Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 310: Licking My Wounds Writing The Mask of Zorro for Hollywood with Randall Jahnson

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BPS 310: Licking My Wounds Writing The Mask of Zorro for Hollywood with Randall Jahnson · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

• 0:03
  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof
• 0:13
  Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number three ten. It's kind of fun to do the
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  impossible Walt Disney broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in Hollywood when we really
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  should be working on that next draft. It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing
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  you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your screenplay
• 0:32
  bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another
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  episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble host Alex Ferrari.
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  Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof Script Coverage. Now. Unlike other
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  script coverage services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses on the kind of project you
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  down by three Categoriescral budget, indie film, market, and studio film.
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  There's no reason to get coverage from a reader that used to reading temp bowl
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  And we wanted to focus on that. At Bulletproof script coverage, our readers
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  So if you need your screenplay or TV script covered by professional readers,
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  head on over to cover my screenplay. Dot Com enjoyed this episode with guest
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  host Scott McMahon. We gotta finish the interview I had with Johnson from Ranald
• 1:42
  Johnson dot Com. Look it up on the website at the link. But
• 1:46
  anyway, were a part two because we ended because this is how bad I
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  am. This is the never ending conversation. By the way, Yeah,
• 1:53
  I hope it goes on and on. I hope there's like seven parts to
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  it. But the thing is, the thing is I this is how bad
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  I am. If I was a real journalist, which I'm not, which
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  you know explains a lot. Yes, is I would have I would have
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  had I would have taken the time to do a little bit more research because
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  on reading your website and everything, because everything you were sharing with me was
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  on your website, and but and when you were telling me I was I
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  was, it was almost as if I was a new person though, because
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  I was like, oh, really, I didn't know you worked with all
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  those you know, uh, you know, Henry Rollins and stand Ridgeway and
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  you know. So that was exciting for me, but it was kind of
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  neat because being stupid as I was, is like I was hearing for the
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  first time, even though I could have probably prepped myself better by reading thoroughly
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  through your website as opposed to just glancing a few the items when I first
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  went through the website. Well, you can just peel the layers away like
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  an onion. Yeah, so each week you'll find a little something new.
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  So so what we did was last we left off, you were mentioning you
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  went to us LA for screenwriting. Yeah, so, and then you had
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  a college you know friend who's working an agency saw you somewhere in the street
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  or something like that, and you know, you bumped into I don't know
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  of their coffee shop, but anyhow, they got your script because there was
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  a whole breed of new young agents that we're looking for some cool stuff,
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  and they really latched onto a slaughter alley. Right, Y's correct. And
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  from that, but we got sidetracked a little bit, because you said you
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  were doing a lot of work with the the exploding punk scene in the late
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  seventies early eighties on the West coast, so the California style, so which
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  is huge. Yeah. So, and you know we're talking about all we
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  were going on about stand Ridgeway Black Flag. We will talk about Minuteman and
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  the label that you created. So we kind of touched upon that, but
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  I think it's still an interesting story. We can continue there. We were
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  working our way on towards how you got dudes made or how it got picked
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  up, like your first screen break, all that kind of stuff. Let's
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  see. Gosh, Well, backing up a bit, Yeah, I ran
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  my friend Howard's Howard Sanders, who I had gone to film school with,
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  and how he had become an agent or was aspiring to be an agent at
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  the William Morris agency. And so when I ran into him, he was
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  literally working in the mail room at William Morris at the time, and and
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  he said, you know what happened to slaughter Alley? Oh yeah, you
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  know, how bit, And that give me perspective, like how big was
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  William Morris at that time? Oh, Morris was huge. It was one
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  of the established, you know, agencies that had been in show business forever.
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  It was so old as a matter of fact that I was. There
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  was a lot of talk about William Morris at that time that like, how
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  interested were they really in the entertainment business because apparently most of their financial holdings
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  were in real estate. Really yeah, yeah, so it was It was
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  kind of an interesting thing. But at that time, William Morris, UH,
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  ICMAA were kind of like the Big three UTA hadn't really emerged yet.
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  Um what was Where was Endeavor at that point? They were? They were
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  there? Um? I actually no, I take that back. I think
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  Endeavor started with um after a bunch of guys that I had met at Morris
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  and then later icem split jumped ship and started at Endeavor. Okay, okay,
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  okay, and then Endeavor became Endeavor and ultimately came back and merged with
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  Morris, right, okay. I mean it just goes to show you what
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  goes around comes around. You know that the sharks eventually devour said one another.
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  They are they are. It's an amazing machine. And how much they
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  survive and how they find their pause and different things like it's taken them a
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  while to get involved with the interactive industry as well, so slowly. Yeah,
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  yeah, they're a little slow in the pickup. But I mean the
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  UTA is really I think hot on them. Interactive in the media, uh
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  you know, new media whatever you want to call it right now, I
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  think but um yeah, I mean you know again a game world, Um,
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  you know on this whole internet thing. Uh, that that was just
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  that's like, you know, it was it was dull. It wasn't interesting
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  to the established industry at that time, right And of course now you know,
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  everything is migrating into that and uh so that stuff is moving front and
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  center a lot more where it certainly has a lot more respect than it used
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  to. Um, you know, um, I would have meetings after I
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  wrote Gun. And again I'm jumping ahead here, but after I wrote Gun
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  or was writing Gun, I was still you know, I would go around
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  and have meetings with a production company or you know, the studio or something
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  and uh, this is what you've been doing lately. And I said,
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  well, I've been writing you know, this game, this video game.
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  Oh yeah, I guess that's kind of a yeah, people are doing that,
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  right. It was like, yeah, it was just it was it
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  was it was something that didn't have any respect. Yeah. Now in the
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  business and how you know, hello, um it's got you know, it's
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  I mean, it's devouring the business in one sense. Oh yeah, it's
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  a total so sure, it's very different. Yeah, please drink eat.
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  I could always pause us. It's always getting the way for those who might
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  be listening. Having a very delicious pumpkin flavored pumpkin chocolate flavored. Umu stout
• 7:32
  a stout or was it um a um, yeah, it's a little it's
• 7:38
  a little lighter for them stout. It's them, that's sorry. We'll we'll
• 7:43
  figure it out when they come down. We'll get it. They we'll get
• 7:45
  the we'll get the I'm gonna get one app from my and it's quite good.
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  So um, you know, Happy Halloween everyone, seriously. And today
• 7:53
  today was sort of the first day that got kind of cold. Yeah.
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  Yeah, I went out, I went out running. It was thirty six
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  this morning when I got up. I noticed second a while for a second,
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  yeah, yeah, And I went out running today and I was like,
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  oh, it's Lily Chili here comes. Yeah, that sounds great.
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  The skies are just wasn't a cloud in the sky now we've been leaves are
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  on the changing and on the ground, and it's just it's beautiful, man.
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  It's been yeah, real nice. I love it. I love it
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  cool. I know, mister surfing. I actually had a great weekend surfing,
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  so I no complaints there, so it's all good. Oh so anyway,
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  going back, Yeah, we got your friends. Yeah. So I
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  ran into Howie Sanders and um it was like literally on the street in Beverly
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  Hill somewhere, and he just said, dude, what what happened with slaughter
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  Alley? And I said, well, the whole project fell through. I
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  had to go back to the mail room, my mail room of at the
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  Academy Emotion Pictures, and uh I was working there, and I said,
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  nothing's happening with the script, and he said, well give it to me,
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  because he said, I'm in the mail room now at Morris and I
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  can get it to some young agents there who are really hungry. And it
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  makes me look good as well. So he said, believe me, he
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  said, given the stuff that I'm reading there in the mail room, which
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  is what every aspiring agent has to do, he said, there's a lot
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  of people far less talented than you that are making a lot of money.
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  So he said, I think you could you you could get represented here.
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  So I did. I gave it to him, and sure enough, a
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  couple days later, I got a call from you know, the young agent
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  over there, and I invited me over to to basically meet and I signed
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  with him. I met with actually a pair of agents there, um Carol
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  yumkus and a guy named Rick Chaffa. We'll be right back after a word
• 9:58
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Rick Jaffa is now
• 10:07
  a writer himself, and he and his wife Amanda Silver, they wrote a
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  wonderful movie called The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Most recently they wrote the
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  remake of the planet Planet of the Apes or Rise of the Planet of the
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  Okay you know, yes, um, the big hit this last summer.
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  But Rick was my agent initially what you consider like a pocket client. I
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  was considered a pocket client by a guy named Shelley Wile, who has since
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  passed away. But at his very established agency, he wouldn't take me on
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  as a regular client. But I was a pocket client based on slaughter Alley.
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  But he wouldn't take me on, as he said, because on the
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  merits of what he termed is an exploitation movie. Okay, so that was
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  a very different I mean, Shelley was very very old school. So when
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  I gave it to Howard, Howard was like, this is a next pint.
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  This is just a great script, right, let's go, let's go,
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  you know. And then he got it to Rick and Carol at Morris
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  and they were they were just starting out, and they rememb remember Rick telling
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  me he read it and he just after he finished the last page he threw
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  it in the air and just was like it felt like, yes, I
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  can sell this or I can write. You know, this is a this
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  is a really great writer. It's just one of those moments where it goes
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  right. It's a template, you know, it's seared into your your memory
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  where it's just like wow, great, I'm so happy that somebody loves it
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  that much. And so they signed me and then they started sending me out
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  on meetings right away. Slaughter ally was still under options, so they couldn't
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  go out and sell it, but they wanted to sell me. It was
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  a great calling card that they could use to sell me as a talent.
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  So what they were able to sell it as, Hey, we got his
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  projects, an option or something like that. So you got to meet with
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  him. He's hot correct correct um. And so subsequently I went out on
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  you know a lot of different meetings, uh with companies. I remember meeting
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  uh uh with Johnny Carson's company. He had a development person at that time.
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  Strange yeah, um, uh, you know it was. It was
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  just kind of interesting. You go out and they're basically meeting greets. Hey,
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  how are you doing? Read your script really like it's cool? What
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  else you got that kind of thing? What did you have at the time,
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  Well, it was interesting. I didn't really have. I had some
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  vague notions, and I went into a meeting at a company called the Vista
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  Vista Films or Vista Organization. And I after this was after a string of
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  meetings with what you might call pod people, okay a little bit, and
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  it's just they're the obligatory meeting where they're they're just like a hey, hey,
• 12:56
  like what we have here? Good? Put on a real quick sure,
• 13:01
  we're back live cool, we just got back. Just finish up our
• 13:05
  dinner delicious again. You know we're at Mars like oswego Mars Ours Pub.
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  Anyway, we were talking, yeah, and by the way, that it's
• 13:13
  a porter my pumpkin chocolate concoction, not a stout. It's a porter.
• 13:20
  It's a lighter, a little bit lighter, so quite quite delicious. Cool.
• 13:26
  I gotta get one after this bearer. It's a fal in itself.
• 13:33
  So the question was we were talking about now you got your you're in with
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  the agency and you're going on meetings. Yea, and let's talk about that
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  because that's one of the things that it was exciting to see for a writer
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  or who They do it for actors too. Like the actors if if you
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  sometimes want you to meet with like the director of one hour program ring programming
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  for Fox or what ever, you're not necessarily auditioning. They just sort of
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  want to meet you, depending on, you know, the agency. And
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  the same thing with writers. And I'm not sure at works with directors and
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  stuff, but maybe the same thing, you know, I mean, I
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  mean, it's a lot easier now for directors because they can they can have
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  a reel either on a disk or they have a website and somebody can go
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  and see their stuff right away. You know. Back in those days,
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  I mean, our director would have to leave a reel, would have like
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  a big fat, an actual film room, yeah, or big videotape or
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  right, yeah, a big fat three quarter inch videotape or something. You
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  know, it's like ridiculous. So when you went, what was your emotional?
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  How are your emotions? That's one thing I never get like in interviews
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  is because a lot of interviews interviewers just sort of skip over like, oh,
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  yeah, so I got this agent agencies behind me. Now they start
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  sending out of meetings, but never stop and say, okay, can you
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  recall sort of the emotions you had were like I'm going to my first meeting
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  and they tell you I'm sure they get like a call or they tell you,
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  all right, you got to be here at three o'clock. You're gonna
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  meet with so and so at this production company. They want to meet with
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  you and talk to you about this story or whatever. So what goes on
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  and somebody's emotions at that point? Well, I used to get really excited
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  or almost anxious about, you know, these meetings, because why do they
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  want to meet with me? You know, am I which should I have
• 15:22
  stuff ready? But what are they expecting? Do I have to pitch another
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  story? Um? You know, the agents would always say no, no,
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  no, just just chill out. They just want to meet you.
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  They read the script. They just want to know if you have any other
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  ideas. You know, it's just a it's just a meeting. Yeah,
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  there's nothing. I used to attach a lot more import to the meeting than
• 15:43
  was really there, and I used to get, you know, at least
• 15:48
  initially, very anxious about it. I remember, just in particular that like
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  the meeting with Johnny Carson's company, Terry Terry something or other. It was
• 16:00
  his head of development, I used to I ended up playing basketball with him
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  at a later later date. Yeah, but um uh he was cool and
• 16:10
  I but I was very nervous about it at first because this is like one
• 16:14
  of my first professional meetings, and like, you know, what do I
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  say, what do I wear, what do I do? Um, that
• 16:19
  whole thing. But you start doing enough of the examens and you get a
• 16:22
  little more relaxed and just be learned to be yourself right and not. You
• 16:29
  know, it's it's not a it's always a little bit of a dog and
• 16:32
  pony show to a degree, but it's it's not um um uh, it's
• 16:40
  you shouldn't suffer from performance anxiety for something like that. They generally, if
• 16:45
  these people have been doing their job for a while, they know that writers
• 16:48
  aren't necessarily the most um uh polished. Yeah, I think they're they're they're
• 16:57
  not, yeah, in the most gregarious individuals you know. Now you know
• 17:03
  um Ron Howard's partner Brian Grazer, Yeah, I saw him in an interview
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  on Iconic Class on um IFC I think it was or and that show is
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  basically kind of combining two icons or moguls for different industries, and they follow
• 17:19
  him around. Then it's like an hour show, but they was following him,
• 17:22
  so is Brian Grazer and his friendship with Redstone head of Viacom. Well
• 17:27
  you know yeah Summer, yes, sure. But then we're interviewing Gracer and
• 17:33
  he was saying that about writers, like he says he wants he he has
• 17:40
  the way they dress. He goes, if they're not like disheveled and like
• 17:42
  look they're just like right off the street and they he goes, he wants
• 17:45
  his writers to be the ones that are like socially awkward, that aren't dressed
• 17:52
  to the tea, that are in like like they look like that's all they
• 17:55
  do is right, um, and that's sort of maybe is a tongue in
• 17:57
  chic sort of perspective. But he was like he's he said he was suspicious
• 18:03
  of a writer that was dressed better than he was, you know. Well,
• 18:07
  and you know then then he just lost out on a meeting with like
• 18:12
  Aaron Sorkin, you know, or somebody of ure. Um. You know,
• 18:17
  come on, if if you'd take a look historically photographs of writers,
• 18:22
  um, from let's say the really uh, from the fifties, forties,
• 18:29
  fifties, early sixties. Um, you know, the Writer's Guild has plenty
• 18:34
  of them on file and in the in the guild home headquarters there. Um,
• 18:41
  you'll see a lot of pipes. But by and large they're a debonair
• 18:45
  crowd. You know, I mean Dashel Hammett, who's one of the founders
• 18:48
  of the Writer's Guild. Really, um, I mean a very debonair gentleman,
• 18:52
  you know, I mean dapper, these guys. These guys knew how
• 18:56
  to dress. Um. It's sort of a sad state of airs, I
• 19:00
  think what it's come to now because we are really sort of a T shirt
• 19:03
  nation. But that I think that's more indicative of the of the population in
• 19:07
  general than anything. But for a long time, you know, the the
• 19:11
  sort of the uniform was a trashy T shirt, uh, and a really
• 19:15
  worn baseball cap of some sort of some obscure product label on it. Um,
• 19:23
  you know, and and of course jeans and uh and a pair of
• 19:30
  you know, some kind of a you know, a tennis shoe of some
• 19:33
  sneakers, you know, of high tops or something like that. You know,
• 19:37
  you know, Frank Darabont was was fond of particular high tops. I
• 19:41
  think at one point, you know, classics. Um. You know.
• 19:47
  So it's kind of come to that in a in a sense, I I
• 19:48
  understand what Grazier is saying, but you know, you can't make a blanket
• 19:52
  statement. It was just interesting to hear he's you know, he's a server.
• 19:59
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to
• 20:06
  the show. I know, I know it's a bunked in the head.
• 20:11
  Yeah. So you're like, oh so yeah, yeah, I mean,
• 20:15
  you know, but but there is a certain you know, it's it's it's
• 20:21
  a certain look, it's a certain vibe. Um, and you'll get um
• 20:26
  sometimes, you know, and they're usually clutching a lot of coffee, a
• 20:29
  coffee mug of some sort, you know, add to that. So they're
• 20:32
  in line at the espresso bar, or they're you know, are in the
• 20:33
  you know you see him in Starbucks everywhere or any kind of coffee house.
• 20:38
  Um there, like it's a given. Like any coffee shop you see in
• 20:41
  Los Angeles, there's a laptop with U spin writing. Sure, I mean
• 20:47
  it used to be in the old days. It used to be a nope,
• 20:49
  nopepad, Okay, I mean, and I was one of them.
• 20:52
  I would go out because, um, you know, writing is a lonely
• 20:55
  business part of the time, for most of the time. And uh,
• 21:00
  writers rarely got out, especially if you were under pressure to get a script
• 21:03
  done or on a deadline of some sort. M you just didn't get out.
• 21:07
  So the only way to get out really was to double up on function
• 21:14
  in business. And what was like, get to this coffee shop, get
• 21:17
  some coffee, and you get some work done, and then you might vicariously
• 21:23
  experience real life and the process. You don't get out of that that those
• 21:29
  four those four enclosing walls. I don't know if it's you know, yeah,
• 21:33
  I don't know if I've I've done it A few times, just because
• 21:36
  at a sheer I had to I was like, on, I had time
• 21:38
  to kill. I was like, I gotta get some work done. And
• 21:41
  I noticed that I kind of shut myself off a little bit when there's a
• 21:45
  lot of noise because I don't know anybody. It's okay, just put the
• 21:48
  earplugs in and you know, you do your business. But when you take
• 21:52
  your moment to take a breath or step away from whatever you're working on the
• 21:55
  writing, it gives me a chance to sort of reserve, you know,
• 21:57
  human nature and you and you never know what triggers that inspiration. Like you
• 22:03
  just see this this somebody ordering you know, a latte, but the way
• 22:07
  they order it is a bizarre You're like, oh, that that might be
• 22:08
  interesting. But I actually found most of my success writing for me is I
• 22:14
  go to the public libraries. You know, it's just they have the Wi
• 22:18
  Fire, But but I try to cut off the Wi Fi because it's too
• 22:19
  easy to get distracted. But for some reason, for me, the libraries
• 22:25
  was always a nice little getaway to get outside the homest home. Marcus and
• 22:29
  the libraries are great. Um, I never I never ventured to them to
• 22:33
  actually work. I would always go. I would be there to research,
• 22:37
  right, and I would always be on a sort of on a mission,
• 22:41
  you know. And again these are days before the Internet. I remember if
• 22:45
  I was on a you know, a couple of projects. Um, I
• 22:48
  became a lifetime member of the UCLA Alumni Association for the sole purpose that I
• 22:57
  would always have library privilege. Well that makes sense, and so yeah,
• 23:03
  I haven't used it now in a number of years, but the point was
• 23:08
  that I used to. And again the days before the Internet, if I
• 23:11
  was researching something in an historical period or something, I would go to the
• 23:15
  Graduate Research Library and just disappear. I mean it would lead I would cross
• 23:22
  reference and go down this path and that path and that aisle and go to
• 23:26
  special collections and everything. And I loved it. I mean it was fantastic.
• 23:29
  It was really a it was actually a physical investigation. You know,
• 23:33
  you actually had to travel, You had to get in the elevator after you
• 23:37
  get to the card catalog and go upstairs or this or that, or you
• 23:41
  know, find different things, and it was it was always a little bit
• 23:44
  of an adventure. And then there would be interesting things you would encounter along
• 23:47
  away on the shelves and down the aisles and all that stuff. So I
• 23:49
  always always really enjoyed that. Now you know, I mean it's all at
• 23:53
  your fingertips, so you don't do that anymore. But I never worked in
• 23:57
  a library. Always liked the vibe, but but I never worked in it.
• 24:00
  I I preferred to go where um I could observe people coming and going
• 24:08
  a lot. So there's a place in La called the Apple pan its Um.
