Episode 772: V.I. Warshawski (1991)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Projection Booth podcast is sponsored by Scarecrow Video. Try
out Scarecrows run by mail service juice from over one
hundred and fifty thousand films that get Blu rays, four
k's and DVDs delivered directly to your door. Visit scarecrow
dot com today.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Oh gez, folks, it's showtime.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
People say good money to see this movie.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
When they go out to a theater. They want clothed, sodas,
hot popcorn in. No monsters in the projection Booth.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Speaker 4 (00:35):
Cut it off.

Speaker 5 (01:00):
W A R.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
H A W.

Speaker 6 (01:04):
It don't look much like a private detective domain s KI.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Who are you.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
V?

Speaker 6 (01:10):
I Washawski Kathleen Turner is bi Worshawski's V stand for
virtuous and the inquisitive, looking for something.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Just because she's a.

Speaker 7 (01:23):
Woman, hardest, blown out of casual.

Speaker 5 (01:26):
Doesn't mean she's always a lady.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Into the point bonehead.

Speaker 5 (01:31):
Sorry about that, guys. You know what this is.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
It's a nutcracker.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
You know what we do with nutcrackers.

Speaker 5 (01:41):
You let it broad do this deal.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Me, I Washshawski said, V stand for my first name.
You're a funny lady, try beautiful.

Speaker 7 (01:58):
It works much better. Believe I'm hiring it to find
out who killed my dad.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Being a detective, there's no job for a girl like you.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
These guys are playing hardball. I have this feeling in
my gut.

Speaker 5 (02:09):
Woman's intuition, get old, stop case. Never underestimated.

Speaker 6 (02:15):
Woman Kathleen Turner is Worsowski's close.

Speaker 8 (02:23):
What's that you're i Q are the size of your dream?

Speaker 4 (02:27):
V I Warshowski.

Speaker 7 (02:30):
My friends call me Vick.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White.
Joining me once again is Ms Rain Alexander.

Speaker 9 (02:41):
Hey, Hey, glad to be here.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Also back in the booth is Miss Dahlias Schweitzer.

Speaker 10 (02:46):
Hi, I'm so excited to be here.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
November twenty five continues with a look at Jeff Canoes
nineteen ninety one film VR Worsshowski, based loosely on the
character created by Sarah Peretzky. The film starts Kathleen Turner
as the titular detective who gets stuck babysitting the daughter
of a man she just met and who just got
killed on her mysterious circumstances. We will be spoiling the

(03:12):
mystery of what happened to former Blackhawks player Boom Boom
and what the VII stands for as we go along.
So if we don't want anything ruined, please turn off
the podcast and come back after you've seen the movie. So, Dahalia,
when was the first time you saw Via Warshowski and
what did you think?

Speaker 10 (03:29):
I saw it when it was first released, and I
was young and naive, and I thought it was great.
I've always loved detective stories, and you know, it's so
rare to get one with the woman that I thought
it was pretty great. My opinion of the movie has
changed over time, and.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Rain, how about yourself?

Speaker 9 (03:49):
You know I also saw it when it was first released,
and it was a profound bummer. One of those films
where I think we I feel like we just walked
out silently and went to Denny's. It was underwhelming. It
was a time when I was seeing every Kathleen Turner
film sight unseen almost I feel like, and I don't know,

(04:14):
felt quite let down. And I'm not so sure that
my feelings have changed in the ensuing years.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
I did not see this when it came out. I
actually remember it opening though, because I was still working
at a movie theater when this came out, and I
remember the standee for this with apparently not Kathleen Turner's body.
Somewhere in the trivia I read whose body that actually is?
And then her head pasted on it. Yeah, this was

(04:43):
still before things like Undercover Blues, which I didn't watch.
I think I got really kind of turned off because
of War of the Roses and just how I don't know,
this sounds so weird for me to say me, of
all people, just how mean spirited that movie was. It
was okay for me the entire way through until there

(05:05):
was a implication of a dog being eaten. That was
a bridge too far. But pretty much everything else I
mean especially, I mean I was a big fan of
Kathleen Turner. I definitely went to see The Jewel of
the Nile and Romancing the Stone when those were movies
were out. I saw The Man with Two Brains. I

(05:28):
wasn't old enough to see Crimes of Passion in the
movie theater, but I definitely saw that late night on
cable and definitely enjoyed it. It made quite an impression
to a twelve year old, So yeah, that was a
big moment for me. But this one, Yeah, I didn't
see it until just a few years ago, and yeah,

(05:50):
I was kind of underwhelmed by it, and it seemed
to suffer from that thing that we get where we
decide that we have to pair up somebody, especially a
police person or a detective, with a little girl or
a little boy, and man o man, does that usually
not fly for me? And it really didn't fly for
me in this movie.

Speaker 9 (06:09):
You know, I'm a I'm a huge fan of Gloria,
both versions, but of course, you know the original film
and you know, after you've like hit that high water mark,
how can you come down from that? I know others
will compare this to like Paper Moon, sure, but it's
less of a caper film in the way that you know,
Gloria was more of a film about protecting this child

(06:31):
and like kind of taking on this role that you
were not expecting to do. And of course, you know,
there's certainly physical resemblance between General Rolands and Kathleen Turner
which would bring that Gloria idea to mind. Yeah, you know,
it's definitely got that, you know, adding Oliver to the
cast of a Brady Munch kind of vibe going on

(06:52):
in this film, and.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
What's weird is that it's solidly a rated R film.
That there are are I don't even know how many
fucks on the soundtrack, and you've got even the little
girl saying fuck a few times, like that whole are
you fucking my dad? She says, once seriously to Kathleen
Turner and once as a joke to the woman that
Jay Saunders is sleeping with. Who oh god. I looked

(07:18):
up what else she was in. She was only in
like two things, but I was fans of both of them.
It's like, okay, so we're saying, fuck, We've got some
pretty good violence in here, not terribly, you know, not
peeling back fingernails or anything like that. You know, I
just watched Drive again the other night, and it's like, okay, yeah,
that's uh. That's got some good violence with like hammers

(07:39):
and things like that. But yet you've got the little
kid in here, which feels like such a PG thirteen
thing to do. So it just feels like this movie
is like almost fighting with itself.

Speaker 10 (07:51):
I would argue that it's not so much a PG
thirteen thing to do, but a misogynistic thing to do,
because the implication is, first of all, that v I
can't solve crime on her own, that she needs a sidekick,
but that the fact that she needs a sidekick that's
a child is incredibly demeaning. And then the fact that

(08:13):
vi I is constantly preoccupied with the question of whether
or not she'd make a good mother, and then at
the end of the movie she ends up becoming a mother,
you know, and that's sort of like, oh, now that's
the you know, that's the happy ending. Now watching the film,
that and her weight are the two things that drive
me crazy.

Speaker 9 (08:33):
Yeah, that opening sequence really really drove me nuts. You know,
we're being given such a mixed message from the beginning.
This character, who you know, is you know, kind of
rough and tumble, doesn't you know, apparently doesn't care how
she smells, right, she like picks up a sweatshirt off
the ground and smells it. But then she weighs herself,

(08:56):
she goes out on a morning run, you know, like
is kind of engaging in these like you know whatever
body conscious kinds of things. And this is not to
say that American women are not full of contradictions, but like,
in the case of this, we're trying to build a
character here, and it's just conflicts from the beginning that

(09:18):
really really don't make sense and more to the point,
don't connect with who I think they're target audience should
have been, which is you know me, and I'm presuming
you tell ya.

Speaker 8 (09:31):
Well.

Speaker 10 (09:31):
I think the conflict that you're sensing is the difference
between the character as she's written in the books and
the character as she's presented in the movie. Because the
character in the books is not worried about her way,
she's worried about being fit. Somewhere in the writing process
they decided to dilute all this message. I mean, the
kid isn't in the book either, so somehow they kind

(09:55):
of inserted all these other messages into the movie that
don't work because they aren't in the original source material.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
And it's fine if a character is a slob, that's
absolutely fine. And I really didn't mind her opening up
the fridge and just like, oh, yeah, everything's gone bad
and stuff. But at the same time, it does feel
like it's undercutting her and really kind of casting judgment
on her more than if it was a Walter Matho
or something. Oh isn't that funny? But when it comes

(10:26):
to this, it's like, oh my gosh, this woman how
can she live this way? You know, it's like, yeah, relax,
but I also don't like that when she's on her
morning run. You've got those guys who and I guess
maybe this is true to life when they're like babe
alert and they all start like woofing at her and stuff.
It's like, okay, what are we doing? Which is it
going to be? And yeah, the whole thing of like

(10:48):
the motherhood and all that. I mean, we have this
whole dichotomy of her VII as the good mother and
then the I keep wanting to say stepmother, even though
she's actually the girl's biological mother, but the girl's mother
and she's basically like the evil stepmother type of character.
And meanwhile VII is like the virtuous mother. And you

(11:09):
even have the whole thing with the egg and the
little girl taking care of the egg to show like
what kind of mother is she and that she keeps
making mistakes and the egg keeps breaking. It's that whole
homech thing where you know, you get the egg and
you have to take care of it, and it's like,
of course, he just hard boiled the egg. Don't worry
about it. Just hard boil the egg. Pretend that you're good,

(11:30):
and then maybe on the last day you bring in
a replacement egg. You're good. That's all you have to do.
But like they even make that very pointed shot of
the broken egg on the dock after she runs away
from basically learning that her father has been blown up,
and it's like, Okay, yeah, I don't know what that

(11:50):
has to do with with his death, but definitely shows
how upset she is, and you know, shows that she's
also still not that great of a like the girl
a little girl, is not a good mother as well,
and it's like, is this a journey for her to
learn how to be a good mom? I don't know.
I mean, this movie just frustrates me a lot. I

(12:10):
like certain things about it, but other things just kind
of get under my skin and irk me watching.

Speaker 9 (12:15):
It through a couple of times in preparation for the podcast,
it became really clear to me that this was in
development hell, and that is where I think a lot
of this the problems are manifesting nobody's taking responsibility for it.
Doing a little research, we find out that like the

(12:36):
writer who really salvaged this ultimately doesn't even get credit
on the picture, right goes through all these iterations that
you know, I don't really get, and I mean I
don't want to be such a second wave feminist about it,
but like this really feels like some misogynist idea of
what women have to put up with, you know, So

(12:58):
the you know, being sex harassed while you're jogging, Yes,
it definitely happens. Does it happen like that? No, it's worse.
Right like those of us who have been sexually harassed,
especially when we're feeling like at our like grubbiest and
most disgusting, which happens a lot. It's not something that
you just like always brush off so easily. Right, if

(13:21):
we've had somebody who had any kind of interiority shooting that,
looking at it writing it, I think that sequence could
have had a lot more. It could have been a
lot more effectiveness. It could have landed more with the
audience is you know, And I feel like that that
idea just infiltrates the entire entire the entire film. Going

(13:43):
back to what you were saying about the moldy refrigerator,
one of the things that's so fascinating about.

Speaker 10 (13:49):
Private detectives is that the better the private detective, you
are the worse you are at life. But that there's
like this kind of direct ratio, and so the private
detective that's why he because usually it's a heat is
so often an alcoholic, a smoker, single, maybe has a

(14:10):
broken marriage, you know. I mean, it's just you can't
be good at being a detective and good at that
other stuff. So in that respect, it makes sense that
of course, you know, her clothes are going to be
on the floor, the refrigerator is going to be a disaster.
But the problem is is the movie is judging that
and because it's a woman, and the woman is supposed

(14:32):
to be a good mother or a good housewife, et cetera.
And so a woman isn't allowed to have a moldy refrigerator.
And so it's you know, if, as you said, like,
if this was a male detective, we wouldn't bat an eye,
but because it's a female, it's it's presented in this
very judgmental way.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Another detective would be out at midnight looking for cat
food for his cat, because it's very particular about the
brain of cat food that it eats. The opening of
the movie, once we get past kind of her introduction,
which by the way, reminds me a lot of the
film Jumping Jack Flash and how they set up the
Whoopee Goldberg character, even like the waking up in the

(15:11):
morning kind of thing with that start. I mean, we've
seen that in so many movies where it's like, Okay,
here's the character in the morning doing their morning routine,
and then we have her dressed to the nines in
this sausage factory with Stephen Root, and I'm just like,
this is Stephen Root the guys in one scene for
one minute, and I just kept wondering what is going

(15:32):
on here? And then luckily, you know, we have one
version of the script, one of like you said, Rain,
this was stuck in development for a long time, at
least four writers on it, one who came back at
one point, and the one that kind of stuck around
towards the end. Warren Light, who doesn't even get any
credit for this. Seems like he worked with Canoe the most.

(15:55):
And there's definitely a lot more of this whole sausage
scene inside of that. And she just kind of makes
a flip throwaway line later on as far as like
she really needs money, but she didn't want to work
for this guy, and it's like, okay, well, why even
show the scene? It just seems so superfluous because it's like,
and I don't know, maybe this is twenty twenty five

(16:17):
Mike White talking versus nineteen ninety one Mike White talking.
But I see Stephen Root show up in a movie
and I'm just like, okay, cool, I'm here for it.
What's he going to do? This is great? I'm really
looking forward to seeing. Oh he's off the screen and
we'll never see him again. I kept waiting for us
to come back to him, and like when Wayne Knight
shows up, I'm just like, Okay, well, ma, you know

(16:39):
these two heavy character actors. I'm like, maybe get Wayne
Knight earlier in the movie instead of this guy. I
don't know what's going on, but I'm just like, I
would have liked to have had him come back or
have any sort of impact on the narrative at all,
and since he doesn't, I'm just like, why do we
even have this scene? Is it just to show her
in a sausage factory, her contrapose against the background where

(17:01):
she's got her high heels and there's like a piece
of meat in front of her feet.

Speaker 10 (17:06):
It serves that purpose where it's kind of the cheap
joke and it's meant to show us that she is
a woman in a man's world and that she doesn't
belong there. You know, the detective needs to be a man,
and that there's there's this kind of conflict that's happening.
By putting this woman in high heels in the sausage factory, hahu.

Speaker 9 (17:26):
It helps set all the dick jokes that come throughout
the film, you know, because it's just this endless parade
of those. And you know the other thing that I
couldn't stop thinking about is I grew up in California,
but I grew up reading the classics as you do,
and you know, I read The Jungle like everybody else
did in high school. This was my first like exposure

(17:47):
to this idea of like Chicago and meat packing and
like all these these things that are you know, highly
identified with what Chicago is. And I feel like, you know,
listening to some of the commentary from the director, you know,
I think that he was really looking for lots of
ways to get really interesting and engaging shots, you know,
much like he was able to find a location where

(18:08):
he could see Wrigley feel from the apartment window. Right,
it feels to me like maybe this was just like
his attempt at like making something that feels Chicago e
In a way, I feel like that's a generous reading
of it. But at the same time, like I don't
understand otherwise why that scene ended up in the final cut.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
And then when I think about her, like we were saying,
she's there in her high heels and shoes. We'll talk
about this more, but shoes play such a major role
in this film. But as soon as I see her, Sorry,
this could be me just being an awful person, but
I see somebody in a factory wearing high heels, I'm like,
that's not safe. There's so many greats, so many things,

(18:50):
you know, like I've I've been to plants in my
life and the rules are very clear, like no high heels.
And I think they even talk about that in the
of this which is so completely different. And I know,
I think Jeff Canoo says like we adapted one and
a half books, and I don't know, there's a strong

(19:11):
thread of one book that goes through this. Yeah, I
don't know if there's ever a book where she gets
peered up with a little girl but the whole thing
of the shipping factory or the shipping and all that
and that again going back to that script from nineteen ninety,
I think it was that really even has more of
the shipping stuff, but even to the point of just

(19:32):
to go to the mystery at the heart of this
whole movie. She meets this guy in a bar. He
shows up at her house. What do we think in
like an hour later or is it like the next
night or something. I'm trying to even figure out the
timeline of when he shows up just unannounced at her
place with the little girl and he dumps her there

(19:57):
with uh Warshowski and then he dies, and now she
has to solve his murder. And she's basically solving the
murder for the little girl, right, She's not solving the
murder for the guy. But you go back to the book,
that's her cousin. That's her cousin that she grew up
with and knew very very well and really liked this guy,

(20:20):
her cousin Boom Boom, who worked was on the Blackhawks.
So she has a real vested interest in solving his murder.
And he's this outsider, he's not a brother to these
other shipping people. He's working for these shipping people, and
he has stumbled onto something that he shouldn't and he's

(20:40):
basically like the more amateur detective putting all of these
things together, and that's what gets him killed, as opposed
to this where it's these three brothers, and I guess
fratricide is just a lot easier than killing a stranger
in this world. So three brothers who by the way,
looked nothing alike, including the one guy who looks like
a rooster. I kept waiting for him to like sling

(21:01):
a guitar across as is, you know, chest, and start
playing something, but instead he's like this modern artist, which
just is kind of bizarre. But I mean, there's so
little left of the original Peretzky novel in here. I
think Chicago is like the biggest thing that stays true
to it.

Speaker 9 (21:20):
It's funny you talk about the brothers that don't look
anything alike when at the same time you have her
reporter friend and this black Hawk's boyfriend or one night
stand or not even one night stand, one night visitor
who basically look identical, you know, when they both show
up her farmit it's it feels like a joke to

(21:40):
me in so many ways, like this visual joke.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
They look so similar, and it just feels like such
a sitcom type of thing to have all of these
people showing up in her bathroom. It feels like this
is something that would happen on friends. And I don't
mean that as a compliment.

Speaker 10 (21:57):
No, And I think a lot of the jokes are
very sick.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, the whole thing of her going into this bar,
the Golden Glow Bar, and I was glad to find
out that that was actually shot at the Green Mill
because I have a friend who's worked at the Green
Mill forever. And if you look at pictures of the
Green Mill and you look at the Golden Glow, they
just pretty much changed the neon of the name and
everything else is the same. But she goes in and

(22:23):
talks with her favorite bartender slash friend, I imagine, and
the bartender's got food for her. She's like, hey, have
some of this, but v I is not happy with that.
She wants the box and we find out that inside
of the box is this pair of red bedazzled shoes.
Puts on the shoes, She's just like, oh, good shoes

(22:44):
make everything better. As a man, I'm not sure about that.
Do you guys just like love putting on new shoes?
Is it? Can either of you explain this one to me?

Speaker 10 (22:57):
I think it's about being sexy.

Speaker 9 (22:59):
I'm shoe conscious, I'm shoe forward. I've loved I love
a good shoe. It's not necessarily always I mean, there's
utility to it. But who wouldn't love a new pair
of shoes? But I feel like one of the things
that I feel like, I mean, and I have not
read the novels myself, so I can't really speak to
that experience. But this is a character quirk of the

(23:23):
I Worshowski. It seems strange to me that it was
be fixated on a single pair of shoes. In the
scope of this bill, I feel like I would want
to see more of it. It doesn't necessarily need to
go into like Emmel de Marco's territory, but as somebody
who's got too many shoes for my own good and

(23:44):
you know, not always a lot of money to like
justify that expense, I feel like we should have seen
a little bit more of that to make it feel authentic,
to just even the delivery of that line. Nothing beats
some good pair of shoes, whatever that line happens to be.

Speaker 10 (24:01):
I always thought that she was putting on those shoes
in order to pick up a guy, and that's why
the shoes lived at the bar.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
That makes sense because as it is, it's like, why
does the bartender have a box basically looks like it's
gift wrapped, but why does she have a box under
the bar at all times? For me, I did to
have so Yeah, and then she does use those shoes
literally to pick up that guy because she sticks out

(24:30):
her leg and hits him, hits his leg and shoe
pops off, And we get that joke later on too,
where she gets accosted by these two thugs, two care
directors who I mostly well, I love Lee Arenberg and
he was fantastic and freaked, but I love him especially
and the other guy from Seinfeld. So this is like

(24:50):
this Seinfeld is on the air at this point, I
think are just about to be on the air. So
there's like between those two and then Wayne Knight. This
is such a time capsule of like early nineties sitcoms
like with them and then what Stephen Root was on
What News Radio? At this point, I think I'm turning
this in like the Root cast here, I'm just like,

(25:11):
let's talk more about Stephen Root. She has that whole
thing about you know, oh, you didn't pick up my shoe,
and luckily who is it? One of her friends gives
it back to her. Because she's got this like friend
group between like the older woman doctor who takes care
of her. She's got Jay Saunders, who's a reporter who

(25:31):
I guess they sleep together. Maybe they used to be
a couple, but she does talk about how she catches
him cheating and things, and she pretty much just knows
that he's a dog and knows how to control this
dog too. The whole thing where she calls and leaves
a message, you know, don't do this, don't report about
this thing, this thing and this thing, and then the

(25:51):
next morning they're in the morning paper. I mean, you
would think maybe she would pretend to be mad at
him at least, but yeah, this whole idea of like
she knows everything about this guy, can can control him perfectly.
And I love Jay Saunders by the way. Every time
he shows up and stuff, he's great. I always associate
him with well another Wayne Knight film, JFK. I alwayo

(26:13):
associate him working with Kevin Costner in that one, and
to see him and Michael Rooker. I would love if
they had been like detective partners in a movie at
some point.

Speaker 9 (26:24):
I mean, I feel like the cast all through does
great work, you know, with what they've what they've got.
I can't really complain about any of the performances except
for the fact that most people aren't given enough to
do most or not, you know, I mean, the Stephen
Root probably being the most glaring example of just being

(26:45):
left I guess on the cutting room floor. So it's
really not really not the fault of the actors, like
I really really come down on. I think this is
this is a script problem at its root.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
And it's Stephen Root. I think the movie looks decent.
I think it's shot pretty well. I do like when
they're making out and you see how they I think
canoes using very long lens there, so they're very much
in focus and you've got the lights behind them all
out of focus. And hearing him on the audio commentary,
it was very interesting to hear just how much of

(27:18):
this movie was shot in Chicago versus shot in California,
and a lot of those times. They blend those sequences
in those shots very very well, to the point where
I actually thought this whole thing had been shot in Chicago.

Speaker 10 (27:32):
I also thought the whole thing had been shot in Chicago,
so I was surprised on that commentary where he's talking
about like, oh, that's actually in Pasadena, because I had
no idea. But I also thought it was interesting going
back to your comment about the long lenses where he
makes a really interesting comment where he says that he
likes to shoot with long lenses because some of those

(27:54):
shots would be boring with the regular fifty millimeter lens,
And I was kind of like, oh, that explains why
they're so many long shots in the movie. He's very
fond of them.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
And he does have a good eye for casting. I mean,
I like, like we said, great performances, even some of
the smaller performances like her Landlord or you know, just
even like people on the street kind of thing, the
lawyer or the banker. I love that story on the
commentary about how Disney wanted him to reshoot the whole
thing with the banker, the one who helps her with

(28:26):
the and I don't know why he's okay pulling up
somebody else's bank account information. You would think that that
would not be good because they're already giving the little
girl trouble depositing a check for somebody else. Which if
somebody wants to deposit a check in my account, feel free,
that's absolutely fine. I don't know if I can like
turn off that safety feature, feel free to just deposit

(28:47):
whatever money you want into my account. But we've got
that security. But then later on she's like, oh, hey,
here's this account number, and he just pulls up and
turns the thing around, is like, oh, here you go.
Look at all of these stumps. Oh my little girl,
you sure have a lot of withdrawn checks. And you know, however,

(29:08):
many I think when they say like billions of dollars
in death kind of thing. So it's like, wow, but
you're fine just showing that to anybody. I'm not trying
to like cinema sens this movie or anything, but you know,
I like a really well drawn detective story, and there
are just so many little pieces in here. I'm like, oh, yeah,

(29:28):
that could have been better, that could have been tighter.
And I want to like this movie because I do
like so many of the people in it. I do
find the story to be fairly interesting. I just wish
the mystery had been a little bit more to it,
a little bit extra than where it is, because it
doesn't feel it doesn't even feel like that much of

(29:50):
a mystery at the end, because when you see that
little rooster guy and you see the mom you're like, oh, well,
these people aren't very nice people at all, and then
they end up basically like screening each other over and
they're the bad guys. I'm like, Okay, shocker.

Speaker 10 (30:06):
Not really, it's just so badly written that it kind
of transcends many different problems, you know. So it's badly
written in terms of the misogyny, but it's also badly
written in terms of these kind of sloppy moments where
you're like, that doesn't make any sense. And I also
desperately want to like the movie because there's so few

(30:28):
female Private Eye films. They just they had to mess
it up.

Speaker 9 (30:32):
And I don't know why.

Speaker 10 (30:33):
I don't know why they couldn't just have been more
authentic to the book.

Speaker 9 (30:37):
I mean, when we talked about tank Girl, Mike, you know,
months ago. This is something where clearly the studio is
coming in and messing with something and the scripts or floundering,
and what we end up with is, you know, a
film that arguably could have really become its own franchise,
but because of how bad they fuck it up, you know,

(31:01):
it ends up being a proof that, like, you know,
the film isn't ever going to work. We could never
have a franchise like that. Nobody's ever going to want
to watch a female Private Eye film franchise because this
movie was you know, not you know, not what it
could have been. And you know, and I think another
thing that is not to be overlooked is that this

(31:23):
film came out like the same summer that Thelman Louise did.
And this was something that was really part of my own,
like my own visceral reaction to this is that I
went to see Thelma and Louise and came out just
riding high and ready to just to like fucking destroy everything,
you know, And like, you know, I just graduated college

(31:45):
and I was like, now what am I going to do?

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Now?

Speaker 9 (31:48):
What am I gonna up to? It felt like maybe
this would be this would be carrying on that energy,
and it just was not able to do that right.
It was going to be the sad drawn Bone film
after you see something like them and Louise.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
I mean, at least they carried on with Kathleen Turner.
She reads the I don't know if they're dramatizations or
if she is just reading the books, but there was
I want to say, a BBC audio series of her
as VII Worshowski. So that's cool that that continued on
in that vein, because I think she really did connect

(32:23):
with that character. And at least that way, if we
don't have to look at her puffy face, Oh my god,
it's like, come on, guys.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
You know.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
Apparently Disney was all up in arms too, because she
was what just getting on some medication for some rheumatoried
arthritis that she had and like occasionally looked puffy. It's like, man,
oh man, if I looked half as good, a tenth,
a hundred as good as she looks in this movie,
she looks amazing to me. And I've always just found
her to be so charming and just so compelling as

(32:55):
a person. I mean, especially you know, like when she
is the FM fatal in body Heat. But no matter
what she's doing, you know, Joan in those jewel denile
and romancing the Stone movies. She's wonderful in that, and yeah,
I just I really, which is funny because when I
think about it, I'm like thinking of other female protagonists

(33:18):
over the last few years, and I just popped onto that.
What was that movie with Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam
Rockwell where she was a mystery writer very much like
Joan was in Romancing the Stone, and then she gets
thrown into a real life adventure very much like Joan.
It's like, I didn't realize that that movie was kind

(33:39):
of a remake of Romancing the Stone until just right now.
It was named after a cat and I can't remember
what the cat's name was, our Gyle, our Gyle. But
another movie that just you know, women can't open a movie,
remember where we had that whole thing going for a while. Women,
you just can't have a woman led film or woman
directed film. You look at the examples quote unquote examples

(34:03):
that were given and it's like, oh, look at what
a mess Chloe's ou made of the Eternals. It's like,
I'm sorry, but the eternals were a fucking mess before
anybody showed up to direct that thing.

