Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / History Series 4: William Mann / Hollywood History / Marlon Brando / Black Dahlia

Transcript

History Series 4: William Mann / Hollywood History / Marlon Brando / Black Dahlia · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:17
  OK. And.
• 0:18
  We're live. Awesome, William.
• 0:20
  Welcome. Thanks so much for coming on.
• 0:21
  I really appreciate this. I'm so excited for our talk
• 0:23
  today. Great to be here.
• 0:25
  Thanks. Yeah, so actually one of the
• 0:28
  things that struck me when I when I was, I was doing homework
• 0:32
  and I'm trying to find some cool guests and some people that I
• 0:34
  think I'd relate to and I'd be interested in hearing about
• 0:37
  their story and their work. And I came when I came across
• 0:40
  your site, one of the things that I saw was your emphasis on
• 0:44
  how much Hollywood and entertainment shapes our
• 0:48
  perspective and our values and stuff like that.
• 0:51
  And it's funny because when I was actually in high school, I
• 0:54
  was a a dweeby, hopeless romantic that had absolutely no
• 1:00
  luck with any kind of romance and.
• 1:05
  And I. I forgot I was talking to
• 1:07
  friends of mine and and I was and we were talking about how we
• 1:10
  didn't know what the word romantic even meant.
• 1:12
  We just kind of had the association of that, you know,
• 1:15
  Adam Sandler, 51st dates, walk on the beach kind of thing.
• 1:18
  And, you know, and, and then I realized, and then what, you
• 1:21
  know, the more we were talking about and thinking about it, the
• 1:23
  more that we realized how much of our definition understanding
• 1:28
  of events we just kind of leave up in the air for Hollywood or
• 1:32
  for media around us to kind of fill in.
• 1:34
  And, you know, so that actually got me excited down the rabbit
• 1:39
  hole and I wanted to actually get involved in Hollywood to
• 1:42
  have hopefully a positive impact.
• 1:44
  I didn't, you know, ultimately or not yet, but you know,
• 1:48
  hopefully this will be something like it.
• 1:49
  But I, I, I, I, I was very happy to notice that you made that
• 1:52
  same observation. I'd like to just ask how you how
• 1:55
  you came to notice it? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's
• 1:59
  unavoidable really. I mean, media has always
• 2:04
  influenced the way we think of ourselves and how we pursue
• 2:09
  relationships. All of that, you know, I mean
• 2:11
  it, you know that that predates the movies and when that, you
• 2:15
  know, that was truly going to vaudeville and and reading the
• 2:18
  you know, the popular press and all of all of this.
• 2:21
  So once popular culture extended into the masses, because let's
• 2:28
  remember way back when, the only people who saw culture were,
• 2:32
  were the elites and they had their own set of rules, right?
• 2:36
  And, and so, and the culture was kind of responding to their own
• 2:42
  traditions and their own attitudes towards relationships
• 2:46
  and identity and all of that. But once pop culture began
• 2:50
  reaching the masses, And so that's in, you know, the late
• 2:54
  19th century and we're getting, you know, minstrel shows and
• 2:58
  Baudville and, you know, the Nickelodeon's, the early movies,
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  then suddenly the masses began to look at those images which
• 3:09
  were still being done kind of in imitation of the upper classes.
• 3:14
  So, and some people began to aspire and, and popular culture,
• 3:21
  for the most part, this isn't entirely true, but for the most
• 3:23
  part from that point on, popular culture was aspirational for
• 3:28
  people. So they would look at these
• 3:30
  people on the screen or in the fan magazines or in the, in the
• 3:34
  literature they were reading and they would say, I want to be
• 3:37
  like them. And, and this became
• 3:39
  particularly true during the the 1930s, during the depression,
• 3:44
  when people were, you know, out of work and, and struggling.
• 3:48
  And they would look at these images on the Hollywood screen
• 3:51
  and say, oh, if only our lives could be like that.
• 3:53
  So it, it does two things, I think.
• 3:56
  And, you know, that that continues up to today too, in,
• 3:59
  in different ways. People, you know, there's been a
• 4:01
  lot of studies on how young people, especially young girls,
• 4:07
  look at Instagram or social media and they say, why can't my
• 4:09
  life be like that? And you know, but those lives
• 4:13
  are off often as artificial as the lives that were being shown
• 4:16
  on the screen of the 1930s, right?
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  So, you know, it's, it's aspirational.
• 4:22
  So it, it, it does two things. It makes you want to strive and
• 4:26
  get more, but it also ends up sometimes making you feel bad
• 4:29
  about yourself and that your lives aren't as good as those
• 4:32
  people we're seeing on the screen or on on our phones or
• 4:36
  wherever you're getting these images.
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  Because it's really the same thing now that images and pop
• 4:42
  culture reaches everyone, everyone's kind of dealing with
• 4:46
  That's the same issues like like you say about what does it mean
• 4:49
  if I fall in love? You know, how what do I expect
• 4:52
  my partner to be and act? And you know, you know, and so
• 4:55
  there's all these expectations that are thrown at people, and
• 4:57
  sometimes that's hard to live up to.
• 4:59
  Yeah, definitely. And what's I think that was
• 5:02
  great. And I actually think
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  additionally, we know that that's you, we, if you ask most
• 5:11
  people, you know, is it good for you to be doing this or to be
• 5:14
  honest? And what's the impact it has on
• 5:16
  you? I think most people are
• 5:18
  completely cognizant of what it's doing to them.
• 5:21
  But like there's a, there's a dissonance between what, you
• 5:25
  know, to be unhealthy and like what you want to consume.
• 5:27
  You know, I mean, the same way that and, and the kind of way,
• 5:30
  and I've said this before, but I look at everything almost like
• 5:33
  an opportunity for either junk food or healthy food.
• 5:37
  And, you know, every now and then it's not too bad to have a
• 5:39
  couple of slices of pizza. But if that's all you're doing,
• 5:42
  then we got some serious problems.
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  And, you know, in the way that we kind of expose ourselves to,
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  it definitely makes a huge difference on our psyche, even
• 5:50
  if even if we're aware of it. Like, you can watch yourself
• 5:53
  slip into the rabbit hole and you're like, Oh my God, this is
• 5:56
  this is real, you know? Yeah, yeah, so true.
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  And then, you know, I think even I'm the same way.
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  So I'll try to eat healthy. And then I say today I'm I'm
• 6:04
  going to get some pizza or I'm just going to get a bag of chips
• 6:07
  and eat some. And and it almost feels like
• 6:09
  you're rewarding yourself, like, OK, I've been good.
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  So and I'm going to give myself this reward.
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  And I think that's the wrong mentality because what you're
• 6:16
  actually doing, you know, it is not a reward.
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  You're actually, you know, harming yourself in some way.
• 6:22
  So I think it I don't I agree. I couldn't live life without
• 6:26
  pizza. So, but at the same time, I
• 6:29
  think we have to, you know, change that mentality that like,
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  OK, I'll, I'll be good. I'll, I'll stay off of Instagram
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  for a week and then I'm going to go back and just like go crazy,
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  you know, So it's, we really have to understand what we're
• 6:44
  doing here. Yeah, that's a great way to put
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  it. That's I, I never even thought
• 6:48
  of it like that. And I actually, I bet if I
• 6:51
  implemented that, a lot of my vices would be a lot more in
• 6:53
  control, you know, but that's a, that's a great way of thinking
• 6:56
  of it. So, so tell me a little bit.
• 6:58
  So, so you have such a, such a cool career.
• 7:00
  You've written such a wide variety of of, of books and, and
• 7:05
  even within the genres like you, there's so many different cross
• 7:08
  genres that you've kind of dive dove into.
• 7:12
  And the ones I'm really particularly interested in is
• 7:15
  like I mentioned Hollywood and either the history.
• 7:19
  And I know that you have a new book coming out that I want to
• 7:21
  talk a little bit about as well, which kind of falls a little bit
• 7:24
  more into the true crime, unresolved, unresolved crime
• 7:27
  world. Do you mind to just tell me a
• 7:29
  little bit about how you got into this whole world and what
• 7:32
  kind of inspired you? Yeah, I mean, since I was a kid,
• 7:36
  I was always fascinated by the cinema of my parents.
• 7:40
  You know, it's interesting. I, you know, I'd like the movies
• 7:42
  that I saw growing up, but I just became really fascinated by
• 7:46
  this world, that it wasn't a world that I knew, you know, you
• 7:51
  know, watching these movies. And I remember being a kid
• 7:55
  because it was the days before YouTube and everything.
• 7:58
  So I'd have to wait until some of these movies were shown on
• 8:01
  television. And and, you know, sometimes
• 8:04
  they'd be at 11:30 at night and my mother would say you can't
• 8:07
  stay up that late. You have school in the morning.
• 8:08
  But like, I've got to see this one.
• 8:10
  I've never seen this one. This is this is Clark Gable and
• 8:14
  Joan Crawford. And, you know, it's it's one
• 8:17
  that's never, never shown. And I have to.
• 8:19
  And so, you know, she sometimes let me, not always.
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  But So, yeah, I had this fascination with with Hollywood
• 8:26
  and I didn't expect to grow up to write about it.
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  I think when I was younger, I wanted to be after and I wanted
• 8:33
  to, I wanted to be in movies rather than write about them.
• 8:36
  But that was never going to happen.
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  So I, you know, I, I pitched this idea, you know, I, I had
• 8:44
  never written a book before, but I pitched an idea and I did some
• 8:47
  freelance writing. So I started doing, you know,
• 8:52
  articles about old Hollywood figures and they got picked up.
• 8:55
  And then from there I was able to, you know, get a book
• 8:58
  contract and then and then start this career as a Hollywood
• 9:02
  biographer, a Hollywood historian, which, you know, when
• 9:05
  I was in high school, I didn't, you know, I didn't think that's
• 9:07
  what I was going to be, but it turned out to be in, you know,
• 9:09
  it's it's work that I love. So I'm very fortunate to do work
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  and and at this point in my career, choose the subjects I do
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  too. So that's really important
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  because in the past, sometimes I've had to do, I've had to do
• 9:25
  projects that I were my ideas. And that's the hardest thing.
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  You know, for those of you who write you or your and your, your
• 9:33
  listeners try to write. It's always easier if you're
• 9:37
  writing about something you care about and you're interested in.
• 9:39
  You know, remember those assignments in school?
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  We had to write about something. That otherwise it's blowing
• 9:43
  teeth. Care at all about.
• 9:45
  So yeah, yeah. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm very
• 9:47
  fortunate. I think it's so I think it's
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  really cool, especially because it at least for me, you know, I,
• 9:55
  I, you know, and again, I also wanted to kind of be in that
• 9:58
  world and I knew that I really wasn't ever going to be.
• 10:00
  I didn't want to move to California.
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  I didn't want to play that kind of everyone kind of knows this.
• 10:05
  Well, I you hope not everyone, but there's a pretty sick game
• 10:09
  that is Hollywood that goes into get into becoming famous and
• 10:12
  becoming a star. And, you know, maybe some people
• 10:15
  avoid it. I'm sure they do.
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  And, you know, but I know that a lot of people have to kind of
• 10:19
  play that game and I wasn't really interested in it at all.
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  And I was really devastated for a while because I thought this
• 10:25
  was my passion and like there was no other way to achieve it.
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  And, you know, and then me and talking to gentlemen like
• 10:30
  yourself and talking. I had another gentleman, Sean
• 10:32
  Levy, who also wrote a bunch of great biographies about that,
• 10:35
  you know, great actors in Hollywood and in history.
