July 29, 2025 • 47 mins
Writer of “Jaws" & "The Jerk" Carl Gottlieb talks about working with Spielberg, Steve Martin, Carl Reiner, David Crosby, Joan Baez, improv group The Committee, performing comedy in the army, how the Smothers Brothers Show was the hippest most popular show at the time and somehow also cancelled.
Bio: Carl Gottlieb is a screenwriter (Jaws, The Jerk), director (Caveman), & actor (Mash). His book, THE JAWS LOG, remains the most popular book about the making of a motion picture ever written. He also wrote WHICH WAY IS UP with Richard Pryor. He was a member of the classic San Francisco Improv group, The Committee. And a writer on the controversial Smothers Brothers show. He served on the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, and was on the faculty of the Film Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, the American Film Institute, the University of Miami's School of Communications and the University of Southern California's School of Cinema & Television.
Bio: Carl Gottlieb is a screenwriter (Jaws, The Jerk), director (Caveman), & actor (Mash). His book, THE JAWS LOG, remains the most popular book about the making of a motion picture ever written. He also wrote WHICH WAY IS UP with Richard Pryor. He was a member of the classic San Francisco Improv group, The Committee. And a writer on the controversial Smothers Brothers show. He served on the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, and was on the faculty of the Film Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, the American Film Institute, the University of Miami's School of Communications and the University of Southern California's School of Cinema & Television.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Strawhut Media. Hi, this is Carl Gottlieb, but reminding you
don't be alone with j Cogan. Not that he's a
bad guy, it's worth being with.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Don't be alone with JJ Cogan. Hey, Cognation, welcome to
Don't Be alin with Jay Cogan. I am your humble
host Ja Cogan, and I couldn't be happier you're here.
Just want to remind you can write to me at
dbawjk at gmail dot com with all your suggestions, your comments,
(00:35):
your criticisms, and most importantly your listener mail. You can
also subscribe to the show here on YouTube if you're
watching it or listening on the Spotify or the Amazon
or the Apple or wherever you're listening. Also, if you
want to subscribe to that substack, that's free J Cogan.
It's substack. It's really good. It's gonna have a lot
of free stuff, extra bonus material from the show. You
(00:57):
like that, right, bonus material, extra free. It's a gift
to you. Who doesn't like a gift anyway, Do all
that and come back and listen to the show and
enjoy it, because I really enjoy having you today. We've
got a very special show. Carl Gottlieb, one of Hollywood's
biggest writers, is here, and not just because he's big physically.
(01:18):
It's because he's he wrote Jaws. It's the fiftieth anniversary
of Jaws. He's the guy who wrote Jaws, and he
was there when they were sort of fumbling through making it,
and it's quite an adventure. He wrote a book about
it called The Jaws log I Think, and it was fantastic.
And you know, Steven Spielberg trying to figure out how
not to get fired, how to make his first movie good.
(01:38):
He would come. He and Carl would live together every night.
They solve problems and go back out and figure out
how to make this movie work, even when a giant
mechanical shark wasn't working. That's fascinating. But he also worked
with Richard Pryor and Carl Reiner and the Smothers brothers,
and he's had a life in the rock and roll
world where you know, he produced concert movies and knows
(02:00):
David Crosby and Joan Biaz and Joni Mitchell and all
those people from the Laurel Canyon era. And he's solid
in the world comedy, solid in the world of movie writing,
solid in the world of politics, and the big voice
in the writers guild. He's had a very interesting and
adventurous life. And it goes on and he'll tell us
all about it, and it's a really great conversation. I
(02:23):
hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Right
after this, don't be alone with j Carl Gottlieb. Thank
you for being here. Man, my pleasure to be here.
I think you'll find out at the end. Yes, when
it's all over, you'll figure it out. We've known each other.
(02:46):
I don't know how many of you a few decades.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah, a few.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
When I first met you were already a legend. You're
already somebody who had written some of the finest movies
anyone had ever seen.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yep, certainly so, some of the most popular. They may
have been the finest films, but they were good films, and.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
People would say The Jaws one of the finest movies
of all time. Yes, yeah, let me just start. Even
though this show is ostensibly about people solving my problems,
and I'm going to ask you how to solve a
particular problem of mind that I think you'd be very
good at solving. But before I get to that. I
just want to talk a little bit about Jawska. Now
(03:27):
you've written a book about Jaws, your experience about Jaws,
and I am too lazy to read it. So I'm
here to talk to you about it and find out
how did you get the gig.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
I was friends with Spielberg. We were pals. I had
acted in one of his TV movies before he ever
got Jaws, and we hung out and when he got
the script from Zanig and Brown, he sent it to
me with a note on the fly leaf that said,
(03:59):
irate it. So I read the script, and as was
my habit in those days, I was a much in
demand rewriter, a screenwriter. I wrote a long memo about
what I thought about the script, and.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
It was all.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
It was always useful to write the memo because afterwards,
if you got the job, you'd start to rewrite, and
then the producers, Oh, we didn't talk about that. I go, yes,
we did. Here's here's the memo I told you I
was going to do this. Those notes were always valuable,
But in this case, uh, I'd written. I saved everything
(04:37):
because I thought there'd be an arbitration, a guild arbitration
for screen credit so I you know, I found the
script with the note on it diviscerated. I also found
my memo that I wrote in response to it, And
in the memo I made, you know, one thing that
was exactly right and one thing that was exactly wrong.
(04:57):
I'll start with the wrong thing. I object did, I said,
does the girl have to get killed in the beginning?
It's such a teenage horror cliche. You know, you have sex,
you die. You know, punishment for extramarital sex is death.
So I thought that was wrong, over the top, inappropriate.
(05:18):
Then I said, if we do our jobs right, people
will feel about going in the water the way they
felt about taking a shower after Psycho.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You're exactly right about that, and I was, And.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
For now, what is it fifty years? My biggest TAC
team job is saying to people when I tell them
I wrote Jaws, they say, you know, I didn't go
in the water for a month after that, or I
didn't go in the water for a year after that.
And I always go, oh, yeah, I bet, I nod
and smiles, so, yeah, I know, get a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Well. I am one of those people. I was a
kid when I saw Jaws and I didn't go into
the beach for quite some time because I was afraid
and honestly still a little afraid.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Of I don't I don't like deep water.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
In the original script that you saw, was there more
of a love affair between the Richard Dreyfus character and
the from the book.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
The script I saw was uh written by Peter Benchley
because they wanted to throw him when they made his deal.
They said, oh, and you can write the screenplay. So
he wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Then they
read it and they realized he didn't do anything but
like put his novel in the screenplay format. So they
hired a writer named Howard Sackler, who was a very
(06:36):
good writer who wrote A Great Lady Down And he's
a navy guy, and he's the one who brought the
Indianapolist to us because he was familiar with that story,
so he brought the Indianapolis story. And then but there's
still all kinds of related. The mafia was buying a
real estate development on the island and it was and
(06:58):
the and the wife had an affair with.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
With rich Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, when we got the picture cast and everything, we said,
we can't imagine her, you know, cheating on her husband's
it's just not going to work. So all that subplot
came out and we were left with just three men
in a fish. Yeah, and that that turned out to
be the winning formula.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
It's an amazing movie. As somebody who's a writer looking
at just structure. Yeah, it's a really it's we study
I teach film school. We study it in film school,
the structure of it. And and it's not you know,
some people say it's three acts. Some people say it's
four acts. Some people say it's twenty two acts. Like honestly,
they said that each scene is its own kind of act,
(07:44):
and it goes up and down and up and down.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
I actually think of it as a two act movie.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Act one is everything up until it land is land,
and see Act one is everything on land, and Act
two begins with a little shot of them going out right.
Just see that's the beginning of Act too, and then
everything takes place at sea is Act too, and then
then it's over.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
It is a slow build of danger. It's like danger, danger, danger,
danger danger danger.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Well, we didn't have a shark when you when you
read the book, I have confidence that you with. There
was a lot in the book, in the in the
press and everything about how the shark was malfunctioning. So
and Stephen and I were living together in a bungalow
on the vineyard, and we both were familiar with the thing,
(08:36):
which is an ald black and white movie. Well, you
don't see the creature until like two thirds of the
way through the movie. So we said, there's there's our model.
You know, you show the effects of the thing, and
you show the proximity of the thing, but you don't
show the thing itself, mostly because we don't have it show.
(08:57):
But even if we had it to show, it might
be nice to hold it back for a while, which
is wound up what we wound up doing by necessity.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
And had the shark been available and working, would you
think you would would have hit the shark earlier.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, you know, if if shark had been working the
way it was supposed to, we would have had a
lot more shark footage, and it would it would have
been less satisfying movie, because you know, the monsters out
front and obvious, and you know, and in doing it,
(09:32):
I had occasion to look at production stills from the
creature from the black lagoon and you can see masking tape,
you know, on the costume and said, I didn't want that,
you know, So.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
When you see Jaws, Now, the worst part about it
is when you actually see the shark, Like to me
currently the one when when the when the shark leaps
onto the boat and eats Robert Shaw. Yeah, that's the
time he kind of kind of maybe see his mechanical. Yeah,
and but by then you're all invested, You're in the
movie completely.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, it works on all kinds of levels. I mean,
there's a typo that I see every time I see
the picture when Dray when Scheider goes to his office
to type up the report. Right, he's typing out a
blank that the prop department just made up for him.
