Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / #132 Kieron Connolly / Publishing / Hollywood History / Art & Artists / Streaming & Theaters

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#132 Kieron Connolly / Publishing / Hollywood History / Art & Artists / Streaming & Theaters · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:14
  Yep. Awesome.
• 0:15
  Kieran, welcome. We're live.
• 0:17
  How are you doing today? Happy New Year.
• 0:18
  Very. Well, thank you.
• 0:19
  Happy New Year to you too. I'm very pleased to to be
• 0:21
  speaking to you Tuesday on New Year's Day.
• 0:24
  Yeah, that's right. I appreciate you taking the time
• 0:26
  on a holiday and I'm really excited to talk to you.
• 0:29
  I found your profile because I was looking for.
• 0:32
  I love Hollywood and I've been learning a lot about just
• 0:36
  history in general recently. And I've been trying to find all
• 0:38
  the niches and fun aspects of history of the, you know, topics
• 0:42
  that I love. And so I came across your book
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  and it's actually on the way to me now.
• 0:48
  I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but but I did get a
• 0:51
  chance to shoot off an e-mail and see if you wanted to talk
• 0:53
  about it first and a bunch of other things because it happens
• 0:56
  to be that I'm also a writer. I got a creative writing
• 0:58
  literature degree in college and I've been writing short poetry
• 1:03
  for the most part ever since. And I teach high school English,
• 1:06
  and, you know, and you have a rare situation where you're on
• 1:11
  both ends of the writing spectrum, where you're editing
• 1:14
  and you're finding, you know, good stories and fascinating
• 1:16
  stories. And then you're a writer
• 1:17
  yourself. So I'm really excited to talk to
• 1:20
  you about a whole bunch of stuff today.
• 1:22
  OK, can I ask a question? Please.
• 1:26
  What What ages do you teach in high school?
• 1:30
  I rotate on a on a yearly basis. This year is 9th, 10th and 12th.
• 1:36
  What? What age is that?
• 1:39
  That would be thirteen. OK. 1314 is 9th grade, 1415 is
• 1:44
  10th grade, and then 1718 is 12th grade.
• 1:47
  OK, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
• 1:49
  Well, what's your? What are you curious about?
• 1:52
  I was just wondering if, if you know, what ages it was.
• 1:56
  And yeah, I mean, we're all everyone's always interested in
• 2:00
  education because we we, you know, we've all been through it
• 2:03
  some, some work in it and their own stories of what was good or
• 2:06
  bad about their schooling. So.
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  I had. It happens to be that I was very
• 2:10
  lucky to go to very good schools, but I had a very hard
• 2:13
  time in school. I had at a very difficult time
• 2:18
  taking tests. I had a very, I would get very
• 2:21
  overwhelmed and then I would panic and my, you know, and the
• 2:24
  information that I'd spent hours and hours studying and taking
• 2:27
  notes on would just fly out of my brain.
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  And, and then I thought I was dumb until I got to college and
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  until, until I got took a creative writing class as one of
• 2:36
  my professors. And I learned that a much more
• 2:38
  eloquent and and well spoken when I have an opportunity to
• 2:45
  put my own words to an idea and not be boxed into particular
• 2:48
  answers or perspectives. Yeah, which kind of fits the
• 2:50
  rest of my life. It's great that you had that
• 2:52
  experience as sort of to see, you know, to find your way.
• 2:55
  Yeah, yeah. And it helps me a lot as far as
• 2:58
  connecting with my students because I try very much to make
• 3:02
  it as relatable. And, you know, I mean, the
• 3:06
  classes are relatively small. They're between 10 and 15 kids
• 3:09
  apiece, which is a really good size.
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  It gives me a good amount of time to be able to focus on each
• 3:14
  kid a good amount. But yeah, I understand.
• 3:19
  I like the, I know the feeling of not being able to sit behind
• 3:22
  your desk for, you know, 45 minutes or starting a class at
• 3:25
  5:45 PM and, you know, and realizing that you got another
• 3:28
  45 minutes of your day to go and you're 17 and you, all you want
• 3:31
  to do is play basketball. So, you know, I, I, I, I relate
• 3:35
  pretty strongly to that. Can you want to tell me a little
• 3:37
  bit about, about yourself and your career?
• 3:40
  And I want to kind of dive into some of some of the work that
• 3:43
  you've done and hear some of your thoughts.
• 3:46
  Yeah. So I've worked across
• 3:47
  publishing, publishing and journalism for many years now,
• 3:49
  maybe 20 odd years now. And you know, we're speaking
• 3:53
  today because I wrote a book called The History.
• 3:55
  It's got various titles over the years, but more recently it's
• 3:57
  been called The History of Hollywood once it's called Dark
• 3:59
  History of Hollywood. And this is a book was published
• 4:02
  by a publisher I, I worked for in house at the time as an
• 4:05
  editor in the UK called Amber Books.
• 4:08
  But cinema had always been a great interest of mine from from
• 4:12
  being a child. And I did go to the National
• 4:14
  Film and Television School in England and I did a screen
• 4:17
  writing course and my interest at that point was becoming a
• 4:19
  screenwriter. But also I was always interested
• 4:21
  in, in generally in how the industry worked.
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  And my father was in the industry a bit as a screenwriter
• 4:28
  himself. So I, I met people over the
• 4:30
  years who worked in the industry.
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  I went on film sets. I went into cutting rooms when I
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  was a student. I introduced some people, my
• 4:37
  first degrees in history. I introduced some people about
• 4:39
  the process of making a film. I introduced a, you know, a
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  producer, a writer, a director, a designer, an editor, a
• 4:44
  cinematographer, A composer. And what a, you know, I hadn't
• 4:50
  to get them to tell me their stories of how it how it works
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  from their point of view. So not just doing their
• 4:53
  celebrity interviews, which is usually an actual director, but
• 4:56
  actually taking different people involved in putting, putting,
• 5:00
  putting on the show. And when the opportunity came to
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  write this book for the publisher, you know, I put my
• 5:07
  hand up and I was very pleased to get the Commission to write
• 5:09
  it. And it was a very intensive, but
• 5:11
  very happy summer writing the book.
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  And I would have spent many, many, many months and years
• 5:16
  writing it, but that wasn't the way it was going to work.
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  There was a there was a deadline.
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  To me, the deadlines are quite exciting and it's nice to, to
• 5:23
  reach to, to step up to that challenge.
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  And although I already knew a bit about Hollywood, I learned a
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  great, great deal more, mainly sitting in the British Library
• 5:32
  reading other books on the subject.
• 5:35
  Right. And I'm so curious, even just
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  from that little introduction, what have you found as you spoke
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  to different people? Because you know, one thing that
• 5:45
  I did I'm doing is I'm focusing on similar to what you did.
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  I'm interviewing stunt double S I'm interviewing music
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  supervisors. I'm I'm, I'm trying to interview
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  writers and editors. I interviewed the gentleman that
• 5:58
  produced the Taken series, which was a lot of fun.
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  And excuse me. And I'm also trying to kind of
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  get a feel for for this. And, you know, reading about the
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  history of Hollywood, you know, Hollywood's kind of gone through
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  different waves of power that you know, or creative power.
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  And you know, and, and, and to kind of see even today the
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  remnants of, let's say, the director, the directing
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  generation, you know, like how much power and their prestige
• 6:27
  and reputation is, you know, whether it's.
• 6:29
  Like the generation from the late 60s to the early 80s,
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  right? Yeah, sixties, 70s till today,
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  even the Spielberg's and you know, and the modern school
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  Stasies and all those gentlemen that that pretty much can have
• 6:42
  an, you know, open check to any studio they want to make any
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  idea that they want. And, and it's cool kind of to
• 6:48
  see how that how that works and how the dynamics of Hollywood
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  have changed over the years. So what have you found when you
• 6:54
  started or what are some things that surprised you or didn't
• 6:56
  surprise you when you started interviewing people?
• 6:58
  So I didn't interview people for for this book in particular.
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  There wasn't really the the time or the budget to do that.
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  I interviewed people. I've interviewed people over the
• 7:06
  years for other projects or just wrote to people.
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  Yeah, I'm trying to think of one particular thing.
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  I'm not sure I can settle the 111 sort of particular gem
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  there. I think what, what what struck
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  me when I was researching the book, which I didn't really know
• 7:26
  about before, was the sort of the level of corruption in
• 7:28
  Hollywood in the 40s forties, how the unions were corrupted by
• 7:33
  the mob. That was something that I hadn't
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  known about it. It's in all the books.
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  I just hadn't read it before. That was an interesting area in
• 7:41
  terms of you're talking about the director's generation.
• 7:44
  You know, I think it's, it's interesting the way that the
• 7:47
  power shifts over the over the decades.
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  And I think those directors were now would say how difficult it
• 7:53
  it is to get certain projects made and easy to get other
• 7:56
  projects made and how the studios are producing far fewer
• 8:00
  films. And they're producing, you know,
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  a lot of like Marvel type superhero things and a few quite
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  low budget films. And like the mid budget movie is
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  very hard to get financed now. And I think about someone like
• 8:12
  Robert Redford, who died last year in 2025, made in 198586 and
• 8:19
  85, I think out of Africa with Sydney Pollock.
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  And you're kind of oh, would they make that movie today that,
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  you know, with two big film stars and expensive film in
• 8:26
  filming in Kenya or whatever. I'm not sure they would finance
• 8:30
  that film today, or at least not at that level.
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  It would be a kind of a much smaller production the way the
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  way sorry I'd. Probably go to streaming I
• 8:39
  imagine. And it might be ATV series, it
• 8:41
  might it might be TV series on streaming yeah.
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  So how things how things change and the different, you know,
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  while Hollywood may make fewer say with grown up films, there
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  are there are other avenues now there are other outlets.
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  Yeah, definitely. I'd say that film has become,
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  has definitely become more democratized over the years,
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  especially with the technology that's been available to
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  everyone. I'm showing my high school
• 9:02
  students now the movie Dead Poets Society, and they are it's
• 9:09
  I had to give them. Come out when I was about their
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  age, right? I was with 17.
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  There you go. And and I mean, it's actually
• 9:15
  funny that you say that because last year I showed them the
• 9:18
  Blind side. They said, what movie?
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  What year did this come out? I said 2008.
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  They said that's the year we were born.
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  And I was like, Oh my goodness gracious, That's that's wild.
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  But I had to give them, I had to really prep them in advance and
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  explain that, you know, what a drama was and how everything you
• 9:34
  know what from the from the cinematography to the acting is
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  much more intentional and that you know, they're not going to
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  this is a different type of movie that they're than what
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  they're used to watching, where not everything is a cut
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  immediately. And you know, the bodies tell
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  stories and the camera tells stories.
