September 10, 2024 • 41 mins
Documentary filmmaker John Scheinfeld is a writer, producer and director whose films cover everything from pop culture to politics and sports to religion. His projects dig deep on fascinating topics like Watergate and the Chicago Cubs – as well as an endless roster of talented people like Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, John Coltrane, Peter Sellers, Bette Midler and John Lennon. His most recent projects include the documentaries “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears?,” about the classic rock band and their involvement with the U.S. State Department and “Reinventing Elvis: The ‘68 Comeback,” on the television special that revived the King’s career. The Emmy- and Grammy-nominee believes he is lucky enough to have the greatest job, going to “interesting places to talk to interesting people about interesting things.” Host Alec Baldwin speaks with Scheinfeld about how he chooses his projects, how he makes his subjects come alive on film and what it was like working with Yoko Ono.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. Making documentary films about fascinating people
and diving deep into their lives and work. That is
the occupation of my guest today, Emmy and Grammy nominated writer,
producer and director John Shinfeld. He's made nearly fifty documentaries
(00:25):
that tell the story behind some of the most famous
names and events in American history, from John Lennon and
Bob Hope to the Chicago Cubs and Watergate. His most
recent film is Mash, The Comedy That Changed Television, about
the iconic sitcom. Last year, he released the documentary What
(00:46):
the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears, answering the
question surrounding the political turmoil that engulfed the popular rock
band in the nineteen seventies. Sinfeld often goes behind the
curtain of the musical world. He recently told the behind
the scenes story of Elvis Presley's famous Christmas special in
(01:07):
the film Reinventing Elvis the sixty eight Comeback.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Basically, by nineteen sixty eight, Elvis had become irrelevant. He'd
been replaced in the public consciousness for the most part
by the Beatles, the Stones, the British Invasion, all of that.
He was doing these crappy little movies and as the
sixties progressed, they were selling fewer tickets, he was not
selling as many records, and by sixty eight he didn't
(01:33):
quite know which direction to go, and his manager came
up with this notion of let's do a Christmas special
for NBC, and his idea was dress him up like
Perry Como in a sweater and sing twenty Christmas songs
and get off the stage. And NBC hired this young
hotshot producer director named Steve Binder, and Steve said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
(01:58):
What we want you to do is what made you Elvis,
And so they constructed this show in spite of Tom
Parker that really showcased Elvis's talents and you can see
it on the screen in this special. He is a
superbly talented guy, very charismatic, gorgeous for men and women.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
And the show turned out to be the highest rated
special of nineteen sixty eight and a jump started his career.
Las Vegas came calling, and that really set up the
third act of his life.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
You see that a film you made, and early on
the guy saying about the concert, he tells a story
about him not wanting to come out, and then he
walks out there and everything's in position, and he walks
out there in that black outfit, and like everything about
him is like, oh my god, it's Elvis, the Elvis
I loved. Here's the Elvis I love. Whereas I mean
(02:53):
that period I'd forgotten the years. That period was the
bad movie Elvis period up to sixty eight of the Comeback,
and I am obsessed. I own that concert. But when
you do a film like that, and I'm assuming it's
extraordinarily difficult and therefore maybe tempting to pass on a
film where there's not a lot of extant footage about
(03:13):
the person. There's a mountains of footage of Delvis, you know.
And when you do a film like that, or any
of your films, how does it begin for you? Where
do you start?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
For me, it's always what's the story?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
I'm not a journalist, I'm not an academic. I came
out of the scripted world. I was a studio executive
for a while and then became a writer of pilot
shows and things like that, so I come out of
a very traditional three actromatic structure. So I'm fascinated by
what's the story. Is there an interesting story here? Is
it compelling? Is there enough depth to it that would
(03:50):
warrant being a feature documentary? So that's the first thing.
Second question always is is there enough audio visual material
with which to tell the story? Some times there is
and sometimes there isn't. I did a film a few
years ago called Chasing Train about the jazz icon John Coltrane,
and there's very little footage on him, but we managed
(04:12):
to find a way to tell the story. Same with Blood,
Sweat and Tears, which we can get into later, and
other times I did one on John Lennon, and he
was perhaps the most photographed and filmed man of the
twentieth century, and there was plenty of film for us
to you. So if there really was nothing, then I
get very frustrated and disappointed that I'm not going to
be able to tell that story and I have to
(04:32):
move on to something else. But largely it's what's the story?
And does it nurture my soul? Does it inspire me,
does it intrigue me? Does it make me laugh? If
I have that kind of a response to something. Then
I know this is a project I want to take on.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Well, I always find like I'll be on YouTube. Let's
say Oscar Peterson is in a concert in Copenhagen, and
I'll go, well, you got a clip of this, and
you're showing a clip of this. What's the clip from?
How can I go buy the concert that Oscar Peterson
is in? They'll be there and there are numerous examples.
There are abundant examples of shows like that or where
(05:08):
there's a clip and I'll go, my god, I want
to see Miles Davis said, Carnie, you know whatever it is,
And they don't offer you that information on the thing.
And I'm such a junkie for documentaries of any kind.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
One of the things I love most about my job
is the detective work of trying to track down this
audio visual material. And we cast a very wide net
around the world to find the most rare, the most unusual,
or the most pertinent material to help tell our story.
And you find things sometimes under people's beds, in their closets,
(05:41):
in some archive in Eastern Europe, you know wherever, it
might be, in the trunk of their car, trunk of
their cars out there. You just never know sometimes when
you're going to find something. I'll share a story nowt
about Bloodswoot and Tears. I had lunch with Bobby Colombie,
who is the co founder and the band leader of
Bloodwitton Tears, and he had seen my Coltrane film and
he said, so, I want to take you to lunch
and tell you a story. So we sit down for
(06:03):
lunch and I literally asked him what the hell happened
to Blood Sweat and Tears. Here was you were one
of the hottest bands going and then you weren't.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
He said, that's the story I'm going to tell you,
and he starts to tell me this story at lunch.
He only knows maybe half of what really happened. We
dug up a lot of information of what was happening
behind the scenes. But in the middle of lunch, alec
He says to me, so, we were in eastern Europe
and this film crew was with us. And wait, wait, wait, wait,
wait a second, there was a film crew with you. Yeah, yeah,
(06:33):
we took a documentary film crew with us. It's like, well,
where's that film? He said, I don't know, and that
became the treasure hunt on this one. Where is that
film now? It was embargoed by the State Department. Correct,
that's correct. That's what we learned at the end of
the day. But what we did learn early on was
they had shot sixty five hours of material with which
they intended to make a feature documentary to be distributed
(06:56):
in theaters back in nineteen seventy seventy one, and they
edited together a two and a half hour version which
they had to show to the State Department. That screening
did not go well. Somehow that two hour feature documentary
was transformed into a one hour for television that never
got shown. And so we're on the trail of this stuff,
(07:18):
and we are checking every archive that we can think of.
We also checked every independent storage facility here in Los
Angeles where a producer might have stored their material, and nothing, nothing.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Finally, one day a woman who runs a vault in
Hollywood who we had contacted some months before, and she said, oh,
we have nothing. It was during COVID and she was
going through some old fashioned loose leaf binders and found
a vague reference to blood, sweat and tears. She went
into the vault and in a far corner in a
pile of stuff marked for destruction. Was the one hour,
(07:55):
sixty minute version of this project that never got released
on what format? Ye It was on sixty millimeter film
with optical sound on the side. And so in our
film What the Hell Happened to Bloodswood and Tears, all
the footage you see from that tour came from that
one hour version. The sixty five hours of raw material
totally disappeared, and we believe the State Department took it
(08:18):
back and at some point destroyed it, not for I
think nefarious reasons. I think it was more it was
taking up a lot of space.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Nixon boy, he just hated those real rock bands. He
hated that rock and roll music.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
He was not a rock and roll fan in the least.
That's what's so interesting about this story is that it's
a rock band and suddenly there are memos about this
rock band on Henry Kissinger's desk and Richard Nixon's desk,
and they're actually responding to them and dealing with it.
And I just found that absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But now that we're on that subject, your film is
about what happened to them, meaning they go over there
if I'm not mistaken. If I remember in the film
which I saw just recently, on some typically traditional cultural
exchange by the State Department, correct, that's right, which had
been mostly a classic arts like dance and ballet and
symphony and things like that.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
And jazz, so Louis Armstrong, Jessey Gillespie, those sorts of
artists had also gone over on these cultural exchange programs.
