You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Bulleproof
Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number three h eight. You fail only if you stop
writing. Ray Bradberry broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in Hollywood when we
really should be working on that next draft. It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast,
showing you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your
screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to
another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex
Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof Script Coverage. Now,
unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses on the kind of
project you are in the goals of the project you are, so we actually
break it down by three categories microbudget, indie film, market, and studio
film. There's no reason to get coverage from a reader that used to reading
tempole movies when your movie is going to be done for one hundred thousand dollars.
And we wanted to focus on that At Bulletproof Script Coverage, our readers
have worked with Marvel Studios, CIA, WM, NBC, HBO, Disney,
Scott Free, Warner Brothers, The Blacklist, and many many more.
So if you need your screenplay or TV script covered by professional readers, head
on over to cover my Screenplay dot com. Now, today we go inside
the mind of screenwriter Randall Jansen. Now. Randall is the writer of The
Doors Mask of Zoro and he worked on Tales from the Crypt HBO Legendary HBO
series, among many other projects in the course of his amazing career. Now
the interview with Randall originally aired on the Filmtrooper podcast and Scott over there did
an amazing in depth interview with Randall. Enjoyed this episode with guest host Scott
McMahon. We are at the Highland Stillhouse in Oregan City, in Oregon City.
So Organ City used to be the original capital of Organ before it was
they moved to Salem. But Organ City was it sort of the last city
or the city established at the end of the Oregan Trail? Was That is
correct? And it was also auspicious in that it was settled by a guy
who bailed out of the Hudson's Bay Company on the fur trade, doctor John
McLaughlin, and settled down and put a trading post right at the foot of
the Willamette River falls here, which was the site of a magnificent Native American
metropolis and had been for thousands, probably thousands of years. And he just
came in planets his trading post right there at the right in the midst of
it, and took a Native American woman for a wife. I believe his
biography is or is his story is one of the things that's on my list
to really read about it. But it's a fascinating story. But this was
back in the eighteen forties, I believe. Well, so it wasn't wow,
Okay, So I mean when I think about it, it's like,
what was the Organ Trail was really eighteen hundreds, wasn't? Yeah, it
started in the eighteen really in the eighteen forties. You know, once the
Organ Territory was established and they the word got out of the very fertile farmland
potential of it, it started creating the migration west. You know. It's
funny. I went on a field with my daughter. They went to the
Foster Farms over in Organ City was one of the first farms outposts for all
the trout you know, pioneer years coming in from the Organ Trail and Foster
he was successful starting up like a general store on in Boston or something like
that. And once he saw that the Organ territory was opening up, he
decided not to take the Organ Trail. He took a ship with his family
and he took his business and decided to open up another store over here in
Oregon. But he took the route of going down the Atlantic all the way
down past the tip of Chile, you know down there the Pacific, coming
all the way up to Pacific. So he never he took that route all
the way instead of taking the wagon trail. Yeah, so he established an
option. So he established the farm and like the outposts of where people came
through hood mountain Hood, right, so, and they would help actually carve
out some roads and passages. Because when I think people when the pioneers came
to Oregon, either they were going to take the Columbia River all the way
you know down or some would take try to get through mountain hood. And
so those who try to venture and get through mountain Hood, they had to
um you know, they got stuck or something like that. So Foster and
his people end up you know, helping him out, helping out a lot
of pioneers and developing a road there. So they he had this outposts and
he had the general story there, he had the farm, he had like
a little you know, like many what he called lodges or ends, you
know, where people could stay. So it's like it was the first site
of civilization for a lot of pioneers after his long journey and he just made
a killing. And so they had this farm that you can go to.
It's an educational farm, but it's still we're walking through the house, you
know, seeing the stuff they use, seeing the farm, seeing the barn.
And it was just made. It was allowed all the kids, so
like, you know, really hands on experience what it could have would have
been like as a you know, a pioneer in the Organ Trail. Wow.
So it was a little bit of history that I had no idea about.
There. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. Sure they
have they have a museum over here for the Oregon Trail Museum, which I
believe has been shut down now because of lack of funding. Because of the
budget cuts and everything else. But that was one of the things I've been
amused actually since I moved up here from California that that with the Oregon Trail,
that was the the overland route that a lot of people who were heading
to the California gold rush took. Yeah, and so at one point,
you know, you have the trail diverts, you know, and you go
go to California search for gold or you go to Oregon and both and growth
things. You know. I think that was a very interesting dichotomy there of
where you know, it sort of really underscores the differences between California and Oregon.
Now that I was funny because it's sort of the what exists today.
Oh, I'm that's my point. That's my point exactly. So I'm a
little slow today. That's all right, We'll just have another have another beer.
There you'll you'll catch um. It was a great segue. So one
of the things I wanted to do with you is, like I one of
my favorite podcasts is the Creative Screenwriting UM podcasts UM hosted by Jeff Goldsmith,
and he's now since left a senior editor of Creative screen screen Creative Screenwriting Magazine
and Uh. He started his own podcast called Q and ANK Question and Answer
with Jeff Goldsmith because he's been really instrumental and and holding these uh free screenings
down in Los Angeles of just different movies. And at the end of every
these free screenings, at the end of every movie, he would have um
the screenwriters there to like talk for like an hour and a half about the
movie, their their experience and all that kind of stuff. What a concept
actually having the writer, Oh, I know, you know, and he's
he's great, and I really enjoy like his style of interviewing, and you
know, and I could tell like sometimes he's polite to like some of the
people or some of the work that they've done. But inside I could tell,
like that comic book geek in him once ago, what were you thinking?
You know, that kind of thing. But he's still very cordial about
it. Sure. He actually happened to be in college the roommate of Dame
Jaffee. Jame Jaffee was the creator of God a War and some of the
Twist of Melsers who I worked with that sony for many years. So when
I met up with Jeff, you know, I introduced myself via that way.
So he was very cool, but he's very busy. And again,
for anybody who wants to check out his stuff, definitely check out Q and
A with Jeff Goldsmith or some of the past stuff on Creative Screen Screenwriting magazine.
But anyway, this is my chance to do my really horrible impersonation of
Jeff interviewing you randall as if like we just finished the screening and oh you
know, and we had this big audience, but right now we're just we
have this cool little puff. It's funny because I note is I normally do
my UM podcast and at Mars Irish Pub and right yeah, like it's gonna
suggest that for you as well. Yeah, so we go there every other
week, my buddy Frederick and I and we go down and he knows everybody
there and so we we're regulars there every like every other Monday night. Okay,
um, But it's funny that it's an Irish pub and here we are
crosses away in Oregan City and a Scottish Irish pub. Again, so they
will tell you it's a Scottish pub. There won't be There's not much any
there, not much Irish here. Okay, good, you know, although
I do see the Bank of Ireland. Uh yeah, him go over there,
you know, but if they had a choice, it would be you
know, basically it's anti English and it's charming. I mean both places are
just charming on this like old style bar. So anybody gets up here,
you gotta check out these places. So we have Mars Irish Pub and l
and we have the Highland Still Still House here in Organ City, ye,
which which if you're a fan of single Scotches, We'll be right back after
a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. This has one
of the best collections you will find anywhere, arguably even on the entire West
coast. So this the the Mick and his wife who owned the place,
are huge Scotch files and they're just uh, I have to learn more about
this. Yeah, I have this. I had this, the nate desire
to want to get into tastes. Well, there's part of it. I
was my honeymoon in Scotland and so that's where I started. That's where I
started, you know, acquiring the taste, and so it was it was
it was more of what you were acquiring. You weren't just because now you're
married. You were just drinking more. I well, I come up,
well, I come up for excuses to drink more, you know, and
I started drinking. I should never drink until my daughter was born. Yeah,
and then I started to drink drink a lot more. Yeah, ways
upon you heavily. So anyway, being the parent, So I wanted to
the first question that Jeff always asked us is he always wants to know breaking
in stories of like how you got started in the business, or what was
your like your first paying job, or how you know, yeah, how
you broke in. Well, I went to film school at UCLA, and
at that time I entered the film school there in nineteen seventy nine, and
you were basically thrown into a little life raft with a bunch of other people
doing that had the same aspirations to either be a writer, director, working
in the film industry in one way or another. And so you also quick
was that time the late seventies, like, because I know that this is
the very late seventies seventy nine when I started, But I was wondering if,
like the early eighties was it? Um, I can't remember. Was
there a golden age of like where everybody wanted to go to film school because
I know that there was a kind of a the the film school sort of
bonanza occurred in the UH I would say probably the mid seventies, okay,
and carried on all through into the early eighties. Um. And that was
basically because George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, they were all products
of film school, you know, Francis Coppola of course, yeah and Squirses
yeah yeah, yeah, you of course and um so and that was it.
I mean, basically we just covered the film school landscape. At that
time. There was three places to go, USC, UCLA, and NYU.
