Andrew Klavan Talks Violence In Storytelling/Becoming Christian/Movies Ruining Movies
In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Andrew Klavan an author, screenwriter, essayist, and host of The Andrew Klavan Show at The Daily Wire. They discuss whether good storytelling requires sex & violence, movies that ruined entire movie genres, and going from secular Jew to Christian at age 49. Kyle and Ethan pitch their best movie remake ideas and they talk shop with a fellow satirist. Topics Discussed Edgar Awards are ugly Writing scripts for Hollywood Going full skinhead and entering conservative media Ruining a perfectly good headline [SATIRE] A secular Jew becoming a Christian at age 49 Kyle and Ethan pitch movie ideas to Klavan that are in dire need of a remake Movies that ruined movies On the necessity of putting sex, cursing & violence in stories Stephen King's twitter feed Behind-the-scenes Ben Shapiro stories Church shopping during lockdown Andrew judges some our subscriber satirical headline pitches The Ten Questions
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Yes, everybody.
Welcome to the Babylon B Interview Show.
I'm Kyle Mann with my host.
Ethan, I'm your host, Ethan Nicole.
With my co-host.
Oh.
All right.
Ethan Nicole.
You always manage to derail things instantly.
Instantly.
Come on, Kyle.
I'm not your host.
I'm your host and what?
You're the host of Andrew Clavin.
I didn't say you're.
Did you notice there's a guy here?
There's a guy here.
Hi, Andrew Clavin.
How you doing?
He's in the attic.
How's it going?
It's a bald man in an attic staring at us.
This is already the most incompetent show I've ever been on.
We take pride in our incompetence.
Yeah, so.
Well, listen to this.
Andrew Clavin is an author, a screenwriter, an essayist, nominated for Edgar Award five times, one two times.
Also, he's the host.
Alsto?
He's the host of the Andrew Clavin show, which is at the Daily Wire.
What is an Edgar Award?
Is that who's Edgar?
Who's Edgar?
It's Edgar Allan Poe.
It's home.
That's like the Edgar.
Wow.
It's like the Oscar of mystery writing.
Do you have them on a shelf somewhere?
Why are they on a shelf behind you?
I do.
Well, they're on a shelf behind me, but out of sight.
Yes.
Okay.
Oh, they're in there.
Okay.
They're the ugliest award in show business, too.
They look like Edgar Allan Poe, the porcelain statue of Edgar Allan Poe, and they are truly ugly.
Well, where should we start with Andrew Clavin?
He worked in radio newspaper.
He's a writer.
So the thing I admit, I only knew you as the Daily Wire guy, and then I just found out recently that I had no idea that you were as like a prolific writer.
Yeah, that was my life I've spent writing crime novels and movies and locked up in a room by myself.
So this has all been kind of a shock to me, this idea of being on camera.
In fact, when the lockdown came, when the Chinese flu lockdown came, I didn't even notice.
It was just like going back to my normal life.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, that's the one weird thing for me because I was in comics.
I do some writing for animation and TV and stuff.
This was never what I thought I was going to be doing.
I'm interviewing people and interviewing Andrew Clavin.
Just weird.
So we have some.
I get it, kind of.
Except for, have you ever met Clint Eastwood?
Because I see that you wrote a book.
And Clint Eastwood directed it and was in the movie of your book, True Crime.
Yeah, I met him at the premiere.
They filmed it in Oakland, and I was living in London at the time, so I didn't get to be on set, but I met him at the premiere, and he was incredibly gracious and nice.
And it was kind of a funny experience because it's a little bit like meeting Mountain Rushmore, like one of the guys.
But his face is so familiar to us and it's such a tough guy face or a cowboy face.
But when he starts to speak in that voice that we all recognize, he's an artist.
He's just one of us.
And so it's like, he talks about his vision.
I had my vision for this film.
And you're my agent.
I call my agent.
You think like, what?
Who turned it?
That guy looks like Clint Eastwood, but he's talking like an actor.
I don't know.
What was his breath like?
So it was sweet as I was like, it was kind of, yeah, supernaturally sweet.
For sure.
I'd like to get the, you know, feel the, get the ambrosia of the experience.
Ambrosia, exactly.
Kyle, you got a question?
Absolutely.
So, yeah, I just kind of wondering, you know, you're sitting there writing books, and then the Daily Wire guy comes up to you, you know, Jeremy or whatever.
Jeremy Boring.
He comes up to you and he says, hey, do you want to be a conservative talk show host?
