Episódios
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Ari Kahan, who assembled and oversees the most complete compendium of on-line information on Brian DePalma’s classic rock music horror classic, Phantom of the Paradise.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
The Swan Archives: https://www.swanarchives.org/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Do you remember when you first saw it? What were the circumstances? How old are you? What was your reaction?
ARI KAHAN: Sure. I first saw it when I was 12. It was double billed with Young Frankenstein. This would have been in early 1975, and my mom took me to see Young Frankenstein, which was okay. It was pretty good, but I was really enamored with the second feature on the bill, which was Phantom. And I've been in love with it ever since.
Did you know anything about it before you went in?
ARI KAHAN: Nothing. Nothing at all.
So, what has been the attraction for you for that film, low those many, many years ago?
ARI KAHAN: It may have just hit me at an impressionable time. But I think that, you know, being 12 and being kind of a nerd, I probably identified with Winslow and his fervent belief that if the world could only hear from his heart, and especially if all the girls in school could only hear from his heart, then they would love him and not the jerk that they always went out with.
So, there's probably some of that.
There was certainly, I do remember very, very clearly that the direction in some respect stood out to me. I had seen a lot of movies when I was 12, and I remember even today, thinking when I was 12, that there was a moment where the Phantom is rising up into the rafters in the foreground as Beef is descending in the background. And I looked at that and I thought, boy, that's complex. Anybody else would have done a shot of the Phantom starting to climb a rope, and then cut away, and then come back to him up in the rafters. This guy is trying to do things that are more interesting than he needs to and I thought that was really fun.
After seeing Phantom I went back and saw Sisters.
Which was no mean feat back then.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I know and in fact, I had to see Sisters by buying a 16-millimeter print of it. That was the only way I could. I had fixed up a couple of—this is probably a year or two later—I had fixed up a couple of 16-millimeter projectors that my school was discarding, so I could even do changeovers in my bedroom. And I got a copy of Sisters just so I could see it because it was unseeable otherwise.
Well, kudos to you for finding Sisters, because it took me a long time. I imagine it showed up at the Film society at the university or something finally. So getting to see William Findlay in a markedly different role and also seeing, oh, okay, this is a director who likes split screen. Although I probably would have gotten that from Carrie, because I'm sure I saw Carrie first. He's accused of doing stuff like that just for showing off. In fact, I think it's always for a cinematic or emotional reason. And Sisters is the best example of that. The suspense of getting rid of that dead body before they get to the door is enhanced by the fact that you're watching two things happen at the same time.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I think in Sisters and Phantom both, it works really well. And I think, and I think even DePalma would agree that it didn't work as well in Carrie. Because the split screen calls for intellectualizing on the part of the audience. And it takes you out emotionally and wasn't really working that well. I understand why he did it, because it'd be boring to like, cut to Carrie's face, cut the things happening, cut back to Carrie's face, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think both he and Paul Hirsch, the editor, feel it would have been better off to do something else.
But anyway, after Phantom, you know, every new De Palma film to come out—all the way through Domino—has been a much anticipated event for me, you know, and I'm in the theater on the first day. And there have been a couple of disappointments along the way, but by and large, it's been awesome.
Since you've seen Phantom so many times, were there any surprises that popped up over the years as you've watched again and again and things that you hadn't seen or hadn't realized?
ARI KAHAN: It took me a really long time to notice that there was a frame or two of Jessica Harper being one of the backup singers on stage when Beef’s performing life at last and only because I think it was unavoidable to use those frames. I think somebody figured out in editing that it didn't make any sense for her to be one of those backup singers and then in a white dress. So that took a while.
It also was only within the past couple of years that I realized that a lot of the sort of classical, but silent movie sounding music that I had always thought was composed by the guy who did the incidental music was actually Beethoven.
Oh, really?
ARI KAHAN: Because Beethoven's not credited.
So that little like a little violin thing that happens …
ARI KAHAN: Or when Swan is going into phoenix's dressing room. When
Winslow is escaping from prison. Well, it's Beethoven piano trios for the most part.
So, you don't need to get permission from the Beethoven estate on that…
ARI KAHAN: Well, I think that they would have had to pay the orchestra involved and I can easily imagine them omitting credit to avoid doing that. Hoping nobody would notice. And nobody did, obviously.
Until you've just brought it up.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, sorry.
That's okay. It's not, it's not our problem. One of the things that, that I found the Swan Archives to be so helpful on—well, lots of things, uh, when I discovered it years ago and I've returned to it as new things have popped up or I've dug a little deeper—was your explanation of the Swan Song debacle. As a frequent viewer of the movie. I wasn't noticing truncated shots. That I didn't notice until you showed us those shots. But obviously the mattes, particularly at the press conference, are really, really terrible. If I'm noticing them, they're bad. Can you just give us a brief history of why they had to do that?
ARI KAHAN: Sure. So, it goes to Beef electrocution. In the early seventies, there was a band called Stone the Crows, whose guitarist was a guy named Les Harvey and Peter Grant, who would later manage Led Zeppelin, managed Stone The Crows. And Les Harvey was—in a freak accident—electrocuted on stage. I think his guitar was badly grounded or something along those lines, in 1971 or 72.
And when Peter Grant learned that there was a film coming out in which a rock guitarist is electrocuted on stage, he assumed, that it was making fun of what had happened to his friend, Les Harvey. And by that time he was managing Led Zeppelin.
I should say in De Palma's defense that Beef’s electrocution shows up in early drafts of the script that were written before Les Harvey suffered his accident. So, this was life imitating art, imitating life, you know, rather than the other way around. De Palma clearly did not take that plot and probably didn't even know about what had happened to Les Harvey.
But anyway, by the time Peter Grant got wind of this, Phantom had already been shot, but not yet released. This was in the summer of 1974. And by sheer absolute sheer coincidence, Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin had just gotten a trademark on Swan Song for their record label. And the first record to come out on the Swan Song label was Bad Company's first record, and that was in somewhere around June of 1974. So that's when their trademark was perfected, and Phantom was scheduled to be released a few months later at the end of October.
And Peter Grant went to 20th Century Fox, which had just purchased Phantom from Ed Pressman and DePalma. You know, it's important for the story to know that Phantom was independently produced. It wasn't financed by Fox. Pressman and DePalma raised money to make this movie in the hopes that they would then sell it to some distributor for more than they had paid to make it.
And it turned out that there was a, quite a bidding war among several studios, which Fox won. And Fox paid more for Phantom than anyone had ever paid for an independent film to that point in history. They had very high expectations for it. So that sale had just closed, but Pressman and De Palma and everyone else hadn't been paid yet by Fox.
And of course, they had run out of money and owed everybody money, everyone who had worked on the film. So, they were in kind of a desperate situation. And Peter Grant went to Fox and said, “I'll sue you and prevent release of this film.” And the only thing that Fox could do was to tell Pressman and De Palma, you need to fix this.
And the only way they could fix it was by removing all of the references to Swan Song, so that Peter Grant wouldn't have grounds for his claim, because he obviously can't claim you can't have a film with an electrocution of a rock star. Really, all he had was the Swan Song thing.
And so that was done very, very hastily. They were still working on it in early October, even though the film was scheduled for release at the end of October. And so, basically, Fox signed a deal with Led Zeppelin saying we won't release the film with any of this Swan Song prominently shown. Which is a very stupid resolution really because Peter Grant in the end did not prevent distribution of a film with an electrocution of a rock star, which was his original concern.
All he really managed to do was mangle somebody else's.
And so the end result is that the film that we've all been watching for the last 50 years, there's a little bit cut out of it. There's some lovely crane shots that you missed because what the DePalma had done through the film was start on this Swan Song logo or the Swan name and then move away from it to whatever was going on. So that you have the impression that Swan was everywhere.
And so that whole thing was lost and, you know, as you and everybody else noticed, some of it's very noticeable, particularly the bird at the airport. Which is too bad.
I understand that you have a secret print of the film in which all those logos had been restored. In addition to fixing the crane shots and having shots that no longer have the terrible matte on them, is there anything else in that version that we wouldn't have seen before?
ARI KAHAN: It's not a secret print, really. It was just reconstructing the film the way that it was intended to be, using footage that had been assumed to have been destroyed decades ago, but which I eventually found and digitized. And then with the help of a couple of other folks, put the movie back together.
The most challenging part: there's a couple of challenging parts to that.
You know, it's not just a matter of sticking things in. The footage was without sound. And so, if you're making a scene a few seconds longer, for example, and there's music underlying that scene, what are you going to do? Are you going to start the music a little bit later? Are you going to end it a little bit earlier?
Are you going to play it a little bit slower so that it fills up these extra seconds? Are you going to loop it? Are you going to find some other piece of music that was probably intended to go there in the first place? So there's that problem.
And then the podium scene, which is the worst offender—at the airport—the original, they actually worked on the negative to put the dead bird on. And so, the original footage for that podium didn't exist. But we knew what the podium was supposed to look like, because there's a photo that was used for the German promotional campaign—created obviously months before the film is released—and that still shows the podium the way that it's supposed to look.
So, I got my friend, Steve Rosenbaum, who is a special effects supervisor. He won Oscars for Forrest Gump and Avatar, I think. And he's about to win an Emmy—I will bet you a box of donuts—he's about to win an Emmy for his work on Masters of the Air. I gave him this image and the footage that's shown, you know, in the theater normally, and he reconstructed the podium for me. So that's how we did the podium.
But the other thing that was that if you go see the film now in the theater projected from DCP, the DCP master—which is the same master that we've used for the current blu rays—it was done by a company called Reliance Media Works in Burbank. And, I don't know what 17 year olds they had working on it, but they did the coloring and grading the way it's fashionable to do when they did it, you know, 10 years ago, which was a lot of orange, teal and the blacks are crushed so that anything that's really dark gray or dark brown, just black, so that the colors pop more, but you lose a lot of the detail, and to my eye it looks terrible.
And so, I used an earlier master of the film that looks more like it looked in the 70s as the base for the reconstruction. And then color matched the replacement footage to that.
It sounds beautiful.
ARI KAHAN: It's gorgeous. The only other thing that I suppose we could have done, but didn't, is there's originally footage of Winslow's face coming out of the record press looking all mangled. And I have that footage, but I didn't put it back in because that footage that DePalma deemed not appropriate to the tone of the film that he was making. And so, since the object of this game was to restore the film to the way that he would have wanted it, I let that out.
I think that was a wise choice. You know, I talked to Pete Gelderblom, who did the Raising Cainreconstruction. And it's a beautiful piece of work that he did. He was more constrained than you, because he was only allowed to use the footage which was there, and he just had to rearrange it. He repeats one shot, but he got it as close to the original shooting script as he could. I don't think Paul Hirsch was particularly thrilled with it, but De Palma was and has referred it as his director's cut. Did De Palma see your version and did he like it?
ARI KAHAN: Yeah. I did a cast and crew sort of screening in Los Angeles and Paul Williams came to that and Archie Hahn and so on. Ed Pressman, the producer. And there was tremendous enthusiasm, because none of them had ever seen the film that they made the way that it was supposed to be.
And I sent a copy to Paul Hirsch and I'm not sure whether DePalma heard about it from Pressman or from Paul Hirsch, but he asked to see it. And I sent it to him and I got a nice note from him saying, you know, that it was great, good job, la la la, it's great to see the film the way that it was, you know, the original cut.
So. Yes, he is. Definitely. He's seen it. He's happy with it. And Ed Pressman, in particular, wanted to have that version released on home video or in some other way. And we went to Fox. This is before Disney. It was still Fox. And Fox said, well, you know, we could consider doing that under two conditions. First, Mr.
DePalma approves. Well, yes, check box checked there. He does.
And second, we made this deal with Led Zeppelin back in 1974, where we agreed not to do this. And if you can get them to waive their rights under that agreement, then yeah, sure. So, I worked with Ed Pressman and we put together a bunch of testimonials from people that we thought Led Zeppelin might respect, like Brett Easton Ellis and I think Guillermo del Toro and others, and sent a package off to Led Zeppelin through their lawyers. And God bless them, they got back to us in less than a week and said no.
At least they didn't leave you hanging.
ARI KAHAN: At least they didn't leave us hanging. That's right.
So, your archive is amazing and is hour’s worth of fun to go through it.
ARI KAHAN: It's a rabbit warren. Yeah, I wish it were a little better organized.
How did it get started? Well first, when did you start collecting memorabilia and then how did that grow into the archive?
ARI KAHAN: I started collecting memorabilia right after I saw the film when I was 12. And that was obviously pre internet and pre-eBay. And it was a lot harder to get stuff. Bt I would frequent science fiction conventions and horror conventions and comic book shops.
And there were a whole bunch of people who knew me as that kid who's always looking for Phantomstuff. And I was the kind of nerd who kept a log with the what everybody else was also looking for. And so, if I were at some convention and the guy who was collecting Olivia Newton, John's stuff, if I saw something interesting—not that there is anything interesting about it, but anyway—if I saw something interesting about Olivia Newton, John, I would run to the pay phone and call him and say, Hey, you want this? And I would pick it up for him.
And so, there was a lot of returning of favorites where there would be people who were going to cons that I wasn't going to. And if they saw Phantom stuff, they would pick it up for me and that kind of thing. And so, you know, that became the way to get the posters from every country in the world that it was released in and the lobby cards and everything else and it started filling up, taking up more and more space over time and grew into, you know, trailers and magazines and everything else.
And then when the site came out in around 2006, I put up the first version of the site. People who either had worked on the film or had something interesting would get in touch with me and say, “You know, I have this. I see you have a good home for it. Do you want it?” And of course, you know, eBay was a way to fill in some gap.
Is there, within what your current collection holds, is there a prized possession that, you know, if there was a fire and you only grabbed one of those pieces, what would you take with you?
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, in every dorm room and every apartment and every house I've ever lived in has hung John Alvin's art from the one sheet, and it's the same art that's on the cover of the soundtrack album. I just thought that was beautiful piece of art. And I think it was his second movie poster he painted. The first one would be for Blazing Saddles. And then he did Young Frankenstein, and if you look at the Young Frankenstein poster and the Phantom poster, you can see that there's a lot of stylistic similarities there.
But he went on to do, you know, E. T. and, you know, 130 odd other posters.
And at some point, he and I started corresponding and he finally said, “You know, I have something that I think you should have. Give me your mailing address.” And a few days later what showed up was his original painting, the comp painting for that poster, which he had had all this time. And so that would be the prize possession for sure.
Well, that qualifies, I think. Is there a Holy Grail out there that you're still looking for?
ARI KAHAN: The original art for the Corbin poster. Which is the “he's been maimed and framed, beaten, robbed, and mutilated.” That artwork would be a Holy Grail.
As well as, well, the Phantom's original helmet. Now, it turns out there's a couple of them, at least. And one of them Guillermo del Toro now has. He just bought the Phantom's costume after it failed to sell at auction at Bonham's. And the other helmet the Pressmanfamily has, so those would be a grail. There's a lot of things that I'm sure no longer exist that would be the grail, like, you know, the Phantom's contract.
Any number of props would be fun, but there's not very many known to still exist. I think Peter Elbling still has—or I think his son has it right now—the microphone that he used with a knife on it. And Garrett Graham still has his guitar strap, Beef’s guitar strap. And I think he may still have the plunger.
But not the antler belt?
ARI KAHAN: No, not as far as I know. That'd be tough to ship.
It would be. Yes. Dangerous to keep around the house. You could bump into it. On the site you kindly show all kinds of different memorabilia that you have or that exists around the world. And you also have a section called Inexplicable Crap. Is there one piece in there that just stands out for you as what in the world were they thinking?
ARI KAHAN: Maybe the Death Records pillow. Like I can understand why they did. They made prototypes that never went out for sale. Why anybody would want it, you know, a dead bird, probably somebody wants a dead bird pillow, but the market would be limited.
When the DVD for Phantom Palooza 2 came out, I bought that and then heard you talking somewhere about getting Jessica Harper to sing Old Souls, which is on the DVD. We just see the very end of her singing it. I'm guessing there were some technical problems or something with that.
ARI KAHAN: It wasn't technical problems. It was the Paul Williams rider, which required that the show not be recorded. And I think that midway through Jessica singing, somebody might have said, or actually I think that's an audience--t might be an audience shot thing that we have. There's probably lots and lots of cell phone video out there of the show, but nobody related to who worked on Phantom Palooza—and I was one of the people who worked on Phantom Palooza—is going to be out there distributing anything that we agreed with Paul we would not even shoot. But, but yes, Jessica was absolutely a highlight of the show there.
I was surprised that she went full force on the end of that song.
ARI KAHAN: Well, there were no plans for her to perform. And the morning of the rehearsal, I said, “Hey, Jessica, you want to go down and watch Paul rehearse?” And I took her over to the auditorium and I was hoping that, you know, seeing that and being a performer at heart, she might be inspired to maybe, you know, participate. And she decided she would do Old Souls with Paul's band. And then she went back to the hotel and practiced the song, I think, all day in her hotel room and then, you know, knocked it out of the park that night. That's how I remember it. And then she came off stage and said, you know, now I know how Mick Jagger feels.
It's a pretty stunning debut for her in that movie, to come from essentially nowhere—although she'd done things before that. And then the run that she had in the seventies, pretty unequaled when it comes to being the, um…
ARI KAHAN: The queen of cult.
Yeah. The queen of cult. And just the range, from Suspiria to My Favorite Year. You don't get a much broader range than that.
ARI KAHAN: Pennies From Heaven.
Yes, just phenomenal. Even just the wheat speech in Love and Death is worth the price of admission alone.
ARI KAHAN: She played, uh, Gary Shandling's wife on The Gary Shandling show in the last season, named Phoebe, of all things. And in, I'm pretty sure it was the last episode of that show, she's held hostage by a phantom who lives under the set, who threatens to sabotage Gary's show, unless she will sing his song. And she ends up singing his song, which turns out to be YMCA. Wearing a dress that is very, very reminiscent of the one she wore to sing Old Souls in.
And they even make a Pennies From Heaven joke. So, it's very inside baseball, I should say.
Speaking of actors from that, I've always been blown away by William Finley's performance in the movie. I think it was Paul Williams who said something like, you know, he spends three quarters of the movie acting with one eye and metal teeth, and that's all he's got. And it's just flawless and so heartbreaking.
And I'm just sorry we didn't get to see him in more movies. He's delightful in The Fury in a very small part. He's all over the early films. And I got the sense since I read somewhere that you did a eulogy for him, that you must have developed a friendship over the years.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah. And, before we get to that, you say heartbreaking, right?
And I think that that's one of the things about Phantom that was so ballsy. It’s obviously a spoof of many things, but while being a spoof, it tries to get you to care about the characters. If, if you were not, you know, devastated at the end when Winslow dies just before Phoenix recognizes that it was him all along, you know, the film has failed.
Whereas in other spoofs, you know, Rocky Horror doesn't ask you to care whether Brad and Janet will get back together after their experience or anything like that. Nobody asked you to care about the characters at all. And I think it's a huge risk that DePalma took in making a film like this: while simultaneously being a parody and a satire and a spoof and everything else, he wants you to care about the outcome.
As far as Finley, I got to know Bill a little bit towards the end of his life after meeting him at Phantom Palooza. I went to New York and spent a little time with him and now I know his wife Susan pretty well and his son Dash a little bit. And when he died, Susan asked If I would put together some kind of a video montage for the funeral, which wasn't that—it's a celebration of life was what she was calling it. And I did that. And every time I had it finished—and, you know, I had like a day and a half to do this. And then I had to take the red eye to New York from California for this, for this event—every time I had it finished, she would send me a few more pictures and I'd have to, you know, redo it.
And then she asked, could you set it to music? Could it be set to Faust? You know, okay. You know, you don't say no to a widow, right?
And I was working at the time too. So, when I finally flew to New York, I was completely exhausted. And I got to the chapel I guess a couple of hours before the ceremony was supposed to start, so that we could make sure that this thing would play on their equipment and so on.
And I’m taking a nap on one of the pews and Susan showed up with, you know, programs under her arm. And I picked up a program and saw that, right after Garrett Graham and Jessica Harper was supposed to speak, I'm supposed to speak. But I this was the first I was hearing about it. And so, I spent the first, unfortunately, the first part of the ceremony—where I really wanted to be paying full attention—kind of scrambling together what I was going to say.
I have no idea what I said at this point. I hope it did Bill justice and didn't offend anybody, but I couldn't tell you now a single word of what I ended up saying there. And it's in front of, you know, various of the icons of my childhood, right, are in that chapel. So it's kind of like all of the nightmares of going to school and realizing that there's a test in the subject that you never took, and that you're not wearing pants, and all your ex-girlfriends are there laughing at you.
Because I have my own podcast that has to do with my series of books, and like your site, I want to make it perpetual. But there's really no way to do that unless I set up a fund so that after I die they keep paying the site to keep running it. Because as soon as that site shuts down, the podcast goes away. And the same thing will happen to the archive. Whoever is hosting it, unless they're paid, it's gonna go away. I'm wondering, do you have a plan in place for all that information?
ARI KAHAN: When I go, it goes.
Oh, I feel like I set you up for that. Okay. Can I propose an alternate ending to that?
ARI KAHAN: Sure.
You essentially have a book there. You just have it in web form. You should put that together so that when it is done, when you are done, it can just be put into a book because it already reads like a book.
ARI KAHAN: People have suggested that, and I've resisted doing a book because every now and then, some new fact comes to light that shows that something I had in there was wrong. And everything in there—virtually everything—is based on conversations that I've had with participants or material that came out at the time. None of it is taken from someone else's book or anything.
So it's all fairly firsthand, but people have fallible memory. So, for example, the guy who made the phantom's helmet assured me that he had made only one. And it's crazy, because every production wants to have multiple copies of any key prop, because if something happens to the prop during shooting, shooting would have to, you know, it's an incredibly expensive problem to stop shooting waiting for another one.
But as it turns out, he's, he's wrong. He made more than one. There is more than one. And so, every now and then, I have to correct something on the site. And if I put it out in book form, these books would be wrong. Potentially, something could come out in the future that that would make something with my name on it. Wrong.
Imagine a book with a mistake. I can't imagine.
ARI KAHAN: Exactly. And I can't abide that. So, it exists in electronic form so that I can edit it and improve it.
Well, I would argue that you can do the ebooks, but that's, you know, that's your circus. It's not my circus. But you do raise an interesting question about misconceptions. I know that one of the biggest misconceptions is that it ran in Winnipeg forever and it didn't. I can—as someone who lived here in Minneapolis when Harold and Maude ran at the Westgate Theater for two and a half years—I can assure you it ran there for two and a half years, because I was there those two and a half years. So that was real. Is there another misconception out there about the movie that you just can't—like a whack a mole—get rid of?
ARI KAHAN: So many. In fact, um, I think on my FAQ page, I list some of them.
Is there an egregious one that just gets under your skin?
ARI KAHAN: Yeah. The idea that it was only popular in Winnipeg and a couple other places is just completely wrong. It was big in Japan. It eventually became a big in Los Angeles. It never did anything in New York. Where it was actually biggest was not Winnipeg, it was El Salvador, where the songs hit number one on the radio. More than once. And it was brought back and revived many times. I get more mail from El Salvador than from anybody else.
As we wrap up here, my favorite scene in the movie is the closing credits. I just love the music. I love what Paul Hirsch did with the assembly of that. And for years, I was living under the mistaken impression that in the credits, when it said Montage by Paul Hirsch, that that's what I was looking at was that montage. That's a montage.
Then I was disabused of that in an interview with him—which I clarified with him. It was very nice to get back to me on Facebook when I said, “Am I correct in my understanding that the montage in the middle of the movie, the writing montage, you never saw that until the film was done? You had to put all the timing of that together, the animation of the writing, the placement of Phoenix's face on this part of the screen, and the Phantom and that, all the dissolves, all that timing?”
And he said, “Yes it was a one-shot thing.” And I think for that he does deserve a special “Montage by Paul Hirsch,” because even today, with all the stuff we have, that would still be a challenging thing to do. And then not to be able to see the end result.
But even with that, I just still love the closing credits. It's a combination of music, it allows me to revisit all my favorite scenes in the movie and a lot of my favorite shots. Do you have a favorite scene?
ARI KAHAN: Well, I actually like those closing credits too, because most of the shots in those closing credits aren't actually in the film. Most of them are outtakes. And so, for example, in those closing credits, you have Swan splashing in the tub. There's Archie Han twirling around like this. And most of them, alternate takes. And they're clearly things that Paul Hirsch thought were charming and wanted to include that he couldn't put in the film.
I suspect that you've held 35-millimeter film in your hands and cut shot A to shot B. I've only done that in 16mm. To keep a piece of film that short, hanging on a hook somewhere going, “I know I'm going to want to use that later.” Then finding that. I don't think people today understand what skill level was involved in, you know, that sort of thing, or the TIE Fighters in Star Wars that he did, or all that connection of little pieces, and tracking that and knowing that that's going to go there and that's going to go. It's so much easier today. And you had to make firmer decisions then earlier in the process than you do now, right? And fixing things was much more arduous.
ARI KAHAN: You know, I think if they had to fix the Swan Song stuff out of Phantom and they were doing it using digital technology today, obviously, it'd be much faster and so on, but, uh, doing it on film. And having to send each change into the processing house, and then getting it back a few days later, and, uh, you know, it's a lot of work. It'd be horrible.
But favorite scenes: The Goodbye Eddie number just remains a favorite.
Do you know why? It's not fancy DePalma. It's a wide shot, two shot, a single.
ARI KAHAN: That's right. It's the most conventionally shot thing in the film, but Archie Han is just so great in it.
His delivery boy in My Favorite Year—when he does the punching—he just does the exact right thing at the right time. And I wish there'd been bigger movies with more Archie Han in them than what we got.
ARI KAHAN: So does Archie.
Okay, last question. If you take Phantom of the Paradise out of the mix, what would you say is your favorite De Palma movie?
ARI KAHAN: Well, I'm not sure that Phantom of the Paradise is my favorite De Palma movie. It is a sentimental childhood favorite. But I go back and forth between Carlito's Way, Casualties of War, Femme Fatale, Carrie. And Raising Cain.
I think that Femme Fatale is probably the one that came closest to his intention.
It's the one that I think of as being, like, the most successfully realized, and I love it for that reason. Carlito's Way is just, by, I think, any objective standard, probably his best work. Then I love Blow Out.
I'm not on the Blow Out train as much as everybody else. Maybe because it just, it goes so dark.
ARI KAHAN: That's what I love about it is the devastating ending.
I really love Peet Gelderboom's version of Raising Cain. Given all that, and given that you're 12 years old in 1974, 75, somewhere in there, and you're you're a movie freak at this point, which is a really good time in film history from that era. Is there a favorite?
ARI KAHAN: So, I was really lucky that I was when I was 15 or 16, I was working at a theater called the UC theater in Berkeley, which was a repertory house that showed a different double bill every night. And any night that I wasn't working, I was there seeing movies.
So, I saw lots and lots and lots of movies. And despite all that and all the weird stuff I saw, my favorites are probably the same things that every 70s kid's favorites were: Star Wars, Harold and Maude, The Godfather.
I loved Harold and Maude so much that I bought an old hearse at one point.
Okay, you win.
ARI KAHAN: And I didn't keep it for long. It got like, I don't know how many gallons per mile. It was just not economical to have as a car, but it was fun for a while.
I was very lucky when they hit the two-year mark here in Minneapolis, and I was a junior in high school, maybe. I happen to know the son of the local movie critic for the paper, and the critic knew that I was a big fan of Harold and Maude. And so he took me along on his press junkets. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort, got to chat with him. I got to hang out with Ruth Gordon for the day.
ARI KAHAN: The only one I can propose to top that would be when I was in high school, I was writing for the school paper. Actually, I had stopped going to high school. I was the entertainment editor for the school paper, and I had stopped going to high school. I dropped out, but I kept submitting articles to the paper. And at some point, the newspaper staff changed my title from Entertainment Editor to Foreign Correspondent.
And on the strength of that—when Tim Curry's first record, Read My Lips, came out, and he was coming to town to sign autographs at Tower Records—myself and a writer from the Berkeley Bar, which was a newspaper back then, had lunch with him around the corner from Tower Records just before he went off to do his autographing. And I was a huge Tim Curry fan. And I had to try to keep that under wraps and, you know, not ask any Rocky Horror related questions.
And that was my claim to fame until all of the Phantom nonsense started.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with the writer of a great new book, “London After Midnight: The Lost Film,” a book about the classic lost Lon Chaney film.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Daniel’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/p/London-After-Midnight-The-Lost-Film-100075993768254/
Buy the Book “London After Midnight: The Lost Film”: https://www.amazon.com/London-After-Midnight-Lost-Film/dp/1399939890
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
TRANSCRIPT
John: So, Daniel, when did you first become aware of London After Midnight?
Daniel: I was about seven years old when I first stumbled into Lon Chaney through my love of all things Universal horror, and just that whole plethora of characters and actors that you just knew by name, but hadn't necessarily seen away from the many still photographs of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And the Phantom was the one to really spark my interest.
But this was prior to eBay. I couldn't see the film of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera for a year. So, I kind of had the ultimate build to books and documentaries, just teasing me, teasing me all the time. And when I eventually did watch a few documentaries, the one thing that they all had in common was the name Lon Chaney.
I just thought I need to learn more about this character Lon Chaney, because he just found someone of superhuman proportions just who have done all of these crazy diverse characters. And, that's where London After Midnight eventually peeked out at me and, occupied a separate interest as all the Chaney characterizations do.
John: So how did you get into the Universal films? Were you watching them on VHS? Were they on tv? Did the DVDs happen by then?
Daniel: I was still in the VHS days. My dad is a real big fan of all this as well. So he first saw Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on TV when he was a kid. And prior to me being born he had amassed a huge VHS collection and a lot of those had Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Hull, Claude Rains, Vincent Price, what have you.
And a lot of them were dedicated to Universal horrors. And as a young curious kid, my eyes eventually crossed these beautiful cases and I really wanted to watch them. I think my first one I ever watched was The Mummy's Tomb or Curse of the Mummy. And it's just grown ever since, really.
John: You're starting at the lesser end of the Universal monsters. It's like someone's starting the Marx Brothers at The Big Store and going, "oh, these are great. I wonder if there's anything better?"
Jim: Well, I kinda like the fact that you have come by this fascination, honestly, as my father would say. You sort of inherited the family business, if you will. The book is great. The book is just great. And I'll be honest, I had no, except for recording the novel that John wrote, I really had no frame of reference for London after Midnight.
John: Well, Jim, were you a monster guy? Were you a Universal Monster kid?
Jim: Oh yeah. I mean, I had all the models. I love all of that, and certainly knew about Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I knew he was the man with a thousand faces. I knew he, when he died, he wrote JR. on his makeup kit and gave it to his kid. So, I knew stuff. But London after Midnight I didn't know at all, except for the sort of iconic makeup and that image, which I was familiar with. What was the inspiration for you in terms of writing this book?
Daniel: Like you say, I really had no immediate go-to reference for London after Midnight, away from one or two images in a book. Really clearly they were very impactful images of Chaney, skulking around the old haunted mansion with Edna Tichenor by his side with the lantern, the eyes, the teeth, the cloak, the top hat, the webs, everything. Pretty much everything that embodies a good atmospheric horror movie, but obviously we couldn't see it.
So that is all its fangs had deepened itself into my bloodstream at that point, just like, why is it lost? Why can't I see it? And again, the term lost film was an alien concept to me at a young age. I've always been a very curious child. Anything that I don't know or understand that much, even things I do understand that well, I always have to try to find out more, 'cause I just can't accept that it's like a bookend process. It begins and then it ends.
And that was the thing with London after Midnight. Everything I found in books or in little interviews, they were just all a bit too brief. And I just thought there has to be a deeper history here, as there are with many of the greatest movies of all time. But same with the movies that are more obscure. There is a full history there somewhere because, 'cause a film takes months to a year to complete.
It was definitely a good challenge for me. When we first had our first home computer, it was one of those very few early subjects I was typing in like crazy to try to find out everything that I could. And, that all incubated in my little filing cabinet, which I was able to call upon years later.
Some things which were redundant, some things which I had the only links to that I had printed off in advance quite, sensibly so, but then there were certain things that just had lots of question marks to me. Like, what year did the film perish? How did it perish? The people who saw the film originally?
And unlike a lot of Chaney films, which have been covered in immense detail, London after Midnight, considering it's the most famous of all lost films, still for me, had major holes in it that I just, really wanted to know the answers to.
A lot of those answers, eventually, I found, even people who knew and institutions that knew information to key events like famous MGM Fire, they were hard pressed to connect anything up, in regards to the film. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. I had all these amazing facts. However, none of them kind of made sense with each other.
My favorite thing is researching and finding the outcomes to these things. So that's originally what spiraled me into the storm of crafting this, initial dissertation that I set myself, which eventually became so large. I had to do it as a book despite, I'd always wanted to do a book as a kid.
When you see people that you idolize for some reason, you just want to write a book on them. Despite, there had been several books on Lon Chaney. But I just always knew from my childhood that I always wanted to contribute a printed volume either on Chaney or a particular film, and London after Midnight seemed to present the opportunity to me.
I really just didn't want it to be a rehash of everything that we had seen before or read before in other accounts or in the Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, but just with a new cover. So, I thought I would only do a book if I could really contribute a fresh new perspective on the subject, which I hope hopefully did.
John: Oh, you absolutely did. And this is an exhaustive book and a little exhausting. There's a ton of stuff in here. You mentioned Famous Monster of the Filmland, which is where I first saw that image. There's at least one cover of the magazine that used that image. And Forrest Ackerman had some good photos and would use them whenever he could and also would compare them to Mark the Vampire, the remake, partially because I think Carol Borland was still alive and he could interview her. And he talked about that remake quite a bit.
But that iconic image that he put on the cover and whenever he could in the magazine-- Jim and I were talking before you came on, Daniel, about in my mind when you think of Lon Chaney, there's three images that come to mind: Phantom of the Opera, Quasimoto, and this one. And I think this one, the Man in the Beaver hat probably is the most iconic of his makeups, because, 'cause it is, it's somehow it got adopted into the culture as this is what you go to when it's a creepy guy walking around. And that's the one that everyone remembers. Do you have any idea, specifically what his process was for making that look, because it, it is I think ultimately a fairly simple design. It's just really clever.
Daniel: Yes, it probably does fall into the category of his more simplistic makeups. But, again, Chaney did a lot of things simplistic-- today --were never seen back then in say, 1927. Particularly in the Phantom of the Opera's case in 1925, in which a lot of that makeup today would be done through CG, in terms of trying to eliminate the nose or to make your lips move to express dialogue.
Chaney was very fortunate to have lived in the pantomime era, where he didn't have to rely on how his voice would sound, trying to talk through those dentures, in which case the makeup would probably have to have been more tamed to allow audio recorded dialogue to properly come through.
But with regards to the beaver hat makeup, he had thin wires that fitted around his eyes to give it a more hypnotic stare. The teeth, which he had constructed by a personal dentist, eventually had a wire attached to the very top that held the corners of his mouth, opening to a nice curved, fixated, almost joker like grin.
You can imagine with the monocles around his eyes, he was thankful there probably wasn't that much wind on a closed set, because he probably couldn't have closed his eyes that many times. But a lot of these things become spoken about and detailed over time with mythic status. That he had to have his eyes operated on to achieve the constant widening of his eyelids. Or the teeth -- he could only wear the teeth for certain periods of time before accidentally biting his tongue or his lips, et cetera.
But Chaney certainly wasn't a sadist, with himself, with his makeups. He was very professional. Although he did go through undoubtedly a lot of discomfort, especially probably the most, explicit case would be for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which his whole body is crooked down into a stooped position.
But, with London After Midnight, I do highly suspect that the inspiration for that makeup in general came from the Dracula novel. And because MGM had not acquired the rights to the Dracula novel, unlike how Universal acquired the rights of the Hunchback or, more importantly, Phantom of the Opera, by which point Gaston Leroux was still alive.
It was just a loose adaptation of Dracula. But nevertheless, when you read the description of Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, he does bear a similarity to Chaney's vampire, in which it's the long hair, a mouth full of sharp teeth, a ghastly pale palor and just dressed all in black and carries around a lantern.
Whereas Bela Lugosi takes extraordinary leaps and turns away from the Stoker novel. But it must have definitely had an impact at the time, enough for MGM to over-market the image of Chaney's vampire, which only appears in the film for probably just under four minutes, compared to his detective disguise, which is the real main character of the film.
Although the thing we all wanna see is Cheney moving about as the vampire and what facial expressions he pulled. It's just something that we just want to see because it's Lon Chaney.
John: Right. And it makes you wonder if he had lived and had gotten to play Dracula, he kind of boxed himself into a corner, then if he'd already used the look from the book, you wonder what he would've come up with, if Lugosi hadn't done it, and if Chaney had had been our first Dracula.
Jim: You know, the other thing that I think of strictly like through my actor filter is here's a guy who -- take Hunchback or Phantom or even this thing -- whatever process he went through to put that makeup on, you know, was hours of work, I'm sure. Hunchback several hours of work to get to that, that he did himself, and then they'd film all day.
So, on top of, I mean, I just think that that's like, wow, when you think about today where somebody might go into a makeup chair and have two or three people working on them to get the look they want. Even if it took a few hours, that person is just sitting there getting the makeup done. He's doing all of this, and then turns in a full day, uh, in front of the cameras, which to me is like, wow, that's incredible.
Daniel: Definitely, it's like two jobs in one. I imagine for an actor it must be really grueling in adapting to a makeup, especially if it's a heavy makeup where it covers the whole of your head or crushes down your nose, changes your lips, the fumes of chemicals going into your eyes.
But then by the end of it, I imagine you are quite exhausted from just your head adapting to that. But then you have to go out and act as well. With Chaney, I suppose he could be more of a perfectionist than take as much time as he wanted within reason. And then once he came to the grueling end of it all, he's actually gotta go out and act countless takes. Probably repair a lot of the makeup as well after, after a couple of takes, certainly with things like the Hunchback or the Phantom of the Opera.
John: And, you know, it's not only is he doing the makeup and acting, but in, you know, not so much in London After Midnight, but in Phantom of the Opera, he is quite athletic. When the phantom moves, he really moves. He's not stooped. He's got a lot of energy to him and he's got a makeup on that, unlike the Quasimoto makeup, what he's attempting to do with the phantom is, reductive. He's trying to take things away from his face.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
John: And he's using all the tricks he knows and lighting to make that happen, but that means he's gotta hit particular marks for the light to hit it just right. And for you to see that his face is as, you know, skull-like as he made it. When you see him, you know, in London After Midnight as the professor inspector character, he has got a normal full man's face. It's a real face. Much like his son, he had a kind of a full face and what he was able to do with a phantom and take all that away, and be as physical as he was, is just phenomenal. I mean, he was a really, besides the makeup, he was a really good actor.
Daniel: Oh, definitely.
Jim: I agree with that completely. I kind of in what I watched, I wonder if he was the makeup artist, but not the actor and he did exactly the same makeup on somebody else. And so we had the same image. If those things would've resonated with us the way they do today. I think it had everything to do with who he was and his abilities in addition to the incredible makeup. He was just a tremendous performer.
Daniel: Absolutely. He was a true multitasker. In his early days of theater, he was not only an actor, but he was a choreographer. He had a lot of jobs behind the scenes as well. Even when he had become a star in his own time, he would still help actors find the character within them. like Norma Sheera, et cetera. People who were kind of new to the movie making scene and the directors didn't really have that much patience with young actors or actresses.
Whereas Chaney, because of his clout in the industry, no one really interfered with Chaney's authority on set. But he would really help actors find the character, find the emotion, 'cause it was just all about how well you translate it over for the audience, as opposed to the actor feeling a certain way that convinces themselves that they're the character. Chaney always tried to get the emotions across to the audience. Patsy Ruth Miller, who played Esemerelda in in the Hunchback, said that Chaney directed the film more than the director actually did.
The director was actually even suggested by Chaney. So, Chaney really had his hands everywhere in the making of a film. And Patsy Ruth Miller said the thing that she learned from him was that it's the actress's job to make the audience feel how the character's meant to be feeling, and not necessarily the actor to feel what they should be feeling based on the script and the settings and everything.
So I think, that's why Chaney in particular stands out, among all of the actors of his time.
John: I think he would've transitioned really well into sound. I think, he had everything necessary to make that transition.
Jim: There's one sound picture with him in it, isn't there, doesn't he? Doesn't he play a ventriloquist?
John: I believe so.
Daniel: Yes, it was a remake of The Unholy Three that he had made in 1925 as Echo the ventriloquist, and the gangster. And yes, by the time MGM had decided to pursue talkies -- also, funny enough, they were one of the last studios to transition to, just because they were the most, one, probably the most dominant studio in all of Hollywood, that they didn't feel the pressure to compete with the burgeoning talkie revolution.
So they could afford to take their time, they could release a talkie, but then they could release several silent films and the revenue would still be amazing for the studio. Whereas other studios probably had to conform really quick just because they didn't have the star system, that MGM shamelessly flaunted.
And several Chaney films had been transitioned to sound at this point with or without Chaney. But for Chaney himself, because he himself was the special effect, it was guaranteed to be a winner even if it had been an original story that isn't as remembered today strictly because people get to hear the thing that's been denied them for all this time, which is Chaney's voice.
And he would've transitioned very easily to talkies is because he had a very rich, deep voice, which, coming from theater, he had to have had, in terms of doing dialogue. He wasn't someone like a lot of younger actors who had started out predominantly in feature films who could only pantomime lines. Chaney actually knew how to deliver dialogue, so it did feel natural and it didn't feel read off the page.
And he does about five voices in The Unholy Three. So MGM was truly trying to market, his voice for everything that they could. As Mrs. O'Grady, his natural voice, he imitates a parrot and a girl. And yeah, he really would've flourished in the sound era.
Jim: Yeah.
John: Any surprises, as it sounds like you were researching this for virtually your whole life, but were there any surprises that you came across, as you really dug in about the film?
Daniel: With regards to London after Midnight, the main surprise was undoubtedly the -- probably the star chapter of the whole thing -- which is the nitrate frames from an actual destroyed print of the film itself, which sounds crazy to even being able to say it. But, yeah the nitrate frames themselves presented a quandary of questions that just sent me into a whole nother research mode trying to find out where these impossible images came from, who they belonged to, why they even existed, why they specifically existed.
Because, looking for something that, you know, you are told doesn't exist. And then to find it, you kind of think someone is watching over you, planting this stuff as though it's the ultimate tease. To find a foreign movie poster for London After Midnight would be one thing, but to find actual pieces of the lost film itself. It was certainly the most out of body experience I've ever had. Just to find something that I set out to find, but then you find it and you still can't believe that you've actually found it.
John: How did you find it?
Daniel: I had connections with a few foreign archives who would befriend me and took to my enthusiasm with the silent era, and specifically Chaney and all the stars connected to Chaney films.
And, quite early on I was told that there were a few photo albums that had various snippets of silent films from Chaney. They didn't really go into what titles these were, 'cause they were just all a jumble. All I knew is that they came from (garbled) widow. And he had acquired prints of the whole films from various, I suppose, junk stores in Spain.
But not being a projectionist, he just purely took them at the face value that he just taken the images and snipping them up and putting them in photo albums, like how you would just do with photographs. And then the rest of the material was sadly discarded by fire. So, all we were left with were these snipped relics, survivors almost to several Chaney lost films. Some of them not lost, but there were films like The Phantom of the Opera in there, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mockery, The Unknown.
But then there were several lost films such as London After Midnight, the Big City, Thunder. And All the Brothers were Valiant, which are mainly other than Thunder are all totally complete lost films.
So, to find this little treasure trove, it was just finding out what the images meant and connecting them up, trying to put them in some sort of chronological scholarly order. Grueling, but it was very fun at the same time. And because I had identified myself with all of these surviving production stills from the film -- a lot of them, which formed the basis of the 2002 reconstruction by Turner Classic Movies -- it didn't take me too long to identify what scenes these surviving nitrate frames were from.
But there were several frames which had sets that I recognized and costumes that I recognized, but in the photographic stills, they don't occupy the same space at the same time. So, it's like the two separate elements had crossed over. So that left me with a scholarly, question of what I was looking at.
I was able to go back and, sort of rectify certain wrongs that have been accepted throughout the sixties as being the original, say, opening to London after Midnight. So I've, been able to disprove a few things that have made the film, I suppose, a bit more puzzling to audiences. Some audiences didn't really get what the plot was to begin with. So, it was nice to actually put a bit more order to the madness finally.
John: At what point did you come across the original treatment and the script?
Daniel: The treatment and the script, they came from a private collector who had bought them at auction a number of years ago who I was able to thankfully contact, and they still had the two documents in question. I had learned through Philip J Riley's previous books on London after Midnight that he had the two latter drafts of the script, the second edition and the third draft edition.
And, again, the question of why and where. I just always wondered where that first draft of the script was, hoping it would contain new scenes, and open new questions for me and to study. And once I've managed to find those two documents, they did present a lot of new, perspectives and material that added to the fuller plot of the original hypnotist scenario, as opposed to the shortened, time efficient London After Midnight film that was ultimately delivered to audiences. So again, it helped to put a little bit more order to the madness.
Jim: You found an actual piece of the film that you were able to, somebody got images from it? And then you found the scripts? But the images are terrific and they're all in your book. They came from what exactly?
Daniel: The just below 20 images of the film came from originally a distribution print, a Spanish distribution print, from about 1928. Originally, they were on 35 millimeter indicating that they were from the studio and as is with a lot of silent films that have been found in foreign archives.
Normally when a film is done with its distribution, it would have to be returned to the original studio to be destroyed, except for the original negative and a studio print, because there is no reason why a studio would need to keep the thousands of prints when they have the pristine copy in their vault.
But, in a lot of smaller theater cases, in order to save money on the postage of the shipping, they would just basically declare that they had destroyed the film on the studio's behalf. There was no record system with this stuff and that's how a lot of these films ended up in the basements of old theaters, which are eventually when they closed, the assets were sold off to collectors or traveling showmen. And eventually these films found their ways into archives or again, private collections. Some of which people know what they have.
A lot of times they don't know what they have because they're more obsessed with, naturally, more dedicated to preserving the films of their own culture that was shown at the time, as opposed to a foreign American title, which they probably assume they already have a copy of. But it's how a lot of these films get found.
And, with the London After Midnight, example, there were the images that I found spanned the entire seven reels, because they came from different points in the film. It wasn't a single strip of film, of a particular scene. Having thankfully the main source that we have for London After Midnight is the cutting continuity, which is the actual film edited down shot for shot, length for length.
And it describes, briefly, although descriptive enough, what is actually in each and every single shot of the film. And comparing the single frame images from the film with this document, I was able to identify at what point these frames came from during the film, which again spanned the entire seven reels, indicating that a complete seven reel version of the film had gotten out under the studio system at one point.
As is the case, I'm assuming, 'cause these came from the same collection, I'm assuming it was the same with the other lost Chaney films that again, sadly only survive in snippet form.
John: It's like somebody was a collector and his wife said, "well, we don't have room for all this. Just take the frames you like and we'll get rid of the rest of it."
So, you mentioned in passing the 2002 reconstruction that Turner Classic Movies did using the existing stills. I don't know if they were working from any of the scripts or not. That was the version I originally saw when I was working on writing, those portions of The Misers Dream that mentioned London After Midnight.
Based on what you know now, how close is that reconstruction and where do you think they got it right and where'd they get it wrong?
Daniel: The 2002, reconstruction, while a very commendable production, it does stray from the original edited film script. Again, the problem that they clearly faced on that production is that there were not enough photographed scenes to convey all the photographed scenes from the film. So what they eventually fell into the trap of doing was having to reuse the same photograph to sometimes convey two separate scenes, sometimes flipping the image to appear on the opposite side of the camera. And, because of the certain lack of stills in certain scenes cases, they had to rewrite them.
And sometimes a visual scene had to have been replaced with an inter-title card, merely describing what had happened or describing a certain period in time, as opposed to showing a photograph of what we're meant to be seeing as opposed to just reading. So, they did the best with what they had.
But since then, there have been several more images crop up in private collections or in the archives. So, unless a version of the film gets found, it's certainly an endeavor that could be revisited, I think, and either do a new visual reconstruction of sort, or attempt some sort remake of the film even.
Jim: That's an idea.
John: They certainly have the materials to do that. I've got an odd question. There's one famous image, a still image from the film, showing Chaney as Professor Burke, and he is reaching out to the man in the beaver hat whose back is to us. Is that a promo photo? Spoiler alert, Burke is playing the vampire in the movie. He admits that that's him. So, he never would've met the character. What is the story behind that photo?
Daniel: There are actually three photographs depicting that, those characters that you described. There are the two photographs which show Chaney in the Balfor mansion seemingly directing a cloaked, top hatted figure with long hair, with its back towards us. And then there is another photograph of Chaney in the man in the beaver hat disguise with a seemingly twin right beside him outside of a door.
Basically the scenes in the film in which Chaney appear to the Hamlin residents, the people who are being preyed upon by the alleged vampires, the scenes where Chaney and the vampire need to coexist in the same space or either appear to be in the same vicinity to affect other characters while at the same time interrogating others, Chaney's character of Burke employs a series of assistants to either dress up as vampires or at certain times dress up as his version of the vampire to parade around and pretend that they are the man in the beaver hat. Those particular shots, though, the vampire was always, photographed from behind rather than the front.
The very famous scene, which was the scene that got first got me interested in London After Midnight, in which the maidm played by Polly Moran is in the chair shrieking at Chaney's winged self, hovering over her. It was unfortunate to me to realize that that was actually a flashback scene told from the maid's perspective.
And by the end of the film, the maid is revealed to be an informant of Burke, a secret detective also. So, it's really a strong suspension of disbelief has to be employed because the whole scene of Chaney chasing the maid through the house and appearing under the door, that was clearly just the MGMs marketing at work just to show Chaney off in a bizarre makeup with a fantastic costume.
Whereas he is predominantly the detective and the scenes where he's not needed to hypnotize a character in the full vampire makeup, he just employs an assistant who parades around in the house as him, all the times with his back turned so that the audience can't latch on as to who the character actually is, 'cause it must have posed quite a fun confusion that how can Chaney be a detective in this room where the maid has just ran from the Vampire, which is also Chaney?
John: Yeah, and it doesn't help that the plot is fairly convoluted anyway, and then you add that layer. So, do you think we'll ever see a copy of it? Do you think it's in a basement somewhere?
Daniel: I've always personally believed that the film does exist. Not personally out of just an unfounded fanboy wish, but just based on the evidence and examples of other films that have been found throughout time. Metropolis being probably the most prominent case.
But, at one point there was nothing on London After Midnight and now there is just short of 20 frames for the film. So, if that can exist currently now in the year 2023, what makes us think that more footage can't be found by, say, 2030? I think with fans, there's such a high expectation that if it's not found in their own lifetime or in their own convenience space of time, it must not exist.
There's still a lot of silent lost treasures that just have not been found at all that do exist though. So, with London After Midnight, from a purely realistic standpoint, I've always theorized myself that the film probably does exist in an archive somewhere, but it would probably be a very abridged, foreign condensed version, as opposed to a pristine 35-millimeter print that someone had ripped to safety stock because they knew in the future the film would become the most coveted of all lost films.
So, I do believe it does exist. The whole theory of it existing in a private collection and someone's waiting to claim the newfound copyright on it, I think after December of last year, I think it's finally put that theory to rest. I don't think a collector consciously knows they have a copy of it. So, I think it's lost until found personally, but probably within an archive.
Jim: Lost until found. That's a great title for a book. I like that a lot. What do you think of the remake, Mark of the Vampire and in your opinion, what does it tell us about, London After Midnight?
Daniel: Well, Mark of the Vampire came about again, part of the Sound Revolution. It was one of those because it was Chaney and Todd Browning's most successful film for the studio. And Browning was currently, being held on a tight leash by MGM because of his shocking disaster film Freaks, I suppose they were a little bit nervous about giving him the reign to do what he wanted again.
So, looking through their backlog of smash silent hits, London After Midnight seemed the most logical choice to remake, just simply because it was their most, successful collaboration. Had it have been The Unholy Three, I'm sure? Oh no, we already had The Unholy Three, but had it have been another Browning Chaney collaboration, it might have been The Unknown, otherwise. So, I suppose that's why London After Midnight was selected and eventually turned into Mark of the Vampire.
The story does not stray too much from London After Midnight, although they seem to complicate it a little bit more by taking the Burke vampire character and turning it this time into three characters played by three different actors, all of which happened to be in cahoots with one another in trying to solve an old murder mystery.
It's very atmospherical. You can definitely tell it's got Todd Browning signature on it. It's more pondering with this one why they just did not opt to make a legit, supernatural film, rather than go in the pseudo vampire arena that they pursued in 1927. Where audiences had by now become accustomed to the supernatural with Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, which no longer relied on a detective trying to find out a certain mystery and has to disguise themselves as a monster.
The monster was actually now a real thing in the movies. So I think if Bela Lugosi had been given the chance to have played a real Count Mora as a real vampire, I think it would've been slightly better received as opposed to a dated approach that was clearly now not the fashionable thing to do.
I suppose again, because Browning was treading a very thin line with MGM, I suppose he couldn't really stray too far from the original source material. But I find it a very atmospherical film, although I think the story works better as a silent film than it does as a sound film, because there's a lot of silent scenes in that film, away from owls, hooting and armadillos scurrying about and winds.