• 24:15
  It's down on Pico Boulevard, just east of Westwood Boulevard a block and
• 24:21
  it's a little horseshoe counter in an old bungalow that's been there since nineteen forty
• 24:25
  seven, and it's family owned and they have refused to sell out, and
• 24:30
  so it's completely surrounded now by taul modern buildings. And here's this little forty
• 24:36
  style bungalow on the corner and it's still run exactly the same way it was
• 24:41
  way back when. And the menu, who really hasn't changed. The prices
• 24:47
  have gone up, but basically they're making the same kind of stuff in the
• 24:49
  menu, the hickory burger, hamburger, cheeseburger, tunafish sandwich, hamsamwich.
• 24:56
  It's been on the on the menu since nineteen forty seven. But I used
• 25:00
  to go there because I lived not too far from it, and it stayed
• 25:06
  open relatively late. It would stay open till midnight on weeknights and then one
• 25:11
  o'clock in the morning on the weekends. And I used to take a corner
• 25:15
  seat and go in there with a note book, order a lot of coffee,
• 25:19
  and I would go in about an hour before closing and get something to
• 25:23
  eat and drink a lot of coffee, make a lot of notes, and
• 25:26
  then go home and work through the night. But I used to see tons
• 25:30
  of people coming through there, and a lot of celebrities. I mean I
• 25:33
  saw everyone from you know, Warren Beatty was with a beautiful woman there,
• 25:41
  Jean Ciskel. I met Jeane Ciskel actually right after The Doors came out,
• 25:47
  Oh yeah, and he and Roger Ebert had interviewed, had reviewed it on
• 25:52
  the show, and I happened to look up and I think, oh my
• 25:55
  god, they're seeing Ciskele. How weird is that? So I went over
• 25:59
  to him and introduced myself. I said, I wrote The Doors, you
• 26:03
  know, And he said, oh, my gosh, Well, he's a
• 26:04
  big music fan, or like pop icon fan, anyway, I didn't.
• 26:08
  I wasn't aware of that. But anyway, he was like, oh wow,
• 26:11
  that's really cool, so you know, and so we but we ended
• 26:15
  up talking less about the doors and more about the apple pan because he always
• 26:18
  go to it whenever he was in town. And so it was like,
• 26:22
  what's your favorite thing on the menu? You know? Ah, they yeah,
• 26:25
  And I sort of said, well, I like the hickory burger and
• 26:26
  he liked the tuna fish sandwich. And you know, it's a tough call
• 26:30
  on that on that back, but it was fun, you know. I
• 26:33
  mean, some of the Lakers used to be in there. I saw a
• 26:36
  lot, just a lot of movie stars that kind of come in and it
• 26:41
  would be, yeah, sort of incognito, and he was very low key,
• 26:44
  but it was fun. It was fun to see. And then just
• 26:45
  lots of very interesting, weird people. And then of course the guys that
• 26:48
  have working there are old crow so they've been there forever ever in a couple
• 26:56
  of the waiters, you know, I mean, just holy cow, you
• 26:59
  know, So there were lots of stories even about those guys. Even now
• 27:02
  that you're now that you're up here in then in Portland, Um, do
• 27:07
  you find yourself going out. I'm observing um sort of human behavior up here
• 27:11
  or anything or well, it's it's really tempting too, and I really should
• 27:17
  when I do get the chance. But I don't step out like I used
• 27:18
  to to go and work, you know. Um. And that's basically because
• 27:23
  I got a family you know now, and I want to be at home
• 27:26
  with him that night. Um, I don't write, excuse me right through
• 27:32
  the night like I used to. I used to work after getting all jacked
• 27:36
  up on apple pant coffee. Um. You know, I would work until
• 27:41
  I would hear the paper delivered, you know, on my doorstep at a
• 27:45
  bed the driveway about you know, five six in the morning or so,
• 27:51
  and then I'd hit the hay and sleep until noon or whatever, and you
• 27:53
  know, get up and kind of start the day, procrastinate day away until
• 27:59
  ten o'clock a night, start writing again. But um, so I don't
• 28:02
  get out like I did. Um. And but when I do go out
• 28:07
  and I you know, go to the you know, find drinking establishment something
• 28:11
  like this and whatever, it's like, Yeah, it brings back a lot
• 28:12
  of memories in terms of wanting to do that. And if you go at
• 28:15
  any you know, of coffeehouse now and at least in Portland. Geez,
• 28:22
  you walk in and everybody's on them, hovering over their screen. You know.
• 28:26
  You never see anyone with a notebook anymore making notes. They're all hovering
• 28:30
  over their screens, you know. Yeah, and it's so it's very difficult
• 28:33
  to tell, like who's who's real and who's not. I used to do
• 28:40
  that. I used to go in and see a lot of people making notes
• 28:41
  or writing or something like, you know, is he really? Is he
• 28:45
  real? Is he someone? Is he not? Right? Is she really
• 28:49
  good? A good writer or not? You know, she's cute, but
• 28:52
  is she an actress? Is she really you know, you know that kind
• 28:56
  of thing. There's friends that um, these girls would tell me and in
• 29:00
  in La it's like they would always meet these cute guys in the waiters or
• 29:04
  whatever they are. And then sure after all actors, you know, and
• 29:10
  they're like and like as they got older and they got more professional or like,
• 29:12
  oh jeez, you know, you know, well, it's funny getting
• 29:17
  back to these, you know, these rounds of meetings that I was that
• 29:19
  my new agents were sending me on um you know, as a as a
• 29:23
  writer, you know, um, well, once I started getting paid as
• 29:27
  a writer, you just didn't get out that often, you know. I
• 29:30
  mean it was you were, you were working, and I took it very
• 29:33
  seriously. So I was, you know, always working and angsting away over
• 29:37
  my stuff. So it actually go out on a meeting, was was like,
• 29:41
  hey, wow, I'm actually going out and mixing with society, and
• 29:45
  so yeah, all this stuff, and invariably, um, you know,
• 29:49
  you'd go to these uh production companies or studios or uh and meet with an
• 29:56
  executive there and they would always have a beautiful young woman working the front desk
• 30:03
  right right right, We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and
• 30:11
  now back to the show, they all and so yeah, and because that
• 30:17
  that was also it's never stated, but it's implied. If you have a
• 30:22
  hot chick, you know, as you're working as your assistant or um,
• 30:29
  you know, receptionists, then you are you too, are a sexy individual.
• 30:34
  You know, you know, your cachet, your your relativity to importance
• 30:41
  in the business is you know, your stock goes up, right, so
• 30:45
  um, but invariably I would always meet these wonderful and a lot of them
• 30:48
  were just really really great, and I would always would end up like,
• 30:56
  you know, these are the only women I would meet, so I would
• 30:57
  be unbiased about like skin them out. I made a fool out of myself
• 31:00
  a number of times. Interesting. But but my roommate at the time used
• 31:06
  to kid me, He's like, oh, YEA had a meeting today.
• 31:07
  Did you ask anybody out? This is a matter of fact I did.
• 31:12
  Yeah, So there you go. There. Any advice to upcoming writers or
• 31:17
  find themselves in opportunities for meetings, any words of wisdom you can give them.
• 31:22
  Just be yourself, you know, I mean the dating part. Oh,
• 31:25
  I'm just be yourself. Uh, you know, I mean it's different.
• 31:32
  It's different now, you don't you know that's not your only outlet,
• 31:37
  you know, I mean you're on If you're on on the on the net,
• 31:40
  you know you're going to find people via Facebook, the you know,
• 31:44
  dating services, e harmony, whatever. You know. There's so many different
• 31:48
  ways now to get hooked up without ever leaving your your four walls, you
• 31:56
  know, right, that's that to me. This was the lifeline. This
• 31:59
  was and the only way out, you know, you had to get out
• 32:01
  is actually have a meeting or go to the Apple pan and have a cup
• 32:04
  of coffee and hope you sit a beautiful girl sits next to you, but
• 32:07
  that rarely happened. Rarely happened. Well, it's funnyby I think my actor
• 32:13
  friends would tell me it was very difficult. They say, it's difficult to
• 32:15
  date in LA because it's sort of implied or understood that everyone's here for themselves
• 32:21
  and their career and it's self absorbed. So to find time to to you
• 32:25
  know, to share with somebody else is very very difficult, and why it's
• 32:30
  difficult to date there. So I've been made sense to me for it.
• 32:35
  Maybe the acting circles, I don't know, but well, everybody's either abody,
• 32:37
  you know. I think I think it applies across the boards. You
• 32:39
  know, everybody's there to become famous. You know, let's face it,
• 32:43
  they're looking to to to climb up, and so you're you're thrown in into
• 32:52
  this, into this sort of you know whatever you want to call it,
• 32:55
  a pool of people who are so climbers um. They could be shallow,
• 33:02
  they can be sincere, they can be artists. They truly want to make
• 33:07
  art, but they don't know how to do it. I mean, there's
• 33:09
  everything's all, you know, kind of thrown together, so it's really hard
• 33:14
  to read people at first. They come across very sincere, but you know,
• 33:16
  sometimes they're not, you know, right, These are just some of
• 33:20
  the hard lessons of human behavior you just sort of go through in your twenties
• 33:24
  when you're when you're trying to make it that just like, oh god,
• 33:29
  you know, you get your heartbroken a couple of times, and I'm like,
• 33:31
  oh, I have really lousy experiences. Yeah, but it all becomes
• 33:35
  great. Yeah, you know, goes into the the into the the hard
• 33:39
  drive of your head for fodder for later scripts, you know, and stuff.
• 33:45
  So you become a student of human behavior if you will. However,
• 33:50
  if I had known what the Northwest holds, you know, for one aspiring
• 33:59
  writer, um back then, I would have come up here a long time
• 34:02
  ago. Interesting, I think, yeah, yeah, and I mean,
• 34:07
  of course I'm married now. But I've found that the girls up here,
• 34:13
  you know, just in chatting and stuff, there's so much more friendly and
• 34:15
  open and sincere than they were in La, right. And I think it's
• 34:20
  just because, you know, Portland doesn't have the stigma of trying people coming
• 34:25
  there to be famous. Nobody comes to Portland to be famous. I don't
• 34:29
  think. I don't think unless maybe you're a musician or something and you want
• 34:31
  to become one of the decembrists or something, you know, but um,
• 34:37
  you know it's it's you go to New York, or you go to or
• 34:39
  you go to LA and that's where the real big business centers are. However,
• 34:45
  that is all changing, but um, it's very right. But yeah,
• 34:50
  the ones that need it at certainly, Dad, Yeah, just constant
• 34:53
  approval or to make it. I mean, look, I mean they're always
• 34:57
  there are insecure people everywhere. There's always you know, everything is sort of
• 35:00
  relative that we're talking about a certain archetype in a way. But but by
• 35:05
  and large I just found people actually in the Northwest all and all being very
• 35:08
  much more open and sincere and uh yeah, I agree. I think the
• 35:15
  great great to hang with. Yeah, there's a fun, definite sense of
• 35:20
  independent spirit or just pure and art or for you know, in their perspective
• 35:24
  is yeah, yeah, art for art's sake, or just weird for weird
• 35:29
  sake. Oh yeah, that's all it is. And you're like, okay,
• 35:31
  I can roll with this, oh gosh, but yeah, I mean
• 35:35
  back in those days again, and also when I was simultaneous with all this.
• 35:39
  I was in heavily into the music scene though, so I did have
• 35:45
  more of an outlet because I was going out a lot late at night to
• 35:47
  see punk bands play and go to these really shitty little clubs in the East
• 35:53
  Side, you know, I mean a place called the Vex. I remember,
• 35:58
  um the Well, there was the On Club in Silver Lake. There
• 36:04
  was Al's Bar downtown. I mean these were and this was downtown. This
• 36:09
  was way downtown. I mean this was no Man's Land in eighty one,
• 36:15
  eighty two or whatever, and it was unbelievable. And there's nothing and it's
• 36:20
  all changed now, you know, I mean the people people are living there.
• 36:23
  But but I would invariably see these very interesting art damaged women with moon
• 36:30
  towns that I have a really heavy duty goth look, or sometimes they would
• 36:34
  be tattooed. It was almost pre tattooed kind of thing. But you know,
• 36:37
  ruby red lipstick and pale white skin and then just like you know,
• 36:42
  have this really bored art vibe about them that I just I felt for the
• 36:46
  a lot of bookline and sinker and that's common place up here now, yeah,
• 36:51
  except that they're not as johndiced in or you know, much more open
• 36:58
  and friendly here, right, a little more tattooed and pure Stephen now than
• 37:02
  they weren't you anyway? Yeah, I digress. No, it's good too.
• 37:08
  Observe me because I want to. I want to I want to UM
• 37:12
  diverted that later, but I want to get back to UM. So you're
• 37:15
  going on these meetings, um, what was the first break that says we
• 37:21
  want to hire you or you know, we're doing this with slaughter Alley or
• 37:25
  you know what, what was the first after all these meetings were like,
• 37:28
  oh my god, it's actually turning into something. Well it's a it's a
• 37:31
  good question because it is Oregon related actually, and I'll tell you about it.
• 37:38
  I'll tell you what the connection is. UM. I went to a
• 37:40
  meeting called at a company called the Vista Organization, and uh, they were
• 37:49
  they were independent, they had a bunch of Canadian money, I think is
• 37:52
  what it was, so they didn't have any ties with the studio or whatever.
• 37:55
  And uh, there was this guy, gel Tajada Flores was the head
• 38:01
  of development there and he wanted to meet me. So I show up.
• 38:07
  And this is after I've had a number of meetings with pod people you know
• 38:12
  who again very friendly. Oh yeah, I really like your stuff. But
• 38:15
  it goes nowhere right right, you know, and you just and you kind
• 38:19
  of exit these meetings and go what was that about? What? You know,
• 38:22
  did he really like my stuff or is he just saying so? Or
• 38:27
  what? You know? What what is this? Yeah? So I finally
• 38:30
  go in and invariably these meetings were you know, in clean offices and really
• 38:35
  you know, tasteful, tastefully decorated furniture was surrounded you. I had a
• 38:40
  meeting with a young aspiring well, a young producer. He was the son
• 38:46
  of a studio head at a certain studio, and I met at his bungalow
• 38:53
  on the West Side. It was at Fox actually, and I remember in
• 38:58
  our meeting there he had a glass coffee table, okay that was had when
• 39:04
  we were there were these two couches that were perpendicular to each other around this
• 39:07
  on the corner of this glass coffee table, and on the table was this
• 39:12
  bowl of peanuts. And so as we were having our sit down and starting
• 39:16
  to chat, he reached in and like started grabbed a bunch of peanuts and
• 39:22
  started cracking them. Peanuts shell peanuts. Yeah, like they were, you
• 39:25
  know, like he was at a ballgame and just letting the shells just drop
• 39:32
  on the thick shag carpet beneath him, not making any effort whatsoever to clean
• 39:37
  it up or not make a mess. He was deliberately just dropping it there
• 39:45
  and eating these peanuts as we were talking. And I thought that was the
• 39:47
  strangest thing. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
• 39:57
  now back to the show. Um. And I've often thought about that.
• 40:01
  It was an image that I'll never forget because it made me think, is
• 40:05
  he trying to show me how powerful he is by the fact that he's gonna
• 40:09
  get shit. Yeah, yeah, he's just gonna let the let the help
• 40:14
  m in and pick it up afterwards. Or was he just clueless? You
• 40:16
  know? Is that the way he was raised? You know? You know,
• 40:20
  I don't know. It was very, very odd. So I had
• 40:22
  all these weird meetings. So then I come to the Vista Organization, come
• 40:24
  to meet mcgueltado for us, and I walk into this office and it's just
• 40:30
  chaos. It's just packed with scripts and books and there was shit. There's
• 40:36
  toys all for the desk, and I remember seeing my first view of him.
• 40:44
  He was working. Um, he was at his computer, which was
• 40:49
  at that time was a big box, boxy computer called Akpro, which was
• 40:53
  made in San Diego. Yeah, okay, you were manufactured in San Diego
• 40:58
  because at this Capro computer in he looked up over the top of it these
• 41:02
  big black rimmed glasses and said Randy Johnson And I said yes, And he
• 41:08
  said, umh mgel toddo Flores. You know a red slaughter ally, I
• 41:13
  fucking love it. What else you got? And we just sit down and
• 41:19
  I just felt like, oh my gosh. You know, here's a nut.
• 41:22
  But he's a sincere nut, and he's all about making movies and telling
• 41:25
  stories and weird stuff and it was just fun. We just clicked immediately.
• 41:30
  So he said what else he got? And I just sort of threw out
• 41:37
  punk rockers in the middle of Wyoming and he says, I love it.
• 41:42
  Come back when you have a story, and I did, and I came
• 41:45
  back a couple of weeks later with a little more story, and he said,
• 41:46
  I like that. Keep coming back. Did you have an outline or
• 41:50
  a treatment or notthing? I just was I it was it was just the
• 41:57
  germ of a of a of a notion that ultimately became dudes. Um.
• 42:01
  But what it was was that I had been going to so many punk rock
• 42:07
  shows and it had struck me um as being a very tribal ye oh my
• 42:12
  god, Yeah, you just want to visit guys? What are you doing?
• 42:22
  I'm Adam, but my buddy had told him. I went, oh
• 42:25
  yeah, yeah, yeah, alright, alright, we're back. Sorry,
• 42:31
  we got a little. Uh. I had no idea Frederick was here.
• 42:35
  I thought he left already, but it sounds like there's gonna be a big
• 42:37
  party here Saturday night for him. So he came down to say hi and
• 42:42
  introduced me his friends. So there you go. He's going to do that,
• 42:45
  and every subsequent interview you I think we just he's just going to show
• 42:47
  up. It's like the Court Jester cards. But you know, his personality
• 42:53
  is so big and and joyous. That's why when he gets here, like
• 42:58
  everybody knows him, he's like normed arm Yeah totally, I get it,
• 43:01
  get it. So we're um. Well, I was at back meanwhile,
• 43:06
  back at the guy at Vista. Yes, guy said McGill from and uh,
• 43:13
  how did you come up with that? Anyway? We were just at
• 43:14
  the punk shows. It was just something. Well yeah, that's what I
• 43:15
  was saying, is that I've been going to all these punk shows, you
• 43:19
  know, and the whole thing had struck me. Uh So the hardcore scene
• 43:23
  in California at that time and was was very was very tribal. Um.
• 43:30
  You know, you had your Social Distortion tribe, you had your your Black
• 43:34
  Flag tribe, you had the Dead Kennedy's and um and and each each sort
• 43:40
  of faction each tribe had there there were subtle differences in there in and how
• 43:45
  they looked right. Um, you know, the Orange County punks were a
• 43:50
  little different from the Hollywood punks. The Valley uh, the La Valley punks
• 43:54
  were different from some of those guys. You know, you had a lot
• 43:58
  of different skinheads or spy kids and you know, um, that whole thing.
• 44:04
  But it was just a it was a very interesting thing. And then
• 44:07
  plus you had the bands were almost embracing the kind of a Western kind of
• 44:14
  quality, and especially like Stan Ridgeway, well well sure you know Stan.
• 44:17
  I mean when when he was he was still with Wallo Ofvoodoo at the time,
• 44:22
  Swallo of Voodoo, although they were not punk, they were on the
• 44:28
  edge of that kind of art damaged new wave experimental sound stuff. And they
• 44:34
  had a medley of of spaghetti Western stuff they used to I remember seeing them
• 44:38
  the first time, you know. Not only did they cover Johnny Cash's Ring
• 44:42
  of Fire, which was their signatures show piece. Uh, they really deconstructed
• 44:47
  that, you know, and they had a big booming Mark Morland, who
• 44:51
  was their guitarist, had just this great twangy guitar sound that evoked the old
• 44:59
  old school well uh instrumentalists, you know, the guys that backed up Johnny
• 45:02
  Cash and those kind of guys back then. It was just a Western sound
• 45:07
  to it, you know. But they but they incorporated in their show.
• 45:09
  They had a medley of spaghetti Western songs. So they remember seeing them first
• 45:14
  time, and they played a Hang Them High and the Good, the Bad
• 45:17
  and the Ugly and some other thing too, and it was like, Wow,
• 45:22
  this is fricking wild. I love this. It was just it was
• 45:25
  really great. So they were the Dead Kennedys had covered like a raw hide
• 45:30
  from the TV show and the Vandals came out of Long Beach. They had
• 45:36
  a thing called Urban Struggle, which was all about a the punkers at the
• 45:40
  Kuco's nest and in Orange County having a like a big, big battle with
• 45:46
  punkers from you know, another place. It was all done like a like
• 45:50
  a cowboy kind of twang. Why do yeah, I do recall the sound
• 45:53
  quite a bit, Yeah, because it was it was that the guitar itself
• 45:58
  they used as sort of big semi hollow, hollow body guitars, the big
• 46:01
  right Gretz guitar, you know, the fifties style guitar, and sort of
• 46:06
  like has the artwork too, sort of like I said, it was at
• 46:09
  rock and roll hot rod subculture that kind of bled over where it's yeah,
• 46:15
  you know, yeah, big big twang distortion sound, you know. I
• 46:20
  mean simultaneous with all this was like the Blasters and this whole rockabilly revival you
• 46:24
  know thing. The alley Cats were not not the alley Cats. The Stray
• 46:28
  Cats were the the very commercial sort of tip of that that sort of phenomenon.
