Special Report: Adam Leipzig on MediaU - podcast episode cover

Special Report: Adam Leipzig on MediaU

May 01, 202341 minSeason 1Ep. 387
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Episode description

Filmmaker Adam Leipzig discusses a fraction of his long, illustrious career from his early days at Disney to producing films like Titus and The Associate to March of the Penguins and A Plastic Ocean and his latest venture as the CEO of MediaU.

Learn more at https://www.mediau.com/



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Transcript

Old he is, folks, it's show people fake good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold SODA's corner in No monsters in the Projection Booth Everyone for ten podcasting isn't boring? Shut it off. Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with producer Adam Leipzig all about his career, well highlights from it, because he's

had one heck of a career and he's still going strong. It's great talking with him, and I hope that you enjoyed this inner. How did you start in the business. You've had such an incredible career. I've always wanted to do something for audiences. From my earliest recollection. I started wanting to be in theater and then actually was in theater. After I left college, I became part of the company that was then called the Los Angeles Actors Theater,

now known as the Los Angeles Theater Center. I was one of the people who built the Los Angeles Theater Center and had a great seven year run in theater. I produced more than three hundred plays, shows, music events, poetry events, dance events, performance art events back at the time when performance art was a thing called performance art, and at a certain point I

just wanted to work for larger audiences. So in effect, I walked across the street into movie studio land landed a job at Disney Studios, and thereby hangs a tale. Tell me about your involved with the Olympics. I was reading a little bit about that. That sounds fascinating. In nineteen eighty four, Los Angeles hosted the Olympics, and part of the things that happens with the Olympics each Olympic here is that there is also an arts component. There

is an Olympic Arts Festival. At the time, the gentleman who had been appointed to run the Olympic Arts Festival was Robert Fitzpatrick, who was the dean or president of cal Arts. And he did something pretty amazing for which we should all always be grateful. He brought amazing international artists to Los Angeles, including Pina Bausch and Georgia Strailer and Peter Brooke. And that's when search de

Sole first left Canada and came to the United States. So he did all of those things, but he deliberately or just subconsciously fully excluded Los Angeles artists, and this did not sit well with Los Angeles artists, and we had a series of meetings and how I became the spokesperson for the Los Angeles Arts Contingent to ensure that we were represented during the Olympic Arts Festival, which ended up happening, and it was great. The mix of local and international was

fantastic. The international artists were able to experience Los Angeles creativity, and we Los Angeles artists saw work we had never seen before and probably never would have seen because we couldn't afford the international plane ticket. When you joined Disney in late eighties, what was the state of the company back then? Because I know they've gone through so many changes and just so many regime changes over the years. This was really the first regime that we think of as contemporary Disney.

What was the state of the company. You would need a microscope. There were eight people at the studio, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, five people, and met I was at the far bottom of that totem pole. And the company hadn't made an animated movie in forever. We hadn't made a movie that grows more than one hundred million dollars. Ever, there haven't been a Disney Live action movie forever, and under their leadership, we reinvented the

studio. We reinvented the Disney Live Action brand with one of my very first films, which was called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. This is also the time that a Little Mermaid and Lion King were made, which reinvented the Disney animated brand, and it was a pretty great time. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. I remember that was pretty subversive in its original tone, but then got toned down a little bit to be more of a kid's movie. Is that correct? Or am I completely off base? I don't think

that we really toned it down. I think it's about how old you were when you saw it, at what you understood and read between the lines. So if you look at the movie, it's no different today. This is one of the amazing things, Mike, right. We movies stay fixed, they don't change, and we see them at an interval of a decade or two decades and it seems like a different movie. But we changed, the movie didn't change. So in Honey, I Strike the Kids, the husband

and wife have separated. Clearly the marriage is not working, the family is falling apart, and the psychological representation of that is that dad has ignored the kids so much they can't even see them. How do you represent that in movies? They're the size of the fingernail on your little figure. So all of that is there, and actually all that psychological truth is there. And I know that as the adults working on the movie, these are things that

we talked about a lot. I know that as adults watching the movie, adults got it. And I also know that a lot of that psychology is embedded in the film and you don't really have to understand it to enjoy the movie. Where was Disney had two when it came to the more adult fear you were talking about, You're an adult, you understand it. But Disney, I've read that line between adult and kids films and it feels like now they have a pretty good balance for it. But how was it back then

for you? At that time, we add we had another label. We had a label called Touchdone Pictures, So movies that did not fall under Family Fair gave out under the Touchdown Moniker even though they were all made by the same group of people. They were just branded in a somewhat different way, so the audience would know. So the audience would that what the movie was

