Joining us for this installment of The Pink Smoke's favorite pretentious thought experiment/goofball children's game, we welcome James Hancock, co-host of The Wrong Reel podcast. In addition to hosting that podcast for cinephiles, film fanatics and movie buffs of all stripes, Hancock has produced a duo of films for legendary animator Bill Plympton: Cheatin' and The Loneliest Stoplight (narrated by Patton Oswalt.)

On to the game: a storage facility houses the collected works of five filmmakers. A raging fire breaks out and Hancock has just enough time to save exactly five prints. All of the other films will be entirely lost to history. Cinders. Ashes. Soot and embers. Which five prints will Hancock save? He can pick five films from a single filmmaker or one from each artist or anything in between. Will he be selfish and refuse to think of an imperiled work's place in cinema history? Or will he weigh each film's cultural value against its personal meaning to him? Remember: he doesn't have a lot of time to react - the place is blazing and he's gotta go with his gut reaction...

~ JAMES HANCOCK ~
~ interviewed by christopher funderburg ~

THE PINK SMOKE: Ok, so you know the deal: the complete filmographies of five directors are stored in a burning warehouse.

You have just enough time to save five films. But you gotta act quick. Your five directors are:

JAMES HANCOCK: First of all, I like the game, it makes people put their money where their mouth is and I like these hypothetical scenarios but the game kinda gave me a panic attack because I'm torn between movies I haven't seen and that I wish to see and those that I wish to preserve for posterity or for my own selfish purposes. So tried to come with a balance of movies that would serve my own selfish needs as well as give me something to look forward to seeing because some of these filmmakers I have not done my due diligence and I feel like I've been saving them for a rainy day.

THE PINK SMOKE: Absolutely.

JH: So, there's no real concern for the order, but first and foremost: George Roy Hill, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I have to save that one. It's the ultimate father/son Sunday afternoon bonding movie. Both my dad and my stepdad and I would watch this growing up on repeat. It's kind of like a hippy Western but it's got these old Western masculine values all mashed into one. It's a really unusual flavor for an American Western, particularly for that time. By the early 70's you start getting movies like The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Little Big Man but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the first Western to break from that old school Howard Hawks, John Ford, George Stevens tradition. And Katherine Ross is such an angel. The chemistry between Butch and Sundance, it's just the ultimate buddy film. Such an unusual score. It's just one of those movies that makes me feel good when I'm watching it. It makes me think of family, just good quality bro time with a male role model.

PS: It's funny that you say that - you know who showed me that movie? I first watched it with my mom, with her saying "you're gonna love this movie." I remember being in like 4th grade and she sat me down to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So, it's funny that you associate with father and son because I had weirdly similar experience only where my mom demanded "this is a great movie you gotta see, you're gonna love it."

JH: And ordinarily, family friendly entertainment is not my thing. Normally, if someone is like "it's a great film for the family to watch" I'm like "sounds atrocious." But with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid I feel like it's family bonding time in the best sense of the word. And it has one of those classic late 60's bleak ending where they just charge straight into oncoming gunfire and that freeze-frame - it's giving me goosebumps just to mention it. That definitely gets preserved for future generations.

PS: Great choice.

JH: Moving on, there's movie on this that I haven't seen but I've been dying to see and that would be The Spiral Staircase by Robert Siodmak. Siodmak is a director whose contributions to film noir can't be ignored but every time I've read about The Spiral Staircase it just sounds like a movie that was made with me in mind - just a sick plot about a killer who likes to murder women with deformities and the idea of trying to show fear through the perspective of a woman who is in immediate danger, I just - I can't believe I haven't seen it. So I refuse to let that film go to the fire without having seen it even once 'cause I know amongst hardcore Siodmak admirers, I know many regard this (as opposed to The Killers) to be his undisputed masterpiece. I can't let this one go - if you could discuss it with me a little more, it might not be in the spirit of the game, but I'm curious your thoughts on it.

