep happening at night. Oh by the way, um, a long time ago on this podcast, I talked about on legal Reddit how the bats in an abandoned attict we're going to give everyone in the house rabies, and someone corrected us and said, like, not all bats have brabies, and we issued that correction. But I have now come completely full circle where I am going to buy a bad airbnb is what they're called. It's a bad house that you keep in your airbat. An air bat I'll

buy one. I'm actually thinking I might wait an will fall, just to be seasonally appropriate, but I will report back. Wait, go on, I'm getting a bad house for outside, so bats will eat my mosquitoes. They're backs yeahs in Griffith Park. I guess bats are so got to invite more bats to this party in l A. After we were talking on the podcast, I was talking about this jun Geto short story about bats that I've been thinking about a lot.

That's what I thought. You met an air bat and bat was going to be was like a house where you let bats feed on you know. But we'll see, you know, seasonal depression. I might have to go down that road. And if so, Yeah, what does the bad house look like, I'll show I'll show you a picture and we'll put it in the show notes. But they just come like eat food. Is like a birdhouse for baths. They live there. They like to be huddled close together. Yeah.

So that's that's where we're at with the bats now, speaking of um being goth af uh, we have a guest for the pod this weekend, John Levenstein, talking about his show Frankenstein's Monsters, Monster Frankenstein, Did I get it. Yes, yes, so that is coming up in just a second. And now joining us are very special guest John Levenstein, writer, uh and creator of the new show Frankenstein's Monster, Monster Frankenstein Almost Frankenstein's Monster's Monster Frankenstein. I love the name

of the show. Yes, um, and thanks for joining us, John, Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to see what happens here. John, Are you a big Frankenstein fan out of curiosity? Not at all, need to be. I was just wondering, No, And I'd say, it's like danger of It's one of those areas like right on the precipice of being overdone, like zombies or vampires. Um. And I was upset why. I said, oh no, drunk History

is doing a Frankenstein thing now. I I the idea first encouraged me just because I pictured David Harbor in the role. Well, yeah, so, could you explain to somebody, to an alien who's just landed on Earth and downloaded Netflix, could you explain the premise of the show of Frankenstein's

Monsters Monster Frankenstein. Correct, all right, there was an evolution, but at this point, and I'm terrible explaining it by the way, and when I released the trailer, Max Silvestri texted me to say that this is a better explanation than I had ever given him any trying to explain the show to him. I'm not I'm not that good at it. But anyway, it's as if David Harbor from Stranger Things came from an acting family and his father had made a play for television in the seventies called

Frankenstein's Monsters Monster Frankenstein. And in this play for television, and David's father played Dr Frankenstein. This is backstory who created life um it tried to kill him. He had to kill it first. Since then, he's been uh perpetrating a hoax where when the funding source shows up, he hires someone to pretend to be him, and he pretends

to be the life that he created. So it means that David is going back and forth between speaking as Dr Frankenstein and then someone enters the room and he has to switch it up and pretend to be the monster. And part of what led me to the idea, aside from David's heavy brow is um I love like in theater for television, the clunkiness of entrances and exits, yes, and so there's a lot of them here. And also David is a very accomplished actor, and like watching him

go back and forth is really entertaining. So things entertaining Aunt's own, Like, I think the script I wrote is funny, but it's also got this weird like sometimes lead in tone like Fraser without a laugh track or something like it's odd you know you just hear clump clumping on like hollow floor. Oh yeah, And like early on we

have like a thirty second entrance. I would say that a doctor makes coming down this creeky staircase and then after this long, long entrance down the staircase, there's some unnecessary blocking and then she finally speaks, and it might be my favorite thing in the show, but it's not funny, and that you would know where to where to laugh, right, Uh, Well, we are big fans at night call of uh weird Things and um of the show Frasier, yes, um, and

of Frankenstein and other monsters. So we were just wondering, like what were the other inspirations? Were there any horror movies involved in this or you just were thinking about a weird place. Okay, So the inspirations. I would say, well, yeah, there was, you know, I watched frank I rewatched Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. I would say Dr Jackline Mr. Hyde was an ration, but was more just theater, and

