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#48. The Substandard Remembers George Romero and Martin Landau
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Dudes Chatting — George Romero and Martin Landau: The hosts pay tribute to two recently deceased figures. On George Romero: Sonny credits him as the progenitor of the modern zombie via Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead (noting the anti-consumerism subtext of the mall setting in the latter), and points out that Romero was famously cheated out of the rights to Night of the Living Dead due to a copyright technicality. On Martin Landau: JVL shares a personal anecdote — he met Landau backstage at the Dennis Miller Show, and Landau confirmed to him that he played Leonard in North by Northwest as gay ("that was his secret"). Vic recalls Landau from Space: 1999, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Tucker, and his later turn on Entourage; Sonny adds Remember with Christopher Plummer. An aside on the Doom video game Easter egg follows: Vic claims the hidden severed head is George Romero's, but the others note it is actually John Romero's head (the game's designer).
Micro-episode; no Reviews or Box Office segments.
Full transcript
Vic00:00:00Hello and welcome to another micro-episode of The Substandard. I'm Victor Matus along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Just a quick reminder that full episodes of TheSubstandard are available every Thursday at 11 a.m. And Substandard show notes are posted by Jonathan Last almost every Friday at WeeklyStandard.com. Over the weekend, we lost two greats in the world of film and television, George Romero, who died at 77, and Martin Landau, who died at 89. I just want to say for the record, yes, I did talk about Martin Landau in the past, but he sort of escaped that sort of, you know, the statute of limitations on my curse.
Sonny00:00:50Nobody escapes the grim reaper Vic Matus. What did you call me? The grim reaper.
Vic00:00:54The effing angel of death, I think you texted. Effing angel of death. Effing angel of death.
Sonny00:00:57It's amazing. It's actually, I saw the news on Twitter, and I texted both of them. I was like, oh, my God, Vic definitely mentioned Martin Landau on the show once. I don't remember that.
JVL00:01:07Is Gene Shalit still alive? I don't know. We better check. I don't know, man. Bless Mr. Shalit for making it through the weekend.
Vic00:01:13We better check. He's not doing anything crazy. I'll leave the final destination, you know, that he's not going to put his popcorn in the microwave. That's the death of him, will be the microwave thing, like in the movie. I loved Martin Landau. What's funny? I mean, again, he's 89, so that when he was doing Mission Impossible, his role in hand with Peter Graves and Barbara Bain, he was already old. And so he was one of these guys, I mean, I have no memory of him as a young actor. Most of it was- North by Northwest. How old was he then?
Sonny00:01:46But even then, he's, I mean, North by Northwest came out and-
JVL00:01:49Was it 30? Yeah. I will effort this one. He was great. I loved him.
Vic00:01:53Although, I have to tell you, I get confused. Between Martin Landau. Martin Landau in North by Northwest and Walter Matthau in Charade. It's kind of like the same thing, but it's not.
Sonny00:02:04I get confused by Martin Landau and John Landau, aren't they?
Vic00:02:08John Landis. Are you thinking of John Landis? No, isn't it?
JVL00:02:10Who's John Landau? John Landau.
Sonny00:02:11Wasn't John Landau the producer, the music producer?
JVL00:02:14Help me do math. Yeah. He is born in 1928. Okay. North by Northwest is 1959. He's 31. 31 years old.
Vic00:02:21Okay, so he was young. He was young. People looked so much older back then.
Sonny00:02:25In any event, he was great. Well, he was like wearing a suit. He was wearing a suit. Yes. He was like a- People didn't act like children.
Vic00:02:30People acted like real people. You know what I remember, though? After Mission Impossible, he and Barbara Bain did another show called Space 1999. Oh. And that was really cool. And I have to say that Space 1999 is still more advanced than 2017, as always. In the 70s, they imagined- 1999 sounds so far away, and of course, it wasn't. But I thought he was great. Tucker, the man in his dream. Remember, he was Bela Lugosi and Ed Wood?
Sonny00:02:56Yeah. Yeah.
Vic00:02:57And Crimes and Misdemeanors, he played the eye doctor who everybody loved, the patriarch of the family who was going to receive this big award, and then he had an affair with Angelica Houston. It went bad, and she was threatening to tear apart his happy family, and so he turns to his brother, the gangster, to get rid of her. And the gangster brother was played by Jerry Orbach. Oh. I think they make perfect brothers, if you think about it. They very much look like that. And Orbach's got the leather jacket. It's fantastic.
Sonny00:03:28No, Martin Landau's, one of his most recent, I guess one of his last movies, was a kind of twisty, turny, thriller-type movie called Remember. Huh. And it was about a Jewish Holocaust survivor who was trying to track down a man who had worked in his camp, and he has Alzheimer's, so he has to, like, he's constantly calling back to his friend at the nursing home in which they live, who was played by Martin Landau, and he has this kind of, he has this, he has this very special look in his eyes where you can tell he's kind of hiding something from the audience and from this other character who is played by Christopher Plummer. Don't mention Christopher Plummer, please. Just don't say his name, Vic. And, you know, it was, it was very, it was a very well-done movie featuring, you know, like, shockingly old actors. I was gonna say, that's a good thing. And it's like, it's, you don't, you don't, there's a reason it didn't get, like, like, blown up on 3,000 screens, you know, it wasn't, it didn't get the $30 million ad campaign.
