Primetime (2026)

A24’s Primetime & The Performance of Justice

In this long-form movie discussion, Benji and Luke take a deep dive into Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, the filmmaker’s first narrative feature film, in which his muse, Chris Hansen, has been gifted with renewed relevance despite his grievance tour. Spoiler: Benji liked Primetime so much he saw it three times.

The conversation begins with an examination of David Osit’s documentary Predators (2025) and Luke Dittrich’s Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die”, two absolutely essential pieces of context for understanding Hansen and the legacy of To Catch A Predator. They then break down Oppenheim’s fever-dream portrait of Hansen's ascending celebrity built on a TV show template of performative justice.

Finally, they discuss the film’s connections to post-9/11 America, Robert Pattinson’s brilliant and unsettling performance, and their final thoughts about Oppenheim's first narrative fiction feature. All Those Moments is a deep dive movie podcast built around connecting social, political, or cultural moments with moments from our favorite movies.

WARNING: Spoilers throughout after 12 minutes. Also, this episode contains direct discussion of suicide.

• Full Transcript

  PRIMETIME (2026) — FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT All Those Moments

  Transcript lightly formatted for readability. Automated transcription may contain errors; dialogue is otherwise unabridged.

  [00:00] I have seen Primetime now three times. Wow. The first time I saw it, I watched Primetime, and then I watched David Osit documentary from 2025 called Predators. Which I did too. Yep. Okay. Which is all about To Catch a Predator. Lance Oppenheim's Primetime like thrilled and terrified me. Mm-hmm. I'm Chris Hansen. Catch us predators with A Line MBC. But I would say that Predators really. Pissed me off, made me feel sick at my stomach, and I went to bed miserable. Primetime is an awesome movie, really loved it.

  Probably would have watched it maybe not a third time, but a second time if I would have had time. That to me is about the lengths we go to to achieve fame in a sense, and doesn't grapple quite as much with the aftermath, in a way that the Predators documentary does. So I feel like the Predators documentary is much more about the phenomenon and the aftermath of reality television and It's perverse successors. And Primetime's a really fascinating look at fame. You might think, boy, is that God security journalism or is that exploitative?

  I I think anybody that's having sex with children or trying to, you guys should do this show every you should have your own channel of this show. Hello, Homer. I'm Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC. I'm Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC. Can I after watching Predators? Not only did it change my feelings about Primetime. Right. And positively changed my feelings about Primetime. Yeah.

  But it also made me want to revisit Primetime, loaded with all of the information that comes from David Osit's documentary, because I think his documentary really surfaces an excellent critique of not just Hansen and To Catch a Predator, but like the persona that's been that Hansen himself has participated in cultivating for the last twenty years. Yeah. I think Predators does. A thousand times more harm to the reputation and persona of Hansen than Primetime. Yes.

  And that's what I really look forward to diving into talking about this movie, because I think Oppenheim and his screenwriter, Ajahn Singh, both provide like a a lot more interesting read than the real Hansen. If you listen to Oppenheim in interviews, he talks openly about liking Chris Hansen and liking To Catch a Predator. So Chris Hansen's out.

  [02:24] All over the place complaining about this movie. Yeah. I think it's just for attention. I think he's excited to get people to go watch it. Absolutely. I have found something about him off putting since the very first time I caught an episode of To Catch a Predator. Yeah. There's this part of means let's just do it right now where I was like, just gave me so much ick. Yeah. It was like, it's punked, but it's for like child punked for predators. Wannabe predators, pedophiles or whatever. I didn't have any connection to it at all.

  It essentially except that it seems to have informed most or much of the media that's gotten made online. Just that sort of like salacious, caught on camera. Yeah. The, you know, the whole just sort of surprise aspect of it is kind of everywhere. It doesn't just infect sort of like YouTube culture, which is a chunk of what a big chunk of what Predators is about. It didn't like think about how Charlie Kirk started his career. So a lot of what started maybe with or was popularized with To Catch a Predator is now.

  One of the primary ways the far right, the religious far right, the Christian nationalist far right creates like an overlay of justice on a pretty regressive reading of the Bible. And right. So yeah, it's it's everywhere, guys. But if you think of Chris Hansen, I and everything he's done. He has none of that. And why I think it's so clever to make this movie now is that we still live with the kind of impact that To Catch a Predator has made on our culture and our society. Which is like a showy and performative version of justice and punishment.

  It's not and not like the same people caping for Hansen in these comments. Let's just be honest, let's get this out of the way now. They are the same people who are carrying water for the Trump administration, who is probably the king of Epstein Fucking Island. The movie is called Primetime. This podcast is called All Those Moments. I'm Benji Wade. I'm Luke Baumgarten. All those.

  [04:27] Nein.

  [04:31] Luke, give me the log line from Primetime. In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history, turning hidden camera sting operations into a ratings phenomenon as the boundary between journalism, justice, and spectacle begins to collapse. Primetime's director is Lance Oppenheim. Lance Oppenheim is known for three different documentary ish, I would say narrative documentaries. One is called Some Kind of Heaven. The others called Sperm World. And finally, there's Ren Faire. Ren Faire is the only one that I've seen.

  I'm not going to go into talking about Ren Faire, especially knowing that Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder co-directed You Can See Everything, which we will be doing an episode about. So we're going to have new Oppenheim double feature. It is this year is Lance Palooza. So it will continue later. So we'll talk about his other documentaries when we do You Can See Everything. The screenplay was written by first-time writer Ajahn Singh. His screenplay is based on Luke Dittrich's. 2007 Esquire article called Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die. I did read that article.

  That's an article I studied about this time because I was a journalist back then, studying story form. Beautiful work. Banger. Did not reread it because it's like 10,000 words. Cinematographer, kind of like when we talked about Matt Johnson's many collaborators on his movies, cinematographer David Bolin is a longtime collaborator with Oppenheim. They actually met through Vimeo. While Oppenheim was in high school and now they're best friends in the time Bolin was going to USC. Production design was from Alex D.

  Gerlando, which is crazy because I was listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, which has come up many times, To the White Sea, right before watching Primetime. Total coincidence. I just hadn't listened to to the White Sea in a long time, and he was a guest on there because he was the production designer. On Beasts of the Southern Wild. And that's how the three of the the two co hosts of Jordan Fish and Rachen Torrey met De Gerlando on making Beast of the Southern Wild. Do you see that maybe? I think so. I remember holding it long time ago. 2012.

  Yeah, yeah. No, that's a great film. Yeah. Original music for Primetime by Ari Balouzian. Quick Note, Bolin, Digerlando, and Belusian all worked on the Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything. So wow.

  [06:50] They were all involved with that as well. So we're gonna be talking a lot about these filmmakers. I will say this about Primetime before we go any further. I think Primetime is like the Eddington of 2025. Interesting. So 2026. I mentioned that there are seven credited producers, most notably Square Peg, which is a production company that was started by Ari Aster and Lars Knutson. Both these movies, Primetime Eddington, kind of hold up a funhouse mirror to the audience. They're both very funny.

  They're both Have a lot to say about modern discourse and where things are headed with our culture, our economy holding up a mirror to the audience. The audience might not like what they see. Yeah. Ari Aster and Lance Oppenheim both intending to say as much or more about the audiences watching their movies as they are about the characters and the narratives. Primetime's a three-hander for the most part, even though the ensemble is enormous. So it's Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, it's Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plum.

  Dan Plum is based on a real life person named Dan Schrack. Merritt Wever plays Andy Bender. There's a real life producer from To Catch a Predator named Lynn Keller that she's probably closest to being based on. We also introduce in her first major film role Phoebe Bridgers. She plays Del Harvey based on the real life person Del Harvey from the organization called Perverted Justice, a real life organization started in 2002 by a guy named Xavier. Von Eric, who will come up later. The real life Del Harvey went on to become the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter.

  Before the Elon era. Yes. Yes, before the Elon era. That's a careful distinction because she did that until 2021 for 13 years. Wow. Anyway, Bridgers also composed the song on video for the movie. Do you like Phoebe Bridger's music, Luke? Yeah. Are you familiar with Phoebe Bridgers? Pretty familiar, yeah. I mean, as much as a forty five year old man can be, I'd say. That's not true. A 45-year-old man can be quite familiar. We just watched two movies about that. I say as a 51-year-old man. I think her 2018 collaboration, Killer Plus the Sound with Noah and Abby Gunderson.

  Watch it on YouTube. One of my favorite pieces of music from the last 25 years. Pretty beautiful. Cannot listen to that song without crying. We will talk about the rest of the ensemble cast from Primetime and its many stunt casting choices in the context of individual moments rather than get bogged down.

  [09:15] doing that now. But before we go any further, I want to set up what we're gonna do with this conversation about Primetime. Okay. We are first going to talk about the aforementioned David Osit documentary from 2025 called Predators. Specifically, I think it's Chris Hansen's persona and the reputation of the show To Catch a Predator. So I mentioned this a little bit already, but after watching Predators and after reading Dittrich's article, Hansen should be grateful. For Primetime. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it makes him seem like a fairly sexy figure.

  And the real life Chris Hansen just kind of flatly sucks and is boring to me. Well, and I was, you know, the the way Predators, the documentary, is set up is you hear all about Chris Hansen and then he finally sits, like sort of it's the final maybe 10-15 minutes of the movie where he actually sits for an interview. So he participated in a much less flattering portrait of him in my opinion, the documentary. And he contributed the much less flattering stuff about him by just saying the things that he said. So but also very boring.

  But also also I don't think there's a lot there's not a lot of self-reflection going on upstairs. There's a lot of self-promotion. Yes. Not a lot of self-reflection. Almost none. In fact, he comes across as quite pathetic by the end of Predators because he has a a show that's called I think it's called Takedown. No, there's yeah. So he's got two shows. I think it was called something like Real News America. So it's all in this True Blue, which I think is mostly a YouTube channel network. Yes. Anyways. Yes.

  And when he's going through the the headquarters of True Blue Network, it's quite pathetic. Yeah. According to David Osit, Hansen saw his movie, his documentary Predators, and appreciated it. And I'm like, how could he watch Predators and go, hell yeah. No notes. That's good shit. Yeah. And then have anything to say about bad about Primetime. I think we're gonna be talking a little bit about what's journalism, if which is like an open question and it has been an open question for four hundred years since journalism was created.

  I think Osit in his documentary does some pretty interesting things to turn the camera on himself, but very sparingly in a way

  [11:22] Very tastefully. Then in a different tradition or in a different time of journalism would like, that's not actually journalism because you're, you know, you're in you're including yourself. It kind of has to happen here to make the the the documentary payoff for reasons we'll talk about later. It's part of what makes it qualify more as journalism to me. for for reasons that are kind of again, like these are subjective definitions, but like you can't really tell any of these stories without you can't tell them honestly without being honest about your priors. Right.