It looks like an official write before, but the prop
(10:25):
department spelled coroner's office, corner's office. And every time he
rolls up put paper into the machine, I go, oh,
don't look, don't.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Look, nobody's looking. If people are looking at the spelling
of the document, they're not in the scene. So, now,
how panicked was Steven and this time? I mean he's
a young director, he's this is first movie movie.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Yeah, he never let him see them sweat.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Okay, but do you live with him? Yeah? I saw Okay,
So we're they're like panicked evenings like what am I
going to do? Or what am I going to shoot?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
No, he always knew what he was going to shoot.
He's too too much of a filmmaker in his life.
But he was, Uh, he was nervous sleeping and the
smell of celery calmed him down. Okay, so he had
(11:23):
a handful of celery that he put in his pillowcase
and slept on. That helped him sleep.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I wonder why Celery locked.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
In the recesses of the Spielberg unconscious.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Some some lunchbox memory somewhere he had celery. Yeah, in Arizona.
That's that's that's fascinating. I mean, you were on the set.
You were in the movie. I mean, you're you're you're
in the movie. Whether every day rewrites or was it
like just this is a special scene that need to
be done.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Or there were almost always rewrites of some sort or another,
And I was never, I never. I got hired on
the film two weeks before the start of principal photography
and we still didn't have Roy. We still we had
Roy Scheiter. We didn't have Dreyfus or Shawl Wow, but
we were going ahead. Steve Berg was pushing ahead. Never
(12:15):
wasted green light right exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
What were they shooting before? The contract was drying on
this other guys.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
There was nothing. There was nothing to shoot. I mean,
we didn't we The start principal photography was May two.
On April fifteenth, I went to Boston with Steve with Stephen.
We were in a hotel room right and we were
casting Boston area locals and Dreyfus came up from New
(12:42):
York because he was in New York promoting Dirty Kravitz.
I remember I asked Steven about him because he would
have been he was ideal, and Steven said, I he
turned me down. I said, let me. Does he know
I'm working on it because we have a relationship with
Dreyfus that goes back a long way. So I called
him and said, you come up beat, Steven. You know
it's not the same movie that you read. So Dreyfus
(13:06):
showed up in Boston and walked in the door and
Spielbert took one look at him, said, don't change a thing.
He was wearing the denim jacket, the scruffy glasses.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
He was. He was Hooper, he was, he was the guy.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
He said, well, you know, I didn't want to do
this movie. The movie I'd rather see than be in.
It's this famous quote. And we said, no, we're gonna
and we found it while we were just riffing. We
found the joke with crushing the styrofoam cup. I did
that in the hotel room in Boston, and we all
looked at each other and said, don't worry, it's in
the script. I'm putting it in now. And the you know,
(13:49):
that's how it went. And then then uh and shaw.
Then we're really getting desperate. I had a wonderful suggestion,
but he couldn't do it. With Sterling Hayden, it would
have been a great quint. But Sterling had income tax
problems from his previous books, so he could only write.
He couldn't work as an actor because Uncle Sam would
(14:12):
just grand money. So here, but he was able to
work on book royalties, so he was. He was more
interested in writing a book than he was in acting.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yeah, no, he would have been good. Bad. Robert Show
was fantastic. Oh yeah, shows did he walk in wearing
the Fisherman's out, No what came out like. I was
hoping this would be good, and then it turned out
that scene really played.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I went to the first two. I went to the
first a second preview. First preview was in Dallas and
they didn't take the writer. But the second preview was
down in Lakeview or Lakewood, and it was an old
fashioned sneak preview where they said, you know, Hollywood movie, come,
you know. So we went to that and as we
(14:59):
were watching it, you know, the the audience was just
you know, still of course, then when the picture ended,
it was like a beat and then they fucking went wild.
They just you know, wouldn't stop clapping, and the bathrooms
filled up, and Zanik and Brown and Henry H. High
(15:22):
and Martin they head of publicity for Universal and Lou
Wasson and Forum stood in the men's room, the only
place you could even hear yourself talk up to their
floorshrimes in water because every you know, fifteen hundred people
got up and had to pee. So they're standing with
their floor shrimes in the water. And that's what Wasserman says.
(15:45):
You know, the best advertisement for a picture, it's word
of mouth and a line around the block. So we're
going to put this in a lot of theaters. And
everybody said, oh, how many? He said four or five
hundred many as we can get. And that was, you know, never,
that was unheard of. It had been done once or
twice before.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
But it played in my local movie theater I grew
up in Encino. It played in the Sino movie theater
for I believe a year and a half. It was just,
you know, we used to go to the movies every
week to see you kind of a new movie every
week or every two weeks. There was no new movie.
It was just your movie playing for a year and
a half.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Yeah, they did that. They don't do that anymore, but
right now, that was that fantastic.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Don't be alone on the So the reason you're here
to solve my problem, and thank you for all the
Jaws information, which is this, Aside from writing Jaws, and
aside from writing The Jerk, and aside from writing many
other amazing things, you've led a fast life. You have
(17:01):
led a life where I consider you'd be part of
the scene, whatever the scene was. Yes, at the time,
you lived the scene. Yep. So in in New York
you lived the theater scene in la You're living this
sort of television comedy scene, but also the rock and
roll scene, right, and then the big movie scenes and
(17:21):
all that. I am I have no scene, Carl. I
need a scene. I need to find a place. How
did you find a way to ingratiate yourself in that
scene to be part of it? Not just you were
part of it. You're in the Woodstock like, aren't you
in not the Woodstuck movie? The movie about the rock
concert celebration? Big sir, Yes, big sir, I produced that. Yeah, yeah,
you're in it, sitting around with all the rock stars
(17:43):
and you're having a great time.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah. My wife and I had a little house in
those days, were newly married, and we lived on Gardner
Street between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard. All those little houses
there we had. We had a little house, right, I
remember I turned down the opportunity to buy it for
thirty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
You probably had other really smart investments. It was.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Like a halfway point between Laurel Canyon and the Hollywood
Bowl and the Greek Theater and all the recording studios
in Hollywood. Wally Hyder, Sunset Sounds, Sunset West Recorders, you know,
all those so and at that time a whole lot
of musicians lived in the canyon. Joni Mitchell, David you know,
(18:32):
David Crosby, Neil Young, Neil Young, Jackson Brown, they all lived.
They all lived in the canyon. And my wife and
I kind of ran a salon. We used to had
like an open house. People could drop in, you know,
see if there's anybody around talk to. Our house was
(18:53):
like this stopping point, so everybody would stop on their
way on the way to the recording studio, they stop
at our house and on the way back, you know,
they'd stopped to have a joint quickly before before they
got to.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I imagine there's gonna be food and drugs. Yes, like
any good stopping point or any rock and roll world,
there's gonna be some good food, some drink, and some drugs. Yep. Fantastic,
And all kinds of people came through.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And I remember I got a phone call from a
friend of mine who had been a PA for me,
who was working for Johnny Cash Show in Nashville, and
she said, there's a guy coming out from this show.
It's a songwriter. He's going to be play the Troubadour.
He really should meet him.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
His name is.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
He needs a place to stay, So I said, you
know I had a guest room, right, So I said,
he can stay here. It was Christmas Jofferson, and he
stayed at my house. And even he actually slept there
maybe five nights out of two weeks because every night
he'd go home. Julie Christy, Samanthagar, Goldie Horn, Starlet of
the Moment.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
He took them all. He beautiful man. He was a
handsome guy.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, I remember, I remember when I first read about
him in the New York Times. You know, he never
had a press agent. John Perellis saw him in the
village and wrote a piece of the New York Times
and that was it. Never stopped after that. He was
a boxer. He was a warrant officer, helicopter pilot, old scholar,
Rhodes Scholar, boxed right in the roads.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
It's a yeah, No, he is a I mean, I'm
people compare my life to his. Yeah, most of the time.
I'm the kind of the Chris Christofferson of Simpson Comedy Writers.
Yes it's not exactly the same, but it's close.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
No, but the Simpson Comedy Writers are in themselves an institution,
you know.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
We are, And that's kind of a scene. But I'm
not really part of that scene. Like I'm not like
I left that show after five years. They've been having
their own scene for the last thirty five years. So
I don't know. But but you know, when you worked
on the Smothers Brothers, rh huh, they couldn't have been
a cooler place to be.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
I don't think if you're going to do television in
those days, there was no place better, you know, for
hippie artist types like myself, right.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Exactly, and so like and and and you were seemed
to be, at least towards the middle and end of
that show in a war with you know, the network
and the establishment and Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
All those I mean, and Tommy gloried in it. But
it got us thrown off the air, right. The best
thing was they picked us up for the next for
the following season, right then we won the Emmy. Then
they canceled us for some reason, and there were lawsuits involved,
(21:38):
and it turns out that since they had picked us up,
they owed us for six out of thirteen or whatever
our contracts were. So I was the best writing check
I ever got. I was writing for writing seven Smothers
by the show that I never had to write.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Well, I think CBS said we don't do don't put
on something, and Tommy said, fuck you, yeah, putting it on.
