An occasional interview podcast, including conversation with filmmakers and film-lovers, discussing the movies that have made a difference in their lives. Hosted by the author of the popular film books, “Fast, Cheap and Under Control” and “Fast, Cheap and Written That Way.”
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John: Can you remember your very first mystery, a movie, book, TV show, play, a mystery that really captured your imagination?
Jeffrey: You know, I was thinking about this, and what came to mind was a Disney movie called Emile and the Detectives from 1964. So, I would have been six or seven years old. It's based on a series of German books by Eric Kastner about a young man named Emile and his group of friends who think of themselves as detectives. So, I remember that—I know that might've been the first film. And obviously it's not a play because, you know, little kids don't tend to go to stage thrillers or mysteries and, “Daddy, please take me to Sleuth.
But there was a show called Burke's Law that I really loved. Gene Barry played Captain Amos Burke of the Homicide Division in Los Angeles, and he was very rich. That was the bit. The bit was that Captain Burke drove around in a gorgeous Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, and he had a chauffeur. And every mystery was structured classically as a whodunit.
In fact, I think every title of every episode was “Who Killed Cock Robin?” “Who Killed Johnny Friendly?” that kind of thing.
And they would have a cast of well-known Hollywood actors, so they were all of equal status. Because I always think that's one of the easiest ways to guess the killer is if it's like: Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy, Derek Jacobi, Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy. It's always going to be Derek Jacobi.
John: Yeah, it's true. I remember that show. He was really cool.
Jim: Well, now I'm going to have to look that up.
Jeffrey: It had a great score, and he would gather all of the suspects, you know, at the end of the thing. I think my favorite was when he caught Paul Lynde as a murderer. And, of course, Paul Lynde, you know, kept it very low key when he was dragged off. He did his Alice Ghostly impersonation as he was taken away.
John: They did have very similar vocal patterns, those two.
Jeffrey: Yep. They're kind of the exact same person.
Jim: I never saw them together.
John: You might have on Bewitched.
Jim: You're probably right.
Jeffrey: Well, I might be wrong about this, either Alice Ghostly or Charlotte Ray went to school with Paul Lynde. And Charlotte Ray has that same sound too. You know, kind of warbly thing. Yes. I think they all went to Northwestern in the late 40s and early 50s. So maybe that was a way that they taught actors back then.
John: They learned it all from Marion Horne, who had the very same warble in her voice. So, as you got a little older, were there other mysteries that you were attracted to?
Jeffrey: Yeah. Luckily, my parents were very liberal about letting me see things that other people probably shouldn't have. I remember late in elementary school, fifth grade or so, I was reading Casino Royale. And one of the teachers said, “Well, you know, most kids, we wouldn't want to have read this, but it's okay if you do.”
And I thought, what's that? And I'm so not dangerous; other kids are, well they would be affected oddly by James Bond? But yeah, I, I love spy stuff. You know, The Man from Uncle and The Wild Wild West, all those kind of things. I love James Bond.
And very quickly I started reading the major mysteries. I think probably the first big book that I remember, the first novel, was The Hound of the Baskervilles. That's probably an entrance point for a lot of kids. So that's what comes in mind immediately.
Jim: I certainly revisit that on—if not yearly basis, at least every few years I will reread The Hound of the Baskervilles. Love that story. That's good. Do you have, Jeffrey, favorite mystery fiction writers?
Jeffrey: Oh, sure. But none of them are, you know, bizarre Japanese, Santa Domingo kind of writers that people always pull out of their back pockets to prove how cool they are. I mean, they're the usual suspects. Conan Doyle and Christie and Chandler and Hammett, you know, all of those. John Dickson Carr, all the locked room mysteries, that kind of thing.
I can't say that I go very far off in one direction or another to pick up somebody who's completely bizarre. But if you go all the way back, I love reading Wilkie Collins.
I've adapted at least one Wilkie Collins, and they read beautifully. You know, terrifically put together, and they've got a lot of blood and thunder to them. I think he called them sensation novels as opposed to mysteries, but they always have some mystery element.
And he was, you know, a close friend of Charles Dickens and Dickens said that there were some things that Collins taught him about construction. In those days, they would write their novels in installments for magazines. So, you know, the desire or the need, frankly, to create a cliffhanger at the end of every episode or every chapter seems to have been born then from a capitalist instinct.
John: Jeff, I know you studied acting. What inspired the move into playwriting?
Jeffrey: I don't think I was a very good actor. I was the kind of actor who always played older, middle aged or older characters in college and high school, like Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler, those kind of people. My dream back in those days was to play Dr. Dysart in Equus and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth. So, I mean, that was my target.
And then I moved to New York, and I auditioned for things and casting directors would say, “Well, you know, we actually do have 50 year old actors in New York and we don't need to put white gunk in their hair or anything like that. So, why don't you play your own age, 22 or 23?” And I was not very good at playing 22 or 23.
But I'd always done some writing, and a friend of mine, Graham Slayton, who was out at the Playwrights Center here, and we'd gone to college together. He encouraged me to write a play, you know, write one act, and then write a full length. So, I always say this, I think most people go into the theater to be an actor, you know, probably 98%, and then bit by bit, we, you know, we peel off. We either leave the profession completely or we become directors, designers, writers, what have you. So, I don't think it’s unnatural what I did. It’s very rare to be like a Tom Stoppard who never wanted to act. It's a lot more normal to find the Harold Pinter who, you know, acted a lot in regional theaters in England before he wrote The Caretaker.
Jim: Fascinating. Can we talk about Columbo?
Jeffrey: Oh, yes, please.
Jim: This is where I am so tickled pink for this conversation, because I was a huge and am a huge Peter Falk Columbo fan. I went back and watched the episode Ashes To Ashes, with Patrick McGowan that you created. Tell us how that came about.
Jeffrey: I too was a huge fan of Columbo in the 70s. I remember for most of its run, it was on Sunday nights. It was part of that murder mystery wheel with things like Hec Ramsey and McCloud, right? But Columbo was the best of those, obviously. Everything, from the structure—the inverted mystery—to thw guest star of the week. Sometimes it was somebody very big and exciting, like Donald Pleasence or Ruth Gordon, but often it was slightly TV stars on the skids.
John: Jack Cassidy,
Jim: I was just going to say Jack Cassidy.
Jeffrey: But at any rate, yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I remembered in high school, a friend and I doing a parody of Columbo where he played Columbo and I played the murderer of the week. And so many years later, when they rebooted the show in the nineties, my father died and I spent a lot of time at the funeral home with the funeral director. And having nothing to say to the funeral director one day, I said, “Have you got the good stories?”
And he told me all these great stories about, you know, bodies that weren't really in the casket and what you can't cremate, et cetera. So, I suddenly had this idea of a Hollywood funeral director to the stars. And, via my agent, I knew Dan Luria, the actor. He's a close friend or was a close friend of Peter's. And so, he was able to take this one-page idea and show it to Peter.
And then, one day, I get a phone call and it's, “Uh, hello Jeff, this is Peter Falk calling. I want to talk to you about your idea.” And they flew me out there. It was great fun, because Falk really ran the show. He was the executive producer at that point. He always kind of ran the show. I think he only wrote one episode, the one with Faye Dunaway, but he liked the idea.
I spent a lot of time with him, I'd go to his house where he would do his drawings back in the studio and all that. But what he said he liked about it was he liked a new setting, they always liked a murderer and a setting that was special, with clues that are connected to, say, the murderer's profession. So, the Donald Pleasant one about the wine connoisseur and all the clues are about wine. Or the Dick Van Dyke one, where he's a photographer and most of the clues are about photography. So, he really liked that. And he said, “You gotta have that first clue and you gotta have the pop at the end.”
So, and we worked on the treatment and then I wrote the screenplay. And then he asked McGoohan if he would do it, and McGoohan said, “Well, if I can direct it too.”
And, you know, I've adored McGoohan from, you know, Secret Agent and The Prisoner. I mean, I'd say The Prisoner is like one of my favorite television shows ever. So, the idea that the two of them were going to work together on that script was just, you know, it was incredible.
John: Were you able to be there during production at all?
Jeffrey: No, I went out there about four times to write, because it took like a year or so. It was a kind of laborious process with ABC and all that, but I didn't go out during the shooting.
Occasionally, this was, you know, the days of faxes, I'd get a phone call: “Can you redo something here?” And then I'd fax it out. So, I never met McGoohan. I would only fax with him.
But they built this whole Hollywood crematorium thing on the set. And Falk was saying at one point, “I'm getting pushback from Universal that we've got to do all this stuff. We've got to build everything.” And I was saying, “Well, you know, 60 percent of the script takes place there. If you're going to try to find a funeral home like it, you're going to have all that hassle.” And eventually they made the point that, yeah, to build this is going to cost less than searching around Hollywood for the right crematorium,
And it had a great cast, you know, it had Richard Libertini and Sally Kellerman, and Rue McClanahan was our murder victim.
Jim: I'll tell you every scene that Peter Falk and Mr. McGoohan had together. They looked to me as an actor, like they were having a blast being on together.
Jeffrey: They really loved each other. They first met when McGoohan did that episode, By Dawn's Early Light, where he played the head of the military school. It's a terrific episode. It was a great performance.
And although their acting styles are completely different, You know, Falk much more, you know, fifties, methody, shambolic. And McGoohan very, you know, his voice cracking, you know, and very affected and brittle. But they really loved each other and they liked to throw each other curveballs.
There are things in the, in the show that are ad libs that they throw. There's one bit, I think it's hilarious. It's when Columbo tells the murderer that basically knows he did it, but he doesn't have a way to nail him. And, McGoohan is saying, “So then I suppose you have no case, do you?” And Falk says, “Ah, no, sir, I don't.” And he walks right off camera, you know, like down a hallway. And McGoohan stares off and says, “Have you gone?” And none of that was scripted. Peter just walks off set. And if you watch the episode, they had to dub in McGoohan saying, “Have you gone,” because the crew was laughing at the fact that Peter just strolled away. So McGoohan adlibs that and then they had to cover it later to make sure the sound wasn't screwed up.
Jim: Fantastic.
John: Kudos to you for that script, because every piece is there. Every clue is there. Everything pays off. It's just it is so tight, and it has that pop at the end that he wanted. It's really an excellent, excellent mystery.
Jim: And a terrific closing line. Terrific closing line.
Jeffrey: Yeah, that I did right. That was not an ad lib.
Jim: It's a fantastic moment. And he, Peter Falk, looks just almost right at the camera and delivers that line as if it's, Hey, check this line out. It was great. Enjoyed every minute of it. Can we, um, can I ask some questions about Sherlock Holmes now?
Jeffrey: Oh, yes.
Jim: So, I enjoyed immensely Holmes and Watson that I saw a couple summers ago at Park Square. I was completely riveted and had no, absolutely no idea how it was going to pay off or who was who or what. And when it became clear, it was so much fun for me as an audience member. So I know that you have done a number of Holmes adaptations.
There's Larry Millet, a St. Paul writer here and I know you adapted him, but as far as I can tell this one, pillar to post was all you. This wasn't an adaptation. You created this out of whole cloth. Am I right on that?
Jeffrey: Yes. The, the idea came from doing the Larry Millet one, actually, because Steve Hendrickson was playing Holmes. And on opening night—the day of opening night—he had an aortic aneurysm, which they had to repair. And so, he wasn't able to do the show. And Peter Moore, the director, he went in and played Holmes for a couple of performances. And then I played Holmes for like three performances until Steve could get back.
But in the interim, we've sat around saying, “All right, who can we get to play the role for like a week?” And we thought about all of the usual suspects, by which I mean, tall, ascetic looking actors. And everybody was booked, everybody was busy. Nobody could do it. So that's why Peter did it, and then I did it.
But it struck me in thinking about casting Holmes, that there are a bunch of actors that you would say, you are a Holmes type. You are Sherlock Holmes. And it suddenly struck me, okay, back in the day, if Holmes were real, if he died—if he'd gone over to the falls of Reichenbach—people probably showed up and say, “Well, I'm Sherlock Holmes.”
So, I thought, well, let's take that idea of casting Holmes to its logical conclusion: That a couple of people would come forward and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes,” and then we'd wrap it together into another mystery. And we're sitting around—Bob Davis was playing Watson. And I said, “So, maybe, they're all in a hospital and Watson has to come to figure out which is which. And Bob said, “Oh, of course, Watson's gonna know which one is Holmes.”
And that's what immediately gave me the idea for the twist at the end, why Watson wouldn't know which one was Holmes. So, I'm very grateful whenever an idea comes quickly like that, but it depends on Steve getting sick usually.
Jim: Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. If it's ever staged again anywhere, I will go. There was so much lovely about that show, just in terms of it being a mystery. And I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I don't want to give too much away in case people are seeing this at some point, but when it starts to be revealed—when Pierce's character starts talking about the reviews that he got in, in the West End—I I almost wet myself with laughter. It was so perfectly delivered and well written. I had just a great time at the theater that night.
Jeffrey: It's one of those things where, well, you know how it is. You get an idea for something, and you pray to God that nobody else has done it. And I couldn't think of anybody having done this bit. I mean, some people have joked and said, it's kind of To Tell the Truth, isn't it? Because you have three people who come on and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” Now surely somebody has done this before, but Nobody had.
Jim: Well, it's wonderful.
John: It's all in the timing. So, what is the, what's the hardest part about adapting Holmes to this stage?
Jeffrey: Well, I suppose from a purist point of view‑by which I mean people like the Baker Street Irregulars and other organizations like that, the Norwegian Explorers here in Minnesota‑is can you fit your own‑they always call them pastiches, even if they're not comic‑can you fit your own Holmes pastiche into the canon?
People spend a lot of time working out exactly where Holmes and Watson were on any given day between 1878 and 1930. So, one of the nice things about Holmes and Watson was, okay, so we're going to make it take place during the three-year interregnum when Holmes is pretending to be dead. And it works if you fit Holmes and Watson in between The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House, it works. And that's hard to do.
I would say, I mean, I really love Larry Millett's book and all that, but I'm sure it doesn't fit, so to speak. But that's up to you to care. If you're not a purist, you can fiddle around any old way you like. But I think it's kind of great to, to, to have the, the BSI types, the Baker Street Irregular types say, “Yes, this clicked into place.”
Jim: So that's the most difficult thing. What's the easiest part?
Jeffrey: Well, I think it's frankly the language, the dialogue. Somebody pointed out that Holmes is the most dramatically depicted character in history. More than Robin Hood, more than Jesus Christ. There are more actor versions of Holmes than any other fictional character.
We’ve been surrounded by Holmes speak. Either if we've read the books or seen the movies or seen any of the plays for over 140 years. Right. So, in a way, if you're like me, you kind of absorb that language by osmosis.
So, for some reason, it's very easy for me to click into the way I think Holmes talks. That very cerebral, very fast, sometimes complicated syntax. That I find probably the easiest part. Working out the plots, you want them to be Holmesian. You don't want them to be plots from, you know, don't want the case to be solved in a way that Sam Spade would, or Philip Marlowe would. And that takes a little bit of work. But for whatever reason, it's the actor in you, it's saying, all right, if you have to ad lib or improv your way of Sherlock Holmes this afternoon, you know, you'd be able to do it, right? I mean, he really has permeated our culture, no matter who the actor is.
Jim: Speaking of great actors that have played Sherlock Holmes, you adapted a movie that Ian McKellen played, and I just watched it recently in preparation for this interview.
Having not seen it before, I was riveted by it. His performance is terrific and heartbreaking at the same time. Can we talk about that? How did you come to that project? And just give us everything.
Jeffrey: Well, it's based on a book called A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen, and it's about a very old Sherlock Holmes in Surrey, tending to his bees, as people in Holmesland know that he retired to do. And it involves a couple of cases, one in Japan and one about 20 years earlier in his life that he's trying to remember.
And it also has to do with his relationship with his housekeeper and the housekeeper's son. The book was given to me by Anne Carey, the producer, and I worked on it probably off and on for about five years.
A lot of time was spent talking about casting, because you had to have somebody play very old. I remember I went to meet with Ralph Fiennes once because we thought, well, Ralph Fiennes could play him at his own age,‑then probably his forties‑and with makeup in the nineties.
And Ralph said‑Ralph was in another film that I'd done‑and he said, “Oh, I don't wear all that makeup. That's just far too much.” And I said, “Well, you did in Harry Potter and The English Patient, you kind of looked like a melted candle.” And he said, “Yes, and I don't want to do that again.”
So, we always had a very short list of actors, probably like six actors in the whole world And McKellen was one of them and we waited for him to become available And yeah, he was terrific. I'll tell you one funny story: One day, he had a lot of prosthetics, not a lot, but enough. He wanted to build up his cheekbones and his nose a bit. He wanted a bit, he thought his own nose was a bit too potatoish. So, he wanted a more Roman nose. So, he was taking a nap one day between takes. And they brought him in, said, “Ian, it's time for you to do the, this scene,” and he'd been sleeping, I guess, on one side, and his fake cheek and his nose had moved up his face. But he hadn't looked in the mirror, and he didn't know. So he came on and said, “Very well, I'm all ready to go.” And it was like Quasimodo.
It's like 5:52 and they're supposed to stop shooting at six. And there was a mad panic of, Fix Ian's face! Get that cheekbone back where it’s supposed to be! Knock that nose into place! A six o'clock, we go into overtime!” But it was very funny that he hadn't noticed it. You kind of think you'd feel if your own nose or cheekbone had been crushed, but of course it was a makeup. So, he didn't feel anything.
Jim: This is just the, uh, the actor fan boy in me. I'm an enormous fan of his work straight across the board. Did you have much interaction with him and what kind of fella is he just in general?
Jeffrey: He's a hoot. Bill Condon, the director, said, “Ian is kind of methody. So, when you see him on set, he'll be very decorous, you know, he'll be kind of like Sherlock Holmes.” And it was true, he goes, “Oh, Jeffrey Hatcher, it's very good to meet you.” And he was kind of slow talking, all that. Ian was like 72 then, so he wasn't that old. But then when it was all over, they were doing all those--remember those ice Dumps, where people dump a tub of ice on you? You have these challenges? A the end of shooting, they had this challenge, and Ian comes out in short shorts, and a bunch of ballet dancers surrounds him. And he's like, “Alright, everyone, let's do the ice challenge.” And, he turned into this bright dancer. He's kind of a gay poster boy, you know, ever since he was one of the most famous coming out of the last 20 some years. So, you know, he was suddenly bright and splashy and, you know, all that old stuff dropped away.
He has all of his headgear at his house and his townhouse. He had a party for us at the end of shooting. And so, there's a Gandalf's weird hat and there's Magneto's helmet, you know, along with top hats and things like that. And they're all kind of lined up there. And then people in the crew would say, can I take a picture of you as Gandalf? “Well, why, of course,” and he does all that stuff. So no, he's wonderful.
Jim: You do a very good impression as well. That was great. Now, how did you come to the project, The Good Liar, which again, I watched in preparation for this and was mesmerized by the whole thing, especially the mystery part of it, the ending, it was brilliant.
How did you come to that project?
Jeffrey: Well, again, it was a book and Warner Brothers had the rights to it. And because Bill and I had worked on Mr. Holmes--Bill Condon--Bill was attached to direct. And so I went in to talk about how to adapt it.
This is kind of odd. It's again based in McKellen. In the meeting room at Warner Brothers, there was a life size version of Ian as Gandalf done in Legos. So, it was always, it'll be Ian McKellen and somebody in The Good Liar. Ian as the con man. And that one kind of moved very quickly, because something changed in Bill Condon's schedule. Then they asked Helen Mirren, and she said yes very quickly.
And it's a very interesting book, but it had to be condensed rather a lot. There's a lot of flashbacks and going back and forth in time. And we all decided that the main story had to be about this one con that had a weird connection to the past. So, a lot of that kind of adaptation work is deciding what not to include, so you can't really be completely faithful to a book that way. But I do take the point with certain books. When my son was young, he'd go to a Harry Potter movie, and he'd get all pissed off. Pissed off because he'd say Dobby the Elf did a lot more in the book.
But if it's a book that's not quite so well-known—The Good Liar isn't a terribly well-known book, nor was A Slight Trick of the Mind--you're able to have a lot more room to play.
Jim: It's a very twisty story. Now that you're talking about the book, I'll probably have to go get the book and read it just for comparison. But what I saw on the screen, how did you keep it--because it was very clear at the end--it hits you like a freight train when it all sort of unravels and you start seeing all of these things. How did you keep that so clear for an audience? Because I'll admit, I'm not a huge mystery guy, and I'm not the brightest human, and yet I was able to follow that story completely.
Jeffrey: Well, again, I think it's mostly about cutting things, I'm sure. And there are various versions of the script where there are a lot of other details. There's probably too much of one thing or another. And then of course, you know, you get in the editing room and you lose a couple of scenes too. These kinds of things are very tricky. I'm not sure that we were entirely successful in doing it, because you say, which is more important, surprise or suspense? Hitchcock used to have that line about, suspense is knowing there's a bomb under the table. And you watch the characters gather at the table. As opposed to simply having a bomb blow up and you didn't know about it.
So, we often went back and forth about Should we reveal that the Helen Mirren character knows that Ian's character is doing something bad? Or do we try to keep it a secret until the end? But do you risk the audience getting ahead of you? I don't mind if the audience is slightly ahead. You know, it's that feeling you get in the theater where there's a reveal and you hear a couple of people say, “Oh, I knew it and they guessed it may be a minute before. But you don't want to get to the point where the audience is, you know, 20 minutes or a half an hour ahead of you.
Jim: I certainly was not, I was not in any way. It unfolded perfectly for me in terms of it being a mystery and how it paid off. And Helen Mirren was brilliant. In fact, for a long time during it, I thought they were dueling con men, the way it was set up in the beginning where they were both entering their information and altering facts about themselves.
I thought, “Oh, well, they're both con men and, and now we're going to see who is the better con man in the end.” And so. when it paid off. In a way different sort of way, it was terrific for me. Absolutely.
Jeffrey: Well, and I thank you. But in a way, they were both con men.
Jim: Yes, yes. But she wasn't a professional con man.
Jeffrey: She wasn’t just out to steal the money from him. She was out for something else. She was out for vengeance.
Jim: Yes. Very good. Very, if you haven't seen it, The Good Liar folks, don't wait. I got it on Amazon prime and so can you.
Jeffrey: I watched them do a scene, I was over there for about five days during the shooting.
And watching the two of them work together was just unbelievable. The textures, the tones, the little lifts of the eyebrow, the shading on one word versus another. Just wonderful, wonderful stuff.
Jim: Yeah. I will say I am a huge Marvel Cinematic Universe fan along with my son. We came to those together and I'm a big fan of that sort of movie. So I was delighted by this, because it was such a taut story. And I was involved in every second of what was going on and couldn't quite tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were and how is this going to work and who's working with who?
And it was great. And in my head, I was comparing my love for that sort of big blow it up with rayguns story to this very cerebral, internal. And I loved it, I guess is what I'm saying. And, I am, I think, as close to middle America as you're going to find in terms of a moviegoer. And I thought it was just dynamite.
Jeffrey: It was very successful during the pandemic--so many things were when people were streaming--but it was weirdly successful when it hit Amazon or Netflix or whatever it was. And, I think you don't have to be British to understand two elderly people trying to find a relationship. And then it turns out that they both have reasons to hate and kill each other. But nonetheless, there is still a relationship there. So, I pictured a lot of lonely people watching The Good Liar and saying, “Yeah, I'd hang out with Ian McKellen, even if he did steal all my money.”
John: Well, speaking of movies, I am occasionally handed notes here while we're live on the air from my wife. And she wants you to just say something about the adaptation you did of your play, Stage Beauty, and what that process was like and how, how that process went.
Jeffrey: That was terrific because, primarily Richard Eyre--the director who used to run the National Theater and all that--because he's a theater man and the play’s about theater. I love working with Bill Condon and I've loved working with Lassa Hallstrom and other people, but Richard was the first person to direct a film of any of my stuff. And he would call me up and say, “Well, we're thinking of offering it to Claire Danes.” or we're thinking…
And usually you just hear later, Oh, somebody else got this role. But the relationship was more like a theater director and a playwright. I was there on set for rehearsals and all that.
Which I haven't in the others. No, it was a wonderful experience, but I think primarily because the, the culture of theater saturated the process of making it and the process of rehearsing it and—again--his level of respect. It’s different in Hollywood, everybody's very polite, they know they can fire you and you know, they can fire you and they're going to have somebody else write the dialogue if you're not going to do it, or if you don't do it well enough.
In the theater, we just don't do that. It's a different world, a different culture, different kind of contracts too. But Richard really made that wonderful. And again, the cast that he put together: Billy Crudup and Claire and Rupert Everett and Edward Fox and Richard Griffiths.
I remember one day when I was about to fly home, I told Richard Griffiths what a fan Evan-- my son, Evan--was of him in the Harry Potter movie. And he made his wife drive an hour to come to Shepperton with a photograph of him as Mr. Dursley that he could autograph for my son.
John: Well, speaking of stage and adaptations, before we go into our lightning round here, you did two recent adaptations of existing thrillers--not necessarily mysteries, but thrillers--one of which Hitchcock made into a movie, which are Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark. And I'm just wondering what was that process for you? Why changes need to be made? And what kind of changes did you make?
Jeffrey: Well, in both cases, I think you could argue that no, changes don't need to be made. They're wildly successful plays by Frederick Knott, and they've been successful for, you know, alternately 70 or 60 years.
But in both cases, I got a call from a director or an artistic director saying, “We'd like to do it, but we'd like to change this or that.” And I'm a huge fan of Frederick Knott. He put things together beautifully. The intricacies of Dial M for Murder, you don't want to screw around with. And there are things in Wait Until Dark having to do just with the way he describes the set, you don't want to change anything or else the rather famous ending won't work.
But in both cases, the women are probably not the most well drawn characters that he ever came up with. And Wait Until Dark, oddly, they're in a Greenwich Village apartment, but it always feels like they're really in Westchester or in Terre Haute, Indiana. It doesn't feel like you're in Greenwich Village in the 60s, especially not in the movie version with Audrey Hepburn.
So, the director, Matt Shackman, said, why don't we throw it back into the 40s and see if we can have fun with that. And so it played out: The whole war and noir setting allowed me to play around with who the main character was. And I know this is a cliche to say, well, you know, can we find more agency for female characters in old plays or old films? But in a sense, it's true, because if you're going to ask an actress to play blind for two hours a night for a couple of months, it can't just be, I'm a blind victim. And I got lucky and killed the guy. You’ve got a somewhat better dialogue and maybe some other twists and turns. nSo that's what we did with Wait Until Dark.
And then at The Old Globe, Barry Edelstein said, “well, you did Wait Until Dark. What about Dial? And I said, “Well, I don't think we can update it, because nothing will work. You know, the phones, the keys. And he said, “No, I'll keep it, keep it in the fifties. But what else could you What else could you do with the lover?”
And he suggested--so I credit Barry on this--why don't you turn the lover played by Robert Cummings in the movie into a woman and make it a lesbian relationship? And that really opened all sorts of doors. It made the relationship scarier, something that you really want to keep a secret, 1953. And I was luckily able to find a couple of other plot twists that didn't interfere with any of Knott's original plot.
So, in both cases, I think it's like you go into a watch. And the watch works great, but you want the watch to have a different appearance and a different feel when you put it on and tick a little differently.
John: We've kept you for a way long time. So, let's do this as a speed round. And I know that these questions are the sorts that will change from day to day for some people, but I thought each of us could talk about our favorite mysteries in four different mediums. So, Jeff, your favorite mystery novel”
Jeffrey:And Then There Were None. That's an easy one for me.
John: That is. Jim, do you have one?
Jim: Yeah, yeah, I don't read a lot of mysteries. I really enjoyed a Stephen King book called Mr. Mercedes, which was a cat and mouse game, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. That's only top of mind because I finished it recently.
John: That counts.
Jim: Does it?
John: Yeah. That'll count.
Jim: You're going to find that I am so middle America in my answers.
John: That's okay. Mine is--I'm going to cheat a little bit and do a short story--which the original Don't Look Now that Daphne du Murier wrote, because as a mystery, it ties itself up. Like I said earlier, I like stuff that ties up right at the end. And it literally is in the last two or three sentences of that short story where everything falls into place. Jeff, your favorite mystery play? I can be one of yours if you want.
Jeffrey: It’s a battle between Sleuth or Dial M for Murder. Maybe Sleuth because I always wanted to be in it, but it's probably Dial M. But it's also followed up very quickly by Death Trap, which is a great comedy-mystery-thriller. It's kind of a post-modern, Meta play, but it's a play about the play you're watching.
John: Excellent choices. My choice is Sleuth. You did have a chance to be in Sleuth because when I directed it, you're the first person I asked. But your schedule wouldn't let you do it. But you would have been a fantastic Andrew Wyke. I'm sorry our timing didn't work on that.
Jeffrey: And you got a terrific Andrew in Julian Bailey, but if you wanted to do it again, I'm available.
John: Jim, you hear that?
Jim: I did hear that. Yes, I did hear that.
John: Jim, do you have a favorite mystery play?
Jim: You know, it's gonna sound like I'm sucking up, but I don't see a lot of mystery plays. There was a version of Gaslight that I saw with Jim Stoll as the lead. And he was terrific.
But I so thoroughly enjoyed Holmes and Watson and would love the opportunity to see that a second time. I saw it so late in the run and it was so sold out that there was no coming back at that point to see it again. But I would love to see it a second time and think to myself, well, now that you know what you know, is it all there? Because my belief is it is all there.
John: Yeah. Okay. Jeff, your favorite TV mystery?
Jeffrey: Oh, Columbo. That's easy. Columbo.
John: I'm gonna go with Poker Face, just because the pace on Poker Face is so much faster than Columbo, even though it's clearly based on Columbo. Jim, a favorite TV mystery?
Jim:The Rockford Files, hands down.
John: Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Last question all around. Jeff, your favorite mystery movie?
Jeffrey:Laura.
Jim: Ah, good one.
John: I'm going to go with The Last of Sheila. If you haven't seen The Last of Sheila, it's a terrific mystery directed by Herbert Ross, written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins. Fun little Stephen Sondheim trivia. The character of Andrew Wyke and his house were based on Stephen Sondheim.
Jeffrey: Sondheim’s townhouse has been for sale recently. I don't know if somebody bought it, but for a cool seven point something million, you're going to get it.
John: All right. Let's maybe pool our money. Jim, your favorite mystery movie.
Jim: I'm walking into the lion's den here with this one. Jeffrey, I hope this is okay, but I really enjoyed the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies. And I revisit the second one in that series on a fairly regular basis, The Game of Shadows. I thought I enjoyed that a lot. Your thoughts on those movies quickly?
Jeffrey: My only feeling about those is that I felt they were trying a little too hard not to do some of the traditional stuff. I got it, you know, like no deer stalker, that kind of thing. But I thought it was just trying a tad too hard to be You know, everybody's very good at Kung Fu, that kind of thing.
Jim: Yes. And it's Sherlock Holmes as a superhero, which, uh, appeals to me.
Jeffrey: I know the producer of those, and I know Guy Ritchie a little bit. And, I know they're still trying to get out a third one.
Jim: Well, I hope they do. I really hope they do. Cause I enjoyed that version of Sherlock Holmes quite a bit. I thought it was funny and all of the clues were there and it paid off in the end as a mystery, but fun all along the road.
Jeffrey: And the main thing they got right was the Holmes and Watson relationship, which, you know, as anybody will tell you, you can get a lot of things wrong, but get that right and you're more than two thirds there.
Episode 201: Archivist Ari Kahan on his phenomenal Phantom of the Paradise website, The Swan Archives.
Saison 2 · Épisode 1
mercredi 10 juillet 2024 • Durée 47:32
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Ari Kahan, who assembled and oversees the most complete compendium of on-line information on Brian DePalma’s classic rock music horror classic, Phantom of the Paradise.
Do you remember when you first saw it? What were the circumstances? How old are you? What was your reaction?
ARI KAHAN: Sure. I first saw it when I was 12. It was double billed with Young Frankenstein. This would have been in early 1975, and my mom took me to see Young Frankenstein, which was okay. It was pretty good, but I was really enamored with the second feature on the bill, which was Phantom. And I've been in love with it ever since.
Episode 112: Writer/Director Nicholas Meyer on Houdini, Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Time After Time and more…
Saison 1 · Épisode 12
mercredi 15 mars 2023 • Durée 38:05
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with writer/director Nicholas Meyer about his work on the Adrian Brody “Houdini” mini-series, as well as thoughts on Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Time After Time and more.
Let's go back to the beginning. We'll start with Noah and then go to Jim. What's your earliest memory of Groucho Marx or the Marx Brothers?
NOAH
Well, for me, it started in a kind of roundabout way, when I was a very little kid. Before I could even read, I was really interested in books. And I had my collection of Dr. Seuss, and all the books that would be read to me. But what I really liked to do was go downstairs where my parents had, in the living room, bookshelves lining the walls. And their books were really interesting to me. I just knew there were secrets there, you know?
Episode 110: Re-Cutting “Raising Cain”
Saison 1 · Épisode 10
mercredi 11 janvier 2023 • Durée 29:31
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Peet Gelderblom, the Dutch filmmaker who re-cut what Brian DePalma now considers to be the Director’s Cut of “Raising Cain.”
Episode 107: Dawn Brodey and Brian Forrest on “Frankenstein” and “Dracula.”
Saison 1 · Épisode 7
mercredi 19 octobre 2022 • Durée 58:38
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Dawn Brodey and Brian Forrest, talking about the various film versions of “Frankenstein” and “Dracula.”
Dawn gave me 4.5 films to revisit: The 1931 version of Frankenstein, Frankenweenie (the feature and the short), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein.
Meanwhile, Brian assigned me the original Nosferatu, the 1931 Dracula, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, Dracula in Istanbul and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Episode 106: Writer/Director Eric Mendelsohn revisits “Judy Berlin”
Saison 1 · Épisode 6
mercredi 21 septembre 2022 • Durée 53:25
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Eric Mendelsohn, who revisits the lessons he learned while making his debut feature film, “Judy Berlin.”
That was a soundbite from “Judy Berlin,” which was written and directed by today’s guest, Eric Mendelsohn. Hello and welcome to episode 106 of The Occasional Film podcast -- the occasional companion podcast to the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. I'm the blog's editor, John Gaspard.
Episode 105: Matthew G. Anderson on the “Theater People” web series
Saison 1 · Épisode 5
mercredi 17 août 2022 • Durée 56:09
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Matthew G. Anderson about his hit web series, “Theater People.”
Did you know anything about it before you went in?
ARI KAHAN: Nothing. Nothing at all.
So, what has been the attraction for you for that film, low those many, many years ago?
ARI KAHAN: It may have just hit me at an impressionable time. But I think that, you know, being 12 and being kind of a nerd, I probably identified with Winslow and his fervent belief that if the world could only hear from his heart, and especially if all the girls in school could only hear from his heart, then they would love him and not the jerk that they always went out with.
So, there's probably some of that.
