136. The Miracle of Preston Sturges

0:00Well, brothers and sisters, once again, we're going to have a little entertain. I guess I don't have to tell you what it is. The sheet kind of gives it away. And once again, brothers and sisters, we're going to share our pleasure with some neighbors less fortunate than ourselves. I want you, please, clear the first three punes so they may have seats. And when they get here, I'm going to ask you once more. Neither by work, nor by action, nor by look, nor to make a guest feel unwelcome, nor draw away from or at heart. For we is all equal in the sight of God. Amen. His work is, to me, irrefutable proof of the afterlife. For it is impossible to make films that sweet and not go to heaven. That is David Mammott on Preston Sturgis, and this is Filthy Armenian Adventures

1:04with your host, Alec Mohebian. As the motion picture academy prepares to honor this year's irrefutable evidence of hell, I thought it would be a good opportunity to remind the world, or introduce the world, to the miracle of Preston Sturgis, and investigate why his unparalleled streak of grand slams from the great McGinty, to Christmas in July, to the Lady Eve, to Sullivan's Travels, to the Palm Beach Story, to Miracle of Morgan's Creek, to hail the conquering hero, and finally to unfaithfully yours, are irrefutable proof of heaven. If you can't sleep at night, it's not the coffee, it's the lack of Preston Sturgis in your life. The first hour will be free for all the bums, the hobos, the less fortunate, the second hour available exclusively to the spiritual elite who subscribe on Patreon. And it will begin with a brief advertisement from the new Filthy Armenian division of Maxford House Coffee.

2:21Hey, this is your host Alec Mojibian with a quick message before we continue. Based in that great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California, Filthy Armenian Adventures is an interdimensional travel program that takes you deep into the cultural mysteries of our time. In search of truth, in search of gold, in search of lost friends and unsung heroes, in search of John Gaul's motor. This show is your antidote to the black pill. This is your guide to the places, the personalities, the ideas and creations, the enemies of man don't want you to know. This is your techno noir investigation into the good, the evil and the God hiding under our noise.

3:23This is where you get the news before it breaks, before it blows, before it burns. The show is supported entirely by patrons at patreon.com slash Filthy Armenian. As a patron, you get access to twice as many adventures, including the most important ones, the ones with the real facts. Plus, regular brief smoke break spiritual reports on topics of the day. As a patron, you also get exclusive access to our smash live events. Ask anyone who's attended one and they will tell you it's an experience you'll never forget. It's very easy to keep Filthy Armenian adventures alive. You can still listen to the show on your favorite app like Spotify or Apple, and you can do so with the pride that you're putting a little bit of money where your soul is. More patrons means more fuel, more topics, more investigations, more miracles,

4:26more secret locations, and forbidden territories around the world. And the world that is Los Angeles, our post-apocalyptic headquarters. It means we'll be able to track down more enchanting figures in the landscape, dare them to abandon their masks, and join our quest out of the darkness and into a golden age. patreon.com slash Filthy Armenian. Thank you for being one of the good ones. And enjoy the show. I mean, if you thought the ideas were good this afternoon, you still think they're good, don't you? Of course I do. Why? Well, I mean, since they were good and they're still good, they have to be good. And then it would make so much difference, or any difference if I hadn't won the contest.

5:27The Maxford House contest. What did? Of course it would make a difference. Oh, it would. Well, certainly it would. Why? I'm no genius. I didn't hang on to my father's money by backing my own judgment, you know. I make mistakes every day. Sometimes, several times a day. I've got a whole warehouse full of mistakes. I should say it would make a difference. You see, I think your ideas are good because they sound good to me. But I know your ideas are good because you won this contest over millions of aspirants. Yes, but you see Mr. Baxter. It's what you might call commercial insurance. And today, I welcome back an old friend of the show to celebrate and explicate and ponder and investigate and try to get at the gist of the magic of my favorite filmmaker of all time, Preston Sturgis. One of the very first comedic or any writers in Hollywood to also become a director and a producer of his own movies.

6:35And to go on a historic run, an absolutely historic run almost entirely within World War II, with one hit after another. And though he is sort of categorized as a screwball comedian and his movies as screwball comedies, he is a style and a voice unto himself. He's not the same as your basic idea of a screwball comedy, even though technically it overlaps. Maybe we can talk about that. Welcome back Matthew Wilder. Thanks. I have been seized with blinding terror about this podcast for days because I don't want to let you down and I don't want to let Preston Sturgis down because I've been pondering him in the last few days. I mean, maybe the first thing is, you know, you should launch.

7:38I think the thing for everyone to get is that this person is someone, if you don't know him, you should rush towards him immediately and devour all of his, there's not that much work. How many movies are there? 12? I think so. I'm so jealous of whoever has not seen Preston Sturgis. I think Preston Sturgis would be to this point because I just rewatched almost all of them, the ones that I considered to be the pantheon, the seven or eight of them. And I watched some that I hadn't seen such as the one he wrote. He was a very successful screenwriter in the 30s and one of the big themes of his autobiography, which was kind of stitched together from his journal notes by his daughter, which is very worth reading. It's called Preston Sturgis by Preston Sturgis. And it's a document of completely just irresistible Americana.

