It turns out starting The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast set a lot of things in motion and opened a lot of damned doors. The most exciting of those newly opened doors is the opportunity to tell some mind-blowing stories in this medium that I have truly come to love. So, I started a little podcasting company. Costard & Touchstone Productions. The first C&T original production is a podcast called “The Donor: A DNA Horror Story“. I really and truly hope that you’ll check it out. If you’re a fan of Tales From The Crypt – or horror […]

How to write like a genius… sounds easy enough! And the way our guest CHARLES FLEISCHER writes, he makes writing like a genius seem easy. Spoiler alert: it’s not. You probably know Charlie as the voice of ROGER RABBIT. He’s also in the TALES FROM THE CRYPT feature film DEMON KNIGHT and a kajillion other movies and TV shows. Or, you may know Charlie as a stand up. Or an artist. or from his scientific work (he’s published actual scientific papers and done extensive research on MOLEEDS). But, you probably don’t know Charlie as a writer of short stories. Charlie […]

Here’s a stone cold fact: it is really, really, REALLY hard to create an iconic character like Tales From The Crypt’s iconic Crypt Keeper.

For one thing, you can’t set out to create a character that will become iconic. That’s because it’s not up to the character’s creators, it’s up to you – the audience.

It’s your embrace – how warm it is – how long it lasts – that determines whether a character can even enter the “iconic” conversation.

With the Crypt Keeper, we ticked off all the boxes.

We created a character that a wide and widening audience still embraces – thirty some odd years after its creation.

But, HOW do characters like the Crypt Keeper GET created? Don’t they just spring fully formed – more or less – from one person’s fertile imagination?

Well, not really…

Every horror icon’s creation is complicated in its own way. And more than one person played a significant part.

Take The Frankenstein Monster.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly – Frankenstein’s author –

and her husband – the Romantic poet Percy Bysse Shelly –

were traveling with friends through Germany down the Rhine River in 1816.

At night, the travel party told each other ghost stories. Mary and her friends were all intrigued by the latest science: using electricity to spark dead limbs to life.

And, as they traveled down the Rhine through Germany, they heard local stories about a crazy local alchemist named Johann Konrad Dippel.

Dippel robbed graves and experimented on corpses at a very real place called Frankenstein Castle.

And then Mary Shelley – all of 21 – filled in the blanks – and published her book anonymously. She put her name on the second edition though.

In time, Mary Shelley’s character found a literary audience. But then a guy named James Whale directed the movie version of the book in 1931. And whatever the character had been on the page became the character in the movie.

And that’s the Frankenstein monster most people think of when they hear the name “Frankenstein”.

Remove any of those elements from the Frankenstein equation and there is no equation.

As you’ll hear – if you haven’t already heard this episode – it took puppeteer Kevin Yagher to create the Crypt Keeper puppet plus John Kassir to create the Crypt Keeper’s voice plus me to create the Crypt Keeper’s inner life plus Gil Adler – who directed and produced the Crypt Keeper segments.

Take any of us out of the Crypt Keeper equation – and this equation isn’t happening either.

When Kevin and John and Gil and I got together for that very first time, we  had never had this conversation before – about the Crypt Keeper’s creation story.

None of us knew the whole story ourselves – until we shared...

Alan & Jason visit CreepI.E.Con

Welcome to a special, bonus episode of the How Not To Make A Movie Podcast: Alan & Jason visit the CreepIE-Con horror convention!

This past weekend was the Creepie-con horror convention in Ontario just outside Los Angeles. It’s not one of the big horror conventions, but being as it’s here in Southern California, it still attracts a fair amount of on-screen talent for signings and photos because “proximity”.

Now, I really hadn’t been to a horror convention before. That seems strange considering all the horror I’ve done. I went to Comic Con once – the year they first started releasing “Tales From The Crypt” DVDs. We did a panel about the show to a very packed room. It was a blast.

It was a while ago, too.

And, as Gil and I are about to unleash a streaming horror series upon the marketplace – and then, hopefully, the world – it seemed like a good time to get into the horror convention flow. So, I called Jason Stein – my other partner in crime on this enterprise. And, together, on Saturday, we headed east – to the Ontario Convention Center. And CreepIE-con.

Among the talent lineup: some of the cast of Scream, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy, Alex Winter, Lee Waddell, Lauren Lavera, Eliot Fulham, Felissa Rose (one of Jason’s favorites) and Damien Leone from “The Terrifier” (another of Jason’s favorites).

Also in the house – our friends Chelsea Rebecca and James Janisse, hosts of the spectacular “Dead Meat Podcast” and YouTube channel.

The most striking about the horror community – and the horror community already knows this about themselves – they are some of the sweetest people on the planet. And it is downright fun watching them have fun.

Mike Vosburg’s cover art for the Crypt episode “On A Dead Man’s Chest”, directed by William Friedkin: Drawn to the dark side

If you’ve ever seen an episode of Tales From The Crypt, you’ve enjoyed the work of artist and comic book creator Mike Vosburg. When you sit and talk to Mike – aka Voz – you can’t help thinking “Wow, what a terrific person!” And then you look at his comic book art and you can’t help thinking “Wow, and he’s so drawn to the dark side.” I mean that in the nicest way possible of course!

Gil and I first met artist Mike Vosburg when we went aboard “Tales From The Crypt” at the start of its third season. Each Crypt episode began with a comic book cover depicting the episode’s most horrific moment. Mike drew the covers. Though Mike had been working in the comic book business for a long time by then, the Crypt gig suited him. He was already “drawn to the dark side”.

Comics Are Mike’s Life

Mike’s love of the comic book form began early. As a teen, he produced and edited the fanzine Masquerader. In time, his passion for comics took him to New York City where he worked for Marvel, DC and Charlton Comics among others. He worked with Stan Lee (as did Gil and I!) Before he headed west, he’d put his imprimatur on series like Thor, She-Hulk, Starfire and GIJoe.

Arriving in Hollywood, Mike got work drawing storyboards for feature films and TV shows. Storyboards help directors articulate their vision. That work eventually led him to Tales From The Crypt. We’ll talk comic books and working at Marvel. Penciling vs inking. John Frankenheimer, Ninja Turtles and film noir among other things. And, did I mention that Mike won an Emmy for directing episodes of Spawn on HBO? And, of course, we’ll talk a whole lot of Tales From The Crypt.

Charlie Fleischer: Still in ‘toon’ with the universe.

If you don’t know Charlie Flesicher’s name, you know his voice. He’s the voice of Roger Rabbit. He’s appeared – in human form – on TV and in movies since the 70’s. We worked with Charlie on “Demon Knight” – the first “Tales From The Crypt” branded horror movie. He plays Wally Enfield. It’s been a while since either Gil or I have spoken to Charlie. In this conversation, we all get to catch up! The headline: “Charlie Fleischer’s Still In Toon With The Universe”!

The Crypt Family

Now, as we’ve said here a bunch of times, one of the really great benefits of working on film and TV sets is that you work with – and hang with – some really fascinating people. Like Charlie Fleischer. Charlie was “family”. He’d worked a couple of times for Bob Zemeckis already (in addition to casting Charlie as Roger Rabbit, Bob also cast Charlie in “Back to The Future 2”). When casting suggested his name for that role, there never was another suggestion.

Even then, Charlie was way more than just Roger Rabbit. He was a regular on “Welcome Back Kotter” and “Laverne & Shirley”. He appeared on “Laugh-In” and “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson”. The second time Charlie did the Carson show, he did panel. Sitting beside Johnny was the point of the exercise. Charlie had – and has – a solid body of acting work to his name and credit.

But, Charlie Fleischer is way more than just an actor. He’s a creative Renaissance Person. He paints. He creates music. And he writes scientific papers. In this interview, we’ll hit the Charlie Fleischer you might know already – the super talented stand up comedian who voices an iconic animated character. And then we spend considerable time with the Charlie you might not know yet.

That Charlie Fleischer will surprise you again and again. He really is in “toon” with the universe.

Here are the art pieces we reference in the podcast –

The Rhythmic Shimmer Of Glimmer Waves Museum Of Self Reflection Monroe Boat Zappa’s Zircon Zipper Picasso What Jade Racoons Frighten Cotton Mice

Charlie’s TED Talk about Gamma Ray Bursts and Moleeds –

Nobody should ever die on a film or TV set. No one should ever get injured either but physical things happen (stunts, for instance). Injuries should should be rare. Death should be a complete stranger. With hundreds of hours of produced film and TV content under our belts, Gil Adler and I had the exact same reaction when the news dropped from the set of the movie “Rust”. It made our heads explode. How could that have happened?

On Oct. 21, 2021, actor/producer Alec Baldwin – on the set of “Rust” outside Albuquerque, New Mexico – discharged a prop firearm that had a live round in it. The bullet killed the film’s director of photography Halyna Hutchins and wounded its director Joel Souza. On the one hand, this was a tragic accident. On the other, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. People made this happen via a combination of carelessness, incompetence and ineptitude.

New Mexico Makes A Move

Yesterday, New Mexico added the potential for criminal behavior to the mix. They announced that they intend to prosecute Alec Baldwin and the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed. Uncharged: the movie’s 1st assistant director, Dave Halls. He, apparently, reached a plea deal.

Gil and I aren’t the only ones scratching our heads over the latest developments. Most everyone in the business is perturbed by it. To help us get our heads around it, we’ve invited two guests. We just sat down with our good friend Tony Adler in S2E18 – Who’s The Boss. Tony is an accomplished 1st AD with a long, illustrious bio. Leigh Webb also had a long, illustrious career as a 1st AD. He worked for us on Tales From The Crypt (and shows like “Moonlighting”). Both Tony and Leigh have dealt with guns on their sets more times than they can count.

There’s a protocol. All one has to do is follow it. And yet…

Rust Makes Our Heads Explode!

Accidents on film sets make us angry. They should never happen though they do. What happened on the set of Rust makes our heads explode.

Film sets are a fascinating place to work. They definitely reflect the nature of the people working on them – especially at the top. But who’s really in charge of any set? Who’s the boss?

Most sets are like bee hives. And, while everyone thinks the director is queen bee, on the set itself, it’s really the first assistant director – the first AD – who’s running the joint. Now, they’re not the boss – they work FOR the boss. If it’s a feature film, the boss is the director. If it’s a TV show however, the bosses are the writer-producers. The first works for them.

They will see to it that the day’s work comes in on time and on budget.

That means when shit goes awry, the first person the shit’s gonna hit is the first. It’s a hard job and it requires a special kind of person.

Like our very good friend Tony Adler – no relation to Gil.

Personal History

Now – as you’ll hear, Tony and I go back a long, long way – to the Vassar College Drama Department. Boy, do we have stories.

