From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

In just a handful of movies,

director Ruben Flesher has found a way to intersect comedy and violence.

And he does so in Zobie Land, 30 Minutes and less,

and his newest film, Gangster Squad.

Ruben, thanks so much for being here.

It's really my honor and my pleasure.

Okay, whatever you say.

But one of the things I kind of like about the movies, and this, in a peculiar way, it lent itself to is that you kind of always have a talker who gets himself in

trouble. We can go back to Woody Harrelson in Zombie Land or Danny McBride in 30 Minutes or less,

and here it's kind of Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen. I went and dug out his autobiography,

in which he seems to fancy himself kind of a stand-up comedian.

I mean, he's got all these great sort of stories.

And the way Sean plays him, is a guy who thinks he's funnier than he is.

So something, even when he tells a joke, he's kind of scary as he's telling it.

Yeah, Ryan tells a story about here's, there were some original members of the gangster squad that came and visited our set and people that were from the era that were kind of around while we were filming.

And people said they remembered Mickey Cohen.

He'd be at a table telling jokes and everyone laughed even though they didn't think they were funny.

And with Mickey, he wrote, like you said, this incredible autobiography called In My Own Words.

And it's the best insight to him as a person and kind of as a character.

He was notorious.

...