I'm Stephen Meckhaff, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Buttery Soft Leggings Edition.

It's Wednesday, September 29th, 2021.

On today's show, Clint Eastwood, he's been a Hollywood icon for 60 years. Now he's,

he's 91 years old. He's not a grandpa. He's a great grandpa. He's made his acting and

directorial farewell. I think it's safe to say it's probably what it is. We discussed the movie

cry macho. And then Lula Rich is a docu series. It's on Amazon Prime. It gets into the story of the clothing company Lula Row, which its detractors say is a pyramid scheme.

Either way, this is a neoliberal parable, if ever there was one.

And finally, start the printing presses.

The digital revolution is disrupting everything we do in R, except really books.

It's never really totally made us think

we're going to evolve beyond the old, you know, book book. Why have e-books never caught on?

We will discuss. Join me today is Isaac Butler. Isaac, welcome back to the show. Always great to be here,

Stephen. A quick thumbnail for the upcoming book, please. Yes, my upcoming book. You can pre-order it now. February 1st, 2022. It comes out. It is called The Method, How the 20th Century Learned to Act. I'm delighted to read it and talk about it on the show. And of course, Dana Stevens is the film critic for Slate. Dana, you don't want me to ask you about your book this week.

Can I just say, Steve, I love your new job as a freelance book publicist for your friends.

It really is extremely touching.

And you don't know how much it's needed, right?

Right, Isaac?

I mean, we always need people out there in our corner telling people because there's books coming out every moment and everybody's thinking about other things and so it's much appreciated. Yes, my book, as all of our listeners probably know by now, is about Buster Keaton. It's called cameraman and it comes out a few weeks before Isaacs. So we're our book release buddies. It's also 20th century themed. It's not a biography of Buster Keaton. That's important to say because there actually is one coming out this year. But this is something else. It's a sort of a cultural study of his lifespan and his

place in the 20th century. I also feel like they'll make great companions. You know, it's like you

could move very smoothly from Dana's book onto mine. And they're so, they're very thematically

related. One could almost be like the thematic sequel to the other whoever has more pull in the wide world than i do should get like the new york public library to sponsor a live event with both of you let's do it and i'd be honored to um to moderate it all right guys should we make a show let's do it let's do. Excellent. Clint Eastwood was a super tall, rangey lifeguard type with a nice but really kind of nothing special career in TV when he made for low pay and even lower expectations, the movie Fistful of Dollars. It's the first and maybe still the greatest of the so-called spaghetti westerns, a real breakthrough. It is the strangest movie, if you think about it. It's a remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo

by a European director who's trying to take over the very American gunslinger archetype

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