And then what happened, well thereby hangs the tale. And
what we learned is the State Department came to Blood
Sweat and Tears and said, we want you to represent
America and go to these Eastern European countries that we
(09:28):
are trying to establish relationships with and perform. And that
seems fairly straightforward, right, but it was never ever that simple.
What we learned is the lead singer for Blood Sweat
and Tears, David Clayton Thomas, was having some immigration problems
and he was going to be deported. So imagine now
(09:50):
you're in the hottest band going and you can't record
with your singer and you can't tour with your singer
in the United States because he's been deported. So the
band is now faced this and now the State Department
shows up and, in a word that we've heard a
lot in the last few years, there was a quid
pro quo, and the quid pro quo was, if you
(10:11):
do this tour for us, we will make David's immigration
problems go away. And that is in fact what happened.
So they blackmailed them. Isn't it interesting where they put
this pressure on them to get them to go, we
want you to represent American pop culture, and then when
it's over there like, well, we don't want you to
represent American pop culture. Actually, And I remember, I think
(10:34):
you said in the film that their debut album which
I devoured that album when I was young. Clayton Thomas
is one of the most legendary vocalists I've ever heard
in my life. I mean, that's a guy that could
have sang on Broadway for the rest of his life.
I mean, he had the greatest voice.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
But I think you mentioned in the film that their
record was number one and beat out Abby Road.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Correct, they won the Grammy for Best Album of the
Year over the Beatles Abbey Road.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
What does that tell you?
Speaker 2 (11:00):
It's the strangest thing.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
That's amazing. We tried to get David Clayton Thomas on
the show. You interviewed him directly, correctly, we did.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
He lives in Toronto, and that was sort of a
casualty of COVID for a long time because the border
was closed. We couldn't get up there to interview him,
and he couldn't come down here to be interviewed. And
then suddenly, in early twenty twenty one, there was a
three week window where the border actually opened, so we
flew up there as fast as we could and we
(11:27):
sat down with David, and as you saw in the
film and perhaps your podcast audience will as well, he
was quite confessional. He was quite candid and open about
what was going on with him at that time and
how he felt about the band having to do this
to save him.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
If you will director John Scheinfeld, if you enjoy in
depth conversations about the craft of documentary filmmaking, check out
my episode with director Rory Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
I love Boeing and what Boeing stood for in this country,
and we really celebrate that in the film because it's
been an extraordinary company for decades. You know, it helped
us get out of World War Two, it helped get
us to the Moon with my uncle Jack, and for
many decades, Boeing did one thing, which was to say,
we're going to prioritize excellence and safety. And the McDonald
(12:23):
douglas people were put in charge, and they had a
very different business model, which was very Wall Street focused.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
To hear more of my conversation with Rory Kennedy, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break. John
Shinfeld shares his experience working with Yoko Ono on his
film The US Versus John Lennon. I'm Alec Baldwin and
(12:57):
you're listening to Here's the Thing document Henry. Filmmaker John
Scheinfeld sometimes finds himself producing more than one film on
the same subject, as he did with Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams,
and the late actor Peter Sellers.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
I have the best job. I get to go interesting
places and talk to interesting people about interesting things. I
can't imagine for me a better job. And I of
course had seen Peter Sellers. I'd seen the Pink Panther
films and seen some of his other things, and I
just thought he was hysterical, and so a chance to
tell his story was interesting. But my approach to a
(13:34):
lot of these films is not to do a straight
on and he was born in a log cabin in Westchester,
and you know, I'm always looking to tell an unknown
story about somebody who's well known and to come into
it that way, and so Sellers. In fact, that film
was called The Unknown Peter Sellers. And while we did
have some excerpts from his well known films, we did
(13:56):
a lot of work to dig up clips from things
that were not as well known. That helps show the
evolution of his talent. So that was kind of interesting.
Film came out, was very well received, and Columbia Pictures
came to me and said, we're doing a Blu Ray
release of Doctor Strangelove, and we want to have some
bonus material on the Blu Ray and we want to
(14:18):
tell the story of Peter Sellers and Doctor Strangelove.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Can you do that? Th Oh, that'd be great.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
So we took some of the interviews that I did
for the previous one and then did a lot of
new interviews with people that had worked with Stanley Kubrick
and put the story together. So as long as I
can find that interesting way in that hasn't been done
you know, ten times before, I'm very.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Happy This is very similar to one man shows in
the Broadway theater. Ideally, you pick someone who people know
but they don't really know. And I've worked on a
couple of one man shows with that ben someone you
know about you under no circumstances. Do you really know them? Now?
This is something that I get wrong. And then as
(14:59):
I look at this list and I think, well, here's
somebody who I found so intriguing, and maybe I worked
with them and I love them to death and I
love them all my life, and they might not have
been the easiest subject for you to deal with. I
worked with Jonathan Winters, and what was that like? Did
you get to interview him? You sat down with him, We.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Spent time with him. I love Jonathan. I have to
tell you. What we wanted to do was not just
tell the story of his career in his life, but
to get a sense of, yes, who he was as
a person. So we decided we were going to follow
him around Santa Barbara, where he lived. He took us
into a travel agency, he took us into the bank
as he was making a deposit. We went to the
(15:39):
gas station when he was getting his car filled up,
and he would talk to people around just it was
totally ad libbed and all of that. What was interesting
about Jonathan was he knows the reputation that he had
and he said, all right, so what kind of a
film do you want to make? And I said to him,
what kind of a film do you want.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Made about you?
Speaker 2 (15:58):
And it was like whoa No one had ever asked
him that question. He was mostly just hired and he
would do what he.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Was asked to do.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
And he said, well, I would like to kind of play.
I'd like to play, and so we allowed him to
play at these places and then with us in his
sit down interviews. He could just kind of go wherever
he wanted and then we stitched the show together from that.
But I thought he was great, terrific guy.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I did a film with him. We did the not
that successful version of The Shadow that I did with
Marty Begman was the producer. And I'm up in a
cabin with my sister and my mother back in the
summer of nineteen ninety three and Marty calls me and says,
Jonathan Winters wants to talk to you, and I go
what he goes, Yeah, we're not signing him, and he
said he wants to talk to you, and he says,
(16:45):
what I want to know is why you want me
in this movie? Why do you want me? And I go, well,
because I think you're this legendary comic talent. I worship you.
You're as funny as hell, and you're one of the
greatest actors I've ever seen a comic actor. And so
originally he's like, wow, all right, well thanks for calling
me and welcome back to you, and he agreed to
do the movie. We do the movie.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Did you have fun with him?
Speaker 1 (17:05):
He was amazing. He was kind and he was sweet,
and he knew we loved him. I mean, you've got
other guys on here, none of which I met, but like,
for example, I love Andy Williams. I love Andy Williams.
What was that experience like with somebody who's as velvety
and silky as he is.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Andy was a sweetheart. I did three shows for PBS
with him over the years, and he was an interesting guy,
alec in that everything he did had to be first class.
He wouldn't cheap out on anything, he wouldn't take the
easy way. Everything had to be just right. And I
love that about him. And so I got to spend
(17:45):
a lot of time with him as we were picking
the clips for the show, and then with the interviews
that we did. Smart guy, very self deprecating and a
gorgeous voice. Just a gorgeous voice. Oh god, Okay, go
back to Nathan just for one second. You were talking
about how funny he could be. There's a great clip
in our piece that it's called the Stick, and it's
(18:09):
a clip from a Jack Parr show. And Jonathan comes
out and Jack Parr gives him a broomstick that's been
cut in half, so it's just the wooden part, and
he hands it to Jonathan and he says, go. Jonathan
does seven and a half minutes with the stick, and
he's different characters in different countries, doing different things, each
(18:30):
one of them more hysterical than the one before it.
And that's who he is. He was like an overgrown child, really,
but as you say, very sweet and very kind.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
So when you do a film like Us Versus John Lennon,
that's eighteen years ago and then it is, of course
dead twenty six years by then. Was there a lot
of rights issues with Yoko Oner or the Beatles estate?
Were there any issues with getting the rights to Lennon's story.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Not really, you know, Alec, My philosophy has always been,
if you're a straight shooter. I'm from the Midwest, I'm
not from New York, I'm not from Los Angeles. I'm
a straight shooter from the middle of the country. If
you're honest and straightforward with people and saying here's the
film we're going to make, here's what we're going to do.
I don't think you experienced many problems and we didn't hear.
But we had to go and pitch to Yoko and
(19:21):
we said, here's the film we want to make, and
it's about the political John Lennon, not the personal John Lennon.