There was certainly, I do remember very, very clearly that the direction in some respect stood out to me. I had seen a lot of movies when I was 12, and I remember even today, thinking when I was 12, that there was a moment where the Phantom is rising up into the rafters in the foreground as Beef is descending in the background. And I looked at that and I thought, boy, that's complex. Anybody else would have done a shot of the Phantom starting to climb a rope, and then cut away, and then come back to him up in the rafters. This guy is trying to do things that are more interesting than he needs to and I thought that was really fun.
After seeing Phantom I went back and saw Sisters.
Which was no mean feat back then.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I know and in fact, I had to see Sisters by buying a 16-millimeter print of it. That was the only way I could. I had fixed up a couple of—this is probably a year or two later—I had fixed up a couple of 16-millimeter projectors that my school was discarding, so I could even do changeovers in my bedroom. And I got a copy of Sisters just so I could see it because it was unseeable otherwise.
Well, kudos to you for finding Sisters, because it took me a long time. I imagine it showed up at the Film society at the university or something finally. So getting to see William Findlay in a markedly different role and also seeing, oh, okay, this is a director who likes split screen. Although I probably would have gotten that from Carrie, because I'm sure I saw Carrie first. He's accused of doing stuff like that just for showing off. In fact, I think it's always for a cinematic or emotional reason. And Sisters is the best example of that. The suspense of getting rid of that dead body before they get to the door is enhanced by the fact that you're watching two things happen at the same time.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I think in Sisters and Phantom both, it works really well. And I think, and I think even DePalma would agree that it didn't work as well in Carrie. Because the split screen calls for intellectualizing on the part of the audience. And it takes you out emotionally and wasn't really working that well. I understand why he did it, because it'd be boring to like, cut to Carrie's face, cut the things happening, cut back to Carrie's face, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think both he and Paul Hirsch, the editor, feel it would have been better off to do something else.
But anyway, after Phantom, you know, every new De Palma film to come out—all the way through Domino—has been a much anticipated event for me, you know, and I'm in the theater on the first day. And there have been a couple of disappointments along the way, but by and large, it's been awesome.
Since you've seen Phantom so many times, were there any surprises that popped up over the years as you've watched again and again and things that you hadn't seen or hadn't realized?
ARI KAHAN: It took me a really long time to notice that there was a frame or two of Jessica Harper being one of the backup singers on stage when Beef’s performing life at last and only because I think it was unavoidable to use those frames. I think somebody figured out in editing that it didn't make any sense for her to be one of those backup singers and then in a white dress. So that took a while.
It also was only within the past couple of years that I realized that a lot of the sort of classical, but silent movie sounding music that I had always thought was composed by the guy who did the incidental music was actually Beethoven.
Oh, really?
ARI KAHAN: Because Beethoven's not credited.
So that little like a little violin thing that happens …
ARI KAHAN: Or when Swan is going into phoenix's dressing room. When
Winslow is escaping from prison. Well, it's Beethoven piano trios for the most part.
So, you don't need to get permission from the Beethoven estate on that…
ARI KAHAN: Well, I think that they would have had to pay the orchestra involved and I can easily imagine them omitting credit to avoid doing that. Hoping nobody would notice. And nobody did, obviously.
Until you've just brought it up.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, sorry.
That's okay. It's not, it's not our problem. One of the things that, that I found the Swan Archives to be so helpful on—well, lots of things, uh, when I discovered it years ago and I've returned to it as new things have popped up or I've dug a little deeper—was your explanation of the Swan Song debacle. As a frequent viewer of the movie. I wasn't noticing truncated shots. That I didn't notice until you showed us those shots. But obviously the mattes, particularly at the press conference, are really, really terrible. If I'm noticing them, they're bad. Can you just give us a brief history of why they had to do that?
ARI KAHAN: Sure. So, it goes to Beef electrocution. In the early seventies, there was a band called Stone the Crows, whose guitarist was a guy named Les Harvey and Peter Grant, who would later manage Led Zeppelin, managed Stone The Crows. And Les Harvey was—in a freak accident—electrocuted on stage. I think his guitar was badly grounded or something along those lines, in 1971 or 72.
And when Peter Grant learned that there was a film coming out in which a rock guitarist is electrocuted on stage, he assumed, that it was making fun of what had happened to his friend, Les Harvey. And by that time he was managing Led Zeppelin.
I should say in De Palma's defense that Beef’s electrocution shows up in early drafts of the script that were written before Les Harvey suffered his accident. So, this was life imitating art, imitating life, you know, rather than the other way around. De Palma clearly did not take that plot and probably didn't even know about what had happened to Les Harvey.
But anyway, by the time Peter Grant got wind of this, Phantom had already been shot, but not yet released. This was in the summer of 1974. And by sheer absolute sheer coincidence, Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin had just gotten a trademark on Swan Song for their record label. And the first record to come out on the Swan Song label was Bad Company's first record, and that was in somewhere around June of 1974. So that's when their trademark was perfected, and Phantom was scheduled to be released a few months later at the end of October.
And Peter Grant went to 20th Century Fox, which had just purchased Phantom from Ed Pressman and DePalma. You know, it's important for the story to know that Phantom was independently produced. It wasn't financed by Fox. Pressman and DePalma raised money to make this movie in the hopes that they would then sell it to some distributor for more than they had paid to make it.
And it turned out that there was a, quite a bidding war among several studios, which Fox won. And Fox paid more for Phantom than anyone had ever paid for an independent film to that point in history. They had very high expectations for it. So that sale had just closed, but Pressman and De Palma and everyone else hadn't been paid yet by Fox.
And of course, they had run out of money and owed everybody money, everyone who had worked on the film. So, they were in kind of a desperate situation. And Peter Grant went to Fox and said, “I'll sue you and prevent release of this film.” And the only thing that Fox could do was to tell Pressman and De Palma, you need to fix this.
And the only way they could fix it was by removing all of the references to Swan Song, so that Peter Grant wouldn't have grounds for his claim, because he obviously can't claim you can't have a film with an electrocution of a rock star. Really, all he had was the Swan Song thing.
And so that was done very, very hastily. They were still working on it in early October, even though the film was scheduled for release at the end of October. And so, basically, Fox signed a deal with Led Zeppelin saying we won't release the film with any of this Swan Song prominently shown. Which is a very stupid resolution really because Peter Grant in the end did not prevent distribution of a film with an electrocution of a rock star, which was his original concern.
All he really managed to do was mangle somebody else's.
And so the end result is that the film that we've all been watching for the last 50 years, there's a little bit cut out of it. There's some lovely crane shots that you missed because what the DePalma had done through the film was start on this Swan Song logo or the Swan name and then move away from it to whatever was going on. So that you have the impression that Swan was everywhere.
And so that whole thing was lost and, you know, as you and everybody else noticed, some of it's very noticeable, particularly the bird at the airport. Which is too bad.
I understand that you have a secret print of the film in which all those logos had been restored. In addition to fixing the crane shots and having shots that no longer have the terrible matte on them, is there anything else in that version that we wouldn't have seen before?
ARI KAHAN: It's not a secret print, really. It was just reconstructing the film the way that it was intended to be, using footage that had been assumed to have been destroyed decades ago, but which I eventually found and digitized. And then with the help of a couple of other folks, put the movie back together.
The most challenging part: there's a couple of challenging parts to that.
You know, it's not just a matter of sticking things in. The footage was without sound. And so, if you're making a scene a few seconds longer, for example, and there's music underlying that scene, what are you going to do? Are you going to start the music a little bit later? Are you going to end it a little bit earlier?
Are you going to play it a little bit slower so that it fills up these extra seconds? Are you going to loop it? Are you going to find some other piece of music that was probably intended to go there in the first place? So there's that problem.
And then the podium scene, which is the worst offender—at the airport—the original, they actually worked on the negative to put the dead bird on. And so, the original footage for that podium didn't exist. But we knew what the podium was supposed to look like, because there's a photo that was used for the German promotional campaign—created obviously months before the film is released—and that still shows the podium the way that it's supposed to look.
So, I got my friend, Steve Rosenbaum, who is a special effects supervisor. He won Oscars for Forrest Gump and Avatar, I think. And he's about to win an Emmy—I will bet you a box of donuts—he's about to win an Emmy for his work on Masters of the Air. I gave him this image and the footage that's shown, you know, in the theater normally, and he reconstructed the podium for me. So that's how we did the podium.
But the other thing that was that if you go see the film now in the theater projected from DCP, the DCP master—which is the same master that we've used for the current blu rays—it was done by a company called Reliance Media Works in Burbank. And, I don't know what 17 year olds they had working on it, but they did the coloring and grading the way it's fashionable to do when they did it, you know, 10 years ago, which was a lot of orange, teal and the blacks are crushed so that anything that's really dark gray or dark brown, just black, so that the colors pop more, but you lose a lot of the detail, and to my eye it looks terrible.
And so, I used an earlier master of the film that looks more like it looked in the 70s as the base for the reconstruction. And then color matched the replacement footage to that.
It sounds beautiful.
ARI KAHAN: It's gorgeous. The only other thing that I suppose we could have done, but didn't, is there's originally footage of Winslow's face coming out of the record press looking all mangled. And I have that footage, but I didn't put it back in because that footage that DePalma deemed not appropriate to the tone of the film that he was making. And so, since the object of this game was to restore the film to the way that he would have wanted it, I let that out.
I think that was a wise choice. You know, I talked to Pete Gelderblom, who did the Raising Cainreconstruction. And it's a beautiful piece of work that he did. He was more constrained than you, because he was only allowed to use the footage which was there, and he just had to rearrange it. He repeats one shot, but he got it as close to the original shooting script as he could. I don't think Paul Hirsch was particularly thrilled with it, but De Palma was and has referred it as his director's cut. Did De Palma see your version and did he like it?
ARI KAHAN: Yeah. I did a cast and crew sort of screening in Los Angeles and Paul Williams came to that and Archie Hahn and so on. Ed Pressman, the producer. And there was tremendous enthusiasm, because none of them had ever seen the film that they made the way that it was supposed to be.
And I sent a copy to Paul Hirsch and I'm not sure whether DePalma heard about it from Pressman or from Paul Hirsch, but he asked to see it. And I sent it to him and I got a nice note from him saying, you know, that it was great, good job, la la la, it's great to see the film the way that it was, you know, the original cut.
So. Yes, he is. Definitely. He's seen it. He's happy with it. And Ed Pressman, in particular, wanted to have that version released on home video or in some other way. And we went to Fox. This is before Disney. It was still Fox. And Fox said, well, you know, we could consider doing that under two conditions. First, Mr.
DePalma approves. Well, yes, check box checked there. He does.
And second, we made this deal with Led Zeppelin back in 1974, where we agreed not to do this. And if you can get them to waive their rights under that agreement, then yeah, sure. So, I worked with Ed Pressman and we put together a bunch of testimonials from people that we thought Led Zeppelin might respect, like Brett Easton Ellis and I think Guillermo del Toro and others, and sent a package off to Led Zeppelin through their lawyers. And God bless them, they got back to us in less than a week and said no.
At least they didn't leave you hanging.
ARI KAHAN: At least they didn't leave us hanging. That's right.
So, your archive is amazing and is hour’s worth of fun to go through it.
ARI KAHAN: It's a rabbit warren. Yeah, I wish it were a little better organized.
How did it get started? Well first, when did you start collecting memorabilia and then how did that grow into the archive?
ARI KAHAN: I started collecting memorabilia right after I saw the film when I was 12. And that was obviously pre internet and pre-eBay. And it was a lot harder to get stuff. Bt I would frequent science fiction conventions and horror conventions and comic book shops.
And there were a whole bunch of people who knew me as that kid who's always looking for Phantomstuff. And I was the kind of nerd who kept a log with the what everybody else was also looking for. And so, if I were at some convention and the guy who was collecting Olivia Newton, John's stuff, if I saw something interesting—not that there is anything interesting about it, but anyway—if I saw something interesting about Olivia Newton, John, I would run to the pay phone and call him and say, Hey, you want this? And I would pick it up for him.
And so, there was a lot of returning of favorites where there would be people who were going to cons that I wasn't going to. And if they saw Phantom stuff, they would pick it up for me and that kind of thing. And so, you know, that became the way to get the posters from every country in the world that it was released in and the lobby cards and everything else and it started filling up, taking up more and more space over time and grew into, you know, trailers and magazines and everything else.
And then when the site came out in around 2006, I put up the first version of the site. People who either had worked on the film or had something interesting would get in touch with me and say, “You know, I have this. I see you have a good home for it. Do you want it?” And of course, you know, eBay was a way to fill in some gap.
Is there, within what your current collection holds, is there a prized possession that, you know, if there was a fire and you only grabbed one of those pieces, what would you take with you?
ARI KAHAN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, in every dorm room and every apartment and every house I've ever lived in has hung John Alvin's art from the one sheet, and it's the same art that's on the cover of the soundtrack album. I just thought that was beautiful piece of art. And I think it was his second movie poster he painted. The first one would be for Blazing Saddles. And then he did Young Frankenstein, and if you look at the Young Frankenstein poster and the Phantom poster, you can see that there's a lot of stylistic similarities there.
But he went on to do, you know, E. T. and, you know, 130 odd other posters.
And at some point, he and I started corresponding and he finally said, “You know, I have something that I think you should have. Give me your mailing address.” And a few days later what showed up was his original painting, the comp painting for that poster, which he had had all this time. And so that would be the prize possession for sure.
Well, that qualifies, I think. Is there a Holy Grail out there that you're still looking for?
ARI KAHAN: The original art for the Corbin poster. Which is the “he's been maimed and framed, beaten, robbed, and mutilated.” That artwork would be a Holy Grail.
As well as, well, the Phantom's original helmet. Now, it turns out there's a couple of them, at least. And one of them Guillermo del Toro now has. He just bought the Phantom's costume after it failed to sell at auction at Bonham's. And the other helmet the Pressmanfamily has, so those would be a grail. There's a lot of things that I'm sure no longer exist that would be the grail, like, you know, the Phantom's contract.
Any number of props would be fun, but there's not very many known to still exist. I think Peter Elbling still has—or I think his son has it right now—the microphone that he used with a knife on it. And Garrett Graham still has his guitar strap, Beef’s guitar strap. And I think he may still have the plunger.
But not the antler belt?
ARI KAHAN: No, not as far as I know. That'd be tough to ship.
It would be. Yes. Dangerous to keep around the house. You could bump into it. On the site you kindly show all kinds of different memorabilia that you have or that exists around the world. And you also have a section called Inexplicable Crap. Is there one piece in there that just stands out for you as what in the world were they thinking?
ARI KAHAN: Maybe the Death Records pillow. Like I can understand why they did. They made prototypes that never went out for sale. Why anybody would want it, you know, a dead bird, probably somebody wants a dead bird pillow, but the market would be limited.
When the DVD for Phantom Palooza 2 came out, I bought that and then heard you talking somewhere about getting Jessica Harper to sing Old Souls, which is on the DVD. We just see the very end of her singing it. I'm guessing there were some technical problems or something with that.
ARI KAHAN: It wasn't technical problems. It was the Paul Williams rider, which required that the show not be recorded. And I think that midway through Jessica singing, somebody might have said, or actually I think that's an audience--t might be an audience shot thing that we have. There's probably lots and lots of cell phone video out there of the show, but nobody related to who worked on Phantom Palooza—and I was one of the people who worked on Phantom Palooza—is going to be out there distributing anything that we agreed with Paul we would not even shoot. But, but yes, Jessica was absolutely a highlight of the show there.
I was surprised that she went full force on the end of that song.
ARI KAHAN: Well, there were no plans for her to perform. And the morning of the rehearsal, I said, “Hey, Jessica, you want to go down and watch Paul rehearse?” And I took her over to the auditorium and I was hoping that, you know, seeing that and being a performer at heart, she might be inspired to maybe, you know, participate. And she decided she would do Old Souls with Paul's band. And then she went back to the hotel and practiced the song, I think, all day in her hotel room and then, you know, knocked it out of the park that night. That's how I remember it. And then she came off stage and said, you know, now I know how Mick Jagger feels.
It's a pretty stunning debut for her in that movie, to come from essentially nowhere—although she'd done things before that. And then the run that she had in the seventies, pretty unequaled when it comes to being the, um…
ARI KAHAN: The queen of cult.
Yeah. The queen of cult. And just the range, from Suspiria to My Favorite Year. You don't get a much broader range than that.
ARI KAHAN: Pennies From Heaven.
Yes, just phenomenal. Even just the wheat speech in Love and Death is worth the price of admission alone.
ARI KAHAN: She played, uh, Gary Shandling's wife on The Gary Shandling show in the last season, named Phoebe, of all things. And in, I'm pretty sure it was the last episode of that show, she's held hostage by a phantom who lives under the set, who threatens to sabotage Gary's show, unless she will sing his song. And she ends up singing his song, which turns out to be YMCA. Wearing a dress that is very, very reminiscent of the one she wore to sing Old Souls in.
And they even make a Pennies From Heaven joke. So, it's very inside baseball, I should say.
Speaking of actors from that, I've always been blown away by William Finley's performance in the movie. I think it was Paul Williams who said something like, you know, he spends three quarters of the movie acting with one eye and metal teeth, and that's all he's got. And it's just flawless and so heartbreaking.
And I'm just sorry we didn't get to see him in more movies. He's delightful in The Fury in a very small part. He's all over the early films. And I got the sense since I read somewhere that you did a eulogy for him, that you must have developed a friendship over the years.
ARI KAHAN: Yeah. And, before we get to that, you say heartbreaking, right?
And I think that that's one of the things about Phantom that was so ballsy. It’s obviously a spoof of many things, but while being a spoof, it tries to get you to care about the characters. If, if you were not, you know, devastated at the end when Winslow dies just before Phoenix recognizes that it was him all along, you know, the film has failed.
Whereas in other spoofs, you know, Rocky Horror doesn't ask you to care whether Brad and Janet will get back together after their experience or anything like that. Nobody asked you to care about the characters at all. And I think it's a huge risk that DePalma took in making a film like this: while simultaneously being a parody and a satire and a spoof and everything else, he wants you to care about the outcome.
As far as Finley, I got to know Bill a little bit towards the end of his life after meeting him at Phantom Palooza. I went to New York and spent a little time with him and now I know his wife Susan pretty well and his son Dash a little bit. And when he died, Susan asked If I would put together some kind of a video montage for the funeral, which wasn't that—it's a celebration of life was what she was calling it. And I did that. And every time I had it finished—and, you know, I had like a day and a half to do this. And then I had to take the red eye to New York from California for this, for this event—every time I had it finished, she would send me a few more pictures and I'd have to, you know, redo it.
And then she asked, could you set it to music? Could it be set to Faust? You know, okay. You know, you don't say no to a widow, right?
And I was working at the time too. So, when I finally flew to New York, I was completely exhausted. And I got to the chapel I guess a couple of hours before the ceremony was supposed to start, so that we could make sure that this thing would play on their equipment and so on.
And I’m taking a nap on one of the pews and Susan showed up with, you know, programs under her arm. And I picked up a program and saw that, right after Garrett Graham and Jessica Harper was supposed to speak, I'm supposed to speak. But I this was the first I was hearing about it. And so, I spent the first, unfortunately, the first part of the ceremony—where I really wanted to be paying full attention—kind of scrambling together what I was going to say.
I have no idea what I said at this point. I hope it did Bill justice and didn't offend anybody, but I couldn't tell you now a single word of what I ended up saying there. And it's in front of, you know, various of the icons of my childhood, right, are in that chapel. So it's kind of like all of the nightmares of going to school and realizing that there's a test in the subject that you never took, and that you're not wearing pants, and all your ex-girlfriends are there laughing at you.
Because I have my own podcast that has to do with my series of books, and like your site, I want to make it perpetual. But there's really no way to do that unless I set up a fund so that after I die they keep paying the site to keep running it. Because as soon as that site shuts down, the podcast goes away. And the same thing will happen to the archive. Whoever is hosting it, unless they're paid, it's gonna go away. I'm wondering, do you have a plan in place for all that information?
ARI KAHAN: When I go, it goes.
Oh, I feel like I set you up for that. Okay. Can I propose an alternate ending to that?
ARI KAHAN: Sure.
You essentially have a book there. You just have it in web form. You should put that together so that when it is done, when you are done, it can just be put into a book because it already reads like a book.
ARI KAHAN: People have suggested that, and I've resisted doing a book because every now and then, some new fact comes to light that shows that something I had in there was wrong. And everything in there—virtually everything—is based on conversations that I've had with participants or material that came out at the time. None of it is taken from someone else's book or anything.
So it's all fairly firsthand, but people have fallible memory. So, for example, the guy who made the phantom's helmet assured me that he had made only one. And it's crazy, because every production wants to have multiple copies of any key prop, because if something happens to the prop during shooting, shooting would have to, you know, it's an incredibly expensive problem to stop shooting waiting for another one.
But as it turns out, he's, he's wrong. He made more than one. There is more than one. And so, every now and then, I have to correct something on the site. And if I put it out in book form, these books would be wrong. Potentially, something could come out in the future that that would make something with my name on it. Wrong.
Imagine a book with a mistake. I can't imagine.
ARI KAHAN: Exactly. And I can't abide that. So, it exists in electronic form so that I can edit it and improve it.
Well, I would argue that you can do the ebooks, but that's, you know, that's your circus. It's not my circus. But you do raise an interesting question about misconceptions. I know that one of the biggest misconceptions is that it ran in Winnipeg forever and it didn't. I can—as someone who lived here in Minneapolis when Harold and Maude ran at the Westgate Theater for two and a half years—I can assure you it ran there for two and a half years, because I was there those two and a half years. So that was real. Is there another misconception out there about the movie that you just can't—like a whack a mole—get rid of?
ARI KAHAN: So many. In fact, um, I think on my FAQ page, I list some of them.
Is there an egregious one that just gets under your skin?
ARI KAHAN: Yeah. The idea that it was only popular in Winnipeg and a couple other places is just completely wrong. It was big in Japan. It eventually became a big in Los Angeles. It never did anything in New York. Where it was actually biggest was not Winnipeg, it was El Salvador, where the songs hit number one on the radio. More than once. And it was brought back and revived many times. I get more mail from El Salvador than from anybody else.
As we wrap up here, my favorite scene in the movie is the closing credits. I just love the music. I love what Paul Hirsch did with the assembly of that. And for years, I was living under the mistaken impression that in the credits, when it said Montage by Paul Hirsch, that that's what I was looking at was that montage. That's a montage.
Then I was disabused of that in an interview with him—which I clarified with him. It was very nice to get back to me on Facebook when I said, “Am I correct in my understanding that the montage in the middle of the movie, the writing montage, you never saw that until the film was done? You had to put all the timing of that together, the animation of the writing, the placement of Phoenix's face on this part of the screen, and the Phantom and that, all the dissolves, all that timing?”
And he said, “Yes it was a one-shot thing.” And I think for that he does deserve a special “Montage by Paul Hirsch,” because even today, with all the stuff we have, that would still be a challenging thing to do. And then not to be able to see the end result.
But even with that, I just still love the closing credits. It's a combination of music, it allows me to revisit all my favorite scenes in the movie and a lot of my favorite shots. Do you have a favorite scene?
ARI KAHAN: Well, I actually like those closing credits too, because most of the shots in those closing credits aren't actually in the film. Most of them are outtakes. And so, for example, in those closing credits, you have Swan splashing in the tub. There's Archie Han twirling around like this. And most of them, alternate takes. And they're clearly things that Paul Hirsch thought were charming and wanted to include that he couldn't put in the film.
I suspect that you've held 35-millimeter film in your hands and cut shot A to shot B. I've only done that in 16mm. To keep a piece of film that short, hanging on a hook somewhere going, “I know I'm going to want to use that later.” Then finding that. I don't think people today understand what skill level was involved in, you know, that sort of thing, or the TIE Fighters in Star Wars that he did, or all that connection of little pieces, and tracking that and knowing that that's going to go there and that's going to go. It's so much easier today. And you had to make firmer decisions then earlier in the process than you do now, right? And fixing things was much more arduous.
ARI KAHAN: You know, I think if they had to fix the Swan Song stuff out of Phantom and they were doing it using digital technology today, obviously, it'd be much faster and so on, but, uh, doing it on film. And having to send each change into the processing house, and then getting it back a few days later, and, uh, you know, it's a lot of work. It'd be horrible.
But favorite scenes: The Goodbye Eddie number just remains a favorite.
Do you know why? It's not fancy DePalma. It's a wide shot, two shot, a single.
ARI KAHAN: That's right. It's the most conventionally shot thing in the film, but Archie Han is just so great in it.
His delivery boy in My Favorite Year—when he does the punching—he just does the exact right thing at the right time. And I wish there'd been bigger movies with more Archie Han in them than what we got.
ARI KAHAN: So does Archie.
Okay, last question. If you take Phantom of the Paradise out of the mix, what would you say is your favorite De Palma movie?
ARI KAHAN: Well, I'm not sure that Phantom of the Paradise is my favorite De Palma movie. It is a sentimental childhood favorite. But I go back and forth between Carlito's Way, Casualties of War, Femme Fatale, Carrie. And Raising Cain.
I think that Femme Fatale is probably the one that came closest to his intention.
It's the one that I think of as being, like, the most successfully realized, and I love it for that reason. Carlito's Way is just, by, I think, any objective standard, probably his best work. Then I love Blow Out.
I'm not on the Blow Out train as much as everybody else. Maybe because it just, it goes so dark.
ARI KAHAN: That's what I love about it is the devastating ending.
I really love Peet Gelderboom's version of Raising Cain. Given all that, and given that you're 12 years old in 1974, 75, somewhere in there, and you're you're a movie freak at this point, which is a really good time in film history from that era. Is there a favorite?
ARI KAHAN: So, I was really lucky that I was when I was 15 or 16, I was working at a theater called the UC theater in Berkeley, which was a repertory house that showed a different double bill every night. And any night that I wasn't working, I was there seeing movies.
So, I saw lots and lots and lots of movies. And despite all that and all the weird stuff I saw, my favorites are probably the same things that every 70s kid's favorites were: Star Wars, Harold and Maude, The Godfather.
I loved Harold and Maude so much that I bought an old hearse at one point.
Okay, you win.
ARI KAHAN: And I didn't keep it for long. It got like, I don't know how many gallons per mile. It was just not economical to have as a car, but it was fun for a while.
I was very lucky when they hit the two-year mark here in Minneapolis, and I was a junior in high school, maybe. I happen to know the son of the local movie critic for the paper, and the critic knew that I was a big fan of Harold and Maude. And so he took me along on his press junkets. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort, got to chat with him. I got to hang out with Ruth Gordon for the day.
ARI KAHAN: The only one I can propose to top that would be when I was in high school, I was writing for the school paper. Actually, I had stopped going to high school. I was the entertainment editor for the school paper, and I had stopped going to high school. I dropped out, but I kept submitting articles to the paper. And at some point, the newspaper staff changed my title from Entertainment Editor to Foreign Correspondent.
And on the strength of that—when Tim Curry's first record, Read My Lips, came out, and he was coming to town to sign autographs at Tower Records—myself and a writer from the Berkeley Bar, which was a newspaper back then, had lunch with him around the corner from Tower Records just before he went off to do his autographing. And I was a huge Tim Curry fan. And I had to try to keep that under wraps and, you know, not ask any Rocky Horror related questions.
And that was my claim to fame until all of the Phantom nonsense started.
Nicholas Meyer: I know something about it. He was interested, the subjects that kind of absorbed his attention were the sons of passive or absent fathers. This was a topic which probably originated from his experiences with his own father, my grandfather, who was a very interesting man and a kind of a world beater, but who spent so much of his time doing what they said in The Wizard of Oz—being a philip, philip, philip, a good deed doer—that he didn't have enough time for fathering. He was not a bad man at all, quite a conscientious one. But the parenting was left to his wife and I think my father missed and was affected by not having an involved father. And I think that a colleague of my dad's said to him Houdini, that's the guy for you. And that's how he did it. I'm only sorry that he didn't live to see the two-night television series based on his book.
Jim Cunningham: I enjoyed it immensely as a Houdini fan. It was fascinating and fun and Adrian Brody is terrific, as is the woman who plays Bess. I thought I knew a lot about Houdini and there was a lot in there that I did not know. And I really enjoyed the opening to it, which suggests that it's all fact and all fiction, and it's our job to figure out which is which. How did you come to being involved with the TV mini-series about your dad's book?
Nicholas Meyer: I have been friends and worked for many years with a television producer named Jerry Abrams. I started working with Jerry in 1973 with the first teleplay that I wrote was for a television movie called Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery. There was a—China apparently invented everything first, including detective stories—and a circuit court judge in the seventh century, Judge Dee Jen Jay, solved mysteries and people wrote detective stories about him and now there are movies about him.
But back in 1972, or something like that, and I had just come to Hollywood and was looking for work and didn't know anybody. And I met Jerry Abrams and I met a director named Jeremy Kagan and I'm happy to say both of these gentlemen are alive and still my friends. They gave me a shot to write this Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery because I think ABC thought they were going to get a Kung Fu movie out of it, which it wasn't. But it was a television movie with an all Asian cast. The monastery in question was the old Camelot castle on the Warner Brothers lot and that's where I met Jerry. And Jerry and I've been friends ever since. Jerry’s son is JJ Abrams, who directs movies.
Anyway, Jerry said to me a couple of years ago, let's do Houdini and I said, Oh, funny, you should say that because my dad wrote a very interesting book about Houdini. I would be interested if it were based on his book. I would only be interested and that's how it got made.
John Gaspard: What was your process? Did you know it would be two nights going in? Did you know it's going to be that long? How did you get started and what other resources did you use, because I know there's stuff mentioned in the movie that I don't remember being in your dad's books. You must have had to dig a little bit.
Nicholas Meyer: There's a lot of books about Houdini, that I read many, many books, because my dad's book is distinguished—if one could call it that—by being the only book of all the books about Houdini that attempts some inner explanation of his psychological process. The why? Why would you do this? Why do you feel the need to do this? Other books will tell you what Houdini did, and some will tell you how he did it. But my dad's book, as I say, it kind of explores the why of it.
And so I read these other books to supplement the rest of the how and the why and I've amassed quite a large Houdini library. When I say large, probably compared to yours not so much, but I must have like 10 books about Houdini and flying aeroplanes and Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism and so forth. So, yes, I read all those to supplement what I was trying to condense.
I don't remember whether at this point whether it was proposed as two nights or three nights or whatever. I also know that if it hadn't been for Adrian Brody agreeing to play Houdini, it never would have happened. They weren't going to do it without a star.
Jim Cunningham: He's great.
John Gaspard: I was telling Jim earlier, before you got on, that my wife was kind enough to sit down and watch it with me. She's always worried in things like this, that she’s going see how something's done. She doesn't want to know how magic is done at all. And when we got to the end, she said, “Houdini seems so nice. He's such a likeable guy.” And I think that's really more Adrian Brody.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. The Adrian Brody. As I say, the movie would not have got made without Adrian. I'm not sure that he wasn't to a large degree cast against type. I think Houdini was a guy with ants in his pants, a kind of frenetic character. And I don't think when you read about him in any detail, that he was what you'd call nice. I think he was a person who had a lot of charm that he could switch on and off like a tap.
And I think this is one of the things that my dad's book brings out, and we tried to bring it out in the movie: that Houdini's whose own father was a failure of flop and absent parent. So, I think Houdini spent a lot of his life looking for substitutes or alternative father figures. And I think the first one he probably stumbled on was the French magician Robert-Houdin, from whom he took his name. And I think Houdini's pattern, at least according to my dad's reading of it, was to find father figures and fall hard for them, only to ultimately become disenchanted and alienated and furious with them. Probably, because ultimately, they weren't his real father. But I think there was something like that going on.
John Gaspard: Yes, it's pretty clear that's what happened with Doyle as well.
Nicholas Meyer: Yes, but he had better reason than in some other cases to be disenchanted with Doyle because Doyle's Atlantic City séance with Lady Doyle, Houdini ultimately regarded as a real betrayal. Because he decided, probably correctly, that the contact with his mother via Lady Doyle doing spirit writing was fake.
And by the way, it's not that Mrs. Doyle or Lady Doyle might not have believed what she was doing. It just didn't track for two reasons: Houdini experienced this contact with his mother, and he was as obsessed with her as he was with the fact of an absent father. And he was so overcome when she spoke to him via the spirit writing that it was a couple of days before he realized that his mother didn't speak a word of English. And she had communicated via lady Doyle in English, she only spoke Yiddish. Doyle got around this difficulty by explaining that the medium in this case, Lady Doyle, worked as a kind of simultaneous translator.
And Houdini said, yeah, but—and this was the second item—it was his birthday. And she never mentioned it and she always sent him something on his birthday. And he then denounced Doyle and Lady Doyle, as quote, menaces to mankind.
John Gaspard: So, were you involved in a day-to-day way with production? And I'm wondering why you didn't direct it?
Nicholas Meyer: I was involved. The whole movie was shot in Budapest, everything and I was involved. I was not invited to direct. I have not directed really since the death of my wife in 1993. I had two small children to raise and by the time it was, like, possible for me to go back since they are now grown up and busy. I was sort of out of a game.
John Gaspard: Oh, that's too bad. You're a terrific director.
Nicholas Meyer: I'm not arguing with you.
John Gaspard: So, once you were scripting it, and you were using other sources, how concerned were you about this is fact, this is fiction?
Nicholas Meyer: That's a very good question and it doesn't just apply to Houdini. It applies largely to the whole issue of dramatizing the stories based on real events.
And by the way, you could make the case in a way that there's no such thing as fiction; that all fiction ultimately can be traced back to something real. I'll give you two examples off the top of my head: one, Moby Dick was based on a real Whale called Mocha Dick because of his color; and, as Heinrich Schliemann proved, when he discovered Troy, most legends, most myths have their origins somewhere in the mists of time, in some kind of reality. It turns out there was a place called Troy. So, he was not far off the mark.
It's a knotty question with a “k” how much we owe to fact and how much we get to mush around and dramatize? And the answer has to be inevitably elastic. The problem is that people are neither taught, nor do they read history anymore. We are not taught civics. We are not taught history.
Nobody knows anything and so by default, movies and television are where we get our history, and that history is not always truthful. It is dramatized for example, in that Academy Award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, we learn that the North Vietnamese made American prisoners of war in Vietnam, play Russian roulette. There is no evidence, no historical evidence that they ever did any such thing. And yet, if you're getting your history from the movies, that's what you see and someone said that seeing is believing. In any case, you have to sort of always be looking over your own shoulder when you are dramatizing history and realizing that, yes, you can tell a story with scope, dates and characters. But what's the point where you cross a line and start inventing things out of whole cloth?
I’ll give you another example: was Richard the Third really the monster that Shakespeare portrays? Now, remember, Shakespeare is writing for the granddaughter of the man who killed Richard the Third and usurped his throne and called himself king. You could make a very different case that that guy was a scumbag and that Richard was not, but you know, Shakespeare was in business. The Globe Theatre was a money-making operation and Henry the Seventh’s granddaughter was the Queen of England. So, there are a lot of variables here.
