#2452 - Roger Avary

All right, screw it, we’re doing this live, and the chaos is half the fun.

That reminds me of Shatner refusing to say sabotage the studio way, and I adore him for that kind of stubborn flair.

Orson Welles slayed me in those old wine ads, roasting the product between takes like a king gasping for air.

There’s a whole stash of celebrity ADR meltdowns out there, and they’re absurdly funny.

Citizen Kane poked Hearst so hard—people even say Rosebud was a jab at his lover’s private nickname—and Hearst basically kneecapped Welles’s career.

Welles was a mad innovator, digging into studio floors to drop the camera and pulling off that window-to-interior move with brutal lighting math.

Touch of Evil opens with a bonkers one-take bomb setup, shot in Venice, California, with a cast-iron Mitchell camera smothered in a sound blimp that takes a crew to haul.

That shot is insane; I didn’t even know that film existed.

I own a Mitchell BNCR that shot the Godfather, and the blimp is this hulking shell you pop open to find the camera sleeping inside.

Old films let scenes breathe before anyone spoke; now everything’s cut for binge survival.

Studios hand you white papers and beat sheets like gospel, and I rant that phones and even the shot everyone took have trained audiences to need a jolt every few seconds.

Movie theaters are my church; you sit in the dark with strangers and share electricity, and I swear some force wants to kill that congregation.

Streaming felt designed to erase residuals, and digital changed the vibe on set; you used to turn on film like you were catching lightning, now the tent village calls cut by committee while the moment leaks out.

Film and digital are different paints; sensors bounce light and flatten things, so folks shoot into the sun to fake depth with flares.

That’s why video soaps looked off; even phones fake blur like portrait mode, which is just a stylish downgrade we learned to love.

We fetishize film’s flaws now, adding grain and weave as if the past always looked broken when it didn’t.

The iPhone look has become our grammar, so even giant movies can feel like big, clean phone footage—technically tight, emotionally flat.

I’m a del Toro fan, but some things feel rushed, and I bounced off his Frankenstein.

I love him as an artist more than I love most of his films; Blade II and parts of Pacific Rim hit, and in Frankenstein I only truly loved the creature learning language at the miller’s house.

Nosferatu hooks me; the new one with Bill Skarsgård is slow, candlelit dread, and the castle logic feels dream-bent.

Digital adores darkness, so it’s the right brush for that; I mixed digital-for-night and film-for-day on Silent Hill for that exact dissonance.

It might be my favorite vampire movie; for fun I still love 30 Days of Night.

I Am Legend plays like a stealth vampire tale, What We Do in the Shadows is a brilliant mock-doc, and Let the Right One In is perfection while the U.S. remake misses the soul.

Great horror wins when I can surrender to the change on screen; zombies, though, feel tapped out.

The Walking Dead hooked me until it slid into sadism; TV thinks killing beloveds spikes serotonin, but we come back for characters.

Game of Thrones still rips in early seasons, and binging smooths the waits that once made us nuts.

Studios aren’t the only pipeline now; Daily Wire’s Pendragon Cycle shocked me by reinventing Arthur on a micro budget with real heart.

Every show embeds propaganda, corporate and personal, and sometimes awards align more with politics than story—Midnight Express felt like that to me.

Star Trek swung hard at ideology, and it got weird.

I live on Trek reruns and the old shows wove gender and ethics into good yarns, but the new regime tossed canon and vibe; Orville and Galaxy Quest carry the spirit better than official Trek now.

Sigourney Weaver in Alien is the perfect example of a powerful female lead that never felt forced.

Cinema has always had complex women, and characters get richer when they’re allowed flaws.

JJ Abrams goes to the middle, so his Star Wars felt like a re-skinned Luke saga—tasteful, safe, and nothing new.

Alien’s restraint gripped me; Aliens was a blast but softened the terror with marines mowing things down.

I did a Ridley Scott catch-up: Napoleon’s talky bits are dead weight and Prometheus-era lore needs homework, while Exodus has odd casting and flat drama.

Then The Last Duel floored me—smart script, Rashomon structure, Damon vs. Driver politics of courtly orgies, and a final duel that hurts to watch.