• 46:35
  But that was a and that and that was happening all at the same
• 46:38
  time, and there was some overlap with the punk stuff, with the Blasters
• 46:42
  especially, but and this was all there was a band called the Plugs that
• 46:45
  were really great came out of East La and uh in Los Lobos then and
• 46:51
  and all those all those and X then in this sent all that embraced all
• 46:55
  those things with the hardcore and and then you know, X they're all they're
• 47:01
  all crackers, you know, they're they're all hillbillies. You know, they
• 47:06
  love they love all that country and twiny stuff from way back when social involved
• 47:12
  into absolutely Mike nes is, you know, a huge country family because they
• 47:15
  recognize that the you know that those guys they were the they were the outlaws
• 47:19
  of their day, you know, and a lot of them as in the
• 47:22
  context of the time, you know, when they were recording for Sun Records
• 47:25
  or whatever they were, they were they were breaking new ground, right This
• 47:30
  was it wasn't like the the necessarily the mainstream music. This was this is
• 47:36
  like a whole new sound, you know. So anyway, I'm going back
• 47:39
  to all of this. I just had seen like this sort of kind of
• 47:43
  new Western landscape in the punk scene and and so but at the same time,
• 47:49
  I mean, punk was primarily an urban or suburban you know phenomenon.
• 47:54
  So I thought, well, gee, how funny would it be to take
• 47:58
  some of these hardcore honkers you know, who are like you know, all
• 48:01
  full of aggression and pissed vinegar and throw them out into the realities of the
• 48:08
  West. So drop them right in the middle of wine Ming or Montana or
• 48:14
  something like that, and see on what would happen. And so that was
• 48:16
  the germ of the idea. And then I kept coming back and urged on
• 48:22
  by McGill, kept coming back every couple of weeks or so with a little
• 48:24
  bit more of a story, a little bit more of a story. So
• 48:27
  you're writing on spec at this time, and completely there's nothing, no agreement
• 48:30
  and nothing. He just said, he express interesting. He just he says,
• 48:34
  I like that. And he knew he couldn't option slaughter rally at the
• 48:37
  time because it was under options somewhere else. He liked my writing a lot,
• 48:39
  and he liked this idea, this sort of He thought I was onto
• 48:44
  something. So he just kept urging me on. And so finally there was
• 48:47
  another guy there, a guy named Hank Palmieri who has subsequently passed away.
• 48:52
  A surfer, a great surfer group of Malibu, really bright guy, really
• 48:55
  brilliant guy, and such a good one of the best people ever met in
• 49:02
  the business. And he was mcguel's partner at the time too, and so
• 49:06
  between the two of them, I just thought, these guys are fantastic.
• 49:08
  I so totally want to be in business with him, and they kept urging
• 49:14
  me back, and finally there and there was a writer's strike looming. This
• 49:19
  is nineteen eighty five, and there was a writer's strike looming, and so
• 49:22
  there was a certain amount of there was a ticking clock that we had to
• 49:24
  get this, get something done, you know, before the strike kicked in,
• 49:29
  because god knows who how long the strike was going to last. So
• 49:34
  finally, what they were you in the guild at the time. No,
• 49:36
  I wasn't, but that was the thing in order if they made a deal,
• 49:38
  I was going to have to get into the guild and things. So
• 49:42
  basically what happened was I went in there one day and Miguel says, okay,
• 49:46
  you we got enough, let's make this. Let's make a deal.
• 49:50
  Let's make this happen. And so they made the deal. It was a
• 49:53
  rush, rush thing, and basically I got some money and they just said,
• 49:58
  we can't communicate with you now. We'll be right back after a word
• 50:04
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. You know, because
• 50:12
  because as soon as the strike is going to kick in, but we want
• 50:15
  you to go ahead and start writing the script. So maybe after wink wink,
• 50:20
  after the strike is over with, we'll have a script, right,
• 50:23
  got it? So the scrip the strike was actually settled in a couple of
• 50:28
  weeks. It didn't last long at all comparative to subsequent strikes, and so
• 50:34
  in the meantime, though, I went out on an adventure of myself of
• 50:42
  out into the contemporary West, because I hadn't been out there since I was
• 50:45
  a kid. So I went out to Arizona, Utah, Nevada. You
• 50:51
  know, I could did this kind of long sweeping tour, you know,
• 50:53
  and just wandering around, I went I was really into ghost towns, so
• 50:57
  I wanted to visit ghost towns. And and it was out when I remember
• 51:01
  this very clearly. I was driving on a highway heading west towards Elie,
• 51:07
  Nevada, and suddenly I got the whole, very clear picture of what the
• 51:13
  movie was all about. Yeah, but it involved Jetta scene A lot of
• 51:17
  the story. I had already worked out the case. Yeah, but I
• 51:22
  just like I knew how to do it. I suddenly saw it. I
• 51:24
  knew how to do it, so I got got in a phone booth somewhere
• 51:29
  and I called them and I remember getting Hank on the phone and I said,
• 51:34
  HENK, I got it. I got it. I got the story.
• 51:36
  I finally you know, and I know what it is. And I
• 51:39
  explained it to him and he said, well, yeah, it sounds kind
• 51:43
  of good, but what about the other stuff. And I said, no,
• 51:45
  no, forget the other stuff, forget it, forgetting This is it.
• 51:46
  I know how to do it. And he was really kind of nervous
• 51:50
  about it, but he said, okay. He gave me this approval to
• 51:54
  go ahead and do it. And so ultimately I came back from this trip
• 51:59
  and it was eye opening for me as well. It was really great.
• 52:01
  I went to all these different places that it was just evocative in so many
• 52:06
  ways. That I came back. I wrote the first draft and they loved
• 52:10
  it, and they had they started sending it around and we got a director
• 52:14
  attached pretty early on. And you know, Penelope's Ferris had read it and
• 52:20
  she was coming off of well, she had done her claim to fame,
• 52:23
  of course, was the Decline of Western Civilization, but she had only done
• 52:29
  the first one at that point, and she had done another several other sort
• 52:34
  of low budget exploitation films, one for like Roger Corman and stuff, you
• 52:37
  know, and so but she was kind of like the punk rock queen.
• 52:43
  And I remember McGill telling me he said, well, Penelope came in and
• 52:46
  she impressed the shit out of us, and we're going to hire her to
• 52:50
  direct this movie. And she said, he said, she came into the
• 52:53
  meeting and said, basically, there are two people that could direct this movie,
• 52:58
  me and Alex cox Um, who did Repo Man at the time,
• 53:01
  which was the kind of like the other you know. You know, Alex
• 53:05
  had been a teacher's aide at UCLA Film School when I was there. Um,
• 53:09
  I knew we had a couple of people friends in common a little bit,
• 53:13
  you know, and so I knew knew him a bit or knew of
• 53:15
  him certainly. And uh anyway, so that was that was it. They
• 53:20
  started. The things started rolling very very quickly from that point on, and
• 53:23
  then once Dudes was in production, that led to the Doors and other things.
• 53:29
  Okay, let's let's roll back here. So you are what kind of
• 53:32
  what was the your agent's perspective of you when they you told them, like,
• 53:37
  hey, these guys are interested in me developing the story, do you?
• 53:43
  I mean, what how what is their reaction like okay, yeah,
• 53:45
  keep keep going, or yeah, sure of course, you know they don't
• 53:50
  want him knowing that you're not on like any sort of contract, you're just
• 53:52
  on spec it's on at this At this point, yeah, they were just
• 53:57
  saying, okay, you know, go for it them. Let you know,
• 54:00
  if they're interested, keep them, keep them on the line, get
• 54:02
  the story done, you know, get a story out there that you that
• 54:06
  they're gonna that they're gonna like. They weren't real mettlesome at that point.
• 54:09
  They were just sort of taking a back seat. The one agent that I
• 54:16
  had, Carol, I didn't necessarily trust her in terms of of feedback.
• 54:22
  Is this a good idea or is this a bad idea? You know?
• 54:25
  Um so I wouldn't test the waters with her. Rick was a different story.
• 54:30
  Rick had a better story, since I felt they both could sell very
• 54:34
  well. Okay, um so I didn't consult Carol in the sense of,
• 54:39
  like, Carol, do you think this is a good idea? Should I
• 54:40
  do it? Or I mean, should I develop the story? Um It
• 54:45
  wasn't like that at all. Um. I was just I knew this was
• 54:49
  the story that I wanted to tell, and she was going to make the
• 54:52
  deal for me when this when the time was right. So there's a difference
• 54:55
  there. You know, a lot of people go to their agents and look
• 54:59
  at them almost as if they are a studio executive or the head of a
• 55:04
  production company and and think that they might have some artistic taste. I think
• 55:09
  that's dangerous. That's dangerous to a degree to trust your agent as being someone
• 55:15
  who really has taste. Their deal is to sell, you know, and
• 55:23
  make the sale. That's what they're about, and that doesn't necessarily mean they
• 55:30
  have taste. It means they can take a product once they see it,
• 55:35
  once it's done, and they can sell it. But it doesn't necessarily they
• 55:39
  doesn't mean that they can necessarily see it as it is forming you know.
• 55:45
  Um. Now there are others who can and have that ability and have that
• 55:52
  sense of like, that's a very good idea, go for it. I
• 55:53
  like or I like how you're thinking, you know, um, But that's
• 56:00
  not always the case. So you would just let that be a warning sometimes
• 56:05
  too. Yeah, you know, if you're yeah, if you got yourself
• 56:08
  representation, sure, now what um, you were just working south the mail
• 56:14
  room. I was still I was still in the mail room. And then
• 56:16
  finally when that when they pulled the trigger on on that the first was it
• 56:22
  the first paycheck that we were well, the first payment, Were you able
• 56:25
  to take your trip like take out extend to leave for the mail room to
• 56:29
  do or that was it? This time? It was it was enough.
• 56:31
  It was substantially more money than I got on the slaughter Alley option and and
• 56:36
  the stuff that I had, you know, I mean at the time,
• 56:37
  it was like, jeez, I don't know. It was like twenty five
• 56:42
  thousand dollars, forty thousand dollars something like. That's pretty good ship. Yeah,
• 56:47
  so are you kidding? Jeez man? There was more money than I'd
• 56:51
  ever seen. So it was definitely enough for me to finally say okay,
• 56:55
  goodbye to the mail room and finally and go for it. And also at
• 57:00
  that stage, I had to become a member of the Writers Guild. So
• 57:04
  that's just the way because Bista was a Guild signatory and I had to become
• 57:08
  a member. So you have to drop fifteen hundred dollars initially to become a
• 57:14
  member, and then get on the health and pension plan and whatever. But
• 57:20
  then that's it UM. And then they take one percent of your your earnings,
• 57:24
  you know, on top of that. So suddenly I was in the
• 57:28
  guild and I was you know this, it was a whole new It was
• 57:30
  a whole new world. You know, I was a professional. I was
• 57:32
  truly a professional writer at that point, and it was you got a guild
• 57:37
  meetings or something. Just to me. They had UM at this time,
• 57:45
  they had they were having some what they called outreach meetings because they knew the
• 57:49
  strike was looming, and so they were, uh having very small gatherings and
• 57:57
  like certain guild members would open up their home to a couple dozen writers and
• 58:04
  they would come in and somebody from the guild would come there and talk about
• 58:07
  the latest contract negotiations and what was to be expected and inform us a bit
• 58:12
  of what was going on. UM. My roommate, my former roommate at
• 58:19
  this time was Gregory Widen, who wrote Highlander. Oh and uh, just
• 58:28
  the first one. Well that's that's all. Greg never has to work a
• 58:32
  day in his life, as you know, really because his name's on everything
• 58:37
  else subsequent to that. So he FLEs a paycheck for it. But he
• 58:39
  did other things too. I mean he wrote backdraft for Ron Ron Howard and
• 58:45
  um, and that's kind he was addressed when he met Grazer. I was
• 58:49
  kidding, but Greg got into the guild just a bit before I did,
• 58:54
  I think, UM and off the Highlander deal, and so he and I
• 59:00
  were basically sort of rookies. So so we were going to a lot of
• 59:02
  these these outreach meetings together, and I remember this initial one. I was
• 59:07
  blown away because, um, there were maybe a dozen people at this at
• 59:13
  this one meeting, and one of them was like Paul Mazerski, who was
• 59:19
  a well known writer director you know at that time, former actor as well.
• 59:24
  And Julius Epstein was there. And this little and this little guy who's
• 59:30
  you know, about four feet tom and about eighty years old. It's one
• 59:34
  of the writers of Casablanca. Oh gee, that's right. It sounds familiar,
• 59:37
  you know, and you just go wow. That's where I was like
• 59:39
  suddenly, it's like, oh my god, I'm these are these are like
• 59:44
  names you know that I mean real pros. I mean, this was like
• 59:47
  an amazing thing. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 59:55
  and now back to the show. Now, stacking up real quick. So
• 1:00:00
  you're exciting when you got in, when you first got the offer, like
• 1:00:06
  you realized it was happening. They're like, Okay, let's make this happen.
• 1:00:07
  We're gonna give you the initial payment. You're gonna have to get in
• 1:00:10
  the guild. Like I'm assuming all this stuff happened very quickly, in a
• 1:00:15
  few weeks or a month or something. No, it was like super passed.
• 1:00:19
  It was within a couple of a week or so. So the emotions
• 1:00:23
  like did you did you get a chance to like go out with friends or
• 1:00:27
  anything or girlfriend and say, let's celebrate just have like just a little toast
• 1:00:30
  or anything that you did that you like, any type of little ceremony.
• 1:00:34
  He said, whoa, this is cool. There was a group of us
• 1:00:37
  that came through the film school or the theater Arts department at UCLA at at
• 1:00:44
  the same time and actually, in retrospect this that whole era, I've been
• 1:00:50
  told by other people from the theater side, the drama department that it is
• 1:00:58
  generally regarded as being extraordinary period from the from the theater arts department. The
• 1:01:04
  UCLA Theater Arts department with included film and drama, so they were sort of
• 1:01:08
  segregated, if you will, but two different buildings, but basically where we're
• 1:01:14
  all under under the roof of theater Arts, right. But out of that
• 1:01:16
  time, I mean there was Tim Robbins, Daphne Zaniga, Alex Cox,
• 1:01:22
  Greg Widen, I mean, Dan Pine, Neil Jimenez. I mean,
• 1:01:28
  there were so many people that were going having huge success, like I mean,
• 1:01:35
  very early on and would later go on to you know, having extraordinary
• 1:01:38
  careers, um. But in my particular circle it was Greg and I had
• 1:01:46
  been roommates. We had a guy named Mike Petzild who was aspiring producer.
• 1:01:52
  His girlfriend at the time ended up becoming hugely part in my career because she
• 1:02:00
  was development and exec at Columbia when they had the doors, so I you
• 1:02:07
  know, went through her was able to get in and have a meeting about
• 1:02:10
  that. But that's a little bit further down the line. But Greg had
• 1:02:15
  grown up in in Laguna Beach and a good buddy of his, Don Knowlton,
• 1:02:22
  was also in the theater arts in the in the drama department, so
• 1:02:25
  he knew a number of people there. Anyway, there was a circle of
• 1:02:31
  you know, four or five of us, um that were all writers uh
• 1:02:38
  and uh and or producers aspiring producers that anytime anyone had any sort of success,
• 1:02:45
  we would go out and celebrate. And usually it was it would you
• 1:02:50
  know, it wasn't anything like you're painting the town read. But we would
• 1:02:52
  always gather. Yeah, we would, Yeah, we would gather. There
• 1:02:55
  was a place called Cafe Figurea which was in West Hollywood. It was on
• 1:03:00
  Robertson right and right where it almost dead ends to Little Santa Monica Boulevard,
• 1:03:07
  and it was George sand I remember this very well because there's I met Demmy
• 1:03:13
  Demy Moore in the bookstore there across the way after one time. But we
• 1:03:19
  would always convene at Cafe Figaro and have drinks and dinner there, and it
• 1:03:24
  was like a real just sort of a working working man's place, you know.
• 1:03:29
  But they always had cute waitresses there and it was just a place where
• 1:03:31
  you know, lonely writers would go and the score you know. You know,
• 1:03:37
  so that was that was the kind of thing that we wouldn't do.
• 1:03:39
  It wasn't um you know, um. I always had a sense that you
• 1:03:45
  know, this stuff was fleeting, you know, and it was never going
• 1:03:46
  to be you know, you just that there was always going to be challenges
• 1:03:52
  further ahead. Just don't let it go like, Wow, I've made it
• 1:03:57
  and it's you know, there's no turning back. No, it's not like
• 1:04:00
  that, because even once you've sort of quote unquote arrived, there's always stuff
• 1:04:08
  going on that you've you know, you get racked with self doubt. You
• 1:04:14
  can you write something that isn't received well, all these things that can sort
• 1:04:17
  of trip you up at one time or another. And it you know,
• 1:04:20
  Hollywood in general is a place that just one of the fuels that runs it
• 1:04:25
  is insecurity and fear of losing one's stature, of losing one's job, losing
• 1:04:32
  losing face, you know, and so that that informs a lot of decision
• 1:04:38
  making and a lot of you know, artistic decisions fortunately you know. Um,
• 1:04:45
  But at that time though, still I was on cloud nine. Man,
• 1:04:48
  I just freaking I couldn't believe it. I was just thrilled. And
• 1:04:53
  then later on it was funny, Um, it wasn't. It wasn't that
• 1:04:58
  strike because it didn't last long enough. It was to strike in eighty eight
• 1:05:00
  that I started seeing because I was a strike captain. Um. The guild
• 1:05:06
  had asked me to be a guy that would have to call Okay, um,
• 1:05:11
  you know, here's the phone numbers of a dozen writers, so,
• 1:05:14
  uh, we're going to uh pick it twentieth century Fox tomorrow, got it.
• 1:05:19
  You got to call all these guys and tell them to be there and
• 1:05:21
  what time they're going to be there, and this and that. And in
• 1:05:26
  the eighty eight strike, you know, you have we have these just these
• 1:05:29
  massive um uh pickets, one studio at a time, so there'd be hundreds
• 1:05:33
  of writers out pickting, you know, marching up to the end of the
• 1:05:36
  block and then back. Now you're going up and now I'm back, going
• 1:05:40
  to act really angry, shake your signs, you know, and uh so
• 1:05:45
  invariably, you know, you're there were these two columns. You're going and
• 1:05:48
  you're passing guys walking in the opposite direction, you know, and you'll see
• 1:05:51
  their faces. So you know, I even see guys that I'd always admired
• 1:05:55
  to Harlan Ellison, um, Richard Brooks, uh, you know, great
• 1:06:00
  writers and directors. And then I see Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury had been
• 1:06:05
  a real inspiration for me ever since. Oh kind of talking to college year,
• 1:06:11
  high school, Well this is going back to high school, you know,
• 1:06:14
  where I was even like I started reading Ray Bradbury short stories when I
• 1:06:17
  was about twelve or thirteen years old, and he I did my high school
• 1:06:23
  term paper English term paper on his work. And then he came down and
• 1:06:27
  spoke to at a local college where I was out at Maracosta where I was,
• 1:06:32
  and I went to see him at the time, and I was like,
• 1:06:34
  I couldn't believe that was actually a living, breathing writer, like one
• 1:06:39
  of my idols right there. I was sitting in the front row. And
• 1:06:44
  afterwards, I went up and just told him, I did my term paper
• 1:06:47
  on you and I, you know, in English this year, and he
• 1:06:49
  said, oh, great, here's my card. You don't write me,
• 1:06:54
  and I did, and I think he asked for a copy of it,
• 1:06:59
  of the report or whatever, and so I sent it to him and he
• 1:07:01
  sent back like a whole little package of stuff that he had autographed and it
• 1:07:06
  was personally printed the stuff, and it was just like, oh my god,
• 1:07:10
  I couldn't believe it. So I cut. Two years later, I
• 1:07:14
  come to LA and just my very first you know month at at UCLA,
• 1:07:20
  and I went into um I knew where he lived. He wasn't too far
• 1:07:26
  from where we lived. That was one of the first things I wanted to
• 1:07:29
  see. It was like, where does a real writer live? And I
• 1:07:32
  found his address down in um in um certain part of West la there,
• 1:07:39
  but anyway, he was signing books one time. He had a bookstory in
• 1:07:43
  Westwood and I went in. This is like, like I said, my
• 1:07:45
  first month there. And I went up and um, I was just again
• 1:07:51
  sort of an ad and just sort of freaking out. Its like, and
• 1:07:55
  he suggests and I said, well, we've met before and whatever. Yes,
• 1:08:00
  yes, I want to be a writer. And he said, well
• 1:08:02
  do you write every day? And I said no. He said, then
• 1:08:06
  you're not a writer. Next, and I was like, oh, I
• 1:08:13
  was so angry, and I was like, right, oh, I felt
• 1:08:15
  like a you know, snubbed, you know, yeah, and it was
• 1:08:17
  really really made me mad. Um, but he was right. You know,
• 1:08:21
  I had to get get my asking gear, get cracking. And so
• 1:08:27
  come the strike and eighty eight I'm out there on the picket line and here
• 1:08:30
  comes Bradberry walking opposite way. You know, he's got this giant had he
• 1:08:34
  does, he's got a kid. And I see him coming and so I
• 1:08:39
  stopped and I said, hey, Ray, and I said, you don't,
• 1:08:42
  you won't really remember me, but blah blah blah um and he's,
• 1:08:45
  oh, he's very friendly. And he said, and I said, isn't
• 1:08:48
  this cool? Here we are on the strike line. We're writers, you
• 1:08:51
  know, we're peers. But I said, I still don't write every day.