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  And and you find that people really can pursue their passions
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  and find a way to make it work. And I think that's like it end
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  of it, that end of itself is something so valuable because I
• 10:48
  teach high school, you know, and a lot of my and it's funny, it's
• 10:50
  actually in a in a Orthodox Jewish school and a lot of the
• 10:54
  students come from very conservative and, and it's, you
• 11:02
  know, not a conservative backgrounds.
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  And, you know, and, and it is the parents want them to kind of
• 11:08
  fit into. And so if you talk to them about
• 11:10
  anything like, you know, Oh well, career about if this, if I
• 11:13
  have students that have loved films in Hollywood without the
• 11:16
  years and, you know, and you want to encourage them without
• 11:19
  stepping on the family's toes. And I think that one of the ways
• 11:21
  to do this is to really like, hey, is you're not too young to
• 11:24
  find your own voice. If there's a if there's a movie
• 11:26
  you like write about, I'll give you credit for it.
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  You know, if there's, if there's something that you enjoy that
• 11:30
  you want to come up with, do it, You know, And if we if we find a
• 11:33
  way to do your own expression of what, what caught you on fire
• 11:37
  about the about the film world to begin with, then maybe you
• 11:40
  could, you know, maybe you could live a life that is fulfilling
• 11:43
  in that kind of sense, you know? Right.
• 11:44
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think really do have
• 11:46
  to encourage people where they're at.
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  And I've done the same thing. I teach, I teach at the
• 11:53
  university level and I'm also fortunate that I usually have
• 11:57
  upper classmen. So you know, you know,
• 12:00
  passionate, you know, juniors and and seniors.
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  So I don't have to be as insistent that you have to do
• 12:06
  their for forms sake. You're going to I allow them to
• 12:10
  choose their topics because it's, you know, like I said, if
• 12:14
  writing about something you don't care about is so difficult
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  and I don't really think it's a great way to learn either.
• 12:18
  I mean, you have to have a passion for what you're doing.
• 12:22
  And yeah, but you know, obviously it's also cultural.
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  So, you know, I've had students who have, you know, you know,
• 12:32
  come from similar backgrounds. And so they're not comfortable
• 12:36
  writing about some of the things and I and they, and they worry
• 12:39
  like, oh, am I ever going to be, you know, just, you know, no
• 12:42
  matter where you are in life, there are things that interest
• 12:46
  you and can can be embraced. So I, you know, I encourage them
• 12:50
  to, you know, recognize their parameters, but then also do let
• 12:54
  your imagination go as far as they can.
• 12:57
  Yeah, yeah, I love it. I think it's great.
• 12:59
  So let's so let's dive a little bit into some of the history
• 13:02
  now. I think I think I would love to
• 13:04
  do that. So, so we you want to start with
• 13:07
  your newest book or do you want to start with actually
• 13:09
  Tinseltown? Because I actually didn't want
• 13:11
  to ask you about that too. That looked, Yeah.
• 13:13
  Let's start with sure. Cool.
• 13:15
  Tell me a little bit about it please.
• 13:18
  Well, Tinseltown is was my first departure from strict
• 13:22
  biographies that I'd, I'd written, you know, I'd written
• 13:24
  about Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra
• 13:28
  Streisand and I, you know, enjoyed those books.
• 13:34
  They weren't always my ideas. You know, Hepburn was my idea.
• 13:38
  Taylor and Streisand were my editors ideas.
• 13:41
  And I really want to do something that that I felt
• 13:46
  really interested to dig into. And there was this unsolved
• 13:51
  murder from 1922 that had kind of gone down in, in history and
• 13:57
  and many people would try to solve it in the past.
• 14:01
  And I said, you know, I'm more interested in how that murder
• 14:07
  transformed Hollywood. I'm less interested in trying
• 14:09
  to, you know, solve it because I think, right.
• 14:13
  You want to do. That 100 years later to solve it
• 14:16
  for certain right. So I'm, I'm more interested in,
• 14:20
  in telling the bigger story about what happened after that
• 14:23
  murder in Hollywood, which was that they created all sorts of
• 14:26
  structures to, you know, contain the scandal and how they, you
• 14:31
  know, you know, started the studio system, which was a top
• 14:34
  down power structure, vertical integration of the industry.
• 14:38
  So I used the murder as a way in to tell that story.
• 14:41
  And I, I really, really enjoyed doing that.
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  I mean, I came up with what I thought was a reasonable
• 14:49
  possible theory. I never said, hey, I've solved
• 14:51
  it. But I said, you know, what about
• 14:53
  if we look at it this way? But I didn't, you know, I never
• 14:59
  really straight from the idea that I was telling this bigger
• 15:01
  story about society and the culture and and specifically
• 15:06
  around how the American Film industry came out of that, that
• 15:12
  scandal to create what we now know as classic American cinema,
• 15:18
  you know, And so that it was really it was a great
• 15:21
  experience. I really loved being able to dig
• 15:24
  in in that way, you know, unfold a mystery as I was writing and,
• 15:30
  and that's what made me interested in the newest book.
• 15:33
  Cool, cool. And what when you're doing
• 15:38
  research, you know, especially when you're taking such a pretty
• 15:41
  dramatic departure in genres. I know that, you know, obviously
• 15:44
  the, the, the research is research and homework is
• 15:46
  homework. But what you know, I guess when
• 15:49
  you're writing biography, it's a lot less put, you know, connect.
• 15:53
  I'm sure there's plenty of connecting dots, but you know,
• 15:55
  when you're trying to when you're observing A cause and
• 15:59
  effect and you know, and like the consequences that are
• 16:01
  outgrowth of cause and effect. I think there's a lot more,
• 16:05
  there's a lot more information and you kind of have to just
• 16:07
  kind of sort it together and try to put it together.
• 16:09
  What's the difference in terms of the research that you had to
• 16:11
  do and what how'd you go about conducting it as opposed to the
• 16:14
  biographies? Well, dude, there, there are
• 16:17
  similarities. I mean, you know, one thing that
• 16:19
  I've always said is, you know, like, you know, there's a new
• 16:22
  biography out of some figure, whether it be, you know,
• 16:25
  Hollywood or political or historical.
• 16:29
  And I always look at the sources.
• 16:31
  And if the sources most like in the footnotes, you know, the
• 16:34
  endnotes and if they're largely sourcing other published works,
• 16:41
  so other secondary sources, I have no interest in reading it
• 16:45
  because the research really determines what you're going to
• 16:48
  be able to say. So, you know, I'm, I, I, I will
• 16:53
  read other books on my subjects and, and reference them if
• 16:55
  they've got found something and I want to give them credit.
• 16:58
  But I, I, I, the majority of my, my, my sources have to be
• 17:03
  primary, have to be stuff that you'd never think of to when you
• 17:07
  want to research someone's life. And in this case, you know it
• 17:13
  both in the biographies, but even more so in the true crime
• 17:18
  works that I've done. You really have to, you know,
• 17:22
  send out as wide a net as possible.
• 17:25
  You have to look at census records.
• 17:30
  You have to look at military records.
• 17:32
  You have to. And what's so great now, which
• 17:36
  is not wasn't the case when I first started writing, is that
• 17:39
  we have 10s of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands
• 17:45
  of newspapers that have been digitized.
• 17:48
  You can search these for like the most obscure mention of your
• 17:51
  person or your incident. And, and, and sometimes that one
• 17:55
  little mention can tell you, you know, take you in a whole new
• 17:58
  Ave. research. So it's really about being as
• 18:01
  exhaustive as possible. In the old days, I think when
• 18:04
  people would do biographies, they would they would rely on
• 18:11
  newspaper clippings which weren't digitized.
• 18:13
  You're only getting what the person kept And and then
• 18:17
  interviews with people and interviews are are vital to any
• 18:21
  book, right to any, any project. You need to talk to the people
• 18:25
  who are involved or who knew people that were involved.
• 18:28
  But memory and we can this is a whole other discussion.
• 18:30
  We can talk about memory is this unreliable thing that one person
• 18:38
  can remember something one way and another person is going to
• 18:41
  remember it another way. And often times those memories
• 18:46
  change as a year. Years go on and tell.
• 18:49
  The story, yeah. And yeah, and it's, and I, you
• 18:52
  know, having interviewed a lot of Hollywood type people,
• 18:55
  they're born to embellishment. So they'll say, oh, yes.
• 18:59
  And then we went, we did this. And I'm like, oh, you did.
• 19:02
  I mean, it doesn't make, you know, here's the record.
• 19:04
  It shows you we weren't there on that night.
• 19:06
  So how do you know that? Well, you know, and so you have
• 19:10
  to be really careful. So I actually think the the
• 19:13
  archival research is more important than the interviews.
• 19:16
  The interview's important, but you need to do the archival
• 19:19
  research first so that when you get to the interviews, you can
• 19:22
  kind of cut the bullshit. You know you can figure out
• 19:24
  what's what's real and what's not.
• 19:27
  That's really cool. It's really, really cool.
• 19:29
  It's smart. Yeah.
• 19:30
  That's yeah, I know. I I, I was kind of hoping that
• 19:35
  was just a me problem that I, that in my memories, you know,
• 19:39
  that the more I tell a story, the more it changes.
• 19:41
  And, you know, my wife will have called me out, you know, be
• 19:44
  like, you know, you told a story a little different than last
• 19:46
  time. And I'm like, yeah, I think last
• 19:49
  time you said it was, you said it was half an hour later,
• 19:51
  something like that, you know, but.
• 19:53
  Yeah, and then eventually start thinking it was, you know, and
• 19:56
  you know, I, my, my sister has a much better.
• 20:01
  Detail memory than I do. So like we'll say, I'll say
• 20:04
  something about, you know, did we ride the, the bus home from
• 20:09
  school? And she was like, yeah, we did.
• 20:10
  And don't you remember? Because I always stopped here
• 20:12
  and so and so always sat in front of us and I'm like, no, I
• 20:15
  have no memory of that. So it's really great to have
• 20:18
  people have memories like that. But oftentimes, and like,
• 20:22
  there's no way I can what, I, I can't judge whether her memory
• 20:25
  is correct or not either, you know?
• 20:27
  So memory, it's just a funny thing and it's different between
• 20:30
  different people. Definitely, definitely.
• 20:32
  So tell me a little bit about the power dynamics that did
• 20:35
  change as a consequence of this murder that the unresolved
• 20:40
  murder in Hollywood, because there's a great book that I
• 20:44
  there's a pretty good book, but the information was great.
• 20:45
  The the way it was written was not my speed, but called easy
• 20:49
  was Easy Rider Raging Bull and it talked about the shift in
• 20:55
  power dynamics in Hollywood over the course of the decades.
• 20:59
  Right. So from producers to directors
• 21:03
  to actors to now studios today, you know what, what was the
• 21:08
  structure before? And of course, in the 20s,
• 21:11
  filmmaking was a very different world, you know, So want to
• 21:14
  elaborate a little bit just for, you know, just to kind of teach
• 21:17
  audience. Yeah, sure.
• 21:19
  The the book you mentioned, easy writers, Raging Bulls is
• 21:23
  actually a book about the tail end of the period of that I was
• 21:28
  describing that came into existence.
• 21:30
  So the structures are similar and the So what what came into
• 21:40
  existence in 1922 was hold, hold on a second, I've got a right in
• 21:48
  here. Back, yeah.
• 21:51
  Yeah. So the book Easy Riders, Raging
• 21:53
  Bulls was about the period that came after the period that I
• 22:01
  described coming into existence in the 1920s, which was a period
• 22:05
  of time in which of consolidation.
• 22:08
  The, the film industry was very new at that point.
• 22:13
  And it was the Hollywood was sort of the Wild West.