Tony’s had a long, amazing career. He’s got some huge features in his bio: “Ragtime” and “American Beauty”. He’s worked on TV series like “Grace and Frankie”, “Heroes”, “Empire” and “Halo”. And, he’s worked with pretty much everyone in Hollywood from Milos Foreman to Steven Spielberg to Dustin Hoffman to Sam Mendes to David Hemmings.

Want some great stories from the sets of movies and shows you love? Tune out the world for an hour and enjoy a little movie making madness. Some of the best stories coming from any movie set happen ON the set.

And the first AD – our good friend Tony –  knows them. Where this episode’s concerned, if you want to know “who’s the boss?” It’s Tony!

Photo 36125862 / Director © Kts | Dreamstime.com

The movie biz attracts all kinds. The horror biz attracts the most unusual among the movie biz. And those who succeed in the horror biz? They’re a truly special breed.

The House On Haunted Hill… The Tingler… 13 Ghosts… These were all competently made horror movies. What made them noteworthy and keeps them noteworthy is the man who made them: William Castle. A master showman, Castle understood one thing above all else: he knew how to sell tickets. It isn’t necessarily about how good or bad your play or movie is (Castle succeeded in the theater before he succeeded in the movies), it’s how good you are at promoting it. And, when it came to promoting his movies, no one could match Castle for panache, imagination or sheer chutzpah.

There’s A Gimmick!

If you’ve never encountered Castle before, you’re in for a treat!

Standing in for the maestro is his daughter Terry Castle (alas, William Castle died in 1977). Terry and Gil worked together when Gil produced a couple of Castle remakes (“House On Haunted Hill” and “13 Ghosts”) for Dark Castle Productions – the production company Joel Silver and Bob Zemeckis started specifically to remake Castle. Boy, does Terry Castle have a story to tell!

Despite being orphaned at 11, Castle rode life’s vicissitudes with remarkable improvisational skill. He quitting school at 15 to work for Bela Lugosi, got additional career help from Orson Welles (who became a lifelong friend) and ended up in Hollywood where he was one of the few people Columbia Pictures’ notoriously bad boss Harry Cohn actually liked. Castle directed dozens of B pictures before leaving Columbia for life as an independent producer.

As always, his flair for the dramatic guided him. His last big project (he produced it because the studio wouldn’t let him direct it): Rosemary’s Baby. That’s a lot of great movie-making over the course of one life. What’s crystal clear from our chat with Terry Castle is that her dad was a genuinely nice man who loved what he did for a living.

Car Ride To Hell

Welcome to our first new episode of 2023! We’re dropping a Joel Silver story we’ve been threatening to tell since we started this podcast last year. The Car Ride To Hell!

How do we know it ended up in Hell? Well, for starters, Donald Trump makes an appearance – two actually!

Here’s the setting. As you probably recall from Season One, Gil and I took over running “Tales From The Crypt” at the start of its third season – supposedly it’s last season. But, Gil and I turned around the franchise. We reinvigorated the storytelling and turned the Crypt Keeper into a franchise player. Gil and I began prepping Crypt’s season 4 (our second season running it). This often meant heading to Joel’s office at Warner Brothers in Burbank to consult; Joel was very hands on at times.

Now, one of the things that Gil and I learned quickly was that going to a meeting at Joel’s could easily eat up a whole day. Though the meeting itself might last minutes, one invariably waited for Joel. And waited, and waited… One needed to maintain very cool heels to work for Joel.

On the day in question, Gil and I cooled our heels outside Joel’s office for hours before he kidnapped us and took us on “The Car Ride To Hell”. Gil and I really were trapped with Joel. However crazy you think this experience is going to be, double your estimate. Then double it again. This is that crazy!

Hell Photo 109649322 © Ig0rzh | Dreamstime.com

For a lot of people, 2022 was an outright annus horribilus. One to forget. That wasn’t the case for us here at the How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast. For starters, we came into being this year. That was a good thing (all things considered). We found a growing audience – that’s been even better. And then Entertainment Weekly called us “The Best Film Podcast of 2022”. That was extremely gratifying. So, choosing among our “best bits” this year has been the best kind of challenge.

Let’s Get Started!

Like Maria sings in “The Sound Of Music”, “Let’s start at the very beginning!” First “best bit” is our origin story – how Gil and I got “Tales From The Crypt” to begin with. We’d been creative partners for a few years by then. We wrote a few unproduced screenplays together but also a few episodes of “Freddy’s Nightmares” – the “Nightmare On Elm Street” TV series. Gil produced the show. He also directed the second episode we wrote.

“Tales From The Crypt” changed both our lives. We both sensed when we got Crypt that it would do that.

The Crypt Keeper & Joel Stories

Another “best bit”: the terrific conversation we had to start season two. For the first time ever, the four people responsible for actually creating the Crypt Keeper sat down together and discussed their creation. Iconic characters like the Crypt Keeper don’t just fall from the sky fully formed. They’re the product of intense creative energy and collaboration. The Crypt Keeper was no different.

Among the best of the best bits – Joel Silver stories. Joel Silver was a challenging boss in ways both good and bad. In this episode, we remember 1) a car ride with Joel wherein we almost hired Donald Trump to act in “Crypt”, 2) how Joel nearly caused an international incident when he crossed an international border without a single piece of personal ID and 3) how Joel got an order for the TV series “Perversions Of Science” through sheer force of will.

We really do thank you for making us part of your life this year! We believe 2023 is going to get  even better!

Photo 203697607 / 2022 Year Review © Enterlinedesign | Dreamstime.com

Tis the season for Die Hard?

Tis the season to ask this essential question: Is “Die Hard” a Christmas movie?

Plenty of people already answer that with an emphatic “yes!” They’ve already made watching “Die Hard” one of their holiday season traditions. But is that only because “Die Hard” takes place over Christmas? Or, do they feel “Die Hard” captures something essential about the holiday season? Does it capture the Christmas Spirit?

Among the more emphatic “yesses!” is Steve de Souza’s. Steve wrote the screenplay for “Die Hard” (in addition to the screenplays for plenty of other classic action movies, too: 48 Hrs, Commando, Streetfighter, Judge Dredd).

As Steve will discuss, “Die Hard” was based on a novel which, itself, was a sequel. Nobody making it had the least inkling that it would become an iconic Christmas movie. They would have been happy with Die Hard just being a great action movie.

Steve uses the classic Hollywood Christmas movie “White Christmas” as his baseline. Not only does Steve make the case that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie up there with classics like “White Christmas”, he proves that “Die Hard” is a much better Christmas movie for a whole lot of reasons.

Next we’ll ask “Would Freddy Kruger make a good Santa Claus replacement hire?

The body’s on the slab now. Let’s do the post mortem. This past Saturday, our little Podcast held a benefit for the Motion Picture Home – the MPTF. They’re a great organization that takes care of film folk in need. We performed a live table read of “Dead Easy“. That’s the “Crypt” film we never got to make (because we made “Bordello” instead). There’s this whole really good podcast all about it! The obvious question is “how’d it go?” The answer is “great!”

But, that’s just our opinion – Gil’s and mine. How about we open this to the floor and get some different perspective.

Chelsea Rebecca performed several roles in the the reading but her main role was Danny, the little boy. Jason Stein is one of the Dads From The Crypt. He was one of the table read’s producers. Through his horror connections, Jason found us Chelsea.

Boy, are Gil and I glad he did.

The Horror, The Horror…!

What began as a post mortem on the reading evolved into a thoughtful conversation about horror. About great horror and about horror that crosses the line. Chelsea speaks with very real authority about horror (as does Jason). She’s a fan with likes and dislikes. She’s also a talented content creator. Chelsea and her husband James Jannisse produce the very popular “Dead Meat Podcast” and “The Kill Count” on YouTube. “The Kill Count” – this is amazing – has almost 6 million subscribers.

Chelsea didn’t become a horror super fan until college. A class on horror movies at the University of Michigan opened her eyes. “Night Of The Living Dead” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” changed her life. Well, they changed her taste in movies forever and started her down the road to becoming Queen of the Dead. We’ll also talk about cos play and the feature film that Chelsea and James are working on right now.

One fascinating part of this conversation – how each horror fan’s taste in horror evolves over time. Life events – like having kids – can alter a horror fan’s likes and dislikes.

We live in a wonderful world where content creators can be content consumers at the very same time. We are over-brimming with great stories. And there’s an audience for almost every bit of it. Let the post mortem begin!

Photo 162755403 / Post Mortem © Marcos Calvo Mesa | Dreamstime.com

When Gil Adler and I took over HBO‘s iconic TALES FROM THE CRYPT at the start of its third season, one of our tasks was to reignite the series – or see it get cancelled. Crypt was a strange, hybrid creature. Today, talent moves easily from film projects to streaming TV projects and back. That didn’t happen in the mid-1990’s, when we made Crypt. The feature film world and the TV world didn’t mingle much (except for JOHNNY CARSON doing THE OSCARS). It wasn’t easy, but Crypt broke that rule. We merged features and TV every episode. So, it was both gratifying and instructive that we were able to attract a screenwriter like LARRY WILSON who had BEETLEJUICE and THE ADDAMS FAMILY to his screenwriting credit.

We had plenty of other feature film writers write scripts for Crypt. Few, if any, understood the show as intrinsically as Larry.

Larry grew up a huge fan of the EC Comics. His favorite movie was (and still is) the original BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. He loved it because it wasn’t just scary, it was funny, too. Like Crypt.

With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice about to drop, Larry’s a wanted person! But, as he points out in the interview, Crypt was an important part of his career. That was the case for almost everyone who worked on Crypt. That means we’ll have Larry not once, but twice. In this episode, Larry will “stick to the “scrypt”. We’re going to talk pretty much Crypt from start to finish.

Larry will revisit us in a few episodes to talk about the great book he’s writing – a history of making Beetlejuice and a screenwriting textbook all rolled into one terrific entertainment! But, that’s the future. We’re here to talk about the past today – about Tales From The Crypt – and Beetlejuice’s co-creator, Larry Wilson!

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Father and son (James) bonding at the movies.

Peter Iliff‘s passion for movies started with James Bond. He was six and his dad took him to see “Goldfinger” on the day it opened. They watched it twice. Now, it may seem strange – a dad taking his six year old to see a Bond film – but, strangely, something happened there in that darkened movie theater. An already strong bond between father and son grew stronger. But, also, a new bond formed – between Peter and those wonderful phantoms up on the screen.

For those unaware, Peter Iliff is a highly regarded screenwriter with some monster credits to his name as both a writer and director: Varsity Blues, Point Break and Patriot Games, the Enforcer and Rites of Passage for starters. He writes a lot about male bonding and male bonds. Whatever ignited inside Peter during Goldfinger burns brightly still.

Writers are like that. We may put stories in a hundred different locations, but, often, we’re trying to solve the same problem again and again (be it family dynamics, politics, love or whatever). What problem is Peter trying to solve? You’ll have to listen to the interview.

