Film School

This means WAR! The Marx brothers dominated the comedy space in the early 30s, and it's easy to see why in what's considered to be their best film. Groucho is a ridiculous dictator with a taste for war, and Chico and Harpo are spies working for the other side...or are they? It's hard to find a sillier comedy...which is all the more rare because it's a SCATHING commentary of a post-Great War world. Just watch "All God's Chillun Got Guns." It's a true classic. Buckle up and enjoy the ride with a hey-nani-nani and a ah-cha-cha!

How do you handle your online platform? What social media do you use? And how do you use it? Social media and the internet in general have a massive impact on our daily lives, so these are important questions as a creative person, or just a person full-stop. How do we navigate the benefits of these powerful tools without letting them consume us? We try to answer that question this week. Enjoy!

There's a lot to be said for making people laugh! Joel McCrea takes a wacky turn as a famously successful comedy director who wants to suffer so he can make a serious movie. His solution: hit the road and pretend to be poor. Along the way, he falls in love with aspiring actress Veronica Lake. Sounds like a dynamite premise, yes? Let's find out if it delivers. This week on Film School!

One the most common questions storytellers get asked is 'where do your ideas come from?' And while that's a deeply personal and probably unanswerable question in any objective or concrete sense...Josh and Ira dive into how and where it happens for them. In the process, they discover it's a question worth asking and answering.

The Wolfman is EVERYWHERE. George Lucas makes his first appearance on the list with this 50s nostalgia cruising culture classic, starring Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, and a soundtrack that doesn't quit. It's a teenage "last night in town" story, but how does it hold up? We watch and debate it this week! Enjoy :)

We all have (at least) that one big dream, the one that is hard to even think of because we want it so much. It's scary to talk about something we're afraid we'll never get. But it's also important. SO important. So this week…ya boys talk about that big, scary stuff that they really, really want. More than anything. The BIG dreams.

Money money moneymoneymoneymoney! It makes the world go round! Liza Minelli and Bob Fosse dominate this late-period musical about love, nazi's, and a divey cabaret bar that echoes the ecstacies and miseries of growing up. It made Minelli a star, and it cemented Fosse as one of the greatest directors to ever work in musicals. This week on Film School!

We draw from Rachael Aaron's "2,000 to 10,000" this week, a book that's ostensibly on increasing productivity. For Ira, however, it cut much deeper recently, and it turns out that one of the central tenants in Aaron's book is kind of THE thing: Joy. Excitement. Inspiration. Whatever you want to call it; it's the key to everything. Buckle up: epiphanies are ahead!

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more! Paddy Chayefsky's script is the real star of this bonkers film. It starts out very conventionally: an aging, depressed news anchor and his equally aged and depressed producer are being pushed out from their network. But when the anchor announces he's going to kill himself on air, things get crazy...and then crazier and crazier. This film is a SCATHING indictment of the news-as-entertainment culture we live in to this day, and what it has to say has never been more relevant. Let's get mad, y'all, this week on Film School!

You'll only fail if you quit. We've all heard that advice. And oftentimes, that's good advice. But...what if quitting was not only okay, but absolutely crucial to success. Knowing when and what to quit is one of the most important things to learn in life. This is a big topic, certainly not one that can be covered in a single episode, but Ira recently went through an experience that taught him a lot about the UPSIDE to quitting, and Josh asks him to talk about it.