When you sit down to dramatize, I've worked for the History Channel and I can tell you the history channel will not make a movie where Americans look bad. The History Channel will not make a movie that questions any point in our own history. Our right to the moral high ground. It's a point of view and they have a demographic and Americans don't want to be shown any of their own flaws or asked to think about them.
Jim Cunningham; Well, who does? Can I ask questions about the espionage? Part of what I witnessed last night, although I had sort of a vague memory, that there is some espionage connection or perhaps connection? In the first episode that he was working for at least the American government and perhaps the English government as well. Is there evidence for that?
Nicholas Meyer: Circumstantial evidence.
Jim Cunningham: Yes, and I suppose that it could still be even at this late date protected in some way in terms of, I don't know them, not admitting, or maybe no real hard evidence exists anymore, right?
Nicholas Meyer: I'm more inclined to think that no real hard evidence exists. Although we all know that somebody said, truth is the daughter of time. But a lot of evidence has for a lot of things, not merely in this country, but also England has been redacted and eliminated and buried. You know, how many of your listeners know the story of Alan Turing?
Alan Turing may have shortened World War Two by as much as two years by inventing the computer that helped break the German Enigma code. Alan Turing signed the Official Secrets Act which meant that his wartime work could never be revealed. Alan Turing was gay. After the war was over, Alan Turing was arrested on a morals and decency charge and he could not tell the world who he was and so he was sentenced to some kind of chemical castration, I believe and he killed himself.
And all of this remained a secret for the next 55 years before the world's, you know, learned and suddenly there was a play called Breaking the Code and then there was the Enigma novel by Robert Harris and then there was the movie, which is very inaccurate, and very troublesome to me, The Imitation Game. Because in The Imitation Game, the first thing he does when he's arrested, is tell the cop who he is. With a crushing irony, as well as inaccuracy, is it there's no way he was allowed to tell. That was the price you pay when you sign the Official Secrets Act. So that movie kind of bugged me.
Whereas for example, Enigma, which I think is one of my favorite movies, doesn't bug me at all because it doesn't call him Alan Turing and therefore, he's not gay, and it's a different story entirely spun out of inspired by, but not pretending to be Alan Turing.
Jim Cunningham: Well, now I'm gonna have to watch that movie because I don't think I've seen it.
Nicholas Meyer: You never saw Enigma?
Jim Cunningham: I don't believe I saw Enigma.
Nicholas Meyer: It's the only movie produced by Mick Jagger and Lorne Michaels, written by Tom Stoppard. Kate Winslet, Dougray, Scott, Jeremy Northam. Anyway, it's a fantastic movie, but you have to watch it like five times in order to understand everything that's going on because Tom Stoppard is not going to make it easy.
John Gaspard: Just a quick side note here. I remember reading somewhere that Mick Jagger was a possible first choice for Time After Time
Nicholas Meyer: Yeah, for Jack the Ripper.
John Gaspard: Okay, interesting. I prefer the choice you came up with.
Nicholas Meyer: Well, when they—Warner Brothers—were trying to sort of figure out how to make this movie, quote, commercial (they were so surprised when it was a hit), they suggested Mick Jagger as Jack the Ripper. And he was in LA at the time touring and I really didn't understand the politics of not just filmmaking, but you know, sort of office politics generally. And my first reply was no, you know, you might believe him as the Ripper, but you'd never believe him—or I didn't think you would believe him—as a Harley Street surgeon. And they said, You mean you won't even meet him? And that's when I said, oh, okay, I get it. I have to agree to meet. So I met him and then I said, fellas, I still don't, you know, think this can work. And so we went on to David Warner.
Jim Cunningham: I think that was the first film I became aware of David Warner and of course, it colored my opinion of David Warner for everything I've seen him in since, including him as Bob Cratchit in a version of A Christmas Carol. I kept thinking to myself, don't turn your back on him. He's a killer. He's a stone-cold killer, because of Time After Time, which is still one of my favorite movies.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, thank you so much.
John Gaspard: We promised not to geek out too much. But I have to tell you that the hotel room scene between him and McDowell, I still pull up once or twice a year to look at the writing and the acting in that scene. “You're literally the last person on Earth expected to see.” They're both so good in that scene.
Nicholas Meyer: They are that, they are.
John Gaspard: I think you mentioned in your memoir in passing that when you did The 7% Solutionthere was some back and forth with the Doyle estate. We—Jim and I—have a friend, Jeff Hatcher, who wrote the screenplay for Mr. Holmes, which is based on a book. Once the movie came out, it did run into some issues with the Doyle estate, because the writer had taken some characteristics of Holmes from the later books …
Nicholas Meyer: It's all bullshit. All that is bullshit. The Doyle estate, which was once the richest literary estate in the world, was run into the ground by his descendants and their in laws and they don't care anything about Sherlock Holmes. All they care about is money. And what they try to do is to stick up movie companies and book companies and say you've got to pay. And back when Holmes legitimately fell into copyright, which is when I wrote The 7% Solution, yes, I had to pay and I understood that. I mean, I didn't understand it when I wrote the book because I was a kid. But I understood it when it was explained to me.
What since happened is they continue, even though he's out of copyright, to try to pretend that he is or that one or two stories are etc. My friend, Les Clinger, who is a business manager but also happens to be a lawyer and a Holmes’ enthusiast, took the estate to court and won. He broke that bullshit stranglehold that they were trying to exercise on anybody who wanted to write or create or make a movie about Holmes.
Now, it's also true that big companies like Warner Brothers, or Paramount or something, if they make a Sherlock Holmes movie, and the Doyle estate comes sniffling to their door, find it cheaper to say, here's $10,000, Go away, than it is to bother to do what Les did, which was take them to court. It's just, it's blackmail, you've all seen the Godfather, you know, give me a little something to wet my beak is what this is all about. I have nothing good to say about them and what they did with Mr. Holmes, your friend's movie, was they waited until the movie was about to come out before they hit him.
John Gaspard: Jim, I should mention, you probably don't know this, that and this is the truth, the man we're talking to is the man for whom the thing at the beginning of a DVD that says the opinions expressed here are not those of this company. He's the reason that's on DVDs.
Jim Cunningham: Is that right?
Nicholas Meyer: Yes, I will explain because I'm very proud of it.
I've made a couple of contributions to civilization. One of them is the movie The Day After, it's my nuclear war movie. And the other is this little sign. And it happened when they were preparing the DVD release of Star Trek Two: the Wrath of Khan. I was interviewed and asked to explain my contributions to the making the movie, the script, the directing, etc. So, I told the story about how I came to write the script. And the DVD lady who subsequently became a very good friend of mine said, “Gee, the lawyers say we can't use any of what you told us.” And I said, “And why is that?” And she said, Paramount was worried about getting in trouble with the Writers Guild, because you are not credited as the author and you wrote this sort of under the table, the script. And I said, Well, why don't you just take me out of the whole DVD? Because if I can't tell the truth about it, I don't want to be in it.
And she said, “That's what I hoped you would say. Now, I've got some ammo.” So, she went back and she came back and she said, okay, here's the deal. And the deal now applies to every studio. “The opinions expressed in this interview, are not those of Paramount Pictures, its employees or affiliates.”
What this does is it stops those interviews from being bullshit puff pieces and allows them to become oral histories. Now, different people may have different oral histories of the same thing. You put them all on the DVD, but suddenly, you've opened up a whole world to telling things that really happened or that the tellers think really happened, or are their opinions without the studio, worried that they're going to be sued, because of that little disclaimer. And they all have that now and that's my contribution.
Jim Cunningham: It's great. Now, I promised John before this interview that I would not talk Star Trekwith you, but since you've opened the door a little bit here. Now, that you say that you wrote Wrath of Khan under the table, can you just flesh that out for me? It might not ever be in the podcast, but I'm an incredible Star Trek fan. So, I'm interested in this story.
Nicholas Meyer: Well, very quickly, I knew nothing about Star Trek when I met Harve Bennett, the producer of what was going to be the second Star Trek movie. He showed me the first movie. He showed me some of the episodes and I got kind of a jones to make an outer space, a space opera. And I realized once I started to familiarize myself with Captain Kirk that he reminded me of Captain Hornblower, which were the books by CS Forester that I read when I was a kid, about a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, who had adventures and a girl in every port, which sounded good to me. I was 12. I think it was 13 or something and so I thought, “Oh, this is Hornblower and outer space. This is destroyers. This is submarines.”
So, I made a deal with Paramount and Harve Bennett to direct a Star Trek movie for them, which was going to be their second movie. And Harve said, draft five of the script is coming in. So, I went home and waited for draft five. And, you know, I looked up and it was three or four weeks later and wondered whatever happened, because I was starting to think about spaceships and stuff like that. And he said, “Oh, I can't send you the script. It's not good. I can't.” I said, “Well, what about draft four, draft three, whatever?” And he said, “You don't understand. All these different drafts are simply separate attempts to get another Star Trek movie. They're unrelated.”
And I said, “Well send them all to me. I want to read them.” And he said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.”
And in those days, you didn't hit Send. A truck, drove up, a van, and it had a lot of scripts. And I'm a very slow reader and I started. I read all these scripts and then I said, “Why don't you and your producing partner, Robert Salem, come up to my house and let's have a chat about this because I have an idea.” And so they showed up, and I had my ubiquitous legal pad and I said, “Why don't we make a list of everything we like in these five scripts? It could be a major plot. It could be a subplot. It could be a sequence. It could be a scene. It could be a character, it could be a line of dialogue, I don't care. Let's just make the list and then I'll try to write a new screenplay that incorporates as many of these elements as we pick.” And they didn't look happy and I thought, I don't get a lot of ideas. This was my idea and I said, “What’s wrong? What's wrong with that?”
And they said, “Well, the problem is that if we don't have a screenplay within 12 days, Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects house for the movie, say they can't deliver the shots in time for the June opening.” And I said, “What June opening? “And I only directed one movie in my life, and these guys had booked the theatres for a movie that didn't exist. And I said, “Well, okay, I'll try to do this in 12 days, but we got to pick the stuff now.”
And they still weren't happy. And I said, “So, what is it? What's the problem?” And they said, “Well, you know, let's be honest, we couldn't even make your deal in 12 days.” And at this point, I was like, foaming at the mouth. I said, “Look, guys, forget the deal. Forget the money. Forget the credit. I'm not talking about directing. We've already got that signed, sealed and delivered. But if we don't do this, now, there's gonna be no movie, yes or no?”
And I was an idiot, because I at that point gave away you know, what turned out to be significant. So, I didn't invent Kirk meets his son. I didn't invent Khan. I didn't invent Savak. I didn't invent the Genesis Planet. I didn't invent any of those things. I just took them and played with them like a Rubik's Cube and poured my, essentially it's all my dialogue, Harve wrote a few lines, but I wrote most of it.
John Gaspard: Well, it certainly worked.
Jim Cunningham: Oh, boy. Yeah, absolutely. And I will not bring up The Undiscovered Countrybecause I promised John I wouldn't. The 7% Solution is very interesting. You took one thing, and you extrapolated out from that an entire kind of reality about Holmes that had not been explored. And it's similar to kind of what your father did with Houdini. And did that ever occur to you that there was there's a similarity there somehow?
Nicholas Meyer: Well, I did 7% before he did Houdini.
Jim Cunningham: He owes you then.
Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. He does. It's interesting. I was not the first person to put together Holmes and Freud. In fact, Freud knew that he'd been compared to Holmes. Freud loved to read Sherlock Holmes stories. That was his bedtime reading and at some point, he even wrote in one of his case histories, “I follow the labyrinth of her mind, Sherlock Holmes-like until it led me to…” So he knew about this comparison.
And there was a doctor at Yale, a famous psychiatrist/drug expert, who wrote a paper that my father gave me to read about Holmes, Freud and the cocaine connection. Because Holmes is a cocaine user and for a time, so was Freud. And when my book came out and was the number one best-selling novel in the United States for 40 weeks, I got sued by this doctor at Yale for plagiarism. This is like the first successful thing I'd ever done in my life and this guy was saying I ripped him off. Because he was probably walking across campus and people were saying, “Hey, doc, hey, professor, that guy in the New York Times you ripped you off.”
So, I got sued. This is how you know you're hot is when you get sued. But it was devastating to me. It was devastating and it was expensive, because I had to defend myself. I had a lawyer and the lawyer said, “They have no case. We will ask for something called summary judgment.” And I said, “Does that mean we have to wait till July?” And he goes, no, no, no, it's not about that x couldn't resist summary judgment. Yeah, that happened in the summertime.
Summary judgment turns out to mean that the facts of the case are not in dispute. No one can dispute that I read his essay. I put it in my acknowledgments. I thanked him. I read it. The question is, what is the definition of plagiarism? It turns out, you cannot copyright an idea. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. The words. I hadn't used his words. I haven't used any of his. I didn't write an academic paper. I wrote a novel. I wrote a story. So, I won and then he appealed and I won again, end of story.
So, it didn't originate with me, nothing originates with me. Moby Dick was based on another whale. Emma Bovary was a real person, on and on and on.
If you read the history or a biography, you understand that in good faith, efforts have been made to lay out the facts. But when you read a historical novel, you understand that the facts have been mushed around and dramatized, that the author has assumed the dramatist’s privilege, his prerogative, to help things along.
There's an Italian phrase, se non è vero, è ben trovato. If it didn't happen that way, it should have.
I’ll give you another example: Queen Elizabeth the first and her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth subsequently had beheaded, never met in real life. They'd never met. But of all the 4,622 movies, plays, operas, novellas, ballets, whatever that are, they always meet.
Because it ain't cool if they don't meet.
John Gaspard: It's a better story.
Nicholas Meyer: It's a better story.
They had like big art books and books of poetry and maybe my first experiences with words were looking at the spines of the books in the living room. And one of the books they happen to have was then fairly recent book, Joe Adamson's Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, which is, I think most Marx Brothers fans would say it's the best loved book about them, certainly and I think the best written.
That book came out in 1973. So, it's 50 years old this year and for some reason, as a tiny kid, that was a book that I took off the shelf. It was interesting that it had silver lettering on the spine and little icons, a harp, and what I would come later to recognize as a Chico hat. “Oh, look, this is interesting.” And I started looking through it, and I saw all these pictures. And the photographs of the Marx Brothers were just something to grapple with and it seemed a little familiar to me. My world was the Muppets and Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. The Marx Brothers appeared in these photographs, like there was some continuity there and I also found them a little scary. Groucho in particular, that's quite a face for a child to reckon with.
So, that was a book that I looked at a lot when I was just little more than a baby. I wouldn't really see the Marx Brothers in their movies until I was 12. Partly that's because, I'm just old enough to have had a childhood where it wasn't so easy to find old movies. And I sort of had to wait for home video to come along. And when it first came along, it's not like all 13 Marx brothers’ movies were at the local Blockbuster.
It was that that journey, that constant searching for things that characterized life in the analog world. So, it was very gradual in between those two times.
Rather than blow your whole episode on this answer: in between the very little boy looking at pictures in Joe Adamson's book, and the 12-year-old finally, like seeing Duck Soup, and a Night at the Opera on video, there were many years where the Marx Brothers always seemed to be right around the corner. I would encounter them in Mad Magazine, or adults I knew might refer to them. And I sort of came to understand that the nose and moustache and glasses had something to do with Groucho. I was aware of them as a kind of vapor increasingly during those, I guess, nine or ten years between discovering the book and seeing the films.
JOHN
Jim, how about you? Where did you first encounter them?
JIM
I was an enormous and still am a Laurel and Hardy fan. There was a local television show here in the Twin Cities where I live on Sunday mornings, hosted by a former television child's television host named John Gallos who played Clancy the Cop. And so I came to the Marx Brothers, kind of grudgingly because I was such an enormous and still am Laurel and Hardy fan, that I poo pooed the Marx Brothers for many, many years. I started watching Laurel and Hardy as a little kid. I mean, 7, 8, 9 years old. Every Sunday morning, I would rush home from church and plop down in front of the TV to watch Laurel and Hardy. They were sort of my comedic touchstones, if you will. And then the Marx Brothers were kind of off to the side for me. And I went to the Uptown Theater, John, here in the Minneapolis area …
JOHN
You crossed the river from St. Paul and came to Minneapolis, you must have really been interested.
JIM
Oh, I only go across the river for work. This was a point where I was not working yet. And I saw a Night at the Opera and you know, was convulsed and then devoured everything I could get my hands on after that. The Marx Brothers were eye opening for me, just in terms of oh my gosh, this whole thing is so different. I was reading in your book that Frank Ferrante said “I was raised by Catholic nuns and I wanted to sort of do to the Catholic nuns would Groucho would do to Margaret Dumont.” And I was like, well, that's exactly right. Because I too was raised by Catholic nuns, and that sort of energy was really attractive to me as a sophomore in high school. And so I fell in love with them. And then, you know, anything I could get my hands on, I watched and read and loved them to this day. I still love Laurel and Hardy quite a bit too.
JOHN
Okay. Noah, this is just my own experience and I'm wondering if you guys have had the same thing: that entering the world of the Marx Brothers was actually a gateway to a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. I mean, you get into the Algonquin table, you get Benchley, and Perlman and into other plays of Kaufman. And you know, you're reading Moss Hart, and all sudden you look at the New Yorker, because, you know, he was there. I mean, did you find that it sort of was a spider web?
NOAH
No doubt about it. Yeah, that's very true. It’s learning about them biographically and the times they lived in, the circles they traveled in; and partly it's in order to understand the references in their films. That's one of the great things about sophisticated verbal comedy: it's an education, and particularly if you're a kid. So, yes, through comedy and show business in general and the Marx Brothers in particular, I learned, I hesitate to say this, but probably just about everything else I know from following tributaries from the Marx Brothers.
JOHN
Do you remember the first time you performed as Groucho?
NOAH
The first time I played Groucho in front of an audience was in a talent show, a school talent show in, I think seventh grade. I performed with my brother and sister as Harpo and Chico. They're both a little younger than me and by the time we became the Marx Brothers, they were so accustomed to involuntary service in my stock company. They were veterans by that time, they had done living room productions of Fiddler on the Roof where they had to play everyone but Tevya. And we did the contract routine from A Night at the Opera, with a little bit of Harpo stuff thrown in.
JOHN
Okay. Fantastic. Jim, how about you: first time as Groucho in front of an audience?
JIM
The first time in front of an audience as Groucho was really the first time I played Groucho. Just as I have a deep and abiding love and respect for the art of magic (and want to see it, want to read about it), I don't want to perform it. Because it is a thing in to its unto itself and if you do it poorly, it's horrible. So, I love to see it. I just don't love to perform it. And I felt the same way about Groucho.
So, I went kind of kicking and screaming, to a staged reading of The Coconuts that Illusion Theater did. We really just carried our scripts because there was just a couple three rehearsals, but we read the whole thing and sang some of the stuff that was in it. And then that morphed from there into an actual production of The Coconuts and we did it both at the illusion theater in Minneapolis, and then it moved to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. When the Marx Brothers performed there, I think it was called The World theatre. So, I love that kind of thing. I love standing where Wyatt Earp stood or standing where William Shakespeare stood. And so, to be doing a play that Groucho did on a stage that Groucho did it. I should have gotten out of the business right then. I should have said it, I've done it. What’s left?
JOHN
Excellent stories. Noah, have you ever done The Coconuts or Animal Crackers?
NOAH
I haven't done The Coconuts. I would love to. Animal Crackers … One of the subsequent childhood Groucho appearances was when I was 14 years old. I had a relationship with this community theater. At this point, I was living in South Florida. I spent the first part of my life in Connecticut, and then lived in South Florida when I was a teenager and New York since I grew up. And this was in the Florida years. There was a local theater in a town called Coral Springs, it's not there anymore, but it was called Opus Playhouse. And it was a great place that helped me a lot and gave me a chance to put on shows and learn how to do things. And I just wanted to do Animal Crackers. So, I did a bootleg production completely unauthorized. I didn't even have the script. I just wrote the movie down line by line to have a script of Animal Crackers. And so I've sort of done it. But you know, I really shouldn't put that on my resume as I was 14 and...
JIM
It counts for me. Anybody who's willing, as a 14-year-old, to go line by line through a movie and write it down, you did the show in my book.
NOAH
That just shows the desperate measures we had to take in those days. There was no internet. Little kids writing down movies, you know?
JIM
Exactly.
JOHN
It's charming. It's absolutely charming. So, what is it Noah that draws you to play Groucho? What is it about that guy?
NOAH
Yeah, what is it? I know, it's funny. ‘What is it about Groucho’ is a question we can grapple with forever, even aside from the question of why try to be him? I think one thing that definitely true is that as soon as I saw the Marx Brothers and heard his voice and watched him moving around and interacting, the urge to be him, or at least to behave like him, was immediate. I mean, it was right there. Now, I was already a kid who was a little ham and a performer and would be inclined to find my role in anything, anyway.
But nothing, no character other than myself, ever grabbed me the way Groucho did or ever has, really. And I think part of it is what you mentioned, Jim, that Frank Ferrante has said, part of it is the instinct to rebel against authority. And that's unquestionably part of the Marx Brothers act, and a big part of the Marx Brothers appeal I think to kids.
But I think it's a little more like watching a great violin player and deciding you want to play the violin. It just seemed to me that, as far as embodying a character and getting laughs and singing songs, nobody ever did it like him. Nobody ever seemed to be speaking directly to my sense of humor and my sensibility. I just wanted to talk in that voice. I wanted to play that instrument.
JOHN
JIM, what about you?
JIM
Nothing. Really, truthfully, I did not want to do it. I still don't want to do it. But I would do it again tomorrow, if somebody asked.
I think trying to find your way to entertain an audience through somebody else is tricky for me. I'm better at playing me than I am at playing anybody else. And so the desire to play Groucho, I have sort of put it inside me, and I have an eye on it all the time. I use Groucho’s sensibility without the grease paint, and I'd like to believe that I do. I'm certainly not in Groucho’s league.
Laurence Olivier said it: steal from everybody, and no one will know. And so I have, but the desire to put on the grease paint and wear the frock coat is akin to me saying, I want to do a magic show. I just I love to go to a magic show. I love to watch a Marx Brothers movie. But I'm really kicking and screaming to play him again, because the mantle is so huge and heavy and I don't think that I'm particularly serviceable as Groucho
It wasn't until we were halfway through the run of The Coconuts when a light bulb went off in the dressing room, while I was putting on the makeup: there's a difference between being faithful to the script of The Coconuts and what we learned, and being faithful to the Marx Brothers sensibilities, if that makes sense. There's the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law.
About halfway through that run, I started doing things that I felt were more attune to the spirit of the Marx Brothers, then the letter of the script. So, I was calling other actors onto the stage. I was going out into the audience, I took a guy out and put him in a cab one night. That sort of anarchy that people talk about when you read about the Marx Brothers in their heyday, about Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in their heyday: I don't know what's going to happen and I want to be there because of that.
And for all I know, it was the exact same show night after night after night, and they just gave the impression that it was crazy. But that idea for me still percolates. This the idea of, am I creating a museum piece or am I trying to, in some way, channel that anarchy for an audience? The other show that I do that has some relevance here is we do a production of It's a Wonderful Life, at Christmas time, as a live radio play. And that too: what am I doing? Are we trying to capture the movie or are we creating something different? So, finding that sort of craziness is what I was most intrigued by and still am.
NOAH
There's not a lot of roles like that. If you're playing one of the Marx Brothers in Coconuts or Animal Crackers, or I'll Say She Is, it's not the same as playing Groucho Marx in a biographical piece about his life. Nor is it like playing Sherlock Holmes, a very familiar character, where there is room to make it your own. I suppose people have done that with Groucho, too. But generally, if you're in a production of one of the Marx Brothers shows, the assignment is to try to make the audience feel like, if they squint, maybe they're watching the Marx Brothers.
JOHN
Noah, when you tackled the formidable and important task of recreating, resurrecting, bringing back to life, I'll Say She Is, were you having that same sort of thing Jim was talking about? Balancing the reality of what may have happened against you don't really know for sure and the spirit of it? How did you approach it? But first, why did you pick that show? And then how did you bring it back to life?
JIM
Can I back up? Because the three of us at this table are enormous Marx Brothers fans. So, if you say I'll Say She Is, we have a frame of reference. But people listening to this may go, ‘what the hell is I'll Say She Is?’ So, can you start with that? Can you start with what is I'll Say She Is and how did you come to it, because I think for the layman who's not a huge Marx Brothers fan, they don't even know what we're talking about.
NOAH
Yes, absolutely. In a nutshell, the Marx Brothers, although primarily remembered for their movies, were already halfway through their career by the time they ever made a film. Most of their lives were spent on stage. They had a long period in vaudeville, and then in the 20s, they became Broadway stars. And that was really the beginning of the Marx Brothers as phenomenon we would recognize. They did three Broadway musicals. The first was I'll Say She Is, a thinly plotted revue, and the second was The Coconuts, and the third was Animal Crackers. By the time they were making talkies, they had these two very prestigious vehicles, Coconuts, and Animal Crackers, written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Riskin, with scores by accomplished composers, Irving Berlin and Kalmer and Ruby. And there was no question but that those would be the first two films.
And as a result, I'll Say She Is just kind of faded into history. It was the show they'd never made it into a movie and no script survived or at least no complete, intact script survived. So, if you were a kid like all the Marx maniacs out there, reading every book you can get your hands on and learning everything you could about the Marx Brothers, I'll Say She Is just had a sort of intrigue about it. What was that show?
Everyone knew from those books that the highlight of the show was the Napoleon scene in which Groucho played Napoleon and the other brothers played the various consorts of Josephine, who are always materializing every time he turns his back. And that scene was touted as like, that's really the arrival of the Marx Brothers. That was the essence of them, before they ever met George S. Kaufman. It’s just such a tantalizing thing if you love them.
I think—because I love the theater and I love musical theater—a lot of my other interests are also right in the bullseye of I'll Say She Is: Broadway, New York City history. I'm a big fan of the culture of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. And this was just so appealing to me. So, every time a new book about the Marx Brothers would fall into my hands, the first thing I would do is look up I'll Say She Is in the index and read all the associated stuff first. I just had a little obsession about it.
In The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, which is a book I'm sure familiar to both of you and many of the fans, that book reprints the entire opening night program from I'll Say She Is on Broadway. When I was 12 years old, I took that book to the library and photocopied it, and cut out the pages, and made myself a little program so that I could pretend that I had seen I'll Say She Is.
Fast forward many years, and I'm an adult doing theater in New York. My wife and collaborator, Amanda Sisk and I were doing political satires, writing these musicals that would be ripped from the headlines. And we did that for a long time before realizing that the time it takes to develop a musical is too long for topical material, so we could never really perfect our work. And we decided to stop doing those shows, which were a bit of a dead end for us creatively. And I found myself after many years of doing one thing trying to figure out, well, what's my thing going to be now?
And I think it was probably inevitable that I would just sort of go home to the Marx Brothers. ‘Well, let's do a Marx Brothers show. I haven't done that in a while, you know?’ I don't know, it seems a little bit silly to call something so unlikely, inevitable, but I just think I was hurtling toward it from the day I picked up Adamson's book when I was three or four years old.
JIM
It had to have been both a joyful and frustrating experiences as you tried to recreate something that doesn't exist. The Napoleon sketch: we did a version of that Napoleon sketch. The only line I can remember from that Napoleon sketch was, “I'll be in Paris tomorrow, don't wash.” That's the only line I can remember from the entire show. I think of that. Was it super fun or was it super frustrating? Or was there a combo? What was that like?
NOAH
It was fun. I mean, writing is always a combination of both of those things. Stephen Sondheim once called it agonizing fun. That's kind of what almost any writing process is. This one, I wouldn't have taken on the idea of doing I'll Say She Is if enough of it didn't survive and how much of it seemed to have survived. Before my research, I think what I was really thinking is that I would maybe try to write a book about I'll Say She Is, and maybe figure out some way to do the Napoleon scene on stage.
But realizing that it could be a show again, that happened kind of slowly as material started to accumulate. Yes, the Napoleon scene has survived and that's been known for a long time. Also, the first scene of I'll Say She Is is one that's familiar to Marx Brothers fans, because it was an old vaudeville piece that they filmed in 1931. The theatrical agency scene.
[Audio from the Clip]
NOAH
So, those are two big pieces of material were a given. And then as for the rest of it, I became aware, by relying on the work of other researchers, that there was a type script I'll Say She Is at the Library of Congress. Also, another slightly different one at the American Musical Theatre Institute run by Miles Kruger. And I was able to get my hands on the type script.
Now it is on one hand, it's the script of I'll Say She Is. That isn't quite that what it is, though. It’s a 30-page document that they went into rehearsal with. And, you know, going into rehearsal with the Marx Brothers, it's an outline with dialogue. It's what we would now refer to as a treatment. and there is some dialogue in it, some of which is recognizable from later Marx Brothers projects. Some of it is very sketchy.
Of course, almost everything Harpo does is merely indicated: stage directions like, Harpo business, or sometimes, business with hat. But this provided something like 20% of the dialogue and the continuity for I'll Say She Is. There were no lyrics in it, but it did specify where the songs would fall.
So, my first attempt to write a script for this was a combination of material from that type script and things learned from the playbill, from reading every account of I'll Say She Is I could find in books and interviews. And then I started to search old newspaper archives, which was just getting easier to do at this time. I was embarking on this sort of major I'll Say She Is research period around 2010 and it was just starting to be possible to read decades worth of old newspapers on the internet. It's gotten much easier since then.
So, by reading every review I could find FROM every city I'll Say She Is had played in 1923, and 1924, and 1925, I started to realize there's material here. There's reviews that quote dialogue or describe scenes that aren't in the type script and that I didn't know about before and maybe nobody did (unless they've read this copy of the New York Clipper from 1924).
And some of the songs from the original I'll Say She Is were published in 1924 and it was fairly easy to get my hands on those. But that represented only about half the score, maybe a third of the score. A number of the original songs remain missing. And of those, I did manage to find a couple. And to fill in the gaps, I found other songs written by the same people. Will Johnstone was the lyricist (Marx Brothers fans will know him as a screenwriter on some of their later films) and his brother Tom Johnstone wrote the music. Well, the Johnstones also wrote six or seven other Broadway shows during the same period. So, I was able to find some of those songs and interpolate them and do a sort of general polish on the lyrics on the surviving lyrics.
When I was bringing in other songs, sometimes I would write the lyrics. I know there was a song here, and I know what it was about. So, I'll write a lyric about that and whenever I had to do that kind of thing, where I would invent something to fill a gap, I would always try to do it very conscientiously, by relying on what I knew about the Marx Brothers act up to 1924. And also by immersing myself in Will Johnstone's writing. He's an interesting, very unsung artist too; he was a very prolific newspaper writer and cartoonist and did a little bit of everything. So, by reading everything I could get my hands on by Johnstone, it made it a little easier to write what he would have written for them.
JOHN
That's just fascinating.
JIM
It really is. The whole thing to me is it's so titillating and so exciting that even though I say I never really want to do Groucho ever again, if you said, I'm gonna send you a copy of I'll Say She Is, I produced that. I'd be in that. I put that up right now.
NOAH
It could happen, Jim.
I think what you said earlier, Jim, about playing Groucho, you feel like there's this mantle of greatness that is, is impossible to live up to. I feel that way too. It is impossible. I mean, playing Groucho on stage, you're kind of making a deal with the audience, like, ‘Hey, we both know, I'm not him. I'm not. Nobody will ever be that good at doing that. But if you'll meet me in the middle, I think I can fool you for a minute.’
It becomes a sense of responsibility. And it's the same thing with reviving, I'll Say She Is. If we're gonna put that title on a marquee, and charge people money to see it, boy, this better be the very best we can do.
JOHN
So, once you started reconstructing I'll Say She Is, were you always planning on putting it on its feet?
NOAH
Well, probably, the answer is definitely yes. I think the question is, would I have admitted it to myself early on? I do remember nibbling around the edges of it for a while before looking at squarely in the face and saying, ‘We have to do this.’ We have to do this on stage for that very reason: because it is so daunting. It’s daunting to produce a big musical, even without all the baggage and the history and responsibility of the Marx Brothers and I'll Say She Is.
JIM
I looked at the pictures of your production and was flabbergasted at the cast and how big the cast is, and the costumes for the cast. It was like, this is a big deal.
NOAH
One thing that was very lucky—because of the nature of the project, and because it's so interesting and historical—it attracted a lot of really talented people, all of whom worked for much less than they deserved. We have done it twice at this point: the Fringe Festival production in 2014 was the first, full staging and the book Give Me a Thrill is current through that production.
Then in 2016, we did an Off-Broadway production, which was larger and fuller and ran longer and was even more fully realized. There will be a new edition of a book covering that production. But even that is now some years ago.
There is in the future, I think for an even bigger, even more 1924-faithful I'll Say She Is. And I also think there may be a lightweight version of I'll Say She Is. I think we may experiment with that, saying, ‘Oh, okay, it's a 1920s revue. It has a line of chorus girls. It's spectacular. But what if we did to it what Marx Brothers fans often want to do to the film's and just boiled it down to just the Marx Brothers gold and do an I'll Say She Is Redux?’ There two licensable versions of Animal Crackers. There’s a small cast multiple role kind of version, and then there's the big full musical.
JOHN
It’s like the Teeny Sweeney. The idea of you offering and creating a version that would be a little easier for most theaters to do. I think is really a smart idea.
JIM
Knowing the Marx Brothers, and knowing Coconuts and Animal Crackers, because of course, they're enshrined in celluloid and we can look at them whenever we want. There's a story to both of those things, loose as it may be. I wouldn't say either The Coconuts or Animal Crackers were a revue. Is the same true of I'll Say She Is? Is it a revue where we're just going from sketch to sketch to sketch or song to song to sketch, and they're not connected by a through line the way Coconuts or Animal Crackers are?
NOAH
It's an interesting question and the answer is kind of both. One thing that has happened is I think the word revue is now understood more narrowly than it was in the Marx Brothers day. When we use the word revue now, we generally mean exactly what you're describing: a variety kind of evening, with a series of unrelated sketches or songs.
But the truth is in the 1920s, particularly, revues tended to have either thin plots or themes that tied them together. And that's exactly what distinguished a Broadway review or what would have been called rather snootily, a legitimate revue. That's what distinguishes it from vaudeville, which really was one act after another and what the third on the bill does on stage has nothing to do with the content of what was second on the bill.
A lot of these Broadway revues, including the Ziegfeld Follies, they would be built on themes or plots. An example would be As Thousands Cheer, Irving Berlin's famous revue. It doesn't have a plot that runs all the way through it, but each piece is based on a news story of the day. It's not just a collection of songs.
In the case of I'll Say She Is, it was a thinly plotted revue. And the thin plot is: a bored heiress is looking for thrills. That's the plot. It makes Animal Crackers look very sophisticated. It begins with a breaking news that a society woman craves excitement, she has promised her hand, her heart, and her fortune to whoever can give her the biggest thrill. Very saucy stuff.
