Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Entertainment Series 12: Marc Eliot / Jack Nicholson / 60-70’s Hollywood/ Walt Disney & the FBI

Transcript

Entertainment Series 12: Marc Eliot / Jack Nicholson / 60-70’s Hollywood/ Walt Disney & the FBI · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:15
  Mark Elliott, thank you so much for coming onto the show.
• 0:17
  How are you? Fine, thanks.
• 0:21
  I really appreciate you making time, especially because you
• 0:24
  mentioned how busy you are. And looking at your library,
• 0:27
  it's very clear how busy you keep yourself.
• 0:29
  You do an astounding amount of work on a really, really
• 0:33
  wonderfully wide array of topics.
• 0:36
  And I just want to say, as a podcast host that tries to keep
• 0:40
  up with that same spirit, I really appreciate all the work
• 0:42
  that you're doing and that you've been doing.
• 0:45
  Well, thanks. It's a, you know, it's a
• 0:48
  lifetime of work. It seems like it.
• 0:50
  It seems like it. What were you?
• 0:51
  What, what got you what, what were you most passionate about
• 0:54
  when I got you started? Because you write about
• 0:56
  politics, you write about music, you write about cinema and
• 0:58
  actors and and the entertainment world.
• 1:01
  What got you started? Well, originally I was in the
• 1:06
  theatre. I was an actor for many years as
• 1:10
  a child. I just a lot of TV and live
• 1:16
  theatre. I lived in Greenwich Village in
• 1:19
  the 60s and I fell in with the folk music crowd and became very
• 1:27
  friendly with a lot of a lot of the young, still unknown
• 1:32
  performers, especially Sterloaks, David Blue, Tim
• 1:37
  Hardin, people like that who were on the precipice of
• 1:43
  becoming quite famous and still are.
• 1:50
  I became especially close to Phil Oakes.
• 1:55
  He was a topical folk singer, very charismatic and brilliant.
• 2:02
  Brilliant singer and songwriter. He had a had a beautiful voice.
• 2:07
  If you've never heard him, you should do yourself a favor and
• 2:11
  Google him and you'll be pleasantly surprised.
• 2:15
  Anyway, after I struggled through undergraduate school at
• 2:22
  the CCNY City University of New York, majoring in liberal arts
• 2:29
  and, you know, kind of growing a little bit out of theater,
• 2:35
  mostly because I didn't like, I didn't like 2 things.
• 2:41
  I didn't like the environment and I didn't like the scripts.
• 2:46
  I thought most of the stuff that came my way was kind of junky
• 2:52
  and predictable and mediocre. So I was thinking about making
• 3:01
  writing more of my profession, which I had always been writing.
• 3:07
  I had been writing since I was a kid, but never really thought
• 3:10
  about it as something to do instead of acting.
• 3:15
  While I was at City College, I took a film course as an
• 3:19
  elective and I I took it because I thought, well here's 3 credits
• 3:25
  that I don't have to do anything for and I'll watch a movie, get
• 3:28
  3 credits and get the hell out of there as soon as I can.
• 3:33
  I made a similar decision. Yeah, I think everybody did at
• 3:37
  some point or another. You look for those courses.
• 3:42
  Did you go to the movies? Yes.
• 3:44
  OK, you get a name. The course was taught by a
• 3:49
  fellow named Herman G Weinberg. Herman G Weinberg had written a
• 3:56
  biography of Joseph Monsternberg.
• 4:03
  People may not know who he is by name, but Sternberg was a
• 4:07
  director of the Blue Angel very famous movie with Marlena
• 4:12
  Dietrich. He had discovered Dietrich while
• 4:16
  she was still in Germany as a kind of a nightclub singer,
• 4:20
  dancehall girl. Whatever she was, he fell in
• 4:23
  love with her. This is Sternberg and he made 8
• 4:29
  movies with her and each of them was less successful as they were
• 4:37
  made. The more his obsession with her
• 4:39
  grew, the less disciplined the films became and more
• 4:43
  specialized. You know, he would shoot her
• 4:46
  through gauze, he would do all kind of special effects.
• 4:51
  He showed all 8 films. That was the course.
• 4:55
  It was. It was Sternberg.
• 4:56
  Dietrich was the name of the course, and for me it was an
• 5:01
  absolute revelation that film, one film of a director, was
• 5:10
  related to another film of the same director.
• 5:14
  That in order to understand one film, you really had to see all
• 5:19
  the films. That opened up a whole new way
• 5:22
  of thinking about film, writing about film and acting in film.
• 5:31
  There were It just kind of opened everything like a flower
• 5:35
  in the spring. I finally graduated from City
• 5:39
  College with ABA. You might see hanging back there
• 5:45
  somewhere. And then I was determined to
• 5:50
  become a writer about film. But my hero at the time, one of
• 5:57
  my heroes, was Andrew Cyrus. Andrew Cyrus, for those who
• 6:03
  don't know, brought or tourism a French theory of film criticism
• 6:09
  to America, and it made him the preeminent film critic of the
• 6:14
  70s, eighties and so on. But mainly in the 70s when we
• 6:19
  had a second called the American New Wave, I guess you could say
• 6:24
  those wonderful films as Scorsese, De Palma, Mike
• 6:29
  Nichols, all those great independently produced movies as
• 6:36
  the studio system was dying out. Anyway, a friend of mine came to
• 6:40
  me and said, you know, you ought to get your, your degrees, your
• 6:45
  graduate degrees, because when you're writing doesn't work out,
• 6:50
  you can then you can then teach. I said, are you crazy?
• 6:54
  What do you mean by when my writing?
• 6:56
  Of course it's going to work out.
• 6:58
  No, no, you better do it. So I said, I have, I don't want
• 7:01
  to spend another minute in inside an institution.
• 7:07
  Then he came back and he said, you know, I'm, I'm on the board
• 7:11
  of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, in
• 7:18
  Manhattan, he said. And Columbia University is
• 7:24
  starting a film program, a graduate film program that you
• 7:29
  should, you should get in there and pick up those degrees and
• 7:34
  something you like. That's I really I.
• 7:38
  And the head of the program is going to be Andrew Sarris.
• 7:41
  Well, that changed everything. When I realized I had the chance
• 7:46
  to study with him. Reluctantly, I applied to
• 7:53
  Colombia. I hadn't even taken the GRE, so
• 7:56
  I had no I had an OK record of grades and all.
• 8:04
  I didn't think I had a chance, but they were.
• 8:07
  It was their first year. They wanted students.
• 8:09
  They were trying to compete with NYU that had a big film school.
• 8:13
  Yeah, very prolific. And my friend who was on the
• 8:20
  board somehow managed to get a fellowship for me to go.
• 8:24
  So in effect, I was going for free.
• 8:27
  And so I, you know, I bit my tongue and I went back to school
• 8:34
  and spent about seven years at Columbia getting my MFA,
• 8:41
  teaching there, doing my PhD, all of which I I had no reason
• 8:48
  to get because I never planned on teaching while I was in my
• 8:53
  after I took my oral exams for my doctorate, Sill Oaks
• 8:58
  committed suicide. He had by that time become one
• 9:04
  of my best friends. We have made a movie together.
• 9:07
  But previous July he had said, hey, Mark, I want you to make a
• 9:11
  film with me. I sure.
• 9:15
  What's the film? The farewell performance of Phil
• 9:18
  Oakes. He said, we're going to shoot it
• 9:21
  down at Dirtys, Folk City, big famous folk club where Bob Dylan
• 9:28
  began. And he said, can you get it
• 9:30
  together in a couple of days with your friends in Columbia?
• 9:35
  And I'll, he said, I'll back, you know, all the expenses.
• 9:39
  So I went, I went to see all my friends, not so much at
• 9:42
  Columbia, but I had friends at NPR.
• 9:45
  A lot of my friends worked on Sesame Street.
• 9:47
  So they had cameras, they had film or video, they had sound
• 9:53
  equipment, and they just brought everything down to Folk City.
• 9:58
  We sat up for three days, made the movie, and you can tell that
• 10:04
  Phil was not well, I mean, to say the least.
• 10:09
  He, he, he had some mental issues that eventually won the
• 10:16
  battle. Six months later, he he was dead
• 10:20
  of his own family. So that really I've changed
• 10:26
  everything for me on, on a lot of levels.
• 10:28
  First of all, the loss of a great friend, a major influence
• 10:33
  on my creative side, and someone who had opened up so many ways
• 10:42
  of approaching subjects that I really hadn't thought about
• 10:46
  before. Combined with Andrew Sarris, who
• 10:49
  became my mentor in film. So I felt in an odd way
• 10:55
  reloaded. I went to tell you a quick funny
• 11:00
  story. I went to I decided to write
• 11:02
  Phil's life. So the most I had published were
• 11:06
  a couple of small articles and a couple of college newspaper
• 11:12
  pieces. I had become the film critic for
• 11:17
  Penthouse magazine to a crazy quirk of fake, and the only
• 11:21
  thing I can say about that is they threw tremendous Christmas
• 11:24
  parties. Anyway, I bought a book.
• 11:33
  There was a book that they used to sell in bookstores and
• 11:36
  remember bookstores. I still frequent them every now
• 11:40
  and then. Yeah, they're like ancient
• 11:42
  relics. They're like Ozamandias.
• 11:46
  There was a book how to get your book published and you could buy
• 11:48
  it and it had no value, had no absolutely no value.
• 11:54
  You get a typewriter, you know, it was that kind of thing.
• 11:56
  But at the end of the book, they always had a list that came out
• 11:59
  every year of agents, literary agents.
• 12:04
  And that's why everybody bought the book.
• 12:07
  So I went through the list of agents.
• 12:11
  The only agency that I recognize was the William Morris Agency,
• 12:15
  because everybody knew William Morris Agency.
• 12:18
  You know, all our grandparents had people who worked at the
• 12:21
  William Morris Agency in Barnville and all that, and at
• 12:25
  William Morris. CA didn't exist yet, right?
• 12:28
  What didn't exist? The CAA did not exist yet right
• 12:31
  there was. Still work came out anymore,
• 12:32
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 12:33
  That's. Right.
• 12:34
  It was a rebel. It was a.
• 12:36
  Michael Ovitz. Yeah, Mike Obitz, who had begun
• 12:40
  it. William Morris.
• 12:40
  So did you sweat? About him, he's a cool dude.
• 12:43
  He's I know my therefore I wouldn't be able to write.
• 12:49
  David Geffen came out of William Morris also.
• 12:52
  Yes, yes, yes. Elliott Roberts, who who
• 12:56
  partnered up with who I knew as a kid.
• 12:58
  Elliott grew up a block away from me.
• 13:00
  Wow. Elliott Rabinowitz when I knew
• 13:03
  anyway. So in those days, we're talking
• 13:08
  about I guess, 7879. In those days, you could still
• 13:16
  do what I did. I took a subway up to Midtown,
• 13:22
  where William Morris was. I walked in, you know, they had
• 13:26
  where they were in The MGM building and they had a security
• 13:29
  desk in a lobby. And I said, I want to see.
• 13:33
  I want to go up to William Morris in the writing division.
• 13:36
  OK. They said, take the elevator to
• 13:38
  the 16th floor. Those were those days.
• 13:42
  So I did. I went up to the 16th floor.
• 13:44
  The elevators opened. There was a reception desk.
• 13:47
  And that pretty young girl was there.
• 13:50
  And I I said, yeah, I'd like to see an agent.