8:39I mean, he grew up, I don't know how much you read of the biography. I just read the whole thing. You just read the whole thing. Okay, good. So you'll be able to guide me through it. I read it a long time ago and I reread the ending, the last part where he becomes a director, which is really just very last few chapters. The rest of it is about his crazy upbringing. His mom was a best friend of Isadora Duncan. So he was just basically raised by Isadora Duncan in spirit. And that, I think, definitely comes through in his work. He had an amazing life. I mean, I didn't even remember the half of it, but I did know some of it. It's not just movies either. And we'll get into that. He had literally a John Gaul's motor company. He had an engineering company to try to invent John Gaul's motor. And it was supposed to be called the silent Sturgis. I don't know exactly what that company did or did not achieve, but it was in business for years. It produced engine after engine. It was one of the many side hustles he had.

9:40Another side hustle he had very near to my heart was the players. The nightclub and restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, which unfortunately went under when he tried to build a theater on top of it and ran out of money. He wanted to build a theater so that people could party, could drink, eat, party, and go to the theater at the same, in the same place. Sounds better in theory than in practice since you learned that people would rather move around than staying the same place all night. But the players is like my dream Hollywood location. I wish I want to own the players. I want to have a place. I have his theory of the players of what he wanted to accomplish with it. And it's exactly what I've always wanted in Hollywood and what I want now and what it seems like it would be absolutely impossible to achieve now. It started out as a place called Snyder's, which he opened to give his friend

10:41who had helped him in the musical business and the songwriting business decades before to give him something to do to manage a restaurant. And he called it, he opened that in 1936, also on Sunset Boulevard at a different location, 8789, a watering hole and eating establishment. We offered steak, chops, good liquor, fine wines, music, pool, chess, checkers, dominoes, and colbudo, whatever that is. And a place to eat and drink that stayed open well after midnight. And so he was just a man of endless energy and also a deep profundity, lustiness. Everything, he is just the most American person who ever lived in my opinion. So if you haven't, yeah, if you have not seen them all, we're going to, I'm going to name them all. We're going to talk at least a little bit about all of them. And highlight some of our favorite, they all deserve their own episode, honestly.

11:42Each of them deserves their own episode. But there is a magic brew to this man's art that makes him not only one of the great filmmakers of all time, but one of the great American artists. And I do not hesitate to say a right-wing artist hiding in plain sight. And that's a very easy thing to pick up when you watch the movies. Put this on your list and just like schedule it for when you need pleasure and joy in your life. I will list the movies now. The first movie that he directed is called The Great McGinty. Original title, biography of a bum, a change of title. The Great McGinty, 1940, starting Brian, Don Levy, and Muriel Angeles. It's about a hobo who rises to become governor, and then falls again. And it begins almost, it almost begins with a depiction of people buying votes

12:42before an election and bribing voters vote in a city machine. It is so perfectly relevant, so evergreen. And it's just like this. It's basically about this like, you know, the bum is like this real tough guy who gets into it with it, who basically enters a bromance with the mafioso who runs the machine of the city. I don't remember what city if it's ever specified. Seems like Chicago, but I don't know if they ever name the city. Number two, I had overlooked this one when I watched it the first time. I kind of like had dismissed it as one of the lighter ones. It turns out it's actually more prescient and more timely to this moment, I think, to this last decade than maybe any of the others. Christmas in July, also 1940. That's two in the same year. 67 minutes masterpiece. 67 minute movie.

13:43If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk. If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk. Yeah. It's about a slogan contest. The invention of a slogan. Well, you go. You go through all these. No, no, no, you take it. Do you take it? Because you're the one who told me you're the one who highlighted that one. And I was like, Christmas in July. I really like Christmas in July. I mean, this is just, you know, the thing that I wanted to speak on on this and you've watched all the, you've watched all the more recently. And I have, I watched some of the more, I went to look at some of the more fringe ones, which actually turned out to be great. There's one that is a Sturgeon's Written movie that was directed by Mitch Lison, a really, really talented guy who was sort of in the kind of a little bit like in between the wit of Billy Wilder

14:45and the sort of design style of Vincent Manelli. And he was sort, you know, he's not a big name. He's sort of forgotten. But I think people are now in this TCM era kind of digging him, digging him up again and seeing that he did a lot of good work. One of his movies, 1937, Easy Living. This is a great fucking movie. This is, and it's pure sturgis. It's directed by Vincent, not quite with the same manic exuberance as Sturgis, but it's really, really good. A movie about a rich, a sort of tycoon whose trademark is that he gives sable coats to all his mistresses. If you see a girl walking down Fifth Avenue with a black sable coat, you know she belongs to this dude. And one day he gets into a fight with one of his mistresses. They fling the coat over the balcony window. It flies down through the air and lands on a double-decker bus and plops onto Jean Arthur, who is a shopgirl and boom, this coat falls on her head.

15:57She goes, wow, look at this fur coat and puts it on. And from that moment on, everybody thinks she's, you know, the king's new woman. So her life changes overnight by donning this coat. It's a fantastic script. It's one of the least plot driven of sturgis scripts. But it is, it's kind of like what nowadays they call a hangout movie. It's a little bit more atmosphere and character than plot. But it is absolutely fantastic. Jean Arthur exquisite. Ray Meland is the rich guy's son posing as a poor kid, of course. Yeah. Who's looking for a job who's trying to pose as poor and trying to find a real job and is going through the class fights. And he has a great line, but I'm going to love it where he says something like, how come there are no jobs for someone who can't do anything anymore? Something like that. Wonderful. Wonderful.

