Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 308: Lessons Learned Writing Oliver Stone's The Doors with Randall Jahnson

Transcript

BPS 308: Lessons Learned Writing Oliver Stone's The Doors with Randall Jahnson · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

• 0:03
  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Bulleproof
• 0:14
  Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number three h eight. You fail only if you stop
• 0:19
  writing. Ray Bradberry broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in Hollywood when we
• 0:25
  really should be working on that next draft. It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast,
• 0:30
  showing you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your
• 0:33
  screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to
• 0:40
  another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex
• 0:44
  Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof Script Coverage. Now,
• 0:49
  unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses on the kind of
• 0:56
  project you are in the goals of the project you are, so we actually
• 1:00
  break it down by three categories microbudget, indie film, market, and studio
• 1:03
  film. There's no reason to get coverage from a reader that used to reading
• 1:07
  tempole movies when your movie is going to be done for one hundred thousand dollars.
• 1:11
  And we wanted to focus on that At Bulletproof Script Coverage, our readers
• 1:15
  have worked with Marvel Studios, CIA, WM, NBC, HBO, Disney,
• 1:19
  Scott Free, Warner Brothers, The Blacklist, and many many more.
• 1:23
  So if you need your screenplay or TV script covered by professional readers, head
• 1:30
  on over to cover my Screenplay dot com. Now, today we go inside
• 1:36
  the mind of screenwriter Randall Jansen. Now. Randall is the writer of The
• 1:42
  Doors Mask of Zoro and he worked on Tales from the Crypt HBO Legendary HBO
• 1:49
  series, among many other projects in the course of his amazing career. Now
• 1:53
  the interview with Randall originally aired on the Filmtrooper podcast and Scott over there did
• 2:01
  an amazing in depth interview with Randall. Enjoyed this episode with guest host Scott
• 2:08
  McMahon. We are at the Highland Stillhouse in Oregan City, in Oregon City.
• 2:14
  So Organ City used to be the original capital of Organ before it was
• 2:20
  they moved to Salem. But Organ City was it sort of the last city
• 2:24
  or the city established at the end of the Oregan Trail? Was That is
• 2:28
  correct? And it was also auspicious in that it was settled by a guy
• 2:37
  who bailed out of the Hudson's Bay Company on the fur trade, doctor John
• 2:42
  McLaughlin, and settled down and put a trading post right at the foot of
• 2:46
  the Willamette River falls here, which was the site of a magnificent Native American
• 2:54
  metropolis and had been for thousands, probably thousands of years. And he just
• 3:00
  came in planets his trading post right there at the right in the midst of
• 3:07
  it, and took a Native American woman for a wife. I believe his
• 3:13
  biography is or is his story is one of the things that's on my list
• 3:16
  to really read about it. But it's a fascinating story. But this was
• 3:21
  back in the eighteen forties, I believe. Well, so it wasn't wow,
• 3:23
  Okay, So I mean when I think about it, it's like,
• 3:28
  what was the Organ Trail was really eighteen hundreds, wasn't? Yeah, it
• 3:30
  started in the eighteen really in the eighteen forties. You know, once the
• 3:36
  Organ Territory was established and they the word got out of the very fertile farmland
• 3:42
  potential of it, it started creating the migration west. You know. It's
• 3:46
  funny. I went on a field with my daughter. They went to the
• 3:51
  Foster Farms over in Organ City was one of the first farms outposts for all
• 3:55
  the trout you know, pioneer years coming in from the Organ Trail and Foster
• 4:03
  he was successful starting up like a general store on in Boston or something like
• 4:09
  that. And once he saw that the Organ territory was opening up, he
• 4:13
  decided not to take the Organ Trail. He took a ship with his family
• 4:16
  and he took his business and decided to open up another store over here in
• 4:20
  Oregon. But he took the route of going down the Atlantic all the way
• 4:26
  down past the tip of Chile, you know down there the Pacific, coming
• 4:31
  all the way up to Pacific. So he never he took that route all
• 4:34
  the way instead of taking the wagon trail. Yeah, so he established an
• 4:40
  option. So he established the farm and like the outposts of where people came
• 4:45
  through hood mountain Hood, right, so, and they would help actually carve
• 4:50
  out some roads and passages. Because when I think people when the pioneers came
• 4:56
  to Oregon, either they were going to take the Columbia River all the way
• 4:58
  you know down or some would take try to get through mountain hood. And
• 5:01
  so those who try to venture and get through mountain Hood, they had to
• 5:05
  um you know, they got stuck or something like that. So Foster and
• 5:10
  his people end up you know, helping him out, helping out a lot
• 5:14
  of pioneers and developing a road there. So they he had this outposts and
• 5:18
  he had the general story there, he had the farm, he had like
• 5:21
  a little you know, like many what he called lodges or ends, you
• 5:27
  know, where people could stay. So it's like it was the first site
• 5:30
  of civilization for a lot of pioneers after his long journey and he just made
• 5:34
  a killing. And so they had this farm that you can go to.
• 5:38
  It's an educational farm, but it's still we're walking through the house, you
• 5:42
  know, seeing the stuff they use, seeing the farm, seeing the barn.
• 5:45
  And it was just made. It was allowed all the kids, so
• 5:48
  like, you know, really hands on experience what it could have would have
• 5:51
  been like as a you know, a pioneer in the Organ Trail. Wow.
• 5:56
  So it was a little bit of history that I had no idea about.
• 5:58
  There. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. Sure they
• 6:00
  have they have a museum over here for the Oregon Trail Museum, which I
• 6:08
  believe has been shut down now because of lack of funding. Because of the
• 6:13
  budget cuts and everything else. But that was one of the things I've been
• 6:17
  amused actually since I moved up here from California that that with the Oregon Trail,
• 6:27
  that was the the overland route that a lot of people who were heading
• 6:31
  to the California gold rush took. Yeah, and so at one point,
• 6:36
  you know, you have the trail diverts, you know, and you go
• 6:42
  go to California search for gold or you go to Oregon and both and growth
• 6:46
  things. You know. I think that was a very interesting dichotomy there of
• 6:49
  where you know, it sort of really underscores the differences between California and Oregon.
• 6:55
  Now that I was funny because it's sort of the what exists today.
• 6:59
  Oh, I'm that's my point. That's my point exactly. So I'm a
• 7:02
  little slow today. That's all right, We'll just have another have another beer.
• 7:06
  There you'll you'll catch um. It was a great segue. So one
• 7:12
  of the things I wanted to do with you is, like I one of
• 7:15
  my favorite podcasts is the Creative Screenwriting UM podcasts UM hosted by Jeff Goldsmith,
• 7:20
  and he's now since left a senior editor of Creative screen screen Creative Screenwriting Magazine
• 7:28
  and Uh. He started his own podcast called Q and ANK Question and Answer
• 7:31
  with Jeff Goldsmith because he's been really instrumental and and holding these uh free screenings
• 7:38
  down in Los Angeles of just different movies. And at the end of every
• 7:41
  these free screenings, at the end of every movie, he would have um
• 7:46
  the screenwriters there to like talk for like an hour and a half about the
• 7:49
  movie, their their experience and all that kind of stuff. What a concept
• 7:53
  actually having the writer, Oh, I know, you know, and he's
• 7:56
  he's great, and I really enjoy like his style of interviewing, and you
• 8:01
  know, and I could tell like sometimes he's polite to like some of the
• 8:03
  people or some of the work that they've done. But inside I could tell,
• 8:07
  like that comic book geek in him once ago, what were you thinking?
• 8:11
  You know, that kind of thing. But he's still very cordial about
• 8:13
  it. Sure. He actually happened to be in college the roommate of Dame
• 8:18
  Jaffee. Jame Jaffee was the creator of God a War and some of the
• 8:22
  Twist of Melsers who I worked with that sony for many years. So when
• 8:26
  I met up with Jeff, you know, I introduced myself via that way.
• 8:30
  So he was very cool, but he's very busy. And again,
• 8:33
  for anybody who wants to check out his stuff, definitely check out Q and
• 8:37
  A with Jeff Goldsmith or some of the past stuff on Creative Screen Screenwriting magazine.
• 8:41
  But anyway, this is my chance to do my really horrible impersonation of
• 8:46
  Jeff interviewing you randall as if like we just finished the screening and oh you
• 8:52
  know, and we had this big audience, but right now we're just we
• 8:54
  have this cool little puff. It's funny because I note is I normally do
• 9:01
  my UM podcast and at Mars Irish Pub and right yeah, like it's gonna
• 9:05
  suggest that for you as well. Yeah, so we go there every other
• 9:09
  week, my buddy Frederick and I and we go down and he knows everybody
• 9:13
  there and so we we're regulars there every like every other Monday night. Okay,
• 9:18
  um, But it's funny that it's an Irish pub and here we are
• 9:20
  crosses away in Oregan City and a Scottish Irish pub. Again, so they
• 9:26
  will tell you it's a Scottish pub. There won't be There's not much any
• 9:28
  there, not much Irish here. Okay, good, you know, although
• 9:31
  I do see the Bank of Ireland. Uh yeah, him go over there,
• 9:35
  you know, but if they had a choice, it would be you
• 9:39
  know, basically it's anti English and it's charming. I mean both places are
• 9:45
  just charming on this like old style bar. So anybody gets up here,
• 9:48
  you gotta check out these places. So we have Mars Irish Pub and l
• 9:52
  and we have the Highland Still Still House here in Organ City, ye,
• 9:56
  which which if you're a fan of single Scotches, We'll be right back after
• 10:03
  a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. This has one
• 10:13
  of the best collections you will find anywhere, arguably even on the entire West
• 10:18
  coast. So this the the Mick and his wife who owned the place,
• 10:24
  are huge Scotch files and they're just uh, I have to learn more about
• 10:28
  this. Yeah, I have this. I had this, the nate desire
• 10:31
  to want to get into tastes. Well, there's part of it. I
• 10:39
  was my honeymoon in Scotland and so that's where I started. That's where I
• 10:41
  started, you know, acquiring the taste, and so it was it was
• 10:46
  it was more of what you were acquiring. You weren't just because now you're
• 10:48
  married. You were just drinking more. I well, I come up,
• 10:52
  well, I come up for excuses to drink more, you know, and
• 10:56
  I started drinking. I should never drink until my daughter was born. Yeah,
• 11:01
  and then I started to drink drink a lot more. Yeah, ways
• 11:05
  upon you heavily. So anyway, being the parent, So I wanted to
• 11:09
  the first question that Jeff always asked us is he always wants to know breaking
• 11:15
  in stories of like how you got started in the business, or what was
• 11:18
  your like your first paying job, or how you know, yeah, how
• 11:24
  you broke in. Well, I went to film school at UCLA, and
• 11:28
  at that time I entered the film school there in nineteen seventy nine, and
• 11:33
  you were basically thrown into a little life raft with a bunch of other people
• 11:39
  doing that had the same aspirations to either be a writer, director, working
• 11:45
  in the film industry in one way or another. And so you also quick
• 11:50
  was that time the late seventies, like, because I know that this is
• 11:54
  the very late seventies seventy nine when I started, But I was wondering if,
• 11:58
  like the early eighties was it? Um, I can't remember. Was
• 12:03
  there a golden age of like where everybody wanted to go to film school because
• 12:07
  I know that there was a kind of a the the film school sort of
• 12:13
  bonanza occurred in the UH I would say probably the mid seventies, okay,
• 12:22
  and carried on all through into the early eighties. Um. And that was
• 12:26
  basically because George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, they were all products
• 12:31
  of film school, you know, Francis Coppola of course, yeah and Squirses
• 12:39
  yeah yeah, yeah, you of course and um so and that was it.
• 12:46
  I mean, basically we just covered the film school landscape. At that
• 12:48
  time. There was three places to go, USC, UCLA, and NYU.
