The Occasional Film Podcast

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with TV writer Phoef Sutton on writing for Cheers, the best way to replace characters on a show, and why it’s not a bad idea to keep your mouth shut.LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Phoef Sutton Website:  https://phoefsutton.net/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast***TRANSCRIPTI understand that you wrote and acted in plays in high school and in college. Was that always the goal to be a writer or was acting a goal? Phoef Sutton: Well, yeah, acting was a goal. When I came out here, I sort of thought I wanted to be a writer or an actor. And I decided I could only take getting rejected in one field at a time. And I thought getting rejected as a writer was more pleasant, because they don't do it to your face. I just didn't get any traction as an actor. I'm really glad that I did it when I did it, because it's very helpful for a screenwriter or television writer to have acted—to have known what it's like to be on the stage and to have to say the words. I can communicate with actors, I think, a little bit better than a lot of other showrunners who've just been writers. Because I know what it's like. I can understand that.  And also, I think I learned—maybe from being an actor or being around actors—I learned how to write for particular people. I mean, when I know a person and I know their voice and I know what they feel. I could write for Treat Williams. I could write for Bob Newhart. I could write for Brian Dennehy. They have different cadences, different ways of speaking. Ted Danson, Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson. And I was able to do that. So that stood me in good stead.  And also, being a playwright, I mean, there aren't very many writers who start as playwrights nowadays. I think, just because there isn't really much theater in this country, or at least not in this city anyway. And I was in plays I wrote, too, so, I mean, there you have nobody to blame but yourself. You can't say, “Who wrote this shit,” or, “That actor screwed it up.”  And the first thing that I did professionally—aside from some plays in regional theaters, where I got paid a stipend—was Cheers. And that was basically a play: the entrances, exits, one set, all that. And all the actors were theater actors. It was a play.  They do stage plays of various sitcoms over the years. They've done The Golden Girls and all that. And I'm surprised they haven't done one of Cheers, because it's a play. And that set, that beautiful set, which was designed by Richard Sylbert, who did Chinatown and all sorts of other movies. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was a beautiful set. It was a beautiful set. So many episodes of Cheers were just on the set. I mean, we're just on the bar, never left the bar. Never even changed days, because we found that when we filmed in front of an audience on Tuesday nights—and we filmed pretty much the whole thing in front of an audience—we found that (this was later on in the run), we found that when we would have them change their costumes to be a day later, you could never get them (the actors) back. They would go to the dressing rooms, they would start playing foosball, smoking pot, and you could never get them back.  So, there are plenty of episodes of Cheers that take place in one day that couldn't possibly have taken place in one day. But we just figured, we don't want to do the costume changes. I remember hearing an interview with (director) Jim Burrows where he talked about Norm's entrance in the pilot. And he said he felt bad for the writers, because in the blocking, he put Norm at the far end of the bar. Which meant every time Norm came in, you guys needed to write a joke to get him across the room.Phoef Sutton: Well, it was one of the trademarks of the show. And so, it was good in that sense. But yes, and everyone had to top the one before. At first, there were very simple jokes. But then they had to be, you know, very complex jokes or philosophical jokes.We would go to great lengths not to have Norm enter; we would have Norm there at the beginning of the show. We didn't want to deal with it.  I wanted to do an episode where they put in a new parking meter in front of the place. So, he had to constantly go and feed the meter. So, there would be like ten Norm entrances in it. And people wanted to kill me for doing that. Let's just back up real quick here. I want to talk about your playwriting, because I know you had sort of a learning experience, you got an understanding of how the business works with your play Burial Customs. About how things look like they're going to happen. And then they don't happen. Phoef Sutton: I was just out of graduate school at the University of Florida, and I moved to New York for a brief period of time. I couldn't really get in, couldn't get an apartment, couldn't get a job. But there was a brief period of time when Ulu Grossbard, who was a big director, wanted to direct that play. And it was very exciting. If I'd known more about the business, I would have been more excited [LAUGHS] because he just done Crimes of the Heart on Broadway. And he was really, really big and he was really into the play. I went to his office on—I don't know, on Times Square or something like that, I don't know where it was—but I felt like I was a part of the Broadway scene. And then he just sort of lost interest and it went away. And that sort of thing happens over and over and over again with people in the business. Even if you're very successful, there are millions of times when things look like they're going to be great and then they fall apart.  And my initial reaction to that was to say, “I'm not going to get excited about anything until it's real. Until it's really happening.” So that if I sold a script, a pilot script, I wouldn't get excited until they agreed to make the pilot. And then when they did the pilot, I wouldn't get excited until it was on the air. And then when it was on the air, I wouldn't get excited until it lasted. And then I realized that I was putting myself in a position where I never got excited about anything. So, then I changed my attitude to get excited about every little victory of what comes on. I was right to be excited about Ulu Grossbard doing the play. It was a wonderful opportunity. It didn't pan out. There was nothing wrong with being excited.  You know, you aren't punished for being excited about something that doesn't come to the ultimate conclusion. I mean, even when we won our Emmys for Cheers, I basically wouldn't be excited, because I would think, “Well, I’ve got to go back there tomorrow and do it again.” So now I allow myself to be excited about things.That's a very good lesson to learn. To find that balance.Phoef Sutton: It’s a hard lesson to learn. So, what happened with playwriting that got you into TV writing? What was that connection? Phoef Sutton: I wanted to write for movies. I wanted to write for movies and I wanted to write for television. I wanted to write for theater and I wanted to write books. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a writer, in one form or another.  So, as I said, I couldn't get into New York. I couldn't get a job, couldn't get an apartment. And in LA, I had a relative that I could stay with. And my brother was with the Crown Books chain. So, I knew I could get a clerk job at a Crown Bookstore. I knew I could get a job.  So, I moved to LA with my then fiancé. And I just wrote plays, wrote screenplays. I had a friend from college, Barbara Hall, who was on Newhart at the time. She's since gone on to do everything. She did Madam Secretary and I'll Fly Away and all that.  And so I wrote a spec Newhart (script), because she was on Newhart. And that was what got me the freelance Cheers job. I didn't know anything about writing for television. I didn't know anything about writing with a group, writing with a room. I was a very private writer, wrote by myself, didn't talk to anybody about what I was writing until it was done. So, I had to learn all that stuff. I had to learn how to pitch. I had to learn how to pitch in the room during the rewrites. It was really my graduate school, Cheers. And it was a good graduate school, because obviously there were the best writers in the business on that show. So, you're learning from some really, really good people.Phoef Sutton: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it was very tense. It was very stressful. It was a hard room. Why was it hard? Phoef Sutton: Well, because you had to be funny. You had to be good. You had to say the right thing. You had to do it. I mean, there were long silences in the room, where people were thinking and crafting and doing stuff, and trying to do it. I didn't speak for the first six months in the room, I think. And I think that was probably a good choice. Because the year I joined the staff, two other writers joined the staff too. And I was the only one who made it all the way through the year. They were both let go. And I think part of the reason was that I knew my place. [LAUGHS] I didn't talk first. And then I would try a few jokes and they got laughs. I would try a few more jokes and they would get laughs. And then before you know it, you're doing it and you're just in the zone. It's a difficult thing to describe. Were you breaking stories as a group? Phoef Sutton: Yeah. Oh yeah. Every story on that show was broken as a group. We never came in with a story.  At the beginning of each season, Glen and Les (Charles) would come in and we would talk about what to do. And it was very clear that they hadn't thought about it for an instant over the break. And everything was, you know, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Director/Editor Roger Nygard on his new book, “The Documentarian.”LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Buy “The Documentarian” Here: http://applausebooks.com/books/9781493086221Roger Nygard Website:  http://rogernygard.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTWhere did you first get the documentary bug?Roger Nygard: It was a big mistake. I didn't plan for it. It is sort of like, “Oh, I'll try one bump of heroin. What could hurt, right? Just once.” I made a documentary called Trekkies because an actress I met named Denise Crosby (who was in my first feature film), we had lunch a few years later and she pitched the idea to me. “Hey, someone should make a documentary about these Star Trek fans.” Because she'd been going to conventions as an actor and said these people are entertaining and we couldn't believe no one had done it yet. It seems so obvious and “Yes, of course.” So, we brainstormed a little bit. We’d never done this before. How do you, uh, we have no idea how to make a documentary. But, you know, as the naive often say, how hard can it be? And then you dive in and it's really hard, especially if you don't know what you're doing.And we just stumbled into it, watched a bunch of documentaries, absorbed what we could, made a lot of mistakes, which I learned from, and then put in a book about how to make documentaries, I made the mistakes, so you don't have to. So, I just kind of stumbled into it. What was the biggest challenge you faced on that one, looking back on it? Roger Nygard: It's always, the biggest challenge is always finding the money to pay for it. Every time. Even for Ken Burns, he said it was a challenge raising money. You’d think a guy like, in, in his career at this point, with dozens of films, they'd be writing him checks, but he says he still has to go searching for the finishing funds on every project. One of the things when I saw Trekkies for the first time I was really impressed with--well, first the humanity that you treated every subject in it with. But also, your balance of the humorous and the serious elements within it. I imagine you found that in the editing, am I right? Roger Nygard: I guess so. I mean, it's something innate. I don't really consciously set out to be, “I'm going to be balanced,” or “I'm going to be funny.” It's what I look for in my own viewing. I look for films where the filmmaker is not lying to me. I want a genuine take on something. They can take a position. In fact, it's better when you take a position with a documentary. You should have a point of view. If you are just presenting both sides equally, you're much less likely to have an audience than if you take a stand, make a position and lay out the evidence and let the audience decide.But I look for that in a film, and so my films, I guess, are an embodiment of me. I'm the filmmaker. You're getting my perspective on the world. Any piece of art is the artist's perspective on the world. They're saying, “here's how I see the world.” And my documentary is me looking at people. I'm amused and I'm obsessed and I'm interested in human behavior.I find it fascinating and really funny. And so that's what happens when I process what I'm making. And then, of course, then in the editing, that's where I'm refining that point of view. So, when you sit down with someone, what techniques do you use to make your interview subjects comfortable and willing to open up to get the sort of responses you need?Roger Nygard: First, you want to start off with some flattery. Obviously. “Thank you for being here. I loved your book. It's such a good book. I loved your movie. I loved your acting. I loved whatever. I love that broach.” You, find something to compliment.And people love it. You bond with someone who likes you. We like people who like us. And so that interview is going to be a connection between two people and it's nice when it's like a friendly connection where they're not hiding their true selves. So, you want someone to feel comfortable enough so that they'll open up and give you the real stuff and not try to present, to pre edit their image. Those interviews don't work so well when someone's trying to make sure that they're going to come off a certain way. They need to be open and you're gonna take what they give you and edit it and make them look good, ideally, or at least give them a genuine, honest portrayal. But you want them to feel comfortable.Another way to do that is to share something about yourself, before you start. Maybe a tragedy you experienced, if you're talking about their tragedy. Or a funny event that happened to you. But keep it short, because they are there to talk, you're there to listen.So, mainly, you ask a question and then just shut up and let them fill the space. How long did it take you to learn to shut up? Because I'm not sure I've learned that yet. Roger Nygard: It's so hard. Especially for men. Men are the worst. I mean, I made a documentary about relationships, and that's almost the number one thing I learned from marriage therapists is that your partner needs to be heard. And men typically try to fix things, because that's what we do, right? But your partner doesn't need you to fix them usually when they're telling you something. Let’s say you've got a wife, she's complaining about her boss, she doesn't want you to, to say, “Oh, why don't you quit? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that?” That's going to make her feel worse. She wants you to just, just show empathy. And so in an interview, you want to do the same thing—show empathy—but don't intrude, just nod, “hmm, hmm, yeah, oh that's, that must have been awful, tell me more about how that felt.”Instead of interrupting and trying to guide them, just ask the question, leave the space, provide silent empathy, because you don't want your voice all over their soundtrack. How much pre-interviewing do you do and do you like that or not? Roger Nygard: I used to do a lot of pre interviewing. On Trekkies, we did a lot because it was expensive to shoot film. We made that in 16mm film. Oftentimes, we would rehearse what they're going to say and get the soundbite we needed kind of ready. And then say “action,” have them say it, and then cut, and then move on. Or maybe say it in a couple different ways. But now, it’s much more typical to just let the camera roll, because we're shooting video, with maybe multiple cameras.And I think that's a better way generally, because you might get things you didn't expect. I'd rather have a lot of extra footage that I can't use and yet get that moment that I wouldn't have had otherwise, than if I'm trying to save video. But that said, you want to know what you're going there to get. You don't want to shoot a bunch of things that are useless, because you've got to sit in the editing room, or your poor editor has to go through all of this stuff. So, you do need to plan it out, and there's nothing wrong with preparing the person, pre interviewing them. You know, early in my career, I was a PA on a documentary that HBO was doing here in the Twin Cities. It was about hockey goalies, I think, and suicide. And I'd never been on a documentary set like that. And the director of it literally would say, “when we talked on the phone, you said the following sentence, would you say that again?” Which appalled me at the time, because I thought, “let him really talk.” But then like you say, he was shooting 16 and he had to get what he had to get. But now, a million years later, having done hundreds of corporate interviews, while I'm absolutely on your side of let the camera run, you also need to know what it is you want to get. But also, I remember, we were wrapping up an interview with a father of someone who, I think she had become ill, but she was fine now. And I said, “OK, well, that's just been great, Dave. Thank you for talking to me.” And the sound man—I was about to say cut—and the sound man said, “John, um, I just feel like Dave wants to say something else.” And I said, “well, yeah, we're still rolling. Go ahead, Dave.” And then he said the sentence that we needed for the whole video. And the sound man had seen that because he was paying attention to the person that I was interviewing. I had not seen it. And I got better later on at seeing that, but it's finding that balance between we're done and we're almost done, but you're about to do something brilliant that I guess you can only get from having done it.Roger Nygard: I agree. Yes, I've oftentimes said to someone, “That was a great story or a great thing you just said. Could you say it again? Because it's so important, I want to have you try again. And maybe we'll get it a little more concise this time?” Or if in your mind, you're thinking they didn't quite deliver it the way you wanted.I might even suggest, “Why don't you start by saying ‘That time I was riding my bike …’ and finished the sentence.” I'll guide them, because I'm editing, I'm pre editing in my head. How am I going to use this soundbite? Can I use it? Is it usable? Or should we try again? That's very common and they like that, because they want to come off well and they want a second chance to say the thing better. So, everybody wins. And by the way, did you meet Gump Worsley? I did not. This was a high school hockey thing, it wasn't a professional hockey video. But I was surprised that at the end of the day they gave me all the film to take over to the lab. I'm just a PA. You're giving me everything to take to the place? It seemed like they were giving an awful lot of trust to this kid who didn't know what he was doing. But you raise an i