16:58That's a wonderful movie. Christmas in July. I mean, here's, this is a thing. It's just what I've been thinking about and just wrestling about with sturgis. First and foremost, we can tell everybody these movies are great. They're beautiful. They're funny. They're perfect. Just go watch all of them. That is a given. The thing that to me was kind of interesting in looking at them again is, I find them kind of indescribable. And I just watched recently, Peter Bach Donovich, who is, of course, you know, like a cinephile non-paray. And he did a thing on press and sturgis. And he loves sturgis and he goes into it in depth. But, you know, kind of everything he says is something you could say about my man God-free, or bring up baby, or whatever. Exactly. And these movies aren't that, I mean, no slur on those movies. But these movies aren't that. There's something different.

18:00But it's really hard to say exactly what that is. We can define the Lubich touch. You can define in five qualities. What's a Lubich movie? If you had to say, what's the sturgis touch? I think it's a little harder. I think it's something that his thing is so unique that it's kind of hard to wrap your hands around. Now, the one thing that I've noted in this that I think is if there's one thing that is a sturgis thing that's different from other people, it's that he was the poet of the American mass culture, the beginning of mass culture, radio jangles, newspaper exposés, cheesy pop music on the radio, typified by Rudy Valley, who pops up in a bunch of these movies. Industrial-produced culture that yet gives everyone a feeling of belonging.

19:01It's something that we don't have now. When you see a sturgis movie, he's poking fun at all these sort of mass culture things like the contest to have a coffee slogan in Christmas in July. It's all about having a contest, a radio contest on a radio program that everyone in the country is hanging, you know, is listening to and is submitting to to find a new slogan for a coffee company. I forget the name of the coffee company. And Joel McCray is the guy that the people in his, he has a great slogan. What is it? It's not the coffee. If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee. It's the bunk. Yeah, if you can't sleep, it's not the coffee. It's the bunk. You get it. It's a pun. It's a pun. There's a pun between, and neither of these words will be known to anyone in 2026, the bunk, which means like a bed in the army, or bunk, meaning bullshit, you know, phony lies, bullshit. It's not the coffee. It's the bunk.

20:04And it's playing, and the whole, and the whole movie, he's trying to explain to everyone who doesn't get it, that he's, it's the whole slogan. The whole point of the slogan is that, you know, people think coffee prevents you from going to sleep at night, but no. So he's like, the whole thing is like, his whole slogan is focused around dispelling, dispelling the belief that coffee keeps you from going to sleep at night. Right. Right. Right. To me is, you know, which is a hilarious thing that, that, that ripples throughout, because there's like, well, why are you focusing on the fact that it keeps you awake or doesn't keep you awake? It's, it's, it's so wonderful. But all these things, all the stuff that Sturgis pokes fun at in all his movies, including, you know, probably it's most famous movies. Sullivan's Travels, which is about filmmaking. There is a, there's a poking fun at it, but there's also, and I think when you, when you call him a right wing artist, to me, this is the, the crux of it. Within that mass produced object, there's, togetherness, there's unity. Everyone comes together in, in whatever world that you're living in in that movie.

21:15If something that brings people together more than it tears them apart, and I think there's also something to that in the fact that, except for Robert Altman, you know, Preston Sturgis is the Repertory Company filmmaker of all time. I mean, he had this crew that kept coming back. Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest, who people, you know, if you're Gen X, you may know my three sons. He's the guy that plays all the rough necked lug nuts in these movies. Eric Bloor, the, the British butler. He had all these guys who came back and back, and there was, I think a metaphor in that too. It was like that, that Sturgis ensemble, the Repertory Company, was like a microcosm of a community. It's like the, the small towns in his movies or America. And these people are very fractious, but at the end, they're unified. They're, they're together.

22:16They come together in their world. It's about, yeah, it's, he is the poet laureate of American capitalism. I was just put capitalism because it's not just, I mean, that's what mass culture is, but also, it's also that he, I mean, just look at, you know, he's also making these movies during the depression. You know, and he's presenting a vision of America that is still and very much, very much America. He is not succumbing to the old drums. He is not succumbing to the communist influences that were at that time pervading American culture to be, to poison it for decades to come in ways subtle and not subtle. He was, he was, he was keeping the so-called myth alive, very much so. The rich people in his movies are good people. They're stupid and they're silly and they're in many ways conformist and they're, you know, all the things that everyone is and, and all the things that, that people are and all the things that reality is.

23:23But they are, ultimately, they're good people. They're always being generous. They're always, they're not, they're always, they're like anyone else. They're, they're, they're looking for love. They're charmed by personality. They're, they're charmed by charisma and sex appeal. I mean, in one of these movies after another, the rich people act kind of with, like, valiantly. And, well, this, this is, okay, you, you, you've touched on something that surprised me in going back and, and, and looking and thinking about these again, which is, there's also like, there's a, there's a strange knife edge of comedy and darkness in these movies. I forgot quite how dark some of the things are. For instance, in Christmas and July, Joel McCree plays this guy. He comes up with a great slogan and the people in his, in his job, play a trick on him and tell him, and they go, oh, you won, you won the prize, you won first prize. You're the guy.

