Speaker 1: Oh he is Bolt, it's showtime.
Speaker 2: People say, good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas,
Speaker 3: hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 2: Ut it off.
Speaker 4: I've never seen that kind of humor before, that kind
Speaker 4: of irreverent comedy. I immediately became.
Speaker 5: People have never seen anything like it.
Speaker 3: Institutions, our culture was being satirized.
Speaker 2: The people who have said they've read Mad shot us
Speaker 2: and we expected more from that trankment.
Speaker 3: Mad started during a time of repression in the United States.
Speaker 6: The Red Thread, the Hollywood Blacklist, and the copy.
Speaker 2: Is and then people were afraid of anything in print.
Speaker 3: Kids were being told to get under their seats when
Speaker 3: the tire went off and that they would be okay,
Speaker 3: and the kids were saying, I'm going to get turned
Speaker 3: at the dust. So they were starting to question the
Speaker 3: adult world. Man was a product of the times or
Speaker 3: anti product of the times, if you will, Jared, who
Speaker 3: Addison list has sabotaged you American ideals.
Speaker 6: You'd come across some article where you go, oh, am
Speaker 6: I reading something bad here.
Speaker 3: A lot of anti comic book stuff was going on.
Speaker 5: People who were going after comics as creating delinquency and
Speaker 5: destroying the youth of America.
Speaker 2: Because med came out of a comic book and it
Speaker 2: was a magazine, and they couldn't touch it, couldn't censor it.
Speaker 6: They were so concerned about stamping out everything that was dangerous,
Speaker 6: and they let the most subversive thing continue.
Speaker 2: They call all the contributors the usual gang of idiots.
Speaker 5: Teachers would say, Drew, what do you want to be
Speaker 5: when you grow up? And I said, I want to
Speaker 5: be an idiot.
Speaker 7: No one would think of making fun of what the
Speaker 7: government was doing. No one think of making fun of
Speaker 7: giant corporations. And Bill was up for all of that.
Speaker 2: Bill Gaines, he was absolutely out of his mind.
Speaker 5: We have no philosophy, we have no politics, We don't
Speaker 5: take sides.
Speaker 7: We got letters from Bill saying that if any of
Speaker 7: you are sued for anything you write that I publish,
Speaker 7: don't worry. You will be defended by all lawyers.
Speaker 3: We said things that other magazines I mean, he did not.
Speaker 2: They sued for twenty five or thirty million dollars.
Speaker 5: It could have killed the magazine.
Speaker 8: From the magazine's standpoint, it made mad magazine something that
Speaker 8: was forbidden. It just started selling and selling and we
Speaker 8: did two million copies.
Speaker 3: We're in a corporate age, of a corporate image. I said,
Speaker 3: we need logo.
Speaker 2: Alfredyman represents the kind of blithe stupidity.
Speaker 3: Personalized and embodied the whole spirit of the magazine that
Speaker 3: I wanted to do, which was kids were smart and
Speaker 3: they had a certain outlook, like Jesus, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: facing this terrible world and the hell, what were you worried?
Speaker 4: I don't know if it's the uh, you know, the
Speaker 4: way that it deals with the forty figures, or trying
Speaker 4: to figure out your place in the world, or dealing
Speaker 4: with the fact that everybody's lying to you when you're
Speaker 4: that age, it really speaks to you.
Speaker 8: Rolling Stone called Mith the best political satire magazine in
Speaker 8: the country.
Speaker 2: Now, oh, Mad the number one magazine of good taste.
Speaker 5: Hey, folks, want to do a special episode of the
Speaker 5: Projection Booth. On this episode, I'm talking with Alan Bernstein.
Speaker 5: He is the writer and director of When We Went Mad.
Speaker 5: It is a documentary all about Mad. Magazine been following
Speaker 5: the project since twenty thirteen. I think when the kickstarter
Speaker 5: is out, I've been bugging Alan ever since to have
Speaker 5: an interview with him, as you'll hear in this interview,
Speaker 5: so we finally made it happen. Twenty twenty four. The
Speaker 5: movie is out well, it's touring around. It will be
Speaker 5: playing in Detroit on November fourteenth at the Redford Theater.
Speaker 5: I highly recommend this film. Thank you so much for listening,
Speaker 5: and I hope you enjoyed the interview. When was the
Speaker 5: first time you remember reading a Mad magazine?
Speaker 8: The first moment I remember it was nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 8: We were vacationing in California and I was a little
Speaker 8: bit bored during some downtime, so we stopped in a
Speaker 8: drug store going through the magazine sections. I picked up
Speaker 8: a Star Trek coloring book, and while I was making
Speaker 8: my way back to meet at my parents, I saw
Speaker 8: a Mad on the shelf, first time I had ever
Speaker 8: seen it.
Speaker 1: Didn't know what it was.
