Old years. It should die. People pay good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas hof hoofcorn
in No Masters. In the Projection Booth, everyone for ten. Podcasting isn't
boring? Turn it off. Something stalks the streets, something possessed of animal
cunning and fury. I understand you know something. I'm the White Shapel matter.
I have seen the man Jack the Ripper. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson
plunge into the Victorian underworld seeking the answers to the most puzzling case in the
annals of crime. Who is Jack the Rivers? Why does he let them
keep you? A story that at last and reveals the identity of history's most
elusive murderer. A stunning cast rout together with an astonishing story, one of
the great screen entertainments in the classic tradition, murder my decree. Welcome to
the Projective Booth. I'm your host, Mike White joined me once again,
is mister Aaron Peterson. Hello. Also back in the booth is mister David
McGregor, And once again it's a delight to be here. We conclude our
month of discussions around the nineteen seventies interpretations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective
Sherlock Holmes. We wrap up with nineteen seventy ninth Murder by Decree, directed
by Bob Clark. The film is a mix of British and Canadian actors,
including Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes and James Mason as Doctor Watson. The fictional
pair are put on the path of the very real Jack the Ripper, one
of Britain's most famous serial killers. We are going to be spoiling the film
as well as probably from Hell and Study and Terror. So if you don't
want those movies ruined to just go ahead and turn off the podcast, go
watch those and come back after you have we will still be here. So,
Aaron, when was the first time you saw Murder by Decree and what
did you think, Sir? I don't remember it. I was a kid.
I don't know that. But I went to seek this one out because
I remember seeing Black Christmas and going that's a crazy movie, and wanted to
find other films that Bob Clark had directed. Didn't realize un till many many
years later, that he also did Christmas story guys had an eclectic career.
Porkys too, right, he did Porky's. I don't know if he did
Porky's too, but he did Porky's. Also. I saw Black Christmas,
Love Black Christmas, and then someone told me he did at Sherlock Holmes,
which of course I'm a Sherlock Holmes buff. So I went nuts and went
to seek this out. And this is probably of the four we've done,
this is probably my favorite, to be perfectly honest and to Eva, how
about yourself. I would have seen this most likely in the late nineteen eighties,
coming to it after kind of getting more interested in Sherlock Holmes with a
Jeremy Brett TV series that came out in nineteen eighty four, and I was
looking for other interpretations of the character. And you know, I've heard good
things about this, and so yeah, probably late nineteen eighties, because I'm
coming to it out of the Jeremy Brett series and the Jeremy Brett series.
He is very heroic, he's brilliant, he's very capable, a little bit
trickly, and so for me, as much as I like the ambiance and
the photography and the story, The Homes of Christopher Plumber kind of fell flat
because he's just not a very good detective. He's a better human being.
I mean, he's crusading around London, crying and feeling sorry for people,
but he's just really, really bad at his job. It was kind of
hit and this for me, I liked everything about it, but the new
humanized homes did not, you know, exactly set the world on fire as
far as I was concerned. And how do you feel about it today?
I we watched it for this podcast, and because of the kind of cultural
weight that the Rathbone Bruce films had. I mean, even in the reviews
for this film, people were still, you know, they were comparing Christopher
Plumber to Basil Rathbone. And you know Rathbone his last film as Sherlock Holmes
was nineteen forty six. And James Mason's Watson is compared to Nigel Bruce.
It's like, oh, well, how great. He's not Nigel Bruce.
He's very Nigel Bruce. Like he is a little bit dottering. You know
the famous scene in the movie with him and his pa, that's right out
of Nigel Bruce. He is a kind of almost petulant child worried about his
pet. Yeah, what are you doing. I'm trying to corner the last
pe on my plate squashed, ma pe. Now you've got to corner.
Yeah, it was squashing it from his pa. I'm just trying to help.
I didn't want it squashed. It didn't like it that way squashed.
And I get who says, Judan feeled pop when you writing down at it.
I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking. Do I like the film, Yeah,
I do. I just personally, I'm not a huge fan of the
idol smashing versions of Sherlock Holmes. I like him to be competent, and
he's just not in any of the films that we're considering, except, oddly
enough, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes is a smarter brother. Yeah, Holmes
is in good form in that, but he's not the focus. He's barely
in the movie. The other three films that we're considering, private life seven
percent solution. In this film, he's pretty pretty broken and not very effective
at his ostensible job. I really wonder if that again. We talked at
the end of the last episode about the seventies and taking those idols and smashing
them and how the seventies affected stuff. I mean the way that this movie
plays out, and I'm just going to jump right into it. This whole
idea of the Freemason's being responsible for a cover up of the murders of these
people. It is so much a conspiracy, paranoid thriller type of thing that
I just really see this fitting in very well, Like to your point,
maybe not in the Sherlock Holmes cannon, but in nineteen seventy nine. This
was perfect for nineteen seventy nine. And it matches up with Ripper Laura too.
I mean Ripper. There's a lot of freemasony and conspiracy theory there two
and they're just trying to tie it with Sherlock Holmes. And I like the
humanistic portrayal that Plumber has here. It's very much the more relatable homes,
not necessarily the homes of the books, but it's still a Sherlock Holmes and
he makes it his own, and I really I loved his approach. I
really really did. Even though it's not true, it's not true to the
books. I will agree with David on that it's not true to the character
of Holms. I don't agree that he's not good at his job. I
just think because of the nature of the crime he's solving, he can't really
do anything publicly without I mean, it's Jack the Ripper. It's an unsolvable
case. Everything has to me behind closed doors. Well, as is quite
out in the film. Though he's working for the bad guys. He's working
for the government. They're trying to find this you know, this missing woman,
and he's also working for the radicals, and much like in seven Percent
Solution, he's the hog being used to find truffles. He doesn't even realize
what he's doing. He gets knocked out twice and as he says at one
point, I led the killers write to Mary Kelly. I led them write
to their final victim, and yes he did. I like my heroes to
be at least somewhat heroic. I mean, he isn't worked human absolutely,
because he starts the film and he is, you know, the kind of
stereotypical, completely out of touch, upper class tough. He's attending you know,
the opera with Watson in his own private booth. They both have white
ties on, and when he's called upon by the merchants of Whitechapel, you
know, we've got these women being slaughtered in the streets. It'd be nice
if you could help us. He's not interested at all at all. He's
just, you know, he's obsessed with cleaning his pipe out. I didn't
read it that way. The way that I'm reading it is it's it's Holmes
playing with them like he doesn't he doesn't know if he wants to work for
them specifically, but he's intrigued by the case. That's the way that I
took it. Okay, Well, even Watson says, you were really rude.
So it was those people, Yeah, which is more of the Sherlock
Holmes I'm used to, you know, more of that Benedict cumber badge.
I'm not paying attention, but I actually am paying attention kind of thing,
or I'm just putting you off type of thing. Yeah, I'm not going
to try to pile onto the movie. I find it kind of interesting that
one of the main characters, and here ish is Donald Sutherland as Robert Lee's
a psychic, and that Holmes goes along with this. I'm just like,
it feels like Sherlock Holmes would never listen to somebody who purports to be a
psychic. No, not to this degree. No. I found it interesting
though that when you watch those scenes, there's a kind of a like a
dreamy effect to show what Sutherland sees and his psychic powers. And then there's
another one, but that's more of a flashback, and I think he actually
gets like two flashbacks. So he gets two flashbacks and a psychic vision,
but they're all kind of treated the same, so they're treated almost like the
truth. Holmes is just like okay, yeah, I'll go along with this.
Gets some of his best clues from a psychic vision. I think he
was fascinated by it is the way that it's basically laid out. You're right,
schlock. Holmes would never take the word of a psychic, but he
would be intrigued by He was always intrigued by odd teas, so that would
he would listen, He would hear him out. He would listen. But
I think it would be more to figure out if he's actually complicit in some
respect. Yeah, yeah, I would put him on the suspect list if
he came to be and said, oh I had this psychic vision or somehow
sure Lack would have to kind of undermine him and be like well, good,
my good man, you actually saw this person here and then he implanted
into your dreams. Blah blah blah. You know, my good friend Sigmund
Freud would tell you all about it again. With the nineteen seventies, the
nineteen seventies were just rife. You know, we talked about the Freemasons,
and this really implicates the Freemasons as being complicit in the Jack the Ripper case,
and that goes back to while it goes back a long ways, but
it was really kind of formalized by a couple of writers who wrote The Ripper
File. They had also worked on a Jack the Ripper miniseries from nineteen seventy
three. And then there was also I can't remember it was those writers or
another one who was part of the episode on In Search Of In Search of
Arthur C. Clark's Mysterious World, and it feels like there was one other
one. I mean, the nineteen seventies were really a golden time for conspiracy
theories, like before we came to where we're at here twenty twenty three.
But when I was a kid, I was just glue to the TV when
In Search Of was on, because almost everything was presented not necessarily as just
a mystery, but it was really very creepy the way that they would lay
these things out. During the autumn of eighteen eighty eight, there occurred one
of the most baffling crimes in the files of Scotland Yard. In a White
Chapel area of London's East End, women walked in fear of their lives.
A wave of terror had been caused by an elusive murderer known as Jack the
River. It was very much like watching Lights Out or some sort of spook
show from the nineteen fifties, or listening to the radio and getting the Bejesus
scared out of you In Search of did that for me? I don't know
if I went back and I watched In Search of Now if I would be
as freaked out. But man, oh man, when I was watching when
I was a kid, just the opening credits were enough to make my skin
crawl. And then when you get something like you know, the Jack the
Rippers story being told in that format that they had with Leonard Nimoy narrating it,
man, it was a really damn scary show and this kind of fits
right in there. And it's great that Clark, I mean Clark at this
point he directed one kind of like a revenge type thriller type thing, but
really so much of his work to this point was horror movies. We talked
on Mark Beagley's Wake Up Heavy. He had me on there for an episode
about Deranged about death, dream about well, actually he came onto the projection
booth about Black Christmas and there was one other one, Oh, children shouldn't
play with dead things. And so having Clark be a director of this Jack
the Ripper story, I mean he's using a lot of tricks that he used
from Black Christmas idea of this slasher. Yeah, this is right there,
Like I was expecting the Ripper to ask how Billy's doing. It's like,
um, Sherlock Holmes gets his own PG rated horror movie with really how it
works out? Yeah, this was PG rated. A lot of people thought
it should have been R rated kind of with him on that, honestly,
But it was the era of Chariots of the Gods, im Pyramid Power,
you know, all those had a vogue. One point I would make about
inserting supernatural elements into a Sherlock Holmes story, it's it's worth noting that was
a real concern of Sherlock Holmes fans, especially in the nineteen twenties when Arthur
Conandra was still writing stories. He personally was deeply, deeply invested in spiritualism.
He wrote a book about fairies. He was pretty credulous. But he
drew the line at Sherlock Holmes, as he he said in one of the
stories, uh, you know, at Homes talking to Watson, this agency
stands flat footed on you know, solid ground, on the earth. No
ghosts need apply. And so that was kind of a relief to fans of
the rigidly logical Sherlock Holmes. But other people have certainly tried to invest,
uh, you know, supernatural themes into the stories, and there weren't the
original stories. You know, the potential was there in The Hound of the
Baskervilles, in The Sussex Vampire, there were was the potential for supernatural elements,
but there was always a perfectly logical, very down to earth, rationalist
human reason that we had been dressed up to look supernatural sco as it were.
Yeah. Well, Arthur Connon Doyle's father was a very talented artist who
wound up in an asylum. He died in an asylum, and a lot
of people felt Arthur Connon Doyle was headed down the same path. And his
was a case in which, as you can see more recently with George Lucas
and Star Wars or JK. Rowling and Harry Potter, the fans to a
certain extent kind of took Sherlock Holmes away because you know, Arthur Condrell was
maybe not one hundred percent trustworthy with this thing that they really valued because of
his I mean, he opened up a bookstore, a spiritualism bookstore in Westminster,
and he was spending hundreds of thousands of pounds. When he came to
the United States, he came to do a tour of lectures on spiritualism.
So it was a real concern of fans of Sherlock Holmes that he was going
to eventually fall prey to wanting to insert more spiritualistic themes into the Sherlock Holmes
stories. But he never did. A lot of where you fall on a
lot of these particular films are where do you sit as a Sherlock Holmes,
as a Holmesian, so to speak. If you're a purist, you don't
want to dva too far from the books, right, you don't want to
get too far from the written word. But when something's been reincorporated over two
hundred times by two hundred plus different writers, at some point, you know,
is it really the same work anymore? Or is it something? Is
it? Is it really owned by more by the public than it is the
original written word, Because that same character can be utilized in supernatural and horror
and different elements. If someone appreciates the substance of the character, it's it's
a tricky thing. I think if you are an absolute purist, If you
are if you are very beholden to the original written text, a lot of
these films are not going to work for you in general. But if you're
open to expanding the world, trying new things, seeing where it fits,
I think you're more open to a lot of these. And that's really a
lot of these are. They're just taking a lot of license with the character
itself. I am one of those writers. I've written three Sherlock Holmes plays
and I adapted them into novels. And yeah, there's people that would say
to me, why can't you do like a straight Sherlock Holmes story. You
know, doctor Watson, Sherlock Holmes mystery the end, And yeah, one
of the problems with at is mysteries don't translate in the same way that some
genres do to film or stage, because it's not especially if you're watching a
play. The audience doesn't want to be sitting there trying to remember clues.
You know. They want action, they want humor, they want romance.
Yeah, they want mystery, but it can't be just an armchair detective sitting
in his rooms. That's for most people, that's not going to be enough.
So you add other elements. And in my case, I tried to
remain very true to what I thought was the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, which
was this is somebody who is basic instinct is to help people and to use
his ability to use his skill. Doesn't matter what strata of society you come
from. He wants to help people, and he's a good guy and his
friendship with Watson is part of the appeal of the stories. And so,
yeah, you riff on it, but at least for me anyway, I
wanted to be faithful in many ways to the general thrust of the story.
In the last movie, we talked about how both Freud and Homes were contemporaries,
and in this they really explore this idea. And we'll talk about some
other interpretations of Holmes meets the Jack the Ripper later on, but you know,
here again we've got a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes, and I think,
David, you also deal with contemporaries of homes and that's what I've read in
the rest of the Nick Meyers stuff. It's apart from well, I guess
even in The Canary Trainer, which is kind of Holmes meets the Phantom of
the Opera, But again there are still real character, real people that he's
injecting into this. And then they're you know, I mentioned either last week
or the week before, this whole idea of Holmes and George Bernard Shaw or
Oscar Wilde or even brom Stoker, all of them are in London at the
same time kind of thing. And with this, you've got world's greatest detect
versus one of the world's greedious quote unquote serial killers, one of the best
unsolved cases that there's ever been. And like I was saying, you've got
all of these things going on in the seventies where you've got different books being
written about Jack the Ripper or all this happening, I guess because maybe it
was ninety years or I don't know exactly what was in the air. But
really, Jack the Ripper has been in movies, probably not as many times
as Sherlock Holmes, but I would say he probably gives him a good run
for his money. Even the same year that this movie came out, we
had another Nick Myer property. It was Jack the Ripper Versus H. G.