And she loved that idea. But she gave us her
blessing but not her participation. And that's a key challenge
that we had because she's been blasted so much by
the media and been ill treated by many films and documentaries,
(19:42):
and I think she wanted to sort of keep us
at arm's length until she could see that we were
delivering what we said we were going to. So we
had a two and a half hour rough cut, obscenely long,
with lots of Hole's film clip here, photograph here, because
she has this amazing archive that I knew we needed
access to, and we weren't getting it at first. So
(20:05):
I felt, all right, let's show her this rough cut
and hopefully that'll open the door for us. So we
go to the Dakota and we're ushered into her apartment,
which is this beautiful apartment. Everything's white. Everything's white, and
you have to take your shoes off when you come in.
And we go into the kitchen and there's a fifty
two inch TV up on the wall. Her attorney is there,
(20:26):
who's a great guy, and we're waiting for her, and
then she comes in. She's a small woman, she's four
to ten. She comes in with a pad and a
pencil and says, doesn't say hello, doesn't say good morning,
doesn't say you know, would you.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Like some tea? It's like, let's go.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
So we put in the DVD and you've been in
screenings like this, and all the way through Alex she's
taking notes all the way through. It's like, but da
da da da, And my heart is like dropping down
to the floor because I'm convinced she hates it. And
we're in big trouble here. Way through. No no, no, no, no, no,
Finally the two and a half hours is over, and
(21:05):
there's dead silence, and she looks at me and like
a little girl, claps her hands as if in applause,
and says, then what she said a moment for you.
Oh my heart is now back up into my chest.
But she said then what she said publicly at Toronto
when we premiered the film there, she said, of all
(21:27):
the films made about John, this is the one he
would have loved. So we didn't have any rights issues
once she gave us the blessing, we got access to
whatever we needed in terms of rights, But it was
that archive that I wanted. After that screening, I don't
think a day or two would go by where either
she wouldn't call me or one of her assistants would concern, oh,
(21:50):
you've got to see this. You have to see this.
We're sending you this piece of film. We're sending you this.
Suddenly the damn has broken, the water was pouring out,
and you'll see in that the US versus John Lennon.
We got access to a lot of rare and never
before seen footage that was in their archive. But each
each film that I do has a different challenge has
(22:10):
a different landscape that has to be navigated.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
What was the hardest one for you to do?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Ooh, that's a great question. The toughest one was Coltrane
Chasing Train only because there was so little on him
and how to do that. The rights were somewhat complicated
because his catalog is controlled by three of the largest
music companies in the world. There's Universal, Warner and Concord.
(22:37):
We had to bring them all together so that we
could feature music from throughout his life. And sometimes, I mean,
you know this better than most is there are people
in our business who are very nice, and there are
people in our business who are not so nice, and
every so often you bump into those. Sometimes it's a
right situation. People who don't trust people, Oh, they don't
trust people. When I have them come on this podcast.
(22:59):
I'm a great filmmaker like you. But when I have
people come on this podcast, I mean it's sometimes I
say to them, my show was about appreciation. I'm not
gonna have to get anybody. We shared that in common, alec.
I celebrate these people. It's because they're worthy of celebration.
And that doesn't mean that there aren't some negative aspects
(23:20):
of their life or some darker spots.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Where you know, I always write it off to fear. Yeah, sure,
I write it off to fear. They're just uptight people
as by their nature. It isn't just with me, it's
with everybody, you know.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
I did a film some years ago on Harry Nilsen
called who is Harry Nilsen? Why is everybody talking about him?
Harry's a very complicated guy, lots of darkness, lots of
bad behavior. We could have done the TMZ version of
that story, we could have done the National Inquirer version.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Of that story.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
But it was a celebration of a great talent who
happened to have a dark side that he and everyone
else acknowledged. And I think that's what made the film
work so well, is that you felt you were really
to know this guy. It wasn't a whitewash, it wasn't
a sanitized version of his life. Here's something Yoko had
said to me, and Harry's widow had said to me,
(24:09):
same things.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
She said.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Look, I know what John was, says Yoko, and Una
Nielsen says, I know what Harry was. Just don't make
stuff up, tell the truth. I'll be happy and that's
what I try to do. And they were good friends
Nilson and Lennon.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Oh very much so.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
They hung out right up to the time John was murdered.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Well, one thing I remarked on to the producers here
with me was that it's interesting how the Beatles reached
the height that they reached because they became movie stars.
That was one contributing factor. The great songwriting, the great performing,
the need that audience has had in the wake of
Kennedy's death to have some light and some joy and fun.
(24:48):
And when you watch Hard Day's Night, which is considered
a classic film, they're the Marx brothers, and they all
had distinct personalities like the Marx Brothers, very much so.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
And that's I think what distinguish them, as you're saying,
from any other band that was around. And they were
extremely talented in so many ways. I sit around with
friends all the time and we're talking about music, and
what I often will say is the thing about the
Beatles that distinguished them from almost any other band is
that each album is different than the one that preceded it.
(25:20):
They are trying new things, they are pushing the envolve,
they are expanding the horizons. They didn't care to repeat themselves,
and so each one is an experiment if you will.
You know, Stones are a great rock and roll band,
but their record sounded a lot alike for the last
fifty years, you know. So that's what I think made
the Beatles so special, and we were able to capture
(25:41):
some of that in the US versus John Lennon, And
it wasn't really about the Beatles, but we had great
cooperation also from Apple in terms of getting the stuff
that we needed. And so again I think if you're
a nice person and your motives are pure, and you
do what you say you will, I think you're going
to do okay. And so so you asked a really
(26:01):
interesting question about the hardest one. Each one has had
his hard moments, but largely all of them have been
really great positive experiences for me. I've not walked away
from any one of the forty seven documentaries I've done
and said, WHOA, I hated doing that one.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Now when you do someone who I remember this for
some reason because I'm such a fan of his. In
Nick Tosh's book If I'm Not Mistaken, Dean Martin stands
there with somebody and he puts on a bing Crosby
album and now Elvis is emerging. He puts on Elvis's album,
he goes, aren't we really doing the same thing? Isn't
(26:41):
it really like just an updated form of crooning? Being's
a crooner, I'm a crooner. Elvis is a crooner. And
I thought found that was fascinating. Crosby died like on
a golf course in Scotland, right, he was golfing over
there and he dropped out of a heart attack. So
what happens when you do the film about him and
there's extant footage? But are there family members you wrangle
(27:02):
and like when you work on somebody who's been dead
a while.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Right, the question is they're not there to speak for themselves.
You really have two options. One is to find their
close friends, colleagues and family members who can speak for
them and give you a window into their character and
personality and experiences. Or what you can do is what
I did in Chasing Train is where there were no
(27:27):
interviews with him on film or video. He had only
done a couple of radio interviews and the sound wasn't
good enough for me to use. But I wanted him
to have a presence in the film and he had
died in nineteen sixty seven, so I got the idea
of going to He did a lot of print interviews
for newspapers magazines, and so I picked words that he
(27:50):
spoke in those interviews that gave us a window into him.
And because I'm somewhat fearless, I said, Okay, now I
have these, I want a movie star to read them.
So I put together a list and I went to
a casting director friend of mine and I said, will
you help me get one of these people to be
the voice of John Coltrane. She said, oh, I love
(28:10):
your films, of course, so tell me your first choice
and give me an email and that I can send
on to them as to what you're looking for them
to do. And I'll get into this anyway. Long story short,
We got Denzel Washington to speak the words of John Coltrane.
So what that enabled us to do. Coltrane was not
there to speak for himself, but we had someone as
talented as Denzel to bring those words to life and
(28:33):
in a small way, bring Coultrane to life.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Documentary filmmaker John Seinfeld. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell
a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing
on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, John Seinfeld shares the one movie
he wasn't willing to make. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
(29:10):
listening to Here's the Thing. After making documentary films for
three decades, it seems like there isn't a topic director
John Seinfeld hasn't covered. I wanted to know if there
was ever a film he wished to make but never
got the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
There are people I've tried to go after and they
just weren't interested. Phil Collins I went after for a while,
couldn't get that. I'm going after another one. Now I'm
not sure that that's going to work. You know. The
interesting thing is, and you've been around this business so long,
you get a reputation and that can be good. So
I have a reputation for doing good work. But you know,
I'm not on everybody's list, and I'm not on everybody's lips.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I kind of like.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Being in my own little world, flying under the radar,
doing what I do and having a great time doing it.
And one of my failings is I'm not a great
self promoter. There are documentarians out there whose names, you know,
everybody knows them, everybody hears them, because they're great at that.