• 13:53
  She said, well, do you have an appointment?
• 13:54
  I know, but I I have a project. She said, well, let me see.
• 14:02
  I don't know if anybody will see and see what, Oh, we have a, we
• 14:05
  have an agent who it's really his first day and he has no
• 14:10
  clients. Maybe he'll see you.
• 14:13
  So she called them up, you know, buzzed them and he said, all
• 14:17
  right, send them in. So I went in and how do you do?
• 14:23
  And sat down and he said, what have you got?
• 14:25
  He said, well, I'm going to write a book about Phil Oaks.
• 14:28
  Never heard of it. I sorry.
• 14:30
  Chill Oaks, everybody else but you.
• 14:34
  You're the guy who hasn't heard of him.
• 14:37
  And I talked to him for about 1/2 hour.
• 14:39
  Is it folk singer, 60s Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan?
• 14:43
  You know, all the all the butts. At the end of the half hour he
• 14:48
  said all right, let me think it over and call me tomorrow.
• 14:53
  So I left. Wow, going back to that book,
• 14:58
  how to get your book published? Besides agents, they had a list
• 15:03
  of editors. So in the film that I made, the
• 15:09
  opening I wrote, I wrote an introduction to the book.
• 15:14
  The only part I wrote based on the opening of the show, What
• 15:19
  went on the tumultuous night at the Folk City.
• 15:25
  And I had sent it out to I think it was 39 editors and they all
• 15:31
  came back one by one. No, no, I got a letter from one.
• 15:36
  I said this is a nicely done but not for us.
• 15:41
  So I thought, well, I called them up and I said hi, Mark
• 15:46
  Kelly. Who I say I wrote this, I sent
• 15:49
  you a letter of Phil Oaks thing and you sent the thing back,
• 15:52
  meaning not for us. What do you mean by that?
• 15:54
  It means we don't want it. We hung the phone.
• 15:59
  You know the lessons that you learned.
• 16:02
  And finally I got AI got a letter from a pub from an editor
• 16:07
  saying, look, you have to have an agent.
• 16:10
  You can't just send stuff over the trance and nobody even reads
• 16:14
  it. It's, it's illegal to read it.
• 16:16
  Get yourself an agent. So that's when I went to the
• 16:18
  agent page. That's when I went to William
• 16:20
  Morris. The next day I was about to call
• 16:25
  Mel my age, no burger, and my phone rang.
• 16:30
  So I thought it was William Morris.
• 16:32
  I, I picked it up and on the other end I heard, hi, my name
• 16:37
  is so and so. We've had your Phil Oakes
• 16:42
  proposal here for a couple of months.
• 16:45
  That's how long this has taken. And we can publish it.
• 16:51
  If you don't want too much money, we'll, we'll take a
• 16:53
  chance on it. And I said to him, you'll have
• 16:57
  to talk to my agent. Well, who's your agent?
• 17:01
  I said, oh, William Morris and I gave him Mel's number.
• 17:04
  I hung the phone up and I called Mel immediately.
• 17:07
  Let me talk to Mel. Mel gets on the phone.
• 17:10
  Who is this? And I said Mark Elliott, I was
• 17:14
  just there yesterday. I can't.
• 17:17
  Phil Hawks. I don't.
• 17:18
  I don't know. I can't do.
• 17:21
  I said, look, I just got a call from Doubleday.
• 17:24
  They want to publish the book. And I told them you were my
• 17:27
  agent. Hop into a cab.
• 17:30
  Come right up. I'll be waiting outside.
• 17:33
  I'll have the contractor sign it on the taxi door.
• 17:37
  And then we'll go up and I'll call this guy and I'll get you
• 17:41
  the deal. He'll get me the deal.
• 17:43
  I I got him the deal. His first.
• 17:45
  His first deal. So sure enough, while we go up,
• 17:51
  he calls the John was the Fellows now a kid, a young,
• 17:56
  young kid who tried for three months to get Doubleday to agree
• 18:00
  to publish the book. A Doubleday was the last family
• 18:03
  owned publisher, which is the only way you could get a book
• 18:07
  like Phillips published. The corporation would be near.
• 18:11
  And by the end of the day, I had a book deal.
• 18:14
  I was a writer, published writer, and that's how I became
• 18:20
  a professional writer. You couldn't do it today.
• 18:24
  When I tell young people that story, they, you know, I have a
• 18:28
  friend who's been trying to publish a book for 10 years and
• 18:34
  they can't even get to an agent. You know, they, it's so
• 18:37
  difficult today. An agent won't take you unless
• 18:40
  you're published. You can't get published unless
• 18:42
  you have an agent. It's a very, very difficult
• 18:45
  crazy field. And now with AI, it's even
• 18:47
  tougher. I did, I did the Phil Oaks book.
• 18:55
  Doubleday didn't know really what they had.
• 19:00
  Not so much me as a book about Phil, Phil's brother Michael
• 19:05
  Oakes, who became a well known source of photographs.
• 19:10
  Michael Oakes archives. He just passed away a few months
• 19:13
  ago. Opened every door.
• 19:16
  Anybody I wanted to talk to. I moved out to LA, lived with
• 19:19
  Michael and spent six or seven months researching that book.
• 19:27
  When I finally got it all together and the book was
• 19:30
  published, nobody at Doubleday thought this was going to sell
• 19:35
  10 copies. The book came out the first
• 19:41
  week. The New York Times Sunday Book
• 19:43
  Review did a half page of the book.
• 19:48
  It wasn't a rave, but it wasn't a it wasn't a bad review.
• 19:55
  It was a pretty good review. That review made my career.
• 20:00
  Yeah. To be in the Sunday book review
• 20:03
  with a half page for a first time writer that made my career.
• 20:08
  The next day, Monday, the publisher called me up.
• 20:12
  Come on, we want to have lunch with you.
• 20:14
  And what do you want to do next? In our way, we'd love to sign
• 20:17
  you for a whole. Everything changed.
• 20:21
  And from then to now, I've never really been out of work.
• 20:28
  That's incredible. That's how I became a writer.
• 20:32
  I love that there's so much, there's so much about that
• 20:36
  that's so wonderful. And I think that from my own
• 20:38
  experience, at least the podcast world, because similar to the
• 20:42
  publishing world, I would imagine every time Dick and
• 20:44
  Harry has a podcast or wants to start a podcast, they want
• 20:47
  something to do with it, right? So you got to do something to to
• 20:50
  stand out and show that you're a little different.
• 20:53
  And one of the things that I realized is that everyone's got
• 20:56
  to find a way to like, if you want to make it, you have to be
• 20:59
  creative about being scrappy and you have to be creative about
• 21:02
  about like forcing opportunity and really, you know, and almost
• 21:06
  making your own luck. Like things happen.
• 21:08
  The more effort I found that I put in, the more that things
• 21:11
  fall into place without any of my intention of it falling into
• 21:14
  place that way. I don't even know what I kind of
• 21:17
  am intending for it just all, you know, I just know that I'm
• 21:20
  putting in the work and then things are kind of happening as
• 21:22
  it goes along. And I feel like that's because I
• 21:25
  think everyone that tries to stick to a formula ends up
• 21:28
  creating this kind of enormous backlog of everyone trying to do
• 21:31
  the same thing in the same system is trying to vet out, you
• 21:35
  know, everyone that's playing this, that that that particular
• 21:37
  version of the game. But if you're able, if you're if
• 21:39
  you're able to circumvent it in some kind of creative way, like
• 21:42
  what you did, I mean, what you did was really just you, you
• 21:45
  just sold yourself and you managed to convince someone to,
• 21:48
  you know, to both people to bite at the same time, you know,
• 21:51
  again, for to I guess sounds like serendipity, but it's I'm
• 21:54
  sure no, it's in no part without the effort that you exerted for
• 21:57
  months to try to make it happen, you know?
• 21:59
  Yeah, I mean, it's serendipity, but it isn't and it isn't.
• 22:03
  I sent out those 39. Sure, that's my point.
• 22:07
  And I didn't know any better that you can't walk into an
• 22:11
  agency. I just said I'm going to go up
• 22:13
  there. Why not?
• 22:16
  It was, you know, the times were different.
• 22:20
  Aggression. Some of it came out of
• 22:22
  ignorance. You know, I didn't know any
• 22:24
  better. When you I say you tell people
• 22:27
  today that story, how did you can't do that?
• 22:29
  You have to do this and that. Well, I didn't read the book,
• 22:32
  so. Yeah.
• 22:32
  And. That's why I'm able to make it.
• 22:35
  I love that. And I also thought that anybody
• 22:38
  who heard the name Phil Oakes would immediately want that
• 22:42
  book. Little did I know you know how
• 22:45
  uninterested most people were in publishing about Phil.
• 22:51
  Right, right. There's so many places to go,
• 22:55
  but I, I, there, there's a couple of topics that I, I want
• 22:58
  to dive into and, and, and there's two that I care the most
• 23:03
  to get into and that is Springsteen and Disney.
• 23:07
  Those are my, those are the two that I, I think that I know the
• 23:09
  most about. So I'd like to have a in depth
• 23:11
  conversation, but I also want to talk about Jack Nicholson
• 23:14
  because you weren't, you spent a lot of time talking about film
• 23:17
  and, and the film world in the 60s and 70s.
• 23:20
  And there's a great book that I've referenced in the podcast
• 23:24
  before called Easy Rider, Raging Bull about, yeah.
• 23:27
  And about, about the, the, the, the development of the creative
• 23:31
  power over time when, as it pertains to movies and film and
• 23:37
  you and the 60s and the 70s were the directors era and you know,
• 23:42
  with Scorsese and Spielberg and George Lucas and, you know, I
• 23:46
  mean, and then everyone was kind of making the way you describe
• 23:48
  it, these art films that were turned into, they were really
• 23:52
  character driven and real narrative driven.
• 23:55
  I, I, I, I've read, you know, accounts of everyone scoffing at
• 23:59
  Star Wars because it was this big commercial, you know, space
• 24:03
  cowboy movie and that was so different from what mean Streets
• 24:05
  would be or something like that. Well, it wasn't.
• 24:09
  It wasn't just because it was a space film.
• 24:13
  What happened was just to. Please.
• 24:16
  Give my view. I I think that Peter Biskins
• 24:20
  stuff is is for the most part pretty good sometimes.
• 24:24
  Hey everyone real quick if you're enjoying the show, click
• 24:26
  subscribe and rate the show. 5 stars helps a ton.
• 24:29
  Thanks so much. Less good than others, but he,
• 24:34
  he know, he, he's never really been in the business.
• 24:37
  He, he looks at the business. What happened with Spielberg and
• 24:42
  Lucas is that they, they didn't want to be independent film
• 24:47
  makers. They wanted to be studio film
• 24:49
  makers. You know, Spielberg's walking
• 24:52
  into was it Fox or it was Fox taking an office and, you know,
• 24:59
  running into Lou Wasserman and nobody knowing that he wasn't
• 25:03
  there. These were guys who wanted who
• 25:05
  grew up on studio movies. They didn't grow up on
• 25:09
  independent films like Scorsese did.
• 25:12
  Scorsese grew up on Italian films he saw on Channel 9 in New
• 25:16
  York. His parents watched every night,
• 25:19
  black and white, near realism Spielberg and Lucas.