specifically theater for television. So things that we were watching included I. Claudius, and again, like takes place in ancient room, you would think it has nothing in common, but what has in common with what we did. We were trying to this like ambitious, high prestige, low budget television. And so when you're watching I. Claudius, some will be walking away from camera, and first of all, it's a long exit,

which I love. But then as they're moving away, you start realizing, okay, that door that they're walking to, that set is completely undressed, and they stuck a big a couple of big candle holders or pillars there or something. Just basically they did not quit furniture everywhere because they didn't have the money, but they have this big set. Actors are always positioning themselves in these plays for television to see little performances within the performance. So it's like

basically they're sitting around. Someone will enter with a report or a story or sing as a song, and the way the other actors will just position themselves to see the play with aunt play is so fun is so funny to me, you know. And so we started just attaching to these little things that were happening in every play that we watched, and the main one was that there's all these jokes about theater and talk about acting and the nature of acting in plays, and like a

lot more resides. But like you're watching I Claudius, and like someone makes an announcement the Emperor is coming, as please stand, and then the other guy says, from this happens in the foreground for like thirty seconds, I'm you have a wonderful voice. Are you an actor? This is ancient rome? And the guys like yes, but the work just isn't there anymore, isn't what it used to be?

And the other person says it never was, my friend, and then on with the scene, and there's like so many things like that place, Like so within this place supposedly about Frankenstein, there's a moment when like David's character does a two minute diversion to talk about the nature of acting and what acting is and what acting isn't and there's like a lot of things like within the

play that could be from any play. I would say, we're doing like moments where like mother is dying, but she's introduced in a crazy way where it's like generic, you don't have to know that much. We have mother upstairs who's dying. We have a little niece who does a dance in place with a gun. But like, but like the backstory, the backstory is contained within the moment, you know what I mean? Um as fans of the theater, big fans, fans, this sounds so good, Like there's something

so I feel like. I mean, I haven't seen Eye Claudius, but I feel like there there's something about watching, uh like filmed stage productions, especially when you're really young, that are just it's so dream like. There's something really hard to like it's such a weird kind of unreality. I mean, I feel like one that a lot of maybe you guys watched this for like the Mary Martin Peter Pan one,

just like Peter Pan. And I mean, now there are all these live musicals and everything on on NBC and whoever else is doing them now, which is sort of like a weird throwback to this this idea of like filming the stage, which is just I don't know, it's like an interesting thing to do on purpose. Um. And sometimes now they're including an audience, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that Jesus Christ Superstar one had an audience in it. But yeah, I love when they try to

make theater edgy. That's my favorite thing. Also we did that too. We have some intense lighting effects, just as do you have the belief pattern you we don't have the leaf pattern. But like as we were about to start shooting, um, Eva Anderson sent me the crazy Frankenstein that was done a few years ago, um in Great Britain where they were switching rolls back and forth. Who

was it? You did it? Remember the British David Hart was the guy who did slum Dog Millionaire Danny Boyle with his Frankenstein, And that had like some intense lighting effects that we borrowed and reminded me of like bullshit lighting effects in True West where it's like suddenly their brother against brother in the Old West. Yeah, they've been arguing about toasters five minutes ago, and now we're doing like a lighting effect as if they're on the prairie

or something climax of the play spoiler. We've got a couple of those of like really clunky lighting effects that take forever when suddenly we dropped the music out of the thing too, where you just have to wonder what am I watching. There's a lot of moments in the thing where if anyone made a noise, it would be odd because there is no audience. You'd have to do a little cough. You'd have to wonder who was that.