• 12:54
  And for me, I had grown up in the San Diego area,
• 12:58
  uh and I couldn't afford going to SC and NYU was just about as far
• 13:05
  removed from a South California beach as possible. Um. And I used to
• 13:11
  go with my dad, who worked for the UC system, up to see
• 13:15
  basketball games at UCLA when John Wooden was coaching there. So, um,
• 13:18
  that was sort of the natural place to go to and it was vastly cheaper
• 13:24
  than SC. Right And actually what I liked about SC that there were differences
• 13:30
  in the curriculum at that time too, which was that if you wanted to
• 13:31
  be. UM. If you if you had a very specific idea of what
• 13:37
  you wanted to do in the in the film industry, whether you wanted to
• 13:39
  be a sound editor or an editor, or a cinematographer or a director,
• 13:46
  producer, whatever, you would go to SC because they had very clear tracks
• 13:52
  and each of those those specific professions. UCLA it was much much looser and
• 14:00
  they were kind of had this had sort of the stigma, if you will,
• 14:05
  uh, being of creating a tours um. You know, you were
• 14:09
  you were the complete filmmaker in a sense once you came out of UCLA.
• 14:13
  But the difference, another difference was is that you had to fund all your
• 14:16
  own stuff after after the basic Super eight class that occurred when you first entered
• 14:24
  school. Uh, SC that didn't happen. You had to um. They
• 14:26
  funded the advanced projects, um, but you had to compete with other people
• 14:33
  to get that one or two directing positions that they would do. Anyone could
• 14:39
  be a director at UCLA if you had the money for it, which to
• 14:43
  me, it was really like the real world, much more like the real
• 14:46
  world. Yeah. Yeah, Coppola came to UCLA. Jim Morrison and ray
• 14:52
  Man's Erica. The doors were there. Um, you know, that was
• 14:54
  in the that was the very early sixties. Um, you know, but
• 15:00
  I mean there's you know Paul um oh um names. I knew this would
• 15:05
  happen. The names start fading, you know, from me who wrote a
• 15:09
  taxi driver, um Trader, Paul Schrader, thank you. I went to
• 15:13
  UCLA. Um, you know, I mean the list of names, he's
• 15:18
  very long and prominent, right that UCLA is produced and n SC as well.
• 15:22
  So you know when I went to uh UCSD and I was looking around,
• 15:28
  I went to junior college. First, went to UM Palmar College,
• 15:33
  right, and the only fame claim to fame we had there was that Phil
• 15:37
  Tippett was famous visual effects artists from the Star Wars films and his you know,
• 15:43
  all his stop modes. I interviewed Phil when I wrote for the Carl's
• 15:46
  Bad Journal back in nineteen seventies. Okay, so you know great, right,
• 15:48
  So his claim to fame was that he went to that school. So
• 15:52
  it was great, you know, T year school, you get out,
• 15:54
  sure, then you can transfer anywhere. And then I didn't know where to
• 15:56
  go exactly, I want. I looked at San Francisco State. I looked
• 15:58
  at uc USC like the UCLA. For some reason, I decided, of
• 16:03
  all places, to goo UCSD, which probably wasn't the best choice of film
• 16:06
  school, but I don't know. It was nearby near a beach, near
• 16:11
  beach, definitely, definitely. So the funny thing was I spent a lot
• 16:15
  more time when I was there because the way they had the film track was
• 16:18
  that everything was really dedicated towards the graduate film students. As an undergrad,
• 16:23
  you were you didn't really get chancey two hands on. Knowing that now,
• 16:29
  I probably should have gone to maybe like Santego State, which is much more
• 16:30
  of a more of a vocational approach to the education. But I spent a
• 16:36
  lot of time with this scraduate film student from UCLA who was doing her thesis
• 16:41
  or her work down in UCSD. So she had access to all the you
• 16:45
  know, the editing bays, the rooms, and she's trying to finish her
• 16:48
  her thesis. She just needed an assistant. So I was there and I
• 16:52
  got all this hands on training of how to like you know, cut film
• 16:55
  and you know, put all this stuff together. And then she would I
• 16:59
  would go up with or Um on a regular basis to UCLA and just I
• 17:02
  was crashing courses. I didn't even go to this school where I was at
• 17:04
  UCLA, just sitting in at the short courses. So kind of give me
• 17:08
  a different perspective of things. Hey, that's my yeah, okay, well
• 17:11
  there you go. Well, um, at that time again, this is
• 17:17
  in the late seventies, you know, those were the three places to go.
• 17:18
  Now it's the landscape is vastly different. Every almost every college has a
• 17:25
  film department or media department and something something like that. So I mean that
• 17:29
  just shows you how thing things have changed. Um. So anyway, I
• 17:34
  went through the film program and at UCLA at that time, they didn't have
• 17:40
  or the difference. There was no difference between the undergrad and the graduate programs
• 17:48
  those days. Those days. Um, literally in my in my second year
• 17:53
  there, the graduate students rebelled and stage a little um demonstration and really forced
• 18:03
  the hand of the school to alter the curriculum in a sense to favor grad
• 18:10
  students because basically, and I think they had a legitimate beef. They were
• 18:12
  competing with you know, freshmen who were new to the or new to the
• 18:18
  department for you know, the limited amount of materials and cameras and things that
• 18:22
  we had to do their graduate films and so which were really wasn't fair.
• 18:26
  So they did an overhaul of the curriculum and my like or they didn't do
• 18:33
  it overnight. It actually happened right after I graduated. So basically I benefited
• 18:37
  from having basically had a graduate education as an undergrad. Wow, because I
• 18:44
  stuck it out and went an extra years as an undergrad. Later. Yeah,
• 18:49
  and then they kicked me out. I said, it's time for you
• 18:52
  to move on. Yeah, I had maxed out every unit possible, but
• 18:56
  knowing that I took every writing class I wanted to do when I first got
• 19:00
  in there, I was hoping to be a director. That was my aspirations.
• 19:03
  Like everybody else, that's what I wanted to do. But you you
• 19:07
  had to fund your own films, um, and I didn't have that kind
• 19:11
  of money. Um you know. Um. So I realized that well,
• 19:18
  typing paper was cheap at that point, and I said, well, shoot,
• 19:22
  I'm just gonna I'm gonna write and I'm going to direct my movies on
• 19:25
  paper and then eventually, if I get enough clout, I will be able
• 19:30
  to direct something that I write myself. So that was that was the philosophy.
• 19:33
  That hasn't happened, by the way, but it has happened for a
• 19:37
  lot of people that I know. Now. You wrote, so you're a
• 19:42
  writer when you're younger too, Like, yeah, I mean I was.
• 19:47
  I started writing, like as soon as I learned to write, you know,
• 19:49
  I just was. I had kind of spates where I was very prolific.
• 19:55
  Third grade, especially seventh grade was also a big one. We'll be
• 20:00
  right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 20:10
  But I initially wanted to be a journalist. I actually wanted to be Cameron
• 20:15
  Crowe because I loved Rolling Stone and loved music still when I was in high
• 20:19
  school. That that's what I was aspiring to be, was to be like
• 20:22
  a music journalist of some sort. Um. There was a great writer for
• 20:27
  Rolling Stone at that pool point. I think he's back now writing some stuff
• 20:32
  for them again, but named Charles M. Young, who did just some
• 20:34
  fantastic interviews with like the Sex Pistols and Kiss And I still have those issues
• 20:40
  because the writing is just so so funny and insightful and really great and just
• 20:47
  inspired me a great deal to be to be, you know. And this
• 20:51
  was the era too, where Tom Wolfe was doing um, you know,
• 20:55
  electric cooleid acid test on the heels of that kind of what is known as
• 20:59
  the new journalism, where it was just wasn't real cut and dry, but
• 21:03
  actually there was a great deal of reportage uh going on and and uh quasi
• 21:11
  sermonizing that would be worked in by um, the likes of Charles M.
• 21:15
  Young or um, um you know, the our Gonzo Hunter Thompson kind of
• 21:22
  you know, people of that sort. It was a it was an interesting
• 21:25
  time to be in journalism. Um. And then I wanted to be a
• 21:30
  magazine freelance magazine writer. I thought, yeah, and then I realized I
• 21:33
  probably really couldn't make a whole lot of money at it. Um. But
• 21:37
  I and I had started working for my hometown newspaper in Carl's Bad, California,
• 21:42
  writing writing sports for them, and then in the summertime when I was
• 21:48
  out of high school, it worked into full time work where I was doing
• 21:49
  feature articles. So I was interviewing surfers and runners and and Carl's Bad was
• 21:55
  also the site of a motocross, um, uh say, seeing out there
• 22:00
  and doing some reporting on that. It was just a lot of it was
• 22:03
  it was very interesting, and I learned how to interview people at an early
• 22:07
  age, which was a great thing. Then I knew that I wanted to
• 22:11
  continue with writing of some sort but in my studies at school, but I
• 22:15
  just wasn't sure what kind it was. So I too went to Community College
• 22:19
  Maracosta. Okay, yeah, just because I was working at the at the
• 22:25
  newspaper still and I was getting experience there part time, and I thought,
• 22:27
  well, get a couple more years their experience and then take classes and get
• 22:33
  my basic education out of the way, and then by that time maybe I'll
• 22:37
  know what to do. And I happened to take a playwriting course and that
• 22:41
  was very interesting. That opened up my eyes to dramatic writing and I and
• 22:48
  I realized that, yeah, playwriting wasn't quite it for me, but screenwriting
• 22:55
  that sounded very avant garde and very cool. So that's what I was all
• 23:00
  like, maybe like when the first moments that you like wrote a piece or
• 23:04
  a paragraph or something or somebody else wrote and you were able to witness sort
• 23:08
  of a a positive sort of emotional response from it, or it's just like
• 23:14
  a like a one moment like you wrote something where maybe you felt good about
• 23:17
  it or somebody else's reaction to it was surprising, but you know what I
• 23:22
  mean, it's just like it. It made you want to keep going or
• 23:26
  or want more of that or anything or feedback. Um. Yeah, that's
• 23:37
  an interesting question. Um. I wrote three scripts when I was at UCLA,
• 23:42
  three full length scripts, and they were pretty abysmal. Um, but
• 23:48
  my instructors were very supportive. I got a's on them. Okay, um,
• 23:56
  yes, that's right for you here, thank you. What did they
• 23:57
  called Scottish as Yeah, the Scotch eggs. Yeah. Um. And that
• 24:06
  was initially I think, be studying and doing that to get that kind of
• 24:11
  thumbs up from them was very positive. That that made a big impression on
• 24:17
  me. Um. And then once I got out of school to have some
• 24:23
  peers of mind to just kind of comment, there's mustard right there, you
• 24:27
  can dip into that. Um. That was positive, but nothing was as
• 24:38
  strong as getting um, um, the kind of the endorsement of a true
• 24:48
  professional somebody working in the business kind of just mangle this one, this matter.
• 24:56
  Yeah, that's all right, there we go. Yeah, it's good,
• 25:03
  all right, mm hmm, yes, what's it's funny? Um can
• 25:14
  get my trains top. All right, now, this is really delicious.
• 25:15
  I know. I'm sorry, we can keep. Don't worry about this.
• 25:29
  I pause, cut this out. This is good. Oh no, don't
• 25:34
  I mean this. I mean it's like your interview. So it's like and
• 25:38
  the food. Oh yeah, mah oh no, there's more mustard right there.
• 25:45
  Yeah, I got something to say. Yeah. So it's an egg.
• 25:49
  It's wrapped in sausage and deep pride. M h it's really healthy.
• 25:56
  So so is it a boiled egg first? And then they put it into
• 26:00
  like a sausage and they have to fry that, I think so yeah,
• 26:07
  m hm mm hmmm. No, I'll show with this beer I'm drinking.
• 26:18
  You know, listen, yummy. It's a great place to be in anytime.
• 26:22
  But I love coming here on a when it's howling wind out and co
• 26:27
  there you go. And well, this place is located right by the river
• 26:34
  vers Falls. This is the fall, like is it the lamb it falls?
• 26:37
  Yeah, lambit rights. So he definitely has a propensity for the wind
• 26:42
  and the weather. Chains Um, before the paper mill was shut down,
• 26:52
  certain fumes wafting up from from the mild and uh sort of sweetened things.
