From Herculoids and Drummer Boy to Movie Marketing Musketeer with Ted Eccles

Actor-turned-marketing whiz TED ECCLES remembers working with Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Arthur Rankin, Jr., Jules Bass, Sid and Marty Krofft, Lucille Ball, and Shirley Temple, then takes us behind the scenes at Paramount and Disney.

Episode Transcript

(00:52):
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna
Barbera. Welcome to the fantastic world
of Hanna and Barbera. A celebration of Bill Hannah,

(01:13):
Joe Barbera and the thousands ofpeople, past and present, who
have shared in their entertainment tradition.
And now your host, Greg Airbar. Thank you, Chris.
Anthony, welcome to the fantastic world.
Our guest today is a ongoing force in the entertainment
industry, someone that you remember for one career.

(01:36):
First of all, because he was thevoice of Dorno on the Herculoids
and the voice of Thule on Arabian Nights, which was a
section of the Banana Splits Adventure Hour.
But he did a lot of voice acting, including the role of
Aaron in Little Drummer Boy, andwas a constant presence as a

(01:58):
actor in the 60s and 70s. Very expressive always, as Eddie
Albert said, an escape to Witch Mountain.
Very wise for his years in his characters, but he also after
spent decades behind the camera working for Paramount, Disney
DIRECTV, NBC, Fox and CBS and isa producer and an executive

(02:20):
producer. And before any of that starts, I
just want to welcome our very special guest, Mr. Ted Eccles.
Thank you. Thank you.
It's good to be here. Or, as we knew his kids, Teddy
Eccles. There you go.
Yes. At what point did you drop the
teddy? It was shortly after I had done

(02:40):
the movie My Side of the Mountain.
Prior to that, I had a child's agent in Hollywood.
It was very famous. Her name was Lola Moore and she
was one of three agents who represented children.
And if you were with Lola and you had a identifiable look, and
if you could remember your lines, hit your mark and find

(03:04):
your key light, you worked all the time.
And so I was Teddy Eccles until I was 12.
And then I got a new agent. His name was Meyer Michigan.
He was kind of a boutique agent.He represented a number of stars
who were up and coming. Richard Dreyfuss and a handful

(03:28):
of others. And the first thing he said to
me was we're going to get rid ofthis teddy business.
Teddy's a kid's name. Your name is now Ted.
You're Ted Ackles. And from that point on, I was
Ted Ackles on. Screen Can we trace the early
days of your childhood and career and how you became a

(03:51):
child actor? Sure.
The very first thing I was in, Iwas about 11 months old.
My mother was close friends withthe office manager for Lola
Moore. And so I started getting baby
infant extra parts because I didn't cry a lot and I was cute.

(04:17):
And so I was in an episode of Matinee Theater, which was a
daily almost live broadcast. In fact, I think it was live.
It was shot at NBC on the West Coast.
And the episode I was in, I played the infant son of a up

(04:38):
and coming actor by the name of Peter Hanson.
And at the end of my career as an actor, I was in General
Hospital and I died twice beforeI left General Hospital.
But my father was Peter Hanson. And I thought that was kind of
a, a, a fitting bookend that from the beginning to the end,

(05:04):
my dad was he was a terrific actor and a very nice man.
After a number of little infant roles, I think the first major
film that I was in was the remake of Cimarron at MGM with
Glenn Ford and Maria Shell and abig cast.

(05:27):
And it was a pretty sensational flop.
But I had a lot of screen time. And from there I started getting
regular parts. Casting agents would say, oh,
he's got a, he's got a good luckand he, he, he isn't a problem

(05:48):
on set. And so from there I did a movie
afterwards called Crowded Sky. And couple years later I did an,
a Paramount movie called My 6 Loves where I played Debbie
Reynolds young. She had six adopted foster kids

(06:09):
and I was the apple of her eye, a character named Sonny who
didn't talk. But I was constantly in her arms
in that movie. Then I started doing TV roles.
I was cast as Christopher Robin,Yes, in the Shirley Temple show.

(06:29):
Poor Eeyore. Was it?
Anybody gonna celebrate his birthday?
Well, Winnie the Pooh was worried about the same thing.
He was in a frightful muddle over Eeyore's sad condition.
That's why the first person he thought of was Christopher
Robin. Is that me?
That's you. Christopher Robin.

(06:50):
Christopher Robin. Christopher Robin.
Christopher Robin. Oh Christopher Robin.
Oh deary dear. What's the matter?
Oh, Eeyore is in a terrible, sadcondition this morning.
It's his birthday. Yeah, nobody's taking proper
notice of him. Silly o'bear, I'm taking proper
notice. I'm arranging a party for him

(07:13):
and you're all invited. But excuse me, I'm busy and I'm
making arrangements. Well, certainly.
To my knowledge, and I could be wrong, maybe there was a live
version of this or a local version.
The Shirley Temple storybook with Winnie the Pooh in 1960.
That was the first time that thepublic in America were being

(07:34):
shown a dramatization of a a Milne stories.
Winnie the Pooh was not that well known here until the Disney
cartoons really made it much more.
It was cherished by the British and no near as literature but
not as a mainstream character. But you were Christopher Robin
first. That's true.
And it was a live show. It was live to air, at least in

(07:59):
part of the country. Obviously the West Coast must
have been recorded, but I remember rehearsing with the
puppeteers. They had built these elaborate
scaffolds above the set so the puppeteers could move the
puppets around the set while I walked around and learning just

(08:21):
the choreography of being able to land in a certain spot, hit a
mark and talk to a puppet that obviously has no voice coming
out of it, but there's someone off stage doing the voice was a
very, very interesting kind of ballet and it was heavily

(08:41):
rehearsed. I think I've watched it back a
few times and I'm mildly horrified that I kept mouthing
the words of what the puppets were saying because I was
worried that no voices coming out of the puppets.
Needless to say, the show did well, and Shirley Temple could
not have been sweeter or kinder.Years later, in the In Memoriam

(09:06):
segment in the Emmys the year that she died, the picture that
they cut to on screen was Shirley Temple holding me on her
lap as Christopher Robin. And it was incredibly touching
because I remember her. I remember what a kind lady she
was. And to have been anywhere near

(09:29):
her picture when she was being remembered.
The young Shirley Temple was as big a movie star as there was.
And to have been able to work with her and, and to say I met
her was something as I got olderin life, I, I really appreciate
it. What a big memory.
If you haven't seen the Shirley Temple Storybook series folks,

(09:52):
many of the color ones, at least13 or 14 of them, are easily
available on several streaming services.
I think it may be on Amazon Prime.
They are out. Some of them are dramatic.
Some of them are adventures, buta couple of them are fantasies.
This one was one of them. They did Babes and Toyland with
Big Stars a year before Walt Disney did.
And they did a The Land of Oz with Agnes Moorhead as the witch

(10:17):
and Angela Cartwright. All of these great actors of
that era were in the shows. And they are very, very sweet
and innocent is the best way to describe them.
There's not a trace of irony in them.
They're very straightforward andbeautifully designed.
And in this particular case, thepuppets were done by the Bairds,
Bill and Cora Baird, who before The Muppets, were considered the

(10:40):
premier marionette puppeteers. They were on Broadway and Off
Broadway in big shows, and most famously they were in the lonely
goatherd sequence in The Sound of Music.
Was this on a blue screen? Were you standing on a blue
screen with the puppets? It was a practical set.
The Baird's had a small theater in downtown LA where on the

(11:04):
weekends they put on puppet shows and so they were able to
move a lot of the sets that theyhad for Winnie the Pooh over to
the stages in Burbank at NBC, which is where we shot it on The
Lucy Show, the follow up to I Love Lucy.

