#258. 'How to Rob a Bank' (Netflix)
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Mike Warren is out this week, leaving Sonny and JVL to fly solo on Netflix's true-crime documentary How to Rob a Bank, and both come away high on it: Sonny praises its tight 87-minute runtime, its original (non-adapted) reporting, and its refusal to romanticize its subject, while JVL is obsessed with the astonishing 60-to-75-foot treehouse mansion the robber (nicknamed "Hollywood") built and lived in, and singles out the mysterious inside woman "Mustang" — the bank teller who fed the crew intelligence and reportedly took her own life after refusing to give up her role — as the film's most fascinating thread; both agree the story, structured like a real-life Point Break, would make a great Michael Mann movie, and Sonny admits he's glad Hollywood dies in the climactic shootout. The episode opens with an extended, almost operatic account of JVL's shed-building saga: ninety man-hours over three days with his handy friend Dave and son Flash, a landscaper-poured gravel pad that turned out to be a ten-inch-off-level trapezoid, an unshingled roof he's dreading climbing, and the now-legendary warning from "Shed Michael" ("good luck") that JVL wishes he'd heeded. From there the two ramble through library trips and comic-book reading with Sonny's daughter, a rewatch of Deadpool that JVL now insists isn't actually funny, Ronaldo's on-field tears at the Euros, the WNBA's Caitlin Clark-driven popularity boom, and a quick box-office rundown covering A Quiet Place: Day One and Kevin Costner's sprawling, structurally bizarre Horizon: An American Saga, which Sonny loves despite conceding it barely qualifies as a movie. They close by circling back to the documentary's funniest aside, a former Evergreen State student insisting the notoriously hippie school "wasn't just drugs and politics" before describing exactly that.
From the show notes
Mike's off this week, so it's a two-man show. Those are the best!
Full transcript
JVL00:00:00This is a robbery.
Sonny00:00:01He was the most prolific bank robber in the Pacific Northwest. He's robbed 14 banks in Seattle since June of 1992. This case was spinning a little bit out of control.
Guest00:00:13He was a smart bank robber. He became our number one priority.
Sonny00:00:19What happened here reads straight from a movie script.
Guest00:00:22His moniker was Hollywood. He wears heavy makeup, a wig.
JVL00:00:27His co-star is this 9mm handgun.
Sonny00:00:30Welcome back to the Sub-Beacon. I'm Sonny Bunch, your co-host. I'm joined by Jonathan V. Last, your other co-host. Our third semi-regular semi-host. He's here most of the time. Mike Warren, he's out. He's out this week. He's got a...
JVL00:00:54Deputy acting co-host.
Sonny00:00:55He's got work or something. He's traveling all around the country. He's following politics or whatever it is he does. I don't know. So, it's just me and JVL today. We're very excited. We're going to be talking about how to rob a bank. Hit movie on Netflix. Big hit. Top 10. True crime docs. People love true crime docs. So, we're going to talk about that. But first, we're going to do seven hours on sheds. JVL, you sent me some pictures. How's that shed coming?
JVL00:01:30Shed doc.
Sonny00:01:32Shed update.
JVL00:01:34We built a shed.
Sonny00:01:37It's like you bought a zoo, but you built a shed.
JVL00:01:40We built a shed. There's so much to talk about. And actually, it ties in very nicely to the documentary we're going to talk about. Okay. Which is called How to Rob a Bank. Because 15 minutes or so of this documentary focuses on the bank robber building an enormous treehouse by which I mean a house inside a series of trees complete with electricity and plumbing.
Sonny00:02:06Like a tree mansion.
JVL00:02:07A tree mansion. And after my weekend experience with the shed, I want to know how the fuck he did that. So we were able to do this only because I have a friend, the father of one of my godchildren, who is. So he's a librarian by trade, but in his heart, he's a handyman. So much so that when he retires, that's what he wants to do. He wants to start a handyman business. And so Dave was like, yeah, I'll come over. We'll get this thing up. And so Dave, Flash, and I spent 90 man hours over the course of three days.
Sonny00:02:52So three people, 10 hours a day. So that's 30 hours each. So 90 man hours. Just want to clarify for folks.
JVL00:02:59Just to get this thing up, this is from the kit, the DIY kit. And you may remember that we had previously thought that Flash and two of his idiot friends from high school were going to do it. Yeah, yeah. If we had allowed, now having done this, had we allowed them to try to build the shed, they would have died. By which I mean, they would have gotten some ramshackle version of this structure up, at which point it would have collapsed on top of them. Right, right. And I am sorry, but I think it should be illegal to sell DIY kits like this without an assembly option. Like, you shouldn't be able to, if you're going to sell a kit like this, you should be forced by law, possibly by the Constitution itself, to also offer professional assembly with it. There's no way that a normal human being, and by normal, I mean, like, normal levels of handiness, could possibly do this.
Sonny00:04:09When you say normal, I want to clarify, you mean like a healthy, able-bodied man and one helper person of indeterminate gender, that's who should be required, that's all you should need to assemble something like this, is that basically what you're saying?
JVL00:04:26You should need those, and they... It should be able to be accomplished by people who have, like, the median level of house handiness. Okay. So, I think I'm slightly above median, honestly. You know, I'm not out on the curve where Mike Warren is. Mike Warren's very, you know, taking apart refrigerators, right? Mike is very handy. But this thing, the reality is, it was impossible. Without Dave, there is no... No universe in which I could have successfully completed this project, even given infinite time. If you had simply placed me at the bottom of a gravity well, like Interstellar, where, you know, one hour was actually 75 years or something like that, and you said, all of your other responsibilities are gone, someone is taking care of your children, somebody is doing your professional job, you can just sit here. And work on this project for as long as you want, totally guilt-free. I could not have erected this thing. And I, it's, uh, let's start with this. So I, I, um, I did employ a landscaper to build for me a gravel pad upon which to erect the shed.
Sonny00:05:45Okay.
JVL00:05:46I noticed that.
Sonny00:05:47I noticed that from the images that you had sent, because I was like, wait, there's a, there's like a little sandbox filled with gravel here.
JVL00:05:55Yeah. And so it's, you know, four by four. There's a 12 by 14 rectangle of four by fours filled with, with gravel. Again, you do this to, to, so you can have it nice and level and, uh, and so you get good drainage. So the gentleman I hired to do this, uh, I hired him back in January, I think. Uh, and he came out and the reason I gave him the job after I had bid it out to a number of people was because they were all basically the same price. And this guy was about to have a baby and really needed the work. So I never really looked too close at it because it was January. It was cold and shit. And, uh, now upon looking at this thing closely, uh, not only was it not level, it was about 10 inches off of level. One corner was 10 inches lower than the others. Um, it wasn't even a rectangle. It's a fucking trapezoid. It's a fucking trapezoid. Okay. And I, you know, and so Dave was like, man, do you want to call this guy back and have him fix it? And I, I just thought, no, like for, for who, for what, what's that going to get? Right. You know, the guy's been paid. It was half a year ago.
