I gave people all the stuff they really needed, social security checks, utility bills, TV guidance counselor, TV guidance counselor, and it's a very special episode. If you're a regular listener of the show, we know June was my birthday month, I did a bunch of extra episodes, well, let's just move that into July because I had the opportunity to speak to one of my personal heroes, the writer, director, film critic, I guess you could say he is, and just one of my personal heroes, Mr. Alex Cox, Alex has done so many good things, so much integrity, smart, talented guy, mostly repo man is probably what most of you probably know him from, my favorite movie, and I wanted to talk to him for years, he wrote a great book about the prisoner a few years ago, he's written a number of books, and I just can't believe I got a chance to sit down and talk to him. He has a Kickstarter going right now for what will be his last movie, it is a western version of Nikolay Gogel's Dead Souls, and I'm very excited about it, so that is one of the reasons that I have this episode, did a quick turnaround time recorded this yesterday, out so that you have time to go to the Kickstarter, there is a link in the show description here, you can just Google, Google Gogel, Google, Alex Cox, Kickstarter, my last film, even 10 bucks you can help contribute to this film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I think that we should all pitch in a little bit and get something cool out of it, obviously if you don't have that kind of money, that's fine too, or if you have an extra two and a half million dollars and want to finance the repo man sequel, this won't be his last film, but we talk about that here. So I'm so excited for this, I'm excited for you to hear it, you're gonna love it, sit back, relax, and enjoy this extra special bonus edition of TV guidance counselor with my guest Alex Cox. Alex Cox, how are you sir? I'm very welcome. How are you doing? I'm doing very well, I'm doing very well, I'm very excited to have you on the show, I am a huge fan of your work and so many of the things you've done, but the first and foremost reason, and this is with mixed emotions that I promote this, you have a Kickstarter going for your final film, which is why it's mixed emotions, because I'm excited to see it. And this is sort of a Western, and you're sort of doing a Western take on Google's dead souls, which is such a, I don't know why no one has adapted Google into the Western genre before. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, because it really, it seems like a very good match, because the dead souls that Chichikov is acquiring in the book are analogued for innumerable suffering, you know, hungry of the earth in the American West, and so you think somebody would have done it before, but nobody has. Yes, which is brilliant, and it's like the same time period, like it's not even, like you're really, you know, swapping too much, it kind of makes sense, and the other reason it's great that it's a Western is because it's sort of your genre in a lot of ways, isn't it? It's sort of, I don't want to say your favorite genre, but it seems to be the one you know the most about and kind of return to in various ways. Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I grew up watching lots of cowboy films, you know, and there was lots of cowboy stuff on television as well, but the kids, so I definitely had a surfeit of Westerns when I was growing up. It's a nice form, you know, it's a very flexible form that you can do a lot of stuff. I have a theory that the sort of sci-fi replaced the Western in television, but it fit the same function a lot of ways. Yes, yeah, yeah, and in the cinema as well. Very true. And it's also interesting because so you're growing up in, did you grow up in Cheshire? Is that where you grew up? Yes, it was the Whirl Peninsula, which was a peninsula that sticks out, it was on the very edge of Cheshire in between Wales and Liverpool. And then when I was still young, it was sort of removed from Cheshire and made a part of an administrative area called Merseyside. But then another government came along and then they gave it back to Cheshire. So I'm not quite sure the status of the Whirl Peninsula now, but I grew up where, so Gawain spent Christmas on his way to meet the Green Knight. Okay, so it's a very sort of English countryside. Yeah, and very north of England, very north of England countryside. Some of the towns there have Viking names and some of my friends had Viking names. So there was a lot of cultural interaction between the Welsh and the English and the Vikings. Who knows who else? So I bring that up too, because some people will be like, "Well, that's strange that you would have this affinity for the American West growing up in England in the mid-century." But it's not totally out of character with that sort of part of the world and that sort of part of the United Kingdom. Liverpool was, before I was born, Liverpool was where the boats went to the United States. So many, many ships left the port of Liverpool to go to New York and Boston and South America. And so it was a big transit point at one time when we still had a ship early in this show when there was still massive ocean line. You're watching all these sort of Westerns on TV as a kid, mostly movies, but I assume you got some of the shows too, which side note theory, just because you're a prisoner guy, and your book, which is great, I recommend to everybody comes up on the show often. I also think that the rifleman is too branded as secret agent man is to the prisoner. Oh, that could make sense because he could be the same person, couldn't he? Yeah. Yeah. He could indeed. He was innocent, not a charge was true, but a world we never know. I mean, it's possible that that is the same individual and of course there was that debate in prisoner circles as to whether Maguwen's character was the dangerman or whether he was somebody completely different. But at a minimum, the making of that show was a direct reaction to the dangerman. Yes. And also, and perhaps this was true with the Chuck Conner's shows as well, is that the one enabled the funding of the other because a success of dangerman gave Lou Gray the confidence to give Maguwen this money to essentially go and do whatever he wants. He wanted thinking that it was the further adventures of John Drake. We're buying a cash cow here and then instead you get this metaphysical rumination on what it means to be human in the 21st century and then he's like, "Oh, what did we get?" Yeah. Yeah. You get something completely different and then there's of course the whole controversy about how many episodes were intended and certainly Maguwen and his closest collaborators were planning on shooting at least three more episodes when the thing came down. But it's interesting because that was sort of had the plug pulled out before it ended. So what we have is what we consider