going to be, who was going to be for. And I think we did something very successful in that we really relaunched the Disney brand because the Disney brand to have great meeting. I think that the Disney brand is still the only brand that means something to an audience that when you see that magic Castle at the beginning of a trailer or the beginning of the movie, you know that you're going to get a certain kind of entertainment. And I think that's

still the case from what I understand. You helped Shepherd through quite a few projects and some things that we've even talked about on the show before, but one that we haven't covered yet was that Poets Society. That was huge for me when I was a young person. You were saying that that's one of the movies that no matter where I go in the world and someone in Google stocks me and sees that I was involved in that film, there's always somebody

who's seen that movie. And it doesn't matter what generation they're from. People have seen that movie and it's really wonderful. Deadpost Society was the first script that Tom Shulman wrote. He won the Academy Award for writing that script. Based on that script, we ended up hiring Tom to write Honey, A Strength the Kids. There's a direct connection between these films, and it was

the first time that I was able to work with Peter. I also worked with Peter on his most recent film, which was now about a decade ago. It was called The Way Back. Yeah, Deadposts. It still holds up. It's a very significant movie and inspires a lot of people. I know that there was already world according to carp but I think Dead Poet Society really helps cement Robin Williams in people's minds as being a very versatile actor.

And then you even worked with him again with Good Morning Vietnam. Robin could do anything. He was that smart, that fast, that witty, that verbal, that great sense of play. He always had shining eyes. And I was in New York when I got a text that he had died, and I just went to the floor. I couldn't believe the very person was very meaningful in my life. Are you still working for Disney when you're doing

things like roommates or the associate or I'm working sideways for Disney. Looked so what had happened Those eight people that were part of the company when I joined. When I was there were seven plus me at the very bottom of the Dunam pole. Over the course of a period of time, the company got bigger. Those seven people expand into one hundred to thirty people, into three different divisions, and I got promoted up and up, and at a certain

point I wasn't making movies. I was supervised people who made movies, and I had to stay out on the lot, and I was and I had one of those those offices in the Disney building with the seven dwarves on it and all of that. And when I would finally be able to go to the set, which was occasionally, I would hear a PA calling down the hall to warn people suit on the set, suit on the set. So this was terrified for me because I'd come out of theater and I came into

movies because I wanted to make movies. I made a kind of lateral move. I moved to a company called Introscope. I was owned and financed by PolyGram. PolyGram at that point had put a bunch of money into the movie business, and we had a distribution deal through Disney. So I was still making movies that Disney distributed, but I was not working for Disney. I was working for the company that produced movies, and that's where I did Roommates

and The Associate and several other movies. I have to tell you, I love The Associate. Thank you me too. If anything, it's as relevant now as it was back in Cashwell was at mid nineties, early nineties. I think it does it maybe even more relevant. What a great cast Whoopie Goldberg, Diane Wees, directed by Donald Petrie. So much fun to make with the great Eli Wallack. What a joy to work with actors of that generation. Actually made two movies with Eli. We're shooting at New York,

obviously, and it was great to shoot in New York. We had every world cast except for the person who was supposed to be Whoopie's assistant ended up being played by Diane Wist. And I just wanted Diane Wist. I don't

know why. I just thought she would be perfect for And she was represented at that time by a legendary agent named Sam Cohen, and Sam was famous for representing almost everybody, for not returning phone calls, and when were in his office taking tiny scraps of paper, putting them in his mouth, chewing them and swallowing them. And so I offered the part to Diane and she said no, and I call it Sam, and I said, I'm offering

her the part. And he said, first he didn't call me back, and then finally what he called, And then I started calling him every hour and finally he has stopped calling me. She said no. I found her address and I sent her flowers, and the next day I called and said, we're offering her the part. Sam said no. I sent her flowers the next day, and I said her flowers the next day, and I sent her flowers for five days and finally Sam says, okay, she'll do

it, and then she did it. It was great that period of time. She was just on fire with hand and her sisters and the Lost Boys, parenthood. There was just like there was nothing that she couldn't do. Mike, I love how you love ad No movies so well, that's great will be at that time too, there were so many great movies as she

was making. This was just yet another really great role, and I was watching it again to last night, like I said, and there are so many Missus Doubtfire connections or even having a drag queen making her up and everything, but I have to say it's even better for me. Like I can see why kids who watch Missus Doubtfire like that one. But for me, the associate is really where it's at. And like I said, that business acumen and all that, it just it really holds up listening audience, go

