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Oh ge is.
Folks, it's showtime.
People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater. They want clothed sodas, hot popcorn in. No monsters in the Projection Booth. Everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring.
Put it off.
Two men on opposite sides of the law, Ryan O'Neill, Bruce Dern, and between them Isabella Johnny m Three loaners playing a ruthless game. None of them could afford to lose. In the Driver, Ryan O'Neill is the driver. My line of work is kind of hard to come by. His reputation the best meal man in the city. Memory is not too good about law not Yeah, you can do better than that. I don't have to. Did you ever get caught on one.
Of your jobs?
Hasn't happened yet. Bruce Dern is the detective. I'm very good at what I do. His reputation the toughest cop in the city, and.
He saw the man who's driving the car. Yeah, you didn't identify him. I just don't like you.
Now you get out of my time because you go out on one more job and I'm gonna nail you. You might be getting too big. Two men driven by their need to prove they were the best. How you're gonna get downstairs? I really like chasing you. Sounds like you've got a problem.
I'm much better at this game than you are. Are you winning to make some money?
I win? You're gonna do fifteen years for them? The money, the law, even their lives no longer count. You don't care about the money, might even send it to it. Who was best was all that matter. This is a quiet part of the hunting traps. Offset cowboys out are somewhere. You've been set up in am to break the cop. The driver was willing to risk it all. Break the driver. The cop was willing to break the laws. Pat It'll cost you two years. Ryan O'Neill, Bruce Dern Isabella, Johnny
the Driver. A ruthless game between two legends.
Welcome to the projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White, joining me once again as Ms. Beth A Commando.
Hello, thank you.
Also back in the booth is mister Walter Shaw.
Thank you so much for having me.
We kick off November twenty twenty five with a look at Walter Hill's The Driver. Released in nineteen seventy eight. The film stars Ryan O'Neil as the titular driver getaway driver that is, if he were younger, you could call
him a baby driver. He's pursued by the detective played by Bruce Dern and if you can't tell by these character names, the film is a stripped down thriller that plays with some familiar archetypes, including some that may feel very familiar if you're a fan of Jean Pierre Melville Le Samurai. We will be spoiling the film as we go along, so if you don't want anything ruined, please turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen
the film. We will still be here. So, Beth, when was the first time you saw The Driver and what did you think?
I have a terrible memory for the first time. I see a lot of films, but I do remember being a big fan of Walter Hill around that timeframe, and I feel like I saw The Long Writers before I saw The Driver, but I remember really liking it, and a lot of my film memories are tied to my dad, who's the one who got me to really love cinema, And I feel like the first time I saw it, I think I was still a teenager and not quite understanding it, and I remember talking to my dad about
how the film was these arc types as opposed to real characters, because my dad always liked to make me think more about films that I was watching, never answering my questions, but prompting me to think about it more. That's what I remember is the first time saying it, being a little bit confused by it, but being a fan of Walter Hill and being a huge fan of just action films, and I just felt like it felt
fresh and new and different. I've since put it into a slightly different context, seeing like Jean Pierre Melville's work, like you mentioned, but when I saw it, that was the first thing.
And Walter, how about yourself?
For some I saw it, I think it's got to be in VHS. I think I came to it backwards through the Warriors and the Streets of Fire was so enamored. Those were more kind of my friend group, this vibe. We really loved Warriors, we love the Streets of Fire. Just when I became more aware that there was somebody, there was an active hand behind some of these movies,
you started to work backwards and forwards. I think most of us did in the pre Internet age, right, we started to look at the credits and start wondering about these people. And The Driver was one of the first movies I was really actively searching for at local video stories and stuff difficult in my small town Collorade to find for a while, but I think I finally did
if I recall it. Video Plus late lamented Video Plus had a copy of The Drivers, So I remember renting it and being disappointed that it wasn't The Warriors over Streets of Fire, something very animal, that was really different. And it wasn't for years later that it came back to it with a different kind of expectation, with no expectation really just to say I was really little. I didn't get it. I was twelve or thirteen. I wanted
street fights. I wanted guys in baseball uniforms. I don't know, something different forty eight hours I wanted even and it wasn't any of those things. I think the second time is really when I began to appreciate it as a kind of its own animal. But the first time I saw it would have been on a pretty crappy VHS and I was not nearly ready for it.
This was actually a first time watch for me for this episode. When we had you on the show. I think it was what last year I think you were on before Walter. Obviously you've got the book about Walter Hill that you wrote, and I was just like, Okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. Let's get him on and talk about a movie that I've always wanted to see but never have because yeah, I'm a fan of Walter Hill. We've done so many Walter Hill films
on this program. We've talked about The Getaway, We've talked about Hickey and Bogs, Streets of Fire, The Warriors. I can't even remember what all else we've discussed. But just I had this blind spot of the driver, even though I think I've got a screenplay that I printed out forever ago and just always wanted to get into this
film and never did so. I use this as an opportunity to say, Okay, if I'm going to talk about this movie, I want to talk about it with two people that I really enjoy their opinions, So let's check it out.
That's great. What's your first reaction to it?
My first reaction is that I love this whole idea of this stripped down narrative. I can really see the Samurai influence on there, the whole idea, mostly at the beginning, especially when it comes to the Isabella Johnny character and
the way that she sees Ryan O'Neill. And I know we'll talk about how the original screenplay played out that it wasn't a coincidence that she sees Ryan O'Neill, but she becomes one of the few witnesses to see him, very much like the singer Well from Le Samurai, as well as Jenny from The Killer, and the way that she can be the person that puts the finger on him, and just the way that this movie plays with this very cool color palette, and also the minimal dialogue that
it has. I'm trying to think it's like, what fifteen minutes into the movie before Ryan O'Neill even says anything, and there's very little dialogue. And then of course I love Brucetern and seeing Bruce Dern in this era, especially anytime I see Bruce Den I'm super happy. But nineteen seventies Bruce Dern, Fuck, yes, I am there for it. And I just really like him in this movie, and especially to him and Matt Clark in their chemistry. And then Joseph Walsh, who I've talked with Joseph Walsh for
hours and hours, but mostly about California Split. I never brought up the Driver, which makes me feel pretty guilty, but it was so nice to see him in here in such a prominent role.