(11:25):
Funny story, Lucy at the time was in the process of buying out
Desi Arnaz's interest in Desi Liu Productions and she was
being helped by Zion National Bank in Utah.
And the president of Zion National Bank was a man by the

(11:48):
last name of Echols, and it was same spelling as mine.
And his father had been the secretary of the Treasury under
FDR, Mariner Echols. And so Lucy thought she was
currying favor with her banker who was helping her take out

(12:10):
Desi's interest. And so I got a call.
I was taken over to the Senate. Desi Liu, I was introduced to
Lucy, who didn't have to read, was hired on the spot.
And for about 6 weeks, I kept getting callbacks and I kept
appearing as different characters.
My agent said to my parents, I don't know what he's doing, but

(12:33):
tell him to keep doing it. They love him.
All right, hold it, hold it. Barry and Newton, come here,
Come here now. One of you was saying 6 geese to
land when you should have been saying 7 Swans.
The swimming, he said. 6 geese to land.
I did not. It was really got me stuff.
It was not. Let me see you.
Prove it. Now.

(12:54):
Now. None of that.
Now, that was entirely uncalled for.
Barry, I'm going to have to separate you two boys.
Now you stand there, you get up and change places with little
Malcolm. Oh, come on, Malcolm.
You come down here. Now stand right.
Here we would rehearse. She would come to the set in the
bathrobe with curlers in her hair and filterless cigarettes
all over this set. And she would.

(13:15):
She was just very, very within herself until they brought in
the audience or until the executives from CBS came in and
then she lit up like a candle on.
This was one of those days wherethe CBS execs were coming and
she at her cigarette gone and she leaned down to the long drag

(13:38):
and said, Teddy Eccles, little Teddy Eccles, how's that family
of yours in Utah? And I said, Gee, Miss Paul, I
don't have any family in Utah. You don't.
No, ma'am, that was the last of those episodes I did.

(13:59):
My agent called my parents and said you tell him from now on
when anybody asks him any question, the answer is just
always yes. He would have been on this show
the whole season. She thought she was doing a
favor for the Utah Echols. So I did Lucy's shows.

(14:20):
After that I did a movie over atParamount again with Jerry Lewis
called The Family Jewels and then I did an episode of The
Beverly Hillbillies where I played Milburn Drysdale's
precocious and money grubbing nephew Lil Milby.
Well, oh hello Uncle Milby. I hope you don't mind my

(14:42):
borrowing this book from your desk.
Oh, not at all, my boy. A sympathetic look at Ebenezer
Scrooge. That's one of my favorites.
Now, what would you like to do today?
Well, a real fun thing is makingmoney.
Good lad, I'll bet you're savingto buy a new bicycle.
No, I've got my eye on some property in the valley.

(15:03):
And I actually did a couple of those shows and they really took
a shining to me. And so after the third Beverly
Hillbillies episode, I was cast as the child lead in a pilot
that the producers of The Beverly Hillbillies were selling
to CVS called My Boy Google. My dad was Jerry Van Dyke, and I

(15:27):
don't know why that show didn't sell.
There's tons of pilots and probably it wasn't very good,
but I did that. I was in a couple of episodes in
my three sons shows like Mr. Ed,The Big Valley, Bewitched, the
Monsters. I played Eddie Monsters, Normal

(15:47):
next door, friend like normal inquotes.
There you go, Wilbur. Thanks Mr. Monster.
Well, Eddie, I can't sit around here tying knots all day.
The car has a flat and I promised Grandpa I'd hold it up
while he changes the tire. Bye, Wilbur.
Bye, Sir Boy. Eddie, you got the nearest

(16:08):
father in the whole neighborhood.
And then a lot of cartoon series.
I had a deep voice as a kid and I could read well and I took
direction pretty well. And so I got voice over parts.
A lot of commercials and couple of Hanna Barbera cartoon series,

(16:28):
which you mentioned. I think the first one, I think
it was the Herculoids where I was doing a there's that strange
sound again. Let's go see what it is.
Came from over that way. Let's go.
What are those things? It's opening behind you.

(16:51):
Ego. It's alive.
They're cutting after us. Let's go.
And for the caves? And I was so fascinated by being
inside Hanna Barbera. It was the world all to itself
and totally different than anything I'd ever encountered in

(17:12):
the TV or movie or even commercial business.
I did lots of TV commercials as well, but they were always on
sets. And there was a kind of a, an
organization to them with assistant directors and
directors and cameramen and hairand makeup people and welfare
workers who were looking after the kids and taking us to

(17:35):
school. And Hanna Barbera was a deal
where I went after school and walked inside would kind of look
like an office building. And it was filled with
workstations of animators and everybody's sort of was
collaborating. And the recording areas were not
little separate booths. I'd done a lot of ADR, what we

(18:00):
call it now. It used to be called looping.
When we had to rerecord dialoguefrom TV shows I'd done.
They'd take you into a little space and put headphones on you,
and you were in kind of a soundproof booth.
But it was a much more open, interactive space.
And at Hanna Barbera, the characters could all see each

(18:21):
other. When I was doing Door now, I
couldn't see my growth. I could see Virginia, Greg,
especially Don Messick, who somehow or other became those
incredible creatures he voiced. Yeah, it was just something to
watch. And of course, I'd seen cartoons
my whole life. As a kid, I loved, love the

(18:41):
Warner Brothers cartoon. So being in a cartoon
environment was a treat that wastotally different from all other
TV and movie making. And I think I shared with you in
an earlier conversation, I remember one of the artists
doing a sketch of what Dornell was going to look like.

(19:03):
And we had done a couple of coldreads and the artist ran in and
gave me the sketch and said, butthis is what the character looks
like and this is what he does. And he do some quick sketches
and can you make your voice sound like this?
It was really a very cool experience.
I loved it. I thought it was so much fun.
And of course, you don't see thefinished product.

(19:25):
There's no rushes or dailies. And then one day you turn on TV
and there you are. And there's the cartoon.
And I thought they were magicians.
Also. Hanna and Barbera really
directed everything. They were giving direction to
all the voice cast artists. So it was something.

