The Flop House: Megalopolis, with Roman Mars

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

If you’ve been listening to our Power Broker Breakdown series, you know my co host Elliott Kalan. Elliott is an unbelievably productive person who juggles way more projects than I could possibly keep track of. But I first got to know Elliott over a decade ago as one of the co hosts of one of my first favorite podcasts called The Flophouse.

It’s from our friends at Maximum Fun, and it’s all about movies, specifically The Flophouse: bad movies, box office bombs, critical duds, and movies that should not have ever been made in the first place. As fate would have it, there is one movie in 2024 that lands at that exact Venn diagram of The Flophouse and The Power Broker.

And that is Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. It is a difficult movie to summarize, as you will hear. But essentially, Adam Driver plays a city planner that’s very, very, very loosely based on Robert Moses. 

STANLEY HART: This time you’ve gone too far, Catalina. This site is under design authority jurisdiction. And what happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?

CESAR CATALINA: We’ll apologize. 

STANLEY HART: Apologize? After the building’s down? Mayor Cicero will be pissed. 

ROMAN MARS: And it is a bad movie. 

CESAR CATALINA: And you think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind? 

JULIA CICERO: Entitles me? 

CESAR CATALINA: Yes. 

JULIA CICERO: Entitles me? 

CESAR CATALINA: Yes. 

JULIA CICERO: Entitles me? 

CESAR CATALINA: Yes.

ROMAN MARS: A few weeks back, I went on The Flophouse to talk about Megalopolis, not just as a movie, but as a vision of an urban utopia.

CESAR CATALINA: Is this society–is this way we’re living–the only one that’s available to us? And when we ask these questions–when there’s a dialogue about them–that basically is a utopia. 

ROMAN MARS: Not that it’s a very clear vision, but, you know, you’ll see. Enjoy.

DAN MCCOY: On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I got a feeling this is going to be a mega love fest. 

STUART WELLINGTON: That’s a good one. Yum. Yum.

DAN MCCOY: Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Flophouse. I’m Dan McCoy. 

STUART WELLINGTON: And I’m Stuart Wellington. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m Elliot Kalan. 

ROMAN MARS: And I’m Roman– 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Wait, what? Hold on a second. What? Oh my god. How did you get here? How did you get in? Dan, I told you, you gotta have your apartment fumigated. You got a Roman Mars infestation.

DAN MCCOY: Someone much more respectable got in here somehow.

ROMAN MARS: I got on my lit up moving sidewalk, and I landed right here. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Wow, in the city of the future, AKA The Flophouse. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, well, we, you know… This is a special movie–a very special movie. So, we had to have a very special guest. Elliott, why don’t you talk a little bit about Roman being on the show? You have been doing some work– you’ve been moonlighting–you’ve been cheating on us with another podcast. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s right. It’s been so exciting to be discovering new things with another host, discovering new things about myself, showing the things about me that you guys have gotten bored with–

STUART WELLINGTON: It’s made you a better co host of The Flop House, honestly. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: In some ways, yeah, because I’m more excited. I come in and I kiss you guys and I give you flowers, and you’re like, “What’s this? You haven’t done this in years.” And I’ve got a spring in my step and a song in my heart. So, Megalopolis is a special movie in that it feels like it is so indebted to the ideas of city building that come from having read The Power Broker and then forgotten most of what was in the book. And so what better person has come talk to us than Roman Mars with whom I have been co hosting the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker all throughout this year. We have been taking on one of the greatest works of nonfiction writing–or I would say writing period in American literature–The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Every month we break down a hundred pages of it. We just recorded our penultimate summary episode, right? We actually made our way through most of the book at this point. And so, The Power Broker is always on our minds. And this movie–Megalopolis–there’s so much about it that is so clearly indebted to a certain idea of Robert Moses, the subject of The Power Broker, and indebted in a way that is totally weird and doesn’t really work. It is messed up. And so we wanted to bring Roman on to talk about that aspect of it and also… I have a little bit of synergistic cross promotion between these two endeavors, but– 

STUART WELLINGTON: I thought because we’re talking about a movie that’s all about New Rome, we would bring in the best Roman we know.

DAN MCCOY: Name-based pun scenario. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: An actual Roman, yeah. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. No, I’m very, very happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I kind of needed sort of a work excuse to see this movie because I was… It looked a little bit like something I wouldn’t necessarily see on my own. And so, it was a good excuse. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It is the only movie I’ve seen in the theater for the past couple months. 

ROMAN MARS: As soon as we decided that I would see it for the show, I was very excited to take it in. But anyway, we’ll get to that. 

DAN MCCOY: I’m on this show all the time, and I had a similar experience where I’m like, “We’ll probably have to watch that eventually so I don’t need to run out to the theater to do it.” But then when we all decided to do this together, I’m like, “Oh great. I can see it on a big screen. I can see all the nutty vision of Francis Ford Coppola–all of the ideas that he’s been saving up for decades and put them all in one script, whether they all belong in the same script or not.” 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. What was the last one we did–last Flop House in the Aisles we did?

ELLIOTT KALAN: Last Exorcist, I think? The one with Russell Crowe. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Was Madame Web since then? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh, did we? No, you know what? It was in the theaters when we saw it. Yeah.

STUART WELLINGTON: It was a theater movie. Yeah, so. Guys, can we talk about Madame Web? I mean, another time, maybe. You know, her web connects us all–kind of like how Megalon connects all these houses. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: The other thing about this movie is that I wanted to see it in the theaters because, unlike every other movie we’ve seen, where there’s a reasonable expectation it will be available for home viewing and they’re like, “You gotta see this new Marvel or Star Wars movie or whatever in the theaters…” I’m like, “I don’t have to because I’ll be able to see it on my nicely sized TV at home.” This movie conceivably could disappear. It is a Francis Ford Coppola-owned thing. It’s amazing to me that it was a national release movie. And it’s very possible that it may disappear after this. I don’t think it will. I think it will be home viewing somewhere, but this is such an indie film in so many ways that it’s potentially unavailable at a certain point. So, we had to see it when we could see it.

DAN MCCOY: I guess I see what you’re saying in the sense that the response to this was so… I mean, there are people who are like, “Wow, big swing. Love you, Francis.” But for the most part, very negative that there could be a part of them that’s like, “Well, I’m taking my ball and going back to my vineyard.” 

ROMAN MARS: He doesn’t have a vineyard anymore. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: He only sold part of the vineyard. 

DAN MCCOY: But if he wants to recoup anything, it has to go to streaming. It has to be available somewhere.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It was distributed theatrically by Lionsgate, but it’s more like I can see a world where a large distributor is like, “We don’t want to handle this.” And so he has to scramble to find some way. And maybe it’s up on Francis Ford Coppola’s YouTube channel that he uploads all of Megalopolis to in 10 chapters or something like that. 

STUART WELLINGTON: His TikTok channel. He just splits it all up. Wait a minute. Didn’t Lionsgate also distribute Borderlands this year? Man, they’re having a tough one. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s been a great year for Lionsgate. But in a world where even movies that are owned by corporations are not readily available the way that they maybe once were or that we assume they were, to have a movie that literally one guy paid for himself… Anyway, it’s all a long way of saying I had to see it in the theater because it was the first time in years that a movie has come out where I’d be like, “This might be my only chance to see this movie.” And of course, maybe it’ll be on HBO Max next week. I don’t know. But it was like this would be my only shot.

ROMAN MARS: There’s only one theater showing it when I was looking. Well, there was maybe a couple, but it was, like, showing at 3:00 p.m. or something at Emory Bay.

STUART WELLINGTON: Makes sense for the Emory Bay area. Tech companies hate this guy. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s the area. You know, his offices were in San Francisco. He lives up over in the Napa area. 

ROMAN MARS: And then we ended up seeing it at the Kabuki. My wife and I saw it at the Kabuki theater in Japantown in San Francisco, which was… We went to dinner ahead of time.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Pretty on the nose name for a theater in Japantown. 

ROMAN MARS: It was a weird experience. That was a weird vibe. 

DAN MCCOY: How does your wife feel about our podcast now that you host this?

ROMAN MARS: It was about midway through the movie where she looked at me and she said, “Why is Francis Ford Coppola doing this to us?” But it started from the very beginning. We sat down. Empty theater. It didn’t stay empty, but it started empty. We were there early. We just got there after dinner. And the place is completely empty. And then this older white woman comes and sits right next to my wife. Like, the theater’s empty. There’s two of us. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Your wife is a very friendly person. There’s something very welcoming about her. So, I get it. Yeah. 

ROMAN MARS: And it already started. It was like, “Oh, there’s a weird vibe here that you would want to sit right next to us in this little pack. “And then it just kept on getting weirder because more and more people sat– glommed on right around us. Maybe they just wanted to sort of sit mostly in the middle because it’s a spectacle and whatever. But it started out weird. It just got weirder. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, well, speaking of how weird it gets, Stuart, you took notes. We all saw this, as we said, in the theater because that’s the way we could do it.

STUART WELLINGTON: I took the notes in the dark of the Alamo. 

DAN MCCOY: I respect you for being able to do that. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Well, I mean, we’re going to see how good these notes are since I transcribed them onto note cards and I’m like, “What the fuck does this say? Surely it couldn’t say that about Claudio!”

ELLIOTT KALAN: To be fair, this is an intricate puzzle box of a movie–every link indelibly forged to the next so that it’s airtight. The movie’s airtight.

STUART WELLINGTON: So, I’m gonna need some help here, guys. So, the movie opens with what? A title card, right? “Megalopolis: A Fable.”

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, and it, like, right off the bat is like, “Modern society is kind of like Rome if you think about it.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Anytime a filmmaker puts “a fable” at the end of their title, you go, “This movie is not going to make sense.” When we did North a while back, I was thinking about these interviews I’ve heard with Alan Zweibel, who wrote North. And he just kept saying, “It’s a fable. It’s a fairy tale. Why do people dislike it?” You can’t just bandage over a movie that doesn’t make sense by calling it a fable. 

DAN MCCOY: I washed my hands of this at the beginning of the movie. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s like when a political candidate says something racist and they’re like, “It was a joke. Come on, everybody.” Well, people would have liked it if you wouldn’t say it was a joke, but anyway… That never happens. But you’re right, Stuart. At the very beginning, they start with their thesis statement. “Hey, America’s kind of like Rome. Is America going to fall like Rome does?” 

STUART WELLINGTON: And then we have title cards that look like they’re chiseled into marble. So you’re like, “Oh, that’s like classic Roman shit.” Let’s just talk about some of the characters and then we’ll get into the plot. I think that’s easy. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Easier than trying to walk us through the actual sequence, which is baffling. Yeah. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Our protagonist is Cesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver. It’s impossible to say this name and not smile. I mean, come on. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, because Catalina Island. 

STUART WELLINGTON: And it’s a Caesar salad. I love it. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: The ultimate fantasy of eating a Caesar salad on Catalina Island. 

ROMAN MARS: Or with Catalina dressing on it. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Stop it. Stop it, guys. Turn the cameras off.

ROMAN MARS: Two types of salads in one. 

STUART WELLINGTON: He is the genius head of the design authority of New Rome, whose task is to design things, like buildings, and plan out the city, right? City planning type stuff. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: He is the, he is the master builder of New Rome.

STUART WELLINGTON: He is also the inventor or discoverer of Megalon, a magic super substance. 