• 25:26
  Lucas after, after Star Wars, no, after American Graffiti came
• 25:32
  out, came to Columbia University where I was at the time, and he
• 25:39
  and his wife, his then wife Marsha, sat in, ran a class and
• 25:46
  somebody said, what do you want to do next after American
• 25:50
  Graffiti, which is basically an independent film done by Zoetro.
• 25:54
  That's a great movie. Yeah, great movie.
• 25:56
  Yeah, Francis Coppola produced again.
• 25:59
  So he said, I want to, I want to do Flash Gordon.
• 26:06
  Now, if you're of a certain age, you grew up with Flash Gordon,
• 26:10
  Saturday mornings on TV with the Buster Krab serial version.
• 26:16
  If you were my age, you watched it in the movie theaters every
• 26:19
  Saturday morning, and you worried all week, how is Flash
• 26:23
  going to get out of this? And then you went back and you
• 26:27
  forgot that they changed the thing a little bit so he could
• 26:30
  survive. That's what Lucas wanted to do.
• 26:33
  He wanted to be a studio. Gotcha.
• 26:36
  There are different paths. There are different paths.
• 26:39
  Yeah, he he independence didn't mean anything to him or to
• 26:43
  Spielberg. Freedom did.
• 26:45
  And they thought that freedom, that they could get freedom in
• 26:49
  the studio system because all the heroes were directors who
• 26:54
  worked in the in the system. So as but by then the system had
• 26:59
  collapsed totally. It had become ATV distribution
• 27:04
  it. Didn't mean so much money,
• 27:05
  right? Because TV was making so much
• 27:07
  money. Well, it was it was making
• 27:10
  money, but they no longer had to put the money in to feature
• 27:15
  films and release one film every month.
• 27:19
  They could just grind it out, same set, same actors, you know,
• 27:23
  long term contracts, residuals, run it a million times so.
• 27:28
  Law and Order comes to mind. Let's Yeah.
• 27:31
  Grey's Anatomy comes to mind. Survivor comes on.
• 27:33
  Shows, I mean, they are they not so much for the actors, but for
• 27:38
  the producers. It's just, you know, it's a cash
• 27:42
  register that keeps ringing. So Lucas and Spielberg made a
• 27:48
  deal with, I think it was you. I was Universal.
• 27:53
  They made a deal with Universal that they would partner up with
• 27:57
  the studio, where they in effect would have their own independent
• 28:01
  production house with Universal. That's how everything changed.
• 28:07
  That kind of killed off the idea of studio and independent
• 28:11
  together for anybody else. So you either worked under that
• 28:17
  umbrella or you went into TV, or you made independent films and
• 28:22
  hoped you could sell them at the new way, which was festivals.
• 28:27
  Right. So that's that's really what
• 28:30
  happened. And it begins, as Biskin points
• 28:33
  out, really with Bonnie and Clyde.
• 28:36
  It begins then where what he called New Hollywood displaces
• 28:43
  Old Hollywood. If you saw the Academy Awards
• 28:45
  this year, the one the most notable thing about it for me
• 28:51
  was that there was nobody there where were the great stars?
• 28:55
  And that's always the reason people watch the Oscars is to
• 28:58
  see who's there, what they're wearing.
• 29:00
  This was a group of people that nobody ever heard of except fan
• 29:05
  film fan people. So you know, the the wheel terms
• 29:09
  and and it turns from the 60s where teenagers were depicted as
• 29:16
  beach blanket bingo kids, where Vietnam War was raging, music
• 29:23
  was creating a counterculture, campuses were in protest and
• 29:29
  Hollywood is making films about Frankie Avalon singing on the
• 29:32
  beach. I mean, they were so out of
• 29:35
  touch by that time. There was nobody wanted to see
• 29:40
  that. They wanted to see something
• 29:42
  real, not to them. So the independent film movement
• 29:48
  began. And what's interesting about it
• 29:50
  for me and for Jack Nicholson, is that when everybody left the
• 29:56
  village, Greenwich Village, and migrated W to films, to a new
• 30:03
  scene on Santa Monica Blvd. a new kind of music, there was a
• 30:10
  group that fancied themselves a combination of hippie and
• 30:15
  beatnik. Who was in it?
• 30:20
  It was Bruce Dern was in it. Robert Walker Junior was part of
• 30:27
  that. That group.
• 30:30
  The kid who did all the acrobatic dancing in West Side
• 30:33
  Story, he was in it. A lot of guys who weren't really
• 30:38
  young aren't really hippies. They considered themselves kind
• 30:43
  of literate. Yeah, kind of neo beats.
• 30:46
  Yeah. And they had, they had a group
• 30:49
  where they would meet in small clubs and they would get up and
• 30:54
  recite poems and they would write screenplays.
• 30:58
  One of them was Jack Nicholson, who originally went to Hollywood
• 31:04
  to be a writer, a screenwriter. He had been he'd gone to high
• 31:08
  school in in New Jersey, in Neptune, NJ, right where Bruce
• 31:12
  Springsteen is. Comes from very creative little
• 31:15
  place in New Jersey. Whatever they're eating down
• 31:19
  there, put back in your diet. He he tried to he wanted to be a
• 31:26
  football player. Nicholson too small and couldn't
• 31:30
  play. He tried baseball.
• 31:33
  He wasn't fast enough. So he he got into a play in high
• 31:37
  school and, you know, the magic wand of getting girls swept over
• 31:42
  him. And he figured, well, that's for
• 31:45
  me. I mean, this is this is what I
• 31:46
  want. I was going to do that.
• 31:48
  And he moved to California, you know, like, like all the
• 31:52
  lemmings and go to where they go.
• 31:55
  You know, the most beautiful girl in any hometown who says
• 32:01
  I'm going to be a movie star goes to Hollywood.
• 32:04
  And Hollywood is nothing but beautiful girls from small towns
• 32:08
  who become like every other girl except Sidney Sweeney, who is
• 32:16
  Creme de la Creme. But most of them lined up, you
• 32:21
  know, as as other things, you know, they they wait on tables
• 32:25
  for five years and they get their job on the sitcom waiting
• 32:28
  on tables. Hey, I'm an actress.
• 32:31
  This group fell in with a producer of independent films.
• 32:39
  What was his name? The guy did all the Edgar Allan
• 32:42
  Poe film. Cooper name slipped by Mark.
• 32:48
  Anyway, a Corman, Roger Coleman. So Coleman was making these
• 32:53
  independent films that cost nothing and he used all of these
• 32:59
  actors because they all wanted to be in movies.
• 33:03
  So Norman said, well I'll put you in a movie, I can't pay you
• 33:06
  almost nothing, but maybe something will come out of it.
• 33:10
  And so they all made these crazy films, these low budget, no
• 33:14
  budget Edgar Allan Poe films and a whole bunch of crazy vampire
• 33:21
  stuff. And Jack Nicholson wrote most of
• 33:25
  them. The other guy who came out of
• 33:28
  that was Peter Founder. Sure he did all the motorcycle
• 33:32
  films they had, you know, Wild Angels and all that was all
• 33:37
  that. That was all Roger Corman, who
• 33:40
  established a really good independent small studio in the
• 33:44
  60s. And part of the reason that he
• 33:46
  succeeded is because there was no competition.
• 33:50
  Hollywood was in such disarray that a guy like Corman could
• 33:54
  come and fill a place where they.
• 33:56
  Where Hollywood used to make B movies, Carmen made B movies and
• 34:00
  sold them as a movies and mostly drive, insurance and Saturday
• 34:05
  night dating movies. Now, what happened was that, as
• 34:15
  Biskin tells the story, Fonda hooked up with A with his
• 34:25
  partner in an Easy Rider, the actor.
• 34:31
  Oh, a naughty guy. Yeah, A.
• 34:34
  Naughty guy. Oh gosh yeah, I forgot his name.
• 34:37
  Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper.
• 34:41
  Yes, Hopper was friends with a a director who was partnered with
• 34:49
  a guy with the president of Columbia Pictures.
• 34:53
  So the head, the president of Columbia Pictures partner in
• 34:58
  various crimes of cinema, was a friend of Dennis Hopper.
• 35:04
  Hopper went to to Peter Fonda and said, look, we're making
• 35:12
  these these motorcycle movies. They're junk.
• 35:20
  I have an in at Columbia Pictures.
• 35:23
  If we can make a movie, a decent motorcycle movie, I can get it
• 35:30
  made. Wow.
• 35:32
  The two guys I told you about, the president of Columbia and
• 35:35
  his friend had already been successful with ATV show called
• 35:40
  the Monkeys. They had dreamt up the idea of
• 35:44
  hey, what? Look at The Beatles.
• 35:46
  And we certainly can do that. We'll put it on TV.
• 35:49
  We'll make. A That's right.
• 35:50
  Create a band. You know all.
• 35:52
  Of that I remember. I remember reading about this
• 35:55
  this the same time, I'm sorry, as the book Indecent Exposures
• 35:58
  going on where? Yeah.
• 36:01
  So that's who that was, that Davis, that was the head of
• 36:03
  Columbia at that point. David yeah, not, no, not Davis.
• 36:09
  If you have, look up who who produced Easy Rider.
• 36:15
  OK, I'll find it. Yeah, producer of Easy of Peter
• 36:23
  Fonda was the producer, but Barbara Fowleson and Bert
• 36:26
  Schneider, Yeah. Bert Schneider and and who was
• 36:30
  the other guy? And Bob Raffleson.
• 36:35
  Raffleson, Bob. Raffleson OK, so Rayfulson.
• 36:38
  Rayfulson was a director who was a friend of Schneider.
• 36:42
  Schneider's father had been a big wheel at Columbia.
• 36:45
  And so with nepotism, full blast.
• 36:48
  The whole. Industry, the whole industry as
• 36:51
  a whole, the whole planet. So Schneider became the head of
• 36:56
  the company. They wanted to make a feature
• 36:59
  film with the monkeys. They say, well, it was such a
• 37:03
  big success, let's make a movie and put these four guys in it
• 37:09
  and we'll make a fortune. They needed a script.
• 37:14
  And so the only guy they thought had any talent at all was Jack
• 37:20
  Nicholson. So they hired Nicholson to
• 37:23
  write. I forgot the name of the film
• 37:26
  that they did, but it was, it was a monkey's feature, the only
• 37:29
  feature of their head. It was the name HEAD, an
• 37:34
  apartment name. Because everybody was stoned all
• 37:36
  the time, especially Jack and that whole gang.
• 37:41
  And the film was directed by Bob Rathelson.
• 37:46
  So then Raphelson and it was pretty good and made some money
• 37:51
  on. It's not a great film.
• 37:52
  I don't think it's going to go into the Hall of Fame of great
• 37:55
  movies. But you know, it was what it
• 37:58
  was. The the monkeys had a moment and
• 38:00
  so they exploited it. Jack Nicholson was so depressed
• 38:07
  by having to work on this idiotic movie, a film called
• 38:12
  Head with all its meanings implied.
• 38:20
  He was going to drop out of it's going to drop out of the
• 38:22
  business. He he he didn't want to write
• 38:26
  anymore. Based on the success of the
• 38:33
  Monkeys movie, Schneider and Raphelson heard about this
• 38:39
  motorcycle film that Peter Fonder and Dennis Hopper wanted
• 38:44
  to make, and they decided they would back it.
• 38:48
  Yeah, which was a nightmare, right?