And for me, I had grown up in the San Diego area,
uh and I couldn't afford going to SC and NYU was just about as far
removed from a South California beach as possible. Um. And I used to
go with my dad, who worked for the UC system, up to see
basketball games at UCLA when John Wooden was coaching there. So, um,
that was sort of the natural place to go to and it was vastly cheaper
than SC. Right And actually what I liked about SC that there were differences
in the curriculum at that time too, which was that if you wanted to
be. UM. If you if you had a very specific idea of what
you wanted to do in the in the film industry, whether you wanted to
be a sound editor or an editor, or a cinematographer or a director,
producer, whatever, you would go to SC because they had very clear tracks
and each of those those specific professions. UCLA it was much much looser and
they were kind of had this had sort of the stigma, if you will,
uh, being of creating a tours um. You know, you were
you were the complete filmmaker in a sense once you came out of UCLA.
But the difference, another difference was is that you had to fund all your
own stuff after after the basic Super eight class that occurred when you first entered
school. Uh, SC that didn't happen. You had to um. They
funded the advanced projects, um, but you had to compete with other people
to get that one or two directing positions that they would do. Anyone could
be a director at UCLA if you had the money for it, which to
me, it was really like the real world, much more like the real
world. Yeah. Yeah, Coppola came to UCLA. Jim Morrison and ray
Man's Erica. The doors were there. Um, you know, that was
in the that was the very early sixties. Um, you know, but
I mean there's you know Paul um oh um names. I knew this would
happen. The names start fading, you know, from me who wrote a
taxi driver, um Trader, Paul Schrader, thank you. I went to
UCLA. Um, you know, I mean the list of names, he's
very long and prominent, right that UCLA is produced and n SC as well.
So you know when I went to uh UCSD and I was looking around,
I went to junior college. First, went to UM Palmar College,
right, and the only fame claim to fame we had there was that Phil
Tippett was famous visual effects artists from the Star Wars films and his you know,
all his stop modes. I interviewed Phil when I wrote for the Carl's
Bad Journal back in nineteen seventies. Okay, so you know great, right,
So his claim to fame was that he went to that school. So
it was great, you know, T year school, you get out,
sure, then you can transfer anywhere. And then I didn't know where to
go exactly, I want. I looked at San Francisco State. I looked
at uc USC like the UCLA. For some reason, I decided, of
all places, to goo UCSD, which probably wasn't the best choice of film
school, but I don't know. It was nearby near a beach, near
beach, definitely, definitely. So the funny thing was I spent a lot
more time when I was there because the way they had the film track was
that everything was really dedicated towards the graduate film students. As an undergrad,
you were you didn't really get chancey two hands on. Knowing that now,
I probably should have gone to maybe like Santego State, which is much more
of a more of a vocational approach to the education. But I spent a
lot of time with this scraduate film student from UCLA who was doing her thesis
or her work down in UCSD. So she had access to all the you
know, the editing bays, the rooms, and she's trying to finish her
her thesis. She just needed an assistant. So I was there and I
got all this hands on training of how to like you know, cut film
and you know, put all this stuff together. And then she would I
would go up with or Um on a regular basis to UCLA and just I
was crashing courses. I didn't even go to this school where I was at
UCLA, just sitting in at the short courses. So kind of give me
a different perspective of things. Hey, that's my yeah, okay, well
there you go. Well, um, at that time again, this is
in the late seventies, you know, those were the three places to go.
Now it's the landscape is vastly different. Every almost every college has a
film department or media department and something something like that. So I mean that
just shows you how thing things have changed. Um. So anyway, I
went through the film program and at UCLA at that time, they didn't have
or the difference. There was no difference between the undergrad and the graduate programs
those days. Those days. Um, literally in my in my second year
there, the graduate students rebelled and stage a little um demonstration and really forced
the hand of the school to alter the curriculum in a sense to favor grad
students because basically, and I think they had a legitimate beef. They were
competing with you know, freshmen who were new to the or new to the
department for you know, the limited amount of materials and cameras and things that
we had to do their graduate films and so which were really wasn't fair.
So they did an overhaul of the curriculum and my like or they didn't do
it overnight. It actually happened right after I graduated. So basically I benefited
from having basically had a graduate education as an undergrad. Wow, because I
stuck it out and went an extra years as an undergrad. Later. Yeah,
and then they kicked me out. I said, it's time for you
to move on. Yeah, I had maxed out every unit possible, but
knowing that I took every writing class I wanted to do when I first got
in there, I was hoping to be a director. That was my aspirations.
Like everybody else, that's what I wanted to do. But you you
had to fund your own films, um, and I didn't have that kind
of money. Um you know. Um. So I realized that well,
typing paper was cheap at that point, and I said, well, shoot,
I'm just gonna I'm gonna write and I'm going to direct my movies on
paper and then eventually, if I get enough clout, I will be able
to direct something that I write myself. So that was that was the philosophy.
That hasn't happened, by the way, but it has happened for a
lot of people that I know. Now. You wrote, so you're a
writer when you're younger too, Like, yeah, I mean I was.
I started writing, like as soon as I learned to write, you know,
I just was. I had kind of spates where I was very prolific.
Third grade, especially seventh grade was also a big one. We'll be
right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
But I initially wanted to be a journalist. I actually wanted to be Cameron
Crowe because I loved Rolling Stone and loved music still when I was in high
school. That that's what I was aspiring to be, was to be like
a music journalist of some sort. Um. There was a great writer for
Rolling Stone at that pool point. I think he's back now writing some stuff
for them again, but named Charles M. Young, who did just some
fantastic interviews with like the Sex Pistols and Kiss And I still have those issues
because the writing is just so so funny and insightful and really great and just
inspired me a great deal to be to be, you know. And this
was the era too, where Tom Wolfe was doing um, you know,
electric cooleid acid test on the heels of that kind of what is known as
the new journalism, where it was just wasn't real cut and dry, but
actually there was a great deal of reportage uh going on and and uh quasi
sermonizing that would be worked in by um, the likes of Charles M.
Young or um, um you know, the our Gonzo Hunter Thompson kind of
you know, people of that sort. It was a it was an interesting
time to be in journalism. Um. And then I wanted to be a
magazine freelance magazine writer. I thought, yeah, and then I realized I
probably really couldn't make a whole lot of money at it. Um. But
I and I had started working for my hometown newspaper in Carl's Bad, California,
writing writing sports for them, and then in the summertime when I was
out of high school, it worked into full time work where I was doing
feature articles. So I was interviewing surfers and runners and and Carl's Bad was
also the site of a motocross, um, uh say, seeing out there
and doing some reporting on that. It was just a lot of it was
it was very interesting, and I learned how to interview people at an early
age, which was a great thing. Then I knew that I wanted to
continue with writing of some sort but in my studies at school, but I
just wasn't sure what kind it was. So I too went to Community College
Maracosta. Okay, yeah, just because I was working at the at the
newspaper still and I was getting experience there part time, and I thought,
well, get a couple more years their experience and then take classes and get
my basic education out of the way, and then by that time maybe I'll
know what to do. And I happened to take a playwriting course and that
was very interesting. That opened up my eyes to dramatic writing and I and
I realized that, yeah, playwriting wasn't quite it for me, but screenwriting
that sounded very avant garde and very cool. So that's what I was all
like, maybe like when the first moments that you like wrote a piece or
a paragraph or something or somebody else wrote and you were able to witness sort
of a a positive sort of emotional response from it, or it's just like
a like a one moment like you wrote something where maybe you felt good about
it or somebody else's reaction to it was surprising, but you know what I
mean, it's just like it. It made you want to keep going or
or want more of that or anything or feedback. Um. Yeah, that's
an interesting question. Um. I wrote three scripts when I was at UCLA,
three full length scripts, and they were pretty abysmal. Um, but
my instructors were very supportive. I got a's on them. Okay, um,
yes, that's right for you here, thank you. What did they
called Scottish as Yeah, the Scotch eggs. Yeah. Um. And that
was initially I think, be studying and doing that to get that kind of
thumbs up from them was very positive. That that made a big impression on
me. Um. And then once I got out of school to have some
peers of mind to just kind of comment, there's mustard right there, you
can dip into that. Um. That was positive, but nothing was as
strong as getting um, um, the kind of the endorsement of a true
professional somebody working in the business kind of just mangle this one, this matter.
Yeah, that's all right, there we go. Yeah, it's good,
all right, mm hmm, yes, what's it's funny? Um can
get my trains top. All right, now, this is really delicious.
I know. I'm sorry, we can keep. Don't worry about this.
I pause, cut this out. This is good. Oh no, don't
I mean this. I mean it's like your interview. So it's like and
the food. Oh yeah, mah oh no, there's more mustard right there.
Yeah, I got something to say. Yeah. So it's an egg.
It's wrapped in sausage and deep pride. M h it's really healthy.
So so is it a boiled egg first? And then they put it into
like a sausage and they have to fry that, I think so yeah,
m hm mm hmmm. No, I'll show with this beer I'm drinking.
You know, listen, yummy. It's a great place to be in anytime.