PS: Well, the game can be whatever the fuck we want it to be. But I like that movie. With list I gave you, it's really hard, I gave you a bunch of directors that I knew it would be difficult to sort, but in terms of Siodmak that's one film worth considering. To me, that movie is one of the few movies that captures what's happening in written pulp fiction during that era better than most - it's more in the vein of the Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson stuff that was happening or just getting ready to happen in a big way in terms of detective fiction and crime fiction, in pulp novels. It slightly presages and captures a tone that was about to overtake the genre because it is a little more unpleasant and more caught up in the psychological aspects of crime than a lots of films noir of that era. It isn't just a rollicking or clever detective story, not a locked-room mystery or a MacGuffin chase. It's an interesting film - although we can discuss it at the end, but it would not be the Siodmak I'd save. But it's not a bad choice. It's a fascinating film and a frequently overlooked piece of the film noir puzzle that was really coming together in 1945, when it was made. I understand if you're a Siodmak fan being passionate about it.

JH: Criterion collection did that great dual box set of both the Don Siegel and Robert Siodmak versions of The Killers a while back and I feel like any movie with Ava Gardner is gonna be good because she was such an absolute vision. So maybe I should save that -

PS: The Siegel version is objectively better because it features John Cassavetes punching Ronald Reagan in the face.

JH: - But something just when I read the descriptions of Staircase caught my attention and I don't know Siodmak maybe the way I should, but Staircase just ends up on the top of my list to preserve so I have something to look forward to. The next movie on my list is kind of a - well, I hate the expression "guilty pleasure" because if you like something you shouldn't feel guilty about it but: Roger Vadim's Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy.

No director embodies semi-sleazy, swinging 60's better than Roger Vadim in terms of directing beautiful women in films with whom he's also romantically involved: Catherine Deneuve, Brigette Bardot and, in this case, Jane Fonda. Just for the opening credits alone, Barbarella deserves to be preserved because it is erotic especially for its era it's some of the craziest shit you've ever seen but it really doesn't show you that much - your imagination fills in the gaps because the opening credits are very discreetly covering up all of the things that you actually think you are seeing.

As soon as it starts, you're like "wow, this is the 60's." I love Eurotrash. Europeans are so much less prudish about sex in many ways and they were trendsetters when it comes to that liberated approach to sexuality in films and Jane Fonda was just absolutely in her prime and a complete physical specimen. It's bad sci-fi in terms of cheap effects but done with a kind of sincerity and I always liked that kind of mashup where straight-faced in spite of the fact that you're working with cardboard backdrops... Barbarella - I could've gone with ...And God Created Woman, I coulda gone with some other things. Even just the Robert McGuinness poster that he painted for Barbarella - everything about the atmosphere and the style screams out to me that that one has to be saved.

PS: Even now, it's still an extremely weeeeirrrd movie - as much of a landmark film as it is, it's still very strange, it's still such a unique specimen even though there's so many imitations of it, so many films in the same Eurosleaze sci-fi vein, it's still a really unique and pungent flavor.

JH: Because Vadim was involved with so many of his stars, people kinda write him off just as "oh, he's a sleazeball" who made a career out of photographing beautiful women. But I feel like the history of film is in some ways the history of great artists photographing beautiful women, so I like that he felt no shame and no guilt about telling the kind of stories he wanted to tell and, if they're not for everybody, fine - but not one can argue that Roger Vadim did not make his films, his way. The moment the opening bars for the score of Barbarella begins, I just get a huge smile on my face and have an absolute blast from start to finish. So Barbarella definitely gets saved from the fire.

PS: Perfect.

JH: Moving on to Isao Takahata. I work in animation and I'm huge on Japanese animation. I grew up on Japanese animation. There's a series of videocassettes in the early 90's that took my video store by storm and it included Vampire Hunter D and Akira and Ghost in the Shell and all these Manga classics and I just ate them up. But most of the ones that have done well in the U.S. tend to have a sci-fi or a fantasy or a horror angle to them - and Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies is one of those movies where things are grounded in reality. It's about two little boys trying to survive during WWII in Japan.

PS: God - it's a tough movie. By any standard.