Speaker 10 (34:15):
Think about how good the movie would have been. If
they had just stayed more authentic to the book.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
And the book goes to a lot of interesting places.
As somebody who lives around the Great Lakes, I was
really intrigued. She goes all the way up to Thunder
Bay in Lake Superior, and there's this whole thing of
you know, what's on these boats and what's being shipped,
And it taught me more about the shipping life than
I ever would have known otherwise. And yeah, I found

(34:42):
it really interesting. I thought that the Peretsky book was
fantastic and it makes me want to read or listen
to a lot more. I listened to the audiobook and
the narrator of it did a fantastic job, and just yeah,
Pareski's pros was really compelling. And I was like, like
you were saying, this could have been a franchise. We
could have had like a whole series of these, but instead,

(35:04):
I know there's other female detectives that are out there
where it's like, please, can somebody bring some of these
ladies to the screen, like some of those what the
Sue Grafton books, some of those things. It's like, yeah,
come on, Laura Litman. Yeah, there's tons of great female
detectives and nope, they just get passed by in favor
of the male ones.

Speaker 10 (35:25):
I mean this movie, I show it in my class
when I do my private detective class, and I use
it as an example of like a failure, you know,
and we talk about why it is a failure and why.

Speaker 11 (35:38):
It is it's like seemingly so impossible to have a
movie with the female private eye where it works, you know,
and that there are all these examples where it doesn't,
and it doesn't work because these things keep getting in
the way, they keep kind of poking holes in its possibilities.
Like I don't know if you ever saw the TV
show The Catch, but it's all also sort of similarly

(36:02):
positioned as it's just a big mess because it's trying
to do these female private eyes. And for instance, going
back to what you were saying about the shoes and
the sausage factory, where you were saying, like, you know,
why is she wearing those shoes? In the Catch, the
female private eyes are wearing like these stilettos, and it's like,
really a private eye is gonna wear stilettos, you know,

(36:23):
as they're like supposedly tailing someone or like, you know,
running behind some bushes or whatever. But it's Yeah, for
some reason, Hollywood cannot figure out how to do an
effective female private eye.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, you get her showing up at the crime scene
wearing that incredible dress because of the little girl took
the dress, and then she's wearing a robe, so she
ends up putting the dress on in the back of
the taxi and then you've got the taxi driver leering
at her and she shows I don't know why she
still has the robot over the dress, but yeah, dressed

(36:57):
to the nines at this crime scene. That's where we're
introduced to Charles Derney. It's funny we're going to be
talking about him again in two weeks when we talk
about the film Cop. But he you know, I'm sure
one thing that you talk about in your private diet
class is the whole relationship between detectives and police. What's
that relationship like? And sometimes it's uneasy, sometimes it's very friendly.

(37:20):
This one, I mean, Dirning is basically her surguate father,
which I don't tend to get with most detectives. It
feels more like a friendship or a rivalry, but not
a father daughter relationship.

Speaker 10 (37:32):
No, it's generally antagonistic, you know, and the cops are
usually portrayed as you know, incompetent, dumb, slow whatever. They
get in the way of the private detective, who's really
better at solving the case.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
He's more concerned just about her welfare, which is nice,
but at the same time, it doesn't fit with the mold,
and I would kind of like it to be more
of the mold and be more antiquistic. And I want
to say again, sorry to sound like a broken record,
but going back to the book, I believe it is
very antagonistic, and it's like, yeah, I mean so many
times Private Eye and movies are former police officers that

(38:14):
wanted to branch out on their own, that couldn't play
by the rules, or you know, just somebody up and
coming that cannot get along with the police and who, yeah,
either there in the way or like you said, the
police are in the way. And the police are always
the ones that come in and they want to make
snap decisions and say this is how it happened. And

(38:34):
the detective is always the one that wants to dig deeper,
wants to find out what's really going on, and isn't
happy with pat answers. A lot of times, the detective
will blow up their own case if they find out
that they've been wrong.

Speaker 9 (38:46):
What's to stop somebody from making a good version of this?

Speaker 10 (38:49):
Right, hypothetically, it should be possible.

Speaker 1 (38:53):
I'm honestly surprised nobody's done it for television because I
could see this being a long form TV thing, just
like a you know, Reacher Reacher, the first Reacher movie
I liked a lot, even though it was completely miscast
with Tom Cruise. They should have called it something else
other than Jack Reacher. The guy who's playing him now
on TV on Prime, he's built for the part, and

(39:18):
he's fantastic, And I love watching that show, and I
love they're using long form TV to tell us a
very intricate detective story and even making nods back to
the former quote unquote books, the former seasons. I really
like that, And I could really see a v I
Worshowski having her whole series of adventures. Why not, you know,

(39:42):
cast somebody really strong in that role, somebody that's very compelling,
like Kathleen Turner. Let's see it today.

Speaker 10 (39:50):
Yeah, you'd think it would be so easy.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
It's not like good mysteries go out of style.

Speaker 10 (39:55):
No, there's something about having the female detective, like it's
it's okay when she's very young and she's very old, right,
so we could have like the Angela Lansbury murder, she wrote,
that's totally fine. We can have the Veronica Mars Nancy Drew,
That's totally fine. But when she's middle aged, it's like
it doesn't work.

Speaker 9 (40:16):
It's right, can be doing detective work during your prime
maternal years, exactly, your child very years.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
No, you're right. As soon as you said that, I
was like, oh, miss Marple, okay, yeah.

Speaker 10 (40:27):
Yeah, the cozy mysteries with the old ladies, like, that's
totally fine.

Speaker 9 (40:31):
Yeah, are you ovulating? You obviously cannot solve the mystery.

Speaker 10 (40:37):
It's like confounding because you think, you know, we clearly
love mysteries. They crank out so many a year, But
yet the closest I've been able to get is like
Jessica Jones, which isn't totally accurate.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
I mean, even when you look at Maddie on Moonlighting,
I mean she just takes such a backseat to David Addison,
and then he's always the one connecting those stories together.
She takes a back seat She's very much like Missus
King from Scarecrow Missus King or even Remington Steele. I
mean Remington Steele a fictional character created by the woman

(41:15):
running this detective agency because no one will hire a
woman detective, so she has to make up this character.
And in walks Pierce Brosnan and he just assumes that
role as a complete con artist basically, And that's the
whole show, which is just a bizarre.

Speaker 10 (41:32):
Premise, Yeah, where she keeps doing all the work and
he keeps getting all the credit because everybody assumes that
you know, she's the secretary.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
And meanwhile she's the power behind the throne.

Speaker 10 (41:44):
No, Remington Steele is I think was really ahead of
its time. It's a brilliant show. That one of the
international titles for the movie was v I Warshawski Colon
Detective and High Heels, which I think kind of says
everything you need to know.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
Well, the ad campaign, what was it? What was the
ad campaign for this? Because it also talked about high heels,
long legs kind of thing. I mean you have the poster,
the poster, yeah, with just her legs and playing off
of the V and the W and the shape of
her legs. Yeah, I mean that whole poster, the big
w behind her and her legs formed the bottom part

(42:22):
of it.

Speaker 9 (42:23):
Yeah, where in the evolution of the movie poster between
a woman's legs is this? Because there's a long history
of it, but I'm not entirely sure when that really
began in earnest and this is certainly one of the
more iconic examples of that trope.

Speaker 10 (42:41):
I think it's interesting also to talk about her name
and the fact that she deliberately tries to downplay her
gender by going by v I, and that when she's
called Vicki, for instance, it's usually done in this very
patronizing sort of way, you know, which again speaks to
it's kind of like with the Remington steal, where she's
aware of the fact that she can't be too feminine,

(43:03):
or at least, you know, her name can't be too feminine,
because they will deter potential clients.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
Well, yeah, she has that whole thing that she even
tells the little Girl about. You know, That's why I
use my initials, is that people can't condescend to you
if they don't know your first name, or it's harder
to you know, they have to call her mis Worshovski,
and you've got the whole thing of the little girl
being there basically. So that and I know there was

(43:29):
talk at one point of there being a voiceover for
this because the books are narrated by Vi Worshovski. The
movie they were talking about having it narrated, and then
Disney changed their mind and said no, no, no narration,
And then they said, oh, you know what, let's have narration.
And by that time, Kathleen Turner's like, you know what,
fuck you, because she was really the force behind this,

(43:50):
Like she's the one who put together this package. You know,
It's like she interviewed Canoe. I'm sure that she had
a hand in picking the writers. She was very into this,
and I really wanted her to succeed, you know, like,
especially at this point in her career. I think her
having a series would have just really put a fine

(44:12):
point on just what a great actress she is. And
it says she keeps ending up in shitty other stuff.
You know, It's like after this movie, I don't know.
I mean, of course I love Dumb and Dumber two,
but I'm trying to think of other stuff that she
did after this, where she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that
was a great thing. Well, I guess serial one, serial
Mom came curial mom, does it? Yes, So yeah, I think.

Speaker 9 (44:32):
There were a couple of things, but yeah, but by
and large you're right. But I think, you know, dealing
with her health issues and the ways that that would
be translating to a camera or a certain burden that
she was having to bear.

Speaker 10 (44:46):
I think the voiceover thing is really symbolic of the
problems with the movie, where you know, if they had
stayed true to the book, she would have had a voiceover,
but for whatever was in Disney didn't want to allow
to have a voiceover. And the voiceover is what gives
the character agency because the voiceover is the person who's

(45:08):
guiding you through the movie. And so you know, Veronica Mars,
for instance, has a voiceover. I mean many Private Eye
and Noir films have voiceovers. It's part of the whole
genre style. And so the fact that they said that
she couldn't have a voiceover is really like taking away
her voice. It's really emasculating her. And then obviously they

(45:30):
realized that they had messed up, but it was too late.
But I was I thought it was really interesting that
they had they because they didn't. They didn't explain why
they didn't give her a voiceover, but they just they
didn't want to give her a voiceover. And I feel
like that movie is supposed to have a voiceover, because
those kinds of movies are supposed to have a voiceover.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
I don't think the voiceover would have played well though,
with all of the advice she's giving to the little girl,
because that's basically her voiceover, that's her inner monologue, like
telling her like, oh, you know rule number one of detecting,
do this, rule number two. Do this. It's like that
would have worked so much better as a voiceover, And

(46:11):
had we not had that kid there, I just really
had problems with having this little girl there and just
kind of glombing onto stuff and being that you know,
little miss Marker type character where you're just like, okay, yeah,
here she goes. She's gonna start crying. And I don't
blame the actress and stuff, but there are a few times.
There's one major scene where she like kind of breaks down,

(46:33):
father's dead, all this kind of stuff, and I just
feel like, oh, this is the Oscar moment, you know,
this is what they're going to play at the Academy
Awards when they're just like and nominated for vi I Warshawski,
this actress, and then you know, like they play this
clip and she's just tearing up and stuff. It was
just a little much for me at times. And again

(46:54):
that could just be you know, nineteen ninety one, I
might have been fine with it, but in twenty twenty
five and I'm just like, okay, can we end up
seeing pretty soon? This is getting to be a little
long in the tooth.

Speaker 10 (47:05):
Well, that's what's so funny about when you were asking
me at the beginning of our conversation about whether I
liked the movie when it came out, and I did
like the movie because I didn't really know any better,
And now watching it with you know, sort of our
twenty twenty five perspective, it's just like you want to
put your head in your hand and go, oh my god.
You know, just like one thing after the next is

(47:27):
just so demeaning. You kind of wonder why if this
was Kathleen Turner's project, she went along with it all
and didn't have more of a role in sort of,
I don't know, making the script better.

Speaker 9 (47:40):
Yeah, it's a mystery.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
It is a mystery that's the bigger mystery than the
mystery in the movie. All right, we're going to take
a break and we'll be back with a whole slew
of interviews. First up, you're going to hear from the
creator of Via Warshowsky, yourself, Sarah Peritzky. After that, we'll
hear from screenwriters David Aaron Cohen and Nick feel After
that we'll hear from director Jeff Canoe, and last but

(48:04):
not least, we'll hear from the final writer on Via Worshowski,
Warren Light. And we'll be back with all of that
right after these brief messages.

Speaker 5 (48:14):
Welcome to highst Club.

Speaker 12 (48:15):
Where we lay out the blueprints for some of the strangest, boldest,
and most unbelievable robberies of all time.

Speaker 13 (48:20):
For mysteries unsolved to flawle plans to split second mistakes.

Speaker 12 (48:24):
Like the nineteen million dollar Last Job pulled off by
London's very own version of the Expendables.

Speaker 13 (48:29):
Or the robbery that made the Mono Leasa the most
famous painting in the world, like the Thomas crime Affair
said in nineteen eleven Paris.

Speaker 12 (48:35):
But also less sophisticated and no Pierce Broston.

Speaker 13 (48:40):
Sorry Todd. We cover bank jobs, art lifts, diamond scores,
all the stuff Danny Ocean's crew be jealous of.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
I'm Todd and I'm Jesse.

Speaker 12 (48:49):
Welcome to hight Club, Real Life Keepers, the Inspired Movies,
Mysteries and Time in Prison.

Speaker 13 (48:54):
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 (48:58):
And follow us at hight Club on all your social
media apps, including letterboxed.

Speaker 13 (49:03):
Tell us about your favorite heists, what you would have
done hypothetically, of course, listen in and join the club.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
Looking for something superior to streaming a place with more
than five times a selection available on all streaming services combined.
Check out Scarecrow Videos rent by mail service. Select from
an unparalleled collection of over one hundred and fifty thousand
films and get Blu rays, four k's and DVDs delivered
directly to your door. Get in on it now at

(49:32):
scarecrow dot com and rediscover the wonders of physical media.
All right, welcome to the interview portion of the show.
First up, we're going to hear from the creator of
vi I Warshawski, Sarah Peretsky. Can you tell me a
little bit about you growing up and becoming a writer.
How did you decide to endeavor in that pursuit.

Speaker 7 (49:52):
I grew up writing. I never imagine myself as a writer,
writing things that other people wanted to read, but every
one I I have four brothers, one older, three younger,
and we all grew up.

Speaker 8 (50:04):
My mother was a.

Speaker 7 (50:05):
Great reader, great storyteller. My mother was a way better
storyteller than I am. She used to tell this serial,
this long serial about a sheriff in Colorado who he
had two children, Sarah and Dan, me and my next brother,
who were always disappearing, finding themselves lost in silver mines

(50:28):
or something. And each week as she was ironing, she'd
have a new episode on this thriller that she'd just
make up on her feet. I've never been that clever.
She was a fantastic storyteller, and then became a children's
librarian and she was just adored by every child in Lawrence, Kansas.
So that's where I learned just the sheer joy of stories.

(50:53):
But I never imagined myself as a published writer. That
sort of just evolved with time.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
What were some of your earlier stories and books like?
I know you definitely wrote some nonfiction when you were
going to college.

Speaker 7 (51:09):
When I was wo how old it wasn't in nineteen seventy,
I was twenty two, twenty three. I thought I could
get a job in the writing world in New York.
I thought some magazine would love to hire me. And
my portfolio were all my history papers, because I was
doing a PhD in American history. I don't know, I

(51:30):
don't know if it was ignorant or arrogance, but of
course no one wanted to talk to me. I didn't
have a sponsor. I knew not one person in the
New York writing world. And I finally ended up getting
a job as a secretary, and then I came back
to Chicago because it was just easier to live in
Chicago than in New York. But as a person just

(51:53):
writing for myself, writing stories, really fairy tales when I
was young, and then in my teens when I really
got engaged by crime novels, crime fiction. Then I started
writing my own crime short stories. And then in my
twenties Bad Love Affair. I would write a story just

(52:18):
absolutely evisceraating the disgusting human being who had abandoned me,
so revenge story. But all the time I was reading
crime fiction, and especially when I started reading American noir
fiction Raymond Chandler, dash Ol Hammett, the great Golden Age

(52:39):
of noir fiction in America, and saw the way that
women were depicted, and a woman was almost always going
to be the main bad person in a Chandler novel,
and she was going to use her body like bridget
O'Shaughnessy and Hammett's Maltese Fall Country, was going to use
her body to get good boys to do bad things,

(53:02):
and she was going to get her come up, because
no bad woman could be as strong as a stalwart hero.
And I wanted to create a woman who turned the
tables on that kind of image of women. I was
working by then in financial services, industry, insurance and so on,

(53:23):
and I.

Speaker 8 (53:24):
Wanted a woman.

Speaker 7 (53:25):
Who reflected the experience of my women friends, my co
workers and mine. Where we were doing a job, We
were getting the job done, We were getting paid less
sixty percent of what the men around us were getting paid.

Speaker 8 (53:41):
Believe me, we did not use our bodies to.

Speaker 7 (53:43):
Do anything except go home, take off our high heels
at the end of the day in soaked and epsom salts.
So I wanted a woman detective who reflected the real
experience that I and my friends were having. And it
took me years for VII to come to me. I
kept trying to write what I see now was just

(54:04):
a parody of Chandler with I had a detective name
Minerva Daniels who was so hard boiled she makes v
I look like a puppy. I know I've said this
a number of times in other places, but this really happened.
I worked for a guy who was just a total
horrible person. His only good quality was that he was

(54:26):
as horrible to the men who worked for him as
he was to the women. It was just an all
round jerk. It was Chicago, it was October. The trees
in Grant Park had lost their leaves. And for anyone
who's watching this, who's been in Chicago at all, there's
a red building across the street from the Art Institute,

(54:48):
the CNA Insurance building. We were up on the thirty
sixth floor looking down at Grant Park. Everything was dead.
My lips were saying, gosh, Fred, heck of an idea,
and the over my head was saying you unspeakable, unprintable, unthinkable,
turkey bird, And really literally my detective came to me

(55:10):
in that moment. So seven or eight years of writing
a few pages here and there, I thought, oh God, no,
she's me and my friends. Only she says what's in
the thought balloon because she doesn't care if someone fires her.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
Yeah. I was curious how much of v I was
in you and you were in her, But sounds like
pretty close.

Speaker 7 (55:29):
I think the thoughts and she talks the thoughts. I
think as time has passed, I've become less inhibited in
what I might say in public. But v I she's
my version of just being fearless and willing to live
with the consequences of being outspoken. And whereas I sometimes

(55:53):
will retreat and think, oh I don't have to say
that in public, I can have v I say it
for me.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
So what was that first novel? What was that first
experience like? Just finding her and being able to have
her explore that world for you.

Speaker 7 (56:10):
It was wonderful in some ways, and yet it also
set the pattern for how I write, which is with
a lot of self doubt, backtracking. I wrote about seventy
pages and thought, I don't know what I'm doing and
I can't make this happen. And then a coworker showed

(56:30):
me that Stuart Kaminsky of Blessed Memory. He was a
crime writer, but he also taught at Northwestern University, Radio,
TV Film. He was teaching a class writing detective fiction
for publication in the Northwestern Night School. So every I
can't remember Tuesday night, I think it doesn't matter what

(56:51):
day of the week. I drove the twenty miles up
to the Northwestern campus and Stu was just immensely supportive,
really liked the idea of the character. I was copying
all these tropes from the thirties and forties because because
I really didn't have confidence that I could forge my
own path, and he explained how outdated they were, that

(57:14):
it would date my work, and so he just gave
me the encouragement I needed to make VII bolder, more contemporary,
and bring her to the finish line. Also, the most
generous additional thing he did was to send my manuscript
to his agent, Dominic Abel, who's been my agent ever since,

(57:39):
and Dominic Dominic liked the book, but he said she
needs flaws. I'd made her too perfect. So I gave
her my flaws, which is a short temper, short fused temper,
and a lack of interest in housekeeping. The first book,
Indemnity Only, she was not as fully formed as she

(58:00):
became with time. So other flaws have emerged as time
has passed. But man, I was so lucky to be
writing when I was, back when there were a lot
of publishers, because I got forty rejection letters before dial
Press agreed to buy the book. And my favorite rejection letter,

(58:24):
I think it was from Simon and Schuster. But all
my papers are now at the Newberry Library. I'd have
to go into their archive and look through and say,
who was it who wrote this? And they said, of
a book set in Chicago had regional interest only, and
not enough people read in the Upper Midwest to make
it worth our while to publish a book set there.

Speaker 1 (58:46):
Wow, just insult for all of us.

Speaker 5 (58:49):
That's right, I know.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Did you know pretty much right off that you were
going to stick with her as your character and build
more of this world around her?

Speaker 7 (59:00):
No, I thought one and done. I wanted to show
that what a woman could do as an independent investigator,
that what a woman who was on her own could do,
that she didn't need to be rescued. And I look
at how I lose my life, and I think I
am stupid, I am naive, and I must also be

(59:20):
arrogant because I thought the only reason that people are
writing about women the way they are is because they
just haven't thought it through. Now they'll see v I
and they'll think, Oh, we didn't get it. Now we do,
and that will change.

Speaker 14 (59:34):
I'm like, ah, Sarah, you are such an idiot. I
had other ideas, other stories I wanted to tell, which
mercifully Dominic persuaded me not to. When I look back
at the proposals I sent them, I was like, oh, no,
talking about things that are just as well never.

Speaker 7 (59:55):
Saw the light of the day. But he also said
that he thought I should write at least three books
about her to establish her. And then three became suddenly
twenty two.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
I know, like when John D. MacDonald wrote his Travis
McKee books, he wrote three just to get the feel
for him. So I was curious, if you did the
same with VI. It sounds somewhat similar.

Speaker 7 (01:00:19):
It was, And then she developed a following. At the
same time as I was seeing her in a fuller way.
I was a marketing manager for CNA Insurance in Chicago,
and I was on the road a lot. It was
the early days of automation when we were trying to

(01:00:41):
persuade our See God, I was such a corporate player.
I still say we and I've been away from that
company for almost fifty years, but almost forty years anyway,
we were trying to persuade our agency force to automate.
And I don't know if you're old to remember the
IBM desktop computers, but we were offering those as special deals.

(01:01:06):
And then I started having more responsibility. I was on
the road two weeks a month. A year went by
where I didn't have time or energy to write. After
three books, I thought, Okay, it's now or never, and
I quit my day job. And I was just lucky
in how my career evolved that and lucky that I

(01:01:28):
was married to a really wonderful person who wanted me
to thrive and flourish in my creative work. The fact
that the money was less did not bother him for
one second, which was also a wonderful gift, one of
many that I had from him over the forty seven

(01:01:49):
years we were together.

Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
I'm reading Deadlock right now. How much research did you
have to do on shipping just to write that book?

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (01:01:58):
Tons and Courtney, my husband. He had been in the
Royal Navy during the Second World War, but he was
a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. But
he always loved ships and shipping, and so we would
take many years. We took our vacation driving up through

(01:02:19):
Macina past the sew Locks and then around like Superior
and back home. So we're standing at the sew locks
and Courtney said, I wonder what would happen if you
blew up a ship in one of those locks. So
I went. When we got home, I started doing the
research into Great Lakes shipping and created a story that

(01:02:40):
would involve blowing up a ship in the locks. And
then it was clear that it would be really good
if I actually had some experience with one of those freighters.
So I started calling the companies in Chicago that I
knew shipped on the Lakes, and they all just paid

(01:03:00):
basically hung up on me. But we were at the
Sioux on vacation, and I started writing down the names
of the shipping companies which are on the hull of
the ship, and Canada Este the ship, which I learned
later was the biggest shipper on the Great Lakes. I
called them their head office in Montreal, and the guy

(01:03:23):
I was transferred to this is nineteen eighty two eighty three.
I had a pay phone outside the Sioux Locks a
guy who answered the phone Friday afternoon. He said, do
you want to sail for a day, a week, a
month or a year? And I had a week of
vacation left at the insurance company, and I said a week.

(01:03:46):
And he said call me back tomorrow morning, Saturday morning.
And I called back and he said, be at Peer
whatever number it was, in thunder Bay, which is the
westernmost port on Lake Superior, at eight o'clock Monday morning,
and the master of the J. W. McGiffin will be
ready to let you board and sail with them. So

(01:04:09):
we drove Courtney with our golden retriever at the time,
drove like maniacs the six hundred miles around to thunder Bay.
Then he said goodbye to me and drove back to
pick me up at Nira Falls. And I had no
idea what to expect, but I was expecting because we

(01:04:31):
toured these ships at the museum in sus Saint Marie.
He was expecting a hammock in a dark cubbyhold.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
No.

Speaker 7 (01:04:40):
I had a suite of three rooms. I was in
the stateroom. I was an honored guest who ate at
the captain's table. And this was September.

Speaker 8 (01:04:49):
They sailed.

Speaker 7 (01:04:50):
I don't know what it's like now, but they sailed
basically from when the ice breaks up in April until
the ice freezes. So they sailed seven days a week,
and all their leave is in that chunk of months.
And it got when the locks are frozen solid. They
were so sick of each other's company. I didn't have

(01:05:10):
to ask any questions. Everyone was eager to have some
new person to tell all their stories too. And I
got to go down into the hold and see the
giant boilers and pistons and everything. And then I'm thinking,
the last person to be in that stateroom was the
head of the Canada Green Board and basically high ranking

(01:05:34):
people and shipping and green and so on. And I'm thinking,
I have six hundred dollars in my bank account. Can
I check long enough to I have no idea what
this will cost. And finally, the last morning, when we
were getting before we were docking at the Wellham Canal,
which raises the ships up to the Saint Laurent seaway.

(01:05:57):
I said, nobody has said anything as awkward as money,
but I don't know what the charges for sailing with you.
And the master said, oh, we can't charge you. Then
we'd have to advertise as a passenger ship.

Speaker 8 (01:06:12):
And I was like, WHOA.

