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1:26

Alright, welcome back everybody. This is going

1:28

to be fun. We

1:30

got to, you know what, you got to have some fun

1:33

podcasts out there. I'm

1:36

excited to talk to Brian Raftree,

1:39

author, journalist of

1:42

the book, Best Movie Year Ever, by the way. Really

1:45

a fun read. I think it was 1999. Which

1:47

I don't know, I don't know if I agree with that title,

1:49

but it is very fascinating. It's a confrontational title,

1:51

you know. It

1:54

was intentionally confrontational, yes. Intentionally

1:56

confrontational. It's meant to get people angry enough to buy

1:58

the book, yeah. Exactly.

1:59

Exactly. Because that's a whole pod

2:02

in itself. What was the best movie? Yeah. But

2:04

he makes a really good case. But he

2:06

is doing this special podcast

2:08

for The Ringer called Do We Get to Win This Time?

2:10

It's fascinating, you guys. It's very provocative. Movies

2:13

that shaped and reflected our feelings towards

2:15

the Vietnam War of 60s, 70s, and 80s. Brian

2:17

Raftery, welcome to Black on the Air.

2:20

Thank

2:20

you so much, Larry. I appreciate it. And

2:22

congrats on the pod, man. It's very

2:24

cool doing those... I like those narrative

2:27

pods. You think you get to produce

2:29

it a little bit? It's not like me

2:31

just going off on a tangent. I

2:35

love making them. And as someone who's been writing about movies

2:37

and culture for many, many years for magazines,

2:39

it's so much fun when you're doing one of these narrative pods and you're

2:41

like,

2:42

okay, how do I tell listeners that

2:45

I'm talking about apocalypse now? And it's like,

2:47

instead of having a boring three-cent description, you

2:49

can just play the original trailer, just drop

2:51

it right in. Sure. Half of these jobs

2:54

are listening and watching old movie trailers, which

2:56

if I can get my full-time job, I would be

2:58

very happy to do. I miss voiceover narration.

3:01

I miss the old suspense

3:03

and drama that these movie trailers used to have. I

3:06

find movie trailers fascinating because

3:08

as opposed to movies, they're

3:10

more contemporary, contemporary of their

3:13

time. It

3:16

gives you more of an insight into

3:19

who the people actually were, depending on

3:21

how they were being sold something. Where

3:23

the movie's a different type of time capsule. It's more

3:26

of the artistic expression of the time. And

3:28

sometimes they're at odds the way something's...

3:31

Well, you hear how something's promoted. That's how they

3:33

promoted that movie? Yeah.

3:36

It's real fascinating. And they

3:38

do give away all the best stuff. I think even... I'm pretty

3:41

sure. That's hilarious. I think even the

3:43

platoon trailer, I'm pretty sure at least one

3:45

of the TV ads had that famous shot of Willem

3:47

Dafoe with his arms up where I'm like, that's

3:49

when he dies. Yeah. That's kind of giving away

3:52

that very particular part of the

3:54

movie. What's interesting as someone

3:56

who makes content and everything, and I always

3:58

hate it when there'd be...

3:59

reviews of our best jokes

4:02

and that kind of stuff. You know,

4:04

or critics would talk about it. I find that

4:06

for the most part, audiences have short memories

4:09

when it comes to those things. You know, like they're

4:11

never something, but they don't, it's never

4:14

negative for them to, in fact, sometimes they

4:16

like to know

4:17

certain things, which goes against every feeling

4:19

that I have. It's like, why would you want to know these things?

4:22

It's like, be surprised. I think it's always

4:24

one of those weird things too, where with movie marketers, when

4:26

they talk about the fact that the worst thing you can do an audience

4:29

is kind of lie about what the movie is. That's

4:31

what turns people away. So there is some

4:33

kind of weird like corrective where it's like, let's give

4:35

every, cause I have a young kid and I've been showing her

4:37

trailers for certain R rated comedies to kind

4:39

of see what she'd be interested in.

4:41

Like some of the, some of like the Will Ferrell stuff. And I'm like,

4:43

they do put some of the best jokes in those trailers,

4:46

but they're so out of context. And also

4:48

when you're in, when you're in a comedy crowd, the last

4:50

great comedy I saw in the theater besides Barbie was

4:53

the most recent Jackass. And a lot

4:55

of those bits had been in the trailer.

4:58

When you're watching with a crowd, it's kind of a fun thing of like,

5:00

Hey, that's what we loved. Here's giant

5:02

Knoxville stapling his penis to a chicken or whatever.

5:04

It's finally happened. We probably got to see it in the crowd. Yeah.

5:08

Yes. There's the communal aspect. That's what's fun about

5:10

films. The communal aspect of it to

5:12

me is the best part, you know, cause I, I'm

5:15

sure like you, we can watch movies in our

5:17

rooms all day long and we'd be satisfied,

5:20

but there's nothing like the satisfaction,

5:22

especially for comedies, but

5:24

dramas too, because having being

5:26

in a room full of people and feeling the

5:29

experience of a really great

5:31

dramatic moment, you know, Oh yeah.

5:33

feeling an audience being hushed

5:36

about something, you know, can

5:38

also shape people's views about

5:40

things too, even more so

5:43

than the isolated movie. Don't you think? Oh,

5:45

I think so. I mean, I think too, you know, one of the reasons why the Barbie

5:47

and Oppenheimer became such like remarkable

5:50

kind of phenomenons. Like both those movies were

5:52

really great to see in the theater for a

5:54

very different reason. I saw Oppenheimer.

5:57

Yeah. Like I saw it at nine 30 in the morning and I'm

5:59

at.

5:59

and it was sold out.

6:01

Part of the joy of that was being like, these

6:03

are my people. These are people who are nerdy enough.

6:06

On opening nights, opening weekend, they

6:08

want to be there at 9.30. I know they bought these tickets

6:10

five weeks ago like I did. Even

6:13

just that's not a movie where you clap or cheer a lot.

6:15

They're actually a very quiet movie. But

6:17

sometimes having the quiet is also

6:19

really remarkable where you're like, no one's on

6:21

their phone, no one's chitchatting. We're all

6:24

wrapped up in this moment. There is something, you're

6:26

absolutely right. The dedicated filmgoer

6:29

who

6:29

does, they're looking forward to something.

6:31

Like when I have favorite movies coming out,

6:34

I had to go that first night, Brian,

6:36

that first weekend and seeing it at midnight

6:39

was always good too. Because those were the people

6:41

that they really wanted to see it. The midnight

6:43

people. I remember the Star

6:46

Trek movies when they first came out in the early 80s

6:48

because that was a Trekkie. Seeing Wrath of

6:50

Khan before anybody else saw

6:52

it at that first one. People were like screaming.

6:54

They were so excited.

6:57

Same with Star Wars. I saw that like

7:00

right when it first came out.

7:01

To me, the experience of seeing the movie

7:03

then shapes my opinion of that

7:06

movie. I'll tell my kids sometimes they

7:08

laugh at this. I go, I remember in the audience laughed at

7:10

that. I remember the audience laughed

7:12

at that. I'll point to a movie like that. I

7:15

still tell my parents that

7:17

they've been wonderful in my whole life. But

7:19

the thing I'll always remember, the thing I'll be most grateful for

7:21

was when I was in third grade, they took

7:24

me out of school early on a Friday, told me I

7:26

was going to a dentist appointment and instead took

7:28

me to the first screening of Return of the Jedi that

7:30

afternoon, which I'm like, that is the

7:32

cool. And knowing my parents, they didn't do that to be cool.

7:34

They probably did it to avoid the crowd at night or save

7:36

on the matinee ticket. That's what

7:39

I still remember that. And not the best

7:41

Star Wars movie, but the best Star Wars movie

7:43

going experience. And I still remember what the crowd was

7:45

like. I still remember like my brother sitting in my mom's

7:47

lab because it was oversold. And yeah,

7:50

those opening nights, opening weekends

7:52

are, I mean, I still, I still try to go if I can.

7:54

It's still the most fun time to see a movie, I feel like.

7:57

Yeah, I have the opposite story of that. And

7:59

I'm trying to think of what the name of the movie was. But

8:02

it was my father, when my parents got divorced,

8:04

you know, he'd go to the dads for the weekend.

8:07

And he

8:10

took us to some movie, and it turned out

8:12

to be some R-rated

8:13

movie that was very disturbing. And

8:16

I'm trying to remember the name of it. If I said it, you know

8:18

what it is. And I'll think of it probably while we're talking.

8:20

But my brother and I talked about this for years.

8:22

It's like, what was he thinking? And I think he was too embarrassed.

8:25

I think he was too embarrassed to take

8:28

us out,

8:29

you know? But it was this like

8:31

slasher movie where the guy was, you know,

8:34

cutting up women and stuff like that. And

8:37

when I think of it, you'll go, oh my God, there's no way

8:39

your dad could've taken you. You know?

8:42

So that's why I became a comedian, you know?

8:44

For the first time in my life. But

8:47

speaking of cutting movie, so the war movie

8:49

itself is an interesting

8:51

thing in Hollywood. It's had a long history.

8:54

And this is it. I love this

8:56

pod because, you know, looking at the Vietnam

8:58

war movie, it is interesting. It's had its own

9:01

relationship with both Hollywood

9:04

and the public that is kind of fascinating. What

9:07

made you want to do this particular pod? Were

9:09

you thinking about that? Or were you, what

9:12

got you into the deep dive?

9:13

Well, the weird thing is I grew up really kind

9:16

of fascinated by Vietnam because of these

9:18

movies. And I was someone who

9:21

was watching those commercials for Platoon

9:23

as an 11 or 12 year old and begging my parents

9:26

to let me see Platoon in full metal

9:28

jacket when I had no real idea

9:31

of what the Vietnam war was. And

9:33

so it's something that's always been with me. And there

9:35

was a CBS show called Tour of Duty about

9:38

Vietnam that I watched like the first episode. There

9:40

was a Marvel comics comic called The Nam, which

9:42

was all about Vietnam, which I read. I had a subscription

9:44

to. And so it's always been

9:47

on my mind, but then as it turns out,

9:49

Bill Simmons of the Ringer wrote his college, go

9:51

to college term paper on Vietnam movies.

9:54

And a college a year or so ago, kind of through

9:57

people at the Ringer asked me if I wanted to do a show about

9:59

it, which.

9:59

I was like, this is perfectly, this is like the

10:02

most perfectly in my wheelhouse kind

10:04

of topic just because a lot of Gen

10:06

Xers who were on my age, we treated these movies

10:09

and I don't mean this to be glib, but like

10:11

we almost treated these movies, Vietnam movies as almost

10:13

pop culture franchises. Like you got to go see

10:15

Full Metal Jacket, but before that you got to watch

10:17

Apocalypse Now and even after that, if

10:20

you're ready for that, you got to watch The Deer Hunter. And it was

10:22

like,

10:22

it was kind of like I say in the show, but it felt like this

10:24

handed me down more where I was watching and learning

10:27

a lot about Vietnam, but I still didn't

10:29

have the intellectual capacity to understand

10:31

it really, or understand the

10:33

geopolitical issues or understand what it was

10:35

like for veterans or understand anything about it.

