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Speaker 2: Oh gez, folks, it's showtime.
Speaker 1: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater. They want clothed, sodas,
Speaker 3: hot popcorn in. No monsters in the projection Booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 4: Cut it off.
Speaker 5: W A R.
Speaker 4: H A W.
Speaker 6: It don't look much like a private detective domain s KI.
Speaker 3: Who are you.
Speaker 2: V?
Speaker 6: I Washawski Kathleen Turner is bi Worshawski's V stand for
Speaker 6: virtuous and the inquisitive, looking for something.
Speaker 1: Just because she's a.
Speaker 7: Woman, hardest, blown out of casual.
Speaker 5: Doesn't mean she's always a lady.
Speaker 3: Into the point bonehead.
Speaker 5: Sorry about that, guys. You know what this is.
Speaker 1: It's a nutcracker.
Speaker 4: You know what we do with nutcrackers.
Speaker 5: You let it broad do this deal.
Speaker 4: Me, I Washshawski said, V stand for my first name.
Speaker 4: You're a funny lady, try beautiful.
Speaker 7: It works much better. Believe I'm hiring it to find
Speaker 7: out who killed my dad.
Speaker 1: Being a detective, there's no job for a girl like you.
Speaker 4: These guys are playing hardball. I have this feeling in
Speaker 4: my gut.
Speaker 5: Woman's intuition, get old, stop case. Never underestimated.
Speaker 6: Woman Kathleen Turner is Worsowski's close.
Speaker 8: What's that you're i Q are the size of your dream?
Speaker 4: V I Warshowski.
Speaker 7: My friends call me Vick.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White.
Speaker 1: Joining me once again is Ms Rain Alexander.
Speaker 9: Hey, Hey, glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Also back in the booth is Miss Dahlias Schweitzer.
Speaker 10: Hi, I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 1: November twenty five continues with a look at Jeff Canoes
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one film VR Worsshowski, based loosely on the
Speaker 1: character created by Sarah Peretzky. The film starts Kathleen Turner
Speaker 1: as the titular detective who gets stuck babysitting the daughter
Speaker 1: of a man she just met and who just got
Speaker 1: killed on her mysterious circumstances. We will be spoiling the
Speaker 1: mystery of what happened to former Blackhawks player Boom Boom
Speaker 1: and what the VII stands for as we go along.
Speaker 1: So if we don't want anything ruined, please turn off
Speaker 1: the podcast and come back after you've seen the movie. So, Dahalia,
Speaker 1: when was the first time you saw Via Warshowski and
Speaker 1: what did you think?
Speaker 10: I saw it when it was first released, and I
Speaker 10: was young and naive, and I thought it was great.
Speaker 10: I've always loved detective stories, and you know, it's so
Speaker 10: rare to get one with the woman that I thought
Speaker 10: it was pretty great. My opinion of the movie has
Speaker 10: changed over time, and.
Speaker 1: Rain, how about yourself?
Speaker 9: You know I also saw it when it was first released,
Speaker 9: and it was a profound bummer. One of those films
Speaker 9: where I think we I feel like we just walked
Speaker 9: out silently and went to Denny's. It was underwhelming. It
Speaker 9: was a time when I was seeing every Kathleen Turner
Speaker 9: film sight unseen almost I feel like, and I don't know,
Speaker 9: felt quite let down. And I'm not so sure that
Speaker 9: my feelings have changed in the ensuing years.
Speaker 1: I did not see this when it came out. I
Speaker 1: actually remember it opening though, because I was still working
Speaker 1: at a movie theater when this came out, and I
Speaker 1: remember the standee for this with apparently not Kathleen Turner's body.
Speaker 1: Somewhere in the trivia I read whose body that actually is?
Speaker 1: And then her head pasted on it. Yeah, this was
Speaker 1: still before things like Undercover Blues, which I didn't watch.
Speaker 1: I think I got really kind of turned off because
Speaker 1: of War of the Roses and just how I don't know,
Speaker 1: this sounds so weird for me to say me, of
Speaker 1: all people, just how mean spirited that movie was. It
Speaker 1: was okay for me the entire way through until there
Speaker 1: was a implication of a dog being eaten. That was
Speaker 1: a bridge too far. But pretty much everything else I
Speaker 1: mean especially, I mean I was a big fan of
Speaker 1: Kathleen Turner. I definitely went to see The Jewel of
Speaker 1: the Nile and Romancing the Stone when those were movies
Speaker 1: were out. I saw The Man with Two Brains. I
Speaker 1: wasn't old enough to see Crimes of Passion in the
Speaker 1: movie theater, but I definitely saw that late night on
Speaker 1: cable and definitely enjoyed it. It made quite an impression
Speaker 1: to a twelve year old, So yeah, that was a
Speaker 1: big moment for me. But this one, Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: see it until just a few years ago, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I was kind of underwhelmed by it, and it seemed
Speaker 1: to suffer from that thing that we get where we
Speaker 1: decide that we have to pair up somebody, especially a
Speaker 1: police person or a detective, with a little girl or
Speaker 1: a little boy, and man o man, does that usually
Speaker 1: not fly for me? And it really didn't fly for
Speaker 1: me in this movie.
Speaker 9: You know, I'm a I'm a huge fan of Gloria,
Speaker 9: both versions, but of course, you know the original film
Speaker 9: and you know, after you've like hit that high water mark,
Speaker 9: how can you come down from that? I know others
Speaker 9: will compare this to like Paper Moon, sure, but it's
Speaker 9: less of a caper film in the way that you know,
Speaker 9: Gloria was more of a film about protecting this child
Speaker 9: and like kind of taking on this role that you
Speaker 9: were not expecting to do. And of course, you know,
Speaker 9: there's certainly physical resemblance between General Rolands and Kathleen Turner
Speaker 9: which would bring that Gloria idea to mind. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 9: it's definitely got that, you know, adding Oliver to the
Speaker 9: cast of a Brady Munch kind of vibe going on
Speaker 9: in this film, and.
Speaker 1: What's weird is that it's solidly a rated R film.
Speaker 1: That there are are I don't even know how many
Speaker 1: fucks on the soundtrack, and you've got even the little
Speaker 1: girl saying fuck a few times, like that whole are
Speaker 1: you fucking my dad? She says, once seriously to Kathleen
Speaker 1: Turner and once as a joke to the woman that
Speaker 1: Jay Saunders is sleeping with. Who oh god. I looked
Speaker 1: up what else she was in. She was only in
Speaker 1: like two things, but I was fans of both of them.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, so we're saying, fuck, We've got some
Speaker 1: pretty good violence in here, not terribly, you know, not
Speaker 1: peeling back fingernails or anything like that. You know, I
Speaker 1: just watched Drive again the other night, and it's like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's uh. That's got some good violence with like hammers
Speaker 1: and things like that. But yet you've got the little
Speaker 1: kid in here, which feels like such a PG thirteen
Speaker 1: thing to do. So it just feels like this movie
Speaker 1: is like almost fighting with itself.
Speaker 10: I would argue that it's not so much a PG
Speaker 10: thirteen thing to do, but a misogynistic thing to do,
Speaker 10: because the implication is, first of all, that v I
Speaker 10: can't solve crime on her own, that she needs a sidekick,
Speaker 10: but that the fact that she needs a sidekick that's
Speaker 10: a child is incredibly demeaning. And then the fact that
Speaker 10: vi I is constantly preoccupied with the question of whether
Speaker 10: or not she'd make a good mother, and then at
Speaker 10: the end of the movie she ends up becoming a mother,
Speaker 10: you know, and that's sort of like, oh, now that's
Speaker 10: the you know, that's the happy ending. Now watching the film,
Speaker 10: that and her weight are the two things that drive
Speaker 10: me crazy.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that opening sequence really really drove me nuts. You know,
Speaker 9: we're being given such a mixed message from the beginning.
Speaker 9: This character, who you know, is you know, kind of
Speaker 9: rough and tumble, doesn't you know, apparently doesn't care how
Speaker 9: she smells, right, she like picks up a sweatshirt off
Speaker 9: the ground and smells it. But then she weighs herself,
Speaker 9: she goes out on a morning run, you know, like
Speaker 9: is kind of engaging in these like you know whatever
Speaker 9: body conscious kinds of things. And this is not to
Speaker 9: say that American women are not full of contradictions, but like,
Speaker 9: in the case of this, we're trying to build a
Speaker 9: character here, and it's just conflicts from the beginning that
Speaker 9: really really don't make sense and more to the point,
Speaker 9: don't connect with who I think they're target audience should
Speaker 9: have been, which is you know me, and I'm presuming
Speaker 9: you tell ya.
Speaker 8: Well.
Speaker 10: I think the conflict that you're sensing is the difference
Speaker 10: between the character as she's written in the books and
Speaker 10: the character as she's presented in the movie. Because the
Speaker 10: character in the books is not worried about her way,
Speaker 10: she's worried about being fit. Somewhere in the writing process
Speaker 10: they decided to dilute all this message. I mean, the
Speaker 10: kid isn't in the book either, so somehow they kind
Speaker 10: of inserted all these other messages into the movie that
Speaker 10: don't work because they aren't in the original source material.
Speaker 1: And it's fine if a character is a slob, that's
Speaker 1: absolutely fine. And I really didn't mind her opening up
Speaker 1: the fridge and just like, oh, yeah, everything's gone bad
Speaker 1: and stuff. But at the same time, it does feel
Speaker 1: like it's undercutting her and really kind of casting judgment
Speaker 1: on her more than if it was a Walter Matho
Speaker 1: or something. Oh isn't that funny? But when it comes
Speaker 1: to this, it's like, oh my gosh, this woman how
Speaker 1: can she live this way? You know, it's like, yeah, relax,
Speaker 1: but I also don't like that when she's on her
Speaker 1: morning run. You've got those guys who and I guess
Speaker 1: maybe this is true to life when they're like babe
Speaker 1: alert and they all start like woofing at her and stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, what are we doing? Which is it
Speaker 1: going to be? And yeah, the whole thing of like
Speaker 1: the motherhood and all that. I mean, we have this
Speaker 1: whole dichotomy of her VII as the good mother and
Speaker 1: then the I keep wanting to say stepmother, even though
Speaker 1: she's actually the girl's biological mother, but the girl's mother
Speaker 1: and she's basically like the evil stepmother type of character.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile VII is like the virtuous mother. And you
Speaker 1: even have the whole thing with the egg and the
Speaker 1: little girl taking care of the egg to show like
Speaker 1: what kind of mother is she and that she keeps
Speaker 1: making mistakes and the egg keeps breaking. It's that whole
Speaker 1: homech thing where you know, you get the egg and
Speaker 1: you have to take care of it, and it's like,
Speaker 1: of course, he just hard boiled the egg. Don't worry
Speaker 1: about it. Just hard boil the egg. Pretend that you're good,
Speaker 1: and then maybe on the last day you bring in
Speaker 1: a replacement egg. You're good. That's all you have to do.
Speaker 1: But like they even make that very pointed shot of
Speaker 1: the broken egg on the dock after she runs away
Speaker 1: from basically learning that her father has been blown up,
Speaker 1: and it's like, Okay, yeah, I don't know what that
Speaker 1: has to do with with his death, but definitely shows
Speaker 1: how upset she is, and you know, shows that she's
Speaker 1: also still not that great of a like the girl
Speaker 1: a little girl, is not a good mother as well,
Speaker 1: and it's like, is this a journey for her to
Speaker 1: learn how to be a good mom? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, this movie just frustrates me a lot. I
Speaker 1: like certain things about it, but other things just kind
Speaker 1: of get under my skin and irk me watching.
Speaker 9: It through a couple of times in preparation for the podcast,
Speaker 9: it became really clear to me that this was in
Speaker 9: development hell, and that is where I think a lot
Speaker 9: of this the problems are manifesting nobody's taking responsibility for it.
Speaker 9: Doing a little research, we find out that like the
Speaker 9: writer who really salvaged this ultimately doesn't even get credit
Speaker 9: on the picture, right goes through all these iterations that
Speaker 9: you know, I don't really get, and I mean I
Speaker 9: don't want to be such a second wave feminist about it,
Speaker 9: but like this really feels like some misogynist idea of
Speaker 9: what women have to put up with, you know, So
Speaker 9: the you know, being sex harassed while you're jogging, Yes,
Speaker 9: it definitely happens. Does it happen like that? No, it's worse.
Speaker 9: Right like those of us who have been sexually harassed,
Speaker 9: especially when we're feeling like at our like grubbiest and
Speaker 9: most disgusting, which happens a lot. It's not something that
Speaker 9: you just like always brush off so easily. Right, if
Speaker 9: we've had somebody who had any kind of interiority shooting that,
Speaker 9: looking at it writing it, I think that sequence could
Speaker 9: have had a lot more. It could have been a
Speaker 9: lot more effectiveness. It could have landed more with the
Speaker 9: audience is you know, And I feel like that that
Speaker 9: idea just infiltrates the entire entire the entire film. Going
Speaker 9: back to what you were saying about the moldy refrigerator,
Speaker 9: one of the things that's so fascinating about.
Speaker 10: Private detectives is that the better the private detective, you
Speaker 10: are the worse you are at life. But that there's
Speaker 10: like this kind of direct ratio, and so the private
Speaker 10: detective that's why he because usually it's a heat is
Speaker 10: so often an alcoholic, a smoker, single, maybe has a
Speaker 10: broken marriage, you know. I mean, it's just you can't
Speaker 10: be good at being a detective and good at that
Speaker 10: other stuff. So in that respect, it makes sense that
Speaker 10: of course, you know, her clothes are going to be
Speaker 10: on the floor, the refrigerator is going to be a disaster.
Speaker 10: But the problem is is the movie is judging that
Speaker 10: and because it's a woman, and the woman is supposed
Speaker 10: to be a good mother or a good housewife, et cetera.
Speaker 10: And so a woman isn't allowed to have a moldy refrigerator.
Speaker 10: And so it's you know, if, as you said, like,
Speaker 10: if this was a male detective, we wouldn't bat an eye,
Speaker 10: but because it's a female, it's it's presented in this
Speaker 10: very judgmental way.
Speaker 1: Another detective would be out at midnight looking for cat
Speaker 1: food for his cat, because it's very particular about the
Speaker 1: brain of cat food that it eats. The opening of
Speaker 1: the movie, once we get past kind of her introduction,
Speaker 1: which by the way, reminds me a lot of the
Speaker 1: film Jumping Jack Flash and how they set up the
Speaker 1: Whoopee Goldberg character, even like the waking up in the
Speaker 1: morning kind of thing with that start. I mean, we've
Speaker 1: seen that in so many movies where it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the character in the morning doing their morning routine,
Speaker 1: and then we have her dressed to the nines in
Speaker 1: this sausage factory with Stephen Root, and I'm just like,
Speaker 1: this is Stephen Root the guys in one scene for
Speaker 1: one minute, and I just kept wondering what is going
Speaker 1: on here? And then luckily, you know, we have one
Speaker 1: version of the script, one of like you said, Rain,
Speaker 1: this was stuck in development for a long time, at
Speaker 1: least four writers on it, one who came back at
Speaker 1: one point, and the one that kind of stuck around
Speaker 1: towards the end. Warren Light, who doesn't even get any
Speaker 1: credit for this. Seems like he worked with Canoe the most.
Speaker 1: And there's definitely a lot more of this whole sausage
Speaker 1: scene inside of that. And she just kind of makes
Speaker 1: a flip throwaway line later on as far as like
Speaker 1: she really needs money, but she didn't want to work
Speaker 1: for this guy, and it's like, okay, well, why even
Speaker 1: show the scene? It just seems so superfluous because it's like,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, maybe this is twenty twenty five
Speaker 1: Mike White talking versus nineteen ninety one Mike White talking.
Speaker 1: But I see Stephen Root show up in a movie
Speaker 1: and I'm just like, okay, cool, I'm here for it.
Speaker 1: What's he going to do? This is great? I'm really
Speaker 1: looking forward to seeing. Oh he's off the screen and
Speaker 1: we'll never see him again. I kept waiting for us
Speaker 1: to come back to him, and like when Wayne Knight
Speaker 1: shows up, I'm just like, Okay, well, ma, you know
Speaker 1: these two heavy character actors. I'm like, maybe get Wayne
Speaker 1: Knight earlier in the movie instead of this guy. I
Speaker 1: don't know what's going on, but I'm just like, I
Speaker 1: would have liked to have had him come back or
Speaker 1: have any sort of impact on the narrative at all,
Speaker 1: and since he doesn't, I'm just like, why do we
Speaker 1: even have this scene? Is it just to show her
Speaker 1: in a sausage factory, her contrapose against the background where
Speaker 1: she's got her high heels and there's like a piece
Speaker 1: of meat in front of her feet.
Speaker 10: It serves that purpose where it's kind of the cheap
Speaker 10: joke and it's meant to show us that she is
Speaker 10: a woman in a man's world and that she doesn't
Speaker 10: belong there. You know, the detective needs to be a man,
Speaker 10: and that there's there's this kind of conflict that's happening.
Speaker 10: By putting this woman in high heels in the sausage factory, hahu.
Speaker 9: It helps set all the dick jokes that come throughout
Speaker 9: the film, you know, because it's just this endless parade
Speaker 9: of those. And you know the other thing that I
Speaker 9: couldn't stop thinking about is I grew up in California,
Speaker 9: but I grew up reading the classics as you do,
Speaker 9: and you know, I read The Jungle like everybody else
Speaker 9: did in high school. This was my first like exposure
Speaker 9: to this idea of like Chicago and meat packing and
Speaker 9: like all these these things that are you know, highly
Speaker 9: identified with what Chicago is. And I feel like, you know,
Speaker 9: listening to some of the commentary from the director, you know,
Speaker 9: I think that he was really looking for lots of
Speaker 9: ways to get really interesting and engaging shots, you know,
Speaker 9: much like he was able to find a location where
Speaker 9: he could see Wrigley feel from the apartment window. Right,
Speaker 9: it feels to me like maybe this was just like
Speaker 9: his attempt at like making something that feels Chicago e
Speaker 9: In a way, I feel like that's a generous reading
Speaker 9: of it. But at the same time, like I don't
Speaker 9: understand otherwise why that scene ended up in the final cut.
Speaker 1: And then when I think about her, like we were saying,
Speaker 1: she's there in her high heels and shoes. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about this more, but shoes play such a major role
Speaker 1: in this film. But as soon as I see her, Sorry,
Speaker 1: this could be me just being an awful person, but
Speaker 1: I see somebody in a factory wearing high heels, I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's not safe. There's so many greats, so many things,
Speaker 1: you know, like I've I've been to plants in my
Speaker 1: life and the rules are very clear, like no high heels.
Speaker 1: And I think they even talk about that in the
Speaker 1: of this which is so completely different. And I know,
Speaker 1: I think Jeff Canoo says like we adapted one and
Speaker 1: a half books, and I don't know, there's a strong
Speaker 1: thread of one book that goes through this. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's ever a book where she gets
Speaker 1: peered up with a little girl but the whole thing
Speaker 1: of the shipping factory or the shipping and all that
Speaker 1: and that again going back to that script from nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: I think it was that really even has more of
Speaker 1: the shipping stuff, but even to the point of just
Speaker 1: to go to the mystery at the heart of this
Speaker 1: whole movie. She meets this guy in a bar. He
Speaker 1: shows up at her house. What do we think in
Speaker 1: like an hour later or is it like the next
Speaker 1: night or something. I'm trying to even figure out the
Speaker 1: timeline of when he shows up just unannounced at her
Speaker 1: place with the little girl and he dumps her there
Speaker 1: with uh Warshowski and then he dies, and now she
Speaker 1: has to solve his murder. And she's basically solving the
Speaker 1: murder for the little girl, right, She's not solving the
Speaker 1: murder for the guy. But you go back to the book,
Speaker 1: that's her cousin. That's her cousin that she grew up
Speaker 1: with and knew very very well and really liked this guy,
Speaker 1: her cousin Boom Boom, who worked was on the Blackhawks.
Speaker 1: So she has a real vested interest in solving his murder.
Speaker 1: And he's this outsider, he's not a brother to these
Speaker 1: other shipping people. He's working for these shipping people, and
Speaker 1: he has stumbled onto something that he shouldn't and he's
Speaker 1: basically like the more amateur detective putting all of these
Speaker 1: things together, and that's what gets him killed, as opposed
Speaker 1: to this where it's these three brothers, and I guess
Speaker 1: fratricide is just a lot easier than killing a stranger
Speaker 1: in this world. So three brothers who by the way,
Speaker 1: looked nothing alike, including the one guy who looks like
Speaker 1: a rooster. I kept waiting for him to like sling
Speaker 1: a guitar across as is, you know, chest, and start
Speaker 1: playing something, but instead he's like this modern artist, which
Speaker 1: just is kind of bizarre. But I mean, there's so
Speaker 1: little left of the original Peretzky novel in here. I
Speaker 1: think Chicago is like the biggest thing that stays true
Speaker 1: to it.
Speaker 9: It's funny you talk about the brothers that don't look
Speaker 9: anything alike when at the same time you have her
Speaker 9: reporter friend and this black Hawk's boyfriend or one night
Speaker 9: stand or not even one night stand, one night visitor
Speaker 9: who basically look identical, you know, when they both show
Speaker 9: up her farmit it's it feels like a joke to
Speaker 9: me in so many ways, like this visual joke.
Speaker 1: They look so similar, and it just feels like such
Speaker 1: a sitcom type of thing to have all of these
Speaker 1: people showing up in her bathroom. It feels like this
Speaker 1: is something that would happen on friends. And I don't
Speaker 1: mean that as a compliment.
Speaker 10: No, And I think a lot of the jokes are
Speaker 10: very sick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the whole thing of her going into this bar,
Speaker 1: the Golden Glow Bar, and I was glad to find
Speaker 1: out that that was actually shot at the Green Mill
Speaker 1: because I have a friend who's worked at the Green
Speaker 1: Mill forever. And if you look at pictures of the
Speaker 1: Green Mill and you look at the Golden Glow, they
Speaker 1: just pretty much changed the neon of the name and
Speaker 1: everything else is the same. But she goes in and
Speaker 1: talks with her favorite bartender slash friend, I imagine, and
Speaker 1: the bartender's got food for her. She's like, hey, have
Speaker 1: some of this, but v I is not happy with that.
Speaker 1: She wants the box and we find out that inside
Speaker 1: of the box is this pair of red bedazzled shoes.
Speaker 1: Puts on the shoes, She's just like, oh, good shoes
Speaker 1: make everything better. As a man, I'm not sure about that.
Speaker 1: Do you guys just like love putting on new shoes?
Speaker 1: Is it? Can either of you explain this one to me?
Speaker 10: I think it's about being sexy.
Speaker 9: I'm shoe conscious, I'm shoe forward. I've loved I love
Speaker 9: a good shoe. It's not necessarily always I mean, there's
Speaker 9: utility to it. But who wouldn't love a new pair
Speaker 9: of shoes? But I feel like one of the things
Speaker 9: that I feel like, I mean, and I have not
Speaker 9: read the novels myself, so I can't really speak to
Speaker 9: that experience. But this is a character quirk of the
Speaker 9: I Worshowski. It seems strange to me that it was
Speaker 9: be fixated on a single pair of shoes. In the
Speaker 9: scope of this bill, I feel like I would want
Speaker 9: to see more of it. It doesn't necessarily need to
Speaker 9: go into like Emmel de Marco's territory, but as somebody
Speaker 9: who's got too many shoes for my own good and
Speaker 9: you know, not always a lot of money to like
Speaker 9: justify that expense, I feel like we should have seen
Speaker 9: a little bit more of that to make it feel authentic,
Speaker 9: to just even the delivery of that line. Nothing beats
Speaker 9: some good pair of shoes, whatever that line happens to be.
Speaker 10: I always thought that she was putting on those shoes
Speaker 10: in order to pick up a guy, and that's why
Speaker 10: the shoes lived at the bar.
Speaker 1: That makes sense because as it is, it's like, why
Speaker 1: does the bartender have a box basically looks like it's
Speaker 1: gift wrapped, but why does she have a box under
Speaker 1: the bar at all times? For me, I did to
Speaker 1: have so Yeah, and then she does use those shoes
Speaker 1: literally to pick up that guy because she sticks out
Speaker 1: her leg and hits him, hits his leg and shoe
Speaker 1: pops off, And we get that joke later on too,
Speaker 1: where she gets accosted by these two thugs, two care
Speaker 1: directors who I mostly well, I love Lee Arenberg and
Speaker 1: he was fantastic and freaked, but I love him especially
Speaker 1: and the other guy from Seinfeld. So this is like
Speaker 1: this Seinfeld is on the air at this point, I
Speaker 1: think are just about to be on the air. So
Speaker 1: there's like between those two and then Wayne Knight. This
Speaker 1: is such a time capsule of like early nineties sitcoms
Speaker 1: like with them and then what Stephen Root was on
Speaker 1: What News Radio? At this point, I think I'm turning
Speaker 1: this in like the Root cast here, I'm just like,
Speaker 1: let's talk more about Stephen Root. She has that whole
Speaker 1: thing about you know, oh, you didn't pick up my shoe,
Speaker 1: and luckily who is it? One of her friends gives
Speaker 1: it back to her. Because she's got this like friend
Speaker 1: group between like the older woman doctor who takes care
Speaker 1: of her. She's got Jay Saunders, who's a reporter who
Speaker 1: I guess they sleep together. Maybe they used to be
Speaker 1: a couple, but she does talk about how she catches
Speaker 1: him cheating and things, and she pretty much just knows
Speaker 1: that he's a dog and knows how to control this
Speaker 1: dog too. The whole thing where she calls and leaves
Speaker 1: a message, you know, don't do this, don't report about
Speaker 1: this thing, this thing and this thing, and then the
Speaker 1: next morning they're in the morning paper. I mean, you
Speaker 1: would think maybe she would pretend to be mad at
Speaker 1: him at least, but yeah, this whole idea of like
Speaker 1: she knows everything about this guy, can can control him perfectly.
Speaker 1: And I love Jay Saunders by the way. Every time
Speaker 1: he shows up and stuff, he's great. I always associate
Speaker 1: him with well another Wayne Knight film, JFK. I alwayo
Speaker 1: associate him working with Kevin Costner in that one, and
Speaker 1: to see him and Michael Rooker. I would love if
Speaker 1: they had been like detective partners in a movie at
Speaker 1: some point.
Speaker 9: I mean, I feel like the cast all through does
Speaker 9: great work, you know, with what they've what they've got.
Speaker 9: I can't really complain about any of the performances except
Speaker 9: for the fact that most people aren't given enough to
Speaker 9: do most or not, you know, I mean, the Stephen
Speaker 9: Root probably being the most glaring example of just being
Speaker 9: left I guess on the cutting room floor. So it's
Speaker 9: really not really not the fault of the actors, like
Speaker 9: I really really come down on. I think this is
Speaker 9: this is a script problem at its root.
Speaker 1: And it's Stephen Root. I think the movie looks decent.
Speaker 1: I think it's shot pretty well. I do like when
Speaker 1: they're making out and you see how they I think
Speaker 1: canoes using very long lens there, so they're very much
Speaker 1: in focus and you've got the lights behind them all
Speaker 1: out of focus. And hearing him on the audio commentary,
Speaker 1: it was very interesting to hear just how much of
Speaker 1: this movie was shot in Chicago versus shot in California,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those times. They blend those sequences
Speaker 1: in those shots very very well, to the point where
Speaker 1: I actually thought this whole thing had been shot in Chicago.
Speaker 10: I also thought the whole thing had been shot in Chicago,
Speaker 10: so I was surprised on that commentary where he's talking
Speaker 10: about like, oh, that's actually in Pasadena, because I had
Speaker 10: no idea. But I also thought it was interesting going
Speaker 10: back to your comment about the long lenses where he
Speaker 10: makes a really interesting comment where he says that he
Speaker 10: likes to shoot with long lenses because some of those
Speaker 10: shots would be boring with the regular fifty millimeter lens,
Speaker 10: And I was kind of like, oh, that explains why
Speaker 10: they're so many long shots in the movie. He's very
Speaker 10: fond of them.
Speaker 1: And he does have a good eye for casting. I mean,
Speaker 1: I like, like we said, great performances, even some of
Speaker 1: the smaller performances like her Landlord or you know, just
Speaker 1: even like people on the street kind of thing, the
Speaker 1: lawyer or the banker. I love that story on the
Speaker 1: commentary about how Disney wanted him to reshoot the whole
Speaker 1: thing with the banker, the one who helps her with
Speaker 1: the and I don't know why he's okay pulling up
Speaker 1: somebody else's bank account information. You would think that that
Speaker 1: would not be good because they're already giving the little
Speaker 1: girl trouble depositing a check for somebody else. Which if
Speaker 1: somebody wants to deposit a check in my account, feel free,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely fine. I don't know if I can like
Speaker 1: turn off that safety feature, feel free to just deposit
Speaker 1: whatever money you want into my account. But we've got
Speaker 1: that security. But then later on she's like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: here's this account number, and he just pulls up and
Speaker 1: turns the thing around, is like, oh, here you go.
Speaker 1: Look at all of these stumps. Oh my little girl,
Speaker 1: you sure have a lot of withdrawn checks. And you know, however,
Speaker 1: many I think when they say like billions of dollars
Speaker 1: in death kind of thing. So it's like, wow, but
Speaker 1: you're fine just showing that to anybody. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to like cinema sens this movie or anything, but you know,
Speaker 1: I like a really well drawn detective story, and there
Speaker 1: are just so many little pieces in here. I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that could have been better, that could have been tighter.
Speaker 1: And I want to like this movie because I do
Speaker 1: like so many of the people in it. I do
Speaker 1: find the story to be fairly interesting. I just wish
Speaker 1: the mystery had been a little bit more to it,
Speaker 1: a little bit extra than where it is, because it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel it doesn't even feel like that much of
Speaker 1: a mystery at the end, because when you see that
Speaker 1: little rooster guy and you see the mom you're like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: these people aren't very nice people at all, and then
Speaker 1: they end up basically like screening each other over and
Speaker 1: they're the bad guys. I'm like, Okay, shocker.
Speaker 10: Not really, it's just so badly written that it kind
Speaker 10: of transcends many different problems, you know. So it's badly
Speaker 10: written in terms of the misogyny, but it's also badly
Speaker 10: written in terms of these kind of sloppy moments where
Speaker 10: you're like, that doesn't make any sense. And I also
Speaker 10: desperately want to like the movie because there's so few
Speaker 10: female Private Eye films. They just they had to mess
Speaker 10: it up.
Speaker 9: And I don't know why.
Speaker 10: I don't know why they couldn't just have been more
Speaker 10: authentic to the book.
Speaker 9: I mean, when we talked about tank Girl, Mike, you know,
Speaker 9: months ago. This is something where clearly the studio is
Speaker 9: coming in and messing with something and the scripts or floundering,
Speaker 9: and what we end up with is, you know, a
Speaker 9: film that arguably could have really become its own franchise,
Speaker 9: but because of how bad they fuck it up, you know,
Speaker 9: it ends up being a proof that, like, you know,
Speaker 9: the film isn't ever going to work. We could never
Speaker 9: have a franchise like that. Nobody's ever going to want
Speaker 9: to watch a female Private Eye film franchise because this
Speaker 9: movie was you know, not you know, not what it
Speaker 9: could have been. And you know, and I think another
Speaker 9: thing that is not to be overlooked is that this
Speaker 9: film came out like the same summer that Thelman Louise did.
Speaker 9: And this was something that was really part of my own,
Speaker 9: like my own visceral reaction to this is that I
Speaker 9: went to see Thelma and Louise and came out just
Speaker 9: riding high and ready to just to like fucking destroy everything,
Speaker 9: you know, And like, you know, I just graduated college
Speaker 9: and I was like, now what am I going to do?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 9: What am I gonna up to? It felt like maybe
Speaker 9: this would be this would be carrying on that energy,
Speaker 9: and it just was not able to do that right.
Speaker 9: It was going to be the sad drawn Bone film
Speaker 9: after you see something like them and Louise.
Speaker 1: I mean, at least they carried on with Kathleen Turner.