Peter’s been in this business for 45 years. He knows a lot of stuff – about writing and about writing for this business. It’s unlike anything else. Along the way – as he tells – Peter learned from some of the very best screenwriters – like William Goldman (“Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid”, “Princess Bride.”, “All The President’s Men”, “Magic”). If he wasn’t learning from them, he was borrowing their cashmere sweaters.

Or going nose to nose with a charging-at-him Gene Hackman (a man notorious for punching people in the nose). Or, directing for the first time on an episode of “Tales From The Crypt” (where we specialized in handling first time directors).

Peter also talks about getting sober – and getting healthier than he’s ever been. Happy, too. That’s the ultimate bottom line, isn’t it?

We also talk a lot about writing in this episode – about screenwriting in particular. It’s a curious craft we all chose to master. Screenwriters are never the last word on any film project.

This one is choc-a-block with cool stories about some of the biggest names in the business. It’s also choc-a-block with insight and a love for movies and an even bigger love for just being alive. Odds are, listening to this one, you’ll end up bonding with Peter Iliff.

Photo 96837851 © Antoniodiaz | Dreamstime.com

Wanna know how to break into the move and TV biz? Know where all the bodies are buried. In order to do that, you have to be in on the burying process. If you’re not leading the body-burying op, you must be assisting. In Hollywood, those people – the ones willing to bury the bodies with ya – those are the people you want on your team. In this episode of The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast, we chat with our friend Ed Tapia (producer of “All American Homecoming” – second highest rated show on the CW). Back in the day, Ed was our assistant on “Tales From The Crypt” and “Demon Knight” and “Bordello Of Blood” and a bunch of other projects. Did Ed know where all the bodies were buried? Yeah – because Ed helped us bury them.

Geeking Out

Ed’s story could be a TV series unto itself. He’s a latter day Alger Hiss (boy, did I just age myself). He’s one of those guys who makes the sum greater than its parts. And, if you want to know how to break into show business (or into anything about which you’re passionate), take Ed’s story to heart. He went from being a great assistant to being a great producer in his own right.

Ed describes himself as a film geek. “American Graffiti” was the film that got under his skin. It compelled him. He’d spend whole days at the movies, buying one ticket and watching three or four. He loved movies. Now, he wanted to make them, too. Ed tells how he found his way to Tales From The Crypt and how joining our team changed his life.

Ed joining Gil and I changed our lives, too. It made our team better. Well, it did until we collectively slammed into “Bordello Of Blood” (or until Bordello slammed into us). However many buried bodies there were up till then? It was nothing compared to the pile making Bordello produced.

We cover a lot of ground in this one and drop some very cool names – everyone from Johnny Carson to Stan Lee to Quentin Tarantino to Timothy Hutton (he’s one of Ed’s idols – and Ed got to work with Tim on “American Crime” and loved the experience). There’s more than just bodies buried here – there’s gold!

Photo 89590408 / Buried Bodies © James Wagstaff | Dreamstime.com

Hobbits aren’t the only creatures making unexpected journeys.

Doing this podcast has been the ultimate unexpected journey. It all started when when the Dads From The Crypt interviewed me for an episode of their podcast. The moment Jason Stein – one of the dads – told me the group’s franchise – reviewing Crypt episodes and giving parenting advice – they had me. And I thoroughly enjoyed the interview. When Jason asked if I’d be interested in sitting for another interview – about “Bordello of Blood” – I told him: “Jason, the story of Bordello’s tortured making is bigger than just one interview. Why, it’s a whole podcast unto itself!” And that’s how it started – this ultimate unexpected journey. Nine months later, the world has changed – entirely for the positive!

That’s the most delicious irony! Making Bordello Of Blood changed my life entirely in negative ways. That making a podcast about Bordello would have the opposite effect? Man, who is writing this insanity?

Long Live The Fediverse!

Speaking of bonkers – how bonkers is it that Elon Musk is murdering Twitter? The good news is that he turned us all onto the fediverse. It’s really the fediverse and Mastodon that I’m thinking about as I republish Season One, Episode One of this podcast – the one that started it all.

There are eerie parallels between Elon Musk wrecking Twitter and Joel Silver carelessly wrecking the second Tales From The Crypt feature film. It’s very uncomfortable when circumstances beyond your control take over your life and happiness. Ultimately, Gil and I were powerless to save ourselves or our movie just as most Twitter users are powerless to save Twitter.

But, whereas Twitter will not have a happy ending, Gil and I are having one. We owe it all to this podcast.

Thank You Clark Collis & EW!

A couple of things we want to mention here. First – a huge thank you to to our audience. We’re nothing without ya! We also want to thank entertainment journalist Clark Collis and Entertainment Weekly. Clark interviewed Gil and I and then published a review of our podcast. He said some very kind things about it including that we’re “The Best Film Podcast of 2022”.

Thank you, Clark Collis, for the very kind words.

The Live Table Read For Charity

One last thing. On Saturday, December 17, 2022 at noon pacific time, we’re holding A LIVE TABLE READ FOR CHARITY. We’ll be reading the script for “Dead Easy”. Lost for all these years, this is the script we took with us to New Orleans. it’s also the script we took home with us after Joel told the production to come home from New Orleans because Universal Pictures (our studio) was pulling the plug.

The charity in question is the Motion Picture Home – a fabulous facility that takes care of film people in need. Your donation receipt will be your ticket to the reading. Please check back here or at our Patreon page for details.

So much has changed since we started doing this podcast! For one thing, Gil and I are working together again – on a project we’re very excited about. We’re having a blast writing i...

Alan & Gil hanging out with the Crypt Keeper

In this episode, Gil and I invite you to hang out with us and shoot the shit. But – before we forget (and while we have your attention) – please join us Saturday December 17 at NOON Pacific time for a “TABLE READ FOR CHARITY”. The MOTION PICTURE HOME (run by the Motion Picture Television Fund) is a great, worthwhile charity. They take care of film folk in need. We’ll be table reading “Dead Easy” – the script for the second “Tales From The Crypt” movie that never happened. “Bordello Of Blood” happened instead.  

Crypt’s Early Days

One of the joys of doing Crypt was getting to work with some really big stars. They really do breathe rarified air. What’s it like working at that level for the very first time? That’s one of the stories Alan will tell about working with Michael J. Fox who directed “The Trap” the first Crypt episode Gil and Alan produced. At the end of the day, it’s about the show – nothing else. Everyone’s as good as their work. Stars become co-workers and partners in crime.

“Rust” & Film Set Safety

No one should ever die on a movie or TV set. No one should ever get hurt. But, definitely no one should ever die. The “Rust” tragedy won’t ever end for the people involved. It should never have happened. Gil especially is obsessive about set safety. On “Freddy’s Nightmares”, we did numerous fire gags. On Crypt, we did lots of gun gags. It’s inconceivable that live ammo gets to any film set. How the hell did it get to the “Rust” set?

How Many Takes Is Too Many?

We’ll close it all out with a story about German director Uli Edell. When he directed the “Came The Dawn” episode, he established a record that has gone unbroken: he went 37 takes into a scene before Gil raced out to the set to stop him personally. We expected directors to get three or four takes of scenes. Five at the very most. Thirty-seven posed a huge problem!

So – pull up a chair (if you’re not already sitting) and “sit a spell”. Gil and I are shootin’ the shit. And there’s lots!

The short answer is YES! You absolutely can believe Taye Diggs and that’s the whole point of this episode! We ask the question “What makes an actor ‘believable’?” And, the actor we’re using for demonstration purposes in this episode is the terrific Taye Diggs who, it just so happens, Gil (Adler) has cast twice. The reason Gil’s cast Taye twice is because Gil loves how believable Taye is. If an audience doesn’t believe an actor, nothing the writers or directors do (or have done) will matter. So, regardless of anything else an actor brings to work each day, nothing is anywhere near as important as believability.

From a film or TV producer’s POV, we don’t want actors to act. The camera will see it and we’ll just have to cut it all out. There are differences between acting on the stage and acting for the camera. Does stage training make actors better at acting for the camera? Spoiler alert: we think so – and Taye’s the perfect example of what theatrical training brings to any actor’s A-game. That’s their “acting game” of course.

On the film side, Taye’s shown off his song and dance chops in both “Chicago” and “Rent”. Taye was repeating for the camera the role he’d originated on Broadway. Taye also got Stella back her groove and, as we said above, he’s worked twice for Gil. One of those times was in the horror movie “House On Haunted Hill”.

For a little while – back in the late 990’s and early 2000’s, Gil produced a series of horror films for Dark Castle Entertainment – a company Bob Zemeckis and Joel Silver created. Dark Castle focused on remaking the films of 1950’s horror maestro William Castle. In the 1940’s and 50’s Castle churned out a ton of pulp titles like “The Crime Doctor’s Warning”, “Johnny Stool Pigeon”, “Slaves Of Babylon” and “New Orleans Uncensored”.

Castle excelled at horror. But, he didn’t approach horror – or movie-making – in a conventional way. He loved using gimmicks to market his movies. Hell, Castle built the marketing gimmicks right into the movies themselves. Right into the movie theaters themselves.

Castle’s “The Tingler” is about a scientist who discovers that a parasite called a “tingler” lives inside human beings, feeding on their fear. A person can tell a tingler’s present because they can feel their spine tingling. To achieve that effect in reality, Castle installed vibrating devices in the movie theater seats showing his movie.

In his “House on Haunted Hill”, Castle equipped some theaters with a technology he called “Emergo“. Emergo was a plastic skeleton emerging from a hiding place and flying at the audience, scaring the crap out of them.

Goofy, yes. But, it worked. The audience loved it. They believed. And believing is everything.

We’ll talk about how “believing” happens. Along the way, Taye will also talk about working on Broadway, the joys of being “theatrical”, how much he loved his years at Syracuse University and how much Gil hated it by comparison (they’re both alums). We’ll talk a lot about acting. About what makes an actor “believable”.

Can we believe Taye Diggs?

We repeat our earlier answer (a little more emphatically) – not just YES, but “HELL, YES!!!” Want proof? Listen in!

Even when he’s playing a villain, Bill Sadler is a really nice guy.

We say this a lot around here at the How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast: one of the real big pleasures of working in film and TV is that you get to work with some terrific people. Our guest today is one of those terrific people. It’s just a stone cold fact: Bill Sadler is a really nice guy. Hell, he’s nice in the extreme.

He’s also super talented.

Bill’s Bio

Aside from doing both “Tales From The Crypt” feature films (Bill stars as the hero of “Demon Knight” and acts as the Mummy opposite the Crypt Keeper in “Bordello Of Blood“) and appearing in multiple episodes of “Tales From The Crypt“, Bill has been part of some truly iconic movies. He played Death in the “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” and “Bill & Ted Face The Music”, Colonel Stuart in “Die Hard 2”, and President Matthew Ellis in “Iron Man 3” and the “Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” movies.