So, each scene or musical number in the show is vaguely an attempt to give her a thrill. It's kind of like a clothesline. You can hang anything on it. So, the Napoleon's sketch—in the context that was provided for it in 1924—is a fantasy sequence where the ingenue fantasizes that she's in the court of Napoleon. That’s the attempt of the hypnotist to give her a thrill.
In order to make the show a little more compact and a little more accessible, in my adaptation I did nudge it a little closer to being a book show. I did I strengthen the plot a little bit. I just added some reinforcements, some undergirding to the plot. And some things in the show that weren't connected to the plot, but could have been, I made some little connections there.
And also, some of the sequencing was a little perverse in terms of how the evening built. So I thought, with the help of many people who worked on the show with me, but I'll mention Travest-D and Amanda Sisk, who had a lot to do with the development of the script, we figured out that the Napoleon scene really should go at the end of Act One. And the courtroom scene should go at the end of Act Two. And other little concessions like that to make a contemporary audience feel some sense of satisfaction.
JOHN
You both do such a nice job of Groucho—even though one of you has to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. What is, from your experience, what is the hardest part of being Groucho on stage?
NOAH
Well, for me, the most challenging part is the physical performance. That's the part I work on the most. When I see video of myself as Groucho, that's the part—if I notice things to improve on next time—they're usually physical things. I think that may have something to do with my particular skill set. I'm very comfortable vocally. I like my vocal version of Groucho and it sounds the way he sounds to me. I generally feel confident with that, although off nights do happen.
But physically, being him physically, partly because he was so verbally overwhelming, we often overlook what an interesting and unusual and brilliant physical performer, Groucho Marx was. I can't think of anyone who moved the way he moved. Both his physical body was unusual, his shape, and the way he—especially in the early films—he like has no gravity. He's sort of weightless.
There is a tendency to make him too manic and to try to match his impact by being loud and fast and very abrupt in your movements. Or overly precise. He wasn't that precise, actually. He was pretty sloppy in the way he moved. But there was a grace in all that sloppiness…
The difficulty of putting it into words—that you're experiencing with me right now—is part of where the challenge is. There are times when I feel good about the physical performance, and I nail something, a move of his that I've been working on. But I think that's the part that's the most challenging.
JOHN
Okay, Jim, how about you? What did you find most challenging?
JIM
You know, what I found most challenging is dealing with the mantle of Groucho. Not just the audience's expectations of what that means, but more problematic, my own belief system, about what I'm capable of, and how far short of what the man was and did on stage my version of him is.
So for me, I always had to really kind of get myself ramped up in order to believe that, okay, I'm going to go on, I'm going to do this. And it was a constant battle for me every night before I would go on. Am I capable of this? Is there anything about this that's even moderately entertaining for an audience? And I just couldn't get by that and I still can't, you know, I still can't get that out of my head.
Now, I separate that for a second and set it aside with It's a Wonderful Life. I'm very happy with what I've achieved in It's a Wonderful Life. Very happy with, what I've done, me personally, and the show in general. But my performances, I'm very happy and satisfied with them and I'd love to do them and can't wait till December comes around so I can do it again.
But the Marx Brothers thing is that there's a fear factor, I guess that I'm going to let him down in some way and I can't help but let him down. There's a certain love and respect I have for him, in the same way that I have love and respect for magic, that I just don't want to be a bad Elvis impersonator. You know what I mean? That's what I don't want to do. There's a big difference between Elvis and the best Elvis impersonator and you can have joy in both. But, you know, Groucho is so far—and nothing against Elvis, please. If you're listening to this podcast, and you think I'm about to diss Elvis, you're right. But I don't mean it that way.
There's a vast difference between what Groucho was on screen and what Elvis was on screen. Elvis could sing. Groucho could do anything. And that's the difference, and I can't do anything. I can barely sing. I'm lucky enough to have done it and I'm happy to have done it and when people talk to me about it. ‘Oh, I saw you was Groucho. You were excellent.’ And I want to say, ‘Apparently, you don't know the Marx brothers. I wasn't.’
NOAH
That's a very Groucho response, that hey, you are great in that show, and you have no taste, you know?
JIM
That's exactly right.
JOHN
Well, I could do this all night, but we're not going to do that. I want to just wrap up with a couple Speed Round questions, kind of general Marx Brothers questions. Noah, do you have a favorite of the movies?
NOAH
Animal Crackers, because I think it's the closest we can get to seeing them as a stage act at the peak of their powers.
JOHN
Okay, do you have a favorite scene?
NOAH
Yes, I feel guilty because my favorite Marx Brothers scene only has one Marx Brothers in it and I I love Harpo and Chico and I even love Zeppo. I have to say that, but my favorite scene is the strange interlude scene in Animal Crackers.
[Audio from the Clip]
JOHN
To have been there live, to watch him do that, to see him step forward. I would rank that very high for my favorite scene. Jim, do you have a favorite movie and a favorite scene?
JIM
Yeah, I think so. Largely because it was my first experience of the Marx Brothers, nothing for me compares to a Night at the Opera. If I am clicking around and Night at the Opera is on, we stopped clicking and that's what it is. And anybody who is in the house, my wife or the kids, I'm sorry, but you'll either have to find another TV or go out to play, because this is what we're going to be watching for a while And you know the line of Groucho’s, what happened?
[Audio from the Clip: “Oh, we had an argument, and he pulled a knife on me so I shot him.”].
JIM
That right there. When I heard that the first time, I was afraid I'd have to leave the theater. I started laughing so hard, and I couldn't come back from it. It just kept coming to me. I kept thinking of that well past it and was giggling about it and so that whole ‘belly up, put your foot up here.’ That whole thing to me is as good as it gets.
JOHN
One other little alley, I want to go down. There's another great book and Noah, if I get the title wrong, please correct me. Is it Four of the Three Musketeers?
NOAH
Yes.
JOHN
Which tracks in exhausting detail, every stage appearance of their stage career. As you look through it—we're all getting older, all three guys—you begin to realize the weird gap or you think something was a long time ago and it turns out it wasn't. I was born in 1958 and realized just recently that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was made a mere 10 years before I was born. The Marx Brothers on stage in the 20s, or late teens and 20s, they're traveling everywhere in the country. They came to Minneapolis a lot. They went to Duluth a lot. And, you know, a mere 40 years before I was born, I could have gone and seen them. So, my question to you guys is: you have a chance to see the Marx Brothers live on stage in that era. What is your pick? What do you go see? You have a time machine. You can go you can go see one thing or two. I'll give you two, because I have two.
NOAH
Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you're given me two, because the obvious answer is I'll Say She Is and....
JIM
That would be my answer too.
JOHN
Bring your iPhone and hit record. Yeah.
NOAH
Yeah, right, bootleg it. Nobody knows what an iPhone is anyway. Exactly.
JIM
And then you just go right back to what you did as a 14-year-old line by line.
JOHN
Okay. So, your second choice after the obvious, I'll Say She Is?
NOAH
I guess it would be to see some of the even earlier stuff, satisfying the urge to see them at their best on Broadway. You know, there's a lot of curiosity about the act up really up to 1920. In 1920 or 21, there's a big change. That’s when Groucho painted the moustache on and drops the German or sometimes Yiddish accent he had been using before. Harpo and Chico evolved more subtly, but in a sense, they were all playing somewhat different characters in the early vaudeville tabs. So I guess I would want to see Home Again, which was their vaudeville tabloid, that carried them through the World War One years and beyond.
JOHN
Jim?
JIM
Anything vaudeville. The school sketches that they did. I'd see anything. It wouldn't matter to me. If I could get back there, I'd go every day. John, you and I were talking about Robin Williams and being the greatest improviser of all time, and the quote that you said was, somebody had said, “see the eight o'clock show, then see the 10 o'clock show, and we'll talk.”
And to me, that's interesting. I would kill to, you know, follow them on the road, like Bruce Springsteen, and just see how much of it really is the same. In the same way that I'm tickled, when somebody says to me, ‘How much of that did you just make up on the spot?’
None of it. Essentially, none of it did I make up on the spot. I'd like to see how much of what they did day to day was exactly the same and how much of it was, ‘today, I'm going to do this for no reason at all’ and I'd like to see how much of that is different.
JOHN
You know, my two choices kind of fall within that. One is the day that Chico's daughter didn't go to the show, and she came home, and Chico thought she'd gone to it and he said, ‘What did you think?’ And she said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Harpo and I switched roles.’
And I know it's weird: if you had like one chance to go see the Marx Brothers, you're gonna go see them do the role they're supposed to do. But it's just fascinating when you think about it.
The other one is when Groucho was sick and Zeppo stepped in and if I'm quoting Susan Marx’s book correctly, the reaction was so strong towards what Zeppo did that Groucho got healthy really fast and came back. But Zeppo was really, really good. We do have the agent sketch, so you get a sense of what they were like on stage. You do get that. But the idea of seeing, I can easily see Zeppo doing Groucho. But Chico doing Harpo and vice versa? I realize that if I have a time machine, I should go back and do something more helpful for the world. But at that same time, I want to stop by and see that one show where they switched.
JIM
That you’ll do that on your lunch break. While you're stopping World War Two, on the way home, swing by and see that show. You've earned it.
NOAH
That's a good answer.
JOHN
Yeah. Noah, thank you so much for chatting with us.
JIM
Just a delight. Thank you so much. I had a great time talking to you.
NOAH
It's been a pleasure, fellas. Thank you for having me on.
Peet Gelderblom – Re-Cutting “Raising Cain”
What was the very first Brian DePalma movie you remember seeing?
Peet: That's difficult. I was probably a little too young for it, but it may have been "Sisters.” Yeah, but I think the first thing I remember from Brian DePalma was that he was on television, because "Body Double" had just come out, and I saw the clips from "Body Double" and I thought, wow, that would be something I would like to see. But I was too young for it.
I wasn't able to go into the cinema and check it out, but immediately I made a mental note. And I think the name just stuck with me. And I started to check him out, and whenever there was something on television, by him, the BBC or whatever, I would definitely see it. So, it might have been "Sisters.” It might have been "Blowout," I'm not really sure.
My point of entry was "Phantom of the Paradise." It was first released in cinema, and I'd never seen anything like it, and then had to follow up with this guy, Brian DePalma, to see what he was going to do. And the next thing I remember seeing was "Carrie," and really loving it.
I remember it was showing maybe a couple years later at a University Film Society, and I wasn't seeing it, but I was walking by. I could hear what was going on, and I said to friend, “let's stand here for just a second, they're about to scream,” because the hand was about to come up out of the grave. And it was so much fun to just know that was going to happen. And then years later to read about how Paul Hirsch came up with that and the music choice that he made and all that. So, is there a favorite Brian DePalma film?
Peet: Yeah, I think "Blowout" is my favorite. It seems to be the one that combines all of his best qualities, you know, combining hot and cold and his formal expertise and his weird plotting and humor. Yeah, all of that.
He does have both weird plotting and very devious humor and all of those, I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but I do whenever it's on, I can't help it, watch "The Fury." Just because it's a filmmaker working so hard to make this work. The cast is great, and they're all giving it their all and you know, the story doesn't really hold up. But he is just throwing so much at it to make it work that I appreciate that.
Peet: That's a good summation, actually. Yeah, it doesn't really work, but it's just so much fun.
Yes, exactly. One that I have trouble finding that I just love and that I just looked it up (as I mentioned, I was just looking to see the order of things), and I'm surprised that “Obsession” came before “Carrie.” I thought it came after “Carrie.” And that's his first time working with John Lithgow, and it's from a Paul Schrader script. And apparently, the last third of the movie they didn't even shoot. There's another whole act of it.
Peet: Yeah, I think Paul Schrader is still a little pissed off about that. Even, more than a little.
Maybe more than a little. Well, and with every right. But I think what Brian DePalma ended up doing with that movie—particularly when you read in Lithgow's book about the difficulty he had working with Cliff Robertson, and how difficult Robertson was and how he sabotaged every scene he was in to make sure that he would get the close ups, which is such a weird thing to want to do. But I guess that's what he did. It's with that Herrmann score. It's just such a lovely movie that I wish I could find it more often, but it is hard to come across.
So, what did you think of "Raising Cain," the first time you saw it?
Peet: Well, I know it like today, it was yesterday, because I discovered him while he was in the middle of his career. And so a lot of the films that I saw were actually older films of his. And I really liked his thrillers and the films that really carried his own signature. And at the time, he had been doing some other kinds of pictures. I think "Wise Guys," was one of them, I didn't even bother to see that. And, of course, "Bonfire of the Vanities," which was not exactly praised.
It wasn't, but it's not horrible. It really isn't horrible. I rewatched it recently, and it's got some wonderful stuff in it.
Peet: Yeah, they always do. All of his films have wonderful stuff. But anyway, it was pretty clear from the promotional materials and interviews that he was doing something with “Raising Cain,” which sort of pointed towards the fact that he was starting to go back to the source, you know, he was going to do his own thing again. And I was completely ready for it. And I had a girlfriend at the time and I must have, you know, been enthusing a lot about it. And she went with me, when it was out in the cinemas. And I liked the movie very much because I was a die-hard, rabid fan. But my girlfriend, she was sitting next to me, and I could feel she wasn't liking it. And after, I think already about four minutes in, she turned to me and said, “what kind of crazy film is this?” And, you know, this was also in the cinema that we saw it, you know, this was the general consensus. It was like, what kind of crazy thing is this?
Now, would that have been the car scene with Carter, and the woman and Cain shows up in the window?
Peet: It's going off the rails really soon in the original version. I was ready for that because I was a Brian DePalma fan. So, I dug it. But I also could completely understand why the casual viewer would have lots of problems with it. So, that stuck with me. Of course, later I found out that Brian DePalma wasn't really happy with how the film turned out. And when I sort of guessed what he originally had in mind, I thought that would work much better, actually.
Yes, it's much more keeping with “Dressed to Kill” and “Psycho,” where you start the story one way andwe don't learn who the villain is until much later. With that in mind, and with enjoying the film, what was it that inspired the re-cut?
Peet: Well, I was hosting a website with a forum on it, that had a lot of the Brian DePalma fans, who actually made the jump from another forum that was specifically about Brian DePalma. So, there were a lot of Brian DePalma fans there, and they were discussing lots of stuff. And at a certain moment, there was this guy who was talking about an interview book he was doing with Brian De Palma. He must have mentioned “Raising Cain” and that DePalma had said in the interview that he wasn't happy with it. And that immediately piqued my interest.
And I asked Laurent, what was it about the film that he doesn't like? And Laurent said, well, he originally wanted to start with the story of the woman. So, that was the point where I thought, yeah, of course, then that probably means that he would start in the clock store, I immediately thought. So I checked out my DVD, and I tried—you know, the DVDs have chapters—so I tried to reorder the chapters to see how that movie must have played originally. And I couldn't really get it to work. But I still thought there might be a better film in this than was originally released.
So, with that in mind, how'd you make that happen?
Peet: Well, I left it alone for a few years. And at a certain moment, I guess it bugged me. The idea kept sticking in my mind, and I thought, well, why don't I just try it> And I ripped the DVD, and I am a director and editor, so I know how to edit. And I started asking around and Jeff who has a DePalma website knows a lot of stuff about the Brian DePalma. He actually had an old draft of the screenplay. It was called Father's Day at that time, and he was willing to send it over to me. So, I was able to read that. And indeed, the movie started the way I mentioned it, in the shop. But there were a lot of things different back then, because the screenplay wasn't completed. There were some really wild things in there that he just let go because it was too wild, or he went into another direction. But basically it laid out how the chronological order used to be.
It wasn't actually chronological. He made it chronological because, as I heard it, he started to second guess his own creative feelings when the movie was tested and people had a problem with it. He started to mess around some more in the editing, and he changed everything to a chronological order. At the time, he thought, well, this is probably better, because then we get to the action really soon. Yeah, we do. So, that is how it was released, but of course in interviews after that, he has mentioned a lot about the fact that he doesn't really like the film as it was released, and that it should have been different.
Before chatting with you, I sat down and rewatched both versions and took notes to try to figure out what the order was. And what throws it off for me a little bit is the opening shot in the theatrical cut of the park from high up is very much a Brian DePalma opening shot, you know, very close to what he did in “Carrie.” Whereas, the opening shot in the clock store is not really a DePalma shot. It's a little mundane. It's a wide shot. It's interesting, you know that Jenny walks up and sees herself in the heart shaped camera and all that--
Peet: It encapsulates the whole movie, but that's in a different way than the original did.
Yes, exactly. And then as I was going through—and I'm sure you ran into this, it's regardless of whether it's the re-cut or the theatrical one—it's a dream sequence with a flashback built into it. And so it isn't until you get out of the dream sequence that you realize, oh, that was a dream sequence. But then in your mind, you're going well, then, was the flashback real, or is that part of the dream?
And then they've added in narration as part of the flashback to help explain it, which I'm guessing was done in post. And so now they have a narration thing. So they have to keep that up. And then when they switch it around, when you did the version that was closer to what he wanted, it's still a bit wonky, regardless of whether you're chronological or not. And the audience has to go: okay, she's going to the hotel. Is this a dream? It must be a dream, because she's walking into the room and she doesn't have a key. That's the only clue, I think, that it's really a dream. And then obviously it's a dream, because she's killed and wakes up. And then you have the repeat of the thing with the gift and all that.
So, regardless of the order of everything before, that whole section, I think is always going to throw an audience off.
Peet: You're right, but the wonkiness, if you call it that, it is intentional. What he wanted to do, and he has stated this in interviews is, you know, normally with kind of police mystery, there is something going on and you don't know quite what. And then the detectives, they start to ask around. And you slowly assemble information, and it becomes clearer and clearer what actually has happened. And he really wanted this time to fuck with his audience, of course, because that's what Brian DePalma does. And he said, what if all the information the audience is getting is either a dream, it has never happened? Or they don't know if it's happened. Or, you know, it's an unreliable narrator. That was actually the game.
And he's so good at that.
Peet: He's really good at it, but of course you also need to get the audience so far that they're willing to go with you. Because it's a very manipulative way of telling a story. And some people don't like that. So, that's a very thin line that he was walking.
And I think in the editing, he got cold feet. He thought, well, maybe I went a little too far here, and maybe I should do it a little differently, help them out and make everything chronological, and it may have fixed some things. But it created other big problems. The flow isn't really right. It wasn't how he originally imagined it.
I think in a way he tested it, and it tested badly. And after that, they changed it around, and I think probably some of those changes were good, because he also shortened some bits, which were maybe a little too wild, judging from the screenplay that I've read. But I think changing the order was a bad decision. And I think he thinks that too, because as you know, he actually likes the version that I did and it's the "Director's Cut."
So, he fixed some things, and he made other things problematic. It's really funny, you mentioned Paul Hirsch earlier, and he's, of course, De Palma, editor. He originally wasn't the editor on “Raising Cain,: it was someone else or two other people, and it didn't really work out as the Brian DePalma wanted it. It says in the book. He was struggling with it in the editing suite, and at a certain moment, I guess, he fired the previous editor. And he made sure that Paul came in. And Paul, he read the screenplay on the airplane, and he didn't get it.
That's a bad sign.
Peet: And he read it again, still on the same flight still didn't get it. He went to the Brian DePalma, he asked about it and still did not get it. And while he was editing, I'm afraid to say he never really got it. And that was an eye opener for me. I realized that pretty late on, because that book came out sometime after thae "Director's Cut" had come out on "Blu Ray."
He was also asked, he was giving a Q&A somewhere, and somebody mentioned the Director's Cut, that it was edited by some random guy, and DePalma actually preferred that version. And Paul Hirsch said, well, he should have hired the random guy. Well, in a roundabout way I did it. But don't get me wrong, though. Paul is brilliant. He must have done a lot of things right as well, because I think the finale of the film, which all plays in slow mo, I think he edited that all over again. And that works brilliantly.
It does. If you remember what he did at the end of “Carrie,” and how he fixed the split screen issues in the end of “Carrie” and made all that work. The montage he put together in the middle of "Phantom of the Paradise," even the closing credit montage in “Phantom the Paradise” in which you really recap all the characters. That's a really good editor.
I understand that for legal reasons—in putting together your recut and making it what became the official Director's cut—you had to use all the elements from the theatrical cut. You had to use all of them, and obviously couldn't add anything, because you didn't have access to that. Was that tricky, where you had to use absolutely everything?
Peet: No, it wasn't tricky. I was just lucky. When I made my own recut, and De Palma wanted it to be part of the Blu ray, the lawyers of Universal also requested that the recut of the film would only be possible if it wouldn't add something and wouldn't take something away. And, yeah, I was just lucky that it works like that. The only thing I did was change the order around, and there's a little change in the overall length of the film. That's because I repeat something, and I make some dissolves little a differently.
That repetition is really helpful, to pull us back to where we need to be on the timeline. If you didn't have the scene that Jenny and her friend played by Mel Harris, I think you would get a little disassociated as to, okay, it’s the same time, they're in the park.
Peet: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And this must have been one of those things where an editor can help a director to achieve what he wants. Because I can imagine that they tried out that order in the editing suite. And that they thought it wouldn't work, because it's too jarring, you don't know where you are in the story, whatever. And the little repetition that I added really helps to get the viewer—you know, it is still jarring—but immediately after that the audience realizes, “okay, it's this moment, right,” and then they get along with it again.
I’m wondering if today's audiences today might be a little more keyed into time jumps than they were back then?
Peet: Definitely, because since then, of course, we've had movies like "Memento" and "Pulp Fiction," which are, you know, messing around with traditional ways that stories are told.
I think part of the problem was that you have this huge flashback, and at a certain moment, the movie goes on again, after that flashback. But it's such a long flashback that Brian DePalma thought, well, maybe the audience will never understand that a flashback can last that long. So, let's not do it. And I think, you know, the movies that I'm mentioning, other ones might have helped to educate the viewer to the modern age where this is not much of a problem anymore. You know, you can, take people to amazingly difficult things. You just watch what Christopher Nolan has been doing, and they are willing to go along as long as you entertain them and reward them.
In comparing the two versions as closely as I did, your version, although it's just a tiny bit longer, it actually seems faster. Because once Carter gets on that Carter train where he has to go all the way to the end, that's happening more in the middle of the movie, instead of the beginning. That just gives it a propulsion that the theatrical version doesn't have because it starts with Carter, and then it goes to Jenny for a big chunk, and then it's back to Carter. You're getting a little surprise of, oh, John Lithgow is evil in the first five minutes. But it's John Lithgow, so how big a surprise is that going to be in a DePalma film, really? I don't think he's ever been in a DePalma film where he wasn't ultimately evil.
Well, it's true. And then switching it so that we're doing the Psycho/Dressed to Kill thing, following a character and then she suddenly dies. But then DePalma’s brilliant touch of, no she is not dead, when Carter sees her on the TV screen is a huge shock. And I think it’s more of a shock in your version than in the original one, and just because of the pacing of things.
There is still though in both versions my favorite moment, and it's one of those things where I wish I could go back and see it again for the first time: when the elevator door opens and you see "Dr. Nix" coming forward with the baby. And you realize he is alive, that he isn't a manifestation of Carter's brain. He's really there, and we've been toyed with all the way up to that point with obviously, “he's not there because he's never in the same shot with anybody else.” He's doing the same tricks that he does with Cain. It's just such a delightfully DePalma moment, that and the appearance of Jenny on the TV screen, are just great moments that only work because the filmmaker has brought us up to them so skillfully.
Peet: Yeah, you're right. You know, that is the original flow as it was intended. It's also funny to me that a lot of people at the time didn't really care for the story of Jenny, because you know, you were already on this track of John Lithgow doing his crazy thing, and then you all of a sudden get a love story. I loved it at the time, but it didn't play that well. So, it's kind of brilliant that if you start with it, it really gets the attention that it deserves, and people actually really like it, and then as soon as John Lithgow does his thing, like you say, it becomes really propulsive, the whole narrative goes toward that ending.
Yeah, it's just great, and of course, we can’t not that mentioned DePalma's lovely play on "Psycho’s," ending scene with Simon Oakland explaining everything. To have France Sternhagen do that same thing in her own way. And then, of course, that classic DePalma shot taking us all the way through the building for no other reason than the fact that he can, in fact, do that. And just watching it, thinking, wow, she's timed exactly where she goes off kilter, and they have to pull her back, and it all fits with the lines as she's saying them.
When he does that sort of thing, like he did at the beginning of "Bonfire," it's just so much fun to watch him do it because you realize not a lot of filmmakers can pull that off and keep the right pacing and make it work. It's just a great moment. He's such a devious, master storyteller.
And then let's just jump ahead: You make the cut, and you heard that he loved it. How did that happen?
Peet: Well, I think a year after I put it online on IndieWire. I talked about what I was doing, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if I make a video essay about my findings, and then it was posted on IndieWire. And he said, I think the whole version should be on IndieWire. And that, of course, you know, in terms of rights, we were thinking like, can we do that? Actually, you can't really, but we decided to do so anyway, and then put up that it was for educational purposes. And we just decided that whenever Universal lawyers would call, like, what are you doing, get this thing off? We would get it off. But it was on there, and I believe it's still visible actually.
They don't really care for Raising Cain at Universal, but Brian DePalma, he found it. And about a year later I started reading in interviews—I think there were at least five—that he actually preferred this version over his own version. And that was of course already completely wonderful.
Much later, I think about five years later, the Blu Ray was announced by Shout Factory. And all of a sudden Jeff from the Brian DePalma site—I mentioned him before—he got an email from DePalma. He said, “I just watched the Raising Cain recut and I think it's great. It succeeds in things that we couldn't get right the first time. It is what I originally wanted the movie to be.” And he thought it should be part of the Blu ray and he said, “Maybe you can make this happen? If I have to call somebody, then I will.”
So, that is how it happened. It was a big surprise for Shout Factory. I think they already finished the Blu ray, and then all of a sudden they got this call from the director, like okay, yeah, well, you have to add something.
There's now going to be a second disc.
Peet: Yes. I never talked to Brian DePalma, but he basically gave me free rein. He said, “Okay, I've liked this version, this recut and it should be on the blu ray.” So, Shout Factory asked me to make that happen. We used the original master, the same master as was on the normal blu ray, and we actually re-edited that according to the recut that I have made and put it on the blu ray.
That's an incredible story. What a thrill for you and what a vindication for him that somebody somewhere did this because of today's technology. It'd be like if you got a letter from Orson Welles, saying thank you so much for restoring "Magnificent Ambersons," that's exactly the movie I set out to make.
Peet: It’s still a little bit of a dream when I think about it. It's really great and I know I've emailed him after that to try to get, you know, some of the correspondence about it, but he's not the kind of guy who answers those emails. But I do know actually from Laurent who did the interview book that DePalma’s very happy with the blu ray as it is right now.
You feel, sort of, it has validated his film again. So, that feels great.
John Gaspard: Today, we're going to talk about your life as an actor and having a diversified pool of things to draw from to be a working actor. I listened to a couple other interviews with you, and there was one point they kept coming to that I wanted to avoid, which was immediately talking about your mother. My connection is, and was, that we went to the same high school, Southwest high school in Minneapolis. So, I thought, well, that's my great connection. And then my friend Jim here, who is … one of the reasons he's here is because he is a working actor as well, but in a much smaller market here in the Twin Cities. So, I thought having him as part of this chat would be interesting. Jim, what is your story?
Jim Meskimen: And he happens to have the name of Cunningham.
John: Well, we're gonna get to that. Here we go.
Jim Cunningham: Therein lies the story. Your mother made an appearance along with some other famous TV moms at, you know, we're very proud of the fact that Spam is produced here in Minnesota.
Meskimen: That's right. That's right.
Cunningham: And there is a Spam museum. It's that important to us, Minnesotans.
Meskimen: Yes, I know she's been there. We had some Spam swag that she gave us one time.
Cunningham: Well, there, it was from that. She came as a famous mom, along with some other famous TV moms, Barbara Billingsley, and--
Meskimen: And Florence, maybe? Florence Henderson?
Cunningham: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I was the emcee of that event and I was interviewing them as they arrived on the red carpet. And I said to your mother, Oh, I'm just so thrilled to meet you because my last name is Cunningham. And more than that, my dad's name is actually Richard Cunningham. And so is my brother.”
Meskimen: Oh, my gosh.
Cunningham: During the height of the Happy Days craze, we literally had to have an unlisted phone number because every third call was, “Is Fonzi there?”
Meskimen: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Cunningham: And your mother said to me, “You have to prove to me that your name is Cunningham.” So I took out my wallet and showed her my driver’s license. And she said, “Oh, you poor darling.” And she gave me a nice hug and a peck on the cheek and it was just, I cherish, I cherish the memory.
Meskimen: That's really sweet. That's hilarious. She challenged you like someone would make that up, you know, so she had to really get to the bottom of that one.
Cunningham: But your mother was just charming and a delight.
Meskimen: That's great.
Cunningham: Yeah. Sorry. We got off on a tangent.
Gaspard: We've given the elephant in the room some peanuts. Now we're shoving it off to the side for you.
Meskimen: Well, if I may say it is, it is no problem at all. I love to talk about my mom. She has blazed such a path for me, not in terms of, you know, any kind of practical nepotism, but just because everyone loves her and loves what she represents. And so I find it very easy to make friends with strangers in this way, because you're already kind of disposed to, well, you must not be such a schmuck, you know, he’s got this mom. And so I'm always very happy to talk about her. She's a delight and she's 93. She lives very close by and she's very happy in enjoying her retirement.
Gaspard: Excellent. All right. So we want to talk about being a working actor, but before we dive into the acting part, I know when you started out, you were focused maybe more on art and cartooning and that. How did you make the switch from that to acting?
Meskimen: Well, I kept both plates spinning. I studied, I taught myself to cartoon and illustrate, enough to be a professional, you know, not enough to be a super genius, kind of in demand, tremendous demand person. But enough to work. And I did that in New York city. And I had this need to perform. And so, I also did plays, I would do little projects.
I would perform, you know, when I could. When I went to college, I didn't take theater classes, but I would do plays, you know, people would audition. And if there was a guy — I was very good at accents. So, you always needed a funny guy with an accent. Sometimes, you know, I could get the part of the old man, the old French guy or whatever. And that I just was always a few clicks above the rest of my fellows there.
So I really kept both these activities going while I was sorting out which one was gonna be the path. Cause I really honestly wasn't clear on what I'd be doing. And, I felt strong feelings about both, but I didn't feel at that time, I didn't see how I could mesh them together. I didn't see how one was going to be, how I’d have to jettison one completely.
And it took me a while to figure that out. And when I did, it was a big relief and I went, okay, I know why I want to pursue acting. I know what's honorable about it. I know why it's right for me at this time. And so I'm going to go for it. And then I went with full energy towards that, but I always, I mean, I haven't forgotten how to draw or paint and I do it now. I'm older, I'm 62. That was when I was 23.
So at this point in my life, I wouldn't mind sitting home and painting a little bit and being away from everybody. But at the time I felt like I needed a more social existence, a more social career that would have more collaborative aspects.
Cunningham: As you look back on things, do you remember some of the first things that you got that were maybe, you know, of note?
Meskimen: Yeah. I started off, I came to New York and I started a bunch of things all at once. Cuz New York is a great place get started, you know, and start things and be a starter. So I was studying acting and I was studying improv. I had a false start. I went and studied at the Stella Adler school for a while, which was a disaster. And I vectored off of that as fast as I could. And I got into improv, which was much more suited to my temperament and I think is better training in general.
So I was doing that. I was looking for an agent and I was also supporting myself as an illustrator cartoonist in the meantime. So I didn't have to be a waiter. I could have a pretty decent job.
So the first things I got had to do with my ability to do impressions. And be a voice actor. So my improv group that I was in had a gig weekly doing what was then a regular feature of the old McNeil Lehrer report, if you ever remember that show?
Gaspard: Oh yeah.
Meskimen:The McNeil Lehrer report, which was a news show. It was like a hard news show, but it had a funny section every Friday. They would take the political cartoons of the day and just by kind of zooming in and out and changing panels, they would sort of, you know, semi-animate them statically. And they would add voices to it.
And then they hired us to do the voices of, you know, Boris Yeltsin, then Reagan and whatever was happening on the time. And we’d go in every Friday. It was my first AFTRA a job and I think I made $114 bucks a week, but it was $114 bucks a week, you know, back then when a ride on the subway was 50 cents.
That was like, this is okay. So that was a nice, kinda like, oh, that's a stability, you know? Cause I think I did, we did a whole, I don’t know, a season or more of it. And every week, you know, it was kind of cool.
My biggest breakthrough came in the area of on-camera commercials. And I had remembered that my mom, when she was a single mom, she would, every now and then before Happy Days, she would get guest spots on things like Mannix and Mission Impossible and Hawaii-5-0. But those were pretty few and far between. And then, if she booked a commercial, it was like, oh, you know, thank God because it would generate enough income, through residuals for her.
And back then commercials paid very, very well. Today it's more rare, as you know Jim. It's kind of a disappearing thing, as things go on the internet. But a network commercial back then could help you stay alive. So, I had that in my mind. I was like, you know, I need to get into commercials.
So, I auditioned and eventually, after a couple of years, actually two years at least going on a lot of things as a young man, I started to get into commercials.
And there was one very, very lucky day that changed my life completely. And it had everything to do with whatever else I was studying, because I was studying communication at that time. I was studying improv at that time and those things came together in a beautiful way.
I had an audition for a grocery chain out of Texas called Skaggs Alpha Beta, the euphonious name of Skaggs Alpha Beta.
And they were looking for a spokesman to interview people in the store. And they had had some market research that told 'em that, you know, you call yourself the friendliest place in town, but you're not so friendly. So, they wanted a friendly spokesman who could talk to people, actual real people and have fun and whatever, you know, and be clean and not insult people.
And that was what I had been studying in improv, you know, clean comedy. Supportive comedy, you know, not cutting the legs off of people. So, I got this audition. I went physically and did it and they said, “oh yeah, yeah, that's great. We're gonna hire you.” I'm like, great. It's three commercials and three regional commercials, which is not a huge deal, but for me it was like, well, this is great.
Then after we did those three commercials, they came back about a month later and said, “all right, we want you to be our spokesman to do all our stuff all year long. We'll give you a contract, radio, TV, photo, you know, put you in the newspaper, the little circulars and billboards and what have you.”
And it was like, forty grand. And I'm like, oh my God, I didn't even know this existed. My mom never had anything like this. This is like new territory. Well, I did that for five years for that company. And every year, the price went up, the contract got sweeter. By the end of it. I was making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just on that job, which would take about seven days a year to do.
And that changed my life, because it gave me tremendous confidence, because I created all the material, I improvised every second of it. Maybe not every second, but you know. And it gave me the wherewithal to exist in New York comfortably without having to really sweat the day job and to do plays and to do things that, you know, if you have time, you go and you do improv shows and you don't worry about, am I making any money? You don't sweat it.
And then I actually got known because the footage, I would take the footage and I would cut it into reels and I would send that around and I got more spokesman jobs. So, you know, it was like a side business that sort of developed outta nowhere.
Off of one audition. Sometimes it makes me scared to think: what if I was late? What if I didn't make it that audition, life would be so different.