• 38:53
  RIP. RIP Torn was in it and RIP Torn
• 38:59
  was going to play the part that Jack Nicholson eventually
• 39:03
  played, but it at Peter Fonders Townhouse in the East 60s in New
• 39:08
  York. RIP Torn and Peter Fonda got
• 39:10
  into it. Was it Peter Fonda or it was
• 39:12
  Dennis Hopper? Dennis.
• 39:13
  Hopper, Dennis Hopper. A fight that's it was like in a
• 39:17
  movie, it spilled out of the brownstone onto the street doing
• 39:23
  this. And that was the end of RIP
• 39:25
  Torn. So they needed someone to play
• 39:28
  this character and it, you know, it's like in a movie where where
• 39:34
  people say, what are we going to do now?
• 39:36
  And everybody's head turns to this one guy and it's Jack
• 39:41
  Nicholson. And they say, Jack, we want you
• 39:44
  to play this guy. He's a kind of a nerd and, you
• 39:47
  know, just kind of stuff that Jack never wanted to do.
• 39:50
  But they convinced it was a real movie was Columbia Pictures.
• 39:55
  They convinced him to do it. And of course, it made him a
• 39:59
  star overnight. He stole the picture from
• 40:01
  everybody. The only thing people remember
• 40:04
  there was this crazy and getting killed while he was sleeping.
• 40:08
  And and that thing he that philosophical thing he does
• 40:10
  about marijuana, all people remember from the film and the
• 40:13
  guys getting their heads blown off at the end.
• 40:16
  But what they did was they touch the zeitgeist of of 1969 his
• 40:24
  counterculture hot heroin. All the cycles, I mean, it had,
• 40:30
  it had everything that era appealed to young people.
• 40:38
  That's good. Still does.
• 40:40
  Absolutely. Still does.
• 40:43
  It made Nicholson the star. It made him a bigger star than
• 40:47
  Peter Fonda. It it it brought back Dennis
• 40:50
  Hopper from one of his several trips to oblivion that took
• 40:54
  place in his career. He's and his next movie was so
• 40:59
  incomprehensible that again, it killed his career for another 10
• 41:03
  years. Well, apparently he was having a
• 41:06
  hard time even during the filming of Easy Rider in the
• 41:08
  sense I apparently, like you mentioned with a fight leading
• 41:11
  up to it. He was.
• 41:12
  He's becoming less and less manageable as time went on.
• 41:15
  Well, you know, drugs played a part in it.
• 41:18
  Ambition and and no real script. Nobody knew what they were
• 41:24
  doing. Bob Raffleson, that's an
• 41:27
  interesting director. He made a couple of interesting
• 41:29
  films, but when I put him on the level of Alfred Hitchcock, no.
• 41:35
  The follow up that they made was a film that Raffleson directed
• 41:41
  for Columbia, 5 Easy Pieces. 5 Easy Pieces not only confirmed
• 41:49
  that Nicholson was a star, but it took him out of the hippie
• 41:54
  thing. It made him a mainstream star in
• 41:58
  a film that could appeal to a wider audience than hippies or
• 42:05
  college kids or counterculture. It was a real film, a very good
• 42:10
  film. Nicholson was superb in it.
• 42:14
  And that's really how Nicholson from this way faraway turns and
• 42:23
  twists like on a roller coaster. You know, it finally leveled off
• 42:27
  and he became the biggest box office star of the 70s.
• 42:34
  It's a kind of a morality tale from misfits.
• 42:38
  I mean, this is how you do it. If you're a misfit, you you
• 42:41
  become the great misfit. It kind of reminds me a little
• 42:45
  bit of Timothy Chalamet. You think so?
• 42:49
  In in that tremendous charisma, hard to cast.
• 42:55
  Very diverse. Yeah, but when he does a role,
• 43:00
  you know, like that Dylan thing, that what?
• 43:02
  Do you think of that? I hated it, but I thought he
• 43:07
  was. I thought he was worried.
• 43:09
  The girl who played Joan Baez, Spectacular.
• 43:12
  You know, there was one good moment in the film for me.
• 43:17
  First of all, I lived through that whole thing and I don't
• 43:21
  remember anybody ever being awake in the daytime.
• 43:24
  And yet 900% of the film is shot in the daytime on the streets of
• 43:29
  Greenwichville. Nobody was awake at that time.
• 43:32
  So, you know, there's so much is not right.
• 43:34
  But what they did get right was at the end of the film when Elle
• 43:39
  Fanning, who's playing Susie Rotolo, is his girlfriend.
• 43:44
  And meanwhile he's with Joan Baez.
• 43:48
  And on screen, on stage, he and Baez have this magic.
• 43:55
  And so he, Dylan invites Susie to come see him at Newport.
• 44:02
  And we had that troubles, you know, they, they're breaking up
• 44:06
  and they she doesn't want to be a part of that, but she comes
• 44:12
  and she's standing behind the fence watching and she sees
• 44:17
  Dylan and Baez Chalamet and that wonderful girl who played Baez,
• 44:22
  who's also in that prime one O 1.
• 44:24
  She walked away with that movie. She sees what they have and
• 44:30
  realizes that she can never have that with Dylan because his life
• 44:35
  is up there on that stage. And I thought, yeah, that's
• 44:39
  right, They got that right. But the rest, I mean, it's like
• 44:43
  the Jolson story, if I had the pleasure of seeing that or
• 44:48
  Yankee Doodle Dandy. I mean, these films that they're
• 44:51
  fiction, yeah, but they. I think that, I think that
• 44:56
  Shamelay, I think that happened with, with a couple of the
• 44:58
  movies that I've seen where the films are never going to be
• 45:01
  great. But I guess the question is how
• 45:04
  the performer, how the how the actor makes a historical record
• 45:09
  of the of the musician, you know.
• 45:12
  And I think that Shamelay did a great job.
• 45:14
  I think the Austin Butler and Elvis did a great job.
• 45:17
  And it just started the Springsteen movie last night
• 45:19
  that I could not get through. But the opening scene I thought
• 45:24
  of the 81 river river like closing.
• 45:27
  I thought that that choreography and Jeremy Allen, what was his
• 45:33
  name? Jeremy Allen White, I believe I.
• 45:35
  Think. I thought that his Springsteen
• 45:38
  mannerisms and face and like and the hand motions, the gesture
• 45:43
  and the energy and like even the leg kick at the end.
• 45:46
  I thought that they did a really good job recreating the 81
• 45:48
  scenes. But the movie itself, I was
• 45:51
  like, I can't. This is this is tough, man.
• 45:55
  There's a genre of films, of biographies.
• 45:57
  You've got Michael Jackson coming out.
• 46:00
  That film, God only knows what. Where's Michael?
• 46:07
  He's with some kids, you know, I don't know what they're going to
• 46:10
  do with that film, but their their responsibility.
• 46:15
  The reason why they don't work generally is because their
• 46:18
  responsibility is to film and not to music and and that that
• 46:23
  skews everything in a weird way. I mean, why my feeling?
• 46:28
  Why go see Springsteen the film? There's so much of Springsteen
• 46:34
  on YouTube, the real thing. Why go see the Dylan's film?
• 46:37
  I have to sit through all that BS when you you can see Don't
• 46:42
  Look Back, the great Pennebaker film and nothing can reach that
• 46:48
  in in terms of who is Bob Dylan, Ronaldo, even Ronaldo and Clara.
• 46:54
  I mean you there's so much of the real stuff which when they
• 46:58
  made the Jolson story, Yankee Doodle Dandy or although Nicole
• 47:02
  Porter, you didn't have that other outfit.
• 47:05
  So the films became film of record.
• 47:08
  Making a Springsteen film to me and then releasing a soundtrack
• 47:12
  album of the guy singing Springsteen songs.
• 47:16
  What? See, if you have a studio
• 47:19
  system, that would never happen. Not that I have a lot, you know.
• 47:23
  You don't, so I tend to agree with your sentiment and that way
• 47:27
  of thinking. The only thing that I would say
• 47:30
  is that it can help. I know that for myself because
• 47:34
  I'm 30 right? I'm a self-taught old soul and
• 47:39
  sorry. I'm 32.
• 47:41
  There you go, you're looking and, and I'm self-taught with
• 47:47
  all this stuff and the way I come across a lot of this stuff
• 47:49
  is actually through covers, right?
• 47:51
  So for example, I've been into the Grateful Dead a lot in the
• 47:53
  last couple of years. The way I got into the Dead was
• 47:56
  I heard a cover of Springsteen's Atlantic City by a Grateful Dead
• 48:00
  cover band, right? And I'm like, wow, this is
• 48:03
  really cool. And my friend goes, if you think
• 48:04
  that's cool, check out the Grateful Dead.
• 48:06
  I'm like, who are they? And he's like, that's the band
• 48:07
  they're covering. And so I stumble into this whole
• 48:10
  universe that I got exposed to through a, through a, through a
• 48:14
  cover. You know that that wasn't even
• 48:16
  like the cover, right? The band's cover is like the
• 48:18
  cover for Atlantic City, but you know that that this band did it.
• 48:22
  And and then, and then I stumbled into this whole
• 48:24
  universe and the same thing happens with, you know, I'm
• 48:26
  listening to Billy Strings and all of a sudden I find myself on
• 48:28
  a dock in a row Hudson record. And I say, how'd I even get
• 48:31
  here? But I think that so I think that
• 48:33
  you're right. And as far as the sentiment
• 48:35
  goes, but as far as exposure, I have a lot of friends that watch
• 48:38
  these movies and have now been turned on to Dylan and now I've
• 48:41
  been turned on to Springsteen. And then they'll say, you know,
• 48:44
  I don't like Dylan's voice. I'm like, well, go to this,
• 48:46
  this, this and this live recording and go try this album
• 48:48
  from this year, because it sounds pretty different
• 48:50
  throughout the years. And you know, but it's a, it's
• 48:53
  a, it's a, it's a journey for a lot of people to discover this
• 48:55
  art and, and, and however they get there, I'm happy to have
• 48:59
  different avenues for them to, to figure it out.
• 49:01
  I mean, yeah, it look, any way that gets people to the people
• 49:08
  they should get to is legitimate.
• 49:12
  I'll tell you a funny story. I was driving up to my house
• 49:17
  upstate and I was with a a young girl in her 20s before you call
• 49:23
  the police and I said New York. Yeah, yeah, I'm from Rockland.
• 49:32
  Greene County, that's where my house Woodstocks around there.
• 49:36
  Yeah. So I say you want to hear some
• 49:39
  music. And this is a young girl in her
• 49:42
  late 20s. I said I'll put, I'll put the
• 49:45
  iTunes thing on. You know, the the Wi-Fi thing.
• 49:52
  I put it on Bob Dylan comes on, She says I kid that guy's voice
• 49:59
  hurting my ears. Take that off and you know,
• 50:04
  crushed, sorry, you know, almost almost went off.
• 50:06
  They turned. I just voice of a generation how
• 50:11
  things have changed. You know, it's just still is
• 50:13
  hurting her too. So, you know, things change.
• 50:19
  They definitely do. They definitely do.
• 50:22
  Can we? I wanted to just also say about
• 50:25
  Jack Nicholson, I'm curious your thoughts on this and then we'll
• 50:27
  kind of transition on. But Jack Nicholson to me
• 50:32
  represents also the shifting of the the creative power in
• 50:35
  Hollywood from directors to actors.
• 50:38
  And he was kind of the bridge between that creative, the
• 50:43
  creative force behind the camera and then the people on the
• 50:45
  camera. And he really like, like what
• 50:48
  you said. And it almost takes a a misfit
• 50:50
  to be able to do something like that.