Guest00:07:11But on the other hand, I was pretty pissed.
JVL00:07:14Like, unless this guy is totally incompetent, he must've known that he had fucked up. I don't know. Um, but here's the thing, even after all this, after the 90 hours and the leveling of this thing and.
Sonny00:07:30So wait, I, I, wait, I want to, I want to, because I feel like this is a whole nother project. This is like a whole sec. You, did you have to like take apart the trapezoid and square it?
JVL00:07:40No, no, you didn't do any of that. So we, we left the trapezoid trapezoidal. And what we did was we, we, there was an optical illusion at which the shed looks as though it is centered within a rectangle when you are looking at it from the direction of the house. So if you're in the house and look at it would only be if you walked behind the shed, you would say, well, shit, this, that you plop the shed down, not parallel with the rectangle. And then you, oh, or it's a trapezoid.
Sonny00:08:11It's so, if you look, it's one of these things where it's like an optical illusion. Then if you look at it from one side, you got a shed, you look at it from the other side, you got like a FW Murnau movie.
JVL00:08:20Oh yeah. No, from the house side, you're like, oh, it looks both like it's a, you know, a rectangle and it's nice and flat. Right. You walk around to the other side of it and you see that the shed is actually jacked up on, on cement blocks, like a, like a car that's been abandoned in 1970s Detroit, uh, jacked up on blocks to keep it from anyway. Oh, but, but the point is even with all Dave's help and with the 90 man hours, it's not done. Like I still haven't put the shingles on it. I saw, you know, the roof is wrapped in a, in a, a nice mid grade membrane. So like it's fine under rain for, you know, however long it takes me to get the roof on it, but I have to climb. Like the roof is pitched very steep. I am not looking forward to climbing up on this roof. Like ladders are where middle-aged men go to die.
Sonny00:09:11Yeah. And, uh, to be fair, the, the roof of the shed's not that high.
JVL00:09:17Well, I mean, what is it at the highest point?
Sonny00:09:20Like eight feet, 15 feet, 15 feet.
JVL00:09:23Yeah. This is a real shed. Like it's a, like. Like it's, you know, it's, it's at least 12 feet. Okay. It's, it's higher than a basketball.
Sonny00:09:32Okay. All right. Well, that is pretty high. That's higher than I would want to be.
JVL00:09:35And, uh, and I, again, I just, I, the entire thing felt like despair and I, you know, I was out there, you know, hammering away at stuff and I'm still, you know, I got to put the window, the windows aren't in the, none of the, the finishing is done. The doors aren't on it and I've got to do all that stuff. It's not urgent that I can attack like an hour at a time. Now the thing is up.
Sonny00:09:58Do like one window a day.
JVL00:10:00Basically. Yes. Um, and you know, and then, but the roof, the roof will be an all day affair. Like I'll have to set aside a full day for me to roof and it'll have to be me and flash
Sonny00:10:11because trying to do it like Shawshank, you get a, you get a bucket of beers out there. You get some folks up on the roof, tarn and pitching it.
JVL00:10:19Uh, no, this is shingles because it's not, this isn't just like swabbing stuff. You know, anyway, the whole thing is, uh, I now think that I was an insane person to take this on.
Sonny00:10:30I told you, I told you.
JVL00:10:32Utterly insane.
Sonny00:10:33I told you the minute you told us that you were buying a shed, you got to hire somebody to do it. You just got to hire somebody to come out and do it.
JVL00:10:41Well, and I told you, I went around looking and nobody would do like, you know, I, I, I kept going to guys, the guy who delivered it, shed. Michael ghosted me. He was like, yeah, it'll be great. I can do that. And now we look at the amount of time I spent on this and shed Michael's price, which I think was like $1,300. For assembly, including roofing materials. I don't know how he could have made money on that because this is, uh, that was a, that was a bargain basement price. The whole thing.
Sonny00:11:07I want, I want, I want to go back. I want to go back in time, uh, to when we were just first discussing this, because if I remember correctly, there were, there were sheds that you could buy that came with an option to purchase assembly. Right. But not this one.
JVL00:11:21This one did not have that option.
Sonny00:11:23This specific one did not. Why did you go with this specific? One instead of the other ones that could have been assembled for money by the Home Depot or whoever.
JVL00:11:32So that's a really excellent question. Uh, the reason is because I liked this shed the most. I liked the design of it. I liked the aesthetic of it. Uh, and it fit my needs in terms of space. And then with the, the, the price, like the, the, the value of what it was getting. Cause I wanted something that was like 10 by 12. I couldn't accommodate much bigger than that, um, and much smaller than that, and it wouldn't have been useful to me. I need, I need to get a full garage worth of shit into it. And, uh, and again, I just, for, for normal consumer protections, this Elizabeth Warren's next, next crusade to protect consumers ought to be about shed sales. Sheds. Specifically sheds. Not allowing these things to be sold to unsuspecting middle-aged men like myself, who this is the first time I feel like I was taken advantage of in a very long time. I feel like I'm a pretty savvy consumer, pretty good about stuff. I, this, I just feel like I was royally turned out.
Sonny00:12:30JV, I just, I need, I once again need to remind you that you had somebody in your ear the whole time telling you this was a mistake, that it would sit unassembled for many months and then it would be a huge pain in the ass to put together. And you'd probably just hire somebody to come do it anyway.
JVL00:12:43You didn't get to that last part, but you know, and I don't know if you remember this, but the, I called now like two months ago, I, I just called the maker of the shed.
Sonny00:12:53Yeah. I remember.
JVL00:12:54And, and when I went to their website, they had like, you know, Hey, installation special, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, I was so excited. I thought this is great. They, they're going to. And when I asked them, okay, so what's the price in this? They were like, what model do you have? And I told him it was the North port or whatever. And they were like, Oh, we don't do assembly on that one. See, I was, that was red alarm bells started going off and I now remember the, what, what shed Michael first said to me when he delivered this. And so the gentleman was last September, I think it was last September when the gentleman from Costco dropped this off and was saying, do it yourself. Uh, and I said, I don't know. I mean, I thought I would, uh, have you done these? And he's like, yeah, I do a couple of these a week. And, uh, I said to him, is it, uh, is it doable? And he said, well, do you have any construction experience? I said, no. And his response to me was, well, good luck. Those are the words that shed Michael said to me upon. Hearing that I was thinking about doing it myself. Well, good luck.
Sonny00:13:59Shed. Michael's going to come out of the closet, reveal himself to be a listener of the show. Cause he was like, I wanted, I was timing you. I wanted to see how long it would take last. I wanted to see what would happen. You didn't disappoint.
