Thank you everybody so much for joining us on our Park Copper episode where we are going to be speaking to Disney Royalty. And again, if you haven't heard this name before, you're not familiar with the name of Stu Krieger, you are absolutely familiar with the projects that this man has been responsible for. We're talking Smart House, the Xenon Movies, Phantom of the Megaplex, cow Bells, True Confessions, Land Before Time, Gotta Kick It Up. I mean it's he's worked with
Polly Shore, He's worked with Steven Spielberg, Kathleen. It's one name after another. So I don't think you'd be speaking out of turn by saying d coms would not be what they are without this man.
Absolutely, and we are so honored to have them here. So absolute, please help us welcome Stu Kreeger. Hello, We're so good. Thank you so much for joining us.
This is we say your name almost every week, so is great.
It's incredibly exciting and very flattering. Thank you.
I imagine that when you heard that, if you heard that there was a podcast re you know, going over and rewatching all the d coms, you would be getting.
A call from us, hopefully to speak with you.
Yes, suspected, I might.
I think the biggest thing right now is you know, for us, we love doing the interview part of this. We've had a chance to talk to a lot of actors. We haven't had a chance to have legends like you that we're there from the start of these kinds of franchises Xenon, I mean just all of the different franchises that you've been a part of. To be at the start of the process, so we have to hear what you know, how is your process and how does that make you feel as you look back at these projects find.
Of the most incredible thing. And it's so funny because I've currently been a professor since two thousand and six at U SEE Riverside, and in my class that i'm teaching, one of the two classes I'm teaching this quarter is called the Filmmaker's Life, and that class is designed to bring in panels of industry guests each week talking about their lives, their experiences, how they got their start, how
they got their first job. And one of the things in the first session we had on Tuesday, Yeah, Tuesday, was it's kind of me introducing myself in my life and my career to them all, and I said, when I was in the middle of it, show business is designed and you can both attest to this. When you are in it, you are never a success because it's always about what's next, What happened to that thing you were working on? Way did that fall apart? Whatever? You know,
you're always scrambling. And then when I started teaching full time in two thousand and six, the kids I was teaching were the generation that grew up on my mood movies. And suddenly, not exaggerating, at least four or five times a quarter some student would stick his or her head into my office and go, hi, I just wanted to tell you, dude, you wrote my childhood. Yes, And when
you're hearing that and suddenly like wow, really. And then the other insane thing that's happened in the last year is I had a book come out in May that's a family comedy novel. And when the publishers first signed me, they said, we really feel like the people that grew up on your movies are now the audience for this book because they're, you know, young adults raising their own family. You need to be on social media, and I said
that will not happen. Ultimately, at their insistence, what I ended up doing is hiring a former grad student to run it, curate it, tell me what to do, what I need to shoot, and suddenly we now have forty seven thousand followers. She's easy again. Ninety nine percent of the comments are about I can't believe how much these movies have resonated, They've stayed with me now I'm sharing them with my own children, and how much fun it is.
And then the other thing that that kind of forced me to do after a couple of interviews was actually go back and watch them. Because I was doing these interviews where people would say so about this scene at Smarthause, and I would go, I love you, but I haven't watched it in twenty years. And I would make the sun Set Boulevard analogy and say, you know, I'm not Norma Desmond sitting home in a turban watching my movies over and over again. But if you're going to be
asking me these questions, I got to watch them. So I happened.
That's the thing We've noticed that we make sure we're watching every movie twice.
We're looking at every kind of thing.
But so Sabrina said something interesting at the beginning, which is, we do we get to speak to people who went through the process of actually filming you know, the characters and and you know what it was like to shoot the movie, how much it meant to them, that kind of thing, which is wonderful to talk about. But we've yet to have the conversation of how did the movie
get made in the first place? So what we're the I mean because again, the we did you're just a few of your credits at the beginning when you're talking about some of the biggest one Xenon, Smart House, going to the Map, got to kick it up. All these kind of movies were the majority of them? Were any of them? Were these your ideas that you went in and pitched? Was it Disney calling you saying we're doing this new franchise, we'd like you to write it.
How did the entire process start?
Well, the humble brag I will start the answer with was when they held a party celebrating the first fifty d coms. Gary Marsha was at that point the head of the network got up and he said, we have to acknowledge the fact that ten of these fifty movies were written by one guy. You know this guy. Wow. So part of the relationship began because I had done both Parent Trapped two with Haley Mills playing that character grown up, and the iteration of Freaky Friday that was
Gabby Hoffman and Shelley Long. I had done those both for the Wonderful World of Disney, so I was a known entity there. And the first entree into the Dcome world that I got is that they called and Xenon was a very very thin little picture book, a kid's picture book called Xenon Girl of the first twenty first Century.