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  And you still get some of that today, but I think a lot less
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  less frequently. And so I was kind of introducing
• 9:55
  them to that genre. They didn't really know what to
• 9:57
  do with it, you know. And yeah, I thought that it's,
• 10:00
  you know, so it's it is a, I guess that genre is a lost art.
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  There's a great book by gentleman Ben Fritz called The
• 10:07
  Big Picture, I believe. And, and he, he's a Wall Street,
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  Wall Street Journal writer for many years.
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  And he, he talks about how the reason why franchises are the
• 10:19
  primary films that the studios are green lighting today is
• 10:23
  because the international audience is so important now to
• 10:26
  the box. And, and, you know, there's not
• 10:30
  as much, there's not as much desire for an Ethan Hawke, Robin
• 10:33
  Williams drama as there is, you know, for, you know, another
• 10:39
  transformer, you know, blowing up, you know, Taiwan or
• 10:42
  Manhattan or something. Yeah, yeah.
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  That there's a point where the, you know, the the markets beyond
• 10:49
  the US were just sort of extra, extra thing.
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  Now that we're at now it's it's it's essential and integral to,
• 10:55
  you know, how they budget the movie.
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  And at the time when the dead purse came out, you know, Ethan
• 10:59
  Hall wasn't was it was I think it's his first film.
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  So he wasn't a name at all. Probably Williams isn't was a
• 11:04
  name, but sure, I've not seen the film since it came out.
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  It's kind of, so it sort of surprises me to sort of for you
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  to say, you know, the, the, the kids found it kind of a
• 11:12
  challenge to watch because to me it seemed like a very
• 11:14
  straightforward film. But obviously ties move on.
• 11:17
  Yeah, yeah. We're seeing, we're seeing our
• 11:21
  attention spans getting, you know, shot down.
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  And it happens to be that because the school that I teach
• 11:25
  at is an Orthodox Jewish school, most of the students don't have
• 11:29
  smartphones and they're not even allowed to have them.
• 11:31
  And so you could see the, the developmental difference even
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  I'm the oldest of 6 and, you know, my youngest brother's 14,
• 11:39
  I'm 30. And, and he, and the difference
• 11:43
  in attention and the difference in the way that you can
• 11:45
  appreciate a film, I think is pretty dramatic without, you
• 11:48
  know, without having that smartphone, you know, and the
• 11:50
  way that you develop and go up. Can you tell me a little bit
• 11:53
  about the, about the corruption with the mafia and the unions?
• 11:56
  And if you want to explain just if anyone doesn't know what
• 11:59
  unions are in the way they work within the world of Hollywood.
• 12:02
  OK, let's see if I can remember. So, you know, with the ending of
• 12:06
  prohibition in with prohibition ended in 20s, When did it end
• 12:14
  anyway? The mob, the mob, when when
• 12:18
  alcohol became legal again to sell the mob, The mob was
• 12:22
  looking for a new outlet. Hollywood became one of those,
• 12:24
  one of those outlets. And one of the ways in was that
• 12:27
  they, they would approach the technicians unions, the people
• 12:30
  who, who managed the, the unions who, the, the organisations who
• 12:34
  supported the, the people who were the carpenters at the
• 12:37
  studios. These are all the projectionists
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  and the body that was supposed to look after the, their
• 12:43
  interests of the, of the projectionists and the
• 12:45
  carpenters, for example, and the scene shifters.
• 12:49
  And the more managed to infiltrate that union and sort
• 12:52
  of say, you know, we will they mostly infiltrate it and
• 13:00
  actually start running it and and then say, and then say to
• 13:04
  the studios, rather than improving the conditions for
• 13:09
  these workers, give us a kickback, a financial, you know,
• 13:13
  give us some money and we'll just we'll all pay a little lip
• 13:16
  service to improve conditions. So we'll do a little bit for the
• 13:18
  workers, but mainly money's going back to the mob.
• 13:22
  And if you don't, and if you don't do it, all these workers,
• 13:24
  all the protectionists will shut down and then you won't have
• 13:26
  anyone coming in, you know, no one, no one paying tickets,
• 13:30
  sure, buying tickets at your cinemas.
• 13:33
  And this happened in the late, late 30s and early 40s.
• 13:36
  And finally, the law caught up with them, and the head of one
• 13:42
  of the studios went to prison for a short time, and the
• 13:47
  mobsters were imprisoned. And I think one of them later
• 13:51
  died in a suspicious car explosion when he was living
• 13:54
  near Vegas. Yeah.
• 13:56
  Yeah, it's suspicious, I, I tell.
• 13:58
  The better in the book, yeah. I see, I see.
• 14:03
  Yeah, there was. Oh man, I'm going to have to
• 14:06
  recall the name of the book, but I read about studio head
• 14:11
  corruption and and misappropriation of funds.
• 14:15
  Oh man, it's going to drive me crazy.
• 14:16
  And I believe it was the Columbia.
• 14:19
  David Bagel man book and decent exposure.
• 14:22
  David. Bagel.
• 14:23
  Decent exposure. Yes, that book was spectacular.
• 14:27
  Yeah, cover to cover was great. Long time ago since I looked at
• 14:30
  that book. But yeah, David Bagel, I tell, I
• 14:33
  tell his story briefly in my book, but only in, oh, yeah, 200
• 14:35
  words. Yeah.
• 14:36
  Yeah, it's a great, it was a great book.
• 14:39
  And is that is that is that the same around the same time period
• 14:41
  that is occurring or? No, because Begman was I think
• 14:43
  late 70s, early 80s, and there's thought I was talking about the
• 14:46
  1940s, Yeah. Gotcha.
• 14:48
  And did. The, the, the, the, the studio
• 14:51
  header went to prison for a while.
• 14:53
  Actually had a relationship with a young Marilyn Monroe, like
• 14:57
  before she was famous. Yeah.
• 14:58
  Really. He was.
• 14:59
  He was much older, yeah, but yeah.
• 15:02
  She's been getting a lot of people in trouble for a while,
• 15:05
  huh? I guess.
• 15:06
  I mean, I don't know if you could blame her, but yeah.
• 15:09
  How does, how does, how does one remove the mafia once they kind
• 15:13
  of get the hooks into, you know, some kind of one remove the
• 15:17
  mafia once they get the hooks into an organization, I mean.
• 15:21
  Yeah, I mean, those guys did go to prison.
• 15:23
  So that was that was that sort of that sort of I think ended
• 15:25
  that thing. I don't know enough now to sort
• 15:28
  of know how close things are, but but that was the sort of the
• 15:30
  story from that period and it's told, I think again in quite a
• 15:32
  good book. The the I can't remember it
• 15:39
  right now. I'll tell you.
• 15:39
  I'll tell you before I'll. Come to you, it was.
• 15:42
  Surfaced at the end of the interview, Yeah.
• 15:43
  Definitely, definitely, definitely.
• 15:45
  Yeah, I did. I did.
• 15:47
  I did an episode with a gentleman that studies the
• 15:49
  history of gambling in general and in Vegas and the mafia
• 15:52
  connection, obviously. And one of the ways that he
• 15:56
  basically said that the government had to catch the
• 16:00
  mafia in Vegas and get rid of them was pretty much to kind of
• 16:03
  just strip them of their civil liberties and then, you know,
• 16:06
  find them guilty and just toss them in prison.
• 16:11
  You know, which I'm not quite sure what I think.
• 16:15
  And you know the problem. I've been thinking about this
• 16:18
  quite a bit recently that, you know, people say that regulation
• 16:22
  leads to corruption, obviously, but lack of regulation leads to
• 16:25
  corruption too. So like, you know, there's
• 16:27
  really no perfect world. And I think all we have to do is
• 16:29
  just really be as vigilant as possible because, you know,
• 16:33
  there, there is no perfect system that people will not be
• 16:36
  able to, you know, kind of sneak their way into and, you know,
• 16:39
  one way or another really 'cause some kind of damage.
• 16:44
  So tell me a little bit. I'm sorry.
• 16:46
  So, so you, you see, how did you get commissioned to?
• 16:48
  So you you said that you were in house, you're an editor and you
• 16:51
  get commissioned to write this book and you have a couple of
• 16:53
  months to write it. No, I had, I think I had sort of
• 16:56
  from June to sort of late September, yeah.
• 16:59
  But adequate time is that is that that that's.
• 17:02
  Good. But it was a real thrill.
• 17:04
  It was because I think 58,000 words, including captions, like
• 17:08
  quite long captions. And that was a great thrill to
• 17:11
  write it. And yeah, I would have happily
• 17:13
  spent much longer. But that was the sort of that
• 17:15
  was what the schedule they were working on.
• 17:16
  And and there's there's quite sort of, you know, I had nothing
• 17:20
  else planned for that summer. So it was quite nice to say, OK,
• 17:22
  this is all I'm going to do, you know, and.
• 17:25
  I'll and you always wanted to be a writer.
• 17:29
  I suppose, you know, when I was younger, I was thinking about
• 17:31
  movies and my, my father's, you know, has been a journalist and
• 17:34
  a novelist and a screenwriter. So there's a sort of you grew up
• 17:37
  absorbing this, this, this sort of way of life, you know, for
• 17:40
  better or for worse. You know, maybe I should have
• 17:42
  kind of looked further afield. But, and so my, all my jobs have
• 17:47
  sort of been on different sides of this desk, either writing a
• 17:50
  book or editing a book or when I was in journalism.
• 17:52
  But a lot of my work was sort of finding books that we could do
• 17:55
  do extracts from, like not finding, pulling the thread out
• 17:58
  of out of a biography to tell a story.
• 18:00
  So it's all sort of storytelling in different ways.
• 18:03
  And then when I then before that, I was sort of trying to do
• 18:05
  screen writing. So I was trying to make up
• 18:06
  stories and things. And it was always.
• 18:08
  Interesting. What's the difference?
• 18:09
  In the process story, sorry. What's the difference in the
• 18:11
  creative process when you when you're trying to, when you're
• 18:13
  trying to come up with a story, how do you kind of outline that?
• 18:16
  Well, I suppose I, I've had, you know, less experience, also
• 18:18
  less, less success in that field.
• 18:20
  And I suppose, you know, with that, you're sort of stuck with
• 18:22
  the blank page. Whereas when you're writing a
• 18:24
  non fiction book, you're, you're always drawing on something.
• 18:26
  There's always another book on David Bagel or, or on, you know,
• 18:29
  1940s Hollywood that, that, that you can look at.
• 18:34
  So there's always more research to be done.
• 18:35
  And the, the danger is you end up doing too much research or
• 18:37
  you haven't got, we've run out of time or, or you're kind of
• 18:39
  you can't see the wood for the trees.