Wells in Time after Time, one of my most favorite movies. And
yeah, it was amazing to see how often Jack the Ripper showed up in
movies. I mean, I would be curious if there's a list out there
of how many times he's shown up or people that are very much like the
Jack the Ripper. I mean, it's really kind of wild, but I
thought it was very smart that they say, Okay, how would Sherlock Holmes
saw this case and get into your guys's earlier points. It's interesting that they
start off with three people already being murdered, and Sherlock Holmes doesn't seem to
give a toss about these people being murdered. It isn't until he is approached
by these merchants and kind of gets the taste for it and says, oh,
maybe I will take this case on. I saw I still saw that
definitely than you guys did, though. I saw that as he was intrigued
by it, but he wasn't requested on it. And then when he got
the direct request and he was more fascinated about it, you know, he
didn't want to overstep. And then you kind of like see the gradual increasing
humanistic qualities of him as he gets more and more involved in the case,
and it's it's probably the most relatable Sherlock Holmes I can actually think of,
Like he's very, very normal, every day Joe in this. So I
saw that a little differently than you guys did. Well, there were people
that wrote to Arthur Connon Doyle. You know, you're the creator of Sherlock
Holmes, here's a mystery, and he was asked about. As far as
I know, he never made any serious inquiries into Jack the Ripper, But
there were other cases. There was a guy named Oscar Slater, there was
another guy named George at Dalgey who were charged with crimes or suspective of crimes,
and Conon Doyle took up the cudgel on their behalf because people felt the
creator of Sherlock Holmes as somebody who can help me. He was a very
kind of a crusading guy in his own right. He had a strong sense
of what was right and wrong. And you know, as you mentioned George
Bernard Shaw. You know, one of the famous quotes about Arthur Conan Doyle
is people would rather be wrong with Conon Doyle than right with Bernard Shaw,
because he was an everyman. He was beloved. He was the author of
Sherlock Holmes. He was a sportsman, he was a patriot. He was
very, very highly regarded by most of British society. Mike, you were
just talking about Jack the Ripper and all the films, and I remember seeing
it everywhere as a kid, you know, just Jack the Ripper is everywhere.
How do you how do you guys feel about the idea that this seems
to be really the only serial killer in history that is grotesquely treated almost as
a fictional property. I don't feel that the gravity of what occurred at that
time is really taken into account in almost anything that's based on that Jack the
Ripper appears in. Yeah, after a while, you start to think that
Jack the Ripper is as equally fictional as Sherlock Holmes. Isn't it a little
disturbing? But I mean in some respects, Yeah, even thinking about I
was just thinking about Jack the Ripper movies, and I think, you know,
even going back to you know, The Lodger, the Hitchcock film,
obviously the movie you're familiar with, that one with your your Hitchcock podcast.
Well he's basically stand in for Jack the Ripper. And that's how many years
after these crimes actually take place in nineteen twenty seven, so yeah, forty
stand and that's an early that was still in the silent era. Well,
he was never caught. He's the perfect mythic bogey man, I mean his
historically. Yeah, there's some really dark characters out there. I mean,
you know, Elizabeth Bathy, the Countess from Hungary, I believe was a
nasty piece of work, but with the tabloids that they had at that time,
in the newspaper coverage that the killing's got, and it just had a
mythic quality to it almost from the outset, the alleys of Whitechapel, the
slums of London, the fog, this you know, remorseless killer going after
helpless women. Um, it kind of ticked off all the marks of this
is obviously horrific, beyond her rific, but it's a great story and it's
gotten you know, a lot of attention in part because of that. It's
it's almost timeless, and I don't think you're gonna see Jack the Ripper stories
or you know, tames kind of generated from that disappearing in any time soon.
It's just something that's always astounded me to and I'm guilty. I've watched
a ton of these movies. I've I've watched so many of them. Can't
keep drag. It's it's way what five women that occurred over three and a
half months, right, And it's it's captured the cinema escape for ever since,
ever since, the entire the entirety of cinema has had Jack the Ripper
in it, almost creating this this whole fictional aura and no other There's there's
tons of unknown serial killer cases out there, none on the Zodiac. How
many Zodiac killer movies that are that seem fictional are out there, Probably none,
they're the ones based on the case. There might be a couple out
there that are like Great b or something okay kind of movies, but nothing
like Jack the Ripper. And I don't understand why we've done that with this
particular case, probably because, like David's said, it's just so fascinating in
terms of the dynamics of it. But it's it's wild how we just basically
treat it like it is a work of fiction. Well, just the idea
too, of the supernatural. And there's movies. There was what a James
Spader movie called Jack's Back, where it's the idea of and I think Scotty
on Star Trek got possessed by the spirit or Jack the Ripper on one episode
as well. And you know there was when I wrote about William Freakin's Cruising,
I was talking about how, more than anything, it feels like the
spirit of a killer gets inside and passes from one person to the other.
And I made comparisons between you know, the killer that's in Cruising that just
kind of moves from person to person, you know, because you never see
how hot, you know, the height changes, the body shape, change
all this stuff. And I'm just like, well, what if it actually
is just moving from person to person, Well, if it's the spirit of
Jack the Ripper and even you know, we'll talk a little bit more about
Dust and Shadow, but there's talking there about, oh there were other famous
killers in London, how about the London Monster and how about this? And
I'm just like, is she gonna go the author? Is she going to
go into like this happens every forty years or something like that. It's like
a Victor Toombs type of thing, where you know, the evil goes into
hibernation and that comes out. But yeah, it was this whole idea of
the killer that comes out of the fog and goes back and then disappears after
these five horrific killings. Whatever happened to this guy. Yeah, it just
kind of lends itself to that supernatural flayer. So having a psychic in here
kind of makes sense. But you know, at the same time, it's
it is interesting, like you were saying, David, that we didn't have
the supernatural in homes, which I kind of appreciate. And then I noticed
that so many movies will try to move into that, I mean, or
they'll give us a nice logical explanation. I mean, we talked way back
for weeks ago about Young Trilock, Holmes, and that seems like there's a
lot of supernatural stuff in it until you realize, oh no, somebody's being
drugged and that's why they're seeing all of these hallucinations. Well, there's a
big market for that particular slice of any kind of narrative. I have students
that I don't know if it's still on. They were big fans of the
show ghost Hunters. All iways ask them, have you ever wondered why the
show wasn't called ghost Finders. You don't have to find anything to make it
a good show and for it to be an entertaining narrative. And I think
part of the appeal of Jack the Ripper as well as I want to say,
it's like what every twenty years, twenty five years, there's a big
splash, I know who it is, here's the killer and here's the proof,
and everybody gets all excited, Oh my god, it's this, it's
that. In this case, it's Prince Eddie. And then it's like that
gets you know, gradually debunked by people actually looking at actual data. The
Ripper keeps on getting, you know, brought up because it's money, you
can monetize it, and people you love that story. Clark shows us pretty
early on parts of the face of the killer, so it doesn't keep him
in shadow and POV shots and all this for too long. I mean,
pretty early on in the movie. You know, I talked about how when
we see Nicole Williamson's eye in the seven Percent Solution, that we see that
first and he's got that, you know, the super wide pupil that he's
all strung out in this movie pretty early on, and we get a shot
at the ripper's eyes and we'll talk about from how later on, but it's
very similar where it's almost pure black and then just this tiny pin prick of
a pupil. So we're kind of getting parts of the face and we just
don't know exactly whose face it is. And then once it's revealed, it's
like, I don't know who these guys are. Like it takes until this
theory protracted explanation at the end of this where you know, I mean,
I think it's fifteen minutes of kind of like Simon Oakland in Psycho where they
realized they had to Sherlock Holmes this. Yes, yes, well they had
John Gilgood for one day, damn it. And we are going to film
John Gilgood all freaking days, see David, That's where he Sherlock Holmes the
hell out of that though, like he just saved it all until the very
very end. But by the same token, it's like, Okay, the
British government is sanctioning the murder of women and children and I'm going to give
you guys a jolly good talking to and then I am going to keep it
a secret because we don't want to make any ways. It's like, that's
weak, that's weak. Yeah, I think they had Gilgood for a day.
They ran with it. If anything, I think this movie really would
have benefited from having microft in here and having this whole thing of like,
hey, brother man, you really need to keep the lid on this.
And yeah, it goes all the way up to the animals of power and
all this, but you really need to you know, my job's in jeopardy.
The whole British government's in jeopardy. You really need to put the lid
on this. I'm surprised they didn't go that route. And by his even
his own admission, he's not he's not saying Eddie was involved in the murders.
Per se. It was some devoted meets of his and that they're just
basically covering it up. I mean, I could see that happen in pretty
much every government, so I don't think it's it's too far fetched, especially
you know these days it's Jack the Ripper and then it's like, oh,
it's two guys. That's not just one guy. It's like a kind of
tag team effort. Because that is the conspiracy driven by the Freemasons that are
trying to protect the monarchy from scandal and the potential that there's a Catholic child
that has been fathered by Prince Eddie, who, to clarify, Prince Edward,
the Duke of Clarence, was the grandson of Queen Victoria, and so
his father, who became Edward and seventh he was in direct line for the
throne, and so it would have been a huge deal if Eddie had fathered
a child out of wedlock with the a prostitute. And then yeah, the
whole Catholic thing too, I guess that's because of the Engludican Church that they're
all members of, and so just even the religion or I mean, I'm
so whatever about religion. I mean, okay, the kid was baptized Catholic.
One just re baptized. But I guess it doesn't work. I don't
know. You can't do that, Okay, you you are so going to
hell boy, just by even thinking it. Really listens, My grandfather got
my grandmother regnant and then they had to get married. This is in Scotland,
and he was Protestant and she was Catholic and they had to get married
so that they could have my mom, and her family stopped speaking to her.
You can look at things in retrospect and say that's insane, but when
people get self righteous, they get rationality goes right out the window. Well,
and I forget about things like the troubles over in Ireland and that being
Catholic and Protestant were super big deals for a long day time, and so
many people lost their lives. Well they had, you know, Elizabeth the
First and Mary, Queen of Scots, and the whole issue of was England
going to be a Catholic or a Protestant country was a point of contention for
a long long time. I totally can understand that, No you can't,
but you're just saying it's not right no matter what The movie itself. I
think it's a very wonderfully shot. I think a lot of this works.
And we're talking before as far as the relationships go, I think that the
relationship between Holmes and Watson is really the reason why I come back to this
movie time and again just to see, well, it's Holmes and Watson,
but moreover it's Plumber and Mason, and just to watch how these guys act
around each other. And even that funny pe scene. And that's pea by
the way, ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't seen this movie, there's
no golden showers in this It is a p on. That's the director's cut.
I love that. I love the p scene. It's a very it's
a very charming scene. And yeah, I agree they work. They work
really well together. It's part of the you know, the humanized homes that
you see homes laughing it up with Watson, I mean sometimes kind of inappropriately,
you know, near the end when they discover the eviscerated Mary Kelly.
You know, Holmes and Watson have a bit of a smile. You know,
here have my gun, old man, you might need it, and
it's like, why man, you guys know what's happened like five feet behind
you. It's in the frame. So I found that a little little disturbing.
I've got some friends where I could see us being that ridiculous in those
moments. It's just like moment of lightness. It's almost like the back of
the world disappears and the horror and they're just trying to find motivation to continue
on. You know, maybe I'm overthinking it, maybe just because I like
I like those two away. Everybody in this cast is fantastic. I was
very surprised. I also forget that David Hemmings is in this, and his
role is interesting because he one he's basically there to be a red herring,
and two he's there to be part of the mystery as well. And he
and those shopkeepers allegedly like they are all in cahoots and they are all these
revolutionaries I want to do away with the monarchy. Holmes is kind of a
dupe for these guys as well. It takes a long durn time before he
figures out that Hemmings is working with those guys, but he's great to see
on screen, and every time he shows up and just like, oh,
okay, cool, this is pretty good. Because he basically is he's a
superfluous character of quite often he's basically just another version of Lestrade, but more
of playing clothes men. I suppose, but Lestrade in here. I really
liked him in this movie. But in Lestrade is I mean, I don't
think we've seen other than that one of the deleted scenes from the Private Lives
of Sherlock Holmes. I don't think we've seen the Strade this entire month until
this episode. No, but I mean, weirdly enough, the guy that
plays Lestrade, Frank Finley. He plays Lestrade in the study in Terror as
well, which is the nineteen sixty five version of Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the
Ripper. Well, and the guy that plays Sir is a Sir Charles.
I think he's also in that movie. A yes, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yes, he and his facial hair are treasures. I love it.
I love it. Yeah, they're worth the price of admission. I
should mention. I don't know if you guys know, but John Gielgood was
He did play Sherlock Holmes on radio in the BBC, and then I might
say nineteen fifty four he was Holmes and Sir Ralph Richardson was his Watson.
When I was listening to the stories that the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes's smarter brother
were based on Gielgood. It was redio versions of at least two of those,
so that was kind of nice to hear. So those are available either
for free or for pretty there and cheap over on Audible, So yeah,
definitely check it out. It's like we talked about, if you're a British
actor, you have to have played Sherlock Holmes or Watson at some point.
I will mention one thing that I realized why I was watching this one again
that it jars me a little bit. Like every film that we've talked about,
Sherlock Holmes is running around and his deer stalker and his Inverness cape,
which he would never do in London. Never. That's for when you're out
in the countryside. And that was one of the things I liked best about
the Jeremy Brett series is when he's in London, he dresses like a gentleman
and it's only he puts on, you know, the deer stalker when he
goes to Dartmoor for The Hound of the Baskervilles. But every Holmes that we've
seen. He's charging about Holmes and this kind of as actually Robert Stephens says
in the Private Life, this improbable costume that Watson has foisted upon him.
So Hollywood wants to They love that. Look, that's the Sherlock Holmes.
Look, that's a silhouette. That's it's almost like you know the Hitchcock silhouette.
You just you know it when you see it. Well, even before
we see Christopher Plumber, we see the pipe, and it's the pipe that
leads us up to Christopher Plumber's face. So again he's kind of this symbol.
You know, we talked about how the pipe in a smarter brother like
sometimes you didn't even see the actor, you just saw the pipe. It's
like you could have gotten anybody then even just hold that pipe a little bit
off screen and there you have Sherlock Holmes looking over things. I always find
that's to me, one of the most interesting things about any incarnation of Holmes
is how did they first present him? When you first see him, Like
in the Basil Rathmone, how to the Basketball's you just see his torso pacing
back and forth, and you see Watson sitting down and you know it's Sherlock
Holmes, but all you see is in pacing back and forth. And then
they cut to Rathbone in profile, and he had that, as somebody once
described it, two profiles pasted together. Look, I mean, he had
a great silhouette to him, and I always find that interesting. How are
we going to first show this iconic hero for his first appearance in this particular
film. I wanted to go back to something you were talking about earlier eron
as far as the fictionality of Jack the Ripper. This is going to sound
like a weird analogy, but Jack the Ripper kind of reminds me of Santa
Claus. Sometimes you get those like Santa Clauses coming to town where it's like,
Okay, here's how he got the hat, here's how he got the
laugh, here's why he's named Chris Kringle, and Jack the Ripper is very
similar in that. Okay, we know that this was the order of victims.