They may not be the greatest filmmakers in the world,
but they are really good at that. And so I
(30:13):
do find people will come to me from time to time,
but a lot of the time I have to generate
my own ideas and persuade them that I am the
right person to do it. So I wish it would
be one of those things where the phone is ringing
all the time, Hey, we got this, we got this,
we got this. And there's the other thing.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Many years ago, I was offered a Whitney Houston project
and it was like, you know, I kind of founded
my agent, I kind of founded the studio that wanted
to do it because I said no, and they were like, well,
but we're this and it's Whitney. I said, you know,
we're not going to be able to tell the real story.
They're looking for a sanitized version of her life and
I just wasn't interested in doing that. So I have
(30:52):
turned down some things as well, but again I kind
of keep coming back to what's the story. If I
find something I really like, then I'm out there trying
to find the best way to get it financed and
get it made.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So some of these things you're commissioned, I would imagine
American Masters and things like that, and other ones you
pitch and you birth them.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Correct, that's right, American Masters. We pitched Bob Hope for
that and they love that idea. And a producer that
I had worked with before had pitched Elvis to Paramount
Plus and they bought it. But they bought my vision
of it because the producer didn't quite know what it was,
so I had to come up with what it was.
But yeah, so sometimes people come to me. Sometimes I'm
(31:32):
out there, you know, being Willy Lohman trying to my
best or Glengarry Glenn Ross to use an Alec Baldwin
environment where you're having to sell and go out there
and do the best you can, and this is a
particularly challenging time to do that. The business has been
changing dramatically.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Well, I wanted to ask you about that. You know,
there used to be no market for really for documentary films,
not compared to now, and now there's a huge market
for documentary films and it's just crazy. What are the
changes you've seen during your career.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
As you describe, I think there was a time where,
you know, the first documentary I ever saw was in
high school and it was about the mating of the
teats fly in the South Pacific. Couldn't have been a
more boring documentary. But as time has gone along, particularly
the last twenty years, you have seen an explosion. It's
kind of been said that it's the golden age of documentaries,
(32:23):
and I think that's really true. The audience has embraced
these as the same kind of If it's great storytelling,
it can be as good as any scripted property. But
what's changing now is the streaming has changed the entire landscape.
There are more buyers buying documentaries, but they are paying
less for them. And now with the streaming business really
(32:47):
being questioned that so many of the platforms are not
making money, they are cutting back on the number of
projects they're buying and the money that they are paying
for them. So we have to be very creative about
getting our documentary He's made. So you can go to
a platform and I call it the kneepad tour, where
you get down on your knees and beg for money.
(33:08):
Here's my story, so you can do that. But also
what has become something that I've made good use of
in the last ten years or so is independent financing,
where you go to someone a high net worth individual
who has the same passion for the subject that I do,
and they'll say, Okay, we're going to fund this documentary.
(33:28):
Then we'll worry about selling it later. And so I've
done a number of those. Blutzwat and Tears was one
of those films where we were funded entirely upfront, great budget,
and then armed with a finished film, we can then
say all right, here it is buy it or don't
buy it. And you know what that's like because you
have your own production company. But sometimes to try to
persuade one of these young buyers what it is that
(33:49):
you're so passionate about can be a real challenge and
sometimes they just don't understand it. I had a meet
and greet with one of the platforms last year and so,
so what are you doing and I'm in and some
of the things that I was interested in, and they said, oh, well, John,
you have to realize we are a millennial channel. History
for us is the nineties. It was like whoa you know,
(34:10):
so those are some of the challenges we have as
well the obstacles we have to overcome.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
At the Hampton Film Festival that I am on the
board of and David NuGen is the artistic director, and
we take advantage for the last several years, I think
it's fourteen or fifteen years now, of the captive audience
out there for the summer and we have a summer
documentary program. We always tried to do some varied programming,
you know, a biopic, a topical one, and then last
(34:35):
we tried to do something that was really cinematically more magical,
and one of my favorites is Bombay Beach by Almahrel.
But let me ask you this, what do you think
about the strike and the way things are with the
streamers now.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
I'm a proud member of the Writer's Guild, proud member
of the Director's Guild. I have my concerns about strikes.
I think this last strike was interesting from the Writer's
Guild standpoint in that almost every point they were striking
for had to do with scripted material, did not impact
documentaries in any significant way. And the business is changing
(35:10):
so much. To stand up for yourselves is very admirable
to try to get higher fees, all that sort of stuff.
That's all great, but there's a reality to the business.
The business is shrinking, and you may get more money
and you may get bigger fees. You may have more
writers in a room, but they may be making less
(35:31):
and there may be not as many opportunities for younger writers.
I did a guest lecture at UCLA last week and
I was talking to some students and I did say
I felt happy that there's more career light behind me
than ahead of me in our business, because I'm not
quite sure what the business is going to be in
ten or fifteen. And I think sometimes with strikes, you're
(35:54):
kind of dealing with the same model that's been going
on for fifty or sixty years and not necessarily recognizing
the changes in the business and perhaps how creatively to
get what you want in a different way. Streaming, to
me is super exciting, I said to you on our
first conversation. We've been binging thirty Rock, my wife and
I and that's one of the great things about streaming
(36:16):
is you can sit there and watch the history of
a whole show and it's right there for you, and
that's a wonderful wonderful thing. And they have great movies
and great documentaries, all of that, but in cutting back
and in terms of purchasing less content or more homogeneous content,
meaning just celebrities, just big names, as opposed to more thoughtful,
(36:37):
smart things.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
It's a contracting business.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It is, very much.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
And what you have.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
What you have then is sometimes people like me will turn,
We'll go on to a particular platform and there's just
not that much to see. And so when they talk
about people drifting away and unsubscribing, that's why, because there's
not enough really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Now, who's somebody you've been you'd love to do. Who's
somebody you haven't done that you'd love to do.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
I have two of those I would dearly love to do.
Paul McCartney is one. Won't happen. He has a documentary
filmmaker in the family, but he's got a fascinating story.
I would dearly love to do that one, you know,
And I would love to do Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart
has an absolutely fascinating story of a man who has
reinvented himself in every decade and yet somehow, unmistakably is
(37:24):
still Rod Stewart. You know you've seen people, you know,
I'm sure, who try something new, try to reinvent themselves
to go with the current trend, and it's like, that's
not even you. Why are you doing that? He has
this remarkable ability to do that. So that's something I'd
be interested in doing. And I have two stories now
I'm taking out that I really were trying to find
the money for now. I have not really talked to
anybody about this, but because you asked, I'd be happy
(37:47):
to mention them. One is here we are. The hottest
topic in the world right now is the Middle East.
Peace in the Middle East, And I've got a story
I want to tell everybody thinks peace is an impossible dream.
Yet I have a story of a guy who did it.
He brought Arabs and Israelis together in a very creative way,
(38:07):
hammered out a piece agreement that lasted for seventeen years.
He got the Nobel Peace Prize for doing it, and
the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
And it's a aspirational film about if you think something
can't be done, look at how this guy did it.
Maybe there's some knowledge in it for how we can
approach it today. And that man's name was Ralph Bunch,
(38:28):
fascinating guy American diplomat working for the United Nations.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
It's funny you say the ones you want and they
reflect a really personal opinion you have or a taste
you have. And I'm the same way. I always think
to myself, if I could do somebody who hadn't been done.
And I only say this because I've never seen an intelligent,
full length interview done of Mick Jagger. Jagger has avoided
any serious dialogue about it. And here he is, still,
(38:54):
you know, going at it. That're going on tour again,
and Jagger has got all the agum moor energy than
I do. And he's like, you know, eighty or whatever
he is now. No one's really gotten to him. No
one sat him down and talked about musicianship. And in
the arcs he's seen in society and even the lofty
perch he's on and he's a rich man and he's
a superstar around the world. He opens his mouth and
(39:17):
you know who he is within one note. So the
new film is Whatever Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears,
And that's streaming where.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
It is available now for purchase or rent on all
digital platforms.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
I would love people to see this because it was amazing.