Speaker 8: It said Mad and seemed interesting, and you flipped through
Speaker 8: it and it was cartoons, but it wasn't cartoons, and
Speaker 8: it had words, and I just found it interesting and thought, oh,
Speaker 8: can we get this too? And my parents didn't blink
Speaker 8: an eye. They made no indie cation whatsoever. That they
Speaker 8: knew what I had in my hand. They weren't opposed
Speaker 8: to it, nor were they ahh here, okay, this is
Speaker 8: a big step for him, none of that. So I went,
Speaker 8: I bought it, and I went in completely blind. When
Speaker 8: I found out later on that it wasn't a one
Speaker 8: off like a coloring book would be. There was another
Speaker 8: issue on the shelf months later, Oh, another one, okay,
Speaker 8: And from there it just it. That's how it started.
Speaker 5: That must have been around the time where Cracked and
Speaker 5: Crazy and were there other kind of pretenders to the
Speaker 5: throne that were going out right around there?
Speaker 8: Yeah, Cracked Crazy, I think a few years later there
Speaker 8: was one called Wacko.
Speaker 1: Right, it was Sick, I don't remember.
Speaker 8: I don't know if Sick was still in publication at
Speaker 8: that time, around seventy six, but it was. It was
Speaker 8: the heyday of periodicals. Magazine shelf, even in a drug
Speaker 8: store was just stacked with monthly issues of everything. I
Speaker 8: don't have any recollection whatsoever of seeing a crazy or
Speaker 8: a sick or any of those other than it was
Speaker 8: just it was the mad. It had that kind of
Speaker 8: in a moment that I didn't know what I was
Speaker 8: in store.
Speaker 5: For especially since you've just spent the last how many
Speaker 5: years working on this documentary.
Speaker 8: This is twenty twenty four and my first interview was
Speaker 8: in January of two thousand and eight.
Speaker 5: What was your inspiration? How did you come to say
Speaker 5: I'm going to make the ultimate documentary about Mad?
Speaker 8: It was really quite simple, So I went into film production.
Speaker 8: That's what I chose to do, That's what I wanted
Speaker 8: to do for your career. And as the years would
Speaker 8: go by, I kept, frankly waiting for someone better than
Speaker 8: me to make a Mad documentary, and I never understood
Speaker 8: why Mad seemed to be left off the interest level
Speaker 8: of telling their story documentary style, And quite frankly, I
Speaker 8: was starting to read newspaper headlines of Mad artists and
Speaker 8: writers who were passing away Dave Berg and I think
Speaker 8: it was either Don Martin or Antonio Proheas who did
Speaker 8: Spy verse a spy. Reading that, I was like, obviously
Speaker 8: this is not happening fast enough.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do it.
Speaker 5: So what was your approach? How did you even decide
Speaker 5: how to get your arms around a project of this size?
Speaker 8: You don't look at how big it really is. You
Speaker 8: just go in head first and Al Feldstein, who was
Speaker 8: the longtime editor of Mad, who oversaw Mad's rise to
Speaker 8: its iconic status that it became. He was in town
Speaker 8: in the Detroit area for actually a exhibit at Eastern
Speaker 8: Michigan University on the history of the Alfred y Newman character.
Speaker 8: A good friend of mine, John, who is also a
Speaker 8: fellow MAD collector but also lives in the area, I
Speaker 8: arranged this exhibit and brought al Feldstein in, and while
Speaker 8: Al was in town for that weekend, I just approached him, Hey,
Speaker 8: do you mind if I sit down and interview you.
Speaker 8: I'm thinking of doing a documentary. You're my first interview.
Speaker 8: I have nothing other than what I'm hoping to do,
Speaker 8: and let's see what happens.
Speaker 1: And he was fine with it.
Speaker 8: He sat down, and I actually ended up interviewing him
Speaker 8: a second time a couple of years later when he
Speaker 8: was in town for a comic book convention, just to
Speaker 8: fill in the blanks. So he was the first interview.
Speaker 8: And like you asked, how do you take on something
Speaker 8: so daunting you don't know it's daunting. You go one
Speaker 8: interview at a time and you just chip away at it.
Speaker 5: I was going to say from two thousand and eight
Speaker 5: to twenty twenty four. That's a lot of time and
Speaker 5: a lot of interviews that you must have been doing
Speaker 5: over the years. Obviously there's so many in the movie,
Speaker 5: it just becomes us who's who of Mad writers as
Speaker 5: well as fans.
Speaker 8: Without even thinking about how this would cut in a documentary,
Speaker 8: I just felt, more than anything, I wanted to get.
Speaker 1: Their stories down.
Speaker 8: Over the years, there had been Mad interviews. Sixty Minutes
Speaker 8: did a segment on Mad magazine around nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 8: and there had been others throughout the years, but they
Speaker 8: were all three to four minute, maybe seven minute segments
Speaker 8: where they interview the key players, the editors and the publishers,
Speaker 8: and maybe an artist or two. And because of my fandom,
Speaker 8: my fanboy attachment to Mad, those were just some of
Speaker 8: the names that I knew. So many of the other
Speaker 8: artists and writers who I quite frankly wasn't even sure
Speaker 8: what they looked like, because no one had ever done
Speaker 8: an interview with them, or at least I had never
Speaker 8: seen one, And so the goal was to get all
Speaker 8: of their stories while I could, because every one of
Speaker 8: them has their own individual stories, and Mad was the
Speaker 8: connecting fiber that brought them all together, and that was
Speaker 8: the goal, really was to get everyone on camera before
Speaker 8: they passed away, and then figure out what to do
Speaker 8: with it after that.