• 22:16
  And so you had all these independent players and people
• 22:19
  were making films and, you know, and then they would just, you
• 22:23
  know, drive them over to the, to the theaters to show them.
• 22:26
  And there was no top down control, you know, and, and
• 22:32
  distributors were different from exhibitors and producers were
• 22:36
  different from the actors. And and by the time of the
• 22:40
  murder, the movie studios were coming to existence and they
• 22:45
  were making a ton of money, more than they any they ever possibly
• 22:49
  imagined. So there were big stakes here
• 22:52
  and the, the guys who were running the, the, the studios
• 22:57
  realize that unless we get some control over this industry, any
• 23:01
  little scandal like this or big scandal like this could take us
• 23:05
  down and then we lose all this money.
• 23:07
  The federal government was threatening to step in and
• 23:12
  control the industry. You know, there was even a
• 23:15
  period of time where people were, some people were pushing
• 23:17
  for state control of the of the film industry.
• 23:21
  So we would have, it would have been like the Soviet Union,
• 23:24
  right, controlling our our student or chat.
• 23:27
  Yeah. And because at the time they
• 23:30
  were saying that they were the film industry was breaking
• 23:34
  antitrust laws and all that. So, so, so the guys who were
• 23:40
  putting this together realized, hey, we should vertically
• 23:45
  integrate the industry. We should, we should not only
• 23:49
  make the films, but we should distribute them.
• 23:52
  And then we should own the theaters that show them so they,
• 23:56
  you know, they were essentially building trusts for themselves.
• 23:59
  But it, it created this this factory system by which movies
• 24:04
  were made for the next 40 years. And it was incredibly
• 24:08
  successful. And even though it stifled some
• 24:12
  voices, like women's voices, before this, women were we're
• 24:17
  working as producers and directors and writers and under
• 24:21
  the studio system, of course, it becomes an old boy network and
• 24:24
  and women are are reduced to, you know, lower, lower positions
• 24:29
  of authority. So but it, you know, it really
• 24:33
  does create these, you know, amazing, beautiful films that
• 24:38
  still stand the test of time, even though they're very
• 24:41
  different from the way films are made today.
• 24:43
  But they, you know, people still go to watch old films and, and
• 24:47
  so there was there was benefits and good things.
• 24:50
  But by the 1960s, you know, and, and so I should just back up and
• 24:54
  say that the, the scandals, that wasn't just the scandal of
• 25:00
  William Desmond Taylor's murder that I was writing about, but
• 25:02
  there were other scandals as well, notably Roscoe Arbuckle,
• 25:06
  who was, you know, the biggest comedian in town, both both
• 25:13
  monetarily and physically. He was known as Fatty Arbuckle.
• 25:17
  And he, he was charged with manslaughter and rape.
• 25:20
  And so he, you know, his death occurred, I'm sorry, his arrest
• 25:26
  occurred right at this time of Taylor's, Taylor's murder.
• 25:30
  So it was all of this criticism of, of the morals of Hollywood
• 25:38
  and, and mostly led by very conservative Protestant
• 25:44
  ministers, later joined by Orthodox students and Roman
• 25:48
  Catholics and insisted that the movies be cleaned up.
• 25:55
  And so to avoid that, the student, the studios create,
• 25:58
  they're all their own in house, not so much in house, but it's,
• 26:03
  it's a form of self censorship where this, this, this
• 26:08
  production code administration that they set up and hired the
• 26:11
  guy to run it would, would have the power to oversee filmmaking
• 26:16
  rather than the federal government.
• 26:19
  So all of this structure, all this corporatization of the film
• 26:22
  industry lasts, as I said, for 40 some years.
• 26:26
  And, and then by the time of the late 1960s, with all the social
• 26:30
  uprising and turmoil and, and, you know, changing values and a
• 26:34
  generational change and all of that, we see the breakdown of
• 26:38
  that structure, which then creates the, a new renaissance
• 26:43
  of films. So the films in the late 60s and
• 26:45
  1970s are, you know, some of the best films ever made.
• 26:48
  And, you know, so it's really in both cases.
• 26:52
  But that book you mentioned and, and the book I wrote is a really
• 26:55
  about how the, how Hollywood structured itself and, and how
• 26:58
  it supplanted 1 system and created a new one, you know, and
• 27:03
  now of course, Hollywood's very different yet again.
• 27:06
  But you know, it's you're reverting back to that demo
• 27:08
  democratization of, of, of creating film.
• 27:12
  Yes, yes, there is there. There certainly is more of that,
• 27:15
  though. I think there's still you know
• 27:19
  what what gets made is, you know, you know, and that's a
• 27:25
  whole nother discussion. But you know, what gets made for
• 27:27
  theaters, you know, up until very recently, it's been just
• 27:31
  super hero movies and, and, you know, it's which eliminates a
• 27:34
  whole section of the audience And, and then, you know, the
• 27:39
  more complex, nuanced work is being done, you know, for
• 27:45
  streaming. So, you know, it's, but it's all
• 27:47
  really the same thing, you know, and it's, it's just about
• 27:50
  different platforms and different buying and selling.
• 27:56
  Yeah. Yeah, I, there's a there's a
• 27:58
  great book by a gentleman, Ben Fritz, who I mentioned this
• 28:01
  actually last time a couple episodes ago too, because I'll
• 28:04
  make a brief. But he, he made that same
• 28:06
  argument that you made and said that the, the, the fundamental
• 28:09
  difference between the movies that are getting made today as
• 28:12
  opposed to 20 years ago is that we have a global market now that
• 28:15
  the studios have to tap into. And so most of the films that go
• 28:19
  to theaters have to be translatable to an audience that
• 28:23
  doesn't necessarily understand the nuance of American culture.
• 28:26
  And whereas the streaming services, they care about
• 28:29
  subscribers, not about the box office.
• 28:30
  And so they want to make content for any, you know, from from
• 28:34
  Orthodox Jews to Catholic priests to, you know, and, and
• 28:39
  they want, they want everyone everywhere to be watching all
• 28:41
  their content all the time. And so everything kind of gets
• 28:43
  greenlit as a consequence or which isn't, you know, I
• 28:47
  actually don't know if I had necessarily have a problem with
• 28:49
  that, especially when you have the beauty of what you call it
• 28:54
  of a curated algorithm. You know, and I mean to know
• 28:57
  really how much content Netflix has, go to five different
• 29:00
  friends house and look at what the say, look at their Netflix
• 29:04
  cut feed and see how different you don't even know that half
• 29:07
  this stuff is on there, you know, and they just keep it.
• 29:10
  Going Yeah, yeah, I'm old. So my friends are always saying
• 29:13
  have you seen this? No, I never heard of that one,
• 29:15
  you know, but it does because it hasn't come up in my, you know,
• 29:18
  my feed. But yeah, but that's where you
• 29:20
  find new stuff too. And and I agree.
• 29:22
  I think what's so great is it is more of a democratization of
• 29:28
  voices. And it's also, however, I think
• 29:35
  it's also problematic for those who are creating that content
• 29:40
  because, you know, if you look at it's why the writers, you
• 29:45
  know, the Writers Guild has been, you know, struggling
• 29:48
  because they don't, they don't get paid what they used to do.
• 29:50
  And they're, they're, they're, you know, I remember when I was
• 29:55
  a kid, a new, new series comes on and you get 36 episodes a
• 30:00
  year, a season. You're lucky, you know.
• 30:04
  And so that means, you know, 24 episodes aren't there that
• 30:11
  writers might have gotten paid for, you know, So that's really,
• 30:14
  that's really the struggle with this new model is that it's, you
• 30:20
  know, for writers and and also for actors in a certain, to a
• 30:23
  certain degree, they're they're certainly not getting to pay.
• 30:26
  But meanwhile, Netflix and other streaming services are pocketing
• 30:29
  huge amounts of money, but they're reluctant to share that
• 30:33
  with the people who are creating that content.
• 30:35
  So that's the thing I think we need to be looking at.
• 30:39
  Yeah, and I've heard there's a great podcast that I listen to
• 30:43
  called The Town with Matt Bellamy.
• 30:44
  Matthew Bellamy. It's great.
• 30:46
  It's half an hour a couple times a week about the purely the
• 30:48
  business of Hollywood. And one argument that he makes,
• 30:52
  he's like, listen, Netflix makes a ton of money that these that a
• 30:55
  lot of the artists don't see the back end of, but Netflix pays
• 30:58
  them a lot more upfront and they're all and, you know, and,
• 31:02
  you know, often 2-3 times what their typical fee is.
• 31:06
  And they say, you know what, like, listen, you can, you can
• 31:09
  try to have your cake and eat it too.
• 31:10
  And by the way, I'm not even necessarily making an argument
• 31:12
  for Netflix because again, at a certain point there's enough
• 31:14
  money to go around in my own philosophy about these kind of
• 31:17
  short term business decision making, decision make, you know,
• 31:21
  choices that companies are forced to make on a quarterly
• 31:24
  earning basis, I think is a little absurd for the well-being
• 31:28
  of any long term company. But, you know, regardless, I, I
• 31:32
  think that, I think that I think that the democratization of this
• 31:38
  information also comes as a consequence, I think of a
• 31:42
  collapse of, and this happening everywhere, a collapse of trust
• 31:45
  and institution and an appreciation for institution.
• 31:48
  And I think that we almost had a generation, we skipped a
• 31:53
  generation of leaders. It almost feels like, you know,
• 31:57
  whether you're looking in Hollywood, we're looking at
• 31:58
  politicians, whether you're looking at, you know, the
• 32:01
  youngest, you know, like the average A list actor, writer,
• 32:05
  celebrity, you see, they're not 2530 years old.
• 32:09
  You know, you don't even. Have 40, not even 40.
• 32:12
  Yeah. I mean, and so like, you wonder,
• 32:14
  like, hey, is it that no one's interested B Is it that the
• 32:18
  people are not giving up control?
• 32:20
  And like, you know, I mean, the biggest problem that Disney, for
• 32:23
  example, has always had for the had has had since the 90s or
• 32:26
  even earlier was a predator with predecessors, you know, was that
• 32:30
  Michael Eisner couldn't, you know, couldn't hand the reins
• 32:32
  over to anyone. And Bob Iger won't pick anyone
• 32:34
  to hand the reins over to. And, you know, and well, even
• 32:37
  they didn't have a plan after Disney, you know, So like, I
• 32:40
  think that that a big problem comes with a lack of a lack of
• 32:43
  appreciation for the future generations and to try to mold
• 32:47
  and shape new young leaders. And then you kind of, and then
• 32:50
  that that system falls apart. And then a new and then the
• 32:53
  young people pick up the pieces and they do it in their own kind
• 32:56
  of language and they do it in their own kind of way.
• 32:58
  True, very true, 100% true. And I think part of that the
• 33:02
  issue is that there were just so many damn baby boomers.
• 33:06
  I mean, there's just, you know, there was.
• 33:07
  So I mean, they're, they're just way too many of them, you know,
• 33:12
  they just keep holding on. I mean, I, you know, I'm, I'm, I
• 33:17
  guess I'm Gen. X.
• 33:18
  So we're the ones who kind of like didn't get up, you know,
• 33:22
  after that. And but and but then you get to
• 33:25
  millennials and and Gen. Z and it's like, you know,
• 33:27
  they're still they're waiting. Yeah.
• 33:29
  So that's totally true. And yeah.
• 33:34
  And and it's it's unfortunate. I also think it's because, you
• 33:39
  know, this is bigger, this is the biggest conversation, which
• 33:41
  I'm not sure who we want to get into, but you know, this kind of
• 33:46
  normalization of greed that it's really all about profits and you
• 33:52
  just make as much as you can and, and you yourself and you
• 33:55
  keep it and you know, it's it's, I don't know if that's, you
• 34:00
  know, I think it's that's a problem.
