Film Critic and Film Historian Joseph McBride author of I Loved Movies, But...

Thanks for coming everyone. Um my name is Jordan Zorker, one of the librarians here at Golden Gate Valley and um we're here for a program with film critic and historian Joseph McBride who will discuss his career and the many major filmmakers he has known and written about. Uh also uh he'll be discussing his two most recent books. uh a new edition of his first published book, Persistence of Vision, a collection of film criticism, uh which uh was edited in 1968 for the University of Wisconsin Madison and an interview book on his career, I love movies, but conversations with Danny Perry. Uh McBride will also uh answer questions hopefully uh at the end of the program. And to give you more about his background, uh, Joseph McBride is a film historian and emmeritus professor of cinema department at San Francisco State University. So he's retired. Uh he has 26 books including biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, Steven Spielberg, three books on Orson Wells, a critical study and critical studies of Ford, Lubich, Wilder, George Cukor, and the Cohen brothers, and two books on the assassination of President Kennedy. Uh McBride spent six years playing the film critic Mr. Pister in Wells's The Other Side of the Wind. Uh, his screenwriting credits include co-writing the cult classic punk rock musical Rock and Roll High School from 1979 and five American Film Institute Life Achievement Awards including the tribute to John Houston for which McBride received a writer's guild of America award. Uh, so please welcome Joseph McBride. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for that nice introduction. and I really appreciate it. Good to see a couple more people showing up. Hey, great. Thank you for coming out on a Sunday and braving the marathon. I hope it was not too hard. Uh, great to have everybody here. I I thought I would be kind of informal and rather than wait till the end of the talk um if you have questions along the way I'd be happy to um talk to you about them because I I thought I would sort of focus on how I broke into the field of film history and uh film making when the field of film history was kind of new in America and uh so we were kind of in the formative years and uh it's it in some ways it's very different from today. Uh in some ways it's it was easy to get into film writing back then but in today there are more more ways to get in uh with um the internet and um different media etc and uh podcasts and all kinds of things and I know some of you I I know a couple people here and uh they've been in that field. Yeah. I'm kind of known for on on the internet movie database it says uh he's known for making his students read the elements of styles if this is some kind of weird thing >> and this this book is used in high schools and colleges all over the country you know like when when you go to Stanford my son went to Stanford all the freshmen have to read that book and the first day of the you know first day of school you go in the um the building the bookstore and they had giant piles of this book there. You know, it's really a great book. Uh but I got some flack for making students study language, but you know, I figured that's part of my job. But um yeah, I think in the uh IMDb it said um uh it said I was called a grammar Nazi by some of my students and I happened to see that I was in Germany. and my partner Ann and I were visiting some friends in Germany and they got very alarmed that what you're being called a Nazi and what is this I tried to explain it to them because they didn't know Seinfeld you know the subnazi or whatever it's called and I had to explain it but they didn't they didn't think it was funny so I had to go back and tell IMDb take that down this is insulting you know it took a while but anyway so little side bit but anyway I'd love to hear from you uh with questions about I like to encourage people to write about films, study film history and keep keep the you know as you get older in the field you want to help mentor people who come after you otherwise the field kind of will die and there's a kind of a der of uh uh interest in old films generally but there are people like us here who are very devoted to watching classic films and streaming like TCM and Criterion Channel and you know in some ways you can get more visibility uh of classic films than back in my day it was really difficult. I had to take a Greyhound bus to Chicago to see The Searchers for the first time and took another Greyhound bus to Chicago to see Chimes at Midnight for the first time. Orson Wells's best film and uh I read the plays on the bus. It's based on several Shakespeare history plays and and uh I thought I might never see this film again because it was getting very poor distribution. So I I sat through it three times in one night and it was a wonderful experience. And then the theater turned into a porno theater two days later. That was the end of that theater. Uh and I I remember thinking this is a Shakespeare's plays about King Henry IV, Prince Hal and uh Henry, he becomes Henry V and his companion Fallstaff Wells's greatest performance. And um it um when I saw the film, it was about half people from the University of Chicago because it was in that neighborhood, you know, intellectuals who knew Shakespeare and then about half old winos off the street and everybody loved the movie. The old winos got all the jokes there, you know, because Fallstaff is sort of the king of the winos. And he's, as well said, he's an early hippie, too. You know, this is 1967. So, everybody got off on it. And um I was thinking this film if properly handled could do very well with a mixed clientele you know and there's there's a wonderful book on Wells called Orson Wells Shakespeare and Popular Culture by Michael Andereg and he writes about he says Wells from I mean all through his youth he was doing Shakespeare as a teenager and then in his early days as a stage director and then he made Shakespearean films and uh but He would do Shakespeare on the radio with Jack Benny and Rudy Valley and those kind of shows would let him do Shakespeare for the masses and uh it became part of his um mission is to bring Shakespeare to the wider public and uh but he was also into what were considered low forms of entertainment like magic and vaudeville and circus and those kind of things that are not considered high art. And um so even when TV came along, Wells would do Shakespeare on the Dean Martin show, you know, which he would clown around and do some silly things, but Dean Martin would give him eight minutes to do Shakespeare and he would do some wonderful stuff. You can see some of it on YouTube. His Shillock uh he does Shillock's great speech, Hath Not a Jew Eyes on um Dean Martin, which is one of the best pieces of acting he ever did. And um he made up his fall staff on the air on the Dean Martin show. He he gets into character and then he does the speech about wine where false gives a great speech uh as Wells said it was the first commercial. You know, Wells was mocked at that time for being in commercial selling Palma's own wine, but Fallstaff was hawking Sheriff's sack, they called it. And uh so Wells didn't see a problem with high or low art. As Andre says, he was um the kind of thing he didn't do was middlebrow art. the kind of things that win Oscars and Emmy awards, you know, that are pretentious uh films based on best-selling novels or plays or whatever. And he didn't do that kind of thing. And people would then had trouble categorizing him. People love to categorize artists and and that's always a problem. But anyway, um, so I thought I'd tell you how I got into writing about films. And, um, I always made my own path because, um, I didn't like I had a great high school education from Jesuit priests at Marquette University High School. Brilliant man. And um, but then I went to Madison University of Wisconsin. And I was dismayed at the quality of the education. Um, partly due to the fact that my high my freshman English TA was Lynn Cheney, who was just as evil as a TA as she later became as second lady of the United States. She was this mean little TA, you know, can still see her face glaring at us from the end of the table. And so it really turned me off. I thought, geez, these these are really terrible teachers, some of these graduate students. And um so I dropped out. I I I think if I had stayed longer I you know I would have had the better professors eventually. And I but I was rebelling against the system and and everything about education. And um we only had three film classes back then and I took them all in short order. And um so I had to form my own u film curriculum and so I I I dropped out of school intentionally. I was actually expelled. I remember the dean called me in and expelled me and uh he was very regretful but you know I just said I just don't feel like coming to class. So he said well if you don't come to class we can't can't keep you in school. I said it's fine. And so but we had a tremendous uh cultural boon in those days in Madison. We had a we had 35 film societies. That was the period when film societies were the big thing that kind of helped uh film history along. All different kinds of films would be shown. Every night there'd be about 10 films you could choose from. So I'd see one or two and then I'd go home and work on my first book on Orson Wells because when I was in one of the film classes and I remember at September 22nd 1966 u Richard Burn who was a good teacher showed Citizen Kain and u it changed my whole life. You know, I tell students sometimes you don't know if you go to a certain class, your whole life can be changed. And this film, I was going to be a um a novelist and journalist. Um I' I've been a journalist since 1960. I sold my first article in 1960 when I was 12. And uh but I when I saw Kane, I thought, "No, I'll write movies and hopefully direct movies and write about movies." So that changed my life and I started writing a book on wells which took four years to write and uh by the end of it I got into a Wells film which was kind of a Walder Mitti experience. Uh in um 1970 I went to Hollywood for the first time after Wells I thought I'll do a book on John Ford who's my favorite director still is with and I enlisted my friend Mike Wilington to help me because he's a he was a brilliant uh critic and uh actor as well. He taught me a tremendous amount about acting and uh so we did this book together and I got an interview with John Ford who was very hard to get an interview with. Um he was very canankerous with interview interviewers as everybody knew. And so I I flew out to Hollywood in August 1970 and I I had um sent a letter to Jean Renwa asking to meet him. He was the other one of my three favorite directors and I didn't hear from him but when I arrived at my hotel I sent a telegram to Reno's house. I was when I was in Madison I met a recovering screenwriter is what I call myself too. But I met one guy in Madison who was recovering screenwriter. I said do you have any advice for me if I want to go to Hollywood and write films? He said just one word hutsp. And that was actually a great piece of advice and I pass it on to my students because great Yiddish word for boldness and you know kind of pushing yourself ahead. You have to do that in the film world because if you just sit there and wait for the phone to ring it's not going to happen. Um so people like Spike Lee I always hold up as an example and Hitchcock they're great self promoters. Everybody knows who they are and and uh they want to be involved with them. Um, so Renoir's wife, Dto called me at the hotel and said, "Come on over Wednesday afternoon." And, "Oh, thank you." And, um, I called Peter Bogdanovich. I got his phone number. And he had just made the film Targets, which very few people saw, which is a terrific debut film. And I saw it in Chicago during the Democratic convention in ' 68. During a break from protesting, getting chairged, I went to see targets and he was also writing interviews and articles about old directors and he did a book on Ford and I was trying to be like him. And so I called him and he said, um, I'm on the other line with Orson. Could you hold on? And I I never expected Wells to be in Hollywood. He was always