It is with mixed emotion that I present the final episode of season two.
Mixed because I love this season and I love doing this show, but right now, we can’t do it full time. We’re putting this together on a shoestring, and without any kind of network or ad support. It’s just the three of us, reaching out to people and bringing them in for these conversations. We’re gearing up to start work on season three, and I’m going to be honest. We need your support.
Please consider joining our Patreon, where we are going to give you bonus episodes that are just me, Craig, and Aundria digging deeper into our lists of Hip Pocket titles on a variety of subjects. You’ll also hear main feed episodes early and you’ll get updates about what’s going on with the production of the show as we’re putting it together. And we’ll invite you to join us on Discord, where we would love to continue to grow a community of people who love to talk about movies as a way of getting to know each other.
If you are with a podcast network and you’re listening to this and you like it, reach out! Let us know. We’re interested in finding a home for the show, one that makes sense and that will allow us to grow the show even more. And if you’re a fan, please take a few minutes and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It seems silly, but it does indeed help the show reach new people every time someone does that.
We have an email address where we’d love to hear from you. What do you like about the show? What guests do you want to hear on the show? What could we do better? What would love to hear us talk about? What are your Hip Pocket movies?
Before you hear any new Season Three episodes, you’ll get a very special late June episode that will be part of this year’s Chattanooga Film Festival. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Chattanooga, and I have enormous fondness for the city. I haven’t been back in a long time, so even just participating virtually this year was a kick. Craig and Aundria and I sat down with Peter Filardi, the screenwriter of The Craft and Flatliners, and the conversation we had was a delight. I am excited for you to hear it, and for all the details of when and how you’ll be able to enjoy it, keep your eyes on their official site.
Now… on to our final episode. Well, final for this year. We spent most of the season trying to pin this guest down, and when he eventually gave us his list of three films, and when he did, I admit… I was baffled. I had never heard of one of the films, and the combination of the other two seemed flat-out insane. I’ve known this guest for a while, and the more he tells me about his upbringing, the more his work as a writer and director comes into focus for me. He’s one of the busiest screenwriters of the last decade, and for good reason. He loves movies with his whole heart, and he seems determined to make movies that both celebrate all the influences he wears on his sleeve and that upend expectation completely.
The further we dug into the titles he brought though, the more it became clear that this was the perfect final episode of the season. This is an x-ray of our guest, a peek at how he became who he is, and far from being a discordant jumble as I originally thought, this is maybe the most fascinating trio of thematically-related titles we’ve done so far.
BRIAN DUFFIELD is a writer/director who has been one of the most acclaimed (and busiest) screenwriters of the last decade. He has shown up on The Black List, the annual selection of the best-loved unproduced scripts in Hollywood, roughly 50 times in the last ten years, which is mathematically confusing but impressive. We talk about his unusual upbringing in this episode, and we dig into just how wild it is that he grew up denied of mainstream pop culture, only to become the creator of Spontaneous and No One Will Save You. His upcoming adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s wildly popular novel Whalefall is in production now, but he took some time to join us with one of the most personal line-ups of the season.
He chose three films that tell an unusual story about his desire to become a storyteller. First up, there’s the 1973 Christian exploitation film A Thief in the Night, a film that was new to all three of us. Then he chose The Prince of Egypt, the animated musical that kicked off DreamWorks Animation. Finally, he selected the sweaty Southern drama, Black Snake Moan, and he managed to tell us a story that tied all three of these films together in a way I found both surprising and completely logical.
Our reaction film for him is the Lars Von Trier feel-bad epic Breaking the Waves, one of the few films that ever stirred real feelings of faith in me, an avowed atheist.
And finally, for the last Hip Pocket Hall of Fame entry for the season, I chose Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant, beautiful mediation on life, Ikiru.
If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.
If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.
The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.
Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.
It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.
COMING SOON
We are about to start recording season three, so you probably won’t hear any new episodes here until the end of July. If all things go well, we’re going to record a full 20 episodes for the next season, and the guests we’ve already lined up are thrilling because we’ve cast such a wide net.
If you’re listening and you want to be on the show, let us know why! In the meantime, I’m going to be publishing new Hip Pocket columns on Fridays, and I’ve got other plans for what we’re going to be doing here at Formerly Dangerous. My goal is to grow my subscribers by a very specific number this summer, and once again, I am asking you to carry the good word. Share things you like here with people who might also like it. Talk about it on social media. If we can reach that certain target number this summer, then I can set aside the various side hustles that have kept my focus so scattered these last few years.
That’s not to say I don’t have outside projects. There are two things that are currently in the works that are so cool I don’t even dare mention them out loud. I have to pinch myself on a regular basis, because I am back at work with some of the most interesting people I can imagine.
It’s a fantastic 2025 so far, and 2026 is only going to be more exciting. Thank you for your ongoing support, and I look forward to all of the cool reveals we’ve got coming soon for you.
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