DAN MCCOY: He also has the ability to stop time. And I do not object to this film having a, you know, magical realist component. I don’t even particularly object to it not being explained why he can do this because what explanation would be appropriate? But this is a very large, bizarre element to be added to the film with no apparent… I mean, I wouldn’t say “no apparent” but, like, it seems like it should have more thematic heft or something if you’re going to put this thing in there. I mean, I might be just too dumb to realize what’s going on.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’re right that it does not work on a plot level. I mean, when you say “magical realist,” the issue is that there is no realist aspect to this. It’s just all magic. And Adam Driver’s character is so clearly a stand in for the artist and, in this case, the filmmaker. And I think his ability to stop time is supposed to be the artist’s ability to reshape the world around them even more explicitly than him just building buildings and stuff like that. But you’re right, he doesn’t do anything with it. Like, he never uses it for anything. 

ROMAN MARS: As a plot device, it is like an anti-Chekhov’s gun. Like, it never pays off in any meaningful way of how the story goes. And especially when you’re talking about someone who is struggling in a power play, you would think, “Why don’t you use some of your time stopping powers to do something.” I don’t know.

STUART WELLINGTON: If Megalopolis was released as a series of episodes, the nerds in the Megalopolis subreddit would be like, “Why isn’t Cesar using his powers?” 

ELLIOTT KALAN: They’d be like, “I know, in the last episode, he’s going to use his powers to do X, X, and Y.” And then when the show doesn’t do what they thought it was going to do, they’ll be like, “This show sucks.”

STUART WELLINGTON: I think also, to me, an element of this time stop power is, like, it plays into the fantasy of a guy who is trying to achieve something amazing but he, you know, is beset by all this other stuff–all this background noise–so many things like distracting him from what he’s trying to do and the fantasy of being able to just stop everything and focus on the one thing he wants to work on. Especially for a filmmaker like Coppola, I’m sure that that’s part of it for him. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, it reminds me of the story I’ve heard about Stanley Kubrick and Jerry Lewis talking. They were both editing movies at the same facility and both took a break at the same time. And Jerry Lewis was like, “Well, you can’t polish a turd.” And Kubrick says, “You can if you freeze it.” And it’s this idea that if you can just stop time, then you can do the work that otherwise would be impossible. You know, if you could just freeze something in place…

STUART WELLINGTON: Sorry, I got a leg cramp, so I’m dancing around my chair. Okay, so that’s Cesar Catalina. We know who he is. He’s super cool. Now, the mayor of New Rome is in a bit of a pickle. That’s mayor Frank Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, who plays it a little hammy. I feel like Adam Driver is pretty straight in this one. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, I don’t know about that.

DAN MCCOY: You can’t not be in this movie. I mean, there are some performances that aren’t big and they suffer for it. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: And the best performances in the movie are the biggest performances. 

DAN MCCOY: Here’s what I’d say. There are very hammy performances in this movie that are fun to watch because what else are you going to do in a movie called Megalopolis with all this stuff in it than chew the scenery? And then there’s Adam Driver, who magically seems to create a grounded and consistent character despite the movie around him being gibberish. Like, he’s amazing. And then there’s, uh… We’ll get to her, but, like, the female lead is sort of lost in this movie because she is giving a small performance and the movie is not helping her out. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays the daughter? 

DAN MCCOY: Who I think is good in other things but is sort of not served by this film at all. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, you see her in that John Woo killer remake where she does the very realistic jump and then latches her legs around a guy’s neck and spins around shooting every other dude in the room? It’s amazing.

DAN MCCOY: It’s a solid move.

STUART WELLINGTON: It’s cool. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s why people do it all the time. That’s why it’s such a common move. 

STUART WELLINGTON: It’s a great move but you can only do it once. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: The movie I was expecting at least was a battle between the mayor and the designer over the future of this portion of the city. And they each have competing goals, and we’re gonna see the pros and cons of each. And even though Adam Driver is kind of a Robert Mosley character, it quickly becomes, “No, he’s a genius, and everyone needs to just, like, STFU and let him do whatever he wants to do.”

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. And this kind of comes to a head in the first scene where we’re also introduced to the mayor’s daughter, Julia Cicero, who seems to be a vapid club girl. But it turns out that she’s much more than that, if anything, because she is able to witness Cesar when he stops time. It stops for her as well, and she can see what’s going on. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: She can witness the stopping of time and it doesn’t affect her, which seems to be an indicator that she has the hidden artistic, you know, ability or at least intellectual skill that Cesar has. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Then the last, like, big faction, I guess, in this is Crassus, who is the owner of the largest bank. He’s a very rich old man, played by Jon Voight, who… Guys, I think he knew what he was doing here. He brings a lot of juice. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: As we’ll see, he does deliver the best line in the entire movie, later towards the end of the film. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, I mean, he’s had a lot of practice both playing and being a rich, old asshole. Yeah, it’s his thing. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Now, we should mention also there’s a lot of little side, minor characters that pop up around here. They’re all played by, for the most part– Like, Dustin Hoffman shows up. James Remar shows up. Like, D. B. Sweeney shows up. Like, it’s all these well known faces.

STUART WELLINGTON: D. B. Sweeney? What? From The Cutting Edge? Jason Schwartzman has a very good scene later on where he plays drums. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, like, Talia Shire, family member of Francis Ford Coppola, shows up. It feels like one of these movies that is overstuffed with people, and you have to imagine there is hours and hours of footage.

DAN MCCOY: We didn’t even talk about Laurence Fishburne, who, uh– 

ELLIOTT KALAN: who’s the narrator/chauffeur. Yeah. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. And we also haven’t even touched on the other two important characters. We have the son of Crassus, Claudio, played by Shia LaBeouf, and Wow Platinum, journalist extraordinaire, played by–

ELLIOTT KALAN: She’s very clearly a take on Maria Bartiromo, the Money Bunny, because she calls herself the Money Honey in this, right? Or is it the other way around? Maria Bartiromo now is just a straightforward “Trump, Trump all the time” person. Her whole thing was she was the CNBC kind of, like, lady reporter, and they used to call her– Whatever one Wow Platinum is in this, she’s the other one of either the Money Bunny or the Money Honey. And I don’t remember which one is which.

STUART WELLINGTON: Listeners, write in.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Is it Jared Leto in House of Gucci? Much as his performance is at the level the movie wants to be at, I feel like these two are at the level the movie wants to be at, which is cartoonish.

STUART WELLINGTON: I mean, it feels very much like Aubrey Plaza’s doing a performance of her character, April Ludgate, doing a performance of this character almost. So, we’re kind of introduced to this drama and these different personalities at a press conference that is held over a scale model of what the city is supposed to look like, I guess? They’re, like, walking around on gantries and, like–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Now, Roman, you know urban studies stuff. Is this usually how a new city development is unveiled–by everyone walking on a catwalk over it and it’s very dimly lit and people are arguing with each other in the catwalk?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. It’s similar to all the ones I’ve been to for sure. But the dramatic lighting–all this sort of thing? This is where the beginning of the nonsense, especially the big talk with nothing inside of the big talk, starts. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, apparently, Adam Driver had a speech that he was supposed to deliver in this scene and Coppola, to loosen him up, said, “Why don’t you just go out there and do the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet?” And he did it, and Coppola was like, “I like that more. I’ll put that in the movie.” So, that’s why Adam Driver goes out and does “to be or not to be.” And it’s not a bad performance of that soliloquy, but the whole time I was reaching to be like, “Why is he doing this in this moment?” I wasn’t yet far enough into the movie to realize there’s not really a logical reason for a lot of the things to happen in the movie. 

STUART WELLINGTON: So, we get a little bit of further backstory. It turns out that Cesar Catalina has a tragic backstory. His wife was potentially, like, killed by him? That’s the belief? He may or may not have been involved in her death or a car accident? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: She was found drowned in a car at the bottom of the lake or bottom of the river, in a shot that is an explicit call to The Night of the Hunter–to Shelley Winters in the drowned car in Night of the Hunter. And so, we already know that, before he was mayor, Giancarlo Esposito was the DA and he brought Adam Driver up on charges and took him to court, accusing him of that murder. And he was acquitted of that murder. And so, yeah, there’s bad blood and he’s a bad boy. It’s bad blood over a bad boy. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Now, speaking of bad boys–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Adam Driver… Ironically, they said that he drove her to death. 

DAN MCCOY: That is ironic. That’s ironic. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Thanks for explaining irony to me. He’s a bad boy because he’s also kind of secretly dating Wow Platinum. And they have this scene where they are kind of hooking up in a very messy hotel room or apartment. He kind of spurns her affections. There is the lovely line where she is down on her knees and says, “Cesar, you’re anal as hell. Luckily, I’m oral as hell.” And I was, like, hooting and hollering in the theater.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s the Academy Award winner for the screenplay for Patton who wrote that line. 

DAN MCCOY: Shot off your pistols into the air.

ROMAN MARS: Should we set up here that when they are in this press conference, talking about the different visions for the city, I think the mayor wants to do this sort of garish, Biff-style casino in this space. And then Adam Driver’s, like, talking. And he quotes Hamlet and stuff, but there’s no presentation of what his ideas are, really. Or did I just miss them?

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, I think it’s kind of taken for granted on his part and made the movie’s part that everyone already kind of has a sense of Megalopolis, his dream city that he wants to build. But he does not. I think that was probably the speech he was gonna give in the original screenplay. 

DAN MCCOY: That’s the thing, like… Look, casinos are basically never the answer. But the way it’s at least presented–

ELLIOTT KALAN: They’re the answer to where can I get a cheap steak at 3:00 in the morning? 

DAN MCCOY: The way it is at least presented here is the mayor is like, “Hey, you’ve got all these, you know, pie in the sky ideas, but there are people who need things right now. And I’m going to give them to them.” And in the absence of Adam Driver’s character having any argument, I’m like, “I don’t know, it sounds like he’s making some sense.” Like, why am I supposed to sympathize immediately with Adam Driver? Because he can stop time? Great.

ROMAN MARS: He says something to the effect of, like, “Let’s just give the people what they want. We need to serve the people. And this is the way we serve the people.” And then Adam Driver offers no counter argument whatsoever. This is the beginning of my frustration with this movie.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Up until now you were totally on board. “I love it. I love it. Yeah.”

STUART WELLINGTON: You showed up wearing a Cesar Catalina teacher.

ROMAN MARS: Foam finger and everything. But if you’re going to be broad stroke fables, then you have to present ideas. You know what I mean? Like, if the characters are not going to make sense and they’re going to be completely arch and not have natural dialogue–if the sets are all fantastical and stuff–that usually means that you’re clearing the way of all this nuance so you can tell, like, a war of ideas of good and evil or whatever. And this is where I begin to be like, “What is the premise of Megalopolis?” What does this utopia mean other than the word utopia? What is the casino? Like, is it really about serving the people? Is it about corruption? Is it about both? None of these things are clear here. And I’m just at sea with this idea of, like– And so much of it is that the deflation of this moment– it isn’t that Cesar is a Moses-like figure. He is just a genius. Like, he’s just great. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I mean, that’s the thing that kind of Elliott pointed out. Like, it’d be one thing if the idea was that Cesar is this guy who… He believes that people don’t understand what they actually want or need and he’s at odds with the mayor and there’s an actual question as to who’s right. But the movie is like, “Nope, Cesar’s right. You gotta listen to the smart guy.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: I really think the way that it makes sense to me is just if I look at it as a metaphor for Francis Ford Coppola, the genius, and the mayor is a studio executive and he’s saying, “Make me a superhero movie. We gotta serve the people. And that’s what they want. They want a flashy casino.” And Francis Ford Coppola’s like, “No, I wanna build them the movies of the future that will create new ways to think and feel. And I have this new element, Coppolan– I mean Megalon.”