in Europe in those years and you'd read little items in Variety that he was off in Yugoslavia doing something or whatever. And it turned out he was in town. He had come back in 1970 thinking with the new Hollywood uh and the studios were falling apart and younger people were getting chances to make avantgard films or experimental films and he thought there'd be a place for him and turned out there wasn't. Uh he was quite bitter about it actually because he thought um you know if you were a young filmmaker who had had almost no experience they'd give you a million dollars to make a film. But they wouldn't give him a job because he precisely because he had a track record and it was considered a bad track record based on lies that had been spread about him. One of the things I founded my research on Wells a few years ago, I was going through the RKO files and US government files on his film it's all true which was a film he made for the US government in Brazil in 1942 as a kind of good neighbor propaganda film and it was cancelled in the midst of production by RKO because they couldn't understand what he was doing. He was sent there to make a sort of free form documentary about Brazilian culture. And he was doing things that were antagonizing both uh the Brazilians and and uh people at Argale because he was mixing black and white performers, for example, which was a taboo in America. And in Brazil, they were getting nervous that he was focusing on minority groups too much. And uh he was shooting in the favllas, which were the slums overlooking the beautiful harbor of Rio. And the government didn't like that. They thought he'd be making a nice travelal log about how beautiful Brazil was. And he was making a serious film investigating their culture and some of their conflicts. And so, but what I found was he was fired for going over budget. That was the story they put out. And you keep reading this even today. He was a wasteful, extravagant guy down there and blowing money and hanging out in nightclubs all the time. And um I I got the actual financial records and I got the contracts. The um the budget for the film was 1.2 million. And when he was fired for going over budget, he had shot some he had they had spent something like 647,000 and then they tacked on overhead of like $180,000 or something. So he was uh 400 or 600,000 u under budget when he was fired for going over budget. And then I found transcripts of two phone conversations between RKO executives and I quote them in my book whatever happened to Orson Wells and they basically say um we don't want him to know how much the movie is costing. Can you imagine a director not being told how much his movie is costing? He never knew. Uh although I I did find in Peter Bogdanovich's interview book Wells said something like when I was fired we had shot only about half of the money that we were allotted. So he had some rough idea over the years what had happened but they spread this story and everybody believed it and um so you know they think he's this wasteful director and it cost him jobs for many years and uh um Charlton H who um was responsible for Wells making Touch of Evil uh said Wells was the most efficient director he ever worked for which is a high compliment especially coming from a guy like that and I found that to be true because Wells put me in this film at the end of my first week in Hollywood. So I met Wells, Renoir and and Ford and um Ford retired in the midst of my interview. He suddenly announced his retirement. I hope I didn't cause it. No, actually he had he kept saying to his secretary, "Has the gentleman from Italy called yet?" And have you heard from the man from Italy? And he kept asking this. I didn't know what that meant. So many years later when I went through all his papers I looked up in that period and his friend Woody Strode the actor was had become a star in Italian westerns and he was trying to get Ford an Italian western to direct and Ford was happy to do that and um he was waiting for a phone call from the Italian producer who was supposed to put up the money and what was happening at the time was he was realizing the phone call was never going to come through from this Italian producer so he then announced his retirement. It was rather moving. He he I apologize for asking stupid questions, I said, because he was very curt as he was with interviewers generally, but he was really giving me a hard time, but he would say wise things in the midst of pretending he had never seen certain films that he had directed and you know, all kinds of stuff like that. Um I tried to discuss Fort Apache with him. He said, "What's that? What's that?" And I said, "You know, the one with Henry Fonda." said, "Well, I don't know." Oh, the one with, you know, it's kind of a big battle scene. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, it's okay. You know, it made a lot of money. I said, "What do you think of the searchers?" He said, "It made a lot of money. That's the whole point, you know." Um, but he finally I said, "I'm sorry for asking stupid questions." And this is my first interview with a Hollywood person, the most difficult person to interview. And uh he said, "Well, it's not that." He said, "But all of you people come here and you ask the same questions." and I don't know how to answer them. And he said, "I'm just a hard-nosed, hard-working long pause." He said, "Ex director, and I'm trying to retire gracefully." And I was very moved by the fact that he was announcing his retirement. But that long pause was moving before he said ex director, you know. Um, but it took me many years to figure out why he chose that moment. But so at the end of the week, I was in this film that Wells was directing. He had just started. He was just starting. That was the first day of shooting. And Peter and I, Bogdanovich, were playing a couple of silly, squabbbling film critics. It was comical, improvised material. And uh some of it wound up in the film. The film took 48 years to finish. It came out on Netflix in 2018. Uh we worked, you know, I was one of the people who tried really hard to get funding to complete the film. And it was kind of like a relay race. Me and several other people were working on that for years. And the cameraman, Gary Graver, who's kind of the unsung hero of that film, did a wonderful job of uh shooting the film. It's a beautiful film. And his style is really strong in the film. I always said that uh the two Wells films whose style depended on the cinematographer as much as on Wells were Citizen Cane with Greg Toland and Gary Graver for The Other Side of the Wind. He was very influenced by their their styles. Gary had a very lyrical modern style and it's a very avantguard film. Even when the film came out in 2018, there were people who found the editing too fast, you know, and I thought at the time, how are people going to deal with this because the editing is going to be so fast? Back in 1970, you didn't have films like that. But anyway, it's um I so I spent five years, he kept calling me back to do more shooting and and um one of the crew said, "I'm the only member of the cast who visibly ages in the film." That's true. because it takes place in one day and night and I I age from 23 to 28 and I you know at that age you look a lot different in that span of time and um it's kind of eerie to see that. Um I interviewed Peter Oul once he said that to him was the most disturbing thing about acting was it it shows the process of aging. He said, "You see your body decay on screen is the way he put it." And he said there was a shot in Lawrence of Arabia. David Lean right before it opened called him up and said, "I need to do a couple close-ups. Come over." And he did he stood in front of a blue screen in some theater and they shot a couple of close-ups and Lean put them in the film. And well, Tulle said, you know, he went from what 32 to 35 or whatever he was in the space of a cut and then went back to 32. He said it was extremely bothersome to him, but um so when I see this film, it seems very strange to see myself as a young guy, but I was playing a spoof of myself as an earnest film critic, and that's what I was at the time. Very serious guy. And uh so I finished that book on Wells and I added a chapter on getting to act for him and I've written two more on him over the years. So he's the guy who got me into uh writing about films. I was so excited by his work. Uh and um in this book, I love movies. But uh it's a series of interview books with film critics and historians. We were asked to pick somebody we knew to interview us. and I picked uh Danny Perry who is one of our Madison film buff people. We had a really good group of about 25 people who went into the film world either as filmmakers or film critics and historians or teachers. And the most famous person in the group was Errol Morris, the great documentary filmmaker. I always say he was the last person I would have guessed would become a filmmaker, uh, an important filmmaker because he was this very nerdy, intellectual guy, not very, you know, um, he wasn't exactly shy. You could have a good talk with him, but he he was um, a bit reserved. He wasn't a flamboyant, swaggering person as the cliche of film directors was at the time. and uh but he's gone on to make extremely unusual films. And what I tell the students is uh Errol um was history major in Madison. And he dedicates um the fog award to the two history teachers in Madison who inspired him, Harvey Goldberg and uh what's the other guy? I forgot. Um, and then when he came to Berkeley, Earl came to Berkeley and sort of lived in the PFA and they let him kind of sleep there and he was kind of homeless and Tom Luddy took him under his wing. Tom Luddy, who is now dead, ran PFA and the Tellyide Film Festival and um, Errol studied philosophy at Berkeley. And so you can see in his films, they're about history and philosophy, you know. So when the students would complain, we have to take all these GE classes, you know, to I just want to take film classes and learn about loading cameras and stuff. And I said, well, your GE classes are the most important classes you're going to take because what are you going to make movies about otherwise, you know, history, take history classes, Shakespeare classes, uh, music, art, whatever. And, um, I learned that partly from Wells. One of the scenes we shot was at USC in 1971, Wells was um standing in for the director, John Houston, later played the director, the star of the film, and he was appearing at a college and we were all in the audience asking him questions. This scene didn't wind up in the film, but um some student said to Wells, uh um what do you think we should study to to become filmmakers? He said, "First of all, um, I wouldn't show you any films." And there, everybody kind of looked like, "What?" And he said, "You've all seen enough films. You've seen too many films." And the guy said, "Well, what would you teach?" And Wells went like this. He said, "I would teach the history of the world." And that that's great advice. And um he he didn't go to film school you know neither did Stanley Kubri or Woody Allen you know some of the best filmmakers didn't go to film school uh because one problem is there's a lot of uniformity in film making people you know especially like if you go to USC you it's a good way to get into the industry but it's all very uh conventional way of making films on the other hand they had certain people who were oddballs like George Lucas and went off and did his own kind of film um but took over the industry you know so anyway that's kind of how I got into film making and back then there were a lot of film magazines that were just starting like film heritage and film comment and film quarterly was in existence and that that's published by the university of California Berkeley and they've been in existence for a long time and I uh I I wrote for film heritage which was a little magazine that only paid like10 $10 an article, but the editor of film quarterly, Ernest Kalenback, wrote to me and uh said, "Would you send us some stuff?" So, I started publishing there. And then I I would send my things to Sight and Sound. And I started getting published there. That's another venerable good film magazine still going. The editor there gave me a good piece of advice that I give