24:26They create a fake telegram, congratulating him. And so he goes, spins out in a tailspin thinking that he's like the king of the world now. And he's laughing about his standing on some desks in the office space. And the boss comes and says, what the fuck is what's going on here? What are you people doing? Get, get down. And he's about to fire Joel McCree. And he really is about to go through with it. By the way, Dick Powell is in Christmas July. Excuse me. I'm sorry. Dick, of course it is. Dick Powell. Oh, fantastic. Dick Powell. He is told by the boss, you know, that's it. You're, you've created a mayhem in my office. You're fired. And someone says, hey, you know what? This guy just won the coffee jingle award. And the boss sort of turns out in him and goes, really? He won the coffee jingle award. All right. Well, you know, and then and then celebrates the guy. And you realize, well, that's what it would take to turn this guy in a dime. He's not going to just recognize the nobility of this guy.

25:31He had to actually do something to, to merit his attention. And there's, there are a lot of things in these movies where I feel like these characters come closer to the abyss than almost any other comedies that I can think of in the US. But you, but you see that, but you see how rare it is. I mean, the, the, the, the wealthy tycoon villain is such a stock character in the movies to this day, to this day. Like if you want to have an evil person, make him the CEO, you know, like everything is like a evil CEO, everything's like Luigi shooting CEO, you know, evil CEO. That's like the, that's been like bred into it from, for a century. And it's, it's amazing how seldom that is subverted, that that stereotype is subverted, which is a lazy leftist stereotype. It's not that rich people aren't extremely evil and stupid often. It's just that that stereotype that somehow there's is, you know, there's inherent villainy in, in the boss is, is just is a very kind of loserish attitude that is, that is spread around.

26:40And it's actually bad for people to have to think that way. And it is completely missing and, and in sturgis, even though he is making these movies in the pit of the Great Depression, when there's never been more misery in America, when there's never been less hope at up to that point in its economic system. And he's completely subverting that stereotype, every single movie without exception. It speaks to his like larger vision and wisdom. I mean, it's, it's like, it's such a, the, the way that the, the boss turns. And it's, in every single movie, it happens. It's like, in every single movie, the, the mean boss kind of turns exactly when you're expecting him to like, bring down the hammer. And there's always this case, people are constantly changing from their stereotype, from their expected stereotype. It's also something that comes through in the romances.

27:40I mean, the definition, the classic definition of a comedy, right, going all the way back to Aristotle is one where everyone gets married, they get married at the end. So you can't make a comedy, basically, I mean, fundamentally, you can't make a comedy without romance, if you're talking about like a true comedy. Well, that's, you know, Andrew Saras wrote something really, I thought was really exceptionally observant, which is he said, Sturges is one of the only comic film directors where you're aware of the film as comedy, not tragedy, rather than comedy, haha. And I think that's, that's very true of these movies because they have an awareness of mortality. There's, there's just a, there's a peril to, to all these heroes that's, it's different from, from everything else. The thing that I just have really stunned by is a lot of, you know, sort of 50s critics talk about this.

28:50Manie Farber talks about it and Saras talks about it, that somehow Sturges hit this incredible zeitgeist feeling during World War II, when there's this, when he became a director and there's just the string of incredible films. And then after he got kicked out of Paramount, basically, you would think, well, after this stream of films, he get picked up by someone else, I'm going to just keep going and making other similar kinds of movies. But he didn't, and some of that was maybe his own combativeness and we, whatever, we, we don't know that part of, of his character versus the suits. But what everyone talks about is how the point of view of these movies, which as you say, it's so refreshing, it's so upbeat, it's so prohuman, that after the war, it suddenly looked ancient to people. It, it, it, it suddenly became this thing from another world, maybe because people were so traumatized, but, you know, at the end of the war, there were so, you know, soul scarred.

30:05But it is to me like an incredible mystery that you have this sequence of what, I don't know, what is it from 40 to 44, I think it's eight films, seven films, eight films. I think there's seven that were huge hits between. Right. Yeah, there's seven massive hits. And then after, and in all the way, after he leaves around the time of the great moment, which is a really weird, I mean, I guess it was sort of, he claims it was mutilated in the cutting, but it's just kind of a perverse movie about the invention of anesthesia. Yeah. And it's kind of a early 30s kind of biopic, like a Paul Mooney sort of really straight biopic and kind of a comedy. But after that stream of films, he was just unable to go on. And I just can't imagine it. So as if, you know, Copa at the end of Apocalypse Now didn't go on from there, you know, like he just became unemployable.

31:06It's really a mystery to me. I don't know. There's some, found out. There's some clues. Yeah, there's some clues to the mystery, which I'd like to get to, and they open up cans of worms. You know, he clearly, and he's very roofful about his break with Paramount. I mean, first of all, let's start from, let's get back to the beginning, which is how did he finally get his break as a director? It was not normal. It was to have a writer director in those days. In fact, he may not be technically the first, I don't know for sure, but he's one of the first. I think he's one of the first in the studio system, and then after him came John Houston with multi-falken and biologist involvement. After, after, but he's the, he's if not technically, you know, if he's not technically Jackie Robinson, he's close to Jackie Robinson, and he's the one who mattered. He's the one who mattered. Do you remember the story from the book about the Paramount guy making him a dinner?