• 1:09:01
  Done. There you go, But that would you know, But that
• 1:09:03
  was the kind of thing. It was a it was a thrill to just
• 1:09:06
  see some of these these people that I had grown up and I was,
• 1:09:11
  you know, in awe of and and to be now sort of marching with
• 1:09:15
  them, to be part of that same organization, to be in the same
• 1:09:19
  arena was thrilling. Yeah, yeah, you know, that's cool. That's
• 1:09:24
  the stuff. Like I like, I haven't heard a lot of interviews with
• 1:09:27
  different writers, and they sort of just kind of gloss over that as if
• 1:09:30
  it's like, um, just the way the interviews go, it's they just
• 1:09:35
  sort of, oh, yes, I got my agents and I got the
• 1:09:38
  deal, and then we moved on and I had to work on this story.
• 1:09:41
  But no one ever stopped, and like I wanted to know all those
• 1:09:44
  little intricacies of just the personal emotion that people have that says WHOA, this
• 1:09:49
  is trippy. This is really crazy that I'm able to do this, or
• 1:09:54
  I'm meeting somebody. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:10:02
  and now back to the show. And and then you, because it reflects
• 1:10:08
  on your own sort of I guess self worth worth and you're like, how
• 1:10:12
  am I hear? You know that? That kind of thing? And I
• 1:10:14
  think it's cool because it sounds it makes all this experience human. What what
• 1:10:19
  I just recall now was after the dude's deal happened, UM, my other
• 1:10:28
  roommate, UM, Mike petziled Um he that this I think guess was that
• 1:10:38
  this for the dudes. Um he and a very good friend of his and
• 1:10:43
  his subsequent subsequently become a friend of mine. Gaed a wonderful guy named John
• 1:10:48
  hart Um who had gone to USC Film School and was a cameraman. Um
• 1:10:54
  and he John we had met John because John shot Greg Whiden's project too,
• 1:10:59
  which was this your sixteen millimeter film, okay, And John was just this
• 1:11:03
  He was from upstate New York. It was just completely different from any of
• 1:11:06
  us that had come come from California, you know, and well just really
• 1:11:12
  John was just tremendously fun. But he and Mike kidnapped me. Was important.
• 1:11:20
  One night after this happened, and I remember this, they took me.
• 1:11:27
  They took me down to we went out wait, wait, east downtown,
• 1:11:32
  right over the La River. It was like, okay, it was
• 1:11:34
  like from Fourth Street bridge or something like that was right right, I need
• 1:11:39
  Old Bridge whatever. But there at this point, this was no man's land.
• 1:11:43
  There was no one out there. It was about two or three in
• 1:11:45
  the morning, and they and they pulled out a bottle of champagne and they
• 1:11:49
  popped it and they said, here's to me a man, you know,
• 1:11:55
  to say, you know, you're you know, the beginning of a new
• 1:11:58
  career. And that that's staggered me. That was that was a wonderful I
• 1:12:03
  choked up and I had tears running on my cheeks at that point because it
• 1:12:06
  was so uh it's cool, you know, it was just it was just
• 1:12:12
  a wonderful gesture. And those guys were, you know, like, you
• 1:12:15
  know, what can you say? I mean, I didn't there was not
• 1:12:18
  much to say, but it was yeah, right, there was a there
• 1:12:24
  was a diner down there, a little bastion of light U in that no
• 1:12:32
  man's land of you know, art lofts and stuff. At that time,
• 1:12:36
  it's called Gorky's and it stayed open. I think it might have been twenty
• 1:12:41
  four seven, you know, and they took me. We went there afterwards
• 1:12:44
  after we did that, and I remember eating. They had like Russian food
• 1:12:47
  and stuff and I remember eating there after that. Um, they always had
• 1:12:51
  hot waitresses there too. It is La got all these art damaged, you
• 1:12:58
  know, and that was Yeah, that was a pretty neat night. That
• 1:13:01
  was That was great. So it was it was very it was monumental thing.
• 1:13:06
  You know. Well, I thank you for sharing, because sure,
• 1:13:09
  I mean, that's it's cool. It's just cool to hear. I mean
• 1:13:12
  it's cool to know that, yeah, we're all human and it's real.
• 1:13:16
  Like I'm sure everyone has the those who working professionally have these little moments where
• 1:13:24
  they feel like just like there's little fleeting moments of whoa, that feels good.
• 1:13:29
  But then then but you know, next day you got to get on
• 1:13:30
  and work. But well, I think it's a perfect place to stop the
• 1:13:33
  podcast. We've been talking for a while, and I think it's a great
• 1:13:36
  segue into the production of Dudes and then how you got, How you got?
• 1:13:42
  How you got to a chance to write the doors and all that stuff.
• 1:13:45
  Yeah, but I think this is fantastic because we've covered in the first
• 1:13:48
  part sort of where you started, how you got into punk rock and and
• 1:13:51
  why that music scene was important to you, and now we're in the second
• 1:13:56
  phase. Yeah. Well, let me just sign off as we signed off.
• 1:14:00
  I mean I got into punk rock by accident, really, I mean
• 1:14:01
  because I was I was writing a script that was a murder mystery. I
• 1:14:05
  think I mentioned this before. There was a murder mystery set in the punk
• 1:14:09
  rock scene of La and uh. And it wasn't because I was really into
• 1:14:15
  punk rock. It just that I thought it was a very exotic place to
• 1:14:19
  set a murder mystery, Okay, And so I started attending all these shows
• 1:14:25
  as research, you know, for you know, for for this stuff.
• 1:14:29
  And I had made friends with all these bands because I started contacting them.
• 1:14:32
  I would read what you know, the cool bands, what the cool bands
• 1:14:36
  were, and there had been some they were associated with you UCLA Film school
• 1:14:41
  as well, so I started, um, I knew of them and whatever.
• 1:14:45
  So that's how I really got it, started getting into the music thing.
• 1:14:49
  The script panned out, I could I never finished it. I wrote
• 1:14:53
  like twenty five pages of it or thirty pages of it, and then I
• 1:14:55
  put it away. But I had think somebody got a hold of it because
• 1:14:58
  I think actually I saw a TV show that had that premise. It was
• 1:15:01
  like it was like Cagney and Lacy or something, some kind of cop show
• 1:15:04
  back then. Yeah, that it starts off at a punk show where people
• 1:15:09
  are a mosh dancing and there's a murder, and then then the whole scene
• 1:15:13
  surrounds the whole punk rock scene and murder. So anyway, it made it
• 1:15:16
  too, I don't murder, she wrote, I've seen that premise. I'm
• 1:15:21
  assuming that somebody found it. Yeah, maybe so maybe, but what you
• 1:15:26
  know, whatever the case was, I mean that that's why I began investigating
• 1:15:32
  a lot of this, you know initially and then the music. But I
• 1:15:36
  mean after the script panned out, I still had all these contacts with these
• 1:15:40
  bands, and I was kind of I started really digging the music. Yeah,
• 1:15:45
  And so that's that started then leading to the notion of like, wow,
• 1:15:49
  maybe I could direct some music videos for these because they were all broken
• 1:15:54
  and have any kind of money. I didn't have any kind of money,
• 1:15:56
  so I was and maybe we could just do cheat and do stuff on the
• 1:15:59
  complete fly here and see what happens. And so that's you know, but
• 1:16:04
  that's another story as well, because I was doing all these videos, working
• 1:16:08
  with Black Flag, Henry Rawlins, writing, writing dudes, and then starting
• 1:16:13
  the Doors thing was it was all like happening. It was at once from
• 1:16:17
  about eighty four to eighty eighty six, and even you know, beyond that,
• 1:16:24
  it was a very highly busy time for so crazy. I was skateboarding
• 1:16:30
  at that time, and obviously that the skateboarding culture led into that. Sure
• 1:16:34
  that was the music at the time, and like all the older kids or
• 1:16:39
  you know, into the punk scene and especially to the California Yeah, and
• 1:16:44
  uh, you know it was different because you're like I don't hear this in
• 1:16:45
  the radio, like you see, like this is such a subculture than what
• 1:16:50
  is being out there on TV. And it was sort of like the first
• 1:16:55
  opportunity of like independence, and skateboarding was definitely in bed with the punk scene,
• 1:17:00
  you know, especially I think with the z Ze town Boys and yeah,
• 1:17:04
  that whole Long Beach scene and Venice Beach scene and all embedded, all
• 1:17:09
  embedded and the look, the where the attitude and then but that's how I
• 1:17:15
  you know, obviously my upbringing with a lot of other Southern California kids that
• 1:17:18
  are in the scene probably saw it the same way. So to know that
• 1:17:21
  you were making and interacting with those bands, where I was just like a
• 1:17:25
  bystander of a kid, just picking up whatever records I can at back then
• 1:17:29
  Tower Records or yeah, what's it called licorice Pizza? Remember that? Yeah,
• 1:17:32
  I'm sure. Anyway, I think a lot of my first albums um
• 1:17:38
  seez. You know. The best thing is my I think my dad eventually
• 1:17:43
  some of the stuff I was going to punk shows and like I come back
• 1:17:46
  with like the pamphlets and stuff. Yeah, I'm only like twelve thirteen at
• 1:17:49
  the time, so he's coming He's looking at this, going what the hell
• 1:17:55
  he's looking He's like he was really disturbed, like what is going on with
• 1:17:59
  my son? And I remember seeing a picture of the sex Pistols and some
• 1:18:04
  it was like Parade magazine and they were like, you know, warning about
• 1:18:10
  the new horrible trend and you know rock and roll or whatever is the sex
• 1:18:14
  pistols And they looked like some just like oh a freak show thing. And
• 1:18:19
  I was so horrified. I was like, oh, no, rock and
• 1:18:23
  roll isn't coming to this because prior this is of course, back in like
• 1:18:27
  seventy seven, seventy eight, when I was just I was seventy seven,
• 1:18:30
  was my senior year in high school, and I hadn't come to I wasn't
• 1:18:33
  going to go to LA until my junior year. I transferred up from a
• 1:18:36
  from a community college. So I was still in kind of the fish bowl
• 1:18:41
  of carlsback California. But you know, I was listening to Yes in the
• 1:18:45
  movie Blues Emerson Lake in Palmer and all the prog rock arena well yeah,
• 1:18:50
  the prog rock, you know, yeah, you know, and the arena
• 1:18:55
  rock kind of stuff, and then this whole thing and the sex pistols.
• 1:18:59
  Oh it just sounded it just sounded wrong. And I was so intimidated and
• 1:19:04
  threatened by what they looked like and everything. And then then I get up
• 1:19:08
  to LA and it was just it all changed, it all changed, And
• 1:19:12
  all that stuff just still resonates with me hugely because it's it's approach, it's
• 1:19:16
  it represents an approach to creativity that is so resonant still today, you know,
• 1:19:25
  I mean it really it's it's about doing it yourself. Yeah, it's
• 1:19:30
  yeah, d I y man and this was the original d I Y stuff.
• 1:19:33
  And but that's another story. We'll pick that up next. Sounds perfect.
• 1:19:38
  I think we'll wrap it up for tonight. I was good, felt
• 1:19:42
  good. We'll welcome to ours together. We got a little cameo from my
• 1:19:45
  friend Frederick and yeah where he takes off. Oh sure, I think he's
• 1:19:48
  like here every night before he takes off. This is the launch pad.
• 1:19:54
  I think that's what it is. We'll be right back after a word from
• 1:19:58
  our sponsor. And now back to the show. You had just basically made
• 1:20:08
  the deals, had your little um your buddies help you celebrate the sale of
• 1:20:12
  the dudes. And I wanted to get into, uh, sort of the
• 1:20:15
  production of dudes and sort of lead our way into um the doors. Okay,
• 1:20:20
  but what I wanted to tell you was like I've had a month ago.
• 1:20:24
  I was down in Portland and uh, I came across as like you
• 1:20:28
  know, weird books. It was a combook story think, but they had
• 1:20:31
  like a bunch of array of like unusual books in there too, And they
• 1:20:35
  had a book was like Punk in the Cinema or the American's Cinema was it?
• 1:20:40
  Um, uh floating world where you were at it's like in Fifth Yeah,
• 1:20:45
  it's like just yes, it's kind of just Fifth and yeah I think
• 1:20:48
  it's Yeah, it's just right off near Um it's near like Chinatown, just
• 1:20:54
  snappy. Yeah, they have a lot of counterculture stuff. Okay, so
• 1:20:58
  that's a great store. Um and uh Jason uh leaving Leviathan. Yeah that
• 1:21:08
  was your last name. Yeah. Um it's a wonderful guy, very friendly.
• 1:21:13
  Yeah, that's his store. And I love that story. That's actually
• 1:21:16
  got me really excited a lot about comics. And uh yeah, I kind
• 1:21:21
  of stumbled into because it was I was looking for the twenty four Hour Church
• 1:21:26
  of Elvis. Oh yeah, and I guess it used to be there,
• 1:21:30
  but now they've closed whatever it used to be there. Now it's just this
• 1:21:31
  hole in the wall with just like weird display that has these buttons he asked
• 1:21:38
  you to push and you can't hear any You can't hear anything. It's like
• 1:21:41
  the most weird sort of like useless. Um yeah, where so so where
• 1:21:45
  is that now? It's just on the other side of Burnside. So where
• 1:21:48
  it goes Burnside, there's couch. It's like, yeah, it's fourth it's
• 1:21:54
  it's right right on the edge of Chinatown. I didn't realize it was it
• 1:21:57
  was that. I thought it was further up north. I'd have been,
• 1:22:00
  but they changed it and that's where the new location. So right down in
• 1:22:03
  the corner of that is that combook kind of culture bookstore. Yeah, but
• 1:22:09
  I was in there and I saw this book. It was like punk history,
• 1:22:12
  Punk in the Cinema or whatever it was. And there it was like
• 1:22:14
  halfway through, full full spread. It was like dudes had like a full
• 1:22:18
  spread of like your of the cover of the movie and like a little synopsis
• 1:22:24
  and it was really kind of cool. Get out of here. Really,
• 1:22:26
  Yeah, I didn't. I thought you might have known. I did.
• 1:22:29
  Okay, so I had to get that for you for Christmas. Oh wow,
• 1:22:31
  just oh crap, I didn't know that. That's great. Yeah,
• 1:22:34
  yeah it was. I mean it's a pretty thick book. I mean it
• 1:22:36
  goes through like a bunch of stuff of like about punk reference or anything punk
• 1:22:43
  related in cinema and this, you know, it wasn't just like a little
• 1:22:46
  like picture and blur. It was a full I think it was a it
• 1:22:49
  was a full page picture one side and another side was the rite up.
• 1:22:54
  So anyway, I'll let you know it's up there. Oh wow, thank
• 1:22:57
  you. Well, well, it's very interesting because you know it was Dudes
• 1:23:00
  was directed by Penelope Spheris, who who really got on the map with the
• 1:23:06
  Decline of Western Civilization, which was her documentary on the La punk scene,
• 1:23:12
  you know, really circa seventy eight, seventy nine, eighty m you know,
• 1:23:17
  with X and Fear and the germs. You know, she had a
• 1:23:21
  lot of a lot of footage of and interviews with Darby cry She would be
• 1:23:28
  dead, you know, in a very short amount of time. Um went
• 1:23:30
  U. And that was one of the compelling aspects of the of the whole
• 1:23:33
  movie. But um, so Penelope had a lot of street cred, you
• 1:23:40
  know, in terms of the punk scene. U. Was this her first
• 1:23:44
  feature after the documentary. No, No, she had done um. She
• 1:23:48
  had done actually two or three more films, narrative films before Dudes, but
• 1:24:00
  she'd done him from Roger Corman and one of them, UM was called The
• 1:24:06
  Boys next Door, which starred Charlie Sheen and young Charlie, a very young
• 1:24:15
  Charlie Sheen. And you know, at that point, Emilio Esteves his brother
• 1:24:19
  had all the street cred or at all, that was an sort of an
• 1:24:24
  established star because especially in the punk world, because he had been in in
• 1:24:30
  Repo Man. Well, this was Repo Man and Dudes came out basically the
• 1:24:36
  same year, or they were being filmed almost simultaneously, so this was eighty
• 1:24:41
  five, eighty eighty eighty six, actually six seven, right, Yeah,
• 1:24:47
  Dudes was actually um shot mostly during eighty six, as I recall now,
• 1:24:54
  and but it didn't get much of a release until eighty seven, and even
• 1:24:58
  then it was barely And what's interesting too, is that Dudes has never come
• 1:25:03
  out on DVD, and we're actually in the process of tracking it down right
• 1:25:08
  now and see if we can get it released on DVD. But what makes
• 1:25:13
  everything so difficult is that there's been a chain of bankruptcies declared by the whatever
• 1:25:23
  entity that that acquired the rights or required the actual finished film, because they
• 1:25:36
  Dudes was made by the Vista organization and they made three or four films,
• 1:25:41
  and then they were bought by someone, and then that company folded, and
• 1:25:45
  then they were bought and gobbled up by another corporate entity, and so on
• 1:25:47
  and so on and so on, and so it becomes very difficult to actually
• 1:25:50
  follow the chain of title for and you know, and what's fascinating is that
• 1:25:58
  this is relatively recent history. I mean, you know, this is nineteen
• 1:26:00
  you know, this was a film that was released in nineteen eighty seven,
• 1:26:03
  right, and yet they're they're serious doubt as to who owns it. I
• 1:26:10
  can imagine you know which is you know, go figure that. That shows
• 1:26:13
  you, in one level, how fast these corporations, you know by by
• 1:26:18
  libraries, Yeah, come and go, and they come and go in the
• 1:26:21
  rights to things or get uh gets very confused right now. I think I
• 1:26:28
  remember when we saw the film on your your writing class, because one of
• 1:26:32
  your students was able to get a copy of it or you had a copy
• 1:26:34
  of it. I had a copy of it, Okay, so you basically
• 1:26:36
  yeah, yeah, basically what happened is I fortunately, I'm glad I did.
• 1:26:42
  I purchased um, a laser disc of it when it disc so it's
• 1:26:48
  this big chrome platter, you know. Um. And when I moved up
• 1:26:54
  here. Uh, actually a friend of mine who was quincidently the engineer on
• 1:27:01
  on two of the records that I put out on my record label back in
• 1:27:04
  the eighties, Blue Yonder Sounds and how long of it did it last year?
• 1:27:12
  Well, it lasted about three years, you know, a couple of
• 1:27:16
  years, three years something like that, you know, I mean you can,
• 1:27:20
  um. But Steve Sharpe who engineered the album by the Fifth Fibonacci's,
• 1:27:27
  which was the first release and then the second one by a band called Slack,
• 1:27:30
  who were from Portland, Oregon. Well, Steve was originally from Portland,
• 1:27:33
  Oregon, and then he moved back to Portland, Oregon. When I
• 1:27:36
  moved up here, I went to go see my friends Stan Ridgeway, who
• 1:27:43
  was performing at Mississippi Studios. Uh with this, this is like in July.
• 1:27:49
  You know, we moved here in June of two thousand and seven,
• 1:27:51
  and then in July, um uh stand came through town and I went to
• 1:27:58
  go see him. And while I was waiting in the beer line at Mississippi,
• 1:28:03
  UM, I hear, hey, Rendy, look over and I did
• 1:28:09
  not recognize him. But it was Steve Sharp. And he now shaves his
• 1:28:13
  head, whereas back then he had big poofy eighties hair, right and and
• 1:28:18
  so and he Steve Sharp, and I said, oh my god, Steve,
• 1:28:21
  what are you doing here? And so anyway, long story short,
• 1:28:25
  Steve has a media duplication company in a recording studio and everything here in town.
• 1:28:32
  So he said, wow, great, all right here, thank you.