And kind of the main elements that have remained from that picture book to the franchise was she was a kid living on the space station with a crush on a rock star named Protozoa and a friend named Nebula. That's kind of the point. And another story that I just told in Glass on Tuesday, because it's exactly what you're asking was I said to the students, when you get these kinds of meetings, do your research, do your due diligence. Know who you're going to meet with, know
what they do. And so when I got called into that first meeting, is it was at the production company of Suzanne to Pass and Suzanne Cooston, who were the producers of Xenon, and their head of development said, I'm going to be incredibly candid with you. We have had eighteen writers come in before you. Nobody's nailed it yet. What is it you know? What would be your approach
to adapting this book? And the other thing I had done prior to the meeting is I said, if this is a new franchise, are any of them done yet? Is there anything I could take a look at to get a sense of what it is you're going for? And at that point Under Wraps was the only one that had been shot and it was still in post production. So they said, we can send you a rough cut, not color corrected, not anything, just the rough cut, and I go, cool, I just want to see, you know,
the wheelhouse of what you're trying to do. Watched that, we read the book, went into them and I said, Xenon is Eloise at the Plaza on the Space Station. And if you know that emblematic kid's book from the fifties, it was a kid living at the Plaza Hotel in New York, creating mischief and wreaking havoc and getting into places she shouldn't be. And I said, it's Eloise at the plaza on the space station, and they went, you're hired.
And the reason you were hired is eighteen writers before you came in and said it's They said it was a variation over and over again of its nine O two one Oho meet Star Trek. Disney Channel would not do nine two Disney gentlemen, not do Star Trek. No, thank you. And you came in and said, Eloi's at applause of this on the space station. That's who we are, that's what we do. Boom, let's go wow wow. That
was initial foot in the door. And then really it was just a series of meetings to begin with a pitching the story, fleshing out of the story, deciding the arc of how we would expand it. The whole plot of Lots and Windom and the missing earring being the code to the meltdown, and all of those plot machinations were stuff that I just kept evolving with them, and how about if we do this and how about that turn to passing. Houstin known as the Suzannes, were wonderful
to work with. They were really story savvy. Michael Healy, who was the head of movies for most of my tenure there, was also really really good at knowing their audience, knowing what it was they were aiming for. And then the thing that I will say, and I think it's why I was able to ultimately do twelve movies with them, was that they were really really good about allowing my
creative freedom. And one of my lines in the Sand was I said, I am a father of two who my wife can go away for the whole weekend and when she comes home and the kids aren't dead, there's nobody missing, the top is not off, the washing machine with a tons across the floor, and the blender. So I said, the only thing I will never do in a movie for you is I will not portray a
stupid dad. I want to be showing that fathers are as competent as moms, and so that is something you cannot ever expect me to do in any of the films I do with you. A couple of times I had to fight for that. Wouldn't it be funny if dad fell down the stairs? No, it wouldn't be fun So that was kind of my line in the sand and something that I was happy that I was able to maintain the integrity of through all the films I did with them.
Now, was it normally Disney coming to you and saying, here's the idea we have, or were any of the films your idea?
That you pitched?
Most of them? It was interesting because in the heyday, they were doing a movie a month. Yeah, So I also think part of the reason I was as employed as I was was I was also somebody if they said we need the script in three weeks, it's like, you'll have it in three weeks. I can do that. So my other point of pride is that of all the movies I did with them, I was either the
last writer or the only writer. So you know, as you guys will know, the last writer means you're the one who got the draft Greenland to go into production. And so some of them, like smart House, had already been in development for more than a year. They were at the point where like the basic structure of this, the premise of it, the idea of what the smart House is, we really like, we don't feel the humanity
is there yet. And they said to me, that's something you do really well go back and kind of reinvent the characters and reinvent the emotional plot of the movie. And one of the things I was kind of struck by and again when I went back to watch it after not having seen it for a couple of decades, was there's kind of a really hard emotional truth in
that movie that I had forgotten was there. And for example, it's the scene when Ryan Merriman and Kevin Kilner end up in his Ryan's being a brat in front of the girl that the scientists that dad has a crush on, and he storms out and the father comes up and they have this hard to heart about you know, you're
going to replace mom. She's mom doesn't deserve to be replaced, and the father yells at him, You're not the only one who lost somebody, and it says like the real talk moment between them when I went Dan Sun, you know, and I was kind of I was proud of myself, but I was even more proud of Disney that they allowed us to go into some of these real spaces that I think are a lot of the reason why
these movies have resonated and sustained over the decades. That they have because those things, you know, the truth of that resonates no matter what generation it is.
