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IFH 725: Hidden Tools of Comedy for Screenwriters with Steve Kaplan

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IFH 724: What is Maximum Screenwriting with Jeff Schimmel

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IFH 723: The Essentials of Screenwriting with Pilar Alessandra

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IFH 722: The Art of Television Showrunning with Steve DeKnight (Marvel’s Daredevil, Spartacus)

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IFH 721: The Million Dollar Mini-Movie Screenwriting Method with Chris Soth

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IFH 720: Psychology for Screenwriters with William Indick

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Alex Ferrari 0:11
I'd like to welcome the show Bill Indick. Man, how you doing Bill?

Williams Indick 0:14
Good, how are you?

Alex Ferrari 0:15
I'm good, my friend. I'm good. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Um, I'm excited to dive into the world of psychology and how it affects writers and screenwriters and characters and cycle analyzing some of our favorite films and characters, which I I do on the show often as a, as a non professional, without a PhD, as I'm sure you've run into too much. But before before we get started, what made you decide to write a book about psychology for screenwriters.

Williams Indick 0:47
Um, so it's this is going back to 2003, so almost 20 years ago, and I was just starting out as a psychology professor, and I was teaching classes like abnormal psychology and theories of personality where you have to, you know, get into the nuts and bolts of psychological theory, Freud, Erickson, young, all those guys. And I was finding it hard to sort of get these very old theories to be relevant to my students. And I, you know, my idea was, okay, well, let me take something that's I find fascinating and interesting, and some and use it as an example to apply it to. So I started doing little short film analyses in class as examples of these classic personality theories. And it really worked very well. So I said, Oh, you know, what, I should get a textbook on like, how to do you know, basically a psychology film book, but none existed, there was really none about specifically applying psychoanalysis to film analysis. So I wrote the book. And one of the people that I shopped the book around to was Michael Reese, and Michael Reese productions. And he said, this is great idea. But we write books for filmmakers, we write books for screenwriters, and they wanted not an academic text for more sort of a practical guide. So I said, Okay, take the same theories, the same applications and just turn them into something that would be helpful for screenwriters. So instead of, you know, saying, Okay, as you analyze a film, think about this, saying, as you write a film, think about this in more sort of analytical ways.

Alex Ferrari 2:22
So can you, like do a cycle analysis on a genre? I like it, because I know you wrote another book about, you know, the psychology of westerns and things. Can you break down like general overall psychologies of specific genres? Are there like key things that are in most of films in certain genres?

Williams Indick 2:40
Absolutely. And that's one of so psychology for screenwriters is going into a second edition, and I had to add three chapters. And basically those three chapters are going to be based on these books I wrote about psychoanalysis, for specific film genres. So in any genre, you're going to have basic character types, which in psychology will typically call archetypes after Carl Jung's theory. So in the western, you have this sort of cast of characters that basically reappear in every film, you have, you know, the cowboy hero, who's oftentimes an anti hero, you have a villain character who usually, quote unquote, a dude. The word dude refers to Easterner who was out west, I don't know how it became just a sort of general term for person. But that's so the villain is usually a dude from the east or a banker or a railroad person or evil cattle Baron, somebody who wants to own the land rather than live in it in a more sort of wholesome or holistic with respects to land. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So you have the quote unquote, horror with a heart of gold character, and then the nice sort of virginal schoolmarm character, and all those characters exist as archetypes. Within this specific mythology that we call the West, and the archetypes change, they grow up and they, you know, become darker usually, but they don't really change the same basic motivation, which is redemption, usually for the, for the hero, that stays the same. And you could do the same thing with horror movies and psycho psychological science fiction, musicals, comedies, every genre exists because there are these archetypal characters and archetypal themes that just repeat themselves over and over again. So yes, you can certainly do a psychoanalysis of genre and I've been doing it and do it again.

Alex Ferrari 4:31
So okay, so let's break down, let's say, the action genre, which is probably one of the most popular genres, sci fi, sci fi and action are both very popular, what are you know, actually a very broad genre. But generally speaking, in your, from your point of view, what are some of the kind of like, archetypes that are constantly in their cycle analyzing that genre?

Williams Indick 4:53
So I would say if we're talking about American films, and that's really I don't know about you, but certainly I'm not particularly comfortable talking about any other rights other than American films. But um, the western was incredibly influential, and really dominated the whole film market for that whole period going from the sort of mid 40s to the early 60s. So what we call the action genre is really just something that evolved out of the Western genre, people saying, hey, maybe we can make an exciting film with guns and chases, and all that exciting stuff happening, but not set in the West. So people started coming up with different types of action movies. But it really basically is the same as the western genre. So you have the same basic kind of hero, this sort of slightly dark character with a good heart who finds it hard to fit in, in his environment, because of his own personal code of honor, that doesn't necessarily mix with the hypocrisy of modern day. And you basically, you take this Western character, and you put them in the city, and you give them a badge, and, you know, a three piece suit. And all of a sudden, he's this the sort of archetypical cop hero, you have the buddy cop movie, that's basically just an extension of the Western genre. And I would say, in this in the 60s and 70s, and 80s, when American culture was getting kind of sick of the Western, we saw a lot more action movies based on this cop hero. archetype, who is essentially the western hero, then starting in the 70s, but really getting a lot of traction in the 80s began to see Action. Action movies based more on classical superheroes, from sort of ancient myth, like people that we call superheroes, people who aren't just regular men, you know, with who are very quick with a gun, but people who are who actually have superpowers, like gods, so Superman, Batman, Spider Man, and that is, you know, a rather different type of story. And that calls upon these ancient patterns of the hero that go all the way back 1000s and 1000s of years, to the ancient Greeks in the ancient Romans, the ancient day ends and Christians, the classical hero, so to understand that character, we really have to kind of study from Joseph Campbell's some Carl young, and move away from the very specific American action hero that basically just an offshoot of the Western hero, the cowboy,

Alex Ferrari 7:30
so the Yeah, cuz I was gonna ask you Next is like, Well, obviously, the the dominant genre in popular movies is superhero. I mean, yeah, it is. It's taken over all other genres. And do you believe in your, in your opinion, do you think what Spielberg said is true? Where we're going to, we're going to get tired of superhero movies, eventually, in the next 15 years, like, we're just going to be like, it's over. Let's move on to something else, just like the western was like the western. But you know, sci fi has always been sci fi action has always been action like there's I don't, but this specific genre of superhero, do you think that that's going to eventually happen?

Williams Indick 8:10
Yeah, you reach a point with any medium point of saturation, where people will have gift had enough and they need something else. That doesn't necessarily mean that the archetypes change. Again, people got sick of westerns in the 1960s, when nine out of 10 TV shows were westerns, and this was something like six out of 10 feature films released every week was a western people got sick of it. And it wasn't as relevant in a time when people were less gung ho about being American in the 60s. So what happened, two things happened, the genre itself became darker and more realistic in an attempt to kind of better reflect the American spirit. And that really kind of killed the western for a while. But the other thing that happened was, the setting changed. And we took the same basic characters and just put them in a different setting. So I would say probably somebody, something similar is going to happen with superheroes, where we're seeing it already, we're seeing the characters get darker and darker and darker. And at one point, it reaches a point where a character gets so dark that nobody wants to identify with that character anymore. It's too dark, like some of the Western characters we saw in the late 60s and early 70s. So yeah, we'll reach that point of saturation, where people just are sick of it. And also we'll reach the point of where the character itself the main character gets too dark, and it's going to have to change. What will it become after that? Well, you never really know. But it's essentially it's the same basic archetype, whether he's in a war movie, or Western or action movie or a superhero movie, basically the same characters with different settings. It take George Lucas, you know, he came around at a time when the western was really dead. And he said, Well, what if I just take a Western and set it in outer space, and instead of lightsaber it's just like samurai swords? Yama. So samurai swords. lightsabers, and he took a state your basic Western plot, mixed a few things in it and came up with Star Wars, which captured everybody's imagination, you know, for decades and decades and decades. And not many people complained, oh, this is just a Western setting Outer Space doesn't matter.

Alex Ferrari 10:16
Right. And I mean, let me he picked obviously he picked he took Seven Samurai and, and hidden fortress specifically, and which are basically, Western semi samurai. Samurai films are westerns, and magnificent, Magnificent Seven and all that stuff. And it's so funny because the this the the success of the latest incarnation of star which was the Mandalorian on the streaming service. It is as Western as you get. I mean, it is yeah, it goes back to the core roots of Star Wars, which was a Western hardcore Western, but in space. And I mean, it's actually I think Mandalorians even more Western than the original Star Wars is,

Williams Indick 10:59
it's a straight up Western, when you see it, you have this character who is the quintessential cowboy hero, he sort of comes in the wilderness, he's in this frontier territory, where everything's kind of dark and scary, yet he has his own personal code of honor. He has this sort of path towards redemption. It's, it's the most traditional Western I've seen in a very long time, and only the setting is different.

Alex Ferrari 11:23
Exactly. And then the whole lone wolf and cub story with him and baby Yoda is also it's just a complete callback to Japanese westerns.

Williams Indick 11:32
Yeah, and the Yoda, the baby Yoda. We've seen that before in westerns, there was specifically there was a film called three godfathers of classic Western that was remade a bunch of times. And probably the classic version was directed by john Ford, with john wayne in it. But the basic premise is you have these three cowboy outlaws, and they're on the run. And they run into a, what he called a wagon train that's been attacked by Indians. And the only survivor is a mother and her newborn baby and the mother died. So now they have to take care of this baby. And yeah, so you have these three really tough guys, like Three Men and a Baby.

Alex Ferrari 12:11
Are you ready? Yeah, you read my mind. I was like a three minute baby.

Williams Indick 12:14
And, but their whole struggle is to you know, deliver this baby to New Jerusalem to this town and a half to fight the wilderness fight Indians, you know, and go through all that and that so uh, yeah, baby Yoda is directly from that. But I mean, when I was watching the Mandalorian, I was thinking, I should probably write something about this show. So not only it's a very traditional Western, but every episode is based on kind of a classic Western movie. Like, like three godfathers or the searchers. You know, it's been a while since I've seen it, but but I was very, very much impressed by Jon Favreau, who's he did a lot of the writing and all the directing, saying, like, this guy knows his westerns, and he's really applying it in a great way. And the wonderful thing about taking a genre like the western, which has very established archetypes, and plots and characters, and just changing the setting is that you don't have to make the characters as dark as they would normally be. Because while people are sick of the sort of a cowboy hero in the white hat in the white horse, perfect character who's so good that he's unbelievably good. People did get sick of that in the 50s, and 60s. But when George Lucas put them in outer space, we have you know, Luke Skywalker, who's again, this classic, very pure white hat, white costume character. Meaning if so, if you change the setting, you can go back to the original home template of the genre. So that's kind of a useful thing to know.

Alex Ferrari 13:46
And it really when you set the whole white hat character in the superhero superhero genre, arguably is the the godfather of all superheroes, which is Superman is very difficult to write for, because he is that white hat character. And at a certain time in American history and world history. That was acceptable in the 70s when Christopher Reeve showed up, it was fine. You wanted that kind of, you know, apple pie kind of character. But as time has gone on, he seems so unrealistic that they had to, like try to darken them up. I'm like, but that's not the character you can't. That's why Batman has been he just days because he's, he's such a realistic character. I mean, to a certain extent, obviously, but much more realistically, dark character. He's a realistically dark character, and he's very vulnerable. And all this stuff. When you're writing for Superman, you're writing for a god. And that was the problem with ancient Greeks. You know, in the myths of ancient Greece, like, well, they had to give them human fair frailties, to be able to write a story about him because if they're just, there's no power in there's no power that can stop them, then why are we watching this? There's no conflict.

Williams Indick 14:53
Yeah, well, when you have a character who's super powerful, the only person who can defeat them is themselves. Eventually, eventually, you have to come to a point of either such darkness when the character is destroying himself, or you have to change the setting, or it changed things around a bit. But yeah, we see. So we see, the same thing with superheroes that we did with the Western characters is at a certain point, we reach point of saturation. So two things happen is one is people start messing around with the setting. And the other thing is people start making the characters themselves get darker and darker, so that they're more interesting and more identifiable. But then you get, you get to a certain point where the character is too dark, and something has to flip, there's a reversal. So like, just to sort of wrap up what we've been talking about with westerns and superheroes, you have the western, the western gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then to the at the point of saturation, it turns into the anti Western turns into a very dark scenario that people are interested in seeing. At the bottom point of it is people are going to the movies to be entertained, not to be edified, or not to be lectured at, and not to have a dark, dismal time with a character who's just completely reprehensible. So, so what happened was, you had a flip reversal, you took the exact same genre, you just change the setting, like Star Wars, or Superman, and now you have all of a sudden, you can have this character who's totally pure and perfect again, because people don't recognize it as the western. But then over time, again, saturation gets in characters get darker and darker and darker. And then there's going to be a flip or reversal, where all of a sudden people like oh, like we have a brand new movie genre, but it's not. It's just,

Alex Ferrari 16:39
it's just, it's all fun. We've been recycled, we've been recycled, the same stuff since the beginning.

Williams Indick 16:47
Well, one question that's relevant is, well, why can't anybody come up with something that's completely original? Why do we always have to recycle the same characters, the same basic plots, the same basic scenarios? And the answer is, life isn't as complicated as you think it is. And in terms of identifiable struggles that characters can have, there's not that many, you know, you have the sort of classic struggle for redemption, the classic struggle for revenge, those are the two classic themes in westerns that we see in action movies, as well. You have love the search for love, the search for connection, the search for community, the search for some type of meaning, meaningful connection with others, beyond and then there's the fight against evil, or whether evil is embodied by you know, enemies, or by, you know, a wilderness or by some type of danger. Those are the classic themes, and you can't really get away from them, it's hard to come up with an idea for a movie that's going to be dramatic and have conflict and keep people's interest, if you don't touch upon one of those key themes.

Alex Ferrari 17:51
Yeah, in a lot of young writers, a writer starting out, they always like, Well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go to any of them, I'm going to come up with something new. I'm like, Listen, you've got to build a house. And there are there's basically about eight or 10 blueprints, you can use. And within those blueprints, you could go crazy. I mean, obviously, look at all the beautiful buildings have been created throughout the world. But at the core, the structure still needs a floor, still needs walls, still needs doors still needs windows in one way, shape, or form, to make this work. And within that scope, within that structure, you could do whatever you want. And that's why I think a lot of young writers fail because they just go off not thinking that they're not being original.

Williams Indick 18:32
And it's and the house is a good metaphor, because the most important thing a house must have is a strong foundation, which nobody sees, you don't see the foundation. So when people think, Oh, you know, I'm going to do something completely original. They're possibly going into the process thinking I don't need a foundation. But we all need a foundation can't see it doesn't make it any less important. In fact, it makes it more important. And that's what the psychoanalysis and psychology gives you. Because if psychology is a study of human behavior, and if film essentially is just human behavior projected onto screen, well, what's underlying all of that behavior? What are people's motivations? What are their both their conscious and their unconscious motivations? There's nothing more interesting than a character who thinks he's doing one thing, but it's actually doing something else and then has to realize at a certain point through an epiphany or revelation, you know, why they're doing what they're doing? Um, that's part of the foundation of any character is what is the secret foundation to this characters issues? And how can it be revealed in a way that doesn't reveal the foundation? Meaning How can I make people understand what this character is going through and what their real inner struggle is by providing symbols and metaphors through some type of outward plot or since it's an external conflict. So the idea is, there's internal conflict. That's what the character is dealing with. That's what we as the viewers identify with, but it all because it's film, it all has to be visualized. It has to be externalized. And objectified in a way that everybody can get, even though they're not psychologists and they're not necessarily doing film analysis.

Alex Ferrari 20:18
So let's let's let's do an experiment here. Can we cycle analyze? One of the more famous heroes of all time, Indiana Jones. Let's Let's psychoanalyze Indiana Jones because because then yeah, if you mean everyone listening, this has if they haven't seen Indiana Jones out there, you got some homework. You've got some homework to do, but he's one of the most, at least if I like the third one. Come on. The third one's pretty good. Yeah. Sean Connery. Yeah, yeah, that's the first three, first three, the fourth one who knows what happened there? But anyway, um, now we can search for more money. And they're doing an apparently that's they're just continuing. Because I think Harrison I think he just broke a hip or something. doing his ad. Now he's doing the next one. But, you know,

Williams Indick 21:01
I hope they're casting him as the mentor character and not the hero, because that's got to be the hero.

Alex Ferrari 21:06
I mean, he's just I mean, at a certain point, I mean, unless you're, unless you're a character like Clint Eastwood and Unforgiven, then you can be the old ie the old hero, but it's different. Yeah. Much, much, much, much, much different. Sorry. So talking about Indiana Jones. What How would you psychoanalyze him? And and can you pinpoint why so many people love that character? It's an adoring character in a time when there's a lot of characters, and there was a lot of copycat, you know, archeology, you know, adventure films made after Indiana Jones. But for whatever reason, and you could say, it's Harrison. And you can say it's the writing and the directing. But for you as on a character cycle analyst cycle, cycle analysts way, what do you think?

Williams Indick 21:51
I think it's the producer, I think it was George Lucas, who has this sort of wonderful eye for archetypes. And he and he saw, he got off and he read the comic book, or however, he saw that character and said, Oh, okay, I see this character, he's a cowboy. He's your classic cowboy hero, but he's in a different setting. And, you know, I, I'm sure George Lucas recognized and said, Oh, I did that with Star Wars. And it worked out really, really well. I took it took the classic Western hero, change the setting, change the scenario a bit. And everybody immediately identifies with his character who's very American, who's very sort of action oriented at but but also has a very basic sense of honor. And also is very American in the way he does things, which is he does things primarily by himself, and does not ask permission or forgiveness, he just does whatever he thinks he should do, tip it oftentimes in a very, very violent way. So we as Americans can identify with that character. So he is that classic hero, and even even dresses, like a cowboy does, with his hat and everything. But there's also, um, you know, so George Lucas took the Western and put it in outer space for Star Wars. For Indiana Jones, he took the western, and he kind of took these superhero character characteristics and put them in with him. So first of all, you have this guy who's super good looking, and, you know, adventure hero, who can do all this stuff. But he's also this brilliant archaeologist, which is, you know, rather unlikely even in a sort of fancy fantasy scenario, can he does seem to have the sort of miraculous powers that Western heroes don't have. So he he is a little bit more of the classic hero, and he's kind of also an Arthurian hero, he's a knight errant, going off on these journeys, to find things like the Holy Grail.

Alex Ferrari 23:45
I was about to say, literally,

Williams Indick 23:47
he's very much the personal hero, meaning he's impure character, or at least pure in his intentions and his motivations. And he's, he's on a good quest. He's going out there to do something good to redeem himself, but but in doing so he redeems the world. Um, yeah, so an interesting sort of amalgamation of these classic heroes you have, you know, the western hero in his costume and his actions and his general kind of approach. And then you have the sort of very classical superhero type of person who has who has all of these superpowers. And then you also have the Arthurian Knight who's who's out on a quest. And he's in he's either rescuing a maiden or he's finding a relic that can save the world or he's defeating some evil enemy like the Nazis. Typically, he's doing all three at once.

Alex Ferrari 24:40
Yeah, and I, I always found that if we're just analyzing just the three Indiana Jones films, the first one and the third one were quests, were the second one was not a quest. It was it was more of he fell upon this scenario, and he's like, I'm gonna go save these kids and I gotta stop what's going on. It wasn't a quest. And I always find in my indie stories, I like a quest, because that's what he's at best at. Is that a fair a fair statement?

Williams Indick 25:09
Yeah, oh, well, he got back to Joseph Campbell. And he would say, you know, there are, there are lots of ways in which the hero finds himself in an adventure. And sometimes it is a quest. And Harold comes and says, look, the Nazis are gonna get this Holy Ark, and we have to get it before them, or something like that, or the Nazis are gonna get the Holy Grail. So that's the very traditional beginning. But then there's also a very sort of classic type of tale, where you have the hero and the hero sort of doing his own thing. And then maybe something like a deer or something, you know, an apparition comes and he sort of follows it into the wilderness. And it's twists and turns, and all of a sudden, he turns around, and he's in the realm of adventure. He's like, how did I get lined up here, but now all of a sudden, here I am. And there's people asking me to help them and they're in desperate need. So it becomes a quest. It wasn't looking for it wasn't directly sort of addressed by a herald character saying you need to do this. But he just sort of finds himself as Joseph Campbell would say, in full career of an adventure. And that's very much, you know, Indiana Jones number two. And I love the beginning part, because it's very exciting. Oh, I love it. And it's a wonderful, Steven Spielberg in sequence of action, action, action, action, but it's also fulfilling that part of the story, meaning the hero gets lost through no fault of his own. And then when he sort of stands up and says, Where am I? Well, you're in intervention. You know, you've got you've got he's got the maiden, you've got the quest, and you've got the villains, and it's all there for you just, you know, just have at it.

Alex Ferrari 26:46
Exactly. Now, so what is someone like Sigmund Freud, have to teach us about character and story?

Williams Indick 26:56
I think probably the most useful stuff we get from Freud, is this notion that we don't understand ourselves, we think we do. But we really don't. And, and when we get frustrated in our lives, it's because we're doing what we think we should be doing. And we have the, what we think is the proper motivation, yet, things aren't turning out the way we want to, and we're not happy the way we think we should be. And Freud said, well, you have to look much deeper into yourself. And you have to look at yourself, like a problem like a like an algebra problem. It's your circumstances. Well, what's going on? Why am I doing these things? And not finding happiness? And what what, why don't I seem to understand myself. And Freud gave us all these tools to try to understand ourselves. So so for example, like defense mechanisms. defense mechanisms are things that we do constantly, all the time to defend our egos in the face of either negative information about ourselves or just negative information in general. And we're constantly defending ourselves from this negative information. But in order for the defense to be effective, we have to be completely unaware of what we're doing. So say a defense mechanism like denial, when there's an obvious problem, but you're not aware of it, because you're in denial. That's something that translates to film very, very well, where you can have a character and we, the watchers, we the viewers are looking at this character and saying, dude, this is there's something horrible that's about to happen, you have to be aware of that. And it's pretty obvious to us, why aren't you seeing it? And it's because they're in denial. And we understand that might not put it in Freudian terms, but we understand Oh, something horrible is gonna happen, and his character is totally unprepared for it. And it's like a train wreck about that happened, and we're watching it, we can't unlock it. Because we've all been in that situation before. And we've all kind of had that wishes. Oh, I wish there was somebody watching me who could Hey, you know, look, look what's gonna happen, you need to prepare yourself. You know? So things like denial and repression and some of the more fancy defense mechanisms like reaction formation are very very very interesting when you put them into characters because the viewer can see where they're going wrong. And but at the same time, they're powerless to help that character kind of like in the movie theater, sometimes we say Hey, watch out. We want to warn them that's an effectual they have to learn for themselves, which is another reason why we identify with these characters is they have to figure out their own weaknesses and then deal with it on their own just like us.

Alex Ferrari 29:35
Now the, you know, with characters they many characters are most characters work on a conscious level, but we as humans, work on a very subconscious level. There's things that motivate and drive us that we honestly in many ways don't even understand why we do things other than when you do that deep dive and psychoanalyst, psycho, you psychoanalyze yourself or You get therapy or you work it out, or it comes out in one way, shape or form through somebody else or another character in your life. Let's say he points it out to you like, Don't you understand why you're pushing everybody away? Because you were abandoned as a child? or something along those lines? Yeah. But to the cut. So can you talk a little bit about the power of using subconscious motivations within character in a story?

Williams Indick 30:23
Sure. Um, so again, it, there's nothing more powerful than seeing a character who's blind to himself. And he, he has to desperately become self aware, in order to save his life. We're in order, you know, to save someone else's life or in order to complete this quest. And again, we identified with that character could we're always in that same situation. So we, it gives us the ability as a viewer, it gives us a certain amount of power, right? Because usually, we're completely blind to our own issues. But when we have somebody else's issues right there on the screen for us to see, we're all you know, we don't know we're doing it. But we're all psychoanalyzing that character. That's why psychoanalysis and film kind of goes along really well together. Because the viewer by default becomes a psychoanalyst, as they're watching this character, they're privy to information that that character doesn't have. Because only we can see that character, objectively, nobody can see themselves objectively. So take, for example, a film that I use as examples of like, Freudian defense mechanisms is a American Beauty, because it's literally they hit everyone. But there's just one scene which is very, very powerful. There's a lot of powerful scenes in that movie. And the power all comes from this revelation of having a character that doesn't know himself. So when he does or says something that makes him momentarily aware of his own issues. It's like a huge revelation. And we if the viewers are like, oh, wow, that's pretty, pretty cool and pretty deep. So there's this one scene. So you know, the film is one scene where he's having a bit of an argument with his daughter and his daughter calls him out on being a perv on perving on her teenage friend, and he says, Jan, you better watch out, you're gonna turn into a bitch, just like your mother. And it just comes out of his mouth. And his daughter is mortified. And he's mortified. He can't believe he said that to his daughter. And he realized how much he hates his wife. And he didn't really I don't think he realized that up until the moment where he said those words. Plus at the same time, he realizes my hatred for my wife, and my hatred for myself, to certain extent for being with with this person that I hate and hates me. It's rubbing off on my daughter. So the worst thing we're doing in this relationship is we're really hurting her. So he has that revelation. And it's all done in this little bit of dialogue. And I say it's mostly done through the just the expression on Kevin Spacey his face after he says that he realized, Oh, my God, I hurt. It's one person who I don't want to hurt. What am I doing? Where am I going? When I you know? And so yes, that's a great example of a defense mech. In this case, the defense mechanism is displacement when you're angry at one person, but you shout at somebody else, a safe outlet. We all do that all the time. But in film, it's so much more powerful because it's it's it's all there for us to see. You know, we set up we're all very aware of it, even if we're not talking about terms like displacement and defense mechanism. We know Oh, he's really angry at his wife. But he took it out and daughter because she touched a nerve by calling him a perv. Because he is a perv. Yeah, so yeah. That's where I think psychology comes in very, very useful for the viewer. But even more useful for the screenwriter, because the screenwriter is the one who has to be very, very explicitly aware of what's going on for their characters. And how these little this little bit of information can come out bit by bit in ways that seem both real to the viewer, and also entertaining and, you know, keeping them engaged.

Alex Ferrari 34:05
Now, what is dream work?

Williams Indick 34:08
The dream work is just a Freud's term for the process of analyzing dreams. And he had, he created a very specific model for doing it. But it's really relatively simple as you can, if you could break it down to two ideas. You have the dream itself that we experienced while we're sleeping. So dream work isn't really for, like daydreams. Those types of fantasies, which are semi conscious, and can be explored just in a sort of regular psychoanalytic way. Because dreams, true dreams are completely unconscious, and they happen while we were asleep. And by the way, 99% of our dreams are never analyzed because we never have any conscious awareness of them. So Freud believed that dreams were important. It was our unconscious minds way of dealing with things IDs and issues that we don't deal with during our waking state. And the two basic principles are that there's the manifest content of the dream, manifest, meaning the clear that what we actually see, which typically doesn't make a lot of sense, or dreams tend to be very illogical. And then there is the latent content. latent means hidden or disguised, meaning the true message of the dream, the true sort of idea that the unconscious is trying to deal with or expressed to ourselves. And, and by analyzing the manifest content by taking the dream as we experienced it, and finding associations for each symbol in the dream, we can uncover the hidden meaning, and then hopefully apply that to our lives in some kind of meaningful way.

Alex Ferrari 35:48
Now, what is normative conflict?

Williams Indick 35:52
Okay, so you're jumping to a different theory, but um, so we have to take one step back to Freud. So Freud believed that dreams, express some type of neurotic conflict, neurotic conflict. So neurotic coming from neuro or the brain, what he means is sort of internal conflict. So there's something we want to do, let's say for Kevin Spacey and American Beauty. what he wants to do is he wants to nail his daughter's teenage friend, which knows, is completely inappropriate, and which she probably doesn't even completely register with himself. It's sort of unconscious desire, that nevertheless is motivating him at every stage in the movie. He's, that seems to be his primary motivation is to become more attractive to this teenage girl so he can seduce her. So this is neurotic conflict, meaning there's one side of him that knows this is wrong, and knows that he's a bad person and a bad father for wanting to do it. Yet there's this other equally strong side of him, call it the end call it the libido that desperately wants this and cannot give it up. It's a fantasy that he knows who's wrong, but it persists because it's has this unconscious power. So so that's what we might say is going on in terms of neurotic conflict. What is normative conflict? Well, Erik Erikson studied really with honor Freud, Freud's daughter. And he wrote when he when Erik Erikson moved to America, from Vienna, in the 40s, he realized that most people didn't really and most people in America didn't understand Freud, that almost everything was lost in translation. And one of the main reasons things were lost in translation why people didn't understand Freud was because it was such a sexual theory. Everything was sexualized. So and in Freudian theory, there is no neurotic conflict without some type of libido without some type of sexual drive, because that's in Freudian theory. That's where all energy comes from. It comes from this basic life urge this libido this need to reproduce, and therefore this need to have sex. Erikson Erickson said, well, all that stuff is true for it in theory, but if people in America can't talk about sex, this is like 1950s. If Americans can't talk about sex, how are they going to understand the theory, they're just going to reject the theory outright, which is what people were doing. But he said, you know, what, you can take the same basic issues that Freud was talking about, and you can unsexual eyes, and you can talk about them in less sexual ways. So he said, you can take neurotic conflict, this internal conflict, and instead of saying, Oh, this is about libido versus guilt, or ID versus super ego, and he's very technical ways, you could say, everybody is always struggling, everybody is conflicted. Why? Well, we want to be normal people and lead normal lives. And we want to be true to ourselves. Yet at the same time, everybody in our environment is putting these demands on us. Our parents want us to be one thing, and our teachers want us to be another thing. And our siblings Expect us of us and our wives and girlfriends and boyfriends, and everybody expects something from us. And those expectations mean that we have to become the person that they want us to become. But we also want to stay true to ourselves. And that's a true conflict, and there's nothing necessarily sexual about it. So that's what we mean by normative conflict. It's neurotic conflict, same exact thing, but not in sexual terms. And it is also more about self identity. How do I understand myself? How do I define myself, while at the same time, satisfying other people's expectations for me?

Alex Ferrari 39:29
Now, I'm not sure if we've covered this or not, but what are some of the archetypes for plot according to a guardian?

Williams Indick 39:36
Okay, well, it'd be really be more to have, according to me, because color you'll never really wrote about movies or anything. Sure. And he wrote about archetypes, but not necessarily archetypes of plot. So but it's the same idea meaning if you have a set of character traits, for, for a certain type of character, and we call the amalgamation of those character, those characteristics, an archetype then we can Do the same thing for a theme meaning basic, the basic characteristics of a theme, become an archetypal theme or a classic theme. And so if we take that and apply that to movies, I mean that if you have a character who audience needs to follow and identify with and be engaged with for 90 to 120 minutes, possibly longer nowadays, we have, you know, a television characters that have, you know, 1000 hours, you know, how are we going to? How are we going to stick with that character? And it's all about motivation. It's all about what is motivating this character? What is holding? And what is holding them back? What's their conflict, what's your struggle. And if we think about it that way, there's only a handful of archetypical plots. There's the revenge plot. And we and we all can identify with that. There's the redemption plot of the character did some bad things in the past, or has led a life which was not completely pure, but now they have a chance to redeem themselves by doing something good and pure for others. There's the love plot of simply character, a character who's in love, but there's some type of obstacle that they have to overcome in order to win the person that they adore. There's the classic quest motivation. You know, so so there's, you know, if you think about it, there's only maybe a half a dozen different plots, different types of motivations that work and can can extend interest in a character for more than, you know, 100 minutes yourself. So that's what we mean by the archetypical plot. And it really ties in with the archetype of the character meaning, an archetypal character is going to have an archetypal theme or not archetypal plot that's driving them along. The two aren't are inseparable. Now,

Alex Ferrari 41:48
I love this. I saw this in your book, I just had to ask you about it. What are some archetypes in the age of narcissism? Because I got we are in the age of Narcissus.

Williams Indick 41:59
Yeah, well, I mean, so in in psychoanalysis, we have the metaphor of the mirror. Now, you know, the idea of looking at oneself. And we, and oftentimes we get confused, because we think we're looking through a window, we think we're looking at other people, but we're looking at a mirror, we're looking at ourselves. And I would say that sort of confusion, which is narcissism. So what was narcissist is a mistake while he looked at a reflection of himself, and became hypnotized or entranced by that image of himself. But he had no idea that he was looking at himself, he thought he was looking at this beautiful young man. And the thing that he was unaware of the reason why this image was so hypnotizing was because it was him. But in a way, it wasn't him. And that's what was hypnotic about it. And we all find ourselves in that situation, right now, with modern media, we all carry around these things, these phones, and you look at it, when it's not on, you're like, Oh, it's just a mirror. We turn it on, but when we turn it on, that's when we lose the accuracy of what it really is. Because we think we're looking at the outside world, we think we're looking at other people's webpages and other people's comments and other people's opinions. But it's all in reflection of who we are. I don't want to get too far off the point. But the the one basic question everybody has is, well, if all of this media is helping us to be informed, helping us to learn about what's going on in the world, and what's going on with other people. Why is why are we the most confused we've ever been? Why do people seem to not understand when a person say like the president of a certain country, is a complete a complete narcissist and only cares about himself and has no real sort of personal morals or virtues of his own? Like, what why does the majority of the country seem to not either not care about that, or not be aware of it, or just accept it and be like, well, that's okay. Everybody's like that. And it's because we're, we, we think we're getting more information, but we're getting less information, because all we're doing is just looking at ourselves, looking for validation of our own opinions, looking for people who repeat what we already believe. And, and this sort of, we're existing in the echo chamber of our own reflections and our own thoughts, and the fact that other people reflect what we're saying what we're thinking or what we want, that doesn't make it less of a mirror, it just makes it a more powerful mirror, a magical mirror, because it really does create that illusion of I'm looking outwards. But in reality, we're just seeking our own reflection. And that's why we have less information because nobody is looking for the truth. We're just looking for what we think we already know. And for validation, confirmation about that. Alright, so how are we plays that apply that to the age of narcissism? Well, the age of narcissism has to do with a modern time when the things that we used to revere what Alfred What's it Adler

trying to think it was Otto ronk, I believe. He called a call that the object of devotion. And he believed in existential psychology, the psychology of existence. He believed that we all need an object of devotion, we need some something outside of ourselves, to devote ourselves to something pure, something good, something to motivate us, and something that we can aspire to. And for all of human history that has been the spiritual that has been God and the different versions of God, you know, just like the hero has 1000 faces, so too does God have 1000 faces. So for most of us, we found that in the heavens, we found that in God, but then we get into the 20th century, and we have all these smart people writing books, and we have Nietzsche saying God is dead. And we have a movement away towards spirituality, because it's not logical. It's not rational. It's not based on what we think we know what we that the narcissist think we know and understand about the world. So we need a different answer. It's kind of like similar to what we were talking about archetypes, like the western hero, super superheroes, meaning when a culture reaches a point of saturation with something they need to move on, they have to change it. So our culture is to a certain standard with either saturated with God, or for what for various reasons found God, no longer meaningful in the way God used to be meaningful. So we have to find other things. And we sit we search outwardly, we search outwardly for heroes, we search outwardly for causes we search outwardly for virtues and issues that we can identify with. But we're fooling ourselves, because we're really just looking at mirrors. We think we're looking outwardly, but we're looking inwardly. And anything that's anything that's a screen is ultimately a mirror, because the only way we understand those characters and those stories, is by associating it with ourselves. So the age of narcissism is this age, when lots of people think they have the answers, and they understand why they're right and why everybody else is wrong. And they just live this life of solipsistic self satisfaction, where they think they have all the answers, they know, they have all the answers, and they're frustrated with everybody else, because they don't seem to be respecting the fact that they have all the answers. But at the end of the day, they're just Narcissus. And they really don't understand other people. And, and they can't, because instead of really trying to understand others, they're just getting more and more reflections of themselves

Alex Ferrari 47:38
as a as a person, a student of psychology. How do you see the society as we've got as the last 120 years that we've had media, as we kind of know it today from the beginning of the film industry, and, and radio and television, and now? computers, internet and all that stuff? How do you think our stories are affecting our society, as far as where we're moving towards? Because we just talked a bit about the age of narcissism. And you can you can kind of start seeing you can see this in the set, 60s and 70s. Were the stories from Hollywood were dark, taxi driver, easy writer. I mean, these are you couldn't even couldn't even conceive of something like that being released today by a major studio. Where do you think this is going for us as a society and also in, in just general American films?

Williams Indick 48:40
It's interesting. Film definitely turned darker in the 60s and 70s. Part of that had to do with the rating system. So prior to the rating system, every movie was was a family movie, family, people went to the movies as families and they sell movies together. So you know, a movie like psycho was seen by tons of, you know, two year olds, and people started to realize like, oh, okay, well,

Alex Ferrari 49:03
this is probably not right.

Williams Indick 49:05
If we want movies to sort of progress as an art form, we are going to have to segregate, you know, children from it. And at the same time, if we want movies to keep on capturing people's attention and make it more interesting, it has to be different from television. Television is a it's for the family. So we have to create movies that aren't necessarily for the family. So the idea of making very dark movies, very dark themes and adding lots of curse words and nudity and sexuality. A lot of that had to do with the struggle to you know, to keep up with television or to compete with television, and cinema trying to redefine itself as an adult art form, as opposed to sort of just mass entertainment, which television had become. And at the same time we saw in America, certainly a much more critical view of America itself. So the old westerns where you had this classic character, who was maybe a little bit dark, because he was violent, and he used violence for his own means, and he used violence in a unilateral way, didn't ask permission. He just killed, killed everybody who thought he should be killed. Um, people in America became a little bit dubious about that. I mean, because at the time, you know, we were in Vietnam, and what the hell are we doing there, and nobody really seemed to know for sure, all we knew was that we, as Americans went there, and just started killing everybody left and right, because we thought that was what we should be doing. And that reflected not just on American society, but on the thing that represents American society. And at that time, certainly by the 60s, it was the western hero, there was nobody, there was no other character that represented America more than the western hero. And that's why the western hero became darker. Because in again, if we apply the notion of narcissism, that when we look at a screen, we think we're looking at something else. But what we're seeing is a reflection of ourselves. If that mirror is not an accurate reflection, know if our feelings about ourselves are dark, and dubious. And we don't know if we're doing the right thing. In fact, if we're pretty sure we're doing the wrong thing, then that mirror reflection in the cinema has to change, it has to reflect that. So that Western hero who best represented America became darker and darker and darker and darker, until it reached a point where nobody wanted to see it anymore. And that was why, you know, it became the superhero. And then the same thing is happening with the superhero, coming darker and darker and darker, until we reached the point where we're not going to recognize that character anymore. It's going to flip and change. So cinema, like television, is this reflection of ourselves on a societal level. And it is very, very true that if you want to get a sense of where a country is where culture is, look at their media, Look at, look at the mirrors that they're using to reflect themselves and see what that tells us. And I would say, you know, right now, our media, certainly for young people is telling us, you know, well, the only way we're going to get out of this mess, is through some type of superhero intervention, some type of divine power needs to come and just change everything. Because we can't rely on people. If you look at the typical super superhero movie, the people that represent average, adults tend to be either corrupt, or downright evil, or just completely helpless and uninformed. They don't know what's going on only the superhero, and usually the adolescent characters that are allied with the superhero who understand the danger, who understand the limits of society, and who know, well, the only thing that can save us is some type of superhero. Possibly, that's why you know, and not our last election, but the previous election, we weren't really looking for a realistic leader for our country, we were looking for some type of fantasy or some type of non person who's who fulfilled fantasies of you know, of being this powerful superhero who's going to change everything didn't work out.

Alex Ferrari 53:20
that's a that's a Yeah, that's a really interesting way of looking at it. Because you're right, right now we are if we're looking at if media is our mirror then superheroes are the dominant force of media that we have in our stories. Right now, and especially in cinema. I mean, if you go back and look at the 80s I mean, Jesus you got you know, Arnold, you've got sly, you got Rambo, you've got commando, you've got you know, Chuck Norris, you've got this America kick ass kind of energy. That was throughout the 80s. You know, that's, that's where the action hero as we know, it today kind of was born. But even then, they were super, they were almost cartoonish versions of like, even now today, you know, you know, Liam Neeson is an action hero, you know, you know, but in the 80s, there would be no way of Liam Neeson or let alone a female action here. And we're now that's doable, but back then it was all muscle bound, cartoon versions of human x, exaggerated versions of ourselves.

Williams Indick 54:26
And I, for whatever reason, that was something our society had to go through. The Western hero as we know him became very dark. And he came to represent the things that we hated about ourselves, you know, the violence, the salep system, the inability to see other people's point of view. And so we had to sort of that hero had to be reborn in a new setting. And it became very, I think, one of the reasons it was very militaristic character, was because in a darkening the western hero we did it in a way that was very reflective of what was going on in Vietnam. And in doing so we kind of cast a pall upon another type of hero, the soldier hero, the warrior hero, which is even more ancient than the western hero. And I think as a culture, we needed to sort of recover from that I need to say, you know what, soldiers are good. The American soldier is inherently a good person who wants to do good things. And yes, he's frustrated by officers who want him to do the wrong thing. Or by you know, the government, you know, there's always that represents that representation of corruption. But the US soldier is a good man, he is a Rambo, he is a what was this Schwarzenegger? Well, commando,

Alex Ferrari 55:43
commando and predator? And yeah,

Williams Indick 55:45
although the American soldier is good, and we can trust him to do the right thing. We needed to reaffirm that to ourselves after Vietnam, and after, you know, that whole period dark period of dark self reflection.

Alex Ferrari 56:00
And officer and gentlemen as well, not as a superhero, but but definitely a positive light on a on, you know, the military deal with Tommy Jesus Top Gun. I mean, that's, that was, yeah, there's, there's as much testosterone and one in one movie ever, is Top Gun and probably 300. I mean, there's just so much testosterone. Through those films, it's not even funny. And a lot of the 80s action films, lethal weapons and all that kind of stuff. It was it was, it was an interesting time, but those films wouldn't play today. Not in the same way. Society has changed. I noticed their Top Gun too, is coming out. But he's the mentor now, but he's the mentor now.

Williams Indick 56:44
Okay. Yeah, I would think I would think so because he's a bit old to be playing that hero character. Yeah, so I'm curious to see how it does. Because I think we are in a bit of a different place. We're not really as open to these unilaterally good American heroes as we used to be. So I would be curious to see you know how that movie does and how it handles the problem of American identity.

Alex Ferrari 57:07
And also don't don't ever underestimate the power of nostalgia. That illness that we have is because I'm like, I was there when Top Gun came out. So I'm the first in line to see it, because I want to go back and relive my youth. And that's I think Hollywood's been doing that now for 34 years.

Williams Indick 57:28
Yeah. I mentioned before the problem with originality that there is essentially no truly original character type. And there is no essentially new original type of plot. But at the same time, you got to use something, something original, it's a new setting a new idea, a new catchphrase something. And it does seem that Hollywood has just gotten stuck in just our recapitulating regurgitating its own archetypes over and over and over again. Possibly, because the foreign market is so important now, and arguably is the foreign market is more important, important than the American market in terms of, you know, making a big film successful.

Alex Ferrari 58:09
Right, and I think comment combining genres genre, you know, crashing genres together, like the Western and the science fiction film with Star Wars. And that's when you start, you know, mashing up all these kinds of different genres that does make things a little bit more interesting. Like, what was the god, there's just so many, but like, when when you bring the superheroes down watchmen, when you're like me, watchmen, you brought the superhero down to the to the ground level, and they have problems. And they're, some of them are assets, and some of them are rapists, and some of them are really good and drunks. And that was a comment that made it a very interesting, made more interesting than just Superman. I'm here to save the day.

Williams Indick 58:58
Yeah, I mean, the good thing about the maturation of any genre is it gets more complex. So like, like when food starts to spoil, the beginning of that process is a complexity meaning it becomes more complex, like, you know, a dark cheese, or complex and interesting than hard cheese or a light cheese. But that's because it's beginning to rot. The first sign of rot is the darkening of the characters. And the and the plots becoming a bit more wiring meaning a bit a bit more sort of complex and over all over the place and unexpected things happening. And that's a sign of genre beginning to beginning to rot beginning to the audience's getting saturated with that. So they're trying to figure out ways of making it more complex and more interesting, but it is the very beginning of the end.

Alex Ferrari 59:52
Interesting. That's I love that analogy. I love that writing analogies like this, the beginning starts to get complex and then it just you can't eat it anymore. surfpoint I'm gonna ask you a couple questions ask all my guests. What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn whether in your industry or in life?

Williams Indick 1:00:11
I'm thinking probably has to do with my process as a writer. And I did I, you know, I was interested in writing screenplays for a long time, and I wrote novels. And now I took me a long time to find a voice and to find what I'm good at. And it wasn't, it's not really what I originally wanted to do. I originally wanted to be a, you know, what I would consider a creative writer to write screenplays, novels, stories, things like that. And it took me a long time to realize that my voice really is in nonfiction. And I think probably that's relevant to anyone who's a writer, we begin the process, thinking, Oh, I'm going to be doing this, I'm going to be doing that. But I think for most of us, it's a process of self discovery. And the thing that is revealed to us is that what we thought we were good at, or what we thought we wouldn't be good at is not it. Kind of like a typical hero's story where a hero goes on sort of adventure after adventure after adventure. And in the process, they learn about themselves, so that by the end of the process, yes, they've had a victory, they did what they set out to do. But the journey was by far more important and more elucidating than the end. So whenever I'm working on a book, now, it's not so much about me thinking, Oh, is this gonna bring me to the level of success that I'm looking for? But it's more about? Am I being as creative as I can be, even though this is nonfiction? Because my goal now is, is to say, well, there's nothing there's no rule that says you can't be very, very creative in writing nonfiction. In fact, you know, if we look at Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, their nonfiction was incredibly creative. And I think yes, so that might be useful, hopefully, for other writers, or filmmakers, or anyone really, in creative pursuit, is you have to give yourself time to find your voice. And then when you do find your voice, you have to be accepting of that you have to get say, like, Well, you know, I don't want to be that type of writer, I don't want to be that type of director or I want to do stuff that I think is cool. Is that really you? Is that where your strength lies? Is that the type of story you're good at telling? Or is that the story you want to tell? You know, it's a process of self discovery.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:34
Right? I mean, I wanted to be a wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, but that just not a thing.

Williams Indick 1:02:43
Yeah. And, again, we go back to this idea of the hero, you know, we have heroes in movies, but we also have heroes and mentors in real life. And I think, you know, most young people starting out, they find someone like, Oh, I want to be Steven Spielberg, or I want to be George Lucas, or I want to be, you know, this famous writer. And we we use these heroes as templates for our own lives. But our choice of selection is not very comforting. We're looking at the most talented and the most successful people ever. And we're saying why can't I be like them? And it takes a long time for us to, for me to look, give ourselves a break and be like, well, you're not going to be Steven Spielberg. You're not going to be even Steven Soderbergh. That's not who you are. But you can do great work. And you can, you know, love your work. And you can do great interesting things. If you find your voice, if you and if you allow your voice to be heard.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:37
You know what the funny thing is that I think George Lucas and Spielberg wanted to be Kurosawa. And, and quote, unquote, they wanted to be Kurosawa. But he's like, I can't be corsage. Well, I guess we'll just be ourselves. And it worked out, okay, for them.

Williams Indick 1:03:52
It's a part a part of growing up is figuring out who you are, where your strength lies. And it's a bit sad. But yes, resigning yourself to the fact that you're not going to be this dream character based on fantasy that you were trying to be when you were 13 years old. When you're 23, you have to find a new hero and find a new mentor and redefine yourself. And we have to do that at every age of life. Or else we're just going to be constantly, you know, defeating ourselves,

Alex Ferrari 1:04:21
and what are three of your favorite films of all time? Okay.

Williams Indick 1:04:26
First one that always comes to mind is just searchers in that job for 1936 john wayne, and I love that movie for so many reasons. One reason is what we were talking about before, we were talking about how westerns, certainly in the 50s 60s, represented the American character and was a mirror to American society. And in the searchers, john Ford did something that was really fearless. He took john wayne, who was identified as the American hero so strongly that people Like every everybody thought that john wayne was a war hero. He was a warrior. His career was just taking off. He didn't go to war he stayed behind, while everybody else but But nevertheless, he was on all these war movies and people always considered him the quintessential American hero of his age. But he wasn't. So john Ford said, I want to tell the story. It's a classic American story, but it's very dark, because we have a character who's a racist. And when his daughter not done it when his niece is abducted by these comanches His goal is at first to rescue her. But then it's the killer. He wants to kill her because she's living among the Indians. She's, you know, she's gone native. And the only way that he could rest with that, if he killed her, by his own hands is very, very dark character. quest is to kill a little girl, who is his nest? Who's nice? How do you tell that story? And how do you cast the quintessential American hero in that story, very difficult. But john Ford was able to pull it off, and one of the greatest the most visually stunning movies ever made, and one of the most powerful movies ever made. So, you know, I always go back to the searchers, and say, like, wow, hard to make a better movie than not match to art art, like people like what's the greatest movie ever made. And of course, you know, Citizen Kane, whatever, whatever you like. But the searchers is john Ford, arguably the greatest director of all time, john wayne, art, certainly the greatest Western hero of all time. That's a pretty strong pair. Okay, another film. Let me think for a moment, after the surgeries, it gets a little bit harder. And I don't want to say john Ford again. Mmm hmm. Well, just because, first of all, this list of like three greatest things, it's always going to be changing. Oh,

Alex Ferrari 1:06:52
of course. Just right now, just today. Yeah, today.

Williams Indick 1:06:56
Right now I'm thinking about the movie Pan's Labyrinth. I'm writing about it. And classic movie by guerra, Guillermo del Toro. And again, he's doing something somewhat similar, where he's taking a fairy tale, the story of the fairy tale about the young girl who's coming of age, and she has a wicked stepfather. And there's a, you know, a sort of a fairy character, and we don't know whether it's good or evil. So it's a classic fairytale. But he, rather than avoiding the darkness that we see in the sort of classic grimms brothers fairy tales, he delves into the darkness, darker and darker and darker. But at the same time, he never loses that fairy tale quality of it. And we never lose the sort of innocence of the girl and we never stopped identifying with her. That was just a wonderful thing to pull off. Where How can you How can you tell a fairy tale that's true to fairy tales, but at the same time, is excessively dark, and terrifying. And, you know, really, really sort of, you know, brings up these questions about, you know, human nature and things like that. So you know, when a film can do can be dark and light at the same time, that to me, it's kind of like an impressive thing to pull off. So I really enjoyed that. When we try to think of another film. Well, I'll just tell you, again, this is just stuff that I've recently seen and was impressed by. But I was very impressed by 1917, which was just visually stunning. So it has that sort of spectacle aspect of cinema. But it tells a simple story, where you're basically following these two characters, and then this one character to the end, and it gets darker and darker and darker. But because there is a basic heroism to the character that we all can identify with. And he's just a man who's given a mission, and he needs to get it done. It's very simple, simple motivation, a very simple story. But it gets very, you know, it gets into the complexities of the characters in a way that you know, wonderful. And again, it's mixing a darkness with light in a way that can be inspirational for the viewer. And I was very impressed by that.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:11
And now where can people find you and your books?

Williams Indick 1:09:16
Well, my books are all you know, out there, go to amazon.com or McFarlane pub comm, you'll find a most of my books. Me personally, I'm a psychology professor William Paterson University in New Jersey. And looking forward to going back and teaching regular in person class. This fall, everything was online for a while, um, I do have a book that just came out, and it's called media environments in the mind. And it deals a lot with you know, when I was talking before about narcissism, and the notion is that all media is a mirror, and how do we understand ourselves at a time when we're constantly being reflected in a million ways? So that's the sort of academic book that I just came out, but I also am just got a contract for a second edition of psychology for screenwriters, which will have a lot more information about writing for genre.

Alex Ferrari 1:10:11
Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been. It's been a journey down the rabbit hole speaking to you today. So I I do appreciate you man. Thank you so much for being on the show.

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IFH 719: Directing ACTION in the World of John Wick for Television with Albert Hughes

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Alex Ferrari 0:04
I'd like to welcome back to the show returning Champion Albert Hughes, how you doing Albert?

Albert Hughes 2:29
So apparently, we still have the record.

Alex Ferrari 2:32
We still have the record brother was that it was during the COVID times. You were stuck in Amsterdam, literally stuck in a room somewhere by yourself. And I think I was the only beacon of hope for a conversation about film for you. They sat there and spoke for three and a half hours, four hours. And it just kept going. And we were we were on Skype. It was again even gone to zoom yet. We were on Skype.

Albert Hughes 2:55
Was it was it Skype? It was it was Skype. Well, Oh, over here about Skype anymore.

Alex Ferrari 3:02
I didn't move over to zoom yet, because I was one of the last holdouts on Skype.

Albert Hughes 3:07
I still have it. I still have the app. Do you still have the app?

Alex Ferrari 3:11
I can't no. Because my I got the new computer. It doesn't now. Like I couldn't record anymore. It's old thing. But man with that that's an epic conversation we had man, it's been one of the most downloaded episodes we ever had. And then of course, when I heard about you, when I heard about it, and press, I emailed you right away, I said, Hey, man, congratulations cannot wait to see what you do in the world of John Wick. And, and you did not disappoint my friend. I have seen it and it is oh, thank you. It is like I was telling you before, it's so nice to see a director direct in television. Not not crapping on anybody else's style, but that you can see a very distinct a point like point of view when you're working. And it's like those things that you and I grew up with in in the 80s. And the 90s are like these kind of directors who like, you know, put the cameras move the cameras, that POV shots, it's like, oh, look at that. That's nice. You know,

Albert Hughes 4:08
I you know, it's also it's a new world now where, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, when we were growing up to it's like the the film directors, film writers, producers kind of looked down on TV, you know, or sphere. There was no streaming back then but, and now like the best writing the best acting, and some of the best directors are coming to those formats. And I mean, Netflix owns have the best directors in town right now. You know, literally, literally, but then.