We know these and like every because by now by the time we're recording
this, I've listened to Dustin Shadow, I've looked at the last Sherlock Holmes
story. I believe it's called Watched Study and terror watch this one several times
and then also watch from Hell. So right now, it's like, okay,
it's just the same pieces being moved around slightly. Like I said,
it's interesting that he starts after the third murder already takes place in this one,
so we don't have to have all five of the murders being shown,
you know, And you've got like, all right, well, Mary Kelly
as the ALUs the final victim, and she's done worse than anybody else is.
And it's just all of these different trappings that you have, and then
you get the whole thing of the note the Jews are the ones who will
not be blatant whatever that whole thing and or Jews ju Wes. That's a
real clue. I mean, that's a real jector. If it's a real
thing, it's a real thing. So that it's just like, Okay,
we've got all these pieces on our chessboard here, how do we rearrange them
in order to weave Sherlock Holmes in there? Or Johnny Depp as a detective,
like, how do we now explain these things in this particular way?
And sometimes that arrow of clues can lead to Prince Edward. Sometimes it goes
over here to anonymous doctor over here. You know, my favorite one is
kind of goes back to private life of Sherlock Holmes. The whole idea that
it's actually the Lockdesk monster is the one that is Jack the Ripper? Is
this the way it happened? It was Jack the Ripper in fact, a
sixty foot sea serpent from Scotland. Did I take this job for a christ
Block? We may never know the answer to these questions. Where do these
clues lead to all the way up to lock Nest? Possibly so, but
these it's it's very fascinating to see how they wind Sherlock Holmes in amongst these
clues and then also make him a very humanistic character. You know, that's
kind of a little bit of the bone of contention with this up. So
it is just Holmes as a humanist, Holmes as more of the traditional story.
How does that work out? Because you know, I was listening to
one of the audio commentaries and somebody said, oh, Holmes cries through like
a third of this movie, and I'm like, it seems a little much,
but he definitely does ships and tears, especially in the uh Genevieve Boujeold
scene where she just again great cast. She just kind of comes in and
steals the show for probably about five to ten minutes. She wasn't she captivating
unless she was absolutely captivating. Yeah, she was great, and she fit
in with the whole we're gonna cast Canadians and English people. That's it,
that's our cast. He got me one of those, so she fit in
really well. And I think I think I believe I've read some place she
cut her own hair for for this film, and she's, yeah, well
she's just fabulous. She's just off the off the charts fabulous. Then it
made me go and look up her original scenes and Voyager and watch those.
And then hear Kate Melbo through just talking so much trash about how bouge Old
pronounced things. I'm like, wow, you're kind of a see you next
Tuesday lady, I mean a big fan of you anymore. Kate melgrew So
it's a good turn. Boujeold would have made a good Janeway is all I'm
saying, because she can definitely act, and this was another great time for
Genevie Boujeold. I grew up with Genevie bougeold in movies and to see your
back in this and again freaking Donald Sutherland, you know, small part,
but very powerful and great, you know, to your point, David another
great Canadian actor and the seventies man like to me, Gould and Sutherland just
own the seventies and these two kind of odd looking characters that just were in
all of these different films. Though with this one, every time I saw
Donald Sutherland in this Victorian garb, I was just like, I mean,
it looks like he's about to go on a great train robbery, because he
was so great in that movie. And I think that was just the year
prior. It's like he was starting to corner the I can be a weirdo
Victorian person. Susan Clark was great too. I really thought the acting across
the board was it was just phenomenal, or at least it looked very strong,
very strong. Anybody who's been married to Alex Carris is okay. In
my book Obscured Detroit lyons anecdote there big timeline. Well for me, he'll
he'll always be Mango more at first than always in my heart. Mongo only
pun in Game of life, but a great football player too. Yeah,
so with that Jewess clue, I think that's really what puts this into the
whole idea of the Masons in this. So it's interesting because it's it's Mason's
covering up the crime, but then you still have Prince Edward at the heart
of it, and it's really from how is various much to that? But
I have heard the Prince Edward thing before, but I didn't necessarily associate with
the Mason's kind of protecting him. So this was, you know, in
these two unquote misguided guys that are murdering all of the people that knew about
the wedding and looking for this child. It makes more an interesting story.
Hasn't been discredited? Yeah do I care now? Not really? I mean
the Masons to me, and hopefully we'll hear from Mason later on in the
show. The Mason's arrows kind of a little bit mythological as well, because
they're so secretive, so you can attribute anything to Mason's I suppose. Yeah.
I don't think they ever had anything to do with this, but for
a long time they were attributed just because of that one clue. Just that's
the big conspiracy theory because of that one clue, and I'm like, couldn't
that have been Jack the Ripper throwing that clue in there? Just a three
year office trail. I'm just saying, well, they're they're reminiscent to me,
and no offense to all the Freemasons out there, but it's it's like
the Ku Klux Klan and the Grand Wizard and secret handshakes. It's it's stuffed.
Most people abandoned once they turned twelve. It's just stilliness. It's just
stilliness. But for a lot of people, you know the trappings of it,
it's very weird and mysterious and exciting, exotic. There's oftentimes kind of
sexual nuances associated with it, and it makes good fiction. But in real
life, having a secret ring and a secret handshake and you know I'm the
Prime Minister, I mean, come on, that's just it's it's sad.
Yeah, it's said, these are supposed to be grown men. And although
you know, I was in Big Boy a couple of weeks ago when the
guy in front of me in line to pay was filling me in on the
international banking conspiracy led by the Rothschilds, just out of the blue. I
don't even know this guy, and he's wand impart the secret New World Order
that was taking place beneath my very notes. So I think his brother actually
drives cat in Vegas because I got the same speech. Well, for the
record, God bless the rothschilds. Yes, this play is really big and
the Rothschild sector. So I actually have all my Facebook ads targeted just to
that. There's a special checkbox, but you have to know the secret to
get in. They're gonna be pointing at their laptops. They're talking about us.
They're talking. It's they're talking about us. Did you feel like Sherlock
Holmes was secretly a Freemason or just knew the secrets of their handshake and their
ring. He just knew he's not going to join any little boys club.
He's an adult. Anyway, that's my take. I don't know. I'm
like, what do you think? Well, it's my take too, But
my take was that he just knew it, not that he was a Mason.
And to your point, David, I think he already laughs at his
brother for being in the dietch and his club and all those silly rules that
they have. So I can see him not wanting to join in any sort
of society, especially to be beholden to somebody else that doesn't feel like other
than Watson and missus Hudson. It feels like he wants nothing to do with
any person in the world. People love that stuff, whether it's the Illuminati
or what is it called the Skull and Bones Club at Yale, the stone
Cutters. I guess it's important to a certain kind of mentality, which apparently
I do not possess me either. Well, and you even get into things
that are more open, but also these clubs like Elks and these guys where
they usually do good things for the neighborhood, those kind of things. But
it's more than anything, it's an excuse to hang around with guys your age
and park cards and drink. Yeah, exactly, it's all about drinking.
All comes back to that. Well, like the Great Groucho Mark said,
I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me
as a member. I honestly thought I was exaggerating, But then when I
was listening to the Bob Clark commentary, I was like, Oh, the
final scene is starting. I need to watch what time it is. It
literally takes fifteen minutes, this whole thing of what is it four people in
one room and shooting that, And I had to say, brob Rura,
Bob Clark does his best to make this interesting, but I just feel like
it goes on for too long. Listening to these books and watching these movies.
She like Holmes can come into a room and say, oh, how
was your time in Dorchester? What was your wife doing? Blah blah blah
you and just like give all of these things about somebody, and then inevitably
they or doctor Watson will have to say, how did you know that?
And then it gives the whole thing, well, you know, the dander
around his coat and the dirt at the bottom of his hem and he'll just
give this whole thing and explain away everything. That's an interesting thing. And
I like that, but the explanations like this where he's just going through point
by point I did like to the Clerk used alternate takes. Most of the
time. It wasn't the same things that we saw, so we got a
slightly different perspective, but still just for him to sum up this movie,
and Jacques over to the Prime Minister and they really get into the masonry stuff
and it just it was a little bit long in the tooth for me,
especially the second time I watched this this week, I was like, oh
my god, can I fast forward through this? Sure? Could? Yeah,
it's my house, I can do what I wanted. I thought,
same as you. It felt protracted, and you know, it's it's not
as you said, It's not simply a case of strlock Holmes explaining his deductive
process. He's basically spends fifteen minutes chastising and shaking his finger. You naughty
boys. You shouldn't be doing this, but I'm not going to tell anybody,
And you know, the power of it is considerably diminished. I mean
it's supposed to be again, part of the humanized homes. He's emotional,
he's getting, you know, weepy eyed thinking about what these horrible, powerful
men are doing. But in the end he doesn't. Actually, all he
wants to do is extract the promise from them that the bastard child, the
little girl, will not be harmed. And if he has that guarantee,
he'll keep mom about the whole sordid affair. And that's what that scene resolves
itself down too. I do think it's the most Sherlock Holmes that Sherlock Holmes
has ever Holmes. It's very much a hey, I'm gonna tell you everything
I learned in this entire movie right here. Welcome to your exposition. And
I do think it goes on a little bit too long. I do like
the scene overall. I feel like it's the culmination of the growing humanistic qualities
we've seen in homes throughout this film. You've got Sherlock Holmes at the end
of his career kind of in many respects. So he absolutely formed some kind
of an emotional bond with her at the sanitarium, and now you know,
and he lost Mary and now it's come to this, So it's this just
outward explosion of emotion. I think Christopher Plummer delivers it masterfully. In my
opinion. I feel like he captivates the screen in this scene. Even though
it does go on too long. It is a little bit too expedition heavy,
but I still enjoy it, and I really enjoy his performance, Like
I thought his performance was captivating personally. One thing that kind of struck me
is the whole notion of Genevieve Boujolt's character. He gets all worked up he
has a bit of a cry, he attacks the doctor, and then he's
subsequently told, oh, well, you know, she committed suicide next day,
and there's no question from him. I mean, it's like, you
know, Jeffrey Epstein, Oh he just died this cell, yep, that
those things happen. He's not gonna, you know, suggest at all that.
Maybe. No, he makes a reference to it in that scene,
remember what the wording was, But he does make a reference to I'm supposed
to take your word or I'm supposed to take you it. I don't remember
how I said it. I really don't, but I'm fairly certain does I
could be wrong. I could be wrong. It happens. Yeah, I
thought he just kind of swallowed that that particular story hole, or maybe you
know, pragmatically, it's like, well, that's not, at this point
in the film a direction that we want to go in and open up that
can of worms. So, I mean, she was right there teetering on
suicide, so it wouldn't probably surprised him either. Yeah, that's true.
All right, let's go ahead. We're going to take a break, and
we'll return with a pair of interviews. For a step, we'll hear from
Brent Morris, the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Freemasonry. And after
that we'll hear from Mary Keller yourself Susan Clark, and we'll be back with
both of those right after these brief messages. Hello everyone, this is Malcolm
McDowell. I just want to say that this is a request to listeners of
the Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via patrion dot com,
pat e o n dot com slash Projection Booth. That's pretty simple. I
think you can do that. It's a great show and Mike he provides hours
of great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my little drugs.
Settle down and take a listen and have a sip of the old molocco,
and then you'll be ready for a little of the old in out, in
out real horror show. Bye bye, mister Morris. When was the first
time you even heard about freemasonry? My grandfather was a Freemason and I knew
that he wore a Masonic rate. That was about all I knew about freemasonry
at that time. So term where I was in lace school, I'm sixteen,
seventeen years old, I'm talking. I was a member of the local
Magic Club, this chapter of the Society of American Magicians, and I was
talking to one of the older members and I had seen an ad in the
back of Popular Science magazine, and at that time they used to have hundreds
of these little bitty ads. One of the ads to caught my attention is
all the secrets of the thirty three degrees of Freemasonry for a dollar ninety nine.
You know. I said to my friend, what do you know about
the Masons. Well, I was in DeMolay, which is a boys group
that sponsored by the Masons. He said, but I'm not a Mason myself,
and we started speculating outcome. They're selling all the degrees at once,
why didn't they sell them for ten sons apiece or whatever. Then when I
was in college, the same type of conversation happened with one of my fraternity
brothers. His uncle was a Mason, and when you're in a dormitory for
churnity house setting, talk about anything and in the conversation just bounces around wildly
from one topic to another. And he and I had passing interest in freemason
I was just curious, what are the Secrets of the Lace, and his
uncle was a Mason. We were both at Southern Methodist University. So I
went to the SMU library and I checked out the books that they happened to
have a freemas drag, and I just started reading them. We continued the
discussion, and in January of our senior year, we both came back from
Christmas break and he says, Prent, you know what I'm gonna do.
I just turned twenty one. I want to join my Elson's Masonic munch.
But we've been talking about this for a semester or two or whatever. And
I thought for half a second and I said, huh, if you will
wait till rch, I will turn twenty one and I'll join with you.
He said, deal. So we both put in our petitions. On my
birthday, March twenty eight, we were both elected members and our initiation was
I think June twenty something like that, and I became a Mason, was
made a Master Mason. On Monday Friday, I packed van and drove to
during North Carolina to start grad school to Duke University. Duke kappen to have
a very large collection of books and freemasonry. I had just joined, so
I had dozens of questions. So I would check out as a stack of
books, take it home and read it over the weekend, and check out
another stack of books. And I just found that it appealed to me.
It clipped. I enjoyed the people I met, I enjoyed the symbolism of
the ritual. And Boy Scouts does not appeal to me. I remember that
I did in the Cup Scouts and they wanted us to move up Boy Scouts
and I went on a camping trip with them, and I thought to myself,
I don't like this camping. It's warumpy and it's cold. And then
they were going to teach us how to do more code and I had a
hard time doing that, and I said, this is the type of activities
they do, play with Morris Covid and sleep on the hard ground in the
cold weather. This ain't for me. So so boy Scouts didn't lick.
Freemasons did go figure, So what kind of activities do the Freemasons do?
What appeal to you about them? I think what I like the most were
the people that I met. Well. I was in grad school. I
was caught up in a ghetto of mathematicians with a few theoretical physicists hanging around,
and those are the only people I saw. When I was at a
Masonic lodge meeting. I saw there was an optometrist who was my optometrist,
and so he was a member of the lodge. The lieutenant sheriff and town
was a member, The fire chief was a member. Small shop owner that
I became buddies was a members. So I met all different kinds of people.
In fact, I post something posted something over my Facebook page and I
said, instead of this a theoretical physicist, a medic, a research mathematician,
and I'm a medieval scholar in a lot and walk into a book.