the ending. But also Dead Souls, that book ends in like the middle of a sentence. Well, the book was meant to be part of three books because Gogol wrote Dead Souls part 2 and it was majorly successful. People wanted the sequel. So he said, "Well, actually, I'm doing a three-party here. It's going to be part two and then part three." And he wrote part two over and over again but hated it, would burn it. He would burn all his notes and burn the manuscripts and start again. So there are fragments of Dead Souls part two and there are no fragments at all of Dead Souls part three, which I don't think he even ever wrote. And it's easy to see why because Dead Souls part one is about all bad people, what bad people do, how they behave. Yes. Very entertaining, you know. Part two is supposed to be all about good people, how good people behave. Much, much more difficult piece to write and part three was supposed to be about heaven. Right. What goes up in heaven, you know. Quite difficult. I mean, there's lots of medieval paintings of hell, there's very few medieval paintings of heaven. Yes. And there's a reason for that, you know. And there's a reason that the book that was easiest for him to write and the most successful was the one about the bad people. And about bureaucracy and like loopholes in a weird way because like the main character, you know, that's one of the things I love about is all those, especially the spaghetti westerns, had a sort of like a supernatural undertone, but weren't necessarily supernatural. Like, is it Kiyoma or Django where he's pulling the coffin? Oh, Django, the beginning, he's dragging the coffin through the ceiling of the mud. You're like, is there something sort of supernatural go? But it never is. And Dead Souls is kind of like that too because you're like, he's collecting these souls. What is he doing? And it's like, oh, it's just like tax fraud. He has, yeah. He's a financial focus. You know, if he acquires enough names of dead people, he can turn them into money or into advancement, or he can become a noble man, you know, there's some way that he's going to gain an earthly advantage by acquiring all these dead people. And that's thus our project too. There's some way that our protagonist is going to, you know, like a good spaghetti western hero is going to turn turns again into dollars. And that the spaghetti western genre was as I look at like the rifleman and branded where the rifleman's very black and white, like classic American fifties Western and branded is a little bit more morally ambiguous, like it's sort of more antihero or I mean, I might be giving it a little more intellectual juice than branded deserves. But comparatively, you know, it's sort of that late sixties like everything's not all black and white. Maybe people aren't just good and bad. And I feel like the sort of final phase of that shift was the spaghetti westerns, where now it's like almost to the point of dead souls. Are there any good people? Yeah. I mean, in the spaghetti western and every so often there is a good person, you know, but most of the people in Italian westerns are not good. They are bad, you know, it was interesting because I was talking to somebody the other day about the television prologue that they shot for a fistful of dollars when it first played on American TV. And they actually hired Monty Helman, the director and Harry Dean Stanton, the actor to create a prologue in which Clint Eastwood's character is released from jail to go and clean up this Mexican town because there's criminality there. And why they felt the need for that, it says a lot about the television executives of the time that the film had been very popular that they couldn't figure it out, you know, and they felt there's got to be some context here. There's got to be an explanation for why this a moral individual shows up in this town and figures out a way to make money off the dead. But it's funny too how they get it so wrong because at the end of the sequence which Monty Helman directed, obviously he hadn't seen a fistful of dollars. And so in the end they show they have a couple of clips of Eastwood's face and tight close up, you know, but they got some stunt double playing Eastwood with the puncture. And at the end of the sequence, at the end of the setup, they have him climb aboard his horse. And somehow the horse turns into a mule in the very next scene, you know, because when Eastwood's character shows up in San Miguel, he's riding a mule. But again, that was... That walk. Yeah, that was just two puzzles for them, you know, they couldn't have the American hero show up on a mule. It's got to be on a steed, a beautiful Lone Ranger steed. One more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you went to school at UCLA on that scholarship program sort of, it was like a film program. It was like the Fulbright Institute. Was that the first time you'd actually bend to the U.S. when you went over to go to school? Yes. Yeah, it was the first time. I mean, I and my girlfriend went to New York, who flew to New York and waited in New York City for several days to get what used to be called a driveway car, which was when somebody had to go a long distance, but they didn't want to drive their own car. And so, the company would hire you to drive that car out west. And we waited for a few days and then we're given a Ford Mustang. And told that we had like six days to drive it to Los Angeles. And so that's what we did, you know, we just drove west and went through Cincinnati and Kansas City and of course, detoured by a monument valley. And ended up on a street called Sweetser in West Hollywood and delivered this lady her Mustang. And that was my introduction to the United States. And you did, you wrote into town on a horse in many ways. Oh, yeah. Isn't that right? You wrote into town on a Mustang. That's right. Yeah. And he's the only other time I've heard them come up as an Eric Reds, the hitcher. That's what that the main characters do in a drive away. Drive away. That's interesting. I've forgotten. Yeah. Which is very. It doesn't happen now. I suppose. I don't know. I certainly don't hear of it, but that kind of transition doesn't occur so much. Yeah. I feel like people will dispose their car by a new one when they get there. Finally. Yeah. Throw it away. In the US, sort of only from movies and television, presumably, how did it compare to what you thought it would be like, because I know, I don't know who originally said this, but I've heard it via Alan Moore, that in the UK, a hundred miles is a long distance and in the US, a hundred years is a long time. So so many of my friends from the UK are like, oh, it's so much bigger than I had anticipated. Yeah. I guess we didn't really think about it because we knew we had to cover a certain number of miles every day. I think we had to cover something like 500 miles a day. So we just did. We were young. You know, when I was like a young