• 34:02
  I mean, you know. I think it is too.
• 34:04
  I think it is. Everything, you know, everything
• 34:07
  in life now is, you know, monetized to the NTH degree.
• 34:12
  It's there's no longer like we're going to give this to our
• 34:15
  consumers or we're going to give this to our customers because
• 34:18
  they've been loyal. You know, there's always
• 34:20
  something, you know, the whole frequent flyer miles on
• 34:23
  interference, it's a whole big scam, you know, and it's, it's
• 34:26
  just too bad because I'm old enough to remember a time when,
• 34:31
  you know, there were giveaways at stores, you know, for our
• 34:34
  loyal patrons this week. Come on in and you all get a
• 34:37
  free blah, blah, blah. You know, if they do that now,
• 34:40
  there's always something attached.
• 34:41
  You got to give me your e-mail or something so they can, they
• 34:43
  can hound you or something. You know, it's, it's really
• 34:46
  true. And so these baby boomers just,
• 34:49
  they're not ready to give up because they want to keep
• 34:51
  killing those Clippers more and more and more anyways.
• 34:53
  Yeah, and it's a shame because you would think that at a
• 34:56
  certain amount. Listen, I'm freaking 30 and I
• 34:59
  know, and I realize it's already, but you're not taking
• 35:01
  anything with you anyway. You know, I like that.
• 35:04
  You know, you're not taking anything with you.
• 35:05
  And the only thing you're leaving behind is a world
• 35:08
  that's, you know, having a little bit of a harder time.
• 35:10
  And that's that's what it seems to me.
• 35:13
  Yeah, it's, it's sad because too, I've been working on some,
• 35:18
  some, some some other writing projects and, you know, I was
• 35:22
  writing about my grandfather who, who, you know, as a kid,
• 35:28
  you know, there were no cars. I mean, there were cars, but he
• 35:31
  lived in a farm area, so there were no cars, you know, for him
• 35:34
  to use. And, you know, and he saw the
• 35:36
  world is constantly getting better and better and better and
• 35:38
  better. You know, suddenly there were
• 35:40
  vaccines and they were, there were, you know, measures to keep
• 35:44
  pollution and, you know, in check all this stuff.
• 35:47
  So he saw the world getting better and better.
• 35:48
  And, and my father too, to an extent that we lived a long,
• 35:51
  long enough to see the world starting to go down.
• 35:54
  What what about today? I mean, generations are making
• 35:58
  less than what their parents made.
• 36:00
  That's the first time in history, in American history
• 36:01
  that that's happened, that children are making, you know,
• 36:05
  grown adult children are making less than what their parents,
• 36:08
  which is just wrong. Yeah, and it's yeah.
• 36:12
  And I've, you know, I've been, I've been thinking about this
• 36:14
  and talking about I just bought, I bought my house for the first
• 36:16
  time and you know, I called my dad before I did.
• 36:19
  I'm asking his opinion on whether he thinks a good idea.
• 36:22
  And you know, I have to put X amount down and just how much it
• 36:24
  is like, what do you think? He's like what I think he goes,
• 36:28
  I was 25 and I bought, you know, my first house for 150 grand.
• 36:32
  I was making $90,000 a year. And you know, in my salary and,
• 36:36
  and typically speaking, whatever.
• 36:38
  And by the way, and also to be fair, for example, my, my, my
• 36:42
  own, my, my, my mom, the house, my mom grew up and my
• 36:44
  grandparents lived in it. My grandfather bought it.
• 36:47
  He was a high school teacher. But it's a 3 bedroom, 1 1/2
• 36:49
  bathroom house that five people lived in, you know, and so at
• 36:52
  the time, I think that expected. And so there's one shower for
• 36:55
  everyone to use, you know, and there's one bathroom, there's
• 36:58
  one downstairs that was like a little closet and that was in
• 37:00
  like, I think that our yardstick have also changed a little bit
• 37:04
  to be a little fair, but that doesn't necessarily but like,
• 37:07
  but again, if someone's making $100,000 and the average cost of
• 37:10
  a house is $600,000 in America like that, how does that how do,
• 37:15
  how do the numbers make any sense?
• 37:16
  And then the issue becomes, and I've heard this put so
• 37:18
  eloquently, people playing the game that have they've been told
• 37:22
  is what you need to do to succeed, are now stuck with debt
• 37:26
  and stuck with credit card debt to it, you know, tuition debt,
• 37:30
  whatever, whatever you have. And then they're like, what's
• 37:33
  the point even playing this game if you can never get out from
• 37:35
  underneath it? And So what do you do?
• 37:38
  You, you, you turn your, do you turn to your own system?
• 37:40
  And I think that I think that this happens one way or the OR
• 37:44
  the other. I'm a huge fan of 60 cultures.
• 37:47
  I don't know if you can, I have a bunch of posters behind me
• 37:49
  from, you know, the dead and brothers and, you know, and
• 37:52
  Woodstock. But one thing that I've noticed
• 37:55
  is that people that experience hardship explode creatively.
• 38:01
  You know what? And you know, black music has
• 38:05
  been freaking incredible throughout America, you know,
• 38:08
  throughout for in history and you're and you're like Blues,
• 38:12
  like what you know, like and it doesn't happen every.
• 38:17
  Every music form has its roots in African American culture,
• 38:20
  whether it be jazz, rock'n'roll, balloons, I mean all of it.
• 38:24
  Soul, I mean all of this. You came from the hard, you came
• 38:27
  with a hard time and the hippies that were rejected by their
• 38:30
  families and rejected by their parents and post World War 2 and
• 38:33
  McCarthyism and all of that. And they're just like, I don't
• 38:36
  want this. And you get the Grateful Dead,
• 38:38
  you get Jerry Garcia, you get the almond.
• 38:41
  I mean, so so I think that we're seeing, we're hopefully going to
• 38:44
  see something similar. And it's interesting because
• 38:46
  even musically we're seeing that kind of revival.
• 38:48
  There's Billy Strings kid who's my age is, is on fire.
• 38:53
  I mean, and, and, and he's bringing an American spirit to
• 38:58
  back to the country that is really, really special and
• 39:00
  really unique and I'm really excited about it.
• 39:02
  That's great. Yeah.
• 39:03
  Yeah. And, you know, the irony, of
• 39:05
  course, is those baby boomers who stood up against the system
• 39:08
  and, you know, change the system are now are, you know, they were
• 39:11
  the hippies and now they're the people holding on to power.
• 39:13
  That's right. So if your generation is
• 39:17
  changing the things, then you got to remember that 40 years
• 39:20
  down the road. It's OK.
• 39:21
  It's time to, you know, let other people in.
• 39:23
  That's right. That's right.
• 39:24
  So, so let's talk a little bit actually.
• 39:27
  You know, one interesting closing point that my, that the
• 39:30
  gentleman Sean that I interviewed, the other
• 39:32
  biographer talked about was the difference between writing a
• 39:36
  biography about someone that's alive and someone that's dead
• 39:38
  and, and how tricky it could get when you're writing about
• 39:41
  someone that's alive. Have you found that that to be?
• 39:43
  Have you found that to be a problem yourself?
• 39:46
  Yeah, I always say that my I prefer my subjects to be long
• 39:49
  dead, OK? Because you know, you don't run
• 39:52
  into issues when I was writing. So 2 of this, my subjects were,
• 40:02
  were still alive when I wrote about them.
• 40:04
  Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand, probably probably the
• 40:06
  reason they weren't my choices. Those were choices for me.
• 40:11
  Elizabeth Taylor was very ill at the time and you know, she,
• 40:16
  everyone thought she was going to be gone by the time the book
• 40:19
  came out. She wasn't.
• 40:20
  She hung on. And the, you know, I did talk to
• 40:26
  her people who said, you know, she's not well enough to talk to
• 40:29
  you. You can talk to her kids, but
• 40:33
  I'm not sure they'll go on record, you know, because every,
• 40:35
  you know, nobody want to say anything because she was at the
• 40:37
  end of her life. So ultimately it didn't really
• 40:41
  affect the book too much, you know, but I did have to take
• 40:45
  that into consideration with Streisand.
• 40:48
  I knew that, you know, she's she's got some control about
• 40:55
  her, her life. And, you know, God bless her for
• 40:58
  it. I mean, you know, she's not
• 41:01
  going to just allow anyone in. And so I decided early on, I
• 41:05
  told her to my editor, I said, this is not a full life
• 41:07
  biography of Streisand. This is a this is a biography of
• 41:10
  Streisand up until the point she first becomes famous, which is
• 41:14
  in funny girl on stage. So basically my book ends in
• 41:18
  1964. She's, I think she's 22 years
• 41:23
  old. So I just do that first piece.
• 41:26
  And, and when I talked to her, her people, they were kind of
• 41:31
  like, oh, OK, that sounds fine. And, you know, even after I
• 41:35
  finished the book and her manager sent me a note and said,
• 41:40
  oh, I'm so glad you found some of those early recording
• 41:43
  sessions and, and performances she gave.
• 41:46
  We had, we didn't have those on our list.
• 41:48
  So I I'd like to think that when she wrote her memoir, she used
• 41:53
  some of that. But yeah, but so that was my
• 41:56
  thing. You know, she's still alive.
• 41:57
  She's still very vital. She's still very involved.
• 41:59
  So I'm not going to, I'm only going to go up to that period
• 42:03
  when she becomes Barbra Streisand.
• 42:05
  In fact, that's what the the book is called becoming, you
• 42:08
  know. Hello, gorgeous.
• 42:09
  Becoming Barbra Streisand. So before that, she was just
• 42:12
  Barbara with two, as you know, in.
• 42:16
  Yeah, I was from Brooklyn. She was just this kid and, and,
• 42:19
  and that allowed me to really get into her, her humanity.
• 42:25
  You know, you really sympathize with this young girl who comes
• 42:29
  to Manhattan wanting to become this big, big star.
• 42:32
  She's not conventionally attractive.
• 42:34
  Her mother's always put her down or she does it, you know, she
• 42:37
  makes it and it's pretty amazing.
• 42:39
  Yeah, yeah, that's a common theme.
• 42:41
  You see a lot of that. You see a lot of.
• 42:43
  And again, I guess, you know, you almost have that like on a
• 42:46
  cultural level, like, you know, we started with music.
• 42:48
  And you also have this on a personal level that people that
• 42:50
  kind of go through this, these challenges and often, you know,
• 42:55
  torments at the hands of their own parents, you know, would,
• 42:58
  you know, explode into something else.
• 43:00
  And, and this greatness is, is beautiful, but it's so hard.
• 43:06
  It's so devastating and heartbreaking to see where it
• 43:08
  has to come from, to see the place that, you know, like I
• 43:11
  complained that my writing has been awful since I got married,
• 43:14
  you know, because, you know, and maybe in 10 years from now, I'll
• 43:17
  be a little bit better. But, you know, like while you're
• 43:19
  writing in my early 20s or, you know, mid 20s when I had no idea
• 43:22
  what I was going to do with my life and where I was going.
• 43:24
  And every day I felt I was lost was a lot better than being a
• 43:28
  family man with two kids sitting in my house and working on a
• 43:31
  podcast. You know it's.
• 43:32
  Yeah, it's true. I mean, great art comes from
• 43:35
  struggle. And yeah, and, and, and I think
• 43:40
  that's been the case with with all of my subjects.
• 43:44
  It's, you know, understanding the the factors that influence
• 43:49
  them at a very young age, you know, helps define their
• 43:53
  personality going forward. You know, that's, that was true
• 43:56
  for Katherine Hepburn, It was true for Humphrey Bogart, Lauren
• 43:59
  Bacall, I mean all of these Marlon Brando.
