Rupert Pupkin

his whole thing was you know I literally wrote the book on how much of an arsehole I was yeah I spent a lot of time with him and he's a fucking prick it's great that De Niro is just like he's a fucking arsehole I'm glad he agreed to let me spend time with him and get to know him and bits like that and he does have some good qualities but not many

fair but yeah great film and then King of Comedy which I've seen a few times and I always forget There are moments in this film where Pupkin kind of knows what he is in moments.

It's like... there's the occasional look or thing that he'll say that it's like, is reality actually going to break through for him? And, and it doesn't.

And I also, I do think it's interesting.

And I love the ending as well.

Like...

so like the end of the film he's like he's jailed but then he releases a book and he kind of becomes famous and then it ends with him on a stage and an announcer saying like you know everybody please welcome back Rupert Pupkin and then people just clapping and he's just standing there kind of like acknowledging people but not saying anything and then it cuts and I was just like thinking like Did he basically just write a five-minute stand-up set and that's all he had? And now he doesn't have anything left to say? What is that ending? Because on the face of it, it kind of feels like he won.

But I don't think it is that.

So I spent all this time looking in the magazines, thinking about, like, this red carpet in heaven.

Or probably even, like, as a nine-year-old, I think I was already, like, on imaginary talk shows like fucking Rupert Pupkin.

Yeah, totally.

In The King of Comedy.

A couple of other things that popped into my mind are number one, big recency bias opportunity here.

But we just watched the King of Comedy last week, and Rupert Pupkin is obviously a character who has a very high time preference.

He does not want to do the work.

He doesn't want to practice stand up.

I mean, what is Kill Tony if not this m-

The Rupert Pupkin marathon

... yeah, every, uh, a 10,000 Rupert Pupkins.

Yeah.

[laughs] You know? It's like that's a great point.

Yeah, it's f- anyway, that's a whole different conversation.

But, so I watch this movie out of context, no idea for who Scorsese is, whatever.

Um, and I'm also, I, uh, basically am Rupert Pupkin when I watch this movie, 'cause I'm 19, about to start doing open mics, and I have this delusion of like, "I'm the fucking man." I haven't done dick, right? I'm fucking, I'm just like, I've never accomplished anything creatively, right? [laughs] I did an open mic at my dorm.

And he had not fully recovered when shooting on The King of Comedy began.

The sequence in which Rupert unexpectedly arrives at Langford's country home is was also difficult to shoot.

Accounts described the material taking roughly two weeks to complete just for that sequence.

And I think I like this, Brad, only because we're going to be talking about this director this week on another podcast.

Um, And they lay that groundwork like pretty early.

Well, that's a good point about sort of the storytelling framework on this thing.

Dylan, did you struggle with that in terms of trying to decipher what was reality versus what is happening in Rupert's head? Or was that pretty easy to follow? Yeah.

I think I thought it was like for the most part, I think it was pretty obvious on like which ones were the like the dreams he was having.

And I think, I think back to, um, King of comedy.

And Rupert pumpkin has a crazy person to work off of.

You know what I mean?

The Sandra Bernard

And we get our first appearance of Robert De Niro bright and early in this film at 1 minute and 33 seconds.

He plays the infamous character Rupert Pupkin, which I think is one of the great all-time character names in cinema.

Yeah.

One of the great bits that we get throughout this film, I'm sure you'll talk about at least a handful of them specifically, but like essentially no one ever says his name correctly.

And he observes that something very ironic about life, which is so true.

That is an incredibly profound observation.

Yeah, that that is surprisingly insightful coming from Rupert Pupkin, because it

is absolutely true.

He's pretty tough.

I mean, Rupert Pupkin is...

Rupert Pupkin's not great.

No.

Yeah, but he's gonna what? He's...

You know, all this stuff.

And-

He's like Rupert Pupkin in that sense.

I said, you have five months in Rome.

And all of a sudden, I felt like Rupert Pupkin.

Six weeks? I can't give you the six weeks.

Anyway.