Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 718: Licking My Wounds Writing The Mask of Zorro for Hollywood with Randall Jahnson

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IFH 718: Licking My Wounds Writing The Mask of Zorro for Hollywood with Randall Jahnson · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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