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The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE — Let’s not go and forget this now

There’s this thing we all do sometimes, and I am as guilty of it as anyone, where we wait for a person to die or have a serious health scare before we decide to say nice things about them. It’s strange. It comes from a good place, for sure. These kinds of events push the person to the front of our brains and make us think of them in a grander context, but again, it’s strange. We could have said all of those things while the person was around to appreciate it. And we should. And we can. Was this all a long way of saying that we should go right on saying nice things about Bob Odenkirk now that he appears to be out of the woods? I mean, yes. You saw the headline. But it’s still important.

That was scary. Bob Odenkirk collapsed and there was no update for what seemed like an eternity. Everyone everywhere went online to pump good vibes into the universe and share things he’s done that inspired them. That was nice. And it was even nicer to get the news that it was just a scare and he’s on the mend. So nice, in fact, that most of us breathed a sigh of relief and moved on with our lives. Which is fine. We all have a lot going on. But if it’s okay with you, I’m going to keep saying how cool Bob Odenkirk is.

Think about Bob Odenkirk’s career for a second. The man helped to revolutionize sketch comedy in the 1990s with Mr. Show, a relentlessly weird and smart endeavor that still clicks today. Go watch some of the sketches again now. Start with my favorite one, which I will plop in right below this paragraph.

It’s so stupid and so good. Just complete nonsense that exists for laughs only. Go down the rabbit hole this weekend and you’ll see a million more like that. You’ll also see a bunch of familiar faces and names, because Bob Odenkirk has his fingers everywhere: Tenacious D got their big break on Mr. Show, Paul F. Tompkins and Comedy Bang Bang host Scott Aukerman were writers, to name a few. And this continues today, like, literally to last month, because Bob Odenkirk, a man whose comedy bona fides are rock-solid and does not need to prove anything to anyone, also appeared in the new season of I Think You Should Leave.

That’s cool. That’s an entire career right there, if you want it to be, just being the Dean Emeritus of sketch comedy. But then Bob Odenkirk appeared on Breaking Bad as sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman and started running off with scenes every week. And then, after he solidified himself as a part of that universe, he went and started starring in a whole damn spinoff based on a character who was the comic relief of an otherwise bleak endeavor. And it was good! It’s still good. The sketch comedy guy has been carrying one of the best dramas on television — a spin-off of one of the best dramas in history — for almost a decade. That’s wild. The degree of difficulty on it was almost incalculable. It’s normal to us now, but maybe it shouldn’t be. We should be impressed by it every day.

Same with this.

Bob Odenkirk just up and decided to become an action star in his late 50s, and that worked, too. It worked so well. Nobody, a movie written by the mind behind John Wick, was a blast. Go watch it this weekend if you haven’t seen it. Watch it again if you have. And then, when you’re done, please take a moment and try to bend your brain around how cool this is, all of it. The sketch comedy guy became a dramatic actor and then became an action star. There’s no parallel here. The closest one, hilariously, might be Keanu Reeves, who went from Bill & Ted to a slew of rewatchable action movies.

But even that doesn’t work quite right. You have to go hypothetical to really make it work. It would be kind of like if Andy Samberg was introduced in this season of Succession and then his character got spun off into an equally good show and then he starred in a movie that was originally written for Liam Neeson. But stretch all of that over decades. Picture a 60-year-old Andy Samberg smashing goons with a hammer. That gets us close.

It’s all just remarkable. And a little inspirational. But mostly it’s cool. Bob Odenkirk has been doing cool stuff on screens large and small for like 30 years now. I’m glad he’s pulling through this health scare, both because I want him to be safe and happy and because I want to see what other cool stuff he does. Bob Odenkirk is the greatest. We shouldn’t need a scary excuse to remember that. In fact, let’s all just agree to have this conversation every six months or so. That would be nice.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — We have ourselves a Jeopardy! fiasco

I suspect all of you are familiar with the Jeopardy! drama at this point but I’m going to recap it briefly anyway to be safe. The show has been parading out guest hosts all year long as it searches for a replacement for Alex Trebek. The early money was on Ken Jennings, but that seemed to get surprisingly little traction. Mayim Bialik swung through and was really quite good. Levar Burton and the public at large clamored for him to get a crack at it, and he did, and it went swimmingly. Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, and a few others gave it a shot. And in the end, if early reports are to be believed, the selection committee, which includes executive producer Mike Richards, went with a surprising option: Executive producer Mike Richards.

And people got mad.

People got so mad.

And a spokesman for the whole thing left just enough wiggle room to back out.

A Sony Pictures spokesman said that discussions were ongoing with several potential candidates. He would not comment specifically on Richards’ status. A source close to the situation cautioned that there’s no certainty that the sides will close a deal and that other candidates remained in the mix, although Richards is clearly the front-runner.