Alex Ferrari 4:36
But you know what, it's really interesting, because I've heard this from a lot of people is that a lot of the independent filmmakers who would have been an independent film in the 90s in the early 2000s are not going to television, because that's the only place they can actually make a living. Because there is no real output for market. The market place doesn't open it's not as open as it used to be for independent film as it used to.

Albert Hughes 4:58
Yeah it's Like the Marvel movies the tentpole, CIPS they've squeezed up Mom and Pop movies or the midsize movie reviews, other genre movies, you know, like, Well, my house is doing well with their movies, the horror genre.

Alex Ferrari 5:12
But Jason's got the sweetest deal. And Hollywood. I mean, you kidding me? Like I thought when I talked to him on the show, it's like, dude, you'd like you're doing like 10 million $50 million movies being distributed by Universal, like, widely. Like, that's the sweetest deal in the US.

Albert Hughes 5:25
Yeah, and some of those movies are only $5 million. And they have the sweet deals for everybody involved. And he has a really good business model. And it's really not only sensible, but very kind to the town in golf. You know, he's one of the few guys out there that that's doing something like that. We actually share the same account. And I did work with him on the Good Lord Bird. Because his company produced that. Yeah, but it's a new day and time. And that's what strange is like, with this series of Continental, it wasn't set up like a typical TV schedule 10 episodes or eight episodes where you're rolling into the next episode with your cast and crew, then bringing in another director, guest directors. And then you know, sometimes those episodic TV shows have that low in the middle where they're trying to save money, you can tell her filler episodes. And we've talked about me and you I do distinctly remember talking about last time in our marathon run. David Fincher. Oh, and the one thing you if you look at what David Fincher did with mine Hunter and you look at whatever the show runners are, I got to look up with the show runners are on Handmaid's Tale, there's a very consistent style and quality control going on with those shows, both shows could have been shown in a theater, and you would have known none the difference between whether it was a TV show or a movie or a one hour episode. But it all came down to quality control. And then there's other like, really nuanced the details like what I learned the difference between TV in feature filmmaking is a TV is a writer with meaning and as you know, right, and features are a director's medium. So when traditionally the writers medium has been going on it. It's less about style and tone of the museum meets on saying, as you know, you learn in film school. And more about close up close ups, close up shop, close. And close up. Yep. And that they still were to this day, they're still think that way, and they're slowly coming out of it. I'm talking at the executive level when you start getting notes. Well, where's the close up for that shot? It's like, well, people have these big screens that you don't need that close up anymore. So then the cinema like I give this, it's a bad good analogy, I don't know. It's like a guide on the phone with his girlfriend, she's breaking up with him. And he's very lonely, right. And TV, you see, there's a close up shot, because the writers are laying on their dialogue and film. You learn the Masters, like tell them the story in the shot to go really wide and have them really tiny in the corner talking and looking small and only so the shots telling you he's lonely and isolated and being broken up with. And so it's the dialogue but you don't necessarily need to close up let's face at this moment, right? That's the difference. But there's a benefit to TV and what they do, because I've been studying like, I consume a lot of people like succession and all those shows, you know, and they button, the scenes with close ups and the characters wheels are spinning. And that takes you into the next scene. You're like, Oh, I wonder what they're thinking or you might project on what they're thinking. And that's a very useful thing to learn from TV, because cinema doesn't feature the filmmaking doesn't really do that. Yeah. So there's, right now also, there's this thing where it's like, if I'm making something or another feature guys making something, I don't want to change my style, because it's a TV show, I don't want to do more consoles, I want to respect the audience is going to read that shot correctly, especially considering that the TV sizes have changed, you know. So we still all have a lot of adjusting to do especially on the the executive and studio network side, too. Welcome those filmmakers into the TV space for what they do, without constantly pounding them about close optional.

Alex Ferrari 9:03
I would agree with you on that. And when I was watching this, I was noticing I mean, it's this basically they're the three movies. These episodes, they're just three standalone movies with like Paley and like cliffhangers essentially are like the next there's another episode in this thing. It's it's serialized in that sense in this miniseries that you've put together with continental but the Makah segment, the budget, the production value of this thing must have been pretty impressive because the I mean, we all seen the continental and John Wick, right. And we've seen it we've done but this is John Wick in the 70s, which is a great decade to Tunis and by the way, the it was anything I mean, come on. It's I mean, it's as fun as you could get to play in that in that era. But the visual effects I was noticing the how the visual effects. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show. And the depth of it the world creation that you did for the Continental. What was that? How did you approach doing it like that? And I assumed there was a decent budget for this. But this is not $100 million $200 million show. But it looks like yeah, it looks like the end, we'll get into the actual sequels in a minute, because that's a whole other story.

Albert Hughes 10:25
Okay. Well, maybe it's actually I was gonna hit on it earlier, but I forgot is the one I was talking about TV schedules. And now they roll into the next thing that there's no prep time for the guest directors, we only had one guest director, Charlotte brush and who has been around forever, very capable. But it's even very difficult for them to maintain the style. And it's a very hard thing to do the quality control, the tone and the look and all that stuff. But one of the reasons I did it, there's several reasons why I did it. One was when I looked at the way they laid it out. It was like a 14 week prep leading into Episode One. While weeks prep, leading into Episode Two or weeks prep, leading to episode three each 35 days a piece that is not normal for TV, that's not a normal schedule. That's not even normal prep for a movie like 12 weeks. 1012 weeks is normal. Not I wasn't allowed to say. But they see that for. Yeah, but they see that 14 is helping the overall to you know, you're not just servicing one. So that was the first thing that raised an eyebrow, they go oh, there, someone was smart. They're trying to ensure quality here, you know, and with a guy like me, don't give me prep, you know, because I'll use it. A lot of directors, you know, don't use it, you know, and don't, you know, you know, parlay that into some real security in quality, basically. And then there's the other thing above the wick film producers talk to me first, because I wasn't sure I wanted to do it. I didn't know if I wanted to play in another man or woman's sandbox. But they they talked to me about it. And I was considering something else. And I go, I just want to have fun man. The COVID thing was really weighing on me as you know. And I think the audience wants to have fun. I don't want to this social issue stuff anymore. Like I've done it. I'll go back to it, maybe but right now, I have fun watching those movies. Why not basically right. And that was a real moto. And then you had me at seven years. Like you just said early. You had me with the 70s. Right. That's the era I grew up in I was born in. I have a white mother who's listened to Pink Floyd a black father was listening to James Brown. And I finally able to explore the the mother's side of my upbringing, you know, the father's side has been tapped into greatly from the past movies with fantastic r&b and hip hop and stuff. But now it's like, Pink Floyd. It's my favorite band of all time. No one would suspect that even some of my closest friends wouldn't know that. That is I don't care what band you bring up. You start bringing up Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, I don't want to hear it. Pink Floyd, My guys are my guys. And then the heartache of having to give that song to episode two, which is a you know, an episode I supervised and finished them the post on but I didn't direct it, though. Yeah. And it was Kirk Woodward, the showrunner. And my friend, my very good buddy. Now my partner in this who he was struggling with that scene, because we just couldn't find the right score for it. And we couldn't find the right. And he came up with that choice. And I go, man, that's one of my favorite songs, like, welcome to the machine. So it was it was he that picked it. And he picked a few others that I was cuz sometimes a needle drops you like I'm pretty, I'm pretty good at it like 70%. But when I'm bad, I'm really bad. It's really off, you know? And once you put it against picture, you're like, What was I thinking? I thought this thing would work. And he is the one that came with Black Sabbath at the end of episode one, which was this attitude Kirk that came with that. Because originally I put it in more of an upbeat kind of, it's kind of a punk reggae. It's called Murder. It's a woman singing murder. Ooh, murder, you know, and I thought, Oh, this is such a downer episode at the end. Because if something tragic happens, I want the audience to leave for a week because I knew it was gonna be a weekly show. I want them not to leave to down and you kept working on me like our and it's not right. It's not right. Okay. And then he brought this sad but track and I go oh, that screaming revenge and anger. So yeah, I got me anger a bit there. But

Alex Ferrari 14:21
You know what? That's the thing. You got to try things before you say no, but no, when you were saying it and I know the scene and I know the ending of that episode. I'm going to pick it would have not worked it just like I'm already playing in my head. I'm like, No, it's not.

Albert Hughes 14:34
I tried it. I tried it. The first few seconds like,

Alex Ferrari 14:37
You need anger. You need revenge. You need vengeance. And that's what that song. The energy of that song came out without question. I mean, listen, you know, John Wick is created an a bunch of movies a world that is unprecedented, really in cinema history. There is nothing like Java. There's just nothing like John Wick, and what piano did and what the creators do. it and the actions is that when you stepped into this world to play like you said on another man sandbox, did you feel any pressure of like, I kind of meant this better bring the heat. Because every single there hasn't been a week John with film in my opinion. Everyone has been like, dude like this last one. I saw it in the theater. I was like, This guy's really like you can bananas. It was it's it's like so much action that you can't even. I'm like how many years? That's like almost like it was a kickback to John Woo style, hardboiled.

Albert Hughes 15:35
That's the that's still Oh, somebody was bringing up No. Like a friend reached out to me yesterday was like, he didn't know I made this and accidentally watched it. And he could recognize it was my style. So he looked at the credits again, and he messaged me. And he goes, it just reminds me of us watching John Wuhan, the night we were go, well, that's where Chad partially, he has a smorgasbord of influences. And some would be shocked to know that not the John Woo part. But the Bob Fossey a musical part. He's into musical and dance numbers. And when you talk to Chad, he'll talk about all these influences. You know, Korean cinema, too, of course, Japanese cinema. Some of the same things overlap with both of us, but I my favorite John Wick, the fours three three just tickled me pink like, it's when you when you talk to the hardcore John Wick fans, they don't. They don't care for three, they love one. I think their order is now it may be one or four. But they really have a soft spot for one. It's one four to three minds in a completely different order of mind. 3124

Alex Ferrari 16:39
And four is still

Albert Hughes 16:42
It's solid, it's crazy. Like they do up the game. There's just weaknesses I have for three because they reminded me of being a 12 year old watching Indiana Jones like that knife fight. And then that Oh, I don't know Museum of knives. Like I thought it couldn't get any better. It just kept getting better and better. And then it ended with a guy's axe in the head. I go oh my god, this is the sword fight and on the motorcycles which is from the villainous Korean movie I believe. But again, it was awesome. And then who could have ever thought the smack of horses asked to kick a guy in the face like there's so there's all and then there's dogs the Halle Berry dog stuff like so it was speaking to the 12 year old boy me were the difference with four was I thought four in the end when it took me a while to realize was more of a spiritual movie. It is became a spiritual Yeah. Is though is one of the most I didn't expect that

Alex Ferrari 17:33
One of the most violent pics. I see that cinema quite some time. But it's it's correct.

Albert Hughes 17:37
But I also saw it with green screen. Yeah, I saw it though early cut where the RTA triumph, you couldn't even see the structure when they were doing that you couldn't see what happened to the Continental. I was watching a lot of blue screen and it was like a three and a half hour cut out. I watched it first. So when I saw it in the cinemas, I was shocked at like how good the VFX were like that arc to the Triumph thing like how there was no, there was no no Orchidee triumph there. They did shoot it in Lidar and do all those things. Right. But how realistic those VFX were like, I didn't know what that scene would become like,

Alex Ferrari 18:12
I thought the shot. I thought they shot it there personally, I said not that you told me that I'm like, I thought they shot they did a fantastic job. Because I couldn't tell

Albert Hughes 18:19
Well, there's established yours you know, and even in an established yours, if you look closely, you can tell that there's digital cars not not that it's badly done it just at the speed they're going in that traffic. And unless you're in Boston locked down all of Paris, it's impossible. You know, of course, we know how these things are constructed. You and I so we're able to know even if it's really great VFX What the What's going on, you know,

Alex Ferrari 18:45
I thought they might have locked up you know, you know, from one o'clock to four o'clock in the morning, something like that, because it was just looks so so good. And going back to John Woo, though. I mean, you go back to those kid that killer hardboiled that is ballet, with guns, and then WIC is just taking it to a whole other place, which then brings me to, but

Albert Hughes 19:07
You don't know what to say just before we get up at John Woo the big difference between then and now is that John wounded and have those air guns that you can put up to somebody's face and see the recoil and hear a little sound that's so safe. You can literally put up your eyeball. You know, he was using real muzzle flashes. stunk. Man, they were getting hurt all the time, because there are regulations out there for protections aren't the same in China at the time, like just running through stunt men, right? He was shooting for 100 days and more like, you know, John, who was going all balls to the walls without all the stuff that we have the tools we have nowadays. And then you have someone like Chester hausky, who comes from its background, who specializes in that. And then he found this perfect match with Keanu in that kind of world. And it's like a parallel universe, which is what's so freeing about doing the show the continental is like

Alex Ferrari 19:58
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Albert Hughes 20:07
You know, when I started checking up a list of why I should do something like this, one of it was like, Well, my brain is gonna be free just to have fun now. So what's that going to be like, I didn't have any idea that I would have the most fun in my life on a set, or in post or in prep. It was like, an experience I'll never forget

Alex Ferrari 20:24
When going into the action, I mean, when I was watching the episodes, I was like, Mike, what is this like John Wick level, action, movie level action. So that this is it's not like if you're tuning in to see the continental and expecting like TV versions of John Wick action. It is not. It is. You could say it's, you could take it out and put it right into $100 million $200 million movie and it would fit perfect that was so I was like, man, it's ball. It was a single man.

Albert Hughes 20:54
It's the same guy. It's a company that Chad owns with David leach called at 711. And some of the same people that were in some of the Jaguar films are part of the stunt team too. And Lauryn Hill Stovall, the coordinator and action director was, it's from that, that at Simon Lebon camp to, and Chad had to bless the person that was being chosen for that basically, before we started, and then they go and do this thing called stunt biz, which is wonderful. You get to see everything beforehand and make adjustments. And they do this really cool thing a new school of stunt men do which is, first of all, they show you the stuff the old school never showed you anything right? They also make use of the environment. And if the environment is not Columba we may rewrite where we're at more this fights gonna take place. And it's interesting, I'm telling you, because there's one scene in episode three that particularly cater to your audience No way. It's like, when we talked in the past about when you have no money, what do you do with it? Right, right. So Kirk had written this scene where this character Lu, a black woman's being followed by this detective Mayhew and it was going to end up in this like fight between the both of them in the streets. And I said, You know what, I've always wanted to do Kirk a fight in the phone booth you ever heard that expression of fighting for was like, Hey, I've heard it, or sometimes a boxer announcer like they're just blowing each other in a corner and blowing each other and hitting each other. Taking blows in the corner, you know, there's they all skill has gone out the window. They're just,

Alex Ferrari 22:26
It's again, it's a street fight. Yeah, it's a street fight. Yeah,

Albert Hughes 22:29
It's street fight in, in close proximity. It's, uh, it was like watching a fight in a phone booth. So I said, we need to do this for two reasons. One, I think it'd be cool. Because we can use the phone with the environment a phone booth to this could be a lesson to people with no money in film school. But I want this thing to be the kind of scene where they look at it and go, you see, you can do something interesting without scope, and still tell the story and move on and play play on kind of, I don't know what the what that's an analogy, I guess, or a metaphor. Play on something like that. Yeah, we did have the budget to do what we want. I didn't feel the pinch in any way. Like you can give me $10 million. I'm not going to feel a pinch. I'll design the movie to the budget. You can give me five I'll design the movie to the budget. But what I always aspire to from the first movie is you give me 2.5 I want to make it as low as seven you give me 10 I want to make it like 20 and there's little tricks to do that we talked about in the last time we talked about but people should know we each budget had a pretty much the same budget as a first John Wick movie. That's it well, it wasn't any lower whether any higher.

Alex Ferrari 23:36
Yeah, and the thing is too is like when I was watching this again, I said this you use some of those tricks to get more bang for your buck. Because it definitely looks more bang for your buck without question. Now speaking of stunt, guys, this is my I love I love stunt guys. I was working on my on a project I was working with a 24 stunt team, the 20 Kiefer Sutherland's shout back in the day, and is it just me or are all of them absolutely nuts?

Albert Hughes 24:07
They are the old school guys are a different type of nuts. The New School guy right there a different type of nuts. Yeah, they all are like, go ahead. Sorry.

Alex Ferrari 24:16
No, it's like I heard like when when I would go Listen, I need you to do this. I need to do a gainer here. And I needed to do flip like but kind of jump off the second story. Like no, I don't need a second. I'm we're good here on the first No, no, but like, I could do the second store. I could like I'm good. Like no, but I'm like guys, it was not there but all of them would always take it to 11 as they say in spite of

Albert Hughes 24:39
Yeah, they're their adrenaline adrenaline junkies, you know, and they're like fighter pilots here in this whole other mode, you know, and they recall from the past and and has moved to the new school. They have this swagger this kind of arrogance in they need that arrogance in their job, you know, but sometimes you can miss read the air again and not see the person basically right. And they're very interesting, especially the new school guys that come out of 87. Let me because they always overdesign, like you're talking about that in a way they want to give you more than it's done. guys never want to give you less. And you actually always have to talk a stunt person though. Like no, no, do. We don't really don't but

Alex Ferrari 25:21
Guy, or girl.

Albert Hughes 25:22
Yeah, but all the dirty little the dirty little secret. The dirty little secret is, the more times they do that stung the keep getting paid bumps on depending on how dangerous Dustin is that you're getting these these crazy pay bumps. You know, I didn't know that until four years ago. I found that out. I'm like, really? Oh, that's why they're so eager to do another. Like they're lipping to the third take like, Yeah, let's go.

Alex Ferrari 25:45
Let's go. Let's go ahead. Let's go again. I can't imagine like with the with the stunt team that you had on the continental these guys, I mean, there has to be, I mean, other professionals, but it's got to do some some damage. Damage on these guys, the body can only take so much, even as a professional as

Albert Hughes 26:02
Somebody,

Alex Ferrari 26:03
You can only throw them down the stairs so many times. Right? I mean, seriously, at a certain point, even if they know how to follow them if they got the gear on. And at a certain point, you just got it that God bless.

Albert Hughes 26:18
Yeah, and the differences too is they have to train our actors. Like that's what the wig fan base wants us to see their actors doing it. And we had this interesting story one day when the Jessa lane is an actress who played Lulu and they're the brother of Myles Hubert. Ponte jour is the actor's name. But it just was, you know, she's a very sweet woman. And she doesn't like violence, really. And they're training her and she accidentally it's a stunt guy in rehearsal. You know, we're not shooting there in the warehouse doing this. And she's really emotional, but she's really bent, bent out of shape about it and like, no, no, this happens all the time. They don't worry. And we were all a little worried about her. Like, is she ever gonna be able to like, just get over this and she did. And you've seen the El Camino fight with her in the back of an El Camino on Episode Two, I think. Yeah, you've seen the whole series, right. Okay, so,

Alex Ferrari 27:09
I've seen most of the series. I haven't seen all of it yet. I'm gonna see most of it.

Albert Hughes 27:12
Oh, shit. You gotta get the three man we shouldn't. Okay, we'll come back with Kirk.

Alex Ferrari 27:16
You come back with Kurt. Oh, that I've seen the first Oh, I've not seen the third one yet because I have a family.

Albert Hughes 27:22
Oh, the third and the third one goes. I know. The third one goes off the rails. But but she is an episode two in the back of an El Camino like kicking a bunch of people's asses. Right? You see in that and then she basically blossom? Yeah, you know, but wait, I gotta pause for Episode Three prepare you because it's gonna feel like to you a very deceptive, it starts out like, Oh, this is kind of starting out like the others. You know, it's normally paced. And then it just takes this right turn and it just goes nonstop for 15 minutes. So

Alex Ferrari 27:53
So you were trying to you were trying to John Wick for it basically just this nonstop.

Albert Hughes 27:57
Why would he was a hybrid because Chad has a status thing he does. It's wonderful is that? It because he has a two or two and a half hour movie and doesn't have to tow a 3x structure and too many new characters. And you have Ken Oh, and the audience knows what he can do. You can wallow in a 20 minute set piece. I can't really because I have a story to tell. I also don't want to bore the audience. You know, I'm very much in tune, not having action fatigue happen. So it's deceptive in episode three. Because there are modules of action, seemingly taking place in one set piece which is inside the hotel. It's a raid. I mean, it's pretty obvious at this point, it's a raid, you know, that Winston has to take power from this hotel, and a revenge story, right? So it feels like one continuous action scene. It actually isn't. It's one continuous raid, that the way to fix your reign is as you're watching a lot of action. Because it it jumps around to different locations within the hotel and different group members doing different things. But it's relentless, not in the same way as relentless as you get the Arc de triumph and then you get the Dragon's Breath seen from the above angle in the building, and then you get this steps. Then you get the steps. You put those three back to back that's like 45 minutes straight of nonstop action. You know,

Alex Ferrari 29:19
It's a lot. It's a lot. Now I gotta ask you, man, because there's a there's a special actor who play who's in this in this show. Mr. Mel Gibson. How do you work with not only a legend, but arguably one of the better directors of his generation? Because he is a really good director as well. How was it to work with him?

Albert Hughes 29:42
Yeah. He's, he's, he's a pro. And once you get to three, you'll see he goes off the hinges, you know.

Alex Ferrari 29:52
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Albert Hughes 30:01
I'm in the process of working with him you've seen in the past like he does he's very passionate like ransom or Braveheart or road warriors, my favorite. And that's why we wanted him. Yeah hacksaw as as a director is he he makes you believe in what he's doing in the movie if he's playing the character, you believe, right? What I found was interesting is that he, those zingers and one liners that Sam he likes playing with words from Lethal Weapon movies, that is him. That's what he comes with. That's how his brain works. And he plays naive on the set. It doesn't look back and look at everything and like what lens you're using, you know, and he acts like he doesn't know, he knows. And he's watching everything like a hawk. And he doesn't go to his trailer, which is a great thing to have with an actor is like they're not slowing you down. He's very much I think he said it one day, he goes, I'm a good soldier. And he is, and he's highly intelligent on both sides of the camera. And it was just a fun, we had fun with the whole cast. Because I have some people in here, like Adam Shapiro, who's opened a pretzel business during COVID. And it's all the rage in Hollywood right now. And chopping pretzels. Who's a who's a one liner, walking one liners Zinger comedy act, you know, that I work with the past few people I've worked with in the past that have this thing that I was dealing with, with Mel to like, they just want to go on the set and have fun. And they don't want to cause problems. They don't want any headaches. They don't want any drama. And those are my favorite kind of people. So he's cut from that cloth. And I've been here for 40 years of professional he is on the set. And it's exactly what I saw.

Alex Ferrari 31:35
That's beautiful man, not when you when you walk into an action sequence like that as a director. These are not simple, not simple sequences by any stretch and right it's not like a punch, punch, punch, the movement the camera. How would you how do you approach doing this? I know you've seen that a little bit of previous but like if you're if you're talking to a young directors who are trying to get into action. How do you approach like some of the scenes like that in the in the first episode? Does their sequence going down the stairs with him? Will you look like Kiana by the way he will I mean, he was on point, the main actor, the main character.

Albert Hughes 32:15
Yeah, less training though you only had three weeks.

Alex Ferrari 32:17
But he but he looked like I'm like this guy looks like John. I mean, in the movie. He looked like John Wick. I was like, Oh, wow. He's like John Wick style. That's how good he is.

Albert Hughes 32:26
And we are not into that.

Alex Ferrari 32:28
Yeah, obviously. Yeah. Because he's just he was so good at it reminded me so much of John, or of Keanu doing that. How do you approach that kind of scene as a director?

Albert Hughes 32:38
Well, I was very lucky because of the built in nature of at 711 in L'Oreal is you would think you would have to stress about it. If it's a younger filmmaker, and you don't have a great stunt team, you're in trouble. Sure, if you have a great stunt team, what I do with them, as I say, I've learned in the years it's like, and I think we discussed it before, it's like sometimes let professionals be professionals if you're trusting and don't get in our way, let them do their job and then stir the pot every once in a while I'll have my bullet points of once. And for that sequence, what I want it was very overall in a general sense was um, Jackie Chan's use of objects and how playful he is with so he's Frankie's carrying a chest with the point precedent and I will I kept saying it might it was bullet points written down and I will talk to her No, I want him to throw it at somebody. So that distracts them and they can shoot it that's very Jackie Chan that's also very chest to hausky to and John Wick. It's very much fits in that world. But I remember first seeing it with Jackie Chan it's a playful playfulness with chairs with objects and stuff like that. And then we would talk about the sequence and they would design it and then we start just making adjustments now a lot of times the struggle between me and Lauren no healthy really healthy struggle and debate creatively was how long he was going that scene is a one page that's one minute you give me one minute he would turn in six minutes right I'm gonna go now you're killing me over here right so there's a this would constantly going on and that's part of the wick way of being trained in stocks is like they do explore it fully right? So in that staircase sequence you're talking about I cannot a whole floor of violence. There's a whole tooth two sets of stairs that I cut out because I felt like it was undercutting the gag before in the gag after and sometimes you have too much of something. It just undercuts itself because you can't focus on the peaks and valleys basically. And so that was even in a phone booth fight that phone booth fight was really long when I first got it. The you'll see this really fantastic fight between these two women and Episode Three on a roof on the roof of the continental I when I first got it, it was long. And I told my editor like let's maybe cut back to somebody else and then cut back to this. And he just looked at me Sit No, this is wick. This is like world, you know, you know it's a cutaway, we're gonna stay in it. And I think him and that's what a good editor does too is like when you're insecure as a director, they just say stop. No, they did like the scene. You've seen it because you haven't made it to three. You saw the adjudicator see where he has been beaten down that guy. And that atrium, right. So when I get the first cut of that, because I love my offline sounds to be great. They put great sounds and so it was pretty much the same thing in an offline It was brutal and how many times he was punching them in the opening. And I said Ron Ron Rosen's, my editor, I mean, he's a genius like Iran. I think maybe there's too many punches on this guy's face, and the studio or the network's gonna say something, and I kind of agree maybe it's a little too much he goes, dude, dude, it's, it's the wick. It's the wick roll. There's, there's no such thing as too many punches. I'm like, Okay, well, we'll just keep it for now and see if they say anything, right. They never said anything. And then I watched John Wick for and when he's when he's punching killer in the face to get his tooth. Like, it's about the same number of punches. But again, it's kianak Carol has such a soft spot for the audience. And he can pretty much get away with anything, except killing an animal.

Alex Ferrari 36:15
Right! I mean, you could fall out of four stories land on a limo and limp away four times and then move

Albert Hughes 36:22
Continuously. Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 36:23
Continue, keep and then fall down 45 flights of stairs. Get up brush it off and you just like get shot

Albert Hughes 36:29
Off the building could shut off a building by Winston fall following an awning and then on the concrete. Yep,

Alex Ferrari 36:35
Sure. Why not? Yeah, it makes the ice canopy of course it's SynScan. Now with that said, it was so with that said did you have any easter eggs? Laid out throughout this episode? These episodes are for John Wick.

Albert Hughes 36:49
There is the John Wick easter egg. For the hardcore fans. There's the casual easter eggs. And then there's the 1970s Easter eggs like let's go in reverse. So 1970s Easter eggs en picks up Frankie after the staircase shootout. That's an exact replica of Travis bagels taxi from taxi driver. I remember I saw on Episode Two. Episode Two. If you notice that late in episode two, a Starsky and Hutch car appears red with that Nike, white swoosh whatever that is. Episode Three. Right before that phone booth be done I told you about. There's the warriors from the movie warriors. There's the hearse with a graffiti all over it right. Then you have the obvious John Wick kind of easter eggs that are quite obvious. Whether it's what they were doing with the coins, what some of the rules are, what some of the changes in the rules are then the deeper ones. Like in episode one, when Winston gets the idea to go to the theater to see that old decrepit theater where he finds his brother. The scene before that he's at a stoplight. And he looks at a poster. And it's a Marilyn Monroe movie. Yeah. And the name of the movie is Be seeing you, which is from which film to and I think the the death, the death of a woman I forgot her name. She's constantly saying to him be seeing you and he would sign back up or he killed or Be seeing you. So that's the title of the Marilyn Monroe movie because they wouldn't give us the rights to Gentlemen Prefer Prefer Blondes as a title. And that triggers a memory. And then that line recalls again in episode three of the show, and also the adjudicators license plate. She has a car we reveal in episode three, but her license plate is a line from the adjudicator and film Three, show filthy. Right? So there's a bunch of them that and Kirk, the showrunner. He itemize them all because Oh, He cocked marketing and Amazon Marketing wanted it for the you know, that's a really smart thing for them to do. They wanted it to use it for marketing. I forget until I see it like oh god, there's that there's that there's a bunch of them in there.

Alex Ferrari 38:58
So that's really interesting. So that was kind of part of the plan. All I mean, yeah, like every once in a while you'll throw stuff in. But this was like really thought out. Like, where are you going to throw?

Albert Hughes 39:06
Yeah, it was more coming from me and Kurt, being fans of the movie. It wasn't any mandate. There wasn't even they didn't even just tip us off from the film side. What happens in John Wick, or although I saw it early in post for this, they weren't doing that. And it was so freeing in a way they weren't doing what Disney or Marvel would do which is like they have these particular mandates. You have to have to show the show to not to the future. We love that we could reverse engineer and know what we will the first three films where we knew what that that was. And they they just kind of trusted us. I don't know why but they did. And me and Kirk would just break down those movies and say, well, that'd be funny if we can put that in there. And it's always fun to put easter eggs. I think easter eggs like even if you're just doing a normal movie that has no reference to anything IP related. To put easter eggs in there nodding to other movies is always a fun thing.

Alex Ferrari 39:59
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Albert Hughes 40:09
And then episode three, you'll get the famous one. You have to really watch out for my favorite movie of all time. Midnight Cowboy. I'm walking over here, you know,

Alex Ferrari 40:18
Yeah, of course, that was a complete fluke. When that happened?

Albert Hughes 40:22
Well, neither did you hear there's two different versions of that story now,

Alex Ferrari 40:25
That that was not really what I know is that it was a real Capitan, a real cab almost ran over Dustin Hoffman. He's like, that's that was the story was the story.

Albert Hughes 40:37
Now there's a counter story that is actually believable because we know what goes on, they would have had to get a release from that guy that uses his likeness. The cab driver because you clearly see his face, and they would never wanted to put the actors in that much peril. Walking across the street secretly recording. And the line of dialogue I heard is actually written the ad lib may be the line after where he talks about that could be a good insurance scam, too. I saw the story that broke it all down I go. That's interesting, because for years people thought this, but we're gonna hear it from Dustin's mouth, I guess.

Alex Ferrari 41:15
I mean, anything's gonna tell the truth at this point. The game he's just gonna make want to live. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he. I mean, it was the 60s. Right? It was the 60s and I

Albert Hughes 41:24
68. He was shot 68 was shot.

Alex Ferrari 41:27
So it was the 60s. Would they need to release Yeah, but it wasn't a public environment. So maybe like That's true. Yeah, that's true. You can kind of get the documentary but you could because it wasn't a public street. Technically you don't need I mean, and it was just a different

Albert Hughes 41:43
And they weren't doing that thing back then were with in New York when we they were shooting inside of a van with like the tinted glass the good shots like that.

Alex Ferrari 41:51
Oh, yeah, like Yeah, and without permits, and just like running around sometimes. Because it was kind of it was guerilla filmmaking was kind of the beginning. And then that beginning but it was like when they started really start being the vibe started like nothing then that capital really kind of started that whole easy, Easy Rider. And now and obviously, reading C drive, right, Raging Bull and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, there was, I'm curious if you talk to us next time you talk to Dustin. Let me know

Albert Hughes 42:19
I'll hit him up on my rolodex.

Alex Ferrari 42:22
Exactly. So I'm coming from a collar battle I was at the colorist for a long time as well and had a post house I was looking at the approach to the color grading of this which is shoot this on by the way, gentle camera

Albert Hughes 42:37
It was the the airy trigger, which model DX whatever the fuck it was the same lens. It looked like we it was degraded. It was degraded because we got the 1950s lenses I may have talked to you about this before from had a vision that no DPS want to use anymore because their soul they literally had to dust them off when I was doing Good Lord Bird, and they have all these imperfections and anomalies in them. Right. And they they are they were built for MGM by path A or path a path A and MGM are somehow involved, right. They hadn't been used in years. And I had danza Zaki was the lens guru over at penerbitan, who services all the top DPS. And I just went in one day without my DP because my DP was in a different city. And I said, just give me the funkiest lenses you got just think of anything wild that nobody wants to touch. Even if it's cracked, just bring it and then we started testing them out. And I picked his set. And later I found out because I said I would like a list of the films these were shot on. Were Yeah, and it took them actually months to give me the list. It was like a list of 200 films, but the three films that stood out to me were Dr. Zhivago. Cool Hand Luke, and the graduate. Oh, so you watching the Continental? Yeah, you're actually seeing through the same exact lenses that shot those three classic films right. Now, I could have shot with a red and airy or Sony and I don't think you truly could know the difference because we're not only doing that we're also deciding a lot. We're Maxine Gervais who was my colorist I spoke to you about last time it was on all my projects dating back to Book of Eli which we talked about that she's fantastic. She's an artist. She's my partner on every project like there is no DP director relationship without her that that try it that Trifecta doesn't work if the DP comes in and doesn't get along with her. I can't hire him because she's she's my partner in this you know? So she goes in and we start doing the grain thing again we start we don't do that that film grain that one they license out which is bullshit you know it's a scam there's no that's a complete scam. It's a scam okay. She scan she's they've scanned every film stock imaginable from the past okay. She Oh, for great. And then she does a thing. And I don't know the technical terms for it. But there's different layers of color registration and mids highlights, and you know more than I on the thing, right, and how brain interacts with the mids and the highlights and the blacks. And she goes in and there's different layers to and degrees to it. And sometimes we land, we do the stubble, we try to have the imperfection or like one close up maybe grainy or than the other one, or the wide shots are a little more grainy than the medium shots. So we checkerboard, the grain, we pick the degrees of grain 1020 or 30, or 40%. And we are base level, let's say be 20 throughout the whole show, and then we sometimes will attend and go to 40. And it's a subconscious thing where you when you're watching it, you feel a little bit of inconsistency that reminds you of analog. And so there was a lot of things she did that she's a genius colorist basically, like she's like, I think she's gonna be mad. I said that she like the Rain Man of colorist because I tease her about certain things.

Alex Ferrari 46:05
It is a compliment, but I could see where she could go. Hey, man,

Albert Hughes 46:09
Yeah, but I teased her about we mean are like, people come into our color selections. They see us bickering, because she's so sensitive, because she's an artist. And she just goes hard to get it right. And sometimes I'll just say something just to fuck with her. But they think that me and Maxine are fighting and we're not really fighting. We love each other. And we're never mad at each other. Never right? She'll pick, she'll pick on me and I'll pick on her. And she'll say something like, Okay, so there's a transition. I know, you will notice it's like I like sometimes selfconscious transition. So it's tilting up from the beat down the adjudicator and goes this atrium, yellow circle turns into a yellow white right?

Alex Ferrari 46:48
Oh, I love that. Well, I love that shot. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. That was one of the shots. I was talking about what I said about directors. Absolutely.

Albert Hughes 46:53
Yes. So with her like, early in, prep up putting a shot list. I'll put a magazine dissolve, which is a customized dissolve, you know how that works. You're pulling different image up on the second the beside, and you get the customized This is all I said I put out so I'll put in the shot list. And for the editor too, because he has my shot list. So then we Maxine does all by putting a quotation to the next thing. And it's a it's a yellow white. I didn't know I didn't explain it to my editor would a magazine dissolve was because him and his assistant were busy online thinking it's a technical term from Hollywood. They can and I said no, no, no, it's my colorist who who does these? Fantastic kind of creative dissolves, because that was one. Like one session. We were snapping at each other on Alpha about as I said, Okay, Maxine, I need like a 48 frame dissolve here. And she just snickered at me and goes, Oh, you want to dissolve here? I thought you wanted something more creative. I'm like, well, sometimes a normal dissolve. Works, you know, just that's better.

Alex Ferrari 47:55
That's amazing that they thought that was like a special tip. Because to be fair, in Hollywood there. There's always insisted beginning of time, there's all these weird names for certain things and you know, a stinger a B 52. Wilhelm scream? Yeah, well, exactly. And then people like, Maxine, dissolve where's the Maxine?

Albert Hughes 48:15
Yeah, well, now, you know, from your show, in the film, also, a Maxine, dissolve as accustomed as all from henceforth,

Alex Ferrari 48:25
Yes. From hence for they will be called the Maxine. It dissolve. I gotta ask you, man, look, him and you and I are a couple of old dogs. We've been we got a couple of bit of shrapnel under our belt. And, you know, when you and I talk is so much fun, because we talk in cinema and talking about but we, you know, our generation kind of grew up with, and I don't see that coming up behind us men. I mean, there are some, where do you think 50? I mean, are they going to be doing? You know, this kind of like, what you just explained with the grain? Like, are they going to be doing that in 40? Or 50 years, man? Is it what do you think?

Albert Hughes 49:06
Well, it's, it's the true the Tiktok generation now, right now, the the generation that was born. I mean, a lot of after us are just a limbo out for us. We were we were there. From the analog to digital, we saw that I'm so happy we were that we know that difference between film

Alex Ferrari 49:24
British generation. It's the British generation.

Albert Hughes 49:26
Yeah. And we know the difference between digital editing and film editing. You know, it's so I'm so grateful that we got to see that there's something interesting going on. And this is a subtle or conversation or more nuanced one on about this generation. It's like they're seeing like, let's say a movie is out in the theater and they didn't put film great and they didn't do this and it's very clean. It's a Marvel movie and it's very everything's very clean. It's very digital. It still somehow does feel like film because of 24 frames because the shutter Oh

Alex Ferrari 50:01
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Albert Hughes 50:10
Motion Blur and depth of field depending on how you use it, those three things we talked about before, right? That do convey the sense of cinema, it took a while for digital to get there because of those three things in image quality, right? But if you actually play a piece of film, you go whoa, whoa, this is completely Oh, done. Oh, God. Oh, even me, and you have been been fooled into thinking, this looks like film would actually know it. There's a whole other thing going on. There's registration problems, there's scratches, there's ducks prints, there's all this

Alex Ferrari 50:43
Project project the print of Lawrence of Arabia and project digitally project the print of a Marvel movie. And you tell me if there's a difference in the

Albert Hughes 50:54
It's an analog, it's an analog quality. Now there's no I'm gonna parse this argument out different like, I think you and I talked about this before I really don't get off on this whole film purists shit, that group of filmmakers and filmmakers. I think it's fucking bullshit. It's nostalgia. It makes no sense. And Excuse Excuse me for saying this. It's a bunch of white men who are in this Daljit okay. They need to stop going against the winds of need to stop going against the winds of change and start help building windmills. Okay. Um, no, like I'm when I see a bunch of nostalgic old timers. It triggers me is a half biracial guy. Do you start getting to nostalgia that goes down a dangerous road? Okay. Enough. Let's just take all these. Let's take all the and I know I'm being harsh there. Okay, but let's take all these tools available to us. And tell the stories we need to tell by some of them don't believe in di somehow I didn't have any VFX in this movie. I don't give a fuck. Or are talking overly too much about IMAX like, I don't give a shit is Is it good? That's all the audience cares about? Is it good? If it was shot in an iPhone like tangerine? It doesn't matter? Is it good? But to answer the larger thing you're talking about, it's like we're in a world where everything's getting drowned out by too many voices on the internet. And like, you know that because you have to find your niche and all that stuff. So film guys on what film in history, it's got to kind of die away with the new generation. And they're gonna be talking about the film from our generation as being you know, they're gonna be talking, it's not really our agenda, but they're gonna be talking about Marvel movies like, like, as if it's So Lawrence of Arabia. That's what's crazy.

Alex Ferrari 52:38
But you know what, quit and quit and said this really quick. I saw an interview with Quentin. And he said this really interesting. He said he saw he had a conversation with his 16 year old. And he's like, Hey, I was four years old and Iron Man came out and he goes for that kid. That is Citizen Kane. That is, you know, Lawrence of Arabia,

Albert Hughes 52:55
And Ironman is a good movie. That is a great movie.

Alex Ferrari 52:58
Ironman is a fantastic film. But the point is that that is I mean, if you talk to John Favre, he's not gonna like yeah, it's it's good as long as Arabia or is as good as you know, all these it's not. It's a classic in the in that genre, without question. But

Albert Hughes 53:11
What what's also like, it's just like when we are you were younger. Did you remember I'm sure even went to the stage where you were the certain age or like, I don't know, watch a black and white film when you're 12. Oh, watch it black and white. It's Oh, yeah, different watch it, and they know, not older. And you're like, oh, Samurai. But here's what happened during COVID. I gotta tell you about what happens because I've been to film school, I got film books, and I read and I watch a lot of stuff. I have the criterion channel. And I started deep diving in the 30s. And being really fascinated by the fact that the technique of opticals, in camera movement in lighting was at an apex in the 30s. And I'm like, Well, why is this like 30s 40s 50s and started slow down by the 60s who was out unless with a very special director, like Hitchcock, right? Or David Lean or somebody like that, but the 30s Kubrick, but the 30s had transitions and moves like I've never seen before, right? And I go, What is this and I started thinking about it, I go, Well, 1930 1927 2728 sound came in. Before sound, they had to rely strictly on the visual so they were well flexing the visual and opticals right, you look at metropolis and the optical no multilayer obstacles, okay, in the framing, and that also, they started leaning more towards dialogue and now that they started going away from technique of the visual. And that was a an epiphany. I came to I don't know if it's correct film theory, but an epiphany. I came through this last year because I've been deep diving on 30 films. And I'm like, Oh, my God, that I'm so embarrassed that I thought that we cannot scale them. You know, it's like, no, you can't creativity is creativity. It doesn't age you know?

Alex Ferrari 54:55
I mean, you look at the look at something like Seven Samurai or you look at you know, any of the core equals our films that were Russia mon are all of those ease just looking at? Oh, okay. Yeah, I just, I just okay, I got what

Albert Hughes 55:10
They're doing I did a time when there was no video monitors. They couldn't image Sergio Leone didn't have a video monitor with those close ups

Alex Ferrari 55:17
Bro watch. I am Cuba. Are you kidding me? watch that movie Iron Cuba and you're just sitting there like who never heard of these filmmakers doing stuff with like 5000 pound cameras that look like they're doing it with an iPhone. They're you know, putting things on on wires and putting them in the middle of the street while there's a revolution got like what is going on? And that was what's the 60s it was in the 60s of him not mistake. Yeah. Early 60s. Yeah, it was it was hidden until

Albert Hughes 55:49
Yeah, well, that sounds amazing. And that's what's amazing about those films like it was much tougher, much heavier equipment, like you're saying, right? Communication. They didn't even have walkie talkies. early cinema, right? They didn't have cracked wall control. This, they didn't have a lot of things. It was a lot tougher. And then you had to get printed scripts do everything by phone. There was no digitally sending the print or script to Well, someone across town to read it right away. It's, it's amazing. It's like it just shows you something like put those people nowadays. Oh, they're running circles around all of us. I mean, can you already work? But let's say

Alex Ferrari 56:27
Can you imagine Kubrick with today's technology? Can you imagine Hitchcock

Albert Hughes 56:31
I wonder I'm so that's the that's that's a fascinating thing. You just said like, what would Hitchcock and Kubrick embrace digital? Or would they do like these other handful of directors? Who would? No no, I was oh my god, I shouldn't film. Which Well, I thought I was gonna be one of those guys in film school. I was I'll never leave felt like, I'll never leave home. No. We talked about it before. It's like I love the control of digital. I love knowing I can sleep at night. I got it.

Alex Ferrari 56:57
Right. You don't have to wait the next day that you rolled the dice. Oh, was the gate? Was there a hair on the gate? Oh, was there

Albert Hughes 57:03
A monitor. You can see you could put your lead on there. You can see all the sudden and costumes react to it? Like no, I'm not into the mystery dog. Forget that

Alex Ferrari 57:12
Kind of greed. But you got but the thing is that both you and I had the opportunity to shoot 35 to shoot 16 to shoot Super Eight. To play with those things, you know, to do cross processing in the lab to like get image Get Image saturation with

Albert Hughes 57:28
And I'm nostalgic about I am nostalgic about it in one way. I like to emulate it. I like the look of it, it doesn't mean I want to use that tool to get the look, I want to use this tool it gets, you know, because this tool gives me greater comfort and control. And I can even do my blow ups in repose and stabilizations much more. Not easier. It just there's another word for it. It comes down to quality and control. And people can debate this thing about you know, you hear different people say that a 35 millimeter is 8k or 10k. And then you're hearing another DP tell me? No, it's nothing better than 10 at its pixels versus grain. Depending on the stock you pick, you know, so you know, at a certain point you're human I after four 4k is not. I even would even dare dare the audience member to know the difference. You know,

Alex Ferrari 58:21
You really can't tell the difference. I mean then now there's a little bit difference with the each boy that forgot what's called with the color grading. Or you HDR you get a little bit more cardid

Albert Hughes 58:30
I did a we did a past and and it's a trip, man, dude, it's a trip. And they bring it to monitors and they're coloring, Maxine's coloring. The standard one I forgot what rec 709 or whatever it is. Yeah. And then ACR. And depending on your TV screen, you can get the HDR version of the Continental. Right at first I'm like, Well, I don't understand what I know what HDR is, you know how it grabs the highlights and the mids and lows and balance it out basically in your phone. I know what it is in theory, but when I'm looking at this image that's HDR looks more contrasted and meets popping more. I go well, I didn't think that's what HDR was. But there's something going on there that I actually prefer that over the rec 709 or whatever, if I'm correct term it like that.

Alex Ferrari 59:16
But then you put your whole filmography is that you like Poppy stuff, dude, like look at back Blue Book of Eli

Albert Hughes 59:21
Contract, right?

Alex Ferrari 59:23
Yeah, yeah, you're crunching you're crunching the blacks. You're dropping the highlights. You're making things a little bit poppier. That's my style to love.

Albert Hughes 59:31
But the difference is, if you I don't know what time type TV you're watching, I'm assuming you have a huge TV. You're watching this laptop. Okay. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 59:41
I was watching it on this last night. It was great. Yeah. The difference? Probably. I shouldn't watch it.

Albert Hughes 59:48
Oh, no, no, no, no, we're talking we were just talking about that generation. Get ready for it. And we all we by the way, it's funny, but we all do have to be aware of that. Right? Sure. But like, if you look at the lighting style,

Alex Ferrari 1:00:00
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Albert Hughes 1:00:10
Episode One in two I chose is really young DP really dope, or he's a hippie dude. Long hair from Norway, right? Spain man, just an artist, right? But he needs more into ambient light, you know, fill the room and will smoke and not hard, light, soft light. And I started learning along the way that I actually loved the way it look. It's not what I've done with in the past Potomac contrast, it's harder to do contrast Hawaii style like that, if you're seeing lighting, oh, it's empty. So what I learned during the show was when you couple that with these old lenses, it can get dangerous. You have to watch out here right? They get to the third episode with Peter Demings shooter who I worked with him from hell and a bunch of other stuff all time. He's been around. He's done Austin Powers. He's done the scream series. He's done session. Last highway, David Lynch Mulholland Drive. He's been around. So the certain point we're shooting, and I can't wait for you to see three. We're shooting and he just goes Howard, trying to introduce a little hard light here. And I didn't know what he meant, right? Because I do have in my style guide noir lighting, this that shadows, silhouettes, and you need hard lighting for that kind of stuff, usually. Okay, so we wrap the whole thing and I see him at the premiere and I'm talking to him. And I said, I know what you mean. Now, moving forward, we have to be careful with these lenses. I love what they've done for the show because they they forget it up with that kind of more diffused look. But moving forward with this. I want to use more hardline I now know what you were saying that day Peter like thank you basically right? Because this is why actually when you see Episode Three you'll see what Peter Deming did with those lenses he's still within the same style of lighting but he's when he's like we're creeping into without using handheld I got out of handheld because I'm actually not a fan of it. I think me and you talked about it before it's like control to me it works in the John Wick world for certain things and Chester house he does it wonderfully because he's not doing it in that Paul. Paul Greengrass style. Just elfies More it's almost it's almost a Steadicam the way they use it for piano you know, we went a little bit more raw with a staircase scene because it's the 70s you can get away with a throwback handheld look you know, but you'll see if you go from episode one, two and three there is not one handheld shot and three there's a little into and there's a few Dutch tilts in there that I had to adjust and put in because I'm not into big into Dutch tails but that was that directors thing and you know, I had to adjust the other episodes because of it so I was able to go but a Dutch Tillman one that's what's great about TV you can Oh well that director did that is not necessarily in my style guide but I can course correct this a little bit for the audience you know

Alex Ferrari 1:02:49
You know it's it's interesting I shot with the Super Bowl stars back in the day on a red for the same reason you shot with the airy and these older indeed Super Bowl tires were like dirty from the 40s very hot like it was like I forgot last home made them I don't know who made them. But they were like it gave it a funky look because the red had this hard edge digital thing is very nice one Yeah, yeah, the very few the older ones had really hard edges. And I'm like I can't I can't I need something to soften it up. But then you start throwing a little ambience and a little smoke in there.

Albert Hughes 1:03:26
Yeah. You get you by the way to register to eat up smoke. Did you notice Oh yeah. Yeah, the first test we do like register on film The Red would just eat it up and make it go away in a way like your room morpher read

Alex Ferrari 1:03:40
Right and then when you start when you know how it is to smoke like the Tony Scott stuff. Like when you start Tony scouting it up a little bit. It's hard man it's hard to control the light yes hard and to try to match it for cuts. You

Albert Hughes 1:03:55
I mean you always you always run into that problem but if you if you have a good stage that's the only way to control it. Yeah, that's the only way you know what I'm gonna do on it. Yeah, no, you definitely have to have a good what do you call it's the effects guys dansette effects guys that do it. Then dp and gaffer keep their eye on it. The camera operators keep his eye on it to direct dress to keep his owner and everybody's like checking the level o's and now you can reference the other shot now thank God like back in the day you couldn't do that. But it's interesting with Peter does some of that you're talking about you'll see in episode three when you get there. There's a lot of shaft lighting come starting to play into it early on. Yeah, yeah. That's why I want to bring Kirk Well, I want to bring Kurt back because if you'll have us if you'll have a horse and we could do because we're lining up Episode Three there's a lot of screenings going on for Episode Three with collider and you know, there's other screenings going on around town and they're actually you know, hopefully this thing in Hollywood will be over soon. You know, I'm praying and everybody will be able to meet the the actors In the others, but for Kirk and I to come talk to you about three because I think you're you're gonna see a lot of stuff in there that we grew. We grew up. We grew up on

Alex Ferrari 1:05:14
Of course, you're welcome, sir. Anytime and I'd love to talk to Kurt as well. I have to ask you this one question. What was the toughest day on set? And how did you overcome it?

Albert Hughes 1:05:23
Oh, geez, man, you have a pro youth this is this is why we went three and a half hours a generation where?

Alex Ferrari 1:05:29
Well, no, well, we'll start wrapping it up soon. I

Albert Hughes 1:05:32
Was still wrapping it up. But I know, I mean, you hit me with something that I gotta say he's like, you saw it, because you you've seen the first episode. It was a toughest shoot day of my life is at party scene, that appears to be a winner, but we stitch together three shots. And the issue was, and I don't want to come off on kind here, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna try to thread the needle here. If you're conducting an orchestra, and one instruments out of place, you know, you have to have a little talk with the flute player. And if that instruments still out of place, you might have to think about replacing the flute player. Well, we had the flute player and the via violinist was out of tune. And I saw some early signs of it. And that the shot was way more challenging that it had to be okay. Because of you correctly plan it, you get your your extras in pods, you know, you're dealing with animals, you know, you're dealing with Arelis you're dealing with a lot of things in that in that shot. Um, you're hiding things, you're revealing things. You need the whole. And that's what I love about I wonder that's what I told the crew out in Budapest, and they were wonderful, by the way, had nothing to do with the Hungarian crew because they were fucking fantastic. Okay, it was either an American or British I'm talking about, okay. And they're supposed to be fantastic. What I said is what I love about one or is is you can get a lot done quickly. That's one thing you have the aesthetic thing is another thing which you know about, right? The thing the other thing it does, and most people don't give enough weight to is, no one has an escape, not the actor, not wardrobe, not hair, not makeup, everybody's exposed not to grips. Everybody's exposed, okay. So they hide, they get to this heightened sense of, they go into fighter pilot mode, because they don't want to be the weak link. And if you drop a one on them every other day, or every day, a mini one or a long run or, you know, you don't have to do it a lot, you're just doing it to save time on a certain section of the scene, or whatever. They your crew gets into fighter pilot mode, because they don't want to be the weak link. And they all super, they're super focused. Now if you do coverage, they start to unfocus because they know that you can come around a mistake. If an equipment piece drops. An actor flubs a line of hair and makeup, don't get the hair overnight and time that led to take continue. So it does this wonderful thing mentally to the crew. And so I have this scene that you were asking the question about, and by the end of it, it just felt like I went 10 rounds with Mike Tyson because I didn't have the I had the proper support of 80% of the crew night of 90% of the crew that 10% Really, really affected the day on what shouldn't have been an easy shot. But what should have been on a normal one or one day if it was properly done by everybody being at their best. But again, this is what post is for this is what I why repo why stabilize? Oh, why building hidden cuts. And this is why people you know, sometimes feel like there's some filmmakers I'll take swipe at other filmmakers like that's not a real winner. Well, it doesn't matter. It's for the audience to to have the impression you're doing something real time the audience doesn't know that. Just because you know that Jackass doesn't mean it's not about how you do it. It's about the result, basically, you know, so yes. The toughest day of my career.