students. Um he said um you know when when you submit an article it's always to totally different from anything we get otherwise. He said when Bergman makes a new film he said we get 50 articles about it and we we probably will run one but when you submit something it's something nobody else in the world will think about and so we'll run it. And so I did an interview with Richard Lester when he was sort of not he hadn't been making films for a while and I was wondering what he was doing because he's a great director and I had a wonderful interview with him and that's my favorite director interview and uh but I caught him right on the cusp of his comeback, you know, and so when you're really out of the loop, it it's a great way to be influential because you're writing about things that people are ignoring, but suddenly you can you can be the one who discovers them. Like Mike and I wrote about The Searchers, the John Ford film in 1971, excuse me. And um nobody really was writing about that film and people didn't even know about it. And suddenly it became this cult movie and Stuart Byron wrote a piece in New York magazine. He called it the cult movie of the new Hollywood. and he listed all these important films like Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and other films that were inspired by the searchers. And um it it suddenly went from they sight and sound every 10 years has a poll of international critics for the greatest films ever made and the searchers made the list the following year because of our article and it's been on the list ever since. it's it's getting less influential as time goes on. But um so that's those are a couple practical things that I've learned. But um is there somebody have a question about in today's world I think for example you have um a lot more venues because the internet is full of uh opportunities and uh it's fashionable to dump on the internet but I I I'm a big fan of the internet. I think it's uh part of our freedom. You know, in totalitarian countries, one of the first things they try to do is shut down or control the internet when there's trouble, you know, in China or some place. And uh I guess the Biden administration and the Trump administration have gone after um internet providers, you know, and try to control them. U but it's it's a democratic way of um getting your thoughts around uh without much censorship. And then people say there's a lot of garbage on the internet which is true but uh there Sturgeon who's a famous science fiction writer was once at a party and some guy said what do you do and he said I write science fiction. And the guy said 90% of science fiction is crap. And he said 90% of everything is crap. And that's now called Sturgeon's Law, which is really true. So it's not a surprise that maybe 90% of the internet is crap, but 10% is really terrific. And uh you can have your own blog and there's some very good magazines like my friend Gary Morris has a magazine called Bright Lights which I've been writing for since 1979. And it started as a print magazine and then became a online magazine and he writes uh I mean he publishes very eclectic articles and he he lets writers pretty much say what they want. He doesn't interfere with doesn't try to rewrite them or anything which I appreciate. Um sort of the bane of my existence my whole life has been copy editors trying to rewrite my work when when it's not necessary. I'm fighting with copy editors, but when when they don't tamper with it, you're you're happy. Um, but you can start your own blog. And then, uh, podcasts are a great way to discuss films. And I'm on a lot of podcasts. Andrew has a podcast that he does periodically. And when he's not busy making a film, it's a great way to get your name around and um, have interesting discussions. and people good filmmakers and other people are good writers are happy to be invited to talk and make a lot of contacts that way right it's it's really good and um so you know but anybody can do these things and it's a great way to get started so the trick is to kind of get published and get noticed and like I said when I published two or three articles it sort of validated me and then I was able to get published by a more prominent magazine and it kind of went on from there but I wasn't trying to make money off it. I was very uh naive I guess but money has never been my goal otherwise I wouldn't have got into film making or you know one of the myths of Hollywood I was working for Variety for seven years so I know the realities of film making people go there because they think they're going to get rich but very few people in Hollywood uh even make a living and it's much worse now than it was back then you know very few jobs I feel sorry for my friends who didn't get out of the business back when I did. I I left in 1984 and I'm very happy I did because I could see the handwriting on the wall. Um in the 80s things went bad. Um but um when I went to Hollywood too, I I assumed that everybody went there because they love movies and this this proved to be completely untrue. Very few people were there because they love films. There are people like Spielberg or Lucas or Paul Shredder those kind of people and some of the guys like you know Nolan or um Paul Thomas Anderson or super film buffs uh but a lot of people in the film business don't know anything about uh film history. You know it's always dism or they don't know anything about history. I'd often read an interview with some actor and they'd say, u you know, I was cast in this movie about the Holocaust and I really knew nothing about it. So, I went out and did some research on it and wow, that's an interesting subject. And you know, you the Civil War, the Holocaust, and I thought, geez, how did you get to your stage in life and not know anything about the Holocaust? You know, I mean, wow. Um, but this is unfortunately true. Uh, but I I found that they went there for two reasons. One is sex and the other is power, you know, and those two are interrelated. Um, I remember there's I wrote a script when I went to Hollywood. I had a script I had written that I wanted to make Red Fox, a movie star. He was a great nightclub comedian in the black circuit. It was called the Chitlin Circuit. And he did these dirty records that were hilariously funny that I used to play. So, I wrote a script with Taylor to Red Fox. It was a good script. First good script I wrote. And um he was asked in there, "Oh, yeah." He said, "What's more important, money or sex?" And he says, "Uh, well, money because you if you got that, you can buy the other thing." And that's that's kind of the Hollywood attitude right there. He's being surgical. But, uh, another little thing, I had trouble getting the script to Red Fox. I finally met him at a party and um I said, "Could I send you the script?" He said, "Okay." And I said it and I'm still waiting for a response, you know. Um but I would mention him to producers and they'd say, "Red Fox." I mean, geez, the guy, you know, he hadn't made a movie at that point. And then he went on, he became this huge TV star, you know, and but it's a shame. And um so that script never got made. But anyway, I wrote a lot of scripts and uh par for the course. Some got made or partly made and some didn't. Um, the one that got made and turned out well is Rock and Roll High School, which became a cult classic. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, I was one of five writers and that I did five drafts. I created basically the plot and the characters and then they brought in some guys to redo the dialogue. So don't blame me for the corny dialogue, but it all works and it's a real kind of team effort. You know, some films are really the result of teams. And um but the craziest film project I wrote three for Roger Corman. I did one that was partly filmed. It was called Hard Time Aces, which is a pet project of his. He always wanted to make a um aviation version of the Seven Samurai and uh because he loves airplanes. So he called me in and um Robert Town had started working on the script and he quit after two days. That shows that he's a smart guy. But Roger wanted me to write Hart Time Aces and uh he said u get a print of the Magnificent Seven and rip it off. That was his his entire advice. So he got me a projector and apprented The Magnificent 7 and you know I tried to adapt it into a movie about aviators in 1946 in the Philippines left over from the war who fight a to defend some village against uh there was a revolution going on and they were fighting for the people against the corrupt generals, you know. And so the Filipino producer director who was going to make this film um well he gave me a treatment he wrote the first line said the naughty airplane takes off down the runway and I said what is the naughty airplane? He said well you know the bad guys the bad guys. Oh okay right. So, I had to make up this whole story and I I I was doing it um pretty quickly, but the producer called me. He said, "You got to send us shot breakdowns for the five big action sequences in the movie by 8:00 tomorrow morning by facts." And I said, "Well, I haven't even started writing the script. I don't even know the story line yet." And he said, "Doesn't matter." He said, "There's an air show tomorrow for the president of the Philippines, Marcos. You remember him? He was a dictator. and um they're doing a big air show and he said, "We we made a deal with the corrupt um head of the Filipino Air Force. He's putting $50,000 into the movie and he's letting us shoot u battle scenes at this air show without the president knowing that Roger Corman is filming this." So I I said, "Okay." So I stayed up all night and I I made up five action scenes, which kind of locked me into the way the story would work out. But you know, shot list, there would be like 10 or 20 shots that you have to get. And they said, "We have 500 guys in black pajamas and uniforms running around in little huts and we're going to drop bombs and stuff." And it sounded very crazy, but they apparently filmed this thing and they said, "We we'll send you the footage." And they never did, but it was filmed. And then um um let's see what happened after that. couple weeks later. Oh, they said you can slow down on the script because the guy who is putting up most of the money was scouting locations in a helicopter and it hit hit a power line and he was killed and you can slow down while we're trying to find more money. So, I did that and then I was worried. They wanted me to go up in the airplane to direct the actors because the director was couldn't speak English very well and he was a idiot, you know. And I really didn't want to be up on an airplane directing. Robert Conrad was supposed to star in this thing. And um I thought people would be killed making this film and I didn't want to be part of it. And um so then they said, "We got another guy who's putting up the money. Hurry up and finish the movie." And so I was writing away and they said, "Okay." Then they called me, "Oh, a typhoon just hit the Philippines." And this guy owned a lot of mango plantations and uh the the typhoon blew all the fruit off his trees and and that's the end of the movie. So I was secretly relieved. But that was the most insane film project that I had. But that's the kind of fun stuff that happens when you're a filmmaker. I was actually very happy that didn't get made. But the fun part I was when I wrote five AFI shows and I got to work with all kinds of great stars and directors and people from the golden age at Hollywood that younger uh people like me wouldn't have had the chance to work with otherwise. So really had a good time. Um I thought I might show just a few film clips if you're interested things that influenced me when I was starting. Um Citizen Canain was my textbook. I watched it over and over. The Magnificent Amber's became my favorite film and it still is his second Hollywood feature based on the Puliter Prizewinning novel by Booth Tarkington. And it's such a unusual way of telling the story. I'd never seen a film like this before. And it's it's um very personal to Wells because he grew up in the Midwest and his father was the model for the Eugene Morgan character played by Joseph Cotton. His father was a a businessman and inventor and playboy kind of character like Eugene Morgan. And uh so