• 27:02
  And I mean that I mean that facetiously. So yeah, So anyway,
• 27:18
  so can you recall like, um, well, let me backtrack. Do
• 27:26
  you recall like one movie, like a movie experience you had where you thought
• 27:30
  to yourself that you were like moved or inspired to say, yeah, I
• 27:37
  want more of this or like for me as a kid, I remember,
• 27:44
  you know, movies were just always sort of part of just growing up.
• 27:48
  But the first time I remember seeing the sort of a I don't say I
• 27:52
  had a more mature, non sort of spectacle movie, you know that I
• 27:56
  realized was different than what I had seen before. It was one of my
• 28:00
  parents, I think, took me to see Amadeus. Oh you know,
• 28:03
  so I was floored by that movie because I thought to myself, I just
• 28:08
  went through something that I never thought I would be entertained by because I thought
• 28:12
  I had to have like, you know, laser guns or cowboys or indians
• 28:17
  or aliens or spaceships or explosions, because that's, you know, that was
• 28:21
  my appetite. I just that I was second nature. But once I was
• 28:23
  introduced to a film that was had none of that but engaged and captured,
• 28:30
  my interest had definitely changed something in me. As well as another film that
• 28:36
  I wasn't expecting to was somewhere in time because I was just like, oh,
• 28:40
  it's super Man. But to me, I was like, what was
• 28:42
  that? And that that got to me. And so I remember those two
• 28:45
  films of all films that sort of changed my perspective. And then I remember
• 28:51
  having UM. When I got into college, I wasn't thinking about film.
• 28:55
  I was thinking about studying illustration and art. I went there for that,
• 28:59
  but then got sort of the film bug myself and came across I had to
• 29:03
  take a scriptwriting class. It's very, very cheesy, but I remember going
• 29:07
  to the library. At the time, this is before the internet. You
• 29:11
  actually had to go to the library. We'll check out the reference books,
• 29:14
  and they had real scripts, and I remember reading Ordinary People and I never
• 29:18
  seen the film. I just read the screenplay, and I remember it was
• 29:22
  just turning the page out to turning the page because I just had to get
• 29:25
  through it. But just having that first experience of absorbing what a script looks
• 29:30
  like, and I didn't know what, you know, all the wrole things
• 29:33
  meant, you know, what is I and t X all that kind of
• 29:34
  stuff. We started beginning to figure out the little code or the language.
• 29:38
  But I remember having that significant moment as well coming out of that going what
• 29:44
  did I just read? What did I just experience? And we wanted to
• 29:47
  ask you did you have anything like that? Well? I did as a
• 29:51
  kid. This is I mean going way back. We'll be right back after
• 29:59
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And I
• 30:07
  really would have to say that I didn't know the impact that would had on
• 30:12
  me at the time, obviously, but it's really almost now that I look
• 30:18
  back on those times as they want, now I understand why I was so
• 30:21
  moved and influenced by And this is it goes back to when we first moved
• 30:27
  to California and my parents were running a beach front motel in Oceanside called the
• 30:38
  Buccaneer, which was the Buccaneer Beach, you know in Oceanside, and it
• 30:45
  h it had all these pirate motifs and everything like that. So my first
• 30:49
  five years in California after moving from Utah to we're here at the Buccaneer Motel
• 30:56
  with all the pirate motifs running around there, and I used to, you
• 31:00
  know, run around there and have a lot of fun and meet a lot
• 31:03
  of different people. That were staying there. But they would always on the
• 31:08
  weekends we would go my parents would take a break. Because we lived on
• 31:12
  the premises, there was no escape from it. My parents would go to
• 31:15
  a drive in movie out an Oceanside and yeah, yeah, and so the
• 31:23
  the it's an airfield now, yeah it is, and the the the ritual
• 31:30
  was basically they would pop their own popcorn ahead of time, put it into
• 31:33
  a big brown paper market sack, and we would They would take a cooler
• 31:40
  full of Cragmont sodas and they would put me in pj's. I had two
• 31:45
  older brothers who were ten and twelve years older than me, so they didn't
• 31:47
  want to They were teenagers by this time. They didn't want to have anything
• 31:49
  to do with that, so they would just stay at home. But I
• 31:52
  would go with my parents with them to the drive end and then I would
• 31:59
  be in my pj's and they would always hope that I would fall asleep in
• 32:01
  the back seat. At least that was the plan while they watched these,
• 32:06
  you know, sometimes very adult movies, and lo and behold, I never
• 32:10
  fell asleep once because I was so intrigued by what I was seeing. And
• 32:15
  I can tell you exactly what I saw, you know, I saw Bunny
• 32:17
  and Clyde. WHOA, yeah, well, I think they had intended that
• 32:22
  I had fallen asleep. They had no idea and I don't, and they
• 32:28
  probably were. They were not film savvy at all. They were probably didn't
• 32:32
  have any idea what they were in store for. Um. But I recall,
• 32:37
  I recall very clearly, um the opening frames of that where you see,
• 32:44
  you know, the naked fade unaway in her but you know up there
• 32:47
  on that big screen, I just my eyes grot really wide. I'm going,
• 32:53
  wow, this is wild. And I was just riveted from that point
• 32:59
  and r oh. I mean, I can still recall being in the back
• 33:07
  seat and seeing my parents visibly recoil from the one after they make the one
• 33:14
  robbery and the guy comes out and try and stands in front of the car
• 33:19
  and tries to either he's got some kind of a weapon at him, and
• 33:22
  they run him down and he ends up hitting the windshield and falling off it.
• 33:27
  My parents just like wow, he kind of gasping over the over the
• 33:30
  violence of that, and I was like wow. So Bonne and Clyde,
• 33:35
  I saw Bonne and Clyde, I saw in the heat of the night.
• 33:37
  Um, guess who's coming to dinner to serve with love? Pattent with my
• 33:44
  dad Planet of the Apes. Then my dad and I started going and seeing
• 33:46
  me Okay, some of these an original, h I mean, my mom
• 33:51
  stayed at home for some reason. I don't think she wanted to see Patton,
• 33:52
  but my dad did and I saw Planet of the Apes with him,
• 33:55
  and um, these now, these are the films that I actually hearkened to
• 34:04
  my and to my students nowadays too in teaching, because I think these were
• 34:07
  This was a fantastic age of American filmmaking. It was really from that from
• 34:14
  about sixty sixty six to about seventy six, that ten year period produced just
• 34:21
  astonishingly great American films and made by the studios, made by the studio at
• 34:27
  the time. Yeah, and and ultimately what killed it, of course was
• 34:32
  Jaws, right and the block you know and Blockbuster. From that point on,
• 34:37
  it changed everything and how the studios started doing things films, and again,
• 34:42
  not not to take away from the you know, the Spielberg's of the
• 34:45
  World and the in the in the geeks, you know, the film school
• 34:49
  geeks, which who basically started running the business at that point, which was
• 34:52
  great, but um, you know, prior to that, we still had
• 34:58
  The Godfathers and The Conversation and Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and
• 35:06
  Five Easy Pieces and the last detail of hal Ashby's Harold and mod you know,
• 35:09
  making these movies, these kinds of movies, and there was just nothing
• 35:13
  like it, right these so a little big man, you know, Um,
• 35:17
  you know these are these are films that I think still really uh resonate
• 35:22
  today hugely. Um in the studios have sort of lost sight of that,
• 35:28
  you know, because they were they were really socially conscious, uh conscious in
• 35:31
  a lot of ways. Um, they pushed the envelope, you know.
• 35:36
  Um, the subject matter was truly adult, the notion of of of like
• 35:42
  uh catering to demographics the pubescent a boy yeah, and action figures and all
• 35:50
  that unheard of no way, right, no, you just you know you
• 35:53
  didn't do that. It was still the days where you had people like Robert
• 35:57
  Evans, who was running you know, Paramount apparently in between his yeah that
• 36:06
  document, you know, he was uh he still was somebody who had gut
• 36:10
  instincts, you know, and could do things that um and in green lit
• 36:15
  stuff that got you know that will never see they haven't seen stuff like that.
• 36:21
  You can. The only way to find it now is, you know,
• 36:22
  in the independent realms. What do you think about there's this sort of
• 36:28
  a article I read a couple of years ago about how like HBO and Showed
• 36:31
  Time, all these the cable network or pay per view and the cable channels
• 36:37
  are now providing that sort of fix for adult drama. That um, where
• 36:45
  the movies, theatrical movies have just becoming such tent pole spectacles either of you
• 36:52
  know, um, the sci fi genre or whatever it is, or then
• 36:58
  or comedies that are you know, the gross out are are it? It?
• 37:02
  Whatno comedies? When you you have a little sprinkle of independence independent films,
• 37:07
  but the canvas of what's going on in the television spectrum right now,
• 37:10
  where you have long form where you can develop a character and a law,
• 37:14
  you know, a much slower pace and the more in depth is why you're
• 37:19
  seeing like the success of like the Sopranos and and all these things. So
• 37:23
  I don't know whether or not that sort of fulfilled the niche or the need
• 37:28
  that once was supplied during the late sixties mid sixties in the seventies for what
• 37:32
  the studios are supplying. You know what I mean Now it's just got fragmented.
• 37:36
  I don't know, that's sort of a yeah. I mean nowadays everything
• 37:40
  has gotten fragmented. It's it's really broken down. I mean we once we
• 37:44
  entered the digital age, right, everything became fragmented. And that's what digitizing
• 37:50
  analog does. You know, it breaks things down into these little bit into
• 37:53
  these little bits. You know this whether it's a sound bite or it's a
• 37:58
  you know, it's a bit of information. Um, and that sort of
• 38:02
  its job in in one way. So we we we've but we've lost a
• 38:08
  lot, you know in the in that at the same time. Um,
• 38:13
  you know, it's just it's just changed. These are This is part of
• 38:16
  a larger conversation that we'll get into here that the benefits and the curses of
• 38:22
  the digital the digital world now in digital culture. But uh um yeah,
• 38:28
  I and answer to your question, I would say yes, indeed, HBO,
• 38:31
  Showtime, AMC, running Madmen and stuff. They are feeling a niche
• 38:37
  now where so many of us have a thirst for those great adult dramas.
• 38:44
  Right, you know that that deal with touchy material um um. Not.
• 38:52
  So it's not necessarily high concept material, but it's really important material, um.
• 38:58
  You know. I mean, for example, it recently doing the they
• 39:01
  did the the you Don't Know Jack, you know, the Jack Cavorkian story.
• 39:06
  I knew nothing really about Cavorcian other than just seeing the headlines always about
• 39:09
  them from that. But you know, Pacino really owned that role, and
• 39:13
  Barry Levinson, you know, came in and directed it and it was a
• 39:15
  really it was a really compelling piece of piece of work. But there was
• 39:20
  no way a studio would make that wake that movie. It would have it
• 39:23
  have to be HBO. And of course HBO loves to flaunt the fact that
• 39:28
  only HBO can do it, you know. And so so I think it's
• 39:32
  great, um, But you know, again, HBO is part of a
• 39:37
  larger conglomerate mega monster that they too have to answer to someone. Uh if
• 39:51
  not, they're in not only their ratings, but you know, it's a
• 39:53
  corporation. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 40:02
  to the show. And so, you know, to find truly independent the
• 40:10
  stuff, you might have to even go further out into the margins then.
• 40:15
  But comparatively still to the mains, the main studios and the three major networks
• 40:20
  that we're used to. It's pretty still pretty very controversial and exciting stuff they
• 40:28
  do. So we'll we get back to. Do you remember like the first
• 40:30
  time you read a finished script that got you like turned on, like well
• 40:36
  I can do this. Well I don't necessarily recall reading a script and going
• 40:45
  daga over it. I recall seeing movies and going just like, oh crap,
• 40:49
  that's what I want to write. That's you know, and and that
• 40:52
  that's what I want to do. Um. So we have to remember,
• 40:55
  you know, as a screenplay is a is is only stepping stone to the
• 41:00
  final the final piece of art. You know that it is. And it's
• 41:05
  hard, it's hard to admit that as writers, but we do have to
• 41:09
  remind ourselves, if you're a screenwriter, that it's a it's a way station
• 41:15
  to the ultimate, the final product, the ultimate vision. Right. Okay,
• 41:21
  So so again in you know, I would look at a script and
• 41:24
  I was like, okay, all right, that's that's okay. But it's
• 41:29
  the movie that really inspired me. And it's still the movies that really inspire
• 41:34
  me now, um um, I don't get overly excited about reading scripts per
• 41:42
  se. Um. You know, I have to. I just I want
• 41:45
  to see the movie so so in so great movies make me want to write
• 41:52
  great scripts. And but it's always interesting and instructive to look at the scripts
• 41:57
  that have become great movies and to see that they that they are not perfect,
• 42:04
  um that sometimes they're far from it. Um. For example, Uh,
• 42:12
  well, whenever you you let's say you go to a bookstore and you'll
• 42:15
  find a the screenplay of a certain movie right there that's been published. Now,
• 42:22
  it's usually the the the shooting script that they'll um publish, you know,
• 42:27
  and so they'll have scene numbers and everything like that. That's anytime there
• 42:30
  are scene numbers on there, you know, that's a very late draft.