• 18:42
  And in fiction, you're fiction, something kind of, you know,
• 18:44
  seems interesting to you and you sort of start running with it
• 18:47
  and think this is going to go very far.
• 18:48
  I sometimes think about fiction a bit like a bit like a sort of
• 18:54
  Doctor Frankenstein studio and you've got all these sort of
• 18:58
  bits of severed limbs and, you know, a torso, but no head.
• 19:01
  Well, you've got a head but no torso.
• 19:03
  And you don't quite, and you can't quite get the electricity
• 19:06
  to it to, to make it come alive, but you've got all these bits on
• 19:09
  on a good day. You think of it in more like an
• 19:11
  artist's studio where there are kind of some, maybe some
• 19:12
  unfinished paintings, but there's bits and pieces going on
• 19:15
  and and you think at one point I will finish that and it will
• 19:18
  come to life and go somewhere. Yeah.
• 19:21
  So I've got various folders of ideas and things scribble down
• 19:23
  and things. I'm very busy right now with
• 19:26
  with other things. So sure, sure, sure, sure.
• 19:30
  Well, if you're editing and you're looking for or you're
• 19:32
  looking for a good story, what are you looking for that catches
• 19:34
  your eye as far as freshness or character, you know, more
• 19:38
  character driven story. How do you determine what's
• 19:40
  like, you know, what's going to try to catch people's eye?
• 19:44
  I mean, mainly now I'm working in nonfiction and a lot of that
• 19:47
  is history. And you're so a lot of the
• 19:51
  history is sort of quite well, actually, it's just the history
• 19:53
  of a country or it's the history of a particular moment, moment,
• 19:56
  moment. So it's not necessarily hugely
• 19:58
  character LED. That said character LED history
• 20:01
  is, is is is very stimulating because it's much more
• 20:04
  interesting for the reader to follow one one person through or
• 20:06
  a few people through a story rather than, you know, you know,
• 20:11
  15 different presidents or something.
• 20:13
  Yeah, So so. You're looking for the kind of
• 20:19
  both the interesting idea and also how well the the author
• 20:21
  tells it and how well do they write, You know, and.
• 20:25
  What would be considered good or bad writing?
• 20:26
  Like what what? What would you look to avoid?
• 20:29
  You know, avoid the cliches. Tell me something I didn't
• 20:33
  already know. If you can tell me something
• 20:35
  I'll already know, kind of tell me it it to me in a surprising
• 20:37
  way that kind of takes me, you know, makes me think, oh, I
• 20:40
  didn't know. You know, I was reading
• 20:41
  something that earlier today and I thought, well, I kind of know,
• 20:43
  know most of this already. And the person who's telling it
• 20:45
  to me isn't sort of presenting it with any sort of fresh
• 20:48
  insight. So even if it's a well known
• 20:51
  story, at least have such a good perspective on it that you're
• 20:55
  bringing something fresh to the topic.
• 20:57
  Right. What kind of tasks do you set
• 20:59
  your your pupils to write at school?
• 21:04
  So it's actually funny you ask. I primarily focus on creative
• 21:09
  and self expressive assignments as in, you know, write a story
• 21:13
  about like, I just had my class write a poem and the 2 rules
• 21:17
  were it has to be about something negative and it can't
• 21:19
  end on a on a happy note. And yeah, and one of the reasons
• 21:23
  why is, like you said earlier, to kind of avoid those cliches.
• 21:26
  And my first year of writing in college, I would only write, you
• 21:31
  know, happy poetry. And it was all bad.
• 21:34
  It was all, it was all quite awful.
• 21:36
  And and my professor, you know, pulled me aside one time.
• 21:39
  He said, listen, he goes, I really do appreciate the mindset
• 21:42
  that you have where you're trying to focus on the good.
• 21:44
  He's like CE OS. The problem is it comes off
• 21:50
  sounding inauthentic and not quite as organic.
• 21:53
  And he's like, maybe try to be a little bit more raw or a little
• 21:56
  bit more real in your writing. And, and then as the, as the
• 22:01
  years have kind of followed, I've noticed that my writing was
• 22:04
  always better when I was kind of trying to work through something
• 22:08
  that I was, that was going on in my, you know, and whether that
• 22:11
  was fictional or whether that was a poem or that was a letter
• 22:13
  to myself. And I'm just trying to work
• 22:15
  through, you know, what's going on in my head.
• 22:17
  And I'm kind of trying and I'm trying to give my students that
• 22:19
  ability to do that because, you know, I'm sure you're, I'm sure
• 22:25
  you're just as aware as I am that by the time these 9th
• 22:28
  graders are in 12th grade, who knows what, what college English
• 22:32
  class is going to look like and to what extent, you know, it's
• 22:34
  even going to even be relevant or necessary.
• 22:37
  So, you know, I, I'm trying, I'm trying to think about what is
• 22:40
  going to be useful to them as they get older.
• 22:43
  And I think that one of the most useful things that we can use
• 22:46
  the English language for is to help understand, is to help
• 22:49
  express ourselves and understand others and try to, if we don't
• 22:51
  understand others, to use our words to figure out what it is
• 22:55
  that we get or don't get and to kind of come to some kind of
• 22:57
  similar conclusion, you know? Yeah.
• 22:59
  Sounds good. Yeah.
• 23:02
  And, and you know, and I found in, in, you know, you have
• 23:06
  experimented with this, with the students in class, that by
• 23:12
  repackaging what they say back to them and then presenting an
• 23:16
  argument makes them much more likely to be thoughtful about it
• 23:22
  or consider another perspective because you're, you're showing
• 23:26
  them that, Hey, I understand exactly where you're coming
• 23:29
  from. Like you, you are heard.
• 23:30
  I, I, I, I understand you. I understand the point you're
• 23:32
  making and what you're trying to say.
• 23:34
  Have you considered in your train of thought or in the way
• 23:38
  that you're framing this, have you considered that perspective
• 23:40
  as well? Because maybe that'll change the
• 23:42
  way that you saw, you know, the way that you actually have this
• 23:45
  prep, this prep, this preposition, this presupposition
• 23:48
  rather. And, and it and it typically
• 23:50
  works. It really does.
• 23:53
  So if that could be the skill that I teach them as far as, as
• 23:57
  far as, you know, self-expression in writing goes,
• 23:59
  then I'm very happy. And then as far as literature
• 24:02
  goes, we kind of bounce around quite a bit, their attention.
• 24:06
  What kind of literature are you are they reading?
• 24:10
  It depends. It depends on what they're I, I
• 24:13
  actually give them a lot of input.
• 24:15
  So if they want to talk about something in one class, love the
• 24:18
  history of film. So we've actually been talking
• 24:21
  about Pixar. We've been talking about how the
• 24:23
  company got started and, and all their creative strategies, like,
• 24:28
  for example, the fact that they don't take typical characters
• 24:32
  they don't like every story is not about a human being or two
• 24:36
  human beings. They have to be something a
• 24:38
  different take on main characters.
• 24:41
  They can't be musicals and they can't be traditional love
• 24:44
  stories where boy meets girl tries to find her, there's a
• 24:47
  conflict and they end up back together again.
• 24:50
  And because at that point in the 90s, Disney was really
• 24:53
  suffocating the market with other, you know, the other
• 24:55
  golden age of, of Disney animation movies from Katzenberg
• 24:59
  and, and, and Michael Eisner and Pixar didn't know how to stand
• 25:04
  out from them. And this is one of the ways that
• 25:06
  we came up with. So reading material on that some
• 25:11
  classes like psychology, more understanding ourselves and
• 25:14
  understanding kind of our behaviour and the way that we
• 25:16
  think. And they, you know, we talk
• 25:18
  about a lot about where the place of anxiety, you know,
• 25:22
  what, what place it has and where it can, where it comes
• 25:24
  from and how it gets out of hand and, and a lot of other, you
• 25:29
  know, experiences and emotions that we have to try to
• 25:31
  understand ourselves. And you know, the best thing,
• 25:33
  they look at me, they go, Mr. Hirshman, this is just a
• 25:36
  therapy. This is just therapy glass.
• 25:38
  And it's like, lucky, Yeah, lucky you.
• 25:40
  Exactly. I'm not, you're lucky.
• 25:41
  I'm not billing you for this. You know, I'm billing your
• 25:43
  parents for this because, you know, I really, I really would
• 25:47
  or, or should. But one of my one of my biggest
• 25:50
  challenges that I have as a writer, personally, I, I'm good
• 25:53
  at creating the fresh content and unique kind of perspective
• 25:56
  on things. One of my challenges, I have a
• 25:58
  very hard time keeping track of a whole story or a whole
• 26:00
  sequence or a whole narrative in my head.
• 26:04
  And I'm not organized enough to really be able to, to really
• 26:08
  know how to lay it all out. That's not the really the way my
• 26:10
  brain works. Would you have any kind of
• 26:12
  recommendations as to the way to the way to kind of get more
• 26:17
  organised or to or any recommendations how to keep
• 26:20
  track of a story for a longer period of time?
• 26:23
  Well, I, I suppose, you know, we will find, you know, our own,
• 26:27
  our own way there somewhere. And some people would say you
• 26:29
  have to kind of outline it very, very, very, yeah, rigidly and
• 26:34
  then stick to your outline. And then you kind of know where
• 26:36
  you're going. And other people say, well, I
• 26:37
  don't, I don't need to do that because I know where I'm going.
• 26:39
  So that's fine. I would say no, I just want to
• 26:42
  kind of start and see where I go.
• 26:44
  And I hope that it goes somewhere interesting.
• 26:46
  And maybe that's the, the thing to do.
• 26:47
  You know that yeah, you'll go, you'll go somewhere and as as
• 26:51
  you're going, you will find, I mean, maybe it's not the story
• 26:56
  you have originally thought you were going to write, but you
• 26:58
  write something else and that becomes something worthwhile
• 27:00
  anyway. So it doesn't matter where you
• 27:01
  thought you were going to go in the 1st place because the story
• 27:03
  has LED you elsewhere. So I kind of hope that these,
• 27:06
  these things sort of work for people and everything.
• 27:11
  Like everyone, everyone's different.
• 27:12
  Everyone has a different approach to it.
• 27:14
  Not the English novelist William Boyd says when people say to
• 27:17
  him, I've got a great idea for the opening of a novel, and he
• 27:20
  always said, he says, I always say to them, have you got an
• 27:22
  ending? Because you know, for him,
• 27:24
  obviously it's more important to know where you're going to go.
• 27:26
  And he always knows where his novel's going to start, when
• 27:28
  it's going to end, what the story's going to be before he's,
• 27:30
  he does all his research 1st and before he actually starts
• 27:33
  writing it, like a year to research, a year to write it.
