Great baseball movies to start the season and Poppy Liu talks ‘Dead Ringers’ | Streamed & Screened podcast

It’s spring, which means it’s time for another season of Major League Baseball. And on this episode of Streamed & Screened, Bruce Miller quizzes co-host Terry Lipshetz on his favorite baseball movies.

Watching the New York Mets isn’t always easy, so the list of movies that includes “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams,” “Fever Pitch,” “The Bad News Bears,” “The Natural,” “A League of Their Own,” “Eight Men Out,” “The Sandlot,” “42” and “Sugar” can get you through a long season. 

They also touch on TV programs such as Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary that originally aired on PBS, the adaptation of “A League of Their Own” for Amazon Prime Video and “Brockmire” that aired on IFC.

The conversation then shifts to the the Amazon Original limited psychological thriller series “Dead Ringers,” which is based on the 1988 film by David Cronenberg starring Jeremy Irons.

The new series stars Rachel Weisz and we have an interview with co-star Poppy Liu.

The show wraps with a look ahead to a discussion about “A Small Light,” a new series coming to National Geographic on May 1. The show follows Miep Gies, who helped hide Otto Frank and his family, including Anne Frank, from the Nazis during World War II.

Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin.

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome everyone to another episode of streamed and Screened and entertainment podcasts about movies and TV. I’m Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee Enterprises and the co-hosts of the program, along with first ballot Hall of Famer Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and a longtime entertainment reporter. I set you up. Good, good, good, good. You did good last week.

You were a little disappointed I didn’t hold you in high enough esteem. There you go. You know, I called my people. My people said, get him on that. What’s going on? This is not right. But that’s very good. I’m so thrilled. Baseball movies? Yes. Are you a big fan or not? I am. So, you know, we kind of preview beforehand what we might talk about on the show and I told you yesterday, I am very behind on things right now.

I’ve been watching a little bit here. I’m a little Mandalorian, a little bit of Barry. Season four is back Succession is back. But I’m squeezing these things in because the New York Mets are in the middle of a West Coast swing. So I’m watching games at like ten, 11, 12:00 at night. I’m a huge baseball fan, Bruce. That’s all I like.

I buy the baseball package so I can watch watch the Mets every game. And I pretty much I probably get 120 games in a year easy. The Mets are your team. They are? Yeah. I’m from New York. Just because my dad, he was a he was a Mets fan. Okay, So I grew up in New York. In Jersey.

So it’s the jeans. It just. Yeah, do the jeans. That’s how that works. And I’m a glutton for punishment, too. Well, you know, it’s a lot like being a Cubs fan. It is. When you have that winning gear, it’s it doesn’t get any better than that. But think of the all the baseball movies then, that you’ve been able to squeeze in in your lifetime.

Which do you like? Which ones stand out for me? Like every year. I don’t do this quite as much now because I’ve got the kids. I’ve got a lot of lot of things in my life. But I used to be for the season or between the spring training and maybe that first month of the season, I would make it a point to watch as many baseball movies as I could year after year.

So the ones that I would go to and so and I did it this year. First movie, I always pop on Bull Durham, always Circle Durham. Yep, because it takes place in the minor leagues. So to me it’s like I’m getting ready for a full season of baseball and I love it. It’s a great comedy. 1988 you’ve got Kevin Costner playing that aging catcher who should be kind of higher in the minor league system at that point.

You know, he should have been a major leaguer at that point, but he never could quite crack. It wasn’t quite good enough for for the big leagues. So they send him down to A-ball to work with a young pitcher who is Tim Robbins. Crazy, crazy. He’s off the walls. He doesn’t you know, he’s a bonus baby and he’s got to show him the ropes of both minor leagues of being a professional baseball player.

But it’s also kind of life coach as well. So and then I love it. Brandon Come on. Sarandon And of course, Susan and Tim Robbins, it’s they ended up they never got married, but they they ended up going into a really long term relationship and they have a child or children, I mean, yeah but yeah so there was a that Bull Durham who’s jerk struck something, right.