It was amazing, You're so nice story. It's so freakish
and so fantastic it.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Is, and it's so strange. And the other thing that
struck me while I was making and we were sitting
in the editing room, and there's so many striking parallels
to what's going on in the world today. The extent
to which the country is polarized between left and right,
red and blue, the authoritarian regimes that are out there
in the world, and what the band members experience when
(39:53):
they went into those communist dictatorships. There are people today
in our country who praise Putin and praise dictators and
what these guys learned when they went over there was
it is no walk in the park to live under
a country's ruled by those kinds of people. And there
are lessons to be learned from the past. And I
so love this and I'm proud of this film for
(40:16):
not only the entertainment value, but also the message that
we have.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
My thanks to John Seinfeld. This episode was produced by
Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is
Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingwich. Here's
the Thing is recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
I'm a mc baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to
you by iHeart Radio
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Four
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. Making documentary films about fascinating people
and diving deep into their lives and work. That is
the occupation of my guest today, Emmy and Grammy nominated writer,
producer and director John Shinfeld. He's made nearly fifty documentaries
(00:25):
that tell the story behind some of the most famous
names and events in American history, from John Lennon and
Bob Hope to the Chicago Cubs and Watergate. His most
recent film is Mash, The Comedy That Changed Television, about
the iconic sitcom. Last year, he released the documentary What
(00:46):
the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears, answering the
question surrounding the political turmoil that engulfed the popular rock
band in the nineteen seventies. Sinfeld often goes behind the
curtain of the musical world. He recently told the behind
the scenes story of Elvis Presley's famous Christmas special in
(01:07):
the film Reinventing Elvis the sixty eight Comeback.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Basically, by nineteen sixty eight, Elvis had become irrelevant. He'd
been replaced in the public consciousness for the most part
by the Beatles, the Stones, the British Invasion, all of that.
He was doing these crappy little movies and as the
sixties progressed, they were selling fewer tickets, he was not
selling as many records, and by sixty eight he didn't
(01:33):
quite know which direction to go, and his manager came
up with this notion of let's do a Christmas special
for NBC, and his idea was dress him up like
Perry Como in a sweater and sing twenty Christmas songs
and get off the stage. And NBC hired this young
hotshot producer director named Steve Binder, and Steve said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
(01:58):
What we want you to do is what made you Elvis,
And so they constructed this show in spite of Tom
Parker that really showcased Elvis's talents and you can see
it on the screen in this special. He is a
superbly talented guy, very charismatic, gorgeous for men and women.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
And the show turned out to be the highest rated
special of nineteen sixty eight and a jump started his career.
Las Vegas came calling, and that really set up the
third act of his life.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
You see that a film you made, and early on
the guy saying about the concert, he tells a story
about him not wanting to come out, and then he
walks out there and everything's in position, and he walks
out there in that black outfit, and like everything about
him is like, oh my god, it's Elvis, the Elvis
I loved. Here's the Elvis I love. Whereas I mean
(02:53):
that period I'd forgotten the years. That period was the
bad movie Elvis period up to sixty eight of the Comeback,
and I am obsessed. I own that concert. But when
you do a film like that, and I'm assuming it's
extraordinarily difficult and therefore maybe tempting to pass on a
film where there's not a lot of extant footage about
(03:13):
the person. There's a mountains of footage of Delvis, you know.
And when you do a film like that, or any
of your films, how does it begin for you? Where
do you start?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
For me, it's always what's the story?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
I'm not a journalist, I'm not an academic. I came
out of the scripted world. I was a studio executive
for a while and then became a writer of pilot
shows and things like that, so I come out of
a very traditional three actromatic structure. So I'm fascinated by
what's the story. Is there an interesting story here? Is
it compelling? Is there enough depth to it that would
(03:50):
warrant being a feature documentary? So that's the first thing.
Second question always is is there enough audio visual material
with which to tell the story? Some times there is
and sometimes there isn't. I did a film a few
years ago called Chasing Train about the jazz icon John Coltrane,
and there's very little footage on him, but we managed
(04:12):
to find a way to tell the story. Same with Blood,
Sweat and Tears, which we can get into later, and
other times I did one on John Lennon, and he
was perhaps the most photographed and filmed man of the
twentieth century, and there was plenty of film for us
to you. So if there really was nothing, then I
get very frustrated and disappointed that I'm not going to
be able to tell that story and I have to
(04:32):
move on to something else. But largely it's what's the story?
And does it nurture my soul? Does it inspire me,
does it intrigue me? Does it make me laugh? If
I have that kind of a response to something. Then
I know this is a project I want to take on.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Well, I always find like I'll be on YouTube. Let's
say Oscar Peterson is in a concert in Copenhagen, and
I'll go, well, you got a clip of this, and
you're showing a clip of this. What's the clip from?
How can I go buy the concert that Oscar Peterson
is in? They'll be there and there are numerous examples.
There are abundant examples of shows like that or where
(05:08):
there's a clip and I'll go, my god, I want
to see Miles Davis said, Carnie, you know whatever it is,
And they don't offer you that information on the thing.
And I'm such a junkie for documentaries of any kind.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
One of the things I love most about my job
is the detective work of trying to track down this
audio visual material. And we cast a very wide net
around the world to find the most rare, the most unusual,
or the most pertinent material to help tell our story.
And you find things sometimes under people's beds, in their closets,
(05:41):
in some archive in Eastern Europe, you know wherever, it
might be, in the trunk of their car, trunk of
their cars out there. You just never know sometimes when
you're going to find something. I'll share a story nowt
about Bloodswoot and Tears. I had lunch with Bobby Colombie,
who is the co founder and the band leader of
Bloodwitton Tears, and he had seen my Coltrane film and
he said, so, I want to take you to lunch
and tell you a story. So we sit down for
(06:03):
lunch and I literally asked him what the hell happened
to Blood Sweat and Tears. Here was you were one
of the hottest bands going and then you weren't.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
He said, that's the story I'm going to tell you,
and he starts to tell me this story at lunch.
He only knows maybe half of what really happened. We
dug up a lot of information of what was happening
behind the scenes. But in the middle of lunch, alec
He says to me, so, we were in eastern Europe
and this film crew was with us. And wait, wait, wait, wait,
wait a second, there was a film crew with you. Yeah, yeah,
(06:33):
we took a documentary film crew with us. It's like, well,
where's that film? He said, I don't know, and that
became the treasure hunt on this one. Where is that
film now? It was embargoed by the State Department. Correct,
that's correct. That's what we learned at the end of
the day. But what we did learn early on was
they had shot sixty five hours of material with which
they intended to make a feature documentary to be distributed
(06:56):
in theaters back in nineteen seventy seventy one, and they
edited together a two and a half hour version which
they had to show to the State Department. That screening
did not go well. Somehow that two hour feature documentary
was transformed into a one hour for television that never
got shown. And so we're on the trail of this stuff,
(07:18):
and we are checking every archive that we can think of.
We also checked every independent storage facility here in Los
Angeles where a producer might have stored their material, and nothing, nothing.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Finally, one day a woman who runs a vault in
Hollywood who we had contacted some months before, and she said, oh,
we have nothing. It was during COVID and she was
going through some old fashioned loose leaf binders and found
a vague reference to blood, sweat and tears. She went
into the vault and in a far corner in a
pile of stuff marked for destruction. Was the one hour,
(07:55):
sixty minute version of this project that never got released
on what format? Ye It was on sixty millimeter film
with optical sound on the side. And so in our
film What the Hell Happened to Bloodswood and Tears, all
the footage you see from that tour came from that
one hour version. The sixty five hours of raw material
totally disappeared, and we believe the State Department took it
(08:18):
back and at some point destroyed it, not for I
think nefarious reasons. I think it was more it was
taking up a lot of space.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Nixon boy, he just hated those real rock bands. He
hated that rock and roll music.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
He was not a rock and roll fan in the least.
That's what's so interesting about this story is that it's
a rock band and suddenly there are memos about this
rock band on Henry Kissinger's desk and Richard Nixon's desk,
and they're actually responding to them and dealing with it.
And I just found that absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But now that we're on that subject, your film is
about what happened to them, meaning they go over there
if I'm not mistaken. If I remember in the film
which I saw just recently, on some typically traditional cultural
exchange by the State Department, correct, that's right, which had
been mostly a classic arts like dance and ballet and
symphony and things like that.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
And jazz, so Louis Armstrong, Jessey Gillespie, those sorts of
artists had also gone over on these cultural exchange programs.
And then what happened, well thereby hangs the tale. And
what we learned is the State Department came to Blood
Sweat and Tears and said, we want you to represent
America and go to these Eastern European countries that we
(09:28):
are trying to establish relationships with and perform. And that
seems fairly straightforward, right, but it was never ever that simple.