But I love coming here on a when it's howling wind out and co
there you go. And well, this place is located right by the river
vers Falls. This is the fall, like is it the lamb it falls?
Yeah, lambit rights. So he definitely has a propensity for the wind
and the weather. Chains Um, before the paper mill was shut down,
certain fumes wafting up from from the mild and uh sort of sweetened things.
And I mean that I mean that facetiously. So yeah, So anyway,
so can you recall like, um, well, let me backtrack. Do
you recall like one movie, like a movie experience you had where you thought
to yourself that you were like moved or inspired to say, yeah, I
want more of this or like for me as a kid, I remember,
you know, movies were just always sort of part of just growing up.
But the first time I remember seeing the sort of a I don't say I
had a more mature, non sort of spectacle movie, you know that I
realized was different than what I had seen before. It was one of my
parents, I think, took me to see Amadeus. Oh you know,
so I was floored by that movie because I thought to myself, I just
went through something that I never thought I would be entertained by because I thought
I had to have like, you know, laser guns or cowboys or indians
or aliens or spaceships or explosions, because that's, you know, that was
my appetite. I just that I was second nature. But once I was
introduced to a film that was had none of that but engaged and captured,
my interest had definitely changed something in me. As well as another film that
I wasn't expecting to was somewhere in time because I was just like, oh,
it's super Man. But to me, I was like, what was
that? And that that got to me. And so I remember those two
films of all films that sort of changed my perspective. And then I remember
having UM. When I got into college, I wasn't thinking about film.
I was thinking about studying illustration and art. I went there for that,
but then got sort of the film bug myself and came across I had to
take a scriptwriting class. It's very, very cheesy, but I remember going
to the library. At the time, this is before the internet. You
actually had to go to the library. We'll check out the reference books,
and they had real scripts, and I remember reading Ordinary People and I never
seen the film. I just read the screenplay, and I remember it was
just turning the page out to turning the page because I just had to get
through it. But just having that first experience of absorbing what a script looks
like, and I didn't know what, you know, all the wrole things
meant, you know, what is I and t X all that kind of
stuff. We started beginning to figure out the little code or the language.
But I remember having that significant moment as well coming out of that going what
did I just read? What did I just experience? And we wanted to
ask you did you have anything like that? Well? I did as a
kid. This is I mean going way back. We'll be right back after
a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And I
really would have to say that I didn't know the impact that would had on
me at the time, obviously, but it's really almost now that I look
back on those times as they want, now I understand why I was so
moved and influenced by And this is it goes back to when we first moved
to California and my parents were running a beach front motel in Oceanside called the
Buccaneer, which was the Buccaneer Beach, you know in Oceanside, and it
h it had all these pirate motifs and everything like that. So my first
five years in California after moving from Utah to we're here at the Buccaneer Motel
with all the pirate motifs running around there, and I used to, you
know, run around there and have a lot of fun and meet a lot
of different people. That were staying there. But they would always on the
weekends we would go my parents would take a break. Because we lived on
the premises, there was no escape from it. My parents would go to
a drive in movie out an Oceanside and yeah, yeah, and so the
the it's an airfield now, yeah it is, and the the the ritual
was basically they would pop their own popcorn ahead of time, put it into
a big brown paper market sack, and we would They would take a cooler
full of Cragmont sodas and they would put me in pj's. I had two
older brothers who were ten and twelve years older than me, so they didn't
want to They were teenagers by this time. They didn't want to have anything
to do with that, so they would just stay at home. But I
would go with my parents with them to the drive end and then I would
be in my pj's and they would always hope that I would fall asleep in
the back seat. At least that was the plan while they watched these,
you know, sometimes very adult movies, and lo and behold, I never
fell asleep once because I was so intrigued by what I was seeing. And
I can tell you exactly what I saw, you know, I saw Bunny
and Clyde. WHOA, yeah, well, I think they had intended that
I had fallen asleep. They had no idea and I don't, and they
probably were. They were not film savvy at all. They were probably didn't
have any idea what they were in store for. Um. But I recall,
I recall very clearly, um the opening frames of that where you see,
you know, the naked fade unaway in her but you know up there
on that big screen, I just my eyes grot really wide. I'm going,
wow, this is wild. And I was just riveted from that point
and r oh. I mean, I can still recall being in the back
seat and seeing my parents visibly recoil from the one after they make the one
robbery and the guy comes out and try and stands in front of the car
and tries to either he's got some kind of a weapon at him, and
they run him down and he ends up hitting the windshield and falling off it.
My parents just like wow, he kind of gasping over the over the
violence of that, and I was like wow. So Bonne and Clyde,
I saw Bonne and Clyde, I saw in the heat of the night.
Um, guess who's coming to dinner to serve with love? Pattent with my
dad Planet of the Apes. Then my dad and I started going and seeing
me Okay, some of these an original, h I mean, my mom
stayed at home for some reason. I don't think she wanted to see Patton,
but my dad did and I saw Planet of the Apes with him,
and um, these now, these are the films that I actually hearkened to
my and to my students nowadays too in teaching, because I think these were
This was a fantastic age of American filmmaking. It was really from that from
about sixty sixty six to about seventy six, that ten year period produced just
astonishingly great American films and made by the studios, made by the studio at
the time. Yeah, and and ultimately what killed it, of course was
Jaws, right and the block you know and Blockbuster. From that point on,
it changed everything and how the studios started doing things films, and again,
not not to take away from the you know, the Spielberg's of the
World and the in the in the geeks, you know, the film school
geeks, which who basically started running the business at that point, which was
great, but um, you know, prior to that, we still had
The Godfathers and The Conversation and Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and
Five Easy Pieces and the last detail of hal Ashby's Harold and mod you know,
making these movies, these kinds of movies, and there was just nothing
like it, right these so a little big man, you know, Um,
you know these are these are films that I think still really uh resonate
today hugely. Um in the studios have sort of lost sight of that,
you know, because they were they were really socially conscious, uh conscious in
a lot of ways. Um, they pushed the envelope, you know.
Um, the subject matter was truly adult, the notion of of of like
uh catering to demographics the pubescent a boy yeah, and action figures and all
that unheard of no way, right, no, you just you know you
didn't do that. It was still the days where you had people like Robert
Evans, who was running you know, Paramount apparently in between his yeah that
document, you know, he was uh he still was somebody who had gut
instincts, you know, and could do things that um and in green lit
stuff that got you know that will never see they haven't seen stuff like that.
You can. The only way to find it now is, you know,
in the independent realms. What do you think about there's this sort of
a article I read a couple of years ago about how like HBO and Showed
Time, all these the cable network or pay per view and the cable channels
are now providing that sort of fix for adult drama. That um, where
the movies, theatrical movies have just becoming such tent pole spectacles either of you
know, um, the sci fi genre or whatever it is, or then
or comedies that are you know, the gross out are are it? It?
Whatno comedies? When you you have a little sprinkle of independence independent films,
but the canvas of what's going on in the television spectrum right now,
where you have long form where you can develop a character and a law,
you know, a much slower pace and the more in depth is why you're
seeing like the success of like the Sopranos and and all these things. So
I don't know whether or not that sort of fulfilled the niche or the need
that once was supplied during the late sixties mid sixties in the seventies for what
the studios are supplying. You know what I mean Now it's just got fragmented.
I don't know, that's sort of a yeah. I mean nowadays everything
has gotten fragmented. It's it's really broken down. I mean we once we
entered the digital age, right, everything became fragmented. And that's what digitizing
analog does. You know, it breaks things down into these little bit into
these little bits. You know this whether it's a sound bite or it's a
you know, it's a bit of information. Um, and that sort of
its job in in one way. So we we we've but we've lost a
lot, you know in the in that at the same time. Um,
you know, it's just it's just changed. These are This is part of
a larger conversation that we'll get into here that the benefits and the curses of
the digital the digital world now in digital culture. But uh um yeah,
I and answer to your question, I would say yes, indeed, HBO,
Showtime, AMC, running Madmen and stuff. They are feeling a niche
now where so many of us have a thirst for those great adult dramas.
Right, you know that that deal with touchy material um um. Not.
So it's not necessarily high concept material, but it's really important material, um.
You know. I mean, for example, it recently doing the they
did the the you Don't Know Jack, you know, the Jack Cavorkian story.
I knew nothing really about Cavorcian other than just seeing the headlines always about
them from that. But you know, Pacino really owned that role, and
Barry Levinson, you know, came in and directed it and it was a
really it was a really compelling piece of piece of work. But there was
no way a studio would make that wake that movie. It would have it
have to be HBO. And of course HBO loves to flaunt the fact that
only HBO can do it, you know. And so so I think it's
great, um, But you know, again, HBO is part of a
larger conglomerate mega monster that they too have to answer to someone. Uh if
not, they're in not only their ratings, but you know, it's a
corporation. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
to the show. And so, you know, to find truly independent the
stuff, you might have to even go further out into the margins then.