(19:45):
And I must say Mike Rhode, who played Zandor, also did the
voices of a couple of the other creatures and he could almost
transform his body when he did these other outrageous voices.
One minute he was Zandor and thenext minute he was a shrieking
ZOC. And how he could go from 1:00 to

(20:07):
the other like that was mesmerizing to me.
He was a real actor's actor and he got into it.
His body language changed with each character that he voiced.
It was all kinds of fun. The attention to detail is so
exemplified by that story with the artist asking you to adopt

(20:30):
the voice more to what they weredrawing and then he was showing
you. It just shows how much quality
they wanted to get out of the animation they were doing.
Despite the limitations. They wanted these to be good.
Everybody was a pro and you wereworking with Mike Rd. who was
Race Bannon first and foremost, and Don Messick who was second

(20:52):
only at Hanna Barbera originallyto Daws Butler and then became
scooby-doo and Papa Smurf. And Virginia Greg who was
legendary in radio and and also doing a lot of famous movie
voiceover. She was in a million TV shows as
a character actress, a lot of Jack Webb and Alfred Hitchcock.
But one of her most famous voices was Norman Bates, mother

(21:16):
and Psycho. Oh my gosh, You know, I never
knew that. But I'm not surprised because
the amount of direction that we got at Hanna Barbera was far and
above any other animated characters that I didn't.
Oftentimes even what would happen on a movie set.
They really cared about the quality of the voices and the

(21:42):
delivery. And we would do multiple takes.
They didn't stop till they got up, right?
I think there were probably other places, certainly some
other studios that maybe had more technical excellence when
it came to the actual animation itself.
But when it came to the storytelling and the performance

(22:04):
when you work in Hanna Barbera, they cared and I think to a
certain extent met their expectations.
Because I was invited back to Julie in The Three Musketeers.
And that point is all kinds of fun, too.
I mean, it was always a real honor.
And even as a kid I understood, you know, if you get cast to do

(22:25):
one thing, there's a lot of times where you do a guest shot
and you're never called again. But when they call you back and
say we've got a new character, you're just right for it.
That was a real honor. That was that was something that
I really appreciated. And I think it was because they
liked the ensemble acting mix that they would put together.

(22:48):
These weren't prima donnas in any way.
And Mike Rd. treated the character of Zandor as much as
if he was in an Academy award-winning feature film.
To him, it was acting and he cared and it came through and it
infused the whole place. And and having animators who

(23:08):
could sketch lightning fast and give you some input.
Because otherwise, particularly as a kid, it's words on a page,
but you don't have any visual. And they would just whip out the
visuals and go. Now it's like this and this is
what gloop and gleep look like and and wow, it was fun.

(23:28):
Gloop and Gleep, they were so cool.
And that was Don Messick doing his sort of alien voice.
They could do anything. What was amazing to me about Don
Messick is the characters Gloop and Gleep are visually very
similar, but there's a size difference and he could create a
differentiation in those crazy sounds that he made.

(23:49):
So you knew what Gloop sounded like and you knew when it was
Gleep. And I have no idea how he did
that. I he could do things with his
vocal cords no one else I ever encountered could do.
He was really fun to watch and he got so into it when he was on
the mic, he became those little rubbery guys.

(24:10):
That's the thing too, is that, like you were saying, it may be
a audio performance, but it's a visual performance when they're
doing it. Totally, totally.
He was. He was acting.
He wasn't voicing a cartoon. The guy was really a study in
professionalism and excellent ina very rare part of the craft.

(24:33):
Yeah, and he was also on The Three Musketeers with you, along
with also some real interesting actors.
You had Bruce Watson as D'artagnan, and he had been on
Star Trek and a lot of shows in the 60s.
And Barney Phillips, who was in everything, The Twilight Zone.
He was the guy in the diner who had the third eye on his head.
And he was also the voice of Shazam.

(24:55):
Julie Bennett, who Julie Bennettwent all the way back to the
beginnings of Hanna Barbera as Cindy Bear and a lot of other
characters. And then Jonathan Harris, still
doing. Harris was a force of nature.
He would just dominate the mic. He didn't project into it.
He owned the mic. He was really something.

(25:17):
Take that and that. You're up against a master
sauceman this time. I'll make you change your mind.
Get Monsieur d'artagnan. Ouch.
Truly stop. Stop this moment.
Not until this one changes his mind.
I wish to be a Musketeer, Aunt Constance, but they say I'm too

(25:38):
young. As a kid, it was such a great
education to watch some of thesereally terrific actors perform
and their body language would teach you so much.
I especially remember Jonathan Harris.
He he didn't read lines, he breathed them.
They came out of some other partof.

(25:59):
He didn't just read lines. I mean, he would breathe life
into the words that he was saying.
It was like coming out of some other part of him.
There were lots of actors who I encountered over the years and
interviews and cold readings andthey would read words on a page.
But Jonathan did not read words on a page.

(26:22):
He just breathed life into the IT was crazy true.
Talent and he was at the time still doing Lost in Space, which
I. Loved as a kid the fact that I
was actually in the room recording with the guy who
scared me to death on Lost in Space.
It was too much fun. Wow.
You worked with a lot of larger than life people.

(26:44):
I mean, you were on Daniel Boone.
You worked with Fess Parker. Yeah, I did 3 Daniel Boone's
again. That was kind of a casting agent
thing. A retired Dodger baseball
player, I think his name was Chuck Assige, and became a
casting agent for Fox. And whenever there was a part
for a kid my age, Darby Hinton was with my same agent.

(27:08):
Darby played Israel Boone on TheDaniel Boone Show.
We didn't look a thing alike. And so it was easy to cast me as
the other kid. Because one of the biggest
problems when casting kids was not to have them look too much
alike. The audience needed to instantly
be able to differentiate who's who.

(27:30):
So I was a natural sidekick for Darby because we look nothing
alike at all. Then you went to work for
another. I know I'm skipping an enormous
amount, but you worked for another group of renowned
puppeteers, Sid and Marty Croft.Oh, that was another really,
really fun experience. That one had a lot of, I think

(27:51):
they've moved past blue screen and it was green screen.
But Doctor Shrinker was a crazy experience on a number of
levels. It was a wild show.
It was headlined by two really famous actors, Billy Party,

(28:11):
Yeah, who I loved. And part of my affection for
Billy Barney is as a kid I always had a little person as a
stand in. There were two little people,
Frank and Sadie. They were Munchkins in The
Wizard of Oz. They were my stand insurance for
about four or five years and I had developed this affection for

(28:35):
them and they had kind of taken me under their wing.
And most of the blocking on manyof these TV shows that I did as
a kid was actually taught to me by Frank, who was very, very
patient and what a sweet guy. And exactly my height.
So by the time I get to do Doctor Shrinker, I am quite a

(28:59):
bit taller than Billy, but I have this affection for the
challenges that little people gothrough, having a career in
Hollywood. And he had exceeded far and
beyond because he was a famous actor.
But he knew a lot of the little people who'd been my standings,
and he loved the fact that I remembered them.

(29:23):
And so he was a really good actor and a ton of fun to be
around. He was a hoot.
And Jay Robinson, who played Doctor Shrinker, had an amazing
career. He played the part of Caligula
in the robe in the 1950s, and hewas given a contract at Fox.

(29:47):
And he was such a consummate villain that the only roles they
could cast him in that the audience would accept him in
were these terrible villain roles.
And they ran out of villain roles.
And according to Jay, he was setup and they planted drugs in his
home in Beverly Hills so they could get him arrested and fire

(30:10):
him under the morals contract and get him off the payroll.
So he actually went to jail, wound up cleaning monkey cages
when he got out. And he would tell me the story
that the one person who stood behind him and stood up for him
when he got out of jail and wanted to come back was Warren

(30:31):
Beatty. And Warren Beatty hired him to
play the beauty shop owner in the movie Shampoo.
And that reignited his career. He did a number of guest shots.
And next thing you know, he's the star of Doctor Shrinker.
And here's this Academy award-winning actor playing this

(30:51):
goofy character. And he took it so seriously and
he was like an acting coach. I absolutely loved the time I
got to spend with him. It was really an education.
What a wonderful person and actor and what an arc to that
career you go please. The shrinking ray was my idea.