JVL00:14:13I'm waiting for the sense of satisfaction to, to kick in, but I gotta be honest. I don't have that. I expected to have it. I thought, oh, I'll have annoyance. Yeah, I have, I have lingering. Annoyance that I was such a sucker. Yeah. Such a sucker. When the answer is just pay somebody to come do this shit, because this is not, this is outside the scope of normal. This is like being, uh, uh, you know, taking a, a one day course in first aid at the Y and then having somebody ask you to do open heart surgery.
Sonny00:14:53Okay. That might be, yeah, it's a little dramatic. Uh, you know, I would say that that is, it's unfair.
JVL00:14:59It's un-American. It's, uh, it's just, you should have just hired the guys outside the Home Depot.
Sonny00:15:04You should have thrown them 50 bucks each. Come out and help me, help me put up a shed.
JVL00:15:09I don't think that would have worked either.
Sonny00:15:10You should have converted to Amish. You should have converted to Amish so you could get the people out there to raise your barn for you and then quit.
JVL00:15:17Boy, howdy. Uh, anyway, and as I was watching this movie and the, we'll talk about it when we get to the, the tree house section of the movie. But these guys, they just build this mansion in the trees with no plans. So far as I can tell, no architectural drawings, no professional help. It's just like, he has a bunch of, bunch of buddies come over and they like find some lumber and boards and they just start tacking stuff up and somehow there's like a working toilet up in the tree house. How is water being pumped upwards? 75. None of this makes it. And I just.
Sonny00:15:59Hoses.
JVL00:15:59Hoses?
Sonny00:16:01Some hose.
JVL00:16:01Is a hose gonna, gonna force water up 75 feet? I don't know that that's how the Bernoulli principle works.
Sonny00:16:08That's how it works. If you put a hose and you just run the hose wherever, the water comes out. I don't, I, how do you think hoses work? I, if you take a hose and you just put it somewhere, water comes out.
JVL00:16:18Normally there are height limits on these things.
Sonny00:16:20No, no, that's not how hoses work.
JVL00:16:22I, uh.
Sonny00:16:24The pressure builds up at the base. And it shoots up and it comes out. I don't, I don't, I'm not sure what's so confusing about this.
JVL00:16:32How are you doing? What's going on?
Sonny00:16:34I'm fine. I haven't had to build anything. It's great. Uh, uh, there, there really isn't much going on on my end. We are definitely in the, I was just saying we're in the hot part of, we're getting to the hot part of summer, uh, in the sense that it has been in the high nineties for the last 10 days or so, which is always, which is always fun. Uh, it's going to be a little cooler next week, which will also be fun. Um, but, uh, you know, it's, it's that part of the summer where like the kids are all in different camps and we're doing like split days and it just is a, it's, uh, it's no, it's no good. It's no, it's no fun. I hate this part of the year. This is the worst part of the year. I wish kids were in school all year round, not for their own educational purpose, but solely for childcare convenience. It would be, it'd be a million times easier for me. I don't, I'm not, when I was, when I lived in England, you know, I lived in England for, for a little while and they have year round school. And it's not really year round. There's still like a month off in the summer. You take, you know, a month or six weeks or something like that off in the summer. Um, but it's, it's such a better system. It's such a, it's such a better system all around.
JVL00:17:38A month sounds like about the right amount of time.
Guest00:17:41Give the kids a break.
Sonny00:17:42Let them have, you give them a break, you let them reset and then they come back ready, ready to, ready to go. It's great. I, we, we have been going to the library quite a bit, which is nice. Uh, my, my daughter gets like seven books and reads them all in two days. And I'm just like, how are you absorbing any of this? You're not actually reading these books. Right. And then I realized that half of them are like those dog man, captain underpants, whatever books. It's like, they're basically cartoon, they're comic books. They're like, you know, uh, graphic novels. And I was like, well, that's not really count. Come on.
JVL00:18:14That doesn't really count, man. She's reading.
Sonny00:18:17It's great. Yeah, it's fine. Whatever. Read, read real books. Go, go get some Stephen King books or something, you know, give her it at age.
JVL00:18:26Oh, so what's coming out in the movie? So we get a, this week, this week is despicable me, right?
Sonny00:18:35There's despicable me that comes out, uh, on the fourth weekend, uh, or I guess maybe the third, even it's, it's July 4th weekend is always a weird weekend because it, the holidays coincide with weird days and it's hard to, um, but I, uh, yeah, you got that. Uh, then at the end of July, you've got. You've got a Deadpool Wolverine and then, um, we got, uh, I don't know. There's a new Kevin Costner, three hour Western horizon. You don't want to go see horizon.
JVL00:19:08Just briefly about Deadpool. I, uh, on the plane out to Denver, I watched Deadpool again cause I was like, Oh, this is, you know, this was fun. I remember this. It's actually not a good movie and it's not fun.
Sonny00:19:21You don't like it.
JVL00:19:21You don't, it's not, it's too like, it was just, it was a novelty. Yes. Oh, they curse and do hard R stuff, but it's not actually funny in the way that like team America world police is, is a novelty. It's like puppets doing sex and stuff, but it's also very funny. Yeah. Deadpool is just the novelty stuff without like, it's not actually all that funny. Yeah. It's not a good movie.
Sonny00:19:49Uh, yeah. I mean, Deadpool, Deadpool definitely exists in this fairly weird. Liminal space of like comic book movies. There's a formula and it's subverting the formula, but not really. And it's kind of clever, but it's also very self-aware. It's very meta. It's winking. There's a lot of winking and how much you, how much you go for that?
JVL00:20:11I, I, I have not rewatched as a substitute for you for jokes, right?
Sonny00:20:16Well, I mean, this is my base problem.
JVL00:20:19It's not funny enough.
Sonny00:20:20Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's fair. Uh, I, I have not rewatched either. I don't rewatch any. Of the Marvel movies. I don't, I, they just, I don't think I've ever. With the exception of, with the exception of the Spider-Man movies that I, which I actually really like, like even the Ramy, like back to the Ramy, even the amazing Spider-Man's, uh, and the, the new ones I like that, that character, I, I find amusing and those films are well enough done that I, I still find some stuff, but like, I, man, I was watching, um, I was in the gym the other day. I was just on the, I was on my, I was doing the elliptical and like they had the, uh, they had the end. End of Avengers end game on one of the TVs. Cause it was on TNT or something like that was on TNT, but here's the best part. It was the end of Avengers end game and the TV, uh, that I was watching it on in the gym had motion smoothing on, let me tell you, that is a nightmare series of images, just having to like sit there on the elliptical while I've got my, uh, you know, uh, AirPods in listening to music and watching the, the soap opera effect. On, on the giant action spectacle of that, that sequence, um, uh, not, not in
JVL00:21:32fun times, bad times, actually, you know, there, there are a handful of Marvel movies that are really rewatchable chief among them being the first Avengers. Because the first Avengers is a perfect movie.