And Brewster wasn't the first choice for this film. It was Robert Mitcham. Hill actually went over to Mitchum's office, I guess it was, and he describes as there's two chairs with a small refrigerator in between, and they sat down and Mitchell pulled out of balla vodka from the refrigerator and his is eleven in the morning here, but he describes his long day spent with Mitcham and a ball of vodka, and then the next day Bencham calls up and says, nah, and that was it. He was
initially considered. You can imagine what a different kind of movie that would have been without it. During snaky Reptilian insinuation, which I think is perfect for the detective.
Durren can play a dirty cop like nobody's business. I love the laughing policeman, which one of these days I'm going to cover on this show. And I just feel that he's racist, sexist, plant evidence and basically he's very similar in this movie and so far as he will do whatever it takes to catch the driver, and I really appreciate that, and I also appreciate that I don't know if we ever really see him in a police station.
No see him. We see him at Torchies, and I'm just waiting for Peter Jason to be running the bar back there and for Eddie Murphy to come walking in saying there's a new sheriff in town.
I was so surprised because I haven't seen it in a long time, and there are no police station shots at all. His office is in that truck and in the bar, and it's interesting because on a certain level, it's like he's never in his real environment of his job, but he's in his real environment of how he sees himself. He's this player out on the streets, or the thing about Priestern. I love him, but he's an actor who in most of his films I always find that he
could have played both roles. He could have done a kick ass job playing the driver. I especially thought of that when I was watching Coming Home. I kept thinking, like, man might have been better in him switched places. But he's a great actor. I love watching him.
Yeah, Ryan O'Neil's an interesting choice. I know that Hill really wanted Steve McQueen to play this role. I was listening to the commentary that Matthew Aspery Greer put together for the I think It's the Imprint disc and talking about how O'Neill's career was a little bit on the waning side. At this point. We had done Nickelodeon, which really wasn't that big. He was huge in the earlier part of the decade. By nineteen seventy eight, you're on
the downswing already. This seems so quick, but I guess suff just moved pretty fast. And I think it's an interesting choice to have this pretty boy actor playing this role. And I like that he is so pretty that and I'm sorry to use that word, but whenever I look at him, he's such a beautiful man, and you would think that he would be more like hard scrabble, like even Bert Reynolds or something in this role would seem more fitting. But I like that he's playing against type.
And I guess, really, when you look at somebody, and we'll talk about this later on in the show, but you look like a Ryan Gosling very similar so far as very pretty man in this role as this silent, stoic driver.
There's something about the John Ireland to him, or I won't say money Cliff because he was a great actor, but there's something about the sort of gentleman cowboy feeling about it if you look at the Driver as a Western which is why I did like write Adeal in that role, because he's such a cipher really as a human being. As an actor, I think there's a real
blankness to him that could be sociopathic. Possibly he had worked with He'll be in a TV movie called The Thief Who Came to Dinner, and Hill had written the screenplay for that. It's really interesting to see the similarities between those two performances. They're both the Thornhill character north By Northwest go as the wind goes. There's not really a set identity for them necessarily, and whatever's happening around
them seems to imprint and get filtered through them. I think Ryan O'Neill's great movies, or because he's got great co stars, there's something about him like open milk and refrigerator or something. He takes on the flavor of whatever is most prominent in the building. And here he couldn't be more different from McQueen to both of your points, I think because McQueen is such a died in the wools sort of character, he is, we is what he is.
But for O'Neil, I think he really fits in with this unknowable archetype maybe even thing, and in a movie that's aspiring towards a Western archetype, I think kind of works for hildasem twice, I think is he engenders a lot of loyalty, but also I think he's got a pretty good eye for that sort of asking all the different kinds of masculinity that he covers in turn in each of his films.
Ryan O'Neil wanted the part too, because I think he was feeling his career. I don't know like waning, but I think he was feeling tired of that sort of type casting that he was getting. He was getting all the same roles, and I think he saw this as a chance to do something different. And if you consider that the Samurai was an influence, he's a pretty boy, just like Alan DeLong. They're both these like beautiful faces that the camera loves that can be just this kind
of blank slate. You can also say that about Greta Garbo. They always joke that what were you thinking about when you were shooting that scene? And it was like nothing. She was just this gorgeous face that whatever you cut to you could read whatever you wanted into her. And so I think the only moment where I felt that he wasn't the right guy was when he beats up that thug. That was the only time when I'm going like maybe not, I'm not sure he would like really
take that guy out. But other than that, I think he worked really well in this context.
You know, I really love that comparison to Alid the Loan because lately I likely Samurai a lot asks almost more as a comedy, like an existential comedy, because he's such a bad assassin. There's thirty witnesses. He doesn't really care. He does care how his hat looks, though he does care of his callers just perfectly irony. He's just very aware of his beauty. And I think there's something about Millville that was talking about referencing that as a trope
I think in some of these movies. And yeah, I think O'Neil's that kind of character as well. And the only minor pushback I'd give to the beating up the thug scene is that I think people who have no like Mark Wahlberg, who have no interior life, seem are really scary when they get violent because they see sharks. You know that was that the Quinn says, their eyes
roll back to black and then the screaming starts. I feel like that with some of these actors that don't really have it seems like any kind of hamster spinning around the wheel. So when they start beating there's something to me that feels really serial killer about that. I can't reason with this thing. There's no mercy here. They've just started down this road and they're going to continue down the road, just because I can't really read him,
So I'm not really arguing with you. He's saying word for me, because the scariest people and film for me are not the cannibal elector seeing you can't engage him in a conversation about bar talk or something he right, and Neil, what are you going to talk to him about? He's just there to kill you. So there's something about that's scary to me. They can't reason with him, there's no talking to him. If he's showing up to your
meeting angry, he's leaving angry. He's programming, and there's something about that I think is interesting in a film that's this programmatic.
But he's so fatalistic as well, because he knows that he's being set up. That's how I I read this movie is that he absolutely, one hundred percent knows. Even when Glasses first approaches him and he basically murders the car in the parking garage, that to me was him just showing like, I know what you guys are up to.
I'm going to ruin your car. And then when he takes the job later on, it's basically, yeah, I know what's going to happen with this thing, but I have to have like you're saying, is if this were Western, I have to have this showdown. I've been on the sidelines. I've been ducking black Bart for this whole time. I need to man up. And I'm not sure if he's actually a white hat or a black hat, because I don't feel that either of these guys have both gray
hats to me, both very morally ambiguitu. But I just feel like, Okay, this is the time I need to make sure that I face off with Brewster and with this detective.