back a few decades. You heard it here. The associate is where it's at. Go watch that movie. What are you really enjoying when you're there as this producer role? The best part of being a producer is that you get to work with amazing people and they're pretty much different people. Every time. You're solving different problems, you're learning different things. You might be studying open heart surgery for one movie and you might be walking on the stock exchange

for another movie. You're always finding your curiosity, intrigues, You're always learning. And I love being a producer because you get to create an ecosystem where creative people can do good work. And it's so important. And you're the producer, You're not the writer. You're not the director, you're not the actor, you're not the cinematographer. Hopefully you have made sure that you have great people in all those roles. Your job is not to do those roles.

Your job is to make sure that they have the resources other people, time, money, creative inspiration, the right locations, the right words to say so they can actually execute what they want to execute. And I just love it. Can you tell me about when you formed Tarabella Entertainment? That was my first solo production company. It was after I had left Interscope. At that point, I was out on my own. People like me, I think people in our business in general, we rock and roll between having

someone employ us and employing ourselves. Times from other people give us a four one kay, and we have to make our own for our one k. If our company makes enough money to give us a four our one k. And at that point I was out on my own. I was developing my own projects and I just set up a company. I've always been a bit of an Italian file and Terrabella means beautiful earth, and I thought it was a beautiful name for a company, so I called it that and we did

some work. One of those films that you helped producer, helped to create was Titus, which we've covered on the show. Absolutely loved that. It's one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations. What a movie me too, I agree, one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations also, And what a great opportunity and what a great pleasure to work with Julie Taymore directing her first movie. Julie and I had never worked together in theater, but we had known of each

other from theater and we respected each other. We had a common language. It was my job as producer on that film was to get Julie's brain on the screen, and I think we accomplished getting Julie's brain on the screen. We had an extraordinary cast and Tony Hopkins, Jessica llang Alan Cumming, Harry Lennox and on and armor and motorcycles at leather and tree stumps and wow, yeah, pretty extraordinary. Was shot in Rome and a couple of weeks in

Croatia. The opening and closing scenes which take place in the coliseum are in Pula, Croatia. We shot there a year after the war. The soldiers in that scene our soldiers from the Croatian Army. It was freezing cold, and somehow they followed their commander's orders to strip naked, put on a little bit of armor, and they could covered in mud and march around at night in the freezing cold. And it was a very hard movie to make, Mike, it was just it was really difficult, and it was so hard.

Thought I was going to be in movie jail after no one ever let me make a movie again. But sometimes the tension of the most difficult movies creates a crucible of quality that you get at the other side. What was so difficult about it just all of the moving pieces, or it's a big movie and for what it was low budget and it was done independently. We

ultimately Searchlight distributed it, but we did it without studio backing. But the biggest problem was that, as so many independent movies, the financing didn't come together until about five weeks before it started. And that means we made that movie with five weeks of prep. If you've seen that movie, it is insane to make that movie with five weeks of prep. But we had to do it then because of actor availabilities, locations, whether all those other exigencies

that you cannot control. So we were never caught up. We were always running behind, and it was nutty and it was the director's first movie. Now, one of the interesting things about Julie is that she does not draw. That seems like a shocker because everything she does is so visual, so how could she not draw? Like she sees something, and of course she draws it and says to the art director or the production designer or costume designer,

here make this, but no, that's not what happens. She sees something in her head and then needs to express it with words or sometimes with gestures, but she doesn't draw. Part of the role that I played was finding ways that the other creative people on the show could understand and make visual what Julie saw in her head and expressed without visual cues. You need tell me the story of March of the Penguins and how you bring that to the

United States. At that time, I am running National Geographic films, and I had not made feature documentaries before I joined National Geographic. But once I was at National Geographic, the docs are so much part of Geo's DNA that we started doing documentaries. The first film that I released at Natchio was called The Story of the Weeping Camel film. I remained super proud of also a

first film by the directors beyond Bassura Dava and Luigi Folorti. But when you're running nat you hear about people who are making movies about nature and wildlife. I heard three insanely committed frenchmen who had wintered over in at Artica with sixteen

millimeter cameras. Decided this is a movie that we have to have, and I actually made an offer to buy the film sight Unseen while they were I think, while the footage was still coming out of the lab, because I figured, we got one hundred hours of penguins and Antarctica, we've got to

