Oh, folks, it's show tied.
People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater. They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection.
Booth, everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring.
Let it off.
The balance of power, the safety of America, and the fate of the free world are all in the hands of a woman named Whoopee.
You should be happy to man, I'm not gonna press charge.
This man is trying to kill me. Of course he's not gonna press charges.
She's discovered a deadly secret.
You don't know anything about this, do you?
I don't know about this.
She's fallen in with a very tough crowd.
Mister Van, what do you mean?
He's dead dead dead, And if she can stay alive.
Face, it's the face of a woman on the deeds, she just.
Might save someone.
You KB.
The k GB named Jumpin' Jack Flash twentieth Century Fox presents the star of the color purple in a dangerously funny new comedy, Whoopy Goldberg in Jumpin' Jack Flag.
Woa, get it, get It, get it.
Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host. Mike White joined me for this month is mister Kevin Laine.
I am in address, I have jellum wy here, I haven't slept all night, I'm starved and I'm armed. Don't mess with me. Hello, Mike, it's glad to be back.
Also joining us as mister Ian Brown al Bo.
Sure, Mike, what's the skinny? What's the buzz?
We are kicking off woop Brewery, a whole month of films starring Whoopy Goldberg. We are looking at a trio film she made in the wake of her triumphant performance in The Color Purple plus one more. First up, we'll be discussing Jumping Jack Flash. Directed by Pemmy Marshall and written by a whole host of people. The film has Whoopee as a computer technician named Terry Doolittle. She accidentally makes contact with a British spy and gets embroiled in
a web of mystery. We will be spoiling this film as we go along, so if you don't want anything ruin, please turn off the podcast and track down the film. We will still be here. So, Kevin, when was the first time you saw Jumpin' Jack Flash? And what did you think, sir?
The first time I saw it in totality was yesterday. Before that, I caught it on the BBC some late evening in the mid nineties, and I saw the last half of it and I thought that was good, So I need to check that out. Never got round to watching it, so I'm happy to have finally seen it and Ian about yourself.
I saw this opening weekend when I was fifteen. I saw it with my mom and my sister. My mom and I had seen The Color Purple earlier that year and loved it. I still love that movie. I think it's one of the best screen adaptations of a great novel. Though at age fourteen, I had not yet read the novel Color Purple, and we had the VHS of Whoopies one Woman Broadway show that was taped for HBO. We never had cable, but we were early VHS adapters or adopters.
I can't remember if my mom liked jumpin Jackflash. I know she thought Burglar was beneath Whoope's talents, but she might and she might have felt that way about this too. I, on the other hand, loved Jumpin Jackflash. I saw it five times in the theater and at least twenty five times on VHS. It was one of those films I barely needed to rent anymore. I'd seen it so much
I could just play it in my head. But up until two nights ago, I had not watched this film for at least thirty five years, so it was a true blast from the past to rewatch it. It's good, silly fun. Every other time you've had me on this podcast, Mike, it's been to talk about some great classic drama or film noir from long before I was born. So it's great to be on this show talking about a movie from my actual youth for the first time. And I enjoy this movie a lot.
Wow an estimated thirty times at least at.
Least I'll watch what I said, no, no, don't hold back.
I mean, this ain't The Godfather.
I think I watched this one first on cable or maybe it was a VHS rental. I did not have the tape. I didn't watch this multiple times at home, but I did remember really liking it, and then throughout the years, I will check it out every you know, ten, twelve, fifteen years or something. And I've been dreaming of doing this WHOOPI Goldberg series for a long time of all things, you know, But here we are. We're doing it because there are three movies that she made right in a
row that I think are pretty darn good. I disagree with your mother, but you.
Know, no, I like Burglar. I watched that at least eight.
Times and I have yet to see it.
Next week we'll be back with Burglar, so little preview there. I don't remember her stand up that much. I remember it being bad and poignant, at least like towards the end of the show maybe, But can you recall what her stand up was like? Ian?
Oh?
Sure?
I mean it wasn't really stand up she did, more like what Eric Magosion and John Leguizamo and those types of It was a one person show where she did
five characters. She did it in stand up clubs. And then I think, as I recall, the story is that Mike Nichols went to see the show and was incredibly moved by it and went backstage and like just like looked at her and they embraced each other, and he became a sort of a mentor for her and got the show to Broadway and then got it, you know, taped for HBO, and it's good it's not a masterpiece. I mean, I think it's one of those things where well intentioned, good liberal white people in New York like
saw a black woman doing characters and exploded. It made their head explode and they thought it was like the greatest thing ever. It's good, but it's not like a revelation. If you compare it, say to Lily Tomlin's Search for intelligent life in the Universe, that's I think a richer, more complicated, multifaceted one woman show that was on Broadway. But I still watch that would be go over. I mean, you know, again, this was the era where I just
I was living in rural Massachusetts. I did not have a car, though I did have a bike and a tractor, but you could not drive the tractor to the town where the mall and the movie theater was. So in the summertimes, I would just ride my bike to the theater and I would see the same movies over and over again, because they were at most like eight to
choose from. So if you're going every weekend and staying there all day and watching five shows like I often, did you watch those movies that you like over and over? And that was you know, this is right around that time, like eighty five to eighty seven is probably when I did that the most.
And the interesting thing for us is that we didn't really have the same exposure too. She was very much one of those American comedians who was big with you guys, but didn't translate over to us. So our introduction to her would have been the Color Purple and Trek the Next Generation and Sister Acting Ghosts and things like that. Her big big hits put her stand up, her comic relief stuff. None of that would have traveled, so our first introduction to her would have been the Spielberg film.
But it was interesting just to see her biography and see that she did a lot of firsts. First person to host the Oscars, is a black woman, first person to win a Grammy, all that kind of stuff. Was fascinating to see how successful she was well sometimes being better than the material that she was putting up to.
I mean, Color Purple was most people's introduction to her unless you saw her on Broadway or in a club somewhere. That's where all of us first saw what Pee Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey and you know, I mean, there's lots of famous people in color purple. But then there are lots of people who were non actors that Spielberg just sort of an Ann Quincy Jones, kind of instinctually cast in that way that great producers know how to do.
That sometimes kind of mystifying, you know, like how you would be sure that Oprah Winfrey is going to deliver the performance that she does based on nothing. She didn't even a talk show host. I don't think at this point it's kind of amazing. I think it's all just an eye that Spielberg has.
This was just so remarkable that she had this run of films, and that the films that we're talking about, at least these first three are very odd that they were all rewritten for Woopy Goldberg, every single one.
This is the third one Fatal Beauty.
The third one is Fatal Beauty. So Rita Rizzoli surprisingly was not supposed to be Wood Goldberg at first. I know, that's a shot. So this one, originally, from what I've read, was supposed to be a vehicle for Burt Reynolds, and then it's gender switched and it became a vehicle for Shelley Long and then it switched one more time and became a vehicle for Woopy Goldberg. And this is before they were making this movie while The Color Purple was
coming out. This was before she really had her huge push. But apparently even at this time she was having difficulties with some of the people behind the scenes. It was originally what Howard Zef was supposed to direct this, and I can't remember the producer, but they both either walked away or got fired from this, and that's how Penny
Marshall came in. And it's interesting to look at some of the actors that are in this and you can go, Okay, that's a pre Penny Marshall actor, like the boss with the bad tu pay because he's in My Girl, I believe, which Howard Zeff did. And then you see you know, John Lovett's and Phil Hartman and all these people, and you're like, oh, okay, well, and obviously Gary Marshall popping in as the police detective and you're like, okay, obviously that's a Penny Marshall thing.
There's all the spinal tap people. I mean, she's got all the people from who are either previously on Saturday Live like Jim Blushi or we're currently on Saturday Life like John Lovett's or We're about to be on Saturday Live like Phil Hartman. And then you know she she did Lavernon Shirley with Michael McKeon, so he's in there, and she was married to Rob Reiner. So's she's got the woman June Chadwick, is that her name, The woman who plays the sort of Yoko Ono character, is like
briefly in there. And then of.
Course Tony Hendra, Tony Hendra.
Yeah. Like, so you got three spinal tap people, three SNL people, and then you've got all these action guys, you know, because this is produced by Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver. You know, big action movie forty eight hours. It's a fire lethal weapon predator. I don't know any of the names of those guys, but like you recognize all these faces of all the people that sort of pop up that aren't comedians. So yeah, you can see who's coming from where in the cast of this movie.
I'm going to say something controversial though, which is that I feel like Whoopee, as brilliant as she isn't as charismatic as she is, and this whole film hinges on her charisma as a movie star to keep us watching
or keep me watching anyway. She's so entertaining, But I feel that as good as she is, she's wrong for this part, and that I can see it working the story essentially working a lot better with Shelley Long being this willowing, lovelorn, put upon bank clerk who ends up falling for a guy that she never sees.
The whoopee Gobert character just feels too.
Irascible and gregarious and confident to risk her life like this for someone that she's never met, and to fall for somebody over a computer screen.
She just feels too street wise for that.
Whereas I could imagine Shelley Long selling that a little bit more convincingly. That being said, I think it wouldn't be as entertaining with Shelley Long.
Well, have you ever seen Outrageous Fortune with Shelley Long and Bette Midler?
I have, She's a brilliant actress.
It would be like that tone.
I think, yeah, more of a twist on romantic comedy I could imagine, whereas this feels like it's taking its cues from Beverly Hills cop and saying, let's put what Pie Goldberg in a star vehicle? And have her up against all these spies and stuff, and it's very entertaining for what it is, but the character she's playing this a bank clerk who can't get a date, a false regard she never sees.
I just don't buy it with her character.
She's too colorful and too much of the class clone for to be successful for me as a storyline.