• 50:52
  To cross over. Yeah, yeah.
• 50:55
  But he, but he embodied. He embodied authenticity and
• 50:58
  real darkness in like people that film felt like it was.
• 51:03
  It was, it was. It was not popular to touch
• 51:05
  unless you were an amateur film maker, you know, like he
• 51:09
  embodied just so many different aspects of human psychology
• 51:13
  throughout his throughout his acting that a lot of people
• 51:15
  didn't weren't necessarily used to seeing portrayed on screen.
• 51:18
  I thought that was really, really cool too.
• 51:19
  Well, you see, he he doesn't come from nothing.
• 51:24
  During the studio era, actors and actresses were trained how
• 51:32
  to act for the screen. They were the studios.
• 51:36
  It's such a fascinating subject, the life inside of a studio.
• 51:41
  I mean, you, you lived there. It was like a college campus.
• 51:44
  You did everything there. You you know Warner Brothers had
• 51:50
  a a whore house on on their premises because they they
• 51:57
  didn't want their actors to make any outside women pregnant
• 52:04
  because of the scandal. No way.
• 52:07
  So they just and and who peopled the the whorehouses starlets,
• 52:15
  you know, it was part of their deal was all you're going to
• 52:17
  have to do this kind of thing. In those days, you could get
• 52:20
  away with that. So along with their sex lives,
• 52:26
  they were also trained in a certain way.
• 52:29
  If you look at actors during the studio era, Jimmy Stewart, Cary
• 52:34
  Grant, John Wayne, Ronald Coleman, all these classic
• 52:41
  actors, the women too, all those women who came out of those
• 52:48
  movies, they all act in a certain way, which you could
• 52:52
  describe as playing for the camera and external.
• 52:57
  Here's what happened. All those great actors were
• 53:02
  conscripted or volunteered to be in World War 2 during this
• 53:08
  Greatest Generation era. Five years later when they came
• 53:14
  out, they were either shell shocked like Jimmy Stewart or
• 53:18
  are they had been physically wounded or they had age, they
• 53:22
  had be lost what they had as leading men.
• 53:26
  So there was a gap. There was a vacuum of a need for
• 53:32
  leading men. So where did they go?
• 53:35
  Where did Hollywood go? They went where they always
• 53:37
  went, to Broadway. But Broadway had become
• 53:41
  methodized through Kazan and Tennessee Williams.
• 53:45
  It was a new kind of Broadway. And the actors that they got
• 53:50
  from Broadway, we're not playing for the camera.
• 53:53
  They were playing for Stanislavo.
• 53:55
  And so you had Who came out of that?
• 53:59
  Montgomery Clift. Marlon Brando.
• 54:03
  Al Pacino No. Later, James Dean.
• 54:07
  Yeah, those 3, Cliff, Brando and Dean, revolutionized what you
• 54:13
  could do on screen, playing these pained, sensitive,
• 54:19
  beautiful men who made everybody in the audience love them in a
• 54:26
  way that Cary Grant didn't. Cary Grant, certainly everybody
• 54:31
  loved him, but there was a kind of a different kind of worship
• 54:34
  there. Out of them came De Niro, came
• 54:39
  Pacino in The Next Generation, the Great Escape guy.
• 54:46
  I don't know those guys, but only a very Warren Beatty.
• 54:55
  Only a few of them could do what you're saying.
• 55:01
  Most actors did not have that kind of power.
• 55:06
  If you were a character actor, you were a character actor.
• 55:09
  If you were a leading man and with a comedic bent, that's what
• 55:14
  you did. If you were a dramatic dark
• 55:18
  looking actor, you know, mean or that's what you played.
• 55:22
  So it was only guys like Brando, Cliff and Dean, later on De Niro
• 55:28
  and Pacino and Beatty, they all were able to call their own
• 55:35
  shots. But whenever they deviated from
• 55:38
  what they, what audiences wanted, that films didn't do
• 55:42
  well. So there was a de facto
• 55:45
  categorization, you know, typecasting or even for the
• 55:50
  biggest actors when De Niro tried in the King of Comedy,
• 55:57
  where he played that comedian, Luna.
• 56:01
  Was that a Scorsese movie too? Yeah, Scorsese movie.
• 56:04
  That's right. That's right.
• 56:05
  And Jerry Lewis is in it, right? Andre Bernhardt, Sandra
• 56:10
  Bernhardt. Yeah, I think that's on that.
• 56:12
  Very, very funny the the film Bond.
• 56:15
  I mean, it laid a golden egg. It wasn't until years later that
• 56:20
  it gained A reputation as being a wonderful film, and it's a
• 56:24
  pretty good film. But as soon as De Niro tried to
• 56:29
  shift into something else besides the broodings, you know,
• 56:34
  method wounded sensitive guy, it didn't work.
• 56:40
  So even then there was a limit. The only difference between the
• 56:45
  studio system and then was in the studio system, if you didn't
• 56:50
  want to do a film and you were under contract, you were
• 56:53
  suspended until you agreed to do the film.
• 56:57
  In modern filmmaking, if you don't want to do it, you move on
• 57:01
  to the next thing. There's no one to say you can't.
• 57:04
  So that that's kind of the power difference.
• 57:07
  Right, I got you Cool Steve McQueen.
• 57:12
  Gotcha. Well, let's well, let's talk
• 57:15
  about Disney. I'm really excited about this
• 57:16
  because I've been a Disney behind the scenes fan and how
• 57:20
  the company works and the back story for a long time fan for a
• 57:24
  long time. And I've read a lot about it.
• 57:27
  But I've never until recently been exposed to the notion of
• 57:31
  his working with governments. I mean, I have heard during
• 57:33
  World War 2 that he'd make these animations, you know, help with
• 57:36
  propaganda purposes, but I didn't know much about it until
• 57:42
  I recently saw that. A guy, I don't know if you've
• 57:44
  heard of him, Mike Benz online is excellent.
• 57:47
  And he does a whole thing about the CIA and their investment in,
• 57:52
  you know, throughout different entities and including
• 57:55
  entertainment. And he was being advised through
• 57:58
  Bank of America and then while they're purchasing the land for
• 58:01
  Disney World through a lot of CIA assets and actual players
• 58:06
  that have been involved in various schemes for a very long
• 58:10
  time. I don't know much about the his
• 58:15
  politics and his relationship with the FBI that I know that
• 58:17
  you wrote about. And I do want to actually ask
• 58:20
  because I did do Google on this. It looks like you got a little
• 58:23
  bit of lash back for, for the work that you did about that.
• 58:26
  I want to ask about that. And I want to ask about the
• 58:29
  actual content. And we, we can go wherever you
• 58:32
  want because I'm having a ton of fun listening to you.
• 58:34
  So wherever you want to go with this.
• 58:35
  Well, first of all, when when you get, what did you call it?
• 58:39
  The. Lash back.
• 58:41
  A flashback that's that's not bad.
• 58:45
  I mean that's you know, that's something that means people are
• 58:51
  reading people are listening to you here.
• 58:55
  Here's what happened after I wrote Death of a Rebel.
• 59:00
  And I did two or three other books, really wonderful books.
• 59:04
  So one of them was called Rock Anomics, which was Financial
• 59:08
  History of Rock. Yes, I want to talk.
• 59:10
  Yeah, yeah. Which is great book, if I can
• 59:14
  say so myself, because it dispels all the myths and tells
• 59:17
  you what the business was. Sure.
• 59:20
  Anyway, then I got the only time in my career got a writer's
• 59:25
  block of monumental proportion, a couple of years where I just
• 59:29
  couldn't. I couldn't follow Death of a
• 59:33
  Rebel with anything that was that important to me.
• 59:37
  And then one day I was reading Truman Capote's By the Biography
• 59:44
  of Truman Capote, a very big, definitive book.
• 59:49
  And I thought to myself, who cares about Truman Capote worst
• 59:56
  of all, and how can you write 800 pages on him?
• 1:00:02
  And what did he do? He wrote a wrote 1 short story
• 1:00:05
  and 11 gruesome book about a murder.
• 1:00:08
  I mean, what, what did he do? He went an awful long way on a
• 1:00:12
  very short string of success. But yeah, I read it and I
• 1:00:18
  thought, wow, it's really, you know, impressive.
• 1:00:22
  And I thought, I want to write a book like that.
• 1:00:26
  I want to write a big sprawling, warts and all.
• 1:00:32
  I mean, the, the Capote book had leprosy.
• 1:00:35
  That's how many, many works that were in that book.
• 1:00:38
  I, I said, I want to write a book like that.
• 1:00:42
  And somehow the name Walt Disney came to me.
• 1:00:49
  I, I don't know. I don't know how, but I thought
• 1:00:51
  Walt Disney. What do we know about Walt
• 1:00:53
  Disney? Well, we know two things, Mickey
• 1:00:56
  Mouse and we know who he is because of this TV show, Walt
• 1:01:02
  Disney presenter or Disneyland, whatever it was called in the in
• 1:01:06
  the 50s. His persona is very tailored.
• 1:01:09
  Yeah, and, and, and, you know, everybody knows.
• 1:01:13
  Everybody knew who he was. The only other director I could
• 1:01:16
  think of at the time who had that was Alfred Hitchcock
• 1:01:22
  because of his TV show. So I thought, well, you know,
• 1:01:26
  that's a good starting point. People who you don't know, who
• 1:01:30
  you know because of their image rather than who they are.
• 1:01:35
  Right. So I I wrote a proposal and my
• 1:01:43
  desperate agent, when are you going to do something, sent it
• 1:01:47
  to a very big publishing house. And I met with the editor and he
• 1:01:52
  said, so this you want to do what Gerald Clark did with
• 1:01:58
  Truman Capote. I said, if you mean write a real
• 1:02:01
  book, yes. He said, OK, you can do it.
• 1:02:06
  And here's what happened. Is that considered risky?
• 1:02:09
  Is that, was that considered risky for the person on the
• 1:02:12
  other end of it that's, you know, signing up?
• 1:02:14
  Is that like, do they consider themselves signing up for
• 1:02:16
  trouble at that point? Probably.
• 1:02:20
  I mean, whenever you try to tell the truth, instead of do PR, you
• 1:02:28
  go through a legal vetting thing, which is a nightmare.
• 1:02:32
  You know, you think that this absolutely needs to be in there.
• 1:02:35
  And they say it absolutely can't be in there.
• 1:02:39
  But here's what happened. I called up, I was living in
• 1:02:44
  Lai, called up the Disney Studios and I said I would like
• 1:02:49
  to go into your archives. The archives are run by a fellow
• 1:02:55
  Dave Something, who his job was to keep the archives going.
• 1:03:02
  The archives at the Disney studio in Burbank is
• 1:03:08
  underground. They keep like a temperature
• 1:03:11
  evolved and they've got all the negatives that got off.
• 1:03:13
  They've got the entire history and all the.
• 1:03:17
  It's legendary. And I said, look, I'm writing a
• 1:03:25
  big biography for a major publisher, and I want to get the
• 1:03:31
  real story. At this point, I had no real
• 1:03:36
  opinion about Walt Disney, except I was skeptical that he
• 1:03:42
  was everybody's uncle. I thought that whole thing was a
• 1:03:45
  little bit calculated, Uncle Walt.
• 1:03:49
  So I went to the studio. They were great.