Wells had a great sense of nostalgia for the Midwest, but his his nostalgia was also critical. The main character of this film, Tim Holt, wonderful performance, I think. But I was just thinking how crazy it is that he used to get ridiculed and attacked by people for giving a bad performance. His performance is perfect. It's just that he plays an unlikable character. People aren't used to seeing an unlikable central character in an American film. But anyway, let's watch part of it. And this is the the line, by the way, that you'll hear from Wells narrating over the long shot of their mansion to me is the most beautiful piece of narration in in movies. The way he reads this line was such feeling. And then he this is the the ball at the Amberson mansion which Wells said was the greatest tour to force in my career. And when the studio mutilated the film, uh they he had a track and shot that went on for three or four minutes following the characters around the ballroom and they they made a couple of huge cuts in it in the middle and the end of it and but it's still the choreography and the movement is so graceful and beautiful in this film and it's all post sync by the way. Uh but the his use of sound and music is just uh one of the things he brought to films from the radio. So let's uh watch this scene that influenced me a lot. But he said in ter he said in terms of moving the actors in the camera I believe I have no peer and he was not modest but he was correct. Um the the choreography is amazing and you know that's product of his theater background. Uh but he the way he does the soundtrack is so beautiful too with the overlapping dialogue and the characters coming in the foreground or whatever the side. Yeah. A great way to learn is to just watch a lot of great films by great actors, directors like Wells, Cucar, Max Ols, those are the people. There's one other one I think that's in that category. But um yeah, when I was on variety, I had to review all different kinds of films from I did mostly B movies because our main I was the second string critic most of the time and he hogged all the big movies. And um so I I wrote a lot of very negative reviews. I met John Wayne's secretary once. I don't know. I went into their office and she said, "Oh, you're that mean critic." I thought, "Wow, John Wayne secretary thinks I'm mean. That's interesting." Uh I guess I called it spade a spade when I was um writing about acting. Um it is I mean I have a lot of sympathy for actors because you know they're emotionally exposed. Well said actors are the most important people in film making. And when I said that in my film classes, people were scandalized because um you know at our school when I came there the student movies, the photography was good, the sound was good, but the acting and the writing were horrible. And I stopped watching these movies after a while because it was just so painful, you know. And so I I was on a curriculum committee and I said, "We need a course in directing actors." And they shot me down immediately. Like they think actors are these spoiled people who have caravans and you know cocaine in their trailer. And I mean they just had contempt for actors at our school because they thought the director was God you know which is crazy. But um uh also well we did start having more courses in screenwriting and Andrew and you took uh screenwriting classes but uh the actors Welsh just loved actors and one of the things that he said was he said I make love to the actors and he meant making their life happy when they're working and he did that. Um he he told you when you see movies in which he's a character and he pops up as a character in a number of films they're always wrong because they they always show him as this ogre who was glowering and mean and that's not the way he was at all when he made films. Uh he had moments of harshness but he was generally trying to make life fun for the actors. He would tell funny stories. He would uh kid around. He would listen to people. He'd take ideas from anybody and he could turn on a dime if somebody had a suggestion or a problem. You know, he would come up with a better solution right away. And he would even sing songs. There was a play from his prep school 1927 play called Finesse the Queen. And he would sing the title song from Finesse the Queen every once in a while. And he had pet phrases he would use. like when he wanted a close-up, he would use a line that Paul and Negri, the silent movie star, had used when she wanted a close-up. She'd say, "Now, a big head of pola." So, that was his line for a close-up, you know. And um he another line he loved was just remember that your heart is God's little garden. I don't know what that meant, but he has John Houston. John Houston says that to me in the in the film. You're supposed to pinch my cheek. I was waiting for that moment. That was my big moment with John Houston. But when it came to shoot it, he wasn't there. And I said to one of the crew guys, "Where is John?" And he said, "Oh, he's off in Morocco shooting some little film." And turned out to be the Manor would be king, which is this masterpiece. And so they had a young guy doubling John Houston with a safari jacket. He was standing on an apple box and he didn't pinch my cheek. But Wells filmed a huge close-up of me and then later huge close-ups of Houston. And the editor, Bob Morowski, did a great job of making it look like we're actually interacting, but he didn't pinch on a cheek. I always miss that. But, um, he he was tough on the crew. Uh, he was a perfectionist, and the crew was mostly young guys from like 19 to 25. There were two women and um one of them was the script clerk, the supervisor and I was sitting next to her once and he ordered her never to speak to him again because he kept the continuity in his head but it was kind of hard for her to sit there and you know she'd write notes but she wasn't allowed to say Orson you know they're crossing from the wrong direction or something but um but anyway uh he he made it fun for the actors And Joseph Cotton said, "There is no performance in any Wells film that I've seen where you can where where the actor was not relaxed and having a good time." And you can kind of feel that from watching this. And Tim Holt was, you know, a cowboy actor, a good solid professional, but not a star. Um, but he went on, he was in four great movies. He's in Stage Coach. He's in um Treasure the Sarah Madre and My Darling Clementine. But then Wells said he made this decision to stay in Western B movies his whole career and he had a very happy time doing that. Um but in this film I I was reading a clipping from the LA Times was on the set of this film and at one point Wells said to Tim Holt, "Don't act, don't act." He said, "That's like movies." He said, "Do it again. Don't act." And I was very happy because he would say that to me every once in a while because I was a non- actor. I was I mean I'm not Tim Holt was a very solid actor but I I had no technique you know so I was just being myself but that's tricky thing to do on screen. I had to I was like a slave to Wells. Other people he had he let free more than me. But with me, he would tell me every gesture and every, you know, turn your head this way, turn your head. I I couldn't do anything that he didn't tell me to do. And I was happy because I needed help, you know. And he would also do line readings. And he would always preface it by saying, "It's a terrible thing for a director to give an actor a line reading, but and then he would give you a line reading." And most professional actors would be offended by that. But I was thrilled because, you know, I needed to know how to say the line. And um um but don't act was a good uh good line for me, you know. Um but um in this scene here the you can imagine a huge crane with 12 people pushing it that weighed 2,000 lbs and all the lights of you know the deep focus lighting you can see all the way in the background and all the extras and the the timing of the movements of the actors when they come in with the line it's just amazing. Wells's films uh when I met him in 1970 he surprised me. He said movies should be rough. And I was kind of shocked because Citizen Kane is the most perfect gemlike film, you know. And um but over time he he had to go to Europe. He was blacklisted in the US and he started making films on his own in Europe with his own money or money he could put together. And when he came back to America for the last 15 years, he made the movies with his and Oya Kodar's own money. Oya was his companion. And um they got a little financing from unfortunately the Iranian government and caused a lot of political problems for the other side of the wind. At one point the Ayatollah when they had the revolution the Ayatollah sent agents to the French uh producers's office trying to confiscate the film and uh as property of the royal family because the producer was the Sha's brother-in-law and uh the the line producer thought very quickly and she said oh you know I happened after a tax bill from the French government for the film and um here I'll give it to you. you guys have to pay this for us before you can get your hands on the film, but then you can have the film. And the kind two guys kind of looked at each other and said, "Uh, well, we we'll get back to you." And they left, you know, so that was pretty smart. Um, but uh he made movies on his own and he said uh there's no pleasure in the world like dealing with a Hollywood crew. I mean, these people are experts and everything, you know. And um I asked him about the opening shot of Touch of Evil, which you may remember, one of the most famous shots. It's this three and a half minute dragon shot. And um Russell Medi was a cinematographer, a great cameraman he worked with a number of times. And he he shot Douglas Cirk films. And he won his only Oscar for Spartacus, the Kubri film, although Kubri really shot that himself because he didn't get along with Medie and he kind of muscled him aside. But um I said, "Who is the boom operator?" Well, the the camera operator was Phil Leup, who later became an important DP. But I said, "Who is the boom operator?" And he said, "John Russell." He brought him in. He was another lighting cameraman. He shot Wells's McBth, for example, and he shot Psycho. And uh very underrated. So he had three great cinematographers for that one shot, you know. But he said, "Everybody talks about the opening shot of uh Touch of Evil, but he said to me, "The greatest use of the moving camera in the history of the cinema." And he mentioned the first interrogation scene when the suspect is being interrogated in the apartment. And I I must say I didn't even realize that that was all one shot when he mentioned this. And it's five and a half minutes long. And when he came back to Hollywood, he got a chance to direct a Hollywood film because Charlton H used his clout to get him to do Touch of Evil. So they were all kind of wary, you know, the executives were worry about Wells. So the first day of shooting, he he quickly did one simple shot of somebody looking out a window. And then he began laying out this five and a half minute tracking shot. and he had rehearsed with the actors at home for about two weeks, I guess. And they all worked for no money because they were when you worked for Wells, you didn't do it for the money, you know. John Gilgood didn't get paid, so I didn't ask for money. Um, but anyway, so he uh started rehearsing this and then lunch came and they took lunch and they still hadn't shot anything. About 3:00, guys started showing up around the corners of the sound stage in suits. the the assistant director had tipped off the front office of Wells wasn't rolling the camera and um so they were getting really nervous and then they they rolled the camera at something like 5:30 and they did three takes and they had 60 camera movements and they had about seven actors and then the lighting uh cast shadows of these guys on the wall and the ceiling you know and very complicated choreography and finally at 7:05 I think it because Wells called rap and they had got the first first scene in the can and he said we're two days ahead of schedule and uh after that he said they left him alone because they were very impressed and he he did that to kind of make a point and then many