Speaker 1: Oh he is boot it's shoot tied.
Speaker 2: People say, good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 2: They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in
Speaker 2: the protection booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring it off.
Speaker 4: You've got one hundred dollars efforts around here trying to
Speaker 4: get a shot at me. I'm scared, I'm to shoot me.
Speaker 4: I didn't go down there to be a bafoone. I
Speaker 4: went down there for funding, and I thought I have
Speaker 4: been the white nail.
Speaker 2: If he pulls this gun and points at me, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna shoot him.
Speaker 4: I'll go up.
Speaker 1: My god, he's gonna shoot him.
Speaker 2: On television, he's coming out, He's coming out.
Speaker 4: I charge, and they've admitted it.
Speaker 1: He had a cable around a man's throat a task
Speaker 1: the shotgun, so there's no way to get the shotgun
Speaker 1: away from a man's head.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy seven, Tony Kuritzis kidnapped a mortgage broker
Speaker 2: and held him captive for three days, so the first
Speaker 2: time ever the media was able to cover the event live.
Speaker 2: To some Tony was a hero. To others, he was
Speaker 2: a crazed thug.
Speaker 5: I knew what a shotgun sounded like, and I knew
Speaker 5: that was a shotgun.
Speaker 2: Dead Man's Line, the true story of Tony kurtzis.
Speaker 3: Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth.
Speaker 3: On this episode, I'm talking with Alan Berry and Mark Enox.
Speaker 3: They are the co directors of the twenty eighteen documentary
Speaker 3: dead Man's Line. It is the story of Tony Kerritzits
Speaker 3: who took a person hostage down in Indianapolis by putting
Speaker 3: a looped wire around the guy's neck which was connected
Speaker 3: to the trigger of a shotgun. Pretty harrowing documentary. It
Speaker 3: is going to be or has been turned into a
Speaker 3: narrative film that was directed by Gus van Zandt and
Speaker 3: that is coming out in January twenty twenty six, so
Speaker 3: it might be out by the time you listen to this.
Speaker 3: But this is talking about the original story, the original documentary,
Speaker 3: and I really enjoyed talking with Alan and Mark. I
Speaker 3: think that they did a terrific job and the movies
Speaker 3: now available for free on YouTube, so you can check
Speaker 3: it out and hole and enjoy it just the way
Speaker 3: that I did. Hope you enjoy this interview and definitely
Speaker 3: check out dead Man's line. I'll have the link to
Speaker 3: it and show notes over our projection dash booth dot com. Mark,
Speaker 3: I want to start with you. How do you and
Speaker 3: Alan know each other?
Speaker 5: Let's see, we met in high school. I think we
Speaker 5: were in history class together and we just became friends.
Speaker 5: And it is odd, out of all the friends that
Speaker 5: I had in high school, me and Alan are the
Speaker 5: only ones I'm really still closely.
Speaker 1: In touch with.
Speaker 3: And how did you guys start working together?
Speaker 1: I was changing careers. I had owned record stores for
Speaker 1: like twenty years and of course that was dying, so
Speaker 1: I had to find a new career path for me
Speaker 1: and always had an interest in video work. Matter of fact,
Speaker 1: Market helped me with some video to stuff we did
Speaker 1: with my business, so it just seemed like a nice transition.
Speaker 1: And documentaries were always an interest to both of us.
Speaker 1: So we had done a documentary with Indianapolis Mayor Greg
Speaker 1: Ballard called Behind the Sash and it went real well,
Speaker 1: all the mayor liked it, et cetera. And then so
Speaker 1: we started looking at what project do we want to
Speaker 1: do next? Because we definitely wanted to do a next one,
Speaker 1: so we created this my top ten list of ideas
Speaker 1: and Mark I had the list of Tony Kurtzis. I
Speaker 1: didn't have a great remembrance of him, of the story,
Speaker 1: even though I lived through it, But Mark, I think
Speaker 1: you did.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I remember in the summer of seventy seven, so we
Speaker 5: were watching TV and often we would see the noon
Speaker 5: news come up, and during that summer the event happened
Speaker 5: in February, but in the summer they were going through
Speaker 5: the process of grand jury and they were evaluating Tony
Speaker 5: on whether or not he could he was mentally competent
Speaker 5: to stand trial, and so they kept showing a lot
Speaker 5: of that footage and I just you know, was burned
Speaker 5: into my brain that image of this little guy with
Speaker 5: a shotgun wired to this taller guy's neck and just
Speaker 5: pushing him aroun and the police not able to do it.
Speaker 5: And for whatever reason, when we came to try to
Speaker 5: figure out what we want to do next, this idea
Speaker 5: came up and we actually held a vote with our
Speaker 5: family and friends around us, and this is the one
Speaker 5: that rose to the top.
Speaker 3: What year was this that you guys did behind the
Speaker 3: sash and decided to do this other documentary twenty twelve.
Speaker 5: It was right after the Super Bowl was here in Indianapolis,
Speaker 5: and you know, Ballard was fresh off that he did
Speaker 5: some stuff with Jimmy Fallon, and so we started, i
Speaker 5: think late twenty twelve, trying to find people to interview
Speaker 5: for the Tony Kurtzy story.
Speaker 3: How do you guys work together, like when it comes
Speaker 3: to diving up the work and deciding like who you're
Speaker 3: going to pursue as far as interviews, do you what's
Speaker 3: that process look like?
Speaker 1: I think it's just come kind of organically. So Mark's Moore,
Speaker 1: the historian studious person, and I've been more into the
Speaker 1: video world, but that video as my day job, so
Speaker 1: they just kind of it just kind of fell into
Speaker 1: place of what of who did what. I don't think
Speaker 1: we ever had a conversation of you doing this and
Speaker 1: I'm doing that. I think it was more of just
Speaker 1: where each person's strength lied. That's who did it.
Speaker 5: You start with basic research, So there was a lot
Speaker 5: of time spent in the State Library looking through old
Speaker 5: Indianapolis Star articles because that was really the only record.
Speaker 5: The hard, hard part, and Alan did a lot of
Speaker 5: this was reaching out to people who were connected with it,
Speaker 5: and it started with cameraman usually from the local stations
Speaker 5: It's incredible that a lot of these stations they owned,
Speaker 5: you know, the material and the footage, but they just
Speaker 5: did not put any effort into keeping it. So some
Speaker 5: of them threw away their files. Some of them actually
Speaker 5: threw away footage in a dumpster, and other instances they
Speaker 5: taped over tapes television stations. Right right immediately, we knew
Speaker 5: we weren't going to get anything there. They didn't have
Speaker 5: a good library system, they weren't organized. So we were
Speaker 5: able to start reaching out to actual cameraman who still
Speaker 5: in many cases had some copy of the film.
Speaker 1: So we did get some from local stations, but Mark's wright,
Speaker 1: a lot of the tape back then seemed to be
Speaker 1: more valuable than the actual archives to them, so they
Speaker 1: would just copy over them. So a big chunk of
Speaker 1: it was from the individual actual videographers, photographers and newspeople
Speaker 1: that just kept their own reels. But we did get
Speaker 1: some from local channels as well. The story that Mark
Speaker 1: is talking about about digging out the trash can, that's
Speaker 1: a true story from Jack Parker. Jack Parker was a
Speaker 1: local videographer and he was actually our first big interview
Speaker 1: we landed because he was very supportive of us, and
Speaker 1: he let us use his footage, and by talking to
Speaker 1: him first, he opened up the doors to like our
Speaker 1: next person, and then our next person. Because when you're
Speaker 1: reaching out trying to get people to do your to
Speaker 1: do the interviews, you have to have a little bit
Speaker 1: of well we talked to this person, when we talked
Speaker 1: to that person. And I gotta say Jack Parker was
Speaker 1: very key into starting this whole ball rolling.
Speaker 3: I can testify that the video cassettes were more valuable
Speaker 3: than what was on them a lot of times working
Speaker 3: at a local cable station. Obviously we had transitioned from
Speaker 3: film into video by seventy seven, But what type of
Speaker 3: video were they using with this one inch three quarter inch?
Speaker 3: Sorry to be nerdy, but I'm so curious.
Speaker 1: No, it's fair. It's everything. So so all all different
Speaker 1: types every which way, because some of them had already
Speaker 1: been transferred. And if you're a film nerd or a
Speaker 1: video nerd, and you know what interlace footage is versus
Speaker 1: non interlas, some of the interlace, you know, is already
Speaker 1: baked in, So when you see those like lines across
Speaker 1: the video, you can't get that out once it's baked in.
Speaker 1: So it was just it was a hodgepodge of all
Speaker 1: types of media, even real real tapes, cassette, say, CDs, DVDs.
Speaker 1: I don't know that you could name a certain type
Speaker 1: of media that we didn't have to work with. And
Speaker 1: the challenge there is is some of those things we
Speaker 1: didn't have the equipment to transfer, so that's where we'd
Speaker 1: have find a company that did it, hire it out,
Speaker 1: and then transfer it. I was always looking for the
Speaker 1: highest quality source, so sometimes we'd get a snippet here
Speaker 1: and there, but the quality would be degraded, and then
Speaker 1: two years later we'd get closer to the source from
Speaker 1: somebody else.
Speaker 3: So are you taking all this and digitizing it and
Speaker 3: putting into onto a hard drive or what's your medium then,
Speaker 3: because obviously twenty twelve when you start this project, things
Speaker 3: have changed over the last thirteen years.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, no, that's exactly right. Digitize it. So digitize it,
Speaker 1: put it on the hard drive, back it up, and
Speaker 1: then I was using a final cut as how what
Speaker 1: I was adding. But yeah, just got it all digitized,
Speaker 1: made sure it was backed up. Some of the people
Speaker 1: would give us their originals, but then when of course
Speaker 1: we have to give him back to I won't have
Speaker 1: any of the original stuff, but I have we have
Speaker 1: pristine copies of that.
Speaker 3: You're starting to dig through the archives. How Mark you
Speaker 3: talked about going to the library and start looking through
Speaker 3: the microfeah and everything, and then you know you're getting
Speaker 3: all this footage. When do you start doing these interviews
Speaker 3: or how do you figure out who you need to
Speaker 3: talk to and how to approach them?
Speaker 5: Well, like with Jack Parker WTTV cameraman, we just went
Speaker 5: to his house and at the time I didn't know
Speaker 5: the whole story, so I would ask him questions about
Speaker 5: all sorts of things, even even stuff that he probably
Speaker 5: wasn't even a part of, and that became the model
Speaker 5: going forward. We interviewed forty five different people, and some
Speaker 5: of them are police, some of them are media, some
Speaker 5: of them are family friends. And it was really it
Speaker 5: was a journey of discovery, like who knew what about
Speaker 5: about what part? So often I would add them all
Speaker 5: the questions and just try to figure out where what
Speaker 5: parts could they give us information on And it was surprising.