It’s been, to summarize, a whole thing. And while I typically prefer to try to hover about 10-12 feet above most internet scrums to prevent bodily injury, I do get this one. It’s not so much that I wanted any particular candidate. I would have preferred they go with someone chaotic and off the board, like, say, Eric Andre or Martha Stewart or the Tessitore/Riggle pairing from Holey Moley. But the process is what stunk. It appeared to be a kind of open audition and it encouraged fans to get behind their favorites and then they went and gave it to the in-house guy helping to oversee the search. It smells bad this way. Especially considering this tidbit from The Ringer’s Claire McNear, who quite literally wrote the book on Jeopardy.

Richards told numerous media outlets, including The Ringer, that his presence was a last-minute decision: The intended host had fallen through, he said, leaving him just days to prepare. “I was never meant to be a part of that process,” he later told Broadcasting + Cable. Audiences warmed to what was widely viewed as the-show-must-go-on panache, an echo of the departed host of more than 36 years.

But two sources close to Jeopardy! tell The Ringer that that’s not an accurate depiction of how Richards came to host. Instead, a planned host had a minor conflict during one of the show’s upcoming tape days. Jeopardy! staff and crew told the host that they could work around it—only for Richards to step in and insist on hosting himself, according to the sources, one of whom described feeling surprised that Richards characterized his presence onstage as an emergency substitution.

Gross! Add it all up and it makes the whole thing feel like a sham, like they played the fans for dopes. It stinks to be played for a dope. Nobody is coming away from this happy, except perhaps executive producer and reported new Jeopardy! host Mike Richards.

Actually, no. That’s not true. I am coming away from it a little happy, too. Not because Jeopardy! ran a sham host search and then some guy hired himself, though. (See above, re: stinking.) My happiness is entirely based on this story kicking off a process that reminded me of the screencap at the top of this section, the one from Celebrity Jeopardy! where Andy Richter — and to a lesser but not insignificant degree, Dana Delaney — absolutely cooked the hell out of world-famous newsman Wolf Blitzer. I’m laughing again now just thinking about it.

And it gets even better, for me, because when I searched my laptop for the picture I discovered I had saved it as “wolf jeopardy,” which, in addition to being an accurate file name, is both an incredible fake name and a situation I would never like to find myself in while in the woods.

So that’s good. The rest of it… less so.

ITEM NUMBER THREE — I am ready for La Brea

If you, like me, have been watching a massive amount of Olympics coverage this week, then you have probably seen this commercial a few dozen times. It’s for an upcoming NBC series called La Brea. It looks completely insane. The official description does not make it appear less so.

An epic adventure begins when a massive sinkhole opens in the middle of Los Angeles, pulling hundreds of people and buildings into its depths. Those who fell in find themselves in a mysterious and dangerous primeval land, where they have no choice but to band together to survive. Meanwhile, the rest of the world desperately seeks to understand what happened. In the search for answers, one family torn apart by this disaster will have to unlock the secrets of this inexplicable event to find a way back to each other.

Three things worth noting here:

• It’s been a long time since I had a good bonkers network television show to sink my teeth into, like a Zoo or a CSI: Cyber or a Deception (the last of which was about, I swear, a hotshot magician getting recruited by the FBI), and it would be cool if this show fills that void for me
• It’s good to see Natalie Zea get another chance at a big network television show because all she’s ever done for the past 10-15 years is steal scenes
• It is a little shameful that it took us all this long to make a show about a massive sinkhole opening a door to a magical subterranean kingdom under Los Angeles

I mean, come on. That one was a layup.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Finally, the good show will return

Well well well, look at that. A new season of Joe Pera Talks With You is on the way. That’s terrific news. Joe Pera Talks With You is a wonderful little show. I’ve written about it before, which is good, because then I can just link to it in case none of what I say here does the job. It’s a tough show to describe. It’s on Adult Swim and almost every episode is under 15 minutes and almost nothing happens in most of them. There are episodes about having breakfast and going to the grocery store and, oddly enough, an episode about Joe Pera — in character as a music teacher who lives in Michigan and is also named Joe Pera — discovering the music of The Who in his 30s.

Here’s a clip of that episode. It somehow both explains the show perfectly and tells you nothing at all. Which also kind of explains the show perfectly.

It’s all the most peaceful and nice and calming thing you’ll ever watch on television and then out of nowhere you’ll start caring about these people so much and then the next thing you know you are crying a little. And laughing. Connor O’Malley shows up sometimes and that might catch you off-guard. It doesn’t feel like his strange/intense style of comedy would fit, but then it does. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising, really. He does have a habit of showing up in hilarious shows that have short episodes.

I guess, in closing, considering I’ve done a pretty poor job of telling you why I like the show so much, I’ll just post some screencaps that make me laugh a lot even without the context. That seems fitting. Here we go.

Not a single lie was uttered that day, friends. I am looking forward to having this show back in my life. I love a good extreme-o high-stress comedy sometimes, but sometimes it’s nice to watch nice people be nice. Just watch the show. I won’t say we can’t be friends if you don’t like it, but I will say that we probably would if you do.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — I need you to think about this one

Okay, I’m going to the bullet points here again because I need to dump some information on you:

• This is a video of Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec towing a boat with his jet ski
• The boat contains a former minor league hockey player and his family
• He is towing these people because they ran out of gas and were stranded on the lake as nightfall approached

Per People Magazine, which blessedly wrote this up for, I’m assuming, me, personally:

“I was out jet skiing and I saw a boat drifting with a dad and his three kids, waving their arms frantically,” Herjavec, who shared a video of the rescue effort on Instagram, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “My first thought was they must love Shark Tank, but then I realized they were out of gas and stranded.”