ROMAN MARS: It would be funnier if they called it Coppolan.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true. And I don’t know if it’s that explicit in his head or if that was intentional, but that’s the way I can read it as a metaphor where it starts to make sense. 

ROMAN MARS: But that’s the only way it makes sense. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: But he also seems to think that it makes sense on a political level of, like, this is a story about politics and, you know, populism versus… It’s one of the things where it’s like obviously populism is bad–we need a genius who can cut through things. And it’s like, “Well, that’s fascism. Only solution is that we all just trust Adam Driver’s magic metal, you know?”

ROMAN MARS: But as you’re doing this synopsis, that the main thing that is to be conveyed about this moment is that the ideas are almost there, as if there’s some kind of thing to be said or some point, but they don’t connect and instead just moves on, you know? It’s very, very weird. I was like, “What does it mean to serve the people with a casino?” These ideas– none of them stick. None of them are consistent. And it just keeps rolling on. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I think Giancarlo Esposito–or Mayor Cicero, my mistake–his plan actually… There is something. He’s saying, “We need to build a casino because the people want it.” At least that’s a concrete explanation. Like, I can at least understand that. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, we learn more about what Megalopolis will be like later. You’ll get to it, Stuart–the plant buildings and the glowing, moving sidewalks. 

STUART WELLINGTON: A home for everyone. There’s apparently tons of space now. I don’t know. I’m like, “Did half the population die?”

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’ll see, there’s a disaster that opens up quite a bit of extra space.

DAN MCCOY: For, like, 15 minutes of this two and a half hour movie.

ROMAN MARS: I’m sorry for moving us backward when we should be moving forward. So, this scene happens. You realize his relationship with Wow Platinum, which is… I kind of enjoy that name. That was one where I was like, “I’m into that.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Everything about Aubrey Plaza’s performance and character is on the level of a political editorial cartoon, which is kind of where this movie wants to exist. And she knows how to play these characters, you know?

STUART WELLINGTON: Meanwhile, Julia Cicero bluffs her way into the office of Cesar Catalina. And we have a little bit of verbal sparring between the two of them. She wants to get in on this Cesar Catalina department of this design authority stuff. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: She, like, sent him a letter to insult him, right? And she wants it back because she doesn’t want to embarrass her dad. 

STUART WELLINGTON: But she’s also, like, I think, interested in him. She saw him stop time, for God’s sakes. 

DAN MCCOY: And he looks like Adam Driver.

STUART WELLINGTON: And he looks like Adam Driver, which is not to everyone’s taste but, you know, most people. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is where he tells her to “go back to the “cluuuub,” which is a moment that, in context, does not seem as bonkers as it does when it’s clicked on.

STUART WELLINGTON: It’s a fun reading, is what it is. It’s a fun line reading. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: And he’s trying to make fun of the idea of the cool club. 

STUART WELLINGTON: This is also where he says, “Why do you deserve to be exposed to the riches of my Emersonian mind?” which is also a very funny line. He then takes her to a probably not perfectly to scale cardboard model of the city and has her walk through it with her eyes closed and she pictures the megalopolis that could be, with, again, floating walkways and streets and everything’s glowing and looks like it’s made out of plants. It’s super bio organic. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It looks like every CGI rendering proposal of a skyscraper in New York when they’re like, “Here’s what we’re going to do with this space that opened up.” And it’s always a CGI rendering where everything’s super glossy and there’s trees all over. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, it looks like it’s the cover of a super, super melodic tech death album cover, you know?

DAN MCCOY: I also hate to slow us down, but in terms of the look of this film–

STUART WELLINGTON: I hate to slow us down, but iiiin teeeerms oooof–

DAN MCCOY: I’d like to do the Bob and Ray Slow Talkers of America sketch.

STUART WELLINGTON: Great sketch.

DAN MCCOY: The look of this movie is all over the place, partly, I assume, because some of it was filmed years ago and then some of it was filmed more recently and it was all sort of jammed together. I mean, even though this is $120 million of his own money, it wasn’t enough. And, like, it’s what he could afford in certain scenes. But I think that there’s some scenes that are genuinely beautiful and visually striking. And some of them look like maybe a C-tier CGI effects company’s reel. And some of it looks like they got it off of Storyblocks or something. There’s some beautiful stuff on there. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It has a lot of great footage, but it’s not what you would expect from a major motion picture.

DAN MCCOY: Yeah. It’s odd to see what seems to be stock footage just sort of interspersed in this thing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, they were making a documentary about them making this movie at the same time they’re making the movie and it hasn’t come out yet. And I’m so curious to watch it because I have to imagine there were huge swaths of the film that were changed at the last minute because of budget reasons and things like that.

STUART WELLINGTON: So, the mayor finds out that his daughter’s been spending some time with Cesar and he’s not a big fan of this. Right around now, he has a parade. And everybody’s, like, mean to him and don’t like him. I think also this is where a random guy gets recruited off the street to be one of Claudio’s henchmen. I think that’s the same guy?

ELLIOTT KALAN: The tuba player in the marching band. He gets recruited to go off with Claudio. And I’m like, “I guess this is going to be an important character,” but it’s not really. They spend a surprising amount of time with the marching band wondering where this guy went to, considering we barely ever see any of them ever again.

STUART WELLINGTON: Okay, fast forward a little bit. It is night time. Cesar jumps in his car and goes driving through the rainy streets of New Rome. He is pursued by Claudio and Julia in separate cars. We have a little rainy street chase, I guess? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: And this is where we have one of the– There are a couple moments in this movie that I do think are brilliant and beautiful. And this is where he’s going, driving through the city, and he’s seeing the statues of the city. These huge kind of Greco Roman type statues are literally sagging out of fatigue and dropping the things they’re holding and leaning against buildings. And I think it’s such a beautiful way of getting across the idea of a society that has, you know, exhausted itself–that is losing the energy that made it great once. And I’m like, “Oh, this is the kind of beautiful, straightforward metaphor that he’s not achieving through most of the movie.”

DAN MCCOY: It’s a sort of directly expressionist look that I think part of the problem is that it doesn’t settle on one thing. If it was all sort of poetic in the same way, it would feel better. But there’s a lot of disjointed, different ways of doing it.

ROMAN MARS: I had the same feeling when I saw this. This scene was the most where I was like, “Oh, this is what this kind of fantastical imagery is. This is where it’s achieving what I think it’s supposed to be achieving the whole time.” This is where it hit me, and I was like, “I can deal with this artifice. I can deal with the fact that this all feels like green screen but, you know, like, purposeful kind of green screen.” My favorite visual moment in the whole movie was the statues and the sort of dilapidated parts of New Rome. That worked on me totally. 

STUART WELLINGTON: And it’s a bit of a sledgehammer, but I feel like it’s very clear what it’s trying to say. It’s not as messy as some of the other stuff.

ROMAN MARS: That’s where it delivers being a fable is the thing. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, yeah. When you saw those statues, you’re like, “We have the title, finally.”

DAN MCCOY: Roman, I have a movie for you called The Fabelmans that you might enjoy more. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. It’s about a little mouse. Oh, sorry, that’s Fievel Goes West. I apologize. It’s An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Cesar’s car stops in front of a mysterious, glowing flower stall that appears in the middle of the street. Julia sees this and says, “That doesn’t make sense.” And I’m like, “It doesn’t make sense. You’re right.” And then he takes the flowers he buys and goes up into a dilapidated apartment building. She pursues him. In his mind, he sees that he’s walking into, like, a well appointed room with attendants. And his wife is in the bed. But in reality, he’s just, like, sitting on a bed, right? Like, there’s no wife there at all. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: He’s hallucinating that his wife is still alive and is being cared for. And he’s visiting her. And Julia seems to see both reality and the hallucination. Like, she sees reality but seems to understand, “Oh, he thinks his wife is there.”

STUART WELLINGTON: And Claudio is also spying on this as well, but he doesn’t see the hallucination, I don’t believe.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I never could quite figure out why– I know why Claudio gets mad later. I could never quite figure out why Claudio cares about Cesar right now. 

STUART WELLINGTON: He has, like, a burn book of all the people he doesn’t like. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Maybe that’s it. This character doesn’t need a motivation. And Shia LaBeouf, I think, is harnessing his natural unlikeability for this character in a really strong way. 

DAN MCCOY: No, that’s true. You don’t need a backstory. You’re like, “Oh, this guy’s just a jerk who doesn’t like this guy.”

STUART WELLINGTON: I just assumed that Cesar Catalina, like–I don’t know– accidentally threw some logs in the fire when they were sitting around the fire and it burned off Shia LaBeouf’s eyebrows, so that’s why he hates him. He has, like, painted on eyebrows or something, right? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, just like Superman and Lex Luthor. Yeah. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Okay. So, shortly after this–I guess it’s like the next day or something–Cesar takes Julia up in his private elevator to the top of the Design Authority, where he has his, like, thinking area, which is a clock on its side and a bunch of ledges and girders that looks kind of like the… To me, it looked like a set for, like, a play, where they can, like, gaze down upon all of New Rome and kind of see as everything moves. 

DAN MCCOY: I mean it’s Sort of like they’re hanging out on top of, like, a mobile you put over a baby or you’d have in an art gallery–on either side of the spectrum of mobiles. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I think around now he kind of explains what he’s doing or what he’s thinking, but I don’t really remember this scene outside of them just hanging out on clocks.

ELLIOTT KALAN: In my notes, there’s nothing particular. It just says “clocks.” 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. Meanwhile, we get a wedding between Wow Platinum and Crassus, the banker guy. I don’t remember his last name. Is that his last name? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think Crassus is his last name. Let me double check.

STUART WELLINGTON: Wow Platinum–this is a power play for her. She wants access to his money.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He is Hamilton Crassus III. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Thank you. And so we have a big fancy wedding. It’s a wedding that has everything. It has gladiators. It has guys riding chariots around on the inside of a coliseum. Cesar shows up, and a pop star shows up wearing a dress made of–

DAN MCCOY: That was a wedding? Honestly, guys, I was just like, “Oh, they all went to the circus,” and I was, like, fine with that as an explanation. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s a celebration of their betrothal. But that’s why they’re doing it. 

STUART WELLINGTON: And there’s a pop star wearing… I can’t remember if this is the same pop star from later, Vesta Sweetwater, who shows up wearing a dress made out of Megalon. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, this is Vesta. This is Vesta Sweetwater.

STUART WELLINGTON: This Megalon dress is perfect camouflage. It does not matter for later. There’s no moment where you’re like, “Oh, you can use Megalon. If you cover yourself, like, The Predator can’t see you or something.” That doesn’t matter. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Nope, it’s just a one-off idea that it’s a dress made out of Megalon where there’s cameras in the back that project what’s behind you on the front. So you turn invisible. That’s it. Just an idea. Just an effect. 

STUART WELLINGTON: There’s a ton of Roman stuff. We haven’t really even talked about the outfits and stuff. Like, everybody has, like, vaguely futuristic Roman outfits. You know it’s futuristic because, like, men’s suits have slightly different collar cuts. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it’s, like, a severe suit cut. But they also have little laurel wreaths behind their ears.