Cunningham: Somewhere in the multiverse, that's happening.
Meskimen: That poor sucker in the multiverse but he probably has all my hair. So it's fine.
Cunningham: Did you do any Happy Days with your mom? I was just thinking as a young kid, did you do any? You know, walk-ons or extra work on any of the shows your mom was doing?
Meskimen: No. The only time when she became Marion Cunningham—your pseudo mom—she got me into an episode and my sister, not the same episode. She exercised a little bit, you know, and it happens to be one of the most famous episodes of Happy Days that I was in.
I'm a young man, 17, on the beach looking buff. And I come and announce the fact that they've caught a shark out in the water. And then the rest of the show is about how Fonzi’s going to jump the shark.
Gaspard: But it sounds like growing up, that you learned the life of a working actor because you've lived with a working actor, is that safe to say?
Meskimen: A hundred percent.
I think one of my primary advantages in my life has been that I saw what it is, you know, and what it isn't. And I saw it. My mom also was particularly driven and also focused and intent, you know. She's a high achiever. So, whereas a lot of actors go, well, I'm waiting for my agent to call and I don't know, I can't do anything, you know, until they give me an audition. Maybe I can, blah, blah, blah.
And I realized that's like a losing attitude. Because what I saw was a woman who went, Hmm, uh, who can I call? What can I do? Who must I reach out to? Who must I meet? Should I do a play? Absolutely, I should do a play and I should let everybody know that I'm doing this play. And even though it's a crappy play and I'm getting no money, I'm gonna do it.
And I looked at that and went, okay. I see. You need to promote yourself. She hired a PR person. She always had a PR person and would utilize that in any way that she could. And then, how do you live and raise kids and pursue this weird career that is so herky jerky, what do you do? And I saw how she did it. She would economize and we hired out—she always remembers this—we rented out one of the bedrooms in our house. Mind you, we have three bedrooms.
We hired out a third of our house to a college student, because, you know, that was 60 bucks a month or something she would get and shared a kitchen with this person. And, she would do plays and she would volunteer for things and she would push it along, push it down the road.
I remember vividly seeing her rehearse lines for an audition over the sink. We were getting ready to have dinner or lunch or something. And she's going to take off in a minute in the car and drive to Hollywood and do this audition. You juggle, but she was a hustler, in the sense of a hard worker. She was a depression child and I think that came as just part of the territory back then.
But even more than other people her age that I observed, she was just intent. And it came from this vision that she had of as a girl of seeing her name on a marque and changing her name too—so it would look better—and just being like, I'm gonna do this. Which I recognize now from my life experiences and for my own philosophy that it's a very smart way to go about it.
Gaspard: Yeah, it really is. You know, it's interesting in looking at your career and then looking at my friend, Mr. Cunningham here, who I've known for 30 some odd years.
Meskimen: Oh, wow.
Gaspard: And seeing that you both have a very similar mindset when it comes to not saying no to things. I learned that from Jim. Don't necessarily say no to something right away. Listen to what it is. A lot of times you're gonna accept stuff just because you're not doing anything else and why not. And you never know where it's going to lead. You both have this living in sort of a limbo world of: I don't know what's coming next, but because you've said yes so often, and because you're easy to work with and because you bring the goods and because you have so many different threads, there's almost always something coming in. Because you've just kept the streams open. And that's why I wanted Jim to meet Jim, because you both represent the same thing just in different towns.
Meskimen: Soul brothers!
Cunningham: Exactly. Well, I'd like to think.
Gaspard: But now you have an online course to help actors become working actors. Because there's a real difference between an actor and a working actor. I’m in the low budget movie world and there's a difference between being a screenwriter and a screenwriter who's working or being a director and being a director. You can say your thing, but to actually be working at it on an ongoing basis, doesn't necessarily just happen. And it sounds like in your course, you're going to walk people through that process.
Meskimen: Yeah, I've really tried to do that. That's exactly right. You can break down a career, and I'm sure Jim understands this very well, like you have the production side of things, which is the rehearsing, showing up, acting, great.
And everybody's focused on that. You're like, that's what acting is. Well, that's right. That is one sliver of the job. The other sliver is marketing. There's also a kind of a sliver that's having the big goal and the vision and sort of the planning and being the visionary of the organization, because you're an organization. There’s finance, there's paying bills, there's keeping one's self fit, medical things. There's a lot of different moving parts to it.
And, and most of us think of acting as like, oh yes, there I am on the stage holding the skull. Giving the speech to Yoric. Okay, that may happen, that may be part of it, but that's like an eighth of it or a 15th of it. So, in my course, I've tried to share what those other parts of the organization that I do.
Because I was paying attention, thank God. It didn't just happen by luck. It happened very concertedly and very determinately. So I know what we did. And I say we: I've got a little team of people, with my wife and now my daughter helps me, agents, managers, other people to actually keep it rolling, because it is that kind of life, the freelance life.
And there are many different kinds of freelancing lives that people can lead. But in an actor freelance life, you don't know the next week. Like, I looked on my calendar yesterday. And I went, wow, there's a lot of blank space on that calendar. And yet there is no blank space in, you know, my bills summary--I'm going to have to pay whether there's something or not.
So now today, because of all the promotion that I do during the week, now I have a couple jobs. I never sweat it because—probably like Mr. Cunningham—I know that these are the actions that I have to do. I know that schedule's gonna fill out. It's gonna fill out ahead of me almost like a train track rolling out in front of the steam engine.
So, in the course, yeah, I've composed a bunch of different videos where I talk about certain things about auditioning, about promotion, marketing, and other very important aspects of keeping the career rolling. I don't teach acting. I'm not going to go there. My wife has a wonderful acting school and anybody can check that of out if they want to. It's called The Acting Center and they run online courses as well as in-person here in LA.
I'm not teaching anything, but I'm sharing. What did I do? And what have I found after 35 years of doing this are the important steps to take, the important actions to always keep in, and what might happen, and how I've bobbed and weaved and kept things going so that I didn't have to take another job.
I never had to back up and go, well, I retreat, you know, now I'm gonna go and just go into teaching or now I'm gonna go into, you know, real estate or nothing wrong with that. And I know a lot of actors have done it, but I have not had to. And I'm a little bit stubborn at this point. I'll go kicking and screaming into any other, non-artistic field.
Gaspard: Good for you. Without giving away too much of the course, we’ve got a couple questions that I'm always interested in when it comes to this sort of career. What's the biggest mistake that beginning actors often make?
Meskimen: I think the biggest single mistake is to have the right mindset concerning who is creating the career. Because we come seemingly with hat in hand, as actors, to the audition, to the theater, to meetings, interviews, we can fall into the trap of thinking, I'm waiting for someone to give me something. When we're really desperate, we're really like beggars and it can get pretty bad. And as any actor who's been begging knows, it just doesn't work very well. It's very unattractive. Unless they're hiring a beggar. For the role of the beggar, you know, then it's okay.
All other times it's really anathema. So, I think it's a viewpoint of like, I am gonna create this career. That's what I saw my mom do. And that's what I exercised too. I totally mobilized that, because I'm a creative person, I like to create. So, it was kind of like, well, here's a good excuse: You want an excuse to create? Guess what? Your whole career is up to you.
What you wanna do, what you're good at? How much you pursue it, how well you do, how fast you go, how much you get paid. It's really kind of up to you. And that may seem counterintuitive or stupid, or, you know, bewildering to people as they just start out, because we are looking to collaborate. We are looking to fill a hole that someone else has created.
You know, somebody is out there right now, writing a part in a show that will need to be cast. And the casting director will be looking around for that person. That hole didn't exist until that writer came up with it. So, in a way, they have created that, they've created that opportunity, that position that needs to be filled. But we can always sort of be ready for those things.
I believe in sort of deciding and picturing things and putting things out there in the universe. So, I do that sometimes I'll go, you know, somewhere someone is writing a great part for me and, it's very difficult to actually link that to cause and effect. But the fact is I've been working as I said for a long time.
So, I think it's just a mindset of: you have to take the hat out of your hand, put the hat on your head or on a hook and go, you know what? I am the guy in charge. So, how much money do I wanna make? What do I wanna do this year? Take charge. Don't go, well, I hope, if only, well, maybe if things go well, somebody might possibly grant me…
No, no, no. That's a losing attitude. That's an expectation, you know, and being the effect of something rather than actually trying to cause something. So, it's a hard lesson to tell people, because so much of life is sort of dictating that we behave like people that are created upon. You know, we are marketed at, you know, come and watch this movie, sit in the dark while we tell you a story and feel this way and laugh at this part and, you know, and pay this money and, oh, okay.
We get that all day long. There's stuff, just shooting at us all day long and at some point, the artist has to kind of shake it off and go, what do I wanna make? I'm gonna make it, you know, I'm gonna produce it, I'm gonna create it.
And so that's what I think is the biggest change. The biggest mistake that could just go through a whole lifetime or a whole career of a person is like, they're thinking like, God, the agent will give me the thing. And then I might, if I possibly do well, they will give me the part and then maybe they'll keep all of it in and not edit out all of it.
And, and then maybe they will pay me and you know, all this kind of awful , you know, slave kind of mentality. As much as you can turn that around. You'll notice that the very big actors didn't take no for an answer. They developed their own projects. They were fussy. Sometimes they were saying, I won't do that, but I'll do this, you know.
They're demanding on themselves and, and many of them have created their own things. I always think about Billy Bob Thornton, would Billy Bob Thornton have the terrific career he does today? He's a great actor, but do you have the career that he has today if he hadn't decided, man, I'm gonna write this script and star in this Sling Blade thing myself.
I don't know. I doubt it. And there's lots of examples of people like that, because he wanted to do it, cuz it was something he observed in life or had this idea, I think while he was on another shoot and he turned, you know, the material of his life into this project that he believed in and miracles happened. And a lot of stories like that.
Gaspard: So you had the advantage of growing up, watching a working actor. So you had probably a bit better sense of that world than someone coming in from the outside doing it. But was there anything that you were surprised by once you started being a full-time working actor?
Meskimen: One lesson that I learned very quickly was: I probably would've had a commercial career about two years earlier, but I made a mistake. A strategic error.
There's a lot of potency to beginner's luck in show business. We hear a lot of stories. They're almost like legendary stories about people who went well, you know, I wasn't, I didn't even have the audition. I went with my buddy and my buddy didn't get the job. And I did. And you hear that there are gazillion stories like this.
Right? Same thing happened to me. I went with my friend to visit a girl who was working for Barbara Shapiro casting in Manhattan. And I went to say hello to this girl. And she said, “oh, by the way, you know, we're casting for this beer commercial.” So I got a call back. I got a second callback.
I got a third callback and they pay you for the third callback. But in between the second and third callback is where I made my error. This is funny, because it was related to impressions and impressions has always been a door opener for me. It was a Miller beer commercial with guys sitting around at campfire.
And I went well, I'm playing a guy who stands up and does a John Wayne thing. That was me. They kept calling me back, kept calling me. And then I had some stupid conversation with the girl that I had been going out with at the time. And she said, “why don’t you do Henry Fonda?” And I went, “yeah, I'll do Henry Fonda.”
That was the end of that. So the lesson I learned is a very important lesson. Most actors pick this up very quickly, but I just kind of screwed up. It’s that if they keep calling you back, don't change anything. It's going right.
If they ask you on the day: Okay, we saw your John Wayne. I wonder, can you do any other voices? That would've been the perfect time to whip out your Henry Fonda, as they say. But I screwed that up. Two years before I got another really good opportunity. So, I never change anything now. I learned that lesson very quickly.
When I did finally book a commercial, I had gone in and I got a call back and I remembered on the day I had like a headache. The day I did the first audition, I was cranky. And on the day I got the call back, I'm like that day, I'm like, well, I feel great. Well, I'm not gonna act like I feel great. I'm gonna be cranky.
And I went in and I booked that job. By applying this do not change anything.
Cunningham: Smart. A lot of people don't think that through, boy. That's a really good tip. If you're an actor listening, that's the price right there. You just got gold just dumped right into your lap.
Meskimen: Yeah, it would be like, if you went to a restaurant and you had the halibut one time and you go, oh my God, this halibut's great. I'm gonna come back. And if they serve you the halibut and now it's in a totally different sauce. You're like, what the fuck? I came for the halibut. What happened?
Cunningham: What happened? As you think about, you know, actors like me, can you point to some, you know, sort of generic, “Hey, this is here's another trap don't fall into this one?” Something that you see other actors kind of making that mistake again and again?
Meskimen: Sure. And it's related to my first comment about what's the biggest challenge in changing this mindset of who's in charge and being in the driver's seat, if you will, of your career. And I think I wind up talking to a lot of people, particularly guys our age who maybe have not made their peace with social media.
But for me it was a major breakthrough to finally have the discipline to get onto YouTube and begin what has become the last 11 years of really, just an interesting chapter of my life, where I have something that I would've loved to have in New York, which is this access and ease of production.
Anyway. Not to talk too much about myself, but just the fact that most actors are underutilizing, I think, the technological reality of today, of being able to share performances with the world and to generate interest in what you do. And to also creatively expand and reach out and come up with content yourself that may not at first have any kind of monetary value to you, but as a product, as a promotional activity, is virtually free and can create great windfalls and attention.
Are you doing anything on YouTube or anything?
Cunningham: You know, I'm really not. And not only am I not doing it, but you're the first person to suggest that if you were to use that in some way, that there would be a benefit there. Now, I'm not a great actor. I'm better as myself than I am as anybody else in general.
And that's where the bulk of my work comes is being me in front of a camera, or on stage. The challenge has been thrown down now: what could I do on YouTube? And could that effect, because as you mentioned, as you get older, the opportunities decrease.
They're looking for a 30-year-old, they're looking for a 40-year-old, and I'm not that anymore. I always used to tell people what you want is the number of auditions to go down and the number of jobs you're doing to go up. That's the goal. And now I'm finding that's no longer true for me. It's inverted now.
Meskimen: Yeah. Well, I can speak to a couple of points to that. So, I understand about playing yourself and being like a spokesman or being like something, a character that is more or less how you appear to other people. I would suggest that you're much bigger than that.
You're much more various than that. Your possibilities and potentials as just a human being are far beyond what your body might dictate: how you look and how you think about things, even some ideas you have. I think you're bigger than that as an individual. And one of the things that I love about acting is that one gets to occupy a completely different point of view.
(as Ian McKellen) For example, this is why I do a lot of impressions is because sometimes I can just change into another person and look at things completely different point of view.
That's sort of the magic of it. I mean, the expectation of an actor generally is that they can do different things. You wouldn't buy a Swiss army knife and find that it has one blade and go, I'm really happy now.
You'd go, wait, where are the scissors? Whereas the ballpeen hammer or whatever. To be an actor means I can play a lot of different characters. I can play a lot of different roles. Now, as we get older, maybe, you know, that gets narrower, but we can certainly always push. Push it out. And I think you can surprise yourself by what you're actually able to do.
You've got a lot of wisdom now, you've earned that over the years, you've met a lot of different kinds of people, and I think it's probably something to take a look at. An actor, if you look at the job description, if there is such a thing it's like knowingly taking on another point of view to help tell a story, that's kind of a quick definition of what it would be like.
So if you are facile and ready to occupy other viewpoints, to look at things from the point of view of someone who's, you know, just physically exhausted or someone who's been just kicked around their whole life or someone who's just won the lottery. You know, if we practice this, which is what they do at the acting center, just kind of changing viewpoints and looking at things from different points of view, then you discover that, you know, I can do a lot of different things. Because a human being is like that. A human being can adopt all kinds of different viewpoints and feel all different kinds of ways and express different kinds of emotions.
And there's a great freedom in that. I think you'll blossom if you start to have a little try at that.
Cunningham: I like that. That's good advice. I like it a lot.
Gaspard: You know, it's interesting. You mentioned social media and we're all of a certain age and feel like things might be passing us by, but Jim Meskimen, your use of social media, your use of YouTube—I found you on TikTok—your promotion of yourself does not seem like promotion. It does not seem like marketing. It is just you, having fun, doing the things you do. And then in some cases it's impressions. It's other cases, it's you doing characters that you've created. And I think that's sort of the secret to promoting yourself on social media is: Do what you love and eventually people will find that and want to be part of that.
Meskimen: Yeah. And there's an example. Thank you for noticing that. I appreciate it. And I'm having the best time. Two things I wanna say about that. one is: I don’t know if you've ever heard the entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk?
He said something very, very helpful about branding. Because branding, when we talk about branding, it immediately sounds like something we don't wanna have anything to do with. But branding is reputation. That's another good synonym, your reputation. And we prove our reputation all the time. By how we talk to people, what we do, what choices we make, it's pretty simple.
So if we let people know, Hey, I was at this concert and I had a great time. Well, we know that about you. We know that you love Fleetwood Mac, you know, and that you had a great time on last Wednesday. That is your reputation too. If you create a character or you go to a play or you just say, God, you know, this is on my mind and I have to say something about it. That's your reputation too. That's your brand. People get to know you that way.
And the other point I wanted make was in terms of the volume of what I do and how it doesn't seem like branding. It's just me having fun. And that is indeed entirely what it is.
There was a guy when I was kicking around New York, back in my twenties, in various subway hubs, like grand central station or times square in the subway downstairs. Every now and then I would walk past this young man who was a drummer and he was banging on—not drums—he had like a joint compound bucket. And he had, I swear, I remember one time he had crisper from refrigerator—you know, the shelf, the drawer.
Anyway, he was banging away those buckets and those instruments, which obviously did not cost a lot of money. And the sound just racketed through the subway. And it sort of integrated; when you walked through to that drum beat. You were kinda like, yeah, I'm in New York and I'm walking.
Not for nothing, this is the right soundtrack for this little part of my life right now, you know? And how many people would walk by this guy every day? Was in the hundreds of thousands, probably, right? So, there is a guy—this is a great example, if you think about it in terms of social media—this was a guy who was drumming for a massive audience every day.
And were people giving him money? I never gave him a dime. I mean, he couldn't have made more than, I don't know, 75 bucks a day. Who knows, maybe made more than that. But that wasn't the point. The point was 10 years later maybe, or earlier, there was a production, called, Bring in the Noise, Bring in the Funk.
This guy got hired. He was seen by the director. He was in a Broadway show. He was performing seven nights a week. I can guarantee he wasn't making $75 a day. And it just was like: oh, look at that. That's a great, very easy example of like, okay, this is what obviously he loved to do it.
Nobody said here is the way to the Broadway: Get your bucket of joint compound young man. And go thee to Times Square. No, not a chance. He loved rhythm. But he made it go right. And I don’t know where he is today. I don't even know the guy's name, but I know that it was the big start of something with tremendous potential for him, you know.
Gaspard: Follow your bliss. Like they say, you never know. I have two working actors in front of me right now. Tell me about rejection and dealing with rejection and how you deal with rejection
Meskimen: Oh, good question. Yeah. Rejection is like a kind of a shock to the beginner, because we kind of know it's coming, but it still hurts.
And the fact is that it's something that you have to kind of make friends with, which sounds really, really impossible. I just watched a video of a guy who—I think it was Joe Rogan. I watched a little on TikTok. Joe Rogan was talking about this ice-cold bath. That you know, it's now a thing to do these super cold plunges to try to handle inflammation in the body.
And I watched him because I want to see you go in that bath. And he went in. I'm like, how long is he going to stay in that thing? It's 34 degrees, just above freezing, but he was in there. I lost interest. So he went on for minutes and minutes. And being judged and being rejected is like that cold bath.
Now, Joe Rogan said that the first time he went in that bath, he could do it for about a minute. And then he got the hell out of there and went into a sauna. Probably. Now he can go in for 15 minutes. So, it was like that for me with rejection. Because, you know, you prepare something it's—and when you're an actor, it's different than other jobs. Because other jobs, if you're producing, like, even a piece of artwork, you know, it's exterior to you.
It's not you. It's that piece of paper. It's that object that you've created. With an acting job, it's like, oh, it's your hair, your body, your face, your tone of voice, your presence, your smell. It's all what you're offering, you know, whether you want to or not, it's there. Especially in the pre-Zoom days.
So, the levels and the dynamics of you being judged are just exponential. You know, you're like, wow, oh, you didn't like it the way I sat, you didn't like the way I said that one word, you know. There's all these swords to die on. But if you recognize and get familiar with the procedure, then after a while, that bite that it had originally does start to taper off.
And at this point— and early on for me, I'd done hundreds of auditions—I'm like, some I get, some I don’t get. Unless somebody says something really cruel, which is a whole different category of thing. There is just a natural judgment and evaluation. That is part and parcel of being an actor, where they go, “thank you very much.”
And you never hear from them again and you go, wow, that's one thing. If someone says, “yeah, you know, you're not quite right. You're not quite good enough. Boy, we were really expecting something better or, wow, that sucked.” I mean, there's a whole range of othernesses. Then that that is something that you don't necessarily get comfortable with.
But after a while you kind of gird your loins and go, well, that comes up, I have a different response to that. You know, I'm gonna say a little something or I'm gonna make a mental note: This casting director is an asshole. But that's different. The everyday kind of, “thank you very much for coming in rejection,” that's just something that if you do it enough and if you're not too precious about it and you don't take it personally, cuz it is not personal, it absolutely is not.
You know, one good thing too is to—if you're an actor and I have not done this, so I'm giving you this advice that's kind of secondhand—but go and participate in a casting process where you're not being cast. Watch other actors come in, be a reader or something, and observe the variety of people that come in and what is attractive and what is unattractive and what is distracting and what is not distracting.
And it'll give you some reality on like, oh, okay. We've interviewed or we've auditioned 15 people for this role, 12 of them could do it. They were fine, but this one's hair is this way. And this one has a little better this and you know, and I don't know, I met this guy before, I'll work with him again.
They're arbitrary, small kind of gentle reasons why the person gets hired. And it's not the Roman arena where they go, Thumbs down. You're dead. Now it’s thumbs down, you are a failure. You—it's your turn to be eliminated. It's not that. It's like, yeah, you're great. You're great. I got nothing to say except the director wanted to work with this guy.
And you’ve got to make your peace with that and go, yep, I would do the same thing if I was a director. I wanna work with this guy. Who cares? It doesn’t matter.
Gaspard: I still remember William H Macy saying once he was on a TV show and went up to the producer/director, the guy in charge, and said, “thanks so much for casting me in this.”
And the guy said, “yeah, it was between you and another 5,000 people, but you’ll work.”
Meskimen: I just found out—this is interesting—I got a role in a show that I'm gonna work on next week. And I was like, wow, great. You always, you know, these days, Jim, you know about this, you do these at home self-tape auditions, and it seems fake. It still seems kinda like I'm not in show business. I'm just doing it in the back of my house, but they call you up and they go, you know what? We want you for the role. And I'm like, oh, okay, great. And I'm all chuffed about it, you know, excited.
And the wardrobe man, when I went to the wardrobe fitting, for reasons of his own I'm sure, told me that, “Yeah, they originally hired another actor to do this part and then the schedule changed and so he couldn't do it.” And so then I found out, you know, in that sort of covert way that I was not the first choice.
I still get to do the job. But that's another aspect of things that could come in and sour things and you can start to feel sort of like a victim a little bit. But you know what? I just look at, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to get bigger and better parts in bigger and better shows. So that like, like Jim said, maybe I don't have to do so many auditions. Maybe they come to you and say, we have an offer. I love that. That happens sometimes, but I am also very happy to audition. I'm very happy to meet with people because for me, I look at an audition is a performance.
Especially these days when they expect a performance. I don't hold the script. I memorize it. I work it out. I spend hours and hours and hours getting that show together and shoot it to the best of my ability, put the best sound on it that I can and fire it back as quickly as I can.
And it's fun for me. I like the activity of acting. I like the activity of portraying a different person, of trying something out.
And that's, that's the joy of it. And the chore of it.
John: [00:00:00] Before we dive into the assignment you gave me—which was to watch stuff I hadn't seen and also rewatch stuff I had seen to get a better idea of who's done a good job of adapting these books—let's just jump in and talk a little bit about your area of expertise and why you have it. So, I'm going to start with you, Brian. I was very surprised after working with you a while to find out that you had a whole vampire subset in your life.
Brian: A problem, you can call it a problem. It's fine.
John: Okay. What is the problem and where did it come from?
Brian: I was just vaguely interested in vampires for a while. When I was in my screenwriting days, someone had encouraged me to do a feature length comedy about vampires, and that led me to do a lot of reading. And then I just kind of put it aside for a while. And then I was, I had just finished a documentary for Committee Films and they said, do you have any other pitches? And I thought, and I said, you know, there's still people who believe in vampires even today, that could be really interesting. And I put together a pitch package. Then, the guy in charge of development said, [00:01:00]this is what we need to be doing. And then it stalled out. Nothing ever happened with it. And I said, what the hell. I could do this on my own. I could fly around and interview these people. And I did, I spent a couple years interviewing academics and some writers. And along the way, I started finding all these very intriguing moments in the history of either vampire lore or fiction or even just people who consider themselves vampires today. And all these things would connect to each other. It was a lattice work of vampires going back hundreds of years. It didn't fit the documentary, unfortunately, but I found it way too interesting. And I said, I need some kind of outlet for this. And so I started writing about it on Tooth Pickings. And that eventually put me in touch with people who were more scholarly, and it opened up a lot more conversations. And now I can't get out. I'm trapped.
John: Well, the first sign is recognizing there's a problem. [00:02:00] Okay. Now, Dawn, you had a different entryway into Frankenstein.
Dawn: Yeah, well, I was a theater major and a history minor at the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers. And, this was in the late nineties, early two thousands, when there were still a lot of jobs for people who had degrees and things like this. Or at least there was a theory that this was a reasonable thing to get educated in. And then I graduated in 2001, which was months after 9/11, when all those jobs went away. And so, I had this education so specific and what was I gonna do? And gratefully the Twin Cities is a great place for finding that kind of stuff. And one of my very first jobs out of college was at the Bakkan museum.
So, the Bakkan museum was founded by Earl Bakkan, who is the inventor of the battery-operated pacemaker. And he has always, since childhood, been obsessed with the Frankenstein movie that came out in 1931. And he attributes [00:03:00]his great scientific invention and many others to a science fiction in general. And to the spark of the idea that comes from sources like this.
So, when he opened the museum, he insisted that there'd be a grand Frankenstein exhibit. And that means going back to the book, and that meant going back to the author, Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein, she started writing it when she was 16.
And so, I was hired because—boom, look at me—my degree is suddenly colliding, right?
So, I was hired by the Bakkan museum to create a one-woman show about the life of Mary Shelley, where I would play Mary Shelley and would perform it within the museum and elsewhere. And through the course of that research, I read the novel for the second time, but then I read it for my third, fourth, fifth onwards and upwards. Because the show was about 45 minutes long, I referenced, you know, the novel, the books, the popular culture, the science behind it. And the deep dive just never stopped. And so long after I was required to do the research and the show was done and up, I just kept reading. [00:04:00] And it gave me the opportunity to meet experts in this field and the peripheral field, as I would sort of travel with this show and be an ambassador for the museum and stuff like that. And, yeah, it still curls my toes.
John: All right, so with that background. I'm going to just be honest right here and say, I've read Dracula once, I've read Frankenstein once. So that's where I'm coming from, and both a while ago. I remember Frankenstein was a little tougher to get through. Dracula had a bit more of an adventure feel to it, but something I don't think has really been captured particularly well in all the movies. But they both have lasted and lasted and lasted.
Why do you think those books are still, those ideas are still as popular today?
Dawn: I will say that I think Frankenstein, it depends on what you mean by the idea. Because on the surface, just the idea of bringing the dead to life, is, I mean, the Walking Dead franchise is right now one of the most popular franchises. I mean, I think we are really pivot on this idea. And I remember saying to a friend once that the part in [00:05:00]Revelation where the dead rise is like the only part of the Bible that I don't question. It's like, oh, the dead will get up. You know, we always just seem to be real sure that at some damned point, they're getting up. And so I think that that is part of why that it sticks in our brains. But then the story around Frankenstein—especially as it was written in 1818—has so many universal and timeless themes, like ambition and what is right and wrong. And the question that Jurassic Park posed in 1995 and continues to—1993 around there—and continues to pose, which is: just because science is capable of doing something, should it do something? And how do we define progress? Surely the very idea of being able to beat death and not die seems to be kind of the ultimate goal. And here is someone saying, okay, so let's just say, yeah. We beat death and everyone goes, oh shit, that'd be terrible. [00:06:00] You know? And then also, I always love the idea of the creature, the monster, Frankenstein's creature himself, who has a lot of characteristics with which people have identified throughout history. Some people say, for example, that Mary Shelley's whole purpose for writing Frankenstein was a question of: didn't God do this to us, make us these ugly creatures that are imperfect and bumbling around and horrifying? And then once he realized that we weren't perfect, he fled from us in fear or fled. He just keeps going and every generation has a new media that tells the story a little bit better, a little bit different, and yeah, there we are.
John: I will say that for me, the most memorable part of the book was the section where the monster is the narrator and is learning. And I think with the exception of Kenneth Branagh’s film, it it's something that isn't really touched on that much. There’s a little bit in Bride of Frankenstein, of him going around and learning stuff. But the sort of moral questions that he [00:07:00] raises as he's learning—what it is to be human—are very interesting in the book. And I wish they were in more of the movies, but they're not. So, Brian on Dracula, again, we have dead coming to life. Why do we love that so much?
Brian: Well, it's one of the questions that made me want to make a film about it myself: why has the vampire been so fascinating for hundreds of years? Why does it keep coming back? You know, it ebbs and flows in popularity, but it never leaves. And it keeps seeming to have Renaissance after Renaissance. Dracula specifically, I think one of the interesting things about that novel is how many different lenses you can look at it through and not be wrong.
People have looked at it through the lens of, is this thing an imperialist story? Is it an anti-imperialist story? Is it a feminist story? Is it an anti-feminist story? And you can find support for any of those views reading Dracula. And I think that some of it might be accidental; there's times where Dracula is catching up to whatever the cultural zeitgeist [00:08:00] is right now. And we look at Dracula and we say, oh, he was thinking about this back then. Or maybe Bram Stoker was just very confused and he had a lot of different ideas.
John: All right, let's explore that a little deeper. You each gave me an assignment of some movies to watch or to re-watch that you felt were worth talking about, in relation to your subject of Frankenstein or Dracula. I'm going to start with Frankenweenie, just because I had not seen it. And in going through it, I was reminded—of course, as one would be—of watching Frankenweenie, I was reminded of Love, Actually. Because I came to the realization after years of Love, Actually being around that it—Love, Actually—is not a romantic comedy. It is all romantic comedies, all put into one movie. And Frankenweenie is all horror films. Condensed, beautifully and cleverly into one very tasty souffle.
[Frankenweenie Soundbite]
John: I stopped at a certain point making note of the references to other horror films. Just because there are so many of them. But the idea that it references everything from Bride of Frankenstein to Gremlins. They do a rat transformation that's right out of American Werewolf in London. The fact that they have a science teacher played by Martin Landau doing the voice he did as Bela [00:10:00] Lugosi in Ed Wood. I mean, it's a really good story that they just layered and layered and layered and layered. What was it about that movie that so captivated you?
Dawn: Well, so much of what you just said. And also it seems to me the epitome of the accessibility of the story of Frankenstein. The idea that if anyone can think of any moment in which if I could bring someone back to life. But what I love about it too, is that the novel Frankenstein that is not Victor Frankenstein's motivation. It generally tends to be the motivation of almost every character, including the Kenneth Branagh character--at some point, he, when Elizabeth dies, his wife dies for the second time, he says, yes, I'm going to try to bring her back. But it is so not the motivation of the scientist in the book. It is just ambition. He just wants to do something no one else has done. And lots of people die around him and he really never, ever says to himself at any point in the novel, I wish I could bring them back, I'm going to bring them back. That's never, that's never part of it. He just wants to be impressive. And so, I love [00:11:00] that it starts with that pure motivation of wanting to bring the dead to life; just wanting to bring your dog back, so that it's so accessible for everyone watching it. Who wouldn't wanna try this? But then, even in that scene with the teacher, when he shows the frog. And he's demonstrating that if you touch a dead frog with electricity, its legs shoot up, which give the kid the first idea of bringing his dog back. Which is like a deep cut in, in the sense that that's nothing -- Mary Shelley herself and her friends were watching experiments exactly like that before she wrote the book: galvanism and animal magnetism were these really popular public demonstrations happening in London and elsewhere where they would do just that. But because electricity itself was so new, I mean, it blew people's hair back you know, that these dead frogs were flopping around. It was the craziest thing. And a lot of them were thinking to themselves, surely it is only a matter of time before we can, we're gonna have our dead walking around all the time. So, it was so circulating and so forward. [00:12:00] So it's not just movie references and it's not just Frankenstein references. That movie really includes source deep source references for how Frankenstein came to be. And I just love it.
John: Which brings me to Frankenstein, the 1931 version, in which Colin Clive has a similar point of view to what you were talking about from the book. He just wants, you know, he wants to be God.
[Frankenstein soundbite]
John: What I was most impressed with about that movie or a couple things was: it starts, it's like, boom. We're in it. First scene. There there's no preamble. There's no going to college. There's no talking about it, right? It's like, they're starting in the middle of act two. And I think a lot of what we think of when it comes to Frankenstein comes from that movie, [00:13:00] that the stuff that James Whale and his cinematographer came up with and the way they made things look, and that's sort of what people think of when they think of Frankenstein. Now, as you look back on that movie, what are your thoughts on the, what we'll call the original Frankenstein?
Dawn: Yeah. Well, I love it. You’ll find with me and Frankenstein that I'm not a purist. Like I love everything. Like I have no boundaries. I think this is great. One of the things that 1931 movie did was answer—because it had to, anytime you take a novel and make it a movie, you take a literary medium and make it a visual medium, there's obviously going to be things that you just have to interpret that the author left for you to make for yourself individual. And in this instance, that individual is the cinematographer. So, we're gonna get their take on this. And one of the real ambiguous things that Mary Shelley leaves for you in the novel is the spark of life. What is the spark of life? She does not in any [00:14:00]detail describe lightning or static or any of the recognizable or, or future developments of how electricity would've been.
Brian: I was shocked when I first read that book and saw how little space was devoted to that, that lab scene. It's blink of an eye and it's over.
Dawn:“I gathered the instruments of life around me that I may infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my.” Period. I just, what I love is what I love about film in general is that they went, oh, spark being all right, girl, it's a dark and stormy night and you know, and there's chains and there's bubblers and there's a thing. And the sky opens. I mean, God bless you, like way to just take that thought. Make it vivid, make it, build a set, make us believe it. And it's so, so pervasive that in Frankenweinie, you know, which of course is about Frankensein. [00:15:00] Like that is one that they do: he's got the white robe that ties in the back and the gloves. And in Young Frankenstein, it's the, you know, that lab scene. And so I love that. And the other thing that they had to do was describe the look of the creature, make the creature—Frankenstein's monster himself—look so like something. Because she, similarly in the novel, says that he is taller than a regular man, has dark hair and yellow watery eyes. That's all we know about what the Frankenstein looks like. And so, in 1931, Boris Karloff with the bolts. And it's black and white, remember, we don't think his skin is green. That he turned green at some point is kind of exciting, but of course he was just gray, but just dead flesh, you know, rotten, dead walking flesh is what's frightening. And, I just thought that the movie did that so well,
John: I think the makeup was kind of a green/gray, and that when color photos came out of it, that's why someone went, oh, [00:16:00] it's green, but it wasn’t green.
