The Point Radio: A Bazillion Bucks

Even Dr Evil might join in for a prize like this. THE BAZILLION DOLLAR CLUB is a new competition show from SyFy where tech gurus Dave McClure and Brady Forrest award big money to brilliant start up ideas, but how do they pick the right ones? The guys share their secrets here. Then meet actor John Lucas (A BRILLIANT MIND, AMERICAN PSYCHO) who previews his new comedy, THE MEND.

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Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. A bazillion dollars could be yours. Well, that's kind of how it goes with a new show called The Bazillion Dollar Club. And a couple of guys looking for the next big idea.

Plus, actor Josh Lucas talks about how he got into show business by accident, and his new movie, which is on the way to digital download and video on the band in just a few days. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point. The Point Radio.

The Point Radio. Tech experts Dave McClure and Brady Forrest are on the hunt for the next big thing. In a new sci-fi documentary series called The Bazillion Dollar Club. I sat down with Dave and Brady and asked them to explain the show. Well, we try and help a bunch of startup companies figure out, you know, what kind of product they're building,

how to go get customers, how to raise money to investors. So each episode follows one of those companies, kind of start to finish. We have a $14, $16 program. And we really try and give them, you know, helpful advice and help put them in front of the right people so that they can raise a million bucks.

So how do they find participants? Dave and I both run multiple of these programs each year, and we get hundreds of applicants for them. And so we have to pair them down and figure out which ones that we want to bring in. I just have 350 applicants for 13 spots.

And from there, do Dave and Brady actually fund these projects? Well, we invest money in the beginning, typically between $50,000 to $100,000 when we're first getting started. That kind of gives them enough money to kind of spend three to six months in our program. But really, we're trying to get each of these folks to raise half a million, maybe a billion dollars or more so that they can really run for a year or more with a full team.

I think you'll agree that tech has changed a lot in the past 10 years, but is it about ready to slow down for the next decade? I ask both Brady and Dave. I think technology is going to continue to be a part of our lives, and that's going to increase. But I think we're going to have challenges figuring out, like, what are the limits?

How people are already having phone fatigue, and I think we're going to see a new wave of technologies that help us kind of moderate where technology is in our lives and where we don't want it. So overall, are we becoming a little tech tired? Well, I think there's a lot of ways that technology can be helpful in people's lives.

So sometimes we complain about it a lot. I think, you know, sort of a commentary on the day, if we're complaining about it a lot, that means we're probably using it a lot. And I still think there's just lots of ways that we can make people's lives better. And over the next five, ten years, I think you're going to see really cool things,

like driverless cars, we'll probably see more use of drones for delivery of packages and other things. Maybe we'll even see virtual reality come to the point where we don't need phones anymore and just, you know, talk to people online, and if they're really right in front of us. So where are the next new ideas coming from? Is there any chance that some of the old ideas that didn't work could be revamped?

I mean, the cost of starting a company is dropping. And so things that didn't work out a long time ago are now possible. You know, Pandora is a great example. There were a bunch of music dot coms that did not make it out of the 90s. And now Pandora, Spotify, they're using new technologies to be able to run a profitable business.

And so we're seeing even cheaper server space, cheaper manufacturing, and so we're going to see a lot of new products come out. Dave McClure and Brady Forrest in the Bazzillion Dollar Club with new episodes every Tuesday on Sci-Fi. The Point Radio DC is cleaning house.

Maybe one of your favorite titles might be on the list. We'll let you know as we look at the latest in pop culture. True fans of the Back to the Future movie trilogy know that Future Day is just around the corner. It hits on October 21, 2015, the day when Doc Brown and Marty McFly traveled back to the future in the second movie to fix future Marty's family troubles.