What we learned is the lead singer for Blood Sweat
and Tears, David Clayton Thomas, was having some immigration problems
and he was going to be deported. So imagine now
(09:50):
you're in the hottest band going and you can't record
with your singer and you can't tour with your singer
in the United States because he's been deported. So the
band is now faced this and now the State Department
shows up and, in a word that we've heard a
lot in the last few years, there was a quid
pro quo, and the quid pro quo was, if you
(10:11):
do this tour for us, we will make David's immigration
problems go away. And that is in fact what happened.
So they blackmailed them. Isn't it interesting where they put
this pressure on them to get them to go, we
want you to represent American pop culture, and then when
it's over there like, well, we don't want you to
represent American pop culture. Actually, And I remember, I think
(10:34):
you said in the film that their debut album which
I devoured that album when I was young. Clayton Thomas
is one of the most legendary vocalists I've ever heard
in my life. I mean, that's a guy that could
have sang on Broadway for the rest of his life.
I mean, he had the greatest voice.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
But I think you mentioned in the film that their
record was number one and beat out Abby Road.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Correct, they won the Grammy for Best Album of the
Year over the Beatles Abbey Road.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
What does that tell you?
Speaker 2 (11:00):
It's the strangest thing.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
That's amazing. We tried to get David Clayton Thomas on
the show. You interviewed him directly, correctly, we did.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
He lives in Toronto, and that was sort of a
casualty of COVID for a long time because the border
was closed. We couldn't get up there to interview him,
and he couldn't come down here to be interviewed. And
then suddenly, in early twenty twenty one, there was a
three week window where the border actually opened, so we
flew up there as fast as we could and we
(11:27):
sat down with David, and as you saw in the
film and perhaps your podcast audience will as well, he
was quite confessional. He was quite candid and open about
what was going on with him at that time and
how he felt about the band having to do this
to save him.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
If you will director John Scheinfeld, if you enjoy in
depth conversations about the craft of documentary filmmaking, check out
my episode with director Rory Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
I love Boeing and what Boeing stood for in this country,
and we really celebrate that in the film because it's
been an extraordinary company for decades. You know, it helped
us get out of World War Two, it helped get
us to the Moon with my uncle Jack, and for
many decades, Boeing did one thing, which was to say,
we're going to prioritize excellence and safety. And the McDonald
(12:23):
douglas people were put in charge, and they had a
very different business model, which was very Wall Street focused.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
To hear more of my conversation with Rory Kennedy, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break. John
Shinfeld shares his experience working with Yoko Ono on his
film The US Versus John Lennon. I'm Alec Baldwin and
(12:57):
you're listening to Here's the Thing document Henry. Filmmaker John
Scheinfeld sometimes finds himself producing more than one film on
the same subject, as he did with Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams,
and the late actor Peter Sellers.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
I have the best job. I get to go interesting
places and talk to interesting people about interesting things. I
can't imagine for me a better job. And I of
course had seen Peter Sellers. I'd seen the Pink Panther
films and seen some of his other things, and I
just thought he was hysterical, and so a chance to
tell his story was interesting. But my approach to a
(13:34):
lot of these films is not to do a straight
on and he was born in a log cabin in Westchester,
and you know, I'm always looking to tell an unknown
story about somebody who's well known and to come into
it that way, and so Sellers. In fact, that film
was called The Unknown Peter Sellers. And while we did
have some excerpts from his well known films, we did
(13:56):
a lot of work to dig up clips from things
that were not as well known. That helps show the
evolution of his talent. So that was kind of interesting.
Film came out, was very well received, and Columbia Pictures
came to me and said, we're doing a Blu Ray
release of Doctor Strangelove, and we want to have some
bonus material on the Blu Ray and we want to
(14:18):
tell the story of Peter Sellers and Doctor Strangelove.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Can you do that? Th Oh, that'd be great.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
So we took some of the interviews that I did
for the previous one and then did a lot of
new interviews with people that had worked with Stanley Kubrick
and put the story together. So as long as I
can find that interesting way in that hasn't been done
you know, ten times before, I'm very.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Happy This is very similar to one man shows in
the Broadway theater. Ideally, you pick someone who people know
but they don't really know. And I've worked on a
couple of one man shows with that ben someone you
know about you under no circumstances. Do you really know them? Now?
This is something that I get wrong. And then as
(14:59):
I look at this list and I think, well, here's
somebody who I found so intriguing, and maybe I worked
with them and I love them to death and I
love them all my life, and they might not have
been the easiest subject for you to deal with. I
worked with Jonathan Winters, and what was that like? Did
you get to interview him? You sat down with him, We.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Spent time with him. I love Jonathan. I have to
tell you. What we wanted to do was not just
tell the story of his career in his life, but
to get a sense of, yes, who he was as
a person. So we decided we were going to follow
him around Santa Barbara, where he lived. He took us
into a travel agency, he took us into the bank
as he was making a deposit. We went to the
(15:39):
gas station when he was getting his car filled up,
and he would talk to people around just it was
totally ad libbed and all of that. What was interesting
about Jonathan was he knows the reputation that he had
and he said, all right, so what kind of a
film do you want to make? And I said to him,
what kind of a film do you want.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Made about you?
Speaker 2 (15:58):
And it was like whoa No one had ever asked
him that question. He was mostly just hired and he
would do what he.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Was asked to do.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
And he said, well, I would like to kind of play.
I'd like to play, and so we allowed him to
play at these places and then with us in his
sit down interviews. He could just kind of go wherever
he wanted and then we stitched the show together from that.
But I thought he was great, terrific guy.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I did a film with him. We did the not
that successful version of The Shadow that I did with
Marty Begman was the producer. And I'm up in a
cabin with my sister and my mother back in the
summer of nineteen ninety three and Marty calls me and says,
Jonathan Winters wants to talk to you, and I go
what he goes, Yeah, we're not signing him, and he
said he wants to talk to you, and he says,
(16:45):
what I want to know is why you want me
in this movie? Why do you want me? And I go, well,
because I think you're this legendary comic talent. I worship you.
You're as funny as hell, and you're one of the
greatest actors I've ever seen a comic actor. And so
originally he's like, wow, all right, well thanks for calling
me and welcome back to you, and he agreed to
do the movie. We do the movie.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Did you have fun with him?
Speaker 1 (17:05):
He was amazing. He was kind and he was sweet,
and he knew we loved him. I mean, you've got
other guys on here, none of which I met, but like,
for example, I love Andy Williams. I love Andy Williams.
What was that experience like with somebody who's as velvety
and silky as he is.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Andy was a sweetheart. I did three shows for PBS
with him over the years, and he was an interesting guy,
alec in that everything he did had to be first class.
He wouldn't cheap out on anything, he wouldn't take the
easy way. Everything had to be just right. And I
love that about him. And so I got to spend
(17:45):
a lot of time with him as we were picking
the clips for the show, and then with the interviews
that we did. Smart guy, very self deprecating and a
gorgeous voice. Just a gorgeous voice. Oh god, Okay, go
back to Nathan just for one second. You were talking
about how funny he could be. There's a great clip
in our piece that it's called the Stick, and it's
(18:09):
a clip from a Jack Parr show. And Jonathan comes
out and Jack Parr gives him a broomstick that's been
cut in half, so it's just the wooden part, and
he hands it to Jonathan and he says, go. Jonathan
does seven and a half minutes with the stick, and
he's different characters in different countries, doing different things, each
(18:30):
one of them more hysterical than the one before it.
And that's who he is. He was like an overgrown child, really,
but as you say, very sweet and very kind.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
So when you do a film like Us Versus John Lennon,
that's eighteen years ago and then it is, of course
dead twenty six years by then. Was there a lot
of rights issues with Yoko Oner or the Beatles estate?
Were there any issues with getting the rights to Lennon's story.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Not really, you know, Alec, My philosophy has always been,
if you're a straight shooter. I'm from the Midwest, I'm
not from New York, I'm not from Los Angeles. I'm
a straight shooter from the middle of the country. If
you're honest and straightforward with people and saying here's the
film we're going to make, here's what we're going to do.
I don't think you experienced many problems and we didn't hear.
But we had to go and pitch to Yoko and
(19:21):
we said, here's the film we want to make, and
it's about the political John Lennon, not the personal John Lennon.
And she loved that idea. But she gave us her
blessing but not her participation. And that's a key challenge
that we had because she's been blasted so much by
the media and been ill treated by many films and documentaries,
(19:42):
and I think she wanted to sort of keep us
at arm's length until she could see that we were
delivering what we said we were going to. So we
had a two and a half hour rough cut, obscenely long,
with lots of Hole's film clip here, photograph here, because
she has this amazing archive that I knew we needed
access to, and we weren't getting it at first. So
(20:05):
I felt, all right, let's show her this rough cut
and hopefully that'll open the door for us. So we
go to the Dakota and we're ushered into her apartment,
which is this beautiful apartment. Everything's white. Everything's white, and
you have to take your shoes off when you come in.
