July 2022 - Have You SEEN This?

145 – The Two Jakes

Jen and Tim marvel at the cursed, ill-conceived, bloated sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes.

Errata: Jen was wrong and Polanski fled the country in February of 1978, not 1977.

The Two Jakes derailed the Robert Towne/Jack Nicholson friendship, which had been forged in the early 60s while both worked for Roger Corman, for at least a decade. Towne admitted as much in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. However, in a 2006 interview, Towne parries a question about the film thusly:

Well, in the interest of maintaining my friendships with Jack Nicholson and Robert Evans, I’d rather not go into it, but let’s just say The Two Jakes wasn’t a pleasant experience for any of us. But, we’re all still friends, and that’s what matters most.
Robert Towne

So, you know, awwwwww.

The History Channel website has the cold hard facts about Jack Nicholson’s 1994 road rage incident, in which he attacked another motorist’s car with a golf club.

A man kneels to push over the smallest domino in a line of dominos of varying size, the largest being taller than the kneeling man. The smallest domino is labeled "singer/songwriter gets wrong address" and the largest is labeled "Chinatown." — 🤪

144 – Fatal Beauty

Tim and Jen host Jacques of the Seeking Derangements podcast so they can hold forth about a personal favorite: Fatal Beauty starring Whoopi Goldberg!

Hear the whole thing at our Patreon, where you can also listen to Jacques’s guest appearance for House (1977), as well as more than 50 other bonus episodes!

Jacques somewhat confused the timeframe of Whoopi’s brief relationship with Ted Danson. They had an affair on the set of the 1993 film Made in America, and the infamous Friars Club blackface bit occurred in the fall of that same year. Ted and Whoopi dated until 1994; they moved on with Mary Steenbergen and Frank Langella(!), respectively.

Several stories exist on the origin of Whoopi’s stage surname, incidentally. The anecdote about “Goldberg” being her mother’s suggestion so she could appear Jewish enough to succeed in show business has not been confirmed. Hilariously, noted treat boy John Podhoretz once wrote an editorial for the New York Post demanding that she drop her adopted surname, in light of some wild-ass comments about the Holocaust Whoopi made on The View.

If you don’t recall the story of Big Lurch, we told it on our Disco Godfather episode.