Talking about showdown, it's like a showdown of egos, like they each think they're the best and the only way to prove it is to play this game where I know what you're doing, but I can still beat you at this or I'm going to trap you. But it feels very much like it's all about their egos, and that's why, like Isabella, Johnny can just walk away at the end. It's not about her. It's about the two of them, like having this fight.
It's his finishing move. It's Ryan O'Neil's the driver for his finishing move where he plays chicken twice in this movie and he wins both times, plays it against the cops at the beginning they both separate and crash, and then later on when he's going against glasses and his driver does it again, sure enough, there's a crash. He will not blink, and I appreciate him for that.
See, that's the part of the sociopath psychic guy that I do believe that he pulls off well for me. The punch did not land right for me, but that sense of I'm not going to blink in this chicken fight that I totally believed and thought he did really well, because it's like it doesn't even fake him at all. He knows he's gonna win because other people are more human and will try to save themselves and pull aside.
Yeah, there's that such a fatalism there too, I think, where I'm not sure that he knows that he'll win. I don't trust that he cares or that he's aware of consequences. I don't trust that he's aware of consequences, which is a strange I guess sem to say. And I think part of the effectiveness of that film for me is that the driver is so ambiguous but also
so scary. He reminds me of all these Western villains from Martin Lando, although I think leave Marvin, who show up and you feel like, I don't know if they know the damage that they're doing. I don't know that they have thought through the preciousness of the lives that they're taking. All this sort of liberal craft that I've
been docrenated with. But watching these movies, that was what was the horror of those people, and to find it a hero for me is one of those things that only later as I got a little older, to college and more existential, that I really truly appreciate. I think watching this movie first, when I was really young and looking for that black and white hero villain thing, which really is there in Warriors and Streets of Fire in forty eight hours, you see this obviously supposed to be
the hero, and yet well, I don't know. It's hard to like him. He's not eloquent, he's not charming, he's not warm at all. He doesn't seem to feel fear. There's something scary and did about him. And I think part of the allure of the Driver now is a cult object, it seems like, because it really didn't do well at the time. Part of that, I think is
that there's this chilliness about it. There's no exit kind of feeling about it, where they're just engaged in the cycle of violence and the set roles that they're trapped in and cased it in their lives and they can't ever break out of the cycle of the stuff that they're doing. The kickers who can, like the player like he is a Belgian player, are almost supernatural. She knows more than she should at all times. She is able to move in and out of the action. Everyone else
is trapped. We'll get glasses for God's sake. All these people are trapped, and these we cannot get out of. These were trapped there by their own design or by the design of what their makeup is. There's something like waiting for you to go about it that you were just stuck here and there's nowhere for you to go, and you're trapped in these roles that you're forced to
enact over and over again. Especially in our culture and our media culture, you are the same roles that you're cast in and you're first to reenact over and over again. There's something about that.
Yeah, not to jump to the end, but there's no resolution. This will continue to go on. It feels like when at the end of this movie that bag is empty, there is no money, there is no winner. They just walk away, and what's going to happen the next day. I don't see Ryan O'Neill turning over a new leaf. I don't see Bruce Dern not being obsessed about Ryan O'Neil anymore. I just see them going their own separate
ways and then starting against the next day. It's like that whole the sheep Dog and the Coyote thing from the Warner Brothers cartoon.
Hello Ralph, Hello Fred.
Clocking in kind of thing, and then off they go again. Because I can see maybe why audiences were like, what the hell dies, nobody wins, nobody goes away with the girl. You've got this beautiful Isabella Johanni in her first American role, and she just walks away. Yeah, she's a complete cipher as well. You don't get to know her at all.
And I'm really glad So I did read the script of this, and I'm really glad that they cut out that first scene where you have the Ronnie Blakeley character, the connection who's at the heart of all this stuff. She's meeting with the player, the Johnny character, and basically giving her money, and like, this whole thing is almost
like a setup. And so when she sees Ryan O'Neil, and if you know that, then it plays that scene a little bit different as far as her looking at O'Neil, O'Neill looking at her, and then the lineup scene plays a little bit differently as well. And I'm so glad that they cut that out because that just would have not done this movie any favors whatsoever.
It would be early on in the film telling you something and removing any sense of ambiguity or interest. And it also doesn't make a whole lot of sense either to me, Like it makes much more sense the way it plays out this way, and it seems more true to the style of what the film is. When I heard about the scenes that were in there, I was like, oh my god, thank god they cut that out.
I don't believe he was interested in making sense. Really, we just wrote and that's the Moto American film since forever. But sat in an interview. They didn't want a realistic depiction of what real criminals were like. I didn't want a realistic depiction of what the city was like. It wasn't interested in any of.
That makes it so interesting.
Yeah, it becomes a metaphor, but for what It becomes a symbol but for a passion play.
But for what?
So that's the question that holds interest. I think over all this time that this is a deeply symbolic, a deeply metaphorical film. But what is it for the politicians that go in every day and say horrible stuff and then they clock out and they have dinner with their opposition that they've just been slandering on TV. It's just a game, except lives are at stake, the real issues are mistaken. These guys are playing some kind of game
here is it? More and more as I just watched it recently in preparation for tonight, I just felt like, Oi, this feels like watching television accidentally for a while, watching Expand or something. Boy, it really feels like these people are just engaging their own micro drama and not realizing that they're actually influencing the world with the decisions that they're making here just because they have to show up and see the right things in front of the camera.
The stiltedness of a strange daccatoess of the dialogue and the roles again, to me, it becomes increasingly poignant, as this is who we are, this is actually what's happening.
Now.
We have to pretend that we're still okay. We have to pretend that we're playing the rules the same that we've always played them. But really we're just trapped in these rules and we have an awareness that there's like an immense darkness looming. It sound like a crackpot, but our job needs to play this role and to enact in these same cycles and act like everything is okay.
That's what we.
Do while these other people who are in control do the same thing, and then we clock out and we don't know. So there's something about The Driver that to me has now become larger than a genre film. It's like an existentialist play.
To me, well, I can see why it was not accepted in America but lauded by more European critics. This feels like a European film that escaped to America. Somehow. I can't even say it feels like a remake of a French film, because it doesn't. It feels like a French film instead of a remake of a French film. It feels very true to that idea because the script is so stripped down and told in very sparse dialogue, sparse directions. I know that he'll described as writing haiku.
