#110： Hardboiled Detectives, Boxing, and Creativity With David Levien
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Summary
David Levine is a writer, director, producer, and writer who has worked with Brian Koppelman on some of their biggest hits, including Rounders, The Illusionist and Ocean s 13. In this episode, we talk about how they met, how they came together, and what they've learned from each other.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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So a few months ago, we had screenwriter and Renaissance man Brian Koppelman on the show
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to discuss creativity, working routines, facing rejection, and what Brian had to say resonated
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with a lot of you and a lot of you. We got rave reviews about that podcast. Anyways, Brian
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mentioned he has a writing partner that he's worked with for pretty much his entire career
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that they've worked together on. Rounders, The Illusionist, Ocean's 13, and that writing
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partner is named David Levine. And Brian made the introduction and I had to get David on
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the show because besides being a screenplay writer, besides being a movie producer and
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director, David is also a published novelist and he's focused a lot of his work on the
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detective genre, which I'm a big fan of, Raymond Chandler and all those classic hard-boiled
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detective novels. Anyways, David and I discussed creativity, his working routine, how you establish
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a working relationship with a writing partner or a business partner of any type. We also
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discussed detective novels and what men can learn from detectives in the detective novel
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genre and why the detective has become such an archetype of American masculinity. Besides
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that, we talked about boxing and MMA. David is a boxer. He's dabbled in mixed martial arts
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as well for most of his life. And in fact, his grandfather was a professional boxer who
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fought Joe Lewis for the world championship. We discussed what lessons David has learned
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from boxing and also from his grandfather's experience as a professional boxer in boxing,
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Joe Lewis. Anyway, fascinating podcast with lots of great insights and things you can do
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to start applying in your life today to improve yourself. I think you're really gonna like
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All right, so you are a writer, not only of fiction, but also of screenplays. And you're
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actually the writing partner of Brian Koppelman, who we've had on the podcast before. And you
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guys worked on, what is it, Rounders and Ocean's 13 and Walking Tall or some of those?
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Yeah. Brian and I have been best friends since we were kids, actually. We met when I was 14. He
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was 15 or 16 on this summer trip. And we lived near each other in New York growing up. Never
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went to the same school, but, you know, lived near each other and had been best buddies since
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then, you know. And a while back, like about 17, 18 years back, we'd each taken these circuitous
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routes through our careers. And we ended up at this place where we both wanted to write screenplays
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and make movies. And I had had a lot of experience in the business because after college, I moved out
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to L.A. and started working in the movie business in low-level assistant type of jobs as a reader
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mainly of screenplays and then a story editor. So I read thousands of screenplays. And, you
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know, out of the thousands, there were probably a dozen good ones. But I felt like I was able to
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identify them and understand the form through osmosis by just being there and reading so many
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of them. And I ended up back in New York and I was bartending. He was working as a record
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exec. And we decided we wanted to sort of join forces and do a script together. And we started
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meeting like in the mornings before he went to his job and after I get back from, you know,
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I wake up early after bartending. And we knew we wanted to tell a story about friendship.
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And about trying to find your destiny and all that sort of stuff. And we couldn't exactly
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figure out what world to set it in. We knew that one of the characters would probably be
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a law school student, though that wasn't the path he wanted to take. And then one night,
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like three in the morning, I got a call and it was Brian. And he'd stumbled into one of these
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underground poker clubs in New York City and gotten cleaned out, lost every dime he had.
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But he loved it. He thought it was so colorful and amazing. And the next night we went back and
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we started going basically every night playing slash researching. And we did that for about a
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year and met all the characters on the scene. And that's when we knew that we'd do this poker
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Yeah. And we've been working together ever since. We've been writing partners in the movie world.
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We've produced a lot of stuff together and we've directed together as well.
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So here's a question I have. You guys are best friends since you guys were kids. How do you
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collaborate on creative work? Because for a lot of people, I think they think something like a
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screenplay or a movie, you know, directing. It's sort of like it's the lone artist, the lone genius
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working by himself. How do you fuse two minds into this, to a story, right? With the screenplay?