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with playwright and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher on Columbo, Sherlock Holmes, favorite mysteries and more!LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Jeffrey Hatcher Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/jeffrey.hatcher.3/The Good Liar (Trailer): https://youtu.be/ljKzFGpPHhwMr. Holmes (Trailer): https://youtu.be/0G1lIBgk4PAStage Beauty (Trailer): https://youtu.be/-uc6xEBfdD0Columbo Clips from “Ashes to Ashes”Clip One:  https://youtu.be/OCKECiaFsMQClip Two:  https://youtu.be/BbO9SDz9FEcClip Three: https://youtu.be/GlNDAVAwMCIEli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTJohn: 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 kn

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. LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/The Swan Archives: https://www.swanarchives.org/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastINTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTDo you remember when you first saw it? What were the circumstances? How old are you? What was your reaction? ARI KAHAN: Sure. I first saw it when I was 12. It was double billed with Young Frankenstein. This would have been in early 1975, and my mom took me to see Young Frankenstein, which was okay. It was pretty good, but I was really enamored with the second feature on the bill, which was Phantom. And I've been in love with it ever since.Did you know anything about it before you went in? ARI KAHAN: Nothing. Nothing at all. So, what has been the attraction for you for that film, low those many, many years ago?ARI KAHAN: It may have just hit me at an impressionable time. But I think that, you know, being 12 and being kind of a nerd, I probably identified with Winslow and his fervent belief that if the world could only hear from his heart, and especially if all the girls in school could only hear from his heart, then they would love him and not the jerk that they always went out with.So, there's probably some of that. There was certainly, I do remember very, very clearly that the direction in some respect stood out to me. I had seen a lot of movies when I was 12, and I remember even today, thinking when I was 12, that there was a moment where the Phantom is rising up into the rafters in the foreground as Beef is descending in the background. And I looked at that and I thought, boy, that's complex. Anybody else would have done a shot of the Phantom starting to climb a rope, and then cut away, and then come back to him up in the rafters. This guy is trying to do things that are more interesting than he needs to and I thought that was really fun.After seeing Phantom I went back and saw Sisters.Which was no mean feat back then. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I know and in fact, I had to see Sisters by buying a 16-millimeter print of it. That was the only way I could. I had fixed up a couple of—this is probably a year or two later—I had fixed up a couple of 16-millimeter projectors that my school was discarding, so I could even do changeovers in my bedroom. And I got a copy of Sisters just so I could see it because it was unseeable otherwise. Well, kudos to you for finding Sisters, because it took me a long time. I imagine it showed up at the Film society at the university or something finally. So getting to see William Findlay in a markedly different role and also seeing, oh, okay, this is a director who likes split screen. Although I probably would have gotten that from Carrie, because I'm sure I saw Carrie first. He's accused of doing stuff like that just for showing off. In fact, I think it's always for a cinematic or emotional reason. And Sisters is the best example of that. The suspense of getting rid of that dead body before they get to the door is enhanced by the fact that you're watching two things happen at the same time. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I think in Sisters and Phantom both, it works really well. And I think, and I think even DePalma would agree that it didn't work as well in Carrie. Because the split screen calls for intellectualizing on the part of the audience. And it takes you out emotionally and wasn't really working that well. I understand why he did it, because it'd be boring to like, cut to Carrie's face, cut the things happening, cut back to Carrie's face, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think both he and Paul Hirsch, the editor, feel it would have been better off to do something else.But anyway, after Phantom, you know, every new De Palma film to come out—all the way through Domino—has been a much anticipated event for me, you know, and I'm in the theater on the first day. And there have been a couple of disappointments along the way, but by and large, it's been awesome. Since you've seen Phantom so many times, were there any surprises that popped up over the years as you've watched again and again and things that you hadn't seen or hadn't realized?ARI KAHAN: It took me a really long time to notice that there was a frame or two of Jessica Harper being one of the backup singers on stage when Beef’s performing life at last and only because I think it was unavoidable to use those frames. I think somebody figured out in editing that it didn't make any sense for her to be one of those backup singers and then in a white dress. So that took a while. It also was only within the past couple of years that I realized that a lot of the sort of classical, but silent movie sounding music that I had always thought was composed by the guy who did the incidental music was actually Beethoven. Oh, really?ARI KAHAN: Because Beethoven's not credited. So that little like a little violin thing that happens …ARI KAHAN: Or when Swan is going into phoenix's dressing room. When Winslow is escaping from prison. Well, it's Beethoven piano trios for the most part. So, you don't need to get permission from the Beethoven estate on that…ARI KAHAN: Well, I think that they would have had to pay the orchestra involved and I can easily imagine them omitting credit to avoid doing that. Hoping nobody would notice. And nobody did, obviously.Until you've just brought it up. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, sorry. That's okay. It's not, it's not our problem. One of the things that, that I found the Swan Archives to be so helpful on—well, lots of things, uh, when I discovered it years ago and I've returned to it as new things have popped up or I've dug a little deeper—was your explanation of the Swan Song debacle. As a frequent viewer of the movie. I wasn't noticing truncated shots. That I didn't notice until you showed us those shots. But obviously the mattes, particularly at the press conference, are really, really terrible. If I'm noticing them, they're bad. Can you just give us a brief history of why they had to do that? ARI KAHAN: Sure. So, it goes to Beef electrocution. In the early seventies, there was a band called Stone the Crows, whose guitarist was a guy named Les Harvey and Peter Grant, who would later manage Led Zeppelin, managed Stone The Crows. And Les Harvey was—in a freak accident—electrocuted on stage. I think his guitar was badly grounded or something along those lines, in 1971 or 72.And when Peter Grant learned that there was a film coming out in which a rock guitarist is electrocuted on stage, he assumed, that it was making fun of what had happened to his friend, Les Harvey. And by that time he was managing Led Zeppelin. I should say in De Palma's defense that Beef’s electrocution shows up in early drafts of the script that were written before Les Harvey suffered his accident. So, this was life imitating art, imitating life, you know, rather than the other way around. De Palma clearly did not take that plot and probably didn't even know about what had happened to Les Harvey. But anyway, by the time Peter Grant got wind of this, Phantom had already been shot, but not yet released. This was in the summer of 1974. And by sheer absolute sheer coincidence, Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin had just gotten a trademark on Swan Song for their record label. And the first record to come out on the Swan Song label was Bad Company's first record, and that was in somewhere around June of 1974. So that's when their trademark was perfected, and Phantom was scheduled to be released a few months later at the end of October.And Peter Grant went to 20th Century Fox, which had just purchased Phantom from Ed Pressman and DePalma. You know, it's important for the story to know that Phantom was independently produced. It wasn't financed by Fox. Pressman and DePalma raised money to make this movie in the hopes that they would then sell it to some distributor for more than they had paid to make it.And it turned out that there was a, quite a bidding war among several studios, which Fox won. And Fox paid more for Phantom than anyone had ever paid for an independent film to that point in history. They had very high expectations for it. So that sale had just closed, but Pressman and De Palma and everyone else hadn't been paid yet by Fox.And of course, they had run out of money and owed everybody money, everyone who had worked on the film. So, they were in kind of a desperate situation. And Peter Grant went to Fox and said, “I'll sue you and prevent release of this film.” And the only thing that Fox could do was to tell Pressman and De Palma, you need to fix this.And the only way they could fix it was by removing all of the references to Swan Song, so that Peter Grant wouldn't have grounds for his claim, because he obviously can't claim you can't have a film with an electrocution of a rock star. Really, all he had was the Swan Song thing. And so that was done very, very hastily. They were still working on it in early October, even though the film was scheduled for release at the end of October. And so, basically, Fox signed a deal with Led Zeppelin saying we won't release the film with any of this Swan Song prominently shown. Which is a very stupid resolution really because Peter Grant in the end did not prevent distribution of a film with an electrocution of a rock star, which was his original concern.All he really managed to do was mangle somebody else's. And so the end result is that the film that we've all been watching for the last 50 years, there's a little bit cut out of it. There's some lovely crane shots that you missed b