But comparatively still to the mains, the main studios and the three major networks
that we're used to. It's pretty still pretty very controversial and exciting stuff they
do. So we'll we get back to. Do you remember like the first
time you read a finished script that got you like turned on, like well
I can do this. Well I don't necessarily recall reading a script and going
daga over it. I recall seeing movies and going just like, oh crap,
that's what I want to write. That's you know, and and that
that's what I want to do. Um. So we have to remember,
you know, as a screenplay is a is is only stepping stone to the
final the final piece of art. You know that it is. And it's
hard, it's hard to admit that as writers, but we do have to
remind ourselves, if you're a screenwriter, that it's a it's a way station
to the ultimate, the final product, the ultimate vision. Right. Okay,
So so again in you know, I would look at a script and
I was like, okay, all right, that's that's okay. But it's
the movie that really inspired me. And it's still the movies that really inspire
me now, um um, I don't get overly excited about reading scripts per
se. Um. You know, I have to. I just I want
to see the movie so so in so great movies make me want to write
great scripts. And but it's always interesting and instructive to look at the scripts
that have become great movies and to see that they that they are not perfect,
um that sometimes they're far from it. Um. For example, Uh,
well, whenever you you let's say you go to a bookstore and you'll
find a the screenplay of a certain movie right there that's been published. Now,
it's usually the the the shooting script that they'll um publish, you know,
and so they'll have scene numbers and everything like that. That's anytime there
are scene numbers on there, you know, that's a very late draft.
It's something that they probably you know, it was the shooting draft or close
to it, if they were numbering scenes. Um. Years ago, Frank
Drabon, who wrote and directed The Shawshank Redemption, published a version of Shawshank
that was not the shooting draft. It was a book that I think included
the early draft of the script and then uh, and then the shooting draft
something like that. And I'm mad at myself, right I never picked that
up, and I remember thumbing through it, but Frank had the courage to
to go ahead and print an earlier draft of it. And the thing was
a mess. It was all there was a full of stracouts and crossed out
stuff and notes in the margins and things like that. And that's what a
real script looks like, right, you know. So beware to anyone out
there who's considering writing scripts and they think that that has to be all perfect.
That's just not the case. You know, a screenplay is it cannot
be chiseled in stone. It really can't. Um it has. It is
a living, breathing entity, and it will ebb and flow. It will
inhale, it will exhale, It will do things you don't expect. Sometimes
you have to make alterations due to weather, to cranky actors, to the
whims of a studio or a star or director or whatever, for good or
for worse or whatever. These are. These are just the things that It's
constantly in a state of flux and will be until the film is shot,
edited, and screen before paying audience. You know. That's you know,
and that and that's the way it is, and you have to understand that,
so you can't be overly precious with it, you know, and just
think. I mean, if you're starting out and you're trying to write a
great writing sample, of course you want to make it as good as you
can possibly be, because you want to get your best foot forward. You
want to show people what you're capable of. But once you are working and
or in that business, you have to know you have to suck it up,
man, and just know that this thing is going to get mangled and
trundled under by the Hollywood machine sometimes. Um, and even in the independent
realms, it doesn't matter because there was still things are going to be constantly
changing because the universe is just throwing you change ups all the time. Know.
Okay, it's raining. We're supposed to shoot a sunny a scene under
sun today in blazing heat. Um, okay, the bar is more crowded
than than we expected to have our you know the scene. Yeah, I
talk, you know, I mean as these are right mics, you know,
I mean, these are things where you just constantly you have to think
on your feet and you have to be sort of flexible in terms of so
as storytellers too, you have to have the acuity of mind and the flexibility
to say, Okay, that doesn't work, I can switch this, I
can do it here, and I'm like, shuffle this around and will make
that work, and we'll we'll we'll fit it for the occasion when you know,
right, do you feel like sometimes I've heard the expression or heard things
where sometimes writers discover the story like it's sitting up there in a cloud of
the years or of moments of inspiration that are just sort of permeating, where
they start picking it up, like it just starts trickling down and they start,
you know, like almost invisible ink, like it starts revealing itself,
the story and the shape that even though your your intentions might not have been
there originally, but as you as it, like you said, ebbs and
flows and evolves, you're discovering it. And it's almost as you just had
to be in the right sort of mental space or capacity to grab hold of
it and and and sort of let it like as I yeah, let it
evolve. Yeah, And I don't know if um oh yeah, oh this
is good. Yeah, I'm good, this is good. Stop. So
I was wondering if um so like when you're so you're in college. You
were taking the writing the screenwriting class, I guess, and getting feedback from
your professors. UM, do you remember like sort of the first permeation of
like the the germ of the idea for your first full length story that you
were like, you know what, this would make it, this would make
a good movie. And I think, I gotta you know you've heard writers
or that with that term. I gotta beat on it. I gotta beat
on it. Yeah, well, yeah, there's you bring up a couple
of points, but just specifically to to me. UM. As I mentioned
before, when I was at UCLA, I wrote three scripts that were completely
uncommercial. They were just they were bad, you know. I wrote a
you know, sprawling period piece and a couple of other just not not good,
you know, pieces of work. UM. And then I graduated,
and I knew that I had to um in order to get somewhere, you
know, to get a get ahead in the business, I had to make
a conscious effort to write something commercial, you know, just to get on
the map. Right. I can be artful and and and write artie movies
later on, you know, but I really need to get it on the
get on the map first, and get get try to make a living because
at that point I was I was working in the mail room of the Academy
Emotion, Pictures, Arts and Sciences, and I and I, you know,
I just which was a great job actually, but because I allowed me
a lot of time to write during the day. But yeah, I had
to. I couldn't stay there for the rest of my life. So so
I said, okay, I'm going to write something commercial and and write something
that could actually get made, you know, for a relatively low sum of
money. So at that time, which that translated to write a horror film.
Okay, So then well, okay, how do you write a horror
film? Or even at that time, it's like, oh god, everything's
been done already. So I was really looking to do something different. Um,
And so what I wrote. I wrote a script in that summer called
Slaughter Alley, which was about a haunted highway or haunted a stretch of road,
a rural road that was haunted by the ghost of a hot rodd who
had been killed on it back in nineteen sixty two. So he races up
and down it in the middle of the night, UM in his fifty seven
Chevy bell Air, you know, running people off the road and claiming souls.
And as you're explaining this, I can completely hear the twiny guitar right
now. Oh yeah, oh it was. I mean, oh that's the
link Ray, you know, the Cramps. I mean it was very music
inspired in that sense because it, you know, just like those great big
Detroit steel iconic cars you know from the you know, from the late fifties
and sixties, all the muscle car era and stuff. Um you you know,
you hear the that that big guitar sound as well the Ventures and you
know all the Eddie Cochrane and all these these the rockabilly sound and stuff.
Um is Eddie repels Eddie? Um but did Rebel Rouser or yeah, but
Eddie something. But anyway, almost like a more of a punk version of
that. Well, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show. What was interesting simultaneous with this for me
was that I had I was in LA I was staying in LA after he
graduated and was really caught up in the music scene in Los Angeles at that
point, which was getting swept um with the real, real kind of I
don't know what to call it, a renaissance of music. But it was
it was the punk rock thing that was at the core of it, and
the hardcore specifically was taking over and really having a profound influence on everything.
It was basically taking a flamethrower to everything right um and just burning it down.
So you had and that was led by Black Flag and the descendants and
irrelevant today Oh sure, sure. I mean the Dead Kennedy's up in San
Francisco, and you know there was in Social d down in Orange County and
stuff. So yeah, um, and and to me it had a huge
influence on me on a number of levels. Specifically, you know, just
creatively how you attack things, um and they strip it down. There was
no pretension. You just went out and you did it and you made it
work, and you did it with passion and really with an attitude, and
there was just something elementally bitching about it fly and oh man, it just
was incredible. So I was witnessing a lot of this, and then at
the same time with the hardcore stuff, there was the sort of the art
damaged bands that were doing things like this. There are bands like Savage Republic
and the Fibonacci's in um Wall of Voodoo even that were heavily influenced by film
right, and so they were doing a lot of like soundtrack stuff. Wall
of Voodoo used to do a medley of Sergio Lee any movies a soundtrack,
so you know, the good and bad and the ugly and hang them high.
They would they would do this in concert and it was just like wow.
And that had that big twangy guitar and it was just like wow,
this is this is really really stuff. Um, speaking of what while I
wud yeah you um the lead the frontman for Yeah stand Ridgeway? Yeah n
Did you become friends with him working on a project. Yeah, Well just
a quick aside there. I was, Um, after I wrote Slough a
Rally, I wanted to write a murder mystery and what I was doing.