• 1:03:52
  Oh, come on in, Mr. Elliott. Oh, we're so happy you're here.
• 1:03:56
  And we're going to take you into the archives, and you can have
• 1:03:59
  anything you want, except there's only one small thing we
• 1:04:02
  want you to do for us. What's that?
• 1:04:06
  We'd like you to sign a contract saying that we have final say
• 1:04:13
  over the book. Sure.
• 1:04:15
  By the way, what year is this, I'm sorry, or around what year?
• 1:04:20
  AM 90. Got it.
• 1:04:23
  OK. So that's Michael Eisner.
• 1:04:25
  Was the CEO at the point or not? Yet yeah, Michael Eisner was
• 1:04:28
  there. Gotcha.
• 1:04:29
  OK, I didn't get to meet him. But The funny thing was, so they
• 1:04:34
  escorted me off. They actually called security
• 1:04:38
  and no way off the studio grounds.
• 1:04:42
  Well, Hollywood is so crazy. The next day I went back and
• 1:04:51
  then they had no offenses. You could just walk on to the
• 1:04:54
  studio. So I walked on to the studio.
• 1:04:57
  I went into the animation building and I talked to
• 1:05:00
  everybody in there and they still had they had what Disney
• 1:05:04
  had what what they called the 9 old men based on the Supreme
• 1:05:08
  Court. They were the big animators, the
• 1:05:09
  guys that's right there from the beginning.
• 1:05:12
  I talked to every one of them and everyone who was still
• 1:05:17
  alive, and then they were great. Now one of them said, you want
• 1:05:22
  to talk to this other guy who Disney fired, Art Babbitt.
• 1:05:29
  Arthur Babbitt was just sure I. Remember his?
• 1:05:32
  I know the name, yeah. Yeah, great.
• 1:05:34
  Adam there. Babbitt was living in a small
• 1:05:38
  house. I went to visit him.
• 1:05:40
  His nickname was Stick the Stick because he was so skinny, and he
• 1:05:47
  told me a story about Walt Disney's that blew my head off.
• 1:05:54
  Babbitt had drawn Snow White based on a real person, a real
• 1:06:04
  actress, and that actress was Marge Champion.
• 1:06:09
  What? She became Marge Champion Gower
• 1:06:11
  Champion's wife later on, But her first husband was Art
• 1:06:18
  Babbitt. And Babbitt said that when he
• 1:06:20
  started dating Marge, Disney had him thrown into an insane
• 1:06:26
  asylum. Had Art thrown in?
• 1:06:29
  Yeah, because he said anybody who would do that to Walt Disney
• 1:06:36
  is obviously crazy. Wait, what?
• 1:06:40
  Walt Disney? I'm sorry, can you?
• 1:06:42
  I don't understand. Have an affair with Snow White?
• 1:06:45
  Oh, he was married to. He was dating.
• 1:06:50
  But he did eventually marry her. Gotcha.
• 1:06:52
  He was dating the girl that was the that was the role model for
• 1:06:54
  Snow White, and Disney had to throw her.
• 1:06:56
  To sleeping with her. And everybody knew it.
• 1:06:59
  And Disney went into a rage about it and he thought, this
• 1:07:02
  guy has to be crazy. And so we had him locked up.
• 1:07:04
  And he was also a bit of a rebel in his own way, but very
• 1:07:09
  creative. He never worked in Hollywood
• 1:07:12
  again and he got released. He was blacklisted from
• 1:07:17
  Hollywood. And he said to me, if you really
• 1:07:22
  want to know the story of Walt Disney, get a hold of this FBI
• 1:07:27
  file under the Freedom of Information Act.
• 1:07:31
  I'm sure there's a law in there. Took me two years to get that
• 1:07:36
  file. I, I hired a girl to work for me
• 1:07:41
  whose only job was to get that file and, and she was amazing.
• 1:07:46
  I don't know how she did it. This girl was great.
• 1:07:50
  The file was the size of the Manhattan phone book, and it was
• 1:07:56
  largely redacted and it had things in it that were
• 1:08:01
  astonishing most of all. And if you have the book or you
• 1:08:07
  look at the book, the back of the book is a page from the
• 1:08:11
  files that identifies Walt Disney as an FBI agent SAC and
• 1:08:20
  agent contact in the files. It clearly, and it's heavily
• 1:08:28
  redacted, but there was enough there.
• 1:08:31
  You know, like the Epstein files, there was enough there to
• 1:08:35
  show that what Disney was doing was allowing the government to
• 1:08:41
  come in and go through the files, the employment files of
• 1:08:45
  everybody at the company to make sure they didn't have subversive
• 1:08:51
  connections. Disney.
• 1:08:53
  Was a huge anti communist point of time right?
• 1:08:56
  To the to the right of Attila the harness.
• 1:08:58
  They say first of all, he didn't like Hollywood when he arrived
• 1:09:05
  in 1922 to be an animator because he began at Universal as
• 1:09:10
  an animator and he created our Walls of Rabbit.
• 1:09:13
  Right. Got stolen.
• 1:09:15
  Souls from him and that's how Mickey was created, because he
• 1:09:19
  wanted to have his own character, but he blamed it all
• 1:09:22
  on Jutes. That was the thing with Disney.
• 1:09:26
  Disney did. Do we have a record of that?
• 1:09:29
  It's in the it's it's in the files and in the people I
• 1:09:32
  interviewed here, here, Here's why.
• 1:09:35
  All the studios were run by Jews, mostly except one or two,
• 1:09:41
  but most of them all the power and and you know, there were a
• 1:09:45
  million books about why Hollywood was Jewish and.
• 1:09:48
  They couldn't. Any other corporation, all of
• 1:09:52
  that, and he was not. And so he felt that he couldn't
• 1:09:57
  break in because they, he wasn't a member of what he, what did he
• 1:10:01
  call the Old Boys club, the European Boys Club.
• 1:10:04
  And it was probably some truth in that, some level of truth.
• 1:10:09
  That's, you know, who is this guy?
• 1:10:11
  You know, we don't trust them, they don't trust us.
• 1:10:15
  And so it was a kind of a mutual thing.
• 1:10:18
  So he started his own studio and he did something and all the
• 1:10:24
  people who flashed back on the book seem to forget that I call
• 1:10:27
  them a genius in the book and pointed out some fantastic
• 1:10:31
  things he did. He created the three minute
• 1:10:34
  cartoon with Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Bill and all that
• 1:10:38
  without dialogue. And the reason who did that was
• 1:10:42
  so he could sell them all around the world.
• 1:10:45
  Every country could buy a Disney cartoon without dialogue music.
• 1:10:53
  True. Yeah.
• 1:10:54
  And so that's how he made his money.
• 1:10:58
  And. And as he made all this money,
• 1:11:02
  his real goal was to make a feature animated cartoon, which
• 1:11:09
  turned out to be Snow White. His brother Roy.
• 1:11:13
  Roy was the business end. Roy, No matter what, no matter
• 1:11:19
  what Walt wanted to do, Roy would say you can't do that.
• 1:11:23
  Crazy. Well then I go bro, no.
• 1:11:25
  Yeah. Yeah, and they went ahead, did
• 1:11:28
  it, and of course made history. But you know, when Disney formed
• 1:11:32
  his own studio, he really wasn't an artist.
• 1:11:37
  He if you want to call him something, you call him a
• 1:11:40
  visionary. The real artist was this fellow
• 1:11:44
  called AB Iworks that nobody has ever heard of.
• 1:11:48
  I think you wrote a book. I never read a book by him.
• 1:11:50
  Yeah, it may have later. On it wasn't very good.
• 1:11:53
  I, I didn't like it very much. Rather, it wasn't speak to me,
• 1:11:55
  but I, but I, I think I've read it before, yeah.
• 1:11:58
  They were partners in the studio and the name of the studio was
• 1:12:04
  Iworks Disney. One day, Disney said said to AB.
• 1:12:11
  You know, oh, no, the name of the studio was Disney Iworks.
• 1:12:17
  That was the name of the studio. And one day Disney said, you
• 1:12:21
  know, it sounds like we we make glasses.
• 1:12:25
  Disney Iworks. It doesn't sound like a studio.
• 1:12:29
  So would you mind very much if we change the name to the Disney
• 1:12:33
  Studios? And who was really a very
• 1:12:37
  talented technician. He created a dry plane.
• 1:12:40
  So he did a lot of wonderful stuff.
• 1:12:43
  He didn't know any better, and so he agreed to it and put
• 1:12:49
  himself into permanent oblivion. Only the only who were
• 1:12:54
  interested in animation who on a deeper level than cartoons
• 1:12:59
  going, nor who he was like. Cosby act as Steve Jobs.
• 1:13:02
  Almost. Yeah, that's right.
• 1:13:04
  That even less so than that. Like the guys who were partners
• 1:13:08
  on Facebook, those guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:12
  But that's, see, that's who Disney was.
• 1:13:15
  He was a kind of a conniving genius.
• 1:13:19
  And when the war was about about to break out, World War 2,
• 1:13:28
  Disney was an American firster. He didn't want the country to go
• 1:13:33
  to war. Why not?
• 1:13:35
  Because he was a fascist and not because he liked Hitler the way
• 1:13:41
  that Wender did, who was also anti war.
• 1:13:47
  Because his market was overseas where he made all his money.
• 1:13:53
  So you go to war with Germany. Germany was a huge market for
• 1:13:57
  Disney. They loved his cartoons and so
• 1:14:00
  he didn't want to go to war. And in his head, he blamed Jews
• 1:14:07
  for the war. You know, of course, the
• 1:14:11
  Holocaust and all of that which came out later, he felt proved
• 1:14:16
  his, his point that they were the enemies.
• 1:14:19
  And also the the Jewish cabal, as he referred to it in America
• 1:14:25
  was going to make money off of the war.
• 1:14:29
  So that he so he decided that the only people who wanted to go
• 1:14:38
  to war were the communists because they were the avowed
• 1:14:41
  enemies of the fascists. And that's where the whole anti
• 1:14:46
  communist thing begins. He, he formed various groups, he
• 1:14:53
  helped anti going to war groups he formed, he helped form the
• 1:15:00
  first HUAC investigations. He he which didn't go very far
• 1:15:05
  during the war, but after the war Hollywood committed suicide
• 1:15:10
  and he was one of the people behind all of it.
• 1:15:13
  Then when he was called to testify and this is all in the
• 1:15:18
  file, he named 3 animators who he said were comments.
• 1:15:25
  One of them was a fellow Silverman who had gone to the
• 1:15:31
  Moscow Arc Conservatory in the 20s to study art.
• 1:15:37
  Ominous. I found him living in a cold
• 1:15:40
  water Canyon in the suburbs or in the woods outside San
• 1:15:44
  Francisco. Never worked again.
• 1:15:47
  He and his wife Silverman kept a scrapbook of the big strike in
• 1:15:53
  1940, at the time the biggest Hollywood strike.
• 1:15:58
  We. And here's where the Uncle Walt
• 1:16:00
  thing comes in. I said to Silverman, can I copy
• 1:16:03
  this at Kinko's? Well, OK, yeah, go ahead.
• 1:16:07
  So I dragged all this stuff to Kinko's.
• 1:16:09
  I stood there while they hundreds of pages took it back
• 1:16:14
  with me. And it is.
• 1:16:17
  Even the people who hated the book begrudgingly acknowledge
• 1:16:21
  that I did the best strike story of what took place during that
• 1:16:27
  strike as essentially this is what it was.