He also played the inmate Heywood in “The Shawshank Redemption“. Ironically, Shawshank wasn’t a hit when it opened. In fact, it bombed – probably because the title’s not very good. Video resurrected Shawshank from obscurity and gave it the second chance it needed.

“Shawshank” is very definitely a classic. Horror fans now consider “Demon Knight” a classic horror movie, too. In time, the Bill and Ted movies may achieve some kind of minor classic status. Certainly Bill’s work as Death in the movies deserves classic status.

He turns Death into a kind of vaguely lovable loser with a hilarious accent.

Talking Craft

We talk a lot about craft in the interview. Acting craft, writing craft, moviemaking craft. We talk about the challenges that produce great work. And, we’ll talk a lot about passion. What makes anyone a great collaborator? Passion for collaboration.

Bill’s collaborated with everyone from Morgan Freeman to Walter Hill (one of Crypt’s executive producers), to Bill Condon (Bill’s favorite director), to Claire Danes and Dennis Quaid (they all just worked together on Steven Soderbergh’s “Full Circle” for HBOMax.

This conversation feels like a pair of comfortable slippers. It’s that warm and familiar. Bill Sadler isn’t just a very, very nice guy. He also happens to be an amazing actor and a superb collaborator.

And, boy, does he have some great stories to tell!

The How NOT To Make A Movie S2E8: “Bill Sadler Is A Really Nice Guy”

Let’s talk dirty laundry!

If you really want to know what’s happening on any film or TV set, the last people you should ask are the executives. We know nothing of value. We may have a pretty good fix on where the budget is, but we have no idea who’s sleeping with whom. Film and TV sets are emotionally overwrought places where people form intense bonds for short periods of time. Very conducive to creativity and having affairs. Terrible for sustaining actual grown up relationships. If you really want to know who’s forming intense bonds, having affairs and sleeping around, go ask “the pretties” – hair and makeup or, alternately, wardrobe. These are the people on any movie set who really know what’s happening to whom and why. If it’s dirty laundry you want, you’ve come to the right place!

When Things Get “Intimate”

“Hurry up and wait” perfectly sums up life on a film or TV set. Lots of mad rushing about, lots of sitting around waiting. That equals time to talk, gossip, shoot the shit and confess even. One of the wardrobe department’s jobs on any set is to do actual dirty laundry. Whether people know it or not, their dirty laundry tells on them.

In today’s episode of the podcast, we welcome Randall Thropp. Listeners to season one of the How Not To Make A Movie Podcast remember Randall’s stories about Crypt. He also worked on the Bordello reshoots when we returned to Los Angeles.

As you’ll hear (and see), Randall tells a lot of great stories. We’ll talk about a mutual mentor, the under-appreciated documentary filmmaker Greg Shuker (he pretty much invented cinema verite single handedly). And, we’ll talk about “Who’s Afraid Of Baby Jane” (Randall worked on the remake)… “The Strip”… “Tony & Tina’s Wedding”… “The Brady Bunch” movies and “The Shining” (Mick Garris’s remake). Also, we’ll talk about Randall’s work with the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Museum. It’s awesome – and well worth a visit, maybe even several!.     

And we will talk actual dirty laundry.

If you really want to know what’s happening on any film or TV set, the last people you should ask are the executives. We know nothing of value. We may have a pretty good fix on where the budget is, but we have no idea who’s sleeping with whom. Film and TV sets are emotionally overwrought places where people form intense bonds for short periods of time. Very conducive to creativity and having affairs, terrible for sustaining actual grown up relationships. If you really want to know who’s forming intense bonds, having affairs and sleeping around, you have to go ask “the pretties” – hair and makeup or, alternately, wardrobe. These are the people on any movie set who really know what’s happening to whom and why. If it’s dirty laundry you want, you’ve come to the right place.

Hurry Up And Wait

“Hurry up and wait” perfectly sums up life on a film or TV set. Lots of mad rushing about, lots of sitting around waiting. That equals time to talk, gossip, shoot the shit and confess even. One of the wardrobe department’s jobs on any set is to do actual dirty laundry. Whether people know it or not, their dirty laundry tells on them.

In today’s episode of the podcast, we welcome Randall Thropp. Listeners to season one of the How Not To Make A Movie Podcast remember Randall. He was Crypt’s wardrobe supervisor. He told the story in season one about working on the Bordello of Blood reshoots in Los Angeles. The experience was so awful that Randall briefly quit the movie biz.

Spoiler alert: he came back.

Dream Projects & Dream Jobs

We’ll also talk about our mutual friend the award winning documentary filmmaker Greg Shuker. Randall has stories from the set of the “Who’s Afraid of Baby Jane” remake starring the Redgrave sisters, Lynn and Vanessa. He has stories about working on “Tony & Tina’s Wedding”, Mick Garris’ remake of “The Shining” and, of course, “Tales From The Crypt”.

Randall will discuss his current work with Paramount Pictures Wardrobe Archive. It’s his dream job come to life! Randall’s working with the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Museum (it’s awesome!) on an exhibit featuring The Godfather movies.     

Along the way? We’ll talk plenty of dirty laundry.

Gil Adler, Alan Katz & Todd Masters talk movie monsters.

Welcome to our Halloween podcast – How NOT To Make A (Monster) Movie. One of the masters of movie make up special effects is our very good friend Todd Masters. We’re sure you remember Todd vividly from Season One of The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast. Todd became Tales From The Crypt’s permanent in-house effects guy starting season four. He created the monsters in Demon Knight – now considered a classic horror movie. And, when our talented but inexperienced special effects team in Vancouver began to crash and burn, Todd was the reinforcement we sent to save the day. Todd Masters really is a movie monster master.

If you like monster movies – if you like special effects period – you’ll enjoy the hell out of this conversation. For starters, we talk a fair amount of “Tales From The Crypt”. How could we not? Todd talks about some of his very favorite make up effects from Crypt. One he’s especially proud of? Steve Buscemi’s squished eyeball in the “Forever Ambergris” episode.

Of High Stakes & Butt Steaks

Sometimes it can be “murder” getting a make up special effect to work right. Great effects take time and money – which, unfortunately, one doesn’t always have in the heat of production battle. There’s a very real “seat of the pants” element to makeup special effects – even great ones. The stakes are always high.

We’ll also talk about working with directors like William Friedkin, Bob Hoskins, Walter Hill, Bob Zemeckis, Larry Wilson, Gary Fleder and the under-appreciated but incredibly talented Bill Malone.

Roger Daltrey asks “Where’s my nose?”

Where do these ideas come from? What makes otherwise normal people obsess on depicting gore so it looks utterly real? To that end, we’ll talk how Todd crafted some of Crypt’s most exquisitely gory effects – like the squished eyeball, the tattoo that comes to life in “On A Dead Man’s Chest” and the “butt steak” from “What’s Cookin”.

Todd will also talk a little about his work on “Yellowjackets”.

Ultimately, this is a conversation between old friends, talking shop. And monsters. Enjoy!

Steve de Souza has even more stories to tell and they’re epic.

This episode picks up where E4 left off. And then it gets even more epic. Listening to episode 3 is not mandatory. It wouldn’t hurt, but this one stands on its own. It’s a big episode in more ways than one. It covers a lot of incredible territory from the making of classic feature films “48 Hrs” and “Die Hard” to “Commando” to “Streetfighter”. Steve de Souza has a story (or two or three).

If you’re a fan of the movie “Die Hard”, this episode is going to make you smile. For starters, Steve takes us way behind the scenes on the making of this classic movie. “Die Hard” is a bona fide classic. The National Film Registry selected “Die Hard” (along with 824 other films) “for preservation because of their cultural, historical or aesthetic significance”. If you had told Steve – or anyone involved in making “Die Hard” – that people would even remember it 30 years later, they’d have been thrilled. More to the point, if you had told them that “Die Hard” would be some peoples’ go-to Christmas movie? They’d have wondered what you were smoking. It wouldn’t even be legal now.

Is “Die Hard” A Christmas Movie?

Steve’s erudite, fully researched (he’s got bells and whistles!), mini-presentation compares “Die Hard” to “White Christmas” and asks the question “which one is the real Christmas movie?”

The “Die Hard” vs “White Christmas” comparison chart. Which movie’s the real Christmas movie?

That part of the podcast would be worth the price of admission (if we charged any).

Dads From The Crypt

In keeping with its epic status, the interview also features our friend JASON STEIN (of Dads From The Crypt) joining the interview firing squad. With Jason aboard, we talk about Steve writing and directing “Streetfighter” and working with actor Raul Julia on his last feature film (before succumbing to stomach cancer in 1994). We’ll also talk about Steve’s work on “Tales From The Crypt”.

Crypt fans and aficionados consider Steve’s episode – “Carrion Death” – among the very best episodes ever. Jason has questions.

Finally, Steve will fill us in on what he’s working on now. Since he got here, Steve’s been one of the busiest people in all of Show Biz. He never stopped.

It’s EPIC!

Among the cast of characters in this episode: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Kyle McLachlan, Sheena-Queen-of-the-Jungle and even ELON MUSK!  Working at the peak of the entertainment industry can put a person in contact with almost anyone.  

As we said – an epic episode with an epic guest. If you love movies and moviemaking, this is both a treat and a master class. We repeat what we said: Steve de Souza has a story.

Our good friend Roger Nygard makes his bread and butter editing and directing TV. Shows like Grey’s Anatomy, The League, Who Is America, Veep and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But, Roger’s passion – the thing that drives him creatively – is making documentaries. That’s part of what motivated him to write his new book “THE DOCUMENTARIANS: The Way to a Successful and Creative Professional Life in the Documentary Business“. Roger’s first documentary out of the gate was the raging success “TREKKIES” about, well, Trekkies.

From there, he went on to make Trekkies 2 and documentaries about The Nature Of Existence, The Truth About Marriage and The Comedy Store.

Roger’s interviewed an incredibly wide range of people for his movies. He’s tackled deep, provocative subjects. Throw in the DIY nature of making documentaries and you have to figure that when Roger sat down and wrote a book about how to make documentaries? Inevitably it was going to be not just meticulous, thorough and exhaustive, but entertaining-as-hell, too.

A lot of the stories Roger uses for illustration come from the making of “Trekkies”. As you’ll hear, Roger has always been a note-taker. It’s one of his suggestions about how to be a successful documentarian.

In fact, Roger is filled with great suggestions about how to make documentaries or even just movies and TV shows in general. And every single lesson he learned, came with a great story to go with it.

And it’s all right there on the page.