• 27:36
  And he says and the, and the researching and the sort of
• 27:38
  planning does involve lots of sort of blind alleys and that,
• 27:40
  oh, no, that one, we'll have to change things.
• 27:43
  But others, others work differently.
• 27:45
  Obviously, there was a lot of, you know, what you don't want is
• 27:47
  a lot of sort of abandoned material.
• 27:50
  Although you suppose you could say that that's part of the
• 27:52
  process of finding your way as a writer and thinking, you know,
• 27:56
  actually I, you know, I can't quite bring this character to
• 27:59
  life or I don't quite know where this, this particular story is
• 28:01
  going. But from that, something else
• 28:04
  might happen that you might. Yeah, you can recycle.
• 28:07
  You think of something else and you have a different character
• 28:08
  and you realise and you, you know, you've, you work out and
• 28:11
  also people's styles. You know, some people write a
• 28:16
  lot of plot, some people don't write a lot of plot.
• 28:18
  And it doesn't matter as long as it, as long as what you're doing
• 28:20
  works. You know, that what, what and
• 28:23
  finding, I suppose also just finding your voice.
• 28:24
  You know that I think it's quite interesting when you can't look
• 28:27
  at some some writers and things. I can't obviously can't right
• 28:29
  now. I can't right now.
• 28:30
  I can't think of any examples. But who in the in the early in
• 28:33
  the early work were doing something.
• 28:35
  I know it's sort of OK, but they hadn't quite hit their stride.
• 28:38
  And then they sort of found whether it's in novels or in
• 28:40
  screen writing, and then they sort of found this is what I'm
• 28:42
  good at. And you know, like they were
• 28:45
  trying to be a very serious writer, but actually naturally
• 28:47
  they were a sort of comic writer.
• 28:48
  And that's what their strength was, you know, and or vice
• 28:50
  versa, or they were trying to be funny, but they weren't very
• 28:52
  funny. But but they were great at sort
• 28:53
  of historical research. And that was that was what they
• 28:56
  should be doing. The guy who writes the actually
• 28:59
  the guy who writes the crown or the the TV Series A Crown about
• 29:01
  the British royal family. He did various things at first
• 29:05
  in screen writing, including writing sort of a couple of
• 29:07
  romantic comedies and things, and then kind of hit on the fact
• 29:10
  that he was better at doing factually based dramas, things
• 29:14
  about about real people, researching them and then
• 29:18
  writing a drama around that. And that's what he's since he
• 29:21
  found that that's pretty much all he's done since then is
• 29:23
  write things that are about as the crown or politicians or
• 29:26
  people in public life. But that goes back to what you
• 29:28
  were mentioning earlier where you know the difference between
• 29:30
  having a blank page or some kind of strand to start pulling at,
• 29:34
  you know, and see exactly where you go with that.
• 29:36
  Yeah, it's also fun. I'm a huge, I've been a huge
• 29:39
  Springsteen nut for about 7 years now.
• 29:42
  And, and I've listened to one of the, one of the, one of the
• 29:46
  great things I, I tend to like artists that have this, they
• 29:49
  have, the artists have big archives of all their live
• 29:52
  performances are a ton of fun to go through because you really
• 29:55
  get a idea as to who the artist is as they perform in the way
• 29:59
  and interact with the crowd. And, and you really could feel
• 30:02
  the, the magic and the energy in the air.
• 30:04
  Even when you're listening 50 years later, you can, I mean,
• 30:07
  it's so tangible. And one thing that I've noticed
• 30:10
  that, you know, because I would, I would listen to let's say an
• 30:13
  album and I'd listen to the tour and see how, you know, the live
• 30:15
  versions compared to the studio versions.
• 30:18
  I tend to like the live versions more.
• 30:20
  But one of the things that I noticed was that he would, that
• 30:23
  Springsteen would have snippets where he would kind of be
• 30:26
  improvising in the middle of a song.
• 30:28
  And he'd have phrases where he'd like kind of throw them out
• 30:31
  while there was an instrument, while there was an instrumental
• 30:33
  break. And he'd kind of mess around
• 30:36
  with words and flow with a little rhythm and just mix
• 30:38
  something in there. And then the next album, you'll
• 30:41
  hear those words again as the name of the song that he was
• 30:44
  been working on the whole time. And you can see that the chord
• 30:47
  structure and the music structure kind of was plucked
• 30:49
  from this, from this other song. And and he, you know, and if you
• 30:54
  the the the examples, I think was in Backstreet is one of his
• 30:58
  more famous songs from born to run in 75 and drive all night
• 31:04
  from the river in in 1980. You know, he the a bunch of the
• 31:09
  lyrics and the verses came from his impromptu rambles during
• 31:13
  badge streets and the year and the years leading up to it.
• 31:15
  So that's. Interesting to to trace the sort
• 31:18
  of creative process, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
• 31:21
  And that's, and that's the that's the fun thing about
• 31:22
  people. And I guess, you know, you kind
• 31:24
  of almost become a historian in and of itself when you kind of
• 31:27
  dive into these, you know, these these musicians and these
• 31:30
  performances as as deeply as you can, because you do notice these
• 31:34
  nuances and you pick up on them and you find out, hey, when you
• 31:37
  played that rendition of this in this particular version that
• 31:39
  year, like, what were you thinking of?
• 31:41
  And you know, it's it's it's a ton of fun.
• 31:43
  It really is very cool. Have you?
• 31:47
  Yeah. Go ahead.
• 31:47
  Go carry on. Yeah.
• 31:48
  Please please. My question is irrevant to what
• 31:51
  you've just been saying. Let me ask you one first.
• 31:53
  Yeah, please go ahead. I was going to change the topic
• 31:55
  too. OK, I was just going to ask.
• 31:57
  I was thinking about the kids that you were showing Dead Poets
• 31:59
  Society too, and I thought, you know, can you show them a black
• 32:01
  and white film or have you? It would be, it would be.
• 32:06
  It would have to be a sell and I would have to prime them.
• 32:10
  I'd have to emotionally prepare them for what they're about to
• 32:13
  experience. If they walked in, they just
• 32:15
  walked in from the whole day and they just popped down in the
• 32:17
  seats and I popped on the black and white film.
• 32:20
  The odds are very, very low that they would just sit there and
• 32:23
  watch it. But if I would sit there and I'd
• 32:24
  explain what it is they're about to look for and what was so and
• 32:27
  provide some of the context. Because one of the big things
• 32:31
  that I noticed as a teacher is that my students don't want to
• 32:37
  be there. And I'm the teacher.
• 32:38
  I want to be there. You know, I find education
• 32:41
  valuable. And so I'm putting all this time
• 32:43
  and effort into finding creating fun and creative assignments and
• 32:46
  fun interesting topics for them. And all they think is I have to
• 32:50
  go to class now. So, you know, I try.
• 32:53
  I actually, there's a certain point with a couple of my
• 32:55
  classes throughout the years where I've been able to
• 32:58
  essentially tell them, I want you guys to have autonomy and
• 33:02
  maturity and start making your own decisions.
• 33:04
  If you feel like you, if you don't want to be in class for
• 33:09
  these 40 minutes, but you will do the, you'll do the makeup
• 33:11
  work for the week. I'll give you a weeks worth of
• 33:13
  assignments in advance. If you come to me at the end of
• 33:15
  the week and you provide with me all the assignments, you don't
• 33:18
  have to come to my class and you'll still get a good grade,
• 33:20
  you know, because as long as you're to me, and I hope you
• 33:24
  agree, but a lot of this stuff is a muscle that you just have
• 33:27
  to keep on exercising. And I don't care whether you're
• 33:30
  exercising it between the hour, the, the hours of four and 4:40
• 33:34
  or whenever or 10:00 to 10:45 at night, if you're in your own
• 33:37
  room, if you want, you know, but I just want you to be doing that
• 33:41
  and, and present and giving them that opportunity make you know,
• 33:45
  and almost none of them took me up on it.
• 33:47
  OK. When when provided the
• 33:48
  opportunity for that, they said, you know, what if we don't have
• 33:52
  to be here, but like, what else are we going to do anyway?
• 33:53
  Then let's go. You know, at least, at least at
• 33:56
  least it's a choice that that they that they make, that they
• 33:58
  whatever they want to join. And also it not being there that
• 34:02
  involves them having to think more about managing their own
• 34:04
  time or studying at home. No.
• 34:06
  And I think they'll go with you and say, OK, well, you'll,
• 34:09
  you'll a teacher, Mr. Harrison. You're responsible for what we
• 34:11
  have to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 34:14
  It's the problem is with teaching.
• 34:19
  I was talking about this in episode I was recording
• 34:21
  yesterday is that you really have to be a moron or a martyr
• 34:23
  to be a teacher, You know, and, and I do it part time and I, you
• 34:27
  know, I have other, I, I, I, I do sales on the on the side and
• 34:31
  I do this. What kind of sales do you do?
• 34:33
  I sell medical equipment. It's a little family business
• 34:36
  that my dad started when I was a kid.
• 34:38
  And you know, so I, I have the luxury of working from home and
• 34:43
  being able to go into school and if I have anything urgent, I
• 34:47
  could text, e-mail or call a customer back or deal with
• 34:50
  anything you got to deal with. But primarily, it's usually
• 34:53
  pretty quiet by 4:00 to 6:15 PM every day.
• 34:55
  So I'm typically, I'm typically not missing too much and it
• 35:00
  gives me the opportunity to feel like I'm giving back.
• 35:02
  And also I, I, I, once I started, I loved it.
• 35:05
  You know, once you start seeing the potential and the creativity
• 35:08
  of, of, of kids, it just reminds you of, of how much hope there
• 35:12
  could be, you know, for, for, you know, a lot.
• 35:15
  There's a ton of potential and talent and creativity out there
• 35:18
  in the youth. And we kind of just watch it or
• 35:23
  try to, you know, we try to fix fit, you know, fit triangles
• 35:27
  into squares or squares into triangles.
• 35:28
  And we don't, we don't let them be themselves.
• 35:30
  And I can only imagine how much more fun the world would be if
• 35:33
  everyone kind of got to be themselves a little bit more.
• 35:36
  Right. Good.
• 35:36
  And how did you get into teaching?
• 35:39
  I always wanted to, I always wanted, but there was, but there
• 35:42
  was an open, there was an opening and they said flexible
• 35:44
  hours. So I said they have flexible
• 35:46
  hours. And then, then I would love to
• 35:47
  do that. But you know, and I, I actually,
• 35:50
  it's funny, I always, I also had ambitions of being a
• 35:54
  screenwriter until I took a college course and my professor
• 35:57
  told me my character, he read like he was autistic and, and
• 36:03
  he's like, was that intentional? And I said it was not
• 36:05
  intentional. And he said, well, then you have
• 36:07
  a lot of work to do and which is which is, you know, good advice.