Speaker 5: Usually when you're doing a documentary, it's on a person
Speaker 5: or there's the people that you have to convince, take
Speaker 5: me seriously, please give me this interview. Sounds like you
Speaker 5: were being taken seriously pretty much right off the bat.
Speaker 8: Yes, And I don't know what I did to convince
Speaker 8: them other than be sincere, and in some regards it
Speaker 8: became a domino effect. Once I think I earned the
Speaker 8: trust of the people, the staff at MAD, the editors
Speaker 8: and our department art directors, I would approach other outside freelancers,
Speaker 8: and I think on occasion they would call the guys
Speaker 8: at Matt and say, what's the story with this guy?
Speaker 8: And they would say, no, he's okay, we think he's okay, we.
Speaker 1: Think he's okay. Yea.
Speaker 8: I think that was part of it, and the other
Speaker 8: thing I'd like to think that part of it was
Speaker 8: they were just genuinely touched to have someone want to
Speaker 8: sit down and record their story. Other than some people
Speaker 8: who might have called Matt and did the background check
Speaker 8: on me, most of them were just yeah, when do
Speaker 8: you want.
Speaker 1: To do this? Come on over.
Speaker 8: So some of them I actually interviewed in their living room.
Speaker 8: There were some that I interviewed on a sound stage.
Speaker 8: But again some of these, some of the guys were
Speaker 8: so welcoming. Hey, we have a light kit and a
Speaker 8: camera and some microphones. Do you mind if we come over?
Speaker 8: And they're like, nah, we've got some room. We'll make
Speaker 8: some room for you, come on over.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 1: So it couldn't have worked out any better.
Speaker 5: How many miles are you putting on your credit card?
Speaker 5: At this point?
Speaker 8: It was two or three trips to New York and back.
Speaker 8: Obviously a drive to North Carolina where a few mad
Speaker 8: writers and editors were there for gathering, flight to Los
Speaker 8: Angeles and back. Obviously credit card. I don't even want
Speaker 8: to look at what that was. But between that and
Speaker 8: the mileage, I took it as far as I could
Speaker 8: with the out of pocket. And from there the crowdfunding
Speaker 8: started to catch on, and so we did a Kickstarter
Speaker 8: and we were able to raise enough money to get
Speaker 8: us to a good rough cut. We were still missing
Speaker 8: some celebrities. I was able on my own to get
Speaker 8: weird Al and Gilbert Gottfried the two name celebrities that
Speaker 8: most people would recognize. And then once I got to
Speaker 8: the point as far as I could take it that
Speaker 8: you ask did these interviews? Did they take me seriously?
Speaker 8: The MAD folks did. It was hard getting to other celebrities.
Speaker 8: I knew it was important to get more iconic celebrity
Speaker 8: people who read MAD, who could give it that fan perspective.
Speaker 8: Right now, I had an entire documentary of artists and
Speaker 8: writers telling their story. We needed to hear from people
Speaker 8: who were personally affected by MAD and who better than
Speaker 8: you know celebrities to do that. I was having trouble
Speaker 8: getting through them. So between the money needed to finish
Speaker 8: the film in general and also trying to get some celebrities,
Speaker 8: I teamed up with Chessis Media, which is run by
Speaker 8: Adam Carolla, comedian, and their producer, Nate Adams was able
Speaker 8: to get us the rest of the celebrity interviews and
Speaker 8: raise the funds to finish the film, which is where
Speaker 8: we are now.
Speaker 5: I was amazed with all of the interviews, but of
Speaker 5: all of them, Brian Cranston just seemed so tickled to
Speaker 5: be talking about it.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 8: It was just a great interview and there's the reason
Speaker 8: why the celebrities are at the status they are. They're
Speaker 8: just so good at this, and it obviously helps that
Speaker 8: they have an affinity towards mad magazines, so to get
Speaker 8: them to publicly speak, which is their specialty, about something
Speaker 8: that has an importance to them.
Speaker 1: He was terrific. They were all terrific.
Speaker 8: They all brought their own something to it, and yeah,
Speaker 8: you're right. Brian's interview was great.
Speaker 5: Did this ever become a full time job? Were you
Speaker 5: working other things throughout this or was there a point
Speaker 5: where you said, I have to spend all my time
Speaker 5: on this documentary.
Speaker 8: I still had to earn a living, so I still
Speaker 8: had my quote unquote day job. I work in freelance television,
Speaker 8: and so it's not a traditional nine to five when
Speaker 8: I am working, It's usually a one to eleven. So
Speaker 8: on work days, I would plot myself down in front
Speaker 8: of the computer at eight and work until I had
Speaker 8: to leave for work, And on off days, I would
Speaker 8: plot myself down at eight and generally wrap things up
Speaker 8: at around eight at night or longer, depending on how
Speaker 8: knee deep I was into it. At that time, it
Speaker 8: was a full time job while still maintaining a full
Speaker 8: time job.