Yeah. So Bull Durham is is my go to start movie of the baseball season so not field of dreams Field of Dreams is kind of like that Number two which is another you know Kevin Costner Costner’s got that trifecta of baseball movies. So that is actually the one that I turned on second. And I watched it. It was a little bit tough to watch this year because it’s about relationships.

Is that that relationships between sons and their fathers. It came out a year after Bull Durham, which is kind of funny, but yeah, Field of Dreams, I threw it on. I showed it to the kids for the first time. They enjoyed it this year, but I was like ball in my eyes. Out from start to finish. My my father passed away recently.

He’s a huge, huge baseball fan. And it was a little tough to watch, especially in that last scene, you know? Yeah. You know, you can forget the field of dreams if you like. Oh, you have already have, Yeah. And did you run the bases? I did know. So I don’t know if you know this, but if you go on Sundays or at least when I went at the time, I don’t know if they changed anything, but if you go on a Sunday during the summer, they bring out a collection of ballplayers, they walk out of the cornfield and they put on a little bit of an exhibition right there.

So it was like, Yeah, yeah. Well then did you get you got down on the field though, didn’t you, to take pictures and stuff. Yeah. Oh yeah, Yeah. We, we kind of hung out, We sat on the sidelines, we watched the game is a little, a little long in the tooth, you know, they probably could have shortened it up a little bit, but we took the kids into the corn and walked out and saw the house and bought some trinkets and.

And then drove. That was good. Yeah. Do these refreshments or not? They have a concession stand. I believe that you can make some purchases. It’s been a few years. I think I was there in 2016, so it’s been a while. So this was before they put that big stadium up for. Yeah. Okay. And I know they’ve I know they’ve expanded and added in like a more proper concession stand and merch and all that stuff.

Like they had things. Then I bought a shirt and something else. A little field of dreams boss, maybe a little toy, but sitting in a box somewhere that I can’t find, you know, that was always our vacation. When I was a kid. We would always go see, I’m sorry, the Minnesota Twins, but we would get there before I think anybody did, you know, because the parents were always making sure that we weren’t late.

And we would sit there and the stadium was empty. There was nobody there. So I had already kind of scoured the whole place, looked at every piece of merchandise. There was eight, like nine different things. And then by the time the game came, I was okay. I could go home. Now that park is in the Mall of America.

That’s right. Home plate in the Mall of America. But I always remember that. And the twins never won when we were there. So we had to be the bad luck charm for them. Well, I have a little a little Minnesota Twins trivia for you or a fun fact. Okay. So the old days, not super old, but do you remember Tom Kelly, the manager of the twins, in the 1980s?

So Tom Kelly, he grew up in South Amboy, New Jersey, which is kind of the area where I lived. I played Little League with Tom Kelly Jr. You’re kidding. Was a kid. He was okay. He was good on the team. And there was a time where we were playing a game when I think the twins were in town to play the Yankees and they had an off day.

This was the year before Tom Kelly was elevated to manager. I think he was the third base coach at the time and he was hanging out on the on the sides and just watching and taking in the game. But Tom Kelly Jr who sadly passed away he’s he’s about my age. He’s in his mid-forties and he he passed away a year or two ago.

Oh no yeah tragically but he had a huge glove which was given to him by a player. So it’s like way too big for a 12 year old, ten, ten year old, whatever it was at the time. He had this big puffy jacket that said Hubert Humphrey Metrodome on it. It was fun. Yeah, well, did Dad yell things to him or was he pretty good?

He he stayed as low key as possible. He didn’t want to. He didn’t. I think he he knew his place and that was not managing ten year olds. Did you have those those bad parents though, that did that. I mine were pretty good with watching. I know there are definitely I’ve run into him I coached softball now there come on I periodically my my parents are pretty good but I’ve I’ve had issues with other parents and yeah I hey I know we’re have you speak okay well then what about the A league of Their own?

Did you like that movie? Yeah, that one’s another favorite of mine. But Tom Hanks and I, I have yet to watch that remake the Amazon Prime TV series. You know what? I’m very disappointed. They are only going to do a handful of episodes for season two to kind of butt up. But I think it started in one direction and went in a whole different direction.