Speaker 7 (01:06:13):
But I think one of the most beautiful moments that
I was able to experience in my whole life was
at midnight in the middle of Lake Superior, on the
very front the bow of the ship. You don't hear
the engines seven one hundred and fifty feet behind you,

(01:06:34):
and you're just there and the water as iridescent in
the moonlight, and it's so peaceful and beautiful. It was magical,
and that memory, all these many years later stays with me.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
I love the way that you described that in the book,
talking about the way that an ink blood a black
ink blot will separate into its colors, and just, yeah,
that sounded beautiful.

Speaker 7 (01:06:58):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
Once you left the insurance company and we're able to
write full time, what kind of routine did you come
up with and do you stick to that today?

Speaker 7 (01:07:08):
I'm not as disciplined, I'm sad to say, as I was,
but I was so worried about not being able to
do it that the morning after my first morning away
from the company, I got up. I did not put
on pantygovers. But other than that, I've had my routine
established breakfast exercises.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
I have a.

Speaker 7 (01:07:31):
Chronic back problem that's gotten worse with time. So I'm
religious about not bodybuilding, but you know what I need
to do to keep it in check. And then in
those days, it was just the earliest days with computers,
and it wasn't until never mind all the history of computers,

(01:07:53):
but every vendor had their own one. They thought that
the future was in the machine. They didn't realize the
future was in the software. I had a little Hewlett
Packard with fourteen megabytes of memory, and that was I
sat there typing away on my HP. Then you'd fill
up the memory, you'd have to answer everything to a
floppy pull it out, and it's just so bizarre. My

(01:08:16):
husband was one of the first physicists to use computers
in experimental work, and they had a machine that had
seventy kilobytes of memory, and they with the whole thing
was writing programs that shifted pro code in and out
of the core of the machine, and of course it
was the size of ten refrigerators or something. But yeah,

(01:08:40):
it's fun. It's fun to have been part of the history.
So that you see, like my first book, I wrote
my hand and then typed my second book. I figured
I could eliminate the middle person and just type it
directly on my Smith corona, and so I did two
books typing in the machine and then we're processing what

(01:09:04):
a salvation?

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
How soon after the via Warshawsky books start coming out
do you get approached by Hollywood for selling the rights.

Speaker 7 (01:09:14):
One of the things that my agent does as a
good agent is he always has been a solo agent.
Some people have agents who are part of a big
firm that has movie agents as well, and the goal
always is for any agent to try to get those

(01:09:36):
kinds of deals. So he was working really from day
one with his Hollywood civil rights agent to try to
find someone. And because it's close to impossible to have
a book turned into a movie is from having options.
And then so I had a number of options that expired,
and then suddenly Kathleen Turner wanted to play VII, so

(01:09:59):
that it was I want to say, around the time
I wrote my fifth book, so eighty six, eighty seven,
something like that, And suddenly it had to have been
later than that because the movie came out I think
in ninety ninety one, so it must have been around
eighty nine. Anyway, Kathleen apparently owed Disney a movie and

(01:10:22):
that was how the deal came about, and she really
wanted to play the character, so that was I was
very fortunate that the character spoke to her personally in
such a way. Even though the movie itself ended up
not being particularly well put together, but it still just
expanded the number of people who knew what I was doing.

(01:10:42):
It was obviously I would love it if it had
been a great movie in a franchise and so on,
and that didn't happen, but it still was a really
stroke of fortune for my career, my ability to be
working independently.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
What was that experience like for you with that whole adaptation.
Did they just say Okay, thanks Sarah, here's a check
and we'll see you in five years or how did
that go?

Speaker 7 (01:11:11):
I don't remember the exact sequence, but basically I was
in England on tour for whatever book it was, and
I got home to a call from a man who
introduced himself as a location scout, and this was how
I heard that they were actually making a movie. I
didn't know that they were doing that. So he said

(01:11:33):
he was in town scouting locations for the movie. And
I was like, WHOA what movie? And then I said,
I just landed half an hour ago and I'd be
glad to show you around tomorrow. And he said, no,
this is just a courtesy call to let you know
that we're taking over the product you used to be
involved in. I was like, what the product I used

(01:11:55):
to be involved in? My heart, my soul, my gizzick
so well, slap in the face, and a realization that
I had no power in this situation. So they were
going to do what they were going to do. I
saw the script. There were things that I wished they
weren't doing. The script that they were beyond and looked
a trifle board. There are things that I liked about

(01:12:18):
the movie. There were things I liked about the process,
but there were some big red flags. One of them
v I has a neighbor, a close confidant, mister Contreras,
and they turned him into such a really ugly stereotype
of a Mexican immigrant that it ruined the movie for
me to have is that so opposite to my values

(01:12:43):
and how I try to see people. There were things
like that, and then they wanted an explosion, so they
blew something up and they had a good time doing that.
There were things that were fun that I hadn't thought
about because they were good cinematically, chasing on the Chicago
River that was just fun. And of course Kathleen was

(01:13:07):
always a strong presence on the screen or when she
was in her heyday. There were definitely pluses and so on.
The big plus wasn't actually the movie itself, but it
used to be where v I lived that she overlooked
Wriggley Field, and they actually rented, and they not rented

(01:13:28):
an apartment, but they persuaded someone with an apartment to
let them film from in the living room. They rented
Wrigley Field, and I got to run the bases. Even
if you go on a paid tour, you are never
allowed on that sacred grass. So there I was. It
was night, they were shooting at night. I was out

(01:13:48):
in the outfield. Andre Dawson, great outfielder for originally the
Expos and ended his career with the Cobs. I was
standing where he had been spitting only hours before. So
I'd melt the cat and kissed the turf, and then
I went and ran the bases. Now I am not
an athlete. I did play baseball for the country school

(01:14:12):
to room country school I went to, and I was terrible,
but everyone had to play because that was how you
got nine people on a team. And I thought, okay,
I'll slide into home and the extras are in the stands.
They're cheering because they're bored. Nothing is happening or waiting
for whatever scene is being set up. And I'm rounding

(01:14:34):
the bases and I'm waving, and I'm thinking, oh my god,
this is why athletes keep doing this even after their
careers are clearly over, because the crowd, the cheering. And
then I get to home plate and I thought, I
have no idea how to slide, so I just fell
head first onto home plate. And sadly, in those days

(01:14:55):
before cell phones, there's no footage of my career at Wrigleyfield.

Speaker 1 (01:15:02):
That sounds like an amazing experience.

Speaker 8 (01:15:04):
Though, oh it was.

Speaker 7 (01:15:06):
I won't say it was worth having a bad movie made,
but it definitely was for me. The high point of
the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:15:13):
It sounds like you already knew that the biggest thing
that could come out of it is just more awareness
of your character and your process.

Speaker 7 (01:15:20):
And it really helped also because American films, they have
an international market, and so it made it possible for
me to At one point my books were available in
thirty languages around Europe and Asia and so on. My
career isn't nearly as robust now as it was then,

(01:15:41):
but it definitely expanded my market and name recognition and
so on. I'm really glad that I had the opportunity,
and frankly, Disney owns the rights and won't give them up,
but also they're interested in doing something. And then I'm
very lucky right now to be represented by creative artists

(01:16:03):
Bruce Naker. And you never know the future Eliza ahead,
as Mortsaul always used to say, but something could happen,
and that would be great. I've lived a long time
with nothing happening, so I'm not hanging my hat on it.
But it's nice to know that people still care about
the character and think about doing something with her on screen.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
I was wondering if there was any talk of bringing
her back, or maybe even a limited series or something, because.

Speaker 7 (01:16:30):
She's exactly a streaming series or something. Yeah, it would
be a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
Because I know Kathleen Turner is a fantastic actress, but
obviously she's probably not the person that was in your
head when you're writing these things. Did you ever have
anybody that you said, oh, that would be the perfect
via Worshovski.

Speaker 7 (01:16:50):
I should have been ready for this question coming into it,
because of course we're talking quite a few years ago,
and now I can't think of the woman's last name.
Her first name was Amy. She was such a Chicago, tough,
in your face, Chicago presence. Why can't I think of
her last name? If it comes to me, I'll let
you know. But I also I really liked Jamie Lee Curtis.

(01:17:14):
Even though she's small compared to how I envisioned VII,
she does have that kind of she just eat my
shorts kind of Bradson's in the attitude, and at the
same time that she's just irresistible. She can say stuff
like that and people just take him from her because

(01:17:37):
because she's Jamie Lee Curtis. Yeah, but of course when
Kathleen said she wanted to do it, she was a
superstar at that point, and it was quite an experience.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):
Yeah, what are you working on these days?

Speaker 7 (01:17:54):
I'm taking a break from VII. I published the twenty
second novel in the series in April of last year.

Speaker 2 (01:18:01):
And.

Speaker 7 (01:18:03):
It was a hard book to write. Emotionally, it was.
It really took a lot out of me, and I thought,
I need a break from her because I can't just
go right back into the ring. I'm working on a
book with a woman named Lily. Lily is older the
I is going to just stay around fifty because I
want her to be as physical as she physical, sexual,

(01:18:25):
all those things that not that we seventy somethings aren't
physical and sexual and all those things, but we'd also
tend to groan a lot while we're.

Speaker 4 (01:18:37):
Anyway.

Speaker 7 (01:18:37):
Lily is a retired CIA agent who goes a foul
of the agency by starting to put out podcasts or
maybe substacks. Who knows what it'll be by the time
I finished writing the book, what the trend deep thing
will be. But anyway, she gets appalled by the consequences

(01:18:58):
of some of the things that she'd so the agency
is not happy, and when they can't get her to
shut up, they wanted to kill her. So she's on
the run from the CIA, and she's going to have
to escape somehow. I haven't figured that out yet, but
I will. I've created an imaginary country because I thought
if I set her in a real country, I will

(01:19:20):
have to spend decades researching everything about it, and even
then I'll make horrible mistakes and I'll get ten thousand
letters saying didn't you know that Congo did this and
not that? So I've created a country called Hyalastan, which
is Turkish for imaginary country. It's carved out of the
west of the all the stands in Central Asia. And

(01:19:44):
I'm having so much fun. I can see why it
took Tolkien forever to finish writing the Lord of the
Rings trilogy, because when you're inventing a country and a
language and an epic and a history, it's just so
fun that you forget you're also supposed to be telling
a story and moving your character forward.

Speaker 1 (01:20:06):
He said, you don't know exactly what happens to her,
how she gets out of this, So I take it
you don't outline everything. You just kind of make it
up as you go along.

Speaker 7 (01:20:15):
I was thinking this morning. Process is something that we
writers talk about when we get together and some people
I was like a PD. James was a personal friend,
and Phyllis said she would outline in such detail that
she would just write the chapter that most appealed to
her on a given day. I don't have that kind

(01:20:38):
of chess playing brain. If this person does this, this person,
I would say, I write more as an explorer, someone
who I set my characters out and they're walking a trail,
and then that trail leads to an impenetrable forest or
a swamp or something, and I can see the book
isn't working, and so I pull back and go back.

(01:21:00):
Each time I do that, it comes more into focus.
And I wish I wrote as many of my peers
do a book two books a year, but I can't
think that way, and it's just it's frustrating. But Christmas
Day I was on page two hundred and seventy, and

(01:21:20):
New Year's Day I was on page ninety. But now
I'm back to one seventy. Trail is going uphill, not
into a small and you'd think you'd get to a
point in your life where you would know ahead of
time that it was that this trial was an error.
But it's not that way for me, And the word

(01:21:41):
on the page really matters to me a lot, writing
as carefully as I can, no sloppy grammar, No I'm
gonna instead of I am going to because I think
it looks bad on the page. You talk like that,
but you it doesn't look good on the page when
you write like that. And the other thing, going back

(01:22:04):
to the very beginning, Stuart Kaminski when he was teaching
this class, he cautioned us all everyone in the class,
that slang dates you more than it makes you look
current and hip, and especially now with the net, slang
is So that's something that I tend to shy away from.

Speaker 1 (01:22:26):
Yeah, there's definitely a timeless quality about your books and
about your stories. The one thing, though, that I do
have to kind of chuckle at, was when her car
was totaled and she goes to buy a new car
with that thirty five hundred dollars check, and I'm like,
oh my gosh, what years.

Speaker 7 (01:22:43):
That I know. I remember calling back in the seventies.
My boss came in bragging she had bought a car
for three thousand dollars, which we were all just shocked.
Who would spend that kind of money on a car.

Speaker 1 (01:22:59):
It's almost like should have variables in them that can
adjust to the.

Speaker 7 (01:23:02):
GDPs I put in the CPI calculator. Maybe I should
put that in the front of my three issues. And
please note that I had never seen Perry Mason Raymond
Burr's Perry Mason because my family were too snotty to
have a television. My parents were like they were too intellectual.

(01:23:24):
So Perry Mason reruns got me through lockdown, and I
love them. I watched every episode twice, but I did
have to go look up the CPI multiplier to figure
out that things in what seemed like nothing in nineteen
in nineteen fifty five seemed like nothing to us was
actually millions of dollars in today's dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:23:48):
Ow Dary still had ten thousand dollars, and the whole
audience gasps.

Speaker 8 (01:23:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
Ms Berreski, thank you so much for your time. This
was so nice talking with you today.

Speaker 7 (01:23:59):
Thanks, thank you for your interest and for just making
it such a fun and engaging experience. It isn't always,
but you really made me feel like I really wanted
to be alive with you, So thanks for that.

Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
All right, up next, we're going to hear from screenwriters
David Aaron Cohen and Nick Fiel, one right after the other.
You're a fellow Wolverine. From what I understand.

Speaker 2 (01:24:23):
Wolverene and I grew up spent all my summers in
Michigan and ended up even when I went to Michigan,
I was like an in state because we had a
home in South Hayn. That's where I would spend the summers.

Speaker 1 (01:24:37):
Speaking of those early days, I'd love to know how
you decided to become a screenwriter.

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):
I was always writing on some level. I went to Michigan,
was in the Honors English program, thought I would be
the next salt Bellow, and that was my trajectory for myself.
That didn't work out, and I never studied film or
screenwriting anything. I mean, I always loved movies, but I
just never thought about it in that way. In a

(01:25:04):
very sort of ironic twist of fate, I moved to
Israel in the eighties and ended up getting work there
on first like TV show that they were doing, educational
television network, and then went to work for Manachem Golan,

(01:25:27):
who famously had Cannon Films in the eighties, and they're
the guys who made all the Chuck Norris movies, either
did a breakdancing movie, Electric Boogaloo or something. Anyway, there
I got a lot of experience and ended up making
my first feature in Tel Aviv. And then once I

(01:25:51):
did that, I was like, I think I can do this,
like we're a living So, with a lot of hubris
and a lot of ignorance, moved to La saying this
is what I was going to do with the wife
and a one year old and not really knowing anyone.
I had one college friend with Michigan and he was

(01:26:12):
working as a reader for TriStar, And then he had
one friend who we also sometimes read for, who was
a development guy named John Marsh. And John worked at
Chestnut Hill Productions, which was the movie company owned by
Jeff Lourie, the guy who owns the Philadelphia Eagles, but

(01:26:36):
at the time he was more scion of a family
that owed a lot of movie theaters in the East Coast,
so wanted to dip his toe into the business and
started Chestnut Hill. And yeah, so John actually Marsh was
shout out to John Marsh because he met with me.
It was during the strike nineteen eighty eight. You couldn't

(01:27:00):
meet with anyone else that we met with me, and
I gave him a specscript that I had written when
I was in Tel Aviv, and she really liked it
and helped me rewrite it so that I could sub
so he could submit it to agents that he knew,
and through him, I got through that experience, I got representation,

(01:27:21):
and then maybe six months later, eight months later, he
was like, David, I have a thing project for you,
and this could be. It ended up being my very
first getting in Hollywood, and it was to do a
rewrite of the Edward Taylor I think that was the

(01:27:41):
guy's name who was the original writer and v I
and it was one of those situations where they were
going to hire me. They were going to pay me
Polish money to do a page one rewrite, which you know,
and I was thrilled, of course, because I had never
really made any serious money writing and that was I

(01:28:01):
remember I got paid four thousand dollars to do that.
I was really happy. That's in nineteen ninety one maybe,
and so I did that complete kind of re imagination
of it. And I also because I'm a Chicago and
that's where I grew up, it was very easy for
me to do that. I also loved the whole detective genre,

(01:28:24):
the noir of it, all the eyes character, and so
for me, I was more inspired by China Out. It
was that kind of a thing. And I read all
the Sarah Peretzky books and it was kind of a
mishmash of a couple of them. So yeah, so how
I got started. Actually, that ended up being my sort

(01:28:44):
of start. It led to my start in all of it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:48):
What was the Israeli film that you made? I'm very
curious about that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:52):
It's never been released. I have a friend of mine
who lives in Europe, and you sent me because I
didn't even have a DVD. I wanted to show it
to my kids point of view. And it was like
an Israeli American split cast. John Savage was in it.
He played the lead, and Fisher Stevens, who became a friend.

(01:29:14):
And at the time, Fisher had just come off doing
what were those robot movies where he played the Indian guy.
They would never let anyone do that today, short Cirt.
So he was like like this nerdy film school kid,
and it was a story about a group of FELP
students who have to make a movie based on a
short story of a famously reclusive Israeli author who wrote

(01:29:35):
about his experience in the war, and so they it
becomes a mystery of what happened when he was out
there and his commando team ran into a shepherd. We
had to make this decision. Do they kill him, because
otherwise they let him go, he'll reveal that they're there.
Or do they let him or do they let him
go anyway? So John Savage played the author. He was

(01:29:57):
actually really good. I still haven't actually opened up and
watched that DVD. I'm going to. I'm planning on doing
a screening with my adult children and see how bad
it is when your first screenplay that you ever wrote
gets turned into a movie. I would recommend.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
Did you direct that as well?

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
No, it was directed by an Israeli director in ned
Noam Yavor. We had worked together. I had made a
with him. We had done a one hour music video
compilation for the Israeli singer o Fra Haraza, who became
pretty famous in American club scene. Later on died tragically

(01:30:37):
of age, like at a very young age. But that's
how we met. And then he had some financing and
then Golden Globus came in and put up the production services,
and yeah, we shot it all in Israel, and then
they got into trouble with investors and they'd suit each

(01:30:58):
other and they couldn't agree on a release got released
in Europe and on the US. So you know, you
need to focal Hollywood story.

Speaker 1 (01:31:05):
So with vi I Worshowsky and you touch about how
you're reading all the books and kind of mashing them together,
taking the best bits and everything. I don't imagine did
you read the earlier draft or did you kind of
try to put that aside so you didn't even think
about it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:20):
Every time you do that process, there is a form
of like reimagining things and trying to figure out what works,
what doesn't, all that kind of stuff. And I have
this is a long time ago, by the way, like
nobody's asked you about via Warshawski in thirty five years.
The only other mention I've had of this movie recently

(01:31:41):
is that I'm doing this project. I'm developing a TV
show with Blake Griffin has a new production company called
Mortal Media, you know that basketball player, And he's doing
it together with Ryan Khalil, who is like a former
NFL player, but they're very talented, they have great taste.
So we're developing this show and the guy who runs

(01:32:03):
his company when we met for the first time. Now
we've been working on the show now for a couple
of months, but he was like, damn, I just got
to tell you. When I was like twelve years old,
I got like a VHS copy of v I Wor
Shawski and I used to watch that thing, and I remembered.
I was like, dude, you're the only one who I've
ever talked to you about it since that. So it

(01:32:24):
was just funny that now that you called and was like, oh, okay,
and you wait long enough and everything comes around.

Speaker 1 (01:32:30):
Well, you're one of several writers on that one. Do
you know who it went to after you?

Speaker 8 (01:32:36):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):
I do very much.

Speaker 4 (01:32:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):
Yeah, that's a funny story. The first part of it
is that I did this page one rewrite of at
Taylor's draft, and I handed it in. I remember it
was in December. I can't remember this because it's connected
up to my son was about to be born, so
he was born in eighty So I handed it in

(01:33:01):
December of nineteen eighty nine and it went out to
Kathleen Turner to read over the winter break, because in
those days they would set up the script and of
course everything is just and delivered. There's no Internet and
all that stuff were popping prehistoric times here, so it
went out to her. In the meantime, my wife was

(01:33:24):
like nine months pregnant with my second son, and because
I got the job from Chestnut Hill, it made me
qualify for the WGA health insurance, right, but it only
kicks in after one quarter because I qualified over the
summer right. Then the insurance was going to kick in

(01:33:49):
on January first, and my wife's due date was January third,
and I was like, hone, you just got to keep
your legs crossed until after they because otherwise we're paying
for this birth because I had no health insurance.

Speaker 1 (01:34:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:34:02):
Of course, the winter vacation starts, she goes into labor
and we found my son is born on December twenty sixth,
so we had to pay for it out of cash.
I don't pocket remember. It was like it was a
whole different world. But anyway, which was fine. It was
like whatever he was healthy, everything was good. But the
better news that came with his birth was like it

(01:34:24):
was literally like the same day or the day before,
John marsh, my executive at Chestnut Hill, calls and said,
Kathleen's on board. She wants to play the Eye, which
was a great acknowledgment of the work that I did,
and that we attracted the movie starring which was great.

(01:34:46):
So that was that, and then what happened was Hollywood Pictures,
which at the time was that the production arm of
Disney they had touchdown, they had Hollywood Pictures was doing
trying to create their own identity. And then that led
to my first sort of studio gig doing a rewrite

(01:35:09):
of my rewrite because they wanted to have their notes
and stuff like that. So I went into Disney and
Burbank met with the executive his name was Charles Hirsharre,
it was his name, and had a really great experience.
I did a rewrite and now I actually got paid
like appropriate money. That's just like being exploited money, which

(01:35:33):
at the time was also twenty grand or something. Today
it wouldn't pay for over months rent in venice. But anyway,
so I did that and was really happy with how
it came out, and John was excited and Chestnut Hill
was excited. Everybody was happy and was we were all
moving towards production. So this is in May of nineteen ninety.

(01:35:57):
I finished my rewrites. I remember the day that they
had me because the day that I was working extra
time with John and doing all the last minute revisions
to send it out to the studio. So we finished,
but it was a weekend, so they were like, you
have to deliver the script to Jeff Katzenberg, like they

(01:36:18):
were going to give it to us.

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
Yeah, no, I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (01:36:20):
Messaging firm or whatever the messenger service and for whatever
reason they weren't available. Don't know, because it was like
a Sunday, I don't know what it was. In the end,
I printed.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
It out and delivered it.

Speaker 2 (01:36:34):
The Kats and Verbs Malibu house was probably just burned
down and dropped it off there, right, And it was
this moment of excitement and kind of terror in a
way because you don't know what they're going to think,
and you hear all these stories about the what happens
at that level. Right now, the big weeks are getting involved,

(01:36:58):
and so a day goes by, two days go by,
three days go by. Could hear anything like it's radio silence, right?
And now I'm starting to get nervous, and I'm calling
John Marshall at the time. He don't worry, it's fine,
I'll see what happens. And then finally, like a whole

(01:37:19):
week and another weekend goes by and then I get
the call from John. And the way I describe it
is that I had the complete Hollywood experience on my
very first movie, right where I have the big break,
I get thing, I get the movie star attached, right.
But then comes the other part of it, which is
I get fired, I get rewritten. They change the movie

(01:37:42):
from a drama to a comedy, like everything that could
have happened, right, And so that's the beginning of what unfolded,
which is Katzenberg read it and he said, I think
this is too much like Chinatown. We want it to
be more like paper Moon. I was gonna say something,
but Moon, Yes, paper Moon. So they wanted to have

(01:38:04):
more of that quality, right that it was like a
girl but because there was a character kat who was
the daughter in it, and so that was the big thing.
It was like, we think it's to be more more
like paper Moon and not less like Chinatown. And I
was cruss because I'm like, I'm a Chinatown fan, and
that's what inspired me. And I loved the darkness of

(01:38:27):
the books and all that stuff, and I felt an
obligation to Sarah Perevsky as well, in the sense that
this is the stuff that she did, and I didn't
want it to be the hollywoodization of whatever. But that's
what happened. So they hired this guy named Nick Thiel,
who was like one of the studio hacks I would

(01:38:47):
call him in that he did a lot of rewrites
for Disney and I can't even remember what his other
credits were, but they definitely weren't like things in the
May of Chinatown. They were more light fair. So that's
what happened. So I got let go. John thought they
were hiring Nick. They kind of sort of like suffered through.

(01:39:10):
Next I would hear from John how it was going,
and then he delivered a draft right maybe two months later,
in July, i'd say it was, And then they were
still now six weeks or seven weeks before the start
of production and messing with the script. So then by

(01:39:33):
that time they had hired Jeff Canoe to be the director,
and I'm thinking, okay, the guy who directed Police Academy
six or whatever it was, wouldn't have been my first
choice for the kind of material that I was hoping
that there would be. But by this time the ship
would sail. It was going to be something else. Then

(01:39:55):
the word from John Marsh was Jeff Canoe was taking
a crack at it now because they felt they weren't
happy with nick Field's draft. And then he started like
cutting and pasting between at Taylor's draft, my draft, and
nick Field's draft. That was like a classic Hollywood right,

(01:40:16):
great success, as a borat might say, so that was it.
By the time I got invited out to the set
in Long Beach, it was like the first day of
principal photography maybe, and I met Jeff Canoe and all
that kind of stuff. It was like I had let go.
You'd never let go because it was like my first

(01:40:37):
baby in a way. So I was really upset, to
be honest, But I also I knew that everyone told me, Hey,
getting produced is the main thing. Don't worry about how
it turns out, just that you get a credit. Right,
So the movie goes into production, right, I see all
the other casting, and they had some good people in there, right.

(01:41:01):
We had Charles Derning playing the Lieutenant. He was great.
I thought j O. Sanders did a nice job is
the put up on the boyfriend. And then we had
good Girl who I don't remember. She was in Hall alone,
Angela go Toles. I don't know if you made any
movies after that, but anyway, Oh, and Wayne Knight would

(01:41:22):
become famous on Seinfeldt as the post bet. But yeah, whatever,
it was all good. Those were the days when the
studios would still do gifts to the whole cast and
crew when movies would start. And I remember, right before
the first day of Pennsyl Photography, I get this box
from Disney and I open it up and inside is

(01:41:44):
a red high heeled shoe that's also a telephone, right,
the old not rotaryd other ones, the push button.

Speaker 1 (01:41:53):
Ones, touchtown they call, Yeah, the touchdown.