• 36:11
  And but one thing I did notice that was and my uncle as part of
• 36:17
  the writers Guild. And so he used to get scripts
• 36:19
  every year sent to him and hoping for him to vote for them.
• 36:23
  So I've gotten my hands on a bunch of fun scripts over the
• 36:25
  years. And what's really cool to see is
• 36:27
  the difference between the way that they play out on on word
• 36:30
  and words and the way that they play out on screen and Irishman,
• 36:34
  for example, which is right down I got must be down your alley as
• 36:38
  far as actually. I've not seen it, but I know
• 36:40
  what you mean, yeah. Yeah, you know, that that that
• 36:43
  movie, the script was remarkable.
• 36:47
  I read the script and I and I was blown away.
• 36:49
  And I was glued to it and I inhaled it and it was just just
• 36:53
  awesome. And then I watched it and I was,
• 36:58
  I was only disappointed because of how good the script was.
• 37:02
  OK, OK. You know that that it was the.
• 37:06
  D aging thing OK. I think that was part of the
• 37:09
  problem. Yeah, I think that was part of
• 37:11
  the problem. I think that, and I hate to say
• 37:14
  it because they're they've given so much to the genres and to
• 37:17
  cinema, but I think that like, you know, Scorsese's got to find
• 37:21
  the young mobster, you know, I mean, how old was De Niro when
• 37:24
  he starred in The Godfather 2? I mean, there are, you know,
• 37:26
  anything that he did. Al Pacino.
• 37:27
  I mean, these guys, these guys weren't start, you know, weren't
• 37:30
  starring in The Godfather when they were 80.
• 37:32
  You know, I mean, even Marlon Brando was, you know, was it was
• 37:35
  not even that it was not up there.
• 37:37
  So I think that's a big problem that we have in Hollywood today.
• 37:39
  And perhaps you could talk about the corruption that, you know,
• 37:42
  that that works in the sense that who gets to get where as
• 37:46
  far as acting and actors and talent goes.
• 37:49
  You know, you talked a little bit about the stocks and the
• 37:51
  extortion. I saw that there were some
• 37:53
  topics that you dive that you dove into.
• 37:56
  What is What does it take to be successful in Hollywood?
• 38:00
  Yeah, I don't know about right now, but I mean, I think all
• 38:02
  these things is, you know, I think Steven Soderbergh, the,
• 38:09
  you know, director said, you know, talent, talent plus
• 38:14
  perseverance equals luck. And, you know, I think I think
• 38:20
  Hollywood is is it's so difficult for anyone to sort of
• 38:23
  to to get going. So I think it's just a sort of,
• 38:25
  you know, it is kind of like a lot of work hard, a lot of
• 38:28
  persistence and you know, you and you hope that with, you
• 38:32
  know, talent and, and and graft and some luck that that that
• 38:36
  things will sort of will pay off.
• 38:38
  Yeah. But there's a whole history of
• 38:40
  studio executives being taking advantage of, you know, I mean,
• 38:44
  I don't really know the extent of men.
• 38:45
  I'm sure. I'm sure that does exist quite a
• 38:47
  bit because Hollywood has always been kind of a big gay culture,
• 38:50
  I think. And, and, but I mean, we
• 38:55
  definitely know tons of stories about about the abuse of women
• 38:58
  and throughout. The whole Harvey Weinstein stuff
• 39:00
  and the and the me too stuff, which this sort of stuff came
• 39:03
  out. Weinstein sort of came out after
• 39:04
  I'd first, the first the book was written came out first in
• 39:07
  2014, ever since updated it. But yeah, the history, history
• 39:10
  of the sort of casting catch and other things.
• 39:12
  Yeah, there's been there from the from the beginning.
• 39:14
  And you know, you've got, you know, very powerful men.
• 39:17
  You've got a lot of young pretty women.
• 39:19
  The women will want a break in this career.
• 39:22
  Some of these men, you know, will try to abuse that position.
• 39:25
  Yeah. Some of the women, you know,
• 39:27
  will, will, will, might see it as OK, I'm going to sort of see
• 39:31
  this as a transactional thing. And I hope it plays in my
• 39:34
  favour. And I'm sure there are plenty of
• 39:35
  stories where it did play in their favour.
• 39:36
  And others think actually it it didn't get me very far.
• 39:38
  I I just ended up sleeping with someone and and I didn't get a
• 39:41
  good part or a good career. And others would have just said,
• 39:44
  no, I'm not doing it. I mean, I think Ava Gardner, the
• 39:46
  actress has sort of said in the 19 would have been 1930s at MGM
• 39:51
  and she said, oh, well, you know, I knew girls who, you
• 39:53
  know, if this isn't so much casting cuts as like a little
• 39:57
  bit of prostitution. So saying, Oh, I know people who
• 39:59
  if, you know, if the rent was low, they they, they give a
• 40:01
  little bit away, you know, so there's, there's always been an
• 40:05
  element of sleaze in the in Hollywood.
• 40:08
  You know, it was a, it was a new, a new industry that was
• 40:13
  sort of uncharted at the time. And is now more than a century
• 40:18
  old, but it's say like in the 1930s, it was a very young
• 40:21
  industry. And yeah, power, beauty, youth
• 40:25
  sleaze, corruption in that way. And I think also, but plenty of
• 40:30
  also a lot of plenty of decent people just just working away,
• 40:32
  getting on with their lives and jobs.
• 40:34
  Yeah, yeah. It kind of reminds.
• 40:36
  I mean it, it absolutely kind of reminds me of of today's world
• 40:40
  in the sense that in order to get ahead, in order to become
• 40:43
  anything, you either have to work incredibly hard or be
• 40:46
  incredibly divisive or incredibly inappropriate.
• 40:49
  You know, I mean, it's pretty much one of those, it's pretty
• 40:51
  much one of those 3. And, you know, there are plenty
• 40:54
  of people that make that make whole careers, you know, out of
• 40:58
  a formerly promiscuous reputation or formerly or, you
• 41:02
  know, or people that caught, you know, just stir up hate, you
• 41:05
  know, and just use just use a good amount of divisive language
• 41:10
  that kind of attracts everyone. And that's a good way to get
• 41:14
  actually, the reason why I started this podcast to begin
• 41:16
  with was I feel like all this information that we consume
• 41:19
  could be either junk food or health food.
• 41:21
  And I think that a lot of the people that kind of get to the
• 41:24
  top get to the top vis A vis the junk food method.
• 41:28
  And the goal of the podcast is to be organic and healthy and to
• 41:32
  kind of provide reasonable and useful information that could
• 41:39
  unify people that people want to listen to, to make their lives
• 41:41
  better, not because they're getting some kind of outrage
• 41:44
  dopamine hit, you know? Yeah, yeah.
• 41:47
  I mean, you sort of hope that the that, yeah, the dopamine
• 41:51
  hit, the short, the short time sugar rush will will pass.
• 41:53
  And then in time people will kind of find things that are of
• 41:56
  value that are out there. Yeah.
• 42:00
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't know, I the, the,
• 42:07
  the film world world has become so democratized and studios kind
• 42:12
  of don't even have the same reputation.
• 42:14
  I I either. A lot of people don't want to go
• 42:16
  to the movies to the same extent, and they only want to go
• 42:18
  for some kind of cultural experience.
• 42:20
  The problem is it's very difficult to make a cultural
• 42:22
  experience when no one's going to any movies, you know?
• 42:25
  So, you know, it's kind of it's kind of this, it's kind of this
• 42:30
  spiralling, you know, self fulfilling death prophecy for
• 42:34
  for studios. And I would love for people to
• 42:36
  come back to it because I'm actually a huge fan of the
• 42:39
  embodied shared, you know, film, film watching experience and one
• 42:44
  of the best. And I wish that more people had
• 42:47
  done this. And this also kind of goes back
• 42:49
  to your create your originality point earlier, like what stands
• 42:51
  out? What's what's something
• 42:52
  different? I want?
• 42:56
  I love to see the good guys lose.
• 42:57
  I love to see, or at least at least at first, you know, and
• 43:01
  one of my favorite cultural experiences of growing up was
• 43:05
  going to see The Avengers Infinity War, where The Avengers
• 43:09
  lost at the end of the first, at the end of the movie.
• 43:12
  And the whole movie theater was absolutely packed to the brim.
• 43:15
  And there were thunderous moments throughout the film.
• 43:18
  Everyone was laughing, everyone was crying.
• 43:21
  And then the film ended on like this dark note and everyone just
• 43:25
  kind of shuffled out of the movie theater without really
• 43:28
  knowing what was going on. And, and it was so cool to be in
• 43:33
  a collective environment where so many people were having
• 43:36
  highs, lows, highs, a moment of like so close, a little bit of
• 43:42
  hope and then and then let down. And then now what?
• 43:46
  And like you see people trying to come to terms with like, what
• 43:48
  do you do now? So I think that we actually
• 43:51
  missed that. I think that that brings us
• 43:52
  together. I think that that's, I think
• 43:54
  it's a wonderful thing. I'm a big advocate of going to
• 43:56
  see of going to see movies. Me too.
• 43:59
  And I think that thing about the kind of the down ending is very
• 44:01
  interesting because you have seen movies where, you know,
• 44:04
  some movies need need an up ending, some made a down ending.
• 44:07
  And you you have seen movies over the years where you think,
• 44:09
  oh, they've they've forced a happy ending on this film
• 44:12
  because they think they'll make it more appealing.
• 44:14
  And it just feels, and you just feel manipulated.
• 44:16
  And actually it doesn't make it a, you know, a good ending.
• 44:20
  And you kind of think they've, you know, they've sabotaged
• 44:24
  their own film or the studio is forced to sort of sabotage their
• 44:27
  own film and it's not, not as good.
• 44:28
  And actually, you think if they had had the kind of courage to
• 44:30
  say, no, no, there's actually film actually ends down And it
• 44:35
  would have had a far greater impact and would probably have
• 44:39
  resonated longer than the one that kind of came out.
• 44:41
  And people kind of liked it enough, but kind of quickly
• 44:44
  forgot about it by the by the time they got home.
• 44:47
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as far as movies go, I mean,
• 44:51
  we as far as the studios go, rather we know that they're as
• 44:54
  as hesitant as can be to make creative risks.