ROMAN MARS: And epaulettes to make their shoulders very broad–lots of capes and stuff. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s the kind of stuff that has been done on stage in productions of Julius Caesar since, at least, the 1930s, where it’s like, “Hmm, we’ll pull out how it’s like modern political times by having everyone wear suits, but they still have Roman haircuts.” 

DAN MCCOY: You know, Roman talked earlier about when the movie started to sort of lose him… 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think he meant when he lost himself in the film, right, Roman? 

DAN MCCOY: He lost himself in the moment. No, I want to talk about the inverse, where the movie, which up until this point had only baffled and dismayed me, started to to get me a little bit. And during this whole circus sequence, it started to engage me in spite of myself partly because I was like, “Oh, I don’t need to care what any of it means.” At least the movie, at this point, was throwing a bunch of stuff at me. And I appreciated that. Like, this is one of the sequences maybe, you know, before they started running out of money. It felt very, like, full of splendor and ideas and none of it necessarily hung together in any thematic way that made any sense to me. But I’m like, “Oh, okay, movie.”

ROMAN MARS: It’s kind of delivering the bread and circuses to placate, you know, people in the audience. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, I’m one of the idiot rabble. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’re like, “Finally, I can relate to someone in the movie–the people screaming for blood in the stands!

ROMAN MARS: It is throwing a lot. I think the point, which is easy to get into, is the sneering at the wealthy and staring at their excess and stuff like that. I mean, it works. That works.

STUART WELLINGTON: And Cesar seems to be doing his best to play along, but he is clearly kind of disgusted by this whole situation. He ends up getting very drunk and getting himself into trouble. Meanwhile, scheming little Claudio– who is, I think, in drag at this point– sneaks into, like, the control booth and frames Cesar and Vesta Sweetwater, who is a Taylor Swift-style pop star. And the idea is that she is supposed to be a, like, young virgin, right? 

DAN MCCOY: Yes. She’s both made a big deal out of, like, “I’m going to keep myself a virgin,” and she’s presenting herself as being younger than she is. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Which we learn later. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, this is, like, statutory rape, it seems. But it’s not actually.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, but isn’t the premise of all this, like, that these old men–the old rich oligarchy– is betting on her virginity? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I believe that’s true, yes. They’re betting that she’s gonna keep her promise, right? Like, they’re not auctioning off her virginity, right? 

ROMAN MARS: I thought that’s what was happening there. But you guys took notes. I didn’t. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Somehow the economy of this city is balanced on her promise of staying a virgin until marriage. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah. Yeah, I thought they were sort of, like, bidding to keep her a virgin somehow, but I don’t know what the… 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s ancient Rome stuff though. The vessel virgins–their virginity was one of the things underpinning the spiritual safety of Rome. And that’s part of the issue with trying to do a metaphor where you’re like, “Ancient Rome is like nowadays.” The basic foundational underpinnings of society are so different compared to ancient Rome. And, like, Rome had a Senate. Yeah, that’s true. But also, like, religion and politics were the same thing, and it was just taken for granted that, if the city was having trouble, you’d make some sacrifices to the gods and hopefully that’ll keep things right.

STUART WELLINGTON: In a way, don’t we do that these days, Elliott?

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’re right, Stu. I’m the one who’s being naive. 

ROMAN MARS: I did interpret this as way more sinister than maybe it was.

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, my notes say, “Fundraiser? Pledging for purity?” 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, I think it’s like a marathon fundraiser, where you’re pledging someone to run a marathon. I think they’re pledging for her to just stay a virgin. And so when they see her on tape, supposedly in bed with Cesar Catalina… 

DAN MCCOY: They’re like, “I wasted all that money!”

STUART WELLINGTON: Everyone is incensed by this. Like, the crowd is baying for blood. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is after her big musical number though, right? 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, after her big musical number. I didn’t talk about it, but do you want to talk about it a little bit? Do you have opinions? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: She does this big musical number where there’s suddenly, like, six of her singing all at the same time. Again, doesn’t make sense, doesn’t really work thematically, never explained, but it’s a cool thing. And I have to say, actually, the Vesta stuff is… The last we see of her character is one of my favorite moments in the movie also, but we’ll get to that. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Please get to it because I don’t have it written down in my notes.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Okay, well, I don’t remember what happens here, but the scandal comes out that this video has been shown to, uh… Shia LaBeouf arranged for this video to be shown on the Jumbotron of her in bed with Adam Driver. And then suddenly, like, the screen fills with fire. And there are headlines that are like, “Vesta Reimagines Herself.” And suddenly she is singing, like, a bad girl song. Now she’s reimagining herself as, like, a sinful bad girl and she’s a superstar again. And it feels so much like Francis Ford Coppola is like, “Who are the teens into? Taylor Swift? What does she do? Okay, I’ll do something. This is my understanding of what that is.” And it’s like the movie suddenly turns into an advertisement for some other movie.

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. I think that that’s a little sequence that happens a little bit later. And it’s done totally like classic MTV news-style, like, explosion bit and then, like, scenes of societal collapse. Cesar Catalina gets too drunk and gets beaten up by some guys. He gets whisked away. The cops arrest him for statutory rape because of the video. But then Julia goes into the archives and finds out that, actually, Vesta Sweetwater is older than she’s been telling everybody. So, she exonerates him. Problem almost immediately solved. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: And don’t we find out that the video is fake? 

DAN MCCOY: The video is fake, too. They double up the explanations of, like, why this is fine. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it feels the movie is feinting towards… F-E-I-N-T-I-N-G. Not fainting like, “oh, stars and garters. The vapors. It’s taking a feint towards this guy might be a genius, but he’s not a good guy. But instead the movie is very quickly like, “No, no, no. He’s a good guy pretending to be a bad guy.” And he tells Julia, “You got to pretend to be bad or people lose interest in you,” or something like that. And they’re like, “Not only was she not a minor, he also didn’t have sex with her anyway. So, it’s fine. He’s double good. He’s a sterling saint.

STUART WELLINGTON: So, around now, we have Cesar and Julia meeting on top of his girder watch ledge, and they have a conversation. And with her help, he’s able to stop time again. He had kind of lost his powers for a little bit. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Like Spider-Man, sometimes he loses his powers when he’s in a bad mood or depressed.

STUART WELLINGTON: Then they have a kind of sloppy make out session. I thought that was pretty great. They, like, decide to work together. And we get a montage of them kind of falling in love and doing some work at the Design Authority.

ROMAN MARS: Which by the way has really boring design. Like, I really wanted those jackets to pop a little bit more. I was really bummed about that because I was like, “Design Authority? All right, let’s spend some time in the Design Authority.” Nothing. Nothing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Robert Moses would be upset. Say what you will about him in his early work, at least he’s got a real design eye. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Claudio meanwhile–one scheme foiled–he’s got more schemes to be had. He starts Trumping it up. He sees what’s going on and he starts getting the masses all angry. They start backing him. Later on, there’s a scene where he’s giving a stump speech, and the stump is literally carved into the shape of a swastika. Is that right? It’s pretty messed up. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think the movie’s pretty subtle. I don’t know if something like that would happen in this movie.

STUART WELLINGTON: We find out that Julia is pregnant. Uh oh! There’s a baby on the way! Master builders build a baby! Mayor Cicero doesn’t like this idea. He doesn’t like the idea that they’re gonna have a kid. So, he tries to basically buy off Cesar. He’s like, “Hey, you can do whatever you want. Just leave my daughter out of this. Get out of this.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Stuart, you’re doing a great job of condensing this movie. Did you skip over the part where the mayor has a dream where a cloud with a hand grabs the moon, and his wife accurately says that’s an omen? I don’t want people to be able to listen to this and be like, “This movie doesn’t sound that crazy.” And it’s like, “Oh yeah. What about the scene where the mayor has his dream about a cloud grabbing the moon?”

DAN MCCOY: Yeah. It doesn’t really figure into it much, but it looks cool. I don’t know when it happens in the movie, but I just want to say the visual that has stuck with me–they’re under the water and there’s some, like, people who are rocks. They’re, like, painted as rocks. And then they sort of move and you see that they’re people. And it is, like, just half a second. But I was, like, “That’s a really gorgeous image right in the middle of this thing. I’m not sure what it’s saying.” 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, and there’s, like, tons of stuff in here. Like, there’s moments where Cesar has, like, a floating mirror that shows his memories made out of Megalon. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Megalon is like H.E.R.B.I.E., the robot from The Fantastic Four cartoon. Or who’s the little alien that hung out with the Flintstones? What was that guy’s name?

DAN MCCOY: The Great Gazoo? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: The Great Gazoo. The Megalon is just kind of a lump that kind of floats in the air around Cesar’s apartment and does stuff sometimes. But he’ll just be working, and the Megalon will kind of float too close to him. And he’ll have to push it out of the way because it’s getting too close to his face. It’s such a strange, goofy thing to have. It’s like, “Oh yeah, this is the miracle metal of the future. Anyway, I got a lump of it, and it just floats around my apartment. It’s kind of irritating.”

STUART WELLINGTON: And they have, like, a family dinner at one point, where they invite the mayor and his wife. And they’re, like, playing cards in this weird, magical Megalon house, right? And they’re, like, discussing string theory and shit. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s like a Megalopolis exhibit. It’s like an exhibit of what Megalopis would be like or something like that. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, does that come after the destruction of the city? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s before the destruction of the city but after you learn that a Soviet satellite is falling to Earth and will crash into the city.

STUART WELLINGTON: I forgot about that satellite. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s a Soviet satellite. They’re like, “Anyway, it’s orbit has decayed. It’s gonna hit the city.” And they’re like, “Wuh oh.” And then they don’t do anything about it for a while. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Man, I’m starting to realize that taking these notes in the dark… It was a lot easier to take notes on Madame Web.

DAN MCCOY: A more straightforward film that, you know, follows a screenplay formula that has been entrenched in Hollywood. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: So yeah, by this point, Adam Driver has also kind of shown us some of the visual visions of what Megalopolis will look like. And the buildings all look like plants. And the idea is, like, the buildings grow as people need them. There’s homes for everybody because the buildings can grow and change with the needs of the people, which is a beautiful idea. Roman, how close are we to that? I mean, has anyone tried that yet–growing buildings? 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, in, in a way, Hundertwasser was really into, like, mold and letting things grow because it was true organic space and the straight line is the godless line and you’re gonna want, like–

DAN MCCOY: He died from the mold in his lungs, I assume.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, totally. So, there have been big, lofty ideals about a kind of, like, organic architecture in a literal way. And then there’s the term “organic architecture,” like Frank Lloyd Wright’s style, that just means it’s reactive and changes to people’s needs. So, that’s all kind of, you know… Those ideas are out there. That is the closest thing this sort of dunderheaded movie gets to an idea. It’s the first time you sort of get to this, like, what does this utopia mean–that it’s organic and reactive and serves people is an actual idea. Everything else has just been, like, glowing walkways and nonsense where I’m like, “What is this for?” Utopias have to have a concept or something. It’s really weird. But that’s one idea. Like, that’d be great, having a magical substance that requires no thought or care or design or politics.

STUART WELLINGTON: Requires no energy–it just does it all. 

ROMAN MARS: And this is,like, a huge problem. That you’re going to use some technology to save us rather than people coming together and actually coming up with solutions and working stuff out is like… I don’t know. It’s just a nonsense idea that you’re exploring for a couple of hours.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You say that until Megalon works its magic.