Alex Ferrari 1:05:59
You can say the same thing about rope. That's not a real winner. I'm like, okay, but it's Hitchcock, and he was doing it in seven pots Shut the hell up. I mean, come on, shut the hell up. No, that's just desperate.

Albert Hughes 1:09:07
I mean, he still has the record. He kind of still has the record. But if you think about it, because it's per real during film, he has to record

Alex Ferrari 1:09:15
Oh, don't want that stuff. Ya know what I mean? He was insane. It was insane. But we can be done with that three hours on Hitchcock alone. So I want to ask you a few questions that are asked all the guests. See how if they've changed a bit since last you were here? What advice would you give? What advice would you give a filmmaker trying to break in today's business?

Albert Hughes 1:09:38
I remember my last answer, I think it had to do with talent. And sometimes you can develop your talent. But you have to know if you have the talent for what you're trying to do. If you're saying filmmaker by director. You mean director, not writer, not cameraman filmmaker.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:56
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Albert Hughes 1:10:06
Recognize if you have talent early if you do keep going if you don't, and you have to be honest with yourself, get out of the way is what I said in the last podcast because you're wasting space for people who need that space. Right? There's plenty of other jobs in this business that you can do. Breaking into the business, I think I would say just keep shooting, no matter who's watching a budget your mom, or you and your room alone. That's all I do. In Prague, I have 250 shorts that nobody's ever seen. I know. I said a couple Oh, I cut I set it up to you like, those are the ones I make available to my friends, like a handful them, I think five or 10, right? I don't, I don't know. What do you call a. You practice your craft. And the most important thing, it's like, I don't say this enough. It's like, you have to be willing to do it when nobody's watching. And still love it. If you love it when nobody's watching, you got yourself a plan.

Alex Ferrari 1:11:01
Beautiful, beautiful answer, sir. That should be a t shirt. I'm just saying.

Albert Hughes 1:11:06
Right under hustle,

Alex Ferrari 1:11:08
rather than a t shirt. If you can go back in time, and talk to Little Albert, what advice would you give him?

Albert Hughes 1:11:18
I now this is a new answer. I know, I think this is a new answer. Any question? The new answer is, when you're young, you think wisdom or being wise is goes hand in hand with being smart. It actually doesn't. I think Wisdom means to me, I don't know, the literal definition means to me, you learn from the past. And you adjust. And that makes you smart enough, you're smart enough to adjust, let's say. And you collect a note on top of these experiences, that you know what to do quite clearly in the future. And I would tell my younger self to go easy on myself. And to not take it so hard that this is part of the process of trying to become wiser in this job or this position. And that you cannot rush that you can't rush wisdom. Wisdom takes time. You can rush talent a lot like you've seen some flash in the pan boxers, lawyers, filmmakers, writers, entertainers filmmaker you that you've seen them like woof super talented, but they don't have the wisdom yet. But they're still super talented, they can rush their talent, you know?

Alex Ferrari 1:12:28
What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn whether in the film business or in life?

Albert Hughes 1:12:33
Up patients, you know the answer, you know, like, Yeah, but you know, like we, you have to hurry up and wait, but that thing I think we talked about last time, it's like, Don't get involved in every argument it takes place in front of you that has to do with your film. It's a waste of time with those people figure it out. And you know, poke and prod a little bit and I have a, I've learned how to do this, I've never good because I think I have a little bit of OCD problem, as I wasn't good at tuning out the room when you're in a conference room, and people are talking because sometimes you'll have your production designer and prop guy now on the same page. And they may be arguing off to the side, or the picture car guy might be arguing with somebody else. And you think it's an unhealthy thing to see an argument but it's quite healthy. And if you get involved in it is going to stress you out and you're gonna be able to your job, they're there to help you. And they're there to do their jobs professionally. And just because they're creatively arguing about something doesn't mean you need to get involved, because that can tax you. And what you need to do is have a way of just making it noise. And if you hear a trigger word, where you need to get in to stir the pot one direction you do that, but generally stay out of it because of the best idea usually comes out when the creative crew starts having a healthy debate.

Alex Ferrari 1:13:49
Very good. And of course the toughest of all the questions three of your favorite films of all time.

Albert Hughes 1:13:56
Did I answered this one before? Yeah, we talked about one I remember. Yeah, they remain the same. Okay, Midnight Cowboy is number one for a lot of reasons. Taxi driver got knocked out of the number one position long ago by taxi driver was it forever okay? It's been a cowboy. It's manbites Dog is second. And taxi drivers third,

Alex Ferrari 1:14:19
That's what we ran remember man, but because there's very few people who know that frickin film. And it is oh mazing criteria lays you

Albert Hughes 1:14:28
At a run menu at a run on we went on a run about it. Okay, because it's only inside baseball too. It is such a look at the bill it is but if you look at the film, there's no reason at face value somebody's looking at my list should believe that should be number two over taxi driver. Oh, and the reason is forget all the stuff that mean you know and I'll finish with this. It's the for the reason is it's the only film and the history of me watching films that made me question Should have my own moral compass. I was okay with a bunch of shit in that film into that one scene. And then I walked out, I draw the line there. And then I got it on criterion laser. And I watch the rest of and I go, Oh my God, it's not the film, it's me. It this is a statement about me. And that's far more important than watching a mentally deranged taxi driver, done well by my hero Scorsese, a film that shakes you like that, and rejiggered and by the way, Midnight Cowboy did the same and made me question a lot of things about growing up in what I saw with my mom, my dad, and you know, what's, you know, the, you know, there's a debate between me my daughter about whether they're to heterosexual men in love or whether they're repressed homosexuals in that form a bond, let's say, okay, and you can have that debate and I finally found the answer, and I was wrong. So that that film was special to me because a foreigner made it from England. John Slusher came to New York and it also blows my mind that this lunatic what's his name of the actor? John's right wing lunatic. Jon Voight like he's gone. He's gone so far, like almost almost into Nazi territory as my daughter walking in with her dog right now. Moving the camera with her Go ahead. Yeah, cuz me and him go along a little, you know, it's like I couldn't I couldn't believe that Jon Voight would do. You had to be liberal minded and open minded to do that type of felt, you know, so that that shocked me.

Alex Ferrari 1:16:34
Oh, and deliverance into deliverance to

Albert Hughes 1:16:38
I gotta watch it again. I don't know. Okay. I gotta watch that film. Again, because I haven't seen this up my childhood.

Alex Ferrari 1:16:45
And, and that says a lot about you. And that says a lot about you that you saw deliverance in your child.

Albert Hughes 1:16:52
While parents took me to inappropriate movies,

Alex Ferrari 1:16:54
Everywhere, but back then there was also only so many Disney films playing in the theater. So there was it was deliverance enough that

Albert Hughes 1:17:00
My dad took me. My dad took me to see all that jazz. And I distinctly remember the nudity and an open heart surgery. I recently saw it again and went on a bob posse run. And it's exactly as I remember, except for the nudity. When you're a kid, it's amplified. You're like, oh my god, you know? It's a but that's a fantastic film. And so it's cabaret like a deep dive on him. And he's, he's just amazing.

Alex Ferrari 1:17:25
Albert, it is a pleasure. And as always talking to you, where can people find and watch your new Opus, the Continental?

Albert Hughes 1:17:35
It's on peacock. The premiere episode was last Friday the 22nd I believe what I'm getting right. That was episode one. Episode Two is the 29th. Friday the 29th. Episode Three is October the sixth on a Friday and get to episode three everybody because it's building that it's all building towards how Winston gets that hotel. And it builds to an explosion. And I'm telling everybody that I'm going to see Alex again with Kirk ward. Our show running to this stuff in episode three in the near future.

Alex Ferrari 1:18:06
Very near future. I can't wait to have you back. And last question. Is there another? Are we going to keep expanding this John Wick world?

Albert Hughes 1:18:14
That's up to like Lionsgate into producers. I have no idea. It's so good to wonderful world. You know, you can go so many different directions with so many different crazy characters. I suspect they will they have the antidote Dr. missa ballerina coming out next year. And it feels like it's ready made 40 Plus it's fresh. It's not a superhero. IP, you know, rightly so it's whether I'm exactly and whether that's what's she you pointed out something I never heard before. That's an adult it never really. It's

Alex Ferrari 1:18:48
PG 13 IP, or PG IP. There's never adult IPS out there really like well, they should taxi driver right Pete? Like they should do another. Like, what? Let's go into that.

Albert Hughes 1:19:00
That's fascinating. That's fascinating. I think like whether I'm involved or not doesn't matter. I'm just a fan of the the show that we did. I'm a fan of the movies and they keep making them and they're good. I'll keep watching them.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:13
But as always, thank you for coming on. We can keep going. And I wish we could but we're going to come back with her and

Albert Hughes 1:19:21
We have a part two, we have a part two,

Alex Ferrari 1:19:22
We'll have a part 2. My pleasure as always my friend. Thank you so much.

Albert Hughes 1:19:26
You too.

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IFH 718: Licking My Wounds Writing The Mask of Zorro for Hollywood with Randall Jahnson

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Alex Ferrari 0:07
Enjoy this episode with guest host Scott McMahon.

Scott Mcmahon 0:48
We got to finish the interview I had with Randall Jahnson from Randalljahnson.com. Look it up on the website, get the link. But no, we were a part two because we ended because this is how bad I am. This is the never ending conversation by the way. Yeah, I hope it goes on and on. I hope there's like seven parts to it. But the thing is, the thing is I this is how bad I am if I was a real journalist, which I'm not, which, you know, explains a lot. Yes, is I wouldn't I would have, I would have taken the time to do lab and more research because on reading your website and everything because everything you were sharing with me was on your website. And but when you were telling me I was I was it was almost as if I was a new person, though, because I was like, Oh, really, I didn't know you work with all this, you know, you know, Henry Rollins and Stan Ridgway and you know, so that was exciting for me. But it was kind of neat, because being stupid as I was, is like I was hearing for the first time even though I could apply prep myself better by reading thoroughly through your website, as opposed to just glancing a few of the items when I first went to the website.

Randall Jahnson 2:40
Well, you can just peel the layers away like an onion. Yeah. So each week, you'll find a little something new.

Scott Mcmahon 2:48
Well, you can just peel let's go. So what we did was last we left off you were mentioning, you went to UCLA, for screenwriting. Yeah. So and then you had a college, you know, friend, who's working in agency saw you somewhere in the street or something like that. And you bumped into I don't know where the coffee shop. But anyhow, they got your script, because there was a whole breed of new young agents that were looking for some cool stuff. And they really latched on to a slaughter alley. Right? Vice. Correct. And from that, but we got sidetracked a little bit, because you said you were doing a lot of work with the the the exploding punk scene in the late 70s, early 80s. On the west coast, Southern California style. So which is huge leaps. Yeah, so and you know, we're talking about, we were going on about Standridge way and Black Flag, we will talk about Minuteman and the label that you created. So we kind of touched upon that, but I think it's still an interesting story. We can continue there. We were working our way on towards how you got dudes made or how it got picked up like your first scream, right? Like kind of stuff.

Randall Jahnson 3:55
Let's see, gosh, well, backing up a bit. Yeah, I ran into my friend, Howard, Howard Sanders, who I'd gone to film school with, and how he had become an agent to or was aspiring to be an agent at the William Morris Agency. And so when I ran into him, he was literally working in the mailroom at William Morris at the time. And he said, You know what happened to slaughter alley?

Scott Mcmahon 4:20
Oh, yeah, yeah. How bitten that give me perspective. Like how big was William Morris? At that time?

Randall Jahnson 4:25
Oh, Morris was huge. It was one of the established you know, agencies that have been in show business forever. It was so old as a matter of fact that I was there was a lot of talk about William Morris at that time that like, how interested were they really in the entertainment business? Because apparently most of their financial holdings weren't real estate. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So it was it was kind of an interesting thing. But at that time, William Morris ICM, CA were kind of like the big three UTA hadn't really emerged yet.

Scott Mcmahon 5:04
What was it? Where was endeavour at that point?

Randall Jahnson 5:06
They were they were there. I actually no, I take that back I think endeavor started with after a bunch of guys that I had met at Morris and then later ICM split, jumped ship and started an endeavor. Okay. Okay. Okay. And then endeavor became endeavor and ultimately came back and merged with Morris. Right. Okay. I mean, it just goes to show you what goes around comes around, you know that the sharks eventually devour one another.

Scott Mcmahon 5:39
They are they are it's an amazing machine and how much they survive and how they they find their paws and different things. Like it's taking them a while to get involved with the interactive industry as well. So slowly, yeah,

Randall Jahnson 5:52
Yeah, they're a little slow in the pickup. But I mean, UTA is really, I think hot on them interactive in the media, you know, new media, whatever you want to call it. Right now, I think but, yeah, I mean, you know, again, a game world, you know, on this whole internet thing. That that was just, that's like, you know, it was it was dull. It wasn't interesting to the established industry at that time. Right. And, of course, now, you know, everything is migrating into that. And so, that stuff is moving front and center a lot more, where it certainly has a lot more respect than it used to, right. You know, I would have meetings after I wrote gun. Again, I'm jumping ahead here. But after I wrote gun or was writing gun was still you know, I would go around and have meetings with a production company, or, you know, a studio or something. And this is what you've been doing lately. And I said, Well, I've been writing this game, this video game. Oh, no, I guess that's kind of an Yeah. People are doing that. Right. Yeah, it was just, it was it was it was something that didn't have any respect. Yeah. No. business and how you know, hello. It's got, you know, it's I mean, it's devouring the business in one sense.

Scott Mcmahon 7:16
Oh, yeah. It's a total. So sure. It's very different. Yeah. Please drink eat. Like it always pauses. It's ok.

Randall Jahnson 7:24
By the way that for those who might be listening, having a very delicious pumpkin flavored pumpkin chocolate flavored

Scott Mcmahon 7:32
Stout.

Randall Jahnson 7:33
Is that sort of stout, or was it? A? Yeah, it's a little it's a little lighter. For them stout. It's the that's all right. We'll, we'll figure it out.

Scott Mcmahon 7:44
When they come down. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. I'm gonna get one out for my style, and it's quite good.

Randall Jahnson 7:50
You know, Happy Halloween everyone.

Scott Mcmahon 7:52
Seriously, today. Today was sort of the first day that got kind of cold.

Randall Jahnson 7:57
Yeah, yeah. I went out. I went out running. Yeah, it was 36 this morning when I got up. I noticed second a while ago. Yeah, up and I went out running today. And it was like a little chilly.

Scott Mcmahon 8:08
Here comes winter.

Randall Jahnson 8:10
Yeah, sounds great. The skies are just in wasn't a cloud in the sky. Now. We've been laser on the changing and on the ground. And it's just it's beautiful, man.

Scott Mcmahon 8:18
It's been Yeah, real nice. And I love it.

Randall Jahnson 8:21
I love it. Cool. I know Mr. Surfer.

Scott Mcmahon 8:28
I actually had a great weekend surfing. No. Did you so I had no complaints there. So it's all good. Oh, so anyway, going back? Yeah, we got your friends.

Randall Jahnson 8:38
Yeah. So So I ran into Howie Sanders. And he was like, literally on the street in Beverly Hills somewhere. And he just said, Dude, what what happened was slaughter alley. And I said, well, the whole project fell through. I had to go back to the mailroom my male realm of at the Academy of Motion Pictures. And I was working there and I said, nothing's happening with the script. He said, well give it to me, because he said, I'm in the mailroom now at Morris and I can get it to some young agents there who are really hungry, and it makes me look good as well. So he said, believe me, he said, given the stuff that I'm reading there in the mailroom, which is what every aspiring agent has to do, he said there's a lot of people far less talented than you that are making a lot of money. So he said, I think you could you could get represented here. So I did, I gave it to him. And sure enough, a couple days later, I got a call from you know, the young agent over there and I invited me over to to basically meet and I signed with him. I met with actually a pair of agents there, Carol young cos and a guy named Rick Jaffa.

Alex Ferrari 9:56
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Randall Jahnson 10:05
Rick Jaffa is now a writer himself. And he and his wife Amanda silver, they wrote a wonderful movie called The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Most recently, they wrote the remake of the planet planet of the apes. Oh, wow. Or Rise of the Planet. Okay, yes. The big hit this last summer. But Rick was my agent initially,

Scott Mcmahon 10:29
Don't you consider like, a pocket client,

Randall Jahnson 10:32
I was considered a pocket client by a guy named Shelly Weil, who has since passed away. But at his very established agency, he wouldn't take me on as a regular client, but I was a pocket client based on slot rally. But he wouldn't take me on as he said, because on the on the merits of what he termed is an exploitation. Okay, movie. Okay. So that was a very different I mean, Shelley was very, very old school. So when I gave it to Howard Howard was like, this is an exploitation. This is just a great script. Let's go, let's go. And you know, and then he got it to Rick and Carolyn Morris. And they were, they were just starting out. And they remember Rick telling me, he read it. And he just after he finished the last page, he threw it in the air and just was like, it felt like, Yes, I can sell this, or I can write, you know, this is a, this is a really great writer. It's just one of those moments where that goes, right. It's a template, you know, it's seared into your, your memory. More, it's just like, Wow, great. I'm so happy. Somebody loves it that much. And so they signed me. And then they started sending me out on meetings right away, slaughter ally, was still under options. So they couldn't go out and sell it. But they wanted to sell me it was a great calling card that they could use to sell me as a talent.

Scott Mcmahon 11:53
So whether you're able to, like sell it as, hey, we got his projects in in option or something like that. So you gotta meet with him. He's hot. Right? Okay.

Randall Jahnson 12:01
Correct. Correct. And so Subsequently, I went out on a lot of different meetings with companies. I remember meeting with Johnny Carson's company, he had a development person at that time.

Scott Mcmahon 12:14
It was strange. Yeah.

Randall Jahnson 12:18
You know, it was it was just kind of interesting. You go out in there, basically meet and greets, hey, how you doing? I read your script really? Like it's cool. What else you got? That kind of thing? What did you have at the time? Well, it was interesting. I would didn't really have I had some vague notions. And I went into a meeting at a company called the VISTA Vista films, or Vista organization. And I after this was after a string of meetings with what you might call pod people. Okay, little there, the obligatory meeting where they're, they're just like, hey, like what we have here?

Good.

Scott Mcmahon 12:59
We can put on pause real quick.

Randall Jahnson 13:00
Sure. We're back live.

Scott Mcmahon 13:02
Cool. We just got back. Just finish up our dinner delicious. Again. You know, we're at Mars, like Oswego Mars Irish club. Anyway, we were talking

Randall Jahnson 13:13
Yeah. And by the way, that it's a porter, my pumpkin chocolate concoction. Not a stout, it's important. It's a lighter, a little bit lighter. So quite, quite delicious. Cool.

Scott Mcmahon 13:26
I gotta get one after this beer.

Randall Jahnson 13:28
Meal in itself.

Scott Mcmahon 13:33
So the question was, we were talking about, now you got your you're in with agency, and you're going on meetings, you know, and let's talk about that. Because that's one of the things that was exciting to see for a writer or who they do it for actors to like the actors, if you sometimes once you to meet with like the director of one hour program, ring programming for Fox or whatever, you're not necessarily auditioning, they just sort of want to meet you, depending on the agency. And same thing with writers and not sure how it works for directors and stuff. But same maybe same thing,

Randall Jahnson 14:09
You know, I mean, it's a lot easier now for directors because they can they can have a real either on a desk or they have a website and somebody can go right or stuck right away. You know, back in those days, I mean, our director would have to leave a reel and have like a big fat

Scott Mcmahon 14:25
and actual film reel. Yeah, or

Randall Jahnson 14:27
videotape or right. Yeah, big fat, three quarter inch videotape or something. Like ridiculous.

Scott Mcmahon 14:32
So when you went, what was your emotional? How are your emotions? That's one thing I never get like an in interviews is because a lot of interviews, the interviewers just sort of skip over like, oh, yeah, so I got this agent, agencies behind me now they start sending out of meetings, but never stop and say, Okay, can you recall sort of the emotions you had? Were like, I'm doing my first meeting and they tell you, I'm sure they get like a call or they tell you. Alright, you gotta be here at three o'clock. If you're going to meet with so and so at this production company, they want to meet with you and talk to you about this story or whatever. So what goes on on somebody's emotions at that point?

Randall Jahnson 15:10
Well, I used to get really excited or almost anxious about, you know, these meetings, because why do they want to meet with me? You know, I might, what should I have stuff? Ready? What? Right? What are they expecting? Do I have to pitch another story? You know, the agents would always say, no, no, no, just just chill out. They just want to meet you. They read the script, they just want to know if you have any other ideas. You know, it's just a it's just a meeting. Yeah, there's nothing, I used to attach a lot more import to the meeting, than was really there. And I used to get, at least initially very anxious about it. I remember just in particular, that like the meeting of at Johnny Carson's company, Terry, Terry something or other rent was in his head of development. I used to I ended up playing basketball with him at a later really later date. Yeah. But he was cool. And I, but I was very nervous about it at first, because this is like one of my first professional meetings and like, what am I say, What do I wear? What do I do, right? That whole thing, but you start doing enough of these and it's and you get a little more relaxed and just be your learn to be yourself. Right? And, you know, it's it's not, it's always a little bit of a dog and pony show to a degree. But it's, it's not. It you shouldn't suffer from performance anxiety for something like that. They generally, if these people have been doing their job for a while they know that writers aren't necessarily the most

Scott Mcmahon 16:54
polished presenters.

Randall Jahnson 16:57
I think they're not. Yeah, the most gregarious individuals now, you know,

Scott Mcmahon 17:03
Ron Howard's partner, Brian Grazer? Yeah, I saw him in an interview on iconic class on IFC, I think it was or, and that show is basically kind of combining two icons or moguls for different industries. And the they follow them around. And then it's like an hour show, but it was following him. So it was Brian Grazer, and his friendship with redstone at Viacom. Well, you know, yeah. So is there some summer Yes, on there. So, but then we're interviewing grazer. And he was saying that, about writers like he says, he wants he, he has his, the way they dress he goes if they're not, like disheveled, and like, look, like just like right off the street. And they he goes, he wants his writers to be the ones that are, like, socially awkward, that aren't dressed to the tee that are in like, like, they look like that's all they do is right. And that's sort of maybe it's a tongue in cheek sort of perspective. But he was like, he's he said he was suspicious of a writer that was dressed better than he was, you know,

Randall Jahnson 18:07
well, then. You know, then then he just lost out on a meeting with like Aaron Sorkin you know, or somebody. Right, right. Or, you know, come on, if you take a look historically, photographs of writers from let's say, the really, from the 50s 40s 50s, early 60s. You know, the Writers Guild has plenty of them on file. And in the in the guild home headquarters there. You'll see a lot of pipes. But by and large, they're a debonair crowd, right. I mean, Dashiell Hammett, who's one of the founders of the Writers Guild really named me the very debonair gentleman, you know, I mean, dapper these guys, these guys knew how to dress. It's sort of a sad state of affairs, I think what it's come to now, because we are really sort of a T Shirt Nation, but that I think that's more indicative of the population in general than anything. But for a long time, you know, the, the sort of the uniform was a trashy t shirt, and a really worn baseball cap of some sort with some obscure product label on it. You know, and, of course, jeans and, and a pair of, you know, some kind of a, you know, a tennis shoe of some sneakers, you know, of high tops or something like that, you know, or, you know, Frank Darabont was was fond of particular high tops, I think at one point in classics, you know, so it's kind of come to that and in a sense, I understand what grazer is saying, but you know, you can't make a blanket statement. It was just interesting to hear he's, you know, he's a surfer.

Alex Ferrari 19:59
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Scott Mcmahon 20:08
I know it's like a bump in the head. Like you're like, oh, so

Randall Jahnson 20:13
yeah, yeah. You know, but, but there is a certain, you know, it's it's a certain look, it's a certain vibe. And you'll get sometimes, you know, and they're usually clutching a lot of coffee, a coffee mug of some sort, you know, add to that. So they're in line at the espresso bar there. You know, we're in the, you know, you see him in Starbucks everywhere, any kind of coffee house? They're

Scott Mcmahon 20:40
like, it's a given like any coffee shop. You see in Los Angeles, there's a laptop with

Randall Jahnson 20:46
Sure. Screenwriting? Sure, I mean, it used to be in the old days, it used to be nope, notepad, okay, I mean, and I was one of them, I would go out, because, you know, writing is a lonely business part of the right for most of the time, and writers rarely got out, especially if you are under pressure to get a script done, or on a deadline of some sort. You just didn't get out. So the only way to get out really was to double up on function in business and what was like, get to his coffee shop, get some coffee, and you get some work done. And then you might vicariously experience real life process to get out of that, that those four those four enclosing walls, I don't know if it's, you know, yeah, I

Scott Mcmahon 21:33
don't know, if I've, I've done it a few times, just because at a shear, I had to I was like, I had time to kill, I was like, I gotta get some work done. And I noticed that I kind of shut myself off a little bit when there's a lot of noise, because I don't know anybody. It's okay, just put the earplugs in, and you know, your business. But when you take your moment, they take a breath or step away from whatever you're working on writing, it gives me a chance to sort of observe, you know, human nature and you and you never know what triggers that inspiration, like, you just see this, this, somebody ordering, you know, a latte, but the way they order it is bizarre that you're like, oh, that's might be interesting. But I actually found most of my success writing from for me, is I go to the public libraries, you know, it's just they have the Wi Fi but, but I tried to cut off the Wi Fi because it's easy to get distracted. But for some reason for me, the libraries was always a nice little getaway to get outside the homes to homart essence the libraries

Randall Jahnson 22:30
are great. I never, I never ventured to them to actually work, I would always go I would be there to research, right. And I would always be on a sort of a on a mission, you know. And again, these are days before the internet, I remember if I was on, you know, a couple of projects, I became a lifetime member of the UCLA Alumni Association for the sole purpose that I would always have library privileges. Well, that makes sense. And so yeah, I haven't used it now in a number of years. But the point was, is that I used to, and again, the days before the internet, if I was researching something in an historical period or something, I would go to the Graduate Research Library and just disappear. I mean, it would lead I would cross reference and go down this path and that path and that aisle and go to special collections and everything. And I loved it. I mean, it was fantastic. It was a really a was actually a physical investigation, right, you actually had to travel, you had to get in the elevator after you get to the card catalog and go upstairs or this or that or you know, find different things. And it was it was always a little bit of an adventure. And then there would be interesting things you would encounter along the way on the shelves and down the aisles and all that stuff. So I always, always really enjoyed that. Now, you know, I mean, it's all at your fingertips. It's crazy. So you don't do that anymore. But I never worked in a library. I always liked the vibe of it, but I never worked in and I preferred to go where I could observe people coming and going a lot. There's a place in in in LA, called the apple pan. It's it's down on Pico Boulevard, just just east of Westwood Boulevard and block. And it's a little horseshoe counter and an old bungalow that's been there since 1947. And it's family owned, and they have refused to sell out. And so it's completely surrounded now by tall modern. And here's this little 40 style bungalow on the corner. And it's still run exactly the same way. It was way back when in the menu who really hasn't changed the prices have gone up but basically they're making the same kind of stuff on the menu with a hickory burger, a hamburger cheeseburger, tuna fish sandwich ham sandwich. It's been on the on the menu since 1947. But I used to go there because I, I live not too far from it and it stayed open relatively late, it would stay open till midnight on on weeknights, and then one o'clock in the morning on the weekends and I used to take a corner seat and go in there with a note book, order a lot of coffee and I would go in about an hour before closing and get something to eat and drink a lot of coffee, make a lot of notes and then go home and work through the night. But I used to see tons of people coming through there and a lot of celebrities. I mean, everyone from you know, Warren Beatty was with a beautiful woman there. Gene Siskel, I met Gene Siskel, actually, right after the doors came out. Oh, really? Yeah. And he and Roger Ebert had interviewed or reviewed it on the show, and I happen to look up and I think, Oh, my God, they're seen Cisco. How weird is that? So I went over to him and introduced myself. I said, I wrote the doors. I said, Oh, my gosh,

Scott Mcmahon 26:05
well, he's a big music fan, or like, pop icon fan anyway,

Randall Jahnson 26:08
I didn't. I wasn't aware of that. But anyway, he was like, Oh, wow, that's really cool. So you know, so we, but we ended up talking less about the doors and more about the Apple pan, because he always whenever he was in town, and so it was like, What's your favorite thing on the menu? You know, there. Yeah. And I sort of said, well, I liked the hickory burger, and he liked the tuna fish sandwich. You know, it's a tough call on that on that. But it was fun. You know, I mean, some of the Lakers used to be in there, I would say a lot. A lot of movie stars kind of come in. And it would be you know, it's sort of incognito, and very, very low key. But it was fun. It was fun to see. And then just lots of very interesting where people and then of course, the guys that have worked in their old row. They've been there for and for ever, in a couple of the waiters, you know, I mean, just holy cow, you know? So there were lots of stories even about those guys, even

Scott Mcmahon 27:02
now that we're now that you're appear and then are in Portland, do you find yourself going out and observing sort of human behavior appear anything or?

Randall Jahnson 27:13
Well, it's really tempting to and I really should, when I do get the chance, but I don't step out like I used to, to go and work. And that's basically because I got a family now and I want to be at home with him that night. I don't write excuse me, right through the night, like I used to, I used to work after getting all jacked up on Capitol coffee. You know, I would work until I would hear the paper delivered, you know, on my doorstep at about the driveway about, you know, five, six in the morning or so. And then I'd hit the hay and sleep until noon or whatever, you know, get up and kind of start the day, procrastinate, day away until 10 o'clock at night and start writing again. But so I don't get out like I did. And, but when I do go out and I you know, go to the you know, find drinking establishments and like this, and whatever it's like, yeah, brings back a lot of memories in terms of wanting to do that. And if you go to any, you know, coffee house now and at least in Portland, geez, you walk in and everybody's on then hovering over their screen. You know, you never see anyone with a notebook anymore making no right or all hovering over their screens, you know? Yeah. And it's so it's very difficult to tell like, Who's, who's real and who's not I used to do that. I used to go in and see a lot of people making notes or writing or something about like, you know, is he really Is he real? Is he someone? Is he not? Right? Is she really good? A good writer or not? You know, she's cute, but Was she an actress is she knew that kind of thing.

Scott Mcmahon 28:57
There's friends that these girls would tell me in in, in LA, it's like, they would always meet these cute guys whose waiters or whatever they are. And then sure enough, they're all actors, you know? And they're like, and like, as I got older, and they got more professional are like, Oh, geez, you know? Yeah.

Randall Jahnson 29:16
Well, it's funny getting back to these, you know, these rounds of meetings that I was that my new agents were sending me on, you know, as a writer. Well, once I started getting paid as a writer, you just didn't get out that often. You know, I mean, it was you were you were working. And I took it very seriously. So I was, you know, always working in angsting away over my stuff. So to actually go out on a meeting was, was like, hey, wow, I'm actually going out and mixing with society. Yeah. And invariably, you know, you'd go to these production companies or studios and meet with an executive there and they would always have a beautiful young The woman working the front desk. Right,

Scott Mcmahon 30:03
right, right.

Alex Ferrari 30:05
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Randall Jahnson 30:15
They all did. So yeah, and because that that was also it's never stated, but it's implied if you have a hot chick, you know, as you're working as your assistant or, you know, receptionist, then you are you too are a sexy individual, you know, your cache, your, your relativity into importance in the business is, you know, your stock goes up, right, so, but invariably, I would always meet these wonderful, and a lot of them are just really, really great. And I would end up like, you know, these were the only women I would meet, so I would be unabashed about like asking them out. I made a fool out of myself a number of times. Interesting. But my roommate at the time, used to kid me, he's like, Oh, you had a meeting today? Did you ask anybody out? As a matter fact, I did. Yes.

Scott Mcmahon 31:15
Any of us who ever coming writers are find themselves in opportunities for meetings, any words of wisdom you can give us be yourself,

Randall Jahnson 31:23
you know, now,

Scott Mcmahon 31:24
I mean, in the dating, oh,

Randall Jahnson 31:27
just be yourself. You know, I mean, it's different, it's different. Now. You don't, you know, that's not your only outlet. You know, I mean, you're on if you're on, on the on the net, you know, you're gonna find people via Facebook, the, you know, dating services, eHarmony, whatever, you know, there's so many different ways now to get hooked up without ever leaving your, your four walls, right. And that's that, to me, this was the lifeline this was the only way out, you know, you had to get out, it's actually have a meeting or go to the Apple pen and have a cup of coffee and hope you sit, a beautiful girl sits next to you. But that rarely, rarely happens.

Scott Mcmahon 32:10
Well, it's funny, I think my actor friends would tell me it was very difficult. They say it's difficult to date in LA, because it's sort of implied or understood that everyone's here for themselves and their career and then self absorbed, going so to find time to, to, you know, to share with somebody else is very, very difficult. And why it's difficult to date there. So, that made sense to me for maybe the acting circles, I don't know, but Well, everybody's

Randall Jahnson 32:38
here. But you know, I think I think it applies across the boards, you know, everybody's there to become famous, you know, let's face it, they're looking to, to, to climb up. And so you're, you're thrown in into this into this sort of, you know, whatever you want to call it a pool of people who are social climbers. They can be shallow, they can be sincere, they can be artists, they truly want to make art, but they don't know how to do it. I mean, there's everything's all kind of thrown together. So it's really hard to read people at first they come across very sincere. But you know, sometimes they're not, you know, in writing, these are just some of the hard lessons of human behavior, you just sort of go through in your 20s when you're when you're trying to make it that just like, Oh, God, can I get your heart broken a couple of times and like, oh, have really lousy experiences. Yeah. But it all becomes great. Yeah. You know, goes into the, the, into the hard drive of your head for fodder for later scripts. And stuff. So you become a student of human behavior, if you will, however. Yeah. I had known what the Northwest holds. You know, for one aspiring writer. Back then, I would have come up here a long time ago. Oh, interesting. I think yeah, yeah. And, I mean, of course, I'm married now. But I've found that the girls out here, you know, just in chatting and stuff. There's so much more friendly and open and sincere than they were in LA. Right. And I think it's just because you know, Portland doesn't have the stigma of Thai people coming there to be famous. Nobody comes to Portland to be famous. I don't I don't think unless maybe you're a musician or something and you want to become one of the Decemberists or something you know but you know it's it's you go to New York or you go to your you go to LA and that's where the real big business centers are. However, that is all changing, but it's very

Scott Mcmahon 34:49
right. But yeah, the ones that need it that certainly that yeah, just constant approval, or so to make it I

Randall Jahnson 34:56
mean, look, I mean, they're always there are insecure, insecure people everywhere. There's always you know, everything is sort of relative that we're talking about a certain archetype in a way but, but by and large, I just found people, actually in the Northwest all in all been very much more open and sincere. And yeah, I agree. I think they're great. Great to hang with.

Scott Mcmahon 35:17
Yeah, there's a definite sense of independent spirit or just pure heart. Or, you know, and their perspective is, ya know, yeah, art for art's sake are just weird for weird. It is, and you're like, Okay, I go with this.

Randall Jahnson 35:33
Oh, gosh. Yeah, I mean, back in those days again. And also, when I was simultaneous with all this, I was in heavily into the music scene, though. So I did have more of an outlet because I was going out a lot late at night to see punk bands play and go to these really shitty little clubs. Inside, you know, I mean, a place called the VAX, I remember. The, the while there was the odd club and Silver Lake, there was Al's bar downtown. I mean, these were, this was downtown. This was way downtown. I mean, this was no man's land, right? And 8182 or whatever. And it was unbelievable. And it was nothing. And it's all changed. Now. You know, I mean, the people that were living there, but but I would invariably see these very interesting art damage women with Moon tans. And I have a really heavy duty Goth look, or sometimes they would be tattooed. It was almost pre tattooed kind of thing. But you know, Ruby, red lipstick and pale white skin, and then just like, you know, have this really bored art vibe about them that I just I I'd love for the long, line and sinker. And that's commonplace up here now. Yeah, except that they're not, as John just in are much more open and friendly. Here. A little more tattooed and pure Steven now than they weren't? Sure. Anyway. Yeah, I digress. Yeah. To observe.

Scott Mcmahon 37:10
I want to I want to, I want to divert to that later, when we get back to. So you're going on these meetings? What was the SIR, the first break that says, We want to hire you? Or, you know, we're doing this with slaughter alley, or, you know, what, what was the first after all these meetings were like, Oh, my God is actually turning into something?

Randall Jahnson 37:31
Well, it's, it's a good question, because it is Oregon related, actually, and I'll tell you about it. Tell you what the connection is. I went to a meeting call at a company called the VISTA organization. And they were, they were independent. They had a bunch of Canadian money, I think is what it was. So they didn't have any ties with the studio or whatever. And there was this guy, Miguel, Tata Flores, was the head of development there. And he wanted to meet me. So I show up. And this is after I've had a number of meetings with pod people, you know, who again, very friendly Oh, yeah, I really like your stuff. But it goes nowhere. Right. Right. Right. You know, and you just and you kind of exit these meetings and go, What was that about? Well, you know, did he really liked my stuff? Or is he just saying so or what? You know, what, what is this? Yeah. So I finally go in. And invariably, these meetings were, you know, in clean offices and really, you know, tasteful, tastefully decorated furniture was surrounded you I had a meeting with a young, aspiring, well, a young producer, he was the son of a studio head of certain studio, and I met at his bungalow. On the west side, it was at Fox actually. And I remember in our meeting there, he had a glass coffee table. Okay, that was had and we were there were these two couches that were perpendicular to each other around this on the corner of this glass coffee table. And on the table was this bowl of peanuts. And so as we were having our sit down and starting to chat, he reached in and like started, grabbed a bunch of peanuts and started cracking the shell peanuts. Yeah, shell peanuts. Yeah. Like they were, you know, like, he was at a ballgame. And just letting the shells just drop on the thick shag carpet beneath I'm not making any effort whatsoever to clean it up or or or not make a mess. He was deliberately just dropping it there. And eating these peanuts as we were talking and I thought that was the strangest thing.

Alex Ferrari 39:50
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Randall Jahnson 39:58
Um, and I've often thought about that it was an image that I will never forget because it made me think is, is he trying to show me how powerful he is by the fact that he's going to shit? Yeah, he's just gonna let the let the help grab it and pick it up afterwards or was he just clueless, you know, is that the way he was raised? You know? It's very, very odd. So I had all these weird meetings. So then I come to the VISTA organization come to meet Miguel Torres. And I walk into this office, and it's just chaos. It's just packed with scripts and books, and there was shitting. There's toys all over the desk. And, and I remember seeing my first view of him he, he was working. He was at his computer, which was at that time was a big box boxy computer called a K Pro, which was made in San Diego. Yeah, okay. And were manufactured in San Diego, because at this Kaypro computer, and he looked up over the top of it, big, black rimmed glasses and said, Randy Johnson, yes. And he said, Oh, Miguel, tada Flores, you know, I read slaughter rally a fucking love it, what else you got? And we just sit down. And I just felt like, oh my gosh, you know, here's a nut. But he's a sincere nut. And he's all about making movies and telling stories and weird stuff. And it was just fun. We just collect immediately. So he said, What else you got? And I just sort of threw out punk rockers in the middle of Wyoming. And he says, I love it. Come back when you have a story. And I did. And I came back a couple weeks later with a little more story. And he said, I like that keep coming back. Do

Scott Mcmahon 41:49
you have an outline or a treatment or anything? It just

Randall Jahnson 41:51
was, I it was it was just the germ of a notion that ultimately became dudes. But what it was was that I had been going to so many punk rock shows and it struck me as being a very tribal. Oh my god your hair. You know, Randa, nice to meet you. Yeah. You just want to visit guys.

Scott Mcmahon 42:22
What are you doing? Adam with my buddy All right. All right. We're back. Sorry. We got a little. I had no idea Frederick was here. I thought he left already. But it sounds like there's gonna be a big party here Saturday night for him. So he came down to say hi, and introduce me his friend. So there you go. He's going

Randall Jahnson 42:44
to do that. And every subsequent interview, I think we should just he's just going to show up. It's like the court jester. Cards.

Scott Mcmahon 42:53
But you know, he's personally so big and joyous. That's why when he gets here, like everybody knows him. He's like your norm.

Randall Jahnson 43:00
Yeah, totally. I get it.

Scott Mcmahon 43:02
So we're past where we are. Well, I

Randall Jahnson 43:05
was said back. Meanwhile, back at the guy at Vista. Yes, yeah. Miguel Flores. Yeah, what do you got for me? And how did you come up with that? Anyway,

Scott Mcmahon 43:14
we're just at the punk shows we're just something Well, yeah, that's what

Randall Jahnson 43:16
I was saying is that I've been going to all these punk shows you know, in the whole thing It struck me so the Hardcore scene in California at that time and was was very was very tribal. You know, you had your social distortion tribe, you had your your black flag tribe, you had the Dead Kennedys and and in each each sort of faction, each tribe had their there were subtle differences in their in how they looked. Right. You know, the Orange County punks were a little different from the Hollywood punks, the valley of La Valley punks were different from some of those guys, you know, you had a lot of different skinheads or spike heads, and, you know, that whole thing, but it was just a it was a very interesting thing. And then plus you had the bands were almost embracing the kind of a Western kind of quality and especially Standridge when you're well Well, sure. You know, Stan, I mean, when he was he was still with wall of voodoo at the time, and swallow voodoo. Although they were not punk, they were on the edge of that kind of art damaged New Wave experimental sound stuff. And they had a medley of spaghetti western stuff they used I remember seeing them the first time you know, not only did they cover Johnny Cash, his ring of fire, which was their signatures, showpiece. They really deconstructed that, you know, and they had a big booming Mark Moreland, who was their guitarist had just this great 20 guitar sound that evoked the the old old school Will instrumentalists you know, the guys have backed up Johnny Cash and those kinds of guys back then. It was just a Western sound to it, you know, but they incorporated in their show they had a medley of, of spaghetti western songs. So they they remember seeing them first time, and they play to hang them high. And the good, the bad and the ugly and some other thing too. And it was like, wow, this is frickin wild. I love this. It was just it was really great. So they were the Dead Kennedys had covered like Rawhide right from the TV show and the Vandals came out of Long Beach they had a thing called Urban struggle, which was all about the the punkers at the Cuckoo's Nest and in Orange County having like a big battle with punkers from you know, another plant. Yeah, it was all done like a cowboy. Kind of twang.

Scott Mcmahon 45:52
I do. Yeah, I do recall those oh sound quite a bit. Yeah. Because it was it was that the guitar itself that uses sort of big, semi hollow hollow body guitars, the big Right, right, Gretz guitar, you know, the 50 style guitar, then sort of like has that artwork to sort of like you said it was that rock and roll, Hot Rod subculture that kind of bled over where it's Yeah, big Twain, the source of the sound

Randall Jahnson 46:19
you know, I mean, that simultaneous with all this was like the blasters and this whole rockabilly revival right, you know, thing up the alley cats were not the alley cats, the stray cats were the very commercial, sort of tip of that, of that sort of phenomenon. But that was a that was happening all at the same time. And there was some overlap with the punk stuff or the blasters, especially But, and this is, there was a band called The plugs that were really great came out of East LA. And in Los Lobos then and all those all those the NX then in this embraced all those things with the hardcore, and then, you know, X, they're all They're all crackers, you know, they're they're all hillbillies, you know, they love they love all that country 20 stuff from way back when Yeah, social distortion evolved into the absolutely Mike Ness, a huge country fan, because they recognize that, that you know, that those guys, they were the they were the outlaws of their day. And a lot of them as in the context of the time, you know, when they were recording for Sun Records, or whatever they were, they were, they were breaking new ground, right. This was it wasn't like the the, necessarily the the mainstream music. This was, like a whole new sound, you know. So anyway, going back to all of this, I just had seen like this sort of, kind of knew western landscape in the punk scene, and, and so, but at the same time, I mean, Punk was primarily an urban or suburban, you know, phenomenon. So I thought, Well, gee, how funny would it be to take some of these hardcore punkers? You know, we're like, all all full of aggression and piss and vinegar, and throw them out into the realities of the West. Drop them right in the middle of Wyoming or Montana or something like that, and see what would happen. And so that was the germ of the idea. And then I kept coming back and urged on by Miguel kept coming back every couple of weeks or so with a little bit more of a story a little bit more of a story. So you're writing

Scott Mcmahon 48:27
on spec at this time, and completely, he's nothing, no agreement, nothing. He just said he expressed interest. He just

Randall Jahnson 48:33
He said, I like that. And he knew he couldn't option slot rally at the time, because it was under Options. It was somewhere else. He liked my writing a lot. And he liked this idea. And this sort of he thought I was on to something. So he just kept urging me on. And so finally, there was another guy there a guy named Hank Palmieri, who has subsequently passed away a surfer, great surfer group, a Malibu, really bright guy, really brilliant guy and such a good, one of the best people I've ever met in the business. And he was Miguel's partner at the time, too. And so between the two of them, I just thought these guys are fantastic. I totally want to be in business with them. And it they kept urging me back and finally there, there was a writer strike looming. This is 1985 and there was a writer strike looming. And so there was a certain amount of there was a ticking clock and we had to get this get something done, you know, before the strike kicked in. Because God knows who how long the strike was going to last. So finally, what they were you in a guild at the time? No, I wasn't. But that was the thing in order if they made a deal, I was going to have to get into the guild and Okay, well, thanks. So both basically what happened was, I went in there one day and Miguel says, Okay, you got we got enough. Let's make this let's make a deal. Let's make this happen. And so they, they made the deal. It was a rush rush thing, and basically I got some money, and they just said we can't communicate with you now.

Alex Ferrari 50:02
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Randall Jahnson 50:11
You know, because because as soon as the strike is going to kick in, but we want you to go ahead and start writing the script, so maybe after week week after the strike is over with, we'll have a script. Right. Got it. So the strike, the strike was actually settled in a couple of weeks. It didn't last long at all, comparative to subsequent strikes. And so, in the meantime, though, I went out on an adventure of myself out into the contemporary West, because I hadn't been out there since I was a kid. So I went out to Arizona, Utah, Nevada, you know, did this kind of long sweeping tour, you know, and just wandering around I went to, I was really into ghost town, so I wanted to visit ghost towns and, and it was out when I remember this very clearly, I was driving on a on a highway heading west towards Ely, Nevada. And suddenly I got the whole very clear picture of what the movie was all about. But it involved jettison a lot of the story I had already worked out. Yeah, but I just like I knew how to do it. I suddenly saw it, I knew how to do it. And so I got on and got in a phone booth somewhere. And I called them and I remember getting Hank on the phone. And I said, Hank, I got it. I got it. I got the story of finally, you know, and I know what it is. And I explained it to him. And he said, Well, yeah, it sounds kind of good. But what about the other stuff? And I said, No, no, forget the other stuff. Forget it, forget it. This is it. I know how to do it. And he was really kind of nervous about it. But he said, Okay, he gave me this approval to go ahead and do it. And so ultimately, I came back from this trip and it was really eye opening for me as well. It was really great. I went to all these different places that it was just evocative in so many ways that I came back, I wrote the first draft, and they loved it. And they had they started sending it around and we got a director attached pretty early on and you know it Penelope Spheeris, had read it and she was coming off of what she had done. Her claim to fame, of course, was the decline of Western civilization. Right. But she had only done the first one at that point. And she had done another several other sort of low budget exploitation films, one for like Roger Corman, and stuff, you know, and so, but she was kind of like the punk rock queen, right? And I remember Miguel telling me, he said, Well, Penelope came in and she impressed the shit out of us, and we're gonna hire her to direct this movie. And she said, he said, she came into the meeting, and said, basically, there are two people that can direct this movie. Me and Alex Cox, who did repo man. Okay, which was the kind of like the other. Yeah, you know, and Alex had been a teacher's aide at UCLA Film school when I was there. I knew we had a couple of people friends in common a little bit, you know, and so I knew knew him a bit, or knew of him, certainly. And anyway, so that was that was out, they started they, they things started rolling very, very quickly from that point on, and then once dudes was in production that led to the doors and other things. Okay, let's,

Scott Mcmahon 53:29
let's roll back here. So, you are what kind of what was the, your agent's perspective of you? When they you told them like, hey, these guys are interested in me developing the story. Do you mean what what is their reaction? Like okay, kaki. Keep going,

Randall Jahnson 53:48
Yeah, sure, of course, you

Scott Mcmahon 53:49
know, they don't want to knowing that you're not on like, any sort of contract, you're just on spec.

Randall Jahnson 53:53
It's not at this. At this point. Yeah. They were just saying, okay, you know, go for it, let them let you know, if they're interested, keep them, keep them on the line, get the story done, you know, get a story out there that you that they're gonna, that they're gonna like, they weren't real mettlesome at that point, they were just sort of taking a back seat. The one agent that I had Carol, I didn't necessarily trust her in terms of, of feedback. Is this a good idea? Or is this a bad idea? You know, so I wouldn't test the waters with her. Rick was a different story. Rick had a better story since I felt they both can sell very well. Okay. So I didn't consult Carol in the sense of like, currently think this is a good idea. Should I do it? Or I mean, should I develop the story? It wasn't like that at all. I was just I knew this was the story that I wanted to tell. And she was going to make the deal for me when this when the time was right. So there's a difference there. You know, a lot of people go to their agents and look at them all. Just as if they are a studio executive or the head of a production company and, and, and think that they might have some artistic taste, I think that's dangerous, that's dangerous to a degree to trust your agent as being someone who really has a taste. Gotcha, their their deal is to sell, you know, making a sale, that's what they're about. And that doesn't necessarily mean they have taste, it means they can take a product, once they see it, once it's done, and they can sell it. But it doesn't necessarily they, that doesn't mean that they can necessarily see it as it is forming, you know, now there are others who can, and have that ability and have that sense of like, that's a very good idea. Go for it. I like where I like how you're thinking, you know, but that's not always the case. So what just let that be a warning sometimes, too. Yeah, you know,

Scott Mcmahon 56:07
if you're Yeah, if you got yourself representation, for sure. Now or what? You were just working so at the mailroom, I was

Randall Jahnson 56:15
I was still I was still in the mailroom. And then finally, when that when they pulled the trigger on on that

Scott Mcmahon 56:21
the first was it the first paycheck that we were, well, that first payment the were you able to take your trip, like take extended leave from the mailroom to do your

Randall Jahnson 56:30
that was it this time it was it was enough, it was substantially more money than I got on the slaughter alley option. And okay, and the stuff that I had, you know, I mean, at the time, it was like, she's I don't know, it was like $25,000 $40,000 Something like, that's pretty good. Yeah. Are you kidding? Cheese man, it was more money than I'd ever seen. So it was definitely enough for me to finally say, Okay, goodbye to the mailroom. I'm gonna go for it. And also, at that stage, I had to become a member of the Writers Guild. So that's the way because VISTA was a guild signatory. And I had to become a member. So you have to drop $1,500 initially to become a member and then get on the health and, and pension plan, and whatever. But then that's it. And then they take 1% of your, your earnings, you know, on top of that. So suddenly, I was in The Guild, and it was, it was a whole new it was a whole new world. You know, I was a professional. I was truly a professional writer at that point. And it was you

Scott Mcmahon 57:37
gotta guild meetings or something just to be Yeah, they had.

Randall Jahnson 57:44
At this time they had, they were having some what they called outreach meetings, because they knew the strike was looming. And so they were having very small gatherings in, like, certain guild members would open up their home to a couple dozen writers turn and they would come in and somebody from The Guild would come there and talk about the latest contract negotiations and what was to be expected and and inform us a bit of what was going on. My roommate, my former roommate. At this time was Gregory Wyden, who wrote Highlander. Oh, and

Scott Mcmahon 58:28
just the first one.

Randall Jahnson 58:29
Well, Greg never has to work a day in his life early because his name's on everything else subsequent to that, so you've Alexa paycheck for it. But he did other things, too. I mean, he wrote Backdraft for Ron Howard. And, and that's kind

Scott Mcmahon 58:47
of how he was dressed when he met grazer. Now it's kidding.

Randall Jahnson 58:52
But Greg got into the guild, just a bit before I did, I think, and off the Highlander deal. And so he and I were were basically sort of rookies of so we were going to a lot of these these outreach meetings together. And I remember this initial one, I was blown away, because there were maybe a dozen people at this at this one meeting. And one of them was like Paul Mazursky, who was well known writer, director, you know, at that time, former actor as well. And Julius Epstein was there and this little this little guy who's you know, about four feet tall and about 80 years old? It's one of the writers of Casablanca.

Scott Mcmahon 59:35
Archie, that's right, it sounds familiar.

Randall Jahnson 59:37
And you just go wow, that's where I was like, suddenly it's like, Oh, my God. I'm and these are, these are like names. You know that. I mean, real pros. I mean, these are this was like an amazing thing.

Alex Ferrari 59:50
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Scott Mcmahon 59:59
Now Backing up real quick, so exciting when you got in. When you first got the offer, like II realized it was happening there, they're like, Okay, let's make this happen, we're gonna give you the initial payment, you're gonna have to get in the guild, like, I'm assuming all this stuff happened very quickly in a few weeks or a month or so

Randall Jahnson 1:00:16
no, it was like the super past. It was within a couple of a week or so.