Speaker 5: How did you catalog all of these interviews and try
Speaker 5: to start pulling out this is what it's going to
Speaker 5: be in the final product.
Speaker 8: Well, the first thing you do is you find a
Speaker 8: really good editor. And the first editor who worked directly
Speaker 8: with me, Eric Weimer, did this for free. He's a
Speaker 8: professional editor, and it was sounded like a fun project
Speaker 8: for him, and between the two of us, he would
Speaker 8: rifle through the footage and find the bites that he
Speaker 8: thought really stood out. And the goal was I think
Speaker 8: we both had the idea early on to try to
Speaker 8: treat telling the documentary as if it were a Mad magazine.
Speaker 8: And so what do you find in Mad magazine when
Speaker 8: you find the movie section, You find politics, and you
Speaker 8: find and so for each section of a Mad magazine,
Speaker 8: those became kind of the chapters of the documentary. And
Speaker 8: then we would add more like we're going to do
Speaker 8: a chapter on the artists and writers themselves, as they're
Speaker 8: called the usual gang of idiots. We're going to do
Speaker 8: a chapter on the fold in and so in a
Speaker 8: way that made the structure pretty easy. Now we just
Speaker 8: need to hone down the interviews to tell those chapters.
Speaker 1: The best way possible.
Speaker 5: What were some of the things that you had to
Speaker 5: get rid of that you really regret.
Speaker 1: More than anything.
Speaker 8: When Eric was editing, he learned pretty quick what a
Speaker 8: fanboy I was, and I knew what a fanboy I was,
Speaker 8: and I did my very best to not go too
Speaker 8: deep in the inside baseball, so to speak, of telling
Speaker 8: the stories that only.
Speaker 1: You know if you know you know type people.
Speaker 8: I really wanted to tell the Mad story that anyone
Speaker 8: who grew up reading Mad, or had a brother, sister,
Speaker 8: or parent who read Mad and knew about it, it.
Speaker 1: Would appeal to them as well.
Speaker 8: I needed it to appeal to the died in the
Speaker 8: Wolf fans who could fact check me, and I needed
Speaker 8: it to appeal to the general reader who just remembers
Speaker 8: it as a part of their life for a brief moment.
Speaker 8: So there were a number of stories that the Mad
Speaker 8: folks would tell, personal stories or favorite articles that I
Speaker 8: thought were iconic too Mad, but didn't move the story along,
Speaker 8: or it was just one more story story of another
Speaker 8: great thing that Matt had. And we have enough. We
Speaker 8: got to pick the best of the best, and there
Speaker 8: are a number of stories on the cutting room floor
Speaker 8: or back of the hard Drive if you will.
Speaker 5: Are you looking forward to a deluxe Blu ray edition
Speaker 5: with tons of extra scenes?
Speaker 1: Boy? Would I? Do you know anyone who wants to
Speaker 1: fund that? No?
Speaker 8: Exactly how long did we say this documentary took. I
Speaker 8: don't want to spend any more time cutting more what
Speaker 8: I would like to do, and we've started doing it
Speaker 8: a little bit. I think the best thing to do
Speaker 8: is to take all of the interviews and break them
Speaker 8: down individually into a podcast. There could be enough interesting
Speaker 8: bits in each individual interview. If I re recorded my
Speaker 8: questions so it sounded appropriate for podcast, we could do.
Speaker 8: Here's forty five minutes chatting with Al Jaffe about his background.
Speaker 8: Here's forty five minutes talking with stan Hart, the mad writer.
Speaker 8: I think that's the best way to go. Just for expedients.
Speaker 8: All of the interviews were essentially shot on green screen.
Speaker 8: Any type of deluxe edition with more interviews requires removing
Speaker 8: green screen. And now we're getting into special effects and
Speaker 8: all of that stuff, and that's where both time and
Speaker 8: money are prohibitive.
Speaker 5: Speaking of special effects, tell me about the effects for this,
Speaker 5: because I love some of the things that you're doing,
Speaker 5: especially where you've got the people framed in the magazine itself.
Speaker 8: That goes back to the idea of imagine yourself reading
Speaker 8: a Mad magazine and let's place the movie into it.
Speaker 8: And so we'll make our own version of it. And
Speaker 8: where do.
Speaker 1: You find these interviews?