It was more about, Oh, what’s the term I want to use it wanted. It really leaned into the LGBTQ audience and you know, they wanted to somehow say that there were a lot of gay female baseball players back in the day, but it that derailed the whole idea of women being treated equally on the field. And I think it got away from the sports aspect and went into a whole other thing with even like a factory nearby and so I was not as the first episode was fine, but then it started waning and I thought, I don’t know if I can watch this anymore.

And it’s not that I have anything against anything that they were doing. It’s just it seemed like bait and switch. So I still want to maybe go back and watch that. The movie itself with Tom Hanks. I watched did a few months ago with my daughters because I thought it would be a really good one for them. They’re about 12 years old now and I, I really think it’s important in this day and age to make sure that they see really strong female role models.

Sure. Because if you think about it, I mean, things like even high school sports, they weren’t playing high school basketball until like the seventies. I mean, college basketball for women wasn’t really a thing until it didn’t really break through until the early 1980s. I don’t know. Yeah. And it’s really taken a long time for for women. And I don’t even think they’ve gotten equal footing to this point.

It’s much better than it used to be. So I think it’s really important for my daughters to see really strong, positive role models like that in sports. So I it was one that I really wanted to watch with them and they enjoyed it. They did? Oh, good, good. How about how about the natural I’m throwing ones out at you.

Yeah, you can do that. The natural. I like it. I don’t love it. I think that’s one where a lot of baseball fans absolutely love the natural. I thought it was a little bit over the top and kind of almost unbelievable. I do like a sense of reality with my baseball movies and there’s tons of of legendary baseball players who can do extreme things.

I just thought that that was just a little too much for me. I think it was too glossy. I think it didn’t have the the the reality that it needed, you know, what, about 40 to 42 with Chadwick Boseman, that. Oh, I did watch it. I have not I’m trying to think when I did it was really good.

I, I think, you know, that’s another one of those movies where from a historical standpoint, I love watching that kind of movie I like, especially Jackie Robinson. He, you know, seeing the story the way he broke it. And I love movies that are historically accurate or true. And as somebody who studied history in college, too, and being a huge baseball fan.

So yeah, 42 solid movie. Yeah. Well, Chadwick Boseman, if you go back and look at his list of work he played a lot of people who were who existed and that he was so versatile that he’d play these ones. It’s amazing that he wasn’t nominated for one of those roles because they were always very inspirational and very, very believable.

I mean, you bottom is any number of people. Yeah, how he dug in and actually did the work to be a baseball player. So you’d buy the the kind of things he’d do on the on the field. It was interesting. Okay. Sandlot love the sandlot, you know. So there there’s one where I still haven’t shown it to the kids because I think my wife isn’t too thrilled with some of the themes in it.

Yeah, it’s kind of in that they’re, they’re 12. They can probably watch it. It’s fine. It goes back to I mean, they’ve already seen it in school. They probably have. I grew up seventies into the eighties. We played so many baseball games in the mid eighties. We would my summers as a 11, 12, 13 year old, we would wake up in the morning, we would walk up to the baseball fields that were at the end of my block.

We would play in to lunch, we would go home and get lunch, and then we go back and finish playing until the parents got home and had dinner. So for me, like The Sandlot was just an extension. It was life. It was life. Yeah, exactly. You’re killing me, Smalls. Yes. Isn’t it funny how that film did produce lines that you can repeat and have repeated?

I’m sure it was Bad News Bears then. Were you a fan of that? Yeah, and that’s probably of the early movies. One of my favorites. Now they did what was it? Bad News Bears did a bunch of them. They were big. Yeah, they were bad. That original, though, is a classic and I think it gets into even if you played Little League, you always and I was on one of those teams where the coach was like, I had a coach one time who the reason why he was coaching was part of community service because he like it through a trunk.

It was like literally the Bad News Bears. We didn’t have uniforms. It was really weird. So yeah, the Bad News Bears, I could very much relate to it. It was a fun movie. Walter Matthau, Tatum O’Neal It’s just it’s a good one. Well, and they took that template and used it for other other films like The Mighty Ducks.