(31:16):
And that's why you made us this small, so we could rob banks.
Oh, the second highest bidder gets you the highest bidder.
Gets the shrinking ray that madeyou So when you're robbing banks
Oregon government secrets in onecountry, someone in another
country will be shrinking them. Isn't that inventive?

(31:40):
Come you go. Time for you to warm up the
generator for the shrinking ray.You go do this, you go do that.
When those buyers show up, you'll really see what Hugo can
do. A lot of these high concept
shows that have outlandish premises and are wild fantasies,

(32:05):
gimmick comedies, whatever you want to call them, require
really capable actors to make them seem the grounded in some
strange way. I mean, Doctor Shrinker was very
much a farce. The crop stuff at the time was
played very much like stage. It was far from subtle, but that
was the kind of show it was. It was like a cartoon with

(32:27):
people, but it took capable people.
I mean, look at Bewitched, whichyou were also on you.
Every single one of those actorswas the top of their field for a
premise. That might seem frivolous to
some, but to make that premise work, you needed skill.
The crops brought in an awful lot of experienced people to do

(32:47):
these series. They were real artists, I think
wildly underappreciated. Their shows do play like live
action cartoons in many respects, but there was a lot of
care and they really were meticulous about the way they
did things. And ironically, years later in
the second-half of my career when I was working at Disney, I

(33:10):
was responsible for the marketing campaign for a very
similar story called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
And it was something that was, of all the movie trailers I did,
that was probably the easiest because I understood it from the
inside out, having played Brad running around in 10 foot tall

(33:32):
blades of grass. That's.
True. Yeah, yeah.
I had a very easy time coming upwith the drama and the tension
that it took to tell that story is a trailer and it's always
funny to me how sometimes stories come back again and
again in different guises. The time that I was on a Doctor

(33:56):
Shrinker was a lot of fun and Brad McKay, who was Co star, he
was one of the kids who was shrunk.
He was Robert Redford's nephew, and he had come out to Hollywood
from the Midwest and Robert Redford got him an agent and
next thing you know, his career leads him to Doctor Shrinker.

(34:19):
And after that he got a series at Universal Baa Baa, Black
Sheep, and he was one of the pilots.
And he took off for a while and he was really headed somewhere.
He died very young, but he was aserious actor.
You had that also, Susan Lawrence.
Susan Lawrence knew how to play broad comedy.

(34:42):
I don't recall her credits, but I would bet that she spent time
on stage because one of the things that was a requirement of
doing Doctor Shrinker is we had to deal with giant oversized set
pieces. Since we were little, 3 inch
tall people, everything that surrounded us was huge and she

(35:05):
could navigate big crazy sets with such ease and she could
express herself. You know when you're on stage
it's not a close up medium so you have to play things a lot
more physically and a lot broader and she was perfect at
that. She had that down to a science

(35:27):
under work with. Nice lady.
One of the several things that Ithink will immortalize you is
playing Aaron, the Little Drummer boy, and you had
mentioned when we talked earlierthe story of how you auditioned
for it. Yes, the studio was on Seward
St. in Hollywood, which is wherea lot of the animation studios
were in those days, which is just kind of off the beaten path

(35:51):
before you get to Paramount. I went in and they gave me, I
don't know, two or three pages of dialogue to read.
And I did it, read it. And they had me wait a little
while, and then they brought outfour or five more pages.
And before I knew it, I think I had read the whole show.

(36:12):
They just kept bringing me pages.
And I thought, boy, this is a long interview.
This is not usually how it's done.
Typically you'd go in if it was a reading for a voice part.
You literally do a couple of pages and they call your agent.
So they said, well, we'll call your agent when I was done.
And later that day they called my agent and said Teddy is Aaron

(36:36):
and we're done recording him, but we'll have some pickups and
we'd like him to come back and read a few pickup lines.
So I did. I was impressed, kind of
surprised. Completely different than a
Hanna Barbera. I didn't see Jose Ferreira, I
didn't see Greer Garson, I didn't see any of the other
characters. I was reading in a very

(37:00):
claustrophobic voice over booth with headphones.
I did the pickups and one of theproducers might have been rank
and said to me, and you do sing,right?
And I, I have remembered the famous words of my agent, Lola
Moore. When you're asked, you always
say yes. Oh, yes.

(37:22):
I say sure. Oh, yeah, They said great.
Well, we're gonna give you some pages we want you to take home,
and you're going to come back and sing.
Why can't the animal smile? So I got this kind of deep
feeling in the pit of my stomach, like, what have I done?
Because in previous shows, notably on a Lucy show where I

(37:46):
was part of a choir, I was askednot to sing because my voice was
very loud and very off key. And I had been asked on other
interviews not to sing. And so here I am thinking, oh,
no, I've got to come back and sing this song.
And sure enough, I gave it my best.

(38:06):
But I was two or three verses in, and they came in and said,
you know, thank you. We don't need to record the rest
of the song. We've got enough.
And I didn't know what that meant, but my voice was replaced
by the voice actor who portrayedSpeedy Alka Seltzer in the TV

(38:27):
commercials. You.
Never heard a mouse to fall a crow that did much more than
talk. Is an eagle to eagle or is it
all illegal? Why can't the animal smile?
Why can't the animal smile? He sang and did an amazing job

(38:51):
of sounding just like me. That was not my voice, but thank
goodness it wasn't. It is a remarkable similarity.
It was Dick Beal's. Yes.
Did a lot, like you said, Speedy.
He was on Frankenstein. Junior did an enormous amount of
kid voices, and you as a child actor were able to convey a lot

(39:12):
of complicated feelings in Little Drummer Boy.
Oh Baba, you mustn't die. You mustn't.
Who can help me? Yes, the kings.
The kings are wise. They will be able to save Baba.
And when Aaron came to the entrance of the stable, he could

(39:34):
hardly believe what he saw. And she brought forth her first
born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him
in a Manger, because there was no room for them.
In the inn. Oh, your Majesty.
Oh. Player Boy.
My lamb has been injured. You must save him.

(39:57):
Oh lad, there is nothing I can do.
But but you are a king. A mortal king only, but there is
a king among kings who would save your little friend.
The babe, but I do not understand.
It is not necessary that you understand.