• 1:28:39
  It's a beautiful thing. Thank you. With right, we're pretty good
• 1:28:47
  for now, yes, thank you, yeah, don't forget us. Um
• 1:28:56
  so Steve, I look, I've got a laser disc. Is there any
• 1:29:00
  way of getting something duplicated? You know? And so basically we gotta got
• 1:29:05
  some Uh we're able to get a DVD copy of Dudes pulled off of the
• 1:29:13
  laser disk of the digital copy there. But quality isn't that great, you
• 1:29:15
  know, it's not like still looking at the original thing. And it was
• 1:29:19
  shot by Bob Richardson, who has gone on to become you know, Martin
• 1:29:23
  Scorsese's DP, and he was all over Stone's DP for for the Doors and
• 1:29:28
  many other films. And he's an Academy Award winner. He shoots beautiful stuff
• 1:29:32
  and always has and so uh, um, you know, I don't think
• 1:29:39
  our little you know, rip off DVD was you know, doing it justice?
• 1:29:44
  But right, you know it worked for my class. That was cool.
• 1:29:47
  We'll take a little break or we eat back. Let's see here,
• 1:29:54
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to
• 1:30:00
  the show. All right, well, let's talk about your the production of
• 1:30:06
  Dudes, so boom you realize it's happening right. Well, what happened was
• 1:30:13
  that I wrote my first draft, which was really long. It was like
• 1:30:18
  one hundred and forty pages long or something like that, you know, And
• 1:30:21
  generally a screenplay should be coming in at tops, you know, one hundred
• 1:30:26
  and twenty pages, right, and even a little less than is better.
• 1:30:29
  But mine came in. It was it was this epic, epic punk rock
• 1:30:31
  western. I shoot for about fifty pages now, yeah, yeah, and
• 1:30:39
  I say add action scene here right here, you know, oh, thank
• 1:30:46
  you. Um. But in the case of Dudes, then they got a
• 1:30:51
  director involved, you know, um, I guess I got notes from mcguiltahud
• 1:30:59
  to Flora's some Hank Palmieri and produce a Herb Jaffee at that at that stage
• 1:31:08
  in which I then, you know, we all knew we had to cut
• 1:31:10
  it down. So I worked really hard and just really condensing it and getting
• 1:31:15
  rid of any anything that was fat. And then Penelope Sphiris came aboard and
• 1:31:21
  they were talking. It was the script was making the rounds at the studios.
• 1:31:26
  As well. They were trying to get a studio maybe further on board,
• 1:31:29
  because so they were already in the midst of producing it, but they
• 1:31:31
  wanted a little bit more back in. Yeah. Yeah, you know what
• 1:31:34
  happened sometimes is that an independent company, we'll say, okay, we've got
• 1:31:39
  this, maybe we can get somebody to you know, come on board more
• 1:31:44
  and uh all just no, no, I just meant I made it closer.
• 1:31:48
  You're going to throw to throw some more money at us or something.
• 1:31:54
  And I was told, you know, it got out to Columbia. Columbia
• 1:32:00
  was kind of interested in it, and actually Ridley Scott. I was told
• 1:32:01
  Ridley Scott had read it and was very interested or were somewhat interested in it.
• 1:32:09
  Obviously not enough to go to get behind it and make it, but
• 1:32:12
  because you know, ultimately it was interesting. He goes and makes Stellman Louise
• 1:32:15
  not that too much later, but there were you know, there's a kind
• 1:32:20
  of a little bit of similarities to it. But anyhow, they started taking
• 1:32:30
  meetings with potential directors for it, and to quote Miguel, Penelope came in
• 1:32:38
  and met with them, and he said she impressed the shit out of us,
• 1:32:45
  and Penelope told me later too, that she went in there and she
• 1:32:48
  said, look, there are only two people on the planet and who can
• 1:32:50
  direct this Me and Alex Cox? And Alex Cox was already making a repo
• 1:32:56
  man at that stage. She said it's got to be me. So I
• 1:33:01
  met her and she gave me some notes and then I did some refining.
• 1:33:05
  But the great thing about Penelope was that she just she really loved the script.
• 1:33:10
  I mean, she really didn't want to change much at all, not
• 1:33:13
  anywhere. It's pretty rare. It's pretty rare, and quite quite frankly,
• 1:33:17
  I mean, Penelope was just, you know, she was just really wonderful.
• 1:33:25
  She was so welcoming and encouraged me to be on the set as much
• 1:33:29
  as possible. She invited me at every stage of the process to be involved.
• 1:33:35
  For example, once she came aboard and they started having casting sessions,
• 1:33:40
  she invited me to a casting session to come in. Now, did you
• 1:33:44
  have there was three sort of main characters, well, sorry, of the
• 1:33:48
  three guys and three dudes, But did you when you're writing, have actors
• 1:33:54
  in mind you're writing? Not? Really. The only guy that I had
• 1:33:59
  in mind was the villain, and that was leaving played by leaving Um.
• 1:34:03
  The villain was his name was Missoula. It was a nickname and it was
• 1:34:09
  played by Leaving. But I wrote it with Leaving in mind because he was
• 1:34:13
  the lead singer of Fear, one of the bands that was featured in the
• 1:34:16
  Decline of Western Civilization. But I had seen Fear a couple of times and
• 1:34:20
  I thought he was very, very menacing, and he was a real kind
• 1:34:27
  of there was a redneck, uh cracker kind of quality to this guy that
• 1:34:32
  was behind all the the the intimidation, intimidation. There was a real biker
• 1:34:39
  kind of quite. Lee was very you know, really provocative presence. So
• 1:34:45
  I had it really with him in mind. But the other three guys,
• 1:34:48
  M Biscuit and uh, you know, Grant and Milo Um. I didn't
• 1:34:56
  have anyone in particular mind. So when you saw that when you go to
• 1:34:58
  the castle and then you're well, I had I mean, I had mine
• 1:35:02
  a character, right, you know what I wanted. And it was interesting
• 1:35:08
  because we on that particular day that I was allowed to sit in or she
• 1:35:11
  invited me to sit in, we saw read for the part we saw Tim
• 1:35:15
  Robbins, h Kyle McLaughlin and Keefer Sutherland and Michael Dabar, who was,
• 1:35:26
  you know, sort of a seventies glam rocker, you know, and that
• 1:35:30
  Um who wasn't quite who wasn't right, And all those guys gave interesting readings,
• 1:35:38
  but the one I was most impressed with was a Keefer right. But
• 1:35:44
  Penelope didn't go for him as much because she felt he didn't have a sense
• 1:35:49
  of humor. And that was interesting to me because I never felt that Grant
• 1:35:57
  had a sense of humor or should have had a sense of humor. It
• 1:35:59
  was the the movies. Comedic quality came out of out of situations where you
• 1:36:05
  have these punkers, you know, from the city of you know, floundering
• 1:36:11
  out in the wild West, you know, the modern West, and that's
• 1:36:15
  that to me, was a funny situation. And if there was any humor
• 1:36:19
  in the it expressed by either of the characters, it was out of Biscuit,
• 1:36:26
  who was this big slobbery Yeah, uh kind of a lovable but you
• 1:36:30
  know um alumics, you know, and uh so um. But we disagreed
• 1:36:36
  on that, and she she just didn't feel it was right. But ultimately,
• 1:36:40
  you know, it was played by John Cryer, the kest John Cryer,
• 1:36:43
  because he was coming off of the John Hughes movies. Uh yeah,
• 1:36:47
  pretty yeah. I think it was pretty impeaked. He was ducky, yeah,
• 1:36:49
  ducky Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know so and I don't think
• 1:36:55
  Keefer hadn't made stand by Me yet, had he? No, he had
• 1:36:59
  not, Okay, So I was really kind. He was he was a
• 1:37:01
  known quantity. Yeah, you know. Uh, they knew about him because
• 1:37:04
  of his you know, certainly his father, but um, but they didn't
• 1:37:11
  h he hadn't quite proven he had bit parts. I think, you know,
• 1:37:15
  prior of that. Um. And uh, it was shortly after that
• 1:37:20
  that he started, you know, taking off, because it was like stand
• 1:37:24
  by Me then Lost Boys and yeah, and that's kind of cemented that s
• 1:37:28
  very you know he was good heavy. Yeah, well he was good,
• 1:37:31
  and you know he had he had suitable angst, and physically he was menacing.
• 1:37:36
  He could be menacing. And that's what I wanted with, you know,
• 1:37:39
  with with Grant, somebody could go head to head with leaving, you
• 1:37:42
  know, in a way, and then you know, you would have the
• 1:37:45
  blummocks of Biscuit, who was based on a I took his name from a
• 1:37:50
  lead singer of a band called The Big boys who were skate punks from Austin,
• 1:37:55
  Texas, and his Randy Biscuit Turner was their singer and he was awesome.
• 1:38:00
  That's awesome. I only saw them once, but their records hold up
• 1:38:04
  really really well. They were great and then unfortunately he passed away a few
• 1:38:09
  years ago, I think, but um, the big boys were were rocking,
• 1:38:13
  and then ultimately then she also cast Flee right and the Chili Peppers as
• 1:38:18
  Milo the Ill Ill Faded Milo Um, which was interesting because on one level,
• 1:38:26
  Um, because Flea had filled in as bass player for temporary bass player
• 1:38:32
  for Fear Oh okay, so in a sense backing up leaving, and I
• 1:38:38
  thought it was always funny that here was, you know, the in the
• 1:38:42
  movie context, the lead singer was killing his bass player. Now, that
• 1:38:48
  was real quick, because I don't think we're gonna lose anything here by just
• 1:38:53
  giving the premise of the movie right, it's like, basically, in a
• 1:38:58
  nutshell, it's about three New York punk rockers who get fed up with all
• 1:39:02
  the urban blight and living in the city and decide to drive cross country to
• 1:39:10
  California. Yeah, because they want to go. They want to meet the
• 1:39:13
  go gos or somebody. It's yea they want to get away from New Jersey
• 1:39:16
  and they want to get away you know, queens whatever. And what happens
• 1:39:21
  then is they're traveling across the country. They're camping out in Arizona, and
• 1:39:26
  then they get attacked by this group of rednecks who are who are out um
• 1:39:32
  uh killing illegal aliens or whatever. They from kicks. Yeah, we'll be
• 1:39:39
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:39:47
  So they find these guys and rock place, long place, wrong time,
• 1:39:51
  and so one of them gets killed and the other two they're surviving to
• 1:39:58
  grant and biscuit um avowed avenge their buddy and go on the trail of these
• 1:40:04
  killers um when no one else will right right, And so it's a it's
• 1:40:10
  an epic Western you know. And so they they track, yeah, they
• 1:40:14
  track them from Arizona and it ends up at least on the script, it
• 1:40:17
  ends up in the mountains of Montana. Oh okay. Yeah, So it
• 1:40:20
  was they were crossing all the way, and so I traveled all around those
• 1:40:25
  areas. I wanted to, you know, actually make it really authentic,
• 1:40:27
  to make sure they're going to real places and all of that. But they
• 1:40:30
  meet characters along the way that come and go and uh uh. Katherine Mary
• 1:40:34
  Stewart plays a um, a young woman who has a toe, drives a
• 1:40:41
  tow truck and she comes out to their aid a few times and then she
• 1:40:45
  actually gives them a few tips on surviving and gives them some guns and and
• 1:40:50
  I wrote the I wrote the role for a much older woman. I wanted
• 1:40:56
  to see that it was you know, it was Grant getting involved with with
• 1:41:00
  an older woman, and so it would be it would have been like you
• 1:41:03
  know, key for Sutherland and Barbara Hershey at the time. Okay, but
• 1:41:09
  um, you know, Hollywood being what it is. Uh. They ended
• 1:41:13
  up casting Katherine Mary Stewart, who was in I think The Last Starfighter or
• 1:41:18
  something that you know, and who's actually quite lovely. And she ended up
• 1:41:27
  being playing the role of Jesse, and um get them filling that role pretty
• 1:41:33
  well. Yeah she didn't get job. Yeah yeah. She broke her arm
• 1:41:36
  during the production of it. I actually went out to the set when they
• 1:41:41
  were filming outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. And by the way, another great
• 1:41:45
  thing about Penelope, she asked me a lot. She said, where where
• 1:41:48
  should this take place? Or do you have any ideas where this location is
• 1:41:51
  and this and that, and I directed her to some of the places that
• 1:41:56
  I had found, specifically in AARs in and around the Verde Valley, which
• 1:42:01
  is up you know, just north of Phoenix, about about one hundred miles
• 1:42:08
  or so. It's in between Phoenix and Flagstaff. It's very close to Sedona.
• 1:42:14
  So there's some great old ghost towns, some interesting places out there.
• 1:42:17
  And so I went out there to the set. She welcomed to me to
• 1:42:23
  come out, and so I was there for a few days while they were
• 1:42:25
  shooting on location. And the day the first day I got there and finally
• 1:42:29
  got to the set, there was a scene where they were riding horses through
• 1:42:34
  this beautiful, beautiful setting right right on the edge of Flagstaff, and she
• 1:42:44
  fell off a horse, I think, And it's just like I'd been there
• 1:42:46
  like five minutes and she fell off this horse. The horse stopped abruptly and
• 1:42:50
  she went like ass over yeah, yeah, saddle pommel and broke her arm.
• 1:42:56
  He said, it was this arm. Yeah, But she was quite
• 1:43:00
  the trooper. She she toughed out, she got that thing put in a
• 1:43:01
  cast, and then they covered it up with a long sleeve Um, some
• 1:43:06
  of the shoots she was just shiding it. Yeah, she was hiding it.
• 1:43:09
  And she got back on the horse and did some more writing and all
• 1:43:12
  sorts of stuff. So she was. She even pressed me quite a bit
• 1:43:14
  crazy. Yeah, you know movies, there show must go on, you
• 1:43:17
  know, so you got this, So the whole movie it's you know,
• 1:43:21
  you're like your first movie. Yeah, like Holy Cow and then and and
• 1:43:27
  I and I wanted to be there every every day, right, but I
• 1:43:30
  couldn't because I got the job on the doors and I had early Yeah,
• 1:43:34
  I had to start. Okay, okay, that's perfect. So how do
• 1:43:38
  we because I think let me double check here, so you so so you're
• 1:43:45
  doing that? Um, hold on, sorry, I want to just make
• 1:43:48
  sure I get this chronicle. Chronicle. I can't speak chronicled, yes,
• 1:43:54
  the chronological order here, it's it's the the dead guy speaking or it's just
• 1:44:00
  me making fun of my mother for so many years. Okay, let's see
• 1:44:06
  here, come on, there we go. So it says here because this
• 1:44:15
  is all true IMDb. If it's on IMDb, then it's gonna be true.
• 1:44:20
  Okay, this is good. Okay, So yes, you're working on
• 1:44:24
  dudes, So how and where did the Doors project come up during the filming
• 1:44:29
  and the production of Dudes. Well, again, Hollywood is a streaky business,
• 1:44:32
  so you know, there's it's all about hype, and anytime you have
• 1:44:39
  something going and heading into production, that creates a fair amount of momentum.
• 1:44:45
  So suddenly everybody's interested in you know, what you're doing and what your next
• 1:44:48
  project is and all of that. So I had some real heat based on
• 1:44:55
  that because again the script had kicked around the studios as well, so there
• 1:44:59
  was there was some interest there. So the Doors project had been languishing for
• 1:45:05
  years because they had, as I think I had explained before, they had
• 1:45:10
  um there were quarreling parties that were involved. Okay, finally Bill Graham,
• 1:45:16
  the Rock promoter, was able to put all the quarreling parties together in one
• 1:45:20
  room and get them all on the same page and get them to agree to
• 1:45:25
  make this particular movie. It was a huge bit of politics. All the
• 1:45:28
  stud was going on prior to even show it out prior. Okay, So
• 1:45:30
  it was finally set and was set up at Columbia Pictures, and Columbia was
• 1:45:34
  where Ridley Scott had his deal. And so that's how I think Dudes got
• 1:45:39
  circulated up out there. And one thing, you know, so they had
• 1:45:42
  read it and they were aware of it. Now, simultaneous with all of
• 1:45:45
  this is that my one of my roommates from film school, Mike Petzel,
• 1:45:50
  was dating a young executive at at Columbia development executive named Jude Schneider. And
• 1:46:03
  Jude was the executive who inherited the Doors project and so it was her job
• 1:46:10
  then to go out and find the appropriate writer for it. So she asked
• 1:46:16
  her boyfriend, my old roommate, Mike, anybody, Yeah, it would
• 1:46:21
  be good for this. And Mike, who was aspiring to be a producer
• 1:46:25
  at the point two as well, I was just saying, well, you
• 1:46:28
  know, he knew a lot of writers around, but also you know he
• 1:46:30
  said, ah, you know Randy. I was Randy then, and uh
• 1:46:35
  so I got the call and I knew Jude anyway, just through Mike,
• 1:46:42
  Yeah, slightly, but not you know, not real close. Um.
• 1:46:45
  So she got me out to come out and talk about it with her,
• 1:46:50
  and then she said I want to I want to put you together then with
• 1:46:54
  a producer on it. Okay, And the producer was a guy named Sasha
• 1:46:58
  Harari who was in Israeli computer magnet who made a lot of money in in
• 1:47:03
  software um way back when, and he had bought his way onto the project.
• 1:47:10
  He had never produced anything before, but he had bought a strategic piece
• 1:47:14
  of the pie. He bought the sync rights to the doors music, which
• 1:47:17
  is that? Yeah, yeah, no one could make a movie with doors
• 1:47:21
  using doors music without pain the piper who was Sasha? Hold that for one
• 1:47:27
  second. Let me close that door, close the door and the doors.
• 1:47:45
  Yeah it's cold though, man, Yeah, alright, so so very which
• 1:47:50
  is yeah? I think like the producers who bought the rights to Harry Potter
• 1:47:57
  just open up. Yes, it did. It's just like the is like
• 1:48:00
  a ghost. That's pretty funny. No, he can't do that, but
• 1:48:14
  you know it's funny. All right, we got a ghost. Yeah,
• 1:48:19
  Jim Morrison coming. Um so, uh Jude facilitated a meeting for me to
• 1:48:28
  meet the producer just Sash he was he was apparently the lead producer at that
• 1:48:33
  point. Uh So I met with him. We had lunch and did he
• 1:48:44
  speak English pretty well? No, he actually had a very thick Israeli accent
• 1:48:47
  and he tended to mumble um a bit. And it's kind of hard to
• 1:48:51
  tell if you're getting a good response. He must have been like, I
• 1:48:55
  don't know about this. Oh I thought, I'm told you. I thought
• 1:48:58
  it was over after tender fifteen minutes. I mean, you know, I
• 1:49:00
  thought it was just going to be a very long lunch because I felt like
• 1:49:03
  I was shooting blanks. Yeah, I was not saying anything that made any
• 1:49:08
  sense to him at all. Well, let me let me back up in
• 1:49:10
  that real quick. So you know you're going to this meeting, you know
• 1:49:14
  what the project is about. You said this the Doors. So how much
• 1:49:16
  preparation do you do before you go into the meeting in terms of like reading
• 1:49:20
  up about the doors and do you have something preset in your mind about this
• 1:49:25
  is how I would tackle the story or Well, it's helpful, yeah,
• 1:49:28
  because they when you're going through an interview process with producers, it's essentially it's
• 1:49:34
  an audition piece. Now, granted they usually have read something that you have
• 1:49:39
  written prior to that, but they're also listening to agents and studio executives and
• 1:49:45
  listening to their recommendations on who they should meet and all that. But when
• 1:49:49
  it really comes down to it, it's about chemistry and it's about it's about
• 1:49:54
  your vision we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now
• 1:50:02
  back to the show. You know, so granted at that time, unlike
• 1:50:13
  today where there is a you know, there's a dozen biographies out in Jim
• 1:50:16
  Morrison. Yeah. Now, at that time there were no biographies except for
• 1:50:23
  No One Here Gets Out Alive, which was written by Danny Sugarman and Jerry
• 1:50:27
  Hopkins, which I read, but I was not impressed with it for a
• 1:50:31
  variety of reasons. But it struck me as being very sensationalized. And it
• 1:50:36
  wasn't footnoted. That's always If a book isn't footnoted, that's nonfiction. You
• 1:50:43
  know, I find it very difficult to believe, you know, some of
• 1:50:47
  the sources they say that they get they get their material from. Anyhow,
• 1:50:53
  I had read that I was a Doors fan. I wasn't a Doors fanatic.
