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RISK!'s monthly NYC live storytelling at the PIT. Featuring Kevin Allison ("The State") and guests Tom Shillue, Robin Gelfenbien and Trevor Noah.

RISK! is a live show and podcast “where people tell true stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public” hosted by Kevin Allison, of the legendary TV sketch comedy troupe The State. The award-winning live show happens monthly in New York and Los Angeles. It’s featured people like Janeane Garofalo, Lisa Lampanelli, Kevin Nealon, Margaret Cho, Marc Maron, Sarah Silverman, Lili Taylor, Rachel Dratch, Andy Borowitz and more, dropping the act and showing a side of themselves we’ve never seen before. The weekly podcast gets hundreds of thousands of downloads each month. Slate.com called it “jaw-dropping, hysterically funny, and just plain touching.”

For tickets and event information visit Risk-Show.com

New to Bullseye? Subscribe to the show in iTunes or via the RSS feed, or check out our SoundCloud page to share any or all of these interviews or recommendations!

Hip Hop Recommendations from Andrew Noz: Juice by Chance The Rapper and Picacho by Young Thug (feat. Maceo)

Andrew Noz joins us to provide some recommendations from the world of hip hop. First, he talks to us about Chance the Rapper's self-proclaimed lyrical challenge, as evidenced in Juice, a track off his latest mixtape, Acid Rap. And what if Lil Wayne stayed off the beaten pop music path? It might sound like Young Thug's weirded-out track, Picacho.

Andrew Noz is the columnist for Pitchfork's Hall of Game, and also blogs and Tumblr-s regularly at Cocaine Blunts and Tumblin 'Erb.

Embed and Share Hip Hop Recommendations from Andrew Noz: Juice by Chance The Rapper and Picacho by Young Thug (feat. Maceo)

Mel Brooks catching up on the present in between takes of History Of The World: Part I. (Photo by Pamela Barkentin Blackburn.)
Mel Brooks Takes Down Hitler (and Makes a Few Wonderfully Bad Jokes Along the Way)

It's hard to imagine what American comedy would look like without Mel Brooks. With a sharp eye for parody, a seemingly infinite supply of gags, and enough destruction of the fourth wall to make a postmodern novelist blush, his work has set the tone for countless comedy TV shows and films. It's hard to imagine SNL's relentless TV parodies without Your Show Of Shows (which Brooks wrote for alongside Sid Caesar back in the 50s), The Simpsons without his filmography full of sly pop-culture references, or the careers of Airplane! creators Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker without Brooks' shameless love of (self-admittedly) awful jokes.

A new PBS American Masters documentary, Mel Brooks: Make A Noise, explores the life and career of the EGOT winner and man behind The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and so much more. Brooks talks to us about fighting in World War II (where he managed to even make a few Germans laugh), the genius of Gene Wilder, and that time Sid Caesar dangled Brooks out the window of a Chicago hotel room.

PBS's American Masters documentary Mel Brooks: Make A Noise premieres Monday, May 20. Check with your public television station for local listings. A box set from Shout! Factory with over ten hours of rare and exclusive footage was also released late last year.

(Embed or share this interview: Mel Brooks Takes Down Hitler (and Makes a Few Wonderfully Bad Jokes Along the Way)

Directors Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille on The Source Family, LA's Most Famous Hippie Cult

The Source Family fit the conventional image of a typical hippie cult in a lot of ways – assuming, of course, that there is such a thing as a typical hippie cult. You could point to the commune, the long hair, the Jesus-y robes...not to mention occasional hits of what they called "sacred herb". Dig deeper, though, and it becomes clear that there was plenty that separated the Source Family from stereotypes.