That's it. Lodge meeting was over. We wanted to finish our conversation and
share a pint before we blow. I find that kind to cool that I
can show up in a meeting and there is a research mathematician by training.
There, there's a nuclear physicist who have to be working on his master's degree
in a theology talk about a change. There was a scholar of medieval Latin,
and we were not talking about any of our academic special meetings. I
don't even remember what the topic was but let's go across the street get a
pipe before go home. So I enjoyed the people we meet. I enjoy
the intellectual background. I suspect that I went to a rotary meeting or a
Learning's club meeting and a member of neither. So I'm just speculating here,
But I doubt if people would be talking about what the Routarians, I know,
they would be talking about the Routarians we're doing three hundred years. They
would not be talking about what the Lions Club did in the community three hundred
years ago, or how they could have an influence on the officials in the
government and so on, and anyway, that's guess. The thing that appealed
to me was the depth of the history and the broad range of people that
I met. How did the Masons even start, Now that's a good question.
It's a little fuzzy, and I can tell you what we know about
the concept of a guild originated in France about twelve hundred. Norman conquest is
ten sixty, So some time after twelve hundred, the invading Norman's brought over
the concept of a guild the workers. It's a trade union, an apprenticeship
program. Then you have membership and there is this quid pro quel the crown
or the owners, whatever the business is, promise of fair wage and in
return with the guild guarantee he's equality a certain quality. So the earliest document
we have on the Mason's Guild is about thirteen running, so the Masons are
abandoned. In fact, it's interesting if you look at the laws. The
King made it illegal for Masons to assemble together in a group because they were
negotiating wage and the King didn't like that, didn't like that at all.
So you have this idea of build developing and then somewhere around sixteen hundred and
Scotland appears they had a practical problem to solve. And here's the problem.
If you're going to have a trade union and you want it to be a
closed shop, so you can't just walk up and start growing master's wages unless
you have been through the apprenticeship and so on. If you want to maintain
that, and you want to give your members the ability to travel. So
they finished the bridge in Aberdeen and they hear they're starting a new church in
Glasgow. We're going to travel and get some work, and that was one
thing that made Masons differed from other gills, is you could be a baker,
a miller, a brewer and spend your entire life in one village and
never leave. If you were a Freemason, when you finished the extension to
the town hall, when you prepare the bridge, when your job was finished,
there might not be mason work in town for ten or twenty years,
so you add to move. Now. When you go to the altered English
Dictionary and it looks at the definition of Freemason, it says they're two origins.
Are two possible origins. One is these were the skilled stone curbs that
worked in something called freestone, and freestone didn't have a grain to it,
so you could easily curve it in any shape or direction. The other possible
explanation is that the Freemasons were free to travel, unlike the other occupations.
So about sixteen hundred, because they were free to and they wanted to be
able to prove their membership, they invented the Mason word. Now, the
first written evidence we have of the Mason word is sixteen thirty seven and a
guy writes in his diary and I know this is going to be a heart
to believe but the Scots Nobles were having conflict with the English King, Scots
in English getting into dispute. They didn't think the Irish would be involved also,
So in this first reference, a guy's trying to play both sides of
the fence, trying to be loyal to the king, trying to make nice
with the Scots nobles. One of the Scots Nobles accuses term of having the
Mason word that he just said, okay, thank you, I'm all through.
And the reason for that is the king at this time was James,
the first of England, who is responsible for the King James Bible. He
was also a fanatic against witches. All of the witch trials that we had
in New England, all of the hundreds of witches burned at the stake in
England and Scotland were due to King James. This obsession and the Mason's word
secretly identify other Masons, and according to written a legend, it let you
secretly summon a Mason to do your bidding. There are two ways you could
do that. I could know the secret side. Hey, Mike, you
know what you do with this afternoon? And you say, oh, would
you like me to come help you with something, you got it. The
other explanation is that I was in league with the devil when I was sending
little demons over to whispering your ear. And that's what James anyway, the
whole reason I go into that detail. That is the first mention of the
Mason words sixteen thirty seven. And there are two things that are significant about
the first. One that's significant is it's scary to be accused of having the
mason work. The second thing, the guy that writes this down doesn't have
to explain what the Mason word is. He just says, Sir Mike was
accused of adding the Mason word, and he dropped out of activity in any
further negotiations. That's a very subtle thing. But to think about it,
he didn't have to tell anybody what he was talking about. They already knew.
And what this reminds me of. There's another reference to the Mason word.
They're about fifteen or twenty references prior to seventeen thirty and about the first
century sixteen thirty seven, the first recorded non instance to about seventeen thirty.
They're only about a dozen or twenty references. One of them is a sermon
given by a Reverend William Guthrie at his church in Scotland, and his sermons
are all recorded a big book and they're in the University of Edinburgh a library,
and he says to the congregation, Christ has a way of knowing his
followers, just like the Masons know who each other are. I don't understand
how the Masons do it, and I don't know how Christ does it either,
but they can identify each other's secret and that's all he said. He
didn't have to elaborate his way. I look at it back in the nineteenth
the Flash Gorrible movie series, and he probably have covered this. But perhaps
in some of your discussions had what the ming the merciless I think was the
bad guy. And in nineteen thirties, if you were giving a sermon anywhere
and you said a really bad guy like me the merciless, and the audience
would all not because they knew who mean merciless was. Today, you'd say
a bad guy like Darth Vader, and everyone would not. They know who
Darth Vaders. He's a bad guy. In the same way, William Guthrie
could talk about the secret way that Mason's identified each other and just as casual
throwaway sentence, and every one of the congregations nodding you. Okay. So
the first ripple reference is sixteen thirty seven. I'll give him twenty five years
just to have a nice real number. Let's pick sixteen hundred. So about
sixteen hundred the Masons developed the first secret and it's a secret word. They
started admitting more honorary members. Okay. Now fast forward to sixteen sixty six.
W we're travel south from scott One to England, and that's when you
have the Great Fire of One. Now, the head of the organization that
run the Masons and Lundon was the London Mason Company it still exists today,
was one of the guills that elects the Lord Mayor and run the city of
One. And they used to have a royal monopoly owned building with stone no.
In fact, some twenty or thirty years ago someone found a stone that
had been intended for the Tower of London had fallen into the tims and they
dug it out of the Tower Tims and they cleaned it off and they were
going to bring it in and make a presentation to the Tower of London,
and the London Company of Mason stepped up and said, no stone for building
Burtons can enter the city without our approval, because we have to check to
make sure it's square and it's going to fit. So the English had a
grand chance for a ceremony. So they bring the stone up to the city
walls. The Mason's company comes out put. The Mason's company is unrelated to
the freemason it's independent from the social fraternity, and so they checked the stone
to make sure it was suitable and they allowed it about it to go in.
So what happens in sixteen sixty six London is burned to the ground.
They I think Christopher Wren designed secondary eighty churches and the Saint Falls and the
King. I don't know how polite he was when he said, but he
said to the Royal Company, to the company of Masons, you guys have
done a great job for the last couple hundred years building the stone. We
have an immersions. Any man that's strong enough to pick up a stone in
one hand and curia trial on the other is a mason. Thank you very
much. You don't have the Royal lopany. Now what does mirror is that
the London Company of Masons no longer had a source of income. They were
no longer apprentice fees. So what do they do? I mean, you
always hear the advice fall of the money. The London Company of Masons had
a private ceremony called the Exception, and you could be accepted as a Mason
for a pretty high fee. And if you looked at the list of men
who were made accepted Masons prior to the Great Fire of London, there were
middle class businessmen that the petty bourgeoisie that didn't exist one hundred years prior to
that. They had now reached the point of economic strength, at economic health.
I guess that they had idle rich so for some reason. And truly
do not know what happened at the ceremony of the Exception, except me what
occasions In a minute Bret Morris paid twenty pounds fifty pounds whatever it is,
walket dinner for everybody, and went through the exception. All of a sudden,
the number of men being accepted into the London Company of Masons, skywrites
shoots up. The fees shoot up. Okay, it makes sense. The
King has taken away the apprenticeship fees. There is no longer an apprenticeship.
You are put immediately to work. The London Company of Masons needs more income,
so they start making honorary members and they're made accepted Masons. Why this
was a cool thing to do, I'm not sure it was. So the
number of Masons increases, that the number of non operatuite we call them today
speculative Masons, because they speculate all the symbol on symbolism as opposed to building
the stone. The number increases. Now we get up to seventeen seventeen.
And this is part of what appealed to me. This is not just a
group where Mike and Brett got together with a bear with their buddy Steve and
they decided to make a club of movie lovers, or if we do that,
we better throw Monica and do so. It's going to be a co
ed club of the movie lovers. And we said, yea, let's do
it. Doesn't it seem prove half of the Masons. It was up more
of a gradual evolution, and at some point the honorary Masons outnumbered the real
Masons. The activity of a lodge moved from actually building with stone becoming more
of a social organization. This is at the same time that the coffee houses
are being created in London. This is the time when the clubs are being
created in London. You know, a London is famous for their various social
qubs, of various levels of exclusivity. So in seventeen seventeen, the Masons
of the London are having a problem. The problem is they have no one
to guide them. They're falling apart in their activities. And they say,
if we had a central authority, if we had someone in charge that would
send out a monthly newsletter remind us to keep more of our toathes, who'd
come around and check up on us, we could get our act together.
So they invented the idea of what's called a Grand Lodge, that is a
regional head of the Masons. Originally the Grand Lodge of Westminster in London,
and then it expanded to England and then they picked up Whales and here they
are today. Seventeen seventeen they formed the first Grand Lodge and one of the
things they weren't doing. One of the complaints that was made is they were
not folding the lodges. We weren't fold in the Annual Assembly at feast.
So I would like to say they were party animals and wanted to get together
and drink and toast and eat. So now the Grand Lodgers want to do
it now. An interesting side note to this Grand Lodge of Scotland is not
formed from seventeen thirty seven. He said to himself, wait a minute.
If you guys are older than the English Mason, and if many of the
important things like the Mason word came from Scotland, how come it took you
so long in the form of grand Look and they will respond in the flesh
because we weren't falling apart like the English. We had our act together.
Our lodges function perfectly well without oversight. We would get together occasionally and have
a dinner hosted the dinner last year, we'll do it this time. And
it wasn't until seventeen thirty seven that they finally and pressure from England from their
own Grand Ledge, and they were formed after Massachusetts, and I think the
order was England, Ireland, Massachusetts and then Scottwell. And at some point
shortly after being four, they taught a member of the nobility to joy and
so the Duke became grand Master and once that happened, this is a cool
route. That means that here I am a little shop older and I can
join the group. The Duke of Montague his head out. He might even
come to the meeting. Will know it wouldn't that be cool that I get
the dinner with the Duke. So it was the first game in Terren.
It was the only game of down, and it spread like wildfire. So
the Masons didn't actually build the Temple of Solomon then were massacred afterwards. That's
the story that I tend to hear. That is the guild ledger. Every
guild had some leg for how they formed, who their patron saints were.
Everyone wanted to trace themselves back just a little bit further. We go back
to King Solomon's temple. Oh, we go back to Hey Braham, we
go back to Adam, and we go back to the candy can't push back.
And much further than that. There's also the stories I hear that,
oh, it was the Masons that built the pyramids. The Basons were building
King Solomon's temple, and surely they built anything that came after it. And
in fact, there was one branch of the Masons that said, we go
back the Tower of Babel, which is older than solom Step. Everyone's looking
for something old and honorable that they can claim that makes them more special than
everyone else. And so when you guys have your meetings, do you just
talk about how to control all the members of government? Correct? Given the
state of the government today, we take a heads off approach. Actually,
one of the things the Masons did very smart, very very smart, back
in maybe seven I'm sure it was adeen seventeen, right after the Forum,
they said there are two things that cannot be discussed at a lodge meeting.
Cannot discuss politics. You cannot discuss religion full stock what else you've invite about
your favorite soccer team. This whole thing of opening it up to people that
just aren't Masons themselves, that's how it's been for a few hundred years now.
That's actually probably how you manage to be because I don't imagine you're not
cutting stone, you're a mathematician. In my lodge, we do have a
real Stonemason. He does general contract work, but he also does find morrible
cutting. So if you order to math of the state of Michigan, he's
the guy that you would hire to take the morrible cutting into shape, use
mortar and foot into plays on the floor of the wall, and then put
the mosaic who rend So we happen to have a real Stonemason, the boy
Wach And we also live in. My lodge in particular, is very close
to Fort Meade, maryl So we have an unusually large number of employees of
the National Security Agency in one place. And that's just because we are geographically
the nearest lodge. And anyone that works at ANSA who's a major employer in
Maryland and wants to join the lodge probably lives near our lodge for some reason.
And there have been honorary members going back centuries, and you can imagine
it makes sense that you make in Scotland, you make the vocal laird a
honorary member, and maybe he will sponsor around the drinks at the Christmas banquet,
you invite him to preside at the annual banquet or whatever. Doesn't hurt
to have friends like that. So the idea of honorary Mason's honorary members goes
back some time, and it picked up steam as it moved forward. After
sixteen hundred, there are enough honorary members in London that they took over in
seventeen seven. And one of the questions it's always raised, just how gradual
was the process. Did each year you get a few more honorary members until
they finally squeezed out the older members, or did the old guild system just
collapse and someone say, hey, here's a pretty cool organization. Let's take
it over and really ourselves. And to be honest, we don't know.
I kind of like the gradual evolution theory, but there's not a move evidence
that there wasn't a radical shift, a radical table, but good a bit,
I don't know. And some people prefer the radical takeover idea that the
old Guild organization was just crumbling and maybe to even going down to business.
All of its left was the name They said, you know that the Masons
used to meet here on this tavern, Well why couldn't we do it?
Oh cool? You want to be the worst for master or the right worst
deputy grand master? Oh wow, Hoods you mentioned the idea of degrees earlier.
It's that kind of like going back to your tep scout days. Is
that kind of like Tenderfoot, you know, like all the different stations like
with Boy Scouts. Of course you got the Eagle Scouts and all these kind
of things. Is that a thirty third degree was the person that's gone through
all of this. Here's what you got at its most basic level. You
had two levels of membership. You were an apprentice and then you were a
fellow of the graft. And so after you finished your apprenticeship, I think
it was a seven year apprenticeship. It was the typical apprenticeship, and you
worked for the master and there was this quid pro quo. He would teach
you the skills necessary to be an independent worker, and you would provide him
with faithful service during the training period, and then you would be a mason,
a fellow of the graft. Now, during this period when you had
two levels of membership, they had masters, but the master was the guy
that had He was like the general contract. He was the guy that had
the contract. And so for the school that we're building, you might get
the contract and you would be the master mason, and so you would be
in charge and I would report to you. Next contract, when we're going
to build a small chapel, I might win the contract and then I would
be the master mason and you'd report to me. The other way you could
be a master is you could be elected Master of lodge. It was a
presiding position, so it was a position of responsibility and people took turns pulling
it. Now, something odd happens in seventeen twenty five, and we don't
know what it is because all of a sudden there is a new level of
membership called Master Mason. So now there are three levels of membership entered,
apprentice, and Fellow of the craft. And now there's a new third one
called master Mason. And we're pretty sure that it stirred in Scotland. We
think we know what date it was picked up by English Masons and made it
back to England, but we don't know why it started. We don't know.