  Which Crittens Hansen never does. Yeah. And which David Osit does an a couple times pretty sparingly. It's mostly not about him, but he does it enough to be like, basically, why am I making this documentary right now? Yes. It's self reflexive, but it is not Michael Moore. Exactly. It's not Nick Broomfield, you know. He's not just running around constantly and be and making predators about himself. It's tasteful. That's a bad word to use. Let me pick a better one because it's just it's so thoughtful. Yeah. And it's fucking heartbreaking.

  It is about his own experiences with being sexually abused as a child.

  [12:26] You said Primetime is the Eddington of 2026. And I didn't really understand what you meant until I got the context of Predators. So if you wanna understand what Benji means, you might want to watch that or at least pay really close attention to what we're gonna talk about in the documentary. There's two specific things. Okay. Number one, I'm gonna issue spoiler warning, not just for the documentary Predators, but also the movie Primetime. Yeah. Don't proceed. I don't look, this podcast is for me to talk to my friend Luke for sometimes way too long.

  About movies that we watch together. Maybe always way too long. And we like to talk a lot of shit about them. So and also there is a I want to issue a warning for anybody. The topic of suicide is going to be discussed quite directly and explicitly in this episode, probably several times. Speaking of which, the climax of Primetime is about one of these To Catch a Predator stings that went completely sideways and ended up with a quote unquote predator committing suicide. Yep.

  The way it is captured in reality, which I did not know, I watched Primetime and saw how it was conveyed in Lance Oppenheim's movie. Yeah. And then I watched Predators, which includes clips from they aired the the freaking episode. Yes. Yes, which is something you don't realize after watching Primetime. Yep. it happens in broad daylight. Yes. There are about eight or nine officers with shotguns and battering rams, but there's not like a full-on army like there is in Primetime. Right.

  And when it happens Chris Hansen walks over and there's this woman police officer who walks up to him and says, He shot himself and she says it kinda like that. Like she's reporting the the current temperature. He shot himself. my god. I don't know if he did. What can you tell us about the scene? It's just a gunshot wound to the head.

  [14:21] Any idea on when it occurred or I don't know for sure.

  [14:29] They're calling for caraplies, so they'll land somewhere and get an angle and take them out.

  [14:43] Now go ahead and scoop back and Well, I mean there's gonna be some competition. It's better that did it when things they were coming in but it wasn't quite good.

  [15:01] This is somehow much worse than how he's portrayed in Primetime. He shows no interest. He acts like he's asking when they're gonna go to lunch. He's standing there in his pleated khakis and he goes, Well, I mean, there's gonna be controversy, but it's better that he did it when you know, as a as opposed to when they were coming and he just kind of trails off. Yeah. But he seems bored and he seems like disappointed in the way he didn't get the shot he wanted. Because he didn't get the shot he wanted. Yeah.

  Meanwhile, we're gonna go into details of like what happens with this person committing suicide, right?

  [15:44] Dan Schrack, who is the real life decoy Dan, who's from the movie. Played by Skyler Gisondo. Played by Skyler Gisondo, who goes up by the name Dan Plum, said about his experience You could offer me $10 million to film that episode in Murphy, Texas again, and I wouldn't take it. I know I've blocked that out. It's not a place I like to live. The other thing I want to talk about from Predators, Lucas brought it up, is the interview with Chris Hansen that ends it. Take down with Chris Hansen. It's on the True Blue Network. It's a new version of To Catch a Predator.

  Where an 18-year-old high school student was caught by one of Hansen's decoys. Cause he's still doing this. He's still out there trying to find online predators and put them in front of a camera and have them arrested and all that, right? And it's important that the this the decoy is an adult, but also the decoy is posing as a 15-year-old. Correct. With a th or say it's a three-year age gap, which is important and it's part it's in the it gets captured in the documentary. Yeah. I'm not gonna name the kid.

  For reasons that are about to be obvious, but 18-year-old high school student, the decoy was pretending to be 15. Hansen decided to move forward with releasing the segment on his show. Completely ruined this 18-year-old kid's life. Yep. And Hansen initially defended the airing by saying he thought there were quote unquote significant developmental differences between an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old. Keep in mind, that's a potentially senior and sophomore in high school. Yeah. Depending on When people are born.

  And then his his partner, the guy who basically I think, I believe, created the True Blue Network, the guy who got him on, they're having an arg or they're having a discussion about whether or not to air that show. And the guy's like, Well, you know, in Michigan I guess that's illegal, but in Ohio, that would be 'cause it's like an age of consent thing. Yeah. And the Which varies state to state. That happened a lot in the nineties and early two thousands, the statutory rape thing. Probably goes without saying, folks, humongous backlash to this episode.

  Well, I say humongous, knowing that he's got this show that's buried on the fucking corners of YouTube. It's not like any b it's not like tons of people, despite all the caping you see in the comments. No, it's not like tons of people are still paying attention to the queer of Chris Hansen in twenty twenty six, which we will come back to. Yeah. They decide to air

  [17:58] The episode, the kid ended entered what's called a diversion program to keep his record clear. And then after that, True Blue and Hansen were like, okay, we'll remove it and we'll give him s a a second chance. Yeah. Like, thanks very much. And this the reason I bring this up. So his record is going to be, and probably already is, because this happened a few years ago, completely expunged. So in the eyes of the state, he didn't even commit a crime. But the damage done by Hansen and the True Blue Network had already been dealt. And this is what is brought up.

  By Osit when he interviews, and this is one of the the few times he appears. He says you search his name and he's the and and his him getting taken down by Chris Hansen is the first five pages of Google results. I think the issue is that if you Google this kid's name, it's the first five pages of the internet because of the show. So there's no wiping of that record. That's in a sense permanent. Permanent for now. It goes away.

  [18:58] Permanently for now. Permanently for now. Yes. God might be. I don't even have to, I don't even have to pull up my notes because that quote is seared into my memory. Permanently for now. Yeah. So Oppenheim's movie Primetime offers an interpretation of how Hansen could make this descent into darkness. he has described his movie as being a fever dream. Again, to this point that we're already kind of making as our thesis about this movie. Is that it is describing this very, very important inflection point. When did Hansen decide, this celebrity stuff? Yeah. Kind of hot.

  I'm gonna go after that. So Hansen goes on Joe Scarborough's show on MSNBC before the Texas suicide episode airs. Joe Scarborough teases an upcoming segment that's gonna air after they come back from their commercial break. And it's about Britney Spears and her hair and whether her treatment of her hair is a call for help. Yeah. And Scarborough's saying all this just very matter of factly, and it's extremely funny. I mean, the fact that Scarborough's talking about Britney Spears fucking hair. Dude. Yeah. A middle-aged man. Yep.

  And at the time, Britney Spears was probably, I don't know, in her twenties still. Yeah. And this is like when she was starting to have her very public mental breakdown that just ended up now like now there's movies being made about freeing Britney. Right. So it's actually a really beautiful and powerful parallel of like a different form of sort of salaciousness. So tabloid journalism basically helping contribute to ruining Britney Spears' life.

  She then ends up basically not even having control over her own fortune, you know, and still doesn't, or is in and then it's only People of David Osit's generation that kind of come to her aid. Like that whole save Britney thing was really, really powerful. And I think it was largely driven by people who are not Britney Spears' age. It's this younger generation that's looking back on what we lived through and was like, that was fucked. Yes. And Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera are the literal definition of the virgin whore thing that was happening in culture.

  We wanna

  [21:10] Have these hypersexualized, but they're virgins. Yeah. But I bring that up because David Osit on Instagram is obviously he's super aware of what's happening with this A24 movie. He says, People still wonder why To Catch a Predator was and remain so popular. And after several years of being mired in the question, I have a suggested answer. We enjoy the satisfaction of catching the most wretched among us because it helps us ignore the fact that we live in a patriarchal society.

  Co-created by men and women, that sexualizes and fetishizes youth and young people, positively relishes dancing along the repressed and forbidden edge of attraction, and appeals to so many men's need for power and self-esteem by making disrespect for girlhood and women an actual fundamental part of our culture. We then, like a mop circling and overflowed toilet, Catch the predators our society creates. It's much easier work and far less slippery than having a seat with ourselves.

  [22:19] All right, Luke, let's talk about the moments from Primetime. Five seconds into the movie, I'm all in. And I know I say this about a lot of movies, but this one literally took five seconds. Okay. The reason is because it's our first moment. We get to see Robert Pattinson. I'm gonna say we get to see Robert Pattinson as Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs impersonating Chris Hansen. It's like. He's doing this, he's talking into the mirror and reciting lines from the chat logs. Yeah. And he's saying shit like for a virgin to have sex. It hurts.

  That's not a bad Chris Hansen, actually. Extra lubricant. You see how this looks, right? He starts doing some of the lines, the famous one-liners. Well, and I haven't seen it three times, but doesn't it start it's kind of off camera or it's like boked, so you can't tell what's going on. You cannot tell where he's at. So for me, it started basically like sex predator ASMR. Yes, dude. It's yes, it's extreme close-up. He's fiddling with a bracelet. The bracelet's gonna become a key part of the movie. The base the bracelet has some Sanskrit writing on it. Yeah. Totally.

  He's doing a broadcast journalist affect. but Pattinson's performance is definitely giving Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. And I went back and looked at that scene from Silence of the Lambs. The close-up of Pattinson's on his mouth. And I can't help but think that Oppenheim was aware of Silence of the Lambs when he was making the scene. If not, it's way too close not to call out. Also reminded me a little bit of have you seen Quiz Show? A long time ago. The Quiz Show host in Quiz Show is named Jack Berry, played by Chris McDonald.

  And he has all these moments in that movie where he's looking in the mirror and he's like saying, He's doing the like all the elocution stuff. Yeah. And doing like, I'm Jack Barry. I'm Jack Barry. Hi. Good evening. I'm Jack Barry. Like walking on the bottom of the sea. For me, what that did, it served to do was anchor at the very, very beginning of the movie and then kind of remind us throughout. This is probably a movie more about performance than truth. Yes. And so I think that was just really, really well done. Our next moment.

  [24:25] Is the very first To Catch a Predator sting shown in Primetime. There's an amazing needle drop. It's the first predator pulling up in his car and we hear Fergie Ferg's London Bridge playing. We also get our first bit of stunt casting. Did you know who this actor was? I just can we just talk about what a traumatizing thing it was for me to hear Fergie Ferg. You just you need a trigger warning anytime Fergie comes on as a needle drop. I just I think that's just a duty of care that filmmakers have.

  Has her reputation be been like rehabilitated, if you will, among the young people? Not that I know of. So stunt casting. Tony Revalori plays Married and Looking for Fun three one three one three, which is the character. Who is that guy? Wes Anderson, actor. Lots of Grand Budapest Hotel. Why do you want to be a lobby boy? Well, who wouldn't? At the Grand Budapest, sir. We also get our first glimpse of Phoebe Bridgers. She is the decoy. And then here comes Chris Hansen. He's stalking across the room to confront the predator.