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with the writer of a great new book, “London After Midnight: The Lost Film,” a book about the classic lost Lon Chaney film.LINKS A Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Daniel’s Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/p/London-After-Midnight-The-Lost-Film-100075993768254/Buy the Book “London After Midnight: The Lost Film”: https://www.amazon.com/London-After-Midnight-Lost-Film/dp/1399939890Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTJohn: So, Daniel, when did you first become aware of London After Midnight? Daniel: I was about seven years old when I first stumbled into Lon Chaney through my love of all things Universal horror, and just that whole plethora of characters and actors that you just knew by name, but hadn't necessarily seen away from the many still photographs of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And the Phantom was the one to really spark my interest. But this was prior to eBay. I couldn't see the film of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera for a year. So, I kind of had the ultimate build to books and documentaries, just teasing me, teasing me all the time. And when I eventually did watch a few documentaries, the one thing that they all had in common was the name Lon Chaney. I just thought I need to learn more about this character Lon Chaney, because he just found someone of superhuman proportions just who have done all of these crazy diverse characters. And, that's where London After Midnight eventually peeked out at me and, occupied a separate interest as all the Chaney characterizations do.John: So how did you get into the Universal films? Were you watching them on VHS? Were they on tv? Did the DVDs happen by then?Daniel: I was still in the VHS days. My dad is a real big fan of all this as well. So he first saw Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on TV when he was a kid. And prior to me being born he had amassed a huge VHS collection and a lot of those had Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Hull, Claude Rains, Vincent Price, what have you.And a lot of them were dedicated to Universal horrors. And as a young curious kid, my eyes eventually crossed these beautiful cases and I really wanted to watch them. I think my first one I ever watched was The Mummy's Tomb or Curse of the Mummy. And it's just grown ever since, really.John: You're starting at the lesser end of the Universal monsters. It's like someone's starting the Marx Brothers at The Big Store and going, "oh, these are great. I wonder if there's anything better?" Jim: Well, I kinda like the fact that you have come by this fascination, honestly, as my father would say. You sort of inherited the family business, if you will. The book is great. The book is just great. And I'll be honest, I had no, except for recording the novel that John wrote, I really had no frame of reference for London after Midnight.John: Well, Jim, were you a monster guy? Were you a Universal Monster kid?Jim: Oh yeah. I mean, I had all the models. I love all of that, and certainly knew about Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I knew he was the man with a thousand faces. I knew he, when he died, he wrote JR. on his makeup kit and gave it to his kid. So, I knew stuff. But London after Midnight I didn't know at all, except for the sort of iconic makeup and that image, which I was familiar with. What was the inspiration for you in terms of writing this book?Daniel: Like you say, I really had no immediate go-to reference for London after Midnight, away from one or two images in a book. Really clearly they were very impactful images of Chaney, skulking around the old haunted mansion with Edna Tichenor by his side with the lantern, the eyes, the teeth, the cloak, the top hat, the webs, everything. Pretty much everything that embodies a good atmospheric horror movie, but obviously we couldn't see it.So that is all its fangs had deepened itself into my bloodstream at that point, just like, why is it lost? Why can't I see it? And again, the term lost film was an alien concept to me at a young age. I've always been a very curious child. Anything that I don't know or understand that much, even things I do understand that well, I always have to try to find out more, 'cause I just can't accept that it's like a bookend process. It begins and then it ends. And that was the thing with London after Midnight. Everything I found in books or in little interviews, they were just all a bit too brief. And I just thought there has to be a deeper history here, as there are with many of the greatest movies of all time. But same with the movies that are more obscure. There is a full history there somewhere because, 'cause a film takes months to a year to complete.It was definitely a good challenge for me. When we first had our first home computer, it was one of those very few early subjects I was typing in like crazy to try to find out everything that I could. And, that all incubated in my little filing cabinet, which I was able to call upon years later.Some things which were redundant, some things which I had the only links to that I had printed off in advance quite, sensibly so, but then there were certain things that just had lots of question marks to me. Like, what year did the film perish? How did it perish? The people who saw the film originally?And unlike a lot of Chaney films, which have been covered in immense detail, London after Midnight, considering it's the most famous of all lost films, still for me, had major holes in it that I just, really wanted to know the answers to. A lot of those answers, eventually, I found, even people who knew and institutions that knew information to key events like famous MGM Fire, they were hard pressed to connect anything up, in regards to the film. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. I had all these amazing facts. However, none of them kind of made sense with each other.My favorite thing is researching and finding the outcomes to these things. So that's originally what spiraled me into the storm of crafting this, initial dissertation that I set myself, which eventually became so large. I had to do it as a book despite, I'd always wanted to do a book as a kid.When you see people that you idolize for some reason, you just want to write a book on them. Despite, there had been several books on Lon Chaney. But I just always knew from my childhood that I always wanted to contribute a printed volume either on Chaney or a particular film, and London after Midnight seemed to present the opportunity to me.I really just didn't want it to be a rehash of everything that we had seen before or read before in other accounts or in the Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, but just with a new cover. So, I thought I would only do a book if I could really contribute a fresh new perspective on the subject, which I hope hopefully did.John: Oh, you absolutely did. And this is an exhaustive book and a little exhausting. There's a ton of stuff in here. You mentioned Famous Monster of the Filmland, which is where I first saw that image. There's at least one cover of the magazine that used that image. And Forrest Ackerman had some good photos and would use them whenever he could and also would compare them to Mark the Vampire, the remake, partially because I think Carol Borland was still alive and he could interview her. And he talked about that remake quite a bit. But that iconic image that he put on the cover and whenever he could in the magazine-- Jim and I were talking before you came on, Daniel, about in my mind when you think of Lon Chaney, there's three images that come to mind: Phantom of the Opera, Quasimoto, and this one. And I think this one, the Man in the Beaver hat probably is the most iconic of his makeups, because, 'cause it is, it's somehow it got adopted into the culture as this is what you go to when it's a creepy guy walking around. And that's the one that everyone remembers. Do you have any idea, specifically what his process was for making that look, because it, it is I think ultimately a fairly simple design. It's just really clever.Daniel: Yes, it probably does fall into the category of his more simplistic makeups. But, again, Chaney did a lot of things simplistic-- today --were never seen back then in say, 1927. Particularly in the Phantom of the Opera's case in 1925, in which a lot of that makeup today would be done through CG, in terms of trying to eliminate the nose or to make your lips move to express dialogue. Chaney was very fortunate to have lived in the pantomime era, where he didn't have to rely on how his voice would sound, trying to talk through those dentures, in which case the makeup would probably have to have been more tamed to allow audio recorded dialogue to properly come through.But with regards to the beaver hat makeup, he had thin wires that fitted around his eyes to give it a more hypnotic stare. The teeth, which he had constructed by a personal dentist, eventually had a wire attached to the very top that held the corners of his mouth, opening to a nice curved, fixated, almost joker like grin.You can imagine with the monocles around his eyes, he was thankful there probably wasn't that much wind on a closed set, because he probably couldn't have closed his eyes that many times. But a lot of these things become spoken about and detailed over time with mythic status. That he had to have his eyes operated on to achieve the constant widening of his eyelids. Or the teeth -- he could only wear the teeth for certain periods of time before accidentally biting his tongue or his lips, et cetera. But Chaney certainly wasn't a sadist, with himself, with his makeups. He was very pr

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with writer (and director and playwright and author and podcaster) Ken Levine about the business of writing and directing situation comedies.LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Ken Levine’s Website: http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTWas being a writer always a goal?Ken Levine: I don't know if it was always a goal. It was something that I always did. Honestly, I did not get a lot of encouragement in high school. I was a cartoonist. I still am. And I was a cartoonist on the school newspaper. And I said, “Well, I also want to write. You know, can I cover sports or do a humor column or something?”And they said, “You're the cartoonist, just stick to cartoons.” And I said, “Well, I really want to write. And if you won't let me write, then I'm going to quit the paper.” And they said, “Then fine, quit the paper.” So, that's how much my cartoons were even valued. They called your bluff on that one, I guess. Ken Levine: They called my bluff, yeah.Just as a little tangent—just because I'm a big fan of your cartoons—did you have a couple of cartoonist heroes when you were growing up? Guys that you looked at and went, that's the kind of writing I want to do?Ken Levine: Well, my cartoonist heroes were more due to their cartooning than anything. Al Hirschfeld, who did the caricatures of the New York Times, was my god. And Mort Drucker would be another. Jack Davis. A lot of those Mad magazine guys. Originally, I wanted to be in radio. I mean, I really loved radio. And a lot of my comic influences early on were disc jockeys, you know. Bob and Ray and Dan Ingram and Dick Whittington. So, radio was a goal. I got out of college and became a Top 40-disc jockey.Let me back up. When I was in college, I got a job as an intern at KMPC in L.A. We're the big, full-service radio station. They had the Angels and the Rams and the Bruins and, you know, they were big music personalities. And their afternoon drive time jock was Gary Owens, who was on Laugh In at the time. You know, “From beautiful downtown Burbank.”And I would write comedy material for Gary, for him to use on the air. I never charged him for it. I mean, I was just so thrilled that someone of the caliber of Gary Owens would use my material on the radio. And one day I get a call to appear in George Schlatter’s office. George Schlatter was the producer of Laugh In. And this is when Laugh In was getting 50 shares. And I'm like, what does George Schlatter want with me? So, I go to the meeting obviously. And apparently, unbeknownst to me, Gary submitted my comedy material to him. And George Schlatter offered me a job as a writer on Laugh In. And it's funny, we laughed about it because George is still around and he was a guest on my podcast, and I talked about this.And I said, “Can I do this part time or from home?” And he goes, “What? No, this is a job. You come to the office every day. We're paying you a lot of money to write the number one show in America.” And I said, “I would lose my 2S deferment and I would wind up drafted in Vietnam.” So I couldn't take it. I had to turn down Laugh In. So, I was almost a writer six years before I actually broke in.Okay. So how did you end up then meeting up with David Isaacs?Ken Levine: Like I said, I became a disc jockey out of college. My draft number was four. And like I said, I was at KMPC and one of our disc jockeys, Roger Carroll, was one of the main AFRTS disc jockeys. I shopped around looking, is there a decent reserve unit I could join that would keep me out of the army? And I saw that there was an armed forces radio reserve unit in LA. And through Roger, he helped pull some strings and got me in the unit. You know, it's like one of those things where you get a call saying, “Okay, there's an opening in the unit, but you got to go down to Torrance and sign up for it tomorrow.” And so, you don't have time to think, “Boy, do I want to risk this? Is there a way I can get a medical thing?” And it's six years. It's a six-year commitment. Go.So that's what I did. I got into that unit. And we were at summer camp three years later and somebody new to the unit was David Isaacs. And we met and started talking and we both kind of had desires to be writers. And when summer camp ended, I was at the time working as a disc jockey in San Bernardino. I got fired, which was a frequent occurrence. And I came back home to live with my parents in LA. I called David and I said, “Hey, remember me from the army? I want to try writing a script. You want to try writing it with me?” And he said, “Okay.” And so, we got together and decided to partner up and we wrote a pilot. But we didn't know anything. We had no clue what we were doing. And I had to literally go to a bookstore in Hollywood and on a remainder table were TV scripts. And so, for two dollars I bought a copy of an episode of The Odd Couple and looked at that.Oh, Interior Madison Apartment Day. That’s what that is. This is the format, and this is how long they are. So, David and I wrote a pilot about two kids in college, which was the sum total of our life experience back then. We were both 23. And it didn't go anywhere, obviously, but we had a good time doing it. And we then learned the way to break in is to write spec scripts from existing shows.So that's what we did. And eventually we broke in. So, had you written anything with him before that or seen any of his writing? What was it that made you think this is the guy?Ken Levine: No, no. He just seemed like a funny guy. Neither of us had written anything. Neither of us had any writing samples for the other. No, we just sat down together and just tried doing it. It probably was a help that we were both starting from the same place, which was nowhere. You know, it's just kind of one of those happy accidents where you go on a blind date, and it turns out to be your wife.How many years did you guys write together?Ken Levine: Well, we're still writing together, if somebody would hire us. Fifty years.Congratulations. Ken Levine: October of 73 is when we started. And I'm trying to remember, was it The Tony Randall Show or The Jeffersons where you sold your first script? Ken Levine: The Jeffersons. And how did that happen? Ken Levine: Well, we had written a spec Mary Tyler Moore and a spec Rhoda, and another spec pilot. Which was better but didn't go anywhere.And one day my mom is playing golf with a guy who says he's the story editor of The Jeffersons, a new show that just came on. My mom says, “Oh, well, my son is a great young writer.” And he's like, “Oh Christ.” And he says, “All right, well just have him call me.” So, I called him, and the guy says, “You have a script?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he goes, “All right, send the script. If I like the script, we'll talk.” And I sent off our Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I got a letter back saying, “Oh, this is a really good script. Make an appointment, come on in and pitch stories.” And we pitched stories, and they bought one. And so that's how we got our assignment. Thinking back, is there one moment that you felt like was really pivotal that officially launched you guys? Ken Levine: Yeah, doing that first MASH episode. We had done The Jeffersons, we had done episodes of Joe and Sons, which was a terrible show on CBS. We had done some stories for Barney Miller, but Danny Arnold always cut us off before we got to script. We did a backup script for a pilot that didn't go. And then we got MASH And our first episode of MASH, which is the one where the gas heater blows up and Hawkeye is temporarily blind. And that script was like our golden ticket. It's a very memorable episode. Ken Levine: Oh, thank you. I remember it.I spoke with—I don't know if you know her—April Smith, and she said she learned everything she learned about writing in a room from Gene Reynolds. Where did you learn about writing in a room? Ken Levine: Well, I don't know about writing in a room from Gene, because we never worked in a room, really, with Gene. But, I learned more about storytelling, and more about story construction, from Gene Reynolds, than everybody else combined. I've been very lucky to have a lot of great mentors along the way, or to work with, you know, really talented writers and smart enough to just shut up and listen and learn from them. But if I had to pick one true mentor, it would be Gene Reynolds. I cannot say enough about Gene Reynolds. I owe my career to Gene Reynolds. What was his special gift? Ken Levine: First of all, he was very much a gentleman. So, when he would give you notes, if he didn't like a joke, he wouldn't go, “Jesus, guys, what the fuck?” He would go, “And, um, you might take another look at this. You might take another look at that joke.” Okay. Gene had a great story sense that was combined with a real humanity. It had to be more than just funny. It had to be grounded. There had to be, like I said, some humanity to it and the humanity and nice moments and things had to be earned. And he was very clever in constructing stories where things were set up and then got paid off in a somewhat surprising way. You know, look for inventive, different ways of finding a solution. It's why to me, storytelling is always so hard, because each time you tell a story, you want it to be different. You don't want to just keep retelling the same story over and over again. And Gene would look at a thing and go, “Is there a better way of conveying this? Is there something more interesting that Hawkeye could do once he learns this information?” You could give Gene an outline, and everyone can go, “Okay, well, this doesn't work.” Gene coul