I mean, you could see the things that they had. It’s just let’s just switch the sports. They’ll never know. It’s the same film. It is the same film. Yeah, that’s all The Mighty Ducks was showed showed the Mighty Ducks to my kids. They did not enjoy it as much as they didn’t like it. Now. Yeah. Yeah. Different sport.

Yep. What other ones do you like? Are there one and out one for me. So I’m a I’m like just a I could be like a crazy fan. I’ve mellowed out my old age a lot, but fever pitch. Do you remember fever pitch? Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. So that one, it’s it’s based on a Nick Hornby movie.

Their book Fever Pitch A Fan’s Tale. But it’s the book is soccer, Right? And they turned it into a movie where Jimmy Fallon is a crazed Boston Red Sox fan whose team never wins and they fail him every year. And he goes through this whole ritual but at the same time is trying to have like a relationship with with a woman.

And, you know, I always thought it’s funny that they were doing it. And then while they were filming that movie, the Red Sox actually were good and they had to shoot a new ending for it to capture the fact that the Red Sox won the world Series. But it’s a fun one. It’s from the same author of High Fidelity.

So if you’re a fan of of his book, High Fidelity or the movie that came out years ago and even there was even a Hulu TV series, but it’s a similar theme, I like to think that I was never quite as crazy as Jimmy Fallon’s character in that movie, but I probably was a little bit close. You know, I think it shows that Jimmy Fallon isn’t really an actor, Right.

But they worked well together. Drew and Jimmy were a good pairing on the screen. It was you know, you don’t really need all the extras. I, I do wonder what it’s like trying to film something like that, you know? Do you just kind of you’re at the park and you do it on the off days and then they bring in the do they have extras or do they just film on a day that, you know, there is a team there?

It’s it’s fascinating to see how they they might play that whole thing. But one of the ones that I like is a series. Okay. Brockmire Oh, yeah. Brockmire. Hank Azaria Yeah, this kind of washed up. ANNOUNCER Yep. Has to go to this. This I don’t even know what league it would be team to be the announcer there. And I always thought it was so funny how they tried to maintain the semblance of, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re professionals.

We’re. Yeah. What do you mean? And they were so bad. Yeah, but. And Hank can really do that. Yeah. Pretty good at playing that. That kind of a role. I love the first two seasons of it. It kind of fizzled out in that last one. I don’t know if you made it through the whole way. It was that that last season was in the future, set in the future, and baseball was kind of on the demise and Oh God, no.

It was it was really weird. I enjoyed it. I tried to get if I had another friend that got me into it that he really liked it. We kind of crushed through it one weekend together and it was really good. I’ve tried to get a few other people into it who just couldn’t get into the concept. I think you have to be a certain level too, of baseball fans may be appreciated.

He did. Hank Azaria modeled the character off of a little bit off of Lindsey Nelson, who is a broadcaster for the New York Mets back in the sixties and seventies. So did he. Yeah, I guess he did. Yeah. It was a little bit more of a deadpan approach to broadcasting. Maybe I like those kinds of films because it’s about losers.

Yeah, Yeah. And for some reason you want to just cheer because if it’s a winning team, think of any movies that were winning teams. I don’t know that there were. It’s always the come from behind concept that seems to to work. So Major League major League. Oh, my point, which is funny because I love Ted Lasso, but Ted Lasso is nothing but a major league rip off just soccer instead of baseball.

But and I love them both. But but Major League is another one, which I think has all those quotable moments that you can dig out all the time. And it had such a fun ensemble cast of Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Wesley Snipes. It’s fine. And it was filmed in Milwaukee, even though it takes place in Cleveland.

That first one. Wow. My grandparents went to one of the filming. They they needed fans to fill the stands at county, State Old County Stadium, which is very similar to Municipal Stadium in Cleveland. And did they say it was fun or do they say they enjoyed it? I really was going back. They went and they spent the night.

They were I guess they were given instructions to like cheer at this moment and then they would have to cheer six times because they had to keep redoing the take. And that it’s kind of funny knowing that having that context that it is County Stadium and that they had to cheer at certain moments. If you go back and watch the movie, even though I can’t see my grandparents anywhere in the movie, I can kind of envision them being told, okay, like cheer now, don’t cheer now look happy, don’t look happy, that kind of thing.

