Timecode Cowboys

Timecode Cowboys | Season Two | Ep. 5 | A Mondo STAR WARS Deep Dive with Special Guest Colin Smight (May the 4th Special) This is the one we’ve been teasing for over a year… and it finally happened. For our May the 4th special, we welcome longtime guest-in-waiting (and Danny’s brother) Colin Smight for a full-blown, multi-generational deep dive into Star Wars — from the original theatrical experie...

Timecode Cowboys | Season Two | Ep. 4 | Dan & Al Talk … Bad Day at Black Rock! We’re back to basics this week — one film, one town, and a whole lot simmering beneath the surface. Fresh off a spontaneous midweek screening assignment (courtesy of a late-night text and a Criterion nudge), we dive headfirst into Bad Day at Black Rock — John Sturges’ lean, mean 1955 desert noir-Western hybrid that...

Timecode Cowboys | Season Two | Ep. 3 | Spring Training! Cactus League Chronicles & Baseball Cinema We hit the road this week for a spring training run through Arizona. What starts as a simple baseball trip becomes a full-blown American detour: a stop at the General Patton Memorial Museum, a surreal hotel experience in Glendale, and a wandering, sun-soaked dive into the rhythms of the AZ Cactu...

Timecode Cowboys | Season Two | Ep. 2 | From Marvel to Morocco: Rave Cinema, Superhero Fatigue & Haunted L.A. Locales We’re back in the saddle with a new RØDECaster setup and a proper grab-bag conversation that veers all the way from Marvel to Morocco to Murphy Ranch. This week, we dive into the surprisingly soulful Wonder Man (and Marvel’s ongoing identity crisis), before shifting gears into...

Timecode Cowboys | Season Two | Ep. 1 | The Universal Backlot: Hollywood’s Factory Floor In this S2 premiere episode, we explore the history, mythology, and everyday reality of Universal Studios Hollywood — not as a theme park, but as a working studio that’s been shaping Hollywood for more than a century. We’re joined on a backlot field trip by special guests Ben Sommer (@ben.gordo), Director of P...

Timecode Cowboys | Ep. 15 | TV PILOTS! (Season One Finale) We’re closing the book on Season One — and doing it the only way we know how: by talking about the strange, high-stakes, half-forgotten corner of Hollywood history known as the TV pilot. In this finale episode, Danny and his dad dig into the lost art of pilot season: rushed schedules, wild concepts, focus-group madness, and shows that almo...

Timecode Cowboys | Ep. 14 | David P. Loughery: The Man, The Myth, The Legend We’re back — and this week we literally walked off the 18th green, dropped our clubs, and hit record. Why? Because David P. Loughery — screenwriter, mentor, raconteur, and honorary cowboy — loved two things with unadulterated devotion: classic movies … and golf! From Dreamscape to Passenger 57 , Money Train , The Three Mu...

Timecode Cowboys | Ep. 12 | Judgment Day: The Future According to Cameron This week marks a new era for Timecode Cowboys — cleaner lines, simpler frames, same father-son chaos. At the urging of our resident design whisperer Claire Smight, we’ve shed the visual noise and gone full refined minimalism — less clutter, more cinema. Fittingly, our topic couldn’t be more on theme: James Cameron’s Termina...

Timecode Cowboys | Ep. 13 | Universal Monsters & Other Ghost Stories Happy Halloween!!! On this, our oh so spooky number 13th episode, Danny and Alec dust off the silver nitrate and dive headfirst into Universal’s monster legacy - from Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man (1941) to Abbott & Costello’s horror-comedy crossover, all the way to the haunted soundstage where Phantom of the Opera was fi...

Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys | Ep. 11 | The A.I. Frontier ☕🤖 This one starts with an espresso machine that refuses to cooperate… and ends with an existential conversation about the fate of art, energy, and humanity itself. Welcome to Episode 11 — our most caffeinated deep dive yet — where we unpack the accelerating world of generative A.I., from the creative possibilities to the ecological costs nobody’s...

Timecode Cowboys | Ep. 9 | Renaissance Man Robert Young III This week we’re catching up with one of Danny’s oldest friends and collaborators — filmmaker, actor, musician, and bona fide creative polymath Rob Young III — for a conversation that spans decades, mediums, and mindsets. From their first short film together (a teenage neo-noir called Bulletproof ) to Rob’s latest political rock opera Nixo...