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Well, you know, you hear about these writing teams and even like three person and sometimes
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even more people on a team. And it is kind of hard to understand how all that can coalesce and
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turn into like a single vision. But for us, you know, if people would think about the Hughes
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brothers or the Cone brothers, it would make more sense in a way as if like, because people are
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brothers, they have a mind meld going. So we sort of say that we're like brothers, but we don't have
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all the baggage of having grown up in the same house in a way. We, you know, growing up since
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we've known each other since we were kids, we've read a bunch of the same books, always we're going
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to the movies together. So, you know, our favorite movies are pretty similar. I'm listening to the same
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music. We have like a shared language in a way. And there just seemed to be something like when
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we started writing, writing scripts, there's, it's a collaborative medium, you know, often it
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starts with one person alone, right in this story. And then other people get involved and, you know,
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it starts to become all these, you know, a director, camera people, all these crew members and producers
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and money people and stuff like that. So our thing just starts being collaborative right from the
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beginning. And, you know, we would be saying the dialogue to each other. So it wouldn't be like
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the solitary thing where you would picture like an author just in a room alone, grinding out this
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prose. We're writing these scenes that are basically, you know, these, a lot of these scenes
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are, are people talking to each other. So there we are doing it before it's barely written.
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That's cool. Well, um, besides your, um, the screenplay work, you also write fiction, write
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novels, uh, and detective fiction in particular, you have the, uh, the Frank Bear series. And I'm
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curious, I'm a big fan of like the, the hard boiled detective novelists from years gone by,
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like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Um, have those guys had an influence on your work?
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Definitely, you know, growing up, I, I would read those books. Um, I love Hammett. I love Chandler.
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Jim Thompson was a guy who, you know, I read everything he wrote. Lawrence Block, and I've
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been lucky enough to get to know Lawrence Block over the last little while, which is amazing.
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Elmore Leonard, I'm a huge fan of, but then other writers too, you know, um, I was a big Hemingway
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reader growing up. And I think I read his sort of, uh, fancier novels, but when I became an adult,
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I went back and started reading those short stories. And a lot of them are kind of hard
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boiled crime, short stories. And his writing style is, you know, really lends itself to that.
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It's so terse and economical and, you know, uh, guys like Ken Nunn. So I've been a huge fan of,
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of that genre. And I wrote a couple of books sort of at the beginning of my screenwriting career.
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I published two. They were more, what would be considered literary novels, um, less genre,
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but I had this idea for the first one of these Frank Bear books in, in the series, you know,
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what turned out to be a series at the time. It was just this one story I really wanted to tell
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about, um, about a kid who, who goes missing from sort of a place where it's not expected. He's,
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he's in Indianapolis and the Midwest kind of bucolic setting where people aren't really ready for that
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kind of thing. And his father sort of can't, can't let the thing go and accept it and tries
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a few times futilely to get private investigators involved, but they don't do any good. And then
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he happens onto this guy, Frank Bear, who's my character and Bear takes on this case and he's
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got a, he's got a dark sort of tragic episode in his past that in a way dovetails with the missing
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kid. And it's sort of haunting to him, but he decides he's going to do it. And he starts getting
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involved and he starts finding what he thinks are results. And before long, the father can't sit
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idly by and sort of forces his way in to, to work with bear. And it's sort of a buddy, a buddy book in
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the hard boiled genre where these guys build a relationship as they go to try to find out what
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happened to this kid. And at the time I was working in the movie business and I didn't have a lot of
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free time, but I had this burning desire to, to be a novelist and publish books. And I decided that I
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was going to start waking up super early before I went to work. And I had moved out to, uh, out of
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New York to the suburbs by then. So I started taking the train to Manhattan and I stopped driving because
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that was wasted time where the most I could do is, was listen to something like listen to a book on tape
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or something like that. And I started taking the train and trying to grab that 40 minute block of
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time in my life. And little by little, just write one scene a day or, you know, a few paragraphs,
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whatever I could. And this, this story came to life and it turned out well. And I was able to
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set the book up at a great publishing company, Doubleday. And they made a two book deal with me and,
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and the series would launch from there. Fantastic. And you have another one coming out,
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right? I do. I have the fourth one in the series coming out. It's called Signature Kill.
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And, uh, that's coming out on the 24th. I'm excited about it and working on it for a long time.
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And it is a, uh, a journey into some, some dark stuff. Frank there, my guy, who's this big brooding
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guy who works on his own, sometimes a little self-destructive, doesn't build a great career
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for himself. Uh, sometimes he, he spikes into a good situation where he can make some money and
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be on the right track, but he's got a couple of self-limiting or antisocial tendencies that,
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that rear up. And he's basically on his own. He's got some financial pressure.