(40:21):
Go to him. But I I have no gift to bring.
Go look about the newborn king. Now, I don't know that a lot of
child actors could have pulled off.
There's this boy who's enraged and bitter and then has this

(40:43):
revelation at the end. Did you know when you were
reading it that it was kind of something special?
I did, but I have to say the direction was really what made
that work. Rankin and Bass were true, true
Craftsman, and they did show me some of the sets that they had

(41:06):
built, what the scene looked like, and they were very good at
getting performance out of theircharacters.
We did a lot of takes, a lot of takes, and I have to say I've
watched it, of course, a number of times since then.
Ironically, years later, when I was in the trailer business, I

(41:27):
was hired to promote that on DVD.
My company was to make the promos and shoot a set of new
commercials for The Little Drummer Boy.
And watching it years later as an adult, I was impressed at the
quality of all the performances.That's a credit, I think, to the

(41:47):
direction they knew what they were doing.
Yeah, it is a remarkable thing. I mean, there's a lot in your
career to be impressed by, but that in particular, there's
something about when you do a holiday show that really clicks
with people. They can run indefinitely, and
that's one of the rank. And Bass was very good at doing
that. Holidays were their specialty,
but it's interesting you had Rankin and Bass just like you

(42:10):
had Hannah and Barbara working with you.
Yeah, yeah. I think that's kind of a special
gift. As I look back on times that I
spent, you know, as a kid, you don't really realize how
talented people are or what their credits are.
You really just connect with howthey interact with you.

(42:31):
But there was a huge difference between directors who didn't
speak down to kids, who weren't condescending.
And I think that was the secret of treating children like just
young actors instead of kids. They had that damn path.

(42:53):
They didn't make the craft feel smaller, insignificant.
They brought some level of importance to it that I can
remember thinking, Gee, I want to give these guys what they're
asking for. They mattered.
I had a similar kind of relationship with a very famous
producer, Gene Reynolds in Hollywood.

(43:14):
Who is most remembered? I think for MASH, being one of
the creators, writers and directors, and I had the
incredible good fortune to run into him when I was about 13 on
a pilot he was producing for Foxcalled Anderson and Company with
Fred Gwynn was about guy who owns a essentially Macy's type

(43:40):
department store in New York andhas this big family of kids.
I was one of the kids and Gene had been a child actor.
And I remember after we were done with the pilot, which
didn't sell, I would get notes from it time to time and I was
regularly called in to interview.

(44:00):
And so as a result, I did a couple of MASH episodes for him,
and then he wrote a pilot along with Larry Gelbart with me in
mind, called If I Love You in MyTrap Forever, which was kind of
a teen romance pilot, which alsodidn't sell, I might add.
But over the years, Gene Reynolds was always kind of a

(44:22):
mentor. And I think he had a soft spot
because he remembered being a kid actor and what it was like,
and he was especially good at getting performance out of kids.
And that's a real art. And some have it and some don't.
He did. That's pretty cool.
But when you did My Side of the Mountain, which I can remember

(44:45):
that book in the library when I was in elementary school, that
was the first time you were carrying a feature film,
correct? Yes, yes, I think I'm in every
scene. I'm pretty sure I am because
it's the story of a kid who is planning a camping trip with his
dad and when his dad can't make it he goes up into.

(45:07):
They rewrote it from being the mountains in upstate New York to
the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec because they needed to
shoot in Canada. Kid spends a year living in the
mountains inside a tree, catching and raising and
training a Falcon and being befriended by wild creatures and

(45:29):
and reading Thoreau. And it was a Disney kind of
film, but on a much more adult level.
In these days when everybody is talking about doing his thing,
here's the story of a boy who not only talks about it, but
does it. My first night in the Laurentian
Mountains of Quebec. This is to be my first entry in

(45:53):
my journal. I will keep it religiously, just
as thorough did his We are goingto make it.
His friends were the animals of the forest, his enemies were
hunters and the forest Rangers searching for him.
Starring Teddy Echols as Sam, Theodore Bikel as Bando.

(46:13):
My Side of the Mountain. Winner of the Hands Christian
Andersen International Award andthe famed Lewis Carroll Award,
the director of that film, JimmyClark, had been the director of
two of the episodes I had done on Daniel Boone, so I had the
good fortune of working with himbefore.

(46:34):
And funny story, maybe funny to me, when I interviewed for the
role of Sonny in My 6 Loves, it was in an office in a building
on the lot on Paramount called the Liberty Building.
And I was interviewed by Gower Champion, who was the director
of the film. And I was hired after one

(46:55):
interview. And I remember the office and it
was a big office and it was kindof homey.
Years later when I went on the interview for My Side of the
Mountain, Robert Radnitz was in that same office, same building,
the Liberty build, same room. And I walked in and met him,
called and I was supposed to do a reading, but the director was

(47:20):
there, Jimmy Clark, and said, oh, he doesn't need to read, he
doesn't, we'll watch some film. And I was hired again out of
that same office. Now, what I didn't know is when
I had done the movie My 6 Loves,the assistant editor on that
film was a very famous, later tobe famous Paramount executive

(47:44):
who was in charge of post production worldwide.
His name was Paul Hager and he was an associate of Warren
Beatty's and he was oftentimes Warren Beatty's editor.
And so years later, when I had quit acting and wanted to get a
job on the lot at Paramount in the trailer department, I showed

(48:08):
up at the front gate and they gave me my pass and said, you're
going to the Liberty Building. And I looked at the office
number and I thought, I've been to this office twice before.
And I walked in and I must have had a smile on my face and Paul
Hager, who was tough and said, what are you grinning about?
And I said, well, I've been in this office before, and it's

(48:29):
always turned out good, so I'm pretty sure you're gonna hire
me. And he looked at me.
And he goes, who the hell are you?
And when did you get hired out of this office before?
And I told him, he goes, oh, I hacked her.
I hate actors, but I'll tell yousomething.
I was The Apprentice editor of my 6 Loves.
So guess what? You're hired again.
Same office. They have since torn the Liberty

(48:49):
Building down, but it was a funny coincidence.
So when did you decide to stop acting and transition into
behind the scenes while? I was on General Hospital, which
although it was a great experience because I had just
gotten married in real life, just prior to being on General

(49:12):
Hospital, I had played the part of Franklin Roosevelt in a
miniseries called Eleanor Franklin and I was Young
Franklin. And the show won 9 or 10 Emmy
Awards and was a really important and well received
program. And I went way up the charts in

(49:33):
terms of being noticed as an actor at ABC.
And they had a part, they wantedto do a story, sort of like the
reverse of love story, where a young couple gets married and
the guy gets sick and dies. And I was that guy.
And so they offered me the role.And my agent, Martin Michigan,

(49:55):
had said, absolutely not. You're not taking this.
You just played Franklin Roosevelt, you knucklehead.
You're going to get lots of other offers.
I said, Meyer, I'm getting married.
I'd like to have a paycheck every week for once in my life.
What would that be like? And he goes, you're crazy.
You're making a mistake, but I'll let you do it.
So I get hired. And as an acting experience, it

(50:19):
is largely ungratified because the volume of dialogue that you
have to learn doing 30 minutes aday, five days a week and
rehearsing it, then shooting it live to tape, it's a little more
like factory work than acting. And so during the course of

(50:40):
that, I was coming to the conclusion that while I loved
the business, maybe I should look for something that had more
longevity. And a number of the actors who
were on at the same time were telling me, oh, we're so glad we
have this show because ten yearswent by and, you know, we were

(51:01):
driving taxis and waiting tablesand the business of being an
actor, oh, it's miserable in this town.
It's just miserable. And I took him to heart.
I listened to him. And I thought, you know, I love
this business, but maybe I should find another path.
And so I asked to be let out of my contract early, and they said

(51:21):
yes. And so I was preparing to leave,
and they killed me. I died on the show and the next
day Michigan calls me and says, so you think you're off that
show, huh smarty pants? Well, you're not.
You're back on. They changed their mind.
I said why? They said General Hospital is
going from 1/2 an hour to an hour next week.