Speaker 5: There were times somebody'd come in you think they didn't
Speaker 5: play any role at all, but they were there for
Speaker 5: one key part. They were there for Tony being arrested,
Speaker 5: or they were there on the street when Tony's marching
Speaker 5: Dick called down down the sidewalk. It was a piece here,
Speaker 5: piece there. It was kind of interesting because a lot
Speaker 5: of times I'd go into the interview think if they
Speaker 5: probably don't know anything about this, but I'm gonna go
Speaker 5: ahead ask the question, and sometimes you're really surprised with
Speaker 5: a great nugget of historical information.
Speaker 1: The whole five years was interviewing and finding resources. We
Speaker 1: found historical archives all the way up till the end
Speaker 1: of doing interview. So it never we had, as I think,
Speaker 1: we had to kind of decide to end right. We
Speaker 1: could have probably gone and finding more, but at some
Speaker 1: point you got to say, all right, let's let's wrap
Speaker 1: this up right. So your question about, you know, doing
Speaker 1: the interviews and finding the sources of media, it went
Speaker 1: hand in hand. And like Mark said, neither one of
Speaker 1: us really knew the full backstory when we first started.
Speaker 1: It was really just kind of evolved. Now if you
Speaker 1: google it today, you'll find a lot about it. Because
Speaker 1: now this is going to sound egotistical, but it's because
Speaker 1: we found out a lot of this information that was
Speaker 1: kind of locked behind people's memories of it. And the
Speaker 1: other thing that was interesting about people's memories is I
Speaker 1: don't think there was one guest that didn't have something
Speaker 1: wrong with what they remembered, because everybody's memory fails them, right.
Speaker 1: So we used to just use like a try and
Speaker 1: you know, we like, if three people agreed on it
Speaker 1: and we found a news report on it, then we said, okay,
Speaker 1: that's probably true. But it just one person said something
Speaker 1: about it and three other people disagreed, we probably figured
Speaker 1: they were wrong. So some of the people that were
Speaker 1: the closest to us still got things wrong about the event.
Speaker 3: The documentary being pieced together from all of these different
Speaker 3: sources kind of lends itself to that idea of what
Speaker 3: are the pieces of people's memories that are there and
Speaker 3: what could be validated.
Speaker 5: It was incredible, Like Dick Hall wrote a book about it.
Speaker 5: He was the victim here the hostage, and a lot
Speaker 5: of what he has in there I believe zaccurate. But
Speaker 5: there are a couple of things here and there it's like, Nope,
Speaker 5: that's not what happened. And we know that because we
Speaker 5: talked to other people and we have footage of what happened.
Speaker 5: Another thing that was interesting. It was a good thing
Speaker 5: we started in twenty twelve because a lot of these
Speaker 5: people they were getting on in years, and some of them,
Speaker 5: some key people we were able to interview, they passed
Speaker 5: away not long after that. That was another interesting thing too,
Speaker 5: There were some individuals that we couldn't talk to. Tony
Speaker 5: had already passed away.
Speaker 1: If you look at our list of interviewees, I would
Speaker 1: say two thirds of them have already passed. A big
Speaker 1: chunk of the people that we interviewed have already gone.
Speaker 1: And just to clarify on Dick Hall's book, that wasn't
Speaker 1: until we were pretty much done with the film when
Speaker 1: his book came out, So when Mark read it, we
Speaker 1: already knew a lot of the stuff. As a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, Dick Hall, we did try to interview him too,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't interested. I don't think. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was a little bit creepy maybe, but like I even
Speaker 1: went to his house and just knocked on his door
Speaker 1: because I was trying to I want him to be
Speaker 1: able to tell his side of the story, because by
Speaker 1: that point we had talked to Tony Kuriz as the
Speaker 1: brother I think the driving force for Mark and I
Speaker 1: both was we want this to be accurate. We want
Speaker 1: this to be truthful. We don't really have a dog
Speaker 1: and to where the story ends up, if Tony was
Speaker 1: right or wrong, if Dick Hall was involved or whatever.
Speaker 1: We just wanted the truth. So we thought, man, we
Speaker 1: really need to have Dick Hall on this project, on
Speaker 1: the record. But it never came to be.
Speaker 3: It's almost good that you don't, though, because you don't
Speaker 3: get his voice over Tony's or vice versa. You don't
Speaker 3: have a privileged point of view from us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a great point. Because the Dick Call had
Speaker 5: agreed to speak with us, we more than likely would
Speaker 5: have built the film around him.
Speaker 3: So tell me more about Tony. I want to know
Speaker 3: more about this guy.
Speaker 5: When we see him in nineteen seventy seven, a lot
Speaker 5: of things have already happened in his life. At one
Speaker 5: point in nineteen sixty his family owned a trailer park
Speaker 5: and he came on and began to be the manager
Speaker 5: of that. He's a really hard to nail down guy.
Speaker 5: You can look at the film and say he's a thug,
Speaker 5: he's just a criminal. You can look at the film
Speaker 5: and say he's a hero. He's a little guy standing
Speaker 5: up against a mortgage company. A lot of people who
Speaker 5: he lived around and took care of the property. They
Speaker 5: loved him. He was helpful, he fixed things for him,
Speaker 5: he got groceries for them, and he did a lot
Speaker 5: of work on the property. And then something started to
Speaker 5: happen in the mid sixties with the family. Tony felt
Speaker 5: he wasn't being compensated for all that he was doing,
Speaker 5: and an argument broke out. He's got three brothers and
Speaker 5: a sister who also a part of this, mainly his sister, Effie,
Speaker 5: was the manager of the trailer park, and Tony demanded
Speaker 5: that he be paid for work that he done. They
Speaker 5: weren't going for it. And so this is not in
Speaker 5: the film. It's this is because there's not a lot
Speaker 5: of evidence, hard evidence of what happened. But he went
Speaker 5: to Effie's house with a pistol and took her hostage
Speaker 5: inside her house, demanding he'd be paid. I believe it
Speaker 5: was fifty thousand dollars, and the whole family gets involved.
Speaker 5: Jimmy kritzis who is in the film.
Speaker 1: He gets in there. He's friends with police.
Speaker 5: The police know Tony because Tony was very friendly with police,
Speaker 5: especially on the west side of Indianapolis in the Speedway area.
Speaker 1: They knew him.
Speaker 5: They were able to get Tony to release Effie that time.
Speaker 5: This is nineteen sixty eight. He was arrested and charged,
Speaker 5: but over the course of a year that trial didn't
Speaker 5: go anywhere. There was a they eventually threw out over
Speaker 5: an affidavit that they didn't believe was acceptable. So a
Speaker 5: lot of disappointment there. The family felt he should have
Speaker 5: gone to prison for that, but instead he gets the money.
Speaker 5: He parts ways with most of the family, though he
Speaker 5: remains in contact with his brother Jimmy and his half
Speaker 5: brother George Ergo, and he takes that money and buys
Speaker 5: a piece of land. It's kind of convoluted. We're still
Speaker 5: finding information on how that land was bought, how the
Speaker 5: money was exchanged. But he bought this piece of land
Speaker 5: that he wanted to then develop and so by nineteen
Speaker 5: seventy three, that's when he walks into the Merdian mortgage
Speaker 5: to speak with Dick Hall's father, em Mel Hall, who
Speaker 5: was the boss of the whole operation, and he gets
Speaker 5: alone to develop that property. It doesn't work the way
Speaker 5: Tony wants. He has to end up in otiating the loan,
Speaker 5: get a little more money, and this deadline is looming
Speaker 5: of March first, nineteen seventy seven. Tony feels that mL
Speaker 5: Hall steered people away from it, accusing mL Hall of
Speaker 5: wanting to just collect the land himself and get more
Speaker 5: money out of it. So Tony has this real I've
Speaker 5: been screwed attitude, and that's what leads him to do
Speaker 5: what he did. He was mentally declining in the months
Speaker 5: leading up. I mean he talked about he couldn't sleep,
Speaker 5: he had all sorts of physical problems, painting his leg
Speaker 5: from walking all of a sudden. But all the while
Speaker 5: he's also methodically planning out how is he going to
Speaker 5: take mL Hall hostage and not be shot immediately by
Speaker 5: the police. That's where his contraption comes in the dead
Speaker 5: man's line. And as we know, mL Hall wasn't in
Speaker 5: the office the day that Tony went in there, but
Speaker 5: Tony didn't want to back down off his plan, and
Speaker 5: that's why he takes Dick Hall hostage. Dick Hall really
Speaker 5: didn't have a lot to do with the loan. It
Speaker 5: was almost all Tony and mL But at that time
Speaker 5: mL had gone to Florida with his wife for vacation,
Speaker 5: and so begins the whole, the whole story of him
Speaker 5: taking Dick hostage.
Speaker 1: He was developing the land for shopping center, and that's
Speaker 1: he thought mL Hall was was directing potential clients that
Speaker 1: would would would you know or store owners away.
Speaker 3: From that property. I think I know the answer to this.
Speaker 3: But in your guys' opinion, was Hall doing any of
Speaker 3: these things which Hall mL or even his Sun, but
Speaker 3: especially mL.
Speaker 5: mL Hall was into real estate, and we found lots
Speaker 5: of articles that suggested maybe he was doing some things,
Speaker 5: but that wasn't exactly right. You know, there would be
Speaker 5: people of Asian descent or African Americans that he would
Speaker 5: block from buying the houses in certain neighborhoods. There's some
Speaker 5: evidence of that. But the really big thing that we
Speaker 5: found was in nineteen fifty seven, mL Hall was convicted
Speaker 5: of a federal crime, and that was he would overcharge
Speaker 5: people who were buying homes approved by the Veterans Administration.
Speaker 5: And the Veterans Administration sets a price for a piece
Speaker 5: of land. You cannot go above that no matter what,
Speaker 5: and in a couple of cases, mL Hall was charging
Speaker 5: them additional money six hundred dollars, you know, to fix this,
Speaker 5: twelve hundred dollars to fix that.
Speaker 1: This happened in fifty two fifty three.
Speaker 5: It took a few years to go to trial, but
Speaker 5: he and a couple of his compatriots were found guilty
Speaker 5: of doing that. So in the back of my head,
Speaker 5: I'm always thinking, look, if he would do that, if
Speaker 5: you would do something means the Veterans Administration. This is
Speaker 5: not local, this is like, this is national, this is big.
Speaker 5: I don't know how you think you're going to get
Speaker 5: away with that. And he didn't he would do that?
Speaker 5: Is it really so implausible that he would jerk Tony
Speaker 5: around so that he could get this land and then
Speaker 5: sell it himself to Osco Jewel or some other you know,
Speaker 5: somebody else who wanted to put in a strip mall.