• 44:02
  So, you know, those were those early experiences shaped who
• 44:08
  they're going to become and then consequently their work.
• 44:12
  Definitely, definitely. I want to ask you about Marlon
• 44:15
  Brando for sure and loose Marlon Brando loosely.
• 44:19
  But I think a bigger question that you can kind of take your
• 44:22
  you could navigate this space however you feel like is I'm
• 44:27
  trying to teach my students how to appreciate movies that are
• 44:31
  not in the last made in the last five years, you know, and one of
• 44:35
  the things that helps is to really explain the humanity
• 44:38
  either behind the characters or the stories or the actors.
• 44:43
  And a lot of times you don't even understand what makes
• 44:45
  someone you know. So like, you know, you hear the
• 44:49
  name Marlon Brando don't really IA lot of kids, unfortunately
• 44:52
  have a very short generational memory and no one even knows who
• 44:54
  he is. So you want to tell me a little
• 44:55
  about his influence and who he was and what about him made him,
• 45:00
  you know, so greater than life and just like this permanent
• 45:04
  mark of Hollywood? Yeah.
• 45:06
  I mean, he's, I mean, he was a transformational figure for
• 45:09
  Hollywood. And I think part of that was
• 45:12
  because he had no real desire to be a star.
• 45:15
  I mean, most of these people that I've written about, whether
• 45:17
  it be Hepburn or Streisand, they wanted to be stars, you know,
• 45:21
  and they were going out there to get it.
• 45:23
  And whereas Brando really had no interest.
• 45:25
  He he was, he came to New York because his sister was was
• 45:32
  acting in New York and needed to get away from an abusive home,
• 45:37
  home life. And so he comes to New York and
• 45:40
  kind of as a Amalaric, he takes these acting lessons and his his
• 45:46
  teacher was one of the great acting teachers of all time,
• 45:49
  Stella Adler. And she just but Oh my God, this
• 45:52
  guy, he can do anything, you know, and and he's what's so
• 45:55
  natural about it. He never had an acting.
• 45:57
  He'd never had had an acting lesson before that and certainly
• 46:00
  had no desire to be an actor, but he was just so good.
• 46:03
  And so she really begins pushing him or not, I don't say pushing
• 46:07
  him, encouraging him to to pursue acting as a career.
• 46:11
  And so he's kind of like, yeah, this could be, this could be
• 46:14
  fun. And and he he really gets into
• 46:16
  the work. He's, he's, he was nurtured by a
• 46:22
  very liberal, progressive Jewish community.
• 46:25
  And you know, he was, he was actually in the first play, play
• 46:31
  of flags Born, which was about the creation of Israel and he
• 46:35
  was passionate about that. And, and so he, he, he kind of
• 46:39
  correlated acting and performing with the betterment of society,
• 46:46
  right. So one of Stella Adler's lessons
• 46:49
  was an actor uplifts. An actor is there to inspire
• 46:54
  people, not to bring them down. And, you know, an actor works
• 46:58
  for justice. So in our acting, we are, we are
• 47:01
  attempting to bring justice to the world.
• 47:04
  So that is that's Marlon Brando's approach to acting and
• 47:08
  why he's he pursues this. And his early work is like that.
• 47:13
  He works with Elliott Kazan and he works with Tennessee Williams
• 47:17
  in A Streetcar Named Desire. And he feels like, OK, I'm doing
• 47:20
  something now that's contributing.
• 47:21
  It's making a statement and, and then but he quickly realizes,
• 47:27
  though, that Hollywood doesn't care about any of that.
• 47:28
  Hollywood simply cares about making some money.
• 47:30
  And so they they're, you know, they ask him to go, you know,
• 47:34
  press junkets with and talk to, you know, gossip columnist and
• 47:37
  all of that. And he he very quickly begins to
• 47:40
  back away from all of that. Like this is not what I thought
• 47:43
  acting was supposed to be. But meanwhile, he's up on the
• 47:47
  screen doing things that have never been done before.
• 47:50
  He brings such a naturalness to acting.
• 47:52
  He's, he wasn't really trained in the studio system.
• 47:56
  So he's, he's bringing a whole different perspective of acting
• 48:01
  and, and what's real and what's truth to the screen.
• 48:05
  And he's, he's amazed. I mean, you, you, you watch any
• 48:07
  of those early films and he you can see why he just blew people
• 48:10
  away because he's so real, so honest.
• 48:14
  And and yet eventually, as he keeps going on, he becomes much,
• 48:19
  much more disillusioned with Hollywood and the machine and,
• 48:23
  and at certain point actually thinks I'm I'm done.
• 48:25
  I don't really want to do this. He becomes friends with James
• 48:28
  Baldwin, the writer and says, you know, I wish I was more like
• 48:31
  you, that I was actually, you know, writing about things and
• 48:34
  and, you know, working on things.
• 48:35
  He becomes involved in the anti segregation movement, the
• 48:40
  desegregation movement and, you know, other civil rights issues
• 48:46
  because that was really important to the community that
• 48:48
  had nurtured him. And eventually it gets a point
• 48:51
  like, I don't want to do this anymore.
• 48:53
  And but people keep throwing all this money at him.
• 48:55
  Like you've got to stay here. We need you.
• 48:57
  You're the greatest. And so he gets a point by the
• 49:00
  end of his career, like, OK, I'll make these this movie
• 49:02
  because they're going to pay me a lot of money and I'm going to
• 49:04
  use it to fight against capital punishment or I'm going to use
• 49:07
  it. He was an early
• 49:08
  environmentalist. He he was one of the first
• 49:11
  people to talk about climate change in the 1990s.
• 49:13
  So he was using that money for good things, you know, you know,
• 49:18
  certainly on Indigenous rights, he was, he was very vocal about
• 49:23
  Native Americans and, and the, the experience they've they've
• 49:26
  been given by this country. You know, really in writing
• 49:31
  about him, I realized that I have to tell this story.
• 49:33
  Not only the great actor, because he really was and he
• 49:36
  influenced a lot of the actors who came along later, but he was
• 49:39
  also somebody who just identified the the bullshit and
• 49:42
  say, like, Oh, acting is the greatest profession in the
• 49:45
  world. And we are.
• 49:46
  So, you know, if we're not, if as actors we're not serving
• 49:51
  others, then there's no point in what we're doing.
• 49:53
  You know, it's not, it's not about narcissism.
• 49:56
  And, and unfortunately, his. Yeah, it's enough.
• 50:02
  Right? Yeah.
• 50:03
  And his reputation later became that he was narcissistic because
• 50:07
  he didn't want to do things. I didn't want to do that.
• 50:09
  But it's really about him saying that's that's not genuine to me.
• 50:13
  That is, that's, that's about making money.
• 50:15
  And that's not what I should be doing here.
• 50:17
  So, you know, he's a he's a, he is a transition transformational
• 50:21
  figure in Hollywood. But I think in more the ways
• 50:23
  than people, you know, automatically assume, you know,
• 50:28
  it was also about saying, you know, all of this.
• 50:31
  You know, he hated award shows. He says it's all these rich
• 50:35
  white guys clap themselves on the shoulder.
• 50:37
  Yeah, yeah, you did great job, did a great job.
• 50:40
  And he was like, I, I he's just not into it.
• 50:42
  Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. I didn't know that about him
• 50:45
  actually. That that's really that's great.
• 50:46
  I have to, I have to check it out.
• 50:48
  I, I got to learn more about him.
• 50:50
  I think one of the, one of the ideas that you mentioned,
• 50:53
  actually there's two things. Number one was that I was
• 50:56
  actually talking to someone about this other day.
• 50:58
  I was on another show and we're talking about and he, you know,
• 51:02
  he's, you know, he noticed obviously that I'm wearing a
• 51:04
  yarmulke and then an Orthodox Jewish and he asked me off
• 51:07
  camera. Actually, we're talking a little
• 51:09
  bit about he's like, you know, I'm Jewish.
• 51:10
  I grew up in this conservative Jewish world.
• 51:13
  And I just want to know, you know, how you balance it because
• 51:15
  you seem like you like you seems like you, you know, you're
• 51:18
  Orthodox, but you seem like a pretty integrated guy into the
• 51:21
  rest of the world. And he said, you know, I
• 51:24
  personally have a hard time because there's so many, you
• 51:26
  know, examples of embarrassing behavior around the world, you
• 51:29
  know, around the world, the society.
• 51:32
  And I said, listen, I said you're completely correct.
• 51:34
  I said, you know, if I were to judge the, the religion of
• 51:38
  Judaism or any religion really based on the people as opposed
• 51:42
  to the ideals of the values, I wouldn't do it either, You know,
• 51:45
  and I was like, but I feel that way about America, you know,
• 51:46
  like I love America with the values.
• 51:49
  You know, I don't love America because of the people that run
• 51:51
  the show. I like that.
• 51:52
  I love America because of what America represents and what the
• 51:54
  people that are living here strive to accomplish.
• 51:57
  And, and that seems like a really, and that seems like
• 52:01
  Brando really, really lived that too.
• 52:03
  And. Absolutely.
• 52:05
  Yeah, and, and I was going to ask if your, your opinion on the
• 52:08
  matter. Of course, being forced to, I
• 52:11
  have a very low tolerance, for example, for for doing things
• 52:14
  that I can't stand. And that tends to get us into
• 52:18
  self sabotaging habits. And it's a behaviors that
• 52:21
  consciously, subconsciously tend to harm ourselves almost as like
• 52:24
  a rejection of, you know, what it is we're participating in,
• 52:28
  you know, and we know that and we know that Brandon wasn't a
• 52:32
  particularly healthy human being towards the end of his life by
• 52:34
  any stretch of the imagination. You want to dive a little bit
• 52:36
  into that. Yeah.
• 52:38
  I mean, you know, he's he was, he was emotionally scarred by
• 52:47
  his abusive father and then, you know, a neglectful alcoholic
• 52:52
  mother. And so that that goes with him
• 52:55
  for the rest of his life. He was never able to have a
• 53:00
  successful long term relationship.
• 53:03
  He went through a couple of different wives and there was
• 53:07
  never he, he was never physically abusive.
• 53:11
  There are no cases of him ever, you know, you know, harassing
• 53:17
  sexually any of his costars. He was always very good about
• 53:20
  that. But he could be emotionally so
• 53:22
  distant that his wives eventually couldn't take it
• 53:25
  anymore. And also some of his long term
• 53:28
  girlfriends like Rita Moreno, who's who's talked a lot about
• 53:31
  that. And he was not a great father
• 53:34
  because he had never had, he didn't have any of that
• 53:36
  modeling. He had a horrible father.
• 53:38
  And so he he just said, I'm going to do, I'm going to, I'm
• 53:42
  just going to make sure I don't do anything my father did.
• 53:44
  So he never drank. You know, Marlon Brando never
• 53:46
  drank because he saw what alcohol did to both his parents.
• 53:51
  But he thought by doing that, that was enough.
• 53:53
  But it wasn't because he'd also never learned how to show his
• 53:56
  children love. And and so he was always very
• 54:00
  distant and as as life went on, you know, both his sisters were
• 54:07
  Alcoholics and Marlon didn't drink, but he ate and he became
• 54:14
  that was a food was his addiction.
• 54:16
  And so he ballooned hugely and, you know, had all sorts of
• 54:20
  coronary issues and high blood pressure and which is eventually
• 54:23
  what part of what what, what killed him.
• 54:26
  So, yeah. So it goes back to what we're
• 54:28
  talking about his idea, you know, the early scars that were
• 54:33
  left in a childhood shape who we are.