We suspect that it was started by the joel and Masons because it involves
a guild legend. But it's a guild legend that had never been heard of
before. Just like a lightning bolt, it suddenly appears. It's a pretty
entertaining story, morals in it and loss of symbolism. You can see where
it would be much more interesting than the very simple welcome to the Lodge type
of ceremonies that existed for an apprentice in a philograph, So that starts in
seventeen twenty five, and then eight years later, in seven bout thirty three,
we have the first evidence of a fourth degree of membership, and this
is called the scott Semester and had nothing to do with Scott. Then they
started coming fast and furious, and so you had dozens of them, hundreds
of them appearing as near as we can tell. Friends, really what gaga
over these extra degrees? So they started producing them by the handfuls, then
by the armloads, and by the end of the eighteenth century you have one
of the branches, it's familiar with the United States, is the Scottish rite
with thirty three degrees. But then you add the Royal Large Masons, the
mark Master Masons, the Knights Temple where the Royal or Scotland the mistress goes.
And they were all connected and glued together in different ways, all overlapping
degrees. I would borrow or plagiarize your degree, you would borrow and plagiarize
my degree. And I think what happened is that the most organizational successful groups
through the ones that prevailed for whatever reason, you were a better organizer than
I was. So your system of thirteen levels of membership worked better than my
system of fifteen levels of membership, not because thirteen or fifteen were important,
but because you were a better administrator, Dalia. And so you were charismatic,
you organized. You belong to enough organizations in your life that you've seen
well run organizations and poorty run organizations really doesn't have anything to do with the
mission of the organization. So what has happened in the United States, And
this is one of the things that tripped up to the script writers all and
murdered by decree. They assumed that the thirty third degree, but it was
the pelicle. No, the thirty third degree is the peinicle, or a
branch of Masonry called the Scottish writer. There is another branch of Nasonry that
in the United States we call the York. They don't call it the York
right at all. In England it's kind of what's the York? But there
are all kinds of other organizations you can join. And that's one of I
think the lasting strengths of freemasonry is that every twenty five years, maybe a
new organization is created sometimes you'll have a whole flurry of activity and it will
create a dozen organizations within ten years or something. And these often turn out
to be young guys that join the organization and they find out that all the
leadership positions are taken again the other branches. Okay, spark, I said,
we'll start our own group, and they start their own group, and
then they fill up the leadership positions and someone comes up. And I think
a good way to think about it is think about a university community. Everybody
is a student and is going to get a bachelor's degree. Oh, here's
assuming we finished college. Some people want to play football, and they want
to play serious football, so they come out of school's NCA team. Other
guys want to play football, but not at that level of competition, so
they joined the intramural game where the dorms play against each other, the fraternities
play against each other. You have the same thing with music organizations, marching
band, the jazz band. You have there's a chemistry club, there's their
singing groups. So you can join a lot of these organizations. And these
organizations are all built upon the foundation of the college, the college years,
the base level, and actually in while it is the bottom, it is
the most powerful piece. Five beta Kappa may be an important honor. People
may gas when you say I'm a Kappa gradual, Oh wow, But being
five beta Kappa doesn't give you any kind of privileges at the budget. It
doesn't give you any kind of authority to assign professors to teach topics. It
just happens to be an honor that acknowledges at one point you achieve a certain
level of academic bascheles, and so all of the other brand of masonry.
The Scottish Rite, the York Right, and the Shrine are probably the three
biggest one. Then the Eastern Star that that's the code for men of their
wives. Those are probably the four big organizations. There are dozens of groups.
If you're interested in Massonic history, the chick will are interstood. There
are two large national groups. One is called the Fellow Leathies Society that means
lovers of truth, it's the Greek word. And the other one is just
called the Masonic Society, and they publish a quarterly journals with Masonic history artist.
So now if you like Masonic history, why you won't remember one of
these groups or both of them. If massonic history isn't quite your thing,
maybe it'd be happy, happier being a Shriner. And they're the ones that
were marching the parades, they were the fezes, and they have this breathtaking
network. I think it's twenty four children's hospitals around the United States. They
were created at the time of the polio epidemic back in the early nineteen twenties,
and so they were originally orthopedic hospitals. And now something interesting has happened.
A medicine is moving away from impatient care and it's outpatient care. It
is only the most serious of operations that they'll have you stay overnight in the
hospital. They want to get you out of there as fast as they can,
and so previously, back in the nineteen twenties, when a child with
the polio might spend weeks or months in the hospital getting treatment, they just
do an an outpatient basis. Another interesting thing that happened, and this factoid
sticks in my mind. Back in how to say that forties or fifties,
in the Twin Cities area Minneapolis Saint Paul, there was exactly one pediatric hospital
and that was the Shrinder's Hospital in patrolling, so they do not They specialize
in orthopedic medicine for children, but they also provide other childhood services. Today
there are eight pediatric hospitals in the area. And the Shreders went from having
a monopoly who being worn. They may move to a competitor because they are
ten miles further away, So there's an evolution of what they offer. Yeah,
they're they're all kinds of branches of masonry. And the big Cahuna is
the president of the universe, the grand Master of the Grand Lodge. Everybody
else, no matter how important you think the president of five betacap is,
no matter how important you think the thirty third degree is. When you get
down to it is the grand Master of the president of the university that pulls
the strings. So what was it about the nineteen seventies And it might have
gone back even earlier. I know there is the book The Ripper Files,
and then that kind of lit a fire to suddenly recast the Masons as protecting
perhaps one of their fellow members who has Jack the Ripper. How does all
of this stuff happen? Why are you guys the bad guys? All of
a sudden, it's not just us. You take any societal institution and you
conclind that they have ups and downs. And Stephen Knight, a curious thing
is in England all the bad press to the Masons is about helping each other
socially, or the police are all Masons. They give special treatment to their
brothers. In the United States, it's all that the Masons are the anti
Christ, that they are secretly pagan religious worshippers, and no particular concern about
government corruption. It's all religious corruption. I guess a social historian familiar with
English history and American history would be able to explain why one black beast is
anti religion and the other black beast is helping insiders. But for whatever reason,
Stephen Knight writes this book in nineteen seventy six, I believe that was
the date in England, and he comes up with this fairly convoluted story that
has massive holes, but it appealed to the public and in particular the Masons.
The night guys that have been around all the time, but you know,
they always get the other drinks after work, and it always seems you
ever know is that the Masons nearly always hire another Mason to work for them,
there's something going on. I'm not in the Masons, and they've got
an edge that I don't know, just like the And I think he gets
back to the social structure in England, where you've got landed gentry, where
you have nobility, where you have the bourgeoisie that is above the working class,
and you have this very small class separation in England. So there's some
jealousy. So Knight's book came out. When you read the details, they're
huge holes in the story. Wikipedia as a pretty good summer and it became
popular and it went through twenty editions, I think, and then ten twelve
years later, I think it was nineteen eighty eight, Stephen Knight came out
with his book The Brotherhood, where he learned to demonstrate that the may Masons,
especially Masons and the police were doing favors to their friends and buddies and
wash my back and I'll wash you a back type of thing. Now,
while that's going on England, in the United States and now I want to
say this was about nineteen ninety a guy in the Southern Baptist conventional, James
Larry Ollie I believe was his name. He was a physician down in Dawn,
Texas. He got it in his mind that the reason that the Southern
Baptists losing members was because we allowed those satanic devil worshiping freemasons to be members
of the church and to have positions of authority. It had nothing to do
that every other denomination in the United States was losing membership. The Baptists were
special and the Baptists were different. And the I mean, you would expect
the Presbyterians of the Catholics to go because they're not Baptists, the Baptists.
And so what he does is he writes this book on Freemasonry and Baptists and
then the Southern Baptist Church. And then he is a I think they're called
messengers. He's a voting member of the Annual Convention of the Southern Baptist Church.
And he puts emotional floor that the Southern Baptists are willing to dis fellowship
all Freemasons. And it is like slapping the side of the head with the
two before. No one expected this to come. He just decided to do
it. And then all of a sudden there is this wild scramble as churches.
There's some churches there's saying, wait a minute, are the Masons really
a problem. Let's check into this another. Churches are saying, wait a
minute, three fourths of our decounts then, and the associate pastor and the
principle of the superintendent of the Sunny School are all Masons. They're not a
problem. What kind of idiot is this? So there's this for some reason.
On both sides of the Atlantic, there are these attack on freemason for
internally different reasons. And then Dan Brown comes out with his book The Da
Vinci Code, and that is now two thousand and five maybe, so you
know, you've got seventy six. You have the Jack the Ripper things that
the Masons are up committing these horrible murders to cover up the one of their
own who with the Prince of wale O Deserver which was air apparent to the
throne. And then you have the attack Night continues his attack that the Masons
are now helping each other in an unethical way. And then you shift across
the Atlantic and now all of a sudden, the Masons are being attacked.
They're the anti Christ. And then ten years after that, fifteen years after
that, Dan Brown comes out with the Da Vinci Code eighteen million copies.
I think it's home nineteen million copies. No one expected them. They're like
two or three sentences about the Masons in there. They say something nice about
the Mason, but all of us, so of the Masons are good guys.
And then you have national Preasure, National pressure, the worldly successful movie,
and that there's a secret message on the back of the deco region of
Independence. And it's just a it's a carnival ride. It don't pay too
much attention to the plot. And now the Masons and the good guys go
figure for the Catholics. The good guys or are they child boets? These
various groups have ups and downs. How did you come to rate the Complete
Idiots Guide to Freemasonry? Chris Hodapp wrote the Dummies and so you have Freemasons
for Dummies done, then you have to completed its guide. And he came
to that's why. I was working for the Supreme Council the Scottish headquarters in
Washington, and he showed up when we do some research. I met him
for the first time. I helped him and I said, one nice project,
good luck, I'm looking forward to reading it. And then four or
five months later, I get a call for a buddy of Marine and he
said, I was just asked to write the Complete Idiots Guy to Freemasonry.
I don't have time. I didn't like agent they sound. I told him
you might be interested. I said, oh yeah, let me talk to
him. And so this is around the time the Da Vinci code is coming
out of the meaning everyone that told many people are lead crumbs off at Dan
Brown's table any day. My book, which was not as successful as Chris's
book, The Dummies, were not as successful with the Idiots, were not
as successful with the drumbies. I sold over fifty thousand copies of my book.
That's That's not bad at all. Published a math book by the Mathematic
Association of America, and I think I sold six thousand copies, which were
a math book. The two thumbs up fifty thousand, though the real world
is pretty impressive. So they gave me the assignment. And I started teaching
at the college level back in seventy six. So I've done a fair amount
of teaching. It's early. All been as an agile factory mom. But
I said to myself, Okay, what if I'm teaching a course in history
American sociology something like this, and the term paper is to describe an American
organization in detail, how it originated, how it functions, what impact it
has on the community, what it does. Okay, yeah, I could
see that as being an interesting topic, and I said, now let's do
it for freemasonry. So I said, how wouldn't put that information together?
Now? Just isn't as an FI. The dummies have a fairly specific format
that you have to follow. The book must have at least five and no
more than nine chapters. Each chapter must have at least three parts and no
more than five parts. You must have at least every other page a sidebar
that's going to say a neat fact, a little more detail of the background.
As you read these books, they have these sidebars all through it,
and east sideboards is formulate. You can't go more than two pages without putting
in a sidebar. You have to have at least three kinds of sideboard.
One is just a factual historical the Schreider's work was formed in nineteen twenty seven
or twenty four whatever it is, so that you're just a factual sidebar.
And then another one we're going to expand and explain that a thirty third degree
mason has no more authority than a master mason and a local watch. And
so you have these little sideboarders, and it's a pretty successful formula. Now
you need to have someone that has a pretty broad background topic if they're going
to write this beginner's and production, because having that broad topic means you know
what has to be included, and more important than that, what can be
exclude. So how many different coed organizations do we want to talk about in
the book. There's the Eastern Store, there's the Order of the Ambulances,
the boy Shwine at Jerusalem. Their list, those aren't known, and so
I knew enough to list the two biggest ones. And then I said,
in addition to these, here are some others that existed in their even chocolate
block. I had enough knowledge that I knew what to put it in,
what to keep out. So I put together the book and it was reasonably
successful. Penwin is the parent company of Alpha, which publishes the Completities guides.
They are not as aggressive about translating and putting their additions in other countries,
whiley who handles the Dummies, is very aggressive about translating and getting other
dishes out around. So I'm very envious of Chris that he had a more
aggressive publisher. That's how I became the editor that completed Its Guide, and
I also had the advantage at that point I was the editor of the Scottish
Rite Journal, which was the largest circulation with sonic magazine in the world and
one of the things and I'm amused by this to know if you look at
the cover of the completed Its Guide to Freemasonry by Esprit Morris Kama, PhD.
I have given up my major writing and editorial duties simply because I got
some health issues that make really fatigue. With the meds I'm taking and the
health issues I take lots of naps. Nice thing about naps is the side
effects of naps are well understood and they're pretty benign, so I don't worry
about that. But I just didn't want to have the pressure hanging over me
of grinding something else. I haven't stopped attending meetings. I am working on
some projects that particularly interest me. I remember that I told you earlier that
I was Charles Warren's successor and Quadrud Coronati Lodge Quadru Coronati was the first lodge
of historians, or the first lodge of we call ourselves the Authentic school as
opposed to the Romantic school, and publish something by Quadrucornati. They want a
footnote. You can't just say, yeah, the English like orange, mormal
ad better than strawberry. No, you've got to say production records turn into
the ministry of whatever show so many tons versus so it has to be factual.
So one of the things I find that I enjoy is type setting,
because it's the mathematical way of laying out these objects that look appealing, that
fit into a regular grid, and they are simul clorously mathematically organized, and
they're also visually appealing. And so if you what is the rule. I've
seen the chart, but if you have, I think it's twenty words.
Is the op with the paragraph? Your eye can fall twenty words, get
to it, drop down and start the next line, and you don't lose
the one if you have an enormously long line with eighty words that you get
so far down to the end of the line and you go back, you
try to go to the next line and your loss your eye can't fall.
So there's an example of a rule that makes reading easier. As a mathematician,
I can apply that mathematical rule and yet it produces something that is esthetically
pleasing. I helped the editors of both the Scottish Rite Research Society in the
United States and Quadrum for a NATI Lodge in England. I helped the way
out in design books. And then one of the things that I enjoy doing
is indexing. And indexing is deeply mathematical to me and one of the things
we want to do that a Quadricordati Lodge is. Since eighty six the Foundation
found the lodge, we have produced an annual transactions, so papers that were
delivered to the lodger or submitted from research and they were indexed every year.
We want to merge the indexes together, but that becomes very interesting. Are
you going to be indexed as white Comma Mike. Okay, that's cool.