Timecode A.I. West Cowboys | Ep. 10 | Ten Gallons Deep: California Gold, Twilight Zones & The Wild Our 10th episode! Ten rides in the can, and we’re celebrating the only way we know how — by going completely off script. No guests, no notes, just a father-son free-for-all through film history, memory, and the strange present tense we’re all living in. Here’s what we wrangle in this milestone epi...

Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys | Ep. 8 | Pt. 2 | Salad Days & Starfields with Crescenzo 🌌🎬 Our ride with cinematographer extraordinaire Crescenzo Notarile continues — and this time we’re diving into his salad days working on ‘80s era music videos, his stint on Star Trek: Discovery, and the bigger questions about art, artists, and legacy - and of course, The Godfather. Here’s what we cover in this jam-p...

Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys | Ep. 8 | Pt. 1 | Lights, Camera… Crescenzo! 🎥✨ We finally wrangled our biggest guest yet — the one, the only, Crescenzo Notarile — Emmy-nominated cinematographer, lifelong student of light 🧠💡 and all-around Renaissance man 🏆📸. We had sooooo much fun with Crescenzo that we had to split this one into TWO PARTS ! Here’s what we cover in this rich and rollicking Pt. 1: 📺 Th...

Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys | Ep. 7 | Cannes You Believe It?! 🇫🇷🎞️ We’re back in the saddle after a wild ride to the Cannes Film Festival 🥂🎥 — where Danny’s work on Slauson Rec was a last-minute addition to the prestigious Cannes Classics lineup! 😱✨ In this very special episode: 🐎 Dan survives the red carpet and a brutal sinus infection 🧢 Buys waaaaay too many souvenir hats 🎟️ Breaks down the circus...

Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys | Ep. 6 | The Smight Stuff: Claire, Con Artists & Paper Moon This week, the Smight family expands—and upgrades. ✨ Claire Smight —art director, film connoisseur, and certified agent of cool—makes her long-awaited Timecode Cowboys debut 🎤🎉 With Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973) as our  compass, we hit the open road to explore a world of scams, grifts, and Americana. Al...

Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys | Ep. 5 | Doctor’s Orders: Learning to Love the Cut with Mark Baldwin (and Dr. Strangelove) This week, we step into the war room and go full Kubrick. Editor, documentarian, and raconteur Mark Baldwin joins us for a deep dive into the genius of Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb — from its razor-sharp satire to the way its editing reshaped comed...

Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys | Ep. 4 | Edit Room Rodeo: John Heath on his Career in and Out of the Cutting Room This week, The Cowboys welcome their very first guest to the corral: producer, editor, and director John Heath 🎥✂️. We saddle up for a ride through John's decades-spanning career — from the wild early days of non-linear editing 🖥️ to the modern media frontier — swapping tales from the trenc...

Buckle up, movie lovers — it’s time to hit the gas!🔥 In Episode 3 of Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys, we cruise the highway with Vanishing Point (1971), the cult classic that turned a white Dodge Challenger into an everlasting symbol of freedom, fatalism, and full-throttle filmmaking. We talk the seeds of the screenplay written by a Cuban novelist (who might have also been a CIA agent) Barry Newman’s effortl...

Is Lonely are the Brave (1962) the real beginning of New Hollywood? In this episode of Timecode⏱️🤠Cowboys, we saddle up with one of the most underrated modern Westerns ever made — a film that saw Kirk Douglas swapping six-shooters for existentialism and horses for helicopters. This isn’t your granddad’s cowboy movie. This is a boundary-breaking elegy for the American individualist, a spiritual br...

Welcome to the first episode of Timecode Cowboys, where we dive deep into the rugged, rebellious terrain of 1970s cinema! 🎥 From gritty antiheroes to groundbreaking auteurs, the ‘70s redefined Hollywood storytelling with daring new visions. 🍿🤠 Join us as we explore how filmmakers wrangled the chaos of the era to create some of the most unforgettable movies in history. 📽️ Subscribe for more epis...

Alec and Danny Smight, father and son filmmakers, discuss Movies, TV, Filmmaking from it's beginnings to present day and beyond!    Instagram - @timecode_cowboys TikTok - @timecode_cowboys Send us Fan Mail