And then he thought, we'll go to court and we'll
make them put us back on. And then he went
to court and they didn't get put back on. Now
who are you writing with at the time?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
I was writing mostly with Lorenzo Music, right, Okay, we
wrote a lot of the monologues together.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
What was the coolest part about that Smothers brothers? Who
is there? Steve Martin?
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Well, it was a great writing Rob Ryan or Steve Martin,
Bob Einstein, a guy named Paul Wayne McLean. Stevenson was
there for a while.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
As a writer. Yeah, I didn't know he was a writer.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
No, he wasn't, but but.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
He was there. But he was. So there were just
some people who, like Tommy, thought hey join the staff
and then.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Well what happened was the Smother's brother has a gun
on the air, and against all expectations, succeeded.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
They knocked Bonanza out of first place in the top ten,
and then they were in the top ten for the
next two years, right, but then they but after two
years the contracts they had enabled them to produce their
own show. They got they got their show back, so
they fired the producers and produced the show themselves. They
(23:16):
were looking for new writers, and in those days, if
you had a successful show on network television, they gave
you your time slot and reduced license fee and you could
produce your own summer replacement. So that's when Dawn got
started and Glenn Campbell was so the Smothers Brothers decided
(23:38):
to go with Glenn Campbell, so they hired a bunch
of us to be Glenn Campbell's writers.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Make Glenn Campbell funny, and that's not easy, No, wasn't
all right. He's a great voice, brilliant musician, but hard
to make funny. So okay, so then you you get
shifted to Glenn Campbell. But then they imported you over
to this Mother's Brothers show.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
So we had so much fun on the Glenn Campbell
Show that they picked us all up for the winter show,
which was great. But in the meantime the show got canceled, right,
and after the lawsuits died down, they CBS had to
pay us because they had picked us up, that we
had gotten the notice we had turned down jobs, you know.
So I got a writing check for seven episodes that
(24:22):
I never had to even type.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
The greatest, the greatest paychecks I've ever gotten were for
shows I didn't have to work on. Yeah, my dad
was the happiest. I tell the story. My dad worked
on the Donny Murrie Show and they decided to move
to Utah, And this is a contract that he would
work in LA but they had to pay him out
anyway when they moved to Utah, and he was the
only time he was truly happy writing variety, I think
(24:47):
for Donny Murrie. Okay, so let's go back a little further.
You started out more in the world of acting. Yes, improvisational, right, improvisational?
The Committee Committee? Did you love that?
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Oh? It was the most fun I've ever had in life.
First of all, we were San Francisco stars. Secondly, we
were sold out almost all the time except in January
and February, so we always had good houses. The material
Went was the first thing we did on stage that
came out of our workshops. I did a sketch that
(25:23):
became part of the repertoire and became part of If
there was Vaudeville, I could still be performing that sketch,
the drummer sketch.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Do you ever see that? Yes?
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Okay, well the drummer sketch was discovered on stage at
the committee. And then there was a verbal sketch called
Vietnam Hi. There it's a beautiful, clear, sunshiny day year
on the Beecong River Delta, elements of the one hundred
and first Airborne Division tangled with North Vietnam's crack seventh Reshmen.
Both teams undefeated, untied so far this season, and here
(25:52):
they come, now win million out and they didn't on
their armed yearly helicopter circling down to the landing zone.
They're coming out of those helicopter because they're starting to fire.
There was shooting long before they actually see anything. And
then I turned it over to Howard, who was my
and then and he would do a second you know, right,
the second opinion, and then they go back to me
(26:14):
and then we come that's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, little shades of good morning Vietnam a little bit. Yeah,
it's fantastic. Uh. Yeah. I couldn't remember a single sketch
that I did with the at the groundlings. I can't
I can't repeat them low. You know, it's only been
thirty years for me, or forty years. So okay. So
there's that scene San Francisco the midt to mid to
(26:39):
late sixties and then La the late sixties and seventies
and Sunset Strip and all, you know, and the canyon. Yeah,
different vibes, Yeah, very much. What was the vibe the
difference between the vibe of San Francisco and the vibe
of La.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Well, San Francisco was you know, La was plastic, you know,
I was. We were We were only the authentic hippis.
Uh so so uh. San Francisco was a little self
righteous about its hip stature.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Always, always, San Francisco was always in competition with Los Angeles,
in competition and Los Angeles never in competition with What
led you to produce that big serve movie?
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Jo Joan asked me if they needed a producer, and
I experienced doing that, so I said I would do.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
It and make money.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
No, the eventually we made money. Yeah, we sold it.
We had an angel investor came along at the last week.
We couldn't sell it. We made it. I learned quite early.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
When you say, Joan, I'm guessing you mean Joni Mitchell,
Joe Bias, John Bias.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Okay, we we we put up our own money to
film it, and I hired a crew supervised, you know,
kind of. We got it on film. And then I
discovered one of the dismal truths is you can get
a picture of nine finished for ten percent of the budget, right.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Put that last, the fixing and the mixing and the end,
and the only timing.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
The only thing to saved my life was I was
working as a writer at ABC on the show called
Music Scene, and the lab sent me my negative okay
by mistake, by mistake, and I immediately ran off with it.
I put it in a storage facility under a different name,
in different thing, and that ended the control that they
(28:44):
had over me, because you know, if I if I
wasn't paying, if I was negative, So I had the negative,
and I knew I had the negative, so I listened
to them, but I wouldn't you know, I could do
things my own way, right, which I did.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
That's great? Uh and and uh at the end, was
it released somewhere? Yes?
Speaker 1 (29:05):
So so now it's finished and we're looking for a buyer,
and we're having trouble, and we screened the film for
a guy named Ted Mann, who was Man's Chinese theater
and Ted loved the movie. So he went to his
friend at Fox said, if you buy this picture, I'll
(29:28):
play it in all my theaters, and that at that
time he controlled like two hundred screens, three hundred screens.
So I'll play the picture if you buy it. So
Fox said, did.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
The math, and they said okay.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Okay, right, so they bought the picture and the first
check got our negative out of Hawk, paid everybody, I
got my investment back, everything, and and then it was
released and you know, it played okay, but it was
it was never a runaway hit, but it it still
(30:03):
players on television every now and then.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Right, that's where I saw it, Yeah, on the cable TV. Yeah,
on the cable TV. How did you write the jerk?
Where did that come from?
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Steve Martin and I had known each other since his
mother's brothers days, and I got a call he says
that they want me to write a movie for myself
to star in. And I've never I've never done that,
and you've done movies and you're acceptable, you know you're right,
(30:38):
So do you want to work with me. Sure, Sure,
So we agreed that we would write a movie together,
and we got to They gave us an office at
Paramount with the yellow pads and pencils, and we sat
there for like two weeks. We'd come in conscientious, we'd
look at each other and as you know, but it's
(30:59):
not coming, it's not coming. How about what about?
Speaker 2 (31:03):
No? Yea was the I was raised a poor Black child?
Be that is that? Yes?
Speaker 1 (31:08):
So we had nothing, and then Steve said, no, I
hate to cannibalize my act because I had to do
that during this Mother show. Because you work in a
piece of mutia. It takes you years to get a
piece of material. You do it on television, it's dead.
You know, you can't do it again. But there's one
line for my act that always gets a laugh, doesn't
(31:29):
matter how the audience is. I was born a poor
black child. And a light went off in the room.
We said, what if you were right? What if let's
let's start with that you're born a poor black child.
So he started with the black family scene and then
one thing that's well.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
It's so yeah to to sort of create a character
that was, you know, a little insane, that little improbable. Uh,
and to sort of play that around people who were
more serious and could take their take establish the world
in a more serious way. It's fantastic people people, Uh,
(32:09):
you know, point to that as one of the great
comedies of all time. Is Steve as much of a
genius as I think he is? Yes, so, like he's
one of my hero heroes, just in terms of you know,
he's I'm a philosophy major. He's a philosophy major. He
he he thinks about his comedy really hard before he
does his comedy.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Well, he quit because he really he's only he was
doing a trick that depended on the stadium audience. He
would just say okay, and now very specially you say
you take a dime, all right, can you see the dime?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Don't be alone. On the of the scenes that you
were part of, and I'll include growing up, the army,
the theater, rock and roll, TV, the movies. What was
the coolest what was your what's your coolest memory?
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I'm stuck. I mean, I I just I enjoyed it all.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
I mean, I just enjoy the writers Guild.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yes, I enjoyed the Guiders Guild a lot.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
I was there.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
I got a lot of a lot of loose trophies
for the Writers Guild. Right, I was vice president. I
was on the board of directors.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
While you were considered the memory, like the person who
was there for previous strikes.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
That was the institutional memory. And I and I was
just following in the footsteps of guys who had come
before me when I do. When I became first time,
I became an officer of the Guild. The secretary of
Treasurer was a writer named Bill Ludwig, who he used
(34:04):
to as a writer he worked at He was a
contract writer at MGM, and he wrote all the many
of the Andy Hardy movies, and he gave up his
royalties on those when we were striking for residuals in
nineteen seventy three, he said, to tell you what he said,
(34:24):
if it'll help, I won't ask for residuals on the
on pre sixty eight, pre forty eight Andy Hardy stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So he gave all that up.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
So I did something similar. I'm Simpsons writer. I had
a million characters on the Simpsons because I was there
from the very beginning for the Simpsons to become a
union show. They asked us to give up our character payments,
like and say, you know that we're no character payments
until it is now you know, now a guilt show.