  His movement makes him look like Vampire Lestat. As he closes down on Married and Looking for Fun, three one three one three. Oppenheim's portrait of Hansen is he's going to be a predator subsisting on predators. He delivers lines from the chat logs that are nearly breaking the fourth wall, but then he snaps back to his role as the host of the show with his classics. You see how this looks, right? What would happen if I wasn't here? The producers are looking on from a room within the decoy house. It's Merritt Wever as Andy Bender.

  And already she reminds me a little bit of Kristoff from Truman Show. Do you remember? The way that she's got this kind of like she's she's starting to, I think at this point she's even breathing at some of the lines. She's like whispering some of the lines that she she's expecting. The music from Ari Balouzian sounds like Philip Glass on ecstasy. The next moment we're introduced to Skyler Gisondo as the legendary To Catch a Predator decoy Dan Plum, aka Decoy Dan. It's a several minute montage that shows him as an aspiring actor living in Los Angeles and preparing.

  [26:35] An audition tape for To Catch a Predator, like the real life Dan Shrek, Dan Plum has no idea what the show is about. city gets paid five thousand dollars in appearance. It's a lot of money. Did you did you cost 2006, man? I know, dude. Five grand an episode. That's more than I was making a month at my first journalism job. But when you realize, dude, the NBC was getting seven million people an episode to watch this shit, it's not that surprising. No.

  His fellow out of work actor Troy, played by very funnily very funnily, I should say, played by Eric Rayhill, is giving him reps like a like he's training a prize fighter. It's very, very funny. He's on a fucking treadmill. Totally. that's the opening of the movie, and it makes sense because it I think it serves as an introduction that there are going to be two key players in this movie, really. It's actually, if we want to say it's a two-hander, I think that would be fair. It's mostly this is Hansen and Plum.

  Yeah, it's a two-hander, three-hander, but If it's only a two hander, then Merritt Wever's role is to be the potential person who has a crisis of conscience. Yes. Which has ramifications. Later. Yeah. our next moment. Chris Hansen meets a big admirer while flying in first class, about fifteen minutes into the movie, maybe maybe a little bit less. the character Chris Hansen's on a passenger plane, first class, when a man seated next to him breaks out into rapturous appreciation of him.

  He's sipping a drink with a straw, which I loved that choice because it made him come across as both immature, a little naive. He's kind of growing into his celebrity that he seemingly doesn't know exists at this point. Right. And we realize if you know anything about the television show The Office, it's Creed. Right. Did you clock that? I did Creed Bratton. Yep. And he This character basically represents perfectly. I keep mentioning these people caping for Chris Hansen in the comments. Yeah.

  On A twenty four's Instagram page, just constantly shitting on Oppenheim in this movie. The people who love to the to just split the world into black and white so they can be on the good side. That performative justice that we're gonna talk a lot about. and he says, You know, Chris, if I was you, I'd just fucking kill those guys. Beat the living shit out of them with my bare hands.

  [28:45] And Hansen says, this is one of the first moments where I was like, wow, Pattinson's fucking killing this role. He's like, I think maybe what I do is a little worse. So I think here's what I think. That is actually to me evidence of him not really being a journalist, but also not being I think one of the reasons he had those like five or six canned lines is he's not very good on his feet. And the re in Predators. You see him sitting down for the interview, he's not great on his feet. He's not a great extemporaneous question asker. this is good.

  Following a conversation and asking follow-up questions or, you know, letting yourself div like divert from what you're planning to talk about to like, you know, carry the interview where it's going. Yeah. You would in order to get something, this I don't think this is spoiling it. Like we don't one of the big criticisms of To Catch a Predator that David Osit posit We don't actually get any clarity about why these guys do what they do, which was kind of part of the sell.

  And part of what would have theoretically made it journalism rather than just entertainment would be to be like, why are like to actually learn anything? Yeah. What's going on here? Yeah. Whenever people start talking, Chris Hansen doesn't really know how to like follow up and make a more probing question. He's just not very good at journalism. He has no ability to to think or speak off the cuff.

  Yeah. that's such a great that's such a great catch. so he smiles at this Creed Bratton guy and he's like, it's the first time you can see that he appreciates the gravity of what he's doing. And by gravity I mean his growing celebrity. One final thing though, too, he also doesn't push back. You can tell he doesn't really think he should be beating people to death on camera. Yeah. Right. And he doesn't have the guts to be like, that's a little too far.

  What he does is do the kind of and it's not quick witted because it takes like almost 30 seconds of screen time, it feels like, because it was an awkward interaction. Where he finally gets the line that's going to get him out of the uncomfortable conversation saying, I think what I do is worse, which is bullshit. It's a cop out. It's also what that guy wants to hear. Cause then then Creed gets this look on his face, like, yeah, brother. you're right. I think they cheers right after that. But clink glasses.

  It is the perfect distillation of this moment we keep describing of his career where he decides, Do I go down this particular path and say goodbye to any of my credibility?

  [30:58] And Stone Phillips and all that shit. Or do I go with the do I just get completely hyper intoxicated by literally and figuratively by my celebrity? And the the latter is what he does. And the latter's a lot easier. Yeah. We then get a mashup of Phoebe Bridgers as perverted justice decoy Del Harvey and a bunch of To Catch a Predator production. Our next moment we want to talk about Jeff Zucker, Sickens with Siccos, Stone Phillips, Shocks, and Oz. Hansen is shown as a kind of like a a preening buffoon.

  He's doing this recitation of these one-liners over and over and over again. Like in the in the NBC offices or something, right? No, this is where he's in a sound recording booth and he's giving lines that he's just recording them over and over again. They're like, they're like, dude, move on. It's yeah, one for safe. You're saying it the same way every time. And he's like, I'm Chris Hansen. Yeah. He's kind of doing the Jack Berry thing. Yep. and one of the producers makes a really funny comment. He's like, This guy thinks he's Mike fucking Wallace. Yeah.

  This is all also when we get our first introduction of the Iraq war. You see coverage of Saddam's statue being toppled in Baghdad. And then, yes, Stone Phillips appears. He's introduced as Hansen and his producer Andy are walking into NBC to meet Jeff Zucker, who's the president of NBC, to talk about their ratings and their time slot.

  I want to shout out the editor Daniel Garber because now that I've watched it three times, I really, really Admire the kind of dexterity that Garber used to take coverage of things that are not even all the times motivated and just put them in front of us. He would just randomly cut to Billy Bob Thornton talking about his role in Sling Blade, or in this particular moment, he does this quick mashup, a series of I'm Stone Phillips again, Jack Berry. Yeah. And it's And you're like, okay, this is Stone Phillips. I remember this guy.

  This is the guy that was like the face of credibility for NBC during this this time period. Yep. Enter Jeff Zucker, playing himself as president of NBC. It's a very funny moment. Zucker is he starts the conversation by saying how much he hates To Catch a Predator, but he's like, America seems to love it. So let's let's compete with lost. And he ends up saying, Well, we're just gonna go head to head with ABC's Lost. Pattinson's out in the hallway outside of Zucker's office after getting this great news. And he's he's con it's a such a funny moment. I'm

  [33:19] I'm guessing it's just something that Pattinson did off the cuff. He's like convulsing, fist pumping. He's like, We're gonna be bigger than lost. And before they can leave the building, Stone Phillips says hi to him and congratulates him. And he says, Great job. I could never do what you do. It's thrilling. I'll be watching from Afghanistan. And that's the moment where you see with so Zucker, it's like it's really not about news for these guys. Eve so even the the you know, the network president.

  Is like, I don't like this. and it probably offends him on some moral level, but it's what the people want, so we're gonna give it to him. And then the Stone Phillip thing was just so beautiful. And this is why I thought it was really great to do that cutting back and forth of the the it was inside the actor studio, Billy Bob Thornton talking about how he dodged the the voice and the the mannerisms from Sling Blade. Yeah. Because like to me, those were parallels of French fried potatoes, sort of a juxtaposition of the two fundamental tensions of television journalism.

  Yeah. You actually have to do that performance thing to get good at speaking on the mic. And there's a very specific way you do it, which is why folks from all walks of life, once they get in front of a camera, and you can see this on your local news, you know, we can see it here where it's like, regardless of what they sound like, regardless if they're white or black or Latino or whatever, you all sound like Stone Phillips at the end because that's how you're trained to.

  You have to train your voice to have the sort of elocution, the sort of the cadence that has been kind of beaten into us as news person. Hansen would rather be in Afghanistan, right? Like that's what any sort of correspondent would rather be doing. yeah. On the front lines. And that was a point and where at that point there was nobody bigger than Billy Bob Thornton, sort of magically, and this was an independent flip Sling Blade was an independent film, kind of came out of nowhere, win a bunch of Oscars. That's the kind of the big moment there.

  And obviously the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, those things were the biggest thing on all of our minds for a decade. And Chris Hansen wants to be somewhere in the middle and just you get a sense like he knows he's not going to get there. The thing I like about having this happen this early in the movie, though, is it does start to foreground how much Oppenheim is interested in post-9-11 America and our feelings as a culture and society about the the it the perception of justice, which you could say is very much in play with shock and awe.

  [35:44] Operation Iraqi Freedom. Totally. The perception of justice. Yeah. When the truth is nothing just ever happened in any of those wars. That was also kind of the entertainment of war correspondency as well. Yeah. my gosh, that could go so far with this, but like the missile cams. Yeah. You know, which is comparable to what happens in To Catch a Predator, not just jump too far ahead. Of it is brought up in this movie that producers from To Catch a Predator had an idea of attaching. To camera to guns. And it is that is actually a thing that happened. I looked that up.

  They put buttonhole cameras on these these law enforcement people that were basically props for the television show. So anyways, I'm and well, let's do a quick parallel of the Eddington, 'cause like what's the the violent conclusion to Eddington is a kid live streaming. Yes, with his camera. With his camera. Yeah, dude. As he kind of does the call of duty perspective, the first person shooter perspective in real life streaming.

  But what I really love is what what I was really getting at is that I feel like Oppenheim having Stone Phillips say, I could never watch do what you do. It's thrilling. I'll be watching Afghanistan. It he's exposing the hypocrisy of that. Of like, really? Because you're gonna go do the credible thing. So I I take your point that yes, there was the perception of credibility. But the truth is there was nothing more there was something even less meaningful happening in Iraq than what was happening on To Catch a Predator, honestly. Absolutely. quick production note.

  Oppenheim talked about this Different formats they used to shoot Primetime. There's 12 different video formats. And he was talking about getting nervous. He was gonna do a post-production call with A24. And he thought he was gonna get fired because of how crazy it was the number of cameras they used. Like, yeah, he was like, no. I he was like feeling like I'm so young, I'm a 30-year-old filmmaker. This is like my first narrative feature. I fucked. anyway, so the stage is set. Hansen's show is taking off, he's becoming famous.

  Stone Phillips is slapping his ass in the hallways at NBC, but Oppenheim just wants to answer the question: can Hansen's home life compete with predators? Hansen's shown as a dad and a husband who travels too much. He comes home and he forces his kids to watch VHS tapes of To Catch a Predator, which is very funny, totally sleazy. And then we meet his wife, who's played by Anna Faris. Chris Pratt thing? Yes, dude.