(51:44):
They can't lose any characters. You're back.
You're not dead. I'll get you out as soon as I
can. So I was on this show for a
couple more months, but I I started trying to find jobs that
I could transition into out of being an actor.
And there was a company in Hollywood that made movie
trailers and special effects called Modern Film Effects.

(52:08):
And my father-in-law, who is a very famous cameraman, had a
good friend there. And I wanted to be a director of
photography and I needed to get in the camera union.
Having a Screen Actors Guild card didn't qualify me to get a
camera card, but if I worked at this company, I could get a
camera card. So I went from making, I don't

(52:32):
know, $750 an episode, I think in 1975 on General Hospital to
making $175 a week developing a high con film in a company
called Modern Film Effects, where at night I got to run an
optical printer, which was technically a camera, which
after six months would get me mycamera card.

(52:55):
But as Wayne leads on to way, I got a promotion pretty quickly
and next thing you knew it, I was in the trailer department at
Modern and I was making trailersfor Paramount.
I was good at it. So after a year or so of working
there, I had my famous interviewwith Paula Hager, who was

(53:17):
looking to hire someone to come on board and make trailers in
house at Paramount. And I got hired to do that.
And shortly after that, the two big executives in Paramount,
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, moved over to Disney.

(53:37):
And I had done a number of trailers and a lot of music
videos for Jerry Bruckheimer andhis films on the lot of
Paramounted. And I went over one day and I
said to him, Jerry, I'm really good at making trailers, but I
have dreams one day of making something longer than 90
seconds. What do you recommend?

(53:58):
He said, I got to introduce you to the guys at at Disney.
You need to work for Jeffrey. And he picked up the phone.
He called Jeffrey Katzenberger and he said there's a real good
guy here and he works really hard.
You'll love him. And I got hired at Disney and I
worked there for seven years making initially movie trailers

(54:19):
and they let me make some TV shows and executive produce a
few things and I really got my feet under me.
Then I took some time off. I was so burned out after eight
years. When I got there, we were
marketing 3 movies a year. When I left, we were marketing
43 and there were three labels and I was doing TV shows for the

(54:44):
studio as well, and I just needed a break.
Took a break for a year and thencame back and started working in
television and did a lot of television marketing and worked
on shows that had a little bit of success like Seinfeld and
Everybody Loves Raymond, How I Met Your Mother and Modern

(55:04):
Family, and worked for every oneof the networks.
It was terrific. I loved being able to work with
the creators of television shows, helping them, market
them. You know, frequently as time
went on, before a studio would even make a pilot, they would

(55:25):
make a sizzle reel for a show. And that was kind of like a long
trailer. And I was really good at that.
So I made the sizzle reels for alot of famous TV shows that made
it onto television. And then sometimes I would get
to work on those shows as they went through their life cycle.
And later on, I created a few shows of my own.

(55:47):
The last national show I did wasa series for CBS called
Whistleblower. And I had the incredible good
fortune of having as my senior executive producer, I was the
executive producer along with a very successful TV judge named
Judge Alex. We had created the concept for

(56:09):
this show. CBS bought it.
We got to work with Susan Zorinsky, who is, if anybody's
ever seen the movie broadcast news, she is the character that
Holly Hunter plays. She is every bit that character.
She is a total force of nature and so inspirational and

(56:29):
demanding and fantastic. And so I had three years working
in New York creating that series, and now I'm back to
coming up with new concepts again.
Wow. But it's been a long career and
it's been tons of fun. Do you think, I mean from what
you're hearing from the inside, that there is a possibility of

(56:51):
us reaching a sort of a Baby Bells situation with some of
these companies? I think so because I think some
of the people who are coming into them are incredibly smart
and see what happened. You know, you reach a point
where everything's a committee. And I vividly remember the time

(57:13):
and there's an expression in Hollywood, you never took a
pitch meeting with someone who couldn't buy in the room.
So if they like your pitch, theycould buy it, meaning they could
go to pilot or they could order a script.
And it wasn't just an endless series of meetings, but as the
companies got bigger and bigger and bigger, and there were more
accountants and more layers, it became a game of just not taking

(57:38):
downside risks. And the whole nature of
entertainment is taking risks. And so the process changed.
The movies that were made when Iwas at Disney, the type of
movies that were being made werechanged by the way they were
marketed. Everything had gone to 32nd.
Commercials and movies open nationally.

(58:00):
They didn't open regionally and roll out and you had to get 3000
screens. So you had to have a high
concept movie because you had tobe able to sell it in 30
seconds. If it was a nuanced, story
driven tale, you couldn't make acommercial that somebody would
say I've got to go see that. So every movie was Down and Out

(58:21):
in Beverly Hills. And I mean no disrespect to Down
and Out in Beverly Hills, it wasa great movie, but it was either
a fish out of water tale or an animated musical.
And they worked. But after a while the audience
says there's got to be somethingelse.
And so the sheer size and the tentpole successes squeeze the

(58:45):
creativity out of the process. Many times the streamers started
using computer analytics to tellthem what audiences liked
instead of hiring executives whoknew what they were doing.
And I mean no disrespect to Netflix either.
They're a paradigm of success. But their process is somewhat

(59:07):
dehumanized, and it doesn't lenditself towards taking risks on
smaller scales where the measureof success isn't so high.
And with marketing budgets exceeding the cost of
production, the business change.And now in television, how do
you find the audience? How do you promote?

(59:30):
There's no network anymore, there's no platform.
And so somebody's gonna have to come up with a new form of
promotion, and social media isn't quite getting there.
There's too many things that arejust lost in the shuffle.
So the long answer is yes, I believe that some of these
companies are going to get broken up into smaller units

(59:53):
with people in charge who are gifted in the same way I
mentioned earlier, there were directors who were really good
with children and with talent and drawing performance out of
them. Executives oftentimes got turned
into executives because they made successful pictures,

(01:00:14):
because they were good producers.
Good producers are rarely good executives.
It's a different breed and we need these smaller universes
where the ones in charge can smell the passion and not be
afraid to take the risk and not have the risk be so extreme.
I think we're headed there. I hope so.

(01:00:35):
I question sometimes some of theway they do research because
I've seen it done in my own career and I've seen it done in
movies, and I've heard people listen to it those sessions and
people not listen to it those sessions.
So I wonder just how precise that is.
Well, audience research from when I was at Disney.