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with magician Lance Burton about how he wrote (and directed and starred in) the delightfully comic “Billy Topit: Master Magician.”LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Lance Burton Website:  https://www.lanceburton.com/Billy Topit Website:  http://www.billytopit.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastLance Burton TranscriptJohn: I loved Billy Topit, both Jim and I did. I've made a number of low budget movies in my life, about a half dozen of them and the driving force behind them has almost always been, let's get together with some friends and make a movie. I got the sense that that was kind of part of the DNA of Billy Topit. Is that right?Lance: Well, yes, I just have to correct you on one thing: Billy Topit was not a low budget movie. It was a nobudget movie. We literally just decided, you know what, I'm not going to spend any money. Everyone volunteered. So, if it ever makes any money, I'll go back and pay the actors.John: Well, okay. But as someone who has done the same thing, I’ve done that a half dozen times with the no money. The results you got, given the no money status, were great. Your sound is exceptional. One of the things that's normally a big sign that it's a low budget movie is the sound is not good. It's a hard thing to get right and when you do get it right, it makes it sound like a big budget movie. The cinematography is terrific, the editing is fantastic. I don't know if you bought the music, or if someone did the music, but whatever it was it fit perfectly, and it just sailed along. So, for a movie that had no budget, you did an exceptional job of making a real movie.Lance: Oh, thank you. You’re right, the sound is the one thing you really don't want to skimp on, because that's something you really can't fix in post a lot of the times. So, we did try to pay attention to the sound recording. As far as the music goes, some of the music was from my show that I already own. Some of the performance pieces, some of the music we use just for the movie, was rights free music that that I got from a company called Digital juice. They have all different sorts of music and it's searchable. So, you can find you know, rock and roll hard driving music, you can find, you know, instrumentals, you really have everything.Then there was a couple of pieces that a friend of mine, who's a musician wrote and recorded for me. And one of the pieces in the film, my lead actress, Joelle Rigetti, she had actually recorded an album a couple of years ago and she gave me the album during the production. She said, “Hey, anything on here you want you're welcome to use.” And I listened to it and there was one track, I went, this is perfect for this one scene I have. It's that it's the scene where the whole cast is waking up on the second day, brushing their teeth and getting ready to go out. That's actually the lead actress singing.John: The stuff you picked all really meshed well together.Lance: Oh, thank you. It was during the post-production process when it really struck me—as we were editing and doing that—how much the music adds to a production, not just a live show. I already knew that for a live show. But as I was making the film, it really just struck me again, you know, wow, music really does add a whole new dimension to the movie or live show.John: Yeah. So, where did the idea for the movie come from?Lance: Well, I'll tell you exactly where it came from. When I was a kid, there was a television series on TV called The Magician starring Bill Bixby. It only lasted one season, because the network got a new president that came in and he just, you know, cancelled all his predecessors’ shows. But it actually did good in the ratings. But it only lasted 22 episodes.The magic consultant on The Magician was Mark Wilson and so when I moved out west, I met Mark Wilson, and became friends with him. Then when I was shooting Knightrider, guess who they hired to provide all of the large illusions and props for the episode? Mark Wilson. He was sort of the magic advisor on that television show. So, Mark, and I got to hang out for seven days on the set as we were shooting. He's actually in the episode. You can see shots of him. He's sitting in the audience during one of the opening performances. In fact, I get him up on stage at one point as a volunteer. So, anyway, one day after filming, Mark and I are going out to dinner and we're in his car and we're driving along. And he says to me, “Lance, how do you like doing this work?” And I said, “What do you mean, Mark? You mean like this episode?” He says, “Yeah, how do you like, you know, acting on this, this TV show?” And I said, “I'm having the time of my life. I get to do magic. I get to act. I get to work with a stuntman, and this is great.” And he says, “Well, you're doing a good job and you ought to think about doing more of this.” And I said, “More of this, so what do you mean?” He says, “You ought to start a notebook, start keeping some ideas of how you could incorporate your magic into a TV series or movie, you know, like with the Bill Bixby series.” And I thought, Oh, that's a good idea. So, I did, I started writing, every time I had an idea about how to use magic within the context of the drama series, or, you know, a story, I would write it down. So, after a few years, I had all these sort of clever things that I came up with, to use magic and propelling the story forward, or to get out of this sticky situation or whatever. And every few years, I've pulled that out, and I'd go, “You know, I'm going to try and go pitch this,” and I would go to Los Angeles and set up some meetings. And I was trying to pitch to do a series every few years and we got close a couple of times, but we never were able to sell it. But the area I was working in was so similar to things that would pop up on my TV screen later. I kept thinking, “Man, I've got something here, I just need to, like any kind of magic trick, you know, I get it in my head and it's frustrating, I just I gotta get it out, I got to put it on the stage because it's like in my brain is like scratching the inside of my skull and it's really annoying.” By that time, the technology had progressed to the point where we had these high-definition cameras that weren't, you know, astronomically expensive. And we had editing software so that somebody on their laptop could put out a professional looking product. So, I finally just said, hey, you know what, I'm gonna do this. And I called my buddy, Michael Goudeau and he came over and we fleshed out the story. And then we wrote the screenplay within, like two or three months. And then we eventually just started casting it and shot it. So, it all goes back to Bill Bixby and The Magician from 1973. John: Well, most things do. Most things do go back that. Were you always planning on directing?Lance: You know, directing and acting at the same time is really difficult. But I had been doing it all my life, you know, with my live show. And we started in on this thing and then at some point, I heard an interview with Barbra Streisand, and someone asked her that question, and they said, “Is it difficult to act and direct in the same production?” And she had a great response. She said, “No, it's easier that way. That's one less person I have to argue with.”Jim: She's right. Absolutely right. So, talk a little bit about how the movie changed, you know, from your initial script and then through shooting and editing. Were there a lot of kind of, oh, let's do this. Oh, that didn't work. Lance: I'll tell you what: when I first had the idea, I didn't have a real clear idea of the tone I wanted to take, you know? As far as it could have been a drama, it could have been a comedy or whatever. But I started chatting with my buddy, Michael Goudeau. Now, Michael worked in my show, as my special guest star. We've been friends for, you know, since the mid-80s and Michael said, this was his idea. So, I gave him credit. He said, we should write this is a family film and I said, why is that? He says, because I have two small children and about two or three times a year, I have to take them to the movies and we have to pick a family film, and they're always horrible. That's why I'd like to see a good family film. Something good, we can take the kids to see. And I said okay, that's fine. You know, that fits. Magic's always been considered a good family entertainment. So, we chose to write it as a family friendly movie, and as a comedy, but I give credit to Michael for that, and it didn't alter that much. Once we had the script completed, the idea was, you know, to keep to the script as close as we can within reason. Now, there were some scenes that were improvised and there were some things that I added during the course of the movie. I'll tell you one thing that we added: the film starts with a dream sequence, with Billy floating a lady in the air. And then he wakes up in bed and you realize, oh, that was just a dream. He doesn't really have a big Las Vegas show. He's a birthday party magician and that was the first thing we shot. So, as we were shooting, I read a book by Robert Rodriguez about his experience shooting El Mariachi. That was recommended to me by Rory Johnston, who played the bad guy in my movie. When I explained to Rory what we were going to do, he said, oh, you're doing like a no budget movie, like Robert Rodriguez. And I said, Who's Robert Rodriguez? He said, he is just a director, he started out by making this movie called El Mariachi. He had $7,000. That was it and he made a whole film. And so, I bought the DVD to watch. I wanted to see what a $7,000 movi

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with screenwriter and author Neal Marshall Stevens about his new book on horror, “A Sense of Dread (Getting Under The Skin of Horror Screenwriting).”LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Neal’s book at Michael Wiese Productions: https://mwp.com/product-author/neal-marshall-stevens/Neal on IMDB:  https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139605/Brian Forrest’s Blog:  https://toothpickings.medium.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastNeal Stevens Transcript JOHN:  Neal, you have a really long and storied history in the horror cinema. Can you remember the very first horror movie that had an impact on you?  NEAL: Well, actually, looking back, the first movie that scared the hell out of me wasn't a horror movie. It was actually a Disney movie called Johnny Tremaine. It was a kid's movie. And there was a scene in that movie, Johnny Tremaine was a kid during the Revolutionary War who knew Paul Revere, who, as you may remember, was a silversmith. And there's a scene in that movie, the British are coming and Paul Revere has got this urn of molten silver.It gets knocked onto a table. Johnny Tremaine trips and puts his hand face up into the molten silver and fries his hand. And I'm sure I know I, every kid in the audience goes like (sound effect.)  But that's actually not the scariest part of the movie. Later on, surgeons are unwrapping his burnt hand, and they look down and they react in horror.His fingers have healed together, stuck together. We don't see it and they say, “Oh, we're going to have to cut his fingers apart,” which also happens off screen. And again, in our imagination, imagining no anesthesia back then, it's a revolutionary war. So, poor Johnny Tremaine has to have his healed together fingers cut apart. The memory of what that must be like has lasted. I must have been like five or six when I saw it. My parents dragged me to see Johnny Tremaine, it's a happy Disney movie. I'm 67 years old, so it's been over a half a century since I saw this movie and was appropriately traumatized by those images. So, Disney knew how to scare little kids. That's for sure.  JOHN: He sure did. Wow. That's a horrible story.  NEAL: Yeah. As for official horror movies that scared the hell out of me, again, we used to watch Phantasmic Features on the TV in Boston. I remember a movie called Teenagers from Outer Space. They weren't actually teenagers. They were all in their thirties. But anyway, these invaders had a skeleton ray that as they would aim it at someone, it would flash and you're instantly reduced literally to a skeleton. And they were, they didn't care who, so as soon as they come out of their spaceship, there's a barking dog—bzzzt!—and the dog falls down, reduced to bones. They didn't care. They would use it as a woman's climbing out of a swimming pool—bzzzt!—skeleton floating in the pool. The casualness with which completely innocent people are reduced to skeletons. Again, absolutely horrifying. Couldn’t have been much older than nine or ten when I watched this movie. But the fact that human flesh has reduced the skeletons, but also the casual innocence of which people are reduced to flesh is stripped off their bones. It's terrifying to me.  BRIAN: I wonder how you parlayed that early sense of, “Oh, I like horror movies” into, “I want to create horror as a genre. “ NEAL: Well, I was one of a whole generation of kids who got super eight cameras and made, you know, we made stop motion movies and made monster movies in their basements. Pursuant to that, I was writing scripts when I was 13 years old. I guess people now do it with phones. We didn't have cell phones back when I was a kid, but we had super eight cameras and then, you know, a little cartridge things that we'd slug in. And so, I made tons of those little stop motion movies down in my basement.  BRIAN: Do you still have some of them? NEAL: I guess I may have them somewhere. I think I have an old creaky super eight projector somewhere. I don't think you can get a bulb for it anymore.  BRIAN:  I've got one up there. I wonder if it would work? NEAL: Yeah. That's the big question. I wonder if it would work? Heaven only knows.  JOHN: But that's a great way to learn visual storytelling.  NEAL: Yeah. When I ultimately went to NYU grad film and, and all the films that we shot the first year were all silent. First silent film then silent with sound effects, but you weren't allowed to use sync sound until you got to second year, if you made it that far. JOHN: Did you make it that far? NEAL: Yes, I did. I actually graduated. Back at NYU, it was a very rough program at the time. They cut the student enrollment in half going from first to second year. So it was, it was a rough program back then.  JOHN:  That's brutal.  NEAL: Yeah.  JOHN: So, you leave film school with something under your arm that you've shot. Where does that lead you?  NEAL: It certainly didn't get me much in the way of employment at the time. I ended up going right back to NYU. I ran their equipment room of all things for something like six years. But during all those six years I was writing. They had like a computer that they used to turn out the schedules. And then when I weren't writing schedules, I was using that computer to write my screenplays using WordStar. If anyone remembers that old program. God, it was horrible, but it was free, because they had the equipment room.  And eventually I sent some stuff to Laurel Entertainment, which is the company that did Tales From the Dark Side. And they had an open submission program. If you signed a release form, you could send them stuff. And I'd gone in and I'd met Tom Allen, who was their senior story editor. I had a screenplay and I went in and talked about it. He liked it. It wasn't for them, but then he invited me to submit ideas for their new series, their follow-up series to Tales from the Dark Side, which is a thing called Monsters. And I went in, and I pitched some ideas, and they bought one. And it turned out to be their premier episode of Monsters. And shortly after that, tragically, Tom Allen passed away. And the VP, Mitch Galen, invited me in and said, “Would you like to take over and be our senior story editor on Monstersand our other projects?” And meanwhile, you know, for the second part of that whole series, I was still working in the equipment room at NYU and also working as a senior story editor on Monsters and being their creative consultant and reading hundreds of scripts for Laurel Entertainment. And then eventually I quit the equipment room, and I went and I worked for them full time and wrote a bunch of episodes for Monsters.  And I was a story editor on The Stand and The Langoliers— which wasn't so good—but on a bunch of other projects, it was just an enormous learning experience. And The Stand I think turned out really well. Other stuff, The Langoliers, did not work out really well. And a bunch of other projects that were not horror.  BRIAN: Why do you think some things, especially, let's talk about Stephen King, why do you think some of those things adapted well and some didn't? NEAL: Well, The Langoliers was not, it wasn't that great. Wasn't that strong a project. And I think the idea, trying to make that and stretch that out into a mini-series. wasn't that strong. It wasn't that strong, the material wasn't really there. I think there are times when staying faithful to the material is the right approach. It certainly was the right approach with The Stand. Working with The Langoliers, you know, there were certainly elements of The Langoliers that were strong. And other stuff that was really just so-so. And I think if you'd had the willingness to step aside and do something different with it, it would probably have ended up—especially because they were expanding it into a mini-series—being just devoted to the original material, I think, ended up with a product that was really thin. Plus, we had hired a special effects company that the Langoliers themselves were just horrible. It was really substandard, honestly. So, it did not work out very well.  BRIAN: I'm guessing with all these different projects you had to work on, you probably had to start dealing with types of horror and genres of horror that weren't in your comfort zone. Maybe not even what you wanted to do. What kind of learning curve was that for you?  NEAL: You end up having to deal with a lot of different kinds of horror, especially with, you know, working in Monsters, where you just were turning stuff out tremendously fast. But also, I grew up with a certain kind of horror.I was never a huge fan of slasher stuff. I missed that whole era of horror.  Certain kinds of movies appealed to me. That particular kind of transgressive material never really clicked.  JOHN: Why do you think that is with you?  NEAL: Because this simple act of repetitive bloodletting, for me, it always felt thin. I mean, it's not that I objected to explicit violence or explicit gore. I mean, I think that Dawn of the Deadunquestionably is one of the most brilliant horror movies ever made. And there certainly, George Romero didn't pull back from explicit violence. Or a movie like Hellraiser, the same deal. It's a question of how the filmmaker employs the use of graphic violence to elevate the material. What I've told people when you watch a movie like Dawn of the Dead, the first 10 or 15 minutes of that movie—which by the way, I saw when it virtually when it first came out and saw it in the theater—you had never seen anything like that opening scene in terms of graphic violence from being bitten and heads being blown off and all the rest. You were just put through th

