Laura Camien:

Welcome to the Town Hall Spark Sessions. I'm Laura Camien.

Susan Blackwell:

And I'm Susan Blackwell. We are creativity coaches at the Spark File, where we help people fear less and create more.

Laura Camien:

As creatives ourselves, we are obsessed with one of the most dynamic cultural centers in New York City: The Town Hall.

Susan Blackwell:

For over a century, The Town Hall has been a champion for artistry and advocacy, amplifying the voices of icons and emerging artists alike.

Laura Camien:

And now the Spark File and the Town Hall have joined forces to elevate and celebrate artists who are gracing the stage at Town Hall and using their creativity to fight for the powers of good.

Susan Blackwell:

So, without further ado, let's get into the Town Hall Spark Sessions.

Laura Camien:

Susan Blackwell! I have the most Sparkish spark to share with you today. I’m really excited about this. It isn’t often that we have fellow podcasters on our podcast. Not that we don’t want to do it, but it just hasn’t happened that often!

Susan Blackwell:

Yes!

Laura Camien:

But, this week something really fun is happening at Town Hall, which led to my spark. So there is a podcast called Blank Check with Griffin and David, where they take a film director and they dedicate a whole series to discussing the complete filmography of that director, episode to episode. I mean, they dissect it, Suze. It’s so fascinating and fun. They specifically focus on Filmmakers who had the early success that afforded them that rare blank check—

Susan Blackwell:

Blank check!

Laura Camien:

Like, you can have the money to produce whatever you want, your passion project, etc. So, that’s the concept. And I got to talk to one of their hosts, Griffin Newman, who, along with his co-host David Sims who, fun fact, is also the film critic for The Atlantic - these guys, like, know their stuff. Together they created Blank Check like ten years ago! They’ve been podcasting for ten years! And I discovered that Griffin started in The Tick with our friend Scott Speiser. So, we talked about our mutual love for Scott. I don’t think we recorded that, so y’all might not get to hear that but just know that it happened, and it was joyful. And Suze, I’m so excited for you to hear what Griffin had to say about his creative pursuits and about their upcoming show at Town Hall. Let’s get into it!

Susan Blackwell:

Let’s do it!

Laura Camien:

Welcome, Griffin! I’m going to call you Griff from here on out.

Griffin Newman:

Totally cool, yes.

Laura Camien:

Can you tell us how do you personally identify creatively speaking?

Griffin Newman:

That’s a, that’s a good question. I think for many years I had a real struggle with identifying as an artist in any way, and I even, like, recoil at saying the word artist. But when people would ask me what I would do, I say I act and I do comedy, and I write. I never waited to say I’m an actor, I’m a comedian, I’m a writer.

Laura Camien:

Interesting!

Griffin Newman:

At this point, the podcasting thing has become such a real career for me that when I’m at a doctor’s office or anything where there’s kind of a checklist, filling out the form kind of thing…

Laura Camien:

But for real, what do you do? (laughs)

Griffin Newman:

For occupation, I say professional podcaster which I’ve seen in the last few years shift from in the last couple of years being like, no, but what do you do for a living? To people now overselling it, I hear, oh, podcasting! I hear people making hundreds of thousands of dollars from that and I’m like… Three people are! Um, but yeah, I do…I do feel like that is, kind of, the dominant thing my work life is built around now, but I have at different points in time been an actor, been a comedian, been a writer, been a filmmaker, various other tangentially related things. I try to just…when things come across I’ll swing back to those identities.

Laura Camien:

Tell us what you’re doing at town hall

Griffin Newman:

Yeah, so, the podcast I do with David Sims, who is the film critic at The Atlantic, Blank Check with Griffin and David. We’ve been doing the show for ten years, it was ten years in March. Um, and we did our first show at Town Hall last March for our ninth anniversary. We thought it was really funny to make the ninth anniversary a bigger deal than the tenth–to treat nine like it was the biggest anniversary you could possibly commemorate and blow it out with the biggest show we could conceive of which was a tribute to the number nine and a history of the number nine in movies.