Speaker 1: We always looked for hard evidence of did mL Hall
Speaker 1: do anything to screw over Tony. We can never find
Speaker 1: any factual evidence that he did. There was no paperwork,
Speaker 1: there's no documentation. So does that mean mL Hall didn't
Speaker 1: do anything shady? We're not for sure, but mL Hall
Speaker 1: definitely was a shady character. I mean think, like Mark said,
Speaker 1: this is ten years after World War Two and he's
Speaker 1: he's screwing over veterans, So it's not a far leap
Speaker 1: to think that he might do something towards Tony, but
Speaker 1: we never really found that hard piece of evidence.
Speaker 5: To Dick Hall, his involvement was he wasn't with the
Speaker 5: loan that there were a couple times when he did
Speaker 5: witness his father. One time they got Tony and EML
Speaker 5: got in a fight in the office and he witnessed
Speaker 5: his father put hands on Tony and marked him out
Speaker 5: of that office. There's also a point early on where
Speaker 5: Dick told his dad, I don't think we should loan
Speaker 5: Tony this money. He's just not a stable client. We
Speaker 5: shouldn't do this, and EML went ahead and did it anyway.
Speaker 5: So in many ways, Dick did not do anything to
Speaker 5: deserve what happened.
Speaker 3: I mean, ultimately, was it mL hoping that Tony could
Speaker 3: make these payments so that it can foreclose on the
Speaker 3: land exactly?
Speaker 5: He would tell Tony, Yeah, I've got somebody going to
Speaker 5: look at it, and nothing would.
Speaker 2: Come of that.
Speaker 5: And you don't know what the side conversation was between
Speaker 5: mL and somebody coming in to look at the land.
Speaker 5: You really don't know, because he could have easily said
Speaker 5: you don't want to do the deal with this guy.
Speaker 5: Just give me a little bit of time. He's gonna
Speaker 5: he's not gonna be able to pay his loan back,
Speaker 5: so just give me a little bit time. Then we'll
Speaker 5: deal with it.
Speaker 1: And in the end, Alan didn't Merity Mortgage own that land. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so after the case was all over, they basically had
Speaker 1: a tussle back and forth. So Tony kind of signed
Speaker 1: over the rights to his brothers and they tried to
Speaker 1: keep it up. Matter fact, they even started like a
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight version of GoFundMe, and they tried to
Speaker 1: raise They try to raise money for it, and they
Speaker 1: didn't raise that much and they ended up ended up
Speaker 1: having to go to auction and lo and behold Mariady
Speaker 1: to Mortgage was the soul bitter, and they got the
Speaker 1: they got the property.
Speaker 3: That's super shitty. But at the same time, putting a
Speaker 3: wire around the Sun's neck and putting a shotgun up
Speaker 3: against his head a little extreme.
Speaker 1: And I'm not defending anybody here, but Tony did sign
Speaker 1: the loan right and it was he owed the money
Speaker 1: and if mL Hall did sway people away from them,
Speaker 1: then he needed to figure out how to do that
Speaker 1: in court or figure out something else around that if
Speaker 1: that even happened. But there's no doubt that Tony owed
Speaker 1: them that money.
Speaker 3: So let's go back to the event and talk about
Speaker 3: how that plays out. Because that footage that you have
Speaker 3: in your documentary is spectacular. Those visuals of that little
Speaker 3: guy with that shotgun in his hand, marching that guy
Speaker 3: down the street, maction David Hall down the street. I
Speaker 3: could feel my heart in my throat the entire time.
Speaker 1: Maybe Mark should talk about the dead Man's line a
Speaker 1: little bit just so people can understand, because that's I
Speaker 1: think where everything wraps around at the very beginning.
Speaker 5: I think the genesis of the idea. This is speculation
Speaker 5: to some degree, but we found a episode of Hawaii
Speaker 5: Fi vo that was probably broadcast in the early seventies,
Speaker 5: and in that episode, it's inside of prison and this
Speaker 5: one guy takes another guy hostage and he has a
Speaker 5: gun and that is connected with masking tape to the
Speaker 5: guy's neck. It's the only place we've ever seen anything
Speaker 5: like that, And one of the people we interviewed did say,
Speaker 5: I think that's where Tony got it. What he actually
Speaker 5: did was he replaced that tape with something stronger, which
Speaker 5: was a steel cable. There's a loop that he put
Speaker 5: over Dick Call's head, so now it's connected to his
Speaker 5: neck and his head. The wire then goes from Dick
Speaker 5: Hall to the shotgun. Tony had sought off the barrel
Speaker 5: so that it would he would be able to keep
Speaker 5: that barrel close to Dick Hall's head at all times.
Speaker 5: That's key because if it was any further away, there
Speaker 5: are things the police could have done to save Dick
Speaker 5: Hall and no one would have got hurt. That wire
Speaker 5: then goes in through the trigger guard of that shotgun,
Speaker 5: and then it's connected to Tony. Sometimes it was connected
Speaker 5: to a ring he had it on his finger. Sometimes
Speaker 5: it was connected to another piece of wire around his
Speaker 5: own net, and you can see some of it in
Speaker 5: the documentary.
Speaker 1: If that wire gets.
Speaker 5: Pulled because police try to rush in because Dick Hall
Speaker 5: tries to escape, it's immediately going to hit that trigger
Speaker 5: and I'll fire the weapon. Tony also removed the safety
Speaker 5: from the shotgun. He actually hands that to one of
Speaker 5: the police officers when he's coming out of the building.
Speaker 5: So the whole time Tony is saying, look at my rig,
Speaker 5: look at it. Can you see how there's no way
Speaker 5: you guys can do anything. You're gonna give me what
Speaker 5: I want? And it was extremely effective. It's based on
Speaker 5: a dead man's switch idea, except Tony flips it. Dead
Speaker 5: Man switches like in a subway, if you take pressure
Speaker 5: off a pedal, it's fail safe. That means the subway
Speaker 5: would stop, it would slow down. Tony's is failed deadly.
Speaker 5: You pull on that thing and people get hurt.
Speaker 1: And I believe historically Tony's the one that came up
Speaker 1: with dead man's line, like that phrasing of his contraction,
Speaker 1: because there's no other historical reference of it before then.
Speaker 1: And he says it too on one of the calls too.
Speaker 3: And that they all on the icy streets of Indianapolis.
Speaker 5: It was the one thing that couldn't happen at no time.
Speaker 5: Convict like, he can't be far away from Tony, and
Speaker 5: he needs to walk in sync with him too, because
Speaker 5: of how short that wire is. And then they get
Speaker 5: to the street corner and Tony is back and forth,
Speaker 5: yell at the police, and all of a sudden, Dick
Speaker 5: Hall or Tony slips and Dick Hall if he had
Speaker 5: stayed standing up, he'd be dead. He instinctively bends his
Speaker 5: knees and gets low, trying to keep his head close
Speaker 5: to the gun, and it was incredible that that gun
Speaker 5: didn't go off. Tony later says he couldn't believe it
Speaker 5: didn't go off. That moment's crazy because Tony also when
Speaker 5: that's happening, he pulls out his pistol that he'd been
Speaker 5: keeping his in the waistban of his pants, and that
Speaker 5: creates a whole new problem for the police because the
Speaker 5: shotgun is almost always going to hit Dick Hall maybe
Speaker 5: other bystanders, but now they see Tony's also gotten this gun,
Speaker 5: and it's just a miracle that Tony didn't point it
Speaker 5: at a police officer, because at that point they would
Speaker 5: have been within their rights to shoot him.
Speaker 1: It's such a crazy scene if you watch the documentary
Speaker 1: that somebody literally crashes because they rubbernecking looking at it,
Speaker 1: and you can see this car crash next to him.
Speaker 1: So if any of the listeners haven't seen these images,
Speaker 1: they're pretty crazy.
Speaker 3: Ultimately, I mean, what's this guy's goal. Is it just
Speaker 3: that he's going to get back the land or get
Speaker 3: paid the money. I mean, what's he asking for? What's
Speaker 3: this demand.
Speaker 5: That's really interesting because initially Tony's not really communicating demands
Speaker 5: of the police. He doesn't really start to get his
Speaker 5: demands across until he's back Door's apartment, which is sort
Speaker 5: of like his passole, and you know, we can talk
Speaker 5: about some of the things he did to make sure
Speaker 5: the police couldn't get in there. But somewhere in there,
Speaker 5: Tony starts to understand what does he really want? Actually,
Speaker 5: I don't know that Tony understood it. He wanted money,
Speaker 5: he wanted the debt clean so that he didn't know anything.
Speaker 5: He wanted immunity from prosecution for what he was doing
Speaker 5: taking a man hostage. But the thing that he seemed
Speaker 5: to want most is an apology. He wanted mL Hall
Speaker 5: to say, I did you wrong and I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: mL Hall was kind of like a father figure to
Speaker 1: Tony two, and Tony's father was a very abrasive man,
Speaker 1: So I think that somewhere in there, that's how that
Speaker 1: apology figures in. Like, he wanted an apology from mL Hall.
Speaker 1: Now this is me reading into it, but I think
Speaker 1: he also kind of want an apology from his own dad.
Speaker 1: But since this is his father figure, now he wanted
Speaker 1: an apology from him.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean Tony didn't know exactly how to develop
Speaker 5: the land, so I think when he went in there
Speaker 5: and made that loan, he was looking to mL for
Speaker 5: some guidance and direction and maybe got some initially, but
Speaker 5: as it kept going, I mean, this was Tony's big treasure,
Speaker 5: This was his big nest egg. I mean, imagine how
Speaker 5: somebody you trusted all of a sudden seems to not
Speaker 5: be helping you and you're going to lose everything. It's over.
Speaker 1: There is no recouping this.
Speaker 3: Now, as you guys are doing the research on this,
Speaker 3: what's the most surprising thing that you find about this story?
Speaker 1: So me, initially it was that nobody's done anything with this.
Speaker 1: Before I take that back, there was a cheesy was
Speaker 1: it called FBI Files TV series? The guy from WKRP
Speaker 1: starred as Tony Carritzis but it's horrible Gary Sanders from WKRP.
Speaker 1: But besides that, nobody had done a documentary on nobody
Speaker 1: had done really a movie on it. So at first
Speaker 1: that was the most surprising thing to me.
Speaker 5: To me, I was super surprised about that he already
Speaker 5: taken somebody hostage before in sixty eight I had no
Speaker 5: idea about that, and then to learn that that's how
Speaker 5: he got the money and he's just going to repeat
Speaker 5: it again. There's a part where his older brother, Stephen
Speaker 5: kuritz Is, is interviewed and he says something to that
Speaker 5: effect of, like, you know, I was there every day
Speaker 5: for court in sixty eight sixty nine. I knew that
Speaker 5: when they threw this out, we're just going to have
Speaker 5: to go through this again at some point. And he
Speaker 5: was right.