Sonny00:21:44The first Avengers I have rewatched once, uh, from start to finish. I have rewatched it once. Uh, and I, I think, you know, I've probably rewatched, uh, I think I watched Thor, the Thor Ragnarok. I watched that twice because, uh, my wife wanted to see it. Um, which was interesting because she doesn't really ever want to see these movies, but she was like, I heard it's funny. It's got that take a white TT. He directed it. I was like, uh, um, but yeah, that's about it. That's, that's about it. I don't know.
JVL00:22:16Wimbledon has started. Are you watching Wimbledon?
Sonny00:22:18I'm not watching Wimbledon at all. I'm not, I'm like, so I'm so checked out of sports. I don't know who's playing, who, who, are there any Americans left yet?
JVL00:22:25Is it still, we, we watched, uh, we watched a little Euro cup yesterday. We were watching, uh, Portugal, Slovenia and late in extra time or maybe it's overtime, not stop, stop, stop, not stoppage time. So it's, oh, it's extra time and went to extra time. Uh, the Portuguese get a, a PK and they give it to Ronaldo and Ronaldo, uh, the, the keeper for Slovenia makes a fantastic save and the, the ball, you know, the, the, and so he saves it and Ronaldo started crying on the field and my family is sitting watching this and my children were in a state of disbelief that this. Drone man was, and when I say crying, I mean, there were tears coming down his
Sonny00:23:29eyes and big movie style tears, like movie style, glycerin and another, you
JVL00:23:37know, another one of his players came over to comfort him and like grabbed his head and, and kissed him, kissed him. And all I could think of was Talagut, Talladega nights, um, towards the end when, when, uh, Jean-Claude says, Ricky, baby.
Guest00:23:55I will be thrown from the race, but you must kiss me.
JVL00:23:58Right. That, that it was so foreign in my kids were like, why is he, why is he crying?
Sonny00:24:07There's no crying in sports.
JVL00:24:09What the fuck is this? And I just, I didn't know without sounding like Hank Hill, I didn't understand how to explain to them that there are just cultural differences between America and Europe and, you know, like in soccer. And grown men cry because they don't do as well as they want.
Sonny00:24:29And, uh, no, but that's, that's, that's a moment where Hank Hill serves as a positive example. You just be like, them boys aren't right. And then you move on. That's, that's, you, you just, you, you just move on from there. Move on from there.
JVL00:24:42It, uh, it was a real, it was a real, real moment. I mean, there's no, there's no crying in baseball. There's no crying in baseball. There's no crying in baseball.
Sonny00:24:52There's no crying in sports. And there's no, I like the, uh, no. Uh, Ronaldo is definitely at the end of his, uh, tenure. I think as a, as a, uh, soccer player, he's had a good run, but I think he's just about, he's about that. It's funny. I actually watch, I did watch a little bit of the, uh, the Euro. Uh, what was I watching? It was the, um, now I can't remember who it was. It was Spain. It was Spain, Spain, and whoever, whoever they were playing Spain ends up winning four to one. Uh, but the, uh, but it was definitely. Definitely like, oh yeah, this is what good soccer looks like. Cause every once in a while I'll see clips of, I'll see clips of MLS or something and I'm just like, these look like high school games to me. These look like, I like, I watched college soccer sometimes and that's about how good this looks and it, you know, it's also like, and this is going to be this, this is going to get, we're going to have to stop this real quick, but this is kind of how I feel every time I see they've been showing lots of clips of the WNBA recently because Caitlin Clark is a big hit, full, she's a big hit. She's really, she's really, and she is really good. She's really good. And then anytime they show a non Caitlin Clark clip, it's like, look at, look at this person making a layup. Good for Caitlin Clark though. I'm glad that she's creating interest in this wonderful sport.
JVL00:26:14Uh, well, you know, the WNBA is figuring out what the NBA figured out 50 years ago, which is that, uh, one of the ways to get popular is by selling race
Sonny00:26:25war and, uh, strong element of that too.
JVL00:26:30And a lot of the comments is really leaning into that. And, uh, it's, you know, it's like we have magic and bird now. Great. Let's do this.
Sonny00:26:38Yeah, it really, there is a, there is a very strong, like, it's a little
JVL00:26:42socially irresponsible to be honest of, of the WNBA to do that. But, uh, I get that.
Sonny00:26:49And Spike Lee's daughter is going to make do the right thing too. It's going to be a Caitlin, someone moves in with a Caitlin Clark Jersey into the neighborhood. It's going to be bad, bad times all around.
JVL00:27:01That's pretty funny.
Sonny00:27:02I don't know if Spike Lee has a daughter. That was just, uh, I'm just, I'm just making racism and sexism jokes now. That's what I do. Do you, uh, but I mean, I, no, I don't, I don't think I'm being, I don't think I'm being unfair here when I say that like the WNBA highlights are not that impressive, but whatever. Uh, people are gonna yell at me in the comments. Yell at me in the comments. It's fine.
JVL00:27:23I have not watched any WNBA highlights. I couldn't say, um, I would say though, the WNBA is finally under figuring out that selling storylines and conflict and narrative, like this was this, the NBA has done that for decades and that, I mean, that's what the league's popularity has built on. It's built on stars and storylines and rivalries and good for them for figuring out, I guess.
Sonny00:27:54I will say, look, I mean, uh, to take slightly the other side of, uh, an argument you might expect me to take, I will say that there is like a very obvious, like, oh, look, finally, there's like a really good, uh, white lady basketball player that everyone can cheer for. And like, that is very much a part of this whole thing.
JVL00:28:15All right. Let me, let me, uh, let me, let me derail us.
Sonny00:28:18Okay.
JVL00:28:20You understand the W, the WNBA now has its own, uh, Anna Kournikova.
Sonny00:28:28Wow. Let's, that's not, oh, you mean, oh, not, not Caitlin Clark. The other one, uh, I mean, who plays for Los Angeles, Cameron. I mean, Cameron blew out her knee, right? She's basically done playing basketball at this point. She's just going to be a model, right?
JVL00:28:43That's like, no, I assume she'll come back and I assume that she will wind up making more money than any female player in the history of the WNBA over the course of her career. Once you wrap up endorsements and all that stuff. Endorsements. Yeah. Um, and, uh, because she's basically just a six foot four. I mean, she looks like Elizabeth Debicki.
Sonny00:29:03Yes. No, that's exactly who I thought of when I, when I saw her, I was like, oh, that's, that's the girl from 10. That's the tall girl. Right. Right. That's who that is.
JVL00:29:12And, uh, the pay gap between her and better basketball players in the WNBA who do not look like her is going to be really something to, uh, really something to behold.
Sonny00:29:24It's going to keep Stephen A. Smith in business for another 10 years. It's going to be great. Oh God.
JVL00:29:28It's a full employment project for Stephen A. Smith.
Sonny00:29:31The take economy. Does pardon the interruption still exist? Is that, is that still on? Do people still watch?
JVL00:29:37No idea. Tim Kalashov. Boy, it's a weird show without Mike, isn't it?
Sonny00:29:42Yeah. I don't know. It's a, it's awkward.