Speaker 1: She reads the I don't know if they're dramatizations or
Speaker 1: if she is just reading the books, but there was
Speaker 1: I want to say, a BBC audio series of her
Speaker 1: as VII Worshowski. So that's cool that that continued on
Speaker 1: in that vein, because I think she really did connect
Speaker 1: with that character. And at least that way, if we
Speaker 1: don't have to look at her puffy face, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's like, come on, guys.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Apparently Disney was all up in arms too, because she
Speaker 1: was what just getting on some medication for some rheumatoried
Speaker 1: arthritis that she had and like occasionally looked puffy. It's like, man,
Speaker 1: oh man, if I looked half as good, a tenth,
Speaker 1: a hundred as good as she looks in this movie,
Speaker 1: she looks amazing to me. And I've always just found
Speaker 1: her to be so charming and just so compelling as
Speaker 1: a person. I mean, especially you know, like when she
Speaker 1: is the FM fatal in body Heat. But no matter
Speaker 1: what she's doing, you know, Joan in those jewel denile
Speaker 1: and romancing the Stone movies. She's wonderful in that, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I just I really, which is funny because when I
Speaker 1: think about it, I'm like thinking of other female protagonists
Speaker 1: over the last few years, and I just popped onto that.
Speaker 1: What was that movie with Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam
Speaker 1: Rockwell where she was a mystery writer very much like
Speaker 1: Joan was in Romancing the Stone, and then she gets
Speaker 1: thrown into a real life adventure very much like Joan.
Speaker 1: It's like, I didn't realize that that movie was kind
Speaker 1: of a remake of Romancing the Stone until just right now.
Speaker 1: It was named after a cat and I can't remember
Speaker 1: what the cat's name was, our Gyle, our Gyle. But
Speaker 1: another movie that just you know, women can't open a movie,
Speaker 1: remember where we had that whole thing going for a while. Women,
Speaker 1: you just can't have a woman led film or woman
Speaker 1: directed film. You look at the examples quote unquote examples
Speaker 1: that were given and it's like, oh, look at what
Speaker 1: a mess Chloe's ou made of the Eternals. It's like,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but the eternals were a fucking mess before
Speaker 1: anybody showed up to direct that thing.
Speaker 10: Think about how good the movie would have been. If
Speaker 10: they had just stayed more authentic to the book.
Speaker 1: And the book goes to a lot of interesting places.
Speaker 1: As somebody who lives around the Great Lakes, I was
Speaker 1: really intrigued. She goes all the way up to Thunder
Speaker 1: Bay in Lake Superior, and there's this whole thing of
Speaker 1: you know, what's on these boats and what's being shipped,
Speaker 1: And it taught me more about the shipping life than
Speaker 1: I ever would have known otherwise. And yeah, I found
Speaker 1: it really interesting. I thought that the Peretsky book was
Speaker 1: fantastic and it makes me want to read or listen
Speaker 1: to a lot more. I listened to the audiobook and
Speaker 1: the narrator of it did a fantastic job, and just yeah,
Speaker 1: Pareski's pros was really compelling. And I was like, like
Speaker 1: you were saying, this could have been a franchise. We
Speaker 1: could have had like a whole series of these, but instead,
Speaker 1: I know there's other female detectives that are out there
Speaker 1: where it's like, please, can somebody bring some of these
Speaker 1: ladies to the screen, like some of those what the
Speaker 1: Sue Grafton books, some of those things. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: come on, Laura Litman. Yeah, there's tons of great female
Speaker 1: detectives and nope, they just get passed by in favor
Speaker 1: of the male ones.
Speaker 10: I mean this movie, I show it in my class
Speaker 10: when I do my private detective class, and I use
Speaker 10: it as an example of like a failure, you know,
Speaker 10: and we talk about why it is a failure and why.
Speaker 11: It is it's like seemingly so impossible to have a
Speaker 11: movie with the female private eye where it works, you know,
Speaker 11: and that there are all these examples where it doesn't,
Speaker 11: and it doesn't work because these things keep getting in
Speaker 11: the way, they keep kind of poking holes in its possibilities.
Speaker 11: Like I don't know if you ever saw the TV
Speaker 11: show The Catch, but it's all also sort of similarly
Speaker 11: positioned as it's just a big mess because it's trying
Speaker 11: to do these female private eyes. And for instance, going
Speaker 11: back to what you were saying about the shoes and
Speaker 11: the sausage factory, where you were saying, like, you know,
Speaker 11: why is she wearing those shoes? In the Catch, the
Speaker 11: female private eyes are wearing like these stilettos, and it's like,
Speaker 11: really a private eye is gonna wear stilettos, you know,
Speaker 11: as they're like supposedly tailing someone or like, you know,
Speaker 11: running behind some bushes or whatever. But it's Yeah, for
Speaker 11: some reason, Hollywood cannot figure out how to do an
Speaker 11: effective female private eye.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you get her showing up at the crime scene
Speaker 1: wearing that incredible dress because of the little girl took
Speaker 1: the dress, and then she's wearing a robe, so she
Speaker 1: ends up putting the dress on in the back of
Speaker 1: the taxi and then you've got the taxi driver leering
Speaker 1: at her and she shows I don't know why she
Speaker 1: still has the robot over the dress, but yeah, dressed
Speaker 1: to the nines at this crime scene. That's where we're
Speaker 1: introduced to Charles Derney. It's funny we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about him again in two weeks when we talk
Speaker 1: about the film Cop. But he you know, I'm sure
Speaker 1: one thing that you talk about in your private diet
Speaker 1: class is the whole relationship between detectives and police. What's
Speaker 1: that relationship like? And sometimes it's uneasy, sometimes it's very friendly.
Speaker 1: This one, I mean, Dirning is basically her surguate father,
Speaker 1: which I don't tend to get with most detectives. It
Speaker 1: feels more like a friendship or a rivalry, but not
Speaker 1: a father daughter relationship.
Speaker 10: No, it's generally antagonistic, you know, and the cops are
Speaker 10: usually portrayed as you know, incompetent, dumb, slow whatever. They
Speaker 10: get in the way of the private detective, who's really
Speaker 10: better at solving the case.
Speaker 1: He's more concerned just about her welfare, which is nice,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, it doesn't fit with the mold,
Speaker 1: and I would kind of like it to be more
Speaker 1: of the mold and be more antiquistic. And I want
Speaker 1: to say again, sorry to sound like a broken record,
Speaker 1: but going back to the book, I believe it is
Speaker 1: very antagonistic, and it's like, yeah, I mean so many
Speaker 1: times Private Eye and movies are former police officers that
Speaker 1: wanted to branch out on their own, that couldn't play
Speaker 1: by the rules, or you know, just somebody up and
Speaker 1: coming that cannot get along with the police and who, yeah,
Speaker 1: either there in the way or like you said, the
Speaker 1: police are in the way. And the police are always
Speaker 1: the ones that come in and they want to make
Speaker 1: snap decisions and say this is how it happened. And
Speaker 1: the detective is always the one that wants to dig deeper,
Speaker 1: wants to find out what's really going on, and isn't
Speaker 1: happy with pat answers. A lot of times, the detective
Speaker 1: will blow up their own case if they find out
Speaker 1: that they've been wrong.
Speaker 9: What's to stop somebody from making a good version of this?
Speaker 10: Right, hypothetically, it should be possible.
Speaker 1: I'm honestly surprised nobody's done it for television because I
Speaker 1: could see this being a long form TV thing, just
Speaker 1: like a you know, Reacher Reacher, the first Reacher movie
Speaker 1: I liked a lot, even though it was completely miscast
Speaker 1: with Tom Cruise. They should have called it something else
Speaker 1: other than Jack Reacher. The guy who's playing him now
Speaker 1: on TV on Prime, he's built for the part, and
Speaker 1: he's fantastic, And I love watching that show, and I
Speaker 1: love they're using long form TV to tell us a
Speaker 1: very intricate detective story and even making nods back to
Speaker 1: the former quote unquote books, the former seasons. I really
Speaker 1: like that, And I could really see a v I
Speaker 1: Worshowski having her whole series of adventures. Why not, you know,
Speaker 1: cast somebody really strong in that role, somebody that's very compelling,
Speaker 1: like Kathleen Turner. Let's see it today.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you'd think it would be so easy.
Speaker 1: It's not like good mysteries go out of style.
Speaker 10: No, there's something about having the female detective, like it's
Speaker 10: it's okay when she's very young and she's very old, right,
Speaker 10: so we could have like the Angela Lansbury murder, she wrote,
Speaker 10: that's totally fine. We can have the Veronica Mars Nancy Drew,
Speaker 10: That's totally fine. But when she's middle aged, it's like
Speaker 10: it doesn't work.
Speaker 9: It's right, can be doing detective work during your prime
Speaker 9: maternal years, exactly, your child very years.
Speaker 1: No, you're right. As soon as you said that, I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, miss Marple, okay, yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the cozy mysteries with the old ladies, like, that's
Speaker 10: totally fine.
Speaker 9: Yeah, are you ovulating? You obviously cannot solve the mystery.
Speaker 10: It's like confounding because you think, you know, we clearly
Speaker 10: love mysteries. They crank out so many a year, But
Speaker 10: yet the closest I've been able to get is like
Speaker 10: Jessica Jones, which isn't totally accurate.
Speaker 1: I mean, even when you look at Maddie on Moonlighting,
Speaker 1: I mean she just takes such a backseat to David Addison,
Speaker 1: and then he's always the one connecting those stories together.
Speaker 1: She takes a back seat She's very much like Missus
Speaker 1: King from Scarecrow Missus King or even Remington Steele. I
Speaker 1: mean Remington Steele a fictional character created by the woman
Speaker 1: running this detective agency because no one will hire a
Speaker 1: woman detective, so she has to make up this character.
Speaker 1: And in walks Pierce Brosnan and he just assumes that
Speaker 1: role as a complete con artist basically, And that's the
Speaker 1: whole show, which is just a bizarre.
Speaker 10: Premise, Yeah, where she keeps doing all the work and
Speaker 10: he keeps getting all the credit because everybody assumes that
Speaker 10: you know, she's the secretary.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile she's the power behind the throne.
Speaker 10: No, Remington Steele is I think was really ahead of
Speaker 10: its time. It's a brilliant show. That one of the
Speaker 10: international titles for the movie was v I Warshawski Colon
Speaker 10: Detective and High Heels, which I think kind of says
Speaker 10: everything you need to know.
Speaker 1: Well, the ad campaign, what was it? What was the
Speaker 1: ad campaign for this? Because it also talked about high heels,
Speaker 1: long legs kind of thing. I mean you have the poster,
Speaker 1: the poster, yeah, with just her legs and playing off
Speaker 1: of the V and the W and the shape of
Speaker 1: her legs. Yeah, I mean that whole poster, the big
Speaker 1: w behind her and her legs formed the bottom part
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, where in the evolution of the movie poster between
Speaker 9: a woman's legs is this? Because there's a long history
Speaker 9: of it, but I'm not entirely sure when that really
Speaker 9: began in earnest and this is certainly one of the
Speaker 9: more iconic examples of that trope.
Speaker 10: I think it's interesting also to talk about her name
Speaker 10: and the fact that she deliberately tries to downplay her
Speaker 10: gender by going by v I, and that when she's
Speaker 10: called Vicki, for instance, it's usually done in this very
Speaker 10: patronizing sort of way, you know, which again speaks to
Speaker 10: it's kind of like with the Remington steal, where she's
Speaker 10: aware of the fact that she can't be too feminine,
Speaker 10: or at least, you know, her name can't be too feminine,
Speaker 10: because they will deter potential clients.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, she has that whole thing that she even
Speaker 1: tells the little Girl about. You know, That's why I
Speaker 1: use my initials, is that people can't condescend to you
Speaker 1: if they don't know your first name, or it's harder
Speaker 1: to you know, they have to call her mis Worshovski,
Speaker 1: and you've got the whole thing of the little girl
Speaker 1: being there basically. So that and I know there was
Speaker 1: talk at one point of there being a voiceover for
Speaker 1: this because the books are narrated by Vi Worshovski. The
Speaker 1: movie they were talking about having it narrated, and then
Speaker 1: Disney changed their mind and said no, no, no narration,
Speaker 1: And then they said, oh, you know what, let's have narration.
Speaker 1: And by that time, Kathleen Turner's like, you know what,
Speaker 1: fuck you, because she was really the force behind this,
Speaker 1: Like she's the one who put together this package. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like she interviewed Canoe. I'm sure that she had
Speaker 1: a hand in picking the writers. She was very into this,
Speaker 1: and I really wanted her to succeed, you know, like,
Speaker 1: especially at this point in her career. I think her
Speaker 1: having a series would have just really put a fine
Speaker 1: point on just what a great actress she is. And
Speaker 1: it says she keeps ending up in shitty other stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, It's like after this movie, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, of course I love Dumb and Dumber two,
Speaker 1: but I'm trying to think of other stuff that she
Speaker 1: did after this, where she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was a great thing. Well, I guess serial one, serial
Speaker 1: Mom came curial mom, does it? Yes, So yeah, I think.
Speaker 9: There were a couple of things, but yeah, but by
Speaker 9: and large you're right. But I think, you know, dealing
Speaker 9: with her health issues and the ways that that would
Speaker 9: be translating to a camera or a certain burden that
Speaker 9: she was having to bear.
Speaker 10: I think the voiceover thing is really symbolic of the
Speaker 10: problems with the movie, where you know, if they had
Speaker 10: stayed true to the book, she would have had a voiceover,
Speaker 10: but for whatever was in Disney didn't want to allow
Speaker 10: to have a voiceover. And the voiceover is what gives
Speaker 10: the character agency because the voiceover is the person who's
Speaker 10: guiding you through the movie. And so you know, Veronica Mars,
Speaker 10: for instance, has a voiceover. I mean many Private Eye
Speaker 10: and Noir films have voiceovers. It's part of the whole
Speaker 10: genre style. And so the fact that they said that
Speaker 10: she couldn't have a voiceover is really like taking away
Speaker 10: her voice. It's really emasculating her. And then obviously they
Speaker 10: realized that they had messed up, but it was too late.
Speaker 10: But I was I thought it was really interesting that
Speaker 10: they had they because they didn't. They didn't explain why
Speaker 10: they didn't give her a voiceover, but they just they
Speaker 10: didn't want to give her a voiceover. And I feel
Speaker 10: like that movie is supposed to have a voiceover, because
Speaker 10: those kinds of movies are supposed to have a voiceover.
Speaker 1: I don't think the voiceover would have played well though,
Speaker 1: with all of the advice she's giving to the little girl,
Speaker 1: because that's basically her voiceover, that's her inner monologue, like
Speaker 1: telling her like, oh, you know rule number one of detecting,
Speaker 1: do this, rule number two. Do this. It's like that
Speaker 1: would have worked so much better as a voiceover, And
Speaker 1: had we not had that kid there, I just really
Speaker 1: had problems with having this little girl there and just
Speaker 1: kind of glombing onto stuff and being that you know,
Speaker 1: little miss Marker type character where you're just like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: here she goes. She's gonna start crying. And I don't
Speaker 1: blame the actress and stuff, but there are a few times.
Speaker 1: There's one major scene where she like kind of breaks down,
Speaker 1: father's dead, all this kind of stuff, and I just
Speaker 1: feel like, oh, this is the Oscar moment, you know,
Speaker 1: this is what they're going to play at the Academy
Speaker 1: Awards when they're just like and nominated for vi I Warshawski,
Speaker 1: this actress, and then you know, like they play this
Speaker 1: clip and she's just tearing up and stuff. It was
Speaker 1: just a little much for me at times. And again
Speaker 1: that could just be you know, nineteen ninety one, I
Speaker 1: might have been fine with it, but in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five and I'm just like, okay, can we end up
Speaker 1: seeing pretty soon? This is getting to be a little
Speaker 1: long in the tooth.
Speaker 10: Well, that's what's so funny about when you were asking
Speaker 10: me at the beginning of our conversation about whether I
Speaker 10: liked the movie when it came out, and I did
Speaker 10: like the movie because I didn't really know any better,
Speaker 10: And now watching it with you know, sort of our
Speaker 10: twenty twenty five perspective, it's just like you want to
Speaker 10: put your head in your hand and go, oh my god.
Speaker 10: You know, just like one thing after the next is
Speaker 10: just so demeaning. You kind of wonder why if this
Speaker 10: was Kathleen Turner's project, she went along with it all
Speaker 10: and didn't have more of a role in sort of,
Speaker 10: I don't know, making the script better.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a mystery.
Speaker 1: It is a mystery that's the bigger mystery than the
Speaker 1: mystery in the movie. All right, we're going to take
Speaker 1: a break and we'll be back with a whole slew
Speaker 1: of interviews. First up, you're going to hear from the
Speaker 1: creator of Via Warshowsky, yourself, Sarah Peritzky. After that, we'll
Speaker 1: hear from screenwriters David Aaron Cohen and Nick feel After
Speaker 1: that we'll hear from director Jeff Canoe, and last but
Speaker 1: not least, we'll hear from the final writer on Via Worshowski,
Speaker 1: Warren Light. And we'll be back with all of that
Speaker 1: right after these brief messages.
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Speaker 1: All right, welcome to the interview portion of the show.
Speaker 1: First up, we're going to hear from the creator of
Speaker 1: vi I Warshawski, Sarah Peretsky. Can you tell me a
Speaker 1: little bit about you growing up and becoming a writer.
Speaker 1: How did you decide to endeavor in that pursuit.
Speaker 7: I grew up writing. I never imagine myself as a writer,
Speaker 7: writing things that other people wanted to read, but every
Speaker 7: one I I have four brothers, one older, three younger,
Speaker 7: and we all grew up.
Speaker 8: My mother was a.
Speaker 7: Great reader, great storyteller. My mother was a way better
Speaker 7: storyteller than I am. She used to tell this serial,
Speaker 7: this long serial about a sheriff in Colorado who he
Speaker 7: had two children, Sarah and Dan, me and my next brother,
Speaker 7: who were always disappearing, finding themselves lost in silver mines
Speaker 7: or something. And each week as she was ironing, she'd
Speaker 7: have a new episode on this thriller that she'd just
Speaker 7: make up on her feet. I've never been that clever.
Speaker 7: She was a fantastic storyteller, and then became a children's
Speaker 7: librarian and she was just adored by every child in Lawrence, Kansas.
Speaker 7: So that's where I learned just the sheer joy of stories.
Speaker 7: But I never imagined myself as a published writer. That
Speaker 7: sort of just evolved with time.
Speaker 1: What were some of your earlier stories and books like?
Speaker 1: I know you definitely wrote some nonfiction when you were
Speaker 1: going to college.
Speaker 7: When I was wo how old it wasn't in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 7: I was twenty two, twenty three. I thought I could
Speaker 7: get a job in the writing world in New York.
Speaker 7: I thought some magazine would love to hire me. And
Speaker 7: my portfolio were all my history papers, because I was
Speaker 7: doing a PhD in American history. I don't know, I
Speaker 7: don't know if it was ignorant or arrogance, but of
Speaker 7: course no one wanted to talk to me. I didn't
Speaker 7: have a sponsor. I knew not one person in the
Speaker 7: New York writing world. And I finally ended up getting
Speaker 7: a job as a secretary, and then I came back
Speaker 7: to Chicago because it was just easier to live in
Speaker 7: Chicago than in New York. But as a person just
Speaker 7: writing for myself, writing stories, really fairy tales when I
Speaker 7: was young, and then in my teens when I really
Speaker 7: got engaged by crime novels, crime fiction. Then I started
Speaker 7: writing my own crime short stories. And then in my
Speaker 7: twenties Bad Love Affair. I would write a story just
Speaker 7: absolutely evisceraating the disgusting human being who had abandoned me,
Speaker 7: so revenge story. But all the time I was reading
Speaker 7: crime fiction, and especially when I started reading American noir
Speaker 7: fiction Raymond Chandler, dash Ol Hammett, the great Golden Age
Speaker 7: of noir fiction in America, and saw the way that
Speaker 7: women were depicted, and a woman was almost always going
Speaker 7: to be the main bad person in a Chandler novel,
Speaker 7: and she was going to use her body like bridget
Speaker 7: O'Shaughnessy and Hammett's Maltese Fall Country, was going to use
Speaker 7: her body to get good boys to do bad things,
Speaker 7: and she was going to get her come up, because
Speaker 7: no bad woman could be as strong as a stalwart hero.
Speaker 7: And I wanted to create a woman who turned the
Speaker 7: tables on that kind of image of women. I was
Speaker 7: working by then in financial services, industry, insurance and so on,
Speaker 7: and I.
Speaker 8: Wanted a woman.
Speaker 7: Who reflected the experience of my women friends, my co
Speaker 7: workers and mine. Where we were doing a job, We
Speaker 7: were getting the job done, We were getting paid less
Speaker 7: sixty percent of what the men around us were getting paid.
Speaker 8: Believe me, we did not use our bodies to.
Speaker 7: Do anything except go home, take off our high heels
Speaker 7: at the end of the day in soaked and epsom salts.
Speaker 7: So I wanted a woman detective who reflected the real
Speaker 7: experience that I and my friends were having. And it
Speaker 7: took me years for VII to come to me. I
Speaker 7: kept trying to write what I see now was just
Speaker 7: a parody of Chandler with I had a detective name
Speaker 7: Minerva Daniels who was so hard boiled she makes v
Speaker 7: I look like a puppy. I know I've said this
Speaker 7: a number of times in other places, but this really happened.
Speaker 7: I worked for a guy who was just a total
Speaker 7: horrible person. His only good quality was that he was
Speaker 7: as horrible to the men who worked for him as
Speaker 7: he was to the women. It was just an all
Speaker 7: round jerk. It was Chicago, it was October. The trees
Speaker 7: in Grant Park had lost their leaves. And for anyone
Speaker 7: who's watching this, who's been in Chicago at all, there's
Speaker 7: a red building across the street from the Art Institute,
Speaker 7: the CNA Insurance building. We were up on the thirty
Speaker 7: sixth floor looking down at Grant Park. Everything was dead.
Speaker 7: My lips were saying, gosh, Fred, heck of an idea,
Speaker 7: and the over my head was saying you unspeakable, unprintable, unthinkable,
Speaker 7: turkey bird, And really literally my detective came to me
Speaker 7: in that moment. So seven or eight years of writing
Speaker 7: a few pages here and there, I thought, oh God, no,
Speaker 7: she's me and my friends. Only she says what's in
Speaker 7: the thought balloon because she doesn't care if someone fires her.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was curious how much of v I was
Speaker 1: in you and you were in her, But sounds like
Speaker 1: pretty close.
Speaker 7: I think the thoughts and she talks the thoughts. I
Speaker 7: think as time has passed, I've become less inhibited in
Speaker 7: what I might say in public. But v I she's
Speaker 7: my version of just being fearless and willing to live
Speaker 7: with the consequences of being outspoken. And whereas I sometimes
Speaker 7: will retreat and think, oh I don't have to say
Speaker 7: that in public, I can have v I say it
Speaker 7: for me.
Speaker 1: So what was that first novel? What was that first
Speaker 1: experience like? Just finding her and being able to have
Speaker 1: her explore that world for you.
Speaker 7: It was wonderful in some ways, and yet it also
Speaker 7: set the pattern for how I write, which is with
Speaker 7: a lot of self doubt, backtracking. I wrote about seventy
Speaker 7: pages and thought, I don't know what I'm doing and
Speaker 7: I can't make this happen. And then a coworker showed
Speaker 7: me that Stuart Kaminsky of Blessed Memory. He was a
Speaker 7: crime writer, but he also taught at Northwestern University, Radio,
Speaker 7: TV Film. He was teaching a class writing detective fiction
Speaker 7: for publication in the Northwestern Night School. So every I
Speaker 7: can't remember Tuesday night, I think it doesn't matter what
Speaker 7: day of the week. I drove the twenty miles up
Speaker 7: to the Northwestern campus and Stu was just immensely supportive,
Speaker 7: really liked the idea of the character. I was copying
Speaker 7: all these tropes from the thirties and forties because because
Speaker 7: I really didn't have confidence that I could forge my
Speaker 7: own path, and he explained how outdated they were, that
Speaker 7: it would date my work, and so he just gave
Speaker 7: me the encouragement I needed to make VII bolder, more contemporary,
Speaker 7: and bring her to the finish line. Also, the most
Speaker 7: generous additional thing he did was to send my manuscript
Speaker 7: to his agent, Dominic Abel, who's been my agent ever since,
Speaker 7: and Dominic Dominic liked the book, but he said she
Speaker 7: needs flaws. I'd made her too perfect. So I gave
Speaker 7: her my flaws, which is a short temper, short fused temper,
Speaker 7: and a lack of interest in housekeeping. The first book,
Speaker 7: Indemnity Only, she was not as fully formed as she
Speaker 7: became with time. So other flaws have emerged as time
Speaker 7: has passed. But man, I was so lucky to be
Speaker 7: writing when I was, back when there were a lot
Speaker 7: of publishers, because I got forty rejection letters before dial
Speaker 7: Press agreed to buy the book. And my favorite rejection letter,
Speaker 7: I think it was from Simon and Schuster. But all
Speaker 7: my papers are now at the Newberry Library. I'd have
Speaker 7: to go into their archive and look through and say,
Speaker 7: who was it who wrote this? And they said, of
Speaker 7: a book set in Chicago had regional interest only, and
Speaker 7: not enough people read in the Upper Midwest to make
Speaker 7: it worth our while to publish a book set there.
Speaker 1: Wow, just insult for all of us.
Speaker 5: That's right, I know.
Speaker 1: Did you know pretty much right off that you were
Speaker 1: going to stick with her as your character and build
Speaker 1: more of this world around her?
Speaker 7: No, I thought one and done. I wanted to show
Speaker 7: that what a woman could do as an independent investigator,
Speaker 7: that what a woman who was on her own could do,
Speaker 7: that she didn't need to be rescued. And I look
Speaker 7: at how I lose my life, and I think I
Speaker 7: am stupid, I am naive, and I must also be
Speaker 7: arrogant because I thought the only reason that people are
Speaker 7: writing about women the way they are is because they
Speaker 7: just haven't thought it through. Now they'll see v I
Speaker 7: and they'll think, Oh, we didn't get it. Now we do,
Speaker 7: and that will change.
Speaker 14: I'm like, ah, Sarah, you are such an idiot. I
Speaker 14: had other ideas, other stories I wanted to tell, which
Speaker 14: mercifully Dominic persuaded me not to. When I look back
Speaker 14: at the proposals I sent them, I was like, oh, no,
Speaker 14: talking about things that are just as well never.
Speaker 7: Saw the light of the day. But he also said
Speaker 7: that he thought I should write at least three books
Speaker 7: about her to establish her. And then three became suddenly
Speaker 7: twenty two.
Speaker 1: I know, like when John D. MacDonald wrote his Travis
Speaker 1: McKee books, he wrote three just to get the feel
Speaker 1: for him. So I was curious, if you did the
Speaker 1: same with VI. It sounds somewhat similar.
Speaker 7: It was, And then she developed a following. At the
Speaker 7: same time as I was seeing her in a fuller way.
Speaker 7: I was a marketing manager for CNA Insurance in Chicago,
Speaker 7: and I was on the road a lot. It was
Speaker 7: the early days of automation when we were trying to
Speaker 7: persuade our See God, I was such a corporate player.
Speaker 7: I still say we and I've been away from that
Speaker 7: company for almost fifty years, but almost forty years anyway,
Speaker 7: we were trying to persuade our agency force to automate.
Speaker 7: And I don't know if you're old to remember the
Speaker 7: IBM desktop computers, but we were offering those as special deals.
Speaker 7: And then I started having more responsibility. I was on
Speaker 7: the road two weeks a month. A year went by
Speaker 7: where I didn't have time or energy to write. After
Speaker 7: three books, I thought, Okay, it's now or never, and
Speaker 7: I quit my day job. And I was just lucky
Speaker 7: in how my career evolved that and lucky that I
Speaker 7: was married to a really wonderful person who wanted me
Speaker 7: to thrive and flourish in my creative work. The fact
Speaker 7: that the money was less did not bother him for
Speaker 7: one second, which was also a wonderful gift, one of
Speaker 7: many that I had from him over the forty seven
Speaker 7: years we were together.
Speaker 1: I'm reading Deadlock right now. How much research did you
Speaker 1: have to do on shipping just to write that book?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 7: Tons and Courtney, my husband. He had been in the
Speaker 7: Royal Navy during the Second World War, but he was
Speaker 7: a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. But
Speaker 7: he always loved ships and shipping, and so we would
Speaker 7: take many years. We took our vacation driving up through
Speaker 7: Macina past the sew Locks and then around like Superior
Speaker 7: and back home. So we're standing at the sew locks
Speaker 7: and Courtney said, I wonder what would happen if you
Speaker 7: blew up a ship in one of those locks. So
Speaker 7: I went. When we got home, I started doing the
Speaker 7: research into Great Lakes shipping and created a story that
Speaker 7: would involve blowing up a ship in the locks. And
Speaker 7: then it was clear that it would be really good
Speaker 7: if I actually had some experience with one of those freighters.
Speaker 7: So I started calling the companies in Chicago that I
Speaker 7: knew shipped on the Lakes, and they all just paid
Speaker 7: basically hung up on me. But we were at the
Speaker 7: Sioux on vacation, and I started writing down the names
Speaker 7: of the shipping companies which are on the hull of
Speaker 7: the ship, and Canada Este the ship, which I learned
Speaker 7: later was the biggest shipper on the Great Lakes. I
Speaker 7: called them their head office in Montreal, and the guy
Speaker 7: I was transferred to this is nineteen eighty two eighty three.
Speaker 7: I had a pay phone outside the Sioux Locks a
Speaker 7: guy who answered the phone Friday afternoon. He said, do
Speaker 7: you want to sail for a day, a week, a
Speaker 7: month or a year? And I had a week of
Speaker 7: vacation left at the insurance company, and I said a week.
Speaker 7: And he said call me back tomorrow morning, Saturday morning.
Speaker 7: And I called back and he said, be at Peer
Speaker 7: whatever number it was, in thunder Bay, which is the
Speaker 7: westernmost port on Lake Superior, at eight o'clock Monday morning,
Speaker 7: and the master of the J. W. McGiffin will be
Speaker 7: ready to let you board and sail with them. So
Speaker 7: we drove Courtney with our golden retriever at the time,
Speaker 7: drove like maniacs the six hundred miles around to thunder Bay.
Speaker 7: Then he said goodbye to me and drove back to
Speaker 7: pick me up at Nira Falls. And I had no
Speaker 7: idea what to expect, but I was expecting because we
Speaker 7: toured these ships at the museum in sus Saint Marie.
Speaker 7: He was expecting a hammock in a dark cubbyhold.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 7: I had a suite of three rooms. I was in
Speaker 7: the stateroom. I was an honored guest who ate at
Speaker 7: the captain's table. And this was September.
Speaker 8: They sailed.
Speaker 7: I don't know what it's like now, but they sailed
Speaker 7: basically from when the ice breaks up in April until
Speaker 7: the ice freezes. So they sailed seven days a week,
Speaker 7: and all their leave is in that chunk of months.
Speaker 7: And it got when the locks are frozen solid. They
Speaker 7: were so sick of each other's company. I didn't have
Speaker 7: to ask any questions. Everyone was eager to have some
Speaker 7: new person to tell all their stories too. And I
Speaker 7: got to go down into the hold and see the
Speaker 7: giant boilers and pistons and everything. And then I'm thinking,
Speaker 7: the last person to be in that stateroom was the
Speaker 7: head of the Canada Green Board and basically high ranking
Speaker 7: people and shipping and green and so on. And I'm thinking,
Speaker 7: I have six hundred dollars in my bank account. Can
Speaker 7: I check long enough to I have no idea what
Speaker 7: this will cost. And finally, the last morning, when we
Speaker 7: were getting before we were docking at the Wellham Canal,
Speaker 7: which raises the ships up to the Saint Laurent seaway.
Speaker 7: I said, nobody has said anything as awkward as money,
Speaker 7: but I don't know what the charges for sailing with you.
Speaker 7: And the master said, oh, we can't charge you. Then
Speaker 7: we'd have to advertise as a passenger ship.
Speaker 8: And I was like, WHOA.
Speaker 7: But I think one of the most beautiful moments that
Speaker 7: I was able to experience in my whole life was
Speaker 7: at midnight in the middle of Lake Superior, on the
Speaker 7: very front the bow of the ship. You don't hear
Speaker 7: the engines seven one hundred and fifty feet behind you,
Speaker 7: and you're just there and the water as iridescent in
Speaker 7: the moonlight, and it's so peaceful and beautiful. It was magical,
Speaker 7: and that memory, all these many years later stays with me.