I don't know if I necessarily see it like that, but it is very minimalist to find that he even hacked a bunch of stuff out of that. I've talked about scripts before where it feels like when you're watching the movie, all of the connecting tissue is gone. But I'm glad the connecting tissue is gone. I'm glad that it is so enigmatic. It just adds to the experience of things because we see Ryan O'Neil where he lives and it is super sparse, like no personal effects or anything.
And then there's a scene where they visit where Bruce Dern lives and I think they say, oh, your place looks just like the cowboys or the drivers, but not like how they call them cowboy as well, and it's yeah, like it's that whole Danny Lee chow yun fat thing of the two sides of the coin, the Batman Joker thing where it's like, okay, which one came first kind of thing, and is he that way because the driver's
that way? Or are they just both so similar that they both live in like squalor like no personal effects. They just have their one job. I'm the driver, I'm the detective.
And back into best point about Lee Samurai. I remember Alan the Loan's apartment in that it's empties except for the bed table in the parakeet who's his best friend, you know, and actually tells him that he's being bugged at one point, I think in that movie. I love that movie, very funny, but yeah, happiness.
I'm also curious if he put that stuff in the script to get it approved by the studios. Like I wonder if there was stuff in there that he knew in his head he was gonna cut because it didn't really fit the rest of the film, because so much of that is so well written and stripped down, and those scenes feel very out of place what that final
film is. So I'm just curious if maybe he put that in as decoy, let the studio have a little more conventional narrative, a little more explanation, a little more exposition, and then we'll just cut it out.
Yeah, very possibly, And for his cast as well, to give them a little bit of direction. That's interesting. He stated about the Driver that he wrote it essentially as a reaction against regular stuff and making a career out of writing for a while. Now at that point he was like, I guess, didn't he want to do the same stuff again? So for the same stuff to show up in there to your point to end up being cut really interesting. Yeah, I think probably you have something there.
Derney here's got to know what he's doing. He's a little background. But while we're shooting, we're not shooting any of this stuff.
Better again.
Yeah, there is almost always a moment when Bruce Dern sounds like he was raised in Ireland, where he will add a little irish to his affect. There's one part. It's when he dumps the coffee on Ryan O'Neill's hands and Ryan O'Neal's about to punch him.
He's just like, it'll cost you two years. Go on, do you want to throw it? Go on? Go on, go on. You know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna catch the cowboy that's never been caught, cowboy desperado.
What are you talking? What's going on here? Bruce? You're not in Ireland. You're somewhere in Los Angeles in the back streets, or at that moment you're at Torches doing a police lined up and the bartender's behind him just polishing glasses. Like sam Alone, I'm like, all right.
Great, Torchie shows up in a lot of his movies. That's also the name of the bar and Forty Streets of Fire as well. Torchies is the name of Raven's bar that he hangs out, and it's just just a name.
I guess it's his Velverde right.
To the county.
I just wanted to get back to one point you made, Mike, where you were talking about it felt like this French film that you know, landed here. To me, what's interesting about it, it's the same thing that kind of happens with Westerns and Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leoni. I feel like it's something American that got exported and reinterpreted in
France and then came back over and got reinterpreted. So it's got these layers of translation, and each time it gets translated, it like picks up some slightly different flavor or tone or texture. And I think that's why it's interesting, because it's not quite Le Samurai, but it's not quite the action films that came before in the United States, and it's not quite anything else at that point, so it feels like it's just been translated a few times.
And well, to throw another wrench in it, the movie that Hill's actually obsessed with is John Woo's The Killer, like a remake Samurai, right, So to your point again, there's another and he wanted.
To remake that for America.
He did, and he has a script written for it in English ready to Go.
And a lot of that felt like it was taking from Rio Bravo. To me, it almost black. He was taking Les Samurai into The Killer and adding more of a Western flavor. But he kind of was doing that whole thing that you're talking about Beth with the echoes. He would kind of re echo everything into Last Man's Standing And this is more of a pure vision of Red Harvest or something. But to me, it's the worst version.
I think there's a version with David carrotyin that I think is an actual better version of Yo Jimbo and fist fill of dollars and Last Man Standing. Nobody gets blasted off of trampolines and shot through windows or anything.
See.
I actually love that. I think there are two different kinds of Walter Hill action film.
Right.
There's the kind where it looks like people are actually fighting and learn how to fight, and then there's that kind with the Fire where Michael Parra swing's a mop I think at one point someone goes flying through the window. Yeah, there's a real comic bookness too, some Hills films. Those are the two things that he always loved were Westerns and comic books, and he wanted to be a comic book artist who went to Mexico to study that. But yeah,
there's two different kinds. And Michael Pere in Streets of Fire was like told Hill that he's gonna go take boxing lessons that you knew how to fight, and he said, absolutely not. It's not that kind of movie. You should not know how to fight. You should swing like a big roundhouse telegraph swing and you're gonna hit some guy. He's gonna go through a door, across the street, through a window. But that's the kind of movie that we're making here. But there are other movies that are very
much about fighting and knowing how to fight. I would say ahead of that, or even for forty eight hours is a very interesting fight film. They both show a lot of character through the way that they fight each other. But yeah, I think my defensive last man's standing it's a really wonderful Prohibition era comic book, a take on all that stuff. For the driver, I think, to Ryan O'Neill's punch, I don't think he's inspired to. What he's really wanting is not for them to be able to
ever express themselves verbally, but only through cars. It's almost like a Cronenberg film in that way, or something where all of the physicality of the film is really through the manipulation of metal and the screeching and the screaming of metal. When he's trying to show Glasses is disdain
for being undervalue, they destroy his car. He destroys his car, and this amazing garage sequence, it's this rather than telling him off and this eloquently penned speech, He's just I'm gonna knock off every door on your car, one by one. I'm taking the wings off a fly. I'm going to I show my disdain for you through the destruction of this metal and so the screeching of it and the torturedness of it, and the idea that we're bus stations
and rail yards and all these places. There's something very brutalless about I think the way that this film is told as well, again not in a realistic way, but in a various metaphorical wayment even about our hist as an industrial nation. Perhaps not to get to eve in the woods, but there's something about that.
It's also him just showing how skilled he is too, because he doesn't just smash the car. He piece by piece very carefully, one side, one other side, one fender, the next vender. I can do this exactly how I want to like, and it's again like it's a bit of ego. And to put my two cents in on last man's standing that is his heroic bloodshed film. So like all that excess and over the top is like perfectly suited to that particular style. I think.