JVL00:29:44Sorry guys. All right. Uh, talk about the box office.
Sonny00:29:48Box office. Huge hit. Quiet place. Day one. Biggest opening in the quiet place series. The Lupita Nyong'o. She's big, big star. Everyone loves her. People love these quiet place movies. I like these quiet place movies. I like them. Nice high concept. Here's what, here's what this series does well. Good high concept horror. If you make noise, the monsters kill you. Great. Perfect. I understand that concept. It's got a good actors. John Krasinski and Emily Blunt in the first one. Emily Blunt and Killian Murphy in the second one. And then Lupita Nyong'o and some guy. I don't know. I can't remember his name. In this one. It's directed by the guy who made Pig. You liked Pig JBL, didn't you?
JVL00:30:25I refuse to see that movie.
Sonny00:30:26You refuse to see Pig? You didn't see Pig? Nope. Oh, it's good. You would like Pig.
JVL00:30:31It's because of you. I refuse to see it because of you. You refuse to see it because of me? Because you wouldn't stop talking about how amazing that movie was. I'm just like, I fucking hate food. I hate everything to do with foodie culture. Yeah. I hate, I'm not, I refuse to watch The Bear. I refuse to watch Pig. I just like, it's just food people.
Sonny00:30:47In part though, in part though, this movie is a repudiation of like the, the, well, whatever. It doesn't matter. You, then you might. Not like this because there's a whole foodie, there's a whole foodie sequence in this where she goes, she, the, the, the, the, it doesn't matter. Anyway, big hit. That's a big hit. Yeah.
JVL00:31:05So the monsters are aliens?
Sonny00:31:07Yes.
JVL00:31:08How did the aliens get here?
Sonny00:31:10Well, we see, we see in this in Quiet Place Day One, they just crash into the earth like the meteors or something. They just, it's not clear why the aliens are here.
JVL00:31:19If this is some sort of terraforming project or if they're, if they're just, if they're
Sonny00:31:24just. A floating, if it's like floating weeds that, you know, go through space and they land on planets and destroy them, it's, it's hard to say.
JVL00:31:31It kind of feels to me like this would be the kind of foe the American military would be pretty okay to handle.
Sonny00:31:41No, you don't understand. They're very well armored. They can't, it's very hard to kill them. You can't just shoot them. You gotta, you gotta really, and they gotta figure out, the whole first movie is trying to figure out their, their weakness. Turns out the weakness is really high pitch noise. It's basically, it's like Mars, Mars attacks.
JVL00:31:57Yes. This is what I'm saying. Like, I feel like the, I feel like the American military industrial complex would figure that shit out in about like four hours and DARPA would have, uh, some gigantic sonic, like a sonic range weapon that just could clear entire square miles at a time of these things.
Sonny00:32:17And then it is one thing we do very well.
JVL00:32:19Yeah. Like these, I'm sorry. I feel like we could handle these guys.
Sonny00:32:24Junker where the, the military would retire to, we would come up with the equipment necessary to defeat these things is what you're saying.
JVL00:32:31Pretty fast.
Sonny00:32:32Yeah.
JVL00:32:32Yeah. And pretty fast. That's a, you know, I was sure it would suck to be Emily Blunt out there running around, but, uh, I don't know. Okay. So quiet place to do well or quiet place day one or three, uh, horizon, horizon, an
Sonny00:32:45American saga, only $11 million. But this is a, this is a movie that, you know, is, uh, that's a, that's a, that's a movie that is going to have to extend. Beyond the opening weekend, that was never going to be a huge, uh, hit on opening weekend is going to be a, uh, a grower, not a show. So I have heard very, there are very competing estimates on the cost of this movie. Uh, the, the official number being touted by the studio is 50 to $60 million, something like that. $55 million. Uh, Matt Bellany at puck has been, has insisted that each of these movies costs $110 million to make. And I think that it's, it's unclear whether or not. It's unclear whether or not the $110 million that everyone talks about is the cost of both movies, like six hours of movie, or if each one costs a hundred million dollars. I think that there's, I think there's some, there's some dispute about this. So it's, it's hard to say precisely.
JVL00:33:40Uh, if it's each one, that should be fine, right? It'll, it'll play for a long time. We'll see. Uh, it'll do huge business on DVD and Blu-ray at Walmart.
Sonny00:33:52Well, that's, that's what this movie is. And look, this is what Kevin Costner is counting on. He is not counting on this movie making $500 million at the domestic box office. He's counting on it making, uh, you know, essentially it's advertising budget back. And then, you know, um, and then the real money being made on home video and licensing it to networks for, for years to come, et cetera, et cetera. So he's got, he's got a long, he's got the long game planned out. Good for him. I, the mute, the movie is, uh, so I've seen it. The movie is one of them. The most shocking acts of cinematic hubris I think I've ever seen. Cause it's not a movie.
JVL00:34:29You said you loved it.
Sonny00:34:30I do love it. I do love it, but it's not a movie. It's not, this is not a movie. It is like the first third of five different movies all jammed together. It's like, it's, it's, it's the most, it's the wildest thing I've ever seen. And I don't, I don't mind because I get, do you remember Dune part one? Do you remember Dune part one? Do you remember the advertising for Dune part one?
JVL00:34:50Yeah. Advertise Dune.
Sonny00:34:52Do you remember what they didn't advertise? No, they never said part one. They never said part one. Part one was not on the posters or anything. Now, if you followed the trades, you knew that this was, they were splitting the book into two movies. You knew that because you followed the trades.
JVL00:35:06People in my audience at Dune, when I first saw it, when part one appeared on screen at the very beginning, I heard people yell, what the fuck?
Sonny00:35:15That 100% happened in my, in my non-press screening as well. When I went to go see it with a, with a paying audience at a, at an IMAX or something on opening weekend and somebody was like, what the hell? Yeah. And it was a, but the, but like, so I, if you do that to audiences, I don't blame them for being mad and upset and feeling like they've been lied to. You put the part one right there in the, in the title and it's fine. Like we all know this is part one. It's not a full movie, but it is aggressively not a full movie. It's like not even a movie that really ends on a supernatural break. There's like one of, one of the segments ends at a natural breaking point and then it literally cuts to a coming this season. On Horizon montage. It's amazing. It's, it's honestly, uh, and the fact that the fact that, so I think, I think, so the second one is done. It comes out in August and I think he is shooting part three now, or like we'll, it has shot part of it and we'll go back to shooting it after the press tour and all that is done for these two movies, something like that. Um, but like it is, it really is like he made, he made straight up. One third of five different movies and slap them all together and maybe they converge all together. And it's like the way I described it on across the movie aisle this week is that it's like, it's kind of like a Robert Altman film, but it's like, it's like, it's like an Altman film that cuts off before all of the converging storylines start interacting with each other. It's like Nashville, except you never see any of the five different groups of people deal with one another. They're all just doing their own separate thing for three hours. So that's what this movie is like. I love it. And it, it like, it's actually really well done. It's, it's, it's a very, it's very snappily edited. It doesn't feel like a three hour movie. There's so much happening that you don't get bored. It's very funny. It is like, it's weirdly funny. It's got a great cast. Michael Rooker, uh, is, is, is doing great work as like a Irish army officer. I, I don't know, man. I, and I enjoyed it a lot, uh, but it's, it's a very strange movie and I, I would not be shocked if it has trouble finding an audience until. Part two comes out. I'll put it that way.