Because you can start sort of pick through those moments in that movie a little bit. Yes, yes, yes. Well, somewhere I have baseball cards from Major League. Do you? Yeah. They sent it back in the day. And don’t ask me where it is, but, you know, when the vast heap is sorted and multiplied, we’ll find it in there and I’ll give them to You can have.

I appreciate that. You know, Topps, the baseball card company occasionally has done it was like weird subsets within their annual sets of cards and they did one a few years ago with cards for the it was like the anniversary of Major league. And they did cards for that. And they they’ve done a couple other movies. I can’t think of them all offhand, but they’ve had they’ve had a few of those in the past where they were.

Yeah. You know, they’re I had to buy them on the secondary market. I had yeah. They weren’t crazy price but they, and they included some inserts like, you know, autographs from Wesley Snipes and but how many did he do. Like two. And then you’re really a rapper and you can’t find one of them. Yeah, exactly. And that one where the honors kid that’s where that went you know, from a historical standpoint to eight months out is another good one.

The 1919 Black Sox scandal. Yes, it’s a little dense. And I think when I first watched it, when it came out, so that came out in 88 and it was probably around 13 or so when it came out. It was a little dense for me at the time, but I’ve come to appreciate it now. It’s just the audience, you know, you were expecting sandlot and instead more than you cared to know.

Another thing that I do like to pop out, I haven’t watched it really this year, but was the documentary Baseball by Ken Burns for PBS, which is just a really deep dive into each inning, is basically a ten year span, more or less in the history of baseball. And you can tell that he’s a fan. Yes. Just by the way, that all put together.

And I’ll I’ll stop because I can’t think of the guy’s name, but he brought a I’m a Negro League player and he was featured heavily in the in the series. And the guy was the sweetest man you’ve ever met. He was just it was really fun to talk to because he talked about a game that maybe we didn’t realize it was there.

You know, you’re out in in Iowa. Yeah. Do you ever see the movie Sugar? Sugar? It’s from 2008. It was kind of a low ish budget. I don’t know if is made for TV or just one of those that went short term in the theaters and then flew out. But it was really if you if you get a chance, go back and check this one out.

It takes place in Iowa. Okay. It follows a player that gets signed out of the Dominican Republic, which is is a big thing in baseball. And it follows him for basically a season where he goes to spring training. He doesn’t speak any English. This player, along with several other players who don’t speak English, they go out to breakfast every morning and the only thing they know how to order is pancakes.

So they they get pancakes every single morning. And then he gets assigned to a team in the Quad Cities and he basically lives with the host family for the whole year but is struggling to adapt. And it follows him through this entire season up until kind of like the end where he he runs into, you know, problems. And it’s really heartbreaking because I think they tried to make it as accurate as possible to what a foreign born young player who kind of, you know, he signs a bonus.

It’s probably you know, it’s not a ton of money. It’s but but for for a young player who’s poor in the Dominican Republic who maybe gets a $10,000 bonus or whatever it was, it’s a huge sum of money that he can support his family. But then he’s dropped in to America and he doesn’t know how to live. He has no connections, he doesn’t speak the language.

And it’s really heartbreaking. I must see that sugar, sugar. I’ll look for it. No, I didn’t see it. It was not here. So I didn’t have the exposure to that. But that does sound fascinating because, you know, there are kind of tropes that they rely on, which is, you know, the losers becoming winners, the bad boy suddenly deciding that he’s not he’s not going to go in that direction.

So you don’t get to really see what the reality of the of the thing is. And I always wonder, you know, what about those who get cut? What happens to them and what career do they have after that? And do they still talk about their baseball years or are they you know, that’s that’s in their past or do they live in the past?

And that’s all, you know. So there’s a good Pete Rose story in there somewhere. So you would I think you would like sugar then because it kind of gets into that check that one out definitely for well, the season has begun. Are you are you as dedicated this year as you were in past years or are you pretty sucked in?