• 54:35
  And so even though he had all of these moral ideas and idealistic
• 54:41
  goals in life, he wasn't able to translate them personally, which
• 54:46
  is really sad because he he had a whole slew of children by
• 54:51
  wives and girlfriends. And, you know, so we had a whole
• 54:55
  bunch of kids, none of whom was ever really close to him.
• 54:59
  Yeah, yeah. What's I I remember there was a
• 55:02
  movie I saw. Maybe it was a was it a comedy?
• 55:05
  Was he in the movie The the comedy knock off with with shoe?
• 55:09
  Who's the actor? Ferris Wheeler.
• 55:12
  Yeah. Broderick, Yes.
• 55:13
  Yeah. Depression.
• 55:15
  And that was one of the that movie.
• 55:16
  He was enormous in that movie, right?
• 55:18
  Probably enormous. I mean, he's, yeah.
• 55:22
  I mean, in some of his later movies, he's enormous.
• 55:24
  And in that movie he's pretty good because he actually liked
• 55:29
  script. But some some of his later
• 55:32
  movies, he's just phoning it in, you know.
• 55:35
  So because he's just like, hey, yeah, I'm going to take the
• 55:38
  money so that I can go and create an aquaculture farm in
• 55:42
  Tahiti, you know, where, you know, I want to, I want to fund
• 55:45
  this school of Native Americans or something like that.
• 55:48
  You know, it's like he was never, he never bought himself
• 55:50
  things. He wasn't like, he was like.
• 55:53
  That's really beautiful. I didn't know that about him.
• 55:54
  That's awesome. Yeah.
• 55:55
  So let's now let's get to Black Dahlia a little bit after.
• 55:58
  It's an hour. Yeah.
• 55:59
  That was related. Let's talk later.
• 56:03
  Yeah, so I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm really glad you, you know, we
• 56:06
  talked about it because it's coming out soon.
• 56:10
  I'd like, like Tinseltown is a true Crime Story.
• 56:16
  So Elizabeth Short was murdered in 1947 in Hollywood.
• 56:19
  She was not an actress. She just was there because she
• 56:21
  wants to see what it was like to live out there for a while.
• 56:25
  And her death, because it was very gruesome and very sadistic.
• 56:32
  It it kind of well, she was her body was found in a in a in a
• 56:38
  vacant lot and it her body had been cut in half.
• 56:41
  She had been drained of all blood and she was given a
• 56:46
  Glasgow smile. So, you know, like a Joker
• 56:47
  smile. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:49
  And all sorts of mutilations. Yeah.
• 56:51
  So, so yeah. So, so consequently, it became
• 56:57
  this sensational crime that the media just jumped all over.
• 57:03
  And, you know, the newspapers in Los Angeles, there were five of
• 57:07
  them at the time, all competing against each other.
• 57:09
  And they, you know, one of the editors later said we sold, sold
• 57:14
  more papers about the Black Dahlia than we did about Pearl
• 57:17
  Harbor. So, I mean, it was, you know,
• 57:20
  and, and so it was the press that gave her that nickname, the
• 57:22
  Black Dahlia. She never, she never wore black
• 57:24
  clothes. It was just the movie.
• 57:26
  The blue Dahlia had just come out and she had black hair.
• 57:28
  So somehow she becomes the Black Dahlia.
• 57:31
  I go into that in the book about how that could have come about.
• 57:36
  But over the years, she's been, you know, she's been cast as a
• 57:38
  sex worker or, you know, an aspiring actress who was trying
• 57:42
  to get a part in the movie or, or she was like working with
• 57:45
  gangsters, you know. And the thing that that struck
• 57:48
  me early on in this was, you know, first I want to, I want to
• 57:51
  tell this story and again, in a bigger way, I want to look at
• 57:54
  the what's going on socially. You know what, you know, this
• 57:59
  was after World War 2, right after World War 2, where, you
• 58:02
  know, demographic ships, ships were happening and, and all of
• 58:05
  this. And so I wanted to set her story
• 58:07
  within those that social context, but I also realized
• 58:12
  that I needed to try to rescue her because, you know, she was
• 58:18
  none of those things that I just described.
• 58:20
  You know, she was just a young woman who decided to drop out of
• 58:25
  school, out of high school with her mother's permission and go
• 58:30
  explore the world. And, you know, people say, well,
• 58:33
  if she had stayed at home, she never would have been murdered.
• 58:35
  Well, yeah, sure. You know, and and you know, or,
• 58:40
  or, you know, she must have been, you know, immoral or, or,
• 58:44
  or sinister in some way. But they don't say that about
• 58:49
  young men who kind of say I'm going to go explore the world.
• 58:52
  You know, they make movies and write novels about guys like
• 58:55
  that Huckleberry Finn, you know, it's or Tom Sawyer, you know,
• 58:59
  who go off. And I'm going to go see the
• 59:01
  world. I'm going to live by my wits.
• 59:03
  And, you know, if I have to con somebody to get a little, little
• 59:07
  money, I'll do that. And and you're you're kind of
• 59:09
  seen as these all American. Romanticized.
• 59:13
  Yeah, exactly. Very romanticized.
• 59:15
  And and yet they didn't do that for Elizabeth Short because she
• 59:18
  was a woman. And so she was, by implication,
• 59:21
  responsible for her own death. That was, that was been the,
• 59:24
  the, the, the, the unstated message in all of the previous
• 59:28
  books about her movies that have been made about her.
• 59:32
  And I decided I want to tell a different story that kind of
• 59:35
  humanizes her, brings her back as to who she was.
• 59:38
  You know, the only person responsible for her death was
• 59:41
  the person who did it. And, and I, you know, and again,
• 59:45
  I have a theory or a couple of theories on who may have done
• 59:47
  it. But again, like Tinseltown,
• 59:49
  that's not the point of the book.
• 59:50
  The point of the book is to recreate that period of time and
• 59:53
  set her murder within that. Yeah, that's really cool.
• 59:57
  It's really, it's a really fun and and and and ambitious idea.
• 1:00:00
  How did you become familiar with the case to begin with?
• 1:00:02
  Because I never heard of it. Yeah, a lot of people, you know,
• 1:00:05
  it's funny, you know, I we, you know, people of my generation,
• 1:00:07
  we grew up with it because our parents had been around for it
• 1:00:10
  and it was like a big thing in their lives, right.
• 1:00:13
  But yeah, a lot of younger people haven't heard about it
• 1:00:16
  because it's it'll be almost, it's almost 80 years since she
• 1:00:19
  was killed. And but, you know, in in Bride,
• 1:00:24
  De Palma made a movie about it in nineteen, 2006, I think.
• 1:00:28
  So it was still kind of, it was still kind of current then.
• 1:00:33
  Yeah, I so I'd heard about her for for years, but like most
• 1:00:37
  people, I had heard those myths and kind of absorbed them.
• 1:00:40
  So when my editor said, you know, what's another true crime
• 1:00:45
  that you could do, Well, let's see if we can repeat the success
• 1:00:48
  of Tinseltown. And I was like, well, I don't
• 1:00:50
  know. I mean, and I said, well, of
• 1:00:51
  course the Black Dahlia has been done a million times.
• 1:00:53
  He said, yeah, but never, never write.
• 1:00:56
  And I'm like, huh? And so I go into it thinking,
• 1:00:59
  I'm going to find out about this young woman who was like some
• 1:01:04
  gangster's girlfriend or, you know, was this high class call
• 1:01:08
  girl or something like that and wasn't like that at all.
• 1:01:10
  She was just there with some friends.
• 1:01:12
  You know what? Hey, let's see Hollywood this
• 1:01:14
  time, you know? And you know, so that was,
• 1:01:17
  that's what pulled me in. Yeah.
• 1:01:19
  And what was the, what was the research like there?
• 1:01:20
  Was there a ton of archives and records and stuff?
• 1:01:23
  And it is easy enough to kind of string it all together.
• 1:01:25
  Like, how come it hasn't been? Was it not done well until now,
• 1:01:28
  you think? Right.
• 1:01:30
  Because of the enormous amount of cultural stigma that was
• 1:01:34
  associated with her, you think? Yeah, I think so.
• 1:01:36
  I mean, I think that's part of it.
• 1:01:37
  I think it's also because previously everybody wrote about
• 1:01:40
  it, wanted to say I saw the Black Dahlia case.
• 1:01:44
  Yeah, Yeah. Even though we don't have access
• 1:01:48
  to the information and the evidence that the original
• 1:01:50
  detectives had that that evidence is still locked up in
• 1:01:53
  the opposite of the LAPD. Yep.
• 1:01:56
  Have. You tried buoying it?
• 1:01:57
  Or have you ever done for this? Oh yeah, Oh yeah.
• 1:02:00
  But because it's still considered an open case, they
• 1:02:02
  don't release those records if it's still considered open way
• 1:02:06
  after 80 years after 80. Years.
• 1:02:09
  That's a. That's a problem, man.
• 1:02:12
  But that's. Way to to break trust.
• 1:02:14
  Seriously. Break trust is by saying
• 1:02:16
  everyone's dead associated with this, but we're still not going
• 1:02:19
  to tell you what happened. Right.
• 1:02:20
  Yeah, I mean, her her mother lived to be 96 years old and
• 1:02:24
  died without ever seeing the information they had.
• 1:02:27
  So. But one good thing was I mean,
• 1:02:30
  that's what allowed me to write the book was the the District
• 1:02:33
  Attorney of Los Angeles of Los Angeles when the when there was
• 1:02:39
  a big blow up at the LAPD and there was, you know, some
• 1:02:44
  corruption going on all that the DEA stepped in and took over the
• 1:02:47
  case. And I asked for that, you know,
• 1:02:51
  I FOIA or and they sent everything to me.
• 1:02:54
  So I have all of the district attorneys.
• 1:02:56
  So they're they're they're probably available.
• 1:02:59
  Anybody wants them can change, can just go get them so that I
• 1:03:02
  was able to build the case, but because that have really allowed
• 1:03:05
  me to get in to this this case and figure it all out.
• 1:03:08
  And there's literally thousands of names that I had to cross
• 1:03:11
  reference and all of that. The FBI files were also released
• 1:03:14
  to me. They're not as detailed, but you
• 1:03:17
  know, they're helpful. The but because there's all of
• 1:03:21
  these other records that I don't have that nobody has and they're
• 1:03:25
  within the LAPD. I could never it would be
• 1:03:30
  hubristic for me to say, oh, I've solved the case, even
• 1:03:34
  though the original who were pretty damn good, they were
• 1:03:37
  unable to do it and I don't even have the evidence that they had.
• 1:03:41
  So instead, I I I put together based on what I've seen, there
• 1:03:46
  are two possible solutions to, you know, to this case of who
• 1:03:50
  The Who the killer may have been, but which will be more
• 1:03:53
  importantly. Yeah, it is.
• 1:03:55
  I come up with two ideas that, you know, give them what we have
• 1:03:58
  right now to me are the only two possible solutions.
• 1:04:02
  But but more, more of it. I kind of want to see what what
• 1:04:05
  it was like for what the society was like for women in this
• 1:04:09
  period of time. You know, during the war, during
• 1:04:12
  World War 2, they were forced into the workforce.
• 1:04:15
  They had to go in and fill the factories and the opposite.
• 1:04:17
  Yeah. Then the men come home, they're
• 1:04:19
  told, go back home and start cooking dinner and having babies
• 1:04:22
  again. And you know what, a lot of when
• 1:04:25
  we're like, no, we kind of like being on our own.
• 1:04:27
  So we're going to stick around and do that.