• 42:34
  It's something that they probably you know, it was the shooting draft or close
• 42:37
  to it, if they were numbering scenes. Um. Years ago, Frank
• 42:40
  Drabon, who wrote and directed The Shawshank Redemption, published a version of Shawshank
• 42:47
  that was not the shooting draft. It was a book that I think included
• 42:52
  the early draft of the script and then uh, and then the shooting draft
• 42:55
  something like that. And I'm mad at myself, right I never picked that
• 42:59
  up, and I remember thumbing through it, but Frank had the courage to
• 43:04
  to go ahead and print an earlier draft of it. And the thing was
• 43:08
  a mess. It was all there was a full of stracouts and crossed out
• 43:13
  stuff and notes in the margins and things like that. And that's what a
• 43:15
  real script looks like, right, you know. So beware to anyone out
• 43:21
  there who's considering writing scripts and they think that that has to be all perfect.
• 43:25
  That's just not the case. You know, a screenplay is it cannot
• 43:31
  be chiseled in stone. It really can't. Um it has. It is
• 43:36
  a living, breathing entity, and it will ebb and flow. It will
• 43:40
  inhale, it will exhale, It will do things you don't expect. Sometimes
• 43:45
  you have to make alterations due to weather, to cranky actors, to the
• 43:52
  whims of a studio or a star or director or whatever, for good or
• 43:58
  for worse or whatever. These are. These are just the things that It's
• 44:01
  constantly in a state of flux and will be until the film is shot,
• 44:07
  edited, and screen before paying audience. You know. That's you know,
• 44:10
  and that and that's the way it is, and you have to understand that,
• 44:13
  so you can't be overly precious with it, you know, and just
• 44:17
  think. I mean, if you're starting out and you're trying to write a
• 44:22
  great writing sample, of course you want to make it as good as you
• 44:25
  can possibly be, because you want to get your best foot forward. You
• 44:29
  want to show people what you're capable of. But once you are working and
• 44:36
  or in that business, you have to know you have to suck it up,
• 44:38
  man, and just know that this thing is going to get mangled and
• 44:44
  trundled under by the Hollywood machine sometimes. Um, and even in the independent
• 44:51
  realms, it doesn't matter because there was still things are going to be constantly
• 44:54
  changing because the universe is just throwing you change ups all the time. Know.
• 45:00
  Okay, it's raining. We're supposed to shoot a sunny a scene under
• 45:04
  sun today in blazing heat. Um, okay, the bar is more crowded
• 45:08
  than than we expected to have our you know the scene. Yeah, I
• 45:15
  talk, you know, I mean as these are right mics, you know,
• 45:17
  I mean, these are things where you just constantly you have to think
• 45:21
  on your feet and you have to be sort of flexible in terms of so
• 45:24
  as storytellers too, you have to have the acuity of mind and the flexibility
• 45:30
  to say, Okay, that doesn't work, I can switch this, I
• 45:32
  can do it here, and I'm like, shuffle this around and will make
• 45:35
  that work, and we'll we'll we'll fit it for the occasion when you know,
• 45:40
  right, do you feel like sometimes I've heard the expression or heard things
• 45:45
  where sometimes writers discover the story like it's sitting up there in a cloud of
• 45:52
  the years or of moments of inspiration that are just sort of permeating, where
• 45:57
  they start picking it up, like it just starts trickling down and they start,
• 46:01
  you know, like almost invisible ink, like it starts revealing itself,
• 46:05
  the story and the shape that even though your your intentions might not have been
• 46:09
  there originally, but as you as it, like you said, ebbs and
• 46:13
  flows and evolves, you're discovering it. And it's almost as you just had
• 46:15
  to be in the right sort of mental space or capacity to grab hold of
• 46:22
  it and and and sort of let it like as I yeah, let it
• 46:27
  evolve. Yeah, And I don't know if um oh yeah, oh this
• 46:30
  is good. Yeah, I'm good, this is good. Stop. So
• 46:35
  I was wondering if um so like when you're so you're in college. You
• 46:39
  were taking the writing the screenwriting class, I guess, and getting feedback from
• 46:44
  your professors. UM, do you remember like sort of the first permeation of
• 46:49
  like the the germ of the idea for your first full length story that you
• 46:52
  were like, you know what, this would make it, this would make
• 46:55
  a good movie. And I think, I gotta you know you've heard writers
• 46:59
  or that with that term. I gotta beat on it. I gotta beat
• 47:01
  on it. Yeah, well, yeah, there's you bring up a couple
• 47:06
  of points, but just specifically to to me. UM. As I mentioned
• 47:10
  before, when I was at UCLA, I wrote three scripts that were completely
• 47:15
  uncommercial. They were just they were bad, you know. I wrote a
• 47:19
  you know, sprawling period piece and a couple of other just not not good,
• 47:23
  you know, pieces of work. UM. And then I graduated,
• 47:29
  and I knew that I had to um in order to get somewhere, you
• 47:36
  know, to get a get ahead in the business, I had to make
• 47:38
  a conscious effort to write something commercial, you know, just to get on
• 47:43
  the map. Right. I can be artful and and and write artie movies
• 47:45
  later on, you know, but I really need to get it on the
• 47:49
  get on the map first, and get get try to make a living because
• 47:52
  at that point I was I was working in the mail room of the Academy
• 47:55
  Emotion, Pictures, Arts and Sciences, and I and I, you know,
• 48:00
  I just which was a great job actually, but because I allowed me
• 48:04
  a lot of time to write during the day. But yeah, I had
• 48:08
  to. I couldn't stay there for the rest of my life. So so
• 48:14
  I said, okay, I'm going to write something commercial and and write something
• 48:17
  that could actually get made, you know, for a relatively low sum of
• 48:22
  money. So at that time, which that translated to write a horror film.
• 48:27
  Okay, So then well, okay, how do you write a horror
• 48:30
  film? Or even at that time, it's like, oh god, everything's
• 48:35
  been done already. So I was really looking to do something different. Um,
• 48:42
  And so what I wrote. I wrote a script in that summer called
• 48:47
  Slaughter Alley, which was about a haunted highway or haunted a stretch of road,
• 48:52
  a rural road that was haunted by the ghost of a hot rodd who
• 48:55
  had been killed on it back in nineteen sixty two. So he races up
• 49:00
  and down it in the middle of the night, UM in his fifty seven
• 49:04
  Chevy bell Air, you know, running people off the road and claiming souls.
• 49:07
  And as you're explaining this, I can completely hear the twiny guitar right
• 49:13
  now. Oh yeah, oh it was. I mean, oh that's the
• 49:15
  link Ray, you know, the Cramps. I mean it was very music
• 49:19
  inspired in that sense because it, you know, just like those great big
• 49:23
  Detroit steel iconic cars you know from the you know, from the late fifties
• 49:29
  and sixties, all the muscle car era and stuff. Um you you know,
• 49:34
  you hear the that that big guitar sound as well the Ventures and you
• 49:37
  know all the Eddie Cochrane and all these these the rockabilly sound and stuff.
• 49:43
  Um is Eddie repels Eddie? Um but did Rebel Rouser or yeah, but
• 49:51
  Eddie something. But anyway, almost like a more of a punk version of
• 49:53
  that. Well, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 50:01
  and now back to the show. What was interesting simultaneous with this for me
• 50:07
  was that I had I was in LA I was staying in LA after he
• 50:10
  graduated and was really caught up in the music scene in Los Angeles at that
• 50:15
  point, which was getting swept um with the real, real kind of I
• 50:22
  don't know what to call it, a renaissance of music. But it was
• 50:25
  it was the punk rock thing that was at the core of it, and
• 50:28
  the hardcore specifically was taking over and really having a profound influence on everything.
• 50:34
  It was basically taking a flamethrower to everything right um and just burning it down.
• 50:37
  So you had and that was led by Black Flag and the descendants and
• 50:45
  irrelevant today Oh sure, sure. I mean the Dead Kennedy's up in San
• 50:49
  Francisco, and you know there was in Social d down in Orange County and
• 50:54
  stuff. So yeah, um, and and to me it had a huge
• 51:00
  influence on me on a number of levels. Specifically, you know, just
• 51:07
  creatively how you attack things, um and they strip it down. There was
• 51:12
  no pretension. You just went out and you did it and you made it
• 51:15
  work, and you did it with passion and really with an attitude, and
• 51:20
  there was just something elementally bitching about it fly and oh man, it just
• 51:28
  was incredible. So I was witnessing a lot of this, and then at
• 51:32
  the same time with the hardcore stuff, there was the sort of the art
• 51:37
  damaged bands that were doing things like this. There are bands like Savage Republic
• 51:45
  and the Fibonacci's in um Wall of Voodoo even that were heavily influenced by film
• 51:52
  right, and so they were doing a lot of like soundtrack stuff. Wall
• 51:55
  of Voodoo used to do a medley of Sergio Lee any movies a soundtrack,
• 52:01
  so you know, the good and bad and the ugly and hang them high.
• 52:04
  They would they would do this in concert and it was just like wow.
• 52:07
  And that had that big twangy guitar and it was just like wow,
• 52:09
  this is this is really really stuff. Um, speaking of what while I
• 52:14
  wud yeah you um the lead the frontman for Yeah stand Ridgeway? Yeah n
• 52:21
  Did you become friends with him working on a project. Yeah, Well just
• 52:25
  a quick aside there. I was, Um, after I wrote Slough a
• 52:31
  Rally, I wanted to write a murder mystery and what I was doing.
• 52:38
  My my notion for it was to have it was a murder mystery that was
• 52:43
  set in the punk rock underground of LA and it was about a hardcore kid
• 52:49
  who was accused of killing someone and who had been apprehended. And then his
• 52:54
  public defender was like a like a hippie liberal middle liberal hippie who had to
• 53:00
  you know, defend this kid, and they were I was very interested in
• 53:02
  just the opposing sensibilities kind of thing, you know. And so I started
• 53:08
  doing all this um uh quote unquote research you know, in the in the
• 53:15
  music scene at the time, and going to I'll see all these different shows
• 53:20
  and and I made contact with the number of bands. I just reached out
• 53:24
  to them and one time or another and say, hey, could I'm doing
• 53:28
  this, would you mind if I come to a rehearsal and see what you
• 53:30
  guys do? And and everybody was really cool, you know. The Minutemen
• 53:35
  was one of those bands, and and uh and stuff, and so um
• 53:40
  the script didn't pan out. I just it just never quite got over the
• 53:45
  hump for it. Um. But I made all these contacts with all these
• 53:51
  bands and very very good friends, and so that's that's what led them to
• 53:54
  getting doing some music videos for them and whatever. One of the band and
• 54:00
  said, I really that were very welcoming to me was a band called the
• 54:01
  Fibonaccis. And the Fibonaccis had artie party and ready to party, as the
• 54:07
  La Weekly describe them, The Fibonaccis were open for Wallavoodoo at one time,
• 54:13
  and they knew Stan Ridgeway very much. And so one time I was at
• 54:15
  Club Lingerie and I forget who was playing, but it wasn't The Fibbs,
• 54:22
  but I was with the keyboardists of the Fibbs, John Dentino and Stan.