years later when Touch of Evil was restored I I worked on this restoration the producer of the restoration called the guy who was the head of the studio who was very hostile to Wells back then, Ed Mole. And he said, "Well, weren't you impressed the first day when he shot, you know, five and a half minutes in in one day." And he said, "Oh, Orson, what a showoff." He said, "So, he wasn't even impressed by that." But, um, he was very good with actors. I mean, he would he wouldn't make you do a line that wasn't right for you, you know, and and what he did with me was unusual. He he said in an interview back in the 60s when he did this film um he was going to cast what he called personages, people who had some kind of a role that public role, you know, and he said everybody would play versions of themselves. And so he cast me as a version funny version of a young director who asks irritating film buff questions of John Houston. And so for every scene I was in, he would ask me for about an hour, what would you ask him? What would you say to him? And I would throw out lines and he would reject some and then a few would intrigue him and then he would say, "Oh, that's good." And then he'd start typing it and he would rewrite it to make it sound more pompous. And uh so I collaborated with my dialogue. And I thought the whole cast was going to do that because he said originally he was going to have everybody do that. But apparently I was the only one who did that for every every uh scene I was in. And um um it helped because I was not an actor. But it's funny when they did the final editing, they had lost the original sound for a lot of the shoot. Everything in 1974 was lost. But Wells had made a Duke copy of the film and and they they had the guy who did the sound on Schindler's List and he won an Oscar and he he was the one who made the dialogue work from this um copy that Wells had made, you know, but they called in um I was the only like living actor who was left to dub in my lines. They had what they call soundlike actors. They're that's the whole job in Hollywood. They have these people who make a point of sounding like famous people. Danny Houston did a lot of his father's lines. He can imitate his father pretty well. Although the editor said Danny can do for a line or two, it sounds just like his father. But if she does three lines, you can tell it's not his father, you know. So, they had some problems with uh how to cut that. But with me, they had me redub my lines. I think I did 17 lines uh over again. And I said to I was down there to look at the rough cut and give um advice and they said, "Oh, would you come in this other room and dub some lines?" And I said, "Well, geez, you know, this is 48 years later and I I used to smoke and I'm a lot older and uh will it match?" And the guy said, "Yeah, I think you know, you sound about the same." And he said, "If you don't uh we'll fiddle around with the sound, you know." So I all I did was I raised my voice a little higher like my voice you know when you get older your voice gets deeper and uh I I you can't tell but I got a chance to redo my line readings which was nice because I learned something over the years you know and um but the last dubbing I did was in Berkeley at the the old Salance studio the editor was in LA and I was in Berkeley and um there's I had a complicated scene where I have to get on a bus and talk while I'm walking on the bus turning and walking down the aisle and I'm talking to Paul Stewart who's in the seat there. He's the guy who played the butler in Citizen Kane. He he told me a great story about Citizen Kane. You'll love this. That this should have been the in the movie about the making of Kane Arao 281. He did his first scene ever in the movie was the scene in that introduces him. He's the butler at Xanadoo. And there's a closeup of him and he's in shadow and he lights a cigarette and his face kind of lights up and he says, "Rose bud. I tell you about rose bud. How much is it worth to you?" And um he said, "Wells, right before they did the shot, leaned over to him and said, "Paul, just remember when this scene is shown on the screen at the Radio City Music Hall, your face is going to be 40t high." And he I guess he was trying to get Paul to tone it down. And Paul said that was the absolute worst direction he could have given him. It terrified him, you know, his first line in the movie. And he they rolled the camera and he he couldn't remember his line. So he said, "Goldberg, I tell you about Goldberg, how how much is it worth?" And they all roared and laughed. That would be a great scene in in the movie. Why didn't they have this? But anyway, so Paul is talking to me and and uh I could walk and I could talk, but I couldn't walk and talk at the same time basically as an actor. I didn't have that ability and I didn't quite know how to turn and you know, real basic stuff. So Wells was exac exasperated by my acting. He turned to Paul. He said, "Paul, you tell him how to do this." And Paul had worked with him in the radio rehearsing all the actors for every show and he was a TV director. And he gave me very succinct directions. He said, "You say this, you stop, you pause, you turn here, you look at me, you turn away, you do that, you know, I mean, just very mechanical stuff." And so I did the scene in one take. And Wells started calling me one take pister. He thought, "This is great." And but anyway, then we dissolved forward 48 years and and um I'm supposed to redub my dialogue in that scene. And uh the editor wanted me to do some kind of a pause that I hadn't done in the original version. I said, "Doesn't that seem a little odd?" And he said, "Well, trust me, it's something has to do with the rhythm of the editing that I'm doing." And so I trusted him and I did the line, but I had to do it 18 times to get it correct because it was like three lines or something. And um he rol he finished. He said, "Okay, congratulations. This is a historic moment. This is the end of the dubbing on the other side of the wind. And I said, "Do you realize it took three directors to get that line rating? Orson Wells, Paul Stewart, and Bob Morowski." And Bob said, "Well, that tells you something about the the performance, doesn't it?" I said, "Okay, well," and he said, "I'm just kidding. You know, the actor doesn't I was just reading a quote from somebody about Bogart, Robert Sherwood, I guess, was wrote about Bogart in his prime. He said it sounds like he wrote his own scripts. You know, he was so natural. That's the height of movie acting, but people misunderstand movie acting because they think great movie acting is people crying and waving their arms. The kind of stuff that wins Emmy awards, you know, really bad performances. And the best actors tend to go underrated like Carrie Grant or John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart. And I mean, they may have followings, but people don't cite them as great movie actors. But, you know, sometimes the best movie actors don't seem to be doing anything. There's a famous story, Gary Cooper was a great movie actor and uh one time uh he was sitting in a chair asleep and u the director told the cameraman to get a closeup of him and then he said, "Gary and Gary Cooper woke up and he cut that into the movie." And then Amal Yannings who is this famous German actor won the first Oscar as best actor but he was very flamboyant and stage actor and all that but he he looked at that scene he said that man is a great actor. He he did the waking up so beautifully. How did he do that? You know that tells I mean that to me says something about what what is good movie acting. It's just behaving and and not overdoing anything. But Wells kind of disagreed. He said uh um people say that James Kagny or he said people say that overacting is bad in movies but he said look at James Kagny he's everything he does is big you know it could be read from the back of the balcony his performances are large but he said they always seem true everything he does is true so he says he's about as good as they come you know and then on the other extreme is Spencer Tracy doesn't seem to be doing much but he's a great actor too So, I guess it's authenticity is what counts and I you don't know when you're reviewing a movie if it's the script or the director or the actor. You hope that they they all kind of contribute to that. But, um I learned a lot about writing about actors from Mike Wilmington who is my collaborator on the Ford book. You know, he was I directed him in a The zoo story and I directed him in a film too and learned learned a lot about what was good movie acting and but then when I did a book on George Cucor a few years ago who was a another great movie great actors director um he was very hard to write about because he didn't seem to have an identifiable style or themes although he actually does if you get into it but I thought why not write about him through his actors. because he believed in expressing himself through his actors. So I wrote about 65 performances that he helped create and I did essays on each one and I was able to use my knowledge of um acting to analyze the performances and I think I did a good job. I was really worried that could I do this and then it turned out to be easy to write actually you know but I guess that's about all I can say. It does help to have been an actor I think to be a critic to be a good actor you know when I met Renoa I just I wanted to be a director then and I said what's your advice on how to be a director he said try a little acting great advice and two days later I was in an Orson Wells film you know when you're u I mean I've seen a lot of plays I used to review plays too which actually was great experience as a critic you know I I reviewed the three sisters five times everybody keeps doing that play, you know, and I' I'd see all different kinds of actors, some bad, you know, but in each each production there'd be at least one good actor you could watch, you know, but um you do have to project to to uh so people in the back can hear you. I mean, now they use microphones. I remember I went to see Katherine Heppern in uh Coco, her musical in Chicago, and it was this huge theater and I had cheap seats way in the back and she was this tiny little speck and I could hear her because of the amplification, but it was disappointing. I couldn't really see her face, you know. I I think you I I only like plays when you can see the face of the actors. I I then I went to see her in Westside Waltz on stage in New York, which was hardly a play at all. was just kind of like spending two hours with Katherine Heeper and sitting around with a couple people. But that was fun. And um but I was in the first row and I got to really see her performances. But she had a kind of a large personality and that comes across. But she was just herself and she was always real I think you know and um um uh I I think Wells maybe his point is well taken. Authenticity is what matters. If somebody has a flamboyant personality that can work really well in a film. On the other hand, if you say like Will Frell who is, you know, like in Anchorman was very funny playing this silly character, but um if you want a different kind of performance out of him, okay, you know, you can get it. Um but then why do you cast him as opposed to some some person who is known for being subtle? But that can work really well. you know, Wells had this um knack for casting unusual people and eclectic casting like in Amberson's, you know, this be movie cowboy actor playing the lead. And Anne Baxter, who was 20 years old at the time, played Lucy. And one thing I love, Andre Bazan, the great French critic, wrote a famous piece about deep deep focus. He loved deep focus cinematography as opposed to montage. And you could see Wells used long takes and um but in this piece about deep focus he said what he he really took away from that scene was Anne Baxter's beatotific smile and I thought that's a great lesson for film critics is what do you remember in a movie is some piece of behavior you know or somebody's wonderful smile and she's with this kind of arrogant fool but she's very self-possessed and has this kind of grace and beauty, you know. Um, then you have the old major Amberson, Richard Bennett, who by that point couldn't remember lines. And Wells just