be able to cut something out of it somehow. But as I was doing, the filmmakers got their movie into Sundance, so I was not able to do buy it preemptively and went to Sundance with some arrangements with some distribution companies that would work with us, because at that point Natchio did not have a

distribution company. And the English speaking audience doesn't know this. The French speaking audience does know this that the film that was unspooled at Sundance consisted of French speaking penguins who spoke in French telepathically to each other, and also a kind of Euro edm techno score which really didn't play. It played in France, and that was the most version that was released in France. So if any one of the audiences French speaking and you saw it in Quebec or you saw

it in France, you saw that movie. But if you saw it anywhere else, you saw another movie. And Mark Gill, who was running Warner Independent at the time, saw the same thing that I did, which is that the visuals were amazing, but what you heard did not work for the US and the rest of the global audience. We bought the film in at the end of January, and very quickly we hired a beautiful poetic writer, Jordan Roberts, who wrote poetic words, asked Morgan Premant to speak those words.

We hired a gorgeous orchestral composer, Alix Warman to write an orchestral score, recorded the score, and at the end of June, very very soon after buying that movie, we released it under the title March of the Penguins, and you know what happened. It remains the highest grossing nature documentary of all time, and it remains the second highest grossing documentary of all time, and it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And it was great.

It was one of the great moments of my life. And you started the whole Penguin franchise and even to the point where Robin Williams comes back and does a voice and Happy Feet. Yeah, Orders didn't green light Happy Feet until March of the Penguins, did, Okay. I think Natchio should get royalties from Happy Feet, and I think I asked, but I think they said no. Tell me a little bit about the other documentary that you were

behind, Plastic Ocean. I'm super proud of that movie. Plastic Ocean came to me because the filmmakers had shot a bunch of footage and they did not know what to do with it. It was incepted by a woman named Joe Ruxton, who was running the natural history unit for BBC at that time. She had gotten fired up about plastic in the ocean. And I had shot and ran out of money, and shot and ran out of money, as

happens with documentary films. And then this gentleman named Craig Leeson, who was a director and also appeared in the movie, joined and also shot and appeared in a couple of scenes, many scenes, and they didn't know what to do with it, and I think they'd been through a couple of iterations trying to figure it out and they weren't able to. I was really interested in

the film because I care about the issue. I never really thought a lot of people would see the movie because I think if you have the choice between a movie about plastic in the ocean where you know it's not going to be a good time, or I don't know, Mike like top Gun, Maverick Black Panther, Wakonda Forever Ill like we're going there right. But instead it happened. And the way it happened was that I asked them to sent all the footage they had and they put it into a giant of giant crates,

which is the size of a grand piano. They had a a plywood There were two hundred hard drives that had been in storage in Bristol, England. They brought them over to a post house in West Los Angeles. We opened up the crate, we pull out the straw. There's all these hard drives that they bought in different parts of the world over about a period of eighteen months. No cables, no connectors. First month was spent finding cables and

connectors to extract the footage. And there were two key things about tying the story. First, there are these two characters. Craig, who is a man who's a fish. He grew up in the ocean and loves the ocean, and we follow him on this journey. And the other character is a woman who actually is a fish. Her name is Tanyu Streeter. She is a free diver. She dives below the crushing depth of World War two submarines. I don't know how she does that. She's like a real life Marvel

superhero character. She's amazing. So the idea of the movie became to take two characters that you can relate to and follow them on this journey around the world. There had been other documentaries about plastic in the ocean. I wanted to create the definitive global movie about plastics in the ocean, and I did not want it to be partisan. I did not want it to be anti

business. I wanted us to be something where it was like we were simply laying the evidence before the jury, journing our cards over one by one, trusting the audience to be smart and make and render its own verdict. And the value of that is that the film became the primary advocacy tool for changing processes and businesses and laws it chade. It has changed more than one hundred and fifty laws around the world, including the national laws in India and Australia.

If anyone in the listening audience lives in a state or a province where there has been a plastic bag or straw ban or limitation, it's because that movie was used as an advocacy tool with the legislators. We were invited to the United Nations. We screened it at the UN. It was placed in every US embassy in the world, so a lot of people saw it. It's had an amazing impact. It continues to have an impact. In fact, I was just interviewed by someone who is about to go to college.