I mean, the Mets 101 games last year and they’re looking pretty good this year. So I’m I’m I’m going to be locked in for the better part of the summer and will probably be crushed by the end of it. It’s going to make it all the way. Come on, you guys are. I’ll be crushed. I’ll I’ll. It always ends in disappointment for me.

That’s that’s life of a mets fan. And then you say, well, I’m just wearing this shirt because I’m a rapper. That’s right. That’s my, my, my phone. Yeah. You know that the League of Their Own is one of those things that we see now with a trend, as I can see it in television, which is rebooting ideas or concepts and putting them out there on the small screen in a different way.

And they did twist that one in a different way. And also the new Greece one, the rise of the pink ladies that goes in another direction as well. And there are other ones down the road, but one that I wish we could talk about is Dead Ringers. The show was a David Cronenberg film with Jeremy Irons, and I remember seeing this thing and it was a scary as you could get because they were two doctors.

And you know, at the time when I saw it, I always believe that you trusted a doctor. A doctor was he was citing gospel. So if he said that you needed to use some weird thing that he had invented, like the Mantel brothers do, I would go for it. Right. And then I guess we’re a little savvy or now about all those kinds of things.

But they’ve changed. They’ve shifted it. So it’s not twin brothers that are in the medical profession. It’s twin women. And they’re they’re still called Beverly and Elliot Mantle, both played by Rachel Weisz. And they are interested in obstetrics and what they can do with that and how they could control life and birth. And I mean, it opens up a lot of areas that the first film never did, and it talks about the the high cost of medical care and how it isn’t necessarily a, you know, kind of a what we would consider a public kind of nonprofit kind of thing.

It’s a profit center for people. And there are rich people investing in the kind of concepts that the mantles come up with, and they’re seeing it as a great revenue stream. And this thing digs into that concept where, you know, they don’t really care if they’re hurting people in the process. They’re going to make some money off of this.

So it’s fascinating to see how they go through all that. It’s a they open it up to a different world and the cast is largely female and the people behind the cameras are female, too. So they’re giving a female perspective of all of all of this. I got to talk to Poppy Lou, who plays the assistant to the Mantles.

I don’t want to call her a maid, but she’s certainly there all the time with both Beverly and Eliot. And she gets a chance to see how kind of corrupt they are and what they’re doing. And the fascinating thing and you’ll see this when you listen to the the interview is that Poppy is a dual in real life.

She actually does have birthing experience with other people. And she talks about the life of a dual life. But it is fascinating what she was able to glean from all of this and what she learned from the process. So that’s in our interview with Poppy Lou from Dead Ringers.

Poppy, can I ask you about being a do a lot. How does that play with this? Did this give you, like different insight or different a different view of everything that goes on in the film? Yeah, I mean, I was a jeweler before this project happened. It kind of was just like a really serendipitous marriage of like worlds and interests.

But yeah, I like, I think being a doula is something that so near and dear to my heart. I think about sort of the reproductive state of this country a lot and that I think to like encounter a script that is so captivating and compelling as a story and also is very deeply embedded in the themes of, in my mind, reproductive rights, reproductive justice, the the difference in birthing experience for different people based on their background, their race, their class status, on how much the medical system fails us to have that as an undercurrent, a backdrop for this incredibly visually captivating, dark, moody, sexy story.

So cool. I was fascinated by the way the monitor is an aspect of it, how, you know, it’s like having a child knowing that we’re making money off this and it’s like, wow, it literally is, though. Have you seen the documentary called The Business of Being Born? It literally I mean, like even I think this is no shade at all.

It’s like doctors or unions, like heroes. Incredible love. But it really is the medical system, you know, like like it’s really based off of an industrial factory mentality where, like, people are like the products, like you want them in and out as fast as possible. It’s based on efficiency, it’s based on cutting costs because that’s how everything is based, you know, And it ends up being that like the care and like what people actually need to have, like a holistic and even holistic, but just like a, like a positive experience is it is not is it prioritized by how the system works?