• 44:57
  And then once creative risk does work out, they just hope to
• 45:00
  replicate that ad nauseam until, until everyone stops going to
• 45:04
  see it. And and I mean, we've seen that
• 45:06
  with franchises essentially. And right, really what the
• 45:10
  questions are now for lots of studios is what is the next
• 45:15
  franchise that we can start so that we have 10 years of movies
• 45:19
  down the pipeline. You know, Minions had served, I
• 45:22
  think how how enormous it was and how well it's served for so
• 45:25
  many years. Think about The Avengers and
• 45:27
  now, you know, DC is restarting with James Gunn and now the
• 45:30
  Mario world is going to be absolutely enormous or the
• 45:34
  Minecraft world. And so these studios are not
• 45:36
  looking necessarily for dramas or for films about the human
• 45:40
  condition. They're looking to copy paste
• 45:43
  success formula. And I don't think if it you know
• 45:46
  you can. That's the reason why.
• 45:48
  You buy an existing you, you licensed an existing, you know,
• 45:50
  intellectual property, then they've got.
• 45:53
  Barbie's going to be a big one. You hope you've got a you, you
• 45:56
  hope you've got a, you know, an audience of some scale might not
• 45:59
  happen, but that's that's the kind of the.
• 46:02
  But there's always a direct, always.
• 46:03
  There's always, always a direct correlation between how the, the
• 46:07
  rating, the critical rate, the, the reviews of a film and how
• 46:10
  much money the first one makes and then the second one always
• 46:13
  makes more money but gets worse reviews and so on and so forth.
• 46:16
  I mean, there's a few rare exceptions like Toy Story or The
• 46:18
  Godfather, you know, the original Star Wars movies.
• 46:22
  But short of that, it's a, it's a very difficult thing to do.
• 46:24
  And a lot of times 'cause they don't want to take the risks,
• 46:26
  they want to copy and paste the, the, the, the formula that
• 46:30
  worked. And streaming is got to be the
• 46:33
  place for creators to do, to be able to do that.
• 46:35
  The real storytelling, I think you got the.
• 46:39
  What I think it was stripping interesting thing is you just
• 46:41
  had this much wider, you know, many more hours to to to
• 46:44
  structure the the the story. So rather than thinking, rather
• 46:47
  than thinking, I've got to get this out this film into two
• 46:49
  hours ish. You think actually it's like
• 46:51
  gone the wind, which where it was three hour, 4 hour movie in
• 46:54
  1939. Well, that's still on on on as a
• 46:58
  as a series. Yeah.
• 47:00
  And what do you think, do you think?
• 47:01
  I mean, that could have been great.
• 47:02
  I mean, I think, I don't know, you know, I think that Netflix
• 47:07
  had a Netflix, I think HBO started it.
• 47:09
  But Netflix had a ton of success recently with their limited
• 47:12
  series where they have 6-7 episodes.
• 47:15
  And I mean I watched that Scorsese movie The it was like 3
• 47:20
  hours long with Leonardo DiCaprio.
• 47:22
  De Niro, the killer of the rising Sun.
• 47:26
  Rising moon? Yeah, that one.
• 47:30
  Killers. Yeah, the new Scorsese movie is
• 47:33
  killer. One of that, yes, Yeah.
• 47:35
  And that could have been a remarkable 5 or 6 part Netflix
• 47:41
  short series. In fact, American Primeval was
• 47:44
  very similar to it in that kind of capacity.
• 47:47
  And it did. You just were able to tell a
• 47:49
  story super, super, super well. And I know that Peter Berg, the
• 47:53
  director has been kind of popping around on a podcast
• 47:55
  talking about how much fun he's having, not being constrained to
• 48:00
  that typical 2 hour thing. And also studios, rather
• 48:05
  streaming studios tend to be much more generous with their
• 48:07
  budget, with their budgeting. They don't have to answer to a
• 48:10
  box office. They don't necessarily have to
• 48:12
  release numbers in the same way. So there's a whole different
• 48:14
  level of responsibility that they have that they can kind of,
• 48:18
  they can tell people like Adam Sandler, do anything you want.
• 48:20
  It could be the worst thing that you've ever always wanted to
• 48:23
  make and that you've never got a chance to do.
• 48:25
  But as long as we see the name Adam Sandler associated with
• 48:28
  Netflix on top of it, then we are happy to pay anything you
• 48:31
  want for that. I mean, in the, in the 1980s,
• 48:35
  Woody Allen had that had that kind of arrangement with, with
• 48:38
  United Artists and then Orion that they were kind of like,
• 48:40
  well, within a certain budget, you can sort of do what you want
• 48:43
  to do. And, you know, their films
• 48:45
  weren't hugely expensive and they usually did OK business
• 48:50
  and, and also actually they did well internationally, or at
• 48:52
  least there was, you know, an audience to some extent broadly
• 48:56
  globally. And he made quite a few movies
• 48:59
  at that point, right, With that, with that option.
• 49:01
  He's a great example of like, you know, a movie a year for for
• 49:04
  and only really slowing down now.
• 49:06
  He's now 90. But you know, when things got
• 49:08
  trickier with the sort of allegations against him.
• 49:10
  But you know, he's a very sort of and I think the the the
• 49:17
  director of Lost Boys, Joel Schumacher worked in costume
• 49:21
  many years ago on on some Woody Allen movies.
• 49:23
  And he sort of said, actually, Woody Allen was very good at
• 49:25
  telling me, you know, I was saying I wanted to be as I
• 49:27
  wanted to write a script and direct myself.
• 49:28
  And then and he said Woody Allen was really good saying, OK, you
• 49:31
  have to finish the script you're writing, you know, to move on in
• 49:34
  life, you know, if you want to do that, you've got to finish
• 49:36
  the script. And he did finish the script and
• 49:37
  at some point became a screenwriter and a director and
• 49:39
  had a, you know, a good career. Yeah.
• 49:42
  And I think Allen's a good example of someone you know, a
• 49:45
  very good work ethic. Yeah, incredible, incredible
• 49:49
  work ethic and, and, and I guess you know, and you have two
• 49:53
  schools of thought. You have the the school of
• 49:55
  thought that says you got to really embody and be the
• 49:58
  character and you have to find the project that speaks to you
• 50:01
  and you got to find, you know, the perfect story and the
• 50:03
  perfect script that with the real voice, that kind of voice
• 50:05
  that you're looking for any people that listen, I'm here to
• 50:09
  act and that's what I'm going to do.
• 50:10
  I'm going to make it work. You know, what's what are some
• 50:13
  films that that have shaped or forged Europe or your
• 50:16
  perspective or appreciation of a film?
• 50:18
  What are some what are some of the iconic movies for you?
• 50:21
  So one of the my pretty favorite film makers, probably not from
• 50:24
  the 1940s and 50s, mainly working in black and white.
• 50:26
  So we'll be Billy Wilder. Who?
• 50:29
  Made some recommendations actually, by the way, I would
• 50:30
  love to. I would love to look into them.
• 50:32
  So Billy Wilder, you know, who made some like a hot the
• 50:35
  apartment, Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd.
• 50:39
  So he's probably my favorite film maker.
• 50:40
  And in those movies you have double Indemnity is a film noir
• 50:43
  from the 1944 or something like that.
• 50:46
  Sound like the Hot is a, you know, fast, a farce.
• 50:51
  Sunset Blvd. is a, you know, sort of black comedy about
• 50:53
  Hollywood. And the Apartment is, is a great
• 50:56
  sort of romantic comedy with a kind of Christmas New Year
• 50:59
  setting, even from from when 1960 of Jack Levinson and Sheree
• 51:03
  MacLean. So I think I like Wilder's sort
• 51:05
  of, he's smart. His, you know, his movies are
• 51:08
  sort of bittersweet. They're funny, but they're kind
• 51:11
  of, but they're not silly. Well, sound like Hot is very
• 51:14
  silly, but it's very funny and they're they're charming.
• 51:17
  And so I like him and I think he's a very elegant film maker
• 51:20
  when he's when he was very good in in the 40s and 50s, as with
• 51:22
  an elegant film makers. So you kind of admire the
• 51:25
  storytelling and how how how well it comes across.
• 51:28
  How would you, how would you describe an elegant film if
• 51:31
  someone like, didn't understand that you know, someone's
• 51:33
  listening and they're watching, you know, Marvel and
• 51:35
  Transformers and you know, Stranger Things?
• 51:38
  What? What How would you describe like
• 51:40
  an elegantly made film that like things that they should be
• 51:43
  looking out for or that they could be more intentional about
• 51:45
  when watching? So I suppose I don't know Marvel
• 51:48
  or or Transformers or strange things very well, so I can't
• 51:51
  come in on those. But I'd say in terms of the
• 51:53
  storytelling that where and it could happen in in prose or in a
• 51:56
  movie where where you where you don't go, Oh, that was so
• 51:59
  obvious or, or that was kind of like, oh, that's kind of dumb.
• 52:03
  Why does the character do that? I don't believe that.
• 52:05
  And if there's a revelation, you go, oh, oh, well, yeah, I didn't
• 52:09
  see that coming. But it's obviously it's obvious
• 52:11
  now. So this that kind of like, you
• 52:13
  know, sort of, and it's, or if you have to kind of feed the
• 52:17
  inflation to the audience, it's not done in a kind of now we're
• 52:20
  going to, you know, shove, shove some information down your
• 52:25
  throats. It's, it's, it's kind of
• 52:27
  there's, there are ways to try and sort of, you know, do the
• 52:29
  exposition so that the kind of it's, it's, it's done with a
• 52:33
  delicate touch. And and while it was was very
• 52:38
  good at those sort of things when you know, at his best in
• 52:40
  the 1940s and 1950s. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:48
  I think so. So you, so you're going to
• 52:50
  equate or I guess kind of have a relationship between elegance
• 52:53
  and nuance and subtlety and nuance.
• 52:54
  Yeah, yeah. That you can pass along.
• 52:56
  And I think that that's also done.
• 52:58
  I think it's a more effective way of storytelling.
• 53:01
  It's a far more effective way. There's, I showed my class the
• 53:04
  movie Argo about, you know, the 1980 hostage hostage situation
• 53:09
  in Iran. And, and then I, I, I'm doing
• 53:13
  hopefully soon a podcast, the gentleman called that, that runs
• 53:16
  a website called Spy Culture and it talks about the government's
• 53:21
  affiliation affiliation, association with different
• 53:24
  films. And, and he had a whole article
• 53:28
  that we read after Argo about the CI as involvement in the
• 53:32
  actual making of the film. And, and the way that they kind
• 53:34
  of insert themselves to make them look as good, you know,
• 53:37
  make them look as good as possible.
• 53:39
  And it was done especially in the film Argo, at least to me,
• 53:44
  it felt a lot more nuance, a lot, a lot more subtle than a
• 53:50
  movie that I that movies that I've seen more recently where it
• 53:54
  almost feels like there are slogans that have to be injected
• 53:58
  into particular films that, you know, that are almost like a
• 54:03
  toll, like a toll to be made by the studio is like, hey, you
• 54:06
  know, you know, you can do whatever you want, but the toll
• 54:09
  to get in here is you have to throw this, this and this
• 54:11
  message in. And even if the film was about
• 54:14
  that particular message, you know, you got, you got to make
• 54:16
  it blanket. You got to make, you got to make
• 54:18
  it out there. And so I guess so I guess we're,
• 54:21
  yeah, it does feel like we've lost some of that.