But I do think, based on things like The Cat and The Canary from 1927 and The Last Warning, I just think that detective sleuth with horror overtones serves better to the silent world than it does the sound world away from the legit, supernatural.
John: So, if Chaney hadn't died, do you think he would have played Dracula? Do you think he would've been in Freaks? Would Freaks have been more normalized because it had a big name in it like that?
Daniel: It would've been interesting if Chaney had played in Freaks. I think because Todd Browning used the kinds of individuals that he used for Freaks, maybe Chaney would've, for a change, had been the most outta place.
John: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: I do think he might have played Dracula. I think Universal would've had a hell of a time trying to get him over because he had just signed a new contract with MGM, whereas Todd Browning had transferred over to Universal by 1930 and really wanted to make Dracula for many years and probably discussed it with Chaney as far back as 1920.
But certainly MGM would not have permitted Chaney to have gone over to Universal, even for a temporary period, without probably demanding a large piece of the action, in a financial sense, because Universal had acquired the rights to Dracula at this point. And, based on the stage play that had, come out on Broadway, it was probably assured that it was going to be a giant moneymaker, based on the success of the Dracula play.
But because of Cheney's, status as a, I suppose retrospectively now, as a horror actor, he was probably the first person to be considered for that role by Carl Laemmle, senior and Junior for that matter. And Chaney gone by 1930, it did pose a puzzle as to who could take over these kinds of roles.
Chaney was probably the only one to really successfully do it and make the monster an actual box office ingredient more than any other actor at that time, as he did with. Phantom, Blind Bargain and London After Midnight. So, I think to have pursued Chaney for a legit, supernatural film would've had enormous possibilities for Browning and Chaney himself.
You can kind of see a trend, a trilogy forming, with Browning, from London After Midnight, in which he incorporates things he used in Dracula in London After Midnight. So, he kind of had this imagery quite early on. So, to go from – despite it's not in that order -- but to have London After Midnight, Mark of the Vampire, and he also did Dracula, he clearly was obsessed with the story.
And I think Chaney was probably the, best actor for someone like Browning who complimented his way of thinking and approach to things like silence. As opposed to needing dialogue all the time, loud commotions. So, I think they dovetailed each other quite well, and that's why their ten year director actor relationship was as groundbreaking as it was.
Jim: If the film does surface, if we find the film, what do you think people, how are they gonna react to the movie when they see it? What do you think? What's gonna be the reaction if it does surface?
Daniel: Well, the lure of London After Midnight, the power in the film is its lost status rather than its widespread availability. I think it could never live up to the expectation that we've built up in our heads over the past 40 to 60 years. It was truly people, fans like Forrest J Ackerman that introduced and reignited the interest in Chaney's career by the late fifties and 1960s. That's when London After Midnight started to make the rounds in rumor, the rumors of a potential print existing, despite the film had not long been destroyed at that point. So, it was always a big mystery. There were always people who wanted to see the film, but with no access to home video, or et cetera, the only way you could probably see the film would've been at the studio who held everything.
And, by the time the TV was coming out, a lot of silent films didn't make it to TV. So again, it has just germinated in people's heads probably in a better form than what they actually remembered. But, the true reality of London After Midnight is one more closer to the ground than it is in it's people are probably expecting to see something very supernatural on par with Dracula, whereas it's more so a Sherlock Holmes story with mild horrorish overtones to it that you can kind of see better examples of later on in Dracula in 1930 and in Mark of the Vampire.
It's a film purely, I think for Lon Chaney fans. For myself, having read everything I can on the film, everything I've seen on the film, I personally love silent, detective stories, all with a touch of horror. So, I personally would know what I am going in to see. I'm not going in to see Chaney battling a Van Helsing like figure and turn to dust at the very end or turning to a bat. I'm going to see a detective melodrama that happens to have what looks like a vampire.
So, it certainly couldn't live up to the expectations in people's minds and it's probably the only film to have had the greatest cheapest, marketing in history, I would think. It's one of those films, if it was discovered, you really would not have to do much marketing to promote it.
It's one of those that in every fanzine, magazine, documentary referenced in pop. It has really marketed itself into becoming what I always call the mascot of the genre. There are other more important lost films that have been lost to us. The main one again, which has been found in its more complete form, was Metropolis, which is a better movie.
But unlike Metropolis, London After Midnight has a lot more famous ingredients to it. It has a very famous director. It has a very famous actor whose process was legendary even during then. And it's actually the only film in which he actually has his make-up case make a cameo appearance by the very end.
And it goes on the thing that everyone in every culture loves, which is the vampirism, the dark tales and folklore. So, when you say it, it just gets your imagination going. Whereas I think if you are watching it, it's probably you'll be looking over the projector to see if something even better is going to happen.
The film had its mixed reactions when it originally came out. People liked it because it gave them that cheap thrill of being a very atmospherical, haunted house with the creepy figures of Chaney walking across those dusty hallways. But then the more important story is a murder mystery.
It's not Dracula, but it has its own things going for it. I always kind of harken it back to the search for the Lochness Monster or Bigfoot. It has more power in your mind than it does in an aquarium or in a zoo. Hearing someone say that they think they saw something moving around in Lochness, but there's no photographic evidence, you just have the oral story, that is much more tangible in a way than actually seeing it in an aquarium where you can take it for granted.
And it's the same with London After Midnight, and I think that's why a lot of hoaxster and pranksters tend to say that they have seen London After Midnight more than any other lost film.
Jim: For a film that I would say the majority of the world does not have any frame of reference, and I'm using myself as the sort of blueprint for that, no frame of reference for this film. That image is iconic in a way that has been, I mean, it at first glance could be Jack the Ripper. I was talking to John before we started the podcast, once I locked in on that image, then I started to think, oh, the ghosts in Disney's Haunted Mansion, there's a couple of ghosts that have elements of that. I mean, it was so perfectly done, even though we don't, I bet you nine out ten people don't know the title London After Midnight, but I bet you seven outta ten people know this image.
Daniel: Definitely, it has certainly made its mark on pop culture, again, I think because I think it's such a beautiful, simplistic design. Everything from the simplistically [garbled] to the bulging eyes and the very nice top hat as well, which is in itself today considered a very odd accessory for a grotesque, vampire character.
But it's one of those things that has really carried over. It's influenced what the movies and artists. It was one of the influences for the Babadook creation for that particular monster. It was an influence on the Black Phone. It's just a perfect frame of reference for movie makers and sculptors and artists to keep taking from.
John: Yep. It's, it'll live long beyond us. Daniel, one last question. I read somewhere or heard somewhere. You're next gonna tackle James Whale, is that correct?
Daniel: James Whale is a subject, again, coming from, I happen to come from the exact same town that he was born and raised in, in Dudley, England. So, it's always been a subject close to home for me, which is quite convenient because I love his movies. So, I'm hoping to eventually, hopefully plan a documentary feature on him, based on a lot of family material in the surrounding areas that I was able to hunt down, and forgotten histories about him and just put it together in some form, hopefully in the future.
John: That would be fantastic, and we'll have you back at that point.
Jim: So, let's pretend for a minute that the audience is me, and they'd have absolutely no idea who James Whale is or what he's done. Just for a minute, let's pretend.
John: Pretend that you don't know that?
Jim: Yeah.
Daniel: James Whale is the most known for his work for directing Frankenstein with Boris Karloff in 1931.
But he also directed probably some of the most important horror films that have ever existed in the history of motion pictures. The Old Dark House, which can be cited with its very atmospherical, and black comedy tones, The Invisible Man with Claude Rains and Gloria Stewart in 1933. And, the most important one, which is probably the grand jewel in the whole of the Universal Monsters Empire, which is Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, which is the ultimate, example of everything that he had studied, everything that he'd learned with regards to cinema and comedy, life and death, and just making a very delicious cocktail of a movie in all of its black comedy, horrific, forms that we're still asking questions about today.
One of his first films that he did was for Howard Hughes Hell's Angels, in which -- because he'd coming over from theater -- when again, films in America were taken off with the sound revolution. They all of a sudden needed British directors to translate English dialogue better than the actors could convey.
So, James Whale was one of many to be taken over to America when he had a hit play called Journeys End, which became the most successful war play at that point. And he did his own film adaptation of Journeys End. He also did a really remarkable film called Showboat, which is another very iconic film.
And again, someone with James Whale's horror credentials, you just think, how could someone who directed Frankenstein directed Showboat? But, clearly a very, very talented director who clearly could not be pigeonholed at the time as a strictly horror director, despite it is the horror films in which he is remembered for, understandably so, just because they contain his very individualistic wit and humor and his outlooks on life and politics. And being an openly gay director at the time, he really was a force unto himself. He was a very modern man even then.
-
Estão a faltar episódios?
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with writer (and director and playwright and author and podcaster) Ken Levine about the business of writing and directing situation comedies.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Ken Levine’s Website: http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
TRANSCRIPT
Was being a writer always a goal?
Ken Levine: I don't know if it was always a goal. It was something that I always did. Honestly, I did not get a lot of encouragement in high school. I was a cartoonist. I still am. And I was a cartoonist on the school newspaper. And I said, “Well, I also want to write. You know, can I cover sports or do a humor column or something?”
And they said, “You're the cartoonist, just stick to cartoons.” And I said, “Well, I really want to write. And if you won't let me write, then I'm going to quit the paper.” And they said, “Then fine, quit the paper.” So, that's how much my cartoons were even valued.
They called your bluff on that one, I guess.
Ken Levine: They called my bluff, yeah.
Just as a little tangent—just because I'm a big fan of your cartoons—did you have a couple of cartoonist heroes when you were growing up? Guys that you looked at and went, that's the kind of writing I want to do?
Ken Levine: Well, my cartoonist heroes were more due to their cartooning than anything. Al Hirschfeld, who did the caricatures of the New York Times, was my god. And Mort Drucker would be another. Jack Davis. A lot of those Mad magazine guys.
Originally, I wanted to be in radio. I mean, I really loved radio. And a lot of my comic influences early on were disc jockeys, you know. Bob and Ray and Dan Ingram and Dick Whittington. So, radio was a goal. I got out of college and became a Top 40-disc jockey.
Let me back up. When I was in college, I got a job as an intern at KMPC in L.A. We're the big, full-service radio station. They had the Angels and the Rams and the Bruins and, you know, they were big music personalities. And their afternoon drive time jock was Gary Owens, who was on Laugh In at the time. You know, “From beautiful downtown Burbank.”
And I would write comedy material for Gary, for him to use on the air. I never charged him for it. I mean, I was just so thrilled that someone of the caliber of Gary Owens would use my material on the radio. And one day I get a call to appear in George Schlatter’s office. George Schlatter was the producer of Laugh In. And this is when Laugh In was getting 50 shares.
And I'm like, what does George Schlatter want with me? So, I go to the meeting obviously. And apparently, unbeknownst to me, Gary submitted my comedy material to him. And George Schlatter offered me a job as a writer on Laugh In. And it's funny, we laughed about it because George is still around and he was a guest on my podcast, and I talked about this.
And I said, “Can I do this part time or from home?” And he goes, “What? No, this is a job. You come to the office every day. We're paying you a lot of money to write the number one show in America.” And I said, “I would lose my 2S deferment and I would wind up drafted in Vietnam.” So I couldn't take it. I had to turn down Laugh In. So, I was almost a writer six years before I actually broke in.
Okay. So how did you end up then meeting up with David Isaacs?
Ken Levine: Like I said, I became a disc jockey out of college. My draft number was four. And like I said, I was at KMPC and one of our disc jockeys, Roger Carroll, was one of the main AFRTS disc jockeys.
I shopped around looking, is there a decent reserve unit I could join that would keep me out of the army? And I saw that there was an armed forces radio reserve unit in LA. And through Roger, he helped pull some strings and got me in the unit. You know, it's like one of those things where you get a call saying, “Okay, there's an opening in the unit, but you got to go down to Torrance and sign up for it tomorrow.” And so, you don't have time to think, “Boy, do I want to risk this? Is there a way I can get a medical thing?” And it's six years. It's a six-year commitment. Go.
So that's what I did. I got into that unit. And we were at summer camp three years later and somebody new to the unit was David Isaacs. And we met and started talking and we both kind of had desires to be writers. And when summer camp ended, I was at the time working as a disc jockey in San Bernardino. I got fired, which was a frequent occurrence. And I came back home to live with my parents in LA. I called David and I said, “Hey, remember me from the army? I want to try writing a script. You want to try writing it with me?” And he said, “Okay.”
And so, we got together and decided to partner up and we wrote a pilot. But we didn't know anything. We had no clue what we were doing. And I had to literally go to a bookstore in Hollywood and on a remainder table were TV scripts. And so, for two dollars I bought a copy of an episode of The Odd Couple and looked at that.
Oh, Interior Madison Apartment Day. That’s what that is. This is the format, and this is how long they are. So, David and I wrote a pilot about two kids in college, which was the sum total of our life experience back then. We were both 23. And it didn't go anywhere, obviously, but we had a good time doing it. And we then learned the way to break in is to write spec scripts from existing shows.
So that's what we did. And eventually we broke in.
So, had you written anything with him before that or seen any of his writing? What was it that made you think this is the guy?
Ken Levine: No, no. He just seemed like a funny guy. Neither of us had written anything. Neither of us had any writing samples for the other. No, we just sat down together and just tried doing it. It probably was a help that we were both starting from the same place, which was nowhere. You know, it's just kind of one of those happy accidents where you go on a blind date, and it turns out to be your wife.
How many years did you guys write together?
Ken Levine: Well, we're still writing together, if somebody would hire us. Fifty years.
Congratulations.
Ken Levine: October of 73 is when we started.
And I'm trying to remember, was it The Tony Randall Show or The Jeffersons where you sold your first script?
Ken Levine: The Jeffersons.
And how did that happen?
Ken Levine: Well, we had written a spec Mary Tyler Moore and a spec Rhoda, and another spec pilot. Which was better but didn't go anywhere.
And one day my mom is playing golf with a guy who says he's the story editor of The Jeffersons, a new show that just came on. My mom says, “Oh, well, my son is a great young writer.” And he's like, “Oh Christ.” And he says, “All right, well just have him call me.”
So, I called him, and the guy says, “You have a script?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he goes, “All right, send the script. If I like the script, we'll talk.” And I sent off our Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I got a letter back saying, “Oh, this is a really good script. Make an appointment, come on in and pitch stories.” And we pitched stories, and they bought one. And so that's how we got our assignment.
Thinking back, is there one moment that you felt like was really pivotal that officially launched you guys?
Ken Levine: Yeah, doing that first MASH episode. We had done The Jeffersons, we had done episodes of Joe and Sons, which was a terrible show on CBS. We had done some stories for Barney Miller, but Danny Arnold always cut us off before we got to script. We did a backup script for a pilot that didn't go. And then we got MASH And our first episode of MASH, which is the one where the gas heater blows up and Hawkeye is temporarily blind. And that script was like our golden ticket.
It's a very memorable episode.
Ken Levine: Oh, thank you. I remember it.
I spoke with—I don't know if you know her—April Smith, and she said she learned everything she learned about writing in a room from Gene Reynolds. Where did you learn about writing in a room?
Ken Levine: Well, I don't know about writing in a room from Gene, because we never worked in a room, really, with Gene. But, I learned more about storytelling, and more about story construction, from Gene Reynolds, than everybody else combined. I've been very lucky to have a lot of great mentors along the way, or to work with, you know, really talented writers and smart enough to just shut up and listen and learn from them. But if I had to pick one true mentor, it would be Gene Reynolds. I cannot say enough about Gene Reynolds. I owe my career to Gene Reynolds.
What was his special gift?
Ken Levine: First of all, he was very much a gentleman. So, when he would give you notes, if he didn't like a joke, he wouldn't go, “Jesus, guys, what the fuck?” He would go, “And, um, you might take another look at this. You might take another look at that joke.” Okay.
Gene had a great story sense that was combined with a real humanity. It had to be more than just funny. It had to be grounded. There had to be, like I said, some humanity to it and the humanity and nice moments and things had to be earned. And he was very clever in constructing stories where things were set up and then got paid off in a somewhat surprising way. You know, look for inventive, different ways of finding a solution.
It's why to me, storytelling is always so hard, because each time you tell a story, you want it to be different. You don't want to just keep retelling the same story over and over again. And Gene would look at a thing and go, “Is there a better way of conveying this? Is there something more interesting that Hawkeye could do once he learns this information?”
You could give Gene an outline, and everyone can go, “Okay, well, this doesn't work.” Gene could go, “This doesn't work, and here's why. And here's how you can fix it. If Radar knows this, and then HotLips does this, then you could do a fun thing where it's a thing and…. And you're going like, man, he just, you know, just solved it. Just, just solved it. I thank him for that.
He was very tough on story, which I took from him. And again, there's the humanity aspect of it, which normally you think, well, okay, that's just part of it. But when I see shows today—and I know I'm going to sound like an old guy, “get off my lawn”—but when I see shows today, like White Lotusand a lot of these other shows that are just mean spirited, where the laughs are coming from watching horrible people do horrible things to each other. And, look, comedy changes and, you know, society changes, et cetera. But to me, there has to be some heart to it. There has to be some, some humanity. And that was so drummed into me by Gene.
Gene also talked about the value of research, which I have learned a lot.
You know, you go off to write a project about whatever. You're going to do a pilot about the Department of Motor Vehicles. You sort of know a lot about the Department of Motor Vehicles. You've stood in the lines and everything.
Gene would say, “Go there. Talk to those people. What is that job really like?
What do they really do? And immerse yourself in that world.” And that's what I've always done since.
Jim Brooks, who worked with Gene on Room 222, would say the same thing, that he learned the value of research from Gene. And when Jim Brooks did Broadcast News, he spent a tremendous amount of time in newsrooms, talking to those people, getting a sense of authenticity. It requires work, it requires a lot of extra legwork, but it makes the scripts richer and more authentic. And it’s worth putting in the time and effort.
I just had Michael Conley on as a guest on my podcast. And one of the things I asked him—he does the Bosch books and The Lincoln Lawyer and he’s my favorite mystery writer—and I said, “So with all the detectives out there, what's so special about yours and your books?”
And he said, “The authenticity.” He spent years on the crime beat at The Los Angeles Times and really got to know the inside working of the LAPD. There is an authenticity to his books that you don't get with a lot. It makes a difference.
Research pays off. Okay, one more TV question. What inspired your move into directing?
Ken Levine: I'd been a writer for many, many years. A lot of those years I was on staff of a show, and years when I wasn't on staff on a show—since I'm a good joke guy—I would get a job as a consultant on a show. Meaning, I would work one night a week, which was always rewrite night.
What a great gig.
Ken Levine: It was a great gig. You worked long hours, but it was a great gig. And at the time the pay was ridiculous. There was one season I was on four shows. So, I was working basically four nights till two, three o'clock in the morning. And it got to the point where I would go down to the stage and I would kind of dread going down to the stage, because all I was worried about was, “Okay, let this not be a train wreck. Okay, let this be in good shape, so that I can go home at 10 or 11 or 12.”
And I thought to myself, “There's something wrong here. You get into the business, you should want to be on the stage.” So, I thought, be a director and be on the stage and play all day with the actors. And then when it comes time for rewriting, “Good luck guys. You go to the room and rewrite, and I’ll go to a Laker game.”
So that was my motivation. It should be fun. If you're in television and you're in multi-camera shows, you should look forward to going down to the stage. And if you don't, then it's time to change things around. So, that was my motivation.
Did you feel like you had any advantages as a director because of your background in writing and your understanding of scene construction?
Ken Levine: Yes. Number one: The writing served me very well. I was talking to Jim Burrows once, who is the Mozart of TV comedy directors.
And I was asking him about shots and this and that. And he said, “Look, if the story works, you can have one camera and just shoot the master of the whole show and it'll work. And if the story doesn't work, you can have all the camera angles and cutting you want. It's not gonna save it.”
So yes, it was a big help to me, having that experience, being able to say to the actors, “Okay, I see what's wrong here. You need help with the script. You need a few more lines before you can get this angry. Okay. The reason why you're having trouble here is you have to go from zero to 70 in two lines. And you need help here.”
And I was also able—this is something Jimmy did and no other director I know of other than me would do the same thing—and that is, we would go back to the writer's room after the run through and I would sit with the guys while we discussed what was wrong and what needed to be fixed. And I would kind of help them along that line as much as I could, which proved to be very helpful.
And also, it was very helpful because you go down to the stage the next morning and you have your table reading. And you're able to say to the cast, “Okay, this is what they did last night. These were the problems. This is how they addressed it.” And there were certain things where actors would go, “Where's my joke?” And you're able to say, “The script was long. It was not you. You did a good job with the joke. The script was really long. It's a joke that was easily liftable as opposed to something that was more integral to moving the story forward. That's why you lost the joke.” So, it helped in communication.
Also, by that time I had been a showrunner. So, I was used to coming down to the stage, and if I saw something I didn't like—with blocking or something—I'd go, “Wait a minute, why is she here and she over there? This is a private conversation. Put them together. Why are they standing back there in the corner? Why did you put them at this table? The audience can't see them over here. You put them over here at this front table, and then we can have background and you can have some depth and geography.” And stuff like that.
So, I have that aspect. I also spent a lot of time editing these shows. So, I would work with the editor, and I'd say, “Okay, go to the wide shot where we see the full costume.” And he goes, “We don't have it.” “Wait, what? It's a costume joke. He comes in dressed like Mr. Pickwick and you only have it up to here?” So, as a director, I go, “Okay, this is what I need to make this joke.” And also reaction shots are so important.
You know, when the director is directing a multi camera show—which is like directing Rubik's cube—you have a camera coordinator who works with you, making sure that all the shots are rights. And so, he'll go down the script and it's like, “Okay, Kelsey's line. All right, we have Kelsey on camera A, and then his line we have on camera C, and then Roz we have here.” And he's making sure that everything is covered. But I also want reaction shots. They aren't in the script, but I know when Sam says this, you're going to want to cut to Diane's reaction to it. So, I had that going in my head.
And also knowing like, “Okay, this show is running a little long. I suspect that they may cut this section of a scene.” So, when I block it and when I set my cameras, do it in such a way where you can make that lift. Don't have somebody cross the stage during that section, because then if you lift it, the guy pops onto the other side of the room. Don't just have a master, so that there's nothing to cut away to.
So, there's like all kinds of things that are going through your head, besides just directing the actors, that my experience was able to help me with.
Well, you said Rubik's Cube, and that's what it sounds like: a Rubik's Cube on stage.
Ken Levine: You’ve got five, six people on stage, and you have four cameras. You want to get a master and singles and reaction shots, and two shots. And it's all happening fluidly while the scene is going on. And then when somebody moves around the couch, then the cameras have to move, and are you covered? And those guys are amazing, the camera people in LA, if you're nice to them.
I remember there was an episode of Becker that I was directing, and it was in the diner. And somebody had to go way upstage in the corner to the coat rack. And so, as I'm camera blocking that scene. I'm saying, “All right, I'm going to have to do a pickup. Fred, I'm going to have to send you way up the line to give me Ted in the corner there.”
And he said, “I can get there.” And I go, “Fred, you have like a line and a half, because I’ve got you on Reggie. And then they cut away to Bob saying, ‘I looked at my lunch pail and I didn't have anything.’ That's all the time you got. You got three seconds to get up there and frame it and do it.”
And he says, “I get it. I can get it for you.” And for them, that was kind of part of the fun, was sort of the challenge. If they like you. If they don't like you, good luck.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with magician Lance Burton about how he wrote (and directed and starred in) the delightfully comic “Billy Topit: Master Magician.”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Lance Burton Website: https://www.lanceburton.com/
Billy Topit Website: http://www.billytopit.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Lance Burton Transcript
John: I loved Billy Topit, both Jim and I did. I've made a number of low budget movies in my life, about a half dozen of them and the driving force behind them has almost always been, let's get together with some friends and make a movie. I got the sense that that was kind of part of the DNA of Billy Topit. Is that right?
Lance: Well, yes, I just have to correct you on one thing: Billy Topit was not a low budget movie. It was a nobudget movie. We literally just decided, you know what, I'm not going to spend any money. Everyone volunteered. So, if it ever makes any money, I'll go back and pay the actors.
John: Well, okay. But as someone who has done the same thing, I’ve done that a half dozen times with the no money. The results you got, given the no money status, were great. Your sound is exceptional. One of the things that's normally a big sign that it's a low budget movie is the sound is not good. It's a hard thing to get right and when you do get it right, it makes it sound like a big budget movie. The cinematography is terrific, the editing is fantastic. I don't know if you bought the music, or if someone did the music, but whatever it was it fit perfectly, and it just sailed along. So, for a movie that had no budget, you did an exceptional job of making a real movie.
Lance: Oh, thank you. You’re right, the sound is the one thing you really don't want to skimp on, because that's something you really can't fix in post a lot of the times. So, we did try to pay attention to the sound recording. As far as the music goes, some of the music was from my show that I already own. Some of the performance pieces, some of the music we use just for the movie, was rights free music that that I got from a company called Digital juice. They have all different sorts of music and it's searchable. So, you can find you know, rock and roll hard driving music, you can find, you know, instrumentals, you really have everything.
Then there was a couple of pieces that a friend of mine, who's a musician wrote and recorded for me. And one of the pieces in the film, my lead actress, Joelle Rigetti, she had actually recorded an album a couple of years ago and she gave me the album during the production. She said, “Hey, anything on here you want you're welcome to use.” And I listened to it and there was one track, I went, this is perfect for this one scene I have. It's that it's the scene where the whole cast is waking up on the second day, brushing their teeth and getting ready to go out. That's actually the lead actress singing.
John: The stuff you picked all really meshed well together.
Lance: Oh, thank you. It was during the post-production process when it really struck me—as we were editing and doing that—how much the music adds to a production, not just a live show. I already knew that for a live show. But as I was making the film, it really just struck me again, you know, wow, music really does add a whole new dimension to the movie or live show.
John: Yeah. So, where did the idea for the movie come from?
Lance: Well, I'll tell you exactly where it came from. When I was a kid, there was a television series on TV called The Magician starring Bill Bixby. It only lasted one season, because the network got a new president that came in and he just, you know, cancelled all his predecessors’ shows. But it actually did good in the ratings. But it only lasted 22 episodes.
The magic consultant on The Magician was Mark Wilson and so when I moved out west, I met Mark Wilson, and became friends with him. Then when I was shooting Knightrider, guess who they hired to provide all of the large illusions and props for the episode? Mark Wilson. He was sort of the magic advisor on that television show. So, Mark, and I got to hang out for seven days on the set as we were shooting. He's actually in the episode. You can see shots of him. He's sitting in the audience during one of the opening performances. In fact, I get him up on stage at one point as a volunteer. So, anyway, one day after filming, Mark and I are going out to dinner and we're in his car and we're driving along. And he says to me, “Lance, how do you like doing this work?” And I said, “What do you mean, Mark? You mean like this episode?” He says, “Yeah, how do you like, you know, acting on this, this TV show?”
And I said, “I'm having the time of my life. I get to do magic. I get to act. I get to work with a stuntman, and this is great.” And he says, “Well, you're doing a good job and you ought to think about doing more of this.” And I said, “More of this, so what do you mean?” He says, “You ought to start a notebook, start keeping some ideas of how you could incorporate your magic into a TV series or movie, you know, like with the Bill Bixby series.” And I thought, Oh, that's a good idea. So, I did, I started writing, every time I had an idea about how to use magic within the context of the drama series, or, you know, a story, I would write it down.
So, after a few years, I had all these sort of clever things that I came up with, to use magic and propelling the story forward, or to get out of this sticky situation or whatever. And every few years, I've pulled that out, and I'd go, “You know, I'm going to try and go pitch this,” and I would go to Los Angeles and set up some meetings. And I was trying to pitch to do a series every few years and we got close a couple of times, but we never were able to sell it. But the area I was working in was so similar to things that would pop up on my TV screen later. I kept thinking, “Man, I've got something here, I just need to, like any kind of magic trick, you know, I get it in my head and it's frustrating, I just I gotta get it out, I got to put it on the stage because it's like in my brain is like scratching the inside of my skull and it's really annoying.”
By that time, the technology had progressed to the point where we had these high-definition cameras that weren't, you know, astronomically expensive. And we had editing software so that somebody on their laptop could put out a professional looking product. So, I finally just said, hey, you know what, I'm gonna do this. And I called my buddy, Michael Goudeau and he came over and we fleshed out the story. And then we wrote the screenplay within, like two or three months. And then we eventually just started casting it and shot it. So, it all goes back to Bill Bixby and The Magician from 1973.
John: Well, most things do. Most things do go back that. Were you always planning on directing?
Lance: You know, directing and acting at the same time is really difficult. But I had been doing it all my life, you know, with my live show. And we started in on this thing and then at some point, I heard an interview with Barbra Streisand, and someone asked her that question, and they said, “Is it difficult to act and direct in the same production?” And she had a great response. She said, “No, it's easier that way. That's one less person I have to argue with.”
Jim: She's right. Absolutely right. So, talk a little bit about how the movie changed, you know, from your initial script and then through shooting and editing. Were there a lot of kind of, oh, let's do this. Oh, that didn't work.
Lance: I'll tell you what: when I first had the idea, I didn't have a real clear idea of the tone I wanted to take, you know? As far as it could have been a drama, it could have been a comedy or whatever. But I started chatting with my buddy, Michael Goudeau. Now, Michael worked in my show, as my special guest star. We've been friends for, you know, since the mid-80s and Michael said, this was his idea. So, I gave him credit.
He said, we should write this is a family film and I said, why is that? He says, because I have two small children and about two or three times a year, I have to take them to the movies and we have to pick a family film, and they're always horrible. That's why I'd like to see a good family film. Something good, we can take the kids to see. And I said okay, that's fine. You know, that fits. Magic's always been considered a good family entertainment.
So, we chose to write it as a family friendly movie, and as a comedy, but I give credit to Michael for that, and it didn't alter that much. Once we had the script completed, the idea was, you know, to keep to the script as close as we can within reason. Now, there were some scenes that were improvised and there were some things that I added during the course of the movie.
I'll tell you one thing that we added: the film starts with a dream sequence, with Billy floating a lady in the air. And then he wakes up in bed and you realize, oh, that was just a dream. He doesn't really have a big Las Vegas show. He's a birthday party magician and that was the first thing we shot.
So, as we were shooting, I read a book by Robert Rodriguez about his experience shooting El Mariachi. That was recommended to me by Rory Johnston, who played the bad guy in my movie. When I explained to Rory what we were going to do, he said, oh, you're doing like a no budget movie, like Robert Rodriguez. And I said, Who's Robert Rodriguez? He said, he is just a director, he started out by making this movie called El Mariachi. He had $7,000. That was it and he made a whole film.
And so, I bought the DVD to watch. I wanted to see what a $7,000 movie look like. And then I read his book and he had some really interesting advice and thoughts. He was talking about the power of three—which magicians will do also—where you have a callback, or something keeps popping back up, and it happens three times. In El Mariachi, there's like this sort of dream sequence. But it happens three times. And I started thinking, he's got a really good point there. So, I started thinking, where else could I insert, I need two more dream sequences? And I’ve got to find a place to insert them. So, we wrote two more dream sequences and found the right place to put them. And we shot that, but that kind of happened once we started once we started shooting.
Jim: You know, John, as he's mentioned, has shot some low budget movies here and there, populated largely by friends of John. And I get the sense that, in watching your movie, that these people are all your buddies, that they're all your pals, these are all your friends.
Lance: Oh, yeah, they're all my friends. The only time there were people in their movie, really, that I didn't know, like extras in the restaurant. We would just ask people, do you have any friends that you can come over and be background actors? And a lot of them are my friends. Like the birthday party scene: those kids are all kids of friends. Like, hey, if you got kids, bring them over to my stage manager's house.
John: It really looks like you guys are having fun throughout the whole movie. I don't mean to denigrate it in any way, but it's a really goofy movie. It is surprisingly silly in a really fun way.
Lance: It's a silly movie and a lot of that stuff is Michael Goudeau. Everybody loves Michael and loves his comedy and kids especially love him. So, that's we wanted to go for. For instance, when we were writing the date scene, you know, that was a silly scene and they were doing the game with the milk, the little milk containers. And Michael said, listen, when I take my kids to a movie, when it gets to the romantic the date scene, they are bored. They are like, oh, they're falling asleep going, oh, when is this over? So, let's beef this up with something silly. Hey, great. That sounds great. So, again, a lot of that stuff was just the purpose of the movie was to keep everybody's interest.
John: And that's probably something you've learned from being on stage forever, is feeling when the audience might be getting bored and being ahead of them.
Lance: Yeah, you don't want to get to that point. You want to keep it moving.
Jim: Your friend Michael is in the movie?
Lance: Yes, he is in the movie. He's one of the jugglers.
Jim: Okay. But the taller one or the shorter one?
Lance: The shorter one. He was my co-writer on the screenplay and also co-executive producer.
Jim: At the very end, in the credits, there's some very clever, funny, little teases about the possibility and it was sort of like, gosh, I hope there is a sequel. Is there talk of that--?
John: And I will say, I'm going to speak from my podcast partner here. We're standing by ready to help you if you want to do.
Jim: Absolutely. I’ll drop everything.
Lance: Billy Topit Part Two, The Empire Strikes Back. Billy Topit Part Two, the Search for Spock. I tell you, that was just me getting at the end of the editing process and doing the credits and it's just going out. This will be funny. Just me just making up silly stuff.
John: And the image of you doing that of sitting on a computer and editing, do you have the filmmaking bug now or you going to it doesn't have to be a sequel, Billy Topit, but...
Lance: I've enjoyed. Here's the thing that I enjoyed the most on the whole process was learning to edit. My good buddy Bob Massey was our photographer and our editor. But in the process of editing, I would go over to his house, and we would work on it and then he'd have to go do something. I was like, do we have to stop? And one day he said, you know, I can give you the software. I bought this and I can put it on two computers legally. So, if you want to, I'll show you how. I went, yeah.
So, I went out, I bought this and I put this stuff on, and I started to learn how to edit. Bob was there to help me, show me. I really loved it. I really, really loved the process.
And a lot of it is very similar to magic. I'll give you a good example of that: There's a scene at the end of the movie where they've opened the big show and I do the sawing a couple into eight pieces. So, we got the two, the boy and the girl and they get sawed apart and they come out of the boxes at the end. And the boys were in the girl’s clothes and they chase each other offstage. And then they run past the camera and then the second shot, you see them run into view in the wings. And then they have a scene in the wings.
Well, we shot the first part, with the doing the trick, and then running past the camera. We shot that at the Monte Carlo hotel in 2010. And the scene in the wings, we shot in 2013, on the other side of town at Rory Johnson's church that he went to. They allowed us to shoot there. So, the two scenes that are supposed to be at the same time were shot three years apart in different locations.
As we were shooting the first one, I knew in my mind what I wanted to do: I wanted him to run past the camera, and then I would pick it up. And the rest of the cast hadn't even been cast yet by the way. I didn't even know who the other actors were going to be. But I knew there was a scene over there. So, as they run past, I'll pick it up. Whenever we get to that three years later, we shoot the thing.
Now I'm editing it together. So, now I take the music from the first part of the shot, playing during the trick and the audience reaction. You get the audience applauding and cheering, and they run past the camera and we go to the second shot. But you still hear the audio, you still hear the music playing, and you hear me out on stage going thank you and the audience applauding. And so now when you put it all together, it's like it's seamless. No one knows that that scene was shot three years apart. It's like a magic trick. It's an illusion. There's a good example of how the sound helps enhance the illusion. And there are a few magic tricks that we do on stage where sound is a very big part of the illusion.
John: I don't know at what point in the process you read Robert Rodriguez’s book, but he based El Mariachi on what he had available. He wrote the script based on the town, the bar, the tortoise, the dog, all of that. You seem to have done a very similar thing, in that I'm guessing you already had some footage you on stage or was it a relatively easy thing to get. For an average person, that's a really hard thing to get.
Lance: Exactly. And I had to shoot all that before the show closed, because we were getting ready to close the show. So, we captured all of that all the stuff that had to be shot in the theatre, we captured that.
John: But for the average person writing a script, to write that in a scene, you can't shoot that. The lights alone in the ceiling are more than your budget.
Lance: And I was well aware that. I had this opportunity that we'd written it into the script and it's like, okay, I gotta shoot this now, because if I wait another two months, it's all going to be gone.
John: Exactly. And I felt the same with the scenes in the casino, which would be I think, normally a difficult thing to do. But you obviously had a relationship to make those happen.
Lance: The casino scenes, those were all shot afterwards. That was my buddy, John Woodrum, who owned this little casino called the Klondike. We wanted it to be a locals type Casino. I talked to a few of the casinos and some of them were like, yeah, we'd let you come in here and shoot, we have a coffee shop. How many days do you need it?
And I'm going to myself, I don't know how long this is going to take to shoot. I never shot a movie before. And then finally I went over to see my buddy, John and I said, John, I've got this movie I'm shooting, and some of the action takes place in the casino. And there's a coffee shop and you've got a coffee shop. What would you think about a shooting here? And he looks at me says yeah, whatever you want. Come on in. I'm like, what? Come on, anytime. That's like, Okay, I found this. I found our location.
John: You are a low-budget filmmaker at heart. You got all the tricks that are necessary to be good at this and you did it on your first movie. That's exceptional.
Lance: It was a fun process and it's not dissimilar to shooting a television special or a TV show, but it is a little different. There is obviously magic in it. But you know, there's also the whole second element of the story and doing the scene and the acting and getting all the actors on the same page.
John: And speaking of the actors, I was thrilled to see our friend Louie Anderson in there. He was a Twin Cities guy who I knew back when he was here and I had the good fortune of working with him a couple times in the corporate arena. And to see Johnny Thompson obviously having so much fun, it was just great. And then to see Mac kind of turn up. I don’t want to spoil it. But he does turn up
Lance: Mac turns up there near the end of the film. It was great fun, being able to work with Johnny. To be able to direct your mentor is a really special thing and that was just so much fun working with Johnny, and he was just so good in this role.
John: He was such a good actor, he really had that ability to turn it on.
Lance: And Pam too.
John: Oh, yeah, Pam was in there as well. It was just so much fun to see them just pop up like that.
Jim: A delight, the whole thing was from start to finish was a delight. I watched it by myself after my wife went to bed and I just was giggling through the whole thing.
Lance: Thank you. Here's my favorite story from the whole process. I had this idea to do the trick on the telephone, The Wizard, that that anybody that is amateur magician knows the trick. Well, when Michael and I were coming up with a storyline, I had this idea of using The Wizard as part of the kidnapping thing, to find out where the assistant was being held. In order to do that, of course, I had to show what The Wizard was.
The reason I wanted to include that was I wanted kids especially to be able to watch the movie and then after the movie, I wanted them to be able to perform The Wizard for their friends. After we had our premiere, my wardrobe lady from the Monte Carlo—and she also did wardrobe on the movie—she called me like a week later. Her stepdaughter, who was in junior high school at that time, the little girl had gone to school the next day and had performed The Wizard for her friends. And when I heard that, I was like, yes, touchdown.
John: Mission accomplished.
Lance: Mission accomplished. It's exactly what I wanted. I wanted kids to go and actually perform a magic trick for their friends.
Jim: But I really liked how you then turn it around and use it as a plot device.
Lance: It's integral to the story. Yes, and those are those are especially the kind of things I like with magic in movies or TV shows: where you can take something and bring it back in later as a practical device.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with screenwriter and author Neal Marshall Stevens about his new book on horror, “A Sense of Dread (Getting Under The Skin of Horror Screenwriting).”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Neal’s book at Michael Wiese Productions: https://mwp.com/product-author/neal-marshall-stevens/
Neal on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139605/
Brian Forrest’s Blog: https://toothpickings.medium.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Neal Stevens Transcript
JOHN: Neal, you have a really long and storied history in the horror cinema. Can you remember the very first horror movie that had an impact on you?
NEAL: Well, actually, looking back, the first movie that scared the hell out of me wasn't a horror movie. It was actually a Disney movie called Johnny Tremaine. It was a kid's movie. And there was a scene in that movie, Johnny Tremaine was a kid during the Revolutionary War who knew Paul Revere, who, as you may remember, was a silversmith. And there's a scene in that movie, the British are coming and Paul Revere has got this urn of molten silver.
It gets knocked onto a table. Johnny Tremaine trips and puts his hand face up into the molten silver and fries his hand. And I'm sure I know I, every kid in the audience goes like (sound effect.)
But that's actually not the scariest part of the movie. Later on, surgeons are unwrapping his burnt hand, and they look down and they react in horror.
His fingers have healed together, stuck together. We don't see it and they say, “Oh, we're going to have to cut his fingers apart,” which also happens off screen. And again, in our imagination, imagining no anesthesia back then, it's a revolutionary war. So, poor Johnny Tremaine has to have his healed together fingers cut apart.
The memory of what that must be like has lasted. I must have been like five or six when I saw it. My parents dragged me to see Johnny Tremaine, it's a happy Disney movie. I'm 67 years old, so it's been over a half a century since I saw this movie and was appropriately traumatized by those images. So, Disney knew how to scare little kids. That's for sure.
JOHN: He sure did. Wow. That's a horrible story.
NEAL: Yeah. As for official horror movies that scared the hell out of me, again, we used to watch Phantasmic Features on the TV in Boston. I remember a movie called Teenagers from Outer Space. They weren't actually teenagers. They were all in their thirties. But anyway, these invaders had a skeleton ray that as they would aim it at someone, it would flash and you're instantly reduced literally to a skeleton. And they were, they didn't care who, so as soon as they come out of their spaceship, there's a barking dog—bzzzt!—and the dog falls down, reduced to bones.
They didn't care. They would use it as a woman's climbing out of a swimming pool—bzzzt!—skeleton floating in the pool. The casualness with which completely innocent people are reduced to skeletons. Again, absolutely horrifying. Couldn’t have been much older than nine or ten when I watched this movie. But the fact that human flesh has reduced the skeletons, but also the casual innocence of which people are reduced to flesh is stripped off their bones. It's terrifying to me.
BRIAN: I wonder how you parlayed that early sense of, “Oh, I like horror movies” into, “I want to create horror as a genre. “
NEAL: Well, I was one of a whole generation of kids who got super eight cameras and made, you know, we made stop motion movies and made monster movies in their basements. Pursuant to that, I was writing scripts when I was 13 years old. I guess people now do it with phones. We didn't have cell phones back when I was a kid, but we had super eight cameras and then, you know, a little cartridge things that we'd slug in.
And so, I made tons of those little stop motion movies down in my basement.
BRIAN: Do you still have some of them?
NEAL: I guess I may have them somewhere. I think I have an old creaky super eight projector somewhere. I don't think you can get a bulb for it anymore.
BRIAN: I've got one up there. I wonder if it would work?
NEAL: Yeah. That's the big question. I wonder if it would work? Heaven only knows.
JOHN: But that's a great way to learn visual storytelling.
NEAL: Yeah. When I ultimately went to NYU grad film and, and all the films that we shot the first year were all silent. First silent film then silent with sound effects, but you weren't allowed to use sync sound until you got to second year, if you made it that far.
JOHN: Did you make it that far?
NEAL: Yes, I did. I actually graduated. Back at NYU, it was a very rough program at the time. They cut the student enrollment in half going from first to second year. So it was, it was a rough program back then.
JOHN: That's brutal.
NEAL: Yeah.
JOHN: So, you leave film school with something under your arm that you've shot. Where does that lead you?
NEAL: It certainly didn't get me much in the way of employment at the time. I ended up going right back to NYU. I ran their equipment room of all things for something like six years. But during all those six years I was writing. They had like a computer that they used to turn out the schedules. And then when I weren't writing schedules, I was using that computer to write my screenplays using WordStar. If anyone remembers that old program. God, it was horrible, but it was free, because they had the equipment room.
And eventually I sent some stuff to Laurel Entertainment, which is the company that did Tales From the Dark Side. And they had an open submission program. If you signed a release form, you could send them stuff. And I'd gone in and I'd met Tom Allen, who was their senior story editor. I had a screenplay and I went in and talked about it. He liked it. It wasn't for them, but then he invited me to submit ideas for their new series, their follow-up series to Tales from the Dark Side, which is a thing called Monsters.
And I went in, and I pitched some ideas, and they bought one. And it turned out to be their premier episode of Monsters. And shortly after that, tragically, Tom Allen passed away. And the VP, Mitch Galen, invited me in and said, “Would you like to take over and be our senior story editor on Monstersand our other projects?”
And meanwhile, you know, for the second part of that whole series, I was still working in the equipment room at NYU and also working as a senior story editor on Monsters and being their creative consultant and reading hundreds of scripts for Laurel Entertainment. And then eventually I quit the equipment room, and I went and I worked for them full time and wrote a bunch of episodes for Monsters.
And I was a story editor on The Stand and The Langoliers— which wasn't so good—but on a bunch of other projects, it was just an enormous learning experience. And The Stand I think turned out really well. Other stuff, The Langoliers, did not work out really well. And a bunch of other projects that were not horror.
BRIAN: Why do you think some things, especially, let's talk about Stephen King, why do you think some of those things adapted well and some didn't?
NEAL: Well, The Langoliers was not, it wasn't that great. Wasn't that strong a project. And I think the idea, trying to make that and stretch that out into a mini-series. wasn't that strong. It wasn't that strong, the material wasn't really there. I think there are times when staying faithful to the material is the right approach. It certainly was the right approach with The Stand.
Working with The Langoliers, you know, there were certainly elements of The Langoliers that were strong. And other stuff that was really just so-so. And I think if you'd had the willingness to step aside and do something different with it, it would probably have ended up—especially because they were expanding it into a mini-series—being just devoted to the original material, I think, ended up with a product that was really thin. Plus, we had hired a special effects company that the Langoliers themselves were just horrible. It was really substandard, honestly. So, it did not work out very well.
BRIAN: I'm guessing with all these different projects you had to work on, you probably had to start dealing with types of horror and genres of horror that weren't in your comfort zone. Maybe not even what you wanted to do. What kind of learning curve was that for you?
NEAL: You end up having to deal with a lot of different kinds of horror, especially with, you know, working in Monsters, where you just were turning stuff out tremendously fast. But also, I grew up with a certain kind of horror.
I was never a huge fan of slasher stuff. I missed that whole era of horror. Certain kinds of movies appealed to me. That particular kind of transgressive material never really clicked.
JOHN: Why do you think that is with you?
NEAL: Because this simple act of repetitive bloodletting, for me, it always felt thin. I mean, it's not that I objected to explicit violence or explicit gore. I mean, I think that Dawn of the Deadunquestionably is one of the most brilliant horror movies ever made. And there certainly, George Romero didn't pull back from explicit violence. Or a movie like Hellraiser, the same deal.
It's a question of how the filmmaker employs the use of graphic violence to elevate the material. What I've told people when you watch a movie like Dawn of the Dead, the first 10 or 15 minutes of that movie—which by the way, I saw when it virtually when it first came out and saw it in the theater—you had never seen anything like that opening scene in terms of graphic violence from being bitten and heads being blown off and all the rest. You were just put through the ringer, watching that opening. And after that opening, the movie was never that violent again. He never showed anything like that again.
And you didn't have to, because you—having seen that opening scene, you were—you were so blown out of your seats. You said, “I'm watching a movie where anything could happen to anyone.” And that was a kind of really intelligent and that kind of thoughtful use of violence is what George Romero was always able to do. It was understanding how graphic images can affect the psychology of the viewer.
JOHN: Do you think it's also that with Romero's films, they're actually about something, whereas a slasher film is really just about a body count, but with Romero, he always had another thing going.
NEAL: Well, of course, I mean, no movie that isn't about anything is ever going to really, from my perspective, be worth watching. But I mean, even a movie like Hostel, which is exceptionally violent and harrowing, is certainly about something. And I think Eli Roth's movies, which get a really bad rap, are very much about something. He's got something to say with his depictions of violence and his images. Not necessarily to my taste. I certainly wouldn't say that he's not, he's making movies that are certainly about something. He's not a dumb filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination.
JOHN: So, you work on Monsters, and then what happens?
NEAL: I worked on Monsters. I worked there for around six years, and then they were acquired by a big studio, and they were shut down. And so, I was out of work. I'd known a woman named Debbie Dion from Full Moon. I figured, well, I'll give that a shot. I'll call her up and see, maybe I could write for a Full Moon. And so, I gave her a shot. I, you know, reintroduced myself and said, you know, “I'm looking to see if I could get some job, maybe writing features for Full Moon Entertainment, Charlie Band's company.”
And they said, “Well, we pay around $3,000 for a feature.” And I said, “Well, I got paid more than that for writing an episode of Monsters. That doesn't seem like such a good deal.” And then my unemployment insurance ran out.
BRIAN: Suddenly it's a very good deal.
NEAL: Sounds like suddenly a very good deal. But, you know, I made it very clear that money buys one draft, and if you want to rewrite, you got to pay me again, because I knew what development was like, where they just expect draft after draft after draft, and I'd say, “I can't do that, that doesn't make any sense.”
And also, having worked for Monsters, I had learned to write really fast. I could write a pass on a Monsters episode in two days, so I knew that I could write fast, because these were 80-page scripts.
And so, I started writing for Full Moon, and over the course of like the next few years, I wrote something like... 50 or 60 features for Charlie Band. And a lot of them got made, because they're not wasting money on movies that don't get made. Tons of them got made.
And in the midst of doing that, I was, you know, whenever I got a break writing a full movie, I would write spec scripts, you know, in the hopes I could sell something of my own that wasn't for $3,000. I didn't have an agent at that point. I didn't have a manager at that point. And so, I'm not really good making cold calls to people. It's not my thing. I just like to sit, write my scripts.
I'd come home one day, and I saw my wife was on the phone having this long conversation with someone. When she was done, I said, “Well, who was that?” “Oh yeah. I called up to order something.” I said, “So she's really good at getting on the phone and talking to people and calling them.” And so, I convinced her to be my manager. So, she agreed. She changed, you know, she went out under her maiden name.
She managed to get an option on a science fiction script that I'd written that, I mean, it was ultimately bought. It was never made. And then I decided, you know what? Horror is really my bread and butter writing for Charlie Band. But I don't really have a horror spec. And most of what was out those days in horror didn't really scare me that much. I should really write a script that would scare me. So, I wrote a script called Deader, which I thought had all the stuff in it that I thought was really scary.
And Judy went out with that script, sent it to a bunch of people, sent it to some folks at Stan Winston's company, as they had a development deal. The producer that she talked to really liked it, asked if he could sort of slip it to some people. He did, he sent it to someone, a producer at Dimension, it's based in New York, and he really liked it. And they showed it to Bob Weinstein.
Bob Weinstein called us on Sunday. Am I half awake? Talk to Judy. Because they didn't know that Judy was my wife. He said, “This is the best goddamn script I've read. I'm like three quarters away. Come in on Monday and we'll talk about it.” So, we came in on Monday and they bought the script.
And of course, at that point, it sort of went all over town. And for a very short period of time, it was like the flavor of the month and everyone loved me. And I got myself an agent and got myself like three pictures. And as I was a really big, big to-do. From that, I also got 13 Ghosts. I had like a really big opinion of myself after, after that sale.
JOHN: Has that been tempered since then?
NEAL: I kind of got the opinion that like, wow, selling scripts is easy. People wanted to hire me because that script was super hot and was all over town. I learned subsequently there are flavors in writers, and I was like that flavor of the month. That fades and then you have to really do a lot more work to get things sold. That was a hard lesson to learn. But I've managed to keep working over the years. I've written many scripts, sold some, and it's been a decent career.
BRIAN: I was just wondering, you were having all the success writing screenplays, when did you decide to make a jump to writing a book?
NEAL: Over the last five or six years, I've been teaching. A woman that I knew from NYU, actually, Dorothy Rumpolsky had been instrumental in starting a screenwriting program at David Lynch Institute for Cinematic Studies. And she realized at one point that she had a number of students who wanted to work in a horror. She remembered me back from NYU many years ago. So, she got in touch with me and wanted to know if I was interested in mentoring those students. And I said, absolutely. I done some other online teaching at other places. And so, the way it works is, you fly out for an opening few days where you meet the students. And then you fly back to where you come from. They go back to where they come from. And it's all done remotely, the mentoring. And so, I've been doing that now for five or six years.
And during that kind of get together, you meet a bunch of guest lecturers and other teachers, other mentors. And a number of those people had written books for Michael Wiese productions. And, in the course of chatting, they suggested, well, you, you know, “You have a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of horror and horror cinema. That might be a good book for Michael Wiese. Give them a call and see if you can come up with a pitch and an interesting take on it.” And so I did, and I called them and they responded. And so we were off to the races.
JOHN: The book is really, maybe delightful is the wrong word, but it's a captivating book because as you read through it—you have outlined breaking down our different types of fears—you can immediately in your mind go, “Oh, that's what that movie was doing. Oh, that was that. That's what was happening there.” What was your research process like?
NEAL: I think that the research kind of developed over the decades as I studied what made movies scary and what was working, not only in the movies that I was watching, but in the movies that I was writing. I mean, in the same way that when you work as a screenwriter, it becomes almost second nature to try to figure out what was working and what wasn't.
Talking to fellow filmmakers and screenwriters, you have to say, “How many times do you watch a movie?” And a lot of times I will watch a movie 8, 10, 20 times. And there's a process that works when you watch a movie that many times, where you say “Certain things will work every time you watch a movie.”