32:06Mr. LeBron, LeBaron or something, it's almost like LeBron, which I find to be amusing. This is the story, but this is a story straight out of a Preston Sturgis movie, which by the way, I'm sure his Christmas in July is basically an allegory of Sturgis' own creative struggles to become a director, or any other period of his life when he wasn't being given a chance that he really wanted and felt he was ready for it. Christmas July is all about that, so in real life, what happens is finally after, you know, and he's this mind you, this is a very successful writer. He's like his very valuable writer, but they still won't give him, they still won't give him a chance to direct, why? Because, well, if you want to direct a movie, you're going to have to direct a movie first and show that you can do it. But how are you going to do the first, how are you going to get it done the first time when you, you know, everyone says the same thing. They're not willing to let you direct unless you do it for someone else first and show that you can do it. So this cycle that many people are familiar with in the creative world, he gets exhausted with, he gets frustrated with him.

33:12Finally, the production chief at Paramount, Mr. LeBaron, at a dinner, and it's a beautiful, I have the story written down because it's, I want to read it one second, I'm going to find it right now, and read it to you. And he gives him the shot, he gives him a chance, he finally convinces him at dinner to give him a chance to do, to make basically the great McGinty. And he offers him, he just prepares like a, like a Caligula level feast for this guy that just, he just puts on the dog for this guy. Yeah, he does the, the brand of the most fun guy, then came the salad, Mr. LeBaron weakened visibly with the dessert he was almost gone, the Napoleon Brandy finished him. What was that biography story again that you always wanted to direct, he gasped. After a dinner like that, I didn't tell the story very well, but it most of your million ventures was recorded over the air between New York City and Hollywood. I don't see how a man Hollywood could produce a dinner like this, could possibly fail to make it an excellent picture, the Sullivan merchants, and then it gets better.

34:15He calls him over to the production to his office to describe and they go over the matter. Thank you for your support, and here's what he said. This is just next week straight out of the war of a movie. A real hot monster just movie, he said. I am perfectly willing to stick to my bargain of last night. And what I remember of the story, I remember as being very good. But are you sure you want to become a director? It's a terrible job. You have to get up at six o'clock in the morning and stand on your feet all day listening to a lot of ham actors moughing their lines until Rieger mortis sets in. You are already a very successful writer with many credits to your name. If you make yourself ridiculous as a director, you will be less valuable as a writer. You are undertaking a very dangerous thing. You remember the adage don't change horse's midstream. To that, let me add, don't change careers in midlife. I told him that I realized all the dangers, but that I had to do it, even if it ruined me.

35:17I had wanted to for so long. I was beginning to like the picture business I told him, but there was only one job in it, and that was making them. Everything else was secondary, and I was not by nature a second fiddle player. Be it on your own head, he said, then as I turned to leave, he added, by the way, how much do you want for the story? I'll okay any price you say. But let me point out that the less it costs to bring in your first picture, the more it will be admired. How about a dollar, I said? At the door, I paused and said, as a matter of fact, I'm going to make a hell of a picture for you. He looked up from his big desk and smiled. As a matter of fact, I know it. So there is a hero, Mr. Labyrin of Paramount, who makes the career of Preston Sturgis as a director, happen. Okay, this is the kind of hero that is often unsung, and that is even more scarce today than people who are like Preston Sturgis.

36:21Have you ever heard Billy Wilder's line about this? I thought this to me is the living end. I'm sure Preston Sturgis would agree with this. Somebody said, Billy, what would you rather, if you had to pick one, which would you rather do? Right or direct, and he said, what would you rather do? Make the bed or fucking it? I think that is. Yeah, I would rather make the bed, but most people will probably want to fucking it. You'd rather make the bed? Yeah, I'd rather make the bed and then sit in the corner on a chair and then watch. Oh, the cocktail. I don't call it the cocktail. The first row seat. I don't call it the Cuck Jarris, so goch. So, yeah, we're talking about just how everything that he does is a Preston Sturgis movie. His whole life is a Preston Sturgis movie, and that is why his movies have the sparkle that they have.

37:22It's not just the kind of schmaltcy, you know, the Hollywood schmaltz, pie in the sky, fantasy of a woman who loves you and everything going right for you, that it is in other pictures and other kind of screwball comedies and stuff. There's a real hard line of, yeah, as you said, I mean, the tragedy is always there, right on the surface. It's right there. I mean, certain of his movies are tragic for long periods, are dark and very serious for long periods. He switches tone very audaciously, and sometimes he felt that he didn't succeed. I mean, he feels that he felt that my favorite Sullivan's travels, and one of the all-time great movies of like about the movies, he felt that that was a failure. Not a total failure, but he felt that he got lost between two strains at the end and he couldn't quite figure out the problem that he had to solve,

38:24which is basically how to make the serious part and the serious part and the romantic part mesh perfectly. It's a harrowing movie, and I don't know if people, you know, probably people listening to this, this is one of the two or three most famous of his movies. But very simply, the conceit of the movie is there's a guy who's a successful filmmaker. He's tired of making fluff. He wants to make something socially conscious and meaningful. He's a comedic filmmaker. First of all, he's a comedic filmmaker. He makes movies like Dance in Your Pants 1939. Yeah. Dance in Your Pants 1939. They wanted to make more comedies, but he wants to make a serious picture about the struggles of the work, you know, about the struggles of the poor. Yeah. He wants to make a brother where art thou? A brother where art thou, which obviously had no other life. So he decides, you know what, I don't really know real life well enough to do this authentically.