My my notion for it was to have it was a murder mystery that was
set in the punk rock underground of LA and it was about a hardcore kid
who was accused of killing someone and who had been apprehended. And then his
public defender was like a like a hippie liberal middle liberal hippie who had to
you know, defend this kid, and they were I was very interested in
just the opposing sensibilities kind of thing, you know. And so I started
doing all this um uh quote unquote research you know, in the in the
music scene at the time, and going to I'll see all these different shows
and and I made contact with the number of bands. I just reached out
to them and one time or another and say, hey, could I'm doing
this, would you mind if I come to a rehearsal and see what you
guys do? And and everybody was really cool, you know. The Minutemen
was one of those bands, and and uh and stuff, and so um
the script didn't pan out. I just it just never quite got over the
hump for it. Um. But I made all these contacts with all these
bands and very very good friends, and so that's that's what led them to
getting doing some music videos for them and whatever. One of the band and
said, I really that were very welcoming to me was a band called the
Fibonaccis. And the Fibonaccis had artie party and ready to party, as the
La Weekly describe them, The Fibonaccis were open for Wallavoodoo at one time,
and they knew Stan Ridgeway very much. And so one time I was at
Club Lingerie and I forget who was playing, but it wasn't The Fibbs,
but I was with the keyboardists of the Fibbs, John Dentino and Stan.
Ridgeway and his wife came in and I said, oh god, you know
John, can you introduce me to Stan? I said, I'm a big
fan and I'd really loved the first time I saw them on stage. I
was just like, oh wow, these guys just to completely especially Stan,
just captured a lot of how that sort of the collectic approach to every anything
and everything. He said sure. So I met Stan and we talked and
I told him I, you know, Wall of Voodoo was actually a big
influencing writing slaughter rally for me. And he said, oh, send me
the script. I'd love to I allowed to read it, and I said
okay, So I did, and a couple of weeks later I got a
postcard. He actually mailed me a postcard and said, I read your script.
I really like it. I'm going to call you in a couple of
days with a plan. Stan is always scheming. He's always got something working
up with a plan. But basically that started a friendship that still continues today.
And ironically his manager eventually manager when he went solo, was my wife's
older brother. Um but I even before I started dating her. Yeah,
I knew Chris, but I didn't know he was related to Kate when we
first met. It was just really so stan Stan and Chris. They both
argue they like to take credit for introducing us, but it sounds like it
was just already in there. It was already in the words, it was
a pretty yeah yeah, but um uh, it was going to add.
One of the things that intrigued me about the music scene at that time,
especially in the rockabilly circle that you would see is that when the Blasters were
playing, and there were a number yeah, yeah, there were a number
of bands that were you know, there was the Stray Cats that were the
real big commercial gap, but the Blasters were the big the ones in the
LA scene, but there were there were some other Los Lobos was really kind
of rockabilly influencing on that. But anyway, they would bring out these these
crowds that you would see them come up and they pull up and there their
vintage cars and these guys would come out when their pompadours and their and their
jeans and t shirt and their their cuffed jeans and their cowboy boots or whatever,
and the and then they would have their their girlfriends and the poodle skirts
and them and uh, the Betty Page kind of you know, a hair
and and all of because it's that scene is like it's a greaser scene by
like a full start. Like you said, it's it's not like it's not
like a happy Day's cutie. It's it's a little bit the edgier. It
was. Okay, pay with it now, it's like tattoos everywhere, right.
Granted it was a little edgier then, but it still struck me.
I was still rather amused by it because to me, it they still struck
me. It was kind of like the posers, you know, because there
had been the real the real guys. That's me, thank you. Okay,
hey we're back. We just take a little dinner break. But listen,
we were talking about slaughter Alley right, which right by the way,
So it was like one of your first scripts, yes, my first attempt
to write something commercial. Yes, but that story is dear to your heart
because we've been working on a little bit launching your site slaughter Alley dot com.
Correct now, just let you know. I'm going to take another crack
at that map. I think because I've learned since since we met last year,
I've learned so much about like launch, how to you know, make
some websites, how to do just my job. Recently, I've just been
working in flash lately, so like all this other stuff, I'm like,
oh my gosh, I think I can go back and like fix what I
kind of oh I tend to do. But anyway, that's in the back
burner. But one of these days the things that get cleared up, I
think I have a way that I can make that thing launch. So that's
great. But again that's just my interests of like learning stuff like that,
and it each year I get more and more knowledged and it's like, oh
wait, I can apply this now. Sure. Sure. Anyway, so
you write Sladder Alley and you have two other ones now. During the process
of like writing these scripts, and you were trying to make it something commercially
viable, Um, was there any moments in there where you feel like,
I don't know, like you felt your groove, Like I know that sometimes
I write stuff like it's a lot of times it's painful, but sometimes you
get these magic moments where you just feel like when it's completed or something,
or like wow, you know I did it or I could see this or
something like that. Yeah. Um, Like what the question is, where
do you find your enjoyment in the writing, because if you've done it so
long, obviously there must be some grain of well. Slaughter Rally was was
fun to write, and I've I've done multiple drafts of it over the years,
and it looks like I'm going to be doing another one here, maybe
very soon, um, because I've got some interest in it yet again.
Um Um, it's the script that refuses to die. It Uh, It's
this is what I was saying that you know, scripts are alive and breathing,
and this is some kind of like a monster that just lurks in the
primordial slime somewhere that every now and then somebody keeps coming back and coming back
to it and saying that like the story of like, uh, Lawrence Kazan
when is one of our early scripts, the Bodyguard and Costner. We'll be
right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
You saw it in his shelf something like one of his early early skips
and he said, I'll grab that, and they made that. But it
was you know things, look those stories where they take they've just been around
for so long. Yeah, you know, I mean, look, the
lesson I've learned from it isn't that nothing is ever dead in Hollywood. It's
just you put it in a drawer for a while and then you know,
six months a year later, bring it back out to show it around again.
Um, that's if it's a spec script. But right, well then
again even that now it's like lead it into bled into the actual finished films.
With what Lucas has done with his Star Wars films, Yeah, and
it just read somewhere the new Blu Ray release. He added some more like
dialogue to Darth Vader and returned the Jedi where he like screams no, like
during the death scene of like the Emperors, and so fans are like again
like what the hell are you doing? Wow? So anyway, so yeah,
even in the film form, it has life that it freezes and sure,
sure, yeah, and that's interesting now that it's come to that where
it's so except easy and accessible to be able to get to make, you
know, slight alterations, nip and tucks, here and there and all that.
I mean, that's the that doesn't surprise me. It's it goes back
to the I think it was as Ezra Pound who said, uh uh,
you know, nothing is a poem is never never finished, it's abandoned.
And uh so anythink that's apropos for any kind of art. You know,
you just uh, including scripts. At some point, you just got to
abandon it because it's it's never quite done, it will always be a work
in progress. You've got to make a T shirt of that, like goes
ready for like those writer conferences and stuff like that. I never thought of
that. That's actually pretty good. You've seen these like cute like shirts like
bustats dot com somewhere, really funny things. But anyway, yeah, I
think that's a great great little say what what nothing has ever finished? Its
abandoned on the it's just something like abandon it. So like this, you
know, and they give like the little web you know, like a website
in the back something to like T shirts that are specific to that market of
writers. But yeah, people like we want to like walk by goes,
what does that mean abandon it? Because then it strikes up our conversation like
you just like, what the hell is that that term or that phrase?
Yeah? So yeah, anyway, um well anyway, uh kind of back
to the to the question, Um, Mike, is it the inspiration or
working? And you have these moments of like where you just feel like you're
like you're the ship, like you're like you know, I mean, like
you feel like you're like, oh my gosh, I'm a genius. But
or sometimes you know, well, I I think if you ever are thinking
thoughts like that, you're really asking for it. You're doomed. You know.
That's the day you really start worrying. I really think. I had
the good fortune one time to meet David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia
and stuff, and a friend of mine was assisting his restoration of Lawrence of
Arabia and I was. She knew that I was a big fan, and
she arranged for me to meet him at that and sneak in on a screening
of it that Spielberg and a few other people were there, and so he
came back and shook my hand there afterwards. But she told me later that
he had told her this story about when he was directing Lawrence of Arabia and
the day came for him to shoot the scene where very late in the movie,
where Lawrence is leading the Arabs on the cutting a swath through the Turkish
lines and heading straight towards Damascus, and then he has to make a tactical
choice of either wipe out and slaughter this Turkish column that had just had raped
and pillage to village, an Arabic village, or move on to Damascus in
greater glory, and the smart tactical thing to do. But Lawrence opts succumbs
to the thing, and where he goes and massacres the Turkish column right and
sort of satiates his his his need for blood letting in a way. And
and uh Lean told her that the day that they filmed that scene, he
drove the limo came and got him at his hotel, and then they drove
the hour and a half out to the to the location or wherever it was.
Lean got out of the car and looked at, you know, the
hundreds of extras, all in uniform and costume, you know, waiting waiting
for his first command, you know, And he looked at all these people
cast and crew were just looking at him, and he got struck with them
with diarrhea just immediately had to jump back into the car and told the chauffeurs
that just take me back to the hotel. Took him back to them the
hotel, and he camped out in the bathroom for two or three hours,
I guess or whatever. And then uh um, I finally got enough courage
up to go back out to the scene and direct it. But he didn't.