In the same way that you can watch a comedy and you can laugh every single time as certain things comes up. And other times, you start seeing the nuts and bolts and say, “Well, this is always working and here they're just connecting stuff.” And you start saying, “Ah, I get it. I see what they're doing. I see how they're taking this piece that works and this other piece that works and they couldn't quite, they kind of, they found some connective tissue to stick it together. I see exactly what they're doing.”
And you start understanding—whether you're watching a comedy or you're watching a drama or you're watching a scary movie—they knew exactly how to make this thing scary. And this is how they're doing it. And they understood exactly how to make this thing scary. And it's like, ah, this is what they're using. Whether it is a spider crawling on someone, that's always going to work. Or, “Oh, I see, this is just a jump scare.” And the jump scare is, I understand, that's just, because a big bang, a loud noise, a hand reaching in from, that's just, that's always going to work. It's going to work no matter what. It's just a kind of placeholder scare, because they couldn't think of anything better.
And there are movies where it's just jump scares. And you can always use a jump scare. You can sneak up on a cat and jab it and it'll jump. It's an instinctive response. And if a movie is just relying on jump scares, you know it's because they don't have anything better. They haven't got any deeper than just having the phone ring and they turn up the soundtrack. You can always get an audience to jump by putting a loud sound on the soundtrack.
JOHN: Is there an example you can think of though, where there is a jump scare that you think is a genuinely good, effective jump scare?
NEAL: I can think of a movie that has two really excellent jump scares. John Carpenter's The Thing. When the doctor's giving the electric shock to the guy's chest, and the chest opens and slams shut on his hand. Didn't expect it.
That's a super great jump scare. It is perfectly integrated into that scene. Everyone jumps, but it's also a brilliant continuation of that scene. Second jump scare, when MacReady is testing everyone's blood. And saying, “We're going to do you next,” puts the needle in, and that thing jumps out of the Petri dish.
Fantastic jump scare. We didn't see it coming. Everyone jumps. And it's again, it's perfectly integrated into that scene. So, two brilliant jump scares in what's already an incredibly brilliant movie.
BRIAN: I remember watching the commentary on Jaws and Spielberg said he got greedy with his jump scares. He had the moment towards the end of the film, you remember that Jaws comes out of the water while it's being chummed. And he said he got this great reaction from the audience, and he wanted one more. And he went back, and he added in the scene earlier where the corpse face comes through the hole. And he said he never got the audience to react as well to the shark after he added in that corpse face coming through the hole of the ship. And I wondered, do you think there's a point of diminishing returns with jump scares in one movie?
NEAL: I think there absolutely is. I mean—and I have no end of admiration for Jaws. I think it may be one of the most brilliant movies ever, and it certainly has stood the test of time.
JOHN: So, we've each come armed with some movies here that I thought it would be fun to talk about them with you, so that you could sort of delve into the different types of fear that are outlined in the book and we'll just sort of
checkerboard back and forth here. I'm going to start with one of my favorite sense of dread movies, and that's Don't Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, directed by Nick Roeg which I saw way too young. First R rated movie I saw. I remember I knew that it was supposed to be really scary, and I went with my older brother, and we were standing in line and the seven o'clock show was letting out. And I said to my brother, “Well, it can't be that scary. They're not saying anything.” Not realizing that they had all been stunned into silence about the last five minutes of that movie. So, what are your thoughts on Don't Look Now and where does that fit?
NEAL: When I talk about the sense of dread, which is what my book is about, it's the notion of those aspects of our lives that we think of as safe and secure and dependable and sacred being suddenly or unexpectedly penetrated by the unknown or the unnatural, the unexpected.
And you have to say, well, what are the things that we depend on? We depend on our homes. We depend on our families. And so that relationship of parent and child, what violates that? And the loss of a child, loss is already wrenching. And so, this sense of parents having lost a child, but then this notion that, well, maybe not, maybe the child is still out there somewhere, is so deeply disturbing. And so this weird, this quest, this pursuit in them. And meanwhile, in the background, you have the sense of a killer, of killings going on. This really disturbing notion of the woman's half decayed body being pulled out of the water is just as an image is—and again, the notion of human body being reduced to mere flesh—it’s deeply disturbing. And nakedness, coupled with decay, it's deeply disturbing. And all of this sort of happening in the background.
We don't quite know how these pieces connect. The notion that the search for the child and the notion that there's a killer on the loose. We know, because the nature of cinematic storytelling is telling us that somehow these things are going to connect, because, I mean, in the real world, there are countless thousands of things drifting around that don't necessarily hook up. But we know that one thing is going to collide with another. And so, there's this growing sense of profound unease, because we know, somehow, this child in this Red Riding Hood cape is wandering around, it's like, is this the child? Is the child going to become embroiled in this?
But what we don't, certainly don't expect is the ending that confronts us in the finale, which is so incredibly, the reversal is so terrifying and so hits us in the face of that sense of innocence—revealed in such a terrifying way—is the essence of dread. Where we expect to find innocence, we find a nightmare.
JOHN: What's great about what Nick Roeg did there was—if you read Daphne du Maurier's short story—he basically shot the last paragraph of that short story. Cinematically, he figured out the way that she's laying out what's going on with Donald Sutherland’s character at that moment. He figured out a way to make it cinematic. So, like you say, all the pieces suddenly fall into place in those last few seconds. And, like you said, we've been brought to this place, we had no idea that that's where it was going to turn. Neal, tell me about Enemy from Space, and what you like about that.
NEAL: Enemy from Space is the second of the three Quatermass movie, adaptations of the serial. It's in the same vein as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and all these other movies about human beings who are being invaded and infested by alien forces.
In this case, over the past few years—but in the context of the story—there have been rains of these tiny little meteorites. Anyone who finds them, they crack open and what's inside infests human beings. And you can find these tiny little burn marks, these V shaped marks on them. And the parasites take them over and make them into these kind of human slaves. And the premise is they serve this larger being, this kind of group entity, and they proceed to start building these atmosphere plants, with the goal ultimately to turn the earth into a colony for these beings that come from outer space.
But the notion of these human beings, they have infiltrated our government, infiltrated our community, and they gradually take people over, scary enough. And they have built this enormous plant that looks, he says, this looks just like this proposed lunar base with these giant atmospheric domes. A group of people managed to infiltrate one of these bases and he looks inside, manages to get close enough to look inside one of these domes and inside are the parasites. When they're released, they grow together into this thing that looks like a giant blob. That's what it looks like outside of the human hosts.
And a bunch of these guys are trapped inside of the atmosphere of plant. And they realize this thing, they can't survive outside the human body. They need methane to breathe, because that's what their home planet is like.
“What we need to do is we need to pump oxygen into this dome to kill this thing. That'll destroy it.” And voices come over to say, “Look, this guy's crazy. There's nothing inside this dome. You send some representatives over, we'll show you anything you want.”
And Quatermass says, “You're crazy if you go over there, you're going to be infected. You're going to be taken over.” But they managed to divide, they send the guys over and Quatermass is pleading with them, “Listen, they're going to get on this speaker. They're going to tell you that everything is fine, but you can't listen. Don't listen to them, whatever you say.”
And then they hear this sound. This hideous sound of screaming coming down the pipes, the pipes that they've been sending oxygen down to the dome. They say, “What the hell is that? What's going on?” And then they look, they see the pressure has gone way up. There's something wrong. And the pipe is burst, the pipe that's sending oxygen to this dome. And they say, “What is it? What's happened?”
And they look and something is dripping down through the pipe. And they say, “What is it?” It's blood. They took the guys that they sent, and they pushed them into the pipe. They say those pipes have been blocked with human pulp in order to keep the oxygen from coming into the dome. That is one of the most, again, all you see is just these drops of blood coming out of the cracked pipe, but that has resonated as one of the most terrifying moments from any movie that I saw, again, as a little kid.
I've seen the movie recently and it's still incredibly terrifying. And again, the architecture of this web of pipes, the cold black and white architecture, is horrifyingly chilling. And the notion of human beings being reduced to mere flesh, being used as material for blocking a pipe. And the pipe's only like, it's like this big. So, you can imagine this person shoved into a pipe is hideous.
JOHN: It is available on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it after that. Brian, do you want to ask about folk horror?
BRIAN: Actually, I was going to jump ahead just because of what Neal was just talking about. I thought this would dovetail nicely into a question I had about a fear of contagion. And you can wrap body horror into this. Movies like The Thing or 28 Days Later, or probably The Quatermas Experiment as well. How does that fear of our own bodies being infected or watching another body change or be infected in unnatural ways? How does that—I don't want to use the word appeal—but how does that appeal to our sense of dread?
NEAL: Well, I think you also have to run back to one of the most common— whether it's psychological or physiological—which is obsessive compulsive disorder.
You say, well, what exactly is obsessive compulsive disorder? We have built in grooming behaviors, whether it's cleaning our hands, we clean our skin. That's wired into us. And when you turn the dial up too far, that turns into obsessive compulsive, obsessive hand cleaning or scratching, itching, hair pulling, all that stuff. It's wired in behavior, in the same way that dogs will scratch, we will scratch.
And so, all of that, we react to it in the same way that if you see a spot of dirt on someone's forehead, it's almost impossible to “Clean that thing off. Get rid of that thing.” I mean, we're built in a certain way to respond to distortions, infections, invasions, in the same way that if someone's eye is cocked to one side, we react to it. Someone's face is distorted. We react to it negatively. We have to work not to respond to it.
It may be a bug, but it may be a feature, because we are built to respond to a diseased or distorted members of our community. It's a survival trait. And so, in some ways, horror movies respond to that. Distorted human beings, Hunchback of Notre Dame or Igor or anyone else who are distorted, deformed, limbless creatures—Freaks—are employed in horror movies in a variety of different ways.
BRIAN: And it's a very different thing from seeing an arm chopped off versus seeing an arm with three hands that are all operating. Both of them is something happening to your body that you might revolt towards, but it's a very different reaction though, right?
NEAL: It is, but it's—in a sense—it's all variations of the same thing. There's a central human norm, and that which varies from the human norm beyond a certain point triggers a reaction that says, “That's not the way it's supposed to be.” And it's just, eyes are too close together, eyes are too far apart, eyes are too big, or there's an extra one. There's one missing. We recoil from it. We recoil from something that is too different, too far off the norm.
And of course, in strictly social terms, you can say, but why, why should we? We shouldn't really respond in that way to others who are too different. But we do respond that way, and it comes with the programming in a very real degree.
JOHN: How does that connect, then, to another movie on your list, The Island of Lost Souls, from 1932?
NEAL: I think it's central to that list. The notion of the difference between that which is human and that which is animal. And Moreau, who experiments with making animals into human beings, but not really. And the sort of terrifying revelation when our hero and the woman—who we know to be an animal woman, but she looks fundamentally human—escape out into the woods and come across the animal person village. And the realization to what extent Moreau has been experimenting. It's not just tens or dozens. The animal people just come flooding out of the woods. And it's just hundreds.
And the extent and the depth and the kind of nightmarish quality, they're all different. They're all horrible. And it's just like, what has Moreau been doing? He experiments with these animals, gets them to a certain state, and then he just discards them and moves on to something else. This utterly careless, sadistic god of this army of nightmares. And you sort of see when they do their, you know, “Are we not men?” And you just see row upon row upon row of these hideous nightmare faces. And you just say, “My God, what has this guy been doing for years? Just making these monsters.”
JOHN: It's a classically creepy movie. I do want to ask you about the classic ghost story movie, The Haunting, and what that says about our fears. If you can, maybe tie that into Ghostwatch, because there's a similar sort of thing going on there.
NEAL: They're both intriguing. They both are opening us up to this notion of unseen nightmare forces, especially the original Haunting, which shows us nothing. All you ever see: Doorknob turning. A face that may or may not be in the wall. This horribly loud banging on the door. A moment where someone thinks that her hand is being held, but there's no one there. It is simply this notion of a house that is born bad, but never really fully explained.
Again, you have this idea of the world itself that should be well behaved, that should be governed by comprehensible natural laws. But there's something deeper and darker and incapable of truly being understood, nevermind being controlled. And if you just prod it a little bit too much, you're going to open it up to forces that are utterly destructive and utterly malevolent.
And in both of these cases, you have this man of science and his team that are going to find out. “We're going to find out for sure whether there really are ghosts, whether there really is a supernatural, whether it really is life after death. We're going to nail this down for science.” Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. These are things that are, that are not meant to be explored, not meant to be examined. Go back.
BRIAN: I'm reminded of Van Helsing's sign off on the original Dracula, where he said, “Just remember, there really are such things in this world.”
NEAL: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the same thing is true in some ways on a much more terrifying scale with Ghostwatch, where it's just, it's this kind of, “It's all just fun and Halloween, we're going to explore this. It's the most haunted house in Britain.” And it's broadcasters whose faces everyone knew at the time, and they were playing themselves. Going to this haunted house where you had these poltergeist phenomena. And we're all going to, “We're going to do it live and call in with your own experiences about being haunted.” And it all just goes so horribly wrong.
JOHN: Now, Neal, I just watched that for the first time this week. Heard about it for years. I had no idea that those were real broadcasters. I thought they were really good actors. But to someone in Britain watching that, those are faces they saw all the time?
NEAL: Yeah. Those are real broadcasters. They had their own shows. They were real, the real deal.
JOHN: Wow. I highly recommend renting it because—it'll test your patience a little tiny bit, because it is quite banal for quite a while, as they lead you into it. But now this new bit of information that these are all faces that that audience who saw it, quote unquote, live that night, it's as terrifying as I imagined the Orson Welles’ War the Worlds would have been. Because it seems very real.
NEAL: And apparently the way they did it, is that there was a number you could call in. And if you called in that number, they would tell you, it's like, “Don't worry, this is all just a show.” But so many people were calling in, they couldn't get through.
BRIAN: This really is War of the Worlds.
NEAL: So, they never were able to get to that message that would tell them, don't worry, it's all just a show. So apparently it panicked the nation, because part of the premise was at a certain point, the ghost that was haunting the house got into the show. And so, the studio itself became haunted. It was really spectacularly well done.
JOHN: It is. It's great. Let's just sort of wrap up here real quick with Neal, if you have any advice for beginning screenwriter about how to best create a really powerful and effective horror screenplay, any little tips.
NEAL: Well, first of all, and I touched on this before, jump scares don't work on the page. You need the loud bang. You need the hand reaching in from the side. You describe that and it doesn't work. So, you have to rely on creating that sense of dread. And while writing screenplays, you have to keep things tight. The concept, the idea—in the same way comedy screenplays have to be funny—scary screenplays have to be scary. It has to be scary on the page. If it's not scary on the page, you're not going to sell the screenplay. And that’s the fundamental trick. You got to make it scary on the page.
JOHN: Excellent advice. All right, let's just quickly, each one of us, tell our listeners a recent favorite horror film that you've seen in the last couple years.
I'll start with you, Brian.
BRIAN: Just last night, I saw Haunting in Venice. And it worked because I had seen the other Kenneth Branagh/Agatha Christie adaptations, and I was very familiar with, and you know, you already know generally that kind of detective whodunit story: it's going to be very, you know, using logic and rationality.
And when they had this episode that was sort of a one off—sort of a departure from that usual way that mysteries are solved—it was very effective. I think if I'd seen it without having already watched a bunch of Agatha Christie adaptations, I would have said, “Oh, that's an okay Halloween movie.” But having seen those other ones, it was an excellent Halloween movie.
JOHN: Excellent. That's on my list. The movie I would recommend, which really surprised me, my wife literally dragged me to it because it was a French film called Final Cut, which is a French remake of a Japanese film called One Cut of the Dead. At about the 30-minute mark, I was ready to walk out, and I thought, why are we watching this? And then they took us on a ride for the next hour that, it's a really good ride. It's called Final Cut.
BRIAN: And this is not to be confused with the Robin Williams Final Cut from... ?
JOHN: Not to be confused with that, no. Or if you can go back to the original and watch the Japanese version. But what's great about the French version is they are literally remaking the Japanese version, to the point where they've made all the characters have Japanese names. Which the French people struggle with enormously. It's a highly effective film. Neal, how about you? Take us home.
NEAL: Okay. It's not a new movie, but I just saw it very recently. It is a Chilean stop motion animated film called The Wolf House. It describes the adventures of a young Chilean woman who escapes from a repressive German colony and ends up in this bizarre house in which she blends into the walls.
She's escaped with two pigs who grow up with her in this house, but again, nothing, no way in which I describe it is going to convey to you how deeply disturbing and chilling this movie is. It really is quite indescribably bizarre and disturbing and just well worth your time to watch. It's not quite like any other movie I've ever seen.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with director John Badham, discussing an early made-for-TV movie, “Isn’t It Shocking,” along with “Wargames” and “Dracula.”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
John Badham Website: https://www.johnbadham.com/
John Badham Books: https://www.johnbadham.com/books
“Isn’t It Shocking” (Made-for-TV movie): https://youtu.be/2fDLHx3feRM
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Amy Scott, discussing her terrific documentary, “Hal,” which takes a deep dive into the life and films of director Hal Ashby (“Harold and Maude,” “Being There,” Coming Home,” “Shampoo”).
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Amy Scott Website: https://www.amyelizabethscott.com/
“Hal” Documentary website: https://hal.oscilloscope.net/
“Hal” Trailer: https://youtu.be/GBGfKan2qAg
“Harold and Maude Two-Year Anniversary” Documentary: https://youtu.be/unRuCOECvZM
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Amy Scott Transcript
First, I want to say thank you for making the movie and thank you for making such a great movie because he totally deserved it. I would always wonder why of all the directors of the 70s and 80s, he was never really heralded the way he should have been. I think part of it has to do with that he had no discernible style. So, you couldn't really pick him for something. But before we dive into that, tell me a little bit about your background before you made Hal?
Amy Scott: Well, I'm from Oklahoma. I moved to Chicago, out of college and in college, we studied a lot of, I had a great professor at ODU at the University of Oklahoma. I don't think he's there anymore. But he really hipped us to the coolest documentaries. I had no idea that you could be a documentary filmmaker, like from Chris Marker to the 7-Up series to Hands on a Hard Body. It was just a really great, great, well-rounded Film and Media Program.
Anyway, I moved to Chicago. I wanted to be a director and a DP, but I fell down, I had gotten a job at the University of Chicago. I think I faked my way into it. I was supposed to start on a Monday, and I fell on the ice and broke my arm on a Friday. So I was like, “I can't shoot. I can't film. I can't use my arm to film and hold the camera. I need to learn how to edit. So I learned how to edit with my right hand, and I loved it. And then I just did that for like 10 years. Well, I mean, I still do it. But it was like this accidental career path.
You're an accidental editor.
Amy Scott: An accidental editor. That became something that later, I just valued as such an important skill set. I use it now. I have wonderful editors that I work with. But we speak the same language. And I think with the story structure, that you have an eye for things in the edit bay and now it really, really helps my ability to break down a three-act structure or figure out where the narrative arc is, and things like that. I think would have taken me a lot longer, had I not fallen and broken my arm.
It was sort of a similar path for Hal Ashby, starting in editing.
Amy Scott: Totally. I loved his films and then when I read Nick Dawson's book, and I started to learn more about him, I really, really connected with him. Because of things that he would say about filmmaking and editing and being in the edit bay and being obsessed with every frame. I felt like, being seen and heard. Like, “Oh, this is how I feel about it, too. I don't feel like such a freak of nature, and lots of people feel this way.” I really connected with Hal and he didn't make The Landlord I believe until he was 40 years old.
He was up there.
Amy Scott: Yeah, up there.
For a first-time filmmaker, that's a late start.
Amy Scott: And that was about the same age that I made the Hal movie.
What was your first experience with a Hal Ashby movie?
Amy Scott: The first film that I saw that I can remember was with my friend Jason in college. I was watching Truffaut and Cassavetes and so I thought that I had a very well-rounded understanding of the new Hollywood. And my friend Jason said, “Have you ever seen Harold and Maude?” I had no idea what he was talking about. He was a couple years older, and he was like, “Oh, honey, you're gonna skip school today. We're gonna watch it.” And I swear to God, we watched it. I couldn't believe what it was. I couldn't believe I'd never seen it. It somehow gone past me.
As soon as it was over, I was like, “Stop. Start it again.” We have to rewatch it. We where there for like eight hours, watching it on a loop. David Russell compares it to The Catcher in the Rye as a sort of like rite of passage for people at that age. It hit me right straight through the heart. And then from there, I think I saw The Landlord, someone had screen of The Landlord in Oklahoma City. And I was like, oh my god, this is incredible.
I live in Minneapolis, where Harold and Maude ran at The Westgate theater for two and a half years. I saw the movie quite a bit there. And then, because I was in a film program, and knew someone who knew the film critic for the local paper, when Ruth and Bud came to town for the two-year anniversary, he sorts of dragged me along with him. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort and hung out a little bit with Ruth Gordon. I made a little documentary on Super 8mm of my perspective on their experiences. I was 15 years old or something and although I knew their itinerary, I couldn't drive. And so I would go to the TV station and shoot some stuff there with them and then they were on to something else. I had to hop on a bus to keep up with them.
Amy Scott: That's incredible.
Yes, my only regret was on that when I had dinner with Bud that I didn't ask better questions. I was sort of starstruck and there's a lot of question. I would ask him now—that I've tried to ask him—but you know, he's not too communicative.
Amy Scott: Yeah. That's incredible that you that you have that footage and I would love to see it.
It was really, really fun and interesting. Ruth Gordon was very much Ruth Gordon, very much Maude. She didn't suffer fools. So, you've seen Harold and Maude, seen The Landlord. At what point did you decide that a documentary had to be made?
Amy Scott: Well, okay, I was pregnant with my first child, and was finishing up Nick Dawson's book on Hal, you know, on Hal’s life. And I thought, I just couldn't believe there was a documentary. But this is before the market became oversaturated with a story about everyone's life. At the time, I just thought, oh my gosh, there's so much here. This guy, his films should be really celebrated. And he should be more known and revered in the canon of American 70s New Hollywood, because he's so influential.
And that's why it was important that we include David O Russell and Adam McKay, and Allison Anders, Judd Apatow. They could draw a direct connections, like the film family tree. When you see the wide shots in Harold and Maude, you think of Wes Anderson. Or, you know, the music, you think of David O Russell. I mean, his influence was everywhere. I started to connect the dots and I thought, oh, my gosh, we've got to, we've got to make a film here.
But I'd never done anything like that. I had directed smaller documentaries. I tried to make a film about this band called The Red Crayola and that was a hilarious attempt on my part. To try to chase them around the globe and on no money. That was my only experience outside of editing. So, fortunately, I had hooked up with my producing partners that I still work with now. I just met them at the time and they hired me to edit some cat food commercials. So it was editing Friskies or Purina, I don't know what it was. It was just looking at cats all day.
And I was about to give birth but I was working trying to lock down the rights And the rights came through one afternoon and I just pulled them (the producers) in and I was like, let's do this together. We didn't know what the hell we were doing, but it was so great and so fun. We approached it, like, all hands-on deck, and we were a little family making this thing. So, that spirit has continued, thank goodness, because of what we put into the Ashby movie.
What do you think were his unique qualities as a director?
Amy Scott: Gosh, so much. I just think he really had an eye. He could see stories. You said something earlier, that all of his films are not the same and therefore it's hard to go, oh, he's this style of filmmaker. But the thing that they all have in common is that he has a very real and raw approach at looking at humanity. Sort of holding the mirror up and showing us who we are, with all of our faults and complexities and layers of contradictions and failures. So he's able to see that and find the stories of humanity. And that's the connective tissue for me. He also had a sick musical taste; I mean, he sort of found Cat Stevens. The soundtrack to Shampoo—I think that's why it's not in wide release right now, as I can’t imagine having to license Hendrix and Janis and the Beach Boys, you know?
That's true. But I'll also say he had the wisdom to let Paul Simon do the small musical things he did in Shampoo, which are just as powerful or if not more powerful.
Amy Scott: So, powerful. So much restraint. Incredibly powerful. I feel like Hal, because he was not—from all of our research and talking to everyone and girlfriends and collaborators—he wasn't a dictatorial director. He didn't lay down mandates. He was really open to hearing from everybody and making it feel like it was a democratic scene and everyone has an equal voice. If you had an idea, speak up.
But at the end of the day, he was like, okay, here's the vision. And once he had that vision, I think that's where he really got into problems with the studio system. Because that was such a different time. The studio guys thought that they were also the director, that they were also the auteur. I cannot imagine a world where you throw your entire life into making a film and then a studio head comes along and tries to seize it from you. I mean, that would give me cancer, you know, from the stress. I can't imagine.
It certainly didn't match with his personality at all.
Amy Scott: No, not at all. What I thought was so fascinating was how open he was to ideas. I love that about him and it resonates in my microscopic ways of connecting to that now. Man, every time it pops up, I'm like, I feel this little Hal Ashby devil angel on my shoulders.
Yes, but it's odd. Because it's not like they didn't know what they were getting. It's not like he hid that part of his personality. You would know, immediately from meeting him that...
Amy Scott: Yeah.
With Harold and Maude, it was just a weird perfect storm of a crazy executive like Robert Evans saying yes to all these weird things. And then the marketing team at Gulf and Western/Paramount going, “we have no idea what to do.” You know, I had the Harold and Maude poster hanging for years. And it's the most obvious example of a studio that cannot figure out how to market a movie. The Harold and Maude different color name thing. It's just so obviously they didn't know what do.
Amy Scott: I know I love when Judd Apatow was talking about that. That's really funny.
So, what was the biggest thing that surprised you as you learned more about Hal?
Amy Scott: What surprised me was that side of his temperament. He did look like this peace love guy. He was an attractive man but, you know, this long hair and long beard and so cool and I had a really myopic like view of what I thought his personality was. I thought he was a super mellow guy. And then I got in and started reading the letters. My producer, Brian would read the letters in his voice as a temp track that we would use that to edit to cut the film. And we were rolling, dying, laughing, like falling down, like, oh, my God, I cannot believe that Hal would write some of this shit to the head of Paramount or whoever. It was like, wow, this guy is not at all who I thought. These were fiery missives that he was shooting off into space.
It wasn't like just getting mad and writing an email. I mean, he had to sit on a typewriter.
Amy Scott: Typewriter and they were very, very long. I mean, the sections that we used in the film, were obviously heavily cut. We couldn't show like six pages of vitriol. The best part about the vitriol though, he wasn’t just vomiting, anger. It was a very poetic. He had a very poetic way of weaving together his frustration and expletives in a way that I just loved.
And then we turned the papers over to Ben Foster. That's why we wanted him to narrate—be the voice of Hal—because he's always struck me as an artist that totally gets it. Not a studio guy and he was all over it. He was right. You can really identify with this sort of, you're either with us or against us artists versus, the David and Goliath. So, that was most fascinating to me.
I knew—because of the book, because Nick did such a great job—I knew Hal’s story. Leaving his child, leaving Leigh. It's one thing to read about it in a book and it's a completely different thing to go meet that person, to sit with her. She's since become a dear friend to me. I feel like she'd never really spoken about that, about her dad and that time of her of her life. I think revisiting trauma on that level, and working through a lot of those emotions with her, was really heavy and not what I intended. When I set out to make the film, I was thinking about the films of Hal Ashby. I didn't think it would get as heavy as it did. I'm glad that we went there and that she took us with her. I feel really, really thankful. I think she got a lot out of it. We certainly did.
It really did show you just how complicated he was, the reality of his life, when you see the child. And she was so eloquent on screen.
Amy Scott: So great. He had some generational trauma too and then you put it all together, and you're like, okay, well, this is somebody that's really adept at looking deep into the human condition. He’d been through a lot. He'd made a lot of mistakes and he's been through a lot. So, of course, this checks out. And he's just so talented and creative, that he can make these films that are this really accurate, fun and funny and sad and tragic and beautiful portrayals of humanity.
Well, let's just if we can't dive into a couple of my favorites just to see if anything you walked away with.
Obviously, Harold and Maude hold a special place in my heart. I've just loved reading Nick’s book and reading and hearing in your film and in listening to commentaries about what Hal did to wrestle Harold and Maude into the movie that it is. I forget who it was on one of the commentaries who said there were so many long speeches by Maude that you just ended up hating her. And Hal’s editor's ability to go and just trim it and trim it and trim it. I compare what he did there to what Colin Higgins went on to do when he directed and he simply didn't have it. He had the writing skill, obviously, and the directing skills. He didn't have that editor’s eye. I don't think there's a Colin Higgins movie made that couldn't be 20 minutes shorter. If Hal had gone into Foul Play and edited it down, it would have been a much stronger comedy. 9 to 5 would have been 20 minutes shorter. Probably a little stronger. Anyway, you don't recognize that. It's all hidden. It's the edit. You don't know what he threw away and that's the beauty of Harold and Maude: within this larger piece he found that movie and found the right way to express it. So, what did you learn about that movie that might have surprised you?
Amy Scott: Everything surprise me about it. You know, we were never able to get Bud Cort. You know Bud Curt, he's so special and so elusive and we thought we thought we were gonna get him a couple times and then it was just a real difficult thing.
But you have him from the memorial service, and that's a great thing.
Amy Scott: Oh, yeah. Anytime he's on camera, he's bewitching. He's incredible. So we went again with the letters. I just didn't realize that Bud and Hal we're so close. I mean, obviously, they were close. But they were very tight. They had a real father son, sort of bond.
Charles Mulvehill, the producer, also talked about how difficult it was to make the film. I didn't know that Charles ended up marrying one of the women that is on the dating service that Harold's mom tries to set up. That was interesting, too. It's hard for me, to tell you the truth. We did so much research on all the films, so there's little bits and pieces of all.
Jumping away from Harold and Maude—just because my brain is disorganized—Diane Schroeder was with Hal for a number of years and she's in the film. She was sort of a researcher archivists, she wore many hats. I did not realize that on Being There, she really needed to nail down what was on the television Chauncey Gardiner learned everything from TV, so it was really important what was on it. When he's flipping, it's not random. She and Hal would take VHS tapes in or I guess it would have been Beta at the time, whatever the fidelity was, but they would record hundreds of hours of TV and watch it. She got all these TV Guides from that year, 1981. But what was a three year’s span, she had all the TV Guides.
She had everything figured out. It was like creating the character of Chauncey Gardiner, with Hal and then Peter Sellars got involved, and he had certain thoughts about it, too. I was just so blown away by the fact that that much care and effort and painstaking detail would go into it. When you see it on screen, it's definitely a masterpiece because of those things. Just the defness of editing, of leaving things out, is what makes it good. That is such a such a really hyper detailed behind the scenes thing to know that. When we were going through his storage space. I remember asking Diane, why are there boxes and boxes and boxes of TV. She said, “oh, yeah, that's Chancy Gardener's.” I said, I cannot believe you guys saved this. Really funny.
It's interesting because they would have done all that in post now. And they had to get that all figured out, before they were shooting it. That’s a lot of pre-production.
Amy Scott: Oh, an immense amount of pre-production. Hal set up an edit bay in his bedroom. It’s the definition of insanity. I had that going on at one point in my life and it's not good. It's not good thing to roll over and it's like right there like right next to pillows staring at you. You need some distance.
When I saw Being There for the first time for some reason I was in Los Angeles/ I saw it and of course loved it. And then came back to Minneapolis and someone had seen it and said, “don't you love the outtakes?” And I said, “What outtakes?” They said, “over the end credits, all those outtakes with Peter Sellars.” And I said, “there were no outtakes.” In the version in LA, they didn't do that.
Amy Scott: I wanted to add this, but we just ran out of time. We found all these Western Union telegrams that Peter Sellars wrote to Hal, just pissed, just livid, furious about that. He said, “You broke the spell. You broke the spell. God dammit, you broke the spell.” He was so pissed that they included those outtakes and I agree with them.
It’s not a real normal Hal move, is it?
Amy Scott: No, it's honestly the first time that I'd ever seen blooper outtakes in a film like that. That’s such an interesting 80s style, shenanigans and whatnot. But, yeah, no, you want them to walk out on the water after watching him dip umbrella in the water and think about that for the rest of your life.
Exactly. I think they left it out of the LA version for Academy purposes, thinking that would help with the awards. But then years later to look at the DVD and see the alternate ending and go, well, that’s terrible. I'm glad you guys figured that out. And then apparently, was it on the third take that somebody said, he should put his umbrella down into the water?
Amy Scott: That's so smart.
It's so smart. Alright. Shampoo is another favorite. I'm curious what you learned about that one, because you had three very strong personalities making that movie with Robert Towne on one side and Warren Beatty on the other and Hal in the middle. It's amazing that it came out as well as it did. Somehow Hal wrangled it and did what he did. What did you learn there that sort of surprised you?
Amy Scott: Well, that aspect is what we wanted to really investigate. Because Hal had a pretty singular vision. Hal as a director—at that stage—was becoming a very important filmmaker. So, then how do you balance the styles of Robert Towne and Warren Beatty? These guys are colossal figures in Hollywood, Alpha dogs. I wish that we could have sat with Warren. It was not for lack of trying. I think a lot of these guys that we couldn't get, it's like, yeah, that's what makes him so cool.
Bruce Dern. I was trying to chase down Bruce Dern at the Chase Bank, and he got up one day and I was just like, I knew, let it go.
But Shampoo, everything we learned, we put in the film. Robert Towne talked to us. And then there was the audio commentary that Hal had from his AFI seminars. Caleb Deschanel spoke pretty eloquently about it being like watching a ping pong match going back and forth between Robert and Warren about what the direction should be. And then the director sitting in a chair probably smoking a joint, waiting for them to finish. It seems like they might have needed a sort of mediator type presence to guide the ship, like have a soft hand with it, you know?
You can't have three alphas in the room at the same time. Nothing would get done. You need a neutralizing force and it seems like that's what Hal was it. He just had a really great taste, you know? My favorite element of that movie—besides Julie Christie's backless dress—would be Jack Warden. Anytime Jack Warden comes on screen, I'm like, just want to hang with him for another half hour. I can just watch that man piddle around and be funny.
I remember reading an interview with Richard Dreyfus after Duddy Kravitz came out, in which he was blasting the director, saying that they ruined Jack Warden’s performance in post-production. And Jack Warden is amazing in Duddy Kravitz. I don't know what they he thinks they did to it, because he's just fantastic.
Amy Scott: He must have just been astronomically amazing and funny, which is what I imagined he's was like.
I took away two things from Shampoo. One was—having seen Harold and Maude as often as I did—recognizing that the sound effects of the policeman's motorcycle as being the same one as George's motorcycle as he's going up the Hollywood Hills. Exact same ones.
But the last shot as he's looking down on Julie Christie's house and the use of high-angle shot, it is one of the saddest things I've ever seen. It's just a guy standing on an empty lot looking down onto the houses below, but it's … I don't know. Given the guys he was dealing with, I don't know how he made that into a Hal Ashby movie, but he did.
Amy Scott: He did. Well, it seems like it's moments like that yeah, there's so much melancholy loaded into that moment. Because George is such an interesting character. Now, I'm realizing that you and I have just blown, we've just spoiled the ending shots of both Being There and Shampoo.
Anybody listening to this who hasn't seen those movies deserves to be spoiled.
Amy Scott: Get on the boat. But yeah, that always got me. I think it's all of those really like, foggy misty Mulholland Drive shot of George on his motorcycle, anytime he's alone. Because he crams his life so full of women to try to fill the hole or the void or whatever he's got going on that's missing in his life. And he's just trying to shove it full of women. So, when he's alone, and he has nothing and no one you're like, oh, my God, this is the saddest thing I've ever seen.
It really is. I don't know. Maybe you can fill me in on this. I remember reading somewhere that the scene—his last scene with Goldie Hawn—they went back and they reshot it because somebody said he's standing. He should be sitting. And I'm always interested in directors who hear that and are willing to go back and do it.
The other example is Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People in his last scene. Telling Redford, “I did it wrong. I should be done crying. I was crying when I should have been done crying.” and they went back and reshot. His portion of it is no longer crying because the director went, you're right. And that simple notion of Warren Beatty should be sitting down, and she should be standing over him.
Amy Scott: She's got the power.
Yes. But I'm not sure a lot of directors would have said yes to that. Like, “We don't need to go back and do that. We're overscheduled we got other stuff to do …”
Amy Scott: Oh, I don't think Hal cared about the schedule at all. Everything that I read or, you know, even Jeff Bridges talked about, like them being over budget and he's like, “you know, all right, let's figure out a creative solution to this. It's going to take as long as it's going to take.” He never seemed to really get riled onset or let those sorts of parameters hold all the power and guide the filmmaking. He was in complete control of that.
Having that sort of attitude about things, that just spreads to the whole set. That spreads everywhere and makes it easier for everybody to work.
Amy Scott: It does.
Let's do one last one. Coming Home is interesting for me because I had friends who ran a movie theater here in town. It was just a couple of running it and I would come by from time to time if they were busy. I’d go up and run the projector for them. They had one of those flat plate systems, so you only had to turn the projector on. It wasn't that big a deal. But you know, I was young and it's like okay, now I'm going to turn the house lights down … I got to see the first five minutes of Coming Home a lot. Probably more than I saw the rest of the movie. Was there anything you learned about the making of that film that surprised you?
Amy Scott: Yeah, I didn't realize how hard it was to get that film made. Jane Fonda is the one that's really responsible for Coming Home even existing. Nancy Dowd had a book and Jane really fought hard to get it made. By the time it got to Hal, it was different, there was a number of rewrites. And it obviously had to be cut down significantly.
I never think—it's never my go-to—to think that one of the actors is the one responsible. Usually it comes to you in a different way, and especially if he's working with Robert Towne and the like. But I thought that was really cool and really interesting that Jane spoke about showing what our veterans were going through. This wasn't new, because you had like The Deer Hunter would have been the comparable. And that's a wildly different take on what coming home from the Vietnam War was like. But also, the woman's journey in that film, and the sexuality of all of that was just like, wow. Only Jane Fonda can speak about it eloquently as Jane Fonda does.
I also didn't realize— when we were sitting with John Voigt—that he was really method in the way that he didn't get out of his chair, I mean, for days on end. Going into crafty in the chair, learning how to do go up ramps and play basketball and all the things that you see was because he wouldn't get out of the chair, which was wonderful.
I really enjoyed talking with Jeff Wexler, and Haskell. That interview that we did with Haskell, I'm so thankful for because, you know, Haskell passed away, not that long after we film. That was one of his last interviews. So, it was really special. He came to the set and Haskell is like, a film God to me and my team. For me, I lived in Chicago so Medium Cool, was one of the coolest things ever. Meeting him and talking with him was so interesting.
I loved hearing about the opening. You can just tell it’s Haskell Wexler. You know it's a Hal Ashby film, but the way it starts and having seen Medium Cool, and going into that opening scene, where the all the vets are non-professional actors. They were actual vets that had come home and those were their true real stories. Now we would say it's sort of hybrid documentary and scripted, but it was like a really early use of that kind of style. And that's what made it feel so real and then you start in with the Rolling Stones, it's just such a masterly, powerful film.
I'm always curious about that sort of thing where he has a lot of footage and he's creating the movie out of it and what would Hal Ashby be like today? How different would his life be if he had everything at his fingertips and it’s not hanging out a pin over in a bin and he had to remember where everything was? I don't know if that would have been any made any difference at all?
Amy Scott: He was an early pioneer of digital editing. He was building his giant rigs and was convincing everyone that digital is the way to go. Which is so cool and so mind blowing. But I think it was born out of a place of independent film, of democratizing the access and taking the power away from the studios. And knowing that you could do this cheaply in your home. It was so actually tragic to learn that. What could he have done? Because his output was just, he put out so much so many great movies. So, what could he have done if the infrastructure was even more accessible and sped up technologically?
Imagine an 8-part streaming series directed by Hal Ashby, what would that be?
Amy Scott: Just be incredible. Well, I know that he was wanting to work. He had so many films that we found. And we found script after script. One of them, I was so, “damn, that would have been cool,” was The Hawkline Monster. A Richard Brautigan science fiction Western novel. It's so trippy and so cool. I feel like every couple of years, I hear about some directors says, “we got the rights, we're gonna make it.” And I'm like, when are they gonna make it? It's so long.
And imagine what his version of Tootsie would have been.
Amy Scott: Oh, I know. Yeah. No joke.
Just seeing those test shots. Wow.
Amy Scott: I know, it would have been a different film.
I read a quote somewhere that one of the producers or maybe it was Sydney Pollack, who said, they took the script to Elaine May. And she said, “yeah, it just needs…” And then she listed like five things: He needs a roommate that he can talk to … the girl on the TV show, she needs a father, so he can become involved with him … there also has to be a co-worker who is interested in him as a woman … the director needs to be an ass, he should probably be dating the woman. It was like five different things. She said the script is fine, but you need these five things. So, what did they have? She just listed the whole movie.
Amy Scott: Right. Well, we're talking about Elaine May. She’s someone that needs a film.
She does. And why aren’t you doing that?
Amy Scott: Listen, I'm telling you. I've tried. This is another one that I've tried for years. You know, here’s a real shocker: It's hard to get a film about a female filmmaker funded. It's a hard sell.
She probably wouldn't want to do it anyway
Amy Scott: She's so cool. My approach has always been that she has so much to teach us still. So, I would love to get her hot takes on all those films. A New Leaf. I mean, the stories behind that thing getting made.
Like the uncut version of A New Leaf.
Amy Scott: Exactly. I want to hear it from her. So, yeah, that's high up on my list. I really, really want to make one with Elaine.
Was there anyone else you really wanted to get to? You mentioned Warren didn't want to talk to you. Anybody else?
Amy Scott: I would have loved Julie Christie or, you know, more women would have been great. Bruce Dern was so great and so funny and I’d seen him a number of times. I saw he was at a screening of one of his movies. He talked for like, an hour and a half before they even screened the film. He was whip smart in his memories. I was so upset that we couldn't work it out because I knew that he would be incredible.
Just his knowledge of movie industry, having been in it so long.
Amy Scott: My gosh, yeah.
He even worked with Bette Davis.
Amy Scott: Yeah, he's national treasure. Exactly. I was just staring at a poster. I have framed poster of Family Plot in my kitchen.
That's the movie that was going to make him a star, according to Hitchcock. It still has one of the greatest closing shots of all time. I think I read that Barbara Harris improvised the wink, and that's another person who you should make a documentary about.
Amy Scott: Oh my gosh. Barbara Harris is something. Do you remember what was the film that she was in with? Dustin Hoffman and Dr. Hook scored it. It's a really long title.
Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?
Amy Scott: That is such a phenomenal Barbara Harris performance. I mean, Dustin Hoffman is incredible. He's always great. But Barbara Harris really shines and I guess I'm like, that's who she was. Yeah, I think she was difficult. Well, I don't know, difficult.
She had stuff she was dealing with.
Amy Scott: She had issues and Hal had to deal with those on Second Hand Hearts too.
From a production standpoint, people are interested in hearing what your Indiegogo process was Any tips you'd have for someone who wants to fund their film via Indiegogo?
Amy Scott: Oh, boy. Well, that was a different time, because I really don't know how films are funded at the moment. This came out five years ago, but it took us like six years to make. So, during in that time, you could at least raise enough capital to get through production.
The Indiegogo campaign enabled it so that we could even make the movie, because everything past that point, nobody ever got paid at all. But at least that way, we could buy film stock and pay the camera operators and our DPs and stuff. So, that was hugely important.
At the time, I remember thinking like, oh, no, how are we ever going to get anybody to because you had to make these—I don't know if this is still the case—but you had to make these commercials for your project or like a trailer to get people's attention. And you had to be all over Facebook and crap like that. So, I was like, oh, no, how am I going to make a thing that shows that Hal Ashby's important to people that want to give money?
A friend somehow knew John C. Reilly and mentioned it to him. It was like, we just need a celebrity to come in for like, you know, half a day or one hour. And he said, I'll come on down and do that. And he came. I couldn't believe it. The generosity of this man. He didn't know us at all. But he knew and loved the films of Hal Ashby and wanted to give back and pay it forward.
So, he came down and because of him, we have a really funny, awesome little commercial trailer. I have no idea where that thing even is. I'd love to see it because I had to do it with him, which was terrifying, because I am not a front of camera person. I didn’t know what to say. And he said, All you have to do is ask for money. I'll all do the rest of the talking.
I remember seeing it.
Amy Scott: It’s been stripped from Indiegogo which probably means that we used a song that we weren't able to. That was back in the early days of crowdfunding, where you could just take images or songs and I'm sure I used the music of Cat Stevens, and then, loaded up with a bunch of photos that we never paid for.
Well, that brings up a question of how did you get all the rights to the stuff you got for the finished movie? Was that a huge part of your budget?
Amy Scott: No. The most expensive thing always to this day is music. Music is going to get you. Outside of that, thank goodness, there's this little thing called fair use now, which wasn't the case in documentary filmmaking for a very long time. But now you can fair use certain elements, photographs, or news clips, video clips, anything that sort of supports your thesis that you're making about your subject and supports your storyline falls under the category of fair use.
So, I think what our money did pay for is the fair use attorneys that that really go over your product. They went over out fine cut, because we couldn't afford to pay for multiple lawyers to look at it. So you give them a fine cut, you hold your breath and hope that they say, oh, you know, you only have to take out a couple things. And you're like, oh, thank God. Okay, and then you change it.
I believe, because we never had any money, that we submitted to Sundance and got in on a wing and a prayer. And then had, you know, two weeks to turn the film around and get it, finished. I remember we were like, you know, pulling all these all nighters, trying to change the notes that the legal said XY and Z was not fair use and trying to swap out music with our composer. It was a wild, wild run.
Isn’t that always the way? You work on it for six years and then suddenly you have two weeks to finish it.
Amy Scott: That's how it shook out for us. It was like really, really pretty funny, because you're going on a leisurely pace until you're not. And then it's like, alright, it's real now. I thought for years, I think my friends and casual acquaintances thought that I've lost my mind. Because every year, I'd see people that I would see occasionally and they're like, hey, how's it going? What are you working on? I'm like, I'm just working on this Ashby's movie. And they were like, year after year, like damn. She's like, we need to reel her in and we need to throw her a lifeline. No, really, I really, really am. So, it was pretty funny. We were. We did it.
People have no idea how long these things take.
Amy Scott: It's unfunded. But you know, then we got lucky after that, because we nearly killed ourselves on Hal. Then we kind of fell into the era of streaming deals and streamers. And then people were like, oh, we want to make biopics and we want to give you money to make a biopic. And that was truly our first rodeo. We're like, oh, my gosh, what? This is incredible. We can get paid for this.
Now that's falling away. This streaming industry is, you know, collapsing in on itself as it should, because there's no curation anymore. And it's like, let's return to form a little bit here, guys. So, we're just riding the wave. I say it's like we're riding trying to learn how to ride a mechanical bull this industry. I’m a tomboy. So, every local Oklahomans is up for the ride.
Let me ask you one last question. I'll let you go then. So, as a filmmaker, what did you learn doing a deep dive into the work of this director and editor and you are a director and editor? So, that's sort of a scary thing to do anyway, to be the person who's going to edit Hal Ashby. What did you learn in the process that you can still take away today?
Amy Scott: Well, listen, we joke about it all the time. My producer, Brian Morrow and I are constantly going, oh, what would Hal do? Everything that he stood for, as a filmmaker. The film will tell you what to do. Get in there, be obsessed be the film, all of those things.
I get this man because I feel the same way. So, when we like took a real bath in Hal Ashby's words for years, that sort of that shapes the rest of your life as a filmmaker. You're not like a casual filmmaker after going through like the Ashby's carwash. That stuff's sticks.
But I'm proud. I'm proud that that we pulled it off. I'm proud that we were able to make the movie. Somebody would have done it, because Hal is too great and too good, and he just has deserved it for so long.
The only thing that we've ever wanted was that we wanted people to go back and watch his films, or to watch him for the first time if they had never seen him. And then to take his creative spirit forward. Be in love with the thing that you make. It’s your lifeforce.
So, otherwise, what is it all for, you know? So, yeah, that's what I got from him.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with director and editor Peet Gelderblom on his collage feature, “When Forever Dies.”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
When Forever Dies website: http://www.whenforeverdies.com/
Watch it on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whenforeverdies/806226783
Watch it on the Eye Film Player: https://player.eyefilm.nl/en/films/when-forever-dies
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Interview Transcript
I do want to just spend just a minute or so talking about When Forever Dies. But oh, my goodness Peet. Where did that come from? And how do—I realize you could probably talk for an hour about it? How did you come up with that? And the very process of putting it together is mind blowing. How would you describe it to someone who hasn't seen it?
Peet: Yeah, When Forever Dies is an archival fiction and it cobbles together scraps of existing films to tell an entirely different story of its own. And that is the story of the relationship between a man and a woman, and how this relationship sort of degrades over time. And it's really experimental in the way that it takes shots and bits and scenes from completely different movies and also completely different genres. It can be advertising, documentaries, animation, love silent films, everything really, and it still manages to tell a whole story.
You know, you say it's experimental, as someone who has seen it, it's experimental for a few minutes. And then you understand the experiment. And it's then a normal narrative, you get it. I mean, you use some interstitial cards that help bring us along.
Peet: I say that, because I've always believed that experiment in accessibility shouldn't be a mutually exclusive. It's actually, it's a roller coaster ride of a film and it's in a very, in a lot of ways, it's actually very traditional because I'm using the rules of continuity editing, but I’m using the rules against themselves a little bit, because I take from different films, and then I create, you know, sometimes the opposite meaning out of different shots. Yeah, but what gave me the idea was just I saw a way to do this. And it has evolved, of course, with maybe the start of it was the Raising Cain recut, and making movie mashups after that—video essays—but it all comes from my editing background. I've edited lots of trailers and promos for Universal Pictures and Comedy Central and all sorts of TV channels. And then I was also able to take from different series and different films, you know, put different shots together and create this new through line that didn't exist before and I always enjoyed doing that and I just thought, wouldn't it be really cool to try and do this for a whole feature film?
As it turns out, it was really cool. You know, we recently had on the podcast an editor named Roger Nygard, and Roger edits, Larry David's show Curb Your Enthusiasm, he edited Veep and he's a filmmaker like you. He directs and he edits and he put he also makes his living as an editor. And he said that the thing that taught him the most about filmmaking and about editing was editing promos, where you had a you know, you had to do it all in 15 seconds. And he said you'd learn the most about filmmaking when you have that sort of requirement to work within those boundaries and still tell a story.
Peet: Yeah, it's the shortest way to tell a story and you really need or you really learn about what things what elements you really need to make something happening on the screen.
With When Forever Dies what's the music on that post-scored or where did you edit to the music? I couldn't really tell, it was all seems so seamless.
Peet: Wow, thank you. Well, it's a little bit of both. I decided I wanted to have a sort of backbone because there was no backbone besides the story that I had made up. So, I actually edited everything on music. Some of the music I made myself but there's also a lot of Creative Commons music and music that was replaced later on by something that our composer did.
Well, it all feels of a piece. It's all just together in perfect. So, I will definitely recommend to listeners that when it becomes available, When Forever Dies is...
Peet: Yeah, it had a very good festival run and then one audience award in Colombia. We're looking into, you know, other, yeah, we're looking into how it could be distributed right now. But obviously it's a weird film. It's difficult to place it.
Yeah, it is. It's different. But then once you get the rhythm of it, you're totally in and you get it.
Peet: Yeah, that's also been my experience with that audience really, audiences really love it when they see it. But I think the trick is to how do you get them in the film theater.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with comedian and USC Professor Wayne Federman on the history and impact of stand-up comedy albums.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Wayne Federman Website: http://www.waynefederman.com/Wayne_Federmans_Official_Web_Site/Welcome.html
The History of Standup Podcast: https://www.thehistoryofstandup.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with writer/director Nicholas Meyer about his work on the Adrian Brody “Houdini” mini-series, as well as thoughts on Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Time After Time and more.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Behind the Page Nicholas Meyer Interview Part One: https://tinyurl.com/3f7mbzer
Behind the Page Nicholas Meyer Interview Part Two: https://tinyurl.com/ms3tm45f
Nicholas Meyer website: https://www.nicholas-meyer.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
***
Nicholas Meyer – Transcript
John Gaspard: Do you remember what it was that caused your dad to write that book?
Nicholas Meyer: I know something about it. He was interested, the subjects that kind of absorbed his attention were the sons of passive or absent fathers. This was a topic which probably originated from his experiences with his own father, my grandfather, who was a very interesting man and a kind of a world beater, but who spent so much of his time doing what they said in The Wizard of Oz—being a philip, philip, philip, a good deed doer—that he didn't have enough time for fathering. He was not a bad man at all, quite a conscientious one. But the parenting was left to his wife and I think my father missed and was affected by not having an involved father. And I think that a colleague of my dad's said to him Houdini, that's the guy for you. And that's how he did it. I'm only sorry that he didn't live to see the two-night television series based on his book.
Jim Cunningham: I enjoyed it immensely as a Houdini fan. It was fascinating and fun and Adrian Brody is terrific, as is the woman who plays Bess. I thought I knew a lot about Houdini and there was a lot in there that I did not know. And I really enjoyed the opening to it, which suggests that it's all fact and all fiction, and it's our job to figure out which is which. How did you come to being involved with the TV mini-series about your dad's book?
Nicholas Meyer: I have been friends and worked for many years with a television producer named Jerry Abrams. I started working with Jerry in 1973 with the first teleplay that I wrote was for a television movie called Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery. There was a—China apparently invented everything first, including detective stories—and a circuit court judge in the seventh century, Judge Dee Jen Jay, solved mysteries and people wrote detective stories about him and now there are movies about him.