39:26So we've got to go into the world and really experience the world. And of course, at first that journey is ridiculous. And he has sort of like, you know, these flunkies from the studio following him along in a jloppy and so on. But the thing that is to me, and it's like this something I didn't really remember that well for however long ago was I saw it, when Sullivan goes into the world by the end of that movie, like his experience of the grit and the rough edges and the violence and the ugliness of real life is really harrowing. It's not just, you know, that we see this guy, a Hollywood guy sort of getting his pants pulled down. It's really scary. And when you get to the end where it reaches, you know, I don't think this is giving anything away. He kind of rediscoveres the meaning of giving joy to people, giving pleasure to people, making them laugh, making them feel good.

40:30It's really earned. It's, it's really earned. You feel really grateful for the sweetness of the last real of this movie. But I, I mean, I don't know about you. I found that movie more shocking and more dark than I had remembered it being. That movie, it is more shocking and more dark because it presents as he does in his movies. It presents a very real sequence of this guy living with the, with hobos and with, with basically the train tracks get rose of the time, which feels especially poignant now that homeless people are everywhere all the time. And he loses his ability to get back into safety. Right. Through clever plot device, he's after, you know, after larping for the whole movie up till the last 30, 40 minutes, he's larping, larping, they're following him around.

41:38I mean, I don't want to just give away the whole movie to everyone because it doesn't even matter. Yeah, it's not a plot movie. Yeah, it's not, none of these are plot movies. They're just brilliant spiritual experiences. Yeah. So, you know, he's, of course, he's larping his poor and various towns and there, there's a big fancy trailer closely monitoring him every step of the way because they're not going to let their investment go off into the fucking boondies without careful monitoring. So, the whole trailer with the entire prestigious troop is there every step of the way to make sure nothing bad happens to him and to give him a place to check into. And, you know, of course, one funny thing after another, he goes, he runs into some rich people who help him out immediately and want to fuck him, some old ladies. He, he's, he ends up back in Hollywood, he ends up at a diner where the guy just gives him free food just to be nice. Like, once again, every little, everything, every step he takes, he runs into American generosity. And then, finally, eventually, due to the criminality of the poor, due to the brutality of a real, of one of his fellow bombs, the real bombs robbing him and knocking him over the head, he ends up in jail

42:56for basically for the murder of himself. It's a lot, I'm not going to give away how that happens. Yeah, but he gets one, it's magnificent. Brilliantly, brilliantly accomplished. He, he ends up in jail for the murder of himself. And so, nobody, of course, believe, you know, he doesn't, he's like, the point is that he's now a, finally, he is in jail. He's on a, what is it called? A labor gang, like a labor camp. Yeah, a chain gang, he's on a chain gang and he's got no recourse. And, and as far as the rest of the world knows, he is dead. The director is dead. So, anything he says to the contrary is only bound to sound crazy. And he's in that chain gang and the scene where it happens, the all-time scene, and this was very important for me. This was, my friend Stephen Cox recommended this movie to me way back when I was in high school. As a, you know, I was myself struggling with, this sounds going to sound really gay.

43:57But I was struggling with kind of role of being a comedic person in a serious life. And in an intellectually serious life. And, you know, in retrospect, that was a very real struggle. And that's a struggle that maybe more people should have who end up being frivolous, kind of like shit eating jokesters for whom nothing is ever real their entire lives. Which is a lot of people, as we see, it's become a whole ethos, it's become a whole subculture called the dirt bag left. And, and it's kind of poisoned by comedic unseriousness. Unseriousness in the name of comedy, I should say. Which, I think that, you know, the best comedy is typically grounded in seriousness as we can see with Preston Sturgis. But anyway, this movie was recommended to me for its moral, for its moral, to give me like, to, to, for me to realize that it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a conflict.

45:06Well, let me, let me, let me ask you something about this because I was, this is something I was thinking about a lot while, you know, like chewing on these movies. And when I was an adolescent, I don't know if you were like this, but, you know, as an adolescent, I was very into movies that had a certain confrontational, nihilistic, clockwork orange, natural born killers, solos, you know, micalonica even, like things that were, like confrontational alienating to the audience, had kind of a bleak vision of humanity. And now I feel like things like Lubich, like Sturgis, watching a stare in Roger's movies, but just focusing now on Sturgis. I feel like, there's, like a greater profundity in this kind of film than there is in a movie that slaps you upside the head.

46:09There's, there is something in these movies which also are filled with charm and seductiveness and music and laughter that I feel spiritually more drawn to this now than I do to that other kind of thing, which is what I think most people who become artists, I think, originate in that stuff. They do. I didn't. I never did. And that's one of the reasons I was never, I was never, I was never, you know, I never had a home in anything I've ever done in life because I've always been, I've always been the, the guy who's into Preston, Sturgis in a world of people who are into 1970s bleak nihilism, you know. I've always been the, I've been the gay in the straight world, I've been the straight in the gay world, I've been the, the right winger in the art world, I've been the artist in the right wing world. I'm always, I'm always fucking out. I'm always the, the, you know, that's just the story of my life everywhere. I'm the, I'm the, the Gentile in the Armenian world, I'm the Armenian in the Gentile world.