Speaker 2 (01:41:57):
With the pad. I still have it somewhere. Yeah. That
was fun. So I guess to me, the continuation of
the story is that then apropos having everything happened to
you on the first time around, Right, get the job,
get the big break, get fired, get rewritten, have a
change from a drama to a comedy.

Speaker 4 (01:42:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:42:20):
Then came the last piece, which was a WJA arbitration
to decide credit right. Are you familiar with the whole
arbitration world.

Speaker 1 (01:42:29):
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's kind of murky sometimes as
far as how they make their decisions sometimes.

Speaker 2 (01:42:36):
I mean, the point of it is that just to
explain to listeners whatever, is that we and the WGA
are responsible for the termination of credits and this became
our right, we want it in labor negotiations, strikes, whatever,
because back in the studio days of the forties, every
producer and his boyfriend girlfriend would want to put their

(01:43:00):
names on a script as a favor, and they could
just do it because they had that power. So we
won back the power to be able to determine whose
names would be on a script in order to avoid
that kind of corrupt practice. The Guild arbitration process is
you can only have a maximum of three writers on

(01:43:22):
a script. Now, when you see more than three names
on a script, they'll notice that there's writing teams. And
the way you know this is that their names are
separated by an amper sayand if it says David Aaron
Cone and Edward Taylor A and D, you know that
they wrote separately. So the arbitration process begins I get

(01:43:46):
sent the script of the production draft, which is the
final script, and then you also the guild sends out
all of the drafts. Everyone has to submit them. So
there's the Edward Taylor draft, there's the David Aaron conn draft.
I had more than one. I had re drafts. And
then there's the Nick Theld draft and the Jeff Canoe draft.
And then you read through them and then you write

(01:44:08):
a statement claiming like why you think you deserve credit?
But the stakes are really high, you know what I mean.
And I was a newbie writers. I didn't really know
too much about the process. Now I like advise other
writers who are going into a process because I've done
it so many times. I'm like, Okay, here's what you
need to know. And I remember this day very vividly.

(01:44:32):
It's a week before the arbitration letters are due. Then
I get a phone call. I pick up the phone.
This is pre self well, so you don't know what
it's calling, and Nick Thiel is on the line and
he goes, David, listen to me. If we all agree
on the credit right, you don't have to go to

(01:44:54):
an arbitration. If the three of us agree, you don't
have to get an arbitration. I'm like, I'm thinking to myself,
why would I do that? Maybe you don't deserve a credit.
And then he got like really dark on me. He
was like, dude, let me tell you, the middle writer
always gets squeezed out, so the chances are you're not
going to get a credit, so you should do this.

(01:45:15):
It's very strong arming me and I'm being naive and
also a little bit like that. So I was like, no,
I'm not doing that. We'll just go through the process
and whatever they decided. So that was that. Yeah, And
then I remember like in those days, you'd get a
letter in the mail saying the determination of credits has

(01:45:37):
been and there was screenplay by or I have to
look it up here does it say, yeah, screen story?
I think it's the three of us, Edward Taylor and
d David ernthone Andy Nick Deal, so all three of us.
And for me, I was kind of like in the aftermath,
I was like, maybe that's good that somebody else is

(01:46:00):
name was after me, because this is not my work.
It doesn't represent the best of my work. Some of
my work is definitely in there in the arbitration. You
have to prove that like thirty three percent of it
is yours, whatever that means. Yeah, so you contributed a
character or the dialogue or structure, those things all there's
different qualifications for it. So that was my experience, and

(01:46:22):
to this day when I tell when I teach screenwriting,
which I do sometimes or talk to mentoring young people
who are entering the business, I'm like, in a way,
having the full experience the first time prepared me for
my career.

Speaker 1 (01:46:38):
I bet, yeah, yeah, you went through the ringer, Yeah,
yeah it was. Did you get invited to the premiere?

Speaker 2 (01:46:46):
I remember was one time?

Speaker 6 (01:46:48):
I up.

Speaker 2 (01:46:50):
I can remember the other my other movies premierees. I
definitely remember devil Ze, Friday Lines, even more recent ones
like American Underdog. But I'm thinking I'm must have been
because I was really friends by this time with John
Marsh and with Jeff Louriy. I actually got invited to
Jeff Lurie's wedding and was at his bachelor party, which

(01:47:12):
I won't talk about, but I'll never forget. Yeah, he
and Christina since divorced and whatever. He's a billionaire and
good time him. He's funny guy. So I don't I
actually don't remember a premier party. Sorry. I do remember
one thing though, the weekend that the movie opened, and
this is lessons from a young screenwriter's point of view,

(01:47:35):
is that I had a careery dear friend of mine,
she was getting married that same weekend, and it was
in Cleveland, Ohio. So I went to Cleveland and I
got to the airport and I don't know if I
had to take a train or elevated or whatever it was,
but I remember I'm in the train. I'm going to

(01:47:59):
wherever it was you lived on in the suburbs, Jake
Or Heights, and I'm going there and it stops at
the stop and I see the posters on the side,
and that was very exciting, and that was really exciting
for me as a first time screenwriter.

Speaker 1 (01:48:14):
When was the first time you saw the movie or
did you ever see it?

Speaker 2 (01:48:18):
John invited me to some of the test screenings, so
they were still tweaking things. So I went to remember
going with him to this test screening in the theater
in Sherman Notes, which was like right next to where
I was living at the time, so I literally could
walk to the theater and that was cool to be
in that experience, and I remember turning around and seeing

(01:48:40):
Katzenberg and oh god, who was running Disney at the time,
because he was in charge of TO. There was someone
else above like you can't remember who was, but all
the big wigs were there taking notes and stuff like that.
And then we got to see to let me stay
in for the Q and A listen to the focus

(01:49:02):
groups when they asked them questions and what they liked,
what they didn't like.

Speaker 1 (01:49:06):
So that was a.

Speaker 2 (01:49:07):
Great learning experience, and then that led to one more.
My last sort of involvement with the movie prior to
its release was that based on the test scores, they
realized that audiences were having a bit of a hard
time understanding because it's like detective stuff and the clues

(01:49:29):
and all that kind of stuff. So they came up
with this brilliant, slash desperate idea of adding voiceover right,
the old Harry the explainer thing, right. And so what
they did, in fairness to Disney, they hired all of us,
all of the writers who worked on it, for one

(01:49:50):
day to write potential voiceovers for the movie to be
considered right. And the irony of that is that I
remember my agent calling me and telling me that since
seven I said, what's the page. She goes, They're going
to pay you gild minimum for a polish, which was

(01:50:13):
the same four thousand dollars that I made to write
the entire rewrite the entire screenplay a year and a
half earlier. I was like, this feels like I could
get used to this. Payday four grand a day. That's good.
And then nineteen ninety one that was like a lot
of money.

Speaker 1 (01:50:29):
What was it like when you finally got to see
the film? I mean you talked about that cut and
paste kind of thing. Are you just like, oh, well
that's mine and then you wait another ten minutes, Oh
that's my line too.

Speaker 2 (01:50:40):
An interesting aspect of the whole arbitration thing is that
credit is based first and foremost on structure and plot.
Dialogue has the least amount of value in determining what
percent of a script is yours and for an audience.

(01:51:00):
Usually most people who go to movies think of dialogue
as the whole thing, But in reality, as we know,
xt structure, how you plot it, and introducing new characters
and characterizations, those are the things that carry the most
weight in arbitration. So for me, it was clear like

(01:51:21):
a lot of the structural stuff. I could see my
work in the dialogue. There were a few lines. I
don't remember what they are today, but I remember going, Okay,
that was great to see Kathleen Turner deliver a line.
That's always just a thrill from that standpoint. And I
do remember also I did go to the set a
few times, not just the first day, but they were

(01:51:43):
shooting in the Culver Studios in Culver City, and I
remember going and seeing because it was cool to see
the house that they built, which was the ice house,
and all that kind of stuff is always fun. I
got to hang out there a bit as well, so
when I saw it, it was like, Okay, it makes you
hungry to want to have more of the same, but

(01:52:06):
more control.

Speaker 1 (01:52:08):
So ultimately, did this open doors for you? It must
have paved the way for some more projects. I would
imagine it.

Speaker 2 (01:52:16):
Did, and in a way that maybe is less obvious
in terms of like how careers work and stuff like that.
And I would say the caveat to what I'm going
to say is that they don't know necessarily that these
same rules apply because our industry has changed so dramatically

(01:52:36):
since the nineties. It's just a completely different animal. But
in nineteen ninety one, when the movie came out, the
fact that I got a credit, and that's what people said,
just get a credit. It's going to open doors for you.
Maybe about six months later or maybe three months, have

(01:52:59):
to move came out, I get a call to go
in and meet it. Imagine in films Brian Grazier run
Hours Company, and the executive there was interested in meeting
with me because my agent had sent her a script
that I wrote, but also because I was a credited writer,
do you know what I mean? And that put me

(01:53:20):
into a different class of a different pool I shouldn't
say a pool of writers, so I could be considered
for other things, right, And so this is a good
story in the sense that so this executive in those
days when they liked your writing and they felt like
you had a voice and the kind of stuff, they'd

(01:53:42):
invite you in. And then you have a general meeting, right,
which most of the time didn't lead to anything, but
sometimes could. So it's kind of like salesmen showing their wares,
Like they ask you what you've got, and they tell
you what they've got. And so she said, look the
projects that we have. See if anything else would interest you,

(01:54:05):
and she went down a list of projects. I said,
there's this, and there's that, and there's that. I'm listening
to all of them. And it's a little bit full
of myself at the time because I just thought, I
don't know whatever again being young and thinking that I
can do this. But she listened all that. I was like, no,
you know not, none of those really or interest to me.

(01:54:27):
And then she came up, here's one, but I don't
think there's any way This one is one you're not
going to get because Alan Pecula is attached as producer
and at the time, Pakola had just finished Sophie's Choice,
nominated for All the Stuff of course, All the President's Men, Clue,

(01:54:49):
Parallax View, all of the great movies that Alan nade,
and so she goes, oh, yeah, that book. That book
was Friday Lights, right, it was about to come out.
They had Alan had a really great eye for good material,
like he was a producer before he was a director.
Hed he won an Oscar, his only oscar actually, for

(01:55:11):
To Kill a Mockingbird, which she produced, so he had
the right to Buzz's books. And she pooh pooed. She goes,
I'll give you the book, but I don't think there's
any way you're ever any of the meeting with Alan, right,
And so I went home read the book. I was like,

(01:55:32):
oh my god, this is just perfect. I love this material.
This is incredible. My agent was pushing to see it.
We could get a meeting, And what happened was she
sent out the writing sample, which was the same sample
that I was using. It was an indie kind of film.

(01:55:52):
It was called Go Down Moses, was about an Israeli
limo driver who befriends this black radio dispatcher who's also
like a rapper on the side. It was like a
whole indie film that you'd want to see in the eighties.
But everyone liked it. Helped me get an agent. It
had a distinct voice, all that kind of stuff. So
she sent Alan my draft to Go Down Moses, and

(01:56:16):
then she calls me up maybe three or four weeks later,
and she goes, wow, I'm surprised, but cool. It was
to meet with you. So that's how that happened.

Speaker 3 (01:56:27):
And then.

Speaker 2 (01:56:29):
That meeting to p and I was just like I
was in odd. Literally. Clute was a movie that I
remember seeing that maybe love films you know what I mean,
if you ever want to do a great episode, dude
about that movie, because that might be just anyway. So
I'm just like over the Moon. I can't believe I'm
actually going to meet like one of my idols. I'm

(01:56:50):
just a little bit very nervous about it. And I
get the instructions to meet him. He's coming to town
to meet with writers, and he's going to meet you
in his like suite at the Four Seasons right Beverly Hills.
They like, okay, I've never been to the Four Seasons.
The whole thing is whatever. So I dressed my sort

(01:57:13):
of casual slash dress the writer artists clothes, leave my
wife and two kids at home, and go step into
this alternative, alternate universe of the Four Seasons. And I
get up to the call and they say, yeah, come
on up and knock on the door. Alan opens the door.

(01:57:35):
Alan was very urbane guy, grew up East Side to
New York City. He almost had his own like accent
in his English. It was like it wasn't like a
New Yorker, active was something old, more refined. He's just
a very cool guy anyway. But he's in socks. He's

(01:57:55):
not wearing shoes, and then he tells me that that's
that I learned afterwards he would direct all of his
films in his socks. He just felt comfortable. You didn't
like wearing shoes, so on set he used to directing
Dustin Hoffmann, Readford, Meryl Street. He's words socks where we
used to laugh out anyway, and I sit down and

(01:58:16):
he starts talking to me about Go Down, Moses, and
like how much he really loved it and there was
just a real grittiness to it and loved the voice
and love this and that was just really and we
just right away got into this sort of deeper conversation
about movies and about script and stuff, which was thrilling
for me. And then I pitched him my take on

(01:58:42):
how I would approach doing Friday Night Lights. That's funny
in the retrospect now, I made like two football movies
and a volleyball movie and then like go to Sports
Guy for whatever that's worth in the pigeonholing that Hollywood
sometimes does to us, but I'll take it.

Speaker 4 (01:59:01):
I'm okay.

Speaker 2 (01:59:02):
But at the time for me, that the inspiration for
the movie was Last Picture Show, because that was the
movie that just very much influenced me, and also had
that element of Jeff Bridges and Timothy Hutton. They were
like on the high school football team. There was even
a scene where they played high school football in Last

(01:59:24):
Picture Show. So I talked a lot about that and
all that, and Allen responded it was great. There was
a moment where he like stepped out he was the
rest or whatever, and so being a little inquisitive because
his seat was sitting on this chair next to me,
and there was like a pad of paper with his

(01:59:46):
appointments for the day, right, and so I saw the
list of the writers that he was reading with, and
it was like all the A writers in Hollywood at
the time, like all these names that would just be like.
I was like, oh my god, there's just no way
this is never going to happen. But I was still

(02:00:06):
happy to be there. Came back, he finished up and
then said goodbye. I walked out, and I thought, Okay,
that was a great experience. I'm just happy that I
got to meet Allan. And maybe a month goes by
and we lived in Venice at the time, where I
just moved back to and I'm out in the backyard

(02:00:29):
and I had this wine barrel that was my office.
It was literally he turned it into an office because
the landlord had this made this structure out of a
wine barrel that he called He called it the cone
House because the top was shaded up like a cone.
We went to rent the house. I was like, oh,
the cone house in the back, that's perfect, I'll take it.
So I was out and back inside of the Cone

(02:00:50):
House and I had a little extension of my phone
out there, and the phone rings and it's Alan. I
haven't talked to him since. Then he goes and he
doesn't say no one told me that this was going
to happen or that whatever. He just went, so we
need to come out to New York maybe the week
of the twenty first. Will that worked for you? And
I'm like, wait what? And then it was came clear

(02:01:13):
to me in the middle of the conversation that I
had gotten the job. So that's my very long answer
to did this oupen doors? Were you? Absolutely well?

Speaker 1 (02:01:23):
I seem to remember, didn't be Coola also direct the
Devil Zone.

Speaker 2 (02:01:28):
Oh yeah. I wrote three scripts for him, two of
which became a.

Speaker 1 (02:01:32):
That's amazing, But Devil' Zone came out before Friday Night Lights.

Speaker 2 (02:01:36):
It did.

Speaker 1 (02:01:36):
It did, was that one of those long protracted things.

Speaker 2 (02:01:40):
For thirteen year sentel, It got made and by that time,
tragically Alan had died in that crazy car crash that
he died in.

Speaker 1 (02:01:50):
Yeah, Cauln, you tell me a little bit about your
Navigating Hollywood course. Are you still teaching that?

Speaker 5 (02:01:57):
Yes, I am.

Speaker 2 (02:01:58):
I've been a little bit on aatis. It was something
that I started up during COVID. But the whole point
of it was and is that I just feel like
I've spent thirty plus years in this business and the
things that they don't teach you in film school are
exactly the things that you need to have a career,

(02:02:21):
you know what I mean. So really to learn how
to pitch, it's not something that necessarily although some of
the more well known programs now like USC and UCLA
have pitching segments to them, but just breaking story, giving notes,
getting notes, the things that are really the sort of

(02:02:43):
bread and butter of how you have and then maintain
a career. Those are things that I address in the course.
I love teaching, and that's one of those things where
you don't really necessarily know how much you know until
you map it.

Speaker 5 (02:03:03):
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (02:03:04):
And so during COVID, when I was seeing that, I
started writing and I was like, oh wow, I could
talk about this. Oh no, and I could talk about that.
And then so I think the big part of the course,
one very big element of it is just having my
students ask questions, just wide open and there's a lot
of I think there's a lot to be gleaned from

(02:03:25):
the answers, and also things that you can really specifically
learn and work on so that you can have a
better career, because access is the big issue there as well.
I mean, that's the hardest thing for people to get.

Speaker 1 (02:03:40):
Do you teach them that the middle guy and the
arbitration gets squeezed out.

Speaker 2 (02:03:44):
I actually do talk about arbitrations, and it's like an
advanced degree side of it. And by the way, with
regard to that, I kind of at some point in
after maybe yeah, after find Out Lights came out, I
was like, I don't want to rewrite other writers anymore.
It just feels not morally the right thing to do.

(02:04:06):
Pretty much since then, you know, all the things I do,
I'm the first writer, and sure I still get fired
and I still get rewritten, and that's the business, I said,
it's a little easier to live with all these years later,
but still not. But at least I know as first

(02:04:26):
writer that I have a shot of delivering the script
that I feel is the best representation of that material,
and whatever happens to it after that, that's speed.

Speaker 1 (02:04:38):
What are you working on right now?

Speaker 2 (02:04:40):
A couple of things. I am adapting a great book
called Running the Amazon by guy named Joe Kine, which
is the true story of a crazy group of ten
individuals who decided they were going to kayak the length
of the Amazon River from source to se four thousand,

(02:05:01):
two hundred miles, and they did this nineteen eighty five,
before you had geo mapping and telephones and all that stuff.
They went down canyons in Peru that had never been
successfully traversed before, ran into Peruvian gorillaz who almost killed them,

(02:05:24):
shot at them, and took them prisoner Colombian drug dealers,
And in the middle of it, they ended up having
a mutiny among the crew because there was one guy
who wanted to go in this direction, the other one
in the other. And so Joe Kane, who wrote the book,
who was coming along just to be the guy who

(02:05:44):
could document the thing and make the guy who hired
him look great. The one who they mutinied against ended
up being one of two of the men who finished
it kayaking. You had never really kayak before, and he
was trained by the other guys who was champion kayaker
from Poland and they made it all the way to

(02:06:05):
the Atlantic Ocean. Yeah, it's great story doing that. And
another front developing a TV series that Sony with Blake Griffin,
the NBA player as a new company with Ryan Khalil
x NFL player called Mortal Media, and we're developing high

(02:06:25):
school show about elite athletes that takes all of the
best football, basketball, tennis, golf, you name it into one
high school based on the IMG Academy, which does this
in Florida. In a way, it's kind of like a
superhero show in a funny way, because they're all best

(02:06:45):
at what they do, but then when they're together with
everyone else, they're just ordinary.

Speaker 1 (02:06:49):
Mister Cohen, thank you so much for your time. This
was so great talking with you.

Speaker 2 (02:06:54):
Absolutely, David. Please, I'm not with tikon to anyone but
my former high school teachers or whoever does that.

Speaker 1 (02:07:02):
You've done so much over the years. I'd love to
know how you even got into it.

Speaker 8 (02:07:07):
I was in Maryland, I lived, grew up in Maryland,
graduated from University of Maryland, and wanted to be a
screenwriter in TV or movies and didn't know how to
do it. And I read an article in back when
there were magazines, Newsweek magazine. They said all the big
players in Hollywood came out of the USC or UCLA
Film School. So I applied to both, got rejected by both,

(02:07:30):
but luckily for me, USC was starting a brand new
graduate program in professional writing where they taught everything from
novel writing to advertising, everything, and they were desperate for
people because they just started, so they accepted me. And
I was a waiter at this there's a chain of
restaurants called Hamburger Hamlet. Back then, they don't think it

(02:07:51):
doesn't exist anymore. It was all over the country and
I got a job waiting tables there and I made
friends with another waiter who also wanted to be a writer,
and he got a meeting on a TV show at
the time, which was the number one TV show called
eight Is Enough and said, hey, you want to go
with me? And I said yeah, and we sold them
and I did and started.

Speaker 1 (02:08:13):
What was your role when it came to Voyagers? Because
that was a favorite of mine. When I was growing up.

Speaker 8 (02:08:19):
I had worked on a show called fall Guy, which
was a big hit at the time, and the producer,
one of the producers from that show got fired and
went to Universal and got on Voyagers, and he told
the showrunner Jim Perriot, you got to hire this guy, Nick,
and I was ready to leave Fall Guy. I like
Glenn Larson as a person, I didn't like working for him,

(02:08:40):
and so he brought me over to Voyagers and I
was this executive story consultant writer, and then I produced
a couple of the episode. It was so much fun
to write. I learned so much about history researching each episode.
It was great.

Speaker 1 (02:08:54):
What was the move like for you to go from
television to movies?

Speaker 8 (02:08:58):
I had done an overall deal at Warner Brothers after
I had done Magnum Pi. I was hot after Magnum
p I because it was such a big hit. I
got an overall deal with Warner Brothers and they put
me on two really bad shows that I hated, and
during a break a hiatus between after the last one,
I decided I got to get out of TV. So

(02:09:20):
I wrote a spec movie. It got a lot of attention,
never got made, but it got me a lot of work,
and I got hired by Paramount to rewrite a movie,
which ended up being The Experts, which is like a
cult hit but not a very good movie. At the time,
being a movie writer was like you were on the
A team and the TV writer was on the B team.

(02:09:42):
That's changed completely now, but that's what it was then.
And so I just had a child and I in TV.
You just don't have time to do anything but do TV.
In movies, I just wrote it home for four or
five hours a day. It was great. And I did
that for sixteen years after to the first one. I
grew up movies for sixteen years. And then my movie

(02:10:04):
career started to fade. And the producer Mark Gordon, who's
done Speed and Great Anatomy and a million others. It's
a big shop producer. He's a friend of Mike, called
me said, don't you go to TV again. I really
want to get in and tell it. He wasn't in
TV at the time, he had not had Gray's Anatomy yet,
And I said, yeah, I got this kind of idea
for an airport, and we pitched it, we sold it,

(02:10:28):
it got made, It was on the air but failed
and was over in thirteen. Big Mark had graded Enemy
and Lax at the same time, and graith Anaimy it
is still on twenty years later, and Lax lasted thirteen episodes.
So goes that's how I go.

Speaker 1 (02:10:45):
The things you worked on one that I really like
a lot, called The Associate. Can you tell me what
was your involvement with that one and what was the
experience like for you on that one?

Speaker 8 (02:10:55):
It actually was a pretty good experience. I at the time,
I was doing a lot of work for Disney and
Hollywood Pictures, which made the movie was part of Disney.
They went out of business, but it was part of
Disney at the time, and Jeffrey Katzenberger was running Disney
was a fan of my writing, and I had done
three or four other movies for them, and so they said,

(02:11:16):
do you want to adapt this French movie called The Associate.
So I watched it and I thought, oh, yeah, this
would be great, and I basically just adapted it. I
mean that movie is about a guy, a nebushy guy
who can't get ahead any invents a fictitious partner. So
I wrote it exactly like that, and they all hated it.
I got called into the office and it was like

(02:11:37):
the worst meeting in my life. They all hated Interscope
was the producer. They said, the guy such a loser.
Who are we going to get to act in it?
This is before Jim Carrey became a big story do
carry would have been perfect? So he's guy such a loser?

Speaker 5 (02:11:49):
I said.

Speaker 8 (02:11:50):
The only way you could do it is because there
was such a glass ceiling in the early nineties that
I said, if we made her a woman, then she
would she could still be really competent and great and
still have to have a fictitious pardon. And they said great.
So I had to completely throw out my script right
from scratch with a woman star. And the way that

(02:12:12):
got made was they wanted Whoope to do a movie
called Eddie, which I don't know if you're familiar with
that movie where she owns a bad and here it's
a basketball team or something like that. And she didn't
want to do it, but she wanted to do the Associate.
So she said, I'll do that movie if you make Associate.
And that's how it got made. It was her idea

(02:12:32):
to have persistent, be an older woman who could have
been a success if she hadn't been a woman who
is like really smart and stuff, and what was her idea?
And I put it in the script. It was great.
I thought that was the best part of the movie.

Speaker 1 (02:12:46):
And to have Diane West play her.

Speaker 8 (02:12:48):
Was oh yeah, she was fantastic, so good.

Speaker 1 (02:12:51):
So where was VII Worshowski when you came to that project.

Speaker 8 (02:12:55):
Oh that's a bad story. It's not a good story. Again,
it's Disney. It was Hollywood Pictures. They love what I
did on the other stuff I did, so they called
me in. It was Katzenberg and Ricardo Mestress, who was
head of Hollywood Pictures at the time, and they said,
we want you to rewrite the script and I said,

(02:13:16):
I can't. It's really bad. I just can't do it.
I have too many other things to do. And they
kept throwing more money at it, and I thought to
a point where I couldn't say no anymore, and I
said okay. So they said, okay, we want you to
meet with the producers tomorrow. So I went to the
producers and it was like a stone wall. They hated
me from the beginning, because they thought the script was perfect.

(02:13:39):
They had already gotten Kathleen Turner and they thought the
script was perfect. And I said, what am I doing here?
If you don't want to change it, why am I here?
And they went, you're right, you shouldn't be here. So
I went back to Jeffrey Katzenberg's office and I said,
they don't want me to write it. He goes, I do,
that's all that matters. I want you to rewrite it.
I said, but I can't work with the producers. He goes,

(02:13:59):
you don't have to just work me and Ricardo.

Speaker 5 (02:14:01):
So I said, okay.

Speaker 8 (02:14:02):
So I completely wrote the script. The producers hated it.
They put some of the stuff back that I hated
that was in the original, like going through the sausage factory.
I don't know if you remember that scene, but I
hated that scene and they put it back. But because
I changed the plot a lot and the story a lot,

(02:14:22):
I still got credit on it. It's more of the
original writers of mine. But I wrote enough for the
writer's guilt to give me credit, and I was the
Latin writer.

Speaker 1 (02:14:31):
Yeah, that sausage factory scene doesn't make a lick of
sense because I don't think that Stephen Rude ever comes
back in the movie.