The point was, he didn't have any idea how to direct that scene.
And he was so struck with fear and insecurity that you know, he
was crapping in his pants. I mean, he just was literally, I
mean, he just got struck with it. And so he said, he
said to my friend Jude that you know, that just goes to show you
it could hit anyone anytime. You know. It's just it's it's always when
you're when you're when you're putting yourself out there, there's a there's a great
risk that you're that you're taking you're overcoming a great amount of fear there,
or or you you're embracing the fear, you're crossing over you're taking these big
risks and stuff in so it takes great effort to do it. But he
said, somebody like the implication was somebody like him who's got all these accolades
and stuff like that. He said, sometimes they just don't know how to
do it. You're scared. You're scared too, you know, I am,
thank you, um and so so I always thought that was that,
that was a great story. I felt very privileged to have heard that,
you know, secondhand, you know, um uh and and and so anyway
back to what we were talking about, if and if you know the times
that where you're really starting to feel cocky and say, damn, I'm good
right right um is uh, you know, that's where you could be into
a little bit of trouble. My best I probably arguably my best writing is
probably stuff that I was mortified that I wrote. You know that I was
scared. I was scared really to pass on because I was afraid of the
reaction it would get that people would just think, what are you thinking?
Are you out of your mind? God's sakes, we're paying you all this
money to write this, direc you know, you pretentious of a bit for
you know whatever art damaged? You know, kind of geek um, you
know all these all you know, all these thoughts run through your mind.
I mean, it's just you know, racing, your mind races with a
lot of irrational, irrational stuff sometimes. But um, I think that and
again, fear and insecurity can paralyze you right when you're when you're working.
But the key thing is to have enough of it that it keeps you on
edge, and it keeps you vigilant and keeps you always um uh wanting to
take a risk, you know enough, just enough to where you won't settle
for the ordinary and the safe. But at the same time, you know
it, you don't want you just want to push yourself just just enough,
you know, just so to just keep yourself on edge with it, you
know, don't settle for the low hanging fruit if you can't. Yeah,
yeah, And that that is I think a really you know, a really
valuable lesson when when you start feeling like you're dialing it in and all I
can do this behind my back, you know, And then I think you're
kind of losing something. You're losing a passion, you're losing um, you're
losing the healthy fear of your stuff. I read something recently about um uh,
it's it's it's in a book called The uh. I think it's in
this book called The War of art Um that's written by a novelist and screenwriter.
This the guy that wrote Bagger Vance. And don't ask me his name
because I couldn't summon his name right now at the moment. But he was
quoting, or were using, the anecdote of how how actors, especially famous
actors, choose their roles, why they make the choices of and he noted
that many actors respond to that question by saying, oh. He was citing
on the actors studio, outside the actor's studio, and he said, invariably
they get that answered that question, how do you choose the roles that you
that you do and what prompts you? And invariably they answer it scared me.
Yeah, you know, a good one, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And I chose because it's scared me. We'll be right back after a
word from our sponsor and now back to the show. So translation is that
it was something I haven't done before. It was challenging, and I wanted
to rise to the occasion. I wanted to meet that challenge, you know,
I wanted to do something that I haven't done before, right right,
you know, and go you know boldly go where no man has gone before,
you know, with the be at the Starship Enterprise or your screenplay.
You know. I was up and until three thirty last night working because I
was scared of not being able to wrestle Flash the program. I'm trying to
learn this program Flash, like I don't know it. I'm online, I'm
learning as I'm going, and it's such a high learning curve, but it's
still it was a challenge and like, I don't I don't feel necessarily tired
because I was motivated all last night because this just sheer desire, like I've
got to learn this, I've got to figure this out. How did you?
How did they do this? How did they? And then just because
that desire wanting to know, and then you and then getting to that place
where you kind of break it, where just like you accomplish it where you
started and where you end up. It's such a far journey, but you're
like, wow, I did it. I was kind of scared jumping into
because I didn't know how I was gonna get, you know, where where
to start. But as you finished and when you found out you could actually
do something or finish a task, that's always you know, satisfying. So
I guess for me that's so now coming back to it's like you have this,
um, you have three scripts that you've abandoned. Yes, yes,
yes, and right yeah so consciously, so when was the first what was
the first gig you had that m that was like where you got paid as
a screenwriter? Well, um, actually I got I got paid to do
a rewrite on slaughter Rally. So what what happened was I wrote it,
um then that summer of eighty two I think it was, and then uh,
I gave it to a friend of mine who had gone to film school
with UM. It's actually former roommate of mine, Richard Green, who was
now a very powerful agent at CAA. Actually, um, there you go,
there you go. And Richard had at that time aspirations to be a
producer, and so he was working um for a true producer, a real
working producer, and as a guy named Bill Finnigan who made TV movies and
such um as opposed to those you know who are in our Hollywood. There's
a lot of producers. Yes, yes, yes, I think it's true
working yes, yes, yeah for the same exactly the same. And you
can apply that to writers and actors and all of that. Um. Um
so I'm gonna order another pipe here when he comes back again, but I'm
just keeping one eye on him. Um So, what happened was, um,
can I get a no? No, okay, but no no,
I actually I want to go for something a little redder? Yeah, and
the color you you you had a nice poor you were tooken to someone there
earlier the Nelson. Oh really, Oh it is an ipa. It's that
red really wow. Wow, that's actually for something that's red that's going to
be multi Yeah. Yeah, I would recommend getting the working Okay. Then
oh that all the skull splitter. Okay, I've had it. I've I've
had it in a body of don that in draft. Okay, oh you
do, Okay, I don't want to go I want to get stick with
the draft. Then do you have the thistle? Yeah? Yeah, they
bring that, thank you? Actually some water. I just need to Um.
So, Richard I gave the script or Richard because he said, let
me let me take this to the producer I'm working for, Bill Finnigan,
and um he said, I think you might like it. Because Richard read
it and really liked it, and thought, Wow, it's just this is
cool and so it's great. Um. So he took it to his boss
and lo and behold, the boss loved it. They um optioned it from
me, and then they like it was at first it's surreal. It's you're
through the roof, you know, you're just uh, it's just an exciting,
wonderful feeling and you could just feel like, wow, I could do
this the rest of my life. Do you like it's all this is like
a moment of thank you? Thanks? Is there like a moment of I
don't know where all of a sudden, like your whole future is right in
front of you. Oh you're like boom that instance like oh I'm I'm on
my way and and all this stuff. Yeah yeah, you it up right
real fast and just see it, you know like billboards on the on the
on the freeway. Uh man, how is that? That's good? That's
good? You want to try that? Yeah, I mean just gave a
quick sip that like, um, very frothy. Yeah, it's a nice
head on that so good beer. So so they optioned it, um and
then they sat on it for like a year for one thing or another.
Reality. Yeah, yeah, just it just it just took a while.
And then um, I think it was that following summer they they called up
and said, I think we're going to get some action on this. Now,
we're gonna start rolling on it. And I think they renewed the option.
They optioned it for one year, and I think they renewed the option.
And then then what happened was they got some money and they asked me
to do a rewrite on it, and they had started they were getting a
direct and they had Judd Nelson and Alexandra paul Um cast. This was about
eighty three eighty two. Jett Nelson with Jett Nelson. All right, okay,
well we knew who Judd Nelson was. Breakfast Cub hadn't come out,
The Breakfast Club hadn't come out yet. He had done um forget what he
had done before that that garnered a fair amount of attention. So he was
cool. He was a cool actor, right, We all like, oh,
yeah, that's cool. Um, So what happened was I did the
rewrite. I got like five thousand dollars to do a rewrite on it.
Like, I remember, you have an agent at the time, did you
well that? Okay, quick, quick, aside on that, there's a
lot of different things that Slaughter Rally is instructional for those listening and in many
different ways. Yeah, you got your Yeah. First of all, let
me roll back. I've literally finished writing the end on slaughter Rally, the
very first draft of it. UM and I took because I lived in Westwood
at the time. I said, I'm gonna go take a walk into the
village and uh, you know, get a cup of coffee or a beer
or something like that. And I feel like yes. So I walked into
Westwood Village, which at that time still had bookstores, and I remember going
into um it was like Hunters Books that was there on Westwood Boulevard, and
I walked in and prominently displayed on a case and the whole little setup as
you walk in is Stephen King's Christine, which has had the cover of it
was the car, the car, you know, and basically the grill of
that. I think it was an old Chrysler. And I looked at that
and I thought, oh, no, don't tell me, it's no,
it can't be about like and it wasn't quite the same, but boy,
it was close enough. It was like, Oh, I couldn't believe it.
I couldn't believe it, So that that first that was less than number
one, which is that you know, there are like you were talking about
earlier, there are ideas up there in the cloud that you just sort of
take. Well, if you don't act on the idea that you have,
somebody else is going to act on it as well. Right, And one
of my instructors that UCLA used to say that, look, ideas are literally
out there floating around in the ether. It's not uncommon at all for someone
or several people to latch onto the same idea at the same time. Right.
