David Remnick: Paul Scheer is an actor and a comedian and he's been in shows like The League and Black Monday and he was a recurring character on 30 Rock and Veep, both of Sainted Memory. Scheer has also just published a memoir called Joyful Recollections of Trauma. Paul Scheer may be best known as a film buff.

You may have come across his podcast, How Did This Get Made? It's a conversation among three friends Paul, his wife, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas, analyzing and picking apart bad movies, only bad movies. These guys are connoisseurs of the lousy. When I talked with Paul Scheer recently at Brooklyn Brewery, I wanted to get to the heart of things. It's my last week on this planet. What are the five most horrible films--

Paul Scheer: Oh my God.

David Remnick: --that I can watch that I can take to the great be beyond?

Paul Scheer: Just because I want to make sure we're on the even playing field. There are horrible films like Gary Busey is in this thing called The Ginger Kill Man or something where he plays a gingerbread, and that's fine. Those are bad movies. Those to me, are not fun bad movies. I want to enjoy myself. I want to be sitting there going like-

David Remnick: Not boring.

Paul Scheer: "I need to show this to everyone." It's how our podcast came to be. It's about sitting around talking about a movie. I did that all the time through my youth. The Mount Rushmore, if you will, you have to put the room on it. Tommy Wiseau's, The Room.

[applause]

Paul Scheer: A movie that--

David Remnick: This guy just went crazy.

Paul Scheer: The best. It's the best. I often say that the AFI needs to put the room on the AFI top 100 list because when you create something so epically disastrous, it should be noted. It is the worst movie ever made. It needs to be elevated. It is Tennessee Williams through the lens of Tommy Wiseau. He thought he was making Streetcar Named Desire. When you watch it like that, it's even more interesting.

Speaker 3: You're part of my life. You are everything. I could not go on without you, Lisa.

Lisa: You're scaring me.

Speaker 3: You are lying. I never hit you. You are tearing me apart, Lisa.

Lisa: Why are you so hysterical?

Speaker 3: Do you understand life? Do you?

David Remnick: This is the great surprise. You're sitting there watching one of these movies and so much work has gone into it and the director and the writer must have thought, "This is awesome. Glen and Glenda is really good somehow."

Paul Scheer: Yes. Oh, and this is the fear. I don't know if you feel this way, but as a writer, as an artist, you feel like I don't want to have that trick played on me. I don't want to make Glen and Glenda and go, "Oh., no." Do you ever have that that you're writing or you're in the middle of something, you're like, "Ooh, I hope," or do you know?

David Remnick: No. I think it sucks all the time.

Paul Scheer: Yes, me too.

David Remnick: As we're closing the piece and I have to read it six times, it gets worse and worse and I just want throw myself off Mount Rushmore. What's the send movie?

Paul Scheer: Second one. We got The Room. I'm going to talk about this movie called Miami Connection.

[crowd cheering]

Miami Connection, a great film made by an owner of an Orlando Dojo decides to make a movie about ninjas, a movie about finding your long lost father.

Speaker 1: My father. My father. I found my father. Oh my God.

Paul Scheer: The drug trade in Miami, even though it's in Orlando.

[laughter]

Great film. Really funny. The way they found this was the Alamo Drafthouse, they found a reel of film. Everyone was like, "We don't know what this is." Alamo Drafthouse was like, "We'll buy it." They bought it and they screened it just internally. They're like, "This is a genius. We're going to re-release this." They did. Miami Connection, that's number two. We recently did a movie on our show called Samurai Cop.

[crowd cheering]

There's a lot of cops in here.

David Remnick: You guys have seen these films?

Paul Scheer: Oh, yes.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 4: Many times.

Paul Scheer: Samurai Cop to me is a new favorite. I can't believe it alluded me for so long. Again, it's lost in translation in the sense that this director clearly saw a lot of cop movies and tries to create the tropes, but the language barrier is tricky. It's like Google Translate or maybe even AI had written this film. Danny Glover and Lethal Weapon would be like, "I'm too old for this shit," and this movie would be like, "I'm too old to take shits." That's the difference.

David Remnick: That happens too.

Paul Scheer: Yes. By the way, Metamucil just stir it up and stuff. Then I'm going to go a little bit more random and it's going to be a dealer's choice because New York especially hates this movie so they might boo me as I say this. Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

[crowd protesting]

David Remnick: What?

Paul Scheer: Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a movie that is just seagulls talking to themselves--

David Remnick: So?

Paul Scheer: --with the music of Neil Diamond underneath it.

David Remnick: Oh, that's so mean.

[laughter]

Paul Scheer: It is based on Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the book. It is one of the most insane film because it is just footage of seagulls, some of them crazy glued to planks, and it's like, "Wow, I want to fly. I'm flying. I'm flying." Then Neil Diamond is like, "The bird is flying." It's longer than it ever needs to be. It's pseudo spiritual and it's Messiah. In the 14 years of doing How Did This Get Made? I've never seen anything like it.

David Remnick: How many times have you seen that?

Paul Scheer: Only once.

David Remnick: Just the once.

Paul Scheer: I don't think I ever need to see it again, but I'm also happy that I saw it.

David Remnick: You've got the nuances.

Paul Scheer: Yes. I was like, "Oh, boy." There's a movie called The Apple.

[crowd cheering]

All right. The Apple to me is predicting American Idol. It's this future where everyone is doing mandated exercise and American Idol is like the only show on television and it's about dancing.