If you live in LA or will be in LA on Monday September 23 at 7:00 pm? Roger’s having a book launch party at West Hollywood’s BOOK SOUP!

And all you have to do be part of it? Just show up! If only the rest of life was that easy…

Steve da Souza Has A Story

In this episode of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast”, we sit down with a master storyteller: writer/director/producer Steve de Souza. You may not know Steve’s name, but you definitely know his work: 48 Hrs, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Commando, Streetfighter, Judge Dredd, Beverly Hills Cop 2. Steve practically invented the modern action picture. He’s one of a handful of writers in the “Two Billion Dollars Club”. Those are writers whose collective work has brought in over two billion bucks. Steve’s made a lot of people a lot of money telling a lot of stories. Funny thing is? You’ll never hear another story like Steve’s. Steve de Souza has a story all right!

The Crypt Angle

Gil and I first met Steve when he wrote and directed an episode of “Tales From The Crypt” during our first season on the show. In “Carrion Death”, Kyle Maclachlan plays a murderous bank robber who’s on the run after a heist goes bad. He tries to escape a relentless motorcycle cop who chases him across the desert. It’s pretty much a one-man show; Kyle’s very good. For Steve, it was one more highlight in a career filled with them.

The Genesis Of A Jewmaican

In this, part one of our interview with Steve, he’ll tell his own genesis story including why he refers to himself as a proud “Jewmaican”. You and I may have family histories, Steve has a family saga that includes a pirate. Did we mention that Steve de Souza has a story?

We’ll follow Steve from the moment he realized he wanted to be a movie maker to the moment he began to achieve it. He epitomizes the “anything can happen” nature of show business like few others. There’s no better illustration than Steve’s first week in LA. He went from zero to sixty in record time. It’s a hell of a story!

Before he became one of the screenwriting gods, Steve conquered television. He wrote for The Gemini Man, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, V, Super Carrier and Knight Rider. TV taught Steve to be quick and good. And how to tell all kinds of stories.

So, settle in for Part One of a real treat as Steve de Souza tells his story.

Check em out!

In this episode of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast: Horror Stories From The Movie Making Trenches”, we sit down with one of the biggest casting directors in the business, Victoria Burrows. Or, as we prefer to put it, we go “Casting About With Victoria Burrows”.

In season one of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast, we spent a long, long, long time talking about casting. If you remember (or, if you don’t), casting was among our most significant failures while making “Bordello Of Blood”. That is, how we cast our three leads. Or, rather, how our executive producer Joel Silver cast our three leads. Joel was our boss. He had final cut. Though we had three terrific actors in mind, Joel had ideas of his own and that’s where we went.

To be honest, “Bordello Of Blood” was never going to be a horror classic (or even a semi-classic like “Demon Knight” is). But, had we cast the movie the way Gil Adler (the movie’s director), Victoria Burrows (our casting director) and I (its co-writer and producer) originally imagined, it absolutely would have been better.

As “Bordello of Blood” demonstrates, cast your movie or TV show wrong and you’re doomed.

Headshots

As Victoria tells it, the day she realized she wanted to be a casting director was the day she found herself. Casting is (most of) her life. Animal rescue also is very important to Vic; she talks about that passion (and what listeners can do to help support this very worthy cause). She also talks about softball.

For years (before the pandemic), Victoria hosted a yearly pickup softball game/birthday party at Rancho Park in West LA. Six, seven, eight hundred people showed up every year including lots of celebrities. Here’s a blog post written by one of the event’s attendees.

Hopefully, while we’re casting about with Victoria Burrows, you’ll get to know her, too. Hanging with Vic is always a pleasure!

With Guest David Brecher What’s funny is… Life!

The creative process is entirely unpredictable. Even creatives who genuinely aspire to produce greatness every time out can’t predict that they will produce greatness. It’s always a crap shoot. So it is with podcasts as it is with movies and with TV shows. In this episode, Gil and I set out to talk about “writing funny” with Gil’s old friend DAVID BRECHER. David’s worked with and around comedians his whole career. He toured for years with Bette Midler. He’s well versed in everything funny. That includes Life, There’s nothing funnier than Life.

Turns out, what’s really funny is the paths we all took to show biz success.

Gil began his professional life as a production accountant working for a guy named Sid Finger in New York. Gil produced plays. He produced a reading early on with a very young unknown named Robert De Niro. And he produced a very funny show that he brought over from the Edinburgh Theatre Festival called “El Grande De Coca Cola”.

“El Grande de Coca Cola was the first show Alan ever saw in New York. The circle is complete!

Meet Our Friend David Brecher

At present, David owns a teleprompter company that provides teleprompters (and David as the teleprompter’s operator) for, among other topline projects, “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” and “Saturday Night Live”. Did we mention that David’s been around funny people most of his life? Running teleprompters for many of them the past few years has given David some fascinating insights. Funny people are notoriously unhappy. It’s probably related somehow.

From Off Broadway to Australia, from Hollywood to the Carnegie Deli, from Sid Caesar to The Crypt Keeper to Superman Returns. This one goes a lot of different places and covers a lot of ground. Life is endlessly funny. But, what’s really funny is how fast it goes.

Meet The Crypt Keeper’s keepers (clockwise from upper left) – Gil Adler, Alan Katz, John Kassir, Kevin Yagher.

First of all, it’s good to be back for a second season! Better still to be back with company. As we kick off Season Two of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast”, we really do become a “we”. Former creative partners Alan Katz and Gil Adler are now current creative partners! One of the bonus content features coming to this site very soon will be inside dope on the various creative projects we’re working on together. But that’s content for another day. Today’s content is special all by itself. Today we bring you “THE Crypt Keeper Interview”. The Crypt Keeper interview that’s never been had before. Hands down, the best Crypt Keeper interview ever!

Not Just Any Crypt Keeper Interview

In today’s episode, the four people responsible for creating and producing one of the world’s most iconic characters discus how that happened. The cool part? We’ve never had this conversation together. Ever.

But, it’s about time we did.

First, Meet Alan & Gil

In Season One of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast”, Alan and Gil told their stories of how they got involved in doing “Tales From The Crypt”. The stops along the way included “The Hitchhiker“, “Freddy’s Nightmares: The Nightmare On Elm Street TV Series“, “Vietnam War Story” and “Children Of The Corn II“. As Alan and Gil describe, Life doesn’t really begin until you’ve got your own Joel Silver stories.

Fans of Joel Silver stories from season one rejoice! There’s never an end to Joel Silver stories!

Meet Kevin Yagher

It would surprise most people to learn how exactly The Crypt Keeper came to be. First, there was KEVIN YAGHER’s inspired puppet. By the time Kevin and Crypt stumbled on each other, Kevin’s career had already intersected with Gil’s a few times. Both worked on “The Hitchhiker” and “Freddy’s Nightmares: The Nightmare On Elm Street TV Series”. Kevin insists that, for him, getting Crypt was an accident of fate – and the physical location of his monster shop. Kevin then tells the story of how he auditioned all the actors who read for The Crypt Keeper. A couple of famous actors were sure they’d nailed the part. Kevin disagreed. And then John Kassir walked in the door…

Meet John Kassir

The instant Kevin heard JOHN KASSIR‘s voice, he recognized it as the Crypt Keeper’s. Want to experience a treat? Listen to John Kassir talk about how he created the Crypt Keeper’s unmistakable voice and the CK’s now world famous laugh. You’ll never watch “The Wizard Of Oz” the same way ever again.

As with all the stories we tell on this podcast, no one in show biz is safe. Why, in this episode, we’ll even drag in James Remar, Steven Spielberg and the enti...

Are you looking for your next great podcast fix! Maybe you’re a little fried on true crime stories or you need a break from politics for two seconds. Sound familiar? Then have I got the podcast for you! In season one of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast”, we told the story of “The Making Of Bordello Of Blood” – a horror movie nobody wanted to make. Actually, making Bordello was scarier than anything in Bordello!

If you haven’t heard season one yet, we highly recommend it.

Now, in season two, we expand the franchise. “Horror stories from across the movie-making trenches”. More painful personal stories of movie-making craft turning into crap.

S2E1 – THE Crypt Keeper Interview

We’re super excited about Season Two’s premier episode! We have a conversation that’s never been had before between the four people responsible for creating Tales From The Crypt’s iconic Crypt Keeper.

It’s true! The four people responsible for creating the Crypt Keeper have never spoken together before about creating the Crypt Keeper. We’ve never discussed the fact that none of us own a bit of him. Not Kevin Yagher who built the puppet. Or John Kassir who voices him. Not the podcast’s co-host Gil Adler who produced and directed the Crypt Keeper segments. And not me – the guy who put all those words and terrible puns into the CK’s animatronic mouth.

HBO’s “Tales From The Crypt” was unique in its time. The ad slogan “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” came about during the show’s very first cast and crew screening. Someone in the audience said it. To this day, “Crypt” remains incredibly popular. Everyone keeps trying to revive it (M. Night Shyamalan tried most recently). As important as the EC comics are to the franchise, when people think of “Tales From The Crypt”, they don’t think of the comics first, they think of The Crypt Keeper. He’s everything. And, for the first time ever, we’re going to talk about how that happened.

If you love movies or if stories about movie-making are catnip to you, if you just love funny stories period, you are gonna love this podcast. Did I mention there’ll be plenty of inside dirt?

“The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast: Horror Stories From The Movie Making Trenches”. Check it out at “How-not-to-make-a-movie-dot-com (separated by dashes except for dot-com). Or find us wherever you go to find your favorite podcasts!

How movie making craft turns to crap

Hi, this is Alan Katz and have I got a podcast for you! It’s the absolutely true, jaw-dropping story about Hollywood sausage-making told from the sausage point of view. You’ll hear about big stars with even bigger egos and Hollywood producers behaving like psychopaths. Thrill to waves of wretched excess, buckets of bad attitude and great, steaming piles of truly terrible behavior.

In this podcast, you’ll observe people doing things that normal people just don’t do.

A Love For Movie Making Craft

But, this also is a story about a very real love for movie-making told by movie makers. It’s about what happens when craftspeople find their craft suddenly turning into crap.

Twenty-five years ago, the creative team behind HBO’s hit horror series “Tales From The Crypt” set out to make three “Crypt” branded feature films for Universal Pictures. The first film out the gate – “Demon Knight” – was highly successful! But something bizarre happened on the way to the Crypt team putting out a second successful feature film. We hit a wall – and the damned wall hit back!

Did We Mention We Have Stars?

“The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast” is a brutally honest, personal expose about what happens when Hollywood movie making goes horribly off the rails. Before we’re done, everyone from Sly Stallone to Joel Silver to Corey Feldman to Tom Hanks, to Dennis Miller to Billy Friedkin to Bob Zemeckis will play a part. And that’s just for starters!