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He can't figure out exactly how he's going to find cases. And he sees a billboard with a missing
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young woman on it with a big reward attached. And he knows it's sort of a hopeless case,
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but he decides to sign onto it. And as he starts working that case of what happened to this girl,
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he realizes that he's in the middle of a, a bigger case overall, where lots of people,
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young women especially have started to disappear in, in the city of Indianapolis over the last
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many, many years, but in a way that it's not clear that it's a serial killer, uh, to people
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who wouldn't be looking or who wouldn't want it to be broadcast. The police sort of don't want it to
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be known as that because they don't want to create a panic, but he starts to figure out that there might
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be linkage between what he's working on in this bigger case. And he goes from there.
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That sounds like some Dashiell Hammett. There's a, one of the novels was like that, where
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the detective will get on a case and he finds out it's actually something bigger.
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The detective, right? The private eye is sort of this, has become this archetype of American
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manliness, right? Because people think of Humphrey Bogart in the trench coat, the hat,
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the cigarette in the mouth, stoic. Uh, I mean, do you consciously think about like masculinity
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or manliness when you're developing your characters or how they'll respond to a situation?
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Well, it's definitely a manly area, right? I, I, my, my thing is set in contemporary times,
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so nobody's walking around in trench coats and hats, but there's this incredible, there's this
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incredible legacy. You know, there's something so great about the detective and especially a detective
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in America, because if you really extrapolate it, then you're talking about somebody who's searching
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existentially and they're looking for answers to incredibly complex questions at the heart of these
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cases, things that get to the heart of our existence that can't really be found out.
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They can find out facts and they can put together the way things happened. And that's sort of just a nod at
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what they're really looking for, which is usually, um, some better description of, of their identity.
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There's in the good ones of these stories, the cases that they're on have a reflection to what, what the,
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the detective doesn't understand about himself. And there's a parallel, a little bit of a parallel
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journey going on. If the guy figures out what's going on on the outside, he's, he's also discovering
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something internal about himself. You have these guys in a violent setting and there's either gunplay
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or fist play. And there's a lot of, you know, there's, there's criminals who are trying to
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inflict their will and take what they want in these situations. And these guys don't want it to
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happen. So it does get very mano a mano. Yeah. I think what's interesting too, is that the detective
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is like, he works outside the authority, right? Like he's usually not a police officer. He works on his
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own. Uh, maybe there's some kind of rugged individualist thing going on there. There is, um,
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my, my character was a cop and that went badly after a certain point due to certain things that
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happened in his private life. So there are times in my story, the conflict is always fun and drama. So
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the cops bitching at the private eye, you know, it just makes for fun scenes. I, I try to texture
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it a little because there are times when my guy can turn to the police and certain friends that he,
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he managed to maintain on the force and they'll help him a little. There's other times when they'll
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try to use him and manipulate him in ways that he doesn't know in order to pursue their agenda
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through an outside person. And there's times when they're both working for the same ends,
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but that diverges most of the time. And it becomes a problem because the cops want,
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they want to be the authority in this area and certain private investigators, hardheaded ones
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don't want to listen. And I mean, real life, you've got guys who really work out of outside of the
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system. If you think of, uh, Pelicano, who's been in jail for a while, you know, he's a classic
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example of that. He was a totally famous figure in Los Angeles, but he was operating a way that was
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more criminal than almost anybody he was investigating. Interesting. Um, I'm curious about
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this. Why there's, there's a lot of talk about how, um, men don't really read fiction, right? Like
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fiction sort of like for ladies, guys like to read biographies and success books or business books,
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but what benefit do you think men can get from reading fiction or why do you think they should
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make that part of their literary diet? That's a great question. You know, and I do think that
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the publishing industry and the book companies buy into that to a certain degree, you know, the book
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companies have just had much bigger success by placing these female themed novels in these book
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clubs, which are somehow, um, largely female. And, you know, the Oprah book club was a huge driver
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of, of sales for books. And, and I understand what it's like, you know, guys have a lot of
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responsibility. They have jobs, they have families to raise, they have a lot of stuff to do. And I,
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I suppose that the wrong kind of fiction can seem trifling or a waste of time to them.
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And they could read a book like on, on, uh, unbreakable or unbroken, the Zamperini.
