A deeply troubled movie production. A 1979 take on the Kennedy family that ruffled some feathers. And Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House joining Jake & Julian in the foam palace. Come take the Winter Kills pill with us.
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Episode music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 168 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Winter Kills Movie Night episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky… Julian Fields.
And today we have… Matt Crisman.
Hey, hey.
There he is.
Hello.
It's not winter where we are, so I feel like… We've messed up because this is clearly a Christmas movie.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, Die Hard and Winter Kills are the best Christmas movies.
Yeah, I placed a call out on Twitter and I was like, what are like some like really pilled movies that maybe we should cover?
And Matt replied with Winter Kills, which I never heard before.
And I went and looked at the poster of it and the poster in and of itself is so melted that I knew I knew that this had been sealed in fate.
It is a jewel of conspiracy theory thought, but also it's almost like an unserious version of JFK or something.
Well, it's because it has, I think, a fundamentally healthier relationship to the Kennedy assassination than JFK does.
JFK is a much better made film.
You know, Oliver Stone is a genius at making movies, but its attitude to the assassination is fundamentally juvenile, which makes sense because Oliver Stone was a kid when Kennedy was assassinated, and it imprinted on him at that point.
This movie is based on a novel by Richard Condon, the author of The Manchurian Candidate, who was a grown-ass man when Kennedy was assassinated, and so it has an adult attitude towards the real implications of the Kennedy assassination.
It's profoundly cynical, I think, about a lot of that.
I mean, at every turn where you want to kind of maybe feel that heroic thing that comes off of, what's the actor in JFK?
Costner?
Yeah.
Costner's like heroic.
He's a knight-errant.
He's out there.
He's jousting against the deep state.
And it's a meaningful—this is the important thing—JFK really, really proposes that this is a meaningful battle.
That, like, if we knew the truth, something would be different.
Whereas this one, it's like every time you take off the mask, there's another mask.
Yeah, there's another mask.
I love it.
So usually, you know, I do a little background on the film's production.
You know, who wrote it, who directed it, how much it cost.
I was like, oh man, I can't wait.
I can't wait until they look this stuff up.
How much it made, that sort of thing.
And when I went to research Winter Kills, the 1979 dark comedy, I found that it is, without a doubt, the strangest production story we have ever covered on the podcast.
Period.
Of all time.
So it's written and directed by a guy named William Riker.
I did not recognize any of his movies, but I did recognize him from some acting work he did later in life.
He was in The Client, the adaptation of the John Grisham novel starring Brad Renfrow.
R.I.P.
R.I.P.
He was in my own private Idaho and like a handful of other TV shows.
He strikes me as kind of a kook.
I found a YouTube video of him from June of 2020 posted to his channel where he attempts to summon the ghost of Howard Hughes to rid the White House of Donald Trump.
I swear to God.
That's amazing.
What, is he going to strafe it in a plane?
What's the plan here?
Is he going to wash the White House's hands until they bleed?
He's like, I've heard, I've heard that playing the voice of Howard Hughes summons his spirit.
Ancient industrialists are gods.
We should be worshipping them and trying to bring them back to life and sacrificing stuff to them.
If he came back to life, he would absolutely banish Trump from the White House and install Mitt Romney because of his absolutely fetishistic love of Mormons.
That's the thing we need.
We need some Mormon blood in the White House, like in my vein.
Did he manage to convert or was it just like admiration?
It was admiration.
He's all of his top, once he went like bug house, all of his top aides were Mormon.
He got blood transfusions from Mormons.
What, because it's better quality?
Yeah, the purest blood.
Yes.
So, Winter Kills has an all-star cast.
You got a very young Jeff Bridges.
He looks almost like Val Kilmer in this movie.
Yeah, that's good.
How old is he?
Like, how old is he in this film?
He's like in his early 20s.
Gotta be.
Smooth.
Little baby.
Smooth.
I mean, did he have to shave to achieve that?
I gotta wonder.
Very smooth.
Yeah, he was very smooth throughout the film.
A smooth boy.