Laura Camien:

Oh my god.

Griffin Newman:

Which really doesn’t end up being much of a history once you dig into it, like, there really aren’t many nine movies, less so than maybe other numbers.

Laura Camien:

Less than you might think.

Griffin Newman:

Yeah, so that was a big variety show with dancers, and musical performances. This year we’re trying something that’s maybe closer to being a more theatrical version of our usual episode format. Our producer Ben Hosley, who has been with us from the beginning, we started doing this thing in our first year, I want to say, in between mini-series about directors, which is the main crux of our podcast, picking a filmmaker and going through their whole career, one movie, one episode at a time. We would sometimes in between series want to throw out a palate cleanser. Something to sort of bridge the gap between two series that will be month long commitments. So we started throwing to Ben, like, what’s Ben’s choice? What’s a Ben movie that’s important to Ben that would maybe never come up in a director series, maybe the director isn’t big enough or prestigious enough to be covered in full, but has done movies that are really core to Ben’s history and identity, and it was always fun to sort of have Ben pick a movie, almost always a fun, out of left-field pick. We tried to psychoanalyze why did this movie mean something to you at a young age? And for years, the promise has always been that the next one would always be King Ralph, the 1992 John Goodman accidentally becomes King of England movie. It was a sort of running gag that King Ralph was always the presumed next Ben’s choice, but by the time we got to it some new idea would come up that would supersede King Ralph. So we were trying to come up with what’s the biggest thing we could do for Town Hall to commemorate the tenth anniversary, we were like…We have been promising this episode for ten years. And we’re like… tackling it.

Laura Camien:

It’s a long time coming, and here we are, at Town Hall, we’re gonna do it.

Griffin Newman:

And I think similarly, you know, when the folks at Town Hall and Paul, Cameron, Harvey reached out to us in particularly about doing it, we were like… it’s so absurd for us to be performing at such a historic and prestigious venue that I think we’re always trying to find the contrast between how stupid what we do feels, and how beautiful and sort of glamorous this venue is. So here’s this 1991 comedy that is a cable mainstay, that has mostly been forgotten, but is sort of about the royal Pomp and Circumstance, and we’re just going to try and put the ultimate sense of importance on this forgotten movie, but also try to dress it up in the same pomp and circumstance as the film itself. Yeah.

Laura Camien:

Is there anything you want to, or can share, um, about what audiences can expect if they show up on that night?

Griffin Newman:

Piano Rock plays a huge role in King Ralph and that definitely plays a role in our show in a big way. We’re trying to highlight that this is a venue not meant for podcasts, it's meant for music, for physical comedy, for all sorts of things, so we’re trying to lean into those other areas. Yeah, I think it’s an opportunity to talk about John Goodman at large. You know, a lot of what we love on the podcast is talking about people’s careers, and it’s sort of in, a kind of spark file way, trying to make sense of the trajectory of people’s entire lives and the choices they make and how they define themselves, and how they respond to failures and successes, and all those things. So, David S . Ward, who wrote and directed King Ralph, had quite a career on his own; even if he’s not a household name, I think that it’s a great chance to talk about him and talk about John Goodman on a larger scale.

Laura Camien:

And the impact on Ben, of course.

Griffin Newman:

Right. There’s certainly going to be a lot of that. A lot of psychoanalyzing.

Laura Camien:

So, what else? Besides this upcoming event at Town Hall, what is sparking your creativity right now?

Griffin Newman:

That’s a great question! Matt Johnson, who is, like, to me, one of the most exciting filmmakers working today, he did the movie BlackBerry, which came out a couple of years ago. Um, also did a movie called the Dirties and Operation Avalanche, out of Canada, and he has a really unique filmmaking style that is not quite improvisational, but is very iterative, and sort of organic in how it develops and then he’ll circle back and rewrite things and re-shoot things based on discoveries, and he had a series a number of years ago called Nirvana, The Band, Show, that was about a struggling rock band trying to make big. And he brought it back as a movie now, which we got to see at SXSW when we were there for the podcast. I think the film is one of the most exciting movies I’ve seen in years. Not just the final product but is really, in that spark way, you kind of just watch…so many people who felt this way. You watch it and go… what’s my excuse for not making stuff?