From this point on, you'll be able to get character payments.
(34:57):
So you had a sort of say goodbye to a
lot of money. So I don't know, but you know,
you do what you do for the union. It's fair.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yep, that's fair, and the union is. And I the
reason I'm diehard union is Steve Martin and I and
Martin Elias Michael Olias.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Had an arbitration on the Jerk.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
The Jerk somebody was somebody was not paying us, and
the guild sued and got us fifty thousand dollars. Though
there was an ad or something anyway, they violated the agreement.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
I know this story. I know this story. Carl wanted credit. Yeah,
that's right, right. Carl wanted credit on the on the Jerk,
and he thought maybe he would get credit, and they
made a poster that showed that he was the co
writer of the movie.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
That poster made fifty thousand dollars from me and Steve Martin.
We took we split twelve twelve five, we split twenty
five each and gave twenty five to the Guild for
forgetting it for us.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
That's good, you know, and I you know, I'm sure
that Carl contributed. But it's different to be contributor as
a director than it is to be a writer.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
As exactly the point I made in my statement, he
was doing his job as a.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Director, he wasn't writing. Did that arbitration put a damper
on your relationship with Carl?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
No, but I always had a kind of a love
hate relationship because I knew Rob so well and Carl.
Carl hosted the Writer's Guild Award show, which I produced
for a couple of years, and the show that I produced,
I busted my ass to get a script out for him,
and it was all sketches and stuff written by guys
(36:40):
like you, and I gave him this. I worked my
ass off, I got the script ready, gave it to
him two days before the show. He walks out on
stage at the theater because they gave me the script.
He says, I don't like to work with scripts, and
he threw the script away, and then of course he
did a lot of jokes, but the theatrical act of
(37:02):
throwing my script away.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Doing that at a Writer's Guild Awards. Seems like a
very poor choice.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
I thought it was in bad taste.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yes, that seems like it's bad, particularly bad taste. But
he was a I you know, of course Carl was
a writer himself.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Well he's one of those guys's nicest guy in show business,
do no wrong.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Right, But also just that an original The fact that
he made the Dick van Degg Show the way he
made it, yeah, was a very impressive thing to me.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Well, he wrote like four seasons of that by himself.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Right, and he just he just built it. And he
he gave me that advice once, like, just you need
to do something that only you have the perspective of,
like you an original idea that only you could see
from where your your vantage point. I've never taken him
up on that. I've only I've only done hack things
that other people could do. But I thought it was
(37:57):
a good idea at the time in the Jerk, when
you made the Jerk. I just had lunch today with
Michael Elias Yea who also worked on The Jerk, and
he said that you called him to help work on
it because you had were working on something else at
the time, probably and he said, like, I can't do both,
can you help? Look how busy you are, You're writing
(38:18):
movies and movies and movies. That's fantastic. Anyway, it was lucky,
he said. It was a lucky call for him.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
That worked out great. We shared story credit, we get
big residual checks.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
He's very happy about the being on the jerk. He
also told me to ask about this, which was there's
some story about a little person on Jaws. Oh yeah, yes.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Everybody pointed out that the shark, as envisioned by the
writers and producers and the director, was the fucking monsters
twenty five feet long. Yeah, as he says, twenty five
feet twenty feet long, twenty five feet six tons on him.
So was a big fucking shark, right, And in their
wisdom they looked that this. They said, We're not going
(39:01):
to find a twenty five foot shark anywhere. So if
we put a midget in a dive suit and put
him in the water with a twelve foot shark, the
proportions will be correct.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
But a living shark, living shark, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
So they built the shark cage, which would in theory
protect the guy, and they hired a little person.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
And he was playing Richard Driver. He's playing Hooper.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
He's playing Hooper, right, And then they filled you know.
So when they filmed the scene, they lowered the cage
and they got a real shark.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
They lowered the little person in a cage into the
water with a real shark.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Yes one time, and the shark hit the cage and
bent it. And they said they told the little person
that it was safe, unbendable, and the meanwhile the shark
is about to eat him. So he when they bring
the thing back up, it's got its wreckage, it's two wings.
(40:01):
So they fix everything up for the next dive and
they go, okay, we're ready for you, and they can't
find him. Now they're on a boat off Australia, the
Great Barrier Reef where the shark waters are, and they
can't find a person on that boat. The little guy.
So what he had done was he had gotten the
(40:23):
pint bottle of whiskey and had gone to the most
inaccessible part of the boat and scooched down. And when
they found him, he said, I'm not going back down
to fire me. I don't care if I never work
in this town again. I'm not going down there again. Yeah,
So we looked at the footage, and the footage with
a little with that we had was good with the shark,
(40:44):
and the shark really did get ten used. You can
see the shark breaking the cave, and that footage stayed
in the movie and to anybody who's interested in figuring
out what's what's real and what's illusion is anywhere where
you can see the head and the tail of the
fish at the same time, it's a real fish.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Okay, But I mean that I remember the shark ripping
apart that cage. Yeah, I didn't imagine an actual person
inside the cage when that was happening. That's that's ballsy. Yeah,
that's ballsy for you guys. Wow, all right, well that's
a good story. Well okay, so we do a section
of the show called a listener mail. Now it's time
(41:26):
for listener man. Okay. This is a question from Nathan.
He writes, as a working writer, how do you motivate
yourself to write on subjects that you may not care
about or that might sometimes bore you. There's always the
overall caring and getting the project finished, but individual pieces
(41:47):
can feel like a slog. Have you ever run into
that always, Okay, So how do you get through it?
Speaker 1 (41:54):
You just write? I mean, eventually I described the process
of writing, and this was what I was writing a lot.
As you make ever decreasing concentric circles around the keyboard
until there's no place else left to go, and when
there's no place else left to go, then you then
you start writing.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Yeah, I would say, also, and I don't know if
you find this true that I've If there's a subject
matter or a scene in something that as kind of
assignment I have to do, I do have to kind
of find something a little interesting about it for myself,
and maybe that's the thing I tweak in it to
make it, to bring that out a little bit more.
(42:36):
If it's just a boring scene of two people sitting
at a restaurant, a kind of scene I've seen a
million times, I might do probably something that gets cut
out later, but it's fun for me, which is have
a waiter be dumb, or have something else been going
on in the restaurant, or have a fight between the
two of them. Make something interesting.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yep, Yeah, that's that's the job, actually.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Right, that is the job. But it's also like, you know,
understand what he's saying.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Well, then, Nathan, you got to understand it. Being a
professional means that you can deliver a certain level of
work under any circumstances. You can be you know, going
through a bad divorce.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
You can be.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
You have lost a parent, or a friend. You can
be I mean, lover's quarrel. But if you're a professional,
you can still put the words together on the paper
in the order they're supposed to go. And that's that
to me, that's the definition of a pro. A pro
can write almost under any circumstances.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
I agree with that. Yeah, if you can, you should
be able to churn up something, something that interests you
and hopefully that interests your writer.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
And if you if you turn it and you write
it and it's exciting and then you look at it
a week later and it stinks, Okay, so you'll do
it again and so it won't stink.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
You talk to a friend, what do you think? Yeah,
you know that kind of thing. It helps to have
friends who, oh, yeah, we're interesting. In fun writers, I
have a question for you. When we think we do
in the show is called Moment of Joy.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
A moment of joy, it seems almost anti climax did
you say it? But just sitting in my.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Chair at home with everything I need around me and
bringing me a lunch of something I want to eat.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Right, and.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I've got I've got everything I need for the moment, right,
And that gives me joy just having everything I need
for the moment, none forever. You can't have it for
life or even for a week. But if you've got it,
moment to moment, when you've got it, revel in it.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Do you do that? Do you take a moment to
appreciate I've got everything I need.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
If I'm sitting there and go, oh jeez, I need
that point or where's my I need a ballpoint pen. Wait,
there's one right here.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
You know. Okay, it works. That's fantastic. Life works, a
little bit of prep. Got a ballpoint pen. You knew
you're gonna use it at some point, and now now
it's there. Yeah, that is joyful. I I subscribe to that. Yeah,
I especially like it's something I've gotten in the past,
in the past, and now it's a chance to use
it and I need to use it. It's there. Yeah,
(45:31):
that's a great, great feeling. That's a great feeling. Well, Carl,
thank you for being a guest on Don't Be Alone
with Jake Cogan.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
You're awesome. You've been awesome for many, many years. I
really appreciate all the great work you've done. But I
also appreciate the kind of person you are. You know,
you're a really sweet guy. Thank you, and and and
and full of fun and knowledge. And I am a
I think I'm a little bit of a guy after
your heart, which is I like crowds of people too.