But back in 1972, or something like that, and I had just come to Hollywood and was looking for work and didn't know anybody. And I met Jerry Abrams and I met a director named Jeremy Kagan and I'm happy to say both of these gentlemen are alive and still my friends. They gave me a shot to write this Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery because I think ABC thought they were going to get a Kung Fu movie out of it, which it wasn't. But it was a television movie with an all Asian cast. The monastery in question was the old Camelot castle on the Warner Brothers lot and that's where I met Jerry. And Jerry and I've been friends ever since. Jerry’s son is JJ Abrams, who directs movies.
Anyway, Jerry said to me a couple of years ago, let's do Houdini and I said, Oh, funny, you should say that because my dad wrote a very interesting book about Houdini. I would be interested if it were based on his book. I would only be interested and that's how it got made.
John Gaspard: What was your process? Did you know it would be two nights going in? Did you know it's going to be that long? How did you get started and what other resources did you use, because I know there's stuff mentioned in the movie that I don't remember being in your dad's books. You must have had to dig a little bit.
Nicholas Meyer: There's a lot of books about Houdini, that I read many, many books, because my dad's book is distinguished—if one could call it that—by being the only book of all the books about Houdini that attempts some inner explanation of his psychological process. The why? Why would you do this? Why do you feel the need to do this? Other books will tell you what Houdini did, and some will tell you how he did it. But my dad's book, as I say, it kind of explores the why of it.
And so I read these other books to supplement the rest of the how and the why and I've amassed quite a large Houdini library. When I say large, probably compared to yours not so much, but I must have like 10 books about Houdini and flying aeroplanes and Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism and so forth. So, yes, I read all those to supplement what I was trying to condense.
I don't remember whether at this point whether it was proposed as two nights or three nights or whatever. I also know that if it hadn't been for Adrian Brody agreeing to play Houdini, it never would have happened. They weren't going to do it without a star.
Jim Cunningham: He's great.
John Gaspard: I was telling Jim earlier, before you got on, that my wife was kind enough to sit down and watch it with me. She's always worried in things like this, that she’s going see how something's done. She doesn't want to know how magic is done at all. And when we got to the end, she said, “Houdini seems so nice. He's such a likeable guy.” And I think that's really more Adrian Brody.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. The Adrian Brody. As I say, the movie would not have got made without Adrian. I'm not sure that he wasn't to a large degree cast against type. I think Houdini was a guy with ants in his pants, a kind of frenetic character. And I don't think when you read about him in any detail, that he was what you'd call nice. I think he was a person who had a lot of charm that he could switch on and off like a tap.
And I think this is one of the things that my dad's book brings out, and we tried to bring it out in the movie: that Houdini's whose own father was a failure of flop and absent parent. So, I think Houdini spent a lot of his life looking for substitutes or alternative father figures. And I think the first one he probably stumbled on was the French magician Robert-Houdin, from whom he took his name. And I think Houdini's pattern, at least according to my dad's reading of it, was to find father figures and fall hard for them, only to ultimately become disenchanted and alienated and furious with them. Probably, because ultimately, they weren't his real father. But I think there was something like that going on.
John Gaspard: Yes, it's pretty clear that's what happened with Doyle as well.
Nicholas Meyer: Yes, but he had better reason than in some other cases to be disenchanted with Doyle because Doyle's Atlantic City séance with Lady Doyle, Houdini ultimately regarded as a real betrayal. Because he decided, probably correctly, that the contact with his mother via Lady Doyle doing spirit writing was fake.
And by the way, it's not that Mrs. Doyle or Lady Doyle might not have believed what she was doing. It just didn't track for two reasons: Houdini experienced this contact with his mother, and he was as obsessed with her as he was with the fact of an absent father. And he was so overcome when she spoke to him via the spirit writing that it was a couple of days before he realized that his mother didn't speak a word of English. And she had communicated via lady Doyle in English, she only spoke Yiddish. Doyle got around this difficulty by explaining that the medium in this case, Lady Doyle, worked as a kind of simultaneous translator.
And Houdini said, yeah, but—and this was the second item—it was his birthday. And she never mentioned it and she always sent him something on his birthday. And he then denounced Doyle and Lady Doyle, as quote, menaces to mankind.
John Gaspard: So, were you involved in a day-to-day way with production? And I'm wondering why you didn't direct it?
Nicholas Meyer: I was involved. The whole movie was shot in Budapest, everything and I was involved. I was not invited to direct. I have not directed really since the death of my wife in 1993. I had two small children to raise and by the time it was, like, possible for me to go back since they are now grown up and busy. I was sort of out of a game.
John Gaspard: Oh, that's too bad. You're a terrific director.
Nicholas Meyer: I'm not arguing with you.
John Gaspard: So, once you were scripting it, and you were using other sources, how concerned were you about this is fact, this is fiction?
Nicholas Meyer: That's a very good question and it doesn't just apply to Houdini. It applies largely to the whole issue of dramatizing the stories based on real events.
And by the way, you could make the case in a way that there's no such thing as fiction; that all fiction ultimately can be traced back to something real. I'll give you two examples off the top of my head: one, Moby Dick was based on a real Whale called Mocha Dick because of his color; and, as Heinrich Schliemann proved, when he discovered Troy, most legends, most myths have their origins somewhere in the mists of time, in some kind of reality. It turns out there was a place called Troy. So, he was not far off the mark.
It's a knotty question with a “k” how much we owe to fact and how much we get to mush around and dramatize? And the answer has to be inevitably elastic. The problem is that people are neither taught, nor do they read history anymore. We are not taught civics. We are not taught history.
Nobody knows anything and so by default, movies and television are where we get our history, and that history is not always truthful. It is dramatized for example, in that Academy Award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, we learn that the North Vietnamese made American prisoners of war in Vietnam, play Russian roulette. There is no evidence, no historical evidence that they ever did any such thing. And yet, if you're getting your history from the movies, that's what you see and someone said that seeing is believing. In any case, you have to sort of always be looking over your own shoulder when you are dramatizing history and realizing that, yes, you can tell a story with scope, dates and characters. But what's the point where you cross a line and start inventing things out of whole cloth?
I’ll give you another example: was Richard the Third really the monster that Shakespeare portrays? Now, remember, Shakespeare is writing for the granddaughter of the man who killed Richard the Third and usurped his throne and called himself king. You could make a very different case that that guy was a scumbag and that Richard was not, but you know, Shakespeare was in business. The Globe Theatre was a money-making operation and Henry the Seventh’s granddaughter was the Queen of England. So, there are a lot of variables here.
When you sit down to dramatize, I've worked for the History Channel and I can tell you the history channel will not make a movie where Americans look bad. The History Channel will not make a movie that questions any point in our own history. Our right to the moral high ground. It's a point of view and they have a demographic and Americans don't want to be shown any of their own flaws or asked to think about them.
Jim Cunningham; Well, who does? Can I ask questions about the espionage? Part of what I witnessed last night, although I had sort of a vague memory, that there is some espionage connection or perhaps connection? In the first episode that he was working for at least the American government and perhaps the English government as well. Is there evidence for that?
Nicholas Meyer: Circumstantial evidence.
Jim Cunningham: Yes, and I suppose that it could still be even at this late date protected in some way in terms of, I don't know them, not admitting, or maybe no real hard evidence exists anymore, right?
Nicholas Meyer: I'm more inclined to think that no real hard evidence exists. Although we all know that somebody said, truth is the daughter of time. But a lot of evidence has for a lot of things, not merely in this country, but also England has been redacted and eliminated and buried. You know, how many of your listeners know the story of Alan Turing?
Alan Turing may have shortened World War Two by as much as two years by inventing the computer that helped break the German Enigma code. Alan Turing signed the Official Secrets Act which meant that his wartime work could never be revealed. Alan Turing was gay. After the war was over, Alan Turing was arrested on a morals and decency charge and he could not tell the world who he was and so he was sentenced to some kind of chemical castration, I believe and he killed himself.
And all of this remained a secret for the next 55 years before the world's, you know, learned and suddenly there was a play called Breaking the Code and then there was the Enigma novel by Robert Harris and then there was the movie, which is very inaccurate, and very troublesome to me, The Imitation Game. Because in The Imitation Game, the first thing he does when he's arrested, is tell the cop who he is. With a crushing irony, as well as inaccuracy, is it there's no way he was allowed to tell. That was the price you pay when you sign the Official Secrets Act. So that movie kind of bugged me.
Whereas for example, Enigma, which I think is one of my favorite movies, doesn't bug me at all because it doesn't call him Alan Turing and therefore, he's not gay, and it's a different story entirely spun out of inspired by, but not pretending to be Alan Turing.
Jim Cunningham: Well, now I'm gonna have to watch that movie because I don't think I've seen it.
Nicholas Meyer: You never saw Enigma?
Jim Cunningham: I don't believe I saw Enigma.
Nicholas Meyer: It's the only movie produced by Mick Jagger and Lorne Michaels, written by Tom Stoppard. Kate Winslet, Dougray, Scott, Jeremy Northam. Anyway, it's a fantastic movie, but you have to watch it like five times in order to understand everything that's going on because Tom Stoppard is not going to make it easy.
John Gaspard: Just a quick side note here. I remember reading somewhere that Mick Jagger was a possible first choice for Time After Time
Nicholas Meyer: Yeah, for Jack the Ripper.
John Gaspard: Okay, interesting. I prefer the choice you came up with.
Nicholas Meyer: Well, when they—Warner Brothers—were trying to sort of figure out how to make this movie, quote, commercial (they were so surprised when it was a hit), they suggested Mick Jagger as Jack the Ripper. And he was in LA at the time touring and I really didn't understand the politics of not just filmmaking, but you know, sort of office politics generally. And my first reply was no, you know, you might believe him as the Ripper, but you'd never believe him—or I didn't think you would believe him—as a Harley Street surgeon. And they said, You mean you won't even meet him? And that's when I said, oh, okay, I get it. I have to agree to meet. So I met him and then I said, fellas, I still don't, you know, think this can work. And so we went on to David Warner.
Jim Cunningham: I think that was the first film I became aware of David Warner and of course, it colored my opinion of David Warner for everything I've seen him in since, including him as Bob Cratchit in a version of A Christmas Carol. I kept thinking to myself, don't turn your back on him. He's a killer. He's a stone-cold killer, because of Time After Time, which is still one of my favorite movies.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, thank you so much.
John Gaspard: We promised not to geek out too much. But I have to tell you that the hotel room scene between him and McDowell, I still pull up once or twice a year to look at the writing and the acting in that scene. “You're literally the last person on Earth expected to see.” They're both so good in that scene.
Nicholas Meyer: They are that, they are.
John Gaspard: I think you mentioned in your memoir in passing that when you did The 7% Solutionthere was some back and forth with the Doyle estate. We—Jim and I—have a friend, Jeff Hatcher, who wrote the screenplay for Mr. Holmes, which is based on a book. Once the movie came out, it did run into some issues with the Doyle estate, because the writer had taken some characteristics of Holmes from the later books …
Nicholas Meyer: It's all bullshit. All that is bullshit. The Doyle estate, which was once the richest literary estate in the world, was run into the ground by his descendants and their in laws and they don't care anything about Sherlock Holmes. All they care about is money. And what they try to do is to stick up movie companies and book companies and say you've got to pay. And back when Holmes legitimately fell into copyright, which is when I wrote The 7% Solution, yes, I had to pay and I understood that. I mean, I didn't understand it when I wrote the book because I was a kid. But I understood it when it was explained to me.
What since happened is they continue, even though he's out of copyright, to try to pretend that he is or that one or two stories are etc. My friend, Les Clinger, who is a business manager but also happens to be a lawyer and a Holmes’ enthusiast, took the estate to court and won. He broke that bullshit stranglehold that they were trying to exercise on anybody who wanted to write or create or make a movie about Holmes.
Now, it's also true that big companies like Warner Brothers, or Paramount or something, if they make a Sherlock Holmes movie, and the Doyle estate comes sniffling to their door, find it cheaper to say, here's $10,000, Go away, than it is to bother to do what Les did, which was take them to court. It's just, it's blackmail, you've all seen the Godfather, you know, give me a little something to wet my beak is what this is all about. I have nothing good to say about them and what they did with Mr. Holmes, your friend's movie, was they waited until the movie was about to come out before they hit him.
John Gaspard: Jim, I should mention, you probably don't know this, that and this is the truth, the man we're talking to is the man for whom the thing at the beginning of a DVD that says the opinions expressed here are not those of this company. He's the reason that's on DVDs.
Jim Cunningham: Is that right?
Nicholas Meyer: Yes, I will explain because I'm very proud of it.
I've made a couple of contributions to civilization. One of them is the movie The Day After, it's my nuclear war movie. And the other is this little sign. And it happened when they were preparing the DVD release of Star Trek Two: the Wrath of Khan. I was interviewed and asked to explain my contributions to the making the movie, the script, the directing, etc. So, I told the story about how I came to write the script. And the DVD lady who subsequently became a very good friend of mine said, “Gee, the lawyers say we can't use any of what you told us.” And I said, “And why is that?” And she said, Paramount was worried about getting in trouble with the Writers Guild, because you are not credited as the author and you wrote this sort of under the table, the script. And I said, Well, why don't you just take me out of the whole DVD? Because if I can't tell the truth about it, I don't want to be in it.
And she said, “That's what I hoped you would say. Now, I've got some ammo.” So, she went back and she came back and she said, okay, here's the deal. And the deal now applies to every studio. “The opinions expressed in this interview, are not those of Paramount Pictures, its employees or affiliates.”
What this does is it stops those interviews from being bullshit puff pieces and allows them to become oral histories. Now, different people may have different oral histories of the same thing. You put them all on the DVD, but suddenly, you've opened up a whole world to telling things that really happened or that the tellers think really happened, or are their opinions without the studio, worried that they're going to be sued, because of that little disclaimer. And they all have that now and that's my contribution.
Jim Cunningham: It's great. Now, I promised John before this interview that I would not talk Star Trekwith you, but since you've opened the door a little bit here. Now, that you say that you wrote Wrath of Khan under the table, can you just flesh that out for me? It might not ever be in the podcast, but I'm an incredible Star Trek fan. So, I'm interested in this story.
Nicholas Meyer: Well, very quickly, I knew nothing about Star Trek when I met Harve Bennett, the producer of what was going to be the second Star Trek movie. He showed me the first movie. He showed me some of the episodes and I got kind of a jones to make an outer space, a space opera. And I realized once I started to familiarize myself with Captain Kirk that he reminded me of Captain Hornblower, which were the books by CS Forester that I read when I was a kid, about a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, who had adventures and a girl in every port, which sounded good to me. I was 12. I think it was 13 or something and so I thought, “Oh, this is Hornblower and outer space. This is destroyers. This is submarines.”
So, I made a deal with Paramount and Harve Bennett to direct a Star Trek movie for them, which was going to be their second movie. And Harve said, draft five of the script is coming in. So, I went home and waited for draft five. And, you know, I looked up and it was three or four weeks later and wondered whatever happened, because I was starting to think about spaceships and stuff like that. And he said, “Oh, I can't send you the script. It's not good. I can't.” I said, “Well, what about draft four, draft three, whatever?” And he said, “You don't understand. All these different drafts are simply separate attempts to get another Star Trek movie. They're unrelated.”
And I said, “Well send them all to me. I want to read them.” And he said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.”
And in those days, you didn't hit Send. A truck, drove up, a van, and it had a lot of scripts. And I'm a very slow reader and I started. I read all these scripts and then I said, “Why don't you and your producing partner, Robert Salem, come up to my house and let's have a chat about this because I have an idea.” And so they showed up, and I had my ubiquitous legal pad and I said, “Why don't we make a list of everything we like in these five scripts? It could be a major plot. It could be a subplot. It could be a sequence. It could be a scene. It could be a character, it could be a line of dialogue, I don't care. Let's just make the list and then I'll try to write a new screenplay that incorporates as many of these elements as we pick.” And they didn't look happy and I thought, I don't get a lot of ideas. This was my idea and I said, “What’s wrong? What's wrong with that?”
And they said, “Well, the problem is that if we don't have a screenplay within 12 days, Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects house for the movie, say they can't deliver the shots in time for the June opening.” And I said, “What June opening? “And I only directed one movie in my life, and these guys had booked the theatres for a movie that didn't exist. And I said, “Well, okay, I'll try to do this in 12 days, but we got to pick the stuff now.”
And they still weren't happy. And I said, “So, what is it? What's the problem?” And they said, “Well, you know, let's be honest, we couldn't even make your deal in 12 days.” And at this point, I was like, foaming at the mouth. I said, “Look, guys, forget the deal. Forget the money. Forget the credit. I'm not talking about directing. We've already got that signed, sealed and delivered. But if we don't do this, now, there's gonna be no movie, yes or no?”
And I was an idiot, because I at that point gave away you know, what turned out to be significant. So, I didn't invent Kirk meets his son. I didn't invent Khan. I didn't invent Savak. I didn't invent the Genesis Planet. I didn't invent any of those things. I just took them and played with them like a Rubik's Cube and poured my, essentially it's all my dialogue, Harve wrote a few lines, but I wrote most of it.
John Gaspard: Well, it certainly worked.
Jim Cunningham: Oh, boy. Yeah, absolutely. And I will not bring up The Undiscovered Countrybecause I promised John I wouldn't. The 7% Solution is very interesting. You took one thing, and you extrapolated out from that an entire kind of reality about Holmes that had not been explored. And it's similar to kind of what your father did with Houdini. And did that ever occur to you that there was there's a similarity there somehow?
Nicholas Meyer: Well, I did 7% before he did Houdini.
Jim Cunningham: He owes you then.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. He does. It's interesting. I was not the first person to put together Holmes and Freud. In fact, Freud knew that he'd been compared to Holmes. Freud loved to read Sherlock Holmes stories. That was his bedtime reading and at some point, he even wrote in one of his case histories, “I follow the labyrinth of her mind, Sherlock Holmes-like until it led me to…” So he knew about this comparison.
And there was a doctor at Yale, a famous psychiatrist/drug expert, who wrote a paper that my father gave me to read about Holmes, Freud and the cocaine connection. Because Holmes is a cocaine user and for a time, so was Freud. And when my book came out and was the number one best-selling novel in the United States for 40 weeks, I got sued by this doctor at Yale for plagiarism. This is like the first successful thing I'd ever done in my life and this guy was saying I ripped him off. Because he was probably walking across campus and people were saying, “Hey, doc, hey, professor, that guy in the New York Times you ripped you off.”
So, I got sued. This is how you know you're hot is when you get sued. But it was devastating to me. It was devastating and it was expensive, because I had to defend myself. I had a lawyer and the lawyer said, “They have no case. We will ask for something called summary judgment.” And I said, “Does that mean we have to wait till July?” And he goes, no, no, no, it's not about that x couldn't resist summary judgment. Yeah, that happened in the summertime.
Summary judgment turns out to mean that the facts of the case are not in dispute. No one can dispute that I read his essay. I put it in my acknowledgments. I thanked him. I read it. The question is, what is the definition of plagiarism? It turns out, you cannot copyright an idea. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. The words. I hadn't used his words. I haven't used any of his. I didn't write an academic paper. I wrote a novel. I wrote a story. So, I won and then he appealed and I won again, end of story.
So, it didn't originate with me, nothing originates with me. Moby Dick was based on another whale. Emma Bovary was a real person, on and on and on.
If you read the history or a biography, you understand that in good faith, efforts have been made to lay out the facts. But when you read a historical novel, you understand that the facts have been mushed around and dramatized, that the author has assumed the dramatist’s privilege, his prerogative, to help things along.
There's an Italian phrase, se non è vero, è ben trovato. If it didn't happen that way, it should have.
I’ll give you another example: Queen Elizabeth the first and her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth subsequently had beheaded, never met in real life. They'd never met. But of all the 4,622 movies, plays, operas, novellas, ballets, whatever that are, they always meet.
Because it ain't cool if they don't meet.
John Gaspard: It's a better story.
Nicholas Meyer: It's a better story.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Noah Diamond and Jim Cunningham, talking about the pleasures and perils of playing Groucho Marx.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Noah Diamond website: https://www.noahdiamond.com/
“Gimme a Thrill: The Story Of "I'll Say She Is," The Lost Marx Brothers Musical” -- https://tinyurl.com/28ftau5e
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
***
Noah Diamond Transcript
JOHN
Let's go back to the beginning. We'll start with Noah and then go to Jim. What's your earliest memory of Groucho Marx or the Marx Brothers?
NOAH
Well, for me, it started in a kind of roundabout way, when I was a very little kid. Before I could even read, I was really interested in books. And I had my collection of Dr. Seuss, and all the books that would be read to me. But what I really liked to do was go downstairs where my parents had, in the living room, bookshelves lining the walls. And their books were really interesting to me. I just knew there were secrets there, you know?
They had like big art books and books of poetry and maybe my first experiences with words were looking at the spines of the books in the living room. And one of the books they happen to have was then fairly recent book, Joe Adamson's Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, which is, I think most Marx Brothers fans would say it's the best loved book about them, certainly and I think the best written.
That book came out in 1973. So, it's 50 years old this year and for some reason, as a tiny kid, that was a book that I took off the shelf. It was interesting that it had silver lettering on the spine and little icons, a harp, and what I would come later to recognize as a Chico hat. “Oh, look, this is interesting.” And I started looking through it, and I saw all these pictures. And the photographs of the Marx Brothers were just something to grapple with and it seemed a little familiar to me. My world was the Muppets and Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. The Marx Brothers appeared in these photographs, like there was some continuity there and I also found them a little scary. Groucho in particular, that's quite a face for a child to reckon with.
So, that was a book that I looked at a lot when I was just little more than a baby. I wouldn't really see the Marx Brothers in their movies until I was 12. Partly that's because, I'm just old enough to have had a childhood where it wasn't so easy to find old movies. And I sort of had to wait for home video to come along. And when it first came along, it's not like all 13 Marx brothers’ movies were at the local Blockbuster.
It was that that journey, that constant searching for things that characterized life in the analog world. So, it was very gradual in between those two times.
Rather than blow your whole episode on this answer: in between the very little boy looking at pictures in Joe Adamson's book, and the 12-year-old finally, like seeing Duck Soup, and a Night at the Opera on video, there were many years where the Marx Brothers always seemed to be right around the corner. I would encounter them in Mad Magazine, or adults I knew might refer to them. And I sort of came to understand that the nose and moustache and glasses had something to do with Groucho. I was aware of them as a kind of vapor increasingly during those, I guess, nine or ten years between discovering the book and seeing the films.
JOHN
Jim, how about you? Where did you first encounter them?
JIM
I was an enormous and still am a Laurel and Hardy fan. There was a local television show here in the Twin Cities where I live on Sunday mornings, hosted by a former television child's television host named John Gallos who played Clancy the Cop. And so I came to the Marx Brothers, kind of grudgingly because I was such an enormous and still am Laurel and Hardy fan, that I poo pooed the Marx Brothers for many, many years. I started watching Laurel and Hardy as a little kid. I mean, 7, 8, 9 years old. Every Sunday morning, I would rush home from church and plop down in front of the TV to watch Laurel and Hardy. They were sort of my comedic touchstones, if you will. And then the Marx Brothers were kind of off to the side for me. And I went to the Uptown Theater, John, here in the Minneapolis area …
JOHN
You crossed the river from St. Paul and came to Minneapolis, you must have really been interested.
JIM
Oh, I only go across the river for work. This was a point where I was not working yet. And I saw a Night at the Opera and you know, was convulsed and then devoured everything I could get my hands on after that. The Marx Brothers were eye opening for me, just in terms of oh my gosh, this whole thing is so different. I was reading in your book that Frank Ferrante said “I was raised by Catholic nuns and I wanted to sort of do to the Catholic nuns would Groucho would do to Margaret Dumont.” And I was like, well, that's exactly right. Because I too was raised by Catholic nuns, and that sort of energy was really attractive to me as a sophomore in high school. And so I fell in love with them. And then, you know, anything I could get my hands on, I watched and read and loved them to this day. I still love Laurel and Hardy quite a bit too.
JOHN
Okay. Noah, this is just my own experience and I'm wondering if you guys have had the same thing: that entering the world of the Marx Brothers was actually a gateway to a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. I mean, you get into the Algonquin table, you get Benchley, and Perlman and into other plays of Kaufman. And you know, you're reading Moss Hart, and all sudden you look at the New Yorker, because, you know, he was there. I mean, did you find that it sort of was a spider web?
NOAH
No doubt about it. Yeah, that's very true. It’s learning about them biographically and the times they lived in, the circles they traveled in; and partly it's in order to understand the references in their films. That's one of the great things about sophisticated verbal comedy: it's an education, and particularly if you're a kid. So, yes, through comedy and show business in general and the Marx Brothers in particular, I learned, I hesitate to say this, but probably just about everything else I know from following tributaries from the Marx Brothers.
JOHN
Do you remember the first time you performed as Groucho?
NOAH
The first time I played Groucho in front of an audience was in a talent show, a school talent show in, I think seventh grade. I performed with my brother and sister as Harpo and Chico. They're both a little younger than me and by the time we became the Marx Brothers, they were so accustomed to involuntary service in my stock company. They were veterans by that time, they had done living room productions of Fiddler on the Roof where they had to play everyone but Tevya. And we did the contract routine from A Night at the Opera, with a little bit of Harpo stuff thrown in.
JOHN
Okay. Fantastic. Jim, how about you: first time as Groucho in front of an audience?
JIM
The first time in front of an audience as Groucho was really the first time I played Groucho. Just as I have a deep and abiding love and respect for the art of magic (and want to see it, want to read about it), I don't want to perform it. Because it is a thing in to its unto itself and if you do it poorly, it's horrible. So, I love to see it. I just don't love to perform it. And I felt the same way about Groucho.
So, I went kind of kicking and screaming, to a staged reading of The Coconuts that Illusion Theater did. We really just carried our scripts because there was just a couple three rehearsals, but we read the whole thing and sang some of the stuff that was in it. And then that morphed from there into an actual production of The Coconuts and we did it both at the illusion theater in Minneapolis, and then it moved to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. When the Marx Brothers performed there, I think it was called The World theatre. So, I love that kind of thing. I love standing where Wyatt Earp stood or standing where William Shakespeare stood. And so, to be doing a play that Groucho did on a stage that Groucho did it. I should have gotten out of the business right then. I should have said it, I've done it. What’s left?
JOHN
Excellent stories. Noah, have you ever done The Coconuts or Animal Crackers?
NOAH
I haven't done The Coconuts. I would love to. Animal Crackers … One of the subsequent childhood Groucho appearances was when I was 14 years old. I had a relationship with this community theater. At this point, I was living in South Florida. I spent the first part of my life in Connecticut, and then lived in South Florida when I was a teenager and New York since I grew up. And this was in the Florida years. There was a local theater in a town called Coral Springs, it's not there anymore, but it was called Opus Playhouse. And it was a great place that helped me a lot and gave me a chance to put on shows and learn how to do things. And I just wanted to do Animal Crackers. So, I did a bootleg production completely unauthorized. I didn't even have the script. I just wrote the movie down line by line to have a script of Animal Crackers. And so I've sort of done it. But you know, I really shouldn't put that on my resume as I was 14 and...
JIM
It counts for me. Anybody who's willing, as a 14-year-old, to go line by line through a movie and write it down, you did the show in my book.
NOAH
That just shows the desperate measures we had to take in those days. There was no internet. Little kids writing down movies, you know?
JIM
Exactly.
JOHN
It's charming. It's absolutely charming. So, what is it Noah that draws you to play Groucho? What is it about that guy?
NOAH
Yeah, what is it? I know, it's funny. ‘What is it about Groucho’ is a question we can grapple with forever, even aside from the question of why try to be him? I think one thing that definitely true is that as soon as I saw the Marx Brothers and heard his voice and watched him moving around and interacting, the urge to be him, or at least to behave like him, was immediate. I mean, it was right there. Now, I was already a kid who was a little ham and a performer and would be inclined to find my role in anything, anyway.
But nothing, no character other than myself, ever grabbed me the way Groucho did or ever has, really. And I think part of it is what you mentioned, Jim, that Frank Ferrante has said, part of it is the instinct to rebel against authority. And that's unquestionably part of the Marx Brothers act, and a big part of the Marx Brothers appeal I think to kids.
But I think it's a little more like watching a great violin player and deciding you want to play the violin. It just seemed to me that, as far as embodying a character and getting laughs and singing songs, nobody ever did it like him. Nobody ever seemed to be speaking directly to my sense of humor and my sensibility. I just wanted to talk in that voice. I wanted to play that instrument.
JOHN
JIM, what about you?
JIM
Nothing. Really, truthfully, I did not want to do it. I still don't want to do it. But I would do it again tomorrow, if somebody asked.
I think trying to find your way to entertain an audience through somebody else is tricky for me. I'm better at playing me than I am at playing anybody else. And so the desire to play Groucho, I have sort of put it inside me, and I have an eye on it all the time. I use Groucho’s sensibility without the grease paint, and I'd like to believe that I do. I'm certainly not in Groucho’s league.
Laurence Olivier said it: steal from everybody, and no one will know. And so I have, but the desire to put on the grease paint and wear the frock coat is akin to me saying, I want to do a magic show. I just I love to go to a magic show. I love to watch a Marx Brothers movie. But I'm really kicking and screaming to play him again, because the mantle is so huge and heavy and I don't think that I'm particularly serviceable as Groucho
It wasn't until we were halfway through the run of The Coconuts when a light bulb went off in the dressing room, while I was putting on the makeup: there's a difference between being faithful to the script of The Coconuts and what we learned, and being faithful to the Marx Brothers sensibilities, if that makes sense. There's the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law.
About halfway through that run, I started doing things that I felt were more attune to the spirit of the Marx Brothers, then the letter of the script. So, I was calling other actors onto the stage. I was going out into the audience, I took a guy out and put him in a cab one night. That sort of anarchy that people talk about when you read about the Marx Brothers in their heyday, about Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in their heyday: I don't know what's going to happen and I want to be there because of that.
And for all I know, it was the exact same show night after night after night, and they just gave the impression that it was crazy. But that idea for me still percolates. This the idea of, am I creating a museum piece or am I trying to, in some way, channel that anarchy for an audience? The other show that I do that has some relevance here is we do a production of It's a Wonderful Life, at Christmas time, as a live radio play. And that too: what am I doing? Are we trying to capture the movie or are we creating something different? So, finding that sort of craziness is what I was most intrigued by and still am.
NOAH
There's not a lot of roles like that. If you're playing one of the Marx Brothers in Coconuts or Animal Crackers, or I'll Say She Is, it's not the same as playing Groucho Marx in a biographical piece about his life. Nor is it like playing Sherlock Holmes, a very familiar character, where there is room to make it your own. I suppose people have done that with Groucho, too. But generally, if you're in a production of one of the Marx Brothers shows, the assignment is to try to make the audience feel like, if they squint, maybe they're watching the Marx Brothers.
JOHN
Noah, when you tackled the formidable and important task of recreating, resurrecting, bringing back to life, I'll Say She Is, were you having that same sort of thing Jim was talking about? Balancing the reality of what may have happened against you don't really know for sure and the spirit of it? How did you approach it? But first, why did you pick that show? And then how did you bring it back to life?
JIM
Can I back up? Because the three of us at this table are enormous Marx Brothers fans. So, if you say I'll Say She Is, we have a frame of reference. But people listening to this may go, ‘what the hell is I'll Say She Is?’ So, can you start with that? Can you start with what is I'll Say She Is and how did you come to it, because I think for the layman who's not a huge Marx Brothers fan, they don't even know what we're talking about.
NOAH
Yes, absolutely. In a nutshell, the Marx Brothers, although primarily remembered for their movies, were already halfway through their career by the time they ever made a film. Most of their lives were spent on stage. They had a long period in vaudeville, and then in the 20s, they became Broadway stars. And that was really the beginning of the Marx Brothers as phenomenon we would recognize. They did three Broadway musicals. The first was I'll Say She Is, a thinly plotted revue, and the second was The Coconuts, and the third was Animal Crackers. By the time they were making talkies, they had these two very prestigious vehicles, Coconuts, and Animal Crackers, written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Riskin, with scores by accomplished composers, Irving Berlin and Kalmer and Ruby. And there was no question but that those would be the first two films.
And as a result, I'll Say She Is just kind of faded into history. It was the show they'd never made it into a movie and no script survived or at least no complete, intact script survived. So, if you were a kid like all the Marx maniacs out there, reading every book you can get your hands on and learning everything you could about the Marx Brothers, I'll Say She Is just had a sort of intrigue about it. What was that show?
Everyone knew from those books that the highlight of the show was the Napoleon scene in which Groucho played Napoleon and the other brothers played the various consorts of Josephine, who are always materializing every time he turns his back. And that scene was touted as like, that's really the arrival of the Marx Brothers. That was the essence of them, before they ever met George S. Kaufman. It’s just such a tantalizing thing if you love them.
I think—because I love the theater and I love musical theater—a lot of my other interests are also right in the bullseye of I'll Say She Is: Broadway, New York City history. I'm a big fan of the culture of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. And this was just so appealing to me. So, every time a new book about the Marx Brothers would fall into my hands, the first thing I would do is look up I'll Say She Is in the index and read all the associated stuff first. I just had a little obsession about it.
In The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, which is a book I'm sure familiar to both of you and many of the fans, that book reprints the entire opening night program from I'll Say She Is on Broadway. When I was 12 years old, I took that book to the library and photocopied it, and cut out the pages, and made myself a little program so that I could pretend that I had seen I'll Say She Is.
Fast forward many years, and I'm an adult doing theater in New York. My wife and collaborator, Amanda Sisk and I were doing political satires, writing these musicals that would be ripped from the headlines. And we did that for a long time before realizing that the time it takes to develop a musical is too long for topical material, so we could never really perfect our work. And we decided to stop doing those shows, which were a bit of a dead end for us creatively. And I found myself after many years of doing one thing trying to figure out, well, what's my thing going to be now?
And I think it was probably inevitable that I would just sort of go home to the Marx Brothers. ‘Well, let's do a Marx Brothers show. I haven't done that in a while, you know?’ I don't know, it seems a little bit silly to call something so unlikely, inevitable, but I just think I was hurtling toward it from the day I picked up Adamson's book when I was three or four years old.
JIM
It had to have been both a joyful and frustrating experiences as you tried to recreate something that doesn't exist. The Napoleon sketch: we did a version of that Napoleon sketch. The only line I can remember from that Napoleon sketch was, “I'll be in Paris tomorrow, don't wash.” That's the only line I can remember from the entire show. I think of that. Was it super fun or was it super frustrating? Or was there a combo? What was that like?
NOAH
It was fun. I mean, writing is always a combination of both of those things. Stephen Sondheim once called it agonizing fun. That's kind of what almost any writing process is. This one, I wouldn't have taken on the idea of doing I'll Say She Is if enough of it didn't survive and how much of it seemed to have survived. Before my research, I think what I was really thinking is that I would maybe try to write a book about I'll Say She Is, and maybe figure out some way to do the Napoleon scene on stage.
But realizing that it could be a show again, that happened kind of slowly as material started to accumulate. Yes, the Napoleon scene has survived and that's been known for a long time. Also, the first scene of I'll Say She Is is one that's familiar to Marx Brothers fans, because it was an old vaudeville piece that they filmed in 1931. The theatrical agency scene.
[Audio from the Clip]
NOAH
So, those are two big pieces of material were a given. And then as for the rest of it, I became aware, by relying on the work of other researchers, that there was a type script I'll Say She Is at the Library of Congress. Also, another slightly different one at the American Musical Theatre Institute run by Miles Kruger. And I was able to get my hands on the type script.
Now it is on one hand, it's the script of I'll Say She Is. That isn't quite that what it is, though. It’s a 30-page document that they went into rehearsal with. And, you know, going into rehearsal with the Marx Brothers, it's an outline with dialogue. It's what we would now refer to as a treatment. and there is some dialogue in it, some of which is recognizable from later Marx Brothers projects. Some of it is very sketchy.
Of course, almost everything Harpo does is merely indicated: stage directions like, Harpo business, or sometimes, business with hat. But this provided something like 20% of the dialogue and the continuity for I'll Say She Is. There were no lyrics in it, but it did specify where the songs would fall.
So, my first attempt to write a script for this was a combination of material from that type script and things learned from the playbill, from reading every account of I'll Say She Is I could find in books and interviews. And then I started to search old newspaper archives, which was just getting easier to do at this time. I was embarking on this sort of major I'll Say She Is research period around 2010 and it was just starting to be possible to read decades worth of old newspapers on the internet. It's gotten much easier since then.
So, by reading every review I could find FROM every city I'll Say She Is had played in 1923, and 1924, and 1925, I started to realize there's material here. There's reviews that quote dialogue or describe scenes that aren't in the type script and that I didn't know about before and maybe nobody did (unless they've read this copy of the New York Clipper from 1924).
And some of the songs from the original I'll Say She Is were published in 1924 and it was fairly easy to get my hands on those. But that represented only about half the score, maybe a third of the score. A number of the original songs remain missing. And of those, I did manage to find a couple. And to fill in the gaps, I found other songs written by the same people. Will Johnstone was the lyricist (Marx Brothers fans will know him as a screenwriter on some of their later films) and his brother Tom Johnstone wrote the music. Well, the Johnstones also wrote six or seven other Broadway shows during the same period. So, I was able to find some of those songs and interpolate them and do a sort of general polish on the lyrics on the surviving lyrics.
When I was bringing in other songs, sometimes I would write the lyrics. I know there was a song here, and I know what it was about. So, I'll write a lyric about that and whenever I had to do that kind of thing, where I would invent something to fill a gap, I would always try to do it very conscientiously, by relying on what I knew about the Marx Brothers act up to 1924. And also by immersing myself in Will Johnstone's writing. He's an interesting, very unsung artist too; he was a very prolific newspaper writer and cartoonist and did a little bit of everything. So, by reading everything I could get my hands on by Johnstone, it made it a little easier to write what he would have written for them.
JOHN
That's just fascinating.
JIM
It really is. The whole thing to me is it's so titillating and so exciting that even though I say I never really want to do Groucho ever again, if you said, I'm gonna send you a copy of I'll Say She Is, I produced that. I'd be in that. I put that up right now.
NOAH
It could happen, Jim.
I think what you said earlier, Jim, about playing Groucho, you feel like there's this mantle of greatness that is, is impossible to live up to. I feel that way too. It is impossible. I mean, playing Groucho on stage, you're kind of making a deal with the audience, like, ‘Hey, we both know, I'm not him. I'm not. Nobody will ever be that good at doing that. But if you'll meet me in the middle, I think I can fool you for a minute.’
It becomes a sense of responsibility. And it's the same thing with reviving, I'll Say She Is. If we're gonna put that title on a marquee, and charge people money to see it, boy, this better be the very best we can do.
JOHN
So, once you started reconstructing I'll Say She Is, were you always planning on putting it on its feet?
NOAH
Well, probably, the answer is definitely yes. I think the question is, would I have admitted it to myself early on? I do remember nibbling around the edges of it for a while before looking at squarely in the face and saying, ‘We have to do this.’ We have to do this on stage for that very reason: because it is so daunting. It’s daunting to produce a big musical, even without all the baggage and the history and responsibility of the Marx Brothers and I'll Say She Is.
JIM
I looked at the pictures of your production and was flabbergasted at the cast and how big the cast is, and the costumes for the cast. It was like, this is a big deal.
NOAH
One thing that was very lucky—because of the nature of the project, and because it's so interesting and historical—it attracted a lot of really talented people, all of whom worked for much less than they deserved. We have done it twice at this point: the Fringe Festival production in 2014 was the first, full staging and the book Give Me a Thrill is current through that production.
Then in 2016, we did an Off-Broadway production, which was larger and fuller and ran longer and was even more fully realized. There will be a new edition of a book covering that production. But even that is now some years ago.
There is in the future, I think for an even bigger, even more 1924-faithful I'll Say She Is. And I also think there may be a lightweight version of I'll Say She Is. I think we may experiment with that, saying, ‘Oh, okay, it's a 1920s revue. It has a line of chorus girls. It's spectacular. But what if we did to it what Marx Brothers fans often want to do to the film's and just boiled it down to just the Marx Brothers gold and do an I'll Say She Is Redux?’ There two licensable versions of Animal Crackers. There’s a small cast multiple role kind of version, and then there's the big full musical.
JOHN
It’s like the Teeny Sweeney. The idea of you offering and creating a version that would be a little easier for most theaters to do. I think is really a smart idea.
JIM
Knowing the Marx Brothers, and knowing Coconuts and Animal Crackers, because of course, they're enshrined in celluloid and we can look at them whenever we want. There's a story to both of those things, loose as it may be. I wouldn't say either The Coconuts or Animal Crackers were a revue. Is the same true of I'll Say She Is? Is it a revue where we're just going from sketch to sketch to sketch or song to song to sketch, and they're not connected by a through line the way Coconuts or Animal Crackers are?
NOAH
It's an interesting question and the answer is kind of both. One thing that has happened is I think the word revue is now understood more narrowly than it was in the Marx Brothers day. When we use the word revue now, we generally mean exactly what you're describing: a variety kind of evening, with a series of unrelated sketches or songs.
But the truth is in the 1920s, particularly, revues tended to have either thin plots or themes that tied them together. And that's exactly what distinguished a Broadway review or what would have been called rather snootily, a legitimate revue. That's what distinguishes it from vaudeville, which really was one act after another and what the third on the bill does on stage has nothing to do with the content of what was second on the bill.
A lot of these Broadway revues, including the Ziegfeld Follies, they would be built on themes or plots. An example would be As Thousands Cheer, Irving Berlin's famous revue. It doesn't have a plot that runs all the way through it, but each piece is based on a news story of the day. It's not just a collection of songs.
In the case of I'll Say She Is, it was a thinly plotted revue. And the thin plot is: a bored heiress is looking for thrills. That's the plot. It makes Animal Crackers look very sophisticated. It begins with a breaking news that a society woman craves excitement, she has promised her hand, her heart, and her fortune to whoever can give her the biggest thrill. Very saucy stuff.
So, each scene or musical number in the show is vaguely an attempt to give her a thrill. It's kind of like a clothesline. You can hang anything on it. So, the Napoleon's sketch—in the context that was provided for it in 1924—is a fantasy sequence where the ingenue fantasizes that she's in the court of Napoleon. That’s the attempt of the hypnotist to give her a thrill.
In order to make the show a little more compact and a little more accessible, in my adaptation I did nudge it a little closer to being a book show. I did I strengthen the plot a little bit. I just added some reinforcements, some undergirding to the plot. And some things in the show that weren't connected to the plot, but could have been, I made some little connections there.
And also, some of the sequencing was a little perverse in terms of how the evening built. So I thought, with the help of many people who worked on the show with me, but I'll mention Travest-D and Amanda Sisk, who had a lot to do with the development of the script, we figured out that the Napoleon scene really should go at the end of Act One. And the courtroom scene should go at the end of Act Two. And other little concessions like that to make a contemporary audience feel some sense of satisfaction.
JOHN
You both do such a nice job of Groucho—even though one of you has to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. What is, from your experience, what is the hardest part of being Groucho on stage?
NOAH
Well, for me, the most challenging part is the physical performance. That's the part I work on the most. When I see video of myself as Groucho, that's the part—if I notice things to improve on next time—they're usually physical things. I think that may have something to do with my particular skill set. I'm very comfortable vocally. I like my vocal version of Groucho and it sounds the way he sounds to me. I generally feel confident with that, although off nights do happen.
But physically, being him physically, partly because he was so verbally overwhelming, we often overlook what an interesting and unusual and brilliant physical performer, Groucho Marx was. I can't think of anyone who moved the way he moved. Both his physical body was unusual, his shape, and the way he—especially in the early films—he like has no gravity. He's sort of weightless.
There is a tendency to make him too manic and to try to match his impact by being loud and fast and very abrupt in your movements. Or overly precise. He wasn't that precise, actually. He was pretty sloppy in the way he moved. But there was a grace in all that sloppiness…
The difficulty of putting it into words—that you're experiencing with me right now—is part of where the challenge is. There are times when I feel good about the physical performance, and I nail something, a move of his that I've been working on. But I think that's the part that's the most challenging.
JOHN
Okay, Jim, how about you? What did you find most challenging?
JIM
You know, what I found most challenging is dealing with the mantle of Groucho. Not just the audience's expectations of what that means, but more problematic, my own belief system, about what I'm capable of, and how far short of what the man was and did on stage my version of him is.
So for me, I always had to really kind of get myself ramped up in order to believe that, okay, I'm going to go on, I'm going to do this. And it was a constant battle for me every night before I would go on. Am I capable of this? Is there anything about this that's even moderately entertaining for an audience? And I just couldn't get by that and I still can't, you know, I still can't get that out of my head.
Now, I separate that for a second and set it aside with It's a Wonderful Life. I'm very happy with what I've achieved in It's a Wonderful Life. Very happy with, what I've done, me personally, and the show in general. But my performances, I'm very happy and satisfied with them and I'd love to do them and can't wait till December comes around so I can do it again.
But the Marx Brothers thing is that there's a fear factor, I guess that I'm going to let him down in some way and I can't help but let him down. There's a certain love and respect I have for him, in the same way that I have love and respect for magic, that I just don't want to be a bad Elvis impersonator. You know what I mean? That's what I don't want to do. There's a big difference between Elvis and the best Elvis impersonator and you can have joy in both. But, you know, Groucho is so far—and nothing against Elvis, please. If you're listening to this podcast, and you think I'm about to diss Elvis, you're right. But I don't mean it that way.
There's a vast difference between what Groucho was on screen and what Elvis was on screen. Elvis could sing. Groucho could do anything. And that's the difference, and I can't do anything. I can barely sing. I'm lucky enough to have done it and I'm happy to have done it and when people talk to me about it. ‘Oh, I saw you was Groucho. You were excellent.’ And I want to say, ‘Apparently, you don't know the Marx brothers. I wasn't.’
NOAH
That's a very Groucho response, that hey, you are great in that show, and you have no taste, you know?
JIM
That's exactly right.
JOHN
Well, I could do this all night, but we're not going to do that. I want to just wrap up with a couple Speed Round questions, kind of general Marx Brothers questions. Noah, do you have a favorite of the movies?
NOAH
Animal Crackers, because I think it's the closest we can get to seeing them as a stage act at the peak of their powers.
JOHN
Okay, do you have a favorite scene?
NOAH
Yes, I feel guilty because my favorite Marx Brothers scene only has one Marx Brothers in it and I I love Harpo and Chico and I even love Zeppo. I have to say that, but my favorite scene is the strange interlude scene in Animal Crackers.
[Audio from the Clip]
JOHN
To have been there live, to watch him do that, to see him step forward. I would rank that very high for my favorite scene. Jim, do you have a favorite movie and a favorite scene?
JIM
Yeah, I think so. Largely because it was my first experience of the Marx Brothers, nothing for me compares to a Night at the Opera. If I am clicking around and Night at the Opera is on, we stopped clicking and that's what it is. And anybody who is in the house, my wife or the kids, I'm sorry, but you'll either have to find another TV or go out to play, because this is what we're going to be watching for a while And you know the line of Groucho’s, what happened?
[Audio from the Clip: “Oh, we had an argument, and he pulled a knife on me so I shot him.”].
JIM
That right there. When I heard that the first time, I was afraid I'd have to leave the theater. I started laughing so hard, and I couldn't come back from it. It just kept coming to me. I kept thinking of that well past it and was giggling about it and so that whole ‘belly up, put your foot up here.’ That whole thing to me is as good as it gets.
JOHN
One other little alley, I want to go down. There's another great book and Noah, if I get the title wrong, please correct me. Is it Four of the Three Musketeers?
NOAH
Yes.
JOHN
Which tracks in exhausting detail, every stage appearance of their stage career. As you look through it—we're all getting older, all three guys—you begin to realize the weird gap or you think something was a long time ago and it turns out it wasn't. I was born in 1958 and realized just recently that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was made a mere 10 years before I was born. The Marx Brothers on stage in the 20s, or late teens and 20s, they're traveling everywhere in the country. They came to Minneapolis a lot. They went to Duluth a lot. And, you know, a mere 40 years before I was born, I could have gone and seen them. So, my question to you guys is: you have a chance to see the Marx Brothers live on stage in that era. What is your pick? What do you go see? You have a time machine. You can go you can go see one thing or two. I'll give you two, because I have two.
NOAH
Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you're given me two, because the obvious answer is I'll Say She Is and....
JIM
That would be my answer too.
JOHN
Bring your iPhone and hit record. Yeah.
NOAH
Yeah, right, bootleg it. Nobody knows what an iPhone is anyway. Exactly.
JIM
And then you just go right back to what you did as a 14-year-old line by line.
JOHN
Okay. So, your second choice after the obvious, I'll Say She Is?
NOAH
I guess it would be to see some of the even earlier stuff, satisfying the urge to see them at their best on Broadway. You know, there's a lot of curiosity about the act up really up to 1920. In 1920 or 21, there's a big change. That’s when Groucho painted the moustache on and drops the German or sometimes Yiddish accent he had been using before. Harpo and Chico evolved more subtly, but in a sense, they were all playing somewhat different characters in the early vaudeville tabs. So I guess I would want to see Home Again, which was their vaudeville tabloid, that carried them through the World War One years and beyond.
JOHN
Jim?
JIM
Anything vaudeville. The school sketches that they did. I'd see anything. It wouldn't matter to me. If I could get back there, I'd go every day. John, you and I were talking about Robin Williams and being the greatest improviser of all time, and the quote that you said was, somebody had said, “see the eight o'clock show, then see the 10 o'clock show, and we'll talk.”
And to me, that's interesting. I would kill to, you know, follow them on the road, like Bruce Springsteen, and just see how much of it really is the same. In the same way that I'm tickled, when somebody says to me, ‘How much of that did you just make up on the spot?’
None of it. Essentially, none of it did I make up on the spot. I'd like to see how much of what they did day to day was exactly the same and how much of it was, ‘today, I'm going to do this for no reason at all’ and I'd like to see how much of that is different.
JOHN
You know, my two choices kind of fall within that. One is the day that Chico's daughter didn't go to the show, and she came home, and Chico thought she'd gone to it and he said, ‘What did you think?’ And she said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Harpo and I switched roles.’
And I know it's weird: if you had like one chance to go see the Marx Brothers, you're gonna go see them do the role they're supposed to do. But it's just fascinating when you think about it.
The other one is when Groucho was sick and Zeppo stepped in and if I'm quoting Susan Marx’s book correctly, the reaction was so strong towards what Zeppo did that Groucho got healthy really fast and came back. But Zeppo was really, really good. We do have the agent sketch, so you get a sense of what they were like on stage. You do get that. But the idea of seeing, I can easily see Zeppo doing Groucho. But Chico doing Harpo and vice versa? I realize that if I have a time machine, I should go back and do something more helpful for the world. But at that same time, I want to stop by and see that one show where they switched.
JIM
That you’ll do that on your lunch break. While you're stopping World War Two, on the way home, swing by and see that show. You've earned it.
NOAH
That's a good answer.
JOHN
Yeah. Noah, thank you so much for chatting with us.
JIM
Just a delight. Thank you so much. I had a great time talking to you.
NOAH
It's been a pleasure, fellas. Thank you for having me on.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Peet Gelderblom, the Dutch filmmaker who re-cut what Brian DePalma now considers to be the Director’s Cut of “Raising Cain.”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Peet Gelderblom website: https://www.directorama.net/bio-english/
“Raising Cain” Re-Cut: https://www.directorama.net/raising-cain-directors-cut/
“Raising Cain” Trailer: https://youtu.be/jx2MeCjfP44
“Raising Cain” Steadicam shot: https://youtu.be/kuTfcP3hTyk
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
***
Peet Gelderblom – Re-Cutting “Raising Cain”
What was the very first Brian DePalma movie you remember seeing?
Peet: That's difficult. I was probably a little too young for it, but it may have been "Sisters.” Yeah, but I think the first thing I remember from Brian DePalma was that he was on television, because "Body Double" had just come out, and I saw the clips from "Body Double" and I thought, wow, that would be something I would like to see. But I was too young for it.
I wasn't able to go into the cinema and check it out, but immediately I made a mental note. And I think the name just stuck with me. And I started to check him out, and whenever there was something on television, by him, the BBC or whatever, I would definitely see it. So, it might have been "Sisters.” It might have been "Blowout," I'm not really sure.
My point of entry was "Phantom of the Paradise." It was first released in cinema, and I'd never seen anything like it, and then had to follow up with this guy, Brian DePalma, to see what he was going to do. And the next thing I remember seeing was "Carrie," and really loving it.
I remember it was showing maybe a couple years later at a University Film Society, and I wasn't seeing it, but I was walking by. I could hear what was going on, and I said to friend, “let's stand here for just a second, they're about to scream,” because the hand was about to come up out of the grave. And it was so much fun to just know that was going to happen. And then years later to read about how Paul Hirsch came up with that and the music choice that he made and all that. So, is there a favorite Brian DePalma film?
Peet: Yeah, I think "Blowout" is my favorite. It seems to be the one that combines all of his best qualities, you know, combining hot and cold and his formal expertise and his weird plotting and humor. Yeah, all of that.
He does have both weird plotting and very devious humor and all of those, I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but I do whenever it's on, I can't help it, watch "The Fury." Just because it's a filmmaker working so hard to make this work. The cast is great, and they're all giving it their all and you know, the story doesn't really hold up. But he is just throwing so much at it to make it work that I appreciate that.