JH: Yeah, it's one of those movies that transcends animation. In the late 80's, people looked at animation in a very different way - people didn't talk about great animated films they way they about, say, Spirited Away with great reverence today. Fireflies was one of the movies that really broke through - Roger Ebert was ranting and raving about how it was one of the greatest films he had ever seen, irrespective of the medium through which it was being told. I feel like in America, so much animation is still geared towards a childlike sensibility. As a producer, I've worked with Bill Plympton and he's always struggled throughout his career to break through those barriers. He loves animation, he sees all kinds of films, but he does appreciate animation with an adult sensibility - it doesn't all have to be geared towards whether or not a 5 year-old can digest it. Grave of the Fireflies where it's like, "there's not going to be any knights, there's not going to be any dragons, they're not going to be any vampires" it's just going to be a really powerful human narrative. It's a true gem in the history of animation.

PS: Yeah, and it really is one of the great Japanese WWII films, any of those films about survival in that era - it stands alongside landmarks of that genre like The Human Condition or Fires on the Plain, absolutely.

JH: I always think of it with Forbidden Games. Forbidden Games is a nice spiritual sibling to Grave of the Fireflies - when you have the horrors of war which you're witnessing through the eyes of a childlike perspective. Forbidden Games is one of those movies that makes me openly weep and sob uncontrollably - which doesn't happen often! - Grave of the Fireflies and Forbidden Games have a connective tissue between them in that way.

PS: I'm the opposite, I cry at Burger King commercials. Trailers for Nicholas Sparks movies. "It's so touching!"

JH: Part of being a parent - my sister said, "I started crying at beer commercials and I don't understand."

PS: Anything featuring children or that's even mildly sentimental, I'll get choked up: "It's so true. It's so absolutely true." Anyhoo, you got one film left, James.

JH: I had to go with Velvet Vampire, which is another movie I haven't seen in its entirely because it's a total filthy pig I've watched certain scenes online but the director Stephanie Rothman... people love exploitation films and they love grindhouse films of that era but she's one of the only female directors who really thrived in that environment. Even though she never considered herself an exploitation director. After the fact, critics said "oh, you made this great exploitation film about nurses" and she said "well, I didn't set out to make an exploitation film, I set to do my job and tell my story, my way." I feel like she's unfairly categorized.

PS: Yeah but when Roger Corman hires you to make a movie about sexy nurses, I don't know how much you can plead ignorance! But I completely understand your - and her - position on the matter.

JH: She was a working director and not every working director gets to make a uniquely personal and poetic film every time out, they can only try to infuse a film with a bit of their stamp. One of the criticisms - with exploitation films, grindhouse films, whether it's cheerleader movies or horror films or blaxploitation film - is that they reinforce negative stereotypes about race or gender and Rothman is one of the ones who did not reinforce or conform to those stereotypes. Her film Velvet Vampire is incredibly erotic but not in the way you'd assume a film from that period would be.

First, she was a director who was a big believer in an equal amount of male and female nudity. I was just reading an interview with her where she was complaining about how she didn't like the fact that a lot of time these movies had men in clothes when the women were out of clothes, but she thought it'd be equally ridiculous to make a lot of movies where the guys were out of their clothes but the girls were still in theirs as some sort of revenge tactic. I like the fact that Velvet Vampire has a female sensibility but is still incredibly arousing and erotic - male and female body parts get equal billing. I love horror and eroticism put together, while this is not necessarily her most beloved film -

PS: I've never actually seen it.

JH: I don't know why horror and eroticism go so well together. I guess going back to Bram Stoker's Dracula, vampires allowing barely repressed sexuality to somehow be unleashed. But it's like chocolate and peanut butter. They reinforce each other and create a greater whole. I just find that subgenre to be irresistible. I have not done my due diligence on her entire filmography, though. Her career was fairly short-lived.

PS: It's also been hard for years to get ahold of her films. They always suffered from spotty distribution. I think she might have been a little neglected by Corman because they didn't end things on the best terms. But that's speculative on my part. A lot of Corman films have had crummy distribution in the VHS era and into the DVD era. She was a very independent, intellectual woman and she had a hit with Student Nurses and Corman wanted her to keep churning out the same thing over and over and she never seemed to have much interest in repeating herself.

By most accounts she seemed to have bristled under any kind of corporate control, even of the Corman variety. They're hard movies to see - I've only seen a handful of them. Probably only 3 of her movies. They're interesting and they're the best version of... well, maybe not the best. Not everything has to be "the best." But as you say, they're a version of exploitation cinema where there's a thought-process and philosophy and a politic behind the work.