We could also index you as white Comma Michael. We could index you as
white Comma m period. We could index you as White Comma Captain Michael,
Comma USA or USM or whatever. It did. The thing that is most
important about building an index take a style and stick to it. You can
and in fact, it's good advice from a book. You can argue about
whether you need an Oxford comma or at the end of the day, make
a decision and stick to it. And so what I've been doing is my
goal is to take the one hundred and thirty existing indexes merge them together in
such a way that you can look up peanut butter and you're really interested in
crunchy peanut butter, so you look under peanut butter might be a category of
nut butters. And so when you go to peanut butter and say seed nut
butters, and it'll list all little butter, peanut butter, cashew butter,
and then under peanut buttered it'll have smooth and creamy like that. So that's
a long term project that I'm looking at. Mister Morris, thank you so
much for your time today. This was so great talking with you. Absolutely,
I'd like to start with how you decided to become an actress. I'm
always curious about how people decide to become that profession that they stick with for
so long. I grew up in the nineteen fifties in a very provincial then
provincial city, Toronto, Ontario, and there weren't a lot of options for
women. You could be a librarian or a nurse or a teacher, but
nothing creative, and I just always wanted to do it. My mother said
I was irritatingly dedicated, and that from the age of five I wanted to
do this to have fun and to play dress up, because those are pretv
days and we had to entertain ourselves. And then when I was twelve,
I joined an organization called the Toronto Children Players, run by Raymond Massey's sister,
whose named Dorothy Goulding, and we gathered in a church basement every Saturday
for our two and a half hours and did improvisation and pantomime, and then
once a year we presented at a big auditorium in the city. And I
like the people. They were fun. They was so constrained and so uptight
in the fifties that this was liberating. If this is what it's all about,
this is what I wanted to do. My mother was very supportive,
my father not so much. But my mother found that there was an apprentice
scholarship in Niagara on the Lake, where the Shaw Festival was close to,
and so I went for six weeks and got nothing but rent and food and
swept the floor and ironed the clothes and did that for six weeks. And
again it was in Iowa. Louis Zarig, I don't remember that name.
We did a lot of movies too, but he played cat on a hot
tin roof, and about halfway into the show it did burned, literally burned
down. So the next year Nate Goodwin and his wife impended me and somebody
else to go back again, and this time they were in Flint, Michigan.
How that has changed, Oh boya. But we had a wonderful time,
and they were musicals. And then I was in my middle teens and
I would stayed in these actors from New York. If you had the chance
to study in London, England, or in New York, where would you
go? Oh London, for sure, because it was just a better education
all around. And so I auditioned and got into a school and went off
around seventeen years of age to London and studied the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
and then got into the rep system. And the education was good, but
what was great was being in that city of fifteen hundred, two thousand years
where we could go from fifty cents to see any opera, any ballet,
any play, whether it was the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National hadn't been
formed yet, so it was a wonderful place to grow up. So I
stayed with it. Did I read that you worked with Donna Michi when you're
young? I did. He was charming that at that was at the Flint
Musical Tent, and I think Flint was at that point very wealthy white suburb.
Its employees and executives came from General Motors so they could afford to support
fifteen hundred tent. So yes, Donna Michi, lots of wonderful, interesting
people. Yeah, So what happened after you graduate from RATA? I'm a
Canadian, so I could get into the repertory system there. So I found
an agent and I did a weekly rep for seven months. That's every show
every other week except for the Christmas special. And then I did the Northeast
Shakespeare Festival, which was amazing. It was a twenty five hundred seat theater
and the Beatles nobody had ever heard of. These four kids were jumping around
on the stage on an off night when I know it wasn't It was a
Saturday night and we were in rehearsal. I can't make this up and we
said. The older people said, oh rubbish, but there was something fun
about for us younger members of the company. And then I was lucky enough
to get a job in the West End with Donald Pleasants and Charles Gray for
Beetles and that ran for six months in the West End, and then I
had to go back and forth. My father was dying of cancer and Donald
Pleasance was the producer and he said, I will give you a compassionate leave
of absence for three weeks if you give me a fortnight two weeks to find
a placement, and when you come back, you have a job. Can
you imagine anybody saying that in this country. No, no, so I
did. He actually gave me a month. I stake for a month,
basically said goodbye to my father, went back, came back into the company
and we continued for another few months. And then it was bouncing back and
forth and then starting to work in television, which was considered they looked on
their nose as you're doing television. That was in the sixties. And then
I came back to Canada and got a lot of work at the Canadian brought
scorporation. In those days, they were doing classics, so I did Shakespeare
and all kinds of different plays, during which I was discovered quote unquote by
Eleanor Kilgallen at Universal Studios, and so that was a back and forth,
and then I ended up in Hollywood, never unpacked a bag, always had
my passport ready because I didn't think it was going to last. And here
we are sixty years later. I'm still here and loving Los Angeles, especially
now that I'm not in the business sights. It's a wonderful city, really
quite extraordinary. Once you got to Hollywood. What were someone really rolls like
for you? I Pink Madigan was one of the first with Henry Fonda,
who was just a prince. What a lovely man, wonderful man. And
I later in the late seventies and ten years later I did another movie with
him in Montreal City on Fire, which what's interesting, but he was always
charming and he and his then wife took me out for dinner in New York
and I was really tongue tied for a while. Don SEAgel did both Madigan
and Coovid's Block Yeah, which is another location in New York, which is
great fun, great fun in the late sixties was all under all this energy
coming in from the young people and lots of change in and it was good.
Don't single didn't like actors. He only liked movie stars because actors asked
too many questions. Henry Vonda was both a theater actor and a film actor,
big star, and he just would give me a wink and say come
and let's have a coffee, and he would answer questions and Lend Eastwood really
understood what movies were about. And he kept saying to the seagull, I
don't really need to say this. Why didn't she say it? Oh,
I don't need to And I thought, why is he giving away all the
style of because the camera was on him and he was just listening. So
he was very interesting. It was a great shoot. I remember going to
the Cloisters and standing on the top of the t W Way building for the
final shot coming up. It was a great time to be in New York
and working and we stayed in a fabuinous luxury hotel and Clint knew everybody from
the series Raw Hide. I met Ray Charles. It was really fun and
it was a good film. I think it was a good film. Don
Stroud and I were both under contract, and as was the young woman whose
name I don't remember because I think she left the business shortly after. But
the three of us would like stare at each other and saying, oh my
god, this food is fantastic. Whoa hey, three young kids just having
a ball with all this time and energy and money and all of that coming
in. So it was fun. It was good. You were in one
that is just a bizarre film, Skullduggery. What were your memories of her?
Kid bad? My memories of all these movies that I'm looking at in
your list are the place is another character. So the place for Skullduggery was
Jamaica, beautiful and beautiful. They had just become independent from Britain. We
walked into a civil war. There was the blue stripes and the red stripes,
and we went through three directors. It was very difficult, so I'm
not sure nobody really understood it. I was under contract still, and I
did I think, four different voiceover narrations to try and explain what was going
on, which even I didn't understand. And I was there. Bert Relolds
was a pretty good director. He had to take over because we were spending
I don't know how many thousands a day waiting for the studio to send the
next director. We had lovely young people from Indonesia who played the trophies,
the monkeys in these absurd suits and this heat, and they were lovely.
But there was a lot of financial shenanigans behind the scenes. It was a
mess. But on camera, Edward Fox and I stayed friends for a long
time. Hans Gude August became a big soap star and never really saw it
much of him later, and it was fun. That island itself is so
beautiful. Remember going to location and seeing a sign at six o'clock in the
morning as we drove up into the Blue Mountains, you are now entering Martha
Bray, who says, entering Martha Bray, who was at Martha Break But
it was a famous Jamaican who held the line against the British. And it
was a very political time in the United States. The Vietnam War was going
on. It was tense. It was tense because of people stealing money from
the show. The directors were replaced for I have no idea why so the
solid part of it was the story, which this one time producer really loved.
It was a French novel called These Animal Pinitive and it was an interesting
thing. But the script didn't work. Sometimes changing from a novel or a
short story or whatever to a script to a film just dies. Somehow it's
lost in the translation of one modality to the next. So it didn't work.
But it was Yeah, it was nice. Memories. My memories happy
memories were of Jamaica and Bob Marley. Hello. There was Bob Marley seeing
a little club in the town that we were all billeted in. So that
was fun. Get Ray Charles on one movie and Bob Marley on the next.
Yes, a little bit in between. But please tell me that Forben,
the Colossus project was not the mess that sculptor gery was. Though it
wasn't. It was very organized. It was very boring to do because they
had tape doing the machines the Colossus. The actors had to wait until all
its technology at very early times, and so all of this technology had to
fit hand and glove, and of course it didn't. So we were lucky
to get I don't know, three four minutes a day, but most of
us were under contract or had a deal with the studio, so they didn't
seem to mind that it was costing a fortune. But again I was not
the right generation to appreciate what was coming with internet and computers. One funny
aside was that about a year later or two, I was in Seattle at
the Seattle rep playing Lady Macbeth in a wonderful production. And we had to
do to get the money from the government, state and federal, you had
to do three shows for kids, teenagers, high school, and of course
it had to be at nine o'clock in the morning. And I had no
idea that they would I didn't quite understand. They were restless and whispering and
all that when we were doing Michelle. But there would be like eighteen young
people standing at the stage store, and I thought, that's weird. They
didn't want to talk about Macbeth. They wanted to talk about Colossus, the
Forbin project, and they wanted to know how we did it, and what
the computers and where we eat in the Lawrence Livermore Lab. Yes we were,
and we have to take our clothes off, Yes we did, and
what was as machine like? It was great, So it was interesting I
don't think we got it really why it was so popular and it's now I
guess, become a cult film. I do know was there ever any talk
of a sequel to that? Because I know there were three books and you
just made the first one. I don't remember. I don't think it made
enough money like or it to really flow into a series. And maybe it
was ahead of its tone, very much ahead of its time. They said,
oh, I didn't make any money. So then we went to Airport
seventy five, total opposite direction that was universal in those days. Well,
speaking of universal, do you men have to ask you about your Colombo experience?
Oh? I loved it. I loved it. Oh good, because
I had heard that Peter Falk has been a little difficult at that time.
He was very difficult, but he wasn't never difficult with actors. He was
difficult with what is called you know what the Black Tower was. Peter was
great and he said, you really want to say this ship? I said,
jer shoe, what do you want to say? He said, let's
just figure out what we want to do. When do we have And then
he'd look up at Norman Loyd, who was directing wonderful became a lifelong friend.
He just died at one hundred and six a year ago. It's a
Norman's he what do we have to do? Whatever you want, dear boy,
whatever you want, he said, We're going to go for a walk.
So it's Mutton Jeff here we are walking around and he said, okay,
as I think, and we had our scene in front of us.
This is the what's important. The rest of it's just I said, Okay,
what do you want to do? I said, He said, let's
try this, and we improvised. He was all good and all of that,
and it was a lot of fun. That part was fun. Peter
did apologize one day. He said, the Black Tower executives at Universal promised
that I could direct five episodes, and now they're rerenegging. So he said,
I want to take a walk. Do you mind if I take a
walk today and you do your close ups on your own? I said,
no, I'm fine with that. Stand up to yourself. Absolutely. Years
before, I did a movie called Beldez Is Coming with Burt Lancaster and Spain
and we were sitting in the mountains outside the famed city of Avila as in
Teresa, and he said, and He was a very tense, difficult person.
He didn't chat up Bert he was, but he said come here,
sit down, okay, all right? So I sat and we were looking
at this beautiful vista over the mountains early in the morning, and he said,
just want to tell you, don't let the bastards grind you down.
And I said, you mean the studio. Yeah. So I got a
lot of backgrounds from Wander Lancaster, Richard Widmark. These men, not so
much the women. They didn't seem to They weren't considered to be important enough
to beat last long. There was this quick turnover because it was a very
male dominated business. Thank god it isn't any more. That led into the
next one, which is Night Loves, which was Arthur Pennon, amazing director
and Gene Hackman again difficult, hurt by the business here and manipulated and all
of that. The Harvey Weinstein's existed in those days. But I was protected
from all of a lot of the most of that by having two women as
my bosses. It was Eleanor Kilgallen in New York and Minique James on the
West Coast. And when it occurred, depending on the time of day,
I would call collect California and they would put me through and I would tell
Minique what was going on. She said, not to worry, dear,
just go and have a nice meal. The next day, that person was
gone absent, But many of my contemporaries were not so lucky. They've been
hired by other people. But Night Moves, Arthur Penn was great with women.
He was a wonderful director, and I like the script. I remember
that Shirley Bernstein was my manager at that point, and she sent me from
I was doing a play at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and she said,
you're going to have to drive to meet Arthur Penn. He'll see you.
So I got into this car on my day off and drove I don't know
where through the Berkshires and found Arthur pan And he didn't ever ask people to
read. He just wanted to talk great and so I enjoyed that too.
That was I didn't get to go on. Most of my work was either
the airport or once the sound stage. But he was a theater and film
director, and he rehearsed with the whole cast for two weeks, including Melanie
Griffith, who was I don't know, fifteen or something. I was lucky
enough to be to learn the classics at the Royal Academy, and then also
lucky enough from about seventy to work with Stella Adler in Los Angeles, who
famously said to me, I'm going to break your English jaw, meaning that
it's not in the words, it's in the intention. So what a movie
is not You can say, don't forget the milk, or I like cream
cheese with my potato. It doesn't mean anything thing until you understand beneath it,
what's the intention? Where is this going? So she was able to,
with exercises and going once or twice a week, two classes when she
was out she'd be out maybe three four months in the summer, understand what
that meant. So I looked around and I thought, there are a lot
of women who are conflicted, who are in terrible marriages, who want to
have kids, are they want to have a career, and their husbands are
wandering or messed up or whatever. So it was easy to just watch and
read. It was all in mis magazine, and all those women's the good
ones, not the ones that are selling ads for makeup and facelifts, but
the other really good writing was happening, So that's I think that was how
it was fun. Also, Jean had been a theater actor, so he
also liked to improvise, and Arthur wanted us to take the script and play
with it. So when we did the big fight in the kitchen, I
reached up and smacked all the pots, made a horrendous noise and got a
great reaction from Markman, and he later said, I wanted to do that.
You beat me to it. I liked that. I went to New
York, I met Ded Allen, the editor. I watched her cut in
the old fashioned way, actual film. I went to observer Arthur teaching a
class at the Actor Studio. These were fun days. A couple of the
other things you wrote to philm the two films North Avenue are Regulars and The
Apple Dumpling Gang. That was like connecting the dots. Disney was so structured,
and the director he actually had a board and this is in the middle
seventies, late seventies for the second one, he know, you actually moved
here and that line and over here you look what. Yes. I also
had a really good company of actors who just told me said yes, and
ignored and went on it did whatever they wanted to do. But he framed
his shot and he knew what it was. It was like working with a
computer. But I don't think they do that anymore. I think that was
then North Avenue of Regulars, all those crazy women of Cloris Leachman used to
tell everybody that she was a vegetarian at that point, bless her soul.