• 54:28
  Ridgeway and his wife came in and I said, oh god, you know
• 54:31
  John, can you introduce me to Stan? I said, I'm a big
• 54:35
  fan and I'd really loved the first time I saw them on stage. I
• 54:37
  was just like, oh wow, these guys just to completely especially Stan,
• 54:42
  just captured a lot of how that sort of the collectic approach to every anything
• 54:47
  and everything. He said sure. So I met Stan and we talked and
• 54:52
  I told him I, you know, Wall of Voodoo was actually a big
• 54:54
  influencing writing slaughter rally for me. And he said, oh, send me
• 54:58
  the script. I'd love to I allowed to read it, and I said
• 55:00
  okay, So I did, and a couple of weeks later I got a
• 55:06
  postcard. He actually mailed me a postcard and said, I read your script.
• 55:08
  I really like it. I'm going to call you in a couple of
• 55:12
  days with a plan. Stan is always scheming. He's always got something working
• 55:20
  up with a plan. But basically that started a friendship that still continues today.
• 55:28
  And ironically his manager eventually manager when he went solo, was my wife's
• 55:37
  older brother. Um but I even before I started dating her. Yeah,
• 55:44
  I knew Chris, but I didn't know he was related to Kate when we
• 55:49
  first met. It was just really so stan Stan and Chris. They both
• 55:52
  argue they like to take credit for introducing us, but it sounds like it
• 55:58
  was just already in there. It was already in the words, it was
• 56:00
  a pretty yeah yeah, but um uh, it was going to add.
• 56:07
  One of the things that intrigued me about the music scene at that time,
• 56:10
  especially in the rockabilly circle that you would see is that when the Blasters were
• 56:15
  playing, and there were a number yeah, yeah, there were a number
• 56:19
  of bands that were you know, there was the Stray Cats that were the
• 56:22
  real big commercial gap, but the Blasters were the big the ones in the
• 56:27
  LA scene, but there were there were some other Los Lobos was really kind
• 56:30
  of rockabilly influencing on that. But anyway, they would bring out these these
• 56:36
  crowds that you would see them come up and they pull up and there their
• 56:40
  vintage cars and these guys would come out when their pompadours and their and their
• 56:44
  jeans and t shirt and their their cuffed jeans and their cowboy boots or whatever,
• 56:49
  and the and then they would have their their girlfriends and the poodle skirts
• 56:52
  and them and uh, the Betty Page kind of you know, a hair
• 56:55
  and and all of because it's that scene is like it's a greaser scene by
• 57:04
  like a full start. Like you said, it's it's not like it's not
• 57:07
  like a happy Day's cutie. It's it's a little bit the edgier. It
• 57:10
  was. Okay, pay with it now, it's like tattoos everywhere, right.
• 57:14
  Granted it was a little edgier then, but it still struck me.
• 57:16
  I was still rather amused by it because to me, it they still struck
• 57:22
  me. It was kind of like the posers, you know, because there
• 57:24
  had been the real the real guys. That's me, thank you. Okay,
• 57:30
  hey we're back. We just take a little dinner break. But listen,
• 57:32
  we were talking about slaughter Alley right, which right by the way,
• 57:36
  So it was like one of your first scripts, yes, my first attempt
• 57:39
  to write something commercial. Yes, but that story is dear to your heart
• 57:43
  because we've been working on a little bit launching your site slaughter Alley dot com.
• 57:49
  Correct now, just let you know. I'm going to take another crack
• 57:52
  at that map. I think because I've learned since since we met last year,
• 57:57
  I've learned so much about like launch, how to you know, make
• 58:00
  some websites, how to do just my job. Recently, I've just been
• 58:04
  working in flash lately, so like all this other stuff, I'm like,
• 58:07
  oh my gosh, I think I can go back and like fix what I
• 58:09
  kind of oh I tend to do. But anyway, that's in the back
• 58:13
  burner. But one of these days the things that get cleared up, I
• 58:15
  think I have a way that I can make that thing launch. So that's
• 58:20
  great. But again that's just my interests of like learning stuff like that,
• 58:23
  and it each year I get more and more knowledged and it's like, oh
• 58:27
  wait, I can apply this now. Sure. Sure. Anyway, so
• 58:30
  you write Sladder Alley and you have two other ones now. During the process
• 58:35
  of like writing these scripts, and you were trying to make it something commercially
• 58:40
  viable, Um, was there any moments in there where you feel like,
• 58:46
  I don't know, like you felt your groove, Like I know that sometimes
• 58:49
  I write stuff like it's a lot of times it's painful, but sometimes you
• 58:52
  get these magic moments where you just feel like when it's completed or something,
• 58:57
  or like wow, you know I did it or I could see this or
• 59:01
  something like that. Yeah. Um, Like what the question is, where
• 59:07
  do you find your enjoyment in the writing, because if you've done it so
• 59:10
  long, obviously there must be some grain of well. Slaughter Rally was was
• 59:16
  fun to write, and I've I've done multiple drafts of it over the years,
• 59:20
  and it looks like I'm going to be doing another one here, maybe
• 59:24
  very soon, um, because I've got some interest in it yet again.
• 59:30
  Um Um, it's the script that refuses to die. It Uh, It's
• 59:35
  this is what I was saying that you know, scripts are alive and breathing,
• 59:37
  and this is some kind of like a monster that just lurks in the
• 59:43
  primordial slime somewhere that every now and then somebody keeps coming back and coming back
• 59:47
  to it and saying that like the story of like, uh, Lawrence Kazan
• 59:52
  when is one of our early scripts, the Bodyguard and Costner. We'll be
• 59:58
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:00:07
  You saw it in his shelf something like one of his early early skips
• 1:00:09
  and he said, I'll grab that, and they made that. But it
• 1:00:12
  was you know things, look those stories where they take they've just been around
• 1:00:15
  for so long. Yeah, you know, I mean, look, the
• 1:00:19
  lesson I've learned from it isn't that nothing is ever dead in Hollywood. It's
• 1:00:24
  just you put it in a drawer for a while and then you know,
• 1:00:30
  six months a year later, bring it back out to show it around again.
• 1:00:34
  Um, that's if it's a spec script. But right, well then
• 1:00:37
  again even that now it's like lead it into bled into the actual finished films.
• 1:00:43
  With what Lucas has done with his Star Wars films, Yeah, and
• 1:00:45
  it just read somewhere the new Blu Ray release. He added some more like
• 1:00:51
  dialogue to Darth Vader and returned the Jedi where he like screams no, like
• 1:00:55
  during the death scene of like the Emperors, and so fans are like again
• 1:00:59
  like what the hell are you doing? Wow? So anyway, so yeah,
• 1:01:02
  even in the film form, it has life that it freezes and sure,
• 1:01:07
  sure, yeah, and that's interesting now that it's come to that where
• 1:01:14
  it's so except easy and accessible to be able to get to make, you
• 1:01:20
  know, slight alterations, nip and tucks, here and there and all that.
• 1:01:23
  I mean, that's the that doesn't surprise me. It's it goes back
• 1:01:28
  to the I think it was as Ezra Pound who said, uh uh,
• 1:01:32
  you know, nothing is a poem is never never finished, it's abandoned.
• 1:01:37
  And uh so anythink that's apropos for any kind of art. You know,
• 1:01:42
  you just uh, including scripts. At some point, you just got to
• 1:01:45
  abandon it because it's it's never quite done, it will always be a work
• 1:01:51
  in progress. You've got to make a T shirt of that, like goes
• 1:01:54
  ready for like those writer conferences and stuff like that. I never thought of
• 1:01:58
  that. That's actually pretty good. You've seen these like cute like shirts like
• 1:02:04
  bustats dot com somewhere, really funny things. But anyway, yeah, I
• 1:02:07
  think that's a great great little say what what nothing has ever finished? Its
• 1:02:12
  abandoned on the it's just something like abandon it. So like this, you
• 1:02:15
  know, and they give like the little web you know, like a website
• 1:02:17
  in the back something to like T shirts that are specific to that market of
• 1:02:22
  writers. But yeah, people like we want to like walk by goes,
• 1:02:25
  what does that mean abandon it? Because then it strikes up our conversation like
• 1:02:29
  you just like, what the hell is that that term or that phrase?
• 1:02:32
  Yeah? So yeah, anyway, um well anyway, uh kind of back
• 1:02:37
  to the to the question, Um, Mike, is it the inspiration or
• 1:02:46
  working? And you have these moments of like where you just feel like you're
• 1:02:51
  like you're the ship, like you're like you know, I mean, like
• 1:02:52
  you feel like you're like, oh my gosh, I'm a genius. But
• 1:02:54
  or sometimes you know, well, I I think if you ever are thinking
• 1:03:00
  thoughts like that, you're really asking for it. You're doomed. You know.
• 1:03:06
  That's the day you really start worrying. I really think. I had
• 1:03:10
  the good fortune one time to meet David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia
• 1:03:16
  and stuff, and a friend of mine was assisting his restoration of Lawrence of
• 1:03:23
  Arabia and I was. She knew that I was a big fan, and
• 1:03:29
  she arranged for me to meet him at that and sneak in on a screening
• 1:03:34
  of it that Spielberg and a few other people were there, and so he
• 1:03:38
  came back and shook my hand there afterwards. But she told me later that
• 1:03:43
  he had told her this story about when he was directing Lawrence of Arabia and
• 1:03:47
  the day came for him to shoot the scene where very late in the movie,
• 1:03:54
  where Lawrence is leading the Arabs on the cutting a swath through the Turkish
• 1:04:03
  lines and heading straight towards Damascus, and then he has to make a tactical
• 1:04:08
  choice of either wipe out and slaughter this Turkish column that had just had raped
• 1:04:14
  and pillage to village, an Arabic village, or move on to Damascus in
• 1:04:18
  greater glory, and the smart tactical thing to do. But Lawrence opts succumbs
• 1:04:26
  to the thing, and where he goes and massacres the Turkish column right and
• 1:04:30
  sort of satiates his his his need for blood letting in a way. And
• 1:04:34
  and uh Lean told her that the day that they filmed that scene, he
• 1:04:42
  drove the limo came and got him at his hotel, and then they drove
• 1:04:46
  the hour and a half out to the to the location or wherever it was.
• 1:04:50
  Lean got out of the car and looked at, you know, the
• 1:04:57
  hundreds of extras, all in uniform and costume, you know, waiting waiting
• 1:05:00
  for his first command, you know, And he looked at all these people
• 1:05:06
  cast and crew were just looking at him, and he got struck with them
• 1:05:11
  with diarrhea just immediately had to jump back into the car and told the chauffeurs
• 1:05:17
  that just take me back to the hotel. Took him back to them the
• 1:05:19
  hotel, and he camped out in the bathroom for two or three hours,
• 1:05:26
  I guess or whatever. And then uh um, I finally got enough courage
• 1:05:31
  up to go back out to the scene and direct it. But he didn't.
• 1:05:35
  The point was, he didn't have any idea how to direct that scene.
• 1:05:40
  And he was so struck with fear and insecurity that you know, he
• 1:05:45
  was crapping in his pants. I mean, he just was literally, I
• 1:05:48
  mean, he just got struck with it. And so he said, he
• 1:05:53
  said to my friend Jude that you know, that just goes to show you
• 1:05:57
  it could hit anyone anytime. You know. It's just it's it's always when
• 1:06:01
  you're when you're when you're putting yourself out there, there's a there's a great
• 1:06:06
  risk that you're that you're taking you're overcoming a great amount of fear there,
• 1:06:12
  or or you you're embracing the fear, you're crossing over you're taking these big
• 1:06:17
  risks and stuff in so it takes great effort to do it. But he
• 1:06:24
  said, somebody like the implication was somebody like him who's got all these accolades
• 1:06:28
  and stuff like that. He said, sometimes they just don't know how to
• 1:06:30
  do it. You're scared. You're scared too, you know, I am,
• 1:06:33
  thank you, um and so so I always thought that was that,
• 1:06:41
  that was a great story. I felt very privileged to have heard that,
• 1:06:44
  you know, secondhand, you know, um uh and and and so anyway
• 1:06:50
  back to what we were talking about, if and if you know the times
• 1:06:55
  that where you're really starting to feel cocky and say, damn, I'm good
• 1:06:58
  right right um is uh, you know, that's where you could be into
• 1:07:02
  a little bit of trouble. My best I probably arguably my best writing is
• 1:07:09
  probably stuff that I was mortified that I wrote. You know that I was
• 1:07:13
  scared. I was scared really to pass on because I was afraid of the
• 1:07:18
  reaction it would get that people would just think, what are you thinking?