I do love that weird feeling. I feel like I watched the Bergman Magic Flute that was on PBS a lot. How's that kind of weird? Like high ambition, low budget glitter face paint on everybody? One that people loved that got sucked into yesterday that was so bad you wouldn't believe it. It's called I Think the Comedian. It's with Mickey Rooney, maybe written by Roder and it's like the it's the desperate comedy writer who's stealing material from a

dead man. But it's like an hour and half about comedy without a laughing Yes, I am the person who bought that Criterion set that was like great filmed plays of the nineteen fifties and sixties and watched them all and was like, A were not good. I was like, oh, they're very weird and boring. My question for John is

what kind of doings do you have? Because my favorite thing about televised plays is the doings, in particular the sweeping of the floor, which on this podcast, the sweeping of the floor is the thing that I cannot know when you say doings, what is that? Man? What is doing? What was the business? The fifth business? Something different that I joined from Stephen King, but not it doesn't relate

to the theater. But the fifth business is the agent of change who shows up and it's like I'm chaotic now everything is different and moving the plot a lot. So it's like sweeping the floor, like you mean within the place would be like the stage manager in our town or something. The doings is like you have a monologue, but you have to be doing something. It's either you're putting on your make up, You're sweeping the floors, You're you're putting all the drink away, like all the glasses,

you're like manning the bar. A lot of this comes from chairs up on table. We have. We do have some doings. We have um, we have one conversation between David Harbor and Cape Berlin in the lab where it takes you a few seconds to realize that she's climbing on top of him to funk him during this conversation, and they treat it surf by way. It's kind like, what is this business that's happening? And then suddenly you see it for a new angle, It's like, oh God,

what they're really going at it? Now? We have we do have we have doings with of course it's an old play. We have doings with the decanters and glasses, yes, and this case we also have test tubes. Um. We have a lot of our doings are are around the gun on the stage and we have one of our sponsors for this play is check Off Guns and Ammo, and the gun does go off in the end. Um. We have like so we have any way, So there's

a play. Would say of our twenty eight minutes show, maybe fifteen minutes of it is the play itself, but there's a few other parts too. There's a documentary aspect where David Harbor our David Harbor who were calling David Harbor the third. His father is David Harvard Jr. Is uh. Look, James was playing interviewing people. So the people he's interviewing are his father's old manager or his father's old agent and producer played by Michael Lerner and Mary Waronoff, who

were both so fantastic. They're both about eighty years old with like some memory issues, but that made everything like super realistic too, And then we shot a bunch of archival material too, so we've got like later day David Harbor Jr. In like an awkward MTV type interview in the mid eighties based on like in the eighties used to see everyone while someone like Roger Moore would come on the show and those interviews were always really odd. So we have like one of those interviews on MTV

type show. Because Alfred Molina is in Frankenstein's Monsters Monster Frankenstein. In the backstory, we have that he's the greatest actor in the world, I mean true story. He flew over from England to do the part, and he has a TV show called The Actor's Trunk, which we see clips of now. In the Actor's Trunk. He has a trunk

on stage m Aubrey Fields. This is the Actor's Trunk, and today our guest is when my favorite actors David Harvard Jr. And I've given him a frying pan and then you'll like go to the same where he's teaching the audience how to act, the audience of like acting students using the props in the trunk um. And then we had him shooting a commercial for a London USA, a Beef Wellington company, kind of like modeled after the

old Orson Wells commercial. It's all very Orson Wells just saw. Actually, my friend went to you will know who this person is ken Nordine's estate sale, and they had a Orson Wells like a thing from when Orson Wells would do basically well people do now where they'll record a video message for you. It was like Orson Wells will do your voiceover for the KTEL voiceover company. This big picture of Arson Wells. Uh God, very very amazing. That so grazy.