(46:02):
I'm a writer who likes people. Yeah, And I appreciate
that about you too. It makes me think that I'm
not such a weirdoh and that maybe my legacy will
be at least part partly nice like yours is. So
that's that's very helpful. So I appreciate you being here,
and I appreciate you the audience being here. Thanks for
(46:22):
joining us. Please write to me at dbawjk at gmail
dot com for all your questions and concerns and viewer questions.
I would love them and just to hear you. It
would be fantastic. Please subscribe to the show when you
get a chance, and when you get a chance, don't
be alone, spend some time in person with somebody. I
do this stuff in person, call, came all the way
(46:44):
in here in person to talk. It's fantastic to actually
sit and spend time with somebody. So you do that too,
and we'll see you next time. Don't be alone with
J
Strawhut Media. Hi, this is Carl Gottlieb, but reminding you
don't be alone with j Cogan. Not that he's a
bad guy, it's worth being with.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Don't be alone with JJ Cogan. Hey, Cognation, welcome to
Don't Be alin with Jay Cogan. I am your humble
host Ja Cogan, and I couldn't be happier you're here.
Just want to remind you can write to me at
dbawjk at gmail dot com with all your suggestions, your comments,
(00:35):
your criticisms, and most importantly your listener mail. You can
also subscribe to the show here on YouTube if you're
watching it or listening on the Spotify or the Amazon
or the Apple or wherever you're listening. Also, if you
want to subscribe to that substack, that's free J Cogan.
It's substack. It's really good. It's gonna have a lot
of free stuff, extra bonus material from the show. You
(00:57):
like that, right, bonus material, extra free. It's a gift
to you. Who doesn't like a gift anyway, Do all
that and come back and listen to the show and
enjoy it, because I really enjoy having you today. We've
got a very special show. Carl Gottlieb, one of Hollywood's
biggest writers, is here, and not just because he's big physically.
(01:18):
It's because he's he wrote Jaws. It's the fiftieth anniversary
of Jaws. He's the guy who wrote Jaws, and he
was there when they were sort of fumbling through making it,
and it's quite an adventure. He wrote a book about
it called The Jaws log I Think, and it was fantastic.
And you know, Steven Spielberg trying to figure out how
not to get fired, how to make his first movie good.
(01:38):
He would come. He and Carl would live together every night.
They solve problems and go back out and figure out
how to make this movie work, even when a giant
mechanical shark wasn't working. That's fascinating. But he also worked
with Richard Pryor and Carl Reiner and the Smothers brothers,
and he's had a life in the rock and roll
world where you know, he produced concert movies and knows
(02:00):
David Crosby and Joan Biaz and Joni Mitchell and all
those people from the Laurel Canyon era. And he's solid
in the world comedy, solid in the world of movie writing,
solid in the world of politics, and the big voice
in the writers guild. He's had a very interesting and
adventurous life. And it goes on and he'll tell us
all about it, and it's a really great conversation. I
(02:23):
hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Right
after this, don't be alone with j Carl Gottlieb. Thank
you for being here. Man, my pleasure to be here.
I think you'll find out at the end. Yes, when
it's all over, you'll figure it out. We've known each other.
(02:46):
I don't know how many of you a few decades.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah, a few.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
When I first met you were already a legend. You're
already somebody who had written some of the finest movies
anyone had ever seen.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yep, certainly so, some of the most popular. They may
have been the finest films, but they were good films, and.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
People would say The Jaws one of the finest movies
of all time. Yes, yeah, let me just start. Even
though this show is ostensibly about people solving my problems,
and I'm going to ask you how to solve a
particular problem of mind that I think you'd be very
good at solving. But before I get to that. I
just want to talk a little bit about Jawska. Now
(03:27):
you've written a book about Jaws, your experience about Jaws,
and I am too lazy to read it. So I'm
here to talk to you about it and find out
how did you get the gig.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
I was friends with Spielberg. We were pals. I had
acted in one of his TV movies before he ever
got Jaws, and we hung out and when he got
the script from Zanig and Brown, he sent it to
me with a note on the fly leaf that said,
(03:59):
irate it. So I read the script, and as was
my habit in those days, I was a much in
demand rewriter, a screenwriter. I wrote a long memo about
what I thought about the script, and.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
It was all.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
It was always useful to write the memo because afterwards,
if you got the job, you'd start to rewrite, and
then the producers, Oh, we didn't talk about that. I go, yes,
we did. Here's here's the memo I told you I
was going to do this. Those notes were always valuable,
But in this case, uh, I'd written. I saved everything
(04:37):
because I thought there'd be an arbitration, a guild arbitration
for screen credit so I you know, I found the
script with the note on it diviscerated. I also found
my memo that I wrote in response to it, And
in the memo I made, you know, one thing that
was exactly right and one thing that was exactly wrong.
(04:57):
I'll start with the wrong thing. I object did, I said,
does the girl have to get killed in the beginning?
It's such a teenage horror cliche. You know, you have sex,
you die. You know, punishment for extramarital sex is death.
So I thought that was wrong, over the top, inappropriate.
(05:18):
Then I said, if we do our jobs right, people
will feel about going in the water the way they
felt about taking a shower after Psycho.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You're exactly right about that, and I was, And.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
For now, what is it fifty years? My biggest TAC
team job is saying to people when I tell them
I wrote Jaws, they say, you know, I didn't go
in the water for a month after that, or I
didn't go in the water for a year after that.
And I always go, oh, yeah, I bet, I nod
and smiles, so, yeah, I know, get a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Well. I am one of those people. I was a
kid when I saw Jaws and I didn't go into
the beach for quite some time because I was afraid
and honestly still a little afraid.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Of I don't I don't like deep water.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
In the original script that you saw, was there more
of a love affair between the Richard Dreyfus character and
the from the book.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
The script I saw was uh written by Peter Benchley
because they wanted to throw him when they made his deal.
They said, oh, and you can write the screenplay. So
he wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Then they
read it and they realized he didn't do anything but
like put his novel in the screenplay format. So they
hired a writer named Howard Sackler, who was a very
(06:36):
good writer who wrote A Great Lady Down And he's
a navy guy, and he's the one who brought the
Indianapolist to us because he was familiar with that story,
so he brought the Indianapolis story. And then but there's
still all kinds of related. The mafia was buying a
real estate development on the island and it was and
(06:58):
the and the wife had an affair with.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
With rich Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, when we got the picture cast and everything, we said,
we can't imagine her, you know, cheating on her husband's
it's just not going to work. So all that subplot
came out and we were left with just three men
in a fish. Yeah, and that that turned out to
be the winning formula.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
It's an amazing movie. As somebody who's a writer looking
at just structure. Yeah, it's a really it's we study
I teach film school. We study it in film school,
the structure of it. And and it's not you know,
some people say it's three acts. Some people say it's
four acts. Some people say it's twenty two acts. Like honestly,
they said that each scene is its own kind of act,
(07:44):
and it goes up and down and up and down.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
I actually think of it as a two act movie.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Act one is everything up until it land is land,
and see Act one is everything on land, and Act
two begins with a little shot of them going out right.
Just see that's the beginning of Act too, and then
everything takes place at sea is Act too, and then
then it's over.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
It is a slow build of danger. It's like danger, danger, danger,
danger danger danger.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Well, we didn't have a shark when you when you
read the book, I have confidence that you with. There
was a lot in the book, in the in the
press and everything about how the shark was malfunctioning. So
and Stephen and I were living together in a bungalow
on the vineyard, and we both were familiar with the thing,
(08:36):
which is an ald black and white movie. Well, you
don't see the creature until like two thirds of the
way through the movie. So we said, there's there's our model.
You know, you show the effects of the thing, and
you show the proximity of the thing, but you don't
show the thing itself, mostly because we don't have it show.
(08:57):
But even if we had it to show, it might
be nice to hold it back for a while, which
is wound up what we wound up doing by necessity.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
And had the shark been available and working, would you
think you would would have hit the shark earlier.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, you know, if if shark had been working the
way it was supposed to, we would have had a
lot more shark footage, and it would it would have
been less satisfying movie, because you know, the monsters out
front and obvious, and you know, and in doing it,
(09:32):
I had occasion to look at production stills from the
creature from the black lagoon and you can see masking tape,
you know, on the costume and said, I didn't want that,
you know, So.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
When you see Jaws, Now, the worst part about it
is when you actually see the shark, Like to me
currently the one when when the when the shark leaps
onto the boat and eats Robert Shaw. Yeah, that's the
time he kind of kind of maybe see his mechanical. Yeah,
and but by then you're all invested, You're in the
movie completely.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, it works on all kinds of levels. I mean,
there's a typo that I see every time I see
the picture when Dray when Scheider goes to his office
to type up the report. Right, he's typing out a
blank that the prop department just made up for him.
It looks like an official write before, but the prop
(10:25):
department spelled coroner's office, corner's office. And every time he
rolls up put paper into the machine, I go, oh,
don't look, don't.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Look, nobody's looking. If people are looking at the spelling
of the document, they're not in the scene. So, now,
how panicked was Steven and this time? I mean he's
a young director, he's this is first movie movie.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Yeah, he never let him see them sweat.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Okay, but do you live with him? Yeah? I saw Okay,
So we're they're like panicked evenings like what am I
going to do? Or what am I going to shoot?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
No, he always knew what he was going to shoot.