• 1:07:21
  Are you out of your mind? God's sakes, we're paying you all this
• 1:07:26
  money to write this, direc you know, you pretentious of a bit for
• 1:07:30
  you know whatever art damaged? You know, kind of geek um, you
• 1:07:36
  know all these all you know, all these thoughts run through your mind.
• 1:07:40
  I mean, it's just you know, racing, your mind races with a
• 1:07:44
  lot of irrational, irrational stuff sometimes. But um, I think that and
• 1:07:51
  again, fear and insecurity can paralyze you right when you're when you're working.
• 1:07:59
  But the key thing is to have enough of it that it keeps you on
• 1:08:03
  edge, and it keeps you vigilant and keeps you always um uh wanting to
• 1:08:12
  take a risk, you know enough, just enough to where you won't settle
• 1:08:15
  for the ordinary and the safe. But at the same time, you know
• 1:08:19
  it, you don't want you just want to push yourself just just enough,
• 1:08:25
  you know, just so to just keep yourself on edge with it, you
• 1:08:28
  know, don't settle for the low hanging fruit if you can't. Yeah,
• 1:08:31
  yeah, And that that is I think a really you know, a really
• 1:08:36
  valuable lesson when when you start feeling like you're dialing it in and all I
• 1:08:41
  can do this behind my back, you know, And then I think you're
• 1:08:44
  kind of losing something. You're losing a passion, you're losing um, you're
• 1:08:47
  losing the healthy fear of your stuff. I read something recently about um uh,
• 1:08:57
  it's it's it's in a book called The uh. I think it's in
• 1:09:00
  this book called The War of art Um that's written by a novelist and screenwriter.
• 1:09:08
  This the guy that wrote Bagger Vance. And don't ask me his name
• 1:09:11
  because I couldn't summon his name right now at the moment. But he was
• 1:09:15
  quoting, or were using, the anecdote of how how actors, especially famous
• 1:09:25
  actors, choose their roles, why they make the choices of and he noted
• 1:09:30
  that many actors respond to that question by saying, oh. He was citing
• 1:09:39
  on the actors studio, outside the actor's studio, and he said, invariably
• 1:09:44
  they get that answered that question, how do you choose the roles that you
• 1:09:46
  that you do and what prompts you? And invariably they answer it scared me.
• 1:09:55
  Yeah, you know, a good one, yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 1:09:58
  And I chose because it's scared me. We'll be right back after a
• 1:10:02
  word from our sponsor and now back to the show. So translation is that
• 1:10:13
  it was something I haven't done before. It was challenging, and I wanted
• 1:10:17
  to rise to the occasion. I wanted to meet that challenge, you know,
• 1:10:21
  I wanted to do something that I haven't done before, right right,
• 1:10:25
  you know, and go you know boldly go where no man has gone before,
• 1:10:30
  you know, with the be at the Starship Enterprise or your screenplay.
• 1:10:32
  You know. I was up and until three thirty last night working because I
• 1:10:38
  was scared of not being able to wrestle Flash the program. I'm trying to
• 1:10:47
  learn this program Flash, like I don't know it. I'm online, I'm
• 1:10:51
  learning as I'm going, and it's such a high learning curve, but it's
• 1:10:57
  still it was a challenge and like, I don't I don't feel necessarily tired
• 1:11:00
  because I was motivated all last night because this just sheer desire, like I've
• 1:11:06
  got to learn this, I've got to figure this out. How did you?
• 1:11:09
  How did they do this? How did they? And then just because
• 1:11:12
  that desire wanting to know, and then you and then getting to that place
• 1:11:15
  where you kind of break it, where just like you accomplish it where you
• 1:11:20
  started and where you end up. It's such a far journey, but you're
• 1:11:24
  like, wow, I did it. I was kind of scared jumping into
• 1:11:28
  because I didn't know how I was gonna get, you know, where where
• 1:11:30
  to start. But as you finished and when you found out you could actually
• 1:11:33
  do something or finish a task, that's always you know, satisfying. So
• 1:11:40
  I guess for me that's so now coming back to it's like you have this,
• 1:11:44
  um, you have three scripts that you've abandoned. Yes, yes,
• 1:11:48
  yes, and right yeah so consciously, so when was the first what was
• 1:11:54
  the first gig you had that m that was like where you got paid as
• 1:11:58
  a screenwriter? Well, um, actually I got I got paid to do
• 1:12:00
  a rewrite on slaughter Rally. So what what happened was I wrote it,
• 1:12:04
  um then that summer of eighty two I think it was, and then uh,
• 1:12:11
  I gave it to a friend of mine who had gone to film school
• 1:12:14
  with UM. It's actually former roommate of mine, Richard Green, who was
• 1:12:17
  now a very powerful agent at CAA. Actually, um, there you go,
• 1:12:24
  there you go. And Richard had at that time aspirations to be a
• 1:12:28
  producer, and so he was working um for a true producer, a real
• 1:12:34
  working producer, and as a guy named Bill Finnigan who made TV movies and
• 1:12:41
  such um as opposed to those you know who are in our Hollywood. There's
• 1:12:45
  a lot of producers. Yes, yes, yes, I think it's true
• 1:12:48
  working yes, yes, yeah for the same exactly the same. And you
• 1:12:54
  can apply that to writers and actors and all of that. Um. Um
• 1:12:59
  so I'm gonna order another pipe here when he comes back again, but I'm
• 1:13:03
  just keeping one eye on him. Um So, what happened was, um,
• 1:13:12
  can I get a no? No, okay, but no no,
• 1:13:15
  I actually I want to go for something a little redder? Yeah, and
• 1:13:18
  the color you you you had a nice poor you were tooken to someone there
• 1:13:24
  earlier the Nelson. Oh really, Oh it is an ipa. It's that
• 1:13:29
  red really wow. Wow, that's actually for something that's red that's going to
• 1:13:32
  be multi Yeah. Yeah, I would recommend getting the working Okay. Then
• 1:13:36
  oh that all the skull splitter. Okay, I've had it. I've I've
• 1:13:41
  had it in a body of don that in draft. Okay, oh you
• 1:13:44
  do, Okay, I don't want to go I want to get stick with
• 1:13:46
  the draft. Then do you have the thistle? Yeah? Yeah, they
• 1:13:51
  bring that, thank you? Actually some water. I just need to Um.
• 1:13:57
  So, Richard I gave the script or Richard because he said, let
• 1:14:00
  me let me take this to the producer I'm working for, Bill Finnigan,
• 1:14:05
  and um he said, I think you might like it. Because Richard read
• 1:14:09
  it and really liked it, and thought, Wow, it's just this is
• 1:14:12
  cool and so it's great. Um. So he took it to his boss
• 1:14:17
  and lo and behold, the boss loved it. They um optioned it from
• 1:14:24
  me, and then they like it was at first it's surreal. It's you're
• 1:14:30
  through the roof, you know, you're just uh, it's just an exciting,
• 1:14:33
  wonderful feeling and you could just feel like, wow, I could do
• 1:14:38
  this the rest of my life. Do you like it's all this is like
• 1:14:42
  a moment of thank you? Thanks? Is there like a moment of I
• 1:14:47
  don't know where all of a sudden, like your whole future is right in
• 1:14:51
  front of you. Oh you're like boom that instance like oh I'm I'm on
• 1:14:56
  my way and and all this stuff. Yeah yeah, you it up right
• 1:15:00
  real fast and just see it, you know like billboards on the on the
• 1:15:04
  on the freeway. Uh man, how is that? That's good? That's
• 1:15:11
  good? You want to try that? Yeah, I mean just gave a
• 1:15:14
  quick sip that like, um, very frothy. Yeah, it's a nice
• 1:15:17
  head on that so good beer. So so they optioned it, um and
• 1:15:27
  then they sat on it for like a year for one thing or another.
• 1:15:30
  Reality. Yeah, yeah, just it just it just took a while.
• 1:15:34
  And then um, I think it was that following summer they they called up
• 1:15:42
  and said, I think we're going to get some action on this. Now,
• 1:15:44
  we're gonna start rolling on it. And I think they renewed the option.
• 1:15:47
  They optioned it for one year, and I think they renewed the option.
• 1:15:50
  And then then what happened was they got some money and they asked me
• 1:15:56
  to do a rewrite on it, and they had started they were getting a
• 1:15:59
  direct and they had Judd Nelson and Alexandra paul Um cast. This was about
• 1:16:08
  eighty three eighty two. Jett Nelson with Jett Nelson. All right, okay,
• 1:16:13
  well we knew who Judd Nelson was. Breakfast Cub hadn't come out,
• 1:16:17
  The Breakfast Club hadn't come out yet. He had done um forget what he
• 1:16:21
  had done before that that garnered a fair amount of attention. So he was
• 1:16:28
  cool. He was a cool actor, right, We all like, oh,
• 1:16:30
  yeah, that's cool. Um, So what happened was I did the
• 1:16:32
  rewrite. I got like five thousand dollars to do a rewrite on it.
• 1:16:35
  Like, I remember, you have an agent at the time, did you
• 1:16:39
  well that? Okay, quick, quick, aside on that, there's a
• 1:16:42
  lot of different things that Slaughter Rally is instructional for those listening and in many
• 1:16:46
  different ways. Yeah, you got your Yeah. First of all, let
• 1:16:51
  me roll back. I've literally finished writing the end on slaughter Rally, the
• 1:16:56
  very first draft of it. UM and I took because I lived in Westwood
• 1:17:00
  at the time. I said, I'm gonna go take a walk into the
• 1:17:02
  village and uh, you know, get a cup of coffee or a beer
• 1:17:05
  or something like that. And I feel like yes. So I walked into
• 1:17:10
  Westwood Village, which at that time still had bookstores, and I remember going
• 1:17:15
  into um it was like Hunters Books that was there on Westwood Boulevard, and
• 1:17:21
  I walked in and prominently displayed on a case and the whole little setup as
• 1:17:28
  you walk in is Stephen King's Christine, which has had the cover of it
• 1:17:34
  was the car, the car, you know, and basically the grill of
• 1:17:41
  that. I think it was an old Chrysler. And I looked at that
• 1:17:45
  and I thought, oh, no, don't tell me, it's no,
• 1:17:47
  it can't be about like and it wasn't quite the same, but boy,
• 1:17:51
  it was close enough. It was like, Oh, I couldn't believe it.
• 1:17:56
  I couldn't believe it, So that that first that was less than number
• 1:18:00
  one, which is that you know, there are like you were talking about
• 1:18:03
  earlier, there are ideas up there in the cloud that you just sort of
• 1:18:06
  take. Well, if you don't act on the idea that you have,
• 1:18:11
  somebody else is going to act on it as well. Right, And one
• 1:18:15
  of my instructors that UCLA used to say that, look, ideas are literally
• 1:18:19
  out there floating around in the ether. It's not uncommon at all for someone
• 1:18:26
  or several people to latch onto the same idea at the same time. Right.
• 1:18:30
  And it's not a case of somebody ripping off someone else or anything.
• 1:18:33
  It's just sometimes you all and you can call it the collective unconscious, you
• 1:18:38
  can call it any synchronicity, you can call it any number of things.
• 1:18:42
  But it is a reality. It happens. So my testament as well.
• 1:18:46
  Yeah, okay, so my only advice in the front is that it will
• 1:18:51
  happen to you sooner or later, and act on your ideas. You get
• 1:18:57
  an impulse, you get a creative impulse, then act on it right away,
• 1:19:00
  you know, and if you can, you know, sometimes it's just
• 1:19:02
  not possible and you know, and sometimes there's not quite enough of a of
• 1:19:06
  an idea. Okay, So so that was that. Then, So anyway,
• 1:19:15
  um, I did this. I did this rewrite on slaughter Alley.