STUART WELLINGTON: Speaking of Megalon working its magic, at this point, Cesar Catalina–probably right on the verge of explaining everything about his utopia–meets with a young 12-year-old fan who actually turns out to be a hired assassin and shoots Cesar in the face. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, okay, so this is then after the city is destroyed by a satellite falling to Earth, right? This is an amazingly large thing to happen and then not really be addressed that much. Like, we get some scenes of catastrophe, like shadows being cast on the wall. The reason I bring it up is just because that card game… One of the things that strikes me about this movie is, as we said, this is a movie that Coppola has been writing for decades and decades. I can only assume that the screenplay grew and grew and grew. And at certain points, it feels like they just shot every other 20 pages of it because people’s relationships to each other will change wildly between scenes without explanation. Like Giancarlo Esposito was just trying to pay off Adam Driver to get away from his daughter. And then in the next scene, they’re all sort of, like… You know, they don’t love each other, but they’re having a genial card game together. I’m like, “Okay, well, what happened here?” And the only thing I can think of is, like–oh–the city was destroyed. So, they all came together, but it’s not said or anything. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m looking at my notes. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have to do the summary today or not, so I took some notes also. But you’re right, Dan, because, like, Dustin Hoffman’s character, who’s an assistant to the mayor, dies off camera. We hear, “Oh yeah, he’s dead now.” 

DAN MCCOY: We get one scene of, like, a thing toppling and falling on him. And I’m like, “That had to have been a whole sequence.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Shia LaBeouf, uh, runs for his position. And then it’s after that that the mayor goes to Cesar and says, “If you leave my daughter, I’ll give you the evidence that I lied when I was prosecuting you. And you’ll be able to destroy me, and I’ll put my support behind your projects.” And at the same time, Wow Platinum approaches Catalina and is like, “Hey, look, why don’t you come back and be with me again? And you can have all of Crassus’s money. Everyone wants to be in the Cesar Catalina business.” And he’s like, “No, no, no.” And that’s when she seems to hypnotize Crassus into giving her control over the bank. And then Cesar is shot in the head by this child who… He should have been suspicious when a kid asked him to sign his book for him. Like, there’s no way this kid is reading Cesar Catalina’s book. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I don’t know, man. Everybody loves Cesar Catalina. I think that’s pretty clear. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: But, Stuart, how do they heal him?

STUART WELLINGTON: At this point, I don’t Know about you guys, but I’m like, “Wow. They killed him. That’s crazy.” And he has this weird death dream. But then they end up healing him by fusing his head with some Megalon. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: They just stick Megalon on his head–on the open skull that’s there. And this truly is an amazing building material. But then having the Megalon in his face gives him lots of new powers and things. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. He shows up at Hamilton Crassus’ apartment. Claudio tries to harass him. Wow Platinum tries to make a move on him. But he reveals his half human, half Megalon face, and it causes multiple images. And everybody is wowed by the majesty of his face.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Especially Wow herself. She’s frozen all of his bank accounts, using her power at the bank, in order to force him to… Something. And then, yeah, she offers herself again. But Crassus kind of interrupts it. But now who does Wow set her sights on if she can’t control Caesar Catalina?

STUART WELLINGTON: Of course, she’s gonna pick, I guess, the next best thing and that’s Claudio Crassus. That’s right. So, we have a little sex scene. You were probably into this, right, Dan? It was like a Game of Thrones-style sex position scene. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It was kind of like a Game of Thrones-style sex scene where it’s all about power and you feel like, “Uh, is this what they think sex is like?” She’s like, “Stick your face in my butt. Okay, now go over there. Lie down there.” 

DAN MCCOY: I mean, it can be like that. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, yeah, if you’re doing it right. 

DAN MCCOY: By the way, I just really love being on the Zoom call and watching Roman’s face as he relives the plot. He’s like, “Oh yeah, that did… That is a thing. What?”

ROMAN MARS: I have been going through that where I was just like, “The satellite. Yeah… Oh my god, yeah. That really is… Oh my god, this is a bunch of nonsense.” Like, I had streamlined it into a much tighter movie in my memory than all this.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, you missed all the good parts. You forgot all the good parts. Here’s my note for that satellite. I wrote, “The mayor learns the Soviet satellite may crash into the city–and then it does?” So, it did happen. And I think the upshot of that is the idea that it now has opened up even more land for building on. In real life, the real Robert Moses had to evict people. He didn’t have Soviet satellites doing the job for him. 

ROMAN MARS: This is just a stew of really, truly problematic and nasty great man, like, tropes. He’s canceled for 20 seconds, but he’s such a genius. Obviously, all that stuff that they say about him is fake. He should be forgiven in the first place because he’s so great or it’s all made up and a bunch of these Me Too made up nonsense is coming after him and trying to take him down. All the people are conspiring in these, like, horrible ways And there’s no notion that Adam Driver is just wrong. You know what I mean? And also, the idea of how necessary destruction is to build something. And then there’s this god particle that fixes everything so that no one has to have, like, actually hard thought and compromise. It’s just bad stuff. I mean, this is real, like, like, 13, 14-year-old… Like, I can’t believe an old man wrote this. You know what I mean? 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, it feels like something made by somebody very young or very old. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I know, I feel like I believe it’s either a very young man or a very old man. 

DAN MCCOY: Or a very stoned man, which apparently he was. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Or a Gary Oldman. “Gary Oldmanana, Gary Oldmanana, Gary Oldmanana…” That’s Gary, Indiana.

DAN MCCOY: I know what you’re singing. 

STUART WELLINGTON: It feels like Coppola’s like, “I want to make a movie about city planning.” And then he got high and read, like, one Jodorowsky Metabarons book, and he’s like, “I’m going to do it like this.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. He’s like, “Should I read The Power Broker or The Incal? Uh, I’ll read them both. I’ll just alternate pages.” So, wait, I wanted to ask you guys… So, this next part, I want Stuart to summarize it. And then I’ve got a question for everybody.

STUART WELLINGTON: I was just talking about Wow Platinum and Claudio scheming to take over the bank. They do it over sex. And then Crassus– 

ELLIOTT KALAN: “I’d like two eggs over sex, please.” 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. “My Google Calendar says ‘sex meeting.’ Um, okay.” So, yeah, then Crassus collapses. He seems to have a stroke or– 

ELLIOTT KALAN: He has a heart attack or a stroke, yeah. 

STUART WELLINGTON: He collapses, leaving Wow and Claudio in charge. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Then, it seems like spring comes. You see flowers blooming, and Catalina and Julia get married in their car. Laurence Fishburne sits in the driver’s seat, and they sit in the back. Not Adam Driver’s seat, but the driver’s seat in the car. And then there is A montage of December holidays in this kind of Abel Gantz’s Napoleon triple screen thing. And suddenly, it’s winter again. And I was like, “Did I hallucinate that it was spring and now it’s winter again?” And it can’t be the next year because the baby is just the same age as when they got married. But let’s explain. Did you guys have any sense of why there’s suddenly a montage of winter holidays?

DAN MCCOY: I would have to remember. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I also have to ask, Elliot… My notes–I just wrote down “Elvis?” What does that mean? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. So, an Elvis impersonator is out on the street singing America the Beautiful. I think it’s part of Claudio’s, like, pandering to the masses. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a busker, and it’s a statement about the plastic artificiality of American value ethics. Yeah. That happens. I’m not quite sure. 

DAN MCCOY: I love this new bit, Stuart Deciphers His Notes, by the way. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Jesus Christ. What did I write? Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on with that. I mean, I did write “winter holiday montage” in my notes.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, that happens. So, it goes on for a while. It goes on for a while that we’re watching people opening presents, people spinning dreidels, people celebrating Ramadan…

STUART WELLINGTON: Everybody’s represented. I love it. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, by “everybody” I mean three religions. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Now, the city is inflamed with riots. The masses are rioting against the mayor, inflamed by Claudio, of course. The mayor’s family has to escape through a secret train car tunnel.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yep. They go through the antique subway car tunnels that have been closed off for years in the city. I think it was the subway station that is beneath City Hall that has been closed ever since September 11th. I mean, it’s not been in use for a long time, but it was closed to tours and things after September 11th. I think that it looked like that place. I wonder if they shot it there. It’s possible. 

STUART WELLINGTON: This is around when Wow Platinum and Claudio are celebrating their good fortune. They have successfully taken out their rivals. Nothing bad could ever happen to them. And they wander into the bedroom of Hamilton Crassus III.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Pride goeth before more success–the old aphorism–yeah. 

STUART WELLINGTON: So, they go into Hamilton Crassus’ bedroom. And something’s… It seems like he’s pitching a little tent. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, I want to get Roman’s take on this. This is, by far, the best– I saw this movie in a theater. It was just me and four other people–strangers–not people I know. They were watching the movie stone faced, very serious. And when this line came out, I laughed so loud. And nobody else in the audience reacted. And I did not regret it at all. And so does anyone want to say what– 

STUART WELLINGTON: Well, Elliott had been like, “Jon Voight has the best line of the movie.” And the whole time I’m like, “Did I miss it? Was it one of those? Was it just a line that is silly because Elliott’s smarter than me?” 

DAN MCCOY: But let’s get Roman’s– 

ROMAN MARS: Well, I have to be refreshed to the exact line. I remember the moment. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m not quoting it direct. I’m trying to quote him–

STUART WELLINGTON: I can quote it direct. So, turning to his son and wife, he says, “What do you think of this boner I got?”

DAN MCCOY: But then he reveals what the boner is.

STUART WELLINGTON: It’s a crossbow. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s so funny. He whips the blanket over, and he’s got a crossbow. If the whole movie had been at this level, I would’ve been like, “Yes. 1,000%. You know?” But the last thing I expected was him to say, “Hey, what do you think of this boner I got?” seemingly totally sincere. You don’t know it’s a trap at that moment. And I was like, “This movie… I can’t…

STUART WELLINGTON: They’re so shocked. He shoots Wow and kills her. And then he shoots Claudio and hits him in the ass. And Claudio manages to escape only to eventually be beaten up by his own mob.

DAN MCCOY: Well, we’ll get back to, of course, the most important thing, Roman’s reaction again in a moment.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Jon Voight’s boner or alleged boner.

DAN MCCOY: The interesting thing to me is, like, this is a world where guns exist. We saw Adam Driver get shot in the head. So, he made a real choice, “I’m going to kill these people with a crossbow so I can do this boner bit.” You know?

ELLIOTT KALAN: You think a gun wouldn’t have been able to make enough of a tent in the sheets?

STUART WELLINGTON: I mean, he’s a prideful man.

DAN MCCOY: Interesting. No, that’s true. My guess is the theatricality of it, though, is–

ELLIOTT KALAN: My guess is he needed a way for Claudio to survive and escape. An arrow to the butt is a classic slapstick way to get somebody to leave a room. But also, we’re recording this before our Caddy Shack 2 episode–a movie which also includes someone getting hit in the butt with an arrow.

STUART WELLINGTON: Find out on Saturday! 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Find out on Saturday before this episode comes out! But I wonder if there’s something he’s playing off of–some either ancient thing or some story he knows that involves an arrow that he’s referencing since there’s so many references in this movie to other things that are floating around in Francis Ford Coppola’s head.

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, that’s the problem with this movie for me–well, one of the many problems. I’m apparently an atypical man in that I think of the Roman Empire almost never, so I don’t have the background in history that I would need to understand all of the–

STUART WELLINGTON: What about their, like, turtle formation, where they lock all their shields together? You don’t ever think about that?

DAN MCCOY: I’m thinking about it now. 

STUART WELLINGTON: They look like a turtle but with spears. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Dan, how often do you think about the Civil War? That’s the other thing I feel like American men think about a lot. 