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with director John Badham, discussing an early made-for-TV movie, “Isn’t It Shocking,” along with “Wargames” and “Dracula.”LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/John Badham Website:  https://www.johnbadham.com/John Badham Books:  https://www.johnbadham.com/books“Isn’t It Shocking” (Made-for-TV movie): https://youtu.be/2fDLHx3feRMEli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Amy Scott, discussing her terrific documentary, “Hal,” which takes a deep dive into the life and films of director Hal Ashby (“Harold and Maude,” “Being There,” Coming Home,” “Shampoo”). LINKS A Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6 Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/ Amy Scott Website:  https://www.amyelizabethscott.com/ “Hal” Documentary website:  https://hal.oscilloscope.net/ “Hal” Trailer: https://youtu.be/GBGfKan2qAg “Harold and Maude Two-Year Anniversary” Documentary: https://youtu.be/unRuCOECvZM Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/ Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/ YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastAmy Scott Transcript First, I want to say thank you for making the movie and thank you for making such a great movie because he totally deserved it. I would always wonder why of all the directors of the 70s and 80s, he was never really heralded the way he should have been. I think part of it has to do with that he had no discernible style. So, you couldn't really pick him for something. But before we dive into that, tell me a little bit about your background before you made Hal?Amy Scott: Well, I'm from Oklahoma. I moved to Chicago, out of college and in college, we studied a lot of, I had a great professor at ODU at the University of Oklahoma. I don't think he's there anymore. But he really hipped us to the coolest documentaries. I had no idea that you could be a documentary filmmaker, like from Chris Marker to the 7-Up series to Hands on a Hard Body. It was just a really great, great, well-rounded Film and Media Program. Anyway, I moved to Chicago. I wanted to be a director and a DP, but I fell down, I had gotten a job at the University of Chicago. I think I faked my way into it. I was supposed to start on a Monday, and I fell on the ice and broke my arm on a Friday. So I was like, “I can't shoot. I can't film. I can't use my arm to film and hold the camera. I need to learn how to edit. So I learned how to edit with my right hand, and I loved it. And then I just did that for like 10 years. Well, I mean, I still do it. But it was like this accidental career path.You're an accidental editor.Amy Scott: An accidental editor. That became something that later, I just valued as such an important skill set. I use it now. I have wonderful editors that I work with. But we speak the same language. And I think with the story structure, that you have an eye for things in the edit bay and now it really, really helps my ability to break down a three-act structure or figure out where the narrative arc is, and things like that. I think would have taken me a lot longer, had I not fallen and broken my arm.It was sort of a similar path for Hal Ashby, starting in editing.Amy Scott: Totally. I loved his films and then when I read Nick Dawson's book, and I started to learn more about him, I really, really connected with him. Because of things that he would say about filmmaking and editing and being in the edit bay and being obsessed with every frame. I felt like, being seen and heard. Like, “Oh, this is how I feel about it, too. I don't feel like such a freak of nature, and lots of people feel this way.” I really connected with Hal and he didn't make The Landlord I believe until he was 40 years old. He was up there. Amy Scott: Yeah, up there. For a first-time filmmaker, that's a late start.Amy Scott: And that was about the same age that I made the Hal movie. What was your first experience with a Hal Ashby movie?Amy Scott: The first film that I saw that I can remember was with my friend Jason in college. I was watching Truffaut and Cassavetes and so I thought that I had a very well-rounded understanding of the new Hollywood. And my friend Jason said, “Have you ever seen Harold and Maude?” I had no idea what he was talking about. He was a couple years older, and he was like, “Oh, honey, you're gonna skip school today. We're gonna watch it.” And I swear to God, we watched it. I couldn't believe what it was. I couldn't believe I'd never seen it. It somehow gone past me. As soon as it was over, I was like, “Stop. Start it again.” We have to rewatch it. We where there for like eight hours, watching it on a loop. David Russell compares it to The Catcher in the Rye as a sort of like rite of passage for people at that age. It hit me right straight through the heart. And then from there, I think I saw The Landlord, someone had screen of The Landlord in Oklahoma City. And I was like, oh my god, this is incredible.I live in Minneapolis, where Harold and Maude ran at The Westgate theater for two and a half years. I saw the movie quite a bit there. And then, because I was in a film program, and knew someone who knew the film critic for the local paper, when Ruth and Bud came to town for the two-year anniversary, he sorts of dragged me along with him. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort and hung out a little bit with Ruth Gordon. I made a little documentary on Super 8mm of my perspective on their experiences.  I was 15 years old or something and although I knew their itinerary, I couldn't drive. And so I would go to the TV station and shoot some stuff there with them and then they were on to something else. I had to hop on a bus to keep up with them.Amy Scott: That's incredible.Yes, my only regret was on that when I had dinner with Bud that I didn't ask better questions. I was sort of starstruck and there's a lot of question. I would ask him now—that I've tried to ask him—but you know, he's not too communicative.Amy Scott: Yeah. That's incredible that you that you have that footage and I would love to see it.It was really, really fun and interesting. Ruth Gordon was very much Ruth Gordon, very much Maude. She didn't suffer fools. So, you've seen Harold and Maude, seen The Landlord. At what point did you decide that a documentary had to be made?Amy Scott: Well, okay, I was pregnant with my first child, and was finishing up Nick Dawson's book on Hal, you know, on Hal’s life. And I thought, I just couldn't believe there was a documentary. But this is before the market became oversaturated with a story about everyone's life. At the time, I just thought, oh my gosh, there's so much here. This guy, his films should be really celebrated. And he should be more known and revered in the canon of American 70s New Hollywood, because he's so influential.And that's why it was important that we include David O Russell and Adam McKay, and Allison Anders, Judd Apatow. They could draw a direct connections, like the film family tree. When you see the wide shots in Harold and Maude, you think of Wes Anderson. Or, you know, the music, you think of David O Russell. I mean, his influence was everywhere. I started to connect the dots and I thought, oh, my gosh, we've got to, we've got to make a film here. But I'd never done anything like that. I had directed smaller documentaries. I tried to make a film about this band called The Red Crayola and that was a hilarious attempt on my part. To try to chase them around the globe and on no money. That was my only experience outside of editing. So, fortunately, I had hooked up with my producing partners that I still work with now. I just met them at the time and they hired me to edit some cat food commercials. So it was editing Friskies or Purina, I don't know what it was. It was just looking at cats all day.And I was about to give birth but I was working trying to lock down the rights And the rights came through one afternoon and I just pulled them (the producers) in and I was like, let's do this together. We didn't know what the hell we were doing, but it was so great and so fun. We approached it, like, all hands-on deck, and we were a little family making this thing. So, that spirit has continued, thank goodness, because of what we put into the Ashby movie.What do you think were his unique qualities as a director?Amy Scott: Gosh, so much. I just think he really had an eye. He could see stories. You said something earlier, that all of his films are not the same and therefore it's hard to go, oh, he's this style of filmmaker. But the thing that they all have in common is that he has a very real and raw approach at looking at humanity. Sort of holding the mirror up and showing us who we are, with all of our faults and complexities and layers of contradictions and failures. So he's able to see that and find the stories of humanity. And that's the connective tissue for me. He also had a sick musical taste; I mean, he sort of found Cat Stevens. The soundtrack to Shampoo—I think that's why it's not in wide release right now, as I can’t imagine having to license Hendrix and Janis and the Beach Boys, you know?That's true. But I'll also say he had the wisdom to let Paul Simon do the small musical things he did in Shampoo, which are just as powerful or if not more powerful.Amy Scott: So, powerful. So much restraint. Incredibly powerful. I feel like Hal, because he was not—from all of our research and talking to everyone and girlfriends and collaborators—he wasn't a dictatorial director. He didn't lay down mandates. He was really open to hearing from everybody and making it feel like it was a democratic scene and everyone has an equal voice. If you had an idea, speak up.But at the end of the day, he was like, okay, here's the vision. And once he had that vision, I think that's where he really got into problems with the studio system. Because that was such a different time. The studio guys thought that they were also the director, that they were also the auteur. I cannot imagine a world where you throw your entire life into making a film and then a studio head comes along and tries to seize it from you. I mean, that would give me cancer, you know, from the stress. I can't imagine.It cert

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with director and editor Peet Gelderblom on his collage feature, “When Forever Dies.”LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/When Forever Dies website: http://www.whenforeverdies.com/Watch it on Vimeo:  https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whenforeverdies/806226783Watch it on the Eye Film Player: https://player.eyefilm.nl/en/films/when-forever-diesEli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/ YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastInterview Transcript I do want to just spend just a minute or so talking about When Forever Dies. But oh, my goodness Peet. Where did that come from? And how do—I realize you could probably talk for an hour about it? How did you come up with that? And the very process of putting it together is mind blowing. How would you describe it to someone who hasn't seen it?Peet: Yeah, When Forever Dies is an archival fiction and it cobbles together scraps of existing films to tell an entirely different story of its own. And that is the story of the relationship between a man and a woman, and how this relationship sort of degrades over time. And it's really experimental in the way that it takes shots and bits and scenes from completely different movies and also completely different genres. It can be advertising, documentaries, animation, love silent films, everything really, and it still manages to tell a whole story.  You know, you say it's experimental, as someone who has seen it, it's experimental for a few minutes. And then you understand the experiment. And it's then a normal narrative, you get it. I mean, you use some interstitial cards that help bring us along. Peet: I say that, because I've always believed that experiment in accessibility shouldn't be a mutually exclusive. It's actually, it's a roller coaster ride of a film and it's in a very, in a lot of ways, it's actually very traditional because I'm using the rules of continuity editing, but I’m using the rules against themselves a little bit, because I take from different films, and then I create, you know, sometimes the opposite meaning out of different shots. Yeah, but what gave me the idea was just I saw a way to do this. And it has evolved, of course, with maybe the start of it was the Raising Cain recut, and making movie mashups after that—video essays—but it all comes from my editing background. I've edited lots of trailers and promos for Universal Pictures and Comedy Central and all sorts of TV channels. And then I was also able to take from different series and different films, you know, put different shots together and create this new through line that didn't exist before and I always enjoyed doing that and I just thought, wouldn't it be really cool to try and do this for a whole feature film?As it turns out, it was really cool. You know, we recently had on the podcast an editor named Roger Nygard, and Roger edits, Larry David's show Curb Your Enthusiasm, he edited Veep and he's a filmmaker like you. He directs and he edits and he put he also makes his living as an editor. And he said that the thing that taught him the most about filmmaking and about editing was editing promos, where you had a you know, you had to do it all in 15 seconds. And he said you'd learn the most about filmmaking when you have that sort of requirement to work within those boundaries and still tell a story. Peet: Yeah, it's the shortest way to tell a story and you really need or you really learn about what things what elements you really need to make something happening on the screen.With When Forever Dies what's the music on that post-scored or where did you edit to the music? I couldn't really tell, it was all seems so seamless.Peet: Wow, thank you. Well, it's a little bit of both. I decided I wanted to have a sort of backbone because there was no backbone besides the story that I had made up. So, I actually edited everything on music. Some of the music I made myself but there's also a lot of Creative Commons music and music that was replaced later on by something that our composer did.Well, it all feels of a piece. It's all just together in perfect. So, I will definitely recommend to listeners that when it becomes available, When Forever Dies is...Peet: Yeah, it had a very good festival run and then one audience award in Colombia. We're looking into, you know, other, yeah, we're looking into how it could be distributed right now. But obviously it's a weird film. It's difficult to place it.Yeah, it is. It's different. But then once you get the rhythm of it, you're totally in and you get it. Peet: Yeah, that's also been my experience with that audience really, audiences really love it when they see it. But I think the trick is to how do you get them in the film theater.

