Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 727 Lessons Learned Writing Oliver Stone's The Doors with Randall Jahnson_mixdown

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IFH 727 Lessons Learned Writing Oliver Stone's The Doors with Randall Jahnson_mixdown · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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