DAN MCCOY: Rarely. I think about Ghoulies Go to College.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh, Ghoulies Go to College. Okay, so that’s your Roman Empire. 

DAN MCCOY: Movies about small monsters– ghoulies and gremlins and munchies. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, Frankie Freako, available on VOD right now. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Some stealth marketing for Frankie Freako right there. 

ROMAN MARS: To answer your question, Elliott, when this happened in the movie theater–it was when Audrey Plaza got shot actually where I was like, “All right! Something’s happening!” like, I was kind of delighted. This was so different and shocking. I mean, when Cesar got shot in the face, that was a little shocking because it had a real pop sound, like a Godfather movie pop. I was like, “Oh, I remember that guy. I like that guy’s movies.” 

ELLIOTT KALAN: The guy who directed maybe the greatest person being shot in the head scene in any movie ever made.

ROMAN MARS: Totally.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And the second greatest guy being shot in the head moment when Moe Greene gets killed at the end of the same movie.

ROMAN MARS: He’s really good at shooting people in faces.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, he was, in 1972. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s kind of wasted in this movie to tell you the truth. But that was a moment of delight just because of the shocking violence. Like, I had no idea that that was what was about to happen. So, it was kind of like, “Oh, right. This thing’s alive.” 

ELLIOTT KALAN: But him talking about his boner just left you cold. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, no, I mean, I think the boner part was, like… It just really happens kind of all at once. There’s not a lot of time in between, so I didn’t have processing time. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I was taking a big slurp of my soda and just spit it all over everyone.

DAN MCCOY: Speaking of fearing missing this, I knew that there was this line. You know, all I’d heard about was how Jon Voight had this great line. And the movie is very long. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, it’s not that long, but it feels long. It’s, like, about two hours–a little less than 2:20. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, okay. It’s longer than, to my mind, the ideal length of a movie, which is less than two hours. The important thing is it’s longer than my bladder can stand. So, all through this movie, I was like, “I gotta wait out for this Jon Voight line. And then I finally, like… I’m in physical pain. I have to leave the theater. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Were you pinching it with your fingers? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: You were literally pinching your urethra shut with your fingers? 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, I was pinching my urethra shut. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Like you’re trying to control a fire hose? 

DAN MCCOY: I had to pee so badly, I was hurting. I thought to myself, “Surely, surely, it will not happen at this exact moment. If I run to the restroom, I will not miss this iconic line.” And of course, it is exactly when this happens. 

STUART WELLINGTON: And you came back, and the audience was rolling on the floor laughing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: They were cheering, firing guns into the air.

DAN MCCOY: So, I looked up the line. And fortunately, you know, someone had put most of the scene on TikTok–not the boner line. Like, I saw the rest of the scenes that I had missed. Then in the description, it was like, “Dude, right before this, the guy said this line about his boner. Apparently, like, they whipped out their phone. They’re like, “Oh man, I missed the key point. But something else crazy’s gotta happen with this setup.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: The other thing is it’s not a funny line in and of itself. What is funny is that it is appearing in this otherwise serious-minded, allegorical movie, said by Jon Voight in a scene near what you have to assume is the climax of the film. There’s something about how it is the least eloquent thing, I think, a character has said in any movie I’ve seen in years. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah. 

STUART WELLINGTON: What a performance. Okay. So, as we said, Crassus gets his revenge. The riots are running wild around New Rome. Cesar appears as a hologram or something, and he gives his speech, talking about time and things like that, and calms everybody down and shows visions of his utopia. Is that correct? Is that what happens? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, this is the classic man of genius comes out and he gives a speech that enthralls the crowd and calms their passions and wins them to his side. And the speech he gives is such vaporware. It’s such empty conceptual nonsense. And it does not speak to any of the actual needs that these people have shown up to this point and why they’re reacting. Say what you will about Donald Trump, the terrible, terrible person–just an evil, bad man–but when he speaks, he is directly reacting to the needs he feels in the audience members that he is talking to and the ones he wants to appeal to. Whereas Adam Driver, when he’s giving the speech, I’m like, “I don’t even know. I don’t know who you’re winning over with what in this.” And so to see the crowd be like, “You’re right. You’re right. What a true leader.” 

DAN MCCOY: “Hey! Platitudes! Yeah!” 

ELLIOTT KALAN: As an audience member in the theater, I was like, “I don’t understand what he’s saying. This doesn’t mean anything to me.”

ROMAN MARS: And this is another part where I’m just, like, so out with this movie. It really tries to have it both ways. It has great contempt for almost all the rich people, which is fine. You can hate all the rich people all you want. Crassus totally sucks, and all of Crassus’ family sucks. Obviously, it has this exception for Cesar because it was sort of genius. And what it rests on is this idea that you have to serve the people–give the people what they need–but it has complete contempt for the people. They’re just this dumb mass of people that follow Claudio, or they’re this dumb mass of people that are just, like, wooed by nonsense language. I mean, there’s no actual common people represented at all in the movie. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: The only characters we see who come close to being actual, on-the-ground people are that one guy who plays the tuba in the marching band in that one scene and the kid who shoots Cesar in the face, I guess. But you’re right, there’s no ordinary citizen point of view ever presented in this–a movie where you have to assume hundreds if not thousands of people are killed by a falling satellite that devastates the city. I just watched Lifeforce recently. And that’s a movie that’s about a nude space vampire that sucks the life out of people. And that showed more feeling for the ordinary, everyday English person than this movie shows for the people of New Rome.

ROMAN MARS: Its ostensible ideas are about, like, serving people in the public and how to make a society. And society is completely unrepresented in any realistic or meaningful way. They’re all really just pawns who are, like, dumbasses who follow Claudio or sort of dumbasses that are wooed by nonsense language. And it’s just weird. I totally get that you can have Shakespeare plays that are all about Kings and shit. That’s fine. The commoner has to be represented in everyday–

DAN MCCOY: There’s comedies and there’s tragedies and there is kings and shit. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m so desperately trying to think of what Shakespeare title I can turn into a pun about another word for shit. 

STUART WELLINGTON: King Smear!

ELLIOTT KALAN: Toilets and Cressida? Does that work?

DAN MCCOY: Why did we go down this road of all the roads? 

STUART WELLINGTON: Okay, speaking of roads, Cesar promises these magical, floating, glowing roads that are all like the Rainbow Road in Super Mario. Claudio’s mob turns on him. Crassus is overcome by the glory of Cesar’s vision, so he leaves all of his riches to Cesar Catalina. So, that’s going to allow him to build this utopia. Mayor Cicero and his family join Cesar on this voyage. They stand upon this glowing bridge. People are all very excited. They’re celebrating. And he manages to stop time for everyone except for Cesar and Julia’s baby.

DAN MCCOY: And let’s say that this is a very strange looking shot, too. This is shot from below. They’re all, like, standing on glass or something. There’s, like, green screen behind them. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is also such an upsetting moment. I think it’s supposed to be a moment of hope for the future–this ability to exist outside of time and be a creative genius is now in their child as well. But time has stopped except for this baby. Who’s going to feed this baby? Like, who’s going to unstop time? Not since Under the Skin have I been more worried about an onscreen child who’s being abandoned in front of me.

ROMAN MARS: But the baby is the one stopping time, right? Maybe? 

DAN MCCOY: It must be because the others are frozen. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Doesn’t Julia tell Cesar to stop time? Maybe I’m misremembering it. I don’t know. 

DAN MCCOY: I mean, I think she does, but–

ELLIOTT KALAN: The baby doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s very upsetting to me. 

STUART WELLINGTON: The feeling I get is that they’re leaving the future for the next generation. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: For the sequel, Megalopolis 2: Babyopolis. 

STUART WELLINGTON: My notes then say “pledge allegiance.” Did something happen after this? Was there, like, a speech or something? 

ROMAN MARS: There’s a title card, and I think it’s the narration read by children.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “We pledge allegiance to the human race” or something like that. 

ROMAN MARS: I pulled this up in front of me because I wanted to make sure we had it. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: It meant so much to you that you printed it out and laminated it and put it up on the wall.

ROMAN MARS: “I pledge allegiance to our human family and to all the species that we protect, one Earth, indivisible, with long life, education, and justice for all” is what the kids say. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, stick that on a placard in front of your house for the next election about the values in this house? Yeah. 

DAN MCCOY: The problem with that Is that it comes at the end of Megalopolis. I do like the idea of a pledge that is not a nationalistic sort of just, like, pledge to–

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think we can all stand behind the values of the human race and everybody getting justice and education. It doesn’t fit with this movie. It’s a real Robert Moses viewpoint movie where the people don’t know what they want, the people are sheep, they have to be shown by a genius what is best for them, and someone needs to make the decision. I think the person making it thinks they’re making a pro-democracy, pro-equality justice movie. But they are making, essentially, in many ways, a fascist movie because there is one man who understands. And he needs to take control. And you should not question him, no matter what he does. And maybe I’m just mad because I realized I should have said “Toilets Andronicus” because Toilets And Cressida is a poem, right? Like, it’s not a play. 

DAN MCCOY: It is a play. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Is it a play? What am I thinking? What’s his epic poem then? 

DAN MCCOY: I don’t know. I’m less familiar with this poetry. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Viewers, if you’re listening, write in and tell us which play you want to have a toilet in.

STUART WELLINGTON: Any English majors on this podcast? 

DAN MCCOY: I mean, we’re getting into the Final Judgment sort of area. But there’s much that is striking about this movie. There are parts of it that sort of took me sort of in spite of myself. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I was thinking of the poem by Chaucer and then Shakespeare had the play. Toilets and Cressida works!

STUART WELLINGTON: Okay, let me just amend the scoreboard.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “On further review, the call against Toilets and Cressida has been overturned.” 

DAN MCCOY: You’ve crystallized something for me, Elliott. Like, the only thing that makes sense to me about this movie as a statement–the only way I can read this–is Francis Ford Coppola being like, “Geniuses are good and above everyone and they shouldn’t be questioned. And maybe I’m one!” Politically, it’s all over the place. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not staking out any particular understandable philosophy. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, instead of a fable, it should say, “Megalopolis: A Bunch of Stuff That Happened,” which is literally the fifth chapter in every Dogman book. It’s called Chapter 5, A Bunch of Stuff That Happened or A Bunch of Stuff That Happened Next. So, maybe Francis Ford Coppola should have made that Dogman movie. Stuart, what do you think?

STUART WELLINGTON: Uh, Dogman, yeah. I think he should have made that movie. Are those the player character race you can play in Rift that have the body of a human but the head and some of the traits of a dog? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s the kind of thing you see sometimes in Old Tales of the Saints. Some of them have dog heads. But no, that’s not what Dogman is. He’s a police officer with a dog’s head. 

DAN MCCOY: We should get into our final judgements. But before we do, I just want to give Stuart some plaudits for how he handled that.

STUART WELLINGTON: That’s cool. Anyone else want to give me plaudits? 

DAN MCCOY: I was keeping an eye on time. And early on, I’m like, “Oh man, this is going to be a four-hour episode.” But, Stuart, you got us through. You hacked a path. 

STUART WELLINGTON: The trick is forgetting things like satellites falling.