JVL00:37:26All right. Uh, so let's talk about the movie we're really talking about, but this is a weird show. It's very weird doing this without you, Michael.
Sonny00:37:35We need it. We need three man shows. That's the best way to, how to rob a bank. It's on Netflix. Uh, and it is a true crime documentary. It's very, it's very, here's the thing I most liked about this movie. 87 minutes long. That's a big plus. Uh, so how to rob a bank is a story of a, uh, bank. A bank robber in the Pacific Northwest, um, who, uh, smart guy goes to college, decides to get into meth. He basically does the Walter White thing.
JVL00:38:03I'm sorry, I had to stop you right there. Yeah. I had to stop you right there. That's not what this is about. How to rob a bank is the story of a man who takes on the most ambitious DIY home building project that America has ever seen. Yes.
Sonny00:38:15That's what this movie is about for me. The tree mansion is a.
JVL00:38:18The tree house, as they call it. Can you please, before you get to the meth, can you start, because the movie starts with the tree house.
Sonny00:38:23All right. So this guy, why don't you talk about the tree house? You're fascinated by this tree house. Explain to the people what the tree house is.
JVL00:38:30The movie spends the first 15 minutes talking about the tree house that this guy built and lived in, which is, and they show it, it's, it's got multiple levels. It's 60 or 75 feet up in the air. And from the interior, it looks like a real house. And from the exterior, it looks like it is being held up with, uh, chewing gum. And some boards that they found behind a dumpster. Is that wrong to say? Like you, you see, and it is unclear how, and you know what? We get a home video of this guy leading a friend in to show it off to him. And he says, yeah, I did it in two weeks. And then he's like, no, it really took like three or four months. I had some friends over. Then we get somebody else who was involved in buildings. Like, yeah, we had a couple dozen guys. We were like hanging upside down from ropes, building it. And I just, I looked at it and I just, how? How did this thing come? I could have had the whole, not the whole 86 minutes. I could have gotten another 30 minutes on the tree house because I just thought. And, and then we learn at the end when we come back to the, one of the guys comes back to the tree house and the entire tree house has just disintegrated and fallen out of the sky. Yeah. And he's like the ruins of a ship. And so like, maybe it really was not built sturdily. You know what I mean? Actual death trap.
Sonny00:39:54They said like after, after he, after the guy ends, after the guy, uh, well, whatever, after he exits the picture of this, this, the main guy, he, uh, the, the tree house like disintegrated within two years. I mean, it was like, it was very clearly like held together with like, oh, this is falling down. I better put a board here.
JVL00:40:15Yeah. It had an open air toilet. Like the bathroom was just open air on the deck. The toilet was just sitting there. They carried a raincoat. Change up like, you know, 75. So they, they were doing fire things.
Sonny00:40:30They were doing fire things in the tree house upstairs in the tree.
JVL00:40:33I just, everything about it is amazing to me. And I assume that they didn't do it, get any permits. No, no. Uh, like where did they get the lumber from? How do they schlep things from here to the, oh, I just had so many questions about this tree house.
Sonny00:40:47You wanted to know more about the tree house. You wanted to do like 70 minutes on the tree house and then 10 minutes on the bank. Robberies.
JVL00:40:53I could know the bank robbing was great, but I could have continue. Sorry. I've got this.
Sonny00:40:59This guy lives in a tree house and he decides that he wants to be, he wants total freedom. It's basically the, the, the movie is structured a little bit like point break to the point where there's even visual references to it. We get a couple of cuts.
JVL00:41:10They talk about point break. They talk about how much he was obsessed with Brody.
Sonny00:41:14And the, the, uh, idea here is this guy, smart guy wanted to be free of civilization. Constraints and free to do what he wanted. And to get that freedom, he realized that the easiest way to do it was to rob banks. And he was, uh, he start with the math.
JVL00:41:32He starts out as a meth dealer, starts out as a meth dealer.
Sonny00:41:35He see, he go, he, in college, he like a common deers, the, uh, the university labs and starts making Walter white style, you know, really high grade math and he's selling it. And they find out about, they kick him out of the school. So he can't, he can't make meth anymore, uh, and decides to get into bank robbing and to do this, he puts on these elaborate disguises. He makes, you know, Hollywood style masks, the prosthetic masks to, to disguise who he is. Uh, and he's pretty good at it. He's pretty good at controlling the crowd, which is the hardest thing. And he's able to, you know, get in, uh, first, first couple, he just gets money out of the cash register. They realize they have to go in the vault to get the real, uh, scores and they start doing that. And they, they wound up, I, what was the total at the end? So it was like two or $3 million, right?
JVL00:42:21Two, it's more than $2 million. Yeah.
Sonny00:42:23Um, that they end up taking in the, the course of these robberies or 19 scores.
JVL00:42:28Yeah.
Sonny00:42:29So they, they, you know, the guy, the guy is a accomplished bank robber and you know, the, the, the way the documentary is kind of set up, it's set up like a fairly standard true crime doc, right? We talked to the surviving accomplices. We talked to, uh, the cops and the FBI agents who stopped them, blah, blah, blah. But the whole thing really is structured like point break or something like that. It is, and it is about the influence. Of, uh, media on how these people see themselves. And that's what I thought was the most interesting element here. Not necessarily the bank robbers, the guy getting away with the robberies, not the tree house, even though that is, that is fascinating. The, the, the idea at the core of this film is all of these people functionally see themselves as characters in a movie doing different movie things. The cops see themselves as we got to stop these bank robbers. The, the robbers see themselves as like, we're basically Robin hood types or Billy, the kid types, you know, we're stealing from the rich. We're not taking the, they even have the scene from heat where Robert De Niro says, we're not taking your money. We're taking the bank's money. Right. And it's like, there's this idea, there's this idea that robbing a bank, a nonviolent robbery of a bank, a robbery that doesn't end in a shootout with, you know, customers getting killed and all that is essentially a victimless crime that. You know, the money is covered by the government. There's insurance. Nobody, everybody's made whole, this isn't coming out of anybody's bank accounts. The, the, the, the crime is not really that big of a deal. And one thing that's interesting is they talk to a couple of, uh, tellers who have been through this a bunch of times tellers who, you know, one of the tellers they talked to has been robbed 14 times, something like that. And she's like, it's terrifying every time it's terrifying to go to work and not know if you're going to have a gun stuck in your face. And it's true. It's traumatizing. And it, it is like, this is not a way to live. This is not a, this is not a, um, this is not mentally healthy. It's bad for, it's bad for all of us. And, you know, w w we should not romanticize this sort of thing. And there are people on, there are people in the documentary who do kind of try and excuse it and romanticize it. And, uh, that contrast is very, is very interesting to me because I do think, and I think documentarians of the sort often have a kind of. Um, affinity for the robbers that they are, you know, if they're taking anybody's side, it's usually, you know, oh, look at these, look at these free spirits. Look at these people who are, you know, out of options, whatever. This was just, this was just a, uh, a, a, I wouldn't describe him as a lazy guy, but he's a guy who didn't want to work a nine to five. He's a guy who was like, I don't, he didn't feel the need to hew to society's conventions. So he's just going to start robbing banks and that's how he's going to make his money and fuck that guy. Like, fuck him. I mean, like, honestly, like I, I'm, you know, by the end of the movie, he gets killed in a shootout with the cops and I'm glad, I'm glad he's dead. Um, and, uh, you know, that, and that sounds callow, callous, whatever. I, I just like, I, I don't care about him. And I, you, you, there are interviews with his family members who are like, um, you know, we got a call that he was involved in the robbery and, uh, and, and I was like, oh my God, is he hurt? He, you know, was he, was he held hostage? And they're like, no, he's the robber. And they couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe. And that's the other point of this film is that the decisions that you make reverberate beyond yourself. They influence your family, friends, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know. I thought it was a really interesting, I thought it was a really interesting documentary, um, at least in part for, uh, at least in part because of the ways in which it kind of refused to make excuses for these guys.
