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 Musketeers, Lakeview Terrace, and The Intruder, David built the kind of career Hollywood rarely celebrates: steady, surprising, generous, and full of personality. A real craftsman. A real wit. A real one-of-one.

In this episode, we cover:

• 📝 Script stories from the trenches — Snipes, Quaid, Shatner & beyond
• 🎬 Notes swaps & mentorship — how David shaped Danny’s writing
• 🍸 Martinis, mini-malls & midnight noirs — David’s secret map of Los Angeles
• 😂 The quirks — the early arrivals, the BMW he wouldn’t drive on freeways, the Word docs saved “somewhere”
• 🧠 A master of genre — thrillers, western riffs, studio rewrites, and pure storytelling
• 💙 A friend who became family — and the voice still echoing in our writing

Here’s to David and the movies, the memories, and the punchlines he gifted us.

🎬 Films discussed:

Dreamscape (1984)
Heart to Hart (TV)
The Stepfather (1987)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Flashback (1990)
Passenger 57 (1992)
Money Train (1995)
Tom and Huck (1995)
Lakeview Terrace (2008)
Obsessed (2009)
Penthouse North (2013)
Nurse 3D (2013)
The Intruder (2019)

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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 filmed (and allegedly never fully dismantled).

Along the way, they wander through forgotten film reels, UCLA’s hidden vault in the hills of Santa Clarita, and a few attempted “phone-a-friend” sessions with none other than friend-of-the-pod Colin Smight (spoiler: he didn’t pick up!).

Plus: Dodgers in the World Series, Tiny Tim trauma, and a quick shoutout for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

It’s a loose, spooky, cinephile séance — half Hollywood history, half family campfire. Join us!

🎬 Films discussed:
The Wolf Man (1941), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Exorcist (1973), Sunset Boulevard (1950), In a Lonely Place (1950), Bugonia (2025), One Battle After Another (2025)

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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 Terminator 2: Judgment Day — a film that redefined what “the future” looked like, both on-screen and off.

Danny and Al dive deep into Cameron’s visionary mix of analog grit and digital precision, unpacking how T2 still feels like the ultimate meditation on A.I., technology, and what it means to evolve — as artists, as humans, and now, apparently, as podcasters with better design taste.

Here’s what’s locked and loaded in this one:

🎬 Why T2 remains the gold standard for sequels (and possibly the greatest action movie ever made)

⚙️ How Cameron’s analog craft makes the digital revolution feel real

🦾 The birth of Skynet — and why the film’s warnings feel even more urgent today

🧩 Time travel, paradoxes, and the snake-eating-its-own-tail logic of the Terminator universe

💥 The genius of Linda Hamilton, the innocence of Joe Morton, and Arnold’s mechanical empathy

☢️ Cold War paranoia, nuclear nightmares, and sci-fi’s obsession with self-destruction

🧠 Plus: parallels between Cameron’s Skynet and the modern A.I. arms race

🎨 And a quick look at our own new aesthetic reboot — courtesy of Claire’s less-is-more design revolution

It’s part film school, part philosophy jam, and part nostalgic rewatch — a cinematic therapy session on what happens when machines learn too much and humans forget what made them human.

👉 Saddle up, hit play, and join us for Episode 12: Judgment Day: The Future According to Cameron.

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