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with comedian and USC Professor Wayne Federman on the history and impact of stand-up comedy albums. LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Wayne Federman Website:  http://www.waynefederman.com/Wayne_Federmans_Official_Web_Site/Welcome.htmlThe History of Standup Podcast: https://www.thehistoryofstandup.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with writer/director Nicholas Meyer about his work on the Adrian Brody “Houdini” mini-series, as well as thoughts on Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Time After Time and more.LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Behind the Page Nicholas Meyer Interview Part One:  https://tinyurl.com/3f7mbzerBehind the Page Nicholas Meyer Interview Part Two:  https://tinyurl.com/ms3tm45fNicholas Meyer website:  https://www.nicholas-meyer.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast***Nicholas Meyer – TranscriptJohn Gaspard: Do you remember what it was that caused your dad to write that book? Nicholas Meyer: I know something about it. He was interested, the subjects that kind of absorbed his attention were the sons of passive or absent fathers. This was a topic which probably originated from his experiences with his own father, my grandfather, who was a very interesting man and a kind of a world beater, but who spent so much of his time doing what they said in The Wizard of Oz—being a philip, philip, philip, a good deed doer—that he didn't have enough time for fathering. He was not a bad man at all, quite a conscientious one. But the parenting was left to his wife and I think my father missed and was affected by not having an involved father. And I think that a colleague of my dad's said to him Houdini, that's the guy for you. And that's how he did it. I'm only sorry that he didn't live to see the two-night television series based on his book. Jim Cunningham: I enjoyed it immensely as a Houdini fan. It was fascinating and fun and Adrian Brody is terrific, as is the woman who plays Bess. I thought I knew a lot about Houdini and there was a lot in there that I did not know. And I really enjoyed the opening to it, which suggests that it's all fact and all fiction, and it's our job to figure out which is which. How did you come to being involved with the TV mini-series about your dad's book?Nicholas Meyer: I have been friends and worked for many years with a television producer named Jerry Abrams. I started working with Jerry in 1973 with the first teleplay that I wrote was for a television movie called Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery. There was a—China apparently invented everything first, including detective stories—and a circuit court judge in the seventh century, Judge Dee Jen Jay, solved mysteries and people wrote detective stories about him and now there are movies about him. But back in 1972, or something like that, and I had just come to Hollywood and was looking for work and didn't know anybody. And I met Jerry Abrams and I met a director named Jeremy Kagan and I'm happy to say both of these gentlemen are alive and still my friends. They gave me a shot to write this Judge Dee in the Haunted Monastery because I think ABC thought they were going to get a Kung Fu movie out of it, which it wasn't. But it was a television movie with an all Asian cast. The monastery in question was the old Camelot castle on the Warner Brothers lot and that's where I met Jerry. And Jerry and I've been friends ever since. Jerry’s son is JJ Abrams, who directs movies. Anyway, Jerry said to me a couple of years ago, let's do Houdini and I said, Oh, funny, you should say that because my dad wrote a very interesting book about Houdini. I would be interested if it were based on his book. I would only be interested and that's how it got made.John Gaspard: What was your process? Did you know it would be two nights going in? Did you know it's going to be that long? How did you get started and what other resources did you use, because I know there's stuff mentioned in the movie that I don't remember being in your dad's books. You must have had to dig a little bit.Nicholas Meyer: There's a lot of books about Houdini, that I read many, many books, because my dad's book is distinguished—if one could call it that—by being the only book of all the books about Houdini that attempts some inner explanation of his psychological process. The why? Why would you do this? Why do you feel the need to do this? Other books will tell you what Houdini did, and some will tell you how he did it. But my dad's book, as I say, it kind of explores the why of it. And so I read these other books to supplement the rest of the how and the why and I've amassed quite a large Houdini library. When I say large, probably compared to yours not so much, but I must have like 10 books about Houdini and flying aeroplanes and Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism and so forth. So, yes, I read all those to supplement what I was trying to condense. I don't remember whether at this point whether it was proposed as two nights or three nights or whatever. I also know that if it hadn't been for Adrian Brody agreeing to play Houdini, it never would have happened. They weren't going to do it without a star.Jim Cunningham: He's great.John Gaspard: I was telling Jim earlier, before you got on, that my wife was kind enough to sit down and watch it with me. She's always worried in things like this, that she’s going see how something's done. She doesn't want to know how magic is done at all. And when we got to the end, she said, “Houdini seems so nice. He's such a likeable guy.” And I think that's really more Adrian Brody.Nicholas Meyer: Oh, yeah. The Adrian Brody. As I say, the movie would not have got made without Adrian. I'm not sure that he wasn't to a large degree cast against type. I think Houdini was a guy with ants in his pants, a kind of frenetic character. And I don't think when you read about him in any detail, that he was what you'd call nice. I think he was a person who had a lot of charm that he could switch on and off like a tap. And I think this is one of the things that my dad's book brings out, and we tried to bring it out in the movie: that Houdini's whose own father was a failure of flop and absent parent. So, I think Houdini spent a lot of his life looking for substitutes or alternative father figures. And I think the first one he probably stumbled on was the French magician Robert-Houdin, from whom he took his name. And I think Houdini's pattern, at least according to my dad's reading of it, was to find father figures and fall hard for them, only to ultimately become disenchanted and alienated and furious with them. Probably, because ultimately, they weren't his real father. But I think there was something like that going on. John Gaspard: Yes, it's pretty clear that's what happened with Doyle as well. Nicholas Meyer: Yes, but he had better reason than in some other cases to be disenchanted with Doyle because Doyle's Atlantic City séance with Lady Doyle, Houdini ultimately regarded as a real betrayal. Because he decided, probably correctly, that the contact with his mother via Lady Doyle doing spirit writing was fake. And by the way, it's not that Mrs. Doyle or Lady Doyle might not have believed what she was doing. It just didn't track for two reasons: Houdini experienced this contact with his mother, and he was as obsessed with her as he was with the fact of an absent father. And he was so overcome when she spoke to him via the spirit writing that it was a couple of days before he realized that his mother didn't speak a word of English. And she had communicated via lady Doyle in English, she only spoke Yiddish. Doyle got around this difficulty by explaining that the medium in this case, Lady Doyle, worked as a kind of simultaneous translator. And Houdini said, yeah, but—and this was the second item—it was his birthday. And she never mentioned it and she always sent him something on his birthday. And he then denounced Doyle and Lady Doyle, as quote, menaces to mankind.John Gaspard: So, were you involved in a day-to-day way with production? And I'm wondering why you didn't direct it?Nicholas Meyer: I was involved. The whole movie was shot in Budapest, everything and I was involved. I was not invited to direct. I have not directed really since the death of my wife in 1993. I had two small children to raise and by the time it was, like, possible for me to go back since they are now grown up and busy. I was sort of out of a game. John Gaspard: Oh, that's too bad. You're a terrific director.Nicholas Meyer: I'm not arguing with you.John Gaspard: So, once you were scripting it, and you were using other sources, how concerned were you about this is fact, this is fiction?Nicholas Meyer: That's a very good question and it doesn't just apply to Houdini. It applies largely to the whole issue of dramatizing the stories based on real events. And by the way, you could make the case in a way that there's no such thing as fiction; that all fiction ultimately can be traced back to something real. I'll give you two examples off the top of my head: one, Moby Dick was based on a real Whale called Mocha Dick because of his color; and, as Heinrich Schliemann proved, when he discovered Troy, most legends, most myths have their origins somewhere in the mists of time, in some kind of reality. It turns out there was a place called Troy. So, he was not far off the mark. It's a knotty question with a “k” how much we owe to fact and how much we get to mush around and dramatize? And the answer has to be inevitably elastic. The problem is that people are neither taught, nor do they read history anymore. We are not taught civics. We are not taught history. Nobody knows anything and so by default, movies and television are where we get our history, and that history is not always truthful. It is dramatized for example, in that Academy Award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, we learn that the North Vietnamese made American prisoners of war in Vietnam, play Russian roulette.

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Noah Diamond and Jim Cunningham, talking about the pleasures and perils of playing Groucho Marx.LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Noah Diamond website:  https://www.noahdiamond.com/“Gimme a Thrill: The Story Of "I'll Say She Is," The Lost Marx Brothers Musical” -- https://tinyurl.com/28ftau5eEli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast***Noah Diamond Transcript JOHNLet'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? NOAHWell, for me, it started in a kind of roundabout way, when I was a very little kid. Before I could even read, I was really interested in books. And I had my collection of Dr. Seuss, and all the books that would be read to me. But what I really liked to do was go downstairs where my parents had, in the living room, bookshelves lining the walls. And their books were really interesting to me. I just knew there were secrets there, you know? They had like big art books and books of poetry and maybe my first experiences with words were looking at the spines of the books in the living room. And one of the books they happen to have was then fairly recent book, Joe Adamson's Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, which is, I think most Marx Brothers fans would say it's the best loved book about them, certainly and I think the best written. That book came out in 1973. So, it's 50 years old this year and for some reason, as a tiny kid, that was a book that I took off the shelf. It was interesting that it had silver lettering on the spine and little icons, a harp, and what I would come later to recognize as a Chico hat. “Oh, look, this is interesting.” And I started looking through it, and I saw all these pictures. And the photographs of the Marx Brothers were just something to grapple with and it seemed a little familiar to me. My world was the Muppets and Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. The Marx Brothers appeared in these photographs, like there was some continuity there and I also found them a little scary. Groucho in particular, that's quite a face for a child to reckon with. So, that was a book that I looked at a lot when I was just little more than a baby. I wouldn't really see the Marx Brothers in their movies until I was 12. Partly that's because, I'm just old enough to have had a childhood where it wasn't so easy to find old movies. And I sort of had to wait for home video to come along. And when it first came along, it's not like all 13 Marx brothers’ movies were at the local Blockbuster.It was that that journey, that constant searching for things that characterized life in the analog world. So, it was very gradual in between those two times.Rather than blow your whole episode on this answer: in between the very little boy looking at pictures in Joe Adamson's book, and the 12-year-old finally, like seeing Duck Soup, and a Night at the Opera on video, there were many years where the Marx Brothers always seemed to be right around the corner. I would encounter them in Mad Magazine, or adults I knew might refer to them. And I sort of came to understand that the nose and moustache and glasses had something to do with Groucho. I was aware of them as a kind of vapor increasingly during those, I guess, nine or ten years between discovering the book and seeing the films. JOHNJim, 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. JIMOh, 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. JOHNOkay. 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. JOHNDo you remember the first time you performed as Groucho? NOAHThe 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. JOHNOkay. 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? JOHNExcellent stories. Noah, have you ever done The Coconuts or Animal Crackers? NOAHI 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... JIMIt 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. JOHNIt'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