Guest00:46:18Yeah.
JVL00:46:19I, uh, I thought it was one of the better. Better Netflix documentaries I've seen it's it's doesn't have a ton of filler. The filler it has like about the tree house is utterly fascinating. Um, it succeeds largely on the strength of his, his number one accomplice. So he has a guy who, who rides shotgun with him, um, who survives and somehow is out of jail now, despite being sentenced to 21 years, which is amazing to me and who looks great and sounds great. And it's very articulate. You, you have one thing. I have one thing that is slightly wrong about the chronology. So he gets thrown out of evergreen state for, for using the lab for math. And so he starts cooking in his own lab and he meets a guy who becomes his connection. So the deal is he makes the, he makes the meth and he goes and meets in the woods with some, some guy whose name I think is like Dr. Dr. Pacific or something. Pacific maybe. And this guy just hands him a briefcase full of money. He takes the math and that's the last that, uh, Hollywood, we're just going to call the character's name. Hollywood is real name is Scott. That's the last he sees of it. And then this guy's the one who takes it. He's the wholesaler. He takes it to the hell's angels, the hell's angels then become the distributors and whatnot. And that's where the real money is. So Scott seems to be making a lot more money in meth than he ever made in bank robbing. Um, they talk about, uh, a couple of million dollars per, per batch that he, he sells off and comes home with just, you know, suitcases full of hundreds and twenties. And, uh, it's only when his, his, the guy who is his middleman gets murdered that he then gives up on meth. So he freaks out and he's like, I don't want to get shot. I don't want to just get like, you know, this is, I thought this was all clean. And then he hits up on bank robbing and he does his first bank robber with an accomplice. He, he actually wears a president mask inspired by just like point break, just like point break. And it's a terrible bumbling, horrible robbery. Uh, they get away with, I think like $8,000 or something. He called in the bank. He yells at his, his buddy who's there with him and calls his buddy by his name. It's like, Mark, what the hell are you doing? You know, it's a comedy of errors. And he then realizes if I want to do this for a living, I have to take it seriously. And so he chooses to treat bank robbing like a job, which is what's interesting. So he doesn't want a job. He doesn't want a nine to five job. Um, but he is perfectly willing to treat bank robbery like a real job. And so he brings on a former college classmate who is, whose name I don't know, but who is, who is a sculptor and, uh, who's also, you know, seems like a pretty smart guy. He's the main source for the movie. And this guy says to him, yeah, you know, fuck the fuck society. I'm happy to help you, but I won't go in. Like, I don't want to be in the banks, but I will be your helper. And so they, they start probing the system to try to learn how it works and they slowly become more and more sophisticated. They hit upon the idea of using, uh, prosthetics and stuff as masks. And they then realize that they have to get into the vault and that's when they make a real leap, which is they go and recruit a character who's referred to as Mustang, who is a woman. And they recruit her to go and become a bank teller, which again, it's like the most fascinating thing. So they, she goes, gets hired by some local bank and it is only once she's on the inside and can explain to them all the protocols of like, how does a bank work that they understand what's going on. We never meet this woman, Mustang. She is referenced often. She is not wrapped up in the criminal conspiracy. And in fact, she goes and visits the, the accomplice who does go to jail at the end. He talks about how she came to visit him. And so this guy who rolled on Hollywood, he rolled on his, his friend and identified him to police. Once he was caught, he doesn't give up Mustang. This, this woman who I guess got a straight job as a teller so that she could be in the inside man. And, uh, and yet this woman supposedly commits suicide afterwards.
Sonny00:50:58Just fascinating.
JVL00:50:59I thought the whole story about Mustang and having an inside man was fascinating because she wasn't an inside man there to help during the robberies themselves. She was really just an intelligence gatherer. Yeah. And, uh, and they do like very months upon months of surveillance before they take down a score. They have very sophisticated plans. They really, they're tough. They are observing patrol routes of police cars and getting things timed out to the, to the second. And they have it set up so that the robberies look like they are the work of a single person, but it's always a team. And the team is, uh, always Hollywood. And there's number one accomplice guy. I think the guy's name is Steve. Sometimes they include a third guy, uh, and then they use various cutscenes. And so they'll like, you know, they'll just find, uh, you know, a guy and be like, you know, I'll give you a thousand dollars to go sit on this street corner. And when you see a police car, just on the radio, we give you say mom's home and then walk away. And that's, it's pretty ingenious, honestly. And then they even do their own money laundering, which is, which is pretty impressive, which the, what they do is they go to Reno and they just go to sports books and they max bet on opposing teams in the same game. And they, they treat the take that the, uh, casino holds on that as just their processing costs for cleaning the money.
Sonny00:52:29Yeah. Yeah.
JVL00:52:31It's really, I, again, I just, I was very impressed with their professionalism as these aren't most criminals are, I think, idiots who are born to lose, you know, uh, and these guys are pretty, I mean, I don't want to say they're Neil McCauley. Um, but they're close, much closer to Neil McCauley than they are, uh, I don't know, even the point break guys, like it's, it's, it's impressive and interesting and fun to watch. And the FBI agents are, are pretty impressive. And the lead guy from the Seattle PD is a psychopath and, you know, like all of the, like that guy, that guy clearly like just gets off on, on shooting people. Um, anyway,
Sonny00:53:21it's kind of an, I thought, I found it very interesting.