He's too too much of a filmmaker in his life.
But he was, Uh, he was nervous sleeping and the
smell of celery calmed him down. Okay, so he had
(11:23):
a handful of celery that he put in his pillowcase
and slept on. That helped him sleep.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I wonder why Celery locked.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
In the recesses of the Spielberg unconscious.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Some some lunchbox memory somewhere he had celery. Yeah, in Arizona.
That's that's that's fascinating. I mean, you were on the set.
You were in the movie. I mean, you're you're you're
in the movie. Whether every day rewrites or was it
like just this is a special scene that need to
be done.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Or there were almost always rewrites of some sort or another,
And I was never, I never. I got hired on
the film two weeks before the start of principal photography
and we still didn't have Roy. We still we had
Roy Scheiter. We didn't have Dreyfus or Shawl Wow, but
we were going ahead. Steve Berg was pushing ahead. Never
(12:15):
wasted green light right exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
What were they shooting before? The contract was drying on
this other guys.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
There was nothing. There was nothing to shoot. I mean,
we didn't we The start principal photography was May two.
On April fifteenth, I went to Boston with Steve with Stephen.
We were in a hotel room right and we were
casting Boston area locals and Dreyfus came up from New
(12:42):
York because he was in New York promoting Dirty Kravitz.
I remember I asked Steven about him because he would
have been he was ideal, and Steven said, I he
turned me down. I said, let me. Does he know
I'm working on it because we have a relationship with
Dreyfus that goes back a long way. So I called
him and said, you come up beat, Steven. You know
it's not the same movie that you read. So Dreyfus
(13:06):
showed up in Boston and walked in the door and
Spielbert took one look at him, said, don't change a thing.
He was wearing the denim jacket, the scruffy glasses.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
He was. He was Hooper, he was, he was the guy.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
He said, well, you know, I didn't want to do
this movie. The movie I'd rather see than be in.
It's this famous quote. And we said, no, we're gonna
and we found it while we were just riffing. We
found the joke with crushing the styrofoam cup. I did
that in the hotel room in Boston, and we all
looked at each other and said, don't worry, it's in
the script. I'm putting it in now. And the you know,
(13:49):
that's how it went. And then then uh and shaw.
Then we're really getting desperate. I had a wonderful suggestion,
but he couldn't do it. With Sterling Hayden, it would
have been a great quint. But Sterling had income tax
problems from his previous books, so he could only write.
He couldn't work as an actor because Uncle Sam would
(14:12):
just grand money. So here, but he was able to
work on book royalties, so he was. He was more
interested in writing a book than he was in acting.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yeah, no, he would have been good. Bad. Robert Show
was fantastic. Oh yeah, shows did he walk in wearing
the Fisherman's out, No what came out like. I was
hoping this would be good, and then it turned out
that scene really played.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I went to the first two. I went to the
first a second preview. First preview was in Dallas and
they didn't take the writer. But the second preview was
down in Lakeview or Lakewood, and it was an old
fashioned sneak preview where they said, you know, Hollywood movie, come,
you know. So we went to that and as we
(14:59):
were watching it, you know, the the audience was just
you know, still of course, then when the picture ended,
it was like a beat and then they fucking went wild.
They just you know, wouldn't stop clapping, and the bathrooms
filled up, and Zanik and Brown and Henry H. High
(15:22):
and Martin they head of publicity for Universal and Lou
Wasson and Forum stood in the men's room, the only
place you could even hear yourself talk up to their
floorshrimes in water because every you know, fifteen hundred people
got up and had to pee. So they're standing with
their floor shrimes in the water. And that's what Wasserman says.
(15:45):
You know, the best advertisement for a picture, it's word
of mouth and a line around the block. So we're
going to put this in a lot of theaters. And
everybody said, oh, how many? He said four or five
hundred many as we can get. And that was, you know, never,
that was unheard of. It had been done once or
twice before.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
But it played in my local movie theater I grew
up in Encino. It played in the Sino movie theater
for I believe a year and a half. It was just,
you know, we used to go to the movies every
week to see you kind of a new movie every
week or every two weeks. There was no new movie.
It was just your movie playing for a year and
a half.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Yeah, they did that. They don't do that anymore, but
right now, that was that fantastic.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Don't be alone on the So the reason you're here
to solve my problem, and thank you for all the
Jaws information, which is this, Aside from writing Jaws, and
aside from writing The Jerk, and aside from writing many
other amazing things, you've led a fast life. You have
(17:01):
led a life where I consider you'd be part of
the scene, whatever the scene was. Yes, at the time,
you lived the scene. Yep. So in in New York
you lived the theater scene in la You're living this
sort of television comedy scene, but also the rock and
roll scene, right, and then the big movie scenes and
(17:21):
all that. I am I have no scene, Carl. I
need a scene. I need to find a place. How
did you find a way to ingratiate yourself in that
scene to be part of it? Not just you were
part of it. You're in the Woodstock like, aren't you
in not the Woodstuck movie? The movie about the rock
concert celebration? Big sir, Yes, big sir, I produced that. Yeah, yeah,
you're in it, sitting around with all the rock stars
(17:43):
and you're having a great time.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah. My wife and I had a little house in
those days, were newly married, and we lived on Gardner
Street between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard. All those little houses
there we had. We had a little house, right, I
remember I turned down the opportunity to buy it for
thirty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
You probably had other really smart investments. It was.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Like a halfway point between Laurel Canyon and the Hollywood
Bowl and the Greek Theater and all the recording studios
in Hollywood. Wally Hyder, Sunset Sounds, Sunset West Recorders, you know,
all those so and at that time a whole lot
of musicians lived in the canyon. Joni Mitchell, David you know,
(18:32):
David Crosby, Neil Young, Neil Young, Jackson Brown, they all lived.
They all lived in the canyon. And my wife and
I kind of ran a salon. We used to had
like an open house. People could drop in, you know,
see if there's anybody around talk to. Our house was
(18:53):
like this stopping point, so everybody would stop on their
way on the way to the recording studio, they stop
at our house and on the way back, you know,
they'd stopped to have a joint quickly before before they
got to.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I imagine there's gonna be food and drugs. Yes, like
any good stopping point or any rock and roll world,
there's gonna be some good food, some drink, and some drugs. Yep. Fantastic,
And all kinds of people came through.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And I remember I got a phone call from a
friend of mine who had been a PA for me,
who was working for Johnny Cash Show in Nashville, and
she said, there's a guy coming out from this show.
It's a songwriter. He's going to be play the Troubadour.
He really should meet him.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
His name is.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
He needs a place to stay, So I said, you
know I had a guest room, right, So I said,
he can stay here. It was Christmas Jofferson, and he
stayed at my house. And even he actually slept there
maybe five nights out of two weeks because every night
he'd go home. Julie Christy, Samanthagar, Goldie Horn, Starlet of
the Moment.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
He took them all. He beautiful man. He was a
handsome guy.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, I remember, I remember when I first read about
him in the New York Times. You know, he never
had a press agent. John Perellis saw him in the
village and wrote a piece of the New York Times
and that was it. Never stopped after that. He was
a boxer. He was a warrant officer, helicopter pilot, old scholar,
Rhodes Scholar, boxed right in the roads.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
It's a yeah, No, he is a I mean, I'm
people compare my life to his. Yeah, most of the time.
I'm the kind of the Chris Christofferson of Simpson Comedy Writers.
Yes it's not exactly the same, but it's close.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
No, but the Simpson Comedy Writers are in themselves an institution,
you know.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
We are, And that's kind of a scene. But I'm
not really part of that scene. Like I'm not like
I left that show after five years. They've been having
their own scene for the last thirty five years. So
I don't know. But but you know, when you worked
on the Smothers Brothers, rh huh, they couldn't have been
a cooler place to be.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
I don't think if you're going to do television in
those days, there was no place better, you know, for
hippie artist types like myself, right.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Exactly, and so like and and and you were seemed
to be, at least towards the middle and end of
that show in a war with you know, the network
and the establishment and Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
All those I mean, and Tommy gloried in it. But
it got us thrown off the air, right. The best
thing was they picked us up for the next for
the following season, right then we won the Emmy. Then
they canceled us for some reason, and there were lawsuits involved,
(21:38):
and it turns out that since they had picked us up,
they owed us for six out of thirteen or whatever
our contracts were. So I was the best writing check
I ever got. I was writing for writing seven Smothers
by the show that I never had to write.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Well, I think CBS said we don't do don't put
on something, and Tommy said, fuck you, yeah, putting it on.
And then he thought, we'll go to court and we'll
make them put us back on. And then he went
to court and they didn't get put back on. Now
who are you writing with at the time?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
I was writing mostly with Lorenzo Music, right, Okay, we
wrote a lot of the monologues together.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
What was the coolest part about that Smothers brothers? Who
is there? Steve Martin?