One of the things that's really interesting about movies of this period, like Beverly Hills Cop and Burglar and a lot of these movies, they are always designed to be action comedies, but the various drafts for all these different screenwriters pull them more in one direction to the other. So it only really it's because of the star that ultimately gets cast that it goes a certain way. Like if Stallone had been in Beverly Hills Cop, it would have been Cobra, which it eventually was, but you know,
instead they got Eddie Murphy and it becomes this huge movie. Obviously, Beverly Hills Cop is a much more successful version of that than Jumping Jack Flash. But I personally like this element of eighties action comedies where it really retains the action movie plot in a way that is not complicated This is not Chinatown or anything like. It's not a
plot you have to really pay much attention to. But it's not inconsequential, and it's not like ironically or grudgingly grafted on like so many action comedy movie plots today are. There are stakes in this movie, but you're never really asked to take them very seriously because she doesn't take them very seriously except when she's like backed into a corner and then she gets out of it, like, you know, using her wits or whatever, like a good eighties you know,
comedy heroin. But I do think that you're right in the sense that I can see this being a little more effective with Shelley Long. But I don't know that I would have watched it as often, Like I had such a good time with all the shtick that Willbi Goldberg does, and I think, whatever again. I read the script you sent us, Mike, but it really was like the shooting script. It wasn't any of the early drafts. So it's hard to picture how invested I would have
been with anybody else in the movie. I can't really tell.
Well.
I wonder if it helps that it was originally an action movie and then the comedy was brought to it, rather than vice versa, where it's a comic movie that they then shove the action into. I'm not sure if that makes a difference or not. But again, also the switching of from a male protagonist to a female protagonist, from a white lady to a black lady, and then
Whoopy Goldberg brings herself to this role. And I think you're kind of right as far as she's very self possessed, like when it comes to the office scenario, like she's the one I would think that everybody goes to for answers, like, isn't it. Like at the very end of the movie, she ends up getting mister Page's job correct, like he moves someplace else and she becomes the boss. And that makes total since because she knows the job better than
anybody else. She doesn't follow the rules, but she makes all of her customers feel good about themselves and has this great relationship. It's that whole hug your customer business mentality that has been shoved down my throat as a manager. So I'm like, okay, yeah, this makes a lot of sense.
She's making a personal connection with all of these people, and the whole Yankee pot roast of it all, you know, But yeah, it is very fascinating that this is a movie that is led by comedian and led by a black woman in nineteen eighty six, which I don't think had really happened before this.
What a first time female director.
Yeah, oh yeah, first time female and she definitely did not feel very comfortable with this. Thank you so much, Ian for sharing Penny Marshall's biography.
That was great.
Oh yeah, both Penny Marshall and Gary Marshall wrote autobiographies late in their lives and they did audiobook versions, and that's the only way with both those people, those siblings and their distinctive voices. It's like listening to a twelve hour podcast where they just tell amazing stories over and over. And yeah, I just like I made a little recording to because I was like, you guys don't want to read this, You want to hear her tell these stories.
They're just so fun. But yeah, this was the era of like the studio development process just being in maximum cocaine fueled overdrive, which is why you get all you know, these big producers who are used to action movies, who I think nothing of bringing on all these high powered writers. So like the first draft is by David Franzoni, who wrote Amistad and Gladiator, but this was his first produced screenplay. Then you get Nancy Myers and Charles Shier who write
a draft when Shelley Long is there. And I think that went for a long time because they still retain screen credit though under pseudonyms. But then the script you gave us, which is a shooting script, has a draft credit to davidy Desuza, who wrote forty eight Hours and Die Hard and Command and Running Man. And Richard Price, the legendary novelist of like Wanderers and Clockers, who wrote at this time like Color of Money, and he would write Sea of Love a couple of years later. Then
the creator of Bosom Buddies, Chris Thompson. He's probably brought on at the very end because he was a Laverne and Shirley writer. And in her autobiography, Penny Marshall says, there was a David Mammott draft of this movie. I mean, it's so when you look at what the actual movie.
Is, I can imagine how Foux Mooth that was.
Oh yeah, well that's what she said. She's like that it was all foxed and shit and motherfucker and all this, you know, like she like it's just listening to her rattle off her anecdotes is great.
Can I tell you?
Though?
I would say that that draft, as vulgar as it would have been, would probably have suited Whoopee's character a lot better, because, for my money, my favorite scene in the film is the scene between her and Gary Marshall where she's able to cut loose and she's being irascible and irritable and she's just swearing like a trooper to this guy.
We sent a card down there, lady, I'm calling lady.
We found nothing, nothing, nothing nothing.
We'll drag the river there.
Aunt killer is running around the fucking city.
How would you like me to wash your mouth out with a wire brush?
How'd you like it if I kick you in the nuts so hard that they get lodged in your fucking nostrils?
And that, to me is like, that's the character that they should have been. Or the alternati would have been to have flipped it and had Carol Kane is delete that would have sort of suited this. But yeah, I can feel the energy shifting in the film depending on the day that they shot, because it changes up tones soft and it goes from slapstick to suspense to sisterhood with her character with any Potts sort of pulling off this heist to get her at the consulate.
And yeah, it has a sort of.
A fly by the seat of its pants sort of tone to it where it keeps changing depending on what mood they were in that day.
Well, it sounds very much like that was the shooting way, like where she was talking about, oh yeah, whoopee was in a rotten mood and so we were shooting this scene and trying to find the frying pan and the I'm like, I don't even I remember that scene from the script, but I didn't remember it for frying pan. Yeah, the fryingpan is a weird way of getting information from one person to another.
That scene. And I found that scene in the shooting script because she says the very first like she came on the film, it was already shooting for ten days and that's when Howard Zef and the producer was Marvin Worth. You asked who Marvin Worth? And I've do this whole past year of twenty twenty four. I've been devoting myself to revisiting all the films of nineteen eighty four on their fortieth anniversaries. So like, I've been totally immersed in that.
And Marvin Worth made three real winners that year. He made Falling in Love, the Romantic movie with Robert de Niro and Meryl Streep, which is a real slog. He made unfaithfully yours, I think with Howard Zef that's the Dudley Moore remake of the Preston Surgis movie, and the infamous Rhinestone with Dolly Parton and sly Stone, which I had not.
Oh, I get it. You're being sarcastic here.
Oh yes, yeah, I'm being sorry. I'm just saying like Marvin Worth was on a fucking roll, is what I'm saying. And so, you know, for someone for him to leave a project, you know, it might must have been in trouble. But yeah, so they shut down, and they they reach out to Penny Marshall and say, like, we're already shooting. We can't really you know, go into any new pre production. So she says the first thing she shot was the footage of the Russian woman who you know, like that
comes in from Soviet television. And then the second is this scene where Woopee goes into the alleyway after she throws the frying pan out her window, and she has this interaction with a homeless person and that is not in the film, but it is in the shooting script, so it was interesting to see that.
Though the Russian woman was not in the shooting script, which was interesting. And then also there's more after she
is confronting Gary Marshall. Is a little bit more because I noticed yesterday when I was rewatching this, it was like, oh wow, that's a very abrupt cut when it goes back to her apartment after she's had that truth serum that Jim Belushi pumped into her, and there's a whole scene in there with Marty where he's talking with her and she's kind of like coming down from the truth serum type of stuff, and there's a doctor and he's like, you should put her to bed and all this stuff.
So I'm like, okay, that would have filled that in a little bit more. But the one thing I really tried to pay attention to, and I know I'm jumping all the way to the end of this movie, is she doesn't bite Professor Falkon aka John Wood aka Jeremy
Talbot's the character's name. She doesn't bite him in the dick in the script, and so I was very glad for that because that's a horrible moment in this movie and it just kind of undermines the movie a little bit for me every single time I watch it, Yeah, because it's just like.
My god, it's such a great I mean.
Yeah, but they say it's perfect because they have Benny like this is.
But going back to what you said, Mike about like how you just didn't see a black woman heading a major like movie like this, I mean, Woopy Goldberg was a total outlier when she became famous. It's a little bit like you didn't see black people on MTV unless it was Michael Jackson. He was sort of grandfathered in.
And it's the same with Whoopy Goldberg in a weird way during this period of time where she is it's not that she is like she's playing a black character, and there are jokes about being black in this movie. There's several jokes. There's that one where she's like riding through the you know, when she gets she's trapped in the phone booth and they're dragging her, and she like looks at at the guy. She's like, hey, brother man black power, like call the please help me, and he's
just like right on. You know, Like there's all these references there, but there's something very I guess unthreatening, And maybe that's not the word. I don't know what it was that just like appealed to Hollywood and America about Whoopy Goldberg. Her sense of style, both in real life
and in this movie is totally unlike anything else. Like I don't know how what her life, sexuality, how she identified at this point in time, but when you see her in the dress, she's like, oh yeah, this is like a thirty year old woman who can totally like rock this sexy dress, but would never choose to unless it was for a gag.
She looks like Milhouse and drag.
Yeah, Like she doesn't do it unless she's doing it for fun, Like she would never show up to an award show in a dress like that.
But she's pure charisma.
She's like one of those movie stars who gets boy because of their charisma. They are so watchable and likable. You can't hate what Pie Goldburg actually ever played a villain. I don't think so, but I don't think it will be. But in her wheelhouse, she's just such a likable presence.
Well, I don't know if you have the view over there in England, but like, there are plenty of maga people who hate with Goldberg because she's on a talk show where she's very opinionated.
I'll be honest. Do maga people like anything now?
No?
I don't think so now. And they don't like movies either, unless they're like mel Gibson movies. But the way she dresses is like very and shapeless. She's sort of like dressed like a cross between Flave of Flave and a Lego character, you know, Like it's like square and colorful, like bright yellows. And to me, the whole biting the dick thing is just like the perfect way for this version of this movie to end, because she did stuff
that was outrageous that you weren't expecting to see. And she's got that incredible mouth with those incredible teeth that are such a huge part of the color purple, using her face and mouth in a completely different way to evoke all kinds of emotions, and in this movie she just like opens up those choppers and bites the guy in the dick. It's like the ultimate, you know, and then he is so shocked. He just looks at and he's just like as he's getting handcuffed, he's like, I don't believe it.
It's so daft.
I have to say it thoughays well, and maybe it's just colored boy. What I know about Stephen Collins, Well, watching this film, I just kept thinking he's the villain. He's the guy who's gonna double crossed. There's something sketchy about this guy. He's got such bad, sinister energy and he's always had that and everything I've ever seen him in. So I was watching it thinking he's definitely the bad guy and he's not. He's he's like an alloy.
He is under covers. He is he is Yeah, he says CIA agent.
Yeah, but he key comes true for in the end and he's like he's a good pile to her.
Yeah.
The other thing is she's trying to get an five agent out of Russia. It should be an six agent. My favor is the domestic wing of the British police. That's a little bit of a slip up there.