  [38:03] I was like, God damn Oppenheim. She's in one scene. She's in one scene. It's basically it's basically a cameo. Yes. And what is her scene? Her scene is to watch Chris Hansen kind of grovel while admitting that he's about to take that turn toward fame and say goodbye to his family. Yep. Which is exactly what Chris Pratt did in real life to Anna Faris. The casting of Anna Faris. I haven't think don't think I've seen anybody commenting on that. Yeah. It's fucking wild for sure. Back on the set of To Catch a Predator, the pressure is on. They're competing with Lost.

  The stakes have been raised, and Dan Plum is on his way to the set, having been cast to play a role in a show he knows fucking nothing about. He's wearing a suit. The set of To Catch a Predator is complete chaos. And producer Andy greets Dan and is like, What the fuck are you wearing? The camera closes down on him and she literally starts undressing him. Yep. Taking his clothes off without consent as he stands there nodding nervously and Which is a thing that TV producers do. on a much less I didn't get you don't get unclothed this much.

  But when you go on the you go on the morning shows at like five in the morning or four in the morning anywhere, even if local your local TV stations are still doing this, you're gonna have a producer who's just like, you know, I've got three minutes to get this mic wired up and I don't really care about your personal space. Like they're not asking for consent when they're putting that up. And that that felt pretty real to me. Clothing, makeup, doesn't matter what it is, you become a plaything for these producers.

  They don't your humanity has exited. so he's standing there nodding nervously and she's dressing him to look like a 13-year-old. Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plum in Primetime reminded me of I can't remember, yes, Naomi Watts as Betty in Mulholland Drive. This doe-eyed, I can't wait. I remember the scene of her walking, I think she's walking through the airport. And she's just looking up and then she's just like, This is gonna be amazing or she gets off the bus, whatever happens.

  [40:15] sh and he's totally confused, is what am I doing here? Yeah. And she's like, You're playing a thirteen year old named Peter who's been chatting with a man. He likes cats. And that's all he knows. That's all he knows. Maybe the funniest camera movement of the movie, which is saying something, the camera pulls back to reveal Dan and he's got a green polo, his shirt, and it's tucked into some surf shorts. Kind of half acidly, yeah. And he looks like what a thirty eight year old producer thinks a thirteen year old looks like.

  They use the Phoebe Bridgers character to sort of Talk about the what they're looking for in these actors. right. Starts by basically being like, I can play a girl or a boy. And you know, and it's like it's very voyeurism to the point of being objectification. And that was the that was actually the first moment where I was like, this is actually about not the harm that's done to actual children, but the harm that's done to adults who are asked to play children in order to draw out these predators. Yes.

  There's not actually a crime being committed, but there is A psychic toll being taken on these child or these not child actors' souls. One of the decoys that you're referencing that is interviewed in Predators, her first name's Casey. I can't remember her last name. And her dad literally convinced producers from To Catch a Predator to cast her in that show because he was he realized his own daughter, who was, I think, 18 at the time, looked like she was 13. Yeah. my God. Yeah, it was dark.

  The producers are watching all this happen on a quad view of different angles as Dan has been left alone on the set of To Catch a Predator moments before a predator arrives. I'm sure a lot of this was extraordinarily embellished, but it is fucking great filmmaking. Yeah. Because then suddenly you're like, God, this is he's like been left abandoned. Yeah. the predator shows up, starts to flirt, and right at that moment, Dan goes to grab the predator a glass of water. He turns around. And we get full frontal of the predator holding a can of whipped cream.

  And he says, I brought you something. And then he sprays whipped cream on his dick. And Dan, sorry, Dan, you did not do a great job of acting unsurprised. No. Skyler Gisondo looks like Terrified. Terrified. Enter Chris Hansen, exit Dan Plum.

  [42:31] Spoiler Luke, and what might be the most intensely cr confrontational moment of the movie when it comes to what Lance Oppenheim wants to say about us as the audience, the predator Luke is Jonathan Lipnicki, is the little boy Ray from Jerry Maguire. Okay, you knew this? I did. Yep. The precocious and wonderfully adorable six year old boy who says the human head weighs eight pounds. Ray, Jerry Maguire. It's an audacious gesture from Oppenheim. Yeah. I didn't know how to feel about it for like 10 straight minutes.

  If that's not like the very definition of trolling the fuck out of the audience and our kind of queasiness and our participation in creating this this television show phenomenon, Dan Plum is traumatized. I was traumatized. I couldn't tell my wife Ray until we were had driven home that that was Jerry Maguire Ray that pulled his dick out. People who are open ahead's age did not have the same experience with Jonathan Lipnicki that we didn't. that might not have even been born when Jerry Maguire came out.

  So that is us, that's that's Oppenheim asking us of people of our age, Benji and older, to, you know, point the mirror at ourselves. Being like, remember Jonathan Lipnicki? Watch this. Remember what we did to him? That's why I think this movie, one of the reasons that I think it's like it's less about the to catch a predators, and it's more about What Hollywood does to people and just fame and entertainment does to people, because that's and that's a fat it's it's the movies are trying to do different things.

  The documentary is trying to do something different than the film is doing. And I think I would encourage people to watch both just to sort of sit with like the diptych of it, being like, this is what this is the carnage that happened in real life. And then this is the carnage that happened to all these entertainers to make this entertainment. I'm glad we're zooming out. Cause this is the moment that I really wanted to do that. And it's exactly why I wanted to have a conversation by first looking at the documentary Predators and the Luke Dittrich, Peace, and Esquire.

  Because turning a sting operation, again, that's ostensibly about catching child predators into a TV show is sleazy, gross, unethical, and really fucking dangerous. Yeah. And it's not surprising that it concluded the way that it did.

  [44:44] Another detail that comes up in the Dittrich piece and not in Predators is when I speak about how dangerous it was. Having five or six sometimes fully armed guns drawn big meathead cops tackle these dudes to the ground is not com it's it was a hundred percent for sure. That is not procedure. When so there's a moment the the there was so much chance for crossfire. Like it's amazing that nobody got killed.

  There was some one moment where the I think the first predator who gets taken down in Primetime, the guy who tackles him is in a ghillie suit, like a sniper would be in Afghanistan or in, you know, Phnom Pan in Was that so that he could blend in? I think it was so he could blend in with the bushes. I was like, that's ridiculous. That's hilarious. my god. And then you know what, dude? There's a scene in Predators where they're showing some of that B-roll and there's a dude in a ghilly suit. it comes it comes from reality. Yeah. Yes.

  So like there were these cops were getting so stoked to be doing this. They were basically cosplaying as like sniper. You know, like they were cosplaying as as as troops. Well, this is all true. Over time, the show's popularity grew, pressure increased from NBC, and therefore advertisers. And the more theatrical things became in terms of Police involvement, Hansen's one liners. He was going on Oprah, Jon Stewart, everywhere. And using his one liners, he became, I don't think I realized how popular he was in the cultural zeitgeist.

  [46:18] Our next moment, Hansen prays on Dan. Speaking of traumatized decoys, Dan is completely fucked up by his first appearance. Producer Andy tells Hansen to take him up to dinner and try to calm him down. Hansen does not want to do that, by the way. Hansen is terrified of people. yeah. That's true. He does not like people. And I think it's true in real life. And she's like, What are you gonna do in Fort Myers? so Dan is sitting next to the poolside restaurant at his hotel, waiting for Hansen.

  And there's a great callback to an earlier scene where Hansen was on the plane talking to Creed and he was sipping a cocktail from a straw, not looking like a grown man, to be honest. And it makes and Dan's doing the same thing. He's sipping a a drink from a straw and he looks naive and almost pathetic in the same way that Hansen did before Creed told him how great he was. Dan orders a Bud Light, Hansen says, you know, NBC's paying for this dinner. He's like, Okay, well I'll get a Budweiser. Very, very funny. Maybe the first like really big laugh.

  Yeah, I I laughed very hard at that. Well, because the way that Merritt Wever even gets him to go to the thing, he's like, why don't you get yourself a nice McCallan? You know, like that's probably a even back then a $15 glass of Scotch. Scott. It's a hopes and dreams meets pep talk conversation. It's pure seduction as Hansen gives Dan the nickname Decoy Dan. He tells him the story of the bracelet he's wearing, not the long version of the story, but he says, I got it by doing this story in India about. child trafficking.

  Hansen tells Dan the bracelet was from his time in India covering a story about child slave labor that won him an Emmy. This moment ends with Ari Balouzian's score sounding like Bernard Herrmann's music in Hitchcock movies right before something disturbing happens. This is what I've always really loved about Hitchcock movies. The way Belusian shifts tone and style With his score and the cues is incredible. There were moments. The soundtrack is fucking sublime.

  I wouldn't I obviously I can't speak to this as well as you can because I only watched it once, but there were moments, and I'm maybe this is what you're talking about, where it's almost like Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen is like he's almost dissociating or he's realizing what he's gonna have to do to become the thing he wants to be. And that's when like the the sound or the score or just the sound design starts feeling like tinnitus, like the mix of what's being said on screen gets lower and lower, and then the

  [48:37] whatever sound design is happening is like getting almost those as those scenes got more and more ratcheted up for me, it got like almost physically uncomfortable to watch, you know, Robert Pattinson's descent. Well, the music in this particular moment when he's getting ready to say goodnight to Dan, it feels like coming of age movie-ish. It feels a little to use the the ABC after school special thing that I love to say all the time. Right.

  Meanwhile, Andy the producer is being recruited by ABC to run a TV show or a TV show inspired by To Catch a Predator called What Would You Do and John Quiñones. With John Quiñones. And Hansen is shown taking his mistress out on a date where he decides to break things off. So it's been introduced at this point that he has a mistress. And this is an invention in terms of the timeline because this actually didn't end up happening until 2011. And I can see why They shot this particular scene.

  I can see why they included the adultery piece to make it seem like he's a hypocrite. But I will be honest with you, I don't give a shit about people that are consenting adults and what they do with their genitals and and their sex life. I just don't. So I think it was kind of it I just just one point of view, and I've watched it three times. I feel like it weakened the movie. For me, it was like, so imagine like.

  That picture like the Looney Tunes or whatever, the cartoons where it's like a small fish gets eaten by a bigger fish, gets eaten by a bigger fish, gets beaten by a bigger fish. What was happening in entertainment at that time was actually kind of the opposite. So like Stone Phillips is the shark of this story. Like there's like he's Hansen's never gonna catch him, but he can kind of grow to be a bigger fish. This was the really rapacious tabloid paparazzi. So it's like TMG. So when you're swimming in this environment. Yeah. You're a little bit famous.

