INCREMENT VICE - EPISODE #12: "...Shasta's missing, Wolfmann's gone, uh, Glen Charlock's dead..." with Jim Hemphill

Connections abound in the paranoiac and conspiracy-laden world of Thomas Pynchon, connections vast and connections minute, connections real and perceived and imagined and hoped for and dreaded and undiscovered. The same could be said of the city, the megalopolis, Los Angeles, with its never ending cascade of connections falling upon its concrete sprawl and tangling up its dazed denizens like fish in the net of a certain schooner sailing the seven seas. Connections that bind this person to that movie, or that movie to that song, or that song to that memory, or that missing person to that booby hatch, or that ex-old to that supposedly dead junkie sax player, and so on and so on and so on, world without end, hallelujah.

And if connections are part of the marrow-deep makeup of Pynchon’s work (and maybe even a little movie based on one of those books), then boy oh boy, today’s guest was pretty much born to talk about them, as he and our host surf upon a series of seemingly endless wave of connections from SoCal noirs to comic book panel art to the hidden extraterrestrial messages buried within PTA’s Punch-Drunk Love.

No, really.

JIM HEMPHILL

Jim Hemphill is the award-winning screenwriter and director of the critically-acclaimed THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH and BAD REPUTATION, as well as a respected film historian whose essays have appeared in the CHICAGO READER, FILM COMMENT, FILM QUARTERLY, MOVIEMAKER, et al. He is a researcher/interviewer for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Visual History Project, and has contributed historical audio commentaries to home releases of many films including INHERIT THE WIND, GARDENS OF STONE, and HANG 'EM HIGH. Jim also hosts a podcast for AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, where he interviews the industry’s top directors of photography, and is the author of Focal Point, a regular column on directing for FILMMAKER MAGAZINE. He is a programming consultant at the Egyptian and Aero theaters in Los Angeles, where he has moderated discussions with Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Nicolas Cage, David Mamet, Jim Jarmusch, Paul Schrader, Viggo Mortensen, Shirley MacLaine, and many others.