• 54:24
  I think there are still some great film makers that do, yeah,
• 54:26
  kind of focus on that. Have you Have you seen many
• 54:30
  Damien Chazelle films? The Whiplash or La La Land or
• 54:33
  Babylon? I've only seen Whiplash and La
• 54:36
  La Land. I've not seen.
• 54:38
  I've not seen Babylon. Yeah.
• 54:40
  Yeah. I'm curious what your thoughts
• 54:41
  on it would because I think it is based on 1920s Hollywood as
• 54:44
  as Hollywood was transitioning from black and white with color.
• 54:47
  I should see. I should see Babylon.
• 54:49
  I watched it in in theaters and I hate to say I wanted to like
• 54:54
  it so, so badly and I couldn't bring myself to and I don't know
• 54:58
  why, but I thought that he was, I thought that from Whiplash
• 55:02
  Nala land that he was a really, really, really remarkable
• 55:06
  director. And apparently the story, his
• 55:08
  story is that he had wanted to make La La Land 1st and no one
• 55:13
  would fund it. And so and, and so he made a
• 55:15
  much lower budget whiplash and and then, you know.
• 55:20
  That sounds reasonable. Yeah, Yeah.
• 55:21
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess it also goes to like
• 55:23
  what you were saying earlier about the different ways to get
• 55:25
  films done is sometimes you got to work hard and just make it
• 55:28
  yourself or find another project that's smaller budget until you
• 55:31
  prove yourself, you know, and show yourself that it happens.
• 55:34
  I have a friend who's who's a playwright in London and, and,
• 55:37
  you know, her first play was, you know, had too many
• 55:39
  characters and too many, too many scene changes and and so
• 55:41
  on. Said, look, you know, this
• 55:42
  station career, just write a play about two people in one
• 55:44
  room, which is what she's gone and done.
• 55:46
  Yeah. And, and it's on in London next
• 55:47
  month. So.
• 55:48
  Yeah. There you go.
• 55:49
  Beautiful. Wow, really cool, really cool.
• 55:51
  What do you think? And, and, and do you think that
• 55:55
  there's people all the audience looks for something different in
• 55:58
  a novel versus a film or that they should be kind of the the
• 56:02
  trajectory of the storytelling should kind of be similar?
• 56:05
  Well, I think 1 interesting thing about that is obviously is
• 56:07
  how how film, TV has changed novels like the storytelling
• 56:14
  that we now now we've seen films and television and that has
• 56:17
  changed our novelists, right? Do do audiences look for
• 56:21
  different things in film as opposed to on on the page?
• 56:25
  And what would you think about? That well, I suppose the one
• 56:27
  great difference is, you know, on the page, you are, you are
• 56:30
  well, you can be far more intimate with, with the
• 56:32
  character. You can hear, you can hear the
• 56:35
  character's thoughts in a way that on on screen people talk,
• 56:38
  but that isn't necessarily what they're thinking.
• 56:40
  You know, that's just what they choose, what they're choosing to
• 56:43
  say or not to say to somebody. So, so the, the struggle that,
• 56:49
  that the screen always has is, is how to convey people's
• 56:54
  feelings and people's thoughts when you, when you've only got
• 56:57
  the external, you haven't got the internal voice.
• 57:01
  But film can do great things and so can literature and, and you
• 57:06
  know, you know, I enjoy both and I hope other people enjoy both.
• 57:10
  What other what other film I want to do?
• 57:12
  I mean, I, I, I, the, the case that always comes to my mind is
• 57:16
  Harry Potter, because I had, I, I growing up.
• 57:19
  I have devoured those books over and over and over again.
• 57:23
  And the films have let me down time after time after time.
• 57:28
  At least I felt they couldn't keep up with the, they couldn't
• 57:30
  keep up with my imagination from the words on the page, like you
• 57:33
  said. And there's so much going on in
• 57:35
  the background of these young adults or teenagers with kids
• 57:40
  minds that are, you know, that, that that cannot be described,
• 57:43
  you know, acted out or described, I guess, on screen.
• 57:47
  I'm really, really curious how HBO is going to do this because
• 57:50
  HBO has a wonderful history. With the TV series.
• 57:54
  Yeah, of the TV series, correct. And they have a wonderful
• 57:57
  history of really packing a lot of emotion and character into
• 58:03
  films when they have the time and space for it.
• 58:06
  Going back to that theme of not giving the audience what they
• 58:08
  wanted watching The Sopranos and it went, I don't know if you
• 58:12
  watched it, but there was a scene where they were Tony, the
• 58:15
  main characters therapist was raped.
• 58:17
  And, and she has the opportunity to tell Tony who the person that
• 58:22
  did it was. And, and you can see, and you
• 58:25
  know, this again goes to what we were just talking about.
• 58:28
  You can see in her mind the conflict the whole time.
• 58:31
  You can see that she's chewing back words that she wants to
• 58:34
  say. And and then the and then the
• 58:36
  and then David Chase does not give it to you.
• 58:39
  He does not like you have. And she's and Tony says, Are you
• 58:41
  sure that nothing that everything's OK?
• 58:43
  And she looks at him and she looks at the audience.
• 58:45
  She looks at the camera and she says yes.
• 58:47
  And then the and the screen goes black and and everyone was let
• 58:51
  down and everyone was frustrated because all you wanted was this
• 58:55
  poor woman to get this, to get her justice.
• 58:57
  And, and sometimes in life, you don't get justice, especially if
• 59:00
  you want to be moral. Sometimes, sometimes if you want
• 59:02
  to play by the games, by the system, then you don't get
• 59:05
  justice. That was a good, bold, a bold
• 59:07
  decision from, you know, David Chase there not to give the
• 59:09
  audience what it wanted, but what he felt was right for the,
• 59:12
  for the character, for the situation.
• 59:14
  Yeah. Yeah, and that's what that's
• 59:15
  what makes a great. That's what I think makes a
• 59:16
  great creator is, is being willing to take risks and have
• 59:19
  your audience be upset at you, but then understand that what
• 59:21
  you're trying to do is make something great for them.
• 59:23
  He's making a great new apparent, I'm really hopeful, a
• 59:26
  new series on the MK Ultra experiments that were going on
• 59:30
  in the 70s or 60s, seventies in America.
• 59:33
  OK. Which should be a lot of fun,
• 59:35
  but. When you were talking about
• 59:38
  elegance before and one other film came to mind of a recent
• 59:40
  more recent film for 1012 years ago.
• 59:45
  It's a Polish film called Ida IIDA at the name of the female
• 59:48
  character by Pavel Pavlikovsky. And I think it's very elegant
• 59:53
  because it's so pared back in terms of how much information it
• 59:58
  gives. It gives you only the minimal
• 1:00:00
  information and often many scenes are just like 11 long
• 1:00:03
  shot. I don't find it very mannered
• 1:00:05
  and I just kind of admire it for how how how compact it manages
• 1:00:11
  to be. So I would recommend that It
• 1:00:14
  isn't black and white. So just pupils might not, might
• 1:00:17
  not have had the patience for it, but it's from the past 15
• 1:00:19
  years. Again, I, I think, I think it's
• 1:00:22
  just preparing in the right way. It's just getting your head in
• 1:00:24
  the right space. And because some of the, you
• 1:00:27
  know, and I, I'll go through phases depending on what I'm
• 1:00:30
  going through my life months at a time where I can't watch a
• 1:00:32
  particular genre. I'm just not, you know, I'm
• 1:00:35
  just, I'm just not there and I'm sitting down and, and I've been,
• 1:00:38
  I've been like that with comedies.
• 1:00:39
  I've been wanting to watch comedies.
• 1:00:41
  I've been consuming a lot of heavier material that are a
• 1:00:44
  little bit more philosophical, a little bit more, tend to be a
• 1:00:49
  little more serious, and I can't get myself to sit down and watch
• 1:00:53
  a comedy. Even though I want to take the
• 1:00:54
  burden off and I do want to lighten up.
• 1:00:57
  I have to kind of get myself back into that, into that zone.
• 1:01:00
  But that's OK because there's, there's like that that I think
• 1:01:02
  it was, it was Umberto echo or someone like that who said this
• 1:01:05
  thing about, you know, it's fine to have a lot of books in your
• 1:01:07
  house you haven't read because it, you know, because there's a
• 1:01:09
  time and a place for everything. I'm going to come to that book
• 1:01:12
  at a certain point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:14
  I, I, I've been, I, I just had to order 5 new books because I
• 1:01:17
  went to my bookshelf a couple of times and I couldn't find
• 1:01:20
  anything, anything new. But yeah, I'm always looking to,
• 1:01:25
  to learn new things in from a different angle.
• 1:01:28
  And so I'm really excited to check out your book.
• 1:01:29
  How did you so it was, it was, it was, it was it was re
• 1:01:33
  released, I guess, or worked on 2023.
• 1:01:36
  I saw. Would you add on to it?
• 1:01:39
  We updated the, these kind of the story about Woody Allen and,
• 1:01:43
  you know, and about Harvey Weinstein and Johnny Depp and
• 1:01:47
  Amber Heard. So that's one of those sort of
• 1:01:48
  because the book was originally called the Dark History of
• 1:01:50
  Hollywood. So it was kind of it was the
• 1:01:51
  Commission was to look more at the scandal than just general
• 1:01:54
  Hollywood. My, my own interest is general
• 1:01:57
  Hollywood including scandal, but just how it all worked.
• 1:02:01
  And so we had to update those stories or include the Johnny
• 1:02:05
  Depp and Amber Heard story, which hadn't been in the earlier
• 1:02:09
  edition. Have you watched the Netflix
• 1:02:11
  documentary about that or the series about that?
• 1:02:14
  About Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
• 1:02:16
  No, I'm not. I've not seen that.
• 1:02:18
  So what's what was your conclusion in the book?
• 1:02:20
  What was your perception of the relationship and the conflict
• 1:02:22
  and? I suppose one thing is I'm not
• 1:02:25
  hugely interested in their relationship.
• 1:02:28
  So all I wrote about, I mean, I wrote about, I've just read it
• 1:02:32
  today. I wrote sort of 300 words, just
• 1:02:34
  sort of up to kind of writing. You know how he sued the UK
• 1:02:41
  newspaper for libel because they called him a wife beater?