• 1:16:30
  Disney was anti union, the same unions with communism.
• 1:16:36
  And he felt that his studio was a family and and so he wanted
• 1:16:43
  people to call him Uncle Walt because you can't go on strike
• 1:16:49
  against your family. You can't complain to a family
• 1:16:53
  member. I'm your uncle, you know, you
• 1:16:56
  don't need to join a union. I'll take every care of
• 1:16:59
  everything. Well, they went out on strike.
• 1:17:01
  The strike lasted nine months, and the only way it was settled
• 1:17:07
  was that Roy the businessman got Nelson Rockefeller to send
• 1:17:12
  Disney to South America on a goodwill tour.
• 1:17:16
  Free war. And while he was away, Roy
• 1:17:18
  settled the strike which. Wow, is that when he got into
• 1:17:23
  all the nature stuff? I think that was around the time
• 1:17:25
  he started doing all the nature documentaries.
• 1:17:26
  Right. A little later, this is when he
• 1:17:29
  did the three caprieros, right, Right, right.
• 1:17:31
  All the Latin stuff, the nature stuff came with TVA little bit
• 1:17:35
  later. And so that that split the
• 1:17:39
  brothers that put something Roy Walt never forgave Roy for
• 1:17:47
  settling that stripe. And you And if you look at the
• 1:17:50
  films that were made during it, like Dumbo, watch Dumbo again
• 1:17:55
  and you'll see there's a group of men working for the circus
• 1:18:01
  who are kind of strike work a strike strikers.
• 1:18:04
  It's a very look at it again. It's an incredibly telling film.
• 1:18:09
  Look at Bambi with the no father, which goes back to
• 1:18:12
  another part of Disney's life. But in 1949 or 50, Disney wanted
• 1:18:20
  to open up a an amusement park called Disney.
• 1:18:27
  He wanted to open it in Burbank right next to the studio.
• 1:18:31
  The Burbank is about 5 miles east of Hollywood.
• 1:18:37
  A lot of the studios were there. Most of them were there Warner
• 1:18:40
  Brothers, Columbia. Columbia was close to and
• 1:18:43
  universe. When Universal found out that he
• 1:18:45
  wanted to open up a studio near them because they were all near
• 1:18:50
  each other, they bought the land.
• 1:18:53
  Jim Fury, Disney. So he wound up buying an orange
• 1:18:59
  robe in Anaheim, but he didn't have the money.
• 1:19:04
  So at the same time, ABC, the ABC network, which today was
• 1:19:12
  owned by Disney, but back then they couldn't compete with the
• 1:19:16
  CBS and NBC and the DuMont Network, which was the 4th
• 1:19:22
  network back then, and they needed content.
• 1:19:27
  So they made a deal with Disney. They would fund Disneyland in
• 1:19:32
  return for having access to his library of films, which would
• 1:19:37
  give them content. And Walt said I'll make that
• 1:19:41
  deal if I can host the show. And that's how Disney became
• 1:19:46
  everybody's uncle Disney and TV Land, how he funded Disneyland
• 1:19:53
  coming out of Hewack and kind of whitewashing his image in
• 1:19:59
  Hollywood by being this avuncular TV host saved ABC from
• 1:20:06
  going out of business with that Sunday and then Wednesday night
• 1:20:09
  show. So it's a great saga and.
• 1:20:13
  You, in my opinion, you can't write a book about anybody if
• 1:20:19
  you don't tell the whole story. You know, there's another guy
• 1:20:23
  who wrote a Disney book after me.
• 1:20:25
  I'm not going to mention his name because I threatened to
• 1:20:27
  beat him up at a party because what he did was he went to
• 1:20:34
  Disney and said the same thing. I want to go into the archives
• 1:20:38
  and they said, well, you have to let us see it.
• 1:20:41
  And he did. He let them really write the
• 1:20:47
  book for him in return for which he wrote a less acerbic account.
• 1:20:54
  And I, OK, you know, fine, if people want to read that, let
• 1:20:58
  them read it. Then he started going on TV
• 1:21:01
  shows and putting my book down. You know, unlike Elliott's book,
• 1:21:05
  my book. So I happened to run into him in
• 1:21:08
  a party. Come here.
• 1:21:10
  I'll talk to you for a second. I got a little rough with him.
• 1:21:14
  Not physically, but I said to him, if you mentioned my name
• 1:21:19
  again in any way connected to your book, I will break your
• 1:21:23
  neck. All right, OK.
• 1:21:27
  And, And he's kind of a meek, kind of a schmuck jerk.
• 1:21:32
  You call him Schmuck, that's fine.
• 1:21:33
  Yeah, Schmuck. Schmuck is actually closer to
• 1:21:36
  what he is. He never again mentioned my book
• 1:21:41
  because you could you know you when these things come on Google
• 1:21:44
  tells you I hate just this whole demeanor changed after that.
• 1:21:50
  Not to say that I'm a tough guy or something, but I it's so
• 1:21:54
  outrageous. The politics behind the Disney
• 1:21:58
  book by Disney hired a when my book came out the daughter hired
• 1:22:05
  yeah Diane Disney hired APR group to discredit the book and
• 1:22:11
  the week the book came out they issued essentially a book
• 1:22:14
  attacking everything in my book but and distributed free to
• 1:22:21
  everybody but never sued me never can't write any any action
• 1:22:30
  against. You know what discovery?
• 1:22:33
  Yeah, that's right. And also the wife was still
• 1:22:35
  alive, Lily and Disney. So they and she's in the book
• 1:22:41
  they they knew they couldn't sue because they knew it was true.
• 1:22:44
  So the only thing that they had was cash.
• 1:22:47
  Credit, yeah. And we?
• 1:22:50
  Do that everywhere, huh? Yeah, that turned into a whole
• 1:22:54
  other situation. But the New York Times called me
• 1:23:00
  and said can we see the the Disney file?
• 1:23:05
  Can we see it? Yeah.
• 1:23:07
  So I'll send it to you, but please send it back to me.
• 1:23:12
  They got it and they wrote a piece.
• 1:23:14
  They wrote two pieces justifying everything I said in the book
• 1:23:19
  was essentially true. One was on the page and 1 was by
• 1:23:23
  Russell. That their famous editorial,
• 1:23:27
  Russell somebody, Russell Baker, wrote this piece talking about
• 1:23:33
  the book. What happened was they then
• 1:23:37
  hired A reviewer for the book review, the Sunday book review,
• 1:23:41
  and he trashed the book based on the Disney thing.
• 1:23:45
  But even he said that the the stuff about the strike was in
• 1:23:52
  great. So you know, what I learned from
• 1:23:58
  all of that is that when you write a book about Walt Disney
• 1:24:04
  or any, any of those icons, you can't really write that book
• 1:24:11
  because you have to overcome the image that they've spent a
• 1:24:15
  century building and they're now, you know, mega corporation
• 1:24:19
  and now own ABC among a million others.
• 1:24:23
  You have to either not write that book or go in and take your
• 1:24:27
  lumps. So at that time, I was coming
• 1:24:30
  out of a writer's block. I did not go into the book
• 1:24:34
  wanting to trash him. But it was Silverman who had
• 1:24:39
  been mentioned in in the Disney's testimony.
• 1:24:44
  All three of the artists he mentioned never worked again,
• 1:24:48
  who said, get the look at the strike stuff.
• 1:24:52
  This is who Disney was. Disney hired thugs, strike
• 1:24:57
  Breakers. One of them wound up working for
• 1:25:01
  it was in Reagan's cabinet. So some of the stories are so
• 1:25:06
  great that you really can't go into here.
• 1:25:09
  But it taught me a lot about how to how to write a biography as
• 1:25:13
  opposed to how to writing Hagia. And there's a big difference.
• 1:25:19
  And, and then of course, I got involved in the OJ case, which
• 1:25:24
  was a nightmare, but my biggest book because I had the goods.
• 1:25:33
  And then I wanted to, I, I said, finally after two years of that,
• 1:25:38
  I want to write a book where nobody is going to put me on the
• 1:25:43
  witness stand and nobody is going to try to kill me.
• 1:25:46
  I said, what about it? I was living with a girl who had
• 1:25:49
  connections to, to Irving Azoff, who was the Eagles manager.
• 1:25:56
  So I, I said I'm going to write a book about the Eagles.
• 1:26:01
  What harm can there be in that? Well, I, I said to her, I said
• 1:26:06
  we send a send a fax over to Irving telling him that I want
• 1:26:11
  to interview the Eagles. Well, we got a fax back 10
• 1:26:15
  minutes later. Tell your boyfriend and not only
• 1:26:19
  will he not talk to the Eagles, but he won't talk to anybody
• 1:26:22
  living in Los Angeles. I will make sure I mean, and it
• 1:26:25
  was just war over all over again.
• 1:26:28
  It was another battle that began a war and I spent two years
• 1:26:34
  battling them. Finally, the book.
• 1:26:38
  This is a great this really this this you'll leave this in.
• 1:26:42
  I'm sure the book was done and they were protesting it.
• 1:26:48
  Here's why they were so angry, among other things, including
• 1:26:52
  Don Henley's a mania for privacy at which he sees as some kind of
• 1:27:00
  measure of authenticity. But you had Warner Brothers,
• 1:27:07
  right? And all kind of attachments.
• 1:27:11
  Warner Books little. Record label, Yeah.
• 1:27:16
  Warner records at the top. Warner films at the top of the
• 1:27:20
  pyramid. The biggest money maker, The
• 1:27:23
  biggest single money maker in the history of Warner Brothers
• 1:27:28
  was the Eagles. No way.
• 1:27:31
  Yeah. Oh yeah.
• 1:27:32
  Until today. They're doing this fear now and
• 1:27:34
  I can't imagine how much money they're bringing in and setting
• 1:27:37
  up the. Receipt since they started that
• 1:27:40
  billboard. Billboard lists the attendance
• 1:27:42
  every week, not an empty seat. It's incredible.
• 1:27:47
  It's going to be it's going to be a film and they're going back
• 1:27:50
  on tour, their 9th of retirement post retirement tour.
• 1:27:54
  That's what they there. Was as many as Elton John.
• 1:27:58
  Or The Who? They're the champion.
• 1:28:01
  So they said you can't publish this book because where are
• 1:28:06
  Warner Brothers? Hey, the publishing division is
• 1:28:10
  independent. You know, we can't stop them.
• 1:28:12
  And they were. The book was already in galleys,
• 1:28:15
  which is a proof copy, a printed proof copy that goes out and
• 1:28:19
  reviews. Finally, I said, you know, this
• 1:28:22
  has been going on since 1990. It's now 1997.
• 1:28:26
  I just want to go up to my house.
• 1:28:28
  I want to turn the phones off. I just want to catch my breath.
• 1:28:35
  The first morning I was there, my phone rang at 7:00 in the
• 1:28:39
  morning. I said, really, it's just too
• 1:28:42
  much. I picked it up.
• 1:28:46
  Is this Mark Elliott? Yeah.
• 1:28:50
  So hold on for David Geffen. Whoa, yeah, sweet.
• 1:28:55
  I'm on the phone. Another girl comes on, said Mark
• 1:28:58
  Elliott. OK, David's coming.
• 1:28:59
  Hold on. Finally, 33 assistants down.
• 1:29:02
  David gets on the phone. Mark, how are you?