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.” LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Peet Gelderblom website: https://www.directorama.net/bio-english/“Raising Cain” Re-Cut: https://www.directorama.net/raising-cain-directors-cut/“Raising Cain” Trailer: https://youtu.be/jx2MeCjfP44“Raising Cain” Steadicam shot: https://youtu.be/kuTfcP3hTykEli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast***Peet Gelderblom – Re-Cutting “Raising Cain” What was the very first Brian DePalma movie you remember seeing? Peet: That's difficult. I was probably a little too young for it, but it may have been "Sisters.” Yeah, but I think the first thing I remember from Brian DePalma was that he was on television, because "Body Double" had just come out, and I saw the clips from "Body Double" and I thought, wow, that would be something I would like to see. But I was too young for it. I wasn't able to go into the cinema and check it out, but immediately I made a mental note. And I think the name just stuck with me. And I started to check him out, and whenever there was something on television, by him, the BBC or whatever, I would definitely see it. So, it might have been "Sisters.” It might have been "Blowout," I'm not really sure. My point of entry was "Phantom of the Paradise." It was first released in cinema, and I'd never seen anything like it, and then had to follow up with this guy, Brian DePalma, to see what he was going to do. And the next thing I remember seeing was "Carrie," and really loving it. I remember it was showing maybe a couple years later at a University Film Society, and I wasn't seeing it, but I was walking by. I could hear what was going on, and I said to friend, “let's stand here for just a second, they're about to scream,” because the hand was about to come up out of the grave. And it was so much fun to just know that was going to happen. And then years later to read about how Paul Hirsch came up with that and the music choice that he made and all that. So, is there a favorite Brian DePalma film? Peet: Yeah, I think "Blowout" is my favorite. It seems to be the one that combines all of his best qualities, you know, combining hot and cold and his formal expertise and his weird plotting and humor. Yeah, all of that. He does have both weird plotting and very devious humor and all of those, I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but I do whenever it's on, I can't help it, watch "The Fury." Just because it's a filmmaker working so hard to make this work. The cast is great, and they're all giving it their all and you know, the story doesn't really hold up. But he is just throwing so much at it to make it work that I appreciate that. Peet: That's a good summation, actually. Yeah, it doesn't really work, but it's just so much fun. Yes, exactly. One that I have trouble finding that I just love and that I just looked it up (as I mentioned, I was just looking to see the order of things), and I'm surprised that “Obsession” came before “Carrie.” I thought it came after “Carrie.” And that's his first time working with John Lithgow, and it's from a Paul Schrader script. And apparently, the last third of the movie they didn't even shoot. There's another whole act of it. Peet: Yeah, I think Paul Schrader is still a little pissed off about that. Even, more than a little.  Maybe more than a little. Well, and with every right. But I think what Brian DePalma ended up doing with that movie—particularly when you read in Lithgow's book about the difficulty he had working with Cliff Robertson, and how difficult Robertson was and how he sabotaged every scene he was in to make sure that he would get the close ups, which is such a weird thing to want to do. But I guess that's what he did. It's with that Herrmann score. It's just such a lovely movie that I wish I could find it more often, but it is hard to come across. So, what did you think of "Raising Cain," the first time you saw it? Peet: Well, I know it like today, it was yesterday, because I discovered him while he was in the middle of his career. And so a lot of the films that I saw were actually older films of his. And I really liked his thrillers and the films that really carried his own signature. And at the time, he had been doing some other kinds of pictures. I think "Wise Guys," was one of them, I didn't even bother to see that. And, of course, "Bonfire of the Vanities," which was not exactly praised.  It wasn't, but it's not horrible. It really isn't horrible. I rewatched it recently, and it's got some wonderful stuff in it. Peet: Yeah, they always do. All of his films have wonderful stuff. But anyway, it was pretty clear from the promotional materials and interviews that he was doing something with “Raising Cain,” which sort of pointed towards the fact that he was starting to go back to the source, you know, he was going to do his own thing again. And I was completely ready for it. And I had a girlfriend at the time and I must have, you know, been enthusing a lot about it. And she went with me, when it was out in the cinemas. And I liked the movie very much because I was a die-hard, rabid fan. But my girlfriend, she was sitting next to me, and I could feel she wasn't liking it. And after, I think already about four minutes in, she turned to me and said, “what kind of crazy film is this?” And, you know, this was also in the cinema that we saw it, you know, this was the general consensus. It was like, what kind of crazy thing is this? Now, would that have been the car scene with Carter, and the woman and Cain shows up in the window? Peet: It's going off the rails really soon in the original version. I was ready for that because I was a Brian DePalma fan. So, I dug it. But I also could completely understand why the casual viewer would have lots of problems with it. So, that stuck with me. Of course, later I found out that Brian DePalma wasn't really happy with how the film turned out. And when I sort of guessed what he originally had in mind, I thought that would work much better, actually. Yes, it's much more keeping with “Dressed to Kill” and “Psycho,” where you start the story one way andwe don't learn who the villain is until much later. With that in mind, and with enjoying the film, what was it that inspired the re-cut? Peet: Well, I was hosting a website with a forum on it, that had a lot of the Brian DePalma fans, who actually made the jump from another forum that was specifically about Brian DePalma. So, there were a lot of Brian DePalma fans there, and they were discussing lots of stuff. And at a certain moment, there was this guy who was talking about an interview book he was doing with Brian De Palma. He must have mentioned “Raising Cain” and that DePalma had said in the interview that he wasn't happy with it. And that immediately piqued my interest. And I asked Laurent, what was it about the film that he doesn't like? And Laurent said, well, he originally wanted to start with the story of the woman. So, that was the point where I thought, yeah, of course, then that probably means that he would start in the clock store, I immediately thought. So I checked out my DVD, and I tried—you know, the DVDs have chapters—so I tried to reorder the chapters to see how that movie must have played originally. And I couldn't really get it to work. But I still thought there might be a better film in this than was originally released. So, with that in mind, how'd you make that happen?  Peet: Well, I left it alone for a few years. And at a certain moment, I guess it bugged me. The idea kept sticking in my mind, and I thought, well, why don't I just try it> And I ripped the DVD, and I am a director and editor, so I know how to edit. And I started asking around and Jeff who has a DePalma website knows a lot of stuff about the Brian DePalma. He actually had an old draft of the screenplay. It was called Father's Day at that time, and he was willing to send it over to me. So, I was able to read that. And indeed, the movie started the way I mentioned it, in the shop. But there were a lot of things different back then, because the screenplay wasn't completed. There were some really wild things in there that he just let go because it was too wild, or he went into another direction. But basically it laid out how the chronological order used to be.It wasn't actually chronological. He made it chronological because, as I heard it, he started to second guess his own creative feelings when the movie was tested and people had a problem with it. He started to mess around some more in the editing, and he changed everything to a chronological order. At the time, he thought, well, this is probably better, because then we get to the action really soon. Yeah, we do. So, that is how it was released, but of course in interviews after that, he has mentioned a lot about the fact that he doesn't really like the film as it was released, and that it should have been different.  Before chatting with you, I sat down and rewatched both versions and took notes to try to figure out what the order was. And what throws it off for me a little bit is the opening shot in the theatrical cut of the park from high up is very much a Brian DePalma opening shot, you know, very close to what he did in “Carrie.” Whereas, the opening shot in the clock store is not really a DePalma shot. It's a little mundane. It's a wide shot. It's interesting, you know that Jenny walks up and sees herself in the heart shaped camera and all that-- Peet: It encapsulates the whole movie, but that's in a different way than the original did. Yes, exac

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with James Davidson, where he talks about his book, “Hal Ashby and the Making of ‘Harold & Maude.’”LINKSA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/The Book: Hal Ashby and the Making of ‘Harold & Maude’: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/hal-ashby-and-the-making-of-harold-and-maude/The Twin Cities Welcomes Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort—A Mini-Documentary: https://youtu.be/unRuCOECvZMEli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with character actor Jim Meskimen on building an acting career one step at a time.LINKSJim Meskimen website:  https://jimmeskimen.com/Jim Meskimen acting reel: https://jimmeskimen.com/acting/The Acting Center:  https://theactingcenterla.com/Behind the Page: The Eli Marks Podcast (Episode 222): https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/eli-marks-podcastA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast***Meskimen Transcript Jim Meskimen — Character and Voice Actor John Gaspard: Today, we're going to talk about your life as an actor and having a diversified pool of things to draw from to be a working actor. I listened to a couple other interviews with you, and there was one point they kept coming to that I wanted to avoid, which was immediately talking about your mother. My connection is, and was, that we went to the same high school, Southwest high school in Minneapolis. So, I thought, well, that's my great connection. And then my friend Jim here, who is … one of the reasons he's here is because he is a working actor as well, but in a much smaller market here in the Twin Cities. So, I thought having him as part of this chat would be interesting. Jim, what is your story? Jim Meskimen: And he happens to have the name of Cunningham.  John: Well, we're gonna get to that. Here we go.  Jim Cunningham: Therein lies the story. Your mother made an appearance along with some other famous TV moms at, you know, we're very proud of the fact that Spam is produced here in Minnesota. Meskimen: That's right. That's right.  Cunningham: And there is a Spam museum. It's that important to us, Minnesotans. Meskimen: Yes, I know she's been there. We had some Spam swag that she gave us one time.  Cunningham: Well, there, it was from that. She came as a famous mom, along with some other famous TV moms, Barbara Billingsley, and--  Meskimen: And Florence, maybe? Florence Henderson? Cunningham: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I was the emcee of that event and I was interviewing them as they arrived on the red carpet. And I said to your mother, Oh, I'm just so thrilled to meet you because my last name is Cunningham. And more than that, my dad's name is actually Richard Cunningham. And so is my brother.” Meskimen: Oh, my gosh. Cunningham: During the height of the Happy Days craze, we literally had to have an unlisted phone number because every third call was, “Is Fonzi there?”  Meskimen: Oh my God. Oh my God. Cunningham: And your mother said to me, “You have to prove to me that your name is Cunningham.” So I took out my wallet and showed her my driver’s license. And she said, “Oh, you poor darling.” And she gave me a nice hug and a peck on the cheek and it was just, I cherish, I cherish the memory.  Meskimen: That's really sweet. That's hilarious. She challenged you like someone would make that up, you know, so she had to really get to the bottom of that one. Cunningham: But your mother was just charming and a delight. Meskimen: That's great.  Cunningham: Yeah. Sorry. We got off on a tangent.  Gaspard: We've given the elephant in the room some peanuts. Now we're shoving it off to the side for you. Meskimen: Well, if I may say it is, it is no problem at all. I love to talk about my mom. She has blazed such a path for me, not in terms of, you know, any kind of practical nepotism, but just because everyone loves her and loves what she represents. And so I find it very easy to make friends with strangers in this way, because you're already kind of disposed to, well, you must not be such a schmuck, you know, he’s got this mom. And so I'm always very happy to talk about her. She's a delight and she's 93. She lives very close by and she's very happy in enjoying her retirement. Gaspard: Excellent. All right. So we want to talk about being a working actor, but before we dive into the acting part, I know when you started out, you were focused maybe more on art and cartooning and that. How did you make the switch from that to acting? Meskimen: Well, I kept both plates spinning. I studied, I taught myself to cartoon and illustrate, enough to be a professional, you know, not enough to be a super genius, kind of in demand, tremendous demand person. But enough to work. And I did that in New York city. And I had this need to perform. And so, I also did plays, I would do little projects. I would perform, you know, when I could. When I went to college, I didn't take theater classes, but I would do plays, you know, people would audition. And if there was a guy — I was very good at accents. So, you always needed a funny guy with an accent. Sometimes, you know, I could get the part of the old man, the old French guy or whatever. And that I just was always a few clicks above the rest of my fellows there.  So I really kept both these activities going while I was sorting out which one was gonna be the path. Cause I really honestly wasn't clear on what I'd be doing. And, I felt strong feelings about both, but I didn't feel at that time, I didn't see how I could mesh them together. I didn't see how one was going to be, how I’d have to jettison one completely. And it took me a while to figure that out. And when I did, it was a big relief and I went, okay, I know why I want to pursue acting. I know what's honorable about it. I know why it's right for me at this time. And so I'm going to go for it. And then I went with full energy towards that, but I always, I mean, I haven't forgotten how to draw or paint and I do it now. I'm older, I'm 62. That was when I was 23.  So at this point in my life, I wouldn't mind sitting home and painting a little bit and being away from everybody. But at the time I felt like I needed a more social existence, a more social career that would have more collaborative aspects.  Cunningham: As you look back on things, do you remember some of the first things that you got that were maybe, you know, of note? Meskimen: Yeah. I started off, I came to New York and I started a bunch of things all at once. Cuz New York is a great place get started, you know, and start things and be a starter. So I was studying acting and I was studying improv. I had a false start. I went and studied at the Stella Adler school for a while, which was a disaster. And I vectored off of that as fast as I could. And I got into improv, which was much more suited to my temperament and I think is better training in general.  So I was doing that. I was looking for an agent and I was also supporting myself as an illustrator cartoonist in the meantime. So I didn't have to be a waiter. I could have a pretty decent job. So the first things I got had to do with my ability to do impressions. And be a voice actor. So my improv group that I was in had a gig weekly doing what was then a regular feature of the old McNeil Lehrer report, if you ever remember that show?  Gaspard: Oh yeah.  Meskimen: The McNeil Lehrer report, which was a news show. It was like a hard news show, but it had a funny section every Friday. They would take the political cartoons of the day and just by kind of zooming in and out and changing panels, they would sort of, you know, semi-animate them statically. And they would add voices to it. And then they hired us to do the voices of, you know, Boris Yeltsin, then Reagan and whatever was happening on the time. And we’d go in every Friday. It was my first AFTRA a job and I think I made $114 bucks a week, but it was $114 bucks a week, you know, back then when a ride on the subway was 50 cents. That was like, this is okay. So that was a nice, kinda like, oh, that's a stability, you know? Cause I think I did, we did a whole, I don’t know, a season or more of it. And every week, you know, it was kind of cool.  My biggest breakthrough came in the area of on-camera commercials. And I had remembered that my mom, when she was a single mom, she would, every now and then before Happy Days, she would get guest spots on things like Mannix and Mission Impossible and Hawaii-5-0. But those were pretty few and far between. And then, if she booked a commercial, it was like, oh, you know, thank God because it would generate enough income, through residuals for her. And back then commercials paid very, very well. Today it's more rare, as you know Jim. It's kind of a disappearing thing, as things go on the internet. But a network commercial back then could help you stay alive. So, I had that in my mind. I was like, you know, I need to get into commercials. So, I auditioned and eventually, after a couple of years, actually two years at least going on a lot of things as a young man, I started to get into commercials. And there was one very, very lucky day that changed my life completely. And it had everything to do with whatever else I was studying, because I was studying communication at that time. I was studying improv at that time and those things came together in a beautiful way. I had an audition for a grocery chain out of Texas called Skaggs Alpha Beta, the euphonious name of Skaggs Alpha Beta. And they were looking for a spokesman to interview people in the store. And they had had some market research that told 'em that, you know, you call yourself the friendliest place in town, but you're not so friendly. So, they wanted a friendly spokesman who could talk to people, actual real people and have fun and whatever, you know, and be clean and not insult people. And that was what I had been studying in improv, you know, clean comedy. Supportive comedy, you know, not cutting the legs off of people. So, I got this audition. I went physically and did it and they said, “oh yeah, yeah, that's great. We're gonna hire you.” I'm like,