  You got a little bit of celebrity. You don't actually have to worry about getting eaten by the shark. The shark doesn't give a shit about you. Yeah. You might get fed on by the even more bottom feeders of this industry, right? So if this is all exploitation, soup to nuts. Yeah. And I don't think the movie really made that point as well as it was as well as it could have. But if that was the intent, I did take that a little bit away from it. Like, yeah. This guy's

  [50:51] Because he doesn't seem to give a shit about his wife. Well if we're being honest. I totally. It was more about is this going to destroy my career before I can make my career? And they did end up, it did end up coming out that he had cheated on his wife and they did get divorced, but that didn't happen until years later. Yeah. so it didn't work for me. But what does work in the movie is what happens next? Del stops by to give Dan some preparation for the show, and we get treated to a really slimy montage of decoy Dan on the set of To Catch a Predator.

  And he's in this kitchen setting and he's greeting predator after predator at the trademark kitchen island of To Catch a Predator. So at this point, the show, the movie Primetime has established its equilibrium. And we've got Hansen focused on meeting the expectations of Zucker, and we've got decoy Dan hitting his stride. Our next moment, enter Xavier von Eric. In Primetime, Van Eric is the master of ceremonies for finding predators in chatrooms while pretending to be a 13 to 15 year old.

  And as pressure from NBC mounts to keep up with ratings, Van Eric thinks he has found the Moby Dick of Predators in a small town in Texas. So it turns out, as captured in this movie, anyways, that a cop in Texas has written a letter to Hansen. Yeah. And he really wants to entreat Hansen and the producers to bring to Catch a Predator to Murphy, Texas. Oppenheim brings life to this letter with a depiction of events as described in the letter, including a bunch of music cues that sound like something from Angela Lansbury murder she wrote.

  It's that's again, I dude, Belusian was fucking cooking with this movie. He could just pick a vein and be like, Yeah, I'm gonna hit that shit. biggest laugh during my screening was when the cop walks into a subway to order a sandwich. And Oppenheim could not resist the branding for Jared. Yes. The cop even orders the Jared special. Yeah. this doting letter from the cop prompts Van Eric to scour this small town in Texas to see if he can snare a world class mount him on the wall of your den, apex predator. He thinks he's found one. Enter in XS Zero Zero.

  And when he's mentioning in XS00 to to Hansen, Robert Pattinson, he's

  [53:05] He's like, he comes on and then he leaves. It's almost like to today it would be like, this guy's using a VPN to disguise where he's at. But this is like an AOL chat room or something that they're in. So it's like he basically is just jumping on and jumping off the chat so much that he's like, he's gotta be he's gotta be big, he's gotta be up there. This could be CIA. Totally. He's convinced himself. He's a congressman. It could be it kind of jumped the shark a little bit.

  Not not exactly jump the shark, but maybe one a little too I know what you Could it be the president? Yeah, could Could it be George W. Bush? I kind of don't think so. Yeah, Van Eric's like, it's either CIA, NSA, or maybe dun dun dun. All of this is setting up what becomes the dramatic third act of the movie. And I want to compress the next section of the movie to get to the good stuff. We then learn that the Inquirer is gonna publish photos taken of Hansen and his mistress.

  And between the ratings war and his personal life nearing collapse, Hansen starts to show some cracks. Hansen and his producer Andy begin what starts as kind of understated tension. She's flirting with ABC about leaving to go do what would you do with John Quiñones? It's all becoming way too much for Hansen. He wants his Moby Dick. Yep. He pressures Van Eric and makes a unilateral decision. The catch a predator is hitting the road. They're going to Murphy, Texas. And his producer, Andy, fucking freaks out. She's like, What are you doing? They're going to the airport.

  Yep. We cut to our next moment. Primetime channels, it's inner Eddington.

  [54:32] All right. You ready, Luke? Yeah. Bokeem Woodbine. The camera movement, the production design, even the sound, the music sounds like Daniel Pemberton's score from Eddington when they do the press conference. So to establish the setting of Murphy, Texas, Oppenheim makes two huge choices, both of which I think pay off quite beautifully. First, he casts Bokeem Woodbine as the chief of police Cortland Gunn. Replete with a 10-gallon hat and a thoroughly elongated Texas drawl. Yep.

  Secondly, he shows the Murphy Texas police as a heavily militarized police force ready to help the To Catch a Predator producers fight pedos with surplus US ordinance from our never-ending wars overseas. And you and I chatted about this, Luke, yeah, before we recorded. Because I was like, I think that was somewhat anachronistics. I think I think it was. Oppenheim trying to use something from this time period to say something about the time period we're living in now. I was totally wrong, and you were suggesting that I was wrong. So I looked this up. Yeah.

  It's called the Defense Logistics Agency and the 1033 program, which is managed by the Law Enforcement Supply Office, AKA L E S O, which allows the transfer of excess Department of Defense military property to civilian law enforcement agencies across the United States. It was started in 1997. Holy shit. But it really got underway during the second Gulf War. Yes. Yeah. So it has been a political football for the last 15 years. Obama first put limits on 1033 in 2015. Of course, Trump immediately revoked those limits in 2017.

  Biden then put the limits on again in 2022, which is where I think it stands now. All of this through, of course, executive order. And from nineteen ninety seven through twenty fourteen, five point one billion dollars in military hardware was transferred from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement agencies across the country. And it's not just guns, it's not just like semi or automatic weapons, it's like bear cats. It's it's sort of troop moving person like in this press conference that with Bokeem Woodbine, there is a pred there's a predator. Fuck.

  There's a bear cat in the background. Yep. Yeah.

  [56:50] No, and that's and that's that is real and that was real back then. We the Spokane County Sheriff just bought a bear cat during the pandemic, around the time of George Floyd. When some kids threw a brick through the Nike the Nike store, we had to get a bear cat. That's right. We had no other choice. Hey kids, don't bring a knife to a fucking gunfight. You know what I'm saying? Exactly. Don't bring a bear cat to some mild vandalism. Dude. So this is when they're announcing this press conference that's depicted is to announce the arrival of To Catch a Predator.

  It's important to note that about Woodbine's character, Cortland Gunn, very much an invention, but he's definitely based around some of the characteristics of the real life guy whose name was Billy Myrick, a guy described in the Luke Dittrich piece as a bull in a China shop who was enthusiastically supportive of To Catch a Predator coming to Murphy, Texas. I think that the use of the bear cat in the movie was meant to be inspired by an instance of asset forfeiture. For sure. Yeah.

  So early on in the Murphy Stings, they catch a local, I think he's a businessman or a lawyer, and they seize his Ford expedition. Yep. And Billy Myrick's like, that's mine. This is real life. Yep. And he drove that Ford expedition around the rest of the time that Hansen and Dateline were in town. I I was thinking the fact that I mean Bokeem Woodbine's obviously black. He's wearing a big cowboy hat. Made me instantly think of David Clark, who was the sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin for a long time.

  And then obviously we're thinking about at that time more, Joel Arpayo, who was the sheriff, I think, of either the county that Phoenix is in or was fired and then brought back by Trump. Yep. Yep. So like it it was this, it was the it was sort of the beginning of the celebritying of Law enforcement officials. Yeah, because Clark was all over Fox News. Might still be. So was so was Arpayo. Yeah. You know, Clark considered a run for president, I think. Didn't get very far. But like that's the level of like the entertainment industrial complex also snatched those guys up.

  All right, back to the movie for our next moment. Hansen and Plum do Field of Dreams in a parking lot. Wait, what? so Jeff Zucker is putting pressure on the show for ratings. yeah. And Hansen is being hounded by an aggressive inquirer reporter.

  [59:06] Meanwhile, Dan Plum is increasingly vital to the success of Everesting as Del kind of slowly fades into the background. And he's threatening to leave the show as she sees Hansen's behavior becoming erratic as fuck. And before we can get to the showdown with NXS zero zero, aka the big fish in Texas, Hansen and Plum decide to have a catch in a poorly lit parking lot. It's a really funny choice that stuck out to me all three times watching this movie. I'm like, where the fuck are they?

  And why does suddenly Dan Plum show up with a glove and they're about to play catch, but they only really get like one throw each? One like Dan Plum, I don't know if he's act it was supposed to be left-handed. He's never thrown a baseball before. And I could it wasn't clear. I think that did that on purpose. Probably. But I guess my point is that he's wearing, I think these are myths that Chris Hansen has brought. Because it's like maybe h his kids or something. Yeah. Like it's it's he's never actually a father to his children, but he tries to be a father to Dan.

  Totally. And it's almost like the way I read it, and this could be wrong, was that maybe Dan is actually right-handed, but all Chris Hansen had was a left-handed mitt. That or Dan has to throw with his left hand. I don't know how anybody wonders whether or not this was an intentional choice. I wondered if Skyler Gisondo is actually right-handed, but to make such a fucking pathetic throw, he he was left-handed in the movie. The ball limply like dribbles out of his hand when he tries to throw it. Pattinson, meanwhile, confidence of a minor league reliever.

  He really muscles up on it. We even get an audio cue of a whoosh sound. That's really nice thwap. And what I really thought was funny the last time I watched us paying close attention, I'm like, Pattinson appears to have thrown that really hard, but I think that's a lot of that is accentuated by the audio cue of the whoosh sound that they give. But then you don't really hear the thwap on the other side. Dan catches it and he just kind of like keeps talking in that sort of high lilting voice.

  Hansen turns this awkward moment of male bonding into an opportunity to inspire Dan, who's feeling a little insecure, after his friend Troy called him and called out the reality of his role in the show. He's like, dude, you're on the screen for like 0.1 seconds as your friend. I'm really proud, man. But if I was just a random viewer, I would care 0.0% about you. Yeah. so Hansen offers Dan a gift.

  [01:01:24] It's his bracelet. This is, I think, one of the most scintillating moments of this movie. Ajon Singh, Indian American writer from New York City, offers Hansen kind of a motive and like a, I would call it like a thematic backdrop for his missionary zeal with to catch To Catch a Predator, both in the movie and in real life. I don't think Hansen really deserves this, but it's Ajon Singh's gift to him. Yeah. So Dan Plum is def desperate for approval and inspiration.

  And Hansen tells him this maybe apocryphal tale about something that happened to him when he was doing this child child slavery story in India. Yeah. We see Plum, he's in the setting as Hansen is describing this. So it's just really good piece of filmmaking. some kids were disappearing, according to what Hansen was told when he was in southern India. Their bodies were turning up in bits, and the villagers had turned to vigilante justice. They were lynching anybody suspected of participating in these disappearing kids.

  And ultimately, authorities think that it was wolves. But Hansen believes this little girl who approaches him and tells him about this boogeyman. Great evil, yeah. Yeah, this boogeyman kind of vision she had. Hansen called it an ancient evil that awaits for them in Murphy, Texas. So I've talked a lot about how Robert Pattinson's depiction of Chris Hansen takes on a kind of almost vampire-like quality. It seems super obviously intentional.

  And when he approaches character the character of Dan with this bracelet to give to him, it's like he becomes, I think Dan Plum becomes kind of Hansen's Renfield. Yeah. And it operates a little bit like a vampire's bite because it's familiar. Meanwhile, our next moment takes us to Murphy, Texas. The sting where everything falls apart rather quickly. All right. They can't get their big fish to take the bait. So Von Eerck is just hammering away at come on, dude. I need you to come out, come to the decoy house. The inquirer's pursuit of Hansen is taking its toll.