Speaker 3: You've got these two guys that are under such tremendous
Speaker 3: stress both at the same time, between Dick Hall and
Speaker 3: Tony himself. Was it twenty four to seven news coverage
Speaker 3: like it is today or is this like you were saying, Mark,
Speaker 3: I come home at noon and then at one o'clock
Speaker 3: they start playing the cartoons again.
Speaker 5: When it was happening, it was as twenty four to
Speaker 5: seven as TV could be at that time.
Speaker 1: And radio radio was the bigger part.
Speaker 5: Radio was huge because WIBC is a local AM station.
Speaker 5: They were the news outlet for anything local, So there
Speaker 5: was twenty four hour coverage on wb SEE. But one
Speaker 5: of the things that's interesting about this is that media
Speaker 5: was there for almost all of it, as it unfolded
Speaker 5: and it goes on for sixty three hours. You know,
Speaker 5: some of them had just got their first satellite cameras.
Speaker 5: A lot of it was still had to be wired up.
Speaker 5: They were getting new technology coming in and some of
Speaker 5: that helped them also cover it longer. That was kind
Speaker 5: of amazing.
Speaker 3: Help me what role the radio plays the story.
Speaker 5: First of all, there's the news coverage part in WIBC
Speaker 5: had a lot of good reporters back then, but the
Speaker 5: main person there was the news director, Fred Heckman. He
Speaker 5: was the trusted voice in Indianapolis News and in Indiana
Speaker 5: sort of a Walter Cronkite type, very conservative, no nonsense.
Speaker 5: And the second day, Tony loves Fred Heckman and he
Speaker 5: wants to talk to him, and he gets this idea
Speaker 5: of Hey, I'm not going to get my story out
Speaker 5: because right now all I can talk to is the
Speaker 5: police and they're going to control what I say. I'm
Speaker 5: going to try to get a hold of Fred, and
Speaker 5: he gets through to him. Fred's aware kind of what's
Speaker 5: going on, but not expecting this. Fred takes his call
Speaker 5: and Tony airs his grievances and Fred is very tactful
Speaker 5: in the way that he talks with Tony, he doesn't
Speaker 5: judge him or anything like that. He's just like, say
Speaker 5: what you want. And that was a big deal for
Speaker 5: Tony and for negotiators, because if Tony felt he was
Speaker 5: getting his story out, he would be calm. If he
Speaker 5: felt he was being blocked, he would be crazy, and
Speaker 5: so obviously they were trying to keep him as calm
Speaker 5: as possible. Fred Heckman becomes one of the cheap negotiating tools.
Speaker 5: Not that they coached him on what to say or
Speaker 5: what to get him to do. It was just like,
Speaker 5: just talk to him, Just talk to him and let
Speaker 5: him know he's being heard. An FBI profile to comes in,
Speaker 5: called by the Chief of Police, Eugene Gallagher. This FBI
Speaker 5: agent is named Patrick Mulaney, and he quickly sees how, hey,
Speaker 5: this is a good thing with him talking to Fred.
Speaker 5: Let's get Fred to do more of this. Fred becomes
Speaker 5: like a part of the story, which means he could
Speaker 5: not stay on the air anymore, and that was not
Speaker 5: something Fred wanted. Producers and some other reporters had to
Speaker 5: go in there and confront him and be like, Fred,
Speaker 5: you're in this. You're gonna have to step away from
Speaker 5: the Mic at least until it's over. Fred didn't like that,
Speaker 5: but he was like, Okay, I'll do whatever. I'll do
Speaker 5: whatever I have to do.
Speaker 3: So you work on this documentary for five years, and
Speaker 3: like you said, you had to kind of figure out
Speaker 3: at some point we need to cut this off. This
Speaker 3: needs to actually be put together. Ellen, Are you editing
Speaker 3: all the time while you're doing this? Are you putting
Speaker 3: everything like starting in order or like how does that
Speaker 3: process work for you?
Speaker 1: I didn't start editing it probably until about a year
Speaker 1: and a half before it was done, just because I
Speaker 1: just felt like, you know, there's gonna I'm hoping we
Speaker 1: can find more footage. I'm hoping we can find better photos.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping that the next interview is gonna answer a
Speaker 1: question that we haven't had answer yet. And all along
Speaker 1: during this I'm still cutting my teeth as a video person.
Speaker 1: So like, if you watch the film like a somebody
Speaker 1: that understands color grading, et cetera, I mess up on
Speaker 1: a few of those shots that now look back in cringe.
Speaker 1: So my skill set was building too. I thought it
Speaker 1: would be best just to kind of get more material
Speaker 1: in and then started to go through it all. Then
Speaker 1: and that's kind of what happened, And it takes a
Speaker 1: lot of time to go through all those archives. But
Speaker 1: once I started in it, then that kind of became
Speaker 1: most of the job, with some interviews and hunting down
Speaker 1: footage on the side.
Speaker 3: How do you keep all of your information straight? Do
Speaker 3: you have like the big conspiracy wall kind of thing,
Speaker 3: or are you using like Google docs or like what
Speaker 3: is that process for you to just keep all your
Speaker 3: records straight?
Speaker 6: Now?
Speaker 5: We would be using Google Docs. Back then, I remember,
Speaker 5: I just had a lot of word docks and I
Speaker 5: was cribbing little bits of information, trying to build a
Speaker 5: timeline myself. I mean it was I don't know, I
Speaker 5: don't remember. It was fifty pages long, not super useful
Speaker 5: in trying to get information quickly.
Speaker 1: A lot of it was on us to try to
Speaker 1: keep it straight. Yeah, a lot of trial and error
Speaker 1: and a big jump between then and now. Right like now,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of tools, those tools I used to
Speaker 1: prep for this interview that I wished I would have
Speaker 1: had ten years ago we were doing this and just
Speaker 1: a completely different landscape as far as tech and keeping
Speaker 1: your files straight, et cetera. So it's just a big difference.
Speaker 3: Did you find new stuff as the editing was going
Speaker 3: in and just had to keep like updating that or
Speaker 3: did you pretty much start with everything you ended with.
Speaker 1: Yes, there was definitely more stuff that came in as
Speaker 1: I was editing, and depending on the quality of the
Speaker 1: footage or depending on what it was, it would replace
Speaker 1: older footage that wasn't as great and or be added
Speaker 1: to the I'm lying to make it better. So yes,
Speaker 1: definitely footage came in after I started editing.
Speaker 3: When you guys were starting this whole project, did you
Speaker 3: have an end game in mind as far as we're
Speaker 3: going to make this documentary and we're going to I
Speaker 3: don't know, sell it to PPS, or what was the
Speaker 3: end goal for you?
Speaker 1: If I remember correctly, there really wasn't an end goal
Speaker 1: as far as distribution or where we wanted to land
Speaker 1: with it, I think and marketing correct me. I think
Speaker 1: the main focus was let's just make a great documentary
Speaker 1: first and then we'll figure out what we're going to
Speaker 1: do with it later.
Speaker 5: We didn't have avenues that we knew for sure would work,
Speaker 5: so instead of worrying about that end goal, we just
Speaker 5: got started on the first goal, which was let's make
Speaker 5: a movie about something that nobody knows anything about.
Speaker 3: Some once you're done with the cut, the first cut
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 1: What do you do the first round of edits and stuff.
Speaker 1: It just basically Mark and I going back and forth saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is good here, or something needs to be done here.
Speaker 1: But then once we got an edit that we both liked,
Speaker 1: I believe we probably shared it out to family members
Speaker 1: and friends, just because all the stuff is subjective, right,
Speaker 1: But sometimes you can get in your own little bubble
Speaker 1: and you watch something so many times and you just
Speaker 1: get kind of thinking, oh, this is really good, right,
Speaker 1: But when you sit and watch it with somebody else
Speaker 1: that knows nothing about it, you start to get this
Speaker 1: feeling of, oh, this doesn't really move along fast enough,
Speaker 1: or this needs to be changed. So my recollection was
Speaker 1: sharing it with my wife, sharing it with my son,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure I'm guessing Marked the same thing with
Speaker 1: his family, and then coming back to the table and
Speaker 1: sprucing it up a little bit more. But my gut
Speaker 1: tells me by the time we got to the family
Speaker 1: and friends, eighty five percent of it was in place,
Speaker 1: and then we just adjusted the last fifteen percent.
Speaker 5: One of the things that Alan was particular dearly concerned
Speaker 5: about was that we didn't want this to be just
Speaker 5: a bunch of talking heads. We had so many people
Speaker 5: talk about so many great things, but when you try
Speaker 5: to put it all in there, you need some kind
Speaker 5: of visual to go with what they're saying, and in
Speaker 5: many cases we just didn't have footage of that. And
Speaker 5: Alan was right all along about it cannot be just
Speaker 5: a bunch of people being interviewed talking about it. So
Speaker 5: that was like a major thing I remember in the
Speaker 5: early edits of like if you had somebody say something,
Speaker 5: you could show them, give them their credentials, but then
Speaker 5: also try to make that bleed on over into the
Speaker 5: footage that we had what was going on at the time.
Speaker 5: And you know, I've watched them the film a couple
Speaker 5: times in the past few weeks, and it's.
Speaker 1: That really works.
Speaker 5: It's really strong that way. And credit to Alan there
Speaker 5: for being able to see that ahead of the time,
Speaker 5: because otherwise we were just had people just people on screen,
Speaker 5: same really interesting things.
Speaker 1: But that's not compelling. That's not compelling film. And I
Speaker 1: appreciate that problem, Mark, but it was mostly just based
Speaker 1: on my own documentary film watching right throughout the years,
Speaker 1: so older documentary films are a lot of talking heads,
Speaker 1: and you just start to realize that it gets boring
Speaker 1: just watching these people talking. You have to have other
Speaker 1: things to go along with it. And something you just
Speaker 1: mentioned there, Mark that I do remember. A pain point
Speaker 1: for us was that everybody we interviewed was great, right,
Speaker 1: we do good relationships, great people. Everybody gave great information.
Speaker 1: But at the end, especially if you've made a film,
Speaker 1: you realize you're not going to get everybody in the film.
Speaker 1: So we had to cut some people out, not because
Speaker 1: they didn't necessarily say anything worth the time of interviewing them,
Speaker 1: but it just didn't fit into what we were talking about.
Speaker 1: And I remember a couple people in particular it was
Speaker 1: a difficult conversation because I think we bruised a little
Speaker 1: bit of their ego. But in reality, we had to
Speaker 1: be dedicated to what's going to make the most entertaining,
Speaker 1: interesting watch for the viewer that knows nothing about this.
Speaker 1: Once you get everything in lockdown, what do you do next?
