Welcome to the dog days of summer. We’ve got an action-packed episode to get you to through August, so fasten your enthusiasm harness, and get ready to listen, and enjoy.

Eddie Muller is an expert in film noir. If you like movies with private eyes, tough guys and saucy dames who kiss and lie, Eddie is your dude. Eddie is the host of TCM’s Noir Alley, which is forever and always a celebration of all things noir. He has a new book out called Dark City Dames, which examines the lives and careers of a group of actresses from the heyday of film noir. As you may suspect, their true life stories are often more intense than the movies they made. Eddie is also the author of Dark City, San Francisco Noir, The Art Of Noir, the novels The Distance and Shadow Boxer. He is a fascinating guy. It was a great interview. I could have talked to him all day to be honest.

Also, one of my favorite people, Katharine Coldiron, is back. Katharine also has a new book entitled Out There In The Dark. It’s part memoir, part film criticism. Maybe one could say it is memoir AS film criticism. Or film criticism as memoir? You decide. But I read it in one sitting. It’s a great. Informative, honest, brave, it’s a terrific piece of work.

True Tales From Weirdsville takes a deep dive into the cult classic Gun Crazy. Informed in large part by the book Gun Crazy And The Origin Of American Outlaw Cinema by, you guessed it, Eddie Muller, Gun Crazy is not only a terrific cult film, but it’s also an incredibly important one, kicking off as it did, an entire subgenre in American film, one that still thrives today. That is, the stories of sociopaths in love. Gun Crazy. If you can find two words that better describe this country, you let me know.

Like a lot of you, I was moved by the passing of film director David Lynch this past January. Much more than I thought I would be, to be honest. A lot of it had to do with the timing. He was such a part of Los Angeles. He made movies set here. He did a daily weather report. He talked at length about how much he loved the light, the feeling of Old Hollywood, the smell of night-blooming jasmine, and he left as the city was on literally burning down around us. On top of that, we were four days away from a new president who is the embodiment of everything Lynch is not. It was like Dale Cooper died four days before Bob become President. Everywhere you turned on the news there was another scumbag asshole winning the lottery, and just when things could not get worse, reality said, “Wait! I got one more!”

While struggling to fight the fires, with thousands of people in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena losing everything the city was now mourning its coolest resident. And if you don’t live here I really cannot understate what a presence he is. There is a rotating sculpture of his head in head in Santa Monica. People gathered at the Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake where he used to go for coffee and a chocolate shake every day at 2:00 PM. The gathered at Jumbo’s Clown Room, the Hollywood Boulevard strip club where he, as legend has it, he wrote Blue Velvet. Every sidewalk sandwich board in town bore a chalk drawing of his iconic quiff.

So, as I began the next podcast, I figured I would dedicate the True Tales From Weirdsville segment to Mr. Lynch. But it quickly became apparent that it was way too much story for just one segment and it eventually stretched over three episodes. And so, for your listening pleasure, we stitched ‘em together, and here they are. Enjoy.

https://www.DanaGould.com

Aaaaaaand we’re back. It’s summer here and the livin’ is easy. For someone. Somewhere. It must be, right? It’s summertime and the livin’ is easy. For bears. It was also the night that the skeletons came to life!

Will Sloan is here! Will is a journalist and author. He is the host of the podcast The Important Cinema Club (highly recommended). Will has a new book coming out called Ed Wood, Made in Hollywood USA which is a serious reappraisal of Wood’s filmography. No, it doesn’t posit that he was actually the greatest filmmaker of all time but it does make an attempt to put Wood’s work into context with regard to what stories he was trying to tell, keeping in mind the resources he had available to him at the time and, even more so, the cultural forces pushing against him. Glen Or Glenda specifically.

Alexandra Seros is here. She has a new book out entitled Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur. Ida Lupino s well known as an actress, starring in several classic Hollywood films, and many of the great film noirs like High Sierra, They Drive By Night and While The City Sleeps. But she also was a great director. One of the first women directors in Hollywood. And not just a director, she directed several terrific and important films, like The Hitchhiker, Outrage and The Bigamist. Her story is fascinating, She was obviously incredibly intelligent. So intelligent, in fact, that she knew she had to pretend she was less intelligent than she was so they men that ran her exclusively all male field wouldn’t feel threatened and prevent her from working. Crazy

Speaking of directors, True Tales From Weirdsville finishes our three part story on the life and career of David Lynch, as seen through the eyes of his magnum opus, Twin peaks. It’s a little bigger than a normal segment, but he warrants it.