And then they shave your head and you become a skinhead.
And I assume that's how it happened.
I mean, what's the transition like there?
Well, it is true that I had this beautiful full head of hair until I met Jeremy.
It was blonde.
It was gorgeous.
Yeah, no, but it was a little slower than that.
What happened was I lived in England for many years.
I lived almost most of the 90s in England and was writing novels and just doing what I do and raising my family and came back.
And shortly after I came back, 9-11 happened.
And so all the, you know, this kind of shock, people killed, Islamists fighting with us.
And I had been away for a long time.
And suddenly, very quickly, I mean, two days, three days after this event, I saw comedians and writers and show business Hollywood people going on TV and saying, why do these people hate us?
Why do they hate us?
And I thought, who gives a turnip.
That's why they hate us.
They're Islamists.
They're supposed to hate us.
It's like asking why Hitler hates us.
These kind of fascist theocratic lunatics.
They're supposed to hate us.
And I thought something has gone seriously wrong with the culture.
And so I started to speak.
I would write about it a little bit.
I would speak to people, go to the conservative meetings.
And I didn't realize I was a conservative until I came back because my politics changed while I was overseas.
So I didn't care whether John Major was the prime minister.
What was it to me?
It's not a real country anyway.
And so I didn't know I was a conservative until I came back.
And I started thinking, gee, the only people who are saying stuff I agree with are on the right.
Rush Limbaugh saying stuff I agree with.
The guys in National Review.
I used to call them, they used to have this thing called the corner where the writers would talk.
And I used to call them my imaginary friends because I think they were the only people saying what I thought.
And so I started to talk about this too, the fact that people shouldn't hate America so much that they blame themselves when people like Islamists kill us.
And it just kind of spiraled out of control because after that, Hollywood, and I was working in Hollywood, I was selling scripts.
I was selling two and three scripts a year, which is like really good money.
Yeah.
And people in Hollywood started making these anti-American war movies where there'd be a war and the bad guy would be the American and the good guys would be the poor Islamist who was raped or murdered by the brutal.
So I started writing about that.
And of course, my Hollywood career just vanished.
But at the same time that happened, this place called PJ TV started.
And it was run by a pal of mine named Roger Simon.
And I would bump into Roger in bars and at conservative meetings and he would say, you ought to do something for PJTV.
And so I finally, you know, it was very annoying having him constantly bothering me about it.
Finally, I looked.
And I don't know if you know Bill Whittle, but there was a guy on PJ TV named Bill Whittle and he was doing these video commentaries.
And he was really good.
He was professional anchorman, network anchorman level good, except he was very serious.
And so I called Roger and I said, I would do that if I could do the same thing as Monty Python, you know, just do the stupidest, craziest commentary ever.
And he said, sure, go ahead.
So I just started making these videos.
And remember, are we allowed to curse on the show?
Because I can't curse on the Daily Wire, so I just want to say that.
You get censored in a funny way.
People like that.
Curse as much as possible.
You put a random word over the word you say, so we have to guess what you said.
It's usually the word flowerbed.
So I went in and I did my first video and I got to the end of it and the door came bursting open like SWAT had invaded and Bill Whittle came marching in and stuck his face in my face and said, flowerbed.
I said, what?
He said, well, he said, that changes everything.
You know, he was kidding around.
He said, doing it that way, doing it this crazy way changes everything.
We're all going to have to change and live up to that.
And so it kind of became this really fun thing at PJ TV where Stephen Crowder was there, Bill Whittle was there, Zoe was there.
And, you know, just a bunch of really talented, conservative guys who had all been discovered mostly by Andrew Breitbart and then stolen by Roger at PJ TV.
And we were just all working together.
Zoe is Alfonso Rachel.
He also is.
And we were all sort of doing this stuff that nobody had even thought of doing before.
And it was really exciting.
So basically, PJTV shut down.
I left for a while and went to Glenbeck and did them there.
But when PJTV shut down, that's when Jeremy and Ben Shapiro said, we're going to start our own site.
Would you come over and do the stuff you were doing there for us?
And that morphed eventually into the show.
And that's when you shaved your head.
And that's when the blonde hair actually just knowing Jeremy the blonde hair.
It just falls off.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
With your success at this point, do you just sit into a kind of a rolling chair that goes through like a bunch of guys with twirly mustaches and they just like clean shave your head every morning before you get into your chair?
They haven't mechanized.
It's just two brushes.
They've got a car wash in which gets all the little stubbles off and then it shines it real good.