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Well, it was a great writing Rob Ryan or Steve Martin,
Bob Einstein, a guy named Paul Wayne McLean. Stevenson was
there for a while.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
As a writer. Yeah, I didn't know he was a writer.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
No, he wasn't, but but.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
He was there. But he was. So there were just
some people who, like Tommy, thought hey join the staff
and then.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Well what happened was the Smother's brother has a gun
on the air, and against all expectations, succeeded.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
They knocked Bonanza out of first place in the top ten,
and then they were in the top ten for the
next two years, right, but then they but after two
years the contracts they had enabled them to produce their
own show. They got they got their show back, so
they fired the producers and produced the show themselves. They
(23:16):
were looking for new writers, and in those days, if
you had a successful show on network television, they gave
you your time slot and reduced license fee and you could
produce your own summer replacement. So that's when Dawn got
started and Glenn Campbell was so the Smothers Brothers decided
(23:38):
to go with Glenn Campbell, so they hired a bunch
of us to be Glenn Campbell's writers.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Make Glenn Campbell funny, and that's not easy, No, wasn't
all right. He's a great voice, brilliant musician, but hard
to make funny. So okay, so then you you get
shifted to Glenn Campbell. But then they imported you over
to this Mother's Brothers show.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
So we had so much fun on the Glenn Campbell
Show that they picked us all up for the winter show,
which was great. But in the meantime the show got canceled, right,
and after the lawsuits died down, they CBS had to
pay us because they had picked us up, that we
had gotten the notice we had turned down jobs, you know.
So I got a writing check for seven episodes that
(24:22):
I never had to even type.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
The greatest, the greatest paychecks I've ever gotten were for
shows I didn't have to work on. Yeah, my dad
was the happiest. I tell the story. My dad worked
on the Donny Murrie Show and they decided to move
to Utah, And this is a contract that he would
work in LA but they had to pay him out
anyway when they moved to Utah, and he was the
only time he was truly happy writing variety, I think
(24:47):
for Donny Murrie. Okay, so let's go back a little further.
You started out more in the world of acting. Yes, improvisational, right, improvisational?
The Committee Committee? Did you love that?
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Oh? It was the most fun I've ever had in life.
First of all, we were San Francisco stars. Secondly, we
were sold out almost all the time except in January
and February, so we always had good houses. The material
Went was the first thing we did on stage that
came out of our workshops. I did a sketch that
(25:23):
became part of the repertoire and became part of If
there was Vaudeville, I could still be performing that sketch,
the drummer sketch.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Do you ever see that? Yes?
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Okay, well the drummer sketch was discovered on stage at
the committee. And then there was a verbal sketch called
Vietnam Hi. There it's a beautiful, clear, sunshiny day year
on the Beecong River Delta, elements of the one hundred
and first Airborne Division tangled with North Vietnam's crack seventh Reshmen.
Both teams undefeated, untied so far this season, and here
(25:52):
they come, now win million out and they didn't on
their armed yearly helicopter circling down to the landing zone.
They're coming out of those helicopter because they're starting to fire.
There was shooting long before they actually see anything. And
then I turned it over to Howard, who was my
and then and he would do a second you know, right,
the second opinion, and then they go back to me
(26:14):
and then we come that's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, little shades of good morning Vietnam a little bit. Yeah,
it's fantastic. Uh. Yeah. I couldn't remember a single sketch
that I did with the at the groundlings. I can't
I can't repeat them low. You know, it's only been
thirty years for me, or forty years. So okay. So
there's that scene San Francisco the midt to mid to
(26:39):
late sixties and then La the late sixties and seventies
and Sunset Strip and all, you know, and the canyon. Yeah,
different vibes, Yeah, very much. What was the vibe the
difference between the vibe of San Francisco and the vibe
of La.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Well, San Francisco was you know, La was plastic, you know,
I was. We were We were only the authentic hippis.
Uh so so uh. San Francisco was a little self
righteous about its hip stature.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Always, always, San Francisco was always in competition with Los Angeles,
in competition and Los Angeles never in competition with What
led you to produce that big serve movie?
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Jo Joan asked me if they needed a producer, and
I experienced doing that, so I said I would do.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
It and make money.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
No, the eventually we made money. Yeah, we sold it.
We had an angel investor came along at the last week.
We couldn't sell it. We made it. I learned quite early.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
When you say, Joan, I'm guessing you mean Joni Mitchell,
Joe Bias, John Bias.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Okay, we we we put up our own money to
film it, and I hired a crew supervised, you know,
kind of. We got it on film. And then I
discovered one of the dismal truths is you can get
a picture of nine finished for ten percent of the budget, right.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Put that last, the fixing and the mixing and the end,
and the only timing.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
The only thing to saved my life was I was
working as a writer at ABC on the show called
Music Scene, and the lab sent me my negative okay
by mistake, by mistake, and I immediately ran off with it.
I put it in a storage facility under a different name,
in different thing, and that ended the control that they
(28:44):
had over me, because you know, if I if I
wasn't paying, if I was negative, So I had the negative,
and I knew I had the negative, so I listened
to them, but I wouldn't you know, I could do
things my own way, right, which I did.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
That's great? Uh and and uh at the end, was
it released somewhere? Yes?
Speaker 1 (29:05):
So so now it's finished and we're looking for a buyer,
and we're having trouble, and we screened the film for
a guy named Ted Mann, who was Man's Chinese theater
and Ted loved the movie. So he went to his
friend at Fox said, if you buy this picture, I'll
(29:28):
play it in all my theaters, and that at that
time he controlled like two hundred screens, three hundred screens.
So I'll play the picture if you buy it. So
Fox said, did.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
The math, and they said okay.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Okay, right, so they bought the picture and the first
check got our negative out of Hawk, paid everybody, I
got my investment back, everything, and and then it was
released and you know, it played okay, but it was
it was never a runaway hit, but it it still
(30:03):
players on television every now and then.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Right, that's where I saw it, Yeah, on the cable TV. Yeah,
on the cable TV. How did you write the jerk?
Where did that come from?
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Steve Martin and I had known each other since his
mother's brothers days, and I got a call he says
that they want me to write a movie for myself
to star in. And I've never I've never done that,
and you've done movies and you're acceptable, you know you're right,
(30:38):
So do you want to work with me. Sure, Sure,
So we agreed that we would write a movie together,
and we got to They gave us an office at
Paramount with the yellow pads and pencils, and we sat
there for like two weeks. We'd come in conscientious, we'd
look at each other and as you know, but it's
(30:59):
not coming, it's not coming. How about what about?
Speaker 2 (31:03):
No? Yea was the I was raised a poor Black child?
Be that is that? Yes?
Speaker 1 (31:08):
So we had nothing, and then Steve said, no, I
hate to cannibalize my act because I had to do
that during this Mother show. Because you work in a
piece of mutia. It takes you years to get a
piece of material. You do it on television, it's dead.
You know, you can't do it again. But there's one
line for my act that always gets a laugh, doesn't
(31:29):
matter how the audience is. I was born a poor
black child. And a light went off in the room.
We said, what if you were right? What if let's
let's start with that you're born a poor black child.
So he started with the black family scene and then
one thing that's well.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
It's so yeah to to sort of create a character
that was, you know, a little insane, that little improbable. Uh,
and to sort of play that around people who were
more serious and could take their take establish the world
in a more serious way. It's fantastic people people, Uh,
(32:09):
you know, point to that as one of the great
comedies of all time. Is Steve as much of a
genius as I think he is? Yes, so, like he's
one of my hero heroes, just in terms of you know,
he's I'm a philosophy major. He's a philosophy major. He
he he thinks about his comedy really hard before he
does his comedy.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Well, he quit because he really he's only he was
doing a trick that depended on the stadium audience. He
would just say okay, and now very specially you say
you take a dime, all right, can you see the dime?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Don't be alone. On the of the scenes that you
were part of, and I'll include growing up, the army,
the theater, rock and roll, TV, the movies. What was
the coolest what was your what's your coolest memory?
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I'm stuck. I mean, I I just I enjoyed it all.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
I mean, I just enjoy the writers Guild.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yes, I enjoyed the Guiders Guild a lot.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
I was there.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
I got a lot of a lot of loose trophies
for the Writers Guild. Right, I was vice president. I
was on the board of directors.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
While you were considered the memory, like the person who
was there for previous strikes.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
That was the institutional memory. And I and I was
just following in the footsteps of guys who had come
before me when I do. When I became first time,
I became an officer of the Guild. The secretary of
Treasurer was a writer named Bill Ludwig, who he used
(34:04):
to as a writer he worked at He was a
contract writer at MGM, and he wrote all the many
of the Andy Hardy movies, and he gave up his
royalties on those when we were striking for residuals in
nineteen seventy three, he said, to tell you what he said,
(34:24):
if it'll help, I won't ask for residuals on the
on pre sixty eight, pre forty eight Andy Hardy stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So he gave all that up.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
So I did something similar. I'm Simpsons writer. I had
a million characters on the Simpsons because I was there
from the very beginning for the Simpsons to become a
union show. They asked us to give up our character payments,
like and say, you know that we're no character payments
until it is now you know, now a guilt show.
From this point on, you'll be able to get character payments.