Speaker 1: What's the story of the film. Once the film's lockdown,
Speaker 1: you do start to think, okay, well, what are we
Speaker 1: going to do with this?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 1: And the typical mo for an indie film would be
Speaker 1: to start putting in the film festivals. So that was
Speaker 1: the next thing we started researching, and we would submit
Speaker 1: it to some film festivals. But there is a financial
Speaker 1: burden there because every film festival is going to be
Speaker 1: one hundred to three hundred dollars. These are prices from
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, so I'll think gone up or what,
Speaker 1: But you know, a few hundred bucks for each festival,
Speaker 1: and you're not really guaranteed anything back, of course, because
Speaker 1: they could look at and be like, ah, this doesn't
Speaker 1: fit our film festival. But you're spending a lot of
Speaker 1: money on this, And then the other part of that
Speaker 1: is okay, So let's say you do get accepted to
Speaker 1: the film festival, Well then you've got to pay for
Speaker 1: your travel to go out there, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So it's just just a big expense to do that.
Speaker 1: And I kept coming back to the thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, and I'm sorry stuck step back a
Speaker 1: little bit. People put their films in film festivals for
Speaker 1: a couple different want reasons. One is ego, right, and
Speaker 1: I don't mean that in a negative way. But you
Speaker 1: want people to see your film, and you probably want
Speaker 1: to hear that that's pretty good, right, Like it's fun
Speaker 1: to hear people say, yeah, that was a good film.
Speaker 1: But then the bigger reason is that you want to
Speaker 1: find distribution. And I think that film festivals define distribution
Speaker 1: is a good thought and theory, but most of the times,
Speaker 1: it's my belief that that doesn't happen for the indie film.
Speaker 1: The bigger film, sure, yeah it does, but the smaller films.
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound too negative, but I kind
Speaker 1: of have a belief that a lot of the indie
Speaker 1: films are actually the ones that fund these film festivals,
Speaker 1: and they rarely get anything back out of it. So
Speaker 1: back to our story. We've submitted to a few. We
Speaker 1: got accepted to the East Lancey, Michigan Film Festival, which
Speaker 1: was just a thrill for us, but the bumber was
Speaker 1: Indianapolis has a local film festival called the Heartland Film Festival,
Speaker 1: which is pretty big deal around here, and we thought
Speaker 1: to ourselves, man, this is this is going to be
Speaker 1: a shoe in right. This is Indianapolis based story done
Speaker 1: by two guys that have lived there their whole lives.
Speaker 1: By this point we had shared it to some One
Speaker 1: of my friends, Mark Allen, was the Indianapolis Star Film critics,
Speaker 1: so we shared it to some film people that we
Speaker 1: knew and they thought, oh, yeah, this is really good, right,
Speaker 1: So we had the Huberts to believe, oh, this is
Speaker 1: a great film. We're going to get into the Heartland
Speaker 1: Film Festival for sure. But lo and behold, we didn't
Speaker 1: get in. And to this day we're still not really
Speaker 1: sure why we didn't get into the Heartland Film Festival.
Speaker 1: But I know for me, and I only to speak
Speaker 1: from Mark, but I know for me that was at
Speaker 1: that point I was like, I'm done with film festivals.
Speaker 1: If we can't get into this local film festival, then
Speaker 1: why are we spending money on these other ones.
Speaker 5: East Lansing was just amazing, you know. We got in
Speaker 5: there and then we won, and that was that was amazing.
Speaker 5: So obviously you're thinking, look, we're local. Heartland's about local,
Speaker 5: it's about Indie. We got to and when we got rejected,
Speaker 5: you don't get any kind of like why, You just
Speaker 5: get sorry, you know, we don't have room in our.
Speaker 1: List this year for you.
Speaker 5: So that was really puzzling and the only thing I
Speaker 5: could think of is you know, is it because it's
Speaker 5: about a guy taking another guy hostage with a gun,
Speaker 5: and that whoever was jurying was sensitive about the use
Speaker 5: of a gun with you know shootings. School shootings were
Speaker 5: huge while we were doing this because otherwise, I, we
Speaker 5: don't know what it was language. No, they have plenty
Speaker 5: of other you know documentaries in there that have you know,
Speaker 5: the F word all over the place. It couldn't have
Speaker 5: been that it was.
Speaker 1: It was Indianapolis history.
Speaker 3: I it was puzzling.
Speaker 5: But he's right After that, I was like, well, what's
Speaker 5: the point. We could enter into these festivals forever and
Speaker 5: unless you place or win, you can't. It's not really valuable.
Speaker 5: East Lansing was very valuable. We can use that in
Speaker 5: our promotion and we can say here we did well here,
Speaker 5: and I agree with you.
Speaker 1: East Lansing was a great film festival, and it is
Speaker 1: nice to say that we wanted one film festival. But
Speaker 1: it still wasn't valuable from like a distribution side. There
Speaker 1: wasn't any distributors there. I mean East Lansing. The people
Speaker 1: were great and all that, but it was still a
Speaker 1: smaller film festival. There's nobody from distribution there. So I
Speaker 1: agree with Mark. I think that East Lansing was great,
Speaker 1: but the lack of any type of distribution options and
Speaker 1: then the Heartland Film Festival saying no thanks, we kind
Speaker 1: of dropped that idea of doing And of course the cost,
Speaker 1: the continuing just dribbling out all this money to do
Speaker 1: these film festivals that we may or may not get
Speaker 1: accepted to just made us say, you know what, let's
Speaker 1: move forward.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, was there an actual budget for the film
Speaker 3: other than what you guys pulled together or did you
Speaker 3: have investors of any kind or is it just you two?
Speaker 6: Just us?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: No, just us, No, there was no it was just us.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it's every expense was you know, all right,
Speaker 1: this this comes out of our pocket?
Speaker 3: What's next for the doc? When you say, okay, we're
Speaker 3: not going to go to the festival route. We got
Speaker 3: this East Lansing, We've got our Laurel Leaves and everything.
Speaker 3: Where do you go from there?
Speaker 1: We really believe in the film, so it seemed like, now,
Speaker 1: of course you can be in your own bubble, but
Speaker 1: it seemed like everybody that we showed it to it
Speaker 1: was like, man, that's a good documentary and So my
Speaker 1: thinking is is, let's just get it to the people, right,
Speaker 1: Let's get just every every day whoever to be able
Speaker 1: to see it. So how do you distribute a film
Speaker 1: on your own?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And at that time iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, and there's
Speaker 1: probably a couple of those two back then, but they
Speaker 1: all had VOD and VOD was still going somewhat strong,
Speaker 1: or it was still it was still kicking around because
Speaker 1: Netflix was on the on the field as far as
Speaker 1: streaming movies, but all the other big players still weren't.
Speaker 1: So VOD was still kind of a thing. So we figured,
Speaker 1: all right, how do we get this these films onto
Speaker 1: these networks? So I start doing some research and come
Speaker 1: to find out none of these companies at that time
Speaker 1: would talk to you as an individual filmmaker. I mean,
Speaker 1: unless you're a big name, you can't get through the
Speaker 1: front door to say, hey, would you watch my film
Speaker 1: and see if it's worthy to putting on iTunes? With
Speaker 1: that not being the case, like all right, so there's
Speaker 1: these things called aggregators. And what these aggregators do is
Speaker 1: they have deals already with these platforms. So aggregator A
Speaker 1: will already have a deal with iTunes, with Google Play,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And so then you've got to get into
Speaker 1: the door of the aggregators. Now, if you're able to
Speaker 1: get in through the front door, the aggregator is going
Speaker 1: to take a look at your movie and they're gonna say, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we like it. We can distribute this for you,
Speaker 1: but they're gonna take a big percentage of your and
Speaker 1: it varied, but they're gonna take a percentage of your sale.
Speaker 1: So every time someboi rents it for three dollars, you
Speaker 1: may not be getting that much of that three dollars
Speaker 1: and a portion would be going to the aggregator. And
Speaker 1: then the aggregators would do this. I would think that
Speaker 1: your audience would know what Hollywood accounting is, which basically is,
Speaker 1: you know, they always make up the expenses a lot
Speaker 1: higher than probably what they really were to eat into
Speaker 1: the profits. And these aggregators will say, well, you've got
Speaker 1: to pay for expensive that expenses that comes out of
Speaker 1: your end before any money it goes into your pocket.
Speaker 1: So they'll say, well, we need XYZ for marketing, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So when it came to that type of aggregator,
Speaker 1: I thought, man, I just don't want to give up
Speaker 1: the mon oh, and you're signing to them for a
Speaker 1: certain amount of time. So let's say you give it
Speaker 1: to aggregator A and you signed a three year deal
Speaker 1: with it. But then Netflix comes along and say, oh,
Speaker 1: we just saw this, we want to take your film. Well,
Speaker 1: you're tied to this aggregator. Now the aggregator gets a
Speaker 1: percentage of that going to Netflix, et cetera. I just
Speaker 1: didn't like that setup. So I was like, I kept looking,
Speaker 1: and then I found this one company that you paid
Speaker 1: them a flat fee and I think it was around
Speaker 1: three grand or so, and you keep the majority of
Speaker 1: the profits. It might have been all of it, I
Speaker 1: can't remember, but it's pretty close to most of it.
Speaker 1: And you own your film and you can leave it anytime.
Speaker 1: And then what they would do is they would get
Speaker 1: it onto iTunes, get it on Google Play, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So you had to take care of marketing yourself. And
Speaker 1: that sounded like a the set up that we wanted
Speaker 1: to do, So that's what we did. In the beginning.
Speaker 1: It seemed like it was pretty good. So what we did,
Speaker 1: and this is the typical way you should do it,
Speaker 1: is you want to get a great number when you
Speaker 1: first land like, you want to be in the top ten,
Speaker 1: top twenty of whatever charts it are, so other people
Speaker 1: see it. So we did do a marketing push to
Speaker 1: try to get that, and I can't remember the exact number,
Speaker 1: but it may have been around in the top ten
Speaker 1: or twelve or something like that. We landed on iTunes
Speaker 1: Top Documentaries. That's pretty thrilling, right, So we thought this
Speaker 1: is great. But then what you're also learning is to
Speaker 1: get in the top fifteen twenty of iTunes is it's
Speaker 1: not that big of money, right, It's still not like
Speaker 1: you're making bank off of it, but at least it's
Speaker 1: out there now. So now we have the film distributed,
Speaker 1: We have it on VOD platforms, and anybody can watch
Speaker 1: it if they want to cough up the three bucks.
Speaker 1: The thing that's kind of fighting against us is that
Speaker 1: is that VOD is starting to fade out and people
Speaker 1: aren't movies like they would back in the day at
Speaker 1: the Blockbuster or whatever. And the other part is how
Speaker 1: do you cut through the noise to even let people
Speaker 1: know that this film exists? So then I start doing
Speaker 1: Facebook marketing campaigns and Google ads, But then what I
Speaker 1: come to find out is Facebook would push back on
Speaker 1: the ads and say that we'd violated the terms because
Speaker 1: of you know, guns or the perception of violence. And
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to sell this documentary without having
Speaker 1: those parts in a trailer or part of the description.