Speaker 8 (02:14:37):
I think once he does. I think somewhere, somewhere he
comes from back one more time. When it was shot
and there was a preview screening, Ricardo and Jeffrey invited
me and I went. And when I walked into that
lobby and those guys saw me, the producers and the
original writer and the director saw me, it was like

(02:14:58):
Hitler just walked into the room. My god, I was
They did not want me there. But the screening was great,
the audience liked it, and it was a lot of fun.
But they were they never I've never talked to those
guys since. I don't want to. I don't even know
if they're still a route, but I don't want But anyway,
it was not a great experience.

Speaker 1 (02:15:18):
Have you ever had an experience as bad as that?
On other things?

Speaker 8 (02:15:22):
If you want to hear the story about the Associated,
there was a period of time in the Associate where
it was really bad. Donald Peachey was a director who
had done Grumpy Old Men, and he had just come
up Grumpy Old Men and he was directing the Associate.
So I worked with him on the script a lot,
and he gave me a lot of good notes and
we did the script. They green lit the movie after

(02:15:42):
Whoopy came on board, and they said we were going
to go to New York for just a preview meeting,
just a meeting to read the script out loud. We
were going to get actress from Broadway to help do
a table read so we can hear it. So we
went to the table read and Whoopee walks in with
Olympia Ducocus to play the part that Diane Least ended

(02:16:03):
I'll play, And I have all respect for both of them.
I think they're both terrific actors. But they came in
and we had Victor Garber, who's terrific, and we had
Babie Dealworth who ended up getting cash because of her reading,
and a bunch of other actors that were great. And
part of one of the things that Whopy insisted on
it and was in the contract that the love story

(02:16:25):
could not be cut because she never gets to do
love stories and there was a love supplt in there
she insisted to say on her. So we do the
read through and Whoopy and Lempia are reading like they've
never acted a day in their life. They are sabotaging it,
but everybody else is doing such a good job and
they're getting laughed. But eventually they went, I guess we

(02:16:46):
better act. And it was a really good reading at
the end. But when the thing was done, whoopy says,
cut that fucking love story she had in her contract,
and we went okay, And so we had to go
and get notes from her the next morning at her
suite at the Plaza at New and Beautiful, two story Sweet.

(02:17:08):
It was great and Donald said listen because she was
being really a jerk to me. And Donald said, listen,
don't come by twenty minutes late because I got to
talk to her. She can't talk to you like that.
She was really disrespectful. I have to talk to her
before you get there. So I walk into the suite
and it's ice station Zebra. There's like icicles hanging from

(02:17:30):
the ceiling. They hate each other. They hate each other. Woopee.
Gave some great notes. One of them was to Diana.
Weives note. She gave great notes about her. And every
time I turned to Donald go hey, that was a
good note, and Donald would just stoneface. So we walk
out on Fifth Avenue and Donald said, I'm quitting I'm

(02:17:50):
leaving today, so I see an animation of my script
flying away, because that would be the end of the
movie if we lost Donald. And I said, Donald, you
can't quit, you can't quit. I beg and goes, no, no, no,
I'm done. So I go to my hotel room and
the phone is ringing off the hook. Everybody's calling me
from Ricardo Messrs. He had a Venerscope, Donald's lawyer because

(02:18:14):
he won't answer the phone, and I said, I can't
He's not going to listen to me anyway. They send
everybody back except me. I got fired. I was fired
off the thing, and Whoopy said, I want to hire
my writer. So Whoopy hired her writer and I just
I licked my wounds. About six to eight weeks past

(02:18:34):
and I didn't hear from anybody. It was great, okay, fine,
maybe I'll get credit, maybe I won't. And I get
a call at six o'clock in the morning from Donald
pechere about six eight weeks later and says, you.

Speaker 2 (02:18:44):
Got to come back.

Speaker 8 (02:18:45):
You got to come back. We need to help with
this script. You gotta come back. I said, I'll be
happy to come back with Whoope take me back, and
he said oh, when she reads this draft, she's gonna
want you back, believe me. So Whoopy was getting fitted
from the male's face that Marl she assisted on being
Marlon Brando. That was what that face is supposed to
be like. Even though her hair made the mask not

(02:19:07):
fit properly, but she wouldn't cut her hair anyway. She
put she's got the mask on, and she's telling Donald
all the things, she all the changes she'd make to
the news script. And Donald said, we just interscope in
Hollywood Pictures. We all met and we're in take. We're
bringing Nick back, and she clipped her faith off it said,
you're paying me a lot of money. I'll fucking say

(02:19:28):
anything you want me to say, and left. So when
I went to the set of New York, it was
not good. Donald and her were not talking. Donald would
hide it is a trailer. It was really bad, but
that's the way it goes. But it ended up getting
made and it was nice. I got sole credit. It
was terrific, but it was that was the one bad

(02:19:50):
part of it. See it's not all great in Hollywood. Yeah, yeah,
I know.

Speaker 1 (02:19:56):
One of your first gakes was flying High and then
you've and then you've done Lax and you've done pan Am,
what's with you in airlines?

Speaker 8 (02:20:07):
That would be pure coincidence. Flying Hi was just one
of the gigs my part I had a partner back then,
my partner I did When we first started out, we
had done an episode of A not wrote an episode
of eight is Enough, but we hadn't gotten on staff yet,
so we were freelanced. We did a show called Carter
Country and Flying High and Beach Patrol and all this

(02:20:29):
really bad stuff before it is enough to come on staff.
But it was the PanAm thing happened because I had
done a show called The Waterfront, which he never got
on the air, which was great. Jack Orman, who ran
Er for a number of years, had written it and
he created pan Am. So he liked me on Waterfront,

(02:20:52):
and when pan Am came he asked me to come
on board, and so it was just pure coincidence that
it happened like that. He didn't hire me because I
had done Lam.

Speaker 1 (02:21:00):
They were like, we need a guy who wrote for.

Speaker 8 (02:21:05):
And that was what Jordans would say to each other.
Pan Ann could have been a great show. It's just
a network in the studio thought about what the show
should be so much, one one that loves show, one
one in a spy show. So it didn't work and
the show ended up not working. But we had Margot Robbie.
That was her first gig. She was nineteen years old

(02:21:26):
and she was so sweet and really funny, but she
was ashamed of her body. She wouldn't wear any bikinis.
Was weird, but she wouldn't because we did a couple
of beach shots and she would not wear a bikini.
She just thought her body wasn't good enough anyway. So
that's how that happened. That's how PanAm happened.

Speaker 1 (02:21:44):
What are you working on now?

Speaker 8 (02:21:45):
I just finished a pilot for ABC Call about a
rural hospital, and they'll make their decisions in January. I
don't know whether it's going to get shot or doesn't
get shot. I don't know pilots. You got one in
what at a one and fifty chance of getting on
the air, but it might happen. I had a great

(02:22:06):
time doing it, and at my age, to get a
job in Hollywood is really doing something?

Speaker 1 (02:22:12):
Are you pretty much exclusively screenplays? Have you written fiction
or anything?

Speaker 8 (02:22:16):
I am right now I'm writing a novel, but just
because I don't have any TV or movie work to
do at the moment, so I'm right when just to
keep busy. But I hadn't, I really never had. I
think I wrote a couple of short stories in college,
and poetry and stuff, but nothing. I really didn't hadn't
written a screenplay until I went to graduate school. It's

(02:22:38):
a weird thing where I knew I wanted to do it,
but I never did it. And I thought everybody in
Hollywood for geniuses, but I was never going to Then
I went into grad school and I saw the other
writers and I went, Holy hit, I'm as good as
these people are. So you gave me a little more confidence.

Speaker 1 (02:22:55):
Mister Thal, thank you so much. This was so much
fun talking with you.

Speaker 8 (02:22:59):
You're very welcome. I'm happy to do it.

Speaker 1 (02:23:03):
Okay. Up next, we're going to hear from the director
of Via Warshowski, Jeff Canoe. I see so many familiar
things from your fimography behind you. But what did you
have to do with Repossessed?

Speaker 4 (02:23:15):
Okay? Repossessed a friend of mine, Joe Uzanne, who eventually
became ahead of production at Fox et cetera, et cetera,
and I did a lot of trailers for him, so
we knew each other pretty well, and he produced that movie.
It was with Linda Blair and he got Leslie Nielsen
and it came out and then he called me and
he said, listen, we want to cut a half hour

(02:23:35):
out of the bad stuff and add a half hour
of new stuff. Do you want to help us? So sure,
I got some ideas and okay. So there's a sequence
when Leslie Nielsen goes to a gym to train for
the exorcism and body by Jake is there, I think.
So that was something one of my scenes that I
put in, and then there was a few other things,

(02:23:57):
and then particularly the finale where they decided to exercise
her with rock and roll and he does his impression
of Elton John and Michael Jackson and all that stuff.
So all that stuff was my stuff in there uncredited.
I was around and it was fun.

Speaker 1 (02:24:16):
How did you get into the business. Did you go
in more through the editing or the directing, because you've
done a lot of both.

Speaker 4 (02:24:22):
I started out wanting to be a rock star. I
had a band and we made some records and that's
what I That was my dream. But little by little
I realized that wasn't happening. One summer, we were the
house band at a place called the Cafe Wis in
Greenwich Village and we auditioned the same day as Paul

(02:24:43):
Simon and a Garfunkel audition. Then we got the job
because they were just being folk singers at the time.
And plus again, here's where the story goes in the
wrong direction. Prior to that, I had taken my demos
around to record companies and didn't get much activity. And
I went to this one little record company and there
was a guy who was there, a and R men

(02:25:05):
named Jerry Landis, and he was very nice and he
listened to my stuff and he said, you wrote these
songs and I said yeah. He said, and that's you
guys are singing. I go yeah. He said you're playing
the instruments too. This was before the Beatles, and he
said yeah, So we usually use studio musicians, so we
wouldn't need you to play, but we'll give you a
contract as a vocal group. So that was great. I

(02:25:28):
was excited. I went and told the guys in my band,
who were also at my high school best friends, and
somehow it came out that because the drummer didn't sing,
why should we split the vocal contract with him, and
said they dubbed me the person that was going to
tell Joel the drummer that he's not getting a cut anyway.

(02:25:50):
So I tell Joel, and now the other two guys
seem to have talked to Joel the night before, and
Joel says that's not fair, and then they're behind me
in the car and they go, that's not fair to Joel.
You guys told me to tell him this. Anyway. My
band broke up, so we forgot to do anything with
the contract for Jerry Landis. Then I started a new

(02:26:10):
band and the next summer we were about to audition.
They had a thing called the hooton Nanny, which was
basically an audition day for the Cafe Wha. And we're
online waiting with all the other bands and this guy
in front of me is this little guy that looks
so familiar. And he turns around and I go Jerry
Landis and he goes, yeah, Hi, who are you? And
I got my name is Jeff Canoe. You gave me

(02:26:31):
a contract? Because he goes yeah, then your group broke up.
He goes, oh, this is my buddy already. I don't
use the name Jerry landis anymore. I use my real name.
What's your real name? Paul Simon? So Simon and Garfunk
who were online just in front of us, and they
sang some folks song about the plane that crashed in Mexico,
and they didn't get the gig, but we got the gig. However,

(02:26:52):
by the end of the summer, they were superstars and
we were not. And this is also at the beginning
of when I went started to go to college, which
I wasn't interested in at all. I was interested in
being a rock star. Anyway, I got suspended from I
went to Colombia. I got suspended from Columbia for cutting
too many classes, and so I had a year's suspension

(02:27:13):
and I didn't really care, but my mother didn't like it.
I had this part time job working at a movie
company because a neighbor, Oh, my father had died the
year before, and this neighbor, out of pity for my mother,
gave me this summer job working at United Artists as
a gopher office boy, whatever you call it. And so

(02:27:33):
I was working there and still thinking about my music career.
And at a certain point when I got kicked out
of school, this man, who was trying to help my
mother got mad at me and he said, all right,
then you're losing your job here too, right, And I said, oh,
that's terrible, and he goes, unless you can get back
into school, then we're going to You can't work here anymore.

(02:27:55):
So I went and begged the dean to let me
back in, and the dean said, I can talk to
your professors and finish all the work, then we won't
suspend you. So I went to the professors and yaha, yah, yaha. Anyway,
they all agreed to let me do the work and
take the final, and two of them failed me anyway,
so I was out. And now the man United Artists

(02:28:16):
felt sorry for me, so he gave me a job
as the assistant to their trailer producer, the in house
trailer producer for the United Artists. I barely knew what
a trailer was, although I had gone to the movies
a lot, and so I became this guy's assistant, and
luckily or unluckily for him, he had some kind of
a muscular dystrophee and his hands didn't work too well,

(02:28:39):
and so I became his hands, which meant like I
could zip up his fly after he goes to the
bathroom where I could hold his sandwich while he ate it.
But in the meantime, I got to do a lot
of his work that I never would have had a
chance to do before. And so I learned how to
edit and that was pretty much fun. I still really
wanted to be a rock star, but I started to
learn how to make movie trailers. So now I'm out

(02:29:04):
of school. I'm working as a trailer assistant to the
trailer guy, and I never went to meetings or anything.
I was happy to just stay back and do the work.
And the other guys in the editing place were all
ex duop guys as well, so that was fine. But
then I got a draft notice and I realized because
this was nineteen sixty five, and it was like, I'm

(02:29:29):
gonna have to go to Vietnam. And that was not
a real popular activity back then, and probably in some
parts of the country, everybody wanted to go, but nobody
from Brooklyn wanted to go there. And so what am
I going to do. All these other guys that I
was friends with were already married. They were like my age,
but married, and that was why they all got married.

(02:29:50):
To beat the draft because that was the law back then.
So they said, so you're seeing this girl, why don't
you just marry her? And I go, but I'm like
twenty years old. I don't want to be married. You
want to go to viet No. No, Anyway, I got
married and now I needed a raise. So I asked
my boss, can I get a little raise because I
was making ninety three dollars a week and the next
level was one O three or something, and he said no.

(02:30:14):
So he said, I, if you want to raise, go
ask the head of the department. I'm not going for you.
And they didn't really know what I did because I
never went to the meetings. Anyway. I went to make
this long story less long. I ended up losing that job,
and now I'm sitting out here one a on the
draft and what am I going to do? And this

(02:30:34):
friend of mine, one of the other guys, who was
an editor, said start your own trailer company. He's a
Brooklyn guy, so you sounded like this. I go, I
can't start my own trailer company. Who was going to
give me work? I can't do the client relationships part.
He goes, just you could do it. So I had
I went to a couple of other trailer companies in
New York, and they all said, no, not interested in you.

(02:30:56):
So I thought, okay, I'll try it. So I declared
myself in the trailer making business, and another young guy
that was working at United Artists in their foreign marketing
department gave me a chance to do a trailer on
a movie called A Man and a Woman, which they
had the foreign distribution right song. And I loved that
movie and it was there was no couldn't use the

(02:31:19):
dialogue because it was all in French, but the music
was dup. So I cut a trailer to that and
it was really nice, and they liked it, and they
paid me like a tenth of what they pay a
regular trailer maker, but I didn't care. And so I
had done my first trailer and I thought that was
pretty good, and so I little by little, god another one,

(02:31:41):
another one. But then the client relationship part came up,
and I wasn't getting enough work because there were other
places where they could go and deal with grown ups,
not with me. So I wasn't getting much work. And
down the hall from this place where we rented a
little editing because everything was on film back then, we

(02:32:01):
had a movieola and cutting on film. Down the hall.
There was a guy who was making pornos and he
came up and he says, you guys editing in here.
I said yeah. He says, if you could cut my
movies and I could go make another movie while you're
editing this movie. So for five hundred bucks, we cut
his movie while he was shooting his next movie. And

(02:32:22):
he did everything himself. He held the camera, he held
the light, he wrote the script. And it was garbage,
but that was soft core porn. This was before deep throat,
so there wasn't a whole lot of actual insertion or anything.
So it was a simulated sect. So I did a
couple of those trailers for those movies, and I edited
those movies, and then I thought, I got nothing else

(02:32:44):
to do, I'll try to make one of those movies.
So I wrote a cheesy script called It was called
Mail Order Confidential, and there's about a guy who sells
porn through the mails, and of course in the end,
it turns out his wife, unbeknownst to him, was his
biggest customer. And so I made that movie, and I
thought I liked the process of doing that, so I

(02:33:06):
wrote another movie, and at the time I had done
the trailer for The Good Debad and The Ugly, so
I thought, how about a soft core porno based on
The Good Debed and The Ugly. So we got some
guys to finance it for like thirty thousand dollars, and
I got a lot of hippie friends who looked like
cowboys when you put a hat on them. And we
made this movie and it was called The Wicked Dies Slow,

(02:33:30):
and there was almost no dialogue, and it was like
a takeoff on an Italian Western. And I was kind
of directing it, copying Sergio Leoni all his angles and
the close syrups. But when I cut the movie together,
because of my trailer making experience, I cut it way
too short. So they spent their money and they got

(02:33:50):
a fifty minute movie. They said, no, this has to
be like seventy five minutes. I said, well, we're gonna
have to shoot more stuff. So they gave me some
more money and we shot some more stuff, and now
it came out to sixty minutes and they fired, so
I was fired from them, but I was in the
movie anyway. I did that. I made The Wicked Diy
Slow and little by little, I started getting little dribbles

(02:34:12):
of trailer work at the same time. And a friend
of mine who's still a friend now, but he was
a young, up and coming marketing executive. He worked at
Embassy Pictures and they had this movie. He called me
and he said, we got this movie. It's got nobody
in it, but it's got music, and it's Simon and
Garfunkel music, and maybe you should do the trailer. So

(02:34:35):
I got the trailer for The Graduate and I loved
the movie, and I thought this could be my big break.
So I made a good trailer, was long, but a
really good trailer on The Graduate, and everybody liked it,
and Mike Nichols saw it and he liked it, and
everything was going to be great. And then I get
a call. The trailers out out in the theaters.

Speaker 5 (02:34:56):
So this is it.

Speaker 4 (02:34:57):
I get a call Mike Nichols wants the trailer pulled
off off the screen because some friends of his saw
it and they said he gave away the whole movie,
but I really didn't. I gave away a lot of it,
but not the whole movie. It just ends with him
banging on the Elan and Elaine, you don't know how
it's going to end, but anyway, So I went to
the theater with a recorder and I interviewed people coming

(02:35:19):
out who had just seen the trailer, and one after
another after another, I would say, did you see the
trailer for this movie? The graduate said yes, did it
look good? It looked great. Do you feel like you
saw the whole movie?

Speaker 2 (02:35:32):
No?

Speaker 4 (02:35:33):
And I just got all those answers, one after another
after another, like a hundred interviews, and I called the
Embassy Pictures and I say, can I take this tape
and play it for Mike Nichols. We're not going to
call him. You want to call him, here's his number,
you call him. So I called Mike Nichols and I say,
I'm the guy that made the trailer. He goes, oh yeah,
I go and I hear you want to take it

(02:35:54):
down because people said it gave away the whole movie,
and I said, it really didn't. I made this tape
of all these people coming out of the theater saying
that we're dying to see it, and we don't feel
like we've seen the whole movie. He said, really, yeah,
I said, can I bring the tape over and play
it for you? He says no. He said, no, don't
you want to just listen to it? He goes, if
it means that much to you, leave it alone. So

(02:36:15):
he left it alone. And then the movie was a success,
and that was my beginning, real beginning as a trailer guy.
And after that I started to get more work. I
got Midnight Cowboy, and I got Lion in Winter and
a bunch of stuff, and I did four hundred trailers
Cuckoo's Nest and Rocky and all the Woody Allen moves.

(02:36:35):
And I love doing it, but the business part, where
you just had to suck up to clients all day long,
it was exhausting, and after ten years of it, I
couldn't do it anymore. Plus, oh, I worked on the
Cuckoo's Nest and I went to the Oscar party after
Cuckoo's Nest won all the awards, and somebody came up
to me at the party and said, so, what did

(02:36:56):
you do on the movie? I said, I made the trailer.
They said, what do you mean made the trailer? I said,
by the trailer the coming attractions? I thought, the projectionist
just shows some scenes from the upcoming movie. So I
realized I'm not famous. I'm never going to be making
trailers and I want to be known. I want to
be somebody. So then I decided I'm going to make

(02:37:16):
a real movie. And it took me a while, but
I found a book that I really liked and I
adapted it and nobody else said bought the rights because
they were smart and very depressing. Movie.

Speaker 1 (02:37:31):
Well, you must be talking about natural enemies that movie.
Oh boy, Yeah, that was rough Man.

Speaker 4 (02:37:37):
That was real rough At the time, I related to
it as a person. I was married, not happily but married,
but I just thought my life wasn't working out and
I could relate to this man who's just sitting there,
going I have all this stuff, but it's not working
for me. Anyway. I made the movie. Nobody played for
two weeks and disappeared and only recently came back as

(02:38:00):
a blu ray and now people like it. But back
then they called it the grimeced Reaper ever made. In fact,
in La there's a I don't know what you'd call it,
a group of people that they have a thing called
Bleak Week and they show only depressing movies and my
film was picked to be the first movie in Bleak Week.

Speaker 5 (02:38:20):
So I went out there.

Speaker 1 (02:38:22):
I'm so curious about Black Rodeo because I've I was
looking for that movie forever and I think maybe you
released the DHS or something. But I've seen it now.
But how did that project come about?

Speaker 4 (02:38:35):
Back when I was This was nineteen seventy or seventy one,
and I was at the height of my trailer making days.
I worked a lot and got a lot of good
movies to work on, and it was just I was
doing trailers for movies like Shaft and Slaughter and all
these black exploitation movies, and I thought, Wow, maybe there
should be a black Western. So I started writing one.

(02:38:59):
And then a friend of mine called me and said,
you're still working on that black Western? And I said, yeah,
There's going to be a Black Rodeo in Harlem in
a couple of weeks. So I thought, oh, that's amazing,
went down, spoke to the Black Cowboy Association and got
the rights to film it, and I got some camera
guys and we went and we filmed this weekend of
rodeo and it was a great experience.

Speaker 5 (02:39:22):
I was like.

Speaker 4 (02:39:25):
Educated because I was afraid to go through Harlem ever,
but now I spent two days in Harlem with all
the people and the kids, and it was so wholesome
and nice. I wasn't scared anymore. And so that was
a great experience. And somehow I thought, I'm going to
put good music in the movie.

Speaker 10 (02:39:43):
I know that.

Speaker 4 (02:39:44):
So I got music from for not a lot of money,
because it was there was no budget. I got Unchained
my Heart, Ray Charles and Little Richard keep a Knocking
and a bunch of things like that. And then I thought,
if I only had an on camera person to talk about, oh,
the Old West and the cowboys. And I showed an

(02:40:08):
assembly of footage to Bill Cosby. I got just got
it to him and he said it's too boring, and
he walked out. And then I thought, now what am
I going to do? But I remember that wood he
Strode had been a guest at the rodeo and there
was a picture of him talking to people, and I
called him up and I said, would you want to
be the on camera guy? And he goes, I'd love

(02:40:29):
to do that, and I know all about the history
of the Black West. Yeah, he had. So he flew
into New York and I shot him sitting in a
rocking chair in a western looking setting and the rocking
chair was very squeaky and ruined it almost but he
knew everything. I had notes for him, but he didn't
need him. He became the on camera sort of guide

(02:40:49):
to the Old West. I thought I'd opened the movie
with a sort of a dig at white cowboys, so
I sang Home on the Range. I played it and
sang it really bad, and showed pictures of Gene Autrey
and John Wayne. It was like, white cowboys are not cool,
and then we went into the of the black Rodeo song.

(02:41:14):
It was good experience. It was a very wholesome thing.
Got some good reviews, but nobody at that point they'd
rather pay to see Superfly than to go see some
cowboys jumping up and down on horses. So it didn't
do well, but it hung around for years and years,
and not that long ago it got somebody put it
out as a VHS or a DVD or whatever, and

(02:41:37):
I was not a good businessman, so I always ended
up giving away the rights for nothing.

Speaker 1 (02:41:42):
How did you get the gig editing ordinary people?

Speaker 4 (02:41:45):
So while I was doing trailers a lot, I got
to work with Sydney Pollack. I got to work with
Redford on Jeremiah Johnson on three days of the Condor,
and so we had a relationship through trailers. And then
he was doing All The President's Men and I did
the trailers and stuff on All the President's Men. And

(02:42:07):
he was having a problem getting the movie cut down
from two and a half hours, and he said, would
you do me a favor and try to shorten this
movie because you used to make short So I said sure.
So I took a couple of weeks and I cut
the movie down. It ended up back where it was
because Alan Pacula wanted it that way, but he could
see that I was able to cut the movie down.

(02:42:29):
And then at a certain point after I did Natural Enemies,
and he knew how Hobrook. He was thinking of Hal
Holbrook for the lead in Ordinary People, and he called
me up and he said, can I see your movie?
And I said sure, and I sent it to him
and he called me back and he said, yeah, I
don't think how's going to work. But you did a
really good job on the movie. It was the first
nice thing anybody said about that movie. And so I said, so,

(02:42:52):
where are you editing Ordinary People? LA or New York?
He goes, I'd like to do it in New York.

Speaker 2 (02:42:56):
And I was in New York.

Speaker 4 (02:42:58):
I said, I got an editor for you. You're interested.
He goes, who? And I said me? And he said,
you wanted to be a director? I said, I love
to cut ordinary people. So he said okay. A couple
of minutes later, I get a call from the line producer,
a guy named Ron Schwery, who I became friends with,
and he says, is this Jeff Canoe? Yeah, who the

(02:43:18):
fuck are you? I go, I do trailers, but I
did some work for Bob and I offered to be
the editor and he said okay. He goes, what other
movies have you cut? Oh? None, just a couple that
I made. But he goes, we have Sam Mustin he
did the graduate he did at Rosemary's Baby. What the
fuck does he want you for? I said, I don't
know about it. He said, okay, what's your rate? I said, oh,

(02:43:40):
I don't have a rate because I never did that before. Anyway,
I got that job. My rate was twelve hundred a week,
and I learned a lot and I had a great experience,
and Bob found the editing process a little boring, so
I got to do a lot of stuff on my own,
and I got to learn watching him work with the actors,

(02:44:02):
because he was great with the actors, and that was
just an amazing experience. And so I got it by
asking for it. He should never have hired me. That
was a bad move.

Speaker 1 (02:44:12):
I'm trying to remember. With Eddie Makin's Run. Was that
the first time that you and Kirk Douglas worked together
because you worked with him a lot.