And she would go around and she'd say, do you know what you're putting
in your body? All that meat, all that fat, It's disgusting.
Then she decided to go and lock herself in her trailer, and mister Disney
himself had to come down and persuade her that the showmen to go on.
And the crew was so mad, and the director was so pissed off that
just said thank you, Claris, just so were there till we're ready.
So that night we were working late. It was a night shot, and
in those days you just didn't think about it. You drove to the studio
at midnight and you bartchigar and new shot all night. And I was coming
back in a break and I see Chlorus coming with a huge container of soup
that was obviously full of meat, and I said, whoa are you working
tonight? Oh no, I'm just bringing a little apology to the crew.
Karen Valentine was a sweetheart. She was lovely. All of those women were
fun. That was fun. I spoke with Bruce Bilson and Edward Herman a
few years ago. Hobby said, before mister Hermann passed and nobody really has
anything good to say about Corse Light. It was horrendous. I think some
of these guys, I think Hermann one. I think he was married.
I think he wanted he had a family. Hello, it's a job,
it's not a religion. So for somebody to every day be late with set
and we're all standing around, or have a problem with the food, or
have a problem with some there was always a problem. And I understand.
She was the mother of eight kids, and I have such respect for her
talent, amazing talent, and I think she's bored. So when she got
bored, she just misbehaved. The rest of us just went home to our
partners with babe. Was that the first time that you met Alex Carris?
Yep, Yeah, buzz Culiko is the director hired me six months before and
persuade at MGM to have me train in hurdling and running and throwing the javelin
and golf. So I had been working out for six months with a wonderful
young man who was on the tour golf tour, Mickey Shoulder, and I
had fun and Buzz said, you have to come and meet Alex Carris.
In fact, you have to come an audition. It's Sunday's Day before Valentine's
Day. And so we went to CBS in Los Angeles and there were three
guys and they were all big and football players. But Alex was the one
who made up his own dialogue. He didn't like the dialogue, so he
made it up and when I tried to respond, he just put his hand
in front of my face and said, Smith, I don't know. And
that was a little kind of strange. But apparently what Buzz and the other
the producers and the writer saw a chemistry that I didn't particularly see at that
poet. But then Alex would sneak over to the golf Force nine whole golf
course in Studio City, Weddington, the Weddington Golf and Mickey would say,
oh, that actor's there again. He's hiding in the bushes and come he
is. He wanted to make sure that his big moment in television was not
going to be messed up by some woman who did not know how to do
anything as far as athlete lads were concerned. And Mickey doubled me in all
the great lull golf shots. Oh he was teased mercilessly to put on the
wig and the dress, and oh it was really funny. But he was
a good egg. Lots of fun. But it changed my life because that
we started living together about eight months later and had a child and got married
and I had thirty seven years of a wonderful relationship. So Babe is probably
my favorite. Buzz Kulick. He just had a knack with actors, and
that is the sign of a director, somebody who listens, who doesn't talk
a lot, whom doesn't push around or redetermined where everything there's another guy that
wanted to rehearse. And so Alex and I and maybe three or four other
actors would go to his house, to Buzz Kulick's house and sit around the
dining table and his wife and service coffee in Danish or whatever, and we
would just keep reading and reading, and the screenwriter was there and she would
change stuff. It's a work in progress always, and so when somebody sets
it installed and it makes it very hard. It's a dialogue going back and
forth with the director and the writer and the other actors, and then in
the theater it's a dialogue with the audience. There. You don't improvise,
you do not change anything that's written in stone. But how you do it
is not where the pauses are. That's not an issue. So the directors
that really came from theater, came from New York, had done early television
where it was all theater people. They had a much better time. When
was the first time you met Bob Clark? He wanted me for a movie
I think at Warner Brothers and Warder Brunners wouldn't accept me, and I was
devastated. Oh my god. I know our manager. We had a business
manager that we shared and it was this guy that introduced the two of us.
And he'd just done a movie in Toronto, so that's where I'm from,
and so we had lots to share about that, and he said,
don't worry. I know it's very hurtful and all of that, but we're
going to work together. So the first thing we did, murdered by Dequipitis
had a lot of other names to but he was great. And then I
did Poor Kies later and he said, I'm the only director at Hollywood that
keeps casting you as a hooker. So murder by decree. Oh my god,
James Mason, I just was thumbstruck. He's one of my favorite actors
ever. That voice is like velvet. Christopher Plumber was naughty. We would
be shooting at night in Southolk, which is on the other side of the
river and dark, and he'd goose me, just just try and get a
reaction. We had to have the middle of the week off. I remember
we shot Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday Monday and had two cy Wednesday
as the weekend. So again I'd been to school, I had friends there,
I got to see theater. It was a magical job. And we
stayed at the annex of the hotel, so we had little apartments. It
was great. I loved it. We were in London. I cannot remember
the name of the hotel. If I could, you would recognize it immediately.
We were in the West End, in Annex, which is a little
part on Albemarle Street and everything was there, Green Park and the West End
and fantastic restaurants, and we could walk to work some days and then other
days we were picked up. Yeah, so it was no. We didn't
do anything in Murder by Decree in Toronto. It was all shot in London.
There was another actress, Genevie Bougeau. Yes, she was lovely.
We went to we went to rock concerts. It was fun. I don't
think films today are fun. I think everybody wants too much money up front.
Maybe I don't know. It was a company of actors and I forget
which with it told them they built the Thames and James Mason has come by
on his way from the makeup room. Have they thrown you in the drink
yet? Dude, No they haven't, No, not yet. It was
everybody. Frank Finnay was on his way to becoming a major theater actor and
did a lot of film as well. But no, it was again being
in those places and when Jack the Ripper was running around killing all these people,
which of course it wasn't. It was the head of the Mason's,
the Masonic Order, and they were looking for the child out up wedlock with
an Irish Catholic girl and they wanted her dead. So it was a lot
of offscreen violence, but interesting, very good play, very good script,
and lots of fun to do. Yeah, the cast is phenomenal. I
couldn't believe when the cast list comes up, and just and David Hemmings,
a and Donald it's just so many people. John Gilgood another. All of
these actors were huge for me because I'd gone to school and they were at
top of their game twenty years before. And also it was a very good
script. I later did a television show with that same playwright and it was
fun. Good writer. What was mister Clark like to work with? Oh,
he was great, he was great. He said, what do you
want to do? He had to be a little stricter because it was nice,
dangerous on that part of London, on the other side of the Thames,
but he'd say, whatever you want to do, let's try it.
Just come prepared to do it so we don't waste a lot of time.
And that's fair enough. That's the actor having to do their own homework.
So then the parties was later and that was great fun. That was again
mostly at night and It was in the jungles of Florida. But it was
great fun. He liked actors, He had a good time. That's so
important, I think for the director to be enjoying himself as opposed to feeling
this heavy weight on their shoulders of having to do X number of pages or
x number of takes, or reverse this and over the shoulder this, and
it doesn't work. It just burns everybody out. I think you mentioned Babs
being one of your favorite roles. I'm curious what other roles you really enjoyed
doing over the years. I'd like to and Amelia Earhart, that was fun.
I liked doing. It. Was an interesting movie called The Choice,
and it was about abortion. And as we were shooting it in Los Angeles,
Ronald Reagan was elected and of course that was Approach, not pro choice
constituency that elected him. And this director was David Greene, wonderful television director,
who said, we better bloody finished this quickly because it'sn't gred to be
on the air. So yeah, that was interesting. It It doesn't say
one way or the other, but I think it wouldn't be done today because
it showed the clinics where they dissuaded women if they could not determinate a pregnancy.
Not anything that anybody ever wants to do, but sometimes have to for
a lot of religion and guilt. That was one thing I've always appreciated you
as an actress and as a woman, and as you always seem to be
conscious of those roles, even just the way that you wore your hair throughout
the years, and just like you've seemed to be making a statement with that.
You seemed like a very powerful character. Whether you were in Webster or
wherever, you always seem to have like your shit together. Thank you.
That's a lovely compliment. Thank you. I think that's the Stella Addler.
She would say, don't come in complaining. If you need therapy, God
to a therapist. Your job is to find the history, the social aspect,
what's going on in the country or city or wherever you are. You
have to be part of this whole or you have nothing really to contribute,
You're just saying lines. So that was fun. That was fun. I
remember spending time in jail when we did The Midnight Man in with Burt Lancaster
again in South Carolina. That was a weird place in the seventies, but
it was my first real time in the South, and it was terrifunny.
They had cells from the nineteenth century where no average person could stand up,
and that informed why my character was pretending to be so concerned where she was
a thief and ull kinds of bearer had a nefarious past which our storm mister
Lancaster helped unravel. But yeah, the place is it? I remember Henry
Hathaway, Alex and I met John Wayne before he passed at a big thing
for babe, and he had said in many interviews to Henry Hathaway, Henry,
what are he got working for me today? Which meant, what are
you shooting behind me? What are the audience going to see? Is it
mountains? Is it desert? Is it forest? Is it a whole bunch
of other people? Am I alone? So we asked him if he'd said
that. He said, oh, damn straight. And that's a big thing,
the character of the place. And now they're doing it. They're doing
it in these wonderful mini series on television. They never did that in television
or sixties, seventies and eighties. It was all close up and backed black
lat And now the place is a character and so you're drawn into it in
a magical way as an actor and as an audience hopefully. Yeah, it's
funny how you're talking about the special effects of Colossus, and now I think
about entire sets are just either green screen or wrap around. So do you
feel like you're in another place? Do you do? We the President of
the United States and all of these scientists sitting around and they built this fantastic
set at Universal and then they would have the video for Colossus and then the
film filming us with Colossus very complicated and for those didn't understand film, and
I was one at that point in the sixties, I thought this so boring?
Is anybody we're going to watch this? But I was wrong. I
was wrong. It was it is a very interesting film. What have you
been up too lately? I'm still a member of the Threshold Foundation and they
know absolutely nothing about show business, which is fine, but it's working.
For over forty years, I've been an environmental activist, peace and social justice,
so working with that kept me grounded for forty years in Hollywood. And
now I don't see plays or much television coming to me that would indicate where
we are now. As a planet as a country, and so reality is
much more interesting and much more frightening. Hello, the end of the planet
nuclear war. You can't just sit there and complain. You've got to get
up and do something. Planning a retreat. And one of the questions that
you had, do I have something to say that I believe in? And
I would say yes, let's all. If you pray, or if you
don't, that's okay too, but let's work toward kindness, generosity, harmony,
hope and peace. Miss Clark, thank you so much. I've had
such a great time talking with you today. You're welcome. Good. If
you are a woman, you walk these streets at your peril. For this
is London's Whitechapel in the time of Jack the Ripper, one of the world's
most infamous killers. Hello, Darling Black A bit of fan ray ray.
The dense black Hog of London hides a multitude would have synth. It shields
a murderer whose urged to kill is conceived in cunning born in the maniac's hill.
Here are the body, spit and saw dost haunts the Ripper knew?
But who was the Ripper? Only one man thought he knew The answer his
address two to one by bakstry Feace Cabin. His name was Sherlock Holmes.
It's through these murders of the work of a madman, but a madman with
certain medical skills, considerable intelligence and education that if you are right, mister
Holmes, it brings us back to the doctors. Sherlock Holmes, the original
special agent, forerunner of today's thrillmakers. Sherlock Holmes, a genius at detecting
the improbable and solving the impossible. Incredible elementary, My dear Watson. Watson,
the other half of this fantastic partnership. This is Comfax, who helped
Holmes more than he knew. And Murray, the doctor whose tongue was as
sharp as his scalpel. This butcher boy has the government has all of us
on the edge of a knife. Only this morning, three more men were
detected in the streets of London. These were the women who lived in the
shadow of the Ripper. The redhead once famed for her beauty, the gay
bosom little Block, the provocative of Brunette. These were the kind of women
the Ripper loved till murder did them part. You'll never see anything like it
this side of Hell. All right, we are back and we were talking
about murder by Decree, and I think all of us have made references to
some of the previous and subsequent pairings of Homes and Jack the Ripper. Let's
talk a little bit about study and terror. I like John Neville. I'm
not sure if I liked his interpretation of Homes, but you know, we're
talking about the whole pieces on the chessboard and stuff. This one just felt
the most linear, just like Holmes always felt like he was one step behind
The Ripper until right at the end, is how I was seeing it.
And it just felt like kind of like subpar Hammer, almost like I know
it's not a Hammer film, but it feels like Hammer so cheesy. I
did not like this at all. I wanted to like it. I liked
Neville in Houston as Watson to a degree. I didn't think they were awful,
but every time they weren't there, I didn't like anything about it.
It just felt like this, what kind of movie are we doing here?
Like? Do you I feel like they couldn't nailed out what totally they were
even going for. That's I think that's completely accurate. They're trying to make
a period Sherlock Holmes film in nineteen sixty five, and you know, you're
in the middle of Swinging London, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and
it just felt and especially when they got to the advertising campaign for that film
in the US and they tried to equate it with the Batman TV show and
play up the camp qualities of it. You know, the posters literally were
saying the original camp Crusader in a cape and it was they were frantically trying
to figure out what the film was. I think holistically Murdered by the Cree
works better. And what distinguishes that from most Sherlock Holmes films is that Sherlock
Holmes has an arc in this film. He goes on a transformative odyssey from
kind of a man in the high Castle, separate from the Mob, to
becoming their crusading advocate. And you don't get that, I mean you certainly
don't get that in any of the Rathbone films. You know, there's no
journey for Sherlock Holmes. He's Sherlock Holmes when the film starts, He's Sherlock
Holmes when it does. And that is one of the aspects of this film
that I did like is it stands out for being a Sherlock Holmes story in
which the character does have an arc and does transform in some way. Going
back to studying Terror, I mentioned the lack of Microft this month, and
here we've got Microft in this played by Robert Morley, who just what an
incredible face. It feels again like he's an actor I grew up with watching
all the time, and just looking at the number of credits and things that
he was in, it was like, yeah, I could see why he
was probably on television just a ton, so great to see him show up.
And this tried to do a good thing to pull Moraley in there and
talk about how this Ripper case is kind of shaking in the halls of power,
but yeah, I just didn't pull it off. And then the other
thing that really bothered me was some of the lady's voices. There's one who's
like super squeaky, and then so many of them that just felt like they
fell off the Eliza do Little Truck where it's just like because I think we
start with a POV shot again, and as soon as the lady turned around,
I was just like and out Dearie, I just knew it was coming.
Gave me a headache. It really gave me an ache. That blond
lady, especially her voice, and it's she talks for so long. It's
yeah, that was rough Man. That's real prop well in that in a
Snunty and Terror. All the prostitutes they're gorgeous. They got all their teeth,
perfect complexions, really nice clothes, and that's you know, in murder
by decree, they at least make an effort. The women of the night
do look a little bit downtrodden. They're not, you know, shining beauties
by by any stretch of the imagination. What was the one that seduced Watson?