Speaker 1: So long story short is that. And I don't want
Speaker 1: anybody think that we're here just you know, I'm just
Speaker 1: saying all negative things. It was just a challenge. It
Speaker 1: was a challenge to get it in front of people,
Speaker 1: and then you had to pay a certain amount of
Speaker 1: money for the marketing, and it came down to, you
Speaker 1: know what, we're spending XYZ on marketing, and that money
Speaker 1: we're not getting a good return on that investment, meaning
Speaker 1: that we'd either break even or we'd still lose money
Speaker 1: by promoting the film. And you know, in a way,
Speaker 1: is I kind of get it, because it's hard to
Speaker 1: break through the noise when you don't have a name,
Speaker 1: you don't have a platform, you don't have you know,
Speaker 1: like we didn't have social platforms ourselves where we had
Speaker 1: a bunch of followers already, we had nothing, so it
Speaker 1: was just difficult. And then so I think we kind
Speaker 1: of just kind of petered out there and we just
Speaker 1: kind of let us sit on the platforms, and I
Speaker 1: think we both went back to our normal lives because
Speaker 1: at this point, you know, Tony Kurritzis was kind of like, man,
Speaker 1: I'm done with this right in a way. We're not
Speaker 1: making many We tried lots of things. Let's push forward.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 1: The thing about the aggregator that sucked is they hold
Speaker 1: on to the money, so they would do out dividends
Speaker 1: like every quarter or something, and it wasn't a great
Speaker 1: sum of money. But the aggregator we were that we
Speaker 1: paid for went bankrupt. So that aggregator, whatever the last
Speaker 1: quarter was or whatever, had our money and we basically
Speaker 1: become another collector or debtor. So so the seggregator, the
Speaker 1: I reator thing collapses. And a surprising thing happened with
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime. They start dealing with individual filmmakers, and it
Speaker 1: was really surprising. So I reached out. I gave them
Speaker 1: the movie or I showed them the movie. They're like, yep,
Speaker 1: you can be a part of this as an individual.
Speaker 1: I was like great. So for it was Amazon Prime,
Speaker 1: meaning that it wasn't on vod it was if you
Speaker 1: had Amazon Prime, you could watch our documentary for free,
Speaker 1: and that Mark and I both loved because at this
Speaker 1: point the thought of making money from this was long gone, right,
Speaker 1: It was more about how do we get it in
Speaker 1: front of people, because we just want people to see it, right,
Speaker 1: And like, in the first month, it was millions of
Speaker 1: views or millions of minutes watched, and I shared it
Speaker 1: with some other independent filmmakers and they said, man, you
Speaker 1: guys are doing them credible. Now, money wise, it's pennies
Speaker 1: on the dollar. You're not making that much from those views.
Speaker 1: But again, and at that point, we were just happy
Speaker 1: that people were seeing it. So we're pretty happy with
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime for I don't know, maybe like three or
Speaker 1: four months it was getting out there, but then Amazon
Speaker 1: reversed its policy and they said, if you're an individual filmmaker,
Speaker 1: you're no longer going to be available for Amazon Prime.
Speaker 1: You can do VOD, but you can't do Amazon Prime.
Speaker 1: So that really took the sale out of the windo,
Speaker 1: out of the sales too. So at that point we
Speaker 1: were like, all right, well, at least we got VOD
Speaker 1: and that's where it's been ever since. And Amazon decides
Speaker 1: the pricing too, so you can't say, well, I want
Speaker 1: to charge twelve dollars for my film to rent it.
Speaker 1: Amazon decides that price, and I think I checked it
Speaker 1: earlier today and it's sitting at two dollars and sixty
Speaker 1: nine cents to rent it, and out of that, I
Speaker 1: think we get like a buck and some change, which
Speaker 1: brings in roughly thirty anywhere from ten to thirty dollars
Speaker 1: a month. Sentence.
Speaker 3: This is getting more and more diary as we go
Speaker 3: along here, Guys, did the film get noticed by anybody?
Speaker 1: A lot of people have Amazon Prime, A lot of
Speaker 1: people watch the free because back it was still just Netflix,
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime. I don't remember what else it was. So
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, we started getting some calls from
Speaker 1: producers that want to talk making about this into it
Speaker 1: like a Hollywood film. The biggest name of note was
Speaker 1: one of Tina Fay's producers, and we had one or
Speaker 1: two conversations and it seemed lukewarm on their side. But
Speaker 1: the bigger one was this producing team out of California,
Speaker 1: but this director producer team. They have both been attached
Speaker 1: to huge films like you, I mean, big, big, mega
Speaker 1: blockbuster films. So when they reached out, it was like
Speaker 1: Mark and I are thinking, man, this is you know,
Speaker 1: this is going to be good. So, and I'm not
Speaker 1: naming them because of the story that we're about ready
Speaker 1: to tell.
Speaker 5: I mean, they were really interested in the in the
Speaker 5: story and really engaged about like what to adapt, how
Speaker 5: to change it. I mean the interest we got from
Speaker 5: them was the same interest that we had, and that
Speaker 5: was incredible. And so we're both feeling really really good
Speaker 5: about that and hoping, hey, maybe we got something or
Speaker 5: maybe this will go somewhere. But then time goes by
Speaker 5: and we're not seeing any forward movement on their end.
Speaker 5: And the whole problem of the script too. Guy we
Speaker 5: were talking to he prefers to write his own scripts,
Speaker 5: and he also made a big deal he was like,
Speaker 5: I'm not going to do this Sun spec. At the time,
Speaker 5: Alan and I we don't know how movies are made.
Speaker 5: We're just sort of stumbling our way through this. But
Speaker 5: it became clearer over months that this guy is not
Speaker 5: going to do a script until he already has the
Speaker 5: other finances in place. That means that's stuff that me
Speaker 5: and Alan probably won't even be a part of those conversations.
Speaker 5: We have no idea how that's going to happen. But
Speaker 5: that at first, I didn't understand what a stumbling block
Speaker 5: that could be, because the other model is you do
Speaker 5: write a script, you do it on spec, you do
Speaker 5: it without being paid, and then you start shopping that script.
Speaker 5: But the first team, that's not what they were doing.
Speaker 5: And months turned in a year, two years. There was
Speaker 5: times where they asked to have exclusive access to the
Speaker 5: material so that we couldn't enter into deals with anybody else.
Speaker 5: So in the beginning, they optioned it, so that was
Speaker 5: the first thing that we did with them. So at that,
Speaker 5: like you said, we were blocked from doing anything else
Speaker 5: with it because they optioned it.
Speaker 1: We talked to this production, these this director producer team.
Speaker 1: They definitely seemed like they knew the story, they got
Speaker 1: what we were saying, they saw the vision, they saw
Speaker 1: it as a big Hollywood film, and we felt really good.
Speaker 1: And the other part about it that was key was
Speaker 1: since they're a director producer of these other films, they
Speaker 1: had some access to major talent. And in the beginning,
Speaker 1: the first two names they threw out was Paul Giamani
Speaker 1: and Sam Rockwell. I think Mark and I both were
Speaker 1: kind of salivating and thinking of Sam Rockwell, especially playing
Speaker 1: Tony Kritz's He was almost perfect. So I have no
Speaker 1: idea Paul Giamani or Sam Rockwell actually saw her documentary,
Speaker 1: but Accorns's producer director team they did see it. They
Speaker 1: did like it, but the next step was getting them
Speaker 1: to sign on as the lead character. Then they could
Speaker 1: get the money, and then the director could get paid
Speaker 1: so he could write the script. Is that how you
Speaker 1: remember it? Tumark? So, So in the first year or so,
Speaker 1: you know, on our side of the table, we don't
Speaker 1: want to be too pushy because these guys are talking
Speaker 1: about Paul Giamani and Sam Rockwell, and again, if you
Speaker 1: see their IMDb you're like, oh damn, they have done
Speaker 1: big pictures. So we're kind of like, okay, well, these
Speaker 1: things probably take time. The one thing that should have
Speaker 1: given it away, that we should have been suspect about,
Speaker 1: was they didn't give us any money for the options.
Speaker 1: And I know people are probably out there thinking you
Speaker 1: guys are dumbasses, but at the time, there wasn't that
Speaker 1: many people knocking at our door. There was some, but
Speaker 1: this just seemed like okay, yeah. So but after about
Speaker 1: a year and a half or so, it was pretty
Speaker 1: obvious that these guys are flaking on us.
Speaker 5: We got a contacted by a young screenwriter out in
Speaker 5: California who initially he had found he had found some
Speaker 5: footage on YouTube of the Tony Curtzis thing, and then
Speaker 5: he went and looked for Tony Kurtzis dot com and
Speaker 5: found that we had it, and he came to us
Speaker 5: initially talking about wanting to buy the domain, but that
Speaker 5: conversation quickly turned into something else where. He was really
Speaker 5: hungry and interested in the story, and Alan and I
Speaker 5: instantly liked him. So we had we had these long
Speaker 5: phone conversations about the inner workings of it and what
Speaker 5: would be some interesting things that the writer.
Speaker 1: Would like to do differently to adapt it, and it was,
Speaker 1: it was. It was really collaborative and really hopeful. We
Speaker 1: also turned over our entire archive to him as well,
Speaker 1: so we have a just so people know, we have
Speaker 1: a very deep archive of stuff that isn't in the movie,
Speaker 1: isn't on the website. It's just so much stuff because
Speaker 1: you can imagine after five years of printed documents, audio video,
Speaker 1: there's just a lot there. And Mark, we should probably
Speaker 1: mention his name, right, I mean, because because we really.
Speaker 3: Liked the guy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, his name is Austin Kladney. You know, we'd never
Speaker 5: heard of him because he hadn't actually gotten anything done yet.
Speaker 5: He had he'd been he'd been production assistant on many movies,
Speaker 5: so he had experience. He was in California, he had
Speaker 5: written scripts that had had not gotten anywhere yet, and
Speaker 5: you know, looking through his writing, I was like, he's good.
Speaker 5: This is fantastic. Maybe this other writer producer thing doesn't
Speaker 5: work out. Let's let's see what Austin can do. One
Speaker 5: day he contacted us and was like, check out my script,
Speaker 5: and it was incredible. He had actually written the whole thing.
Speaker 5: At a time when we were still getting promises about
Speaker 5: this other team, we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it,
Speaker 5: we'll get a table.
Speaker 1: I think by that point the other team had pretty
Speaker 1: much the first round. They had pretty much we're done
Speaker 1: with them.
Speaker 5: At that point, they'd ghosted us, they'd wandered away, so
Speaker 5: we were hoping, hey, let's go with this. I can't
Speaker 5: remember how long all that took, but eventually he had
Speaker 5: representation and he started to form some relationships with some
Speaker 5: movie companies in California and started to pitch the story,
Speaker 5: and we were a part of one of those pitches.