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll plotz! The last one I guarantee. It’s a Yiddish word that means “enjoy”. If you like podcasts about famous people and movies and everyone acting crazy – you’re gonna love “The How NOT To Ma...

It must be a movie monster, it won’t die!

With this episode, I’m going to bring Season 1 of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast” to an end – but only because there’s a sequel coming – a Season Two of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast”! It’ll be about the same thing but sorta different! Before I get too deep into sequels though, I need to finish with all the old business first. I’ve still got a few last Season 1 stories to tell.

Music From The Crypt

When we were running “Tales From The Crypt“, one of the elements that mattered a lot to Gil was music. Gil has mentioned that he starts his “directing process” by trying to imagine what the music would be. It sets an important tone in his head. Literally. Gil reached out to feature film composers. In part, that was because our mandate was “don’t look or sound like a TV show!” When we made Crypt, TV shows sounded one way and feature films sounded another.

Gil brought in big name feature composers like Chris Boardman (“The Color Purple”), Jay Ferguson (“Terminator”), James Horner (“Titanic”) and Alan Silvestri (“Forrest Gump”). We got those feature composers to do our “dumb little TV show”. Actually, getting them often just involved picking up the phone. Everyone wanted to “do” Crypt.

It had a “mystique”.

Hiring Superman

The first Crypt episode Gil directed was called “What’s Cookin“. It’s about a couple who own a failing cafe. When their landlord goes to evict them, the homeless guy who sweeps up for them steps in “to help”. When the couple show up the next day, expecting to be locked out, instead, they find the doors open and a pile of fresh steak in the fridge. Unsure what this means, the wife throws a steak onto the grill and the smell brings more customers in the door than they’ve ever had. Success! She throws more steaks onto the grill. The problem – the steaks all came from the landlord who’s hanging in the meat locker in back!

Having executive producers like Joel Silver, Bob Zemeckis, Walter Hill and Dick Donner gave us huge advantages when it came to casting. Dick Donner – director of “The Omen“, “

As you’ve probably gained from listening to this podcast, working for Joel Silver was an adventure. So, if you like stories about Joel, you’re gonna love this episode.

The Joel Silver Fan Club

In this one, we tell the story of the time our boss, Joel Silver, directed an episode of HBO’s “Tales From The Crypt“. The episode, “Split Personality” stars Joe Pesci and Joey Pantoliano. It’s not half bad! But making it with Joel in the director’s chair – that’s a story!

It’s not surprising that stories about Joel seize the imagination. As we discuss in the podcast, show business has always attracted larger than life people. If you either don’t have an ego to match or the personality to live with such egos, show biz ain’t for you. Everything that makes a Joel Silver (or working for him) entertaining, also makes him hard to work with. And for.

But, even in an industry filled with Tasmanian Devil-like personalities, Joel’s stands out. It can be soul-destroying working for people like Joel. It can be exhilarating too. The strange thing is – for all the bizarre, unbelievable stories we tell here about Joel? Most of us would work with him again.

It ain’t the money. It’s the creative buttons Joel pushes. Underneath the chaos, there’s an artist. I don’t know how else to explain it…

Now, as this podcast has described, working with first-time directors wasn’t new to us. We prided ourselves on working as seamlessly with the first timers our executive producers sometimes asked us to “school” as we did with veterans like Billy Friedkin and John Frankenheimer. But, none of the first time directors we worked with posed quite the challenges that working with our boss Joel Silver did – especially to Gil Adler.

More Great Crypt Stories!

Once we start talking about directors, it’s hard to shut up.

We talk actors, too. Among the many names that’ll pop up: Joe Pesci, Buck Henry, Gary Fleder, Russell Mulcahy, George Burns and Jan de Bont.

We’ll also tell a story about iconic actor Joey Pantoliano and how Joey gave me a literal haircut on the set of an episode of “The Outer Limits” that we did together. I have photos to prove it really happened, too!

Actor Joey Pantoliano gives me a style on the set of “The Outer Limits”

The “martini” usually means it’s quittin’ time!

The classic Martini is simple. Elegant. Ice cold gin or vodka with a whisper of vermouth. It’s the perfect end of the day cocktail. This episode will feature another kind of cocktail – a lively conversation wherein the Dads From The Crypt will interview Tales From The Crypt.

Dads From The Crypt

First, let me introduce the Dads From The Crypt – my partners in crime on this podcast. The Dads are a lovely group of Tales From The Crypt fans (who also happen to be dads). They do a really delightful podcast (called “Dads From The Crypt” where 1) they review all 93 episodes of Crypt one at a time, and 2) give parenting advice.

When DFTC’s Jason Stein first told me that? I knew I had to work with the group.

First, Jason interviewed me for an episode of his podcast. Then, he asked if I was up for another interview – this one about “Bordello of Blood”.

“Jason,” I said, “The story of Bordello’s making is more than just one podcast. It’s…” and I stopped as the inspiration dawned on me – “…a podcast unto itself“.

And here we are.

A Change Of Plans!

In movie-making lingo, the “martini” is the last shot of the day. Originally, this was going to be the final episode of the podcast but, things changed. More episodes happened. A season two is coming! Well get to that.

In the meantime – I’ll savor this martini as I slip into a chair for my Dads From The Crypt interview. Then we’ll serve up a whole pitcher of martinis as the rest of the “Tales From The Crypt” crew (Gil Adler, Victoria Burrows, Ed Tapia, Todd Masters, Greg Melton, Randall Thropp and Todd Masters) sit down for interviews, too.

A guy named Cody Whitehouse coined the movie making term “martini” in 1989. The idea: “the next shot will be out of a glass”. That won’t be the case here, with this episode, the next “shot” will come from the Dads From The Crypt.

The official “Bordello Of Blood” cast & crew photo

Get a bunch of people together who worked on a project and they’ll have stories. That’s what this one is – backstage stories from “Tales From The Crypt”. How to describe the experience of making “Tales From The Crypt“… It was unique, for starters!

Back in the 1990’s when we made Crypt, the feature world was the feature world and the TV world was the TV world. The two didn’t intersect the way they do now. Occasionally, a TV star like John Travolta or Robin Williams would break through and cross over. Once they made it to features, they never looked back at TV.

And a feature actor who did a TV series? The obvious question was when’s the retirement party?

That isn’t how the entertainment world is now. These days, TV is the creative skunk works.

We knew while we were making “Crypt” that it was a special experience. But, it wasn’t until we’d all had careers and lives after Crypt that we could fully appreciate just how special doing “Crypt” was. For starters, anthologies aren’t like other TV shows. Each episode is a thing unto itself. Whereas a regular series has standing sets and regular characters, an anthology episode has to invent a whole world every time out. It’s a staggering but amazing challenge. It produces a whole other set of backstage stories.

Great anthologies are transcendent. “The Twilight Zone” is the gold standard. If anything, that’s what we aspired to. But, as important as the stories are, it’s the host who ties it all together. With Crypt, the Crypt Keeper was everything. For better or worse, during the six years I worked on Crypt, I wrote every word the Crypt Keeper ever said. Boy, could I tell some backstage stories about that guy!

In all honesty, not every episode of “Tales From The Crypt” is a gem. Some are a little hard to watch, But some episodes? They still make us incredibly proud that we made them.

In this episode, we put the band back together to talk about Crypt – and spin a few tales about the making of “Tales”. And we’ll put you right in the room with us!

Welcome to another in our series of “TALES FROM THE CRYPT” reunions. This episode’s guest – JOHN LEONETTI – isn’t just a great director of photography and director, he’s from one of HOLLYWOOD’S LEGACY FAMILIES. His dad FRANK LEONETTI was a sought after gaffer who helped light THE WIZARD OF OZ and SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN. John’s brother MATT LEONETTI DP’d movies like POLTERGEIST, FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, COMMANDO and JAGGED EDGE. While John would go on to DP and direct movies like THE CONJURING and ANNABELLE, John’s really here to celebrate the thing we all have in common: TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

We’ve said on the podcast repeatedly what a remarkable experiencing it was making Crypt.

How Crypt Changed TV

With hindsight, we can now see all the many ways in which Crypt really was remarkable. And remarkably influential. Crypt changed television because Crypt changed HBO.

Before Crypt, back in the 1990’s, the feature film world and the TV world were two separate things.

One could – like Robin Williams or Tom Hanks – go from TV into features. But, if you were going from movies into TV? Your career was dying.

The first two original series at HBO – First And Ten and Dream On – were basically regular TV shows but with tits and the word “fuck” thrown in.

Then Crypt executive producers – Joel Silver, Dick Donner, Walter Hill and Bob Zemeckis approached HBO with an idea to do little horror movies every week as a TV show – all based on a classic comic book from the 1950’s.

How Crypt Changed HBO

John Kassir – the voice of the Crypt Keeper – tells a story (he told it, in fact, on this podcast) about the cast and crew screening of the first three episodes just before the show premiered.

Some crew guys – having just seen the first episode – were talking amongst themselves. “Wow,” says one, “That’s great TV!”

“It’s not TV,” says the crew guy next to him, “It’s HBO”.

The two HBO executives in the row ahead suddenly turn and look back. They just heard HBO’s new ad slogan – and HBO’s new way of seeing itself.

When it comes to how Crypt “saw” itself, one of the key people responsible was JOHN LEONETTI. He was director of photography on eleven episodes including some of the very best.

In fact, John Leonetti DP’d Season One, Episode One, the very first Crypt episode ever: Walter Hill’s amazing “The Man Who Was Death”.

Conjuring Annabelle

After Crypt, John made a name for himself as both a DP and a director of horror. His success putting James Wan’s vision onto the screen in THE CONJURING got John the gig directing ANNABELLE.

As you’ll also hear, John grew up living and breathing the movies – cameras especially. His family’s been in the movie business almost from its start.

Remember how John’s dad Frank (before he opened a hugely successful film equipment rental house) was a gaffer at MGM.? He worked on movies like WIZARD OF OZ and SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN. Well, ironically, one of the Crypt episode’s John DP’d was “STRUNG ALONG” which starred DONALD O’CONNER. From SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN.

See? It comes full circle.

The guy’s not just a Tales From The Crypt Alum, he’s a movie legacy.

Here’s John – and our Crypt reunion…   

The Cutting Room Floor is legendary in Hollywood. Whole careers have happened there. In fact, there’s a whole weird history in Hollywood of scenes and actors who famously never made “the cut”. Kevin Costner, for instance, was entirely cut out of “The Big Chill“. He plays Alex – the guy who’s funeral all the other characters are attending. In that vein, this episode is about scenes rescued from the cutting room floor

Video and DVD’s changed everything. One could rent or buy the studio’s cut or “The Director’s Cut”. Finally, the director could put out the extended movie they envisioned with all the scenes the studio cut out. Often that was great. Sometimes though you saw the studio’s wisdom.