Speaker 1: I love the way that you described that in the book,
Speaker 1: talking about the way that an ink blood a black
Speaker 1: ink blot will separate into its colors, and just, yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounded beautiful.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Once you left the insurance company and we're able to
Speaker 1: write full time, what kind of routine did you come
Speaker 1: up with and do you stick to that today?
Speaker 7: I'm not as disciplined, I'm sad to say, as I was,
Speaker 7: but I was so worried about not being able to
Speaker 7: do it that the morning after my first morning away
Speaker 7: from the company, I got up. I did not put
Speaker 7: on pantygovers. But other than that, I've had my routine
Speaker 7: established breakfast exercises.
Speaker 2: I have a.
Speaker 7: Chronic back problem that's gotten worse with time. So I'm
Speaker 7: religious about not bodybuilding, but you know what I need
Speaker 7: to do to keep it in check. And then in
Speaker 7: those days, it was just the earliest days with computers,
Speaker 7: and it wasn't until never mind all the history of computers,
Speaker 7: but every vendor had their own one. They thought that
Speaker 7: the future was in the machine. They didn't realize the
Speaker 7: future was in the software. I had a little Hewlett
Speaker 7: Packard with fourteen megabytes of memory, and that was I
Speaker 7: sat there typing away on my HP. Then you'd fill
Speaker 7: up the memory, you'd have to answer everything to a
Speaker 7: floppy pull it out, and it's just so bizarre. My
Speaker 7: husband was one of the first physicists to use computers
Speaker 7: in experimental work, and they had a machine that had
Speaker 7: seventy kilobytes of memory, and they with the whole thing
Speaker 7: was writing programs that shifted pro code in and out
Speaker 7: of the core of the machine, and of course it
Speaker 7: was the size of ten refrigerators or something. But yeah,
Speaker 7: it's fun. It's fun to have been part of the history.
Speaker 7: So that you see, like my first book, I wrote
Speaker 7: my hand and then typed my second book. I figured
Speaker 7: I could eliminate the middle person and just type it
Speaker 7: directly on my Smith corona, and so I did two
Speaker 7: books typing in the machine and then we're processing what
Speaker 7: a salvation?
Speaker 1: How soon after the via Warshawsky books start coming out
Speaker 1: do you get approached by Hollywood for selling the rights.
Speaker 7: One of the things that my agent does as a
Speaker 7: good agent is he always has been a solo agent.
Speaker 7: Some people have agents who are part of a big
Speaker 7: firm that has movie agents as well, and the goal
Speaker 7: always is for any agent to try to get those
Speaker 7: kinds of deals. So he was working really from day
Speaker 7: one with his Hollywood civil rights agent to try to
Speaker 7: find someone. And because it's close to impossible to have
Speaker 7: a book turned into a movie is from having options.
Speaker 7: And then so I had a number of options that expired,
Speaker 7: and then suddenly Kathleen Turner wanted to play VII, so
Speaker 7: that it was I want to say, around the time
Speaker 7: I wrote my fifth book, so eighty six, eighty seven,
Speaker 7: something like that, And suddenly it had to have been
Speaker 7: later than that because the movie came out I think
Speaker 7: in ninety ninety one, so it must have been around
Speaker 7: eighty nine. Anyway, Kathleen apparently owed Disney a movie and
Speaker 7: that was how the deal came about, and she really
Speaker 7: wanted to play the character, so that was I was
Speaker 7: very fortunate that the character spoke to her personally in
Speaker 7: such a way. Even though the movie itself ended up
Speaker 7: not being particularly well put together, but it still just
Speaker 7: expanded the number of people who knew what I was doing.
Speaker 7: It was obviously I would love it if it had
Speaker 7: been a great movie in a franchise and so on,
Speaker 7: and that didn't happen, but it still was a really
Speaker 7: stroke of fortune for my career, my ability to be
Speaker 7: working independently.
Speaker 1: What was that experience like for you with that whole adaptation.
Speaker 1: Did they just say Okay, thanks Sarah, here's a check
Speaker 1: and we'll see you in five years or how did
Speaker 1: that go?
Speaker 7: I don't remember the exact sequence, but basically I was
Speaker 7: in England on tour for whatever book it was, and
Speaker 7: I got home to a call from a man who
Speaker 7: introduced himself as a location scout, and this was how
Speaker 7: I heard that they were actually making a movie. I
Speaker 7: didn't know that they were doing that. So he said
Speaker 7: he was in town scouting locations for the movie. And
Speaker 7: I was like, WHOA what movie? And then I said,
Speaker 7: I just landed half an hour ago and I'd be
Speaker 7: glad to show you around tomorrow. And he said, no,
Speaker 7: this is just a courtesy call to let you know
Speaker 7: that we're taking over the product you used to be
Speaker 7: involved in. I was like, what the product I used
Speaker 7: to be involved in? My heart, my soul, my gizzick
Speaker 7: so well, slap in the face, and a realization that
Speaker 7: I had no power in this situation. So they were
Speaker 7: going to do what they were going to do. I
Speaker 7: saw the script. There were things that I wished they
Speaker 7: weren't doing. The script that they were beyond and looked
Speaker 7: a trifle board. There are things that I liked about
Speaker 7: the movie. There were things I liked about the process,
Speaker 7: but there were some big red flags. One of them
Speaker 7: v I has a neighbor, a close confidant, mister Contreras,
Speaker 7: and they turned him into such a really ugly stereotype
Speaker 7: of a Mexican immigrant that it ruined the movie for
Speaker 7: me to have is that so opposite to my values
Speaker 7: and how I try to see people. There were things
Speaker 7: like that, and then they wanted an explosion, so they
Speaker 7: blew something up and they had a good time doing that.
Speaker 7: There were things that were fun that I hadn't thought
Speaker 7: about because they were good cinematically, chasing on the Chicago
Speaker 7: River that was just fun. And of course Kathleen was
Speaker 7: always a strong presence on the screen or when she
Speaker 7: was in her heyday. There were definitely pluses and so on.
Speaker 7: The big plus wasn't actually the movie itself, but it
Speaker 7: used to be where v I lived that she overlooked
Speaker 7: Wriggley Field, and they actually rented, and they not rented
Speaker 7: an apartment, but they persuaded someone with an apartment to
Speaker 7: let them film from in the living room. They rented
Speaker 7: Wrigley Field, and I got to run the bases. Even
Speaker 7: if you go on a paid tour, you are never
Speaker 7: allowed on that sacred grass. So there I was. It
Speaker 7: was night, they were shooting at night. I was out
Speaker 7: in the outfield. Andre Dawson, great outfielder for originally the
Speaker 7: Expos and ended his career with the Cobs. I was
Speaker 7: standing where he had been spitting only hours before. So
Speaker 7: I'd melt the cat and kissed the turf, and then
Speaker 7: I went and ran the bases. Now I am not
Speaker 7: an athlete. I did play baseball for the country school
Speaker 7: to room country school I went to, and I was terrible,
Speaker 7: but everyone had to play because that was how you
Speaker 7: got nine people on a team. And I thought, okay,
Speaker 7: I'll slide into home and the extras are in the stands.
Speaker 7: They're cheering because they're bored. Nothing is happening or waiting
Speaker 7: for whatever scene is being set up. And I'm rounding
Speaker 7: the bases and I'm waving, and I'm thinking, oh my god,
Speaker 7: this is why athletes keep doing this even after their
Speaker 7: careers are clearly over, because the crowd, the cheering. And
Speaker 7: then I get to home plate and I thought, I
Speaker 7: have no idea how to slide, so I just fell
Speaker 7: head first onto home plate. And sadly, in those days
Speaker 7: before cell phones, there's no footage of my career at Wrigleyfield.
Speaker 1: That sounds like an amazing experience.
Speaker 8: Though, oh it was.
Speaker 7: I won't say it was worth having a bad movie made,
Speaker 7: but it definitely was for me. The high point of
Speaker 7: the movie.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you already knew that the biggest thing
Speaker 1: that could come out of it is just more awareness
Speaker 1: of your character and your process.
Speaker 7: And it really helped also because American films, they have
Speaker 7: an international market, and so it made it possible for
Speaker 7: me to At one point my books were available in
Speaker 7: thirty languages around Europe and Asia and so on. My
Speaker 7: career isn't nearly as robust now as it was then,
Speaker 7: but it definitely expanded my market and name recognition and
Speaker 7: so on. I'm really glad that I had the opportunity,
Speaker 7: and frankly, Disney owns the rights and won't give them up,
Speaker 7: but also they're interested in doing something. And then I'm
Speaker 7: very lucky right now to be represented by creative artists
Speaker 7: Bruce Naker. And you never know the future Eliza ahead,
Speaker 7: as Mortsaul always used to say, but something could happen,
Speaker 7: and that would be great. I've lived a long time
Speaker 7: with nothing happening, so I'm not hanging my hat on it.
Speaker 7: But it's nice to know that people still care about
Speaker 7: the character and think about doing something with her on screen.
Speaker 1: I was wondering if there was any talk of bringing
Speaker 1: her back, or maybe even a limited series or something, because.
Speaker 7: She's exactly a streaming series or something. Yeah, it would
Speaker 7: be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Because I know Kathleen Turner is a fantastic actress, but
Speaker 1: obviously she's probably not the person that was in your
Speaker 1: head when you're writing these things. Did you ever have
Speaker 1: anybody that you said, oh, that would be the perfect
Speaker 1: via Worshovski.
Speaker 7: I should have been ready for this question coming into it,
Speaker 7: because of course we're talking quite a few years ago,
Speaker 7: and now I can't think of the woman's last name.
Speaker 7: Her first name was Amy. She was such a Chicago, tough,
Speaker 7: in your face, Chicago presence. Why can't I think of
Speaker 7: her last name? If it comes to me, I'll let
Speaker 7: you know. But I also I really liked Jamie Lee Curtis.
Speaker 7: Even though she's small compared to how I envisioned VII,
Speaker 7: she does have that kind of she just eat my
Speaker 7: shorts kind of Bradson's in the attitude, and at the
Speaker 7: same time that she's just irresistible. She can say stuff
Speaker 7: like that and people just take him from her because
Speaker 7: because she's Jamie Lee Curtis. Yeah, but of course when
Speaker 7: Kathleen said she wanted to do it, she was a
Speaker 7: superstar at that point, and it was quite an experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are you working on these days?
Speaker 7: I'm taking a break from VII. I published the twenty
Speaker 7: second novel in the series in April of last year.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 7: It was a hard book to write. Emotionally, it was.
Speaker 7: It really took a lot out of me, and I thought,
Speaker 7: I need a break from her because I can't just
Speaker 7: go right back into the ring. I'm working on a
Speaker 7: book with a woman named Lily. Lily is older the
Speaker 7: I is going to just stay around fifty because I
Speaker 7: want her to be as physical as she physical, sexual,
Speaker 7: all those things that not that we seventy somethings aren't
Speaker 7: physical and sexual and all those things, but we'd also
Speaker 7: tend to groan a lot while we're.
Speaker 4: Anyway.
Speaker 7: Lily is a retired CIA agent who goes a foul
Speaker 7: of the agency by starting to put out podcasts or
Speaker 7: maybe substacks. Who knows what it'll be by the time
Speaker 7: I finished writing the book, what the trend deep thing
Speaker 7: will be. But anyway, she gets appalled by the consequences
Speaker 7: of some of the things that she'd so the agency
Speaker 7: is not happy, and when they can't get her to
Speaker 7: shut up, they wanted to kill her. So she's on
Speaker 7: the run from the CIA, and she's going to have
Speaker 7: to escape somehow. I haven't figured that out yet, but
Speaker 7: I will. I've created an imaginary country because I thought
Speaker 7: if I set her in a real country, I will
Speaker 7: have to spend decades researching everything about it, and even
Speaker 7: then I'll make horrible mistakes and I'll get ten thousand
Speaker 7: letters saying didn't you know that Congo did this and
Speaker 7: not that? So I've created a country called Hyalastan, which
Speaker 7: is Turkish for imaginary country. It's carved out of the
Speaker 7: west of the all the stands in Central Asia. And
Speaker 7: I'm having so much fun. I can see why it
Speaker 7: took Tolkien forever to finish writing the Lord of the
Speaker 7: Rings trilogy, because when you're inventing a country and a
Speaker 7: language and an epic and a history, it's just so
Speaker 7: fun that you forget you're also supposed to be telling
Speaker 7: a story and moving your character forward.
Speaker 1: He said, you don't know exactly what happens to her,
Speaker 1: how she gets out of this, So I take it
Speaker 1: you don't outline everything. You just kind of make it
Speaker 1: up as you go along.
Speaker 7: I was thinking this morning. Process is something that we
Speaker 7: writers talk about when we get together and some people
Speaker 7: I was like a PD. James was a personal friend,
Speaker 7: and Phyllis said she would outline in such detail that
Speaker 7: she would just write the chapter that most appealed to
Speaker 7: her on a given day. I don't have that kind
Speaker 7: of chess playing brain. If this person does this, this person,
Speaker 7: I would say, I write more as an explorer, someone
Speaker 7: who I set my characters out and they're walking a trail,
Speaker 7: and then that trail leads to an impenetrable forest or
Speaker 7: a swamp or something, and I can see the book
Speaker 7: isn't working, and so I pull back and go back.
Speaker 7: Each time I do that, it comes more into focus.
Speaker 7: And I wish I wrote as many of my peers
Speaker 7: do a book two books a year, but I can't
Speaker 7: think that way, and it's just it's frustrating. But Christmas
Speaker 7: Day I was on page two hundred and seventy, and
Speaker 7: New Year's Day I was on page ninety. But now
Speaker 7: I'm back to one seventy. Trail is going uphill, not
Speaker 7: into a small and you'd think you'd get to a
Speaker 7: point in your life where you would know ahead of
Speaker 7: time that it was that this trial was an error.
Speaker 7: But it's not that way for me, And the word
Speaker 7: on the page really matters to me a lot, writing
Speaker 7: as carefully as I can, no sloppy grammar, No I'm
Speaker 7: gonna instead of I am going to because I think
Speaker 7: it looks bad on the page. You talk like that,
Speaker 7: but you it doesn't look good on the page when
Speaker 7: you write like that. And the other thing, going back
Speaker 7: to the very beginning, Stuart Kaminski when he was teaching
Speaker 7: this class, he cautioned us all everyone in the class,
Speaker 7: that slang dates you more than it makes you look
Speaker 7: current and hip, and especially now with the net, slang
Speaker 7: is So that's something that I tend to shy away from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's definitely a timeless quality about your books and
Speaker 1: about your stories. The one thing, though, that I do
Speaker 1: have to kind of chuckle at, was when her car
Speaker 1: was totaled and she goes to buy a new car
Speaker 1: with that thirty five hundred dollars check, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, what years.
Speaker 7: That I know. I remember calling back in the seventies.
Speaker 7: My boss came in bragging she had bought a car
Speaker 7: for three thousand dollars, which we were all just shocked.
Speaker 7: Who would spend that kind of money on a car.
Speaker 1: It's almost like should have variables in them that can
Speaker 1: adjust to the.
Speaker 7: GDPs I put in the CPI calculator. Maybe I should
Speaker 7: put that in the front of my three issues. And
Speaker 7: please note that I had never seen Perry Mason Raymond
Speaker 7: Burr's Perry Mason because my family were too snotty to
Speaker 7: have a television. My parents were like they were too intellectual.
Speaker 7: So Perry Mason reruns got me through lockdown, and I
Speaker 7: love them. I watched every episode twice, but I did
Speaker 7: have to go look up the CPI multiplier to figure
Speaker 7: out that things in what seemed like nothing in nineteen
Speaker 7: in nineteen fifty five seemed like nothing to us was
Speaker 7: actually millions of dollars in today's dollars.
Speaker 1: Ow Dary still had ten thousand dollars, and the whole
Speaker 1: audience gasps.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ms Berreski, thank you so much for your time. This
Speaker 1: was so nice talking with you today.
Speaker 7: Thanks, thank you for your interest and for just making
Speaker 7: it such a fun and engaging experience. It isn't always,
Speaker 7: but you really made me feel like I really wanted
Speaker 7: to be alive with you, So thanks for that.
Speaker 1: All right, up next, we're going to hear from screenwriters
Speaker 1: David Aaron Cohen and Nick Fiel, one right after the other.
Speaker 1: You're a fellow Wolverine. From what I understand.
Speaker 2: Wolverene and I grew up spent all my summers in
Speaker 2: Michigan and ended up even when I went to Michigan,
Speaker 2: I was like an in state because we had a
Speaker 2: home in South Hayn. That's where I would spend the summers.
Speaker 1: Speaking of those early days, I'd love to know how
Speaker 1: you decided to become a screenwriter.
Speaker 2: I was always writing on some level. I went to Michigan,
Speaker 2: was in the Honors English program, thought I would be
Speaker 2: the next salt Bellow, and that was my trajectory for myself.
Speaker 2: That didn't work out, and I never studied film or
Speaker 2: screenwriting anything. I mean, I always loved movies, but I
Speaker 2: just never thought about it in that way. In a
Speaker 2: very sort of ironic twist of fate, I moved to
Speaker 2: Israel in the eighties and ended up getting work there
Speaker 2: on first like TV show that they were doing, educational
Speaker 2: television network, and then went to work for Manachem Golan,
Speaker 2: who famously had Cannon Films in the eighties, and they're
Speaker 2: the guys who made all the Chuck Norris movies, either
Speaker 2: did a breakdancing movie, Electric Boogaloo or something. Anyway, there
Speaker 2: I got a lot of experience and ended up making
Speaker 2: my first feature in Tel Aviv. And then once I
Speaker 2: did that, I was like, I think I can do this,
Speaker 2: like we're a living So, with a lot of hubris
Speaker 2: and a lot of ignorance, moved to La saying this
Speaker 2: is what I was going to do with the wife
Speaker 2: and a one year old and not really knowing anyone.
Speaker 2: I had one college friend with Michigan and he was
Speaker 2: working as a reader for TriStar, And then he had
Speaker 2: one friend who we also sometimes read for, who was
Speaker 2: a development guy named John Marsh. And John worked at
Speaker 2: Chestnut Hill Productions, which was the movie company owned by
Speaker 2: Jeff Lourie, the guy who owns the Philadelphia Eagles, but
Speaker 2: at the time he was more scion of a family
Speaker 2: that owed a lot of movie theaters in the East Coast,
Speaker 2: so wanted to dip his toe into the business and
Speaker 2: started Chestnut Hill. And yeah, so John actually Marsh was
Speaker 2: shout out to John Marsh because he met with me.
Speaker 2: It was during the strike nineteen eighty eight. You couldn't
Speaker 2: meet with anyone else that we met with me, and
Speaker 2: I gave him a specscript that I had written when
Speaker 2: I was in Tel Aviv, and she really liked it
Speaker 2: and helped me rewrite it so that I could sub
Speaker 2: so he could submit it to agents that he knew,
Speaker 2: and through him, I got through that experience, I got representation,
Speaker 2: and then maybe six months later, eight months later, he
Speaker 2: was like, David, I have a thing project for you,
Speaker 2: and this could be. It ended up being my very
Speaker 2: first getting in Hollywood, and it was to do a
Speaker 2: rewrite of the Edward Taylor I think that was the
Speaker 2: guy's name who was the original writer and v I
Speaker 2: and it was one of those situations where they were
Speaker 2: going to hire me. They were going to pay me
Speaker 2: Polish money to do a page one rewrite, which you know,
Speaker 2: and I was thrilled, of course, because I had never
Speaker 2: really made any serious money writing and that was I
Speaker 2: remember I got paid four thousand dollars to do that.
Speaker 2: I was really happy. That's in nineteen ninety one maybe,
Speaker 2: and so I did that complete kind of re imagination
Speaker 2: of it. And I also because I'm a Chicago and
Speaker 2: that's where I grew up, it was very easy for
Speaker 2: me to do that. I also loved the whole detective genre,
Speaker 2: the noir of it, all the eyes character, and so
Speaker 2: for me, I was more inspired by China Out. It
Speaker 2: was that kind of a thing. And I read all
Speaker 2: the Sarah Peretzky books and it was kind of a
Speaker 2: mishmash of a couple of them. So yeah, so how
Speaker 2: I got started. Actually, that ended up being my sort
Speaker 2: of start. It led to my start in all of it.
Speaker 1: What was the Israeli film that you made? I'm very
Speaker 1: curious about that.
Speaker 2: It's never been released. I have a friend of mine
Speaker 2: who lives in Europe, and you sent me because I
Speaker 2: didn't even have a DVD. I wanted to show it
Speaker 2: to my kids point of view. And it was like
Speaker 2: an Israeli American split cast. John Savage was in it.
Speaker 2: He played the lead, and Fisher Stevens, who became a friend.
Speaker 2: And at the time, Fisher had just come off doing
Speaker 2: what were those robot movies where he played the Indian guy.
Speaker 2: They would never let anyone do that today, short Cirt.
Speaker 2: So he was like like this nerdy film school kid,
Speaker 2: and it was a story about a group of FELP
Speaker 2: students who have to make a movie based on a
Speaker 2: short story of a famously reclusive Israeli author who wrote
Speaker 2: about his experience in the war, and so they it
Speaker 2: becomes a mystery of what happened when he was out
Speaker 2: there and his commando team ran into a shepherd. We
Speaker 2: had to make this decision. Do they kill him, because
Speaker 2: otherwise they let him go, he'll reveal that they're there.
Speaker 2: Or do they let him or do they let him
Speaker 2: go anyway? So John Savage played the author. He was
Speaker 2: actually really good. I still haven't actually opened up and
Speaker 2: watched that DVD. I'm going to. I'm planning on doing
Speaker 2: a screening with my adult children and see how bad
Speaker 2: it is when your first screenplay that you ever wrote
Speaker 2: gets turned into a movie. I would recommend.
Speaker 1: Did you direct that as well?
Speaker 2: No, it was directed by an Israeli director in ned
Speaker 2: Noam Yavor. We had worked together. I had made a
Speaker 2: with him. We had done a one hour music video
Speaker 2: compilation for the Israeli singer o Fra Haraza, who became
Speaker 2: pretty famous in American club scene. Later on died tragically
Speaker 2: of age, like at a very young age. But that's
Speaker 2: how we met. And then he had some financing and
Speaker 2: then Golden Globus came in and put up the production services,
Speaker 2: and yeah, we shot it all in Israel, and then
Speaker 2: they got into trouble with investors and they'd suit each
Speaker 2: other and they couldn't agree on a release got released
Speaker 2: in Europe and on the US. So you know, you
Speaker 2: need to focal Hollywood story.
Speaker 1: So with vi I Worshowsky and you touch about how
Speaker 1: you're reading all the books and kind of mashing them together,
Speaker 1: taking the best bits and everything. I don't imagine did
Speaker 1: you read the earlier draft or did you kind of
Speaker 1: try to put that aside so you didn't even think
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: Every time you do that process, there is a form
Speaker 2: of like reimagining things and trying to figure out what works,
Speaker 2: what doesn't, all that kind of stuff. And I have
Speaker 2: this is a long time ago, by the way, like
Speaker 2: nobody's asked you about via Warshawski in thirty five years.
Speaker 2: The only other mention I've had of this movie recently
Speaker 2: is that I'm doing this project. I'm developing a TV
Speaker 2: show with Blake Griffin has a new production company called
Speaker 2: Mortal Media, you know that basketball player, And he's doing
Speaker 2: it together with Ryan Khalil, who is like a former
Speaker 2: NFL player, but they're very talented, they have great taste.
Speaker 2: So we're developing this show and the guy who runs
Speaker 2: his company when we met for the first time. Now
Speaker 2: we've been working on the show now for a couple
Speaker 2: of months, but he was like, damn, I just got
Speaker 2: to tell you. When I was like twelve years old,
Speaker 2: I got like a VHS copy of v I Wor
Speaker 2: Shawski and I used to watch that thing, and I remembered.
Speaker 2: I was like, dude, you're the only one who I've
Speaker 2: ever talked to you about it since that. So it
Speaker 2: was just funny that now that you called and was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: and you wait long enough and everything comes around.
Speaker 1: Well, you're one of several writers on that one. Do
Speaker 1: you know who it went to after you?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 2: I do very much.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a funny story. The first part of it
Speaker 2: is that I did this page one rewrite of at
Speaker 2: Taylor's draft, and I handed it in. I remember it
Speaker 2: was in December. I can't remember this because it's connected
Speaker 2: up to my son was about to be born, so
Speaker 2: he was born in eighty So I handed it in
Speaker 2: December of nineteen eighty nine and it went out to
Speaker 2: Kathleen Turner to read over the winter break, because in
Speaker 2: those days they would set up the script and of
Speaker 2: course everything is just and delivered. There's no Internet and
Speaker 2: all that stuff were popping prehistoric times here, so it
Speaker 2: went out to her. In the meantime, my wife was
Speaker 2: like nine months pregnant with my second son, and because
Speaker 2: I got the job from Chestnut Hill, it made me
Speaker 2: qualify for the WGA health insurance, right, but it only
Speaker 2: kicks in after one quarter because I qualified over the
Speaker 2: summer right. Then the insurance was going to kick in
Speaker 2: on January first, and my wife's due date was January third,
Speaker 2: and I was like, hone, you just got to keep
Speaker 2: your legs crossed until after they because otherwise we're paying
Speaker 2: for this birth because I had no health insurance.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Of course, the winter vacation starts, she goes into labor
Speaker 2: and we found my son is born on December twenty sixth,
Speaker 2: so we had to pay for it out of cash.
Speaker 2: I don't pocket remember. It was like it was a
Speaker 2: whole different world. But anyway, which was fine. It was
Speaker 2: like whatever he was healthy, everything was good. But the
Speaker 2: better news that came with his birth was like it
Speaker 2: was literally like the same day or the day before,
Speaker 2: John marsh, my executive at Chestnut Hill, calls and said,
Speaker 2: Kathleen's on board. She wants to play the Eye, which
Speaker 2: was a great acknowledgment of the work that I did,
Speaker 2: and that we attracted the movie starring which was great.
Speaker 2: So that was that, and then what happened was Hollywood Pictures,
Speaker 2: which at the time was that the production arm of
Speaker 2: Disney they had touchdown, they had Hollywood Pictures was doing
Speaker 2: trying to create their own identity. And then that led
Speaker 2: to my first sort of studio gig doing a rewrite
Speaker 2: of my rewrite because they wanted to have their notes
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. So I went into Disney and
Speaker 2: Burbank met with the executive his name was Charles Hirsharre,
Speaker 2: it was his name, and had a really great experience.
Speaker 2: I did a rewrite and now I actually got paid
Speaker 2: like appropriate money. That's just like being exploited money, which
Speaker 2: at the time was also twenty grand or something. Today
Speaker 2: it wouldn't pay for over months rent in venice. But anyway,
Speaker 2: so I did that and was really happy with how
Speaker 2: it came out, and John was excited and Chestnut Hill
Speaker 2: was excited. Everybody was happy and was we were all
Speaker 2: moving towards production. So this is in May of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: I finished my rewrites. I remember the day that they
Speaker 2: had me because the day that I was working extra
Speaker 2: time with John and doing all the last minute revisions
Speaker 2: to send it out to the studio. So we finished,
Speaker 2: but it was a weekend, so they were like, you
Speaker 2: have to deliver the script to Jeff Katzenberg, like they
Speaker 2: were going to give it to us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Messaging firm or whatever the messenger service and for whatever
Speaker 2: reason they weren't available. Don't know, because it was like
Speaker 2: a Sunday, I don't know what it was. In the end,
Speaker 2: I printed.
Speaker 1: It out and delivered it.
Speaker 2: The Kats and Verbs Malibu house was probably just burned
Speaker 2: down and dropped it off there, right, And it was
Speaker 2: this moment of excitement and kind of terror in a
Speaker 2: way because you don't know what they're going to think,
Speaker 2: and you hear all these stories about the what happens
Speaker 2: at that level. Right now, the big weeks are getting involved,
Speaker 2: and so a day goes by, two days go by,
Speaker 2: three days go by. Could hear anything like it's radio silence, right?
Speaker 2: And now I'm starting to get nervous, and I'm calling
Speaker 2: John Marshall at the time. He don't worry, it's fine,
Speaker 2: I'll see what happens. And then finally, like a whole
Speaker 2: week and another weekend goes by and then I get
Speaker 2: the call from John. And the way I describe it
Speaker 2: is that I had the complete Hollywood experience on my
Speaker 2: very first movie, right where I have the big break,
Speaker 2: I get thing, I get the movie star attached, right.
Speaker 2: But then comes the other part of it, which is
Speaker 2: I get fired, I get rewritten. They change the movie
Speaker 2: from a drama to a comedy, like everything that could
Speaker 2: have happened, right, And so that's the beginning of what unfolded,
Speaker 2: which is Katzenberg read it and he said, I think
Speaker 2: this is too much like Chinatown. We want it to
Speaker 2: be more like paper Moon. I was gonna say something,
Speaker 2: but Moon, Yes, paper Moon. So they wanted to have
Speaker 2: more of that quality, right that it was like a
Speaker 2: girl but because there was a character kat who was
Speaker 2: the daughter in it, and so that was the big thing.
Speaker 2: It was like, we think it's to be more more
Speaker 2: like paper Moon and not less like Chinatown. And I
Speaker 2: was cruss because I'm like, I'm a Chinatown fan, and
Speaker 2: that's what inspired me. And I loved the darkness of
Speaker 2: the books and all that stuff, and I felt an
Speaker 2: obligation to Sarah Perevsky as well, in the sense that
Speaker 2: this is the stuff that she did, and I didn't
Speaker 2: want it to be the hollywoodization of whatever. But that's
Speaker 2: what happened. So they hired this guy named Nick Thiel,
Speaker 2: who was like one of the studio hacks I would
Speaker 2: call him in that he did a lot of rewrites
Speaker 2: for Disney and I can't even remember what his other
Speaker 2: credits were, but they definitely weren't like things in the
Speaker 2: May of Chinatown. They were more light fair. So that's
Speaker 2: what happened. So I got let go. John thought they
Speaker 2: were hiring Nick. They kind of sort of like suffered through.
Speaker 2: Next I would hear from John how it was going,
Speaker 2: and then he delivered a draft right maybe two months later,
Speaker 2: in July, i'd say it was, And then they were
Speaker 2: still now six weeks or seven weeks before the start
Speaker 2: of production and messing with the script. So then by
Speaker 2: that time they had hired Jeff Canoe to be the director,
Speaker 2: and I'm thinking, okay, the guy who directed Police Academy
Speaker 2: six or whatever it was, wouldn't have been my first
Speaker 2: choice for the kind of material that I was hoping
Speaker 2: that there would be. But by this time the ship
Speaker 2: would sail. It was going to be something else. Then
Speaker 2: the word from John Marsh was Jeff Canoe was taking
Speaker 2: a crack at it now because they felt they weren't
Speaker 2: happy with nick Field's draft. And then he started like
Speaker 2: cutting and pasting between at Taylor's draft, my draft, and
Speaker 2: nick Field's draft. That was like a classic Hollywood right,
Speaker 2: great success, as a borat might say, so that was it.
Speaker 2: By the time I got invited out to the set
Speaker 2: in Long Beach, it was like the first day of
Speaker 2: principal photography maybe, and I met Jeff Canoe and all
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff. It was like I had let go.
Speaker 2: You'd never let go because it was like my first
Speaker 2: baby in a way. So I was really upset, to
Speaker 2: be honest, But I also I knew that everyone told me, Hey,
Speaker 2: getting produced is the main thing. Don't worry about how
Speaker 2: it turns out, just that you get a credit. Right,
Speaker 2: So the movie goes into production, right, I see all
Speaker 2: the other casting, and they had some good people in there, right.
Speaker 2: We had Charles Derning playing the Lieutenant. He was great.
Speaker 2: I thought j O. Sanders did a nice job is
Speaker 2: the put up on the boyfriend. And then we had
Speaker 2: good Girl who I don't remember. She was in Hall alone,
Speaker 2: Angela go Toles. I don't know if you made any
Speaker 2: movies after that, but anyway, Oh, and Wayne Knight would
Speaker 2: become famous on Seinfeldt as the post bet. But yeah, whatever,
Speaker 2: it was all good. Those were the days when the
Speaker 2: studios would still do gifts to the whole cast and
Speaker 2: crew when movies would start. And I remember, right before
Speaker 2: the first day of Pennsyl Photography, I get this box
Speaker 2: from Disney and I open it up and inside is
Speaker 2: a red high heeled shoe that's also a telephone, right,
Speaker 2: the old not rotaryd other ones, the push button.