10:38

But it was, there were dozens and dozens of these

10:40

movies when I was a kid and they were just something you watched,

10:42

you know? And I've always been fascinated

10:44

by the war because of it.

10:47

Yeah. And you're the first generation, because I'm right

10:49

before your generation. I don't call myself

10:51

a boomer because I was born in the 60s.

10:53

Like I call myself moonshot generation. I think of

10:55

the new title. Yeah. And

10:57

I think of each one of those right in the middle, you know?

11:01

Because we were the generation where we thought

11:04

anything's possible, you know? And our

11:06

parents are in the home, but then

11:08

when we were about 10 or 11, everybody got divorced

11:11

and we got into the 70s and the world

11:13

changed. So we were in that transition

11:15

one, you know? But

11:18

you, your generation didn't

11:20

grow up like mine where we were

11:23

filled with all the war propaganda films,

11:25

you know, in our youth. So

11:27

I got to experience that shift,

11:30

but I was still young enough where I wasn't

11:32

cynical about it. I was interested in it, you

11:34

know?

11:35

It was more like, oh, wow, that's,

11:38

oh, like that's what really happened, you know? So

11:41

for, it was always, whenever those movies

11:43

came out, it was always a fascinating

11:45

standpoint for me of, oh, wow,

11:47

now there's, because I had an uncle who went to

11:49

Vietnam and I saw like the effects firsthand

11:53

and that kind of stuff. And I knew there

11:55

was more to it than we had ever been told.

11:57

So it was kind of, it was kind of like.

12:03

talk

12:12

to children of the show

12:14

and a lot of said yeah they never talked about

12:16

it yeah and but interesting

12:18

enough. I'm many war two veterans

12:21

same thing the rarely talked about it you know

12:23

yeah because wars nasty

12:25

in

12:26

it doesn't matter what war

12:28

it is and i the first time

12:30

i got a glimpse of it was.

12:35

My uncle lived in

12:37

a episode noise for my family's from my parents

12:39

from and we're visiting out there and

12:41

he lived in the attic of my grandmother's house and

12:44

i went up to to go see him he he

12:46

taught me how to play chess i was gonna go play some chess

12:48

with him. And i went up to the and can you

12:50

know i didn't hear my looked in and he was asleep you

12:53

know so i just so you know i'm just

12:55

a little kid went over and just kinda tap to uncle

12:57

michael and he just like the

12:59

way he reacted.

13:01

Just i mean

13:04

it scared the fuck out of me

13:06

and i don't

13:07

it don't to me a little bit then

13:09

but even more so later he

13:11

was just on a battlefield you know

13:13

like somebody that was somebody coming

13:16

to kill him. You

13:18

know that simple reaction man

13:21

it's i still

13:23

feel i have goosebumps talking but i never

13:25

forgot that you know. And

13:28

he was a change person after that his

13:30

life was broken after that war so i have an

13:33

experience of how it can just break

13:35

people

13:36

you know. Yeah and me look at how

13:38

you know ptsd for me it was something that

13:40

i feel like i was always aware of growing

13:42

up early even if i didn't know that term but

13:45

when i was watching these movies i really kind

13:47

of realize how much my. Form

13:49

my my idea of what veterans lives

13:51

were like were kind of formed by Vietnam movies

13:54

and this idea of like travis pickle or

13:56

you know these kind of veterans who come back and

13:58

they're angry and prone.

13:59

of violence, which was a whole kind of sub

14:02

genre. I mean, I, I grew up at a time where

14:05

Rambo was kind of the most famous Vietnam

14:07

vet in popular culture. Um, and

14:09

those movies are, those movies are fascinating

14:12

to rewatch. I don't know if you've seen the first two Rambo movies

14:14

in a while. They're actually, I haven't seen them in a

14:16

long time since they came out. It was the first one

14:18

was excellent.

14:20

The first one is excellent. I also say that I ended

14:22

up the author of the novel. The novel is fantastic.

14:24

I actually read a lot of action novels

14:26

where you can kind of really,

14:28

but it's, it's good stuff. Um, but

14:30

that was kind of my perception of what they

14:32

were either Travis Fickle or they were John Rambo. And

14:34

a lot of that comes from

14:36

all those Vietnam movies that I was watching. Again, at

14:39

an age where you get an HBO free

14:41

weekend and you're watching first blood part two

14:43

and you're elect 12 years old and you're like,

14:45

I guess we should go back and rescue POWs

14:48

and blow up as many, you know, you just, you'd have no idea

14:50

what the reality of the situation is. And,

14:52

and these movies were kind of my education about

14:55

Vietnam early on and probably for better

14:57

and for worse. It's like, it sparked my interest in history

14:59

and global,

15:01

global wars and stuff. But I don't know if

15:03

I actually got the most accurate information

15:05

or context about a lot of these conflicts. When

15:08

you think about what were two movies, they were much

15:10

of them or, you

15:11

know, from a propaganda standpoint, from

15:13

the sense of it was cheering on

15:16

Americans for the most part, especially the ones during the

15:18

war, which makes sense, of course, you know, you're in the middle

15:20

of war, you don't want to have a

15:22

full metal jacket in the middle of, you

15:25

know, especially going against someone like Hitler,

15:27

the lines drawn were a little more

15:30

black and white, you know, but people, people

15:33

forget though, that

15:34

before Pearl Harbor, the Americans were very

15:37

much anti-war because

15:38

World War One didn't have the same type

15:41

of feeling, people didn't have the same type of

15:43

feeling about World War One that they eventually had about World War

15:45

Two. You know, World War One is closer

15:47

to what Vietnam was in some ways where,

15:49

you

15:50

know, there was a, by the way,

15:52

there was a global pandemic at the end of

15:54

the war. There was a, it

15:56

was a trench war where the,

15:59

the reality.

15:59

of that war were never really talked about,

16:02

but when people came home, they had prosthetic

16:04

limbs. You know, in

16:06

fact, there was new technology for people

16:09

that were disfigured and that kind of stuff. And

16:11

the horrors of that war,

16:14

I kind of catapulted people into the roaring

16:16

twenties because they were in denial of it. They didn't want to

16:18

talk about World War I. So there's not

16:20

to me as many World War I films

16:23

as there are about World War II because people

16:25

wanted to forget World War I. They didn't want to relive

16:27

that. By the time World War II ended, Hollywood was

16:29

now five or six major

16:32

studios. They had big stars. I mean, there

16:34

was such,

16:35

there was a machine in place and Hollywood was

16:37

so

16:38

interested. Hollywood had a vested interest in

16:40

the World War II effort. And Mark Harris

16:42

wrote this amazing book about World

16:44

War II that became a Netflix

16:46

documentary. And it's like, when you watch

16:48

the fact that like, Frank Capra went to, yeah,

16:52

came back. And

16:55

his, I mean, Capra going to World War II, John

16:57

Huston, all these huge filmmakers literally just going

16:59

and filming combat. And Vietnam

17:02

was so different because it was, Hollywood

17:05

was like at his kind of peak era. You

17:07

talk about best movie years. I feel like 99 I

17:09

wrote a book about, but 1969 is certainly like a pretty

17:11

remarkable year.

17:12

And there's no real, aside from

17:14

John Wayne's movie, the Green Berets in the late sixties,

17:17

there's no real big studio Vietnam

17:19

movie. I mean, you can watch,

17:21

I just went and saw The Wild Bunch in the theater for

17:24

the first time in a long time. And you can watch that and be

17:26

like, this is kind of about Vietnam. It's not really

17:28

at all. There's a lot of movies that fit that way. Dirty Dozen

17:30

has a little bit of that. Yeah, I mean, especially, and

17:33

certainly like The Wild Bunch, which is like all

17:35

about what the violence of conflict

17:37

is.

17:39

And by the way, that's an amazing movie to rewatch in the theater speaking

17:41

to. Like I saw it at a sold out show in Santa Monica

17:43

and afterward I was like so just buzzing

17:46

with like that post Wild Bunch

17:48

crazy energy from it. But

17:50

Vietnam could not inspire those kind

17:52

of movies because studio executives figured

17:54

no one wanted to watch it. It had been on TV. It was

17:57

too divisive and it was depressing

17:59

and America was. seen as a failure.

18:03

You can't make, you could not make an easy movie about

18:05

Vietnam in the early 70s. No one wanted to do

18:07

it. I mean, would

18:08

a movie about Ukraine and Russia

18:10

coming out right now, would a lot of us want

18:13

to go see that? If it was a narrative film,

18:15

I

18:15

don't think so. I just were surrounded by it

18:17

on the news. I think what we're to is the last

18:20

time people could cheer for a side.

18:22

I think

18:24

Vietnam is the first time people, you

18:26

couldn't outside of Green Berets,

18:29

which was kind of that.

18:31

People didn't want to cheer for them. It

18:35

was too graphic at that point because

18:38

of television, I would think.

18:40

Yeah. Also, like World War II, it

18:42

was so black and white who the good guys and bad

18:44

guys were. We're still making World

18:46

War II movies. I mean, the new Harry and

18:48

the new Indiana Jones movie, he's punching Nazis off the train.

18:50

It's like you've been fighting Nazis

18:53

for 40 years. I know. It's

18:55

like there was a weird point in the 80s and early 90s where every

18:58

bad guy had to be Russian because it was just this post-Cold

19:00

War. That's what the bad guy is. You don't have to

19:02

explain too much. That's kind of. Yeah.

19:05

We've just completely gone back to like,

19:08

let's just make every bad guy Nazi. No

19:10

one questions it. Yeah.

19:12

You could not have that

19:15

very clear cut good guy, bad guy

19:17

feel with the Vietnam movies. It was a

19:19

war a lot of people literally just didn't understand why

19:21

it was going on, what the goals were.

19:23

Yeah. It seems to me that because

19:26

the bad guy might have been us. Yes.

19:30

That's one thing that's missing

19:32

from a lot of these movies. I

19:34

think that is some

19:36

of the filmmakers talked about the guilt that Americans

19:38

felt and whether they could articulate it or not, there

19:40

was a guilt of like, maybe we should never have done this. Maybe

19:44

we're in the wrong here. It's that great scene in

19:46

Platoon where Willem Dafoe and Charlie

19:48

Sheen are talking. Charlie Sheen's like,

19:51

Willem Dafoe says, his character says, I

19:53

think we're going to lose. Charlie Sheen's like, how do we lose?