Film v Video

Back then, we shot on film, cut on digital then transferred back to film for the release. Digital editing began in 1985 when Quantel produced its limited “Harry” compositor. Things got rolling two years later (1987) when Avid released its Avid/1 Media Composer. Cutting on video was revolutionary of course. You could see dissolves and freeze frames in real time. Before, you’d see dissolves laid out in yellow grease paint drawn across the literal film.

Filming the movie gets all the attention. But, it won’t be until we deliver all the filmed footage to the editing suite – and the editor performs their magic – that it will become “a movie”. Or a TV show.

And it can blow your mind what exactly can happen in an editing suite. There’s a story in this episode about executive producer Bob Zemeckis cobbling together a scene we never shot. He took scraps from the cutting room floor to imply a lesbian sexual encounter between Angie’s character and Erika’s. One pickup shot was all it took to marry it all together in the audience’s head.

That simple cross (filmed using two extras instead of the actors) ties it together perfectly. It really is like seeing how magic tricks work. And at the hands of a magician – our boss Bob Zemeckis.

Ain’t Podcasting Grand!

To be absolutely honest, I hadn’t planned to include an episode like this when I laid out the podcast initially. I knew as I interviewed Gil Adler and Ed Tapia and Greg Melton and Victoria Burrows and Todd Masters and Colleen Nystedt (and Randall Thropp – Randall is a podcast unto himself he’s got so many stories!) that they were giving me way more incredible content than I could possibly use. I figured I’d be the only one who ever knew such gold even existed.

But,...

As the production of “Bordello Of Blood” stumbled toward its climax, we knew we’d leave Vancouver with an unfinished movie in hand. That was ironic because our unfinished movie had finished one relationship (between Sly Stallone and Angie Everhart) and was on its way to finishing another – the decade-long creative one between Alan Katz and Gil Adler. Endings are never pretty.

In this episode, things don’t so much go from bad to worse as settle into a soul-sucking certainty that the project is doomed.

On the bright side (if there was one), at least we weren’t keeping a secret from Angie any more. We had all grown fond of Angie and sympathetic to her after Sly Stallone unceremoniously dumped her in the middle of a working day. Talk about unhappy endings!

Can This Please, Please Be Over?

Tensions between cast members was high. Corey Feldman felt disrespected by Dennis Miller. So did Erika Eleniak and all of the day players – all Canadian. There was even more tension between Dennis and our Canadian crew. The crew had soured on Dennis almost as soon as he’d arrived in Vancouver. First, because he was rude. Second, because he was rude to them for being Canadian. That was weird because Dennis was married to a Canadian from Vancouver! What really annoyed the crew though was having to switch their weekends in order to accommodate Dennis and his HBO TV show’s shooting schedule.

There’s actual fisticuffs between the cast. The crew begins to desert us in droves. And, so we realize too late to do anything about it, there’s not nearly enough night time to make our shooting days. Night time in at the height of summer this far north lasts about four hours.

You’d think a bunch of savvy filmmakers would have considered that. Oh, how wrong you’d be.

Ultimately, Bordello would leave Vancouver uncompleted. And the Crypt creative team was more broken than we realized. Indeed – endings are never pretty.

But, boy, can they make for a great story! And, this being a Hollywood story, there are even a few twists and turns along the way – and an actual “Hollywood ending”.

In a horror movie, makeup special effects are everything. Get them wrong and your audience will hate you. It’s just how the horror business is: no guts, no glory.

If Freddy Krueger had looked like 1953’s “Robot Monster” (with a gorilla body and a deep sea diver helmet head – with antennas), the whole “Nightmare On Elm Street” series would have flopped. Freddy’s backstory is interesting and the “dream logic rules” are truly terrifying, but if Freddy looks dopey rather than terrifying? Nothing else will matter. The audience will hate him (in the wrong way) and hate the movie in every other way.

Nothing is more important to a horror movie than its makeup special effects.

When Special Makeup Effects Aren’t “Special” Enough

We live and die (ironically) by the quality, the craftsmanship, the authenticity and the sheer OMG-ness of how well we create the illusion of gore. Some of my fondest memories from “Tales From The Crypt” involve me, “Tales'” make up guru Todd Masters and a stack of pathology textbooks. Oh, how we would cackle, the two of us, as we leafed through those pathology textbooks, looking for examples of extreme physical mayhem to put on screen. Unfortunately, agreeing to pay Dennis Miller a million bucks (half a million more than was in our budget for the lead) forced us to leave Todd back in Los Angeles.

In place of Todd, we took a leap of faith and entrusted our horror movie’s makeup special effects – our bread and butter – to an untried local team up in Vancouver.

That’s where this episode begins: we’ve realized that our local makeup special effects team – talented and willing as they are – needs help.

We call in Todd Masters. But there’s only so much he can do with a bus that’s already careening toward a cliff. Meanwhile, Dennis wants to be anywhere but the set. Erika doesn’t want to play the role she’s playing. And Sly finally cuts it off with Angie – leaving her an emotional wreck.

And then Joel comes for another visit!

We had turned into one of those horror movies. the kind where there’s way more horror in making the movie than ever makes it onto the screen.

Welcome To Vancouver…

This episode also could be called “Location, Location, Location!” Where you shoot your movie makes a huge difference. One surefire way to turn craftsmanship into crap is to shoot somewhere you have no organic reason to be. For “Bordello of Blood”, that location was Vancouver.

Like the script for “Dead Easy”, “Bordello of Blood” took place in the South. But, whereas “Dead Easy” mostly took place in and around New Orleans (incredibly atmospheric), “Bordello” took place in a South that was completely generic. Actually, the entire rationale for even thinking it takes place in the South is the word “Bordello” in the title.

There’s nothing in the script that says the titular bordello has to be in Sarasota or Savannah. I suspect we made it the South out of deference to “Dead Easy”, a project we were all still mourning. Our decision to keep the movie in a Southern location while deciding to shoot up north wasn’t based on anything. I guess we figured that doing something for a poor reason beat doing something for no reason.

Vancouver is a fantastic place to make movies, TV shows, content, music – whatever! Between Gil and I, we’ve worked a ton in Vancouver. But, there are reasons to take a project to a location like Vancouver and reasons to not do that. This episode of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast: The Making Of Bordello Of Blood”, starts with the unit’s arrival in “Rain City” – a location we should never have visited.

If We’re Shooting, It Must Be Thursday

At “Tales From The Crypt“, filming always began on a Thursday. Bordello also began shooting on a Thursday. We’ll explain why. But, before we started shooting, we still have casting issues.

Some are courtesy of our executive Producer Joel Silver. His three choices were all producing unexpected ripple effects. Our star, Dennis Miller won’t speak any of the lines written for him (and we can’t blame him).

Our female lead, Erika Eleniak, doesn’t want to play “those kinds” of roles anymore (after having accepted a part in a movie called “Bordello of Blood”).

And Angie Everhart, the super model/actress playing our villain (who got the role because she was engaged to Sylvester Stallone who’s shooting a movie just to the south in Seattle – with the same executive producer), doesn’t know what everyone else on our set knows: her fiancee – Stallone – is cheating on her on his movie set in Seattle.

Can We Go Home Now?

Meanwhile, our production team can’t find any of the southern US locations called for in the script in Vancouver, the northern Canadian city where we chose to make the movie. Our gung-ho but inexperienced (local) special effects team suddenly makes us nervous; they ask us how to make fake...

How you cast your movie IS your movie

In movies and theater and TV shows – in anything that hires actors – casting is the most important creative decision the director will make. Even where a director puts the camera will make no difference if the actors working the other side of the camera are wrong for their roles. Casting can be so tricky that even if you get all the actors but one cast correctly? The one bad actor will ruin the entire story. They’ll be the only actor anyone ever thinks about.

Right For The Role

From a director’s point of view, sometimes casting is “fate and destiny more than a director’s skill and talent.” Steven Spielberg said that and he’s shockingly right. In theory, casting is ninety percent of any director’s work. Sure, sure – in movies and TV shows, the director has to worry about where to put the camera, too, but even perfect camera placement will mean nothing if the actors the camera is photographing are wrong for their roles.

Sometimes, in movies, casting is fate. Ronald Reagan was Warner Bros original choice to play Rick, the hero of Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart was an afterthought.

How does one know when an actor is right for a role? Can one tell if an actor is wrong? Sometimes those choices are hard to discern. Sometimes they’re as clear as a heart attack.

“Bordello Of Blood”

As we geared up to make Bordello of Blood, we had three solid actors in mind for our leads. We never made an offer to a one of them because Joel Silver, our larger-than-life executive producer, had ideas of his own for the leads. And reasons of his own for having those ideas.

In a horror movie, the lead’s important but the villain is more important than anything. “Tales'” first feature, “Demon Knight” had an excellent villain in Billy Zane. Billy’s bad guy is funny, terrifying and relentless – perfect for a “Tales From The Crypt” movie. In “Dead Easy”, we would have had a complex villain caught between two worlds – this one and the afterlife – with the villain so desperate to get back to this world, he doesn’t care that it would cost the soul of his son. “Bordello’s” villain – Lilith – had no particular end game in mind. That came around to bite us in the end – like a vampire prostitute.

Fade In

The “How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast” tells the story of Hollywood sausage making but from the sausage’s POV. It’s a story of outsized egos, misused power, wasted money and utter foolishness. Of bad behavior and even worse behavior. Of grown ups acting like inmates running the asylum. Of bullshit winning the day. It’s about dedicated film-makers and the larger-than-life impresarios they work for. It’s about what happens when craftspeople see their craft turn into crap.

“TALES FROM THE CRYPT”

“Tales From The Crypt” was one of the HBO’s early hits. It put some of Hollywood’s biggest movie producers on TV via a TV series. Back in the 1990’s the feature world was the feature world and the TV world was the TV world. But Crypt brought the two worlds together to make an anthology based on the classic 1950’s horror comics published by EC Comics. The show had no standing sets or characters. Every episode was its own little feature film – with feature film stars.

A L Katz, the Crypt Keeper & Gil Adler – making movies instead of sausage

Alan Katz and Gil Adler joined the Crypt team after its second season. Crypt’s third season was supposed to be its last. But, Alan and Gil reinvigorated not only the Crypt franchise, they reinvigorated the Crypt Keeper, too. Before their first season as Crypt’s producers was over, HBO ordered more seasons of “Tales From The Crypt” sausage.

More success followed. Universal Studios ordered three Crypt branded feature films (more sausage still!). The Crypt team’s first feature produced the successful “Demon Knight” starring Billy Zane, Jada Pinkett-Smith and William Sadler. As the team prepared to make the second mandated Crypt feature, circumstances beyond their control suddenly conspired against them.

