If you’re a Frotcast listener you already know the gist of this story, but for everyone else, the background is this: Our original podcast co-founder, Ben Kaplan, has been sick with cancer for the past few years. It started out as a testicle lump, went away and came back a few times; he lost a testicle first, then a kidney, his gall bladder, and part of his colon (he wrote about part of his journey). Ultimately, none of it worked. The cancer entered the terminal stage and he left the hospital to start hospice care a few weeks ago.

Ben, whom you may also remember as the really buff guy who had a flex-off with a bodybuilding Juggalo in our Gathering of the Juggalos documentary, Whoop Dreams (1:23 of this trailer) — which, like the podcast itself, was mostly his idea — is happy to be out of hospitals forever, despite what that means. I always felt, and still feel, weird writing about his illness. For a lot of reasons, but especially because I don’t want to turn Ben into some “tragic cancer guy,” where everything he is and has done in his life gets subsumed by the last crappy chapter. No one wants that. He’s just a dude, who managed to live an incredibly full life, until he got some really shitty luck.

The best thing about hospice care is that you can say your goodbyes and tell a person what they mean to you and how grateful you’ve been to know them while they’re still around to hear it. The worst thing is… pretty much everything else. But above all, the sense that you can’t really do anything to help. Should I visit? Should I leave him alone because he’s tired? When can I come? When would he want visitors? Should I spare him the burden of figuring out the logistics and just go? Or should I save him from feeling like he has to entertain me and just not go? Should I try to help him stay positive or just nod and listen? Make jokes to distract him or deal with the pain head on? Everything becomes fraught (to borrow a homonym). Every seemingly good option comes with a potential downside. It’s fucked. There’s no way to know what to do and doing nothing is even worse.

A month or so back, Ben’s brother, who moved back into their mother’s house to take care of Ben, told me that one thing Ben did want for certain was to see Blade Runner 2049. Again, if you were a Frotcast listener, you’d know Ben liked blockbuster sci-fi the most out of all of us, to the point that that he’d willingly endure a new Transformers movie unironically. So he was pumped about the new Blade Runner. Of course, he couldn’t make it to a theater in his current state, and likely won’t live long enough for the Blu-Ray release. He has a tumor that’s producing fluid, which fills up his abdomen and can’t be drained. It will eventually suffocate him.

Ben, pre-Juggalo flex-off, on the left.

Ben getting to see a movie seemed like small comfort, but at least it was a thing we could do. Or try to, anyway. Finding a version of the film he could actually watch from his bed turned out to be a unique problem. It required reaching someone at the studio with enough power to even approve that kind of decision, and I didn’t know who that was or how to do that.



I sent as many emails as I could, probably ruining many people’s days with depressing cancer stories in the process. There was no way around that. Fairly quickly I exhausted my studio contacts. In every case, people seemed receptive at first and then I’d hit dead ends. One avenue culminated in an offer, from an email account labeled simply “CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS,” to give Ben the original Blade Runner final cut on Blu-Ray. I tried hard not to be offended by this, by what was, ultimately, an offer of a free gift from a person (well, an entity, anyway) who didn’t have to give it, and did it solely out of some reserve of caring and kindness. I try hard not to be one of those people who makes my problems everyone else’s, but the impersonality of it all stuck in my craw. Still, I understood it. People didn’t know what to do, so they didn’t do things (or did the wrong things). That’s how people are. That’s how I was.

After a few weeks of this, all the while knowing I only had a limited time in which to get this done (which is to say Ben only had a limited time), I remembered that our friend (and frequent Frotcast guest) Justin Halpern works with Warner Bros.

Justin put us in touch with a producer he knew who had co-produced Blade Runner 2049, Steve Wegner at Alcon Entertainment. Things immediately seemed promising when Wegner emailed me back right away asking for more information, rather than doing what most of the other people did — not respond, or say they were forwarding me along to someone else who they didn’t name. (Maybe I shouldn’t have been so cautious about not ruining people’s days? Appealed more openly to their emotions? Maybe I should’ve called more? I still don’t know).

I’ll admit that I didn’t know exactly what getting a playable version of the movie to a house in Mountain View would entail, and probably other people at the studio didn’t either, which is why I couldn’t make any headway. I just knew it seemed like something we should be able to make happen. Wegner not only knew what it would take, but was undeterred by the logistics, and was just as determined to make it happen, even though in his case he was doing it for a complete stranger.