Laura Camien:

Ahh!

Griffin Newman:

They just went out and did something that, on paper, seems insane and yet, you watch a movie and its a staggering accomplishment for how silly is. He talks a lot about trying to put a tremendous amount of thought and work and craft in a way that makes it look like it took no thought and work and craft whatsoever. But that’s the magic trick of it, and you’re just like…we all gotta get more ambitious, and we all gotta start just doing something and seeing where the hell it goes.

Laura Camien:

Oh, hell yes! You’re really speaking our language.

Griffin Newman:

I think coming out later this year, but I highly recommend—

Laura Camien:

And it’s called?

Griffin Newman:

Nirvana: The Band: The Show: The Movie.

Laura Camien:

Ha! Okay. I will not forget that. One of the things I wanted to say that I love about what you do, is when you look at the whole filmography of someone’s life’s work because, besides the Spark File Susan and I run these coaching programs, creativity coaching programs, and we work with a lot of people who, for what reason, did they stop 20 years ago. Like something happened, where they had a perceived failure, and they stop themselves and go, well I can’t ever do that again. Um, and what you do when you look at this person, you’re like…this person created something extraordinary. This next thing flopped. This next thing hit big. This next thing was, eh? And you, you show like, A.) It’s all survivable. B.) The whole point is to keep going, I mean, just keep making things. Because, if Spielberg had stopped at Duel, or if he had stopped even Mid-Jaws when he thought he was gonna get fired, if he was like… the pressure is too great, just forget it, like I cant do this. Look what not only he, but the rest of us would have missed out on. And I love that you show the whole scope of it. It’s going to be ups and downs if you want to be making stuff. It’s going to be some big hits and some big misses, and everything in between.

Griffin Newman:

It is what David and I talk about all the time, and it is what interests us. It’s what actually led to the podcast. It took us a while to actually figure out, oh, this is the thing we should direct the conversations around because this is the thing we’re actually drawn to, but putting those things in the context and trying to make sense of the peaks and valleys that sometimes I think these people couldn’t even verbalize while they’re in them. You know? But, um, you know, I think the podcast has this bent to it, but we’re also very cognizant of, you know, film is one of the most collaborative creative mediums, it takes so many people. I think we try to pick people where there’s some sense of, uh, a specific viewpoint a personality, a style, um, that is basically you can’t beat out of these people, that to some degree any movie they make is going to be that, or is going to be trying to fight against it. It doesn’t mean that it’s not just interest in how these movies turned out, but it does mean that every movie can make some sense at a square one, as a response to what just happened and Spielberg is such a great example because his is so long that we split it in half. His first movie, Duel, is a TV movie, he levels up from that to Sugarland Express which is theatrical, doesn’t make a ton of money, but is well reviewed. They give him Jaws, Jaws is this notoriously disastrous production, goes so over budget, so over schedule, everyone thinks its going to be this mess, and he makes a miracle out of it. And it redefines the idea of blockbusters. It changes the whole industry and he has this blank check to make, what’s his most personal movie? At that point in his life, it’s close encounters and Close Encounters also similarly goes crazy over budget, way over schedule, no control, people think that’s the moment he’s gonna fall, his hubris come to earth moment, and instead its also critically beloved and gets Oscar nominations. So he’s kind of invincible at that point and he uses all that cache to make 1941, which is even more expensive and even more off schedule and then that one’s a disaster. It’s like, the buck stops here. And suddenly, even though he’s coming off of two ginormous successes, the public response is, even with those responses, he can’t be controlled. He costs too much, and even with that work, there’s this feeling of do we have to reign this guy in. And what he does that I find so interesting, and what he does that I find interesting is that he goes to George Lucas and George Lucas pitches Raiders of the Lost Ark to him. And George Lucas is going to produce that himself, its his own movie, he’s going to set up the production, but it’s kind of being set up like an independent movie because of George Lucas and his autonomy in that moment. But what he recognizes in that moment is that he realizes, I need to challenge myself into getting as in control as I can. Even if, I could make another Jaws type disastrous production and pull off a miracle but then that would by my reputation for the rest of my life. I need to say, limit my days, limit my budget, whittle it down, samurai style. How do I get as clean and spartan, and there’s a clarity ot that movie, a simplicity, a focus, and it is him knowing he needs to force himself as an artist. It’s a turning point for the rest of his career, and he goes into different genres, and different budget scales, all different types of things, but it did change the way he worked forever, which is, I need to create boundaries for myself. Regardless of the success I have.