Peet: That's a good summation, actually. Yeah, it doesn't really work, but it's just so much fun.
Yes, exactly. One that I have trouble finding that I just love and that I just looked it up (as I mentioned, I was just looking to see the order of things), and I'm surprised that “Obsession” came before “Carrie.” I thought it came after “Carrie.” And that's his first time working with John Lithgow, and it's from a Paul Schrader script. And apparently, the last third of the movie they didn't even shoot. There's another whole act of it.
Peet: Yeah, I think Paul Schrader is still a little pissed off about that. Even, more than a little.
Maybe more than a little. Well, and with every right. But I think what Brian DePalma ended up doing with that movie—particularly when you read in Lithgow's book about the difficulty he had working with Cliff Robertson, and how difficult Robertson was and how he sabotaged every scene he was in to make sure that he would get the close ups, which is such a weird thing to want to do. But I guess that's what he did. It's with that Herrmann score. It's just such a lovely movie that I wish I could find it more often, but it is hard to come across.
So, what did you think of "Raising Cain," the first time you saw it?
Peet: Well, I know it like today, it was yesterday, because I discovered him while he was in the middle of his career. And so a lot of the films that I saw were actually older films of his. And I really liked his thrillers and the films that really carried his own signature. And at the time, he had been doing some other kinds of pictures. I think "Wise Guys," was one of them, I didn't even bother to see that. And, of course, "Bonfire of the Vanities," which was not exactly praised.
It wasn't, but it's not horrible. It really isn't horrible. I rewatched it recently, and it's got some wonderful stuff in it.
Peet: Yeah, they always do. All of his films have wonderful stuff. But anyway, it was pretty clear from the promotional materials and interviews that he was doing something with “Raising Cain,” which sort of pointed towards the fact that he was starting to go back to the source, you know, he was going to do his own thing again. And I was completely ready for it. And I had a girlfriend at the time and I must have, you know, been enthusing a lot about it. And she went with me, when it was out in the cinemas. And I liked the movie very much because I was a die-hard, rabid fan. But my girlfriend, she was sitting next to me, and I could feel she wasn't liking it. And after, I think already about four minutes in, she turned to me and said, “what kind of crazy film is this?” And, you know, this was also in the cinema that we saw it, you know, this was the general consensus. It was like, what kind of crazy thing is this?
Now, would that have been the car scene with Carter, and the woman and Cain shows up in the window?
Peet: It's going off the rails really soon in the original version. I was ready for that because I was a Brian DePalma fan. So, I dug it. But I also could completely understand why the casual viewer would have lots of problems with it. So, that stuck with me. Of course, later I found out that Brian DePalma wasn't really happy with how the film turned out. And when I sort of guessed what he originally had in mind, I thought that would work much better, actually.
Yes, it's much more keeping with “Dressed to Kill” and “Psycho,” where you start the story one way andwe don't learn who the villain is until much later. With that in mind, and with enjoying the film, what was it that inspired the re-cut?
Peet: Well, I was hosting a website with a forum on it, that had a lot of the Brian DePalma fans, who actually made the jump from another forum that was specifically about Brian DePalma. So, there were a lot of Brian DePalma fans there, and they were discussing lots of stuff. And at a certain moment, there was this guy who was talking about an interview book he was doing with Brian De Palma. He must have mentioned “Raising Cain” and that DePalma had said in the interview that he wasn't happy with it. And that immediately piqued my interest.
And I asked Laurent, what was it about the film that he doesn't like? And Laurent said, well, he originally wanted to start with the story of the woman. So, that was the point where I thought, yeah, of course, then that probably means that he would start in the clock store, I immediately thought. So I checked out my DVD, and I tried—you know, the DVDs have chapters—so I tried to reorder the chapters to see how that movie must have played originally. And I couldn't really get it to work. But I still thought there might be a better film in this than was originally released.
So, with that in mind, how'd you make that happen?
Peet: Well, I left it alone for a few years. And at a certain moment, I guess it bugged me. The idea kept sticking in my mind, and I thought, well, why don't I just try it> And I ripped the DVD, and I am a director and editor, so I know how to edit. And I started asking around and Jeff who has a DePalma website knows a lot of stuff about the Brian DePalma. He actually had an old draft of the screenplay. It was called Father's Day at that time, and he was willing to send it over to me. So, I was able to read that. And indeed, the movie started the way I mentioned it, in the shop. But there were a lot of things different back then, because the screenplay wasn't completed. There were some really wild things in there that he just let go because it was too wild, or he went into another direction. But basically it laid out how the chronological order used to be.
It wasn't actually chronological. He made it chronological because, as I heard it, he started to second guess his own creative feelings when the movie was tested and people had a problem with it. He started to mess around some more in the editing, and he changed everything to a chronological order. At the time, he thought, well, this is probably better, because then we get to the action really soon. Yeah, we do. So, that is how it was released, but of course in interviews after that, he has mentioned a lot about the fact that he doesn't really like the film as it was released, and that it should have been different.
Before chatting with you, I sat down and rewatched both versions and took notes to try to figure out what the order was. And what throws it off for me a little bit is the opening shot in the theatrical cut of the park from high up is very much a Brian DePalma opening shot, you know, very close to what he did in “Carrie.” Whereas, the opening shot in the clock store is not really a DePalma shot. It's a little mundane. It's a wide shot. It's interesting, you know that Jenny walks up and sees herself in the heart shaped camera and all that--
Peet: It encapsulates the whole movie, but that's in a different way than the original did.
Yes, exactly. And then as I was going through—and I'm sure you ran into this, it's regardless of whether it's the re-cut or the theatrical one—it's a dream sequence with a flashback built into it. And so it isn't until you get out of the dream sequence that you realize, oh, that was a dream sequence. But then in your mind, you're going well, then, was the flashback real, or is that part of the dream?
And then they've added in narration as part of the flashback to help explain it, which I'm guessing was done in post. And so now they have a narration thing. So they have to keep that up. And then when they switch it around, when you did the version that was closer to what he wanted, it's still a bit wonky, regardless of whether you're chronological or not. And the audience has to go: okay, she's going to the hotel. Is this a dream? It must be a dream, because she's walking into the room and she doesn't have a key. That's the only clue, I think, that it's really a dream. And then obviously it's a dream, because she's killed and wakes up. And then you have the repeat of the thing with the gift and all that.
So, regardless of the order of everything before, that whole section, I think is always going to throw an audience off.
Peet: You're right, but the wonkiness, if you call it that, it is intentional. What he wanted to do, and he has stated this in interviews is, you know, normally with kind of police mystery, there is something going on and you don't know quite what. And then the detectives, they start to ask around. And you slowly assemble information, and it becomes clearer and clearer what actually has happened. And he really wanted this time to fuck with his audience, of course, because that's what Brian DePalma does. And he said, what if all the information the audience is getting is either a dream, it has never happened? Or they don't know if it's happened. Or, you know, it's an unreliable narrator. That was actually the game.
And he's so good at that.
Peet: He's really good at it, but of course you also need to get the audience so far that they're willing to go with you. Because it's a very manipulative way of telling a story. And some people don't like that. So, that's a very thin line that he was walking.
And I think in the editing, he got cold feet. He thought, well, maybe I went a little too far here, and maybe I should do it a little differently, help them out and make everything chronological, and it may have fixed some things. But it created other big problems. The flow isn't really right. It wasn't how he originally imagined it.
I think in a way he tested it, and it tested badly. And after that, they changed it around, and I think probably some of those changes were good, because he also shortened some bits, which were maybe a little too wild, judging from the screenplay that I've read. But I think changing the order was a bad decision. And I think he thinks that too, because as you know, he actually likes the version that I did and it's the "Director's Cut."
So, he fixed some things, and he made other things problematic. It's really funny, you mentioned Paul Hirsch earlier, and he's, of course, De Palma, editor. He originally wasn't the editor on “Raising Cain,: it was someone else or two other people, and it didn't really work out as the Brian DePalma wanted it. It says in the book. He was struggling with it in the editing suite, and at a certain moment, I guess, he fired the previous editor. And he made sure that Paul came in. And Paul, he read the screenplay on the airplane, and he didn't get it.
That's a bad sign.
Peet: And he read it again, still on the same flight still didn't get it. He went to the Brian DePalma, he asked about it and still did not get it. And while he was editing, I'm afraid to say he never really got it. And that was an eye opener for me. I realized that pretty late on, because that book came out sometime after thae "Director's Cut" had come out on "Blu Ray."
He was also asked, he was giving a Q&A somewhere, and somebody mentioned the Director's Cut, that it was edited by some random guy, and DePalma actually preferred that version. And Paul Hirsch said, well, he should have hired the random guy. Well, in a roundabout way I did it. But don't get me wrong, though. Paul is brilliant. He must have done a lot of things right as well, because I think the finale of the film, which all plays in slow mo, I think he edited that all over again. And that works brilliantly.
It does. If you remember what he did at the end of “Carrie,” and how he fixed the split screen issues in the end of “Carrie” and made all that work. The montage he put together in the middle of "Phantom of the Paradise," even the closing credit montage in “Phantom the Paradise” in which you really recap all the characters. That's a really good editor.
I understand that for legal reasons—in putting together your recut and making it what became the official Director's cut—you had to use all the elements from the theatrical cut. You had to use all of them, and obviously couldn't add anything, because you didn't have access to that. Was that tricky, where you had to use absolutely everything?
Peet: No, it wasn't tricky. I was just lucky. When I made my own recut, and De Palma wanted it to be part of the Blu ray, the lawyers of Universal also requested that the recut of the film would only be possible if it wouldn't add something and wouldn't take something away. And, yeah, I was just lucky that it works like that. The only thing I did was change the order around, and there's a little change in the overall length of the film. That's because I repeat something, and I make some dissolves little a differently.
That repetition is really helpful, to pull us back to where we need to be on the timeline. If you didn't have the scene that Jenny and her friend played by Mel Harris, I think you would get a little disassociated as to, okay, it’s the same time, they're in the park.
Peet: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And this must have been one of those things where an editor can help a director to achieve what he wants. Because I can imagine that they tried out that order in the editing suite. And that they thought it wouldn't work, because it's too jarring, you don't know where you are in the story, whatever. And the little repetition that I added really helps to get the viewer—you know, it is still jarring—but immediately after that the audience realizes, “okay, it's this moment, right,” and then they get along with it again.
I’m wondering if today's audiences today might be a little more keyed into time jumps than they were back then?
Peet: Definitely, because since then, of course, we've had movies like "Memento" and "Pulp Fiction," which are, you know, messing around with traditional ways that stories are told.
I think part of the problem was that you have this huge flashback, and at a certain moment, the movie goes on again, after that flashback. But it's such a long flashback that Brian DePalma thought, well, maybe the audience will never understand that a flashback can last that long. So, let's not do it. And I think, you know, the movies that I'm mentioning, other ones might have helped to educate the viewer to the modern age where this is not much of a problem anymore. You know, you can, take people to amazingly difficult things. You just watch what Christopher Nolan has been doing, and they are willing to go along as long as you entertain them and reward them.
In comparing the two versions as closely as I did, your version, although it's just a tiny bit longer, it actually seems faster. Because once Carter gets on that Carter train where he has to go all the way to the end, that's happening more in the middle of the movie, instead of the beginning. That just gives it a propulsion that the theatrical version doesn't have because it starts with Carter, and then it goes to Jenny for a big chunk, and then it's back to Carter. You're getting a little surprise of, oh, John Lithgow is evil in the first five minutes. But it's John Lithgow, so how big a surprise is that going to be in a DePalma film, really? I don't think he's ever been in a DePalma film where he wasn't ultimately evil.
Well, it's true. And then switching it so that we're doing the Psycho/Dressed to Kill thing, following a character and then she suddenly dies. But then DePalma’s brilliant touch of, no she is not dead, when Carter sees her on the TV screen is a huge shock. And I think it’s more of a shock in your version than in the original one, and just because of the pacing of things.
There is still though in both versions my favorite moment, and it's one of those things where I wish I could go back and see it again for the first time: when the elevator door opens and you see "Dr. Nix" coming forward with the baby. And you realize he is alive, that he isn't a manifestation of Carter's brain. He's really there, and we've been toyed with all the way up to that point with obviously, “he's not there because he's never in the same shot with anybody else.” He's doing the same tricks that he does with Cain. It's just such a delightfully DePalma moment, that and the appearance of Jenny on the TV screen, are just great moments that only work because the filmmaker has brought us up to them so skillfully.
Peet: Yeah, you're right. You know, that is the original flow as it was intended. It's also funny to me that a lot of people at the time didn't really care for the story of Jenny, because you know, you were already on this track of John Lithgow doing his crazy thing, and then you all of a sudden get a love story. I loved it at the time, but it didn't play that well. So, it's kind of brilliant that if you start with it, it really gets the attention that it deserves, and people actually really like it, and then as soon as John Lithgow does his thing, like you say, it becomes really propulsive, the whole narrative goes toward that ending.
Yeah, it's just great, and of course, we can’t not that mentioned DePalma's lovely play on "Psycho’s," ending scene with Simon Oakland explaining everything. To have France Sternhagen do that same thing in her own way. And then, of course, that classic DePalma shot taking us all the way through the building for no other reason than the fact that he can, in fact, do that. And just watching it, thinking, wow, she's timed exactly where she goes off kilter, and they have to pull her back, and it all fits with the lines as she's saying them.
When he does that sort of thing, like he did at the beginning of "Bonfire," it's just so much fun to watch him do it because you realize not a lot of filmmakers can pull that off and keep the right pacing and make it work. It's just a great moment. He's such a devious, master storyteller.
And then let's just jump ahead: You make the cut, and you heard that he loved it. How did that happen?
Peet: Well, I think a year after I put it online on IndieWire. I talked about what I was doing, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if I make a video essay about my findings, and then it was posted on IndieWire. And he said, I think the whole version should be on IndieWire. And that, of course, you know, in terms of rights, we were thinking like, can we do that? Actually, you can't really, but we decided to do so anyway, and then put up that it was for educational purposes. And we just decided that whenever Universal lawyers would call, like, what are you doing, get this thing off? We would get it off. But it was on there, and I believe it's still visible actually.
They don't really care for Raising Cain at Universal, but Brian DePalma, he found it. And about a year later I started reading in interviews—I think there were at least five—that he actually preferred this version over his own version. And that was of course already completely wonderful.
Much later, I think about five years later, the Blu Ray was announced by Shout Factory. And all of a sudden Jeff from the Brian DePalma site—I mentioned him before—he got an email from DePalma. He said, “I just watched the Raising Cain recut and I think it's great. It succeeds in things that we couldn't get right the first time. It is what I originally wanted the movie to be.” And he thought it should be part of the Blu ray and he said, “Maybe you can make this happen? If I have to call somebody, then I will.”
So, that is how it happened. It was a big surprise for Shout Factory. I think they already finished the Blu ray, and then all of a sudden they got this call from the director, like okay, yeah, well, you have to add something.
There's now going to be a second disc.
Peet: Yes. I never talked to Brian DePalma, but he basically gave me free rein. He said, “Okay, I've liked this version, this recut and it should be on the blu ray.” So, Shout Factory asked me to make that happen. We used the original master, the same master as was on the normal blu ray, and we actually re-edited that according to the recut that I have made and put it on the blu ray.
That's an incredible story. What a thrill for you and what a vindication for him that somebody somewhere did this because of today's technology. It'd be like if you got a letter from Orson Welles, saying thank you so much for restoring "Magnificent Ambersons," that's exactly the movie I set out to make.
Peet: It’s still a little bit of a dream when I think about it. It's really great and I know I've emailed him after that to try to get, you know, some of the correspondence about it, but he's not the kind of guy who answers those emails. But I do know actually from Laurent who did the interview book that DePalma’s very happy with the blu ray as it is right now.
You feel, sort of, it has validated his film again. So, that feels great.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with James Davidson, where he talks about his book, “Hal Ashby and the Making of ‘Harold & Maude.’”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
The Book: Hal Ashby and the Making of ‘Harold & Maude’: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/hal-ashby-and-the-making-of-harold-and-maude/
The Twin Cities Welcomes Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort—A Mini-Documentary: https://youtu.be/unRuCOECvZM
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with character actor Jim Meskimen on building an acting career one step at a time.
LINKS
Jim Meskimen website: https://jimmeskimen.com/
Jim Meskimen acting reel: https://jimmeskimen.com/acting/
The Acting Center: https://theactingcenterla.com/
Behind the Page: The Eli Marks Podcast (Episode 222): https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/eli-marks-podcast
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
***
Meskimen Transcript
Jim Meskimen — Character and Voice Actor
John Gaspard: Today, we're going to talk about your life as an actor and having a diversified pool of things to draw from to be a working actor. I listened to a couple other interviews with you, and there was one point they kept coming to that I wanted to avoid, which was immediately talking about your mother. My connection is, and was, that we went to the same high school, Southwest high school in Minneapolis. So, I thought, well, that's my great connection. And then my friend Jim here, who is … one of the reasons he's here is because he is a working actor as well, but in a much smaller market here in the Twin Cities. So, I thought having him as part of this chat would be interesting. Jim, what is your story?
Jim Meskimen: And he happens to have the name of Cunningham.
John: Well, we're gonna get to that. Here we go.
Jim Cunningham: Therein lies the story. Your mother made an appearance along with some other famous TV moms at, you know, we're very proud of the fact that Spam is produced here in Minnesota.
Meskimen: That's right. That's right.
Cunningham: And there is a Spam museum. It's that important to us, Minnesotans.
Meskimen: Yes, I know she's been there. We had some Spam swag that she gave us one time.
Cunningham: Well, there, it was from that. She came as a famous mom, along with some other famous TV moms, Barbara Billingsley, and--
Meskimen: And Florence, maybe? Florence Henderson?
Cunningham: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I was the emcee of that event and I was interviewing them as they arrived on the red carpet. And I said to your mother, Oh, I'm just so thrilled to meet you because my last name is Cunningham. And more than that, my dad's name is actually Richard Cunningham. And so is my brother.”
Meskimen: Oh, my gosh.
Cunningham: During the height of the Happy Days craze, we literally had to have an unlisted phone number because every third call was, “Is Fonzi there?”
Meskimen: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Cunningham: And your mother said to me, “You have to prove to me that your name is Cunningham.” So I took out my wallet and showed her my driver’s license. And she said, “Oh, you poor darling.” And she gave me a nice hug and a peck on the cheek and it was just, I cherish, I cherish the memory.
Meskimen: That's really sweet. That's hilarious. She challenged you like someone would make that up, you know, so she had to really get to the bottom of that one.
Cunningham: But your mother was just charming and a delight.
Meskimen: That's great.
Cunningham: Yeah. Sorry. We got off on a tangent.
Gaspard: We've given the elephant in the room some peanuts. Now we're shoving it off to the side for you.
Meskimen: Well, if I may say it is, it is no problem at all. I love to talk about my mom. She has blazed such a path for me, not in terms of, you know, any kind of practical nepotism, but just because everyone loves her and loves what she represents. And so I find it very easy to make friends with strangers in this way, because you're already kind of disposed to, well, you must not be such a schmuck, you know, he’s got this mom. And so I'm always very happy to talk about her. She's a delight and she's 93. She lives very close by and she's very happy in enjoying her retirement.
Gaspard: Excellent. All right. So we want to talk about being a working actor, but before we dive into the acting part, I know when you started out, you were focused maybe more on art and cartooning and that. How did you make the switch from that to acting?
Meskimen: Well, I kept both plates spinning. I studied, I taught myself to cartoon and illustrate, enough to be a professional, you know, not enough to be a super genius, kind of in demand, tremendous demand person. But enough to work. And I did that in New York city. And I had this need to perform. And so, I also did plays, I would do little projects.
I would perform, you know, when I could. When I went to college, I didn't take theater classes, but I would do plays, you know, people would audition. And if there was a guy — I was very good at accents. So, you always needed a funny guy with an accent. Sometimes, you know, I could get the part of the old man, the old French guy or whatever. And that I just was always a few clicks above the rest of my fellows there.
So I really kept both these activities going while I was sorting out which one was gonna be the path. Cause I really honestly wasn't clear on what I'd be doing. And, I felt strong feelings about both, but I didn't feel at that time, I didn't see how I could mesh them together. I didn't see how one was going to be, how I’d have to jettison one completely.
And it took me a while to figure that out. And when I did, it was a big relief and I went, okay, I know why I want to pursue acting. I know what's honorable about it. I know why it's right for me at this time. And so I'm going to go for it. And then I went with full energy towards that, but I always, I mean, I haven't forgotten how to draw or paint and I do it now. I'm older, I'm 62. That was when I was 23.
So at this point in my life, I wouldn't mind sitting home and painting a little bit and being away from everybody. But at the time I felt like I needed a more social existence, a more social career that would have more collaborative aspects.
Cunningham: As you look back on things, do you remember some of the first things that you got that were maybe, you know, of note?
Meskimen: Yeah. I started off, I came to New York and I started a bunch of things all at once. Cuz New York is a great place get started, you know, and start things and be a starter. So I was studying acting and I was studying improv. I had a false start. I went and studied at the Stella Adler school for a while, which was a disaster. And I vectored off of that as fast as I could. And I got into improv, which was much more suited to my temperament and I think is better training in general.
So I was doing that. I was looking for an agent and I was also supporting myself as an illustrator cartoonist in the meantime. So I didn't have to be a waiter. I could have a pretty decent job.
So the first things I got had to do with my ability to do impressions. And be a voice actor. So my improv group that I was in had a gig weekly doing what was then a regular feature of the old McNeil Lehrer report, if you ever remember that show?
Gaspard: Oh yeah.
Meskimen: The McNeil Lehrer report, which was a news show. It was like a hard news show, but it had a funny section every Friday. They would take the political cartoons of the day and just by kind of zooming in and out and changing panels, they would sort of, you know, semi-animate them statically. And they would add voices to it.
And then they hired us to do the voices of, you know, Boris Yeltsin, then Reagan and whatever was happening on the time. And we’d go in every Friday. It was my first AFTRA a job and I think I made $114 bucks a week, but it was $114 bucks a week, you know, back then when a ride on the subway was 50 cents.
That was like, this is okay. So that was a nice, kinda like, oh, that's a stability, you know? Cause I think I did, we did a whole, I don’t know, a season or more of it. And every week, you know, it was kind of cool.
My biggest breakthrough came in the area of on-camera commercials. And I had remembered that my mom, when she was a single mom, she would, every now and then before Happy Days, she would get guest spots on things like Mannix and Mission Impossible and Hawaii-5-0. But those were pretty few and far between. And then, if she booked a commercial, it was like, oh, you know, thank God because it would generate enough income, through residuals for her.
And back then commercials paid very, very well. Today it's more rare, as you know Jim. It's kind of a disappearing thing, as things go on the internet. But a network commercial back then could help you stay alive. So, I had that in my mind. I was like, you know, I need to get into commercials.
So, I auditioned and eventually, after a couple of years, actually two years at least going on a lot of things as a young man, I started to get into commercials.
And there was one very, very lucky day that changed my life completely. And it had everything to do with whatever else I was studying, because I was studying communication at that time. I was studying improv at that time and those things came together in a beautiful way.
I had an audition for a grocery chain out of Texas called Skaggs Alpha Beta, the euphonious name of Skaggs Alpha Beta.
And they were looking for a spokesman to interview people in the store. And they had had some market research that told 'em that, you know, you call yourself the friendliest place in town, but you're not so friendly. So, they wanted a friendly spokesman who could talk to people, actual real people and have fun and whatever, you know, and be clean and not insult people.
And that was what I had been studying in improv, you know, clean comedy. Supportive comedy, you know, not cutting the legs off of people. So, I got this audition. I went physically and did it and they said, “oh yeah, yeah, that's great. We're gonna hire you.” I'm like, great. It's three commercials and three regional commercials, which is not a huge deal, but for me it was like, well, this is great.
Then after we did those three commercials, they came back about a month later and said, “all right, we want you to be our spokesman to do all our stuff all year long. We'll give you a contract, radio, TV, photo, you know, put you in the newspaper, the little circulars and billboards and what have you.”
And it was like, forty grand. And I'm like, oh my God, I didn't even know this existed. My mom never had anything like this. This is like new territory. Well, I did that for five years for that company. And every year, the price went up, the contract got sweeter. By the end of it. I was making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just on that job, which would take about seven days a year to do.
And that changed my life, because it gave me tremendous confidence, because I created all the material, I improvised every second of it. Maybe not every second, but you know. And it gave me the wherewithal to exist in New York comfortably without having to really sweat the day job and to do plays and to do things that, you know, if you have time, you go and you do improv shows and you don't worry about, am I making any money? You don't sweat it.
And then I actually got known because the footage, I would take the footage and I would cut it into reels and I would send that around and I got more spokesman jobs. So, you know, it was like a side business that sort of developed outta nowhere.
Off of one audition. Sometimes it makes me scared to think: what if I was late? What if I didn't make it that audition, life would be so different.
Cunningham: Somewhere in the multiverse, that's happening.
Meskimen: That poor sucker in the multiverse but he probably has all my hair. So it's fine.
Cunningham: Did you do any Happy Days with your mom? I was just thinking as a young kid, did you do any? You know, walk-ons or extra work on any of the shows your mom was doing?
Meskimen: No. The only time when she became Marion Cunningham—your pseudo mom—she got me into an episode and my sister, not the same episode. She exercised a little bit, you know, and it happens to be one of the most famous episodes of Happy Days that I was in.
I'm a young man, 17, on the beach looking buff. And I come and announce the fact that they've caught a shark out in the water. And then the rest of the show is about how Fonzi’s going to jump the shark.
Gaspard: But it sounds like growing up, that you learned the life of a working actor because you've lived with a working actor, is that safe to say?
Meskimen: A hundred percent.
I think one of my primary advantages in my life has been that I saw what it is, you know, and what it isn't. And I saw it. My mom also was particularly driven and also focused and intent, you know. She's a high achiever. So, whereas a lot of actors go, well, I'm waiting for my agent to call and I don't know, I can't do anything, you know, until they give me an audition. Maybe I can, blah, blah, blah.
And I realized that's like a losing attitude. Because what I saw was a woman who went, Hmm, uh, who can I call? What can I do? Who must I reach out to? Who must I meet? Should I do a play? Absolutely, I should do a play and I should let everybody know that I'm doing this play. And even though it's a crappy play and I'm getting no money, I'm gonna do it.
And I looked at that and went, okay. I see. You need to promote yourself. She hired a PR person. She always had a PR person and would utilize that in any way that she could. And then, how do you live and raise kids and pursue this weird career that is so herky jerky, what do you do? And I saw how she did it. She would economize and we hired out—she always remembers this—we rented out one of the bedrooms in our house. Mind you, we have three bedrooms.
We hired out a third of our house to a college student, because, you know, that was 60 bucks a month or something she would get and shared a kitchen with this person. And, she would do plays and she would volunteer for things and she would push it along, push it down the road.
I remember vividly seeing her rehearse lines for an audition over the sink. We were getting ready to have dinner or lunch or something. And she's going to take off in a minute in the car and drive to Hollywood and do this audition. You juggle, but she was a hustler, in the sense of a hard worker. She was a depression child and I think that came as just part of the territory back then.
But even more than other people her age that I observed, she was just intent. And it came from this vision that she had of as a girl of seeing her name on a marque and changing her name too—so it would look better—and just being like, I'm gonna do this. Which I recognize now from my life experiences and for my own philosophy that it's a very smart way to go about it.
Gaspard: Yeah, it really is. You know, it's interesting in looking at your career and then looking at my friend, Mr. Cunningham here, who I've known for 30 some odd years.
Meskimen: Oh, wow.
Gaspard: And seeing that you both have a very similar mindset when it comes to not saying no to things. I learned that from Jim. Don't necessarily say no to something right away. Listen to what it is. A lot of times you're gonna accept stuff just because you're not doing anything else and why not. And you never know where it's going to lead. You both have this living in sort of a limbo world of: I don't know what's coming next, but because you've said yes so often, and because you're easy to work with and because you bring the goods and because you have so many different threads, there's almost always something coming in. Because you've just kept the streams open. And that's why I wanted Jim to meet Jim, because you both represent the same thing just in different towns.
Meskimen: Soul brothers!
Cunningham: Exactly. Well, I'd like to think.
Gaspard: But now you have an online course to help actors become working actors. Because there's a real difference between an actor and a working actor. I’m in the low budget movie world and there's a difference between being a screenwriter and a screenwriter who's working or being a director and being a director. You can say your thing, but to actually be working at it on an ongoing basis, doesn't necessarily just happen. And it sounds like in your course, you're going to walk people through that process.
Meskimen: Yeah, I've really tried to do that. That's exactly right. You can break down a career, and I'm sure Jim understands this very well, like you have the production side of things, which is the rehearsing, showing up, acting, great.
And everybody's focused on that. You're like, that's what acting is. Well, that's right. That is one sliver of the job. The other sliver is marketing. There's also a kind of a sliver that's having the big goal and the vision and sort of the planning and being the visionary of the organization, because you're an organization. There’s finance, there's paying bills, there's keeping one's self fit, medical things. There's a lot of different moving parts to it.
And, and most of us think of acting as like, oh yes, there I am on the stage holding the skull. Giving the speech to Yoric. Okay, that may happen, that may be part of it, but that's like an eighth of it or a 15th of it. So, in my course, I've tried to share what those other parts of the organization that I do.
Because I was paying attention, thank God. It didn't just happen by luck. It happened very concertedly and very determinately. So I know what we did. And I say we: I've got a little team of people, with my wife and now my daughter helps me, agents, managers, other people to actually keep it rolling, because it is that kind of life, the freelance life.
And there are many different kinds of freelancing lives that people can lead. But in an actor freelance life, you don't know the next week. Like, I looked on my calendar yesterday. And I went, wow, there's a lot of blank space on that calendar. And yet there is no blank space in, you know, my bills summary--I'm going to have to pay whether there's something or not.
So now today, because of all the promotion that I do during the week, now I have a couple jobs. I never sweat it because—probably like Mr. Cunningham—I know that these are the actions that I have to do. I know that schedule's gonna fill out. It's gonna fill out ahead of me almost like a train track rolling out in front of the steam engine.
So, in the course, yeah, I've composed a bunch of different videos where I talk about certain things about auditioning, about promotion, marketing, and other very important aspects of keeping the career rolling. I don't teach acting. I'm not going to go there. My wife has a wonderful acting school and anybody can check that of out if they want to. It's called The Acting Center and they run online courses as well as in-person here in LA.
I'm not teaching anything, but I'm sharing. What did I do? And what have I found after 35 years of doing this are the important steps to take, the important actions to always keep in, and what might happen, and how I've bobbed and weaved and kept things going so that I didn't have to take another job.
I never had to back up and go, well, I retreat, you know, now I'm gonna go and just go into teaching or now I'm gonna go into, you know, real estate or nothing wrong with that. And I know a lot of actors have done it, but I have not had to. And I'm a little bit stubborn at this point. I'll go kicking and screaming into any other, non-artistic field.
Gaspard: Good for you. Without giving away too much of the course, we’ve got a couple questions that I'm always interested in when it comes to this sort of career. What's the biggest mistake that beginning actors often make?
Meskimen: I think the biggest single mistake is to have the right mindset concerning who is creating the career. Because we come seemingly with hat in hand, as actors, to the audition, to the theater, to meetings, interviews, we can fall into the trap of thinking, I'm waiting for someone to give me something. When we're really desperate, we're really like beggars and it can get pretty bad. And as any actor who's been begging knows, it just doesn't work very well. It's very unattractive. Unless they're hiring a beggar. For the role of the beggar, you know, then it's okay.
All other times it's really anathema. So, I think it's a viewpoint of like, I am gonna create this career. That's what I saw my mom do. And that's what I exercised too. I totally mobilized that, because I'm a creative person, I like to create. So, it was kind of like, well, here's a good excuse: You want an excuse to create? Guess what? Your whole career is up to you.
What you wanna do, what you're good at? How much you pursue it, how well you do, how fast you go, how much you get paid. It's really kind of up to you. And that may seem counterintuitive or stupid, or, you know, bewildering to people as they just start out, because we are looking to collaborate. We are looking to fill a hole that someone else has created.
You know, somebody is out there right now, writing a part in a show that will need to be cast. And the casting director will be looking around for that person. That hole didn't exist until that writer came up with it. So, in a way, they have created that, they've created that opportunity, that position that needs to be filled. But we can always sort of be ready for those things.
I believe in sort of deciding and picturing things and putting things out there in the universe. So, I do that sometimes I'll go, you know, somewhere someone is writing a great part for me and, it's very difficult to actually link that to cause and effect. But the fact is I've been working as I said for a long time.
So, I think it's just a mindset of: you have to take the hat out of your hand, put the hat on your head or on a hook and go, you know what? I am the guy in charge. So, how much money do I wanna make? What do I wanna do this year? Take charge. Don't go, well, I hope, if only, well, maybe if things go well, somebody might possibly grant me…
No, no, no. That's a losing attitude. That's an expectation, you know, and being the effect of something rather than actually trying to cause something. So, it's a hard lesson to tell people, because so much of life is sort of dictating that we behave like people that are created upon. You know, we are marketed at, you know, come and watch this movie, sit in the dark while we tell you a story and feel this way and laugh at this part and, you know, and pay this money and, oh, okay.
We get that all day long. There's stuff, just shooting at us all day long and at some point, the artist has to kind of shake it off and go, what do I wanna make? I'm gonna make it, you know, I'm gonna produce it, I'm gonna create it.
And so that's what I think is the biggest change. The biggest mistake that could just go through a whole lifetime or a whole career of a person is like, they're thinking like, God, the agent will give me the thing. And then I might, if I possibly do well, they will give me the part and then maybe they'll keep all of it in and not edit out all of it.
And, and then maybe they will pay me and you know, all this kind of awful , you know, slave kind of mentality. As much as you can turn that around. You'll notice that the very big actors didn't take no for an answer. They developed their own projects. They were fussy. Sometimes they were saying, I won't do that, but I'll do this, you know.
They're demanding on themselves and, and many of them have created their own things. I always think about Billy Bob Thornton, would Billy Bob Thornton have the terrific career he does today? He's a great actor, but do you have the career that he has today if he hadn't decided, man, I'm gonna write this script and star in this Sling Blade thing myself.
I don't know. I doubt it. And there's lots of examples of people like that, because he wanted to do it, cuz it was something he observed in life or had this idea, I think while he was on another shoot and he turned, you know, the material of his life into this project that he believed in and miracles happened. And a lot of stories like that.
Gaspard: So you had the advantage of growing up, watching a working actor. So you had probably a bit better sense of that world than someone coming in from the outside doing it. But was there anything that you were surprised by once you started being a full-time working actor?
Meskimen: One lesson that I learned very quickly was: I probably would've had a commercial career about two years earlier, but I made a mistake. A strategic error.
There's a lot of potency to beginner's luck in show business. We hear a lot of stories. They're almost like legendary stories about people who went well, you know, I wasn't, I didn't even have the audition. I went with my buddy and my buddy didn't get the job. And I did. And you hear that there are gazillion stories like this.
Right? Same thing happened to me. I went with my friend to visit a girl who was working for Barbara Shapiro casting in Manhattan. And I went to say hello to this girl. And she said, “oh, by the way, you know, we're casting for this beer commercial.” So I got a call back. I got a second callback.
I got a third callback and they pay you for the third callback. But in between the second and third callback is where I made my error. This is funny, because it was related to impressions and impressions has always been a door opener for me. It was a Miller beer commercial with guys sitting around at campfire.
And I went well, I'm playing a guy who stands up and does a John Wayne thing. That was me. They kept calling me back, kept calling me. And then I had some stupid conversation with the girl that I had been going out with at the time. And she said, “why don’t you do Henry Fonda?” And I went, “yeah, I'll do Henry Fonda.”
That was the end of that. So the lesson I learned is a very important lesson. Most actors pick this up very quickly, but I just kind of screwed up. It’s that if they keep calling you back, don't change anything. It's going right.
If they ask you on the day: Okay, we saw your John Wayne. I wonder, can you do any other voices? That would've been the perfect time to whip out your Henry Fonda, as they say. But I screwed that up. Two years before I got another really good opportunity. So, I never change anything now. I learned that lesson very quickly.
When I did finally book a commercial, I had gone in and I got a call back and I remembered on the day I had like a headache. The day I did the first audition, I was cranky. And on the day I got the call back, I'm like that day, I'm like, well, I feel great. Well, I'm not gonna act like I feel great. I'm gonna be cranky.
And I went in and I booked that job. By applying this do not change anything.
Cunningham: Smart. A lot of people don't think that through, boy. That's a really good tip. If you're an actor listening, that's the price right there. You just got gold just dumped right into your lap.
Meskimen: Yeah, it would be like, if you went to a restaurant and you had the halibut one time and you go, oh my God, this halibut's great. I'm gonna come back. And if they serve you the halibut and now it's in a totally different sauce. You're like, what the fuck? I came for the halibut. What happened?
Cunningham: What happened? As you think about, you know, actors like me, can you point to some, you know, sort of generic, “Hey, this is here's another trap don't fall into this one?” Something that you see other actors kind of making that mistake again and again?
Meskimen: Sure. And it's related to my first comment about what's the biggest challenge in changing this mindset of who's in charge and being in the driver's seat, if you will, of your career. And I think I wind up talking to a lot of people, particularly guys our age who maybe have not made their peace with social media.
But for me it was a major breakthrough to finally have the discipline to get onto YouTube and begin what has become the last 11 years of really, just an interesting chapter of my life, where I have something that I would've loved to have in New York, which is this access and ease of production.
Anyway. Not to talk too much about myself, but just the fact that most actors are underutilizing, I think, the technological reality of today, of being able to share performances with the world and to generate interest in what you do. And to also creatively expand and reach out and come up with content yourself that may not at first have any kind of monetary value to you, but as a product, as a promotional activity, is virtually free and can create great windfalls and attention.
Are you doing anything on YouTube or anything?
Cunningham: You know, I'm really not. And not only am I not doing it, but you're the first person to suggest that if you were to use that in some way, that there would be a benefit there. Now, I'm not a great actor. I'm better as myself than I am as anybody else in general.
And that's where the bulk of my work comes is being me in front of a camera, or on stage. The challenge has been thrown down now: what could I do on YouTube? And could that effect, because as you mentioned, as you get older, the opportunities decrease.
They're looking for a 30-year-old, they're looking for a 40-year-old, and I'm not that anymore. I always used to tell people what you want is the number of auditions to go down and the number of jobs you're doing to go up. That's the goal. And now I'm finding that's no longer true for me. It's inverted now.
Meskimen: Yeah. Well, I can speak to a couple of points to that. So, I understand about playing yourself and being like a spokesman or being like something, a character that is more or less how you appear to other people. I would suggest that you're much bigger than that.
You're much more various than that. Your possibilities and potentials as just a human being are far beyond what your body might dictate: how you look and how you think about things, even some ideas you have. I think you're bigger than that as an individual. And one of the things that I love about acting is that one gets to occupy a completely different point of view.
(as Ian McKellen) For example, this is why I do a lot of impressions is because sometimes I can just change into another person and look at things completely different point of view.
That's sort of the magic of it. I mean, the expectation of an actor generally is that they can do different things. You wouldn't buy a Swiss army knife and find that it has one blade and go, I'm really happy now.
You'd go, wait, where are the scissors? Whereas the ballpeen hammer or whatever. To be an actor means I can play a lot of different characters. I can play a lot of different roles. Now, as we get older, maybe, you know, that gets narrower, but we can certainly always push. Push it out. And I think you can surprise yourself by what you're actually able to do.
You've got a lot of wisdom now, you've earned that over the years, you've met a lot of different kinds of people, and I think it's probably something to take a look at. An actor, if you look at the job description, if there is such a thing it's like knowingly taking on another point of view to help tell a story, that's kind of a quick definition of what it would be like.
So if you are facile and ready to occupy other viewpoints, to look at things from the point of view of someone who's, you know, just physically exhausted or someone who's been just kicked around their whole life or someone who's just won the lottery. You know, if we practice this, which is what they do at the acting center, just kind of changing viewpoints and looking at things from different points of view, then you discover that, you know, I can do a lot of different things. Because a human being is like that. A human being can adopt all kinds of different viewpoints and feel all different kinds of ways and express different kinds of emotions.
And there's a great freedom in that. I think you'll blossom if you start to have a little try at that.
Cunningham: I like that. That's good advice. I like it a lot.
Gaspard: You know, it's interesting. You mentioned social media and we're all of a certain age and feel like things might be passing us by, but Jim Meskimen, your use of social media, your use of YouTube—I found you on TikTok—your promotion of yourself does not seem like promotion. It does not seem like marketing. It is just you, having fun, doing the things you do. And then in some cases it's impressions. It's other cases, it's you doing characters that you've created. And I think that's sort of the secret to promoting yourself on social media is: Do what you love and eventually people will find that and want to be part of that.
Meskimen: Yeah. And there's an example. Thank you for noticing that. I appreciate it. And I'm having the best time. Two things I wanna say about that. one is: I don’t know if you've ever heard the entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk?
He said something very, very helpful about branding. Because branding, when we talk about branding, it immediately sounds like something we don't wanna have anything to do with. But branding is reputation. That's another good synonym, your reputation. And we prove our reputation all the time. By how we talk to people, what we do, what choices we make, it's pretty simple.
So if we let people know, Hey, I was at this concert and I had a great time. Well, we know that about you. We know that you love Fleetwood Mac, you know, and that you had a great time on last Wednesday. That is your reputation too. If you create a character or you go to a play or you just say, God, you know, this is on my mind and I have to say something about it. That's your reputation too. That's your brand. People get to know you that way.
And the other point I wanted make was in terms of the volume of what I do and how it doesn't seem like branding. It's just me having fun. And that is indeed entirely what it is.
There was a guy when I was kicking around New York, back in my twenties, in various subway hubs, like grand central station or times square in the subway downstairs. Every now and then I would walk past this young man who was a drummer and he was banging on—not drums—he had like a joint compound bucket. And he had, I swear, I remember one time he had crisper from refrigerator—you know, the shelf, the drawer.
Anyway, he was banging away those buckets and those instruments, which obviously did not cost a lot of money. And the sound just racketed through the subway. And it sort of integrated; when you walked through to that drum beat. You were kinda like, yeah, I'm in New York and I'm walking.
Not for nothing, this is the right soundtrack for this little part of my life right now, you know? And how many people would walk by this guy every day? Was in the hundreds of thousands, probably, right? So, there is a guy—this is a great example, if you think about it in terms of social media—this was a guy who was drumming for a massive audience every day.
And were people giving him money? I never gave him a dime. I mean, he couldn't have made more than, I don't know, 75 bucks a day. Who knows, maybe made more than that. But that wasn't the point. The point was 10 years later maybe, or earlier, there was a production, called, Bring in the Noise, Bring in the Funk.
This guy got hired. He was seen by the director. He was in a Broadway show. He was performing seven nights a week. I can guarantee he wasn't making $75 a day. And it just was like: oh, look at that. That's a great, very easy example of like, okay, this is what obviously he loved to do it.
Nobody said here is the way to the Broadway: Get your bucket of joint compound young man. And go thee to Times Square. No, not a chance. He loved rhythm. But he made it go right. And I don’t know where he is today. I don't even know the guy's name, but I know that it was the big start of something with tremendous potential for him, you know.
Gaspard: Follow your bliss. Like they say, you never know. I have two working actors in front of me right now. Tell me about rejection and dealing with rejection and how you deal with rejection
Meskimen: Oh, good question. Yeah. Rejection is like a kind of a shock to the beginner, because we kind of know it's coming, but it still hurts.
And the fact is that it's something that you have to kind of make friends with, which sounds really, really impossible. I just watched a video of a guy who—I think it was Joe Rogan. I watched a little on TikTok. Joe Rogan was talking about this ice-cold bath. That you know, it's now a thing to do these super cold plunges to try to handle inflammation in the body.
And I watched him because I want to see you go in that bath. And he went in. I'm like, how long is he going to stay in that thing? It's 34 degrees, just above freezing, but he was in there. I lost interest. So he went on for minutes and minutes. And being judged and being rejected is like that cold bath.
Now, Joe Rogan said that the first time he went in that bath, he could do it for about a minute. And then he got the hell out of there and went into a sauna. Probably. Now he can go in for 15 minutes. So, it was like that for me with rejection. Because, you know, you prepare something it's—and when you're an actor, it's different than other jobs. Because other jobs, if you're producing, like, even a piece of artwork, you know, it's exterior to you.
It's not you. It's that piece of paper. It's that object that you've created. With an acting job, it's like, oh, it's your hair, your body, your face, your tone of voice, your presence, your smell. It's all what you're offering, you know, whether you want to or not, it's there. Especially in the pre-Zoom days.
So, the levels and the dynamics of you being judged are just exponential. You know, you're like, wow, oh, you didn't like it the way I sat, you didn't like the way I said that one word, you know. There's all these swords to die on. But if you recognize and get familiar with the procedure, then after a while, that bite that it had originally does start to taper off.
And at this point— and early on for me, I'd done hundreds of auditions—I'm like, some I get, some I don’t get. Unless somebody says something really cruel, which is a whole different category of thing. There is just a natural judgment and evaluation. That is part and parcel of being an actor, where they go, “thank you very much.”
And you never hear from them again and you go, wow, that's one thing. If someone says, “yeah, you know, you're not quite right. You're not quite good enough. Boy, we were really expecting something better or, wow, that sucked.” I mean, there's a whole range of othernesses. Then that that is something that you don't necessarily get comfortable with.
But after a while you kind of gird your loins and go, well, that comes up, I have a different response to that. You know, I'm gonna say a little something or I'm gonna make a mental note: This casting director is an asshole. But that's different. The everyday kind of, “thank you very much for coming in rejection,” that's just something that if you do it enough and if you're not too precious about it and you don't take it personally, cuz it is not personal, it absolutely is not.
You know, one good thing too is to—if you're an actor and I have not done this, so I'm giving you this advice that's kind of secondhand—but go and participate in a casting process where you're not being cast. Watch other actors come in, be a reader or something, and observe the variety of people that come in and what is attractive and what is unattractive and what is distracting and what is not distracting.
And it'll give you some reality on like, oh, okay. We've interviewed or we've auditioned 15 people for this role, 12 of them could do it. They were fine, but this one's hair is this way. And this one has a little better this and you know, and I don't know, I met this guy before, I'll work with him again.
They're arbitrary, small kind of gentle reasons why the person gets hired. And it's not the Roman arena where they go, Thumbs down. You're dead. Now it’s thumbs down, you are a failure. You—it's your turn to be eliminated. It's not that. It's like, yeah, you're great. You're great. I got nothing to say except the director wanted to work with this guy.
And you’ve got to make your peace with that and go, yep, I would do the same thing if I was a director. I wanna work with this guy. Who cares? It doesn’t matter.
Gaspard: I still remember William H Macy saying once he was on a TV show and went up to the producer/director, the guy in charge, and said, “thanks so much for casting me in this.”
And the guy said, “yeah, it was between you and another 5,000 people, but you’ll work.”
Meskimen: I just found out—this is interesting—I got a role in a show that I'm gonna work on next week. And I was like, wow, great. You always, you know, these days, Jim, you know about this, you do these at home self-tape auditions, and it seems fake. It still seems kinda like I'm not in show business. I'm just doing it in the back of my house, but they call you up and they go, you know what? We want you for the role. And I'm like, oh, okay, great. And I'm all chuffed about it, you know, excited.
And the wardrobe man, when I went to the wardrobe fitting, for reasons of his own I'm sure, told me that, “Yeah, they originally hired another actor to do this part and then the schedule changed and so he couldn't do it.” And so then I found out, you know, in that sort of covert way that I was not the first choice.
I still get to do the job. But that's another aspect of things that could come in and sour things and you can start to feel sort of like a victim a little bit. But you know what? I just look at, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to get bigger and better parts in bigger and better shows. So that like, like Jim said, maybe I don't have to do so many auditions. Maybe they come to you and say, we have an offer. I love that. That happens sometimes, but I am also very happy to audition. I'm very happy to meet with people because for me, I look at an audition is a performance.
Especially these days when they expect a performance. I don't hold the script. I memorize it. I work it out. I spend hours and hours and hours getting that show together and shoot it to the best of my ability, put the best sound on it that I can and fire it back as quickly as I can.
And it's fun for me. I like the activity of acting. I like the activity of portraying a different person, of trying something out.
And that's, that's the joy of it. And the chore of it.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Dawn Brodey and Brian Forrest, talking about the various film versions of “Frankenstein” and “Dracula.”
Dawn gave me 4.5 films to revisit: The 1931 version of Frankenstein, Frankenweenie (the feature and the short), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein.
Meanwhile, Brian assigned me the original Nosferatu, the 1931 Dracula, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, Dracula in Istanbul and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
LINKS
Dawn’s podcast (HILF): http://dawnbrodey.com/ - shows
Brian’s Blog and Vlog, Toothpickings: https://toothpickings.medium.com/
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Frankenstein (1931) Trailer: https://youtu.be/BN8K-4osNb0
Frankenweenie Trailer: https://youtu.be/29vIJQohUWE
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/GFaY7r73BIs
Young Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/mOPTriLG5cU
Nosferatu (Complete Film): https://youtu.be/dCT1YUtNOA8
Dracula (1931) Trailer: https://youtu.be/VoaMw91MC9k
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/j6l8auIACyc
Horror of Dracula (Trailer): https://youtu.be/ZTbY0BgIRMk
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Trailer): https://youtu.be/fgFPIh5mvNc
Dracula In Istanbul: https://youtu.be/G7tAWcm3EX0
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Dawn and Brian TRANSCRIPT
John: [00:00:00] Before we dive into the assignment you gave me—which was to watch stuff I hadn't seen and also rewatch stuff I had seen to get a better idea of who's done a good job of adapting these books—let's just jump in and talk a little bit about your area of expertise and why you have it. So, I'm going to start with you, Brian. I was very surprised after working with you a while to find out that you had a whole vampire subset in your life.
Brian: A problem, you can call it a problem. It's fine.
John: Okay. What is the problem and where did it come from?
Brian: I was just vaguely interested in vampires for a while. When I was in my screenwriting days, someone had encouraged me to do a feature length comedy about vampires, and that led me to do a lot of reading. And then I just kind of put it aside for a while. And then I was, I had just finished a documentary for Committee Films and they said, do you have any other pitches? And I thought, and I said, you know, there's still people who believe in vampires even today, that could be really interesting. And I put together a pitch package. Then, the guy in charge of development said, [00:01:00]this is what we need to be doing. And then it stalled out. Nothing ever happened with it. And I said, what the hell. I could do this on my own. I could fly around and interview these people. And I did, I spent a couple years interviewing academics and some writers. And along the way, I started finding all these very intriguing moments in the history of either vampire lore or fiction or even just people who consider themselves vampires today. And all these things would connect to each other. It was a lattice work of vampires going back hundreds of years. It didn't fit the documentary, unfortunately, but I found it way too interesting. And I said, I need some kind of outlet for this. And so I started writing about it on Tooth Pickings. And that eventually put me in touch with people who were more scholarly, and it opened up a lot more conversations. And now I can't get out. I'm trapped.
John: Well, the first sign is recognizing there's a problem. [00:02:00] Okay. Now, Dawn, you had a different entryway into Frankenstein.
Dawn: Yeah, well, I was a theater major and a history minor at the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers. And, this was in the late nineties, early two thousands, when there were still a lot of jobs for people who had degrees and things like this. Or at least there was a theory that this was a reasonable thing to get educated in. And then I graduated in 2001, which was months after 9/11, when all those jobs went away. And so, I had this education so specific and what was I gonna do? And gratefully the Twin Cities is a great place for finding that kind of stuff. And one of my very first jobs out of college was at the Bakkan museum.
So, the Bakkan museum was founded by Earl Bakkan, who is the inventor of the battery-operated pacemaker. And he has always, since childhood, been obsessed with the Frankenstein movie that came out in 1931. And he attributes [00:03:00]his great scientific invention and many others to a science fiction in general. And to the spark of the idea that comes from sources like this.
So, when he opened the museum, he insisted that there'd be a grand Frankenstein exhibit. And that means going back to the book, and that meant going back to the author, Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein, she started writing it when she was 16.
And so, I was hired because—boom, look at me—my degree is suddenly colliding, right?
So, I was hired by the Bakkan museum to create a one-woman show about the life of Mary Shelley, where I would play Mary Shelley and would perform it within the museum and elsewhere. And through the course of that research, I read the novel for the second time, but then I read it for my third, fourth, fifth onwards and upwards. Because the show was about 45 minutes long, I referenced, you know, the novel, the books, the popular culture, the science behind it. And the deep dive just never stopped. And so long after I was required to do the research and the show was done and up, I just kept reading. [00:04:00] And it gave me the opportunity to meet experts in this field and the peripheral field, as I would sort of travel with this show and be an ambassador for the museum and stuff like that. And, yeah, it still curls my toes.
John: All right, so with that background. I'm going to just be honest right here and say, I've read Dracula once, I've read Frankenstein once. So that's where I'm coming from, and both a while ago. I remember Frankenstein was a little tougher to get through. Dracula had a bit more of an adventure feel to it, but something I don't think has really been captured particularly well in all the movies. But they both have lasted and lasted and lasted.
Why do you think those books are still, those ideas are still as popular today?