Speaker 8: They're taking place at the start of each chapter, and
Speaker 8: then we dive into those interviews and they go from
Speaker 8: magazine to full screen and yeah, that was the basic
Speaker 8: idea of it. And then from there we include examples
Speaker 8: of specific articles that people are talking about, and that
Speaker 8: was an interesting challenge because you only have a limited
Speaker 8: amount of time to show them on the screen before
Speaker 8: the subject changes. You want to give the audience enough
Speaker 8: time to get the gist of that one particular panel
Speaker 8: that you show. You can't show the whole article, so
Speaker 8: you have to show the best panel from an article
Speaker 8: that explains or supports what the interview was saying. And
Speaker 8: that was a fun challenge in figuring out how to
Speaker 8: do that.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm pretty envious of anybody that gets to see
Speaker 5: this on the big screen because speaking of framing this,
Speaker 5: like the magazine having those little drawings on the side,
Speaker 5: which were some of my favorite things from the original
Speaker 5: Mad magazine, and trying to see those on my TV
Speaker 5: not so good. But I imagine seeing that projected in
Speaker 5: a movie theater must be spectacular.
Speaker 8: It obviously helps to have it as big as possible. Yes,
Speaker 8: so what those are generally referred to as the term
Speaker 8: they use is chicken fat. It's the fun little stuff
Speaker 8: that they include, not only in the specific article, but
Speaker 8: on outside the edges, the little marginals that Sergio Aragones
Speaker 8: would draw. That was chicken fat. And I wanted to
Speaker 8: include chicken fat in the movie itself, again trying to
Speaker 8: mimic that Mad magazine feel, and that's what you find
Speaker 8: in a mad So let's make sure that we populate
Speaker 8: the movie with that as well.
Speaker 5: Speaking of seeing it on the big screen, when did
Speaker 5: you have your premiere?
Speaker 8: The world premiere was August twenty second in New York
Speaker 8: at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, and it
Speaker 8: went great. We had a sold out show. We had
Speaker 8: an number of Mad artists and writers attend. We also
Speaker 8: had a number of family members of people we interviewed
Speaker 8: who had since passed away, and then we just had
Speaker 8: a bunch of Mad fans and it was great. It
Speaker 8: couldn't gun any better. You never know what the response
Speaker 8: will be when you premiere any type of creative piece
Speaker 8: that you've done, and it was to me it was
Speaker 8: doubly nerve wracking because there were people who were in
Speaker 8: the movie, who were in attendance who had never seen
Speaker 8: it and had no idea what to expect, and there
Speaker 8: were family members who were there on the behalf of
Speaker 8: people in the movie who were no longer there, and
Speaker 8: as far as I could tell, everyone seemed to really
Speaker 8: enjoy it. I got some just wonderful personal thanks at
Speaker 8: the screening, and I also got some wonderful emails afterward,
Speaker 8: And as far as I concerned, if I got their approval,
Speaker 8: everything else is sprinkles on top of the ice cream.
Speaker 5: I know that it could be very easy to fall
Speaker 5: into a trap of making this a documentary about William Gaines,
Speaker 5: who's just got such a great, big personality. And I
Speaker 5: really commend you for looking at all of these other artists.
Speaker 5: Of course Gaines is there throughout the whole story, but
Speaker 5: just to find out more about these folks and when
Speaker 5: did eclectic background of so many people just all coming
Speaker 5: together for one common purpose.
Speaker 8: That was the really the main reason to do this.
Speaker 8: I wanted to give credit to as many people who
Speaker 8: worked on Mad. As possible gains was rotten Center. That
Speaker 8: was really the main reason to do this. I wanted
Speaker 8: to give credit to as many people who worked on
Speaker 8: Mad as possible gains was rotten Center, the center of
Speaker 8: the universe. Everything orbited around him. But he if you
Speaker 8: were a follower of MAD and you had seen interviews,
Speaker 8: he was one of those who would always be interviewed,
Speaker 8: and the interviews are great. It helps to be the
Speaker 8: greatest fan for your own publication. But again I wanted
Speaker 8: to hear from everyone else. Everyone else had their own
Speaker 8: story as well, and I want to know what brought
Speaker 8: them to MAD and who they were.
Speaker 1: That was goal one.
Speaker 8: As much as this is a history of MAD, I
Speaker 8: wanted it to be a celebration of the people who
Speaker 8: made MAD. And that's asking a lot to cram into
Speaker 8: a regular hour and forty minute film, but I think
Speaker 8: we pulled it up.
Speaker 5: You have such a rich group of photographs, especially behind
Speaker 5: the scenes, especially of these people that never were on
Speaker 5: the page, that were or rarely on the page until
Speaker 5: they were in the advertisements and things like that, which
Speaker 5: I found fascinating. Where are you able to find these photos?
Speaker 5: Is this all of the artists bringing them themselves, and.
Speaker 8: All of the photographs are donated by the creative staff
Speaker 8: the artists. I even was able to get a home
Speaker 8: movie shot by one of the artists, Angela Torres, while
Speaker 8: he was on vacation. One of the famous Mad things
Speaker 8: was Gaines would take the staff and trips around the
Speaker 8: world each year, and so I have one of the
Speaker 8: home movies of the Mad guys enjoying various countries of
Speaker 8: whatever trip they were at at the time. A bunch
Speaker 8: of still photos we found a This is one of
Speaker 8: my absolute favorite things.
Speaker 1: I think I'm.