Speaker 4 (02:44:20):
Yeah, Eddie Makin's Run. I had done Natural Enemies already
that went nowhere then, but I wanted to try again,
and I found this novel, Eddie Makon's Run, and nobody
had the rights, so I got the rights and I
adapted it, and I was trying to get financing, and
somehow or other, I ended up getting it financed because
I got this producer named Marty Brigman, who was Alan

(02:44:44):
Alda's manager and Al Pacino's manager and produced a lot
of movies, and he took over and got us financing,
and then he became my boss and bullied me the
whole time making that movie. And one of the things
first he calls me because that movie was about a
guy with two children who wrongly goes to prison and
then runs away from prison to be with his family.

(02:45:07):
He calls me up one day and he goes, what
you ever watch Dukes of Hazzard. I go, no, there's
this guy on Dukes of Hazzard named John Schneider. I
want him to play the lead. I go, but he's
twenty years old. This is about a man with two children. Yeah,
well tough. He says, you're going down to Atlanta, and
if John Schneider approves you, he's going to be the
star and you can direct the movie. So I go

(02:45:27):
down there and I get approved, and then I go
back and I was thinking the cop should be the
antithesis of a Southern guy, so let's try to get
Peter Boyle or Gene Hackman. And he goes, you've gotten
on a plane. Tomorrow you're going to see Kirk Douglas.

Speaker 2 (02:45:43):
I go.

Speaker 4 (02:45:43):
I love Kirk Douglas, but for what he goes, he's
going to play the cop. I go, I don't know that.
He doesn't seem New Yorky enough for the cop. He says,
where you're going? So I flew out there and I
met with Kirk Douglas and he had watched Natural Enemies,
and maybe he was only the second person that ever
said anything nice about Natural Enemies, and he said, I
liked your movie. I think it was a little one note,

(02:46:05):
but I really liked it. So he agreed to do
Eddie Macon's Run, and I learned a lot from him
making that movie, and then we became friends and did
more things together. Tough Guys get the movie together, and
Peter McGregor Scott had taught me always preview the movie

(02:46:26):
with audiences before you show it to the studio, and
you get to tighten it up, and so I always
did that, and so I had a number of good
screenings with test audiences on Tough Guys. And then Michael
Eiser said I want to see the movie. So I
took it over there and we had a screening with
a test audience and all the Disney executors are there

(02:46:46):
with their pads and their pencils, and I was like
really nervous. We come out of the screen room and
Michael says, let's go across the way to my office
to our conference room. I go to be a favorite.
I'm really I wound up from the screening and can
we do this tomorrow? Oh, let's go over there right now, okay.
So we go over there and I see all the
guys with their notepads, and we go into their conference

(02:47:09):
room and everybody it's getting ready to be a firing squad, right,
And he gets a phone called Michael Eiser and he
leaves the room and these guys are all aren't getting
ready to kill me. And he comes back in he goes, look,
I think there's some things about this movie that we
could change, but you know what, I think it's good.
Let's just leave it alone. And all the pads go

(02:47:30):
under the table. So he saved that movie that they
didn't hack it up or anything. A couple of years later,
via Aworshowski, we have a screening in I Forget somewhere
in the Valley, north Ridge or somewhere like that. And
I had some test screenings of the movie, so I
knew it played pretty well for audiences. So now we
have vi Awshowski. And within the first tops fifteen minutes,

(02:47:53):
a guy I see a guy. The audience is listening intently.
A guy gets up and starts walking up the aisle.
Big guy walks right past me. It's Michael Eisda and
maybe he's just going to the bathroom. Maybe he's just
going for a soda. He never comes back. The next day,
the word comes down and Michael doesn't like the movie.
And that was the opposite of the tough guys reaction shorter.

(02:48:16):
He wants it this, he wants it that. So that's
why I have this color hair.

Speaker 1 (02:48:23):
Tell me how you got the gig for Revenge of
the Nerds, because that seemed to really just jettison you.

Speaker 4 (02:48:29):
So I had made all these this depressing, two depressing movies,
and no one would hire me to do a comedy.
I didn't want to do a comedy. And my friend
Joe Wizanne, the producer who had done stuff with me
before at for trailers, he calls me up ononin Dan.
He goes, you won't believe this. I just got a
job as head of production in twentieth Century Fox. I go, wow, Joe,

(02:48:51):
he had been an agent and a producer. That's amazing.
He goes, I'll probably get fired within a year, but
I can hire some friends. So I'm going to send
you some scripts and see if you want to do
one of these movies. So he sends me Bachelor Party
and another thing called Give Me An f about a
cheerleader camp, all comedies, and this Revenge of the Nerds thing.

(02:49:13):
So I read Bachelor Party and I thought, yeah, it's
all right. The cheerleader thing was disgusting. And then I
wasn't even going to read Revenge of the Nerds because
it sounded so stupid, because nerds weren't a thing yet,
that word. But I read it and within three pages
I thought, oh my god, that's me arriving at college
feeling like I don't belong and that nobody likes me,

(02:49:35):
and I could relate to that. So I said, okay,
I could do this one. He goes, here's the problem.
The producers don't even want to meet with you, but
I'm going to force them to meet with you. So
you got to fly out here. So I fly out
and I do whatever homework you can do to get
a job directing, and I go and meet with these
guys and takes about two hours. Would seem to hit

(02:49:56):
it off, see things the same way. And then I
fly back in New York and I get a call
from Joe, my friend, and he says, so, what happened
at the meeting? I said, it lasted a long time,
and I think we really see things the same way,
so I think it went well. He goes, you made
one mistake.

Speaker 15 (02:50:13):
I go what.

Speaker 4 (02:50:14):
He goes. You said Risky Business was a better movie
than Animal House. I said it is. Animal House was
funny and it made a lot of money, but Risky
Business is a better movie. What kind of a movie
are you're going to make of this? I go, this
is more like Animal House. But I'm still want to
make as good a movie as I can make, and
I don't want the characters to be cartoons. I want

(02:50:37):
them to be people that you can relate to, and
that's why you'll root for them. What kind of a
movie are you're going to make? I go, I know
what you're trying to get me to say, Joe, animal House, sir,
but I'm not going to do that. He goes. I
want you to make a movie. Not only will it
not play at Cinema two in New York, but you'll
never be allowed in there again. I go, all right, Joe,

(02:50:58):
I'll tell you what. How about if I make a
movie that I'm ashamed to put my name on. He goes,
You got the job, That's how I got the job.
And every actor that's in the movie, none of them
wanted to be in it because they all thought it
was going to be stupid, and so I had to
promise them, no, we're going to make them real, and
we're not gonna the goofy stuff is there, but they're

(02:51:19):
gonna be real characters that you can care about. And
it worked out. Then, Oh, my friend Joe lost his
job before the movie opened, and this guy, Norman Leevy
came over from Columbia Pictures and took over a Fox.
And I in a restaurant somewhere and a guy walks
up to me and goes, hey, I hear your movie's
a piece of shit. I go, who'd you hear that from?

(02:51:43):
He says Norman Levy, the new head of production at Fox.
I go, that's great anyway. So I had to go
through this whole process of proving this movie wasn't a
piece of shit, which he didn't want to hear. And
it was supposed to open in seven hundred theaters. He
cut it down to one hundred, and he cut the
marketing budget and it was disaster. But for some reason,
that movie opened and didn't die. It just went on

(02:52:05):
and on and it ended up being successful. So I
had gone from making the most depressing movies ever to
making a hit comedy, and after that, I couldn't get
a serious movie job. I was a comedy director. I
was always trying to work my way back to real
stories or whatever, but I don't know. So I did Gotcha,

(02:52:26):
which was a comedy, but it also had reality to it.
There was real stakes. And then Tough Guys, which was
Kirk and Bert. Again, it's a comedy, it's a gimmicky movie,
but those guys are not going to play it goofy
and that kind of worked out.

Speaker 7 (02:52:44):
And then.

Speaker 4 (02:52:47):
There's a long story in the middle there where I
found a script that nobody wanted to make and I
loved it, and I got it set up somewhere and
as a low budget movie, and I cast it and
it was Dead Poets Society. Right, So I'm now literally

(02:53:07):
two weeks away from starting to shoot on Dead Poets
Society with Ethan Hawke. Jennifer Connelly was playing one of
the girls. It was going to be great. And I
had this experience with Robin Williams, who read it and
he liked it, but his manager wouldn't let him work
with me for whatever reason, so he wouldn't do it no,

(02:53:29):
Robin Williams. They give me the green light. We're going
to shoot at Non Union in Georgia, and I start
to get that. They start sending me memos, Let's change
the title, let's get a bigger name. And I went
through a lot of casting things with them. Two guys
came in that I would have said yes, that I

(02:53:51):
did say yes to, and Disney said no. One was
Liam Neeson and the other was Alec Baldwin. They wouldn't
hire either of those guys. They really wanted Robin Williams,
and Robin Williams didn't want to do it with me.
I should have seen the writing on the wall, but
I didn't have that experience. So I'm down there waiting
to shoot like Sunrising behind the school. And oh before

(02:54:15):
I went down there for that trip, I thought, if
I don't get them a name, I'm gonna lose this job.
So I sent the script to Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman,
and Harrison Ford. Don't hear anything from Parrison Ford. Jack
Nicholson passes, don't hear from Dustin Hoffman. So I'm down
in Atlanta and I get a call from my agent
and he says, Dustin Hoffman's person whoever that is, read

(02:54:38):
the script and Dustin's going to read it tomorrow. They
like it. That's great. Next day comes by, I get
a call from Michael Eisner, who never calls me. Jeff, Hey,
Mike Eisner. What's going on, Michael? I just want to
let you know Dustin Hoffman read the script. He really
likes it, and he's coming to my house for dinner
tonight and he's never come to my house for dinner ever.

(02:55:00):
I go, oh, that's great. And then the next day
they call me and they say you better fly back
here because we got Dustin wants to do it, but
not with you. And this is after I did the
trailer on the Graduate and Midnight Cowboy and Stroll not
with me. It was must have his manager or agent
must be saying, don't this guy's know? But nobody's the
wrong director. Anyway. I got fired off Dead Poets after

(02:55:23):
I got up, So after that I thought I got
to have a hit. Obviously, because I Tough Guys wasn't
a big hit. So I heard about this movie called
Troop Beverly Hills, where a director named Howard Deef was
directing that movie. But he's leaving that movie to go
do this other movie called dream Team, and so that

(02:55:46):
job is open, so I throw my hat in the
ring and I get the job of Troop Beverly Hills,
even though I don't think I was the right choice
for that, but I ended up doing a good job
on that movie. It didn't make money, but it had
a long life in video and people still liked that movie.
So I did that, and then after that I wasn't

(02:56:08):
getting jobs because that wasn't successful. Whatever. And you get
to a point where you have heat, you lose the heat,
and now the age your agent's not that interested anymore.
So I had been with William Morris. I ended up
at the Grocery Agency, and the Groce agency got me
the Kathleen Turner job on Virwa and I had a

(02:56:28):
great experience making that movie and loved the casting and
everything about it was good, except nobody went to see it.
So that was it for me in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 (02:56:39):
Sounds like Kamplin. Turner was already attached by the time
you got there.

Speaker 4 (02:56:43):
Yeah, and I had to go and audition for her,
and I got the job. We got along and whatever,
and we got we worked together great, and there was
a cold, big committee on that movie. There were like
five producers and two studio execs on the set at
all times. And because I got along well with Kathleen,
they couldn't push me around too much and had good actors.

(02:57:08):
And I just watched the movie today. I'm happy with
the movie. There was just no way to sell it.
They couldn't figure and I will say that the title
may have been a problem.

Speaker 10 (02:57:20):
So that was that.

Speaker 1 (02:57:21):
I know. There were also a lot of writers on that.
At least three Where was.

Speaker 6 (02:57:28):
On that?

Speaker 1 (02:57:28):
At least three where was the script at?

Speaker 4 (02:57:31):
When you came aboard There was a writer named Edgar
Somebody or other serious mystery writer, and he did the
first adaptation. Because the novels were basically detective stories, they
weren't comedies. She had a tone in her description of
things that had comedic but they were the bad guys
in violence, and she was the detective. Anyway, The script

(02:57:56):
was a tri Star and then the producer Jeff Lewie
and his guys, he had like several people who work
for him. They would put it in turnaround at Trystar
and they moved it to Disney, and Disney, who I
had now had a bad experience with because of Dead
Poets Touchstone. This guy David Hoberman, who is the head
of Touchstone, he didn't want any part of me. But

(02:58:19):
this Hollywood Pictures was this other company that was at Disney.
And because David didn't like me, ricardomestris if Hollywood Pictures
did like me, And so I got to do that job.
And again I feel pretty good about the movie. And
every movie is a war and every movie is an education.
And that was another one. But before the movie opened,

(02:58:43):
there was a thing called Premier magazine and they'd do
a summer prediction, and their summer prediction was and it
was always like who stands to gain? Who stands to lose?
And with the Irishovski, who stands to gain? The producers,
Kathleen Turner, the studio because if this movie succeeds, they'll
have it like a franchise. Like James Bond, who stands

(02:59:06):
to lose. The director because if that movie doesn't succeed,
it's his fall. I got all the credit for the failure.

Speaker 1 (02:59:14):
When you said there's so many producers on sett and everything,
it feels like there was a lot of pressure on
you for this.

Speaker 4 (02:59:21):
I got along well with Jeff Lury and his people.
Except for a couple of them, everybody has an opinion.
Then there was the studio had appointed their own representative
on the set, and she was the one carrying notes
back from the other, so that there were every weekend
there was like it's long, several hours meeting with studio

(02:59:43):
notes and trying to figure out how to deal with
them and how are we going to sell this to
Kathleen because if she said no, then that's it. If
she want to make this change or do this scene.
So she saved the movie in sense because she made
good choices as far as it goes. She didn't save
the movie at the box office, but she worked the

(03:00:04):
movie work because they kept trying to turn it into
Paper Moon, a funny relationship between this young girl and
this female detective, that's all. They were trying to push
it towards comedy. But they had a mother and her
husband trying to kill the daughter, and it was a
serious and her dad was blown up at the beginning,

(03:00:24):
so it was not a comedy, but it had comedic
elements to it.

Speaker 1 (03:00:29):
He the Kathleen Turner's already attached to it. Who else
is already cast for this or did you help the
casting process?

Speaker 4 (03:00:36):
Oh yeah, just Kathleen. I got the job. And then
casting is always it's a little bit of a committee thing,
but the casting person gives you suggestions. Some casting people
don't like you to shop as they say, they like
you to accept who they give you. So Wayne Knight
plays the kind of bad guy, and Stanley Tucci came

(03:01:00):
in and read for that, and he was great, and
I wanted him, but Katzenberg wanted Wayne Knight, and he
came and read and he was good, and I wasn't.

Speaker 5 (03:01:09):
At that point.

Speaker 4 (03:01:09):
I had learned to shut up and not argue that,
not to speak truth to power. But I learned it
a little late, that's all. So there was and Charles Derney.
I had worked with him on Tough Guys, and so
that was great. And the guy who dies at the beginning,
Steven Meadows, was brand new and we read a lot
of people on that, Bruce Greenwood and Jack I forget

(03:01:30):
his name, Scalia or whatever, but I really liked Steven
Meadows and they let me hire him and he was good.
And the girl's mother was an actress named Nancy Paul,
who I with the redheaded woman. I thought she was great,
and the two older brothers. Everybody was really good actors,
and I didn't have them in my pocket. But whoever

(03:01:52):
the casting person was, I'd have to look it up again,
but they presented good people.

Speaker 1 (03:01:57):
I always liked j O. Saunders.

Speaker 4 (03:02:01):
Jay was in Eddie Macon's Run. Jay was one of
the two bad guys who hanged John Schneider in their
living room, and we got to be pretty good friends
on that movie. And then I offered him the coach
job in Revenge of the Nerds, but he said it
sounded stupid, so he didn't do it. So then he
was sorry that he didn't do it. And then I

(03:02:22):
offered him the Worshovski thing and he did it and
Kathleen approved him, and it was great.

Speaker 1 (03:02:29):
Did you actually shoot that in Chicago?

Speaker 4 (03:02:31):
Mostly? Yeah, actually almost entirely, But at the last minute,
Chicago was great because here's this river and no one's
ever shot a boat chase on that river before, and
I thought, here's my French connection moment, and so did
that and that was fun and great. But then Disney

(03:02:52):
sort of changed their mind about the ending of the movie.
It wasn't a big enough ending because it was just
at the dock and she goes into water to rescue
the girl. They thought it was too small, and they
had done this movie's stakeout with Dreyfus and Emilio Estevez
and that ended in a big I don't even know what.
It was, a factory where they were burnie or cutting

(03:03:15):
wood or it was all these machines they wanted that
they wanted ending, so they brought in a writer named
Nick Feel. I never even met him. He worked with
the studio people. He wrote them a new ending. The
producers and I and Kathleen read that and said no,
So that was out. But in the meantime they made

(03:03:35):
us move back from Chicago to shoot the ending. And
it was too cold in Chicago now because they had
stalled rewriting the ending whatever, So we shot the original ending,
but we shot it in San Pedro, but it's the
same ending.

Speaker 1 (03:03:50):
I always find that the Stephen Root character is very
interesting in that it feels like it comes out of nowhere.

Speaker 4 (03:03:56):
It was always there, the sausage factory guy. It was
the setup that met her pigs. I guess you know,
he was nobody at the time. I mean, he's done
so many things since Nati's Yeah, that was like a
half a day shoot with him, but he was great.

Speaker 1 (03:04:10):
Do you tend to work with the same people behind
the camera?

Speaker 4 (03:04:14):
Try because it's a good thing to do, but there's
always politics behind it. Like the DP who shot Nerds
and Gotcha Troop Beverly Hills, they wouldn't hire him. They
wanted their own guy for Troop Beverly Hills. And Shelley
Long had a guy she wanted because he only knows
how to photograph women. So King Baggett who shot Nerds

(03:04:34):
and Gotcha, they wouldn't hire him, and tough guys. He
shot three movies for me in a row and he
was great. But it didn't And at a certain point
you go, I mean, if you're if I was Franciscopola,
I'd say this is who I want and that would
be it. But I hadn't achieved that level of political
power or whatever. Try to work with the same people

(03:04:57):
if you can. I had a line producer or named
Peter McGregor Scott who when I first got out to
LA to prepping Nerds. Guy comes into my office one
day and he goes, Hi, I'm the new line producer.
I go, okay, great. He goes, Yeah, let me just
tell you this. I'm being hired as a spy. What

(03:05:20):
do you mean, he goes, They, No, I did Animal House,
and if I think you're not making it funny, I
have to call the studio and squeal. I said, oh,
that's good to know, he goes. But we'll just work
together and we'll make it work. And that's what we did.
We worked together and we made it work. And so
then he did Gotcha with me, and then Disney wouldn't
hire him on Tough Guys for some reason. But then

(03:05:41):
Troop Beverly Hills I got him back again. So I
did three movies with Peter. But it's a shorthand thing.
If you work with somebody and you know how each
other works, it's very helpful.

Speaker 1 (03:05:54):
I'm curious about you, having come from the editing background,
how was it giving up that control to somebody else
to edit your films?

Speaker 4 (03:06:03):
It was not easy, and in fact I always had
my own cutting room. I didn't take credit, but I
on Nerds. For example, they gave me an editor that
had worked on mel Brooks's most recent movie. I think
it was called to Be a Not to Be or something,
and the studio liked him and he started to work

(03:06:23):
for me, and I realized he doesn't try enough permutations
on a scene. He just likes to cut the scene
and not make too many splices because we're still cutting
on film and it sounds sloppy if you'd make too
many splices when it goes through the movie. Editors didn't
like that. And also they would have their assistant editors
and they were just like a style of thing. They

(03:06:44):
would go the thing would be on the movie all
and then he would hit it with the grease pencil
and that was where to cut, and then he would
give it to the assistant to go cut there like that.
When I was cutting, I was saying, I don't know
should be here? Should it be there? And I always
had too many cuts because I wanted it to be
the perfect cut, and a lot of it was trial
and error to me. So I worked with that guy

(03:07:06):
on that movie, and I worked with a different person
on Gotcha. Although I worked I had an apprentice editor
on Nerds who also worked on Gotcha as an assistant,
and she became a really big solid editor. She did
Hangover one Hangover to Hangover. She became a really big
time editor. This girl Debbie that was the apprentice on Nerds.

(03:07:28):
I worked with different editors, but I always had my
own cut room, so I would just patchki around and
make things the way I needed them to be.

Speaker 1 (03:07:35):
Who your DP for Worshowsky was a Yan Kesser Keyser, Yes, Yesser, Okay, Okay,
he was Okay.

Speaker 4 (03:07:44):
All my films up to that point were visually fine,
but nothing brilliant about them, And on Worshowsky, I wanted
to try to become a less boring director visually, and
so I tried to get a couple of guys and
they didn't like the script. Conrad Hall didn't like the script.
And then John Keezer came in. I had seen one

(03:08:05):
of his movies, and I said to him, listen, I
need to look more stylish on this movie. So let's
make different kind of choice. Let's not make choices just
based on story, Let's make some choices based on style.
And he said absolutely. But every time I would ask
him to do something like that, he would say, it's
not justified.

Speaker 1 (03:08:24):
And so it was.

Speaker 4 (03:08:24):
The movie was fine, but it could have been more
interesting visually.

Speaker 1 (03:08:30):
So did you end up in movie jail afterwards?

Speaker 4 (03:08:34):
That was nineteen ninety one. I wasn't getting meetings, I
wasn't getting jobs. I was bouncing from agency to agency
and like nothing was happening. So I started doing trailers again.
And now I was no longer the top of trailer makers.
I was like level three of trailer makers. So after
they'd been to a couple of other companies, they give

(03:08:55):
me a crack at it. So I worked for a
couple of years just doing trailers again. It was good
and the ego was crushed. And so then at a
certain point Kirk called me up and he was offered
a touch by an Angel episode and he asked where
I directed with him. I said sure, So he got

(03:09:17):
me that job, and I went to Salt Lake City
and we shot that and I thought, it's like making
a movie. It's fast, but I enjoyed it. So I
did three episodes of that, and then Kirk got this
offer to make a movie in Belarus, a Holocaust movie,
and he had already had his stroke and he was

(03:09:39):
not feeling well, but he got me the job as
the director, and then just when it was time to
go over there and shoot the movie, he said he
couldn't do it. So he canceled, and I called the director,
who would never talk to me because he would only fax.
So he faxed me back and he said, what do
you want? And I said, I guess I'm not going
to be the director. A workers Kirk's not going to

(03:10:01):
do it. He goes, no, you're still the director, but
we're cutting your salary in half. But I needed the job,
so I flew over there and I made that movie.

Speaker 2 (03:10:08):
And.

Speaker 4 (03:10:10):
I liked the movie mostly. It was an amazing experience
working in a place where I didn't speak the language,
with a crew who didn't speak my language, with actors
who spoke several languages. You had an Italian actor and
a German actor and a Russian actor all acting in
their own language in a scene together. And I thought
this is never going to work, but it did. Those

(03:10:33):
seems are fine. But then the producer, who was this
older Jewish guy from Berlin, he basically got me pushed aside.
After I edited the movie, he took over and he
made some changes and it ended up opening in the
Berlin Film Festival. And told the Berlin Film Festival that

(03:10:54):
I was, in a way making a movie in the jungle,
and I couldn't be reached. So I was walking down
the street in Brentwood one day and a friend of
mine says, hey, I hear your movies in the Berlin
Film Festival. I said, what when did that happen?

Speaker 7 (03:11:08):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (03:11:08):
Yeah, I called the Berlin Film Festival. They go, you're
back from the jungle. I said, I was a jungle.
They said, we want you to come over. So I
went over there, and that producer was so upset that
I was there. That was almost made it worthwhile. But
it was his movie and that was it. He took
it from there. It's never played in America or a
lot of places really.

Speaker 1 (03:11:30):
Since you were doing trailers in the eighties, did you
ever work with the big vo guys like Don la Fontaine.

Speaker 4 (03:11:36):
Oh yeah, No, I was doing them in the seventies.

Speaker 1 (03:11:40):
In the seventies, but then it sounds like you went
back to it in the nineties.

Speaker 4 (03:11:43):
In the nineties, that went back to it.

Speaker 5 (03:11:44):
Yeah, I was Don.

Speaker 4 (03:11:46):
Don was great and he could do it in his sleep.
You didn't have to direct Don. He knew he could
just read the copy. Yeah, I used him a lot.
I used eight off Caesar until he died. Guy named
Hal Douglass. He's still alive, I think, but I used
him a lot, and every once in a while there
was a guy named John Roger and brother John. He
had a great voice. I was talking about Revenge of

(03:12:09):
the Nerds. I didn't do the trailer on Revenge of
the Nerds, but Orson Wells narrated the trailer for Revenge
of the Nerds for twenty five grand. He's only there
at the beginning.

Speaker 1 (03:12:20):
But how about now, what are you working on these days?

Speaker 4 (03:12:24):
Last thing I did after I did the thing in Belarus,
I came back. I made a movie for having just
made a movie for twenty million dollars via Worshowski, I
now made a movie for three hundred thousand. My son
wrote it and it was with Cameron Douglas and an
actress named Emmanuel Shrieky. It got picked up by a

(03:12:45):
National Lampoon, so it was called National Lampoon's Adam and Eve.
It was a small love story set in a university,
and it was actually pretty good. Nobody went to see it,
but New Line put it out as a TVD. So
I did that Adam and Eve, and then still trying
to get an agent and do some work, and I

(03:13:08):
did a few more trailers. My son, who I had
done the Adam and Eve movie, he got a job
working as National Lampoons had a production for some reason,
and they had a script that I had read. It
was like a parody of three hundred and Troy and Gladiator.
It was called The Legend of Awesomest Maximus. And my

(03:13:32):
son called me and he goes, they're talking to directors.

Speaker 3 (03:13:34):
Now.

Speaker 4 (03:13:34):
He goes, I know they're not going to call you,
but if I see an opening where they some directors
say no, I'll stick your name. And then so that's
what happened. Waited, and then he called me. He goes,
come in today, they can't get a director. So I
went in and I tap danced, and I got this
job directing that and that was actually a fun experience

(03:13:55):
and parts of it are really good. And that was
two thousand and seven. That was the last thing done,
except for a couple of short films.

Speaker 6 (03:14:02):
That I made.