19:55

We're going to lose our America. And Willem Dafoe's

19:57

like,

19:57

we've been kicking ass for so long. time

20:00

is up. And that's also a big part

20:02

of the bummerness of these movies. It did

20:04

feel like when the

20:06

war was over, it ended in this very

20:09

dramatic but still anti-climactic way. And

20:12

no one can feel good about it. No one could hold a parade

20:14

in the

20:15

mid-70s after Vietnam in any

20:17

country, really, it feels like.

20:19

veterans were treated horribly when

20:22

they came home too. And I always thought it wasn't their fault.

20:24

Of course, there are atrocities, but people don't understand

20:27

atrocities happen. It

20:29

just happened because there's war.

20:35

There were atrocities, plenty of atrocities

20:37

committed by the North Vietnamese in that war too.

20:40

But of course, we focus on our own

20:42

rightly so. And then

20:45

the image of the Vietnamese

20:47

being left behind in the helicopter,

20:50

that's

20:50

our last image, was so horrible.

20:54

I'll never forget that too. I mean, that burned

20:56

in my mind too. It seemed like it

20:58

was so futile. It seemed like what was the

21:01

point of all that? And yet I think that

21:03

was 1975, I think. I think it was 75. Is

21:08

Dear Hunter the first movie

21:11

that really was a

21:13

popular movie? Because I know it was, it won some

21:15

Academy Awards and everything where we really

21:17

kind of first saw what the

21:19

war really felt like. Is that the first one, do

21:22

you think? That's the first big studio

21:24

hit. And I think if Francis Portcoville

21:26

had finished Apocalypse Now earlier,

21:29

it probably would have been Apocalypse Now, but that movie took

21:31

a

21:32

long, long time to finish and figure

21:34

out. But Dear Hunter really was. And

21:36

what's so fascinating about Dear Hunter is it

21:39

came out around the same time as Coming

21:41

Home, which is the Jane Fonda John Voight movie.

21:43

Oh, John Voight. Yeah, yeah.

21:45

They were both these big Oscar

21:48

movies. They were both kind of competing against one another.

21:50

And they're very different visions of

21:52

Vietnam. I think those two camps, there was

21:54

actually

21:55

some tension between those two filmmaking groups

21:57

because they

21:58

were saying different things about the war.

21:59

war. And the deer hunter is kind

22:02

of fascinating because when you watch, when you watch

22:04

the trailers for the way they sold, we're talking about trailers

22:06

earlier, it's just, they don't, I don't

22:08

think they even say Vietnam, it's clear that it's about

22:10

Vietnam, but it's just a series of images

22:13

and like critics quotes, it doesn't even get into

22:15

what it really says about Vietnam. It's gotten

22:17

more critics as the years have gone on. I think there is a certain

22:19

sense of like,

22:21

this was a very cruel depiction of the

22:23

Vietnamese. It was a kind of inaccurate depiction

22:25

in some ways of what

22:27

people who were stuck in Vietnam went through. But

22:30

it's, that movie is really powerful. It's

22:32

still deeply, deeply upsetting to watch.

22:34

It's a, it's a tough movie for one that's over 40 years

22:37

old. I was kind of surprised how much power

22:39

some of these movies still had. Like, I don't

22:41

think a major studio would make a movie that bleak

22:44

and that dark about a just ended war

22:46

nowadays. I mean, it's even, even late 78

22:49

79 feels almost too soon to make that movie. I'm kind of

22:51

amazed it happened when it did. Yeah, it's funny

22:53

because the 70s,

22:55

I think it was because of the 70s and a lot of the

22:58

films that came out then, you know, it's the rise of

23:00

the anti hero, you know, what's

23:03

his name, easy writers and blah,

23:05

blah, blah. That book really talks

23:07

about, yeah, yeah, such a great book

23:10

talks about a lot of the films. But

23:12

yeah, when you think of

23:14

the types of

23:15

feeling and all that, in fact, Stallone

23:18

famously

23:19

was wanted to do an anti

23:22

bleak anti hero. That's

23:24

what Rocky really was. Yeah, it was, it

23:27

was more his reaction to feeling that

23:29

there weren't American heroes on screen more

23:32

so than he wanted to do a boxing movie.

23:34

Right.

23:35

Which is, which is kind of interesting, you know, so

23:38

apocalypse. Now, what is your view

23:40

on that? Like, what is the, where

23:42

does that film fit? I asked that

23:45

film is complicated to me, you know, I'm

23:47

not sure what to think of apocalypse now. Because

23:50

when I think of that, like when I first started

23:52

to know what to think of it, like, let me put it

23:54

like this.

23:55

I find apocalypse now, sometimes

23:58

entertaining in a bad way. Yeah.

24:01

Right. You know, like

24:03

I'm cheering for, I love the

24:05

smell of napalm in the morning. I wish

24:07

the audience should not be cheering and applauding

24:09

that, you know. It's tough because when I had

24:11

not seen it in about 10 years when I rewatched it, like

24:14

last year for the podcast, and I really was

24:16

like the first hour and a half, I was just so enthralled

24:19

because it's just one of those things now. And like in like the

24:21

post

24:21

CGI area, you're like, those

24:24

huts are exploding. Those helicopters

24:26

are flying. Those guns are, I don't know if there's

24:28

a real live animal, but this looks real. And

24:33

you know, it is a very American

24:35

told. It's a very American vision of that war.

24:38

And

24:39

I spoke to a couple people about the fact that like, yeah,

24:41

I mean, there's scenes, there's no Vietnamese

24:43

character, you don't even learn their names. They're just basically

24:46

there to be killed on screen. And

24:49

the same is kind of true of the deer hunter. And that's

24:51

the way the movies were made at that time. That's the way the filmmakers want

24:53

to tell that story.

24:55

They're probably aiming at American audiences. And I understand

24:57

that. At the same time, it's those

24:59

movies are really tough to sit through for

25:02

those reasons. Because you feel

25:04

kind of like

25:05

uncomfortable by the fact that like, it's,

25:08

it's kind of what I was talking about walking out of the wild ones. Like I was so

25:10

like, keyed up. And I'm like, that's not a movie you're supposed

25:12

to feel good about at the end. You're not supposed to be

25:14

like, yeah, what a great action scene.

25:17

And I think that does kind of make those movies, it

25:20

makes them hit harder. And I think that's one of the reasons why Apocalypse

25:22

Now is still,

25:24

still such a rite of passage for young

25:26

movie nerds. Like I still talk to people who are like, who

25:28

were in their 20s, who were talking about like seeing

25:31

Apocalypse Now was a big deal.

25:34

They just showed in here in LA, I think it's sold out like

25:36

three nights in a row. And people are still seeing that movie.

25:38

My other issue with Apocalypse Now is that I,

25:41

I try every time to be open minded about the Brando

25:44

stuff. And it still just doesn't work for me at

25:46

all. I just feel like it's a little bit indulgent.

25:49

It's kind of indulgent. And it's

25:51

a little patronizing too, where you're like this guy

25:53

who mutters a lot of bad poetry and wanders

25:56

around in a robe is going to somehow

25:58

all these villagers and natives are going to see him as

26:00

a God. I'm like, not quite

26:03

by him. But

26:05

it's a fascinating movie to watch. And it is like, you know, and

26:08

it's one of those movies where the myth behind

26:10

the movie, you know, and some is an easy writer's

26:12

rating bulls. And we did a whole episode about apocalypse now.

26:14

I mean, the making of that movie is

26:16

fascinating and just truly epic. I

26:19

mean, years and years to make that movie, which

26:21

again, no studio would have the patience

26:23

or the money or the resources for that anymore.

26:26

Yeah. And Martin Sheen is incredible in the film.

26:28

He's great. The weird thing we're watching is when I rewatch

26:31

it, I have a new theory now that Matthew McConaughey's

26:33

first 10 years, every character he played, he's

26:36

doing Robert, he's doing Robert Duvall

26:38

in Apocalypse Now. Like, watch Robert Duvall the

26:40

way, not just the accent, but everything about

26:42

it. It just feels like he's almost,

26:45

but you almost feel like Robert Duvall's about to say,

26:47

all right, all right, all right. Like he's got that weird, That's hilarious.

26:50

rough authoritarian laid backness

26:52

that Matthew McConaughey had in a lot of early roles. Anyway,

26:54

that's my theory. If I were talking about Matthew McConaughey,

26:57

I'll try that on and see what he thinks. You know, Vietnam

26:59

wars have always seemed to be therapeutic

27:02

or cathartic in a sense. That, to me, is

27:04

what distinguishes them from other war

27:07

films. There's

27:07

some therapy in there. Like, we're supposed to

27:10

have a catharsis for what we're really supposed

27:12

to see. But

27:14

what are the exceptions? Are

27:16

there exceptions to that with Vietnam? Because there's

27:18

so many World War II films that aren't that, you know,

27:20

they're not, they don't feel that way at all.

27:23

Even the

27:24

ones, even

27:27

Schindler's List doesn't feel that way. It feels

27:29

more, you know, like,

27:32

it's more inspirational in

27:34

many ways, you know, than cathartic,

27:37

I would say, you know, Saving Private Ryan,

27:39

same thing, even though we see horrors in Saving Private

27:41

Ryan,

27:42

you know, it's almost like a buddy

27:44

film. Yeah. I

27:47

don't mean to slam it because I love Saving Private

27:49

Ryan. But it doesn't have that same

27:51

catharsis to it, that therapy in there,

27:53

you know. Yeah. It's also what's interesting to me

27:55

is that I, it's like that

27:57

catharsis might not be applicable to everyone.

27:59

When you first love is so interesting

28:02

is when I started the show, I

28:04

always assumed

28:06

in the 80s that Rambo's popularity

28:09

was at least a little bit fueled by veterans

28:11

who wanted to see

28:14

this vision of a Vietnam vet go back and

28:16

reaffirm his life. And

28:19

I spoke to a couple of veterans and a couple

28:21

of people who have worked with veterans of PTSD, and

28:23

they also have the same thing, which is that

28:25

at least in this group of people I talked to, they were like, we were not going

28:27

to see Rambo. We did not want to see that movie. That

28:31

superhero vision of a veteran to them was

28:33

very off-putting. But when you watch

28:35

First Blood

28:36

and listen to and read what Stallone was trying

28:38

to do, I do think he was trying to make like a... Because

28:41

people forget that First Blood ends

28:43

with Rambo basically crying. He's basically

28:45

saying, I came back. I don't know

28:48

how to do anything anymore. It's a really heartbreaking

28:51

movie that I think got lost

28:53

in the many Rambo movies that followed

28:55

where he could decapitate people with

28:57

his pinky. The last couple of Rambo movies

28:59

were so wild where it's like, is he just straight

29:01

up twisting people's heads off? But the first

29:04

movie is fairly sensitive. And it is

29:06

a real kick-ass action movie. But

29:08

I

29:09

think he was trying to get at the loneliness

29:11

and

29:12

the uselessness that some veterans

29:14

felt when they come back. But I don't know if that necessarily

29:17

registered with people who just wanted to see him

29:20

tackle someone in a helicopter or whatever.