Brian: I thought I saw a museum piece of, you know, an actual makeup bit that Jack Pierce did and I thought it was greenish.
Dawn: Yeah. Greenish/gray. I think, yeah, the rots, just kind of trying to capture the sort of rotten flesh.
Brian: It’s just like the bride's hair was red.
Dawn: That's right. That's right. My day job here in Los Angeles is as a street improviser at Universal Studios, Hollywood. And two of their most treasured characters of course are Frankenstein and Dracula. So, while most people might separate them, John, they are usually arm and arm where I work every day. And the bride has recently come back to the theme park as a walking character, and they gave her red hair. We don't mess around.
John: That's excellent. But you mentioned Dracula, let's jump into the 1931 Dracula. There’s a connection point between the two that I want to mention, which is the amazing Dwight Frye, who is Fritz, I believe in Frankenstein. And I'm not the first one to mention his naturalistic [00:17:00] acting kind of putting him above everybody else in that movie. Famously, when he's running up the stairs, stopping to pull his socks up at one point. He's just really, really good in that. And then you see him in Dracula as the, essentially the Harker character. I think he was called Harker --
Brian: Yeah. Well, he's Renfield in Dracula. They merged those two characters. I thought it was a smart move for a first attempt at the film. Yeah. And Dwight Frye, he's in a lot of other Universal horrors, too. Dwight Frye often doesn't get the credit. He somehow was not the leading man he should have been.
John: I don't know why that is. He turns up again as an assistant in Bride of Frankenstein. He's a towns person in Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. And then he tragically died on a bus ride to an auto parts job that he took because he wasn't getting any acting work, which was too bad. A really, really good actor.
Brian: There is another intersection besides the fact that they were both produced by Junior. Lugosi was put into the [00:18:00] short, the trial film they shot for Frankenstein. I can't call it a short film, because it was never intended for release. But they shot a cinematic test reel and they had Lugosi play the monster, but he was under a sheet the whole time. I think he may have been able to pull the sheet off. It's a lost film. We don't know for sure. We just have kind of the recollections of a few crew people.
John: I've never heard of that. I would love to see that.
Brian: I would too. I think a lot of people would really love to see it, but it was as much a kind of a testing ground for Lugosi— whether they wanted him to be the monster—as it was for some of the techniques, the things they wanted to try in the film. And what I understand is the producer saw the test reel and they said, yes, we love this look, this is the look we want you to give us. And then it's whatever version of Lugosi not getting that part you want to believe: whether Lugosi turned it down or the producers didn't like him or something. But he ended up not taking that part.
John: But he is of course always known as Dracula. So, what are your thoughts on their adaptation? Which [00:19:00]again is not the first adaptation but is the kind of first official?
Brian: Yeah. The first to bear the name Dracula, although, well, I'll back up a second. Because some releases of Nosferatu called it Dracula. He would be named as Dracula in the subtitles, you know, because that's an easy thing to do in silent film, you can just swap that out however you want to. But yes, it’s the first authorized official film adaptation.
John: Well, let’s back up to Nosferatu, just for a second. Am I wrong in remembering that the Bram Stoker estate—Mrs. Stoker—sued Nosferatu and asked that all prints be destroyed? And they were except one print remained somewhere?
Brian: Close. That is the popular story that she sued Prana Films. She won the lawsuit. All films were set to be destroyed. Now there's a guy named Locke Heiss and a few others who've been doing some research on this. And they will tell you that there's no proof that a single print was ever destroyed. It's a more fun story to say that, you know, this one was snuck away and now we have the film. But there was no real enforcement mechanism for having all the theaters [00:20:00]destroy the film. Who was going to go around and check and see if they actually destroyed this film or not? Nobody, right? So maybe some people destroyed it. Maybe Prana Films destroyed their remaining copies. But the exhibitors kept all of theirs and there's different versions and different cuts that have been found. So, we know that some of these reels went out in different formats or with different subtitles or even different edits. And some of them have made their way back to us.
John: There's some really iconic striking imagery in that movie. That haunts me still.
Brian: What I always tell people is see the film with a good live accompaniment, because that still makes it hold up as a scary film. If you see a good orchestra playing something really intense when Orlok comes through that door. It feels scary. You can feel yourself being teleported back to 1922 and being one of those audience people seeing that and being struck by it.
John: What do you think it would be like to have [00:21:00] seen that or Dawn to have seen the original Frankenstein? I can't really imagine, given all that we've seen in our lives. If you put yourself back into 1931, and Boris Karloff walks backwards into the lab. I would just love to know what that felt like the first time.
Dawn: You know, what is so great is I was fortunate enough to know Earl Bakkan who saw the movie in the theater in Columbia Heights, Minnesota when he was 10 years old.
And he went, he had to sneak in. People would run outta this, out of the theater, screaming. I mean, when they would do the close up of Frankenstein's Monster's face, you know, women would faint. And of course that was publicized and much circulated, but it was also true. People were freaking out. And for Earl Bakkan—this young kid—the fear was overwhelming, as you said. And also in this theater, I was lucky enough, I did my show in that theater for Earl and his friends on his 81st birthday. So, I got to hear a [00:22:00] lot of these stories. And they played the organ in the front of the curtain.
Brian: Is this the Heights theater?
Dawn: Yes, the Heights.
Brian: Oh, that's an amazing space.
Dawn: So, they played the organ in there and it was like, oh my God. And it was so overwhelming. So, I'm glad you asked that question because I was really fortunate to have a moment to be able to sort of immerse myself in that question: What would it have been like to be in this theater? And it was moving and it was scary, man. And yeah, to your point, Brian, the music and the score. I mean, it was overwhelming. Also, I think there's something that we still benefit from today, which is when people tell you going in this might be way too much for you, this might scare you to death. So just be super, super careful. And your heart's already, you know…
John: And it does have that warning right at the beginning.
Dawn: Yeah. Versus now when people sit you down, they're like, I'm not gonna be scared by this black and white movie from 1931. And then you find yourself shuffling out of the bathroom at top speed in the middle of the night. And you're like, well, look at that. It got me.
Brian: That reminds me, there [00:23:00] was a deleted scene from the 1931 Dracula that was a holdover from the stage play. Van Helsing comes out and he breaks the fourth wall and he speaks directly to the audience. And he says something to the effect of—I'm very much paraphrasing—about how we hope you haven't been too frightened by what you've seen tonight, but just remember these things are real. And then black out. And they cut that because they were afraid that they were really going to freak out their audience.
Dawn: It's like a war of the world's thing, man. It's oh, that's so great. I love that.
[Dracula Soundbite]
John: So, Brian, what is your assessment of the 1931 version? As a movie itself and as an adaptation of Stoker's work?
Brian: The things they had to do to try to adapt it to film, which they borrowed a lot of that from the stage play. They used the stage play as their guide point, and I think they made the best choices they could have been expected to make. You know, there's a lot of things that get lost and that's unfortunate, but I think they did a decent job. I don't find the 1931 version scary. I like Bela Lugosi. I think he's a great Dracula. I think he set the standard. With the possible [00:25:00]exception of the scene where the brides are stalking Harker slash Renfield, I don't think the imagery is particularly frightening. The Spanish version, I think does a little bit better job. And you know the story with the Spanish version and the English version?
Dawn: We actually talk about it on the back lot tour of Universal Studios. Because they shot on the same sets in some cases.
Brian: Yeah. My understanding is that Dracula shot during the day, Spanish Dracula would shoot at night. So, they got to benefit maybe a little bit by seeing, okay, how is this gonna be shot? How did Todd Browning do it? Okay. We're gonna do it a little bit differently. It's a little bit of a cheat to say they move the camera. They do move the camera a lot more in the Spanish version, but the performances are a little bit different. I'm going to, I can't get her name out. The actress who plays the ingenue in the Spanish Dracula, I'm not going to try it, but you can see her kind of getting more and more crazed as time goes on and her head is more infected by Dracula. You see these push-ins that you don't see in the English version. There's blocking [00:26:00] that's different. I put together a short course where I was just talking about how they blocked the staircases scene. The welcome to my house, the walking through spider web. And how it's blocked very differently in the two versions. And what does that say? What are these two directors communicating differently to us? In one, Harker slash Renfield is next to Dracula. In one, he's trailing behind him. In one, we cut away from the spider web before he goes through. And in the other one, we see him wrestle with it. That's not really what you asked, John. Sorry, I got off on a tear there.
John: I agree with you on all points on the differences between the two films. Although I do think that all the Transylvania stuff in the English version is terrific: With the coach and the brides. The Spanish version, the biggest problem I have is that their Dracula looks ridiculous.
Brian: He's not Bela Lugosi. You’re right.
John: He looks like Steve Carell doing Dracula and there is no moment, literally no moment [00:27:00] where he is scary, whereas Lugosi is able to pull that off.
Brian: There’s a lot of people who have observed that the Spanish Dracula would be a superior film were it not for Bela Lugosi being such an amazing Dracula in the English version.
John: He really, really nailed it.
Brian: And since he learned his lines phonetically, he could have done the Spanish Dracula. Just write it out for him phonetically, because he didn't speak English very well.
John: If we could just go back, you know, cause a lot of things in history we could change, but if we could just be at that meeting and go, Hey, why not have Bela do it? Okay. So then let's jump ahead, still in Dracula form, to Horror of Dracula. From 1958. With Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.
[Soundbite from Horror of Dracula]
Brian: For some people, Lee is the ultimate Dracula, and I think that's a generational thing. I think he's great. He's got the stage presence and I love Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. I don't like the film as a whole. It feels like I'm watching a play with a camera set back. It doesn't work for me the way it works for other people. That is personal taste. Don't come after me.
John: It does, however, have one of the greatest, ‘Hey, we're gonna kill Dracula’ scenes ever, with Peter Cushing running down the table and jumping up and pulling down the drapes and the sun.
Brian: Oh, right. Interesting. Because in Dracula, the book, the sun is not deadly, remotely really. But that's [00:29:00]the influence of Nosferatu being pasted onto the Dracula cannon, that the sunlight is deadly to Dracula.
Dawn: I remember having this fight very enthusiastically in the nineties when Bram Stoker’s/Winona Ryder’s Dracula came out and I was already sort of a literary nerd. And they were like, hey, they have a scene with him walking around during the day. And I was like, yeah, nerds. That's right. That's cuz vampires can walk around during the day.
I was very already, like, you don't know anything, go back to history.
Brian: And there's a seventies version where he's out on a cloudy day, but he is not hurt either. There suggestions in the book that he's more powerful at night.
Dawn: He's a creature of the night. I always understood he had to wear sunglasses. He was sort of like a wolf. Like they show him as a wolf during the day; it can happen, but it's not great.
Brian: I like the way they did it in the Gary Oldman version. He's suited up. He's got the sunglasses on. There's not a whole lot of skin exposed. But he's not [00:30:00] going to turn into smoke.
John: Well, okay. Let's talk about that version and Kenneth Branagh’s version of Frankenstein.
Dawn: Ug.
John: I'm not going to spoil anything here, when I say it doesn't sound like Dawn cared it.
Dawn: You open this, you opened this can of worms. John, sit down for a second. Listen. He calls it: Mary Shelly's fucking Frankenstein. I inserted the fucking. I'm sorry, I wasn't supposed to say that. He calls it. He calls it. How dare you, Kenneth, Brannagh, call this Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. So that was A-number one. But I went into it all excited: It’s Kenneth Brannagh. Love him. He calls it Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and he starts with the ship captain out at sea, just like the book. And so I pull up my little, you know, security blanket and I'm like, oh, Kenneth Brannagh, do this to me, buddy. Do it to me buddy. Show me Mary Shelley Frankenstein as a movie. [00:31:00] And then he just fucks it up, John. And he doesn't actually do that at all. It's a total lie. He screws up every monologue. He makes up motivations and then heightens them. And it’s dad. The acting is capital B, capital A, capital D across the board. Everybody sucks in this movie. It looks bad. The direction is bad, and it has nothing to do. He tries to bring Elizabeth back to life. This is a huge departure from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Thank you very much, Mr. Brannagh, that's all I have to say for now.
John: All right, I was fooled by the fact that he started at, at the north pole.
Dawn: That’s because he's tricking us, John. That’s because it's the whole movie is a lie.
John: Okay with that same mindset, what do we think of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola?
Dawn: I love that one.
Brian: I'm afraid that I don't have, I can't match Dawn's intensity in either respect. Um, except I thought Robert DeNiro [00:32:00] was really good in Frankenstein.
Dawn: But that's no, he's not. you're wrong. Your opinion is valid and wrong. Yeah, I'm kidding for listeners who don't know me. I am, I am kidding. Of course. Everybody's opinion is valid except for that one. Yeah. The movie, everything about that movie is bad.
John: He is, I think, miscast.
Dawn: And Helen Bonan Carter is one of the finest actresses of not just our generation, but of all time. And she sucks in this movie.
John: Right. So. Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Brian: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
[Soundbite: Bram Stoker’s Dracula]
Brian: Also produced by Branagh. And I assume that is the connection, why they both start with the author's name. I always call it Coppola's Dracula because it gets too confusing to make that distinction. I thought it was a decent movie, but it didn't feel like Dracula. It felt like someone who had heard of Dracula and wrote a good script based on what they had heard. So many divergences that bothered me, although I think it's aged better than it felt the first time. I remember seeing it when it first came out in the nineties and not thinking much of it. And I think audiences agreed with me and it seems like it's been kinder, that audiences have been kinder to it as it's gotten older.
John: Okay. Dawn, you love it.
Dawn: I loved it. I loved it. It, you know what though? That was one of [00:34:00] those movies that unlike, unlike Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I can't look at with like an adult critical eye because I, what year did it come out? Was it like 90, 92? I'm like middle school getting into high school and like Winona Ryder was everything. Vampires are everything. I mean, Gary Oldman is the, is a great actor and it's so sexy, very sexy. The sex is Primo. And so I remember loving it, very moving. I don't remember comparing it as certainly not as viciously to the novel because I read Dracula after I had seen the movie. And so there's always that inherent casting where Nina is always going to be Winona Ryder. But I do remember really loving the Gothic convention of the letter and that the movie did seem to utilize and to great effect how letter writing can build suspense and give us different perspectives in a, in a unique cinematic way.
Brian: [00:35:00] The two or three biggest stakes that film puts in the ground are not to be found in the book. So there's no love story in the book. There's no Vlad in the book.
John: Can I interject there? Isn't that basically, didn't they just rip that off of Dark Shadows, The idea of my long lost love is reincarnated in this woman. I must connect with her.
Brian: That is a good question, John. I'm glad you asked that because I call it the doppelganger love interest. Right? We first see that, the first time I know of it happening, I'm sure there's an earlier precedent, is in The Mummy, but then Dark Shadows does it. But that's not where Stoker, I mean, that's not where Coppola and a screenwriter claimed to have gotten the idea. They claimed to have gotten it from Dan Curtis's Dracula in 74.
John: Dan Curtis, who produced Dark Shadows, with Barnabas Collins, falling in love with his reincarnated love.
Brian: But Dan Curtis's Dracula comes out two years after Blacula. That has a reincarnated love interest.
John: Not only does the Blaclua [00:36:00] have a reincarnated love interest, but if I'm remembering movie correctly at the end, when she says I don't want to go with you. He goes, okay. And he's ready to go home. It's like, sorry to bother you.
Brian: No, uh, in Blacula, he commits suicide
John: Oh, that's it? Yeah. He walks out into the sun.
Brian: He goes home in a different way.
John: Yes. He's one of my favorite Draculas, the very stately William Marshall.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. That is a favorite of mine.
John: Anyway, you were saying stakes in the ground from Coppola’s Dracula.
Brian: Well, the, the love story, the equating Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And I felt like they did Lucy really bad in that movie. They had her turn into a wanton harlot, which is not in keeping with the book. Some things are okay, but they really said these are the building blocks of our story and that bugged me. But Anthony Hopkins I liked, so, all right.
Dawn: Alright, but see, this [00:37:00] the itch that still that still makes me wanna scratch though: why say Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Why say Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? I mean, because I think you heard the venom, obviously. If they took Mary Shelley's name off that thing, you can make Frankenweenie. And I will love, like, I love Frankenweenie. Do your Frankenstein homage all day, all the time. But when you call, when you say it's Bram Stoker’s, I think that this is what has been frustrating historians like me and getting high school students Ds in English class ever since. Because it just creates the false perception that you've basically read the book. Right. Or that you, if you know the thing you know the book and it's just a cheap ploy. And I don't like it.
Brian: I think, somebody correct me on this, that there, there had been a plan to do a reboot of the Universal monster franchise, and these two movies were supposed to be the reboot of it. [00:38:00] And then they would've then done HG Wells’ Invisible Man.
John: The Mummy killed it. They've tried to reboot it several times. And that was the first attempt.
Brian: Yeah, I’ve heard that called the dark universe. They were trying to do their own MCU.
Dawn: Yeah. Well, at Universal Studios, there is of course in, in LA, in general, there's the property wars, you know? What what's, who has what? And sometimes those get really blurred. Like why does Universal Studios have Harry Potter? When we can see Warner Brothers from the top of our wall/ And that's obviously, you know, those things happen. But when it comes to like the IP or intellectual property, those original monsters are so valuable and they always are at Halloween. And then it's like, sort of, how can we capitalize on this? And yeah. And it's cross generational.
Brian: All they really own right now is the look right? They own Jack Pierce's makeup job from Frankenstein.
Dawn: But I think that that's exactly the point; [00:39:00] the delusion of what is it that you own if you own, you know, Frankenstein, whatever. But yes, there was definitely an interest to sort of revamp all of the original Universal Monsters they call them and it's the Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Invisible Man.
John: It's everybody who shows up in Mad Monster Party.
Dawn: Exactly.
[Soundbite: Mad Monster Party]
Dawn: But yeah, The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, was a tremendous flop. And I think that sort of took the wind out of everybody's sails.
John: Let me ask you this, Dawn. If Mel Brooks had titled his movie, Mary Shelley's Young Frankenstein, instead of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, would you have a problem with that?
Dawn: Yeah, no, but no, I would not have had a problem, because that would've been irony and juxtaposition. Not just a straight lie.
John: So that brings us to some comedies. Young Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, which I was very surprised and a little unnerved to [00:40:00] realize a few years back, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein was made a mere 10 years before I was born. And I had always assumed it was way back then. And it's like, no, it wasn't all that way back then. It was pretty, pretty recently.
Brian: That happened to me when I realized that Woodstock was only six years before my birth. And it always seemed like ancient history.
John: Is that the common thing, Madame Historian? That people kind of forget how recent things were?
Dawn: Oh yeah. Remember Roe V. Wade. Sorry, too soon.
Brian: We're recording this on that day.
Dawn: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it happens to everybody so much faster than you think it's going to. I remember looking around in the nineties feeling, well, surely the seventies was ancient history, you know, because they had That Seventies Show, which debuted as like a period piece. I am still very young and hip and happening and [00:41:00] they are in production for That Nineties Show right now. And I said to my husband, That Nineties Show. I was like, Jesus, I guess that's 20 years because I was in the nineties they did That Seventies Show. And he goes, no baby that's 30 years. And I was like, I'm sorry. I said, I'm sorry, what? He goes, the nineties was 30 years ago. And I just had to sit down and put my bunion corrector back on because these feet are killing me.
John: All right. Well, let's just talk about these two comedies and then there's a couple other things I wanna quickly hit on. What are our thoughts on, let's start with Young Frankenstein?
[Soundbite: Young Frankenstein]
Dawn: I told you I'm not an idealist and we're not a purist about Frankenstein, but I am an enthusiast. So that is why I told you to watch Kenneth Branagh’s movie, even though I hate it so much. And that is also why I love Young Frankenstein, because I think that it is often what brings people into the story. For many, many people, it introduces them to the creature. They may know literally nothing about Frankenstein except for Young Frankenstein. And that's actually fine with me because I'm a comedian myself. And I believe that parody is high honor. And often when you parody and satirize something, especially when you do it well, it's because you went to the heart of it. Because you got right in there into the nuggets and the creases of it. And there is something about Young [00:43:00] Frankenstein as ridiculous as it is that has some of that wildness and the hilarity and The Putting on the Ritz. I did find out from my Universal Studios movie history stuff, that that scene was very nearly cut out. Mel Brooks did not like it. And he just didn't like that they were doing it. And of course it's the one, I feel like I'm not the only one who still has to make sure that my beverage is not only out of my esophagus, but like aside, when they start doing it.
[Soundbite: Young Frankenstein]
Brian: And I understand they were about to throw away the sets from the 1931 Frankenstein when Mel Brooks or his production designer came up and said, Stop stop. We want to use these and they were able to get the original sets or at least the set pieces.
John: I believe what it [00:44:00] was, was they got Kenneth Strickfaden’s original machines. Ken Strickfaden created all that stuff for the 1931 version and had been used on and off, you know, through all the Frankenstein films. And it was all sitting in his garage and the production designer, Dale Hennessy went out to look at it because they were thinking they had to recreate it. And he said, I think it still works. And they plugged them in and they all still worked.
Brian: Oh, wow.
Dawn: Oh man. It’s alive.
John: Those are the original machines.
Dawn: I didn't know that. That's fantastic.
John: At the time when I was a young kid, I was one of the few kids in my neighborhood who knew the name Kenneth Strickfaden, which opened doors for me. Let me tell you when people find out, oh, you know of the guy who designed and built all those? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I know all that. One of my favorite stories from Young Frankenstein is when they sold the script. I forget which studio had said yes. And as they were walking out of the meeting, Mel Brooks turned back and said, oh, by the way, it's gonna be in black and white, and kept going. And they followed him down the hall and said, no, it can't be in black and white. And he said, no, it's not gonna work unless it's in [00:45:00] black and white. And they said, well, we're not gonna do it. And they had a deal, they were ready to go. And he said, no, it's gonna stay black and white. And he called up Alan Ladd Jr. that night, who was a friend of his, and said, they won't do it. And he said, I'll do it. And so it ended up going, I think, to Fox, who was more than happy to, to spend the money on that. And even though Mel didn't like Putting on the Ritz, it's weird, because he has almost always had musical numbers in his films. Virtually every movie he's done, he's either written a song for it, or there's a song in it. So, it's weird to me. I've heard Gene Wilder on YouTube talk about no, no, he didn't want that scene at all, which is so odd because it seems so--
Brian: I never thought about that, but you're right. I'm going in my head through all the Mel Brooks films I can remember. And there is at least a short musical interlude in all of them that I can think of.
John: But let's talk then about what's considered one of the best mixes of horror and comedy, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [00:46:00]
[Soundbite: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein]
Brian: As with comedies of that age, it, it starts off slow, but then it starts to get very funny as time goes on. And all the comedy is because of Abbot and Costello. They are the, [00:47:00] the chemistry they have on screen. I don't know how much of that was actually scripted and how much of it was just how they rolled with each other. But it works really well. Not much of the comedy is provided by the monsters or the supporting cast or even there's maybe a cute, a few sight gags. But wouldn’t you say most of the comedy is just the dynamics between them?
John: It is. The scary stuff is scary and it's balanced beautifully at the end where they're being chased through the castle. The monsters stayed pretty focused on being monsters and Abbot and Costello's reactions are what’s funny.
Dawn: If I may, as someone who has already admitted I haven't seen much of the movie, it's feels to me like it may be something like Shaun of the Dead, in the sense that you get genuinely scared if zombie movies scare, then you'll have that same adrenaline rush and the monsters stay scary. They don't have to get silly. Or be a part of the comedy for your two very opposing one's skinny, one's fat, you know, and the way that their friendship is both aligning and [00:48:00]coinciding is the humor.
Brian: I believe there is one brief shot in there where you get to see Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman all in the same shot. And I think that might be the only time that ever happens in the Universal Franchise. During the lab scene, does that sound right John?
John: I think you really only have Dracula and the Wolfman. I'll have to look it up because the monster is over on another table--
Brian: Isn't he underneath the blanket?
John: Nope, that's Lou Costello, because it's his brain that they want. And so they're fighting over that table. And then just a little, I have nothing but stupid fun facts. There's a point in it, in that scene where the monster gets off the table and picks up someone and throws them through a window. And Glenn Strange, who was playing the monster at that point -- and who is one of my favorite portrayers of the monster, oddly enough -- had broken his ankle, I believe. And so Lon, Chaney, Jr. put the makeup on and did that one stunt for him, cuz he was there.
Brian: He did that as Frankenstein's monster?
John: Yes. Frankenstein.
Brian: I didn't know that. Yes, I [00:49:00] did not know that. So he plays both of those roles in that movie?
John: Yes. Let me just take a moment to defend Glenn Strange, who played the monster three times: House of Dracula, House of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In House of Frankenstein, he is following up the film before that, which was Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, in which, in this very convoluted universe, Lugosi is playing the monster, even though he didn't wanna do it in 31. Because his brain in Ghost of Frankenstein had been put into the Monster's body. So, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, it is Lugosi as the Frankenstein monster. It is Lon Chaney Jr., who had played the monster in Ghost of Frankenstein, now back to playing Larry Talbot. So, it is Wolfman versus Frankenstein. And the premise of the script was he's got Ygor’s brain and it's not connecting properly. He's gone blind. They shot that. They had tons of dialogue between the two characters of Larry Talbot pre-wolfman, and the monster, Bela Lugosi. And the executives thought it sounded silly. So they went in and they cut [00:50:00] out all of Lugosi’s dialogue out of the movie. So now you have a blind monster stumbling around with his arms in front of him, but he doesn't talk. And if you look at the movie, you can see where he's supposed to be talking and they cut away quickly. And it's really convoluted. Glenn Strange who then has to play the monster next, looks at that and goes well, all right, I guess I'm still blind. I guess I'm still stumbling around with my arms in front of him. Which is the image most people have of the Frankenstein monster, which was never done by Boris in his three turns as the monster. So with, in that regard, I just think Glenn Strange did a great job of picking up what had come before him and making it work moving forward.
Anyway, a couple other ones I wanna just hit on very quickly. Brian asked me to watch Dracula in Istanbul. Under the circumstances, a fairly straightforward retelling of the Dracula story. I would recommend it--it is on YouTube--for a couple of reasons. One, I believe it's the first time that Dracula has actual canine teeth.
Brian: Yes.
John: Which is important. But the other is there's the scene where he's talking to Harker about, I want [00:51:00] you to write three letters. And I want you to post date the letters. It’s so convoluted, because he goes into explaining how the Turkish post office system works in such a way that the letters aren't gonna get there. It's just this long scene of explaining why he needs to write these three letters, and poor Harker’s doing his best to keep up with that. That was the only reason I recommend it.
Brian: That movie is based on a book called Kazıklı Voyvoda, which means The Warrior Prince and it was written in, I wanna say the 1920s or thirties, I wanna say thirties. It's the first book to equate Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, which I've come back to a couple times now, but that's significant because it was a Turkish book and the Turks got that right away. They immediately saw the name Dracula like, oh, we know who we're talking about. We're talking about that a-hole. It was not until the seventies, both the [00:52:00] fifties and the seventies, that Western critics and scholars started to equate the two. And then later when other scholars said, no, there, there's not really a connection there, but it's a fun story. And it's part of cannon now, so we can all play around with it.
John: But that wasn't what Bram Stoker was thinking of? Is that what you're saying?
Brian: No. No, he, he wasn't, he wasn't making Dracula into Vlad the Impaler. He got the name from Vlad the Impaler surely, but not the deeds. He wasn't supposed to be Vlad the Impaler brought back to life.
John: All right. I'm going to ask you both to do one final thing and then we'll wrap it up for today. Although I could talk to you about monsters all day long, and the fact that I'd forgotten Dawn, that you were back on the Universal lot makes this even more perfect. If listeners are going to watch one Dracula movie and one Frankenstein movie, what do you recommend? Dawn, you go first.
Dawn: They're only watching one, then it's gotta be the 1931 Frankenstein, with Boris. Karloff, of course. I think it has captured [00:53:00] the story of Frankenstein that keeps one toe sort of beautifully over the novel and the kind of original source material that I am so in love with, but also keeps the other foot firmly in a great film tradition. It is genuinely spooky and it holds so much of the imagery of any of the subsequent movies that you're only watching one, so that's the one you get. But if you do watch any more, you've got this fantastic foundation for what is this story and who is this creature?
John: Got it. And Brian, for Dracula?
Brian: I was tossing around in my head here, whether to recommend Nosferatu or the 1931 Dracula. And I think I'm going to have to agree with Dawn and say the 1931 for both of them, because it would help a viewer who was new to the monsters, understand where we got the archetypes we have. Now, why, when you type an emoji into your phone for Vampire, you get someone with a tuxedo in the slick back hair or, I think, is there a Frankenstein emoji?
Dawn: There is, and he's green with bolts in his neck. [00:54:00]
Brian: Yeah, it would. It will help you understand why we have that image permanently implanted in our heads, even though maybe that's not the source material. We now understand the origins of it.
Dawn: And if I may too, there's, there's something about having the lore as founded in these movies is necessary, frankly, to almost understand what happens later. I mean, I get very frustrated in 2022, if there is a movie about vampires that takes any time at all to explain to me what a vampire is, unless you're breaking the rules of the vampire. For example, you know, like in Twilight the vampire sparkles, like a diamond when it's out in the sunshine and is the hottest thing ever. That's really great to know. I didn't know that about vampires. That wasn't necessarily true before, you know, but you don't need to take a lot of time. In fact, when you do read Dracula, one of the things for me that I found very frustrating was the suspense of what is it with this guy? They were like: He said we couldn't bring [00:55:00] garlic and they take all this time. And you're kind of as a modern reader being like, cuz he is a fucking vampire. Move on. Like we know this, we got this one. It's shorthand
Brian: That’s one snide thing I could say about the book is that there are times where Dracula’s powers seem to be whatever his powers need to be to make this next scene creepy and move on to the next chapter.
John: He was making it up as he went along. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Judy Berlin, starring Edie Falco, as well as Madeline Kahn, Bob Dishy, Barbara Barrie and Julie Kavner, was Eric Mendelsohn's feature film debut. The film was an Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival … won Best Director at Sundance … Best Independent Film at the Hamptons Film Festival … and was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards. Eric is currently the Professor of Professional Practice, Film, at Columbia University.
I first spoke to Eric about Judy Berlin years and years ago, for my book, Fast Cheap and Under Control: Lessons Learned from the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Time. In the course of that interview, Eric laid out a handful of really smart filmmaking lessons – lessons that, if followed, might be the difference between making a successful film … or making no film at all.
I was curious: What did Eric think about those lessons, all these years later? Before we got into that, though, we talked about the origins of Judy Berlin …
[MUSIC TRANSTION]
John
What was the impetus that made Judy Berlin happen?
Eric
It's answerable in a more general way. When I get interested in making a script or making a film, it's because a group of feelings and images almost in a synesthesia kind of way, come together and I get a feeling and I say, oh, yeah, that would be fun. And for Judy Berlin, the set of feelings were definitely having to do with melancholy, hopefulness, the suburbs and my intimate feelings about them being a fresh place that I hadn't seen, represented in the way I experienced them. Things as abstract as how everyone feels in autumn time, I guess, maybe everyone does. I don't know. Maybe there are some people who are just blissfully unaware of all those sad feelings of you know, autumn, but I felt like they were worth reproducing if maybe they hadn't been in that particular locale. I think this is a funny thing to say but against all of that sadness, and kind of hope against hope, being hopeful against hopelessness, I had this sound of a score to a Marvin Hamlisch score to Take the Money and Run. And I actually asked him to do the music and he said he didn't understand such sadness that was in the movies that this isn't something I do. Which is really true and I didn't get it and I wanted to persist and say no, but that score for Take the Money and Run, that has such like almost like a little kids hopefulness about it.
That's what I wanted. It was like a river running underneath the ground of the place that I had grown up with. And I think the other inspiration for the movie was pretty, I don't know, maybe it's called plagiarism. Maybe it's called inspiration, the collected feeling that you can distill from the entire works of Jacques Demy, and I loved Jacques Demy 's films. They gave me a license. I saw them and said, Well, if you can mythologize your own little town in the northwest of France that maybe seems like romantic to Eric Mendelsohn from old Bethpage, Long Island, New York but truly is a kind of a unremarkable place at the time it was made, that I can do it with my town. I can mythologize everybody, and love them and hate them and talk about them and so those are some of the feelings that went into it.
John
But they all came through. So, what I want to do is just go through the handful of lessons that you told me X number of years ago, and let's see what you think about them now. So, one of the big ones that turns up again and again, when I talked to filmmakers was the idea of write to your resources. And in the case of Judy Berlin, you told me that that's a great idea and you thought you were: It takes place over one day with a bunch of characters in one town. When in fact you were really making things quite difficult for yourself by having middle aged people with homes and cars and businesses and professional actors who all had other things going on.
Eric 03:35
And multiple storylines is a terrible idea for low budget movie making. Each actor thought oh, I’m in a little short film. I, however, was making a $300,000 movie about 19 characters. What a stupid guy I was.
John 03:53
Do you really think it was stupid?
Eric 03:54
It was. You know, everyone says this after you have graduated from that kind of mistake or once you've done it, you look back and say I would only have done that because I didn't know any better. I know you haven't finished your question. But I also want to say that writing or creating from ones’ resources also includes what you are able to do, what you are able to manufacture. In other words, I didn't have enough writing skill to concentrate on two characters or one character in house, like Polanski, in his first endeavors. I didn't I had small ideas for many characters. It's much more difficult to write a sustained feature film with two people. So, I was writing to my resources in a number of ways, not just production, but in my ability as a writer at that point.
John 04:53
Yeah, you're right. It is really hard. I don't know why they always say if you're gonna make a low budget movie, have it be two people in a room. That's really hard to do. The idea of let's just tell a bunch of stories does seem easier and I've done that myself a couple times and it is for low budget easier in many respects. My stuff is super low budget, no one's getting paid. We're doing it on weekends, and you can get some really good actors to come over for a couple days and be really great in their part of the movie and then you put it all together. Another advantage is if you have multiple stories, I learned this from John Sayles in Returns of the Secaucus Seven, he said I couldn't move the camera. So, I just kept moving the story. It allowed him to just, I can't move the camera, but I can move to the next scene, I can move to these people, or I can move to those people there. And it also allows you an editing a lot of freedom, because you can shift and move and do things. So, the downside you had of course was on just a strictly production shooting day level, very hard to do what you were doing. But it did allow you to grow a bit as a writer because you're able to write a lot of different kinds of characters and different kinds of scenes.