She is a senior in high school. She was interviewing me for a local publication on the East Coast, and she told me that she saw the film first in middle school biology class and it made her want to become an environmental Scientist's seriously, Mike, that's as deep and meaningful as it gets. It's just amazing. It's amazing to be able to make anything to make you know, I make movies, but to write a book or to write a song or any kind of creative work that then it touches people that you would not

normally be in the room with. But you can touch people at scale. Yeah, I can't even imagine the difference of that feeling. Here. I am telling you how important something like Dead Poet Society was to me. And then you've got other films and this film that actually makes a difference to the world and to your kids' grandkids, etc. Yeah, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. I knew if you've written a couple of books and one of them was Ash ten years ago. Now insidetrack for independent filmmakers.

Do you think there are still a pretty good intention of independent filmmakers in twenty twenty three? There is a good contingence. The business sucks. The spirit to make independent films has not died, It has only expanded, But the business has really changed. It was already changing pre pandemic. The pandemic accelerated the change independent film or art film or whatever we want to call it. A quality cinema is down more than thirty percent from pre pandemic levels,

and the question is will it recover or will it not recover. I think that people really became quite used to watching those films at home. The quality of what you can watch at home, the size of the screens, the quality of the sound increased. A lot of people just got there, and that became a tradition. I don't think it ever goes away. I think it goes through surges. Like the ocean. It accelerates and it decelerates.

I think we are still in a decelerating time. I see in other parts of the world greater excitement and interest about independent cinema that exists right than exists right now in the United States. I don't see the number of submissions to festivals like Sundance or slam Dance really reducing that much. It means that the movies are there, and that's still the universe that I'm in. I enjoy big studio movies, I personally do not want to spend three or four years

of my life on one of them. To me, I'm doing something else now. Anywhere I've titrated myself away from producing films to launch a new company. But I enjoy working on independent films, maybe because it's harder. It's harder to make a movie with fifty people than five thousand people. It's harder to make a movie for two million dollars than two hundred million dollars. And

maybe I just enjoy that challenge. And I think I also enjoy the spirit of independent filmmakers and the creative ideas that come from the limitations that we face. You can't just throw money off the problem, and you don't have enough time, right you should be moving in twenty four days instead of one hundred and four days. It's a really different situation. How did the pandemic affect you? Pre pandemic, I had started a new company, and the company

that I've started is called Media U mediau dot com. And the concept of MEDIAU is that we need to put tools of storytelling, media making, filmmaking, streaming series, anything that happens on a screen. We need to put those skills and those tools into the hands of as many people as possible because the world gets better when more people have the capacity to authentically tell their stories and whether they are storytellers in front of the camera, behind the camera,

in the back office, doing data analytics on the streaming platform. It just makes it better when there are more voices that have those skills. And the media business has remained something that feels really impenetrable, really hard to get into. It seems like a giant wall without a door. How do you get in? And film school costs I don't know, but two hundred and fifty three, three hundred fifty thousand dollars, who's gotten that money, who wants

to take out those student loans? Who's got four years? How do we make that change? So we had started MEDIAU before the pandemic. The concept had always been that we were going to be a virtual remote training mentoring experience. We just tried to do a few things. Then the pandemic hit and

the barriers that people had to learning online evaporated. And so now as we have more things, more things, more courses, more opportunities for people those that disbelief that you can't do an online, you can do it online. Everybody learned how to do an online on faculty at the Business School at UC Berkeley, where are teaching the NBA program and a couple of other things.

Because I had started MEDIAU when we went to the pandemic, I immediately turned my courses into online experiences, not power points with narration, not somebody staring uncomfortably at the camera, try to read write experiences. And it was they were so good that the Business School sent many other faculty members to meet to say, here's how you do it, so you do it. And so the thing about MEDIAU is that when you take a course at MEDIAU, it's

not somebody with elbow patches lecturing at you. It is an experience. We are filmmakers. We make it exciting, we make it entertaining. We find that people binge watch our courses the same way they've binge watched the latest show on Netflix, because they're just fun and they're good, and they're all very practical. Everything that we do is practically focused. It's not film theory, although I love film theory. I'll go with anybody eyeball to eyeball, But

that's not what media does. MEDIAU believes that creative people who are motivated and work hard should be able to pay the rent with their creativity. That shouldn't be so hard. In the year twenty twenty three, it shouldn't be, and there is a global idea here. There's a lot of talk now about sustainability. We think about sustainability a lot. We think about social equity. We think about the quality of the society that we're living in. Why is

the world unsustainable right now? Why is their social injustice? Why is our society not of the quality that we wanted to be. It's because the stories that we have been told that resident in our heads, that form the patterns of the behavior that we follow without even thinking about it. Because those stories are unsustainable, because those stories are unjust, because those stories are about socially uncomfortable and inequitable situations. We change. We have to change the stories,