47:13It never stops. It's just, even now, even with all this, even in our own world, even in our own little circles of online hell, it's turned out that way. And people hate, people resent it when you don't, especially people who are into the bleak nihilism, which I think your generation is, you know, kind of was steeped in so heavily, especially through its, through its artistic influences because of how New Hollywood, because of punk, because of all that shit. And you could, they, they, they, not all of them, some of them, like people like Brett, who I think is also steeped, artistic sensibilities are absolutely steeped in Gen X nihilism, right? The, the, you know, in terms of his big influences and so on. But he's not, he's not somebody who then holds that over others. And I don't think he's somebody that resents it when someone is diverts from that and has a different view. But many resent it. Many resent, many think that you're trying to blow smoke up their, somebody's ass when you're not a championing art that's all about killing yourself.

48:18Like many just want everything, like they just find this comfort in the bleakness, the misery, and they find, they find. All right. Okay. I have to say just to push back against that a little bit, when I was growing up, and I think this kind of, this tilts into your, I don't even know how old you are. I'm 40. God damn it. I'm 40 and in one. Okay. Okay. In a week and a half in two weeks, I'm going to be 41. Okay. Then you're a little kid. But, you know, when I was growing up, the, the sunny side of the street was caddy shack. It was not crest and sturgis. It was not her in slumage. It was cad jack. It was stripes. It was ghost busters. And I think to your generation, probably it was Judd Appetal. So to me, I'm like, well, if I'm, if I'm given the choice between the clockwork orange and Judd Appetal, I'm probably going to go with Kubrick. Well, yeah, although I don't know, Judd Appetal, I think Judd Appetal is, it is best was, you know, to be fair to Judd Appetal, I don't have any personal, I don't have any personal, you know, feelings of generosity toward him these days that I haven't for many years.

49:36But I think he, he deserves to be closer in the conversation to prestigious than he does to caddy shack, at least at his best, you know, his involvement in girl, he's, he's done, he, he tried to, he, he did imbue his work with some reality and some like tough moral kind of yet, he had some moral ambitions with his, with his work that I think are not to be completely dismissed. But, but, you know, whoever you want, the thing that I go, whoever you want, there's endless stupid bullshit. No, no, no, but I think that I think he's important because I think he did one thing to comedy, which remains to this day, which is he is the opposite, you know, Preston Sturgis, I think, you know, obviously the air, the air is apparent to Preston Sturgis right now or the Cohen brothers and they, I mean, they literally copy tons of Sturgis shit in their movies. But the thing that they both share is their films are very written, they are, they are written to a T, both, I mean, both people's movies are written to a T, and apt to have pioneered this thing of, hey, let's get funny people together and have them just fucking spitball everything in their head, just say everything you want about that might be funny and then we'll cut it together.

50:51And that's statistically they're totally different, stylistically they're totally different, there's no quid, there's no comparison at all. I'm just kind of, I'm getting into the kind of abstract spiritual dimension where I, where I kind of, I assign, I group certain, you know, for me. So I've often, I've thought lately about like who are my big three, overall influences, overall everything, everything inclusive and like as tent pole influences. And I decided that Preston Sturgis is in that big three and everything else that you could kind of like everything else in my, in my like spiritual world view that is in the realm of comedy, in the realm of cinema, in the realm of, you know, what's the word like brighter magic and that in that kind of zone of energy, I kind of like affixed to the Preston Sturgis category.

51:54But, you know, like I think that when certain movies come out of the, come out of nowhere and surprises with joy, surprise by joy as the title of a certain book by Mr. C.S. Lewis's. It, it, it remind, it bring, it puts them, it, you know, it, it dominates them for the Preston Sturgis award of that year, you know what I mean. So I think that there is, it's not a style, yeah, I mean stylistically, they couldn't be further apart. Yeah, John Abbott, I love to jerk off, love to smoke weed and like have everyone have look for little moments here and like have everyone improvise and improv, improv, improv. And it's a very different mode. It's a very different style completely. And yeah, the coen brothers have a more sturgisian style. But man, do I not, I do not experience to join the coen brothers. I am maybe, I mean, I guess to find joy, it's, it's, you know, I mean, I guess they're, they're sort of all over the map.

52:54Yeah, I just have to have been delighted by the coen brothers. I know some people love, I haven't watched the Big Lebowski in decades. So I'll putting that aside. Not a fan of that one, but okay. I just, you know, I like some of their movies well enough. I'm like, okay, you know, I found, I find some of their movies interesting, but I find a lot of the other ones to be just kind of. I think they're pretty inspired. I mean, you know, one movie that has a lot of, of Sullivan's travels in it. And I think it actually is even set in 1941. Is Barton Think, which I hated. I hate it. Well, you may hate it, but it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a fun house mirror version of Sullivan's travels about this guy who is, it's essentially Clifford Odets, a left-wing playwright who comes to Hollywood. And thinks that he knows something about the common man and about, you know, lived life and reality shows him a thing or two. It's certainly not in his life-affirming away as Sullivan's travels, but I think it's pretty similar. And I think that movie is very, very original.