Okay, a few more bullet points

• Please think about this story
• Think about it a lot
• Think about how stressed out you would be if your boat ran out of gas in the middle of a Canadian lake as the sun started setting
• Think about how excited and relieved you would be to see a jet ski approaching
• Think about how you would react, as the jet ski approached, when the person next to you on your impotent boat whispered, “Is that… is that Robert from Shark Tank?”
• “… On a jet ski?”
• “… In Canada?”

It’s so weird! And yet, it is still not my favorite story involving a celebrity and an emergency. It’s not even in the top two. I suspect nothing will ever crack that list. I don’t see how anything could, considering those two things are 1) Werner Herzog pulling Joaquin Phoenix from the wreckage of a car accident, and 2) a plane crashing in the fairway of a Los Angeles golf course and the startled golfers have to process all of that and then immediately also having to process that the man walking away from the rubble is Indiana Jones himself, Harrison Ford.

Those golfers probably tell that story at every party they go to. I bet they get invited to some parties just because people want their friends to hear it. It’s a really good story. This one is a solid number three, though. A bronze medal. The jet ski is a really nice touch. No writer’s room for any comedy on television could have stumbled into that one. Nope, that’s the kind of thing only reality can come up with.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Chris:

Brian help me – since ITYSL’s 2nd season has come out I haven’t been able to see a coffin or funeral in film/TV (they are darkly commonplace!) without picturing a possibly naked corpse bursting out of the bottom of that sucker, leading me to audibly laugh during an otherwise sober scene.

Anyway to actually ask a question, what is something that broke your TV-watching brain in an unexpected way?

The tricky thing here isn’t answering your question as much as it is narrowing my answer down to one thing. Or even two things. This happens to me constantly. I will pause a movie to take screenshots the instant I hear a character tell another character the two of them are “not so different.” I almost ruined the entire last few seasons of Bosch for myself once I noticed the way Bosch puts his hands in his pockets. Judith Light is a wonderful actress and has been for decades now but I cannot see her in anything without immediately thinking of the time she did cocaine at the rodeo on the short-lived updated version of Dallas that aired on TNT almost 10 years ago. And now I’m going to post it again.

I guess what I’m saying here is welcome to the funhouse, buddy. It gets weird in here. We have a good time.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To London!

A British wildlife sanctuary has been forced to separate five parrots who wouldn’t stop swearing at visitors. Keepers say the birds encouraged each other to keep cursing, and had to be moved from the main outdoor aviary.

Well, guess what: I love these birds. And I love that the people at the zoo are taking the same approach to rascal birds that my teachers took with me and my rascal human friends in high school: separate them and hope for the best. It’s only a matter of time until one of the birds gets a leather jacket and starts smoking. One of them could end up pregnant and have to drop out of beauty school. I’ve seen it a million times.

According to Nichols, none of the zoo’s visitors complained about the parrots, and most found them amusing.

“When a parrot tells you to ‘f*** off’ it amuses people very highly,” he said. “It’s brought a big smile to a really hard year.”

I have a question and I’m already angry about it because I read this entire article and know it does not get answered: When these birds curse at people, in this zoo, in London, and I think you can already see where I’m headed here… do they do it in a thick British accent? Like, a parrot voice but with the accent. Like if Jason Statham were a bird, which is a movie I desperately want to see now that I’ve typed it out, but that’s another post for another day.

Do they curse with a British accent?

Someone answer me.

I’m serious.

This is going to bother me.

Probably not enough to call up this zoo over the weekend and identify myself as a writer to try to get through to the trainer to ask him, but still.

Probably.

“With the five, one would swear and another would laugh and that would carry on,” he said.

“I’m hoping they learn different words within colonies,” Nichols added. “But if they teach the others bad language and I end up with 250 swearing birds, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

I posted this link on Twitter the instant I saw it, including this quote, and my very smart colleague Robby Kalland replied with the correct answer to this potential scenario: You take these 250 profane birds and you open a zoo that features only them. You start The Cussing Bird Zoo. I would pay extra to go to that zoo. I would pay, I don’t know, $50 for a ticket to a zoo where the birds swear at me, in stereo, possibly in a thick British accent. (I might call. This is killing me.) Put in a cash bar. Add a whole dinner show. Encourage the guests to cuss back. Let it get a little rowdy. Just a little. Dress a few of the birds in tiny leather jackets. Maybe not that last one. But maybe especially that last one.

This is one of those ideas that is either really good or really, really terrible. I think I need to sleep on it. No one start a cussing bird zoo until I make up my mind.