  Predators are aware of the sting operation. So even run-of-the-mill fish aren't taking the bait. Merritt Wever, as producer Andy, gets her biggest laugh from the movie. Hansen

  [01:03:38] Collapses in their decoy house in Murphy, Texas from exhaustion. He started wearing a bulletproof vest. Yep. And he's more paranoid than Joe Cross in Eddington at this point. And Weaver gets this chance to just fucking go crazy. She hovers over him when he collapses the floor and she's like, I swear to fucking God that if you do not get your shit together, I will call the network, motherfucker. They are totally blowing their budget, and she's aware of this. And she threatens to call the network on Hansen. Well, honestly, can we can we pause?

  Because this character, this is the one I was saying, like this Merritt Wever is the only person who really gives herself the opportunity to have a moral qualm with this. But as you were talking, it kind of triggered something for me. The reason she is so reluctant to just like pull up stakes, because they were planning to go to Fort Myers, Florida, but they actually go to Texas, right? They had already had the house scoped out down there. She says This makes me look like an asshole when he just sort of unilaterally moves the production.

  We should talk just briefly about what you would do. John Quiñones, that is like inspired by Taketchic Predator, but it's more about like what would be the good feeling version of this. Like two people are having an argument. Is the per is the third person gonna come up and say, Hey, you shouldn't talk to your wife that way, or hey, you dropped this. Would you like to return your wallet? You shouldn't shame your kid for eating food. But but Merritt Wever is not. Going to that show because she wants to have like her soul renewed by like feel good television.

  She's just worried that her host is making her look like an asshole as a producer. It's a career thing for her throw out. Actually, Hansen looks like he's about to flush the show down the drain. Exactly. It sets up the best moment from the movie. So Dan sees this tension escalating between Andy and Hansen. And she's getting ready to disembowel Hansen. So he's like, it's go time. You could see this like moment where there's a flicker in Dan and all of a sudden there's a predator parked outside the decoy house. And he sees his big moment.

  The predator has a disability and crutches and is walking up to the decoy house and it's raining like crazy outside. It's an ordinary setup for To Catch a Predator, just small talk, up until the point where Dan looks down at the coffee table where the online chat logs are printed.

  [01:05:54] And the logs that he had been asking for the whole movie. Because he's like, if you just give me the logs, I can play my part better. And we see in this over-the-shoulder shot down at the coffee table, the bracelet is on his wrist as he picks it up. This is our Renfield, our decoy Dan. Yep. And he seizes his opportunity to become Dracula. He starts reading from the chat log. Then you said, Can I be your first at sex? And he says sex. He's doing this. Like Hansen. And our whole fucking audience, the two times I saw this, the three times I saw this movie, just eruption.

  People were like, my fucking God. Like more like ooze and oz. Yeah. Because of the way that Gisondo does sex. Gisondo's a really good actor. He has to be ex extremely good in this to play somebody who's as bad as at acting as decoy Dan is. Dude, the Predator starts stammering. Cause he's like, what the fuck is going on here? Dan stands up, puts his hand over his chin. He's at this point completely aping Chris Hansen. He's just not pretending to be Dracula. He is Dracula. And he says, What in the world are you doing here?

  Maybe it was the Indian ancient evil boogeyman, or maybe it was seeing Skyler Gisondo's Dan Plum become Robert Pattinson's Chris Hansen. But I could not stop thinking about Mulholland Drive. So the boogeyman that they created for Primetime, also just for a quick aside about Mulholland Drive reminded me a little bit about the monster that hides behind Winky's Diner in Mulhull and Drive. You Mulh and Drive in a long time? Not in a long time. Okay.

  Well, I'd say that the way that the little boogeyman character in Primetime appears is only about three percent as scary as what's behind the Winky's Diner in Mulholland Drive. Shout out Patrick Fischler. Go rewatch the scene with Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, where she plays an aspiring actress who's gone to some rehearsals. She has a friend similar to Troy for Dan in Primetime, who's trying to rally her toward a career as an actress. And her first couple rehearsals go poorly. She's clearly not a very experienced or good actor. Yeah.

  But then something weird happens where she goes to an audition and she just channels this femme fatale energy and goes totally nuts. Voila. Betty Elms, I would like you to meet. Jack Tupman, my assistant. Woody Katz, who we have cast in the part of Chuck, and will do the scene with you.

  [01:08:19] I think this moment Primetime might do for Skyler Gisondo's career what Mulholland Drive did for Naomi Watts. And they were about the same age. I mean, Gisondo's performance in this movie, to be clear, is just so fucking sensational that it does feel like he's gonna have, if he isn't already, a total star turn. His depiction of like somebody completely enamored with Chris Hansen, I think it it foregrounds the way that To Catch a Predator becomes of like a thing all about Hansen's fame, right? Yep. And it has very little to do with criminal justice.

  And I think that this it's this moment of movie where that sort of clicks for Dan. So I really do feel like this particular moment is the entire ballgame of Primetime. Because after this occurs, so they take down this guy that's got the crutches and this disability. It's as though Chris Hansen's fever dream that Lance Oppenheim was capturing so expertly becomes contagious to everybody around him, including the law enforcement people.

  Including his producer who turns down, ultimately turns down the lucrative occur opportunity with ABC, and including Dan Plum. but it does lead to the most, and this is something you and I chatted about a little bit yesterday, the most moralistic, moralizing moment of the movie. So Dan, you would think coming out of this moment where he just channeled his inner Chris Hansen and just fucking killed it, would be super stoked. No, it felt awful to him. Yeah. And he's trans it is awful. He's transformed by the moment. It sickens him.

  He finds Hansen wallowing in self-pity next to the decoy house's backyard pool. And this part, all three times, just rubbed me a little bit weird. So Hansen starts waxing very moralistically about the history of pillaries. yeah. And he's like, you know, they used to just put on these public displays and he's basically describing like every civilized town had a pillory, I think. Had a pillory where You know, this is medieval times, basically. Like pillories kind of went away. Like maybe there were some pillories in America.

  Like basically the witch trials were probably like the end of pillories, you know. So 400 years ago, we're talking about. And he's like, now there's a television in every home, and I'm on it. So are you, Dan. Dan hands the bracelet to Hansen. He doesn't want to be Dracula. He doesn't want to be Renfield. And we could tell things are just going completely sideways for his participation in the show at this point. But you and I talked about.

  [01:10:38] Whether or not this show is moralistic. And I just honestly struggled to see the character of Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen break the fourth wall, really, and kind of tell the audience what's going on. You know, the you and I made a joke. I don't remember which episode it was of all those moments where we were talking about a movie where it's kind of like an actor will say something that just basically like sums up the movie, like that's why they call it Moneyball. Exactly.

  It had a little bit of that to it, and it felt very you kind of needed it because he gave back the bracelet. But I it just I don't think this the scene landed for me. One quick thing that I was just remembering is when he gets the bracelet in the first place, there's a moment and it's like it's not even played for a laugh. It's almost kind of between beats of the scene when Robert Pattinson just puts the bracelet on him almost it's not a gift. It's almost like you're gonna take this. It's a curse. It's a curse. And he in Gisondo just says, like, it doesn't fit. does he?

  I I don't think it fits. Or it's like that or it seems too big or something like that. that's great. And it's almost and that's I didn't catch that. And You almost see, or I I thought I saw almost like Robert Pattinson's 'cause it's just one of those bracelets. It's like a little like C, you know. So you pop it on. Yeah. And it's almost like you see him ratchet it onto Skyler Gisondo's arm almost to like handcuffs almost. Ooh, that's really good. The vampire's bite. Yeah.

  So our next and final moment of Primetime, Luke, the biggest fan of Michael Hutchins in the history of Murphy, Texas, reveals himself. So before Dan can exit the movie, just like the real life Dan exited the show, they still need their big showdown with a big fish. They get the phone number through Von Eric's chats with NXS00. They use a string of LED lights and a colonoscopy camera to visualize information transmitted through the internets. Is that what they did? It's nice. Yeah.

  I I it looked like a visual effect, but no, they literally I mean it's practical visual effect. Totally. I thought it was just CGI shit. But they also used like We weren't really using dial up in two thousand six anymore. They did use the they had they a couple of fifty six K modem sounds. Which I don't know, dude, in remote places in Texas. Maybe, yeah. I'll bet you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in Fairbanks, Alaska, I had cable modem at this time for sure. Yeah. anyway, so they tie the phone number to a local assistant DA.

  His name is Bill Conradt, and that's the name of the real life person that's being played by actor Alex Winter. Shout out Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. Alex Winter, by all accounts,

  [01:13:00] Really poured himself into this role. He's also a very good filmmaker himself now. Dude, I did not catch. I didn't either. Wow. Dude, I didn't either. Wow. you're my to am I you finding out right now? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's Alex Winter. They finally get NXS00 AKA Bill Conradt on the phone. They're all huddled up in the Murphy police station command center for the sting operation. Conradt's talking about Australia with Dan Plum and Hansen. This is one of the funniest moments in the fucking movie. Hansen makes a finger gun.

  And he points it at Dan's crotch and he whispers cock. Genuine LOL. Conradt's talking about kangaroos and you know, he's just making small talk. At this point, he's trying they're still trying to lure him to the house. Totally. And Chris Hansen gets impatient. Yes. Like he's on the hook. So like the fish is on the hook. Dude. He points at his crotch and he says, Cock. And Dan Plum is talk. my God. He's talking to Conradt about this. He's talking about kangaros and shit and you know, just flirty small talk about how much he loves Australia.

  And Dan awkwardly belts out, hey, that's cool. Hey, anyway, I get hard like super easy. Why don't you come over and make it hard? Fuck. I would have hung too. This movie's so sleazy. It's so hard. And I want to watch it a fourth time. Conradt hangs up. And vanishes, they lost their big fish. I think the impatience of Hansen obviously doesn't pay off. This becomes the most intensely hyper fictionalized and hyper-dramatized version of actual events. All right, let's describe things first from the perspective of where Primetime and the true story are aligned.

  Hansen and his producers, they make a huge decision to break the formula of their own show. Yep. The this guy in excess zero zero, Bill Conradt, does not take the bait. At this point, the crime he has committed is online solicit solicitation of a minor. They were going to pursue Conradt and attempt a shakedown while he was out grabbing the newspaper or getting groceries.

  Their motivation for doing this and their kind of rationale for how they were able to pursue a search warrant and an arrest warrant was that they were worried that Conradt would destroy evidence that he had child pornography or whatever. Meanwhile, the police wanted to make an extreme gesture and a show of force against pedophiles in Texas. So they brought

  [01:15:21] A SWAT team to the home of Bill Conradt when he failed to come out of his house to grab the aforementioned newspaper or groceries. Again, we're aligning the actual events and Primetime where they're aligned. And this is the sickening way in which NBC's motives and law enforcement of a small town in Texas became completely unified. Yeah. And to the point that is made so eloquently at the end of Dittrich's piece and Esquire.