The group was just as unique as their leader, a man who called himself Father Yod. He was a former Marine, stuntman, jujitsu expert who founded the Source Family alongside a highly successful vegetarian restaurant. Out of the back of that restaurant, the family sold recordings of their regular jam sessions, which became the stuff of psychedelic rock legend. Perhaps most unlike your average cult leader, Father Yod was not particularly attached to any particular ideology – not even his own. In direct violation of his own commandments, Yod married thirteen wives, a move which both alienated a number of family members and caught the LAPD's attention. This caused the Source Family to flee to Hawaii, which ultimately resulted in the group's demise.

We're delving further into LA's most famous hippie cult with the help of Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille, the directors of a new documentary called The Source Family. They discuss the group's run-ins with celebrities (and law enforcement), why Father Yod once told his followers to cut their hair and get jobs, and whether or not they would have joined the group, if given the chance.

The Source Family is in limited nationwide theatrical release. For information about screenings at a theater near you, check out the film's website.

(Embed or share Directors Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille on The Source Family, LA's Most Famous Hippie Cult)

The Outshot: Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson

This week, find out why Jesse's been spending a lot of time with Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson, a home-tome that gracefully runs the housekeeping gamut from sections titled "Administering Insurance Policies" to "Privacy, Sex, and the Constitution".

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Tommy O'Malley, Jenny Smith, and Moses Storm share surprising stories about moms and stepmoms.

So much summah, so little time...to talk about Jewish Orthodox men attacking women praying at the Kotel, National Organization of Marriage's fight to clear their homophobic names, and of course, Bryan does the whole episode in his boxers. 
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Comedian Damonde Tschritter returns to talk trucking, barbecue, and penguins.

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Bryan y Erin put on their fanciest tee shirts and give you a monthly dose of unfiltered shade. A full evening of stories, bad impressions, celebrity guests and of course, a roundup of all the 'ssues important to ladies and gays, treated with much less respect than they deserve.

Come spend the evening with other superficial people who care a lot.

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Comedian John Roy joins Jordan and Jesse for a discussion of Jordan's coyote attack, Cumberbitches, HBO programming, and morning radio.

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Vital stats:
Format: Q&As, often post-screening, with directors, writers, writer-directors, and other filmmakers
Episode duration: 40m-2h30m
Frequency: often weekly, though it varies

I moved to Los Angeles for the filmgoing, sure — how many other cities offer the chance to experience all eras of cinema, theatrically, pretty much every week? — but also for the post-film-Q&A-watching. Enough filmmakers and filmmakers’ collaborators live in or regularly pass through town that theater programmers don’t have to strain to add an enticing liveness to a screening: “Director in person!” “A conversation between the writer and cinematographer to follow!” “Three of the supporting cast will probably turn up!” Some become regulars: the guy who wrote Electra Glide in Blue’s screenplay seems happy to appear whenever and wherever the movie gets projected, for instance, and Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Andersen fields an hour of audience questions every time I catch his documentary. And sometimes you hit a surprise jackpot, as when not just Quentin Tarantino but Robert Forster and Pam Grier took the stage after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art played Jackie Brown. That Q&A fired on all cylinders, which not all of them do. But this very element of suspense keeps them interesting, as does the fact that you can never quite know in advance which ones will, to mix the metaphor, give off sparks.

Having held no particular expectations for a conversation between Looper director Rian Johnson and someone named Jeff Goldsmith, I in the event found them far exceeded. Were I inclined to listen again and scrutinize what, exactly, so impressed me, I could do so by downloading the very same Q&A as an episode of the podcast The Q&A [iTunes], Goldsmith’s own. Instead, I listened to a whole range of his other Q&As, one-on-one and sometimes one-on-two sessions with a variety of directors and writers, writer-directors, and occasionally producers and actors working today, creators as rooted in the mainstream as the writing team behind Horrible Bosses and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and ones as strictly independent as Man Push Cart and At Any Price auteur Ramin Bahrani. Most often, Goldsmith engages people like Johnson, established filmmakers entrenched in neither Hollywood nor the arthouse. I saw him do so at Cinefamily, a theater on Fairfax Avenue that, before I actually moved to town, displayed such acumen screening rarities and bringing in guests (and especially bringing in guests who had a hand in these rarities) as to force me to pull the trigger and rent a U-Haul. “This reminds me of the sixties,” a well-known broadcaster friend who lives in the neighborhood said of Cinefamily during their potluck showing of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, “the last time life was unquestionably good.”