Scott Mcmahon 1:00:21
So emotions, like did you did you get a chance to like go out with friends or anything or girlfriend and say, let's celebrate, just have like just a little toast or anything that you did that you like any type of little ceremony said, Whoa, this is cool.

Randall Jahnson 1:00:36
There was a group of us that came through the film school or the theatre arts department at UCLA at the same time. And actually, in retrospect, this that whole era, I've been told by other people from the theater side, the drama department that it is generally regarded as being an extraordinary period from the from the theater arts department, the UCLA Theater Arts Department was included film and drama. So they were sort of segregated, if you will, but two different buildings, but basically, we're all under under the roof of theater arts. Right, right. But out of that time, I mean, there was Tim Robbins, Daphne Zuniga, Alex Cox, Greg Wyden. I mean, Dan pine, Neil Jimenez. I mean, there were so many people that we're going, having huge success, like, I mean, very early on and would later go on to, you know, having extraordinary careers. Yeah. But in my particular circle, it was Greg and I had been roommates, we had a guy named Mike pencilled, who was aspiring producer, his girlfriend at the time, ended up becoming, it's hugely important in my career, because she was a development exec at Columbia when they had the doors. So I threw her was able to get in and have a meeting about that, but that's a little bit further down the line. But Greg had grown up in in Laguna Beach, and a good buddy of his Don Knowlton was also in the theater arts in the drama department. So he knew the number of people there anyway, there was a circle of you know, four or five of us that were all writers and in or producers, aspiring producers, that anytime anyone had any sort of success we would go out and celebrate and usually it was it was you know, wasn't anything like you're painting the town red right. But we would always gathers Yeah, we did. Yeah, we would gather there was a place called Cafe Figaro, which was in West Hollywood, it was on Robertson. Right. And right, we're almost dead ends to Santa's Little Santa Monica Boulevard. And it is George San, I remember this very well, because there's I met Demi, Demi Moore, in the bookstore there across the way after one time, but we would always convene at Cafe Figaro, and have drinks and dinner there. And it was like a real to serve a working. Yeah, working man's place. You know, they always had cute waitresses there. And it was just a place where, you know, lonely writers would go and score, you know, so that was that was the kind of thing that we would do. It wasn't you know, I always had a sense that, you know, this stuff was fleeting, you know, and it was never going to be, you know, you just that there was always going to be challenges further ahead, just let it go, like, wow, I've made it and it's, you know, there's no turning back, is it? No, it's not like that. Because even once you've sort of, quote unquote, arrived, there's always stuff going on, that you've you know, you get wracked with self doubt, you can write something that isn't received well, all these things that can sort of trip you up at one time or another. And it you know, Hollywood in general is a place that just one of the fuels that runs it is insecurity and fear of losing one's stature of losing one's job losing losing face, you know, and so that that informs a lot of decision making and a lot of, of, you know, artistic decisions, right? Fortunately, you know, but at that time, though, still, I was on cloud nine, man, I just frickin I couldn't believe it. I was just thrilled. And then later on, it was funny. It wasn't it wasn't that strike because it didn't last long enough. It was Strike and 88 that I started seeing, because I was a strike captain, the guild had asked me to be a guy that would have to call okay, you know, here's the phone numbers of a dozen writers so we're going to pick it 20th Century Fox tomorrow got it, you got to call all these guys and tell them to be there, what time they're going to be there and this and that. And in the 88 strike, you know, you have we have these just these massive pickets, one studio at a time, so there would be hundreds of writers out there today, you know, marching up to the end of the block and then back down, up and down and bagging them act really angry, shake your signs.

And so invariably, you know, you're there these two columns you're going in you're passing guys walking in the opposite direction, you know, when you see their faces so it you don't even see guys that I've always admired a Harlan Ellison, Richard Brooks, you know, great writers and directors and then I see Ray Bradbury. Bradbury had been a real inspiration for me ever since. Oh, God,

Scott Mcmahon 1:06:10
we talked about college, your high school wrote,

Randall Jahnson 1:06:12
this is going back to high school. Right, right. You know, where I was leaving, like I start reading Ray Bradbury short stories when I was about 12 or 13 years old. And he I did my high school, term paper, English term paper on his work. And then he came down and spoke to at a local college where I was out at MiraCosta, where I was, and I went to see him at the time. And I was like, I couldn't believe that was actually a living breathing writer, like one of my idols right there. I was sitting in the front row. And afterwards, I went up and just told him, I did my term paper on you, and I, you know, in English this year, and he said, Oh, great. Here's my card, you know, write me. I did. And I think he asked for a copy of it of the report or whatever. And so I sent it to him. And he sent back like a whole little package of of stuff that he had autographed and personally printed stuff. And I was like, Oh, my God, I couldn't believe it. So cut two years later, I come to LA, and just my very first, you know, month at at UCLA. And I went into, I knew where he lived, he wasn't too far from where we lived. It was one of the first things I wanted to see was like, Where does a real writer live? And I found his address down in, in in certain part of West LA there. But But anyway, he was signing books one time at a bookstore in Westwood. And I went in, this is like, like I said, my first month there. And I went up, and I was just, again, sort of in awe and just sort of freaking out. And I and he said, Yes. And I said, Well, we've met before, and whatever. Yes, yes. So I want to be a writer. And he said, Well, do you write every day? And I said, No. And he said, then you're not a writer. Next. I was like, Oh, I was so angry. And it's like, wow, I felt like I don't know. But yeah, it was really, really made me mad. But it was right, you know, I had to get get my ass in gear to crack and get cracking. And so come the strike and 88 I'm out there on the picket line. And here comes Bradbury walk in opposite way. He's got this giant head. He does. He's got it. And I see him coming. And so I stopped. And I said, Hey, Ray, and I said, you know, you will really remember me, but Bob, like. And he was, oh, it was very friendly. And he said, and I said, Oh, isn't this cool? Here we are on the strike line. We're writers, you know, we're peers. But I said, I still don't write every day.

But that was, you know, that was the kind of thing it was, it was a thrill to just see some of these these people that had grown up and I was, you know, in awe of and and to be now sort of marching with them to be part of that same organization to be in the same arena was thrilling.

Scott Mcmahon 1:09:22
Yeah, yeah. That's cool. That's the stuff like, I'd like to haven't heard a lot of interviews with a different writers. And they sort of just kind of gloss over that as if it's like, just where the interviews go, is. They just sort of Oh, yeah. So I got my agent and I got this deal. And then we moved on, I had to work on this story. But no one ever stopped and, like, wanted to know those holes intricacies of just the personal motion that people have that says, Well, this is trippy, this is really crazy that I'm able to do this or I'm meeting somebody.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:57
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Scott Mcmahon 1:10:06
And, and then because it it reflects on your own sort of, I guess self worth worth, and you're like, how am I here? You know, that kind of thing. And I think it's cool because it sounds it makes all this experience human.

Randall Jahnson 1:10:19
What? What I just recall now was after the dude's deal happened my other roommate, Mike penciled he said that this I guess I'll set this up for the dudes. He and a very good friend of his and subsequently subsequently become a friend of mine. Got a wonderful guy named John Hart, who had gone to USC film school and was a cameraman. And he John, we had met John because John shot Greg widens project to which was this year 16 millimeter film, okay. And John was just this. He was from upstate New York, he was just completely different from any of us that had grey cotton come from California, you know, and just really, John was just tremendously fun. But he and Mike kidnap me was one night after this happened. And I remember this, they took me, they took me down to we went out, we wait way east, downtown, right over the LA River. I was like, Okay, it's like Fourth Street Bridge or something like that was right, right, needle bridge, whatever. But at this point, this was no man's land. There was no one out there. It was about two or three in the morning. They they pulled out a bottle of champagne, and they popped it and they said, here's to, to me. Man, you know, to say, you know, you're, you know, the beginning of a new career and that that staggered may that was, that was a wonderful my choked up. I had tears running down my cheeks at that point, because it was so cool. You know, it was just, it was just a wonderful gesture. And those guys were, you know, like, you know, what can you say? I mean, I didn't, not much to say but but drains. Yeah. There was a, there was a diner down there a little bastion of light. In the in that No Man's Land of you know, art lofts and stuff at that time is called Gore keys. And it stayed open. I think it might have been 24/7 You know, and they took me we went there afterwards after we did that. And I remember eating that they had like Russian food and stuff. And I remember eating there after that. They always had hot waitresses there too. It is LA. Oh, God, all these aren't damaged. You know. And that was yeah, that was a pretty neat night. That was That was great. So it was it was very it was monumental fan. You know,

Scott Mcmahon 1:13:08
I thank you for sharing. Because you're I mean, that's, it's cool. It's it's cool to hear. I mean, it's cool to know that. Yeah, we're all human. And it's real like that. I'm sure everyone has the those who are working professionally have these little moments where they feel like just like there's a little fleeting moments of Whoa, that's feels good. But then then but you know, next day you got to get on and work but I think it's a perfect place to stop the podcast. We've been talking for a while and I think it's a great segue into the production of dudes and then how you got to how you got how you got to a chance to write the doors and all that stuff. Yeah, but I think this is fantastic because we've covered in the first part sort of where you started how you got into punk rock and and why that music scene was important to you and now we're in the second phase. Yeah, well,

Randall Jahnson 1:13:57
let me just sign off a bit once we sign off I mean, I got into punk rock by accident really? I mean, cuz I was I was writing a script that was a murder mystery. I think I mentioned this before there was a murder mystery set in the punk rock scene of LA and and it wasn't because I was really into punk rock it just that I thought it was a very exotic place that said a murder mystery. Okay, and so I started attending all these shows as research you know, and for you know, for the for this stuff and I had made friends with all these bands because I started contacting them and I would read what you know, the the cool bands, what the cool bands were, and there had been some that were associated with you at UCLA Film School as well. So I started I knew of them and whatever. So that's how I really got in started getting into the music. The the script panned out. I could I finished it I wrote like 25 pages of it or 30 pages of it and then I put it away but I haven't somebody

Scott Mcmahon 1:14:57
got a hold of me because I think actually I saw a T A show that had that premise. Oh was that was like it was like Cagney Lacey or something. Some kind of show back then. Yeah, that it starts off at a punk show, where people were a mosh dancing, and there's a murder. And then the whole scene surrounds the whole punk rock scene and murders anyway. Yeah, it made it to. I know, Murder She Wrote. I've seen that premise. Yeah, I'm assuming that somebody found it.

Randall Jahnson 1:15:23
Yeah, maybe. So maybe, but what, you know, whatever the case was, I mean, that. That's why I began investigating a lot of this, you know, initially, and then the music. But, I mean, after the script panned out, I still had all these contacts with these bands. And I was kind of, I started really digging the music. And yeah, and so that's, that started then leading to the notion of like, Wow, maybe I could direct some music videos for the broken and have any kind of money, or have any kind of money. So as I maybe we can just do cheat and do stuff on the complete fly here and see what happens. And so that's, you know, but that's another story as well, because I was doing all these videos working with Black Flag, Henry Rollins, writing, writing dudes that don't, and then starting the doors thing was, it was all like happening, it was at once from about 84. To to 8086. And even, you know, beyond that was a very high, highly busy time for me.

Scott Mcmahon 1:16:28
So crazy. I was skateboarding at that time. And obviously, that the skateboarding culture bled into that, sure. That was the music of the time. Like all the older kids, were, you know, into the punk scene, and especially southern California. And, you know, it was different, cuz we're like, I don't hear this on the radio, like, you see, like, this is such a subculture than what is being out there on TV. And it was sort of like the first opportunity of like, independence and skateboarding was definitely embedded with the punk scene, especially I think, with the Z to Z town boys. And you know, that whole long beach scene and Venice beach scene and all of that, no doubt all of that and the look the way or the attitude. And then, but that's how I, you know, obviously, my upbringing, a lot of other Southern California kids that are in the scene, probably saw it the same way so to know that you were making and interacting with those bands where I was just like a bystander of a kid just picking up whatever records I can at back then Tower Records or yeah, what's it called lagers, pizza? Remember that? Yeah, sure. Anyway, I think a lot of my first albums she's, you know, the best thing in my thing, my dad eventually, some of the stuff that I was going to punk shows and like, I come back with, like, the pamphlets and stuff. Yeah, I'm only like, 1213 at the time. So he's come he's looking at this going. Yeah. He's like, he was really disturbed, like, what is going on with my son?

Randall Jahnson 1:18:01
I remember seeing a picture of the Sex Pistols and some was like Parade Magazine. And they were like, you know, warning about the new horrible trend and you know, rock and roll or whatever and use extra pistols and they look like some it's just like, oh, a freak show. thing. And I was so horrified. Like, oh, no, rock'n'roll isn't coming to this because prior that this is, of course back in like 7778 When I was just, I was 77 was my senior year in high school. And I hadn't come to I wasn't going to go to LA until my junior year I transferred up from community college. So I was still in kind of the fishbowl of Carlsbad, California. But, you know, I was listening to Yes, the blues right Emerson Lake and Palmer and the prog rock arena, and he Well, yeah, the prog rock, you know, yeah. And the arena rock kind of stuff. And then this whole thing of the Sex Pistols. Oh, it just sounded just sounded wrong. And I was so intimidated and threatened by what they look like and everything and then then I get up to LA and it was just it all changed, it changed. And all that stuff just still resonates with me hugely. Because it's it's a it's a represents an approach to creativity. That is so resonant and still today, you know, I mean, really, it's, it's about doing it yourself. Yeah, it's Yeah, DIY man DIY. This was the original DIY stuff. And but that's another story and we'll pick that up.

Scott Mcmahon 1:19:38
I think we'll wrap it up for tonight. I was good. Felt good. Well, welcome. We got a little cameo from your friend Frederick. And yeah, where he takes off. Oh, sure. I think he's like here every night before he takes off.

Randall Jahnson 1:19:53
This is the launch pad. I think that's what it is.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:56
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Scott Mcmahon 1:20:06
You just basically made the deals and had your little, your buddies help you celebrate the sale of the dudes. And I wanted to get into sort of the production of dudes and sort of lead our way into the doors. But what I wanted to tell you is like, about a month ago, I was down in Portland and I came across this like, you know, weird books, sitcom bookstore thing, but they had like, a bunch of array of like, unusual books in there too. And they had a book was like, Punk in the cinema or the American cinema.

Randall Jahnson 1:20:40
Was it floating world where you were out? And it's like in fifth?

Scott Mcmahon 1:20:45
Yeah, it's like, just Yes. It's kind of just fifth and I think it's yeah, it's just right off near is near like Chinatown. Just yeah. So have you ever floated? Yeah,

Randall Jahnson 1:20:56
they have a lot of counterculture stuff. Okay, so that's a great store. And Jason, leave Leviathan Leviathan,

Scott Mcmahon 1:21:06
I think says Yeah, well, that was your last name.

Randall Jahnson 1:21:11
So wonderful guy. Very friendly. And that's his store. And I love that story. That's actually got me really excited a lot about comics and

Scott Mcmahon 1:21:20
Oh, really? Yeah. I kind of stumbled into because it was I was looking for the 24 hour Church of Elvis. Oh, yeah. And I guess it used to be there. But now they've closed whatever it used to be there. Now. It's just this hole in the wall, right? This like weird display that has these buttons you asked you to push? And you can't hear anything. Can't hear anything. It's like the most weird sort of like useless.

Randall Jahnson 1:21:44
Yeah, we're so where is that now?

Scott Mcmahon 1:21:45
I it's just on the other side of Burnside. So what it goes Burnside, there's kuj. It's like yeah, it's fourth fifth. It's right around the edge of

Randall Jahnson 1:21:55
Chinatown. I didn't realize it was it was I thought it was further up north it

Scott Mcmahon 1:21:59
might have been but they changed it and that's where the location so right down the in the corner of that is that come book counter? Culture? Bookstore. Yeah. But I was in there. And I saw this book. It was like punk, history Punk in the cinema, or whatever it was. And there was like, halfway through fools full spread is like dudes had like a full spread of like your, of the cover of the movie and like little synopsis, and it's really kind of cool. Get out of here. Really? Yeah. I thought you might have no, no, I did. Okay, so we had to get that for you for Christmas.

Randall Jahnson 1:22:31
Oh, wow. Just Oh, crap. I didn't know that. That's great. Yeah,

Scott Mcmahon 1:22:35
it was. I mean, it's a pretty thick book. I mean, it goes through like a bunch of stuff of like, about punk reference or anything related in cinema. And this, you know, it wasn't just like little like, picture and blurb. It was a full thing. It was a full page picture. One side and other side was the right up. So anyway, I'll let you know what's out there.

Randall Jahnson 1:22:56
Oh, wow. Thank you. Well, it's very interesting, because, you know, it was dudes was directed by Penelope Spheeris, who, who really got on the map with the decline of Western civilization, which was her her documentary on the LA punk scene, in really circa 78 7980. You know, with x and fear and the germs, you know, she had a lot of a lot of footage of interviews with Darby cry, she would be dead, you know, in a very short amount of time. When and that was one of the compelling aspects of the of the whole movie, but so Penelope had a lot of street cred, you know, in terms of the punk scene, right.

Scott Mcmahon 1:23:44
Was this their first feature after the documentary?

Randall Jahnson 1:23:46
No, no, she had done. She had done actually two or three more films, narrative films, before dudes, but she'd done it from Roger Corman. And one of them was called the boys next door, which starred Charlie Sheen. And a young, a very young Charlie Sheen, and that, you know, at that point, Emilio Estevez, his brother had all the street cred, or at all that was sort of an established star because especially in the punk world, because he had been in remote and Repo Man, where is that? Well, this was repo man. And dudes came out basically the same year, or they were being filmed almost simultaneously. So this was 8580. Was it let's say it at 8686 87 Right? Yeah. Dudes was actually shot mostly during 86 As I recall now, and but it didn't get much of a release until 87. Then it was barely you And what's interesting too, is that d dudes has never come out on DVD. And we're actually in the process of tracking it down right now and see if we can get it released on DVD. But what makes everything so difficult is that there has been a chain of bankruptcies declared by the whatever entity that that acquired the rights to require the the actual funny and finished film, because they dudes was made by the VISTA organization, and they made three or four films, and then they were bought by someone, and then that company folded and then they were bought and gobbled up by another corporate entity, and so on, and so on and so on. And so becomes very difficult to actually follow the the chain of title right before. And you know, and what's fascinating is that this is relatively recent history. I mean, you know, as a 19, you know, this was a film that was released in 1987. Right? And yet, they're, they're serious doubt as to who owns it. And imagine, you know, we're gonna figure that that shows you in one level, how fast these corporations you know, bye, bye. Come and go. And they come and go, and the rights to things or get gets very confused right.

Scott Mcmahon 1:26:27
Now, I think I remember, well, we saw the film on your writing class, because one of your students was able to get a copy or you had a copy of No, I had a copy of it. Okay, so you basically,

Randall Jahnson 1:26:37
yeah, basically, what happened is, I fortunately, I'm glad I did, I purchased a laser disc of it when a disc was this big chrome planter, you know. And when I moved up here, actually, a friend of mine, who was coincidentally the engineer on, on two of the records that I put out on my record label back in the 80s was an AMI record label. Yeah, blue yonder sounds and

Scott Mcmahon 1:27:10
how long did it last year?

Randall Jahnson 1:27:12
Well, it lasted about three years. You know, a couple of years, three years, something like that, you know, I mean, you can. But Steve sharp, who engineered the album by the fifth Fibonacci, which was the first release, and then the second one by a band called slack who were from Portland, Oregon. Well, Steve was originally from Portland, Oregon. And then he moved back to Portland, Oregon, when I moved up here. I went to go see, my friend, Stan Ridgway, who was performing at Mississippi studios. With us, this is like in July, you know, we moved here in June of 2007. And then in July, Stan came through town, and I went to go see him. And while I was waiting in the beer line at Mississippi, I hear, Hey, Randy. And I did not recognize them. But it was Steve sharp. And he now shaves his head, whereas back then he had big poofy, 80s hair. Right. And, and so he, Steve sharp and said, Oh my god, Steve, what are you doing here? And so anyway, long story short, Steve has a media duplication company and a recording studio and everything here in town. Yeah. So. Wow, great. All right here. Okay. It's a beautiful thing. Thank you. But you will see I finish with right on anything else? We're guess? We're pretty good for now. Yes, thank you. Yeah. Don't forget us. So, Steve, I said look, I've got a laser disc. Is there any way of getting something duplicated on you know, and so basically, we got we're able to get a DVD copy of dudes pulled off of the laserdisc the digital copy there, but the quality isn't that great. You know, it's not like still looking at the original thing and it was shot by Bob Richardson who has gone on to become in Martin Scorsese's dp and he was Oliver Stones DP for the for the doors and many other films and he's an Academy Award winner. He shoots beautiful stuff and always has and so you know, I don't think our little you know, rip off DVD was, you know, doing it justice, but Right, right. You know, it worked for my class.

Scott Mcmahon 1:29:47
That was cool. We'll take a little break or eat your back. Let's see here.

Alex Ferrari 1:29:54
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Scott Mcmahon 1:30:04
All right, well, let's talk about your production of dudes. So boom, you realize it's happening, right?

Randall Jahnson 1:30:12
Well, what happened was that I wrote my my first draft, which was really long, it was like 140 pages long or something like that, you know, in generally a screenplay should be coming in at tops, you know, 120 pages, right? And even a little less than is better. But mine came in it was it was this epic, epic punk rock Western.

Scott Mcmahon 1:30:34
I shoot for about 50 pages now. Yeah. Yeah, and I say add action scene here now. Right.

Randall Jahnson 1:30:47
Oh, thank you. But in the case of dudes, then they got a director involved. You know? I guess I got notes from Miguel Tata Floros. And Hank Palmieri, and producer herb Jaffe, at that, at that stage in which I then, you know, we all knew we had to cut it down. So I worked really hard and just really condensing it and getting rid of any anything that was fat. And then Penelope Spheeris, came aboard. And they were talking it was the script was making the rounds at the studios as well. They were trying to get a studio maybe further on board.

Scott Mcmahon 1:31:29
Because so they're already in the midst of producing it, but they want a little bit more back. Yeah, yeah.

Randall Jahnson 1:31:34
You know, what happens sometimes is that an independent company will say, Okay, we've got this, maybe we can get somebody to come on board more. And

Scott Mcmahon 1:31:46
I'll adjust. No, no, I just met, I moved it closer, you

Randall Jahnson 1:31:49
get to throw to throw some more money at us or something. And I was told, you know, it got out to Columbia, Columbia was kind of interested in it. And actually, Ridley Scott, I was told Ridley Scott had read it was very interested, or were somewhat interested in it. That's obviously not enough to go to get behind it and make it but because, you know, ultimately, it was interesting. He goes and makes Thelma and Louise not that much later. But there were you know, there's kind of a little bit of similarities to it. But anyhow, they started taking meetings with potential directors for it. And to quote Miguel Penelope came in and met with them. And he said, she impressed the shit out of us. And Penelope told me later to that she went in there and she said, look, there are only two people on the planet who can direct this me and Alex Cox and Alex Cox was already making repo man at that stage. She said, it's got to be me. So I met her and she gave me some notes. And then I did some refining. But the great thing about Penelope was that she just she really loved the script. I mean, she really didn't want to change much at all. Not not in rare. Yeah, it's pretty rare. It's pretty rare. And in quite, quite frankly, I mean, Penelope was just, you know, she was just really wonderful. She was so welcoming, and encouraged me to be on the set as much as possible. She invited me at every stage of the process to be involved. For example, once she came aboard, and they started having casting sessions, she invited me to a casting session to come in.

Scott Mcmahon 1:33:43
Now, did you have those three sort of main characters? Well, sort of the three guys, three dudes. But did you when you're writing have actors in mind? No writing,

Randall Jahnson 1:33:56
okay, not really. The only guy that I had in mind was the villain. And that was leaving, play by leaving. The villain was his name was Missoula was a nickname. And it was played by leaving but I wrote it with leaving in mind because he was the lead singer of fear. One of the bands that was featured in the decline of Western civilization, but I had seen fear a couple of times, and I thought he was very very menacing. And he was a real kind of there was a redneck cracker kind of quality to the sky that was behind all the, the the intimidate intimidation, there's a real biker kind of going lately was very, you know, really provocative presence. So I hadn't really with him in mind, but the other three guys biscuit and you know, Grant and Milo. I didn't have anyone in particular

Scott Mcmahon 1:34:57
line. So when you saw that when you go to the casting show And then you're

Randall Jahnson 1:35:01
well, I had I mean, I had in mind a character, right, you know what I wanted. And it was interesting because we on that particular day that I was allowed to sit in, or she invited me to sit in. We saw read for the part, we saw Tim Robbins. Kyle McLaughlin, and Kiefer Sutherland and Michael Dunbar who was, you know, sort of 70s glam rocker, you know, in that, who wasn't quite who wasn't right. And all those guys gave interesting readings. But the one I was most impressed with, was a keeper. Right? But Penelope didn't go for him as much because she felt he didn't have a sense of humor. And that was interesting to me, because I never felt that Grant had a sense of humor or should have had a sense of humor. It was the the movies, comedic quality came out of out of situations where you have these punkers you know, a city of, you know, floundering out and the Wild West, you know, the modern West. And that's, that, to me was a funny situation. And if there was any humor in the Express by either of the characters, it was out of biscuit. It was this big slobbery. Yeah, kind of a lovable but, you know, a lummix. Right. And so, but we disagreed on that and she she just didn't feel it was right. But ultimately, you know, we was played by Jon Cryer that cast stone prior because he was coming off of the John Hughes movies pretty pretty. He was pretty big. He was Ducky, ducky. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know. So,

Scott Mcmahon 1:36:54
and I don't think kefir hadn't made stand by me yet, Hattie. No, he had not. Okay. So no one really kind of

Randall Jahnson 1:37:01
he was he was a known quantity. Yeah. You know, they knew about him because of this, you know, certainly the the, the his father but but they didn't. He hadn't quite proven he had bit parts. I think that, you know, prior to that. And it was shortly after that, that he started, you know, taking off.

Scott Mcmahon 1:37:23
Because he was like, stand by me then. Oh, Lost Boys. Yeah. That's kind of cemented that, sir. Very. Yeah, he was a good heavy.

Randall Jahnson 1:37:31
Yeah. Well, he was good. And you know, he had that he had suitable answer. And he physically he was menacing. You could be menacing. And that's what I wanted with, you know, with with Grant, somebody could go head to head with leaving, you know, in a way. And then you'd have the lummix of biscuit, who was based on a took his name from a lead singer of a band called the big boys who were skate punks from Austin, Texas. And interview Randy biscuit. Turner was there. And he was awesome. That's awesome. I only saw them once. But their records hold up really, really? Well. They were great. And then Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago, I think but the big boys were were rockin and then ultimately then she also cast flee. Right and the chili peppers as Milo the ill. ill fated Milo which was interesting because on one level, because flee had filled in as bass player for temporary basically player for fear. Oh, okay. So in a sense, backing up leaving, and I thought it was always funny that I hear was, you know, the movie contest? The lead singer was killing his bass player.

Scott Mcmahon 1:38:48
Now, that was real quick, cuz I don't think we're gonna lose anything here by just giving the premise of the movie. Right? It's like no, no,

Randall Jahnson 1:38:57
basically, in a nutshell, it's about three New York punk rockers who get fed up with all the urban blight living in the city and decide to drive cross country to California. Yeah, because they want to go they want to meet the Go Go's or something. It's they want to get away from Jersey and they want to get away or you know, Queens, whatever. And what happens then is they're traveling across the country. They're camping out in Arizona, and then they get attacked by this group of rednecks who are who are out killing illegal aliens or whatever they put kicks. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 1:39:39
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Randall Jahnson 1:39:48
So they find these guys and wrong place wrong time and place wrong time. And so one of them gets killed and the other to the surviving to grant biscuit Without events there, buddy, and go on the trail of these killers, when no one else will write and write. And so it's a it's an epic Western. So they try, they try and track from Arizona and ends up at least on the script, it ends up in the mountains of Montana. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it was a, they were crossing all the way. And so I traveled all around those areas. I wanted to, you know, actually make it really authentic to make sure they're going to real rise and all of that. But they meet characters along the way that come and go. And Catherine, Mary Stewart plays a random a young woman who has a tote drives a tow truck, right, okay. And she comes out to their aid a few times. And then she actually gives them a few tips on surviving and gives him some guns and and I wrote the I wrote the, the role for a much older woman, I wanted to see that it was, you know, it was Grant getting involved with with an older woman. So it would be it would have been like, you know, Kiefer Sutherland and Barbara Hershey. That time, okay. But, you know, Hollywood being what it is. They ended up casting Catherine, Mary Stewart, who was in I think, The Last Starfighter, you know, and who's actually quite lovely, and she ended up being playing the role of Jessie and gonna fill in that role pretty well. Yeah, not she did a good job. Yeah, she broke her arm during the production of it actually went out to the set when they were filming outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. And by the way, another great thing about Penelope, she asked me a lot. She said, Where where should this take place? Or do you have any ideas where this location is and this and that, and I directed her to some of the places that I had found specifically in in Arizona, in and around the Verde Valley, which is, you know, just north of Phoenix about about 100 miles or so it's in between Phoenix and Flagstaff. It's very close to Sedona. So there's some great old ghost towns, interesting places out there. And so, I went out there to the set, she welcomed me to come out. And so I was there for a few days while they were shooting on location and the date the first day I got there and finally got to the set. There was a scene where they were riding horses through this beautiful, beautiful setting, right? Right on the edge of Flagstaff and she fell off a horse I think, and this is like I'd been there like five minutes and she fell off this horse. The horse stopped abruptly and she went like ass over Yeah. Saddle pommel and broke her arm. Arm. Yeah, but she was quite the troopers. She She toughed it out, she got that thing, put in a cast, and then they covered it up with a long sleeve.

Scott Mcmahon 1:43:06
So some of the shoots she was just tightening it. Yeah, she was

Randall Jahnson 1:43:09
hiding it. And she got back on the horse and did some more writing and all sorts of stuff. So she was shooting press me quite a bit crazy. Yeah. You know, movies show must go on, you know.

Scott Mcmahon 1:43:19
So you got to see the whole movie. And, you know, you're like, the first movie. Yeah, like holy cow. And then,

Randall Jahnson 1:43:26
and I wanted to be there every every day. Right, but I couldn't. Because I got the job and the doors. And I had early. Yeah, I had to start.

Scott Mcmahon 1:43:36
Okay. Okay, that's perfect. So not only because I think let me double check here. So you said, so you're doing that. Hold on, sir. I want to just make sure I get this in Chronicle. Chronicle.

Speaker 2 1:43:52
I can't speak chronicled. Yes. The

Scott Mcmahon 1:43:54
chronological order here.

Randall Jahnson 1:43:57
It's the dead guy speaking.

Scott Mcmahon 1:44:00
Or it's just me making fun of my mother for so many years. Okay, let's see here. Come on. There we go. So it says here because this is all true. IMDB.

Randall Jahnson 1:44:19
on IMDb, then it's true.

Scott Mcmahon 1:44:21
Okay, this is good. Okay, so yes, you're working on dudes. So How and where did the doors project come up during the filming in the production dudes?

Randall Jahnson 1:44:30
Well, again, Hollywood is a streaky business. So you know, there it's, it's all about hype. And in the anytime you have something going and heading into production that creates a fair amount of momentum. So suddenly everybody's interested in you know, what you're doing and what your next project is and all of that. So I had some real heat based on that because again, the script had kicked around the studios as well, right. It was The there was some interest there. So the doors project had been languishing for years because they had as I think I explained before they had there were quarreling parties that were involved. Okay, finally, Bill Graham, the rock promoter was able to put all the quarreling parties together in one room and get them all on the same page and get them to agree to make this particular movie. It was a huge bit of politics and

Scott Mcmahon 1:45:28
all this stuff was going on prior to even showing up right. Okay.

Randall Jahnson 1:45:31
So it was finally set and was set up at Columbia Pictures and Columbia was where Ridley Scott had his deal. And so that's how I think dudes got circulated out there. And one thing right, you know, so they had read it, and they were aware of it now, simultaneous with all of this is that my, one of my roommates from film school, Mike penciled was dating. A young executive at at Columbia, a development executive named Jude Schneider. And Jude was the executive who inherited the doors project. So it was her job then to go out and find your appropriate writer for it. So she asked her boyfriend, my old roommate, Mike, doing good for this. And Mike, who was aspiring to be a producer at that point, too, as well is just saying, Well, you know, he knew a lot of writers around but also, you know, he said, you know, Randy, I was Randy them. And so I got the call, and I knew Jude anyway, just through Mike Yeah, slightly, but not, you know, not real close. So, she got me out to come out and talk about it with her and then she said, I want to, I want to put you together then with a producer on it. Okay. And the producer was a guy named Sasha Harare, who was an Israeli computer magnate made a lot of money in in software. Way back when and he had bought his way onto the project. He had never produced anything before but he had bought a strategic piece of the pie. He bought the sync rights to the doors music, which Yeah, no one can make a movie with doors using DOORS music without pain. Right the Piper was Sasha

Scott Mcmahon 1:47:26
well that for once I close that door

Randall Jahnson 1:47:32
close the door and the doors Yeah, that's cold though.

Scott Mcmahon 1:47:47
Yeah, good reason. All right. So so very, which is that? Yeah, to think like the producers who bought the rights. Harry Potter, right. That just opened up.

Randall Jahnson 1:47:58
Yes, it did. It's just like, it was like a ghost. That's pretty funny. No, you can't do that. But, you know.

Scott Mcmahon 1:48:02
Funny. All right. We got a ghost. Yeah. So sorry.

Randall Jahnson 1:48:19
Jim Morrison coming. So Jude facilitated a meeting for me to meet the producer. Sasha he was he was apparently the lead producer at that point. So I met with him. We had lunch, and that he speak English pretty well. No, actually have very thick Israeli accent. Yeah, he tended to mumble a bit. And so it's

Scott Mcmahon 1:48:52
kind of hard to tell if you're getting good response. Oh, he must have been like, I don't know about Oh, I thought I

Randall Jahnson 1:48:57
told you. I thought it was over after 10 or 15 minutes. I mean, you know, yeah, I thought it was just going to be a very long lunch because I felt like I was shooting blanks. Yeah, I was not seeing anything that made any sense to him at all? Well, let

Scott Mcmahon 1:49:09
me let me back up on that. Real quick. So you know, you're going into this meeting, you know, what the project is about is just the doors. So how much preparation do you do before you go into the meeting? In terms of like reading up about the doors? Or do you have something preset in your mind about this is how I would tackle the story or

Randall Jahnson 1:49:27
Well, it's helpful. Yeah. Because they, when you're going through an interview process with producers, so it's essentially it's an audition piece. Now granted, they usually have read something that you have written prior to that. But they're also listening to agents and, and studio executives and and listening to their recommendations on who they should meet and all that. But when it really comes down to it, it's about chemistry. And it's about, it's about your vision.

Alex Ferrari 1:49:57
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Randall Jahnson 1:50:06
You know, so granted at that time, unlike today where there is a, you know, there's a dozen biographies out and Jim Morrison Yeah. Now, at that time there were no biographies, except for no one here gets out alive, which was written by Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins, which I read, but I was not impressed with it for a variety of reasons it but it struck me as being very sensationalized and what wasn't footnoted? That's always if a book isn't footnoted, that's nonfiction. You know, I find it very difficult to believe, right. You know, some of the sources they say that they get the they they get their material from anyhow, I had read that I was a DOORS fan. I wasn't a DOORS fanatic. I had a couple of their albums. I didn't have the complete catalogue. Yeah. And but I had gone to UCLA, film school, which Morrison and Raymond's Eric, the keyboardist had had attended. And we had actually shared a couple of the same instructors. They were they had attended, you know, and I think 6465 Okay, and I was there and started in 79 and 8080, and out in 82. And so what happened, though, is that I caught a couple of these professors at the very end of their tenure, after many years there and that one was Ed Brokaw and the other was loose Doman and they both had had Morrison and, and Raymond's Eric, his students, and he left the door wide open there. And

Scott Mcmahon 1:51:49
he's having now down Yeah,

Randall Jahnson 1:51:51
so that brought a little credibility for me, because I you know, it's always about insider information. And somebody Oh, he must be really in touch. Because he's come up through the so you did all the UCLA Film School mystique. Okay. So

Scott Mcmahon 1:52:08
do you do is prep work before? Like,

Randall Jahnson 1:52:10
not really, because there wasn't a whole lot to do other than listen to their music, read the book.

Scott Mcmahon 1:52:15
How many days did you have to prepare to do like one day like he's gonna meet with him tomorrow? Yeah,

Randall Jahnson 1:52:20
it was pretty quick. It came up, I think, within a couple of days, because they were ready to go, they had to get moving. You know, they were they'd been this project had been festering for years. And so now that they finally had the green light to do it, that people were very, very eager to have moving. So I went and met with Sasha on this, this restaurant up on, on the Sunset Strip there and Hollywood, West Hollywood and sat down and we started chatting, and I just felt right away. This is not working. It's not going anywhere.

Scott Mcmahon 1:52:49
Did you feel like you're doing most of the talking? And he was just kind of looking mumbling Yeah.

Randall Jahnson 1:52:54
Yeah, basically, he was even closer. Sure.

Scott Mcmahon 1:53:13
He's just cooking out there.

Randall Jahnson 1:53:16
On the chef's Yeah, well, he's cooking and out there. We're freezing in here.

Scott Mcmahon 1:53:20
He's like yah no problem close it. Anyway, so you're just great. So yeah, it was the meeting like 20 minutes?

Randall Jahnson 1:53:28
Well, it was about to be I thought it was going to be over real fast. It was the quickest lunch ever because I thought I was boring them and we just couldn't find seem to be finding any any common ground. And granted again, to I at this time had had directed. You know, I've been working with Henry Rollins, Black Flag, men. And so I was kind of very steeped in the punk culture in LA at that time. Just didn't seem to matter to him. So then I said something that was I remember him cocking his head. And I felt that I made some sort of impression. And that was I drew the comparison between Jim Morrison and Lawrence of Arabia. And the movie Lawrence of Arabia, in which I said that both of these guys were very charismatic, very well educated, well read young men who were literally swept up by the events and the wave of history. And they served it as best they could. But what was happening is that there was a discrepancy that arose between their public persona and their private ones. And it got to the point of where that discrepancy pulled them so far apart that something had to snap, and it did, and it broke them out. I got my attention. And that did He cocked his head and then what I thought was going to be a 20 minute conversation ended up being two hours. We Were there for a couple of hours. That was a turning point was the turning piano hook, gone with that hook. And so who would have thunk, but that's the way that's the way it worked. And so he became very curious then about, you know what I thought and because he was Sasha was very intrigued with the notion that Jim was indeed a poet. He was he was an intellectual. Yeah, and arguably, he was. So he wanted to see that aspect really exploited and dramatized as much as possible. And so when I brought that up, I mean that to him, you know, there was there was a corollary between him and Lawrence of Arabia, te Lawrence, who was, you know, was a writer, and basically, you had the poet, the soul of a poet himself. But Lawrence was homosexual. And Lawrence also started believing his own press, at a certain point, at least, that was the take that the movie had. And it became very, very difficult for him to measure up to the sort of the public, or the heroic image that that had been perpetuated them by the media of the day. So it's very true with with Morrison Morrison wasn't a homosexual. He's probably bisexual. Yeah. But he had some secrets and some issues that, you know, caused him to, to snap, you know, to break as well. So, and also then the other thing that, I think scored some points was that I said, and this was one of the reasons why I really wanted to do the project was I had felt there had never been a rock and roll epic. Yeah. You know, up until that point, we'd seen the Buddy Holly story and the Richie Valens story and things like that Coal Miner's Daughter, which was really great, but it was different types of music and different, we hadn't seen a really serious treatment of rock and roll, and rock and roll, epic rock and roll.

Scott Mcmahon 1:57:08
Yeah, at a crucial time, like you said, it's different like the by high pitch the value or is is is different.

Randall Jahnson 1:57:14
And so I felt that the doors really had that potential, you because the, because of the subject matter of what they they sang about and what they their performances and the way they orchestrated things and the way their albums were produced and all of that, and you know, in Morrison's vision and men's Eric's vision and all of that they collectively they they had scope. It was It wasn't bubblegum rock. Yeah, it wasn't Paul Revere and the Raiders are, you know, really was about that was about the big questions, you know, yeah. And so that's what I bought dramatically. cinematically, it had great potential. And that's why I wanted to do it.

Scott Mcmahon 1:57:51
Did you find yourself once you cry, you broke through that like 20 minute mark, and you realize that now you're gelling? having this conversation that? Are the things kind of come in your mind. Like it's just you started just riding the wave yourself?

Randall Jahnson 1:58:04
You started the station started talking about your aspirin? Yeah, you do. You gotta do like, no, yeah, they

Scott Mcmahon 1:58:11
give you like this dolphin No, no, not.

Randall Jahnson 1:58:15
A bit. Yeah, it gets like that. It's, it's pretty funny. And you got to be careful to have like, not not promising more than you can deliver. But you can't help you get excited. And, and they and they feel that, you know, they producers, and executives and stuff, they they want to be swept up with the with your enthusiasm, they want to see your vision as well. Right? And they want to feel it. So it's a it's exciting for them, when you get excited and you sell them on it, you know, and then they're going to get on board because they usually have to turn around and then either have to sell you to their boss or to the studio or tested to some sort of money entity, that they and make them feel confident and good enough that they are making the right decision in hiring you and that you and only you have have the vision to pull this off. Right. So when I went off to this meeting, I remember talking to my my agent at the time, Rick Jaffa who I mentioned in our last session, you know, wrote has written with his wife, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, you know, he left Morris to go become a writer. Rick was still my agent at that time. And he called me before I had this lunch before I called him up to tell him that I had this meeting that Jude had set up with Sasha and and he said, Listen, you know, you said I don't mean to dice your hopes, you know, rain on your parade, but, you know, they're talking to some really heavy hitters. It's a very, very slim chance you're gonna get that gig. Okay, I said, I don't care. I'm gonna I gotta go for it. I want to try, right? We try for it. And so he was very pleasantly surprised when when I got the gig But however, I didn't know I really had it.

Alex Ferrari 2:00:04
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Randall Jahnson 2:00:13
See, Sasha was very good poker player and so. So we that 20 minute lunch expanded into to a two hour lunch and we'd left. And then I heard from Jude I believe a later on that said, All right, he wants you to come and meet the doors. Now, the surviving doors. Great. Nothing else. That's already been worth it. Yeah. So we met and I can't remember if it was at Columbia Studios, or if it was at some other location there. But we had a preliminary meeting and where I met them. I can't remember if Jude was present in that meeting or not. But what was interesting was that man's Eric was there and men Zarek was impressed with with the stuff that I had done music video wise, and and also with my record label, and here's the here's where it got. No, no, my record label hadn't hadn't been established yet. But here's here's where it got incestuous though, which was that men's. Eric was producing X at the time. Oh, X was of course right now the punk rock band of LA and LA. Yeah, so man's Eric was producing them. So he was very keyed into what their their, you know, vibe and aesthetic was. Then he was a further impressed by the fact that I had gone through I was through UCLA. And we had had some of the shame Siemens instructors, so We compared notes. Yeah, a lot. And then Ray was also very interested in a band called the Fibonacci series who were he was interested in producing them. And they were the band that ultimately that would be my debut band on my record label. So I got to kind of really, and then then Densmore, the drummer John Densmore to the doors found out that I had written dudes, and he knew about dudes already. That it was I don't know, in the, in the works somewhere. And John was acting a lot at that point. And he immediately said, Do you think you can get a nice part in the movie? Like this? Oh, I just. I said, Well, sure. And then I had also the other thing that brought them in Zurich like was that I had been working with black flag and Henry Rollins. And I had always argued that, you know, the doors were much more punk rock than they were FlowerPower psychedelic, oh, yeah, generation kind of stuff. And that Henry was, you know, sort of the spiritual inheritor of the Morrison legacy, you know, by doing all his spoken word stuff, and I felt Henry had potentially had some acting chops. And there was even some discussion about Henry even possibly being the guy to play Jim, just very briefly. But Henry and I were piling around a lot at that time. And so I actually brought Henry over and to meet men's Eric and Paul Rotschild and Bruce Botnick, who engineered all the doors albums in Roswell, who produced them all. With some recording session was going on that they end so the he thought that was really cool. I scored a lot of points on that day, because Henry was really impressed to meet men's Eric and Rothchild. And men's Eric was really impressed to me, Henry and further just kind of, I think submitted my street cred in terms that I I was the right guy for to do this project. Right, right. So that's how in session and then I got I got Densmore an audition for dudes and Penelope Castile. So he's in dudes. He plays sheriff in a, you know, that's right. A Montana town and leaving blows him away, you know, at the very end there and but it was it was really funny. It was quite a time that was a high watermark in my, my career. And I so yeah, 1986

Scott Mcmahon 2:04:34
God, so you had your duties in production? You basically, at what point did you know was official that you're on doors?

Randall Jahnson 2:04:43
Well, I did. So we have that you had all these meetings. We were having all these meetings. And I kept wondering, Well, where are we you know, and we a lot of talk, a lot of discussion. A check. Well, nobody was saying anything. Yeah. So then we met again at a meeting. We had a meeting at 20th Century Fox and the reason why we were there was because we were in the in the office of a screenwriter named Tom Rickman. Tom Rickman is a wonderful, wonderful guy and a wonderful screenwriter. And he had written Coal Miner's Daughter, Michael Apted directed, they had originally gone to Tom to see if he wanted to write the doors movie of which he declined. He just, he just didn't want to get into that. That rat's nest, I guess, or whatever it was hornet's nest. But he agreed to be a board as to mentor, anyone who did step in to do it. So in other words, Tom was there for backup in case you know, whoever stepped into it failed. So he wanted to meet me then. And so we all convened at his office and 20th Century Fox, and so so it was Tom, were the surviving doors myself, Sasha. And I remember, they had ordered out lunch and everybody was brought in the sandwiches and zoo were all sitting around eating sandwiches, and there was a lot of banter going back and forth and discussion. And they kept asking me certain things about the movie or out, you know, what, how I saw certain things and what was important and what wasn't. And I kept, like, figuring out what, what, and finally I just find out, I just looked at Sasha. And I said, Look, do I have the job? I remember him just kind of grinning up. And he said, Yeah, you have the job.

Scott Mcmahon 2:06:35
That was your job. Like, my age and my man. Oh,

Randall Jahnson 2:06:43
my God. And that's, that's when at that moment, then it was just like, I frickin couldn't believe it, man. Because then it was like, I, I had run the gauntlet. I had beat the odds. I was, you know, having lunch with legends. And I was on a studio lot. And it was the dream. It was the dream. You know, it was just an amazing feeling.

Scott Mcmahon 2:07:08
When you got that moment when he gave you the smile a nod. Internally, were you just how quickly were able to focus back on to the task at hand which is like Well, here's the vision the movie because inside us be like, a holy shit. This is actually happening. Like this has actually happened. Yeah,

Randall Jahnson 2:07:24
I mean, you're you're doing somersaults inside. Yeah. But try to be cool. Cool. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Cool. I'm into it

Scott Mcmahon 2:07:42
well, it goes outside, but that door keeps flying.

Randall Jahnson 2:07:47
No, no. Yeah, this is it. So yeah, it was like, but I remember getting out of there and just like, Oh my God, who do I call first? I mean, it was like so well, who do you call? I think I called my agent I called Rick and Carol young guests and I said, I got the job and they just like, Are you kidding? Are you sure you Sure? And they said they told me they only got the job. And sure enough, it was you know, consummated shortly after that. I called Jude to thank her for really going to bat for me because she she really also it wasn't just all me she had influence with the studio of course and cuz she was still the executive in charge of the project. So she went to bat for me as well. And Jeeves, I think I called I don't know I call my parents and I you know, it's all blur a blur at this point, but it was just, I just

Scott Mcmahon 2:08:41
chose this is still a payphone Oh, yeah.

Randall Jahnson 2:08:46
I waited till I got home. But you know, this was this was at six but this was the drag though is that I got the gig and then dudes was in production was going into production. So like, I want to be there on the set, but I got it. I have to start going to work. Right away. Yeah. Fortunately, they were shooting dudes in LA in LA locations before they went off to Arizona. Okay, so I was able to, to go down the set in LA a couple of times. And I was dating this girl who worked for SST records at the time. Nice. Punk Rock. Yeah, yeah. She was a little skate punk. Nice. And she was tough man, Karen Nicks. And she was a photographer as well, and a really actually very good writer. And anyway, I took her to the set of dudes and we were I remember being then fully started, started trying to pick up on her. I was gonna

Scott Mcmahon 2:09:52
ask you, Ryder down there. I'm assuming that you see you lost her to one of the rockstars punks.

Randall Jahnson 2:09:59
Fleet was You know,

Alex Ferrari 2:10:02
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Randall Jahnson 2:10:11
Chili peppers were just starting to Yeah. They were they were still very underground. They were, you know, they were the opening band for more established bands in LA at that time. But, you know, flea was a known commodity because of his, his playing with a fear. Yeah. You know, for even though it was a short stint, and then, and he was just a well known guy on that whole scene. So, yeah, but Fli was after Cara that. That was pretty funny. But yeah, so then, then Sasha told me, he said, basically, take a couple of weeks to research and then go and write the script.

Scott Mcmahon 2:10:57
Okay, so where do you start?

Randall Jahnson 2:11:01
Well, I started by interviewing, you know, the door, the doors themselves, you know, you go right straight to the horse's mouth in this particular case. And that was a, an array, Robbie, and John and I interviewed them collectively. And then I interviewed them individually, as well, because it's a little bit of corroborative Yeah, kind of witnesses and and that that I found it was sometimes they wouldn't be more frank, if they were if the others weren't around especially Densmore would really open up and the other two weren't around. So it became very apparent to me. Oh, and then Rothschild was also the gem of have an interview. And he was really my, my head. We're, yeah, we're doing really, really well. I guess you can take that empty. Yeah, I'm not gonna suck anymore. No,

Scott Mcmahon 2:12:02
I games. Another one, I think.

Randall Jahnson 2:12:04
Okay. Yeah. I'm just been talking to him tonight. I know. Yeah. , so So ray, t. Densmore, Rothschild. It was, yeah. My first or second session with him. It was like, wow, I felt like I was still being auditioned to a certain degree. Yeah. Because a lot of these guys now now, even though I was on board, and sanctioned, yeah, had the blessing. Now, it's still I sort of had to prove myself. And in, in a sense, I mean, these were the guys who were the guardians of the, the faith, keepers of the faith. And so therefore, I had to further prove myself in a sense, so that's where I started doing a lot more research and really asking the right questions, really thinking ahead of time before I would speak, it wasn't just trying to, you know, talk out on my end, what was Joe really like? Yeah. Blow, can you tell me some good drugs, stories and stuff like that, and, but, but really try to get to the meat of the matter. But it became very apparent to me. After my first round of interviews, that the public persona of Jim Morrison was one thing, the private one was an entirely different, right, so that there was in other words, there was a whole lot of stuff that had never been discussed, never been talked about never been delved into whatsoever. And that it was not, this was not a particular case of where I was going to be able to take a couple of weeks to research and then go and write the movie. Because the deeper the more and more I got into it, the deeper and deeper I felt it was, and it was going to take some real work and some heavy lifting and Rothschild. Rothschild, you know, told me at one point, he said, Look, you're gonna, you know, the, the key to it is, is finding, you know, what, what made Jim so angry, what was the core? What was the, the, the source of his angst?

Scott Mcmahon 2:14:17
And did you ask him, Where do I go to fight?

Randall Jahnson 2:14:20
Well, he offered it up, okay, me. So. And he said that, he said, Jim came to him a couple of times with a problem and asked Paul's advice about what to do about it. And the, it would it was related to a particular function. And, and Paul said, you know, look into this because he said, I think this might provide some, you know, answers to Jim's angst.

Scott Mcmahon 2:14:57
So let's back up real quick. For me. It's like we have Ray the keyboard earnest Yes, we have. Paul is

Randall Jahnson 2:15:05
rape, Raymond's Eric is the keyboardist right Robby Krieger is the guitarist right for John Densmore is the drummer right. And then Paul Rothschild produced thank all of the doors albums except la woman. Okay. Okay. So that's where he he if he was done as really in one sense sort of was Jim. After the soft parade, he couldn't, he didn't. He heard some of the demo tapes for. We're not even they weren't even demo tapes. He attended a couple of band rehearsals for where they had the new material working on and he heard writers on the storm which he said it sounded like cocktail music to him. It was boring. He didn't say he didn't like it. Thank you. So that's what was interesting. There. So but Rothschild, was the elder statesman in a sense of the band. Ron Paul was a few years older than even man's Eric immens. Eric was definitely the elder statesman of the band. You know, Robin, and John were like, 2122. Yeah. And Ray was 2728 years old when the doors really kicked in. Ray was born in 1939. Ray had been in the Army Ray was in graduate school for film school when he was at UCLA. He wasn't an undergrad. I know when

Scott Mcmahon 2:16:34
the film came out. I ever heard read statements, he was just upset like, because he's felt like the movie sort of portrayed him as like kind of a whiner. You know,

Randall Jahnson 2:16:45
it's like, yeah, well, Ray had a lot of issues about V and

Scott Mcmahon 2:16:50
the jump ahead, but yeah, remember? Yeah, that mean as you know, outsider

Randall Jahnson 2:16:54
Yeah, there there were a lot of I re did not get along with Oliver from what I understand. I can't say that okay, you know, but I they did not see eye to eye. And it was interesting too, because Ray was very tight with Danny Sugarman. And Danny Sugarman ended up being very tight with Oliver. So you would think there would have been some sort of synchronicity there, but there wasn't apparently there was a lot of friction between Oliver and Ray. And Ray did not like you know, how the movie handled a lot of the stuff and so and so went on record again, and again, really just say no bad movie bad, bad portrait, etc, etc. all over again. Oliver likes to get sensational with stuff and but he's and he's the man not lacking in opinions. Yeah. And so And nor nor the guts to express them. So he's, you know, he was going to make his own movie one way or another.