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Oh yeah. Unbroken. Yeah. Unbroken or, or lone survivor. And they get all of the charge of fiction
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out of that, but it's a true story. And in a way it's inspiring because there's this great courage,
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bravery going on. And in a way you can graph that into your own daily thing. So I understand it,
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but I think that, I think that there's the right kind of stuff for guys to read that they'll get a
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ton out of depending what their interests are. I mean, there's a lot of great writers working these
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days. Yeah. I mean, I love some of my favorite fiction, male fiction writer guys. I mean,
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cause I'm not specifically male fiction writers, but the guys, the authors who a lot of men gravitate
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to, um, I love like, they're often very ambiguous, right? Like you don't know, it never, it never ends
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with like a good ending. Right. But it leaves you thinking and pondering, like, what would I do in
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that situation? You know, like Cormac McCarthy. I mean, I read, I've read almost all of his books and
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like, they're all like really violent and they're all sort of like, you're, there's not really not a
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really great resolution at the end, but it leaves you thinking the same with like the detective
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novels. Uh, you know, so there's usually, there's a resolution, of course, they solve the crime,
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but you never, it's sometimes it's not a happy ending. And for some, I like that for some reason.
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Yeah. I mean, the thing Cormac McCarthy is something you think about any guy who would read
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nonfiction would love to read those, those books, but you're right. You know, sometimes things are
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ambiguous or sometimes because of the writing style, which in his case is very elevated and also
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very iconoclastic. It's, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to parse sometimes, you know, these passages
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in Spanish in some of his books, there's no punctuation, there's no quotation marks. And, you
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know, if somebody's on their way to work or something or has a half an hour to read, that can just be a bit
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of a pain. Um, I, for me, it's worth it. This is, this is the, uh, area that I live in and toil in.
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So, so I, it's sort of natural to me. I know tons of guys went and saw, um, no country for old men
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when it came out. And I, I bet you tons of people love that movie and probably not that many of them
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read the book, but it's an incredible read. Yeah. And I think, you know, weirdly, um, premium cable,
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like the AMC really great shows on right now that have sort of, um, a novelistic style to them.
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You know, they've 10 or 12 episodes that are sort of chapters and it's not cheesy. Like some broadcast
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TV, there's no commercials. You can, you can download it on iTunes and take it in a binge or
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something like that. And in a way that supplanted what the detective novels and the noirs used to be
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for, for guys in the fifties. Yeah. Justified, I guess, is a good example of that or true detective
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on HBO. Yeah. Great example. You know, love both of those shows and you watch those and you're getting
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everything that, um, that a really good Elmore Leonard or Mickey Spillane in the old days or
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whatever one of those books would, you know, what you'd be going for. Yeah. I think I've,
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I've read studies too about fiction, um, helps you become more empathetic or like builds like theory
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of mind. Cause like you're, you, by reading fiction, you get into the minds of other characters,
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even though they're fictional or other people. And it allows you, it sort of builds up like social
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repertoire in you by reading fiction. I've read somewhere about that. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah.
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Yeah. That's certainly why I would do it because it puts you in a world and it puts you in the head
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or voice of, of a person that you would never encounter. You know, really in a way it's putting
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you in, in the head of an author who some of these guys have been great thinkers or had brilliant ideas
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or great way to express themselves. So you kind of refer to this, um, earlier when you talked about
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how you started writing on the train. Um, I mean, I'm curious, like, do you have a ritual to get you
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ready for work or, but are you one of those guys like, you know, Stephen King, where it's just like,
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it doesn't matter what I'm doing. If it's on the back of a napkin, if I'm going to create something,
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I'm going to create something. Things don't have to be perfect.
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Well, I certainly wouldn't compare my output to Stephen King's. Um, you know, that guy is just a
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phenom, how he does it. I, I've read some of his books on writing and I actually can't remember his
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exact way that he goes about it, but clearly the guy is just a natural. For me, I try to,
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I try to make it less about a ritual because if you build a ritual, it can be a great way to
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insulate yourself from actually doing it. You can start to get elaborate with that stuff.
