The Hip Pocket: Warm-Up #2

There is forward progress on The Hip Pocket as a podcast. I promise.

I’m talking to our first handful of guests right now, and we’re getting ready to record the last of these warm-up episodes. As you listen to this, please keep in mind these are all warm-ups. This is not the final format of the show or a fair indication of what to expect, audio-wise, once we’ve got our set-ups all figured out. The point of these early episodes is to get to know each other and to figure out how to technically put our show together, and I want to share the episodes with you guys as a way of being transparent about how we’re progressing.

So far, we’ve recorded eight episodes, and I’ve released six of them on the Patreon. I’ll be posting them all here before we launch the actual podcast, so you’ll be part of this development process just like the patrons are right now. If you missed it, the first one is right here.

I am so grateful that Craig Ceravolo and Aundria Parker are willing to indulge this idea of mine from very different remote locations, and I’m enjoying the conversations we’re having so far. In the first episode you heard, we each picked a title from any decade, so you got some very disparate eras represented in that conversation. This time, we’re all picking something from the 1940s, and I thought that might create a little more of a coherent through-line between our choices.

Nope. But to be fair, this is exactly what I wanted. I think all three of us approach each of these lists very differently, and that’s good. Once we add guests into the mix, it’s going to be even more interesting to see how wide a variety of things we end up discussing.

Let’s jump right into it, and as I did last time, I’ve included a transcript here for those of you who would rather read the conversation than listen to it. Thanks for giving us your time and attention, and here’s hoping you enjoy this visit with The Hip Pocket.

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DREW: Hi everyone, Drew McWeeny here. You may know me from my time at HitFix or from the early work I did at Ain’t It Cool, or maybe you read one of my Substack newsletters. Whatever the case, welcome. I am very glad that you are here for my new adventure with my two good friends, The Hip Pocket. The Hip Pocket, for those of you who have not heard this concept before… these are the movies that we carry around with us. Movies that mean something special to us. Movies that we love to share with people.

Sometimes they're a litmus test to see if you're on the same page as somebody, or you want to show them this thing that means so much to you as a way of expressing who you are. Or sometimes, it's as simple as this thing makes me happy and I hope it makes you happy too.

Whatever the case, I think you learn a lot about people when you talk about these films and why they matter. I have hundreds of these movies like this for me, movies that have stuck with me for one reason or another over the last thirty years of writing films and writing about them. I'm joined by two friends who I look forward to sharing these movies with for years to come.

First up, there's our bandleader, Craig Ceravolo. Hi, Craig. How are you doing today?

CRAIG: Hey, Drew. Thanks for another ride.

D: Yeah, absolutely. I am glad to have you here for this today. And of course, we couldn't do any of this without the jelly to my peanut butter.

AUNDRIA: Here we go.

D: My co-host, the one and only Aundria Parker. Aundria, how you doing?

A: Hi, Drew. It's jelly checking in. I like to think of myself more as jam, but we can work on that.

C: Can I be the... am I the bread?

A: What does that mean?

D: You're a banana, Craig.

C: Okay, that's fine.

D: Yeah, you’re in the South, man. No... I am excited today because this is the first of our regular sort of format. We're gonna do a different decade each episode during the rest of this warm-up run, and we are gonna just start, jump in with the 1940s, which was... a weird decade. The first half of the decade is scarred by war. The second half is nothing but rapid change and rebuilding and economic growth. It is a weird, weird time.

This is the decade that gave us radar and the microwave oven and the frisbee and Tupperware and Velcro and the motherflippin' Slinky. It is a great decade and it also gave us three pretty cool movies that we're going to discuss today on The Hip Pocket.

Craig, we're going to kick off with your pick this time. And this is one of the things I got really excited about when we sent these lists back and forth to each other. I have known you for almost 20 years. And I had no idea the appetite that you have for women's weepy melodramas from the ‘40s and ‘50s. And dude, I'm here for it.

C: I love it.

D: I was delighted to see you pick Mildred Pierce.