DAN MCCOY: But of course, this is where we give our final judgments, whether we thought that Megalopolis was a good bad movie, a bad bad movie, or a movie we kind of liked. Is it a movie where you get some joy out of its badness, no joy to be found in Mudville, or did we actually like it a bit? I am going to say good bad in the sense that you so rarely get something this personal and big. In a weird way, I kind of didn’t know whether we should do this at first, until, you know, like, we got so many people going, “You gotta do Megalopolis. I want to hear what you say about Megalopolis.” But part of me was like, “Well, I don’t want to, like, take someone down for passion.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “I won’t give the masses what they want. I’m a genius. I know better than they do.”

DAN MCCOY: Well, I feel bad about, like, taking a passion project down. Like, even if it’s misbegotten, I do appreciate the swing. I don’t think that this movie is successful, and there’s large chunks of it that are boring. But I say good bad in the sense that, like, I would not discourage anyone with any curiosity about this movie from seeing this movie because it is quite an experience. If you’re interested and if you’re willing to commit the time, yeah, sure, watch it because there’s going to be some stuff in it that’s going to have you grasping your head and shaking your fists to the heavens. So, that’s what I say. So, what do you think? 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. I mean, I feel I have less of an issue with, like, targeting passion projects because I feel like passion projects often suffer from a certain amount of great man syndrome and delusion of genius. But I don’t know. I feel like this movie would fall somewhere between a good bad movie and almost, like, there’s parts of it that are a movie I kind of like. I mean, I feel like time is going to be kinder to this than at least current critics are. I feel like it reminds me in a lot of ways of either a Neil Breen movie or if Neil Breen had directed the Star Wars prequels because it feels a lot like those movies. At least it doesn’t feel like mass produced garbage, but it is still kind of like garbage. So, I guess that’s not a direct answer, but I’m glad this movie exists. And I feel like if you’re interested in it, you should check it out. It’s a mess. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I feel similar to Stuart. I think it’s good bad with a– There’s some things about it that I liked that are enough to make it a movie I am glad to have seen, even if I’m never going to watch it again, probably. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Not with your kids?

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, eventually. Eventually. “Dad, can we watch Megalopolis?” “You’re not ready yet. You wouldn’t understand.” Meanwhile, I’m trying to get them to watch Metropolis, another kind of politically mushy movie set in the city of the future. And they have no interest, even though that’s a great movie. I think the future film critics will look back on it, knowing what it is and being able to pick out the few kind of pearls that are in the morass of sludge, rather than us looking at it now, expecting something different than it is. What we’re expecting is a coherent story with interesting characters. And instead, future generations will be like, “Well, that was a fascinating capstone to Francis Ford Coppola’s career.” I just finished reading Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Alfred Hitchcock. And in that, he’s able to treat Hitchcock’s later movies, which at the time were considered abysmal and which are certainly not among his best– But now You can look at them and be like, “Here’s the good things in them. Here’s the not so good things in them.” I think it’ll be kind of like that. But at the moment, it’s kind of nice to watch this movie now at a moment when you’re… It’s rare that I see a movie that has this level of production behind it and this level of artistic vision behind it where I’m like, “What? What is he doing? Why is he doing that?” I like what you’re saying, Stuart. In an era of mass produced casinos made for the people by the mayor, that’s something to be at least glad that someone is willing to put the shares they sold in their winery where their mouth is… Roman, what do you think? You loved it, right ?

ROMAN MARS: Right. I think that, you know… What, like, 15 years of watching bad movies has rotted y’all’s brain ’cause this is a bad bad movie.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’ve seen things you couldn’t imagine. Crap movies glittering off the shoulder of– 

ROMAN MARS: Here’s the thing. I think this is a bad bad movie. And I think that if you compare it to other… This is a false premise of, like… It is interesting that, whereas all, like, superhero movies are boring, at least this thing exists and it has some kind of vision or whatever. But that is not what this thing is occupying space of. It is occupying the space of, like, taking time to stare at a loved one’s face for two hours or something like that.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh, Roman, Roman… If that’s the way you think, you’re never gonna be able to make it in this business. Certainly, there are better ways to use the limited time you have on Earth.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, this vision was messy and chaotic and whatever. But as you dig into the ideas of the movie, I think those ideas are bad and dangerous ideas. Like, I think they actually are pernicious and make the world a worse place. That’s why I was almost wooed by this idea of the passion project that you don’t want to take on and criticize, except for that the passion project is kind of this weird, like, defensive, great man, genius–this idea of this fake populism of caring about the people and that even the movie cares about people and serving people but then ignores them and ignores their needs. There’s this, like, phony kind of Me Too crisis in the middle of this thing that’s completely dashed by facts that exonerate this man. If the underlying core of this was sort of more benign or innocuous, I would have more charity towards its big swings. But I think that it actually has terrible ideas at its core.

STUART WELLINGTON: I feel like that almost makes it more interesting than this guy. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: If you’re worried that this movie is going to sway people–

ROMAN MARS: I don’t think it is either. But I just feel like it should be held accountable for its dumbness. 

STUART WELLINGTON: But I would argue it does because he spent so much of his money for a huge flop that is being publicly pilloried. 

ROMAN MARS: But you know and I know this, too, because we’re all… Like, I’m a little older than you guys are. But you’ve watched really misguided Millennials and Gen Z resurrect the Star Wars prequel trilogy and talk about its secret genius. And you’re like, “No, you don’t understand. We were there. It’s fucking awful. You have to trust us on this. The book is closed on that matter.” And you’re right. This is going to be resurrected, and people are going to find things in it. And it’s just going to be just amazing. That’s going to be such an irritating process to witness in 20 years because it truly is, like, of the moment. Just to take it in the moment, it is dealing with these ideas of, you know, populism and politics and great men being sort of, like, somehow thwarted in their great… Like, what’s so crazy about the movie is, with all this crazy stuff that happens, everything is just given to Cesar. He has this magic particle that heals his face. The richest man in the world gives him all the money he needs to do his thing. A satellite clears the land for him to build his thing. It is full of this moment of billionaires and so-called geniuses and bad populism and pretending to serve people like this. These are bad ideas to play with poorly right now. And that’s the part that really, like, incenses me about it as a movie.

DAN MCCOY: You’ve given the passionate, swaying the masses speech that the movie fails to do.

STUART WELLINGTON: “I’m one of the dumb masses. I wanna follow this guy. Tell me about your utopia, Roman!” 

ROMAN MARS: But I want it to be so much better. Like, I can deal with all the nonsense of it. In fact, one of the things that I think is the miracle of this movie is that Adam Driver, at the center of this, comes out pretty unscathed. He commits to this nonsense in this way that is almost… I just don’t even know how he does it. He just leans into it. But he’s not hammy. That’s the part where I’m like… I liked him more coming out of this movie–not than I ever have. But it just added to my esteem of him.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, something that we see a lot in the movies on the podcast is that when you’re an actor who’s in a movie that doesn’t make sense or is not good, you never win points by being openly disdainful of the movie or by acting like you know it is. Like, I think one of the things that helps with Adam Driver’s performance is when he’s saying nonsense or he’s doing things that don’t make sense, he is still acting as if the things that he’s doing make sense and are rational and coherent. And I think you’re right. He comes out of it– I mean, I feel like most of the main performances come out pretty well.

ROMAN MARS: They’re goofy and stuff, but I’m just surprised how he comes out, like… There’s a lesson in here with watching him, and maybe that’s worth watching, which is that, even in life or in a movie or as a piece of art or whatever, just lean in and do the thing. You will be cooler if you just do it rather than try to resist it. 

DAN MCCOY: From what I understand from hearing people talk about it, he had a much better sort of experience on the movie because he leaned into the working process of the movie. And I understand that if you don’t want to lean into that, that’s fine because it sounds like this was not a good working experience for a lot of people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: If you don’t want to be, like, told to do something different every single moment then let someone kiss you…

DAN MCCOY: I’m not necessarily making an argument to ignore that, but I am saying that he seemed to embrace, like, “Okay, as an artistic thing, I am going to roll with this and be collaborative and really commit to it.” And that’s probably part of why he does come out feeling like he–

ELLIOTT KALAN: I don’t think we need to get into it, but I’m sure there was also an element of Francis Ford Coppola probably treating him better than he treated other people, you know, because he’s the star that he identifies with in the movie. And he loved 65. So, he saw that, and he was like, “You were shooting dinosaurs!”

DAN MCCOY: “No, no, Francis. Those weren’t real dinosaurs.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “I saw that movie you made where you got away from that comet that hit the earth with the dinosaurs. So, I’m having a satellite hit the city. Let’s see if he can get away from that one.” And then Francis was watching his own movie–he’s like, “Son of a bitch did it again! He got away from another thing falling out of the sky.” And Adam Driver’s like, “Francis, you made this movie! You knew it was going to happen!” He’s like, “I don’t think so. I don’t know how you did it, but it doesn’t seem like my movie.” 

DAN MCCOY: “I mean, my movies are good. This one…”

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, what if it was like Severance where he had a different personality than when he left set.

STUART WELLINGTON: Probably.

DAN MCCOY: Could be.

ROMAN MARS: After the break, more from The Flop House…

DAN MCCOY: Let’s answer a couple of questions from listeners. This one is from Nylo, last name withheld. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: “From FF Coppola. Uh oh.”

DAN MCCOY: Or perhaps Nilo. I don’t know. But they write, “Intergalactic greetings, Floppers. I have a gigantic projector built in space capable of projecting a movie onto the moon. What should I show on it?” And, of course, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is From the Earth to the Moon. You want to see that moon man get a rocket in his eye. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Yep. Yeah, everybody’s gagging for it. 

DAN MCCOY: Everyone wants that–to look up and be like, “Oh…”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Finally the real moon’s going to get the just desserts that the film moon got.

STUART WELLINGTON: The stand up and cheer moment of the year. 

DAN MCCOY: But what else? Moonfall maybe? 

STUART WELLINGTON: I was going to say Akira for that scene when Tetsuo blows up part of the moon. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, I’m going to think about this a little more practically. We don’t have sound because it’s just being projected on the moon.

ROMAN MARS: No, you have to tune your radio to a certain, like, frequency. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh, maybe, yeah. I’m trying to think of something where the visuals would pull all of humanity together as one shared family once it’s projected on the moon. 

DAN MCCOY: One Week by Buster Keaton. 

ROMAN MARS: You’re basically talking about the biggest movie in the park that you can imagine for the summertime. And so it’s gonna be, like, Toy Story.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Worse things you can go with than Toy Story, yeah. 

ROMAN MARS: No, it’s gonna be some Pixar movie that you can bring all the kids to. And then and that’s it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, listen, I want it to be family friendly because if my kids are out looking at the moon, I don’t want them seeing something that they shouldn’t see. Yeah.

STUART WELLINGTON: What shouldn’t they see? What’s on the list? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, I don’t think they’re ready for Akira. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Well, when are your kids going to be ready for Akira? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Daddy! Daddy! Why is Tetsuo expanding into a techno organic mass?” 

STUART WELLINGTON: “Why is he crushing Kaori when he’s trying to love her?” 

ROMAN MARS: I saw Paris is Burning at Lincoln Center outside. And that was a lovely experience. So, you know, that could be one that you could do.

DAN MCCOY: I like it. This second and final letter is from Anne Marie, who writes, “Hey, y’all.” And this is clearly in response to our recent break into Flop TV episode we had.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Tickets available now for Flop TV Season Two. 

DAN MCCOY: “I wanted to add an additional theory about how someone could dance on the ceiling. A few years ago, I played Dancing on the Ceiling for my then four-year-old niece. And she said it was her favorite song. I showed her the music video, and she kept asking, ‘How did he do that?’ and then posited that he had sticky stuff on the ceiling so he could stick to it like a bug. So, there’s another.”