Eric 05:57
Remember, I always say this, you know, you sit in your room, and I believe you need to do this as a writer, you sit in your room and you say to yourself, she slams a car door harder than usual. And then you realize later she drives a car, where am I going to get a car from? She enters her house. How am I going to get a house and if I have seven characters, and they all have cars, that's a job in itself. One person could spend their summer looking for seven cars. But that's the least of your problems. When it's houses, cars, clothing, handbags, all of it.
John 06:30
Yeah, when you're starting out, you don't necessarily realize that every time you say cut to something in your script, that's a thing. You've got to get it. I did a feature once that had four different stories and there are four different writers and a writer came to me with his finished script, which was brilliant, but it was like 14, 15 locations that I had to shoot over two days. So, how do you do that? Well, you end up spending four days on it. But the other hand, another writer who understood screenwriting, handed me a script that was four locations, but brilliantly combined and figured out. So, in two days, you could shoot them all because he knew what he was doing. And that's something you don't necessarily learn until you're standing there at six in the morning with a crew going, I don't know what I'm doing right now, because I screwed myself up and I wrote it and that's sometimes the only way you can learn it.
Eric 07:16
I think it's the only way. The only way. Look, you can be precautious, you can, it's no different than life, your parents can warn you about terrible, ruinous, stupid, love affairs that are going to wreck you for a year. Are you really going to just not get into them because of what smart older people said? You throw yourself at a film in the way that hopefully you throw yourself at love affairs. You're cautious and then you've just got to experience it. And I think the difference obviously is in film, you're using lots of people's time, effort money, and you do want to go into it with smarts and planning. I still say that you should plan 160%. Over plan in other words. And then the erosion that naturally happens during production, this crew member stinks and had to be fired a day before. This location was lost. This actress can't perform the scene in one take because of memory problems. All of that is going to impact your film. Let's say it impacts it 90%. Well, if you plan to 160%, you're still in good shape in the footage that you get at the end of the production.
John 08:29
Yeah, I'm smiling, because you're saying a lot of the things you said last time, which means it’s still very true. Alright, the next lesson was, and this is one that I've embraced forever: No money equals more control. You spoke quite eloquently about the fact that people wanted to give you more money to make Judy Berlin if you would make the following changes. Looking back on it did you make the right decisions on that one?
Eric 08:51
Yes. I'll tell you something interesting. Maybe I didn't say this last time. But I remember my agent at the time saying to me, we could get you a lot of money. Why don't you halt production? We'll get you so much money that will get you--and this is the line that always stuck in my head-- all the bells and whistles you want. Now, I'm going to be honest with you what he said scared me for two reasons. One, I had worked in production for a long time in my life and I knew that if you stall anything, it just doesn't happen. It just doesn't. That the energy of rolling downhill is better than sitting on the hill, potential energy and trying to amass funds. But another thing and I was scared privately because I said to myself, I don't even know what the bells and whistles are. I'm afraid to tell him that I don't know what they are. And I'd rather I think that's those bells and whistles are for some other savvy filmmaker that I'll maybe become later. But right now I have the benefit of not knowing enough and I'm going to throw myself and my planning and my rigorous militaristic marshalling of people and props and costume names and locations and script. I'm gonna throw that all at the void and do it my cuckoo way because once I learned how to make a movie better, I'll have lost a really precious thing, which is my really, really raw, naive, hopeful, abstract sense of what this could be. And that thing that I just said with all those words was not just a concept. I didn't know what I was making, in the best sense possible.
I was shooting for something, shooting it for an emotional goal, or a visual goal for a dramatic goal but I didn't put a name on it. I didn't put a genre to it. So much so that by the time I got to the Sundance Film Festival, and I read the first line of a capsule review, and it said, A serio-comic suburban. I almost cried, I felt so bad that I didn't know what I was making in an objective sense. In a subjective sense, obviously, I knew exactly what I was trying to do. But objectively, I didn't know it could be summed up by a review. And it hurt me so badly to think I was so mockable and now I'm going to embarrass myself by telling you what I thought I was making. I didn't think I was making something that could have a boldface thing that said, serio comic, multi character, suburban fairy tale. I didn't know that. I really thought I was like writing in glitter on black velvet or I don't know, I didn't even know that it could just be summed up so easily.
And I think I've written a lot of scripts since that one, and many haven't gotten made, but each time I reject and issue an objective determination of what the thing is that I'm working on, prior to sitting down. Is that the best way to work? It is a painful way to work. My friends will tell you that. I have my great friend and filmmaker Rebecca Dreyfus always says that I have creative vertigo, that I don't know what I'm doing for months and years on end and then I looked down and I say, Oh, God, I think it's a horror film. Or I think I've rewritten a Dickens story. And I get a nauseated kind of, you know, dolly in rack, focus thing. It's not, I'm telling you, I'm not describing a creative process that is painful for me to realize, always later on what I'm doing. And I still hold, that's the only way I can do it. I will not go into a screenplay and then a film saying this is a serio comic black and white, multi character, suburban, who wants that? I go in thinking, I'm making something that I don't know, that no one's seen before and then we'll see what they think.
John 12:54
You know, we were very similar, you and I in that regard. In addition to low budget, filmmaking, as I've gotten older, I've gotten into novel writing and mystery writing, which I enjoy. And the parallels between independent publishing and independent filmmaking are really close. One of the things that people say all the time in independent publishing that I back away from is you have to write to market. You have to know who your audience is, what they like, and write a book for them. And I can't do that. I can write a book for me that, you know, if I slip into dementia in 20 years and read it, I won't remember writing it, but I would enjoy it because all the jokes are for me and all the references are for me...
Eric 13:32
I think you and me, doing the exact right thing, according to me. And you'll be happy to know, because I teach at Columbia Columbia's film grad school, we have an unbelievable group of alumni people, you know, like, you know, Jennifer Lee, who created Frozen and the people behind Making of a Murderer and Zootopia. And all they ever say when they come back to speak to our students is nobody wants a writer who is writing to the industry. They want something they haven't seen before that is new, fresh, odd, and still steaming be you know, out of the birth canal.
John 14:14
Yep. The corollary to that, that I tell people who are writing and also people who are filmmakers who want to work that way is the more you can take economics out of the process, the more you're able to not need to make money from what you're doing, the happier you're going to be. Because every movie I've ever made has never made money and it didn't matter. It wasn't the purpose. The purpose was, oh, this is interesting idea. Let's explore this with these 12 actors and see what happens. But if you can take economics out of it, you completely free.
Eric 14:41
You free and I'll tell you what, I know. Again, it's just a perspective, one person's perspective. But everyone, you know, you want to leave on the earth some things that you felt good about, whether they're children or ethics or some civic thing you did for your town, or a movie. And all the people I know who made tons of money always are talking about coming back to their roots because they're so unhappy. Like, I get it. I get it. And all these actors who want to do work for no money, it's because they feel like well, I sure I made a ton of money, but I didn't get to do any of the stuff I really care about.
I remember in my first real attempt at filmmaking after film school, a short half hour film that starred the late Anne Meara and Cynthia Nixon in an early film role and F Murray Abraham did the voiceover. And I was 20 something years old, and the film did very well and it was just a half hour movie and we showed it at the Museum of Modern Art. And after the screening, a woman came up to me and I don't remember what language she was speaking. She was Asian, and she tried to explain to her to me, what the movie meant to her, but she spoke no English and she kept tapping her heart and looking at me. Anne Meara was standing next to me and she kept pointing like and then making a fist and pounding her chest and pointing to like a screen in the air, as if she was referencing the movie. And then she went away. Anne Meara said, listen to me now, it will never get better than that. I understand completely. For the movie I made after Judy Berlin, which is called Three Backyards and a movie I produced and cowrote after that, called Love After Love. I didn't read the reviews. Who cares?
John 16:27
Yeah, that's a pretty special experience and good for her to point that out to you.
Eric 16:31
Her husband in a bar after a production of The Three Sisters told me that--this is pretty common. This is Jerry Stiller, the late great comedian said to me, I was about to tell him what the New York Times had said about his performance. He said, no, no, no, don't. Because if you believe the good ones, then you have to believe the bad ones. And I've since known that that is something that's said a lot. But if a review isn't going to help you make your next movie, then don't read it.
Marlena Dietrich, in my favorite last line, paraphrased from any movie, gets at why criticism is unimportant for the artist. In the end of Touch of Evil, she says, “what does it matter what you say about other people.” It's just, you either do or they did to you or you experience all that garbage of what people say it goes in the trash, no one except for maybe James Agee’s book, there's very few film criticism books that people are desperate to get to, you know, in 50 years. But you take a bad movie, I watched some summer camp killer movie the other night, and I thought I'd rather watch this than read what somebody said about this movie. I’d rather watch somebody's earnest attempt to fling themselves at the universe than a critics commentary upon it. Yeah. Anyone who gets up at five in the morning to go make a movie has my respect and I don't even you know, on the New York Times comments online commentary site, I refused when it's about artwork to come in even anonymously. Nope!
John 18:05
Okay. You did touch on this. But it's so important and people forget it. I phrased it as time is on your side. You talked about being prepared 160% and having Judy Berlin, every day, there were two backups in case for some reason, something didn't happen and the advantage you had was you had no money. But you had time and you could spend the time necessary doing months of pre-production, which is the certainly the least sexy part of filmmaking, but is maybe the most important and is never really talked about that much.
How much you can benefit from just sitting down and putting the schedule down? I mean, we used to, I'm sure with Judy Berlin, you're using strips and you're moving them around and when we did our 16-millimeter features, we didn't even spend the money on the board. We made our own little strips, and we cut them out and did all that. You can do it now on computers, it's much easier, but it's having that backup and that backup to the backup. You don't really need it until you need it and then you can't get it unless you've put it in place already.
Eric 19:06
Well, I'll say this, I have to disabuse some of my students at Columbia by telling them that there is no like effete artist who walks onto a set-in filmmaking with no idea about scheduling. That character fails in filmmaking. That every single director is a producer, and you cannot be stupid about money, and you cannot be stupid about planning and in fact, Cass Donovan who is an amazing AD and one of my good friends. She and I sometimes used to do a seminar for young filmmakers about scheduling your movie and I always used to say, you know, a good schedule is a beautiful expression of your movie, where you put your emphasis. And it comes out in the same way that people say like oh, I just like dialogue and characters. I'm not good at structure. There's no such things. You need at least to understand that a good structure for your story can be a beautiful, not restrictive, rigorous device that's applied to your artistry, a structure and a story is a beautiful can be a beautiful thing and the expression of the story and the same thing is true with the schedule.
The schedule is an expression of your story’s emphases. If your story and your resources are about actors, and you've got an amazing group of people who are only doing the project and lending their experience and talent, because they thought this was a chance to act and not be hurried. Well, that expresses itself in how many days and how many shots you're going to schedule them in. And I love how a schedule expresses itself into an amount of days and amount of money and allocation of funding. I love it. There is no better way to find out what your priorities were and I love it. And in terms of planning, one of the reasons I don't understand or have an inkling to investigate theater is I don't want something that goes on every evening without my control, where the actors sort of do new things or try stuff out and the carefully plotted direction that you created can get wobbly and deformed over time. Instead, I like the planning of a script and now I'm not talking about pre-production. I'm talking about I like that, with screenwriting, you go down in your basement for as long as you need. So, maybe I'm afraid of shame and I don't like to present stuff that is so obviously wrong to whole groups of people. I like to go down in the basement for both the writing and the pre-production and get the thing right.
You know, there are so many ways to make a movie that I'll also I want to place myself in a specific school of filmmaking. To this point in my directing life, I've created scripts that are meant to be executed in the sense that not as disciplined in execution as what Hitchcock or David Lean, we're shooting for, but not as loose an experiment as Cassavetes, or let's say, Maurice Pilar. We're going for, everyone has to find their own expression. In other words, if you are Maurice Pilar or Cassavetes, or Lucrecia Martel, you have to find your own equation, you have to find your own pre-production/production equation where the room for experimentation.
I haven't really wanted to experiment on set, I know what shots I want, and I get them. The next film I make may be different. But everyone has a different equation and every script and every director are going to find their own priorities that are expressed in the project and then the execution. The fun thing was, the last movie I worked on, was something I've produced and co-wrote ,called Love After Love. And that was directed and co-written by Russ, and Russ and I spent years writing a script that we knew that was intended to be elastic, and to be a jumping off ground for the kind of impromptu directing he does. Now, a lot of what we wrote ended up in the movie, but sometimes he would call me from the set and say, this isn't working and that was exciting, because we knew that would happen. And he told the cast and the crew before they went into the project, before they went into the short film he made before that called Rolling on the Floor Laughing. This is intended to be a porous experiment ,with a firm spine of drama that is not porous.
So, we've created a drama and interrelations in that script that then he went off, and those couldn't budge. Those were fixed the dramatic principles and dynamics. But he worked as a director in a completely different way than me and I was very happy to loosen my own way of working and then as a producer, make sure that he had what he needed on the set, and that the pre-production, production and even editing--we took a year to edit that film--was based in an idiosyncratic methodology of his particular artistry, not mine.
John 24:34
And why I think is so interesting about that is that you know, you made sure that everybody involved knew going in we're doing this kind of movie and this kind of movie has … I remember talking to Henry Jaglom, about I don’t know which movie it was, you know, Henry has a very loose style of what he does. But it's still a movie, and he was talking about, he was shooting a scene and an actress either jumped into a swimming pool or push somebody into a swimming pool. And he said, Why did you do that? She said, I was in the moment. Yeah, and he said, yes, this is a movie and now I have to dry these people off and I have to do the coverage on the other side. So, you need to know where the lines are, how improvised is this really.
Eric 25:15
And everyone has different lines, and you make movies to find out how you make movies. You write screenplays to find out what that feeling is and whether or not you can interest an audience in it. You don't write a screenplay to execute Syd Fields, ideas about story or the hero's journey. I'm not a hero. I don't have a hero's journey. I have my journey. The task, the obligation is to see if I can take that and still make it dramatic and interesting to a group of hostile strangers, normally called an audience,
John 25:52
As Harry Anderson used to say, if you have a bunch of people all seated facing the same direction, do you owe them something.
Eric 25:58
Yeah, it's unbelievable. A friend of mine who works in theater saw a terrible show and he works on Broadway, and he works on all the big shows that you have heard of. So, I can't give the title of this one particular production. And he said, you know, I feel like telling these people because he works in lighting. He said, I feel like telling these people who create these shows that every single audience member who comes to see the show at eight o'clock that night, woke up at seven in the morning, and they're tired, and they worked and you better provide something at eight that night.
John 26:33
Exactly. I remember talking to Stuart Gordon, the guy who made Reanimator, and he was big in theater before he got into horror films. And he said we had one patron who always brought her husband, and I'll say his name was Sheldon, I forget what the name was. And he would consistently fall asleep during the shows. And my mandate to the cast was our only job is to keep Sheldon awake. Yeah, that's what we're there to do is to keep Sheldon alert and awake. And I think at all the time as you're watching something on film, you're going is that going to keep Sheldon awake, or is that just me having fun?
Eric 27:01
No, he didn't ask this question, so it's probably not. But a lot of students are not a lot, actually but some students will say to me like, well, what I have to know the history of movies? Why do I have to know that when I'm going to create something new? And I just think because you're not. Because there is a respect for a craft. Forget the art of people who have been doing this for ages. And to not know it puts you in the position of the only person on set who doesn't realize that. Every single crew member is a dramatist: the script supervisor is a dramatist, the set decorator is a dramatist, the costume designer, the cinematographer, the producer. So sometimes my students in directing will say to me, well, I thought this shot was interesting and I said, Okay, you may think that's interesting. But I'm going to tell you something scary right now: your producer, and your editor will know immediately that you don't know what you're doing and that that won't cut. It is not a secret this thing you are doing, this skill. Learn what other people, what the expectations of the art form are, please, and then build from them and break rules and expand but don't do it naively.
John 28:06
Yeah. When I wrote the first book, it was because I had done an interview with a couple guys who made a movie called The Last Broadcast, which came out right before Blair Witch, which had a similar project process to it. And one of them said to me, he said in talking to film students, one thing I keep seeing is everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. And so I put the book together, because here's all the different lessons, you can you're going to end up learning in one way or another, you might as well read them now and like you say, not find out that that won't cut because it won't cut. It just won't cut.
Alright, you did touch on this lesson earlier just in passing, but it's a good one and it's sometimes a tough one. I just called it Fixed Problems Quickly and it was about if there's a crew member who's not part of the team, it's easier to get rid of them two weeks out, then two hours into the shoot.
Eric 28:54
Yep, it still holds, and it happened on the film I made after Judy Berlin as well. Someone who had worked on Judy Berlin came on to the new production of Three Backyards, and I tried my best to keep this untenable relationship working. But like a rotten root on a plant, it started to rot everything around it, and everyone would like to be the well-liked captain of the ship. But that also means firing crew members sometimes. We had a very, very big key position on that film, and we had to lose them a week before we shot. I'll tell you something else about Three Backyards. It was a week before we shot it. Is it okay that I talked about that?
John 29:39
Absolutely. We're talking about what you've learned.
Eric 29:42
Yeah. So, after Judy Berlin I made a film called Three Backyards with Edie Falco and Elias Kotes and host of other people. A very strange movie it was, I am not joking. I haven't said this. So, not that this is some big reveal that anyone gives a shit about but before, a week before we shot it was called Four Backyards. I've never told that because I didn't want anyone to watch it with that mindset and start to say, and we even kept the crew quiet and said, please, we don't want this to get out that it's you know. And I cut out an entire storyline a week before shooting. Now, when I tell you that it was an actor, a very amazing actor in that storyline, the fourth backyard, who I had to call, who was already doing driving around on his motorcycle in the location, going to visit places that had to do with his storyline, costume fittings, everything had been done locations we had gotten, I had to call them and say we're cutting, that your character and that storyline. It was still to this day unbearable. I don't expect you know, the guy is very well known and successful, and you know, has done far more important things than my little movie. But I still feel guilty to this day. I feel nauseous to this day that I did that, that I had to do it.
We got to a point where it was clear, the expression of the film called Four Backyards would be running through one take per shot, per setup and running through with no time to work on the characters, no time to give these amazing actors, you know what they wanted. We'd be run and gun and I just said, I'm not this old, you know, to making this movie so that I can re-learn terrible lessons and put these actors through that kind of experience. So, I cut an entire storyline that was dragging down this buoy, let's say in the water and then once we cut it off, and I of course I don't mean the actor or the performance, the potential performance. I mean, the production. Once that fell to the bottom of the sea, the buoy lifted and bounced and righted itself. And I lived with that decision knowing I did the right thing, but that it was hard.
We also lost one of the key, we lost our production designer I would say about 15 days before shooting, and that was another one of those kinds of decisions where I said get it done now. I will say this offline on Three Backyards. There was a crew member who had, the minute I shook hands with them, I knew this is that kind of poisonous sniping inconsolable person. But I leave those decisions to department heads and that's not my job to get in and say this person seems awful to me. But that's my feeling. They worked for about, let me say this carefully, they worked and it and became exactly the problem that I had predicted. They initiated a work stoppage that was uncalled for, unprofessional, and everyone was aware.
They pretended not to know what location we were going to next and didn't show up. We were delayed I think 40 minutes. On a low budget movie, 40 minutes is unsustainable. And I will just say this, I had to make the decision because we were so deep into the film, whether or not firing that person would cause such bad feelings in the remaining crew or free us up in a way that was similar to what I described earlier. I decided to keep the person and it was I believe the right decision because we were close enough to finishing the film that I believed I would no longer reap benefits from firing them and that leads me to a sentence that I probably told you when I was 20 or whatever how old I was when I spoke to you. I'm now 57.
On a movie, you want to be effective not right. In other words, a decision that is morally right on a film which is a temporary, collapsible circus tent where people strangers get together and work for a month, being morally right can hit the main pole of that circus tent really hard and collapse. You want to be effective not right. The right decision in a movie. It is the one that gets forward motion. In that particular case, I took my revenge out later, I kept the person, I bit my tongue and swallowed my pride and said I'm so sorry, let's negotiate. How can we make you happier? However, after we finished production, my more powerful friends in the industry never hired that person again. That person was fired from large TV productions that they were on and given no reason and I felt absolutely thrilled with that.
John 34:48
Well, it does catch up with you. The next one is one that I use all the time and you just put it very succinctly you said, Fewer Takes, More Shots.
Eric 34:57
So, I can talk about that. I want to be specific though, that it's for my kind of filmmaking. If you're shooting every scene in one shot, this cannot apply. But in the edit room generally, is a very broad stroke comment, generally, if you're a more conventional visual director who tells stories with shots, you get stuck on one shot in one setup, especially if it's a master and you're trying to get it right. You have no other storytelling ability. You don't have the move in. You don't have the overhead shot. You don't have the insert shot of the finger of the character touching a teaspoon nervously. You don't have any other storytelling ability if you get stuck in one setup.
So, a lot of people always say, you know, remember, your first take is probably your best take. That's a good truism. There's an energy that you get from nervous actors, nervous camera operators in a first take. So, sometimes your first take has a great spontaneity about it. Sometimes it lingers for a second or third take. The idea that you are going to beat that dead horse into the ground with subsequent takes going up through 13, 15, 19 to get something perfect flies in the face of the actuality, which is that editing, performance, the rhythm of the eventual scene through shots and takes creates what the audience experiences. That the idea of perfection is a great way to flatten your actors, kill your dialogue, ruin your scene.
It's like when I first made a pie ever in my life, nobody taught me and I didn't really look at a book. I was preparing a meal for a woman who was coming up to her country house and I was upstate using the house. And I thought to myself as I carefully cut the butter into the flour and created a little pebbly, beautiful texture, and then gently gathered those pebbles of flour and butter and sugar together into a ball. I mistakenly thought that if I took the rolling pin and roll the life out of it, I would be making the best crust possible. And it tasted it was inedible. It tasted like shoe leather. And I said what did I do wrong? And they said, the object she said to me when she arrived, the object is to gather those delicate, beautiful pebbles together and lightly make it into a crust that retains the little particles, the delicate interstitial hollows. Not to flatten the life out of it. And the same is true about shots. The more angles you have, if that's the way you shoot, create a sense of life. That's about as good as I can say it.
John 37:49
Well, you know, I want to add just a couple of things. When I did the book, originally, I talked, had a wonderful long conversation with Edie, Falco about Judy Berlin. She was trying to get her brand-new baby to go to sleep while we talk and so it's very quiet recording of her talking.
Eric 38:04
That's my godson Anderson.
John 38:05
Oh, that's so sweet. She said about multiple takes. She said there's a perception sometimes with filmmakers that actors are this endless well. And she said, I'm not, I'm just not. Unless you're giving me direction to change something, it's going to be the same or worse. Again, and again. And so you know, of all the lessons from the book that I tell people when I'm making presentations, fewer takes more shots. The thing, a corollary of attitude, is if you're going to do another take, tell them to do it faster, because you're gonna want a faster version of it. You don't realize that right now, but you're gonna want one.
Eric 38:38
Here's a great way of saying it. I feel people mistake, directors mistakenly think that they are making the film on set. The filming of a movie is a shopping expedition for, drumroll please, ingredients. If you are shooting one take per scene, sure, get it right, you have your own methodology. But if you're going to be telling a story in the traditional narrative way, where a bunch of angles and performances in those shots, setups angles, will eventually tell the story of a scene that let's say for example, goes from pedestrian quotidian to life threatening, remember that you need the ingredients to then cook in the edit room of quotidian, seemingly boring escalating into life threatening.
Making a movie on set in production is shopping for the ingredients and you come home and then you forget the recipe and say, what did I get? What was available? What was fresh? What does that mean if you're not talking about food? Well, this actor was amazing, and I lingered on them and I worked on their performance because it's going to be great. That's one of the ingredients you have to work on. In the edit room, this actor was less experienced, and I had to do more setups because they couldn't carry a scene in one shot. That's what I have to work with now in the edit room.
When you're in the edit room, you're cooking with the ingredients you got in the fishing expedition called shooting. That's why my students say to me, well, why am I going to get extra footage? Why am I going to get anything but the bare minimum? Why am I going to overlap in terms of, well, you think you're only going to use that angle for two lines, we'll get a line on either side of the dialog, so that you have it in case. And they say, that's not being professional. That's not being precise and accurate. And I'd say it's a fishing expedition, especially if you're starting to learn film. You don't go shopping for a party and say, I think everyone will have about 13 M&Ms. You're buy in bulk, because you're getting like, oh, it's a Halloween party, I’ll need a lot of this, a lot of that and a lot of this, and then you cook it later.
John 41:04
You know, one of the best examples of that is connected to Judy Berlin, because as I remember, you edited that movie on the same flatbed that Annie Hall was edited on...
Eric 41:18
I still have it, because the contract I made with Woody Allen was that if no one ever contacted me for it, and I bore the expense of having to store it, I would keep it. And so I got it and nobody ever asked for it. Nobody uses it anymore.
John 41:34
But the making of that movie is exactly that. They had a lot of ingredients and they kept pulling things away to what was going to taste the best and all of a sudden, this massive thing … You know, I was just talking to another editor last weekend, o, I pulled out this, the Ralph Rosenblum’s book, but...
Eric 41:49
Oh, yeah, I was just gonna mention that. The best book on editing ever.
John 41:51
Although Walter Murch’s book was quite good. But this is much more nuts and bolts.
Eric 41:56
And much more about slapping stuff together to make art.
John 42:00
That one lesson of: don't spend all day on that one take over and over and over. Let's get some other angles is …
Eric 42:06
I'll tell you what happens. I may have said this in our first interview, but I will tell you from the inside, what happens. It's terrifying and if you start with a master, a director can get terrified, because to move on means more questions about what's next. Was it good? And you can get paralyzed in your master shot if you're shooting in that manner. And then the actors aren't doing their best work in the master, especially if it's a huge master, where there's tons of stuff going on. They're going to give you some better performance, if you intend to go in for coverage and you by the time you do that you may have lost, you know, their natural resource. They might have expended it already. I've been in that situation where I got lost in my master and you almost have to take a pin on set and hit your own thigh with it and say, wake up, wake up, move on, move on.
John 42:58
Yeah. All right, I got one more lesson for you, because I'm keeping you way too long. It's a really interesting one, because it's when I talked to Edie about it, she didn't know you had done it and she thought, well, maybe it helped. But Barbara Barrie played her mother in Judy Berlin, they had never met as actors, as people. And you kept them apart until they shot, because you wanted a certain stiffness between them. I just call that Using Reality to Your Advantage. What do you think about that idea now?
Eric 43:25
Edie isn't someone who requires it, you know, she's one of the best actresses in the world.
John 43:30
And Barbara Barrie wouldn't have needed it either. I'm sure.
Eric 43:32
She wouldn't have but I do think there's a … look. This is a funny thing about me and my evolution from Through an Open Window, which is the half hour film, to what I'm writing today. I always thought that film was interesting in the same way that I thought military psyops were interesting: that you could control or guide or influence an audience's experience of the story in ways they were unaware of. So, I always liked those hidden influencers. Even in advertising, I thought they were interesting. You see how this company only uses red and blue and suddenly you feel like, oh, this is a very, this is an American staple this product. I love that shit and after I'm done with a script, I know what I'm intending the audience's experience to be I want to find anything to help me to augment that and if you're a fan of that kind of filmmaking, would the shots have a power outside of the audience's ability to see them? They know that the story is working on them and they think the audience thinks, oh, I was just affected by the story in that great performance. They have no idea that the director has employed a multitude of tricks, depth of field to pop certain actor’s faces out as opposed to wider shots that exclude are identifying with other characters, moving shots that for some reason, quote unquote some reason meaning every director is aware of how these techniques influence an audience, suddenly make you feel as if that moment in the story of the character are moving or have power have influence while other moments have nothing.
In Three Backyards, funnily enough with Edie, I had a scene where Edie was, the whole, Edie's whole storyline was about her desperate, unconscious attempt to connect with this other woman who was a stranger to her. And I refused to show them in a good two shot throughout the entire film. I separated them. I made unequal singles.
When their singles cut, they were unequal singles tighter and wider, until the moment that I had convinced the audience now they're going to become best friends. And I put them into their first good, easy going two shot. And that kind of manipulation is done every moment by every filmmaker directing. In one aspect it is a mute, meaning silent in an unobtrusive, persuasive visual strategy for enhancing the story. So, whether you're keeping two actors away from each other during the course of the day before their first scene, because the scene requires tension, or whether you're separating them visually until a moment late in the movie, where they come together, and they're coming together will suddenly have tension because they're in the same shot. Those kinds of persuasive manipulations are what visual storytelling, otherwise known as directing is about.
John 43:33
Yep, and there's a lot of tools. You just got to know about them because a lot of them you're not going to see, you won't recognize, though until somebody points out, do you realize that those two women were never really in the same shot together?
Eric 47:06
Every well directed movie has a strategy. Sometimes they're unconscious, but you don't want to be unconscious. As the director, you want to be smart. You want to be informed about your own process, and I think smart directors … Here's what I always say to my students: learn a lot, know a lot, then feel a lot.
So, what does that mean? It's just my way of distilling a whole bunch of education down into a simple sentence. Understand what has been done and what you can do, and what are the various modes of directing and storytelling. And then when you get into your own script, feel a lot. What do I want? Why isn't it working? Add a lot of questions marks to the end of sentences. Why can't this character be more likeable? Why isn't this appealing? Why haven't I? How could I? And it's a combination of knowing a lot and being rigorously intellectual about the art form that you want to bow down before you want to bow down before what works and what doesn't work. I would say that you want to bow down before the gods of what works and what doesn't work. You know, you don't want to look them in the eye and say, screw you, I'm doing what I want. You bow down and say, I don't even understand why that didn't work. But I'll take that lesson.
You want to feel a lot. You want to be open on the set. One of the hardest things to learn is how to be open on the set. You want to be open when you're writing. You want to be open when you're editing. It's a real juggling act of roles that you have to play, of being naive, being smart, being a businessperson, being a general, being a very, very wounded flower.
You know, I remember reading, as a high school student, Gloria Swanson's autobiography. And then it's so many years since I read it that I might be wrong. But I remember they said what are you proudest of in your career. And she said without hesitation that I'm still vulnerable. And I didn't even know if I understood it at the time, but I get it now.
You want to be smart. You want to be experienced. You want to have a lot of tools and know the tools of other directors and still be naive and vulnerable and hearable and have your emotional interior in tech. Those are hard things to ask of anyone, but if you want to be in this industry, an art form that so many greats have invested their life's work toiling in, then you owe it to yourself to be all of those things.
[MUSIC TRANSTION]
John
Thanks to Eric Mendelsohn for chatting with me about the lessons he learned from his debut feature, Judy Berlin.
If you enjoyed this interview, you can find lots more just like it on the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. Plus, more interviews can be found in my books -- Fast, Cheap and Under Control -- Lessons Learned from the greatest low-budget movies of all time ... and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap and Written that Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google and Apple Books.
And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series, staring with The Ambitious Card, can be found on those same online retailers in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats. And if you haven’t already, check out the companion to the books: Behind the Page: The Eli Marks podcast … available wherever you get your podcasts.
That's it for episode 106 of The Occasional Film Podcast, which was p roduced at Grass Lake Studios. Original music by Andy Morantz. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you … occasionally!
John Gaspard 00:33
That was a soundbite from the Theater People Web series, which was created, written, directed, edited and occasional photographed by today’s guest, Matt Anderson. Hello and welcome to episode 105 of The Occasional Film podcast -- the occasional companion podcast to the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. I'm the blog's editor, John Gaspard. I've known Matt Anderson for too many years to calculate -- certainly as a screenwriter and filmmaker, but occasionally as an actor. He even shows up as a waiter in my digital feature, Grown Men.
[Film Clip 1:09 to 1:28]
In our conversation today, Matt talks about the origins of the Theatre People web series and takes us through the unique challenges he and his team faced bringing each of the four seasons to life. Where did theater people come from?
Matt Anderson 01:44
Desperation. Don't they all come from desperation?
John Gaspard 01:48
I guess so. What was your desperate situation?
Matt Anderson 01:52
I had just not been working, or, more specifically, I'd been working for a really long time writing. I was out in LA, and was doing that thing where you write for free, and nothing ever actually gets made. And I got to a point where I just kind of got tired of that, you know? After a while you kind of would like to see something actually reach fruition. I just kind of hit this point where I felt like, even if it was something just completely do-it-yourself, I just needed to see something I was writing actually get made without needing to, you know, pass through 1000, gatekeepers and sell to a studio in order to see it happen. So, that was pretty much it. I just felt like I wanted to make something truly independently and I hooked up with a producer named Lydia Bolder, who was just getting out of stage management and was looking for a new kind of project and the two of us just kind of started it up. And we brought Crist Ballas on to produce with us and the three of us just kind of made Season One happen without any real sense of whether it would work or not.
John Gaspard 03:08
All that being said, why did you land on the idea of theater people as your subject matter?
Matt Anderson 03:14
Just because it seemed like subject matter that would never exhaust itself. I'd been acting for 10 years prior to moving out to LA and I felt like the material was inexhaustible. You know, if you've spent any time in theater, as you know, you have the story, it is just coming fast and furious, like you couldn't, forget enough to not have just a goldmine of good stories and good characters and experiences to draw from. And so that was kind of the idea behind why that world. And then the practical reason was I really just wanted to work with a lot of the people that I'd used to act with. I knew that I knew a ton of really good actors and I felt like this this kind of story would lend itself to a really large cast which would allow me to work with a lot of actors, which was another thing that I wanted to do. Get as many people involved as possible and I knew I had a lot of resources. I knew that, you know, if I was going to be trying to do this completely out of pocket and as inexpensively as possible, playing to the fact that I knew a lot of people with theater spaces and knew a lot of people that would be willing to help me out and let us shoot in them for free. And all of that logistical stuff just made it seem like it was a really economical choice of story, as opposed to doing something like an office set, you know, or a restaurant or any of the other kinds of locations that are just absolute nightmares to line up. I felt like theaters were the ones that were going to be my best shot and this was something that could be primarily shot in theaters.
John Gaspard 05:11
I had that exact same thought when we did Ghost Light, when I was hanging out at Theater in the Round and realized that the building was only actually in use, really, Friday, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon. The rehearsal room was used in the evening, but there were more than 30 other rooms in that building that were genuinely never used and were kind of interesting.
Matt Anderson 05:33
Being able to have that kind of access is just, you know, when you can't pay to close a place down, finding a restaurant or a store or an office. And me being me, I still wrote in plenty of restaurants and stores and offices and then we just had to problem solve that. But at least we were able to, for the majority of what we needed, rely on friendly locations that were available to us for cheap.
John Gaspard 05:57
So, as you were doing that, I remember that in addition to the episodes for Season One you also did I don't know what you would play call them. They were Theater People Minute, a Minute.
Matt Anderson 06:10
Yeah, the Promo Minutes.
John Gaspard 06:12
Why did you think to do that? And they were all very funny but if I'm remembering right, aren't they really completely divorced from your main stories?