• 1:29:06
  How's everything? I've never met him, even though
• 1:29:08
  he's in the Eagles book. He had refused to be
• 1:29:11
  interviewed. I said, what do I owe this
• 1:29:16
  lovely phone call to? And he said, he said, you know,
• 1:29:25
  I read your Eagles book and I have to tell you, it's terrific.
• 1:29:31
  However, you left a couple of things out.
• 1:29:34
  Now, bear in mind there are two things.
• 1:29:36
  First of all, the book was embargoed.
• 1:29:38
  There was no way he could get a copy of the book, but he was
• 1:29:41
  David Geffen, and so there's. No way he couldn't get a copy of
• 1:29:44
  the book, actually. I mean, I couldn't get a copy.
• 1:29:48
  I you know what I discovered writing the book was that Geffen
• 1:29:54
  and Henley hated each other. Hated each other.
• 1:29:59
  And the reason they did was because when Henley, when Henley
• 1:30:04
  and the Eagles signed with Geffen, Geffen was creating an
• 1:30:08
  independent label called Asylum Hit the allure for the Eagles,
• 1:30:14
  who considered themselves anti corporate.
• 1:30:16
  You know, we don't want to be part of the machine.
• 1:30:19
  We want to be independent. And Geffen said, well, I'm the
• 1:30:22
  guy you know, I'm the guy who will give you all of that.
• 1:30:27
  So they, they signed with Asylum, they made an album,
• 1:30:32
  Desperados, the album, everything was fine.
• 1:30:36
  And then Geffen sold the album, sold the label to Warner
• 1:30:44
  Electra, Merge, became Warner Electra Atlantic Asylum.
• 1:30:52
  That's right. And suddenly Don Henley finds
• 1:30:57
  himself working for the biggest corporation and music, and he
• 1:31:04
  blames David Geffen. And so they get into all kind of
• 1:31:08
  lawsuits because he also had a solo contract with Gavin.
• 1:31:12
  He didn't want to give him the solo stuff.
• 1:31:14
  And Gavin, I'm taking you to court.
• 1:31:15
  You have to give me these wrecks.
• 1:31:17
  So when Geffen. So when I wrote the book, I
• 1:31:20
  didn't know any of that. You know, I wrote the book the
• 1:31:25
  way I could, Geffen says to me, I'm going to tell you some
• 1:31:31
  things that nobody knows that need to be in your book.
• 1:31:35
  I said, well, you have the book in front of you.
• 1:31:37
  It's already written. Don't worry about that.
• 1:31:39
  I'll call. I'll call your publisher.
• 1:31:43
  We'll work the whole thing out. Just listen to me and listen
• 1:31:47
  carefully. Flip the tape recorder on.
• 1:31:50
  I spoke to him for a week, one week.
• 1:31:53
  Every morning, he would call me. Now, don't forget 7:00.
• 1:31:56
  My time is 4:00 in the morning in LA That's David Gaff, 24
• 1:32:01
  hours. Yeah, that's right.
• 1:32:02
  By the time the week was over, my eyes were open.
• 1:32:11
  And I say to the publishers, you know, I have all this new
• 1:32:15
  information I want to put in what they say.
• 1:32:17
  Well, the book is already written.
• 1:32:21
  Then Irving Azoff, the manager of the Eagles, called the
• 1:32:24
  publisher and said, we understand that Mark talked to
• 1:32:30
  David Geffen. Is that true?
• 1:32:33
  And my publisher says, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:37
  And we're going to redo the book.
• 1:32:38
  So Irving Azoff says, well, you can't redo the book unless Mark
• 1:32:43
  talks to Don Henley, the guy who swore I would never be able to
• 1:32:49
  step foot in Los Angeles. They wound up all talking to me
• 1:32:54
  and I rewrote the whole book. Wow.
• 1:32:59
  And they paid me again, which big money they paid me again to
• 1:33:04
  agree to pull the book, rewrite the whole thing and release it.
• 1:33:11
  Henley I, I, I, I spent a lot of time with him, with all the
• 1:33:16
  living Eagles. It was a different book.
• 1:33:20
  It was, it was fantastic. And still he wasn't happy
• 1:33:23
  because Henley wanted me to take out the story about the, the
• 1:33:28
  girl that overdosed in his house.
• 1:33:31
  And he went, he actually went to trial and they were going to put
• 1:33:35
  him in jail. He didn't want that to come out.
• 1:33:38
  I said why it happened and he said I don't want my 97 year old
• 1:33:42
  mother to read that. I see your your 97 mother year
• 1:33:45
  old can read. She she's going to be reading a
• 1:33:48
  rock book. Come on.
• 1:33:51
  Anyway, the book came out Graves still in print to this day.
• 1:33:58
  You can go on Amazon and you'll see it's not only as an imprint,
• 1:34:02
  but it's always high on numbers of rock books.
• 1:34:04
  It's always like 30, 2015. It's one of the biggest books I
• 1:34:09
  I ever wrote. So the life of a writer.
• 1:34:15
  I mean, that's, that's that's how it goes.
• 1:34:18
  You have to be aggressive. You have to be either ignorant
• 1:34:22
  or fearless or both. Both helps and you have to want
• 1:34:28
  to be able to tell a story, but you give you get 100 artists in
• 1:34:36
  a room and you get David the statue of David in Florence by
• 1:34:45
  Michael and you say to them here's here's the marble, here's
• 1:34:50
  the chisel, here's the hammer. These are all the tools that
• 1:34:54
  Michelangelo use. Make David point being that you
• 1:35:01
  can have all the training, you can have all the technical
• 1:35:04
  knowledge, but you also have to have talent.
• 1:35:09
  You have to be able to make that magic leap into talent.
• 1:35:15
  So I got into biography because of Phil Oakes's death and
• 1:35:23
  wanting to tell that story before someone came in and
• 1:35:26
  screwed it up and we biographer became my main, not my only
• 1:35:32
  subject, but my main subject. The last big one I did was Merle
• 1:35:37
  Haggard, which it's a five star book.
• 1:35:40
  Everybody loves that book and everybody, almost everybody,
• 1:35:44
  talked to me for it. And I'm working on two books
• 1:35:47
  now, not exactly biographies, but one is a movie book and 1 is
• 1:35:52
  a film, a music book and film book.
• 1:35:55
  So they're my 30th and 31st books.
• 1:35:59
  Incredible. Incredible age of 35.
• 1:36:02
  I've done all these books. Wow, Age of 32, Ripe age of 32.
• 1:36:07
  And you've done all this. You know I would.
• 1:36:13
  I know, I know we're out of time.
• 1:36:14
  I know we're a little overtime. I would love to do another
• 1:36:18
  episode with you if in a couple of months, if you have the time,
• 1:36:21
  because I'm having so much, I'm having so much fun with this.
• 1:36:24
  And I just want to ask maybe one or two last questions if you
• 1:36:27
  have a minute. Sure.
• 1:36:29
  Do you? There's so many good things over
• 1:36:32
  here. Circling back to Disney, do you
• 1:36:35
  think there's any reason to assume that that he stopped,
• 1:36:41
  that he said that the company stopped working with the
• 1:36:43
  government, with FBI and, you know, treat, you know, giving
• 1:36:46
  that kind of internal information to the government at
• 1:36:48
  any point? I mean, one thing that is a
• 1:36:51
  famous sentiment is that once government to anyone gets power,
• 1:36:55
  it takes an awful lot for them to relinquish any of it, you
• 1:36:57
  know, And so like, once a precedent is set, I, I imagine
• 1:37:00
  that the fear is that that it could just keep on happening.
• 1:37:04
  Well, first of all, it wasn't. The company was Disney OK,
• 1:37:10
  individual OK. Secondly, Ronald Reagan.
• 1:37:15
  I wrote a biography of Reagan called The Hollywood Years that
• 1:37:19
  is only about what he did before he became a.
• 1:37:23
  Professional, Ronald. Reagan and it's it's a wonderful
• 1:37:26
  book. It's being made into a
• 1:37:28
  documentary now. It it shows you where all of his
• 1:37:35
  abilities came from, mostly from Jack Warner and Warner Brothers.
• 1:37:40
  It's a really wonderful story. Reagan also collaborated with
• 1:37:47
  the FBI when he was the head of the screen, the Screen Actors
• 1:37:53
  Gil Sack. When Reagan was asked about it,
• 1:37:59
  he said, well, of course I did it.
• 1:38:01
  It was the patriotic thing to do, see, And that's where the
• 1:38:05
  Disney people went off. They should have said yes, he
• 1:38:08
  did because he was doing it for the sake of what he felt was his
• 1:38:13
  patriotic duty. Instead, they went crazy.
• 1:38:17
  No, he never, even though that said on every page in the file
• 1:38:21
  that he was a special agent. SAC.
• 1:38:25
  What is an SAC? Special Agent contact, which
• 1:38:29
  meant that the FBI had agents in all over Hollywood.
• 1:38:34
  That's a whole other story. The war between Hollywood and
• 1:38:38
  Washington. And they had contacts in every
• 1:38:41
  studio and they would call them an SAC.
• 1:38:46
  So in their memos, they would say to J Edgar Hoover re
• 1:38:51
  regarding Walt Disney SAC, Walt Disney special agent Wow.
• 1:38:59
  You see the back cover of the book, there's a page from the
• 1:39:03
  file that shows you Walt Disney SAC.
• 1:39:06
  So all the all the accusations that they made and all the the
• 1:39:11
  lying and the covering up didn't hold any water.
• 1:39:16
  Yeah, because I had the goods, but I didn't have the goods.
• 1:39:20
  Believe me, they would own my country house today.
• 1:39:23
  That's right, that's right, that's right.
• 1:39:25
  Well, thank you. Thank you really sincerely for
• 1:39:28
  the great work that you've done and that you continue to do.
• 1:39:31
  And I love the mentality of not listen, we live in a world that
• 1:39:38
  is so dependent on people who self censoring out of
• 1:39:42
  intimidation and fear that it's really, really wonderful to hear
• 1:39:45
  someone say, you know, look at the machine in the face and say,
• 1:39:47
  Hey, I don't know what you're talking about.
• 1:39:49
  I got the facts right here. You want to fight with me about
• 1:39:50
  the facts, fight with me about the facts.
• 1:39:52
  But like, I don't know what you want to say about this.
• 1:39:53
  And I know that it takes and you know, I don't know, I, I, I'm
• 1:39:57
  beginning to learn very, very slowly.
• 1:39:59
  And you know that there is an enormous amount of pushback for
• 1:40:02
  just pointing out the obvious a lot of times and pointing out
• 1:40:05
  reality. So thank you really.
• 1:40:08
  For, for the great work that you're that you're doing and
• 1:40:10
  that you've done. And I really would love to
• 1:40:13
  record again in a couple of months, maybe when you have some
• 1:40:15
  more free time, but to dive into a lot more of the work you do
• 1:40:17
  that you've done. Because I'm having a really
• 1:40:19
  amazing time. And this conversation is exactly
• 1:40:21
  down, down my alley. And I'd love to have a lot more
• 1:40:24
  of it. All right.
• 1:40:25
  Well, yeah, happy to to do it. I always like to nothing I like
• 1:40:32
  better than talking about myself so.
• 1:40:34
  There we go. Beautiful.
• 1:40:35
  I've noticed a lot of people have that in common.
• 1:40:38
  Anyway, Mark, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time.
• 1:40:41
  This is really wonderful. Thank you.
• 1:40:43
  You're welcome.