29:23

I think a lot of people went into these movies with whatever

29:25

baggage they had about the war.

29:27

And I'm not sure sometimes

29:29

if the message of some of these films necessarily connected

29:32

with mainstream audiences at the time. Platoon

29:37

has a very kind of optimistic

29:38

ending in a weird way. And it's

29:40

last minute and a half.

29:42

And it was sold as this beautiful, tough

29:44

movie. But it's so much darker

29:46

than I remembered. Didn't Platoon

29:49

end with the next group coming?

29:51

Didn't

29:51

it end with that or anything? That's

29:53

kind of in my

29:55

memory. Yeah, Charlie Sheen's been kind of airlifted off.

29:57

And I think he might be seeing a new group arrive. Right.

30:00

The fresh face. Yeah. I can't remember

30:03

if he gets that if you see that in the shot or not, but it's

30:05

definitely it ends with a voiceover that

30:07

I actually, as much as I love platoon, I think

30:09

the voiceover is a little much, but it does have kind of a,

30:12

a kind of like calming kind of voiceover that can make

30:14

you feel almost okay when you walk

30:17

out of theater. But the rest of the movie is like, it

30:19

is,

30:20

it's tough. And again, like that's a movie that was number

30:22

one for weeks on end and made like almost

30:25

a hundred million dollars in one best pictures.

30:27

It's, it's kind of a remarkable moment in like movie

30:29

going American movie, going history, that that was such a big

30:32

film. I remember that. What do you think was the

30:34

power of platoon? Why did that resonate

30:36

because it wasn't the first Vietnam

30:38

war movie. You know, why, why did that resonate

30:41

with people so much? I think there were a couple of things,

30:43

one, and I get into this in later episodes of

30:45

that. I do think that the eighties, the combination

30:48

of Reagan

30:49

really trying to talk about Vietnam

30:51

at a, you know, when other presidents did not, um,

30:54

even though a lot of veterans, some veterans did not agree what he

30:56

was saying, but I do think a big part of it was

30:58

I think the Memorial wall and I think the kind of

31:01

the eighties became slowly over

31:03

the early eighties.

31:04

It does seem like more and more veterans were willing

31:06

to talk about what happened. It seemed like there was a greater

31:09

sympathy toward what happened toward

31:11

the veterans. Um, but also the

31:13

thing that's so remarkable about platoon and the reason why

31:15

I think it connected aside from being a

31:17

great movie is that when you watch the TV ads

31:19

for platoon, it's about Oliver Stone.

31:22

I mean, one of the, one of the TV ads literally says Oliver

31:24

Stone served in Vietnam. This is the first

31:26

real and it was sold as

31:28

time magazine put on the cover. The first real

31:30

Vietnam as it really was. And

31:32

the fact that you had all this stuff by so much was

31:34

there, right? Like firsthand account. Yeah.

31:36

And I think that gave it a certain amount of credibility.

31:39

And I know that some of the veterans I talked to and some

31:41

of the veterans that when you read newspaper accounts

31:43

platoon was the first Vietnam movie that these

31:45

veterans would actually go to. They would not go see a

31:48

pockets now. They would not go see the Rambo

31:50

movies, but I think stones credibility,

31:52

um,

31:53

which you see in the movie. I mean, it's, it

31:55

feels very real. It's a very, it's a very

31:57

tough film. Um,

31:58

I think that gave it a break.

31:59

But I also think the 80s may have just been the

32:02

time when people had it

32:03

had been more than 10 years since the word ended A

32:06

new generation come in people were more maybe

32:09

more open to discussing it And I think again the

32:11

moral wall was a huge huge part

32:13

of that awareness. What year was platoon

32:15

is it 85? It's Was

32:20

released late and it came out like a

32:22

Christmas and then came out wider in the

32:24

rest. Yeah country

32:26

I associate the 80s with a lot of

32:28

escape is fair 80s started in 77

32:31

to me, you know with Star Wars Yeah,

32:33

yeah, I kind of that's when the 80s started,

32:35

you know, but yeah, and I have to

32:37

make my brain Like remember

32:39

no, no Larry. There's some there was a lot of Like

32:43

stuff like platoon and that kind of stuff

32:45

too, you know But

32:47

it does feel that way where I don't feel that way about the

32:49

70s Even though it had a lot of escapists thing

32:51

to like that knobs and brimsticks, you know I

32:57

mean, I'm sitting in front of us three days the Condor

32:59

poster like 70s escapism is my

33:02

is my go-to Yeah, come on three.

33:04

There's nothing in the 80s. That's like three days of the Condor.

33:06

That's that's just so good That's so

33:09

defining of the 70s. Yeah. Oh, yeah

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only and should not be attempted on public

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roads. Full

35:26

Metal Jacket.

35:28

Now you have Stanley Kubrick weighing in who

35:30

had weighed in previously on World

35:32

War I actually. I read that. Paths

35:36

of Glory I think. Yeah, which I think is

35:38

probably the best World War I movie. Like I

35:40

still feel like it's being ripped off. The trench scenes

35:42

in that movie are amazing. Yeah, it's

35:45

a fantastic film, yeah. Yeah, not talked

35:47

about enough.

35:49

Now Full Metal Jacket was

35:51

riveting to me.

35:53

A platoon was very emotional, but

35:56

Full Metal Jacket,

35:57

it was almost like one, like platoon

35:59

was.

35:59

documentary and Full Metal Jacket was this

36:02

artistic just opus, you know, yeah,

36:05

of this thing. But still, I

36:07

mean,

36:08

the first part of the film is devastating

36:10

to me because

36:13

it's such a comment on

36:17

how you're just broken, you

36:19

know, and it's such a metaphor

36:21

for so many things. Where do you place Full

36:23

Metal Jacket in this canon and

36:26

and how important

36:28

is it? Do you see that and Platoon kind

36:30

of have a unique because they came out around the same time

36:33

in terms of how people viewed the Vietnam

36:35

War and the effects and that sort of thing.

36:38

Yeah, I mean, they were part of this kind of like 86 to 89 in particular,

36:41

it was Platoon

36:43

into Full Metal Jacket into Hamburger Hill,

36:45

you had Cassie the War, you

36:47

had Born on the Fourth of July, that was really those

36:50

last three or four years of the 80s is really

36:52

kind of like, and we get into this later episode, that

36:54

was kind of the apex of

36:56

this boom. And

36:58

Full Metal Jacket, I mean, as far as a as far as a movie,

37:01

as far as a Vietnam movie, I mean, I feel like that and

37:03

Apocalypse Now and Platoon are kind of,

37:05

they're kind of the three essential movies, if

37:07

you just want to watch the three biggest movies about Vietnam

37:09

and the most impactful. Because

37:12

I've always been, I always go back and

37:14

forth on Full Metal Jacket, like I think the second

37:16

half where they're clearly filming in England.

37:19

It does not look like, you know, yeah, that's

37:21

a kind of studios. Yeah, yeah.

37:24

I've gone back and forth on that. And the movie

37:26

has a certain, there's

37:28

a dream like quality the second half was sometimes I love

37:30

with all Kubrick movies. But you know, one of

37:33

the people I interviewed for the show was Anthony Swofford,

37:36

who wrote Jarhead and

37:38

for about his time in the Marines.

37:40

And he talks about going to see Full Metal

37:42

Jacket with his buddies on

37:44

like opening, you know, when it came out.

37:46

And for him, that was a huge it wasn't

37:48

it wasn't the movie that sent him to enlist,

37:51

but it was a huge part of it because he really

37:53

kind of

37:54

loved that for me, that first hour ends in such

37:56

a terrible, bleak way, but he kind

37:59

of wanted to be part love the kind of macho

38:01

fantasy that that movie is kind of offering up,

38:04

which, you know, I'm not sure whether Kubrick made

38:06

that movie,

38:07

hoping young people would want to, you know,

38:09

enlist but that movie is really powerful

38:11

because a Kubrick could not make a boring movie

38:14

and you watch that movie and you are really kind of caught

38:16

up

38:16

in Modine's character and it is like it is a very

38:19

satisfying in

38:20

its own way as dark as it gets. It's a very

38:23

kind of satisfying macho

38:25

movie for that first half hour 40 minutes where

38:27

you can't help but think how would I

38:29

deal in this situation? Like how would I be kind of like

38:31

the one, would I

38:34

be Vincent Denafrio's character kind of sobbing in

38:36

my bunk at night or would I be kind of someone

38:38

who could kind of, I

38:39

could take it, you know? And I think that

38:42

was very, you know, intoxicating. And when I saw

38:44

that when I was 13 or 14, I had

38:46

never seen a war movie like that. I mean,

38:49

it's so gut level and

38:51

terrifying. And I think my

38:53

father was in Paris Island. He never went to the war

38:55

but my father is just someone I could not

38:57

imagine going through that like at all.

39:00

It's like if I had a time machine, I probably

39:02

just want to watch my dad go through basic training because he

39:04

was this quiet, gentle photography

39:06

nerd and I'm like, how did he deal with being screamed

39:09

at for five hours straight while, you

39:12

know, running and blazing hot sun and getting

39:14

ready for war? So I think

39:16

that's opening sequence which like Paths

39:18

of Glory, like you can't watch any military

39:21

training sequence in any movie nowadays and not

39:24

think about Full Metal Jacket. I mean, that is kind

39:26

of the most like, best to go to image you

39:28

have.

39:29

Yeah. And inspired

39:31

casting of Ermey, you know,

39:33

in that role. I mean,

39:36

that's just inspired casting, you know, because

39:39

I mean, so representative of

39:41

it. What that movie is about in many ways

39:43

too is

39:45

what people ultimately end up

39:47

fighting for is each other, you

39:50

know, at the end of the day. You know, it's

39:52

not for country, it's not for ideas, is

39:54

that at the end of the day, they're

39:57

fighting for each other, you know, covering.

40:00

in each other's ass or for this person or that person.

40:02

Like war many times is reduced

40:05

to that. And when you hear even modern soldiers

40:07

talk about that, hey, when I'm out there, you know,

40:09

that's my brother out there, that's my sister, you

40:11

know.

40:12

That's who people are fighting

40:15

for. And it kind of was reductive in that sense

40:17

to me, even though in the beginning they're beating

40:19

the shit out of Vincent Di Nopro, you know,

40:22

like there's division. But all of that trauma

40:24

kind of connects you in a way where people are bonded

40:27

for life many times. Well,

40:29

I think it's what you were saying earlier about Saving Private Ryan

40:31

in some ways, kind of being like a buddy movie. Like

40:33

a lot of the great war movies are, let's

40:35

take a ragtag team of people who would never

40:38

be in the same room together and they

40:40

have to help one another. And that's,

40:42

it's irresistible. I mean, it's like, it's everything

40:44

from like Dirty Dozen to Inglorious Basterds.