guy, you know, I would cover 500 miles a day on a motorcycle. Yeah. You can't keep even doing that. No, I can't even conceive of driving 500 miles in a car or a truck now. I mean, it's that's a long way. And there's no pleasure in it, you know. My maximum now is about 250 miles. That's more than even I have. If I get offered a gig, I'm like, it's more than 15 minutes away. Yeah. But that's the thing. You know, if you want to go from Oregon to Arizona, one way or another, a thousand miles or more. You got their wars about 1980, '79, '80? No, that would have been 1977. '77. Okay. The punk thing hit with you in the UK. Not really so much. I mean, I was in Bristol when the punk thing started happening and that was 1976. And I remember seeing a member of a Bristol band, the Cortinas, walking down the street one day. And he had a leather jacket and written on the back of the woods was the number, 1976. And I thought, oh, that's good. That's interesting. He's onto something. And but I didn't really get into the punk scene until a couple of years later in Los Angeles when it all started urging me there. And that's for people who haven't read, I've recommended the books that John Doe did. The More Fund in the New World and the second book, which I'm forgetting the name of, but they sort of really go into a great detail in that sort of the fruitful sort of artistic before the beach kids ruined it with hardcore kind of-- I think it was hardcore. I think hardcore was great, too. I mean, it was all part of the process, you know, it was all part of the movement. The movement had various phases and the bands were so different. I mean, acts were so different from fear. And fear was so different from the circle jerks and the circle jerks were so different from Black Flag. And so, yeah, it was all a movement. And it had many in with the screamers and the weirdos and there was so much variety. The plugs, you know, the takes the plugs. There was so much variety and peripheral, peripheral LA bands, which were kind of punk and kind of something else, like Wall of Gudu. It was just a tremendous time to be going to see live music. I think about-- and "Rebelman" is one of my all-time favorite films with that sort of downtown, the art scene too, like the Gary Panter stuff and like the Paul Ruben stuff, mixing with the sort of punk rock. And it reminds me that that generation is sort of the first generation who grew up always having rock and roll or always having television. They were the first generation to start making their own art, having always had these sort of vehicles that were new prior to that. And so we started to get this sort of reflexive or like evolution of that sort of thing in very interesting ways. Yeah. And it starts to reflect on the preexisting form because they've grown up with rock and also start to make a new type of rock and roll and that was very interesting. So you were actually in the U.S. when the sort of events of "Sid and Nancy" were going on in the UK? Yeah. Well, really, the events of "Sid and Nancy" were really born in America and New York from London. Yeah. But the Sex Pistols. Yes, I was in Los Angeles while the Sex Pistols were happening. We thought that the Sex Pistols were coming to LA. Yeah. I never saw the Sex Pistols play because their next venue after the Winterland was supposed to be LA. But they didn't come. They didn't make it. They didn't come up in San Francisco and they didn't make it. Which is kind of better? Like I feel like that was ultimately better than if you had just seen them and it was a fine show. Oh, no. I don't like to do the Sex Pistols. I mean, I was lucky because I saw the Clash twice both times in Los Angeles and they were fantastic shows. And even a bad Sex Pistols show would have been much better than the no show. True. True. I'm going to candy coat it, I guess, to make you feel better, but you're right. It was better than you missed it. And you befriended Joe Strummer later. Well, he was not even something to do. I mean, after the Clash broke up, he was looking to reinvent himself as something else. You know, and maybe that was going to be a record producer. He produced a record for a band in Granada in Spain. Or maybe he was going to be an actor and he acted in a couple of films that I made. Or maybe he was going to be an American recording artist and he did that earthquake weather band, an album, which was really geared towards the American market, like he was trying to find his way into American rock and roll music. And so he was just looking for something to do. He was looking to reinvent himself as something. And of course, what he really reinvented himself as when I knew him was as a film composer. And he wrote The Score for Walker, which is one of the best film soundtracks ever. It's amazing. Yeah. And it makes me sad that we didn't get like tons of soundtracks from him. Yeah, yeah. I know. And he could have done it too. I just think he retreated for a while. The problem or the great thing about him in the Clash was presumably he always had an income stream. There was always money coming in from the Clash records. And I say, oh, should I go, it was always money coming in. So he didn't need to work. And one of the issues that I have faced is that I've always needed to work. I've always needed to get money. And so that's why a lot of the characters in my films are like they have to get money. And but that kind of keeps you on your toes, keeps you busy. I wasn't able to retire to my country residence for 20 years, you know, I had to keep at it. Yeah. I guess it's the price you pay for the ethos of doing stuff that you want to do. It's not always necessarily the commercially viable stuff. I think that the Clash, it's kind of a fluke that that happened. I mean, obviously, they're great records with the fact that they also were commercially viable was like a one in a million that happens every now and then. But generally the people who make the best stuff, they're not making the most money. And it's not the stuff that grows over time to feed this investment. Yeah. But then think about the Beatles and the Clash, you know, I mean, they quit at the height of their commercial success, because they just got tired of each other, didn't want to hang around each other, didn't want to make music together anymore, you know? As a protagonist, our hearts were broken, and it was like when John Doe and Exean split up. No, no, they're the honor and parents of the LA punk scene. They can't split up, but, you know, people do what they're going to do, and the pistols had to split up, the Clash had to split up, the Beatles had to split up. Joe was living in Boston for a bit in the late '90s, and I knew him here, of which blew my mind, because I'm like, this is Joe's drummer. I don't know why he was here, but I don't know if he was trying to just like get out of LA for a bit or wherever he was for a while, but he was here for about a year in like '96, '97, and he was just hanging around. Like he was, when I was in a punk band, we started with like, Dropkick Murphy's, and Joe was doing stuff with the Bostones, and he would just be like at shows. Like he was just kind of hanging around here, and it was insane, because we're just these rinky dink punk fans, you know, and we're like, just a freaking drummer, and he's super nice, and he remembers our names. Yeah, I'm just, yeah. Which blew my mind. That was probably the first person of that sort of era, and like, I don't know what the word I'm looking for, is like status that I'd ever met in the context of something that we were doing at a much smaller level, which was interesting. Is Harry Dean the first guy you worked with that had been in like the Westerns and those things? Like, had you seen that extra footage prior to doing Repo Man? Funnily enough, I did see it when we first came to the States. We were in a hotel in New York, waiting for the driveway car, and I saw his full of dollars on TV with that intro, but it's funny, I never talked to Harry Dean about it. I guess because I'd seen Harry Dean in other things that were much better, you know, and seeing him in a lot of other films in which he was like extremely good. And you know, I thought of him from like Tule in Blacktop and the worry breaks, and you know, he had an illustrious career and was a fabulous actor. And so we never thought around to talking about that intro to his full of dollars. So you, obviously, huge movie fan, and you know, some movies that are very difficult to see. And they were when you were growing up as well, like stuff that didn't play on TV and you know, movie drum, which is amazing, and you showed so many cool movies that had never been but aired in the UK, you couldn't get on home video and those sorts of things. But prior to that, you know, you're growing up in a pre-VCR world, where you just kind of comb in the paper, seeing if these stuff would play at a repertory house? Yeah, just knowing that we didn't even have a repertory house, we just had regular cinemas, you know, but there were a bunch of cinemas in Liverpool and Birkenhead, there were, there were, it must have been about 10 cinemas, two of which had multiple screens, so, or three of which had multiple screens. So in fact, I mean, there was a lot of films playing. And at the time, most of them were double bills. So you might see a double bill of an Italian Western with the samurai, the samurai by Jean Pierre Melzor, you know, because dubbed in English, there was a lot more foreign films in those days, even though they'd be dubbed in English because they'd be playing commercial cinemas. And we had a local, we had a local film society as well in Liverpool, Blue Coat Chambers, and I saw, that's where I saw your Jimbo for the first time. So there was a lot of cinema, and I was, I was a, I was a keen cinema girl. Was there a film that like, I know most of us who are big, big movie guys, there's always like a Holy Grail movie that they could, I mean, not now because you can pull anything up on your phone, you know, but like, for example, I remember to see a racer head, I had to take two buses in a train and find the one video store that had it and it was like a three-day excursion, but was there like a Holy Grail film that you had heard about forever and it took you forever to actually see? Well, I'd always wanted to see those, the Kobuchi movies, which seem to have been banned in England, Django and the Great Silence, which both of which I think ran into censorship problems with the British film, so those were, you know, films that I wanted to see and had to wait a long time to see. I saw Django finally, there was a US print in New York and I persuaded the film archives at UCLA to somehow borrow the print, so we got a hold of a print, but then nobody wanted to screen it, you know, because it was a stupid spaghetti western. So I ended up watching Django on a flatbed, which wasn't the best way to see it. At the Great Silence, I saw in Paris, I went to Paris and I had a job working for a film distribution company in Paris, and I saw the Great Silence there. And that's where they told me, because I went and my duties involved me going around to various distributors, including the distributor of the Great Silence, Le Grasseilons. So I said to them, "Is this film going to come out in England or the US?" And the guy goes, "Well, we intended to bring it out, but the rights have been bought by 20th Century Fox, and they've bought it because Flint Eastwood wants to do a remake. And so they're not going to release the original until Eastwood has done the remake." And of course, Eastwood never did the remake. So it just buries it forever. Yeah. But that buried it for years. He made a film called Joe Kidd, which they go up into the mountains, so there's a bit of snow. And one of the characters, I think it's Don Stroud, has the automatic bolo pistol, the Mauser Bolo, that Tantino uses in the Great Silence. So obviously, Eastwood had seen the film and was referencing it slightly in Joe Kidd. But for whatever reason, either the studio wouldn't let him or he lost faith and didn't want to be killed at the end of the movie. Well, he also probably wasn't really established as like a marquee director at that point either. So it probably would have been early days. That's like the joke. Kidd was directed by John Sturgis. Yeah. So it would have been, if it was post-Bridges of Madison County, it could have made it. But then, you see, because it was a movie, whether that thing, you know, I can't die. Yeah. You know, I've had movie actors say that to me. Movie stars, you know, when I've been trying to persuade them to be in the film, I can't die. And then you're just thinking, "Oh, yes, you can, and you do it one day. What are you going to do then?" I'm thinking of so many ways for you to die now. Yeah. But of course, what they mean is my character can't be seen to die in a film because it will diminish my bankability. It's all down to the bankability of the box office instead of necessarily what's best for the film, which is... Yeah. They're in a contest. Yeah. And they're not in a contest to make the best film. They're in a contest, in a contest with other movie actors. Who can make the most money, you know? Who is married to the most beautiful, whatever it is, you know? Who has the biggest house or the biggest swimming pool? Sadly, that is the kind of thing that movie stars care about. It's endlessly frustrating that the way they attain those things is by utilizing creative people who almost... Their goal is the antithesis of that, and they're sort of forced to have to work together. Yeah. And they can wait to abandon them, and they never helped them, so that's very interesting. Which is why, you know, would this be the third or fourth movie that you've crowned crowdfunding? This is the third film I've crowned. And that is kind of an amazing process