There, on another night, I saw Shane Carruth, he of Upstream Color, discuss his first film Primer with USC physicist Clifford V. Johnson. Had I braved even standier-room-only conditions on a later night, I could have seen Johnson and Carruth (who provided time-travel consultation on Looper) talk Upstream Color. I opted instead to hear that evening on an episode of The Q&A which combines it with Goldsmith’s own interview of Carruth at his usual venue, someplace called the Los Angeles Film School, whose name sounds faintly scammy but which must bring enough legitimacy to attract a cinephile of Goldsmith’s standing. It doesn’t surprise me that students of film production would dig Goldsmith’s interviewing style. He asks the questions you’d expect about process, budget, and schedule, and in his having a standard line of inquiry to fall back on, as well as his playing to audiences of eager learners and his tendency to conduct what we might call praise-intensive conversations, he reminds me at times of a non-octogenarian James Lipton from Inside the Actors Studio.

Goldsmith’s version of Liptonism also features pre-written “geek questions,” those hair-splitting inquiries about plot minutia that you resent other audience members for squandering minutes of our valuable lives asking but which he somehow makes endearing. The geek questions, needless to say, get a field day after new-wave science fiction films like Primer and Looper, but Goldsmith has many other modes as well, which he switches between with startling efficiency. One week he’ll ask a director about the ways he circumvents the deadening conventions of the screenwriting process; another week he’ll ask a writer, with equal interest and earnestness, how he managed to adhere to those same conventions so successfully. But when Goldsmith talks to, say, Christopher McQuarrie about writing Jack Reacher, he doesn’t ask only about how best to craft studio-pleasing character arcs. Rather, he asks about that, but the conversation then shifts toward more meaningful points. I’ll always remember McQuarrie telling Goldsmith that experience, credentials, intelligence and skill all fall distantly secondary to whether people like having you around, a principle I suspect holds for every field of human endeavor. Woody Allen’s words about the attainment of a modest mastery by simply working, working, and working some more over long spans of time, even though he says them in an episode not hosted by Goldsmith himself, will also stick with me.

The Q&A delivers such deposits of universally golden wisdom with unusual regularity, and the more eccentric but endlessly fascinating Carruth drops one of them every few minutes during his appearance. He casts much light on how each element of filmmaking — writing, shooting, scoring, cutting — constantly informs all the others in a kind of perpetual creative cycle, and explains (to my mind once and for all) why a plot needs a core of unanswered, even unanswerable questions. Goldsmith even includes in the podcast, during his usual open-it-up-to-the-audience segment, an eloquent, impassioned, seemingly minutes-long declaration from my aforementioned colleague that Upstream Color indicts the modern condition: “Something happened. It was horrible. It happened to the environment; it happened inside us. It prevents us from talking to one another, or knowing what we’re saying when we talk. Whether God moved away from us or chemicals approached us, it doesn’t matter; we all feel this Martian, alienated state. And it’s our time.” But Goldsmith and Carruth also get into the nuts and bolts of do-it-yourself distribution, if you tuned in for that.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

This week, Justin announces that he's ready to give the greatest Mother's Day gift of all: The gift of life. He's got a baby, in there. In that crazy womb of his.

Suggested talking points: Junior Disease, Complaints, Genny Up, Patricia Chiefin, Sexual Kobayashi Maru, Rattata Frittata, Homeland, Kid Court

Cameron Esposito, Rob Huebel, Humphrey Ker and Nat Luurtsema join host Jesse Thorn for a distinctly dirty episode of the comedy quiz show where land laws do not apply. You're welcome, posterity.