Scott Mcmahon 2:17:53
So let's back up real quick. So you, you go on this, this journey, your own journey now that you've entered the portal of Jim Morrison's world who was exactly it was that Yeah, and I don't know if you, you may check out just last week, Jimmy Fallon, that this Jim Morrison person he did. He does this thing where you he takes famous like musicians that he does imitations of like, Paul. I'm sorry. Who's it? Neil Young. Yeah. But he's, he had like Jim Morrison the doors like his makeup make believe ban, but they were he would just sing the songs. But the lyrics are just nonsense, but he was he was basically reading like, the Reading Rainbow. You know, the, you know, good night moon. So it's like, children's songs done. And it is uncanny how much he sounds like Jimbo more. Yeah. And so it's online. It's you can easily find it, like a quick YouTube search. And it's just to see him just going like rooting rainbow. Indian rubber. Yeah. It's like the way he sees it. And like the whole band is like for your show, but just just as a little tongue in cheek. Sure. Pretty funny. But as you go down this journey, yeah. And what you thought was a couple of weeks how big of a fan was Sasha of the music? Or was he just more of a business pragmatic person that's, I'm gonna buy into this and then

Randall Jahnson 2:19:22
that's an interesting question, because Sasha would tell me on more than one occasion, how he got into this whole thing in which was that he had been had been in New York. Sasha was married at the time to one of the Efrain sisters, Amy Ephron, who's a very prolific novelist now, but she's the younger sister of Delia and the other AirFrance. There's a lot of them.

Alex Ferrari 2:19:55
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Randall Jahnson 2:20:06
He had been living in New York at the time. And he said that or prior to all this, he said that he had been out partying all night long or something. And he was coming back from some all night thing and was driving across a particular bridge and the sun was coming up in New York, and I think he said the end came up. Right on right on time. Yeah, right on cue. And he said, that was just like, a salient moment. For him. He had never really heard it, I guess, you know, Sasha had been, I think it was in the Israeli army was in the seven days war and 67, or whatever. So I mean, he was just this was not a, he wasn't, in other words, he wasn't in LA or San Francisco drinking the FlowerPower wine, you know, he was in an entirely different place, much like Oliver Stone was, you know, he was an Oliver was in, in Southeast Asia is in Vietnam. And when the doors were really happening stateside. So anyway, he just said that this was just a huge moment for him. And he just he got from that point on, he became obsessed about the band, and he had made all this money in software. And he just went out and bought, literally just bought his way onto into this, the strategic piece of

the producing puzzle of the producing puzzle. Fascinating. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, it really,

I mean, I was very interested in and I mean, it was effective, because boy, he was he instantly made himself a player. Yeah. Now he had bought it a couple of years before, you know, but he'd laid the money down and then did it. It was it was a smart thing.

Scott Mcmahon 2:21:53
So then, now you've, you're exploring, you're going wow, it almost sounds crazy. But you could have like, written a book biography, because all the legwork that you've done to do the research,

Randall Jahnson 2:22:06
Yeah, I accumulated I think I have about 50 hours of interviews, you know, on on tape, and, you know, I mean, it's, I mean, it's it's everyone, all the doors, you know, Rothchild. Jac, Holzman around Elektra Records. Got it. I mean, I mean, there were characters, you know, babe Hill. I've babe Hill was Jim's trusted drinking buddy in the latter part of his career. Nobody knew where babe Hill was. When I got on board. No, and a lot of people didn't want to know, I wanted to know because I wanted to interview him. Yeah. But everyone was, was afraid of baby because baby was kind of this biker guy. And he was in pretty tight with some, I guess, some real heavy friends. Right? Robbie had did not want to have anything to do with him. He's and I mean, Rothschilds just said, Jesus, you know, the last time I saw a baby at a he had a hunting rifle on was shooting it, you know, off of, you know, my backyard, you know, up in the Hollywood Hills, just like crazy all these crazy stories about baby but nobody knew how to get a hold of them. And, you know, Ray and all those guys didn't, they didn't know. So how did you do it? Well, I I wish I could take total credit for it. But I couldn't. Tom Rickman had a very resourceful secretary at the time named Francesca and Francesca did a little bit of sleuthing, which was we had heard that babe was in the grips union work in the film business and he was a grip. So she called the grip union headquarters. Wherever that number is, yeah.

And then they said, Well, you got to talk to moose. So moose was like, this guy named moose was the head of the grips at MGM. So she called up moose and he said, Oh, yeah, well, babe, you know you can find babe at this bar. I forget the name of it now. She it's only been 26 years. Yeah. That was literally across the street from MGM, the old MGM lot in Culver City. And he said, He's there every day about four o'clock. So you know, just buying some Jack Daniels. Like, okay, so, Francesca relays this information to me, she said, I think I found them or at least Nunnery where you can find them.

Scott Mcmahon 2:24:44
So you kind of go solo on these things. It's not like you have a team that says like, you have your own little team that says like, I'll find this setup this interview for you. It's you going Hello?

Randall Jahnson 2:24:55
Yep, that's exactly what remember there's no internet. No cell phone. That's fine. But, you know, it's an entirely different landscape.

Scott Mcmahon 2:25:04
What an event?

Randall Jahnson 2:25:04
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So she gave me the name of the bar, new dress. And I went down there on a particular day about four o'clock in the afternoon.

Scott Mcmahon 2:25:15
Now set the scene here. You in this bar? Did you fit in? Or were you

Randall Jahnson 2:25:20
totally No, this was a real this was this was a drinking mansbach.

Scott Mcmahon 2:25:28
So what were you wearing? Well,

Randall Jahnson 2:25:32
certainly not going to dress up for the occasion, you know, jeans and a T shirt, and it's probably wearing my black Doc Martin Doc Martens at the time. It was a little horseshoe counter of a bar really small. Gosh, I can't remember the name of it. I probably got it somewhere in my notes. Three or four professionals at the bar drinking, you know, four o'clock on a weekday afternoon. And I think I got there first. I think I was there staking it out, and went in in order to order the beer. And you know, honestly, boy, I haven't really thought about this in a long time. It might have been that moose conveyed a message to bait.

Scott Mcmahon 2:26:24
Like, hey, this guy's like, yeah, yeah.

Randall Jahnson 2:26:27
And and I think the message came back something like Go tell that guy to go fuck himself or something like that. Their usual. Yeah. Or, or it was like, you know, meet me at this bar at that at such and such, you know, just do different responses. Yeah, I know. Honestly, it's been that long, and I can't remember. But let me just say that, you know, for the record, I entered the establishment with a certain amount of trepidation. But sure enough, baby came in. And I took a seat next to him and say, Hey, babe, I'm Randall. And you know, I'm writing this. Yeah, the movie

Scott Mcmahon 2:27:12
now hard horse. How hard was it to say, Hey, babe, I

Randall Jahnson 2:27:19
haven't really thought of it. I guess well, it would have been worse if I'd said, Hey, babe, I'm Randy. If we were in England, that would have been an entirely different subtext. And, you know, he just he didn't really want to talk i At first, I remember him being Sutton's taken somewhat aback. So which leads me to believe now actually, that he was I caught him a little off guard, he wasn't sure that I was going to be there or something. So he, but I remember him saying, kind of, you know, being standoffish at first, but I didn't. Back away. I knew this was like, I have to get this is my job. Yeah. And he finally said, Well buy me some whiskey. And we'll talk. And so we ended up drinking, he drank a lot of whiskey and having a, you know, we talked for probably an hour and a half, two hours there at that bar, initially. And then, again, like I was talking about before, whether it's, it's kind of like these hurdles, or the, you know, this gauntlet, you have to go through, I cleared it with him. So, therefore, then I was able to go the next level, which was okay. We'll meet again, and yeah, we'll get into it. Okay, I see what you're doing. No, no. So it was like, the outer circle, right. And we're, we'll get into the meat of the map. Now,

Scott Mcmahon 2:28:47
let me so when you get hired on the job, again, as a life of a writer, you know, you're paid in a sort of like a freelancer, you're paid in these chunks. There's not like a regular paycheck. It's literally like, here's a bit of money. And here's another bit of your paid

Randall Jahnson 2:29:01
at increments, and usually the way it worked at that time, you get paid, you know, half upfront, and you'll get paid the half the second half upon delivery of your first draft. And there's usually yeah, there's there's a usually some leftover for another pass and possibly a Polish, right, you know, but basically, you get a very large sum upfront, and then you get another large sum after you deliver a first draft and what can happen in in between that, you know, it can be a long time, and it was in my case a long time.

Scott Mcmahon 2:29:36
Yeah, I was gonna think like, because you're on this project or like, okay, he's asking you buy him some whiskey, you're like, Okay, money is like yeah, they're paying me to this. I'll buy this whiskey for you, you now makes the second you enter that circle and and yeah, and the stuff that he was telling you, like, like

Alex Ferrari 2:29:57
we'll be right back after a word from our spot. Sir and now back to the show

Scott Mcmahon 2:30:07
for you personally, it was just more like were you finding moments of like, oh wow. Oh wow like just your head spinning in a sense that you were like, like story points or just just sheer pure human interest

Randall Jahnson 2:30:19
it's more of the latter. I mean I don't recall you really just going holy goobers you know this. This is the most amazing stuff I've ever heard. It wasn't anything quite like that a lot of the a lot of the stories had already been kicked about, you know, that people were aware of them at least as a rumor or something, but I don't I don't remember. You know, having really earth shattering stuff coming out from Babe and I actually I think I might have been a little disappointed in babe, actually and then more subs hoping you had Yeah, okay. But basically Babe. Babe was was just a good guy. Babe was unlike Jim. And a lot of gyms old film school crew. Babe was kind of the anti intellectual. And in a sense, Bade kind of kept it real. I got that for him, you know? And that babe was probably more loyal than almost any and all of those friends. But babe, wasn't Jim's intellectual. On his level, he would listen and he would tolerate it and kind of stuff like that. But basically, he would watch gyms back and he would call bullshit. Yeah, Jim in you know, in gym knew that. Babe was real. He wasn't just sort of somebody who was fawning all over him. And that was pretty much the case too, with with the other guys that were that they were pretty close in that in that little knit, close knit group, which was included Paul Ferrara, who I never interviewed, and Franklin Leandro who I did interview. Those were Jim's old friends from film school. And those guys were really tight knit, you know, for for a period of time. And so they did a lot of partying together a lot of drinking together and alone, you know, that stuff, but But yeah, you know, but what was happening, though, is that I would interview all these different people, and they not none, none of them really got along with one another. And they, you know, headed two different directions, you know. And so what happened is that I just had this it was amassing all this information, though. And none of it jived food, none of it was sort of coalescing. Yeah. Anything. And it was like a classic case of that, you know, the blind men touching the elephant. Yes. Thinking that, oh, I really have the knowledge of what Jim Morrison was all about. But you know, he's got his hand on the Tusk, that somebody else is holding on to the tail, right. And all that and, and they, neither one of them really knew.

Scott Mcmahon 2:33:11
Right, right.

Randall Jahnson 2:33:13
So fast. It was, yeah. And so it was it was scary. Then, because I had to pull it all together.

Scott Mcmahon 2:33:19
Like yeah, like you realize now it's real, like all the honeymoons over now. It's this word right. Now, how many years? Or how long did it take you to get the first draft to them?

Randall Jahnson 2:33:30
I spent all of 1986 working

Scott Mcmahon 2:33:32
on one year. Yeah. When you're free starting writing.

Randall Jahnson 2:33:36
I got I think I got the job in like February, March, something like that. And yeah, and so then I started researching and then writing and holy crap, you know, I just got, and I was funny, too. I was. I was 27 years old. Same age. Jimbo was when he died. drove a Mustang. I had a Mustang. Jim drove a Mustang. I was living in West Hollywood, which is literally around the corner from from where Jim used to crash at Pamela's apart apartment on Norton Avenue. I was on lived on Sweetser and just up from Santa Monica Boulevard. And so I was literally around the corner from his his universe, which was basically the corner of the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega. Yeah, because the doors offices were right there. The LTC anago Hotel Motel was there. Elektra was just down the street. There were buttons, Barney's, Beanery, and a few other locales that are now long gone, but that was really kind of the center of his universe. And so it was it was a little interesting, you know, living living there at that time, and you know, and writing about it. This was when I was First on onboard on it, and then and I, it was it was odd. Yeah, it was really kind of a sort of a strange thing. But I couldn't work at home a lot of times because there was noise in the apartment. I had a roommate at the time. And yeah, and it was just, it was a lot of it was distracting. So I moved around a lot. And I actually came down to the, came home to Carlsbad and wrote a lot of it down, there was a stand with my parents. Just to get away, well, just to get away and I got really sick. Also, I got Oh, I got a it sounds worse than it was. But if I had mono hepatitis, which just waylaid me. It's actually a more benign form of hepatitis, then you would, yeah, but it sounds worse than than it really actually was. But it was it. I mean, I was wasted for a long time. And I literally couldn't get out of bed. And here it was, I had the most felt like the the job of a lifetime. And I couldn't, I couldn't, you know, so I wasn't laying there in bed, and too sick to even sit up straight. But I remember just envisioning in my head it was laying there with this fever or these, oh, these aches or whatever. I would just go over it again. And again, in my head, like one scene after the next how I would see the movie. Yeah, you know, and it just formed it from based on all the interviews and stuff and just just envisioned it one thing after another after another after another as far as far as I could. So you're still working. I'm still working but literally not write writing.

Scott Mcmahon 2:36:49
Yeah. Which is fine. It's mean they talk about that. And they said the other podcast I listened to with Jeff Goldsmith, like creative, screenwriting magazine, but now he has his own podcast called the q&a. And a lot of the screenwriters he's talked to they talk about this, this technique that they use, which is they need their naptime. The Coen Brothers talked about that where they just have a nap, which is that that weird state of in between when you're about to fall asleep and in awake, and all sudden, somehow it just cleanses your your thoughts. And like, what you're trying to work on comes clear in that weird moment of bright before sleep or coming out of sleep. So you were lucky enough to be induced with the this sickness that you are, like, constantly like that. every waking hour, but

Randall Jahnson 2:37:39
Well, there's Yeah, I mean, but yeah, it is interesting. There was there's a lot of truth to that. And to that sort of state between waking and waking, conscious. Ness, yeah. Asleep. But it was nevertheless, you know, I was I moved around a lot. I went up to Idlewild up in the mountains above you know, Palm Springs there. And some friends of mine had a known it wasn't friends. Yes, it was friends of friends. And I rented a little a frame cabin for like, three weeks or a month and wrote up there like a real writer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then then I was down on my parents place and then then I got some office space. This is really bizarre to there's just all these really weird things that happen but I have this office space that I rented for a while and a big barn like building in West Hollywood. It was an old old historical building. I think it had been a silent film studio or something like that. But had been all divided up subdivided inside and so there were all these different little cubicles and, and things within it. And somebody I a friend of a friend had office space there and they were going to be gone and so I could go in there and work. So I was there working late one night. You and I had my all my stuff out at doors tapes, I had a little this is again the day of cassettes. I had a little portable cassette player and I had all my doors tapes and I had a briefcase full of stuff. And I had a whole stack of photographs of that I'd taken on the set of dudes that were in this briefcase and everything. And I was really tired at one point. So I went out and I got a bite to eat over around the corner and like at Hugo's or someplace and I and I came back came upstairs into this into this place and it was pretty big and dark, you know and others and and we have this just this little light around my little cubby right? It's working

Alex Ferrari 2:39:59
we'll be right back. back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Randall Jahnson 2:40:08
And I came in and I sat down, and I noticed that some of my stuff did look like the way I had left it. You know, and it was weird as a kid. I don't remember these things. Well, something was off it. There was some papers on the floor or something was something was in disarray. Something was it wasn't quite right. Then I heard something in the back. What the hell is this? So I go back? No, I had been told that there was there's this comedian rich. Paul, hot, rich Hall rich hall itself. Yeah. had also had space there. And he would occasionally come in late at night and work around. So I thought it might have been him. So I was oh, let's go. And I'll go and say hello, maybe. So go on the back. And here's this guy stooped over, and going through a bunch of stuff. And I come in, I say, hey, and he's, and he looks up and he says, Oh, hello. And he has this kind of affected English accent of some sort is very, very odd. And he had this retro, like, 50s suit on and a fedora hat. Literally. Yeah. And I thought, well, this isn't it definitely isn't rich Hall. Yeah. And so I said, Who are you? And I said you work for it was a production company that actually was do you work for such and such? And, and he's, he said something? He said some weird answer. That was like neither yes or no. And I thought, This isn't right. Yeah. So we chatted a little bit more and he was like, really just like, iron me and like, it was very, really, really kind of weird. He stood up, you know, and I was like, there's this is something's really not right. You're inside. Yeah. Yeah. So I said, Look, your spidey senses. Yeah, my spidey sense was up, you know. And so I said, like, Gee, do you know? I don't mean to be out of line here. But I missing I'm missing some stuff that was on my desk. Be here. And he said, Oh, really? What was that? And I said some tape some doors, tapes and stuff. Oh, I liked the doors. He's really kind of creepy. I liked the doors. Oh, boy. This is okay. My spidey senses. Really, ya know, and I was thinking, geez, what do I do? And I kept thinking I can I can take them I can take, but I thought also this guy is just weird enough that he's got like a switchblade or some kind of weird thing in there. So I kind of made my exit segway to back backed away from him. I went over to my cubicle, and I called the cops and, and I said, I got a, you know, as a, there's a burglary, and they said, Okay, you know, blah, blah. And they said, they put me on hold. And then they finally came back. And he said, so when it had happened, I said, it's happening. Now he's in the building. She sees in the building, why don't you tell us? So, I mean, they both and then this guy was he heard me and he bolted. He pulled it out of the place and went running with my pieces of my briefcase. Yeah, ever and, and boy, the cops were there fast. I got down on the street. And then I had to put my hands up because they thought I was the guy and I said, No, I'm the guy who called this is the you know, and so they had a helicopter overhead. This is not LAPD, but this is West Hollywood. So it was Sheriff's Department. And they were there very, very quickly. And then people from the production company called later on and I told him what happened and because there have been other things that have been taken, and so what happened is, you know, I lost this guy absconded with a bunch of my doors, cassettes, not not Unfortunately, nothing that could not be replaced, except that he took my grandfather's briefcase which was something that I was you know, very proudly thought was cool. Yeah, gold satchel looking kind of a briefcase. And there might have been some notes or something but he also all the photographs I'd taken out on the set which the happy ending though I found the negatives too many years later, like after I moved up here actually interesting. And I found them you know, that's one of the advantages of moving is that you find a lot of stuff so I got those reprinted and actually they're on my my website now. So anyway, but that was just, they never found the guy and actually many like said Couple months, like six months later, I got a phone call. And they had found the briefcase and they had found and stuff, but it was just deteriorate. He had stashed it under the steps or some bushes there on the on the compound and had been rained on and deteriorated and all that stuff. But they had found that there was still some stuff in it that, you know, I was able to salvage a little bit of but still the good stuff was gone. And anyhow, that was just kind of, sort of typical of what was going on. I you know, I remember coming home one day after working, you know, interviewing people, and I was just exhausted and my head was swimming. And I, you know, I didn't know if I was making any progress at all. And I and I literally, like lay down to take that nap. And my head hit the pillow and the phone rang. And I picked it up and I said hello. And he said, Randy Johnson. Yes, blah, blah, blah here. I won't say who it was because he's actually a very successful director now. But he was an actor at the time aspiring actor. And he said, I hear your writing the the doors movie. I said, are and he said he announced his name. Like we were all buddies. And I said hi. And good, I think. And he. He said, Well, I understand you're writing the doors movie. And I say, yeah. Well, listen, you know, we got to get together because, you know, I'm a huge doors fan. And I'm, I'm the guy to play Jim. And I said, well, listen, man, you know, thanks. But there's not even a script yet. It's a little premature. I mean, I haven't even written finished the script yet. And, frankly, you know, when it comes down to casting, I'm not gonna I'm gonna be lucky to even if they even asked me, you know, my opinion. And so I knew I somehow I, you know, I got off the Line. He called me up a couple. One other time, in literally, it was the same kind of circumstances. Middle, the afternoon, I was like trying to take a nap. And he was he says, I'm tripping. I'm tripping. Man, I'm tripping. And I said, Well, good for you. And he said, listen, he said, You got to know this. He said, The I had a dream last night. And guess who came to me in my dream? She, I wonder, he said, Jim Morrison. He came to me in the dream. And he said, I'm the guy to play him in the movie. So we have got to get together, man, we've got to get together. Dude, you know, don't call me when you're high. But now he's a successful director. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. I won't say who it was. But but this was just kind of the nutty, bizarre circumstances that were, you know, just in the midst of all this and where I was trying really hard just to get through my find my way through it all. And yeah, and I could. And so, you know, again, back to your whole thing. Could I have written a book? Yeah. I think in one sense, after I was off the project that I had all this all this, all these interviews, and it was very, I thought, I nobody's nobody's gonna want to read a book about and then subsequently, you know, I mean, for like, every six months, there was a new Jim Morrison biography that was coming out, I'm just sort of kick myself for not doing it.

Scott Mcmahon 2:48:40
There's, you know, the reason I brought that up is because I remember hearing this interview with another, another screenwriter, and they were talking about this other famous, I don't remember her name, but they were asking her like, hey, you know, if you would ever were approached with this particular project again, and would you, you know, write it the same way or write this project? She was she was her response, I remember was something like, like, hell no, because I would write, I would write the book, I read the play, I write the movie, basically, mindset was like, I would figure out a way to milk it. Yeah, it's in all different facets, you know, and like her life lesson as what she learned after being a writer for so many years. Like, so that's what I thought about it, too. It's like, wait a minute, holy cow. You know, I just had to ask you, just because I remember that little, little snippet from

Randall Jahnson 2:49:30
well, some of this stuff. I'm actually I think, going to attempt in the large article about it, you know, at some point, because I think there is enough stuff that in here that's kind of actually worth looking at in terms of a screenwriters approach to a daunting project and that my kind of like my whole trip my whole journey on this was, it was it was something Yeah, it's something I I earned some stripes on this one, I think Yeah, it's cool.

Alex Ferrari 2:50:02
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Scott Mcmahon 2:50:11
I think we will wrap it up here because I think we can go into the next next. I love it because we can go the next one, we talked about the final release of dudes, we can talk about coming into this as Exactly. This is fantastic. Believe me, I, I'm gonna be honest with you. I, I lost a lot of podcasts. And I said with a lot of screenwriters, and they do like a lot of the interviews they do with screenwriters. Even though I love what Jeff Goldsmith does, they served as he only has like an hour and a half to really kind of gloss over somebody's career. So the advantage that we have here is, I get to ask these questions. I know, I'm just like, fan like anybody else going? Like, how much would that be? Like, if you had that moment, or like, Oh, my God, I'm on the job. You know, it's like, or, like, I can't believe this is so surreal that that I'm working with the doors, the doors, and then like you, but you got to step back or like now it's this work, I got to just figure it out. And just talking about the little things about writing about like, you know, you realize you're, you're you're doing a service, because you're just trying to get the story. But there comes a time sometimes where you I guess you're you have to ask yourself, like, what kind of story do I want to see? Or like, what is it? You know what I mean? That was that little ounce of personal reward out of it? Especially when you're writing all these, you know, sort of pseudo auto autobiographies?

Randall Jahnson 2:51:36
Well, in that auto biographies, I'm sorry, yeah, in bio pics, or whatever. But in this particular case, the more I got into it, and the more information I began to uncover, and collect, the more and more it fueled my, my passion for it, let's say, it became my crusade, I got a degree to, to, in a sense, blow the whistle on the bullshit that had circulated about him for so many years. And and in the very least, try to tell attempt to tell some truth about him. But at the same time, that was my undoing on the project. And so we'll leave it at that there was much conflict to come. Okay, because it was not smooth sailing.

Scott Mcmahon 2:52:33
Okay, well let you know where and I remember when we finally saw the film, I think it was in senior high school. Yeah. It was a big, big deal for my buddies. And I had to go see this movie. So you know, because it was a big like event. So anyway, well, when

Randall Jahnson 2:52:48
I was in the, in the South Pacific earlier, in this year, in March, there was a I met a gentleman who was a politician and serving in the Parliament of the island Kingdom chain of Vanuatu. And he found out that I wrote the tours, and he just, he, he said, I saw it in college. This was in Australia, but he grew up and has returned to Vanuatu, out there in the Deep South Pacific. And he said, Oh, man, he's that I'm so glad to meet you. So you really gotta write. And so it never ceases to amaze me how powerful, you know, film, and pop culture is really, you know, it's so far reaching, you know, there's not a point in the globe anymore, where it just doesn't go

Scott Mcmahon 2:53:38
it is the greatest export that the United States has. Yeah. And it will change. It will change. I mean, it will change worlds, because, you know, doesn't matter how I mean, the culture of these young people and all the all these subtle other countries. I mean, not to say Western eyes it but there is this romance idea of I think what these western movies, so that hits a psyche amongst, you know, the rest of the world. Yeah, and I think that is sort of sometimes becomes the root of, you know, revolution and how we were bombed. I mean, we were attacked 911 Because of the stupid things of like, they're, they're reciting, you know, Britney Spears, like, how could you have your women dress like this? Right. You know, it's like, sure. We were so like, what? That was the reason? Yeah, but they go there anyway. Yeah.

Randall Jahnson 2:54:32
Well, thanks for asking the questions. And thanks for giving me the opportunity actually, to get into this in a certain amount of depth. Yeah, no, I just doesn't, you know, again, if this were any other interview, it would be

Scott Mcmahon 2:54:42
glossed over. Yeah, and then it's like, Okay, you're right. But yeah, soundbites. Now, this is good. I mean, I'm enjoying it. It's like uncovering and, and all this kind of stuff. Now, it gives me those thoughts like when we should write a story about your adventure writing this stuff. I don't Oh, that Yeah,

Randall Jahnson 2:55:01
I think that's in the works here at some point. I'm yeah.

Scott Mcmahon 2:55:04
See, we're like we're scratching the surface here. All right. Yeah. Well, here we are. I'm sure I got some good stuff.

Randall Jahnson 2:55:11
Thanks, Scott. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Scott Mcmahon 2:55:12
Thank you guys. Thank you.

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IFH 717: From $7K Film Red 11 to Making SPY KIDS: ARMAGEDDON for Netflix with Racer Max & Rebel Rodriguez

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Racer Max 0:08
This project fell apart because of COVID twice, each time shrinking the budget as it went, because we this film was pre sold. So all the budget that you have is all the budget you got. And twice we almost got it started once in California and once in Canada, but both times it fell through. And so we finally found a way to bring it over to little home called Austin and pulled out Well believe it or not pulled out a lot of our rental love and tricks on this on.

Alex Ferrari 0:38
This episode is brought to you by the best selling book Rise of the Filmtrepreneur how to turn your independent film into a money making business. Learn more at filmbizbook.com I'd like to welcome to the show Racer Max and Rebel Rodriguez. How're you guys doing?

Racer Max 0:55
Right doing great. Thanks for this really excited.

Alex Ferrari 0:58
Thank you so much for coming on the show guys. I am I was telling you before obviously a lot of people who ever watched the show knows I'm a huge fan of your dad. And but I'm also a fan of what you guys have been doing with him and seeing you grow Literally. Literally seeing you grow as as filmmakers, as actors, as composers, as producers as writers. It has been it's been fascinating to see your guys's journey as well. So I have to ask you, my first question is because everybody listening is gonna want to know, what is it like growing up on movie sets? Like I mean, first movie set I walked onto was when I was in college, and that's not really a movie set. I mean, you were walking around with movie stars, you know who you were like, oh, that's just that person? What was it like for you to kind of growing up in this kind of environment? I kind of protected environment as well. Because, you know, Elizabeth, your mom has been on the show as well. And I know how protected she's been with, you know, to protect you from the less the less nice people in the industry?

Racer Max 2:00
For sure. For sure. Yeah, she was definitely the the moderator and Guardian at Mama Bear. That made it all allowed us to have just a wonderful experience growing up. To be honest, it's a lot like growing up normally, as if your parents do any other kind of job. But you don't realize to later that you're in an industry that's so different and wild and crazy. To you know, as us as kids, you're just running around playing hide and seek. And you run past some crazy costume people as you're hiding under the producer's desk or the accountants desk, and they're helping you hide while they're trying to manage an entire crazy army show that that's going on. It's, it's pretty much that. And, and with the cat, you know, you you meet these famous, he recognizes and are famous as you when you grew up. But when you're a kid, that's just oh, that's just uncle Bruce. Oh, there's uncle moneyshow You can just call him uncle Benny. So you just kind of get a normal childhood, especially with someone like our mothers who was very protective of us and helped ensure that it was just a wonderful experience. So yeah, that's what it was like growing up.

Alex Ferrari 3:15
So when you guys were talking to secondary level, what when? What was it like when you discovered? Oh, oh, this isn't normal. Like, oh, oh, that Uncle bunnies you just won an Oscar. Why when you had that realization, what was that like? For both of you like when I hit because I'm assuming that hit at a certain point when you got older?

Rebel Rodriguez 3:42
Yeah, yep. Definitely. Yeah, it was definitely all the props. So you know, you kind of see as you're running past them as a kid. People like remarking on them like, oh, wow, that's this and that. And as we started to see some of the movies or dad made, I mean, obviously, we didn't see him for a long time other than like Spy Kids and Sharkboy and Lavagirl and stuff, for good reason. When you hear people like remark on it, and it's like, oh, it's like a thing people really, this is like a huge thing for them. Kind of like how for us Spy Kids vehicles are like a big thing. And so, you know, the the, the electric chair from Sin City, we never quite knew what it was. But it was like, you know, that's kind of Yeah. Yeah, like, there's like, Great wax figure of Bruce Willis there as hard again, and it always freaked us out as kids and like, He's just staring at you. But now, you know, you see the posters. Adults are like, Dude, it's just so iconic and cool. And, you know, it was just as impressionable as a kid even if you didn't fully understand what it was but

Alex Ferrari 4:38
I mean that sincerely when you walk when you watch the city for the first time when that first came out, people don't get it. There's nothing in film history that have ever been shot like that ever.

Racer Max 4:47
Yeah, nothing like that ever.

Alex Ferrari 4:49
Ever. Like that was it was insane man is insane. So alright, so let me ask you this. So then when you guys first, so you're growing up with Uncle Bruce uncle? don't need to do all these kind of guys. At a certain point, you're able to watch some of your dad's early work. So what was it like watching mariachi for the very first time,

Racer Max 5:11
Man it was really, really impressive. And what's funny is we held that off for so long, it wasn't till we were, you know, getting in a little late teens, kind of at the end of high school. And from then on out, you're out of school, and you got to figure out what it is that you want to do. And we had an inkling that we wanted to create and be in the creative space, whether that was filmmaking or anything else. But watching that, for the first time, it was just mind blowing to see how much you could step out and accomplish. And to see that it's our dad who we've known our whole lives, and we love him. He's super, he's funny, great father. But to see like, wow, how smart and how little he had then, yet how smart he was, and just how perseverant he was that with absolutely nothing, you can go and create something incredible that sets off a not only a lifetime career, but at the same time an entire wave that inspires so many people across the world for decades. And yeah, yeah, definitely. It was really just an impressive moment and really inspiring of like, Oh, we're at his age, we too can go off and do something like this. And we too can conquer and accomplish just like he did. So that's really what it was the first time

Rebel Rodriguez 6:27
Yeah, it's, it was cool. It's, uh, you know, we grew up with a lot of the wisdom that he kind of injected in the way he worked and also in like, his books, like, you know, Rebel Without a crew. So we'd always kind of heard you know, when you're making something, work with what you have, not with what you need, and all that kind of stuff. But then when we watched it, it was cool to see like everything he's kind of told us through the years that we thought was just like dad wisdom, was like, you know, how we kind of did it and it was incredible to see it in action and see the results you get from it. It was really, really inspiring and cool.

Alex Ferrari 6:56
Did you did you either. Have you ever just go? The old man just doesn't know what he's talking about? Like he I know better? I mean, look what I mean. I did I mean, every every son does that to their data. That's the old way of doing it. Dad, you don't really? We weren't 19 We know life.

Racer Max 7:17
Yeah, you know, it's kind of more sobering when you think about for a second are like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna say that. But then you walk past poster after poster after poster, like, maybe you know what else he taught me to be humble and look at other people's point of view. So I think I'm going to channel that a little. So there have been few, very few moments.

Alex Ferrari 7:38
Many thoughts. Very few many.

Racer Max 7:41
Exactly. That's the way to put it. About you rebels. Same thing.

Rebel Rodriguez 7:45
Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. I mean, it was also another thing as we grew up, right. It's like the era of the Gameboy Advance, and like the DS, and like all the video game kind of stuff. So we're always like, man, but our video games are different. This is our kind of stuff we're into and all that and but spike is still always kind of captured out in a way to where we were like, I mean, we never thought it weird that movies could so well capture what kids were into in that era. Until you see some of the things it's like, right? It just really didn't have that. Right? I don't think but you still have that feeling of like, I don't know, we have this in our thing. And you don't even realize all of its inspired by Well guess who you know? And many other filmmakers. That's like, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 8:20
Yeah, you know, it's fascinating, because when when mariachi came out, I was only probably about five or six years younger than your dad. So I was in high school. I was working at a video store. And that's behind me. That's the video store poster that I can't all these years. mariachi it says Ahmadi Archie poster I have to by the way, I still do for my story. Because he was the only he was the only Latino filmmaker that I could even do there were no Latino. I mean, there were but there was no real out there Latino filmmakers like he was. And in my in my intro people, can you explain to people from your point of view? You know, from my point of view, mariachi is that movie that you said it started it launched an independent film revolution. People still talk about it, like a myth. Like there was this once there was this dude who made a $7,000 movie and then he became a then he got into Hollywood. Like it's a it's a mythical story that they tell in the corners of film schools around the world, to this to this to this day. And I always tell people, because it's this is something I have a this is one of the things I brought the show up I started the show up was because I wanted to tell people how to avoid pitfalls in the industry. And, you know, Robert, and your mom both fell into a lot of those pitfalls along the way. And they were kind of thrust into a world that this you know, Robert wasn't even thinking this is gonna go to the Latino Mexican Film Video market. It was not supposed to be the thing. But a lot of people were like, oh, you know, I'm gonna make a $7,000 movie. I'm like, That's great. It's 2023 It's a little different. Now the markets a little different the world a little different than it was before. And I've been trying to say that again and again, like this is not 1991 anymore. It's not 1999 anymore. It's not what 2009 anymore. It's 2023. From your point of view, how do you think the legacy of mariachi has kind of continued? And do you guys agree with me? That a lot of filmmakers listening to like, Oh, I'm gonna go make go make it? You know, but understand, Roberts path was no, people tried to redo that path, like Quinn's path, or Kevin Smith's path, or Richard Linklater spat, it's insane. So from your point of view, what do you guys think?

Racer Max 10:42
So, first off, absolutely agree and love that about you and your work that you've kind of taken that ethos, and have always updated it for people now of like, how to take that drive that that movie, that Smith inspires people to go create, and helping them adapt it to the current day's current era. And to avoid, as he said, avoid pitfalls, that now we have the knowledge and foresight to be able to avoid. So I've always really liked that about, about your work. Oh, appreciate it. But yeah, what? So agree on that, first off, but then, totally, but what I've always saw from it, is that he got a very specific path, through what you know, it's so many things that happened and came together all at the same time, for that passion and drive and what he went through to equate to what it led to. But I always see that the thing that inspires people the most is kind of the timeless aspects of it, the idea of perseverance and creativity under restriction, intense restriction, and the attitude that put that drive and passion into whatever it is that you love. And you can create something that will turn heads that will get attention that people were will like and want to follow you for. And that can inspire people you've never met. So that's why I always love when people outside of the film industry that read the book, or repaired the myth, and went off to go do things that have nothing to do with film, but just whether it's business or even an accountant or an accounting before as well, like so many different fields that were inspired by that idea. So that's what's really cool to me is that there's something you can adapt to it the modern times, but yet there's this timeless aspects almost have that met.

Rebel Rodriguez 12:32
Yeah. So there's that time almost timeless aspect of that. What it really captured was that it doesn't take a budget of that huge size to create great quality work and great quality story. And especially if you write and you work with what you have, and work with limitations you do have rather than trying to do something that's going to be outside of your scope or possibility at the moment financially, you can create something that turns heads and is really like, you know, Blockbuster remarkable level work with very little and that will that you know, can do a lot. And usually quality like that doesn't go unnoticed for very long. It starts to it starts to make the rounds may make waves and stuff. So there it's really important part of it.

Alex Ferrari 13:16
Now, rebel, you did a little movie years ago when you were five. called Shark, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. And, I mean, I know how you were cast, but how did you even like want to do it? Were you even thinking of acting at that point? You know, you know what, how did that even because one thing is to jump around the set and play around and like, Oh, Uncle Buddha's and all that stuff. But to be in front of the camera, be there even for the small part that you played? I saw that I was like, Man, that kid's got some coordinates. I mean, he's up there with the with the with the things on the scales on the site.

Rebel Rodriguez 13:55
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. So you have to look back a bit to spike. It's one spike. It's two. I was the this is where it really started was spike. It's one I was the baby on the front of the magazine. Kylie Jenner is reading. And when she's in the airport, two spies who fell in love story. That's me on there. That's where it started. Spike gets to win like the Magnum men attack at the banquet, the OSS banquet in there fighting the bad guys. One of the kids takes down one of the guys and that's my oldest brother rocket. The next one comes along and grabs him too. That's racer. So next one down the line. And then I come running out. I kicked the guy in the side and that's me. And I don't know our dad's always been a filmmaker, even outside of film. He loves taking home videos of us and stuff we have like whole archives. Do he just loved filming us too? He thought it was just so interesting, you know, kind of brings back the bedhead kind of days that that short? Yeah. We've always just kind of been used to the idea that there's a camera like right here sometimes for whatever reason, and so it didn't feel like that big of a transit. Should it just be like, well, it's just the other camera here at the place. And there's a bunch of people looking at you while you do something, and they tell everyone Quiet on set, which you've heard a lot if you're running around there. And yeah, it was pretty natural. It was just I liked the story he made. And I was like, I want to be in it too, you know, because that's how kids are. You brothers got it you want it to. So they're obviously, obviously coming, that they would put me up on wires and stuff to simulate the swimming parts and things and spray me with water and all that once I learned how hard it was. And I was freezing up there. And I was doing my own stunts. I was actually even a funny moment where they've got me up there on the wires, and I'm there yelling. Well, how come I have to do my own stunts? I mean, it's like, yeah, so very quickly learned is not not quite as easy as it seems. But I mean, it was very natural to us, considering we just always kind of had a camera in front of us all the time. So it's like, oh, well, you know, they just throw you into the movie. And that's how it goes. And it's like,

Alex Ferrari 15:58
So you're telling me that that film industry is not glamorous? Is that? It's, don't you guys all just eat lobster at lunch all day. That's not the way it works.

Racer Max 16:09
It was surprising to a five and seven year old but it wasn't glamorous. quickly found.

Alex Ferrari 16:15
Yeah. And so it sounds like your parents were pretty much programming you since birth to like, subtly hypnotically.

Rebel Rodriguez 16:25
I mean, a little bit to some extent, but it's like that wasn't even the attention either. Right?

Alex Ferrari 16:30
No subtle. They're very smart. Both of them. Suddenly, it was very subtle.

Racer Max 16:38
They, they never wanted to pressure us into doing anything, which was pretty cool. But so if there was hypnotism, it was very subtle. It was very subtle is very

Rebel Rodriguez 16:48
More than anything, they were excited to show us what they do. And I think that's really special. You know,

Alex Ferrari 16:52
Of course, of course, like any parent would be wanting to show like, hey, look what I do. I just happen to make cool movies, you know, and have cool things happening around you. That's awesome. Now, I wanted to talk to you both about red 11. Because when I heard about red 11, and for people who don't know, please explain to her what red 11 is. But when I heard about red 11, I was so excited. I was like, Oh, the goat is going back. He's gonna go back to do it. Do another $7,000 movie. And he's bringing in the boys with him. So. So Ted, can you tell people what red 11 was

Racer Max 17:25
Absolutely Red 11 is one of our favorite projects. So this myth, we keep talking about a mariachi made for $7,000. In the 90s. For the 25th 25th anniversary of that movie, Robert wanted to go back and make a film for $7,000. Again, no crew, or one other crew member, no money, try to do it all in one location and shoot it all in 14 days, just like he did on the original of mariachi. And so he thought, Oh, my one crew member I'm going to bring my son under this because I had just started working with him apprenticing under him at the time for Alita Battle Angel. And so is that you want to come on and be my one other crew member. So we can do this whole thing together. And while we're making it, let's make an entire documentary about how to make a film with no money. And it was super for such a blast of an experience we quickly brought on rebel to both star in it so that he could be there on set to help us out because the only crew members we had were the cast when they weren't on camera, they were behind camera moving lights, moving props, closing doors for sounds just like being being a

Rebel Rodriguez 18:33
Little light, just like

Racer Max 18:35
Real, real bare bones, film production. And so we cast rubble and put them in a row, I wrote them into almost every scene so that you could always be there to help us. And then our rebel went on to do the score for it as well. And that's the premise of red 11, I'll tell you is to this day, it's still my favorite film project we ever did. Because it's so creative. When you have nothing all you have is your mind. And you have to be creative every single day. Because everything's falling apart even when you've limited so much. Every single day things are falling apart, you have to come up with creative solutions laughing now that laughing about it with your dad and your brother in the cast. But you've quickly become friends with because we're all on the same trench together. It's really, really a sublime experience. And the most the coolest part about it was you know, you see your parents as these figures that have like lived so much life and you don't feel like you could ever be put in this forced in the same situation together and see how each other act but I thought he would be my my dad would be my mentor on this and that oh, he's he knows exactly how to do all this. He's paved the way before. But it was really humbling and inspiring to see him look at me and go, I don't know how we're gonna do it either. Let's figure it out here. You and I we're gonna sit here we're gonna figure it out. We're gonna move this through that. So to really see him put into the same pressure put in the same experience that was mind blowing. And this is one of my favorites.

Rebel Rodriguez 19:56
He doesn't have all the answers all the time he finds them and that's what he's for. really, really good at, though he knows how to find answers on a dime on that and create some really great stuff out of it. So, I mean, it was just cool to finally see it as like, how does he work? When he's put into this pressure? It's like, oh, it's just like all of us too. But he's just that, but he's learned that much more about how to do it and stuff. So it's, it's a skill people can develop and learn. So

Alex Ferrari 20:17
Yeah, it's like a call a call. I told my daughters, I have old man strength. And that's the thing, by the way, old man strength is a thing. I had a trainer who was lifting, I'm lifting more than he is, how are you doing that you're out of shape. I'm like, I have old man strength now. In the same tone, Robert has not all man strength. But you know, he's got experience. He's got a wealth of you know, you just pick up these things. And you know, when you're on set, you just been there before. So even though I might not know how to do it right now. Oh, yeah. This over here, over here, move that over there. It's, it's pretty remarkable. It's pretty remarkable to see

Rebel Rodriguez 20:55
It's cool. How it fundamentally starts, you all start out in the same spot. We don't know how we're gonna do it. And then it's just like, that's what you're developing is the learning of how you're going to do it. So

Alex Ferrari 21:03
Did you go? Did you guys just run a gun? I mean, you had some plan, obviously got a script, but you kind of show up on the day and just go, alright, let's set up the scene or divert. There's a lot of storyboards, things like that.

Racer Max 21:16
Man, it was pretty run and gun because it's funny, the one we kind of restricted it a little, even a little more than mariachi because now we had all the money to make a movie with a budget, but we've cut up the money. Now we, all the crew, and people, we know who could do it, but we cut out the crew. And then it's like, well, I guess all we have left this time, but 14 days. But Robert didn't even have that at this point. Because we were busy, made doing visual effects for Lita Battle Angel and writing other projects. So we would just, we would just pick days that we could get a few hours in and tally it up to 14 to 14 days. And so over the course of a month, month and a half, we just squeezed in some hours, they're squeezing some hours here. So that leads to very much you're texting a cast like an hour before you get there. Hey, we're gonna film the day, we got like four hours, let's go knock out the scene while we can. So people just show up and like, oh, gosh, we don't know how we're gonna do this. But let's figure it out right now, because we've only got what time is it? All right, let's keep going. We got it.

Alex Ferrari 22:13
So what's the side hustle? It was a side hustle.

Racer Max 22:16
Side Hustle film. Yep. Side Hustle phrasing.

Rebel Rodriguez 22:19
I mean, really, I wasn't on the writing side of it. But whole scenes were rewritten because you get on set go, well, we don't have this, this, this and that. Okay, well, let's just change it up to make it work with this. And it was just like, nonstop. I mean, writing, writing it right there, as everyone's showing up. So then you can do the scene right away. I mean, it's really,

Alex Ferrari 22:36
It's remarkable. And that's such a lesson for filmmakers listening, because so many filmmakers, you know, they think they study like Hitchcock or Scorsese, or, you know, Kubrick and, you know, they like, oh, everything has to be exactly the way I have it in my mind, because I'm a genius. And you know, we're all geniuses. I mean, all of us, obviously, are geniuses, filmmaking geniuses. And soon Hollywood will see our genius. And that's how we think because we're all nuts. We're all absolutely insane. The filmmaker we're all in? Absolutely. So I've seen on set when I visited other other filmmakers sets that they just break down if something's not exactly the way they planned it. And that's and I'm like, That guy's not going to make it he. Because filmmaking isn't that filmmaking is even even the biggest guys, we've had an opportunity to talk to many of them, some of the famous famous scenes in the history. I've talked to these, I've talked to some of these filmmakers, and they're just like, yeah, it's on the day.

Rebel Rodriguez 23:33
Everything's planned out, half of it falls apart, which is pretty much how it goes, you plan at all. So that way, as much of what was planned will stay there as possible, the rest is gonna fall apart, and you got to figure it out from there. But it's, yeah, you kind of accept it. And you got to learn to roll with the punches as much as you do figure things out ahead of time. So

Alex Ferrari 23:49
And Racer when you started writing rebel, 11, with, with your dad, you guys, kind of, I think the first time I'd ever heard I'm sure it happened somewhere else in cinema history. But when mariachi was written, he was just riding around the things he had already, which was such a revolutionary idea, as opposed to like, I need to buy I need to have a Porsche in this scene. I need to like do have a Porsche? No, it's gonna cost you for what you have a Volkswagen. Just use the Volkswagen. He wrote around the elements literally like a dog, a turtle and a Mexican town and a couple guns and that's what I had. And that's how I made my movie. Can you explain the power of that in the red 11 experience of just writing around things that you know you have access to? Because it does free you a lot and lessens the stress a bit on a stressful situation already?

Racer Max 24:40
Yep, absolutely. Yeah, we wanted to implement the exact same writing process for read 11 And so we said let's only take what we got and go from there. So we filmed the entire film, all of it on our Treblinka studios, our studios here in Austin, which is to airport to a airport hangars, and then a bunch of hallways and offices. And we thought we'll write a story that works for this location. And that's all we're going to use. And so location, we just use all that we had. Now, what Roberts got kind of in his back pocket now was a little more than a turtle and bus. Now, we have the whole storage that because we're kind of Hoarders, we keep all of our props, and anything we've ever used in a movie before. So we have all the guns, all the gadgets, all the things locked up somewhere. So we pulled from there as all our props, but still, we only wrote around what we could get out of that storage room out about Walker, a lot of people get more than that from Goodwill nowadays, but so are out of their dad's closet really. So we came at it from the same approach. And it is really freeing because it unlocks creativity in a way you can't imagine, suddenly, when you have just the one thing you're going to use in a scene in one room you're going to have to use, you come up with five or six more ideas than you would have just kind of thinking what you would want going what you have versus what you want. It's really powerful. I have anybody I talked to now a day. And they want to make a whole feature film, they've done shorts and whatnot. And they've done it in a traditional setting, I tell them, Okay, write a feature and just go off of what you've got, just trust me, it's powerful. The, what you want is the rep of doing the entire film from beginning to end. You don't want to have to add more pressure of having to get things to land to be there on time, or people or places or objects like that's really free. And to this pretty much on every project, you'll find yourself using that same method going forward.

Rebel Rodriguez 26:40
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's really what it does is when you're just there thinking about I could make anything, what am I going to make? I mean, there's like a trillion different options, there's an infinite amount of options, really, it's just, you'll end up with something that's got too many elements too much. There's too much that by just using what you have it streamlines at all in an instant. And it's like you've got three things. Okay. Well, now I gotta write a whole story about these three things. And it's just, it really does probably one of the most important things is really streamlining what kind of an idea you have. And from there a lot generates because you go well, I only have this isn't that how do you make a story with this, this and that. So

Alex Ferrari 27:13
And I'll tell you

Racer Max 27:18
The process just gets a little funny on read 11 Part of why it's so special because you go okay, this scene only has to have a syringe, this office, and the jackhammer that George Clooney used industrial Bob how we're gonna do it. So it's a little unique. And that makes sense. It's

Alex Ferrari 27:33
Like a crazy mad libs, like filmmaking? Well, I'll tell you, I mean, I got inspired going down the road of mariachi and red 11. By last feature, I shot exactly the same way. I said, You know what I'm going to I'm going to shoot an entire movie at Sundance, while the movie while the festival is going on. And still the still the entire movie. have three actors I had never met before. Meet me there. I had an apartment on Main Street, and had cameraman, myself and the sound guy and we just stole the whole thing and three days and shot an entire movie in three days. And we sold it and it made money and and oh yeah, it was so much because I knew it's Sundance. And I'm like, and it's like it was kind of like the Mexican town because you could get 1000 locations in a couple blocks. So tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Everyone's like, how did you how did you did you get permission? I'm like, No. I shot in Sundance headquarters. I went into Sundance headquarters and shot. People are in my scene. Like, can you move? I'm shooting Can you please? Like, my TV is like, Dude, we don't have permission to be like, I'm sorry. I'm the director, the director and he's like, You're ruining my shot. Can you please move sir?

Racer Max 28:51
That is amazing. Okay, I'm right now to watch that later. But yeah

Alex Ferrari 28:59
It was it was so much fun to do. But you know, and I've shot other things and you know, bigger budgets and stuff. But that was so much fun. It was an experimental, just like I don't care what happens with this three grand. Let's just go and have some fun. And the actors I told the actors I sold the actors I go you know, I don't know what's going on. I truly when I was on the trip back to LA at the time, I didn't know if I had a movie that I get enough coverage. I don't know. The dailies you were just like moving Go, go, go. Go go go. So then I tell them like look, at least you're gonna have an insane story to tell somebody in 20 years that that one time you went to Sundance you shot a movie like that's gonna make you have so I'll give you stories because I can't pay you a whole lot. So I'll give you stories and it worked.

Racer Max 29:46
That is amazing. That's incredible. Oh my gosh.

Alex Ferrari 29:50
Oh, that's

Racer Max 29:53
That is the best extrapolation of El Mariachi filmmaking ever heard.

Alex Ferrari 30:01
So, I'm reading love and what was the biggest challenge for you guys? You know, just because there's challenges every day, every second every day. But what was the time that you were just like? How can I get out of this?

Racer Max 30:17
Yeah, oh, man, I felt like there is. Man, I felt like each day I had an existential threat like that, oh, man, like, oh, we might not be able to finish this project ever. Really. I felt like every day had something like that. It's weird. I can't really pinpoint one problem, but rather that the very first time that we had our plan, we had our script. And we got to set. And it was a scene with gosh, we want to say like 20 actors in it. And so much had to ride on what we had written. But then none of it could because the set was off and then a part of the studio broke down so we could use it, as some of the Cast Main cast couldn't be there. And we thought, oh, my gosh, and I was just thinking, How the heck are we going to fix this? Again, running into that moment of having to be creative. The biggest problem was right after my dad tells me, Oh, well, we're guess we're just gonna figure it out. Like what ran through my mind beyond that, after that, that was definitely the biggest problem. But then realizing that every single problem after that, no matter what it was, whether it was the hangar we were in was not soundproof. So it decided to Texas rainstorm on our foot finale scene that included a lot of dialogue all over that hangar, so none of the dialogues usable. Whether it was that or missing cast members, or just completely losing an entire vehicle that we had set up. None of that. Like, none of that is bigger. All of that is just an extension of the same problem of we're gonna figure it out. We're gonna get everybody in a room and it's the quietest room and we're gonna rerecord all the lines we just did, hoping that they match up to what we just filmed over there in the rainy hangar. And it does like magic. So that's so that's funny that that was what I would say is the biggest problem is the recurring one that didn't learn to go with the flow. And by the end of the production, your life, the most of those, and you're like, those were the most fun, really, when we were all put in the same corner, and had to punch our way out that those are the most fun.

Rebel Rodriguez 32:19
Those are the stories as you said, those become the stories. Don't forget that stuff on it.