And I'll see one last theater joke. David Harvard Juniors catchphrase which comes up several times is and that's how I got into Juilliard and the big drama, the Big I'll give you one spoiler, because there's a lot of plot here, is that turns out he did not go to Juilliard. That's the greatest acting of all. Um. Well, we're all very much looking forward to watching the show. You can watch the show on Netflix. It will be out when this is released, because the episode we are

making comes out soon. Um. Well, we have some nightcall. We're going to take a nightcall. Yeah, I just wanted to plug down Dan Longino. Is that how you say it? Correct? Catch one, Catch a one quick, Dan lunch And I was gonna say it's directed by Dan Longeno, who is a friend of the Pond and we're big fans of and you guys work together on Cruel Show, and I think you guys are the masters of uh doing really specific TV parody stuff that's really funny and weird, and

nobody will is doing so. Yeah. Dan was one of the editors the first two years of Curl Show and then became a director's season three after Jonathan Chryso left. He directed Pen fifteen and then with this, And like Dan's hallmark is he just can't stand anything on screen

that seems fake to him. And like, as an example, we had one moment that we were going to shoot where David was in a white wig as his father like looking back on stage and uh, the kind of like everyone's looking at like it looks a little cartoony hair is messing with it. Okay, I guess it's okay now. And I looked over it Dan and it seriously looked like Dan was about to cry, and uh, actually, Dan, what's going on? And he said, just it just looks

so stupid. And so he was like physically incapable of doing something he thought was that fake. So like hair rushed in. They took off the wig. They like whitened David's hair instead. It was much better than what we were about to shoot. But like I have almost I have this internal mechanism where I was just gonna shoot it. I was just like, well, I guess the hair looks stupid. But as a director like Dan has these checks where he won't do it. Wow, it was a bridge to

a wig too far. He likes authenticity. Yeah, well, we were going to ask a question about authenticity. A night email from friend Ken Night called friend Ken, Hey, Emily, Molly and TuS. It is twelve twenty am and the unseasonably cool suburbs of Milwaukee. I found out about the podcast a few weeks ago. And I've been making my way through the backlog. I just finished an episode where doppelgangers were brought up, and it reminded me of my own story. We were watching a fire safety video in

third or fourth grade. A fireman was talking to students in a gym. The camera panned over the crowd and paused on my double I remember the kids next to me asking if that was me in the video. I was positive it wasn't, but he looked just like me. I distinctly remember feeling uneasy. The camera continued around the crowd, and that's when I saw the one difference between us. He had a wicked rat tail that went halfway down his back. I wonder what cool me is doing? Now

take care? Can John do you have a doppelganger? I you know, I'd like to say no, but a couple of times back in the day, this was really irritating to me. Um cars stopped on the street and the driver like yelled out excitedly Suits because they thought I was the guy Rick Hoffman from Suits. It's like a little pod. It's like it's not the most flattering look alike, but like, look likes aren't usually that flattering. You know totally.

When somebody tells you the person they think looks like you, you're like them really well, but it can be worse if if you if you're doppelganger is better looking, then you're like, oh no, because now I'm the person that I'm going to be the disappointment. I'm the poor man somebody exactly. I do have a doppelganger story that just happened, a great doppelganger story. I have a doppelganger who runs

an Instagram account called Valley Haunts. I follow that everybody thinks it's me because I also take I also haunt the valley, and I also take pictures of like weird l a architecture all the time that are very much in the exact same style as this person who goes around documenting all the weird, weird old architecture that still exists in the valley. Her name is Alex. We found out because I was like who are you and she was like, I'm a girl named Alex from the valley.

She the other day messaged me and was like, hey, do you have a brother named Ben? And I was like, yes, I do, and she was like, I also have a brother named what why also with the producer mad Lib. Wait what what so it's a double doppelganger. I called my brother. I was like, you know that Simpsons episode where they meet Board and Eliza, right and they solve the crown before them, Like, that's what this felt like. I was like, not only does she run a weird

Valley Instagram like he? Does she look like you? Or is her her? I haven't seen a picture of her yet, doesn't know what doppelganger this is not my? Yeah, this is my your intellectual dopple ganger. Yes, well it's just read. I guess there's only like two things for kids from the Valley to do is start a weird Instagram account or get into the underground hip hop game. Yeah, manage rappers. I feel like the guy who wrote that email, though, I don't think people really know what they look like.

They did that the camera's going around and that lands on someone who looks exactly like me. I don't know that I would know that someone looked ex about when they do that Instagram thing where people are like celebrity twins and everybody is very generous. That's terrible. Well, I mean the fact that it sounds like his classmates. Classmates are the ones who pointed it out, so that always because it's always somebody else, and the classmates went crazy.