It's like Wallace and Gromit.
That's a big Wallace and Gromit thing, Wallace and Gromit.
Machine.
So you became a Christian at age 49.
I did.
And you were a secular Jew beforehand.
Oh, that's right.
What kind of analysis?
Are you still a Jew?
A psychopath turns Christian at 49.
I know, I know.
It's like a desperate, desperate psychology.
Yeah, no, it was a wild journey.
I should plug my book, my memoir is the great good thing that I wrote about my journey because it's like a 35-year story, so I probably shouldn't tell it here.
But yeah, you know, it just was a long process of thought during which time, absolutely true.
When I was a kid, I was a troubled kid, and around the age of 28, I actually went nuts.
I mean, I just went like crazy.
And I don't even want to describe it.
It's described in the book, but it was really bad.
And miraculously, I found a shrink.
I always remember before there was the Babylon B, there was the onion.
The onion, when it started out, was absolutely hilarious.
You're still there.
And the onion.
Yeah, it's not as funny as it used to be, but it's.
But The Onion had a hilarious headline once, psychiatrist cures patient.
And I was that guy.
I was that guy.
I got this genius psychiatrist.
And I actually went sane.
I mean, I went from being an utter crazy man to being a totally sane person.
And then once I was a sane person, I started slowly to trust my own logic because when you're crazy, you can't trust your own logic because you don't know whether you're just being crazy or not.
But once I started to trust my own logic, I started to follow certain trains of thought, like the fact that everybody was telling me that morality was relative, but I could see with my own eyes that morality was not relative, that there were obviously moral truths.
I had read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, so I knew that there were moral truths, a moral universe.
And once you get to the point where you realize there is a morality, it actually is a pretty straight, though slow path to starting to saying, well, if there's an absolute morality, there must be a God.
And if there's a God, what does he look like?
Well, it's funny.
It's kind of strange, but he looks almost exactly like Jesus.
Maybe I better take the hint.
And that's really, it really was a slow, long process because the last thing I thought of was converting.
The last thing I thought of doing, you know, as a Jew, it was didn't mean anything to me religiously, but it was important to my father in terms of tradition.
And it was not something I wanted in my life, but I had started, after I started realizing there was a God, I started to pray and that transformed my life.
And ultimately, I really, it was almost like I heard God's voice saying, well, now that I've transformed your life, donkey.
You know, you got to pay back by getting baptized.
And I was like, all right.
It was a great, I mean, listen, it was one of the two choice moments in my life, the other one, getting married, when the minute it was over, like first I had to decide to do it, then I had to do it.
And the minute it was over, I thought, that's like the best thing I ever did.
That is the smartest thing this stupid guy ever did.
And it's been, it truly has been a journey of joy.
I mean, it's been my baptism, was the culmination of one journey from craziness to just lovable zaniness.
And that from there, from the baptism, it was been a journey of joy.
It has just been one of the most, I was reading something I wrote a long time ago before I was a Christian.
I thought, wow, my thought has gotten so much deeper, so much richer, so much more realistic.
My observations, my prose has gotten better.
It just was an absolutely transformative experience.
And I won't bore you just going on and on, but it has been great.
We hate conversion stories.
So annoying.
Boring.
Really boring.
I know.
Unless you were a gang member.
Yeah.
I know.
There's no mess involved.
The only thing with me was just being nuts.
I was just like flipping it out of my hitting yourself with a trout in your face.
Did your Jewish family make you get uncircumcised?
Cut it back.
I cannot tell you how painful that is.
I mean, it's like you thought it was bad getting taken off by sewing it back on.
It's like my pterodactyl.
Because it's slower, you know.
Yeah, you're not three months old anymore.
That sounds like a TLC show.
What's that?
The Learning Channel.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, circumcision.
It was difficult.
I mean, my favorite comment, my favorite comment was: I told a Jewish friend that I had converted to Christianity.
His only response was, they'll still gas you.
It's like, well, congratulations to you, dude.
Yeah, being a 49-year-old baptism, that's got to be kind of like community college is always like the one old guy.
Right?
And everyone else is like teenagers.
A little slower than everybody else, maybe.
Yeah, and you don't know all the Christianes, you know?
People would say, you know, you want your testimony, we want your testimony.
And you say, well, was there a crime?
Like, did I see something I wasn't supposed to see?
He's way more driven than everybody else.
Yeah, yeah.
I have no idea.