I love speaking of the use of the cars. When I'm trying to remember exactly when it is in the film when he is Ryan O'Neill is driving through, I want to say it's another parking garage, but it's like he's sneaking in the car. It's almost like as if he were like crawling or just like looking around corners. But it's the car doing it. It's not him, but it's him as an extension of the car. And I want to say that Durn's doing something very similar as well.
And it's just like these two men just going around corners but in these vehicles and just sussing each other out. I just really love that he is so identified with the cars and the other thing too, going back to John wu and the color palette of the Samurai is so distinct, and the color palette of Unflick is so
distinct as well. And I love, absolutely love the cinematography that is coming in this movie, and just that it's the same gentleman Phil Lathup who did Point Blank, which is to me one of the best looking movies pretty much ever. It looks so good, and I just love
the coolness of the colors. I love that amazing shot of Walker going down the the airport corridor and you just hear the shoes and see him coming, and the whole thing of him busting through the door and the gray suit that he's got on, or all the gangsters with those green, different shades of green. You get so much of this, especially in some of these outdoor scenes where they have these chases where the world is green.
There's an amazing shot when O'Neill finally confronts Johnny after the lineup scene, and it's a corridor kind of thing and it's lit up at the bottom. It looks like with green neon and it just casts a shade over everything, and you see these two elevators in the background, like outside of the building type elevators going up and down, and you just see these little red lights going up
and down. It just looks so good, and everything looks so cool and controlled with this film, very much like the characters.
And then the city looks gorgeous too, even when they're having the car chases and seeing the neon and the lights of the city whiz by when they're taking the curves and stuff.
Yeah, I don't think La looks like this anymore.
You know.
There's something very time capsule about this as well. It was wonderful movies during the no wave period in New York where you really get a feeling for it. This is the La version of that, I think. And Lathrop he did the Hills first movie Too Hard Times and also worked with him on FIFA Came to Dinner, But I'm not sure there are a lot of cinematographers who are better at shooting with low light like this, bouncing light off the streets, using neon and all those things
to do it. Hill would recapture a lot of that, I think for the Warriors, but just the way to shoot at night. It's really elle noir Quinn essentially ell noir. Right when we think about that is man, This is a really beautiful film. What a great comment. I love talking about his use of cars and the extension of cars and tying it with brilliant observation about heroic bloodshed and last standing.
Thank you for that.
Jordan does that as well in his Mission Impossible movie. There's that sort of tango that Tom Cruise's character has on the back of the on the motorcyclist. They're actually expressing this and also through the cars, and he does that of course in Hard Boiled with motorcycles and cars too, and there's yeah, there's a real like marriage of man and metal theme trope or whatever going on here. But yeah, Lathrop is to be commended for a lot of that
really beautiful stuff. He also shoot a shot out. They shoot horses, don't they?
Oh? Yeah, another Bruce Stern classic.
Yeah, just really beautiful films, gorgeous looking movies, right, But yeah, it's always smart. I think for young filmmakers to attach themselves to veteran cinematographers for their first couple of times out, it really helps ease the transition.
I think. Yeah.
To think that this was Hill's second directorial effort is just amazing. And I do love that he says about the Warriors. Thank god I was making the Warriors because this movie.
The Driver is the kind of movie that's so experimental and unusual that it ends careers pretty quickly in the United States. It's very possible that if he didn't have Warriors in the chamber already and was actually shooting it, that we wouldn't have had at Walter Hill, not the way that we do now. I think he had already maybe sold the script for Ayleen as well. At that
point he had started brandy Wine with David Tyler. He already luckily had some really soft landings because The Driver was just even Isabella Johnny came out afterwards saying that she was betrayed. She was told that it was going to be an American action movie with a big car chases and stuff, and this is what we got. She was not a supporter of that experience. Yeah, no, I think it's a career ender. But luckily he was already ready to go.
She's an interesting person. I spoke years and years Sorry, this is very off topic that I spoke years and years ago to Sam Neil about possession and I was just like, oh, I'd love to talk to you more about this, and he said, I after certain people are no longer with us. So I was like, oh, that's interesting. So then when Chaikowsky passed away, I was like, are you ready to talk about this now? And he goes, Nope, not yet. I'm like, oh, okay, you're narrowing the field.
And then when I recently was reading her Wikipedia article and just where she's at politically, I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, she's a little loony. So maybe he's just biding his time for that one. I don't know.
Didn't you check herself into an institution after possession?
I think she did. Yeah. I think she's very right wing these days.
I would have so much empathy for those people now, for the damage that they're doing.
It's just so casual when it comes to knowing the driver is behind all this stuff. There is no I'm going to find out who did this. There's no cat and mouse as far as that goes. There's no I'm following the clue. He knows exactly what's going on. He knows that Ryan O'Neil is the guy. There is a little cat and mouse as far as he's just batting him around, just hey, I know this, Like, here's the fake key that you used to get into that car.
You want this back because I found it, but you can have it back, and just walks right into his It looks like a hotel room, but it's an apartment, and then later on when he checks into a hotel it basically looks exactly the same.
It was funny. When he was handing in the key. The first thing that I was thinking he was trying to do is to get him to put his fingerprints on it so that he could take it back and use it as evidence. I don't know if that was his first thought. And then when he didn't do that, then it was like, let me egg him on more to play this cat and mouse game and take the bait. But that was I was going like, oh, don't touch it, don't put your fingerprints on it.
Because it's immediately thereafter that the driver goes to Glasses like, Okay, I'm your man, let's set it up.
There's a strangeness about this, right, there's too much knowledge and there's not enough. No, they're just playing his role, right, I keep being inarticulate about it. Did you guys read Animal Man, the comic book that Grant Morrison revived during the Vertigo era when sand Man was big and all
that stuff. Anyway, this is a superhero. But there's this episode called the Coyote Gospel that talks about Wiley Coyote as a sentient and he has to wake up every day to get murdered horribly and it's a terrible pain, and there's like this existential The comic is like this where the character is aware of itself as a troupe, as a device and a larger machine that is so much older than him, and he's helpless to break out
of it. He is the project of it. He can only enact what he's forced to enact, but he does it with a certain kind of resignation and fatalism and self awareness, all these things that we're all pulling out of the driver as a vibe from it, and I think that's being carried through with these guys like Brewster Earn and Isabelle, Johnny and whatever. They are indeed characters that feel as though they're trapped in this and that everything else is just like there's money in the back or there isn't.