Speaker 7: Citizens.

Speaker 8: It is now one minute to four o'clock. Time to stop ordinary activities and prepare for the National Bim hour.

Speaker 7: The National Fitness Program is watching you.

Speaker 8: Five.

Speaker 7: Four.

Speaker 8: Three.

Speaker 7: Two. Bim.

Speaker 8: Bim.

[music]

Hey Hey Hey, Bim's On The Way

Hey Hey Hey, Bim's On The Way

Paul Scheer: A movie that was so bad that when they premiered it, they gave everybody LPs, vinyl LPs, and they started throwing the vinyl LPs at the screen because they--

David Remnick: That's not nice.

Paul Scheer: Not nice.

David Remnick: Not nice.

Paul Scheer: Not nice, but great soundtrack. A weird movie. I love that level of weird. Again, it's like when I hear a director go Passion Project, I'm like, I'm in. Megapolis, I'm like, "Can't wait."

David Remnick: We gave it a good review.

Paul Scheer: They gave it a good review.

David Remnick: Justin Chang just came to The New Yorker in February.

Paul Scheer: Pulitzer Prize-winning Justin Chang.

David Remnick: I've heard. He liked it.

Paul Scheer: That movie is a perfect example of something that I love because it may just be weird enough that it could be great because it's so insane. It's like you're just shoving everything in there. I think that's what I love about a bad movie. It's like Coppola doesn't think he made a bad movie. He wanted to make this big epic. Does he have all the tools to make it? Who knows? That's what I get off on because I'm looking at it, I'm just like, "Wow, this is what you wanted to do."

David Remnick: Just to be clear on your criterion, so a movie like The Hottie and the Nottie.

[laughter]

Paul Scheer: Lobe it. Fine.

David Remnick: Paris Hilton-

Paul Scheer: Paris Hilton.

David Remnick: Vehicle.

Paul Scheer: Great Vehicle. Fine.

David Remnick: It never wanted to be anything else. It's that it?

Paul Scheer: Yes. It's not elevating the form. Garbage Pail Kids, the movie, great, fine, but there are movies like My brain is still broke that I saw Madame Web and I was like, "It is not bad."

[laughter]

I'm also fascinated by 50 Shades of Gray because I'm like, "Oh, here's this woman who wrote this thing. She's not having crazy S&M sex, but she's imagining what it is." Then we're watching this chaste sexual movie and I'm like, "That's weird."

David Remnick: Boring.

Paul Scheer: Yes, it's boring. It's the worst sexual film I've ever seen. It's supposedly titillating. It's titillating to someone who's never Googled anything sexual.

[laughter]

David Remnick: I'm the editor of The New Yorker. I can't say anything about that.

Paul Scheer: Sorry. Yes. Sorry

David Remnick: Paul, thank you.

Paul Scheer: Thank you.

[applause]

David Remnick: Paul Scheer is a co-host of the podcast How Did This Get Made? His new book is called Joyful Recollections of Trauma. We mentioned Megalopolis, a passion project of Francis Ford Coppola. In fairness, let's give the last word on that film to our critic, Justin Chang. Justin, before the Cannes Film Festival where you saw Megalopolis, everybody was saying this was going to be an epic bomb. A huge amount of money was spent on it, much of it Coppola's own. Why was there so much negativity directed at a filmmaker who had made, after all, The Godfather.

Justin Chang: Francis Ford Coppola has always elicited this kind of reaction. When Apocalypse Now, which premiered at Cannes in 1979, and was trailing epically bad buzz about how off the rails the movie had gone, and how over budget it had gone, people thought it was going to be some folly. I think people are very uncomfortable with outsized ambition. I think it scares them. I think talent scares them.

I think a lot of the negativity was, "How dare he do this?" I really take issue with that, not just because I liked the movie, but because you blow your own money on some epic artistic or commercial failure, so what? Hundreds of millions of dollars are blown every day on far worse causes than that. It's not a perfect movie. I don't think you know it's a masterpiece or anything, but I think though that, it's really disheartening when critics and journalists suddenly turn into Hollywood bean counters.

David Remnick: What did you like about Megalopolis?

Justin Chang: I liked this movie. It's a strange movie. Is it going to work for everyone? Absolutely not. It didn't work for a lot of people. We argued. I argued about this movie a lot with some of my closest friends and critics I love and trust, we were all over the map with this. The movie gives us this version of New York that is actually called A New Rome, and that is modeled on the ancient civilization of Rome. It is asking big questions about the future, and about a looming apocalypse, and are we becoming a fascist state. It's asking questions fundamentally about civilization, and specifically Western civilization especially.

The movie is quite theatrical in a lot of ways, the acting is very theatrical and declamatory in a way that I found really interesting and some might find off-putting. There's a futuristic tinge to it. The movie is engaging with different layers of artifice and reality. There are times when the movie looks like old Hollywood, complete with a rear projection, and there's something very old-fashioned and almost classical about it. There are times when the movie looks almost like something from the future, something that does not exist yet. The movie is playing with our sense of time. I just found all of this really stimulating and interesting and new. Does it all work? No. Are there parts of it that fall flat? Maybe. It's thrilling to see a filmmaker like Coppola, who's 85 years old, one of the greatest filmmakers this country has ever produced, coming out with a movie that in its idiosyncrasies, is unlike anything out there on the landscape.

David Remnick: You can find Justin Chang's review of Megalopolis at newyorker.com.

[music]

 

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