  There were supposed to be, if you listen to the producers from Dateline NBC, Very clear boundaries and distinctions between NBC, perverted justice, and law enforcement. And by this point in the narrative, in real life and in the movie, that line had been not just blurred. It was clear that Primetime were that NBC was calling all the shots. NBC wanted to keep up the ratings machine of people watching Chris Hansen's pillory The Predators before they vi were violently arrested. The police in Texas wanted to demonstrate to their constituents that they weren't gonna let.

  Conrat destroy evidence of child pornography. So the SWAT team eventually enters the home of Bill Conradt, and Conradt kills himself. Now let's talk about the differences between the movie and reality. Like Robert Pattinson driving up in a bearcat. Like Robert Pattinson. That's the first sentence I have, Luke. There's a bear cat and probably fucking 30 heavily armed officers ready to assault the suburban home of Conradt. It looks like a scene out of Sicario when the Delta Force dudes led by Josh Brolin and Emily Blunt are descending on Juarez.

  But only if the Delta Force people were middle-aged and pretty out of shape. Yeah, exactly. Andy tells ABC that she's changed her mind about the gig. She is catch a predator for life, baby. And that's where it's like it's it's clear that at that point, if it wasn't earlier, this is about her career because she's like, my God, this idiot is gonna maybe pull it off. So they For me, it felt like she was like, Well, this is the ratings win I've been looking for. Fuck you, John Quiñones.

  Dude, and this is why I think it's so important that they started this character, Andy, kind of from scratch. Yeah. So Hansen and Dan make a last-itch effort to coax Conradt out of his house, but he doesn't bite. They just end up talking about the musical rent. Dan breaks out into his second rendition in the movie of Seasons of Love from Rent. I guarantee Skyler Gisondo has a better singing voice than he does. This is why it's like

  [01:17:43] It's it's a gutsy performance because he's gotta be so bad at so many things. I fucking love Skylar because he's great. Hansen is staring at Conradt through a window while standing on his front lawn. And I've already described what happens in reality. Meanwhile, Dan continues singing just as Conradt lifts a gun to his head and shoots himself. We cut back to a close up reaction from Hansen, and he has halted breaths, stunned silence, remorse, maybe, a flicker of a tear forming. Mm-hmm. Here comes this producer Andy.

  She walks over and she's like, I think I can make this work. Find some police to interview. And this moment, I think this is just a really, really affecting and effective edit. So I'd say that like the next 30 minutes of movie time are elighted by this next edit that shows first a multi-view monitor feed from the camera truck, ostensibly, or from back at Murphy headquarters, right? As the signal drops from the cameras feeding these monitors one by one. Yeah. Hansen's still standing in the front yard and tears are streaming down his face.

  And the last line we hear is, What would have happened if I wasn't here? There's a very funny epilogue with Dan Plum receiving his SAG card in the mail. But I wonder if that final line from Hansen might have been the natural ending for the I think so. Yeah. The length to which Oppenheim humanizes Hansen with this final moment with Pattinson, if you juxtapose that with what the real life Hansen did, this is why I'm like, how does he complain at all about this movie?

  He's made to look like, okay, could you squint and go, is that remorse, or is it him thinking about how he just lost his big fish? But you can read it both ways. Yeah. He looks like a human being who is totally horrified and traumatized by witnessing, and of course, in real life, he was nowhere near. Not even the front door of Conradt's house. His house was kind of almost one of those like seventies, eighties. It was his parents' home. Fake Japanese vibe things. There was like a a wall, like there's like sort of like the kind of courtyard and shit.

  The kind of fence that you see in like Japanese gardens, like up at Manitou Park. And that's how they go in. So you're like Chris Hansen is like multiple layers of house between him and his subject. Nowhere near it. He gets nowhere near

  [01:20:05] He doesn't even know how it happened. You hear a gunshot and everyone goes like this on the actual recording at the time. Yeah. And Luke is Luke is talking about the real life thing. Sorry, yes. The the real that gets to shown in Predators a little bit. It was interesting though, too, because Predators came out before this movie, obviously. That's the sort of the monitor be or the multi-screen monitor thing. That's also how they end that is Chris Hansen's. Interview in Predators. But also I do think that multi-monitor thing is a thing they did in To Catch a Predator.

  Definitely. It was one of the things that yeah. So like they're they're both of those filmmakers are calling back to the original show, I think, in that. And what is so fascinating to me and is about this choice from Oppenheim is he lets his version of Chris Hansen do what the real life Chris Hansen didn't get a chance to do and probably would have been too cowardly to do. Yeah. Which is to like confront the horrific violence that has occurred as a result.

  I just, I'm just gonna jump ahead and say we have to keep in mind he reacted in real life to Bill Conradt killing himself as though that was a justifiable outcome. Yep. And a or I might even say stroke necessary outcome, which is fucking insane. Yeah. Conradt refused to actually participate in like the material crime of pursuing a minor or whatever, right? He was guilty of online solicitation of a minor, which would have been a potentially considerable offense, and I'll I'll come back to that later. But he reacted as though, well, damn.

  Yeah, I'm glad he's dead, or it doesn't matter that he's dead. Yeah. And so that's what I think is really interesting about Oppenheim's depiction doesn't do that. it seems super obvious that all of Hansen's bluster is just to get people to pay attention to him. Yep. With his faltering YouTube channel and his waning celebrity. Because I just honestly think Oppenheim did him a solid the way he's depicted in this movie. I mean, even if you think the remorse is actually just thinly veiled self-pity. Meanwhile, Ajon Singh gave Hansen the boogeyman vigilante story.

  So I think Oppenheim gave Hansen the final shot on the lawn outside of Bill Conradt's house. The story of the real Chris Hansen is just far less interesting, far less sympathetic. I'm sorry, but the meanest thing I could probably say about the real life Chris Hansen is that he's fucking boring. And I know I've already said that. So I think the documentary and what Chris Hansen actually did.

  [01:22:26] is a worse is like a more insidious fall from grace and from journalism than what they put on screen for Primetime because in the South Asia or the you know the India story, it seems like it's fabricated it might actually be wolves or whatever. And instead Chris Hansen takes one girl's testimony and uses that to be like, it must be a predator. It must be this prime evil that's this prime evil ancient evil. Yeah. What really happened In the real Chris Hansen's life, was he did a report on child trafficking.

  And there are gro four girls who meet him at the airport and send Chris Hansen on his way, and you see them visibly crying. And when Chris Hansen recalls this moment in the actual interview in Predators, you can tell that like those girls are who he's still thinking about to some extent when in To Catch a Predator. But the the real difference there, and maybe why it's kind of brilliant that. The fictionalized version of this focuses on the child actors as victims. There aren't actually any victims in To Catch a Predator. The show.

  There is no actual child being in that exact moment. Doesn't mean that people who There's Von Arc flirting with them on AOL chatrooms, and then there's Del Harvey pretending to be Dan Plum. Maybe he did actually get justice for some victims of child trafficking. There is not even a pretense of justice for actual victims in To Catch a Predator.

  [01:23:56] Kaufman is a real person. Kaufman County District Attorney Ed Walton described the Terrell Police Department as the most incompetent bunch of buffoons you've ever seen. And he suggested that the show of force with the SWAT team was just to prove to the dateline audience that they were tough on crime. Mike Minor, an attorney who had worked with Kaufman Counties as an attorney in Kaufman County for 30 years, said of the SWAT deployment, it was the stupidest and most unnecessary thing he had ever. scene and his career in law enforcement.

  And Conradt's sister sued NBC for a hundred million dollars and the case was settled out of court, which probably suggests that she's sought and received a lot. She got a chunk. She got a chunk of change. You just mentioned this, Luke.

  In June 2007, Collin County District Attorney John Roach, which is the again in that area of Texas, declined to prosecute all 23 cases that came from the Murphy, Texas To Catch a Predator sting operation due to insufficient Or poorly gathered evidence, jurisdictional problems, and the big old problem of the involvement of non-law enforcement personnel. You're really not supposed to do that, guys. AK really not supposed to do that.

  Chris Hansen, who never does like Miranda rights or anything like that, Roach said that the police department had no real law enforcement position in the sting. Other people were doing their work while the offer series of this is so funny coming but it's a call back to what we were talking about earlier. While the officers were just there like potted plants to make the scenery. I want to use that quote from Roach to talk about Skeeter Jean, Jean. But when he is doing his To Catch a Predator thing, he's he's Skeeter. He's Skeeter. Skeeter Hansen.

  He calls himself Skeeter Hansen. That's right. Okay. This is part of Predators. This is a copycat YouTuber and Predator Hunter. And I think this is probably the biggest legacy of Chris Hansen, if I'm being honest. Yeah. so This guy, Skeeter Jean, Skeeter Hansen, fakes the participation and representation of law enforcement. Yep. In his so he's copying. He's doing the exact same thing Hansen's doing, but in like a a low quality kind of He's literally blurring out the faces of his friends as he has them wear like it w it it was like party city level literally costumes.

  Yeah. Like fucking spirit Halloween shit. And as of right now, I just want to point something out though.

  [01:26:15] Chris Hansen's YouTube channel has seven hundred thousand subscribers right now. Skeeter Hansen has two point six million subscribers. So To Catch a Predator, the TV show peaked with seven million viewers per episode.

  [01:26:30] I want do a couple final thoughts. I think Primetime's incredible. I think it's the Eddington of this year. I've said that. I think we're going to be talking about it for the next decade. I found it more enjoyable and entertaining than Eddington. Eddington's tough to revisit. I don't know that it even has as important a thing to say as Eddington because of the the representation of solid gold magic carp and data centers. but like, you know, Eddington has the dad yelling at the son, Brian, are you fucking retarded? You're white.

  That is super funny, but Primetime has like 30 moments that are that funny or funnier. Both Primetime and the documentary predators make the implicit explicit, which is that Hansen is just a different type of predator. Yeah. And he's fueled by ratings and clicks. And that's why I loved this quote from David Osit so much. I'm gonna come back to it. We then, like a mop circling and overflowed toilet, catch the predators our society creates. It's much easier work and far less slippery. And having a seat with ourselves.

  On that exact topic, when Chris Hansen is on screen sitting for his interview in Predators, and he's telling the story of his his formative moment, the thing that made him Chris Hansen. He's telling the story of these little girls he probably saved or could like likely saved. I because I was thinking, like, that was an actual legit piece of journalism that he did. Seems like seems like he did it the right way. His response, do you remember what he says? No. It was an amazing piece of television. This was showing them the chat logs. Right. You got one shot.

  You gotta get it. And he came up with a bunch of cockamami excuses. And I was drunk or or it may have been slipped a pill, who knows? That is not drunk or slipped a pill? Right. That's your defense. Yes. And it was an amazing piece of television. yeah. So it's an amazing piece of entertainment. It's not an amazing piece of journalism. He doesn't fucking care. No. And when journalism he's not a journalist. And when David Osit asks him And he had already disclosed that he himself had been abused sexually as a child. Yep. And he asks Hansen, why do these men do this?