Matt Anderson 06:22
Yeah, character-wise, there's no continuity. We just did that because we knew that we needed to, this was my first, I had never done a web series before. I came from a background where I had done a bunch of shorts, and I had done a feature and I had kind of done that sort of those modes. I'd never done something that I was going to need to be able to market and promote and find an audience for and raise awareness of and build a brand and all that kind of stuff. And it was really sort of a learning as we were going sort of thing. So, I knew that we somehow needed to get the idea that we were making a show out there, to start building an audience and bringing people to our Facebook page, even though we didn't have a show yet and you know, getting people interested in when the show was going to launch. And so the Minutes were just a way for us to do something that was in the same spirit of the show, you know. They were silent. So, they were things that we could shoot without needing sync sound, they were short, they were a minute long, set to like old times silent movie music, and they kind of had that feel to them.
So, we could shoot them in three hours, and edit them pretty quickly and just put them out there as something that people could watch in a minute and get a sense of what the sense of humor of the show was going to be. The first season was 10 episodes, of eight to 10 minutes a piece. And once we launched, we released one a week, every Friday for two and a half months. And people liked them and we got, you know, a few 100 views every time we'd launch one. And then more people would find them as we released further episodes, and we'd go back and catch up and, and it was good. It was really warm. What was most important to me was when we started it, you know, we didn't have any money and literally nobody got paid and everything was out of pocket and everybody was basically signing on to this big question mark. When I approached them, I think I told everybody, you know, I have no idea how this is going to turn out. I just want to work. Lydia, I and Crist just want to work and so we're going to do this thing and I have no idea if it's going to be any good. I think it's going to be good because it's resting on good writing and great performances and I feel like we can do that but, I said two things.
· I said, one, it'll get done. Because that's a big thing, you know, a lot of projects, a lot of independent projects, that actors sign on to, they work on them really hard for you know, sometimes months int the end, and they never see the light of day, you know. You're checking in with the producers like a year later and they're like, our editors trying to fit it in between the other projects, and we're not sure when it's gonna get done and you know, a lot of them just don't get finished. So, I said, this will get finished.
· The other thing I said was, you're gonna like your work. I said it'll get finished and you'll like you in the final product and that's really all I can offer. And we had a ton of actors that were willing to come on for this big question mark and just see what happened and, and it worked out well.
I think I probably also said, I think it's going to be fun, and I think it has been. I think people have had a good time working on it, which is, as you know, with an independent project always, again, a question mark because, these productions are not cushy, you know. They're a lot of work and it's a lot of scrambling around and I mean, making any kind of film is a ton of work and then for a web series, especially one like this, where I mean, we ended up shooting 35 days, I think over the course of a year. We started in September, and I think we finished in May or June. And it was a really long process and we had all these great actors that were willing to come on for free and just kind of roll with it. And, you know, take the gamble.
John Gaspard 10:34
Okay, so Series One is a success. What pushed you into, hey, let's do Series Two, and along with that, let's try to raise money via Kickstarter?
Matt Anderson 10:46
When we finished Season One, there were a lot of questions about what we were going to do next. Because it had turned out well, and people liked it, and people liked working on it, and it definitely did have that sense of, you know, we could go anywhere with it next. And I always had the same answer, which was we'll do another season, if we're able to pay people. Because for me, I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask actors to work for free for a project that you think is going to end up being a good project. And I think actors are used to that and you know, they can always say no, if they're not in a position to do it, which is totally fine. It's no different from theater that way. But my personal philosophy is you get to ask them to work for free once and if you're gonna ask them again, you have to be able to add something to the equation. Like that's just how I wanted to operate. I always said, you know, if we can find a way to put some money together and actually pay people even if it's just a stipend, then we would do a Season Two, or look at doing a Season Two. About a year after we finished Season One we've been doing well, like, we'd still see, I would say probably, like 15 to 20 Episode views a day, I think if I'm remembering correctly. Like just organically, like it was just kind of out there, people would hear about it and, you know, check it out and that was day to day for a year. So, I mean, that was nice, you know. It's just small, grassroots organic growth. And then, about a year after we launched, American Theater Magazine put our link on their Facebook page. I still don't know, I think it was somebody local, specifically who got it to them, I've never really heard what the provenance of it was. And they didn't editorialize it. They weren't like, hey, here's a great show. It was literally just the link, if I recall correctly. And within a week, we had, like, hundreds, if not 1000s of views on top of the, you know, probably couple or 1000 that we've had to that point. My numbers might be wrong. It was a long time ago, but it was huge. It was a huge bump. A lot of people were checking us out because of that American Theater push. And so we were getting all this feedback from all over the place and we were seeing our numbers go up and it was really exciting and totally unexpected. And that was the point where I said, you know, maybe if we're going to look at doing crowdsourcing, which we knew would have to be the next step, if we were going to try and raise money, this would be the time to do it.
And so, Lydia and Crist and I kind of put together a Kickstarter campaign to try and raise a budget for a second season. The first season was about independent theater, the second season was going to be about corporate theater. And so we put together a budget for that and put together a Kickstarter and ran the Kickstarter for a month and it was absolutely, unexpectedly exhausting. I had no idea. I had talked to some people about Kickstarter, to get ideas about, like how to run it. I talked to people who had run successful campaigns. I was so completely unprepared for how difficult it was. It was, so much more than a full-time job, but it was successful and, in the end, we had actually a decent amount of money over the amount that we were planning to raise, which was great. It was all worth it, but it was a real learning experience.
John Gaspard 14:12
What would you say to someone thinking of starting a Kickstarter campaign now, even though it is a couple of years later, and things might be a little different? But what were the big takeaways you got from that exhausting experience? Because I remember watching just how exhausting it was from the sidelines.
Matt Anderson 14:29
Well, you know, part of it was the way that we approached it, for sure. Like, I don't think every campaign has to be this way, but the way that we approached it, you know, you know me. My strong suit is not going around and asking people to give me money. That's just not anywhere near my comfort zone. And the only way I could really get comfortable with it was I said if we're going to ask for money, I kind of want to sing for our supper. I only going to be comfortable doing this if we are giving something as well, during the campaign. And so what we planned out was we released three videos a week, for the month of the Kickstarter campaign. So, every week, I think it was probably Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we would release a new video. We'd release one video that was like sourced from Season One. So, it'd be like an outtakes reel, or it would be a supercut of every one of the dozens, I think we had 50 some speaking parts in Season One: every one of those actors saying one line or one word from one line, just fun stuff like that. And then on another day, in the week, we'd released what we call our help us pay videos where we introduced a member of our crew and kind of showed what they did. So, help us pay Katie Driscoll, she's our production assistant, these are all the things she does. Help us pay our composer, this is Mike, you know, get to know him a little bit. And they were all just these little one minute videos and again, you know, all of them had the same spirit of the show. I mean, that was kind of the idea, you know, everything was sort of a piece of the project. So, every time we released something, it was like another piece of Theater People. And then, the last video each week would be something sort of more ambitious. So, for one of them, it was another Theater People minute. For one of them, it was a scene between two of our Seasons One characters. One of them had gone to prison at the end of Season One, because really, if you're going to try and do a really easy, quick shoot, what you should do is write it to take place in a prison. That is just smart producing.
John Gaspard 16:37
Can I suggest something? Why don't you do it out of state, certainly a long way away from your base?
Matt Anderson 16:43
You know, luckily, we came up with that idea on our own and ended up in Iowa.
John Gaspard 16:48
Yeah, that makes sense.
Matt Anderson 16:51
No, this is the thing. I mean, I'll tell you like, I was gonna say the unsung hero, but I think I'm still singing about her. So, hopefully she's the sung hero, but Lydia Bolder and her production magic, like literally, I would just write this stuff, and then say, hey, Lydia, I need a prison. And then she would give me that look and then she'd go get a prison. So, the last video was always something like that, sort of a bigger piece of the puzzle. And so we were releasing videos, like every other day during the week, and obviously, you know, producing anything is exhausting. So, producing at that pace was really difficult and that's on top of the fact that you have to be constantly shepherding your campaign, you know. We were Facebook based, because the Twin Cities, social media wise, is primarily Facebook based. So, we were always on Facebook, you know, we were always, tracking where we were getting the word out, spreading the news about new videos. That was actually a real upside to how we operated. You know, it allowed us to have something new to talk about all the time. So, it wasn't a month of, hey, we're doing this thing, give us some money, and then two days later, having to go back and be like, hey, we're still doing this thing, give us some money. Like, we were able to have a conversation about each video, you know. Instead, it was like, hey, come meet Katie Driscoll, a one minute video just hit our page, you know, and then we can focus on that and then the ask for the campaign was in that video. So, we didn't have to kind of be walking around hat in hand all the time.
John Gaspard 18:43
You gave them a reason to keep coming back.
Matt Anderson 18:46
Exactly.
John Gaspard 18:47
Just the hardest thing to do.
Matt Anderson 18:49
It was absolutely exhausting and then honestly. And this was advice that was given to me by somebody, who had done a successful campaign, you're emailing literally everyone that you've ever had an email address for. And you’re Facebook messaging every single Facebook friend you have, that you can bring yourself, to ask for money from. And, you know, that's just kind of how it works and it's hugely uncomfortable if you're not sort of constitutionally built for that, which I'm really, really not. But really effective, because if people know, especially with a personal ask, and you know me surprise, surprise, I couldn't just send a form letter, like I needed to make a personal reach, check in and, it was really rare, frankly, once you reached out to somebody for somebody not to contribute. I mean, it might not have been much, it might have been five bucks. But that's kind of what we wanted, we weren't angling for big ticket donors. We didn't feel like that's how our show operated. You know, the show for us was really about community and showing that if you make something out of a community, that the community will be there to support it. And so in the end, I think our average donation was something around 20 bucks, which meant we had a lot of people who gave five bucks and we had a lot of people who gave more. And it averaged out to a really nice, manageable reasonable average, which I was really pleased with.
John Gaspard 20:25
So, you exceeded your goal and with the leftover money thought, what the heck, rather than do Season Two, let's do Season Twoand Three.
Matt Anderson 20:33
Yeah, well, that was a surprise that came out of the campaign. So, midway through the campaign, I got contacted by Graydon Royce, who was the Minneapolis Star Tribune, theater critic, who I'd met, I think, in passing. He just sent me an email, I think, via Facebook and said, hey, I really love the show, I saw that you're doing the Kickstarter, I hope it's going well. I had an idea for Season Two, if you'd be interested to talk about it. And I said, well, I think I know what Season Twois going to be. But you know, I'm never going to turn down an idea. Let's get together and talk. And we met for coffee, and I just loved his idea. It was just this really fantastic idea. He said, I have this house that my brother and I are renovating. It's our old family home and it's in Mound, Minnesota, about 40 minutes west of the cities. And we were out there working last weekend and it just occurred to me that it might be really funny to have Jamie, the ridiculous Avant Garde director from Season One, if he decided to do a site-specific show. You know, sort of crazy, rundown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. And then we started spit balling ideas and I was like, yeah, maybe, what if he plans it in the fall, but by the time they do the show, it's winter and so now it's winter in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota, and nobody is aware of what they're getting into, and it just kind of spirals out of control. And I just fell in love with the idea. And so we took a look at the numbers and the money that we'd raised and you know, we'd plan for a month-long shoot for our big season for our corporate season. I said I feel like we could shoot Season Two, if we really scale it back, and I shoot it myself. So, we don't have to worry about bringing in a bunch of crew to do it. Similar to Season One, we did bring in a godsend, Mickey Richardson, who did sound and lights for us, which was beyond I mean, it wouldn't have happened without Mickey. But otherwise, we shot it pretty much like we shot Season One, except it was all in one location.
So, we could go out there on a Friday night and basically shoot Friday night, all day Saturday, all day Sunday for three weekends. And we ended up shooting in, you know, what is that seven and a half days. What was originally going to be a shorter season and ended up just being a fewer number of episodes, but the episodes were longer. So, it still ended up being I think about a 90-minute season. So, basically, it's one story as opposed to the A story and the B story. It's basically like a feature film cut up into, you know, six episodes.
The first thought was a well maybe that'll be Season Three. But I knew that this one was going to have to play differently. I knew it wasn't going to have the A story and the B story. I'd had this idea about doing it in black and white, because Jaime our director character is very much the sort of person who would think of himself as being Ingmar Bergman, and this season would sort of be from his perspective. And so it allowed us to shoot in black and white, which gave us a lot of leeway because you can shoot faster in black and white than you can when you're shooting in colors. It can speed up and you know, winter in Minnesota and black and white.
Like, if you're trying to make something look stark, desolate and foreboding, black and white is the way to go. And so I said if we're going to do it that way, it's got to be Season Two. Because if we have a Season One that's in color, and there's A story and a B story and it's 10 episodes long, and then we have Season Twoand it's in color and there's an a story and a B story and it's 10 episodes long. That's the show, we've established our format for the show. But I said if we sneak this one in between as a six episode thing in black and white, that's kind of the weird offshoot, I said then it kind of opens up the possibilities for the show. Then we've built ourselves some flexibility then, we can kind of do anything. If we really liked that prison location and want to do an entire season in a prison, that could be Season Four. We did not do that because that would have been a terrible idea. But it gave us the flexibility. It just opened up the format to have it be the second season. So we actually did shoot Season Three first. And then while we were wrapping up Season Three, we started the weekend shoots on Season Two. So, I think we shot Season Three in December of that year and started and shot Season Twoon the weekends in January. We were done with everything pretty much by the end of January.
John Gaspard 25:01
Okay, so you finished Season Two, finished Season Three, what was it that happened that made Season Four happen?
Matt Anderson 25:07
So, we did Season Two. Season Two was a really interesting experience. Honestly, I have so much love for all of the seasons of the show. Season Two is the is season that if I were to stumble on it, just by accident online, it's the season that I would like the most. I'm a film guy so, like the Bergman thing and the like, ridiculous fake British director. And there's a Fawlty Towers aspect to it like, it really speaks very directly to the stuff that I enjoy. But it was a huge break from our format, and it really threw a lot of people. And we saw our views go down, like from where we were in Season One, it wasn't the same level of enthusiasm. The people who liked it, the people who really responded to it, liked it better, absolutely, like the passion index was much higher for it. But they were also longer episodes and as with anything on the internet, as you increase your episode length, you're going to reduce the number of people who are just going to click in and then watch on a whim, you know, instead of 7 to 10 minutes. Now, our episodes were 12 to 17 minutes, which sounds like not a ton more, but it's like 50% longer. And so like that was a dissuading factor for a portion of our audience. And we definitely had people come up to us and say, hey, I saw Season Two, that's really weird. Season Three is going to be like Season One, though, right?
Like, you're gonna go back to that. There were definitely some people who really missed the sitcom format of it and that was, I don't know, it wasn't surprising, I guess, but it was a little disappointing to me. Just because I loved it so much and I felt like it was such an interesting step forward for the show. But I say, I understand why it happened and it made a lot of sense to me. But what was really great was because of the nature of it, because I felt like it was something unique. I felt like it might have some legs on the film festival circuit, which I'd never really considered doing, with the show. I'd been burnt out on the film festival circuit pretty badly, just doing short films. Like my experience was pretty much always you spend a lot of time submitting it to a film festival, your work, whatever it is. And you pay your 50 bucks and then two months later, you get a letter saying how happy they are that you paid your 50 bucks, but they just didn't have a place for you. And then you do it all over again. And so I'd kind of moved past that, you know, it was not something I had anticipated.
But I started looking around and I started seeing that more film festivals were having sidebars for web series. And I thought, you know, there's not going to be a lot of black and white Bergman-esque comedy web series out there, I might as well you know, throw our hat into the ring. And so I submitted to a few festivals, and was really surprised that we really started doing well. Like we got into a really high percentage of the festivals that we applied to. I mean, I feel like on average, if you apply to if you're applying to film festivals, I feel like you've got a really good hit to miss ratio if you're getting into 10 to 20%, right? And we got into probably two thirds or more of the festivals that we applied to, which was really great, because it meant that first of all, the show was getting out there, you know, it was finding audiences in a different way than I'd ever expected it to. And also it was just really validating, you know, because when you do see your numbers drop like that, you know that it's not really playing for everybody, you start to kind of second guess yourself a little bit. And it was really validating to have, a curated festival come along and say, we really want to show your show. And then we won some awards and our cast was nominated for Best Ensemble Cast at the New York City Web Fest, which is one of the biggest web fests in the country, if not the biggest. And so like, we started having that reaction, it made a lot more people aware of the show. And it's always difficult to get people to hit the play button and having that kind of legitimacy bestowed on you by people who aren't friends of yours, who aren't people who are in the show, really helped us build an audience.
So, that was kind of step one toward raising the profile of the show. And then we did Season Three, we released Season Three later that year, once I was done editing it, obviously. And right before Season Three launched, Minnesota Public Radio, Marianne Combs, did a piece on the show, a really great piece, which by the way, I was completely unprepared for. I thought that was going to be a train wreck. I met with her thinking that we were going to meet to talk about doing a piece and then we sat down and she pulled out a microphone and like, I hadn't been doing any PR for the show for like six months, because I'd been editing. I had no talking points like, I was totally unprepared and that woman is a genius and the piece that she put together was fantastic. Like it was this really great piece, like she integrated some fantastic clips from it and it played on NPR one morning, right around the time, we were launching Season Three. And that same day, I got a Facebook message from a local guy in town named George, who said, I heard the piece on the radio this morning and I'm working with a couple of guys to put together a new social media content platform. And it's going to be geared specifically toward independent web content and it sounds like we should sit down and talk.
So, we did we sat down and had a cup of coffee and kind of talked about what their plans were. And over the course of a few months, we talked about--because I'd had the same response to, after we were done with Seasons Two and Three, again--people would start asking, are you gonna do a season four and I had the same response. I said, yeah, we'll do it. If we can pay people more, because we were finally able to pay people for Seasons Two and Three. But I mean, it was a pittance. I think everybody, all the actors in Seasons Two and Three made $100 for the project, you know, whether it was people who were shooting for a month on Season Three, or people who were living in a freezing farmhouse for three weekends for Season Two. 100 bucks for the project, not a lot. And I said if we're going to move forward, same situation, we'll do it if we can pay people more. If we can actually pay a day rate instead of a stipend. And so in talking with, with these guys, who were putting together this platform that's called SeekATV, they said, you know, we're going to be acquiring a lot of shows, like dozens of shows, but we also are interested in producing a handful of original seasons of shows. And Theater People was the first one that they asked, I believe. And they said, would you be interested in, if we could license the first three seasons for our site, we could produce, we can help finance a fourth season. And, you know, it's one of those things that comes up, and you never think it's actually going to pay off because you hear you know, these ideas floating around all the time. And most of the time they don't come through. nd these guys absolutely came through and you know, by June or July, we had a deal in place for them to produce the fourth season of Theater People with a budget of about five times what we had made, Season Two and Season Three for. So, a significant step up in terms of what we were able to work with for a budget.
John Gaspard 32:55
So, with Season Four, though you're going with longer episodes.
Matt Anderson 32:59
Yeah, they were looking for something more around the 15-minute mark, like the 15-to-20-minute mark, and most of our episodes for Season Four are about 15.
John Gaspard 33:07
Which is closer to the traditional 22 minutes of standard sitcom?
Matt Anderson 33:11
Yeah, and that was actually the appeal for me, like when we got our deal put down, and they said, we'd like your episodes to be somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, there was sort of a moment of creative, well, it turned out to be hubris on my part. Because I went, hey, we get to make a sitcom, that's great, that's really exciting. Like, this is a terrific creative challenge. That was really short sighted of me. It meant that now we were going to be dealing with, instead of 150 pages of content, 200 pages of content, which is a lot more content.
John Gaspard 33:53
Now, let's just back up and do the math on that. You're saying 200 pages of content is more content than 150 pages of content?
Matt Anderson 34:01
I don't have the numbers in front of me. But we worked it out and 200 It turns out is a significant percentage more than 150. And we had budgeted for, you know, more or less the Season Three model, like a 10-to-15-minute episode. And so, we had budgeted in terms of both money and in terms of schedule for that kind of a production. And now, as excited as I was about it, I very quickly realized, we signed on for suddenly 25% more show. And that then became the challenge for Season Four, was how do we develop it in such a way from a production point of view that we can with this budget that we've got. Which was primarily Seeka put up the lion's share of the budget and then we raised the rest of it from individual investors. And then it was figuring out okay, well, how do we do this show right? How do we do this show in a way that we are compensating people the way that we'd like to be compensating them and we're getting done the work that we need to get done and the show is a legitimate step up from what we've done before. Like, if we do a show, at this new budget level, ends up looking like what we did for 20% of this budget previously, that's going to kind of be a failure. It should look better, it should look like a marked step up from what we've been doing before. Like this is our chance to show what we can do with more resources. And so that was the goal with this one was to make a show that really represents an advance on what we've been able to do previously.
John Gaspard 35:49
How did you do that? What were the key things you focused on to make that happen?
Matt Anderson 35:53
From a development point of view, the real key was embracing it as a sitcom and by that, I mean, the show had always been sort of arranged in a way that I really liked. But if you watch an episode of Theater People, aside from Season Two, which was its own beast. From Seasons One or Three, we're all over the place. Like an episode will hop from an apartment to a theater to a street to another theater to an office. We needed to find a way to embrace the idea of sort of a single set sitcom, you know. It was never going to be a single set, but, if you watch a sitcom and especially like, the shows that I really love, like I'm a huge fan of Community. Community is a little rangy, but the majority of an episode of Community takes place in the study room. Cheers is in the bar, most of Seinfeld is in Seinfeld's apartment. It's not that you never go outside, it's just that the majority of what you're doing takes place in one location. And we've never done that before. And so for Season Four, what we decided was we are going to embrace this idea of being a real sitcom and as with the other seasons, we wanted to look at a different kind of theater.
So, Season One had been independent theater, Season Two was site specific theater, Season Three was corporate theater. And for Season Four, I felt like, because we were looking at being on a new platform that I felt was probably going to want to be appealing to like college kids like 20 somethings like a younger audience than we had necessarily been skewing toward in our previous seasons, I felt like Youth Outreach Theater was the way to go. I had been a member of a Youth Outreach Theater in high school for a year and a half and it was a huge part of my sort of getting into theater. And I knew that the material was there as well. And it put us in a position where we could be dealing with a younger cast than we'd had before. You know, a lot of 20 somethings. Our youngest principal cast member literally started college the day of our readthrough. And it also meant that we could base out of basically their headquarters, their homeroom, which is this, you know, supposed to be a room in this college and it turns out to be the costume locker in the basement. But it allowed us to shoot probably 80% of what we were doing in this one controlled room, which really was the only way that we were going to be able to crank out the amount of material we needed to on the schedule that we had there.
John Gaspard 38:22
So, you had a different aesthetic designed for Season Four, tell me a little bit about that.
Matt Anderson 38:26
Yeah, well, the aesthetic was kind of… I would have brought Amber back on if I could have to shoot Season Four as well. But logistically, knowing that we were going to have to be moving as fast as we were with a nine person principal cast, which meant scheduling was already going to be really difficult, and she is a busy shooter and it just seemed like it was going to be logistically impossible. And on top of that, most of our shooting was going to be taking place in this little tiny room where every extra body really makes a difference. And so we kind of were in a position where we had to run lean again, which is what we're used to. We've never had a crew of more than four or five people. But we had to keep to that again and it just made sense for me to operate. I was feeling comfortable enough, I was pleased with how Season Two looked, having somebody who was lighting it for me in particular being important and Mickey was back. He actually produced Season Four and he was also our gaffer, and our lighter are all around go to tech equipment guy. And again, like this season wouldn't have happened without him being there. You have to have somebody on set, John, who knows what they're doing.
This is what I found, you might only need one, no, you need two because you also need a sound guy and we had Nathaniel who did the sound for Season Three for us. But you have to have those two people who know what they're doing as Kevin Costner, I think, would tell you. As long as you've got people around you who know what they're doing, you can do a pretty good job. And that was the situation. I felt comfortable enough shooting it myself, because we were going to adopt this aesthetic of having it be handheld, everything that's down in the room is handheld. And that was, you know, largely born out of just necessity. Like we traditionally, I get absolutely nothing usable from the first day of shooting, this has just always been my experience, I should plan on it and I still never do.
John Gaspard 40:27
You should start on day two then.
Matt Anderson 40:30
Right, give everybody a day off. Now, Season Two, we had to be up and running on day one. But usually there's a bit of a learning curve going into it. And the learning curve with Season Four was we were going to shoot, I was planning on having everything locked down just because it takes a little bit of the responsibility off of me to be able to actually operate the camera. But we tried shooting in that room on a tripod, and it was just not going to be tenable. We just weren't gonna be able to move fast enough. Like, every time we moved, it required a different lighting setup. And there frankly, wasn't enough room in the room to have a full tripod setup. I mean, for a lot of different reasons, it just really quickly made sense that, okay, we're gonna do sort of a, you know. I've been watching a lot of Veep, so like, when I sat down to write Season Four, I was looking for good inspiration. I had already stolen everything I could from Community for Seasons Two and Three. So, I needed something new. So, I sat down, and I watched Veep and Silicon Valley, both of which are fantastic. And the Veep aesthetic, the sort of run and gun, let that be part of it, you know, that sort of fly on the wall feeling. And you know, we were able to emulate that. We didn't go so far into it that it ever feels documentary. But it does definitely have a looseness, it definitely had, it gave us the flexibility to have less of a restrictive lighting setup.
So, we could sort of light the room and just let the camera go where the camera needed to go as much as possible. And that just meant that we were able to shoot a lot faster than we would be able to do. And because it was looser like that, I felt more comfortable operating because it didn't need to look composed and perfect. It needed to just have the right energy, and basically be pointing at the right people at the right time. And as long as I knew who I needed on camera, when I needed them on camera, it allowed me to operate pretty quickly, it worked out really well.
And you know, the upside to having a good director of photography is that you have a good director of photography. The downside of having another a separate director of photography is that that's another layer of communication and well, I would say on most productions, it's absolutely worth that. On this one, because we were going to need to be moving as quickly as we were, it was really helpful for me to just be able to know what I needed to get and get it, as opposed to having to try and effectively convey that information to somebody else who was going to have to execute it. And then probably have to go and watch it myself on a monitor to make sure that it was what I wanted. You know what I mean? It's in order to move fast and when we needed to move fast. It just made more sense for me to do it and I'm pleased with the results. If we had a better director of photography, I have no doubt that they would have brought another level of production quality to it. Like, it would have been another step up on that front, but we'd still be shooting.
John Gaspard 43:30
Well, then you wouldn't be able to talk to me right now.
Matt Anderson 43:31
That's true, I'd be in the middle of a shoot and dealing with mass mutiny on the part of all of my cast and crew, I have no doubt.
John Gaspard 43:38
Most likely. So, you've pretty much covered most of the pro side of when it comes to you being the writer, director, shooter, editor.
Matt Anderson 43:47
Yeah, the pro is if you're doing it all, you know that you're going to be there, and you can prioritize the work in a way that you're not going to be able to afford to have other people prioritize the work. You know, I do always bring on the most important crew position in a lot of ways is your sound recordist. I remember, did you ever see, In The Company of Men?
John Gaspard 44:12
Yeah.
Matt Anderson 44:13
Got that movie, I remember watching the DVD of it, so that was Neil LaBute’s first movie. And I will always remember this: he was talking about how his sets don't look very good, which they don't. Like if you look at a shot in that movie, it looks like what it is, it looks pretty amateur. But he said his belief--and I don't know where he picked it up or whatever it stuck with me forever--he said people will accept a movie that looks like crap, as being an aesthetic. As long as it's consistent, they will absolutely watch a movie no matter what it looks like and just assume that that's an intentional choice. No one will watch a movie with bad sound because that's never a choice, it's always a deal breaker. And so, I use the guy that I uses name is Nathaniel and Nathaniel is fantastic. Nathaniel recorded a lot of Season Three for us and that was really important to have a sound recordist and then he also mixes for us, which is great because, he can record in such a way that he knows what he needs when he gets to the mixing part of the process. But yeah, then you're in a position where you know, Nathaniel's got a job, you know, he's got other projects, other things that potentially are going to be prioritized over this. He does a really great job of prioritizing us and of hitting the deadlines that we need and I'm not really sure how he does it? But it's really difficult to ask that of people when you're not able to pay them something commensurate to what they're making on a corporate project, or on their day job doing this. So, the nice thing about doing it yourself is you're personally driven to get it done and to do it as well as it can be done, and you are able to prioritize it ahead of kind of everything else because that's just your role. You know, your job is to kind of make it the most important thing in your world while you're doing it.
John Gaspard 46:03
That's all well and good. But what's the downside of wearing all those hats?
Matt Anderson 46:08
It'll kill you. I'm not done yet, John, which is why we're able to have this conversation. It's way too much. I mean, honestly, like, I have overreached, which is good. That's how much you can reach, you overreach, and then you go, I won't do that that way again. But that is the position that I've put myself in, it was just, it was a lot, it was shooting, you know, like I say, 200-page script over the course of we started in the middle of September, I was still doing pickup shoots in February. So, again, I'm not a math guy, but that's, you know, at least two or three months.
John Gaspard 46:52
How do they tell, them how they can seek out Seeka?
Matt Anderson 46:55
Seeka is amazing. And this is what I loved about Seeka: from the first time I heard about what they were trying to do, when I started making a web series, I had never seen a web series, I might have stumbled across something. But it was probably something pretty high profile, like Funny or Die. The problem is with web series, they're just out there. But unless you know that they're out there, it's like a cool club, you know, you only know it's there, if you already know it's there. Which is neat for a cool club, but not neat for a web series that you would actually like people to find. And what Seeka's whole mission was, let's make a hub for quality, independent web content, so that people can just go to one place and find 50, 60, 70, 100 shows and find what they like, you know. There's no more searching around. And when I started, Season One of Theater People, it was hard to figure out even what to watch, to know what to emulate, you know, because unless you knew what to Google like, and you could Google like best web series out there, but you're gonna get like five or six different shows. And there's 100 shows, at the time, there was probably already hundreds of shows out there.
So, Seeka's whole model was, let's make a place where you can find a lot of great shows, of a lot of different types from all over the world in one place. Watch them easily, it's free, it's subscription free, there's the opportunity to contribute to a show, you can tip the show, after you watch an episode, there's a little button if you want to kick in a buck, or three bucks, or however much you want to kick in. And that money goes largely like generously, largely to the content creators. I forget what the actual split is. But it is a generous split in favor of content creators, because they want content creators to want to be on Seeka. The only way this works for them as if they've got people who want to have their stuff on the platform and so they have to make it attractive.
Also, they're just really great guys and I don't think they want to screw anybody over. But like, they need to have a good platform in place in order to have the kind of content that's going to make their platform successful. And I have found some fantastic stuff on there. Like I feel very privileged to be airing alongside some of the stuff that they have on there. And I know that as they move forward, you know, the goal is going to be to continue to find that really high quality stuff. And they're going out to festivals, and they're getting the stuff that's winning the awards at festivals, and they're really doing a great job of finding the kind of content that is sort of ready for primetime, in the web series landscape and it's great.
John Gaspard 49:37
So, I'm going to wrap this up with a closest thing to a Barbara Walters question that I would ever ask anybody, which is, I don't remember how many years ago, young Matt Anderson drove home from Los Angeles with his new Rebel camera with the idea of creating theater people or something like that?
Matt Anderson 49:56
Pretty close to that.
John Gaspard 49:57
What would you want to say to him? If you could just give him a call, because you've been through quite a bit here, what have you walked away with, that would be helpful for him or anybody else starting something that turns out to be quite this massive.
Matt Anderson 50:10
You know, honestly, I would say this: I've been really fortunate. A lot of it would be validation of the ideas that I had coming into it, there have absolutely been discoveries, there have been so many discoveries. I'm actually teaching a course called web series one on one right now. There is so much knowledge that I have just had to find via trial and error over the last five years that it's absolutely, I'm still learning all the time, you know. You learn how to make the show, you learn how to put the show out there, you learn how to find an audience, you learn how to promote it, you learn how Facebook works, if you want to get the word out to more people, you know, like all of that stuff. But honestly, I think the most important thing that I would say would be the general idea that I had, which was that, if you've got good material, and great actors, that is all you need, like I really and direct them, that's what you have to do, you have to direct them.
That actually is also super important, because actors are supposed to be working with the director, you know, the director is the one who knows how everything fits together. And I think part of the reason that I'm as proud of our casts and all of our casts, like, every season, including Season Four, which has a ton of young actors and a ton of actors. For the first time, I'm dealing with a cast where I haven't worked with most of the principal actors before, because I've been working with actors that I used to act with 10, 15 years ago, and a bunch of them are still around, and a bunch of them are still in the show. But for this, you know, Youth Outreach Theater, we needed people who could pass as college students. And so we had to go out and find them. And this cast is as fantastic as any we've had and that's why the show works. Like it really is, and you know, different shows are different, some shows are effects driven, some shows are, you know, location driven. So, I'm sure you know, there's lots of things that draw people into a show. But for this show, the key has always been having a really great ensemble, you know, having an ensemble that doesn't seem like they're doing an amateur project, you know, having an ensemble that is delivering work that is on par with something that you would see on broadcast television. I really believe that is why the show has traveled as well as it has. I believe that's why it's played, the festivals, that attract, that it has, I think that's why Seeka wanted to come on and produce a fourth season. And that was always the idea was the Twin Cities have this amazing pool of actors. And now you know, specifically I'm talking about, where I'm making stuff in Minneapolis, like what we have is this fantastic, deep pool of acting talent. And so I built a show around it. And the show works because that's the engine and these guys are fantastic and that's what I would say would be just continue to have faith in the idea that if you've got good writing and great actors, you don't need to be a great camera person.
You don't need to have all the technical stuff down, you don't need to have a jib arm, you don't need the equipment that you don't know how to use, you don't need a 10 person crew. Like this show is about really good actors delivering hopefully really good dialogue in a way that is compelling and that tells a story from start to finish. And I think that has borne itself out as being a really viable method. And the nice thing is you don't need to do that in a studio, you know what I mean? You don't need to do that with a million dollars behind you. You can do it effectively on the scale that we've been doing it. That's the best thing that I could say like if I was whether I was talking to myself or anybody else, especially in Minneapolis,making stuff that would be what I would say was find really great actors and then work with them and trust them because that's the goal. That's why I like watching the show.
[Film Clip 54:24 to 54:38].
John Gaspard 54:38
Thanks to Matt Anderson for chatting with me about creating the Theater People webs series, which you can find online at SeekTV.com – check the show notes for a direct link to all four seasons. If you liked this interview, you can find lots more just like it on the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. Plus, more interviews can be found in my books -- Fast, Cheap and Under Control -- Lessons Learned from the greatest low-budget movies of all time ... and its companion book of interviews with screenwriters, called Fast, Cheap and Written that Way. Both books can be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google and Apple Books. And while you're there, check out my mystery series of novels about magician Eli Marks and the scrapes he gets into. The entire series, staring with The Ambitious Card, can be found on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats. That's it for episode 105 of The Occasional Film Podcast. Produced at Grass Lake Studios. Original music by Andy Morantz. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you … occasionally!