He was the smoothest boy.
And the curtains are always open.
Always open to expose the smoothness.
That's not CGI, that's real bridges.
That's a real chest and stomach of a real man.
Back when they used to use squibs in the sex scene.
You'd bust and they'd have a little explosion at come go off.
You've also got Anthony Perkins from Psycho.
You've got John Huston who is a prolific writer and director.
He did Maltese Falcon, African Queen, Misfits, you know, Hollywood classics.
He's also the father of Angelica Huston.
You even have a cameo from Elizabeth Taylor.
I have zero idea how they got all these people for this movie, especially when you hear about the production.
Weren't you saying that she's like the only one who got paid?
She was basically the only person, only cast member who got paid, because she wasn't going to step on the set unless it was already in her bank account.
Yeah, so Bridges was not like a name.
A lot of these people got, I don't know, I mean, or was he already kind of big?
He was, he was like, he'd been in some stuff.
He'd been, he was like a star.
So do you think he just was like, we gotta do this, we gotta expose the deep side?
Yeah, no, he, like a lot of the people cast specifically were like, they thought it was important.
They thought it was an important movie and it was, it was worth sacrificing to get out.
As Matt said earlier, the movie's based on a Richard Condon book who wrote Manchurian Candidate and cost $6.5 million to make.
It was produced by Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg, who had amassed a fortune as marijuana dealers.
Nice.
Their previous producing endeavor was bringing the softcore porn series Emmanuel from France to the United States.
Oh my god, are you kidding me, dude?
Sylvia Kristall!
There's another incredible French connection then, because Maurice Jarre made the soundtrack to this, and he's the dad of the legend of electronic music and early dance music, Jean-Michel Jarre, who did Oxygen and all that shit.
But apparently his dad got pissed at him and cut him off.
And I have to say, the soundtrack was fun.
And also, going back to the cast, an absolutely baffling and out-of-this-world cameo by Toshiro Mifumi!
I know!
The cast has said that they got paid for their acting work by going to a hotel room where they would receive envelopes stuffed with small, worn bills.
One of the producers, Leonard Goldberg, was murdered during the production of the movie!
He was murdered, they think, maybe by the mafia.
Yeah, yeah, because he was probably in debt to some people.
They found him tied to a chair, execution-style shot to the head, on his birthday.
This was during the production of the movie, if Wikipedia is to be believed.
Yeah, and if you haven't watched it, there's a lot of Mafia stuff in the movie.
Yeah.
The cash envelopes started drying up, but for some reason, the cast agreed that they would continue working on the movie for free.
Eventually, someone snitched to the actors' union and they shut down the entire production, forcing it to declare bankruptcy.
The only movie at that point to ever do so.
Like, a movie declaring bankruptcy.
Really?
And not in, like, the Uwe Boll, like, you're-making-money kind of way?
No, no.
As in, like, this is a bankrupt production.
Because usually the funding model kind of precludes that from occurring.
Right.
Yeah.
Wow.
Shortly thereafter, the other producer, Robert Sterling, was sentenced to 40 years in prison for marijuana smuggling.
40 years for weed?
Fuck.
Yeah, but he was moving weight.
I mean, yeah.
These guys were kingpins.
Flying planes.
Yeah, yeah.
They became drug lords.
They moved Emmanuel from France to the United States.
I have to say, that's good taste.
And then they were like, let's do this weird fucking pilled conspiracy satire about the JFK assassination.
The only reason Winter Kills ever saw the light of day was that Jeff Bridges and Riker, the director, made another movie together called The American Success Company, which is ironic, and the distribution rights for that film were enough for them to finish Winter Kills.
It was released in 1979 by Embassy Pictures and made just over a million bucks at the box office.
Hell yeah.
less than one sixth of its budget, a bomb.
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave Winter Kills one star, writing,
"Winter Kills rapes the memory of President John F. Kennedy while giving his late father a few dozen kicks
in the head, too.
It revels in its every degrading scene.
One feels a little less clean just having seen this picture."
Hell yeah, that's a fricking review.
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