Alex Ferrari 32:24
That's, that's remarkable. I mean, and one thing I noticed about read 11 Is that you guys used a lot of practical effects, because you just didn't have the budget to do anything else. Really. So can you talk a little bit about the power of practical effects just just the phone, the telekinetic phone on the little another little table? Which is such an easy prac I mean when cuz I saw the behind the scenes by the way everyone listening have to watch Rebel Without a crew the show but also the behind the scenes of red 11 Because it is a film school and then some but the the phone moving with the magnet like it's so when you when you show it to you is super simple. If not, you're just like using wires is it was such a beautiful way. Can you talk about the power of practical effects, where so many filmmakers just want to lean on computer effects? Where practical effects I mean, look at Nolan, he's doing okay. You know, he's doing okay with the practical effect.

Racer Max 33:22
Absolutely, yeah, that that the red 11 was really app coming right off of Alita Battle Angel where it's most visual effects we've ever used. So we didn't have entire characters that didn't exist until we put them in digitally later. Coming off of that it was a shell shock. We got the bends definitely under 11. But it's so much more fun and so much more immediately gratifying on camera when you get a practical effect working. And you see it you go oh my gosh, I can't believe we're getting away with this. Look how look how dumb this looks when you look two feet this way. But in the lens, it looks incredible. Look at that. I'm totally fooled. practical effects I've really come to appreciate and go that's the magic, most timeless aspects of filmmaking, you know, when we when we see the predator and we see oh my gosh, look how much that suit and that face and that creature still holds up this day, where it still feels just as real just as like slimy and tactile as it did when it released in what 8487 Whatever it was. Like that. To me practical effects are the most timeless aspects of film and I want to incorporate a lot more into live action filmmaking and see a lot more of it because it's, as I say, that's the real movie magic right there. But the most I was added the most important thing of a practical effects is that you can write is that you can make it mean a lot more than what it is the simple $2 trick it is because you can write a story around it. You can make it meaningful through the story. You can bring it back multiple times you can make the same trick means something and just then bus stick with the audience. So that's really what I see the power practical effects. How about you?

Rebel Rodriguez 35:07
Yeah, again, if you're because what you have, that phone trick is actually a very important story moment. It's like that's literally dragging a phone on a string or with a magnet is an important story thing. And it's like, that's how you have to approach writing and approach creating as well, because you just get, you get a lot more mileage out of what little you have. And it's really, really cool.

Alex Ferrari 35:26
I mean, I, when I, when I saw, I think it was Once Upon a Time in Mexico was the introduction of the guacamole gun. For me. I remember the first time if you guys have not heard about the guacamole, and I have an entire tutorial on it on YouTube, of how I built my rockabilly gun back in the day, because my friend and I were making our first short film, and we're like, we need to blow this girl's head off. Like how are we going to blow this girl's head off? And we built a we we just cobbled together, Eric, Eric, what is air compressor guy and the PVC pipe we did multiple, like, at first it was like someone was peeing on you is not enough pressure. And then like we got to put like, what's brain matter? Like it was so much fun. But that that's a practical, we use a ton of practical effects. I'm one of those first films I made, because it was cheap. And we had a lot of visual effects too. But the practical effects sell so much easier. And it's done. No rendering.

Racer Max 36:23
Absolutely.

Alex Ferrari 36:24
No crashes. No nothing. But the guacamole gun, man, that's

Rebel Rodriguez 36:31
The way it looks when you film it is how it's gonna look in the final movie. It's like, Yes, you got it. You got it. There's no. And let's hope we have enough money to make it look good. It's like, well, if it looks great here, you're gonna be fine, honestly.

Alex Ferrari 36:42
And I'm a big proponent of combining practical and visual. Because if you have a base of practical like in that that headshot that we did in that movie, I had my VFX guy just throw a couple more splatters out off of it, but if it would have been just the VFX you wouldn't have sold it just we didn't have the technology for Oh, wow. Really make blood hits that really song. So those are fire if you do fire, like fire still is rough. Visually.

Racer Max 37:14
It's still difficult. It's it's hard to fake. Make out the human eye.

Alex Ferrari 37:18
Well, I mean, if you remember the rock, remember the movie The Rock? There was an explosion of the the car McCarthy? Yeah, yeah, there. Yeah, the car that blows up. You can see the visual effect flame that they kind of wrapped around that as a little bit while the bottom was all real. And I'm like man that's only trained eyes. cinephiles will notice that for sure, for sure.

Rebel Rodriguez 37:46
But it has a subtle effect to even the people who don't catch it's a subconscious effect of like, this isn't entirely real. And it loses gravity as a result.

Alex Ferrari 37:55
Oh, no, my wife. I mean, she was not in the film industry whatsoever. And when she's you know, I've been together for nearly 20 years now. Well, watching movies like that green screen composite was really bad. And I'm like, really? It's just like, yeah, just the compositing wasn't really good. I mean, didn't they had this a Marvel movie? Did that the money to clean that up a little bit? I'm like, wow, wow. Yeah, audiences, but

Racer Max 38:23
So many kids, really kids are CG was bad. I don't want to get bad CG. But wow, that's something

Alex Ferrari 38:31
Because now as opposed to when mariachi came out, there was no information. There was just no information. Trust me, I looked other than the Raiders of the Lost Ark stunt spectacular VHS behind the scenes of behind the scenes of Star Wars. There really wasn't a lot of behind the scenes, it was still kind of a mystery. And that's when all these DVDs that Robert put out with really practical, you know, stuff was you started that was the beginning I think of that kind of behind the scenes access and then and the YouTubes now everybody, you know, could do anything. But back then for people that listen who don't understand or have a certain age, they don't they don't understand how difficult it was back then to to even begin to do what what they did on mariachi or or Desperado or from dusk till dawn or any of the films that he did during that era. But it was a Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's

Racer Max 39:28
That's amazing. I forgot to think about that point. But yeah, in for it was almost CG and all that was movie magic back then. Because nobody knew how it worked. But now it was.

Alex Ferrari 39:38
There was a show called Magic. There was a show called Magic. And you would watch it was a 30 minute like behind the scenes of Terminator two. Those kinds of things, and you were just like, that's great. I don't have James Cameron money. So it's nice, but that's why when when you Desperado and from Dessel Don's documentary and behind the scenes on mariachi, it was the first time you like I think I can build a welcome Oh, I can I can. I think I can. I can do that. So it was this inspirational way of looking at filmmaking it's so with with red 11 Rebel, what was it like composing with me because, again, that's another thing that your dad did. He's like, You know what? I'm gonna start writing music for the hell of it. Like, I remember that I'm like, Wow, dude, calm down. Yeah Robert calm the hell down. What's wrong? Steadicam craft service? I'm instance like, Come on dude.

Rebel Rodriguez 40:37
He would just be like, Yeah, you know, I think I want to try that. Yeah, I want the music to be like this, I'll just do it and it's like, wow, okay. I mean, it's, you forget how revolutionary that is like, right? No direct who was director was writing and editing, then what director was writing, editing and doing music and then also doing cinematography and then all that stuff. It's really

Alex Ferrari 40:55
Hard for carpenters, the only one that I know of that didn't use it for his own movies. But he still didn't do everything else.

Rebel Rodriguez 41:02
Crazy. Exactly. So it's really special. But the thing he always that's always been the way he's like, wanted to teach us is if okay, if you want to get into movies and stuff, I'm just gonna throw you in under something you don't know how to do all entirely. And you're gonna learn while you're doing it pretty much. So racer was only on the crew mate. He had to do all the sound he had never done sound before. And so

Alex Ferrari 41:25
I got the feeling brother. Even though I could afford it, like, you know what, screw it. I'm gonna do it. And I'm like, I'm never doing sound. Again,

Rebel Rodriguez 41:35
Again. You learn real quick, though, in life.

Alex Ferrari 41:39
What a good sound what a good sound guy is and why he's valuable. She's valuable. Because my next, my next film, I had a sound guy. Everything sounds good. Thank you. Thank you.

Racer Max 41:50
I know it's getting a budget next time. Absolutely.

Alex Ferrari 41:53
Oh my god.

Rebel Rodriguez 41:56
Yeah, so it was. I mean, I was writing a little bit of music at home. I was always been playing piano since I was a kid. And I stopped High School stopped taking piano lessons. And I was like, I want to do something with music. And somehow, all those years, I never quite dawned on me. Oh, right. My dad makes movies. I could write music for movies, right? They have stories, and you can write some music. I mean, like, took me that long, by the way. But I was like, you know, that would be cool. So I've been writing a little bit throughout the year before. And I wrote like 15 minutes of music for a VR short, Robert and racer did called the limit. That was like my first scoring project. And then from there, he was like, Well, now you just write a whole feature, you know, just just a little extra, you just got to write longer and more stuff. And I was like, okay, and I was on my laptop on logic. Just logic. Yeah, they can stop. Yeah, it was after writing after writing on GarageBand for most of the time, and I started just like with nothing, just a little keyboard. And I was like, alright, well, we got to figure this out. And it was probably one of the most stressful experiences ever. But it was really, really fun and special to start looking at the movie and go, right I guess this is when you would do a character theme and stuff like here, you can play a theme for a character and build that up across and you start getting understanding if if your tools are really small. You start learning the thinking and the methodology behind it a little bit more so and appreciate like when something time's up well and all that. So it taught me a sense of pacing, at least I kind of learned when I would wrote a scene I was like, that's in pace, that I wasn't paced well to the scene, it felt weird. And then when it actually did work or not, but

Alex Ferrari 43:27
Can we just say can we say something publicly here that your father's insane. Let's just throw that out there. As a general statement, the insanity of trying to make mariachi it's insane at a time that nobody was made. And that insanity has kept going throughout his career. He has been insane. In the most beautiful, wonderful way. Insane to like, Hey, Rob, you've never done it. Come over here. Figure it out. Like that's pretty much on like, you know, small budget films first, but then, you know, then you're like, thrown into the deep end of the water with some bigger budgets.

Rebel Rodriguez 44:04
He's like, you want to learn? Yeah, yeah, he's like, you're gonna learn how to swim. I'm gonna throw you out into the ocean. And once you're like coughing up along the water, I'll fish it back out. That's how you're gonna learn. It's like

Alex Ferrari 44:14
Shark point. Get out

Rebel Rodriguez 44:16
Do your own stunts. Get out there. I mean, it's pretty much always been that and when sharks. Yeah,

Alex Ferrari 44:22
Exactly. But we all have to, but we all have to be kind of insane. To even be in this business. This is insane. We're like, this is corny. We're all carnies. And this is the circus. I mean, at a carnival. We're all carnies. We all smell of cabbage. And that's

Racer Max 44:41
Absolutely true.

Rebel Rodriguez 44:42
It's true. It's true. And I think one of the most important lessons it's taught us every time it's happened, you've had to do it where you're like, I have no clue what I'm doing. You just feel like and in this one, even though the budget was small, I had seen all the work we had done, and I was like, I'm gonna score all that work and if it sucks, I I'd like, you know, dropped the ball right after everyone else put in all this effort. So it is a lot, but the most important thing it taught me is you're really not ever going to be ready, it's like you have, you're not always, you're never going to be fully comfortable, I can do this and then dive into it, you're always going to have that I don't know, if I can do this, I, I'm almost there. But I don't know, that's when you got to start is, you'll become ready as you're doing it, and you learn a lot more actually doing it. You know, when you actually have to, when the boat asked to actually hold water, you'll learn a lot more of what actually works, what doesn't work. So you do have to be read, you know, put yourself out there and actually be willing to fail sometimes, you know, don't write Don't Make Your First Movie feature when you you know, you can do it. It's like you're not going to feel like you know, you're ready at all, you know, maybe you've done some shorts, maybe done some of this. You just got to dive in there and do it basically. So

Alex Ferrari 45:49
Would you agree that the one of the biggest the biggest skill sets, any filmmaker at any level, any crew personality, is the ability to understand and accept failure, as far as part of the process? And not to like that, let that derail you, you just have to kind of keep going because that is a skill set that most people don't have let alone filmmakers don't have that ability to fail. And it seems like you know, what your your father and your mother have taught you throughout your career is failures. Okay, you know, hey, everyone has everyone goes up and down and exact. Sometimes you have a good movie, sometimes you have a I liked the movie, but the audience didn't like the movie didn't do well in the box office didn't do this or that. Or oh my god, how the hell did that happen? Like all of it, but but failures are the big deals. Can you talk a little bit about that? From your experience?

Rebel Rodriguez 46:38
Yes. Yeah. No, that is totally it. I mean, he says you learn so much more from your failures and your successes. And I mean, he's shown it all throughout his career, you know, for rooms, was didn't do all that great. But right, what he saw was, hey, it's actually pretty funny to have these two little kids here who like, get into all this trouble. They barely even tie their own shoes, their shoes, and they're like doing all this stuff about like their spies or something. That's where that came from, you know, from his failure, came Spy Kids, which ended up being a humongous thing. So he's always been excited to just jump in and trip and fail, because he knows you'll, you know, when you stumble, when you go down that path that no one's ever gone, where you you're not comfortable with, you'll stumble, but you also stumble upon new things. you'll stumble upon great new ideas for stuff. And yeah, it's I don't think you're ever going to fully appreciate that you have more to learn unless you've seen you have things to work on, basically. So it's almost like you're guaranteed it's not like I was, it's not like it was a home run, making the red 11 score, I had things that I was like, that really didn't work out. This wasn't that but instantly from there, I was like, that's what I need to get better at. That's what you know, this is really important. I never would have probably realized that unless I actually scored a movie. And seen this works. This doesn't work that all that so it's really Yeah, it teaches you to accept failure pretty quick.

Racer Max 47:56
Yeah, absolutely agree. It's one of the most important skill sets that anyone can have. And I can point a lot to what makes you averse to failure. Because we felt that you know, whether you're the son of anybody important, or whether you're just comparing yourself to somebody that you're not like any of the other great filmmakers, because we watch all these great movies, you want to be like them, but the most important you're and you're gonna see only your failures, and you're not going to look at any of theirs. And you're gonna write what are what you what they consider their failure, you consider their greatest work because so you know, you're blind to other people's failures. And, you know, you can compare yourself to like, Ah, man, I'm the he made the mariachi and he did all of that by himself. And like, I haven't done anything. I haven't made a film all by myself like that, too. And it's like this is and he's made such a big splash, but like, I haven't made anything like that. But, you know, comparing to others makes you so averse to failure, because that's one of the biggest drivers or drivers of why you don't want to fail. But you just got to fail. You just got to go at it and fail and compare yourself only with yourself really go as revel just said, you know, okay, wasn't a score wasn't a slam dunk, but I know where I can do better next time. So I'm going to try it. I know I'm gonna make that better for myself and for the audience next time. That's what I want to do. So

Alex Ferrari 49:17
And when you're saying that the first thing that came into my mind is as filmmakers of my generation, first thing you think of is when you hit 23 You go, Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at 23 I haven't done crap. And you're like, but it's okay. It's okay. Then it hit 27 Like Spielberg made Jaws at 27 Okay, so then you keep moving is like, couldn't make reservoir like at like, 30 or something like that. And you keep pushing you keep pushing Terminator. 30. And then now, Ridley Scott didn't make his first film till 40 Like trying to make yourself feel better. You're like, oh, by the way, that's gonna be my first feature at 40 Why couldn't I go That's a whole other story of why I didn't do it before, but I did a lot of other directing and other things like that. But you start going like, okay, but if you do compare yourself to these, quote unquote gods and that's another thing that a lot of filmmakers do they put these filmmakers up on pedestals. I mean, look, I have a Stanley Kubrick autographed book behind me that I got Hitchcock right next to it. You know, I mean, although I have, I have books from all my favorite filmmakers behind me, you know, you do put them up on a pedestal. But one of the great honors and privileges of my life of doing the show is I get to talk to some of these sometimes these guys, these guys. And then I start to realize I realized a long time ago, when I did this first year, I was I was like, they all have the same issues. They all have, they don't have enough money. They don't have enough time. They they all I always tell people you can no matter who you are in this business, you're gonna get punched in the face. Every Spielberg still gets punched in the face. Not as much as he used to. You know, Robert, I'm sure still gets punched in the face sideswiped like, Oh, I didn't see that coming, you know, from the business or something like that. The difference is that now that as you get older, you start to learn how to duck a little bit. You know, sometimes it just grazes you. And sometimes you're not even there when the punch is thrown because you've been around a little bit longer. But no, but no matter who you are, you're gonna go through it is the great equalizer filmmaking. No matter who you are, no matter how much money you have, you can have a look at Cameron. Jesus, look at you look what James is doing. You know, I mean, he's all the money in the world is the only filmmaker who does that, by the way is people like, what do you think gonna make only James Cameron? No, absolutely not given they're not giving that to Spielberg to Nolan to Fincher to to Robert to note, no one else is getting half a billion dollars to like, make a movie in a few years. It's just It's insane. Right? It's, it's insane. But, but no matter how much money you have, there's every day there's a problem, because it's part of the the artistic process. So So you brought up four rooms, by the way, my favorite four rooms, obviously is Robert because it was the most fun. And that was that was the moment that you started to see the shift into the family stuff. Because before then it was stuff that you guys could watch. And that's why kids came out. And I want to impress on people. What Spy Kids means to so many people around the world Spy Kids is one of those franchises in the first film. There never been anything like that. Again, Robert, nothing made like that with Latino, Latino people. And I always say this, because I'm Latino. I'm of Cuban descent. And I've never seen myself portrayed in a movie like that before. But anytime I do, it was always like, Hi, I'm Latino. Let me eat my taco. And I'm like, again, like it was so on the nose, where it was never mentioned inspire kids. It was just, there's just people having an adventure. And I think that was another one of those points that inspired other filmmakers to bring in other cultures. And not point out like there's the black guy. There's the Asian guy. There's, it's like, no, let's just it's a story. And it opened up a Spy Kids was one of the first times I saw that in the Latino culture. And, you know, when I when my kids were old enough, I showed them Spy Kids, and they just like gobbled up the first four. Like they were just like, because it's like, it's great. I will always watch a movie or story that gives kids power. It's a give anytime there's kids in power making adults look like idiots. Done. It's a hit

Racer Max 53:49
Very right. make kids feel powerful. make kids feel cool.

Alex Ferrari 53:54
Right. Exactly. And we are heroes. And then you did that with a we are heroes as well. What was your experience when you guys first saw Spy Kids? And because you were on it, you were shooting? Tell me what your experience was making it? Because I know you were how old were you guys were spiking.

Racer Max 54:10
So I like for me,

Rebel Rodriguez 54:12
But yeah.

Racer Max 54:13
You ever was to when it first came out? So okay, it was four when the first one came out. And that was imagine you you're from like zero to four years old. You don't you kind of know that your parents do something. They do work this thing called job. They've got one. But you don't know what it is. You see Dad go off to this office that's attached to the house and he goes off and he disappears all day. And he's doing something and no matter how many times he comes home to tell you that he's making a movie you don't you don't like get it. You don't really understand. Until you're sitting in a you're sitting in a car service. Writing to this movie theater. We're now there's instead of a quiet Tuesday afternoon there's 1000s of kids and families gathered outside of this theater. And you're like oh there's a there's a Carpet. There's like wait, why are we walking down this? Why are we dressed so nice to go to this movie theater? And then you sit in the theater you watch this mind blowing movie called spike. It's one. And end credits come on, and both your mom and dad's names come out at the end. And you're like, what? Okay, wait, I don't know. Like, wait all these other crew people who I've met and I know their names to. This is crazy. Wait, you all make movies that you made this? Yeah. That's people who

Alex Ferrari 55:30
Like racing?

Racer Max 55:34
You made me pancakes yesterday morning. Like what?

Rebel Rodriguez 55:38
Exactly. It really takes him showing you the props afterwards. going, Look, here he is.

Racer Max 55:43
Here's the jetpack.

Rebel Rodriguez 55:44
Here's the buddy pack. Here's the thumb thumb. We made these. They're on the move. It's like it takes that much for you to finally go. Ah, okay, I get it. Yeah, it's like, yeah.

Alex Ferrari 55:54
Oh, my kids. My kids still don't understand what I do. They're like, like, you're on YouTube. But you also make movies and they're like, Can we watch your movies? Now? You're not old enough for the movies I've made. Okay, so but you're on YouTube, get followers. People follow you. Subscribe. You like Yeah. And then I got I got recognized a couple times in public, which is crazy with them. And they're just like, what, what? Why? It's the thumb. It's like showing you the jetpack. And like somebody else's. It's, it's remarkable. The, the, the vaporization of it, the veil that we have as kids to what our parents did. And and you just stuck it you need to be hit over the head for you to go, oh, they make movies.

Rebel Rodriguez 56:46
Because movies and here we are making home movies. And we're like, well, he just kind of like

Alex Ferrari 56:56
Of course everyone makes movies, like,

Racer Max 56:59
Hit over the head with it. For sure. That's good. Yeah, it's an you know, when you see it like that. And then you're a part of the next all the next ones. You know, it makes a lasting impact on YouTube. You know, we joke that our family is the biggest fans, the biggest geeks of Spy Kids ever. Yeah, we got the most over all the props and vehicles and actors and anything. That's amazing. Yeah. So it's it's not just the impact that I'm not it's like not a stretch at all to see how much it's impacted people you know, across the world and how much they remember it and love it and have such fond memories of it.

Alex Ferrari 57:35
And for people listening when spike is one came out. It was a massive hit like it was. It was a massive hit. Like the biggest hit your parents ever had is crazy. Yeah, it was McDonald's toys. I remember McDonald's toys. It was a it was a thing with McDonald's. I was like, this was huge. It was it was it was huge. Hey, maybe we should do some more this kid stuff.

Rebel Rodriguez 58:05
Pretty cool. In the kitchen. There's still a little Routh. I'm, there's a little Ralph toy about this big just sitting up on one of the ledges. And he really one day and I got a picture. I was like, man, it took that long for him to finally fall down. I got a picture of him. I put him right back up

Racer Max 58:21
Back on your bed.

Rebel Rodriguez 58:23
And I was a kid just staring at him up there. Like when can I play with him? They knew we'd lose him as a kid. But so he just stayed up there. It's like, no, no, he's spying. He's just It's crazy how pervasive it was everywhere. I mean, it just and it was just such so impactful to so yeah, and nothing like that. I mean, it's just

Alex Ferrari 58:42
No nothing like that. And you know, what was really fascinating to me, too, is that with Spy Kids, your parents didn't fall into the same trap that so many Hollywood filmmakers get into was when they have a big hit the studio's show up and like, here's more money, take a lot more money, and just double the budget and just do whatever you want. And they said no, we're gonna do the exact same budget. And it'll be fine. And it's that's such a smart move. It's such a brilliant move, because you get intoxicated with money being thrown at success and success. And they said, no, no, no, we're good. Give us the same, we'll make another one. And it was so brilliant. Because if that's not as big of a hit, it's okay. But if they would have taken 100,000 100 They could have easily got $100 million budget for the next episode comfortably and it would not have been a good business move. So that's another lesson you know, for all of us who will eventually have the Spy Kids kind of fame. Number Don't take the 100 million when they offer to you boy

Racer Max 59:55
That's really good observation I'd never thought of I'd never thought about that now wants to event Should it today, but I? Oh, God, I really agree with you. Yeah, that's, I mean, I'm just another side of their genius, you know, the how smart they were and how thoughtful about filmmaking and how much they can make, how much what they can accomplish. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 1:00:14
And it's and it is a lesson that can be, you know, we were joking about the 100 million dollars, but, but when you're anywhere, if you have some success anywhere, don't get intoxicated by it. Understand that. This is a moment, it will pass. And you're gonna be right down at the bottom again, real quick, real quick, how many filmmakers? How many wonderful filmmakers have we seen who rose rose rose, got a little too intoxicated, went a little crazy, bombed. And they get thrown into director jail, and you don't see them again. And sometimes you don't see them again, ever again. And it's such a shame. Where you know, that happens. And again, it happens in any interview successes in any field anywhere you go. Don't get intoxicated by it, because the one thing that people and that's one thing I think your parents never really fell into was the you're the greatest. Oh my god, you're this You're that here's more money. Here's it they just really grounded really really grounded the entire the entire time they've been making movies. It has been you could see it in the in the filmography you know, SimCity huge, monumental filmmakers that are legendary were like how to do this, you know, and yet Cool. Cool, very, very high level headed throughout the rest of you know, moving forward, it's pretty admirable to see film a filmmaker and and like your parents, both filmmakers, stay grounded during this whole process and then keeping you guys grounded. I mean, you guys are an example of this. groundedness because you guys could have eat I mean, I've I've met some Hollywood, quote unquote, Hollywood kids. And it's, it's, it's I'm sure you have to it's, it's a it's a brutal business, guys. It's a brutal business that can eat up somebody and tear them apart and destroy them. Like that. Would you agree?

Racer Max 1:02:13
I agree. Absolutely. Yeah, I row is appreciated. That groundedness they applied, you know, to their careers that they applied to raising us and even raising us in the same industry and bringing, and now teaching us and training us in the same industry. So yeah, but I absolutely agree. That's a really cool observation. Thank you for that about them.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:35
No, absolutely. Absolutely. So now there's this fifth and stuff, because you guys can't stop making Spy Kids. I mean, it's just like, just back to the horse. We go. No, I'm joking.

Racer Max 1:02:49
We had other people tell us these are like Bond movies like this is such a universal tale.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:55
While just new cash will bring Daniel Craig in will bring Pierce Brosnan. It'll be great. It'll be great. No, these these could arguably keep I mean, you guys can be you know, you know, when when Robert and Elizabeth are both, you know, completely retired from making stuff you guys like working to keep going and you could be the petroleum like, can spike it just keep the Brooklyn family just keeps going. And we have to bring in some new Spy Kids. It can easily keep going. I mean, it's it by the way is a Spy Kids Armageddon, the beginning of a new trilogy, that you guys are trying to make.

Racer Max 1:03:31
That is that's the that's the ideas we we got new kids that we really love new family, new parents that we really love. And we just love seeing them together and their energy in the first thing everybody sees when they like any of the crew or the producers, anybody got to see them on set. They're like, Oh, my gosh, I want to see so much more. They have so much fun and so much energy. So that was the idea. We just made it a little standalone reboot on its own. That was its kind of division going in. But seeing it on camera, you go oh my gosh, I want to keep watching this. I want to see more. Just like with Spike, it's one everybody wants to see those kids somewhere. So

Alex Ferrari 1:04:05
Right and now they're like my age those kids. I mean, having kids of their own

Racer Max 1:04:09
Yeah. kids of their own.

Alex Ferrari 1:04:13
And then you see one of them in my chat and you're like wow, okay. Okay. All right. All right. Yeah, go. It's fascinating. But so, so tell us a little bit about Spy Kids. Armageddon. I know. There was no Netflix finally got the rights to help you. You know, make the sequels and they love what you guys did with. We are heroes or we are yours. We are champions. We can be heroes. Yeah, we can be heroes. We are we can be heroes, which by the way loved as well. It's such a beautiful story. Beautiful film. My kids like watched it a ton of times. You know, it's great. Yeah. And the little behind the scenes that they made with you guys on YouTube and stuff like that was so much fun to watch what you guys were doing. And then my kids were like, I want a pen and an iPad. I'm like God, Jesus Christ. Great, thanks. Thanks, Robert. Thanks, Robert. Elizabeth. I appreciate that. Thanks. So tell me a little bit how this this story came about how you guys came at this new this new installment?

Racer Max 1:05:18
Yeah, it's it's perfect that you mentioned we can be heroes because we had just just finished making that. And we loved it. We had such a great time getting to do kids kids film again. And getting it right. That was fun getting to make it was fun. And so, Robert, and I were just joking around, like, how could you imagine what if we do another Spy Kids? I can be really fun, right? Yeah, let's do something like that. And Robert does what he does best. We he starts talking to people about it immediately. And it was Skydance that was really interested. And they said we would love to do Spy Kids. And Robert and I were laughing from the studio that brings you Mission Impossible comes schmuck. That's okay. We laughed at the idea. And we did a writing process that we've been doing since I was seven. And we did Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Together is we jump in the pool, and have a little notepad next to the pool. And just swim around and talk ideas, laugh about things, make jokes talk about it. And pretty much in that. In that pool session, we came to one of the major ideas, the story of the film, including the idea that then that, in that making up for in the behind the scenes with we come here as mentioned the idea of give kids technology like don't hold them back to what whatever you did when you were growing up or growing up or anything like that, give them the best, so that they can go further than you and they will go up leaps and bounds. So try not to hold them to any restrictions you had. See what's available now see what can help them and give that to them. So we loved that. And we were just we were just talking about it in the making of and we thought that would have made the whole story about that was Spy Kids and rebel hoarded a great Lego for a rebel the the idea that you weren't a great lady idea that giving kids technology and wow, that was a huge part of this one.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:07:11
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was interesting, it kind of all came together because we'd love this. You know, it's technology's kind of gotten a bad rap. To some extent, you know, of like, it's all bad books are better. And so we're like, how about we have a movie where it's the opposite. And the book, the book can be just as bad as the technology can be just as good. And vice versa. You know, it's less about the tool and more about the teaching, what are they learning? You know, what are you learning? What values are you kind of learning from that. But that kind of came together with an idea of like, you know, it'd be really cool to have a To Do A Spy Kids, where is there any way we could make the whole world change to where suddenly kids have like a unique advantage over adults in some way? Like, just conceptually, is there any way to do that? And we're like, you know, what, if like, the only way to access technology in the world was through like video games, since kids have gotten so adept at this and technology in general, that they completely outpaced their parents and stuff and that their own things. It's like the hot time of their lives. And if that's like the inciting event, now, suddenly, the kids are super spies, and everyone else is struggling. So it's like now they're really like the only people that can like save the world. So that's, that was like where the concept really started.

Racer Max 1:08:18
But so kind of the core idea came to that, yeah, let's have a bad guy who's a villain who's video game designer. And he infects the whole world with a video game virus and nobody gets to their vices, except the kids can because they're smart. And they're savvy with technology and games. So they go leaps ahead of the parents. And within the course a few days become super spies and are now having to go save the world take on all the responsibility of that. And so a lot of the core ideas really came to that writing session. And we have from there took off we just started writing, creating it over the course of 2020 2021. And yeah, that was the birth of the new ones like is Armageddon.

Alex Ferrari 1:08:55
I feel that it's going to do well sir. I feel that the kids are gonna really like my girls are like excited to see it. It's, it's, it's so admirable to see how you guys have continued that that franchise and I hope because even when I saw the trailer, I haven't seen the movie yet, because we haven't had access to it yet. But soon, soon, we're seeing hopefully next week. But, but even the trailer kind of that's why I asked Is this a trilogy? Like I saw it, I saw where this was going, I was like, Oh, this is not they're making another trilogy out of this. This is solid, solid.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:09:35
Yeah, it's really it's really special. That was kind of the intention of like, you know, you know, I get the feeling of like, Spike hits five, you know, usually when something gets to the fifth, it's like, I don't know what's going on anymore. But we really were like, We really only wanted to do it if there was really a story we could tell that's different from the old ones, but has the same values and stuff. So that's where we kind of saw the opportunity of like, right, there's almost a modern take on this now that it's been 20 years since the The first one where now we have a very significant gap between what that one was about what this one is about. But they're both still about family and about still about empowerment of kids. And this generation would really love that sort of thing, you know, in this new form factor. And it's really cool now, especially that we learned from we can be heroes is, streaming services is really great for kids, they can watch the movie as much as they want, not as much as they can convince their parents to go to the movie and drive them there. So they get to watch it that much more. So we can be heroes is really impactful. And beloved, because kids could just watch it at the pace, they like watching things, watch it all the way through, gets to the end credits, you just replay it, and you do it again. And you do that a few times a day,

Alex Ferrari 1:10:39
Where you guys might be you guys might be a little young to remember this. But that's exactly what they did. In the video store days with Disney movies, I would rent out a Disney movie and the kids would just on loop, watch the VHS, again, rewind again, they did it with five kids, because both kids was on VHS as well. And they would just loop again and again and again. But now it's instant on their phone, on the car. They could just watch. I mean, I think my girls have seen we can be heroes a few times at least two or three times. And I was like, I'll walk into limits. Great. Are you Why didn't you just see this like last week? Yeah, they have the ability to do that, like I can watch a movie again. And again, mine doesn't do that anymore. Lethal Weapon like five times in a row, I can really do that anymore.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:11:28
Just like different the way they enjoy their entertainment. And it just it was always kind of difficult to make to make that work. But you know, now it's easier than ever for them kind of, I mean, they don't really have much problem watching it on a phone or an iPad, they just want to see it and like be able to watch experience it over and over again, see the jokes again. And, you know, so it's cool to put something in front of them that like really empowers them and shows them you know, they can go on a really cool, awesome adventure, they can do really incredible things. And if they work together with their family as well, you know, you can do, you can move mountains. And it's it's always been about that sort of thing, too. It's really special. So

Alex Ferrari 1:12:00
And we can be heroes, if I'm not mistaken was like number one on Netflix for a while. Right? Was like everybody was like, what's going on? Like, what is Stranger Things like what's going on? I heard that I'm like, good, man. That's awesome. It wasn't and I know the budgets because I know, Robert spent $400 million dollars and make that sounds like good that, you know, a film like that gets that kind of attention worldwide. Worldwide.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:12:34
It's really it's really something.

Racer Max 1:12:37
It's really interesting.

Alex Ferrari 1:12:40
And I believe that this one will probably do, I hope similar business, if you will. So they can make the next two or three, and then your kids will start making them.

Racer Max 1:12:52
That's yeah, that's the hope for us. You know, right now we're still waiting for the launch. And we're like, Oh, I hope I just want to make a second and a third and beyond this. So

Rebel Rodriguez 1:12:59
Yeah, exactly. So just as much as we can be heroes and all that kind of stuff, because it's really hard.

Racer Max 1:13:05
If not, we really had a great time making it but really brought the family together in a really fun way. And what are excited for people to watch it.

Alex Ferrari 1:13:14
And what was the biggest challenge of making that film? Because it makes you guys fun? Yeah, cuz you guys got a little different. You got you got some shrapnel. Now you got a little bit of shrapnel on you, you know, you've taken a couple hits along the way. How did this big a little bit bigger budget slightly bigger budget a

Racer Max 1:13:31
Little bigger than red 11

Alex Ferrari 1:13:34
So from a production standpoint and a composing standpoint, how did this like biggest challenges? Yeah.

Racer Max 1:13:39
This one, definitely the biggest challenge was dealing with a legacy, you know, of the originals are so beloved, that and we're just love them so much to that. crafting something that has to capture what came before that. That was all you know, you put on your gloves to deal with that every single day. Just okay, and now we're gonna carefully adjust this and that and make sure this is feels up to snuff. So like reference of the originals was so key and so important. And like, in hindsight, there's still little elements that I watch now in the movie and go, Gosh, I wish I made that more like this or more like that, because like, Oh, I missed, totally missed that whole side of fun that the originals had that, that I only incorporate a little bit. So like that definitely is the biggest challenge. But we're and that haunts you throughout writing throughout production or editing, even through visual effects. It's like no, this has the right shape. They're composing. Compose. Yep. All throughout all of that challenge Honsou throughout all of it, but at the end, I'm really happy with where it how it came together. And how I watched it and I see kids smile sitting next to me and go okay, you know, you can beat yourself up about like, Oh, I wish I did this, this and that. But it really it captures something that's Just like the originals, and that makes us smile as kids that makes us smile now is big kids. Well,

Alex Ferrari 1:15:05
I never I never thought about that. But you're absolutely right. You guys are the the number one fans of this franchise. I mean, and the pressure that that puts on you guys as creators. It's kind of like my parents started this train. I better not do really. Now not at the beginning of the process, you can't do this.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:15:29
Especially, you know, many times this type of stuff hasn't worked out, you're like, the odds are stacked against you for sure. It's definitely

Alex Ferrari 1:15:37
Any sequel, any sequel, the second, third or fifth? Yeah, always. You're always. Occasionally you get the Terminator two. Occasionally, you get aliens. Yeah. Okay. And by the way, I actually liked by kids too, more than I liked by kids, one on my personal I love my kids. But Spy Kids too. I really remember liking it more. I just liked it more than the first one. So

Racer Max 1:16:03
My favorite to write it's like

Alex Ferrari 1:16:05
Occasionally. But man, I can't imagine that kind of pressure. Because from your parents legacy from the films legacy, and also your own love of being part of it. Since you were so young. Must have been How the hell do you make this movie? I'm like, I'm stressed out and I didn't make it.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:16:22
Yeah, definitely the stress and the weight. And like the pressure of all that is what counterbalances a lot is the love and the passion we've had for the series. And it's like, you know, we're like some of the biggest fan. So it's like, we were there the whole time going, it's got to have this, it's got to have that it's got to have this, you know, we need the vehicles, we need a little robot assistant, because you can't go without that. I mean, that's all I wanted as a kid was thinking robotics is I wanted Ralph so badly. And needs this. And it's I mean,

Alex Ferrari 1:16:48
I still need Ralph, Sir. I still think

Rebel Rodriguez 1:16:54
We all told me I could buy one, I'd probably be looking towards that. Yeah, I would 100% Ralph is a necessity. But yeah, it's definitely just as much as it was a huge deal. And there was a lot to a lot to get done here. There was the passion for it was really what drove us. And it was, you know, it's what made it probably one of my favorite projects we've done was that, we get to do all that again, and you know, be able to add a new twist to it and add new flavors to it. And we have enough under our belt that we're like, we know how we can approach that in the writing and this and that, you know, we kind of put all our heads together and can try to do something new, but still have that same feeling as the originals. So it's really beautiful. I think it came at exactly the right time when I didn't feel I was ready for it. But I had the passion to like, if I could do it, this is how I do it. And so yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:17:45
So now moving on real quick. You guys also worked on another little film called hypnotic. Recently you produced and you compose that, again, slightly bigger than read a lovin maker. Yeah, yeah. Hi, Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben was that was a star. So I mean, you guys, you guys are taking on bigger and bigger projects now. You know, it's it's so admirable to see how you guys are taking on this kind of pressure. Because you could. I mean, you guys could easily be all honest. in OBS aside, you guys could Coast comfortably for the rest of your life. But no joke, you can do this. But you guys are challenging yourself and pushing yourselves as creators as filmmakers. And I think that is a legacy of your parents who are pushing you and throwing you into the deep end. Because when I saw like, because I'm like, Oh, they did here. And then when I looked at him, like some of it they did hypnotic too. Like that's, that's a big that's that's a big that's a big boy movie. You know, serious movie, big boy movie, big girl movie. You know? So when you approach that, like, how did you guys I mean, it's it's a it's a bigger deal, guys. It's not like it's not legacy. It's not something else that you're like, Okay, we're we're now in the deep end with Uncle Ben

Racer Max 1:19:11
Absolutely, it's yeah, as you were saying that. We I as you were saying you guys are taking on the challenge the little voice in my head is going Oh, but I love the challenge. And it's like in this moment in this chair, I realized oh gosh, my parents gave me a bit of their insanity Yeah, this is that insanity that

Alex Ferrari 1:19:28
That got programming programming I talked to you about earlier. There he settled

Racer Max 1:19:37
They flipped it around the pressure and challenge that nobody wants they've made us like private and desire it and go after it as a day job

Rebel Rodriguez 1:19:44
Makes you more excited. But it's that's really us kind of thinking that you know, I mean you become unbreakable in that regard. The more challenge you get the more excited you are about it. It's like that's the passion can completely outgun the amount of pressure you have and really that's what generates the ideas if you're not passionate for If you just feel like you're gonna get steamrolled, nothing's gonna come to you at all. But if you're, if you're if you got that rocky kind of mentality to it, where it's like, there's no way you just gotta go the distance and give it everything you've got, you start coming up with stuff, the passion kind of drives it. And that's where you start to get the inspiration impetus to kind of start making something and,

Racer Max 1:20:19
And talk about a challenge that makes you feel unbreakable. With hypnotic. It's like, Yeah, this is a serious thriller. We have major great actor attached to this. And also

Alex Ferrari 1:20:28
And also an Oscar winner, and a great director in his own right, a fantastic director. Absolutely

Racer Max 1:20:34
Fantastic director. Yeah, exactly, exactly. On top of that, it was 2020, it was 2020 2021. We made this during a little something called the pandemic, the

Wow, this project fell apart because of COVID. Twice, each time shrinking the budget as it went, because we this film was pretty sold. So all the budget that you have is all the budget you got. And twice we almost got it started once in California and once in Canada, but both times it fell through. And so we finally found a way to bring it over to little home called Boston and pulled out Well believe it or not pulled out a lot of our rent 11 tricks on this on. A good amount of the movie is shot in the exact same office studio as a good we're like how much how can we use more of our own studio for this film, and just the fact

Rebel Rodriguez 1:21:35
That it's a ruler, and it's got psychological aspects to it. It's literally we kept calling it it's like the spiritual successor of like read 11 like read 11 had a Desperado. It was weird like mariachi had a just really strange how that happened. markable so much of the same kind of DNA that made that was kind of had to put this out of necessity, but it made them so it feel almost like they're linked spiritually a little bit.

Racer Max 1:22:02
So it was it took all sides to do it. You know, we're like, Okay, well, this is just a normal office, but rebel with your incredible music that you've just learned how to compose. We're going to make this feel great and psychological and epic and moving dramatic, even though he's just walking through our same boring gray hall that we have in our studio.

Alex Ferrari 1:22:23
No pressure at all boys.

Racer Max 1:22:24
No pressure at all. Yeah, yeah, it was fun. It was really fun to you know, move on to something like that. That's, as you said, big, big boy, big girl movie. And then tackle it with all the same toolset that we've learned up to this point and gain new ones along the way.

Alex Ferrari 1:22:41
So I have to ask you guys, this question, what is the biggest if you can if you can bring it down to one thing? What is the biggest lesson you've learned from your dad?

Racer Max 1:22:51
Biggest lesson I've learned from my dad filmmaking, filmmaking or life?

Alex Ferrari 1:22:54
It's up to you.

Racer Max 1:22:55
That's kind of the thing with him. It's almost like the kung fu masters. You don't realize he's teaching. He's teaching how to throw a punch. But he's also teaching you how to pay your mortgage or how to how to have a successful relationship or anything like that. I always tell him this one is my favorite. And is he taught me one day I think I was upset about something when I was five or six. And he grabbed visuals are good for parents who grabbed a cup of water filled about halfway. And for less than we've all heard, but you know, just sticks with you. He spilled about halfway and he said, Look at this cup of water. You can look at it. You can either see it as half full or half empty. But is it tea right now. And I said it's half empty. Like there's only half water there. And he said, You just use a negative mindset. To me, I see a lot of potential a little water that's in there. That's half full. I've got so much water to work with. I've got half full cup of water. That's incredible. And he said that is positive thinking with that. I can conquer anything with think with believing I've got so much greatness in this little half full cup of water. I've got so much I can do. And he taught me that I didn't tell him till probably like, a decade later. 17 that that was the most important thing you ever taught me and he went, I remember teaching you that really good. I said,

I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. Well teach me what did it what did you got from it? But

That absolutely. You know, it's it's filmmaking, it's life. It's everything. That kind of thinking. Pressure and challenges. Don't turn into opportunity unless you can look at it in a positive way. So like, oh, everything I couldn't have learned anything I've learned either from them or from these projects that they've blessed us by putting us on challenging us with unless I have that. So

Rebel Rodriguez 1:24:38
No, I definitely. It's probably one of the most foundational lessons that everything else builds on. It's like if you have that a lot of things can fall into place. It's yeah. Yeah, pretty much that one's Yeah, that's the one that's really it's continued to mean more the more I grew up, it's like wow, this was that was really it and I think the only the other one is his main one that you know, no matter how prepared you think you are, you're always going to everything's gonna fall apart. He said, as much as knowing is half the battle, the other half the battle is not knowing. And so it's just this kind of this eternal, you're never going to have the whole battle basically, it's just always gotta meet, meet it the rest of the way. But, but um, yeah, definitely between those two. That's kind of been what's always driven us because it's really powerful. It allows you to turn a monumental amount of pressure and problems into a monumental amount of potential. And for creativity potential and passion is what makes it grow. So you just beautiful when you got nothing, at least got your mind and like a piece of paper and some ideas. So that takes no budget, but that's what the movie The best movies are made out of. It's all throughout it is fabric. So so if

Alex Ferrari 1:25:51
I may be able to quote Dumb and Dumber, so you're saying there's a chance that's great. And on the other side of that coin of your growth is your mother. And the lessons that she taught me She's a remarkable producer. And holds the entire, the entire place for you know, when when your parents work together and work together early in their in their careers. She held the space for him, for him to be insane. Absolutely. Without question, right. So and inspire kids. And this one as well as she held the space. So everyone could be insane. What lesson if you can hold on to one, what is the lesson that your mother has taught you? From not only in the filmmaking side, but on the life side as well? Because, you know, I you know, I adore your mom, she's, she's, she's amazing. But as a producer, I even respect her so much. Because what she does, she doesn't get a lot of limelight for now and and producers, producers raise producers. Who What about Uncle Ben and Robert?

Rebel Rodriguez 1:27:12
What you know about them is usually because there were a huge problem. That's when

Alex Ferrari 1:27:17
You're like, oh, that producer. Okay. All right. We're we're in the Hollywood Hills. But so, so yep. So that that ability to hold space to protect your creators to hold a set to build a set? What advice to What lesson did you learn from her on that aspect and also in life in general? Yeah, it hurts.

Racer Max 1:27:40
This hurts the same thing filmmaking in life, you kind of learn one rule that applies to everything. And with her it was that you adore her. Everybody who's worked with her loves her. It's everybody, everybody, everybody, and so many, so much that on this new spike, it's we got to work together again, and so I was producing and she was producing. And I watched how much she's a mother, on set, and in production and in post, and seeing how much as much as we talked about the myth of a guy one did it all by himself, no money, none of this all by himself, but you got it. There are so many people in the background that led to something like that. And it's so important to remember that all of them are family too. They're just as much stewards of this creation, as you the lone Maverick, are. And they deserve all the love and all the respect and all the kindness you can give them to where they feel safe, and that they can explore and they can be creative and be insane. So that same foundation that allows them to grow and flourish. That's what she taught me. I see so many, like I studied the secrets of so many other films and TV shows that I love and I do some digging, do some digging and find people saying oh my gosh, the production was lovely because like there was this one person who took care of all of us and I go up they had an Elizabeth havea and I read another was had an Elizabeth Aviana up they had an Elizabeth Ibn I believe that so that would definitely be the biggest thing.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:29:08
Yeah, she always kind of mentioned that offense. Because she's you know, sprays five kids and all in quick succession while also making movies and she always says it took a village to raise to raise kids. I mean, it takes a whole team. But you hear her always say that it takes a village I always catch her saying it on set too. And it's like it's true. It takes a village to make a movie too. And it takes everyone being there. It's a whole team and it's all of us working together well and having a space where we can all be creative and bring our best to it that really is what makes it you know, that's kind of what she does. She sets the space for the magic to happen and yeah, that's

Alex Ferrari 1:29:42
The insanity Oh, don't get it twisted. Your mom's crazy to there they all think oh god different flavors. But there's there's an insanity to all of this love. Absolutely.

Racer Max 1:30:02
Absolutely.

Alex Ferrari 1:30:05
Now guys, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you a few questions ask all of my guests. Please. What advice would you give a filmmaker or screenwriter starting in the business today and trying to break into the business today? Don't say make a mariachi, I'll hit you. Someone asked that to Quinton like ComiCon or something like that, you know what he said, Make Reservoir Dogs. That's the only way I know how to do it. And I'm like, Man, that easy, man, like just write Reservoir Dogs than fiction. I mean, that's it.

Racer Max 1:30:43
That's it's linear, simple, super simple. For me, it definitely be you go. There's the apps, if you haven't, if you want to make films, and you haven't made a feature yet, absolutely make a feature. And absolutely make a feature. And most importantly, put restrictions on it. Put time restrictions, put deadlines, put physical restrictions of what you can use what you got, I'm not telling you to go make mariachi I promise don't hit me, Alex. We talked about the importance of creativity and flourishing that and harnessing that. The dual side of that is you got to have your pants on fire a little bit, you got to have you got to channel insanity, you got to be a little bit crazy, so that it gets done. Because I I say you're not a filmmaker, until someone is sitting somewhere can be a couch that your house can be in a theater, if you're that lucky, or a screening room of some kind, if you make it that far, but you're not a filmmaker until the end credits are rolling. And people around, you have watched a full film you've made in that moment, you're a filmmaker. That's and doesn't matter if it's good or bad, whether they're running out of the theaters, to go grab pitchforks and come chase after you. Or if they're laughing, laughing their butts out harder than the left ever, it doesn't matter. The What matters is that you do that whole rep. Once you It's like doing half a push up and expecting that you've done one, it's now you can't filmmaking, it takes a long time to do a single push up. And you got to get all the way to that to that moment for it to fully count. So that's what I would suggest.

Alex Ferrari 1:32:22
Beautifully said sir, I will not be hitting you. Now it's your turn, you're still on the block. Go ahead.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:32:30
Adding to that, yeah, so that's the first thing we've learned. I've never learned more in my life than I have when there was a deadline, when you've got the pressure, that's when I don't know, I think it turns into kind of fight or flight. That's when you feel like, okay, we got to move, it's something has to be done by now. Even if you made up the deadline, it's something has to be done now. But my own one is, I think the most important thing too, is if you're, you know, you want to get into the business, you have these ideas, you know, because if again, like you said, we're all geniuses, we have this incredible thing in our head. Just start make something, don't care what it is start. Don't go and wait till you've got you know, Terminator till you got avatar, you've written the whole thing. And you can create this monstrosity, make something it doesn't have to be very big, but make at least start doing it and do a whole rep even if it's a little one. Do one show people now you officially made a movie. So it's most people never even start. They're like I want to do it. But I need blank, I have this, I haven't done this, I don't have that, you know, it's, you don't need anything, just start. And you will pick up the pieces that you need along the way. And at least then you've started doing it which most people don't even get there. So just by showing up the first day, you've started the process. Now you'll get momentum, if you're standing around waiting for inspiration or momentum, it's not gonna happen. So you gotta

Alex Ferrari 1:33:50
I feel that I feel like there's like a spirit of Robert in the room. And he's like, channeled through you to at the moment because it sounds so it sounds so beautiful. And both you guys said it's absolutely right. And where were you guys like 15 years ago for me because I wish I would have heard this 15 years ago, all I did was throw obstacles in front of myself. Right? And that's what a lot of filmmakers do. They're like, Oh, I can't do it until I have this camera. I can't do it until this person's there. I can't do it until I have this location. And it's excuses because you're either scared or have some trauma like I did, which is a whole nother story or other stuff like that. That stops you from going forward until you finally get to the place where like, Screw it. I'm gonna go to Sundance and make a movie

Rebel Rodriguez 1:34:38
You had the time of your life doing it and as oh my god I'm sure Nick came up. I'm sure you could feel the vibrancy in it as a result if it you know with what you came out with, it's just gonna it's got this energy to it because you were excited you drove this just the fact they said screw it. We're gonna make a movie. There you go. You started you're doing something now even if it's with your phone, you're going around and doing something at least and it's a difference.

Alex Ferrari 1:34:59
It's very harmful, it's really a powerful idea to just get going and get started. But I think the one thing that's missing from this this little bit is the attachment to what happens to it. The attachment to oh, I have to make this that was the biggest thing like a mariachi was the best. And the worst thing that ever happened to a whole generation of filmmakers, as as was clerks, as was slackers. All those, that generation is like, Oh, when I make my first film, it has to be Reservoir Dogs, right? It has to be mariachi, it's got to be clerks. And that pressure, you're just destroying yourself before you even get off the you can't walk with that kind of weight on you. You know, exactly. And you learned early on that you don't have to do that. Because you you know, I mean, I imagine that as filmmakers, the pressure that was on you guys, we talked a little bit about on Spike, it's too but you've got two very large shadows. They ain't but you're like, Screw it. I'm doing me and I'm going to do what I'm gonna do. They did what they did. I'm going to do what I'm gonna do. And it took me to just say, I'm 40 I gotta, I mean, what am I gonna wake up tomorrow? I'm gonna be 60 I'm going to start doing with this BS. I gotta make something. And I've been directing for 20 years, but I hadn't made the feature. Yeah, that was and that was the thing. So then once, I mean, once you make the one good, bad and different matter, you're like, Okay, I proved to myself, I can make one. Great. And now I can move forward. It doesn't have to be Reservoir Dogs, because no one's gonna make a Reservoir Dogs. Brothers McMullen in the Boys in the Hood. No one's gonna make those movies again, ever, ever. So once you get that out of your head, then it frees you to be the creative, the creative forces that you are now. So

Racer Max 1:36:50
Yeah, that is the missing key. The triumvirate right there. Absolutely agree.

Alex Ferrari 1:36:54
If there was if there was a worst day you've ever been on a production? What was that day? And how did you overcome it?

Racer Max 1:37:03
Oh, that's a good one. Let's see I gave him the raining raining on our climax story. Gosh, what's another? I know that was one of those wagons.

Alex Ferrari 1:37:19
I assume rebel when you're when you're composing. I mean, a hard drive might have crashed here and there. Or you are you get blocked from it's

Rebel Rodriguez 1:37:27
It's almost seems mental. It's almost always mental. It's and it almost happens on every single one of them. I'm gonna say and that's another thing I'll point out in a second. But yeah, it's it was heroes. This was the first time it really hit us. We can be heroes, I wrote that entire score. It was like a blessing and a curse. I wrote the huge battle sequence for the parents fight the aliens and all that I wrote. That was one of the first things I wrote for that. That was like, after he almost a year of learning orchestral music. I'd never written for an orchestra. So I've spending a year writing pretty much garbage. And hit that. And I was like, that's great. And Robert was like, Well, the good news is, that's really great music. That's incredible. You know, I could never write at that level. The bad news is, I can't help you on this anymore. You got to do the whole movie yourself.