And we go into the kitchen and there's a fifty
two inch TV up on the wall. Her attorney is there,
(20:26):
who's a great guy, and we're waiting for her, and
then she comes in. She's a small woman, she's four
to ten. She comes in with a pad and a
pencil and says, doesn't say hello, doesn't say good morning,
doesn't say you know, would you.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Like some tea? It's like, let's go.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
So we put in the DVD and you've been in
screenings like this, and all the way through Alex she's
taking notes all the way through. It's like, but da
da da da, And my heart is like dropping down
to the floor because I'm convinced she hates it. And
we're in big trouble here. Way through. No no, no, no, no, no,
Finally the two and a half hours is over, and
(21:05):
there's dead silence, and she looks at me and like
a little girl, claps her hands as if in applause,
and says, then what she said a moment for you.
Oh my heart is now back up into my chest.
But she said then what she said publicly at Toronto
when we premiered the film there, she said, of all
(21:27):
the films made about John, this is the one he
would have loved. So we didn't have any rights issues
once she gave us the blessing, we got access to
whatever we needed in terms of rights, But it was
that archive that I wanted. After that screening, I don't
think a day or two would go by where either
she wouldn't call me or one of her assistants would concern, oh,
(21:50):
you've got to see this. You have to see this.
We're sending you this piece of film. We're sending you this.
Suddenly the damn has broken, the water was pouring out,
and you'll see in that the US versus John Lennon.
We got access to a lot of rare and never
before seen footage that was in their archive. But each
each film that I do has a different challenge has
(22:10):
a different landscape that has to be navigated.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
What was the hardest one for you to do?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Ooh, that's a great question. The toughest one was Coltrane
Chasing Train only because there was so little on him
and how to do that. The rights were somewhat complicated
because his catalog is controlled by three of the largest
music companies in the world. There's Universal, Warner and Concord.
(22:37):
We had to bring them all together so that we
could feature music from throughout his life. And sometimes, I mean,
you know this better than most is there are people
in our business who are very nice, and there are
people in our business who are not so nice, and
every so often you bump into those. Sometimes it's a
right situation. People who don't trust people, Oh, they don't
trust people. When I have them come on this podcast.
(22:59):
I'm a great filmmaker like you. But when I have
people come on this podcast, I mean it's sometimes I
say to them, my show was about appreciation. I'm not
gonna have to get anybody. We shared that in common, alec.
I celebrate these people. It's because they're worthy of celebration.
And that doesn't mean that there aren't some negative aspects
(23:20):
of their life or some darker spots.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Where you know, I always write it off to fear. Yeah, sure,
I write it off to fear. They're just uptight people
as by their nature. It isn't just with me, it's
with everybody, you know.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
I did a film some years ago on Harry Nilsen
called who is Harry Nilsen? Why is everybody talking about him?
Harry's a very complicated guy, lots of darkness, lots of
bad behavior. We could have done the TMZ version of
that story, we could have done the National Inquirer version.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Of that story.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
But it was a celebration of a great talent who
happened to have a dark side that he and everyone
else acknowledged. And I think that's what made the film
work so well, is that you felt you were really
to know this guy. It wasn't a whitewash, it wasn't
a sanitized version of his life. Here's something Yoko had
said to me, and Harry's widow had said to me,
(24:09):
same things.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
She said.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Look, I know what John was, says Yoko, and Una
Nielsen says, I know what Harry was. Just don't make
stuff up, tell the truth. I'll be happy and that's
what I try to do. And they were good friends
Nilson and Lennon.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Oh very much so.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
They hung out right up to the time John was murdered.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Well, one thing I remarked on to the producers here
with me was that it's interesting how the Beatles reached
the height that they reached because they became movie stars.
That was one contributing factor. The great songwriting, the great performing,
the need that audience has had in the wake of
Kennedy's death to have some light and some joy and fun.
(24:48):
And when you watch Hard Day's Night, which is considered
a classic film, they're the Marx brothers, and they all
had distinct personalities like the Marx Brothers, very much so.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
And that's I think what distinguish them, as you're saying,
from any other band that was around. And they were
extremely talented in so many ways. I sit around with
friends all the time and we're talking about music, and
what I often will say is the thing about the
Beatles that distinguished them from almost any other band is
that each album is different than the one that preceded it.
(25:20):
They are trying new things, they are pushing the envolve,
they are expanding the horizons. They didn't care to repeat themselves,
and so each one is an experiment if you will.
You know, Stones are a great rock and roll band,
but their record sounded a lot alike for the last
fifty years, you know. So that's what I think made
the Beatles so special, and we were able to capture
(25:41):
some of that in the US versus John Lennon, And
it wasn't really about the Beatles, but we had great
cooperation also from Apple in terms of getting the stuff
that we needed. And so again I think if you're
a nice person and your motives are pure, and you
do what you say you will, I think you're going
to do okay. And so so you asked a really
(26:01):
interesting question about the hardest one. Each one has had
his hard moments, but largely all of them have been
really great positive experiences for me. I've not walked away
from any one of the forty seven documentaries I've done
and said, WHOA, I hated doing that one.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Now when you do someone who I remember this for
some reason because I'm such a fan of his. In
Nick Tosh's book If I'm Not Mistaken, Dean Martin stands
there with somebody and he puts on a bing Crosby
album and now Elvis is emerging. He puts on Elvis's album,
he goes, aren't we really doing the same thing? Isn't
(26:41):
it really like just an updated form of crooning? Being's
a crooner, I'm a crooner. Elvis is a crooner. And
I thought found that was fascinating. Crosby died like on
a golf course in Scotland, right, he was golfing over
there and he dropped out of a heart attack. So
what happens when you do the film about him and
there's extant footage? But are there family members you wrangle
(27:02):
and like when you work on somebody who's been dead
a while.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Right, the question is they're not there to speak for themselves.
You really have two options. One is to find their
close friends, colleagues and family members who can speak for
them and give you a window into their character and
personality and experiences. Or what you can do is what
I did in Chasing Train is where there were no
(27:27):
interviews with him on film or video. He had only
done a couple of radio interviews and the sound wasn't
good enough for me to use. But I wanted him
to have a presence in the film and he had
died in nineteen sixty seven, so I got the idea
of going to He did a lot of print interviews
for newspapers magazines, and so I picked words that he
(27:50):
spoke in those interviews that gave us a window into him.
And because I'm somewhat fearless, I said, Okay, now I
have these, I want a movie star to read them.
So I put together a list and I went to
a casting director friend of mine and I said, will
you help me get one of these people to be
the voice of John Coltrane. She said, oh, I love
(28:10):
your films, of course, so tell me your first choice
and give me an email and that I can send
on to them as to what you're looking for them
to do. And I'll get into this anyway. Long story short,
We got Denzel Washington to speak the words of John Coltrane.
So what that enabled us to do. Coltrane was not
there to speak for himself, but we had someone as
talented as Denzel to bring those words to life and
(28:33):
in a small way, bring Coultrane to life.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Documentary filmmaker John Seinfeld. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell
a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing
on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, John Seinfeld shares the one movie
he wasn't willing to make. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
(29:10):
listening to Here's the Thing. After making documentary films for
three decades, it seems like there isn't a topic director
John Seinfeld hasn't covered. I wanted to know if there
was ever a film he wished to make but never
got the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
There are people I've tried to go after and they
just weren't interested. Phil Collins I went after for a while,
couldn't get that. I'm going after another one. Now I'm
not sure that that's going to work. You know. The
interesting thing is, and you've been around this business so long,
you get a reputation and that can be good. So
I have a reputation for doing good work. But you know,
I'm not on everybody's list, and I'm not on everybody's lips.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I kind of like.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Being in my own little world, flying under the radar,
doing what I do and having a great time doing it.
And one of my failings is I'm not a great
self promoter. There are documentarians out there whose names, you know,
everybody knows them, everybody hears them, because they're great at that.
They may not be the greatest filmmakers in the world,
but they are really good at that. And so I
(30:13):
do find people will come to me from time to time,
but a lot of the time I have to generate
my own ideas and persuade them that I am the
right person to do it. So I wish it would
be one of those things where the phone is ringing
all the time, Hey, we got this, we got this,
we got this. And there's the other thing.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Many years ago, I was offered a Whitney Houston project
and it was like, you know, I kind of founded
my agent, I kind of founded the studio that wanted
to do it because I said no, and they were like, well,
but we're this and it's Whitney. I said, you know,
we're not going to be able to tell the real story.