Speaker 1: Ones, touchtown they call, Yeah, the touchdown.
Speaker 2: With the pad. I still have it somewhere. Yeah. That
Speaker 2: was fun. So I guess to me, the continuation of
Speaker 2: the story is that then apropos having everything happened to
Speaker 2: you on the first time around, Right, get the job,
Speaker 2: get the big break, get fired, get rewritten, have a
Speaker 2: change from a drama to a comedy.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Then came the last piece, which was a WJA arbitration
Speaker 2: to decide credit right. Are you familiar with the whole
Speaker 2: arbitration world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I know, it's kind of murky sometimes as
Speaker 1: far as how they make their decisions sometimes.
Speaker 2: I mean, the point of it is that just to
Speaker 2: explain to listeners whatever, is that we and the WGA
Speaker 2: are responsible for the termination of credits and this became
Speaker 2: our right, we want it in labor negotiations, strikes, whatever,
Speaker 2: because back in the studio days of the forties, every
Speaker 2: producer and his boyfriend girlfriend would want to put their
Speaker 2: names on a script as a favor, and they could
Speaker 2: just do it because they had that power. So we
Speaker 2: won back the power to be able to determine whose
Speaker 2: names would be on a script in order to avoid
Speaker 2: that kind of corrupt practice. The Guild arbitration process is
Speaker 2: you can only have a maximum of three writers on
Speaker 2: a script. Now, when you see more than three names
Speaker 2: on a script, they'll notice that there's writing teams. And
Speaker 2: the way you know this is that their names are
Speaker 2: separated by an amper sayand if it says David Aaron
Speaker 2: Cone and Edward Taylor A and D, you know that
Speaker 2: they wrote separately. So the arbitration process begins I get
Speaker 2: sent the script of the production draft, which is the
Speaker 2: final script, and then you also the guild sends out
Speaker 2: all of the drafts. Everyone has to submit them. So
Speaker 2: there's the Edward Taylor draft, there's the David Aaron conn draft.
Speaker 2: I had more than one. I had re drafts. And
Speaker 2: then there's the Nick Theld draft and the Jeff Canoe draft.
Speaker 2: And then you read through them and then you write
Speaker 2: a statement claiming like why you think you deserve credit?
Speaker 2: But the stakes are really high, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: And I was a newbie writers. I didn't really know
Speaker 2: too much about the process. Now I like advise other
Speaker 2: writers who are going into a process because I've done
Speaker 2: it so many times. I'm like, Okay, here's what you
Speaker 2: need to know. And I remember this day very vividly.
Speaker 2: It's a week before the arbitration letters are due. Then
Speaker 2: I get a phone call. I pick up the phone.
Speaker 2: This is pre self well, so you don't know what
Speaker 2: it's calling, and Nick Thiel is on the line and
Speaker 2: he goes, David, listen to me. If we all agree
Speaker 2: on the credit right, you don't have to go to
Speaker 2: an arbitration. If the three of us agree, you don't
Speaker 2: have to get an arbitration. I'm like, I'm thinking to myself,
Speaker 2: why would I do that? Maybe you don't deserve a credit.
Speaker 2: And then he got like really dark on me. He
Speaker 2: was like, dude, let me tell you, the middle writer
Speaker 2: always gets squeezed out, so the chances are you're not
Speaker 2: going to get a credit, so you should do this.
Speaker 2: It's very strong arming me and I'm being naive and
Speaker 2: also a little bit like that. So I was like, no,
Speaker 2: I'm not doing that. We'll just go through the process
Speaker 2: and whatever they decided. So that was that. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: then I remember like in those days, you'd get a
Speaker 2: letter in the mail saying the determination of credits has
Speaker 2: been and there was screenplay by or I have to
Speaker 2: look it up here does it say, yeah, screen story?
Speaker 2: I think it's the three of us, Edward Taylor and
Speaker 2: d David ernthone Andy Nick Deal, so all three of us.
Speaker 2: And for me, I was kind of like in the aftermath,
Speaker 2: I was like, maybe that's good that somebody else is
Speaker 2: name was after me, because this is not my work.
Speaker 2: It doesn't represent the best of my work. Some of
Speaker 2: my work is definitely in there in the arbitration. You
Speaker 2: have to prove that like thirty three percent of it
Speaker 2: is yours, whatever that means. Yeah, so you contributed a
Speaker 2: character or the dialogue or structure, those things all there's
Speaker 2: different qualifications for it. So that was my experience, and
Speaker 2: to this day when I tell when I teach screenwriting,
Speaker 2: which I do sometimes or talk to mentoring young people
Speaker 2: who are entering the business, I'm like, in a way,
Speaker 2: having the full experience the first time prepared me for
Speaker 2: my career.
Speaker 1: I bet, yeah, yeah, you went through the ringer, Yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah it was. Did you get invited to the premiere?
Speaker 2: I remember was one time?
Speaker 6: I up.
Speaker 2: I can remember the other my other movies premierees. I
Speaker 2: definitely remember devil Ze, Friday Lines, even more recent ones
Speaker 2: like American Underdog. But I'm thinking I'm must have been
Speaker 2: because I was really friends by this time with John
Speaker 2: Marsh and with Jeff Louriy. I actually got invited to
Speaker 2: Jeff Lurie's wedding and was at his bachelor party, which
Speaker 2: I won't talk about, but I'll never forget. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: and Christina since divorced and whatever. He's a billionaire and
Speaker 2: good time him. He's funny guy. So I don't I
Speaker 2: actually don't remember a premier party. Sorry. I do remember
Speaker 2: one thing though, the weekend that the movie opened, and
Speaker 2: this is lessons from a young screenwriter's point of view,
Speaker 2: is that I had a careery dear friend of mine,
Speaker 2: she was getting married that same weekend, and it was
Speaker 2: in Cleveland, Ohio. So I went to Cleveland and I
Speaker 2: got to the airport and I don't know if I
Speaker 2: had to take a train or elevated or whatever it was,
Speaker 2: but I remember I'm in the train. I'm going to
Speaker 2: wherever it was you lived on in the suburbs, Jake
Speaker 2: Or Heights, and I'm going there and it stops at
Speaker 2: the stop and I see the posters on the side,
Speaker 2: and that was very exciting, and that was really exciting
Speaker 2: for me as a first time screenwriter.
Speaker 1: When was the first time you saw the movie or
Speaker 1: did you ever see it?
Speaker 2: John invited me to some of the test screenings, so
Speaker 2: they were still tweaking things. So I went to remember
Speaker 2: going with him to this test screening in the theater
Speaker 2: in Sherman Notes, which was like right next to where
Speaker 2: I was living at the time, so I literally could
Speaker 2: walk to the theater and that was cool to be
Speaker 2: in that experience, and I remember turning around and seeing
Speaker 2: Katzenberg and oh god, who was running Disney at the time,
Speaker 2: because he was in charge of TO. There was someone
Speaker 2: else above like you can't remember who was, but all
Speaker 2: the big wigs were there taking notes and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: And then we got to see to let me stay
Speaker 2: in for the Q and A listen to the focus
Speaker 2: groups when they asked them questions and what they liked,
Speaker 2: what they didn't like.
Speaker 1: So that was a.
Speaker 2: Great learning experience, and then that led to one more.
Speaker 2: My last sort of involvement with the movie prior to
Speaker 2: its release was that based on the test scores, they
Speaker 2: realized that audiences were having a bit of a hard
Speaker 2: time understanding because it's like detective stuff and the clues
Speaker 2: and all that kind of stuff. So they came up
Speaker 2: with this brilliant, slash desperate idea of adding voiceover right,
Speaker 2: the old Harry the explainer thing, right. And so what
Speaker 2: they did, in fairness to Disney, they hired all of us,
Speaker 2: all of the writers who worked on it, for one
Speaker 2: day to write potential voiceovers for the movie to be
Speaker 2: considered right. And the irony of that is that I
Speaker 2: remember my agent calling me and telling me that since
Speaker 2: seven I said, what's the page. She goes, They're going
Speaker 2: to pay you gild minimum for a polish, which was
Speaker 2: the same four thousand dollars that I made to write
Speaker 2: the entire rewrite the entire screenplay a year and a
Speaker 2: half earlier. I was like, this feels like I could
Speaker 2: get used to this. Payday four grand a day. That's good.
Speaker 2: And then nineteen ninety one that was like a lot
Speaker 2: of money.
Speaker 1: What was it like when you finally got to see
Speaker 1: the film? I mean you talked about that cut and
Speaker 1: paste kind of thing. Are you just like, oh, well
Speaker 1: that's mine and then you wait another ten minutes, Oh
Speaker 1: that's my line too.
Speaker 2: An interesting aspect of the whole arbitration thing is that
Speaker 2: credit is based first and foremost on structure and plot.
Speaker 2: Dialogue has the least amount of value in determining what
Speaker 2: percent of a script is yours and for an audience.
Speaker 2: Usually most people who go to movies think of dialogue
Speaker 2: as the whole thing, But in reality, as we know,
Speaker 2: xt structure, how you plot it, and introducing new characters
Speaker 2: and characterizations, those are the things that carry the most
Speaker 2: weight in arbitration. So for me, it was clear like
Speaker 2: a lot of the structural stuff. I could see my
Speaker 2: work in the dialogue. There were a few lines. I
Speaker 2: don't remember what they are today, but I remember going, Okay,
Speaker 2: that was great to see Kathleen Turner deliver a line.
Speaker 2: That's always just a thrill from that standpoint. And I
Speaker 2: do remember also I did go to the set a
Speaker 2: few times, not just the first day, but they were
Speaker 2: shooting in the Culver Studios in Culver City, and I
Speaker 2: remember going and seeing because it was cool to see
Speaker 2: the house that they built, which was the ice house,
Speaker 2: and all that kind of stuff is always fun. I
Speaker 2: got to hang out there a bit as well, so
Speaker 2: when I saw it, it was like, Okay, it makes you
Speaker 2: hungry to want to have more of the same, but
Speaker 2: more control.
Speaker 1: So ultimately, did this open doors for you? It must
Speaker 1: have paved the way for some more projects. I would
Speaker 1: imagine it.
Speaker 2: Did, and in a way that maybe is less obvious
Speaker 2: in terms of like how careers work and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: And I would say the caveat to what I'm going
Speaker 2: to say is that they don't know necessarily that these
Speaker 2: same rules apply because our industry has changed so dramatically
Speaker 2: since the nineties. It's just a completely different animal. But
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety one, when the movie came out, the
Speaker 2: fact that I got a credit, and that's what people said,
Speaker 2: just get a credit. It's going to open doors for you.
Speaker 2: Maybe about six months later or maybe three months, have
Speaker 2: to move came out, I get a call to go
Speaker 2: in and meet it. Imagine in films Brian Grazier run
Speaker 2: Hours Company, and the executive there was interested in meeting
Speaker 2: with me because my agent had sent her a script
Speaker 2: that I wrote, but also because I was a credited writer,
Speaker 2: do you know what I mean? And that put me
Speaker 2: into a different class of a different pool I shouldn't
Speaker 2: say a pool of writers, so I could be considered
Speaker 2: for other things, right, And so this is a good
Speaker 2: story in the sense that so this executive in those
Speaker 2: days when they liked your writing and they felt like
Speaker 2: you had a voice and the kind of stuff, they'd
Speaker 2: invite you in. And then you have a general meeting, right,
Speaker 2: which most of the time didn't lead to anything, but
Speaker 2: sometimes could. So it's kind of like salesmen showing their wares,
Speaker 2: Like they ask you what you've got, and they tell
Speaker 2: you what they've got. And so she said, look the
Speaker 2: projects that we have. See if anything else would interest you,
Speaker 2: and she went down a list of projects. I said,
Speaker 2: there's this, and there's that, and there's that. I'm listening
Speaker 2: to all of them. And it's a little bit full
Speaker 2: of myself at the time because I just thought, I
Speaker 2: don't know whatever again being young and thinking that I
Speaker 2: can do this. But she listened all that. I was like, no,
Speaker 2: you know not, none of those really or interest to me.
Speaker 2: And then she came up, here's one, but I don't
Speaker 2: think there's any way This one is one you're not
Speaker 2: going to get because Alan Pecula is attached as producer
Speaker 2: and at the time, Pakola had just finished Sophie's Choice,
Speaker 2: nominated for All the Stuff of course, All the President's Men, Clue,
Speaker 2: Parallax View, all of the great movies that Alan nade,
Speaker 2: and so she goes, oh, yeah, that book. That book
Speaker 2: was Friday Lights, right, it was about to come out.
Speaker 2: They had Alan had a really great eye for good material,
Speaker 2: like he was a producer before he was a director.
Speaker 2: Hed he won an Oscar, his only oscar actually, for
Speaker 2: To Kill a Mockingbird, which she produced, so he had
Speaker 2: the right to Buzz's books. And she pooh pooed. She goes,
Speaker 2: I'll give you the book, but I don't think there's
Speaker 2: any way you're ever any of the meeting with Alan, right,
Speaker 2: And so I went home read the book. I was like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, this is just perfect. I love this material.
Speaker 2: This is incredible. My agent was pushing to see it.
Speaker 2: We could get a meeting, And what happened was she
Speaker 2: sent out the writing sample, which was the same sample
Speaker 2: that I was using. It was an indie kind of film.
Speaker 2: It was called Go Down Moses, was about an Israeli
Speaker 2: limo driver who befriends this black radio dispatcher who's also
Speaker 2: like a rapper on the side. It was like a
Speaker 2: whole indie film that you'd want to see in the eighties.
Speaker 2: But everyone liked it. Helped me get an agent. It
Speaker 2: had a distinct voice, all that kind of stuff. So
Speaker 2: she sent Alan my draft to Go Down Moses, and
Speaker 2: then she calls me up maybe three or four weeks later,
Speaker 2: and she goes, wow, I'm surprised, but cool. It was
Speaker 2: to meet with you. So that's how that happened.
Speaker 3: And then.
Speaker 2: That meeting to p and I was just like I
Speaker 2: was in odd. Literally. Clute was a movie that I
Speaker 2: remember seeing that maybe love films you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: if you ever want to do a great episode, dude
Speaker 2: about that movie, because that might be just anyway. So
Speaker 2: I'm just like over the Moon. I can't believe I'm
Speaker 2: actually going to meet like one of my idols. I'm
Speaker 2: just a little bit very nervous about it. And I
Speaker 2: get the instructions to meet him. He's coming to town
Speaker 2: to meet with writers, and he's going to meet you
Speaker 2: in his like suite at the Four Seasons right Beverly Hills.
Speaker 2: They like, okay, I've never been to the Four Seasons.
Speaker 2: The whole thing is whatever. So I dressed my sort
Speaker 2: of casual slash dress the writer artists clothes, leave my
Speaker 2: wife and two kids at home, and go step into
Speaker 2: this alternative, alternate universe of the Four Seasons. And I
Speaker 2: get up to the call and they say, yeah, come
Speaker 2: on up and knock on the door. Alan opens the door.
Speaker 2: Alan was very urbane guy, grew up East Side to
Speaker 2: New York City. He almost had his own like accent
Speaker 2: in his English. It was like it wasn't like a
Speaker 2: New Yorker, active was something old, more refined. He's just
Speaker 2: a very cool guy anyway. But he's in socks. He's
Speaker 2: not wearing shoes, and then he tells me that that's
Speaker 2: that I learned afterwards he would direct all of his
Speaker 2: films in his socks. He just felt comfortable. You didn't
Speaker 2: like wearing shoes, so on set he used to directing
Speaker 2: Dustin Hoffmann, Readford, Meryl Street. He's words socks where we
Speaker 2: used to laugh out anyway, and I sit down and
Speaker 2: he starts talking to me about Go Down, Moses, and
Speaker 2: like how much he really loved it and there was
Speaker 2: just a real grittiness to it and loved the voice
Speaker 2: and love this and that was just really and we
Speaker 2: just right away got into this sort of deeper conversation
Speaker 2: about movies and about script and stuff, which was thrilling
Speaker 2: for me. And then I pitched him my take on
Speaker 2: how I would approach doing Friday Night Lights. That's funny
Speaker 2: in the retrospect now, I made like two football movies
Speaker 2: and a volleyball movie and then like go to Sports
Speaker 2: Guy for whatever that's worth in the pigeonholing that Hollywood
Speaker 2: sometimes does to us, but I'll take it.
Speaker 4: I'm okay.
Speaker 2: But at the time for me, that the inspiration for
Speaker 2: the movie was Last Picture Show, because that was the
Speaker 2: movie that just very much influenced me, and also had
Speaker 2: that element of Jeff Bridges and Timothy Hutton. They were
Speaker 2: like on the high school football team. There was even
Speaker 2: a scene where they played high school football in Last
Speaker 2: Picture Show. So I talked a lot about that and
Speaker 2: all that, and Allen responded it was great. There was
Speaker 2: a moment where he like stepped out he was the
Speaker 2: rest or whatever, and so being a little inquisitive because
Speaker 2: his seat was sitting on this chair next to me,
Speaker 2: and there was like a pad of paper with his
Speaker 2: appointments for the day, right, and so I saw the
Speaker 2: list of the writers that he was reading with, and
Speaker 2: it was like all the A writers in Hollywood at
Speaker 2: the time, like all these names that would just be like.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh my god, there's just no way
Speaker 2: this is never going to happen. But I was still
Speaker 2: happy to be there. Came back, he finished up and
Speaker 2: then said goodbye. I walked out, and I thought, Okay,
Speaker 2: that was a great experience. I'm just happy that I
Speaker 2: got to meet Allan. And maybe a month goes by
Speaker 2: and we lived in Venice at the time, where I
Speaker 2: just moved back to and I'm out in the backyard
Speaker 2: and I had this wine barrel that was my office.
Speaker 2: It was literally he turned it into an office because
Speaker 2: the landlord had this made this structure out of a
Speaker 2: wine barrel that he called He called it the cone
Speaker 2: House because the top was shaded up like a cone.
Speaker 2: We went to rent the house. I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: the cone house in the back, that's perfect, I'll take it.
Speaker 2: So I was out and back inside of the Cone
Speaker 2: House and I had a little extension of my phone
Speaker 2: out there, and the phone rings and it's Alan. I
Speaker 2: haven't talked to him since. Then he goes and he
Speaker 2: doesn't say no one told me that this was going
Speaker 2: to happen or that whatever. He just went, so we
Speaker 2: need to come out to New York maybe the week
Speaker 2: of the twenty first. Will that worked for you? And
Speaker 2: I'm like, wait what? And then it was came clear
Speaker 2: to me in the middle of the conversation that I
Speaker 2: had gotten the job. So that's my very long answer
Speaker 2: to did this oupen doors? Were you? Absolutely well?
Speaker 1: I seem to remember, didn't be Coola also direct the
Speaker 1: Devil Zone.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. I wrote three scripts for him, two of
Speaker 2: which became a.
Speaker 1: That's amazing, But Devil' Zone came out before Friday Night Lights.
Speaker 2: It did.
Speaker 1: It did, was that one of those long protracted things.
Speaker 2: For thirteen year sentel, It got made and by that time,
Speaker 2: tragically Alan had died in that crazy car crash that
Speaker 2: he died in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Cauln, you tell me a little bit about your
Speaker 1: Navigating Hollywood course. Are you still teaching that?
Speaker 5: Yes, I am.
Speaker 2: I've been a little bit on aatis. It was something
Speaker 2: that I started up during COVID. But the whole point
Speaker 2: of it was and is that I just feel like
Speaker 2: I've spent thirty plus years in this business and the
Speaker 2: things that they don't teach you in film school are
Speaker 2: exactly the things that you need to have a career,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. So really to learn how
Speaker 2: to pitch, it's not something that necessarily although some of
Speaker 2: the more well known programs now like USC and UCLA
Speaker 2: have pitching segments to them, but just breaking story, giving notes,
Speaker 2: getting notes, the things that are really the sort of
Speaker 2: bread and butter of how you have and then maintain
Speaker 2: a career. Those are things that I address in the course.
Speaker 2: I love teaching, and that's one of those things where
Speaker 2: you don't really necessarily know how much you know until
Speaker 2: you map it.
Speaker 5: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: And so during COVID, when I was seeing that, I
Speaker 2: started writing and I was like, oh wow, I could
Speaker 2: talk about this. Oh no, and I could talk about that.
Speaker 2: And then so I think the big part of the course,
Speaker 2: one very big element of it is just having my
Speaker 2: students ask questions, just wide open and there's a lot
Speaker 2: of I think there's a lot to be gleaned from
Speaker 2: the answers, and also things that you can really specifically
Speaker 2: learn and work on so that you can have a
Speaker 2: better career, because access is the big issue there as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the hardest thing for people to get.
Speaker 1: Do you teach them that the middle guy and the
Speaker 1: arbitration gets squeezed out.
Speaker 2: I actually do talk about arbitrations, and it's like an
Speaker 2: advanced degree side of it. And by the way, with
Speaker 2: regard to that, I kind of at some point in
Speaker 2: after maybe yeah, after find Out Lights came out, I
Speaker 2: was like, I don't want to rewrite other writers anymore.
Speaker 2: It just feels not morally the right thing to do.
Speaker 2: Pretty much since then, you know, all the things I do,
Speaker 2: I'm the first writer, and sure I still get fired
Speaker 2: and I still get rewritten, and that's the business, I said,
Speaker 2: it's a little easier to live with all these years later,
Speaker 2: but still not. But at least I know as first
Speaker 2: writer that I have a shot of delivering the script
Speaker 2: that I feel is the best representation of that material,
Speaker 2: and whatever happens to it after that, that's speed.
Speaker 1: What are you working on right now?
Speaker 2: A couple of things. I am adapting a great book
Speaker 2: called Running the Amazon by guy named Joe Kine, which
Speaker 2: is the true story of a crazy group of ten
Speaker 2: individuals who decided they were going to kayak the length
Speaker 2: of the Amazon River from source to se four thousand,
Speaker 2: two hundred miles, and they did this nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 2: before you had geo mapping and telephones and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: They went down canyons in Peru that had never been
Speaker 2: successfully traversed before, ran into Peruvian gorillaz who almost killed them,
Speaker 2: shot at them, and took them prisoner Colombian drug dealers,
Speaker 2: And in the middle of it, they ended up having
Speaker 2: a mutiny among the crew because there was one guy
Speaker 2: who wanted to go in this direction, the other one
Speaker 2: in the other. And so Joe Kane, who wrote the book,
Speaker 2: who was coming along just to be the guy who
Speaker 2: could document the thing and make the guy who hired
Speaker 2: him look great. The one who they mutinied against ended
Speaker 2: up being one of two of the men who finished
Speaker 2: it kayaking. You had never really kayak before, and he
Speaker 2: was trained by the other guys who was champion kayaker
Speaker 2: from Poland and they made it all the way to
Speaker 2: the Atlantic Ocean. Yeah, it's great story doing that. And
Speaker 2: another front developing a TV series that Sony with Blake Griffin,
Speaker 2: the NBA player as a new company with Ryan Khalil
Speaker 2: x NFL player called Mortal Media, and we're developing high
Speaker 2: school show about elite athletes that takes all of the
Speaker 2: best football, basketball, tennis, golf, you name it into one
Speaker 2: high school based on the IMG Academy, which does this
Speaker 2: in Florida. In a way, it's kind of like a
Speaker 2: superhero show in a funny way, because they're all best
Speaker 2: at what they do, but then when they're together with
Speaker 2: everyone else, they're just ordinary.
Speaker 1: Mister Cohen, thank you so much for your time. This
Speaker 1: was so great talking with you.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, David. Please, I'm not with tikon to anyone but
Speaker 2: my former high school teachers or whoever does that.
Speaker 1: You've done so much over the years. I'd love to
Speaker 1: know how you even got into it.
Speaker 8: I was in Maryland, I lived, grew up in Maryland,
Speaker 8: graduated from University of Maryland, and wanted to be a
Speaker 8: screenwriter in TV or movies and didn't know how to
Speaker 8: do it. And I read an article in back when
Speaker 8: there were magazines, Newsweek magazine. They said all the big
Speaker 8: players in Hollywood came out of the USC or UCLA
Speaker 8: Film School. So I applied to both, got rejected by both,
Speaker 8: but luckily for me, USC was starting a brand new
Speaker 8: graduate program in professional writing where they taught everything from
Speaker 8: novel writing to advertising, everything, and they were desperate for
Speaker 8: people because they just started, so they accepted me. And
Speaker 8: I was a waiter at this there's a chain of
Speaker 8: restaurants called Hamburger Hamlet. Back then, they don't think it
Speaker 8: doesn't exist anymore. It was all over the country and
Speaker 8: I got a job waiting tables there and I made
Speaker 8: friends with another waiter who also wanted to be a writer,
Speaker 8: and he got a meeting on a TV show at
Speaker 8: the time, which was the number one TV show called
Speaker 8: eight Is Enough and said, hey, you want to go
Speaker 8: with me? And I said yeah, and we sold them
Speaker 8: and I did and started.
Speaker 1: What was your role when it came to Voyagers? Because
Speaker 1: that was a favorite of mine. When I was growing up.
Speaker 8: I had worked on a show called fall Guy, which
Speaker 8: was a big hit at the time, and the producer,
Speaker 8: one of the producers from that show got fired and
Speaker 8: went to Universal and got on Voyagers, and he told
Speaker 8: the showrunner Jim Perriot, you got to hire this guy, Nick,
Speaker 8: and I was ready to leave Fall Guy. I like
Speaker 8: Glenn Larson as a person, I didn't like working for him,
Speaker 8: and so he brought me over to Voyagers and I
Speaker 8: was this executive story consultant writer, and then I produced
Speaker 8: a couple of the episode. It was so much fun
Speaker 8: to write. I learned so much about history researching each episode.
Speaker 8: It was great.
Speaker 1: What was the move like for you to go from
Speaker 1: television to movies?
Speaker 8: I had done an overall deal at Warner Brothers after
Speaker 8: I had done Magnum Pi. I was hot after Magnum
Speaker 8: p I because it was such a big hit. I
Speaker 8: got an overall deal with Warner Brothers and they put
Speaker 8: me on two really bad shows that I hated, and
Speaker 8: during a break a hiatus between after the last one,
Speaker 8: I decided I got to get out of TV. So
Speaker 8: I wrote a spec movie. It got a lot of attention,
Speaker 8: never got made, but it got me a lot of work,
Speaker 8: and I got hired by Paramount to rewrite a movie,
Speaker 8: which ended up being The Experts, which is like a
Speaker 8: cult hit but not a very good movie. At the time,
Speaker 8: being a movie writer was like you were on the
Speaker 8: A team and the TV writer was on the B team.
Speaker 8: That's changed completely now, but that's what it was then.
Speaker 8: And so I just had a child and I in TV.
Speaker 8: You just don't have time to do anything but do TV.
Speaker 8: In movies, I just wrote it home for four or
Speaker 8: five hours a day. It was great. And I did
Speaker 8: that for sixteen years after to the first one. I
Speaker 8: grew up movies for sixteen years. And then my movie
Speaker 8: career started to fade. And the producer Mark Gordon, who's
Speaker 8: done Speed and Great Anatomy and a million others. It's
Speaker 8: a big shop producer. He's a friend of Mike, called
Speaker 8: me said, don't you go to TV again. I really
Speaker 8: want to get in and tell it. He wasn't in
Speaker 8: TV at the time, he had not had Gray's Anatomy yet,
Speaker 8: And I said, yeah, I got this kind of idea
Speaker 8: for an airport, and we pitched it, we sold it,
Speaker 8: it got made, It was on the air but failed
Speaker 8: and was over in thirteen. Big Mark had graded Enemy
Speaker 8: and Lax at the same time, and graith Anaimy it
Speaker 8: is still on twenty years later, and Lax lasted thirteen episodes.
Speaker 8: So goes that's how I go.
Speaker 1: The things you worked on one that I really like
Speaker 1: a lot, called The Associate. Can you tell me what
Speaker 1: was your involvement with that one and what was the
Speaker 1: experience like for you on that one?
Speaker 8: It actually was a pretty good experience. I at the time,
Speaker 8: I was doing a lot of work for Disney and
Speaker 8: Hollywood Pictures, which made the movie was part of Disney.
Speaker 8: They went out of business, but it was part of
Speaker 8: Disney at the time, and Jeffrey Katzenberger was running Disney
Speaker 8: was a fan of my writing, and I had done
Speaker 8: three or four other movies for them, and so they said,
Speaker 8: do you want to adapt this French movie called The Associate.
Speaker 8: So I watched it and I thought, oh, yeah, this
Speaker 8: would be great, and I basically just adapted it. I
Speaker 8: mean that movie is about a guy, a nebushy guy
Speaker 8: who can't get ahead any invents a fictitious partner. So
Speaker 8: I wrote it exactly like that, and they all hated it.
Speaker 8: I got called into the office and it was like
Speaker 8: the worst meeting in my life. They all hated Interscope
Speaker 8: was the producer. They said, the guy such a loser.
Speaker 8: Who are we going to get to act in it?
Speaker 8: This is before Jim Carrey became a big story do
Speaker 8: carry would have been perfect? So he's guy such a loser?
Speaker 5: I said.
Speaker 8: The only way you could do it is because there
Speaker 8: was such a glass ceiling in the early nineties that
Speaker 8: I said, if we made her a woman, then she
Speaker 8: would she could still be really competent and great and
Speaker 8: still have to have a fictitious pardon. And they said great.
Speaker 8: So I had to completely throw out my script right
Speaker 8: from scratch with a woman star. And the way that
Speaker 8: got made was they wanted Whoope to do a movie
Speaker 8: called Eddie, which I don't know if you're familiar with
Speaker 8: that movie where she owns a bad and here it's
Speaker 8: a basketball team or something like that. And she didn't
Speaker 8: want to do it, but she wanted to do the Associate.
Speaker 8: So she said, I'll do that movie if you make Associate.
Speaker 8: And that's how it got made. It was her idea
Speaker 8: to have persistent, be an older woman who could have
Speaker 8: been a success if she hadn't been a woman who
Speaker 8: is like really smart and stuff, and what was her idea?
Speaker 8: And I put it in the script. It was great.
Speaker 8: I thought that was the best part of the movie.
Speaker 1: And to have Diane West play her.
Speaker 8: Was oh yeah, she was fantastic, so good.
Speaker 1: So where was VII Worshowski when you came to that project.
Speaker 8: Oh that's a bad story. It's not a good story. Again,
Speaker 8: it's Disney. It was Hollywood Pictures. They love what I
Speaker 8: did on the other stuff I did, so they called
Speaker 8: me in. It was Katzenberg and Ricardo Mestress, who was
Speaker 8: head of Hollywood Pictures at the time, and they said,
Speaker 8: we want you to rewrite the script and I said,
Speaker 8: I can't. It's really bad. I just can't do it.
Speaker 8: I have too many other things to do. And they
Speaker 8: kept throwing more money at it, and I thought to
Speaker 8: a point where I couldn't say no anymore, and I
Speaker 8: said okay. So they said, okay, we want you to
Speaker 8: meet with the producers tomorrow. So I went to the
Speaker 8: producers and it was like a stone wall. They hated
Speaker 8: me from the beginning, because they thought the script was perfect.
Speaker 8: They had already gotten Kathleen Turner and they thought the
Speaker 8: script was perfect. And I said, what am I doing here?
Speaker 8: If you don't want to change it, why am I here?
Speaker 8: And they went, you're right, you shouldn't be here. So
Speaker 8: I went back to Jeffrey Katzenberg's office and I said,
Speaker 8: they don't want me to write it. He goes, I do,
Speaker 8: that's all that matters. I want you to rewrite it.
Speaker 8: I said, but I can't work with the producers. He goes,
Speaker 8: you don't have to just work me and Ricardo.
Speaker 5: So I said, okay.
Speaker 8: So I completely wrote the script. The producers hated it.
Speaker 8: They put some of the stuff back that I hated
Speaker 8: that was in the original, like going through the sausage factory.