And it's not a case of somebody ripping off someone else or anything.
It's just sometimes you all and you can call it the collective unconscious, you
can call it any synchronicity, you can call it any number of things.
But it is a reality. It happens. So my testament as well.
Yeah, okay, so my only advice in the front is that it will
happen to you sooner or later, and act on your ideas. You get
an impulse, you get a creative impulse, then act on it right away,
you know, and if you can, you know, sometimes it's just
not possible and you know, and sometimes there's not quite enough of a of
an idea. Okay, So so that was that. Then, So anyway,
um, I did this. I did this rewrite on slaughter Alley.
They were on the fast track. They were going to head an into production,
Alexander Paul and Judd Nelson starring in it. I was doing this rewrite.
I finished the rewrite. I remember this very well on Halloween nineteen eighty
I guess it's eighty three at that point. And then, um, two
weeks before they were scheduled to go before cameras, the money disappeared, it
evaporated. And oh and oh, I forgot to say. We got the
proverbial green light after my rewrite on it. Okay, green light, they're
going forward. It's happening. Boom. We'll be right back after a word
from our sponsor. And now back to the show. I quit my job
at the Academy, and I was kind of like Solong mail room, Solong
suckers, You're never gonna you know, you're never gonna see me again,
you know, except when I'm walking up the red carpet to collect my little
gold mane. And uh, well that's what I was saying, you know,
just after that option, that initial payment of like, wow, I
am truly a boom. It's just you're getting You can see the billboards on
that highway lighted up all the way to the horizon. What you're gonna do?
You know, the old it's all laid down for you. And so
then the money is yanked two weeks before the start date. It just fell
apart. I never got an answer as to why it happened, and suddenly
everything came to a screeching and I mean screeching. Yeah, so the big
pay day that I was going to get once they started filming never happened.
And so I actually had to go back to the Academy and ask, in
the most humiliating circumstances, asked for my old job back, which they gave
me. And yeah, God love them. And but that taught me such
a valuable lesson, you know, just such a valuable lesson m a very
early on about the film industry, how volatile it is, and no matter
how good it looks or whatever, there are there are things, there are
bolts of lightning that can strike at any given moment out there that will just
derail even the most seemingly the most soundest of projects. So U so,
just always be aware of that. Do not count your chickens before they hatch,
because it's just too many things can happen until an audience, until your
film is playing before an audience who has paid money to see it in a
theater you know and near you. Um man, it does you know,
Just keep keep knocking on wood the whole way. Just be lucky you can
even you know you've gotten, You've gotten that far. So um So,
Then in answer to the agent, um so, when they first made the
offer to option it, I was I had no agent, I had no
representation at all, and so I didn't know what to do. Yeah,
so um uh, through some friends of good friends of mine, um they
knew they they recommended an agent to me. They made a call to him,
and this guy came in and negotiated a deal. And suddenly, and
this was another valuable lesson, I learned the figures that they were offering me
directly were suddenly twice as high as I ultimate. After the agent got into
the into the business, so he basically knew agociated a better deal for me,
so he get his cut. He certainly w got his cut. But
he also you know, they stepped in and they made sure that I wasn't
taken advantage of because you know, you're young and you're hungry, and I
think, yeah, yeah, I'll take You'll take anything that they want to
want to throw at you. But they this agent came in and his name
was Shelley Wile, and Shelley came in and got that did a good job
on that on that first deal. However, Shelley wouldn't take me on as
a as a full as a legitimate client at his agency because they didn't represent
well as He would keep me on as what he called a pocket client,
which was kind of in his back pocket. But yeah, but I wasn't
a regular client yet based on the merits of a quote unquote exploitation script.
So you know, slaughter ally was still for him, didn't merit a you
know, real representation yet. So so that's how so I had. I
was his pocket client for a while, and so he wasn't going to do
anything for me. He would be there to negotiate a deal for me,
but I wasn't going to be able to get out and meet other people or
or move on the success of or the limited success of slaughter Ally, so
what happened was I went back, I had my took back my job at
the at the mail room, fell into a deep funk of a depression where
I was like xerox in my face every day, and you know, because
thinking I'm never going to get out of here, I'm going to die an
old man in the mail room, you know, all this stuff. It
was just oh so depressing, um and I felt I was never I wasn't
going to find anything worth writing about again. And so then then what happened.
And during this time, I was going to all these punk shows,
and I was starting to make music videos for Black Flag and Henry Rollins and
the are you um cinematographer director part of the crew I was. I was
directing them, you know, you know so I mean basically I just was
going to these guys. I went to the Minimen after a show and I
said, I talked to Mike Watt, the bass player, and I said,
Mike, you know, I can make it. I've had a couple
of beers and I said, Mike, I can make a I can make
a video for you. You guys were like, you know, three hundred
dollars and Mike said, okay, let's do it. Do you mean,
do you recall any songs the videos have you done? Oh? Yeah?
It was for the minimen. It was this Ain't No Picnic? And then
we uh in the same session we shot, we went down and they were
performing live that night too. We were shooting on a weekend, and so
we shot on a Saturday and Sunday, and then they were performing Saturday night
at a big punk rock show down at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown LA,
which used to be an arena for like you know, old wrestling gigs and
stuff like that. It was just a concrete slab and so we had all
the camera equipment everything, and I had the crew and we were all young.
I said, look, I'll pay everybody, you know, we'll we'll
you guys, let's get some pizza and let's go down to the frecking show
and we'll we'll um shoot um, what what do you shoot? And we'll
man, we'll shoot um. I said, I want to shoot him doing
um uh this um ain't talking about Love, which was their cover of the
Van Halen Opus. You know, Van Halen's first big hit, Ain't Talking
about love and when you know, when Van Halen performed it, it's like
six minutes long, you know, and then it finally climaxes with it,
you know, hey hey, hey, yeah, you know in that whole
um. The miniment did it in thirty seven seconds and basically they just took
the last um, the last stands of lyrics and then, uh, you
know, I've been to the edge. I stood and looked down. You
know, I lost a lot of friends there. I got no time to
mess around, no way. And then um, hey, hey hey,
you know, hey, hey hey, and that was it, and they
played it really fast. So I told the miniment, I said, let's
let's do this live. You know, I mean, I'm gonna shoot you
guys live performing this, but try to perform it at the tempo you remember
recording it because we had no playback room, right, you know, I
had a cassette that was playing back for the stuff earlier in the day and
so um um and they said okay, and I said, do one other
thing. The song is so short, just play it twice so I have
time to switch camera positions because I had two cameras, and I said,
I just want my two guys to switch, you know, angles so we
can get full on coverage, right And he said, sure, you know,
we'll do it. So so we get down there. We get and
it's this big punk show. There's like half a dozen bands on on.
They were pretty high up in the in the order in so we we were
there and we were right on the edge of the procenium and I had all
the camera stuff in there, and they told me where was going to be
in their set, you know, and so I said okay, and they
gave me the signal and I said, roll the cameras and then they started
playing the song and the guys, we're shooting, and then the song d
thirty seven seconds later and great, now we're going to switch. They just
went right back into it without any break. And I said, Mike,
no, no, you know. And d boone you know, on the
guitar, was just I remember him just kind of shrugging like, oh,
dude, you know, rock and bucket. So I had good My good
friend Bill Judkins was doing a second unit quote second unit, which was basically
he had an old spring wound bell and Howe sixteen millimeter camera that was like
the leftover from World War One or something. You know. And uh,
and Bill was right next to me, and I remember he just scrambled up
onto the stage. He just clambered up there right away. And as soon
as they started doing the second version and got behind them looking out at the
audience, he got a great got a great angle. My other friend,
John Hart couldn't do it because the camera was too too big. He just
couldn't get it up. It was an airflex and so Bill got got these
great shots. But the problem was Bill's camera was so old. The the
spring on the cameras it would get lower in the wind, it would start
slowing down. So when the film starts moving slower through the aperture, you
capture more action on each frame. So basically when you project it, everything
starts speeding up and it's like an old silent film, you know. And
so the last footage bits of them, they're just like jumping around. They
look like you know, Buster Katona. It was just it was crazy.
But once we started cutting it together, it kind of added to the whole
frenetic quality of the video. And then we did some in this because it
was early eighties, we could solarize some video and stuff. As we added
some kind of effects to it, and it's just it's I have it on
my website, you can you can see it. Yeah, but MTV played
it as the world's shortest video. It made the MTV news. I never
saw I saw that, but apparently Kurt Loder introduced as the world shortest video
at the time and now which says something like that, we'll be right back
after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. But
I thought was pretty cool. But um, this ain't no picnic, the
one that we really did that was sort of legitimate. That that played quite
a while on MTV and uh um and and actually a lot of that footage,
all the outtakes and everything else were proved to be pretty valuable because you
know, Dee Boone, the guitarist for the miniment, was killed in a
car wreck. Um late in the December of that year. This is eighty
four, and um, you know, it's great having some really good,
great images of him performing, although we don't have sound one on it,
but there's some really crisp stuff. And then I did another one for them,
um no that yeah, later later that year. Um, um,
this ain't not this Saint King of the Hill, which we shot on video
at the time, and we had a steadicamp for that. We really stepped
up, you know. Um so um, so you did all this stuff,
so we're, um, what what doors are that opened for you?