(01:00:56):
Literally every movie was playedby Joe Farrell at National
Research Group, and audiences filled out surveys and I get
tons of notes of what to put in the trailer.
But The funny thing is it doesn't work that way.
What the audience like on screenin the movie isn't necessarily

(01:01:18):
what's going to hook them into going to the theater.
We were given the movie to market that was originally
called 3000. It was called 3000 because
that's what Richard Gere pays Julia Roberts to spend the week
with him. And was it a pretty dark story?
There was a lot of drugs in it and there were more suicides and

(01:01:40):
it was dark and it was a story about a hooker.
And we were given the instructions that whatever you
do, this is not a movie about a hooker.
They were even thinking, becausethey had aspirations early on,
that it was going to be the nextMary Poppins and they were
thinking about releasing it as aDisney film instead of

(01:02:00):
touchdown. So it it had all kinds of
problems and we tried for monthsto come up with a trailer that
met their expectations and everyone was a disaster.
And finally we heard the song Pretty Woman.
And we cut a trailer and we decided, OK, it's not a story

(01:02:21):
about a hooker. It's a Disney film.
What are Disney films? They're fairy tales.
So Julia Roberts is a down on her luck Princess and she's
gonna meet her handsome Prince and she's going to have the
experience of a lifetime and she's going to go shopping on
Rodeo Drop and playing scenes ofJulia Roberts walking down Rodeo

(01:02:41):
Drive past all the famous luxurybrands, holding bags of clothes
to pretty women walking down thestreet changed everything.
We were asked how much is it going to cost the license that's
on for the trailer. We told them it wasn't very
much. Next thing you know, they they
said, well, maybe we want to putit in the movie.

(01:03:03):
The next thing you know, they said we're going to name the
movie Pretty Woman because each time then they went back to Joe
Farrell and tested it. And when it went from 3000 to
Pretty Woman, it was off the charts and it became the highest
grossing film for Disney since Mary.
Poppins. I remember when it was.
Released and they reshot scenes to turn it into the fairy tale

(01:03:28):
so that at the end he climbs up the fire escape and there's
Julia Roberts and they have their classic fairy tale scene.
What happens to the handsome Prince after he rescues the
Princess? And the answer is she rescues
him right back. And the rest was kind of film
history. And then we got a series of

(01:03:49):
other movies to market, and the instructions were find a hit
song and we'll rename the movie after the hit song.
The next movie we got was a picture called Boy, Rinse Girl.
And we licensed Can't Buy Me Love, And there was another
summer box office success. So for a time it was all about

(01:04:10):
music and marketing. But today, the ability to
capture an audience and to get enough screens is a huge
challenge. And so they make far fewer
movies and they make a lot of remakes because the risks, you
know, even if the sequel does 60% of what the original did,

(01:04:33):
it's a win. So why take the risk on
something new? And all the wins come when you
take the risk on something new. Gary Marshall's masterful
direction of Pretty Woman, JuliaRoberts and Richard Gere's
performances. It was amazing when you saw them
on screen. One other note is we used to

(01:04:54):
look at movies on TV screens because we were watching rough
cuts in our offices. The difference between seeing
something on a small screen and seeing it on a large screen
cannot be overestimated. And a large part of the magic
that's lost today is people who are making decisions are making

(01:05:16):
them because they're watching onthe computer screen on their
desktop, or worse, on a tablet or even worse on a mobile
device, and they're watching dailies and rushes that way.
They're missing what's really there.
Yeah, You know, Speaking of trailers, a lot of people say
things about trailers, and this is fascinating to me and

(01:05:37):
hopefully to everyone listening.A trailer isn't the movie.
And people say several things about trailers, including
sometimes they give it away. I've seen the whole movie in the
trailer. That's one thing.
Sometimes the trailer shows all the good parts, and sometimes
there are scenes in the trailersthat aren't even in the movie,

(01:05:59):
so you get a different view of that.
I know I've given you three things, but I think you can very
well address address them. Well, there is an art to making
trailers. Although we had a sign at my
offices when we were under contract with Disney, a large
sign is walked in the front doorand it said we make long things

(01:06:21):
short and we make executives look good.
And that was our assignment. And so we didn't care what the
intended story of the filmmaker was.
We watched the whole film and we'd always get long cuts.
They rarely were the finished cuts, certainly not the release

(01:06:45):
version. Then we'd ask ourselves the
tough question, what would make me want to go see this movie?
And oftentimes it's the B story or the back story, or sometimes
it's a single scene. You mentioned.
We always said there's basicallythree ways you can sell a movie

(01:07:05):
in a trailer. You can sell the stars, you can
sell the story, or you can sell a scene.
And I think probably the most consistent way was to sell the
stars depending upon the story. Fish out of water, high concept
movies were very easy to sell because it's one line or two.

(01:07:27):
He's a this, she's a that. Together they do this.
There it is. So you have to like the stars.
And I still think the stars sellis probably the biggest, but
sometimes it's the scene or the look.
The recent movies, Dune I think succeeded on the way they
looked. It was a spectacular visual

(01:07:50):
experience and sometimes that's a compelling reason to go to the
theater. Interestingly, over the last
decade, we used to always be in a battle to hire the best voice
over talent, and movie trailers have almost no voice over
anymore. They're all graphics.
It's like you can't talk to the audience.

(01:08:11):
That's not allowed. You can just put words on the
screen, which I think is stupid,by the way, and I think it'll
come back. I think being clever is the most
important thing and being intriguing and communicating to
the audience that you haven't seen it all creates the one AC

(01:08:33):
factor. When I was at Disney, one of the
things that we did on The Lion King, which was hugely
successful as a marketing technique, who wanted to get
critics reviews out early, way early, and so we invited the
press to see the movie when it wasn't finished.

(01:08:55):
It was half pencil tests and getting to see the process and
not having seen it all created this appreciation and this
fascination with what's that scene gonna look like when it's
finished. So I think sometimes taking
risks with the trailers is as important as taking risks on

(01:09:20):
stories and stars from you cast and decisions that you make as a
movie maker. Great trailers leave you wanting
to see it again. We always said we only did our
job right if we took a trailer into a marketing meeting and
showed it to everybody, and the first question was, play that

(01:09:43):
one more time. When I was at Paramount, Ned
Tannen, who was a movie executive from Universal for
many years, and before Frank Mancuso was head of production
at Paramount, I took the trailerinto his office for Beverly
Hills Cop and we were really proud of it, really proud of it.

(01:10:05):
We thought this movie was a hit and he had a huge office.
It was beautiful. I remember I was stunned at how
big his office was and it was myfirst meeting with him and I put
the trailer in. In those days we had tape
players and he had a really big screen.
It wasn't a projection system, but it was almost like it played
the trailer for him. He smiled and kind of laughed

(01:10:28):
and I looked at him and I said, do you want to see it again?
Because big mistake. You only watch a trailer once
because the audience only sees it once.
Every time after that you're talking yourself into something
that's a really good trailer. And the next time I see it, I
want it to be in Westwood on a screen.

(01:10:49):
Don't show it to me again. Finish it.
And that was and is great advice.
And the take away for the audience should be that they
haven't seen all that before, that they want to see something
that they know is in the film. But we didn't give it all away.
I think the audience can tell bythe way, when you give it all

(01:11:12):
away. And I think it's it's like
playing poker. It's a tell that you don't have
a very good hand. Yeah, some people don't want to
see trailers because they're afraid it's too much is going to
get given away. And I will sit through some of
them saying, well, you know, I know how that what's going to
happen there. There's another one, too.
Did you work on Meet the Robinsons?