I think we get confused about those numbers and letters over here on the side of the pond. I mean even in like James Bond, he's six. Well he's six at some point, but in at least four of the movies and even one of the novels he's referred to as MI I five. So I always I was like, did they change the number? But he's in the sixties and the eighties or I don't know, but.
It's the difference between the FBI and CIA.
I didn't know until reading those books. When it finally came to the Moonriker book where it was like, oh, this is a domestic thing. He shouldn't be on this, I was like, oh, I never really picked that up before that all of his cases take place around the world rather than in itself.
Yeah, but the exploding pen is totally realistic.
That's sex they never had.
That's the upgrade I have to say. As well.
I felt quite sorry for her at the end when she got the big reveal of who this guy was that she'd been courting, and.
I was wondering. I was like, is Jonathan Price really worth all the trouble?
Yeah, it should be like Pierce Brosnan or somebody. Daniel Craig. You know somebody that's like a knockout for her, and it's John Deprice Falding receding here.
And I don't know.
I like Jonathan Price a lot, but did you guys read this in Whoopee in Wikipedia? According to Wikipedia, Sam Kinnison was originally cast to play that role because he was I don't know, this may be completely apocrypal. Wikipedia says Sam Kinnison was dating Penny Marshall at the time. She offered him the role of Jack, but Whoopy Goldberg nixed the deal, causing Marshall and Kinnison to end their relationship and starting a bitter feud between Kennison and Goldberg.
That sounds like complete Wikipedia bullshit to me, But there's not a lot on this Wikipedia page, and that's like prominently there. I was sort of shocked to see that, but I've always liked Jonathan Price. I do think that, as you were saying, like if it was Shelley Long or Anti Potts, or even Carol kin Well not Carol Kane. I think if both if Carol Kine or Whoopy Goldberg are playing this part, you have to get the feeling that like it's not going to be an overwhelming James
Bond masculine presence that walks in. Reading the script was really interesting because there are so many things that are not in the final cut of this movie that are in the shooting script that really make him sound like a player and a ladies man. And there's like when she's listening to the answer machine message, there's even like a woman was like, by the way, the baby's not yours. When she's like calling to find out, like where have you?
All the messages that say where are you? And like I'm like, oh, so this jump and jack flash.
She got catfish?
Yeah, exactly. I like him. He's got a great voice. I love that we don't hear his voice until she hears his voice on the answering machine tape, and then she.
Can hear excuse yeah, I was nice.
That's like that little bit of cinema language that like just lit up the brain of this budding fifteen year old cinephile. I was just like, ooh, more of that, more of that.
I never trusted him though, because he spoken all caps, you know those a well.
The way the dialogue between the computer and her is depicted in this movie is very bizarre because there are definitely times when she's always just reading text and hearing things in her mind. His voice, but like he he knows when she's like turned around and not looking at the camera. She knows when he knows when she's not answering because she's emotional as opposed to she's just like distracted, a stepped away.
You know.
It really feels like an actual conversation, which which is a choice. I don't know how well it works, but especially since the whole payoff at the end is that he is watching her from that room as they text. It's a little strange, but I like hearing his voice. I think it's important to have a really good voice. Maybe Hugh Grant, if this had been shot like ten years later, would have been an ideal jump in Jack Flash because he's suave.
But goofy, Yeah, you want to start out with her just meeting all these schmucks and these guys that are just like beneath her, and then she gets the ultimate prize at the end, like Adonnis walks in and it's like that's the guy who owes his life to her and is like, let's go on a date. But instead it's kind of like uh, okay.
I would have thought that Gero and Crab would have been a better choice than Mark Van Meter. But again, seeing him, I'm just like, oh, he's evil, you know, like be careful, like, don't meet him near the docks.
That's a guy who killed Richard Kimball or not.
He's got the whole Devila McGregor things stewing up. They're going to be selling that drug pretty soon.
So damn Bond. His defection was phony.
I can never trust that dude, but in this one, I guess you can.
That was the first time I ever saw him though I had never seen any of his Dutch films, and Crossing Delancey hadn't come out yet, so this was my first exposure to Jerome Krebe and I thought he was like he was a memorable actor from this movie.
Oh yeah, even though he's only in here for a few seconds. What I'm seeing, Yeah, And then veto rugg Reginnis, I think it is is the guy Carl. He just shows up with the tow truck, and then he shows up later on and shoots up the office. And it's funny because he'll be in next week's movie. When we
talk about Burglar. He's got a little bit larger of a part, but he's one of those guys where I'm just like, whenever he shows up, I'm like, Okay, I don't know if he's going to be evil or if he's going to be good, because I want to say he's the guy that saves the day in Cliffhanger and throws the briefcase with the money outside of the plane, and the whole movie wouldn't exist if it wasn't for him.
It's a stacked cast. I mean, if you look at somebody that you recognize from something else. Almost at the point where it became a bit distracting, where it was like,
where are the rest of our office workers? That lovely camaraderie that she had with all of them, I wanted to see more of those, And that's why we ended up feeling like, Yeah, they are trying to plug holes here in a shifting target, and maybe that's what's happening where you've got all these great character actors coming in for a little bit and then the story just moves away from them and it feels like, no, they're more of a distraction than anything.
I don't find them a distraction I mean, I think it was one of the things I responded to the most was that feeling of camaraderie. But it is just work, Like you know. This is the thing that I think gets down to the heart of why this movie works at all, aside from Whoopie Goldberg, is that the initial premise, in the initial draft whenever that was written, is kind
of good. It's this idea that you know, like computer like computers are still relatively new, this idea of being an office drone or in the case of this film, they're just people who work at a bank literally doing stuff that within years would just be completely automated. But at this point you actually need to have a whole room full of people doing nothing but accepting the transfer of funds from one bank to another, which seems like
the dullest job you can imagine. I mean, it's data entry, and she makes it fun by like striking up these little relationships. And as you said, Mike, like she's obviously she's not a slacker, she's not a bad employee. When mister Page is dressing her down at the beginning, even
says like, you're my most productive employee. But whatever it is, you got a bad attitude or you you know, you swear at work or whatever it is, you know, and then he takes out all these transcripts about how or these printouts about how she's like using the computer time for personal chitchat with these people and that that's unprofessional. But of course, then to have an MI six agent backing into this what I imagine is very secure, but secure on a certain level that probably has nothing to
do with however stuff was encrypted for espionage. It's all like financial encryption or whatever. So he's able to kind of break in there. And that is the cool thing. And what Penny Marshall said she really responded to when she initially read the script was just the idea of a woman who's smarter than her job and bored at work. And everybody understands that. It's a very relatable thing. And her first thing that she did was like, we got to make this workplace fun, and that's why she called
in all these favors. I don't know who was cast, if Carol Caine was already cast, and I mean John Lovett's like all his character is there in the script, you know, but obviously Phil Hartman he wasn't cast in this movie his whole like don't shave with a sickle baby line, Like all these lines that are just obviously wild lines or adyrd or improper or whatever are really
really fun. I like that she kind of brings in all this color, all this comedy royalty or pre royalty to fill out what could be a sort of dull scenario in a bank.
But I think the trade off of that then is that the office is more exciting than the actual mission that she's going on.
So for an awful long time, I was like, I.
Want to be back at the office with all those guys, not with her listening to Mick Jagger lyrics and trying to decipher what the code is. It's funny because there's so much of this film which is a product of his time, and you look back at it and think she could just google it. You could just get the actual lyrics on Google and seconds do you know exactly what he's trying to send them as a coded message.
But that's what I mean in terms of them being in distraction, is that they're so entertaining that as soon as the story shifts away until Gud's coming to play.
But what is it that you want to see, like you want to see them going out to dinner and stuff, or you want to see that in an eventual adventure, like.
If you're fun, you see it's need a feast a fall for me.
What I really need is somebody like John loving exact competency.
I wish to Stephen Collins character was John Levits, but obviously Stephen Collins is going to be the villain. And I got disabused at that notion. But yeah, I just felt like spiceduff was not as fun or as entertaining as the office stuff for the most part.
Well, I agree that Stephen Collins is not a high point in this movie, like his character. I mean, as a kid, I had no idea. I did not see that twist coming because I just hadn't seen enough movies to be able to predict stuff like that, and I'd only seen them in Star Trek the motion Picture and probably didn't even make the connection that it was the same guy.
And I was again when he was on screen, and that's saying, get off screen, I want to watch corknut you.
Well, yeah, everybody felt that. I mean, that was oh.
Come on, you guys, weren't Tails of the Gold Monkey fans.
Well, that's part of the fun of Motion Star Trek the motion picture is that rivalry between them, you know, like and you can tell they're stead of one upping or you know, anyway, that's a that's another movie.
He's no William Riker.
I know that I would have liked to have seen Phil Hartman in that role. Like, I think that would have been a more you know, having Phil Hartman come down to the police station and bail her out and talking about how she has Tourette syndrome to get like that would have been a better casting, I think. But Phil Hartman was, you know, the guy who wrote with Paul Rubens. At this point, he hadn't even been on television,
you know, except for that Pee Wee Herman special. He's not even credit like if he doesn't get an on screen credit. If you look at the Wikipedia, he's only listed as by the way, this guy is also in here, not as like an actual cast member.
Yeah.
They miss Speller's name, don't.
They, Phil E.
Hartman? Yeah, and they put an extra n at the end.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The whole thing with Carol Kane, with all the dates that she was on. I was kind of hoping for more of that or the things where because at the end, Woody Goldberg says to the one woman that's not Carol Kane in the office, just admit that it's yours or something, or like she was like basically, oh yeah, Phil Hartman's character had been sleeping with her and got her pregnant and oh that was when she was on the The
Truth serum. So she's just letting it all fly. And it is funny because at one point there's a security guard, like we have one of a few scenes of what be after Hours, waiting for Jack to come on so she can talk with him and figure stuff out. And you've got a security guard who's just like, oh yeah, there's just this one woman here, Terry Doolittle, and she talks to herself all the time. And after he said that, I was like, fuck, yeah, she does. She tugs herself all the.
Fuck you need scene this show.
I mean, with her talking on the computer, I'm like, oh okay. But then like she leaves that and she's just talking to herself while she's walking down the street, especially where it's like when she's there waiting for Mark van Meter to show up, She's like, this is great.
This is great.
I mean, I'm down here one thirty in the morning on the docks. I should just pait one hundred dollars bills on my ass.