JH: When you watch a movie like American Grindhouse and it talks about filmmakers like Larry Cohen or Herschell Gordon Lewis, they talk about all these pioneers who were working on that front and very rarely does her name come up and I feel like her name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath along with the rest of these guys. She was working in a similar space and tackling similar plot constructs as those guys.

PS: Well, she invented a subgenre. Student Nurses I don't believe is the precisely the first of its kind - the kind of nurse film that presents itself as sexploitation but is actually a melodrama. But it certainly crystalized the format. It invented a formula that Corman kept utilitizng thereafter because it was successful. As somebody who was the inventor of a subgenre in some ways, it's weird that she doesn't get more credit.

But again, she battled with Corman and he has a lot of say when with the way these legacies get written. If you interview a bunch of Corman acolytes, few are going to bring her up fondly because she clashed with a lot of people and had a very independent vision and mindset. That's the way people get written out of history. You call up Corman you're writing your book or making your documentary and he says "oh, have you talked to this guy and that guy" and the names that don't get brought up stand that much less of a chance of being remembered.

JH: I read an interview with her where she said some very flattering things about him. She said that Corman is politically very, very open-minded and socially progressive but financially incredibly conservative "and that's all I'm going to say about that." But I feel like she recognized that she had the freedom to have her point of view so long as she could would work with very very tight, very rigid financial constraints. Which is definitely the Corman model. On her end, I think she's still alive, it seems like there isn't any lasting bitterness towards Corman. She had a chance to go work for a studio called Dimension and get more money and took the chance to cut and run and went to work for a rival.

PS: I should emphasize that my thoughts on her relationship to Corman and how it factors into her legacy are purely speculative. For all I know, Corman tells everyone "ya gots to talk to Stephanie Rothman, she invented the student nurse picture" and then Johnny Documentary gives Rog's advice the blowoff.

So, to summarize, the five films you are saving from the blazing warehouse are:

With three of those filmmakers you picked their biggest, most iconic work - were you tempted to pick something by Hill, Vadim or Takahata that was more offbeat or had more of a personal meaning to you? Or maybe something a little more slight but still beloved - Slapshot with Hill or Pom Poko with Takahata for example?

JH: Slapshot very nearly made the list because my reaction was "there are so few good sports films" and Slapshot is one of them. I thought of boxing and how you can count on one hand how many good non-boxing films there are. Slapshot definitely is in the mix and its an absolute blast to watch and it shows hockey culture better than any movie ever made.

PS: It's so funny, it's great. [imitating Denis Lemieux] "The puck come down, bang you know, before the other guys you know. Nobody there - my arm go comme ça then the game stop, game start."

JH: I did feel weird about taking two films by George Roy Hill at the exclusion of one of the other filmmakers. Even though I know George Roy Hill's filmography better than the rest of the directors on the list, I still wanted to give each one of them their due. The deck was unfairly stacked in favor of George Roy Hill because I've seen The Sting and whatnot - for whatever reason, when I was in college I went on a rampage and watched a bunch of George Roy Hill films.

PS: With Siodmak you selected an offbeat and pretty cool film, but Siodmak was known for his collaborations with Burt Lancaster - did you feel temped to pick on of the Lancaster films like The Killers, Criss Cross or even The Crimson Pirate (which is a movie I really enjoy.) Did you feel like "oh, I gotta do a Lancaster/Siodmak?" Or it just didn't even cross your mind?

JH: That I went for purely selfish purposes. There are few directors that I've always saved for a rainy day and he would definitely be in the mix where his collection of films I've always felt like "one day, I'm going to really sink my teeth in" but as I was going over it, Spiral Staircase was the one I wanted to see the most. For purely selfish purposes, in this hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't have forgiven myself for skipping a film I was that interested in.

PS: Have you seen Criss Cross? That's the one I would've saved - I'm a Criss Cross partisan.

JH: I saw Criss Cross on VHS in 1997 or 98. When I first got movie crazy I went on a rampage where I watched 5 or 6 classic Hollywood films per day and it was in that mix. My memories of it are hazy at best.