Earlier in the week, James Gunn revealed that there’s a Guardians of the Galaxy cameo in The Suicide Squad, and he voiced his surprise that it hadn’t been leaked yet considering the massive amount of advanced reviews. Of course, that’s no longer the case now that the film is out in the wild. In a new move for HBO Max, The Suicide Squad was available for streaming starting at 7 PM EST on August 5 as opposed to the previous release strategy of dropping new films at 3 AM EST.

Here’s what Gunn told the Happy Sad Confused podcast about the Guardians cameo, and don’t expect much of a hint on how to find it. Via The Wrap:

“Well, I mean people know I almost cast Dave [Bautista] in a role and he couldn’t do it, so he didn’t,” Gunn said. “Other than that, well, there might be a Guardian somewhere in the film that no one has seen yet and I’m so surprised by… I’ve gotten a hundred reviews from this movie and I’m just astounded.”

In defense of critics who saw The Suicide Squad in advance, the cameo is very brief and verges on “blink and you’ll miss it” territory. As for who the Guardian is? Mantis star Pom Klementieff. Late in the film, she can be spotted as one of the dancers in the Corto Maltese bar where Task Force X capture Peter Capaldi’s The Thinker. The camera lingers on Klementieff for just a moment, and that’s the entirety of her cameo. She’s not in character as Mantis or a DC Comics character or anything along those lines.

However, despite the brevity of the scene, eagle-eyed Guardians fans spotted Klementieff right away, and they were all about seeing a little Marvel love pop up in the DC Comics film.

On an interesting note, The Suicide Squad star Steve Agee inadvertently (or purposefully) revealed Klementieff’s cameo almost two years ago. In a September 2019 Instagram post, Agee shared a photo of Klementieff with The Suicide Squad cast at a screening for Joker, and he even name-dropped her as a “guest star.”

The Suicide Squad is now playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.

Though he’s just coming off the release of a new self-titled album, Vince Staples, the Long Beach rapper is sharing new music today. The new one-off track, “Got ‘Em,” is part of the a new collaborative EP that Capitol Records is releasing to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Pokémon,, with another installment coming later this month. The Red EP also features contributions from Cyn, Mabel, and Zhu, and an accompanying album, Pokemon 25: The Album includes songs from Katy Perry and Post Malone, memorably covering Hootie And The Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be With You.”

“I’ve always been a fan of Pokémon, so it was particularly special to be asked to take part in this 25th-anniversary celebration,” Vince Staples of the EP in a press release. “I’m excited for people to hear ‘Got ‘Em,’ and hope the song resonates with fans, especially those who grew up with Pokémon like I did.” The eerie but celebratory song slots nicely along the new music Staples has already shared this year, and shouts out Pokemon characters Mew and Raichu in the lyrics.

Hear the new song above and look for the The Blue EP out later this month, with the Pokemon 25: The Album coming this fall.

Comedy has a rule of three, and so do celebrities. If three famous people (or couples) do something, it’s officially a trend. And the latest “celebs are it again” trend is not bathing.

First it was Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher saying that they only bathe their kids when “you can see the dirt on them.” Then Kristen Bell admitted that she’s a “big fan of waiting for the stink. Once you catch a whiff, that’s biology’s way of letting you know you need to clean it up.” Jake Gyllenhaal has completed the trifecta with his anti-taking-a-bath take.

When asked by Vanity Fair if there’s anything “revelatory” about his bathing rituals, the Nightcrawler star replied, “I always am baffled that loofahs come from nature. They feel like they’ve been made in a factory but, in fact, it’s just not true. Since I was young, it’s amazed me. More and more I find bathing to be less necessary, at times. I do believe, because Elvis Costello is wonderful, that good manners and bad breath get you nowhere. So I do that. But I do also think that there’s a whole world of not bathing that is also really helpful for skin maintenance, and we naturally clean ourselves.”

It would be one thing if Gyllenhaal said he doesn’t take a daily bath or shower because he wants to conserve water. I understand that. But his cat-grooming-itself logic of “a whole world of not bathing that is also really helpful for skin maintenance” is curious. I’m not saying it’s time to put Jake in a bubble again, but I’m also not NOT saying it.

Between his peculiar grooming habits, and Taylor Swift confirming that the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” (a song written about Jake) will be on Red (Taylor’s Version), it’s been a rough day for Gyllenhaal. I’d say he should hit the showers, but… you know.

After previously shouting out the New York duo EPMD on his contribution to the Judas And The Black Messiah soundtrack, Nas is back giving props to them on his new King Disease II on “EPMD 2.” This time, though, he’s got both the duo themselves and Eminem in the pocket with him. This song marks the very first time Nas and Em have ever connected on a song together, and true to form, Eminem spit a fiery verse that has peers like 50 Cent exclaiming over his bars.

“No you can not front on this verse, you just gotta listen, shut the f*ck up and listen,” 50 wrote on Twitter. Of course, Em fans love to fawn over his incredibly fast bars, but even skeptics have to admit that he brought his best game for this collaboration. Em shouted out EPMD and Nas while sharing his verse, calling Nas “legendary” in the process:

That’s not the only rapper he shouts out, though, in the back half of his verse he goes through a litany of rappers he considers to be the highest echelon of rap, hoping he’ll claim his place among them. In his list he includes Kane (Big Daddy Kane), Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Ye (Kanye), Drake, J Dilla, Jada (Jadakiss), Cool J (LL Cool J, one of his biggest influences) and Nas himself.