that we even have that ability. Yeah. And also, I mean, it's kind of, you know, and now it's really not thought of as such a viable way to make films as it was 10 or 12 years ago. You know, it's viewed as being more difficult, you know, so there was concern at Kickstarter as to whether we could make $100,000, because I was going to say, "Let's make the first all be $100,000." And they're saying, "No, you better make it less than that," because, you know, this isn't 10 years ago. But we've been very lucky. We've gone past $10,000, and we're hoping to get 125 or 150, you know, before it ends. Well, all my listeners, I'm going to make them give, so we'll get past that. Yeah. Yeah. Because, unfortunately, money is the lifeblood of film, you know, it's a terrible thing to say. But you do need money, you need to pay people salaries, you need to rent locations, you know, you need to spend all this money to make it sell, you need to rent those costumes and those horses and those wagons. Do you find it easier to make a better film for less money now, because of technology or anything, or is it kind of the same as it was when you do in Repo Man? Well, the only thing that's changed is shooting on video as opposed to shooting on film. Shooting on video is definitely cheaper than shooting on film, absolutely, and less complicated. But shooting on film, it has certain rewards, you know, there's a certain visual aspect of film which you really can't replicate on video. But it's interesting, too. I mean, there are other downsides. I saw the bike riders last week, the new film that just come out about the origins of U.S. motorcycle gangs and very proudly they were saying that was made on film, sure enough it was. But there are moments, you know, there are moments where it's not super sharp, and I'm thinking, man, I should start bringing my glasses to the movie. But no, because then the next shot will be super, the next shot will be super sharp. And then the next one will be a little bit soft, you know, and you just realize it, whoever's pulling focus on this film really doesn't quite have it together. And you know, and with video, you apply the sharperizer to it afterwards, but film is less forgiving. You really have to get it right when you make a film. You have to get it absolutely right. On the other hand, the fact that they shot on film means that there are no drone shots because the camera is too hot to carry. And so the film is rooted to the ground. And that's very interesting and makes for a very, you know, kind of a good experience if you're watching a film about motorcycle. Because that reminds me that one of the things I've heard you talk about often, you know, especially some of the movie drone intros is sort of how the ability to do different shots or like the editing process affects the tone and style of the movie, the content, not just the presentation. I remember you talking about rope or, you know, some of the single take stuff and you've made at least one film that was kind of with that approach, right? Where you're trying to do like long single takes, right? People don't necessarily think about how those things affect the actual making of the film. It's not all post-production. We could have edited it this way or this way. It's sort of you thinking the film out differently in those sorts of shots. And now it's different because now in video you can shoot for longer because when we were shooting on film, we were limited to an 11-minute shot. That was the longest shot that you could shoot because then the reel would run out, right? There wouldn't be more film in the magazine. So you couldn't go for longer than 11 minutes. Whereas now think about a film like Hunger, that scene where Bobby Sands and the priest just sit at the table and they talk about whether he's going to starve himself to death or not and smoke cigarettes. That scene's 17 minutes long and it's a single take of two actors. And that's the glory of video is that you're not limited to that 11-minute maximum length. So you're still seeing new movies often, it sounds like? Yeah, I like films. It's my job. I like it. It's odd that that's refreshing to hear that. I want to see what people are doing. When I was teaching at CU Boulder 10 years ago now and a university in Colorado and the students would turn me on to films. We talk about long takes and the students would say, "I want to see this film because this film, the conceit of it, is it all happens in one take?" And so it was a Uruguayan horror film. So yeah, it's interesting to see what people are doing and sometimes you see something quite amazing. Yeah, I always say that people too, more in the context of comedy just because I do stand up, but I'm like, "Watch a ton of it because even stuff you hate is helpful because if you can figure out why you hate that, that will make what you do better." Yeah, and at least it challenges you and makes you think, "Why do I hate that? Why does it feel so bad to me?" Because something like that movie, the one I just talked about, the end of the bike riders is so stupid, so lame, so crybaby-ish, and yet the film has some tremendous moments and some great performances. So it's all always something, unless a film is truly bad, unless there are some truly bad films, but often if it's not like a franchise film, if it's not like the latest Marvel comic or the latest Star Wars, then there's usually something in there that you can see in the one that's buying. Were you a comic reader growing up because you've written comics, you've written Godzilla comic I think, right? Yeah, yeah. I used to read Mad Magazine and I used to read mostly DC comics rather than Marvel because my cousin, who I got most of my comics from, DC film, but I was very into also Dr. Strange, and then Dr. Strange got me into Steve Ditko as a comic book artist, you know, and I appreciated Ditko, the mysterious traveler, and those comic books. So yes, yes, I was very into comics. Yeah, and the sequel to Repo Man you did as a graphic novel, which I love. That's right, an demographic novel. The Ditko stuff where he got all into the weird and rammed objectivism and all that Mr. Ray. Dave. Yes, which is all very fascinating. I feel like not enough people know about that era of him. It's right, but it kind of crippled his style as well because then he became obsessed with didactic, didacticism, you know, and there's so many words that the words are crowding out that the characters, you know, there's like a whole, there'll be a panel that's all words, all and randy, good stuff. And the character is like squeezed into the corner of the frame, you know. So I think that that was not Ditko's finest hour. No, it's interesting given his other stuff. Yeah, I love his DC stuff where like shade, the changing man and what he really just went like bonkers, but not in ranch yet. Yeah. Yeah. And Dr. Strange, the wonderful kind of other dimensions that Dr. Strange would go into