40:47

I mean, that's what all, there's a reason why that

40:49

has become the war movie cliche. And

40:52

it's very, you know, the thing that's interesting about

40:54

Full Metal Jacket is that, and Hamburger

40:56

Hill kind of captures this too. That's another really interesting movie.

40:58

It's like

40:59

those movies also in some ways capture the tedium

41:02

of combat, which when you read Vietnam memoirs,

41:05

you know, Full Metal Jacket

41:07

is based on a book called The Short Timers, which was basically

41:09

a memoirs as a novel. And

41:12

a lot of the book is just about the sheer, it's

41:14

like moments of sheer terror and then sheer

41:17

boredom where you're just

41:18

hanging out with these guys in the jungle and

41:20

some of them have, some of them are pissed

41:23

off at each other about stuff that's interesting, that's

41:25

important and some of them are just like sick of hearing this one

41:28

guy whistle this way. You know what I

41:30

mean? Like this is the weird kind of like what happens when you're in close quarters

41:32

with these guys for so long. And I think Hamburger

41:35

Hill and Full Metal Jacket in some ways platoon kind of really

41:37

get at like

41:38

those slow moments of war where you're like,

41:40

I gotta hang out with this guy. It might be the last person

41:42

I ever talked to. So what

41:44

are we gonna do to sit here and talk about for eight hours, you

41:46

know? And I think that's kind of a fascinating element of

41:48

those, of kind of the better Vietnam

41:51

movies.

41:52

Do you think these movies have kind of

41:54

changed, helped change people's

41:57

ideas about Vietnam and their relationship or do

41:59

you think the movies reflected those changing

42:01

views? I think

42:03

both. I think specifically, you know,

42:05

I did a lot. The last episodes

42:08

get on and get into born the fourth of July.

42:11

And I think one thing that

42:13

which really interested me about born the fourth of July is that it came

42:16

out right before the Persian Gulf war. And

42:19

I, at that point, I had watched a lot of movies about Vietnam

42:21

vets, but born in the fourth of July was very

42:23

different. I mean, it was really Ron

42:26

Kobich story. It was a huge

42:28

hit. I mean, it was, it was Tom Cruise,

42:31

the biggest movie star in the world playing a

42:33

returning Vietnam vet. And I'm missing that

42:35

movie in the theater when I was a teenager and being really heartbroken

42:37

by it. And I also know everyone else in my school

42:39

saw that movie. And I've always kind of wondered

42:42

if,

42:43

you know, I remember when the Persian Gulf, the first Persian

42:45

Gulf war ended so quickly. And it was, you know,

42:47

tie a ribbon around the tree. It

42:49

was what we support our troops. It was these

42:51

big parades when these troops came back. And

42:54

I, I was kind of caught up in that as

42:56

a teenager, where I really kind of wanted the troops

42:59

coming back to be treated better than

43:01

the troops that

43:02

returned from Vietnam. And I think the movies

43:04

had a huge part in that because I was 14 years

43:07

old. What else did I know these wars from, but

43:09

the movies, I think those movies

43:11

did kind of have an impact in shaping at least how

43:13

people viewed veterans. And

43:16

maybe that's just me and my own experience, but I talked to a

43:18

couple of people for the show about that. And including

43:21

Dale Dye, who's a veteran who works on these movies.

43:23

And he definitely thinks those movies impacted

43:25

how

43:26

troops are treated in the nineties and beyond,

43:28

because how could you not feel anything but heartbreak after

43:30

watching four on the Fourth of July? I mean, it's,

43:32

it's, and reading the book.

43:36

But in terms of how they changed their perception of the war, it's,

43:39

I do think that at a certain

43:41

point, as the movies got darker and more

43:43

violent, I do, I do think they helped

43:45

some people understand

43:47

what their fathers or brothers

43:49

or uncles had gone through and what they'd been

43:52

quiet about. You know, one

43:54

of the most amazing bits of research I found was, it was

43:56

a New York Times column when Platoon came out written

43:58

by a veteran.

43:59

And he basically just said that like when the movie was

44:02

over, his kids and

44:04

his wife had to go to the parking lot and he just had to walk

44:06

around by himself for a while. And they, they'd

44:09

never understood what he'd gone through. He'd

44:11

never been able to articulate it. He didn't

44:13

maybe want to talk about it. And then platoon

44:15

and some of these movies gave at least an

44:18

opening, you know, kind of an opening shot in the conversation

44:20

where they could talk about finally what this

44:22

war had been like for a lot of veterans. It's

44:24

born on the 4th of July, the last great

44:27

movie about Vietnam.

44:29

It has been one since. There

44:31

are a couple, that is kind of the

44:34

peak of that moment. There's a

44:36

couple of the nineties we get into Forrest Gump,

44:38

which is not a Vietnam movie, but which is very, very,

44:40

very, it's kind of like a fantasy though in many

44:42

ways, you know, the way it is. Yeah.

44:45

But the last big one, and I talked to Lorenz

44:48

Tate for the show about it, is Dead Presidents

44:50

is the Hughes brothers Vietnam movie, which

44:52

is 95, which was kind of the last

44:55

real big like

44:57

studio movie about Vietnam around

44:59

that there were more that came afterward, but that's kind

45:01

of,

45:02

that's these two young filmmakers taking all

45:04

the Vietnam movies they grew up with, taking

45:07

Apocalypse Now platoon and the Deer Hunter and

45:09

just kind of blundering into one really,

45:11

really intense over the top

45:13

Vietnam movie, which, so the

45:15

show kind of goes from the Green Berets to Dead Presidents,

45:18

which is almost, almost 30 years. And

45:21

then, then by the late nineties, it was Saving

45:23

Private Ryan. It was the Thin Red Line. It

45:25

was Pearl Harbor. Yeah. It was World

45:27

War II kind of came back in the end century. Like,

45:30

are we done?

45:31

Is that, are people just done

45:33

with Vietnam? I'm like, okay, we're done because

45:36

you're right. We, we, I mean, we even went back

45:38

to World War I with 1917. Yeah.

45:41

Yeah. Oh, I mean, all quiet on the Western front was, All

45:43

quiet on the Western front, which was brilliant. I loved

45:46

all quiet on the Western front.

45:47

I mean, HBO is doing, there's a great

45:50

novel called The Sympathizer. And I interviewed the author

45:52

of that, which is about Vietnam and HBO

45:54

is doing a

45:55

mini series, which looks really great with Robert

45:57

Downey Jr. in it. And

46:00

there was the Five Gluds, a Spike Lee movie a few

46:02

years ago.

46:04

But it does. And there was, you know, I think there was

46:06

the Great Beer Run, the Zac Efron movie by

46:08

I think Peter Forelli. But

46:10

otherwise, it's kind of few and

46:12

far between. It's not something that is,

46:15

and it doesn't seem to be part

46:17

of the kind of cultural imagination

46:20

the way it was when I was growing up. I mean, that

46:22

was, that it may have, Gen X may have been the last

46:24

generation to really kind of

46:26

go see a lot of Vietnam movies when they came

46:28

out. Why do you think people got tired of it?

46:33

I think honestly, it's just it's how

46:35

many wars have we been through now

46:37

at this point? You know, I mean, in the last 20 years alone,

46:40

I

46:41

think there's a real fatigue from war

46:44

movies in general. I just think,

46:46

you know,

46:47

my theory partly is that once you have CNN,

46:50

once you have Operation Desert Storm,

46:52

once you have, which I watched that war 24, I mean, I

46:54

just came home from school every day and watched a war on TV,

46:57

which was wild to me. Now you have

46:59

these heavily televised wars.

47:01

The political aspects of wars are no longer

47:03

easy to discuss without becoming

47:06

polarized in some way. I mean, we're

47:08

making, you know, again, like Indiana Jones,

47:10

like World War Two, we're still making World War Two

47:12

movies. I mean, there will always be World War

47:14

Two movies coming out

47:15

every couple of years. And I think that

47:17

will probably always be the one war where you're

47:19

like, you don't worry about people not

47:21

understanding what it was about. You could have a pretty easily

47:24

defined good guy or bad guy. Conflicts

47:27

are so clear, which is, you know, the conflicts

47:29

are clear. And these movies are also expensive and ambitious.

47:32

And you know, I

47:33

don't know. I mean, you and I don't know if someone's

47:35

gonna make a Dunkirk about Vietnam. I don't know if you're

47:38

gonna get a huge filmmaker, making it that

47:40

kind of high caliber, high budget, you

47:42

know, kind of war movie at this point about Vietnam.

47:44

I'd like to be proved wrong, but no. What

47:46

would you think from your critical standpoint,

47:49

what are the stories left to tell about Vietnam?

47:51

Do you think? Have

47:53

you thought about that? I think we have. Yeah,

47:55

I have. I mean, especially when you read the sympathizer,

47:57

which was written by Viet Tanh Nguyen.

47:59

and it's a great book.

48:02

It's basically about, it's

48:03

a spy novel, but it's also about this

48:06

counterintelligence agent who kind of winds up

48:08

for a while on the set of a movie that's very

48:10

clearly apocalypse now. So

48:12

it's tied in Vietnam movies,

48:14

but there's no

48:16

way we have not, I mean, almost all the Vietnam

48:19

stories that have been popular in this country, whether on

48:21

TV or in movies or in books, have

48:23

been mostly written by Westerners and mostly

48:26

white Westerners. So it's very

48:28

rare, you get the Five Bloods and

48:30

you get Dead Presidents. And

48:31

Hamburger Hill, which was a white filmmaker, but

48:33

does have, is one of the few Vietnam movies of

48:35

the eighties to actually have, like Don

48:37

Cheadle and Courtney Vance. You know,

48:40

Platoon has that too, but those

48:42

are the only two Vietnam movies of the eighties to even really

48:44

get into the black experience of Vietnam. That

48:47

has not been told enough. And certainly

48:49

the experience of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans

48:51

has not been told enough. I mean, Oliver Stone

48:53

made Heaven and Earth. That was his third Vietnam

48:56

movie about Lely Haysl, who came

48:58

to America from Vietnam. And her

49:00

memoir is amazing. I met with her and talked to her. She's a remarkable

49:03

person.

49:04

But by the time that came out in 93, people

49:06

were just like, we just want Vietnam

49:08

movies about Americans

49:10

either going there or coming back. That

49:13

was kind of the limit is. And there's a huge

49:15

untax.

49:17

I mean, I would hope that more studios

49:20

at some point would start looking at the Vietnam War and say, what

49:22

are the stories that were coming out of Vietnam that we did

49:24

not tell from the perspective

49:26

of the people who were from that country?

49:29

Yeah. When you think about being in Vietnam

49:31

War movies, what

49:35

were they most about, do you think, dismantling

49:38

the war myth or dismantling the

49:40

American myth?