PS: It's got one of the great heists, an armored car robbery - it's a great tough-as-nails crime picture.

JH: Siodmak is one of those classic cases where Hollywood was so much richer in the 30's and 40's and 50's as a result of this huge influx of European talent. Even WWII is one of the worst atrocities that ever befell the globe, the flipside is this flood of European talent to Hollywood. And the combination of Hollywood sensibilities with a European eye led the quote-unquote "Golden Age of Hollywood." And while he's not necessarily celebrated on same level as Billy Wilder or Fritz Lang or some of those guys, he's definitely in the mix as one of those great directors who came over.

PS: He's also tough for this game because his Golden Era is the 40's but he made almost 20 movies, maybe 19 movies in that decade - so there's a lot in his Golden Era. It's not like Takahata or Rothman where there's only a half dozen features really to be considered. With Siodmak, I can appreciate both that paring it down is hard and wanting to pick one you haven't seen. When I think about it, it's like "hunh, what else did he do? I never actually saw Cobra Woman." And that one is one of the big camp classics, you know? That's one of Kenneth Anger's favorite movies, that's where I first heard of it - and I understand the impulse: "Should I save Cobra Woman?" That sort of thought with a filmmaker who has made so many films there are always a few you haven't seen so you have those thoughts pass through your mind. Do you have anything you really regret losing?

JH: Well, maybe ...And God Created Woman - Brigette Bardot is one of cinema's great beauties and when it came down to choosing between posterity, the legacy of film history, and my own personal preference - Bardot was so lovely in so many movies that even if we were to lose that one, we still have so many movies where she was amazing. Well, we've still got Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt and that's my favorite Bardot film. Even if we lose one of her iconic performances, Contempt is still out there to represent her.

PS: What about the Rebecca De Mornay version? I always thought it was interesting that Vadim basically bookended his career with two versions of the same film.

JH: Ha, I barely remember it.

PS: With Bardot, I think Clouzot's La Veritie is the essential film. It’’s like the anti-Contempt - it was supposedly intended as a rebuke to the New Wave.

JH: I love Clouzot. I was posting some picture of them to my twitter feed the other day of them working together on The Truth. But my knowledge of his work doesn't extend beyond Diabolique, Wages of Fear and Le Corbeau.

PS: Oh, he's phenomenal - you gotta see 'em all!

JH: I really liked the documentary about the making of Inferno, L'Enfer, that has all the footage that got scrapped. You know the surviving footage of Romy Schneider that he made is just awe-inspiring. 

PS: I like that the documentary reveals that he had a heart attack while filming a lesbian love scene. I feel like that's the correct thing to happen to a filmmaker like Clouzot.  Anything else you want to throw in. Anything else you wanted to touch on that we overlooked?

JH: Only that I feel like I have a lotta homework to do, part of film history is always an ongoing study and I am a perpetual student. When you sent the list, I was like "whoa, he sent some not obvious choices." I immediately felt self-conscious and embarrassed - I like to at least pretend that I'm an expert on film history and some directors, but we all have our blind-spots. This has been a reminder that I have a lot more fun movie-watching to do. My work is not complete on this front, nor will it ever be.

PS: Nobody has perfect knowledge - certainly there's no need for embarrassment. Part of the meaning of this thought experiment is "what if these films were lost." Part of the idea from the concept came from me thinking about how almost all of Ozu's pre-war movies were destroyed by the fire-bombings of Japan in WWII and how I really wanted to see these films I could never see. It's a bit of reminder to people: watch those movies you haven't watched! A reminder to me to watch Cobra Woman or Terminal Island. At any rate, I wanted to thank you again for doing this, this was a really fun conversation.

JH: You're absolutely welcome, I want to invite you to come on Wrong Reel again and talk some more - you won't have to make a choice in the hypothetical scenario of films being burned. 

Some notable losses we didn't cover:
Pretty Maids all in a Row, The World According to Garp, Only Yesterday, The Tale of Princess Kayuga, My Neighbors the Yamadas, Slaughterhouse-Five, Funny Farm, Sait-on Jamais, Blood and Roses, Son of Dracula, Flesh and the Woman.