Alex Ferrari 1:38:14
Because you have to pass the Master, I can't help you anymore. Good luck.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:38:19
It's not gonna sound the same. Exactly. You know, it's just sweat. Get in the way. And it was four months of me. I composed for four months on that one. And it's 90. It's like a 590 minutes of music. All

Alex Ferrari 1:38:37
Music

Rebel Rodriguez 1:38:39
From the music. Yeah. And I was halfway through, it's like two and a half months, I think was actually more than halfway, two and a half months in. And I had written 1/3 of it going as fast as I could go. And that's when it dawns on you. I don't think I'm Omega dude. And it's all mental. You're just up all night, just sitting there going, Dude, it's done for I'm gonna sink this whole movie.

Alex Ferrari 1:39:02
Oh, you start going down the rabbit hole, you start circling the drain.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:39:08
The whole movie has been made everyone's done their things. High fives you saw everyone was so excited when set was over did it's amazing edit. It's all coming together. You're the last guy there. I mean, you're just like, they're all like, Alright, make the last leap. You know, you're right there. And it's like, I don't think I'm gonna make it. And I don't know if something clicks there, where you go into overdrive. It's one of the scariest kinds of things because the way I say it is, the more ideas you create, the more impetus you're gonna get on the project, because you're kind of figuring it out like the puzzle piece of what's the style of it. What's this? What's that? Just keep making don't stop. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad. Don't judge it just keep making stuff, because you're going to have more room to work with. And so you start a movie, at least a score and it's halfway through and you haven't made half you've made like a third maybe even less. It almost like multiplies until by the end You're writing like, 10 times faster than you worked the beginning because you've just figured out more of the movie. So it always feels like you're down to the wire, pretty much. That was the first time I've ever experienced it. And there's always that moment where it dawns on you, it's like Rocky, where he's like, I can't do this, you know, I'm just gonna go the distance I it's, and it's one of if it could either break you or it can make you definitely it's one of those moments where you either quit and say, I can't do it, man, you're gonna have to hire someone else, or you just drive through and you know, it's fairly make it by the skin of your teeth. It's, you know, what's

Alex Ferrari 1:40:28
Fascinating is that I've done I don't know, 1000 episodes at this point. I've had composers on before, but I've never had a composer at your level that's able to do these large movies, or have have the opportunity to these large movies. And this really race pressure, because you're the last leg of the race. Yeah. And if you remember, yeah, if you fumble the damn baton. It's all over no matter how fast the other guys, we're, you're done. That pressure is something I've never really thought about for a composer, because a lot of the composers I've talked to like, you know, Oscar winners are big guys who have done this 1000 times. But you're just like, I've never talked them about like the beginning aspects of their career. Just like I was on a $70 million movie and I and I had no one around me to help like, I don't know, alone by sweating. I didn't really remark here.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:41:25
I'm here today. I survived somehow. i It's a blur. But yeah, it happens. And it's gonna happen. Every single movie, that's all. I come back, you think, Oh, you're on top of the world. That's it? No, it's like Rocky, he comes back. He can't do it again. You got to start from that from scratch again. You're like, I don't think I can do this one. Because this isn't that oh, this. This one's hypnotic. It's, um, it's got you know, and I feel like, we don't have an orchestra. They carried away. I mean, they do amazing work. You write this stuff, you give it to them, they make it sound incredible. It's all on me. What comes out of my computer, is what's gonna be on the movie. And it's like, I don't know if I can do this again. And it's like, you just you get in your head and it's over. So it's Yeah, every single time I've had it. It's just

Alex Ferrari 1:42:06
That's beautiful. Because it's like, like, you know, am I gonna have to go down to the button that a dungeon with Apollo and train again? Like, am I? Because I just can't obviously Mr. T is too much for me. I don't think I'm gonna make it. I think I've been broken. And now I have to come back. So it's so your Mr. T was like, spin off.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:42:30
A glass of water better be powerful, man. Because only thing you got oh my gosh.

Alex Ferrari 1:42:35
That's remarkable. Well, that's, that's great, man. Thank you for that story. That's I've just never really thought about that aspect of all right. I've been in post most of my life. So I've always been at the end. And I always figure it out. And I always, you know, posted and I've been post supervisor VFX, all that kind of stuff. So I always just figure it out along the way. But mines is technical in that sense. Maybe the creative with editing and stuff, but I'm not alone. A lot of times I have either producer. You're out there and an island by yourself. And there's just a phone call. Oh. Yeah. That's amazing. That's amazing. It's

Racer Max 1:43:14
Pretty incredible.

Alex Ferrari 1:43:15
So Rachel, how about you, my friend?

Racer Max 1:43:18
I'll just tack on to what he said. Because it's excellent. We're just really been fortunate. We haven't had really anything bad. You know, we've had things explode. We've had sure everything that could be considered bad, but it's like it's ever been really that bad. Because you just do it rebels had their

Rebel Rodriguez 1:43:34
Movie set standards happens all the time.

Racer Max 1:43:38
Whether it's Oh God, the wind is kicking up so high on our hypnotic finale that none of the actors can see Cassandra's blowing in their eyes. So we got to close out this finale as quick as we can. Let's make it emotional somehow. Because we're at a dry river basin and COVID We can't go anywhere else. Or it's like, oh, gosh, it's 105 degrees outside and our little actor star is just not having this seat. He is having a horrible time. And he's got to deliver some lines right now unless we can cut them cleverly. Right. Now watch this, I'll do a little drawing. I'll show you how we can fix this. So as Robin said, you start getting your head over, the most important thing you can do is get out of your head quickly. Start making it tangible start making tangible solutions, no matter what it is, whether it's the boats linking, the vehicles gone, actor can't make it. You have to rewrite the entire scene. Just start drawing, start writing, start talking to everybody that's there to help you and figure it out. Get out of your head quickly.

Alex Ferrari 1:44:35
Beautiful, beautiful advice, guys. Now, if you had a chance to go back in time, and talk to little rebel and little racer, what advice would you give them have a time machine. Dude, seriously, can I borrow a lot. There's a lot of stuff I need to work on.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:44:59
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, yeah on on Spy Kids, I had this one actually, we were we were in London and recording for the we're there for the orchestra group recorded live because the whole thing is live recorded. And it was up there that I wrote it down. I was telling Theresa, we're always just talk ideas about this kind of stuff. And I told them, I think I finally have something I would have like, gone back a few years and wish I told myself, like, really, really like, Man, I wish I did this five years ago, man, but it's a, it's an interesting kind of trap you rot you fall into because you're doing what you love. It's not what you really expect is. I loved making music. I mean, it was like everything to me, I was just out of school, and I've got all the time, you know, all the time, you could possibly think of got a part time job or whatever, you've got so much time as opposed to when I was in school, and it's like you're squeezing out whatever little bit you got, that isn't school time. And I think the worst thing you can do is be so passionate about it, that you put all of your time into it, and are willing to put in an unbelievable amount of hours into it constantly. And do every little last little touch and try to make the most perfect thing you can make. Because it's not at all how reality works. Honestly, it's, it's almost like you need and it's like it was always weird, I make things and I would just get so into the details and almost lost in the details to where you're not really doing the broad strokes well, and all that kind of stuff. Because that's so much time. It's like, oh, well, I can sit here and do this all day. And you know, mess with every little note I write and all that kind of stuff. It's it's actually counterintuitive. It teaches you all the wrong ways to do things in a weird way I'd watch my dad work. And Robert just has kind of this thing of like, well, I've only got this many hours, let's just hit it and let's do it. And he just dives right in. And he, I mean, he's making broad strokes pretty much but you see how he's not afraid to make mistakes, he's not afraid to make something that it doesn't seem like it's perfect to him. And it's almost like when he's mostly focusing on those broader strokes, he gets a big he gets a better result from it. It's almost like a bolt. I call that line confidence when you're an artist and you draw if you're just trying to make every like line really perfect actually end up kind of screwed scribbly if you've seen a great artists, they're just like, like nothing. I mean, it's just like they're just throwing them out there. And you watch Robert, he does the same thing. I went up and got to work with we got to work with John W on this again, who did the music first bite gets to he did you know it's like it's one all that kind of stuff. And he kind of helped birth the spike it sound but I watched him compose I like never gotten to see like a professional composer, actually in the midst of writing. And he's just like, all this stuff. I had like put all this time and attention to detail to Oh, I do this because I've all this time. He's just like glancing over like, and what he's focusing on is so different than what I was focusing on. Because he doesn't have time he doesn't put a lot of time into he's like, Well, in one hour, I gotta get the scene done. Swish wash, you know, does all that then versus me, I've got eight I could put all the time in the world, I wanted this and you focus on all the wrong things that teaches you to not look at the right things. If you give yourself a little time, this kind of goes into the deadline thing. You actually focus on what's the most important thing that will make the most impact. And that's where you start to make some real progress. So it was once I've started to do that I really started after I watched him write like that as like, oh, that's how you write. All my music was. I mean literally like leaps and bounds improved. So I mean, the

Alex Ferrari 1:48:22
The old guys have a couple of tricks. I'm gonna say baby.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:48:30
It's weird. It's like so counterintuitive, because you're like, I'm so passionate about this, how could I just now be so apathetic towards it? And it's like, it's not an apathy so much is it's like, you have to learn to just let it flow. You got to have that confidence in your strokes and just, you know, move with it. And it's almost more important to put more ideas out there rather than barely squeeze out one because you finally thought it was perfect. You know, get out of your head. Throw down too many. It's way better to have too much stuff. I mean, he would just overdo it. It put in too much and go. That was too much. And he backed off. At least now you found out where the ledge was. If you kept tiptoeing forward, blindfolded, you never know what that legends

Alex Ferrari 1:49:05
And take you forever to get there.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:49:06
Exactly. So it's that was really, really important.

Alex Ferrari 1:49:11
Another good answers racer.

Racer Max 1:49:13
First off, I would take the entire recording of this podcast and just play it to a 17 year old racer, you're gonna listen to this, you're gonna memorize every single word that is said here by all three of these people talking right now. Start with that, that's book one. Appreciate that book too. You're gonna you're at a high school now, little 18 year old racer, okay, you're gonna take a whole year off, you're gonna take gap year, what you're going to do is you're gonna make a feature, you have one year to do it. I don't care how you do it. But it's got to be done in one year and I dare you to make it good. It can't be you can't make it you can't be good. And go over time. You have to try to strive for some level of greatness. And you have to but you have to finish it. It has to be done by the end of this and and put some of your time into it. As Rachel said, Don't put all 16 hours of your day into it. Give yourself a workday, eight hours, six hours, whatever you manage to then go take time for family, for friends, all that stuff, because that's important too. You got to take care of all the other sides of your life because now you're dealing with adult things too. And make that happen. That'll teach you more than anything by and of course, most important thing, make it with what you got. Because without one year, no money. You don't have time for you don't have, there's nothing you can get for that. So once you've got

Alex Ferrari 1:50:35
And now and finally, the last question, and arguably the most difficult one, I've asked this entire conversation. Oh, each of you three of your favorite films of all time.

Racer Max 1:50:45
Oh, I always keep my list ready.

Alex Ferrari 1:50:50
By the way, everyone who's just listened to this, Rubble just grabbed this feels like okay, let me just pull up my list. Actually. That's great. Go ahead, guys.

Racer Max 1:51:01
I keep my top five on hand. So I've got Excalibur 1981 John, my top of the top favorite. Has everything. You see the new spike as you might see some influence. Fair enough. I absolutely love it. Number two, The Incredibles picks classic Pixar. Talk about VHS as you would watch on infinite repeat that that was the first time where I watched a movie all the way to the end. Went through the end credits because they're incredible. The music and everything Michael Giacchino just killing it. And I watched it all and I just hit reset. And I went, I think this is one of my favorite movies. This is the only one I've ever done this on. And then number three is old boy. Absolutely love, love the style from the early 2000s. It's got a style that all my favorite like video games, and like TV shows had at the time, that like this is y2k, dark futurism absolutely love it. So So those are my top three,

Alex Ferrari 1:51:55
The great top three and a half to just tell you a geek story real quick. I was at Sundance at midnight screening of old boy in the US premiere of a while, while the director was there he from Japan. And I met him and he was like, half asleep because the poor guy just flown over. And I remember seeing Oldboy at Sundance at the at the main theater there the Egyptian. And I'm like, What did I just watch? Like he was like, what insanity is this? I was it was it was one of those moments I'll never forget. No,

Racer Max 1:52:36
Nno, no, it's great. I had

Alex Ferrari 1:52:37
A midnight screening at Sundance with the director just flying in from Japan. Like he. He hadn't gotten there yet. When the movie started, he was there at the end for q&a. And then I met him outside outside. Everyone was gone already. I'm like so how are you? He's the end. This interpreter was there and it was like

Racer Max 1:52:55
Aamazing. Oh my god. That's amazing. I had

Alex Ferrari 1:52:59
A little geek story. Stories along the way, but that's

Racer Max 1:53:04
One of the benefits I get a lot of cool stories. That's for sure.

Alex Ferrari 1:53:10
Rebel, how about you? How's your tough time?

Rebel Rodriguez 1:53:13
All of his three are also my favorites, but I pulled out some extra other ones as well. We love those. But definitely one of my top favorite favorite animated at the moment right now cross the spider verse that was in I absolutely loved it. That was so radical. I mean, it's just it's changing the game of animated we love Incredibles, but it's really cool to see something now that's like, shoot. That's like another incredible system. Like it says a

Alex Ferrari 1:53:35
Whole other level. It's when I watched that. I was like, I mean that is going on.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:53:39
It's really impressive. On Mondays that's a classic. I love that one a lot. And now I love it more because I make music more learned. I appreciate it.

Alex Ferrari 1:53:49
I laugh Oh my god.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:53:54
Like the more you learn about music, the more you're just like, it's crazy. They captured like the genius of it so well.

Alex Ferrari 1:54:00
It's such a masterpiece.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:54:03
It's just fantastic. And then tied either jaws. That's a classic always loved on musical mountains. Great. I've always been a big fan of that but playing it on piano since I was like, you know, however young I was our dad intrusive to the jostling me. We didn't know what the movie was. So I just stared the music in the car and it was like you'll see it someday. And it's like, that was it. That's all I knew. And what's up, Doc? I love, love.

Racer Max 1:54:30
Nice, great. Comedy. Great. So great.

Alex Ferrari 1:54:34
So I noticed your dad didn't make the list, but that's fine. That's fine. I'm sure his ego will be fine with that. I wouldn't be like SimCity guy seriously did seriously. I drank the Kool Aid. So I'm glad to be of your father's

Racer Max 1:54:55
He's he's got a special list. It's like it almost doesn't count because like

Alex Ferrari 1:55:00
Oh So let me ask you this What is your favorite death?

Racer Max 1:55:03
Your first travel just to make sure I don't pick the same one.

Rebel Rodriguez 1:55:05
No you go for it because I know we're gonna pick the same one. I'll pick it.

Alex Ferrari 1:55:08
Okay top three top three. Top three Robert films in your world.

Racer Max 1:55:13
Number one road racers his second film. Yes, of course. So great. Incredible. I love the rebel spirit of it. So, so good. Then for me next it's Desperado. I just love what he did with mariachi and just like complete spiritual successor that just blew even more heads than the first one. Incredible. And then spike it to honorable mention my favorite my absolute favorite of the Spy Kids. Cuz I love the fantasy and the creatures and the fun and they have the best outfits in that movie. How about you?

Rebel Rodriguez 1:55:45
Road racers. Very big favorite of ours since city though, is another one. Definitely. I loved watching that one. He always puts off showing us his movies. We just wait till he wants to show it to us that when we watched, like midnight, practically we finished was like 2am. And he was like, Hey, let's make the breakfast tacos from the five minute cooking school. We made those 8am and like 3am

Racer Max 1:56:07
Just so we could ask them questions like, Yeah, but that was super

Rebel Rodriguez 1:56:11
Memorable for me. And then definitely MIT Archie as well and Desperado. So those are just,

Alex Ferrari 1:56:17
If I may, if I may throw mine into the ring, go for it. I think Desperado was because I was in film school and Desperado came out. I saw it in the theater. I saw it in the theater. And I saw I had that poster in my my room right in here. Whatever. Yeah, with Uncle Antonia. And that gun that was just amazing. That double barrel. Shotgun. Yeah. I'm gonna say Desperado. Because that was the one that really, that wouldn't really hit me since at without question, do you look at sincerely just like

Racer Max 1:56:52
I don't even know.

Alex Ferrari 1:56:56
And believe it or not, one of the other films that I really loved of his is once upon a time in Mexico. Oh, it's classic. It's excellent. Because once upon a time in Mexico, for me was the film that got me off. To make my first big short film that went on and did it didn't same things for me. And I had Roger Ebert review it and it was a whole. That's great. That's how it all started with once upon a time in Mexico is when I saw the guacamole gun, right? As I saw the welcome all the gun and I saw that and I was like, I think I could do this now. Like it was like there was so much like for sure obstacles that you put in your head. But that was the movie that just kind of pushed me over. So it has a special place in my heart for that was the movie that kind of launched my filmmaking side, not the commercial or music video side that I've been doing. But more the filmmaking filmmaking side was that that was the film that kind of did it for me. So those are my top three.

Racer Max 1:57:49
Wow, that's awesome. That's great. I love those pics. There's just so much to choose from. It's just all great. Oh, no, again, they're their own. That's their own category. You can't even Yeah, but

Alex Ferrari 1:58:00
Boys, I truly appreciate this conversation. Man. It has been such a pleasure and honor talking to both of you. Your your energy is infectious. I want to go make a feature. Now. I don't know why. But I'm gonna go shoot something. I don't know when but I'm gonna figure it out. Just figure it out. Yes, go, No, your energy is infectious. And in this has just been such a pleasure of conversation. And I do believe I agree with your race, or I think that filmmakers will get a whole lot out of this conversation. There's a lot of gems in this. And I hope it helps people around the world kind of maybe demystify a little bit of the myth. And really get into the weeds of how you actually make these films, and actually do this kind of process. The mariachi process, if you will, without the myth is much overhead. And you guys kind of cut through the myth really quickly. Like, we don't know. And, and there's. So it's been an absolute pleasure. So thank you so much. Oh, by the way, where can people watch spike?

Racer Max 1:58:59
It's spike. It'll be on Netflix coming at the end of September. Very soon. Very, very soon. Yeah, very excited. Please, if you're, if you're a fan, if you've grown up, if you have kids, please fill us we'd love for you to see it. And even if you've never heard us by kids, go check them all out there. have excellent, classic classic films.

Alex Ferrari 1:59:18
And do you have do you guys have any parting messages for any young racer or young rebel out there? Who's thinking about getting into this insanity, carnival circus ridiculous business that we're all in any parting messages for them?

Racer Max 1:59:36
Absolutely. I please jump in. Whether you want to do animated live action or shows or whatnot, please jump in because stories and films stories are how one of the methods that humans get truth from the world. And I want to see the truth that you can put into the world and teach all of us about and you're never going to make a mariachi Reservoir Dogs are clerics are any of those. But I don't want to see that from you. I want to see your film. I want to see what you can make. Rebel. That's great. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, shoot me think about that.

Alex Ferrari 2:00:18
Well, while you're thinking about that, I do have to say something. This is kind of the elephant in the room. You guys both have the greatest names ever. I know. I know. Is that your mom? I know it wasn't your mom. Your mom just allowed it but because I'll be honest with you I try already started I started a propaganda campaign with my wife when I was gonna have kids and like if I have a boy he has to be Maximus Ferrari Max Ferrari.

Racer Max 2:00:49
Ferrari has to be

Alex Ferrari 2:00:53
Extra yet I had but luckily I had girls so but it would have been

Racer Max 2:01:02
Maximum world was spared of a backstory

That's true. You can't you can't pass it up. Little bit or not. It's a little little mom's and sanity. Racer Max was chosen because my mom had a crush on Racer X when she swapped Speed Racer

Alex Ferrari 2:01:26
She came up with the name first and our dad came up with

Racer Max 2:01:29
It he they both thought racer would be fun after rocket and and then rebel was gonna be my name too but I was like that's not a rebel. I think this is a racer and came up with the middle name with with the Osama about people

Alex Ferrari 2:01:46
Insane insane all of your nuts anything you want to add Rachel no pressure.

Rebel Rodriguez 2:01:58
Yeah, so I think definitely, if you're gonna dive in, like Rachel said, do so. It's amazing. It's it's creative work is one of the most gratifying kinds of things ever. I mean, it's nothing opens your mind more like creativity. But definitely learn to love the process and all that it is it's all the good all the bad all the crazy days learn to see it Hafele learn to enjoy all of it. Because no matter how big and famous you get, or how much you stay right where you are, it's all gonna be the same the whole time it was just more money so there's more people and there's more problems more of the same thing. So enjoy and love the process for what it is and how gratifying it can be in an exciting that you know, you don't always know what's gonna come your way. So definitely learn to love the process. So

Alex Ferrari 2:02:40
Like P Diddy says more money, more problems. I understand what I got out of that. Guys, again, you guys are amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show and continue this gender, the next generation of Rodriguez insanity. So I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

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IFH 716: How Master Storytellers Keep the Audience Engaged with Richard Walter

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Alex Ferrari 1:34
Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.

Richard Walter 1:39
This concluding academic year July 1 is the new academic year of course, is the this is the concluding 38th year. So I've seen a lot. But I'm recalling years and years ago and one of the things I've seen is all about 25 years ago, actually probably a little longer than that. The Arts at UCLA all across the campus were reconfigured. And the film school, which was part of the theater arts department was turned into a long I was turned into a separate two separate departments. Film TV, digital media on one hand, that's my department, and our sister department, the theatre department and we are together in the School of theater, film and television. And years ago, when we were still a theater department, there was a retreat up to Lake Arrowhead. There's a very beautiful upscale and gorgeous conference center up in the mountains, just about an hour, hour and a half on the campus. And the whole subject that was discussed up there for the weekend was the spelling of the word theater. There were some people who wanted to change it from the ER to the ar e. It's terribly unimportant, but I am on the side of the ER people. Well, there was this right after two days of robust and vigorous and eager discussion. It was decided without any equivocation without any hesitancy to discuss this further at another retreat. Yeah, I mean, it's like it's been said of the universities, that universities is like a corporation, except if there's no bottom line, and there's no calendar. Now both of those things are completely untrue. Today, you know, there are universities, especially here in California, but all across the country are very much in touch with the notion of the bottom line as we really you know, support for public education retreats and not only university level, but much more grievously, I think at the K through 12 lead level, and calendar is very much attached to budget issues and so on. So fascinating place to spend a life that said there's no escaping the you know, these bureaucratic issues, they're not your may unique to public universities or private it's the universities but all institutions, corporations, nonprofits, governmental agencies, you know, nothing ever runs real smoothly and people should stop expecting it to you know, and, and kind of make do because what else can you do? So, in any event there I am very sympathetic with the organizing principle of my life has always been no meetings. I don't do lunch as much as I can avoid it. For example, yesterday I was at an awards luncheon, how to be there. I am also the Associate Dean now of the School of theater, film and television and I have to be there for the awards ceremony, you know, to give out scholarships and stuff like that and celebrate the students But I'm reminded of a line and one of my favorite lines in all of movies. And Oliver Stone's Wall Street, there's a line. There's a moment where Gekko, you know, Michael Douglas, I'm sure you've seen the I expect you've seen the movie. He's on, he's feeling like 11 phone calls at the same time. At one point. He says lunch, you know, clearly, somebody's invited him to lunch, in his lunch. And he's got his his lunches for wimps. And he hangs up, you know, and I say lunches for wimps, I believe, you know, my first obligation to the university as a professor in a research institution like the University of California. The first the second obligation is teaching, the first obligation is what they call in the traditional disciplines, research. And in the arts, they call it creative activity. But that's the first obligation that I have. And I can't do that and that all the faculty have. But we can't do that if we don't have the time to do that. So you One doesn't need to be a warrior for one's writing time. If you follow what I'm saying. I'm just responding to your meetings. Our previous chair, she had a sign I loved it, because because she had a sign on her desk on a little table at her in her office that said, this meeting is costing and then there was a blank, you know, filling, filling the number up next to $1 sign. So I'm very sympathetic with what you're talking about.

Dave Bullis 6:33
You know, there was a book I was just reading Richard, it was called The Power of No. And basically, it's that one word you could use to just sort of the crux of the book is if you say the word yes. You inherit all that person's problems. So like, if I asked you, Richard, what would you like to go to lunch? And you say yes, well?

Richard Walter 6:51
Well, you know, it's funny because the there's a self help guru who died I think last year as a very well known Stephen Covey wrote a book that is translated into like 167 languages, you know, several of which are not even identifiable. I mean, he sold millions and millions of copies of this book, and it's called something like the seven habits of highly effective people or something like that. And in that book, he says, at one point, he has a he has something called six words, for serenity. And he they are on less, do less, saying no. And that's what you're talking about. I have had to learn how to say no. You know, it's a necessary condition. When I'm asked to do things that I just can't do, rather than sort of play along, go along, and so on, you know, there's all kinds of ways to say it to a student, I just got a request, for example, for the summer student, and you know, the rifle. I love the greatest thing about UCLA, and the greatest thing about teaching is the students. And I love I love our students, but there is among young people and, and maybe college students in particular, maybe especially prestige students in glamour programs like UCLA, I mean, it is the, you know, those major film schools, like my own alma mater, USC, like NYU, like, like, certainly, like UCLA, we are the glamour corner of higher learning. So the people who do get in, it's very competitive. They, you know, they they're very gifted, and they used to get getting their own way. And I think maybe they're uniquely entitled, you know, they have a sense of unique entitlement. So somebody just announced to me, and this is somebody I really rather fond of in a very fine writer student in a program that he's decided to take an independent study with me this summer. I don't get paid for that, by the way. He will. And of course, I have to consent to it. He can't just announce it, although he thought that he could, that he's just entitled to it. And he's going to, if he has his way, you know, meet with me this summer and discuss his outline for a screenplay after I look it over and then we'll meet several times, I'll review the pages and give them notes and, and so on. I do that, you know, for eight writers every quarter. We're on the quarter system at UCLA routinely. But I'm not gonna do that this summer. You know, I'm working on my own stuff. I have all kinds of things planned, rather than just saying no, what I told them was that I wished I could do that, which is only partly true. And however, that I would not be able to give him and his screenplay, the time and the attention to the consideration, that they both merit so that's a polite way to say no, you

Alex Ferrari 10:00
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

Richard Walter 10:09
But you do need to learn how to say, No. And I've also said in Hollywood, dealing in the movie business, you're a hard No, no, this is not for us. As painful as that is, it's not as painful as one usually here is when one submits a project, either to potential representatives or to a production company, one usually hears is this. Know what I mean?

Dave Bullis 10:40
The silence is deafening,

Richard Walter 10:42
Very shrill, very shrill silence. So I'm sympathetic with what you're talking about. You do need to I mean, I consider it actually part of my life, my pedagogy, if I could call it that my teaching philosophy is to teach students. We are a professional program or graduate program, we offer the Master of Fine Arts. I tried to teach them by example, how they need to be warriors for their own writing time. I once had a definition, I used to clown around about a definition of a writer. A writer is somebody who's always available to pick up relatives at the airport. And I preach to writers that if they when they complain, you know, like, I can't get anything done into the family, he wants me to, you know, they think I'm available because people say, Well, you are available. I mean, you did you pick them up, I didn't do so why, you know, if you don't get it, you're gonna get it, you know, you why it's one of my principles in which is if you want to be treated as a professional writer, you have to treat yourself as a professional. And the fact is people who are going to pick up relevance at the airport, what they don't realize is they actually glad to do that. Because it allows them to avoid doing what every writer wants to avoid doing. And that is writing. And not only that they get to do to feel virtuous about it. And to get the gripe and catch and carp and complain about everybody impinging on their time when in fact, they're terrified to sit alone in front of that word processor, you know, and their relatives coming in from out of town has given them the excuse not to do that, if you follow me.

Dave Bullis 12:24
Yeah, I absolutely follow you. Because there's a book that I read the The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Richard Walter 12:32
He's a genius. Pressfield he's just I love that book.

Dave Bullis 12:37
Absolutely. And, you know, I was fortunate enough to be able to speak with him briefly. And I told him, you know, reading that book was an epiphany for me,

Richard Walter 12:44
Oh, absolutely. I just love the book. In fact, I was just quoting and somebody, I do a lot of consulting off campus, I give notes to writers who have deals at studios, you know, it's becoming more and more routine in Hollywood. Now, even when you have a deal. You know, typical writing assignment is what they call and it's whatever is negotiable, you know, as long as the guild minimums are being observed, the typical assignment is what they call a draft and a set a draft is a draft of a screenplay. And a set usually consists of what somebody will call a rewrite and somebody else and then we will be haunted by what somebody calls a Polish, but of course, the guy doing the polish and the guy doing the rewrite have different views of you know, what, what it should be, let it be called, but often between such such stages, smart writers will go to somebody like me, a script doctor, a script consultant, and say, listen, they owe me You know, I owe I owe them this draft beforehand and and asked me, you know, I want you to ask me the hard questions because the studio asks them and, and so on. So I was talking to and but I also work with writers who, you know, who are independent and who can afford my very, very high fees to give those kinds of notes. You know, it's easier for a writer who's getting a quarter of a million dollar fee from Paramount Pictures, that didn't happen, then somebody's out of out of their own pocket. But I do work with writers off campus, as I say, who can get in if I'm attracted to the script? I think it's something that I want to you know, if you feel merits encouragement and then of course, it costs a lot of money so I was working with somebody I'm working with with a particular writer was in the Midwest and she I just sent her back a second raft of notes. Oh, it's about a 15 page document going through her her script and talking about it in general but also going through the pages note, you know, page by page and and indicating we have certain issues that are arise some of them as trivial as typos and some of them you know, fundamental issues about kind I returned story structure and whatever. And she she complained to me that she was really disappointed that there's more work to do that she thought she had the whole thing set up. And that she's kind of sorry that things aren't proceeding according to schedule, you know, in the way that she predicted, and I immediately thought of Pressfield, who I know what he would say Stephen would say that her only amateurs and dilettantes think that it goes, you know, in a steady, predictable, reliable way that it's not Herky jerky and frustrating, every inch of the way, you know, Pressfield would say stop trying to feel good about it, you know, feel good about having done it. But don't feel good about doing it. Nobody does. No writer does it. One of my first principles is all writers hate to write. We love having written, but actually sitting down and addressing the pages. That's what Pressfield calls resistance, there's always resistance sitting there. And I have a lot of experience as a writer. Over my my years, I've been writing professionally for more than 40 years. But my own experience is leveraged by the experience I've had with other writers working very, very closely very intimately with writers on campus and off campus. And so my, you know, I have the experience also of of all of those writers. And that's the way it is for everybody, for everybody, including the highest handed, you know, highest minded, most successful, richest practitioners. It's always that way. And people have to, you know, stop trying to feel good about it.

Dave Bullis 16:45
You know, it's like Stephen said one time, he said, you know, if you can beat resistance, inch by inch, and you can actually get something made. And you can actually, you know, you sit there and there's a polished manuscript, and he says, Congratulations. Now move on to the next one.

Richard Walter 16:59
Exactly. I quote a student of mine, he wrote two scripts in class that became gigantically successful films. They became franchises. One is Highlander. Maybe they called it the Highlander, and the other one is Backdraft. I mean, Backdraft became a meant amusement park ride. I mean, it's gigantic success. And so here was this 26 year old rider, multimillionaire already. I was reading an interview with him in the press, this is some years ago. And he was again, just like writers complaining and you think you'd be jumping for joy and you know, whistling a happy tune. Now, he was talking about how they had betrayed him at Fox, how they had discovered NBC and burned him at Warner Brothers and lied to him with Paramount and on and on, you know, all of these dramas and you know, lakhs of these crimes that have been visited upon him, this poor poor guy, this poor multimillionaire 26 year old screenwriter. And then he pauses in the interview, and I swear, if you held the interview, this was a press print piece. If you held the news page close to your face, you could have felt the waft of his thigh if you felt the breeze on his cheek. It was at that level in the context and what he was saying, was quoting me he was in awe, but I can just hear after he's griping and complaining he says, ah, but I can just hear my professor Richard wolf of UCLA saying that Greg don't even know it's a privilege in Hollywood even merely to be mistreated this way. Again, what Hollywood will do do the worst thing Hollywood will do is not mistreat you but ignore you. I had an experience I met with Restless oil, Julius Epstein. He's he and his brother. And another writer wrote Casablanca and among many other things, that the Julius was involved in he lived he was working well into his 80s the past a few years ago now rest his soul he when I first time I met him I said, Oh, Mr. Epstein. I'm so excited immediately only you know all I hope all of all I or any my film phony pounds, when we hope for it is once in our lives, we should touch something as you did with Casablanca that's timeless that's eternal. That is going to, you know, touch the hearts and minds of generations. Something like that. Yeah. I wouldn't be nice if I could report to you that he said, all thanks very much kind of you to say so. I mean, courtesy 101 You know, he's a writer. You're gonna understand he grew up in Brooklyn, but he spent 70 years in LA, but he never lost his the Brooklyn drawl that he had

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Richard Walter 20:09
And his reply to me was at Casablanca schmetzer Blanca they flipped that up. You know what apart with fluid rain says such and such a day to day, but oh no, they weren't with my brother Philip me we had a thing with and here he is complaining, you know, more than a half century later, like 6070 later about how they messed up his movie what movie Casablanca and all I could think is my God, I wish somebody would mess up my movie like they mess up Casablanca. So, you know, again, only amateurs in dilettantes Thank you just settled in eagerly in front of the word processor. And, you know, you take a deep breath, and you kind of just get into your creative zone, and it just kind of flows out of you magically, you know, just think that way. Think that way. And the other thing is, people are never you can't get no satisfaction, if a MakerBot the Rolling Stones, it's never as good as people think that it should, as the writer, herself or himself thinks it ought to be. It's always better in the mind. You know, when it's not an actual tangible thing, holding your hand, it's always more perfect than when it's a real thing. And so there is a quality of frustration and disappointment that walks hand in hand with creativity. And professionals know that they accept that they tolerate that they endure it, they don't like it. And amateurs deny it.

Dave Bullis 21:41
You know, it's amazing that the scream out of Casablanca, actually, at a Feb problems with it. Because, you know, that's the movie, that's the go to movie that, you know, almost every screenwriting professor I've ever had, or, you know, book I've ever read. That's one of the go to movies that they use as a paradigm for listeners that this is what a great movie or I'm sorry, this is what an excellent movie is, you know?

Richard Walter 22:05
Yes. Well, it's what a great screenplay is. And it is a great movie. And it's beautifully acted and beautifully directed. I quite agree with you. And yet the actual writer of that is, you know, think fast. So, so, but then there is also a trend that kind of, that I've detected among writers where if you talk to a really successful writer, and you have to go, what's the favorite thing that you've read, they're gonna pick their most obscure, least successful project, you know, while most to make up for the disappointment that they experienced, when it was, was released, as I say, one prays for disappointment when well, because you'll never be disappointed if something isn't released, you know what I mean? So, again, I tell my writers, and I tell my colleagues around the table from time to time at UCLA, on the faculty, that fantasy is for your screenplay, for your life. Reality.

Dave Bullis 23:04
So, you know, as we we talked about, you know, just about writing and, you know, some disappointments, you know, in your classes, what I wanted to ask, you know, was, whenever a student comes to you, you know, how do you know, what's a good concept and what's not?

Richard Walter 23:20
Well, you're not you don't you never know, what's a good concept? You never know, I'm going to tell you two concepts right now. That are the stupidest concepts for movies, you will never hear a stupid or common concept for movie than, than either these ready? I mean, let me let me let me before I say that when he let me mention, Blake Snyder and save the cat, he argues that if you're a writer, and you have a concept, you should run that concept past some, some other people, he actually says you should stop people in the streets, and especially young people, and tell them, Hey, can I talk to you for a minute, I'm a writer, and I have a notion for an eye, you know, for a screenplay of a concept. And I'm wondering, I'd love to, you know, talk you through it for a minute or two and, and see what you think of it. Wherever, wherever you think I'm like, you know, the mistake to move forward? Or is this a worthy thing? Imagine you're walking down the street and somebody comes up to you, and wants to run a concept fast you and you and you're generous enough? Most people probably would say, all right, all right. You know, let's see where it goes. And you did that. And the guy gave you the following concept. You're ready. I'm ready. A man stutters, but he has to give a speech. So he hires a speech therapist, and they work on the speech and then he gives the speech. What if somebody, what have you said to the guy well, I gotta tell you, honestly, you know, you seem like a really good guy. And, you know, that's just, I mean, who could possibly care about what you just described? What if he then said He will Oh, well, you know, thanks just the same but respectfully, let me tell you that I happen to think this this when it's all done, it's going to win the screenplay, you know, Best Screenplay Oscar, and Best Movie. You'd figure crank up the lithium on this guy's drip. It's madness, you know. And yet, I don't have to tell you what movie that is, I'm sure. I'll tell about this. Somebody comes up and says, I want to do I have an idea for a cable series, I think it's going to be 62 hours, it's going to run for, you know, five seasons or six seasons gonna be 62 hours of programming. And here's the idea. A here's the concept. A high school chemistry teacher gets a cancer diagnosis. And he, he decides in order to provide for his family to partner with a former incorrigible students go into the meth trade to manufacture and sell methamphetamine. One of these will have certainly much of a concept that would wear one of these they live and it's going to turn into 62 hours of unparalleled genius. I don't mind telling you, I am one of those people who regards Breaking Bad as one of the greatest achievements in the history of civilization. In fact, last Saturday, I was at just a week ago, today, I was at the pitch Fest in Burbank biggest screenwriting festival they have every year, and I'm actually met. Tom's now is Peter Gould, who are the forces behind Better Call Saul, which of course grew out of Breaking Bad. And I just trembled to meet them, you know, as I have to have to shake the hand that wrote those one of those beautiful Breaking Bad episodes, they were prominent writers, producers, and I occasionally I think directed some of the Breaking Bad episodes. So it's not about ideas. It's not about concepts, it's about story. Story is all it's about stories, everything. And that's what we preach at UCLA. And, you know, the proof is in the tasting. We've we've, you know, there's a lot of evidence that we were wrong about that.

Dave Bullis 27:14
Yeah, I, you know, I saw the some of the accomplishments, you know, they, some of your students have done, and that is just phenomenal. And, you know, that's why, you know, you were the guy that I wanted to talk to you or, you know, when I was, in the early stage of this podcast, you were one of the people that I actually marked down to talk to, and I'm so happy that we actually got to talk now.

Richard Walter 27:35
And I'm flattered by what you're saying. And I thank you kindly.

Dave Bullis 27:39
Oh, completely. My pleasure. And, you know, just to continue talking about your class, you know, you mentioned before an outline. So do you have your students actually, you know, sort of, flush it out, flush out their stories to an outline or, and how, if so, how detailed? Do they have to go with that outline?

Richard Walter 27:57
Well, the first answer is, yes, I do have them do an outline. But I also tell them to throw away the outline, once I get started writing. It's not terribly detailed. When we have our each quarter, we have 310 week quarters at UCLA, where most institutions have two semesters, you know, 15 week semesters. And at the big I work each quarter, I've taught the course now over 100 times, with students, eight students around the table writing a feature length screenplay. And each one has to, we meet once a week for three hours, the whole group, but while I do meet with them, multiple times during the quarter independently, individually, and auditorially, one on one where we review the pages together, you know, I read their pages, having read the pages I meet and give them my notes. We I have everybody has to bring the second week of that class, they have to bring in a maximum two page, kind of a beat sheet, sort of a scene list. It's not really an outline, but it's sort of document that that helps the writer have a general direction that the script is going but then I tell everybody to stay open to the surprises. The last thing you want to do is drag something back to you know, an earlier notion that you had if it's working better in a new fashion, you know, I never knew a writer who wasn't surprised by lines of dialogue that our characters spoke. You don't seem to invent by themselves, you know, by twists and turns in the story that they didn't they weren't even aware of even though they are creating the whole thing. There is a kind of a magic to it. I had Neil Simon come to class to talk about comedy.

Alex Ferrari 29:56
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Richard Walter 30:05
Imagine being in a writing class and having you know, Neil's comedy, it's like being in seminary. And you know, there's an answer. And at two o'clock in room nine, the Lord will be doing a q&a, you know. And I asked Mr. Simon, I said, Do you laugh at your own jokes? And he said, sure I do the first time I hear them. And I think that's a great line. It's as if his jokes are not made up by him, but but told to him by the characters that he creates. I don't know any writer who hasn't had that experience. So, yes, I do think you have to have an outline. But I think you have to then sort of throw away the outline and expect the script to unfold in a way that will surprise not only people who read it, but the person who wrote it.

Dave Bullis 30:55
Very true. And there was a book and I can't remember the name of it off top my head, I think maybe in the artists way. But the the author of that book, Julia Cameron, yes, I Yes. And one of the methods that she described in that book was basically, you know, just sort of starting and just going and don't worry about the, you know, having a plan, you know, meaning like, you know, what a detailed outline mean?

Richard Walter 31:18
Well, there's something there's something to be said for that the El Dr. Rao, who's not a screenwriter, to my knowledge, but a very, very successful novelist who some substantial number of his novels have been made into movies. He's probably best known for Ragtime. He, he says driving, he compares riding to driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights reveal. But that's long enough. That's far enough to drive. You know, the whole journey. He also describes Ragtime how he came up with Ragtime. Which is that he was in his he lived in New Rochelle. I think he still does number show, which is in Westchester County. It's a suburb of New York City. And he lives in a home with kind of a early 2020 century home. And he was just stuck. He was in his writing room. And he just didn't know what to write about. And he was in deep, deep dark depression and despair, the way writers get. And he finally just wandered around his study, and could think of nothing to write about. So he put his head against the wall, he started to like bang his head, literally bang his head against the wall. And finally he decided, Well, hell with it. He's just going to write about the wall. And he thought about the wall that he was, you know, pushing his forehead up against. And when it went up when the house was built, and that happened to be around, you know, in the period that Ragtime is built what was going on in New Rochelle at that time, and there was a parade, and this one Fraternal Order of something and rather and, and suddenly out of out of banging his head against one random ebook comes Ragtime, which is a gigantic number one New York Times bestseller. And it's insanely successful film directed by Milosz foreman. And one of this came about by you know, banging his head against the wall. So, so, again, the you were asking about, Oh, yes. But getting started. There's a writer. Do you know the name? Anne Lamott? Yeah, and Annie Lamott, she's best known. She's a wonderful novelist, but she she's probably best known for the books she's written about writing. The best known is called Bird by Bird. And she Annie preaches that every writer should allow themselves what she calls a shitty first draft. You got to get it down on the page and stop. You know, being disappointed that it's not genius yet. There's another book I think is very interesting. It wasn't written about writing. About 30 years ago, there was a best seller by a writer named Mark McCormack Mark McCormack actually was a sports. He invented modern day sports management. He really started in golf, and he's the guy who, you know, got multimillion dollar contracts for ballplayers and really went a long way towards getting rights for ballplayers that they, you know, used to not have. I remember, almost a half a century ago, I was working on a Jerry Lewis picture. I was the dialogue director on a journalist picture of Warner Brothers and on the Hill Jerry likes to slum with ballplayers. And so he had the star of the Dodgers at that time Willie Davis on the movie. And Willie was a holdout that went there. You know, it was pretty free agency. And all you could do is refuse to play so he had held out for this country and finally he is driving over to the studio one day. We were shooting in December in January, you know, offseason for baseball. I heard on the radio that Willie had he signed his contract. So I asked him when I got to the studio, I had no right to ask them how much What the What do you think he got for the 1970 season? He was 29 years old, he had hit almost 400. The previous season. He was in his prime. He's one of the best players in baseball, what do you think was his salary? For the 1970? Season? Take a guess.

Dave Bullis 35:23
I'm gonna take a guess at 30,000 for the year,

Richard Walter 35:27
That's a really good guess that was not as bad as that it was actually 50,000 Well, people will guess oh, you know, quarter million, half a million, you know, million dollars, and so on. When I mentioned this, it had to do with Oh, yeah, Mark McCormack writing about sports management. He wrote a book called, he went to Harvard Business School. And he wrote a book called, what they don't teach you in the Harvard Business School and was kind of street savvy, you know, wisdom for MBAs, and CEOs, you know, and CFOs, and CEOs, and CEOs and whatever, you know, major executives. And we were saying at one of his rules, is, it's quite wonderful. I believe that and works very well for people in the arts, including writers and here it is, don't let excellent stand in the way of good. You got something that sort of works, go with it, you know, at least for the time being. And then you come back and rewrite. But I think that's what slows people down. Sometimes they and stops them cold, you know, is it's not excellent, every inch of the way as they go, it's merely good. And I'm saying if you can be merely good. Give thanks to God and move on.

Dave Bullis 36:50
You mentioned Bird by Bird, though it's funny you mention that because I was actually talking to people about, you know, books on writing. And you know, and I and you know, usually the book, if we just talked about writing as a whole the number one book I always hear about Stephen King's on writing.

Richard Walter 37:04
That is my favorite book by Stephen. It's a brilliant book. And by the way, you'll recall what he has to say about ideas he launched his whole career with carry that was his big success. His breakthrough and by the way, you may remember from the book that he'd gotten some distance into it, many despaired of it, he threw it away, and Tabitha, his wife, Tabitha King, found it in the garbage and took it out and read it. What's this? And she said, What's this? That's one of the garbage she said, that's just not we're gonna have them the band name she's wanting to get it was great. You should keep going. That's how carry came about. But do you remember how it started? Stephen was living in Maine where he still lives. And it was a high school teacher and he always wondered what the he knew what the boys room and the boys lockers looked like. But he was curious what the girls bathrooms in the girls lockers looked like so one day when the after school hours when school was closed, but some of the teachers were still there. And the lockers in the bathrooms were were deserted. He went into the women's you know, the girls bathroom and the girls lockers. And he discovered guess what they're just exactly like the boys lockers except for two differences. One is that in the showers, the boys lockers had gang showers. You know, just a great big room of novels, you know, on the wall. And the girls had curtains they had you know, modesty curtains, they were they would tracks on the on the ceiling of the shower room. And that provided for curtains so that they had, you know, more modest experience when they showered. The other difference was that was that in the girls? locker rooms and bathrooms there were these little vending machines. You know what I mean? And look at Carrie it's all about this girl who comes into menstruation and doesn't know what it is. Is mocked and ridiculed by the other girls who see her in the shower and they can see blood running under the curtain if you saw the movie for remembered or if you read the book, just looking at the locker room leads to a thing which he sold back then 40 years ago for $400,000 adjusted for inflation to be about $3 million today. And it all came down from curtains and tampons gazing amazing.

Dave Bullis 39:41
Yeah, I remember the opening to that movie and it did heavily involve that and I you know and you know even the remake, which I remember pieces I don't remember as much as the original but you know that had I think that it's a similar similar beginning.

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Richard Walter 40:07
So open Yeah, well, I don't see the remake. But I remember since he's basic in the beginning as she's very beautiful now she's, you know, the movie, she's in the shower, at school. And there were other girls on the showers and suddenly blood is running. And she clearly does not know what this is about. He's never been taught by her parents or anybody else about menstruation. And she thinks there's something horribly wrong with her that, you know, she's evil and, and, and then the other girls see the blood and they see that she's upset about it. And you know, there's this terrible bullying attitude that emerges among adolescents, men and women, and they start to attack her and so on. I mean, that's what drives the whole movie. Anyway, this movie about revenge isn't dead. And she ultimately, you know, Avengers them at the end of the the movie, but it all derives from from that very, very simple premise. And if you describe that to somebody, superficially, they would think it's pretty helpless. So again, I think that the one of the biggest mistakes that writers make is to assign too much value. Too much credit to the idea. I like to tell writers, when you have a great idea, if you have a really great idea for a movie, that's all you got. I mean, what remains after that. The, you know, the incidents, the anecdotes, the events, the characters, the dialogues, a disgrace, I mean, everything remains after that. The idea is really rather useless, what what has value is the story and think about it, you can tell the idea for a movie in a in a, you know, a minute is about 40 seconds more than you need to tell an idea. But to tell the story takes you you know, as long as the moving. For example, I was talking I was saying to somebody the other day, what I had just said to you a little while ago about talking about The King's Speech, I was describing to you a man, a man stutters. He has given speech, he hires a speech therapist and gives a speech. So somebody's like, Yeah, well, you left out that the man who stutters is the king of England. And man, it's the 1930s and war clouds are gathering in, you know, on the continent, and that he's having a romance with Wallace Simpson, a, you know, an American commoner, and so on until that well, that's the story that isn't that the story, that's not the idea any longer. It's the story. And that's where the value is.

Dave Bullis 42:40
You know, somebody wants to told me that ideas are a dime a dozen. But at that, at that point, you're overpaying for the idea.

Richard Walter 42:49
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you something, I have a sideline I have, you know, well, I am. If you ask me what I do, I would say I'm a writer, if I if, if I were in the elevator, what's your response respond, you know, but the truth is, I also am a an educator, pretty well known educator. But that's not the end of it. That's just the beginning. But I'm also a consultant. And I consult in, you know, I'm a public speaker. And I'm a media commentator, I do a lot of appearances on talk shows, television, radio. And as a consultant, I do two kinds of consulting. One is, I've already told you about where I work with writers. I consult with writers as a script doctor, I give them support in working out their, their scripts. And the other kind of consulting that I do is in the courts. I am a court authorized expert in intellectual property law, particularly copyright infringement and plagiarism, who wrote the movie. And I have testified and I've been an expert witness in all between 30 and 40. court cases over the years, where there's litigation over, you know, who wrote the movie, somebody thinks the movie was stolen from them. And over my over the years I've on occasion been retained as a witness by plaintiffs but also by defendants. I was a witness, for example, in the very legendary case at Paramount, involving Art Buchwald, the famous humorist, and the Paramount the producer of the movie coming to America and any movie Eddie Murphy movie, and any movie Murphy were Buchwald sued claiming they'd stolen it from him and so on. I testified that you know, they didn't steal it from him that it was a different movie, but I only mentioned it because it is the MIS appropriation of value regarding ideas that has if I could put it this way put orthodontia on my children's teeth and paid for their fancy ass nosebleed costly private school education. My wife and I looked like it's a grown up now God bless him. But we used to joke that we saved up enough money to send their kids to college, but we spent it all on high school, you know. And what I mean by that is people attach too much value to the idea, they had an idea for a movie, they see another movie that has a similar idea, and they think it must have been stolen from them. When they don't get that it's just an idea. Ideas are not protectable it's the expression of the idea over the length and breadth of a narrative. where the value is, you know, you have to show what the courts call substantial and ideally, strikingly similar examples from one to the other, you know, not just that the boy and a girl fall in love, they break up and then they get back together again, you know, so So this misunderstanding of ideas has put a lot of money in my pocket.

Dave Bullis 46:03
You know, it's, it's funny, you mentioned that, because about, maybe two summers ago, I actually met a professor who teaches at Yale, and he actually also does, you know, does copyright and things like that. And he was actually involved in the avatar case, because some some writers came and said, James Cameron stole their idea for Avatar. And they wanted, you know, they wanted a couple million actually, you know, more than a couple of million dollars, but, and he was involved in that whole litigation.

Richard Walter 46:33
Interesting. I don't mind bragging that it's just a student of ours, named Lita, Kellogg Ritas. Very successful writer, she wrote much of Avatar, Jim gives her credit not as writer but she does have a producer credit and it's her own card, her name, stands all alone on the screen. But the fact of the matter is, she really wrote a lot of that mo she's not suing a complaining, you understand she idolizes Jim Cameron, and I think he's great. I know him too. He's been very good to us and our students in a program and, you know, Lita was paid millions and millions of dollars for her work on Avatar and she's she's not not complaining. But yeah, I believe that any any big movie? You know, a lot of people know about the the Buchwald case it was covered. You know, the coming to America case that I mentioned earlier. It was covered gavel to gavel It was held live gavel to gavel on the trial on on CNN, I remember. And a lot of people don't know that. That particular litigation was one among seven or eight cases where people had claimed, you know, other people that claimed they'd written the movie, you know, independently. There's an expression that every success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. In other words, if a movie makes no money and nobody hears about it, no one will sue. But if you have a great big hit like Avatar, there's going to be bunches of lawsuits. I know that my old classmate, George Lucas, from USC film school, we were Film School students together all those years ago. There have been multiple suits and Star Wars was stolen from him, you know, from them, I I remember that he went up to Canada to it would have been easier for him to just settle, which is what they usually do. But he's a very funky, feisty guy, George. And nobody's going to say that, you know, he's not going to going to consent to anybody. You know, he's never going to agree with me that he ever ripped anybody off. And so he actually went to the trial, and somebody had come claim that he the plaintiff had had invented the Wookiee, and George has stolen that from him, you know? So it's like when my son was little If he couldn't find his baseball, maybe they stole my glove. You know, it couldn't be that he misplaced it, you know? So people always think that there's something similar it must have been stolen from them. Occasionally it happens but it's most exceptional. And when you mistake the exception for the rule, you fall on your face every time

Dave Bullis 49:22
Very true. You know, and the more I hear about you know, cases like that, you know, Richard the more I hear that it is either you know, a hey, you know what, two people you know, great minds think alike as they say so, you know, it is possible if you know, two people that live in you know, maybe the opposite ends of the earth came up with a similar idea, you know, I mean, I mean, you know, you and I could go to the video store with their video stores are still around, you're not gonna go to Netflix, and we could see there are there's, there's a plethora of movies that maybe share maybe the same scene or maybe share like the same plot points or maybe share the same, you know, character characteristics. Beautiful!