Speaker 5: It didn't go great. There were some suspicious things about
Speaker 5: the guy that we were dealing with. He didn't seem
Speaker 5: like he was really interested and just kept talking. There
Speaker 5: was somebody that was seemed great, and there was somebody
Speaker 5: that not seemed so great. Right, the not so great guy,
Speaker 5: I believe he was day drinking.
Speaker 1: It was like a used car salesman that had a
Speaker 1: couple too many pops at one o'clock in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: So he was selling us a bill of goods and
Speaker 1: he seemed like there was a bit of a slur
Speaker 1: there in his voice. So and Mark, we should probably clarify.
Speaker 1: By this point, the first director producer team had come
Speaker 1: back into the picture. They'd come back and said, we're
Speaker 1: still interested.
Speaker 5: What are you doing.
Speaker 1: Austin's working part time or he's working at a zoo
Speaker 1: while he's writing the script, like he's paying his dues,
Speaker 1: and that got a lot of respect me and Mark
Speaker 1: because it's like, oh, this dude's actually doing Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: multi million dollar director can't pick up a pen unless
Speaker 1: he has the money in front of him. And so
Speaker 1: we felt connected to Austin because we did the same
Speaker 1: thing with our film. We weren't getting paid anything. It
Speaker 1: was the passion of creating this project. So right before
Speaker 1: this meeting with Austin's team or Austin's possible team, the
Speaker 1: original Hollywood producer and director team comes back out of
Speaker 1: the would work. We get on a call with him
Speaker 1: and I just call him out. I'm like, you know you, guys,
Speaker 1: I don't believe anything you're saying because you already painting
Speaker 1: this picture of all these great things and then you
Speaker 1: ghosted us. Now, the one thing that they were really
Speaker 1: great at was smoothing things over. And so we get
Speaker 1: in a conversation with them again and they're great at
Speaker 1: the talking. And I'm still not sure how Mark andized
Speaker 1: bullshit detectors didn't pick it up on it. Probably because
Speaker 1: we had Star Eiyes, because they start now mentioning that
Speaker 1: their buddies with Shilah buff and Jeremy Strong from Succession
Speaker 1: and Jeremy Strong seemed like a real possibility from them,
Speaker 1: and so again I'm thinking, man, Jeremy Strong might be
Speaker 1: pretty good for Tony Kuritz's right. And of course when
Speaker 1: we're on the calls with this team, they go into
Speaker 1: great detail of how they're friends and how they've seen
Speaker 1: the film and they really want to do this, and
Speaker 1: so we have that conversation with them, and then we
Speaker 1: have the meeting with Austin's people with the one guy
Speaker 1: that I felt I don't want to speak for Mark,
Speaker 1: but maybe we both felt there was something off with him. Now,
Speaker 1: to be fair to Austin's side, the team, they let
Speaker 1: that guy go a few months later, so there was
Speaker 1: something off about him. And I want to make it
Speaker 1: clear that we're not talking about the other producers. We're
Speaker 1: just talking about one particular person that's now gone. The
Speaker 1: other producers were good and fine and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: So so now we're like, okay, but we got this
Speaker 1: other director Hollywood team that wants to do it, and
Speaker 1: got Jeremy Strong. Why don't we combine. Let's see if
Speaker 1: let's take Austin's script and do it with the Hollywood
Speaker 1: team that's already together and supposedly either has Schilada Buff
Speaker 1: or Jeremy Strong. And so he's like, Austin, would you know,
Speaker 1: would you be cool with that? And Austin's yeah, let's
Speaker 1: do it. So the Hollywood director team, we sent him
Speaker 1: over Austin's script and they come back and act like
Speaker 1: Austin just wrote the biggest piece of shit ever, And
Speaker 1: we definitely didn't feel that way, but that's how they felt. Now,
Speaker 1: my gut tells me this director didn't read past page
Speaker 1: three and all he could think about was he wanted
Speaker 1: to write it like or he wanted to make the
Speaker 1: money from it or whatever. Now that's in hindsight, of course. Okay,
Speaker 1: So now we have this decision to make. Well, the
Speaker 1: Hollywood producer director team they don't want anything to do
Speaker 1: with the Austin script. We are an alliance with Austin.
Speaker 1: Not only do we the guy, but we've agreed to
Speaker 1: kind of make this film together and he's wrote to script.
Speaker 1: So what are we gonna do? So we kind of
Speaker 1: have to pick a team. Which way are we gonna go? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because also the writer producer it was.
Speaker 5: Another exclusivity timeline where we went with the writer producer team.
Speaker 5: They would be the only ones to be able to
Speaker 5: work on this for like it was a year or
Speaker 5: something like that. I think it was like another year,
Speaker 5: so we would have been tied up, and that means
Speaker 5: we couldn't been doing anything with Austin. So that was
Speaker 5: the choice we had to make. Which which way are
Speaker 5: you going to go? We have zero understanding about how
Speaker 5: movies do get made and what these models are.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. We didn't want to screw over Austin, Right,
Speaker 1: So he has a script, but he has his script,
Speaker 1: and we were involved, not in the writing of the script,
Speaker 1: but definitely flushing out here's ar Chibal material, here's the
Speaker 1: factual things that happened. So we were a part of
Speaker 1: the process. But Mark and I ended up foolishly thinking,
Speaker 1: let's go with the Hollywood team. Yeah, they've done stuff,
Speaker 1: They've got like, look, they've got a list of things,
Speaker 1: they've got a history.
Speaker 5: Doesn't it make logical sense to do that? And all
Speaker 5: the while we're throwing out all of this flaky behavior
Speaker 5: we've been seeing along the way.
Speaker 1: We put up our blinders because we wanted to believe
Speaker 1: that Jeremy Strong was going to play Tony Kritzis. And
Speaker 1: they talk about money, of course, you know, and we
Speaker 1: be EPs and all that stuff. Executive producers. Again, we
Speaker 1: like Austin, like we're friends with them, right, Like, we
Speaker 1: don't want to do anything to negate him. So we
Speaker 1: throw out the proposition to him, say, hey, look what
Speaker 1: if we just say, we cut ties, but you're free
Speaker 1: to do whatever you want with your script. You can
Speaker 1: sell it, you can do whatever. Right, it's your script,
Speaker 1: make money from it, and you are not legally tied
Speaker 1: to us in any which way. I think Austin still
Speaker 1: wanted to hang with us, but he knew that our
Speaker 1: producer director team didn't want anything to do with the script.
Speaker 1: So he was like, okay, and that's what we agreed
Speaker 1: to do. And so we go back to our producer
Speaker 1: director team and we're like, okay, guys, we're free and clear.
Speaker 1: Let's move forward. And of course they're like, great, this
Speaker 1: is going to be outstanding, this is you know, and
Speaker 1: just start feeding. And I'm still I'm sure people are like,
Speaker 1: you guys are dumb asses. Yes, we were dumb asses
Speaker 1: at that time, but we pushed forward with them. And
Speaker 1: then Austin pushes forward with his It didn't take but
Speaker 1: about six months till I start to get the feeling again,
Speaker 1: Oh man, we're being shafted again. These guys are goat.
Speaker 1: Not only are the ghostness, but they now they got
Speaker 1: these issues with these other projects that they're working on,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna do it next month, and then next month.
Speaker 5: And let's just say out those other projects, they've never
Speaker 5: seen a lot of day either.
Speaker 1: They still not seen the Lie Day, all these other
Speaker 1: things that were important that what that never happened either. Yeah,
Speaker 1: supposedly they had a deal with Amazon too. You know
Speaker 1: we would dovetail into this Amazon deal and be part
Speaker 1: of that too. Who knows if it is true. And
Speaker 1: again I want to make it clear that I have
Speaker 1: no idea of Paul Giamadi, Sam Rockwell, Shout out the
Speaker 1: Buff or Jeremy Strong's ever heard of our film, ever
Speaker 1: saw our film, was ever even up for the role.
Speaker 1: I have no idea. That's just what they sold us.
Speaker 1: We knew that our thing was not really working out,
Speaker 1: but you know, Mark and I were like, man, good
Speaker 1: for Austin. This dude was hustling it out, working a
Speaker 1: you know, a job at a zoo or whatever. And
Speaker 1: now it looks like maybe his stuff's coming to fruition.
Speaker 1: He put in the work, and maybe success is coming
Speaker 1: the first And I still remember when we got told this,
Speaker 1: I was like, you son of a bitch in a
Speaker 1: good way. Werner Herzog signs on to be the director
Speaker 1: of his movie, of his script, and then Nicholas Kate
Speaker 1: is in the picture to play Tony Kurtz's. So Mark
Speaker 1: and I are just I think are pretty thrilled at
Speaker 1: that point, just for Austin that this is happening for him.
Speaker 5: We didn't find out from Austin that this was happening.
Speaker 5: We started seeing notifications from movie online movie sites, you know,
Speaker 5: saying hey, this is now in production. We check with Austin,
Speaker 5: sure enough, it's really happening. He's meeting with Berner Hertzog
Speaker 5: and Hertzg's given him notes and wants to you know,
Speaker 5: change things, and it's like that's incredible, that's amazing. And
Speaker 5: then hert Sock's not part of the project and Nicholas
Speaker 5: Cage is in apartment and so it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 5: I guess he's going through the he's going through the
Speaker 5: same stuff we've had to go through. And then like
Speaker 5: what was it alan It was like a month or
Speaker 5: two and we started get notifications again. No, Gus van
Speaker 5: Zant is now signed to direct, and we didn't know
Speaker 5: who was in the movie or anything at all at first,
Speaker 5: but again got in test with Austin. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's happening. Yeah, And then we started to find out
Speaker 5: it was being shot in Louisville about a year ago,
Speaker 5: really really happening, and we're not a part of it.
Speaker 5: That was the kicker to both be like, I wish
Speaker 5: nothing but the great success for Austin, but god damn it,
Speaker 5: we made the wrong call.
Speaker 1: It still sucks, but it did suck. And I got
Speaker 1: to get props to the people that we had a
Speaker 1: call with that we turned down. They did a phenomenal
Speaker 1: job by by you know, going out and finding the
Speaker 1: money to make the picture multiple times in the past
Speaker 1: year and a half. Mark and I are just like, man,
Speaker 1: we bet on the wrong team. And I still clarify
Speaker 1: some of this too, that you know, we're kind of
Speaker 1: speaking for Austin and the history of his how this
Speaker 1: planned out. There may be parts to this that we
Speaker 1: were not that we're not in the know or we're
Speaker 1: not remembering of how this developed. But one thing that
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure on is that it's Warner Herzog that
Speaker 1: came up with the title of dead Man's Wire. Tony
Speaker 1: never called it dead Man's Wife.