“DEAD EASY” PLEASURE BECOMES “BORDELLO OF BLOOD” PAIN

The team spent six months working on a psychological thriller script called “Dead Easy”. With Universal’s approval, they spent months in New Orleans finding locations and setting up shop.

But, three weeks before starting formal prep (the production schedule was tied to a Halloween release date a year away), Universal canceled “Dead Easy”. Instead, they handed the film makers a whole other script called “Bordello Of Blood” – with the very same production schedule. That meant they had three weeks to revise and then start shooting a script none of them had ever seen before.

What happened next – the production of “Tales From The Crypt Presents Bordello Of Blood” – would make a train wreck look tidy. It’s what happens when sausage-making replaces movie-making. From the casting of its stars to the choice of shooting in Vancouver, every decision the creative team made backfired on them horribly. When you do things for all the wrong reasons, nothing good happens. You end up making a horror movie where the making of the movie is more horrifying than anything in the movie.

But, ultimately, “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast” is really about a creative relationship – how it started, how “Bordello of Blood” ended it – and how a podcast –...

There’s a whole Hollywood history of scenes and characters – whole endings even – that never made it to the final cut. Back in the days when we all shot on film – as with Bordello of Blood – pieces of story and character really did end up on the floor. There’s a story in this episode about executive producer Bob Zemeckis cobbling together scraps TAKEN from the cutting room floor to imply a relationship between two characters that we absolutely never shot.

Such is the magic of editing.

To be absolutely honest, I hadn’t planned to include an episode like this when I laid out the podcast initially. I knew as I interviewed Gil and Ed and Greg and Victoria and Todd and Colleen (and Randall – Randall’s a podcast unto himself he’s got so many stories!) that they were giving me way more incredible content than I could possibly use; I figured I’d be the only one who ever knew such gold even existed.

But, hey, podcasts, ya know?

In a sense, this episode really is a monster made up of spare parts. Don’t be afraid! It won’t hurt you. Much…

The official “Bordello Of Blood” crew photo

As the production of “Bordello Of Blood” stumbled toward its climax, we knew we’d leave Vancouver with an unfinished movie in hand. That was ironic because our unfinished movie had finished one relationship (between Sly Stallone and Angie Everhart) and was on its way to finishing another – the decade-long creative one between Alan Katz and Gil Adler. Endings are never pretty.

In this episode, things don’t so much go from bad to worse as settle into a soul-sucking certainty that the project is doomed.

On the bright side (if there was one), at least we weren’t keeping a secret from Angie any more. We had all grown fond of Angie and sympathetic to her after Sly Stallone unceremoniously dumped her in the middle of a working day. Talk about unhappy endings!

Can This Please, Please Be Over?

Tensions between cast members was high. Corey Feldman felt disrespected by Dennis Miller. So did Erika Eleniak and all of the day players – all Canadian. There was even more tension between Dennis and our Canadian crew. The crew had soured on Dennis almost as soon as he’d arrived in Vancouver. First, because he was rude. Second, because he was rude to them for being Canadian. That was weird because Dennis was married to a Canadian from Vancouver! What really annoyed the crew though was having to switch their weekends in order to accommodate Dennis and his HBO TV show’s shooting schedule.

There’s actual fisticuffs between the cast. The crew begins to desert us in droves. And, so we realize too late to do anything about it, there’s not nearly enough night time to make our shooting days. Night time in at the height of summer this far north lasts about four hours.

You’d think a bunch of savvy filmmakers would have considered that. Oh, how wrong you’d be.

Ultimately, Bordello would leave Vancouver uncompleted. And the Crypt creative team was more broken than we realized. Indeed – endings are never pretty.

But, boy, can they make for a great story! And, this being a Hollywood story, there are even a few twists and turns along the way – and an actual “Hollywood ending”.

In a horror movie, makeup special effects are everything. Get them wrong and your audience will hate you. It’s just how the horror business is: no guts, no glory.

If Freddy Krueger had looked like 1953’s “Robot Monster” (with a gorilla body and a deep sea diver helmet head – with antennas), the whole “Nightmare On Elm Street” series would have flopped. Freddy’s backstory is interesting and the “dream logic rules” are truly terrifying, but if Freddy looks dopey rather than terrifying? Nothing else will matter. The audience will hate him (in the wrong way) and hate the movie in every other way.

Nothing is more important to a horror movie than its makeup special effects.

When Special Makeup Effects Aren’t “Special” Enough

We live and die (ironically) by the quality, the craftsmanship, the authenticity and the sheer OMG-ness of how well we create the illusion of gore. Some of my fondest memories from “Tales From The Crypt” involve me, “Tales'” make up guru Todd Masters and a stack of pathology textbooks. Oh, how we would cackle, the two of us, as we leafed through those pathology textbooks, looking for examples of extreme physical mayhem to put on screen. Unfortunately, agreeing to pay Dennis Miller a million bucks (half a million more than was in our budget for the lead) forced us to leave Todd back in Los Angeles.

In place of Todd, we took a leap of faith and entrusted our horror movie’s makeup special effects – our bread and butter – to an untried local team up in Vancouver.

That’s where this episode begins: we’ve realized that our local makeup special effects team – talented and willing as they are – needs help.

We call in Todd Masters. But there’s only so much he can do with a bus that’s already careening toward a cliff. Meanwhile, Dennis wants to be anywhere but the set. Erika doesn’t want to play the role she’s playing. And Sly finally cuts it off with Angie – leaving her an emotional wreck.

And then Joel comes for another visit!

We had turned into one of those horror movies. the kind where there’s way more horror in making the movie than ever makes it onto the screen.

Our guest today is both a friend and a co-worker. John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer. After 9-11, John was part of the CIA’s covert team tasked with tracking down Al Qaeda’s leadership.

Abu Zubaydah

In March 2002, Pakistani forces with CIA support captured the man we thought was Al Qaeda’s number three: a man with the nom de guerre ABU ZUBAYDAH.

For the first 60 hours that we had Abu Zubaydah – as he recovered from severe wounds suffered during his capture, John Kiriakou was his handler.

He built up a relationship with Abu Zubaydah. A degree of trust.  

Ultimately, Abu Zubaydah provided significant intelligence though, in the end, he wasn’t the number three at Al Qaeda. Despite those two facts, we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times.

John deplored the Agency’s turn toward torture. Heart sick over it, he ratted out the program. And then spent 18 months in federal prison for doing it.

John’s written a number of books about his CIA experiences. He’s made TV shows. And (here’s where the co-worker part kicks in) he and I are about to drop a new podcast together called PRISONER EX.

“Prisoner Ex” is about people who are in prison – here in America and around the world – but who shouldn’t be. The podcast’s mission is to tell all these stories, but, more importantly, its mission is to empower the audience and tell them specifically what they can do to help make these prisoners ex ex prisoners.

A Quick Note

A quick note for those who watch us on our YouTube channel – Alas, our visual elements this week – beyond this intro – are gonna be kinda sparse merging on non-existent.

We only ever think we have the technology. In point of fact, the technology always has us.

But. hey – on the bright side, if you experience this podcast sonically, you’ll never know the difference.

So – if you like spies and spy stuff, boy, is this episode’s right in your wheelhouse.  Even if you don’t, this episode will open your eyes.

Here’s John…

Welcome To Vancouver…

This episode also could be called “Location, Location, Location!” Where you shoot your movie makes a huge difference. One surefire way to turn craftsmanship into crap is to shoot somewhere you have no organic reason to be. For “Bordello of Blood”, that location was Vancouver.

Like the script for “Dead Easy”, “Bordello of Blood” took place in the South. But, whereas “Dead Easy” mostly took place in and around New Orleans (incredibly atmospheric), “Bordello” took place in a South that was completely generic. Actually, the entire rationale for even thinking it takes place in the South is the word “Bordello” in the title.

There’s nothing in the script that says the titular bordello has to be in Sarasota or Savannah. I suspect we made it the South out of deference to “Dead Easy”, a project we were all still mourning. Our decision to keep the movie in a Southern location while deciding to shoot up north wasn’t based on anything. I guess we figured that doing something for a poor reason beat doing something for no reason.

Vancouver is a fantastic place to make movies, TV shows, content, music – whatever! Between Gil and I, we’ve worked a ton in Vancouver. But, there are reasons to take a project to a location like Vancouver and reasons to not do that. This episode of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast: The Making Of Bordello Of Blood”, starts with the unit’s arrival in “Rain City” – a location we should never have visited.

If We’re Shooting, It Must Be Thursday

At “Tales From The Crypt“, filming always began on a Thursday. Bordello also began shooting on a Thursday. We’ll explain why. But, before we started shooting, we still have casting issues.

Some are courtesy of our executive Producer Joel Silver. His three choices were all producing unexpected ripple effects. Our star, Dennis Miller won’t speak any of the lines written for him (and we can’t blame him).

Our female lead, Erika Eleniak, doesn’t want to play “those kinds” of roles anymore (after having accepted a part in a movie called “Bordello of Blood”).

And Angie Everhart, the super model/actress playing our villain (who got the role because she was engaged to Sylvester Stallone who’s shooting a movie just to the south in Seattle – with the same executive producer), doesn’t know what everyone else on our set knows: her fiancee – Stallone – is cheating on her on his movie set in Seattle.

Can We Go Home Now?

Meanwhile, our production team can’t find any of the southern US locations called for in the script in Vancouver, the northern Canadian city where we chose to make the movie. Our gung-ho but inexperienced (local) special effects team suddenly makes us nervous; they ask us how to make fake blood.

...

We hereby call to order the first meeting of the How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast’s SHAUN OF THE DEAD FAN CLUB! How’s that for a SLICE OF FRIED GOLD? Leading today’s meeting will be our guest writer and entertainment journalist CLARK COLLIS author of the definitive (and only as far as we know) book about the making of Shaun Of The Dead, “YOU’VE GOT RED ON YOU“.

While we’re on the subject, Clark’s book is terrific! It’s chock-a-block with incredible detail about not just a seminal horror-comedy (not a crowded field) but it’s auteur – EDGAR WRIGHT.

This could just as easily be the first meeting of the Edgar Wright Fan Club, too. Synthesizing the COEN BROTHERS (especially RAISING ARIZONA), MARTIN SCORSESE and QUENTIN TARANTINO, Wright walks onto a movie set the movie already envisioned inside his head. His task: convey that vision to the craftspeople collaborating with him. Clearly, he’s figured out how to do that (and it took figuring out as our conversation will detail). Wright has a distinct visual style that’s visceral, driven and irresistible.

His film making finger is always measuring the movie’s pulse.

Or showing us a character’s literal thought process as they puzzle out a solution to the zombie problem bearing down on them.

So, if you’re already a hard core Shaun Of The Dead fan, or just a casual admirer, grab a chair and settle in. This one bites deeply into the flesh.

But, you know what they say: “Safety first, Shaun!”