  Hansen has no fucking answer. And it's like, You've been spending 20 years of your life doing this. So this is where David Osit is more of a journalist than Hansen is. Hansen starts to wave it away saying, I haven't the foggiest. Yeah. And he says, No, what I'm actually asking is, why didn't you push harder, basically, to get that answer? Yeah. And Hansen has no

  [01:28:54] Has no answer. I can't believe he watched that documentary. I he maybe is not the smartest guy in the world and was like, Yeah, fuck yeah, I appreciate that. Roxana Hadadi, whose name has come up on this podcast before, great film critic, had this to say on Twitter. Incredible the amount that Primetime depicts the entire To Catch a Predator enterprise as analogous to the invasion of Iraq and the search for WMDs. Our absolute American certainty that force is the only way forward, no matter the truth, as long as it's our truth. Good movie.

  Primetime's a critique of failed and vain and showy performative masculinity. Yeah. I think Chris Hansen is cherished by Andrew Tate worshiping bros. It's not the mainline Christians, it's not the progressive Christians, it's not the the social justice Christians who have. A nuanced sense of morality and even God. It's the people who are like spending 99% of their time reading the Old Testament. To catch a predator's feeds our the the love that everybody has for performative justice.

  I think too many people, not just the I I call these guys the kind of social justice warriors of the MAGA movement that are making all these comments, but I think it's more than that. The fact that this show was popular for Jon Stewart. Yeah. I had a take after watching the movie the first time. Because I had just watched Ren Faire. And my favorite thing about Oppenheim, just having seen Ren Faire, which is so fucking good. I cannot wait to talk about it when we do you could see everything. Yeah.

  Was the way that he actively collaborated with the subjects in his in Ren Faire? Yeah. He would basically be like, Look, I'm gonna be around you for a month and a half. It's a documentary. And I'm gonna it's gonna be annoying. So why don't you just participate with me? How do you imagine yourself? And we can capture how you imagine yourself in this movie. It was very the line between nonfiction and fiction were never less clear because of how he did that. And I loved that about it. Like anything you observe, you're changing, right?

  So as a journalist, you spend, I'll spend sometimes, and I try to be as unobtrusive as possible, which is why I don't know how documentary filmmakers make those documentaries. Cause I spend time, I'll like put my recorder down and then I'll have to talk for 10 or 15 minutes to even get.

  [01:31:12] Somebody to not be self-conscious about the, you know, my phone sitting in a weird way on the table. In order to do honest, probably filmmaking of any sort, certainly anything that's aspiring to documentary or journalism, you have to acknowledge that there is no black and white truth, at least in this format. Because no matter what you're trying to seek, even if you believe that there is, like, if I'm interviewing you, like Benji's real feelings are being. mediated by the fact that there's a recording device here or there's a camera right there.

  And therefore the truth is already skewed because of the the means of recording it. You change it by observing it. That's good. It's a great way to put it. And we talked about this when we were at Weirdly was our very first episode about Eephus and how Frederick Wiseman was in that movie and we talked about his documentaries a little bit and how Wiseman completely resisted the label of like cinema verite. He was like, fuck that. I know it's like I'm telling a story. Yeah.

  The moment I turn my camera on, the moment a camera is anywhere near where I put the camera, he's like, I've got this camera across this gymnasium in this high school. That's me saying there's a specific version of what I'm seeing that I want to show you. I am telling a story and don't get it twisted. And that was Frederick Wiseman, who's one of the goats of nonfiction filmmaking. And Oppenheim brought him up recently when talking about that very fact that even Wiseman's movies were stories. Yeah. It's narrative. Yeah. And he just went, fuck it.

  I'm just going to go all in. And Ren Faire is so brilliant that way. I wanted to make some comparisons to the character George Coolom in Ren Faire, because the story depicts people dressed as knights in shining armor. And it's all about a Renaissance festival in Texas. And I just thought I couldn't help but be like, Chris Hansen is a self styled knight in shining armor, supposedly rescuing these decoy damsels in distress through chivalry and his sting operations. Yep. And Ren Faire starts by referring to George Coolom King George.

  And I think Primetime shows what happens when reporter and journalist Chris Hansen transforms into King Chris. One more break, and then we're gonna talk a little bit about four by three mini D V cameras. Sure. And we'll get the fuck out of here.

  [01:33:25] So I know you want to talk about four by three DV cameras right now. Could I just say, Benji, as a guy who hasn't thought nearly as much about like the process of making films as you have and all that stuff, I was how much of Predators ended up in four by three was I mean Primetime? Sorry, Primetime was in four by three was a little traumatizing to me. I don't want to go back to that time. I don't the the I I lived through the CRT movement. You know, I'm happy to have a sixteen by nine. Hang on. That's not a four by three thing though, man. It's not.

  The mastermind was four by three, brother. And it was beautiful. Yeah. Train dreams. Train dreams of four by three. It's still They shot Train Dreams on the same camera at Alexa thirty five and they shot at three two. So it was a it was the same shape. I guess it was more jarring, maybe because it was depicting the time. Yeah. Question. It just felt like I'm watching TV. You're saying you don't want to yes, you don't I just don't want to go back to watching maybe broadcast network television. You don't want to go back to NTSC, yes, mini DV, SCSI video cameras.

  Same the same issue I had with no reservations. No reservations when we talked about that. Yeah, dude. so they shot this movie on at least twelve different camera formats. That's wild. A lot of it was mini DV, but I will tell you, I thought they could have done it much more. Yeah. I was like it I mean it was an effective form of trauma that it created for me. It was so effective, dude. And I just watched it three times and I thought, I wanted I didn't I didn't want as much of the Alexa 35. It's jarring. Alexa 35 was their main camera.

  And I wanted more of the mini DV because they shot it on like DVX one hundreds and they shot it on these old RGB tube cameras that are actually from like the early eighties. I was reminded of I bring this movie up so many times. I brought it up talking to Isabel Hagen about her movie, Thomas Vinterberg's Festen.

  [01:35:19] Kære er den, der finder det her brev, du er nok.

  [01:35:34] It is, if I did, I haven't fucked with the letterbox four thing, but it would be in my letterbox four with Miller's Crossing, with The Shining. Okay. Coincidentally, the Celebration is a movie about a pedophile. Fest and AKA celebration was shot by cinematographer Anthony Dodd Mantle using a Sony DCR PC seven handicam, which is a mini DV camera. Yeah. And it's one of the most breathtaking movies I've ever seen. And it's because it looks and feels like a home video. yeah. And it's about trauma within a family. Movies can be beautiful in in four by three and on mini DV.

  They can. You bite your tongue. Well, I do think that part of this is clearly a 30-year-old filmmaker in much the way that Zoomers are wearing Gene Cos again. They're doing a much more handsome version of old old trends, I think. man, the fascination that people he's a cusper. He's 30. Yeah. So is Gasondo. They're right on the cusp between old millennial or young millennials old Zoomers. Yeah. And Zoomers. And the way that they are showing, not nostalgically all the time, but with just this fucking sense of humor and a really incisive sense of humor. Yep. I love it.

  Yeah. Can't help myself. I do want to talk about three fever dream movies, my favorites. Sure. Because this has been described as a fever dream movie. You mentioned Nightcrawler, which you said you hadn't seen him. Jake Gyllenhaal. Yep. Very much kindred spirits with this movie. Also about T V News. Also about TV Muse. mine would be the Hughes Brothers 2001 movie From Hell. God.

  Johnny Depp plays Inspector Frederick Aberline, a Victorian-era Scotland Yard detective who uses opium and absinthe and laudanum to induce these like psychic visions that help him track down the serial killer Jack the Ripper. And that's basically fucking love that movie. From Hell was a fuck. Who's the watchman? It is Alan Moore. So I was I'm a big Alan Moore fan. and I don't remember. From hell very well, but that graphic novel that it's based on is very much a favorite dream. Fucking loved it. Yeah. I haven't seen it in a long time, but I've seen it at least twice.

  Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Sometimes you watch a movie and you're like, I think that was great. And then I watch it now and I'm like, ooh, boy. Yeah. One is like Primal Fear. I watched that movie with the Ed Norton movie. Yeah. Terrible. That movie sucks. Richard Gere and God, that movie's terrible. I was like, God, I'm so sorry. She's Dad, I'm not watching movies with you for a while. Fucking so. So it's your third one.

  [01:38:00] well I've doing my second one yet. yeah. Sean Penn's two thousand one movie The Pledge. Retiring detective Jerry Black played by Jack Nicholson as becomes dangerously consumed by a promise to catch a child killer. Whenever a good child dies, an angel of God comes down from heaven and takes the child in his arms and spreads out his great white wings and flies with her over all the places that she loved during her life. This one's real obvious. Barton Fink.

  John Turturro, titular character, Barton Fink, an earnest and sanctimonious New York City playwright in 1941, who moves to Los Angeles to write scripts for a major film studio, but goes through horrific writer's block. I watched that movie shortly after I had seen Miller's Crossing for the first time. When and now Miller's Crossing's my favorite movie of all time. Yeah. The scream that John Tuturo makes in the scene in one of the scenes in that movie could could replace the Wilhelm scream. It's so fucking iconic. Yeah. And that's what I got.

  I got I wanted I wanted to throw some fever dream movies, my favorites, at people because that's fun to do. Yeah, that's good. That's a good list. Fever I was thinking maybe of a different kind of fever dream. So I was thinking of twelve monkeys, but I was also thinking of what are the good luck, have fun, don't die. Which also is like a s these two similar time periods. So why why are we getting back to fever dreams now? Is it because the world's circling the toilet? I don't know. In a similar way. But is you can see everything gonna be a fever dream?

  I have no idea what to expect. I know that it takes on many different forms, which you'd kind of expect from Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder. But yeah, I can't wait, dude. That's next. I saw an extended trailer that made me even more excited about it. And now I'm staying away. I I'm gonna have to. Now I'm self sequestering because I don't want to ruin the movie by seeing too many trailers. All right. Let's get out of here. Let's do it.

  [01:40:01] That's gonna do it for this episode of all those moments. We really did mean all of those moments this time. it's probably our longest episode to date, except I just couldn't help myself. I absolutely love this movie. I can't wait for our next show, which will be more Lance Palooza. It probably will be You Can See Everything as our next episode by the time I get this out. Yeah. I'm gonna be in New York City for the next week, so I'll probably catch it when it premieres there. Okay. Which means I won't get to watch it with our local friends, but that's okay.

  I'll watch it more than once. If I watch Primetime three times, I'm pretty sure I'll watch you can everything more than once. This is like three hours. I know, except for that part. Yeah, I know, exactly. Thank you to the Magic Lantern. Thank you to everyone for watching or listening. And thank you to my friend Luke. Thanks, Benji. Why don't you have a seat, Luke? Sex. What's going on here? The way he says sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. That could be the cold open for the show. Sex. All those moments will be lost in time.

  [01:41:09] Cheers.