Vic00:04:31It's not gonna be on IMAX, but they have a combined age of 180.
Sonny00:04:35I mean, almost, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Vic00:04:37And, and he had a little bit part of an entourage, too, on HBO. He was the has-been producer, and sort of, like, people, you know, like, sort of, you know, you, you, they don't want to hang out with that guy because he's kind of a pain, and he was a big deal in the 70s, but not anymore, but it's very touching. And JVL, I've always found him to be a sympathetic actor. You're watching him, but you actually met him, and remind us again about that.
JVL00:05:00I did. I met him on backstage in the, actually, not even in the green room, literally backstage on The Dennis Miller Show. We were both on The Dennis Miller Show back when he had his CNBC gig, and Martin Landau was sitting in his little director's chair backstage waiting for his segment, and I was brought in by the producers to wait for my segment, and I, so I just went up and talked to him. And I said, you know, hey, Mr. Landau, Jonathan Last from The Weekly Standard, love your work. This is what Matt Labash taught me, is how you have to approach selection. And so I told him, I said, you know, I'm a huge fan of your daughter, Juliet Landau. She's a fabulous actress in her own realm. Good in. And so he's tickled by this and happy that I knew his daughter, and so we just started chit-chatting, and I asked him about his character, Leonard, in North by Northwest. And I said to him at the time, I said, so I gotta ask you, is this, were you playing Leonard as gay? Because there was always something very interesting about the character, but, you know, I've seen this movie 50 times and could never quite understand it. And so I put my finger on it, and he looked at me and he said, yes!
Vic00:06:00Oh, that's good.
JVL00:06:01I said, really? He said, yes! That's good. He said, my idea was to play Leonard as if he had a secret that nobody else in the movie knew, and that that was his secret. And later, like four years later, he confirmed this in an interview with, like, Entertainment Weekly or something like that. That's fantastic.
Vic00:06:15So, now, Sonny, you had deep thoughts on George Romero. Yes, George Romero. You wrote about him at the Free Beacon.
Sonny00:06:19George Romero also died over the weekend after a very brief battle with lung cancer. That's a bad one. He, George Romero is really the progenitor of the modern zombie, right? Like, the idea of the flesh-eating undead, the brainless kind of meandering, shambling monster that you kill by destroying his brain pan, you know, that is, like, that is an invention of George Romero, and it's kind of interesting to think about, you know. Like, with the ubiquity of the kind of zombie idea right now, with its dominance on TV and in movies and elsewhere, you would think that this was, like, a long-running human horror, that this idea of, like, the undead returning to life as cannibals, but it's not. It's actually in the last 50 years or so, and George Romero is the guy we have to thank for that. He is also one of the few consistently interesting directors who also had a very strong ideological viewpoint, and sometimes that would overwhelm the work a little bit, you know, but I, even as a staunch right-wing, you know, fascist, I still enjoyed the left-wing claptrap Mr. Romero put out there. That's how good he was.
Vic00:07:42And he didn't make a, he didn't, like, capitalize on the whole zombie phenomenon, right? He didn't end up with millions and millions of dollars, right?
Sonny00:07:49Yeah, he, well, the Night of the Living Dead was famously kind of wrapped up in bad rights deals and stuff. He got, he got kind of, kind of... He got kind of screwed in that, in that regard, and to the point where it was actually, I'm pretty sure Night of the Living Dead is actually in the public domain, maybe. I would have to check that. I might be wrong. But I believe it is, I believe it is, like, one of these movies that has been released in a bunch of different terrible formats, because there are no rights protections to it. JVL.
JVL00:08:19Sonny, I have to ask you about this. You said that you can put aside his ideological... Problems. But doesn't he hold the one ideology that you find most repugnant? What's that? He's anti-consumerism.
Sonny00:08:38Well, no, I know, well, this is, this is the, well, this is why I have always, this is one of the reasons why I have always actually thought secretly that Dawn of the Dead is the weakest of the Night of the Living Dead movies, because it, like, I don't, I don't find it terribly compelling at all, but I'm also, you know, a huge fan of warmongering and his... His anti-military Day of the Dead is probably my favorite, so, I don't know.
Vic00:09:00Okay. If you ever play Doom, the, if you go into... What's that? I don't know, it's something I heard about in the mid-90s, and I, apparently you needed six diskettes to load onto your Power Mac, or anyway, and it was like Doom 3D, and if you went into Immortal mode, I only heard about this, I'm not saying that I played this myself, if you go into Immortal mode at the very end level, when everything is firing upon you, you... You can jump through a wall, and to kill, like, the giant beast behind this wall, you're supposed to fire rockets and things into a tiny, like, hole in the wall, but you can go through it in Immortal mode, and what's behind that wall is the head of George Romero on a spike. And then you could, and that was clearly a homage, obviously, to The Great Witch, where everyone got their influences from.
JVL00:09:50Did your friend, Victorino Vadis... Yes! ...in college play this game?
Vic00:09:56I spent most of the time playing that game and the other half on SimCity 2000.
JVL00:10:00Oh.
Vic00:10:00Yeah, it was a very sad... It was a very sad life, and drinking. There wasn't much room for school, so, anyway. Yeah. Sounds like a smart choice. Yeah. I'm sure it's fine.
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