#2452 - Roger Avary

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

Roger Avary (0:06)

Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

SPEAKER_4 (0:12)

Come on, Roger.

Jamie (0:14)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_4 (0:14)

Fuck it.

Roger Avary (0:16)

Fuck it.

SPEAKER_5 (0:16)

Fuck it. Go for it.

Roger Avary (0:17)

Fuck it.

SPEAKER_4 (0:18)

We'll do it live.

Roger Avary (0:19)

Do it live.

SPEAKER_5 (0:20)

That's a classic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_4 (0:22)

That's a classic look behind the scenes.

Roger Avary (0:25)

Do it live.

SPEAKER_4 (0:25)

Fuck it. Crazy people telling you the news.

SPEAKER_5 (0:28)

Yeah. That's good.

Roger Avary (0:30)

And the William Shatner one where the studio guy, he says, Shatner is doing some ADR for the cartoon, the Star Trek cartoon. And he says, he uses the word sabotage. And he gets corrected by the by the studio guy. He's like, Bill, it's pronounced sabotage. Please don't correct me. It disgusts me, it sickens me. And you say sabotage. I say sabotage. I absolutely love William Shatner.

SPEAKER_4 (1:09)

My favorite ones are the Orwell, excuse me, fuck, I can't remember his name. Rosebud Orson Welles, Jesus Christ.

Roger Avary (1:18)

Orson Welles.

Jamie (1:19)

What happened?

SPEAKER_4 (1:20)

I know. What happened? My brain just said, nope, no access. When Orson Welles was doing the Gallo wine commercials, remember those days? Orson Welles.

Roger Avary (1:29)

Selling the wine before it's time. I know. And he was like, everything was like an exhaustive sucking of air to come in.

SPEAKER_4 (1:37)

But then he was making fun of how shitty the wine was in between takes, like he was angry.

Roger Avary (1:45)

There is a CD that you can get. I can't remember what it's called, but I have them at home. And it's like all these radio things like that, where just when celebrities lose it while doing voiceover and ADR, it's hilarious.

SPEAKER_11 (1:59)

Orson Welles is a crazy story, right?

SPEAKER_4 (2:01)

Because when he made that movie, when he made Citizen Kane, which was about William Randolph Hearst, William Randolph Hearst essentially shut down one of the most talented guys alive at the time, shut down his career.

Roger Avary (2:13)

Yeah, because the movie was kind of an insult about, you know, the whole thing about Rosebud is that's the name of his girlfriend's clitoris. Oh, really? That was his nickname for her clitoris. And so Orson Welles was doing a kind of very, like, he was jabbing at him in a very low level way. Like, really? Yeah, Rosebud.

SPEAKER_4 (2:36)

How did he know that that was the nickname of his girlfriend's clitoris?

Roger Avary (2:40)

People in Hollywood know these things.

SPEAKER_12 (2:42)

Oh, boy.

Roger Avary (2:42)

Word gets around. Word gets around.

SPEAKER_4 (2:45)

I would keep that one just to her.

Jamie (2:47)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_12 (2:48)

Who told?

Jamie (2:49)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_4 (2:50)

That's crazy. But, I mean, if you go back to, like, War of Worlds and then Citizen Kane, I mean, this guy was a dynamo, and then they shut him down.

Roger Avary (2:58)

Well, yeah, and he was doing things that nobody else would do. It's like, he's like, oh, I want the camera down here, like, on the phone. Well, we can't get the camera lens down that low. Like, what you're talking about is impossible to do. And so he would just grab, like, a pickaxe and just start chopping away at the studio concrete and dig a hole in the ground so you can put the camera down that low. Oh, really? Yeah, he was obsessed with getting a vision on screen that was, even today, is so advanced. There's a shot in the very beginning when young Kane is, like, a little kid, and he's out there playing with Rosebud. He's out there playing with the sled in the snow, and the camera is on him, and then it kind of starts pulling back, and it pulls through a window, and then we see his parents and the trust attorney, and the camera keeps backing up all the way into the room. Well, to do that in a studio, and to have all that snow and everything, you need so much light, but you also need a lot of light inside the exposure change.

It's like an amazing, incredible dolly shot, a reverse tracking shot. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_11 (4:06)

And what year did he do this to?

Roger Avary (4:11)

I don't know the exact year.

SPEAKER_4 (4:12)

Citizen Kane has to be 40s, right?

Roger Avary (4:14)

Yeah, yeah, probably. It's in the late 40s, I would think.

SPEAKER_11 (4:20)

Is that when it was, Jamie?

SPEAKER_4 (4:21)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_5 (4:22)