• 1:19:19
  They were on the fast track. They were going to head an into production,
• 1:19:21
  Alexander Paul and Judd Nelson starring in it. I was doing this rewrite.
• 1:19:26
  I finished the rewrite. I remember this very well on Halloween nineteen eighty
• 1:19:30
  I guess it's eighty three at that point. And then, um, two
• 1:19:38
  weeks before they were scheduled to go before cameras, the money disappeared, it
• 1:19:44
  evaporated. And oh and oh, I forgot to say. We got the
• 1:19:48
  proverbial green light after my rewrite on it. Okay, green light, they're
• 1:19:53
  going forward. It's happening. Boom. We'll be right back after a word
• 1:19:58
  from our sponsor. And now back to the show. I quit my job
• 1:20:06
  at the Academy, and I was kind of like Solong mail room, Solong
• 1:20:11
  suckers, You're never gonna you know, you're never gonna see me again,
• 1:20:14
  you know, except when I'm walking up the red carpet to collect my little
• 1:20:17
  gold mane. And uh, well that's what I was saying, you know,
• 1:20:26
  just after that option, that initial payment of like, wow, I
• 1:20:29
  am truly a boom. It's just you're getting You can see the billboards on
• 1:20:32
  that highway lighted up all the way to the horizon. What you're gonna do?
• 1:20:38
  You know, the old it's all laid down for you. And so
• 1:20:40
  then the money is yanked two weeks before the start date. It just fell
• 1:20:43
  apart. I never got an answer as to why it happened, and suddenly
• 1:20:46
  everything came to a screeching and I mean screeching. Yeah, so the big
• 1:20:54
  pay day that I was going to get once they started filming never happened.
• 1:20:59
  And so I actually had to go back to the Academy and ask, in
• 1:21:02
  the most humiliating circumstances, asked for my old job back, which they gave
• 1:21:09
  me. And yeah, God love them. And but that taught me such
• 1:21:18
  a valuable lesson, you know, just such a valuable lesson m a very
• 1:21:24
  early on about the film industry, how volatile it is, and no matter
• 1:21:29
  how good it looks or whatever, there are there are things, there are
• 1:21:32
  bolts of lightning that can strike at any given moment out there that will just
• 1:21:39
  derail even the most seemingly the most soundest of projects. So U so,
• 1:21:45
  just always be aware of that. Do not count your chickens before they hatch,
• 1:21:48
  because it's just too many things can happen until an audience, until your
• 1:21:53
  film is playing before an audience who has paid money to see it in a
• 1:22:00
  theater you know and near you. Um man, it does you know,
• 1:22:06
  Just keep keep knocking on wood the whole way. Just be lucky you can
• 1:22:11
  even you know you've gotten, You've gotten that far. So um So,
• 1:22:16
  Then in answer to the agent, um so, when they first made the
• 1:22:20
  offer to option it, I was I had no agent, I had no
• 1:22:27
  representation at all, and so I didn't know what to do. Yeah,
• 1:22:30
  so um uh, through some friends of good friends of mine, um they
• 1:22:36
  knew they they recommended an agent to me. They made a call to him,
• 1:22:42
  and this guy came in and negotiated a deal. And suddenly, and
• 1:22:45
  this was another valuable lesson, I learned the figures that they were offering me
• 1:22:49
  directly were suddenly twice as high as I ultimate. After the agent got into
• 1:22:57
  the into the business, so he basically knew agociated a better deal for me,
• 1:23:01
  so he get his cut. He certainly w got his cut. But
• 1:23:04
  he also you know, they stepped in and they made sure that I wasn't
• 1:23:09
  taken advantage of because you know, you're young and you're hungry, and I
• 1:23:13
  think, yeah, yeah, I'll take You'll take anything that they want to
• 1:23:15
  want to throw at you. But they this agent came in and his name
• 1:23:18
  was Shelley Wile, and Shelley came in and got that did a good job
• 1:23:23
  on that on that first deal. However, Shelley wouldn't take me on as
• 1:23:27
  a as a full as a legitimate client at his agency because they didn't represent
• 1:23:34
  well as He would keep me on as what he called a pocket client,
• 1:23:41
  which was kind of in his back pocket. But yeah, but I wasn't
• 1:23:45
  a regular client yet based on the merits of a quote unquote exploitation script.
• 1:23:51
  So you know, slaughter ally was still for him, didn't merit a you
• 1:23:58
  know, real representation yet. So so that's how so I had. I
• 1:24:03
  was his pocket client for a while, and so he wasn't going to do
• 1:24:06
  anything for me. He would be there to negotiate a deal for me,
• 1:24:09
  but I wasn't going to be able to get out and meet other people or
• 1:24:13
  or move on the success of or the limited success of slaughter Ally, so
• 1:24:18
  what happened was I went back, I had my took back my job at
• 1:24:23
  the at the mail room, fell into a deep funk of a depression where
• 1:24:27
  I was like xerox in my face every day, and you know, because
• 1:24:30
  thinking I'm never going to get out of here, I'm going to die an
• 1:24:32
  old man in the mail room, you know, all this stuff. It
• 1:24:35
  was just oh so depressing, um and I felt I was never I wasn't
• 1:24:41
  going to find anything worth writing about again. And so then then what happened.
• 1:24:46
  And during this time, I was going to all these punk shows,
• 1:24:51
  and I was starting to make music videos for Black Flag and Henry Rollins and
• 1:24:59
  the are you um cinematographer director part of the crew I was. I was
• 1:25:04
  directing them, you know, you know so I mean basically I just was
• 1:25:08
  going to these guys. I went to the Minimen after a show and I
• 1:25:10
  said, I talked to Mike Watt, the bass player, and I said,
• 1:25:13
  Mike, you know, I can make it. I've had a couple
• 1:25:14
  of beers and I said, Mike, I can make a I can make
• 1:25:16
  a video for you. You guys were like, you know, three hundred
• 1:25:19
  dollars and Mike said, okay, let's do it. Do you mean,
• 1:25:23
  do you recall any songs the videos have you done? Oh? Yeah?
• 1:25:26
  It was for the minimen. It was this Ain't No Picnic? And then
• 1:25:31
  we uh in the same session we shot, we went down and they were
• 1:25:35
  performing live that night too. We were shooting on a weekend, and so
• 1:25:39
  we shot on a Saturday and Sunday, and then they were performing Saturday night
• 1:25:44
  at a big punk rock show down at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown LA,
• 1:25:47
  which used to be an arena for like you know, old wrestling gigs and
• 1:25:53
  stuff like that. It was just a concrete slab and so we had all
• 1:25:58
  the camera equipment everything, and I had the crew and we were all young.
• 1:26:00
  I said, look, I'll pay everybody, you know, we'll we'll
• 1:26:02
  you guys, let's get some pizza and let's go down to the frecking show
• 1:26:06
  and we'll we'll um shoot um, what what do you shoot? And we'll
• 1:26:12
  man, we'll shoot um. I said, I want to shoot him doing
• 1:26:14
  um uh this um ain't talking about Love, which was their cover of the
• 1:26:19
  Van Halen Opus. You know, Van Halen's first big hit, Ain't Talking
• 1:26:24
  about love and when you know, when Van Halen performed it, it's like
• 1:26:28
  six minutes long, you know, and then it finally climaxes with it,
• 1:26:30
  you know, hey hey, hey, yeah, you know in that whole
• 1:26:33
  um. The miniment did it in thirty seven seconds and basically they just took
• 1:26:38
  the last um, the last stands of lyrics and then, uh, you
• 1:26:43
  know, I've been to the edge. I stood and looked down. You
• 1:26:45
  know, I lost a lot of friends there. I got no time to
• 1:26:46
  mess around, no way. And then um, hey, hey hey,
• 1:26:51
  you know, hey, hey hey, and that was it, and they
• 1:26:54
  played it really fast. So I told the miniment, I said, let's
• 1:26:57
  let's do this live. You know, I mean, I'm gonna shoot you
• 1:26:59
  guys live performing this, but try to perform it at the tempo you remember
• 1:27:03
  recording it because we had no playback room, right, you know, I
• 1:27:05
  had a cassette that was playing back for the stuff earlier in the day and
• 1:27:11
  so um um and they said okay, and I said, do one other
• 1:27:15
  thing. The song is so short, just play it twice so I have
• 1:27:19
  time to switch camera positions because I had two cameras, and I said,
• 1:27:23
  I just want my two guys to switch, you know, angles so we
• 1:27:26
  can get full on coverage, right And he said, sure, you know,
• 1:27:29
  we'll do it. So so we get down there. We get and
• 1:27:31
  it's this big punk show. There's like half a dozen bands on on.
• 1:27:35
  They were pretty high up in the in the order in so we we were
• 1:27:41
  there and we were right on the edge of the procenium and I had all
• 1:27:44
  the camera stuff in there, and they told me where was going to be
• 1:27:47
  in their set, you know, and so I said okay, and they
• 1:27:50
  gave me the signal and I said, roll the cameras and then they started
• 1:27:54
  playing the song and the guys, we're shooting, and then the song d
• 1:28:00
  thirty seven seconds later and great, now we're going to switch. They just
• 1:28:04
  went right back into it without any break. And I said, Mike,
• 1:28:08
  no, no, you know. And d boone you know, on the
• 1:28:13
  guitar, was just I remember him just kind of shrugging like, oh,
• 1:28:15
  dude, you know, rock and bucket. So I had good My good
• 1:28:23
  friend Bill Judkins was doing a second unit quote second unit, which was basically
• 1:28:28
  he had an old spring wound bell and Howe sixteen millimeter camera that was like
• 1:28:31
  the leftover from World War One or something. You know. And uh,
• 1:28:34
  and Bill was right next to me, and I remember he just scrambled up
• 1:28:39
  onto the stage. He just clambered up there right away. And as soon
• 1:28:42
  as they started doing the second version and got behind them looking out at the
• 1:28:47
  audience, he got a great got a great angle. My other friend,
• 1:28:50
  John Hart couldn't do it because the camera was too too big. He just
• 1:28:55
  couldn't get it up. It was an airflex and so Bill got got these
• 1:28:59
  great shots. But the problem was Bill's camera was so old. The the
• 1:29:04
  spring on the cameras it would get lower in the wind, it would start
• 1:29:11
  slowing down. So when the film starts moving slower through the aperture, you
• 1:29:15
  capture more action on each frame. So basically when you project it, everything
• 1:29:21
  starts speeding up and it's like an old silent film, you know. And
• 1:29:25
  so the last footage bits of them, they're just like jumping around. They
• 1:29:30
  look like you know, Buster Katona. It was just it was crazy.
• 1:29:33
  But once we started cutting it together, it kind of added to the whole
• 1:29:36
  frenetic quality of the video. And then we did some in this because it
• 1:29:42
  was early eighties, we could solarize some video and stuff. As we added
• 1:29:45
  some kind of effects to it, and it's just it's I have it on
• 1:29:48
  my website, you can you can see it. Yeah, but MTV played
• 1:29:53
  it as the world's shortest video. It made the MTV news. I never
• 1:29:57
  saw I saw that, but apparently Kurt Loder introduced as the world shortest video
• 1:30:00
  at the time and now which says something like that, we'll be right back
• 1:30:04
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. But
• 1:30:13
  I thought was pretty cool. But um, this ain't no picnic, the
• 1:30:15
  one that we really did that was sort of legitimate. That that played quite
• 1:30:19
  a while on MTV and uh um and and actually a lot of that footage,
• 1:30:27
  all the outtakes and everything else were proved to be pretty valuable because you
• 1:30:30
  know, Dee Boone, the guitarist for the miniment, was killed in a
• 1:30:33
  car wreck. Um late in the December of that year. This is eighty
• 1:30:38
  four, and um, you know, it's great having some really good,
• 1:30:43
  great images of him performing, although we don't have sound one on it,
• 1:30:46
  but there's some really crisp stuff. And then I did another one for them,
• 1:30:49
  um no that yeah, later later that year. Um, um,
• 1:30:55
  this ain't not this Saint King of the Hill, which we shot on video
• 1:31:00
  at the time, and we had a steadicamp for that. We really stepped
• 1:31:02
  up, you know. Um so um, so you did all this stuff,
• 1:31:06
  so we're, um, what what doors are that opened for you?