I talk to Christians and I nod and smile a lot because they like that, but I have no idea what they're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're like completely because we make a lot of Christian cultural references and you're probably completely removed from all those.
It's amazing.
I mean, one of the things that happened, not to flatter you, but one of the things that happened with Babylon, you don't know this.
Go ahead.
The Babylon D, the Daily Wire, when the Daily Wire was expanding, one of the ideas was to buy the Babylon B.
Oh, yeah, we were going to talk about this.
And they came to me and they said, Do you want to be the editor of the Babylon B?
Do you want Kyle Mann's job?
You were going to kick my job.
Well, I was lying awake at night thinking, firing this guy is going to be so much fun, you know.
And I said, you know, like I thought about it, and I thought, like, the only way I would do it is if they expanded from their very close focus on evangelical Christianity and made it more of a kind of like the onion.
And we didn't want to do that.
And I didn't really want, I had other things I wanted to do anyway.
And I didn't want to have to look at you guys every day.
That would have been too much, too high a price to pay.
But you guys did it without me, basically.
You expanded.
And I think you are now next to me.
You are now the funniest thing on the internet.
And it really is.
I mean, you really have gotten spectacular.
You are definitely.
I mean, at Instapund that they call you the paper of record.
And I think that's pretty close to the truth.
Yeah.
We like some of your satire pieces, Andrew, that you do on Daily Wire, but you kind of ruin the joke because you guys put satire at the end of the label.
Do they make you do that?
The satire?
They do.
And I hate it, but it's also fair.
It's not one of those things where I hate it and I protest because I'm the only guy doing satire on the site.
So it's a little unfair to say, you know, here's a true story about Hillary Clinton.
And here's a story where Hillary Clinton runs and drives a car over Donald Trump.
Is that one of your stories?
That may be a true story.
I got a little confused.
Okay.
It's like saying this is a joke.
And then you see the headline and they go, this has been a joke.
Yeah.
That's rough.
They're much more sympathetic.
I'm not much funnier on my show when I read it on my show because I'm not a performer.
And I keep cracking up.
And I hate comedians who pretend to crack themselves up, but I just can't help it.
I just have occasionally collapsed into laughter, which even I find obnoxious, but hilarious.
Yeah, but you don't do the satire label when you read your satire on the show.
That's right.
You just open with it.
It's a coal open.
It's great.
Have you ever considered raising ferrets?
Who hasn't?
I mean, who hasn't come to some point in their life where they just say, ferrets?
I mean, why not ferrets?
Throwing it out there.
I don't know.
Yeah.
So, okay, so there's been a lot of reboots that have been happening in Hollywood.
And you're a screenwriter.
You've got ideas.
And you probably have some ideas on how to shift Hollywood so they're not so communist.
Socialist.
Well, it's not going to happen from within.
The thing about leftists, and I wasn't a leftist, but I was a liberal.
And the one thing that all liberals know is that right-wingers are evil.
And see, we right-wingers think that the left is arguing with us, but they're not.
They have no idea what we think.
They have no idea what we believe.
They have no idea what we're talking about.
They're arguing with liberals.
Leftists are arguing with liberals.
And liberals have no power anymore.
So it's really leftists just kind of screaming at their mothers who are liberal.
But they have no idea what we're talking about.
You cannot go to them and say, why don't we do a show that Trump supporters will like?
Because it's really like speaking German.
Let's do a show for child molesters.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
You say, what about the other half of the country?
And what they hear is, can you keep doing your Hitler impression so that we can get it isolated and then we can give it to the left-wing media to think progress and stuff.
Media Matters.
Andrew Clavin.
Media Matters would actually do that.
Media Matters.
They're probably your biggest fans.
They watch your show more than anybody.
It is incredible.
What kind of life is that?
And if you've ever seen their pictures, they all look like the Hitler youth.
They have these big smiles and they're actually white.
They're so white, they kind of blind.
So they wake up in the morning trying to destroy other people.
So we had some ideas for some franchises that we could reboot.
And we want the Andrew Clavin reboot.
Rapid fire these.
First thing that comes to your head.
Give us your pitch for turning these into an Andrew Clinton.
Sitting there in the pitch room at Bruckheimer Films.
Okay, here we go.
The Muppets.
The Muppets.
Yeah, I think we should do the Muppet porn movie.
I think this is really something that's the time has come.
That is weird.
Would that be censored?
I don't know if that's the private life of Kermit the Fog.
Okay, we better move on from the fakes and everything.
It'd be terrible.
We better move on.
Fancy Nancy.