The screams victim hands, victim hand till complaints shut up.
Okay, Well, you're just talking all the time, aren't you.
That's one of the only scripted lines like that. I mean, the first five minutes of this movie are just her talking to herself through the entire opening credits, and she never stops. And yeah, that line where she's waiting for van meter is actually in the script, but it is amazing, And I do think like that's something going back to the alternative casting, Like if that had been Shelley Long, I would have shut that. I would have walked out
of the theater. I mean, I don't want to hear Shelley Long talking to herself for ninety minutes the way I do want to hear wo Pee Goldberg do that.
It would have been a very different character.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I don't think Shelley Long would have been doing that. But I think that it's one of the ways that this movie kind of cuts through the narrative to a large extent and it's obviously not all in post production, Like these are not adr lines. This is like, this is what she's doing a little bit, like turn the camera on, and she is kind of
grounding us in what's going on as she's typing. She says different things than what she's typing, like she's having a conversation with herself, but only like which is like three lines long, but she's.
Only rather than being voiceover in a while.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's not going on in her head. She's just like an eclective person. And I think that shot with the security guard is a great addition. I like it when movies do stuff like that because it reminds you that, like, yes, this is odd that this woman not only is staying late, that's not the strangest thing. He even says maybe she's trying to get a promotion or something. But he also is like, yeah, she's wandering around. She's not just sitting at her computer. She's like pacing
around talking to herself like she's a little cracked. Maybe you know, people look at her as an odd duck, which also I think helps kind of sell the idea that she can get into all these situations, which obviously you know she never would in real life, but it feels like more of a fantasy, more of an eccentric character, so that when she's like sneaking into the British Consulate or talking her way in, You're like, yeah, that would work, would be gold would would be able to sneak into
an invitation only party by pretending to be a dress queen. I mean sure that makes sense.
Yeah, with the little tape recorder that's stuck to her, I'm like, okay.
With like a little transistor speaker that like, I'm sure that that went over.
Really the same song and look in the same way she does in Cis Direct, So I thought, oh, maybe they went to her because of that.
It was like, let's get whoope, well or what.
You said, Mike was that she really looks like she does in that Moonlighting episode, And you're totally right. I mean, the wig, the dress, she looks almost it literally looks like she ran off the set that one day to do that Moonlighting episode in that costume. As soon as I read that you had noticed that, I was like, oh my god, yeah, forgot about that Moonlighting episode.
Well, yeah, because I used devil in a blue dress through the whole thing, and then she shows up in a blue dress in this and you get that comic moment of her dress getting caught in the shredder and the saber dance starts playing and everything, And I'm like, that's really the most physical type, you know, like overt physical comedy that you have in this whole movie. And I do like the whole idea of like her being
so out of place at the British Consulate. Again, Shelley Long probably could have, you know, passed, but her Whoopi Goldberg coming in to the British Consulate where every fucking person there is white except for like just a few people were.
Cousins by marriage.
Oh yeah, Shellie Long would have just waltzed in there like no problem, put on a little and she would have done great in the shredder scene too.
Not only is Whoopi Goldberg such an an outrag character, but her hair is such a statement as well. And like even at the beginning in the opening credits when she's like brushing her hair and stuff and just like going kind of crazy with it, I'm like, yeah, that's great, Like I love that not only is she a black woman, but she's a black woman with natural hair, and it's such a statement especially. I mean it's a statement now, but in nineteen eighty six, that's huge.
She's also a dark skinned black woman, which you don't get to see that much. Colorism is a thing as well that they have to contend with the African American community. When you're talking about that consulate sequenced do that whole set piece, there's some lovely little directorial flourishes that did get me where I thought, Oh, it's the director here that's making me laugh, not the performance.
Not the script or whatever.
But it's the moment where the all the equipment starts beeping and sending off all these different alarms. The security guy gets up from the Benny Hill TV show he's watching, and he walks in and he goes to bend down't to check a plug or something, and she's under the table and the way that the camera just panned down
and she just looks like a deer in headlights. That got me or like before, and I thought, that's a lovely little directorial moment of selling a joke by Marshall did really good in this.
And also selling a suspense moment. Yeah, like that is actual suspense moment because you kind of like go like when he's starting to go down and the camera bends down with him and she's like, oh my god, she's gonna get caught. Like that's what I mean by the film does have steaks.
It's like an eggorte moment, a little bit of a directorial gag, but subtle but subtle.
Well, it was nice to using John Wood and Tony Hendra as the British guys, because I mean John Wood but War Games had been out at this point and so I was more familiar with him as Professor Falcon, where he's like the kindly, grandfatherly type of person. Tony Hendra, I know, he had been around for a long time, had done like Lemmings and things at this point, and of course spinal tap, but he's great. He's got such a menace and he doesn't even need to use a crickapad in this one.
Yeah.
John Wood is also in Purple Rows of Cairo. He's one of the main characters in the movie. Within the movie of that, I think he's the guy who goes like I hope you like Yama Tini's very dry, which is like a scene that's repeated often. There, he's in Choc a Lot, the Juliet Pinoche movie, He's in the Ian McKellen Richard the Third, that sort of quasi contemporary version.
He had a lot of good eighties and early nineties movies, but yeah, Professor Falcon is probably the most iconic because it's such a late introduction to a character that you hear about from the very beginning. I watched that movie not too long ago when Dabney Coleman passed away. I had a lot of people over. I have a thirty five milimeter print of that movie, and that movie still plays, so damn well, that is a great, great little eighties
gem of a movie. Even though like the technology is totally forty plus years old, it feels very timely and interesting ways like a good movie.
Well, there's one thing about eighties comedies. It's the Hollywood eighty eighties comedies that I really like, and I wish we'd get back to them. Well, just in general, I wish we'd make more comedies.
Back to comedies.
Yeah, I missed them, but there was a grit to eighties comedies where the characters were aspirational versus where we were up until the twenty tens, where the films themselves were aspirational, where you were looking and thinking, I wish I had their life. But in this like the apartments aren't too flashy, they don't look like they've got a lot of money to spare. There are thrifty characters, and
I like that. I like that there's that texture to the films where they feel lived in and they feel like these are one of the mill working class characters who've probably gotten themselves into predictment that's beyond their capabilities. That's far more enjoyable that it works so much better for comedy, and I love that about eighties films like This had that as well, where you know, she's in a frigid apartment and she's just getting buoye working in linked to Flave.
What a perfect way to set the character up to she wakes up, she has no heat in her apartment, and she's wearing fifteen layers of clothes, and like the whole opening of the movie is her like taking these clothes off, trying to stay warm while she's like brushing her teeth and getting ready for work, and then she's got to run for the.
Bus and all that stuff while she gets involved in a Cold War espionage.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, that's the sort of everyman aspect of eighties comedies was great, and I think then you get this other layer though, of Whoopy Goldberg playing and every man character, except she's like Whoopy Goldberg. There's no other person like her on screen, any on any screen at this point. So she's like an everyman and also a complete outsider, which is an interesting man.
What it is interesting too that she doesn't have a friend, she doesn't have the sidekick in this movie, because we'll see that as we go through the rest of this month, especially with the last film with Theodore Rex where she got a fucking dinosaur as her partner in that one.
I haven't seen that one.
Oh boy, you're in for a treat. Let me tell you that.
I'm sure she hasn't seen anydo.
But she doesn't have that other person, so then her talking to herself makes a lot more sense. But she uses people or has people when she needs them. She's got Annie Potts when she needs her. She's got Stephen Collins when she needs him. But she doesn't really take anybody too much into her orbit. You know, it's very much just her alone, facing off against all of this stuff. And yeah, to your point, she seems very capable. I like too that when we see her in her apartment,
there's a lot of old movie posters around. She's got you know, tapes and all these things, but it doesn't define her and it doesn't become this thing where it's like, oh, oh, well, that sounds like the plot of Sahara and I'm gonna have to do this, this and this. It's like, no, no, She's not like the lonely woman with the spy novels who then gets thrust into a spy caper or something like that. I'm like, okay, we're going to see that, and like Romancing the Stone and those kind of things,
but where they do it very well. But then you get movies like Argyle where it's like, oh, okay, yeah, maybe this isn't the best thing to do. That's like the last real female led adventure film that I can think of offhand.
But there are still echoes of that in the film as it stands. Because that was a moment that stood out to me where she's watching Love Affair and she's just enraptured with this Love Affair on screen, and that feels like a character's longing for that kind of relationship in their life, and that to me feels like it was probably an echo of the Nancy mos Shelley Long draft and.
The Casablanca poster on the wall too. I feel like that's obviously from Nancy Myers and Childs Shire, Like, you know, it's almost feels like a Nora Efron set up in that situation where it's like, yeah, this is a woman who lives alone and she watches old movies and eats
ice cream in bed. And in the script, it's interesting that the Carol Kine character and her have much more of a rival, which you can picture Shelley Long, you know, like Carol Kine is much more of like a slutty character in the script and not a cute pixie like I mean, it's the same dialogue, but when Stephen Collins is over at her house after the whole incident with the Gary Marshall cop, that character notices that Stephen Collins was in her apartment, it starts to get jealous, and
there's even a line where she's like, I'm going to make a play for him, unless I'm stepping on your territory and Terry's like, what are you talking about? He's married. Like they still have the joke too, where she's like, you know, welcome to our little family. Oh, I see
you've got a little family. Well, shit, welcome anyway, you know, like that's in the script, but then she picks it up again later on where and like, so I do feel like those characters, even though there aren't so many of them, and the artists developed the actual like John Lovet's character and Carol Kane character are maybe slightly larger presence in the screenplay as it were, because if it's Shelley Long, you kind of get the feeling that she
really is one of these people, whereas Whoopy Goldberg does feel like some bit of an outsider, you know, like she's not part of any of these worlds to a certain to a huge extent, but she's also not really a woman who sits alone watching romantic old movies on TV, except that she's got nothing else to do. You feel like it's more like insomnia with Whoopy Goldberg than it is some kind of longing.
I wonder what was the twoth portion to David Mammadraft.
The Giant Toothbrush that she used it.
The trailer starts with that, like you know, like that's like the first image you see in the trailers are opening the door with a giant toothbrush and going, Hey.