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You know, you need your room set up in a special way. Nobody can be around. It has to be the right
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time of day. You have to have the right materials. You have to be in the right mood. You can just
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basically, if then any part of that isn't right, you're starting to make an exit for yourself from
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doing the task at hand. And you can tell yourself that the rich, you know, the ritual wasn't lived
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up to. So how could you be expected to do your work or do your best work? I try to not be too
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precious about that stuff. And I get up, I take and read the paper for a little while, get ready for
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the day, take my kids to school, which is a good time. I drop them off and then, um, head for the
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train. And it's like a 42 minute ride. And I just, there's something about the fact that it's
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short. That's very freeing because it doesn't seem too punishing. It's just like, okay, just do
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whatever happens to how much expectation can you have. Nobody expects you to write 10 pages. You're
00:23:41.840
getting up out of the seat in 40 minutes. So whatever happens, happens. And sometimes I grind out a couple
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of sentences and end up just staring into space. And other times, um, I have to pack up my stuff
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and jump off the train before the doors close and they take it back to the train yard or something
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because I got on a roll. Um, so that's how my day starts. Now I'm someone who's fortunate to do what
00:24:07.780
they love. So writing is my day job or, you know, creating stuff is my day job. So parts of it are
00:24:14.620
long periods of, of writing these screenplays and teleplays. So I'll end up in my office shortly
00:24:20.760
after getting off the train and then I'll have a day of writing ahead of me. But the day of writing
00:24:25.460
at times isn't even as concentrated as the 40 minutes because the phone will start ringing.
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There'll be stuff to deal with. Brian and I, um, you know, we could just be like in a different
00:24:36.840
headspace where one of us wants to talk something through and the other one wants to write something
00:24:40.960
down or one guy wants to write dialogue and the other guy wants to keep going with the outline.
00:24:46.220
So, you know, out of the bigger portion of the day, sometimes you're just looking for a way to
00:24:53.780
capture quality minutes also. Gotcha. That's what it is. I remember when I was younger, um,
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trying to make everything perfect and clear my day so I could write for hours and cover page after
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a page and it was, it was almost crippling. And then I read something that Carver wrote about
00:25:10.980
writing, Raymond Carver, great short story writer. And he said he'd always planned on being a novelist,
00:25:17.160
but he had kids when he was young and it was always, he had to be a teacher to make money.
00:25:22.060
And every night it was like he had to help doing the laundry and cleaning the dishes and making his
00:25:28.200
kids lunches the next day. And he realized he was never going to have more than a 45 minute or hour,
00:25:32.740
two hour patch in his life. And he better write something that he could finish in that amount of
00:25:37.860
time. So he started writing short stories and just gave, you know, forgot about the novels and
00:25:42.360
became one of the best ever. Wow. So yeah, the constraints helped him.
00:25:47.280
Yeah. You know, I guess you got to find a way to, to make these limitations work for you because
00:25:51.500
otherwise they really are going to be limitations. Yeah. So this is something interesting about you.
00:25:56.680
Brian told me you have a background in boxing and martial arts, correct? Yeah. I've been,
00:26:02.740
doing that stuff for years. Um, you know, not as a serious, I'm not out there like as a club
00:26:10.240
fighter, even amateur fighter. I gotta, I have to, um, protect the mainframe, you know, I'll spar,
00:26:17.480
I'll wear headgear and it won't be too crazy. Generally I'll be sparring with trainers now instead of
00:26:23.220
guys at the gym. But I, I've been boxing for a while. I've done martial arts. I do, um,
00:26:29.300
Brazilian jujitsu. I'm into it. It's, it's, um, I love, I love MMA and I'm getting kind of on the
00:26:39.900
older side for that. I'm 47, but it keeps you in great shape and it just, it makes you feel like
00:26:44.820
alive, you know, whenever I go to do some of this, but like tennis or golf or something, I just,
00:26:50.060
it's like sleepwalking. And when, when you're in there rolling with somebody or sparring,
00:26:55.020
you just really feel alive. Yeah. So, I mean, it's kind of interesting that there's like a lot
00:26:59.100
of those like manly writers, right. That we think of as iconic ones, like Hemingway, uh, Jack London,
00:27:04.100
both were avid boxers. And I I've read, there was a, this guy, he's a philosopher, philosophy
00:27:09.800
professor, I forgot where, but he wrote an essay. He's a boxer too. Um, how philosopher boxing has
00:27:16.880
helped them in philosophy. And I'm curious, has, has taking part in martial arts boxing,
00:27:24.140
has it helped you in any ways with your like creative and intellectual battles in your work?