Speaker 8: I don't know if you remember that scene, but I
Speaker 8: hated that scene and they put it back. But because
Speaker 8: I changed the plot a lot and the story a lot,
Speaker 8: I still got credit on it. It's more of the
Speaker 8: original writers of mine. But I wrote enough for the
Speaker 8: writer's guilt to give me credit, and I was the
Speaker 8: Latin writer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sausage factory scene doesn't make a lick of
Speaker 1: sense because I don't think that Stephen Rude ever comes
Speaker 1: back in the movie.
Speaker 8: I think once he does. I think somewhere, somewhere he
Speaker 8: comes from back one more time. When it was shot
Speaker 8: and there was a preview screening, Ricardo and Jeffrey invited
Speaker 8: me and I went. And when I walked into that
Speaker 8: lobby and those guys saw me, the producers and the
Speaker 8: original writer and the director saw me, it was like
Speaker 8: Hitler just walked into the room. My god, I was
Speaker 8: They did not want me there. But the screening was great,
Speaker 8: the audience liked it, and it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 8: But they were they never I've never talked to those
Speaker 8: guys since. I don't want to. I don't even know
Speaker 8: if they're still a route, but I don't want But anyway,
Speaker 8: it was not a great experience.
Speaker 1: Have you ever had an experience as bad as that?
Speaker 1: On other things?
Speaker 8: If you want to hear the story about the Associated,
Speaker 8: there was a period of time in the Associate where
Speaker 8: it was really bad. Donald Peachey was a director who
Speaker 8: had done Grumpy Old Men, and he had just come
Speaker 8: up Grumpy Old Men and he was directing the Associate.
Speaker 8: So I worked with him on the script a lot,
Speaker 8: and he gave me a lot of good notes and
Speaker 8: we did the script. They green lit the movie after
Speaker 8: Whoopy came on board, and they said we were going
Speaker 8: to go to New York for just a preview meeting,
Speaker 8: just a meeting to read the script out loud. We
Speaker 8: were going to get actress from Broadway to help do
Speaker 8: a table read so we can hear it. So we
Speaker 8: went to the table read and Whoopee walks in with
Speaker 8: Olympia Ducocus to play the part that Diane Least ended
Speaker 8: I'll play, And I have all respect for both of them.
Speaker 8: I think they're both terrific actors. But they came in
Speaker 8: and we had Victor Garber, who's terrific, and we had
Speaker 8: Babie Dealworth who ended up getting cash because of her reading,
Speaker 8: and a bunch of other actors that were great. And
Speaker 8: part of one of the things that Whopy insisted on
Speaker 8: it and was in the contract that the love story
Speaker 8: could not be cut because she never gets to do
Speaker 8: love stories and there was a love supplt in there
Speaker 8: she insisted to say on her. So we do the
Speaker 8: read through and Whoopy and Lempia are reading like they've
Speaker 8: never acted a day in their life. They are sabotaging it,
Speaker 8: but everybody else is doing such a good job and
Speaker 8: they're getting laughed. But eventually they went, I guess we
Speaker 8: better act. And it was a really good reading at
Speaker 8: the end. But when the thing was done, whoopy says,
Speaker 8: cut that fucking love story she had in her contract,
Speaker 8: and we went okay, And so we had to go
Speaker 8: and get notes from her the next morning at her
Speaker 8: suite at the Plaza at New and Beautiful, two story Sweet.
Speaker 8: It was great and Donald said listen because she was
Speaker 8: being really a jerk to me. And Donald said, listen,
Speaker 8: don't come by twenty minutes late because I got to
Speaker 8: talk to her. She can't talk to you like that.
Speaker 8: She was really disrespectful. I have to talk to her
Speaker 8: before you get there. So I walk into the suite
Speaker 8: and it's ice station Zebra. There's like icicles hanging from
Speaker 8: the ceiling. They hate each other. They hate each other. Woopee.
Speaker 8: Gave some great notes. One of them was to Diana.
Speaker 8: Weives note. She gave great notes about her. And every
Speaker 8: time I turned to Donald go hey, that was a
Speaker 8: good note, and Donald would just stoneface. So we walk
Speaker 8: out on Fifth Avenue and Donald said, I'm quitting I'm
Speaker 8: leaving today, so I see an animation of my script
Speaker 8: flying away, because that would be the end of the
Speaker 8: movie if we lost Donald. And I said, Donald, you
Speaker 8: can't quit, you can't quit. I beg and goes, no, no, no,
Speaker 8: I'm done. So I go to my hotel room and
Speaker 8: the phone is ringing off the hook. Everybody's calling me
Speaker 8: from Ricardo Messrs. He had a Venerscope, Donald's lawyer because
Speaker 8: he won't answer the phone, and I said, I can't
Speaker 8: He's not going to listen to me anyway. They send
Speaker 8: everybody back except me. I got fired. I was fired
Speaker 8: off the thing, and Whoopy said, I want to hire
Speaker 8: my writer. So Whoopy hired her writer and I just
Speaker 8: I licked my wounds. About six to eight weeks past
Speaker 8: and I didn't hear from anybody. It was great, okay, fine,
Speaker 8: maybe I'll get credit, maybe I won't. And I get
Speaker 8: a call at six o'clock in the morning from Donald
Speaker 8: pechere about six eight weeks later and says, you.
Speaker 2: Got to come back.
Speaker 8: You got to come back. We need to help with
Speaker 8: this script. You gotta come back. I said, I'll be
Speaker 8: happy to come back with Whoope take me back, and
Speaker 8: he said oh, when she reads this draft, she's gonna
Speaker 8: want you back, believe me. So Whoopy was getting fitted
Speaker 8: from the male's face that Marl she assisted on being
Speaker 8: Marlon Brando. That was what that face is supposed to
Speaker 8: be like. Even though her hair made the mask not
Speaker 8: fit properly, but she wouldn't cut her hair anyway. She
Speaker 8: put she's got the mask on, and she's telling Donald
Speaker 8: all the things, she all the changes she'd make to
Speaker 8: the news script. And Donald said, we just interscope in
Speaker 8: Hollywood Pictures. We all met and we're in take. We're
Speaker 8: bringing Nick back, and she clipped her faith off it said,
Speaker 8: you're paying me a lot of money. I'll fucking say
Speaker 8: anything you want me to say, and left. So when
Speaker 8: I went to the set of New York, it was
Speaker 8: not good. Donald and her were not talking. Donald would
Speaker 8: hide it is a trailer. It was really bad, but
Speaker 8: that's the way it goes. But it ended up getting
Speaker 8: made and it was nice. I got sole credit. It
Speaker 8: was terrific, but it was that was the one bad
Speaker 8: part of it. See it's not all great in Hollywood. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: I know.
Speaker 1: One of your first gakes was flying High and then
Speaker 1: you've and then you've done Lax and you've done pan Am,
Speaker 1: what's with you in airlines?
Speaker 8: That would be pure coincidence. Flying Hi was just one
Speaker 8: of the gigs my part I had a partner back then,
Speaker 8: my partner I did When we first started out, we
Speaker 8: had done an episode of A not wrote an episode
Speaker 8: of eight is Enough, but we hadn't gotten on staff yet,
Speaker 8: so we were freelanced. We did a show called Carter
Speaker 8: Country and Flying High and Beach Patrol and all this
Speaker 8: really bad stuff before it is enough to come on staff.
Speaker 8: But it was the PanAm thing happened because I had
Speaker 8: done a show called The Waterfront, which he never got
Speaker 8: on the air, which was great. Jack Orman, who ran
Speaker 8: Er for a number of years, had written it and
Speaker 8: he created pan Am. So he liked me on Waterfront,
Speaker 8: and when pan Am came he asked me to come
Speaker 8: on board, and so it was just pure coincidence that
Speaker 8: it happened like that. He didn't hire me because I
Speaker 8: had done Lam.
Speaker 1: They were like, we need a guy who wrote for.
Speaker 8: And that was what Jordans would say to each other.
Speaker 8: Pan Ann could have been a great show. It's just
Speaker 8: a network in the studio thought about what the show
Speaker 8: should be so much, one one that loves show, one
Speaker 8: one in a spy show. So it didn't work and
Speaker 8: the show ended up not working. But we had Margot Robbie.
Speaker 8: That was her first gig. She was nineteen years old
Speaker 8: and she was so sweet and really funny, but she
Speaker 8: was ashamed of her body. She wouldn't wear any bikinis.
Speaker 8: Was weird, but she wouldn't because we did a couple
Speaker 8: of beach shots and she would not wear a bikini.
Speaker 8: She just thought her body wasn't good enough anyway. So
Speaker 8: that's how that happened. That's how PanAm happened.
Speaker 1: What are you working on now?
Speaker 8: I just finished a pilot for ABC Call about a
Speaker 8: rural hospital, and they'll make their decisions in January. I
Speaker 8: don't know whether it's going to get shot or doesn't
Speaker 8: get shot. I don't know pilots. You got one in
Speaker 8: what at a one and fifty chance of getting on
Speaker 8: the air, but it might happen. I had a great
Speaker 8: time doing it, and at my age, to get a
Speaker 8: job in Hollywood is really doing something?
Speaker 1: Are you pretty much exclusively screenplays? Have you written fiction
Speaker 1: or anything?
Speaker 8: I am right now I'm writing a novel, but just
Speaker 8: because I don't have any TV or movie work to
Speaker 8: do at the moment, so I'm right when just to
Speaker 8: keep busy. But I hadn't, I really never had. I
Speaker 8: think I wrote a couple of short stories in college,
Speaker 8: and poetry and stuff, but nothing. I really didn't hadn't
Speaker 8: written a screenplay until I went to graduate school. It's
Speaker 8: a weird thing where I knew I wanted to do it,
Speaker 8: but I never did it. And I thought everybody in
Speaker 8: Hollywood for geniuses, but I was never going to Then
Speaker 8: I went into grad school and I saw the other
Speaker 8: writers and I went, Holy hit, I'm as good as
Speaker 8: these people are. So you gave me a little more confidence.
Speaker 1: Mister Thal, thank you so much. This was so much
Speaker 1: fun talking with you.
Speaker 8: You're very welcome. I'm happy to do it.
Speaker 1: Okay. Up next, we're going to hear from the director
Speaker 1: of Via Warshowski, Jeff Canoe. I see so many familiar
Speaker 1: things from your fimography behind you. But what did you
Speaker 1: have to do with Repossessed?
Speaker 4: Okay? Repossessed a friend of mine, Joe Uzanne, who eventually
Speaker 4: became ahead of production at Fox et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 4: and I did a lot of trailers for him, so
Speaker 4: we knew each other pretty well, and he produced that movie.
Speaker 4: It was with Linda Blair and he got Leslie Nielsen
Speaker 4: and it came out and then he called me and
Speaker 4: he said, listen, we want to cut a half hour
Speaker 4: out of the bad stuff and add a half hour
Speaker 4: of new stuff. Do you want to help us? So sure,
Speaker 4: I got some ideas and okay. So there's a sequence
Speaker 4: when Leslie Nielsen goes to a gym to train for
Speaker 4: the exorcism and body by Jake is there, I think.
Speaker 4: So that was something one of my scenes that I
Speaker 4: put in, and then there was a few other things,
Speaker 4: and then particularly the finale where they decided to exercise
Speaker 4: her with rock and roll and he does his impression
Speaker 4: of Elton John and Michael Jackson and all that stuff.
Speaker 4: So all that stuff was my stuff in there uncredited.
Speaker 4: I was around and it was fun.
Speaker 1: How did you get into the business. Did you go
Speaker 1: in more through the editing or the directing, because you've
Speaker 1: done a lot of both.
Speaker 4: I started out wanting to be a rock star. I
Speaker 4: had a band and we made some records and that's
Speaker 4: what I That was my dream. But little by little
Speaker 4: I realized that wasn't happening. One summer, we were the
Speaker 4: house band at a place called the Cafe Wis in
Speaker 4: Greenwich Village and we auditioned the same day as Paul
Speaker 4: Simon and a Garfunkel audition. Then we got the job
Speaker 4: because they were just being folk singers at the time.
Speaker 4: And plus again, here's where the story goes in the
Speaker 4: wrong direction. Prior to that, I had taken my demos
Speaker 4: around to record companies and didn't get much activity. And
Speaker 4: I went to this one little record company and there
Speaker 4: was a guy who was there, a and R men
Speaker 4: named Jerry Landis, and he was very nice and he
Speaker 4: listened to my stuff and he said, you wrote these
Speaker 4: songs and I said yeah. He said, and that's you
Speaker 4: guys are singing. I go yeah. He said you're playing
Speaker 4: the instruments too. This was before the Beatles, and he
Speaker 4: said yeah, So we usually use studio musicians, so we
Speaker 4: wouldn't need you to play, but we'll give you a
Speaker 4: contract as a vocal group. So that was great. I
Speaker 4: was excited. I went and told the guys in my band,
Speaker 4: who were also at my high school best friends, and
Speaker 4: somehow it came out that because the drummer didn't sing,
Speaker 4: why should we split the vocal contract with him, and
Speaker 4: said they dubbed me the person that was going to
Speaker 4: tell Joel the drummer that he's not getting a cut anyway.
Speaker 4: So I tell Joel, and now the other two guys
Speaker 4: seem to have talked to Joel the night before, and
Speaker 4: Joel says that's not fair, and then they're behind me
Speaker 4: in the car and they go, that's not fair to Joel.
Speaker 4: You guys told me to tell him this. Anyway. My
Speaker 4: band broke up, so we forgot to do anything with
Speaker 4: the contract for Jerry Landis. Then I started a new
Speaker 4: band and the next summer we were about to audition.
Speaker 4: They had a thing called the hooton Nanny, which was
Speaker 4: basically an audition day for the Cafe Wha. And we're
Speaker 4: online waiting with all the other bands and this guy
Speaker 4: in front of me is this little guy that looks
Speaker 4: so familiar. And he turns around and I go Jerry
Speaker 4: Landis and he goes, yeah, Hi, who are you? And
Speaker 4: I got my name is Jeff Canoe. You gave me
Speaker 4: a contract? Because he goes yeah, then your group broke up.
Speaker 4: He goes, oh, this is my buddy already. I don't
Speaker 4: use the name Jerry landis anymore. I use my real name.
Speaker 4: What's your real name? Paul Simon? So Simon and Garfunk
Speaker 4: who were online just in front of us, and they
Speaker 4: sang some folks song about the plane that crashed in Mexico,
Speaker 4: and they didn't get the gig, but we got the gig. However,
Speaker 4: by the end of the summer, they were superstars and
Speaker 4: we were not. And this is also at the beginning
Speaker 4: of when I went started to go to college, which
Speaker 4: I wasn't interested in at all. I was interested in
Speaker 4: being a rock star. Anyway, I got suspended from I
Speaker 4: went to Colombia. I got suspended from Columbia for cutting
Speaker 4: too many classes, and so I had a year's suspension
Speaker 4: and I didn't really care, but my mother didn't like it.
Speaker 4: I had this part time job working at a movie
Speaker 4: company because a neighbor, Oh, my father had died the
Speaker 4: year before, and this neighbor, out of pity for my mother,
Speaker 4: gave me this summer job working at United Artists as
Speaker 4: a gopher office boy, whatever you call it. And so
Speaker 4: I was working there and still thinking about my music career.
Speaker 4: And at a certain point when I got kicked out
Speaker 4: of school, this man, who was trying to help my
Speaker 4: mother got mad at me and he said, all right,
Speaker 4: then you're losing your job here too, right, And I said, oh,
Speaker 4: that's terrible, and he goes, unless you can get back
Speaker 4: into school, then we're going to You can't work here anymore.
Speaker 4: So I went and begged the dean to let me
Speaker 4: back in, and the dean said, I can talk to
Speaker 4: your professors and finish all the work, then we won't
Speaker 4: suspend you. So I went to the professors and yaha, yah, yaha. Anyway,
Speaker 4: they all agreed to let me do the work and
Speaker 4: take the final, and two of them failed me anyway,
Speaker 4: so I was out. And now the man United Artists
Speaker 4: felt sorry for me, so he gave me a job
Speaker 4: as the assistant to their trailer producer, the in house
Speaker 4: trailer producer for the United Artists. I barely knew what
Speaker 4: a trailer was, although I had gone to the movies
Speaker 4: a lot, and so I became this guy's assistant, and
Speaker 4: luckily or unluckily for him, he had some kind of
Speaker 4: a muscular dystrophee and his hands didn't work too well,
Speaker 4: and so I became his hands, which meant like I
Speaker 4: could zip up his fly after he goes to the
Speaker 4: bathroom where I could hold his sandwich while he ate it.
Speaker 4: But in the meantime, I got to do a lot
Speaker 4: of his work that I never would have had a
Speaker 4: chance to do before. And so I learned how to
Speaker 4: edit and that was pretty much fun. I still really
Speaker 4: wanted to be a rock star, but I started to
Speaker 4: learn how to make movie trailers. So now I'm out
Speaker 4: of school. I'm working as a trailer assistant to the
Speaker 4: trailer guy, and I never went to meetings or anything.
Speaker 4: I was happy to just stay back and do the work.
Speaker 4: And the other guys in the editing place were all
Speaker 4: ex duop guys as well, so that was fine. But
Speaker 4: then I got a draft notice and I realized because
Speaker 4: this was nineteen sixty five, and it was like, I'm
Speaker 4: gonna have to go to Vietnam. And that was not
Speaker 4: a real popular activity back then, and probably in some
Speaker 4: parts of the country, everybody wanted to go, but nobody
Speaker 4: from Brooklyn wanted to go there. And so what am
Speaker 4: I going to do. All these other guys that I
Speaker 4: was friends with were already married. They were like my age,
Speaker 4: but married, and that was why they all got married.
Speaker 4: To beat the draft because that was the law back then.
Speaker 4: So they said, so you're seeing this girl, why don't
Speaker 4: you just marry her? And I go, but I'm like
Speaker 4: twenty years old. I don't want to be married. You
Speaker 4: want to go to viet No. No, Anyway, I got
Speaker 4: married and now I needed a raise. So I asked
Speaker 4: my boss, can I get a little raise because I
Speaker 4: was making ninety three dollars a week and the next
Speaker 4: level was one O three or something, and he said no.
Speaker 4: So he said, I, if you want to raise, go
Speaker 4: ask the head of the department. I'm not going for you.
Speaker 4: And they didn't really know what I did because I
Speaker 4: never went to the meetings. Anyway. I went to make
Speaker 4: this long story less long. I ended up losing that job,
Speaker 4: and now I'm sitting out here one a on the
Speaker 4: draft and what am I going to do? And this
Speaker 4: friend of mine, one of the other guys, who was
Speaker 4: an editor, said start your own trailer company. He's a
Speaker 4: Brooklyn guy, so you sounded like this. I go, I
Speaker 4: can't start my own trailer company. Who was going to
Speaker 4: give me work? I can't do the client relationships part.
Speaker 4: He goes, just you could do it. So I had
Speaker 4: I went to a couple of other trailer companies in
Speaker 4: New York, and they all said, no, not interested in you.
Speaker 4: So I thought, okay, I'll try it. So I declared
Speaker 4: myself in the trailer making business, and another young guy
Speaker 4: that was working at United Artists in their foreign marketing
Speaker 4: department gave me a chance to do a trailer on
Speaker 4: a movie called A Man and a Woman, which they
Speaker 4: had the foreign distribution right song. And I loved that
Speaker 4: movie and it was there was no couldn't use the
Speaker 4: dialogue because it was all in French, but the music
Speaker 4: was dup. So I cut a trailer to that and
Speaker 4: it was really nice, and they liked it, and they
Speaker 4: paid me like a tenth of what they pay a
Speaker 4: regular trailer maker, but I didn't care. And so I
Speaker 4: had done my first trailer and I thought that was
Speaker 4: pretty good, and so I little by little, god another one,
Speaker 4: another one. But then the client relationship part came up,
Speaker 4: and I wasn't getting enough work because there were other
Speaker 4: places where they could go and deal with grown ups,
Speaker 4: not with me. So I wasn't getting much work. And
Speaker 4: down the hall from this place where we rented a
Speaker 4: little editing because everything was on film back then, we
Speaker 4: had a movieola and cutting on film. Down the hall.
Speaker 4: There was a guy who was making pornos and he
Speaker 4: came up and he says, you guys editing in here.
Speaker 4: I said yeah. He says, if you could cut my
Speaker 4: movies and I could go make another movie while you're
Speaker 4: editing this movie. So for five hundred bucks, we cut
Speaker 4: his movie while he was shooting his next movie. And
Speaker 4: he did everything himself. He held the camera, he held
Speaker 4: the light, he wrote the script. And it was garbage,
Speaker 4: but that was soft core porn. This was before deep throat,
Speaker 4: so there wasn't a whole lot of actual insertion or anything.
Speaker 4: So it was a simulated sect. So I did a
Speaker 4: couple of those trailers for those movies, and I edited
Speaker 4: those movies, and then I thought, I got nothing else
Speaker 4: to do, I'll try to make one of those movies.
Speaker 4: So I wrote a cheesy script called It was called
Speaker 4: Mail Order Confidential, and there's about a guy who sells
Speaker 4: porn through the mails, and of course in the end,
Speaker 4: it turns out his wife, unbeknownst to him, was his
Speaker 4: biggest customer. And so I made that movie, and I
Speaker 4: thought I liked the process of doing that, so I
Speaker 4: wrote another movie, and at the time I had done
Speaker 4: the trailer for The Good Debad and The Ugly, so
Speaker 4: I thought, how about a soft core porno based on
Speaker 4: The Good Debed and The Ugly. So we got some
Speaker 4: guys to finance it for like thirty thousand dollars, and
Speaker 4: I got a lot of hippie friends who looked like
Speaker 4: cowboys when you put a hat on them. And we
Speaker 4: made this movie and it was called The Wicked Dies Slow,
Speaker 4: and there was almost no dialogue, and it was like
Speaker 4: a takeoff on an Italian Western. And I was kind
Speaker 4: of directing it, copying Sergio Leoni all his angles and
Speaker 4: the close syrups. But when I cut the movie together,
Speaker 4: because of my trailer making experience, I cut it way
Speaker 4: too short. So they spent their money and they got
Speaker 4: a fifty minute movie. They said, no, this has to
Speaker 4: be like seventy five minutes. I said, well, we're gonna
Speaker 4: have to shoot more stuff. So they gave me some
Speaker 4: more money and we shot some more stuff, and now
Speaker 4: it came out to sixty minutes and they fired, so
Speaker 4: I was fired from them, but I was in the
Speaker 4: movie anyway. I did that. I made The Wicked Diy
Speaker 4: Slow and little by little, I started getting little dribbles
Speaker 4: of trailer work at the same time. And a friend
Speaker 4: of mine who's still a friend now, but he was
Speaker 4: a young, up and coming marketing executive. He worked at
Speaker 4: Embassy Pictures and they had this movie. He called me
Speaker 4: and he said, we got this movie. It's got nobody
Speaker 4: in it, but it's got music, and it's Simon and
Speaker 4: Garfunkel music, and maybe you should do the trailer. So
Speaker 4: I got the trailer for The Graduate and I loved
Speaker 4: the movie, and I thought this could be my big break.
Speaker 4: So I made a good trailer, was long, but a
Speaker 4: really good trailer on The Graduate, and everybody liked it,
Speaker 4: and Mike Nichols saw it and he liked it, and
Speaker 4: everything was going to be great. And then I get
Speaker 4: a call. The trailers out out in the theaters.
Speaker 5: So this is it.
Speaker 4: I get a call Mike Nichols wants the trailer pulled
Speaker 4: off off the screen because some friends of his saw
Speaker 4: it and they said he gave away the whole movie,
Speaker 4: but I really didn't. I gave away a lot of it,
Speaker 4: but not the whole movie. It just ends with him
Speaker 4: banging on the Elan and Elaine, you don't know how
Speaker 4: it's going to end, but anyway, So I went to
Speaker 4: the theater with a recorder and I interviewed people coming
Speaker 4: out who had just seen the trailer, and one after
Speaker 4: another after another, I would say, did you see the
Speaker 4: trailer for this movie? The graduate said yes, did it
Speaker 4: look good? It looked great. Do you feel like you
Speaker 4: saw the whole movie?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 4: And I just got all those answers, one after another
Speaker 4: after another, like a hundred interviews, and I called the
Speaker 4: Embassy Pictures and I say, can I take this tape
Speaker 4: and play it for Mike Nichols. We're not going to
Speaker 4: call him. You want to call him, here's his number,
Speaker 4: you call him. So I called Mike Nichols and I say,
Speaker 4: I'm the guy that made the trailer. He goes, oh yeah,
Speaker 4: I go and I hear you want to take it
Speaker 4: down because people said it gave away the whole movie,
Speaker 4: and I said, it really didn't. I made this tape
Speaker 4: of all these people coming out of the theater saying
Speaker 4: that we're dying to see it, and we don't feel
Speaker 4: like we've seen the whole movie. He said, really, yeah,
Speaker 4: I said, can I bring the tape over and play
Speaker 4: it for you? He says no. He said, no, don't
Speaker 4: you want to just listen to it? He goes, if
Speaker 4: it means that much to you, leave it alone. So
Speaker 4: he left it alone. And then the movie was a success,
Speaker 4: and that was my beginning, real beginning as a trailer guy.
Speaker 4: And after that I started to get more work. I
Speaker 4: got Midnight Cowboy, and I got Lion in Winter and
Speaker 4: a bunch of stuff, and I did four hundred trailers
Speaker 4: Cuckoo's Nest and Rocky and all the Woody Allen moves.
Speaker 4: And I love doing it, but the business part, where
Speaker 4: you just had to suck up to clients all day long,
Speaker 4: it was exhausting, and after ten years of it, I
Speaker 4: couldn't do it anymore. Plus, oh, I worked on the
Speaker 4: Cuckoo's Nest and I went to the Oscar party after
Speaker 4: Cuckoo's Nest won all the awards, and somebody came up
Speaker 4: to me at the party and said, so, what did
Speaker 4: you do on the movie? I said, I made the trailer.
Speaker 4: They said, what do you mean made the trailer? I said,
Speaker 4: by the trailer the coming attractions? I thought, the projectionist
Speaker 4: just shows some scenes from the upcoming movie. So I
Speaker 4: realized I'm not famous. I'm never going to be making
Speaker 4: trailers and I want to be known. I want to
Speaker 4: be somebody. So then I decided I'm going to make
Speaker 4: a real movie. And it took me a while, but
Speaker 4: I found a book that I really liked and I
Speaker 4: adapted it and nobody else said bought the rights because
Speaker 4: they were smart and very depressing. Movie.
Speaker 1: Well, you must be talking about natural enemies that movie.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, Yeah, that was rough Man.
Speaker 4: That was real rough At the time, I related to
Speaker 4: it as a person. I was married, not happily but married,
Speaker 4: but I just thought my life wasn't working out and
Speaker 4: I could relate to this man who's just sitting there,
Speaker 4: going I have all this stuff, but it's not working
Speaker 4: for me. Anyway. I made the movie. Nobody played for
Speaker 4: two weeks and disappeared and only recently came back as
Speaker 4: a blu ray and now people like it. But back
Speaker 4: then they called it the grimeced Reaper ever made. In fact,
Speaker 4: in La there's a I don't know what you'd call it,
Speaker 4: a group of people that they have a thing called
Speaker 4: Bleak Week and they show only depressing movies and my
Speaker 4: film was picked to be the first movie in Bleak Week.
Speaker 5: So I went out there.
Speaker 1: I'm so curious about Black Rodeo because I've I was
Speaker 1: looking for that movie forever and I think maybe you
Speaker 1: released the DHS or something. But I've seen it now.
Speaker 1: But how did that project come about?
Speaker 4: Back when I was This was nineteen seventy or seventy one,
Speaker 4: and I was at the height of my trailer making days.
Speaker 4: I worked a lot and got a lot of good
Speaker 4: movies to work on, and it was just I was
Speaker 4: doing trailers for movies like Shaft and Slaughter and all
Speaker 4: these black exploitation movies, and I thought, Wow, maybe there
Speaker 4: should be a black Western. So I started writing one.
Speaker 4: And then a friend of mine called me and said,
Speaker 4: you're still working on that black Western? And I said, yeah,
Speaker 4: There's going to be a Black Rodeo in Harlem in
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks. So I thought, oh, that's amazing,
Speaker 4: went down, spoke to the Black Cowboy Association and got
Speaker 4: the rights to film it, and I got some camera
Speaker 4: guys and we went and we filmed this weekend of
Speaker 4: rodeo and it was a great experience.
Speaker 5: I was like.
Speaker 4: Educated because I was afraid to go through Harlem ever,
Speaker 4: but now I spent two days in Harlem with all
Speaker 4: the people and the kids, and it was so wholesome
Speaker 4: and nice. I wasn't scared anymore. And so that was
Speaker 4: a great experience. And somehow I thought, I'm going to
Speaker 4: put good music in the movie.
Speaker 10: I know that.
Speaker 4: So I got music from for not a lot of money,
Speaker 4: because it was there was no budget. I got Unchained
Speaker 4: my Heart, Ray Charles and Little Richard keep a Knocking
Speaker 4: and a bunch of things like that. And then I thought,
Speaker 4: if I only had an on camera person to talk about, oh,
Speaker 4: the Old West and the cowboys. And I showed an
Speaker 4: assembly of footage to Bill Cosby. I got just got
Speaker 4: it to him and he said it's too boring, and
Speaker 4: he walked out. And then I thought, now what am
Speaker 4: I going to do? But I remember that wood he
Speaker 4: Strode had been a guest at the rodeo and there
Speaker 4: was a picture of him talking to people, and I
Speaker 4: called him up and I said, would you want to
Speaker 4: be the on camera guy? And he goes, I'd love
Speaker 4: to do that, and I know all about the history
Speaker 4: of the Black West. Yeah, he had. So he flew
Speaker 4: into New York and I shot him sitting in a
Speaker 4: rocking chair in a western looking setting and the rocking
Speaker 4: chair was very squeaky and ruined it almost but he
Speaker 4: knew everything. I had notes for him, but he didn't
Speaker 4: need him. He became the on camera sort of guide
Speaker 4: to the Old West. I thought I'd opened the movie
Speaker 4: with a sort of a dig at white cowboys, so
Speaker 4: I sang Home on the Range. I played it and
Speaker 4: sang it really bad, and showed pictures of Gene Autrey
Speaker 4: and John Wayne. It was like, white cowboys are not cool,
Speaker 4: and then we went into the of the black Rodeo song.
Speaker 4: It was good experience. It was a very wholesome thing.
Speaker 4: Got some good reviews, but nobody at that point they'd
Speaker 4: rather pay to see Superfly than to go see some
Speaker 4: cowboys jumping up and down on horses. So it didn't
Speaker 4: do well, but it hung around for years and years,
Speaker 4: and not that long ago it got somebody put it
Speaker 4: out as a VHS or a DVD or whatever, and
Speaker 4: I was not a good businessman, so I always ended
Speaker 4: up giving away the rights for nothing.
Speaker 1: How did you get the gig editing ordinary people?
Speaker 4: So while I was doing trailers a lot, I got
Speaker 4: to work with Sydney Pollack. I got to work with
Speaker 4: Redford on Jeremiah Johnson on three days of the Condor,
Speaker 4: and so we had a relationship through trailers. And then
Speaker 4: he was doing All The President's Men and I did
Speaker 4: the trailers and stuff on All the President's Men. And
Speaker 4: he was having a problem getting the movie cut down
Speaker 4: from two and a half hours, and he said, would
Speaker 4: you do me a favor and try to shorten this
Speaker 4: movie because you used to make short So I said sure.
Speaker 4: So I took a couple of weeks and I cut
Speaker 4: the movie down. It ended up back where it was
Speaker 4: because Alan Pacula wanted it that way, but he could
Speaker 4: see that I was able to cut the movie down.
Speaker 4: And then at a certain point after I did Natural Enemies,
Speaker 4: and he knew how Hobrook. He was thinking of Hal
Speaker 4: Holbrook for the lead in Ordinary People, and he called
Speaker 4: me up and he said, can I see your movie?
Speaker 4: And I said sure, and I sent it to him
Speaker 4: and he called me back and he said, yeah, I
Speaker 4: don't think how's going to work. But you did a
Speaker 4: really good job on the movie. It was the first
Speaker 4: nice thing anybody said about that movie. And so I said, so,
Speaker 4: where are you editing Ordinary People? LA or New York?