JVL00:53:24Yeah. We haven't even gotten into all the casual nudity.
Sonny00:53:27Yeah. Well, there is, there's a, well, this is in the tree house again. A lot of dong shots in the tree house. It's just walking around without any pants on. Um, uh, the, uh, Hey, I would say the other thing that's nice about it is it is, uh, it is, it's stylish enough without being overly stylized. Like the, the use of the storyboards to kind of stitch the scenes together is very nice. It's, it's very well done. Uh, and it again, drives home this whole kind of obsession with Hollywood that these guys, uh, these guys have and it, in it, uh, the recreations are, are fine, but pretty sparing. They're not, they're not doing a ton of that sort of thing. Um, I just, I, and again, it's 87 minutes. Like these, the, the, the amount of, the amount of wasted time in your average Netflix documentary or TV show is what drives me the craziest about all of them. Like it's, it's like, it is occasionally. A real slog to get through. And this, this was definitely not, it was like, here's, it's a, like, it's the sort of thing. It's like an old dateline.
JVL00:54:30Yeah.
Sonny00:54:31You know, but like better.
JVL00:54:33Almost always when you see these, especially true crime documentaries, as you watch them, at least I think to myself, I would rather have read the Texas monthly version of this. Right. There's, you know, I just assume that at the base of the documentary is some 15,000 word long form piece of. Reporting from Atavist or Texas monthly or Vanity Fair or something, or maybe even Wired. And so I went looking for that piece, which I assumed was the source of this movie and I couldn't find it.
Sonny00:55:02No, I don't. It's original reporting. So I had the, I had the directors and producers on Bulwark Coast Hollywood last week and it was, uh, it's like, uh, they, they basically found the story, realized nobody had really reported it out. One of the guys is one, one of the guys is a old school reporter. The other one was, um, uh, the director of class action. Park. Remember that?
JVL00:55:22Yeah. Remember that?
Sonny00:55:23Um, so like it was, uh, it like, but it's, it's, it's an original piece of reporting. They did.
JVL00:55:28So that's really nice about it. Yeah. So that's what I was going to say. The thing I valued most about it was that it really is newish. Like you couldn't get this in another form. And, uh, it's, I don't know. It's just, it's good. People should, this is the rare Netflix doc, which is worth watching and is interesting. And, uh,
Sonny00:55:51What did you make, what did you make of the, the kind of entanglement of Hollywood with all this? And like the idea of media as a vector of behavioral influence.
JVL00:56:06I mean, so this is a, this is all happening in the early nineties and when, so it's really pre-internet. And so that's what it would be. It would be watching Point Break and Heat, right? And those, those are going to be the reference points. Which I, I totally get. I mean, mobsters all watch Goodfellas supposedly, right? And they, I was in one more thing. Even this is so cinematic in here. I do have one serious question to ask you that it all unravels because Hollywood and his primary accomplice decide that they're going to, it's all getting to be too much. So they're going to do one last score. One last big score. One last big score in which they're going to hit three. Banks in one day. Yeah. The idea being that the first bank is going to be done just for basically just as a primary distraction hit the first bank. They don't expect to get more than like 8,000 bucks out of it, but because it's at an end, the far end of the town and get all the cops heading that way, all of which is building to the third bank, which is the big score. And they get it done. But they immediately fall into a problem, which which I saw the minute they started playing. I'm shocked that they didn't figure it out. And I think it just shows that they got sloppy at the end. This is how I get caught. The police have started putting trackers in money and the police are putting two trackers in every bank. And what they do is like a thin thing that's in a in like a pack of 20s. And the only way to find it is to buy by fanning. And finding the tracker. And when they talk about how much money they're hoping to pull from this last job, I think it's like three million dollars. And I immediately thought to myself, how the fuck are they going to find the tracker? There's gonna be so many bills. Yeah. And in fact, that's exactly what happens. So they get into the van. And the reason it all goes wrong is because they have too much money. And they can't get through all of the bills to find the trackers in time to get rid of them. Yeah. And it is. The whole thing just is so cinematic. And this is what I wanted to ask you, ultimately. Should this have been a film?
Sonny00:58:30Well, there's no reason you can't make it a film.
JVL00:58:32No, you can't. Right. Totally. You could turn this into a film. Yeah. But the story, this, do you agree that this story would have made a very good movie?
Sonny00:58:41Yeah, totally. I mean, 100%. I mean, this is absolutely a Michael Mann movie.
JVL00:58:48Yeah.
Sonny00:58:48If, like, if Michael Mann was 20 years old. 20 years younger, this is a movie he would be making, you know, right now. I mean, it's, it is absolutely, it is, it is absolutely a Michael Mann movie.
JVL00:59:01It's a great story.
Sonny00:59:02Yeah.
JVL00:59:03Go watch it. Go watch How to Rob a Bank.
Sonny00:59:06Instead, it'll probably end up being a Peter Berg movie, so.
JVL00:59:10Which he wouldn't do the worst thing in the world. Dead.
Sonny00:59:13All right. That's all the time we're giving to this. Anything else on How to Rob? All right. Thank you, Mike, for not being here. JVL, pleasure as always. We'll be back next week with another episode of The Sub-Beacon. We'll see you guys then.
JVL00:59:34Do you have a, do you have an exit?
Sonny00:59:37No, I don't really have anything for the exit. So, when are you going to start moving stuff into the shed?
JVL00:59:43Well, I have to finish it first.
Sonny00:59:45You're not going to put anything in until you finish the...
JVL00:59:47No, I can't put anything in until there are windows and doors on it and stuff. I will say this. There's one lady in the beginning who I think they met with at Evergreen State. So, Evergreen State is a notoriously...
Sonny01:00:00We're back to the movie. We're talking about the movie again.
JVL01:00:03Evergreen State, this is our good outro. A notoriously progressive, crazy, hippie place. And they speak to a woman who is a classmate of theirs there. And she's describing Evergreen State and saying that it wasn't what you people think it was. It's not... You know, it wasn't a place where it was just a bunch of people, like, doing drugs and being weird. And she then describes what it was. And what it was was just a bunch... She's like, you know, we just like to do a lot of mushrooms and we were very active politically. I just... I laughed so hard at that moment. And I thought, the filmmakers are in on this joke with me.
Sonny01:00:42Yeah.
JVL01:00:42They have given us this woman saying, oh, it wasn't just, like, drugs and crazy politics. And then when she describes what it was like, it was just drugs and crazy politics.
Sonny01:00:50It's just drugs and politics. It was... It seems about right. It seems... It seems... I may know... Man, I may know a guy who went to that school and kind of dropped out, tuned in, dropped out. What's the... What's the phrase there?
JVL01:01:04Oh, the Timothy Leary, right? Yeah. Tune in, drop out, or... Yeah. I don't know what it was.
Sonny01:01:09He now works at a Christmas tree farm somewhere in the Midwest. So... But...
JVL01:01:16I'm sure it's fine.
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