We have to change the narrative. Because the walls that we face as people, as creative people, socially, culturally seem to be so tall, so impenetrable, so thick, so dense of a kind of concrete that they cannot be broken down. But what does break them down? Empathy? And how do you scale empathy with story? And in fact it is a kind of

asymmetrical combat where we're the ewoks, but the ewoks can win. Yeah, it was very interesting going back and watching your head talk from thirteen years ago about the real culture wars and everything that you're saying at that time is still as relevant in twenty twenty three. Yeah, that was before I even had the idea for media you, but clearly I was thinking along the lines right. Yeah, that was remarkable. And your other ted talk how to know

your life purpose in five minutes, that was wonderful as well. I get emails every week from people. It's now what like years ago, nine years ago? It's back, but I get emails every week from people who have seen it. It's like you put forward five questions that people can answer, and they send me their answers. It's amazing. So you're running media you, you're working at the business school. You still writing a lot. I write business plans, I write decks, I write emails. You've got your

hands pretty darnful these days. I am. Yes. Are you still doing any producing? I actually just finished producing a movie we shot in Sicily in the fall. I really was stopping. I wasn't going to produce anything because MEDIAU demands time, and I know that I won't produce anything for at least

another year. Just producing more MEDIAU content which I am producing, but one of Media U's trusted counselors and advisors, a woman named MICHAELI Scolari, who was a producer herself, whom I've known for about a decade, wrote a script and about a year ago she gave it to me, and I'd really do not like to read scripts from friends, because usually they're terrible, and then I have to say, I really, you're a nice person, but please don't write any more scripts. I'm sorry, or maybe it's just not

for me. It's not you, it's me. I just didn't get it. But Michaela's script was brilliant, it was so good, and then she asked if I would produce it. Michael has never directed before. I like producing movies for first time directors like MICHAELA, like Julie Tamoor, like Joe Johnston, like John Turtle, tab like etc. Etc. And I said, yeah, I'd be happy too. So we just finished shooting it in

Sicily at the end of last year the end of twenty twenty two. We are finishing it now or starting our final mix in about two weeks, and I'm really happy with it. It's going to be a beautiful movie. It's called Sicilian Holiday. Are you on social media? Do you do a lot of updating? I have been off social media for the longest time because I don't know. I just Twitter is weird. Now Twitter is really weird. I saw that Elon must just declared NPR state sponsored propaganda media. So NPR

has stopped posting on Twitter. But in the past few months, I found TikTok and I'm loving TikTok. I think TikTok is really great. And what I've been doing recently is I did a you can do wet on TikTok where you look at someone else's video and you make some reaction to it. Someone had done a list of their favorite movies. They were top ten, and I didn't I liked some, I didn't link some, and I made this offan comment like you've got ten I don't know, like I got three hundred

favorite movies. And then I actually press send, and there was what happened in the comments, Hey Adam, what are your three hundred top movies? So I am in the middle of doing my top three hundred movies on TikTok. I'm backwards counting. I started number three hundred, which was Yellow Submarine and then moving all the way up to I will get to the top ten sometime in the next month. And no, I will not reveal now what they are. You have to wait. But that's been pretty great. That's

awesome. I don't tend to look at TikTok, but I will look at your TikTok. Check out my TikTok. And I've not put the top those top three hundred videos in a playlist. I'm doing ten per videos. It's going to be a total of thirty videos to get up to all the way through the top three hundred. And here's the crazy thing, Mike, and you would it would be the same for you because you're such a movie buff. I've left out movies I like three hundred, Like I couldn't even have

a hundred because that's crazy talk. There's so many more than one hundred movie I'm leaving out movies. I'm gonna have to videos about, well, I didn't put in that movie because you know, I don't know. I just doesn't resonate with for me that much now. But it's still a good movie. There's so many good movies because movies have been in existence for twenty one hundred thirty years. There's a lot of content. It's not as you and your audience knows. It's not just the US, it's all around the world.

Every country has a tradition of cinema, and my list is idiots more weighted towards English language movies and particularly in the earlier days, the Hollywood movies. But it's global because I love movies from all over the world and they teach me things and they give me windows on perspectives that I wouldn't otherwise see, which is one of the reasons that I love them. Mister Leipzig, thank you so much for your time. This was so great talking with you.

Mike, Thank you so much. It's been great talking with you. What a pleasure to talk with someone who loves movies and culture in the way that you do, and the generosity with which you ask your questions. And I know your audience can't see you, but the brightness in your eyes when you ask them the off

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