• 1:31:11
  Well? Do you think that um that you saw on top of your writing?
• 1:31:18
  All right, sorry, we're back, okay, so you've done well
• 1:31:23
  videos. Yeah. So what I was my idea at the time was like,
• 1:31:26
  okay, cool, I'm I'm getting my some directing experience now doing these
• 1:31:30
  these music videos, you know. And uh and it was again it was
• 1:31:32
  real, real shoe string budget kind of stuff. It was totally punk rock
• 1:31:40
  um. But SST Records was really happy with the with the the minimum videos,
• 1:31:45
  and so they started talking to me about doing something with with Black Flag.
• 1:31:51
  Yeah. It was because they were black Flag basically ran SST at this
• 1:31:57
  time. It was Henry Rollins was ahead of it, wasn't he. No,
• 1:32:00
  well, well yeah he wasn't. The original Well that my memories old
• 1:32:03
  black Flag was always Greg Genka and and Chuck Takowski. But then Chuck eventually
• 1:32:11
  left um and just continued to sort of run SST. But but Greg gen
• 1:32:17
  started SST Records and he was the guitars for Black Flag and so Henry excuse
• 1:32:25
  me, it was not the original Yeah, no vocalists. There were several
• 1:32:29
  before Henry Um, but he was the one that finally stepped in and became
• 1:32:33
  really the face of Black Flag because Henry really relished, i think, being
• 1:32:39
  the front man there and he was, you know, a formidable personality.
• 1:32:45
  Um. And so who formed the Circle Jerks after that, well, Chris
• 1:32:48
  Morris and he would been Chris Morris was the original vocalist for Black Flag,
• 1:32:53
  right okay, And he sang on like nervous breakdown and some of those really
• 1:32:57
  that that very first EP for fives that they did, um and then and
• 1:33:01
  then he went on to he left and to start Circle Jerks. I was
• 1:33:05
  up at Skywalker Sound a couple of years ago, huh, and they had
• 1:33:10
  a project there. They had all the original masters for the Black Flag um,
• 1:33:15
  you know albums and really they were remastering oh wow, and it's it
• 1:33:18
  was just classic, Like at my box, they were showing us like this
• 1:33:21
  project they were working on. I'm just like, that's interesting, crazy black
• 1:33:27
  Yeah. Yeah, there's a clash of stuff right there. But um,
• 1:33:32
  um, and that's that's another story. Working with with Henry and and and
• 1:33:36
  all that. But you know, by my I was hoping that what this
• 1:33:41
  would do would would give me continued cred, you know, as a director,
• 1:33:45
  and then my writing career would be kind of moving along simultaneously, you
• 1:33:50
  know, with this, so that eventually I would be I could parlay it
• 1:33:54
  into a thing where I write something and say, okay, I want to
• 1:33:57
  direct this, okay, and and hoping that somebody would give me that option,
• 1:34:00
  it would give me that chance. Um what happened then was that I'm
• 1:34:08
  back at the mail room right and I'm like in a funk now because the
• 1:34:11
  production fell apart, and um and I just didn't think I was going to
• 1:34:15
  get anywhere out. So like I was saying, I've seen all these punk
• 1:34:18
  shows and really may be inspired by the music. And I that's when I
• 1:34:21
  really tried to write that failed murder mystery thing that fell apart, and it
• 1:34:27
  just it just didn't come to come together. So I also started a record
• 1:34:30
  label shortly after this too, but that but that was a little further down
• 1:34:33
  the line. But um so anyway, still in working there, m I
• 1:34:40
  ran into another old friend of mine that I had gone to film school with,
• 1:34:43
  and he said, um, what are you doing? And I said,
• 1:34:47
  on the licking stamps in the mail room, dude, I've kind of
• 1:34:50
  I'm like bummed. And he said, well, whatever happened to slaughter Alley?
• 1:34:55
  He said that was a great scrap And I said, I'm just sitting
• 1:34:57
  there on a shelf. But he said, give it to me. He
• 1:34:59
  said, I'm working. I'm working in the mail room of William Morris Agency.
• 1:35:01
  And he said, oh, you know, I can't tell you the
• 1:35:04
  crap I have to read every day, and a lot of this is by
• 1:35:08
  in a lot of the scripts are by people who are making a lot of
• 1:35:10
  money. He said that slatter rally is just as good as any of the
• 1:35:13
  stuff that I'm reading. So let me get Let me get it too.
• 1:35:15
  A couple of young agents there that I have in mind, and I said
• 1:35:17
  okay, So he did, and within a couple of weeks I was asked
• 1:35:27
  to come into William Morris and I met with a couple of young agents there,
• 1:35:30
  Rick Jeff and Carol Yumpkis were their names, and they they loved the
• 1:35:36
  script and they signed me and that was just like boy, Suddenly it was
• 1:35:44
  like, oh, well, being represented by people my age, whereas Shelley
• 1:35:47
  while was an old, much older guy, and now here were people that
• 1:35:51
  like in my age bracket and speaking my language right, And they just loved
• 1:35:58
  it. And they said, we're going to get you out of meetings and
• 1:36:00
  we'll start, you know, we're gonna start finding some things for you.
• 1:36:02
  And I said, fantastic. So I was really emboldened by that. Um
• 1:36:08
  Rick Jaffa incidentally, UM left a couple of years or three three, three
• 1:36:14
  years or four years later UM as my agent, UM to become a writer
• 1:36:18
  himself. And he just recently, he and his wife just recently wrote Rise
• 1:36:21
  on the Planet of the Apes. Oh wow, Yeah, so he's done,
• 1:36:25
  all right, okay, and yeah yeah, but um but he was
• 1:36:30
  a he was a terrific guy and a terrific agent, you know, for
• 1:36:32
  me at the time. And I remember meeting him the first time and he
• 1:36:35
  said, I gotta tell you. I said, I got your script.
• 1:36:40
  I read it. I couldn't put it down. He said, when it
• 1:36:41
  was done, I threw it in the air. I was so happy reading
• 1:36:44
  a really good script. This is a really awesome script. I love it,
• 1:36:46
  you know. And this was just like, oh God, thank you.
• 1:36:49
  Hearing stuff like that from somebody really in the know, yeah, you
• 1:36:55
  know who said we're gonna take this and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're
• 1:36:57
  gonna get you some work, you know based but it was still under option
• 1:37:00
  with the company that had so it was tied up. They couldn't go out
• 1:37:04
  and try to resell it. But they said, we're gonna, we're gonna
• 1:37:08
  use this as a calling card for you and get you out there now and
• 1:37:12
  start starting out. Yeah you start, you know, thinks. So that's
• 1:37:15
  um, that's what what led to my first bit of employment, which I
• 1:37:20
  can tell you about now, or we'll hold until next we'll take it later.
• 1:37:24
  I think we'll wrap it up for two. Okay. I think this
• 1:37:26
  is great. This is this is better than I expected about it. I
• 1:37:29
  mean, because it's I feel like there's so much more. There's so much
• 1:37:32
  more we could talk about. And I think that the uh, the audience
• 1:37:36
  of one whoever's listening to this podcast get kick out of it. Okay,
• 1:37:42
  but um, yeah, so let's wrap it up and sure we'll catch up
• 1:37:45
  another you know. Sure we've kind of jumped around all over the place with
• 1:37:48
  music and yeah, but it's good. Okay, let me finish the thought
• 1:37:54
  though, which was maybe you can put this back into the context that it
• 1:37:57
  really should have been. Okay, when I was are talking about going to
• 1:38:01
  these the shows and like they've seeing the blasters and and a lot of this
• 1:38:05
  rockabilly stuff that was happening, Um, they struck me all as being a
• 1:38:10
  little bit like posers, right and I and and I felt very acutely,
• 1:38:15
  um that you know, there would have been a generation or two before them
• 1:38:18
  who were the real McCoys, if you will, that were the real the
• 1:38:24
  real rockabilly guys, the guys who were sniffing glue and racing their cars at
• 1:38:29
  three o'clock in the morning and like, you know, drinking they got a
• 1:38:31
  pint of sloe gin in the back pocket and high school you know, and
• 1:38:34
  and and would rumble with a chain and a dire iron, right, And
• 1:38:41
  I always was thinking about, boy, would be really it's amusing to what
• 1:38:45
  would happen if some of those guys came and met up with these kind of
• 1:38:50
  poser blockabilly pussies, you know, and it really come to rumble, what
• 1:38:56
  would happen, you know, what would happen to these kind of posing guys
• 1:38:59
  who looked like really tough, right right, You know if the real McCoys
• 1:39:01
  showed up one night on their doorsteps. So that was kind of an impetus
• 1:39:04
  to start writing slaughter Allister. Really, what would happen if the past came
• 1:39:10
  and visited upon the future? Yeah, and how how would either hold up?
• 1:39:15
  You know, it is cool and it's such a cool little subculture.
• 1:39:19
  Um yeah, like um, you know like um conan and Bryan is a
• 1:39:25
  huge Rocketbilly fan. These guys all his own Rocketbilly band and you know,
• 1:39:29
  oh really I didn't know that was his brand of brand. Yeah, he
• 1:39:31
  go, he goes sometimes on these little tours, like on his hiatus of
• 1:39:36
  the show, where he and his little Rocketbilly band play across the you know
• 1:39:41
  country. Sure so, but he's got this little he's got this affinity.
• 1:39:45
  It's probably why his hair is a pompado our time or whatever. Yeah,
• 1:39:47
  okay, well that's that sort of explains a lot. He's a Harvard guy
• 1:39:50
  whatever he is, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. H
• 1:39:57
  it'd be funny if he met at with the past. Now we'll be right
• 1:40:02
  back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. Well,
• 1:40:12
  that's kind of what I'm talking about, you know, so you know
• 1:40:15
  you look at it. I mean again, it's partly our our fascination with
• 1:40:19
  people like Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and all those all those early guys.
• 1:40:25
  You know, they weren't they weren't bright educated guys. They were tough as
• 1:40:30
  nails though, and they were really they were the real deal. And uh
• 1:40:34
  so I just you know, kind of wonder what would happen, what would
• 1:40:40
  happen? So how funny? All right, cool? Yeah, we can
• 1:40:43
  wrap this up and we'll We'll continue another time for sure, and I know
• 1:40:47
  I'm interested. There's so much more to talk about. So yeah, and
• 1:40:50
  hopefully the next time we talked, I'll mention whatever the next steps of projects
• 1:40:56
  are going on, and we'll catch up at what you're doing. Yeah,
• 1:40:58
  there was kind of a cluster back to vity there at at a period there
• 1:41:01
  that really, um, you know it, career in Hollywood is very streaky.
• 1:41:10
  It can be like like a hot streak in sports, you know,
• 1:41:14
  where if you're if you're hot and you're you're working at then were you work
• 1:41:18
  at? You know, surf that wave you know, like yeah, yeah,
• 1:41:21
  yeah, because you never know when if if another good one is going
• 1:41:27
  to calm or not right right again? Thanks. Hollywood is always throwing the
• 1:41:31
  changeup ball at you. So I'm mixing my my sports metaphors. I know,
• 1:41:35
  you know. We got about three or four of them in the span
• 1:41:38
  of a two or three sentences here, But I think you get the gist
• 1:41:42
  of what I'm talking about. You lost me on the wave when I was
• 1:41:46
  just my brain started thinking about the wave. Yeah, yeah, yeah right
• 1:41:50
  cool? Well right, Scott, thank you, Yeah, we'll catch up
• 1:41:55
  later. Cool. I want to thank Scott so much for doing such a
• 1:41:59
  great job on this episode. If you want to get links to anything we
• 1:42:00
  spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting
• 1:42:04
  dot tv forward slash three h eight, and if you haven't already, please
• 1:42:09
  head over to Screenwriting podcast dot com and leave a good review and subscribe to
• 1:42:13
  the show. It really helps us out a lot. Thank you so much
• 1:42:15
  for listening, guys, As always, keep on writing no matter what.
• 1:42:19
  I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast at
• 1:42:25
  Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.