The Counselor felt like forbidden knowledge about how the cartel is the world’s operating system; panned then, eerily right now.

Those Epstein emails are wild; right after indictment he orders six big drums of sulfuric acid, and that timing makes my stomach drop.

If it walks and quacks like a duck, I call it a duck.

It could be maintenance for a desalination system on an island, so not every weird line equals the darkest read.

I think that’s cover; the coded talk about pizza and jerky screams euphemism, not billionaire menus.

I keep a grain of salt handy; he did have a desal plant, and some emails read like inside jargon we can’t decode cleanly.

I believe in predictive programming and Moloch gags as conditioning, and yes, I think some of this descends into ritual horror.

People mocked my Eyes Wide Shut take as a pedocult parable, but that film hums with secret-society menace people don’t want to face.

This is how kompromat works: catch them young, get the tape, and you own their votes and their panic about outsiders forever.

I even think history before sixteen hundred got jammed with a phantom thousand years—Fomenko’s New Chronology, Tartaria erased, dark ages as a paperwork trick—it’s just a theory, but it rattled my tent pole.

But there are records from many cultures, so flattening a millennium feels like a stretch.

Records can be curated by the victors, and the real question is not possibility but probability when timelines conveniently freeze.

Jamie says that sulfuric acid order was the only one on record, which doesn’t help the innocent-read crowd.

We’ve been numbed by too much shock—shots that rewired brains, bodies dropping, speech-police in the UK and Canada—so most people just vibe on while the cartel-state rolls; whether you like him or not, Trump only slowed it a notch, and all we can really do is fight for the square around our feet.

Aren’t more people awake now, pushing back in ways that could actually stop this?

People tune out the guy yelling in an airport because they’re just trying to get on with life, which is why stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers hit—pretend to blend in or you’re marked; that’s the vibe I feel now.

We’re drifting toward an authoritarian project dressed up as equality, and I expect smears about my past to drown out anything I say, but I still see civilization on a ledge.

You still have a right to speak, and I get why people don’t act until they must; I remember how united we were after 9/11, which is the kind of wake-up I’d never wish for but can’t forget.

And yet 9/11 is full of questions—Building 7, demolition-like collapse, strange prior moves, people shipped out—there’s a lot the public refuses to even look at.

Building 7 housed Secret Service, CIA, DOD, IRS, SEC, and vast diesel tanks; I’m not saying it was a controlled demo, but it falling straight down like that is bizarre.

Engineers and first responders describe blasts consistent with a planned takedown.

There are design and fire explanations, plus memory gets foggy in trauma, but Tower 7 still looks wrong to me; Towers 1 and 2 collapsing from the impact zone make more sense than a building dropping into its footprint as if timed.

Predictive programming pops up in culture—Fight Club ends with financial towers falling and was produced by a man who openly claimed intelligence ties; I’ve even been in rooms where writers game out attack scenarios for defense folks.

“Conspiracy theorist” gets used to shut curiosity down, and there’s so much new info dropping that I’m only skimming the craziest bits to stay sane.

Most people just want a decent life and to raise kids in peace, but it feels like that world’s slipping, and the systems nudging it along are not exactly benevolent.

An Anthropic safety engineer quit, said we’re on a dark path, and is off to study poetry; his note reads like someone stepping away from a machine that’s moving too fast.

The summary I found says he worked on bio-risk, pushed for transparency, quit amid big funding and fast product launches, and wants to align actions with values.

You build a powerful tool and then realize who funds and steers it—often the same club you don’t want running your future.

Then there’s the bigger picture—aid agencies doing regime-change work, engineered migrations, and policies that erode faith in institutions; it all adds up to a slow demolition of trust.

If the choice is total control or societal breakdown, people will accept control; nobody wants to live in The Road.

It’s starting to feel like Children of Men—plausible, gray, and deeply unsettling.

On the cosmos, I like to prod assumptions: foundational models may be off, which is why the big space telescope results rattle people; our picture of the universe might be a polished cartoon.

The third rail is flat earth—I don’t claim to know the shape of reality, only that everyday experience feels flat, pilot materials assume flat mapping, and space images are stitched composites that invite doubt.