• 1:04:29
  And that was a little bit short. She's like, Nah, I don't want to
• 1:04:31
  get married right now. I want to go see the world.
• 1:04:33
  So it was it was reestablishing that part of her that was really
• 1:04:36
  important to me. Do you think that she was
• 1:04:38
  influenced by culture at that point?
• 1:04:40
  I mean, there was a great book I read called, I was reading
• 1:04:44
  called Wise Gals I have over here by Natalia Halt.
• 1:04:47
  And, and she wrote, and she wrote specifically about this
• 1:04:51
  topic of basically how the how, how women during World War 2 set
• 1:04:55
  up the structures and the bones for what would be the CIA slash.
• 1:04:59
  You know, it was previously the OSS.
• 1:05:01
  And and again, how you know, 1 morning ever wakes up and all
• 1:05:05
  the men are in war. The next morning ever wakes up
• 1:05:06
  and they're all home and then everything and then have like,
• 1:05:09
  like it's all wonderful. But now what?
• 1:05:11
  It's the cultural repercussions to to having such dramatic
• 1:05:16
  change up so quickly. So was she, you think that she
• 1:05:18
  was influenced by, was there a lot of cultural influence at
• 1:05:20
  that time that was expressing, you know, female individuality
• 1:05:24
  and freedom and stuff like that? Yeah, I mean, the the people
• 1:05:27
  that she would connect with in her travels, the women she would
• 1:05:31
  connect with were men who were like her, who kind of like, you
• 1:05:34
  know what, we can do this, you know, and you don't have to rely
• 1:05:37
  on a man for that. And even though Elizabeth was
• 1:05:39
  very good at getting a man to buy her, you know, dinner, you
• 1:05:42
  know, she'd be sitting at the counter and then she'd make eyes
• 1:05:44
  and the guy would say, how you doing?
• 1:05:45
  So, well, I'm a little hungry and I can't afford it.
• 1:05:47
  Oh, I'll buy you a dinner. So, you know, but at the same
• 1:05:50
  time, she, you know, she could have gone home in any time, gone
• 1:05:54
  back to her mother's shit because her mother was very
• 1:05:56
  sweet and would have accept her to come home, but she didn't
• 1:05:58
  want to. She just keep kept wanting to
• 1:06:00
  see the world. And I think that was because she
• 1:06:02
  was with other women who were doing the same thing.
• 1:06:05
  She would have, she would have definitely have seen women
• 1:06:09
  working in the war effort. Her sister was actually in the
• 1:06:11
  war in the the the waves, I think.
• 1:06:14
  And, you know, so she would have seen women part, you know,
• 1:06:18
  participating in the war effort. And I think she would also seem
• 1:06:22
  like, OK, now they're all expected to get married.
• 1:06:25
  I don't want to get married. So yeah, I think she would have
• 1:06:28
  been very aware of the cultural changes.
• 1:06:31
  Right. Yeah, that's really interesting.
• 1:06:33
  I was reading, I was reading a book.
• 1:06:35
  I couldn't even make my way through it, unfortunately called
• 1:06:38
  Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. And it's about just a whole slew
• 1:06:43
  of unsolved deaths that happened around this time around this
• 1:06:48
  time period, you know, post World War 2 leading into the 60s
• 1:06:52
  and 70s. And there there didn't there was
• 1:06:56
  not a day or two that would go by without some kind of bizarre
• 1:07:00
  death. And while, and what I actually
• 1:07:02
  liked about what I love about the way that you're presenting
• 1:07:04
  this information is you're saying, listen, we know we have
• 1:07:07
  a context that I would like to elaborate on.
• 1:07:09
  I don't know the information. And part of what was a little
• 1:07:12
  off putting to me about the book was that the author immediately
• 1:07:15
  leaps to, feels like it leaps to a lot of conspiracies that when
• 1:07:18
  you like, if you have the potential for the simplest
• 1:07:21
  solution to be the case, a lot of times it could be it, you
• 1:07:24
  know, like Janis Joplin, you know, overdosing.
• 1:07:27
  Well, like, it wasn't a mystery that she was an addict and an
• 1:07:31
  alcoholic and severely depressed and, you know, had and had a
• 1:07:34
  whole slate of, of, of problems, problems that really needed to
• 1:07:38
  be, that went into her genius but also needed to be resolved.
• 1:07:40
  And like, yeah, that seems like a pretty simple,
• 1:07:43
  straightforward, you know, answer, but about, you know,
• 1:07:48
  saying, hey, I don't know what's going on.
• 1:07:51
  I just want to fill in the context and see what's
• 1:07:53
  happening. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:54
  I have no patience for conspiracy theories, whether
• 1:07:56
  they're contemporary ones or really or historical ones.
• 1:08:01
  I think conspiracy. I mean, you know, yeah, you're
• 1:08:05
  right. Occam's Razor.
• 1:08:06
  The most, the simplest answer to a problem or a mystery usually
• 1:08:10
  is the correct one. And, you know, previous people
• 1:08:14
  who wrote about about this case would have all these elaborated
• 1:08:19
  tortured theories about, you know, it was all conspiracy.
• 1:08:22
  Well, somebody was paying off someone else and somebody.
• 1:08:24
  There's no evidence for that, you know, So, you know, I, I,
• 1:08:29
  you know, I often say that, that, you know, I often apply
• 1:08:34
  Occam's razor to, to my, in my book.
• 1:08:37
  I, I actually reference that I, hey, look, here's the, the
• 1:08:39
  simplest solution. Sometimes the simplest solution
• 1:08:43
  might not be the solution, but much more often it is.
• 1:08:46
  So, you know, I think we have to keep that in mind.
• 1:08:48
  And, and there was still been so many crazy conspiracy theories.
• 1:08:54
  It's just, it's just there's one guy who's made a franchise about
• 1:08:59
  conspiracy theories, believes his father was the killer.
• 1:09:03
  And you know, but he was also the Zodiac Killer and he killed
• 1:09:05
  these other people. And, you know, it's a book after
• 1:09:07
  book about just crazy conspiracy theories.
• 1:09:10
  And you know it's. Imaginative.
• 1:09:17
  It's imaginative, but when you know, I think when it comes to
• 1:09:19
  actually understanding history or understanding people's
• 1:09:22
  intentions, I think a lot of times the simplest things are
• 1:09:25
  still the simplest things. Like you said.
• 1:09:27
  How long do you think you typically write a book?
• 1:09:30
  Three to four years. Three to four years.
• 1:09:33
  Gotcha. And and what's your structure
• 1:09:34
  for doing it? Because I, you know, I was a
• 1:09:36
  creative writing in literature on major college and I always
• 1:09:40
  have a hard time with the long form writing and keeping track
• 1:09:44
  of a whole story in my head at one time.
• 1:09:47
  And I kind of get overwhelmed with the whole process.
• 1:09:48
  So how do you go around breaking down, you know, especially over
• 1:09:50
  the course of years? Do you have like, do you break
• 1:09:53
  it out into phases or into sections or how do you, how do
• 1:09:56
  you go about it? Well, first you do as much
• 1:09:58
  research as you can and you just have as much data, as much
• 1:10:02
  facts. And then in the sometimes that
• 1:10:05
  creates the structure for you like, oh, OK, this is about, you
• 1:10:09
  know, her wanderlust. And then this is about her
• 1:10:13
  father. And, you know, and you're able
• 1:10:16
  to kind of come up with, you know, a rough outline of how the
• 1:10:20
  story should go. And usually doing that, I
• 1:10:24
  suddenly get the idea, OK, that's where the book opens, you
• 1:10:27
  know, And because I love movies so much, I think very
• 1:10:30
  cinematically. So think about a movie like you
• 1:10:33
  always have that powerful opening scene that just grabs
• 1:10:36
  you and like, OK, I need that for my book.
• 1:10:39
  So I need to have this powerful opening scene.
• 1:10:41
  And sometimes then you flashback or sometimes you jump forward or
• 1:10:44
  whatever, but that's you got to get that grabbing.
• 1:10:47
  And then and then once I've got that, I can usually imagine
• 1:10:50
  where it goes to. So you also need to have an
• 1:10:52
  ending eventually where you're going to go to because then
• 1:10:55
  everything else you have works towards that.
• 1:10:59
  You know, you're like, oh, wait, I'm getting sidetracked.
• 1:11:01
  I'm not, I'm not leading to that ending and don't want to go that
• 1:11:04
  route because that's going to take me in a direction I don't
• 1:11:06
  want to go. I want to head towards that
• 1:11:07
  ending. So, you know, it's really about
• 1:11:10
  having as many facts and, or if you're writing creatively or
• 1:11:15
  like fiction or, you know, memoir, I would also have this
• 1:11:18
  many ideas and I, you know, on the paper or on the computer
• 1:11:22
  screen before you actually start writing because then you can
• 1:11:24
  start linking them together. And are you organized about this
• 1:11:28
  or do you like to have a jumbo that you kind of sort out?
• 1:11:31
  Yeah, I'm, I'm ridiculously organized.
• 1:11:33
  I mean, it's, it's like I immediately start cross
• 1:11:36
  referencing and, you know, keep an index and, and you know, I've
• 1:11:41
  got, you know, eventually have 4 huge boxes of material, but I
• 1:11:44
  know where everything is because I've created an index for that
• 1:11:47
  material. Yeah.
• 1:11:48
  And that's it's, it annoys people sometimes, but but it's
• 1:11:53
  also, I think it's also why I'm able to do what I do.
• 1:11:57
  I bet you do. It's the reason why I haven't
• 1:11:59
  done it, The reason why you have, you know, what are some,
• 1:12:04
  what are some passion projects that you would like to that you
• 1:12:07
  would like to accomplish? You think over the over the
• 1:12:10
  course of the next couple of years.
• 1:12:11
  Well, I mean, I've really enjoyed writing these true crime
• 1:12:15
  stories because it really allows me to get into a bigger picture,
• 1:12:19
  more, more kind of intimate experience in people's lives in
• 1:12:23
  some ways and more people. And I'm also going to get, I'm
• 1:12:28
  also working on a project now that is much more, I guess it's
• 1:12:31
  more like a memoir. And I guess I'm getting to the
• 1:12:34
  point in my life where I can look back on it, you know,
• 1:12:36
  that's I've had this life and really interesting about how my
• 1:12:41
  childhood was so different from the childhood of my nieces and
• 1:12:46
  nephews. And like, you know, and so I
• 1:12:49
  kind of want to get that down because I feel like if you don't
• 1:12:53
  get history down on the paper or on screen, it's going to
• 1:12:56
  disappear because every every young person thinks they're
• 1:13:00
  experiencing life for the first time and that, you know,
• 1:13:03
  nothing's really happened before of any interest, you know, and,
• 1:13:06
  and I was like that. And, you know, kids being born
• 1:13:11
  today are like that. They think, you know, oh, brand
• 1:13:13
  new slate, you know, and, but I it's important so you get this
• 1:13:16
  history down. I teach history.
• 1:13:17
  So that's a cool awesome. What kind of history do you
• 1:13:20
  teach? American history, mostly 20th
• 1:13:22
  century popular culture and but how popular culture then
• 1:13:27
  intersects with everything else. So like the women's movement or,
• 1:13:32
  you know, all of that. So yeah.
• 1:13:35
  So you. So it's important to me as a
• 1:13:37
  historian to make sure that history is down.
• 1:13:39
  So I'm kind of like saying, Oh yeah, I didn't have this notable
• 1:13:43
  childhood. It was just pretty normal lower
• 1:13:45
  middle class child, you know, and but it was still interesting
• 1:13:48
  and they did things differently then than we do now.