loved him. He he loved old people. That's one of the nicest things about Wells. He just loved old actors and he just This was the height of Richard Bennett's life, you know, that Orson asked him to be in a film and and he just couldn't remember the lines. But, you know, they would do scenes where they would feed him a line and then he would say it and then, you know, that's one reason they post synced a lot of the film. But this this had to be post sync because they were shooting on a sound stage that was old and bumpy and they had this huge crane making a lot of noise. So, that all the dialogue was post-sc. But, uh, um, Agnes Morhead gives one of the greatest performances ever in a film. If you see this film, it'll just knock your socks off. This film is has been horribly mutilated as you may know. 50 Minutes was cut from it and they reshot parts of it and um uh there is a search going on for the lost print. I'm in a documentary called The Lost Print. Josh Gberg is searching. He has a theory that the the uncut version might have been left behind in Brazil because Wells had the copy down in Brazil. And I don't know, he isn't telling people if he found it or not. He probably hasn't, but stranger things have happened. Uh, one thing I find in film history is I think you have an obligation to help rescue films. And I've I've discovered some films like I discovered through my professor Russell Merritt. He said, you know, Wells made a short film before Cain, the Hearts of Age, and he said it's at the Greenwich, Connecticut public library. So I went there and saw this student film that he had made with another guy, and I wrote about it. And then the Library of Congress preserved it and you can see it on YouTube now. And and I discovered 10 Frank Kappa war World World War II films at the National Archives when I was researching him and dozens of John Ford war movies that nobody knew about. And um you know that's part of your job. So Amber's you know finding a film like that would be it's like the holy grail. But um somebody found a print in South America of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It was 30 minutes longer than the version we had and um they restored the film accordingly. And um another crazy thing, The Passion of Jonavar, one of the great silent films. They found the director's cut in a Danish mental hospital. They had rented the film. The the negative burned up while they were editing it. Somebody had a cigarette and the negative burned up. So the film was put together from outtakes and everybody thought it was one of the greatest films ever made. But they found the somehow the directors got in a Danish mental hospital that some priest had rented in 1928 or something. So there are these things out there, you know, John Ford films keep getting rediscovered is silent films. I'm part of somebody just sent me one from uh Brazil, I guess, a film called The Scarlet Drop, which I've seen a bad copy of it, but they found a better copy in their archive, and I haven't had time to watch it yet, so I have a John Ford film to watch. Any other questions? Any questions about um anybody tempted to write about films? Selling them is the is difficult. I, you know, one thing I always try to tell my students now, and I I'm more interested in this than I was when I was younger, is minimalism and cheapness. Um, and maybe that's from studying wells and working with Corman. Um, I I'm really sick of movies costing 200 million or $300 million. It just seems insane. Um, but you can make a good movie for almost nothing, you know, today with digital cameras. All you need is a camera, which anybody can get their hands on. As I tell people, if you can't afford to buy one, you know, find somebody who has one and and you know, make that person your director of photography. And then you don't have to pay the actors. But what you should do is there are books you can find contracts in the back. make out a contract with the actors that if the film sells, they get 1% or 2% or whatever so they don't feel totally ripped off. Uh, but you can get crew people to work for credit. Everybody needs credit. When I was in Hollywood, they used to say actors need a piece of film. That was back in the 70s and 80s that some actress would hope that she had like a three-minute scene in some TV show that she could show people and show that she could act and then they'd hire her for the next for, you know, better role. And now you can do that. I mean, that's a good reason to do a student film is you can show that to people and say, "Look at what I can do." You know, and if you're a good actor, there are a lot of good actors all over the place. It's like in I saw a film. There was a student film that was just great called Monsters After Midnight that a student made. It was about a lonely woman in San Francisco who was like 27 and she would come back at home after working in some dull job and turn on the horror movie at night at midnight and the monsters would start moving into her apartment with her. It was really clever. And so she had these really interesting monsters made up, you know, and u it was a wonderful movie. And of course, you know, our committee that picked student films to show in the finals rejected it because it was too entertaining, I guess, you know. Uh which violates our number one rule, bore bore people out of their minds. Um but a few years later, I I called that student. I said, "Could you bring Monsters After Midnight to show my screenwriting class?" She said, "Oh, I don't have it anymore." more. And I said, "What? You don't have it? What happened?" She said, "I don't know. I mean, it I don't know. It fell apart or something or she lost parts of it or it's really tragic. I mean, one thing I learned really early is make copies of what you're doing." My dad worked in Milwaukee Journal and he was in World War II and he had a friend who was in World War II and those guys, a lot of them were trying to write their World War II novel, you know. And this guy was, he had spent like 16 years writing a novel about World War II. And then his house caught fire one night. And he said, "I have to decide whether I'd save my novel or save my wife." So he saved his wife and the novel burned up. A horrible story. But then he he spent another year or two and he rewrote the novel kind of from memory and and he got it published. It was called Rainbow because he was in the rainbow division. So that had a happy ending. But um you know um when I was doing my Frank Capra book uh you know I often write in the wee hours of the morning when it's quiet and I would put the pages in the trunk of my car at 6:00 in the morning in case the house burned down, you know. And I always make dupe copies. Now you have the cloud where if you put stuff in the cloud and your house burns down, you could still retrieve them, you know, but I still make discs of uh stuff and put them in trunk of my car or somebody or somewhere um just in case. So don't ever say I lost my film or something. But so so much of film history has been lost. Like 90% of silent films are lost, which is tragic, you know. And right now too with digital cinema, a lot of what is being made will be lost because it's a very fragile medium. People are not really aware of this. And I I've talked to archavists who told me this is true. Um digital stuff has to be migrated to new um machines every few years because the technology keeps changing. And so these archives have to keep buying these machines and then they have to keep re-recording it which takes up a lot of time and um a lot of films will disappear. And I I've heard this story a lot and the Wall Street Journal just did a feature on it that the movie Toy Story 2 which was a huge hit gross $435 million or something. They were going to put it out on u home video and they they found out that somebody had erased the master at the Pixar studio and they were freaking out. What? We don't have this movie. And finally some woman said, "Oh, you know, I made a copy of it and I took it home with me and that's how the film survived." And it it it explained it. It was during well I don't know if it was during co or not but she was she had just had a baby and so she was working out of her home and that's why she had the film on her home computer but otherwise this famous film would be lost. I mean it's shocking. So Spielberg when they restored Jaws and also another thing in films is the most successful films are the ones that are usually in the worst shape because they print them so much. So Jaws was in terrible shape and they did an expensive restoration and Spielberg insisted that they make um a film copy to save because film stored properly will last about 200 years. But digital cinema, who knows, you know, um you might not be able to play it. Like you you see when you're on your computer sometimes you try an old file and it says you can't access it because it that's a new operating system or something. A film that means an awful lot to me also is Fort Apache, the John Ford film. How many people have seen this? This film had a gigantic um effect on my life. Um in 1967, I saw this. I was already familiar with Ford, but this this when I was a kid, I used to watch a western on TV every day at 4:00 in Milwaukee. And um I kept noticing the Indians were always losing. And I kept wondering, why are these Indians always losing? what's what's going on here? This seemed crazy to me. And I thought I' I'd really love to see a film and wish they'd win for a change, you know. And um I had no idea of the whole historical reason for this or cultural reason why they were demonized. And um one day I came home and the Indians won and I was ecstatic and I don't know what what film it was. It could have been Fort Apache. It's one of the few westerns in which the Indians win. And it's um and not only do they win, but they're the heroes of this film, which is amazing. Most people don't even realize this today because you read about Broken Arrow being the film that supposedly uh inaugurated the cycle of pro-Indian films, but that's actually not as sympathetic to Native Americans as as this Ford film. Um, but this film got me interested in John Ford and it's based loosely on the Kuster uh story. And I asked Ford about Kuster. I had a little trouble getting him to comment. He finally said, "Why don't you ask me about Kuster? That was a pretty goddamn silly expedition." He said, you know, and u he tried to make a movie about Kuster in the 30s called Glory Hunter, which was the title of a novel that came out then that was debunking his myth. And we now see Kuster as this, you know, vain glorious kind of crazy guy who was leading his men into a massacre that was not necessary. And um but Hollywood was making films glorifying Kuster and so Ford couldn't get his anti-Custer film made. So he decided to fictionalize it and he had Henry Fonda play a character who is Kusterlike but has a different biography etc. And John Wayne plays his subordinate in the cavalry and he's the guy who is sympathetic to the Indians somebody we we identify with and that goes against the cliche of John Wayne being anti-Indian. Um, and I could tell you about some stories about that, but um, this film just knocked me out. And here's a scene with Coochis, played by Miguel Inclan, who is a well-known Mexican actor. He's in Buunwell's Los Alvidados, has a really important part in that film. Um, Frank Nan wrote the script for this and he was, this is the first script he had produced. He was the New York Times film critic and they brought him out to Hollywood and Ford became friendly with him and um they did 10 films together and I interviewed Ford's research assistant Katherine Clifton and she told me she thought Ford hired her just he needed somebody to talk to about books because nobody read books in Hollywood. And his main interest in life he told my friend Gavin Lambert in 1961 was the Civil War. And Gavin thought he was joking, but he he was telling the truth. That was his main interest. So she said he Ford would give her like 10 books in the Civil War and say, "Go home and read these and we can talk about them." And she cataloged his books. He had 6,000 books and she made a little booklet where he could find the books. and and um anyway, but she I asked her about the research that Nent did because Ford Nent said Ford