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. LINKSDawn’s podcast (HILF):  http://dawnbrodey.com/ - showsBrian’s Blog and Vlog, Toothpickings: https://toothpickings.medium.com/ A Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Frankenstein (1931) Trailer:  https://youtu.be/BN8K-4osNb0Frankenweenie Trailer:  https://youtu.be/29vIJQohUWEMary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Trailer):  https://youtu.be/GFaY7r73BIsYoung Frankenstein (Trailer):  https://youtu.be/mOPTriLG5cUNosferatu (Complete Film):  https://youtu.be/dCT1YUtNOA8Dracula (1931) Trailer:  https://youtu.be/VoaMw91MC9kAbbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (Trailer): https://youtu.be/j6l8auIACycHorror of Dracula (Trailer):  https://youtu.be/ZTbY0BgIRMkBram Stoker’s Dracula (Trailer):  https://youtu.be/fgFPIh5mvNcDracula In Istanbul: https://youtu.be/G7tAWcm3EX0Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastDawn and Brian TRANSCRIPT John: [00:00:00] Before we dive into the assignment you gave me—which was to watch stuff I hadn't seen and also rewatch stuff I had seen to get a better idea of who's done a good job of adapting these books—let's just jump in and talk a little bit about your area of expertise and why you have it. So, I'm going to start with you, Brian. I was very surprised after working with you a while to find out that you had a whole vampire subset in your life. Brian: A problem, you can call it a problem. It's fine. John: Okay. What is the problem and where did it come from? Brian: I was just vaguely interested in vampires for a while. When I was in my screenwriting days, someone had encouraged me to do a feature length comedy about vampires, and that led me to do a lot of reading. And then I just kind of put it aside for a while. And then I was, I had just finished a documentary for Committee Films and they said, do you have any other pitches? And I thought, and I said, you know, there's still people who believe in vampires even today, that could be really interesting. And I put together a pitch package. Then, the guy in charge of development said, [00:01:00]this is what we need to be doing. And then it stalled out. Nothing ever happened with it. And I said, what the hell. I could do this on my own. I could fly around and interview these people. And I did, I spent a couple years interviewing academics and some writers. And along the way, I started finding all these very intriguing moments in the history of either vampire lore or fiction or even just people who consider themselves vampires today. And all these things would connect to each other. It was a lattice work of vampires going back hundreds of years. It didn't fit the documentary, unfortunately, but I found it way too interesting. And I said, I need some kind of outlet for this. And so I started writing about it on Tooth Pickings. And that eventually put me in touch with people who were more scholarly, and it opened up a lot more conversations. And now I can't get out. I'm trapped.  John: Well, the first sign is recognizing there's a problem. [00:02:00]  Okay. Now, Dawn, you had a different entryway into Frankenstein.  Dawn: Yeah, well, I was a theater major and a history minor at the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers. And, this was in the late nineties, early two thousands, when there were still a lot of jobs for people who had degrees and things like this. Or at least there was a theory that  this was a reasonable thing to get educated in. And then I graduated in 2001, which was months after 9/11, when all those jobs went away. And so, I had this education so specific and what was I gonna do? And gratefully the Twin Cities is a great place for finding that kind of stuff. And one of my very first jobs out of college was at the Bakkan museum. So, the Bakkan museum was founded by Earl Bakkan, who is the inventor of the battery-operated pacemaker. And he has always, since childhood, been obsessed with the Frankenstein movie that came out in 1931. And he attributes [00:03:00]his great scientific invention and many others to a science fiction in general. And to the spark of the idea that comes from sources like this.  So, when he opened the museum, he insisted that there'd be a grand Frankenstein exhibit. And that means going back to the book, and that meant going back to the author, Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein, she started writing it when she was 16.And so, I was hired because—boom, look at me—my degree is suddenly colliding, right?  So, I was hired by the Bakkan museum to create a one-woman show about the life of Mary Shelley, where I would play Mary Shelley and would perform it within the museum and elsewhere. And through the course of that research, I read the novel for the second time, but then I read it for my third, fourth, fifth onwards and upwards. Because the show was about 45 minutes long, I referenced, you know, the novel, the books, the popular culture, the science behind it. And the deep dive just never stopped. And so long after I was required to do the research and the show was done and up, I just kept reading. [00:04:00] And it gave me the opportunity to meet experts in this field and the peripheral field, as I would sort of travel with this show and be an ambassador for the museum and stuff like that. And, yeah, it still curls my toes.  John: All right, so with that background. I'm going to just be honest right here and say, I've read Dracula once, I've read Frankenstein once. So that's where I'm coming from, and both a while ago. I remember Frankenstein was a little tougher to get through. Dracula had a bit more of an adventure feel to it, but something I don't think has really been captured particularly well in all the movies. But they both have lasted and lasted and lasted.Why do you think those books are still, those ideas are still as popular today? Dawn: I will say that I think Frankenstein, it depends on what you mean by the idea. Because on the surface, just the idea of bringing the dead to life, is, I mean, the Walking Dead franchise is right now one of the most popular franchises. I mean, I think we are really pivot on this idea. And I remember saying to a friend once that the part in [00:05:00]Revelation where the dead rise is like the only part of the Bible that I don't question. It's like, oh, the dead will get up. You know, we always just seem to be real sure that at some damned point, they're getting up. And so I think that that is part of why that it sticks in our brains. But then the story around Frankenstein—especially as it was written in 1818—has so many universal and timeless themes, like ambition and what is right and wrong. And the question that Jurassic Park posed in 1995 and continues to—1993 around there—and continues to pose, which is: just because science is capable of doing something, should it do something? And how do we define progress? Surely the very idea of being able to beat death and not die seems to be kind of the ultimate goal. And here is someone saying, okay, so let's just say, yeah. We beat death and everyone goes, oh shit, that'd be terrible. [00:06:00] You know?  And then also, I always love the idea of the creature, the monster, Frankenstein's creature himself, who has a lot of characteristics with which people have identified throughout history. Some people say, for example, that Mary Shelley's whole purpose for writing Frankenstein was a question of: didn't God do this to us, make us these ugly creatures that are imperfect and bumbling around and horrifying? And then once he realized that we weren't perfect, he fled from us in fear or fled. He just keeps going and every generation has a new media that tells the story a little bit better, a little bit different, and yeah, there we are. John: I will say that for me, the most memorable part of the book was the section where the monster is the narrator and is learning. And I think with the exception of Kenneth Branagh’s film, it it's something that isn't really touched on that much. There’s a little bit in Bride of Frankenstein, of him going around and learning stuff. But the sort of moral questions that he [00:07:00] raises as he's learning—what it is to be human—are very interesting in the book. And I wish they were in more of the movies, but they're not. So, Brian on Dracula, again, we have dead coming to life. Why do we love that so much?  Brian: Well, it's one of the questions that made me want to make a film about it myself: why has the vampire been so fascinating for hundreds of years? Why does it keep coming back? You know, it ebbs and flows in popularity, but it never leaves. And it keeps seeming to have Renaissance after Renaissance. Dracula specifically, I think one of the interesting things about that novel is how many different lenses you can look at it through and not be wrong.People have looked at it through the lens of, is this thing an imperialist story? Is it an anti-imperialist story? Is it a feminist story? Is it an anti-feminist story? And you can find support for any of those views reading Dracula. And I think that some of it might be accidental; there's times where Dracula is catching up to whatever the cultural zeitgeist [00:08:00] is right now. And we look at Dracula and we say, oh, he was thinking about this back then. Or maybe Bram

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.”LINKSJudy Berlin Trailer:  https://youtu.be/23PlEaTy9WAEdie Falco Interview about Judy Berlin: https://youtu.be/AoC5q5N-6kYA Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast***TRANSCRIPT -EPISODE 106Eric Mendelson Interview [JUDY BERLIN SOUNDBITE] JohnThat was a soundbite from “Judy Berlin,” which was written and directed by today’s guest, Eric Mendelsohn. Hello and welcome to episode 106 of The Occasional Film podcast -- the occasional companion podcast to the Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts Blog. I'm the blog's editor, John Gaspard. Judy Berlin, starring Edie Falco, as well as Madeline Kahn, Bob Dishy, Barbara Barrie and Julie Kavner, was Eric Mendelsohn's feature film debut. The film was an Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival … won Best Director at Sundance … Best Independent Film at the Hamptons Film Festival … and was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards. Eric is currently the Professor of Professional Practice, Film, at Columbia University. I first spoke to Eric about Judy Berlin years and years ago, for my book, Fast Cheap and Under Control: Lessons Learned from the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Time. In the course of that interview, Eric laid out a handful of really smart filmmaking lessons – lessons that, if followed, might be the difference between making a successful film … or making no film at all. I was curious: What did Eric think about those lessons, all these years later?  Before we got into that, though, we talked about the origins of Judy Berlin … [MUSIC TRANSTION] John What was the impetus that made Judy Berlin happen? Eric It's answerable in a more general way. When I get interested in making a script or making a film, it's because a group of feelings and images almost in a synesthesia kind of way, come together and I get a feeling and I say, oh, yeah, that would be fun. And for Judy Berlin, the set of feelings were definitely having to do with melancholy, hopefulness, the suburbs and my intimate feelings about them being a fresh place that I hadn't seen, represented in the way I experienced them. Things as abstract as how everyone feels in autumn time, I guess, maybe everyone does. I don't know. Maybe there are some people who are just blissfully unaware of all those sad feelings of you know, autumn, but I felt like they were worth reproducing if maybe they hadn't been in that particular locale. I think this is a funny thing to say but against all of that sadness, and kind of hope against hope, being hopeful against hopelessness, I had this sound of a score to a Marvin Hamlisch score to Take the Money and Run. And I actually asked him to do the music and he said he didn't understand such sadness that was in the movies that this isn't something I do. Which is really true and I didn't get it and I wanted to persist and say no, but that score for Take the Money and Run, that has such like almost like a little kids hopefulness about it.  That's what I wanted. It was like a river running underneath the ground of the place that I had grown up with. And I think the other inspiration for the movie was pretty, I don't know, maybe it's called plagiarism. Maybe it's called inspiration, the collected feeling that you can distill from the entire works of Jacques Demy, and I loved Jacques Demy 's films. They gave me a license. I saw them and said, Well, if you can mythologize your own little town in the northwest of France that maybe seems like romantic to Eric Mendelsohn from old Bethpage, Long Island, New York but truly is a kind of a unremarkable place at the time it was made, that I can do it with my town. I can mythologize everybody, and love them and hate them and talk about them and so those are some of the feelings that went into it.  John But they all came through. So, what I want to do is just go through the handful of lessons that you told me X number of years ago, and let's see what you think about them now. So, one of the big ones that turns up again and again, when I talked to filmmakers was the idea of write to your resources. And in the case of Judy Berlin, you told me that that's a great idea and you thought you were: It takes place over one day with a bunch of characters in one town. When in fact you were really making things quite difficult for yourself by having middle aged people with homes and cars and businesses and professional actors who all had other things going on. Eric  03:35And 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  03:53Do you really think it was stupid? Eric  03:54It 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  04:53Yeah, 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  05:57Remember, 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  06:30Yeah, 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  07:16I 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  08:29Yeah, 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 on

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Matthew G. Anderson about his hit web series, “Theater People.” LINKSTheater People Website: https://www.theaterpeoplewebseries.com/Theater People on SeekaTV: https://watch.seeka.tv/en/theater-peopleNo Context Theater People on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nocontexttheaterpeople/A Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTranscript — Episode 105 [Film Clip 0:00 to 0:32] John Gaspard  00:33That 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  01:44Desperation. Don't they all come from desperation? John Gaspard  01:48I guess so. What was your desperate situation? Matt Anderson  01:52I 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  03:08All that being said, why did you land on the idea of theater people as your subject matter? Matt Anderson  03:14Just 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  05:11I 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  05:33Being 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  05:57So, 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  06:10Yeah, the Promo Minutes.  John Gaspard  06:12Why 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  06:22Yeah, 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  10:34Okay, 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  10:46When we finished Season One, there were a lot of questions about what we were going to do next. Because it h