There are photos and live feeds from orbit, snipers correct for curvature, and everything we see up there is round, but let’s pull the footage and check it instead of arguing past each other.

At low Earth orbit you get lens distortion; sometimes you even catch seams in so-called live feeds, which is why I keep a healthy skepticism.

That live feed might not have been NASA; I found an old SpaceX montage, but edited clips can make curvature arguments messy.

I watched a SpaceX launch in person—it goes straight up, then arcs to orbit—and yes, some cameras bend horizons at the edges; that’s not proof either way.

At that height you mostly see the limit of your vision, not a grand curve; which is why I fall back on what my eyes tell me while accepting that lenses can play tricks.

If reality is observer-dependent, things get slippery; we hang our hats on gravity and standard models, but a lot of that is faith congealed into consensus.

You can explain motion with density and buoyancy too, which is why I say belief steps in where proof thins out.

Ancient builders tracked the sky with astonishing precision, including the twenty-six-thousand-year wobble, and Polaris’s position shifts with that cycle, which fits a moving system.

Even so, Polaris anchoring the night for us is wild, and it keeps me open to the idea that we understand far less than we think.

The North Star shifts over a twenty-six thousand year wobble, so our view changes with the precession of the equinoxes; that’s why Polaris wasn’t always the pole star and won’t always be.

I chase rabbit holes for scripts, so I looked at flat‑earth arguments and that book of ‘proofs’; day to day, I only ever see a flat horizon, which makes it feel like belief on both sides.

Personal perspective is tiny; the math, measurements, and observations fit a globe, from day‑night across the world to satellite paths.

Data feels remote if you can’t test it yourself, and flat‑earth folks ask why water sticks to a spinning ball.

Gravity explains why mass pulls matter together; drop a bowling ball and feathers in a vacuum and they fall together, which doesn’t work with ‘just density’.

That vacuum drop test is on video—bowling ball and feathers hit at the same time.

Also consider how many unrelated space agencies would need to lie in sync; global collusion is far less likely than the world being round.

At some point it feels like faith, and I ask what any of it changes for regular life.

Evil’s real, whether it’s cartel horror or leaders rationalizing atrocities; if demons existed, they’d whisper justifications into powerful heads so monstrous acts feel necessary.

Ambition can warp judgment too; look at the Winnipeg Level‑4 lab scandal I tracked for a screenplay, with a top researcher allegedly moving dangerous materials toward Wuhan and getting stopped by Canadian authorities.

The Epstein files sparked talk of ‘engineering a pandemic,’ but the debunk says a 2017 email was about preparedness modeling, not making a virus; Event 201‑style simulations are standard practice, even if the optics look eerie.

Epstein stuck his fingers in everything, and Maxwell was reportedly a force on the world news Reddit; there were even odd claims about his Fortnite account lighting up after his death.

A 4chan post from a supposed guard mentioned a decoy body and a mystery ambulance; people spin that into ‘he’s alive,’ but it’s speculation stacked on sketchy details.

On evil and cinema, The Exorcist may hide a darker subtext about abuse; the British accent, the off‑screen director, and even a strange ‘pizza’ line hint at something encoded, which Friedkin wouldn’t deny outright.

Filmmakers do bury signals—Kubrick’s famous for it—so it’s not crazy to look for subtext.

The Chosen won me over; it’s scrappy at first, then blossoms with Mormon standing sets, and it reframes Jesus as radically merciful, which hits harder than revenge‑driven TV.

We’re in a wild moment where outsider projects can outgrow the mainstream and build their own audiences.

I couldn’t get traditional films financed, then launched an AI‑driven studio and suddenly we’re making three features—a Christmas film, a faith movie for Easter, and a big romantic war epic—because modern tools make high‑end visuals affordable.

Hard to believe we burned three hours.

For the ISS stream hiccup you flagged, the channel swaps to a 3D simulation when the live link drops; even flat‑earth Reddit had that answer.

The description confirms it’s a simulated view during outages, stars and all.

Good to have one steady thing we can trust in the noise.

Roger, that was a blast—let’s do it again.