00:27:31.460
Um, it's helped me in numerous ways, I'd say. I mean, for one, any, any experiential information
00:27:40.020
that I gain by practicing this stuff has been put on its feet in my books because Frank Bear lives in
00:27:48.300
a world where he's not doing this stuff as sport. You know, he's constantly like, he's living this rough
00:27:52.940
and tumble life as this private investigator. So I can use the details that I've learned for him.
00:27:59.720
You know, he's a guy who is an experienced street fighter and he's a big, tough guy and he knows
00:28:07.700
firearms. He's, he, he knows hand to hand and all that stuff. So there's always scenes in the books
00:28:15.540
that cover it that, that, that I get to inform with a lot of real life detail. So that's great. But
00:28:23.680
I think what you're asking is what does it do on a psychological level? And, you know, pursuing
00:28:33.600
filmmaking or writing novels is definitely a discipline because you can only go little by little
00:28:41.480
and it's daunting and it takes a long time. And there's a lot of room for self doubt. And there's
00:28:48.060
a lot of ways that you can get distracted and get off course. Even if you have deadlines, there's
00:28:54.240
always a way you can make up an excuse if you're not careful. So training in these arts is super,
00:29:01.420
you have to be super dedicated. And that's one of the reasons why I keep the sparring or the rolling
00:29:09.180
and jujitsu in there because that'll force me to keep up the strength training and force me to keep
00:29:15.400
up the cardio because the downside of not doing those things is so vivid. When you go into the
00:29:22.800
third round against some guy who's 25 years old and works in the gym as a boxing trainer and does it
00:29:28.460
all day long. And now, you know, whatever, whatever semblance of skill you had starts to fade because
00:29:34.980
you're crapping out and you have no more gas because you haven't been doing your running and
00:29:39.880
lifting and everything. It's a disaster. I mean, you're, you're totally hosed at that point. You're
00:29:45.760
just going to immediately get physical pain as your reward. So it forces you to keep up the discipline.
00:29:53.620
And then that does transfer over. Um, because sitting there and writing a hard scene or doing something,
00:30:02.360
you know, rewriting a book or something, it's just not going to seem as difficult if you've
00:30:08.220
put yourself through the roadwork and all that stuff. It's a mindset.
00:30:12.780
Gotcha. Um, boxing runs in your family, uh, your dad or your grandfather, excuse me,
00:30:18.100
uh, was a boxer and he actually bought Joe Lewis for the heavyweight championship of the world.
00:30:23.840
Tell me about your grandfather and how did that fight go down?
00:30:26.400
Yeah. My grandfather was, um, his name was John paycheck and the country singer guy, you know,
00:30:33.520
that take this job and shove it guy, Johnny paycheck took his name for my grandfather,
00:30:37.100
but the stage name, but, um, yeah, he was, uh, he lived on the South side of Chicago. He was super
00:30:45.740
poor growing up. He got into boxing. He was really good. He was the top prospect in the U S he fought
00:30:53.360
golden gloves for the U S he won the golden gloves against Ireland and knocked this guy out, broke his
00:30:59.160
jaw. He, so he was a top prospect when he was like 19 or 20 years old and he was a heavyweight,
00:31:08.000
but it's ironic. Cause I don't think he touched one 90. I think he was like one 88, something like
00:31:13.520
that, you know, very small sort of heavyweight. And Joe Lewis wasn't super big either, but he was
00:31:17.640
definitely bigger than my, my grandfather. So my grandfather was having a really great string of
00:31:22.740
fights through the Midwest. And it was around the time when, when Joe Lewis got drafted into the
00:31:27.920
army and they knew he was going to go in like six months or a year or something like that.
00:31:32.160
So they organized the bum of the month club, you know, what's pejoratively called that now,
00:31:37.720
um, where they wanted to book him like a fight a month. So, so he could make a bunch of money before
00:31:42.880
he went into the army and couldn't fight for a while. Um, so they started to reach out to these likely
00:31:50.400
prospects and, you know, I'd seen, I've seen footage of the fight and it's, it's so hard to
00:31:58.580
watch because there's my grandfather and he, he gets knocked down three times in the first round.