49:41

Wow, that's a good question. I mean, I

49:44

think in some ways, it's

49:47

maybe the latter. I think in

49:50

some ways for Oliver Stone but

49:52

I do think that

49:53

there are a lot of filmmakers who

49:56

he in particular wanted moviegoers

49:58

to understand what the war was just like.

49:59

on a day-to-day grunt level. Yeah, it's kind

50:02

of opening up his diary.

50:04

This is what happened. And he took very

50:06

extreme measures on platoon. I mean, I think he

50:08

even imported red dust from Vietnam

50:11

to the Philippines, so the dust would actually look, because

50:14

he knew veterans will be watching and he wanted people to understand

50:16

what it was like underground. So

50:18

I think for some of these films, it

50:21

is like this is what the war, this war was like,

50:23

and kind of dismantling the myth about it, the myths about

50:26

it. But in terms of the greater American ideal,

50:29

one of the weird things about this show is that the

50:32

supporting character of the whole series, the one person

50:34

who came up in multiple interviews who comes

50:36

up years after he's dead is John

50:39

Wayne. Yes, yes. I spoke

50:41

to veterans who grew up watching John

50:44

Wayne movies. I grew up, you know, Oliver Stone watched

50:46

them. Ron Kovik loved

50:48

John Wayne movies. He used to, he writes

50:50

in Borne in the Fourth of July about sometimes on his first tour

50:52

of duty, he would fantasize that he was

50:54

John Wayne, but he's just in the jungle on patrol.

50:57

And to the point where

51:00

John Wayne is at that Oscar is where he's coming

51:02

home versus the deer hunter. He gets up on stage right

51:04

before he dies three months later. And it's like a huge deal that

51:06

John Wayne is back on the Oscar stage.

51:09

And I think that particular American

51:11

myth of the great American

51:14

hero marching into a country and

51:17

rescuing it, and this idea

51:19

that American might consult anything. And

51:21

an idea that,

51:23

you know, John Wayne's westerns actually

51:25

kind of subverted, but his war movies often very

51:27

much kind of held up.

51:28

I think that was, whether they were conscious of it or

51:30

not, that was an idea that a lot of these

51:32

movies are dismantling. I mean, even Dead

51:35

Presidents, the last movie in the nineties

51:37

as a character talking about like, yo, you were like

51:39

John Wayne out there. Like, it just,

51:41

he hangs over this whole American

51:44

idea of itself at that time, which is fascinating

51:46

to me. So it was weird to make a podcast

51:49

that was 5% about John Wayne, but

51:51

it kind of wound up that way. John Wayne's

51:53

an interesting figure. He is a stand-in.

51:57

Like a lot of people, and I think you talked about this a little

51:59

bit in your pad,

52:01

It's easy to point to John Wayne in

52:04

that Playboy interview, I think you referenced, where

52:07

he talks about white supremacy

52:09

and that sort of thing. To me, this is my point

52:11

of view on this. I don't look

52:13

at John Wayne and consider him the villain. John

52:15

Wayne's a stand-in for the majority of Americans,

52:18

white Americans. He's not an outlier

52:21

with that point of view. In fact, if you go back to

52:23

a television interview he did, he pretty

52:25

much talked about the same thing. I can't

52:27

remember what show it was. It might have been Donahue. There

52:30

was a 60 Minutes interview.

52:31

Maybe the 60 Minutes interview he did. It was

52:33

on one of those shows where you're surrounded by the audience

52:35

like the Donahue shows. Oh, okay.

52:38

Those types of shows. He's basically talking about the same thing,

52:41

talking about white supremacy, whatever it is. I

52:44

can't remember the exact words. There's no shock from

52:46

the audience. There's no gasping. There's

52:48

no, how dare you?

52:49

It's all silent agreement.

52:54

Because he represented the majority

52:56

of views, not the minority of views. I

52:58

have to remind people,

53:00

you can't contemporize

53:02

how we

53:04

look at these people. I'm not just saying I'm

53:07

excusing John Wayne. I'm saying

53:09

this was the majority view, you guys. This

53:11

is not an outlier. John Wayne represented

53:14

how the world thought.

53:18

That's why it was easy for

53:21

that save your mentality. I'm

53:24

entitled to go in and just shoot up

53:27

Indians or

53:29

whatever. That sort of attitude.

53:32

That's why I talked about dismantling that American

53:34

myth. I think

53:36

people were resisting. Vietnam on

53:39

television was dismantling that a lot.

53:41

In the anti-war movement, I think in the

53:44

60s,

53:45

people were hated in that anti-war movement.

53:49

Not just the extreme right, but

53:51

just Americans who felt like they were being

53:53

attacked

53:54

by that anti-war movement. That's why the Vietnam

53:56

War is so fascinating to me.

53:59

I was just struck at the heart of a lot

54:02

of just dogmatic

54:04

thinking that people just had in their bones, whether they

54:06

agreed with it or not. It was just in there. Yeah. I mean,

54:08

that's one of the most fascinating things, the most heartbreaking,

54:11

one of those heartbreaking things while doing research

54:13

and re-immersing myself is, you know, I had

54:15

grown up with this image of Kent State,

54:17

which, you know, is tied to Vietnam in a different way.

54:20

And, and, but about that era in general,

54:23

and I was always, I'm always kind of shocked

54:25

when you see that, like after the Kent, I grew up

54:27

with the Kent State shooting that picture was in every documentary

54:29

I watched about the sixties. I always knew it was

54:31

a horrible thing. When you look

54:33

at some of the polling that was done, like the

54:35

week after we're in America, there

54:38

was, yeah, I mean, it's like, it is, I'll

54:40

just say the numbers were higher than I expected, like in

54:42

terms of like, yeah, they should have gotten, they got what they

54:44

were getting, you know, they got what was coming to. And I'm like,

54:47

I cannot, I mean, and I think that's why the sixties

54:50

and seventies are so fast and we're always kind

54:52

of so fascinating to Gen X. One is that it

54:55

was kind of shoved down our throats for the time. I was like 10

54:57

years old. It was like, gotta listen to the doors.

55:00

You got to know who got to listen to the doors.

55:03

You got to listen to the doors. You gotta

55:05

know about Vietnam, but also like, it's just,

55:07

when you, when everyone talks about how turbulent and crazy

55:09

things are now, I'm like, yes, they are. But

55:11

like, have you read about California in the

55:14

late sixties? Like that was like a

55:16

state that was about

55:17

where literally bombs were going off in major cities

55:19

and they don't know who set off some of them. It's

55:22

yeah, it's, I think there's almost something comforting and knowing

55:24

there was almost a more fucked up time than

55:26

the one you now, you know, it's interesting

55:28

is that

55:29

I did this as an exercise because I remember,

55:32

uh, I don't know if it was my kids, I don't want to blame it, but

55:34

you know, saying, you

55:35

know, when I was a kid, there was nine 11 and

55:37

there's this economic crash and did

55:40

all the talking about all the things they had to live

55:42

through. Now there's a pandemic, you know, and I said,

55:44

yeah, you're right. You know, when I was two,

55:46

the president of the United States was assassinated.

55:49

Yeah.

55:51

There you go. He was shot down in a parade. Uh,

55:54

all right. What else I got? Uh, yeah.

55:57

Uh, Martin Luther King when I was seven, he was a

55:59

sad.

55:59

in the head, you know, assassinated. I could go on

56:02

and on, you know, but it's like, Hey, and

56:04

then the president resigned after taping

56:07

his conversations for years. Yeah. Absolutely.

56:09

But you know, but you could go to someone who grew up in the

56:11

thirties. Well, the whole economic system

56:13

of the country collapsed, you know, like, yeah, but

56:16

there may not have been United States the next

56:18

day. Nobody knew, you know, I

56:20

think that's why there's a lot of Gen Z kids who on,

56:23

on TikTok are obsessed with the nineties. I think

56:25

even though you and I were there for the nineties,

56:27

a lot of really fucked up stuff happened in the nineties. I

56:29

do feel it seems like a six

56:32

year pocket window where things are

56:34

maybe bad, but not on fire.

56:36

Like,

56:38

you'd want to go back to like, you know, crazy

56:41

Europop and, and, you know, like

56:43

friends, watching friends and Seinfeld

56:45

and whatever else was going on back then that kids

56:47

are so nostalgic for now. I call that the Starbucks

56:50

decade, you know, people are just

56:53

just latte themselves into, into

56:55

a sleep or whatever. Cause it ends, it ends

56:57

with the Seattle protest where I think people are throwing

56:59

rocks into Starbucks. So there you go. Yeah. The anti-capitalism

57:02

rise begins and ends with Starbucks, I guess.

57:07

Yeah. Nineties, they had a good nineties

57:09

were a lot like the fifties in some way. It was just a, a

57:12

run of people just not interested in

57:14

just whatever, you know, it's like, it

57:18

does. And then when you dive back into it, you're like, Oh,

57:20

I need a hill LA riots, combine

57:23

Waco. You're like,

57:25

it was pretty bad, but like we just, but

57:27

then we're also like MTV still showing

57:29

videos. It's good. We can put on

57:31

MTV and watch a,

57:33

we can watch the real world or something. You know, it still felt

57:35

like a little bit more escapism at that point

57:37

than, than now. Yeah. And those are kind of

57:39

the cycles or whatever, you know, do you think people,

57:42

I have people forgotten about Vietnam. I do

57:44

one, I do wonder and kind of worry about

57:46

that only, especially now, because we're at this

57:48

point now where,

57:50

you know, the, the, the

57:53

surviving veterans are getting older and

57:55

this kind of, and it does sort of feel like when the surviving

57:57

veterans of world war two are getting older, we did kind

57:59

of have the.

57:59

this saving private Ryan,

58:02

greatest generation. Greatest generation. Yeah. We

58:04

could have been venerated in a way that, it's

58:07

nice to do, but

58:09

the Vietnam veterans won't be called the greatest generation.

58:12

Well, yeah. I think one thing that is really

58:14

hard is because like I said, I have young kids and they've been

58:17

asking me what I'm working on, and they ask me

58:19

to explain Vietnam. Frankly, it's

58:21

really hard to,

58:22

it's a really hard war to wrap your head around because

58:25

it's like you have to start with, well,

58:27

you have to understand the history of the country and the

58:30

French were there for a long time, and then you

58:32

have North and South. It's a complex

58:34

war. I think it's hard for younger people to

58:37

wrap their

58:38

heads around, and I mean that in a patronizing

58:40

way, like I still have trouble wrapping my

58:42

head around a lot of it. But it

58:44

does feel like when a war slips away from popular

58:46

culture and when the men and

58:48

women who fought and served during that war begin to pass

58:51

away,

58:52

what else is keeping that war in our minds?

58:55

Pop culture is what keeps wars going a lot

58:57

of ways. If pop culture

58:59

is interested, if audience are interested in Vietnam,

59:02

will it slip away? I hope

59:04

not because I feel there's, again, there's a lot of stories to be told

59:06

still,

59:07

and there's a lot to learn from it. You

59:10

can look at the Vietnam War as an analogy

59:12

or allegory for some of the wars

59:15

we're seeing now in some ways. I

59:17

think it's important to understand this stuff as much as you can.