• 1:50:57
  I had a couple of their albums, I didn't have the complete had
• 1:51:00
  a lot, yeah, yeah, And but I had gone to UCLA Film
• 1:51:03
  School, which Morrison and Raymond's Eric the keyboardists, had had attended, and
• 1:51:10
  we had actually shared a couple of the same instructors. Um they were they
• 1:51:15
  had attended, you know, in UM. I think sixty four sixty five,
• 1:51:19
  okay, And I was there and started in seventy nine and eighty eighty
• 1:51:24
  out in eighty two. And so what happened, um though, that I
• 1:51:29
  caught a couple of these professors at the very end of their tenure after many
• 1:51:32
  years there, and that one was Ed Brokaw and the other was Leu Stuman,
• 1:51:38
  and they both had had Morrison and uh and Raymond's Eric as students,
• 1:51:43
  and uh, he left the door wide open there and uh so, uh
• 1:51:51
  that brought a little credibility for me because you know, it's always about in
• 1:52:00
  sight or information and somebody, Oh, he must be really in touch,
• 1:52:02
  you know, because he's come up through the so you get all the UCLA
• 1:52:05
  Film School mystique. Okay, So did you do this prap work before?
• 1:52:09
  Like, not really because there wasn't a whole lot to do other than listen
• 1:52:12
  to their music read the book. Um, how many days did you have
• 1:52:15
  to prepare to do like one day like he's gonna meet with him tomorrow.
• 1:52:19
  Yeah, it was pretty quick. It came up, I think within a
• 1:52:21
  couple of days because they were ready to go. They had to get moving,
• 1:52:25
  you know, they were they'd been this project had been festering for years,
• 1:52:29
  and so now that they finally had the green light to do it,
• 1:52:30
  that people were very, very eager to get moving. So I went and
• 1:52:34
  met with Sasha on this this restaurant up on the Sunset Strip there in Hollywood,
• 1:52:40
  West Hollywood, and sat down and we started chatting, and I just
• 1:52:45
  felt right away this is not working. It's not going anywhere. And then
• 1:52:48
  did you feel like you're doing most of talking? And he was just kind
• 1:52:50
  of looking and mumbling, yeah, yeah, basically sure, he's just cooking
• 1:53:13
  out there. No one. Yeah, well he's cooking out there. We're
• 1:53:18
  freezing in here. He's like, anyway, so you're you're just going a
• 1:53:25
  great So yeah, it was a meeting like twenty minutes. Well, it
• 1:53:29
  was about to be. I thought it was going to be over real fast.
• 1:53:31
  It was the quickest lunch ever because I thought I was boring him and
• 1:53:34
  we just couldn't find seem to be finding any any common ground. And granted
• 1:53:39
  again too, I at this time had had directed you know, I've been
• 1:53:44
  working with Henry Rowlins, Black Flag and the Men at Men, and so
• 1:53:46
  I was kind of very steeped in the punk culture in La At that time
• 1:53:50
  just didn't seem to matter to him. So, uh, then I said
• 1:53:56
  something that was I remember him cocking his head. Yeah, I felt that
• 1:54:00
  I made some sort of impression, and that was I drew the comparison between
• 1:54:06
  Jim Morrison and Lawrence of Arabia and the movie Lawrence of Arabia, in which
• 1:54:14
  I said that both of these guys were very charismatic, very well educated,
• 1:54:21
  well read young men who were literally swept up by the events in the wave
• 1:54:28
  of history and they surfed it as best they could. But what was happening
• 1:54:32
  is that there was a discrepancy that arose between their public persona and their private
• 1:54:41
  ones, and it got to the point of where that discrepancy pulled them so
• 1:54:45
  far apart that something had to snap, and it did, and it broke
• 1:54:49
  them. I would have got my attention, and that did. He cocked
• 1:54:55
  his head, and then what I thought was going to be a twenty minute
• 1:54:57
  conversation ended up being two hours. There for a couple of hours that was
• 1:55:00
  at turning. For it was the turning that hook gone with that hook,
• 1:55:04
  and so who would have thunk, But that's the way, that's the way
• 1:55:09
  it worked. And so he became very curious then about you know, what
• 1:55:13
  I thought, And because he was, Sasha was very intrigued with the notion
• 1:55:16
  that Jim was indeed a poet. He was he was an intellectual, yeah,
• 1:55:21
  and arguably he was. Um. So he wanted to see that aspect
• 1:55:28
  really exploited and dramatized as much as possible. And so when I brought that
• 1:55:34
  up, I mean that to him, you know, there was there was
• 1:55:39
  a corollary between him and Lawrence of Arabia te Lawrence, who was you know,
• 1:55:43
  was a writer and basically had the poet the soul of a poet himself.
• 1:55:49
  Um. But Lawrence was homosexual, and Lawrence also started believing his own
• 1:55:58
  press at a certain point, at least that was the take that the movie
• 1:56:00
  had, and it became very, very difficult for him to measure up to
• 1:56:06
  the sort of the public or the heroic image that that had been perpetuated then
• 1:56:12
  by the media of the day. So it's very true with with Morrison.
• 1:56:16
  Morrison wasn't a homosexual. He's probably bisexual, Yeah, but he had some
• 1:56:23
  secrets and some issues that you know, um, caused him to snap,
• 1:56:29
  you know, to break as well, you know. So and also then
• 1:56:31
  the other thing that I think scored some points was that I said, and
• 1:56:39
  this was one of the reasons why I really wanted to do the project,
• 1:56:43
  was I had felt there had never been a rock and roll epic. Yeah.
• 1:56:47
  You know, you know, up to to that point, we'd seen
• 1:56:49
  the Buddy Holly story and the Richie Vallen's story and things like that Cole Miner's
• 1:56:55
  Daughter, which was really great, but it was different types of music and
• 1:57:00
  different We hadn't seen a really serious treatment of rock and roll in rock and
• 1:57:05
  roll epic rock and roll. Yeah, And at crucial time, like I
• 1:57:09
  said, it's different, like the Body High Vich Valce, It's just different.
• 1:57:14
  And so I felt that The Doors really had that potential because because of
• 1:57:18
  the subject matter of what they they sang about and what they had their performances
• 1:57:21
  and the way they orchestrated things and the way their albums were produced and all
• 1:57:26
  of that, and you know, in Morrison's vision and Men's Eric's vision and
• 1:57:29
  all of that, they collectively they they had scope. It was it wasn't
• 1:57:32
  bubblegum rock. Yeah, it wasn't Paul Revere in The Raiders or you know,
• 1:57:38
  it really was about it was about the big questions, you know.
• 1:57:41
  Yeah, and so that's where I thought dramatically, cinematically, it had great
• 1:57:48
  potential, and that's why I wanted to do it. Did you fan yourself
• 1:57:51
  once you cry? You broke through that like twenty minute mark, and you
• 1:57:55
  realized that now you were jelling having this conversation at or other things kind of
• 1:58:00
  come in your mind. Like it's just you start just riding the way yourself.
• 1:58:03
  Yeah, you start station, you start talking out of your ass,
• 1:58:06
  you know. It's yeah, yeah, you do. You get You're like,
• 1:58:10
  yeah, they could be like this dolphin no no, not a dolphintive
• 1:58:15
  a bit. Yeah, yeah, it gets like that, you know.
• 1:58:18
  It's it's it's it's pretty funny. And you gotta be careful too of like
• 1:58:21
  not not promising more than you can deliver, you know, but you can't
• 1:58:26
  help you get excited and they and they feel that, you know, they
• 1:58:29
  producers and executives and stuff. They they want to be swept up with the
• 1:58:36
  with your enthusiasm. They want to see your vision as well, right,
• 1:58:40
  and they want to feel it. So it's, uh, it's exciting for
• 1:58:45
  them when you get excited and you sell them on it, you know.
• 1:58:48
  And then they're going to get on board because they usually have to turn around
• 1:58:50
  and then either have to sell you to their boss or to the studio or
• 1:58:55
  to some sort of money entity. That they make them feel confident and good
• 1:59:00
  enough that they are making the right decision and hiring you, and that you
• 1:59:05
  and only you have have the vision to pull this off, you know,
• 1:59:11
  right. So when I went off to this meeting, I remember talking to
• 1:59:14
  my my agent at the time, Rick Jaffa, who I mentioned in our
• 1:59:17
  last session, you know, wrote has written with his wife The Rise of
• 1:59:20
  the Planet of the Apes. You know, he left Morris to go become
• 1:59:24
  a writer. Rick was still my agent at that time, and he called
• 1:59:30
  me before I had this lunch or I called him to tell him that I
• 1:59:33
  had this meeting that Jude had set up with Sasha and and he said,
• 1:59:39
  listen, you know, he said, I don't mean to dash your hopes,
• 1:59:41
  you know, rain in your parade, but you know they're talking to
• 1:59:44
  some really heavy hitters. It's a very very slim chance you're going to get
• 1:59:47
  that gig. Okay. I said, I don't care. I'm going to
• 1:59:50
  I gotta go for it. I want to try to try for it,
• 1:59:54
  and so he was very pleasantly surprised when when I got the gig. But
• 2:00:00
  however I didn't know I really had it. We'll be right back after a
• 2:00:04
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Now. See
• 2:00:14
  Sasha was a very good poker player, and so so we that twenty minute
• 2:00:18
  lunch expanded intoto a two hour lunch, and we left and then I heard
• 2:00:23
  from Jude, I believe a later on that he said, all right,
• 2:00:27
  he wants you to come and meet the Doors. Now, the Surviving Doors.
• 2:00:33
  Great, you know, if nothing else, it's already it's already been
• 2:00:36
  worthy. Yeah. So we met, and I can't remember if it was
• 2:00:43
  at Columbia Studios or if it was at some other location there, but we
• 2:00:48
  had a preliminary meeting and where I met them. I can't remember if Jude
• 2:00:53
  was president in that meeting or not. But what was interesting was that Man's
• 2:00:57
  Eric was there. In Man's Eric was impressed with with the stuff that I
• 2:01:04
  had done music video wise, and and also with my record label. And
• 2:01:11
  here's the here's where it got uh no, no, my record label hadn't
• 2:01:15
  hadn't been established yet, but here here's where it got incestuous though, which
• 2:01:18
  was that man Zeric Um was producing X at the time. X X was,
• 2:01:25
  of course, you know, the punk rock band of in La,
• 2:01:29
  So man z Eric was producing them, so he was very keyed into what
• 2:01:32
  their their you know, vibe and aesthetic was. Um then he was a
• 2:01:39
  further impressed by the fact that I had gone through I was through UCLA and
• 2:01:42
  we had had some of the same sameon instructors, so we compared notes that
• 2:01:46
  a lot. And then um Ray was also very interested in a band called
• 2:01:53
  the Fibonaci's who were um Uh. He was interested in producing them, and
• 2:01:59
  they were the band that ultimately would be my debut band on my record label.
• 2:02:05
  You know, so I kind of kind of really and then then Densmore,
• 2:02:10
  the drummer John Densmore to the Doors, found out that I had written
• 2:02:14
  Dudes, and he knew about Dudes already that it was I don't know,
• 2:02:18
  in the in the work somewhere, and John was acting a lot at that
• 2:02:24
  point, and he immediately said, do you think you can get a part
• 2:02:29
  in the movie, Like, oh, I just like I said, well
• 2:02:36
  sure, And then I had also the other thing that brought the man Zeric
• 2:02:43
  like was that I had been working with Black Flag and Henry Rawlins, and
• 2:02:47
  I had always argued that, you know, the Doors were much more punk
• 2:02:51
  rock than they were Flower power Psychedelic generation kind of stuff, and that Henry
• 2:02:59
  was you know, sort of the spiritual inheritor of the Morrison legacy, you
• 2:03:04
  know, by doing all his spoken words stuff, and I felt Henry had
• 2:03:10
  potentially had some acting shops, and there was even some discussion about Henry even
• 2:03:15
  possibly being the guy to play Jim, just very very briefly. But Henry
• 2:03:20
  and I were paling around a lot at that time, and so I actually
• 2:03:25
  brought Henry over and to meet Man's Eric and Paul Rothschild and Bruce Botnick,
• 2:03:30
  who engineered all the Doors albums, and Rothschild, who produced them all.
• 2:03:35
  It was some recording session was going on that they and so he thought that
• 2:03:40
  was really cool. I scored a lot of points on that day because Henry
• 2:03:45
  was really impressed to meet Man's Eric and Rothschild, and Man's Eric was really
• 2:03:50
  impressed to meet Henry, and a further just kind of I think cemented my
• 2:03:55
  street cred in terms that I was the right guy for to do this project
• 2:04:00
  right. So that's how in session and then I got I got Densmore an
• 2:04:04
  audition for Dudes, and Penelope cast him. Um, so he's in Dudes.
• 2:04:13
  Um he plays uh sheriff in a a Montana town and leaving blows them
• 2:04:20
  away at you know, at the very end there and uh, but it
• 2:04:24
  was, it was. It's really funny, man. It was quite a
• 2:04:30
  time. That was a high high water mark in my career. And nine
• 2:04:31
  he had nineteen eighty six, Thanks God. So he had your Dudes is
• 2:04:35
  in production? You basically, at what point did you know it was official
• 2:04:41
  that you're on doors? Well I didn't, So we had that. We
• 2:04:44
  had all these meetings. We were having all these meetings and my cap winder
• 2:04:48
  well where you know, and we a lot of talk, a lot of
• 2:04:51
  discussions. Well nobody was saying anything. Yeah, So then we met again
• 2:04:58
  at a meeting. We had a meeting at twentieth Century Fox. And the
• 2:05:00
  reason why we were there was because we were in the office of a screenwriter
• 2:05:08
  named Tom Rickman. Tom Rickman is a wonderful, wonderful guy and a wonderful
• 2:05:13
  screenwriter and he had written Coleminer's daughter, Michael Lapphead directed. They had originally
• 2:05:20
  gone to Tom to see if he wanted to write the Doors movie, of
• 2:05:26
  which he declined. He he just didn't want to get into that rat's nest,
• 2:05:30
  I guess or whatever it was hornet's nest. But he agreed to be
• 2:05:35
  aboard as a to mentor anyone who did step in to do it. So,
• 2:05:43
  in other words, Tom was there for backup in case, you know,
• 2:05:45
  whoever stepped into it failed. So he wanted to meet me then,
• 2:05:50
  and so we all convened at his office in twenty century Fox. And so
• 2:05:55
  so there was Tom, there was the Surviving Doors, myself, Sasha,
• 2:06:00
  and I remember they had ordered out lunch and everbody was brought in these sandwiches
• 2:06:05
  and we were all sitting around eating sandwiches, and there was a lot of
• 2:06:09
  banter going back and forth and discussion, and they kept asking me certain things
• 2:06:14
  about the movie or out you know what, how I saw certain things and
• 2:06:17
  what was important it wasn't. And I kept like hearing, my honest job,
• 2:06:25
  what you Finally I just find out just look at Sasha and I said,
• 2:06:29
  look, do I have the job? And I remember him just kind
• 2:06:31
  of grinning up and he said, yeah, you have the job. That
• 2:06:34
  was your job. It was confirmation paper, like my, oh my god.
• 2:06:43
  And that's that's when at that moment then it was just like I freaking
• 2:06:48
  couldn't believe it, man, because then it was like I had run the
• 2:06:53
  gauntlet, I had beat the odds. Um. I was, you know,
• 2:06:58
  having lunch with legends, and I was on a studio a lot,
• 2:07:02
  and it was the dream. It was the dream. You know. It
• 2:07:05
  was just an amazing feeling when you got that moment where he gave you a
• 2:07:10
  smile on the nod huh. Internally, where you just how quickly we're able
• 2:07:14
  to focus back onto the task at hand, which is like, well,
• 2:07:17
  here's the vision of the movie. Because inside you must be like, oh,
• 2:07:19
  holy shit, this is actually happening, Like this has actually happening.
• 2:07:23
  Yeah, I mean you're you're I'm just doing somersaults inside. Yeah yeah,
• 2:07:29
  but try to be cool yeah cool? Oh yeah cool man. Yeah,
• 2:07:34
  Okay, yeah, I'm cool. I'm I'm into it. Hey, well
• 2:07:43
  it goes outside, but the door keeps flying. No, no, this
• 2:07:47
  yeah, this is it? Um. So yeah, it was just like
• 2:07:53
  but I remember getting out of there and just like, oh my god,
• 2:07:56
  who do I call first? I Mean I was like, so, well,
• 2:07:58
  who do you call? I think I called agent. I called Rick
• 2:08:01
  and and Carol yumkiss and I said I got the job, and they just
• 2:08:03
  like, are you kidding? Are you sure? You sure? And they
• 2:08:05
  said they told me they'd only got the job, and sure enough, it
• 2:08:09
  was, you know, consummated. Shortly after that, Um, I called
• 2:08:11
  Jude to thank her for really, you know, um um going to bat
• 2:08:16
  for me because she she really also, uh, it wasn't just all me.
• 2:08:20
  She had influence with the studio of course, and because she was still
• 2:08:24
  the executive in charge of the project, so she went to bat for me
• 2:08:30
  as well. And Jeeves I think I called, Uh, I don't know,
• 2:08:35
  I called my parents and uh, you know, it's all blur a
• 2:08:37
  blur at this point, but it was just I just because this is still
• 2:08:41
  a payphone style. Yeah, yeah, I wait until I got home.
• 2:08:46
  Yeah, but you know, this was this was eighty six, but this
• 2:08:52
  was the drag those that I got the gig, and then Dudes was in
• 2:08:56
  production, was going into production, so you're like, I want to be
• 2:08:58
  there, and like, yeah, that set, but I got it.
• 2:09:01
  I had to start going to work right away. Yeah, you know,
• 2:09:05
  yeah, Fortunately they were shooting dudes in LA, in the LA locations before
• 2:09:11
  they went off to Arizona. Okay, So I was able to to go
• 2:09:16
  down the set in LA a couple of times, and um, I was
• 2:09:20
  dating this girl who worked for SST Records at the time. Nice. Yeah,
• 2:09:26
  yeah, she was a little skate punk nice and uh she was tough
• 2:09:30
  man Karen Knicks, and uh she was a photographer as well and a really
• 2:09:35
  actually very good writer. Um uh. And anyway, I took her to
• 2:09:43
  the set um of dudes and I remember beating down there and then then Flee
• 2:09:48
  started started trying to pick up on her. I was going to ask you
• 2:09:52
  write her down there. I'm assuming that you see you lost her. You
• 2:09:56
  wanted the rock stars, the punk star Fleet was you know, the pep
• 2:10:00
  that we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back
• 2:10:09
  to the show. The Chili Peppers were just starting to be yeah, yeah,
• 2:10:13
  yeah, they were still they were they were still very underground. They
• 2:10:18
  were, you know, they were the opening band for more established bands in
• 2:10:20
  LA at the time. But uh, you know, Flee was a known
• 2:10:24
  commodity because of his uh his playing with Fear. Yeah, um uh,
• 2:10:31
  you know, for even though it was a short stint and then and he
• 2:10:35
  was just a well known guy on that whole scene. So um, yeah,
• 2:10:37
  but Flee was after Carol that that that that was pretty funny. But
• 2:10:46
  yeah, so then, um, then Sasha told me, he said,
• 2:10:50
  basically, take a couple of weeks to research and then go and write the
• 2:10:54
  script. And I don't. Okay, So where do you start? Well,
• 2:11:01
  I started by interviewing you know, the door, the doors themselves,
• 2:11:05
  you know, you go right straight to the horse's mouth in this particular case,
• 2:11:09
  and that was in a ray Robbie and John um, and I interviewed
• 2:11:18
  them collectively, and then I interviewed them individually as well, because you know,
• 2:11:24
  it's a little bit of corroborative, you know, kind of witnesses and
• 2:11:30
  and that that I found it was sometimes they would be more frank if they
• 2:11:33
  were if the others weren't around, especially Densmore would really open up if the
• 2:11:37
  other two weren't around. So it became very apparent to me. Oh and
• 2:11:46
  then Rothschild was also um a gem of an interview. Um, and he
• 2:11:50
  was really my kid, We're um, yeah, we're doing really really well.
• 2:11:56
  I guess you can take that empty. Yeah, I'm not going to
• 2:11:58
  suck anymore out of that, you know, gang another one. I think,
• 2:12:03
  okay, yeah, I'm I'm just been talking to yah yeah uh yeah,
• 2:12:11
  so Ray let's see um Densmore Rothschild. Um. It was yeah,
• 2:12:22
  my first or second session with him, it was like wow, Um,
• 2:12:26
  I felt like I was still being auditioned to a certain degree. Yeah,
• 2:12:30
  because a lot of these guys. Now, now even though I was on
• 2:12:33
  board and sanctioned, I had the blessing, now, it was still I
• 2:12:35
  sort of had to prove myself and in a in a sense, I mean,
• 2:12:39
  these were the guys who were the guardians of the faith, you know,
• 2:12:43
  um, keepers of the faith, and so therefore I had to further
• 2:12:48
  prove myself in a sense. So that's where I started doing a lot more
• 2:12:52
  research and really asking the right questions, really thinking ahead of time before I
• 2:12:56
  would speak. It wasn't just trying to, you know, talk out of
• 2:13:00
  my what was Jim really like? Yeah, you blow? Can you tell
• 2:13:05
  me some good drug stories? Stuff like that, but really trying to get
• 2:13:09
  to the meat of the matter. But it became very apparent to me after
• 2:13:16
  my first round of interviews that the public persona of Jim Morrison was one thing.