I have no idea what Fancy Nancy is.
Biker Mice from Mars.
What's that?
But this is what happens when you work in Hollywood.
They're like, we need you to reboot this property.
And you're like, I never heard of that.
And you just pull something out, right?
No, you never say that.
You never say that.
What you say.
So you don't say that, but you say, oh, yeah, it's the greatest property ever.
And then you pull out an idea from your right.
And you just put sexy.
If you put sexy, they'll think that's cool.
So you're going to do Biker Mice from Mars also porn.
Exactly.
This is not where we're expecting this to go.
I wrote a script for a young adult classic, and a director came on.
This is how I got fired.
A director came on and said, I want to put some SM in it.
I said, it's for our children.
It's Ramona.
He said, yeah, but that'll give it some edge.
And I said, you know, bye.
When I said I wouldn't do it, he said, you're trying to be the producer.
I said, not just trying to be a human being.
Wow.
I do not understand that.
Hollywood making movies about literal teenagers that are in high school and then it's all sex.
What do you think?
You're an adult.
So weird.
A bunch of pervs.
Pervos.
Three men and a baby.
Three men and a baby.
I think it's got to involve cannibalism now.
I think if you know, and it should be a heartfelt plea for people who eat their children.
I think it's, you know, this is something that not everybody understands.
You know, we have this kind of white male-centric idea that when you have a baby, you're supposed to raise him and feed him, you know, and all this.
But if you just devour that's just social norms.
Yeah, it's just another way of looking at it.
Yeah.
So this is the point where the Hollywood.
I'm trying to talk my way back into the movie.
This is where the Hollywood producers are like, yeah, great idea.
Yeah, they're like, we love this.
Well, we'll call you.
We'll call you back.
That wouldn't make hire you on the spot.
I think Ghost Dad needs help.
Ghost Dad.
Ghost Dad.
I think we should remake Ghost Dad, this time starring Bill Cosby.
It's a horror film this time.
Exactly.
Bill Cosby is a ghost.
That's why he ghosted us.
Or the American Ninja franchise, not the obstacle courses, but Michael Dudakoff.
American New York.
American Ninja franchise.
That's not actually a bad idea.
That's pretty sweet, actually.
Why are they?
I mean, now that theatrical movies are a thing of the past, we should actually just have them come to your home and just kick it.
It's an interactive.
Well, there you go.
Quibby.
You just watch him punching you on your phone.
It's so real.
All right.
Your pitch for an Airbud reboot.
But we're giving you all the best franchises.
You're probably talking to the only person you've ever met who actually saw Airbud because I think my son was right at Airbud age when Airbud came out.
And that's the, if I've got that right, it's the dog who plays basketball.
That's right, yes.
Right.
But they made like 30 sequels.
There's Airbuddies.
There's like the Air Buddies.
I think he's done all the sports.
All the sports have been done.
I think we should do a twist on that and have Air Grasshopper.
The whole movie is 15 seconds long because the minute the basketball hits, it's just, you know, that's Inspiring story of the basketball play.
He's got a great jump shot.
He could have it build all the way up to him finally getting to the big game, and then it just gets flat.
Yeah.
No, because he's got a great jump shot.
But it's like the Rocky ending, where it feels like he still won, even though he lost.
Still inspirational.
Exactly.
The real basketball game was inside him.
So what if they want to launch a movie, TV show, video game franchise based on the Quaker Oats guy?
Well, that's actually, you know, like, that would be like Black Mirror, because I don't know if you remember the Quaker Oats guy, but the Quaker Oats guy is on the stage.
The ceremony holding up the cereal box with the Quaker Oats guy, holding up the cereal box with the Quaker Oats guy, holding up the cereal box with the baby.
It's an infinite reason.
Yeah, so that would actually be quite a startling idea where the Quaker Oats guy sees the other Quaker Oates guys and realizes that pacifism just isn't going to work in this situation.
So if it's fire, you know.
All right.
He's back.
And this time it's personal.
Exactly.
Princess Bride.
Give us a Princess Bride reboot.
Princess Bride 2.
This time it's funny.
It'll be savage.
Dang.
Okay, and finally, they want you to do an awesome action-packed Kids Love It reboot of the Koran.
Yeah, that's.
No, that's great.
It's great.
It would be kind of like The Towering Inferno.
It would be a remake of the Towering Inferno.
But this time it's not an accident.
That's the difference.
All right.
Perfect.
All right.
Cool.
Give us your three movies that you think ruined movies.