(34:57):
So you had a sort of say goodbye to a
lot of money. So I don't know, but you know,
you do what you do for the union. It's fair.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yep, that's fair, and the union is. And I the
reason I'm diehard union is Steve Martin and I and
Martin Elias Michael Olias.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Had an arbitration on the Jerk.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
The Jerk somebody was somebody was not paying us, and
the guild sued and got us fifty thousand dollars. Though
there was an ad or something anyway, they violated the agreement.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
I know this story. I know this story. Carl wanted credit. Yeah,
that's right, right. Carl wanted credit on the on the Jerk,
and he thought maybe he would get credit, and they
made a poster that showed that he was the co
writer of the movie.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
That poster made fifty thousand dollars from me and Steve Martin.
We took we split twelve twelve five, we split twenty
five each and gave twenty five to the Guild for
forgetting it for us.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
That's good, you know, and I you know, I'm sure
that Carl contributed. But it's different to be contributor as
a director than it is to be a writer.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
As exactly the point I made in my statement, he
was doing his job as a.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Director, he wasn't writing. Did that arbitration put a damper
on your relationship with Carl?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
No, but I always had a kind of a love
hate relationship because I knew Rob so well and Carl.
Carl hosted the Writer's Guild Award show, which I produced
for a couple of years, and the show that I produced,
I busted my ass to get a script out for him,
and it was all sketches and stuff written by guys
(36:40):
like you, and I gave him this. I worked my
ass off, I got the script ready, gave it to
him two days before the show. He walks out on
stage at the theater because they gave me the script.
He says, I don't like to work with scripts, and
he threw the script away, and then of course he
did a lot of jokes, but the theatrical act of
(37:02):
throwing my script away.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Doing that at a Writer's Guild Awards. Seems like a
very poor choice.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
I thought it was in bad taste.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yes, that seems like it's bad, particularly bad taste. But
he was a I you know, of course Carl was
a writer himself.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Well he's one of those guys's nicest guy in show business,
do no wrong.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Right, But also just that an original The fact that
he made the Dick van Degg Show the way he
made it, yeah, was a very impressive thing to me.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Well, he wrote like four seasons of that by himself.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Right, and he just he just built it. And he
he gave me that advice once, like, just you need
to do something that only you have the perspective of,
like you an original idea that only you could see
from where your your vantage point. I've never taken him
up on that. I've only I've only done hack things
that other people could do. But I thought it was
(37:57):
a good idea at the time in the Jerk, when
you made the Jerk. I just had lunch today with
Michael Elias Yea who also worked on The Jerk, and
he said that you called him to help work on
it because you had were working on something else at
the time, probably and he said, like, I can't do both,
can you help? Look how busy you are, You're writing
(38:18):
movies and movies and movies. That's fantastic. Anyway, it was lucky,
he said. It was a lucky call for him.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
That worked out great. We shared story credit, we get
big residual checks.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
He's very happy about the being on the jerk. He
also told me to ask about this, which was there's
some story about a little person on Jaws. Oh yeah, yes.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Everybody pointed out that the shark, as envisioned by the
writers and producers and the director, was the fucking monsters
twenty five feet long. Yeah, as he says, twenty five
feet twenty feet long, twenty five feet six tons on him.
So was a big fucking shark, right, And in their
wisdom they looked that this. They said, We're not going
(39:01):
to find a twenty five foot shark anywhere. So if
we put a midget in a dive suit and put
him in the water with a twelve foot shark, the
proportions will be correct.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
But a living shark, living shark, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
So they built the shark cage, which would in theory
protect the guy, and they hired a little person.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
And he was playing Richard Driver. He's playing Hooper.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
He's playing Hooper, right, And then they filled you know.
So when they filmed the scene, they lowered the cage
and they got a real shark.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
They lowered the little person in a cage into the
water with a real shark.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Yes one time, and the shark hit the cage and
bent it. And they said they told the little person
that it was safe, unbendable, and the meanwhile the shark
is about to eat him. So he when they bring
the thing back up, it's got its wreckage, it's two wings.
(40:01):
So they fix everything up for the next dive and
they go, okay, we're ready for you, and they can't
find him. Now they're on a boat off Australia, the
Great Barrier Reef where the shark waters are, and they
can't find a person on that boat. The little guy.
So what he had done was he had gotten the
(40:23):
pint bottle of whiskey and had gone to the most
inaccessible part of the boat and scooched down. And when
they found him, he said, I'm not going back down
to fire me. I don't care if I never work
in this town again. I'm not going down there again. Yeah,
So we looked at the footage, and the footage with
a little with that we had was good with the shark,
(40:44):
and the shark really did get ten used. You can
see the shark breaking the cave, and that footage stayed
in the movie and to anybody who's interested in figuring
out what's what's real and what's illusion is anywhere where
you can see the head and the tail of the
fish at the same time, it's a real fish.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Okay, But I mean that I remember the shark ripping
apart that cage. Yeah, I didn't imagine an actual person
inside the cage when that was happening. That's that's ballsy. Yeah,
that's ballsy for you guys. Wow, all right, well that's
a good story. Well okay, so we do a section
of the show called a listener mail. Now it's time
(41:26):
for listener man. Okay. This is a question from Nathan.
He writes, as a working writer, how do you motivate
yourself to write on subjects that you may not care
about or that might sometimes bore you. There's always the
overall caring and getting the project finished, but individual pieces
(41:47):
can feel like a slog. Have you ever run into
that always, Okay, So how do you get through it?
Speaker 1 (41:54):
You just write? I mean, eventually I described the process
of writing, and this was what I was writing a lot.
As you make ever decreasing concentric circles around the keyboard
until there's no place else left to go, and when
there's no place else left to go, then you then
you start writing.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Yeah, I would say, also, and I don't know if
you find this true that I've If there's a subject
matter or a scene in something that as kind of
assignment I have to do, I do have to kind
of find something a little interesting about it for myself,
and maybe that's the thing I tweak in it to
make it, to bring that out a little bit more.
(42:36):
If it's just a boring scene of two people sitting
at a restaurant, a kind of scene I've seen a
million times, I might do probably something that gets cut
out later, but it's fun for me, which is have
a waiter be dumb, or have something else been going
on in the restaurant, or have a fight between the
two of them. Make something interesting.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yep, Yeah, that's that's the job, actually.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Right, that is the job. But it's also like, you know,
understand what he's saying.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Well, then, Nathan, you got to understand it. Being a
professional means that you can deliver a certain level of
work under any circumstances. You can be you know, going
through a bad divorce.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
You can be.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
You have lost a parent, or a friend. You can
be I mean, lover's quarrel. But if you're a professional,
you can still put the words together on the paper
in the order they're supposed to go. And that's that
to me, that's the definition of a pro. A pro
can write almost under any circumstances.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
I agree with that. Yeah, if you can, you should
be able to churn up something, something that interests you
and hopefully that interests your writer.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
And if you if you turn it and you write
it and it's exciting and then you look at it
a week later and it stinks, Okay, so you'll do
it again and so it won't stink.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
You talk to a friend, what do you think? Yeah,
you know that kind of thing. It helps to have
friends who, oh, yeah, we're interesting. In fun writers, I
have a question for you. When we think we do
in the show is called Moment of Joy.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
A moment of joy, it seems almost anti climax did
you say it? But just sitting in my.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Chair at home with everything I need around me and
bringing me a lunch of something I want to eat.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Right, and.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I've got I've got everything I need for the moment, right,
And that gives me joy just having everything I need
for the moment, none forever. You can't have it for
life or even for a week. But if you've got it,
moment to moment, when you've got it, revel in it.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Do you do that? Do you take a moment to
appreciate I've got everything I need.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
If I'm sitting there and go, oh jeez, I need
that point or where's my I need a ballpoint pen. Wait,
there's one right here.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
You know. Okay, it works. That's fantastic. Life works, a
little bit of prep. Got a ballpoint pen. You knew
you're gonna use it at some point, and now now
it's there. Yeah, that is joyful. I I subscribe to that. Yeah,
I especially like it's something I've gotten in the past,
in the past, and now it's a chance to use
it and I need to use it. It's there. Yeah,
(45:31):
that's a great, great feeling. That's a great feeling. Well, Carl,
thank you for being a guest on Don't Be Alone
with Jake Cogan.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
You're awesome. You've been awesome for many, many years. I
really appreciate all the great work you've done. But I
also appreciate the kind of person you are. You know,
you're a really sweet guy. Thank you, and and and
and full of fun and knowledge. And I am a
I think I'm a little bit of a guy after
your heart, which is I like crowds of people too.
(46:02):
I'm a writer who likes people. Yeah, And I appreciate
that about you too. It makes me think that I'm
not such a weirdoh and that maybe my legacy will
be at least part partly nice like yours is. So
that's that's very helpful. So I appreciate you being here,
and I appreciate you the audience being here. Thanks for
(46:22):
joining us. Please write to me at dbawjk at gmail
dot com for all your questions and concerns and viewer questions.
I would love them and just to hear you. It
would be fantastic. Please subscribe to the show when you
get a chance, and when you get a chance, don't
be alone, spend some time in person with somebody. I
do this stuff in person, call, came all the way
(46:44):
in here in person to talk. It's fantastic to actually
sit and spend time with somebody. So you do that too,
and we'll see you next time. Don't be alone with
J
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