Episode Details

Every so often a guest arrives having chosen not the safe pick, not the crowd-pleaser, but the one movie they have been quietly waiting years for somebody to ask them about. Kynan Dias picked Sphere. It's a 1998 Barry Levinson picture starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson, adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, and it currently sits at twelve percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (Twelve. Out of a hundred. Mandy looks this up, then spends a while working out how to raise it politely, which in the end she does not.) Kynan knows the number. Kynan is undeterred.What follows is the rare episode where the defense turns out to be more interesting than the verdict. There's a real conversation buried in here about what alien life would actually be like if it declined to be cinematic about it, about why a book that lives entirely inside one man's skull resists ever becoming a movie, and about the very specific, very gendered shape of what each of these characters is afraid of. (Mandy has a theory. Kynan has receipts from the novel that make it worse.) Also: a helicopter, a jellyfish, and a question about what's inside the sphere that nobody answers satisfactorily — including the movie. Press play.Guest SpotlightKynan Dias is an actor, screenwriter, and film professor whose work lives in the narrow space between the funny and the devastating. Las Vegas–raised, he earned his B.A. in film at UNLV and his MFA in screenwriting at UCLA, studied improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and has taught at UNLV FILM since 2008, where he built courses in Women in Comedy and Queer Cinema. As an actor, by his own account, he is most often hired to cry in comedies. He is also, as established over multiple appearances on this show, an enormous nerd who did not realize it until Mandy pointed it out.

• TruStory FM host page: Kynan Dias
• UNLV faculty page: Kynan Dias, MFA
• Instagram & Letterboxd: @howdykynan

His shows on TruStory FM:

• The Devil's Details — with Lester Ryan Clark, tracing the devil through art, literature, and pop culture. Currently deep in Mark Twain.
• Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All at Once — also with Lester, going minute by minute through a film that occasionally hands them shots one frame long.
• Sitting in the Dark — monthly horror, with Tommy Metz III, Chelsea Stardust, and Pete Wright, where Kynan was recruited specifically because he's a scaredy cat.

Reference LinksThe Movie

• Sphere (1998) — Letterboxd
• Sphere (1998 film) — Wikipedia
• Sphere (1987 novel) — Wikipedia. The book Kynan has been carrying since childhood.
• Roger Ebert's review — the one Kynan cites, and the last shot that apparently sank it

The Cast

• Barry Levinson — director
• Dustin Hoffman — Dr. Norman Goodman

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