had him read 50 books for background on this. And he said, "I've always uh you see the cavalry in a western, they just ride in and attack the Indians and that's about it." But he said, 'I want to show their life at the fort, you know, their families and who these people are and and u so it's a very it's a film that deals a lot with women. Um you know, westerns are not known for I mean most people think women are not uh prominent in westerns, but that's just not true. They're very important in westerns generally. And um Nent um but anyway, Katherryn Clifton said Mrs. Kuster's three books helped them a lot because she filled in a lot of the cultural um and social dimensions of uh life on the frontier. Um so let's watch the scene where Fonda Henry Fonda plays a great hard ass in this movie. It's the last film he did before he went off to New York to be in Mr. Roberts for seven years. He plays a very um shockingly racist uh martinette of a commander. And Ford got away with this. I'll just say one more thing. Some somebody wrote a letter to Ford that I found in his papers. And this woman said, "Why are you making just westerns now that you've come back from the war?" And he he said, "Well, frankly, um you can deal with subjects in westerns you can't deal with in contemporary films like racism and and other things like that. Genocide. This film was a film about genocide and u you know nobody cared about western so nobody paid attention and he didn't get a lot of grief from the studios or the sensors um nobody cared no nobody noticed but I I'm still writing about this film it's a really important film so you can see John Ford had the greatest eye of any filmmaker I think literally he was a oneeyed guy um his his vision visual style was stupendous, but um the script is great and it's it's a very sympathetic portrait of Coochis. And uh um one thing Ford did to avoid the usual cliche of having the Native American characters speak pigeon English. He hadn't speak Spanish, which is uh historically accurate that the Apaches were bilingual in Spanish and uh and their language. And uh so he had um Pedro Aranderas be the translator who's a he was the biggest star in Mexican cinema, the biggest male star and Ford cast him partly to get you know box office in Mexico but he became a a favorite actor for Ford. He was in um I think three Ford films and he's wonderful actor and but he he gets to translate and then you see John Wayne who's a very sympathetic figure and part of the the background here is that Wayne has brokered a uh peace agreement with Coochis that he'll bring his people into the reservation if Thursday Colonel Thursday will not attack them and Thursday just brazenly breaks the treaty as we did all the time and uh there's a great scene where Fonda says to Wayne, "There's no question of honor between an American soldier and Coochis." And Wayne says, "There is to me, sir." I really, you know, admire that character. But the tragedy of this film, as one of my students pointed out, is that um he said Dante reserved one of the lowest circles in hell for a good man who didn't do anything. And I kind of changed my view of Thursday to some extent. You learn from your students that Wayne's character is a rebel, but only so far. He doesn't uh there's a scene right before Thursday makes his fatal charge where uh he calls Wayne's character a coward and orders him to remain behind with the supply wagons. And that's when Wayne should have either arrested or shot his commanding officer. um he knows that the men are going to all be massacred and um this film has caused a lot of debate about what what is Ford's ultimate point in the film and the ending is very interestingly complex. It's too long to describe but it' be interesting for you to see that. But um Ford had filmed the Nuremberg trials. People didn't know this or forgot his unit in World War II, the OSS field photographic unit. Um, one of their final jobs was they photographed the Nermberg trials for posterity and they also made two films for evidence. George Stevens and other people made Nazi concentration camps, a very graphic film that they showed at the Nerburgg trials, which was a a landmark in trials to show visual evidence of this kind. And they also made a a two and a half hour film called The Nazi Plan, which used footage of the Nazis themselves, talking about their intentions. They're damning themselves out of their own mouths. And then Ford made a they they made a short film called That Justice Beone, which was a 10-minute film explaining why the Nermberg trials were taking place. And uh um the Nazis defense was we were just following orders and we hanged 10 people who said that, you know, it was not a good defense. And so Ford made this film about people who follow orders and let themselves be killed. And uh if you know anything about history and the Nermberg trials, you you you question why are they why are they doing this? And why don't they stop this insane commander? Well, I mean, hey, look at the news today. We have an insane commander who's sending people to be killed and and um all different kinds of people are being victimized, killing, you know, American um military are being killed. And then they they changed the number of people killed on the Pentagon website. You may have heard this that after four people were killed the other day, they first added them onto the list and then they took their names off and their families are horrified. Um, so why aren't people stopping this? I mean, this is history. So, this this film had a huge impact on me because it's the kind of film I really wanted to see about American history to tell the truth about, you know, they called Thursday's character a madman in this film. And, um, they're led by a madman. Um, I just I I have an interesting story. when I was doing my uh after I did my first book on Ford, I I moved to California in 1973 and I went through Monument Valley with a friend of mine and um the the Native Americans were they were very friendly and they invited us to stay overnight and go to a squad dance they were holding under the stars which was beautiful. And we ate rattlesnake stew and had uh Thunderbird wine and it was just great. And um if you get to know the uh these are Navajos if in movies they're often portrayed as kind of very solemn serious people but if you get to know them they have a great sense of humor and u there's a wonderful story and Tony Hillerman who was a white guy but he wrote books about the Navajos that are authentic you know detective stories and he talks about in the background of a lot of westerns would be the Native American actors and the director would say things like you guys uh say that um you know we'll come in peace if you make a treaty or whatever and they didn't know what they were saying and so the the Native American actors would say stuff that they would make up they would be very subversive and um he writes about this in in one of his books and he said when the Indians saw these movies they were cracking up because and I asked some of the Navajos I said was this true and they said oh yeah we did that and I said what are some examples and one of the ladies said, "Well, you know, the lieutenant has a small penis." That was one of the lines. Or, "The white man crawls like a snake with his belly on the ground." That was another line that they had in the background. I thought a a great documentary would be The Secret History of the American Western, where you get, you know, like 10 interpreters to watch scenes from movies and say, "What are they really saying in the background here?" You know? Um, so I was talking to some of the Navajos and one guy, he was like 27 year old guy and he was wearing a fatigue jacket from Vietnam with insignia and stuff. He had just got back from Vietnam and uh, so I said to him, um, did you know um, John Wayne and John Ford? And he had been around and he said, 'Oh yeah, yeah. Um, I said, 'What do you think of John Ford? He said, ' Was he the old guy with the eye patch? And I said, 'Yeah.' He said he's okay. And then I said, "What do you think of John Wayne?" I knew this was a fraught question because John Wayne had given an interview to Playboy in 1971 which was infamous because it's very racist interview where he says basically the Indians had it coming to them because they wouldn't share their land with the white people and other outrageous things. And he actually talks about white supremacy in a positive way. I mean just shocking interview. And so this this young guy when I said, "What do you think of John Wayne?" And he said, um, he said, "If he comes back here to make another movie, I'm going to be up in one of those rocks with my M1 rifle from Vietnam and I'll pick him off." And I thought, "Wow." And I thought, "What a story this would be." Indian kills John Wayne. I could see the headline. And I I thought he was serious. And I I kind of had a moral crisis. I kind of thought, what would I do if I heard that John Wayne was going back to Monument Valley? Would I call him up and say, "This guy's going to be waiting for you, or would I let history happen?" And I never really resolved the issue. And he never went back to Monument Valley. He did um some Dayril commercials where in front of a backdrop of Monument Valley, and that's that's as close as he got, but um who knows what would have happened. It's an interesting would have been an interesting resolution to some of the issues in American history. But, you know, I love John Wayne's acting. I use that in an article I wrote about why he's my favorite actor that um he when he worked for Ford and Hawks and other good directors, he played characters were very different from what he was off camera in a sense. I mean, he people said he just played himself. And you know, this goes back to what I talk about screen acting. I was able to go on the set of the shooters which was Wayne's last film and Jimmy Stewart played his doctor and told him I was there for the scene where he tells John Wayne that he's dying of cancer. So I watched these two great guys acting together for two days and u uh I asked Wayne uh about this claim that he just plays himself. He said uh well it's quite obvious you don't play yourself. He says, "If you do, you'll be the dullst son of a who ever walked across the screen." And he says, "What you do is you create a character. You you create yourself." And so, it's a very conscious creation. You know, he learned how to do the walking and the talking that are very distinctive. Like when he did Stage Coach, um Claire Trevor, who co-starred with him in Stage Coach, Wayne had done a lot of bee movies before that, and she said he had bad beovie acting habits. And so Ford would was very rough with him and he would grab Wayne during a take and he'd say, "Stop acting with your chin. You don't act with your chin." He said, "You act with your eyes. Your eyes tell us what you're thinking." And um then he would u tell him how to walk and you know, he was just really molding his performance. And she said by the end of the film he had cured himself of a lot of his bad habits. And um um but anyway, Wayne, oh the he said, "I have only one trick as an actor." He said, "I pause in the middle of a line so you don't look away, and I don't pause at the end of a line so you don't look away." And I thought that was very interesting because one of the reasons I like his acting is that pause in the middle of a line that he does, uh which to me gives a sense of vulnerability to this very strong man. um like he's like a Hemingway character and Hemingway's writing is is really about male fragility of the male ego. People don't seem to realize that often that you know later now people are writing about that but it's not just about being a tough guy. It's the sensitivity underneath and and um I said to Wayne, "Do you do you like to make fun of yourself in movies?" He said, "Oh god, yes." He said, "That's one of the most important things about being big," he said. So he was very uh you know aware and analytical actor but his political sensibilities were very stupid and unlike Ford who was very sophisticated um Wayne's Wayne was one of the blacklist leaders in Hollywood and he was a racist and all these bad things but when he acted for Ford he was you know like David to Ford's Michelangelo in a sense and um so I I've