I don't know.
Tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up. I'm wanna be a cop in a movie, and you're gonna be a bad guy in a movie or a hero an anti hero, and you are gonna be the damsel that knows too much the film Fatale, and we're gonna do this again. And then after that we're gonna wake up and I wanna be the cop again. And there's a sort of inevitability
of what they're doing. And if we read into a little bit of Hill's sort of interviews around that time, talking about his exhaustion with rewriting, adaptation, writing for other people like Pecking Pod, and he just wanted us to do something different. These guys are brilliant. I grew up on this stuff. All this stuff is brilliant. It's all familiar. What if I made a movie that everybody knew what
roles they were to be playing. He's the gun slinger, and there's the kid that comes in the end who thinks he's a better gun slinger than he is and has to be taught like a day of the Gunfighter, Day of the Outlaw? Was that the name of that.
So there's a sort of archetypal quality to this. And then indeed Edgar Wright comes in with Baby Driver and does a lot of similar feeling tropes, and to me, it's just yeah, do this again, Nicholas ref drive, do this again, over and over again, because in fact, the point of The Driver is that we are trapped in these cycles of storytelling. The mcguffin of the movie is the mcguffin to itself. There's nothing in the bag. It's empty. It's just completely empty. There are other bags in movies.
Extreme Prejudice has a suitcase full of money, Hicking Bogs has a suitcase full of money. There are all these things that wouldcur over and over again. Even in his own work. The Driver is when he's commenting on I.
Want to say, there's a suitcase of money in the getaway as well. That's right, And it might even be at a It's been a while since I've seen it, but yeah, it feels like it might even be at either a bus or train station. And I kind of love this whole idea of so much of this taking place, the finale taking place around that bus station. And again, like the exchange man they call him with the money exchange, the guy who actually gets away with the money but
then doesn't. The guy who's just there saying, oh, yeah, he just picked up the money. He's doing the exchange. The key's gone. This guy's a punk just reading out all of this stuff about this guy. There's no again, Oh my god, he's gonna get away. No, they're on him like flies on shit the entire time.
That wonderful image you have that one brother's cartoon work. They're just punching in and they're doing this every day, and every day it's like Groundhog's Day. Right, every day's the same thing, every day's the same variation a different thing. Hill is really famous for saying, there's only two stories in the Western Cannon. There's the Crucifixion and there's the Odyssey, and everything else is just a ballishment, right, And so if this is what you believe and he's a really
well read guy. He knows of which he speaks when it comes to some of these things. This is I think his real moment of that existential risk. We're saying, I'm gonna make a movie that is actually a commentary on all action movies and a commentary on all of these Western trips we're telling in a commentary in Western
masculinity in a lot of real ways. There's a really uncomfortable scene and I don't know that we're allowed to really use this word flippantly anymore, but it's sexual assault essentially of the connection in which a gun is forced in her mouth. It was really uncomfortable in ugly sequence. Even that's recreated in Hill's filmography and Alien, when As tries to kill Ripley he rolls up a pornographic magazine
and tries to put it into her mouth. For me, that was always interesting, weird when I was a kid an Alien, because I thought, how is he really planning on killing her? Is it choking or is it whatever? But really later you realize it's a metaphor for sexual violence, engendered violence, and how often does that occur in Hills films? Fairly frequently, especially towards characters that are as powerful as
replay or as powerful as the connection is. Really like Mercy and the Warriors or Ellen in Streets of Fire. These are really powerful women characters that are the only way that men are able to confront their castration before them is in a gendered way. Even that I think is he'll reckoning with certain tropes that he himself will continue to enact in his movies as he was forward in his career. But yeah, here with the second film,
he's already taking this unbelievably huge ballsy swing. It's almost like it's the kind of thing that Francis Ford might do after he tells those vineyards and says, I'll give a crap people like this or not. I think the Driver willfully denies pleasure in a lot of ways. It pushes away the usual easy catharsis, and it says, really, examine what it is that you've come here for. What
is it that you're looking for? What is the resolution that they get away, they get married, they buy a bungalow in the Bohma, What is it that you're looking
for here? Because I deny that you remember he was brought into the Getaway to rewrite bogdhana script for that, and Bogdonagean's script for that was really faithful to the book too, Harrison and the book ends in a fantasy hell town where robbers pay to stay until they can't and then they're cannibalized by the rest of the residents there, and that's the ending of the Getaway, and they brought
in hell to give them something more conventional. So I think the driver really is working against that, and in a subtle way, he does that for the rest of his career. I have all this capital that I just won from making this forty eight hours movie. What am I going to do now streets his career is the giant middle finger to expect and what people want from him?
God, Now I tracked down that Bogdanovitch script because I that's what we talked a lot about when we did the Getaway episode, was talking about that ending from Thompson and just how aft up that was, and how that so many of Jim Thompson's books just take that wild turn towards the end, like Savage Night or The Killer Inside Me. But yeah, so many of his books just take this weird turn towards the end, and when I read the original of The Getaway, I was just like,
what the hell just happened? What dimension did we just enter? At the end of this book, it's so good.
You were talking about denying expectations. But Bruce Dern has that scene early on where he says, what do you do first thing in the morning? You read the sports section because it's easy, It's like good, it's like win or lose, there's losers and winners, and it's He's basically saying, here's the most simple, basic outcome, that's clear and precise, and that's not what you're going to get.
Hills, Well, what did to do? Another Thompson novel for a long time too? Pop twelve eighty in a population twelve eighty, which is also really weird.
So anyway, didn't they do that? As is that coup de tourchon or whatever? That's cat? I start to speak very quietly when I try to pronounce French work.
Yeah, the richand Tavinir film. Yeah, Jergo's Lanthemos currently owns the rights to it, so we'll see if he brutalizes him the stone in that one.
Yeah, I know I've really got turned on to thompsone from Keith Gordon, the filmmaker or slash actor, because he wanted to do Savage Night Forever Ago and it's God. I would love to see what you end up doing with that, or if you could, because that one is really wild too.
Keith Gordon is one of my favorite directors that people don't talk about enough. As a director, Yeah, would be amazing. I'd just love to send another one of his movies. Honestly, he's amazing and I love him as an actor too.
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the wonders of physical media. All right, we are back and we were talking about The Driver and Walter, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your book. How did you come to write about Walter Hill for.