59:20

Where does the documentary fit in this

59:22

as opposed to narrative storytelling?

59:25

I think you referenced Kim Burns. He had

59:27

a series on Vietnam and I'm sure there have been

59:29

other. Where does

59:32

the documentary fit in this canon?

59:35

For the show itself, I really

59:37

tried to focus only on theatrical films

59:39

because there's so many Vietnam TV movies, but

59:41

also the documentaries I was most interested

59:43

in about Vietnam were the ones that were released

59:46

during Vietnam because I feel like those

59:48

movies like Hearts and Minds

59:51

in the Year of the Pig because those are really

59:53

confrontational movies coming out at a time

59:56

when no one really wanted to talk

59:58

about Vietnam, obviously.

59:59

And hearts and minds won an Oscar and that was a

1:00:02

whole controversy But some of the smaller ones are really

1:00:04

good in the year of the pig in a winter

1:00:06

soldier of these movies that are very Tough and they're being

1:00:08

made in like 69 70 71 and

1:00:11

they barely got you still see those films. They're

1:00:13

on YouTube Yeah, you can watch it. You totally watch it.

1:00:15

That's the irony is these movies were you

1:00:17

know You'd have to travel to Europe or yeah,

1:00:20

right pray or pray that a college campus

1:00:22

had a scene that wasn't canceled So

1:00:25

to me those and now they're on YouTube you get

1:00:27

a sin watching I mean I just

1:00:29

watched in the middle of the afternoon one day in my couch But

1:00:32

the documentaries I mostly focused on were the ones

1:00:34

in the late 60s early 70s that were because

1:00:37

those were Those were really hard to get made

1:00:39

and really hard to get seen and those really do reflect

1:00:41

how much Resistance audiences

1:00:43

had I did rewatch the Ken Burns PBS

1:00:46

documentary Before I watch

1:00:48

this and watch a bunch of other ones the Ken Burns one is

1:00:50

really great I'm also

1:00:53

I'm also a very big fan of

1:00:55

like there's a Dick Cavett special with all

1:00:57

of his Vietnam interviews, which I highly

1:00:59

recommend I will

1:01:01

say to my face is you might

1:01:03

love these if you love 70s 60s history There

1:01:05

are two Dick Cavett specials one about him

1:01:08

broadcasting during Watergate every night and

1:01:10

one where he had we where he brought Vietnam vets

1:01:13

There's

1:01:13

just dedicated specials and they're fascinating

1:01:15

like you would love it. Like he's a great talk show.

1:01:18

He's a great interviewer It's my favorite

1:01:20

he's my all-time He's

1:01:22

great. The Watergate one is fantastic I

1:01:24

think he was broadcasting from like they let him broadcast

1:01:26

from like a congress like a congressional hearing floor

1:01:29

at night with like an audience But he's almost

1:01:31

doing a daily show of Watergate

1:01:34

as it's happening on prime time TV

1:01:37

But that his Vietnam special is grimy had John Kerry

1:01:39

on when John Kerry was like in his late 20s

1:01:42

Those are really great. They were very helpful for

1:01:44

me in terms of background and context

1:01:46

But for the show itself I mostly just

1:01:48

focused on the ones that were

1:01:50

trying to get in the theaters during the war because

1:01:52

those were those are real challenge to Me the

1:01:54

thing that's left out of all the Vietnam films

1:01:57

and I don't think they're in there. It's

1:01:59

It's kind of a cousin of my criticism

1:02:02

of Oppenheimer in some ways. Not

1:02:04

that I'm overly critical of the movie. I thought

1:02:07

it was real interesting. But there's

1:02:09

some context missing from it that

1:02:12

is contemporary context that,

1:02:14

you know,

1:02:15

that represents

1:02:17

kind of how people's relationship to

1:02:20

these conflicts from a

1:02:22

general standpoint. And let me be more specific.

1:02:26

In Vietnam, what's missing

1:02:28

in a lot of these is the Soviet aggression

1:02:31

aspect of it.

1:02:32

And what that actually

1:02:34

felt like in the world, and what that

1:02:36

meant to people,

1:02:37

and

1:02:40

what the real threat of that was.

1:02:43

Which for somebody like Kennedy

1:02:45

and LBJ, I know

1:02:47

from their standpoint, it was about

1:02:49

the Soviets. And

1:02:53

from a lot of people in this country, it

1:02:56

wasn't so much the Soviets as much as it was communism.

1:02:59

They related those to, you

1:03:01

know, we had just gone through the 50s and all that

1:03:03

stuff. When

1:03:05

the Soviet Union got the H-bomb, that

1:03:07

was huge. That was no joke.

1:03:10

People thought the world was going to end and all that stuff. But

1:03:12

some of that context is never there in these

1:03:14

films about the

1:03:16

origins of the feelings of that. And

1:03:19

with Oppenheimer, it's the same thing. There's

1:03:21

no Pearl Harbor in Oppenheimer. There's no

1:03:24

context for why people

1:03:27

needed

1:03:27

to punish Japan. Why

1:03:31

Americans felt that needed to happen.

1:03:35

We're

1:03:38

not allowed to empathize, I think, properly

1:03:40

with the proper context in some of these films. It's

1:03:42

kind of an isolated, we're making a bomb.

1:03:44

Well, no, there's a little more than that.

1:03:46

And it wasn't just about stopping Hitler. There

1:03:49

was a reason why there was the energy and

1:03:51

the reason why it was easy

1:03:54

for people to let that happen. And we're

1:03:56

almost cheering it on as we saw at the end of that movie

1:03:58

in some ways.

1:04:00

Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting is that there's only really,

1:04:02

there's a handful of the Vietnam movies

1:04:04

that kind of talk about the geopolitical

1:04:07

kind of bigger picture. And, you

1:04:09

know, one of them is born in the Fourth of July, where Ron Kovik

1:04:11

is kind of like, when he returns after being

1:04:13

paralyzed, he's kind of yelling at his mom about

1:04:16

we were told communism was the enemy, we were, you

1:04:18

know, and regretting it. But the

1:04:20

movie, the only movie of the big, really big

1:04:22

ones that really takes a moment to talk about the

1:04:25

domino theory in any way is the Green

1:04:27

Berets, which I think is one of the reasons why it's

1:04:29

so, it was so popular, because there's this whole

1:04:31

scene where Al Garei picks up every weapon

1:04:33

and goes,

1:04:34

this M16M is

1:04:37

from China, this is from Russia. And I

1:04:39

think I interviewed a veteran and he

1:04:41

said, he still, you know, in his mind, that's why we went

1:04:43

to Vietnam. And that scene is still in his

1:04:45

mind,

1:04:46

one of the best distillations of why Vietnam

1:04:48

is necessary. But yeah, that kind of context

1:04:50

is, you know, it's not,

1:04:52

it's not in platoon, because they're not going to sit there,

1:04:55

the grunts aren't going to sit there and talk about the

1:04:57

geo, you know, the moving pieces of communist,

1:04:59

you know, Cold War communism. It's the

1:05:02

thing that got those ships there and got

1:05:04

the things. Yeah, you know, it's not just, let's

1:05:06

go help the Vietnamese, you know, and that's

1:05:09

what that's what movies about. That's why movies about history

1:05:11

are tough, because you know, you can't make

1:05:13

them history lessons. And

1:05:15

putting all that information in a movie is

1:05:18

really tough to do without boring

1:05:20

the audience. Like it's really unless you have

1:05:22

like, if you have a line in Oppenheimer, where someone's like,

1:05:24

you know, holding up a newspaper, it says, you

1:05:27

know, Pearl Harbor destroyed, it's almost like, you

1:05:29

either have to really go all in on that. Or you

1:05:31

have to mention it for one second and hope that the audience

1:05:33

picks up because if you have a conversation where

1:05:35

two guys are just saying like, Hey, Pearl Harbor was pretty

1:05:37

bad, huh? Yeah, we got to really, we

1:05:40

got to really get this bomb going

1:05:42

so we can have a, something we can put this war to an

1:05:44

end, that would be,

1:05:45

it's tough to do. And that's why all these movies, as

1:05:47

you know, this history lessons are kind of, they're

1:05:49

kind of incomplete. I mean, they're, they're supposed

1:05:52

to, I think they're supposed to sort of start you down a path of

1:05:54

wondering more about these events. Yeah, it

1:05:56

depends what the artist's intention is to, you

1:05:59

know, yeah.

1:05:59

Yeah, it's tough to have

1:06:02

everything in there, but I just find that interesting.

1:06:05

Many times the context for things

1:06:07

are just

1:06:08

a little missing. And the thing in Vietnam, you're

1:06:10

absolutely right. Many

1:06:13

young people went over there and really

1:06:15

not even know why they were fighting. It wasn't

1:06:17

like World War II where you have why we fight. You

1:06:19

talk about the Frank Capra and all

1:06:21

those stuff where they were very clear. And soldiers

1:06:24

were really motivated during

1:06:27

that time too. The reason

1:06:29

why I bring up Pearl Harbor was because Americans

1:06:31

were very anti-war before it.

1:06:33

And that's why Pearl Harbor was significant

1:06:35

because the attitude changed in a day.

1:06:38

And

1:06:40

the gung-ho attitude and the team

1:06:42

aspect of it came from that event.

1:06:46

Not just because we were fighting. Germany

1:06:49

didn't invade us, all that kind of stuff. So

1:06:52

it is kind of interesting.

1:06:55

Also, the other part of that

1:06:57

movie too, not to go off on a tangent,

1:07:01

is some of the horrors

1:07:03

of the

1:07:05

American-Japanese conflict itself

1:07:08

too. You can't do it in a movie like Oppenheimer. But

1:07:10

it wasn't just that bomb. And

1:07:16

that once again is the comment on war. War

1:07:18

is bad, you guys. There's so much bad

1:07:20

things. You can't isolate it to single

1:07:23

events and that kind of stuff even though they're the worst. But

1:07:25

anyhow, it's kind of interesting.

1:07:27

No, all this stuff is fascinating. And my hope is

1:07:29

the fact that Oppenheimer has made like $400 million

1:07:32

in the US. It's

1:07:34

amazing. That's got to mean that a lot of young people

1:07:36

are watching it. And I hope they decide to maybe

1:07:40

learn more about it. Maybe that would be the same

1:07:42

catalyst that these Vietnam movies were

1:07:44

for me when I was younger to learn more about this war. Because

1:07:46

yeah,

1:07:47

you're not going to get all of World War II from Oppenheimer.

1:07:49

But it might make you pick up a book about what, 1944,

1:07:52

45, what those years were like. I

1:07:55

mean, I'd be kind of fascinated to see if there'll

1:07:58

be a ripple effect.