been defending John way in my whole life, you know. Uh but you have to do a lot of that when you're writing about uh westerns. Any comments on that scene or or that film have has anybody seen that film Ford Apache or I hope you go out and watch it. Ford deeply he knew so much about American history and and um for example when um Colonel Thursday says he's going to divide his troop and Wayne says I wouldn't do that sir. And that was one of the fatal errors that Kuster made. He divided his troop into three parts and and combined forces of the Native Americans just slaughtered them, you know. And um part of the reason he's such a fool in this film is he underrates his enemy. And and there's that great book by Sunzu, the Chinese general, and one of his first maxims is know your enemy. You know, Kapper made a series of films, Know Your Enemy and Know Your Ally in World War II. Um, but if you don't know your enemy, like in Vietnam, that was a big part of why we lost the Vietnam War was we knew nothing about Vietnam and and we were so arrogant. We really didn't bother to find out about it. You know, there's a book by Francis Fitzgerald that talks all about that. And we were shockingly ignorant about the history of Vietnam, you know, and how they've been fighting for a thousand years and they had, you know, fought off the Chinese and they fought off the French and we thought we could go in there and wip wipe them out in a short period of time just like um Trump thought Iran, okay, three or four days, maybe a week tops. You know, it's kind of like it's like Orson Wells in this 1966 interview about the other side of the wind. said uh yeah the film I'm going to do um it'll take about six weeks tops you know so it takes 48 years but that's film making for you so any other questions you have we're getting near the end time and I had some other clips to show from films that I love uh some like it hot is one of my favorite films I always say Billy Wilder was my sex education teacher because I grew up in the 50s and I was a Catholic kid I was had nuns teaching me about sex. And our at Catholic high school, we had a book called Modern Youth and Chastity, which was written by our school disciplinarian who would carry a sought-off golf club and he would whip us in the ass if we misbehaved. And so that guy naturally was our sex teacher. Basically, his rule was don't do it. You he called it the fear rule. He said, "How do you know that kissing is mortally sinful if it's frequent, enduring, and ardent? Fear rule." You know, this is So anyway, then I go to see this Billy Wilder film in which guys are dressing up as women and and become better men as a results as a result of uh being literally walking around in women's shoes. That's what the film is about. And they start, you know, Tony Curtis is this CAD at the beginning who abuses doesn't abuse women in the physical sense, but he he treats him in a very shallow way. And he learns by being a woman to treat women better. And Jack Lemon gets off on being a woman. He just loves it, you know. And so Billy Wilder, this film, somehow I got in to see this film, even though it was condemned by the Legion of Decency in 1959, but I went to see it at our local theater where I saw some of the greatest movies ever made. And uh it opened my eyes to a whole different world of reality. Well, let's let's just end by showing this because it is so much fun. It's just a good way to to uh celebrate Billy Wilder. I did a book called Billy Wilder, Dancing on the Edge a few years ago. critical study, Billy Wilder. This is one of my I think this is the funniest American sound comedy. A lot of great silent comedies like The General and Sherlock Jr. and the Gold Rush, but this is a fabulous uh talking picture, great script by Ael Diamond and Billy Wilder. Well, soon after that, Marilyn Monroe has a wonderful song and she's she's just great in this movie. And uh one of the um when you write books about filmmakers, you try to destroy cliches and stupid things that people keep repeating. And one of the things they kept repeating was Billy Wilder was some kind of misogynist and hated women. It just total nonsense. If you look at his work, um he he has many sympathetic women characters. There only three that I counted that are really villainous, you know. um a lot of them are just um they behave like real people. They behave in a period when women were sentimentalized on the screen. He was showing women with u actual human uh flaws and strengths and mixtures thereof, you know, and um so people would beat up on him for it. But now the films look better and better because people think, "Wow, he's really showing the three-dimensional qualities of the actresses." So Monroe gives a very natural and rich and complex performance and you get to you see her vulnerabilities and and uh and her pizzazz that she conveys but the sort of innocence that she blends with sexuality. Robert Town in his book on u he wrote a book on of his two two screenplays Chinatown and the last detail he has his opening chapter is all about acting which is interesting. It's not about writing per se, but it's about how to write characters. And um he said the best film stars convey a paradoxical quality. He said um Marilyn the sensitive brute and um who else did he mention? But Marilyn, he said that she's a child, but she's very sexual and she there's an innocence in sexuality and you know that paradox. a fonda. He mentioned Fonda was a kind of rigidity but um uh nobility at the same time and this blend that Ford got into dealing with Fonda's character. But um I I talked to um the publicist who was on the location when they were shooting the train scene and this when Wilder was shooting it, the train shot out some steam just without this was not planned. And Wilder immediately said, "Oh, even the train goosees her." So he he arranged it so she's walking along and the train just shoots her rear end at the right moment. And that was the kind of wonderful accident Orson Wells said and John Ford always said the best things in movies happen by accident. And the director is somebody who recognizes an accident and makes something out of it and puts it in the film because that's like unexpected real life stuff but it's all very carefully choreographed. Um, to give you an example of of what you do when you research a film, uh, Wilder and Diamond based this on a German film called Fanfares of Love and they didn't really want people to know that the film doesn't say that. It's a story by I think it's M. Logan and R. Thoren. And I always thought, who are these two guys? Story by, you know, um, and there's always kind of a backstory. And Michael Logan and Robert Thorne were two German writers. And um um this is a remake of a German film which was a remake of a French film called Fanfare of Love. And they re so but it's very hard to see. Wilder didn't want people to know this. So Anne, my partner and I went to Germany. She was teaching in Germany and I was researching Lubich and Wilder and we went to the National Film Archive where they had a copy of Fanfires of Love. That's where how far we had to go to see it. And it's amazingly similar to Some Like It Hot in many ways. Wilder gave Diamond great credit. Um, well, Diamond kept saying, "We have to have a hammerlock is what he said. Why do these guys put on women's clothing? There has to be an absolute reason, life or death reason for it." And Wilder said, "Yeah, you know, it's not just some women." In the German film, they're out of work and they put on different costumes. They they're gypsies at one point and at one point they they go into blackface and join a black band which Wilder said, "Boy, you couldn't do that today." Um, but he said, "You need something that is absolutely critical." And so he thought about it for a couple days. He said, "I got it. The St. Valentine's Day massacre. These guys witness this killing and they have to run hide in Florida and the gangsters chase him." And that really makes the film work, you know. And um, but people thought he was crazy. David O. Salsnik said, "You can't make a movie where it starts out with seven or eight people getting killed and these guys witness it and it's supposed to be a comedy and you know, but that's what makes great movies, you know." And um so fanfares of love um one of the things that um they changed and it really helped was that the Monroe character in that German film was a more sort of sophisticated person who saw through their disguise midway through the film which kind of ruins the film you know that she's playing with them and that's it doesn't you know so they made Monroe a innocent naive character And that really makes the film work. So there you can really study the sources and you can see how a great film comes together with certain key decisions. And I always say certain decisions like Spielberg making Schindler's List in black and white was the key decision on that film because if he had made it in color, it wouldn't be a good film. And the studio was leaning on him. you know, they didn't think the movie would make money and and um he made it for only 22 million, which is cheap for a big period film, but one of the executives said to him, "Why don't we just give 22 million as a donation to your favorite Holocaust charity?" Spielberg was really offended by that. And uh but then they said, "You make it in color and then we'll release it in black and white." and he knew that that meant that they would then later put it out in color for TV and and DVDs and he just held the line. Um, but somebody I know told me they saw it in color. I don't know. It's like I'll just tell you one last story. My friend uh Ron Haver who was film archavist in LA. He he he saw Psycho in color. He was walking through the Universal editing building one night and he looked in and Psycho was playing in color and then he said he he saw Hitchcock at a party and he said, "Mr. Hitchcock, why did you shoot Psycho in color and release in black and white?" And Hitchcock said, "Uh, I didn't." And um Ron said, "Well, I saw it in color the other night." And there's a long pause and Hitchcock said, "You weren't supposed to." And uh but actually Ron did further research. What happened was Universal was experimenting with a new kind of colorization technique and they took Psycho as a example and they realized it would ruin the film if it was made in color because Hitchcock said the blood would look horribly fake in color. And you know there's very little blood in that film anyway because if you stab somebody in the torso there's tremendous amount of blood but he just had a little trickle of blood you know and u but black and white stylizes things and you can get away with more and so Schindler's List Spielberg felt it would look like he said I I I think of the Holocaust in black and white because I've seen all those documentaries and but Steven's father was in World War II. I got to interview his father. That was a real coup to interview Arnold Spielberg, a fantastic guy. And he kept saying to Stephen when he was going to do Saving Private Ryan in Black and White, he said, "Stephen, I was in the war. I remembered." And it was in color when I was in the war. He was in Burma. And so Stephen listened to him and he made Private Ryan and Color. But that film, it works, you know. But um Howard Hawks, I asked him why he made Red River in black and white and he said color back then was kind of garish. It was used for musicals and comedies and he said but also black and white gives you a feeling of being older, which is a wise comment about period films. So when you see a Ford film, he was going to make Fort Apache in color and he they didn't have the money and they made it in black and white. And it's a good thing they did because Ford's films as Wellington and I wrote were are kind of like documentary visions of ideal world. You know, they're kind of like news reels from the past. They look like you're there. And Wells said, John Ford knows what the Earth is made of. You know, there's a real sense of that reality of the past. Anyway, we could go on for a while, but it's been fun talking to you and um I appreciate you coming and and watching some film clips with me. I have a few copies of my books if anybody's interested in buying one, but um anyways, just great. Okay. Well, thank you so much.