00:32:05.160
He survives the first round in the second round. He, he gets taken out with a, I think it's like a
00:32:10.380
left hook, brutal left hook. And I, and I remember talking to him about it when I was young, when he was
00:32:16.200
still alive, he, he said, you know, when I went in that night, I was dry. I couldn't get a sweat
00:32:22.180
going cause I was nervous. And he said, when he hit me with his jab, I felt that it hurt me.
00:32:27.720
And he said that he'd never been, you know, he wouldn't get hurt by a jab. You get, you get
00:32:32.500
thrown off a little by a jab, but Lewis's jab actually hurt him. And before long it was over.
00:32:38.340
And, you know, I used to always think about it. I used to, the thing that I learned about,
00:32:45.540
about him as a fighter was that he was extremely tough. He, he didn't become a legend, but he sort
00:32:54.740
of, he got a shot at a legend. He got pretty close. And the realities of like the fear and the pain
00:33:00.900
hearing it from, from a guy who'd been in there was totally eyeopening because as a fight fan,
00:33:05.700
you never actually hear about that. Nobody ever admits that in a post fight interview,
00:33:09.140
you know, they just say like it wasn't their night or whatever. So there was that side that
00:33:14.220
I learned back in the day, but it's funny as I got older, one of the first things I wrote,
00:33:19.720
I think the first thing I published was in ring magazine. Actually, it was a story about my
00:33:23.180
grandfather and it touched on that fight and stuff like that. Um, but as I got older, I learned
00:33:29.820
something else. This guy reached out to me, an old man who was friends with my grandfather reached out
00:33:34.460
to me, um, after the article came out and he told me how the fight came together. And, and that was
00:33:40.920
a real education in the way the world worked, which was, he, he wasn't just some rude who thought that
00:33:46.700
he was going to be Joe Lewis. In fact, when, when the fight offer came in, they said, you know,
00:33:52.540
we want you to fight. I can't remember the date exactly, 1941 at the garden in June or something
00:33:57.320
like that, Madison square garden. And he and his camp said, the kid's not ready. He needs another year.
00:34:03.280
So we're going to turn down the fight. And the promoters strong armed him and said,
00:34:08.080
he'll either, he'll either be there that night at the garden or he'll never fight in the garden
00:34:12.080
for the rest of his career. And it was like an amazing firsthand lesson and just how crooked the
00:34:20.440
game has been and how it's always been that way. So I felt, I, you know, I didn't just feel like
00:34:27.700
he was an athlete who lost. I felt for him as a young man who got, who got bowled into something
00:34:33.480
that was bigger than him, that there was no way he could have actually pulled off.
00:34:37.360
Yeah. And you just have to take it, you know, I don't know. I mean, that's like, I feel like we've
00:34:41.740
all been in one of those situations where you're sort of forced into something and you just have to
00:34:48.260
Yeah. I mean, sometimes you just find yourself taking it and you just hope you can take it like a man.
00:34:53.420
Yeah. Well, David, where can, uh, this has been a great conversation. Where can people find out
00:34:58.720
more about your work? And when does the next book come out?
00:35:02.440
Well, then, so the next book comes out on, uh, Tuesday, March 24th and it's called Signature Kill.
00:35:10.720
And my website is davidlevine.com and my last name's L-E-V-I-E-N. So a little unusual spelling,
00:35:18.480
davidlevine.com, L-E-V-I-E-N.com. And, and all the infos on there.
00:35:24.760
Fantastic. Well, David Levine, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:35:29.840
Our guest today was David Levine. He is a screenwriter, movie producer, and director,
00:35:34.240
and a novelist. And his latest novel in the Frank Baer series dropped last month. It's called
00:35:40.060
Signature Kill. If you're a big fan of detective novels, and if you're not, go pick it up. I think
00:35:45.580
you'll, you'll find a new genre of literature you're going to like. I'm a big fan of it. You
00:35:49.920
can find that on amazon.com. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:35:56.680
For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at
00:35:59.880
artofmanliness.com. And if you'd like to support our podcast and support the website, one thing you
00:36:04.480
do is go to store.artofmanliness.com and pick up some of our Art of Manliness gear that we have
00:36:09.880
there. We've got a fantastic, really manly coffee mug we've gotten rare reviews about. We put a
00:36:15.560
whole bunch of t-shirts on clearance for the spring. So go check out the clearance section.
00:36:19.760
Anyways, some great stuff there. Go check it out. Again, store.artofmanliness.com. Your
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