Speaker 8: Still amazed to see it. We found a sixty minute
Speaker 8: style interview show shot in Canada in nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 8: and they went to the Mad offices and interviewed everybody,
Speaker 8: and I was able to track down the footage and
Speaker 8: for the entire duration of our rough cut, the footage
Speaker 8: that we provided by the CBC was black and white
Speaker 8: and fuzzy, old time TV looking, and approached them to
Speaker 8: get to here's what we're here's the footage we're using,
Speaker 8: what's going to run? They sent us full color HD
Speaker 8: film footage of these of that episode, and six seven
Speaker 8: years of looking at the black and white footage and
Speaker 8: then suddenly seeing this staff at MAD in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 8: It is still blowing my mind at how cool that is.
Speaker 1: It was so nerd cool.
Speaker 8: I somehow saw a clip of it, of some of
Speaker 8: the footage in color, and the first thing I did
Speaker 8: was called the editor Eric, oh my god, the stuff
Speaker 8: we got from the CBC, it's actually in color, and
Speaker 8: he was, you're kidding, Oh, this is it's so cool.
Speaker 1: Wait do you see this stuff? Wow? So yeah, nerd. Yeah.
Speaker 5: It must have been a lot for you to not
Speaker 5: nerd out during some of these interviews too, where you're
Speaker 5: getting these inside baseball stories and you're just like, yeah,
Speaker 5: tell me more.
Speaker 8: It was less nerd and more just I love hearing
Speaker 8: their stories, their history. Some of the folks who worked
Speaker 8: for MAD escaped the Holocaust. To me, their stories and
Speaker 8: the pure fascination to hear them tell as many Mad
Speaker 8: stories as possible, but just to hear their background.
Speaker 1: I just loved hearing that stuff.
Speaker 8: And to be perfectly honest, we do these marathon interviews
Speaker 8: where we'd interview four or five of them each time
Speaker 8: that we would go to New York on a day,
Speaker 8: and then a year or two later, we'd go back
Speaker 8: and we'd interview. We actually set up a whole thing
Speaker 8: in the Mad obfice. They invited us over and we
Speaker 8: flew in artists and writers from all over and we'd
Speaker 8: do these other marathons, and when you're in it, you're
Speaker 8: just going through it. And it wasn't until they had
Speaker 8: all left and you do the kickback and you're like,
Speaker 8: holy crap, I just talked to Al Jaffy, Paul Kocher,
Speaker 8: I talked to my heroes, and only now as it's
Speaker 8: sinking in, and yeah, it was great.
Speaker 5: Who were some of your toughest interviews? To get?
Speaker 8: The celebrities were the challenge, But beyond that everyone, I
Speaker 8: can't think of any of anyone from Mad who were tough.
Speaker 8: It was just convenience flying out to LA and interviewing people.
Speaker 8: That was the difficulty. Driving to New York and spending
Speaker 8: a week there and interviewing. So it was the physical
Speaker 8: act of getting the interviews that was the challenge, rather
Speaker 8: than getting people to agree. I guess I'm still amazed
Speaker 8: that it were so amenable to this dude from Detroit
Speaker 8: who they didn't know from anyone else and agreed to
Speaker 8: just do it and in their living rooms. No less,
Speaker 8: I will say that the weird Al interview was unique
Speaker 8: in that, again, we have no money. We need to
Speaker 8: find a way to do this as cheaply as possible.
Speaker 8: And it turned out that weird Al was going to
Speaker 8: be performing in Traverse City at the Traverse City Cherry Festival.
Speaker 8: I'm based in Detroit, so that's a reasonable car ride
Speaker 8: because both cities are in Michigan. It's about a three
Speaker 8: hour car ride. So once we were able to get
Speaker 8: Al's people to lock him down and say, come on up,
Speaker 8: we'll interview before the show. How you pack the car
Speaker 8: up and drive up to Traverse City and we set
Speaker 8: up in one of those little portable offices behind the stage.
Speaker 8: You set up up and sweat your butt off because
Speaker 8: there's no air conditioning, and weird All walks in and hey, guys,
Speaker 8: what's going on.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm just doing a little interview. All right, let's
Speaker 1: do it. And it was great.
Speaker 8: It was terrific. He was so kind about it. So
Speaker 8: it showed a real interest in what we were doing
Speaker 8: with it. And it's terrific.
Speaker 5: Who are you showing this to throughout the editing process
Speaker 5: to hone it and get feedback.
Speaker 8: Quite frankly, and this isn't meant to sound like we're
Speaker 8: the smartest guys in the room. We just trusted ourselves.
Speaker 8: Between myself, Eric, the original editor, Jonas became the main editor,
Speaker 8: and once Chassis came on board, Jonas Menskar we all
Speaker 8: just trusted what we liked and once any of our
Speaker 8: disagreements were settled, we figured it out. And during the
Speaker 8: process of editing it was really limited to just the
Speaker 8: few of us. We didn't do a whole lot of
Speaker 8: showing other people to get their take on it.
Speaker 5: You talk a little bit in the doc about some
Speaker 5: of the merchandise that is related to MAD, and I
Speaker 5: see you've got quite a healthy collection behind you.