I don't know that the classmates said a word. People love to project in their anecdotes that like everyone around them had the same reaction that they just reading over the tale. Have you, guys, ever had an exact appleganger? Have you ever seen somebody that looks so much like you freaked you out? Yes, several times. It's for a while, I was my hairstyling glasses. It was like that's all you see, your glasses and hair, you know, bangs and glasses.

So I had several and then there was apparently there's a couple who lives like about a mile from me. And frequently still people are like, oh, I just saw you walking on hill Hurst And it was like, wasn't we're talking more about like mirror pairs. Mirror pairs? Yeah, not exactly doppelgangers, I mean not yeah, not like the exact would you say Frankenstein's Monsters in any way a doppelganger? I mean because David is playing Dr Frankenstein, who sometimes

pretends to be the monster. And then in the flashback when the monster is alive. He plays the monster. It's wald Wald doppelgangers. Would you say that this is the first paraos, that he was just faking that he had done something in order to advance science because he didn't want to say the science wasn't there yet. I don't even know when this thing takes place, Like I don't know.

If I don't, I guess I'm predates Edison. She wrote it in like well, she wrote it in eighteen nineteen, and then it came out a couple of years later. I was talking about my play, like my play about Dr Frankenstein, like, I don't know if I would be surprised if a phone rang or not. Right, we like things. That's a theater verse. Yeah, it's all the times at once.

And sometimes I had a very like concrete prop guy who would ask me questions that I was answering metaphorically, and when he would say things to me like what decade is, would be like, it's not, it's no decade. It's a prestige play. I was reading about the old dark house genre and finding out that there's this play that's been remade like five thousand times. That's The Ghostbreakers.

That was the beginning of the Universal Horror series. Uh, and I like that Frankenstein, like the Frankenstein myth, you can just bring it back over and over again. The one thing legal told us we couldn't do. It's like, you can't have a green like Frankenstein's public domain. But the Universal Frankenstein is not public domain, like they created that green creature where if you make it look too much like that, they'll see you. Really, that's so weird. How but I mean, there must be like a list

of the things that make that image Dracula copyrightable. Not such is public domain, right, but it is the universal Dracula, like if you get too close to that Dracula. Yeah, but I feel like that was already I was thinking about, was already an image before Dracula. Whereas I do, I do kind of see the case to be made for the Universal Frankenstein because there was no like all the images or illustrations of Frankenstein prior to that movie look nothing like that. They look they look like a they

look kind of zombie ish. It's like a like a guy with like you know, fucked up a scorched scalp or whatever and makes some stitches on his body, but he's not green and he doesn't have that flat head and his head. How did you approach conceptalizing what you Frankenstein's Monster would look like? Oh, just that it had because David was playing his father, who had this huge ego. He thought he could do the transitions David's fictional father

from Monster to Dr Frankenstein purely through acting. So it's like Bradley Cooper Elephant. We did We did nothing because that's the greatest thing an actor can do, not put on a up and transform. The prosthetic is my soul. And the transformations were happening kind of fast, as like people would enter an exit like back and forth. That's that's part of how he was showing off in the fake play Can't Wait, Well, everybody check out Frankenstein's Monsters

Monster Frankenstein Correct. It from John Levinstein, directed by Dan Longino and starring an all star cast including David Harbor and Cape Berland. Cape Perland. Come on night call please, Oh yeah, we love you. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us, Thank you for having that's all the night

calls we have today. Thanks so much for listening, and please join us again next week and you can always leave us a question, comment, or fan theory about Midsummer Bats or Frankenstein and their Monster at two four o four six Night, or leave us a night email at night Call Podcast at gmail dot com. You are also invited to follow us on our social media on Twitter We're Nightcall Pod. On Instagram and Facebook we're Nightcall Podcast, and we would love your support on Patreon at patreon

dot com. Forward slash Nightcall. Thanks everybody, We'll see you next week