And there's lots of cool stuff coming up, including a new comic series from IDW that looks at the series from the different perspective of other characters in the movie. It'll be called Future Day, and that'll be in stores coming up in a few weeks. Along with that, HarperCollins has a Back to the Future Ultimate Visual History,

a behind the scenes book that details the making of the movie trilogy. And of course, there's plenty of visuals as well when a new edition of Back to the Future comes out. The 30th anniversary trilogy home video will be released on October 20th. It's a limited edition DVD and Blu-ray package. It has all three movies, a complete animated series, a new bonus disc,

and a lot more, including a light up flux capacitor. That'll retail for just under a hundred bucks for the Blu-ray. And to top it all off, a documentary on Back to the Future called Back in Time. It'll be released on video on demand and DVD Blu-ray also on the 21st of October. If you got the first season of the web series, Adul-ish on YouTube.

Well, the second season is debuted this week with all six episodes up. The story is about a 28 year old female blogger living in New York City. It's also available in the Adul-ish web series YouTube page and on the website, adultishwebseries.com. DC has changed their mind and decided to give Omega Man a little bit of life.

The 12 issue mini series had been canceled with issue number seven due to poor sales. That was set to hit stores in December. Now we'll go for the full original 12 issues. However, in the midst of this, four more titles have also been canceled by DC. That includes Lobo, Doom, Gotham by Midnight, and Justice League United,

all four again canceled for very low direct market sales. It wasn't a good night for the Emmys this year. Sunday's telecast of the 67th annual Primetime Emmys drew the show's smallest audience on record. 11.9 million viewers, which was down 4 million viewers from last year's event, which aired on NBC. This year, the show aired on a Sunday night on Fox.

Last year, NBC broadcast the show on a Monday. It was a pretty great summer for Marvel Comics winding up the season with seven titles in the top ten best sellers in comic stores for the month of August. DC managed to slide something in there too as well as we look at the top ten. We start at number ten with Star Wars Lando number two for Marvel.

At number nine, the best seller was Civil War number two. At number eight, Justice League 43 from DC. One IDW title made it into number seven. That was Walking Dead number 145. Number six, best seller was Amazing Spider-Man, Renew Your Vows number four.

Number three, from that very same series, came in at number five. Darth Vader number eight was the number four best-selling comic in stores in August. At number three was Batman number 43 from DC. Second best seller was Star Wars number eight. And on top of the list, best-selling book in stores in August was Secret Wars number five.

You know actor Josh Lucas from films like American Psycho and A Beautiful Mind. And his latest project is a comedy called The Men. And I ask him to tell me about it. Well, The Men is a story of these two brothers and their women and how they all end up sort of colliding in this tiny Harlem apartment that they all get stuck in because they don't have any money

and their lives are all falling apart. And it's told in a hopefully very funny, very sort of punk rock. I would say people are saying critically that a bit of a visionary director underneath it is a first-time guy. And that's the part of the fun of the movie is I don't know.

It's not an easy movie to explain. And I'm saying that in a good way. There's a kind of manic punk rock filmmaking going on here. There's been some cool reviews where people have compared it to even some early work of Tarantino and Ron Shostasi in terms of its edge and in terms of its humor and in terms of its just complexity.

And it's, you know, to an extent, it's about when family shows up to stay and stays longer than you want them to. It's got into show business in an unusual way. All it took was one particular moment. The first moment I ever had, which is something that strikes me about why I'm still here, was I was a little kid off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, one of the islands called Isla Palms.

And this tiny little movie from Canada came to shoot because they'd been snowed out of Canada. And they took the little island and they converted it. They put up big pine trees and they tried to make it look more like Canada. And they shot this scene on the sand dunes in front of my house. And I was a little, you know, 10 year old boy, a nine year old boy.

And I was hiding in the sand dunes. There was a scene between two teenage kids, lovers that things went bad. And the boyfriend pulls a gun on the girlfriend. Nothing bad ends up happening. But I just remember feeling like it was so exciting and so thrilling and something so magical to be a part of sand dunes.

And the island on the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, that my whole career, my whole life sort of happened in that moment. And here I am. And then almost 30, more than 30 years later. When you look at Josh's resume, he's had some pretty rich roles and some pretty solid films. I ask him how he goes about choosing the right script.