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Dave Bullis 50:11
Along those lines

Richard Walter 50:13
Again the only thing I totally I totally agree theme many movies have the same theme Jaws I happen to know now one blank record about lead who who wrote yours Of course he was adapting to Peter Benchley book was was telling me that the conversations with Bentley Joe Jaws is based on a play by the great Norwegian playwright Enric Gibson. And the play is called an enemy of the people. It's a very well known, you know, sort of a classic play I guess it's 150 years old or something. And it's set in a health resort health spa that's famous for its waters, that there are healing waters people come from, you know, 1000 miles you know, to have their their maladies healed in the waters, the magical waters of this particular health spa. And the protagonist in the movie is dr. Stockman, he's the Medical Director of the baths. Now this doesn't sound at all like Jaws. But consider this, at the beginning of the movie, he discovers the doctor does that the waters are actually polluted. And that making people ill. And this is a really important discovery, when he announces that he thinks people will honor him, because he's saving a lot of people a lot of illness and even death, you know, because they'll stay out of that bad water. And it'll also get the resort to do whatever it needs to do. If it can be done to you know, repair that right. So that doesn't sound terribly like us. And yet it is because we the reaction of the health spa and the community around it that lives off the income brought in from tourists coming in to be guests at the spa. They instead of honoring Him, they they, you know, degrade and they deride him and they declare him an enemy of the people. And that's exactly the deal with Richard Dreyfus. And as the sheriff in Jaws, and John's, if you remember that, that he realizes it's the start of the season, it's a beach town, and suddenly, there's a dangerous shock. And if word gets out that there's all of that danger, and people aren't supposed to use the beach, well, they're not gonna do a beach vacation, at least not there, you know. So instead of honoring him for making this really important, lifesaving discovery, they, they degrade him, they humiliate him, they scorned him, they mock Him, they love him. And so the theme is, history hates a truth teller, something like that. And that's the same theme for JAWS and for the enemy of the people, even though they are. So what's the difference between them, the difference is the story. Totally different story, the setting, the dialogue, the characters, everything's different, though they have the same theme. Quite, quite true. So you're going to see movies that have similar themes, but you can't protect a theme, all you can protect is a story and has to be substantive. This happens, that happens, this happens, that happens, the same stuff happens in both and then you're starting to get onto a you know, an enterprise that is protectable. It just a very yet very crazy arena. The truth of the matter is, studios, producers, production companies, networks, cable companies, they have no selfish interest in stealing material. They don't want to risk the 10s of millions of dollars that it takes to put together a series or a movie. Indeed that a billion dollars the nobody's gonna make that kind of investment and try to cut somebody out of 1/10 of 1% of that, which would be you know, hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of dollars or even millions of dollars for the script and put the whole rest of the project into jeopardy just trying to shave off a point or even two from the budget by stealing the script. You follow what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. You know, there's a not a lawyer, that I've spent a lot of time around lawyers doing this kind of kind of work and there's a there's a Latin phrase, I forget what it is or something like Cui bono. You know, who benefits from this? If you're you're looking at a legal case and you want to people Who's in? You suddenly discovering somebody dies, and you suddenly discover that they had a huge insurance policy. And it all goes to this particular beneficiary? Well, that beneficiary had a substantial stake and a great reward and this person dying, maybe, maybe she or he killed him, right. So, movie companies have a stake in not stealing material. Nobody benefits by that. And, indeed, they suffer greatly. So I think it does happen, but I believe it's vastly, vastly exaggerated.

Dave Bullis 55:37
You know, you mentioned you know, your classmate was George Lucas, do you have any other you know, interesting stories or any other funny stories about you and George?

Richard Walter 55:47
Well, you know, I am the uncredited writer of the first two drafts of American Graffiti. This there's no controversy about it. GEORGE doesn't tell it any differently. The there's nothing unusual in Hollywood about a substantial number of writers being paid for the services on a particular picture. And not all of them getting credit credit as a judgment that is rendered by the Writers Guild. So I yeah, I worked fine to George pretty well, we weren't very close friends in film school. But we knew each other and we were at parties together, we were in classes together, I was in awe of his achievements as a film student, as we all were back then at USC, his legendary student film Thx 11384 Ed, which became a feature length film ultimately not as good as the shorter version. But it was his first movie was done at Warner Brothers with Francis Ford Coppola producing I was, you know, in awe of his talent as a graphic artist as a filmmaker when I was in film school. When we work together on graffiti, I didn't really work closely with him. He had he was out of the country actually had the the long version of FX we called the FX Thx. He was bringing back to Cam, the festival he was traveling with his then wife, Marcia, they were backpacking around Europe, and they were going to end up at Cannes, and they needed a draft of graffiti in a hurry, and I was asked to write it in a couple of weeks, which I did on that first draft. And it did not he was not pleased with it, for he complimented it for me, he has over the years, complimented for its professionalism and all of that. But he was bothered by two aspects of it. One was the sex in it, you know, I saw it as a, a tale of, you know, adolescence, coming of age and all of that. And that's a time of sexual awakening. And, you know, if you look at George's films that kind of like clinical saran wrap, as far as sexuality is concerned, that sort of isn't any, you know, the sexual pervert, not really as kidding. But, but I think that you know, in my own but I've written at length about adolescence, my first novel was a coming of age, in New York City, and there's a lot of sexuality in it. Young people, flirting and more, and George didn't like that he's kind of uptight about those sorts of things. And the other thing he didn't like was that it wasn't close enough his own experience, you know, growing up in Modesto, Hey, um, you know, I'm a New York kid, I grew up in Queens and went to school, with high school in Manhattan, you know, and I didn't know anything about cars and, and stuff like that. So we never really worked together on it, except after the first draft, it was a two draft deal. We did, we did meet at my house. And then we met I remember, we had another meeting at a restaurant in Hollywood. And we spoke at length on the phone, after the, you know, during the process of writing the second draft and, and so on, I was well paid for the work that I did, and I'm not complaining. You know, again, the the credit decision is something that is rendered by the Writers Guild. And the, so it's really their judgment, not the studio's judgment, not George's judgment, and so on and so on. He's a powerhouse, you know, he's a kind of a gruff, nerdy, scratchy voice little guy, but I mean, he's, he's just the greatest genius I've ever known. I mean, the impact of that his work has had across I mean, who on the world who around the world doesn't know some aspect of the front of the Star Wars franchise hasn't been touched by some aspect of it, right. I mean, you know, don't you think it's realistic to suggest that millions of people have Who doesn't at least

Alex Ferrari 1:00:02
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Richard Walter 1:00:11
Who do you know in all of human history who touched so many people have run into the consciousness and the awareness of so many people all around across the globe in so little time? As George did, I also believe that the influence that he's had the influence of Star Wars, I'm not really crazy about the movies. John Neely is our film, school alumni, you know, a fellow alumni, alumnus, you know, call them pap. I watch all of them. I've seen the first one, which is, I guess, the fourth one, by a certain measure and part of the second one and so on. But the the lesson that they put out there, I think, is a really, really affirmative feeling. positive message across the world. A very Judeo Christian message, which is that the power of love is greater than the power of hate the power of God is stronger than the power of Satan, the power of, of construction is bigger than the power of destruction. I mean, you know, you have a fairy tale. And so again, again, going back to the idea as we were talking before, what's the idea behind Star Wars? I'll tell you what it is. And you already know what it is. It's a fairy tale and space. The bad guys have ducked the princess and you know, the good guys rescue her. That Star Wars, isn't it? Yeah. What makes those two special in the answer is the frame by frame, moment by moment, scene by scene, action in it and the dialogue that the characters speak and so on. So, you know, George is a very, you know, he's not a very available kind of a guy. I don't think a lot of it, people would describe him as warm and cuddly. But when I worked with him, both on campus and off campus, that was certainly a professional arrangement and agreement and, you know, whatever disagreements that that were had were, you know, our experience, we're not unusual among artists working on a movie together.

Dave Bullis 1:02:31
Yeah, very, very understandable.

Richard Walter 1:02:33
And I was actually I, his house guest, I remember my wife and I, in August of 1969, he had already left LA, he was living up in Marin. And I love to say that my class at USC, we were the first to move on. When we came to film school, there was no tradition of moving from film school into the professional community. It's like I have an article right now. It's just come out, like, yesterday or the day before in the current issue, the most recent issue, which is just come out, excuse me, I've written by, which is the Writers Guild, monthly journal. And it's called Film School Haven or hoax. And I'm arguing that, you know, in and I'm arguing, because I have a vested interest in it. But I still believe it's observably, verifiably, empirically true that film school is not a hoax. You know, but very, very helpful in in getting, you know, people into the movie business. I stated in the article 1111 titles of movies, written I'm sorry, directed or Purdue and or produced by Steven Spielberg, that were written by, at least in part, by UCLA, trained writers who have on screen credits for those movies. 11 of them. Jurassic Park 123, Indiana Jones, two and three. That's five right there. The terminal Munich, Lincoln, one of the world's EagleEye EagleEye was produced by Steven Travis Wright was the writer our student a few years ago, what am I leaving out the Oh, the TV series amazing stories. Our students in the last six or seven years of a five, just in the last six or seven years five Academy Award, Best Screenplay nominations and have won three Oscars for Best Screenplay in the last five years. So scrape between now and then now being today and then being the time now almost half a century ago that I was going to film school in classes with George Lucas. The big difference is that film school has gone from being a dead end professionally to being the single most advantageous way to enter the film industry. So I like to say that our class at USC we were the first one As to go on to own Hollywood, except for Georgia loans Marin County. So, in any event, my wife and I in 1969 in August we took a motor trip just to vacation holiday up the west coast and we drove all the way up ultimately to the Oregon border. California Oregon border of the quad dunes. There are some beautiful sand dunes along the northern California Southern Oregon coast. Just exquisite. We camped along there and so but on the way we stopped the San Francisco and I remember I had we had brunch one Sunday morning in Sausalito with some old film close pals including Georgia and Marcia. Also John nearly as if you know that name. I referred to him earlier. John, you know, invented Schwarzenegger, you know, he did call Conan and bunches of other movies, he wrote John Salley, best known for his script of Apocalypse Apocalypse Now. There was my wife and I and George and Marcia and Amelia is also Caleb Deschanel who's probably famous, being the father of very famous actors, daughters. But Caleb is of course himself a multi nominated cinematographer. He is one of the most respected the most successful cameramen in the history of the industry. And they were so other people there was Walter Murcia is very famous, Walter actually won two Oscars for sound design and something else in the same year and money gotta come twice, to the stage to pick up his Oscars. He was there with his wife, Aggie, a British woman. And then there's also Caleb, as I mentioned, and a producer, and now a well known producer, David Lester, who produced all of Ron Shelton's film, you know, Bull Durham, and on and on and on. And I remember Marcia invited us to, to be their their house guests. We said, well, we're, we're moving on up the coast tonight, you know, I mean, right after this meal, we're driving north. She said, but on the way down if you want to stay with us, feel free. So we did, we were actually the house guests overnight, when he was living in Mill Valley, in Marina was before his gigantic success with live graffiti, graffiti wouldn't come out yet for about three years. I think it was in 72 71, or 72 73. It came out it was released in 73. So we were alone, you know, when a film school pals when I look back. At the time, we weren't really aware of it. You kind of look back to see it, but talk about Right Place Right Time, you know, I had come out to California for three weeks from New York. And at the last moment, I just fell into film school that I see on kind of a whim. And, you know, somebody turned around it was 10 years later, you know, had never really planned to settle in California, much less to become a screenwriter and much, much, much less to be a tenured professor, you know, and legal experts and so on. He has a great example of staying open to the surprises in a life narrative. I think, you know, I'm always telling writers in your dramatic narrative in your life narrative. Stay open to the surprises that all of the people I know who were enjoying what they're doing, are also surprised by what they're doing. They're not doing what they planned to do. People who do what they plan to do, are people I know a lot of such people and they offer the most what doctors I grew up in New York City and the big thing to be was a doctor. So I know a lot of medical professionals and they're very successful. They're very, you know, they're well paid and so on, but not a lot. Some of them are very happy, but not all of them, many of them are unhappy. This one wishes he was an oceanographer that one wishes he was a anthropologist, and all of them seem to wish they were also screenwriters. Sometimes it seems like the point is that, you know, there's a Chinese person or your dreams come true. It's a little scary when when you accomplish what you set out to accomplish an ended doesn't really feel right. I have a friend who just retired from medicine. He's done very, very well. He's respected. He's made a good living, but he's always been lukewarm at best about about his career. Never really enjoyed it. On the other hand, I know another doctor, a friend of mine who went to film went to medical school.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:53
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Richard Walter 1:10:02
But just didn't like practicing medicine when he liked was computers. And very early in the computer revolution, he got into the the writing of software for computerizing pathology labs, he was a pathologist, his specialty was pathology. And that branched on out to general medical, medical record keeping in general, they were computerizing all of that, you know, previously, a doctor would see a symptom and sort of think about it. Now, you can, you know, really search the databases. And this has resulted not just in convenience, but in the savings of countless lives, if you think about it. So my friend is we were visiting with him, he lives in Seattle, we, we were visiting with him and his wife, oh, dear old pounds of lawn some months ago. And his house is on Lake Washington, there's a dock behind it. And on one side is his power boat. And on the other side is his sailboat across the lake. And a little to the south is the Bill Gates compound. I mean, this guy has done really well my friend and he loves his work, and he didn't jettison his medical education. He very much exploited it. And that's not a dirty word. It just means make the most of it. He integrated it into his career, his very successful career, a career that he loves, that he just enjoys enormously. My point is, he's not doing what he expected to do. And he's loving it. And what I'm, what the point that I'm making is, it's possible to over plan, kind of outsmart yourself in life.

Dave Bullis 1:11:52
And also, you mentioned, Richard, you know, sometimes wants to be a screenwriter, you know, it's kind of like everyone, I think it was Joe Esther house, the the screenwriter of Basic Instinct, one said, you know, it used to be everyone wants to write the great American novel. Now, what's the great American screenplay?

Richard Walter 1:12:09
Yeah, no, Joe is a friend of mine. I know him well over a number of number of years. And I'm aware, aware that he said that and it seems to be true. It seems to be true people people want to, you know, there are more people who years ago would have been writing novels than writing screenplays. I do both. I've just finished a novel. And I've had modest success in both areas, and it's interesting, the guy was just lecturing on this. This is my subject. We could go at the pitch fest. We were talking about how it's funny. Let me put it this way. There's a there's a political figure. You've heard of Governor Christie from New Jersey. He's running for president. And he was I saw him sometime last week. Early in the week he was bitterly denying that he was what somebody had accused him of somebody could accuse him called him and characterize him as a particular word. Very, very evil word, the most evil word that you can use to characterize a political figure that these days in this country, can you guess what the word was? I'll tell you. Somebody called him a moderate. They said that he was moderate. That used to be like a compliment. You know? He was denying these the moderate and Why do I bother you about that? Because there's a word in Hollywood that Hollywood seems to have come to hate. Are you ready? Original. They don't want to do anything original. In fact, it's the disappointing release of Tomorrowland. Is that what it's called? Yeah, tomorrow. Yeah, with Clooney. That kind of disappointed. They say that they're not gonna do any more original movies. You know, because of Tomorrowland is originally there only want to do 10 photos, remakes, reboots, prequels and sequels, adaptations of material from other media. They don't want to do original screenplays. I think that's a real pity because what they're trying to do is play it safe. And playing it safe is the most hazardous course you can follow in an arc. You have to take the risks you have to embrace the risks invites the listening courage, the risks, it seems to me And nevertheless, it if you're a writer, and you have an original screenplay, what are you gonna do with that nobody's making original screenplays or certainly the studios are not. They're not buying spec scripts and turning them into movies. They're developing projects inside I had a writer who wants to. He's a huge fan of Batman and he wants to Does the Batman franchise and he wanted to pay me a substantial sum? To give him notes on that manuscript that he ran, I said that you, you can't do anything with Warner Brothers on the right. You know, Batman. So he said, well after what the Warner Brothers, but Warner Brothers isn't going to look at the Batman script, they're not going to buy it speculated that manuscript, they're gonna develop it with writers, they know who worked with producers, they know, those writers may very well be former students of mine, mind you, and I'm happy to brag about that. But they're not going to do this guy script, not only are they going to make it, they're not even going to read it, they're going to make a point not to read it. For reasons that go back to what we were talking about earlier having to do with litigation, if it's Batman, it's certainly going to be similar. It's going to have certain similarities to that doesn't happen to have franchise, don't you think? And then there'll be there'll be their lawyers at Warner Brothers will be telling you, you mustn't look at this. And you must notify him or send this back to him and tell him we haven't looked at it. We don't accept that until this material and so on, because he's gonna claim when the new Batman came up that we that we really used it. And we didn't, you know, that we just stole it from. So, we talked about originality. So how do you get around that as a writer? And the answer is, and I've had modest success with this repeatedly in my career. I don't consider myself to be any kind of superstar. But the The Wall Street Journal calls me they What did they say about me, they said, I am a writer of substantial, professional experience, you know, there's no literary laundry I haven't taken and I've written feature assignments, feature length, movie assignments, were all of the studios, almost every studio. And I've sold material to all three major broadcast networks. And I have had almost half a dozen books published by by all of them by major New York publishers, I've had bestsellers in nonfiction, my screenwriting books in print, you know, what, for 30 years, my last novel, read made the Times list. Best Seller was only for a week and only at number 13. But the you know, the Times list, it's not a not a small thing. And the reason I mentioned it to you is that my very first novel I had written as a screenplay, and I just couldn't. It's been said Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement. I had so much encouragement over that scribble of when he didn't have was a nickel for it. And finally, there was a strike and you couldn't market the Hollywood anyway. And so naively, I turned it into I use it as an outline for a novel and wrote a novel, I was naive about how cruel the fiction market is, especially the first fiction market. And that naivete served me very well, because I sold the thing right away. And, you know, had I been more savvy about the business, maybe I wouldn't have, you know, invested the time and effort it would take to turn that into a novel, knowing how grim the chances were, so you understand how ignorance is your friend. Now you say, is your pal. Now as soon as it was sold as a novel, it was sold as a movie. Warner Brothers, or somebody that had turned it down when it was a screenplay, bought the same screenplay, as soon as it had been published as a novel because was no longer original. It was now an adaptation. It had been tested in another market, the executives have every every day in Hollywood that an executive doesn't have to make a decision about anything is a victory for her. She hasn't put her neck out. She hasn't risked anything, you know, if you don't do anything, you'll never do anything wrong, right? So, and every movie that does get made starts with the anticipation by the executives who are responsible for spending the money to produce it. It starts with their expectation that it will fail. And they're trying to figure out how to explain away the anticipated failure of the movie. I don't see how that can do anything other than to suppress creativity and imagination and so on. But you understand how somebody could say if if, if the movie comes out, and it bombs, for example, Bonfire of the Vanities, which is reduced by a friend of mine and a colleague of mine, he's also a professor at UCLA Peter Guber, very successful producer. He was the head of Warner Brothers. He was at Columbia he's produced a lot of major major movies. Well, one of the movies that he produced it was a terrible mom. There's even a book written about about it was Bonfire of the Vanities. And when people said in theater, how could you invest so much money in this turkey?

Alex Ferrari 1:20:01
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Richard Walter 1:20:10
He can, I mean, you must be some lousy executive, we should get rid of you. He has a defense and the defense is Wait a minute. This was a best selling novel by Tom Wolfe. I also had Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks in the movie. The screenplay was adapted by Michael Cristofer, a very, very distinguished, respected writer, the director was Brian De Palma. It's not my fault. It's not my fault. You understand what I'm saying? So suddenly, because the with my own novel when it was sold as a movie, the producer who bought it could say if anybody asked him how to get to get by this, because they want any more books published this, you know, major publisher in New York published this. So I'm not the only one crazy enough to think that there's merit in this. So I've been recommending to writers. That's a contemplate. Write a Screenplay, but instead of showing the screenplay, writing original screenplay, certainly you don't want to do an adaptation of material that you don't own. I mean, they're like dragons. What are you going to do with something if you don't have the underlying rights? So so what I'm recommending is they write an original screenplay, but then instead of mocking the screenplay, at first, they use it as an elaborate outline for their novel, and write it as a novel, and then try to sell the work as a novel. And once it's sold as a novel, they can get action as a screenplay. I've done that multiple times now. And right now I'm working on just finished a novel that's based on a screenplay. I wrote the screenplay last summer. And now I'm finished a draft of the novel, it's just the draft, I still have to do a bunch of work on it. But once you've got the screenplay, most of the heavy list lifting has been done I regard just like we were talking earlier about the the most valuable part of the equation is the story. Once you've got the story or work down, you've got the characters, the dialogue, I mean, most of that's there in the screenplay, isn't it? The turn that into a novel is relatively easy underscore relative. There's, you know, relatively there's not a you know, no, no, writing is easy. But for me, the hardest part of writing is the heavy lifting is in devising, creating the plot because the Plot The story really involves everybody else. Story is character. Story is dialogue. Story is description. It's everything. I mean, it was the richest character. I mean, imagine somebody say, Well, wait a minute, Richie, what about character? isn't that important? Well, who's the greatest character? In all of English language Romantic literature is a hamlet. Certainly, Hamlet would be a good candidate, don't you think? So? What's the description? Have you ever read Hamlet? Do you remember the playwrights description of Hamlet? Here it is. It's three words Prince of Denmark. That's it. There's nothing about melancholy. So where does this hamlet come from? And the answer is from the story, the stuff he does, and the stuff he says inside the context of the story. So it's really, really all about the love of that story. So once the story is worth down, you have the opportunity to retell that story is a novel and it's just easier to write a novel it's easier because you're not stuck with just sight and sound like you are in a movie. You're not. You know, we mentioned George Clooney a moment ago. I read a screenplay called the American I didn't see the movie, the dreadful screenplay. Clooney was in it. I think the only reason George was in it because it was shot near his where he lives in Northern Italy and I lived in Lake Como at the edge of the Swiss border up there and he was shot it up there. That's the only reason I can imagine that. George would have been you know, had anything to do with this movie would be because it was convenient was in the neighborhood. So it's an area that there's a scene in the movie where the main character is sitting is at a cafe, ordering a bottle of wine, he's with a girl, and the waiter comes up and offers a taste of the wine and he samples the wine and it actually says in the script and he takes a sip of the wine. It takes slightly flinty with notes of chestnuts and cinnamon. Wait a minute. It's kind of new. I haven't anybody knows sitting in a movie theater watching them on screen with what something tastes like. You follow what I'm saying?

Dave Bullis 1:24:54
Yeah, I knew exactly what you mean.

Speaker 2 1:24:56
This guy this writer doesn't understand the most fundamental aspects of screenwriting, which is you stuck with sight and sound, it's just sight and sound. It's easier to write another because you're not stuck with you can say what somebody remembers what they think how they feel, you know, the greatest compliment that's ever been paid me is that final draft the software I'm sure you know of it. The screenwriting software has actually created, I don't know if it's available yet. We are creating, they are creating for me in consultation with me the Richard Walter templates, you know, like if you want to write a if you want to write a Simpsons script, for example, you can you can punch up symptoms, you know, there's a pulldown window in final draft, and you can go to Simpsons, and you click that and it'll immediately give you the formatting that that the you know, The Simpsons likes that the Simpsons uses. And I don't mind telling you that colleague of mine has won several Emmys for The Simpsons and a bunch of our students have written for The Simpsons and one of them this makes me sad because he died young in his 40s, a wonderful writer, wonderful guy very successful. In not just in TV, but also in features he wrote Thor, he wrote Supergirl, very, very fine writer. He he was a the the old producer, one of the colleagues, a producer of The Simpsons and a writer for The Simpsons. So final draft has a Simpsons template, they now have a Richard Walter templates. If you if you punch up me, you'll get format that conforms to my particular desires. For example, I don't, when if you write x e x, t, for exterior, you know, it's like x or int, I was taught that you don't put and I, I preach it, you should not put a period after that. And in Final Draft, if you go to the rich Walter template, it'll get rid of the theory that comes after exp. Now somebody might say, Gee, that seems like a pretty petty point. But actually, I think it's the most important the most profound point in almost creative expression. And the point is simply this there shouldn't be anything in the script that doesn't serve this script. That is to say, it doesn't move the story forward. And if you learn if you get into the kind of mindset that leaves out even the period after exterior, then you'll leave out lines of dialogue that you don't need, you leave that whole characters you they don't leave, you leave that whole scenes that you don't need. If you follow what I'm what I'm saying. So in any way, the only reason I'm telling about this is that in the Richard Walter template for final draft, they are now having, we're tweaking it and in the wide margin description of a word like realizes feels, remembers, thinks, appears it's gonna get highlighted. A little zigzaggy line underneath is some attention will be called to it. To ask the writer Do you really want to say this? Is this something that the audience can see or hear? Because if it's an internal, interior mental thing, it has no place in the movie. But in a novel, I mean, everything in it, that's interior, a mental movie has to come out of sight and sound. You know, the Maryland's eyes widen in what can only be the realization that Harry left the gun in the nightstand at the motel, you understand what I'm saying? It's gonna be told from a visual standpoint, answering the question, nevermind the reader of this ink on the page, I want to know how the viewer in the movie theater watching it on the screen is going to know this information. And but in a novel, you can just spill it out. And you can also write in the past tense, or in the future tense, I wrote a novel. Instead in the past, in the present in the future, and in the past, I tell it in the past. And in the future, I tell him in the future tense and in the present, I tell it in the in the present tense, she goes to the door, she opens if he stands, you know what I'm saying. So you don't have to worry about that in a novel you can get you can do anything you want. Also, novels are longer, and it's easier to write longer than shorter. Not everybody gets that. There's a it's like it's easier to ride a bike fast and slow. You know what I'm saying?

Dave Bullis 1:29:39
It's very true. You're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 1:29:41
The the there's a letter from Hemingway, there's a very famous letter from Ernest Hemingway. He was in Cuba. I think he was working on the old man in the sea. And he wrote a letter to his legendary editor Maxwell Bergens.

Alex Ferrari 1:29:59
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Richard Walter 1:30:09
It was nine pages long on and on and on, and on and on about this and that the other thing of aspects of the script of the manuscript attack script for old men to see and this and then finally, halfway down the middle of page nine, he says, Well, that's about it for now, Max. He says, Please forgive me for writing such a long letter, I didn't have the time to read a short one. It takes longer to be quick and to the point and to call and select and do the things that artists have to do. So I think it's really something to be said for writers taking another tack, trying their script out as a novel, trying to get some traction there. And if they do, suddenly, it becomes viable as a movie project, because it's no longer original, they've taken the quotes, curse, bones, quote, off of it, by removing its originality and making it an adaptation. So just some thoughts. Since once, you know,

Speaker 3 1:31:11
It's funny, you mentioned Richard, because I'm actually a final draft, not only affiliate, but I also am part of their, their program where we like beta testing. So whose program I missed? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm actually a part of final drafts. Final Draft? Yeah, not only their affiliate program, but also their Beta testing. So like, I get the new stuff before anybody else, you know, and give feedback. I haven't had a chance to actually check that template out. But went, but I'm going to keep my eye out. Because

Speaker 2 1:31:39
Yeah, you know, I've been working with all 100 series, who was one of their guys a great guy. And I don't know if it's available or not yet, I think it's an a, you know, like, you can sort of upload it if, depending what, you know, what version you have, and so on.

Speaker 3 1:31:55
Yeah, and because right now, the latest thing that I've been beta testing is, they have a new app out for the iPhone. And that's what I've been beta testing a lot of just, you know, giving them feedback. And, you know, Hey, I like to see this feature, I wouldn't like to see this feature, you know, stuff like that. And I'm gonna keep an eye out for that template. I'm going to execute, because if it's available, I will definitely upload that as well.

Speaker 2 1:32:20
Thank you. I'm honored that you would, it's not radically different. But I am a big believer in lessons more, no continued. Absolutely nothing. I've argued for years and years and years, that if you can embrace this very, very fundamental precept, which is what we were just saying earlier, that it's just sight and sound. And if you can add to that, just one thing, and that is that every sight, every sound must move the story forward, some palpable way, some identifiable way. It doesn't matter what you write, that doesn't matter what the so called genre is, it doesn't matter what happens, people will be drawn to you can even have nothing happened. And if somehow nothing happening, can move the story forward. People will pay very, very rapt attention to nothing happening. And I'll give you an example of that in a student of mine. God bless him he blurbs my book, very prominently Alexander Payne in one of his best movies, I think about Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson, I think it's Nicholson's best work. The movie opens with Jack just sitting alone. He's an insurance salesman, it's it's clearly his last moment, literally his last minute on the job before he retires. And he just sits at the desk, and absolutely nothing happens. But the camera kind of wanders around the room. And you can see the only motion in the room is the the sweep second hand of the wall clock, and it's ticking off the seconds, it's like 40 seconds before five o'clock. And when it hits five, he gets up and he leaves, you know, that's the scene. But it tells you so much about that man, and how punctual he is and how afraid he is and how this he is and how bad he is and so on that you get it, you get really, really drawn in into that. So that's why my template if you can get into it, if you can find it, you'll see that it's it really preaches minimalism, that you should keep everything off the page that you can keep off the page. You know, if you look at my books, you see the front page of a screenplay, I have a model of a front plate of strings, and then I have a model of what not to do. And the model of the what you should do is just the title of the script. The name of the writer, it shouldn't say written by, or even the lead by much less than original screenplay written by in case you think you're worried somebody might think it's a chicken sandwich sandwich or a bowling ball or something. Well, what if it just says by a written, written by, what does that tell you, it tells you nothing. It simply says, bottom dollar. You know, Sam Smith, we're gonna show you this script is called Buck bound dollar. And this guy, Sam Smith probably wrote it, you know, and then on, the only other thing you should have on that page is a phone number and an email address, your contact info, now if you have an agent, she's going to be sending out on her own, you know, she's not going to want potential buyers to contact the client, she's going to want them to contact her. And by the way, they also should not want to be contacted directly be suspicious of anybody contacted directly, whoever representative, if they're legitimate. If the producer was legitimate, they should be willing to and eager to call the producer, you know what I'm saying? So, so it's different if the thing is so that if it's a speculative script, it you just have the name of the script, the title of the script and the name of the writer. And as I say, a phone number one phone number, only one phone number, I have a bunch of phone numbers, I have my UCLA number, I have my home number, I have a cell number, I have a special number, my home office, they don't want all of that they don't want my mother's number, they don't want to my lawyers, I'm going to just one number, and one email address so that you can be found if people people are interested. And as I say, if it even simply says by somebody who puts that on the script on the front page doesn't get it that right on the cover of the script, there's information that serves no purpose at all, what is the likelihood that somebody's going to miss that, but get character and story and dialogue and all of the sophisticated and heady and provocative precepts and principles that apply to the autograph in the business of screenwriting? You know, it's, you know, not encouraging. So, again, that's what you'll see is very, very minimal. Anything that that can be lost, you should lose. And if you're in doubt about something, you sort of feel well, maybe you need this, but maybe then you lose it. If you're in doubt, throw it out. Just have stuff that absolutely must be there. And it's so easy to figure out what must be there. You just ask yourself, What if it was there? Does it still make sense? If it makes sense. Without it being given wasn't needed? If the whole thing falls apart? Without, you know, when it's not there, then it was needed? You follow what I'm saying? It's like there's a there's a joke. guy goes into a library. And he steps up to the desk and he says to the librarian, I'll have a hotdog and a coke. And french fries, please. And the librarian system, sir. This is a library. It's just Oh, I'm sorry. I have a ham. I have a hot dog. whispers it. You get the joke. It's like you're not supposed to talk loud in the library. He thinks that she's reprimanding him for talking too loudly rather than for ordering food at a library desk. You follow the joke? Yeah, absolutely. So the reason I tell you that joke is you can imagine if that were a screenplay, unfortunately, screenplay. You absolutely have to have the parenthetical direction whispers sure this is a library carry. whispering and then the line again, you with me? If if, if you don't have it, the person who's going isn't going to whisper and the whole joke is lost. So you needed the parenthetical. But that's the exception. One of my great battles is against parents medicals. It's a sure sign of amateurism when there are a lot of parents medicals. Riley drolly angrily smiling. You know, sadly, Shakespeare got through 36 or 37 plays. Not a single parenthetical, you know, Hamlet, melancholic, never. So you want the least. And you can figure out what the least is by asking yourself, What if this word here? Does it still make sense, then we didn't need it. So that answers the question that every artist is confronted with, which is what needs to be in the work and what doesn't. And why doesn't everybody do that? And the answer is it takes time to do that. And that's what people won't give it. They just won't give it the time that it takes.

Speaker 3 1:39:52
You know, one of my, one of my mentors, Bill Boyle, he actually wrote a book called The visual MindScape of the screenplay,

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Dave Bullis 1:40:11
Many and he goes into that in depth that you have to take out anything that is not, you know, it's always about what's on the screen all. And it always and he's in that way. Because he says he always would see people hand in screenplays and they would say things that, like, you know what someone is thinking in a screenplay and he's like, show that stuff.

Richard Walter 1:40:35
Exactly. Exactly. You know, Evelyn remembers that the she left the car idling. Well, what does that look like on the screen? Somebody's remembering something, you know? And how are you going to know? Let's say the actor looks up remembering enacting for Dummies if there is such a thing, and is able to put on the remembering face if there is such a thing. Then how do we know what they remember it? Again, it's so simple. It's it's really very simple. Very simple to know what to do to succeed. Why doesn't everybody see because it's hard to do it. It's even though I get to it, but I know exactly what to do to hit a home run. I'm sitting here about two miles from Dodger Stadium. And I know exactly what you have to do. You have to get to bat around in the right place at the right time. The difference between me and you know, Babe Ruth is that he could do it. He didn't merely know how to do but actually could do it. I know how to do it, but I can't do it. I don't have the equipment to do it. So it's really you know, that's really all there is to it. And again, the reason people don't do it is they get in too much of a hurry. I had a writer just tell me it's already. This is already a third draft. Well, come on David cap. I bet you know the name K Oh, EPP, a former student of mine, a writer director he wrote, you know, Mission Impossible. Jurassic Park one and two. He right now he's a writing of the second chapter of the Ron Howard of the Davinci Code. I mean, he's a gigantic successful writer, also a very, very sweet man. He says the secret of his success is 17 drafts, he knows he can get through 17 drafts, he says it takes 17 drafts, to hear somebody complaining to me about their third draft, you know, they don't like hearing me telling them, you're just getting started, you're gonna if you could get one more draft out of this. And you'll only need about 30 more after that, you know, and that stops a lot of people. They just don't have the what some people call the zits flesh, you know, the ability to sit there. The flesh, tolerate just sitting there, reworking it, reworking it, reworking it,

Speaker 3 1:43:11
You know, in my own experience, you know, Richard, I wrote a, it was a comedy horror movie. And it was at a at a summer camp, and summer camp. It's a made up summer camp that I had. And the the, I'm about seven or eight drifts in now. And some people feel that the stress, some people have said, who read it, they said this in these drafts are better. Some are saying, you're starting to get maybe a little too far away from the original concept. And you know, and now, you know, I sort of judge for myself, I sort of have to say, you know, what, who's right in this situation? Well, you know, and I sort of go back and, and there was a one point I'm going to be honest with you, I was so burned out for rewriting this thing. I was like, I was fearing opening up final draft and looking at this thing again.

Speaker 2 1:44:02
Well, that's every runner has that experience, it's actually a good sign, but do go on.

Speaker 3 1:44:09
And at that point, I actually, you know, I printed it out. And then my favorite thing to do was actually just print it out. And I make marks with just a pen, you know, sort of I cut myself off from all technology. Just me and you know, 90 are

Speaker 2 1:44:23
Excellent, excellent thing to do. I also think it really makes a lot of sense to write something else, put it aside, work on something else, and then you'll be able to come back to to it with fresh eyes. You know, over the last number of years, I've become a fanatic crossword puzzle guy. I do the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, every Sunday. And one thing that I learned doing crossword puzzles is you know, you go through, you get what you can get and then there's stuff you just can't get. And finally just reading all the clues and you fill them maybe a little Less than half the thing and you're just stuck, you can't get another freaking thing. You just can't. And you feel defeated and stupid and so on, you put it aside, just go and do something else come back to it later you sit down and suddenly, wham, wham, wham, wham, wham, this thing, guy thing, this thing. It all leaps, you know, into relief that you can write in and almost run your hand over and feel it like a freeze on a temple, you know, a carved marble freeze. And it teaches me that just like the body gets tired, the muscles get tired, the mind gets tired. And when you rest the muscles and they recover. So also can you rest the mind and it recovers and you look away from something. You look at something too careful, you really can't see it. You kind of look away. And then you look back there. It's suddenly as I'm reminded of when I was a undergraduate student in Binghamton, New York. As a you know, history major in college. Binghamton is in Broome County, New York. And I remember going through some original letters that had to do with Broome County history. And they had been written in like the early 1800s. And there was a, you know, they were concluded in some state archives and kind of the archive or something like that they were contained there. They were housed there. And they're written in this ancient kind of script, you know, handwriting. And sometimes I just can't read what it says, I remember my teacher telling me you're looking at it through hard look away from it, then kind of sneak up on it. And, and suddenly, suddenly, in context, it all leaps out, you know. So if you take time away from you, you really stuck with your script. You don't let your eighth draft and when I say you, I mean any writer. What about putting it aside for a while and work on something else, and then come back to it. And as far as you're getting too far away from your original concept, maybe there's something better than your original concept, maybe you've taken it to a place. That's even better for it to be one more thing on this on this subject. And it goes back to David kept in the 17 draft. He says very often, the latest drafts mimic the earliest drafts, you sort of get back to the beginning of it. And you get back to that context. That original love concept that you had. And that might seem like a ferocious waste of time. But it wasn't you needed to go through all of that to see that this is the way it really ought to be. I was talking to writer only the other week, a few weeks ago who was I ran advanced seen him in a long time a guy I know pretty well. But I'm seeing a long time. And he says well, much better now. What do you mean? He said, Well, I was stuck. For 10 months, this year, I was struggling with this script. And I just felt pressured and hesitated and stumbled and just couldn't make any progress with it at all. And it haunted me and tortured me. And then finally, two weeks ago, I just settled in and said, Screw this, I'm gonna do this. And I went right through it. And I got it, you know, and nailed it. And it's just great. You know, and that's why I'm upset. I don't understand why. Why is that upsetting? It sounds like, like a nice thing. He said, Well, I struggled with this thing for nine or 10 months. Why don't I just do this 10 months ago, you know, and I wouldn't have had all of the darkness and all of the pain that I had. And I said to him, you couldn't have done this 10 months ago, you need it to struggle and suffer, and have all of this pain and live all of this life of the last nine to 10 months to become the person that you are that could you know who's also the person that could finish the script to write the script. So that's the way it goes, you know, nothing new about writers beating up on themselves.

Dave Bullis 1:48:50
So what I ended up doing was I ended up actually, I did work on something else. I just at that point, I said, You know what, I think I should just take a break from this. And, and I'm thinking about coming back to it very soon. And cuz it's been about probably a month or more for him. And I think now it's probably better if you can come around full circle now. And I just again, start draft nine see where that takes me.

Richard Walter 1:49:14
Look, my first novel was, I told you about it earlier, I had written it as a screenplay and couldn't get any action on the road as a novel and then sold it as a screenplay. years later. I, by the way, taught me a lot of work, you know, it was an adolescent coming of age story. And given that in my drafts of American Graffiti, which is, you know, an adolescent loss of innocence rite of passage.

Alex Ferrari 1:49:50
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Richard Walter 1:49:59
Coming your way extraor I was able to get a lot of work I was kind of the go to guy for adolescent coming of age stories, loss of innocence stories in Hollywood. That novel after I saw and it's a kind of a, I grew up in New York City and I sang do up in the streets with friends of mine. And so it's just about the screw up group that never really succeeds. But they learned that if you sing in harmony, you live in harmony, you know. And after I saw it, I started thinking about it as a stage play. You know, some musical, but I, I needed a songwriter. And then after I saw Jersey Boys, I've seen it several times on Broadway. I realized no, it could be a jukebox musical. And so I, I rewrote it as I adapted it for the musical theater using existing tunes, you know, just like the Carole King Show and the Motown music musical. And Jersey Boys, you know, are just examples. There are a lot of them now that are not using original music. But that's why they call jukebox musical because they use existing tunes. I suddenly realized I could do it as a jukebox musical. So I rewrote it as a jukebox musical. Two years ago, it was a workshop at UCLA. There was a humble read through sing through, directed by one of the professors in the musical theater program in our sister department theater was the most satisfying, fulfilling creative experience I've ever had in my career. This humble little read through. Now there's a there's somebody eagerly showing the play around trying to get a production for it. Probably nothing will come of it. But but it might, you know, the crazier things have happened. But the point is, and the reason I bother you with it, telling you about it is Look how long I've been in business with this thing. It goes back over 40 years. Between the time that I first started outlining what became the screenplay, which ultimately became the novel and so on my most recent novel, which which I brag to you made the Times list. I also wrote originally as a screenplay. i And I'm talking about over 30 years ago, probably 31 or 32 years ago, I wrote it as a screenplay. It was optioned and dropped an option and dropped I made some money on it. It was optioned by, you know, an Oscar winning multi Oscar winning independent company, very prestigious companies. I made some money on it, but I never got anywhere with it and never got produced. So eventually a student of mine at UCLA, I was talking about the project, he said, he'd love to read it. So I convinced me to let him read it. And he came to me and he said, You should use this as an outline for a novel, A comic novel. So I did. And when that was done, I showed it around to the publishing business, and I couldn't get any interest in it at all. All I had with it was frustration and heartache. And they say disappointment, then, I mean, I'd made some money on it, you know, in the early days when it was a film script, and I got those options, but generally, it had been a pretty big disappointment. Then I met an editor in I'm sorry, I met a very powerful agent. I have been so privileged in my life. To do the things that I've done. One of them is, for five summers, I would take the whole family to Maui for the Writers Conference late in the summer. And if it had been in a Motel Six, that'd be okay. It's Maui, but it wasn't in the Motel Six it was in the Grand Wailea, five diamond luxury spa, hotel resort, you know, just an incredible place where I would meet all of these heavyweights from both literature and film. We mentioned Stephen King earlier, Stephen was there. And I mean, they had world class writers both in the movie business and in the literature business. And I remember I met an agent there and she said to me, I very powerful New York agent. And she agreed to I pitched the project to her and she agreed to read it on the mainland when she got back to the mainland. So I sent it to her in New York. And she called me up and she said, and this is like 20 this is 20 years after I had first written in and about 15 years ago, if you with me. She said, I have to tell you, I read your your TypeScript. And I think it's great. And I want to represent it and I'll represent it exactly as it is if you want me to. I'll send it out exactly as you've written it. However, I have an editor here in the office that I work with And I think you should get notes from Miriam. And if you don't like the notes you know, then how would that, you know, Rama lay off and I feel the book as is. But I have to tell you, Richard, she said to me that when my office work with Miriam, I sell this stuff right away. Now I charge 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of dollars for notes, and they're not charging me a nickel for this, you understand? Now, I want you to say to them, please, I'm not interested in rewrite had nothing but grief from this project. And I'm depressed and lost. At the moment, this moment in my life, and I hardly feel like going into some old you know, thing that's been nothing but disappointment all the way. And you've already said you'd show it as this or just show it as it is. I didn't say this mind you, David, I just was this was my thinking you understand? So I said to myself, don't tell her how much you hate the notes until you see the notes. In other words, wait for the notes. And then tell them that yeah, you know, you really appreciate Miriam doing what she did. But no, you want to stick with what you have and the hell with it. So you don't have to do any more work, right? And by the way, who the fuck is this Miriam, some 23 year old who just got out of you know, creative writing major from Swarthmore, or Bryn Mawr one of them Moore's, you know, don't they know who I am, and on and on, you know, that kind of insulated view of self that a writer can get become his own worst enemy. Of course, I said, none of that was that was my thinking. So finally, the notes come from Miriam. By the way, it's Marian go to rich, she's now a partner in the agency. It's good. This'll go to rich now. And I read Miriam's notes. And you know what, David, the notes, my heart sinks like a stone when I read these notes, because they have such good notes. And I know I'm looking at my worst enemy. And when I brush my teeth, and then I shave, if you follow me, if I don't get my butt in the chair, my hands on the keys and find the old files and get get back into it, right. So I certainly didn't want to do that. But I did. And by the way, the moment I started, I've written two three sentences, I suddenly was born again, the fog lifted, the depression was gone, I was healed by the wonderful nurturing juices that flowed through the system when you when you, you know, get involved in creative expression. And it took me a couple of months, you know, to get the, the the script attended to in the way that had been recommended. And then I got it back to the agency. And bingo, they sold it right away. As I told you, it's made the Times list. bestseller, you know, it's a Times bestseller. And there was a lot of movie action around it. But nothing ever came of it as a movie. Now, if all that ever comes of it as it was a best selling novel. That's such a bad thing, isn't it? But guess what? I'm going to London, I'm going to be at the London screenwriters festival in October. And a British producer called me. He said that he's he's actually American producer, but he's British based. He's London base. And he said he has. This was a few years ago, this was three or four years ago, he come upon the novel, and he thought it make a great movie. And he wanted to option the rights to it. Well, nothing ever came of that more frustration and disappointment. Now suddenly, he calls me, just coincidentally, I'm going to be in London in the fall. And he says Guess what he made a movie. With a he produced a movie that was directed by a new director, a short film. And on the strength of that short film, that director has been signed by a very, very prominent agency. And they have asked him to bring projects to them that he would like to do. So he asked this producer and producer called me and said, Is your novel still available? And it is. So right now, as we're talking, it's being shown not by me, but by a an artist who has been signed by a major agency who have asked him to show them stuff that he wants to do. Do you understand how much better that is for the material to be exposed to them that way then for me, the author to call their attention to it. You follow what I'm saying? Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And on top of that, it's, it's conceivable that they will be showing it to producers and production companies. I would rather be represented if anything comes of it by a lawyer, rather than an agent, but if they want to go out with this thing, and they approached me, they want to want me to let them represent them on and I'll do that enough in a heartbeat.

Alex Ferrari 1:59:58
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Richard Walter 2:00:07
It's better for me to have them motivated, you know, extra motivated, you follow my reasoning there. If they can represent me, as well as the director, they're going to be that much more motivated to sell the thing. So the likelihood is nothing will come of it. But here we are. We're talking in 2015. midway through the year, just about, and I'm still in business on this thing that I started writing in, like 1980. So you see what a mistake it is for writers to do what they often do, which is a write a script that doesn't sell, that's the end of it, they think it was a fair, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake mistake.

Speaker 3 2:00:44
Yeah, and you know, that that's very true. I have a friend of mine, also who he's in his 40s or 50s, but he wrote a screenplay, you know, in his 20s. And then suddenly, you know, that's becoming a light again, and you know, you know, again, like you were saying, you know, it's, it's amazing how these things, get new life, you know, you're good

Speaker 2 2:01:07
With people's, you know, he won the Oscar for unforgiven. It was the best, best movie that year, Clint hung onto that script for 20 years. And Clint made another movie that was very successful, didn't win the Oscar, but it was very successful about the, the Secret Service guy takes the bullet for the President and in the line of fire. And that's another script that was hanging around for 1516 years, the writer of that script was packing his the trunk of his car and getting ready to go back into feet with his tail between his legs. Back to New Hampshire, when the phone rings, it's not possible oaklins company. And, you know, they want to know that they want him to know that they wanted to come in for some meetings about brushing up the script there, they now have a schedule, they're gonna go ahead and you know, produce it for 88 million hours, or something like that. You just never know, people don't understand that when a script doesn't sell, it's not the end, it's just the beginning, that script might sell eventually. But even if it doesn't, it's a sample of your craft, it could lead to representation, it could lead to a development deal on another notion that you have in mind, it could lead to a rewrite assignment. I've seen all of these things happen. They've happened to me they've happened to writers that I know. And that is why it is a terrible, self defeating mistake. To imagine that a script that doesn't sell that's the end of it. It's a failure. The very first script I ever wrote, I wrote in a class at USC, it was in the legendary. The instructor was the legendary Erwin on blacker was George's the teacher and John mulia is his teacher and on and on. The that script never sold. But I got top flight representation as a result of it, I got a onto staff that universal here I was a young kid, I wasn't. I was in my 20s. And I had an office at Universal with my name on the door to a parking place next to Paul Newman's parking place, I noticed a ridiculously generous salary, at least it seemed that way at the time actually adjusted for inflation was pretty generous. And it all came about from a script that has been sold, you know, to this day. So to consider that script to be a failure is noticing. Yeah, and very, very much business. The business is hard enough on writers writers don't need to be hard on themselves, is the point that I'm making?

Dave Bullis 2:03:49
Yeah. And that's that's an excellent point. And that sort of leads me into my last questions. I know, we've been talking about two hours, I haven't taken up a lot.

Speaker 2 2:03:58
Yet. We want to make sure we do cover we I do. Talk a little bit about the summer session that we offer. So go ahead and ask me a question. And then I'll talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3 2:04:07
That's actually the question I was gonna ask you was, you know, I know you have an upcoming summer session. And this is the only time of the year where non UCLA students can sign up. And I wondered if you could just, you know, talk a little bit about the class and and you know, for anyone listening who's interested in signing up?

Richard Walter 2:04:23
Well, the first thing I'll say is just the housekeeping. If you want to find out official information about it. You can do that by simply going to my website, Richard walker.com. There is no asset at the end of my name, Richard walter.com. And I think the very first thing on the site is a link that will take you to the UCLA site that describes enrollment procedures and tells you a little bit of class it also tells you something wrong about this class, which is that there are certain prerequisites for the summer session, all prerequisites are waived. And the class is open to other classes is spent actually designed for the summer session, I've taught it for 30, over 30 years now. It meets starting on June 22, Monday, June 22. Monday afternoon for the and for the next five, that is a total of six, Monday afternoon sessions. It's not electrical, it's it's hands on writing course, where you get the main activity of the classes, the in class examination of in progress scripts being written by students in the class. So you get not only the support of the teacher, and the teaching assistants, but also your fellow writers around the table. And one thing that has touched me very deeply all these years easily is how generous everyone is all the writers are with everybody else, how much support that the writers give each other. I feel like I've learned much more than I've ever taught, you know, being at UCLA, and my students or my teachers. So you get all of that alive, it's not online, it's alive in a classroom. And it is a rare course in that. It's very difficult to get into it. Even if you're a registered matriculated UCLA student is very hard to get into an advanced film class, with senior faculty like me. So this is an opportunity to do that not only for UCLA students, but even for students who are not enrolled at UCLA. And by the way, everybody gets eight credits for it. Those credits are useful at anybody, for anybody at any university of California campus, but also that transferrable depending upon the attitude of the institution that transferable to other institutions. Though, I would say most people taking the class really aren't interested in the credits, they're interested in getting the attention and consideration that, you know, our regular students get when they write their screenplays. So it's a really upbeat, six weeks together, and it's limited enrollment, it's almost sold out. But there is still some room for some people I want, you know that I don't get paid per student, I don't get paid on a per student fee. I rather I get a flat fee. And the only thing I tell you that is that I'm not trying to self aggrandize. Here, I'm not against self promotion. And I'm not against making money. But I'm not I don't get any extra money if, you know, extra students enroll or anything like I just want anything like that. I just want your readers and listeners, the people that you reach, I want them to know that this is a rare opportunity. It's not that widely known, it is available to them. And we we crank up two weeks from Monday. It's not too late to register. people commute by the way. It's obviously most convenient for people in Southern California region, but they want people who commute from all across the country. I had somebody last summer commuting from Illinois, the previous summer, I had a couple of labor, a doctor and his wife coming commuting every Monday, they would fly in to LA from El Paso and take the plants and then fly back, you know, either late that night or the following morning. That's how motivated people want to take the class and I would commend it to you know, one of the people that you reach.

Dave Bullis 2:08:25
And, you know, I've actually I've known people who have actually taken the course. And you know, I'll probably I'll mention the names when we get off Richard Cooper, I know you probably remember a few of them. And they spoke very, very highly of the course. Oh, thank you. And, you know, and again, I mean, to work with someone who has actually been in the field has been in the trenches, it's just, you know, it's unbelievable. And, you know, I again, I will link to your your upcoming class in the show notes, you know, and everyone else who were coming to check out Richards book, essentials of screenwriting. I have a copy behind me, I swear, Richard, you can't see it. But it's on the the massive bookshelf behind me. But I've taken up so much of your time today, I want to say thank you very much.

Richard Walter 2:09:10
I enjoyed chatting with you. I really, truly did. David, I would love to have you back on if you ever wanted to. Absolutely. You know how to reach Kathy, she kind of handles my calendar. And I'd love to come back. It'd be a pleasure to do that.

Dave Bullis 2:09:23
Excellent. Because there's a ton of questions that we never got a chance to. I never got a chance to ask you because I mean, there's so many and there's so many things we could talk about.

Richard Walter 2:09:31
Well, one thing I've learned about the questions and answers, and that is really good answers just leave lead to more questions, you know, so and there's nothing wrong with that. That is the nature of learning.

Dave Bullis 2:09:40
Absolutely. You know, everyone you could check with Richard at Richard walter.com. And Rich exactly right. And I wish I want to say one more time. Thank you again for coming on. And I will thanks for having me, David. Thank you. Oh, it's my pleasure. I still look forward to chatting with you again.

Richard Walter 2:09:56
We will do it for sure.

Speaker 3 2:09:58
Amazing. Everyone, thanks again for listening. And Richard, I wish you have a great day. And, you know best of luck with all your projects.

Richard Walter 2:10:06
Back to you. And thank you so kindly Thanks. Take care now. Bye bye bye.

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