It’s really like, get in, get the baby out or like whatever, and like la la la la. And I think you encounter care through like individual people, but not because of like the system. That to me, that was even scarier than all of the kind of other things, especially when we saw the Cronenberg film where they had all those kind of tools and whatnot that scared the hell out of me.

But the idea that everything is so kind of old and calculated, I guess, is what I see it, is that for you, you dealt with both Beverly and Elliot. Yeah. How good is that or how easy was that? Or how fun was that? It’s easy and fun cause it’s Rachel and she’s a genius and it’s incredible. But I mean, yeah, we for the scenes where they’re where both twins are, and then we just.

We have to sell them twice or twice as many takes everything. She’ll play it as one of the twins. Katie Hawthorne was incredible, who is both Rachel’s body double and also plays the young version of Rachel’s mother in the final scenes is incredible, everybody. And she’ll stand in for the other twin and you’ll just then, you know, they’ll be like a 30 minute or whatever changeover Rachel will get from Beverly to Elliot or Elliot to Beverly come back again.

And like, I think even when you watch it the way that these two characters are so specifically different, like, like there’s even a scene where the two twins, like, they play each other as themselves. And the fact that that’s done with so much like, like the specificity and realness, like, I think Rachel’s a genius, you know, she’s playing two different people and then she’s playing them play each other.

All right, Bruce, thanks for that interview. You know, you were talking a little bit about a lot of program now seems to be remakes of things or maybe stuff that’s been sitting in development for a little while. We’re in this threat of a writer’s strike it I correct right. But what is going on there? Well, and it could really delay the fall season.

It could make content, you know, kind of disappear. They would end up doing a lot of game shows and things that didn’t need scripting. But what they also did back the last time I can remember is they took old scripts and reshot them. So they didn’t need to have new writers. They just did old shows and I’m sorry I can’t get one off the top of my head.

But it didn’t work. It was a concept. It didn’t work. Reality TV, however, was a good answer to all of that because they said, Well, we really don’t need a script there. You know, they’re just talking mirror. And so I think they would lean in heavier in that aspect and maybe they would bring back stuff and say, we’re going to remake it.

I don’t know. Interestingly, next week we’re going to talk about a small light, which is a National Geographic miniseries. And they had done a movie about the people that are covered in this, but not in such an extensive way. And it’s about the people who helped the Franks hide out during World War Two. MEEP Jeez, does that name ring a bell?

Meep Geese. She was a an assistant or a secretary of sorts to Mr. Frank and he just he said, you know, we’ve got to get out. Can you help us? And she didn’t pause for a minute. She and her husband were very good at keeping their secret, hiding them, bringing them food, doing all this kind of stuff. And they really never got the attention that others thought they should have because they were very courageous in what they did.

Well, now this miniseries opens that up and gives you a real good look at what they actually did and others like them and what kind things they were able to do during World War Two. But I talked to the the stars of that show, and they’re a unique perspective, particularly since, you know, they’re young and they didn’t have a point of reference for a lot of the things that were going on.

So that’ll be next week. A small light and we’ll talk to the stars of that. I saw that live Schreiber is in that is he’s out of frame Yeah yeah he you know he’s not in it that much but it is one of those ones where you go I didn’t recognize them because it isn’t it isn’t one of those kind of roles that he’s used to playing it is, it is a a leap for him as well.

Okay. Well, I’m looking forward to that one because as I said, I love historical dramas and as somebody who’s got Jewish heritage, it certainly will, you know, be a little bit touching for me as well. They went on location to film a lot. They didn’t film the Anne Frank House, but they did film nearby a lot of places.

There’s one where they jump in the water and what you’ll find I thought really interesting about this is that they were far more contemporary. I mean, you know how we think of people in the past, how kind of maybe closed up they are and these are not these people aren’t like that. And they were very fun. And Miep is one of those ones who just will.

She’s not going to think about it if she should do it, just jumps in and does it. And she’s very good when she’s dealing with the Nazis and how they want her to talk. So you’ll enjoy I think you’ll enjoy how it how it spills out. And it also tells us that we too, could make a difference if we only speak out and and do what’s right.

Wonderful. Well, we’ll we’ll dive more into next week. Until then, thank you for listening. Until then, batter up.