To your point, what you're saying about her being alone character, it's sort of to me when she mentioned her motor and I thought, oh, she actually has a motor. I wonder what her mother is like. And you don't really see family members in will Bigberg films. She's always a force of nature, just this individualistic character who draws all the focus. But yeah, I found that interesting because I thought to myself, I wonder what her family life is like.
In Ghost, her mother is dead, Like there's the whole backstory of her mother really had the gift to talk to go. Yeah, and she's got her sisters, but like she's kind of living in her mother's shadow because she's a charlatan and we assume her mother really was a psychic and then all of a sudden, she's got this
psychic power for the first time. So there's like, yeah, but I but in general, you're right, and certainly like in Burglar and Fatal Beauty, like she doesn't have family, like she does feel outside of the sort of realm of normalcy.
It's good to see that as well, though, to have that version of a character.
I'm curious about the editing because I believe in that Penny Marshall book she talks about bringing in two editors to help her with the final cut, because it's Mark Goldblad is credited.
He left after the first cut, which she wasn't happy with, and she was big friends with James Brooks, and she brought his editor, Richard Marx in and another guy whose name I didn't recognize, but Richard marx you know cut terms of endearment and broadcast news and a lot of romantic comedies, and they definitely do you know all those scenes we were talking about that are in the script that are like plot scenes, You can sort of feel how like those scenes must have melted away, the scene
in the alleyway with the frying pan, like these these things that are that might have sold the espionage story better in theory but not in practice, and probably would have maybe not in practice even with a Shelley Long or another actor in there. You get the feeling that it's trying to bring out more heart.
I think, all right, guys, Let's go ahead and take a break, and we'll be back with an interview with the original screenwriter of Jump and Jack Flash, David H. Franzoni. Right after these brief messages.
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Can you tell me about some of your adventures and how you got into screenwriting.
Actually, I drove out of graduate school that was a geology major. We're have emphasis and vertebrate pialeontology. Just so we get this strip. I go stroll. I just was you know, the sixties had ended, in the seventies were coming on, and those two periods of time were as far as I'm concerned. Yes, so your head was very free. And a friend of mine said, hey, let's go around with all the motorcycles. That's done, you know, I said sure.
So we sold everything and there were three bikes and we went to West Berlin picked up the bikes and they were to North America smoke cash and not what East, and I hitched up with the betrayal. In fact, I'm working on a product right now about this. And you know, I just went all the way to Australia and it
was the best thing that ever happened my life. You know, the music scene was unexpected, like everything there, all our music we you know, the the evolvement of music in the West had become a revolution in the East, and.
You know the end of the Hippie Trail, and the end of that movement, the end of the spiritual travels came when they executed Penron, who was this really cute little rock and roll singer in Cambodia, and they started showing their clubs down and arresting bands and and that that you can't go back.
You can't go back. The Hippie Trails. One of the most dangerous places on earth right now. But it was fantastic while it was alive, and it was very much alive in the sixties and seventies. And I was there in the seventies, and you know that's why I came. You may know, I can't put the idea for gladiare H. I was living in Baghdad.
When did you decide? You know what, I'm good with the pantology. I think I'm going to go work on some writing.
Being dishonest with myself all my life and in writing all my life. And I've read Ink she Wells the time Machine. When I was a little little kid, and the whole idea that you could take a pen and create a worlds went to blew my mind. It never really left me. It was revived. I grew up in a small town in Vermont, and what you had at the movies were Roger Cordin or you know what's the names, oh,
John Wayne movies Ford. That was the choice. I mean, I prefer to Rodne Corman being houst with you, because he was much more like you know. But I got to college and I just still to remember the night that my roommates said, Hey, we're going to go see a stupid little movie called Lostrata. And I had never heard of it, you know, being a potoun from Vermont, and but that was changed my life. I said, Jesus Christ, you can pray worlds, and not just worlds, but you
can control people, worlds everything. This is like, you know, to do a movie like Lestrada and have it work. I mean, come on, you know that that's amazing.
So that's when did you decide, Hey, I'm gonna start writing screenplays or were those on the trip? On the trip so did you have to pick up, like, you know, the books and figure out the screenplay format or you just thought then you just we're in the stars.
That seens somebody, you know, Gladiator, you know, Landfills if you will, and so much of the graffiti and the sculptures, and you know, I was in Italy and Anatolia by the time I got the bag dabb Actually I was on the Yeah, I was on bank that a girl gave me and we traded. I traded a book on the Irish Revolution, which I wish I still had with the book called Those About the Guy, which is now
you know, a TV series and blah blah blah. And that's It's not that Gladiator was based on those about to Die, but what Those about the Die did was created a direct wire between them and us, and so it wasn't me studying them, it was me being them. And that's when I thought, hey, I got to write a movie about a bladdier. So if I if I ever become a writer, I ever become a screenwriter, we's to Varno Gladiator and it happen'ed.
So it was glad to gto your first screenplay.
You know, the first one to sell was Jumping Jack Flash, but I had written a couple before that, Leaster maybe three. I wrote one on mercenaries in the Belgian Congo. We'll get the Jumping Unit Flash, but you know that that was that I'll be the first one that got made. It's my first when I wrote them.
Where did the idea for Tempa Jack Flash come from? And what was it originally?
Well, it was not a comedy. I mean, it would have goodheaded moments, but it wasn't a comedy. This stury the okay. I got the idea from an article on the walls figure about transferring funds to banks at night. And this is when you still had to have somebody eat it, push a button yes, no, left right, whether they couldn't just automate everything, and so there were there's sort of these people who did that, and Terry the
girl and jem j Flash was was that girl. And I thought, well, what happens if something comes in on your computer that you're totally not expecting, and you know, changes your life and nobody believes you. They think you're insane, and maybe you think you're insane. And so that's where
that came from. So with my first Saddle to the lad Company, every buddon had a problem with it in that it was a love story, but it never met the guy in the original, and you didn't meet the guy until the very end, I think in the current when they did the same one that exists. I mean, I must have met with every big director and I had no idea that it was making the impression that
was made. Everybody wanted to find a way to make it, except they didn't want to do it the way I thought that should be done, because who the fucking mind? So I kept saying, I remember, I'm meeting with one director and they keep asking you. It's like, you know, well, what is it? You know, it's like subtext? Is this Gone with the Wind? Is this space odyssey? You know? Is this whatever?
You know?
And then funny, I picked this script up and I said, this is what it is, and I just banged it down on the table. I was like, you know, guys, that's what you gotta make. You want to make it otherwise do something else. But I was lollig wrong. So you know, they you know, they look I don't. I don't hate what they do with it. I thought it was sort of fun. And the rock video with Keith
Richard's and Aretha Frankl was to die for. So what they do was they sort of covered up the fact that they couldn't find a way to bring the lovers together or the lovers could, you know, with the jokes and stupid ship and that that's what they usually do that you know, it's like a cat bearing its ship, right, they just you know, keep moving stuff around to you
dune veldous anymore. But what I what I I was sort of sad was that, I know, aunt of trouble of creating this profile of Jemmy jack Flash, who was you know, a young kid because I was a kid in the sixties, so I meant him a kid in the sixties. He was a radio operator in the Congolese Wars, and you know, I thought i'd, you know, i'd bring up stuff that probably not a lot of people knew much about. Let's talk about it, because the Congolese Wars were you didn't want to be on certain sides. It was,
you know, a fucking mess. But that's okay. I wanted it to be a fucking mess. And his predicament was the result of his life being a fucking mess. And and the only person he can talk to was this girl working the midnight shift of the bank. And so the idea is is, you know, can she saved him not? Do they fall in love and get married with the problems, Well, none of they got to fall in love and if they do, but can she save him? Is she being used? Is she going nuts? You know? Well, you know those
are the questions. It had to be a girl because I was sick of hearing seeing movies about men heroes and women are much more clever and you know, more strong anyway, So I wanted to see how she would grapple with this. And I thought that obviously everybody liked the draft. I did because everybody wanted to do it, but nobody wanted to do it.
So were you just kind of shopping it all around?
And no, none at all? You know, I didn't have an agent. I mean I I'd written a specscript that was a billy action piece that brought me with Cea seeing it was just starting up. They were the action piece, and went, yes, so we need so they signed me. But I was just finishing Jumping Jack Flash and so one person got it to a lad company that was it,
and they bought it and shopped it anywhere. I mean Sissy's basic Greta and hired me to write a project for her, WHICHOK, a meeting with Sissy, I came out and this little al form brold in a you know, just a fun little car that I rebuilt the engine myself in the back there and I had flat hire so I opened the trump and the spear was flat. I heard of the meeting was good. The next week I had six figures in the back, so it worked.
You went down the hippie trayal. So, obviously you can be in uncomfortable situations, but it feels like Hollywood is such a different situation.
Okay. Vermont was the most conservative state naming that never voted for a democratic pression until What's gold Water came on and they couldn't do that. Vermont is obviously legendarily now very liberal socialists. They support the YPJ and Syria. It's like, you know, so for me when I came out here, I remember I woke up in this apartment that somebody had set me up with it. I drove there in the night and I woke up in the morning and it was like filthy air and palm trees.
I'm fucking still in Bagdad, like nothing has changed except they speak my language. So my feeling on being out here was a bit of contempt because there were so many people lying about everything they were doing and not living in the hours you know, getting for eleven and you know that kind of stuff. So I didn't really I didn't really knix to the town. I felt like I was still on the at the trail.
So after the Lad Company buys it, they seemed to still have problems with it. Do they say, Okay, well thanks Dave, we'll get back to you eventually, or we're just going to hire another writer or how did that go?
They brought her director in, Michael at Ted and you know, we had the same problem, which was trying to bend it into somebody else's shape instead of just going, hey, you know what this is different, let's just fucking shut up and shoot it. So what he did was he fired me and hired a female buyer, I think a female and figure it out because the lead character, she totally destroyed it and it probably wasn't her fault. I
can't remember her name. This is the joke. The girl who showed her to the Lad Company was working at Fox at the time. She'd shurek as Sherry Lanson and Sherry pooh poo. And then with the Lad Company they bought it. Then Fox bought it back from the Lad Company. It made it. I mean what I could assumed you the middleman, you know, after.
They brought in this new writer, where you're just completely out of it.
Yeah, I mean, I'm like glad that it was a good guy and he kept me appraised of what was going on. He sent me drafts and stuff, and I like Gareth Wigan who was the lad Company and Laddie, I mean they were it was. It was a family sort of thing over there, so nobody totally cut me out.