• 2:13:24
  The private one was an entirely different so that there was, in other
• 2:13:30
  words, there was a whole lot of stuff that had never been discussed,
• 2:13:33
  never been talked about, never been delved into, whatsoever. And that it
• 2:13:39
  was not This was not a particular case of where I was going to be
• 2:13:43
  able to take a couple of weeks to research and then go and write the
• 2:13:46
  movie. Because the deeper more and more I got into it, the deeper
• 2:13:50
  and deeper I felt it was, and it was going to take some real
• 2:13:56
  work and some heavy lifting and rock Child Rothschild you know, told me at
• 2:14:03
  one point he said, look, you're gonna you know, the key to
• 2:14:07
  it is is finding you know what what made Jim so angry? What was
• 2:14:13
  the court? What was the source of his angst? And then did you
• 2:14:16
  ask him where do I go to find that? Well? He offered it
• 2:14:22
  up okay to me, um so um and he said that he said Jim
• 2:14:28
  came to him a couple of times with a problem and asked Paul's advice about
• 2:14:35
  what to do about it, and um, the uh it would it was
• 2:14:43
  related to a particular function and um and Paul said, you know, look
• 2:14:50
  into this because he said, I think this might provide some you know,
• 2:14:54
  answers to Jim's angst. So let's backup for me. It's like, we
• 2:14:58
  have ray the keyboard artists. Yes, we have Paul's rape. Raymond's Eric
• 2:15:05
  is the keyboardist. Robbie Krieger is the guitarist. John Dinsmore is the drummer,
• 2:15:11
  right, and then Paul Rothschild produced all of the Doors albums except La
• 2:15:16
  Woman. Okay, okay. So that's where he he was done as really,
• 2:15:22
  in one sense sort of was Jim um after the soft Parade. He
• 2:15:28
  couldn't. He didn't. He heard some of the demo tapes for or not
• 2:15:37
  even they weren't even demo tapes. He attended a couple of band rehearsals where
• 2:15:41
  they had the new material and we're working on end. He heard writers on
• 2:15:46
  the Storm, which he said it sounded like cocktail music to him. It
• 2:15:50
  was boring. He didn't. He didn't like it, thank you. So
• 2:15:56
  that's what was interesting, umu there um so. But Rothschild was the elder
• 2:16:03
  statesman in a sense of the band. M Paul was a few years older
• 2:16:09
  than even Man's Eric, and Man's Eric was definitely the elder statesman in the
• 2:16:16
  band. You know, Robbie and and John were like twenty one twenty two,
• 2:16:20
  Yeah, and Ray was twenty seven, twenty eight years old when the
• 2:16:24
  doors really kicked in. Ray was born in nineteen thirty nine. Ray had
• 2:16:28
  been in the Army. Ray was in graduate school for film school when he
• 2:16:31
  was at UCLA. He wasn't an undergrad. I know when the film came
• 2:16:35
  out, Um, I heard red statements. He was just upset, like
• 2:16:39
  because he's felt like the movie sort of portrayed him as like kind of a
• 2:16:43
  whiner, you know. He's like, yeah, well, Ray had a
• 2:16:46
  lot of issues about the movie and not the jump I had. But I
• 2:16:50
  just remember, yeah that I mean, as you know, yeah, there
• 2:16:54
  there there were a lot of I Ray did not get along with Oliver from
• 2:16:58
  what I understand. I can't say that, okay, you know, but
• 2:17:01
  they did not see eye to eye. And it was interesting too, because
• 2:17:05
  Ray was very tight with Danny Sugarman Um and Danny Sugarman ended up being very
• 2:17:13
  tight with Oliver Um. So you would think there would have been some sort
• 2:17:18
  of synchronicity there, but there wasn't. Apparently there's a lot of friction between
• 2:17:20
  Oliver and Ray, and Ray did not like, you know how the movie
• 2:17:26
  handled a lot of this stuff, and so and so went on record again
• 2:17:30
  and again really just saying no bad movie, bad bad portrait, etcetera,
• 2:17:33
  etcetera. Oliver again, Oliver likes to get sensational with stuff. But he's
• 2:17:41
  and he's a man not lacking in opinions and so and nor nor the guts
• 2:17:46
  to express them. So he's you know, he was going to make his
• 2:17:50
  own movie one way or another. So let's well back up real quick.
• 2:17:54
  So you you going this this journey, your own journey now, now you've
• 2:18:00
  entered the portal of Jim Morton Morrison's world. It was exactly it was that.
• 2:18:05
  Yeah, And I don't know if you, um you may check out
• 2:18:07
  this last week. Um, Jimmy Fallon did this Jim Morrison impersonation. Funny.
• 2:18:13
  But he does this thing where he takes famous like musicians that he does
• 2:18:18
  imitations of, like Paul Um, I'm sorry, who's it? The Neil
• 2:18:20
  Young Yeah, but he's he had like Jim Morrison and the Doors, like
• 2:18:26
  his makeup make believe band, but they were he would just sing these songs,
• 2:18:31
  um, but the lyrics are just not nonsense, but he was.
• 2:18:33
  He was basically reading like um um, the reading Rainbow, you know,
• 2:18:39
  the you know, good Night Moon. So it's like songs but done.
• 2:18:43
  And it is uncanny how much he sounds like Yeah. And so it's online
• 2:18:50
  and it's you just easily find it, like a quick YouTube search, and
• 2:18:54
  it's just to see him just going like reading Rainbow, you know, because
• 2:19:00
  Indian cover. Yeah, it's like the way he sings it and like the
• 2:19:03
  whole bands for his show, but just just as a little tongue in cheeks
• 2:19:09
  funny. But so you go down this journey, Yeah, and what you
• 2:19:13
  thought was a couple of weeks. How big of a fan was Sasha of
• 2:19:16
  the music or was he just more of a business pragmatic person that I'm going
• 2:19:20
  to buy into this? And then that's an interesting question because Sasha would tell
• 2:19:26
  me on more than one occasion how he got into this whole thing, and
• 2:19:30
  which was that he had been um, he had been in New York.
• 2:19:35
  Sasha was married at the time to one of the Ephron's sisters, Amy Efron,
• 2:19:41
  who's a very prolific novelist now. But she's the younger sister of Delia
• 2:19:48
  and the other Frons. There's a lot of them. Um, but we'll
• 2:19:56
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 2:20:03
  show. He had been living in New York at the time, and he
• 2:20:09
  said that or prior to all this, he said that he had been out
• 2:20:13
  partying all night long or something, yeah, everything, and he was coming
• 2:20:20
  back from some all night thing and was driving across a particular bridge and the
• 2:20:28
  sun was coming up in New York and I think he said, the end
• 2:20:35
  came up right on time. Yeah, right on Q. And he said
• 2:20:39
  that was just like a salient moment for him. He had never really heard
• 2:20:43
  it, I guess, um. You know, Sasha had been I think
• 2:20:46
  he was in the Israeli Army, was in the Seven Days War and sixty
• 2:20:50
  seven or whatever. So I mean, he was just this was not a
• 2:20:54
  he wasn't in other words, he wasn't in La or San Francisco drinking the
• 2:20:58
  flower power line. You know, he was in an entirely different place,
• 2:21:01
  much like Oliver Stone was. You know, he was in Oliver was in
• 2:21:05
  in Southeast Asia's in Vietnam and when the doors were really happening stateside. So
• 2:21:13
  anyway, he just said that this was just a huge moment for him,
• 2:21:16
  and he just he got from that point on, he became obsessed about the
• 2:21:20
  band, and he had made all this money in software and he just went
• 2:21:24
  out and bought literally just bought his way onto into uh the strategic piece of
• 2:21:33
  the producing puzzle. Of the producing puzzle. Exascinating. Yeah, yeah,
• 2:21:37
  yeah, it really I mean it was very interesting and I mean it was
• 2:21:39
  effective because boy he was he instantly made himself a player. Yeah. Now
• 2:21:45
  he had bought it a couple of years before, you know, but um,
• 2:21:48
  he had laid the money down and they did it. Was it was
• 2:21:50
  a smart thing. So then and now you've you're exploring, You're you're going,
• 2:21:56
  Wow, it almost sounds crazy, but you could have like written a
• 2:22:01
  book, a biography because all the all the legwork that you've done to do
• 2:22:05
  the research. Yeah, I accumulated. I think I have about, um
• 2:22:09
  fifty hours of interviews, you know, on on tape. And you know,
• 2:22:15
  I mean it's I mean, it's it's it's everyone. Um, all
• 2:22:18
  the doors you know, Rothschild, oh, Jack Holsman around Electric Records,
• 2:22:26
  Um, um god, I mean I mean there were characters, you know,
• 2:22:31
  Babe Hill, I've Babe Hill was Gym's trusted drinking buddy in the latter
• 2:22:35
  part of his career. Uh, nobody knew where Babe Hill was when I
• 2:22:41
  got on board. No, and a lot of people didn't want to know.
• 2:22:45
  I wanted to know because I wanted to interview him. Yeah. Yeah,
• 2:22:48
  but everyone was was afraid of Babe because Babe was kind of this biker
• 2:22:54
  guy and he was in pretty tight with some I guess some real heavy friends.
• 2:23:00
  Um Robbie had did not want to have anything to do with him.
• 2:23:05
  He's and I mean Rothschilds just said, Jesus, you know the last time
• 2:23:07
  I saw Babe, he had a he had a hunting rifle and was shooting
• 2:23:13
  it, you know, off of you know my backyard, you know,
• 2:23:16
  up in the Hollywood Hills or something. It was just like crazy, all
• 2:23:18
  these crazy stories about Babe, but nobody knew how to get a hold of
• 2:23:22
  him. And you know, Ray and all those guys didn't. They didn't
• 2:23:26
  know. So how did you do it? Well? I wish I could
• 2:23:31
  take total credit for it, but um, I couldn't. Um. Tom
• 2:23:35
  Rickman had a very resourceful secretary at the time named Francesca, and Francesca did
• 2:23:43
  a little bit of sleuthing, which was we had heard that Babe was in
• 2:23:48
  the Grips Union, worked in the film basins and he was a grip.
• 2:23:54
  So she called the Grip Union headquarters, whoever that ever is, Yeah,
• 2:24:00
  and then they said, well, you got to talk to Moose. So
• 2:24:03
  Moose was like, this guy named Moose was the head of the Grips at
• 2:24:09
  at MGM. So she called up Moose and he said, oh, yeah,
• 2:24:13
  well babe, you know, you can find Babe at this bar.
• 2:24:18
  I forget the name of it now. She has only been twenty six years.
• 2:24:22
  Yeah. That was literally across the street from MGM, the old MGM
• 2:24:28
  lot in Culver City. And he said he's there. He every day about
• 2:24:31
  four o'clock. So, you know, just buying some Jack Danielson, you
• 2:24:35
  know, like Okay, So Francesca relays this information to me, she said,
• 2:24:41
  I think I've found them, or at least in a no whe where
• 2:24:43
  you can find him. So you kind of go solo on these things.
• 2:24:46
  I mean, it's not like you have a team that says like you have
• 2:24:48
  your own little team that says like I'll find this set up this interview for
• 2:24:52
  you. It's you going hello, Yeah, that's exactly way. What Remember
• 2:24:56
  there's no internet, cell phones, you know, it's an entirely different landscape.
• 2:25:03
  Yeah, what an event? Yeah yeah, so, um yeah,
• 2:25:07
  she gave me the name of the bar, the address, and I went
• 2:25:11
  down there on a particular day, about four o'clock in the afternoon. Now
• 2:25:15
  set the scene. Here, You in this bar. Did you fit in
• 2:25:18
  or were you totally okay? This was a real this was this was a
• 2:25:26
  this is a drinking man's ball. So what were you wearing? Well,
• 2:25:31
  I'm certainly not going to dress up for the occasion. Um, you know,
• 2:25:35
  jeans and a T shirt. And it was probably wearing my black doc
• 2:25:39
  Market Doc Martin's at the time. Um. It was a little horseshoe counter
• 2:25:43
  of a bar, really small. Um gosh, I can't remember the name
• 2:25:48
  of it. I probably got it somewhere in my notes. Three or four
• 2:25:52
  professionals at the bar drinking, you know, all really four o'clock on a
• 2:25:56
  weekday, afternoon, and I think I got there first. I think I
• 2:26:01
  was there staking it out and went in and ordered a um, ordered a
• 2:26:07
  beer. And you know, honestly, boy, I haven't really thought about
• 2:26:18
  this in a long time. It might have been that Moose conveyed a message
• 2:26:24
  debate like hey, this guy's o yea, yeah, yeah, and um,
• 2:26:30
  and I think the message came back something like go tell that guy to
• 2:26:33
  go fuck himself or something like that. They're usual yeah, or or it
• 2:26:37
  was like, you know, meet me at this bar at that at such
• 2:26:41
  and such time. You know, yeah, I know, I know,
• 2:26:43
  honestly, it's been that long and I can't remember, but let me just
• 2:26:48
  say that, you know, for the record, I entered the establishment with
• 2:26:52
  a certain amount of trepidation and uh um, but yeah, sure enough,
• 2:27:01
  Babe came in and I took a seat next to him and said, hey
• 2:27:07
  babe, I'm Randall and you know I'm writing this the movie. How hard
• 2:27:13
  was it to say, hey babe? Yeah, I really thought of it
• 2:27:20
  like that. I guess, well, it would have been worse if I'd
• 2:27:22
  said, hey babe, I'm Randy. Uh if we were in England,
• 2:27:26
  that would have been you know, an entirely different subtext. Um. And
• 2:27:33
  you know, he just he didn't really want to talk at first. I
• 2:27:39
  remember him being something taken somewhat aback, so which leads me to believe now
• 2:27:43
  actually that he was. I caught him a little off guard. He wasn't
• 2:27:46
  sure that I was going to be there or something, so he but I
• 2:27:52
  remember him saying, um, kind of you know, being standoffish at first,
• 2:27:58
  but I didn't back away. I knew this was like I have to
• 2:28:01
  get this here because my job. Yeah, and he finally said, we'll
• 2:28:05
  buy me some whiskey and we'll talk, and so I we ended up drinking.
• 2:28:13
  He drank a lot of whiskey and having you know, we talked for
• 2:28:18
  probably an hour and a half two hours there at that bar initially and then
• 2:28:24
  again like I was talking about before, where there's this kind of like these
• 2:28:26
  hurdles that you were the you know, this gauntlet you have to go through.
• 2:28:31
  I cleared it with him, So therefore then I was able to go
• 2:28:37
  the next level, which was okay, we'll meet again and yeah, we'll
• 2:28:41
  get into it. Okay, you know, so it was like the outer
• 2:28:45
  circle. Then we'll get into the warm meeting the matter. Now. Let
• 2:28:48
  me so when you got hired in the job again, as a life of
• 2:28:52
  a writer, you know, you're paid and as there's like a freelance,
• 2:28:54
  so you're paid in these chunks. There's not like a regular paycheck. It's
• 2:28:58
  just literally like here there's a bit of money and there's another bit of you're
• 2:29:01
  paid an increments, and usually the way it worked at that time, you
• 2:29:03
  get paid, you know, half upfront, and you'll get paid the half
• 2:29:09
  the second half upon delivery of your first draft, and then yeah, there's
• 2:29:15
  there's a usually some left over for another path and possibly a polish you know.
• 2:29:22
  But basically you get a very large sum upfront, and then you get
• 2:29:26
  another large sum after you deliver first draft. What could happen and in between
• 2:29:31
  that, you know, it could be a long time, and it was
• 2:29:33
  in my case a long time. Yeah, I was gonna think like,
• 2:29:37
  because you're on this project, You're like, Okay, he's asking you buy
• 2:29:41
  him some whiskey. You're like, okay, I have money still whatever you
• 2:29:43
  didn't like, yeah, they're paying me to this, I'll buy this whiskey
• 2:29:46
  for you. You now make to the second you enter that circle and yeah,
• 2:29:52
  and the stuff that he was telling you, like like we'll be right
• 2:29:58
  back after a word from our spont sir, and now back to the show.
• 2:30:07
  For you personally, was it just more like were you finding moments of
• 2:30:09
  like oh wow, oh wow, like just your head spinning in a sense
• 2:30:13
  that you were like like story points or just just sheer pure human interest.
• 2:30:18
  It's more of the latter. I mean, I don't recall really just going
• 2:30:28
  holy yeah, goobers, you know, this is the most amazing stuff I've
• 2:30:33
  ever heard. It wasn't anything quite like that. A lot of the a
• 2:30:37
  lot of the stories had already been kicked about, you know, okay,
• 2:30:39
  that people who were aware of them, at least as a rumor or something.
• 2:30:43
  But I don't I don't remember, you know, having really earth shattering
• 2:30:48
  stuff coming out from Babe. And I actually I think I might have been
• 2:30:50
  a little disappointed in Babe actually, and then more than anybody else had.
• 2:30:56
  Yeah, okay, But basically, Babe, Babe was was just a good
• 2:31:00
  guy. Babe was unlike Jim and a lot of Jim's old film school crew,
• 2:31:09
  Babe was kind of the anti intellectual and in a sense, Babe kind
• 2:31:16
  of kept it real. I got for him, you know, and that
• 2:31:20
  Babe was probably more loyal than almost any and all of those friends. But
• 2:31:26
  Babe wasn't Jim's intellectual on his level. He would listen and he would tolerate
• 2:31:35
  it and kind of stuff like that. But basically, he would watch Jim's
• 2:31:37
  back and he would call bullshit Jim, you know, and Jim knew that
• 2:31:43
  Babe was real, he wasn't just sort of somebody was fawning all over him.
• 2:31:48
  And that was pretty much the case too with the other guys that they
• 2:31:52
  were pretty close in that in that little knit, close knit group, which
• 2:31:56
  was included Paul Ferrara, who I never interviewed, and Frank Leciandro, who
• 2:32:01
  I did interview. Um, those were Gym's old friends from film school.
• 2:32:05
  Um. And those guys were really tight knit, uh at you know,
• 2:32:09
  for for a for a period of time. Um. And so they did
• 2:32:16
  a lot of partying together, a lot of drinking together, and a lot
• 2:32:18
  of you know of that stuff. But um, but yeah, you know.
• 2:32:24
  But what was happening though, is that I would interview you know,
• 2:32:26
  all these different people and they none of them really got along with one another,
• 2:32:31
  and they had all kind of like you know, headed two different directions,
• 2:32:35
  you know. Um. And so what happened is that I just had
• 2:32:41
  this It was amassing all this information though, and none of it jived,
• 2:32:46
  none of it was sort of coalescing anything. And it was like a classic
• 2:32:50
  case of that you know, the the blind men touching the elephant and thinking
• 2:32:56
  that, oh, I really have the knowledge of what Jim Morrison was all
• 2:33:01
  about. But you know, he got his hand on the tusk, but
• 2:33:05
  somebody else is holding on to the tail and all and they neither one of
• 2:33:09
  them really knew right right, So it was yeah, and so it was
• 2:33:16
  it was scary then because I had to pull it all together, like like
• 2:33:20
  you realized, now it's real, Like all the honeymoons over now, it's
• 2:33:24
  just worked right now. How many years or how long did it take you
• 2:33:28
  to get the first draft to them? Well, I spent all of nineteen
• 2:33:31
  eighty six working on the one year. Yeah, when you're free starting writing,
• 2:33:35
  I got. I think I got the job in like February March something
• 2:33:41
  like that. And yeah, and so then I started researching and then writing,
• 2:33:46
  and holy crap, you know, I just got And it was funny
• 2:33:50
  too. I was. I was twenty seven years old, the same age
• 2:33:54
  Chimbo was when he died. Drove a Mustang. I had a Mustang.
• 2:34:00
  M drove a Mustang. I was living in West Hollywood, which is literally
• 2:34:03
  around the corner from from where Jim used to crash at uh Pamela's um apartment
• 2:34:13
  on Norton Avenue. I was on lived on Sweetzer and uh, just up
• 2:34:20
  from Santa Monica Boulevard, and so I was literally around the corner from his
• 2:34:26
  universe, which was basically the corner of the intersection of Santa Monica and La
• 2:34:31
  Sienega. Yeah, because the door's offices were right there. Um, the
• 2:34:35
  Alta Sienega Hotel, motel was there, Elector was just down the street.
• 2:34:41
  There were Barton's, Barney's Beanery, and a few other locales that are now
• 2:34:45
  long gone. But that was really kind of the center of his universe.