The three movies that I think ruined the movie.
Once that movie came out, like my example is The Matrix, because it was a great movie, but then it ruined action movies because after that, everybody's doing ballet fighting slow-mo.
No longer are we having the handcuffed fistfight in the back alley or whatever.
Interesting.
Well, I mean, I can think of some movies that really did do bad things.
One of them, you'll be surprised to hear, is Schindler's List, which is a beautifully made movie.
You really do hate Jews now.
Yeah, no.
It's all coming together, the Hitler impression, the skin.
That was the thing.
It made Jews look sympathetic.
No.
Spielberg is a brilliant shooter.
He's a brilliant director visually.
And it's a beautiful film.
And it's this tremendous, like the film about the Holocaust.
And it's about a guy saving Jewish lives.
And that's not what the Holocaust was actually about.
So if you're going to make the film about the Holocaust, it should be a lot darker than anything that Steven Spielberg could make.
And I felt that was the beginning.
When I saw that film, I thought, oh, now we're going to get all the sentimental Holocaust films.
And that's essentially what's happened.
So it's like it essentially erased reality for me on a lighter note.
Sentimental Holocaust films.
Wow.
I mean, every film since then was like, you know, Life is Beautiful, the hilarious film.
I just think, oh, my God.
Hacks off.
Finally, we started doing some concentration camp buddy comedies.
Yes.
You know, Star Wars ruined movies.
Interestingly enough, the first Star Wars film, if you go back and watch the first Star Wars film, it's a parody.
It's supposed to be a joke about the old Flash Gordon movies, and it's overdone, and even the acting is kind of stilted and weird.
And people were so hungry for heroes after basically a decade of anti-heroes and 60s and 70s film.
People were so hungry to see what they are actually offering that it then became the standard of filmmaking.
And after that, that was what sort of led us down this path toward these superhero movies.
And, you know, superhero movies to me are just like, I like one a year, maybe, but every movie is a superhero movie is really boring.
So that was a big turnaround.
And maybe the fifth reboot of Spider-Man.
Where somebody in Hollywood realized, oh, we can just make the same movie every year with a different actor.
And people will go like, yeah, that was good.
That was good less four times and it's good again.
Yeah, that's what I'm getting.
You'll be in a group of people, rational people that you actually respect.
And they'll sit there and they'll talk about all the different Spider-Mans or all the different Star Wars forever, as if it's an important thing to talk about.
It's like talking about, it'd be like if you're like a seal and you're all talking about the crappy fish that they're giving you at the aquarium.
They're like, oh, well, the first one was pretty good compared to the third one.
It's like, just feeding you garbage.
You have no idea.
I mean, I used to go in to the Daily Wire and we get into these fascinating political arguments, you know, and we'd all see things differently and all this.
And, you know, and Ben Shapiro is a very bright guy, so you'd get some really interesting takes and he talks in that rapid-fire way and all this.
And then you'd come in after one of these Marvel Universe movies, and there'd be the same guy standing there, and they'd be saying things like, no, Spider-Man is not dead because they wouldn't kill Spider-Man.
You'd be like, hacksaw.
What are people talking about?
You're grown men.
You should not be talking about it.
Kyle's insulted right now.
I'm just glad I wore my Star Trek shirt today, not in a Star Wars shirt.
It was close.
I almost wore my Star Wars shirt.
I'm not attacking Star Wars, actually.
I think the first movie is really entertaining.
I'm just saying that it kind of ruined everything anyway.
See, but you've come out as you're a guy that likes sex, violence, swearing in your movies.
So that's why you don't like Star Wars shoes.
And you like it.
You know, it's not that I like those things.
It's just I hate when they should be there and they're not.
Like I hate a Christian gangster movie where the guy says, you know, listen, you rotten guy.
I may hit you with this stick.
Just give me some cursing and killing.
And have you ever done that with the Bible where they kind of soften everything up?
You think they would at some point?
Well, you know when an edit of the Bible?
Yeah, like an editor clean version.
Yeah, it's literally true when they made the film Noah.
I think that's what it was called.
Newer one?
That's Russell Crowder.
Russell Crowe.
Yeah.
Where it was God destroyed the world because we weren't environmentalists, which I love.
But it is literally true that evangelical Christians complain because Noah got drunk.
Oh.
Which is literally in the Bible.
That's why you were mad at it.
That's the reason you were mad.
Naked, drunk.
And people find out what happens a lot.
It should be a country song based on that passage.
Drunk in a tent.