So the next time you encounter it is that at the premiere.
I mean London, working with Bob Swain. I wrote him, but Bob I just wanted to say czar for lav Alones. He's in town in Hollywood, you know, basking by some swimming pool, and I go to see him and we he likes the script and working on so to develop, but he wants me to be in Paris, and which is okay whatever. So I go over to Paris for quite a long time, and in the middle of that quite a long time, he starts to make half Moon
Street the Sigournia weaver Michael Caine. So shove our butts to London and and while I'm in London, I got a call from my agent saying they were casting will be go over And I said, well she's great, that's that's this is now a comedy and yes, of course, and I said, okay, well, I said she's great. I said. The only thing is, you know, like this guy is supposed to be jumping jack fly, I supposed to be
hiding in Albania. I think, you know, some black guys is going to stand out pretty much in the Albania landscape. And her her time was what was oh real quick staff they fixed everything else. So that's why I knew I would go to the premiere and see what were your thoughts. Well, then I was a big premiere, a lot of fun. You know. It was you know, it wasn't gonna hurt me, but you know, look like you can't be rush. She had to, you know, to move on.
What was the project you were working on with Bob Swain?
I was called La Gold I think that was the working title. It was about the heist piece. It was, you know, knocking out a bank or something. It did change a lot, but Bob them Bobo is he couldn't. He didn't want me writing by myself and he didn't have time to write. So I called the executive student and said that maybe I should go home because we were spending a lot of money over here. Ya. No, no, no, let's go for us. So I'm stuck in Paris. And I loved it. I mean I loved Paris. I really
really got into Paris. And the fact that I'm doing it probably now a script that I wrote about the years on Rooney the Suvi poet and a Mulloch the French rapper wants to direct it a finance and you know, they just got to cast it and again, going and then I'll be back is great. It was running with a French crowd because Bomb was so busy doing what he was doing. And I learned so much about the
makeup of the Parisian character. They had that one one phrase I remember not called the crushed people and the quant sea people or something. They're crushed people. They were the ones who always wore suits and the girls always wore like school suits and they but they were like they crushed in their society and they they well, you know, I had ninety of these and anyways, so that that was a fantastic experience.
How did Citizen Cone come to you?
Okay, we're probabuct on Diligent and then John Millius was my my overlord if you will, which was a lot of fun and I love Mollis and okay, what it was was so this was it there. So there were there were problems with the script and the writers are about to go on story. So I told the studio I said, look, I'll go through it and clean it up, but you gotta pay me for a polish over his backdate that jacker whatever, and I mean we got it
in the fluid stride. So what I did was I rewrote the entire thing talk a bottle for almost nothing. Now it blew them awa when I went from a script was very problematical to one that was ready to go. So THEO I wanted to do it with then ADC or CBS. He said it was doing a dilient thing or something, so I said no. So then I saw they had gotten the rights to Citizen Cone. I said,
we would like to do Citizen Cone. They said we want Fred Pearson to do it, and I said, okay, well whatever, and then they followed me and said, Frank's too expensive. What do you do like? I said, yes, I earned the right with HBO, you know, as I you know, and anyway, so it was I alerted a lot from that experience of HBO too.
So did I ReadWrite that you wrote the Hannibal movie that's been trying to get made for a long time.
Right, well, I wrote the one that's being made is not the one I wrote, all right, I wrote one for a Vin Diesel. It's a brilliant story. Denzel. I was too old. He should be playing Amokar the father and he's African and the Hannibal was Phoenician. You know, however, a Vin Diesel racially was actually sort of perfect, you know, kind of a nominals. You know, he's like, he's dark, but he's not exactly African. He's not exactly he was.
He would be like, okay, so if the Phoenicians had moved to North Africa for a couple of centuries, they'd look like Vin. So we went through a lot of them. I'm not saying actually the equal to it. We would spend a lot of time trying to sort out what the army would look like, whether we have sub Sidharan Africans, and yes we we we did, and we should have because you know, Ethiopia was an area presently. When you when you watch a movie on ancient Greece, you never
seen what he's black. But there were England boys. They were called the Ethiopians because they were and it's like so as but you know they still a'll do it. You know, it's like, hey, how many blacks did you see? And Glad here too? Yeah? Who was? I mean the Briddles issue was we were every great director in town. Here was like Joe and Jack flash for a due and all calling me and going in a world this
is great. Ron Howard, who I knew from years ago anyway, and Michael Man and you know, we just call it because they wanted to get involved with it was a great just like you're saying, it was a great idea. And then I see, you know, I see the agents who we no longer is a Wither of course, because the guys whatever talked him into doing Riddick instead of Hanmile.
It's like, okay, so now you're going to make yourself into a tent pole hero and remove the possibility of doing now because if you're going to do ritic, you're not going well. We tried for years. In fact, it's a great story. A friend of mine, Chris Grucci, was that Hell's Angels and then he was Angels and he went to work for Tippy Hedrin, who has the animal sanctuary north of there, and they had just got Timbo, this male bull elephant that was the biggest dual elephant
in North America. Half of him. Chris was, you know he was. He got a job there and he was taking care of the elephant. Yeah, the Angels come in and they said, look, I can't be at the clubhouse. I got to give Timbo twenty four to seven. They said, we got gray. So one day Chris had a very bad accident and I thought of his motorcycle. I thought his motorcycles. Motorcycle of a tree. He fell into a gully.
Then the most like I fell on top of them, and he was pretty messed up, and he was in this wack award getting drugs, and so we got to see him. And the second time I go to seeing the doctor pulls me aside, used to look, you know this, this obviously got brain damage and I said, no, I can't wait for you to explain that to me. Well, what do you mean, he said, he claims it an elephant team and then Vin Diesel was sending him around the world to collect elephants, and I said, you know,
biggest now practice suit in history coming up. It was an elephant trainer, and Vin Diesel did sit to cos the guy was gonna that was pace maker. We're gonna ball up. But look, in this town, you never know who you're talking to. He's at the elephant.
How much in movement did you have with glennyat or two?
Noting that a lot, I mean a lot of my stuff found its way in there. To leave it at that, although contextually misused was miking. You know a lot of reviews have noticed that beat by beat by beat, it's the same script with different people, and I just think, look, I think the bottom line is what no one seemed to understand is the Glady order was about Russell. It's about Maximus. This is Maxillus. It's not about let'sically you sure gliders in there. It's thereism. It's not about them.
It's about max. So I'm not going to play because I had to separated races ladder. I'm running a stage play. I'm glad here and it's called Max and I think it's pretty great. And when I find out shortening when I take it out. I had to go to Paramount first and give them a chance to invest. I mean, I little look I lighted Gladier too. Yeah, I do. I like I love seeing the people that I remember
from the first one. I do feel strongly that a lot of what I created is zoom there, and I think Ridley is one of the greatest shooters out period. We had a great time Laia what I mean they it was a nightmare, but we have a lot of fun.
What was nightmarish about it?
Well, they didn't think they had. There was a script they got. I flew to New York, sorry, flew to London. We were getting ready to have a read through, and I was a friend stody because I created I brought the steed and so they couldn't get rid of it. And they still can't. And so I mentioned to the crowd. I said, look, there's a problem, big problem of this. He said, well, you know, it's a big round this iss sheet blah blah blah. And they didn't see it
that way. Says okay, well, and I'm out voted. So that's the way it is. So we go to the read through and Russell's not there and he's pissed because of what I had pinpointed. He had also pitpoint. So now we're getting like six weeks eight weeks out, we're going to go start making the movie, and there's no scramp I had. I had written the draft and done everybody's notes and you know, brought that rewrite Wiedman, so every saniel we pulled it out of our ass and
you know, it's all bullshit. And I brought a script with me. I wrote the thing, everything that retakes credit for is in the scraft, you know, not every single thing, but you know, and so I didn't feel that freaked out about it. But we shot it in sequeens, so everybody was a little you know, nervous. The thing was, it was brilliant about Stephen was my first mission to Spielberg. Is you could see there was a war going on with him. One is you know, he you know, doesn't
go there you will. But the movie was very risky. He was just you know, you know, DreamWorks was just taken off. But he sees, you know, he had the guts to say let's do it. So I'll always you know a lot, I will always, always always appreciate that you know, everybody's doing, everybody's taking credit for and A. But he's the one who said yes, wrote the check and you know, got it going. He's doing it.
It seems like you are still really super busy these days with all these projects you're talking about.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm warning my wife. I said, when God's sick of me writing, should I'll pull you down. But you know no, Yeah, I mean really, I just got to endove our email for my net and it's another producer wants to do. Rooney's a ruler against crib. This is the thing because I spent so much time in the Arab world, but on my motorcycle chap, you know, I sort of got it, and Rooney is. It's a
really great script. I'm doing another one from Mira max On Raban, the first who was started, basically started the golden age of Islam in Spain. Always wanted to do.
I had to beg a project on the Sakina who was the daughter of like that pronounce his name, who was chilled about little Cabala, sort of an Islamic A friend if you and I did another one which I love, love love about Zaiyad the guy who crad the you know, the un Republic, and I really it's it's a great script, but I just you know, the thing is oddlemn is there's a there's a there's a disconnect between the East and the western there and you know, in that way,
it's nothing. It's an artistic disconnect. It's sort of a you know, get your arms around at disconnect. I remember I got some notes from Isaiah's family going, well, you can't do that. He didn't do that, and I'm going to knowledge how do you know you weren't bad with him? I mean, how did you must be to do that? And I didn't say that. I do you order?
That?
The only name we have to go with. And that's the next that that one. And it is so great because he was such a goddamn cowboy, you know he was. There was a grave Hollo and the Iran's about to invade, you know, because the the nine of their republic is nothing right, it's and he doesn't have an army and
he's got these you know, basically order guards. They're fighting with Iran over the straits of the Moves and so he calls up Sally and goes, hey, can I runt An army front and they go share because everybody has something. God down, it's money back then, right, So he were in with his army and he brought in chefs so that everybody had really great food. And so Iran looked across the streets and went, who the hell would they
come from? And back off? But I mean what And in Russaid is the buddy who founded Abadavi is always driving around the rolls and the thing is solely disintegrate. Right. That's because he's you know, there's no will. It's just like a pre terrible it's real it. I love the piece,
I love the people. And you go back to a time when they know before they will, when all men were dying from the pearl industry, and there's boats every time you go to like the Cutter or or Abadaba Dubai, they have a pearl boat, a sort of monument to those days. And they were terrible days, terrible days, and so you got to remember, Okay, they got a lot of oil now and they're flexing their muscle, but before then.