1:07:59

Look, I'm sure that I'm sure American Prometheus

1:08:02

is

1:08:03

some I'm sure there's some 16 year old kid reading

1:08:05

the opera autobiography this summer. And yeah,

1:08:07

God bless this. God bless that kid or those

1:08:09

kids who can get through a 700 page

1:08:11

book about World War

1:08:13

Two and his life. But I these movies

1:08:16

can do that. And that's why they're important to look back

1:08:18

on. And even if they're in perfect

1:08:20

histories, they get you started on history. Absolutely.

1:08:22

That can be good.

1:08:23

Absolutely. Like I said, it's my personal Pecadilla,

1:08:26

but not a criticism film itself. Do

1:08:29

you have a favorite war movie? Vietnam war movie?

1:08:33

The ones I've really enjoyed for the show. I'm

1:08:35

now like I've seen Apagos now in Fullmetal Jacket

1:08:38

and Platoon so many times. Platoon is

1:08:40

maybe the best of them. The ones

1:08:42

I loved watching for this show. I mean,

1:08:45

I just think there's something it's I think, because it's such a simple,

1:08:48

it is almost a good guy bad guy story in

1:08:50

Vietnam. I mean, the company will I know that

1:08:52

I talked to refer to it as kind of a Western and it kind

1:08:55

of is in some ways. I mean, like Tom Barringer is,

1:08:57

you

1:08:57

know, the black hat one, the white hat

1:08:59

guy. But the shows that I

1:09:02

really even recommend the movies that I'm recommending

1:09:04

are the ones that I kind of discovered or rediscovered.

1:09:08

There's a great revenge movie called Brotherhood

1:09:10

of Death from the 70s. Oh, yeah,

1:09:13

it's about these. It's very, very, very low

1:09:16

budget. It's about these a group of black

1:09:18

veterans who come back home after the war and

1:09:20

realize their and realize their town has

1:09:22

basically been run over by the KKK. And after

1:09:25

doing everything they can to

1:09:27

try to push them away, including like a whole sequence

1:09:29

about a voting drive, which is not

1:09:31

in a lot of movies, period.

1:09:33

They eventually eventually becomes

1:09:35

like a very Tarantino revenge

1:09:38

movie. And wow, I gotta be honest,

1:09:40

the last 10 minutes of the movie, it's like

1:09:43

these guys getting dressing back up in their fatigues.

1:09:45

And I know, I know it sounds tasteless, but they're blowing up

1:09:47

these guys in white robes. I gotta say, I'm

1:09:49

not mentally satisfied. Yeah. And when I

1:09:52

interviewed one of the actors in it,

1:09:54

who was a Vietnam vet who came back

1:09:59

from him and came back from Vietnam and wound

1:10:02

up playing a soldier again all of a sudden

1:10:04

in this movie. And another one

1:10:06

I really love is called Running on Empty, which is this

1:10:08

River Phoenix drama that came out in the late 80s. Yeah,

1:10:11

I remember that. With Judd Hirsch and it's about

1:10:13

Judd Hirsch and Christine Lottie play these former

1:10:15

radicals who blew up a napalm lab

1:10:18

in the 60s and had been hiding underground. And it's

1:10:20

just, to me, that movie is just, it's a very,

1:10:22

it's about the other side of Vietnam coming back

1:10:25

and living with

1:10:26

what the anti-war protesters had to deal with.

1:10:29

But it's also just, to me, that movie is very

1:10:31

much about how Gen Xers like

1:10:33

myself could not escape the 60s, no matter

1:10:35

how much we try.

1:10:39

This poor kid, his entire life has been dictated

1:10:41

by his parents being on the run from the 60s. And

1:10:43

I'm like, I

1:10:44

love 60s culture, but there were definitely moments in

1:10:46

the 60s where I was like, could

1:10:47

you guys, in the 80s where I was like, could you guys just

1:10:49

let us have our own decade, please?

1:10:52

Again, hilarious. Why,

1:10:54

why did I have a Doris poster when I was like 10

1:10:56

years old? Did I legitimately think LA Woman

1:10:59

was a great song? I don't know. I think

1:11:01

about that frequently. Okay, let me ask you this. This is,

1:11:04

and I appreciate you being on. It's so great talking to

1:11:06

you.

1:11:06

Oh, yes, great. Okay. Why

1:11:08

do Gen Xers let

1:11:11

the boomers push them around? I don't understand this.

1:11:13

Like, how come, who's, have the

1:11:15

millennials kind of

1:11:19

put their stake in the ground where the Gen Xers really wanted

1:11:21

to in terms of what's important in

1:11:23

the culture? I don't know, man. It is,

1:11:26

it is like, Like who's telling us what's important

1:11:28

right now? Which generation is telling us what's important?

1:11:31

I don't know. I think maybe we're telling ourselves, I have no

1:11:33

idea anymore. I do feel like, I have no idea.

1:11:35

I mean, the, the 80s, it was just the

1:11:38

boomers were out of that age. I know, they were out of control.

1:11:40

Every aspect of the media. They were out of control. Yeah, I

1:11:42

agree. And some of the stuff I really

1:11:44

liked, but it is, it is like, it is remarkable

1:11:47

to me how much 60s shit I was

1:11:49

consuming. And, and

1:11:50

so the shirt, the Brady Bunch shirt, like fine.

1:11:52

But like, there was a certain point where I'm like,

1:11:55

why do I know like 10 Steve

1:11:58

Miller band songs? Why?

1:11:59

You know what I mean? And also

1:12:02

some of the really great 60s shit, they

1:12:04

didn't get handed down where I'm like, I would have much

1:12:06

rather been told at 11 or 12 years old to watch

1:12:08

Midnight Cowboy or The Wild

1:12:11

Bunch than, yeah, like have,

1:12:13

I mentioned

1:12:15

later on these ads for, do you remember the Freedom Rock

1:12:17

ads? Oh yeah. They were

1:12:19

like the two hippies who were like, it's Freedom Rock,

1:12:21

man. That is what it was. The 60s

1:12:23

were sold as like,

1:12:25

the 60s were sold to the Gen X kids

1:12:27

as either like, we cured racism

1:12:29

and political scandal in our generation.

1:12:31

Okay.

1:12:32

Or we also had so much fun

1:12:34

being hippies and being at Woodstock.

1:12:37

And I'm like,

1:12:38

I don't think any of those things were particularly true. And

1:12:40

I have no idea. I remember graduating high school

1:12:42

in 1994

1:12:43

and a couple of kids in my school were going like, yeah, we're going to Woodstock 94.

1:12:46

And I was like in my head, I was a very cynical punk

1:12:49

rocky teen. I was like,

1:12:50

why the fuck would you want to go to something called

1:12:52

Woodstock? Aren't you guys sick of this?

1:12:55

Like this was not, this was not our

1:12:57

festival. This

1:12:59

was not our generation. Like why is everything still that

1:13:01

boomer's stamp of approval or legitimacy?

1:13:03

And like, I don't know. I, I love

1:13:05

the doors for like three years. And that's a period that

1:13:08

I'll probably still always be in therapy about.

1:13:10

Like why,

1:13:11

why did I have, why did I have like, I had an album

1:13:14

and hit that guy doing like poetry or something like, why

1:13:16

the hell was I listening to Jim Morrison do poetry?

1:13:19

Why am I not listening to my own stuff? Why

1:13:22

do I not have my own stuff that people

1:13:24

care about? Seriously? Yeah. Why,

1:13:27

why were the cure covering the doors in 1987? I

1:13:29

don't want the mud. It was crazy.

1:13:31

Yeah. It is interesting. Yeah.

1:13:34

My whole point was that I

1:13:35

always looked at it from racial point of view. It's like, white

1:13:37

people get to be hippies and be all dirty

1:13:39

and make it, having sex with everybody in the mud,

1:13:42

Woodstock. And then they just shave

1:13:44

and bathe and put in a suit and they get to be yuppies

1:13:46

in the eighties. It's like, good job,

1:13:48

white people. Yeah,

1:13:51

I know. I know. It's like,

1:13:53

you guys. I don't buy that Woodstock,

1:13:55

Woodstock was not, an STD, bacterial,

1:13:58

fucking nightmare.

1:13:59

sure it's like by the

1:14:02

seventh hour was like, can we go

1:14:04

home? Like it never appealed to me

1:14:06

as a kid that hippie culture. I just saw

1:14:08

dirty people. I was like, I don't know why this

1:14:10

is so appealing. These people need

1:14:12

to bathe and I was so conservative

1:14:15

as a kid. They need to bathe and get a haircut and stop

1:14:17

complaining. Yeah. I got to go to school

1:14:19

every day. What are they complaining about? Yeah.

1:14:22

And please stop talking about how great the festival was. But what are

1:14:24

the headlines? It was really Seanana. It's

1:14:27

like Seanana. That's true. Exactly.

1:14:29

Did they break

1:14:32

their guitars and everything? I'm with you on

1:14:34

this. I'm with the gymsies on this.

1:14:37

Brian, thanks so much. Brian

1:14:39

Raffy. Yeah, thanks, Larry. It's such an entertaining pod,

1:14:42

you guys. I mean, thank you. Do we get

1:14:44

to win this time? It's a provocative

1:14:46

title, of course, too.

1:14:48

But it allows you, as I like to do,

1:14:50

you know, to

1:14:52

listen to the spot and then go do some deep dimes,

1:14:54

go down some rapid holes.

1:14:55

Yeah, go for it. It's good stuff.

1:14:58

Yeah, I want to check that out. I never even

1:15:01

heard of it.

1:15:02

I have the Criterion Channel,

1:15:05

one

1:15:05

of those apps where

1:15:07

you get to they have all these interesting films

1:15:09

used to be called

1:15:12

Film something. There was a film struck.

1:15:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which was a great film. Struck

1:15:17

was awesome. But then it became criteria. Yeah. Look

1:15:21

up that, guys.

1:15:22

Go see movies. Go back to the theater.

1:15:24

I haven't seen Barbie yet. So I'm going to go see them.

1:15:27

It's great. You know, it's all about

1:15:29

our lives, all of this stuff. Yeah. How

1:15:31

long is your podcast? You have how many episodes are

1:15:34

you doing? I think there's there's two more weeks

1:15:36

and two episodes a week. And they're running on the ringers

1:15:38

big picture feed. So it's eight episodes

1:15:40

in a prologue. Yeah.

1:15:42

OK. And then you and that'll be the run of it. Is

1:15:44

that what it is? Yeah. Yeah. OK, great.

1:15:46

It's a lot. So it's a lot of Vietnam. It

1:15:48

is a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:15:50

It's a lot, but very, very entertaining, you

1:15:52

guys. Brian, we're after you. Thanks. Thanks so

1:15:54

much, man. It's great talking to you. Thanks,

1:15:56

Larry. Great chatting with you.

1:16:00

the