STUART WELLINGTON: That’s how bugs stick to things. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s a good theory. Well, I don’t think it’s really how they stick to stuff. 

STUART WELLINGTON: That’s how it works in Inception, too, right? Chrissy Nolan just smeared sticky stuff all over the ceiling and Joseph Gordon-Levitt bounced off of it. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, was there a question there, Dan? It was just, it was just sharing an idea? 

DAN MCCOY: A charming tale of a child’s imagination. Sort of like, you know, E.T.? I guess it’s not imagination, but it sparks imagination. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, old, old special effects are great. The greatest special effect of all time is Kermit riding a bike. It’ll never be beaten. It’ll be the greatest. Like, that’s the thing that’s wowed me the most for all my life.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s also a scene where a woman goes from nice looking to evil looking in camera, in a movie called Sh! The Octopus, in a way that uses makeup that only shows up on certain colors of light. And that effect is from a movie from the ’30s. And the effect looks amazing.

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah, I still think the best special effect is that scene where the guy falls over, in the movie The Gate, and he turns into a bunch of little guys. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, that’s pretty good. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: And also there’s the moment in Throne of Blood when Toshiro Mifune gets an arrow through the neck. And I’m always like, “Did they really kill him?” 

DAN MCCOY: On that note of credulity, let’s move on. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Actually, Elliott, I just checked. Toshiro Mifune is dead. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh no, they did it. Officer, arrest Akira Kurosawa. We’ve solved the cold case. 

DAN MCCOY: Let us move on to our final segment. Our final regular segment of the show, which is–

STUART WELLINGTON: Dan, I’m looking as you scan through your Letterboxd. Dicks: The Musical is on there. That scene with Nathan Lane spitting lunch meat on those puppets–isn’t that great? 

DAN MCCOY: I appreciate the spirit of Dicks: The Musical. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I think you did. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: So why are you recommending it, Dan? 

DAN MCCOY: I’m not. Again, I haven’t even introduced the segment. We’re recommending movies that we have seen of late or just like that might be a better use of your time than, say, Megalopolis. Take Roman’s advice. Either stare at your loved one’s face, or watch one of these.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Just stare at their face for the full runtime of Megalopolis, which is, like, two hours. 

DAN MCCOY: “What are you doing? Can you stop that?”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Is Megalopolis showing on my face?”

DAN MCCOY: Uh, I recently just rewatched Lost Highway, which I hadn’t seen since around the time it was new. David Lynch’s Lost Highway. And, you know, because I’d seen it when it was new, it kind of had never struck me, like, how much this is a dry run for Mulholland Drive, which is not to say it’s not valuable in its own right. But it’s like, “Oh, okay, like, you’re revisiting so many of the themes.” And I didn’t even think about that. You know, Lynch’s films… I think it’s a bad idea to try and just decode them. But if you’re gonna go down that road, like, there’s a lot about sort of–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Is that road Mulholland Drive?

DAN MCCOY: Yeah. Dissociation after sort of a horrible event. Trying to make sense of your life through these, like, sort of fantasies. Lost Highway was his first trip down that lost highway to Mulholland Drive. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’re going to want to go down Lost Highway. You’re going to take a turn onto Mulholland Drive. 

DAN MCCOY: Yeah, if you want to– 

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’ll get you to the Inland Empire.

DAN MCCOY: Yep. If you want to see Bill Pullman just wail on a saxophone as well, that’s your best chance. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Some would say your only chance. 

DAN MCCOY: There’s not much to say about it. I mean, if you like Lynch and you haven’t seen it, that’s strange. If you haven’t watched it, if you’re not a Lynch person–

STUART WELLINGTON: Maybe you’re, like, a huge Robert Blake fan. 

DAN MCCOY: But not his movies, more his personal life.

ROMAN MARS: Not his eyebrows.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “I love Robert Blake. I just hate when he has hair below his forehead. Is there a movie for me? I feel like Lost Highway is the opposite of Megalopolis in that it is a movie that, when it came out, I remember the reviews were like, “What?”

DAN MCCOY: Scathing. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: They were scathing because it had a non-linear, not totally rational plot. But you watch it now and you’re like, “Oh, like, now I know what Lynch does. I understand what he’s doing.” And honestly, the fact that film reviewers saw it at the time and weren’t like, “Oh, it’s a David Lynch movie. I have to watch it through David Lynch glasses…”

STUART WELLINGTON: Yeah. I don’t know if I ever told this story, but I remember seeing it at, like, the very small independent theater in my hometown. And it was a late screening. And we got out. And I was driving my friends home. And I remember, you know, driving up to a red light. The light turned green, and then it turned red again. And I had just sat there the whole time because my brain was processing what I just watched. 

DAN MCCOY: Let’s go in the same order we did our judgments. Stuart, what do you have? 

STUART WELLINGTON: Okay, I’m going to recommend a movie I saw a couple weeks back. I saw Anora, the new Sean Baker movie. It’s, I guess, an offbeat comedy love story about a young sex worker who marries the son of an oligarch in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. It’s a very New York movie in that way. There’s a scene where they fucking go to Tatiana’s in Brighton Beach. And I was like, “Whoa! I go there! I’m like Anora.” Yeah, I mean, I feel like it really captures the, like, rush and craziness of love and hope and also, like, hoping against the crushing power of capitalism and shittiness. And then, of course, things start to come back to Earth and things get a little bit rough. It’s got, you know, an incredible central performance by Mikey Madison as the title character. I thought it was great. I love it. Yeah, check it out. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Cool. I’m also going to recommend an offbeat comedy romance but not the same one. I want to recommend the movie You and Me from 1938. This is a movie directed by Fritz Lang, director of Metropolis, the movie I mentioned earlier. But it’s a very different movie than Metropolis. And Sylvia Sidney is a woman who works at a department store. And the department store makes a point of hiring ex-convicts to give them a second chance at life. And George Raft is one of those ex-convicts and they fall in love. She doesn’t want him to know she’s also an ex-convict because, when you’re on parole, you’re not allowed to fall in love and you’re not allowed to get married. And so she has to hide from him that she is also a convict, and the repercussions of that involve him getting back involved in crime. And it’s a surprisingly sweet movie for a movie about criminals directed by Fritz Lang. And it also has some musical numbers in it, with some of the music written by Kurt Vile. So, it’s a real strange movie. It’s this kind of somewhat anti-capitalist, romance, drama, comedy, crime movie with Sylvia Sidney and George Raft. But I really loved it. I really enjoyed it. It’s the kind of movie that, you know, you could crank out in the ’30s because they were making so many movies that sometimes one of these popped out where it was like, “This is kind of a stranger movie than it had any right to be.” It could have been a pretty down the middle movie, but there’s some great scenes in it. And Sylvia Sidney’s been on my mind since there’s that new Beetlejuice movie. She’s not in the new one, but since she was in the old one, you know… So that’s You and Me. 

ROMAN MARS: I was having a hard time thinking of what to recommend. But I think the one I’d settle on is Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which is the documentary Eleanor Coppola made of Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now. One of the things that ends the Megalopolis is, at the very end, it says, “For Eleanor,” which is sort of this moment where I’m feeling kind of seething for this thing. And then there’s a sweet moment of their long term relationship and how she was such a gifted filmmaker as evidenced by this piece that did make me think, “Okay. He did what he wanted to. It’s all okay.” And that was a nice sort of homage to her. But she was an extremely good documentary filmmaker. It made me appreciate Apocalypse Now so much more. It gave you so much insight into making a movie. It just, like, has so much drama. It’s so fascinating. I really love Hearts of Darkness. I saw it as a kid. Well, not a kid. I guess, pretty soon after it came out, I was 15 or 16– Hearts of Darkness not Apocalypse Now. I had not seen Apocalypse Now. I caught this, like, on HBO or something. And then I saw it afterward. I’d kind of heard about Apocalypse Now. And it gave me the blueprint for appreciating another sort of, like, good mess of a movie. I think that’s a good mess–Apocalypse Now–in a lot of ways. But I love this. It’s one of the reasons why I love documentaries. I think it’s just expertly and beautifully made.

DAN MCCOY: I think I also saw it before I saw Apocalypse Now. I saw it with my, like, college girlfriend. We were at her house in cleveland. And it was just, like, young film buffs. And we’re like, “What arty thing can we get? We’ll get this. I know it’s a good documentary.” And it is a testament that, even without having seen the movie, this is fascinating in its own right and then gets richer once you’ve seen the film. Or, like most people, you probably see Apocalypse Now first and then–

ROMAN MARS: It’s weird. I mean, I think people take things in a lot differently now. You never know. But I think this movie is great. I think it’s actually better than Apocalypse Now. But that’s my own flavor. That to me is, like, not defensible. It’s just taste, you know?

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s just a personal choice. There are people who saw Spaceballs before Star Wars. People watch things in all sorts of crazy orders, you know?

DAN MCCOY: These days. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I thought you were about to mention a documentary about the making of Spaceballs. That would be fascinating. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: May the Schwartz Be With You: A Filmmaker’s Journey.

STUART WELLINGTON: How’d they rig up that bit where Rick Moranis goes flying through the–

DAN MCCOY: Was that real? Did they kill Rick Moranis? 

ELLIOTT KALAN: Did they kill Rick Moranis in that moment? 

DAN MCCOY: Alright, well, we should wrap this up with a big thank you. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I want a comedy sketch in a show where they’re like, “Okay.” They’re talking to the lead actor on a movie set. And they’re like, “We saved this last stunt to the end of the shooting because you’re going to die when you do it. The only way to get the shot is to kill you while you do it. That’s why we shot all your scenes ahead of time.” “Uh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” “No, it’s okay. We shot the rest of the movie already. We shot it already. We’re done. You know, we’re wrapped on that. So this is your last thing you have to do. We’ll be covered.”

DAN MCCOY: Before we say goodbye, I want to just say thank you to Roman for being on this episode. We all know how busy you are. And so we’re always charmed when you make time for our shenanigans. 

ROMAN MARS: Delighted. Long time fan and supporter. I’m so happy to be here. It makes me very, very happy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: If you want more shenanigans like this, just tune into The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. It’s exactly like this show. It’s just like it. 

DAN MCCOY: Just cutting it up. Before we go, thank you to our producer, Alex Smith. He goes by the name Howell Dawdy on the internet. He does music. He does Twitch streams–does a lot of stuff. Look him up. Thank you to our network, Maximum Fun. If you go to maximumfun.org, there are a lot of great other podcasts you can listen to about culture–about comedy. You’ll find something you like. But that’s it for this episode. For The Flophouse, I’ve been Dan McCoy. 

STUART WELLINGTON: I’m Stuart Wellington. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m Elliott Kalan.

ROMAN MARS: I’m Roman Mars. I’m going to take that again. I’m Roman Mars. 

DAN MCCOY: That’s it. 

ELLIOTT KALAN: What a professional. 

STUART WELLINGTON: Bye! 

DAN MCCOY: Professionalism undone. On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis! 

ELLIOTT KALAN: You want me to do one? 

DAN MCCOY: No, I’ll just start it over again. We’re embarrassing ourselves in front of Roman.

STUART WELLINGTON: No, Roman knows we’re cool. 

DAN MCCOY: This is the whole experience.

ROMAN MARS: You can listen and subscribe to The Flophouse wherever you get your podcasts. And after all that, if you still somehow want to watch Megalopolis, it’s now available on VOD.