Late Fame

you know ideal get as close to the fucking flame as you can without burning your nose off I don't know but That kind of links to what I think we'll listen to now.

So I watched a really good movie a couple of weeks ago called Late Fame.

And it stars Willem Dafoe.

Yeah.

Our next movie, another new release.

We watched Late Fame starring Willem Dafoe.

I thought from the trailer, this one seemed interesting, kind of an interesting concept.

We got Willem is a former poet, I guess.

Personal preference.

And if I'm ranking this week, I'm putting My Own Private Idaho right at the top.

We're going to put Late Fame in the middle.

Disclosure Day all the way at the bottom.

If anyone listening to this also checked out the main show this last week, she was gone all weekend.

So scheduling has been a bit chaotic and she was not able to see late fame in time.

So I scoured the internet, checked in with some friends.

And I'm excited because joining the show for the first time is Jacob Diedenhofer.

I'm still excited to see the films there.

And I'm excited to talk about the movie that we are here to discuss.

We are talking about the Kent Jones film, Late Fame, starring Willem Dafoe.

Before we get into it, though, Jacob, I'm curious, do you have any thoughts about Kent Jones? He hasn't directed a ton of films, but have you seen his previous work at all?

I've seen a couple of things I wanted to share.

Um, the, the most important one is this recent film on the festival circuit directed by Kent Jones and starring Willem Dafoe called Late Fame, and I think it's based on a novella that was discovered among Arthur Schnitzler's papers after he died, and was published, I think, within the last decade.

And it was a very fine, very fine movie, kind of what we want from the movies.

It wasn't what I was expecting, so I was a little thrown by that because they...

My guest this week is Kent Jones, a critic, archivist, and filmmaker who started out in documentaries and has slowly moved into drama, co-writing Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P. in 2013, making his feature directorial debut with Diane in 2018.

And his latest is Late Fame, which stars Willem Dafoe as an obscure New York poet rediscovered by a group of young artists 50 years after his last publication.

If that synopsis sounds familiar, it might be because last week's episode featured the film's screenwriter, Sammy Burch.

But I like this movie a lot, so I invited Kent to do an episode of his own.

And Kent chose The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 drama, or possibly a thriller, starring Jack Nicholson as an exhausted TV reporter named David Locke, who impulsively assumes the identity of a dead man and almost immediately finds himself encountering a shadowy world of power brokers with hidden agendas and motivations in the company of a mysterious young woman played by Maria Schneider.

And that trip can only end one way.

Despite positive reviews, the film was withdrawn soon after its release and remained unavailable for almost three decades, ultimately reemerging in 2005, where it was received as the masterwork it is.

I'm so glad we get to talk about it, and I'm glad you're along for the ride.

Fill me once, you know and such and such.

Apart from that, there's one that I've seen that you've not and that's a film called Late Fame directed by Kent Jones who directed the documentary Hitchcock and Truffaut.

It's a kind of documentary about the two of them sort of like You used to have a time column on television where you'd have, like, people of intellectual ability sort of, like, talking to each other and debating things.

Yeah, you don't get that anymore.

What a world we lived in.

Or could have lived in.

The plot of this film is, it's called Late Fame, and the plot of this film is basically that a guy who wrote poetry back in the 70s, got one book published, didn't really sell well, no one really saw it, and he sort of just let that go.

He moved to Greenwich Village when he was young, but he stayed in New York.

But anyway, Dave, what's the last one?

My last one that we're going to talk about is Late Fame, which just hit VOD.

It's from Kent Jones.

It stars Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee.

So he's like, I'm going to do something else.

And then kind of like this poetry club discovers him.

and loves him and wants him to come hang out with them and kind of like want him to talk on their, like their beat poet night and just kind of that, just kind of him kind of discovering, I guess, late fame.

Hmm.

We get into every spoiler twist and turn in this film.

We discuss why there is more connective tissue than you might think between May December, Coyote vs. Acme, and Sammy's other summer 2026 release in cinemas, the tender drama Late Fame.

And of course, we also discuss what hope for the future of movies people might take from Coyote vs. Acme's eventual revival following a huge public outcry.

I loved this film, and I loved this conversation.

Um, uh, so one of the fun things about getting to chat with you today, Sammie, is, uh, when you last came on Script Apart, May December was the only movie to your name.

Now of course there's three.

There's that film, there's Coyote, and there's Late Fame, which, you know, I, I've alluded to a few times and also hit cinemas this summer.

Go see it, people, if you haven't already.

My guest this week is Samy Burch, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for 2023's May December.

This summer, two of her movies made it to theaters within weeks of each other: Coyote vs. Acme, which you may have heard about, and Late Fame, a considerably smaller drama starring Willem Dafoe as an obscure New York poet who finds himself rediscovered by a group of young artists 50 years after his last publication.

Co-starring Greta Lee and Edmund Donovan and directed by Kent Jones, it's available on Blu-ray and VOD today, and you should check it out.

And Sammy chose another New York picture, Six Degrees of Separation, Fred Schepisi's 1993 adaptation of John Guare's Tony Award-winning stage play about a wealthy Manhattan couple, Flynn and Ouisa, who take in an injured young man named Paul who says he's a friend of their college-aged children, and he's also Sidney Poitier's son.

That's too good to be true, right? With perfectly calibrated performances by Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing, and rising star Will Smith at the three points of Guare's dramatic triangle, and a subtle but unmistakable plea for empathy and understanding that lands a lot more powerfully now, Six Degrees of Separation has sort of fallen by the wayside over the decades, so I'm very glad we get to talk about it today.

This is Someone Else's Movie.

I mean, I think it probably came into my head because I've been talking so much about Late Fame, and, you know, it's a very New York movie with a lot of pretensions in it.

Um, and I think, and I think it's just kind of been underseen.