While I was writing a couple of movie theaters and I did a screening on thirty five millimeter of The Warriors and Streets of Fires double feature. I loved him as a kid, and I thought, we're going to get some the usual suspect showing up to these weird screenings or whatever I like to do them. Whatever won't make any money. They both sold out within a few minutes of us putting on the scale, and I snuck in the back just to see what the vibe was like.
And people were going nuts. During the Warriors, they were yelling and laughing and all the right places. And Streets of Fire same thing. I had flown Larry gross Out, the screenwriter, to talk after Streets of Fire, and we got up in front of the stage as the credits started going, and we turned the music down a little bit, and people cried out in horror that we turned the music down.
It's the fix.
Closer and closer. I think it is the closing sign. And so we were like, oh, okay, we just let the credits play at full volume so people can't get the rest of their energy out, and that kind of created kind of a spark in my head of curiosity, what is it about these movies? What is it exactly? And I started doing research and there weren't any books at that time in English about Walter Hill. I think Walter Hill was dismissed in a way as a maker of ro movies like Red Heat and Last Man Standing.
He's working with Stallone, He's working with Schwartz and there He's just one of those guys. There's more to it, obviously in my head anyway, and I started just going down that rabbit hole. Okay, what did he do?
Right? Who is he? Really?
Can we pull something out of watching his filmography? So I went through I think he had twenty three twenty four movies at the time, and I watched them all, and I watched the tales from the Crips, and I watched some of his TV shows that I could find, Dog and Cat and stuff like that, and I was like, Okay, there's actually a lot here, and I'm not sure that I'm the right person for it, but there's no one else doing it, so I'm going to do it. And
seven years later I finished. And I'd gone out several times during that time to meet with him and chat with him. And he was very open and very willing to help with the caveat that it wouldn't be a biography of him, and it wouldn't be about the behind the scenes and the dirty stories, which is not interesting to me at all, if you know me. So I was lucky that worked out perfectly. And the first time I met him, he said I've been warned about you, and I was like, Okay, here we go. What movies
of mine don't you like? Was this question? And I was like, I don't like Brewster's Millions. I never really understood that in your photography, and I don't know that I like Crossroads. I hope that you'll give Crossroads another and I'm like, deal, I want to write your book and we'll give all of them a lot of looks after writing the book. Really understand Crossroads, I think in
a different way. He made that movie after his father had just died, and his father was a real musical kind of person, and it introduced him to the Southern.
Blues and all of that.
Crossroads was really made for him and about an older mentor and a young man. All that stuff. I get it now. And Brewster's Millions is actually an interesting populous piece in which a person that doesn't even want to be the mayor the governor is elected on a platform
of burn everything down. So ultimately the longest chapter in my book is ultimately about Brewster's millions because of this suppression in some ways without being still not my favorite, but anyway, Yeah, I just I knew there was something there, and I wondered, because you can program all sorts of stuff.
You can program class of nineteen eighty four. You know nothing about Marc Lester, but you can program a lot of stuff from that era that's not going to get the same kind of reverence and the same kind of full roaded approval and love today, but by a large audience. It's a relatively large, cold audience. And so I was like, what is it about this guy that we've overlooked and
that we haven't really reckoned with? And then some friends of mine knew that I was doing the book when forty eight Hours was coming out on four K, I think, and they asked if I wanted to do a special feature for it, And first they can you send us the chapters of the chapter, And then he asked me to do that. We finished a thing for forty eight hours, a little video essay, and then my partners in that said,
this is too good for Paramount. Let's see if David Fincher wants it his Fincher was doing something for Netflix at the time. He wanted to do a little documentary series about film critics that he liked in films.
That he wanted.
Fincher got a hold of that, and he took a little bit of convincing, not too much, because he had not a great experience making Alien three with Hill and Kyler, and I think what might have sold it ultimately, not only that was done already pretty much. But I said to him, I think the assembly cut of three is actually the best Alien film and told him that, trying to convince him of my seriousness and maybe backfire. He was silence for a minute, and he goes, come on, Walter. Yeah,
he was really like angry almost at the suggestion. But I kept talking to him about what was really great and what really works about Alien three, the best version of Ripley, the most interesting version of this world, the blue collar world. And I think at the end of our conversation, hopefully what sort of moved the ball in our favor was that finally after all that, he was like, Okay, let's do it. And so the show that we did for him was on forty eight hours and the sort
of endairy nature of its characterizations and racial dynamics. Anyway, I just started writing the book because I think I felt like there was an opportunity to tell the story of somebody who deserved to get his flowers before he was gone. I think too often we have these great retrospectives, like, yeah, I had twenty years and it wouldn't have been great. Someone said something, well, he could hear it, and that
was really what drove me to the finish line. At the end of it, it was like, I just want to quit. I'm so tired, and we've got so much material and I just overwhelmed. But it really drove me to think I really want him, whether he agrees with everything saying or not, to know how appreciated he is in his lifetime.
I'm glad that there are movies that take so liberally from some of the things that he's done. You mentioned Baby Driver earlier, and I bet I think you mentioned refin I would throw probably Death Proof a little bit in there. Some of the color palette stuff that Tarantino's doing and that I'm not a big fan of that. Actually, I'm not a big fan of Drive, Baby Driver, or death Proof, But I just rewatched Drive before we sat down to record this, and it did hit me a
little bit better than before. But I don't know if I've ever seen the theatrical version of Drive, because the only version I've ever seen has Angelo by the name in the credits, So I'm wondering if that's all temp music, because I don't think he ever wrote a score for it, and I don't think it's the who is it Cliff Martinez. I don't think it's the Cliff Martinez score that's going along with it. But it's great music that goes throughout
the entire thing, and it is an interesting film. I did like it more the second time, and I do think what a cipher Ryan Gosling is in that, and I can really see him being very related to as far as this, Like I said, pretty Boy, very minimal dialogue, you don't always know exactly what's going on through his head, and some of the violence in that movie is just
absolutely wonderful. The thing with the hammer and the scene and the elevator and that opening chase, which for me just pays so much homage to the opening chase in The Drive, and how it ends at that sports game and everyone coming out and him putting on the baseball cap and with that cool fucking jacket that he's got. I can see why people like that a little bit more. But sometimes Refin I love the bits that of Billy Friedkin just tearing him a new asshole. I thought that
was great. I feel like Refin is way up his own ass A lot of times.