Dawn: I will say that I think Frankenstein, it depends on what you mean by the idea. Because on the surface, just the idea of bringing the dead to life, is, I mean, the Walking Dead franchise is right now one of the most popular franchises. I mean, I think we are really pivot on this idea. And I remember saying to a friend once that the part in [00:05:00]Revelation where the dead rise is like the only part of the Bible that I don't question. It's like, oh, the dead will get up. You know, we always just seem to be real sure that at some damned point, they're getting up. And so I think that that is part of why that it sticks in our brains. But then the story around Frankenstein—especially as it was written in 1818—has so many universal and timeless themes, like ambition and what is right and wrong. And the question that Jurassic Park posed in 1995 and continues to—1993 around there—and continues to pose, which is: just because science is capable of doing something, should it do something? And how do we define progress? Surely the very idea of being able to beat death and not die seems to be kind of the ultimate goal. And here is someone saying, okay, so let's just say, yeah. We beat death and everyone goes, oh shit, that'd be terrible. [00:06:00] You know? And then also, I always love the idea of the creature, the monster, Frankenstein's creature himself, who has a lot of characteristics with which people have identified throughout history. Some people say, for example, that Mary Shelley's whole purpose for writing Frankenstein was a question of: didn't God do this to us, make us these ugly creatures that are imperfect and bumbling around and horrifying? And then once he realized that we weren't perfect, he fled from us in fear or fled. He just keeps going and every generation has a new media that tells the story a little bit better, a little bit different, and yeah, there we are.
John: I will say that for me, the most memorable part of the book was the section where the monster is the narrator and is learning. And I think with the exception of Kenneth Branagh’s film, it it's something that isn't really touched on that much. There’s a little bit in Bride of Frankenstein, of him going around and learning stuff. But the sort of moral questions that he [00:07:00] raises as he's learning—what it is to be human—are very interesting in the book. And I wish they were in more of the movies, but they're not. So, Brian on Dracula, again, we have dead coming to life. Why do we love that so much?
Brian: Well, it's one of the questions that made me want to make a film about it myself: why has the vampire been so fascinating for hundreds of years? Why does it keep coming back? You know, it ebbs and flows in popularity, but it never leaves. And it keeps seeming to have Renaissance after Renaissance. Dracula specifically, I think one of the interesting things about that novel is how many different lenses you can look at it through and not be wrong.
People have looked at it through the lens of, is this thing an imperialist story? Is it an anti-imperialist story? Is it a feminist story? Is it an anti-feminist story? And you can find support for any of those views reading Dracula. And I think that some of it might be accidental; there's times where Dracula is catching up to whatever the cultural zeitgeist [00:08:00] is right now. And we look at Dracula and we say, oh, he was thinking about this back then. Or maybe Bram Stoker was just very confused and he had a lot of different ideas.
John: All right, let's explore that a little deeper. You each gave me an assignment of some movies to watch or to re-watch that you felt were worth talking about, in relation to your subject of Frankenstein or Dracula. I'm going to start with Frankenweenie, just because I had not seen it. And in going through it, I was reminded—of course, as one would be—of watching Frankenweenie, I was reminded of Love, Actually. Because I came to the realization after years of Love, Actually being around that it—Love, Actually—is not a romantic comedy. It is all romantic comedies, all put into one movie. And Frankenweenie is all horror films. Condensed, beautifully and cleverly into one very tasty souffle.
[Frankenweenie Soundbite]
John: I stopped at a certain point making note of the references to other horror films. Just because there are so many of them. But the idea that it references everything from Bride of Frankenstein to Gremlins. They do a rat transformation that's right out of American Werewolf in London. The fact that they have a science teacher played by Martin Landau doing the voice he did as Bela [00:10:00] Lugosi in Ed Wood. I mean, it's a really good story that they just layered and layered and layered and layered. What was it about that movie that so captivated you?
Dawn: Well, so much of what you just said. And also it seems to me the epitome of the accessibility of the story of Frankenstein. The idea that if anyone can think of any moment in which if I could bring someone back to life. But what I love about it too, is that the novel Frankenstein that is not Victor Frankenstein's motivation. It generally tends to be the motivation of almost every character, including the Kenneth Branagh character--at some point, he, when Elizabeth dies, his wife dies for the second time, he says, yes, I'm going to try to bring her back. But it is so not the motivation of the scientist in the book. It is just ambition. He just wants to do something no one else has done. And lots of people die around him and he really never, ever says to himself at any point in the novel, I wish I could bring them back, I'm going to bring them back. That's never, that's never part of it. He just wants to be impressive. And so, I love [00:11:00] that it starts with that pure motivation of wanting to bring the dead to life; just wanting to bring your dog back, so that it's so accessible for everyone watching it. Who wouldn't wanna try this? But then, even in that scene with the teacher, when he shows the frog. And he's demonstrating that if you touch a dead frog with electricity, its legs shoot up, which give the kid the first idea of bringing his dog back. Which is like a deep cut in, in the sense that that's nothing -- Mary Shelley herself and her friends were watching experiments exactly like that before she wrote the book: galvanism and animal magnetism were these really popular public demonstrations happening in London and elsewhere where they would do just that. But because electricity itself was so new, I mean, it blew people's hair back you know, that these dead frogs were flopping around. It was the craziest thing. And a lot of them were thinking to themselves, surely it is only a matter of time before we can, we're gonna have our dead walking around all the time. So, it was so circulating and so forward. [00:12:00] So it's not just movie references and it's not just Frankenstein references. That movie really includes source deep source references for how Frankenstein came to be. And I just love it.
John: Which brings me to Frankenstein, the 1931 version, in which Colin Clive has a similar point of view to what you were talking about from the book. He just wants, you know, he wants to be God.
[Frankenstein soundbite]
John: What I was most impressed with about that movie or a couple things was: it starts, it's like, boom. We're in it. First scene. There there's no preamble. There's no going to college. There's no talking about it, right? It's like, they're starting in the middle of act two. And I think a lot of what we think of when it comes to Frankenstein comes from that movie, [00:13:00] that the stuff that James Whale and his cinematographer came up with and the way they made things look, and that's sort of what people think of when they think of Frankenstein. Now, as you look back on that movie, what are your thoughts on the, what we'll call the original Frankenstein?
Dawn: Yeah. Well, I love it. You’ll find with me and Frankenstein that I'm not a purist. Like I love everything. Like I have no boundaries. I think this is great. One of the things that 1931 movie did was answer—because it had to, anytime you take a novel and make it a movie, you take a literary medium and make it a visual medium, there's obviously going to be things that you just have to interpret that the author left for you to make for yourself individual. And in this instance, that individual is the cinematographer. So, we're gonna get their take on this. And one of the real ambiguous things that Mary Shelley leaves for you in the novel is the spark of life. What is the spark of life? She does not in any [00:14:00]detail describe lightning or static or any of the recognizable or, or future developments of how electricity would've been.
Brian: I was shocked when I first read that book and saw how little space was devoted to that, that lab scene. It's blink of an eye and it's over.
Dawn: “I gathered the instruments of life around me that I may infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my.” Period. I just, what I love is what I love about film in general is that they went, oh, spark being all right, girl, it's a dark and stormy night and you know, and there's chains and there's bubblers and there's a thing. And the sky opens. I mean, God bless you, like way to just take that thought. Make it vivid, make it, build a set, make us believe it. And it's so, so pervasive that in Frankenweinie, you know, which of course is about Frankensein. [00:15:00] Like that is one that they do: he's got the white robe that ties in the back and the gloves. And in Young Frankenstein, it's the, you know, that lab scene. And so I love that. And the other thing that they had to do was describe the look of the creature, make the creature—Frankenstein's monster himself—look so like something. Because she, similarly in the novel, says that he is taller than a regular man, has dark hair and yellow watery eyes. That's all we know about what the Frankenstein looks like. And so, in 1931, Boris Karloff with the bolts. And it's black and white, remember, we don't think his skin is green. That he turned green at some point is kind of exciting, but of course he was just gray, but just dead flesh, you know, rotten, dead walking flesh is what's frightening. And, I just thought that the movie did that so well,
John: I think the makeup was kind of a green/gray, and that when color photos came out of it, that's why someone went, oh, [00:16:00] it's green, but it wasn’t green.
Brian: I thought I saw a museum piece of, you know, an actual makeup bit that Jack Pierce did and I thought it was greenish.
Dawn: Yeah. Greenish/gray. I think, yeah, the rots, just kind of trying to capture the sort of rotten flesh.
Brian: It’s just like the bride's hair was red.
Dawn: That's right. That's right. My day job here in Los Angeles is as a street improviser at Universal Studios, Hollywood. And two of their most treasured characters of course are Frankenstein and Dracula. So, while most people might separate them, John, they are usually arm and arm where I work every day. And the bride has recently come back to the theme park as a walking character, and they gave her red hair. We don't mess around.
John: That's excellent. But you mentioned Dracula, let's jump into the 1931 Dracula. There’s a connection point between the two that I want to mention, which is the amazing Dwight Frye, who is Fritz, I believe in Frankenstein. And I'm not the first one to mention his naturalistic [00:17:00] acting kind of putting him above everybody else in that movie. Famously, when he's running up the stairs, stopping to pull his socks up at one point. He's just really, really good in that. And then you see him in Dracula as the, essentially the Harker character. I think he was called Harker --
Brian: Yeah. Well, he's Renfield in Dracula. They merged those two characters. I thought it was a smart move for a first attempt at the film. Yeah. And Dwight Frye, he's in a lot of other Universal horrors, too. Dwight Frye often doesn't get the credit. He somehow was not the leading man he should have been.
John: I don't know why that is. He turns up again as an assistant in Bride of Frankenstein. He's a towns person in Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. And then he tragically died on a bus ride to an auto parts job that he took because he wasn't getting any acting work, which was too bad. A really, really good actor.
Brian: There is another intersection besides the fact that they were both produced by Junior. Lugosi was put into the [00:18:00] short, the trial film they shot for Frankenstein. I can't call it a short film, because it was never intended for release. But they shot a cinematic test reel and they had Lugosi play the monster, but he was under a sheet the whole time. I think he may have been able to pull the sheet off. It's a lost film. We don't know for sure. We just have kind of the recollections of a few crew people.
John: I've never heard of that. I would love to see that.
Brian: I would too. I think a lot of people would really love to see it, but it was as much a kind of a testing ground for Lugosi— whether they wanted him to be the monster—as it was for some of the techniques, the things they wanted to try in the film. And what I understand is the producer saw the test reel and they said, yes, we love this look, this is the look we want you to give us. And then it's whatever version of Lugosi not getting that part you want to believe: whether Lugosi turned it down or the producers didn't like him or something. But he ended up not taking that part.
John: But he is of course always known as Dracula. So, what are your thoughts on their adaptation? Which [00:19:00]again is not the first adaptation but is the kind of first official?
Brian: Yeah. The first to bear the name Dracula, although, well, I'll back up a second. Because some releases of Nosferatu called it Dracula. He would be named as Dracula in the subtitles, you know, because that's an easy thing to do in silent film, you can just swap that out however you want to. But yes, it’s the first authorized official film adaptation.
John: Well, let’s back up to Nosferatu, just for a second. Am I wrong in remembering that the Bram Stoker estate—Mrs. Stoker—sued Nosferatu and asked that all prints be destroyed? And they were except one print remained somewhere?
Brian: Close. That is the popular story that she sued Prana Films. She won the lawsuit. All films were set to be destroyed. Now there's a guy named Locke Heiss and a few others who've been doing some research on this. And they will tell you that there's no proof that a single print was ever destroyed. It's a more fun story to say that, you know, this one was snuck away and now we have the film. But there was no real enforcement mechanism for having all the theaters [00:20:00]destroy the film. Who was going to go around and check and see if they actually destroyed this film or not? Nobody, right? So maybe some people destroyed it. Maybe Prana Films destroyed their remaining copies. But the exhibitors kept all of theirs and there's different versions and different cuts that have been found. So, we know that some of these reels went out in different formats or with different subtitles or even different edits. And some of them have made their way back to us.
John: There's some really iconic striking imagery in that movie. That haunts me still.
Brian: What I always tell people is see the film with a good live accompaniment, because that still makes it hold up as a scary film. If you see a good orchestra playing something really intense when Orlok comes through that door. It feels scary. You can feel yourself being teleported back to 1922 and being one of those audience people seeing that and being struck by it.
John: What do you think it would be like to have [00:21:00] seen that or Dawn to have seen the original Frankenstein? I can't really imagine, given all that we've seen in our lives. If you put yourself back into 1931, and Boris Karloff walks backwards into the lab. I would just love to know what that felt like the first time.
Dawn: You know, what is so great is I was fortunate enough to know Earl Bakkan who saw the movie in the theater in Columbia Heights, Minnesota when he was 10 years old.
And he went, he had to sneak in. People would run outta this, out of the theater, screaming. I mean, when they would do the close up of Frankenstein's Monster's face, you know, women would faint. And of course that was publicized and much circulated, but it was also true. People were freaking out. And for Earl Bakkan—this young kid—the fear was overwhelming, as you said. And also in this theater, I was lucky enough, I did my show in that theater for Earl and his friends on his 81st birthday. So, I got to hear a [00:22:00] lot of these stories. And they played the organ in the front of the curtain.
Brian: Is this the Heights theater?
Dawn: Yes, the Heights.
Brian: Oh, that's an amazing space.
Dawn: So, they played the organ in there and it was like, oh my God. And it was so overwhelming. So, I'm glad you asked that question because I was really fortunate to have a moment to be able to sort of immerse myself in that question: What would it have been like to be in this theater? And it was moving and it was scary, man. And yeah, to your point, Brian, the music and the score. I mean, it was overwhelming. Also, I think there's something that we still benefit from today, which is when people tell you going in this might be way too much for you, this might scare you to death. So just be super, super careful. And your heart's already, you know…
John: And it does have that warning right at the beginning.
Dawn: Yeah. Versus now when people sit you down, they're like, I'm not gonna be scared by this black and white movie from 1931. And then you find yourself shuffling out of the bathroom at top speed in the middle of the night. And you're like, well, look at that. It got me.
Brian: That reminds me, there [00:23:00] was a deleted scene from the 1931 Dracula that was a holdover from the stage play. Van Helsing comes out and he breaks the fourth wall and he speaks directly to the audience. And he says something to the effect of—I'm very much paraphrasing—about how we hope you haven't been too frightened by what you've seen tonight, but just remember these things are real. And then black out. And they cut that because they were afraid that they were really going to freak out their audience.
Dawn: It's like a war of the world's thing, man. It's oh, that's so great. I love that.
[Dracula Soundbite]
John: So, Brian, what is your assessment of the 1931 version? As a movie itself and as an adaptation of Stoker's work?
Brian: The things they had to do to try to adapt it to film, which they borrowed a lot of that from the stage play. They used the stage play as their guide point, and I think they made the best choices they could have been expected to make. You know, there's a lot of things that get lost and that's unfortunate, but I think they did a decent job. I don't find the 1931 version scary. I like Bela Lugosi. I think he's a great Dracula. I think he set the standard. With the possible [00:25:00]exception of the scene where the brides are stalking Harker slash Renfield, I don't think the imagery is particularly frightening. The Spanish version, I think does a little bit better job. And you know the story with the Spanish version and the English version?
Dawn: We actually talk about it on the back lot tour of Universal Studios. Because they shot on the same sets in some cases.
Brian: Yeah. My understanding is that Dracula shot during the day, Spanish Dracula would shoot at night. So, they got to benefit maybe a little bit by seeing, okay, how is this gonna be shot? How did Todd Browning do it? Okay. We're gonna do it a little bit differently. It's a little bit of a cheat to say they move the camera. They do move the camera a lot more in the Spanish version, but the performances are a little bit different. I'm going to, I can't get her name out. The actress who plays the ingenue in the Spanish Dracula, I'm not going to try it, but you can see her kind of getting more and more crazed as time goes on and her head is more infected by Dracula. You see these push-ins that you don't see in the English version. There's blocking [00:26:00] that's different. I put together a short course where I was just talking about how they blocked the staircases scene. The welcome to my house, the walking through spider web. And how it's blocked very differently in the two versions. And what does that say? What are these two directors communicating differently to us? In one, Harker slash Renfield is next to Dracula. In one, he's trailing behind him. In one, we cut away from the spider web before he goes through. And in the other one, we see him wrestle with it. That's not really what you asked, John. Sorry, I got off on a tear there.
John: I agree with you on all points on the differences between the two films. Although I do think that all the Transylvania stuff in the English version is terrific: With the coach and the brides. The Spanish version, the biggest problem I have is that their Dracula looks ridiculous.
Brian: He's not Bela Lugosi. You’re right.
John: He looks like Steve Carell doing Dracula and there is no moment, literally no moment [00:27:00] where he is scary, whereas Lugosi is able to pull that off.
Brian: There’s a lot of people who have observed that the Spanish Dracula would be a superior film were it not for Bela Lugosi being such an amazing Dracula in the English version.
John: He really, really nailed it.
Brian: And since he learned his lines phonetically, he could have done the Spanish Dracula. Just write it out for him phonetically, because he didn't speak English very well.
John: If we could just go back, you know, cause a lot of things in history we could change, but if we could just be at that meeting and go, Hey, why not have Bela do it? Okay. So then let's jump ahead, still in Dracula form, to Horror of Dracula. From 1958. With Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.
[Soundbite from Horror of Dracula]
Brian: For some people, Lee is the ultimate Dracula, and I think that's a generational thing. I think he's great. He's got the stage presence and I love Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. I don't like the film as a whole. It feels like I'm watching a play with a camera set back. It doesn't work for me the way it works for other people. That is personal taste. Don't come after me.
John: It does, however, have one of the greatest, ‘Hey, we're gonna kill Dracula’ scenes ever, with Peter Cushing running down the table and jumping up and pulling down the drapes and the sun.
Brian: Oh, right. Interesting. Because in Dracula, the book, the sun is not deadly, remotely really. But that's [00:29:00]the influence of Nosferatu being pasted onto the Dracula cannon, that the sunlight is deadly to Dracula.
Dawn: I remember having this fight very enthusiastically in the nineties when Bram Stoker’s/Winona Ryder’s Dracula came out and I was already sort of a literary nerd. And they were like, hey, they have a scene with him walking around during the day. And I was like, yeah, nerds. That's right. That's cuz vampires can walk around during the day.
I was very already, like, you don't know anything, go back to history.
Brian: And there's a seventies version where he's out on a cloudy day, but he is not hurt either. There suggestions in the book that he's more powerful at night.
Dawn: He's a creature of the night. I always understood he had to wear sunglasses. He was sort of like a wolf. Like they show him as a wolf during the day; it can happen, but it's not great.
Brian: I like the way they did it in the Gary Oldman version. He's suited up. He's got the sunglasses on. There's not a whole lot of skin exposed. But he's not [00:30:00] going to turn into smoke.
John: Well, okay. Let's talk about that version and Kenneth Branagh’s version of Frankenstein.
Dawn: Ug.
John: I'm not going to spoil anything here, when I say it doesn't sound like Dawn cared it.
Dawn: You open this, you opened this can of worms. John, sit down for a second. Listen. He calls it: Mary Shelly's fucking Frankenstein. I inserted the fucking. I'm sorry, I wasn't supposed to say that. He calls it. He calls it. How dare you, Kenneth, Brannagh, call this Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. So that was A-number one. But I went into it all excited: It’s Kenneth Brannagh. Love him. He calls it Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and he starts with the ship captain out at sea, just like the book. And so I pull up my little, you know, security blanket and I'm like, oh, Kenneth Brannagh, do this to me, buddy. Do it to me buddy. Show me Mary Shelley Frankenstein as a movie. [00:31:00] And then he just fucks it up, John. And he doesn't actually do that at all. It's a total lie. He screws up every monologue. He makes up motivations and then heightens them. And it’s dad. The acting is capital B, capital A, capital D across the board. Everybody sucks in this movie. It looks bad. The direction is bad, and it has nothing to do. He tries to bring Elizabeth back to life. This is a huge departure from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Thank you very much, Mr. Brannagh, that's all I have to say for now.
John: All right, I was fooled by the fact that he started at, at the north pole.
Dawn: That’s because he's tricking us, John. That’s because it's the whole movie is a lie.
John: Okay with that same mindset, what do we think of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola?
Dawn: I love that one.
Brian: I'm afraid that I don't have, I can't match Dawn's intensity in either respect. Um, except I thought Robert DeNiro [00:32:00] was really good in Frankenstein.
Dawn: But that's no, he's not. you're wrong. Your opinion is valid and wrong. Yeah, I'm kidding for listeners who don't know me. I am, I am kidding. Of course. Everybody's opinion is valid except for that one. Yeah. The movie, everything about that movie is bad.
John: He is, I think, miscast.
Dawn: And Helen Bonan Carter is one of the finest actresses of not just our generation, but of all time. And she sucks in this movie.
John: Right. So. Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Brian: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
[Soundbite: Bram Stoker’s Dracula]
Brian: Also produced by Branagh. And I assume that is the connection, why they both start with the author's name. I always call it Coppola's Dracula because it gets too confusing to make that distinction. I thought it was a decent movie, but it didn't feel like Dracula. It felt like someone who had heard of Dracula and wrote a good script based on what they had heard. So many divergences that bothered me, although I think it's aged better than it felt the first time. I remember seeing it when it first came out in the nineties and not thinking much of it. And I think audiences agreed with me and it seems like it's been kinder, that audiences have been kinder to it as it's gotten older.
John: Okay. Dawn, you love it.
Dawn: I loved it. I loved it. It, you know what though? That was one of [00:34:00] those movies that unlike, unlike Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I can't look at with like an adult critical eye because I, what year did it come out? Was it like 90, 92? I'm like middle school getting into high school and like Winona Ryder was everything. Vampires are everything. I mean, Gary Oldman is the, is a great actor and it's so sexy, very sexy. The sex is Primo. And so I remember loving it, very moving. I don't remember comparing it as certainly not as viciously to the novel because I read Dracula after I had seen the movie. And so there's always that inherent casting where Nina is always going to be Winona Ryder. But I do remember really loving the Gothic convention of the letter and that the movie did seem to utilize and to great effect how letter writing can build suspense and give us different perspectives in a, in a unique cinematic way.
Brian: [00:35:00] The two or three biggest stakes that film puts in the ground are not to be found in the book. So there's no love story in the book. There's no Vlad in the book.
John: Can I interject there? Isn't that basically, didn't they just rip that off of Dark Shadows, The idea of my long lost love is reincarnated in this woman. I must connect with her.
Brian: That is a good question, John. I'm glad you asked that because I call it the doppelganger love interest. Right? We first see that, the first time I know of it happening, I'm sure there's an earlier precedent, is in The Mummy, but then Dark Shadows does it. But that's not where Stoker, I mean, that's not where Coppola and a screenwriter claimed to have gotten the idea. They claimed to have gotten it from Dan Curtis's Dracula in 74.
John: Dan Curtis, who produced Dark Shadows, with Barnabas Collins, falling in love with his reincarnated love.
Brian: But Dan Curtis's Dracula comes out two years after Blacula. That has a reincarnated love interest.
John: Not only does the Blaclua [00:36:00] have a reincarnated love interest, but if I'm remembering movie correctly at the end, when she says I don't want to go with you. He goes, okay. And he's ready to go home. It's like, sorry to bother you.
Brian: No, uh, in Blacula, he commits suicide
John: Oh, that's it? Yeah. He walks out into the sun.
Brian: He goes home in a different way.
John: Yes. He's one of my favorite Draculas, the very stately William Marshall.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. That is a favorite of mine.
John: Anyway, you were saying stakes in the ground from Coppola’s Dracula.
Brian: Well, the, the love story, the equating Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And I felt like they did Lucy really bad in that movie. They had her turn into a wanton harlot, which is not in keeping with the book. Some things are okay, but they really said these are the building blocks of our story and that bugged me. But Anthony Hopkins I liked, so, all right.
Dawn: Alright, but see, this [00:37:00] the itch that still that still makes me wanna scratch though: why say Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Why say Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? I mean, because I think you heard the venom, obviously. If they took Mary Shelley's name off that thing, you can make Frankenweenie. And I will love, like, I love Frankenweenie. Do your Frankenstein homage all day, all the time. But when you call, when you say it's Bram Stoker’s, I think that this is what has been frustrating historians like me and getting high school students Ds in English class ever since. Because it just creates the false perception that you've basically read the book. Right. Or that you, if you know the thing you know the book and it's just a cheap ploy. And I don't like it.
Brian: I think, somebody correct me on this, that there, there had been a plan to do a reboot of the Universal monster franchise, and these two movies were supposed to be the reboot of it. [00:38:00] And then they would've then done HG Wells’ Invisible Man.
John: The Mummy killed it. They've tried to reboot it several times. And that was the first attempt.
Brian: Yeah, I’ve heard that called the dark universe. They were trying to do their own MCU.
Dawn: Yeah. Well, at Universal Studios, there is of course in, in LA, in general, there's the property wars, you know? What what's, who has what? And sometimes those get really blurred. Like why does Universal Studios have Harry Potter? When we can see Warner Brothers from the top of our wall/ And that's obviously, you know, those things happen. But when it comes to like the IP or intellectual property, those original monsters are so valuable and they always are at Halloween. And then it's like, sort of, how can we capitalize on this? And yeah. And it's cross generational.
Brian: All they really own right now is the look right? They own Jack Pierce's makeup job from Frankenstein.
Dawn: But I think that that's exactly the point; [00:39:00] the delusion of what is it that you own if you own, you know, Frankenstein, whatever. But yes, there was definitely an interest to sort of revamp all of the original Universal Monsters they call them and it's the Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Invisible Man.
John: It's everybody who shows up in Mad Monster Party.
Dawn: Exactly.
[Soundbite: Mad Monster Party]
Dawn: But yeah, The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, was a tremendous flop. And I think that sort of took the wind out of everybody's sails.
John: Let me ask you this, Dawn. If Mel Brooks had titled his movie, Mary Shelley's Young Frankenstein, instead of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, would you have a problem with that?
Dawn: Yeah, no, but no, I would not have had a problem, because that would've been irony and juxtaposition. Not just a straight lie.
John: So that brings us to some comedies. Young Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, which I was very surprised and a little unnerved to [00:40:00] realize a few years back, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein was made a mere 10 years before I was born. And I had always assumed it was way back then. And it's like, no, it wasn't all that way back then. It was pretty, pretty recently.
Brian: That happened to me when I realized that Woodstock was only six years before my birth. And it always seemed like ancient history.
John: Is that the common thing, Madame Historian? That people kind of forget how recent things were?
Dawn: Oh yeah. Remember Roe V. Wade. Sorry, too soon.
Brian: We're recording this on that day.
Dawn: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it happens to everybody so much faster than you think it's going to. I remember looking around in the nineties feeling, well, surely the seventies was ancient history, you know, because they had That Seventies Show, which debuted as like a period piece. I am still very young and hip and happening and [00:41:00] they are in production for That Nineties Show right now. And I said to my husband, That Nineties Show. I was like, Jesus, I guess that's 20 years because I was in the nineties they did That Seventies Show. And he goes, no baby that's 30 years. And I was like, I'm sorry. I said, I'm sorry, what? He goes, the nineties was 30 years ago. And I just had to sit down and put my bunion corrector back on because these feet are killing me.
John: All right. Well, let's just talk about these two comedies and then there's a couple other things I wanna quickly hit on. What are our thoughts on, let's start with Young Frankenstein?
[Soundbite: Young Frankenstein]
Dawn: I told you I'm not an idealist and we're not a purist about Frankenstein, but I am an enthusiast. So that is why I told you to watch Kenneth Branagh’s movie, even though I hate it so much. And that is also why I love Young Frankenstein, because I think that it is often what brings people into the story. For many, many people, it introduces them to the creature. They may know literally nothing about Frankenstein except for Young Frankenstein. And that's actually fine with me because I'm a comedian myself. And I believe that parody is high honor. And often when you parody and satirize something, especially when you do it well, it's because you went to the heart of it. Because you got right in there into the nuggets and the creases of it. And there is something about Young [00:43:00] Frankenstein as ridiculous as it is that has some of that wildness and the hilarity and The Putting on the Ritz. I did find out from my Universal Studios movie history stuff, that that scene was very nearly cut out. Mel Brooks did not like it. And he just didn't like that they were doing it. And of course it's the one, I feel like I'm not the only one who still has to make sure that my beverage is not only out of my esophagus, but like aside, when they start doing it.
[Soundbite: Young Frankenstein]
Brian: And I understand they were about to throw away the sets from the 1931 Frankenstein when Mel Brooks or his production designer came up and said, Stop stop. We want to use these and they were able to get the original sets or at least the set pieces.
John: I believe what it [00:44:00] was, was they got Kenneth Strickfaden’s original machines. Ken Strickfaden created all that stuff for the 1931 version and had been used on and off, you know, through all the Frankenstein films. And it was all sitting in his garage and the production designer, Dale Hennessy went out to look at it because they were thinking they had to recreate it. And he said, I think it still works. And they plugged them in and they all still worked.
Brian: Oh, wow.
Dawn: Oh man. It’s alive.
John: Those are the original machines.
Dawn: I didn't know that. That's fantastic.
John: At the time when I was a young kid, I was one of the few kids in my neighborhood who knew the name Kenneth Strickfaden, which opened doors for me. Let me tell you when people find out, oh, you know of the guy who designed and built all those? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I know all that. One of my favorite stories from Young Frankenstein is when they sold the script. I forget which studio had said yes. And as they were walking out of the meeting, Mel Brooks turned back and said, oh, by the way, it's gonna be in black and white, and kept going. And they followed him down the hall and said, no, it can't be in black and white. And he said, no, it's not gonna work unless it's in [00:45:00] black and white. And they said, well, we're not gonna do it. And they had a deal, they were ready to go. And he said, no, it's gonna stay black and white. And he called up Alan Ladd Jr. that night, who was a friend of his, and said, they won't do it. And he said, I'll do it. And so it ended up going, I think, to Fox, who was more than happy to, to spend the money on that. And even though Mel didn't like Putting on the Ritz, it's weird, because he has almost always had musical numbers in his films. Virtually every movie he's done, he's either written a song for it, or there's a song in it. So, it's weird to me. I've heard Gene Wilder on YouTube talk about no, no, he didn't want that scene at all, which is so odd because it seems so--
Brian: I never thought about that, but you're right. I'm going in my head through all the Mel Brooks films I can remember. And there is at least a short musical interlude in all of them that I can think of.
John: But let's talk then about what's considered one of the best mixes of horror and comedy, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [00:46:00]
[Soundbite: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein]
Brian: As with comedies of that age, it, it starts off slow, but then it starts to get very funny as time goes on. And all the comedy is because of Abbot and Costello. They are the, [00:47:00] the chemistry they have on screen. I don't know how much of that was actually scripted and how much of it was just how they rolled with each other. But it works really well. Not much of the comedy is provided by the monsters or the supporting cast or even there's maybe a cute, a few sight gags. But wouldn’t you say most of the comedy is just the dynamics between them?
John: It is. The scary stuff is scary and it's balanced beautifully at the end where they're being chased through the castle. The monsters stayed pretty focused on being monsters and Abbot and Costello's reactions are what’s funny.
Dawn: If I may, as someone who has already admitted I haven't seen much of the movie, it's feels to me like it may be something like Shaun of the Dead, in the sense that you get genuinely scared if zombie movies scare, then you'll have that same adrenaline rush and the monsters stay scary. They don't have to get silly. Or be a part of the comedy for your two very opposing one's skinny, one's fat, you know, and the way that their friendship is both aligning and [00:48:00]coinciding is the humor.
Brian: I believe there is one brief shot in there where you get to see Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman all in the same shot. And I think that might be the only time that ever happens in the Universal Franchise. During the lab scene, does that sound right John?
John: I think you really only have Dracula and the Wolfman. I'll have to look it up because the monster is over on another table--
Brian: Isn't he underneath the blanket?
John: Nope, that's Lou Costello, because it's his brain that they want. And so they're fighting over that table. And then just a little, I have nothing but stupid fun facts. There's a point in it, in that scene where the monster gets off the table and picks up someone and throws them through a window. And Glenn Strange, who was playing the monster at that point -- and who is one of my favorite portrayers of the monster, oddly enough -- had broken his ankle, I believe. And so Lon, Chaney, Jr. put the makeup on and did that one stunt for him, cuz he was there.
Brian: He did that as Frankenstein's monster?
John: Yes. Frankenstein.
Brian: I didn't know that. Yes, I [00:49:00] did not know that. So he plays both of those roles in that movie?
John: Yes. Let me just take a moment to defend Glenn Strange, who played the monster three times: House of Dracula, House of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In House of Frankenstein, he is following up the film before that, which was Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, in which, in this very convoluted universe, Lugosi is playing the monster, even though he didn't wanna do it in 31. Because his brain in Ghost of Frankenstein had been put into the Monster's body. So, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, it is Lugosi as the Frankenstein monster. It is Lon Chaney Jr., who had played the monster in Ghost of Frankenstein, now back to playing Larry Talbot. So, it is Wolfman versus Frankenstein. And the premise of the script was he's got Ygor’s brain and it's not connecting properly. He's gone blind. They shot that. They had tons of dialogue between the two characters of Larry Talbot pre-wolfman, and the monster, Bela Lugosi. And the executives thought it sounded silly. So they went in and they cut [00:50:00] out all of Lugosi’s dialogue out of the movie. So now you have a blind monster stumbling around with his arms in front of him, but he doesn't talk. And if you look at the movie, you can see where he's supposed to be talking and they cut away quickly. And it's really convoluted. Glenn Strange who then has to play the monster next, looks at that and goes well, all right, I guess I'm still blind. I guess I'm still stumbling around with my arms in front of him. Which is the image most people have of the Frankenstein monster, which was never done by Boris in his three turns as the monster. So with, in that regard, I just think Glenn Strange did a great job of picking up what had come before him and making it work moving forward.
Anyway, a couple other ones I wanna just hit on very quickly. Brian asked me to watch Dracula in Istanbul. Under the circumstances, a fairly straightforward retelling of the Dracula story. I would recommend it--it is on YouTube--for a couple of reasons. One, I believe it's the first time that Dracula has actual canine teeth.
Brian: Yes.
John: Which is important. But the other is there's the scene where he's talking to Harker about, I want [00:51:00] you to write three letters. And I want you to post date the letters. It’s so convoluted, because he goes into explaining how the Turkish post office system works in such a way that the letters aren't gonna get there. It's just this long scene of explaining why he needs to write these three letters, and poor Harker’s doing his best to keep up with that. That was the only reason I recommend it.
Brian: That movie is based on a book called Kazıklı Voyvoda, which means The Warrior Prince and it was written in, I wanna say the 1920s or thirties, I wanna say thirties. It's the first book to equate Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, which I've come back to a couple times now, but that's significant because it was a Turkish book and the Turks got that right away. They immediately saw the name Dracula like, oh, we know who we're talking about. We're talking about that a-hole. It was not until the seventies, both the [00:52:00] fifties and the seventies, that Western critics and scholars started to equate the two. And then later when other scholars said, no, there, there's not really a connection there, but it's a fun story. And it's part of cannon now, so we can all play around with it.
John: But that wasn't what Bram Stoker was thinking of? Is that what you're saying?
Brian: No. No, he, he wasn't, he wasn't making Dracula into Vlad the Impaler. He got the name from Vlad the Impaler surely, but not the deeds. He wasn't supposed to be Vlad the Impaler brought back to life.
John: All right. I'm going to ask you both to do one final thing and then we'll wrap it up for today. Although I could talk to you about monsters all day long, and the fact that I'd forgotten Dawn, that you were back on the Universal lot makes this even more perfect. If listeners are going to watch one Dracula movie and one Frankenstein movie, what do you recommend? Dawn, you go first.
Dawn: They're only watching one, then it's gotta be the 1931 Frankenstein, with Boris. Karloff, of course. I think it has captured [00:53:00] the story of Frankenstein that keeps one toe sort of beautifully over the novel and the kind of original source material that I am so in love with, but also keeps the other foot firmly in a great film tradition. It is genuinely spooky and it holds so much of the imagery of any of the subsequent movies that you're only watching one, so that's the one you get. But if you do watch any more, you've got this fantastic foundation for what is this story and who is this creature?
John: Got it. And Brian, for Dracula?
Brian: I was tossing around in my head here, whether to recommend Nosferatu or the 1931 Dracula. And I think I'm going to have to agree with Dawn and say the 1931 for both of them, because it would help a viewer who was new to the monsters, understand where we got the archetypes we have. Now, why, when you type an emoji into your phone for Vampire, you get someone with a tuxedo in the slick back hair or, I think, is there a Frankenstein emoji?
Dawn: There is, and he's green with bolts in his neck. [00:54:00]
Brian: Yeah, it would. It will help you understand why we have that image permanently implanted in our heads, even though maybe that's not the source material. We now understand the origins of it.
Dawn: And if I may too, there's, there's something about having the lore as founded in these movies is necessary, frankly, to almost understand what happens later. I mean, I get very frustrated in 2022, if there is a movie about vampires that takes any time at all to explain to me what a vampire is, unless you're breaking the rules of the vampire. For example, you know, like in Twilight the vampire sparkles, like a diamond when it's out in the sunshine and is the hottest thing ever. That's really great to know. I didn't know that about vampires. That wasn't necessarily true before, you know, but you don't need to take a lot of time. In fact, when you do read Dracula, one of the things for me that I found very frustrating was the suspense of what is it with this guy? They were like: He said we couldn't bring [00:55:00] garlic and they take all this time. And you're kind of as a modern reader being like, cuz he is a fucking vampire. Move on. Like we know this, we got this one. It's shorthand
Brian: That’s one snide thing I could say about the book is that there are times where Dracula’s powers seem to be whatever his powers need to be to make this next scene creepy and move on to the next chapter.
John: He was making it up as he went along. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Eric Mendelsohn, who revisits the lessons he learned while making his debut feature film, “Judy Berlin.”
LINKS
Judy Berlin Trailer: https://youtu.be/23PlEaTy9WA
Edie Falco Interview about Judy Berlin: https://youtu.be/AoC5q5N-6kY
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
***
TRANSCRIPT -EPISODE 106
Eric Mendelson Interview
[JUDY BERLIN SOUNDBITE]
John
That was a soundbite from “Judy Berlin,” which was written and directed by today’s guest, Eric Mendelsohn. Hello and welcome to episode 106 of The Occasional Film podcast -- the occasional companion podcast to the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. I'm the blog's editor, John Gaspard.
Judy Berlin, starring Edie Falco, as well as Madeline Kahn, Bob Dishy, Barbara Barrie and Julie Kavner, was Eric Mendelsohn's feature film debut. The film was an Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival … won Best Director at Sundance … Best Independent Film at the Hamptons Film Festival … and was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards. Eric is currently the Professor of Professional Practice, Film, at Columbia University.
I first spoke to Eric about Judy Berlin years and years ago, for my book, Fast Cheap and Under Control: Lessons Learned from the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Time. In the course of that interview, Eric laid out a handful of really smart filmmaking lessons – lessons that, if followed, might be the difference between making a successful film … or making no film at all.
I was curious: What did Eric think about those lessons, all these years later? Before we got into that, though, we talked about the origins of Judy Berlin …
[MUSIC TRANSTION]
John
What was the impetus that made Judy Berlin happen?
Eric
It's answerable in a more general way. When I get interested in making a script or making a film, it's because a group of feelings and images almost in a synesthesia kind of way, come together and I get a feeling and I say, oh, yeah, that would be fun. And for Judy Berlin, the set of feelings were definitely having to do with melancholy, hopefulness, the suburbs and my intimate feelings about them being a fresh place that I hadn't seen, represented in the way I experienced them. Things as abstract as how everyone feels in autumn time, I guess, maybe everyone does. I don't know. Maybe there are some people who are just blissfully unaware of all those sad feelings of you know, autumn, but I felt like they were worth reproducing if maybe they hadn't been in that particular locale. I think this is a funny thing to say but against all of that sadness, and kind of hope against hope, being hopeful against hopelessness, I had this sound of a score to a Marvin Hamlisch score to Take the Money and Run. And I actually asked him to do the music and he said he didn't understand such sadness that was in the movies that this isn't something I do. Which is really true and I didn't get it and I wanted to persist and say no, but that score for Take the Money and Run, that has such like almost like a little kids hopefulness about it.
That's what I wanted. It was like a river running underneath the ground of the place that I had grown up with. And I think the other inspiration for the movie was pretty, I don't know, maybe it's called plagiarism. Maybe it's called inspiration, the collected feeling that you can distill from the entire works of Jacques Demy, and I loved Jacques Demy 's films. They gave me a license. I saw them and said, Well, if you can mythologize your own little town in the northwest of France that maybe seems like romantic to Eric Mendelsohn from old Bethpage, Long Island, New York but truly is a kind of a unremarkable place at the time it was made, that I can do it with my town. I can mythologize everybody, and love them and hate them and talk about them and so those are some of the feelings that went into it.
John
But they all came through. So, what I want to do is just go through the handful of lessons that you told me X number of years ago, and let's see what you think about them now. So, one of the big ones that turns up again and again, when I talked to filmmakers was the idea of write to your resources. And in the case of Judy Berlin, you told me that that's a great idea and you thought you were: It takes place over one day with a bunch of characters in one town. When in fact you were really making things quite difficult for yourself by having middle aged people with homes and cars and businesses and professional actors who all had other things going on.
Eric 03:35
And multiple storylines is a terrible idea for low budget movie making. Each actor thought oh, I’m in a little short film. I, however, was making a $300,000 movie about 19 characters. What a stupid guy I was.
John 03:53
Do you really think it was stupid?
Eric 03:54
It was. You know, everyone says this after you have graduated from that kind of mistake or once you've done it, you look back and say I would only have done that because I didn't know any better. I know you haven't finished your question. But I also want to say that writing or creating from ones’ resources also includes what you are able to do, what you are able to manufacture. In other words, I didn't have enough writing skill to concentrate on two characters or one character in house, like Polanski, in his first endeavors. I didn't I had small ideas for many characters. It's much more difficult to write a sustained feature film with two people. So, I was writing to my resources in a number of ways, not just production, but in my ability as a writer at that point.
John 04:53
Yeah, you're right. It is really hard. I don't know why they always say if you're gonna make a low budget movie, have it be two people in a room. That's really hard to do. The idea of let's just tell a bunch of stories does seem easier and I've done that myself a couple times and it is for low budget easier in many respects. My stuff is super low budget, no one's getting paid. We're doing it on weekends, and you can get some really good actors to come over for a couple days and be really great in their part of the movie and then you put it all together. Another advantage is if you have multiple stories, I learned this from John Sayles in Returns of the Secaucus Seven, he said I couldn't move the camera. So, I just kept moving the story. It allowed him to just, I can't move the camera, but I can move to the next scene, I can move to these people, or I can move to those people there. And it also allows you an editing a lot of freedom, because you can shift and move and do things. So, the downside you had of course was on just a strictly production shooting day level, very hard to do what you were doing. But it did allow you to grow a bit as a writer because you're able to write a lot of different kinds of characters and different kinds of scenes.
Eric 05:57
Remember, I always say this, you know, you sit in your room, and I believe you need to do this as a writer, you sit in your room and you say to yourself, she slams a car door harder than usual. And then you realize later she drives a car, where am I going to get a car from? She enters her house. How am I going to get a house and if I have seven characters, and they all have cars, that's a job in itself. One person could spend their summer looking for seven cars. But that's the least of your problems. When it's houses, cars, clothing, handbags, all of it.
John 06:30
Yeah, when you're starting out, you don't necessarily realize that every time you say cut to something in your script, that's a thing. You've got to get it. I did a feature once that had four different stories and there are four different writers and a writer came to me with his finished script, which was brilliant, but it was like 14, 15 locations that I had to shoot over two days. So, how do you do that? Well, you end up spending four days on it. But the other hand, another writer who understood screenwriting, handed me a script that was four locations, but brilliantly combined and figured out. So, in two days, you could shoot them all because he knew what he was doing. And that's something you don't necessarily learn until you're standing there at six in the morning with a crew going, I don't know what I'm doing right now, because I screwed myself up and I wrote it and that's sometimes the only way you can learn it.
Eric 07:16
I think it's the only way. The only way. Look, you can be precautious, you can, it's no different than life, your parents can warn you about terrible, ruinous, stupid, love affairs that are going to wreck you for a year. Are you really going to just not get into them because of what smart older people said? You throw yourself at a film in the way that hopefully you throw yourself at love affairs. You're cautious and then you've just got to experience it. And I think the difference obviously is in film, you're using lots of people's time, effort money, and you do want to go into it with smarts and planning. I still say that you should plan 160%. Over plan in other words. And then the erosion that naturally happens during production, this crew member stinks and had to be fired a day before. This location was lost. This actress can't perform the scene in one take because of memory problems. All of that is going to impact your film. Let's say it impacts it 90%. Well, if you plan to 160%, you're still in good shape in the footage that you get at the end of the production.
John 08:29
Yeah, I'm smiling, because you're saying a lot of the things you said last time, which means it’s still very true. Alright, the next lesson was, and this is one that I've embraced forever: No money equals more control. You spoke quite eloquently about the fact that people wanted to give you more money to make Judy Berlin if you would make the following changes. Looking back on it did you make the right decisions on that one?
Eric 08:51
Yes. I'll tell you something interesting. Maybe I didn't say this last time. But I remember my agent at the time saying to me, we could get you a lot of money. Why don't you halt production? We'll get you so much money that will get you--and this is the line that always stuck in my head-- all the bells and whistles you want. Now, I'm going to be honest with you what he said scared me for two reasons. One, I had worked in production for a long time in my life and I knew that if you stall anything, it just doesn't happen. It just doesn't. That the energy of rolling downhill is better than sitting on the hill, potential energy and trying to amass funds. But another thing and I was scared privately because I said to myself, I don't even know what the bells and whistles are. I'm afraid to tell him that I don't know what they are. And I'd rather I think that's those bells and whistles are for some other savvy filmmaker that I'll maybe become later. But right now I have the benefit of not knowing enough and I'm going to throw myself and my planning and my rigorous militaristic marshalling of people and props and costume names and locations and script. I'm gonna throw that all at the void and do it my cuckoo way because once I learned how to make a movie better, I'll have lost a really precious thing, which is my really, really raw, naive, hopeful, abstract sense of what this could be. And that thing that I just said with all those words was not just a concept. I didn't know what I was making, in the best sense possible.
I was shooting for something, shooting it for an emotional goal, or a visual goal for a dramatic goal but I didn't put a name on it. I didn't put a genre to it. So much so that by the time I got to the Sundance Film Festival, and I read the first line of a capsule review, and it said, A serio-comic suburban. I almost cried, I felt so bad that I didn't know what I was making in an objective sense. In a subjective sense, obviously, I knew exactly what I was trying to do. But objectively, I didn't know it could be summed up by a review. And it hurt me so badly to think I was so mockable and now I'm going to embarrass myself by telling you what I thought I was making. I didn't think I was making something that could have a boldface thing that said, serio comic, multi character, suburban fairy tale. I didn't know that. I really thought I was like writing in glitter on black velvet or I don't know, I didn't even know that it could just be summed up so easily.
And I think I've written a lot of scripts since that one, and many haven't gotten made, but each time I reject and issue an objective determination of what the thing is that I'm working on, prior to sitting down. Is that the best way to work? It is a painful way to work. My friends will tell you that. I have my great friend and filmmaker Rebecca Dreyfus always says that I have creative vertigo, that I don't know what I'm doing for months and years on end and then I looked down and I say, Oh, God, I think it's a horror film. Or I think I've rewritten a Dickens story. And I get a nauseated kind of, you know, dolly in rack, focus thing. It's not, I'm telling you, I'm not describing a creative process that is painful for me to realize, always later on what I'm doing. And I still hold, that's the only way I can do it. I will not go into a screenplay and then a film saying this is a serio comic black and white, multi character, suburban, who wants that? I go in thinking, I'm making something that I don't know, that no one's seen before and then we'll see what they think.
John 12:54
You know, we were very similar, you and I in that regard. In addition to low budget, filmmaking, as I've gotten older, I've gotten into novel writing and mystery writing, which I enjoy. And the parallels between independent publishing and independent filmmaking are really close. One of the things that people say all the time in independent publishing that I back away from is you have to write to market. You have to know who your audience is, what they like, and write a book for them. And I can't do that. I can write a book for me that, you know, if I slip into dementia in 20 years and read it, I won't remember writing it, but I would enjoy it because all the jokes are for me and all the references are for me...
Eric 13:32
I think you and me, doing the exact right thing, according to me. And you'll be happy to know, because I teach at Columbia Columbia's film grad school, we have an unbelievable group of alumni people, you know, like, you know, Jennifer Lee, who created Frozen and the people behind Making of a Murderer and Zootopia. And all they ever say when they come back to speak to our students is nobody wants a writer who is writing to the industry. They want something they haven't seen before that is new, fresh, odd, and still steaming be you know, out of the birth canal.
John 14:14
Yep. The corollary to that, that I tell people who are writing and also people who are filmmakers who want to work that way is the more you can take economics out of the process, the more you're able to not need to make money from what you're doing, the happier you're going to be. Because every movie I've ever made has never made money and it didn't matter. It wasn't the purpose. The purpose was, oh, this is interesting idea. Let's explore this with these 12 actors and see what happens. But if you can take economics out of it, you completely free.
Eric 14:41
You free and I'll tell you what, I know. Again, it's just a perspective, one person's perspective. But everyone, you know, you want to leave on the earth some things that you felt good about, whether they're children or ethics or some civic thing you did for your town, or a movie. And all the people I know who made tons of money always are talking about coming back to their roots because they're so unhappy. Like, I get it. I get it. And all these actors who want to do work for no money, it's because they feel like well, I sure I made a ton of money, but I didn't get to do any of the stuff I really care about.
I remember in my first real attempt at filmmaking after film school, a short half hour film that starred the late Anne Meara and Cynthia Nixon in an early film role and F Murray Abraham did the voiceover. And I was 20 something years old, and the film did very well and it was just a half hour movie and we showed it at the Museum of Modern Art. And after the screening, a woman came up to me and I don't remember what language she was speaking. She was Asian, and she tried to explain to her to me, what the movie meant to her, but she spoke no English and she kept tapping her heart and looking at me. Anne Meara was standing next to me and she kept pointing like and then making a fist and pounding her chest and pointing to like a screen in the air, as if she was referencing the movie. And then she went away. Anne Meara said, listen to me now, it will never get better than that. I understand completely. For the movie I made after Judy Berlin, which is called Three Backyards and a movie I produced and cowrote after that, called Love After Love. I didn't read the reviews. Who cares?
John 16:27
Yeah, that's a pretty special experience and good for her to point that out to you.
Eric 16:31
Her husband in a bar after a production of The Three Sisters told me that--this is pretty common. This is Jerry Stiller, the late great comedian said to me, I was about to tell him what the New York Times had said about his performance. He said, no, no, no, don't. Because if you believe the good ones, then you have to believe the bad ones. And I've since known that that is something that's said a lot. But if a review isn't going to help you make your next movie, then don't read it.
Marlena Dietrich, in my favorite last line, paraphrased from any movie, gets at why criticism is unimportant for the artist. In the end of Touch of Evil, she says, “what does it matter what you say about other people.” It's just, you either do or they did to you or you experience all that garbage of what people say it goes in the trash, no one except for maybe James Agee’s book, there's very few film criticism books that people are desperate to get to, you know, in 50 years. But you take a bad movie, I watched some summer camp killer movie the other night, and I thought I'd rather watch this than read what somebody said about this movie. I’d rather watch somebody's earnest attempt to fling themselves at the universe than a critics commentary upon it. Yeah. Anyone who gets up at five in the morning to go make a movie has my respect and I don't even you know, on the New York Times comments online commentary site, I refused when it's about artwork to come in even anonymously. Nope!
John 18:05
Okay. You did touch on this. But it's so important and people forget it. I phrased it as time is on your side. You talked about being prepared 160% and having Judy Berlin, every day, there were two backups in case for some reason, something didn't happen and the advantage you had was you had no money. But you had time and you could spend the time necessary doing months of pre-production, which is the certainly the least sexy part of filmmaking, but is maybe the most important and is never really talked about that much.
How much you can benefit from just sitting down and putting the schedule down? I mean, we used to, I'm sure with Judy Berlin, you're using strips and you're moving them around and when we did our 16-millimeter features, we didn't even spend the money on the board. We made our own little strips, and we cut them out and did all that. You can do it now on computers, it's much easier, but it's having that backup and that backup to the backup. You don't really need it until you need it and then you can't get it unless you've put it in place already.
Eric 19:06
Well, I'll say this, I have to disabuse some of my students at Columbia by telling them that there is no like effete artist who walks onto a set-in filmmaking with no idea about scheduling. That character fails in filmmaking. That every single director is a producer, and you cannot be stupid about money, and you cannot be stupid about planning and in fact, Cass Donovan who is an amazing AD and one of my good friends. She and I sometimes used to do a seminar for young filmmakers about scheduling your movie and I always used to say, you know, a good schedule is a beautiful expression of your movie, where you put your emphasis. And it comes out in the same way that people say like oh, I just like dialogue and characters. I'm not good at structure. There's no such things. You need at least to understand that a good structure for your story can be a beautiful, not restrictive, rigorous device that's applied to your artistry, a structure and a story is a beautiful can be a beautiful thing and the expression of the story and the same thing is true with the schedule.