Speaker 8: There's a little bit of a shrine behind me there.
Speaker 5: What are some of your favorite things?
Speaker 8: Let's see. I'm gonna do a little pan here.
Speaker 1: Let's see.
Speaker 8: So I don't know if you could see it or not,
Speaker 8: but pardon me, I need to get up real quick.
Speaker 8: I had right here is a what is called what
Speaker 8: is a MAD straight jacket, which was something now that
Speaker 8: was offered by Mad back in the late fifties. You
Speaker 8: could clip out and I forget how much it was
Speaker 8: a true Mad fan can fact check me on that,
Speaker 8: but you would send away for it and you'd get
Speaker 8: an actual Mad straight jacket.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 8: Next to that is the original artwork to Mad cover.
Speaker 8: I'll for it as the greatest American hero nice I
Speaker 8: you could see there's a Mad skateboard, and then just
Speaker 8: a bunch of other just wagging material that they put
Speaker 8: on over the years. Is this is a right back there,
Speaker 8: it's artwork for a Don Martin cartoon. Wow, This right
Speaker 8: here is a and a slot machine that used Alfred's
Speaker 8: image on it. So yeah, and I have a pretty
Speaker 8: sizable collection, but it's compared to some of my friends,
Speaker 8: it's a tip of the Iceberg collection, which is crazy
Speaker 8: to think about.
Speaker 5: I love how you go through the evolution of Alfred
Speaker 5: Y Newman, especially those pre Mad versions of him. That
Speaker 5: was remarkable to see.
Speaker 8: It really is because he's so iconic to Mad that
Speaker 8: you assume that he was created.
Speaker 1: Specifically for Mad.
Speaker 8: All of the other humor magazines that follow the Cracked
Speaker 8: and the Crazies, if you pay any attention, it's obvious
Speaker 8: that they thought we need to have our symbol as well,
Speaker 8: and so they would create their characters. But the amazing
Speaker 8: thing about I find about Mad and Alfredy Newman is he.
Speaker 8: The image was not created.
Speaker 1: Specifically for Mad.
Speaker 8: It was a pure happenstance that an editor saw or
Speaker 8: had a postcard from im imagined from the forties or
Speaker 8: thirties with the Alfred image, and he thought, let's have
Speaker 8: a funny face, let's throw it on on the book.
Speaker 8: And it had no meaning other than I imagine that
Speaker 8: he just thought it was funny. And so as far
Speaker 8: as the Mad history goes, over time they would use
Speaker 8: it more and more and it never really had a meaning.
Speaker 8: It had different names, and eventually Al Feldstein, the editor,
Speaker 8: decided when he took over as editor, that they needed
Speaker 8: a true icon. I needed an image to go to,
Speaker 8: and he talks about how Playboy had the rabbit and
Speaker 8: Arcia had the dog looking into the speaker of the phonograph,
Speaker 8: jolly green giant type thing. Everyone needed their branding, and
Speaker 8: so he basically had a mad artist, Norman Mingo, create
Speaker 8: the definitive Alfredy Newman to be specifically used for Mad,
Speaker 8: and Feldstein named him ALFREDY Newman and then from there
Speaker 8: on it goes.
Speaker 1: He becomes the icon of Mad.
Speaker 8: But what I also find really interesting about the Alfred
Speaker 8: image is if you look at that the history of
Speaker 8: that image, you in a sense are seeing the history
Speaker 8: of I don't want to be too broad and say
Speaker 8: the history of America, but there are many people who can,
Speaker 8: I think credibly pinpoint the origin of Alfred's image to
Speaker 8: anti Irish immigration political cartoons in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 8: and from there it would move on to advertising. Alfred's
Speaker 8: image was used for painless dentistry or miracle cures that
Speaker 8: contained cocaine or narcotics in it. But I think you
Speaker 8: could do a small study on the history of the
Speaker 8: Alfred image and how it was placed throughout America at
Speaker 8: the time, and how it would change. How it went
Speaker 8: from this horrific anti immigration cartoon to selling products and
Speaker 8: even later on it was the image was used as
Speaker 8: an anti fdr image that had anti Semitic undertones to it,
Speaker 8: and somehow it all gets flipped and owned by mad
Speaker 8: and becomes the cover boy.
Speaker 5: You talked a little bit about the premiere, but what's
Speaker 5: next for the film We.
Speaker 8: Are preparing for or our Detroit premiere which will be
Speaker 8: November fourteenth at the Redford Theater in Detroit. If you
Speaker 8: have not been to the Redford Theater on November fourteenth
Speaker 8: is a terrific night to make it your first night there.
Speaker 8: But it is a classic movie palace, restored from the twenties,
Speaker 8: where all they do is show essentially other than the
Speaker 8: occasional new movie, they show classic films and it is
Speaker 8: just a great night if you are a film lover
Speaker 8: to go to see a film at the Redford. They
Speaker 8: have a live organ playing before the movie, and the
Speaker 8: best concessions in town and cheapest concessions in town if
Speaker 8: you're going to the movie. The whole thing is nonprofit.