And thank you so much for your time. This was such a pleasure talking with you.
Take care.
All right, We are back and we were talking about jumping Jack Flash.
What happened to the anti Pots character because she went run to the house and then she got jumped, she got moved, Yeah, and the CIA moved just felt like a dropped that's like the that's the rug being pulled out from under her because she she's realizing that in the world of espionage.
Well, we never go back to her, there's never any sort of.
Like she finds out, I mean, her husband has been murdered and she's not sure that's happening. But the more she talks to Terry Doolittle, the more she realizes, hey, my husband may be killed, like because he's supposed to be with Flash. Then we find out later that that was what Jeremy Talbot has sort of set jumpin Jack Flash up that he murdered his colleague and that's why
he can't come back. So the CIA kind of hushes her up and whisks her and her children out of the house and that's when Roscoe Lee Brown comes and like gives her And that's a good scene. I don't
know who's responsible for that scene. Maybe that scene goes all the way back to the original writer because it's a really good, like plot scene that comes at just the right point the way eighties, you know, sort of formula I used to termine a positive sense, not a negative sense that way, that sort of formula narrative structure works so well in the eighties. Is like, Yeah, we have this character and we've cast a great actor to play him. He's only in like a couple of scenes,
but he brings with him great gravitas. Rascal Lee Brown is a great actor, and he just sort of like lays things down. He's like, this is what you're in for, and you know, explains the whole point of like a pawn. Like Jack Flash is just a pawn, but you're not even a pawn. I mean, he doesn't use those words, but that's what He's a prawn. You're a prawl.
I do like the prawn thing.
Yes you know what a pawn is.
Yes, it's a shrimp.
That's a prawl.
Is the smallest piece on the chest.
I'm the most expendable the ones you sacrifice. Jack and I have been friends for many, many years, and Jack knew it could come to this going in. So let me give you a little bit of advice, amateur, and I, mister little is over get off the stage before you're getting carried off.
Yeah, he's so freaking good. I'm so glad he shows up in this movie. Yeah, Like you guys are saying, it's just this stack stacked cast of so many faces where you're like, oh, I know that, Oh I know
that person too, and this person and this person. It is interesting that Jim Belushi shows up as the computer repair man, and then he comes back two more times than I do, like the idea that he was supposed to have died in the second time, but then they just put that bandage around his head so he can come back a third time.
Yeah, he does die. I mean in her book, she's like, yeah, Jim Belushi died. But then after Richard Marx comes in and they re edit, we need another scene and it's supposed to be I think it might have been supposed to be the you know, the other guy, the guy with a gun. But she's like, well, this needs to be funny. So when she does the reshoot, she calls you in Vlushi. She's like, I know you're dead, but
you're gonna be alive. I'm gonna put you in a neck brace, you know, And and that's a ridiculous scene, but like, I'm so glad did the whole shooting her up with the truth serum and then that she's like sort of drunk and unable to not express herself even more than Whoopy Goldberg character would already express themselves because she's got tooth serm, you know, coaxing through her veins.
It's just such a great setup, And I love how Jim Belushi just gets so pummeled in this movie, Like every time he shows up and he is a threatening presence.
I mean, if you've seen Twin Peaks the Return, like Jim Belushi can really pull off being a heavy but like the second time he's there, when he like she comes back in the cab and the cab driver is gone and he's now the cab driver and he's got a gun on her and all she does is like you know, basically shifted into high gear and he like, you know, he he doesn't.
Wasn't a very convincing repair mandol with very sinister yeah, But like what happens to his car is so like a thousand times more damage.
It's like a Joel Silver moment. Like it's like a Penny Marshall escape followed by a Joel Silver like death. You know, it just almost like two but it works. I think it's it makes it all the more funny that this cab that was probably going seven miles an hour like double flips and explodes over a trash can or whatever happens to him.
Yeah, and I.
Forgot that he was in at least one episode of Lavernon Shirley. And yeah, he plays a great character in Like Salvador, which I think is the same year that this comes out.
Also, Penny Marshall's very first directing job, aside from directing episodes of Laverne and Shirley, was the very short lived sitcom called Working Stuffs, which was Jim Belushi and Michael Keaton. Yet, that's what that's all about. Go to work, get it work, and we work to work. We can't leave me.
What is too tied.
So we work and we work. It works out right. So that was I think just six episodes. I think she did the pilot.
So it's all about who you know.
Well, she knew everybody. I mean, that's what it's so fun about reading these books from these people.
Getting advice from Spielberg whatever she should do to film or not.
Yeah, their buddies with Spielberg and like, I mean, she's best friends with Carrie Fisher. She's super close with John Belushi and Laurene Michaels and you know, all these all these people and her the sort of again like diving into nineteen eighty four and and kind of just reading reviews and doing all this research. Like she came very close to directing Peggy Sue got married, her daughter was dating Geo Coppola, who you know, Francis Coppola ends up
making that movie. But it was originally going to be Deborah Winger not And this isn't like originally when you read like I AMDB, like, oh, you know, Ronald Reagan was almost in Castleblake, Like no, he wasn't. He was barely close. Like it's not just like this was a famous star, so they were considered, Like Deborah Winger was definitely on a trajectory to starring in Peggy Who Got Married, and Penny Marshall was being considered as a director.
I like that she walked away as well in Solidarity. That was a nice show of solidarity.
And the same thing happened with Joy of Sex, which is like, you know, one of nineteen eighty four's worst movies, and is much more famous for the role it played in the end of John Belushi's life, because that again, Penny Marshall was set to direct that movie when they were going to do the John Hughes version of it. This was going to be National Lampoon's Joy of Sex. And this was before Vacation and Sixteen Candles. He had written this and the screenplay was in the Chateau Marmaut
bungalow where Belue she died. He was very despondent when he was sent the script and talked to the head of Paramount. It's like Don Simpson and he finds out that they want to sell this movie with a poster of him in a diaper, and don't I've read that script. I don't know if he was supposed to be cupid or a baby. There's no scene with anybody in a diaper in the John Hughes script. But clearly this information got to him and he calls Penny Marshall, really despondent thing.
It's like, is this what they think of me in Hollywood? Am I just a fucking joke? And this is She's like, no, no, no, we'll go into Paramount, we'll talk to these people. She sets up a meeting and like that night, like the night before that meeting is supposed to happen, is when he overdoses on the speedball. So that script is like
obviously goes into turnaround. It doesn't really happen for another two years, and then they literally develop it in nine days and shoot it in twenty with Martha Coolidge, and it's sort of a movie that everybody, everybody connected with absolutely hated making and is not a success. But it's
just so interesting how close she gets to everything. And then with her relationship with Rob Ryner and all the Saturday Night Live people and all the Star Wars people and all the Spinal Tap people, she seems like such a not a She doesn't seem like Carry Fisher, Like Carry Fisher seems like the kind of person who was going to be at every party and everybody's buddy, and like Penny Marshall seems like someone who doesn't even want
to get out of bed. Like so it's so funny to think of her as this like social butterfly who's like dating Art Garfunkle and you know, all like it's It's really really fun to listen to her her book if it's on audible, if anybody wants to give it a listen.
I just had the image of Fred Armison as from Senate Leave directing this.
She's such a character, pull on Penny Marshall.
This by book. My mother was not memoir by Penny Marshal. That's me. My mother was not Got so good stories, isn't it. The book's coming out September eighteenth.
Are we gonna have a phone number?
Here?
A link to what Amazon? You gotta go to the Amazon and get a book, buy it. I'm just gonna pick out a few words from the book.
Shut up, Jim Brooks.
This is just two pages I open up to and then that she just embraces that accent, and I just love hearing her talk, and just to hear the way she stretches out those vowels. Oh my god, it was such a treat hearing her voice again.
I remember in the late eighties, after Tom Hanks made big, he was on some show like Friday Night Videos or something. I can't I can't remember what the show was, but he says something like, you know, I've now been directed
by both of the Marshall siblings. And it's a very different experience because when you're working with Gary Marshall, everything's high energy and it's like, Okay, we're making a movie now, and Tom, you're gonna come over here and you're gonna be very funny and it's gonna be great, it's gonna be amazing. And when you're working with Penny Marshall, it's more like, oh, I'm making a movie now, and Tom,
can you go over here? And hopefully you'll be very funny and it'll be okay, but it'll be you know, like and it's just like a really amusing anecdote that he told, but it's totally true, And in listening to those audiobooks, it is exactly like that they had the same upbringing. They tell the same stories about their childhood and their mother and father and stuff, but like he tells it in this like very upbeat, buoyant way, and she's more like, I wonder what my mother was really
thinking at that moment. I was concerned, you know. I mean, just it's just fun to get and they're obviously good friends. They obviously enjoyed being related to each other.
Speaking of Rob Reiner, I know Tracy Reiner, their daughter is in this as well. Is she the one that plays the secretary at the Consulate.
No, she's mister Page's secretary. So any scene with mister Page, she's sort of like at his right hand.
Oh beautiful.
It feels like he's trying to sleep with her. Is that what's going on? There's that weird moment that he's like closing her mouth. Yeah, okay, And then it took me forever. It took me until I read the script to realize that the woman at the British counsul it is supposed to look like Princess Diana. Then when I saw it after I read the script, I was like, oh, I can see what they're doing. But having just watched Oh God Vacation, I think it was where there's the
fantasy where oh no European vacation. Yeah, and Princess die you know, she's flirting with him. I was like, yeah, that was a much better looking Princess Diana.
Well, this is more like somebody who wants to look like Princess Diana, but it's just a secretary in the lobby of the British Consulate in New York. So I think it's good casting, but it is funny that the script says she's trying to.
Look seeing Tracy Olman.
Yeah, pregnant Tracy Ullman.
That was such a treat to see her show up in.
This and because she's pregnant and young, you barely recognize her. I mean she's only like two years younger than she is when she started to do her American show. It's like, is that Tracy Ullman's like pudgy or sister? Like it's like or is it makeup? Or but I saw in the somewhere in the book. Oh yeah, it's in in Peenny Marsha's book. She says, pregnant Tracy Ullman. I'm like, ah, of course she's pregnant.