Speaker 4: He goes, I'd like to do it in New York.
Speaker 2: And I was in New York.
Speaker 4: I said, I got an editor for you. You're interested.
Speaker 4: He goes, who? And I said me? And he said,
Speaker 4: you wanted to be a director? I said, I love
Speaker 4: to cut ordinary people. So he said okay. A couple
Speaker 4: of minutes later, I get a call from the line producer,
Speaker 4: a guy named Ron Schwery, who I became friends with,
Speaker 4: and he says, is this Jeff Canoe? Yeah, who the
Speaker 4: fuck are you? I go, I do trailers, but I
Speaker 4: did some work for Bob and I offered to be
Speaker 4: the editor and he said okay. He goes, what other
Speaker 4: movies have you cut? Oh? None, just a couple that
Speaker 4: I made. But he goes, we have Sam Mustin he
Speaker 4: did the graduate he did at Rosemary's Baby. What the
Speaker 4: fuck does he want you for? I said, I don't
Speaker 4: know about it. He said, okay, what's your rate? I said, oh,
Speaker 4: I don't have a rate because I never did that before. Anyway,
Speaker 4: I got that job. My rate was twelve hundred a week,
Speaker 4: and I learned a lot and I had a great experience,
Speaker 4: and Bob found the editing process a little boring, so
Speaker 4: I got to do a lot of stuff on my own,
Speaker 4: and I got to learn watching him work with the actors,
Speaker 4: because he was great with the actors, and that was
Speaker 4: just an amazing experience. And so I got it by
Speaker 4: asking for it. He should never have hired me. That
Speaker 4: was a bad move.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember. With Eddie Makin's Run. Was that
Speaker 1: the first time that you and Kirk Douglas worked together
Speaker 1: because you worked with him a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Eddie Makin's Run. I had done Natural Enemies already
Speaker 4: that went nowhere then, but I wanted to try again,
Speaker 4: and I found this novel, Eddie Makon's Run, and nobody
Speaker 4: had the rights, so I got the rights and I
Speaker 4: adapted it, and I was trying to get financing, and
Speaker 4: somehow or other, I ended up getting it financed because
Speaker 4: I got this producer named Marty Brigman, who was Alan
Speaker 4: Alda's manager and Al Pacino's manager and produced a lot
Speaker 4: of movies, and he took over and got us financing,
Speaker 4: and then he became my boss and bullied me the
Speaker 4: whole time making that movie. And one of the things
Speaker 4: first he calls me because that movie was about a
Speaker 4: guy with two children who wrongly goes to prison and
Speaker 4: then runs away from prison to be with his family.
Speaker 4: He calls me up one day and he goes, what
Speaker 4: you ever watch Dukes of Hazzard. I go, no, there's
Speaker 4: this guy on Dukes of Hazzard named John Schneider. I
Speaker 4: want him to play the lead. I go, but he's
Speaker 4: twenty years old. This is about a man with two children. Yeah,
Speaker 4: well tough. He says, you're going down to Atlanta, and
Speaker 4: if John Schneider approves you, he's going to be the
Speaker 4: star and you can direct the movie. So I go
Speaker 4: down there and I get approved, and then I go
Speaker 4: back and I was thinking the cop should be the
Speaker 4: antithesis of a Southern guy, so let's try to get
Speaker 4: Peter Boyle or Gene Hackman. And he goes, you've gotten
Speaker 4: on a plane. Tomorrow you're going to see Kirk Douglas.
Speaker 2: I go.
Speaker 4: I love Kirk Douglas, but for what he goes, he's
Speaker 4: going to play the cop. I go, I don't know that.
Speaker 4: He doesn't seem New Yorky enough for the cop. He says,
Speaker 4: where you're going? So I flew out there and I
Speaker 4: met with Kirk Douglas and he had watched Natural Enemies,
Speaker 4: and maybe he was only the second person that ever
Speaker 4: said anything nice about Natural Enemies, and he said, I
Speaker 4: liked your movie. I think it was a little one note,
Speaker 4: but I really liked it. So he agreed to do
Speaker 4: Eddie Macon's Run, and I learned a lot from him
Speaker 4: making that movie, and then we became friends and did
Speaker 4: more things together. Tough Guys get the movie together, and
Speaker 4: Peter McGregor Scott had taught me always preview the movie
Speaker 4: with audiences before you show it to the studio, and
Speaker 4: you get to tighten it up, and so I always
Speaker 4: did that, and so I had a number of good
Speaker 4: screenings with test audiences on Tough Guys. And then Michael
Speaker 4: Eiser said I want to see the movie. So I
Speaker 4: took it over there and we had a screening with
Speaker 4: a test audience and all the Disney executors are there
Speaker 4: with their pads and their pencils, and I was like
Speaker 4: really nervous. We come out of the screen room and
Speaker 4: Michael says, let's go across the way to my office
Speaker 4: to our conference room. I go to be a favorite.
Speaker 4: I'm really I wound up from the screening and can
Speaker 4: we do this tomorrow? Oh, let's go over there right now, okay.
Speaker 4: So we go over there and I see all the
Speaker 4: guys with their notepads, and we go into their conference
Speaker 4: room and everybody it's getting ready to be a firing squad, right,
Speaker 4: And he gets a phone called Michael Eiser and he
Speaker 4: leaves the room and these guys are all aren't getting
Speaker 4: ready to kill me. And he comes back in he goes, look,
Speaker 4: I think there's some things about this movie that we
Speaker 4: could change, but you know what, I think it's good.
Speaker 4: Let's just leave it alone. And all the pads go
Speaker 4: under the table. So he saved that movie that they
Speaker 4: didn't hack it up or anything. A couple of years later,
Speaker 4: via Aworshowski, we have a screening in I Forget somewhere
Speaker 4: in the Valley, north Ridge or somewhere like that. And
Speaker 4: I had some test screenings of the movie, so I
Speaker 4: knew it played pretty well for audiences. So now we
Speaker 4: have vi Awshowski. And within the first tops fifteen minutes,
Speaker 4: a guy I see a guy. The audience is listening intently.
Speaker 4: A guy gets up and starts walking up the aisle.
Speaker 4: Big guy walks right past me. It's Michael Eisda and
Speaker 4: maybe he's just going to the bathroom. Maybe he's just
Speaker 4: going for a soda. He never comes back. The next day,
Speaker 4: the word comes down and Michael doesn't like the movie.
Speaker 4: And that was the opposite of the tough guys reaction shorter.
Speaker 4: He wants it this, he wants it that. So that's
Speaker 4: why I have this color hair.
Speaker 1: Tell me how you got the gig for Revenge of
Speaker 1: the Nerds, because that seemed to really just jettison you.
Speaker 4: So I had made all these this depressing, two depressing movies,
Speaker 4: and no one would hire me to do a comedy.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to do a comedy. And my friend
Speaker 4: Joe Wizanne, the producer who had done stuff with me
Speaker 4: before at for trailers, he calls me up ononin Dan.
Speaker 4: He goes, you won't believe this. I just got a
Speaker 4: job as head of production in twentieth Century Fox. I go, wow, Joe,
Speaker 4: he had been an agent and a producer. That's amazing.
Speaker 4: He goes, I'll probably get fired within a year, but
Speaker 4: I can hire some friends. So I'm going to send
Speaker 4: you some scripts and see if you want to do
Speaker 4: one of these movies. So he sends me Bachelor Party
Speaker 4: and another thing called Give Me An f about a
Speaker 4: cheerleader camp, all comedies, and this Revenge of the Nerds thing.
Speaker 4: So I read Bachelor Party and I thought, yeah, it's
Speaker 4: all right. The cheerleader thing was disgusting. And then I
Speaker 4: wasn't even going to read Revenge of the Nerds because
Speaker 4: it sounded so stupid, because nerds weren't a thing yet,
Speaker 4: that word. But I read it and within three pages
Speaker 4: I thought, oh my god, that's me arriving at college
Speaker 4: feeling like I don't belong and that nobody likes me,
Speaker 4: and I could relate to that. So I said, okay,
Speaker 4: I could do this one. He goes, here's the problem.
Speaker 4: The producers don't even want to meet with you, but
Speaker 4: I'm going to force them to meet with you. So
Speaker 4: you got to fly out here. So I fly out
Speaker 4: and I do whatever homework you can do to get
Speaker 4: a job directing, and I go and meet with these
Speaker 4: guys and takes about two hours. Would seem to hit
Speaker 4: it off, see things the same way. And then I
Speaker 4: fly back in New York and I get a call
Speaker 4: from Joe, my friend, and he says, so, what happened
Speaker 4: at the meeting? I said, it lasted a long time,
Speaker 4: and I think we really see things the same way,
Speaker 4: so I think it went well. He goes, you made
Speaker 4: one mistake.
Speaker 15: I go what.
Speaker 4: He goes. You said Risky Business was a better movie
Speaker 4: than Animal House. I said it is. Animal House was
Speaker 4: funny and it made a lot of money, but Risky
Speaker 4: Business is a better movie. What kind of a movie
Speaker 4: are you're going to make of this? I go, this
Speaker 4: is more like Animal House. But I'm still want to
Speaker 4: make as good a movie as I can make, and
Speaker 4: I don't want the characters to be cartoons. I want
Speaker 4: them to be people that you can relate to, and
Speaker 4: that's why you'll root for them. What kind of a
Speaker 4: movie are you're going to make? I go, I know
Speaker 4: what you're trying to get me to say, Joe, animal House, sir,
Speaker 4: but I'm not going to do that. He goes. I
Speaker 4: want you to make a movie. Not only will it
Speaker 4: not play at Cinema two in New York, but you'll
Speaker 4: never be allowed in there again. I go, all right, Joe,
Speaker 4: I'll tell you what. How about if I make a
Speaker 4: movie that I'm ashamed to put my name on. He goes,
Speaker 4: You got the job, That's how I got the job.
Speaker 4: And every actor that's in the movie, none of them
Speaker 4: wanted to be in it because they all thought it
Speaker 4: was going to be stupid, and so I had to
Speaker 4: promise them, no, we're going to make them real, and
Speaker 4: we're not gonna the goofy stuff is there, but they're
Speaker 4: gonna be real characters that you can care about. And
Speaker 4: it worked out. Then, Oh, my friend Joe lost his
Speaker 4: job before the movie opened, and this guy, Norman Leevy
Speaker 4: came over from Columbia Pictures and took over a Fox.
Speaker 4: And I in a restaurant somewhere and a guy walks
Speaker 4: up to me and goes, hey, I hear your movie's
Speaker 4: a piece of shit. I go, who'd you hear that from?
Speaker 4: He says Norman Levy, the new head of production at Fox.
Speaker 4: I go, that's great anyway. So I had to go
Speaker 4: through this whole process of proving this movie wasn't a
Speaker 4: piece of shit, which he didn't want to hear. And
Speaker 4: it was supposed to open in seven hundred theaters. He
Speaker 4: cut it down to one hundred, and he cut the
Speaker 4: marketing budget and it was disaster. But for some reason,
Speaker 4: that movie opened and didn't die. It just went on
Speaker 4: and on and it ended up being successful. So I
Speaker 4: had gone from making the most depressing movies ever to
Speaker 4: making a hit comedy, and after that, I couldn't get
Speaker 4: a serious movie job. I was a comedy director. I
Speaker 4: was always trying to work my way back to real
Speaker 4: stories or whatever, but I don't know. So I did Gotcha,
Speaker 4: which was a comedy, but it also had reality to it.
Speaker 4: There was real stakes. And then Tough Guys, which was
Speaker 4: Kirk and Bert. Again, it's a comedy, it's a gimmicky movie,
Speaker 4: but those guys are not going to play it goofy
Speaker 4: and that kind of worked out.
Speaker 7: And then.
Speaker 4: There's a long story in the middle there where I
Speaker 4: found a script that nobody wanted to make and I
Speaker 4: loved it, and I got it set up somewhere and
Speaker 4: as a low budget movie, and I cast it and
Speaker 4: it was Dead Poets Society. Right, So I'm now literally
Speaker 4: two weeks away from starting to shoot on Dead Poets
Speaker 4: Society with Ethan Hawke. Jennifer Connelly was playing one of
Speaker 4: the girls. It was going to be great. And I
Speaker 4: had this experience with Robin Williams, who read it and
Speaker 4: he liked it, but his manager wouldn't let him work
Speaker 4: with me for whatever reason, so he wouldn't do it no,
Speaker 4: Robin Williams. They give me the green light. We're going
Speaker 4: to shoot at Non Union in Georgia, and I start
Speaker 4: to get that. They start sending me memos, Let's change
Speaker 4: the title, let's get a bigger name. And I went
Speaker 4: through a lot of casting things with them. Two guys
Speaker 4: came in that I would have said yes, that I
Speaker 4: did say yes to, and Disney said no. One was
Speaker 4: Liam Neeson and the other was Alec Baldwin. They wouldn't
Speaker 4: hire either of those guys. They really wanted Robin Williams,
Speaker 4: and Robin Williams didn't want to do it with me.
Speaker 4: I should have seen the writing on the wall, but
Speaker 4: I didn't have that experience. So I'm down there waiting
Speaker 4: to shoot like Sunrising behind the school. And oh before
Speaker 4: I went down there for that trip, I thought, if
Speaker 4: I don't get them a name, I'm gonna lose this job.
Speaker 4: So I sent the script to Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman,
Speaker 4: and Harrison Ford. Don't hear anything from Parrison Ford. Jack
Speaker 4: Nicholson passes, don't hear from Dustin Hoffman. So I'm down
Speaker 4: in Atlanta and I get a call from my agent
Speaker 4: and he says, Dustin Hoffman's person whoever that is, read
Speaker 4: the script and Dustin's going to read it tomorrow. They
Speaker 4: like it. That's great. Next day comes by, I get
Speaker 4: a call from Michael Eisner, who never calls me. Jeff, Hey,
Speaker 4: Mike Eisner. What's going on, Michael? I just want to
Speaker 4: let you know Dustin Hoffman read the script. He really
Speaker 4: likes it, and he's coming to my house for dinner
Speaker 4: tonight and he's never come to my house for dinner ever.
Speaker 4: I go, oh, that's great. And then the next day
Speaker 4: they call me and they say you better fly back
Speaker 4: here because we got Dustin wants to do it, but
Speaker 4: not with you. And this is after I did the
Speaker 4: trailer on the Graduate and Midnight Cowboy and Stroll not
Speaker 4: with me. It was must have his manager or agent
Speaker 4: must be saying, don't this guy's know? But nobody's the
Speaker 4: wrong director. Anyway. I got fired off Dead Poets after
Speaker 4: I got up, So after that I thought I got
Speaker 4: to have a hit. Obviously, because I Tough Guys wasn't
Speaker 4: a big hit. So I heard about this movie called
Speaker 4: Troop Beverly Hills, where a director named Howard Deef was
Speaker 4: directing that movie. But he's leaving that movie to go
Speaker 4: do this other movie called dream Team, and so that
Speaker 4: job is open, so I throw my hat in the
Speaker 4: ring and I get the job of Troop Beverly Hills,
Speaker 4: even though I don't think I was the right choice
Speaker 4: for that, but I ended up doing a good job
Speaker 4: on that movie. It didn't make money, but it had
Speaker 4: a long life in video and people still liked that movie.
Speaker 4: So I did that, and then after that I wasn't
Speaker 4: getting jobs because that wasn't successful. Whatever. And you get
Speaker 4: to a point where you have heat, you lose the heat,
Speaker 4: and now the age your agent's not that interested anymore.
Speaker 4: So I had been with William Morris. I ended up
Speaker 4: at the Grocery Agency, and the Groce agency got me
Speaker 4: the Kathleen Turner job on Virwa and I had a
Speaker 4: great experience making that movie and loved the casting and
Speaker 4: everything about it was good, except nobody went to see it.
Speaker 4: So that was it for me in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Sounds like Kamplin. Turner was already attached by the time
Speaker 1: you got there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I had to go and audition for her,
Speaker 4: and I got the job. We got along and whatever,
Speaker 4: and we got we worked together great, and there was
Speaker 4: a cold, big committee on that movie. There were like
Speaker 4: five producers and two studio execs on the set at
Speaker 4: all times. And because I got along well with Kathleen,
Speaker 4: they couldn't push me around too much and had good actors.
Speaker 4: And I just watched the movie today. I'm happy with
Speaker 4: the movie. There was just no way to sell it.
Speaker 4: They couldn't figure and I will say that the title
Speaker 4: may have been a problem.
Speaker 10: So that was that.
Speaker 1: I know. There were also a lot of writers on that.
Speaker 1: At least three Where was.
Speaker 6: On that?
Speaker 1: At least three where was the script at?
Speaker 4: When you came aboard There was a writer named Edgar
Speaker 4: Somebody or other serious mystery writer, and he did the
Speaker 4: first adaptation. Because the novels were basically detective stories, they
Speaker 4: weren't comedies. She had a tone in her description of
Speaker 4: things that had comedic but they were the bad guys
Speaker 4: in violence, and she was the detective. Anyway, The script
Speaker 4: was a tri Star and then the producer Jeff Lewie
Speaker 4: and his guys, he had like several people who work
Speaker 4: for him. They would put it in turnaround at Trystar
Speaker 4: and they moved it to Disney, and Disney, who I
Speaker 4: had now had a bad experience with because of Dead
Speaker 4: Poets Touchstone. This guy David Hoberman, who is the head
Speaker 4: of Touchstone, he didn't want any part of me. But
Speaker 4: this Hollywood Pictures was this other company that was at Disney.
Speaker 4: And because David didn't like me, ricardomestris if Hollywood Pictures
Speaker 4: did like me, And so I got to do that job.
Speaker 4: And again I feel pretty good about the movie. And
Speaker 4: every movie is a war and every movie is an education.
Speaker 4: And that was another one. But before the movie opened,
Speaker 4: there was a thing called Premier magazine and they'd do
Speaker 4: a summer prediction, and their summer prediction was and it
Speaker 4: was always like who stands to gain? Who stands to lose?
Speaker 4: And with the Irishovski, who stands to gain? The producers,
Speaker 4: Kathleen Turner, the studio because if this movie succeeds, they'll
Speaker 4: have it like a franchise. Like James Bond, who stands
Speaker 4: to lose. The director because if that movie doesn't succeed,
Speaker 4: it's his fall. I got all the credit for the failure.
Speaker 1: When you said there's so many producers on sett and everything,
Speaker 1: it feels like there was a lot of pressure on
Speaker 1: you for this.
Speaker 4: I got along well with Jeff Lury and his people.
Speaker 4: Except for a couple of them, everybody has an opinion.
Speaker 4: Then there was the studio had appointed their own representative
Speaker 4: on the set, and she was the one carrying notes
Speaker 4: back from the other, so that there were every weekend
Speaker 4: there was like it's long, several hours meeting with studio
Speaker 4: notes and trying to figure out how to deal with
Speaker 4: them and how are we going to sell this to
Speaker 4: Kathleen because if she said no, then that's it. If
Speaker 4: she want to make this change or do this scene.
Speaker 4: So she saved the movie in sense because she made
Speaker 4: good choices as far as it goes. She didn't save
Speaker 4: the movie at the box office, but she worked the
Speaker 4: movie work because they kept trying to turn it into
Speaker 4: Paper Moon, a funny relationship between this young girl and
Speaker 4: this female detective, that's all. They were trying to push
Speaker 4: it towards comedy. But they had a mother and her
Speaker 4: husband trying to kill the daughter, and it was a
Speaker 4: serious and her dad was blown up at the beginning,
Speaker 4: so it was not a comedy, but it had comedic
Speaker 4: elements to it.
Speaker 1: He the Kathleen Turner's already attached to it. Who else
Speaker 1: is already cast for this or did you help the
Speaker 1: casting process?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, just Kathleen. I got the job. And then
Speaker 4: casting is always it's a little bit of a committee thing,
Speaker 4: but the casting person gives you suggestions. Some casting people
Speaker 4: don't like you to shop as they say, they like
Speaker 4: you to accept who they give you. So Wayne Knight
Speaker 4: plays the kind of bad guy, and Stanley Tucci came
Speaker 4: in and read for that, and he was great, and
Speaker 4: I wanted him, but Katzenberg wanted Wayne Knight, and he
Speaker 4: came and read and he was good, and I wasn't.
Speaker 5: At that point.
Speaker 4: I had learned to shut up and not argue that,
Speaker 4: not to speak truth to power. But I learned it
Speaker 4: a little late, that's all. So there was and Charles Derney.
Speaker 4: I had worked with him on Tough Guys, and so
Speaker 4: that was great. And the guy who dies at the beginning,
Speaker 4: Steven Meadows, was brand new and we read a lot
Speaker 4: of people on that, Bruce Greenwood and Jack I forget
Speaker 4: his name, Scalia or whatever, but I really liked Steven
Speaker 4: Meadows and they let me hire him and he was good.
Speaker 4: And the girl's mother was an actress named Nancy Paul,
Speaker 4: who I with the redheaded woman. I thought she was great,
Speaker 4: and the two older brothers. Everybody was really good actors,
Speaker 4: and I didn't have them in my pocket. But whoever
Speaker 4: the casting person was, I'd have to look it up again,
Speaker 4: but they presented good people.
Speaker 1: I always liked j O. Saunders.
Speaker 4: Jay was in Eddie Macon's Run. Jay was one of
Speaker 4: the two bad guys who hanged John Schneider in their
Speaker 4: living room, and we got to be pretty good friends
Speaker 4: on that movie. And then I offered him the coach
Speaker 4: job in Revenge of the Nerds, but he said it
Speaker 4: sounded stupid, so he didn't do it. So then he
Speaker 4: was sorry that he didn't do it. And then I
Speaker 4: offered him the Worshovski thing and he did it and
Speaker 4: Kathleen approved him, and it was great.
Speaker 1: Did you actually shoot that in Chicago?
Speaker 4: Mostly? Yeah, actually almost entirely, But at the last minute,
Speaker 4: Chicago was great because here's this river and no one's
Speaker 4: ever shot a boat chase on that river before, and
Speaker 4: I thought, here's my French connection moment, and so did
Speaker 4: that and that was fun and great. But then Disney
Speaker 4: sort of changed their mind about the ending of the movie.
Speaker 4: It wasn't a big enough ending because it was just
Speaker 4: at the dock and she goes into water to rescue
Speaker 4: the girl. They thought it was too small, and they
Speaker 4: had done this movie's stakeout with Dreyfus and Emilio Estevez
Speaker 4: and that ended in a big I don't even know what.
Speaker 4: It was, a factory where they were burnie or cutting
Speaker 4: wood or it was all these machines they wanted that
Speaker 4: they wanted ending, so they brought in a writer named
Speaker 4: Nick Feel. I never even met him. He worked with
Speaker 4: the studio people. He wrote them a new ending. The
Speaker 4: producers and I and Kathleen read that and said no,
Speaker 4: So that was out. But in the meantime they made
Speaker 4: us move back from Chicago to shoot the ending. And
Speaker 4: it was too cold in Chicago now because they had
Speaker 4: stalled rewriting the ending whatever, So we shot the original ending,
Speaker 4: but we shot it in San Pedro, but it's the
Speaker 4: same ending.
Speaker 1: I always find that the Stephen Root character is very
Speaker 1: interesting in that it feels like it comes out of nowhere.
Speaker 4: It was always there, the sausage factory guy. It was
Speaker 4: the setup that met her pigs. I guess you know,
Speaker 4: he was nobody at the time. I mean, he's done
Speaker 4: so many things since Nati's Yeah, that was like a
Speaker 4: half a day shoot with him, but he was great.
Speaker 1: Do you tend to work with the same people behind
Speaker 1: the camera?
Speaker 4: Try because it's a good thing to do, but there's
Speaker 4: always politics behind it. Like the DP who shot Nerds
Speaker 4: and Gotcha Troop Beverly Hills, they wouldn't hire him. They
Speaker 4: wanted their own guy for Troop Beverly Hills. And Shelley
Speaker 4: Long had a guy she wanted because he only knows
Speaker 4: how to photograph women. So King Baggett who shot Nerds
Speaker 4: and Gotcha, they wouldn't hire him, and tough guys. He
Speaker 4: shot three movies for me in a row and he
Speaker 4: was great. But it didn't And at a certain point
Speaker 4: you go, I mean, if you're if I was Franciscopola,
Speaker 4: I'd say this is who I want and that would
Speaker 4: be it. But I hadn't achieved that level of political
Speaker 4: power or whatever. Try to work with the same people
Speaker 4: if you can. I had a line producer or named
Speaker 4: Peter McGregor Scott who when I first got out to
Speaker 4: LA to prepping Nerds. Guy comes into my office one
Speaker 4: day and he goes, Hi, I'm the new line producer.
Speaker 4: I go, okay, great. He goes, Yeah, let me just
Speaker 4: tell you this. I'm being hired as a spy. What
Speaker 4: do you mean, he goes, They, No, I did Animal House,
Speaker 4: and if I think you're not making it funny, I
Speaker 4: have to call the studio and squeal. I said, oh,
Speaker 4: that's good to know, he goes. But we'll just work
Speaker 4: together and we'll make it work. And that's what we did.
Speaker 4: We worked together and we made it work. And so
Speaker 4: then he did Gotcha with me, and then Disney wouldn't
Speaker 4: hire him on Tough Guys for some reason. But then
Speaker 4: Troop Beverly Hills I got him back again. So I
Speaker 4: did three movies with Peter. But it's a shorthand thing.
Speaker 4: If you work with somebody and you know how each
Speaker 4: other works, it's very helpful.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about you, having come from the editing background,
Speaker 1: how was it giving up that control to somebody else
Speaker 1: to edit your films?
Speaker 4: It was not easy, and in fact I always had
Speaker 4: my own cutting room. I didn't take credit, but I
Speaker 4: on Nerds. For example, they gave me an editor that
Speaker 4: had worked on mel Brooks's most recent movie. I think
Speaker 4: it was called to Be a Not to Be or something,
Speaker 4: and the studio liked him and he started to work
Speaker 4: for me, and I realized he doesn't try enough permutations
Speaker 4: on a scene. He just likes to cut the scene
Speaker 4: and not make too many splices because we're still cutting
Speaker 4: on film and it sounds sloppy if you'd make too
Speaker 4: many splices when it goes through the movie. Editors didn't
Speaker 4: like that. And also they would have their assistant editors
Speaker 4: and they were just like a style of thing. They
Speaker 4: would go the thing would be on the movie all
Speaker 4: and then he would hit it with the grease pencil
Speaker 4: and that was where to cut, and then he would
Speaker 4: give it to the assistant to go cut there like that.
Speaker 4: When I was cutting, I was saying, I don't know
Speaker 4: should be here? Should it be there? And I always
Speaker 4: had too many cuts because I wanted it to be
Speaker 4: the perfect cut, and a lot of it was trial
Speaker 4: and error to me. So I worked with that guy
Speaker 4: on that movie, and I worked with a different person
Speaker 4: on Gotcha. Although I worked I had an apprentice editor
Speaker 4: on Nerds who also worked on Gotcha as an assistant,
Speaker 4: and she became a really big solid editor. She did
Speaker 4: Hangover one Hangover to Hangover. She became a really big
Speaker 4: time editor. This girl Debbie that was the apprentice on Nerds.
Speaker 4: I worked with different editors, but I always had my
Speaker 4: own cut room, so I would just patchki around and
Speaker 4: make things the way I needed them to be.
Speaker 1: Who your DP for Worshowsky was a Yan Kesser Keyser, Yes, Yesser, Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: he was Okay.
Speaker 4: All my films up to that point were visually fine,
Speaker 4: but nothing brilliant about them, And on Worshowsky, I wanted
Speaker 4: to try to become a less boring director visually, and
Speaker 4: so I tried to get a couple of guys and
Speaker 4: they didn't like the script. Conrad Hall didn't like the script.
Speaker 4: And then John Keezer came in. I had seen one
Speaker 4: of his movies, and I said to him, listen, I
Speaker 4: need to look more stylish on this movie. So let's
Speaker 4: make different kind of choice. Let's not make choices just
Speaker 4: based on story, Let's make some choices based on style.
Speaker 4: And he said absolutely. But every time I would ask
Speaker 4: him to do something like that, he would say, it's
Speaker 4: not justified.
Speaker 1: And so it was.
Speaker 4: The movie was fine, but it could have been more
Speaker 4: interesting visually.
Speaker 1: So did you end up in movie jail afterwards?
Speaker 4: That was nineteen ninety one. I wasn't getting meetings, I
Speaker 4: wasn't getting jobs. I was bouncing from agency to agency
Speaker 4: and like nothing was happening. So I started doing trailers again.
Speaker 4: And now I was no longer the top of trailer makers.
Speaker 4: I was like level three of trailer makers. So after
Speaker 4: they'd been to a couple of other companies, they give
Speaker 4: me a crack at it. So I worked for a
Speaker 4: couple of years just doing trailers again. It was good
Speaker 4: and the ego was crushed. And so then at a
Speaker 4: certain point Kirk called me up and he was offered
Speaker 4: a touch by an Angel episode and he asked where
Speaker 4: I directed with him. I said sure, So he got
Speaker 4: me that job, and I went to Salt Lake City
Speaker 4: and we shot that and I thought, it's like making
Speaker 4: a movie. It's fast, but I enjoyed it. So I
Speaker 4: did three episodes of that, and then Kirk got this
Speaker 4: offer to make a movie in Belarus, a Holocaust movie,
Speaker 4: and he had already had his stroke and he was
Speaker 4: not feeling well, but he got me the job as
Speaker 4: the director, and then just when it was time to
Speaker 4: go over there and shoot the movie, he said he
Speaker 4: couldn't do it. So he canceled, and I called the director,
Speaker 4: who would never talk to me because he would only fax.
Speaker 4: So he faxed me back and he said, what do
Speaker 4: you want? And I said, I guess I'm not going
Speaker 4: to be the director. A workers Kirk's not going to
Speaker 4: do it. He goes, no, you're still the director, but
Speaker 4: we're cutting your salary in half. But I needed the job,
Speaker 4: so I flew over there and I made that movie.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 4: I liked the movie mostly. It was an amazing experience
Speaker 4: working in a place where I didn't speak the language,
Speaker 4: with a crew who didn't speak my language, with actors
Speaker 4: who spoke several languages. You had an Italian actor and
Speaker 4: a German actor and a Russian actor all acting in
Speaker 4: their own language in a scene together. And I thought
Speaker 4: this is never going to work, but it did. Those
Speaker 4: seems are fine. But then the producer, who was this
Speaker 4: older Jewish guy from Berlin, he basically got me pushed aside.
Speaker 4: After I edited the movie, he took over and he
Speaker 4: made some changes and it ended up opening in the
Speaker 4: Berlin Film Festival. And told the Berlin Film Festival that
Speaker 4: I was, in a way making a movie in the jungle,
Speaker 4: and I couldn't be reached. So I was walking down
Speaker 4: the street in Brentwood one day and a friend of
Speaker 4: mine says, hey, I hear your movies in the Berlin
Speaker 4: Film Festival. I said, what when did that happen?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I called the Berlin Film Festival. They go, you're
Speaker 4: back from the jungle. I said, I was a jungle.
Speaker 4: They said, we want you to come over. So I
Speaker 4: went over there, and that producer was so upset that
Speaker 4: I was there. That was almost made it worthwhile. But
Speaker 4: it was his movie and that was it. He took
Speaker 4: it from there. It's never played in America or a
Speaker 4: lot of places really.
Speaker 1: Since you were doing trailers in the eighties, did you
Speaker 1: ever work with the big vo guys like Don la Fontaine.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, No, I was doing them in the seventies.
Speaker 1: In the seventies, but then it sounds like you went
Speaker 1: back to it in the nineties.
Speaker 4: In the nineties, that went back to it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was Don.
Speaker 4: Don was great and he could do it in his sleep.
Speaker 4: You didn't have to direct Don. He knew he could
Speaker 4: just read the copy. Yeah, I used him a lot.
Speaker 4: I used eight off Caesar until he died. Guy named
Speaker 4: Hal Douglass. He's still alive, I think, but I used
Speaker 4: him a lot, and every once in a while there
Speaker 4: was a guy named John Roger and brother John. He
Speaker 4: had a great voice. I was talking about Revenge of
Speaker 4: the Nerds. I didn't do the trailer on Revenge of
Speaker 4: the Nerds, but Orson Wells narrated the trailer for Revenge
Speaker 4: of the Nerds for twenty five grand. He's only there
Speaker 4: at the beginning.