They're looking for a sanitized version of her life and
I just wasn't interested in doing that. So I have
(30:52):
turned down some things as well, but again I kind
of keep coming back to what's the story. If I
find something I really like, then I'm out there trying
to find the best way to get it financed and
get it made.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So some of these things you're commissioned, I would imagine
American Masters and things like that, and other ones you
pitch and you birth them.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Correct, that's right, American Masters. We pitched Bob Hope for
that and they love that idea. And a producer that
I had worked with before had pitched Elvis to Paramount
Plus and they bought it. But they bought my vision
of it because the producer didn't quite know what it was,
so I had to come up with what it was.
But yeah, so sometimes people come to me. Sometimes I'm
(31:32):
out there, you know, being Willy Lohman trying to my
best or Glengarry Glenn Ross to use an Alec Baldwin
environment where you're having to sell and go out there
and do the best you can, and this is a
particularly challenging time to do that. The business has been
changing dramatically.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Well, I wanted to ask you about that. You know,
there used to be no market for really for documentary films,
not compared to now, and now there's a huge market
for documentary films and it's just crazy. What are the
changes you've seen during your career.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
As you describe, I think there was a time where,
you know, the first documentary I ever saw was in
high school and it was about the mating of the
teats fly in the South Pacific. Couldn't have been a
more boring documentary. But as time has gone along, particularly
the last twenty years, you have seen an explosion. It's
kind of been said that it's the golden age of documentaries,
(32:23):
and I think that's really true. The audience has embraced
these as the same kind of If it's great storytelling,
it can be as good as any scripted property. But
what's changing now is the streaming has changed the entire landscape.
There are more buyers buying documentaries, but they are paying
less for them. And now with the streaming business really
(32:47):
being questioned that so many of the platforms are not
making money, they are cutting back on the number of
projects they're buying and the money that they are paying
for them. So we have to be very creative about
getting our documentary He's made. So you can go to
a platform and I call it the kneepad tour, where
you get down on your knees and beg for money.
(33:08):
Here's my story, so you can do that. But also
what has become something that I've made good use of
in the last ten years or so is independent financing,
where you go to someone a high net worth individual
who has the same passion for the subject that I do,
and they'll say, Okay, we're going to fund this documentary.
(33:28):
Then we'll worry about selling it later. And so I've
done a number of those. Blutzwat and Tears was one
of those films where we were funded entirely upfront, great budget,
and then armed with a finished film, we can then
say all right, here it is buy it or don't
buy it. And you know what that's like because you
have your own production company. But sometimes to try to
persuade one of these young buyers what it is that
(33:49):
you're so passionate about can be a real challenge and
sometimes they just don't understand it. I had a meet
and greet with one of the platforms last year and so,
so what are you doing and I'm in and some
of the things that I was interested in, and they said, oh, well, John,
you have to realize we are a millennial channel. History
for us is the nineties. It was like whoa you know,
(34:10):
so those are some of the challenges we have as
well the obstacles we have to overcome.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
At the Hampton Film Festival that I am on the
board of and David NuGen is the artistic director, and
we take advantage for the last several years, I think
it's fourteen or fifteen years now, of the captive audience
out there for the summer and we have a summer
documentary program. We always tried to do some varied programming,
you know, a biopic, a topical one, and then last
(34:35):
we tried to do something that was really cinematically more magical,
and one of my favorites is Bombay Beach by Almahrel.
But let me ask you this, what do you think
about the strike and the way things are with the
streamers now.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
I'm a proud member of the Writer's Guild, proud member
of the Director's Guild. I have my concerns about strikes.
I think this last strike was interesting from the Writer's
Guild standpoint in that almost every point they were striking
for had to do with scripted material, did not impact
documentaries in any significant way. And the business is changing
(35:10):
so much. To stand up for yourselves is very admirable
to try to get higher fees, all that sort of stuff.
That's all great, but there's a reality to the business.
The business is shrinking, and you may get more money
and you may get bigger fees. You may have more
writers in a room, but they may be making less
(35:31):
and there may be not as many opportunities for younger writers.
I did a guest lecture at UCLA last week and
I was talking to some students and I did say
I felt happy that there's more career light behind me
than ahead of me in our business, because I'm not
quite sure what the business is going to be in
ten or fifteen. And I think sometimes with strikes, you're
(35:54):
kind of dealing with the same model that's been going
on for fifty or sixty years and not necessarily recognizing
the changes in the business and perhaps how creatively to
get what you want in a different way. Streaming, to
me is super exciting, I said to you on our
first conversation. We've been binging thirty Rock, my wife and
I and that's one of the great things about streaming
(36:16):
is you can sit there and watch the history of
a whole show and it's right there for you, and
that's a wonderful wonderful thing. And they have great movies
and great documentaries, all of that, but in cutting back
and in terms of purchasing less content or more homogeneous content,
meaning just celebrities, just big names, as opposed to more thoughtful,
(36:37):
smart things.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
It's a contracting business.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It is, very much.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
And what you have.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
What you have then is sometimes people like me will turn,
We'll go on to a particular platform and there's just
not that much to see. And so when they talk
about people drifting away and unsubscribing, that's why, because there's
not enough really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Now, who's somebody you've been you'd love to do. Who's
somebody you haven't done that you'd love to do.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
I have two of those I would dearly love to do.
Paul McCartney is one. Won't happen. He has a documentary
filmmaker in the family, but he's got a fascinating story.
I would dearly love to do that one, you know,
And I would love to do Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart
has an absolutely fascinating story of a man who has
reinvented himself in every decade and yet somehow, unmistakably is
(37:24):
still Rod Stewart. You know you've seen people, you know,
I'm sure, who try something new, try to reinvent themselves
to go with the current trend, and it's like, that's
not even you. Why are you doing that? He has
this remarkable ability to do that. So that's something I'd
be interested in doing. And I have two stories now
I'm taking out that I really were trying to find
the money for now. I have not really talked to
anybody about this, but because you asked, I'd be happy
(37:47):
to mention them. One is here we are. The hottest
topic in the world right now is the Middle East.
Peace in the Middle East, And I've got a story
I want to tell everybody thinks peace is an impossible dream.
Yet I have a story of a guy who did it.
He brought Arabs and Israelis together in a very creative way,
(38:07):
hammered out a piece agreement that lasted for seventeen years.
He got the Nobel Peace Prize for doing it, and
the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
And it's a aspirational film about if you think something
can't be done, look at how this guy did it.
Maybe there's some knowledge in it for how we can
approach it today. And that man's name was Ralph Bunch,
(38:28):
fascinating guy American diplomat working for the United Nations.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
It's funny you say the ones you want and they
reflect a really personal opinion you have or a taste
you have. And I'm the same way. I always think
to myself, if I could do somebody who hadn't been done.
And I only say this because I've never seen an intelligent,
full length interview done of Mick Jagger. Jagger has avoided
any serious dialogue about it. And here he is, still,
(38:54):
you know, going at it. That're going on tour again,
and Jagger has got all the agum moor energy than
I do. And he's like, you know, eighty or whatever
he is now. No one's really gotten to him. No
one sat him down and talked about musicianship. And in
the arcs he's seen in society and even the lofty
perch he's on and he's a rich man and he's
a superstar around the world. He opens his mouth and
(39:17):
you know who he is within one note. So the
new film is Whatever Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears,
And that's streaming where.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
It is available now for purchase or rent on all
digital platforms.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
I would love people to see this because it was amazing.
It was amazing, You're so nice story. It's so freakish
and so fantastic it.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Is, and it's so strange. And the other thing that
struck me while I was making and we were sitting
in the editing room, and there's so many striking parallels
to what's going on in the world today. The extent
to which the country is polarized between left and right,
red and blue, the authoritarian regimes that are out there
in the world, and what the band members experience when
(39:53):
they went into those communist dictatorships. There are people today
in our country who praise Putin and praise dictators and
what these guys learned when they went over there was
it is no walk in the park to live under
a country's ruled by those kinds of people. And there
are lessons to be learned from the past. And I
so love this and I'm proud of this film for
(40:16):
not only the entertainment value, but also the message that
we have.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
My thanks to John Seinfeld. This episode was produced by
Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is
Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingwich. Here's
the Thing is recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
I'm a mc baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to
you by iHeart Radio
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Four
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