Well? Do you think that um that you saw on top of your writing?
All right, sorry, we're back, okay, so you've done well
videos. Yeah. So what I was my idea at the time was like,
okay, cool, I'm I'm getting my some directing experience now doing these
these music videos, you know. And uh and it was again it was
real, real shoe string budget kind of stuff. It was totally punk rock
um. But SST Records was really happy with the with the the minimum videos,
and so they started talking to me about doing something with with Black Flag.
Yeah. It was because they were black Flag basically ran SST at this
time. It was Henry Rollins was ahead of it, wasn't he. No,
well, well yeah he wasn't. The original Well that my memories old
black Flag was always Greg Genka and and Chuck Takowski. But then Chuck eventually
left um and just continued to sort of run SST. But but Greg gen
started SST Records and he was the guitars for Black Flag and so Henry excuse
me, it was not the original Yeah, no vocalists. There were several
before Henry Um, but he was the one that finally stepped in and became
really the face of Black Flag because Henry really relished, i think, being
the front man there and he was, you know, a formidable personality.
Um. And so who formed the Circle Jerks after that, well, Chris
Morris and he would been Chris Morris was the original vocalist for Black Flag,
right okay, And he sang on like nervous breakdown and some of those really
that that very first EP for fives that they did, um and then and
then he went on to he left and to start Circle Jerks. I was
up at Skywalker Sound a couple of years ago, huh, and they had
a project there. They had all the original masters for the Black Flag um,
you know albums and really they were remastering oh wow, and it's it
was just classic, Like at my box, they were showing us like this
project they were working on. I'm just like, that's interesting, crazy black
Yeah. Yeah, there's a clash of stuff right there. But um,
um, and that's that's another story. Working with with Henry and and and
all that. But you know, by my I was hoping that what this
would do would would give me continued cred, you know, as a director,
and then my writing career would be kind of moving along simultaneously, you
know, with this, so that eventually I would be I could parlay it
into a thing where I write something and say, okay, I want to
direct this, okay, and and hoping that somebody would give me that option,
it would give me that chance. Um what happened then was that I'm
back at the mail room right and I'm like in a funk now because the
production fell apart, and um and I just didn't think I was going to
get anywhere out. So like I was saying, I've seen all these punk
shows and really may be inspired by the music. And I that's when I
really tried to write that failed murder mystery thing that fell apart, and it
just it just didn't come to come together. So I also started a record
label shortly after this too, but that but that was a little further down
the line. But um so anyway, still in working there, m I
ran into another old friend of mine that I had gone to film school with,
and he said, um, what are you doing? And I said,
on the licking stamps in the mail room, dude, I've kind of
I'm like bummed. And he said, well, whatever happened to slaughter Alley?
He said that was a great scrap And I said, I'm just sitting
there on a shelf. But he said, give it to me. He
said, I'm working. I'm working in the mail room of William Morris Agency.
And he said, oh, you know, I can't tell you the
crap I have to read every day, and a lot of this is by
in a lot of the scripts are by people who are making a lot of
money. He said that slatter rally is just as good as any of the
stuff that I'm reading. So let me get Let me get it too.
A couple of young agents there that I have in mind, and I said
okay, So he did, and within a couple of weeks I was asked
to come into William Morris and I met with a couple of young agents there,
Rick Jeff and Carol Yumpkis were their names, and they they loved the
script and they signed me and that was just like boy, Suddenly it was
like, oh, well, being represented by people my age, whereas Shelley
while was an old, much older guy, and now here were people that
like in my age bracket and speaking my language right, And they just loved
it. And they said, we're going to get you out of meetings and
we'll start, you know, we're gonna start finding some things for you.
And I said, fantastic. So I was really emboldened by that. Um
Rick Jaffa incidentally, UM left a couple of years or three three, three
years or four years later UM as my agent, UM to become a writer
himself. And he just recently, he and his wife just recently wrote Rise
on the Planet of the Apes. Oh wow, Yeah, so he's done,
all right, okay, and yeah yeah, but um but he was
a he was a terrific guy and a terrific agent, you know, for
me at the time. And I remember meeting him the first time and he
said, I gotta tell you. I said, I got your script.
I read it. I couldn't put it down. He said, when it
was done, I threw it in the air. I was so happy reading
a really good script. This is a really awesome script. I love it,
you know. And this was just like, oh God, thank you.
Hearing stuff like that from somebody really in the know, yeah, you
know who said we're gonna take this and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're
gonna get you some work, you know based but it was still under option
with the company that had so it was tied up. They couldn't go out
and try to resell it. But they said, we're gonna, we're gonna
use this as a calling card for you and get you out there now and
start starting out. Yeah you start, you know, thinks. So that's
um, that's what what led to my first bit of employment, which I
can tell you about now, or we'll hold until next we'll take it later.
I think we'll wrap it up for two. Okay. I think this
is great. This is this is better than I expected about it. I
mean, because it's I feel like there's so much more. There's so much
more we could talk about. And I think that the uh, the audience
of one whoever's listening to this podcast get kick out of it. Okay,
but um, yeah, so let's wrap it up and sure we'll catch up
another you know. Sure we've kind of jumped around all over the place with
music and yeah, but it's good. Okay, let me finish the thought
though, which was maybe you can put this back into the context that it
really should have been. Okay, when I was are talking about going to
these the shows and like they've seeing the blasters and and a lot of this
rockabilly stuff that was happening, Um, they struck me all as being a
little bit like posers, right and I and and I felt very acutely,
um that you know, there would have been a generation or two before them
who were the real McCoys, if you will, that were the real the
real rockabilly guys, the guys who were sniffing glue and racing their cars at
three o'clock in the morning and like, you know, drinking they got a
pint of sloe gin in the back pocket and high school you know, and
and and would rumble with a chain and a dire iron, right, And
I always was thinking about, boy, would be really it's amusing to what
would happen if some of those guys came and met up with these kind of
poser blockabilly pussies, you know, and it really come to rumble, what
would happen, you know, what would happen to these kind of posing guys
who looked like really tough, right right, You know if the real McCoys
showed up one night on their doorsteps. So that was kind of an impetus
to start writing slaughter Allister. Really, what would happen if the past came
and visited upon the future? Yeah, and how how would either hold up?
You know, it is cool and it's such a cool little subculture.
Um yeah, like um, you know like um conan and Bryan is a
huge Rocketbilly fan. These guys all his own Rocketbilly band and you know,
oh really I didn't know that was his brand of brand. Yeah, he
go, he goes sometimes on these little tours, like on his hiatus of
the show, where he and his little Rocketbilly band play across the you know
country. Sure so, but he's got this little he's got this affinity.
It's probably why his hair is a pompado our time or whatever. Yeah,
okay, well that's that sort of explains a lot. He's a Harvard guy
whatever he is, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. H
it'd be funny if he met at with the past. Now we'll be right
back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. Well,
that's kind of what I'm talking about, you know, so you know
you look at it. I mean again, it's partly our our fascination with
people like Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and all those all those early guys.
You know, they weren't they weren't bright educated guys. They were tough as
nails though, and they were really they were the real deal. And uh
so I just you know, kind of wonder what would happen, what would
happen? So how funny? All right, cool? Yeah, we can
wrap this up and we'll We'll continue another time for sure, and I know
I'm interested. There's so much more to talk about. So yeah, and
hopefully the next time we talked, I'll mention whatever the next steps of projects
are going on, and we'll catch up at what you're doing. Yeah,
there was kind of a cluster back to vity there at at a period there
that really, um, you know it, career in Hollywood is very streaky.
It can be like like a hot streak in sports, you know,
where if you're if you're hot and you're you're working at then were you work
at? You know, surf that wave you know, like yeah, yeah,
yeah, because you never know when if if another good one is going
to calm or not right right again? Thanks. Hollywood is always throwing the
changeup ball at you. So I'm mixing my my sports metaphors. I know,
you know. We got about three or four of them in the span
of a two or three sentences here, But I think you get the gist
of what I'm talking about. You lost me on the wave when I was
just my brain started thinking about the wave. Yeah, yeah, yeah right
cool? Well right, Scott, thank you, Yeah, we'll catch up
later. Cool. I want to thank Scott so much for doing such a
great job on this episode. If you want to get links to anything we
spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting
dot tv forward slash three h eight, and if you haven't already, please
head over to Screenwriting podcast dot com and leave a good review and subscribe to
the show. It really helps us out a lot. Thank you so much
for listening, guys, As always, keep on writing no matter what.
I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast at
Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.