before the dread dawn and that was, that was comic art, comic book art at the highest order. Well, it's so strange to me too that I look at the stuff Ditko did in Jack Kirby and they're sort of cosmic stuff. They're stuff about multiverses, all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, these two guys inadvertently laid the groundwork for what has become all mainstream entertainment for the last two decades. Yes. How bizarre from this like 60s sort of weird, post hippie cosmic mythology that for those guys. Yeah. And they were the illustrators. They wrote everything, you know, even though they, you know, that people would fight him for a shared credit because of, because their contribution as the illustrator was in north. But Stanley was the guy that wrote it all, you know, and because I collaborated with Stanley on a script for Dr. Strange project. Oh, wow. I didn't know about that. Yeah. And we wrote it together. But every day, you know, he could only write for a certain amount of time. And then he had to go away and write the Spiderman script for the newspaper. Oh, right. You know, Stan, get somebody else to do that, you know, we can, we, we should keep working on Dr. Strange. No, this is what I do. And every day he would go away, lock himself away and write the next four panels of Spidey's Adventures in the newspaper, you know, he was, yeah, and that's where all of our popular culture for good or bad comes from. When was that project that you guys worked together? Just have been the late 80s. Okay, so that was probably when that Carlico had bought like Spiderman and Marvel had sold off some of the rights to stuff. So the corpsman had fantastic four. So were you just doing the script or was it set up somewhere? We were trying to make it with, I know what it happened. For some reason, I was in the offices of American Zoetrope, Francis Coppola's company in San Francisco in the Flatiron building. I know why because I knew the guy that lived in the basement or the work in the basement, Richard Beggs, a sound designer, at a studio in the basement. And when Coppola had bought the building, they were thinking of kicking Beggs out, but then when they realized that he had this sound recording studio in there, they think, "Oh, no, we can work with you." So they kept him and I was hanging out with Richard and we'd gone upstairs for some reason. And Francis Coppola comes out of his office and goes, "Hey, listen, this guy Stan Lee's been on the phone. He's got the rights back to a whole bunch of his stuff. Are there any of his comic books we want to do?" And I just happened to over here, this conversation, chimed in, "Dr. Strange." So we developed it and Stan and I wrote the script together. And there was talk of Francis getting his nephew to star in it, Nicholas Cage. Yep, who's a big comic guy also. Yeah, but it never came about. For some reason, it never came about. It was like my Mars attacks project. It just didn't, you know, it was a good idea but it didn't happen. When those projects, even if they're not necessarily the version of it you worked on, end up coming out in a different forms you avoid them or do you see them out of like more grid curiosity? Oh, no, I'm interested to see them. I thought the "Dr. Strange" film was terrible. Absolutely, absolutely. But I thought that Tim Burton's attempt at Mars attacks began really well because it was the only scene in the film that was actually based on one of the bubble gun cards when the heard of burning cattle raced through frame. And years later I realized that the mistake I'd made when I was writing the script and the mistake that he made too was in not just telling the story of the bubble gun cards. It should just have been like 48 or 52 scenes, you know, with no continuous characters just one scene of Martian mayhem after another, being completely faithful to the bubble gun cards the way he was in that opening sequence. And that would have been quite a film. Oh yeah, that would have been amazing. And I think there was, there's an aversion to that sort of episodic approach for movies. But when I think of movies that are structured that way, I pretty much always like them. And actually Dead Souls is kind of set up that way. It's just there's such an aversion to making things that don't fit the norm. And because films often cost a lot of money, very, very square and straight people are handing that money out and they'll only spend the money if it's like something they've already seen. Right. So if you're trying to do something different or original, it's very difficult. And that's why you end up making the difficult and original stuff for very little money. Did you see the Google TV series from a few years back? I saw the Russian version Dead Souls. That was just quality TV. That was like a BBC thing. There's one that it's goggles. It is a character in it. Oh, really? Well, he could character in this series too. You see him appear from time to time burning the pages of the manuscript. But this is something else. So it's made in, it's made in Ukraine, I believe, and Netflix aired it here. It's from maybe three or four years ago. It's really good. He's a character in it, like a main character in it. But the conceit is sort of all of his writing is also kind of real. And normally, I don't necessarily like that where it's like Edgar Allen Poe is solving mysteries or whatever, but it kind of works here. And the main, I think it's about eight episodes, but the main thing they adapt is the V, the V, the witch, you know, sit with the body for the night story with him in it. And I thought it was really great. I think you would like it. I'd be curious to hear what you thought of it. Yeah, no, I haven't seen it. It's hard, you know, foreign language programming. It doesn't, it comes and goes. But I mean, as you say, if it's on Netflix, it might still be that. Yeah, take a look if it's there. I think you dig it. And then speaking of which, like showing foreign films, I mentioned movie drum, which was for my US listeners, was a show that you hosted for like seven years, I think, right on four years after I stopped doing it, it was presented by somebody else for three years. Okay, so it was four years, different seasons you would show sort of cult films. But the thing that was always so refreshing to me, and I sort of put it in the same category as Jonathan Ross's incredibly strange film show, which was like a mind blow to me here when I saw it as a kid. But you would show these movies. And I've never seen anyone do this before since when you would host them, you were just so honest about your opinions of them. Without being ironic or the sort of making fun of the movie, you would be very much like, here's what I like. I think this is bad. Watch the movie. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's ever been another instance of that when the presenter, because the presenter is normally like Robert Osborne, you know, is a kind of I, you have to pretend that whatever it is you're about to see is the best thing. All time classic. Yeah. And this wasn't like that. This I could say, you know, this film is really quite bad. But there's this one scene where they've designed the set around a packet of jitang cigarettes. And so the color scheme of the whole interior is based on this pack of cigarettes. And that's kind of interesting. So that because that brings into question the work of the art director, what does the production designer do? And so that was interesting for me. And that was the great pleasure of doing it was that I wasn't obliged to just be a front man. You know, I actually, did you have to fight for that? Or did that was that kind of from the beginning that was sort of the idea? It was just what I did, you know, and so they just went with it. They hadn't found anybody else to front the show, you know, and so. And it seemed to be working okay. So I was, and also the guy, the producer of the show was a man called Nick three and Jones. And he was, he was very into those films, you know, love those films. And so he was a great supporter of it. And it was really his show. I was just a guy. But I mean, I don't think, I think if it wasn't you, we wouldn't have gotten that specific style of presenting where you're just this straight up, very honest about what he like and don't like in the movie. No, I think that's right. Because the, because there is, that wasn't the house style. The house style is, you know, is to just be a we the liner notes. Right. It's either the greatest thing ever, or you're going to be like, this is so bad, we're going to laugh at it. And it's, it wasn't either of those, which was amazing. Yeah, because if it's really that bad, you shouldn't be showing it anyway, shouldn't be the rest of people's time. Right. That might never understand people loving plan nine from outer space. You know, if it's always genuinely bad, just let it go. I always struggle with that because it's the line I try to draw is sincerity and intent. So if someone's like sincerely making, they're trying to make a good movie and it's terrible, I always find that somewhat charming or something worth watching because it's usually, there's something in there that'll be like, wow, this person's out of there, mind. But it's the people who are like, I'm going to try to use the trappings of bad movies to make, to make my own bad. I'm like, don't why are you wasting everyone's time with this? Just like, can't make a cult film on purpose. It's not going to happen. No, that's the thing. You can't make a cult film on purpose and people try. Oh, yes. But you can't do it on purpose. The cult thing is the result of the film. You can't decide going in, but that's what it's going to be. Is there a movie that you love that you are surprised isn't a cult film like doesn't have the cult audience that you would think it would? Well, but you know, I don't really, you see, I don't, that's just a term what people use to describe films. And I don't really think about things in those in that way. I mean, I just think about things that I like. Sure. Whether other people like him or not is irrelevant. I might be the only person who likes it. The only person that's seen it. How many people have seen Sin by Konchilovsky? Not me. It's one of the best ones we've ever seen. It's about Michelangelo. Okay. And it was made a few years back in Italy with an Italian cast. It's absolutely fantastic. But nobody's seen it. It's on the list. It's on the list. Sin. Is there something you've made that you're particularly proud of that you feel like not enough people have seen that you would recommend they check out? Walker is probably your favorite movie that you've made. Yeah, no, I love Walker. I love Walker. Walker for a long time was very, very hard to see. But now it has, you can get it on Blu-ray or DVD from Criterion in the US. You can get it in Europe or Coke media. It was always available in Japan. Sometimes they're off. I mean, Walker definitely was suppressed for a long time. Repo Man was suppressed for a long time. Yeah. And the studio, the same studio because they just hated the film. But these things kind of sneak out. There's a film by Francesco Rosie called "The Maté Effect" about the guy who invented the guy, the man who was the kind of the originator of the Italian petrochemical business after a second. What more boring subject could that be? But it is brilliant. It's amazingly political. And it's a thriller. It's called "The Maté Effect." It stars Jan Maria Volante. And it's very, very hard to see. It's very hard to see. Because Maté was probably murdered by either by the CIA or by the French Secret Service or by the audience companies, by Hitman from the oil company. And unfortunately, the film was made for Paramount. And Paramount at the time was owned by Gulf and Western, a Gulf oil company. So not surprisingly, Maté is very, very hard to see. And even Walker in the States, Criterion have got a license to distribute it on disc, but they're not allowed to stream it. Is it just because the studio is like, we don't want it that out there? There's institutional hostility to Walker, just as that is to repo man. Universal hate the fact that repo man is so popular. And I've been trying for 40 years to make a sequel to repo man. Even going so far, I actually got back to the US rights. So I could make a domestic sequel or remake or series based on repo man. But it's hard to do that if you don't own foreign. Because what the investors want to do is they want to amortize their investment, not just from the domestic territory, but from the rest of the world. Right. And that used to be the way you got things done. You'd sell the foreign rights and then you could kind of, for the US, do whatever you wanted in a lot of ways. And now it's sort of the opposite, right? Yeah. And isn't that weird? Because in fact, that's the way it used to be. So you would find an investor who'd come in and just own US rights and then a different investor would own foreign rights. And that was the way it worked. But now it's, investors are very, very cagey. It is weird because I would have thought that, you know, was a film that was because the US is the biggest market for repo man. Oh, yeah. So I would think that if some county investor would spend two and a half million bucks to make a sequel to repo man and they'd clean up. Oh, absolutely. That's a slim dunk. Still banging on the big door. Take my money, you know, be a repo man. And just because I love this so much and I've told it on the show before, so it'd be better to hear it from you is the Mellon farmer edition of repo man where the story is, you kind of insisted you do the TV edit? Is that? No, I didn't insist at all. No, no, I, I, it was, this is very like the introduction that they made for the television version of a fist full of dollars. Universal got in touch with me and they