54:02Listen, I didn't, I didn't watch that that long ago. And I'm not going to, I don't want to get into a debate over because I haven't, I don't have my, you know, talking points near to hand. It felt like a lot of their movies like Pastiche more than a real, more than a, you know, it's like, okay, here's the scene where, here's the scene where we have Faulkner. And here's the scene where, it felt like one of these, like one of Woody Allen's type of like period pieces, which I'm not a fan of Woody Allen's period pieces relative to his other work. Well, I will say, you know, one thing is you're talking about Sullivan, and I was thinking about Woody Allen is, Woody has a lot of endings that are very similar to the ending of Sullivan's travels. Where, you know, some Woody is a hypochondriac who's thinking about death. And then he goes to see a market movie and all of a sudden he realizes what, what life is all about. And somehow he never does it as convincingly as, as Preston searches did. That ending the faces, the extras that Sturge has got in that scene when they're watching, what is it like goofy or so? It's like a Disney short.

55:06They're watching Pluto, a Pluto Disney cartoon. And that scene at the end, that scene at the black church, they marched, they marched the prisoners into a black church for the picture show as their, you know, once a week relaxation. And it's a black church and then a, you get, we start out in the black church and there's, and the black preacher is giving a sermon. And then he's telling people to make way for the guys, for the less fortunate who are coming in and do not show, you know, do not make them feel unwelcome in any way. And, and then they pull the screen down and they put on the picture show. And it's, and it's a, yeah, it's a, it's a Pluto cartoon. No, it's a, yeah, it's a Pluto not goofy. It's a Pluto cartoon. Everyone just, just screams with laughter uncontrollably throughout it. And Joel McCray Sullivan learns his lesson. It's a, it's one of my favorite scenes ever of anything of all time. And I think about it constantly. And it's like it plays in my, like it plays in the screen in my soul on a loop. That scene.

56:13It's playing nonstop. It's the thing. Yeah, I mean, to me, I mean, the thing I just, the image that I keep coming back to over and over again. And looking at all these movies is, and this, I think speaks to your notion of the political dimension of Sturges, is that he has all these characters that represent so many types. He represents so many classes. He has sort of hoity toity character actors. He has rough neck character actors. He has all kinds of low brow people. And it's, to me, it's very Mozart like, if you, if you kind of squeeze all these movies together, you get the marriage of Figaro, where at the end. It's, it all comes together like all the different parts of the nation, all the different classes, the different regions, they harmonize. And through the whole movie, they're yelling over each other and poking each other in the stomach and picking up the phone and yelling into the phone.

57:19And all that frenzy at the end turns into a beautiful harmony. As in the ending of Nashville. Yeah. Well, it's a different register. It's a different register. But that's what I've always felt the connection between the ending of Nashville and one of those massive, you know, Preston Sturges ensembles. It is still an American. It is still a celebration of the American spirit. However, different the register. It's a quiver call, I think, because the song, it don't worry me if people don't know that go on YouTube and look up the ending of Nashville. Or just watch the movie. You could also watch the one of the great movies of the 20th century. But it ends. It ends with a pan up from the stage of Barbara Harris singing, it don't worry me to the clouds. And it feels like Altman is throwing his hands up to God and saying, now what? What do we do now?

58:24Yeah. Well, what we do is we put on some Preston Sturges and we bring that camera back down and we start singing again. And so that's what we do. The beautiful frenzied ensembles, I mean, Christmas in July has the most impressive one because it's like, there's like a thousand people on the screen. And it's madness. And the madness changes direction multiple times. And Christmas in July has one of the best speeches in all of Sturges, one of the most arresting and one of the smartest. And just one of the most, I think, affecting speeches that you could listen to today. If you're at all entangled with the zeitgeist of the moment, when she tries to convince Dick Powell's boss to let him have the promotion anyway, even after they realized that he didn't win the contest after all it was all a prank.

59:32And that speech she gives and that come that back and forth with the boss, which I'm going to try to find and play right now, is one for the ages. It would be just as hard to face them from in here if you didn't belong here uneasy lies the head. Now what is the joke this time? He belongs in here because he thinks he belongs in here because he thinks he's a very deep dish and highfalutin. But from a practical practical Mr. Baxter, it's the most practical idea you ever had. He belongs in here because he thinks he has ideas. He belongs in here until he proves himself or fails. And then somebody else belongs in here until he proves himself or fails. And somebody else after that and somebody else after him and so on and so on for always. I don't know how to put it in the words like Jimmy Kud, but all he wants, all any of them one is a chance to show, to find out what they've got while they're still young and, and burning like a sharp cutter or a stepping stone.

1:00:41No, they're not going to succeed. At least most of them are. They'll all be like Mr. Waterberry soon enough, most of them anyway. But they won't mind it. They'll find something else and they'll be happy because they had their chance. Because it's one thing to muffle chance when you get it, but it's another thing never to have had a chance. His name's already on the door. And that does it for the rather generous free portion of this episode for the last hour. Please subscribe at patreon.com slash filthy Armenian patreon.com slash filthy Armenian. It is the only way to show support and keep the lights on over here at filthy Armenian adventure land, which has no Maxford House coffee behind it because it is singularly concerned with the truth and the state of your soul. So please do support it. It's not that much. It's a minimum of $5 a month. If you see a higher minimum, you're on the wrong, you're on, you're using the Apple iTunes, whatever.

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