Speaker 1: But how about now, what are you working on these days?
Speaker 4: Last thing I did after I did the thing in Belarus,
Speaker 4: I came back. I made a movie for having just
Speaker 4: made a movie for twenty million dollars via Worshowski, I
Speaker 4: now made a movie for three hundred thousand. My son
Speaker 4: wrote it and it was with Cameron Douglas and an
Speaker 4: actress named Emmanuel Shrieky. It got picked up by a
Speaker 4: National Lampoon, so it was called National Lampoon's Adam and Eve.
Speaker 4: It was a small love story set in a university,
Speaker 4: and it was actually pretty good. Nobody went to see it,
Speaker 4: but New Line put it out as a TVD. So
Speaker 4: I did that Adam and Eve, and then still trying
Speaker 4: to get an agent and do some work, and I
Speaker 4: did a few more trailers. My son, who I had
Speaker 4: done the Adam and Eve movie, he got a job
Speaker 4: working as National Lampoons had a production for some reason,
Speaker 4: and they had a script that I had read. It
Speaker 4: was like a parody of three hundred and Troy and Gladiator.
Speaker 4: It was called The Legend of Awesomest Maximus. And my
Speaker 4: son called me and he goes, they're talking to directors.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: He goes, I know they're not going to call you,
Speaker 4: but if I see an opening where they some directors
Speaker 4: say no, I'll stick your name. And then so that's
Speaker 4: what happened. Waited, and then he called me. He goes,
Speaker 4: come in today, they can't get a director. So I
Speaker 4: went in and I tap danced, and I got this
Speaker 4: job directing that and that was actually a fun experience
Speaker 4: and parts of it are really good. And that was
Speaker 4: two thousand and seven. That was the last thing done,
Speaker 4: except for a couple of short films.
Speaker 6: That I made.
Speaker 4: My daughter was in film school. I made a film
Speaker 4: with her, and maybe one or two other little things.
Speaker 4: But I'm ready to go. I've been working on I
Speaker 4: got a couple of scripts. It's going to be hard.
Speaker 4: You do get to the point where is he still alive.
Speaker 4: I was going to change my name to that.
Speaker 10: Did he.
Speaker 1: Didn't you do a short with Paul Mazerski as well?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that wasn't sure. There was a documentary.
Speaker 1: Oh documentary, okay, well.
Speaker 4: Yippie, Yeah, Paul did it. I had known him from
Speaker 4: trailer making and we ran into each other at a
Speaker 4: funeral and I had done my thing in Belarus and
Speaker 4: he had just come back from the Ukraine where he
Speaker 4: had shot this documentary, and I said, what is it about.
Speaker 4: He goes, there's about twenty thousand Hasidic Jews gathered around
Speaker 4: the lake, singing and dancing. I went, oh, that sounds great.
Speaker 4: He goes, you want to look at the footage with me?
Speaker 4: I go, but I couldn't say no. So I looked
Speaker 4: at the footage and it wasn't That part wasn't great.
Speaker 4: But he's in it and he's great. So he became
Speaker 4: our guide through this world, and we made this documentary.
Speaker 4: No one released it, and finally this Brandeis University released it.
Speaker 4: But it's a good little documentary and Paul was great. Yippie.
Speaker 4: Now all we need is my eulogy and we're done.
Speaker 4: So that sums it all up there.
Speaker 1: Mister Ken, thank you so much for your time. This
Speaker 1: was great talking with you.
Speaker 4: I can feel free to edit this if I send
Speaker 4: anything to disparage anybody. Cut that out, except for David
Speaker 4: Hoberman from Disney because he's a dick.
Speaker 1: And last, but not least, we're going to hear from
Speaker 1: the final writer on the Via Worshowski project, Warren Light,
Speaker 1: before we start talking about via Worshowski. I really would
Speaker 1: like to know a little bit more about you, and
Speaker 1: especially how he decided to become a writer. I thought
Speaker 1: you would have been a musician.
Speaker 5: I grew up in a home where my father was
Speaker 5: a trumpet player, and he practiced three four hours a day,
Speaker 5: and they didn't communicate well with each other, and I
Speaker 5: was not allowed to have music lessons because my mother said,
Speaker 5: I will never allow my son to do to another
Speaker 5: woman what your father did to me. Very happy home,
Speaker 5: I noodled the instruments when nobody was home. And I
Speaker 5: don't know if there would have been a different path
Speaker 5: had I been. I probably wasn't disciplined enough to be
Speaker 5: a musician, so I ended up often writing about music
Speaker 5: and writing musicals, and every time I do a musical,
Speaker 5: the musical arrangers and the pianists everything. Just you're the
Speaker 5: only book writer who understands music. And I said, why
Speaker 5: would somebody write the book to musical if they didn't
Speaker 5: understand music? And there's this long pause, I'll say, I
Speaker 5: love working with the piano players and the arrangers and
Speaker 5: the compos and just trying to figure out interstitially, where
Speaker 5: to place lines, How much time do you need? It
Speaker 5: sounded like you wanted to go another chorus? Would it
Speaker 5: help to have a little more to me? It's as
Speaker 5: close as I get to being a musician, and I
Speaker 5: really enjoy one of the things I enjoy more than anything,
Speaker 5: just being in the rehearsal room with these beautiful Broadway voices.
Speaker 5: And it begins with justin piano played these amazing piano players,
Speaker 5: and then it expands as the musical gets closer to
Speaker 5: whatever fate awaits it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: You ended up going to school for communications and journalism,
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 5: Communications was the West Coast term for journalism, which you know,
Speaker 5: I wanted to be a sports writer because evidently I
Speaker 5: was never going to be an athlete, and I grew
Speaker 5: up reading all these great New York writers or were
Speaker 5: a columnists like Timmy Breslin started out as a sports
Speaker 5: writer than Red Smith and all of these guys. I
Speaker 5: didn't learn to read until I started reading sports pages.
Speaker 5: I was one of those kids people were whispering about.
Speaker 5: And then I started to follow baseball teams, and then
Speaker 5: the Knicks, and then I was I wanted to be
Speaker 5: a sports writer, and then for a while I wanted
Speaker 5: to be a stand up comic. I actually did stand
Speaker 5: up comedy at a club where Lou Black was the MC,
Speaker 5: and I went on and Lou Black wanted to be
Speaker 5: a playwright, and I wanted to be a stand up comic.
Speaker 5: This is the mid eighties, and life takes you where
Speaker 5: it takes you.
Speaker 1: Tell me about some of those early scripts that you
Speaker 1: had right because you got in with the Kaufman Brothers
Speaker 1: and working with like the early days of trauma.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the trauma as I used to call it liver
Speaker 5: In case people are wondering, how do you get your
Speaker 5: career breaks. I had an apartments share in an upper
Speaker 5: West side building. I had what was used to be
Speaker 5: called the maid's room off the kitchen. I paid one
Speaker 5: hundred and twenty five bucks a month to rent it,
Speaker 5: and there were three kind of rich kids in the
Speaker 5: bigger rooms, and I had like this little Cinderella like room.
Speaker 5: And there was a guy in the building who I'd
Speaker 5: run into in the hallway, and his name was Charlie Kaufman,
Speaker 5: not the favorite Charlie Kaufman, but Lloyd Kaufman's brothers. One
Speaker 5: day we were talking and he said, you're right right.
Speaker 5: I go heah, he goes do you like horror movies?
Speaker 5: At that point I booked any job. I had to
Speaker 5: make six hundred dollars a month to live. So you
Speaker 5: could ask me, do I like romance novels? Do I
Speaker 5: like horror movies? Do I like corporate speeches? It didn't matter.
Speaker 5: I would say yeah, I loved them. So I said yeah,
Speaker 5: I love them. And he said we may need to
Speaker 5: write a treatment. I have these Swedish investors looking to
Speaker 5: hide money for tax reasons. And I said sure, and
Speaker 5: I went to Times Square. I was not a fan
Speaker 5: of horror movies. I didn't like them at all, and
Speaker 5: I watched in those days there were all those double
Speaker 5: features in Times Square, and I did. I probably saw
Speaker 5: eighteen horror movies in the course of a weekend in
Speaker 5: the time with the Times Square audience, which, first of all,
Speaker 5: you're taking your life in your hands in those days.
Speaker 5: Second of all, anytime there's a flaw on the script,
Speaker 5: which is often they start saying things like get in
Speaker 5: the car, bitch, get in the car, like they point
Speaker 5: out the holes. And then I had the joy of
Speaker 5: seeing my own horror movie at one of those theaters,
Speaker 5: and it was the same. I made the same mistakes.
Speaker 5: I wrote this treatment for Charles for six hundred dollars.
Speaker 5: He had the rights to He knew he could shoot
Speaker 5: it in an abandoned summer camp in the Delaware Water Gap,
Speaker 5: so we needed the girls to go on a camping trip,
Speaker 5: and bad things happen. We had one day in the
Speaker 5: city before the Unions found us, and then we had
Speaker 5: all the time and I didn't know anything about the woods.
Speaker 5: I'd never gone camp. I was not a I was
Speaker 5: a city kid, so I was like, what can happen
Speaker 5: to the Anyway, we filled up a treatment and he
Speaker 5: said I'll call you if they want the screenplay, and
Speaker 5: I was like, okay, there's six hundred bucks. And he
Speaker 5: called about six weeks later and he goes the Swedes
Speaker 5: like it. They're ready to go to screenplay so I
Speaker 5: sat with him in his apartment, which was nicer than mine,
Speaker 5: but not that nice. He would lie on a couch
Speaker 5: with his head on a pillow, and I sat at
Speaker 5: the typewriter, and he would say, so what comes next?
Speaker 5: So what comes next? Which is actually great in terms
Speaker 5: of what if this happens? He sum up with sudden.
Speaker 5: They say, yeah, that works. So we wrote a screenplay
Speaker 5: and I was allowed to do anything. I had probably
Speaker 5: more autistic freedom there than I've had since. I named
Speaker 5: the two psychopathic brothers, Ike and Adley. I said the
Speaker 5: mom was a big fan of elections, and we did
Speaker 5: all kinds of crap culture references and he said, this
Speaker 5: is gets made. I'll give you a call and I said, okay.
Speaker 5: I thought this is never going to get made. Nothing
Speaker 5: ever gets made. And they called about eight weeks later
Speaker 5: and he said, we're going to start shooting. I want
Speaker 5: you to be on set because some of these actors
Speaker 5: may not be good at saying two sentences together, so
Speaker 5: you may have to make changes, he said, but I
Speaker 5: can't afford you to have you on set just writing,
Speaker 5: so you're going to boom the movie. I'm the rare writer.
Speaker 5: Boommn hyphen it, and I boomed Mother's Day. There's one
Speaker 5: shot in the movie where you see my fishpool fully
Speaker 5: extended and my entire body in the shot, which I
Speaker 5: don't blame myself for. I feel like somebody should have
Speaker 5: caught that, but it's in the movie. It's become sort
Speaker 5: of this weird cult thing of late, but it's Charles
Speaker 5: got stuck because the certain international markets wanted a lot
Speaker 5: of blood in it, and blood was expensive to use
Speaker 5: in those days, so we had the PA's were below
Speaker 5: the stabbing, soaking it up with sponges and pouring it
Speaker 5: back in the buckets today really low budget. Had he
Speaker 5: not drenched it in blood, it might have been more
Speaker 5: well received here. That was the first screenplay I think
Speaker 5: I ever wrote, and it got made and I got
Speaker 5: twelve hundred bucks. I don't mean to brag. I'm still
Speaker 5: friends with Charles to this day. In those days, I
Speaker 5: booked whatever weird jobs from whatever directors who were on
Speaker 5: a downward slide and were trying to get a screen
Speaker 5: These guys couldn't necessarily write on their own, but they
Speaker 5: knew a lot about I worked with this Italian director
Speaker 5: and I learned so much from him about structure and story.
Speaker 5: Nothing that ever got made with him. His name was E. G. Polidoro,
Speaker 5: and it came to the States after middling success in Italy,
Speaker 5: thinking he'd be the next guy. He came too late
Speaker 5: in his life then, But again he would say what
Speaker 5: was next? Anytime we got lost, he would say, which
Speaker 5: was all the time, he would say, no, we are lost,
Speaker 5: go back. What was the original idea? What was the premise?
Speaker 5: If you remember the premise, you can always find your way.
Speaker 5: And there were these like things that these guys knew,
Speaker 5: not from film courses or whatever, but from breaking hundreds
Speaker 5: of stories over the years. It were if you got
Speaker 5: past their other insensitivities. They were interesting guys. They were
Speaker 5: not world beaters, but I think it was formative for me.
Speaker 1: You actually worked on on a movie that we covered
Speaker 1: a few years ago, and that I wrote about a
Speaker 1: few years prior to that, because I wrote a whole
Speaker 1: article about talking genitals films. Can you tell me about
Speaker 1: your experience on me and him?
Speaker 5: Yes, they're talking. Jenital was on there. That was another
Speaker 5: one of these. That's one of those stories. When I
Speaker 5: finished the first rapt of the screenplay and it got
Speaker 5: passed around, people told me, I'd written the next TUTSI
Speaker 5: and I would never have to worry about work again.
Speaker 5: And anytime I've heard that in my life, it's followed
Speaker 5: by about two to three years of complete unemployment. Again,
Speaker 5: that was a fluke. In this apartment that I shared
Speaker 5: with those same three guys, one of the guys had
Speaker 5: a sister who had a friend from Germany come. There
Speaker 5: were like just lots of people staying in the apartment.
Speaker 5: And one morning I woke up and there was this
Speaker 5: naked German couple walking across the living room making with
Speaker 5: my with my coffee. And she was Doris Dorri, who
Speaker 5: was a German short story writer and film director. She
Speaker 5: had not yet had her big hit. She had a
Speaker 5: big German comedy hit, if He Forgives the contradiction in
Speaker 5: Terms and the years later, So I met her and
Speaker 5: so so I liked her. We got along great, and
Speaker 5: then she was approached to adapt an Italian political didactic
Speaker 5: novel called in English Me and Him, about a guy
Speaker 5: who's packer starts to talk to him on his thirty
Speaker 5: fifth birthday. But it was really also about the battle
Speaker 5: of socialism versus communism versus class capitalist. It was and
Speaker 5: I speak Italian. It was impenetrable in either language. It
Speaker 5: was really I think it was the premise that the
Speaker 5: guy bought and then they had nothing. So I created
Speaker 5: a thirty five year old married guy who begins to
Speaker 5: act out. There was great possibility of humor. Unfortunately, was
Speaker 5: produced by Barrent Eichinger, who is had just by chance
Speaker 5: I'd known Robin Williams through some people and he heard
Speaker 5: about the movie. He's you're the guy who wrote the
Speaker 5: Penis movie. I want to play the part of the Penis.
Speaker 5: I was like, oh, my life is about to change,
Speaker 5: and I bring a bootleg copy of Robin Williams Live
Speaker 5: at Carnegie Hall. I guess there's something to Barrent Eichinger,
Speaker 5: who watches about five minutes if it, turns it off
Speaker 5: and goes flng. There is one thing of hits, I'm
Speaker 5: as shilling you now is funny. This man will never
Speaker 5: be so. Robin Williams as the improvisational voice of the
Speaker 5: Penis would have made that movie very different from what
Speaker 5: we ended up with. And then Doris, as often as
Speaker 5: the case, Doris's boyfriend was the DP and there was
Speaker 5: a producer. Anyway, she breaks up with the DPY and
Speaker 5: can go. Somehow, she and her new boyfriend did a rewrite,
Speaker 5: mercilessly stomping out virtually every joke in the script, turning
Speaker 5: it more into again a European tretise about politics and
Speaker 5: economic class struggle, and which is not always the funniest stuff.
Speaker 5: I went to set a few times. They shot in
Speaker 5: New York, but in such a way that New York
Speaker 5: looked like Munich. I don't know how they pull it.
Speaker 5: It went from being this movie that was going to
Speaker 5: change my life to a movie that did very well
Speaker 5: in Germany but died pretty much everywhere else. Eventually I
Speaker 5: got them Mark linn Baker to voice the Penis Mark
Speaker 5: perfect Strangers lin Baker, who's an old friend. But if
Speaker 5: you try to trace the after my career, it's almost
Speaker 5: none of it makes any sense at all. And a
Speaker 5: lot of it is like a naked German couple walking
Speaker 5: across my living room. And that's how I got to
Speaker 5: do Me and Him five years later. There's no planning
Speaker 5: going on.
Speaker 1: So how do you know Jeff Canoe or is he
Speaker 1: the one that brought you in on Worshowski or how
Speaker 1: did you get that gig?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Okay, that was a Weird One and Jof's a
Speaker 5: nice guy. I enjoyed his company as the Titanic sink.
Speaker 5: So I was in New York. Is this like nineteen ninety?
Speaker 5: I think it really comes out of ninety one, and
Speaker 5: it's nineteen ninety And I had an agent at that time,
Speaker 5: and I would get there was a guy at Hollywood Pictures.
Speaker 5: Disney at this point was going to take over the world,
Speaker 5: and they kept creating new film divisions that were going
Speaker 5: to put out Each film division was going to put
Speaker 5: out thirty films a year. And there was a guy
Speaker 5: at Hollywood Pictures. Again, a guy I had who was
Speaker 5: two grades above me in high school run into on
Speaker 5: fifty seven Street Ones. He'd put me up for this movie.
Speaker 5: A number of writers had been on it already and
Speaker 5: shooting was about to begin. And my actual take on
Speaker 5: it is that the word was out in Hollywood this
Speaker 5: was a job that would be thankless impossible and horrible,
Speaker 5: and that they couldn't get a legitimate LA screenwriter to
Speaker 5: do it, and in desperation, who will take the job.
Speaker 5: I was in New York. I never spent time in LA,
Speaker 5: so I was not part of any world. I didn't
Speaker 5: know enough to notice say no to it, I think
Speaker 5: was how it happened. There was like a weekly rate
Speaker 5: that I'd never seen in my life that I think
Speaker 5: they thought they got me cheap. There was just such
Speaker 5: a gap between my New York life. My memory is
Speaker 5: it was twenty five thousand dollars a week, which to
Speaker 5: this day seems like a lot of money, but in
Speaker 5: nineteen ninety that was two weeks, was more than I
Speaker 5: was making in a year. Most yeah, that was like
Speaker 5: are you yeah sure, I don't care. I'll say whatever
Speaker 5: it is. And as it happens, it was based on
Speaker 5: these novels, and I knew the novels, and I had
Speaker 5: been a big detective reader who hadn't gone through that
Speaker 5: noir stage. Knew I knew a lot about that. It
Speaker 5: was not like asking me to do a show about
Speaker 5: some obscure era in British monarchy or something that I
Speaker 5: don't This was in my wheelhouse. There were a lot
Speaker 5: of meetings, and this is pre zoom, but these a
Speaker 5: lot of Hollywood. There were I would say there were
Speaker 5: more cooks on this than anything I've done other than
Speaker 5: Network TV. There were just and I got there and
Speaker 5: the script was it was a patchwork quilt of different drafts,
Speaker 5: and people liked this piece, and this was in and
Speaker 5: it was there was no there was no flow or
Speaker 5: shape to it. And I've flown out to LA and
Speaker 5: there was a big conference table and I said, I
Speaker 5: just got a couple of questions. When everybody gets in
Speaker 5: the car at some point, they drive to a grain
Speaker 5: silo and the grain silo explodes on purpose and almost
Speaker 5: kills them. They go, yeah, that's great, that's great, And
Speaker 5: I go, why do they get in the car and
Speaker 5: drive to the grain silo? And there's this pause and
Speaker 5: they go, we have permission to blow up a grain silo?
Speaker 5: And I go, no, I get that, that's totally clear.
Speaker 5: That that makes some sense to me. But what prompts
Speaker 5: our characters to get in the car and drive to
Speaker 5: a grain silo in the middle of nowhere late at night?
Speaker 5: And they go, it can be in the day. I go, okay,
Speaker 5: either way, why are they going? They have permission to
Speaker 5: grow up a grain silo? So everybody just drove there.
Speaker 5: But there was no way the script was filled with
Speaker 5: things like that. It was and I don't call that
Speaker 5: out on any of the writers. I think it's what
Speaker 5: happens when I don't know what number writer I was.
Speaker 5: I know that there are more people who work down
Speaker 5: with them names on the script. There was an arbitrations
Speaker 5: are always ugly with the Writers Guild, but there was
Speaker 5: an arbitration afterward. But I think I was the one
Speaker 5: who and I think Jeff Canoe would say this, I
Speaker 5: was probably the one who pulled it together and made
Speaker 5: it coherent, which is something I've done on a lot
Speaker 5: of projects in my life. I was raised to fix
Speaker 5: things in certain ways. I tried to pull it together.
Speaker 5: There were a lot of notes. Katzenberg was giving notes,
Speaker 5: and he was at that point the most powerful man
Speaker 5: in Hollywood, but he was micromanaging this among eighty other things.
Speaker 5: There were some very nice people involved, but there was
Speaker 5: no I said, I don't think the grain style makes sense.
Speaker 5: So then they ended up blowing up a boat which
Speaker 5: they had for mission to blow up, and so that
Speaker 5: was exciting and it made more sense to me. At
Speaker 5: least they were in Chicago. There was a reason to
Speaker 5: go near water in the city of Chicago. It sort
Speaker 5: of made some sense as opposed to getting in a
Speaker 5: car and driving an hour and twenty minutes to an
Speaker 5: empty Grain silo every day for the three maybe I
Speaker 5: was there from I went, I got to live in
Speaker 5: a nice hotel in Chicago. For me, it was like
Speaker 5: being dropkicked into Hollywood. But every day there would be
Speaker 5: notes from Katzenberg, from the Hollywood Pictures team, from a
Speaker 5: variety of producers, from the director, from Kathleen Turner about
Speaker 5: the scenes that were going to shoot the next day,
Speaker 5: and and the notes nobody was coordinating them. They contradicted
Speaker 5: each other, they conflicted with each other, and I would say,
Speaker 5: here's a version of the scene the way Jeffrey Katzenberg
Speaker 5: wanted it. Here's a version of the scene the way
Speaker 5: two execs that Hollywood Pictures wanted it. Here's a version
Speaker 5: of the scene the way that third exactly Hollywood Pictures
Speaker 5: wanted it. Here's Appling Turner version. Here's the director, not
Speaker 5: that anybody cares what he thinks. And I said, and
Speaker 5: then I tried to think, all of you guys are
Speaker 5: focusing on different things. Maybe the prescriptions are wrong, and
Speaker 5: maybe the diagnosis is probably not right, but it may
Speaker 5: something is wrong with these scenes. So here's my attempt
Speaker 5: to just try to make the scene work with a
Speaker 5: three act structure. To the scene and with characterizations, and
Speaker 5: it's also if you'll notice much shorter than all that.
Speaker 5: Then I would say, and here's a scene that incorporates
Speaker 5: all of your notes, which like literally at the door,
Speaker 5: Kathleen Turner wanted to put your lips together and blow
Speaker 5: sort of lying like an exit line that showed she
Speaker 5: was sassy. But they all had different ideas for what
Speaker 5: the exit line are. She actually has seven lines at
Speaker 5: the door, so we should probably choose one, and they said,
Speaker 5: du all seven, we'll edit it later. It was completely insane.
Speaker 5: I rather enjoyed it, but it was trying to get
Speaker 5: something to cohere with unbelievable amounts of incoming conflicting messages,
Speaker 5: and they were doing that. Jeff was being tortured by them.
Speaker 5: They'd look at the dailies and they'd say, tomorrow, go
Speaker 5: back and shoot Jay Saunders with this sized lens, micromanaging,
Speaker 5: not script. But they actually this was the delusion they
Speaker 5: were under the time. They thought they were really the
Speaker 5: filmmakers and the directors of the movie and the writers
Speaker 5: of the movie, and we were sort of assembly and
Speaker 5: they could dictate. They really were under the impression of
Speaker 5: those days that they knew how they knew better how
Speaker 5: to make a movie from I guess two thousand miles
Speaker 5: away than the filmmakers, and that they could micro manage it.
Speaker 5: It was a corporate belief at the time at Disney
Speaker 5: and Hire Pictures. Didn't last very long, but it was
Speaker 5: It's that thing of overexpanding and getting over ambitious, and
Speaker 5: you can't direct a movie from two thousand miles away,
Speaker 5: you can't write a movie from two thousand miles away.
Speaker 5: We were all aware, I think that we were on
Speaker 5: a sinking ship. That the movie came out coherent is
Speaker 5: slightly a miracle, and they just wanted options in the
Speaker 5: editing room. Options. Jay Saunders and I still run into
Speaker 5: each other in New York and he was one of
Speaker 5: the principles in the movie. I think he was number
Speaker 5: two on the call sheet or something like that. Very
Speaker 5: good guy, really good actor, And we talk about it
Speaker 5: when I ran in him some thing in May of
Speaker 5: this year, and we still talk about it because it
Speaker 5: was like an experience to survive. We were all aware
Speaker 5: that it was insane while it was going on. No
Speaker 5: one was really acting out. Kathleen had good days and
Speaker 5: bad days, but nobody was. It was all just an
Speaker 5: attempt to shoot something that wasn't ready to shoot with
Speaker 5: a director who's probably wasn't right for it. I remember
Speaker 5: I met him. I said, I know what everybody else wants.
Speaker 5: What do you want this film to be? What's it
Speaker 5: about to you? And said to me, Kathleen Turner, she's
Speaker 5: running around with a gun and she's got great legs.
Speaker 5: And I was like, Okay, that's the poster. He kept saying.
Speaker 5: So they knew what the poster was, and they never
Speaker 5: knew what the story was. And it wasn't based on
Speaker 5: one Wasshovski novel. It was based on four novels. They
Speaker 5: had the rights to four novels, so instead of doing
Speaker 5: one novel at a time, they cut and pasted from
Speaker 5: three or four different I felt bad for Sarah. She
Speaker 5: wrote some really good books. The thought of the time
Speaker 5: was this was going to be a major franchise, that
Speaker 5: it would be one Kathleen Turner Watshowskin movie after another
Speaker 5: after another, like Raiders of the Lost Ark or something,
Speaker 5: you know, except that they didn't approach it in any
Speaker 5: sensible way, And so I enjoyed it and stayed in
Speaker 5: touch with a number of people. The guy who was
Speaker 5: production manager on that. When I got my first TV
Speaker 5: job in New York. He ended up he was the first.
Speaker 5: He was the production manager on that. I'm like, didn't
Speaker 5: you hurt Warshawski ten years ago? And he goes, oh, brother,
Speaker 5: that's a long story. John Roman was his name. He
Speaker 5: was great. I remember we were in Jeff Canoe's hotel
Speaker 5: room one Saturday night and he was getting just clobbered
Speaker 5: by the West Coast and we all knew it and
Speaker 5: we felt bad and having to reshoot things because they
Speaker 5: wanted a different Can you change the color of the
Speaker 5: wall behind Mike in this next shot in the it's like, yeah, okay.
Speaker 5: We were in his hotel room and Jeff had been
Speaker 5: an editor more than end. You can see he has
Speaker 5: a He directs in the style of an editor who
Speaker 5: became a director. It cuts really well, and people aren't
Speaker 5: moving a lot, because that makes it harder to you know,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of a group of three and one person,
Speaker 5: but they don't change places to off, but there's not
Speaker 5: a lot of dosey doing It's it cuts easily, but
Speaker 5: there's not a lot of movement to the characters. The
Speaker 5: characters tend to be stagnant. So we were watching Saray
Speaker 5: at Live and he'd ordered some nice wine. We were
Speaker 5: just trying to unwind after another week of just being
Speaker 5: clobbered and a sketch comes on SNL called what were
Speaker 5: you thinking? And it's Herbie Villain. Suez. Villain said, we
Speaker 5: were on the one of the most successful shows of
Speaker 5: all time and he left it to launch a movie career.
Speaker 5: What were you if? The notion was actors who were
Speaker 5: lucky to have these great jobs, who've made horrible choices
Speaker 5: and then they go, Shelley Long, you were on Sheers,
Speaker 5: the most successful sitcom in the of the decade, and
Speaker 5: you left it to do Troop Beverly Hills. What were
Speaker 5: you think? And of course Jeff had directed Troop Bearefully
Speaker 5: it was when it rains, it pours, and it was
Speaker 5: pouring every day on the set of Worshowski, and it
Speaker 5: was mostly I think this moment in time when Disney
Speaker 5: thought they could put out more movies by themselves than
Speaker 5: all other studios put together, and they created I think
Speaker 5: Hollywood Films was the third division that they had going
Speaker 5: at the time, and they were micromanaging poorly. After about
Speaker 5: eleven weeks after about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, my
Speaker 5: mother took ill and there was I had an assistant
Speaker 5: for the first time in my life, and he had
Speaker 5: a like a typewriter that could he raise two lines
Speaker 5: by hisself, which was like this astounding to me. And
Speaker 5: I felt bad for this kid because I was the
Speaker 5: amount of stuff I was generating that he then had
Speaker 5: to He was working harder than I was, yes, and
Speaker 5: it was a very nice kid, very sardonic. And my
Speaker 5: mom got diagnosed with cancer and I thought I probably
Speaker 5: said the job was going on and it was going
Speaker 5: to be four weeks in LA and I just said, guys,
Speaker 5: I think I'm done, Like what about this? I said,
Speaker 5: the kid can do it. It's just dictation at this point,
Speaker 5: but I said, just dictate to him instead of telling
Speaker 5: me you'll be And I think that's what they did.
Speaker 5: So I was replaced by like a twenty three year
Speaker 5: old kid who had good had had him. I don't
Speaker 5: even know if it was a computer. It was like
Speaker 5: k pro. I don't know what was called, but it
Speaker 5: was it could erase two lines, which was incredible. And
Speaker 5: that was the end of my tenure there. It's not
Speaker 5: really a golden age of Hollywood story. But it was
Speaker 5: also for me a great learning experience because I'd never
Speaker 5: been on Me and Him was not a Hollywood set,
Speaker 5: that was just handmade filmmaking. And I had another flop
Speaker 5: called Deer God. I don't know which came for us,
Speaker 5: but I was not. That was another one with nine
Speaker 5: riders and you get replaced. May come later, but it
Speaker 5: was the first time really seeing how the sausage gets
Speaker 5: made in a factory rife with health violations. And Kathleen
Speaker 5: didn't want to be there. I think she felt she
Speaker 5: signed on for something other than what she was. I
Speaker 5: think she was correct in assuming that she deserved better,
Speaker 5: and she may have gone on a slightly self destructive
Speaker 5: way during that. No one could blame anyone for any
Speaker 5: acting out that occurred on a set like that, and
Speaker 5: it was just fascinating to me that the crew knew
Speaker 5: this was not going to be something that looks great
Speaker 5: on their resume, but that they were going to get
Speaker 5: extra weeks because of the amount of reshe said, kept coming,
Speaker 5: and the spigot, the Hollywood Pictures spigot, was open. I
Speaker 5: got a letter from one guy afterward who was high
Speaker 5: up in the ranks of Hollywood Pictures, but was always
Speaker 5: respectful to me. Some of them were not some of
Speaker 5: them were really disdainful, but he was quite respectful. And
Speaker 5: I wrote him and he wrote back, I said, my
Speaker 5: mom took her. I said, also, you were not like
Speaker 5: some of the others, but it was the amount of
Speaker 5: abuse or disdain was a little hard to handle. And
Speaker 5: he said, Warren, and I understand. I just remember these words.
Speaker 5: Every day I eat more shit than you can imagine
Speaker 5: here and he maybe the head of Hollywood Pictures, but
Speaker 5: it just stayed with me. He I believe he left
Speaker 5: Hollywood and became a doctor, became an emergency room doctor.
Speaker 5: I believe that's the story I heard about it.
Speaker 16: But he was a decent human being trapped in this
Speaker 16: machine and the every day I eat more shit than
Speaker 16: you can imagine, And it was very articulate.
Speaker 5: Who's not a coarse man. That's where Disney was at
Speaker 5: the height of the narcissistic balloon before Pops gets bigger
Speaker 5: and bigger. So I don't know, I haven't seen the movie.
Speaker 5: How does it hold up.