• 1:13:51
  And I kind of like, I want to put that down so that it kind of
• 1:13:54
  gets. What are some things you think
• 1:13:56
  you'd like to preserve as far as like childhood or you know the
• 1:14:00
  youth, if you know if the world that you grew up with that we
• 1:14:03
  don't feel like we have today? Yeah, I think there was a there
• 1:14:06
  was a greater emphasis put on community because we were, you
• 1:14:17
  know, I think there was, you know, I was going to say it was
• 1:14:20
  maybe because I grew up in a smaller town, but it but I think
• 1:14:23
  that was true for friends of mine who grew up in Manhattan,
• 1:14:25
  for example, my age. I felt the same thing in their
• 1:14:28
  neighborhoods are, you know, very strong connections.
• 1:14:30
  And, you know, our parents, I seemed were less helicoptery
• 1:14:36
  parents, you know, so I could be out until 9:30 at night and a
• 1:14:40
  summer night and come home. My mother said, where were you?
• 1:14:42
  Rather than like, I called everybody looking for you, you
• 1:14:44
  know, and but again, we hadn't experienced some of the horrors
• 1:14:48
  that parents have been the last 20 years, 30 years.
• 1:14:52
  So and not it's not that those things weren't happening, but
• 1:14:55
  they weren't, you know, so publicized.
• 1:14:59
  They weren't on your Facebook page, you know, and now parents
• 1:15:02
  are rightfully nervous. Where's my kid?
• 1:15:04
  Right. So I'm not criticizing that.
• 1:15:07
  But but but there was a just a more relaxed tone to to
• 1:15:12
  childhood. I mean, and also, but it was in
• 1:15:16
  a sense of anticipation that because you nothing was today,
• 1:15:23
  you know, instant gratification is just so easy.
• 1:15:26
  You want to look at a scene from the Wizard of Oz, just go on
• 1:15:29
  YouTube and even look at it immediately.
• 1:15:31
  When I was a kid, the Wizard of Oz was on once a year and you
• 1:15:33
  you swap then and then you run a whole nother year before you saw
• 1:15:38
  it again. And so that was like that for
• 1:15:40
  anything. You know, the the Christmas
• 1:15:42
  specials, Charlie Brown, all of that comes up.
• 1:15:44
  It came once a year and for. Me.
• 1:15:51
  Yeah, it's like, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 1:15:54
  And I don't know, I mean, it's I'm not saying that that was
• 1:15:57
  better than today because I like I like the fact that, you know,
• 1:16:01
  when I got interested in movies as a as a teenager and old
• 1:16:04
  movies, like silent movies. Well, how else is like going to
• 1:16:07
  see a silent movie until like the the theater in Hartford, CT,
• 1:16:12
  where I lived, the suburb of Hartford, CT, I could drive to
• 1:16:16
  Hartford and you know, 16 year old and driving in my car to see
• 1:16:19
  this silent movie because I'm never going to see.
• 1:16:21
  And again, now it's all on YouTube or, you know, wherever
• 1:16:24
  you can, you can, there's someone on Tubi and Netflix and
• 1:16:28
  all of that. So, and that's good.
• 1:16:31
  I like being, especially as a writer that I can just go look
• 1:16:33
  at it, not say, oh, how am I going to get a copy of this?
• 1:16:36
  But there was also something about it was more wonder, I
• 1:16:39
  think as as when I was a child, like, oh, wow, look with this
• 1:16:42
  and look what I found. And and that's different.
• 1:16:46
  Not especially better, but different.
• 1:16:48
  Yeah, yeah, I, I think that I have.
• 1:16:50
  I think that you're totally right.
• 1:16:52
  I think there's a couple of #1 I think that actually probably for
• 1:16:57
  better, you know, I guess critical back in the day, you
• 1:17:01
  could call it, you know, But to have when, when everything was
• 1:17:05
  kind of a shared embodied experience, you wanted to see
• 1:17:07
  The Wizard of Oz, you had to go to the movie theater.
• 1:17:09
  And you go to the movie theater, you're watching it with 250
• 1:17:11
  other people. And when you had that moment and
• 1:17:15
  you're watching some and you know, you have a couple of those
• 1:17:17
  kind of moments in modern day history.
• 1:17:18
  Like I was talking to a couple of friends this weekend and
• 1:17:21
  we're talking about what it was like in the movie theater when
• 1:17:24
  in The Avengers movie, you know, when they when they when The
• 1:17:28
  Avengers lost at the end of Infinity War.
• 1:17:31
  And like, you walk out of the movie theater and there's 350
• 1:17:33
  people piling out from all these theaters and everyone's kind of
• 1:17:36
  coming together and it's just silent because no one knows like
• 1:17:40
  what hit them in the head, you know?
• 1:17:42
  And I'm sorry you lost your audio a little bit.
• 1:17:45
  I think. No, hang on.
• 1:17:48
  I'm going to pause it. And the other thing was that
• 1:17:53
  about about the parenting and about the freedom.
• 1:17:56
  I was reading this great book called Jonathan Hate the Ancient
• 1:18:00
  Generation. And one of the thing points that
• 1:18:03
  he makes is that the generation that I guess I was at the tail
• 1:18:06
  end of was that parents looked at other parents in America like
• 1:18:11
  friends, you know, and like you go to the supermarket.
• 1:18:14
  If a kid got, if you lost your kid in the supermarket, another
• 1:18:16
  parent would come up to you and be like, oh, is this your child?
• 1:18:18
  Or like you go to a kid, Oh, you lost, where's your mom?
• 1:18:21
  And nowadays we're afraid to do that, you know, and, and right.
• 1:18:25
  But you know, again, not for wrong reasons.
• 1:18:27
  Like you say, you know, now it's parents against the world.
• 1:18:32
  It's not all of us together raising one kid or our family
• 1:18:36
  and our community doing that. It's, it's everyone to get it's,
• 1:18:39
  it's me against the world. And I don't know who's a threat,
• 1:18:41
  I don't know who's in danger. I don't know if anyone you know.
• 1:18:45
  It's incredibly sad, but I mean, I'm just doing the math.
• 1:18:48
  You were five when 911 happened, right?
• 1:18:51
  Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
• 1:18:52
  I mean, so that generation grew up constantly.
• 1:18:56
  My niece was, was, I think she's your age, actually.
• 1:18:59
  And she, same thing. I remember walking with her.
• 1:19:03
  She's, you know, 6 and we're walking and she's so scared.
• 1:19:07
  It was a nice little street near my house.
• 1:19:10
  And the, the street light went out and she went, Oh my God.
• 1:19:12
  And I said, what's the matter? Shit.
• 1:19:13
  It's Osama bin Laden. And I'm like, I'm like, no, it's
• 1:19:16
  not hanging. It's not.
• 1:19:17
  But you know, that it was in their head, you know.
• 1:19:19
  And yeah. So, I mean, you grew up thinking
• 1:19:24
  that, you know, remember those. Well, you wouldn't remember, but
• 1:19:28
  I mean, but you know, today's an orange alert day, today's a red
• 1:19:32
  alert day today. And and then, you know, and it's
• 1:19:35
  been like that ever since with, with something else, COVID or
• 1:19:38
  whatever. So people are always and then,
• 1:19:41
  you know, yeah, it's all, you know what, how kids going to
• 1:19:46
  school, you know, you know, they're afraid they're going to
• 1:19:50
  get shot. I mean, it's, it's just.
• 1:19:52
  It's terrible. Yeah, it's sad.
• 1:19:53
  It's sad. Yeah, one of the things I'm
• 1:19:56
  hoping for and I'm really hoping that this happens and we could
• 1:19:58
  kind of hopefully leave evolve with this as a positive note.
• 1:20:01
  But I think that I think that we became so comfortable, we forgot
• 1:20:06
  the spirit of adventure and youth that like was our country
• 1:20:11
  for so long. And like the spirit of like, you
• 1:20:14
  know what, a lot of times it's funny, I, I showed I'm not
• 1:20:18
  really even sure what I think about this at this point.
• 1:20:22
  But you know, the Age of Disclosure, which was this
• 1:20:24
  documentary about the Uaps and what they could potentially be
• 1:20:27
  UFOs. And you know, I showed them to
• 1:20:29
  my 9th graders, 10th graders and 12th graders, 12th graders,
• 1:20:32
  we're totally not prepared to hear it and just cut it out.
• 1:20:35
  And like, on one hand, I get it. On the other hand, like, even if
• 1:20:40
  it's not true, the conversation is a fun, exciting conversation.
• 1:20:44
  Like where's the nation? Where's the enthusiasm?
• 1:20:46
  Where's the even if it doesn't exist, why don't we explore?
• 1:20:49
  Why don't we figure out how it might have happened?
• 1:20:50
  How do we like, like why we're not looking for more of that?
• 1:20:53
  And. Why didn't that happen?
• 1:20:54
  You know, why was that? Yes.
• 1:20:56
  You know, I just want to actually talk about that a
• 1:20:58
  little bit in the Black Dahlia book.
• 1:21:00
  I mean, that whole, you know, the atomic bomb had exploded and
• 1:21:05
  Russia was building it. And so there's this big paranoia
• 1:21:08
  and then suddenly there's this fear of UFOs.
• 1:21:11
  And so it came from somewhere. That fear came from somewhere.
• 1:21:15
  And we have, you know, we have to put that.
• 1:21:17
  You know, I think it's it's an interesting moment in history.
• 1:21:21
  And yeah, but it's. But I do think you're right.
• 1:21:25
  I mean, I think what's important is to, you know, keep telling
• 1:21:32
  stories that, as Brando said, that that uplift that actually
• 1:21:38
  something to say. And they're not just
• 1:21:40
  Kardashians, you know, it's you know, I know that's an easy joke
• 1:21:43
  to make. But I mean, you know, that
• 1:21:45
  actually is has some value in how we see ourselves in our
• 1:21:49
  world and, and helps us understand our world kind of
• 1:21:52
  better and inspires the imagination and curiosity, you
• 1:21:56
  know, So that's, that's I think what we have to do as podcasters
• 1:22:00
  or writers or whatever is to, you know, have conversations
• 1:22:03
  like this. And bring the speed of adventure
• 1:22:04
  back to the country. I think that's really youth and
• 1:22:07
  adventure is really what we need.
• 1:22:08
  And I would love that. Well, this is such a pleasure
• 1:22:11
  telephone where you can find your information and when your
• 1:22:14
  book comes out and and this was really so.
• 1:22:17
  Sure. I'm I'm at williamjman.com and
• 1:22:21
  you can pick up my book starting on January 7th.
• 1:22:25
  I'm sorry, January 27th, and I hope you'll and the black
• 1:22:31
  Dahlia. Yep, and you've I'm going to be
• 1:22:34
  appearing in in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, CA in Brooklyn,
• 1:22:42
  NY, Miami, FL. And you know when you come down.
• 1:22:47
  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's I think it's it's
• 1:22:50
  early February in in Florida. Yeah, remember it's off off on
• 1:22:54
  top of my head and then also Boston, MA.
• 1:22:57
  So those are the ones that are set up for now.
• 1:22:59
  Awesome. Super exciting.
• 1:23:00
  Well, this is such a pleasure. It's so nice getting to meet
• 1:23:03
  you. Hopefully I'll meet in person
• 1:23:04
  when you're down here. I'll buy you a coffee or a beer
• 1:23:06
  if you drink beer and we'll, we'll have a good time I'm sure.
• 1:23:10
  But this is such a I'll post the the links to your stuff on the
• 1:23:13
  caption. Williams, thank you so much for
• 1:23:15
  the time it's. Such a great thanks for the
• 1:23:17
  conversation. Appreciate it.
• 1:23:18
  Of course. Take care.
• 1:23:19
  Bye, bye now.