You know, I'm not just saying this to be mysterious about it. It's a lot of luck. It's a lot of chisnip, you know, in the sense of like what just comes to you. Like here's the perfect example. We're talking about a movie that was made for you take the lowest budget movie I've ever done and you divide it by 10.

You know, the men was a student film really. And what I saw with it, though, was that there was a character that had been, you know, unlike anything I have done and a director who had a feeling of starving to make a movie that was going to prove himself and create his career. And that energy of itself is exciting to go be a part of. Now, did we expect that anything was going to happen with it? No, absolutely not.

You really did it for the experience of making it. But for me, each film has a little bit of a different essence that way. Recently, I got to work with Clint Eastwood. The reason why I was able to work with Clint Eastwood is because I literally sent the guy a sound letter and said, hey, Matt, I want to work with you and I'll be an extra in your movie. And so he said, well, there's a small part in a movie coming up and will you audition for it?

And, you know, that was also some of it is a little bit of the connection to your own life that I try and search for. And in the case of Clint Eastwood movie, J. Edgar, you know, I'm playing Charles Lindbergh. And my grandmother was one of the first female pilots in America. And she had decided to be a pilot because of Charles Lindbergh. So there was this kind of interesting family connection there.

And you try and search for those and you try and also like let them say, happen to you and never know when they're going to end up having a life. And that being in this case, like a movie that you're really excited and proud to talk about because it announces a new talent. That's what this movie does in those roles. Josh has worked with some pretty big stars and directors. The search for me of this career is to be around talent, you know, and to be pushed by it and to be inspired by it.

You know, I've been so really lucky from early on to work with people like Ron Howard and Russell Crowe and Sean Penn. And I mean, these people who, you know, you admire from afar and then you get the experience of working with and you realize why they are the talent that they are and why they're separated. I mean, I think the same thing goes with sports. You know, there's a reason why legends are legends. And in the case of Clint Eastwood, you go back and you look through kind of analyze it.

You know, you say there's a guy who's on a raw, hot TV show that my understanding is he was bored of and didn't respect. And so he started thinking about what if he was going to do it differently, how he would do it differently. And I'm sorry, he started making movies based on, you know, what he would change. And here he is, you know, 50 years later. I mean, it's profound.

And so you these people become just tremendous inspirations for you. And also they become like I would say, how do I put this, like high bars that you want to set your own bar to, you know, for me, I look at someone like Eastwood. God, man, that's a guy in his mid 80s directing at the highest caliber of this business. And that's an extraordinary achievement. And, you know, I yearn for some of that.

And that's where you push yourself towards. So among all the parts he's had, is there any you'd like to revisit one more time? Well, I mean, some of them are. Look, I would say Poseidon is an interesting one because Poseidon there was some real problems with from early on where, you know, they had spent a lot of money on the set before they had finalized the script. So there was sort of a gap between what had happened between the writing and the story that they were planning to tell, which wasn't even worked out yet.

And these extraordinary, you know, crazy set pieces that they were doing. So I look at that and think, I wish I would have been able to push harder towards what I thought were the concerns about character and about scripts that myself and Russell and Ron. I'm sorry, the different actors who are on board that Kurt Russell and Richard Trifisk, you know, have epic careers. All of us have the same concerns that way. So if I go back, there's a number of movies I feel that way that the achievement of the movie is OK, but that it could have been better.

And that part of it is that if I would have been able to fight a little harder, probably would have been more rewarding for me. The men available on video on demand, digital download and in select theaters this month. You can also see Josh and episodes of mysteries of Laura every week on NBC. That's it for the podcast right now, but stay in touch with us over the next few days. We're easy to find on Twitter under PC upload Instagram under PC upload to as well and on Facebook under the point radio.

The podcast turns up on websites like ComicMix dot com and get the point radio dot com and in the iTunes podcast directory to see you right back here in a few days.