• 2:34:50
  And so it was it was a little interesting, you know, living living
• 2:34:54
  there at that time, and you know, and writing about it. This
• 2:34:58
  was that when I was first on on board on it and then and um,
• 2:35:05
  I it was it was odd. Yeah, it was really kind of
• 2:35:09
  a sort of a strange thing. But I couldn't work at home a lot
• 2:35:13
  of times because there was noise in the apartment. I had a roommate at
• 2:35:18
  the time, and yeah, and it was just it was a lot of
• 2:35:20
  it was distracting. So I I moved around a lot um and I actually
• 2:35:28
  came down to the came home to Carl's bad um and wrote a lot of
• 2:35:33
  it down there, staying with my parents, Um, just to get away,
• 2:35:39
  well, just to get away, and I got really sick. Also
• 2:35:41
  I got a UM, I got a UM. It sounds worse than it
• 2:35:46
  was, but it had monohepatitis, which just waylaid me. Um. It's
• 2:35:50
  actually a more a benign form of hepatitis than you would, you know,
• 2:35:56
  I think. But it sounds worse than than it actually was, but it
• 2:36:01
  was it. I mean, I was wasted for a long time and I
• 2:36:05
  could I literally couldn't get out of bed. And here it was. I
• 2:36:07
  had the most felt like the job of a lifetime and most importantly, and
• 2:36:11
  I couldn't. I couldn't, you know. So I wasn't laying there in
• 2:36:15
  bed and too sick to even sit up straight. But I remember just envisioning
• 2:36:22
  in my head I was laying there with this fever or these oh these aches
• 2:36:26
  or whatever. Um. I would just go over it again and again in
• 2:36:30
  my head, like one scene after the next. How I would see the
• 2:36:33
  movie, yeah, you know, and it just formed it from based on
• 2:36:37
  all the interviews and stuff, and just just envisioned it one thing after another
• 2:36:41
  after another after another's for as far as I could. Yeah, so you're
• 2:36:45
  still working, you know, I'm still working, but literally not writing.
• 2:36:48
  Yeah, which is fine. It's I mean, they talk about that and
• 2:36:52
  um, I said. The other podcast I listened to with Jeff Goldsmith's a
• 2:36:58
  creative swing writing magazine, but now he has his own podcast called The Q
• 2:37:01
  and A. And a lot of the screenwriters he's talked to, they talk
• 2:37:05
  about this this technique that they use, which is they need their nap time.
• 2:37:11
  The Coen Brothers talked about that where they just have a nap, which
• 2:37:13
  is at that weird state of in between when you're about to fall asleep and
• 2:37:18
  in a wake and all of a sudden, somehow it just cleanses your your
• 2:37:22
  thoughts and like what you're trying to work on comes clear in that weird moment
• 2:37:26
  of right before sleep or coming out of sleep. So you were lucky enough
• 2:37:31
  to be induced with the sickness that you are like constantly like that every waking
• 2:37:39
  hour. But well there's yeah, I mean, but yeah, it is
• 2:37:41
  interesting. There was there's a lot of truth to that, um and to
• 2:37:46
  that that sort of state between waking and wake and sleep and conscious umness.
• 2:37:54
  Yeah, and sleep. Um. But it was uh. Evertheless, um,
• 2:38:01
  you know, I was. I moved around a lot. I went
• 2:38:05
  up to Um, I had a wild up in the mountains above you know,
• 2:38:11
  um Palm springs there. Uh. And some friends of mine had a
• 2:38:16
  no it wasn't frint, Yes, it was friends of friends. And I
• 2:38:18
  rented a little a frame cabin for like three weeks or a month and wrote
• 2:38:24
  up there like a real writer. Yeah, yeah exactly. And then uh
• 2:38:31
  um, then I was down to my parents place, and then um,
• 2:38:35
  then I got some office space. This is really bizarre too. There were
• 2:38:39
  just all these really weird things that happened. But I was. I had
• 2:38:41
  this office space that I rented for a while and a big barn like building
• 2:38:46
  in West Hollywood. It was an old It was in an old historical building.
• 2:38:50
  I think it had been a silent film studio or something like that.
• 2:38:52
  But it had been all divided up subdivided inside, and so there were all
• 2:38:56
  these different little cubicles and plate and things within it. And somebody I had
• 2:39:03
  a friend of a friend had office space there and they were going to be
• 2:39:07
  gone, and so I could go in there and work. So I was
• 2:39:09
  there working late one night and I had all my stuff out, had doors
• 2:39:20
  tapes. I had a little again the day of of cassettes, so I
• 2:39:22
  had a little portable cassette player, and I had all my doors tapes,
• 2:39:26
  and I had a briefcase full of stuff, and I had a whole stack
• 2:39:31
  of photographs of that I had taken on the set of dudes that were in
• 2:39:37
  this briefcase and everything. And I was really tired at one point, so
• 2:39:39
  I went out and I got a bite to eat over around the corner and
• 2:39:43
  like at Hugoes or someplace. And I and I came back, came upstairs
• 2:39:48
  into this into this place, and it was pretty big and dark, you
• 2:39:50
  know, and others and end and I had this just this little light around
• 2:39:54
  my little cubby. I was working. We'll be right back back after a
• 2:40:00
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And I came
• 2:40:09
  in and I sat down, and I noticed that some of my stuff didn't
• 2:40:13
  look like the way I had left it, you know, and it was
• 2:40:18
  weird. I said, God, I don't remember, well, something was
• 2:40:22
  off it. There was some papers on the floor or something was something was
• 2:40:24
  in disarray, something wasn't wasn't quite right. Then I heard something in the
• 2:40:31
  back way. What the hell is this? So I go back. Now
• 2:40:37
  I had been told that there was there was this comedian rich Um Hall,
• 2:40:45
  Rich Hall, Rich Hall myself yeah, had also had space there and he
• 2:40:48
  would occasionally come in late at night and work around, so I thought it
• 2:40:52
  might have been him, So I said, oh, I was going,
• 2:40:54
  I'll go and say hello. Maybe. So I go on the back and
• 2:40:58
  here's this guy stooped over going through a bunch of stuff. And I come
• 2:41:05
  in and I say, hey, he's and he looks up and he says,
• 2:41:09
  oh, hello, And he has this kind of affected English accent of
• 2:41:13
  some sort of very very odd and he had this retro like fifties suit on
• 2:41:20
  and a Fedora hat literally, and uh, I said, well, this
• 2:41:30
  isn't definitely isn't rich Hall. And so I said who are you? And
• 2:41:35
  I said do you work for? It was a production company that usually was
• 2:41:39
  do you work for such and such? And he he said something, He
• 2:41:43
  said some weird answer that was like neither yes nor no, And I thought
• 2:41:46
  this isn't right. Yeah, yeah, So we chatted a little bit more
• 2:41:52
  and he was like really just like ion me, and like it was very
• 2:41:56
  really really kind of weird. And he stood up, you know, and
• 2:42:00
  I was like, there's this is something that was really not right. You're
• 2:42:03
  inside like yeah, So I said, look your si. Yeah, my
• 2:42:07
  spidy sense was up, you know. And so I said like, um
• 2:42:11
  gee, dude, you know, I don't mean to be out of line
• 2:42:16
  here, but I missing I'm missing some stuff that was on my desk me
• 2:42:22
  here. And he said, oh really, what was that? And I
• 2:42:24
  said, some tape, some doors tapes and stuff. Oh, I like
• 2:42:28
  the doors, he said. It was like, I'm really kind of creepy.
• 2:42:33
  I like the doors. Like, oh boy, this is okay.
• 2:42:37
  My spidy sense is really a point now. And I was thinking, geez,
• 2:42:41
  what do I do? And I kept thinking I can I can take
• 2:42:43
  him, I can take him. But I thought, also, this guy
• 2:42:46
  is just weird enough that he's got like a switchblade or some kind of weird
• 2:42:50
  thing in there. So, um, I kind of made my exit segue
• 2:42:58
  to back backed away from him. I went over to my cubicle and I
• 2:43:01
  called the cops and um, and I said, I got a you know,
• 2:43:05
  as there's some burglary and they said, okay, you know, blah
• 2:43:09
  blah blah, and they said they put me on hold, and then I
• 2:43:13
  then they finally came back and they said, so, when did it happened.
• 2:43:16
  I said, it's happening. Now, he's in the building. She
• 2:43:18
  say, he's in the building. Why didn't you tell us? So,
• 2:43:24
  I mean they and then this guy was he heard me and he bolted.
• 2:43:28
  He bolted out of the place and went running with my pieces of my briefcase
• 2:43:33
  or whatever and m and boy, the cops were there fast. I got
• 2:43:37
  down on the street and then I had to put my hands up because they
• 2:43:41
  thought I was the guy, and I said, no, I'm the guy
• 2:43:43
  who called. This is the you know. And so they had they had
• 2:43:46
  a helicopter overhead. This is uh not LAPD but uh this West Hollywood.
• 2:43:52
  So it was Sheriff's department. And they were there very very quickly. And
• 2:43:56
  then people from the production company called later on and I told him what happened,
• 2:44:00
  and because there had been other things that had been taken, and so
• 2:44:03
  what happened is, you know, I lost um. This guy absconded with
• 2:44:07
  a bunch of my doors cassettes, not not fortunately, nothing that could not
• 2:44:13
  be replaced, except that he took my grandfather's briefcase, which was something that
• 2:44:18
  I was, you know, very proudly thought was cool. I need old
• 2:44:20
  satchel looking kind of a briefcase, and um, there might have been some
• 2:44:26
  notes or something, but also all the photographs I had taken out on the
• 2:44:31
  dude set, which happy ending though I found the negatives too. Many years
• 2:44:37
  later, like after I moved up here, actually interesting, and I found
• 2:44:41
  him. You know, that's one of the advantages of moving is that you
• 2:44:43
  find a lot of stuff. So I got those reprinted and actually they're on
• 2:44:48
  my my website now. So anyway, but that was just m and they
• 2:44:54
  never found the guy. And actually many it's like several months, like six
• 2:45:00
  months later, I got a phone call and they had found the briefcase and
• 2:45:05
  they had found stuff, but it was just deteriorate. He had stashed it
• 2:45:09
  under the steps or some bushes there on the compound and it had been rained
• 2:45:16
  on and deteriorated and all that stuff. But they had found it. There
• 2:45:18
  was still some stuff in it that you know, I was able to salvage
• 2:45:22
  a little bit of, but still the good stuff was gone. And uh,
• 2:45:26
  anyhow, that was just kind of sort of typical of what was going
• 2:45:33
  on. I. You know, I remember coming home one day after working,
• 2:45:37
  you know, interviewing people, and I was just exhausted and my head
• 2:45:39
  was swimming, and I, you know, I didn't know if I was
• 2:45:43
  making any progress at all. And I literally like laid down to take that
• 2:45:48
  nap and my head had hit the pillow and the phone rang and I picked
• 2:45:56
  it up and I said hello, and he said, Randy Johnson. Yes,
• 2:46:01
  I'm blah bladeh blah here. I won't say who it was because he's
• 2:46:05
  actually a very successful director now, but he was an actor at the time,
• 2:46:11
  aspiring actor. And he said, I hear you're writing the Doors movie,
• 2:46:18
  I said, and he said he announced his name like we were old
• 2:46:22
  buddies, and I said high and uh good um and he um. He
• 2:46:31
  said, well, I understand you're writing the Doors movie. And I say
• 2:46:33
  yeah, and said, well, listen, you know, we gotta get
• 2:46:37
  together because you know, um, I'm a huge Doors fan and I'm I'm
• 2:46:41
  the guy to play Jim. And I said, well listen, man,
• 2:46:46
  you know. Um. Thanks, but there's not even a script yet.
• 2:46:48
  It's a little premature. I mean, we don't I haven't even written this
• 2:46:52
  finished the script yet. And um, frankly, you know, when it
• 2:46:56
  comes down to casting, I'm not gonna I'm gonna be lucky to even if
• 2:46:58
  they even asked me, you know, my opinion. And so anyway,
• 2:47:03
  somehow, I you know, I got off the line. He called me
• 2:47:05
  up a couple of one other time, and literally it was the same kind
• 2:47:09
  of circumstances. Middle of the afternoon. I was like trying to take a
• 2:47:13
  nap and he was. He said, I'm tripping. I'm tripping, man,
• 2:47:18
  I'm tripping. And I said, well, good for you, and
• 2:47:22
  he said, listen, he said, you got to know this. He
• 2:47:24
  said, I had a dream last night and guess who came to me in
• 2:47:30
  my dream? Yeah, she um, I wonder he said, Jim Morrison.
• 2:47:39
  He came to me in the dream, and he said, I'm the
• 2:47:41
  guy to play him in the movie. So we have got to get together,
• 2:47:46
  man, we've got to get together. And I just like, dude,
• 2:47:50
  dude, you know, don't call me when you're high, you know.
• 2:47:56
  And he's a successful director. Yeah, it's fine, he's fine.
• 2:47:58
  He's on. I won't say who it was, but but this was just
• 2:48:01
  kind of the nutty, bizarre circumstances that were, you know, just in
• 2:48:07
  the midst of all this and um, where I was trying really hard just
• 2:48:11
  to get through my find my way through it all. And yeah, and
• 2:48:13
  I couldn't. And so you know, again back to your whole thing,
• 2:48:16
  Could I have written a book? Yeah? Um, I think in one
• 2:48:18
  sense, after I was off the project, that I had all this,
• 2:48:24
  all this, all these interviews, and it was very I thought, nobody's,
• 2:48:28
  nobody's gonna want to read a book about it. And then subsequently,
• 2:48:31
  you know, I mean, for like every six months there was a new
• 2:48:35
  Jim Morrison biography that was coming out, and I'm just sort of kicked myself
• 2:48:37
  for not doing it. There was you know. The reason I brought that
• 2:48:41
  up is because I remember hearing this interview with another another screenwriter and they were
• 2:48:46
  talking about this other famous I don't remember her name, but they were asking
• 2:48:52
  or like, hey, you know, if you would ever we're approached with
• 2:48:54
  this particular project again, and would you, you know, write it the
• 2:48:58
  same way or write this project she's she's her response. I remember it was
• 2:49:03
  something like like hell no, because I would write. I would write the
• 2:49:07
  book, I write the play, I write the movie. Basically like mindset
• 2:49:11
  was like I would figure out way to milk it in all different facets,
• 2:49:15
  you know, and like her her life lesson as what she learned after being
• 2:49:18
  a writer for so many years. Like so that's what I thought about it
• 2:49:22
  too. It's like, wait a minute, Holy cow, you know,
• 2:49:24
  I just had to ask you just because I remember that little a little snippet
• 2:49:28
  from suff Well, some of this stuff. I'm actually I think going to
• 2:49:33
  attempt a large article about it, you know, at some point, because
• 2:49:37
  I think there is enough stuff that in here that's kind of actually worth looking
• 2:49:43
  at in terms of a screenwriter's um approach to a daunting project. And that
• 2:49:50
  my kind of like my whole trip, my whole journey on this was it
• 2:49:54
  was, it was something, and yeah it's something. I earned some stripes
• 2:49:58
  on this one. I think, Yeah, that's cool. We'll be right
• 2:50:01
  back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 2:50:11
  I think we'll wrap it up here because I think we can go into the
• 2:50:15
  next next. I love it because we can go the next one. We
• 2:50:18
  talk about the final release of Dudes, we can talk about the Stone coming
• 2:50:24
  into this exactly. This is fantastic. Believe me. I'm gonna be honest,
• 2:50:30
  with you. I listened a lot of podcasts, and I said,
• 2:50:33
  with a lot of screenwriters, and they do like a lot of the interviews
• 2:50:35
  they do with screenwriters. Even though I loved what Jeff Goldsmith does, they
• 2:50:41
  served as kind of he only has like an hour and a half to really
• 2:50:43
  kind of closs over somebody's career. So the advantage that we have here is
• 2:50:48
  I get to ask these questions that I know, I'm just like a fan
• 2:50:52
  like anybody else, going like, god, wish what would that be like
• 2:50:56
  if you had that moment you're like, oh my god, I'm on the
• 2:50:58
  job. You know, it's like or like I can't believe this is so
• 2:51:01
  surreal that that I'm working with the doors the doors, And then like you
• 2:51:05
  but you got to step back and you're like, now it's this work.
• 2:51:07
  I gotta just figure out and just talking about the little things about writing about
• 2:51:11
  like you know, you realize you're you're you're you're doing a service because you're
• 2:51:16
  just trying to get the story. But there comes a time sometimes where I
• 2:51:20
  guess you're yet that's yourself, like what kind of story do I want to
• 2:51:24
  see? Or like what is it you know that you know what I mean
• 2:51:26
  that, where was that little bounce of personal reward out of it, especially
• 2:51:33
  when you're writing all these you know, sort of pseudo autobiographies. Well,
• 2:51:37
  in that autobiographies, I'm sorry, Yeah, in biopics or whatever. But
• 2:51:41
  in this particular case, Um, the more I got into it and the
• 2:51:48
  more information I began to uncover and collect, the more and more it fuelled
• 2:51:56
  my I don't know my passion for it. Let's say, um, it
• 2:52:03
  became my crusade. I got to a degree to um to in a sense,
• 2:52:09
  blow the whistle on the bullshit that had circulated about him for so many
• 2:52:13
  years and in the very least try to tell an attempt to tell some truth
• 2:52:20
  about him. But at the same time, uh, that was my undoing
• 2:52:26
  on the project. And so we'll leave it at that. There was much
• 2:52:30
  conflict to come, okay, because it was not smooth sailing. Okay,
• 2:52:33
  Well, let you know where. And I remember when we finally saw the
• 2:52:35
  film. I think I was in senior high school. Yeah, it was
• 2:52:39
  a big, big deal for my buddies and I to go see this movie,
• 2:52:43
  so, you know, because it was a big event. So anyway,
• 2:52:48
  well, when I was in the in the South Pacific. Earlier in
• 2:52:50
  this year, and in March um there was a I met a gentleman who
• 2:52:54
  was um a politician and serving in the parlor of the island kingdom chain of
• 2:53:03
  Vanawattu, and he found out that I wrote the Doors and he just he
• 2:53:09
  he said, I saw it in college in all places. You know,
• 2:53:13
  this was in Australia. But he grew up and has returned to Vanawattu out
• 2:53:18
  there in the deep South Pacific, and he said, oh man, he
• 2:53:22
  said, I'm so glad to meet you. So you really got it right.
• 2:53:24
  And so it never ceases to amaze me how powerful, you know,
• 2:53:31
  film and pop culture is really. You know, it's so far reaching.
• 2:53:35
  You know, there's not a point in the globe anymore where it just doesn't
• 2:53:37
  go. It is the greatest export that yeah, the United States has.
• 2:53:41
  Yeah, and it will change. It will change. I mean, it
• 2:53:46
  will change worlds because you know, it doesn't matter how I mean the culture
• 2:53:52
  of these young people and all the all these little other countries. I mean
• 2:53:56
  not to say westernize it, but there is this romance idea of I think
• 2:54:01
  what these Western movies sort of ten that hits a psyche amongst you know the
• 2:54:07
  rest of the world, and I think that's sort of sometimes becomes the root
• 2:54:09
  of you know, revolution. I mean, hell, we were bombed.
• 2:54:13
  I mean we were attacking nine to eleven because of the stupidest things of like
• 2:54:18
  of they were they were citing, you know, Britney spears, like how
• 2:54:22
  could you have your women dress like this? Right? Yeah, you know
• 2:54:24
  it's like sure we were so like what that was the reason? Yeah,
• 2:54:28
  but there you go. Anyway, Yeah, well thanks for asking the questions,
• 2:54:33
  and thanks for giving me the opportunity actually to get into this and in
• 2:54:37
  a certain amount of depth, you know. Yeah, no, it just
• 2:54:39
  doesn't you know again, if this were any other interview, it would be
• 2:54:41
  gloss over yeah. Yeah, and then it's like, oh, okay,
• 2:54:46
  you're right, but yeah, sound bites. Now this is good. I
• 2:54:48
  mean I'm enjoying it. It's like, oh, uncovering and and all this
• 2:54:52
  kind of stuff. But now, but gives me those thoughts like why we
• 2:54:56
  should write a story about your adventure writing this stuff? Yeah, I don'
• 2:55:00
  yeah, I think that's in the works here at some point, I don't.
• 2:55:03
  Yeah, see you we're like we're scratching the surface here, all right,
• 2:55:05
  Yeah, well here we are. I'm sure I like some good stuff.
• 2:55:09
  Thanks Scott, thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thank you,
• 2:55:13
  guys, Thank you. I want to thank Scott so much for doing such
• 2:55:18
  a great job on this episode. If you want to get links to anything
• 2:55:20
  we spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at Bulletproof
• 2:55:24
  Screenwriting dot tv. Forward slash three ten, and if you haven't already,
• 2:55:28
  please head over to Screenwriting podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good review
• 2:55:33
  for the show. It really helps us out a lot. Thank you again
• 2:55:37
  for listening guys. As always, keep on writing no matter what. I'll
• 2:55:41
  talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast at Bulletproof
• 2:55:46
  Screenwriting dot tv.