And I got all my teeth and oh, there goes one. The
look on her face was great because she was just like, oh shit,
there it goes. So I wanted to also talk a little bit about dustin
Shadow, an account of the Ripper killings by doctor John Watson actually being written
by another person, Lindsay Faye. Great, great book. It really worked
very well for me, and it was kind of weird having all of this,
all of these different versions of Holmes and Jack the Ripper and how all
the pieces met and she actually went in a different direction than I wasn't expecting,
so it actually surprised me. So there were a couple of good red
herrings in the book, and I would say, yeah, definitely check it
out if you like Sherlock Holmes stories. And of all of these things that
we're talking about studying Terred Murdered by Decree, we'll talk about From Hell in
a minute. I think that her book is probably the best of the lot.
Well, Lindsay Faye is a very well regarded and very knowledgeable Sherlock Holmes
fan, and that's a major figure in the Sherlockian community. So yeah,
she knows her stuff backwards and forwards. So going back to very pretty prostitutes,
Heather Graham looking really good in From Hell and does not look like she
lives on the streets and not at all. Know some of her companions don't
look that way either. They're very very pretty, very well put together.
And I mean the setting for this film it really you know, they went
all out when it came to the squalor and all that. But what I
saw from how the very first time, way back when in two thousand and
one at the Toronto Film Festival funny. I was talking with my friends Skizz
and he actually saw From Hell the morning of nine to eleven, and when
the movie was over, they came in and said, that's a festival's canceled
because of nine to eleven. But when I saw at the first time,
not a big fan. When I saw it again all these years later,
twenty two years later, still not a big fan. I liked the graphic
novel a lot more, but yeah, this movie, I was not feeling
it. I kind of agree with you. It was okay, It was
okay. I only saw it once. It's not like I didn't like it
enough to watch it again. And I mean, I like that period.
I liked my Ripper stories at one point, you know, when there was
all the Hulla balloon about was it Prince Eddie? I had, you know,
three or four Sherlock Holmes books that I read. But for whatever reason
it did, that particular film didn't grab me. I don't look the way
it shot. I feel like it's chaotic. It's trying to be more style
lies and it needs to be. And forgetting the substance portion. I don't
necessarily like the story end of it. I really don't like the ending that
kind of oh, oh yeah, she didn't. I mean, oh,
you're wrong. I'm okay with changing a real life ending and making it more
of a fictional account. I mean, hey, once upon a time in
Hollywood, I kind of like how that ended, But this I just didn't
like. I just didn't like. So Mary's okay, so somebody else just
died in her place. That person doesn't matter, I don't know, And
I just didn't like that twist. I wasn't feeling the whole thing of Johnny
Depp being psychic because we it's it's very late in the game before we start
to see the flashes that he gets. I guess it's you're taking your Donald
Sutherland and making the main character in this one. But there's so many times
at first where he's just like, oh, yeah, I had a vision.
Oh I saw that in a vision, And I'm just like, are
you actually having visions? Are you just bullshitting? I'd say the only thing
I liked about from how I liked it the first time, I think I
like it even more the second time. Robbie Coltrane. Yeah, I love
his character. I love when he makes Shakespeare references and nobody gets that he's
making Shakespeare references. I like that he got a lot of pleasure of punching
Johnny Depp to wake him up. Johnny Depp to me, I kept mixing
this movie up with Sleepy Hollow, and I was like, Oh, yeah,
this is the one. It's kind of like The Alienist, where you
know he's going to come in and he's gonna put on like scientific equipment and
figure the case out. And I'm like, I think my mashup is better
than either one of those films individually. I would like to see Ichabod Crane
in from Hell. I think that might actually make it a little bit more
interesting. I would watch that. Yeah, that sounds great. That's what
this should have been. Is he really is a gysthematic? Does he really
have envisions? I mean, I really don't know what. I just don't
like this movie. I just don't. I tried so hard. This is
everything about this movie was right up my wheelhouse, especially when it came out,
and it does not perform at any level for me. Well, it's
funny. It kind of goes back to what you were saying I think earlier,
David, where it's the whole idea of like these cycles and here we
are again. Here's now Jack the Ripper again, all these years later,
Like, what's the next major Ripper movie? When is that going to be
out there? But yeah, here we are again with the same thing.
And here we are again with the Masons. And I mean the similarities between
this movie and Murder by Decree. I mean, the Hughes brothers must have
seen Murder by Decree. You've got the whole black eyes that Ian Holmes gets
when he gets really into his persona of Jack the Ripper. You've got all
this Masonic stuff that's going on. And here, I mean it's it's really
kind of wild to see the similarities. And they saw Murder by Decree and
that just pushed it ever so slightly into a different way. I'd like to
like the title. I like that from Hell. I mean that's uh,
that's one of the letters that you know, Jack the Ripper ostensibly sent to
the Central News Agency. And you can see, you know, the letters,
you know, just pipe in Jack the Ripper and you can see the
letter itself on Wikipedia and it's really creepy to look at because it goes on,
you know, from Hell, mister Lusk, that's who it's addressed to
and the just the penmanship itself and the misspelled words. It's disturbing to look
at, even if it appears to have been uh, you know, not
legitimate kind of a hoax, not clearly from the Ripper, you know,
the guy actually doing the Ripper killings. Um. And I'm always a sucker
for a good title from hell. That's a great title. By the way,
don't make the mistake that I made and look up killing pictures of Mary
Kelly, that good Man. Yeah, they're available, and they're pretty awful.
They are absolutely terrible. I mean when they say he mutilated his vic
comes, they weren't exaggerating. Well, Mary Kelly's the one that he had
a lot of time. A lot of the other killings were rushed and outdoors.
It's amazing what human beings are willing to do to other human beings.
One two he did on one night right, like um right, yeah,
same day, the double event as it was called, Yeah, in the
whole sheet of Heather Graham. No, it wasn't really her, it was
this other one. I'm like, okay, this kind of like silence of
the lambs going to the door with the flowers kind of thing. No,
no, the like it wasn't the hobbits in here, it was actually pillows.
You stab pillows, you silly nascual. Here you've got that, and
then you've got like basically the minority report ending of her and the baby or
the little girl out in this beautiful cottage that you know, in this completely
make believe type land where it's like I almost feel like, are they dead
because it doesn't feel like they're you know, it feels like they're in of
it rather than actually on an island. But no, she's all good.
And then poor Jenny Depp spoilers just smokes too by jopium and floats away so
he doesn't get the happy ending. Well, that's one thing I appreciate about
this about Murder by Decree was there is no emphasis on drug use. I
mean they make a joke of it. You know, they show homes with
a syringe in a needle, but he's using it to clean out his pipe.
I like that. That was a fun check and I believe I believe
they ran the script past the Trelock Holmes Society of London and that was why
they gave it their mark up approval. They liked the fact that there was
not an emphasis on Trlock Holmes's drug use and murder by de Create. I
would say it's it's worth watching. A lot of the cinematography is very cool.
A lot of the location shooting is very cool. They used the Tate
Gallery in the beginning as the opera house, and then there's a track shot
traveling shot of Buckingham Palace and not that you know they've got permission, they
just put a camera in a carriage or a card or moving and they just
shot it and they included it into the picture. And the sets themselves,
I mean this was shot at Shepperton Studios the same time they were shooting Alien
there. And the set that they've built just of the wharf and the Thames,
it's just magnificent. I mean the film has like seventeen major sets and
you know, they were really really meticulous about trying to capture eighteen eighty eight
Victorian London and it looks great. It's just a great looking film. A
little bit preachy at the end, but other than that, I think it's
well worth watching. Yeah. I love the cinematography, especially how fog is
almost a secondary character here, which you would almost expect from this particular storyline,
but I just I really liked the way Bob Clark captured it. And
again it amazes me that this is the Bob Clark of poor Key in a
Christmas story and baby Geniuses. I mean, it's wild to even think that.
But I love the cinematography. I love the look and the feel of
the film. I think the music really compliments everything that's in it. The
performances are strong. I realize it's not very purist Sherlock Holmes and they don't
disagree with David that he doesn't do a lot until the end. But I
feel like he's building towards the end, so I can in my mind,
I can justify it. He's building toward that finale where he explains everything and
he's been on the trail and he's tracking him down and he's figuring it out.
When you said the end, I thought you were talking about the scarf
in the Big Fight. I'd love how it's like Chekhov's scarf, Like we
get that in the first act and then and I really appreciate how once the
fight is completely over and he's hung and everything else, that's when he collapses.
I mean, basically, just he was going on. I'm pure adrenaline
up until that point. I love the wild reveal of finding Mary. It
was the crew epious reveal. I thought, I had just a very ominous
and just horribly dour reveal of her death and they're just sitting there almost ogling
the body. It's just it's very unnerving. So Bob Clark, I think
it was a very talented horror director. I felt like, and you know,
Black Christmas, I'm a big fan of that film. I like what
he does here. He does some intriguing shots. I'm very surprised as PG.
I really love the Jaws homage at the beginning that you talked about with
the Black Eyes and I, yeah, there's a lot here that I like.
I got a real charge out of that. I'd forgotten it. Like
watching the scenes with the psychic, you know, Donald Sutherland and realizing that
his sister is Ralphie's teacher in a Christmas story. It's like, oh my
god, that's her. Yeah, that was great. I like that a
lot. Yeah, he definitely liked to work with the same people very often,
which was nice. And then to hear his commentary on the keynote disc
and just he sounds like he was a kid in the candy store. When
it came to these actors, I love the idea of it originally being Peter
O'Toole and Laurence Olivier, and that would have been a little weird since we
just saw Laurence Olivier being Moriarty in seven Percent Solution. But yeah, to
your point, errand if you're if you're British, you're probably gonna play yeah,
Sherlock Holms. I mean even Plumber had played Sherlock Holms the year before,
and I think I can't remember what that one was called the Silver Flame
or something, silver Blaze, silver Blaze, thank you. Yeah. And
the Watson in that is that the Saint Watson is from Smarter Brother. Uh
yeah, yeah, okay, that is Yeah, that's wild because as soon
as I saw him, I was like, I've seen this Watson before now,
so he was Watson four times. He just had he just had a
good Watson look to you. I really feel like you can't get into the
British Academy unless you play Sherlock Holmes or John Watson. At some point,
I think it's it's just legally required. It's a part of citizenship. What
a scandal. I have a little puny Robert Downey Junior coming over and stealing
British roles. What the first that and then breaks it and he takes black
roles. He takes British roles. He just doesn't care. He doesn't care.
Downey can do anything but Canny do Jimmy Stewart and Vertigo. We'll have
to see. Well. Peter Peter O'Toole did make an appearance as homes in
a cartoon. Unfortunately. My understanding is that Peter o'tool and Lawrence Olivier both
agreed to be in the film, but then they backed out because of I
mean, I think it was like Lawrence Olivier was having dalliances with other actresses
while he was married to Vivian Lee, and Peter O'Toole took advantage of that
to have a dalliance with Vivian Lee. And so the two gentlemen were not
on the best of terms because you're making merry with my wife, old man.
So they couldn't put they couldn't put the personal differences inside, which is
unfortunate because they would have been a really interesting pairing as homes and watch respect
to Peter O'Toole for a season an opportunity though, well I think, I
think, he said at one point. The only disconcerting thing was there were
pictures of Laurence Olivier all over her bedroom while he was with her, But
that didn't put him off apparently. So all right, guys, let's go
ahead and take another break and play a preview for next week's show. Why
don't you just go home? I've been asking myself that one all night long?
So what happened? Why can't you? I met this girl tonight,
okay, in a coffee shop. I like something incredible was really going to
happen here. So when I got home, I gave her a call on
the cab. On the way down here, all my money flew out the
window. I didn't really get along with her that Well, what's the matter?
I said? I want to see a plaster of pairs, bagel and
cream cheese, paperweight, now cough it up. So I left. So
I haven't got enough money to get home until I meet this bartender who wanted
to lend me the money. That's all that's right, I forget it,
get it? Sorry, you're a boy. So I go back to the
girl's apartment. But her roommate's really pissed off at me for the way I
treated her friend to go. So I marched right in there to apologize,
but she'd already killed herself. I was too late. Oh wow, lighting
up, what is this? I'm in big trouble. I mean big trouble.
Now this part you're gonna say, Oh, you're lying to me.
Don't lie to me. But it's true. This guy whever I couldn't believe
that. Tell him, tell him it's not my fault. I didn't do
it. I gotta tell who you didn't do? What do call? Lee?
What's with you? Are you nuts or something? Luckily, Oh there
was this girl and so the whole thing. So now she's the one in
the mister soft gay stream truckers trying to kill me. They're all trying to
kill me. I mean, I just wanted to leave. You know,
my apartment made me meet a nice girl, and now I've got to die.
Hi, you know what do you want from me? What have I
done? I'm just a word processor? Damnit? Is that after hours when
anything can happen and usually does. Is that unbelievable or what does? That's?
All right? We are switching gears next month and talking about some comedic
films. First up, we'll be talking about Martin scor says these after hours.
Until then, what is the latest with you? Aaron? Well?
As I've talked about in the previous episodes, I am the host of the
Hollywood Outsider podcast, a weekly award winning podcast for film and television. We
have a topic each week. We do reviews and anything big in entertainment news
on a weekly basis. That's that the Hollywood Outsider dot com. That's the
Hollywood Outsider dot com. And I do a monthly podcast on Alfred Hitchcock films
where we re go through each and every single one of them. We're almost
to the end. Actually, it's called Presenting Hitchcock. You can also find
that at the Hollywoo Outsider dot com as well, but the podcast itself is
called Presenting Hitchcock and David, What is happening with you? Sir? I
found out earlier this week that my next new play will premiere at the Purple
Rose Theater and Lovely Chelsea, Michigan on March twenty ninth, twenty twenty four.
The Anti Christ Cometh, a black comedy and I got two screenplays.
I'm hawking one on street soccer, one on a Middle Eastern banker. And
I've got to if anybody wants to make a great movie with the actress Chay,
I blosh you, she's attached to play the lead. Now we just
need a wee bit of money to get it made. So if any of
your well healed listeners want to make a film, the script is complete.
Got an Oscar nominated, Amy winning actress attached. Every once in a while
I'll get sort of a hot shot director, producer, writer, guy that's
just like, oh yeah, I'm a big fan of the show. So
come on, you guys, put some money behind this project. If anybody's
ever heard of the Athenal List, which is an award given to best screenplays
featuring female protagonists, my screenplay in the Land of Fire and Ice won that
and Ray liked it and I met her in Toronto to talk about it and
she's very geeked about it. But yeah, you know, movies are hard
to get, you know, made, So we'll see, we'll see what
happens. Thank you guys so much for being on this journey of us talking
about Sherlock Holmes for a month. I think we might have to come back
and we'd look at some eighties incarnations or two thousands, pick another decade.
You know that we can finally talk about young Sherlock Holmes thereon that you tease
me, don't tease. I'm on board if you guys, I'm a right
absolutely might become a tradition. You never know. So thank you so much
guys for being able to show Thanks everybody for listening. If you want to
hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other
shows I work on. They are all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks
especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit
patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth
take Her for the world. M