Speaker 4 (03:14:04):
My daughter was in film school. I made a film
with her, and maybe one or two other little things.
But I'm ready to go. I've been working on I
got a couple of scripts. It's going to be hard.
You do get to the point where is he still alive.
I was going to change my name to that.

Speaker 10 (03:14:23):
Did he.

Speaker 1 (03:14:25):
Didn't you do a short with Paul Mazerski as well?

Speaker 4 (03:14:28):
Oh yeah, that wasn't sure. There was a documentary.

Speaker 1 (03:14:31):
Oh documentary, okay, well.

Speaker 4 (03:14:32):
Yippie, Yeah, Paul did it. I had known him from
trailer making and we ran into each other at a
funeral and I had done my thing in Belarus and
he had just come back from the Ukraine where he
had shot this documentary, and I said, what is it about.
He goes, there's about twenty thousand Hasidic Jews gathered around

(03:14:56):
the lake, singing and dancing. I went, oh, that sounds great.
He goes, you want to look at the footage with me?
I go, but I couldn't say no. So I looked
at the footage and it wasn't That part wasn't great.
But he's in it and he's great. So he became
our guide through this world, and we made this documentary.
No one released it, and finally this Brandeis University released it.

(03:15:19):
But it's a good little documentary and Paul was great. Yippie.
Now all we need is my eulogy and we're done.
So that sums it all up there.

Speaker 1 (03:15:30):
Mister Ken, thank you so much for your time. This
was great talking with you.

Speaker 4 (03:15:33):
I can feel free to edit this if I send
anything to disparage anybody. Cut that out, except for David
Hoberman from Disney because he's a dick.

Speaker 1 (03:15:44):
And last, but not least, we're going to hear from
the final writer on the Via Worshowski project, Warren Light,
before we start talking about via Worshowski. I really would
like to know a little bit more about you, and
especially how he decided to become a writer. I thought
you would have been a musician.

Speaker 5 (03:16:00):
I grew up in a home where my father was
a trumpet player, and he practiced three four hours a day,
and they didn't communicate well with each other, and I
was not allowed to have music lessons because my mother said,
I will never allow my son to do to another
woman what your father did to me. Very happy home,
I noodled the instruments when nobody was home. And I

(03:16:21):
don't know if there would have been a different path
had I been. I probably wasn't disciplined enough to be
a musician, so I ended up often writing about music
and writing musicals, and every time I do a musical,
the musical arrangers and the pianists everything. Just you're the
only book writer who understands music. And I said, why
would somebody write the book to musical if they didn't

(03:16:42):
understand music? And there's this long pause, I'll say, I
love working with the piano players and the arrangers and
the compos and just trying to figure out interstitially, where
to place lines, How much time do you need? It
sounded like you wanted to go another chorus? Would it
help to have a little more to me? It's as
close as I get to being a musician, and I

(03:17:04):
really enjoy one of the things I enjoy more than anything,
just being in the rehearsal room with these beautiful Broadway voices.
And it begins with justin piano played these amazing piano players,
and then it expands as the musical gets closer to
whatever fate awaits it.

Speaker 3 (03:17:21):
Now.

Speaker 1 (03:17:21):
You ended up going to school for communications and journalism,
Is that right?

Speaker 5 (03:17:27):
Communications was the West Coast term for journalism, which you know,
I wanted to be a sports writer because evidently I
was never going to be an athlete, and I grew
up reading all these great New York writers or were
a columnists like Timmy Breslin started out as a sports
writer than Red Smith and all of these guys. I
didn't learn to read until I started reading sports pages.

(03:17:49):
I was one of those kids people were whispering about.
And then I started to follow baseball teams, and then
the Knicks, and then I was I wanted to be
a sports writer, and then for a while I wanted
to be a stand up comic. I actually did stand
up comedy at a club where Lou Black was the MC,
and I went on and Lou Black wanted to be
a playwright, and I wanted to be a stand up comic.

(03:18:11):
This is the mid eighties, and life takes you where
it takes you.

Speaker 1 (03:18:17):
Tell me about some of those early scripts that you
had right because you got in with the Kaufman Brothers
and working with like the early days of trauma.

Speaker 5 (03:18:26):
Yeah, the trauma as I used to call it liver
In case people are wondering, how do you get your
career breaks. I had an apartments share in an upper
West side building. I had what was used to be
called the maid's room off the kitchen. I paid one
hundred and twenty five bucks a month to rent it,
and there were three kind of rich kids in the
bigger rooms, and I had like this little Cinderella like room.

(03:18:50):
And there was a guy in the building who I'd
run into in the hallway, and his name was Charlie Kaufman,
not the favorite Charlie Kaufman, but Lloyd Kaufman's brothers. One
day we were talking and he said, you're right right.
I go heah, he goes do you like horror movies?
At that point I booked any job. I had to
make six hundred dollars a month to live. So you
could ask me, do I like romance novels? Do I

(03:19:11):
like horror movies? Do I like corporate speeches? It didn't matter.
I would say yeah, I loved them. So I said yeah,
I love them. And he said we may need to
write a treatment. I have these Swedish investors looking to
hide money for tax reasons. And I said sure, and
I went to Times Square. I was not a fan
of horror movies. I didn't like them at all, and
I watched in those days there were all those double
features in Times Square, and I did. I probably saw

(03:19:34):
eighteen horror movies in the course of a weekend in
the time with the Times Square audience, which, first of all,
you're taking your life in your hands in those days.
Second of all, anytime there's a flaw on the script,
which is often they start saying things like get in
the car, bitch, get in the car, like they point
out the holes. And then I had the joy of

(03:19:55):
seeing my own horror movie at one of those theaters,
and it was the same. I made the same mistakes.
I wrote this treatment for Charles for six hundred dollars.
He had the rights to He knew he could shoot
it in an abandoned summer camp in the Delaware Water Gap,
so we needed the girls to go on a camping trip,
and bad things happen. We had one day in the

(03:20:15):
city before the Unions found us, and then we had
all the time and I didn't know anything about the woods.
I'd never gone camp. I was not a I was
a city kid, so I was like, what can happen
to the Anyway, we filled up a treatment and he
said I'll call you if they want the screenplay, and
I was like, okay, there's six hundred bucks. And he
called about six weeks later and he goes the Swedes

(03:20:37):
like it. They're ready to go to screenplay so I
sat with him in his apartment, which was nicer than mine,
but not that nice. He would lie on a couch
with his head on a pillow, and I sat at
the typewriter, and he would say, so what comes next?
So what comes next? Which is actually great in terms
of what if this happens? He sum up with sudden.

(03:20:58):
They say, yeah, that works. So we wrote a screenplay
and I was allowed to do anything. I had probably
more autistic freedom there than I've had since. I named
the two psychopathic brothers, Ike and Adley. I said the
mom was a big fan of elections, and we did
all kinds of crap culture references and he said, this
is gets made. I'll give you a call and I said, okay.

(03:21:20):
I thought this is never going to get made. Nothing
ever gets made. And they called about eight weeks later
and he said, we're going to start shooting. I want
you to be on set because some of these actors
may not be good at saying two sentences together, so
you may have to make changes, he said, but I
can't afford you to have you on set just writing,
so you're going to boom the movie. I'm the rare writer.
Boommn hyphen it, and I boomed Mother's Day. There's one

(03:21:43):
shot in the movie where you see my fishpool fully
extended and my entire body in the shot, which I
don't blame myself for. I feel like somebody should have
caught that, but it's in the movie. It's become sort
of this weird cult thing of late, but it's Charles
got stuck because the certain international markets wanted a lot

(03:22:05):
of blood in it, and blood was expensive to use
in those days, so we had the PA's were below
the stabbing, soaking it up with sponges and pouring it
back in the buckets today really low budget. Had he
not drenched it in blood, it might have been more
well received here. That was the first screenplay I think
I ever wrote, and it got made and I got

(03:22:26):
twelve hundred bucks. I don't mean to brag. I'm still
friends with Charles to this day. In those days, I
booked whatever weird jobs from whatever directors who were on
a downward slide and were trying to get a screen
These guys couldn't necessarily write on their own, but they
knew a lot about I worked with this Italian director
and I learned so much from him about structure and story.

(03:22:48):
Nothing that ever got made with him. His name was E. G. Polidoro,
and it came to the States after middling success in Italy,
thinking he'd be the next guy. He came too late
in his life then, But again he would say what
was next? Anytime we got lost, he would say, which
was all the time, he would say, no, we are lost,
go back. What was the original idea? What was the premise?

(03:23:09):
If you remember the premise, you can always find your way.
And there were these like things that these guys knew,
not from film courses or whatever, but from breaking hundreds
of stories over the years. It were if you got
past their other insensitivities. They were interesting guys. They were
not world beaters, but I think it was formative for me.

Speaker 1 (03:23:33):
You actually worked on on a movie that we covered
a few years ago, and that I wrote about a
few years prior to that, because I wrote a whole
article about talking genitals films. Can you tell me about
your experience on me and him?

Speaker 5 (03:23:47):
Yes, they're talking. Jenital was on there. That was another
one of these. That's one of those stories. When I
finished the first rapt of the screenplay and it got
passed around, people told me, I'd written the next TUTSI
and I would never have to worry about work again.
And anytime I've heard that in my life, it's followed
by about two to three years of complete unemployment. Again,

(03:24:09):
that was a fluke. In this apartment that I shared
with those same three guys, one of the guys had
a sister who had a friend from Germany come. There
were like just lots of people staying in the apartment.
And one morning I woke up and there was this
naked German couple walking across the living room making with
my with my coffee. And she was Doris Dorri, who

(03:24:31):
was a German short story writer and film director. She
had not yet had her big hit. She had a
big German comedy hit, if He Forgives the contradiction in
Terms and the years later, So I met her and
so so I liked her. We got along great, and
then she was approached to adapt an Italian political didactic

(03:24:56):
novel called in English Me and Him, about a guy
who's packer starts to talk to him on his thirty
fifth birthday. But it was really also about the battle
of socialism versus communism versus class capitalist. It was and
I speak Italian. It was impenetrable in either language. It
was really I think it was the premise that the

(03:25:16):
guy bought and then they had nothing. So I created
a thirty five year old married guy who begins to
act out. There was great possibility of humor. Unfortunately, was
produced by Barrent Eichinger, who is had just by chance
I'd known Robin Williams through some people and he heard
about the movie. He's you're the guy who wrote the
Penis movie. I want to play the part of the Penis.

(03:25:38):
I was like, oh, my life is about to change,
and I bring a bootleg copy of Robin Williams Live
at Carnegie Hall. I guess there's something to Barrent Eichinger,
who watches about five minutes if it, turns it off
and goes flng. There is one thing of hits, I'm
as shilling you now is funny. This man will never
be so. Robin Williams as the improvisational voice of the

(03:26:01):
Penis would have made that movie very different from what
we ended up with. And then Doris, as often as
the case, Doris's boyfriend was the DP and there was
a producer. Anyway, she breaks up with the DPY and
can go. Somehow, she and her new boyfriend did a rewrite,
mercilessly stomping out virtually every joke in the script, turning

(03:26:24):
it more into again a European tretise about politics and
economic class struggle, and which is not always the funniest stuff.
I went to set a few times. They shot in
New York, but in such a way that New York
looked like Munich. I don't know how they pull it.
It went from being this movie that was going to

(03:26:45):
change my life to a movie that did very well
in Germany but died pretty much everywhere else. Eventually I
got them Mark linn Baker to voice the Penis Mark
perfect Strangers lin Baker, who's an old friend. But if
you try to trace the after my career, it's almost
none of it makes any sense at all. And a
lot of it is like a naked German couple walking

(03:27:06):
across my living room. And that's how I got to
do Me and Him five years later. There's no planning
going on.

Speaker 1 (03:27:13):
So how do you know Jeff Canoe or is he
the one that brought you in on Worshowski or how
did you get that gig?

Speaker 5 (03:27:21):
Yeah? Okay, that was a Weird One and Jof's a
nice guy. I enjoyed his company as the Titanic sink.
So I was in New York. Is this like nineteen ninety?
I think it really comes out of ninety one, and
it's nineteen ninety And I had an agent at that time,
and I would get there was a guy at Hollywood Pictures.

(03:27:44):
Disney at this point was going to take over the world,
and they kept creating new film divisions that were going
to put out Each film division was going to put
out thirty films a year. And there was a guy
at Hollywood Pictures. Again, a guy I had who was
two grades above me in high school run into on
fifty seven Street Ones. He'd put me up for this movie.
A number of writers had been on it already and

(03:28:07):
shooting was about to begin. And my actual take on
it is that the word was out in Hollywood this
was a job that would be thankless impossible and horrible,
and that they couldn't get a legitimate LA screenwriter to
do it, and in desperation, who will take the job.
I was in New York. I never spent time in LA,

(03:28:30):
so I was not part of any world. I didn't
know enough to notice say no to it, I think
was how it happened. There was like a weekly rate
that I'd never seen in my life that I think
they thought they got me cheap. There was just such
a gap between my New York life. My memory is

(03:28:50):
it was twenty five thousand dollars a week, which to
this day seems like a lot of money, but in
nineteen ninety that was two weeks, was more than I
was making in a year. Most yeah, that was like
are you yeah sure, I don't care. I'll say whatever
it is. And as it happens, it was based on
these novels, and I knew the novels, and I had

(03:29:10):
been a big detective reader who hadn't gone through that
noir stage. Knew I knew a lot about that. It
was not like asking me to do a show about
some obscure era in British monarchy or something that I
don't This was in my wheelhouse. There were a lot
of meetings, and this is pre zoom, but these a

(03:29:33):
lot of Hollywood. There were I would say there were
more cooks on this than anything I've done other than
Network TV. There were just and I got there and
the script was it was a patchwork quilt of different drafts,
and people liked this piece, and this was in and
it was there was no there was no flow or

(03:29:55):
shape to it. And I've flown out to LA and
there was a big conference table and I said, I
just got a couple of questions. When everybody gets in
the car at some point, they drive to a grain
silo and the grain silo explodes on purpose and almost
kills them. They go, yeah, that's great, that's great, And
I go, why do they get in the car and

(03:30:16):
drive to the grain silo? And there's this pause and
they go, we have permission to blow up a grain silo?
And I go, no, I get that, that's totally clear.
That that makes some sense to me. But what prompts
our characters to get in the car and drive to
a grain silo in the middle of nowhere late at night?
And they go, it can be in the day. I go, okay,
either way, why are they going? They have permission to

(03:30:39):
grow up a grain silo? So everybody just drove there.
But there was no way the script was filled with
things like that. It was and I don't call that
out on any of the writers. I think it's what
happens when I don't know what number writer I was.
I know that there are more people who work down
with them names on the script. There was an arbitrations

(03:31:00):
are always ugly with the Writers Guild, but there was
an arbitration afterward. But I think I was the one
who and I think Jeff Canoe would say this, I
was probably the one who pulled it together and made
it coherent, which is something I've done on a lot
of projects in my life. I was raised to fix
things in certain ways. I tried to pull it together.

(03:31:21):
There were a lot of notes. Katzenberg was giving notes,
and he was at that point the most powerful man
in Hollywood, but he was micromanaging this among eighty other things.
There were some very nice people involved, but there was
no I said, I don't think the grain style makes sense.
So then they ended up blowing up a boat which

(03:31:42):
they had for mission to blow up, and so that
was exciting and it made more sense to me. At
least they were in Chicago. There was a reason to
go near water in the city of Chicago. It sort
of made some sense as opposed to getting in a
car and driving an hour and twenty minutes to an
empty Grain silo every day for the three maybe I
was there from I went, I got to live in

(03:32:03):
a nice hotel in Chicago. For me, it was like
being dropkicked into Hollywood. But every day there would be
notes from Katzenberg, from the Hollywood Pictures team, from a
variety of producers, from the director, from Kathleen Turner about
the scenes that were going to shoot the next day,

(03:32:24):
and and the notes nobody was coordinating them. They contradicted
each other, they conflicted with each other, and I would say,
here's a version of the scene the way Jeffrey Katzenberg
wanted it. Here's a version of the scene the way
two execs that Hollywood Pictures wanted it. Here's a version
of the scene the way that third exactly Hollywood Pictures
wanted it. Here's Appling Turner version. Here's the director, not

(03:32:47):
that anybody cares what he thinks. And I said, and
then I tried to think, all of you guys are
focusing on different things. Maybe the prescriptions are wrong, and
maybe the diagnosis is probably not right, but it may
something is wrong with these scenes. So here's my attempt
to just try to make the scene work with a
three act structure. To the scene and with characterizations, and
it's also if you'll notice much shorter than all that.

(03:33:09):
Then I would say, and here's a scene that incorporates
all of your notes, which like literally at the door,
Kathleen Turner wanted to put your lips together and blow
sort of lying like an exit line that showed she
was sassy. But they all had different ideas for what
the exit line are. She actually has seven lines at
the door, so we should probably choose one, and they said,
du all seven, we'll edit it later. It was completely insane.

(03:33:32):
I rather enjoyed it, but it was trying to get
something to cohere with unbelievable amounts of incoming conflicting messages,
and they were doing that. Jeff was being tortured by them.
They'd look at the dailies and they'd say, tomorrow, go
back and shoot Jay Saunders with this sized lens, micromanaging,

(03:33:53):
not script. But they actually this was the delusion they
were under the time. They thought they were really the
filmmakers and the directors of the movie and the writers
of the movie, and we were sort of assembly and
they could dictate. They really were under the impression of
those days that they knew how they knew better how
to make a movie from I guess two thousand miles

(03:34:14):
away than the filmmakers, and that they could micro manage it.
It was a corporate belief at the time at Disney
and Hire Pictures. Didn't last very long, but it was
It's that thing of overexpanding and getting over ambitious, and
you can't direct a movie from two thousand miles away,
you can't write a movie from two thousand miles away.

(03:34:35):
We were all aware, I think that we were on
a sinking ship. That the movie came out coherent is
slightly a miracle, and they just wanted options in the
editing room. Options. Jay Saunders and I still run into
each other in New York and he was one of
the principles in the movie. I think he was number

(03:34:57):
two on the call sheet or something like that. Very
good guy, really good actor, And we talk about it
when I ran in him some thing in May of
this year, and we still talk about it because it
was like an experience to survive. We were all aware
that it was insane while it was going on. No

(03:35:18):
one was really acting out. Kathleen had good days and
bad days, but nobody was. It was all just an
attempt to shoot something that wasn't ready to shoot with
a director who's probably wasn't right for it. I remember
I met him. I said, I know what everybody else wants.
What do you want this film to be? What's it
about to you? And said to me, Kathleen Turner, she's

(03:35:38):
running around with a gun and she's got great legs.
And I was like, Okay, that's the poster. He kept saying.
So they knew what the poster was, and they never
knew what the story was. And it wasn't based on
one Wasshovski novel. It was based on four novels. They

(03:35:58):
had the rights to four novels, so instead of doing
one novel at a time, they cut and pasted from
three or four different I felt bad for Sarah. She
wrote some really good books. The thought of the time
was this was going to be a major franchise, that
it would be one Kathleen Turner Watshowskin movie after another

(03:36:18):
after another, like Raiders of the Lost Ark or something,
you know, except that they didn't approach it in any
sensible way, And so I enjoyed it and stayed in
touch with a number of people. The guy who was
production manager on that. When I got my first TV
job in New York. He ended up he was the first.
He was the production manager on that. I'm like, didn't

(03:36:40):
you hurt Warshawski ten years ago? And he goes, oh, brother,
that's a long story. John Roman was his name. He
was great. I remember we were in Jeff Canoe's hotel
room one Saturday night and he was getting just clobbered
by the West Coast and we all knew it and
we felt bad and having to reshoot things because they
wanted a different Can you change the color of the

(03:37:03):
wall behind Mike in this next shot in the it's like, yeah, okay.
We were in his hotel room and Jeff had been
an editor more than end. You can see he has
a He directs in the style of an editor who
became a director. It cuts really well, and people aren't
moving a lot, because that makes it harder to you know,

(03:37:23):
there's a lot of a group of three and one person,
but they don't change places to off, but there's not
a lot of dosey doing It's it cuts easily, but
there's not a lot of movement to the characters. The
characters tend to be stagnant. So we were watching Saray
at Live and he'd ordered some nice wine. We were
just trying to unwind after another week of just being

(03:37:45):
clobbered and a sketch comes on SNL called what were
you thinking? And it's Herbie Villain. Suez. Villain said, we
were on the one of the most successful shows of
all time and he left it to launch a movie career.
What were you if? The notion was actors who were
lucky to have these great jobs, who've made horrible choices

(03:38:06):
and then they go, Shelley Long, you were on Sheers,
the most successful sitcom in the of the decade, and
you left it to do Troop Beverly Hills. What were
you think? And of course Jeff had directed Troop Bearefully
it was when it rains, it pours, and it was
pouring every day on the set of Worshowski, and it

(03:38:28):
was mostly I think this moment in time when Disney
thought they could put out more movies by themselves than
all other studios put together, and they created I think
Hollywood Films was the third division that they had going
at the time, and they were micromanaging poorly. After about

(03:38:51):
eleven weeks after about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, my
mother took ill and there was I had an assistant
for the first time in my life, and he had
a like a typewriter that could he raise two lines
by hisself, which was like this astounding to me. And
I felt bad for this kid because I was the
amount of stuff I was generating that he then had
to He was working harder than I was, yes, and

(03:39:15):
it was a very nice kid, very sardonic. And my
mom got diagnosed with cancer and I thought I probably
said the job was going on and it was going
to be four weeks in LA and I just said, guys,
I think I'm done, Like what about this? I said,
the kid can do it. It's just dictation at this point,
but I said, just dictate to him instead of telling

(03:39:36):
me you'll be And I think that's what they did.
So I was replaced by like a twenty three year
old kid who had good had had him. I don't
even know if it was a computer. It was like
k pro. I don't know what was called, but it
was it could erase two lines, which was incredible. And
that was the end of my tenure there. It's not

(03:39:57):
really a golden age of Hollywood story. But it was
also for me a great learning experience because I'd never
been on Me and Him was not a Hollywood set,
that was just handmade filmmaking. And I had another flop
called Deer God. I don't know which came for us,
but I was not. That was another one with nine

(03:40:17):
riders and you get replaced. May come later, but it
was the first time really seeing how the sausage gets
made in a factory rife with health violations. And Kathleen
didn't want to be there. I think she felt she
signed on for something other than what she was. I
think she was correct in assuming that she deserved better,

(03:40:40):
and she may have gone on a slightly self destructive
way during that. No one could blame anyone for any
acting out that occurred on a set like that, and
it was just fascinating to me that the crew knew
this was not going to be something that looks great
on their resume, but that they were going to get
extra weeks because of the amount of reshe said, kept coming,

(03:41:01):
and the spigot, the Hollywood Pictures spigot, was open. I
got a letter from one guy afterward who was high
up in the ranks of Hollywood Pictures, but was always
respectful to me. Some of them were not some of
them were really disdainful, but he was quite respectful. And
I wrote him and he wrote back, I said, my
mom took her. I said, also, you were not like

(03:41:22):
some of the others, but it was the amount of
abuse or disdain was a little hard to handle. And
he said, Warren, and I understand. I just remember these words.
Every day I eat more shit than you can imagine
here and he maybe the head of Hollywood Pictures, but

(03:41:44):
it just stayed with me. He I believe he left
Hollywood and became a doctor, became an emergency room doctor.
I believe that's the story I heard about it.

Speaker 16 (03:41:53):
But he was a decent human being trapped in this
machine and the every day I eat more shit than
you can imagine, And it was very articulate.

Speaker 5 (03:42:05):
Who's not a coarse man. That's where Disney was at
the height of the narcissistic balloon before Pops gets bigger
and bigger. So I don't know, I haven't seen the movie.
How does it hold up.

Speaker 1 (03:42:19):
It's decent, it's not great, and you just feel while
you're watching it like this probably could have been a
lot better.

Speaker 5 (03:42:25):
That was the heartbreak to me. Those novels had an
interesting character at the center of them. Kathleen is capable
of good words. Those novels deserved a better fate. I
don't think anyone's ever made a Worshowski movie again. They
didn't just kill the movie, they killed the franchise.

Speaker 1 (03:42:44):
Yeah. I think they ended up doing a BBC audio
series with Kathleen reprising v I. But yeah, I guess
Disney still owns all the visual rights to everything.

Speaker 5 (03:42:57):
They should try again, but get somebody who can direct
a good episode of criminal intent and get a good
writer in and Just. They weren't the most complicated plots
of storylines, but there was. She also had moral outrage
about certain issues, and that was something that was not
appealing to Disney at the time. The novels were political.

(03:43:19):
I remember there was one with a subplot about an
abortion clinic being by something, and that was like a
third rail. I was instructed, as this's often the case
from corporate America. I was instructed not to do anything political.
You'll hear that today in any la writing job. That's

(03:43:39):
my success story. I have only fond memories of ten
weeks of staying in a hotel in Chicago. I went
to my first Starbucks. It was very exciting. I'd never
be they had one and I'd never been to one,
and I walked in. I was like, what is this? Yeah,
though I think it was their second city, presumably Weirdly,
Jeff Canoe now lives around the block from my office,

(03:44:01):
and I have run into him on the street in
recent years. Have you spoken to him?

Speaker 8 (03:44:06):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (03:44:07):
Yeah, What did he have to say? I'd love to know.

Speaker 1 (03:44:10):
He definitely did not have the greatest time in the world.

Speaker 13 (03:44:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:44:14):
Yeah, they were tough on him, but nobody knew what Again,
go back to what the Italian guy told me, what's
the movie about? Nobody knew what the movie was about.
They all knew what was what the poster was. I
don't think you should try to write a movie based
on a poster. You should have a beginning, middle, and
an end, and you should have a character finding out

(03:44:35):
something about herself in the process of breaking this crime.
And none of this was what they were going for.
I don't know if he directed much again after that.

Speaker 1 (03:44:46):
It took a long time for him to get another
directing gig. We talked about him being in movie jail
for quite a while.

Speaker 5 (03:44:52):
Yeah, that's like movie prison for writers.

Speaker 1 (03:44:54):
Uh huh.

Speaker 5 (03:44:56):
I did not go to movie prison for I've gone
to movie prison for other jobs. I did not go
to movie prison for this because I jobbed in and
jobbed out. But somebody once told me, no writer in
movie prison thinks he's thinks he's guilty of the crime
he's been accused of.

Speaker 1 (03:45:11):
I spoke with two of the other writers as well
as Sarah Peretzky, and yeah, one of the writers was
it was like his very first gig that he ever had.