I want to throw out. One film that draws on Walter Hill, City of Violence, the Korean film. There is a great fight sequence where the two Korean guys have to face off all these local gangs that are totally playing off of the Warriors. It's one of the best fight sequences. I love that film so much.
I need to see that one.
Oh, it's such a good film.
I think you really touched on something interesting about Walter Hill, though, is that people in the the industry seem to really know him to movies and stuff. People who are making movies in general really revere some of the things that he does in him and you see these echoes popping up. He even did the pilot for dead Wood. He did this really interesting mini series called Broken Trail, in which he allowed his Chinese actresses to write their own dialogue.
And it's really about an undertold story all over the West. And so there's so much that when you say about Walter Hill, people are kind of surprised, right you say he influenced this. He influenced this, and he was really into Asian cinema and he's really into the honesty. He
would have been my choice to direct The Odyssey. There's really this sort of foundational generation I think of filmmakers here in internationally, and he's huge in France and to your point, and so there's a lot going on here.
I think podcasts like yours and he's really smart comments by both of you and it's a really hard there's nothing to do with me, But I feel justified now spending all this time digging into the and is feeling like, boy, this guy just deserves a different kind of conversation.
Part of it, too, is that his personality is not the type to demand attention, like he seems like he doesn't need to be in the spotlight. He's very I don't know, it's humble, he doesn't strike you as this person who's like this narcissist who demands to have attention. He's doing his work. He's a lot like these directors for the studios, where they were doing this job and they were doing the best they could and elevating it
as high as they could. But on a certain level, it was like, no, it's like I'm not I don't need that kind of extra attention, you know.
And I was always a little bit at the beginning. I was a little bit suspicious of that because a lot of people say that and they don't mean it.
Means.
He really genuinely is extraordinarily humble and kind. We've talked to people in a circle and to a one on welter great guy that there isn't ever I wouldn't tell you probably anyway, but I've never really come upon to anybody who has anything to say about him other than he's genuine. They may now have gotten along with him, but they never felt like he lied to them. He's just a very genuine person. And when he says he's
allergic to attention, he is. He Ultimately watched that thing that I did with Fincher, and only because his family tricked him into it. He sat me down, they didn't tell me what was going He called me after and they did it. They sat me down and they didn't tell me what I was about to see, and they made me watch the damn thing that you did. And I just want to tell you thank you.
And that was it.
But he wouldn't get into it. He wouldn't talk more about it. He doesn't like to talk about his stuff. He said that people usually do that when the crew is over. And I like to think I got two or three more left in me. And he's genuine. He's still writing like crazy. He's got four or five screenplays that he's written just in the last couple of years. He just pitched a new idea for an alien film
to a Segourity of Uber and she's on board. And so there's a lot of life in him and he wants to do more, and I think that's hope he gets too. That's always interesting to see what he's got.
What's interesting at this point in his career because one of the things about the French New wave directors, they were all making films late in their lives and making films that were like still breaking boundaries and pushing the envelope. So I'm rooting for him to make a couple more films at least.
You know, the thing about Hill is you don't have to like his movies, but there's always something to talk about, and I'm not sure that's true for everybody, and I always appreciate that by him.
I don't know if you would consider this a minor Hill film, but for me, one of his best that nobody talks about his Trespass. I fucking love that movie.
It's incredible and largely nineteen ninety two. He's like dealing with new forms of media. He's using surveillance videos, he's using camcore footage, he's using sixteen mil, he's using thirty five. He's really getting deeply into how just a good Gudar dish, But he's really getting into these different new at the time ninety two new media is in new ways to tell these stories. Yeah, absolutely, Trespass is phenomenal. And of my favorite movies of his for the longest time was Undisputed,
the boxing film that he did with Wesley's nine. He had Peter Falk again. He's dealing with these new stats on each character that comes up how long they're going to be imprisoned for. It's like playing with new modes of meat. He's never really getting Oh, I guess in the art of creation. And I love Supernova as well, which is.
Super Nova is so interesting and I would be so interesting.
Thank you.
What a wild story of the making of that too.
And consider this is a movie that was touched by Francis Coppola. He did an edit on it. I was directed by Hill and then directed by Jack Shoulder, who did one of my favorite eighties movies. They hidden. So there's all is weirdly nage in it, but there's also there's this weird moment where Angela Bassett somebody is digitally turned into an African American woman.
And because there's a sex scene Robin Tunny.
Thank you.
Yes.
So there's a sex scene between Robin computer Facchinelle that they made into one between James Spader and Angela Bassett, so they had to digitally darken Robin Tunny's crazy. It's insane but also fascinating. The final product is really fascinating. There's an AI in it that is really incredible. It's an incredible AI. It falls in love with the creator, but it's bound by its programming not to help it's
creator when his creator is being murdered. Maybe I've drunk too deep from the spring, but I'm able to find often right on the surface, these really fascinating tropes that bind all the movies together, and they almost always have to do with how relationships work between different kinds of people. That's what these movies are all about, even stuff that's really hate it, like the Assignment I think was really hated and misunderstood. If you just give it a look,
you understand where's coming from. But no, another great one is Johnny Hansome. You guys haven't seen Johnny Highly.
I think I watched that around the time that I was on another person's show talking about Angel Heart, and I was like, oh, let's watch Johnny Hansom.
As a double feature, of course would occur. It's just this incredible group just talking about what is the nature of personality? Is it announced someone looks or is that are you just born with it? And these are just primary issues for Hill all the way back to the beginning of it.
Hicky Box, all.
Right, we're gonna take another break and play a preview for next week's show. Right after these brief messages.
Javeline Turner is trying a detective v I. R. Sholski. She's turning up the heat, turning on the charm, get to the point, Hello when you talk, turning the town up? Signed down, happy Detective, I was a lousy gus wife.
You let a broad do this deal?
Kathleen Turner's v I Warshowski? What's that? By Sten for Virtuists and the Inquisitive readinar.
That's right. We'll be back next week with a look at a Weird One VII Warshawski. Until then, I want to thank my co hosts, Beth and Walter. So Walter, what is keeping you busy these days?
I'm teaching film history at the University of Colorado, Denver a lot. I'm working on a few other physical media projects, things like that. I don't know, trying to keep my head above water as the tides a rising.
And Beth, how about yourself.
I'm continuing to work with Film Geek San Diego, just trying to bring interesting programming here to San Diego. And we're in the midst of picking what our theme will be for next year's year long film series. So that's exciting.
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