Yeah, I'm drunk, naked, and a tent.
There probably is one.
That is kind of a country song, right?
They flooded the world, killed everybody, and now I'm drunk and naked.
So if you were to be like a screenwriter for Veggie Tales, you would add in a bunch of sex, vegetable sex, and swearing and violence.
Well, where do little vegetables come from?
I think it's time we get down to tell the truth.
I would love the broccoli, like just opening fire on the tomatoes.
Tomato sauce everywhere.
Yeah.
Ketchup.
Well, it's on a serious note.
Because I think there's a lot of Christians that struggle with that.
Yeah, we get this question all the time about.
Or even creators.
Even I do as a creator.
Because I do comics and stuff like that.
I have a book called Bear Mageddon, where bears are taking over the world.
And everyone's trying to, you know.
And I get criticized by Christians who try to read it and they're like, I can't handle the swearing and the violence.
I'm like, bears have taken over the world.
And these people are not Christians in my book.
I'm trying to get a guy to transform and become a man, you know, and that's, I'm using bears for that.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting question.
Because I think that the left looks at entertainment this way too, right?
They want to make, they want your entertainment to reflect how the world should be.
So there should be this equal cast of like, if you're in the Wizard of Oz, all the different munchkins should be all different colors.
And like, you know, they need to like have the responsibility is to make the world as it should be rather than in the world we're in.
That's right.
Oh, that's a good question.
That's not a question that I'm handing off to you.
Well, somebody actually complained.
A Christian writer actually wrote a column when Game of Thrones came out saying it was so full of corruption and evil and meanness that it was as if Jesus Christ had never been born.
And I thought, well, first of all, it's a fantasy world, so who knows whether Jesus Christ has ever been born.
But secondly, I haven't particularly noticed that since Jesus Christ was born, the world has ceased to be corrupt and evil and full of wickedness.
So, I mean, it was kind of a crazy, very strange, crazy comment.
But no, my feeling about this is, you know, it is true that I, who admittedly love a good nude scene, I'm just being honest here, I have never seen a movie with a nude scene that was actually needed to be in it.
I've never seen that.
That's pretty rare.
What about Titan?
As I have gotten older, and as I've gotten older, a little voice in the back of my head is saying, if this lady is talented and wants to be an actress, why does she have to take her shirt off?
Is that really necessary for her career?
Couldn't she actually perform in such a way that we don't have to see her entire body, but she gets to do her job?
Mind you, I think a lot of actresses like taking their clothes off, but still.
But I think the problem is, especially in fiction, especially in prose, is that you have to invent a world that is the world.
The book, as I mentioned before, and I didn't get into it that much, but the book that changed my life, that set me on the course over 30 years to becoming a Christian, was Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
I read that book, and that was the moment I knew that the moral relativism that was just infiltrating colleges, that was the moment I knew it was wrong.
It was incorrect.
And after that, the chain of logic, it took 30 years because I was so far away from being a Christian.
Plus, it's a really long book.
Yeah, and it's a long book.
It took me 30 years.
It takes 30 years to read.
But I read that book, and that book is about an axe murderer who falls for a hooker.
And I always think, you know, go into a Crossways bookstore and say, you know, do you have that book about the axe murderer who falls for a hooker and see what look you get, you know?
And this idea that Christian art is supposed to be squeaky clean, ultimately happy, has to have a conversion scene in it.
Nobody's supposed to be sad when people die.
I mean, that was one of my favorite scenes in that God is not dead when the guy got hit by a car.
And the first reaction was, well, at least he was saved and he went to heaven.
I thought, like, not even a moment of, oh, his wife, his children, nothing.
Like, now just sing some Christian rock and it'll be great.
And I think that that has made Christian art, which was once the art.
You know, when you think about Dostoevsky, when you think about the Sistine Chapel with its horrors and its beauties and all that, you think about Bach.
I mean, it was once the great art form, the greatest art form, the greatest inspiration of art.
It has made Christian art just banal and not realistic.
And God is the God of the real world.
And so it is actually your job as an artist to depict the real world.
And it can, you know, I'll tell you, this is a good true story, a good example, was I wrote this trilogy, Another Kingdom, which we put out as a podcast at the Daily Wire.
And it was very popular.
And it was not a Christian story at all.
It was a fantasy story, not a Christian story, but obviously had deep Christian underpinnings.
And in the first, as I was writing the first volume, I started to think, oh, gee, Christians are really going to like this story.