“I just pray for the day when I’m able to say that I’m placed with the greats / And my name’s with the Kane’s, and the Wayne’s, and the Jay’s / And the Dre’s, and the Ye’s, and the Drake’s / And the J Dilla’s, Jada’s, Cool J’s, and the Ra’s / And amazin’ as Nas is, and praise to the Gods of this / Shout to the golden age of hip-hop and the name of this song is…”

He also shouts out rappers who have recently passed, including a line about hitting up 50 Cent on text just to make sure he’s told him he loves him. “R.I.P. out to DMX, Stezo, E and Nipsey / Ecstasy and Prince Markie Dee, MF DOOM / I hit 50 via text / Told him that I love him / ’cause I don’t even know when I’ma see him next / Tomorrow could be your death.”

Check out the verse on the song above and some fan reactions below.

Looking back through the archive, it looks like the first time we wrote posted on this site about the Foo Fighters trolling the Westboro Baptist Church was almost exactly 10 years ago, in September of 2011. Then it happened again in 2015.

During the Foos return to Kansas this week, as if on cue, the Westboro Baptist Church assembled on the other side of the venue’s parking lot to protest the appearance with their typical vitriolic signage. This time, the Dave Grohl and Company dressed up in their Dee Gees garb and hopped on a flatbed truck to treat the protesters to a lengthy rendition of Bee Gees’ 1976 cut “You Should Be Dancing.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, I got something to say. Because you know what? I love you! I do,” Grohl told the protesters as the band noodled guitar solos and disco beats behind him. “The way I look at it, I love everybody. That’s what you’re supposed to do… I deliver all of my love, and you shouldn’t be hating. You should be dancing!”

Check out a clip of the performance, as well as the studio version of Dee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing,” below.

Foo Fighters are currently in the midst of their rescheduled 25th Anniversary tour. Grab tickets here.

Billy Corben’s latest documentary, Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings Of Miami (the fourth installment of Cocaine Cowboys, for those keeping track) is framed around an opening local news segment from the ’80s about Seahawk Racing, a powerboat racing team run by Sal Magluta and Willy Falcón. The two happened to be prolific cocaine traffickers at the time with numerous warrants out for their arrests under various aliases, and the fact that they would willingly participate in a news segment about their boat team at the same time underlines the brazenness and panache with which they conducted their business.

Through movies like The U, the previous Cocaine Cowboys, and Screwball, Corben has become the poet documentareate of South Florida criminality, arguably as famous as some of his subjects. His most recent film, 537 Votes, was something of a capstone to his career documenting “Florida Fuckery” (Billy’s words). It made a cogent case that our current national malaise in large part owes its origins to the local politics of Miami in 1999 and 2000.

537 Votes was an invaluable and necessary watch, but also a bit of a downer, in some ways a primer on “why everything sucks” (answer: because Florida). Kings of Miami feels in many ways like Corben’s penance, another wild story of drugs and excess through which one can vicariously powerboat. I honestly wasn’t sure that the world needed another story of above-the-law druglords when I flipped it on, but I was quickly hooked. It got better and better as it went along and saved more wild twists for the epilogue sequence than most series have in their entire runs. A Real Housewives connection?!

Inasmuch as Kings Of Miami is a great popcorn watch, it’s not without relevant social content. It’s ostensibly about drug kingpins, but no one comes off smelling like a rose. The traffickers, the FBI, ICE, lawyers, and local politicos all come off varying degrees of predatory and corrupt. Don’t piss off the Feds, man, they’ll shoot your dog and throw your grandma in jail.

Rare for a director and even rarer for a documentary filmmaker, Billy Corben is, as always, a great interview. I never turn down a chance to talk to him.

—

Is that still the pandemic hair for you?

Still the pandemic hair, yeah. But luckily the pandemic ended in Florida last summer. So woo! We’re open for business, baby.

That’s right. Yeah, you guys are doing great now.

Yeah, you know what’s really open for business? The ICU, apparently. Un-fucking-believable.

Wasn’t there a Bill Maher where he was congratulating somebody in Florida about how well they’ve done COVID?

Yeah. The Governor. Ron DeathSantis as they call him. Just a pile of bodies now that he’s going to run for reelection standing on top of. Un-fucking-believable. Out there trying to be like, “Well, I’m not anti-vax.” He’s anti-mask though. Then he’s fucking selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” gear to raise money for his reelection campaign. So there you have it.

Well, politics is merch now.

Wow. Yeah, listen, politics is the WWE. I think we talked about this on Screwball. It’s all performative. It’s all selling action figures and T-shirts and shit. Yeah.

Right. Okay, so the docuseries. I feel like at this point in your career, you’re not a real Miami criminal until Billy Corben has made a documentary about you. You must have guys jumping over themselves to tell you about all the crazy shit they did in the ’80s and ’90s. Do you find that? Do you find yourself having to separate bullshit from fact?

So Alfred Spellman, my producing partner, often jokes that when people get released from prison in Florida, their first call is to their mother and their second call is to Rakontur to make a documentary about them. I mean, especially now with the ubiquity of true crime content and this kind of golden era of documentary filmmaking that we’re in right now, there’s something kind of post-modern about criminals — some of them are already contemporaneously documenting their crimes for their inevitable capture, release, and documentary series. It feels that way. People coming to the table like, “But I got footage, bro.” It’s like, “You’re a criminal. Why do you have footage?” It’s probably why you got caught, convicted, and are in prison right now.

But yeah, no. While it’s easier to get access, the vetting is that much more important. The bullshit meter. There was this guy running around as Pablo Escobar’s son for a while who was not in fact Pablo Escobar’s son. Pablo Escobar does have a real son, but then there was this other kind of imposter running around, if I remember correctly. These days it’s that much more incumbent upon us to do our homework.

Right. Then how do you do that when you’re dealing with criminals and people who might be legitimately dangerous?

Uh… very carefully? That’s part of the reason I think for the most part that sometimes we discover, I guess, obscure criminals in the case of the first Cocaine Cowboys. Not a lot of those characters were well known or publicized per se, certainly not in several decades. This series, for example, this case was the biggest cocaine trafficking case in US history at the time. So well documented by the government, by the defense. In fact, when we first started this project, Alfred and I were interviewed for Ocean Drive Magazine. We talked about the Willy and Sal documentary being a passion project for us. Lo and behold, Sal Magluta has an Ocean Drive Magazine subscription in federal prison. There he was in his cell reading our interview in Ocean Drive Magazine, and I think someone in the series says that there may be six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but in Miami, there’s only one or two degrees from Willy and Sal for everybody.

So sure as shit, I hear from friends and family going, “Hey. Sal read your interview in Ocean Drive and wants to talk to you.” We became pen pals. Eventually, through the years, he sent me to his parents’ house. His mom made me cafecito, fed me pastelitos, and we sat there going through photo albums going back from Cuba all the way to Sal’s arrest in ’91 and scanning pictures and going through their personal archive of home movies and boat race videos. The next thing you know I’m in Sal’s giant private walk-in storage unit with 20 years of documents and videos and trial exhibits and photographs and audio tapes. That was really the treasure trove. That happened towards the end of the project. Sal just handed us the key, no pun intended, to the kingdom there.

Speaking of pictures, you reuse this one a few times where they’re up against the chain-link fence. What is Sal doing in that picture? Is he showing his ass to the camera?

No, they’re pretending to escape prison. They’re in a prison yard, and they’re pretending to climb over the fence. There is truth in sarcasm. So they’re not actually intending to escape, but I think in their hearts, they are. But yeah, they’re scaling the fence of a federal prison I believe.

On the flip side of the coin, you seem to get a certain amount of cooperation from the feds and from law enforcement. It would seem like it would be hard to make without that. Are there any promises you have to make in order to get that, or what does it require on your end to get their participation?

No, I think, listen, this case was a pretty big deal for them. Both the loss and the win. There’s a lot of ups and downs for the feds in this case. If you go to the FBI, there’s not a museum, but the FBI building in DC, there’s a tour and some displays and things for tourists to look at. The FBI in each state gets to pick a kind of seminal case that defines their achievements in each state. [In Florida] it is the Willy and Sal jury tampering case. Miguel Moya, the jury foreperson, that is the FBI’s crowning achievement in the state of Florida. This pursuit went on for quite a period of time, required a lot of man and woman power, and a lot of taxpayer dollars just to go after these two guys. Then what they called the satellite cases, you can see how many people and jurors and lawyers who were arrested and charged. There was a joke for a while in South Florida that Willy and Sal and the satellite cases financed the criminal defense bar in South Florida for 10 or 15 years because every attorney in town had a client on one case or another, a cooperating witness, a defendant, a co-conspirator, somebody.

In my head, I don’t have anything against lawyers. I agree with the principle that everybody deserves a competent defense, but I still was taken aback a little by the level of amorality that some of the defense attorneys seem to have in this. Where they’re like, “Hey, as long as the check clears…”

Well, listen, I think when you’re in that game, you see it as a game. When you spend day in and day out in the criminal justice system, it’s extremely exhausting. It can be very emotional. If you don’t find your way to some sort of detachment from it or become able to kind of compartmentalize, you can get real run down real quick. I mean, the consequences could be life and death or freedom or incarceration for their clients, but there’s only so involved you can get. These lawyers were really involved. Willy and Sal were arrested in ’91. They didn’t go to trial until ’95. So there was four years of just pretrial motions and hearings. They tried to go all the way to the Supreme Court on the search and seizure of the Miami Beach mansion that Sal was at where he had all those ledgers. Just every kilo and every dollar, Sal not only knew where it was, but had it written in a ledger book somewhere. So when the government stormed in and seized those materials, those defense attorneys fought that. They wanted to get that evidence excluded all the way to the US Supreme Court where they ultimately failed. This just went on.

You have to remember, especially in that era, you have to what they call members of the “white powder bar” is what they called them in Miami at the time. So you have to kind of take some of these things in stride. So I don’t think it was meant to be cavalier. I think they understood that it’s a game to some extent, and they’re on the other team from the prosecution.

For a while, it was respected as such. It was really during this case where the government really took the gloves off, and they started to actually target the attorneys and accuse them of being a part, not simply representing the organization but being like in-house counsel. At least two attorneys were indicted as a result of this case.

The eventual case, a lot of it came down to money laundering. Now with Bitcoin and shell companies and this entire secrecy apparatus, do you think it would be easier for that organization to launder money now?

Well, Miami’s a tech hub now, I don’t know if you’ve heard. But yeah, which is just the new hustle. It’s the new cocaine. Miami, since we have no indigenous industry, we kind of subsist from hustle to hustle down here. But do I think it would be easier? I think the money laundering was pretty easy back then. They owned banks. The Sunshine State Bank was a bank that they had helped open, Willy and Sal. Another deleted scene with some friends of theirs, like childhood buddies, I don’t want to say they owned the bank, but they effectively owned a bank. They had the run of the place, and this was a bank effectively opened for the purpose of drug money laundering. It was ultimately shut down by the government for that. So for a while it was not that challenging. I guess to your point, all the transactions were quite overt. There was a paper trail obviously of everything. Yeah, certainly I would think that would be much easier for them to launder money now in the crypto world. But I don’t know if the smuggling of the product would be quite as easy. Maybe that’s our next documentary, Crypto Cowboys.

So you’ve got your Seahawk Racing shirt on. Does powerboat racing exist without cocaine??

I think Jim DeFede said it, at least half of the world champions in that sport were drug smugglers. Marijuana and/or cocaine. It was such an expensive sport that unless you’re the Budweiser boat or the Benihana boat where you had a legit sponsor… Nobody had a job. Nobody had a sponsor. So where the hell was the money coming from? They’re spending upwards I think of they estimated a million dollars per race, that they would spend just on boats and crew and engines. Because you needed a backup engine in the event that one engine failed. It was an extremely expensive sport. Anything on the water is dangerous and expensive.

So no. You notice it’s not really so much a thing anymore, offshore powerboat racing. It was kind of like disco music. It existed in a time in which the drug that fueled it was king. So no, I think the answer to your question is no, I would argue. I think some people would be upset with me for agreeing with you, but… just like there’s no disco without cocaine, I think there’s probably no offshore powerboat racing without cocaine.

Do you see any other things that are obvious cultural ripple effects from the cocaine craze?

Well, yeah. Listen, now I think the nostalgic cycle is swinging background to disco. You listen to a lot of artists who were not alive when disco was a thing whose producers are very much borrowing those tempos and those beats and those bass lines from disco. I think music-wise certainly. I think fashion-wise as well. Every once in a while I get out in the world and see someone in a Members Only jacket.

Can you explain that hit list sort of thing that [Magluta’s lawyers] were able to publish in a magazine basically?

So the defense team was looking to gather information and evidence against the potential witnesses against Willy and Sal, most of whom were themselves criminals. Some convicted or admitted criminals because they had pled guilty in an effort to get a deal from the government, a reduced sentence in exchange for their cooperation against Willy and Sal. Flash forward to the trial, the cross-examinations of the cooperating witnesses by the defense team were blistering, absolutely devastating. It was because the defense knew more about them than the government knew about their own witnesses. This was because Willy and Sal spent $25 million on their defense in just the first trial in ’95 and ’96.

So they had private investigators. They had paralegals. They had associates, lead attorneys. They had evidence against the witnesses that the government just was shocked to learn about during the trial. In an effort to dig up that dirt, they had made a list which they turned into an ad that first went in Champion Magazine, which was a criminal defense attorney magazine. Then in Prison Life Magazine, which true to its name is distributed in prisons. Many of the men on this list were in fact in custody or in prison at the time. and if they weren’t in protective custody, you better rest assured they were immediately moved there after this ad came out, because while the defense saw this as a “research effort,” the US attorney’s office, the DOJ saw it very much as a hit list. In fact, witnesses against the boys started turning up dead very shortly thereafter.

Without the part where they started killing people and doing crazy things, I feel like there’s a natural desire to want there to be a good drug dealer who just makes some money and takes it and splits. Just takes a bunch of money and rides off into the sunset. Why can’t that happen? Is it greed or is there some logistics involved?

It’s not a happy ending, I mean, everybody ends up dead or in prison, including Taby [a Willy and Sal associate who was a fugitive for 20+ years]. I mean, can you imagine what it was like living for 27 years with your wife, your son, and your daughter who were barely single digits when they ran away and living like that, looking over your shoulder for 27 years? I spoke with his wife Gina Falcón after they were busted, and she looked so relieved, dude. He was like, “Let me do whatever I’m going to do.” I think they gave him seven years or whatever. I think it was a real weight honestly off their shoulders to finally get caught. So that’s the bottom line is you wind up dead or in prison.

There were some people who quit back in the day. They made some money. They’re weekend warriors, maybe did a little smuggling on the side, made a lot of money, bought some real estate, bought a car dealership maybe, luxury car dealership, and then got out of the game. Some of whom got out relatively unscathed. I think you just got to know when to quit. Back in the day, I’m just guesstimating here, but the average career in this industry would’ve been maybe five years before you get dead or arrested. These guys operated for 20 years, all the while getting arrested over and over and over again. It was a pretty unprecedented run.

They had enough money to afford planes and offshore accounts. You’d think one of them would’ve been like, “Hey, I’m going to move to the Philippines,” or whatever like the Q guys.

Listen, I keep thinking I’ll leave Miami too, but where the hell would I go? It becomes a part of your blood after a while. They could’ve gone anywhere. Let me tell you something funny: this is the kind of shit that’s deleted scenes in this documentary. That’s how big and crazy this story is. You remember there’s the attorney in ’89, Juan Acosta who gets murdered, and he was the lawyer who handled, not just for Willy and Sal but a lot of the local drug kingpins, offshore corporations and accounts. Mostly the money was in Panama. Their private banker in Panama who was listed as a treasurer on a lot of their corporations and their offshore accounts was the guy by the name of Guillermo Endara. So, totally in bed with these major cocaine traffickers. When the United States of America goes and arrests Noriega ostensibly for drug trafficking and allowing Panama to be a safe haven for drug trafficking and drug money laundering, the United States replaces Noriega with… Guillermo Endara. So the next president of Panama after Noriega that the United States ostensibly installs was Willy and Sal’s private banker and practically business partner.

‘Cocaine Cowboys: Kings Of Miami,’ is available now on Netflix. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

It was just a few years ago that New York native Lil Tecca saw his rise to fame seemingly happen overnight. The rapper’s breakout single “Ransom” arrived in 2019 and it immediately boosted the rapper to fame as the track peaked at No. 4 on the singles chart. He then released his debut project, We Love You Tecca that same year, a project that also peaked at No. 4 on the albums chart. Now, after dropping his official debut album, Virgo World last fall, Tecca is back in action with Gunna for their new track, “Repeat It.”

The collaboration is a boastful effort that sees both rappers promising to keep up a consistent flex as their successful lifestyles have allowed them to do just that. Led by a pair of verses from Tecca over the song’s giddy production, Gunna arrives as an anchor for the final verse that brings the track to a close.

In addition to the new songs, Lil Tecca revealed his next project, We Love You Tecca 2 would arrive at some point in the near future. The track also arrives after Gunna connected with Polo G for their recent collaboration, “Waves.”

You can listen to Lil Tecca and Gunna’s “Repeat It” in the video above.

We Love You Tecca 2 is out soon via Galatic/Republic. Pre-order it here.

Gunna is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

About a month ago, Strand Of Oaks (aka singer-songwriter Timothy Showalter) announced his forthcoming new album, In Heaven and shared its lead single “Galacticana.” Showalter says that the album was created with love in his heart, with the goal to provide “a momentary space for reflection, joy, catharsis, and whatever else someone might be looking for in their life.” Now, Showalter is back with another fresh new track called “Jimi & Stan,” a beautiful and soaring ode to his recently departed cat.

The track opens with a yearning vocal as Showalter calls out to his late buddy. Over driving, anthemic instrumentals, he then goes on to build a vivid scene of his cat in heaven, sitting and looking out at the galaxy alongside guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. “My sweetest buddy/cat Stan sadly passed away,” Showalter said in a statement. “And the only way I could describe my love for him was imagining Stan and Jimi Hendrix hanging out in heaven together smiling and going to shows and having the best time.” Listen to “Jimi & Stan” above.

In Heaven is out October 1 via Galacticana Records/Thirty Tigers. Pre-order it here, and check out Strand Of Oaks on tour across the U.S. later this year.

After starting off the day with a cryptic teaser video from Taylor Swift, her eagle-eyed fans were quick to discover that Phoebe Bridgers was going to be one of the surprise guests on the re-recorded version of Red that Swift is dropping this fall. But she actually shared even more than that a few hours later, previewing some of the best-known songs on her Instagram story — new versions, obviously. Check out snippets of “22” and her infamous foray into EDM “I Knew You Were Trouble” below.

But because Taylor knows exactly how to keep a news cycle spinning, she also shared even more with fans today. Confirming their decoding skills, Taylor let fans know that yes, Phoebe Bridgers would indeed be on the new version of Red, along with Chris Stapleton, and a new collab with her longtime friend, Ed Sheeran, who is of course featured on another iconic Red song, “Everything Has Changed.”

The new songs from the vault with collaborations are as follows: “Nothing New” featuring Phoebe Bridgers, “I Bet You Think About Me” featuring Chris Stapleton, “Run” featuring Ed Sheeran. Check out Taylor’s tweet above for other new songs from the vault, including the 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” and her own take on “Better Man,” a song she wrote for Little Big Town.