• 1:02:44
  I think it was he lost the case. You know how he was dropped from
• 1:02:48
  the Fantastic B series after the second film, I think it was, or
• 1:02:52
  the first film. And then he did win a defamation
• 1:02:58
  case against his ex-wife. So there's a bit on both sides.
• 1:03:01
  And I kind of wondered, you know, will his, you know, at
• 1:03:03
  that point he was approaching 60.
• 1:03:05
  He'd, you know, Pirates of the Caribbean had run its course, it
• 1:03:08
  wasn't going to be any any any more of the fantastic beast
• 1:03:13
  films, you know. Would his career come back?
• 1:03:15
  None of his other kind of films, the more serious films have have
• 1:03:19
  had made as a critical or commercial impact.
• 1:03:24
  I think he was in something recently that was getting some
• 1:03:26
  more attention at a festival. But he hasn't really yet come
• 1:03:30
  back. But maybe he will.
• 1:03:32
  Yeah, and he had a really interesting.
• 1:03:34
  He's kind of, there's a lot of actors like this where he starts
• 1:03:37
  his career with a lot of fun and really unique kind of small
• 1:03:40
  indie and character driven films.
• 1:03:43
  And then and then and then he kind of, and then he and then
• 1:03:45
  with Pirates exploded into another genre of film.
• 1:03:49
  But I would have, I would love to see him go back to to to that
• 1:03:51
  the kind of earlier movies that he was making, like Blow or
• 1:03:56
  What's Eating Gilbert Grape or any of those type of films.
• 1:03:58
  Yeah. Gilbert is a lovely film and
• 1:03:59
  also I was like that film where it's a mob film with him and
• 1:04:05
  Pacino. Yes, Donnie Brasco.
• 1:04:08
  Donnie Brasco I really like. Yeah.
• 1:04:10
  So yeah. Excellent.
• 1:04:11
  Great book too. Yeah, great book.
• 1:04:13
  Too. I don't know.
• 1:04:14
  Yeah. That was fun.
• 1:04:15
  How do you feel about separating the art from the artist?
• 1:04:18
  Yeah. I mean, that's something, you
• 1:04:19
  know, when you think about, you know, with someone like with
• 1:04:23
  Woody Allen or something. Yeah, I think I'm kind of all
• 1:04:28
  right. One thing is I kind of don't
• 1:04:29
  really know what the truth is in these stories.
• 1:04:31
  So, you know, with Woody Allen, there's allegations he's, you
• 1:04:35
  know, lost custody of what the children when they was younger
• 1:04:37
  or lost access to them. But he was never charged with
• 1:04:40
  any himself. So there's allegation, account,
• 1:04:42
  allegation. But, you know, he was allowed to
• 1:04:44
  carry on making films because as far as the courts could see,
• 1:04:46
  there was no issue here. So I think I'm kind of OK
• 1:04:51
  separating the artists from the art.
• 1:04:56
  Yeah. And also because it's sort of
• 1:04:58
  more interested in what the art is than than who the artist is.
• 1:05:01
  So I'm interested in what the movie is, what the book is.
• 1:05:05
  Like, I think it's, you know, I'm not really sure what I've
• 1:05:09
  thought of. I haven't thought this all the
• 1:05:10
  way through yet, but Kevin Spacey was an incredible talent
• 1:05:14
  and has not worked in in a very long time.
• 1:05:16
  And I don't think again, as far as the legal case goes, I don't
• 1:05:19
  think he was ever convicted of anything.
• 1:05:22
  I could be wrong. I don't, I, I haven't, I haven't
• 1:05:24
  been as you know, intuitive. But these are it's just another
• 1:05:28
  example of someone that is just an enormous talent that right or
• 1:05:33
  wrong reputation gets, you know, and very, very well could be
• 1:05:37
  that whatever the allegations were were correct.
• 1:05:39
  It could be that they weren't. Again, how, you know, like if
• 1:05:42
  you're a studio, you know how much you're going to let that
• 1:05:44
  affect your decision. And I guess the answer is a lot
• 1:05:48
  you know. Yeah, and I think there are
• 1:05:49
  certainly cases. I mean, in the book we could
• 1:05:51
  look at look at Fatty Arbuckle was in a comedy star in the 19
• 1:05:54
  or 20s, what it was. And, you know, his career ended
• 1:05:58
  and you kind of felt that over a scandal where I think think, you
• 1:06:02
  know, he was innocent ultimately, but that the, the
• 1:06:06
  studios, you know, the whiff of scandal, they washed their hands
• 1:06:11
  of him, you know, but actually rather they didn't stand by him.
• 1:06:14
  Yeah, so so. You can look at that point of.
• 1:06:19
  View and think, well, the studios you know, should have
• 1:06:21
  had more backbone. Of course, there are many other
• 1:06:24
  situations such as Harvey Weinstein where you think will
• 1:06:26
  actually, you know, he was the bully, bully in his own company
• 1:06:33
  and and people weren't weren't blowing the whistle on him and
• 1:06:37
  he was getting away with it. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:41
  And yeah, man. And also, it's such a shame
• 1:06:45
  because he made such great movies and you can't really, you
• 1:06:48
  can't really blacklist anything that has Harvey Weinstein's name
• 1:06:50
  on it. If you go through, if you look
• 1:06:52
  at his, his IMDb or, you know, the collection of films that
• 1:06:55
  he's made, I mean, there's at least that he's been associated
• 1:06:59
  with. And again, that's another
• 1:07:00
  question is, and we know that at this point, for example, in
• 1:07:05
  today's world that almost everyone's name kind of gets
• 1:07:08
  thrown on, slapped on as producers.
• 1:07:10
  You know, everyone, everyone, everyone's a producer.
• 1:07:12
  If they had any, you know, if they looked at the script,
• 1:07:14
  they're a producer. If they, you know, if they
• 1:07:15
  talked to the actor about it, you know, on set, they're a
• 1:07:18
  producer. If someone you know, I don't, I
• 1:07:23
  don't know how much I you think I don't know the involvement to
• 1:07:26
  the degree that he was part of all these films that even if you
• 1:07:30
  know, you decided that you don't want anything to do with Harvey
• 1:07:33
  Weinstein, that has to do with Dead Poets Society or any or
• 1:07:36
  every decision that Miramax, that Miramax made makes.
• 1:07:41
  You know, I mean, I think with Weinstein, you know, someone's,
• 1:07:44
  I think someone said, you know, he likes to think that he was
• 1:07:46
  creative. And yeah, he was initially,
• 1:07:50
  initially he was responsible for for distributing kind of often
• 1:07:53
  like non-us films in the US and he was very good at marketing
• 1:07:59
  and selling those films to the US market and then kind of moved
• 1:08:02
  more into producing things himself.
• 1:08:03
  But there was always that sort of allegation that you're always
• 1:08:05
  not really producing, but he's, you know, can find the finance
• 1:08:08
  and for and very, very good at the awards season marketing and
• 1:08:13
  then push. Yeah.
• 1:08:15
  Push is a good word for you, right.
• 1:08:18
  As far as as far as the way they go about it goes, Yeah,
• 1:08:23
  definitely. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:27
  With again. So that doesn't have anything to
• 1:08:29
  do with him making the film. You know, that doesn't have
• 1:08:31
  anything to do with, you know, not watching the film because
• 1:08:34
  he's, because he pushed it for, for an award, because he pushed
• 1:08:36
  it for, you know, for a Golden Globe or for I, I don't know
• 1:08:40
  what that would have to do with. No, he doesn't make me think any
• 1:08:43
  differently about, say, the formula, The Crying Game, you
• 1:08:47
  know, you know, British Irish film from early 1990s, you know,
• 1:08:53
  I just wouldn't want to work with him.
• 1:08:56
  Yeah, yeah. I can't imagine.
• 1:08:57
  I wouldn't want to work with a lot of people in Hollywood.
• 1:08:59
  That's it. But and I think that that's
• 1:09:02
  that, that's another institution.
• 1:09:03
  I think that there has been kind of reforming and kind of
• 1:09:06
  restructuring itself. Have you, have you read into or
• 1:09:10
  have you had any thoughts on Disney and open AI's recent
• 1:09:14
  business transaction together? I I've barely followed that.
• 1:09:17
  I know nothing about that so. It's fascinating.
• 1:09:20
  Disney invested a billion dollars into open AI and gave
• 1:09:25
  them the rights to use their characters in AI generated films
• 1:09:29
  for the next three years. And Disney is historically
• 1:09:32
  extremely protective of their IP.
• 1:09:35
  And so it's a really curious decision, but it's also happens
• 1:09:40
  to work out very well time wise because I think that this next
• 1:09:43
  year Bob Iger plans on stepping down and, and, and I, you know,
• 1:09:47
  we've heard that plenty of times already.
• 1:09:48
  He's stepped down before he's come back, yeah.
• 1:09:50
  Exactly right, exactly. So it's funny, yeah.
• 1:09:54
  And following the Disney saga, there's an incredible book I
• 1:09:56
  read called Disney War by James Stewart, I believe is author.
• 1:10:00
  And it's about the, excuse me, the history of the company from
• 1:10:03
  the 80s to the early 2000s and, and the, and the corporate
• 1:10:08
  battle and you know, the, the corporate inner workings of the
• 1:10:12
  company. And the biggest issue that
• 1:10:15
  Disney has had since Walt Disney himself is that people that run
• 1:10:20
  the, the ship have a very difficult time finding or
• 1:10:23
  creating successors. And so I think that that when
• 1:10:26
  Bob Iger made this deal, I would, I would speculate as
• 1:10:31
  someone who is speculating and just reading and listening and,
• 1:10:35
  you know, following on the side that there's a risk that he can
• 1:10:38
  take with the company because he's not going to be responsible
• 1:10:40
  for the repercussions. And you know, that's going to be
• 1:10:43
  same way that Bob Shaypeck took over with during COVID for that
• 1:10:46
  for those couple of years while, you know, he kind of watched him
• 1:10:49
  fail and then step back in. You know, I'm very I, I this is
• 1:10:54
  a big enough decision that it could be him just saying, let
• 1:10:58
  me, I don't want this to tarnish my reputation, but let's see how
• 1:11:01
  the future looks with this, you know, anyway, Karen, this is a
• 1:11:07
  ton of fun. I really appreciate you taking
• 1:11:09
  the time to coming on for coming on and especially again on New
• 1:11:11
  Year's Day. And I really enjoy talking to
• 1:11:14
  you. This is really wonderful.
• 1:11:15
  And thank you so much for your work.
• 1:11:17
  And I'm really excited to read your book.
• 1:11:18
  OK. We're welcome.
• 1:11:20
  You're. Welcome.
• 1:11:21
  Thank you very much for coming. Take care.
• 1:11:23
  Nice meeting. You bye, bye.