Speaker 1: It's decent, it's not great, and you just feel while
Speaker 1: you're watching it like this probably could have been a
Speaker 1: lot better.
Speaker 5: That was the heartbreak to me. Those novels had an
Speaker 5: interesting character at the center of them. Kathleen is capable
Speaker 5: of good words. Those novels deserved a better fate. I
Speaker 5: don't think anyone's ever made a Worshowski movie again. They
Speaker 5: didn't just kill the movie, they killed the franchise.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think they ended up doing a BBC audio
Speaker 1: series with Kathleen reprising v I. But yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: Disney still owns all the visual rights to everything.
Speaker 5: They should try again, but get somebody who can direct
Speaker 5: a good episode of criminal intent and get a good
Speaker 5: writer in and Just. They weren't the most complicated plots
Speaker 5: of storylines, but there was. She also had moral outrage
Speaker 5: about certain issues, and that was something that was not
Speaker 5: appealing to Disney at the time. The novels were political.
Speaker 5: I remember there was one with a subplot about an
Speaker 5: abortion clinic being by something, and that was like a
Speaker 5: third rail. I was instructed, as this's often the case
Speaker 5: from corporate America. I was instructed not to do anything political.
Speaker 5: You'll hear that today in any la writing job. That's
Speaker 5: my success story. I have only fond memories of ten
Speaker 5: weeks of staying in a hotel in Chicago. I went
Speaker 5: to my first Starbucks. It was very exciting. I'd never
Speaker 5: be they had one and I'd never been to one,
Speaker 5: and I walked in. I was like, what is this? Yeah,
Speaker 5: though I think it was their second city, presumably Weirdly,
Speaker 5: Jeff Canoe now lives around the block from my office,
Speaker 5: and I have run into him on the street in
Speaker 5: recent years. Have you spoken to him?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, What did he have to say? I'd love to know.
Speaker 1: He definitely did not have the greatest time in the world.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they were tough on him, but nobody knew what Again,
Speaker 5: go back to what the Italian guy told me, what's
Speaker 5: the movie about? Nobody knew what the movie was about.
Speaker 5: They all knew what was what the poster was. I
Speaker 5: don't think you should try to write a movie based
Speaker 5: on a poster. You should have a beginning, middle, and
Speaker 5: an end, and you should have a character finding out
Speaker 5: something about herself in the process of breaking this crime.
Speaker 5: And none of this was what they were going for.
Speaker 5: I don't know if he directed much again after that.
Speaker 1: It took a long time for him to get another
Speaker 1: directing gig. We talked about him being in movie jail
Speaker 1: for quite a while.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's like movie prison for writers.
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
Speaker 5: I did not go to movie prison for I've gone
Speaker 5: to movie prison for other jobs. I did not go
Speaker 5: to movie prison for this because I jobbed in and
Speaker 5: jobbed out. But somebody once told me, no writer in
Speaker 5: movie prison thinks he's thinks he's guilty of the crime
Speaker 5: he's been accused of.
Speaker 1: I spoke with two of the other writers as well
Speaker 1: as Sarah Peretzky, and yeah, one of the writers was
Speaker 1: it was like his very first gig that he ever had.
Speaker 5: This happened to me the other in that I guess
Speaker 5: in this point I was the well paid writer. But
Speaker 5: like four years earlier, I was doing an adaptation of
Speaker 5: slaughter House five and I got my usual six hundred
Speaker 5: or eleven hundred dollars fee to write it, and then
Speaker 5: I was replaced by Franken and Davis, who got eighty
Speaker 5: thousand dollars to destroy us. What that's how that goes?
Speaker 5: Never got what it was.
Speaker 1: He got paid more to come in at the very
Speaker 1: last minute, because apparently Disney or Hollywood Pictures was like, oh,
Speaker 1: we need a voiceover to explain all this stuff. So
Speaker 1: they hired him, they hired the guy that rewrote, they
Speaker 1: hired somebody else, and I'm not sure if you were
Speaker 1: in that.
Speaker 5: Of course they hired four writers simultaneously. Of course they did,
Speaker 5: because I had forgotten about that. I think later in
Speaker 5: the process I got called back in to do some
Speaker 5: voice that I had completely forgotten about that because it's
Speaker 5: not really one of those remarkable things. But yes I was.
Speaker 5: I think I was in so that would be here's
Speaker 5: a tell. You have four different writers at the same
Speaker 5: That was the thing. Even while I was doing the rewrites,
Speaker 5: occasionally rewrite, other rewrites were coming in and I would
Speaker 5: then rewrite the other rewrite, and I was like, where
Speaker 5: did this come from? And nobody knew. I feel bad
Speaker 5: for Sarah Perevsky and Jeff deserved better, although at that
Speaker 5: time in his career, up until that, he was living
Speaker 5: a good life. But occasionally, if I'm channel surfing at night,
Speaker 5: I'll see some pieces of a film and I'll know
Speaker 5: it's a canoe direction, just by the certain approach he
Speaker 5: has to fill lakers, the titles of being what could
Speaker 5: have been? Or how to destroy a franchise through hupriss
Speaker 5: death by executive Hubris.
Speaker 1: You know it's scarios how you got involved with television
Speaker 1: because you've been mister Law and Order for a long time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know how. I do know how that happened.
Speaker 5: I'd had a hit Broadway play that won to Tony
Speaker 5: and that changed my life. About two years later, I
Speaker 5: was drowning in elder care. My mother was ill, my
Speaker 5: father was ill, my father's my brother was ill, and
Speaker 5: I was on the hook for all of the go
Speaker 5: to the Medicare car doesn't swipe one day and there
Speaker 5: they have to have that. I was just hemorrhaging money,
Speaker 5: which is not unusual with medical care in our society.
Speaker 5: And and I ran again. I ran into Teresa Reebeck
Speaker 5: on the street. Teresa is a wonderful writer, playwright who
Speaker 5: I think at the time was known as crime chick
Speaker 5: until I was going through a bit of a time.
Speaker 5: She said, would you ever consider TV writing? I was like,
Speaker 5: how do you do that? I wasn't really up on
Speaker 5: television at all. She said, Law and Order. I'm working
Speaker 5: on a new Law and Order. I literally I said,
Speaker 5: what channel is it on and where does it shoot?
Speaker 5: That's how much I knew about the franchise. I had
Speaker 5: never watched one. I don't think I've watched any hour dramas.
Speaker 5: I had just always been a sitcom guy. If anything,
Speaker 5: she says, it shoots. We were on twenty second and ten.
Speaker 5: She said, it shoots two blocks from here. And this
Speaker 5: is the first year was thirteen episodes, and they started
Speaker 5: the second year. They want one more writer in New York.
Speaker 5: I didn't think I knew what a showrunner was. I said,
Speaker 5: tell the head writer, I'm a big fan of the shows.
Speaker 5: And then I did the same thing I did with
Speaker 5: the horror movies. I went home and I watched I
Speaker 5: called William Morris, my agents and the somebohow. I got
Speaker 5: thirteen video cassettes of the first season and every script,
Speaker 5: and I watched them straight through. And I went in
Speaker 5: and I thought, okay, it seems to be a commercial.
Speaker 5: I didn't know what a teaser was, but it seemed
Speaker 5: like there was this thing at the beginning with broken
Speaker 5: point of view and then four commercial breaks. And I
Speaker 5: came in and pitched a whole story to the guy.
Speaker 5: I think he liked me because I had a Tony
Speaker 5: Award and that looked classy to him. But I also
Speaker 5: pitched a cohering story, and I was talking to him
Speaker 5: about the background of his lead Detective Gore, and I said,
Speaker 5: to be this hyper vigilance, he must come from a
Speaker 5: home where he grew up, none of the stuff he'd
Speaker 5: ever thought about it all. I stumbled my way into TV.
Speaker 5: I called my agent and said, I think this guy
Speaker 5: wants to hire me, and they said he can't do
Speaker 5: TV or a Tony Award winning playwright. My lawyer fired me,
Speaker 5: which was like save the bullet. I don't know it was.
Speaker 5: I mean, they were like, what are you doing? And
Speaker 5: I had been David Chase had been flirting with me
Speaker 5: for three years to go on to Sopranos, but he'd
Speaker 5: never pulled the trigger. He discovered Edie Falco in my
Speaker 5: play met with him, and I'm half Italian American, and
Speaker 5: I do understand that the world of that' show pretty
Speaker 5: well well. Just then, after I got hired for criminal intent,
Speaker 5: he found out I was hired, and he called and
Speaker 5: said I'd like to hire I said, I just took
Speaker 5: a job, and he goes, have you signed a deal yet?
Speaker 5: I said no, but I told him I was doing it.
Speaker 5: That would be to this thing. I wonder, what would
Speaker 5: have happened if I'd gone with him. As it turns out,
Speaker 5: I became solvent in the world of law and order,
Speaker 5: and I figured out how to write it. But it
Speaker 5: was like learning how to write with my left hand
Speaker 5: in a foreign language. I have always had to figure
Speaker 5: out how to do something if I got the job,
Speaker 5: So I just figured it out. But anyway, again TV,
Speaker 5: I ran into somebody on the street. It's a good
Speaker 5: thing I walk a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have to say Goren was probably the most
Speaker 1: interesting character on all of those shows put together. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I gave him a mother. We had Rita Moreno, who
Speaker 1: was great. I gave him a serial killer father later.
Speaker 5: I really tried to, but I was really trying to
Speaker 5: retrofit a backstory for this really complicated character that Vince.
Speaker 5: Vince was himself fairly complicated. I don't think Vince could
Speaker 5: do a straight line to save his life. He couldn't
Speaker 5: say good morning, how's the weather without you wondering what
Speaker 5: the fuck's gonna happen next. You had a guy doing that.
Speaker 5: There was so much subtext and sanity everything to what
Speaker 5: he was doing that you just had to try to
Speaker 5: figure out what would explain it and Yes. Most of
Speaker 5: the characters on Law and Order had no characters or
Speaker 5: personalities whatsoever. And I used to get yelled at for
Speaker 5: doing that. I still get yelled at at the wolf
Speaker 5: Rode first character work and until they need character work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I used to love Dinafrio's whole body language, especially when me,
Speaker 1: you'd ask a question, yeah to that whole leaning filt.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he got that from a cop advisor. A cop
Speaker 5: advisor told him a lot of these guys look down,
Speaker 5: so you have to lean over to make eye contact
Speaker 5: with and keep the pressure on him. And it became
Speaker 5: his signature, the Goren lean, we called it. That was
Speaker 5: there four years and then they made me showrunner. Things
Speaker 5: moved quickly in that world. If you could do it.
Speaker 5: They just kept throwing the work, did you, because it's
Speaker 5: hard to plot those it's only an A story. Most
Speaker 5: TV dramas have an A story, a B story, C story,
Speaker 5: and a little D runner some guy in the break
Speaker 5: room upset about a breakup or something. This was one storyline,
Speaker 5: almost no and it's forty five beats in an hour
Speaker 5: or TV commercial filled hour with all these act outs.
Speaker 5: And I didn't like the gratuitousts find a body at
Speaker 5: the end of an act act out. You rely on
Speaker 5: that a lot, But how do you make these twists
Speaker 5: that are so important for the storytelling? How do you
Speaker 5: make them organic? And I sometimes watch those episodes now
Speaker 5: on reruns and I'm like, how did I fucking plot that?
Speaker 5: What was I on? You get into it ahead when
Speaker 5: you're doing them, and they were these master criminals. And
Speaker 5: I learned from that show runner, and no scene should
Speaker 5: anything be easy for your detectives, which was the opposite
Speaker 5: of Lawn Order, where Law and Order you go up
Speaker 5: to someone and say, Mike, did you see a bad
Speaker 5: guy running? Yeah he was? Yeah, I certainly did he did.
Speaker 5: If I did that, the scene would come back with
Speaker 5: a big X through it. You weren't going to tell
Speaker 5: me you saw the guy because you were there to
Speaker 5: cop something that you should have been doing, and your
Speaker 5: wife doesn't know you were there, so you're gonna lie
Speaker 5: to me. But I have to figure out that you're lying.
Speaker 5: If every scene is difficult for the detectives, that makes
Speaker 5: it more interesting to watch and much harder to write.
Speaker 5: Warshowsky had very little of mess.
Speaker 1: Mister light I cannot thank you enough for your time.
Speaker 1: This was so nice talking with very nice to meet you.
Speaker 5: And when it comes out with you drop me an
Speaker 5: email and oh definitely, yeah, my daughters will laugh at me,
Speaker 5: as they always do.
Speaker 1: All Right, we were back and we were talking about
Speaker 1: VR Worshowsky and I don't know if you guys had
Speaker 1: a chance to listen to that audio commeddar Area. I
Speaker 1: think he did. That was amusing. That was very amusing
Speaker 1: to me. Like I felt so bad because first off,
Speaker 1: I had no idea who was going to be talking
Speaker 1: on the commentary because Jeff Canoe doesn't introduce himself. He
Speaker 1: just kind of jumps into it and he starts talking
Speaker 1: about TriStar and all this stuff, and he just goes
Speaker 1: right into it. I didn't know there was another person
Speaker 1: with him for like the longest time until finally this
Speaker 1: guy pipes up. He again doesn't introduce himself, so had
Speaker 1: to go looking and it's Mark Edward Hook or hike
Speaker 1: h e U c K. He was the other guy.
Speaker 1: And Canue was just not happy to have this other
Speaker 1: guy with him. It was so cringey. So many times
Speaker 1: it's like, well, how about we actually talk about this movie?
Speaker 1: You're like, how about we actually talk about something important?
Speaker 9: It felt like he was saying I listened to the
Speaker 9: commentary without watching the film. I just put in the
Speaker 9: headphones and so, you know, just kind of was in
Speaker 9: that liminal space where I'm not sure who's talking or
Speaker 9: what their role is. And it's rare that you hear
Speaker 9: a commentary where you get a little bit of antagonism
Speaker 9: between the speakers. So that was perplexing and engaging. But
Speaker 9: also I think really it speaks to my feelings about
Speaker 9: the film, is that I feel like there's a lot
Speaker 9: of people with something to say about it, and they're
Speaker 9: kind of talking over each other, and this is the
Speaker 9: way that the film is out in the world. You know,
Speaker 9: like this it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
Speaker 9: There's a lot of things that I thought were engaging
Speaker 9: and interesting, but you know, as a whole, it just
Speaker 9: doesn't in the end hold up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I felt like Mark had a really good point
Speaker 1: when it came to the idea of this being told
Speaker 1: like a fairy tale. You know, I mentioned the whole
Speaker 1: thing with the evil mother slash stepmother, you know, the
Speaker 1: little princess who's going to inherit the kingdom and all
Speaker 1: these things, and man o man can you wanted nothing
Speaker 1: to do with that. And then later on in the
Speaker 1: in the commentary, he's basically embracing that and he's just like,
Speaker 1: oh well yeah, like the little girl who's the princess.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, yeah, it was actually a good reading.
Speaker 1: Wasn't completely off base. And we mentioned those red shoes.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, he talks about how they're the
Speaker 1: ruby slippers. Okay, I could kind of see that too,
Speaker 1: and that's what, you know, leads her into this whole
Speaker 1: quote unquote adventure because that's.
Speaker 5: How she means.
Speaker 10: No, he says that they are the ruby slippers, right, yeah,
Speaker 10: oh yeah.
Speaker 1: He's just like no, no, no, it just denies it.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying, like Mark, the other guy was like,
Speaker 1: oh oh so ruby slippers and yeah canoes just like yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, fuck that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, He's like that definitely was not the idea. I mean,
Speaker 10: it makes sense. It's a Disney movie. She's got these
Speaker 10: red shoes. It does kind of start everything going. And
Speaker 10: I know, like you know, with somebody, as someone who
Speaker 10: does a lot of film analysis, sometimes you just kind
Speaker 10: of ignore what the director says because maybe the director
Speaker 10: was doing something unconsciously and didn't even realize it. They
Speaker 10: did choose red shoes, So maybe on a subconscious level,
Speaker 10: it was, you know, thinking of the Wizard of Oz,
Speaker 10: who knows.
Speaker 9: Yeah even yeah, even just at the costume design. It
Speaker 9: seems to me that Canoe is coming from this place
Speaker 9: of just kind of being a studio filmmaker, you know,
Speaker 9: a commerce kind of filmmaker as opposed to an art filmmaker.
Speaker 9: And so he's going to be making decisions based on
Speaker 9: what he can pull off, on what the budget is,
Speaker 9: and you know, and try to come up with something interesting.
Speaker 9: And I feel like this might be something that is
Speaker 9: not as revelant now that we don't have as many
Speaker 9: of those kinds of studio pictures happening. You know, it
Speaker 9: seems like everything has to be a tent pole now
Speaker 9: in a way that it wasn't. Then. I could see
Speaker 9: him having to be kind of led along to seeing
Speaker 9: where the art themes are are showing up in a
Speaker 9: film that he probably really in the time was thinking
Speaker 9: of it as just a job.
Speaker 1: Was somebody like a Sam Fuller. Was he doing these
Speaker 1: as just a job or were they all passion projects?
Speaker 1: Was he thinking of all the things that we see
Speaker 1: in his films and I feel like with somebody like him,
Speaker 1: the answer is yes, that they were all passionate, that
Speaker 1: they he was really thinking about all of these things.
Speaker 1: But then yeah, it's like you think of the whole
Speaker 1: aw tour theory and it's like, well, what was everybody
Speaker 1: that self aware or were there people just taking the
Speaker 1: job doing the This is my job, I make these movies,
Speaker 1: I direct these movies. This is basically commerce to me.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's always fascinating to think about like
Speaker 1: who really was being intentional about things and whose stuff
Speaker 1: is more accidental. I mean, you even think about, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the the hair color of the characters and everything,
Speaker 1: and you have like, you know, Kathleen Turner and kat
Speaker 1: the little girl are both blonde, and then the mom's
Speaker 1: got this kind of crazy red hair and stuff. So
Speaker 1: it's like they belong together because they're both blonde, and
Speaker 1: they look more like mother and daughter than you know,
Speaker 1: page or whatever. The mother character and she dresses in black,
Speaker 1: she looks kind of witchy and all this stuff. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: was that intentional or not? How far does that go?
Speaker 10: Well, that's why I feel like it's very useful to
Speaker 10: be able to say that you can disregard what the
Speaker 10: director does or doesn't say. People do a lot of
Speaker 10: things unintentionally, you know, they might not even realize, you know.
Speaker 10: And I talk about it in my classes where I say,
Speaker 10: you know, the director isn't living in a vacuum, right,
Speaker 10: They're part of the popular culture that we're all living in,
Speaker 10: and so they're going to be responding to it, even
Speaker 10: if they aren't doing it on purpose. So I give
Speaker 10: you permission to read into things and ignore what the
Speaker 10: director says.
Speaker 9: Just a little throwaway thing that I feel like I
Speaker 9: have to say because I am such an advocate of Baltimore.
Speaker 9: In the Wikipedia entry for this, it talks about how
Speaker 9: there was a point where they were intending to set
Speaker 9: this in Baltimore and not Chicago, which puzzles me. I
Speaker 9: haven't really been able to explore that a little bit further.
Speaker 9: But it doesn't make sense because that's it's not where
Speaker 9: the Detective was set in the books, right, she said
Speaker 9: in Chicago, you know, in Chicago in the books. The
Speaker 9: greedy part of me is like, that'd be great to
Speaker 9: have this set in Baltimore. But the question is why,
Speaker 9: and especially you know, like imagine if that had happened,
Speaker 9: and then she still continued to do Serial Mom just
Speaker 9: a couple of years later. What would that be like,
Speaker 9: you know, what would the world be like where we've
Speaker 9: got the Warshawski franchise set in Baltimore and Serial Mom
Speaker 9: is also there.
Speaker 10: Speaking of the Warshowski franchise, I think it's always fascinating
Speaker 10: to me when a studio is so wrong about a movie.
Speaker 10: You know, like if you talk about Mommy Dearest, for instance,
Speaker 10: you know that they originally thought this was going to
Speaker 10: be like this Oscar worthy, serious drama, and they were
Speaker 10: kind of blindsided by the fact that audiences had such
Speaker 10: a you know, camp comedic response to it, and they
Speaker 10: really thought this was going to be a successful movie,
Speaker 10: and they were already in the works planning a sequel.
Speaker 10: And in the sequel, the concept is that she settles
Speaker 10: down to have her own child, which is like so
Speaker 10: incongruous from what v. I. Worshowsky is supposed to represent
Speaker 10: that It's just it's like, why even use the Puresky
Speaker 10: books as like your source material if you're just going
Speaker 10: to go so far, you know, off the plantation or
Speaker 10: whatever the expression is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I said, it's very, very loose when it
Speaker 1: comes to what they take from Deadlock, and it kind
Speaker 1: of again selfishly like you were saying rain for me.
Speaker 1: Parts of the book actually take place at the Sioux
Speaker 1: Locks up in Sioux City, Michigan slash Canada. It's where
Speaker 1: we have the locks I can go through and you know,
Speaker 1: for the shipping lanes and all those things, and like
Speaker 1: I said, Thunder Bay up in Canada and all of
Speaker 1: these things where I was just like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: can picture all of this stuff in my head. So
Speaker 1: as I'm reading the book or listening to the book,
Speaker 1: I'm just like picturing all of these places that I've
Speaker 1: actually been to before, and it's just like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this will be great to see this on film. But
Speaker 1: of course it never leaves Chicago. It's just all in Chicago.
Speaker 1: And so like the shipping, I mean, at the end
Speaker 1: of the movie, the shipping has nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: That's what they figure out. It's like, oh yeah, the
Speaker 1: shipping has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's all
Speaker 1: about this beachfront property that was granted to your waterfront
Speaker 1: property I should say that was granted to the granddaughter
Speaker 1: to cat to the little girl in the movie. And
Speaker 1: so she's the key. She's basically the walking, talking mcguffin
Speaker 1: of this movie. Fuck me. Then, I guess this whole
Speaker 1: thing about shipping stuff just really doesn't matter. I'm glad
Speaker 1: that they don't go into it too much, but you
Speaker 1: also I don't. For me, I don't really get a
Speaker 1: feel for the brothers that much, especially the one brother
Speaker 1: who's not Trumble. I guess his name is Horton. Frederick
Speaker 1: Coffin plays him, who I mostly remember as the I
Speaker 1: think famously for me, he's the cop that Wayne and
Speaker 1: Garthur are making fun of in Wayne's world. And then
Speaker 1: you get the one of the guys, the guy who
Speaker 1: was with the Arenberg who kidnaps her. I think he's
Speaker 1: also in Wayne's world. Like, these are very Chicago actors,
Speaker 1: and I was really glad for that, and I'm glad
Speaker 1: that they embraced the Chicago News. I was actually happy
Speaker 1: this doesn't again take place in the book, but the
Speaker 1: chase on the Chicago River, I was like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this is nice. It's good to actually use the city
Speaker 1: because otherwise, other than like really feeled, we don't see
Speaker 1: a whole lot of the Chicago nests of stuff. I
Speaker 1: don't think he thinks she eats a hot dog, and
Speaker 1: from wonders understand, people in Chicago just live on hot dogs.
Speaker 1: I would hot dogs and deep dish pizza.
Speaker 10: Canoe seem to be very taken with the fact that
Speaker 10: it was in Chicago and seemed to, you know, take
Speaker 10: personal delight in all the real locations that they were
Speaker 10: able to use and everything. So it wasn't like, oh,
Speaker 10: we were just in Chicago because they gave us a
Speaker 10: tax freebait.
Speaker 1: Well, even the house that she lives in that street
Speaker 1: that she's on, and those types of houses very much
Speaker 1: remind me of a friend of mine who lives in Chicago,
Speaker 1: in the house that he lives. And I know that
Speaker 1: the guy in the commentary track Mark is like, Oh,
Speaker 1: she's got this huge apartment. I'm like, they're at Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're pretty good size. But this is not New York City.
Speaker 1: This is a world where you could, well, at this time,
Speaker 1: you still could have a decent sized apartment for not
Speaker 1: that crazy amount of money. This isn't San Francisco either.
Speaker 10: And it doesn't look like a super posh apartment.
Speaker 1: No, it looks dingy as hell.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I was kind of surprised in the commentary where
Speaker 10: he's sort of saying, like, how it seems weird that
Speaker 10: she can afford this apartment, and I was like, wow,
Speaker 10: I did not get that impression.
Speaker 1: Did not look very lavish.
Speaker 10: It goes along with her car, Yeah, and that's.
Speaker 1: One of the big action moments in the book is
Speaker 1: she gets her brakes cut and ends up getting into
Speaker 1: an accident on either ninety four or the like sure
Speaker 1: drive at fifty five or whatever it is, and it's
Speaker 1: like that's really like she gets really fucked up from that,
Speaker 1: Like that really almost takes her out of commission, but
Speaker 1: luckily she has the wherewithal to actually be able to
Speaker 1: survive that. And that's when they really introduced that doctor character,
Speaker 1: who again is just like shows up for three scenes
Speaker 1: and she's kind of out of there, and you really
Speaker 1: get a sense of friendship of those characters. And I understand,
Speaker 1: like a book is a book and a movie's a movie,
Speaker 1: but like just the characterization of these people, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: give me more of their relationship or would that be
Speaker 1: too lesbian if we have two women talk on screen
Speaker 1: for more than five minutes.
Speaker 9: I mean it was nineteen ninety one, so you know,
Speaker 9: only lesbians talk to each other on film at that point.
Speaker 9: Unless they're talking about a man, then it's okay.
Speaker 1: Which a lot of this is, yeah, failing the Bechdel.
Speaker 10: Test for sure, which is unfortunate because it could have
Speaker 10: been this great, empowering feminist movie and instead we get this.
Speaker 1: By the way, I hope I haven't mispronounced Borshowsky as
Speaker 1: I've been going through this, but as somebody who grew
Speaker 1: up with a lot of Polish people in his life,
Speaker 1: most Polish names other than the seas the seas get
Speaker 1: pronounced a little bit differently, but most of them is
Speaker 1: just as easy as it looks. Is how you pronounce it,
Speaker 1: just like wo joh, howitz what I would say? You
Speaker 1: spell it just like it sounds, You say it just
Speaker 1: like it looks. I know that becomes like the funny thing.
Speaker 1: And I'm surprised that there isn't more of that in
Speaker 1: the trailer, though I was surprised with the trailer of this,
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to remember, is there a moment in
Speaker 1: the movie where Charles Dirning spells her name, because that
Speaker 1: goes through the trailers him spelling her name at one point,
Speaker 1: but it sure is there in that trailer and I
Speaker 1: know Canue said that there are a few scenes that
Speaker 1: they ended up cutting out and include why j Saunders's
Speaker 1: face is all sooty because she makes him go after
Speaker 1: her apartment gets firebombed, which seems like a really big
Speaker 1: deal after an apartment gets fire bombed. She makes him
Speaker 1: go save those goblets of her mother's because that's when
Speaker 1: we first see him. He's drinking out of one of
Speaker 1: these goblets, and she's like, oh, it's the only thing
Speaker 1: that my mother brought over from the old Country. And
Speaker 1: apparently there was more about her father as well. I'm
Speaker 1: okay if they cut that out, they had enough about
Speaker 1: her dad in here, because I you know, it's that
Speaker 1: whole thing like a strong woman has to have a
Speaker 1: strong father who taught her right. You know, good Lord,
Speaker 1: you can't have a strong woman that didn't have a
Speaker 1: strong father. All right, We're going to take another break
Speaker 1: and play PREV for next week's show right after these
Speaker 1: brief messages.
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Speaker 1: That's right. We will be back next week with a
Speaker 1: look at black Gravel. Until then, I want to thank
Speaker 1: my co host Rain and Dahlia. So Dahalia, what is
Speaker 1: new in your world, ma'am?
Speaker 10: Before I talk about what I'm working on now, I
Speaker 10: just wanted to suggest that people might be interested in
Speaker 10: reading my l A Private Ezed book, which is the
Speaker 10: book in which I talk about uh the Warshawski even
Speaker 10: though it is said in Chicago, there are so few
Speaker 10: female private Eye movies that I use Bi Warshawski as
Speaker 10: as kind of a case study. So that's not a
Speaker 10: new book, but it's one that's relevant to our conversation.
Speaker 10: And then at the moment these days, I am locked
Speaker 10: up in my apartment on a sabbatical working on my
Speaker 10: next book, which is called Dead Bombshells The Afterlife popular
Speaker 10: Culture's most glamorous Corpses, and it it basically looks at
Speaker 10: how we turn these sort of glamorous corpses into symbols
Speaker 10: of beauty, tragedy, desire, how they integrate politics of gender, race,
Speaker 10: and celebrity. And I look at people like the Black Dahlia,
Speaker 10: Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith, Princess Diana, Selena
Speaker 10: Whitney Houston. Each person gets a chapter and I kind
Speaker 10: of look at their afterlife and what kind of collective
Speaker 10: fantasies have been spawn since their death and.
Speaker 1: Rain, how about yourself? What's going on with you?
Speaker 9: Well, as we're recording this, I've got an art show
Speaker 9: that's up here at a gallery in Baltimore called Current
Speaker 9: Space that has been two years in the making, and
Speaker 9: so I think by the time it's airs that will
Speaker 9: have closed. Sadly, but hopefully, you know, if you want
Speaker 9: to see it, get in contact and maybe we can
Speaker 9: set up at a gallery near you.
Speaker 2: And you know, I was.
Speaker 9: Supposed to hear back on a residency today and I
Speaker 9: just got that email just now that said I did
Speaker 9: not get that residency. Which it's fine because you know
Speaker 9: what this is the you know this is this is
Speaker 9: my advice to the world who are applying for residencies
Speaker 9: and grants and stuff like that. Once you put that
Speaker 9: application out there, just pretend you're not going to get it.
Speaker 9: Just think I'm not going to get this and move
Speaker 9: on to that next thing, and so I'm kind of
Speaker 9: in that head space. You know, it would have been
Speaker 9: cool to have gotten this, but you know, it means
Speaker 9: that I'm going to have a little more time this
Speaker 9: winter to develop that next project. So I will just
Speaker 9: say watch this space. I'm sure I'm going to be
Speaker 9: back on the projection Booth before too much longer, and
Speaker 9: I'll tell you all about what I'm up to.
Speaker 2: Then.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much ladies for being on the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks to everybody for listening. Want to support physical media
Speaker 1: and get great movies by mail, head over to scarecrow
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Speaker 1: will find films there entirely unavailable elsewhere. Get what you want,
Speaker 1: when you want it, without the scrolling. If you want
Speaker 1: to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check
Speaker 1: out some of the other shows that I work on.
Speaker 1: They are all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially
Speaker 1: to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community,
Speaker 1: visit Patreon dot com. Slash Projection Booth. Every donation we
Speaker 1: get help some Projection Booth take over the World's.
Speaker 15: Girl starts one the deep pencil paint stree pencil correct
Speaker 15: red dodsons.
Speaker 3: She looks so good, veget fled. She's watching the detectives. Oooh,
Speaker 3: you're so cute. She's watching the detectives. The right start again, shot.
Speaker 20: Loud, shot, a dead jumping side, in visible shivers run
Speaker 20: down as mine. The anything can not being close because
Speaker 20: some of the sand that says you never close.
Speaker 3: It's not to chilling your that just sing red. She
Speaker 3: pulls to hack down with a face lack of paget.
Speaker 3: I don't know how get more of this at Cade.
Speaker 21: She's silenced her nails while the dragon the day.
Speaker 3: She's watching the detectives.
Speaker 2: He's so cute.
Speaker 3: She's watching the detectives.
Speaker 20: Shut me uptil the cheese rup start again, doing what
Speaker 20: he does. He's l hard. You take your alone until
Speaker 20: you realize you're in nappy to see if everything it
Speaker 20: is the chi with his the legal and little and
Speaker 20: stretching at the window windows is protectives belong to the parents,
Speaker 20: who already is the rest about the test appearance. So
Speaker 20: it's till it's just a mire goal to catching the
Speaker 20: stay on that little fingers to blow you.
Speaker 3: Just like watching the pets.
Speaker 20: Don't get cute, but just La like watching her detectives, gets.
Speaker 3: Angry and the tea Drup start all watching the detectives.
Speaker 21: Let's just strike watching the detectives, watching the detectives, watching
Speaker 21: the detectives
Speaker 20: Watching the backs, watch at the bat