Speaker 8: So that's November fourteenth. All the while, we are pursuing
Speaker 8: selling the film for streaming wherever it lands, whatever streaming
Speaker 8: service we're hoping to find a home for and get
Speaker 8: our investors paid back.
Speaker 5: Are you thinking that a live screen of it is
Speaker 5: pretty rare and should definitely be taken advantage of.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 8: I would love to see this film in the theater
Speaker 8: as much as it could be, but for the moment,
Speaker 8: we have Detroit coming up, and that's it right now.
Speaker 8: We want to have a screening in la We have
Speaker 8: many people out there who both invested in it and
Speaker 8: also have direct ties to mad out in La who
Speaker 8: would love to see it as well, So we want
Speaker 8: to do that. And yeah, I would love to show
Speaker 8: it in as many towns as possible. Hopefully a distributor
Speaker 8: will do that for us.
Speaker 5: If you get it transferred over to film, they might
Speaker 5: show it the New Beverly there you go.
Speaker 8: Yeah, hopefully we can get a line to Went in
Speaker 8: Tarantino and he'll let us show it at the Vista.
Speaker 8: Someone suggested. A friend of mine suggested to try getting
Speaker 8: it at the Vista, and that would be pretty darn cool.
Speaker 8: That definitely, which is a vista is a screen in La.
Speaker 5: I got you and hopefully the people at home will go, well,
Speaker 5: So what's next for you?
Speaker 1: It Quite frankly, I haven't really thought about it much.
Speaker 8: I'm still in it as what we're done with production
Speaker 8: and now we're onto getting the film out, and that
Speaker 8: involves tying up the look of the poster or any
Speaker 8: type of advertising for it. We're in the middle of that,
Speaker 8: but beyond that, as far as other endeavors, for better
Speaker 8: or for worse, I haven't really turned my brain towards
Speaker 8: that direction yet, So.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm open.
Speaker 5: After sixteen years of working on one thing. Maybe it's
Speaker 5: time to relax a little bit.
Speaker 8: I feel like I'm going through a little withdrawal. When
Speaker 8: you do something that's sustained and that regular, Like I said,
Speaker 8: you get up at eight, you PLoP yourself down, and
Speaker 8: you start animating and you start editing. That's a rhythm
Speaker 8: that's hard to break clean. I'm going against my better
Speaker 8: judgment of Oh, I can always tweak that animation. We
Speaker 8: can always punch that up a little bit. No, the
Speaker 8: movie's done, We're done. I've got to gotta breakaway.
Speaker 5: Is there a good place online for people to.
Speaker 1: Keep up with you?
Speaker 8: The best way is through Facebook, at old people's form
Speaker 8: of social media. We have when we went mad, Facebook page,
Speaker 8: and other than my personal page, that's where right now
Speaker 8: most of the any news announcements are coming from. We
Speaker 8: do have a web page, but it is woefully underutilized,
Speaker 8: and so Facebook is really the best place right now.
Speaker 5: Hey, granted it was very hot when you started this documentary.
Speaker 8: Let's be honest. My space was very hot when we
Speaker 8: started this thing. Fax machines were still in the mix
Speaker 8: when we were doing this.
Speaker 5: I'm trying to remember, was your Kickstarter around like twenty twelve,
Speaker 5: twenty thirteen. It was twenty thirteen, okayteen.
Speaker 8: The goal was to raise fifty thousand, and thank goodness
Speaker 8: we were It got us that rough cut, but it
Speaker 8: was never going to be enough to finish the film, right.
Speaker 8: I just needed to get enough done that we could
Speaker 8: show people and show we had something really good here,
Speaker 8: and it worked.
Speaker 5: I'm just glad that for the last eleven years you've
Speaker 5: been keeping everybody up on this project, and I've just
Speaker 5: been so excited to talk to you about it for
Speaker 5: all this time, and when I finally sat down to
Speaker 5: watch it, you blew my socks off that it was
Speaker 5: better than I ever could have hoped this documentary would
Speaker 5: have been.
Speaker 8: You specifically would check in every now and then, Hey,
Speaker 8: you have something to show me yet, And when you
Speaker 8: have people waiting that long, it's understandable that it could
Speaker 8: be underwhelming.
Speaker 1: Believe me when I tell.
Speaker 8: You, I'm truly thrilled to hear that you enjoyed it
Speaker 8: on again. Like I said, with the screening, with all
Speaker 8: the other people who gave me their kind words, you
Speaker 8: never know, and with something that took this long, you
Speaker 8: truly never know. Yeah, it's great to hear that you
Speaker 8: enjoyed it.
Speaker 5: More than enjoyed it, absolutely loved it. So thank you
Speaker 5: so much for making this, and thank you so much
Speaker 5: for your time tonight.
Speaker 1: It was my pleasure. Really, thank you.
Speaker 6: It's a gas Bastian.
Speaker 3: Road f
Speaker 6: Rob Roada