The schedule is an expression of your story’s emphases. If your story and your resources are about actors, and you've got an amazing group of people who are only doing the project and lending their experience and talent, because they thought this was a chance to act and not be hurried. Well, that expresses itself in how many days and how many shots you're going to schedule them in. And I love how a schedule expresses itself into an amount of days and amount of money and allocation of funding. I love it. There is no better way to find out what your priorities were and I love it. And in terms of planning, one of the reasons I don't understand or have an inkling to investigate theater is I don't want something that goes on every evening without my control, where the actors sort of do new things or try stuff out and the carefully plotted direction that you created can get wobbly and deformed over time. Instead, I like the planning of a script and now I'm not talking about pre-production. I'm talking about I like that, with screenwriting, you go down in your basement for as long as you need. So, maybe I'm afraid of shame and I don't like to present stuff that is so obviously wrong to whole groups of people. I like to go down in the basement for both the writing and the pre-production and get the thing right.
You know, there are so many ways to make a movie that I'll also I want to place myself in a specific school of filmmaking. To this point in my directing life, I've created scripts that are meant to be executed in the sense that not as disciplined in execution as what Hitchcock or David Lean, we're shooting for, but not as loose an experiment as Cassavetes, or let's say, Maurice Pilar. We're going for, everyone has to find their own expression. In other words, if you are Maurice Pilar or Cassavetes, or Lucrecia Martel, you have to find your own equation, you have to find your own pre-production/production equation where the room for experimentation.
I haven't really wanted to experiment on set, I know what shots I want, and I get them. The next film I make may be different. But everyone has a different equation and every script and every director are going to find their own priorities that are expressed in the project and then the execution. The fun thing was, the last movie I worked on, was something I've produced and co-wrote ,called Love After Love. And that was directed and co-written by Russ, and Russ and I spent years writing a script that we knew that was intended to be elastic, and to be a jumping off ground for the kind of impromptu directing he does. Now, a lot of what we wrote ended up in the movie, but sometimes he would call me from the set and say, this isn't working and that was exciting, because we knew that would happen. And he told the cast and the crew before they went into the project, before they went into the short film he made before that called Rolling on the Floor Laughing. This is intended to be a porous experiment ,with a firm spine of drama that is not porous.
So, we've created a drama and interrelations in that script that then he went off, and those couldn't budge. Those were fixed the dramatic principles and dynamics. But he worked as a director in a completely different way than me and I was very happy to loosen my own way of working and then as a producer, make sure that he had what he needed on the set, and that the pre-production, production and even editing--we took a year to edit that film--was based in an idiosyncratic methodology of his particular artistry, not mine.
John 24:34
And why I think is so interesting about that is that you know, you made sure that everybody involved knew going in we're doing this kind of movie and this kind of movie has … I remember talking to Henry Jaglom, about I don’t know which movie it was, you know, Henry has a very loose style of what he does. But it's still a movie, and he was talking about, he was shooting a scene and an actress either jumped into a swimming pool or push somebody into a swimming pool. And he said, Why did you do that? She said, I was in the moment. Yeah, and he said, yes, this is a movie and now I have to dry these people off and I have to do the coverage on the other side. So, you need to know where the lines are, how improvised is this really.
Eric 25:15
And everyone has different lines, and you make movies to find out how you make movies. You write screenplays to find out what that feeling is and whether or not you can interest an audience in it. You don't write a screenplay to execute Syd Fields, ideas about story or the hero's journey. I'm not a hero. I don't have a hero's journey. I have my journey. The task, the obligation is to see if I can take that and still make it dramatic and interesting to a group of hostile strangers, normally called an audience,
John 25:52
As Harry Anderson used to say, if you have a bunch of people all seated facing the same direction, do you owe them something.
Eric 25:58
Yeah, it's unbelievable. A friend of mine who works in theater saw a terrible show and he works on Broadway, and he works on all the big shows that you have heard of. So, I can't give the title of this one particular production. And he said, you know, I feel like telling these people because he works in lighting. He said, I feel like telling these people who create these shows that every single audience member who comes to see the show at eight o'clock that night, woke up at seven in the morning, and they're tired, and they worked and you better provide something at eight that night.
John 26:33
Exactly. I remember talking to Stuart Gordon, the guy who made Reanimator, and he was big in theater before he got into horror films. And he said we had one patron who always brought her husband, and I'll say his name was Sheldon, I forget what the name was. And he would consistently fall asleep during the shows. And my mandate to the cast was our only job is to keep Sheldon awake. Yeah, that's what we're there to do is to keep Sheldon alert and awake. And I think at all the time as you're watching something on film, you're going is that going to keep Sheldon awake, or is that just me having fun?
Eric 27:01
No, he didn't ask this question, so it's probably not. But a lot of students are not a lot, actually but some students will say to me like, well, what I have to know the history of movies? Why do I have to know that when I'm going to create something new? And I just think because you're not. Because there is a respect for a craft. Forget the art of people who have been doing this for ages. And to not know it puts you in the position of the only person on set who doesn't realize that. Every single crew member is a dramatist: the script supervisor is a dramatist, the set decorator is a dramatist, the costume designer, the cinematographer, the producer. So sometimes my students in directing will say to me, well, I thought this shot was interesting and I said, Okay, you may think that's interesting. But I'm going to tell you something scary right now: your producer, and your editor will know immediately that you don't know what you're doing and that that won't cut. It is not a secret this thing you are doing, this skill. Learn what other people, what the expectations of the art form are, please, and then build from them and break rules and expand but don't do it naively.
John 28:06
Yeah. When I wrote the first book, it was because I had done an interview with a couple guys who made a movie called The Last Broadcast, which came out right before Blair Witch, which had a similar project process to it. And one of them said to me, he said in talking to film students, one thing I keep seeing is everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. And so I put the book together, because here's all the different lessons, you can you're going to end up learning in one way or another, you might as well read them now and like you say, not find out that that won't cut because it won't cut. It just won't cut.
Alright, you did touch on this lesson earlier just in passing, but it's a good one and it's sometimes a tough one. I just called it Fixed Problems Quickly and it was about if there's a crew member who's not part of the team, it's easier to get rid of them two weeks out, then two hours into the shoot.
Eric 28:54
Yep, it still holds, and it happened on the film I made after Judy Berlin as well. Someone who had worked on Judy Berlin came on to the new production of Three Backyards, and I tried my best to keep this untenable relationship working. But like a rotten root on a plant, it started to rot everything around it, and everyone would like to be the well-liked captain of the ship. But that also means firing crew members sometimes. We had a very, very big key position on that film, and we had to lose them a week before we shot. I'll tell you something else about Three Backyards. It was a week before we shot it. Is it okay that I talked about that?
John 29:39
Absolutely. We're talking about what you've learned.
Eric 29:42
Yeah. So, after Judy Berlin I made a film called Three Backyards with Edie Falco and Elias Kotes and host of other people. A very strange movie it was, I am not joking. I haven't said this. So, not that this is some big reveal that anyone gives a shit about but before, a week before we shot it was called Four Backyards. I've never told that because I didn't want anyone to watch it with that mindset and start to say, and we even kept the crew quiet and said, please, we don't want this to get out that it's you know. And I cut out an entire storyline a week before shooting. Now, when I tell you that it was an actor, a very amazing actor in that storyline, the fourth backyard, who I had to call, who was already doing driving around on his motorcycle in the location, going to visit places that had to do with his storyline, costume fittings, everything had been done locations we had gotten, I had to call them and say we're cutting, that your character and that storyline. It was still to this day unbearable. I don't expect you know, the guy is very well known and successful, and you know, has done far more important things than my little movie. But I still feel guilty to this day. I feel nauseous to this day that I did that, that I had to do it.
We got to a point where it was clear, the expression of the film called Four Backyards would be running through one take per shot, per setup and running through with no time to work on the characters, no time to give these amazing actors, you know what they wanted. We'd be run and gun and I just said, I'm not this old, you know, to making this movie so that I can re-learn terrible lessons and put these actors through that kind of experience. So, I cut an entire storyline that was dragging down this buoy, let's say in the water and then once we cut it off, and I of course I don't mean the actor or the performance, the potential performance. I mean, the production. Once that fell to the bottom of the sea, the buoy lifted and bounced and righted itself. And I lived with that decision knowing I did the right thing, but that it was hard.
We also lost one of the key, we lost our production designer I would say about 15 days before shooting, and that was another one of those kinds of decisions where I said get it done now. I will say this offline on Three Backyards. There was a crew member who had, the minute I shook hands with them, I knew this is that kind of poisonous sniping inconsolable person. But I leave those decisions to department heads and that's not my job to get in and say this person seems awful to me. But that's my feeling. They worked for about, let me say this carefully, they worked and it and became exactly the problem that I had predicted. They initiated a work stoppage that was uncalled for, unprofessional, and everyone was aware.
They pretended not to know what location we were going to next and didn't show up. We were delayed I think 40 minutes. On a low budget movie, 40 minutes is unsustainable. And I will just say this, I had to make the decision because we were so deep into the film, whether or not firing that person would cause such bad feelings in the remaining crew or free us up in a way that was similar to what I described earlier. I decided to keep the person and it was I believe the right decision because we were close enough to finishing the film that I believed I would no longer reap benefits from firing them and that leads me to a sentence that I probably told you when I was 20 or whatever how old I was when I spoke to you. I'm now 57.
On a movie, you want to be effective not right. In other words, a decision that is morally right on a film which is a temporary, collapsible circus tent where people strangers get together and work for a month, being morally right can hit the main pole of that circus tent really hard and collapse. You want to be effective not right. The right decision in a movie. It is the one that gets forward motion. In that particular case, I took my revenge out later, I kept the person, I bit my tongue and swallowed my pride and said I'm so sorry, let's negotiate. How can we make you happier? However, after we finished production, my more powerful friends in the industry never hired that person again. That person was fired from large TV productions that they were on and given no reason and I felt absolutely thrilled with that.
John 34:48
Well, it does catch up with you. The next one is one that I use all the time and you just put it very succinctly you said, Fewer Takes, More Shots.
Eric 34:57
So, I can talk about that. I want to be specific though, that it's for my kind of filmmaking. If you're shooting every scene in one shot, this cannot apply. But in the edit room generally, is a very broad stroke comment, generally, if you're a more conventional visual director who tells stories with shots, you get stuck on one shot in one setup, especially if it's a master and you're trying to get it right. You have no other storytelling ability. You don't have the move in. You don't have the overhead shot. You don't have the insert shot of the finger of the character touching a teaspoon nervously. You don't have any other storytelling ability if you get stuck in one setup.
So, a lot of people always say, you know, remember, your first take is probably your best take. That's a good truism. There's an energy that you get from nervous actors, nervous camera operators in a first take. So, sometimes your first take has a great spontaneity about it. Sometimes it lingers for a second or third take. The idea that you are going to beat that dead horse into the ground with subsequent takes going up through 13, 15, 19 to get something perfect flies in the face of the actuality, which is that editing, performance, the rhythm of the eventual scene through shots and takes creates what the audience experiences. That the idea of perfection is a great way to flatten your actors, kill your dialogue, ruin your scene.
It's like when I first made a pie ever in my life, nobody taught me and I didn't really look at a book. I was preparing a meal for a woman who was coming up to her country house and I was upstate using the house. And I thought to myself as I carefully cut the butter into the flour and created a little pebbly, beautiful texture, and then gently gathered those pebbles of flour and butter and sugar together into a ball. I mistakenly thought that if I took the rolling pin and roll the life out of it, I would be making the best crust possible. And it tasted it was inedible. It tasted like shoe leather. And I said what did I do wrong? And they said, the object she said to me when she arrived, the object is to gather those delicate, beautiful pebbles together and lightly make it into a crust that retains the little particles, the delicate interstitial hollows. Not to flatten the life out of it. And the same is true about shots. The more angles you have, if that's the way you shoot, create a sense of life. That's about as good as I can say it.
John 37:49
Well, you know, I want to add just a couple of things. When I did the book, originally, I talked, had a wonderful long conversation with Edie, Falco about Judy Berlin. She was trying to get her brand-new baby to go to sleep while we talk and so it's very quiet recording of her talking.
Eric 38:04
That's my godson Anderson.
John 38:05
Oh, that's so sweet. She said about multiple takes. She said there's a perception sometimes with filmmakers that actors are this endless well. And she said, I'm not, I'm just not. Unless you're giving me direction to change something, it's going to be the same or worse. Again, and again. And so you know, of all the lessons from the book that I tell people when I'm making presentations, fewer takes more shots. The thing, a corollary of attitude, is if you're going to do another take, tell them to do it faster, because you're gonna want a faster version of it. You don't realize that right now, but you're gonna want one.
Eric 38:38
Here's a great way of saying it. I feel people mistake, directors mistakenly think that they are making the film on set. The filming of a movie is a shopping expedition for, drumroll please, ingredients. If you are shooting one take per scene, sure, get it right, you have your own methodology. But if you're going to be telling a story in the traditional narrative way, where a bunch of angles and performances in those shots, setups angles, will eventually tell the story of a scene that let's say for example, goes from pedestrian quotidian to life threatening, remember that you need the ingredients to then cook in the edit room of quotidian, seemingly boring escalating into life threatening.
Making a movie on set in production is shopping for the ingredients and you come home and then you forget the recipe and say, what did I get? What was available? What was fresh? What does that mean if you're not talking about food? Well, this actor was amazing, and I lingered on them and I worked on their performance because it's going to be great. That's one of the ingredients you have to work on. In the edit room, this actor was less experienced, and I had to do more setups because they couldn't carry a scene in one shot. That's what I have to work with now in the edit room.
When you're in the edit room, you're cooking with the ingredients you got in the fishing expedition called shooting. That's why my students say to me, well, why am I going to get extra footage? Why am I going to get anything but the bare minimum? Why am I going to overlap in terms of, well, you think you're only going to use that angle for two lines, we'll get a line on either side of the dialog, so that you have it in case. And they say, that's not being professional. That's not being precise and accurate. And I'd say it's a fishing expedition, especially if you're starting to learn film. You don't go shopping for a party and say, I think everyone will have about 13 M&Ms. You're buy in bulk, because you're getting like, oh, it's a Halloween party, I’ll need a lot of this, a lot of that and a lot of this, and then you cook it later.
John 41:04
You know, one of the best examples of that is connected to Judy Berlin, because as I remember, you edited that movie on the same flatbed that Annie Hall was edited on...
Eric 41:18
I still have it, because the contract I made with Woody Allen was that if no one ever contacted me for it, and I bore the expense of having to store it, I would keep it. And so I got it and nobody ever asked for it. Nobody uses it anymore.
John 41:34
But the making of that movie is exactly that. They had a lot of ingredients and they kept pulling things away to what was going to taste the best and all of a sudden, this massive thing … You know, I was just talking to another editor last weekend, o, I pulled out this, the Ralph Rosenblum’s book, but...
Eric 41:49
Oh, yeah, I was just gonna mention that. The best book on editing ever.
John 41:51
Although Walter Murch’s book was quite good. But this is much more nuts and bolts.
Eric 41:56
And much more about slapping stuff together to make art.
John 42:00
That one lesson of: don't spend all day on that one take over and over and over. Let's get some other angles is …
Eric 42:06
I'll tell you what happens. I may have said this in our first interview, but I will tell you from the inside, what happens. It's terrifying and if you start with a master, a director can get terrified, because to move on means more questions about what's next. Was it good? And you can get paralyzed in your master shot if you're shooting in that manner. And then the actors aren't doing their best work in the master, especially if it's a huge master, where there's tons of stuff going on. They're going to give you some better performance, if you intend to go in for coverage and you by the time you do that you may have lost, you know, their natural resource. They might have expended it already. I've been in that situation where I got lost in my master and you almost have to take a pin on set and hit your own thigh with it and say, wake up, wake up, move on, move on.
John 42:58
Yeah. All right, I got one more lesson for you, because I'm keeping you way too long. It's a really interesting one, because it's when I talked to Edie about it, she didn't know you had done it and she thought, well, maybe it helped. But Barbara Barrie played her mother in Judy Berlin, they had never met as actors, as people. And you kept them apart until they shot, because you wanted a certain stiffness between them. I just call that Using Reality to Your Advantage. What do you think about that idea now?
Eric 43:25
Edie isn't someone who requires it, you know, she's one of the best actresses in the world.
John 43:30
And Barbara Barrie wouldn't have needed it either. I'm sure.
Eric 43:32
She wouldn't have but I do think there's a … look. This is a funny thing about me and my evolution from Through an Open Window, which is the half hour film, to what I'm writing today. I always thought that film was interesting in the same way that I thought military psyops were interesting: that you could control or guide or influence an audience's experience of the story in ways they were unaware of. So, I always liked those hidden influencers. Even in advertising, I thought they were interesting. You see how this company only uses red and blue and suddenly you feel like, oh, this is a very, this is an American staple this product. I love that shit and after I'm done with a script, I know what I'm intending the audience's experience to be I want to find anything to help me to augment that and if you're a fan of that kind of filmmaking, would the shots have a power outside of the audience's ability to see them? They know that the story is working on them and they think the audience thinks, oh, I was just affected by the story in that great performance. They have no idea that the director has employed a multitude of tricks, depth of field to pop certain actor’s faces out as opposed to wider shots that exclude are identifying with other characters, moving shots that for some reason, quote unquote some reason meaning every director is aware of how these techniques influence an audience, suddenly make you feel as if that moment in the story of the character are moving or have power have influence while other moments have nothing.
In Three Backyards, funnily enough with Edie, I had a scene where Edie was, the whole, Edie's whole storyline was about her desperate, unconscious attempt to connect with this other woman who was a stranger to her. And I refused to show them in a good two shot throughout the entire film. I separated them. I made unequal singles.
When their singles cut, they were unequal singles tighter and wider, until the moment that I had convinced the audience now they're going to become best friends. And I put them into their first good, easy going two shot. And that kind of manipulation is done every moment by every filmmaker directing. In one aspect it is a mute, meaning silent in an unobtrusive, persuasive visual strategy for enhancing the story. So, whether you're keeping two actors away from each other during the course of the day before their first scene, because the scene requires tension, or whether you're separating them visually until a moment late in the movie, where they come together, and they're coming together will suddenly have tension because they're in the same shot. Those kinds of persuasive manipulations are what visual storytelling, otherwise known as directing is about.
John 43:33
Yep, and there's a lot of tools. You just got to know about them because a lot of them you're not going to see, you won't recognize, though until somebody points out, do you realize that those two women were never really in the same shot together?
Eric 47:06
Every well directed movie has a strategy. Sometimes they're unconscious, but you don't want to be unconscious. As the director, you want to be smart. You want to be informed about your own process, and I think smart directors … Here's what I always say to my students: learn a lot, know a lot, then feel a lot.
So, what does that mean? It's just my way of distilling a whole bunch of education down into a simple sentence. Understand what has been done and what you can do, and what are the various modes of directing and storytelling. And then when you get into your own script, feel a lot. What do I want? Why isn't it working? Add a lot of questions marks to the end of sentences. Why can't this character be more likeable? Why isn't this appealing? Why haven't I? How could I? And it's a combination of knowing a lot and being rigorously intellectual about the art form that you want to bow down before you want to bow down before what works and what doesn't work. I would say that you want to bow down before the gods of what works and what doesn't work. You know, you don't want to look them in the eye and say, screw you, I'm doing what I want. You bow down and say, I don't even understand why that didn't work. But I'll take that lesson.
You want to feel a lot. You want to be open on the set. One of the hardest things to learn is how to be open on the set. You want to be open when you're writing. You want to be open when you're editing. It's a real juggling act of roles that you have to play, of being naive, being smart, being a businessperson, being a general, being a very, very wounded flower.
You know, I remember reading, as a high school student, Gloria Swanson's autobiography. And then it's so many years since I read it that I might be wrong. But I remember they said what are you proudest of in your career. And she said without hesitation that I'm still vulnerable. And I didn't even know if I understood it at the time, but I get it now.
You want to be smart. You want to be experienced. You want to have a lot of tools and know the tools of other directors and still be naive and vulnerable and hearable and have your emotional interior in tech. Those are hard things to ask of anyone, but if you want to be in this industry, an art form that so many greats have invested their life's work toiling in, then you owe it to yourself to be all of those things.
[MUSIC TRANSTION]
John
Thanks to Eric Mendelsohn for chatting with me about the lessons he learned from his debut feature, Judy Berlin.
If you enjoyed this interview, you can find lots more just like it on the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. Plus, more interviews can be found in my books -- Fast, Cheap and Under Control -- Lessons Learned from the greatest low-budget movies of all time ... and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap and Written that Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google and Apple Books.
And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series, staring with The Ambitious Card, can be found on those same online retailers in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats. And if you haven’t already, check out the companion to the books: Behind the Page: The Eli Marks podcast … available wherever you get your podcasts.
That's it for episode 106 of The Occasional Film Podcast, which was p roduced at Grass Lake Studios. Original music by Andy Morantz. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you … occasionally!
-
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Matthew G. Anderson about his hit web series, “Theater People.”
LINKS
Theater People Website: https://www.theaterpeoplewebseries.com/
Theater People on SeekaTV: https://watch.seeka.tv/en/theater-people
No Context Theater People on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nocontexttheaterpeople/
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Transcript — Episode 105
[Film Clip 0:00 to 0:32]
John Gaspard 00:33
That was a soundbite from the Theater People Web series, which was created, written, directed, edited and occasional photographed by today’s guest, Matt Anderson. Hello and welcome to episode 105 of The Occasional Film podcast -- the occasional companion podcast to the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. I'm the blog's editor, John Gaspard. I've known Matt Anderson for too many years to calculate -- certainly as a screenwriter and filmmaker, but occasionally as an actor. He even shows up as a waiter in my digital feature, Grown Men.
[Film Clip 1:09 to 1:28]
In our conversation today, Matt talks about the origins of the Theatre People web series and takes us through the unique challenges he and his team faced bringing each of the four seasons to life. Where did theater people come from?
Matt Anderson 01:44
Desperation. Don't they all come from desperation?
John Gaspard 01:48
I guess so. What was your desperate situation?
Matt Anderson 01:52
I had just not been working, or, more specifically, I'd been working for a really long time writing. I was out in LA, and was doing that thing where you write for free, and nothing ever actually gets made. And I got to a point where I just kind of got tired of that, you know? After a while you kind of would like to see something actually reach fruition. I just kind of hit this point where I felt like, even if it was something just completely do-it-yourself, I just needed to see something I was writing actually get made without needing to, you know, pass through 1000, gatekeepers and sell to a studio in order to see it happen. So, that was pretty much it. I just felt like I wanted to make something truly independently and I hooked up with a producer named Lydia Bolder, who was just getting out of stage management and was looking for a new kind of project and the two of us just kind of started it up. And we brought Crist Ballas on to produce with us and the three of us just kind of made Season One happen without any real sense of whether it would work or not.
John Gaspard 03:08
All that being said, why did you land on the idea of theater people as your subject matter?
Matt Anderson 03:14
Just because it seemed like subject matter that would never exhaust itself. I'd been acting for 10 years prior to moving out to LA and I felt like the material was inexhaustible. You know, if you've spent any time in theater, as you know, you have the story, it is just coming fast and furious, like you couldn't, forget enough to not have just a goldmine of good stories and good characters and experiences to draw from. And so that was kind of the idea behind why that world. And then the practical reason was I really just wanted to work with a lot of the people that I'd used to act with. I knew that I knew a ton of really good actors and I felt like this this kind of story would lend itself to a really large cast which would allow me to work with a lot of actors, which was another thing that I wanted to do. Get as many people involved as possible and I knew I had a lot of resources. I knew that, you know, if I was going to be trying to do this completely out of pocket and as inexpensively as possible, playing to the fact that I knew a lot of people with theater spaces and knew a lot of people that would be willing to help me out and let us shoot in them for free. And all of that logistical stuff just made it seem like it was a really economical choice of story, as opposed to doing something like an office set, you know, or a restaurant or any of the other kinds of locations that are just absolute nightmares to line up. I felt like theaters were the ones that were going to be my best shot and this was something that could be primarily shot in theaters.
John Gaspard 05:11
I had that exact same thought when we did Ghost Light, when I was hanging out at Theater in the Round and realized that the building was only actually in use, really, Friday, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon. The rehearsal room was used in the evening, but there were more than 30 other rooms in that building that were genuinely never used and were kind of interesting.
Matt Anderson 05:33
Being able to have that kind of access is just, you know, when you can't pay to close a place down, finding a restaurant or a store or an office. And me being me, I still wrote in plenty of restaurants and stores and offices and then we just had to problem solve that. But at least we were able to, for the majority of what we needed, rely on friendly locations that were available to us for cheap.
John Gaspard 05:57
So, as you were doing that, I remember that in addition to the episodes for Season One you also did I don't know what you would play call them. They were Theater People Minute, a Minute.
Matt Anderson 06:10
Yeah, the Promo Minutes.
John Gaspard 06:12
Why did you think to do that? And they were all very funny but if I'm remembering right, aren't they really completely divorced from your main stories?
Matt Anderson 06:22
Yeah, character-wise, there's no continuity. We just did that because we knew that we needed to, this was my first, I had never done a web series before. I came from a background where I had done a bunch of shorts, and I had done a feature and I had kind of done that sort of those modes. I'd never done something that I was going to need to be able to market and promote and find an audience for and raise awareness of and build a brand and all that kind of stuff. And it was really sort of a learning as we were going sort of thing. So, I knew that we somehow needed to get the idea that we were making a show out there, to start building an audience and bringing people to our Facebook page, even though we didn't have a show yet and you know, getting people interested in when the show was going to launch. And so the Minutes were just a way for us to do something that was in the same spirit of the show, you know. They were silent. So, they were things that we could shoot without needing sync sound, they were short, they were a minute long, set to like old times silent movie music, and they kind of had that feel to them.
So, we could shoot them in three hours, and edit them pretty quickly and just put them out there as something that people could watch in a minute and get a sense of what the sense of humor of the show was going to be. The first season was 10 episodes, of eight to 10 minutes a piece. And once we launched, we released one a week, every Friday for two and a half months. And people liked them and we got, you know, a few 100 views every time we'd launch one. And then more people would find them as we released further episodes, and we'd go back and catch up and, and it was good. It was really warm. What was most important to me was when we started it, you know, we didn't have any money and literally nobody got paid and everything was out of pocket and everybody was basically signing on to this big question mark. When I approached them, I think I told everybody, you know, I have no idea how this is going to turn out. I just want to work. Lydia, I and Crist just want to work and so we're going to do this thing and I have no idea if it's going to be any good. I think it's going to be good because it's resting on good writing and great performances and I feel like we can do that but, I said two things.
· I said, one, it'll get done. Because that's a big thing, you know, a lot of projects, a lot of independent projects, that actors sign on to, they work on them really hard for you know, sometimes months int the end, and they never see the light of day, you know. You're checking in with the producers like a year later and they're like, our editors trying to fit it in between the other projects, and we're not sure when it's gonna get done and you know, a lot of them just don't get finished. So, I said, this will get finished.
· The other thing I said was, you're gonna like your work. I said it'll get finished and you'll like you in the final product and that's really all I can offer. And we had a ton of actors that were willing to come on for this big question mark and just see what happened and, and it worked out well.
I think I probably also said, I think it's going to be fun, and I think it has been. I think people have had a good time working on it, which is, as you know, with an independent project always, again, a question mark because, these productions are not cushy, you know. They're a lot of work and it's a lot of scrambling around and I mean, making any kind of film is a ton of work and then for a web series, especially one like this, where I mean, we ended up shooting 35 days, I think over the course of a year. We started in September, and I think we finished in May or June. And it was a really long process and we had all these great actors that were willing to come on for free and just kind of roll with it. And, you know, take the gamble.
John Gaspard 10:34
Okay, so Series One is a success. What pushed you into, hey, let's do Series Two, and along with that, let's try to raise money via Kickstarter?
Matt Anderson 10:46
When we finished Season One, there were a lot of questions about what we were going to do next. Because it had turned out well, and people liked it, and people liked working on it, and it definitely did have that sense of, you know, we could go anywhere with it next. And I always had the same answer, which was we'll do another season, if we're able to pay people. Because for me, I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask actors to work for free for a project that you think is going to end up being a good project. And I think actors are used to that and you know, they can always say no, if they're not in a position to do it, which is totally fine. It's no different from theater that way. But my personal philosophy is you get to ask them to work for free once and if you're gonna ask them again, you have to be able to add something to the equation. Like that's just how I wanted to operate. I always said, you know, if we can find a way to put some money together and actually pay people even if it's just a stipend, then we would do a Season Two, or look at doing a Season Two. About a year after we finished Season One we've been doing well, like, we'd still see, I would say probably, like 15 to 20 Episode views a day, I think if I'm remembering correctly. Like just organically, like it was just kind of out there, people would hear about it and, you know, check it out and that was day to day for a year. So, I mean, that was nice, you know. It's just small, grassroots organic growth. And then, about a year after we launched, American Theater Magazine put our link on their Facebook page. I still don't know, I think it was somebody local, specifically who got it to them, I've never really heard what the provenance of it was. And they didn't editorialize it. They weren't like, hey, here's a great show. It was literally just the link, if I recall correctly. And within a week, we had, like, hundreds, if not 1000s of views on top of the, you know, probably couple or 1000 that we've had to that point. My numbers might be wrong. It was a long time ago, but it was huge. It was a huge bump. A lot of people were checking us out because of that American Theater push. And so we were getting all this feedback from all over the place and we were seeing our numbers go up and it was really exciting and totally unexpected. And that was the point where I said, you know, maybe if we're going to look at doing crowdsourcing, which we knew would have to be the next step, if we were going to try and raise money, this would be the time to do it.
And so, Lydia and Crist and I kind of put together a Kickstarter campaign to try and raise a budget for a second season. The first season was about independent theater, the second season was going to be about corporate theater. And so we put together a budget for that and put together a Kickstarter and ran the Kickstarter for a month and it was absolutely, unexpectedly exhausting. I had no idea. I had talked to some people about Kickstarter, to get ideas about, like how to run it. I talked to people who had run successful campaigns. I was so completely unprepared for how difficult it was. It was, so much more than a full-time job, but it was successful and, in the end, we had actually a decent amount of money over the amount that we were planning to raise, which was great. It was all worth it, but it was a real learning experience.
John Gaspard 14:12
What would you say to someone thinking of starting a Kickstarter campaign now, even though it is a couple of years later, and things might be a little different? But what were the big takeaways you got from that exhausting experience? Because I remember watching just how exhausting it was from the sidelines.
Matt Anderson 14:29
Well, you know, part of it was the way that we approached it, for sure. Like, I don't think every campaign has to be this way, but the way that we approached it, you know, you know me. My strong suit is not going around and asking people to give me money. That's just not anywhere near my comfort zone. And the only way I could really get comfortable with it was I said if we're going to ask for money, I kind of want to sing for our supper. I only going to be comfortable doing this if we are giving something as well, during the campaign. And so what we planned out was we released three videos a week, for the month of the Kickstarter campaign. So, every week, I think it was probably Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we would release a new video. We'd release one video that was like sourced from Season One. So, it'd be like an outtakes reel, or it would be a supercut of every one of the dozens, I think we had 50 some speaking parts in Season One: every one of those actors saying one line or one word from one line, just fun stuff like that. And then on another day, in the week, we'd released what we call our help us pay videos where we introduced a member of our crew and kind of showed what they did. So, help us pay Katie Driscoll, she's our production assistant, these are all the things she does. Help us pay our composer, this is Mike, you know, get to know him a little bit. And they were all just these little one minute videos and again, you know, all of them had the same spirit of the show. I mean, that was kind of the idea, you know, everything was sort of a piece of the project. So, every time we released something, it was like another piece of Theater People. And then, the last video each week would be something sort of more ambitious. So, for one of them, it was another Theater People minute. For one of them, it was a scene between two of our Seasons One characters. One of them had gone to prison at the end of Season One, because really, if you're going to try and do a really easy, quick shoot, what you should do is write it to take place in a prison. That is just smart producing.
John Gaspard 16:37
Can I suggest something? Why don't you do it out of state, certainly a long way away from your base?
Matt Anderson 16:43
You know, luckily, we came up with that idea on our own and ended up in Iowa.
John Gaspard 16:48
Yeah, that makes sense.
Matt Anderson 16:51
No, this is the thing. I mean, I'll tell you like, I was gonna say the unsung hero, but I think I'm still singing about her. So, hopefully she's the sung hero, but Lydia Bolder and her production magic, like literally, I would just write this stuff, and then say, hey, Lydia, I need a prison. And then she would give me that look and then she'd go get a prison. So, the last video was always something like that, sort of a bigger piece of the puzzle. And so we were releasing videos, like every other day during the week, and obviously, you know, producing anything is exhausting. So, producing at that pace was really difficult and that's on top of the fact that you have to be constantly shepherding your campaign, you know. We were Facebook based, because the Twin Cities, social media wise, is primarily Facebook based. So, we were always on Facebook, you know, we were always, tracking where we were getting the word out, spreading the news about new videos. That was actually a real upside to how we operated. You know, it allowed us to have something new to talk about all the time. So, it wasn't a month of, hey, we're doing this thing, give us some money, and then two days later, having to go back and be like, hey, we're still doing this thing, give us some money. Like, we were able to have a conversation about each video, you know. Instead, it was like, hey, come meet Katie Driscoll, a one minute video just hit our page, you know, and then we can focus on that and then the ask for the campaign was in that video. So, we didn't have to kind of be walking around hat in hand all the time.
John Gaspard 18:43
You gave them a reason to keep coming back.
Matt Anderson 18:46
Exactly.
John Gaspard 18:47
Just the hardest thing to do.
Matt Anderson 18:49
It was absolutely exhausting and then honestly. And this was advice that was given to me by somebody, who had done a successful campaign, you're emailing literally everyone that you've ever had an email address for. And you’re Facebook messaging every single Facebook friend you have, that you can bring yourself, to ask for money from. And, you know, that's just kind of how it works and it's hugely uncomfortable if you're not sort of constitutionally built for that, which I'm really, really not. But really effective, because if people know, especially with a personal ask, and you know me surprise, surprise, I couldn't just send a form letter, like I needed to make a personal reach, check in and, it was really rare, frankly, once you reached out to somebody for somebody not to contribute. I mean, it might not have been much, it might have been five bucks. But that's kind of what we wanted, we weren't angling for big ticket donors. We didn't feel like that's how our show operated. You know, the show for us was really about community and showing that if you make something out of a community, that the community will be there to support it. And so in the end, I think our average donation was something around 20 bucks, which meant we had a lot of people who gave five bucks and we had a lot of people who gave more. And it averaged out to a really nice, manageable reasonable average, which I was really pleased with.
John Gaspard 20:25
So, you exceeded your goal and with the leftover money thought, what the heck, rather than do Season Two, let's do Season Twoand Three.
Matt Anderson 20:33
Yeah, well, that was a surprise that came out of the campaign. So, midway through the campaign, I got contacted by Graydon Royce, who was the Minneapolis Star Tribune, theater critic, who I'd met, I think, in passing. He just sent me an email, I think, via Facebook and said, hey, I really love the show, I saw that you're doing the Kickstarter, I hope it's going well. I had an idea for Season Two, if you'd be interested to talk about it. And I said, well, I think I know what Season Twois going to be. But you know, I'm never going to turn down an idea. Let's get together and talk. And we met for coffee, and I just loved his idea. It was just this really fantastic idea. He said, I have this house that my brother and I are renovating. It's our old family home and it's in Mound, Minnesota, about 40 minutes west of the cities. And we were out there working last weekend and it just occurred to me that it might be really funny to have Jamie, the ridiculous Avant Garde director from Season One, if he decided to do a site-specific show. You know, sort of crazy, rundown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. And then we started spit balling ideas and I was like, yeah, maybe, what if he plans it in the fall, but by the time they do the show, it's winter and so now it's winter in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota, and nobody is aware of what they're getting into, and it just kind of spirals out of control. And I just fell in love with the idea. And so we took a look at the numbers and the money that we'd raised and you know, we'd plan for a month-long shoot for our big season for our corporate season. I said I feel like we could shoot Season Two, if we really scale it back, and I shoot it myself. So, we don't have to worry about bringing in a bunch of crew to do it. Similar to Season One, we did bring in a godsend, Mickey Richardson, who did sound and lights for us, which was beyond I mean, it wouldn't have happened without Mickey. But otherwise, we shot it pretty much like we shot Season One, except it was all in one location.
So, we could go out there on a Friday night and basically shoot Friday night, all day Saturday, all day Sunday for three weekends. And we ended up shooting in, you know, what is that seven and a half days. What was originally going to be a shorter season and ended up just being a fewer number of episodes, but the episodes were longer. So, it still ended up being I think about a 90-minute season. So, basically, it's one story as opposed to the A story and the B story. It's basically like a feature film cut up into, you know, six episodes.
The first thought was a well maybe that'll be Season Three. But I knew that this one was going to have to play differently. I knew it wasn't going to have the A story and the B story. I'd had this idea about doing it in black and white, because Jaime our director character is very much the sort of person who would think of himself as being Ingmar Bergman, and this season would sort of be from his perspective. And so it allowed us to shoot in black and white, which gave us a lot of leeway because you can shoot faster in black and white than you can when you're shooting in colors. It can speed up and you know, winter in Minnesota and black and white.
Like, if you're trying to make something look stark, desolate and foreboding, black and white is the way to go. And so I said if we're going to do it that way, it's got to be Season Two. Because if we have a Season One that's in color, and there's A story and a B story and it's 10 episodes long, and then we have Season Twoand it's in color and there's an a story and a B story and it's 10 episodes long. That's the show, we've established our format for the show. But I said if we sneak this one in between as a six episode thing in black and white, that's kind of the weird offshoot, I said then it kind of opens up the possibilities for the show. Then we've built ourselves some flexibility then, we can kind of do anything. If we really liked that prison location and want to do an entire season in a prison, that could be Season Four. We did not do that because that would have been a terrible idea. But it gave us the flexibility. It just opened up the format to have it be the second season. So we actually did shoot Season Three first. And then while we were wrapping up Season Three, we started the weekend shoots on Season Two. So, I think we shot Season Three in December of that year and started and shot Season Twoon the weekends in January. We were done with everything pretty much by the end of January.
John Gaspard 25:01
Okay, so you finished Season Two, finished Season Three, what was it that happened that made Season Four happen?
Matt Anderson 25:07
So, we did Season Two. Season Two was a really interesting experience. Honestly, I have so much love for all of the seasons of the show. Season Two is the is season that if I were to stumble on it, just by accident online, it's the season that I would like the most. I'm a film guy so, like the Bergman thing and the like, ridiculous fake British director. And there's a Fawlty Towers aspect to it like, it really speaks very directly to the stuff that I enjoy. But it was a huge break from our format, and it really threw a lot of people. And we saw our views go down, like from where we were in Season One, it wasn't the same level of enthusiasm. The people who liked it, the people who really responded to it, liked it better, absolutely, like the passion index was much higher for it. But they were also longer episodes and as with anything on the internet, as you increase your episode length, you're going to reduce the number of people who are just going to click in and then watch on a whim, you know, instead of 7 to 10 minutes. Now, our episodes were 12 to 17 minutes, which sounds like not a ton more, but it's like 50% longer. And so like that was a dissuading factor for a portion of our audience. And we definitely had people come up to us and say, hey, I saw Season Two, that's really weird. Season Three is going to be like Season One, though, right?
Like, you're gonna go back to that. There were definitely some people who really missed the sitcom format of it and that was, I don't know, it wasn't surprising, I guess, but it was a little disappointing to me. Just because I loved it so much and I felt like it was such an interesting step forward for the show. But I say, I understand why it happened and it made a lot of sense to me. But what was really great was because of the nature of it, because I felt like it was something unique. I felt like it might have some legs on the film festival circuit, which I'd never really considered doing, with the show. I'd been burnt out on the film festival circuit pretty badly, just doing short films. Like my experience was pretty much always you spend a lot of time submitting it to a film festival, your work, whatever it is. And you pay your 50 bucks and then two months later, you get a letter saying how happy they are that you paid your 50 bucks, but they just didn't have a place for you. And then you do it all over again. And so I'd kind of moved past that, you know, it was not something I had anticipated.
But I started looking around and I started seeing that more film festivals were having sidebars for web series. And I thought, you know, there's not going to be a lot of black and white Bergman-esque comedy web series out there, I might as well you know, throw our hat into the ring. And so I submitted to a few festivals, and was really surprised that we really started doing well. Like we got into a really high percentage of the festivals that we applied to. I mean, I feel like on average, if you apply to if you're applying to film festivals, I feel like you've got a really good hit to miss ratio if you're getting into 10 to 20%, right? And we got into probably two thirds or more of the festivals that we applied to, which was really great, because it meant that first of all, the show was getting out there, you know, it was finding audiences in a different way than I'd ever expected it to. And also it was just really validating, you know, because when you do see your numbers drop like that, you know that it's not really playing for everybody, you start to kind of second guess yourself a little bit. And it was really validating to have, a curated festival come along and say, we really want to show your show. And then we won some awards and our cast was nominated for Best Ensemble Cast at the New York City Web Fest, which is one of the biggest web fests in the country, if not the biggest. And so like, we started having that reaction, it made a lot more people aware of the show. And it's always difficult to get people to hit the play button and having that kind of legitimacy bestowed on you by people who aren't friends of yours, who aren't people who are in the show, really helped us build an audience.
So, that was kind of step one toward raising the profile of the show. And then we did Season Three, we released Season Three later that year, once I was done editing it, obviously. And right before Season Three launched, Minnesota Public Radio, Marianne Combs, did a piece on the show, a really great piece, which by the way, I was completely unprepared for. I thought that was going to be a train wreck. I met with her thinking that we were going to meet to talk about doing a piece and then we sat down and she pulled out a microphone and like, I hadn't been doing any PR for the show for like six months, because I'd been editing. I had no talking points like, I was totally unprepared and that woman is a genius and the piece that she put together was fantastic. Like it was this really great piece, like she integrated some fantastic clips from it and it played on NPR one morning, right around the time, we were launching Season Three. And that same day, I got a Facebook message from a local guy in town named George, who said, I heard the piece on the radio this morning and I'm working with a couple of guys to put together a new social media content platform. And it's going to be geared specifically toward independent web content and it sounds like we should sit down and talk.
So, we did we sat down and had a cup of coffee and kind of talked about what their plans were. And over the course of a few months, we talked about--because I'd had the same response to, after we were done with Seasons Two and Three, again--people would start asking, are you gonna do a season four and I had the same response. I said, yeah, we'll do it. If we can pay people more, because we were finally able to pay people for Seasons Two and Three. But I mean, it was a pittance. I think everybody, all the actors in Seasons Two and Three made $100 for the project, you know, whether it was people who were shooting for a month on Season Three, or people who were living in a freezing farmhouse for three weekends for Season Two. 100 bucks for the project, not a lot. And I said if we're going to move forward, same situation, we'll do it if we can pay people more. If we can actually pay a day rate instead of a stipend. And so in talking with, with these guys, who were putting together this platform that's called SeekATV, they said, you know, we're going to be acquiring a lot of shows, like dozens of shows, but we also are interested in producing a handful of original seasons of shows. And Theater People was the first one that they asked, I believe. And they said, would you be interested in, if we could license the first three seasons for our site, we could produce, we can help finance a fourth season. And, you know, it's one of those things that comes up, and you never think it's actually going to pay off because you hear you know, these ideas floating around all the time. And most of the time they don't come through. nd these guys absolutely came through and you know, by June or July, we had a deal in place for them to produce the fourth season of Theater People with a budget of about five times what we had made, Season Two and Season Three for. So, a significant step up in terms of what we were able to work with for a budget.
John Gaspard 32:55
So, with Season Four, though you're going with longer episodes.
Matt Anderson 32:59
Yeah, they were looking for something more around the 15-minute mark, like the 15-to-20-minute mark, and most of our episodes for Season Four are about 15.
John Gaspard 33:07
Which is closer to the traditional 22 minutes of standard sitcom?
Matt Anderson 33:11
Yeah, and that was actually the appeal for me, like when we got our deal put down, and they said, we'd like your episodes to be somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, there was sort of a moment of creative, well, it turned out to be hubris on my part. Because I went, hey, we get to make a sitcom, that's great, that's really exciting. Like, this is a terrific creative challenge. That was really short sighted of me. It meant that now we were going to be dealing with, instead of 150 pages of content, 200 pages of content, which is a lot more content.
John Gaspard 33:53
Now, let's just back up and do the math on that. You're saying 200 pages of content is more content than 150 pages of content?
Matt Anderson 34:01
I don't have the numbers in front of me. But we worked it out and 200 It turns out is a significant percentage more than 150. And we had budgeted for, you know, more or less the Season Three model, like a 10-to-15-minute episode. And so, we had budgeted in terms of both money and in terms of schedule for that kind of a production. And now, as excited as I was about it, I very quickly realized, we signed on for suddenly 25% more show. And that then became the challenge for Season Four, was how do we develop it in such a way from a production point of view that we can with this budget that we've got. Which was primarily Seeka put up the lion's share of the budget and then we raised the rest of it from individual investors. And then it was figuring out okay, well, how do we do this show right? How do we do this show in a way that we are compensating people the way that we'd like to be compensating them and we're getting done the work that we need to get done and the show is a legitimate step up from what we've done before. Like, if we do a show, at this new budget level, ends up looking like what we did for 20% of this budget previously, that's going to kind of be a failure. It should look better, it should look like a marked step up from what we've been doing before. Like this is our chance to show what we can do with more resources. And so that was the goal with this one was to make a show that really represents an advance on what we've been able to do previously.
John Gaspard 35:49
How did you do that? What were the key things you focused on to make that happen?
Matt Anderson 35:53
From a development point of view, the real key was embracing it as a sitcom and by that, I mean, the show had always been sort of arranged in a way that I really liked. But if you watch an episode of Theater People, aside from Season Two, which was its own beast. From Seasons One or Three, we're all over the place. Like an episode will hop from an apartment to a theater to a street to another theater to an office. We needed to find a way to embrace the idea of sort of a single set sitcom, you know. It was never going to be a single set, but, if you watch a sitcom and especially like, the shows that I really love, like I'm a huge fan of Community. Community is a little rangy, but the majority of an episode of Community takes place in the study room. Cheers is in the bar, most of Seinfeld is in Seinfeld's apartment. It's not that you never go outside, it's just that the majority of what you're doing takes place in one location. And we've never done that before. And so for Season Four, what we decided was we are going to embrace this idea of being a real sitcom and as with the other seasons, we wanted to look at a different kind of theater.
So, Season One had been independent theater, Season Two was site specific theater, Season Three was corporate theater. And for Season Four, I felt like, because we were looking at being on a new platform that I felt was probably going to want to be appealing to like college kids like 20 somethings like a younger audience than we had necessarily been skewing toward in our previous seasons, I felt like Youth Outreach Theater was the way to go. I had been a member of a Youth Outreach Theater in high school for a year and a half and it was a huge part of my sort of getting into theater. And I knew that the material was there as well. And it put us in a position where we could be dealing with a younger cast than we'd had before. You know, a lot of 20 somethings. Our youngest principal cast member literally started college the day of our readthrough. And it also meant that we could base out of basically their headquarters, their homeroom, which is this, you know, supposed to be a room in this college and it turns out to be the costume locker in the basement. But it allowed us to shoot probably 80% of what we were doing in this one controlled room, which really was the only way that we were going to be able to crank out the amount of material we needed to on the schedule that we had there.
John Gaspard 38:22
So, you had a different aesthetic designed for Season Four, tell me a little bit about that.
Matt Anderson 38:26
Yeah, well, the aesthetic was kind of… I would have brought Amber back on if I could have to shoot Season Four as well. But logistically, knowing that we were going to have to be moving as fast as we were with a nine person principal cast, which meant scheduling was already going to be really difficult, and she is a busy shooter and it just seemed like it was going to be logistically impossible. And on top of that, most of our shooting was going to be taking place in this little tiny room where every extra body really makes a difference. And so we kind of were in a position where we had to run lean again, which is what we're used to. We've never had a crew of more than four or five people. But we had to keep to that again and it just made sense for me to operate. I was feeling comfortable enough, I was pleased with how Season Two looked, having somebody who was lighting it for me in particular being important and Mickey was back. He actually produced Season Four and he was also our gaffer, and our lighter are all around go to tech equipment guy. And again, like this season wouldn't have happened without him being there. You have to have somebody on set, John, who knows what they're doing.
This is what I found, you might only need one, no, you need two because you also need a sound guy and we had Nathaniel who did the sound for Season Three for us. But you have to have those two people who know what they're doing as Kevin Costner, I think, would tell you. As long as you've got people around you who know what they're doing, you can do a pretty good job. And that was the situation. I felt comfortable enough shooting it myself, because we were going to adopt this aesthetic of having it be handheld, everything that's down in the room is handheld. And that was, you know, largely born out of just necessity. Like we traditionally, I get absolutely nothing usable from the first day of shooting, this has just always been my experience, I should plan on it and I still never do.
John Gaspard 40:27
You should start on day two then.
Matt Anderson 40:30
Right, give everybody a day off. Now, Season Two, we had to be up and running on day one. But usually there's a bit of a learning curve going into it. And the learning curve with Season Four was we were going to shoot, I was planning on having everything locked down just because it takes a little bit of the responsibility off of me to be able to actually operate the camera. But we tried shooting in that room on a tripod, and it was just not going to be tenable. We just weren't gonna be able to move fast enough. Like, every time we moved, it required a different lighting setup. And there frankly, wasn't enough room in the room to have a full tripod setup. I mean, for a lot of different reasons, it just really quickly made sense that, okay, we're gonna do sort of a, you know. I've been watching a lot of Veep, so like, when I sat down to write Season Four, I was looking for good inspiration. I had already stolen everything I could from Community for Seasons Two and Three. So, I needed something new. So, I sat down, and I watched Veep and Silicon Valley, both of which are fantastic. And the Veep aesthetic, the sort of run and gun, let that be part of it, you know, that sort of fly on the wall feeling. And you know, we were able to emulate that. We didn't go so far into it that it ever feels documentary. But it does definitely have a looseness, it definitely had, it gave us the flexibility to have less of a restrictive lighting setup.
So, we could sort of light the room and just let the camera go where the camera needed to go as much as possible. And that just meant that we were able to shoot a lot faster than we would be able to do. And because it was looser like that, I felt more comfortable operating because it didn't need to look composed and perfect. It needed to just have the right energy, and basically be pointing at the right people at the right time. And as long as I knew who I needed on camera, when I needed them on camera, it allowed me to operate pretty quickly, it worked out really well.
And you know, the upside to having a good director of photography is that you have a good director of photography. The downside of having another a separate director of photography is that that's another layer of communication and well, I would say on most productions, it's absolutely worth that. On this one, because we were going to need to be moving as quickly as we were, it was really helpful for me to just be able to know what I needed to get and get it, as opposed to having to try and effectively convey that information to somebody else who was going to have to execute it. And then probably have to go and watch it myself on a monitor to make sure that it was what I wanted. You know what I mean? It's in order to move fast and when we needed to move fast. It just made more sense for me to do it and I'm pleased with the results. If we had a better director of photography, I have no doubt that they would have brought another level of production quality to it. Like, it would have been another step up on that front, but we'd still be shooting.
John Gaspard 43:30
Well, then you wouldn't be able to talk to me right now.
Matt Anderson 43:31
That's true, I'd be in the middle of a shoot and dealing with mass mutiny on the part of all of my cast and crew, I have no doubt.
John Gaspard 43:38
Most likely. So, you've pretty much covered most of the pro side of when it comes to you being the writer, director, shooter, editor.
Matt Anderson 43:47
Yeah, the pro is if you're doing it all, you know that you're going to be there, and you can prioritize the work in a way that you're not going to be able to afford to have other people prioritize the work. You know, I do always bring on the most important crew position in a lot of ways is your sound recordist. I remember, did you ever see, In The Company of Men?
John Gaspard 44:12
Yeah.
Matt Anderson 44:13
Got that movie, I remember watching the DVD of it, so that was Neil LaBute’s first movie. And I will always remember this: he was talking about how his sets don't look very good, which they don't. Like if you look at a shot in that movie, it looks like what it is, it looks pretty amateur. But he said his belief--and I don't know where he picked it up or whatever it stuck with me forever--he said people will accept a movie that looks like crap, as being an aesthetic. As long as it's consistent, they will absolutely watch a movie no matter what it looks like and just assume that that's an intentional choice. No one will watch a movie with bad sound because that's never a choice, it's always a deal breaker. And so, I use the guy that I uses name is Nathaniel and Nathaniel is fantastic. Nathaniel recorded a lot of Season Three for us and that was really important to have a sound recordist and then he also mixes for us, which is great because, he can record in such a way that he knows what he needs when he gets to the mixing part of the process. But yeah, then you're in a position where you know, Nathaniel's got a job, you know, he's got other projects, other things that potentially are going to be prioritized over this. He does a really great job of prioritizing us and of hitting the deadlines that we need and I'm not really sure how he does it? But it's really difficult to ask that of people when you're not able to pay them something commensurate to what they're making on a corporate project, or on their day job doing this. So, the nice thing about doing it yourself is you're personally driven to get it done and to do it as well as it can be done, and you are able to prioritize it ahead of kind of everything else because that's just your role. You know, your job is to kind of make it the most important thing in your world while you're doing it.
John Gaspard 46:03
That's all well and good. But what's the downside of wearing all those hats?