It does well.
Speaking of true moments, one of the last films that we watched covered and absolutely love was Going to the mat.
He loved that movie. Either one of us had seen it before.
Oh nice, and it was amazing.
It was incredible, And we got to talk to Andy a little bit about what it was like to you know, portray the character and to shoot the film. But what was it like getting to write I mean, it was such an interesting story because at its heart it's a Disney sports story, but at the same time.
It's so much more than that. So can you talk a little bit about how you approached writing that script.
Yeah, that was another script that was in process when I came aboard, and I would say probably all of the movies that I was brought into that were already in process. It was about that emotional pass, you know, kind of we're locked into the premise, we're locked into some of these signposts of the movie, but here's what's missing. And so the very first thing I did was Tom Sullivan is a writer actor who is blind and did
wrestle as a young person. So the producer, and I set up a meeting with Tom and spent the afternoon with him, and that was so incredibly helpful to just you know, I don't want to mess it up. I don't want to fake it. And then the other thing about doing due diligence is I had a nephew who was a wrestler and both high school and college, and I called him and I said, I got some technical questions, how about this? How about that? Side note? To this day,
I thought I was doing him a big favorite. I wrote a character with his name into it, who was one of the ancillary wrestlers, and then when the movie aired, he goes, dude, I knew my name was in it. So I had all my friends gathered together to watch the movie. My character got pinned. I couldn't want And to this day, however, many years later, every time we're together in person, at some point it hit me in the shoulder and go, yeah, that, my god, get bimmed.
Now.
One of the other things we hear sometimes is that sometimes the writers are on the set when things are being shot.
Sometimes they aren't you there when most of these films are being done.
I'm a really funny and somewhat you neque writer in terms of I absolutely hate being on the set. I think it's so intrusive, and then like, there's no way not to be in the way when you are a writer on set. And so the thing that I did with almost all of them except Z three shot in South Africa and Z two shot on New Zealand, and they weren't about to fly me over for the those.
But other than that Toronto, Vancouver, La, Salt Lake City, what I would do is I would go for the week before when we did the table read rehearsals, hearing it out loud, seeing if there was any problems, work on the script while I was there with the actors, with the director, with everybody, and then usually stay for the first three or four days of shooting and then peace out. If you need me, I'm at home. Yeah.
All of my writer friends would always say to me, at some point, you're going to have to direct because they're going to mangle your work, and they're like, no, know what, I'm perfectly happy being home with my family. Once upon a time, click click click here, you go make it and call me when it's done. Oh wow,
one of the great stories. Does that point is when we were doing poof Point that shot in Salt Lake City, and Neil Israel, who directed it, was a friend of mine, and I did exactly what I just described, you guys. I was there for all the rehearsals at table Read, and then the first or second day on set they were shooting in a diner and the juke box was pushed in the corner, and I again doing everything I
could to be out of the way. So I was sitting up on the juke box with my legs crossed, just observing, and I thought I was being so subtle. And at one point Neil walks over to me and he goes, you hate being here, don't you? And I go why And he goes, I'm looking at your face and You're like, look like you'd rather be anywhere else. And I went, well, I'm you know, I'm basically what am I here to do?
What am I here for?
Yeah? So I love you well.
Even though you didn't get a ton of time on you know, it sounds like you really kind of have allowed the directors and the actors to do their work after your job, you know, felt good and done. Was there any of the young actors that. I mean, you have so many that have been in your d coms or any of them, ones that when either you saw the finished product or the part on set that you did be a part of, where you walked away and said, wow, that that little actor stood out so much.
Was there anyone that.
Realized Actually quite a few. I mean I thought Ryan Merriman was an incredible actor always. You know, Raven was either twelve or thirteen when we did the first zene on and it was very clear where she was going. One of the lovely things about the whole social media happening was I did get sometime more than a year ago now, I got to reach out with a DM from Taylor Hanley, who was the star Phantom of the Megaplex. Yeah, and he was like, hey, buddy, it's so great to
see on social media how you been. And we had been in touch for several years after the movie, but then lost touch, and so I got back in touch with Taylor, and then one of the things we do is, if you remember the movie Mason monologue that Mickey Rooney delivers about the magic of the movies and Phantom of the Megaplex, Taylor and I did a dramatic reading back and forth of that. That's somewhere on the Instagram account.
Oh that's cool, My gosh, that's so great.
Cool, that's cool.
So you mentioned that you'd go a week before you'd be there for some of the rehearsals and the table read. Was there a project that after the table read or rehearsals they were like, no, this needs this needs major work and you had to go and kind of rewrite before they shot.
No, it was part of the beauty of the machine of you know, needing to do a movie a month that by the time they green led it, they were really committed to this is the movie we're making. And then the other thing that was a benefit for me as a writer who didn't want to direct, was because of that, ninety nine percent of what was on the
page ended up on the screen. So there really was I don't think among the dcoms, I don't think there was any of them where were so radically different by the time the movie was finished the way they end up in feature films often being rewritten daily, and they didn't really have the time or the budget to be doing that. So I think the biggest thing was when they were shooting the second scene on the Zequal, which years later I was railing against the chipmunks when they
had the squeakwall. It was like, I want credit for that.
I did that?
I did that?
Yeah, totally. But when they were shooting the Zequel, I got a call and whatever I forget it was, you know, like eighteen hour time difference. And I got a call very late in the afternoon saying we're about to shoot the climactic song tomorrow. We just got it back from the Disney songwriters. They don't get what these movies are all about. The melody's great, the lyrics are terrible. Would you want to take a crack at them? And I said, yeah, sure,
I'm a songwriter not but I could do that. And they said, okay, the only problem is we needed back at about six hours because we have to record it. We're doing the playback shooting of it tomorrow afternoon. And once again it was like, all right, that's what you need, that's what you're yet and bing bing bing banged up the Galaxy is ours said it back to them and they said, everybody here loves it. We're recording it tonight.
Oh my gosh.
They shot day and I still get a roy when the movie.
Wow.
Have you noticed now, just through the regular flow of social media and of your students, have you we've we've started to see a very big resurgence in all of these d coms.
Have you started to feel that Have you noticed that from the people you're talking to?
I've noticed it from by residuals. There.
There you go, that works too.
That's a great way to I do not say that factiously, because there was many years between you know, the Disney Channel heyday when they were on every minute, and then the lull, and then as soon as Disney Plus happened. Yes, I mean before I even knew all the machinations of Disney Plus. One of my students called me and he said, I'm going through the menu here, dude, and there's like fifteen of your movies here, like your whole career is here on Disney Plus. Yes, yes, that can be bad.
And then, like I said, the bump in residuals in the last two or three years since that resurgence tells me as much as the students tell me.
Well, what's amazing with Disney Plus is you know, like we all know with the channel, was they pumped them out and then they put it was Xenon, Xenon, zene On, Zenon. You know, they just kept going, so the audience just really kept falling in love with those kinds of movies even more now with Disney Plus, it has this way of bringing in shows that are somewhat like the shows that you watch, and they just start, you know, suggesting them.
Yeah, right exactly, and so they start. You get to go down memory lane.
If it's something you grew up with, which is what I grew up with, you get to go down memory lane. Or for the new generation, they get to find it out of nowhere and it feels like, you know, so that's so exciting that Disney Plus has done that.
Because my Disney Plus just suggests, Stu Kreeger, I suggest, so before we get off of dcoms, because we have other films that you've done that I want to talk about, I have to do something that might be a little bit mean, and I know that I shouldn't, but I have to ask which one's your favorite?
Oh yeah, that's rough.
I think it is the original Xenon. For a couple of different reasons. One is I had so much fun inventing the language for that movie, and where it all came from was I'm always a character driven writer, And when you asked earlier about the process, I always start from who's my hero, what do they want? What's in the way of the wand what is their world? You know, all of those questions for myself, and I usually do character bios before I even begin to think about the plot.
Hmmm.
And so with Xenon, it was like, you know, I want to do some kind of what would be her modern slang? What would be the clueless equivalent for Xenon? And my two things were, well, she grew up on the space station, so she looks out of her window. These are space terms, so things like it's a problem major or problem minor, was you know, URSA major, ursa minor,
galaxies and all the rest of it. And she knows technology, so all the macro and micro in any of those terms, it was all her frame of reference would be technology or space. And so you know, it's very funny watching how everybody mangles seed this lapitas because online there's like seven hundred and twenty seven spellings of it, and I'll always respond back and go, see this c e t
Us as a constellation. That's where that came from. And then I just made up a stupid word to rhyme with it, so it's like her version of cheeper screepers or holy cow?
Was we so literally we have as we're doing this, we have our producers checking in on the side, writing things like.
Seat us lapedius with exclamation over. This meant so much.
Are you into to techie things?
Because I noticed that obviously with Xenon, But then you also have smart house. Is that something that you that's an interest for you as well, and that's where you draw from with those kinds of projects.
Nope, not at all.
That is so shocking. Are you mean serious?
I've been one hundred percent serious tech. I am very happily and proudly refer to myself as a lud.
Very too nice me too.
If I did not have my student running the social media, it would not exist. And he runs it to the point where he will call me and to go. You know, dude, when you did that video that I asked you for, You're sitting and you look really kind of just frozen and not interest, stand up and walk around while you're talking. It's more interesting, and I just do what I'm told the tech side of things. What I did was xenon Is. I went to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.
Oh cool, and I.
Got to meet the beautiful thing with all of those movies, was you call and say I'm working on a movie for Disney. Can I speak to someone? You get pretty much you know, the access you want. And so I went to JPL and I spent two days with the guys and just like, what kind of future tech are you working on? What kind of things could I extrapolate?
And I would say now that I've probably done it at least somewhere around eight or ten interviews with either tech podcasts or like Wired magazine has reached out to me. I've done all these interviews and they're like, you know, dude, you predicted the future and Zeno and they have I pad like you know all this, and it's like, well, I really didn't, because again, kind of like the language my extrapolation was, computers started filling up an entire room,
then they went to desktops, then they got smaller. Soon they'll be portable. You know, it didn't feel like you're a genius. What hasn't jobs reached out, it was just, you know, that's the next just.
The credits, take the genius credit. Just take that's what you gotta do.
With the With smart House, it's a high and having computer assistant, it's going a wire. Do you have a feeling that that's gonna happen to society? Do you do you worry for us? Because it would be something something along the lines that you've predicted in Smart House?
Definitely, that's part of what that goes hand in hand with the lot. I think it's like, why don't you people understand these robots are gonna kill us all? What's the matter with you?
It's good they're gonna be self aware at some point people, is no one seen a movie we come on?
Exactly? And one of my favorite things since I've been on social media One day, Katie Sigal reached out and she said, I don't understand where my royalties are. I was the original theory she was. She totally was Was.
There ever a project that you pitched for a d com that didn't get made that you wish had?
Yeah, kind of late in the run, I had a project that I took directly to Raven and she was at a point in her career where she was wanting to do more producing and wanting to more focus on her music for a while. It was before the Raven reboot, and it was a really fun caper thing that she was going to executive produce, write music for, and do a cameo in, but not starting. It was for a younger, like twelve year old actor when she was about eighteen or nineteen, and it was another one of those days
where she and I went together to the network. We pitched it to the executives. They bought it in the room. We did two drafts, and then one day they just called and said, we've changed our mind and we're not making the movie.
Oh no.
And we never got any explanation. We never got any not like, you know, take one more pass it. It just boomed and that one didn't happen. That was too bad, because it was a really fun caper movie. It was a little bit more They were starting to take a little bit more risks in terms of, you know, they were so romance a verse to begin with. They were so chased in this kind of where you could push the stories, and this had a little bit more of
an edge to it. That I was excited about, and then they just went never mind.
Jeez.
Okay, So before we came on, one of our producers popped on and said, do me a favor and please tell mister Kreeger that I'm still scarred from the Land Before.
Time and I we talked a little bit about this tho this film because I mean produced by Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, George Lucas, and Frank Marshall.
I mean, this is there is no aer team than this, a team of filmmakers. How did this project come about? How did you sign on? And how did you scar an entire generation?
It was my pleasure, But I also I would get back to the best part of the story because it's a good part of the story that I also got to relate to the students on Tuesday. But I was one of the writers and story editors on Amazing Stories, which was Spielberg's first four A into television.
Awesome that came.
About in a way that I'm going to take a moment to talk about because it's really really instructive to aspiring writers out there, which is a lot of people do not know that writers get typecast as quickly, as actors do. And so the first couple of things that I had done were kind of young coming of age stories of young people who filled with anxiety. And I had two or three low budget movies made in that genre, and that was the kind of stuff I was being offered.
And so it was like, I'm going to take three months off. I'm going to write a very naked, autobiographical, more adult script that I want to kind of represent who I think I am as a writer. And I wrote a very personal family comedy about three generations of actually four generations of a family coming together for the grandparents sixtieth anniversary, and all the family secrets, all the stuff that have been tamped down for years, blows up
in the middle of this party. At the time, the equivalent of Franklin Leonard's Blacklist in that day was American Film Magazine would do the ten best done produced scripts in Hollywood. And my script was called Kinfolk, and it ended up on that list. Oh and first it got to Josh Brandon John Folsey, who became the executive producers of Amazing Stories. They read it and loved it. They gave it to Steven to read. He really liked it, and they ended up hiring me to write one episode
of Amazing Stories. I wrote that, I got a letter that's still framed on my office wall from Steven Spielberg saying you took my because it kind of the reason Amazing Stories existed was because he had all these ideas for things that he realized weren't quite feature film ideas but could be more anthology, short story kind of films. And so a lot of the episodes were just literally a scribbled page of Steven with an idea on it, and then take this idea and make it an episode.
And the letter I have from him, he said, you took my little idea and made it one of my favorite episodes of the season. Thank you very much, and
that's cool, signed Steven Spielberg. And so then out of that he hired me to do two more episodes, and then for season two, I was part of a panel of story editors and we're in the middle of doing that and as head of development, Deborah Newmeyer took me to lunch since she said, Stephen and I were talking the other day and we both feel like you've become a better writer since you become a dad Steven and George have for a long time have this idea for
an animated dinosaur movie they want to do. They had another team of writers on it, weren't happy with what they did. Do you want to write this movie? And what I said to my students on Tuesday is when somebody says, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas want you to write this movie, you say yes, yes, yes, don't say how much will I be paid? When is it due? You say yes, yeah, and you figure everything out after that.
But that's what I did, and I said to them, if you're not happy with the existing script, I'd rather hear what you are happy with what it is you're attached to what it is you want to do, and not have to read the script and have pieces of it stuck in my head that you don't, you know,
are drawn to. So they ultimately gave me a folder filled with scraps of paper that said, like dinosaurs walked by verning volcano, you know, just kind of sket and there was already some preliminary character sketches that were done. Littlefoot's name at the time was Thunderfoot. And then they found out there was a series of kids books in
the UK with a dinosaur named Thunderfoot. Petrie's name was originally Terry the pterodactyl, but that was pee Wee's playhouse, as I had to tell them, and Dan Donald and Dan Petrie soon Senior were all friends of mine, so I said, how about we name him Petrie. So I have been told the Petries claim him more than they even claimed in their own films, which I really love.
Let's go, so that's how that happened. And then to your question to begin it all, Uh, it's always my pleasure to be very very happy to throw Stephen under the bus because he was the one that first brought up the idea of Littlefoot's mom died, and his justification for it was I was fully traumatized by Bambi's mother dying when I was a kid's to do it to a new general.
Like the credits are still rolling when Baby's mom days, Oh my god.
The beautiful part of my legacy has been that you know that movie came out in nineteen eighty eight. When my kids were in elementary and middle school, I would often do career day and career day I would have the DVDs or BHS tapes on the table and some original artwork from Land Before Time to show the kids, and the artist gave me a couple of cells from the movie that I would take into my whole dog and Pony show, and somebody's mother would always come. And yet,
so you're the reason my kids. And in those days I was still prolific and active enough that I didn't throw Stephen under the bus. In those days, I'd go, yeah, that was me.
Now I'm perfectly happy. Okay we answered that question.
It's even worse because he did it on purpose. I can't get over that.
Tell me you stay on set for like a couple days and that you've enjoyed it a little bit more.
We're in the Army Now with Pollie Shore. Tell me that he's the best thing in the world.
And it's so funny on an off camera because I have him on this just giant pedical.
I love him in his movies. I was so excited to hear that you are a part of in the Army Now.
I mean, so, here's how small the world is. Who is the director of In the Army Now, Dann Petrie Junior.
Oh jeez, okay, wow, right, Well that's La that's for sure the industry.
So Petrick is back. The thing that was really really impressive about Poullie because how I got involved in that movie. I was working on a project at Disney at the time on the feature side of things that was a romantic comedy that Goldie Hawn was going to produce and star in. So she had an overall deal with them, a five picture deal. The beauty of show business is what I'm saying about your number of success as long
as you're in it, multimillion dollar five picture deal. They never made any of the movies that she took to them, not what she got to collect her paycheck she needs. Never made one of those movies. But the project we did for them, hand to god people, we did twenty one drafts of before they finally said, yeah, not so much.
We're not making your mom. But in the middle of it, they came to me and they said, we have this Polly Shore movie that's fairly well down the tracks, but again not all the way there in terms of the script.
We want to lot Dan Petrie. I don't even think Dan was attached to direct yet at that point, but Dan was a friend of mine and then a third friend, Ken Kaufman, and they said, we want to take you Dan and Kenn and basically lock you in her room for two weeks and have you finished this script because we have a firm production day because Polly has other commitments after that that we got to get him in and out for this date. So I kind of like, you know, is this the point in my life where
I want to do a poll Shore movie? Dad? And then they were like, do you want your Godi Han project made?
Rely?
I want to work on this and you know, so it was like, you know, I love kenon Dan and I was like, we'll have fun. It's fine, let's do it. So we, you know, began with a couple of meetings with Paulie and the thing that was so impressive was he was so clean and clear on who that character was and what it was about that character that his audience loved. And so before we would go to writing script pages, we would just pitch them, how about this idea,
how about this turn? What if the character did this? So the plot took that twist, and he would say, my audience isn't going to care about that? And another movie that would probably work to spend there at one point it was a love story angle that we were introducing, and you go, they don't want to see me in a love story. That's not what my audience cares about. They want the weasel, they want mister if they want
all of those things. And he was right, you know, and ultimately the movie succeeded in large part because he was so good at steering us toward this is what my audience expects and wants and needs to have in the movie to make it work. And at some point in that process they approached Dan about directing. So the answer to your question was I was around quite a bit for that because they shot locally and it was the kind of thing where Dan would go, hey, we're
doing this scene today. It might be fun for you to come out and watch and see what we're up to. And so the other thing to learn is find out what the lunch break is time your visit to either right.
Before get so good, catering nice.
That's brilliant, smart way to do it.
Absolutely.
So, you've mentioned that you're a professor, have been since two thousand and six. Is there one you prefer? Do you prefer screenwriting? Do you prefer teaching? Is it a combination of the two.
Yeah. Part of the reason for the last several years, I've been writing fiction. Like I said, the book that came out in May called Raft, the story of a children's book author who has a midlife crisis and wakes up and he's a penguin.
Well that sounds awesome.
Yeah, the way I pitched it to the publisher, as I said, some guys leave their wives for a younger woman, some buy a sports car. Clark Whittaker turned into a penguin, happens to deal with it. So it's the common adventure of what happens to the family when dad becomes a penguin and how do we undo whatever happened. So anyway, part of the reason I turned to novel writing was the first year and a half that I was at
UC Riverside. I was also the head writer and story editor on Toot and Puddle for Nickelodeon, and suddenly I was working ninety five hours a week. Yeah, you know. I wrote nine episodes. I story edited the rest of them. I was responsible for coordinating the writing staff, taking the notes from the studio and filter room back to the writers. Doing all that while teaching full time and I went, yeah, not really what I'm inspiring to do at this point in my life. And so again I believe in the
gods intervening. And I was at Paradigm at the time, and my agent called and he said, I'm jumping out of agenting to become a manager. Do you want me to introduce you to some other agents here? And I said, no, that's the universe. I'm good, I'm out, you know, very happy with the career I have, very happy with the resume I have. I'm going to focus on academia now, but I'm a writer. I will always need to write. And with the books, it really it's done. When it's
done is as long as it is. The first novel was like a historical alternate fiction type of novel, and so that was almost six years of research before I even started writing, and then you know, another two years before the book came out. And then with raft it was about a two and a half year process to get that out.
What was the first one called? What was the first one called the historical fiction?
That one cigarette?
Okay, and what's that? What's that one about?
So what the jumping off point is, it's four families and four different parts of the world that you don't know what their common thread is until the very very last chapter when they finally come together. But the jumping off point, there's a guy in nineteen sixty three in Dallas trying to quit smoking, and he works at the Texas Book Depository and he goes up to the fourth
floor to have his last cigarette. I'm gonna done today, cold turkey after this cigarette, and walks into the loft just in time to see Oswald pick up the rifle, tackles into the ground, knocks them out of the way. JFK doesn't die, and then it's the ripple of what happened? Cool?
Okay, Wow, that's my Those are like my kind of stories. So I'm gonna have to go check that out absolutely.
Because I'm very proud of it and pleased with it. But like I said, it's the four different families that you follow each of them through the decades and then finally they all dovetail and an event on the last.
Chapter that's very wow.
Well I could talk to you with seriously, we could this could just be the podcast.
We could just do this every week and just talk to you.
The whole time. This has been so amazing. Thank you for spending the time with us to take a.
Moment to say. Both of my children are huge Cheetah Girl and boy Be's World fans, so they are so tickled that we're doing this. Oh oh right, wow, ooh you get to do what.
Oh I'm so.
Happy to hear that you said you're at UC Riverside. Are you still living in LA and doing that drive?
Yeah? What I do and have done since two thousand and six is I am able to set my schedule. So usually, like this quarter, I teach on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but I always go there when traffick's coming this way. Okay, I spend Tuesday night in Riverside. I teach Wednesday morning, I leave after lunch and I'm home before traffic coming the other way. There you go, smart, and yeah, so I've got it wired.
I live in Orange County, so I'm in the middle. So I know the traffic going that way could be madness, and I know the traffic going towards LA could be madness. I'm like, that would be oh mad.
Is there any chance we could we could ask you to come back and you know, talk another movie with us, But we haven't gotten a smart house yet. Xenon's next. So maybe if we when we do another one of your films, maybe you could come back and we could.
Talk a little more. Would that be possible? Oh heck yeah, ah, so thank you so much.
One of the things I said in class on Tuesday is the beautiful thing about being at this stage of both my life and career is I'll have guests to come to my filmmaker's life classes. Go I'm going to tell you about this incident, but I really am not comfortable naming names, and I'm like, I'll name names like, yeah, all the bodies are buried in all the tea, because what have I got to lose at this point?
So I think that's great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Everybody, go pick up both those books because I want to. I'm going to be reading both of those so I can't wait.
I think you will enjoy. I feel very comfortable.
Thank you for writing so many people's childhoods, and thank you for scarring so many people with land before time.
It's true my pleasure, but.
It's still one of my favorite.
Course.
Of course, I do have a three year old.
She's not ready for that, yet she will not be watching that any time.
Timing is every thing. One of the first insane things that happened when we joined the social media world was there was a video about Sarah. You know, people all like I said, the suggests all came from my assistant reading comments and saying somebody asked this question, respond directly
to that, or somebody asked that question. And there was this whole thread of people going, how come the dinosaurs were littlefoot and Spike and Sarah had a human name, and so I did this really kind of snarky it was ce r A because she's a try Sarah dats And in two days that video had two point eight million views, and the common thread was either, well, duh, I knew that, or I had close captions so I knew that, or dude, you just blew my mind. It was it was either or.
Well, I'm glad your fans get to reach out to you, because you've got tons of them out there and the stories are great. I can't wait we were bringing you back. So we'll just we'll have to figure out at the time because there's too much to talk about.
I really really appreciate you guys, and appreciate the research and the thoughtful questions, and it was a ton of fun.
Oh thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.
Are making right?
I I could do that all day. I could do ten episodes of that right in a row, just hearing all the cool stories.
I love it too, because I think the more he like would get to know us, it'd be feeling a little bit more like Disney after Dark, Like I think you can give us some real good tea, you know, like it would be so awesome to know some.
Of the fun, fun fun times and things like that.
And I love that he has reasons to like his inside of he doesn't like to be on set. He feels like it's intrusive to the actors. That that's so cool because sometimes it's totally different. You know, you have a writer that's it right over your shoulder if she was like while you're while you're filming, And he.
Just seems amazing to hear the different processes that the writers have, Like, you know, he does the character work before even coming up with the story, So he's doing character bios before even figuring out the story. I didn't want to tell him that I hadn't seen most of the films yet. I kept so like Xenon, Smart House, I can't wait to watch these.
I'm very excited.
Well, Xenon, I've watched smart House, I watch, but I don't remember a lot of it, so I'm excited to see that again.
But he was just awesome.
It totally would have expected him to be this like it total, you know, I.
Don't know, He's like, absolutely not. That is not me anyway. He just was so much fun.
Wow.
Well, thank you again everybody for joining us for this park Opper episode with the amazing Stu Krieger and those stories.
I can't wait to hear more of them.
We will have him back because he's just a font of knowledge.
I cannot wait to hear more. And thank you for joining us.
And don't forget our next movie is Xenon zhow Xenon of the twenty first century?
Wait for you to know what that means.
I can't wait to see the entire thing. So thank you again for joining us, and join us next time. Bye, everybody,