Laura Camien:

Yeah, and to build his own confidence, to build an understanding of like I can do this different. That’s extraordinary. Watching films, then, with a new bit of context, with a new understanding because a lot of times we don’t know, we have no idea really what the filmmaker was going through, what this moment in time, sometimes we’re not even thinking about what year was this made? And what was happening in the world when this was being filmed? It’s like getting to watch it all through a new lens.

Griffin Newman:

I think our main effort is to just build a new lens around all these movies. You know that whether people rewatch the movies, or watch the movies for the first time along with our podcast, or if they just want to listen. It’s fun to talk about the movies themselves, but if it's from a vantage point of the day on which we are recording the episode, what is the best lens we can build around this to examine everything that’s in there and everything hovering around the universe of the movie.

Laura Camien:

I have one more question for you. You work really hard, you’re committed to your creativity. What’s it all for?

Griffin Newman:

Big question! Um, for me, for better or for worse, I think I was a child in particular who struggled to make sense of the world around me, and especially kind of struggle to get a kind of grasp on the human condition, the experience, how to verbalize feelings, and things like that. And there was a lot of communication that only made sense to me when I would see it reflected in creative works, you know? When I would read a book or hear a song or watch a movie—standup comedians, um, someone who was able to encapsulate something where I felt like, oh, I get that and I never heard someone say that, or I haven’t heard someone say that in that way before, and it’s unlocked something in me, or something about the world, and helped me process in that way. And I, you know, always entertained first and foremost, but when entertainment can also provide that for me, it was so, um, it was really instrumental in my development as a human being that I think with anything I create, I am hoping there is the off chance that I might stumble on something that has that same effect for someone else.

Laura Camien:

I love that. And I think you’re doing it. Goal achieved.

Griffin Newman:

Thank you!

Laura Camien:

And it’s great to see you guys doing it for ten years, and beyond. Maybe you’ll celebrate the nineteenth anniversary.

Griffin Newman:

That’s the next big one!

Laura Camien:

Thank you for being here. I personally can’t wait for Friday, June 6 at Town Hall. I think it’s going to be an incredible night, and I hope a whole bunch of listeners will join me there.

Griffin Newman:

I hope so, yeah! And thank you so much for talking to me.

Susan Blackwell:

Thank you so much to our guest Griffin Newman for joining us at the Town Hall Spark sessions, and thanks to the team at The Town Hall, who make all of this possible.

Laura Camien:

The Town Hall and this episode of the Town Hall Spark Sessions were made on the lands of the Lenape people.

Susan Blackwell:

If you'd like to learn more about the Spark File, creativity coaching and how we can support you as you clarify and accomplish your creative goals, visit thesparkfile. com, and you can follow us on socials @ thesparkfile. To learn more about the Town Hall and their exciting upcoming events, go to thetownhall. org, follow them at Town Hall NYC and visit them at 123 West 43rd Street in the heart of New York City. It's all happening at the Town Hall.

Susan Blackwell:

And if something you heard inspired you to use your creativity for the powers of good, we are writing you a forever permission slip to make that thing that's been knocking at your door. It's your turn to take that spark and fan it into a flame.

Laura Camien:

We're going to wrap it up with the Town Hall Ensemble—take it away!

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