Well, and she was such a chameleon, I mean that was her whole stick. Like, wasn't there a music video where she's like tons of different people and things, And then on the Tracy Ullmans Show, you never knew what she was going to look like from once get to the next.
One and Tracy takes on even more so.
He was also a pop star in the UK. Yeah right, I love that song.
No we we get that, We got that that they don't know about us. Song over here, yeah.
Her and Paul at the end of it in the car driving.
That's a great song.
The opening song is an interesting one because when it starts, I thought it was money for Nothing.
I thought that true, Thank you too. But this money for Nothing is later? Right when did Brothers and Arms come out?
I mean I remember weird Al was parioding it in I want to say eighty six. I want to say it was right around this time.
Eighty five. Yeah, just I just googled it. It literally came out a little bit beforehand, so it's a pretty direct lift.
IO agents have arrested Air Force Sergeant Michael Prescott in connection with the plant sell weapon sigarettes to an unnamed foreign government. Prescott was arrested last night in a Staten Island supermarket. Turning to whether the city remains in the grim usual Sibella, did you temperature and Central Park drop to thirty.
Six degrees overnight? It's been to sety nine because the prints of thirty nine next whether again at eight o'clock backs Big or music station.
That's more of a direct lift than Ghostbusters. It's from I Want a New Drug.
It's a unique score. For Thomas Newman as well. It doesn't sound like him. It's kind of got a bit of a Baltimore kind of son to it.
Yes, it has the exactly it has that. Yeah, I mean a lot of this movie has that Beverly Hills cop feeling of like, let's try to mine go to that.
Well, it's strange they never worked together herself on Eddie Murphy would have thought that would have been a dynamic peering. Maybe it would have been there's been too much of the same kind of energy.
Well, they're both they're both two big stars too, so you wonder if they would have room for each other, sharing sharing the screen, or would it have wound up like another nineteen eighty four film with Clintie and Burt Reynold's City Heat, which totally suffers from two big egos that do not want to share the screen together. Yeah.
I don't know if necessarily Jump a Jack Flash is a great name for this. It's okay for the code name and everything, but I guess the original title was Knock Knock, which also is not that great of a name or a movie.
But I like Jump a Jack Flash just because it gives you this the redo of the song with Aretha Franklin and Keith Richards, Like when that song kicks in at the end of the movie and it's this new version and Aretha's really selling it, like she's singing Hallelujah at the end and everything, and they did a music video and Keith Richards is like dancing around doing the music video like they were into it. It didn't feel like let's just cash a check. They seem to really put their all into this cover.
It had a great poster as well. That film. I just remember seeing it.
Every time you go into a video shop, you noticed jump a Jack flush.
Yeah, she's like jumping over the city with her you know, eyes big and her mouth wide jump and uh not as big. Well, but did Elon spread eagle like that.
Because x.
X I did not realize that.
I don't spend enough time on X. Okay, yeah, that makes total sense, masse. Instead he looks like Whoopi Goldberg.
A man named Jack has got her jumping and the world may never be the same.
Penny Marshall. There was another poster tagline that Penny Marshall complained about and thought really hurt the marketing, which says, like, you know, Whoopy Whoopye is here to save the world or something like that where it identifies the character. It seems like it's identifying the character as Whoopy, And in the trailer it says that too. It's like the fate of the world is in the hands of one woman.
And then she's open there with the toothbrush going hi, and the narrator goes called Whoopie and they just Penny Marshall thinks, like, it's confusing, Miss Terry do little. Why are we saying whoopee?
I could listen to you do Pemmy Marshall all day long.
Well of the best line in like literally in every chapter where she's talking about a movie, she's like, I've said it before. Director is a dog's job. I learned that on Jumping Jack Flash. It's a dog's job. You gotta wake up before in the morning. Not my finest hour.
I love that she called the crew together and said, you know, if I make a mistake, please don't laugh behind my back. Come up and explain to me what you think should be done, and we'll do this together. I thought, Oh, that's a lovely spirit to set a lovely tone to set on her on quite a tumultuous production.
Before she said yes to directing the movie, She's she met with the DP Matthew Lionnedi who shot Breaking Away and Poltergeist and Fast Times Ridgemont High and I think weird science maybe, but like, you know, established cinematographer. And she was just like, are you gonna have a problem. I'm a first time director when I'm woman, can you walk with a woman? And he was like, yeah, no problem. And you know, she comes highly recommended. She's buddies with
Spielberg and obviously they made Poltergeist together. You do get the sense that she probably really meant it. Like she seems like a very down to earth person. So when she gathers the crew together and says, I really want you to call me out if I'm making dumb mistakes since I don't know what I'm doing. I've only directed three camera live television before and everybody does it. So like setting that sort of tone of humility is good.
But she also says like she doesn't look good and Whoopy Goldberg like on day three of the shoot, like drags her into the makeup chair and she's like, you gotta look good, like maker Joel Silver comes on the set and it's like what, Yeah, Like, why are you in the makeup chair? She's like, ah, gotta look good for the.
Crew, you know.
Like so that's fun too. Yeah, yeah, you get again, it's like so many nightmare stories. I mean, if you read the again Barry Sonenfeld's book, you know, he he sounds like he had a terrible time working with Penny Marshall on Big because she wanted to shoot everything like TV and didn't understand that you could like pan up from feet to a head and you know, and I'm like, there're panting shots from feet to head and jumping jack flash like there are several of them.
Yeah, with that joke I was talking about that was you know, the Pandona and it was it was a big laugh.
Yeah.
So I don't know. You know, again, you got to read all these biographies with a grain of salt, you know, it's obviously just each person's perspective. But yeah, I think she really kind of she does exactly the right thing with this movie, not only for the movie but for her career, and she got a lot of good advice, like Gary Marshall when she was debating whether to get into this movie, at such a late date with no prep time. He gave her the really good advice, saying
filmmaking is a strange business. They pay you to learn, so just show up and as long as you finish and make your days, you know. And James L. Brook said, this is a great situation because it's not your movie. So if this movie is a hit, you become a hero. If this movie is a flop, it's not your fault, like you can't lose, which is actually quite true, especially in this day and age.
You know, it could have been in like an Lame May situation only if she had gone over But I mean, Elaine May goes over schedule by you know, two thirds as long, So I mean, I don't think Benny Marshall was going to do that on her first first time out.
It is weird that Vincent can be called her out as in his review he's just like, oh yeah, it looks like she wants to direct the decorps rather than the performance. It's like, okay, dude, that's a lame, lame criticism. I found the performances in this to be absolutely fine, if not really good.
God forbid, we are direct her apartment. I mean, come on now you know.
No, that's a selling point. That's you know, that's all character stuff as well.
Yeah, it's a selling point for sure.
Even just what she's wearing, Like Howard the chase scenes and she's wearing these big, bright, luminous red sneakers.
It's like, yeah, it didn't.
Have to be right, I looked at the It's like every little decision, a choice matters.
Those costume choices for Whoop, we are really great. I mean, she just pops. She totally pops.
She's a cartoon character in amongst this spy world.
Well, are there any other films named after Stone songs? First of all, because there are a lot of Stone songs we think of any is there is there an as Tears Go Buy movie?
There must be a film called Satisfaction, but probably on the wrong side of the internet.
I think that.
No.
I think actually there is a Justine Bateman movie called Satisfaction from the eighties. Yeah, so that can be your next you know, when you're on episode oney eighteen and you really need a new month, you can do four movies based on Stones movie and we can talk about this movie again.
Yeah.
I remember I was making a list when I was working at Blockbuster, of all the movies that are based on song titles, which is pretty much impossible because there are so many. Yeah, that was right around the time of things like Only the Lonely and I don't remember what else was coming out then I was like.
Can't Buy Me Love?
Yes, yeah, oh gosh. Just comedies based on song titles is one thing, much less espionage films.
Like Pretty Woman was originally called you know, eight days or something, however long the contract is, or a certain amount of hours, however long their agreement is, And it's one of those things. Again, Gary Marshall, there's a wonderful commentary on that Blu ray where he basically like, that's the great thing about working in Hollywood, Like I get all the you know, they just give me all these songs.
So like every song choice he's using is like there's that song where they break up and rock Set is playing must Have Been Love, and he's just he's just like, what a wonderful song. Like who knew what this rock set band was? I had no idea, but he's like, this is the perfect song, and it's it's fun to you know, people complain about studio filmmaking, so much, and it's fun to listen to someone who just was like I loved it. I mean, he just loved show business.
He loves his work. But yeah, Like, they had three titles for pretty Woman. One was She's a Late, which was for the Tom Jones song. Then there was another song title I can't remember what it was, and the other was pretty Woman. And it's like, yeah, well, obviously it should be pretty Woman, even though that's a very sad song, like that's a Roy Orbison song about longing and not being able to get a pretty woman and all that stuff, But it doesn't matter.
It should have been she drove on nice.
All right, we're going to take another break and play a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
As a burglar, Wow, she's in a high risk job.
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That's right. We'll be back next week, but they look at Whoopy's next film, Burglar and adaptation of Lawrence Block's Bernie Rosenthal Books. Until then, I want to thank my co host Kevin and Ian. So Kevin, what is the latest with you?
Sir?
I will be sitting down to watch Burglar?
Are you doing all four of these movies?
He's my co I believe so four of that?
Yes, Well, have a good time. Burglar's fun.
I've only seen Failed Beauty.
That's the only one of the four that we've got schedule I've seen before or didn't that. You can catch me on the Best Bits podcast, which I do my co host Will Collins, where we break down our favorite film scenes depending on a different topic each episode and it's a lot of fun.
So you can check us out there.
And Ian, what's the HAPs with you?
Sir?
You can always hear me every month on the Bratlefilm podcast, and you can read my blog film five thousand dot com where you can see what I had to say about all one hundred and seventy five movies from nineteen eighty four that I just watched last year and Starting in twenty twenty four, I will be programming movies at Boston, the Boston Area's oldest continuously running cinema, as well as
the Capital Theater in Arlington. Excited to finally be breaking out of programming things for myself to do some actual programming for people in the great city of Boston.
Well, thank you so much guys for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They're all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over the world.
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