Speaker 5 (03:45:21):
This happened to me the other in that I guess
in this point I was the well paid writer. But
like four years earlier, I was doing an adaptation of
slaughter House five and I got my usual six hundred
or eleven hundred dollars fee to write it, and then
I was replaced by Franken and Davis, who got eighty
thousand dollars to destroy us. What that's how that goes?

(03:45:44):
Never got what it was.

Speaker 1 (03:45:45):
He got paid more to come in at the very
last minute, because apparently Disney or Hollywood Pictures was like, oh,
we need a voiceover to explain all this stuff. So
they hired him, they hired the guy that rewrote, they
hired somebody else, and I'm not sure if you were
in that.

Speaker 5 (03:46:03):
Of course they hired four writers simultaneously. Of course they did,
because I had forgotten about that. I think later in
the process I got called back in to do some
voice that I had completely forgotten about that because it's
not really one of those remarkable things. But yes I was.
I think I was in so that would be here's

(03:46:23):
a tell. You have four different writers at the same
That was the thing. Even while I was doing the rewrites,
occasionally rewrite, other rewrites were coming in and I would
then rewrite the other rewrite, and I was like, where
did this come from? And nobody knew. I feel bad
for Sarah Perevsky and Jeff deserved better, although at that

(03:46:44):
time in his career, up until that, he was living
a good life. But occasionally, if I'm channel surfing at night,
I'll see some pieces of a film and I'll know
it's a canoe direction, just by the certain approach he
has to fill lakers, the titles of being what could
have been? Or how to destroy a franchise through hupriss
death by executive Hubris.

Speaker 1 (03:47:06):
You know it's scarios how you got involved with television
because you've been mister Law and Order for a long time.

Speaker 5 (03:47:12):
Yeah, I don't know how. I do know how that happened.
I'd had a hit Broadway play that won to Tony
and that changed my life. About two years later, I
was drowning in elder care. My mother was ill, my
father was ill, my father's my brother was ill, and
I was on the hook for all of the go
to the Medicare car doesn't swipe one day and there

(03:47:36):
they have to have that. I was just hemorrhaging money,
which is not unusual with medical care in our society.
And and I ran again. I ran into Teresa Reebeck
on the street. Teresa is a wonderful writer, playwright who
I think at the time was known as crime chick
until I was going through a bit of a time.
She said, would you ever consider TV writing? I was like,

(03:47:59):
how do you do that? I wasn't really up on
television at all. She said, Law and Order. I'm working
on a new Law and Order. I literally I said,
what channel is it on and where does it shoot?
That's how much I knew about the franchise. I had
never watched one. I don't think I've watched any hour dramas.

(03:48:20):
I had just always been a sitcom guy. If anything,
she says, it shoots. We were on twenty second and ten.
She said, it shoots two blocks from here. And this
is the first year was thirteen episodes, and they started
the second year. They want one more writer in New York.
I didn't think I knew what a showrunner was. I said,
tell the head writer, I'm a big fan of the shows.

(03:48:41):
And then I did the same thing I did with
the horror movies. I went home and I watched I
called William Morris, my agents and the somebohow. I got
thirteen video cassettes of the first season and every script,
and I watched them straight through. And I went in
and I thought, okay, it seems to be a commercial.
I didn't know what a teaser was, but it seemed
like there was this thing at the beginning with broken

(03:49:03):
point of view and then four commercial breaks. And I
came in and pitched a whole story to the guy.
I think he liked me because I had a Tony
Award and that looked classy to him. But I also
pitched a cohering story, and I was talking to him
about the background of his lead Detective Gore, and I said,
to be this hyper vigilance, he must come from a
home where he grew up, none of the stuff he'd
ever thought about it all. I stumbled my way into TV.

(03:49:28):
I called my agent and said, I think this guy
wants to hire me, and they said he can't do
TV or a Tony Award winning playwright. My lawyer fired me,
which was like save the bullet. I don't know it was.
I mean, they were like, what are you doing? And
I had been David Chase had been flirting with me
for three years to go on to Sopranos, but he'd

(03:49:49):
never pulled the trigger. He discovered Edie Falco in my
play met with him, and I'm half Italian American, and
I do understand that the world of that' show pretty
well well. Just then, after I got hired for criminal intent,
he found out I was hired, and he called and
said I'd like to hire I said, I just took
a job, and he goes, have you signed a deal yet?
I said no, but I told him I was doing it.

(03:50:10):
That would be to this thing. I wonder, what would
have happened if I'd gone with him. As it turns out,
I became solvent in the world of law and order,
and I figured out how to write it. But it
was like learning how to write with my left hand
in a foreign language. I have always had to figure
out how to do something if I got the job,
So I just figured it out. But anyway, again TV,

(03:50:32):
I ran into somebody on the street. It's a good
thing I walk a lot.

Speaker 1 (03:50:38):
Yeah, I have to say Goren was probably the most
interesting character on all of those shows put together. Oh yeah,
I gave him a mother. We had Rita Moreno, who
was great. I gave him a serial killer father later.

Speaker 5 (03:50:51):
I really tried to, but I was really trying to
retrofit a backstory for this really complicated character that Vince.
Vince was himself fairly complicated. I don't think Vince could
do a straight line to save his life. He couldn't
say good morning, how's the weather without you wondering what
the fuck's gonna happen next. You had a guy doing that.

(03:51:14):
There was so much subtext and sanity everything to what
he was doing that you just had to try to
figure out what would explain it and Yes. Most of
the characters on Law and Order had no characters or
personalities whatsoever. And I used to get yelled at for
doing that. I still get yelled at at the wolf
Rode first character work and until they need character work. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:51:36):
I used to love Dinafrio's whole body language, especially when me,
you'd ask a question, yeah to that whole leaning filt.

Speaker 3 (03:51:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:51:43):
Yeah, he got that from a cop advisor. A cop
advisor told him a lot of these guys look down,
so you have to lean over to make eye contact
with and keep the pressure on him. And it became
his signature, the Goren lean, we called it. That was
there four years and then they made me showrunner. Things

(03:52:03):
moved quickly in that world. If you could do it.
They just kept throwing the work, did you, because it's
hard to plot those it's only an A story. Most
TV dramas have an A story, a B story, C story,
and a little D runner some guy in the break
room upset about a breakup or something. This was one storyline,
almost no and it's forty five beats in an hour

(03:52:28):
or TV commercial filled hour with all these act outs.
And I didn't like the gratuitousts find a body at
the end of an act act out. You rely on
that a lot, But how do you make these twists
that are so important for the storytelling? How do you
make them organic? And I sometimes watch those episodes now

(03:52:48):
on reruns and I'm like, how did I fucking plot that?
What was I on? You get into it ahead when
you're doing them, and they were these master criminals. And
I learned from that show runner, and no scene should
anything be easy for your detectives, which was the opposite
of Lawn Order, where Law and Order you go up
to someone and say, Mike, did you see a bad

(03:53:11):
guy running? Yeah he was? Yeah, I certainly did he did.
If I did that, the scene would come back with
a big X through it. You weren't going to tell
me you saw the guy because you were there to
cop something that you should have been doing, and your
wife doesn't know you were there, so you're gonna lie
to me. But I have to figure out that you're lying.
If every scene is difficult for the detectives, that makes
it more interesting to watch and much harder to write.

(03:53:33):
Warshowsky had very little of mess.

Speaker 1 (03:53:36):
Mister light I cannot thank you enough for your time.
This was so nice talking with very nice to meet you.

Speaker 5 (03:53:41):
And when it comes out with you drop me an
email and oh definitely, yeah, my daughters will laugh at me,
as they always do.

Speaker 1 (03:53:50):
All Right, we were back and we were talking about
VR Worshowsky and I don't know if you guys had
a chance to listen to that audio commeddar Area. I
think he did. That was amusing. That was very amusing
to me. Like I felt so bad because first off,
I had no idea who was going to be talking
on the commentary because Jeff Canoe doesn't introduce himself. He
just kind of jumps into it and he starts talking

(03:54:11):
about TriStar and all this stuff, and he just goes
right into it. I didn't know there was another person
with him for like the longest time until finally this
guy pipes up. He again doesn't introduce himself, so had
to go looking and it's Mark Edward Hook or hike
h e U c K. He was the other guy.
And Canue was just not happy to have this other

(03:54:35):
guy with him. It was so cringey. So many times
it's like, well, how about we actually talk about this movie?
You're like, how about we actually talk about something important?

Speaker 9 (03:54:43):
It felt like he was saying I listened to the
commentary without watching the film. I just put in the
headphones and so, you know, just kind of was in
that liminal space where I'm not sure who's talking or
what their role is. And it's rare that you hear
a commentary where you get a little bit of antagonism

(03:55:05):
between the speakers. So that was perplexing and engaging. But
also I think really it speaks to my feelings about
the film, is that I feel like there's a lot
of people with something to say about it, and they're
kind of talking over each other, and this is the
way that the film is out in the world. You know,

(03:55:25):
like this it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
There's a lot of things that I thought were engaging
and interesting, but you know, as a whole, it just
doesn't in the end hold up.

Speaker 1 (03:55:37):
Yeah, I felt like Mark had a really good point
when it came to the idea of this being told
like a fairy tale. You know, I mentioned the whole
thing with the evil mother slash stepmother, you know, the
little princess who's going to inherit the kingdom and all
these things, and man o man can you wanted nothing
to do with that. And then later on in the
in the commentary, he's basically embracing that and he's just like,

(03:55:59):
oh well yeah, like the little girl who's the princess.
I'm like, yeah, yeah, it was actually a good reading.
Wasn't completely off base. And we mentioned those red shoes.
I was like, yeah, he talks about how they're the
ruby slippers. Okay, I could kind of see that too,
and that's what, you know, leads her into this whole
quote unquote adventure because that's.

Speaker 5 (03:56:17):
How she means.

Speaker 10 (03:56:18):
No, he says that they are the ruby slippers, right, yeah,
oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:56:21):
He's just like no, no, no, it just denies it.
But I'm saying, like Mark, the other guy was like,
oh oh so ruby slippers and yeah canoes just like yeah,
I know, fuck that.

Speaker 10 (03:56:30):
Yeah, He's like that definitely was not the idea. I mean,
it makes sense. It's a Disney movie. She's got these
red shoes. It does kind of start everything going. And
I know, like you know, with somebody, as someone who
does a lot of film analysis, sometimes you just kind
of ignore what the director says because maybe the director
was doing something unconsciously and didn't even realize it. They

(03:56:51):
did choose red shoes, So maybe on a subconscious level,
it was, you know, thinking of the Wizard of Oz,
who knows.

Speaker 9 (03:56:59):
Yeah even yeah, even just at the costume design. It
seems to me that Canoe is coming from this place
of just kind of being a studio filmmaker, you know,
a commerce kind of filmmaker as opposed to an art filmmaker.
And so he's going to be making decisions based on
what he can pull off, on what the budget is,

(03:57:20):
and you know, and try to come up with something interesting.
And I feel like this might be something that is
not as revelant now that we don't have as many
of those kinds of studio pictures happening. You know, it
seems like everything has to be a tent pole now
in a way that it wasn't. Then. I could see
him having to be kind of led along to seeing

(03:57:41):
where the art themes are are showing up in a
film that he probably really in the time was thinking
of it as just a job.

Speaker 1 (03:57:50):
Was somebody like a Sam Fuller. Was he doing these
as just a job or were they all passion projects?
Was he thinking of all the things that we see
in his films and I feel like with somebody like him,
the answer is yes, that they were all passionate, that
they he was really thinking about all of these things.
But then yeah, it's like you think of the whole

(03:58:11):
aw tour theory and it's like, well, what was everybody
that self aware or were there people just taking the
job doing the This is my job, I make these movies,
I direct these movies. This is basically commerce to me.
So yeah, it's it's always fascinating to think about like
who really was being intentional about things and whose stuff
is more accidental. I mean, you even think about, like,

(03:58:33):
you know, the the hair color of the characters and everything,
and you have like, you know, Kathleen Turner and kat
the little girl are both blonde, and then the mom's
got this kind of crazy red hair and stuff. So
it's like they belong together because they're both blonde, and
they look more like mother and daughter than you know,
page or whatever. The mother character and she dresses in black,

(03:58:56):
she looks kind of witchy and all this stuff. It's like, yeah,
was that intentional or not? How far does that go?

Speaker 10 (03:59:02):
Well, that's why I feel like it's very useful to
be able to say that you can disregard what the
director does or doesn't say. People do a lot of
things unintentionally, you know, they might not even realize, you know.
And I talk about it in my classes where I say,
you know, the director isn't living in a vacuum, right,
They're part of the popular culture that we're all living in,

(03:59:24):
and so they're going to be responding to it, even
if they aren't doing it on purpose. So I give
you permission to read into things and ignore what the
director says.

Speaker 9 (03:59:34):
Just a little throwaway thing that I feel like I
have to say because I am such an advocate of Baltimore.
In the Wikipedia entry for this, it talks about how
there was a point where they were intending to set
this in Baltimore and not Chicago, which puzzles me. I
haven't really been able to explore that a little bit further.

(03:59:57):
But it doesn't make sense because that's it's not where
the Detective was set in the books, right, she said
in Chicago, you know, in Chicago in the books. The
greedy part of me is like, that'd be great to
have this set in Baltimore. But the question is why,
and especially you know, like imagine if that had happened,
and then she still continued to do Serial Mom just

(04:00:18):
a couple of years later. What would that be like,
you know, what would the world be like where we've
got the Warshawski franchise set in Baltimore and Serial Mom
is also there.

Speaker 10 (04:00:30):
Speaking of the Warshowski franchise, I think it's always fascinating
to me when a studio is so wrong about a movie.
You know, like if you talk about Mommy Dearest, for instance,
you know that they originally thought this was going to
be like this Oscar worthy, serious drama, and they were
kind of blindsided by the fact that audiences had such

(04:00:51):
a you know, camp comedic response to it, and they
really thought this was going to be a successful movie,
and they were already in the works planning a sequel.
And in the sequel, the concept is that she settles
down to have her own child, which is like so
incongruous from what v. I. Worshowsky is supposed to represent

(04:01:13):
that It's just it's like, why even use the Puresky
books as like your source material if you're just going
to go so far, you know, off the plantation or
whatever the expression is.

Speaker 1 (04:01:25):
Yeah, like I said, it's very, very loose when it
comes to what they take from Deadlock, and it kind
of again selfishly like you were saying rain for me.
Parts of the book actually take place at the Sioux
Locks up in Sioux City, Michigan slash Canada. It's where

(04:01:46):
we have the locks I can go through and you know,
for the shipping lanes and all those things, and like
I said, Thunder Bay up in Canada and all of
these things where I was just like, oh yeah, I
can picture all of this stuff in my head. So
as I'm reading the book or listening to the book,
I'm just like picturing all of these places that I've
actually been to before, and it's just like, oh yeah,
this will be great to see this on film. But

(04:02:08):
of course it never leaves Chicago. It's just all in Chicago.
And so like the shipping, I mean, at the end
of the movie, the shipping has nothing to do with it.
That's what they figure out. It's like, oh yeah, the
shipping has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's all
about this beachfront property that was granted to your waterfront

(04:02:29):
property I should say that was granted to the granddaughter
to cat to the little girl in the movie. And
so she's the key. She's basically the walking, talking mcguffin
of this movie. Fuck me. Then, I guess this whole
thing about shipping stuff just really doesn't matter. I'm glad
that they don't go into it too much, but you
also I don't. For me, I don't really get a
feel for the brothers that much, especially the one brother

(04:02:53):
who's not Trumble. I guess his name is Horton. Frederick
Coffin plays him, who I mostly remember as the I
think famously for me, he's the cop that Wayne and
Garthur are making fun of in Wayne's world. And then
you get the one of the guys, the guy who
was with the Arenberg who kidnaps her. I think he's

(04:03:15):
also in Wayne's world. Like, these are very Chicago actors,
and I was really glad for that, and I'm glad
that they embraced the Chicago News. I was actually happy
this doesn't again take place in the book, but the
chase on the Chicago River, I was like, Okay, well,
this is nice. It's good to actually use the city
because otherwise, other than like really feeled, we don't see

(04:03:37):
a whole lot of the Chicago nests of stuff. I
don't think he thinks she eats a hot dog, and
from wonders understand, people in Chicago just live on hot dogs.
I would hot dogs and deep dish pizza.

Speaker 10 (04:03:51):
Canoe seem to be very taken with the fact that
it was in Chicago and seemed to, you know, take
personal delight in all the real locations that they were
able to use and everything. So it wasn't like, oh,
we were just in Chicago because they gave us a
tax freebait.

Speaker 1 (04:04:07):
Well, even the house that she lives in that street
that she's on, and those types of houses very much
remind me of a friend of mine who lives in Chicago,
in the house that he lives. And I know that
the guy in the commentary track Mark is like, Oh,
she's got this huge apartment. I'm like, they're at Yeah,
they're pretty good size. But this is not New York City.

(04:04:28):
This is a world where you could, well, at this time,
you still could have a decent sized apartment for not
that crazy amount of money. This isn't San Francisco either.

Speaker 10 (04:04:38):
And it doesn't look like a super posh apartment.

Speaker 1 (04:04:41):
No, it looks dingy as hell.

Speaker 10 (04:04:43):
Yeah, I was kind of surprised in the commentary where
he's sort of saying, like, how it seems weird that
she can afford this apartment, and I was like, wow,
I did not get that impression.

Speaker 1 (04:04:52):
Did not look very lavish.

Speaker 10 (04:04:54):
It goes along with her car, Yeah, and that's.

Speaker 1 (04:04:57):
One of the big action moments in the book is
she gets her brakes cut and ends up getting into
an accident on either ninety four or the like sure
drive at fifty five or whatever it is, and it's
like that's really like she gets really fucked up from that,
Like that really almost takes her out of commission, but

(04:05:20):
luckily she has the wherewithal to actually be able to
survive that. And that's when they really introduced that doctor character,
who again is just like shows up for three scenes
and she's kind of out of there, and you really
get a sense of friendship of those characters. And I understand,
like a book is a book and a movie's a movie,
but like just the characterization of these people, it's like, yeah,

(04:05:42):
give me more of their relationship or would that be
too lesbian if we have two women talk on screen
for more than five minutes.

Speaker 9 (04:05:49):
I mean it was nineteen ninety one, so you know,
only lesbians talk to each other on film at that point.
Unless they're talking about a man, then it's okay.

Speaker 1 (04:05:58):
Which a lot of this is, yeah, failing the Bechdel.

Speaker 10 (04:06:01):
Test for sure, which is unfortunate because it could have
been this great, empowering feminist movie and instead we get this.

Speaker 1 (04:06:11):
By the way, I hope I haven't mispronounced Borshowsky as
I've been going through this, but as somebody who grew
up with a lot of Polish people in his life,
most Polish names other than the seas the seas get
pronounced a little bit differently, but most of them is
just as easy as it looks. Is how you pronounce it,
just like wo joh, howitz what I would say? You

(04:06:31):
spell it just like it sounds, You say it just
like it looks. I know that becomes like the funny thing.
And I'm surprised that there isn't more of that in
the trailer, though I was surprised with the trailer of this,
and I'm trying to remember, is there a moment in
the movie where Charles Dirning spells her name, because that
goes through the trailers him spelling her name at one point,

(04:06:53):
but it sure is there in that trailer and I
know Canue said that there are a few scenes that
they ended up cutting out and include why j Saunders's
face is all sooty because she makes him go after
her apartment gets firebombed, which seems like a really big
deal after an apartment gets fire bombed. She makes him
go save those goblets of her mother's because that's when

(04:07:16):
we first see him. He's drinking out of one of
these goblets, and she's like, oh, it's the only thing
that my mother brought over from the old Country. And
apparently there was more about her father as well. I'm
okay if they cut that out, they had enough about
her dad in here, because I you know, it's that
whole thing like a strong woman has to have a
strong father who taught her right. You know, good Lord,
you can't have a strong woman that didn't have a

(04:07:38):
strong father. All right, We're going to take another break
and play PREV for next week's show right after these
brief messages.

Speaker 17 (04:07:53):
And film fan Heimmu Koitner is this and his manaster
Forlon and Bad Night that Lose on the lands bar
Yess and a teens.

Speaker 18 (04:08:04):
There's Peggy and the w as Madeira Father and oslaa
and Keira as Foss brother and Midle.

Speaker 3 (04:08:11):
Small scientists and dish wrestler.

Speaker 8 (04:08:15):
The APIs the amist.

Speaker 7 (04:08:19):
Priest for the cloves for the zebra for them Anglison.

Speaker 18 (04:08:23):
Good vision, don't nova gives pistos.

Speaker 3 (04:08:31):
Next march to the of.

Speaker 19 (04:08:32):
Us jolt and a man on loon and the bat
American rakitin Bason and a ropa albata pass it that's
misquichic with and a fouri shwats and cases. You have
a Chetonville Nafts and only kabites of fur Helmut kit

(04:08:52):
and puts in and it's wheelish together.

Speaker 2 (04:08:56):
That's this their job of us and cools. Yes, this
isn't all stars.

Speaker 19 (04:09:01):
And the modern technique and as lands one dimensions aren't
a fang of the last, the stems, the leaders of
the yacht an ambusing look lambs hung I have on
at very.

Speaker 3 (04:09:21):
And if he lambos.

Speaker 7 (04:09:26):
A sous an that questions inst I mentioned sun.

Speaker 4 (04:09:34):
From listening.

Speaker 17 (04:09:35):
He had to pull it taifers the links and your
da and pressure over of the lower SUSI.

Speaker 19 (04:09:40):
My cockdain oil boss that's name and kids Schwartz and keys.

Speaker 8 (04:09:54):
The maskaphon Yeah, the gram of famous next to ft.

Speaker 18 (04:10:16):
Have I stuff, I know doing mon Yeah, I give
just the one funds.

Speaker 19 (04:10:32):
Said peace and high Sis team mountains my target.

Speaker 1 (04:10:40):
That's right. We will be back next week with a
look at black Gravel. Until then, I want to thank
my co host Rain and Dahlia. So Dahalia, what is
new in your world, ma'am?

Speaker 10 (04:10:49):
Before I talk about what I'm working on now, I
just wanted to suggest that people might be interested in
reading my l A Private Ezed book, which is the
book in which I talk about uh the Warshawski even
though it is said in Chicago, there are so few
female private Eye movies that I use Bi Warshawski as
as kind of a case study. So that's not a

(04:11:11):
new book, but it's one that's relevant to our conversation.
And then at the moment these days, I am locked
up in my apartment on a sabbatical working on my
next book, which is called Dead Bombshells The Afterlife popular
Culture's most glamorous Corpses, and it it basically looks at

(04:11:32):
how we turn these sort of glamorous corpses into symbols
of beauty, tragedy, desire, how they integrate politics of gender, race,
and celebrity. And I look at people like the Black Dahlia,
Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith, Princess Diana, Selena

(04:11:53):
Whitney Houston. Each person gets a chapter and I kind
of look at their afterlife and what kind of collective
fantasies have been spawn since their death and.

Speaker 1 (04:12:03):
Rain, how about yourself? What's going on with you?

Speaker 9 (04:12:06):
Well, as we're recording this, I've got an art show
that's up here at a gallery in Baltimore called Current
Space that has been two years in the making, and
so I think by the time it's airs that will
have closed. Sadly, but hopefully, you know, if you want
to see it, get in contact and maybe we can
set up at a gallery near you.

Speaker 2 (04:12:27):
And you know, I was.

Speaker 9 (04:12:30):
Supposed to hear back on a residency today and I
just got that email just now that said I did
not get that residency. Which it's fine because you know
what this is the you know this is this is
my advice to the world who are applying for residencies
and grants and stuff like that. Once you put that

(04:12:50):
application out there, just pretend you're not going to get it.
Just think I'm not going to get this and move
on to that next thing, and so I'm kind of
in that head space. You know, it would have been
cool to have gotten this, but you know, it means
that I'm going to have a little more time this
winter to develop that next project. So I will just

(04:13:12):
say watch this space. I'm sure I'm going to be
back on the projection Booth before too much longer, and
I'll tell you all about what I'm up to.

Speaker 2 (04:13:18):
Then.

Speaker 1 (04:13:19):
Well, thank you so much ladies for being on the show.
Thanks to everybody for listening. Want to support physical media
and get great movies by mail, head over to scarecrow
dot com and try Scarecrow Videos incredible rent by mail service,
the largest publicly available accessible collection in the world. You
will find films there entirely unavailable elsewhere. Get what you want,
when you want it, without the scrolling. If you want

(04:13:42):
to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check
out some of the other shows that I work on.
They are all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially
to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community,
visit Patreon dot com. Slash Projection Booth. Every donation we
get help some Projection Booth take over the World's.

Speaker 15 (04:14:21):
Girl starts one the deep pencil paint stree pencil correct
red dodsons.

Speaker 3 (04:14:35):
She looks so good, veget fled. She's watching the detectives. Oooh,
you're so cute. She's watching the detectives. The right start again, shot.

Speaker 20 (04:15:10):
Loud, shot, a dead jumping side, in visible shivers run
down as mine. The anything can not being close because
some of the sand that says you never close.

Speaker 3 (04:15:25):
It's not to chilling your that just sing red. She
pulls to hack down with a face lack of paget.
I don't know how get more of this at Cade.

Speaker 21 (04:15:39):
She's silenced her nails while the dragon the day.

Speaker 3 (04:15:45):
She's watching the detectives.

Speaker 2 (04:15:50):
He's so cute.

Speaker 3 (04:15:52):
She's watching the detectives.

Speaker 20 (04:15:57):
Shut me uptil the cheese rup start again, doing what
he does. He's l hard. You take your alone until
you realize you're in nappy to see if everything it

(04:16:22):
is the chi with his the legal and little and
stretching at the window windows is protectives belong to the parents,
who already is the rest about the test appearance. So
it's till it's just a mire goal to catching the
stay on that little fingers to blow you.

Speaker 3 (04:16:45):
Just like watching the pets.

Speaker 20 (04:16:49):
Don't get cute, but just La like watching her detectives, gets.

Speaker 3 (04:16:57):
Angry and the tea Drup start all watching the detectives.

Speaker 21 (04:17:13):
Let's just strike watching the detectives, watching the detectives, watching
the detectives

Speaker 20 (04:17:24):
Watching the backs, watch at the bat

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 772: V.I. Warshawski (1991)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

Episode 772: V.I. Warshawski (1991)

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang