Tales from A.L. Katz

Alan Katz has lived the wild ride of Hollywood—writing and producing films and shows like HBO’s legendary Tales From The Crypt. His career has taken him to the highest highs and darkest lows of showbiz, and he’s ready to spill every twisted story along the way.

Entertainment Weekly named the debut season of his How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast the “Best Film Podcast of 2022.” That’s when Alan realized he’d finally become what he always wanted to be when he grew up: a podcaster.

You can find Alan's podcast here: https://thedonorpodcast.com/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
You are listening to The Billy D's Podcast. The views
and opinions expressed by guests on The Billy D's Podcast
do not necessarily reflect those of the host or its producers.
Any occurrences described by guests cannot be independently verified by
the show's producers.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
All right, well, hello everyone, and welcome to the program.
As always, I am absolutely thrilled that you are here.
If you've never checked us out before, we are primarily
an interview and a commentary based podcast. My name is
Billy D's. On the studio line with me is Alan
Katz Alan. It's thrilling to have you here, a showbiz

(00:40):
better and I got a lot to ask you, so Alan, welcome.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure
to be on your podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Alan is probably if you were around like gen X,
like so many of us, you grew up on HBO
and there was a program on there called from the
Crypt and Alan was one of the writers and the
producers behind that and the co creator of The Crypt Keeper.

(01:09):
So yeah, that's pretty cool. Before we get into that, though,
I got to ask you, what are you from? California?
That's kind of when people here with showbiz. That's kind
of what they presume.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
No, Like an awful lot of people, I went there
to accomplish. When I accomplished. I grew up on the
East Coast. I grew up in Baltimore, outside of Baltimore,
suburb of Baltimore, and I went to school in New York.
I went to Vassar I when I was in high school.
In middle school, I was I was a drama rama okay.

(01:41):
And when I went to Vassar, I was a drama
major awesome. And when I graduated from Vassar, I thought
I was going to be an actor. I've always been
a writer. Writer. I've been a professional writer since I
was sixteen, and so writing was something I just always

(02:01):
took for granted. It's just it's like breathing. I've just
always I don't know. The best thing I ever learned
to do was type. I took a type in class
in high school. That's probably the best thing I ever
learned in my public school education. It's incredibly useful and
words have always flown off my fingertips.

Speaker 4 (02:22):
Well, that is the talent for sure.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Uh. But when I went to Vassar, I wanted to
I thought I was I wanted to be an actor,
and I after a vassa, I went to one audition.
I thought, oh, my first tie was terrible. It's not
well prepared for it. But I walked out and I
thought it kind of an idiot, Thanks for a living
this way. I'm going to go be a writer instead.
Bigger idiot. Really, But and I vowed to myself that
I was never I would not act again, like anybody

(02:48):
cared until someone asked me nicely, which I actually that
did happen a couple of times. I had a friend
who was directing episodes and America's Most Wanted and he said, Hey,
would you like to be in an episode? Come on,
please be in the episode. I went ooh. And then
in an episode of Tells from the Crypt, the director
Mick Garris asked me very nicely to be in the

(03:10):
episode that he was directing, and I said, okay, But
I you know, I set out to be a writer.
I had a friend from the school who I grew
up with in Baltimore who had become an agent at
William Morris in Los Angeles, a literary agent in the

(03:31):
movie in Movie TV department, and she knew that I
was now writing and she said, hey, you should try
writing a screenplay, And that would have been in the
back of my mind. So I went okay, and I
wrote one cent to her. She said, this is good.
You should come out and meet and greet people. Now
I was a burgeoning New Yorker. To me, Los Angeles

(03:52):
was the stupidest place on the whole planet, the land
of the avocado head. I flew out June nineteen eighty
five for a week of a meet and greet. Now
June in New York, it's hot, it's humid walking around Manhattan.
Back then everything smelled like pith. In Los Angeles it's

(04:15):
the desert. There's no humidity.

Speaker 4 (04:17):
And forty years.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Ago, when I first got here, it was a lot
less crowded, and it's beautiful, and the people were so
nice to me. Copious amounts of smoke blown up my ass.
Very pleasant experience. One night, Carol, my agent, took me
to a movie premiere, Saint Elmo's Fire. William Morris represented it,

(04:40):
and so I saw this from the inside, and that
was intoxicating. At the party afterwards, even more intoxicating. Someone said,
since I had no meetings the next morning, they said
you should take a drive Topanga Canyon. It's a really
pretty part of Los Angeles. Into the next morning, I
did it really is its forty years ago, is a

(05:03):
lot less developed than it is now. It's within the
city limits, this lovely wild area. As I'm driving from
the freeway, the one on one through the Santa Monica
Mountain says they plunged the ocean at the Pacific Coast Highway.
By the time I got to the water screw New
York Man, LA had completely seduced me completely. So the

(05:26):
next month I moved out. I drove cross country and
I moved out. And among the first people that I
met that first week when I was there meeting and
greeting people, was a producer named Gil Adler. And Gil,
now I'm not a horror guy. That first greenplay I wrote,
and everything I thought I was going to do afterwards

(05:47):
was a comedy. I came out of comedy and Gil
came out of a theater in New York, but on comedy.
But he had trained as an accountant, and so he
underst good that if you have a dollar to make
your movie or TV show, don't spend a dollar one
you haven't got it. But hey, if you can make
your movie or TV show for ninety nine cents or

(06:10):
ninety eight cents, still make it look like that dollar
that's really good. Better yet, if you can do it
for ninety seven cents, make it look like a dollar
one or a dollar two, now you're onto something. The
creative process is really it's just problem solving, right, And
so Gil's solution to the solving these problems wasn't throw

(06:34):
more money at it. It was throwing more creativity at it,
which is exactly how I approached the larger problem of
the smaller problems. And so we became best friends, we
became creative partners. We began writing together, and Gil got
He made a couple of movies and trackeded HBO's attention.

(06:56):
They hired him to produce a series for them called
The Hitchhiker Right, and Gil brought it in it they
were happy. A couple of years later they had a
problem production. They spent some money on this, There were
big names involved. It was shooting in Savannah. It was
called Vietnam War Stories three episodes, but it was deep

(07:17):
in the shitter and they sent gill in to take
it over. And not only did he solve all the problems,
get it back on time, schedule, back on budget. It
ended up winning awards, and a year later they had
another problem production, very expensive, big names involved, and it's
just a shipwreck. And so they sent gill In to

(07:39):
take it over. That was called Tails from the Crypt.
And since I was Gil's writing partner, I was I
went along for that initially, for that's what got me
in the door, because I didn't have the bona fide
he used to run a TV show. Now. At the
time that HBO started doing Tel from the Crypt in

(08:01):
the late eighties, they were mostly movies, but just beginning
to dip their toe into original programming. They had a
show called First and ten. They had another one called
dream On and those were basically just single camera shows
with tits and the word fuck. But you took tits
and funk out of those, you know, those shows. They

(08:23):
were basically just ordinary, you know, network ready shows. Yes,
the TV world and the movie world at this time
were it's not like now where you could travel free
between them as telling matter what you did. Back then,
two worlds vastly separated, and the occasional Tom Hanks Robin

(08:46):
Williams would go from TV into feature films. But if
you were going from features into TV, that meant your
career was over. So when suddenly these four big Hollywood
movie producers Joelsover that's the Lethal Weapon movies, the Matrix movies,

(09:10):
Dick Donner, Walter Hill, Bob Zamechis and these four mega producers,
they approach HBO with a passion project, a comic book
series they loved from their collective boyhoods called ailsrom the
crypt Comics horror series, and they say to HBO, we
want to take this passion project with a feature film

(09:33):
vision and put it inside your little TV box. HBO
jumped up and now said yes, yes, yes, And so
they went right to work. The executive producers the TV show,
they went to work writing scripts. It never went through
a development process, so there was no one ever saying,
all right, so, how exactly are we every episode going

(09:55):
to take the franchise, all those elements that we loved
from the comic book franchise and translate them into this
whole other media. How do you do that? How what
are we going to do to make sure that all
those elements that we love that are essential are there
in every frame of the TV series. Nobody got hired

(10:17):
to do that. The first three episodes the first season
was the first order of three, which are brilliant. It
is Bob's All Through Bob's and Mechas's All Through the House,
Dick Donders dig Discaddy's Real Gone, and Walter Hill's The
Man Who Was Death. Brilliant TV, really amazing TV. The

(10:39):
back three not quite so good. HBO thought, okay, great,
They ordered a season two of eighteen episodes and a
season three of thirteen. The executive producers went right to
work writing scripts. Still no development process. They also never
did what their featured guys, what you got to do

(11:01):
on the TV side. You got to get a deficit partner,
because whatever the network is paying for your TV show
is not going to pay for your TV show their
license fee. In essence, that's not going to pay until
you get to profitability. However, you're going to achieve that.
There was no deficit partner, so HBO was cash flowing

(11:23):
the whole thing. Okay, at the very end of season
two production. In fact, the night before the rap party,
HBO handed the executive producers of financial statement said guys,
you are a million dollars cash in the whole. If
you want your season three, there's a lot of money
there for the producers. Pay us what you owe us

(11:46):
right now. The executive producers promptly canceled the wrap party.
They fired everybody, They got out their checkbooks, and they
paid HBO the million dollars cash that they owed them
to get to the season three. Nowho wanting not to
go down that same road again, that same road again,
they said, and we want this guy Gil Adler to

(12:08):
produce the show. The executive producers, Hey, they figured season
three was going to be the end of it. They
were going to get their money. They get their million
dollars back out of the budget of the show, they
get all their fees that they were due from the
deal that they've made, and that would be the end,
to tell some of the crypt Season three was supposed
to be it the end. Uh, And when Gill and

(12:29):
I walked in the door, we had other plans. Gill
is a, like I said, a terrific producer. He's a
great creative producer and he understand he understands how to
spend money the best ways possible. My job on the
show was one to be the guy, the person who
translated the franchise from the page to the screen. I

(12:54):
was Every script had to go through me before it
went to the department heads or out to casting. So
I was really the last writer on every script that
we did. That was my first job, the keeper of
the franchise. My other job was to write Cryptkeeper segments. Well,
just like the TV series never went through any development process, well,

(13:16):
the Cryptkeeper didn't either. The Cryptkeeper in the comic books
is an old white guy with stringy hair. The executive
producers wanted their own Cryptkeeper, and one day, purely by chance,
Joel Silver, one of the executive producers, at a storage facility,

(13:40):
he bumped into a guy named Kevin Yaeger, who is
a special effects semeiestro. Kevin, among other things, created Chucky,
and when Joel saw all the amazing monsters that were
inside Kevin's storage unit, he said, I want you to
make a crypt Keep performing Keim and said great. So
Kevin Yeger created the puppet and actually had six puppeteers
got for Cryptkeeper, and then Kevin found John Cassier, who

(14:04):
became the voice of the Cryptkeeper. But there is no
development process. No one ever said, okay, so who is
he whoever wrote the scripts for the show, wrote a
few lines for the Cryptkeeper, and that's what he said.
My job was to write Cryptkeeper segments. I don't know, Hey,

(14:26):
you're right for a character, who isn't There's got to
be some meat on them bones just and you want
them funny? How do you write? You want generic funny,
you want real and it's got to come from a character.
And so simply to do my damn job, I had
to invest him with I had to put a character
inside of him. I grew up loving old movies. I

(14:48):
loved the Marx Brothers, and so the Cryptkeeper became my
little ground show. And having to stick a personality inside them,
and being a and therefore somewhat lazy, I reached for
the closest personality at hand, which was mine. And so
he looks like Kevin's puppet. He sounds like John's voice,

(15:10):
but every thought in his head, every word that spewed
from his mouth, as such as it was, it was me.
During that third season, something happened because we reinvested in
the franchise, making sure that everything that was there on

(15:31):
the page, all those elements were there on the screen.
We went after the biggest names we could possibly get,
and so we went back to the feature film on
TV idea. I went very hard at it. We didn't
take no for an answer, and the Cryptkeeper went from
being the puppet called the Cryptkeeper to the Cryptkeeper he

(15:54):
became over the course of the third season. The audience
recognized that he had become the franchise. Everything that was
that the show needed to embody was personified in essence
in him. And because he had suddenly become this remarkable personality,

(16:15):
this funny, fun engaging, little monstrosity of a character, suddenly
well it began to attract attention outside of just the
horror community and HBO, Yeah, the ratings went up, audience

(16:36):
suddenly doubled, and the next thing, you know, HBO says,
let's order a few more seasons. And it really was
the crip Keeper at the end of the day, more
than anything in retrospect, but clearly what was driving the
franchise's success. He had the episodes are important. You got

(16:56):
to make great episodes, sure, but the episode at the
end of the day weren't the franchise. Among the other
players who recognized that, well, this franchise now has wings
of a kind was Universal Pictures, and they ordered three
feature films because where anthological, each one could be entirely different.

(17:21):
Gil was supposed to direct the first one, but for
a little while we toyed with making Quentin Tarantinos from
Dusk Till Dawn, but we couldn't close that deal. We
ended up making a movie called Demon Knight. It's a
monster movie, and Gil didn't want to direct a monster movie,

(17:42):
so Ernest Dickerson directed. He was Spike Lee's director of photography.
What an amazing talent, an amazing movie, a great cast.
Billy Zaine is the villain, and Philly zins and he's

(18:02):
not really a good villain, he's a great villain, great monster.
Jada Pinkett at the time and Bill Sadler were the heroes.
The whole cast was great. Movie worked out exactly as
it should, and so we were often running to make
the second And like I said, neither Gillan nor I

(18:22):
came out of horror, and we really didn't want the
town to pigeonhole us as the town tends to do
as just horror guys, and so we we saw the
second Tales from the Crypt feature film as a chance
to show everyone that we were not one trick ponies,
and we had been developing over the course of a

(18:43):
year and a half between us but also the entire
Crypt creative team, a project that ultimately was called Dead
Easy and Dead Easy was very different from the first
feature film. This one was a taught psychological thriller about
a recovered memory. It took place in the swamps outside
New Orleans, and it had an amazing franchise villain, this

(19:06):
Harlequin character. Eighteen months working on it, Universal Pictures got
aboard because you know, they spent money on the script.
They spent well. We spent six months in New Orleans
prep in the movie. We had locations, we were setting
everything up, we were casting, We had cast a young
unknown named Salma Hayak to play the female lead. And

(19:28):
three weeks before the start of principal photography, we're all
in New Orleans getting ready to make this movie. Universal
Pictures called and said, stop, do not spend another penny,
Get on an airplane and come home. You're not making
that movie. And so we got on airplane, we got
on back to Los Angeles and they stuck another script

(19:49):
under our noses. They said, you're going to make this
thing instead. Oh you're you know your release date hasn't changed.
You get going, guys, you got rewrite this thing, this
Bordello of Blood script that you're going to make instead.
Now where did Bordello come from? Well, at about this time,
a new studio called DreamWorks had come into being, and

(20:12):
DreamWorks was formed when Stephen Spielberg left his deal not
the Lotting So, but left his deal at Universal, set
up as a studio of his own and began making deals.
Universal was desperately afraid of losing another big piece of talent.
One of my executive producers, Bob Zimchis Steven Spielberg was
his mentor. Universal went to Bob. They said, Bob, we

(20:33):
love you. Universal, what we do to make you stay?
Obviously the deal was good enough. Bob stayed. I don't
know any I know one deal point. Universal Pictures agreed
to buy the first student script that Bob Zemchus and
Bob Gail the Future Back to the Future, Back to
the Future guys ever wrote when they were students at

(20:54):
USC half a million bucks a script called Bordello of Blood.
It was a deal point, a way to put half
a million dollars into the deal and that was it.
But after they made the deal, Universal Pictures sat there thinking, well,
we're just going to eat this half a million bucks eat.

(21:15):
Wait a minute, Bob's about to executive produce this other
horror movie. This did easy thing, But we spent like
fifty thousand bucks on the script. Well taking out of
their budget. Guys, you're gonna make Fort dellaw a blood
and Stead's got Bob's and mechas and Bob Geil's name
one of those bigger than Alan Katson Gil Athler's name.
Get going, guys. And so we all, the entire creative team,

(21:37):
everyone involved, went from making a movie that we all
very much what we spent eighteen months working on. We
were invested in, we believed in, we had a higher
purpose because we all saw it as a way to
demonstrate that we're not one trick ponies to making a
student movie. M Well, after the money makes a decision

(22:03):
that cynical, it's all downhill from there, and it really
do not be surprised when every day is stupid and
the day before it, and that is exactly what happened.
Making Tells from the Crypt was a remarkable creative experience
because oh gosh, over the seventy some odd episodes that

(22:25):
I oversaw that I wrote and or produced, I got
three notes from HBO that kind of creative freedom is amazing.
And that's what we all had, the freedom to do
our jobs, to tell these stories the best way we
possibly could. And suddenly Bordella Blood was It's diametric opposite. Yeah,

(22:53):
the bad decision making continued from there. We didn't make
the movie in Los Angeles. We ended up making the
movie in Vancouver. We made the movie in Vancouver. Not
because there was something in Vancouver that would make the
benefit Bordela of Blood, a movie called Bordella Nothing was
gonna benefit Bordella of Lund, but simply because Joel, who

(23:17):
was usually walking point on our thew all of our deals,
but especially with our crew, was always at war with
the IA, the union that represented our crew, and they
had just struck a TV movie that we were doing
for Fox. They shut it down. So Joel's attitude was screaming, no,
screw you. And so not only were we going to
take the movie out of Los Angeles, We're going to

(23:38):
take it out of the country where our crew could
not follow Jen. That's why we made the movie in Vancouver. Now,
the strange thing, it's July. We're making a horror movie
in Vancouver in July. Now, horror movies you stock in
trade is night. When you go that far north in July.

(24:01):
One of the things you don't get a whole hell
lot of is night. The sky doesn't really get dark
enough to shoot until about midnight. Then by around four
am it's already starting. You're done. So what is normally
a twelve thirteen hour shooting day, we had to cram
into four hours. It's twelve thirteen hours. We had to

(24:24):
cram into four hours intrument. Absolutely, of course you're not
going to do that. That's utterly impossible. But we didn't.
You know, again, this was a situation we created for ourselves.
When you look at the accumulated experience of the names
of the people who made the movie, that we made

(24:44):
so many terrible, stupid, ridiculous mistakes is insane. Joel took
over the casting of our three leads. First of all,
rewriting the script was it was impossible really to solve

(25:06):
the larger problems that the script had, in large part
because the main character was a small town detective. Now
ask yourself. How much business can a detective actually do
in a small town? Not enough to be a small
town detective. That's the kind of character that film students

(25:26):
would create because they have no experience in the real
world and something go, oh, that's that's a non secretar
Now that doesn't exist. So now here's a character who
when you go to rewrite it, you can't justify. You
can't explain their background. And if you can't explain the background,
that's not a real character. It's hard to write a character.

(25:49):
And you wanted to be funny too, based on what
where you know dark. If there's no character to work from,
there's nothing, so an impossibility of turning the script into
anything other than really a glorified student movie, other than
student movie. Joel then took over the casting. We wanted

(26:13):
Danny Baldwin for the lead, and we could have had
Danny Baldwin and it was I'm sure Danny would have
done stuff that was better than what was on the page,
I'm quite certain, but Joel for some reason insisted that
we hired Dennis Miller. To this day, I cannot tell
you why. Dennis Miller. No idea our audience wanted special

(26:39):
effects and makeup. They did not care about a political comedian,
an esoteric political comedian act. They did not care about
him whatsoever. Dennis did not want to do the movie,
and he said, yeah, okay, I'll do it for a
million dollars, figuring nobody in their right mind would pay
him a million dollars to be in a movie, since,
up until that point a couple of movies he'd done
he got scale. Why would you pay this man a

(27:01):
million dollars when your audience doesn't give a fuck about him?
Could not tell you so? All right, So there's the
lead hired. I understood why Joel wanted Eric a Leniac,
but that was never gonna happen. She was already involved
in a long time relationship. Nothing was going to happen

(27:21):
between them, and just after she took she said yes,
and we paid her more than we had. Oh, I
should go back and point out with Dennis. We said
yes to the minute. Yes, we paid him a million dollars.
We didn't have a million dollars in our budget, Denis.
We were a twelve million dollar movie. I had half

(27:43):
a million bucks. We went to Universal to say and
we said, hey, can can we get some helpier little breakage,
and they said, we don't know why you're hiring Dennis Miller. Yeah, no,
you're not going to help you at all. And so
we took that half a million extra that was going
to cost us. Hey, all the money in our budget
with special effects makeup what our audience wanted to see,

(28:05):
we took it out of that budget. Literally took took
money away from the stuff our audiences, our audience wanted
to see, to pay an actor, they didn't give a
fuckerty Erica Aleniac also, we paid twice as much as
we had in the budget, and as soon as we
agreed to pay her, and that was bigger pay payday

(28:26):
than she ever got, she decided she didn't want to
be that kind of actress in our kind of movie.
After saying yes to the part, Gil, he said, a
very savvy producer, and as when he's directing what he's
what he's written, and what he's producing, he's he likes
to start shooting on a Thursday, because that way you

(28:50):
get two days in. If there are any significant problems
with the script or a performer or a technical issue,
you've got the weekend to solve it. And then when
you hit the ground running on Monday for your week,
hopefully all the significant problems have been ironed out. And
so for that reason, we had started shooting on a Thursday,
some scenes and some bar scenes with the local actors,

(29:12):
and we expected Erica Eleniak to be flying on Saturday,
to be in wardrobe on Monday, to work on Tuesday.
But on Saturday, her manager calls me and tells me
she doesn't want to be that kind of actress in
this kind of movie anymore. She doesn't want to She's
not going to get on an airplane unless we rewrite

(29:32):
the script significantly. Well, we're already shooting, but we find
a way to accommodate her. It doesn't make any sense,
but I'm between a rock and a hard play, So
we agree to it. And she gets on a plane Sunday,

(29:55):
wardrobe Monday to start work on Tuesday. But it's abundant
clear every day she's on this head she does not
want to be there. Yeah. Right, the other lead, our monster,
our villain. We wanted Robin Gibbons, and I think Robin
would have given us a great, great performance. But as

(30:18):
I said, we were shooting the movie in Vancouver and
at the time that we were about to start shooting
in Vancouver, Joel was already executive producing another movie in
Seattle that my other executive producer, Dick Donner, was directing
a movie called Assassins with Antonio Banderis and Sylvester Stallone.

(30:39):
At the time, Sylvester Stallone was engaged to a supermodel
named Angie Everhart, and one day on the set of Assassins,
Stallone approaches Joel and he says, hey, Joel, you can
mamic movie of Vancouver when girlfriend and agur in the movie.
That way we can vise each other course the border.
And Joel, rather than being a respeble executive producer and

(31:01):
saying that's a great ideas, lie, but let me check
with the guys to make sure it quicks for them,
he said, that's a great idea, sle period. And so
our executive producer committed us to hiring the girlfriend of
the actor on once set just to make him happy,

(31:22):
regardless of the impact it had on our movie. Now,
Angie's a lovely person, she's a this is a terrific
human being.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
She was a.

Speaker 3 (31:32):
Supermodel who had done a little bit of light acting
in small, small, teeny tiny roles, this is the villain
in a name brand horror movie. That's let me. I
hired a lot of actors. I never ever hired an

(31:55):
actor to act, not for the camera. When they're doing
a stage playing in the theater, Yeah, you got to
act because the people in the back row have to
see you. Yes, they have to hear you. But if
you're on a movie or TV series, because a camera's
right in your face, you don't have to act, because
if you act, the cab will see it, will have

(32:16):
to cut it out. I hired actors not to act.

Speaker 5 (32:20):
But to be as as emotionally naked and honest as
they can possibly be at certain moments when called for
in the script.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
At those moments, they need to be, not act. And
so what makes a great actor for the screen is
someone who can be, who can reveal a piece of
themselves in those moments. Billy saying it was a great
villain in Demon Night, He's a great villain in Titanic.

(32:56):
Because I'm not saying Billy's a villain, but there are
villains quality He's inside him, He's there's a darkness inside
a Billy that he can tap into, and that's that's
his secret sauce that he's got this very genuine darkness,
and so in those moments he ain't acting, he's being well. Angie,

(33:18):
even if she had been a trained actress, is a
lovely human being. There is nothing whatsoever villainous inside of Angie.
And so even if she had been a super highly trained,
technically proficient actress, she would have had to act it,
acted villainous to do it, and the camera would have

(33:39):
seen it. But she's not. She was not a trained
actress in any way, shape or formed, and so all
she could do was to try to act villainous, and
that's what the camera sees. She is. She is giving it.
Everything she's got. Onus is not on her. Onus is
on us. It's not like producers saw something in Angie

(34:03):
and said, trust me, trust me, boys, I see something
it's gonna blow you away. That was not the case.
We were We were trying to make and we were
making an actor happy on another movie set. Yeah, at
the end of the day, he had an ulterior motive,

(34:23):
did sly He He intended to break up with Angie
and we were the consolation prize, And that is exactly
what happened. Two thirds of the way through our movie
he broke up with her. I think via phone. I
think the phone, uh, and that rector for that day
and pretty much the rest of the shoot. Now, what

(34:46):
made it even worse was the fact that we all
knew it was coming. The whole production office knew. Everyone
who knew anything from the production office. Yeah, we all
knew it was coming because before early on the first
couple of weeks. Of course, the point of the exercise
was so we could visit each other across the border.

(35:07):
So we our production office would arrange those visits with
their production office to fly ANGI from Vancouver across an
international border to Seattle. You know, it all had to
go smoothly, So there was a lot of coordination between
these two movie production offices. A lot of information flowed
back and forth, and we became aware from their production
office to our production office he was fucking around on her.

(35:29):
And there is a story about sly Stallone. He has
never ever denied that had happened. The only question has
ever been on what on which of his movies did
this story take place. I would tell you it took
place on Assassins, because I didn't hear the story beforehand.
I first heard it from the women in my production office,

(35:50):
who heard it from the women in the Assassin's production office,
And the story goes like this. Stallone finishes a scene
and heads back to his trailer, unaware of the fact
that his wireless lavalleer Mike is still broadcasting. Back to
the sound card, there is a young woman waiting for
Sly in his trailer, and she proceeds to give him

(36:11):
a blowjob. Apparently Stallone is very well. He's he likes
his blowjobs a certain way, and so now people are
gathering around the sound card listening to Sli go yeah, yeah,
stroke the shaft, stuck the balls, Yeah you cook the bull,
stroke the chaft. The next day he shows up on
set and the whole crew wearing T shirts that say
stroke the shaft, cup them all. Like I said, this

(36:36):
is a story that happened. The only question is on
what set. I would tell you Assassin's because that's where
I heard it from their set. Okay, the making of
that movie was awful. It was awful. Our Canadian crew
hated us rather quickly with good reason. We be behaved

(37:00):
badly by the time the rap party came around. If
I had thrown the product. If the producers had thrown
the rap party, literally, none of the Canadian crew would
have come. Our Canadian production manager, Colleen, through a rap party,
invited all the Americans. I was the late one who
showed up, and people looked at me like I was
a lepard. Our original release date when we headed back

(37:28):
to Los Angeles, because we could not make our nights,
we did not have a completed movie. We had to
do some reshoot down in Los Angeles. We could have
made our original Halloween release date, but Universal didn't care
and they held us for the following August Wow, the
Doldrums of August, and that's when they dumped this. By

(37:49):
the time the movie was released, I was no longer
creative partners with Gil Ladler. I noer no longer best friends.
We parted on extremely bad term and did not talk
to each other for twenty five years. I did a
couple other things after Bordello. I spent two wonderful seasons

(38:11):
on a show called The Outer Limits for Showtime, which
was also up in Vancouver. But really, for the most part,
what happened on Bordello sent me into really the beginning.
It started me down a two decade long descent into
a deepening depression and a writer's block. I didn't even
know I was in. Three days before Christmas twenty sixteen,

(38:40):
I came within literal inches of killing myself, and I knew.
I knew I was in a bad way. I knew
I needed a mood stabilizer. But my dad was a surgeon,
so I grew up in the medical culture, and I
knew that my GP had no background in mood stabilizers.
The last pharmaceutical rep who walked through their office, Hey,
you got me to press patient, try him out on this.

(39:02):
See if see if that helps that this kind of
medication moved stabilizers even under the best of circumstances. Circumstances,
it's a crapshoot. It's a lab experiment. I did not
want to be a lab experiment where none of the
boxes had been ticked off, where it was a generic.
You know, sure nobody's raining chemistry as a generic. And
I didn't want to. You know, I didn't want to

(39:24):
because you can spend sixty eight weeks hoping and discover
not only did not make it better, it's making it worse.
So I'd done my own research and after I had
all right. I suddenly I realized, Okay, now you're capable
of doing something fatally stupid. I drove right to my GP.
I said here's what I did. And I said, here's
the medication I want you to write me a prescription for.

(39:46):
And he got out of smartphone and said, okay, that
makes sense. He wrote the prescription. I picked it up,
went home, told my family what I was going to do,
and took the first dose. And then I got super lucky.
Within thirty six hours, I leveled.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
I felt the medication put the darkness in a cage,
not a box cage, because I could still it. I
can still see it, and it can still see me.
But though it can reach for me, it can no
longer get me. And once my darkness, this self loathing
rage could no longer infect every thought, I could confront

(40:28):
the fact that I've been keeping a secret from myself
for forty five years, the fact that I was sexually
molested twice when I was fourteen by the religious director
of synagogue where my family belonged outside of Baltimore. Now,
the first time is bad because your thing is actually molested,
But it's the second time that really fucked me up
and set the hook deep. The second time happened. I

(40:50):
didn't say anything the first time, and it's during the
second time where I know inside my head I said,
this is your fault. You get this, you did this,
it's your fault. Well that's bullshit. It's not a fourteen
year old's fault that an adult is using you like
a sex toy. That is not your fault. But it

(41:11):
became the template. And as you get into adulthood and
you take the blame for everything, even when it's not
it's not your you should not. That doesn't solve anybody's problem.
When you do that, it entirely counterproductive. But this becomes
the template. It is so true what they say about

(41:36):
the truth setting you free. And when I finally confronted
this secret, hardest thing I've ever had to do, I
woke up suddenly one am Friday, Saturday morning. Let's slip
out of bed. I didn't want to wake my wife,
and I got into the bathroom. I curled up on
the bathroom floor and I wept for three hours, fourteen

(42:00):
year old me who just wanted to not take the
blame for this anymore. It is so true what they
say about the truth, setting you free to be liberated
from this was I suddenly got back in touch with
me and I had lost connection with me and suddenly

(42:24):
being whole again. I've always said I'm grateful to Hebrews
School for making me the atheist i am today. But
I know what evangelicals mean when they say they are
born again. I understand what that means. I absolutely do.

(42:45):
And if you can't tell your own story to you,
can you really tell anybody else's story? Of course, suddenly
being able to tell my own story to me with absolute,
absolute honesty, and then suddenly I could tell anybody's story,
and that suddenly became my passion after I told my story,

(43:09):
because that was important too. Keeping in a secret, no no, no,
no no, you must tell the world, and that was
right as me too was happening. And so during the pandemic,
a Tells from the Crypt fan group. These three dads
from all across the country. They were Tells from the
Crypt Fans, and they started a podcast called Dads from

(43:29):
the Crypt. They reviewed episodes of Tells from the Crypt
and gave parenting advice. One of the dads, Jason Stein,
reached out to me. He said, hey, we're going to
be reviewing an episode you wrote. You want to sit
in with us? And that sounded like fun and said, yeah, okay, cool,
it was great fun. A few weeks later, Jason reached

(43:50):
out again. He said, Hey, we're going to be reviewing
Bordella of Blood. You want to sit in again? And
I said, Jason, story they're making of Bardella Blood is
a not a half hour conversation with you. It's a
podcast unto itself. And that was the spark for the
first season of my first podcast, the How Not to

(44:12):
Make a Movie Podcast, The Making of Bordello of Blood,
which Entertainment Weekly called the best film podcast of twenty
twenty two. What Clark Collis really know why he wrote
what he wrote, That he's the guy who wrote wrote
the piece after he listened to it. It was the honesty

(44:33):
that was what he connected with I. As subsequent seasons
went on, that podcast became conversations with everyone I've ever
worked with in the business, stories about about our craft
and what happens when the craft turns to craft. But
a friend from school approached me with a story that

(44:57):
he was a true story, that it happened to him.
He wanted to turn into a movie or a TV
series of TV Serich Jacks. And when he told me
the story, I said, no, you do not want to know.
You do not want to turn this into a TV series.
All right? To take any idea from let's say my
head and turn it into a TV series, Let's say
years to get the script written. Years and okay, let's

(45:21):
say let's say we're really really good, we got it
done in three years. All right, Now you're ready for
the marketplace, all right? To take it in. First, you're
going to have to well, that's season one, episode one?
What about episode two, three, four or five? Rest of
season one? What happened season two and season three three?
Who are all these characters? What's the environment? Well, what's
the tone? What does it look like? Smell? I feel

(45:43):
like that's You've got to put all that into what's
called a bible. And that's sixty to seventy pages. That
doesn't write itself overnight. I think you're on another year
and hey, everything that goes into that. You got to Hey,
you're gonna put stuff in there to go, Hey, I
got to put this in the script. That's a great idea.
You're gonna start rewriting the script too. All right, let's
say five years, all right, five years to take this

(46:05):
thing out to the marketplace. Just to get the executives,
the handful literally five or six executives that all this
work needs to impress. You have to create a pitch
deck that's a PowerPoint presentation of the comic book version,
spare words, a couple of words, lots of images to

(46:25):
give them an idea of what the IP is, the
intellectual property. All this worked years, years of incredible effort
just to get a handful of people to try to
induce them to read it. And then, hey, if they
read it, that doesn't guarantee anything. Now, you got to

(46:46):
go through a whole development process, and between there and
the end of where the sausage comes out, there are
thousands of assholes standing in your way, and at any
one point, any one of those assholes can kill the
project dead just because they're an asshole.

Speaker 4 (46:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:00):
Turn that same idea into a podcast. Well, hey, and podcasting.
One person can do it all. And I'm going to
say for nothing, that's not true. Our time and our
expertise and our technical skills, it's worth good money. Yeah,

(47:22):
but we can produce a finished product and put it
out to an audience just like that. And when we
put it out into the world, we own it. Any
idea that I take into an executive if he says,
I love this, let's develop it. The first thing I'm
going to have to sign is a certificate of authorship.

(47:44):
I will surrender all ownership authorship from that point forward,
throughout the own universe and in perpetuity, I stop owning
it or controlling it. If they want to cut me
out out, I'm gone. If I do the same thing

(48:04):
as a podcast, I own everything. Stick a pin in that.
So I said to How, let's call it how. When
he told me his story, I said, you want to
do this as a podcast first, and it's very tricky story.
He could not tell his own story. He had to
protect his identity. So I was going to tell his
story now if you can't let me my first story.

(48:28):
That was my first story podcast that became The Donor,
a DNA heart story. My friend Hal worked his way
through medical school in the mid nineteen nineties as an
anonymous sperm donor. Jump forward twenty three years. He's a
successful radiologist. He joined twenty three and me curious about
his health jeans. It never occurred to him the ramifications

(48:51):
of adding his DNA to a growing DNA database. What
twenty three and meters and ancestry are He lost his
donor anonymity. Seven total strangers found Daddy, except six of
them had no idea whatsoever. Their actual biological father was
hou spermedowner. These were six twenty five, twenty six year

(49:11):
old people who were learning for the first time through
twenty three and me that they weren't who they thought
they were. Wow, and this guy is their actual father.
The seventh, one of the daughters, brought a thing called
genetic sexual attraction to the table. Now, the adoption community

(49:32):
has known about genetic sexual attraction for a long time.
In fact, the woman who coined the term genetic sexual attraction,
Barbara Ganner, gave up a son for adoption when she
was sixteen, and she met him twenty five years later
and fell head over heels in love with him, was
quite ready to have sex with him. He was in
love with her, but not quite to the sexual point.

(49:54):
There is data and research that says a lot of
the taboo we feel toward incest has nothing to do
with the genetics. We don't know about this. That's an
abstract idea. A lot of it comes from negative imprinting
upon us that occurs in the proximity of our first

(50:15):
two or three years of life. The imprinting that occurs
makes any idea of a sexual relationship negative. There is
that imprinting begins then, but if there's no proximity and
the imprinting, that imprinting never happens. When people who are
genetically related meet each other later in life as adults

(50:37):
that genetic connection, they feel like they've known this person
in their whole life. They laugh at the same things,
they complete each other's sentences. It's the most intense feeling
they've ever had. And if there's any kind of a
sexual spark has barbegone your experience. Mostly it's between siblings,
of course, they describe it as the most tense feeling

(51:00):
they've ever had. Well, when this one of the the
daughters brought genetic sexual attraction to the table, it was
a hand grenade into the tenthile. He was another another cliche,
and Hal had wanted. He had been married to a
woman for twenty years who brought a son from a

(51:23):
previous marriage to the relationship and how raised this son
as like a son, adopted him later in life, never
raised any biological children of his own. The thought of
having all these biological children. He wasn't going to be
their father. He was not there to father them, but
he was open to being father Lee toward them. Yeah,

(51:43):
and he had lots of money, and he was quite
willing to cut them in on the inheritance because they
were blood. But genetic sexual attraction blew everything up. The
relationship between the donor conceived siblings. They call each other,
some of them dibblingsationship between the dibblings is very strong.
These are people suddenly discovered discovering as young adults, as

(52:05):
as adults. I have a sister, I have a brother,
half brother, half sister, and that's revelatory. And those bonds
are very tight, much tighter and more reliable in a
sense than anything between them and the donor. Sure, there
are different feelings towards the donor, and that destroyed any

(52:29):
of the happy family. This unusual family that Hal had envisioned.
It's called a DNA horror story. There are monsters of
plenty in this in this telling eight episodes, and as
I was doing it, I really loved storytelling in the
podcasting in its radio.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Well, you know, the speaking is I think underrated as
when we hear about voice overs and things like that,
we just take it for grant that is just talking.
But there's a certain magic that happens I think in
the spoken word that I think, you know, audio doesn't
get it its fair due.

Speaker 4 (53:11):
So many video people.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
I work in media, and so many times I hear
somebody say, you know, we got the lighting just right,
we got the said oh yeah, I guess we got
to mic him. It's like the last thing they think of.
And to me, a quality voice recording is just as
powerful as just about anything else.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
It is. People take our voices and our stories, and
that's why our voices and how we use the microphone
is super You can't see this as a piece of equipment.
You got to see it as an extension of your
vocal cords. And they take our stories and our voices,

(53:51):
and they listen via earphones, their earbuds and their cars
are just giant soundpot really, and they put us between
their ears, into their most intimate space between the inside
their heads. And it really is essential that if if

(54:13):
they don't like us, they won't let us be there.
They have to trust us, they have to trust they
have to feel us. It's like I said, the camera
sees all, Yeah, it sees all the artifice of acting.
The microphone works exactly the same way. It really is
a bullshit detector, and it hears artifice, and we hear artifice,

(54:38):
and we also hear authenticity, we hear the real. Sometimes
the most wonderful parts of podcasts, all the different podcasts
that I listen to, when when the people who are
telling the story have a human moment in the middle
of telling the story. It's gosh, I love that even Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(54:59):
it's it's the storyteller. Yeah, it's This medium is so
wonderful because of the relationship between the storyteller and the
person whom the story is being told. It's so pinch out.
It's really quite immediate. As in order to do the
research on the donor I had, I met with a

(55:21):
lot of donor conceived people. One of the donor conceived
community who gave me some great background was a woman
named Donnah Hall who learned it forty that she was
donor conceived. And when Donna told me her story, I said,
Donna you're a podcast, undo yourself and she said, yeah,
I know, I've been trying to do it. Great stories
have to be told the right way to become great stories,

(55:45):
and sometimes if you're too close to your own story,
you can't quite see how to tell it. And that
was the case with Donna. Donna Well that became my
second story podcast, The Hall Closet. Donnah Hall grew up
in the in the early nineties in a lower tier
crime family outside of Philadelphia. The Halls weren't the Corleones

(56:07):
from the Godfather movies, but they made national headlines. Donna's mom,
phyllis maybe the worst mom ever really. She spent six
months in prison for child endangerment. Donna's stepdad, John Hall,
was a true criminal mastermind. He was the Philadelphia Police

(56:27):
Department's favorite snitch. He put more than twenty five people
behind bars on bullshit confection confessions he concocted to mitigate
his own considerable legal jeopardy. Among the people that John
Hall put into prison for long stretch as a time
was his own steps on Herb, who spent eighteen months
in prison awaiting trial for a murder he did not commit.

(56:52):
John Hall put a man named Walter Ogrod on death
row in Pennsylvania for twenty four years for a murder
Walter did not commit. When Pennsylvania let Walter out, they
gave him nine point one million dollars to try to
make up for their fuck up because they they took
the confession of a guy who, Oh, it was so corrupt,

(57:14):
it was so stunningly corrupt. The last person spending time
based on a John Hall confession. John Hall died two
decades ago. A man named David Dixon was just they Yeah,
he was just released from Pennsylvania. He was serving a
life sentence for a bullshit murder conviction. He's never been
convicted of John Hall confession. Donna describes what it was

(57:37):
like growing up in a family where every single day,
at least at least one of the adults was doing
something criminal. But she's a wonderful storyteller. She is vivacious,
she is gregarious, she's not an ounce of self pity.
And these are rough stories that she tells wonderfully. Hers

(58:01):
is a journey really to safety and empowerment. And that's
really why I had to tell her story. And while
I was in producing the was the first eight episodes
we're now working on season two of that podcast. I
realized I had become the thing I always wanted to
be when I grew up, which is a podcast. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:24):
Well, I want to make sure people know where to
find you. We're an arian.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
I just want to make sure people know where to
find you places.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
Okay, all of these podcasts or wherever you find your
your favorite podcast. There at Spotify, there at Apple, there
wherever you find your favorite podcast. The donor at DNA,
Horror Story, the Hall closet is are at these places.
You can also go to. My little company is called
Costard and Touchdown Productions at cost At https, Colon backslash, backslash,

(58:54):
Costard and Touchstone dot com. Uh. In my very brief
acting career, I was in two Shakespeare plays, both comedies.
I played Costed in Loves Labor's Lost and Touchstone in
As You Like It. Both characters are wise fools who
speak truth to power, and that's what our little company does.

(59:17):
So Costed and Touchtone dot com co O S T
A R D A N D Touchstone t O U
c H S t O n E dot com. You'll
find everything that we've got. You can link to all
the podcasts that we got out right now there are five,
and there are a dozen more in various stages of
pretty close to get in there.

Speaker 2 (59:37):
Well, yeah, I can tell you're a very passionate storyteller.
There's absolutely no doubt about that. I mean, do you
feel a story as you tell it? You know?

Speaker 3 (59:46):
My company, our mission is to make the world a
better place through storytelling. Storytelling is empowering. When someone tells
their story, they they get seen and they get heard.
That is empowerment. It's if you want to blot someone out,
you wipe their story out, you don't have a story.

(01:00:07):
I lived my whole life thinking my story was not
interesting in the least because I was I had a secret. No, no,
everyone has literally everyone has a story. It's just a
matter of how you tell it. Yes, And that is
my personal mission really is to tell every single story
I can the best way I possibly can. That is

(01:00:28):
the mission I am now personally on.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
Well, I can certainly tell you're good, addie, because you're
I mean listening to you. Yeah, rattle on, Well, I
wouldn't call it that you you you you uh, act
your story, you tell your story, you feel your story. Uh,
it's not somebody just enunciate any words, and I have
no doubt that that's how the podcast goes. And that's

(01:00:54):
probably why it's it's gotten the acknowledgment that it has. Uh,
We've been speaking to Alan kat to know that's with.

Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
A K and A L A N kat Z.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Yes, and your al Kats in the in the database
like for those people who like to.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Find database right. And that's because when I got to
town in nineteen eighty five, I was not the first
Alan Katz here. Yeah, the other Alan Katz A L
l A N k at Z. He had a very
successful career. He had written on Mash, he had From
the Showers on Mash, and you've been on Carobin Net
show lots and lots of TV, great TV series. And

(01:01:34):
when I got to town in nineteen eighty five and began,
I had a script, another script I'd written, and I
was pitching. I would walk into meetings when I first
got here, and at that time, the other Alan Katz
had written a script that everybody loved called The Hunchback
of U. C. L A. And I would walk into
meetings and say Hi, I'm Alan Cats and they say, oh,

(01:01:55):
we love your script. The hunchback at us, and the
first couple of times for I got smart and I said, oh,
that's not I mean, that's that's the other guy, and
they'd look at me and go, what the fuck are
you doing? Any of those meetings never went well, strangely,
so then I got smart and I go, well, thank
you very much. Hey, if you like that, you're gonna
like the thing I'm pitching now. And it's funny. Uh.

(01:02:20):
One of the first things I did when I got
to Los Angeles I took a class with the Groundlings
because I'd been a performer and I wanted to stay
connected to my performance, and I always enjoyed improv prov
You know, it's yes, and you enter the scene and
you add information, you never subtract, and the last word
you ever use is no. Hey do you like my hat? Oh? Yes?

(01:02:42):
And I love the tropical birds? What are their names? Well,
that's how and that's Lucy. And so you add information,
the word no kills everything dead. So I took in
broad class with the Groundlings, and my teacher great class,
some a couple of well known people in there. Was
taught by a woman named Phyllis Katz, who was the

(01:03:04):
sister of Alan.

Speaker 4 (01:03:06):
Kats Oh interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
So bizarre. I ultimately I did get a chance to
meet Alan much later. He was a guest. He was
one of the guests I've had both Phyllis casts and
Alan Katz on the Hell Not to Make a Movie podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
I have an idea for a podcast with Alan that
when I pitched on.

Speaker 4 (01:03:27):
All right, well, I hope you do well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
I'll tell you what very enthusiastic podcaster we have here,
a very seasoned writer and storyteller, Alan Katz, Alan, thank
you so much. I mean that was quite I mean
that story went all kinds of places. I mean that
was some Story's a little bit of everything in there.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
Yeah, Hey you wanted passion and hey man, we didn't
even get to you know, there are I have a
couple of couple of my podcast hosts would be wonderful
guests you, okay. And the one that I really want,
would love you to talk to is the podcast that
I just started dropping. It's called Just the Photographer with

(01:04:10):
David Swanson.

Speaker 4 (01:04:11):
Yes, I have those.

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
Yeah, And David is a He is a Pulitzer Prize
winning photo journalist. He took one of the iconic nine
to eleven photos of the first responders down to the
you have seen, you have seeing David's work all over
the place. He's been war zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan
to Iraq, natural disasters Katrina, earthquakes in Haiti, the La wildfires,

(01:04:36):
red carpet events. His really and truly, as the little
blurb says, yeah, his pictures can His pictures can tell
you what it looked like standing where he stood, but
they can't tell you what it felt. And the podcast,
really that's the point, is to tell the stories that
the pictures can't tell. And one of the essentials is

(01:04:58):
that when you go into a war zone, well you
can leave the war zone. War zones never leave you,
that's right. And war zones are terrible, dangerous, deadly places,
but they can also have remarkable beauty in them and laughter.

(01:05:19):
And it's David his stories. You know, he's he's not
just a great teller of stories to his pictures. He's
pretty good about taking us inside his experience of being
in those places. Like I said, he's he's a pull
of surprise wedding photo journalist. I'm honored that he's working

(01:05:41):
with me. I think he would make a wonderful guest
and take take you and your listeners inside his experience.

Speaker 4 (01:05:50):
That's fantastic, Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
And Donna Hall also is a great guest. Really she
in the old well guys like thank you and I
you know, this is what we used to call someone
like this abroad. You know what if you know what
I mean, Bette Midler is abroad. Yeah, you know, a
woman who she can take care of herself and no
man is ever going to be her overlord Amy, thank you,

(01:06:15):
but several other things coming to him. She is, that's Donna.
She's yeah, I get it.

Speaker 4 (01:06:25):
Yeah, yeah, she's sounds like a real pistol.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
Awesome to happen on a podcast with you, And that's
that's the only reason I'm putting them there in front
of you. They would make good content for you.

Speaker 4 (01:06:35):
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:37):
And I appreciate the fact you're thinking enough for this
program to recommend these extremely wonderful and talented people. Again,
speaking to Alan Katz, thank you so much for coming
on the program. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:50):
Pleasure was absolutely mine.

Speaker 4 (01:06:53):
Thank you. Billy D's right here.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
You can find me kind of like my social media
home is at Billy D's on X. At one time
that was referred to as Twitter, but now it's X.
You can find Ability's podcasts anywhere you find podcasts in
its current form. We're going on about ten years now,
so real easy to fine. Thank you very much for listening,
and we will talk to you again very soon. I'm

(01:07:19):
Billy D's and host of the self titled podcast, The
Billy D's Podcast. We are primarily an interview and a
commentary based podcast featuring authors and creators talking about their craft,
advocates for community issues, and myself in an array of
co host discussing current events. There's no partisan renting and
raving going on here, just great content. You can find

(01:07:41):
The Billy D's Podcast on your favorite platform and on
Twitter at Billy D's. Thank you, and I hope you
listen in