(01:11:34):
I didn't. OK, well, good, because
sometimes the movie is fantasticand the trailer in some ways can
hurt the movie because the I'm sorry to whoever did it, but a
lady showing her nicotine patches, like that's the
funniest thing in the movie. When that movie had so much
beauty and so much warmth and ithad memorable care, it was a

(01:11:55):
wonderful film. But the trailers, what was the
deal there? Did they not understand the
story? I don't know the nature of
marketing departments. As the marketing budgets grew,
the number of people involved inthe process got larger and
larger and larger, and so ultimately the biggest ego

(01:12:19):
usually would win. And they're not always right.
That's sometimes how you can come up with what I would say is
a really blonde campaign. Sometimes you can make a
mediocre movie look fantastic. There are tricks.
They aren't always used. We had a film called An Innocent

(01:12:41):
Man, which was Tom Selleck in jail for a crime he didn't
commit. There's a lot of violence that
takes place inside the jail cell.
And the studio really, really, really wanted APG trailer.
They didn't want an R rated trailer 'cause it wouldn't play
on enough screens. So we kept trying, and they

(01:13:04):
wanted to emphasize, by the way,the violence of being in prison.
They wanted to be showing you ananother side of Tom Selleck.
This wasn't three men and a baby.
So we kept trying to make trailers, and the studio would
like them, and we'd submit them to the NBA and they'd say, no,

(01:13:25):
that's an R that's an R, that's an R.
Finally, we came up with just one idea.
One of our editors did. We took a piece of classical
music and we played all the violin, slow motion, and it
looked like ballet. We got APG rating and it looked
artistic. And the movie opened really
well, better than it was expected to.

(01:13:46):
Tom was a huge, bankable star atthe time, but the movie probably
opened better than it deserved to because we had created this
impression that there was something very artistic about
the movie. That's one trick.
There's many, but you often times have to use those in order

(01:14:11):
to create a want to see factor. It wasn't always the first
weekend that mattered because movies like sound and music and
I can remember a theatre when I was growing up in 69 I think it
was. Oliver and Funny Girl played at
a theatre for more than a year, and a film like Sister Act

(01:14:32):
wasn't a huge hit out-of-the-box, but word of
mouth made that really, really popular.
But it seems like that's not as desirable.
What is the big deal with the the first weekend?
Well, as the method of distribution changed from single
screen cinemas to multi screen cinemas, even though you could

(01:14:56):
book a movie into a theater or aminimum run, you couldn't
guarantee the number of screens it was going to be on if the
movie opens on the weekend. Sometimes now we see them
opening on Thursdays as opposed to Friday to try to get a jump
ahead, or a midnight showing Thursday if they've built a big

(01:15:17):
event around it. But generally speaking, by
Sunday the theater chains are deciding how many screens that
movie is going to be on the nextweek.
And so if you start losing screens in the first week,
you're toast year over and you're never going to get that
critical momentum back, which there are still some films and

(01:15:40):
there are still some studios andsome marketing executives who
are brave enough to platform a movie and start it small and try
and build word of mouth and makeit the hard ticket to get and
run the risk that they'll be able to then open it broadly.
But generally speaking, there's so much of A marketing

(01:16:01):
investment that's made for that opening weekend.
If you don't hit the number, they pull the plug on marketing
and you lose 2530% of your screens.
And when the next week box office drops 35%, you're gone.
And that's sad. With certain movies that are
quite wonderful, I can think of James and Giant Peach, that was

(01:16:24):
a film that probably didn't openbig, but I guess it was just
deemed not going to be very commercial and got virtually
nothing in the way of promotion.And it's a wonderful film.
There's quite a few like that. And well, Newsies wasn't a hit
at all, but it became a thing, So did Hocus Pocus.
I would hope that perhaps there would be a rethinking of, like

(01:16:47):
I've said on the show before, rethinking of what your assets
are, because there are other ways now.
People are telling you where they want to see things by doing
that, that maybe you can find new avenues for something and
maybe not make what you thought you were going to make.
But certainly, you know, Walt Disney did it.
Can't do this anymore, but Walt Disney did it with the reissues.

(01:17:08):
People grew up with the originalDisney films generation after
generation, even when they weren't new anymore.
With all the streaming and all the ways to promote, maybe there
are ways to solve some of this? Well, sometimes remastering is
the key, and sometimes allowing the director's cut to be shown

(01:17:28):
is a brave and interesting way to go.
Certainly, I remember seeing a remastered version of Lawrence
of Arabia when digital projection was now becoming the
thing and the picture was so spectacular that movie just
warranted going to the theater again to see it.

(01:17:52):
Instead of a mediocre slightly scratched print with inferior
audio to a full Dolby sound experience in a perfect print
with twice as many lumens on screen, It's it's a wow factor.
I still believe that there's a wow factor in theater

(01:18:13):
exhibition, and some movies really deserve their second
chance, but it's a rare executive who wants to run the
risk paying the price for remastering and bringing it back
out. There are many films that could
really benefit from one more spin through the theaters.

(01:18:36):
Yes, and also to leverage when there is a remake or a sequel.
The Flintstones, when Steven Spielberg made the first one,
they blitzed TV and McDonald's and but they had the original
series very easy to find. They didn't say the old series
is no good. Come see the new Flintstones.
This one's good. And if you like the old series,

(01:18:56):
then then you don't know nothing.
And it seems like now when there's a revival of something,
rather than leverage that enthusiasm for it and say, OK,
if you like this, you're going to really like this, like them
both, whatever you want to do, but come see the new one.
Now they disparage the original and I think that's off putting,
negative, and it doesn't seem tobe working.

(01:19:18):
It sometimes works in reverse. How do you feel about that?
Well, I completely agree. You never build enthusiasm
putting down the predecessor of what you're trying to sell.
It does not work because we all have memories, and with memory,
pictures get better most of the time.

(01:19:39):
So trying to attack memory is a bad marketing strategy.
The secret is to conjure up thatmemory, remember that
experience, have it again, only even better.
It's the theater of the mind, and playing on that is a winning
strategy. Telling you that you know the

(01:20:02):
old one really wasn't good enough.
You need to see them. They would.
I think that insults the audience.
Yeah, it's one thing to say about Clorox or Colgate
toothpaste, but when you've got a piece of art that's been
beloved and renowned, doesn't work quite the same way, no.
People don't want the new and improved.
They love what they loved and ifyou can take it to the next

(01:20:23):
level or if you can expand on itsomehow, you win.
Just like I think the second Star Wars movie was better than
the first Star Wars movie, but they certainly didn't put down
the first Star Wars movie. No, and Star Trek The Next
Generation and Superman, the movie, it wasn't George Reeves.

(01:20:44):
It was beyond George Reeves. But that means we love them both
for what they are. It doesn't mean one needs to go
away or be replaced. It's like now I have two that I
love. Exactly.
It's as we used to say, win, win, yes. 1 + 1 could sometimes
equal 3. I am so, so happy that you were
able to join us. You have these careers that are

(01:21:05):
so fascinating and you have so much knowledge.
And when you were a kid, you were paying attention.
So you have these great stories that I know everybody listening
really appreciates that you tookall this time to be with us.
So thank you so very much, Ted Echols.
You're welcome, This was fun, I enjoyed it.
I'm so glad you did and I enjoyed speaking with you and

(01:21:28):
I'm thrilled for all of you who constantly listen in and look
forward to the shows, write nicethings and subscribe and all of
those things that you do with podcast.
Most of all, I hope that in our next show that you'll be with
us. But until then, bye bye.
We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and

(01:21:48):
Barbera with Greg Airborne. Please join us again and Many
thanks for listening.