You know, it's fantasy with knights and slashing, but I thought this is, so I'm going to just see if I can cut out all the cursing because I know that they hate that stuff.
So I tried, and it was absurd.
I mean, it just was absurd.
It was about the whole thing was about 20-somethings in L.A.
To have them talk without cursing was basically to lie.
I couldn't do it, you know.
Golly, geez, what occurs, man.
Exactly.
So I overcompensated and I put in too many F-words in the podcast.
I cut them out when the book was published.
I cut them back when the book was published.
But then later on in the third volume, there's an actual sex scene.
And it's not, I wouldn't call it graphic, but it's spirited.
It's a sex scene.
It is a real sex scene.
Can you read it to us right now?
Yeah, I'll act it out for you.
The Christians got very upset about it.
And what was interesting about it was that the kind of, I won't say there was a point to the scene, but what was going on in the scene was the guy was doing something that was really immoral in having sex with this particular girl.
And it was also blissful.
He was having the greatest time of his life.
I was making the point that like that's not actually a good guide to morality, whether you're having a good time or not.
And I was just showing you that the life that he was obviously headed into, which was not a very good life, was a fun life as he went down the drain.
And a lot of Christians were like, well, that was unnecessary.
And I thought, if it was unnecessary, you know how you know it's necessary?
I put it in.
That's how you know it's necessary.
I would not put something in, any kind of scene into my book if it weren't necessary.
And so I just think this kind of uptight, you know, don't show me anything.
Don't, you know, soil my eyes.
Everything has to be good for children really has ruined Christian art.
And, you know, obviously Mel Gibson didn't do that when he wrote Passion of the Christ.
If you want to see pornography, the violence in that movie is very close to pornographic.
And yet it's incredibly powerful, incredibly beautiful film.
And that's the only story you're allowed to tell, realistically, like that.
And I think that's ridiculous.
If you can't convince people that your God is the God of the real world, you're not convincing anybody of anything.
So do you write sex scenes more like Stephen King or more like George R. Martin?
It's probably throbbing or there's a there's some throbbing, some pulsing, a little moaning.
You know, Stephen King is one of, I love Stephen King, great storyteller, but he doesn't write good sex.
He didn't have a sex.
He didn't actually have a true sexual relationship in any of his books until I think Tommy Knockers.
And it's just a perfect word for it.
Exactly.
I mean, Charles Dickens wasn't good with sex either, so I'm not knocking.
Yeah, so Tommy Knockers is your favorite Stephen King book, I assume.
It's everybody's.
Recently, Stephen King said he hated that book and he wished he had it back, but I really liked it.
Yeah, it's really upsettingly frightening.
Which is the better, like the best of two Stephen King's works?
One, Maximum Overdrive.
Two, his Twitter feed.
Yeah, his Twitter feed.
You can only have one.
I don't want to knock Ding King because I think he is a great storyteller.
That Twitter thing.
I'll take Maxwell overdrive every time.
It's weird that he can be such a great writer and then he writes tweets like a 12-year-old.
It's so weird.
The other guy like this is Don Winslow, who writes really interesting, very far-left crime novels.
I mean, he blames America for everything.
It's like the Mexican drug trade.
It's America's fault.
It's like, why is it called the Mexican drug trade?
It's Mexico's fault.
But he is so left-wing, and his Twitter feed is just this ponderous, pompous attack on one attack after another on the evil Donald Trump.
And it's like absent subtlety, absent nuance.
It's weird.
Interesting.
Well, Sat, I think we should shuffle into our subscriber portion and do some crazy.
We'll get that sex scene read.
We're going to get the live sex scene read and a lot more cursing in our subscriber portion.
Subscriber headlines, see it get his take on them.
And we're going to talk about a little more about Ben Shapiro.
We're going to get all the interesting stories about Ben Shapiro, and we're going to ask Andrew the 10 questions.
So you ready?
I'm ready.
Are you ready?
Here we go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Give us the craziest Ben Shapiro stories.
We need, like, you know, he broke the Sabbath.
What Andrew needs is for each of these to say satire.
Bracket satire at the end.
Otherwise, I take them seriously.
Let's talk about Christianity.
What kind of church do you go to?
Could you just show me that verse on that?
Like, I just, you know, I just really, could you just show me what that's written?
Because that's not the way I read the book.
So these guys subscribe and we insult them.
That's what I'm trying to figure out.
If you want to really be a writer, you got to be able to take it.
You got to be able to take it.
That's true.
That's true.
Enjoying this hard-hitting interview.
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