hated me, but they got in touch with me because they were trying to come up with a re-edited television version and they couldn't do it. They just couldn't figure out what to do, because by the time they cut out all the swearing and the drug taking and stuff, the film was only about 50 minutes long. And so, and they needed to go into the outtakes and put stuff back and they shot new footage and all this stuff, trying to fix it, you know, and they'd made such a mess. It was unbelievable. You know, they'd shot like pictures of the car license plate, you know, where the face of the devil appeared and disappeared, you know. So you see, Hollywood is run by Satanists. That's true. Very, yeah. But what they'd done then was these were static shots where the car wasn't moving and they'd intercut them with shots of the car moving and driving past. This is how little they understand cinema at the American studios. So anyway, they hired me, or they didn't hire me, I did, I worked for free and paid me anything. I came in and re-edited Repo Man so that it could play on television. And Dick Rood, who was one of the actors in Repo Man, became the dialogue director. And his job was to direct Harry Dean and Emilio Estebes and all the other actors to say alternatives to swear words. And so I don't know who it was that came up with melon farmers, but that was on Dick Rood's watch. And it may even be Dick that came up with that that immortal expression. It's almost, it almost sort of conveys the message of the movie more than the regular kind of the movie in some ways to me, like that kind of... Yeah. Yeah, well, that's why we did, when we did straight to hell, there is no swearing in straight to hell. There is not a single swear word in straight to hell. Because after Repo Man and after Satan Nancy, we were tired of swearing. And the funny thing is, when the film got distribution, it received an R rating for foul language. There isn't a single swear word in the film, but I think that part of the problem was Shane McGowan. When he would speak, Shane McGowan, the clogs, he would go... Yeah, it could be a whole... Yeah, it's like Popeye. Yeah. And so you wouldn't know what he'd said. And the film sensor again was so the American board of film patriots or whatever they were called. We're so just so confused by Shane, they assumed he must be swearing. I can't believe I've never heard anything so filthy in my life. I know. Speaking of straight to hell, which sort of brings us full circle to the new project, which a Western, and you shot it on some of the actual spaghetti Western sets, right? When did you just shoot the hell? And some of the sets that you plan to shoot the new one on are still standing from that era as well. And some of them still exist. The town that we made straight to hell in has turned... It was Adobe Town, and it's gone back into the earth. So there's almost nothing left of it now. It's just a few lumps in the desert. But some of the other Western towns, such as the one that Carlos Cimi, the designer, built for a few dollars more, are still there. And when he built that set, it was meant to be El Paso, you know, the American city of El Paso on the border with Mexico. And so because of our film ends in El Paso, or one of the last scenes is there, we thought we've got to shoot it there. We've got to shoot it there. So the film is being shot partially in Spain on these original, certainly only movie locations, and partially in Arizona, because Arizona has the big cactus. So we'll get the best of both worlds in my last movie. And it's amazing to be, you know, you're growing up, you're watching these movies, and then to be able to not only, like physically, essentially walk onto the set of these movies that you are growing up, and then to make your own there, just, I can't even imagine what that must be like. It'll be amazing, because I've never actually shot in this location before, and the scene that we're going to do there is the biggest scene in the movie. So there's extras, there's wagons, there's horses. Yeah, it'll be really interesting. It'll be really interesting. And to do it on a shoestring is even more interesting, because nobody's going to give us a, you know, any, at the time of day, if it doesn't look amazing. So even though we're working on the modest budget, it's got to look pretty fantastic. You know, it's got to hold its own with Once Upon a Time in the West. I have full confidence that if anyone could do it, you can. We will try. And with the help of everyone else, so I'll put links to the Kickstarter in the show description here. And from my listeners, you know, you can, it's like as little as 10 bucks is helpful to the, to the movie, and there's all kinds of cool, cool rewards you can get and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we added some more stuff, we just added some more stuff. I mean, we, one that we hadn't thought of ridiculously enough is you get your name on a wanted poster in the Sheriff's office. It's awesome. But also, we had a reward, which completely sold out. All the great stones. Yeah, have your name on the great stone or, or across in the graveyard. So there's other, there's other kind of weird and bizarre rewards that, that can be obtained by backing my last movie. Perfect, perfect. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I really do appreciate it. As I said, I've worked out for a long time and I know the movie's going to be great. And I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. There you go, Alex Cox, Reepo Man said Nancy, movie drum. Just amazed that I got to talk to him and he's done so many great things. And we'll do at least one more great thing with his last film. So go to the Kickstarter. If you have a couple bucks, kick into that. And how cool was that Dr. Strange story? I never heard that anywhere. I might be breaking news exclusive here on TV guidance counselor. If after you give two and a half million dollars or a couple bucks to the Kickstarter, you have any bucks left over. And you want to help me with my show, you can go to patreon, patreon.com backslash TV guidance counselor is little as dollar a month. If you did five dollars and up a month, you get some bonus stuff, you get PDFs of the issues of TV guide. When we talk about specific issues of TV guide, we didn't in this special episode, but we did earlier in the week. Or if you just want to say hello, I am at social media at Kenneth W. Reed, or at TV guidance, or you can email me at tvguidenscouncer@gmail.com or kennedycanread.com. Hopefully you are having a good summer. Hopefully we get this full amount of money for Alex so that selfishly I can watch the best version of this movie that can be made. And I'll be here next week with a brand new edition. So I hope to see you then for that brand new edition of TV guidance counselor. I can't die. Are you just thinking, oh yes you can. And if you go one day, what are you going to do there?