Speaker 5: There is no reference to dead Man's Wire anywhere, but
Speaker 5: he did call it a dead man's line. And I
Speaker 5: can and I can kind of see like, oh, they're
Speaker 5: they're gonna switch out the one word. Okay, okay, this
Speaker 5: is the way I took it. This is my own
Speaker 5: personal opinion. It was odd that they are essentially using
Speaker 5: the same title. Changing the one word. To me was
Speaker 5: like I thought, to adapt, you'd need to move further
Speaker 5: away or do something different, and if you you're to Austin,
Speaker 5: that was not the title he wanted, but that became
Speaker 5: it and stuck with that project.
Speaker 3: Have you guys had a chance to see dead Man's Wire.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think Austin did an incredibly great job. First
Speaker 5: of all, it's based on a true story, but there
Speaker 5: are obviously lots of differences, and so you can see
Speaker 5: things in dead Man's Wire that's like, that's not what
Speaker 5: really happened. All that aside, I think Austin had some
Speaker 5: really great ideas that he was able to expand, and
Speaker 5: those stuck.
Speaker 1: The actors.
Speaker 5: Some of the people who were cast really interesting. Dacker Montgomery,
Speaker 5: who most people probably know is Billy from Stranger Things.
Speaker 5: I thought he was pretty great. Not somebody I ever
Speaker 5: would have thought of to play Dick Hall, but I
Speaker 5: thought he was pretty great. Bill Scarsguard interesting Joyce. He
Speaker 5: doesn't look hardly anything at all like Tony. Okay, that's fine.
Speaker 5: Coleman Domingo as Fred Temple, that was an interesting adaptation
Speaker 5: because the real guy was Fred Heckman. He was white,
Speaker 5: he was definitely not cool the way that Coleman Domingo
Speaker 5: was portrayed. But this was Austin's vision, along with many
Speaker 5: of the songs that he uses there. I thought it
Speaker 5: was a great theaptrical adaptation of something that really happened.
Speaker 1: When Mark and I and Austin would talk about dead
Speaker 1: Man's Line and Tony Kurizz many times, the movie Dog
Speaker 1: daypp Noon got brought up with al Pacino, and you
Speaker 1: can definitely see the similarities or the vibe or the pill,
Speaker 1: the you know, the connection there. And at the ninth hour,
Speaker 1: who do they land but al Pacino to be in
Speaker 1: dead Man's Wire And I think that was the final
Speaker 1: nail of me saying that was me again saying, oh
Speaker 1: my god, we picked the wrong team. They got al
Speaker 1: Pacino in the film.
Speaker 5: I mean that was kind of Austin's dream, you know,
Speaker 5: at first, just to be like, I hope this gets
Speaker 5: compared to Dog Day After and I hope some of
Speaker 5: that tension. I hope people see that. But to actually
Speaker 5: get Pacino to come in at the end, and Pacino,
Speaker 5: I think is really interesting in it too. He plays
Speaker 5: mmel Hall that calls Dad and there's a couple scenes there.
Speaker 5: I think it's just incredible. Pacino's fantastic. It's a different take,
Speaker 5: but it's compelling, super compelling.
Speaker 1: It was my favorite part of the film. It is
Speaker 1: the al Pacino part. And that's not to negate anything else.
Speaker 1: It's just that it's a very interesting play on it.
Speaker 3: Ultimately, do you have credit dead Man's fire?
Speaker 1: Another feather in Austin on how good of a guy
Speaker 1: he is. So we come back, you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: doing these great things and me and Mark kind of
Speaker 1: come back scrapping to the table saying, hey man, can
Speaker 1: we get can we get anything here?
Speaker 10: You know?
Speaker 1: And he was able to land his historical consultants for
Speaker 1: the film. So I'm I would bet that our our
Speaker 1: credit is pretty low on the credit roll, and that's okay,
Speaker 1: but yeah, we got that. We got a little historical
Speaker 1: consultant credit there. Plus we got a quote from Gus
Speaker 1: van Zandt about our documentary that was pretty thrilling. That's
Speaker 1: That's definitely a thrilling part of this too is to
Speaker 1: be able to say that, you know, have this quote
Speaker 1: from Gus talking about our doc what are the.
Speaker 3: Plans for dead Man's Line going forward?
Speaker 1: After post dead Man's Line, I started a new project,
Speaker 1: start a YouTube channel called The Tapes Archives, and I've
Speaker 1: done like, I have a bunch of unreleased interviews from
Speaker 1: my music critic friend Mark Allen. But then I started
Speaker 1: do like music documentaries like on Black Sabbath or Van Halen,
Speaker 1: and then even more recently, I've done some videos on
Speaker 1: like movie on movies. And so when we know that
Speaker 1: this film's coming out, dead Man's Wire, and we need
Speaker 1: a platform to put our film on because we want
Speaker 1: to reach the biggest audience, We're like, well, why don't
Speaker 1: we just put it on YouTube? Right, Like, you're not
Speaker 1: gonna make a lot of money again, but YouTube is
Speaker 1: so huge now, right, So it's it's gonna have the
Speaker 1: widest audience. I'm being long Win and saying we're gonna
Speaker 1: put it on YouTube, and I'm guessing by the time
Speaker 1: people hear this, it'll be out, because I'm gonna drop
Speaker 1: it tomorrow December night.
Speaker 5: We kind of exhausted the other channels too. I mean,
Speaker 5: we've looked at everything else. This is the only thing
Speaker 5: that we have any control over in terms of like
Speaker 5: managing how it goes out, how it is promoted.
Speaker 1: One other thing happened this year where a producer did
Speaker 1: offer us twenty grand for the movie, but then they
Speaker 1: would own it, like like full lockstock. We would get
Speaker 1: twenty grand, they would own our film. We said no way,
Speaker 1: So I don't know what we're gonna make from YouTube.
Speaker 1: But it was one of those things where it's like, dude,
Speaker 1: I'm not giving you my film for you to have
Speaker 1: for eternity for twenty grand. So instead we would rather
Speaker 1: release it so everybody can see it and hopefully it
Speaker 1: becomes a little bit of a historical documentation of a
Speaker 1: crazy event that happened in Indy. And to accent all that,
Speaker 1: if you go to our website, you'll see a lot
Speaker 1: of archives and if this, if it does well on YouTube,
Speaker 1: Mark and I are committed to adding more stuff to
Speaker 1: the archives. But if it doesn't do well, then we've
Speaker 1: probably won't because it's a lot of work.
Speaker 3: So you guys going to work together on another documentary
Speaker 3: anytime soon.
Speaker 1: I think both of us would love nothing more, but
Speaker 1: at our age, you know, knocking down on being sixty
Speaker 1: years old, we just can't give up five years of
Speaker 1: our lives for basically not knowing if anything monetarily is
Speaker 1: going to come from it. I'm not really looking to it.
Speaker 1: I would love to do more documentaries. I just can't
Speaker 1: justify it to my wife and saying, hey, for the
Speaker 1: next five years, I'm not gonna be paid for this
Speaker 1: and we're gonna have to sacrifice, you know, time and
Speaker 1: maybe something like this happens again. And the moral of
Speaker 1: that story, any young filmmakers watch it or listening to this,
Speaker 1: do it. Do it while you're young, because I think
Speaker 1: if Mark and I would have gone down this path
Speaker 1: in our twenties, we would have definitely done more stuff
Speaker 1: and been okay with it because we both probably lived
Speaker 1: cheaper lives, didn't have these expensive mortgage or kids, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So it is and I know us sound like old
Speaker 1: man here telling the kids what to do, but do
Speaker 1: it when you're young, and that way you don't have
Speaker 1: that expectation of money, or not the expectation.
Speaker 5: But the need to be able to pay your bills
Speaker 5: as much and the energy. I mean, you know, we
Speaker 5: worked full time jobs, so we every weekend. We were
Speaker 5: often doing this as well in the evenings, and it
Speaker 5: takes a heavy toll after a while, and I think
Speaker 5: a younger person is more fit for that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Mark and Allen, thank you guys so much for giving
Speaker 3: me so much of your time. I really do appreciate this.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Mike.
Speaker 1: I've been a big fan of your podcast, for You're
Speaker 1: like one of the ogs in the podcast world and
Speaker 1: especially in the film podcast world. So for me coming
Speaker 1: on this show is without sounding corny, it's an honor
Speaker 1: because you've had some big names on here and your
Speaker 1: work is so prolific, and so I was surprised that
Speaker 1: you even said, yeah, it'll allow us all So thank
Speaker 1: you to you, Mike.
Speaker 7: Late lad, I've been thinking.
Speaker 11: How much I miss my lady hair Amarna Hut.
Speaker 6: In the Cory, riding in the TB.
Speaker 10: Living hand like a lust of hair flower, running through
Speaker 10: the grounds, woud, lying to the.
Speaker 1: Like a puppy child.
Speaker 9: And when they raised to rain down.
Speaker 10: Washing out the cattle town, and she's far went somewhere.
Speaker 1: Into out of down.
Speaker 6: And hit things up crystal streams.
Speaker 11: I'm being gone by, and we would lean laughing, fit
Speaker 11: to burst on each other.
Speaker 7: I could see sit eating apples an.
Speaker 11: The fruit juice, throwing slowly slow and stool down the
Speaker 11: buns of your body, and.
Speaker 1: Lifting in like lust and bow.
Speaker 2: Running through the.
Speaker 9: Grass house got ahead.
Speaker 1: Like a bun of giants.
Speaker 10: Im went aad the rain bar down, washing out the
Speaker 10: cattle town, and she's fall where somewhere.
Speaker 9: In her eye and Din, and.
Speaker 6: She dreans up chrystals, strains of days gone by, and.
Speaker 7: Weirdly laughing, fit to burs on a shoulder phone in
Speaker 7: I could ness home.
Speaker 1: In the creed of your.
Speaker 8: Cap, handle my thoms around your shoulder, white and open,
Speaker 8: while the sycamore, and I'm the.
Speaker 9: Swallows up there and there the hand or come there
Speaker 9: shine my I like a king did, because it's all
Speaker 9: I'm When her raise the rainfalls down, washing out the
Speaker 9: cattle town up, and she's fall away offwhere hell her
Speaker 9: out of Din, and she dreams.
Speaker 6: Up crystal streams of days gone by, when we would leave.
Speaker 1: Laughing but to burst on each other.
Speaker 10: I'm when her raise the rainfalls down, washing out the
Speaker 10: cattle town, and she's.
Speaker 8: Far away somewhere.
Speaker 9: In her eye of don.
Speaker 6: And she dreams up crystal streams of days gone by,
Speaker 6: and we would lead laughing with a birth sonny table.
Speaker 11: Lately I've been thinking, but I miss my lady and
Speaker 11: Marina in a cary, ridden in the tabut, living like
Speaker 11: a lusty cloud.
Speaker 9: Through the grass, blouse lying to the head.
Speaker 8: Like a puppy, like a puffy child.
Speaker 7: Hey,