Matt Anderson 46:08
It'll kill you. I'm not done yet, John, which is why we're able to have this conversation. It's way too much. I mean, honestly, like, I have overreached, which is good. That's how much you can reach, you overreach, and then you go, I won't do that that way again. But that is the position that I've put myself in, it was just, it was a lot, it was shooting, you know, like I say, 200-page script over the course of we started in the middle of September, I was still doing pickup shoots in February. So, again, I'm not a math guy, but that's, you know, at least two or three months.
John Gaspard 46:52
How do they tell, them how they can seek out Seeka?
Matt Anderson 46:55
Seeka is amazing. And this is what I loved about Seeka: from the first time I heard about what they were trying to do, when I started making a web series, I had never seen a web series, I might have stumbled across something. But it was probably something pretty high profile, like Funny or Die. The problem is with web series, they're just out there. But unless you know that they're out there, it's like a cool club, you know, you only know it's there, if you already know it's there. Which is neat for a cool club, but not neat for a web series that you would actually like people to find. And what Seeka's whole mission was, let's make a hub for quality, independent web content, so that people can just go to one place and find 50, 60, 70, 100 shows and find what they like, you know. There's no more searching around. And when I started, Season One of Theater People, it was hard to figure out even what to watch, to know what to emulate, you know, because unless you knew what to Google like, and you could Google like best web series out there, but you're gonna get like five or six different shows. And there's 100 shows, at the time, there was probably already hundreds of shows out there.
So, Seeka's whole model was, let's make a place where you can find a lot of great shows, of a lot of different types from all over the world in one place. Watch them easily, it's free, it's subscription free, there's the opportunity to contribute to a show, you can tip the show, after you watch an episode, there's a little button if you want to kick in a buck, or three bucks, or however much you want to kick in. And that money goes largely like generously, largely to the content creators. I forget what the actual split is. But it is a generous split in favor of content creators, because they want content creators to want to be on Seeka. The only way this works for them as if they've got people who want to have their stuff on the platform and so they have to make it attractive.
Also, they're just really great guys and I don't think they want to screw anybody over. But like, they need to have a good platform in place in order to have the kind of content that's going to make their platform successful. And I have found some fantastic stuff on there. Like I feel very privileged to be airing alongside some of the stuff that they have on there. And I know that as they move forward, you know, the goal is going to be to continue to find that really high quality stuff. And they're going out to festivals, and they're getting the stuff that's winning the awards at festivals, and they're really doing a great job of finding the kind of content that is sort of ready for primetime, in the web series landscape and it's great.
John Gaspard 49:37
So, I'm going to wrap this up with a closest thing to a Barbara Walters question that I would ever ask anybody, which is, I don't remember how many years ago, young Matt Anderson drove home from Los Angeles with his new Rebel camera with the idea of creating theater people or something like that?
Matt Anderson 49:56
Pretty close to that.
John Gaspard 49:57
What would you want to say to him? If you could just give him a call, because you've been through quite a bit here, what have you walked away with, that would be helpful for him or anybody else starting something that turns out to be quite this massive.
Matt Anderson 50:10
You know, honestly, I would say this: I've been really fortunate. A lot of it would be validation of the ideas that I had coming into it, there have absolutely been discoveries, there have been so many discoveries. I'm actually teaching a course called web series one on one right now. There is so much knowledge that I have just had to find via trial and error over the last five years that it's absolutely, I'm still learning all the time, you know. You learn how to make the show, you learn how to put the show out there, you learn how to find an audience, you learn how to promote it, you learn how Facebook works, if you want to get the word out to more people, you know, like all of that stuff. But honestly, I think the most important thing that I would say would be the general idea that I had, which was that, if you've got good material, and great actors, that is all you need, like I really and direct them, that's what you have to do, you have to direct them.
That actually is also super important, because actors are supposed to be working with the director, you know, the director is the one who knows how everything fits together. And I think part of the reason that I'm as proud of our casts and all of our casts, like, every season, including Season Four, which has a ton of young actors and a ton of actors. For the first time, I'm dealing with a cast where I haven't worked with most of the principal actors before, because I've been working with actors that I used to act with 10, 15 years ago, and a bunch of them are still around, and a bunch of them are still in the show. But for this, you know, Youth Outreach Theater, we needed people who could pass as college students. And so we had to go out and find them. And this cast is as fantastic as any we've had and that's why the show works. Like it really is, and you know, different shows are different, some shows are effects driven, some shows are, you know, location driven. So, I'm sure you know, there's lots of things that draw people into a show. But for this show, the key has always been having a really great ensemble, you know, having an ensemble that doesn't seem like they're doing an amateur project, you know, having an ensemble that is delivering work that is on par with something that you would see on broadcast television. I really believe that is why the show has traveled as well as it has. I believe that's why it's played, the festivals, that attract, that it has, I think that's why Seeka wanted to come on and produce a fourth season. And that was always the idea was the Twin Cities have this amazing pool of actors. And now you know, specifically I'm talking about, where I'm making stuff in Minneapolis, like what we have is this fantastic, deep pool of acting talent. And so I built a show around it. And the show works because that's the engine and these guys are fantastic and that's what I would say would be just continue to have faith in the idea that if you've got good writing and great actors, you don't need to be a great camera person.
You don't need to have all the technical stuff down, you don't need to have a jib arm, you don't need the equipment that you don't know how to use, you don't need a 10 person crew. Like this show is about really good actors delivering hopefully really good dialogue in a way that is compelling and that tells a story from start to finish. And I think that has borne itself out as being a really viable method. And the nice thing is you don't need to do that in a studio, you know what I mean? You don't need to do that with a million dollars behind you. You can do it effectively on the scale that we've been doing it. That's the best thing that I could say like if I was whether I was talking to myself or anybody else, especially in Minneapolis,making stuff that would be what I would say was find really great actors and then work with them and trust them because that's the goal. That's why I like watching the show.
[Film Clip 54:24 to 54:38].
John Gaspard 54:38
Thanks to Matt Anderson for chatting with me about creating the Theater People webs series, which you can find online at SeekTV.com – check the show notes for a direct link to all four seasons. If you liked this interview, you can find lots more just like it on the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. Plus, more interviews can be found in my books -- Fast, Cheap and Under Control -- Lessons Learned from the greatest low-budget movies of all time ... and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap and Written that Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google and Apple Books. And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series, staring with The Ambitious Card, can be found on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats. That's it for episode 105 of The Occasional Film Podcast. Produced at Grass Lake Studios. Original music by Andy Morantz. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you … occasionally!
-
Filmmaker Roger Nygard (“Trekkies,” “Suckers,” “The Nature of Existence”) on cutting comedy, the need for editors to also be filmmakers, creativity and why sometimes you have to cut great jokes.
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
Roger Nygard Website: http://rogernygard.com/
Cut to the Monkey (The Book): https://www.amazon.com/Cut-Monkey-Hollywood-Behind-Scenes/dp/1493061232
The Truth About Marriage (Trailer): https://youtu.be/VeFI_4WC2OI
-
Director Lee Wilkof talks about the production of his film, “No Pay, Nudity” (starring Gabriel Byrne and Nathan Lane), as well as his work as an actor on the musicals “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Assassins.”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
“No Pay, Nudity” trailer: https://youtu.be/toO8g8fgtP4
Lee Wilkof revisits “Suddenly Seymour”: https://youtu.be/x7DNEts0yQQ
“Suddenly Seymour” from MDA Telethon: https://youtu.be/b4tddRw6JVU
“Little Shop” TV spot: https://youtu.be/itYxORbajSc
TRANSCRIPT
The Occasional Film Podcast - Episode 103
NATHAN LANE 0:00
I had one of the best times I’ve ever had making a movie doing this, this little teeny-tiny film. One could say it’s a niche film. And yet I think everyone can relate to the notion dreams lost or shattered and you think it’s going to turn out one way and it doesn’t. And how do you come to terms with that?
JOHN GASPARD
That was the one and only Nathan Lane talking about his experiences making Lee Wilkof’s lovely film, “No Pay, Nudity.”
Hello, and welcome to episode 103 of the Occasional Film Podcast, the occasional companion podcast to the Fast Cheap Movie Thoughts blog. I'm the blog's editor, John Gaspard.
Today we're talking with long time actor and first-time director Lee Wilkof about his film “No Pay, Nudity.” It's the story of Lester Rose, a mid-career actor in crisis about show business in particular, and life in general. It stars Gabriel Byrne, Frances Conroy, Boyd Gaines, Donna Murphy, and Nathan Lane.
[AUDIO EXCERPT FROM THE FILM’S TRAILER]
When I saw the name Lee Wilkof listed as director during the film's credits, I thought where do I know that name from? I racked my brain and then it came to me. Suddenly.
[LEE WILKOF SINGING “SUDDENLY, SEYMOUR”]
Lee originated the role of Seymour Krellborn in the Off Broadway production of a little musical called “Little Shop of Horrors,” and went on to originate the role of Samuel Bick in Stephen Sondheim's “Assassins.”
He talked about those two memorable roles at the end of our conversation. But first we talked about “No Pay, Nudity”, which was his first time as a film director.
Tell me what it was that made you decide, hey, at this point after stage and TV and movies, I want to direct.
LEE WILKOF 3:20
It was something that was gnawing at me for the last 10 years, just something that I always wished I had done. I never said I wish I wasn't an actor, and I wish I had been a director. But it was something that I just felt that I thought I could do.
And I would say oh, maybe nine years ago, I was in a kind of a fallow period and I had been friendly with this young man, Ethan Sandler, we had met at this theatre festival, the Williamstown Theatre Festival. We've done a play together. He was a young, in his 20s, maybe, maybe early 30s. And I decided, I said I think we should I have this idea for a story. Let's write it together. And let's direct it together and then we'll write it for me. As it shook down, you know, I'm not, it wasn't for me, I decided it was not something that I didn't want to direct it and be in it. And then I realised the character was I was not really, the right character for it. And then as it turned out, we didn't end up co-directing it and he got the screenplay credit. And that was kind of how it played out.
But it took it took and we wrote it I think together eight years ago and then it sat in my on my computer for at least five years and then I dusted it off when I was doing a play in Chicago, and I was free during the days and I looked at it and I said, this is good.
I happen to be working with Nathan Lane. And we were doing a play at the Goodman “The Iceman Cometh.” And I said, I said, would you read this, this screenplay that I wrote. And I was hoping he'd get back to me eventually. And he got back to me the next day. And he said, This is really good. And I said, would you play Herschel, if I got this made? And he said, Yes. And that's really when the ball started to roll.
JOHN GASPARD 5:35
Why did you decide you weren't right to play the part? Because it kind of feels like you would be. I mean, was just you didn't want to direct and act?
LEE WILKOF 5:42
I didn't want to direct and act. To say that I wasn't right for it, I think, didn't mean, as it turned out, I wanted more of a leading man. But it would have worked, I think with a character actor, but I didn't want me directing my first film. I just couldn't do double duty. I admire those people that can, but I just I just couldn't. I couldn't multitask to that level. And maybe this had a little to do with it. Although I think I'd already made the decision by the time the investors came on, and they wanted a name, and I was certainly not a sufficient name. I was not. I was not and I'm not a name. So, we started making some inquiries about some names.
JOHN GASPARD 6:34
So, what was your process for that? I mean, you already had one name, who had said yes..
LEE WILKOF 6:39
I had Nathan, and that was they wanted for the lead, they wanted a name. But we made some offers to some prominent names. And one was one was very interested, but his wife was ill. Several didn't get back to me. One other prominent name just was on the fence and decided no, and then I got a casting director, involved and gave me a list of a number of names. And Gabriel was on it, Gabriel Byrne, and it, sent it to him. And he responded immediately. And he wanted, he wanted to do it.
He understood it, he got it. And I couldn't be more fortunate that it worked out that way. If you would have said to me when I started the process, and we were going to make this film, that Gabriel Byrne would be playing Lester Rosenthal, it was not something I would have not believed it possible. I would have said to you, I don't I'm not really positive that he's right for it. And you know, these kinds of accidents happen. And it was so fortuitous that we got Gabriel, I think he's just fantastic in the role.
JOHN GASPARD 7:52
Did you find that once you had everyone in place, did you tweak the script at all to fit?
LEE WILKOF 8:00
Yes, to some extent, although the Gabriel, the fact that Gabriel is you know, there's a line that when you first, when he runs into the girl from high school, she said when you first got here, your accent was so fascinating. That's the only reference to the fact that he has a not necessarily an American accent. It's not quite fish or fowl. And we didn't find that it was a problem.
When he first called me. Our first phone conversation was I was at the Jazz Fest in New Orleans with music blaring. And he was in Norway, shooting I think it's called the Vikings. And we spoke, I could barely hear him. But he said I think I'm going to keep my accent. And I didn't quite know what to say. I didn't know him. I didn't want to say no, I don't want you to but by the time we started shooting, it was kind of vague, and it never seemed to be an issue. So, we didn't necessarily tweak for the particular person.
Now, some of the actors wrote some things for themselves. Nathan contributed a fair amount of his dialogue, which I encouraged. And then there was an incident where somebody brought in dialogue for themselves and I did not care for it. And it created the only real conflict during shooting. And I insisted, with the help of my producer, insisted that the actor speak the words written and it I think it enhanced the performance because the actor was so upset. And the actor didn’t speak to me for a couple of days.
But there was tweaking all along. The role Nathan plays was originally written for actually another actor, an actor friend of mine who had passed away in between the time it was written and we shot it. It was written with, I wrote it with Maury Chaykin. You know, Maury…
JOHN GASPARD
Yes indeed.
LEE WILKOF
Maury Chaykin. He and I did our first play in New York together like 44 years ago. And he was just physically and such a, such a wonderful actor that Herschel was I just wrote it, we wrote it for him. But as I said, he passed away. And Nathan stepped into it brilliantly, I think.
JOHN GASPARD 10:44
I agree. So, with all your time on the other side of the camera, what was it like to step behind it? And how easy a transition was that for you? I mean, you probably know how to talk to actors, or at least how not to talk to actors…
LEE WILKOF 10:59
I had spent many years in Hollywood on TV and film sets. And I probably would have paid way more attention if I knew someday I was going to be directing. But I always was paying attention.
I wasn't like going up to the DP and saying, You know what size lens you're using? But I was I was like, I watched and I listened. And I also had the I had the great pleasure and the great fortune of working with Sidney Lumet twice. And I didn't do a movie with him, but I'd worked with Bob Fosse. I mean, I've been around some, some very amazing people, and I observed them as closely as I could without being in their way.
So being on the set itself, physically, was not was not intimidating at all. Speaking to the actors. No one was with the exception of that one little set-to with the actor that rewrote their lines, the actors were very, I didn't have to give many notes. But when I gave notes, I was surprised that not only were they well received, but they were well understood. Because I've been directed. I'm an I'm an actor that needs as strong a good hand as possible by a director. So, I've had many directors have to talk to me to get me to what they need to do.
And there was like, just like maybe two or three times. Gabriel had so much to do, there were times where I had to, like, maybe guide him and another just a little nudge, and he liked to talk things out. He probably would have wanted to talk things out longer, but we just didn't have the time. That's just how he works.
One of my actors would call me up at night, and just need to be stroked. And he's a good friend of mine. And I was able to do that. I had worked with him in a play and knew that that was something that he needed. And I was sincerely telling him how wonderful he was because he was and that was useful.
The first scene in the movie with the veterinarian's assistant, I cast this woman I love this actress. Her name is Janine Serralles. I don't think she'd be embarrassed by this story. She was a student of my wife, my wife used to teach at Yale Drama School. And she was somebody that I was aware of her, and my wife cast her in a lot of plays. She came in with an interpretation that was completely and it was completely valid, but it was not what I wanted her to do. And I think I like said maybe two sentences to her. And she's such a great actress, she made the adjustment. And I surprised myself by being able to communicate that to her. But luckily, I had an actress that could take it, you know, take it in and make that quick adjustment.
So, I cast the film with such fine actors, that I didn't have to tell them too much. But when I did, they got it.
JOHN GASPARD 14:20
Right. Did you have rehearsal time away from the set? Or was it just like, like a TV show where you just show up and block and rehearse?
LEE WILKOF 14:28
We did read through the movie for about four hours, I think a couple days before we started shooting. And we talked it through and we would rehearse on the set.
But my DP, my wonderful young DP, named Brian Lannon. He was he was 26 years old. I met him I had done a couple episodes of a show called High Maintenance. And he was the DP and I loved what I saw. And I hired him and he and his crew were a little, I have to say this, and I think he knows is they were a little slow. Andnd they were slow because they were, you know, immaculate with, with their setting up. But we had a little more time sometimes than I wanted. So, we were able to rehearse.
And the actors, all the actors, the first nine days of the shoot, were in the lounge set that we built the Actors Equity lounge, and the actors would be in a holding area, and they would work on the stuff while I was on the set, you know, getting things set up.
JOHN GASPARD 15:40
Was that the only set you built?
LEE WILKOF 15:41
We built I think we built another set. I believe you are required to build a set on certain sound stages that are designated by the state in order to get your tax credit. So, we were required to build a set. It was one of the plays that was getting done. We could have found a theatre to do it at, but it was the one that was most easy to build. So, we built that, we had some raw space down in Wall Street. And that's where we built the Actors Equity lounge. And then we built one other set for the two-hander play that Lester attends.
JOHN GASPARD 16:35
The lounge set is terrific. It looks, I thought oh, yeah, it's you're actually on location.
LEE WILKOF 16:41
Yeah, we wanted to use the real Actors Equity lounge, but it was in a state of transition, it was finally being renovated. And it just timewise we couldn't use it. But luckily, I had a friend of mine is one of the, I think I know most of the officers there. My friend is a vice president and they were really helpful.
But I had a young production designer Maki Takenouchi. And she put that together in three days. It was the last location that we found. It was the most crucial location, it was driving us insane, that we couldn't find the space we liked. But we finally settled on this. And they threw it together. And I don't mean throw it together. They put it together in three days, her and her crew. And it really was effective.
JOHN GASPARD 17:35
How many days did you have to shoot overall? You said you spent nine days in the lounge?
LEE WILKOF 17:40
I believe it was either 24 or 25 days. And I wanted to read I had a scene that I wanted to end the film with that I wanted to add, and we would have had to have a day of shooting but we just didn't have it in the budget. There’s nothing that I miss.
JOHN GASPARD 18:04
Okay. Was it always planned that the character of Herschel would narrate the story?
LEE WILKOF 18:11
No.
JOHN GASPARD 18:12
At what point did you decide to include that?
LEE WILKOF 18:15
When certain people thought it would be a good idea.
JOHN GASPARD 18:19
Okay. I'll move on.
LEE WILKOF 18:25
Some people weren't as comfortable with silence as I was. So, some compromises were made to be perfectly blunt. I'm assuming you wisely got it that it was added on. I believe film works with it. And I believe the film would have worked without it.
JOHN GASPARD 18:41
And that's exactly what I'm feeling to it. It certainly didn't hurt, it kind of it filled in some gaps. But it didn't feel to me like when you sat down to write at the very first thing you thought was, okay, I'm going to have this character narrate it
LEE WILKOF 18:58
No. But it was I've had people that watch the film like it, and people go, Yeah, you don't need it. Okay, I'm glad you know, I feel fine about it either way. It is. It's what we have.
JOHN GASPARD 19:13
Yeah. Do you want to talk about the Kickstarter campaign and...
LEE WILKOF 19:18
It was not successful. I'm assuming you know that. It was very highly, highly ambitious. I think it was, uh, if memory serves me, it was like $450,000, which is a ton of money for a Kickstarter campaign. And we did nicely, but we didn't succeed. I think we got close to $200,000, which is very, I was, I was, I was touched by all the generosity, but it didn't work out. But because of the Kickstarter campaign, certain people became aware of the film. And then were able to communicate their knowledge of the film to some other people that came aboard and invested in the film. So, the Kickstarter campaign had value.
Also, I did circle back to some people on the Kickstarter that had that had committed money to the Kickstarter campaign and said to them, would you still be willing to, to help me out? I'm not going to give the same kind of perks. But if you can give me, if you can help, a couple people got associate producer credits, everybody got their name in the credits, everybody got a video, no matter what the level, so that was helpful.
But it was not the amount of money that, I didn't go to back to everybody. I just was like, at that point, I had had my hand out for so long, I couldn't go, like with my hand out to every single person. That was more stressful than making the movie.
JOHN GASPARD 21:04
So, I was going to ask, what advice would you give to someone who is considering Kickstarter now that you've tried to get that and then end up going with more traditional investors?
LEE WILKOF 21:14
I would say don't ask for so much money. But don't go nuts with the, with the perks. People are really, I don't believe, giving you, being generous for little rewards. Or I don't mean to belittle the rewards, but they're doing it out of the kindness of their, you know, belief in you.
Some guys I know, did a Kickstarter campaign to do in a documentary film about something to do about my hometown. And they did I think, a 40-day campaign, and I said, Don't do it, it's too long, and you'll have like a nervous breakdown. And they did it and they raised the money. So, what the hell do I know?
JOHN GASPARD 21:58
I noticed that you had Ann Roth credited for a special custom consultant. What? What way did she help you guys out?
LEE WILKOF 22:08
Ann Roth is as to me, she's, you know, the premier costume designer of the second part of the 20th century, Edith Head and then Ann Roth into the 21st century. I had worked with Anne on a couple plays. I did The Odd Couple with Nathan Lane on Broadway and Ann designed that.
But we had a very nice, warm relationship. And I told her, someday I'm going to direct a film and I want you to be the costume designer, and then she would if she could. And then as it turned out, she agreed to and then she got busy. And another lovely woman that works in her with her, became the costume designer. Michelle Matlin who did a great job.
But Ann specifically worked with, because she's done so many shows with Nathan, they work together on his look, and Gabriel's look. And I said to her, I hope you know, I hope this is not a diss to Michelle and I don't believe it was, but I would like I would like you and to give you some sort of credit. You're Ann Roth. I mean, it's and she said whatever you want to give me. So, we gave her that title.
JOHN GASPARD 23:41
As you were editing the movie, I know you've you were very in from the beginning on the writing and then I've obviously there for the directing. What was your process for finding the movie in the editing? How, how precious were things to you? How willing were you to move things around or change?
LEE WILKOF 23:58
That is a very, we're opening. We're opening a very interesting can of worms. Editing was the most difficult part of the process for me. I'd never been in an editing room. My editor and I, I think sometimes we didn't see eye to eye. And I didn't really sometimes know how to communicate what I wanted.
The producers got involved in the editing room. I mean, the you know, the money people, were not thrilled with the editing. And we brought on another supervising editor. And it got a little more complicated. And I was doing a play at the time. And the editor was the supervising editor was doing some editing out in California while I was in New York. And there were some ideas that were had, that I did not agree with. And there are some things in the film... Boy, I’m just opening a can of worms.
JOHN GASPARD 25:12
There's open it as far as willing to open it.
LEE WILKOF 25:18
There are some things in the film that it was it was suggested that we edit it a different way. And I was adamant not to. And, and those things are in the film. And there's a few things that were not my idea. And that I learned to live with.
Ultimately, we ended up with I think, a pretty damn well edited film. It was a somewhat of a difficult journey, the post production, I think, where we got in, I think, I probably got us into a little bit of a little bit of jams, because I didn't do the sometimes the coverage I should have done. Yeah, if I had the opportunity, if I get the opportunity to do it again, I will. I've learned I learned a ton from that. That's where I learned the most, what I needed for the editing room.
JOHN GASPARD 26:22
So, there's two questions I always ask at the end, do with these what you will. The first question is two part: what's the smartest thing you did during production? And what was the dumbest thing you think you did?
LEE WILKOF 26:36
The smartest thing I did was getting Nathan and Gabriel on board, deciding when Maury wasn't available to get Nathan, and not saying, I don’t think Gabriel Byrne. And the stupidest thing I'm not going to say. I won't.
JOHN GASPARD 27:00
But you learned from it.
LEE WILKOF 27:01
I learned from it. I learned from it. And that's all I can say.
JOHN GASPARD 27:07
So, are you going to do this again?
LEE WILKOF 27:10
I’m really getting itchy to do it. There's another script that I wrote with the same young man, it's called Teenage Waistband. And it's about growing up in Canton, Ohio my junior, sophomore year high school. Was at a junior? In late 60s in Canton, Ohio, it's period and it would cost a fair amount of money. I'd love to do it. But I wouldn't want to do it under the certain same circumstances. I don't want to do it. I don't want to put my hat in my hand and have to go ask a zillion people for, you know, $1,000 here and there. So, I don't know. But I hope to do it again. I'm trying to figure out what to do next.
JOHN GASPARD 27:59
Before I could let him go. Lee was kind enough to spend a few minutes talking about two early-stage successes, Sondheim’s Assassins, and the original off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors.
So, I had a couple questions for you about just that whole experience, because having talked to Roger Corman about the movie, the original movie.
LEE WILKOF 28:18
Yeah, I did it in Los Angeles and met him That was thrilling. Actually, opening night in Los Angeles, Roger came, Jackie Joseph came who played Audrey, and I forget the guy's name. Yes. I forget his name. Anyhow, anyhow, what do you want to know?
JOHN GASPARD 28:38
Well, Corman was so, I tell the story all the time to filmmakers, because he was he's a great interview. He's an engineer, and he speaks like an engineer and perfect sentences. And I had 20 minutes and I had to talk about five movies with him, because I was doing five different. And I asked him, I said, So you shot a little shop in three days? And he said, Well, technically, yes. But there was some pickups. I had the actors for five days, and we rehearsed for three and shot for two. And that's what I tell people all the time is you think you think rehearsal is not important? The cheapest man in the world, spent three days rehearsing. And then he said, I shot it with two cameras. He said it really was more of a stunt. I've never do that sort of thing again. But how did you get involved in that project?
LEE WILKOF 29:25
I could go on for hours. Anyway, I grew up in Cleveland. I grew up in Canton, Ohio. This is a little background because you just talked about the film, grew up in Canton, Ohio, on Friday nights. In the late 50s. Early 60s There was a guy that did the horror movies. His name was Ghoulardi his name, Ernie Anderson. His son is Paul Thomas Anderson. If you see Paul Thomas Anderson's films called Ghoulardi films. And he showed horror movies.
One of our favourites, we would have like sleepovers with you know, 12 year old boys and we'd stay up late and watch. And one of our favourites was always Little Shop of Horrors, the original Little Shop of Horrors. So, I grew up knowing it, loving it, being, just thinking it was amazing. Didn't know when I was a kid that it was shot in three days, but it was primitive. You know, it was great. It's crazy. It's one of those movies. It's so bad that it's great. It's brilliant. It's not bad movie. It's just production values when you look at it now, of course, two days, you know, the scene with Jack Nicholson, this that fell over and they stopped shooting this.
So anyway, okay, I was familiar with it. I did a play in New York. The play with Maury Chaykin and I met our stage manager, who had a girlfriend who was a casting director. And I knew them personally.
I moved to California a few years after doing that first play in New York, and I was pursuing my Hollywood, that pursuit, working sporadically and playing nerds on TV. And I got a call from this woman. The woman who was the girlfriend of my stage manager. We're doing a musical written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, and I knew Alan Menken from a revue I did in in New York before I moved to California. And it's called Little Shop of Horrors. I said, I know this, I know Little Shop of Horrors. I grew up watching it, somebody's turned it in to a musical. That's amazing.
So, I was very excited. I flew myself into New York. And I was auditioning for the role of the dentist for some reason or another and I , in those days, when I was in California, I was I was I was wearing I was trying to get jobs with wearing a toupee.
I was bald when I was 17. And I walked into the audition. And Alan Menken knew me from this revue that I did as bald and he started laughing, and I got so embarrassed, I tore off my toupee. And Howard Ashman said, You are not a dentist, you're Seymour, you're you know, you're a potential Seymour.
So, I auditioned for the role. And it, I got a call back the next day. And it was between me—this is a story I've heard years later—but the story was it came down to me and another actor. Nathan Lane, between me and Nathan and Howard Ashman had an assistant, a young woman who suggested to him that I was probably a better fit, for one reason or another. And she is my wife. I married her, I met her on the show, and married her. Her name Connie Grappo. She subsequently directed it all over the world.
And so, I played Seymour. We opened it in New York, it was this tiny little show, I would take the flyers for it to people. And they would like, you know, look at me, like what the hell was this. And then, a month later, they were begging me for tickets, because it was such a huge hit. It was the hottest ticket in New York. And it was in a little 99 seat theatre, and then it moved off Broadway ran for five years, but I didn't do it for five years. I did it for like six months, and then six months in Los Angeles, where it didn't do so well.
And then I fille in over the years for different Seymour’s that would go on vacations. So that was that. My wife directed it all over the world. And then there was a production in Florida that was Broadway bound about 12 or 15 years ago, and I played Mr. Mushnik in that. So I have played Mr. Mushnik. But I did not come. It came to Broadway but I did not come in with it for all sorts of different reasons. But I would like to play this. I'm certainly old enough.
JOHN GASPARD 34:38
Yes. It’s finally time.
LEE WILKOF 34:44
It was 35 years ago, it was just about now. We were in rehearsal. 35 years ago, we opened the end of April or the beginning of May in 1982. And it was you know very, it was very profound for my career. Because it was a huge hit. And it got me. You know, people came to see it. And I met my wife on it. So it was it was very significant.
You know, people say to me, what's your favourite thing you've ever done? And they all think I'm going to say Little Shop of Horrors. And it's Assassins.
Assassins is, is the greatest experience I ever had. It was not a huge smash hit. But I was, you know, I was in A Sondheim musical, which is a gift that I got. And the cast. I loved the cast. And for me a lot of doing it any show is who I'm doing it with. Of course, you know, the material is really important, but I, it was just a great cast.
And the part was really challenging. I think that was a show like the director didn't know what the hell to help me do and I was kind of on my own and I kind of, thank God, found my way.
I don't have a lot of stories except we did the album. Nowadays you do a cast album, you do it in like, you get one take.
On Assassins, we had three days. And the first number up was the number that I had the most singing. My character really did monologues and didn't sing. I played this guy Sam Bick, who tried to kill Richard Nixon by crashing an airplane into the White House. He was shot in the cockpit. But anyhow, he did these like rants. He did these taped rants.
But I had the song that I had to sing and it was the first number up and I was nervous and I was tight. And Steve Sondheim had a broken ankle so he couldn't come in like to the studio. He was in the in the control room. And I was I was just struggling with it. I came in during a break to hear it and Steve Sondheim said to me, yeah, it's tough for you guys that can't sing.
And, you know, I wanted to disappear. But we finally got it. They told me to try to sound like Jack Nicholson. And I think it's who I tried to sound like.
And then years later I did another thing with Steve Sondheim, this workshop of thing called The Frogs. And I did have a number and I sang. And he forgot that he told me I couldn't sing and he was very complimentary. So, in the presence of him was just like, the most intimidating, the most. It was, it was thrilling, but he's very intense. It was just a great experience. My greatest joy and the thing that I cherish the most.
[SOUND CLIP FROM LITTLE SHOP]
JOHN GASPARD 38:20
Thanks to Lee Wilkof—heard here performing my favourite song from Little Shop of Horrors, Mushnik and Son—for taking the time to talk to me about his movie, “No Pay Nudity,” which is available now for home viewing. I recommend that you track it down.
If you liked this interview, you can find lots more just like it on the Fast Cheap Movie Thoughts blog.
Plus more interviews can be found in my books, Fast, Cheap And Under Control:Lessons Learned From The Greatest Low Budget Movies Of All Time, and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap And Written That Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google, and Apple books.
And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series starting with The Ambitious Card can be found in paperback hardcover eBook and audiobook formats.
Well, that's it for episode 103 of the occasional film podcast. Produced at Grass Lake Studios. Original Music by Andy Morantz.
Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you occasionally.
-
Writer/Director Jonathan Lynn talks about his work on the classic films “Clue” and “My Cousin Vinny,” as well as his comically dark novel, “Samaritans.”
LINKS
A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12
Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6
Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/
Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/
Albert’s Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast
“Clue” Trailer: https://youtu.be/KEXdWfsKZ1k
“My Cousin Vinny” Trailer: https://youtu.be/HrfXTjYyenE
“Yes, Minister” Clip: https://youtu.be/KgUemV4brDU
The Occasional Film Podcast - Episode 102 Transcript
[SOUNDBITE FROM “MY COUSIN VINNY”]
John Gaspard 00:32
That was Joe Pesci and Fred Gwynne in a much-quoted scene from the much-loved film, My Cousin Vinny. Hello, and welcome to episode 102 of The Occasional Film Podcast, the occasional companion podcast to the Fast Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. I'm that blog’s editor, John Gaspard. In this episode, we're talking to Jonathan Lynn, the director of My Cousin Vinny. But Jonathan Lynn is much more than that. He studied Law at Cambridge, appeared in the Cambridge follies, went with that show to Broadway and the Ed Sullivan Show, and played Motel the Tailor in the original West End production of Fiddler on the Roof.
[SOUNDBITE FROM FIDDLER ON THE ROOF]
He wrote for television and—with Anthony Jay—created Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, two classic British situation comedies.
[SOUNDBITE FROM YES, MINISTER]
Lynn came to America and wrote and then ended up directing the classic movie comedy Clue. And he did all this by the age of 42. As the satirist Tom Lehrer said,
Tom Lehrer 01:54
It's people like that will make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.
John Gaspard 02:39
In my conversation with Mr. Lynn, we talked about what he learned from shooting Clue and went into detail about the making of My Cousin Vinny. But we started our conversation talking about his new novel Samaritans, a caustic look at the American Health System, viewed through the eyes of one hospital, and its staff in Washington DC. What was it about this story that made you think this should be expressed as a novel?
Jonathan Lynn 03:05
I played around with it as a in other forms, because mostly I haven't written—I mean, I've written four or five prose books. I wrote The Complete Yes, Minister and The Complete Yes, Prime Minister, which were enormous bestsellers. But mostly I've written, as you say, in script form, either plays, TV or film scripts. The more I played around with this, the bigger the subject seemed to get. There was no way I could explore the characters of all of these people in a two-hour script, which is actually not very long. A screenplay is 120 pages, that's a pretty well-spaced out. Stage plays, you know, are a similar length we're talking about, you know, usually no more than an hour and a half, especially for comedy. You can make dramas last longer, because you're not asking to be so on the ball and get every joke. But with a comedy you don't want it to go on too long. The famous comedian’s rule, you know, leave them wanting more. And as I kept writing. I found more and more to write about, and it seemed to expand, and it seemed to me that expanding it was good. So, in the end, it seemed to me that its best form would be a novel.
John Gaspard 04:27
As I was reading it, I began to think at first, oh, this is going to be a farce. It's going to be absurd. It's going to be like, Catch 22. It's just going to take an idea and take it to its illogical endpoint. But then as I got into it, I realized, no, this is completely grounded in reality and every bizarre thing that happens seems to have an analogue in the real world and it isn't absurd. I mean, it is absurd. It's kind of like reality. Was that your intention?
Jonathan Lynn 05:03
Well, yes, you're right. It is absurd and it is reality. It's the absurd reality of the healthcare system in the United States, not just in the United States. I mean, I come from Britain where the National Health Service is in a state of collapse, for similar reasons. Because everything is viewed as a business model. And patients are viewed not as patients, but as consumers. And hospitals and healthcare is viewed as something that has to in some way make money. It's worse here, because healthcare in America costs approximately 1/3, more than in any other developed country in the world. In every other developed country, health care is regarded as a right, not a privilege. So, the absurdity here is greater than anywhere else. So, when you mentioned compared to Catch 22, which, by the way, is a very generous compliment that is such a wonderful book. But that's only a little exaggerated too. I mean, that really is what the military was like and World War Two. When you write comedy, you heightened things to exaggerate on the comic effect. But essentially, if they're not true, the reader, or the audience, recognizes that they're not true, and doesn't think it's funny anymore. And so, the balance is always to keep it truthfully observed so that people recognize it and slightly exaggerate it so that people laugh at it.
John Gaspard 06:36
And it is a very funny book. I don't want to talk about it and make it sound like it's dour or serious. I mean, the subject matter is serious, and it is, in many cases, literally life and death. I mean, I just jotted down a couple of quotes that I loved. Referring to healthcare as the ultimate lottery. A student loan, like a diamond, is forever and then I know you put this in for those of us who are fans of your other work to find when Blanche says, I feel you know what I feel flames on the side of my face.
Jonathan Lynn 07:08
Yes, that's a little indulgence for people who are fans of Clue. People really love Clue and that seems to be everybody's favorite moment in the movie.
Madeline Kahn
I hated her soooo much, it, it, flame, flames on the side of my face, breath, breathing, heaving breaths.
Jonathan Lynn 07:08
Because I always saw Blanche. I mean, in God's production, you know, sadly, Madeline Kahn is no longer with us. But if she was, and if we did of production of Samaritans, you know, Madeline Kahn would be the perfect Blanche.
John Gaspard 07:47
She'd be ideal.
Jonathan Lynn 07:49
So, you know, it just sort of came to mind that maybe that's what Blanche say and why not have a little in joke for the benefit of fans of Clue.
John Gaspard 08:02
Absolutely. It's a weird thing to say about a novel, but it's really well researched. At least it appears to be really well researched, which isn't something you think about with a novel. I have written a couple of mystery novels that involve a magician, and it does for me—not being a magician—involve a lot of research to understand that process for me. What was the process for you? Was it research first and then writing or writing leading you down rabbit holes of research?
Jonathan Lynn 08:29
It goes hand in hand to me. The idea comes first. The idea, that the funny idea that hospital beset with raising costs and poor management should decide that they need the head of a Vegas casino as their new CEO, because he understands about check out and check in, beds occupied, and dinners, and has no interest in healthcare. That struck me as a really fun idea as that truthful about the way the health care system is operating here. Then, when I was writing it, I discovered, I read a story in a paper. That said I think it's Aetna, it was one with the big insurance companies, had hired a new CEO, the CEO of Caesars Palace. So, I discovered that life was imitating art in that case. But what happens is that as you can see, when if I got an idea, I started researching simultaneous. So, then I had to find out about hospitals. I knew a bit about hospitals because, well partly I've been a patient more than once, partly my wife taught in two major London teaching hospitals, partly because I have friends who are doctors, and they were very unhappy with the way the situation, the system works here. And you start researching and you start talking to friends and acquaintances or people that you get in touch with and gradually, you discover things that are actually both more appalling and funnier in real life than you would probably ever have thought of as you sat at home trying to make it all up.
I've always found that research led me to greater comic possibilities than I ever thought were there, in anything I've ever written. I think humor is about dark subjects, because it's about serious subjects and I know we're also going to talk about My Cousin Vinny in a few minutes. But you know, that's a perfect example. I mean, that is funny, only because of its terrifying implications that those two kids would have been electrocuted, would have been killed by the state, if they hadn't had a peculiarly argumentative lawyer in Vinny. And you know, so what makes that film both funny and compulsive viewing for people is that it is about something terribly serious. It is finally about life and death. It's a film about capital punishment, although people never talk about it in those terms, but that's at the root of it. So, the answer to your question is yes, I think the more serious the subject, the better the comic possibilities.
John Gaspard 11:16
What special pleasure does novel writing give you that you're not getting as a playwright, or a screenwriter, or a director or an actor?
Jonathan Lynn 11:25
The pleasure is that I only have to please myself. I don't have to worry about, you know, is there some actors who would like this part, or will somebody demand that this character has made more likeable before they'll play it. How can we raise, you know, millions of millions of dollars, in order to get this out before the public. There are all kinds of ways of putting you in a straitjacket when you're creating a play or a film or TV series. That are all to do with the fact that they cost so much money and that, therefore, you need the approval of producers, directors, executives, star actors and everybody else about everything and if you're not very careful, they get compromised out of existence and that often happens. As you know. That doesn't happen if you're writing a book. All I have to do is please myself, and then hopefully find someone who will publish it.
[SOUNDBITE FROM MY COUSIN VINNY TRAILER]
John Gaspard 12:26
The other reason for the call now was, this is the 25th anniversary this year of My Cousin Vinny and I'm sure you've been involved in other interviews and events about that, and those will continue. But I thought it'd be kind of fun to revisit this, you were kind enough to talk to me, I actually don't know how many years ago, but there were some of the questions wanted to ask you about it now that it's 25 years later. But to back up a little bit: So, your first movie, as a director was Clue, which you'd written.
[SOUNDBITE FROM CLUE TRAILER]
And I know you have had before that a lot of experience on stage, both as a director and an actor, but it's a really self-assured directing debut. It's a big movie, although it's in one house, but it's still a big movie with a big cast and a lot going on. What was the biggest lesson you took away from that directing experience?
Jonathan Lynn 13:33
The biggest lesson I took away, although I don't always manage to stick to it, it to trust my own judgments and don't, don't be overly impressed by what I'm told by studio executives. There are things in Clue that I regret, that I should have changed, and I didn't because I was persuaded by the studio that's what I should do, and as a first-time director, I assumed they knew what they were talking about. There are various examples of that. But perhaps the most obvious example is the multiple endings, which was a great mistake to release them in separate movie theaters. Because the whole point about the multiple endings is the ingenuity of the fact that the story could lead to three different outcomes, all of which made sense, and all of which were funny. The film wasn't a success until I put them all together for the video version and they started being seen on TV. I mean, I also learned all kinds of other things that I haven't found about how to use camera, because directing on stage is completely different, especially directing a farce, which Clue is, a broad comedy. Because on stage, you see all the characters and your eye takes in all different sorts of actions. The camera has to focus on little pieces of action one moment at a time. You can't have too many wide shots with eight or nine people in them because they all become too small. You can have some. So, for me it was a big lesson in learning how to photograph comedy as opposed to stage comedy. Staging it was not a problem for me, making sure that I had photographed it exactly right. So, and it was complicated because there were so many people in every scene, that the geography of the scene always had to be clear. You know, the audience needs to know where people are and in the case of Clue, they need to know where people are not, because that of course meant somebody was missing, they could be the murderer. And whenever I've been left alone by the studio, or by the producers to do my thing, my films have been better than when I've been subjected to too much pressure from the parent company.
John Gaspard 13:41
And then we get into My Cousin Vinny. Now, my, some of my questions are going to be based on having re-looked at your book, Comedy Rules. Because there's some stuff in Comedy Rules, although it doesn't refer specifically to Vinny, it feels like it sort of tendentially does. And one of the things you write about there a couple times, and this is I think, first in reference to Yes, Minister, is the idea of the hideous dilemma. Can you just define that for me?
Jonathan Lynn 16:07
Well, yes, I think there has to be. I think all comedy needs a hideous dilemma. And, you know, in, in my book, Comedy Rules, I talked about it in connection with, Yes, Minister, and Yes, Prime Minister, because the politician Jim Hacker, in those series and books, is like all politicians torn between doing the right thing and doing the thing that will either advance his career, or make him look better to the public, or go down better with the press. And these things are nearly always fighting each other. Doing the right thing is often not the safest thing and politicians are always scared of being exposed. Being in government or being in politics is essentially about having two faces, about hypocrisy, and you never want it to be revealed that you said one thing one day and then did something else another day. Now that rule has slightly changed since the advent of Donald Trump, who doesn't seem to care that he's caught out in the lie every day of his life or maybe 10 lies. But it matters to most politicians, and it kills their careers. Sir Humphrey, the senior civil servant, was also always caught in a dilemma. That was some of the nature. Now in My Cousin Vinny, the hideous dilemma is obvious. The two boys are charged with murder that we the audience know they didn't commit, and they have to make a choice. They have to hire Vinny, who has never had conducted a trial. He's only been qualified at the bar for six weeks and he's never done a murder case.
[SOUNDBITE FROM MY COUSIN VINNY TRAILER]
Jonathan Lynn 18:09
They have to hire him. They have nobody else. This is a hideous dilemma for them. The hideous dilemma for Vinny is that he knows that if he fails, his cousin will be executed. I mean, what worse situation could he be in? The hideous dilemma Mona Lisa Vito, Marisa Tomei, is that she's living with this guy who means well, but just can't get it right. All of this is what makes it funny.
John Gaspard 18:38
You know, it could have been played as a completely straight drama right out of John Grisham, because all the elements would be the same.
Jonathan Lynn 18:44
It's a trial movie. It’s just that comedic choices are made instead of dramatic choices. But you're right. That's why it works. Because most trial movies—I mean, I didn't know there was another trial movie that's a comedy from start to finish. There are comedies with trial scenes, but most of them are rather treated rather frivolously. In Vinny, I treated the situation with the utmost seriousness. And I think that's why it's funny, because it's so frightening.
John Gaspard 19:16
Exactly. Another thing you mentioned in the book Comedy Rules that I think applies really nicely here is the concept that it helps to be an outsider, which Vinny clearly is. And that gives you a great way into the story. Did your experience sort of as an outsider, a British director working in America, was that also helpful?
Jonathan Lynn 19:39
When I look at the history of Hollywood movies, one has to assume that that is helpful. If you look at the extraordinary number of really good directors who came from Europe mainly but also from other cultures to Hollywood and one of the best things about Hollywood that has to be said, that’s good about Hollywood, that it is not at all xenophobia. It welcomes anyone from anywhere. But if you look, I mean, Billy Wilder is my favorite comedy director. He was Viennese, Fred Zimmerman was from Vienna, Milos Forman is from Czechoslovakia. Michael Curtiz is from Hungary, and you could go on all day. I mean, a colossal number of the greatest Hollywood directors of—Alfred Hitchcock from Britain—are from somewhere else. And I think it helps. I think as an outsider, you see it maybe more clearly. People always talk to me about the fact that the South is presented differently in My Cousin Vinny than in most American films. That's because I think most American films are directed by northerners and they see the South as some strange, foreign place. To me, the South and the North they're all just America. I mean, the differences, there are obvious differences, but they're still part of American culture, all of which is, or was that time, foreign to me.
John Gaspard 21:01
I don't know, I'm one of those people who I'm sure you're running this all the time, who say if you're flipping channels, and My Cousin Vinny is on, that's it. You're gonna watch the rest of the movie.
Jonathan Lynn 21:10
That's really nice. I feel like that about some movies. I feel like The Godfather Part One and Two and you know, some other movies. I mean, if I see the Godfather on TV, if I happen to stumble across it, I have to keep watching. And, you know, there are some other movies. It's very nice to that people feel like that about Vinny.
John Gaspard 21:32
Yeah, everything came together in that movie, the script is very strong the way you directed it. And I don't mean just where you put the camera, or how you cast it. All those are great and you have a really very clean, non-intrusive visual style, which allows comedy to play really, really well. But between the script and the directing, and the way it's edited, all the pieces are there as a mystery, which it is sort of. It is completely fair. All the clues are given, and they're given so subtly, the how long does it take to cook grits, which is an important thing, is almost a throwaway line. You don't even think about it, it's perfectly in character for that conversation to happen. Just even the shot of the boys pulling away from the store at the beginning, where the curb can be seen on the left side of the screen, and you don't make a point of the fact that they don't go over the curb, because we don't know that's a fact. But when we see the photos later, we—if we had any doubts at all—knowthat wasn't their car, because they didn't go over that curb. I mean, it's that sort of attention to detail, you wouldn't necessarily see in a quote unquote, light comedy. But I think it’s what makes it a perennial favorite.
Jonathan Lynn 22:44
Perhaps it's because I have a degree in law and I wanted it to be legally good. And perhaps because I've seen a number of trial movies that I really, really liked, like The Verdict and Absence of Malice and of course, To Kill a Mockingbird, there's a lot of great, Anatomy of a Murder. One of those are films that I think are full of tension and suspense and hold the audience's attention and I think I felt that was important. You can't make the whole movie about a trial unless the trial is dramatically effective from start to finish. So, yes, I approached it as a drama, except that we made comedic choices all the way through.
John Gaspard 23:24
What was your rehearsal process like? Did you have time for rehearsal?
Jonathan Lynn 23:27
No, there was no rehearsal. I discussed it with Joe Pesci and Joe said he hated rehearsal. He felt it took away his spontaneity and of course, he liked to rehearse a scene on the morning that we were shooting it, but he didn't want any advance rehearsal. Now, one of the jobs of the director, maybe the main job of the director is just to get the best work out of all the people in the movie. If you're leading actor doesn't want to rehearse, there's no point in trying to make them rehearse. It won’t improve the result. So, we didn't have any rehearsal and all the rehearsals were just on the day of each scene.
John Gaspard 24:06
Well, that sort of jumps us right to my next question, which is going back to Comedy Rules again. This is rule number 140, which was remember the old English proverb you don't buy a dog and bark yourself. Talk to me about how that applies to your work as a director, because you are also an actor, and you're also a writer.
Jonathan Lynn 24:28
I never demonstrate how everything should be done. I never say play it like this. I never say, say it this way. I assume that the actors that I've got are high level, skilled professionals. And what I want them to do is bring what they can bring to something that I already have in mind and that the writer—which may or may not have been me—has already written. You know, with really good actors, with leading actors you know, you don't tell the movie star, this is how you play the scene and then demonstrate, because they would, you know, rightly send for their limo and go home. That's not what they're there for. They're there to bring what they can bring to the proceedings. And what you have to do as a director is have what know what you have in mind and meld it with what your actors bring. And that's why casting is so absolutely critical, because if you miscast a part, you know, it will never work, or will certainly never work the way you intended it to.
John Gaspard 25:37
You mentioned Billy Wilder, and I'm going to mention another rule from Comedy Rules, because there's a lot of good ones in there. Rule 149 is the last part of every film and play is a race to the finish between the show and the audience. Which I think is something Wilder would have agreed with. And you went on to add, the show must get there first. One of the things that makes, I think, Vinny so successful is that when the end is there, it's there. We zip right to the end. You don't hang around, there's not a lot of extraneous stuff. It's like the movie is over and we're out. How hard was that to achieve?
Jonathan Lynn 26:17
Well, it was interesting, because of course, that was done in the production rewrite. Dale wrote a wonderful script, but there were things that still needed sorting out and Fox hired me to do the production rewrite. And in the original draft that I was given, we never knew who committed the murders. You never knew what the real story was. So, that was a problem. For me, that was a problem. You can't have a trial movie without knowing what actually happened. Now, obviously, we didn't want to see what actually happened, because that would have been time consuming and boring. That's the problem with a Who Done It. That's why Hitchcock never made a Who Done It, because in a Who Done It, there's always a scene at the end, when the detective explains what really happens and that's always really dull. I made fun of that in Clue, with the butler’s ludicrous explanation of everything. But I made it into a joke, because that film was a parody of a murder mystery. But in this case, we didn't need to see it all on camera. But we did need to know that the real murderers had been found and had been caught and that it all made sense. The other thing is that we didn't want to have the jury. Once it was clear that the two boys have not committed the murder, we have to get out of that trial as fast as possible. So, that meant it didn't have to it couldn't go to the jury. We couldn't have a boring scene when they came back and the judge said, you know, have you reached a verdict? Yes, Your Honor and reading out the verdicts and all that stuff that you see on television every week. So, it meant that we had to have the prosecutor do the right thing, which was very good anyway, because for me, there's no bad guy. The one most interesting thing about film, I think, is there is no villain. The court system, the justice system is the antagonist. So, we have to get out of that fast. So, it meant that the prosecutor did the right thing and simply withdrew the case. He just said, you know, we're not proceeding with this. So, that was the end of the trial. And that meant we could get out of that trial, in terms of screen time, probably five minutes sooner then if we'd gone through the whole thing of it going to the jury.
John Gaspard 28:27
Now, is there anything looking back in the movie that you wish you would have done differently?
Jonathan Lynn 28:30
Well actually, no. When I see the movie now, which I don't very often, but I you know, I have seen it occasionally. I'm really pleased with it. I have to say, most of my films, I see plenty of things I would like to change and that one, I think, you know, was a lot of luck. We made all the right choices, I think. I don't see anything I would want to change.
John Gaspard 28:53
I would agree. Is there anything any consistent thing you hear from fans about that movie that if someone mentions it, you know, they're gonna say this or that?
Jonathan Lynn 29:04
No, I get a lot of terrific response from judges and attorneys, who will say that it's legally the most accurate film that's ever been produced by Hollywood. I've met a number of federal judges who use it in their teaching at law schools, especially in the teaching of evidence. That's very gratifying. I was asked to speak at a couple of legal conventions to federal judges and others, not about the law, of course, which they know more about than I do, about how Hollywood treats trials and legal firms. So, they're very gratifying group of people. And then of course, they're just favorite moments that people refer to, which always happens in films, just like we were talking about in Clue, like Mrs. White’s lines about the flames on the side of my face. It seems that a large number of people quote Vinny’s line ‘Two Youts,” and there are a number of other moments in the film which people refer to with the great affection.
[SOUNDBITE: MORE FROM THE MY COUSIN VINNY TRAILER]
John Gaspard 30:23
Thanks to Jonathan Lynn for taking the time to talk to me about his new book Samaritans, as well as Clue and My Cousin Vinny. If you liked this interview, you can find lots more just like it, including the transcript of an earlier interview with Mr. Lynn, covering other facets of My Cousin Vinny on the Fast Cheap Movie Thoughts blog. Plus, more interviews can be found in my books: Fast, Cheap And Under Control: Lessons Learned From The Greatest Low Budget Movies Of All Time, and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap And Written That Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play and Apple books. And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series, starting with The Ambitious Card, can be found on all those online retailers I just mentioned in paperback hardcover eBook and audiobook formats. You can find information on those books and all the other books at Albertsbridgebooks.com. That's Albertsbridgebooks.com. And that's it for episode 102 of The Occasional Film Podcast, produced at Grass Lake studios. Original Music by Andy Morantz. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.
- Mostrar mais
